Favorite Books: Summer 2024

Wildness, Dementia, Mother Wound, & Heat

My reading actually increases during the gardening months because of the wonderful inventions of cellphones and audiobooks. I tend to listen to fiction and read non-fiction, but it often depends on what is available in my Libby audiobook app. I purchase books that I know I will reread and/or use as a resource. I selected my favorites so far this summer.

I had some extra couch time this week as I recovered from my first case of COVID-19. It’s awful stuff. Today is the first day I can function. Fortunately, I had prepared this newsletter before I became sick.

Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

by Janisse Ray

I am always on the lookout for unique and descriptive nature writing, and this book is one to savor. Each essay offered a story from Ray’s life and the wild landscape that was sometimes the backdrop, a companion, or a living character. What I love about nature writing is that nature has an important presence in telling our human stories. Ray states: “Nature writing has been called a marginal literature. If culture is a set of stories we tell about life in a place and how to navigate that life, then nature writing is at its most essential. Its tenets are that humans are biological; that we are dependent on the earth; that places are vital to our psyches; and that humans have volumes to learn from nature.”

Her descriptions are vivid, emotional, and recognizable. In the essay In the Elkhorn, the reader hikes with her in canyon country, bushwhacking off trail, feeling the panic of being lost while logically considering the possibility of a mountain lion chasing her if she runs, and then recognizing the familiar warnings of a severe thunderstorm approaching. As a hiker who lives in the West, I could feel the urgency, witnessing the animal bones as reminders of death. The essays have layers of human love, connection, appreciation, wonder, flirtation, and loss. It is truly a book to be reread.

From the publisher:

Looking for adventure and continuing a process of self-discovery, Janisse Ray has repeatedly set out to immerse herself in wildness, to be wild, and to learn what wildness can teach us. From overwintering with monarch butterflies in Mexico to counting birds in Belize, the stories in Wild Spectacle capture her luckiest moments―ones of heart-pounding amazement, discovery of romance, and moving toward living more wisely. In Ray’s worst moments, she crosses boundaries to encounter danger and embrace sadness.

Anchored firmly in two places Ray has called home―Montana and southern Georgia―the sixteen essays here span a landscape from Alaska to Central America, connecting common elements in the ecosystems of people and place. One of her abiding griefs is that she has missed the sights of explorers like Bartram, Sacagawea, and Carver: flocks of passenger pigeons, routes of wolves, herds of bison. She craves a wilder world and documents encounters that are rare in a time of disappearing habitats, declining biodiversity, and a world too slowly coming to terms with climate change.

In an age of increasingly virtual, urban life, Ray embraces the intentionality of trying to be a better person balanced with seeking out natural spectacle, abundance, and less trammeled environments. She questions what it means to travel into the wild as a woman, speculates on the impacts of ecotourism and travel in general, questions assumptions about eating from the land, and appeals to future generations to make substantive change.

Wild Spectacle explores our first home, the wild earth, and invites us to question its known and unknown beauties and curiosities.

Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection and Guidance

by Kelly McDaniel

I wouldn’t have read this book while my mom was still alive; it would have been too much to realize while keeping silent, avoiding confrontation of past harms. My relationship with my mother was loving throughout my adult life, but my childhood was filled with chaos and traumatic events (I scored a 6 out of 10 on the Adverse Childhood Experiences assessment -ACE). She was a young mom whose own mother had not nurtured or guided her, and the effects of her own “mother wound” deeply impacted her ability to nurture, guide, and protect my sister and me. Despite that, I held compassion for my mom, who desperately wanted to be loved and to have the family she never had as a young girl.

The mother-and-daughter relationship is unique, especially living in a patriarchal culture that allows various levels of misogyny to exist. The author offers compelling examples of how our culture negatively affects the mothering of our children, from a too-short and usually unpaid maternal leave to the sexualization of young girls and the layers of subtle and not-so-subtle misogyny girls and women experience every day. It is an educational book that helps readers understand their role as daughters and the effects of mothering in a patriarchal society.

From the publisher: 

Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact. In doing so, she destigmatizes the shame that comes with being under-mothered and misdiagnosed. McDaniel offers a healing path with powerful tools that include therapeutic interventions and lifestyle changes in service to healthy relationships.

The constant search for mother love can be a lifelong emotional burden, but healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. McDaniel is the first clinician to identify Mother Hunger, which demystifies the search for love and provides the compass that each woman needs to end the struggle with achy, lonely emptiness, and come home to herself.

