Summer is winding down, and I did pretty well on my reading stack, all chaos considered. I’ve been posting the covers throughout the summer, but below are BRIEF summaries of what I thought of them (spoilers: they were all GREAT), in case you need to combat your choice paralysis at Barnes and Noble.

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

This book has all the things I like to talk about. Religion! Scientific inquiry! World cultures! Female relationships! WOOT! 

Our main character, Gifty, is a PhD candidate trying to finish her studies, take care of her ailing mother, and reconcile the trauma of her childhood all at once, and of course the three are deeply intertwined. I loved the structure of this book—the action takes place over only a few days, but we learn about 25 years of Gifty’s life through ruminations and flashbacks.

Read Transcendent Kingdom if you like a relationship-centered, meditative book with a strong female protagonist and a dash of neuroscience. As a bonus, the prose is quick and straightforward, so this is a fast read, despite its heavy themes.

Such a Fun Age, Kiley Reid

Ooh boy. Such a Fun Age was a Reese’s Book Club pick, so I am probably the last person on the planet to read it. If you haven’t heard of it, though, it’s about the relationships between characters of different races and classes—centering around a young black woman and the upper-class white family she nannies for—and, more uncomfortably, how they perceive those relationships.

Read Such a Fun Age if you like your racial reckonings packaged with humor and snappy dialogue, and, if you’re a white woman in her 30s (hi there), you don’t mind recognizing that you’re the butt of many of the jokes. There is much squirmy discomfort to go around here, but hey, it’s the kind we need to get used to, if we want to make anything better.

City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert

Oh do I love me some Elizabeth Gilbert, especially for the way she can make all of her books—despite wildly different plots and settings—unite as this ongoing deliberation on womanhood and humanity. In City of Girls, those themes are wrapped in a particularly unlikely tortilla shell of a premise: an aimless and privileged young woman, Vivian, falls into unbridled drunken debauchery amongst theater people in the 1920s.

Read City of Girls if you like your historical fiction low on trauma and high on female characters, and if you’re in the mood for something aggressively life-affirming. You also need some free time and a certain level of commitment, because this one clocks in at over 450 pages, but it’s worth it.

Bad Feminist, Roxanne Gay

Reading this collection of essays feels like sitting in a senior lit seminar, and as a forever English major, it scratched an itchy, lonely spot in my soul. It’s hard to find people who just want to put on their monocles and talk around issues, leaning into free associations and never coming to hard conclusions. But Roxanne Gay is those people. This book contains essays about feminism, of course, but it’s also about being flawed and human, surviving trauma, and interacting with pop culture as an imperfect, enduring person. 

Read Bad Feminist if you’re disappointed that life has not been one continuous Socratic seminar, as you were led to believe as an undergraduate, and if you dig literary criticism and a strong author’s voice.

The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green 

Surely you know who John Green is, right? The wildly successful YA author? The twitchily appealing YouTube history professor? The PODCAST HOST??

Dude generates a lot of content, and as a consumer of much of it, I can tell you that if you want to get in on the John Green action, this book is an excellent place to start. It’s an essay collection about the ways people have irreversibly changed the world we live in (the Anthropocene), and it elevated my baseline happiness by at least two percent. He thwacks this magical writing spot where you can feel the energy of an author through their words, and in this case, that energy is warm, thoughtful, and hopeful. And still twitchily appealing.

Read The Anthropocene Reviewed if the world seems like a giant Springfield Tire Fire and you could use a boost, and/or if you’ve been searching for the place where obscure facts, pop culture, and Indianapolis intersect.

Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, Stephen Herrero

As I posted on the Facepage, I read this book because it was on the bookshelf at our AirBnB. I managed to read about seven chapters before we left and then, of course, left the book behind for the next ursine apocalypse prepper, so my apologies for the substitution in the picture here. I can still give you my honest review, based on those few chapters and what has been seared into my brain for the rest of my mortal existence.

We should all just stay inside.

Well, that’s not a review. My review is that the book is riveting, not only for its detailed accounts of grizzly bear attacks, but also for its central message, which is that the odds of you making an intelligent decision in the face of a charging grizzly are approximately zero.

If you must leave your home (which I’ve stopped doing since reading this book), carry bear spray at all times, and if a grizzly attacks you, play dead. Or climb a tree. Or wave your arms and shout at it. No one really knows. Also, consider whether you even wish to survive this encounter, because I learned that if an angry grizzly can reach your face, it WILL chew it off, one hundred percent of the time.

Read Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance if you are looking for justification for a life spent exclusively in climate-controlled environments, or for fuel for your nightmares.

That’s it! As always, I’d love to know what you’re reading, as long as it’s not about more things that can kill me in the places I like to vacation. My reading stack is close to empty at the moment, so send them my way. Happy reading!