Suggestions from a Friend
I have a good friend who was a media specialist for her entire career. She reads voraciously and somehow seems to pick books that many people haven’t heard of. Read about three books she recommends and see if any of them appeal to you. I’m going to read at least one of them. Enjoy!!
Book Recommendations, 2022
Michelle Huneven, Search: A Novel. 393 pages, hardcover. Fictional Dana Potowski is a restaurant critic and novel writer. She is the member of a Unitarian Universalist church in southern California; she and her husband, Jack, who is a lawyer, married in their forties and have been married for ten years. Dana is asked to join the search committee for a new minister at her church, Arroyo Unitarian Universalist Community Church. The story focuses on the nine-month-long dynamics of the committee and how they choose a new minister. All members of the committee come alive on the pages as well as the final candidates for the job. The author includes recipes at the end of the book for the meals that the fictional committee members ate together as they made their decisions.
Mary Pipher, Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age. 262 pages, paperback. Mary Pipher is a psychologist in her 70s who writes about women in their 60s and older and the issues they face as they age. She discusses issues such as health challenges, caregiving, community, and loneliness. At the same time, real-life women have generously offered to allow Dr. Pipher to share their stories with names and some details altered. She emphasizes, “Attitude is not everything, but it is almost everything. In fact, in many situations, it is all we have. Especially as we age, we can see clearly that we do not always have control, but we do have choices. That is our power. These choices determine whether we stagnate or grow into fully realized people” (p. 2).
Julia Ridley Smith, The Sum of Trifles. 238 pages. In a series of essays. Smith tells us about the close relationship that she possessed with her complicated parents. Her parents married in 1961 and lived in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they owned both a home filled with possessions and an antique shop. Her father, a lifelong diabetic, became wheelchair-bound in the 1990s. Her mother, a smoker for decades, developed cancer of the adrenal gland and then lung cancer. In their late sixties, they had to leave their home and move into assisted living, where her mother died in late 2011; and her father, six months later. Still, Smith and her brother, Moreland, took almost two years after their parents died to empty and sell their childhood home and business. Smith writes, “For me, it’s objects. . . that evoke the richest memories. Of the thousands of things I grew up knowing or own now. . . Which one would I single out above all others for its ability to trigger memories of my childhood, that time before the trouble of growing up and being a grown-up? I cannot choose. All my things mean something to me. . . .” (p. 15).