One of my New Years resolutions was to try to get back into a groove with the writing here, so hopefully we’re on track to have this be monthly yet again! As usual for a January in an odd-numbered year for me, this month was getting ready to plunge back into legislative session, but there was a little trip out of town too!

In Books…

• Gulp: This book examines the digestive process, from how the food tastes going in to the problems that can arise when it’s supposed to come out, in trademark Mary Roach fashion, which is to say with humor and curiosity. Her style is definitely pop science, and there are plenty of poop and fart jokes, but she’s clearly done her homework and spends time talking to actual researchers in the field. It’s a fun read and I even learned some things!
• The Last Wife of Henry VIII: I was a little worried about this one because historians don’t always make great fiction authors, but Carolly Erickson’s work here was aggressively fine. Catherine Parr comes across as generally sensible and level-headed and therefore easy to root for, though the idea that she would have had a physical relationship with Tom Seymour while Henry remained alive is preposterous, given that she’d lived through Catherine Howard’s grisly execution for the same crime shortly beforehand. She took a few liberties with the historical record, but overall crafted a book that was reasonably enjoyable but not at all memorable.
• Matrix: I ultimately found myself with mixed feelings over this book club read. The prose is spare and elegant, in a way that I initially thought worked but as the story went on, I found myself wanting more verve and emotion. The central character, loosely based on an amalgamation of two historical persons, the poet Marie de France and Mary, the illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey Plantangenet and Abbess of Shaftesbury Abbey, is interesting. She fluctuates between sympathetic and unsympathetic, but remains a consistent and compelling person to follow. The plot was the weakest element, with very little tension to give the narrative any propulsion. Altogether this was good but not great.
• A Room With A View: The first Forster I read was A Passage to India, which I did not at all like. But the two Forsters I’ve read since, this and Howards End, have been much more enjoyable. This is so short as to be practically a novella and tells the brief story of Lucy, a young English woman who travels with her cousin to Florence and meets a father and son when they offer to exchange their rooms (that overlook the Arno) with those of the two women and come to change her life forever. It’s lighthearted and amusingly mocking of the milieu it depicts but has a fundamental sweetness.
• Dreams From My Father: Campaign autobiographies are often only interesting in what they tell you about how the candidate would like to be viewed. But this was written in the mid-90s, long before a run for office was on Barack Obama’s radar, and it should not come as much of a surprise that it’s very good. He’s always been a talented writer, and this examination of his own childhood, his post-college years organizing in Chicago, and a trip to Kenya to learn more about his father is well-crafted, despite some uneven pacing and occasional indulgences. It’s very much worth the read and still has interesting things to say even nearly 30 years after it was written.
• Daring to Drive: Manal al-Sharif was already remarkable in that she became a female computer scientist in Saudi Arabia. But what makes her even more so is her dedication to the cause of allowing women to drive cars in her native country. Al-Sharif’s memoir traces her journey from a pious teenage zealot, who burned her brother’s illicit Backstreet Boys cassettes, to being imprisoned after posting a video of herself driving in 2011. The writing is matter-of-fact, perhaps a little dry, but it reveals an interesting perspective on Saudi society and al-Sharif is compelling and easy to root for.
• The Daydreams: While there was a period where everything was trying to pitch itself as the next Gone Girl, it seems like some of that has shifted over into trying to be the next Daisy Jones & The Six. This book, which releases in May, is following the latter path but swaps in the early 2000s and television for the 1970s and music. It tells the story of the cast reunion of a once-beloved teenybopper show, whose four stars have all found themselves in different corners of the world: male lead Noah is a well-liked working actor on the cusp of movie stardom, female lead Summer Wright became a tabloid fodder “trainwreck” after the live finale of the show’s second season went sideways, the best friend type Liana is an athlete’s wife and Instagram influencer, and the villain, Kat (our protagonist) has left the industry entirely and works as an attorney. The story is told in dual timelines, during the show’s heyday and as the cast prepares for the reunion, and while it isn’t necessarily an especially great book from a prose or characterization perspective (and doesn’t actually say anything all that revelatory about the celebrity culture of the era), it is very much a page-turner and easy to get drawn into.

In Life…

• Digging out from the snow: We started off the New Year with what was supposed to be a huge rainstorm but turned into a huge snowstorm that dumped eight inches on a largely unprepared area instead. Surprise! It snarled things pretty badly, and some people went days without power because it was super heavy, wet snow that brought down tree limbs. And then we just kept getting hit with a little bit more here and there. We depend on snowpack in the Sierras to have water in the summer, so it’s definitely a good thing in a long-term sense, but holy wow was it not fun to deal with.
• Weekend in San Francisco: The last time I went on a work retreat was in January 2020…there was the pandemic, and then last year’s trip to Washington DC was held about three weeks after I’d given birth. This year’s trip was to the Bay Area and it was nice to get some time in with my colleagues as well as hang out in a super cool city. I did one of my favorite things to do on vacation and spent some quality time at Green Apple Books!