One Sentence Book Reviews

Written by and for people who don't like book reviews

Hello & happy Friday! January is off to a galloping start. If you made a resolution to nourish your creativity this year, read on!

Announcements

Story Connection now has a podcast! You can listen right now to amazing stories told on stage right here in Carrboro, N.C.— hear more stories at the next show on February 13th.

Details for the next Journey to Jupiter Writing Retreat are being finalized now—stay tuned for an announcmeent about when and where we’ll be blasting off.

One Sentence Book Reviews

I haven’t read the news since November, and it’s the single greatest development of recent years of my life. In addition to getting my focus back, I’m enjoying a sidelight I hadn’t expected: I have a lot more time to read books.

I’m getting close to turning into the compulsively reading weirdo Stephen King describes in his book On Writing:

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway…

Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dig in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows. Waiting rooms were made for books—of course! But so are theater lobbies before the show, long and boring checkout lines, and everyone’s favorite, the john.”

—Stephen King

Of course King wrote this before the advent of the smartphone, but the logic still applies. Put down that phone and pick up a book and you will make much more headway on your To Be Read pile than you thought possible.

I’ve read a lot of good books lately, but not reviews. I tend to avoid reviews, which often have an agenda outside of fairly conveying a book’s content. My solution? One sentence book reviews, with enough info to help you decide if it’s for you or not.

Since brevity is hard for me, I did allow myself a few additional sentences specifically for writers, who might be reading beyond entertainment, to examine some element of craft or style.

Let me know which of these you’ve read and what I should add to my TBR pile. Happy reading!

Wellness by Nathan Hill

Read this book if you’re in the mood for a smart, readable romp, that manages to send up postmodernism, parenting, and polyamory (and more), with Gen X protagonists who will twang your nostalgia nerve if you’re the right age, and a fascinating plot line about the placebo effect I’m still thinking about.

Additional thoughts for writers: The structure of this book is truly wild and impressive. To say it’s a-chronological does not begin to describe the leaps and dives Hill takes. This is his second book, so accordingly more freedom was available. I was also impressed with the level of detail in the characters and description—utterly convincing across many landscapes, eras, and humans.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Read this book if you like a voice-driven, underdog protagonist, don’t mind reading about poverty and addiction, like long, epic novels, and/or want to spend some time in rural Appalachia.

Additional thoughts for writers: This book is a triumph of voice—for over 500 pages, Kingsolver inhabits a unique voice and lets it drive the story and its telling. I am not qualified to weigh in on the authenticity of this voice—I only know it is not easy to create such a distinctive voice and be consistent with it for as long as she is. And no, you don’t have to read David Copperfield to enjoy this book, though I do suggest you pillage Dickens’ oeuvre for both enjoyment and edification!

Meditation for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

Read this book if you struggle with perfectionism, are tired of not making progress on projects you care about, and/or feel there aren’t enough hours in the day—you won’t find miracle solutions, but you will learn how to live in the realm of what’s feasible and pay attention to what matters.

Additional thoughts for writers: This book is written in short sections, meant to be read one per day for four weeks. His first book, 4000 weeks, makes many of the same points in less distilled form. This pruned version is both punchier and a little too light for me in certain places. Sometimes you need more page space for concepts that are complex and hard to integrate.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Read this book if you like slim novels with few characters (but one big dog) that explore grief, writers, sexism, and the complexity of friendship between slightly damaged humans.

Additional thoughts for writers: This book is very inside baseball for writers, with a lot of searing observations about old-school sexism in the literary establishment (mostly in the form of inappropriate relationships between older male authors and younger female disciples) and competition and insecurity in creative circles. I’m not sure a non-writer would be as interested in all that as I was.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko

Read this book if you are interested an elegant, complex, and heartbreaking story of a boy born in the U.S. to a Chinese mother who is later adopted by a white family and struggles to understand, accept, and reconcile his own identity and forgive his mother, who grapples with moving on from heartbreaking choices forced upon her.

Additional thoughts for writers: This book blew me away: very sharp, real characters and relationships, deft shifts in voice, point of view, and setting, and ultimately a story about “the immigrant experience” that could have fallen into so many common traps but superseded them all. Very much worth reading.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Read this book if you love lyrical writing and wonder what life is like for 6 astronauts living on the International Space Station and contemplating the vastness of the cosmos and the smallness of humanity.

Additional thoughts for writers: This book has almost no plot—it reads like a 200 page poem. Almost every sentence is astonishing. And sometimes the book is boring, but what she does with words is truly awe-inspiring. Ya know, like space.