Tag: memoir

Posted on

Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop

Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop: A Memoir – written by Alba Donati and translated by Elena Pala

After working in Italian publishing for many years and being a poet herself, Alba Donati returned to her very small hometown of Lucignana to open a tiny bookshop called Libreria Sopra la Penna. The bookshop opened in December of 2019, and the memoir takes the form of a diary that she kept from January to June of 2021. Each day’s entry ends with a list of the books that were ordered from the shop that day, and it was fascinating to see what people were getting and which books showed up multiple times.

Throughout the memoir, we learn a lot about life in a small village of only 180 people, where everybody knows your business almost before you do. Donati also shares a lot of her childhood, her family history, and how she handles the relationships with her elderly parents. And, of course, there are many stories about books and authors and the many readers she encounters.

As Donati puts it, “People want stories. It doesn’t matter who wrote them; they need stories to take their mind off things, stories to identify with or to take them elsewhere. Stories that won’t hurt, that will heal a wound, restore trust, instill beauty in their hearts.”

I love that quote, and I found the entire book very engaging. I enjoyed hearing Donati’s thoughts on literature, especially on the importance of championing women authors. I found myself imagining living in a small village and getting to spend my days around so many books, which sounds like heaven.

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, but I have enjoyed several memoirs over the years. I think I need to add some more of them into my rotation.

Posted on

Autism Out Loud

Autism Out Loud: Life with a Child on the Spectrum, from Diagnosis to Young Adulthood by Kate Swenson, Adrian Wood, and Carrie Cariello

Summary

Kate Swenson, Adrian Wood and Carrie Cariello are from different parts of the country and backgrounds, but they were brought together by a singular experience: they are each a mother to a child with autism. Together they have shared laughter, tears, victories and the unconditional love that molds their lives.

Kate, Adrian and Carrie have children with very different autism profiles, and in Autism Out Loud they write about their unique experiences on a variety of topics, from diagnosis to caregiving, schooling and aging. Through their varied stories and lessons they’ve learned, these incredible women provide a glimpse of what to expect on the autism journey and show parents that they are not alone.

My Thoughts

I really appreciated how all three of the authors gave us such an intimate view of their lives. They were so willing to be vulnerable in sharing their experience as moms of autistic children. I could relate to a lot of their feelings in this book, and I am thankful I was able to read this book.

The part that I connected with the most was the anxiety about helping an autistic child transition to adulthood and planning for their future. This is a huge source of worry for me and I know I have not done enough yet. It helps to know I am not alone in my struggle.

Posted on

Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

In this 2015 memoir, the late Rachel Held Evans shared her journey with church – how she got to the point of leaving the church she had loved and how she struggled with where she belonged after that.  The book is structured around the seven sacraments of the Catholic church: Baptism, Confession, Holy Orders, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Marriage. Each section has several chapters where her personal story is woven in with a discussion of the theme.

I really appreciated how Evans shared both the positive and the negative of her experience with church.  She did not paint the conservative church she grew up in as all bad by any means, but she also didn’t shy away from the problems she came to have with some of the beliefs and behaviors she encountered.

After spending some time away from church entirely, she found herself longing for community and began searching for a church where she could experience that alongside people who were also willing to question and examine what they believed.  This quote seems to sum up what she was looking for:

Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable.  Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth.  We might just create sanctuary.

I can relate to her struggle with finding yourself in a place that does not align with your beliefs, but then feeling a sense of loneliness and disconnection when no longer inhabiting that space.  I am thankful that I have been able to find a community of faith that allows me to be myself while also challenging me to grow even more.

Posted on

What I’m Reading – January 2025

A brand new year – so exciting! It’s fun to look back on the year that we have just finished as well as to look forward to the next twelve months.

What I’m Reading Now

I currently have three books out from the library, so I am listing them all under this section. Hopefully I will finish them all before the due dates!

