Summary: Lauren Groff’s Matrix is a work of historical fiction loosely based on the life of Marie de France, a poet from the 12th century. Groff depicts Marie as an unusually large and willful woman who, at the young age of seventeen, is forced to join an impoverished abbey of nuns somewhere in England. Matrix tells the story of [...]
A Year of New Beginnings As we prepare to say goodbye to 2022 with the usual holiday celebrations, I am reflecting on some important life developments that came about this year. The most impactful of these was Jessie’s new job as McKinleyville High School’s teacher-librarian, which she started this fall. Landing a librarian position at [...]
Summary: William R. Miller and Theresa B. Moyers’s Effective Psychotherapists is a concise and instructive introduction to the particular skills and attitudes that make some therapists more effective than others. In Part One, Miller and Moyers argue that “therapist effects” or “relational factors” that shape the foundational working alliance between therapist and client are at least as [...]
Summary: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a fictional mélange of philosophy, history, romance, and political commentary. Set in Prague during the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the novel recounts the story of two couples struggling to find peace and connection in turbulent times. In a world where time flows forward and everything happens [...]
Summary: Irvin D. Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy is a guidebook written for people entering the psychotherapy profession. The text’s many concise and enlightening chapters cover a range of topics that unveil Yalom’s therapeutic theory and practice, focusing on his experiences with individual therapy, group therapy, and existential therapy. Written with tremendous spirit, deep compassion, and candid [...]
Summary: Richard V. Reeves’s Of Boys and Men takes a hard look at the challenges faced by the modern American male and advocates for structural changes that can help boys and men overcome them. In Part One, Reeves describes what he calls “the male malaise,” how boys and men have fallen behind and become disengaged from school, work, [...]
Summary: Scott Barry Kaufman and Jordyn H. Feingold’s Choose Growth is a direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an effort to transform our collective trauma into an opportunity for reflection and posttraumatic growth, Kaufman teamed up with Feingold to expand and operationalize the research from his previous book, Transcend, which upgraded Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs using a [...]
Summary: Elaine N. Aron’s The Highly Sensitive Person presents Aron’s theory and research on ”highly sensitive persons” (HSPs). Aron claims that HSPs comprise about 15-20% of the general population, with roughly another 20% being “moderately” sensitive. HSPs tend to “pick up on the subtleties that others miss” and “arrive quickly at the level of arousal past which [they] are [...]
2022 Update: Just shy of ten years since I first read it, No Country for Old Men is every bit as grim as I remember, and then some. One thing shifted for me on my second reading: I used to think of this book as an ultra-gritty crime story, but this time around, it felt more like [...]
Summary: Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is a work of speculative fiction that celebrates humanity’s ability to endure and laments our tendency to self-destruct. Beginning 600 years after a catastrophic “Flame Deluge” (i.e. late-20th-century nuclear war), Part One introduces the “Order of Saint Leibowitz,” a group of Catholic monks dedicated to preserving precious scraps [...]