Bluestocking Catalogue #20
The best nonfiction I read in 2020, my current favorite podcast, and a poem about connection.
Greetings, friends.
I hope your holidays were the best ones available to you, as Sarah & Beth at Pantsuits Politics say. Noah and I had a quiet, lovely Christmas at home. After we'd Zoomed with our families, he worked on building a new computer and I finished the fourth and final book of the Red Queen series I raved about a few newsletters ago. I'm grateful I picked up an immersive fantasy series at the end of the year (and I would highly recommend this one) - this series kept me reading even though my attention has felt fragmented and frayed this month.
As I alluded to last week, I've continued to journal my way through Laura Tremaine's end-of-year questions. Question #5 - what surprised you most this year - elicited a response about connection with other humans- at first, I was concerned about a lack of connection, but as quarantine days lengthened, I was surprised by the connections I forged in 2020.
My anxiety means I am often thinking about the future, so at the beginning of the pandemic, I realized that a stay-at-home order would take away my most effective mental health coping mechanism: namely, quality in-person time with other people. Planning coffee with a friend or Friday afternoon drinks with colleagues not only gave me something to look forward to, they brought me genuine joy and satisfaction in the moment. In March, I realized that it would be impossible to continue in-person interactions in the way I always had, and I worried about what that would mean for my mental health. I was concerned that my two choices were either I can either be safe or I can maintain my mental health.
This summer especially, as we found creative ways to safely see the people who matter most to us, I realized I wasn't as trapped as I feared. I also discovered that I often overthink connection when it can be quite simple: a little intentionality and vulnerability go a long way. Many of my fondest memories from this year took place in the various parks and green spaces where friends and I met to walk or just talk as we sat in the sunshine. I've also re-discovered phone calls as a simple way to connect with long-distance loved ones. Everything doesn't have to be Zoom - thank goodness. As I wrote about how magical it felt to connect (socially distancing and outside) with other people this summer after long isolation, I wrote this poem.
Connection:
the thread tying
your heart to mine.
Like light,
necessary to life.
Like communion,
nourishing, feeding
a deeper part of me.
Like joy, requiring
release, not frenzy.
Like a child's delight,
ebullient, as bubbles
twinkle away.
[Read on for one podcast recommendation, one recipe, and my favorite nonfiction books of 2020.]
One podcast: Be There in 5
Have you ever had a friend so simultaneously smart, funny and relatable that you thought, I could listen to them for hours? I feel that way about Kate Kennedy (even though we're not friends IRL ... yet 😉) Kate is a 32-year-old podcaster, writer and pop-culture aficionado who also happens to be funny & insightful. Her podcasts are long-form monologues about all sorts of things, and I often listen to them in chunks (or when I'm doing a long cleaning task.)
Part of what I love about Kate's podcast is that I feel like it's made for me (it likely is, as her target demographic is probably millennial women.) Her tone is honest and heartwarming, and I always finish her podcast feeling a little less alone. If the long lengths of her episodes give you pause, I'd recommend just listening for 30 - 40 minutes, so you can get the feel of what she's doing, then see if you want to listen again later. (Speeding up your audio, even just a little bit, is your friend in terms of getting through podcasts. I usually listen at 1.3 speed, and it makes a difference.)
Here are a couple of recent episodes I've loved:
"Be Terrible in Five" (with Nora McInerny)" - a gorgeously nuanced interview on grief & loss & being a person which is not as heavy as it sounds
"Destiny's Inner Child" - Kate deep-dives what she calls her "main character" moments by sharing the songs that defined certain periods of her life.
Childless Millennial (Part 1) - Kate shares how, for her, Mommy internet culture can make being a parent seem so terrible that it's both terrifying and off-putting for someone who wants to be a parent but is not yet.
Double chocolate peppermint cookies:
Y'all know I love the Lazy Genius. She went live while making cookies last week, and this video is a great primer on basic cookie baking principles. I made the double chocolate peppermint cookies she did in the video, and they are delicious. You can see them in my Christmas cookie box below:
Best Nonfiction I've Read This Year
I've read a lot of fantastic nonfiction this year, partly because nonfiction was all I wanted to read at the beginning of quarantine. This is also a little bit of a surprise to me, because I adore reading fiction and usually read more fiction than nonfiction. But when I sat down to make this list, it came easily, and I heartily recommend all these books.
