Title: The Autobiography of an Execution
Author: David R. Dow
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir

This was a heartbreaking book. It took a long time for me to firmly decide what my position is on the death penalty. The opinion I held as a young woman is very different than the opinion I hold now. That’s to be expected because I most certainly am not the same person now that I was then. Reading this book made me recommit to my position and it pushed me to better verbalize and explain my position.

I’m not sure if this book would change the mind of someone who is a strong supporter of the death penalty but I think it should be required reading for just about everyone. A couple reviews I read of this book didn’t like the author’s style and his choice to jump back and forth between the horrible reality of death row and the happy family life he tries to maintain but I found it to be a perfect balance.

Strongly recommended.

Title: Yom Kippur A Go-Go
Author: Matthue Roth
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir

5 or 6 months ago my rebbetzin asked me if I would organize a class or reading group at shul. She knows what a voracious reader I am and how much of the stuff I read relates to Judaism in some way. So I came up with an idea for “Not Your Bubbe’s Bookclub.” Part curated reading list, part book club, I’m trying to bring some new ideas and new styles of literature into the shul. At the first meeting I presenting the class with three potential tracks to kick off with. The class unanimously chose the “Tradition Transformed” track which consists of Yom Kippur A Go-Go, Yentyl’s Revenge and The Big Kahn.

We started with Yom Kippur A Go-Go and I am so nervous to find out tomorrow night what the small group thought of this book. I loved it but there are some actually Bubbes in this group and I was blushing just thinking about them because of Roth’s liberal use of “fuck”, his no holds barred descriptions of a friend’s sex toys and all the debauchery he encountered while living the life of an Orthodox Jew he was also a wild-child poet in San Francisco in the early part of the last decade.

What I really want to get into with our discussion tomorrow night is how much room in the Jewish tradition there is for individuality and individual paths and how to navigate those paths to stay close to the heart of our tradition while being true to ourselves. Without any judgement of Roth I say that his self-identity as an Orthodox Jew and his very strict observance of shabbat and kashrut coupled with a lack of any real discussion of any outward manifestations of Jewish ethics was confusing to me. But that’s good because it’s given me a lot to think about.

I’m pretty nervous about the discussion tomorrow night. I can only hope that the Bubbe’s got past the language and talk of trannies and dry humping enough to let the book make them about some big questions as well.

Title: With Roots in Heaven: One Woman’s Passionate Journey into the Heart of Her Faith
Author: Rabbi Tirzah Firestone
Genre: Memoir

One of the things I most looked forward to in my recent trip to Chicago was visiting a Jewish bookstore. Yes, yes I can find just about any book in the world on the internet but browsing for books and knowing what you’re looking for are two very different things. I headed way, way out of downtown to Rosenblum’s World of Judaica (and after wandering around in the rain for an hour, they didn’t open until 11AM!) up on Devon. Apparently the neighborhood used to be primarily Orthodox Jewish but that’s the not the case anymore. It was a mix of a few kosher shops and the bookstore, synagogues, halal butchers, Indian-Pakistani groceries, Indian restaurants and shalwar kameez shops and shops with signs in various Cyrillic languages.

Rosenblum’s was small but filled to the brim with ritual objects, books, jewelry, CDs, toys and just about everything else you could imagine. I spent a lot of time looking at mezuzahs, kiddush cups and other ritual objects but didn’t want to carry them back on the plane. So I left with only two books and a chai necklace.  I loved browsing for books in this shop. So many titles and subjects I’d either never heard of or know only a very little about. Strangely enough though I came away with two feminist slanted books. One called Women and Jewish Law and With Roots in Heaven.

It says something about this book that I bought it on Thursday morning and finished it before we left Chicago Saturday afternoon. That is not to say I loved the book but that I found it very interesting and a compelling read. The reasons I didn’t love the book are primarliy my own biases and judgemental questions. Namely how does an intelligent woman end up in a cult in the frozen tundra of Minnesota cut off from the entire rest of the world with a “guru” and two of his wives? Yes, that’s one of the paths Rabbi Firestone took in her journey from her childhood of Orthodox Judaism to her eventual place as a rabbi in the Jewish Renewal Movement.

I recognized some elements of my own spiritual journey in Rabbi Firestone’s story like the longing for community and study as well as abject lonliness brought about by seeking and not finding at first but by and large hers was so far removed from what is known and comfortable for me I found myself going “huh, how’d she end up there?” several times. It was really interesting though to read the story of someone so dedicated to traveling a spiritual path even though for most of the book she really had no idea where she’d end up. It had huge twists and turns and was unexpected in so many ways and yet she kept committed to seeking and finding her spiritual path and spiritual place in the world. I respect that a lot.

The one negative of the book is what I perceive as the one great negative of Rabbi Firestone’s story: her Orthodox family’s rejection of her for marrying a non-Jew. Her family completely cut her and another of her siblings off because they strayed from the Orthodox path. There is no denying that such families exist and such things happen in the Jewish world but oh how sad it makes me. So throughout the book I had this feeling of great sadness at seeing something I love so much, namely Judaism, being used almost as a weapon against this woman who really was doing nothing more than following her heart and looking for (and finding) love and holiness.

