Julia

Jacob and I started reading this book out loud on a road trip to CA last summer...and just finished it on a road trip to CA this summer. What can I say? Who reads out loud, anyway? What I can say is that I unreservedly think Antonia Fraser is a treasure. Which is not the typical reaction I have to someone who uses at least one word per page that I don't know. She is delightfully British, delightfully clever, and sneakily snarky in a way I absolutely adore. Plus, this is one. juicy. story. Even if you're already sort of familiar with it. Perfect for when you feel the need to be reminded that truth is stranger than fiction.

For my final pre-internship year, I'm going to be working with individuals with eating disorders. I figured I'd try something completely new. When I asked my supervisor what books she'd recommend as introductory readings, “Intuitive Eating” is where she sent me, telling me that it's the only self-help nutrition book out there that she not only tolerates, but actually likes. In short: her assessment is spot-on.

People ask me for book recommendations fairly often (and I'm only a grad student, so I'm guessing it'll get more frequent). It's a tricky question because so many books are so deeply cheesy, and I'm not exactly going for “deeply cheesy” as a psychologist-in-training. Well, hallelujah. “Intuitive Eating” is not cheesy. It is not patronizing. It is not preachy, simplistic, or annoyingly cheerful. It is compassionate, straightforward, and wise. It brims with good, old-fashioned common sense that is too often overwhelmed by the dieting hysteria that has gripped the U.S. for...well, decades, now.

I am sure this book will be invaluable when doing eating disorder treatment. But, if you're reading this, and you're experiencing even just a niggling iota of doubt that maybe you don't have as healthy of a relationship with food as you could (TRULY healthy, none of this sanctimonious all-raw-food-all-the-time crap), then do me a solid, and get yourself to a bookstore ASAP.

Silly, silly, silly. But also funny. Would have been a great airplane read, except that I'm such a sucker that I got teary-eyed at the end.

I...wish I liked this more. I really loved both of Eugenides' other novels. I think I get where he was trying to go, with regard to tongues in cheeks, but my main struggle as a reader was with consistency. I felt grabbed once in a while, but variations in tone both within and across characters really left me feeling disconnected. I found myself wanting to finish not because I was desperate to find out how things wrapped up (too neatly, in my opinion), but because I wanted to stop reading. I feel sad about that. Finally, for the first time in reading Eugenides, I got the vibe that he's Franzen adjacent, which I don't mean as a compliment. I want more from fiction; in particular, I want bigger risks and more authorial commitment to them.

I like Rollo May, I think. I know, damning with faint praise. Credit where credit is admirably due, however, for parsing good from bad with regard to Freud's legacy, and making an impassioned (and excellent) argument against indiscriminate use of medication (“It is the failure of therapy, rather than its success, when it drugs the daimonic, tranquilizes it, or in other ways fails to confront it head on.”). But, at the end of the day, he's just not my favorite existentialist. It took me a long time to drag my way through this, despite fits and piques of interest, and in the end, two of my three favorite quotes are from people other than May:

” ‘Apathy is a curious state,' remarks Harry Stack Sullivan; ‘It is a way used to survive defeat without material damage, although if it endures too long one is damaged by the passage of time. Apathy seems to me to be a miracle of protection by which a personality in utter fiasco rests until it can do something else'.”

“The moral problem is the relentless endeavor to find one's own convictions and at the same time to admit that there will always be in them an element of self-aggrandizement and distortion. Here is where Socrates' principle of humility is essentially, for psychotherapists and for any moral citizen.”

Finally:
” ‘If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.' –Rilke”

I just realized I never wrote a review for this, but I can't even remember when I read it. I definitely liked it, and recall being pleasantly surprised–Egan's characters aren't always sympathetic, and I wondered how she was going to write an ending that actually satisfied. Then she did.

Well, here's the thing: I like Jonathan Franzen most of the time. And I certainly zipped through Freedom. I can't, however, help harboring the sneaking suspicion that he is just a little bit sexist. Certainly not misogynistic, nor a male chauvinist, but just a wee bit biased towards his male characters. I'm sure someone could offer a compelling argument about how Patty Berglund's character in this novel is not only central to the plot, but a detailed and sympathetic portrait of a troubled woman. Alright, fine fine. But she's the sole central female character flanked by three central male characters, and two women who certainly could have had their stories woven into the plot more intricately seem simply flat against the more in-depth psychologies of the other four. Franzen spends a lot of time on how Patty was the forgotten child of her family of origin, and then, ironically (and, I believe, unintentionally), allows Patty's daughter, Jessica (written to be an eerie match for her mother on several dimensions) to become the forgotten child of the Berglund family.

