alaska

This week I devoured The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr. Devoured. Anyone who is thinking of writing memoir or who does write memoir should read this book. Or any of her other books.

Last week I was reading The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan. I finished it this week. Amazing. Jenny Norberg did incredible research and reporting, she also has clear, well-thought out discussions of gender and women’s rights. Don’t miss this one.

I restarted Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption this week, too. This time I’m reading it as research. Not into the story but into the author, the writing, the ‘how the heck did she do this?’

And I started reading Looking for Alaska by John Greene. My kids read it this summer and I was stuck at the grocery store for over an hour because the battery died on our car. So while he worked on that, sweating and all, I sat at the cafe in the air-conditioned grocery store and read a novel. A bit rougher around the edges than I was anticipating, but I’m intrigued because the main setting is a boarding school.

Still reading Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown. Might be reading it for a while, it isn’t really a fly-through-it kind of book, though I do really like it and am finding it useful for parenting teens.