ALSO - I just became a Bookshop affiliate, which means two main things. First of all, I get to list all of the books I’m loving in one place - and it looks so pretty! Second of all, I will earn a small commission if you use my links. I love Bookshop because they support independent bookstores, who can use our help more than ever right now. Of course you can check out these books at the library - my favorite way is to borrow e-books using Libby.
I've arranged these books in the approximate order I read them below.
How to be Loved: A Memoir of Lifesaving Friendship by Eva Hagberg
This beautifully poignant book explores the vulnerability it takes to receive from others. After finishing it in one sitting, I immediately sent to my best friend, who was like "yeah, the vulnerability and friendship stuff is cool, but I tracked down one of the people online and I think she's bananas."
Where Goodness Still Grows by Amy Peterson
I've pressed this book into no fewer than three other people's hands - that's how much I love it. Here's my online review:
Hope for Ex-Evangelicals: A Must-Read
As a woman who grew up with a similar conservative background as Peterson's, this beautifully written book has been a balm. Peterson not only deconstructs but reclaims virtues that Western evangelicalism has distorted and abused for the sake of power.
Like Rachel Held Evans (may she rest in peace), Peterson leans into well-researched Biblical scholarship alongside her own experience and stories. The lament chapter especially hit home for me.
This is a book for our times - if you, like me, are longing for a hopeful vision for what Christianity might have to offer our broken world, I cannot recommend this book enough.
The Body Keeps the Score
I've had trouble finishing this book for some reason, but it is amazing. I'm determined to finish it by the end of the year - according to my Kindle, I'm 63% of the way through it. In conversation with McBride's book below, the research on how trauma stores itself in our bodies helped me make a lot of personal connections and opened my eyes to some new things about myself and about psychology and embodiment.
Mothers, Daughters & Body Image by Hillary McBride
This book found me at the perfect time, and transformed the way I think and feel about my body. Here are some excerpts from my journal as I was reading this book (it's definitely one I had to write/ reflect my way through):
"Knowing you are loved frees you to be yourself, to rebel sometimes, and to move through the world with confidence ... The way safety shows up as healing in my body means that I am free enough to do the work of re-imagining my relationship with my body. Healing in one area expands. Freedom grows exponentially. So does oppression."
"My body is me. My body's cues are a gift."
"When did I start to experience loss of voice?"
"Quarantine provides the luxury of listening to myself and adjusting in the moment."
Native by Kaitlin B. Curtice
I wrote extensively about Native here.
The Lazy Genius Way by Kendra Adachi
I wrote about my obsession with LGW here. I’ve also gifted this book at least three times since August. Here’s the review I left online:
This book is for you if you're tired of shaming self-help books that give you a seemingly-impossible list of to-dos. In lieu of rules, the Lazy Genius offers soulful principles that can be applied in any context. She doesn't say what to do - she says, "let's trying thinking about it this way." Along the way, Kendra validates our collective humanity by sharing her own stories alongside these principles, which are both funny and poignant.
As someone who works to live with intention, rather than autopiloting my way through life, Kendra's work helps me clarify what matters most to me and my people so I can stop wasting my energy on the stuff I don't care about. I love this book and plan on referencing it often, highlighters in hand. (It would also make a great gift, especially for people who are hard to buy for. )
When I was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson
I contend that Robinson is one of America's greatest living writers. Her fiction ranks among my favorite books of all time. I'm part-way through this memoir that is also insightful cultural commentary. Her writing and thinking is on another level, and I found myself highlighting every other sentence. Here's a snapshot of some of my highlights:
“We live on a little island of the articulable, which we tend to mistake for reality itself.”
“I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of—who knows it better than I?—people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.”
“The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. The postal system, the land grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, the G.I. Bill -- all of these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large.”
“The broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global.”
Do yourself a favor and read some Marilynne Robinson in the new year.
May your last days of 2020 be filled with excellent books & tasty bakes & connection that feels like champagne bubbles. See you in the new year!