Ellie @ Home 2018 Summer Reading List...and an update

The Reading List is very condensed this year as I only have 6 weeks off from school. Spring 2017/2018 ends July 21, and Fall 2018/2019 begins September 3. I keep reminding myself that I am getting ever-closer to my goal of a Bachelor’s Degree, but days like today when the sun is shining, birds are singing, and I’m stuck at my computer doing an online chemistry exam (and taking a break because I’m going cross-eyed) it’s very difficult to keep on keeping on. Work, school, and trying to maintain some semblance of home life has quite taken over my world; my poor blog has been woefully neglected yet again, I haven’t written anything new in ages except physics discussions and history papers (at least those have been fun), and reading for entertainment usually consists of me getting a page or so in, then waking up as my husband removes my glasses. I did this before, though, while working full-time and raising two young children…I can do it again! (After all, this time around I have only one child to care for, and a husband who believes marriage really is a partnership—how did I get so lucky?!?)

Anyway, I will stop my boo-hooing, and give you the list of books I am hoping to cram into six weeks of freedom. All of the titles are from my Goodreads “Want to Read” list. Without homework to eat up my reading time, I average one book every three days or so; I can reasonably expect to get 12 books in, and I’ll add the remaining 2 as “hope to’s.” (6 weeks x 7 days per week ÷ 3 days per book = 14…see, those math classes really did come in handy!) Plus I’ll toss in another 3 “oh my god I really did have time to read it all so I’ll read a few more” books.

Ellie @ Home 2018 Summer Reading List…

1: The Swan Gondola by Timothy Schaffert

A lush and thrilling romantic fable about two lovers set against the scandalous burlesques, midnight séances, and aerial ballets of the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair.

On the eve of the 1898 Omaha World’s Fair, Ferret Skerritt, ventriloquist by trade, con man by birth, isn’t quite sure how it will change him or his city. Omaha still has the marks of a filthy Wild West town, even as it attempts to achieve the grandeur and respectability of nearby Chicago. But when he crosses paths with the beautiful and enigmatic Cecily, his whole purpose shifts and the fair becomes the backdrop to their love affair.

One of a traveling troupe of actors that has descended on the city, Cecily works in the Midway’s Chamber of Horrors, where she loses her head hourly on a guillotine playing Marie Antoinette. And after closing, she rushes off, clinging protectively to a mysterious carpetbag, never giving Ferret a second glance. But a moonlit ride on the swan gondola, a boat on the lagoon of the New White City, changes everything, and the fair’s magic begins to take its effect.

From the critically acclaimed author of The Coffins of Little Hope, The Swan Gondola is a transporting read, reminiscent of Water for Elephants or The Night Circus. (Cole says: My daughter and I LOVE The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and I’m hoping this one holds true to its promised magical ideal!)

2: Church of Marvels by Leslie Parry

A ravishing first novel, set in vibrant, tumultuous turn-of-the-century New York City, where the lives of four outsiders become entwined, bringing irrevocable change to them all

New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.

Odile Church and her beautiful sister, Belle, were raised amid the applause and magical pageantry of The Church of Marvels, their mother’s spectacular Coney Island sideshow. But the Church has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in its ashes. Now Belle, the family’s star, has vanished into the bowels of Manhattan, leaving Odile alone and desperate to find her.

A young woman named Alphie awakens to find herself trapped across the river in Blackwell’s Lunatic Asylum—sure that her imprisonment is a ruse by her husband’s vile, overbearing mother. On the ward she meets another young woman of ethereal beauty who does not speak, a girl with an extraordinary talent that might save them both.

As these strangers’ lives become increasingly connected, their stories and secrets unfold. Moving from the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East Side, a spectacular human circus to a brutal, terrifying asylum, Church of Marvels takes readers back to turn-of-the-century New York—a city of hardship and dreams, love and loneliness, hope and danger. In magnetic, luminous prose, Leslie Parry offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past in a narrative of astonishing beauty, full of wondrous enchantments-a marvelous debut that will leave readers breathless. (Cole says: This brings to mind Alice Hoffman’s beautiful story The Museum of Extraordinary Things.)