All that is not to say that I didn't like the book. I did. And Franzen can clearly write about whatever he wants to write about, and plenty of people will (probably justifiably) adore it. I'm just saying (admittedly, quite possibly as a result of the blossoming of my inner feminist curmudgeon) that I would have liked it more had I not finished with the sense that Franzen is an eminently capable and entertaining writer, but, also, a dude.

I stole this book from my little brother, who took a seminar on existential and humanistic psychology during his last semester of college. Lucky duck!

Anyway, Carl Rogers is badass. I taught Introduction to Psychology this summer for the third time, and whenever we discuss his person-centered approach, I get bemused questions such as, “So he just...listened to his clients? Really listened to them? And it worked?” Well, yes. Essentially, Carl Rogers articulated the idea that what makes a therapist helpful is not how many degrees a therapist has, or how many fancy and completely non-parsimonious theories they espouse, but how well they connect to their clients, and if they can actually provide unconditional positive regard–the idea that a therapist doesn't have to like or condone things that clients do, but does have to accept them as worthwhile human beings, no matter their circumstances or actions. This is not just some warm and fuzzy idea; decades after Rogers first started writing, we now have a strong body of evidence that the type of therapy matters far, far less than how much you like and trust the person you're graciously allowing to help you.

This book is a mash-up of memoir, academic writings (one special treat is hearing him get super sassy while addressing his naysayers in the American Psychological Association after receiving some fancy-schmancy award), and philosophical treatises explicating his perspective. It's really fun. Not “light reading” fun, but I would definitely recommend it if you're a mental health professional, or if you'd like to read something that's continually optimistic about the potential for growth present in all human beings.

Two quick quotes. First, Rogers is all about the freedom that comes from finding and maintaining your own integrity:

“To be a person...this would be painful, costly, sometimes even terrifying. But it would be very precious: to be oneself is worth a high price.”

Second, this is Rogers' telling therapists that real therapy requires bravery, on the part of the client, but also on the part of the therapist, as well. I hope I eventually get to a place where this is what I consistently do:

“We are deeply helpful only when we relate as persons, when we risk ourselves as persons in the relationship, when we experience the other as a person in his own right. Only then is there a meeting at a depth that dissolves the pain of aloneness in both client and therapist.”

My love for Lonely Planet guidebooks is undying and true, and this book was a happy reminder why. My one small quibble is that its many truly awesome tips are organized by various themed trips, so making sure you're reading about everything in a given location is a little dizzying. I recommend post-its to assist in the process. But, on a recent trip, this compact & dense guide led Jacob and me to, among other things, an awesome Ethiopian restaurant in LA, a date shake at a date farm in the Coachella Valley, a lovely hidden little restaurant near Joshua Tree NP, and an old-school diner/cafe in Mammoth Lakes that totally hit the spot after a backpacking trip. None of which we would have found otherwise. Rock on, Lonely Planet, rock on.

I was in Krakow a few years ago with a dear friend, and we spent one morning touring Auschwitz and Birkenau. I cannot imagine I am likely to ever find myself in another place with similarly eerie energy. It is, of course, both sobering and horrifying to contemplate the Holocaust, let alone to attach a now beautiful spot in the Polish countryside to the genocide that took place there. Beyond that, though, the remains of Auschwitz and Birkenau have gravitas. I think that feeling (and it sounds a little woo-woo to say, but it's the perfect word) of gravitas just might stem from the dignity of the individuals who lived (and the many who died) there. Frankl spent four years in concentration camps, including these two, and emerged the sole surviving member of his family. He then went on to dedicate his career to found and then practice existential psychology–the idea that, counter to everything Freud ever said, it's not food, sex, and power that make us tick. It's our ability to create meaning out of our own lives, whatever the circumstances may be. When we lose sight of our own personal meaning, nearly every modern psychological malady has fertile ground to grow. Frankl found that not even concentration camps, however, can make a person lose sight of their purpose if they don't let them. If the idea that our humanity lies in our ability to make our own choices and create our own meaning sounds interesting to you, do not miss this book (and if you're a psychologist, just do not miss this book). It is an extraordinary memoir of an extraordinary man, and the foundational text of existential psychology. I hesitate to quote Frankl, although I found much of his writing deeply moving. He's just so quotable that his thoughts can come across as pithy at a glance, although they often made me teary-eyed with their power in the rich and nuanced context the book as a whole provides. So, a few favorites:

“If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.”

“I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.”

“After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

I would have read this at the beach, except I'm not at the beach. I'm stuck staring down the deadline for a huge grad school obligation. Blah. But this was a fun bit of distracting fluff. Ryder Howe could have been obnoxiously pretentious (I think my roommate thought he was), but I found him droll. Just the right book at the right time, you know? And an interesting sliver of the deli scene in NYC, interracial marriages, and the inner workings of a hoity-toity literary magazine. Quite the cultural smorgasbord.

