wendyrward
Vintage Crew Kid
I review books and buy old J.Crew because you don't.
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Extended New York Times Article
Maine wild child Erin French grows up slightly feral but learns to love the landscape’s abundance and the land under her feet in Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story Remaking a Life From Scratch. I spoiler-alerted myself when after less than 100 pages in I Googled Erin French and basically got the nutshell of this scrappy woman’s hard luck resume (abusive father, young single motherhood, college drop-out, abusive husband, drug and alcohol addiction, recovery, and salvation) then after reading the book, I wanted to see images and read the New York Times article about her restaurant The Lost Kitchen and basically got the Cliff Notes of the book but with photos. Skip the book, read the article.
Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Weiner Does it Again: #metoo #beachread #justkidding
It’s easy for forget that Jennifer Weiner writes serious books--with titles like In Her Shoes (made into a movie starring Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette) and Good in Bed, she seems like the author of just another romantic comedy. She is not. Her subject matter ranges from bullying to learning disabilities, sibling rivalry, weight, and now, sexual assault. A breezy beach read her 15th novel That Summer is not.
Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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An Anxious Depressed Texan Does Not Walk Into a Bar Because She Can Barely Leave the House: The Latest by Jenny Lawson
Book #4 of personal essays by the Bloggess and Nowhere Bookshop owner Jenny Lawson, Broken (in the best way possible) drops drink bombs three times in the first page but mostly discusses the prescribed drugs and procedures that keep her all the things she needs to be in this life (sister, wife, mom, writer, friend, pet owner, house owner, bookshop owner) while dealing with debilitating anxiety and depression. She is funny, brash, honest to the point of possibly annoying when she goes on and on and on and on and on, and skilled in illustrating her demons. She cray--in the best possible way.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Pro Tips
I loved this book! As someone going back to graduate school in the late summer, I welcome any tips I can learn about LEARNING and this book by Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe got me excited about gaining knowledge and really understanding new facts. I started using the Pomodoro method of a timed 25-minutes of focus followed by a 5-minute break when I’m scattered and the advice to make goals SMART: specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic, and time-limited stayed with me. The book explains the importance of continuing to form new connections in long-term memory and developing deep understanding by forming long links connected to other links. Right? It’s cool!
Seriously the only issue is that they have visual aids in the book that don’t show up in my Kindle version--very disappointing and I’m surprised other reviewers didn’t mention it.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Tits Aplenty in LA
Dirty. Sophomore effort from known Twitterer of @sosadtoday, Melissa Broder, Milk Fed is the story of a young woman, Rachel, working in the entertainment business in LA while coming to terms with her attraction to women, her Jewish heritage, her deeply troubled relationship with her mother who lives across the country, and her serious eating disorder. It’s a lot to pack into your early twenties but Broder’s sensitive and truthful descriptions of how food, calorie counting, exercise, and weight can take over a life carry us to a place in the story when the main character begins to spend less time obsessing over that and the sex scenes dominant. Some readers might be into it--but for me, it made me squirm and not in a good way.
Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Cookbook Book
A cook and cooking instructor herself, the English Anne Willan introduces Women in the Kitchen as such, “I have chosen twelve cookbook authors and each is described in a biography followed by a handful of their own recipes as they appeared in the original, together with those same recipes adapted for the modern kitchen.” This listing of original recipes alongside her updated version makes a great deal of sense with her first author Hannah Woolley who wrote the first cookbook by a women published in 1661 but is redundant by her last author Alice Water who wrote the legendary The Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook in 1982. Still, Willan’s writing is fresh, appreciative, and illuminates voices from the south, mid-west, New England, and California with equal delight and respect. I love a cookbook and this book--that mentions Bloody Marys twice--is almost as fun as browsing through one in a bookstore.
Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Tres Inquiétant
The memoir of her abuse by a famous French writer when she was 14 and he in his fifties, Consent by French author Vanessa Springora, is harder to swallow than I somehow stupidly anticipated. I don't know why I thought it might not be all that disturbing--that I might somehow feel removed from the fucking pedophilia of the story but damn, it's rough, and the eloquence of the author, the Frenchness of it all, the 50-years ago of it doesn't make it easier to get down. But it is brave and lyrical and translated from the French.
Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Drink? Drink! Drink ...