3: I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl: Poems by Karyna McGlinn

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues—frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse’s eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In otherworldly vignettes, 1994 pairs the unreliable narration of Jacob’s Ladder (with its questions of identity and shifting realities) with the microscopic compulsiveness of Einstein’s Dreams. The book’s sense of hypnotic premeditation brings Donnie Darko to mind as well, as poem after poem scatters the breadcrumbs of a murder mystery leading us further away from the present self and deeper into the past. I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is an astounding debut collection that will crawl under your skin and stay there.

"I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is a remarkable book. It is innovative, original, unprecedented, and, at the same time, its originality and innovation are predicated on a passionate, even obsessive relationship with the past."—Lynn Emanuel (Cole says: I have just finished reading Amanda Lovelace’s two stunning, heart wrenching, visceral books the princess saves herself in this one and the witch doesn’t burn in this one, and this book brings them to mind, as well as Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey. Women’s poetry is taking new forms, free-flowing, written as the poet lives them, I think, rather than as how convention says women should present it, and themselves.)

4: Lampblack & Ash: poems by Simone Muench

There is something utterly in thrall here, honey-slow and fixated. Driven by obsession—in particular, obsession with the legendary French poet, Robert Desnos—Muench’s identification with a true self beyond the self’s known truth is startling.
—from the introduction by Carol Muske-Dukes

“Simone’s poems have a confidence and sophistication of what I like to call intentionality. Also wit, grace, poise, and a relationship to writing beyond self-referential feeling.”
—Anne Waldman

“Lush, sprouting, sensuous images line-by-line, adopting myth freely, Muench’s poems are volatile explosives, circling beauty.”—James Tate (Cole says: I am not familiar with the work of Robert Desnos, and my interest in this book is based mainly on the reviews provided by other Goodreads members, who say such things about this book as: “Her poems are gorgeous & well-crafted. This newest is no exception.” and “…the power of Muench's language quickly won me over. Her language often borders on the sublime, with a narrative intensity, whether she's talking about a Louisiana evening or a sexy boy.”)

5: Dark Roses for the Grave of Andersen by Rod Starcke

This collection of entertaining stories were written in the tradition of older fairy tales such as The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. It contains "The Unicorn And The Lovelorn Knight" in which a unicorn falls in love with a human, "The Little Skeleton" wherein a little girl continues to dance after her death, "The Wine Of Good Humor"--a tale of a soldier who chances upon a magic bottle of wine that grants good humor to any who drink of it. Readers will be enthralled at the cast of characters, the original story lines and the return to the archetypal fairy tale style. (Cole says: I will never outgrow my love of faerie tales, and with authors like this turning out contemporary faerie tales in traditional themes, I don’t have to.)

6: How a Mother Weaned Her Girl From Fairy Tales by Kate Bernheimer

Elegant and brutal, the stories in Kate Bernheimer's latest collection occupy a heightened landscape, where the familiar cedes to the grotesque and nonsense just as often devolves into terror. These are fairy tales out of time, renewing classic stories we think we know, like one of Bernheimer's girls, whose hands of steel turn to flowers, leaving her beautiful but alone. (Cole says: I LOVED her collection My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales. Bonus points if you know which Grimm’s faerie tale that line comes from…it’s my favorite!)

7: He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter’s Quest to Know Him by Mimi Baird

A Washington Post Best Book of 2015

A mid-century doctor's raw, unvarnished account of his own descent into madness, and his daughter's attempt to piece his life back together and make sense of her own.

Texas-born and Harvard-educated, Dr. Perry Baird was a rising medical star in the late 1920s and 1930s. Early in his career, ahead of his time, he grew fascinated with identifying the biochemical root of manic depression, just as he began to suffer from it himself. By the time the results of his groundbreaking experiments were published, Dr. Baird had been institutionalized multiple times, his medical license revoked, and his wife and daughters estranged. He later received a lobotomy and died from a consequent seizure, his research incomplete, his achievements unrecognized.
            Mimi Baird grew up never fully knowing this story, as her family went silent about the father who had been absent for most of her childhood. Decades later, a string of extraordinary coincidences led to the recovery of a manuscript which Dr. Baird had worked on throughout his brutal institutionalization, confinement, and escape. This remarkable document, reflecting periods of both manic exhilaration and clear-headed health, presents a startling portrait of a man who was a uniquely astute observer of his own condition, struggling with a disease for which there was no cure, racing against time to unlock the key to treatment before his illness became impossible to manage. 
     Fifty years after being told her father would forever be “ill” and “away,” Mimi Baird set off on a quest to piece together the memoir and the man. In time her fingers became stained with the lead of the pencil he had used to write his manuscript, as she devoted herself to understanding who he was, why he disappeared, and what legacy she had inherited. The result of his extraordinary record and her journey to bring his name to light is He Wanted the Moon, an unforgettable testament to the reaches of the mind and the redeeming power of a determined heart. (Cole says: This looks like it will be a tear-jerker, as a daughter seeks to find the truth of her father’s illness and the life he lived.)

