This month has been quite the reading kick-off to 2021- being confined to my home has given me the opportunity to get through 26 books in their print, electronic and audio forms. I picked whatever I was in the mood for at the moment, and was pleasantly surprised by some of the interesting clusters that emerged:

• Books about families in suburban America with significant trees involved
  • The Most Fun We Ever Had - Claire Lombardo
  • A Good Neighborhood — Therese Anne Fowler
  • White Elephant — Julie Lanfsdorf
  • Fire in Paradise — Alastair Gee
• Books about the Muslim experience in America and circumstances driving immigration
  • Homeland Elegies - Ayad Akhtar
  • Mornings in Jenin — Susan Abulhawa
  • The Other Americans — Laila Lalami
• Books with Christian missionaries
  • Dissident Gardens — Jonathan Lethem
  • Fieldwork — Mischa Berlinski
• Books about Americans traveling abroad, more generally
  • Dirt: Adventures, with Family, in the Kitchens of Lyon, Looking for the Origins of French Cooking — Bill Buford
  • Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name — Vendela Vida
  • The Lovers — Vendela Vida
• Books discussing, at some point, the complexities of our sense of smell
  • Proof: The Science of Booze — Adam Rogers
  • The Reason for Flowers — Stephen L. Buchmann

In other news... some of my favorite quote-of-the-days:

• "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change." — Carl Rogers
• "We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full." — Marcel Proust
• "A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life." — Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
• "Whatever you do won’t be enough... Try anyway." — Barack Obama, A Promised Land

And an random selection of other highly-recommended links, articles, and the like I stumbled across:

• "There Are Two Kinds of Happy People" — Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic
  • I'm definitely one of these more than the other, and it's a good challenge to try to live a little more in the Epicurean tradition, too.
• "Where Camels Take to the Sea" — Shanna Baker, Hakai Magazine
  • What can this camel, a creature that is apparently native to my ancestral homeland, teach us about surviving in an extreme world?
• "The definitive case for ending the filibuster" — Ezra Klein, Vox
  • Made me more informed, hopeful, and frustrated, all at once. It's always satisfying to feel any increase in understanding of how my world works.