A non-shaming, realistic look at what alcohol is, what it does physically and emotionally to the humans consuming it, and its effects on society at large, Professor David Nutt’s Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol + Your Health covers a lot of ground without leaving you behind in either Science 400 class or the opposite: boring you like a basic brochure. His point seems to be, “What’s the level of drinking that will make me feel good but allow me to function well too?” I’ve read much quit lit and nonfiction about alcohol, diatribes concerned with over-drinking, and drunk-to-sober memoirs, and this scientific look with just enough personality is like reading The New Yorker review of a big dry book you would never actually read but are interested in. Extra points for being English and the many examples of pub life, pints, lagers, and cider. Cheers.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Witchy Women
Laura Hankin’s 2020 novel Happy & You Know It combined chick lit (I say with love), suspense, classism, New York real estate porn, the feelings of being an outsider, and working girl ambition. Her latest, A Special Place for Women, touches the same pleasure points with a similar story about women’s work, friendships, and our singular quest for independence and love (partner and family--blood or not) at the same time.
We know from the first page that there’s a mysterious women’s only club called Nevertheless “where the elite tastemakers of NYC met to scratch one another’s backs.” Jillian Bechley is a young reporter/writer out of a job when the news website where she worked, Quill, gets sold. She has a few heavy things going all at once: a story hunt to pitch to her ex-editor and inappropriate crush Miles working at another paper and going through a divorce, supporting her childhood friend and the new hottest chef in Manhattan Raf, dealing with the loss of her mother to cancer (“all those mornings over the past couple months where I’d woken up thinking that I still had a mother, and then had to reorient myself all over again”), selling her childhood house, and working as a bartender in a dive to pay the bills.
So when she meets Margot, the beautiful rich millennial influencer who runs a hip horoscope app, she plots to get into her club Nevertheless and write an exclusive story busting the doors wide open and their possible part in taking down a promising female politician whom they recently backed but who fell from grace. Page turner for real! Bonus points for tackling what it’s like to be physically vulnerable as woman, “I knew that nobody would come to help me, that I was finally in that moment so many women experience, the moment when our luck runs out.”
Wendy Ward
http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Longest Night Ever
Jesus. I hate this book so much. The author drones on and on for over 400 pages about her “night women,” the term she uses for the shero travelers and artists that inspire her to write about them, mentions the two words AT LEAST ONCE A PAGE, and even ends the book by bitching about how hard it is to write. “At this rate I’ll never finish this book,” she moans on whatever page 86% is and girl, I feel you. Someone should have cut her off at 200 pages. Seriously, I’m this close to finishing it and every time I read the words “night women” I want to shot myself in the head. What a bore. What a waste of time.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Eat Like the Rich: Don’t
Don’t eat and then when you do eat, eat what Dr. Will Cole says is his latest book, Intuitive Fasting: The Flexible Four-Week Intermittent Fasting Plan to Recharge Your Metabolism and Renew Your Health, in a nutshell. Oddly, he has nothing to say about the fake cheese included in many of his recipes--which take up the second half of the book. It’s just weird when he lists the herbs you can use (dill? duh!) but doesn’t discuss the vegan dairy products he includes. And I guess you can use good oils in your coffee which don’t break your fast? I’m a stickler for rules and his are a bit confusing. Plus, Cole just seems to not enjoy food at all. He says at the end of the book, “When you learn to love feeling great more than you want to eat the food that will diminish how you feel, that’s food peace.” That’s actually just sad. A little handmade pizza feels pretty damn good.
Gwyneth Paltrow has very little to say in the introduction so although he’s been on the Goop Men podcast, GP doesn’t come across as enthusiastic as the cover of this book would lead you to believe. I’ve never been someone who eats breakfast first thing in the morning, but I’ve been experimenting with waiting even longer before consuming anything other than coffee (with non-dairy sugar-free milk) since reading this book--not sure if my health is renewed but it’s been slightly interesting to change it up in these long cold days of February.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Stunningly Unpredictable
As crazy as the main character Ivy, the plot of Susie Yang’s debut novel White Ivy has it all: twists, turns, thieving grandmothers, old school disciplinarian Chinese parents, teenage angst, popularity wars, envy, lying, seduction, bad guys you root for, good guys you don’t like, Ivy League money, mob ties, and a broke-down preppy vacay house. Ivy Yin is trouble but at the same time just an unsatisfied, self conscious teenager trying to separate herself from her Chinese family in a very white Boston suburb when a infraction sleep-over at the beautiful blond crush Gideon Speyer’s perfect home (father’s a senator) results in her first sex with troubled teen and best friend Roux (coming from his own messed childhood minus a father and a mother in an open affair with an Italian mobster) and a summer banished to China to stay with relatives both rich and poor. This is all before we even get to her all grown up, out of college, and just as unsatisfied as ever. Her Chinese grandmother taught her to steal when she was just wee and it becomes her most basic coping mechanism to deal with feeling forever not enough and she never stops wanting what she can’t have and didn’t earn.