I like Ehrenreich. She can seem cynical, but I really think she's not a killjoy at heart. She's an optimist of the best kind, who thinks that things can get better, but aren't going to on their own, so we might as well take a good, hard look at what's going wrong. So, if you're curious to find out what pastors of megachurches, the inane author of “The Secret,” positive psychologists, and Wall Street have in common (or if you're just in the mood for a well-written, timely, and not-too-long work of non-fiction), definitely check this out. Ehrenreich is mordant and sly at her best, which is often, but only when people deserve it (ahem, Martin Seligman).

Look, I realize anyone who gives James Joyce two stars for anything is kind of an asshole. My feeling on having read this (on plane rides to and from my little brother's college graduation–fatal mistake?) is not that it's objectively just okay, but that I probably need a college-level English lit class to appreciate it. Literature that makes me work as a reader is just sooooo not my scene right now, and I get that that's my failing, not Joyce's. In other news, I stole half my little brother's books from his “Humanistic and Existential Psychology” seminar, and am currently tearing through Viktor Frankl's “Man's Search for Meaning” (review forthcoming). I'll definitely credit Joyce with some of my current fervor for anything that attempts to tackle the field of inquiry of what it means to be human.

I mean, you always hope that something that won a Pulitzer is going to be good. Indeed, “Angle of Repose” is. Quite. It's funny, but as I near the end of my third year out here in Utah, I really do think there's something about geographical location that lends different tones to writing. Stegner sounds somehow “Western” to me, and not just in his subject matter. His style is an inimitable one; at times very emotionally intimate (e.g., the narrator alternates between prying and gentle deference to his grandmother's privacy as he speculates on her quashed love for her female best friend), and at other times, a more detached survey of the space of the western mountain states (e.g., he gets the sun-bleached tumbleweeds and canyons that appear out of nowhere in Idaho spot-on). It's clear to me now the debt that Abbey owed Stegner; Abbey is more free-wheeling and irreverent, but nonetheless obviously cut from Stegner's cloth. Loving Abbey, I'm certainly grateful for that! At any rate, it's a captivating novel that remains relevant 40 years later. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the book is the unflinching focus on the ties that bind...a quote, as the narrator addresses his grandparent's tumultuous but decades-long marriage: “What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them.”

I've had a class with Lorna for a semester now, and at least one more to go. I'd give this book five stars, because I think her therapeutic approach is truly a gift, but the IRT book is really just the beginning. You can't simply read the book & magically become a competent IRT therapist; I suspect I'll be working on that one for a few decades. You can, however, read the book for an excellent and seasoned approach to case conceptualization when people present with complicated, entrenched, and emotionally demanding issues.

Stole this from my mother, and then didn't get around to it until she'd already needed to get another copy for one of her two book clubs. Oops! Anyway, I was suitably entertained by this collection of short stories, but feel as if I somehow missed whatever got the book to be a finalist for the National Book Award. I could possibly attribute it to the weird pace of winter break reading? It was certainly enjoyable, however, and I'd guess that a more careful read could uncover some real treasures in Mueenuddin's storytelling.

Yalom came into my life just as I started serving as the sole therapist for two groups of child sex offenders. To put it mildly, some sage advice on being a group therapist was sorely needed. This volume is a must-read (yes, all bajillion pages of it) for anyone doing group work, which is the majority of folks in doctoral psychology programs. Yalom's tone is approachable, his sense of humor much appreciated, and his clinical wisdom boundless. I tend to think of books this hefty as in need of good editing, but in this case, there's just a lot to be said on an endlessly interesting subject.

First work of fiction in three months. Lordy.

Anyway, I stole this from my mom; it was one of her beach reads. For me, it was a fantastic “sneak in chapters between writing a final paper” read. Sunley's clearly done her research on Icelandic mythology, which was new & fun territory for me to experience, and keeps the pace & plot lively. I'm always impressed when a writer manages to capture the nuances of different psychological disorders, which Sunley also does quite deftly. The story is ultimately about family secrets, and in that regard, I wish I hadn't figured the secret out so quickly, but that didn't diminish my pleasure in the ending.

Good fluff, with a bit more thrown in.

An interesting book. Paul Farmer is a bigwig in the public health domain; Kidder chronicles his progression from starry-eyed med student to co-founder of Partners in Health, a non-profit that now has a serious global reach. Kidder's writing is involving and well-researched, but I would have loved a more interpersonal approach to Farmer's outsized personality. He is, as Kidder portrays him, a genius with apparently no need for sleep. Amazing, to be sure, but I'm always curious what kind of legacy such a person leaves in his wake–most of us aren't geniuses, and need lots of sleep, and pushing to Farmer-esque reaches will cause many smart & competent people to underperform. Kidder touches on such issues briefly, but I'm curious to see what PIH will do without such an unusual man at its helm. Anyway, overall, it's an interesting read if you're into public health, poverty, and the politics of international aid.