  • The Taste of Ginger by Mansi Shah
  • Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
  • The Avalon Ladies Scrapbooking Society by Darien Gee

What I Recently Finished

Fiction:

  • The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg
  • The Little Italian Hotel by Phaedra Patrick
  • Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev
  • The Book Swap by Tessa Bickers
  • The Handmaid and the Carpenter by Elizabeth Berg
  • The Healer’s Apprentice by Melanie Dickerson
  • Return to Bella Beach by Kate Wentworth
  • Miss Amelia’s List by Mercedes Lackey

Nonfiction:

  • Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans
  • UnClobber: Rethinking Our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality by Colby Martin

Short Stories:

  • When We Were Friends by Jane Green
  • The Answer Is No by Fredrick Backman
  • Cruel Winter with You by Ali Hazelwood
  • Merry After Ever by Tessa Bailey
  • All by My Elf by Olivia Dade
  • Merriment and Mayhem by Alexandria Bellefleur
  • Only Santas in the Building by Alexis Daria

What I Added to my TBR

  • Happy After All by Maisey Yates
  • The Autumn of Ruth Winters by Marshall Fine
  • One Big Happy Family by Susan Mallery
  • Wedding at Bella Beach by Kate Wentworth
  • My Friends by Fredrik Backman
  • Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
  • We All Live Here by Jojo Moyes
  • Becoming the Pastor’s Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman’s Path to Ministry by Beth Allison Barr
  • Queer & Christian: Reclaiming the Bible, Our Faith, and Our Place at the Table by Brandan Robertson
  • The Year of What If by Phaedra Patrick
  • The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance by Jemar Tisby
  • What Happened to the McCrays? by Tracey Lange
  • Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop: A Memoir by Alba Donati
  • Never Meant to Stay by Trisha Das
  • Christmas at the Little Paris Hotel by Rebecca Raisin
  • A Bookshop Christmas by Rachel Burton
  • The Second Chance Year by Melissa Wiesner
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
  • Flirting Lessons by Jasmine Guillory
  • The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
  • How to Read a Book by Monica Wood
  • Plymouth Undercover by Pamela M. Kelley

TBR Stats

  • I currently have 120 books on my TBR
  • Of those, 20 are nonfiction and 100 are fiction
  • All of the books were added in 2024

One of my goals for 2025 is to read 2 nonfiction books each month. I usually set an overall goal on the Goodreads Reading Challenge as well. Last year, I put down 52 and I ended up finishing 99 books. This year, I may be a bit more ambitious and put down 75.

If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add me as a friend. I’m always looking for new recommendations!

Posted on

6 Memoirs to Check Out

I don’t read a lot of memoirs, so these go back quite a few years, but I highly recommend all of them.

House Lessons: Renovating a Life by Erica Bauermeister – I have greatly enjoyed her novels and equally loved this memoir of her time renovating a house and starting her writing career.  Both topics were equally fascinating.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb – I finished this in one day, it was so good!  She shares about her experiences with therapy, both as a therapist and as a client, and it was captivating.

I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag: A Memoir of a Life Through Events – the Ones You Plan and the Ones You Don’t by Jennifer Gilbert – While Jennifer’s story centers around a painful experience, her writing is filled with the determination and hopefulness that she has fought to recover in her life. In addition to her insights about her personal journey and close relationships, we also see how she brings the lessons she has learned to her professional life as an event planner.

Surprised by Oxford by Carolyn Weber – A journey from agnosticism to Christianity. The story takes place over the course of a year and is set against the backdrop of time spent in graduate study at Oxford University in England, far from her home in Canada.  Highly recommend the book as well as the movie that followed.

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise by Ruth Riechl – So well written and such an intriguing account of how a food critic lives.  I loved hearing about the food she encountered but also the disguises she created in order to get regular treatment when she went out to eat for a review.

The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of the Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure – I found this memoir to be extremely enjoyable and fascinating. I greatly appreciated the writing style as much as the content and laughed out loud at least a dozen times during the course of the book. I would definitely recommend this book to any and all Little House book fans.

Do you read memoirs? Are there any you recommend?

Posted on

Faith Unraveled

Faith Unraveled: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask Questions

In this 2010 book by the late Rachel Held Evans, we are taken on a journey of faith.  Evans describes her upbringing in a conservative Christian environment and how she learned to defend the faith she had been taught.  I resonated with a lot of her experiences, including going to a conservative, evangelical church and then college.

Along the way, she began to question some of the things she had been taught and some of the things she read in the Bible.  Her questions were not well received by those around her, but she continued pursuing answers.  Eventually she determines that she does not need to leave her faith in God to find answers but just the limited beliefs about what it means to be a Christian and follow God that she had been taught.

