A book review for Valentine's Day

I recently reviewed five relationship books for BookPage's February issue.

http://bookpage.com/features/20948-challenge-way-you-think-about-love#.WKW8OBjMyb8

CHALLENGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT LOVE

BookPage feature by Sarah McCraw Crow

Valentine’s Day. If those two words inspire dread rather than desire, take heart; a new crop of books offers advice and wisdom, whether you’re out there looking for The One, long married and bored with your sex life, or downright heartbroken.

BYE BYE LOVE
The qualities that we usually look for in a partner—sense of humor, charisma, beauty, good family, intelligence—are often red flags in disguise, write Michael Bennett, M.D., and Sarah Bennett in F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship. Dr. Bennett, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, and his daughter Sarah, a comedy writer, teamed up for a previous book, F*ck Feelings, in which they advised that paying less attention to feelings helps you manage life better. The Bennetts write in an irreverent, sometimes profane style—for instance, each chapter, devoted to a red-flag trait, includes F*ck in its title: “F*ck Beauty,” “F*ck Charisma” and so on. Despite the irreverence, the Bennetts’ advice is sincere and sensible. They explain how and why readers should seek partnership qualities (common goals, shared effort when times get tough) more than the red-flag traits. Though it includes advice for readers in relationships, this book is most useful for those in the dating world. 

THE RIGHT MATCH
Susan Quilliam’s How to Choose a Partner covers some of the same material as the Bennetts’ book but takes a quieter, more meditative approach. She refers to classic novels like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd for anecdotes. A British psychologist, author of 22 books and advice columnist, Quilliam also teaches classes on love and sexuality. “We now approach partner choice with bigger expectations, deeper confusion, and heavier pressure than ever before,” she writes, offering advice on meeting potential partners (aim for a “slow river”: put your energy into groups that offer a steady flow of different people) and what to look for in a partner. Quilliam emphasizes partnership qualities, breaking these down into goals, values and personality traits. The book has a straightforward style, with appealingly quirky illustrations. 

SPICE IT UP
Sex is the glue of marriage, writes Dr. Kevin Leman, a psychologist and author of more than 50 books about marriage and parenting. In Have a New Sex Life by Friday: Because Your Marriage Can’t Wait Until Monday Leman notes that what happens outside the bedroom affects what happens inside the bedroom, and readers need to consider the different ways that women and men communicate and process emotions. The book follows a five-day structure, considering a different aspect of sex (why women need sex, why men need sex, get your mother out of the bedroom) each day. This book is not for everyone; Leman writes from a Christian perspective for married, heterosexual couples. That said, his advice on how to talk to your partner about sex, and how to incorporate new sex positions and more “spicy” techniques into your routine, is frank, openhearted and sensible.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE
Carrie Jenkins’ What Love Is: And What It Could Be is not a self-help book, nor is it a collection of heartwarming essays. Instead, Jenkins aims to come up with a definition of romantic love that suits her as both a philosopher and a human being. A professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Jenkins walks the reader through theories about romantic love past and present, drawing from classical philosophy, science and literature. This might sound dry and academic, but Jenkins adds fun with pop culture references and vivid images. She explains biological arguments (humans fall in love because it leads them to reproduce) and societal arguments (romantic love is a product of social expectations and traditions), and she posits that love has a dual nature. She shows how our understanding of romantic love has changed over time, and she hopes it will come to include polyamory, because she’s married, with a long-term boyfriend. I wish Jenkins had revealed a little more about her personal life, which she refers to in the book’s prologue: “On the mornings when I walk from my boyfriend’s apartment to the home I share with my husband, I sometimes find myself reflecting on the disconnects between my own experiences with romantic love. . . .” I’d love to know what else she reflects on, as she goes from one partner to another.

HEALING FROM HEARTBREAK
Meditation teacher and Buddhist practitioner Lodro Rinzler takes on heartbreak in Love Hurts: Buddhist Advice for the Heartbroken. Rinzler offers ancient Buddhist wisdom in a youthful, playful style. The book’s opening lines: “If you’re reading this, you’re probably heartbroken. I mean, why else would you pick up a book about heartbreak? I’m sorry you’re heartbroken.” For this book, Rinzler met with dozens of people who shared their stories of heartbreak, not just romantic heartbreak but all sorts of loss—giving up a child for adoption, losing a parent, losing family members. The book is made up of about 50 short chapters, and Rinzler suggests readers flip to the chapter they need at the moment (“If You Feel Like You Will Never Love Again,” “If You Are Feeling Angry,” “If You Need to Hear a Less Bizarre Joke”). It also offers a primer on mindfulness meditation, and on the concept of love in the Buddhist tradition—which includes loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity—“we include in our heart the people we like, the people we really don’t like, and the vast number of people we have never even met,” Rinzler writes. As to why our hearts break, Rinzler is succinct: “Your heart breaks because life isn’t what you thought it would be.” Love Hurts is a wise, funny companion and a reminder that we can move through loss and beyond it.