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Somebody I Used to Know: A Memoir

by Wendy Mitchell

This book was mentioned in a Fairytale Salon with Sharon Blackie, and the writer who helped Wendy Mitchell bring this book to completion joined the discussion. I have no direct experience with anyone who has lived with dementia, specifically Alzheimer's, and I was intrigued by the idea of a book written by a woman who documents her adjustment to living with this disease. 

It is an illuminating and touching memoir. Throughout the book, the author shares her most challenging moments: forgetting how to turn right while driving, forgetting to eat, relying extensively on reminders written on Post-its, and her worst fear, not remembering her daughters. She forced herself out into the world, joining dementia groups, traveling to speak about her condition, and helping others to understand more about the disease and how it affects people. She maintained a blog titled “Which Me Am I Today?” throughout most of the ten years she lived with dementia. She died in February of 2024.

I found the book inspiring, thoughtful, and educational.

From the publisher:

Wendy Mitchell had a busy job with the British National Health Service, raised her two daughters alone, and spent her weekends running and climbing mountains. Then, slowly, a mist settled deep inside the mind she once knew so well, blurring the world around her. She didn’t know it then, but dementia was starting to take hold. In 2014, at age fifty-eight, she was diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s. 

In this groundbreaking book, Mitchell shares the heartrending story of her cognitive decline and how she has fought to stave it off. What lay ahead of her after the diagnosis was scary and unknowable, but Mitchell was determined and resourceful, and she vowed to outwit the disease for as long as she could.

As Mitchell learned to embrace her new life, she began to see her condition as a gift, a chance to experience the world with fresh eyes and to find her own way to make a difference. Even now, her sunny outlook persists: She devotes her time to educating doctors, caregivers, and other people living with dementia, helping to reduce the stigma surrounding this insidious disease.

Still living independently, Mitchell now uses Post-it notes and technology to remind her of her routines and has created a “memory room” where she displays photos—with labels—of her daughters, friends, and special places. It is a room where she feels calm and happy, especially on days when the mist descends.

A chronicle of one woman’s struggle to make sense of her shifting world and her mortality, Somebody I Used to Know offers a powerful rumination on memory, perception, and the simple pleasure of living in the moment. Philosophical, poetic, intensely personal, and ultimately hopeful, this moving memoir is both a tribute to the woman Wendy Mitchell used to be and a brave affirmation of the woman she has become.

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The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on A Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

In Janisse Ray’s Substack newsletter, she mentioned this book, and I was surprised to see it immediately available for checkout at my library. Shouldn’t we all be interested in understanding the effects of climate change?

But then again, the book’s title does not engage curiosity as much as it sends a message of doom and death. Editors and publishers should offer more engaging titles on these essential issues.

Goodell is a journalist who injects personal anecdotes into his reporting of the climate crisis, which helps balance out the content. But this is not a light-hearted book. Goodell describes recent global heat events that have killed thousands of people yearly, discusses the impact on other species and their abilities to adapt, and explains how world leaders mostly ignore the effects of climate change.

I found the book compelling as I now live with wildfire threats each summer, the cost of food has risen, my homeowner’s insurance is threatened with cancellation, and it is simply too damn hot for too long here in the Cascade foothills. Please read this. It’s an important book.

From the publisher: 

The world is waking up to a new reality: wildfires are now seasonal in California, the Northeast is getting less and less snow each winter, and the ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica are melting fast.  Heat is the first-order threat that drives all other impacts of the climate crisis.  And as the temperature rises, it is revealing fault lines in our governments, our politics, our economy, and our values. The basic science is not complicated: Stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, and the global temperature will stop rising tomorrow. Stop burning fossil fuels in 50 years, and the temperature will keep rising for 50 years, making parts of our planet virtually uninhabitable.  It’s up to us.  The hotter it gets, the deeper and wider our fault lines will open.  

The Heat Will Kill You First is about the extreme ways in which our planet is already changing. It is about why spring is coming a few weeks earlier and fall is coming a few weeks later and the impact that will have on everything from our food supply to disease outbreaks. It is about what will happen to our lives and our communities when typical summer days in Chicago or Boston go from 90° F to 110°F. A heatwave, Goodell explains, is a predatory event — one that culls out the most vulnerable people.  But that is changing. As heat waves become more intense and more common, they will become more democratic.  

As an award-winning journalist who has been at the forefront of environmental journalism for decades, Goodell’s new book may be his most provocative yet, explaining how extreme heat will dramatically change the world as we know it.  Masterfully reported, mixing the latest scientific insight with on-the-ground storytelling, Jeff Goodell tackles the big questions and uncovers how extreme heat is a force beyond anything we have reckoned with before.

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