Yang seriously nails it. (Sidebar: LOVE Roux. Shouldn’t but do.)
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com
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Ongoing Therapy
I was reading other books at the same time but still it took me months to finish Knowledge in a Nutshell: Carl Jung by Gary Bobroff--it’s a slog reading about the life and work of a turn of the nineteenth century Swiss scholar and the father (along with Sigmund Freud) of analytical psychology but much like the therapy with my own Jungian therapist, the work to understand is ongoing. Woody Allen once said about his own psychoanalysis, ''On balance, I would say it has been helpful, but not as helpful as I had hoped ...,'' and ''there were no dramatic moments, there were no insights, there were no tears, there was, you know, nothing special.'' Yeah, I get it. This book is informative but sorta boring and maybe the Wikipedia page would have held the extent of my interest not a 240-page book.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/
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The World As We Don’t Know It
I’m psyched Rumaan Alam has written previous novels because his latest, Leave the World Behind, is one of the best books of 2020--everyone says so and everyone is right. Leave the World Behind feels like 2020: doomy, apocalyptic, full of the unknown and sometimes pure fear. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The novel opens with a family of four driving from Brooklyn to their Airbnb rental home for a week away on Long Island. The house isn’t on the beach but tucked away in a forested area and it is gorgeously renovated. They enjoy a nice 24 hours of vacation before a knock at the door late on the second night changes everything. It’s the older couple that owns the house. A power outage in New York caused them to drive out to the country where there’s power but it seems to be no internet. Cautious and frightened, two families face the unknown world changing without knowing exactly how, why, or the extent of the sonic booms breaking glass, animals crazed, and a random tick bite. Includes cultured racism/classism, house porn, and vacay food. Yum.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/
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Relentless and Uneasy
Samantha Harvey’s stream of conscious writing put me to sleep so I could not read her memoir The Restless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping anywhere other than bed, oh but the guilt of being lulled to slumber by her endless awareness of staying awake long into the night. Her writing captures all of the many sometimes weighty, sometimes minor as a breath thoughts that fly through or lie down in her mind when she should be sleeping. She shares rough patches from her childhood, discussions with her doctor, bits of fiction she’s working on, thoughts of death: “If finality makes something holy then every moment is holy, because every moment could be the last. that’s a thought we spend too cheaply. Live each day as if it’s your last, and then we don’t. everything is holy. It’s only when we die that the holiness is called up. But it was always holy, all along.” (I don’t know if her random capitalization is purposeful because I read this book on a Kindle, but it’s annoying.)
She writes about her worry and anxiety: “I see all of this as indulgent, self-centered and a little mad.” She’s not wrong, but she was right to think she could write a whole book about the experience of not sleeping and she writes equally beautiful about sleeping too: “Rest awaits. the relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. there’s nothing for you to do or to work out.”
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/
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Topically Applied
Zo and Ethan left Brooklyn to lead a simpler life in cozy New England town Starkfield, raise a family, maybe some chickens while working remotely. A dozen-odd years later, during the Bret Kavanaugh hearings, they find themselves shadows of the optimistic, loving, creative people they once were, lost among many of the materialistic New Yorker assholes they attempted to move away from and dealing with a medicated daughter with ADHD at a private school they can’t afford. Ali Benjamin’s political modern-day retelling of Edith Warton’s Ethan Fromme is a lively read especially when paired with the 2020 presidential election and Zo’s conscious-raising group named All Them Witches--a reminder that frustration, fear, and gathering with casseroles isn’t a thing of the past. Sub-plots of the gig economy, cam-girls, and protesters rioting protests will no doubt be as topical in 2021 when this debut novel is released.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/
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Hello Kitty, Hello Habits
Translated from the Japanese, Fumio Sasaki’s Hello Habits: A Minimalist’s Guide to a Better Life is a simple and entertaining look at acquiring habits from as basic as establishing a set times to get up in the morning and to go to sleep at night and to as difficult as running everyday but all in service of a happier life. I love how often he talks about beer (he says one of his next books will be about quitting alcohol) and his sometimes random 50 rules for developing habits. Others have written books about the merits of and how to establish habits, but as someone who learns from repetition (and especially influenced by my most recent readings) Saski’s version is a valuable and unusual addition to the subject.
Wendy Ward http://wendyrward.tumblr.com/
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