Category Archives: book review

Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women by Silvia Federici

Leave a reply

A few years ago, a colleague recommended I read Silvia Federici for my scholarship. At the time, I tried her Caliban and the Witch, but it was not what I was looking for. Fast forward to now, and I Federici’s Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women is what I was looking for! This past fall, it was finally time. I started learning more specific history about the European witch hunts and started reading more theory about it. Federici’s Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women offers an interesting Marxian feminist lens to the phenomenon, which helps inform my study.

While typical academic texts may not be for everyone, Federici’s Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women may be the exception. I think the book may have a wider readership. The concepts are fairly accessible. And, it’s short!

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Leave a reply

I didn’t really intend for this to happen, but Heart the Lover by Lily King was my first book of 2026! This book is a plot-driven piece of popular fiction, so it is not my typical go-to book. However, I read so many rave reviews of it that I decided to add it to my list.

My conclusion is that this is an excellent book for the nostalgic English major. In this book, college feels rich and heady, the best it could be. This book probably gets its best reviews from those nostalgic English majors (and I am one!), who recall college warmly. In the book, characters develop, the plot weaves, and meanings deepen.

Because it is so plot-based, literary prose readers may not be deeply interested in this one, no matter how nostalgic they are for days of yore. However, meanings don’t beat you over the head and conclusions are fairly subtle and I find that all to be very likable. For many, this will be an all-time favorite. At the very least, I think most readers will like the book.

2025 reading list

Leave a reply

Here’s my 2025 reading list! It’s longer than I thought it would be, since I didn’t read much in the spring, summer, or even fall, it seemed. Summer is normally a big reading time for me, but my literacy energy this summer was mostly spent in writing. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of my reading was that this was the year that I became obsessed with Moa Martinson. There are other treasures here as well…

  1. Farm-Raised Kids by Katie Kulla
  2. The Blue Fox by Sjón
  3. Paris: A Memoir by Paris Hilton
  4. Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  5. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
  6. Dear Girls by Ali Wong
  7. Making Love with the Land by Joshua Whitehead
  8. Love, Pamela by Pamela Anderson
  9. Atomic Habits by James Clear
  10. My Mother Gets Married by Moa Martinson
  11. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
  12. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
  13. There There by Tommy Orange
  14. I’ll Tell You in Person by Chloe Caldwell
  15. Women by Chloe Caldwell
  16. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
  17. In Pieces by Sally Field
  18. Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro
  19. Through the Children’s Gate by Adam Gopnik
  20. Little Weirds by Jenny Slate
  21. Women and Appletrees by Moa Martinson
  22. I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum
  23. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
  24. The Best American Short Stories 2024
  25. Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl
  26. Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder
  27. How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
  28. The Goodbye Kit by Daneen Bergland
  29. Spiral Staircase: A Meditation on Alchemy by Alyssa Spungen
  30. The 5 Types of Wealth by Sahil Bloom
  31. The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter
  32. Audition by Katie Kitamura
  33. If You’re Seeing This It’s Meant for You by Leigh Stein
  34. Surviving Autocracy by Masha Gessen
  35. The Deep Places by Ross Douthat
  36. Mindset by Carol Dweck
  37. Who Is Government? by Michael Lewis (et al)
  38. The Forever Colony by Victor Villanueva
  39. Rosarita by Anita Desai
  40. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
  41. If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die by Lee Tilghman
  42. The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes
  43. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer
  44. A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai
  45. Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
  46. The Witch’s Trinity by Erika Mailman
  47. Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
my 2025 booklist from Goodreads

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Leave a reply

At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll get through any more books from my tbr pile, so Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh might be my last book of 2025! I found this little gem in a little free library awhile back. Mostly these little libraries are full of throw away titles, but there’s one a few blocks from the house that is carefully curated, and I’ve found several high quality children’s books and decent literary titles over the years.

I took a quick glance at this book and saw that the writing was literary-quality and that the author was female and that it was old–all good signs–so I grabbed it. Here’s why they are good signs: there were not a lot of women writing 100 years ago, so those who were published tended to earn their place, and secondly, this book was a reprint from the original, which was published in 1955. The fact that publishers are still putting effort into keeping the book in publications is a good sign!

The book itself is, perhaps, not the feminist anthem that some hope it would be, but the message is important, if not too class-based, and that message is the fact that a woman should have the opportunity not just to have a room of one’s own, but also to have an annual two-week vacation of one’s own. And I agree!

After reading a chapter, I got curious and looked up the author. I quickly realizing that the author is also the mother from the famed Lindbergh kidnapping! I read on.

The book’s setting is lovely, in rustic a vacation home on a tropical beach, admiring the sea and the seashells it offers to the shore. How idyllic! The insights are not inconsequential and demonstrate an understanding of social class and the social movements of the time, which was before second wave feminism.

This book is worth reading for those interested in tracing feminist thought over the last century because I do think the author’s writing adds to that opus. However, the writer is also cautious and relatively safe with her ideas. I would have loved a deeper sense of place, and a deeper sense of self. Instead, it read more like theory in that regard. As a reader, I found myself wanting more specific personal reflection, one that pointed to a unique person (Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s life on paper was fascinating!), but she reveals none of that and instead mostly sticks to pairing insightful platitudes with observations inspired by nature–in this case on the beach during her two week vacation–which is a worthwhile endeavor.