8: I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death by Maggie O’Farrell

We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death.

I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter--for whom this book was written--from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers.

Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O'Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself. (Cole says: I expect this will redefine for me what “life” truly is, and remind me to truly appreciate everyone I hold dear.)

9: Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard

From the author of the monumental My Struggle series, Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of the masters of contemporary literature and a genius of observation and introspection, comes the first in a new autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons.

“28 August. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you...

I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.”

Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerizing intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice--the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention. This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is. (Cole says: I often wish I had done a similar thing for my children, if only writing them a letter before birth to let them know how very much they were loved and looked-forward to.)

10: Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married by Nancy Rubin Stuart

The story of two Revolutionary–era teenagers who defy their Loyalist families to marry radical patriots, Henry Knox and Benedict Arnold, and are forever changed

When Peggy Shippen, the celebrated blonde belle of Philadelphia, married American military hero Benedict Arnold in 1779, she anticipated a life of fame and fortune, but financial debts and political intrigues prompted her to conspire with her treasonous husband against George Washington and the American Revolution. In spite of her commendable efforts to rehabilitate her husband’s name, Peggy Shippen continues to be remembered as a traitor bride.

Peggy’s patriotic counterpart was Lucy Flucker, the spirited and voluptuous brunette, who in 1774 defied her wealthy Tory parents by marrying a poor Boston bookbinder simply for love. When her husband, Henry Knox, later became a famous general in the American Revolutionary War, Lucy faithfully followed him through Washington’s army camps where she birthed and lost babies, befriended Martha Washington, was praised for her social skills, and secured her legacy as an admired patriot wife.

And yet, as esteemed biographer Nancy Rubin Stuart reveals, a closer look at the lives of both spirited women reveals that neither was simply a “traitor” or “patriot.” In Defiant Brides, the first dual biography of both Peggy Shippen Arnold and Lucy Flucker Knox, Stuart has crafted a rich portrait of two rebellious women who defied expectations and struggled—publicly and privately—in a volatile political moment in early America.

Drawing from never-before-published correspondence, Stuart traces the evolution of these women from passionate teenage brides to mature matrons, bringing both women from the sidelines of history to its vital center. Readers will be enthralled by Stuart’s dramatic account of the epic lives of these defiant brides, which begin with romance, are complicated by politics, and involve spies, disappointments, heroic deeds, tragedies, and personal triumphs. (Cole says: Strong women in US history. Yes.)

11: The Other Side: A Memoir by Lacy M. Johnson

Lacy Johnson was held prisoner in a soundproofed room in a basement apartment that her ex-boyfriend rented and outfitted for the sole purpose of raping and killing her. She escaped, but not unscathed. The Other Side is the haunting account of a first passionate and then abusive relationship, the events leading to Johnson’s kidnapping and imprisonment, her dramatic escape, and her hard-fought struggle to recover. At once thrilling, terrifying, harrowing, and hopeful, The Other Side offers more than just a true crime record. In language both stark and poetic, Johnson weaves together a richly personal narrative with police reports, psychological evaluations, and neurobiological investigations, provoking both troubling and timely questions about gender roles and the epidemic of violence against women. (Cole says: Another strong woman who defied the odds and held on to the life she had a right to live, regardless of what anyone else thought. There is far too much violence against women being acted out in our world. Women like Lacy Johnson aren’t afraid to move mountains to make that stop. )

12: The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Magnuso

At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. In this captivating story, Manguso recalls her struggle: arduous blood cleansings, collapsed veins, multiple chest catheters, depression, the deaths of friends and strangers, addiction, and, worst of all for a writer, the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. A book of tremendous grace, The Two Kinds of Decay transcends the very notion of what an illness story can and should be. (Cole says: Again, a strong, determined woman brave enough to face the challenges in her life and then climb over them.)