This was such a good book. It really affirmed what I have been experiencing in my faith journey the last few years. Evans compares the process of questioning your beliefs to evolution, as the town she lived in was the location for the Snopes trial in the early 1900s, which was about teaching evolution in schools.  My favorite line in the book is, “Faith must adapt in order to survive.”

Posted on

What I’m Reading – February 2024



Where We Meet: A Lenten Study of Systems, Stories, and Hope by Rachel Gilmore, Candace Lewis, Tyler Sit, and Matt Temple – This is a Lenten devotional that my pastor is going to be leading a virtual Bible study on during Lent this year. I have read the introduction and first day of the devotional and am very intrigued to read more.

That’s What Love Is by Amy Rose – This is a novel I got for free on Stuff Your Kindle Day. It’s okay but not great.

What I Recently Finished:

Postscript (P.S. I Love You #2) by Cecelia Ahern – An enjoyable follow up to P.S. I Love You, which I loved. I enjoyed this book.

The Summer Getaway by Susan Mallery – This was a fun read. 

Leave It To Us by A.C. Arthur – This was a free book from Amazon First Reads, where they let Prime members pick a free book from a short list each month. I enjoyed this one. It had interesting characters and a good story.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price – This book has been all over TikTok lately and I am glad I read it. I would highly recommend it for anyone recently diagnosed with autism, but I also found good value as someone who has had their diagnosis for awhile.

Launching Your Autistic Youth to Successful Adulthood by Katharina Manassis – I have been reading this book off and on for several months and finally finished it last month. It is a really good book and would be especially helpful for those with autistic children still in high school. Even though my son graduated over two years ago, I still found it worth reading. It gave me a lot of things to think about as I help my son become an independent adult.

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans – This is an exploration of the Bible from a writer I have recently discovered. Although she passed away a few years ago, her books are still very popular with people looking for answers to their faith questions. I appreciated this book a lot.

House Lessons: Renovating a Life by Erica Bauermeister – This memoir was my first 5-star read of the year. I loved it! I have read some of her novels and loved them as well. This tells the story of her life during a house renovation, but goes beyond that in many ways. Highly recommend!

The Bakery on the Cove by Eliza Ester – This was a free book from Stuff Your Kindle Day. I did not like it at all. The writing was bad and the story didn’t even come to a conclusion at the end. It was like reading one episode of a badly written soap opera. Do not recommend!

What I’ve Added to my TBR list:

Marriage in the Bible: What Do the Texts Say? by Jennifer Bird – I am very interested to learn more about this topic.

She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up by Sheila Wray Gregoire – Although I don’t have a daughter, I was a girl who grew up in a toxic environment and am hoping this will bring me some insight.

Blank by Zibby Owens – This is my free Amazon First Reads for February.

If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add me as a friend. I’m always looking for new recommendations!

Posted on

What I’m Reading – May 26th

What I’m Reading Now:

The Burning Bridge by John Flanagan – Book 2 in the Ranger’s Apprentice series I started a couple of weeks ago.

What I Recently Finished:

Some Wildflower in My Heart by Jamie Langston Turner – I’m rereading her books in the order they were published, and this is her second book. I have read this one several times, so I knew the story details pretty well, but I still enjoyed the writing and the characters.

What I’ve Added to my TBR list:

I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott – A memoir in essay form, this was recommended by Nick & Hanna True from Mapped Out Money.  They read sections from the book on a recent podcast, and I was intrigued to read more of it.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins – Just released prequel to The Hunger Games series. The wait on my library app is more than 6 months, so it will be a while before I get to read this one!

Added to DNF list:

The Truth About Us by Brant Hansen – Fairly recent arrival by the author of Blessed Are the Misfits, which I enjoyed. The book has a good message and prompted me to recognize times I think I am better than other people in some way. I enjoyed the social science aspect of it as well as how he integrates Biblical wisdom on the topic of self-righteousness, but I just felt like he made his point pretty early on and was just restating it in different ways, so I didn’t finish this one.

If you’re on Goodreads, feel free to add me as a friend. I’m always looking for new recommendations!