Title: Atchafalaya Houseboat: My Years in the Louisiana Swamp
Author: Gwen Roland
Genre: Memoir

It is my custom to read this book and few others every single year. Normally I do so in January but the early part of 2009 was busy and dramatic and all that so I didn’t get to it a few months ago. Finally, yesterday, I was able to spend the afternoon just inhaling this sweet, delicate, inspiring little book. I’m sure eventually I’m going to enjoy this book less but I’ve been reading it at least once a year since 2006 and the pleasure has to diminish. It’s the story of two people living life in the most deliberate of ways, in almost complete seclusion, living off the land and water, basking in a life of their own design and making. They fish and garden, raise chickens, write poetry and take walks, watch the stars and make homemade wine, can and preserve, read and listen. I don’t know that I could ever commit to living in such seclusion but the principles and values they live by are incredibly inspiring to me. And I could definitely see myself someday splitting my time between a small house back home on the farm and Louisville.

I need to just order like 10 copies of this book from Amazon because so frequently I want to give it as a gift but it’s a tiny little book from a university imprint so bookstores never stock it.

Title: Lovesong: Becoming a Jew
Author: Julius Lester
Genre: Memoir, Judaism

I wish I had read this book at the beginning of my conversion journey instead of starting it the day before my mikvah and finishing it the day of my conversion ceremony. Oh well, you can’t have everything you want. If I had read it at the beginning it would have been much easier to verbalize a lot of the things I felt cause I could have just shared passages from this book. Lester speaks so much more eloquently than I was able to about the yearnings of the soul that are particular to converts and a lot of the intangibles that make us find and know our paths. It is a powerful book.

Seriously, I’d love to just paste about two pages worth of quotes in here and then go: “yes, that’s the way I’ve felt and feel now.” But there are copyright issues so go buy your own copy. Or ask to borrow mine and I’ll highlight some passages for you.

Title: It Sucked and Then I Cried
Author: Heather B. Armstrong
Genre: Non-Fiction

I think you either really love Heather Armstrong’s blog Dooce.com or you really, really don’t like it. If you don’t love her blog you won’t love her book. I have loved Dooce forever. It’s a small badge of honor to say that I’ve been reading Dooce since before she got fired for her blog all those years ago. If you read Dooce during Heather’s pregnancy and her postpartum depression there isn’t a lot of new material in the book and I think that’s ok. I enjoyed reading the book very much. It was irreverant, funny and heartbreaking. I think her honesty about her mental illness is so very refreshing and is an absolute public service that she should be thanked for. So, thank you Heather.

Title: Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s
Author: John Elder Robison
Genre: Memoir

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I thought I was going to. That’s not the author’s fault it’s mine for having very specific expectations. This book is about someone who had a really dreadful childhood as much as it’s about his “life with Asperger’s.” And, perhaps it’s wrong of me to admit this, but I was looking forward to reading a work that was primarily focused on how Asperger’s impacted a person’s life and their place in and interaction with society. Yes this book addressed those things and focused on them to a degree but….I’m not explaining this right. OK how about this? It was a perfectly fine book, a perfectly fine memoir, it was just not the book that I wanted to read.

Title: I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology
Author: Abraham Joshua Heschel
Genre: Non-Fiction

While I enjoyed this book and found some really inspirational passages and many thought provoking books I now wish I hadn’t tried to read it from front to back like a normal book. I wish I had read it much more slowly, say over the course of many months or even a year. This collection of Heschel’s work on several different spiritual topics is full of deep meaning and context that I need to process and work through. It would have been better to read one section and at times even one paragraph a day or week and really thought about it and figured out if it had meaning or not to me. And if it had meaning what was it? Only after working all that out should I have moved on. When I re-read this that’s the way I’ll do it.

Title: When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Author: David Sedaris
Genre: (mostly) Non-Fiction

It makes me a little sad to say that I’ve basically enjoyed each David Sedaris book since Holidays on Ice a little less than the previous one. You do the math and figure out how much I enjoyed this one.

Title: The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
Genre: Memoir, Non-Fiction

I think perhaps that it’s wrong to say I love a book that is so filled with a real person’s real pain. To love, and therefore enjoy, such a book seems selfish and yet I cannot help but say that I deeply loved this book. Didion’s prose is straightforward and direct, not flowery but not quite Hemingway stark either. The tone ranges from slightly detached and clinical to deeply emotional, though still restrained. 

The book is completely and totally about the author and her responses to her husband’s death and the serious illness of her adult child. It’s all her and it is deeply honest, true and emotionally raw. I was tremendously moved.

I read a passage out loud to B where Didion is examining different kinds of bereavement. Pathological is the worst type, it’s most difficult to deal with and recover from. It’s also known as “complicated grief.” Specifically I read to B where Didion learns from medical texts that this complicated grief frequently occurs when “the survivor and the deceased had been unusually dependent on one another.”

Didion quotes a medical text: ” Was the bereaved actually very dependent upon the deceased person for pleasure support or esteem? Did the bereaved feel helpless without the lost person when enforced separations occurred?”

Reflecting on this quote I said to B “we’re fucked.” She said “Yep. I happily acknowledged our co-dependence many years ago and we’ll deal with the dramatic grief that will bring later on.”