The “Hope To” Reads….

13: Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink by E. Melanie DuPuis

For over a century, America's nutrition authorities have heralded milk as "nature's perfect food," as "indispensable" and "the most complete food." These milk "boosters" have ranged from consumer activists, to government nutritionists, to the American Dairy Council and its ubiquitous milk moustache ads. The image of milk as wholesome and body-building has a long history, but is it accurate?

Recently, within the newest social movements around food, milk has lost favor. Vegan anti-milk rhetoric portrays the dairy industry as cruel to animals and milk as bad for humans. Recently, books with titles like, "Milk: The Deadly Poison," and "Don't Drink Your Milk" have portrayed milk as toxic and unhealthy. Controversies over genetically-engineered cows and questions about antibiotic residue have also prompted consumers to question whether the milk they drink each day is truly good for them.

In Nature's Perfect Food Melanie Dupuis illuminates these questions by telling the story of how Americans came to drink milk. We learn how cow's milk, which was associated with bacteria and disease became a staple of the American diet. Along the way we encounter 19th century evangelists who were convinced that cow's milk was the perfect food with divine properties, brewers whose tainted cow feed poisoned the milk supply, and informal wetnursing networks that were destroyed with the onset of urbanization and industrialization. Informative and entertaining, Nature's Perfect Food will be the standard work on the history of milk. (Cole says: I’ve always hated milk, even before I became lactose intolerant…)

14: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia — a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo — to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family — past and present — is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences. (Cole says: This book made so many headlines, and seriously questions the practice of ethics in medicine today.)

The “oh my god I really did have time to read it all so I’ll read a few more” Reads…

15: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.

In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves. (Cole says: I can churn out pages and pages of text, but don’t expect me to say more than two or three sentences….)

16: I Am First a Human Being: the Prison Letters of Krystyna Wituska by Krystyna Wituska

On the eve of World War II, Krystyna Wituska, a carefree, rather spoiled teenager attending finishing school in Switzerland, returned to Poland. During the Occupation, when she was twenty years old, she drifted into the Polish Underground. By her own admission, she was attracted at first by the adventure, but youthful bravado soon turned into a mental and spiritual mastery over fear. Because Krystyna spoke fluent German she was assigned to collect information on German troop movements at Warsaw airport. In 1942, at the age of twenty-one, she was arrested by the Gestapo and transferred to prison in Berlin where she was executed two years later. In the last eighteen months of her life Krystyna wrote over sixty letters which, through the kindness of a courageous prison guard, were smuggled to her parents or the guard's daughter who became her pen pal. From the moment she was arrested, Krystyna would not allow her spirit to be broken and believed that "the noble that is within us will not perish." It is Krystyna's humanity that unites her with other victims of war and other resistance fighters, and enables us to identify with her even though her ordeal was outside the scope of our experience. (Cole says: One of the thousands of unsung heroes of World War II, the outline brings to mind Etty Hillesum’s Letters From Westerbork.)

17: Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal by Alexandra Johnson

A practical guide to keeping a diary and transforming it into future projects. Alex Johnson shows how to spark memory, generate and focus material, identify key patterns, make procrastination work for you and insure your diary's privacy. Each chapter features tailored exercises for both beginning and committed diarists. Beginners will turn first to quick ways to get - and stay - started and to overcome inhibitions. Seasoned chroniclers, though, will start diaries with a new slant: how to trigger inspiration with creative brainstorming exercises; how to note patterns in diaries they already have; and how to shape their material. (Cole says: I do love my journal. I have fourteen volumes on my shelf, and am currently filling in number 15. My journal is very much a part of me; it is a place where I can explore my fears, concerns, sort out work or school issues that are needling me, and a place to brew creative ideas. Will I leave my journals to my children when I am gone? Probably not. But for now they are there, a reminder of who I am and how I have changed, and continue to.)

And there you are, 17 titles that I am hoping to read most of between July 21 and September 3 of this year. I hope people find this list both interesting and inspiring, and maybe pick up a few of these themselves. If you do, feel free to drop me a line letting me know if you liked it, loved it, hated it, used it as a doorstop…but no spoilers please! I can’t get started on these for another almost 2 months! Oh, the heartbreak….)