This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Favorite books of 2016

I missed out on some of 2016's biggest books, but still read a lot of wonderful books. My favorites all did a lot of veering from present to past and back again.

Here they are:

THE NIX, Nathan Hill

As I began this novel, I was skeptical: another satirical portrait of a failed writer who's stuck teaching English to moronic college students, another heartless skewering of our social-media- and online-gaming-obsessed culture. But this book turned out to have a ton of warmth and heart (as well as a ton of pages, more than 600). The story runs through many threads and characters, and it zips back and forth in time, back to the 80s, the 60s, and the 30s, but the two main POV characters are Samuel, the sad failed writer, and Faye, Samuel's mother, who abandons Samuel when he's just a kid. The heart of the book is Samuel's search to understand why his mom left him all those years ago, and what happened to her in her youth and later in life. I admired but didn't love Hill's long, almost stream-of-consciousness passages to get us into a character's head or to set a scene, decade- and culture-wise. Hill plots like a wizard, bringing threads together in an improbable yet completely plausible way. And he makes us care for Samuel and Faye, and to happily stick with them for all those pages.

THE RETURN, Hisham Matar

In this memoir, novelist Hisham Matar tells how his father, an exiled Libyan who fought to end Muamar Qaddafi's regime, was kidnapped by Qaddafi agents and held for decades in a notorious Libyan prison. Matar, also a longtime expat, returns to Libya in his forties to find out what happened to his father. There he reconnects with extended family, some of whom are involved in the more recent Libyan uprising. It's a bleak and terrifying story, but also gorgeous and delicate in its portrayals of family, of exile, and of Libya itself. It's one that stayed with me and kept me thinking about it for a long time. (I reviewed this memoir for BookPage: here's the link.)

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, Elizabeth Strout

A spare, brief, beautiful novel from Elizabeth Strout. The narrator, Lucy Barton, remembers her time in the hospital many years before, during which her mother comes and stays with her. Strout delves into some of the same themes she explored in previous novels, like poverty, depression, loneliness, and the power of brief moments of connection. Lucy Barton is a writer, and her efforts to learn to write inform her ability to observe, but this is a novel about a writer unlike any other that I've encountered.

COMMONWEALTH, Ann Patchett

Another amazing novel from Patchett, a two-family story, the long aftermath of divorce and remarriage. The novel opens in the early 70s, on the hot afternoon an affair begins, and its chapters go back and forth in time, and from character to character. It's a fairly short and spare novel, yet Patchett covers a remarkable amount of ground with these two families, the siblings and step-siblings. She is a master plotter, and the surprise she reveals late in the novel is subtle, but devastating.

THE PAST, Tessa Hadley

I love Hadley's short stories, reminiscent of Alice Munro. The Past (which I think came out at the end of 2015 rather than 2016) unfolds over a few weeks as four grown siblings gather at their old country house, originally the home of their grandparents. Plenty of family dynamics here: three fractious sisters, all perceiving themselves as failures of one sort or another, and their brother Roland, who arrives with his sleek foreign wife and his teenage son. The present alternates with the past, dropping back to the late 60s, when the siblings' mother leaves her philandering, jackass husband and returns to her parents' house with her little children. It's a quiet but intense novel, with some wonderful character studies, and evocative descriptions of the house, the overgrown wilderness around it, and the nearby towns.

I recently reviewed Tom Friedman's new book Thank You for Being Late (FSG) for BookPage.

THANK YOU FOR BEING LATE

Keeping pace as the world moves faster

BookPage review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Fans of Thomas Friedman will be happy to know that he’s back with another comprehensive look at the world’s trends and troubles. In Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, Friedman, longtime New York Times columnist and author of six previous books, returns to the forces of globalization, climate change and technology. These are themes he’s covered before, but in this book he explains that we’re living in an age of simultaneous accelerations—ever-faster changes in climate, globalization and technology—that affect different parts of the world differently. These accelerations work together, Friedman argues, to create effects as disparate as an intelligent electrical grid that makes wind power viable, vast waves of migration out of overpopulated regions of Africa, and the political rise of Donald Trump.

Drawing on interviews with academics, CEOs, Silicon Valley innovators and other experts, as well as quotations from books, magazines and TV interviews, Friedman distills complicated concepts, using catchphrases and analogies to underscore his points; for instance, he refers to the amplifying effect of the computing cloud as “the supernova.” While the mix of sources and quoted passages can occasionally make for jumpy reading, Friedman’s informal style keeps the reader engaged.

The accelerations that Friedman describes are worrisome indeed, especially climate change and “the world of disorder,” his phrase for an increasing number of disintegrating nations. As to solutions, Friedman goes in two directions: He makes recommendations based on Mother Nature (be adaptive, embrace diversity, build ownership culture). He also returns to his hometown of St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb that produced an unusual number of writers, thinkers, and creatives, among them Joel and Ethan Coen, Al Franken and Norm Ornstein. He uncovers the factors that made his community successful, drawing lessons from its experience. Thank You for Being Late is vintage Friedman: clear-eyed on the world’s enormous problems, but optimistic about possible solutions.