The Witch’s Trinity by Erika Mailman

Leave a reply

My research has recently lead me to the learn more about the horrendous witch hunts that took place, especially in Europe, circa 1400-1700s and about the book that was used for those persecutions, the Malleus Maleficarum. That research process lead me to read Erika Mailman’s book, The Witch’s Trinity. The book is not my typical genre, but it was an engaging read that helped inform my understanding of that time in history. Here are a few things that stood out:

Mailman’s scene setting in the book was phenomenal. The consistent tone and language throughout was effective. The details of village life and the beliefs of the time were captivating and really helped set the scene for the terrifying witch hunts of that time.

The book takes place in a village that is experiencing famine, and the reader can easily see how the intensity of starvation completely skews people’s ability to think straight, to be reasonable, or to act with justice. I also recently learned that people with anorexia begin to loose their reasoning abilities due to lack of calories, and that lack of reasoning only exacerbates the problem. So too could I see the role of starvation and suffering in the witch hunt accusations.

Next, in reading this book, and having recently reading through the Malleus Maleficarum, I was struck by just how dangerous these books can be, how dangerous it can be to so completely trust a perspective or an interpretation that disadvantages and even outwardly harms certain individuals. As I read, I thought of all of the good people I know who might be accused just because of their differences. In the end, nobody is except from the dangerous mob mentality that can plague human thinking.

The Witch’s Trinity is an engaging, plot driven book that is expertly told by the author. It’s an interesting read for those interested in this place, time, and circumstances.

Dare to Lead by Brené Brown

Leave a reply

I read Dare to Lead by Brené Brown while thinking about how it would/might inform my own scholarship. As it turns out, it was a quite timely read. While reading, I spent a good deal of time anticipating what the counter arguments might be, but I won’t go into all of that here.

My only skepticism is not one of the book or the ideas, but that the author claims to be a 10 out of 10 introvert, and in reading the anecdotes throughout I just think there is no way! Not because of the speaking and busy life–no introverts can do all of that. It was because of moments in the book like when she seems to applaud a company’s move to replace walls with glass and keep doors open, and it is in the way she schedules herself with so much peopling. Even her time blindness is something I see mostly in my extrovert friends. In fact, she reminds me of a few extroverts I know. They like to unwind with a bath daily, and then they call themselves introverts for that quiet time, but in my opinion, they’re still a million miles away.

I’ll end by saying that this book reminds us of our humanity, especially at work, a place and dynamic where negativity can thrive. Most of us spend a lot of our time in work for pay, and this book offers some other ways of interacting within those long spaces.

A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai

Leave a reply

Like the long title, this book is full of long passages, sentences that are entire paragraphs long. Entire chapters, in fact! A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai is a strange and fascinating medication on obsession, focus–deep, deep focus–of the absurdity, of the pain and beauty of life. Big stuff.

Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in literature this year, and so I grabbed this book to see what he was all about. The deep descriptions in this book is what does it, I think. Krasznahorkai pairs deep description with complete control and poetry on the line level, informs, and conveys to readers some deeper understanding of the human psyche than they otherwise would have known. Yes, Krasznahorkai wins this award.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer

Leave a reply

Now this was a fascinating book! In Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, Dederer offers monstrous male artists (in every form) and analyzes their audience. As an avid reader, and citizen of the world, I am somewhat interested in the question, especially in the wake of the “me too” movement and subsequent “cancel culture.” Dederer wrestles with the question and avoids simple soundbites and quick solutions.

As a reader, I was interested in our similarities and differences. We both love Woody Allen movies, but she loves Polanski and I can take or leave his work. She has a distaste for Hemingway, and I still think his work is extraordinary. We both love Carver.

However, what was most interesting to me was in the last half of the book, when she turns her lens toward herself: “Am I a Monster?” and “Abandoning Mothers.” As a mother and an intellectual and an author, and, maybe above all else, someone who delights in deep focus, the questions Dederer asks are those that I share.

A question arises, “Do my children matter as much as my writing?” Dederer seems to have a good relationship with her children, seems to have balanced it all in some kind of positive way, but it was not without struggle.

However, for me, this is not the question, but rather an adjacent statement, which is that I matter too. Contemporary motherhood culture has women give of themselves so completely that there is no space for exploration, creation, for the self of the mother/person. To me this is intolerable, and I find myself needing to claw out a space for myself within the rigid expectations of motherhood within my culture, also still while the other thing is true: I love my children and feel deeply grateful for them. Plus, they inspire a greater depth of work in me that I otherwise could have created. And, amid all of these realities, I matter too.

The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes

Leave a reply

The Siren’s Call by Chris Hayes is about the attention economy and how various forms of media seek to gain and hold our attention for profit. This book is important for anyone engaging with media, especially social media, to read. Because our attention is a means of profit, the smartest, wealthiest, most powerful people put massive amounts of resources into taking our attention from our own purview and giving it to others, who then exploit it for profit. From there, it isn’t hard to delve into deeper philosophical questions about the value of a life lived with an attention that has been ceded to others.

If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die by Lee Tilghman

Leave a reply

When Lee Tilghman’s followers said she was problematic, out of touch, too privileged– that she should be cancelled–she responded with her book, If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die, where she basically says, “Yes, I am, and you don’t even know the half of it.”

What follows is a behind the scenes look at the life of an “influencer.” Most people follow influencers, and Tilghman offers a behind the scenes look at the work, the lifestyle, and the mental sacrifice that can go into that world. Things are definitely not what they seem. Tilghman’s book highlights just how all consuming social media is–from excessive time, to resources, and to our attention too, of course. Posting became her entire life. She saw everything from the perspective of a post, and she worked very hard at it constantly. But she was so focused that she could not enjoy regular life.

Many people say that social media makes people sad because it makes them feel fomo. I do not experience that. However, I do experience the time suck that is synonymous with social media usage.

I paired this reading with Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call, a book about the attention economy, and they work really well together! I recommend!