A really enjoyable read, as I suspect any book that includes a four year old who refuses to wear anything but a Batman costume and to be referred to as Batman might be. I'm going with three stars instead of four because things fell apart for me a little at the end; Cleave's strength is in his mordant observations of the minutiae of modern life, in this case as observed through the very proper English of a Nigerian refugee, and the pace of the last chapter or two leaves no room for the original, completely engaging prose of the rest of the novel. Nonetheless, I'd recommend it to a friend.

I'd like to buy Richard Ford a drink. In honor of Frank Bascombe, I'd like to make it an old fashioned.

I first read Richard Ford when I was far too young to appreciate him–I think I stumbled across “Independence Day” in late elementary school. I was glad to revisit him at the beach this summer.

In terms of logistics, “The Lay of the Land” is the third in a set of novels about Frank Bascombe's life (Who is he, you ask? A modern-day self-deprecating Renaissance man of a sort). The first two, “The Sportswriter” and “Independence Day” (which won a Pulitzer), will go down in family history as the only two works of fiction that both of my parents have read in my entire years of being cognizant of their reading habits. So Ford's got pretty wide appeal.

The end of the trilogy is...sweeping in its attention to the minutiae of life, and our idiosyncratic and fumbling reactions to said minutiae. Which I mean in a completely excellent way. Easy description of the book's many & subtle virtues is escaping me at this point, but suffice it to say that I really, really liked it.

For my first two years of grad school, I pretty much resisted putting assigned readings on goodreads. That wasn't too hard; much of my reading involves journal articles, not books. But, fuck it. I realized that, particularly with regard to clinical work, chronicling what I read for posterity may be interesting and/or useful for me later (I doubt it's interesting for anyone else).

So, with that said, this book is the pretty much the bible of Axis II. If you work in mental health, and you've ever felt overwhelmed by the implications of an “Axis II flavor” in one of your clients, or irritated at the high comorbidity and fuzzy diagnostic labels in the DSM, or you're at all fascinated by interpersonal processes, this book will be nothing short of a miracle.

I'm taking Lorna's class in Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy in the inpatient unit of a neuropsychiatric hospital this year, and even without experiencing her exceptional mind in person, I'd recommend this book, without hesitation or reservation, to anyone who does clinical work. Lorna's theory of disordered personalities is cohesive, eloquent, parsimonious, and, moreover, when put into practice, it works on the clients for whom no one thinks anything will work. I'm working with men who have committed child sex offenses this year, and have already repeatedly reconsulted chapters, and always found a nugget of wisdom I pray I'm going to be able to render clinically useful.

A great beach read. Here Reichl tackles not her unruly adult love life, but her equally unruly childhood. Her insight is crisp, as is her ability to tell a good story. I didn't love it quite as much as I loved “Comfort Me with Apples,” but I'm beginning to suspect that I seldom love the second book I read from an author after having completely adored the first.

This was very first-novel-esque. There were some very lovely moments, and also some sappy moments. In the acknowledgments, Hampton writes that the original was 800+ pages, but a firmer editorial could still have been useful, as I found myself skipping paragraphs towards the end. For similar subject matter with a more masterful treatment, I prefer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni...but every novelist starts somewhere.

The short story: DO NOT read this book if you don't want to feel horrifically guilty about eating animals. DO read this book if you want to understand why a celebrity author death match between JSF and Michael Pollan would be epic in the way that would blow UFC title matches out of the water.

The longer story: The three stars are for the book itself (which I thought was good, but not remarkably well-written), not the book's effect on me (it's more of a five-star book in that regard). Anyway, ::obligatory and self-indulgent whining about how grad school really interferes with reading for fun::, so at some point, I put this book down when I felt like Safran Foer was being really preachy (although lord knows he can do no sin when writing novels!), and then didn't return to it for a month or two. I'm not sure whether to attribute my hiatus to needing something lighter to read, or to JSF needing to get to the goddamn point. Either way, once he got there, he convinced me not to eat chicken again, and to contemplate total vegetarianism as well. That's not the hugest leap for me, given that I stopped eating red meat & pork in the third or fourth grade, but it's a leap nonetheless. Every liberal-minded person I know knows that factory farming is an abomination, but very few people I know have actually changed their eating behaviors based on that knowledge, and I'm tired of not being one of the very few (although hopefully not “very few” forever, or even for very long). I guess it's kind of nice when reading inspires change. And props to my roommate for setting an excellent example in both the reading of this book and her switch to vegetarianism.

A favorite quote: “It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be made illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabelled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”