It's Monday! What are you reading?

Aren't books amazing? I mean, they're nothing but squiggles on paper but somehow as your eyes gaze on the squiggles, they make a whole new world come alive inside your head. And with a good book, you come away a better person, with a tad more empathy and a little more wisdom than you did before you started . Well, here are some hits and misses from the last few months.

Sometime in 2012, I started seeing ads for a new mini-series on PBS (the public broadcasting channel), named Call The Midwife. Always interested in issues of women's health, I sought out the book that this TV series is based on. The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth was one of my best reads of 2012.

The author was a young woman from a comfortable middle-class home who, when the time came to make a career decision, did something very unlikely- she left her nice life and went to live in a convent and work as a midwife in the slums of London. This memoir is hilarious and devastating in equal parts. Her case studies are snapshots of what life is like on this planet- so wretched, so hopeful, so tender and so cruel all at once. If you've read and enjoyed James Herriot's stories of being a vet, you will appreciate how this memoir is written by someone who clearly loves her work and clearly respects the people that she serves. And at the end of the book, there is a completely enjoyable essay on  the Cockney dialect of English. Truly, read this book if you can find it. You'll probably stay up half the night to read it (I did) and sob uncontrollably once or twice (I did this too). By the way, I did see some of that PBS mini-series based on this book and thought the book is SO much better. Your mind will do the dramatization, there's no need for actors and television here.

Around the same time, I read another memoir called My Year with Eleanor by Noelle Hancock. Hancock was a celebrity-gossip blogger who wanted more from life and took on a year of taking on her fears and trying new things, based on a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, "Do one thing every day that scares you". Now, I do appreciate the author's desire to face her fears and get out of her comfort zone. But the whole thing came off as being shallow and gimmicky- like learning to swing on a trapeze, or swimming with sharks or learning to do dangerous maneuvers in an aircraft. To me, this had a whiff of that awful awful TV show Fear Factor. What's the big deal with doing stunts? The person who doesn't settle for an easy life (like that midwife up there) is the one who is truly fearless, not the person who overcomes her stage fright by doing crude stand up comedy for one night. I'm probably being too harsh but reading these two books around the same time definitely made me roll my eyes while reading this one.

Along these very lines of conquering one's fears and taking on adventures is another very fascinating memoir, Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Strayed describes her life in her early 20s- a very troubled life with all reckless decisions around drugs and men. Out of nowhere, she gets the idea of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail on the US West Coast and actually goes on to do an 1100 mile solo hike. I got completely sucked into her story. This woman was so desperately ill-prepared- she could not life her backpack even off the ground, she ran out of money and water, her toenails fell off one by one while hiking- but she just literally puts one foot in front of the other. This is one story worth reading for the unique adventure that it is.

I was so fascinated by Wild that this week I read yet another memoir of an author who goes hiking on a long trail. A Walk in The Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. Similar to Strayed's book, this one has a new and inexperienced hiker who takes on a very ambitious trail, but there the similarity ends. The book has its comic moments, and the author has many things to say about the park service and the history of wilderness preservation in the US. It was an interesting read but not something I would call particularly memorable for me. I'm adding this book to the What's in a Name reading challenge for "Lost or Found" because there's the word "rediscovering" in the subtitle.

Reading books about ill-prepared people who get up and go for months-long hikes is tempting me to go off and do long hikes too. Just kidding. I'll be right here on this couch if you need me.

All of these books were non-fiction but I've been reading a couple of novels too. I did start J. K. Rowling's (yes, that J. K. Rowling) much-awaited novel, A Casual Vacancy. Found it too casual and vacant and didn't finish it. I just did not find myself caring enough about the characters in this book. It was relentlessly petty and depressing and I just gave up. Not that I have anything against depressing books (as the next book will illustrate) but I have to care about the characters.

Image: Goodreads

Last week I read Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell. This book first appeared on my radar when its movie adaptation won several awards a couple of years ago. What made me want to read it is that the book is set in rural Missouri and in the years that I lived in MO, I heard several descriptions of life in the Ozarks, and it was mostly negative- the poverty, the meth labs. This short and intense novel tells the story of a teenager who's having to grow up too fast and specifically, about an episode in this teenage girl's life where she has to find her father who has skipped bail (and risk losing her home if she doesn't find him). The author succeeded in transporting me to this bleak landscape for a few hours and to a life and culture completely foreign to me. I'm adding this book to the Monthly Key Word Reading Challenge where "Winter" was one of the key words for January.


So, tell me, what are you reading? I'm linking to It's Monday! What Are You Reading?