January Reading

How are you?

I read (can’t remember where!) that by this point in January, people can tell what kind of person they are by how they’re tackling their new year goals.

If you still have a foot in the game, bravo!

If efforts are meh, quickly look for the smallest, most infinitesimal thing you can do RIGHT THIS MINUTE toward your goal.

You’ve got this.

If reading daily is a goal—or an ingrained way of life by now—here are recommendations:

Love Walked In, the charming debut novel by poet and novelist Marisa de los Santos.

While this is an adult novel, one of the main characters is an eleven-year-old girl, Clare, who tries desperately and valiantly to hide her mother’s dysfunction from her friends and teachers until she’s able to get the mother some help.

The other character, Cornelia (don’t you love that name! It sounds like a pastry), is so smitten by old movies that she holds her life up to those standards.

While working at a café—where good stories often live—love does, indeed, walk in, but not in the boy-meets-girl-in-a-cutesy way.

Leave it to a poet to turn that notion on its head.

I also appreciate what the author has to say about how children are not taken seriously often enough.

Simon Sort of Says by Erin Bow.

Middle-schooler Simon is trying to heal his heart following a tragic event.

In hopes of no one finding out what they experienced, Simon and his family move to a small, internet-free town.

The story is gut-wrenching at times, but the tone of the book is hopeful and funny—while being completely respectful of the subject.

Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell.

A gift from my son, this book leans far more toward fantasy than others of hers I’ve read and loved.

This book has a huge cast of impossible creatures, but that’s not the point.

The point is steeling yourself to do the hard, important things—even when curling up into a ball and forgetting about them would be so much easier.

Rundell writes beautifully, whimsically, wistfully, finely detailed(ly?), and her characters are always well-crafted and endearing.

I recommend this and any other story by Rundell you can get your hands on.

Oh, and in my last post I mentioned I might have picked up a book or two while we were in New York.

At the Strand Bookstore on Broadway (there are several Strand Bookstores in NYC) I bought a book called Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson.

It’s a nonfiction book that suggests your deceased loved ones may be leaving you signs all over the place if you’d only take a minute to look.

When I told my sister-in-law about this fantastic book, she said to me, “But you’ve already read that! We both did. Years ago!”

What?!

Then I looked at my Kindle, and lo-and-behold, I had, indeed, already purchased that book and read it, too.

In my defense, all I can say is that physical books imprint on my brain much differently than e-books.

The Christmas Owl: Based on the True Story of a Little Owl Named Rockefeller, a picture book by Ellen Kalish and Gideon Sterer and illustrated by Ramona Kaulitzki.

Bonus points if you get it at the bookstore in Rockefeller Plaza.

Don’t make a special trip.

Just sayin’….

From The Plaza hotel (home to Eloise, Nanny, Weenie and Skipperdee), I bought Sunday Morning, a funny picture book by the great Judith Viorst AND illustrated by Eloise’s very own illustrator, Hilary Knight. (I already have the Eloise picture books.)

And one more.

If you LOVE New York, get yourself a copy of Dearest New York, A Love Letter to the Big Apple by Deirdre Gartner.

The pictures are perfect, the writing evocative.

It is, without a doubt, a love letter.

Until next week,

~ Gail

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