For Your Summer Reading Stack
My family's current library check-out total: 73 books. YIKES.
Today brings a quick note to let you know about a change in The Holy Labor.
I’ve decided to split the newsletter into shorter reading by making it a weekly arrival in your inbox. One Saturday I’ll offer an original essay, the next I’ll offer a round-up of others’ creative work for your enjoyment.
As someone who reads widely, I love gathering good books, intriguing articles, thoughtful podcasts, and beautiful art to share with you. I also have a growing number of ideas I want to explore in short essays, and this is a perfect way to wonder together.
I hope you’ll enjoy this new, more frequent offering. Let me know what you think! And please share with a friend who might be interested in reading.
For now, here are 3 books I’ve loved lately:
Underland by Robert Macfarlane. I’m savoring this deep dive into the world under our feet, after discovering Macfarlane’s work through the On Being podcast. His vivid writing takes you from ancient caves to distant dark matter and all the hidden places under the earth where humans hide and bury what they love or fear.
Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours by Sarah Sentilles. This story of the foster care system in America is eye-opening and heart-aching, but offers a complex kaleidoscope of perspectives and relationships. As a devoted student of memoir, I’ll be turning over this one for a long time.
Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell. Devoured in three breathless days. Ranks with All The Light We Cannot See for gorgeous prose (and her characters are even better). I’m still haunted by her memoir on 17 brushes with death, but this is the finest novel I’ve read in years.
What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
Peace,
Laura
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Hamnet left me breathless too--such a gorgeous book. I just listened to Broken Horses by Brandi Carlile--it is wonderful and includes a song or two at the end of each chapter. Also just finished The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen--powerful novel about the end of the Vietnam War.
Laura, have you read Charis in the World of Wonders by Marly Youmans? I think you would really like it; a Cinderella story set in Puritan New England. The language is exquisite but there is the death of a child in the first chapter that I had to pause the book for; I almost couldn't go on but I'm glad I did. Yesterday I started Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley and it's already given me a phrase I will hold on to; when it comes to biblical texts that challenge us or make us squirm, McCaulley asks us to be like Jacob and wrestle with it and say, "I will not let you go until you bless me." BAM. Wishing you a happy summer filled with reading and writing!