Bossypants by Tina Fey (2011)

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Usually, I’m not one for contemporary memoirs. The history buff in me prefers to wait at least a hundred years before reading about anyone, historical or celebratory. But when I saw that Tina Fey, the creator of one of my current favorite TV shows (30 Rock), had a comic memoir out, I knew I had to give it a try.

First of all, let me state for the record that I think Tina Fey is comic gold. She could write a version of the tax code and I’d probably read it from cover to cover, chuckling all the way. For the most part, Bossypants was an entertaining chucklefest but it wasn’t hilarious nor terribly compelling. It felt more like a series of amusing New Yorker pieces cobbled together as a book. Perhaps enjoying it in small bits over time would have been preferable to a straight-through reading. About three-quarters of the way in, I was starting to get antsy to wrap it up and start something new.

All this sounds like a mediocre review, but it’s more positive than that. I’d definitely recommend it to fans of Fey, and for those of us in the Chicago area, there’s a lot to enjoy during Fey’s early years at Second City. There are even shout-outs to Evanston and a hilarious bit at the YMCA.

Wish You Were Here by Stewart O’Nan (2002)

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stewart O’Nan is one of my favorite authors. I’d read anything by him, sticking it out to the last page, no matter how difficult it was to get through. Not that Wish You Were Here was a drudgery to read; it just helps to adjust your expectation going in and understand that nothing much happens in this book. And that’s okay. This book isn’t about the destination, it’s pleasure comes in the journey and if you accept that going in, you’ll be richly rewarded.

Emily Maxwell and her two grown children, along with their families and their spinster aunt, spend a final week in the family summer home on a lake in upstate New York. The patriarch has recently died and mom, to the bafflement of her son and daughter, has sold the cottage. Moving chronologically through the week, O’Nan gives each character a distinct voice, bouncing back and forth between family members and their unique perspective on shared events. Wish You Were Here will resonate with anyone who’s vacationed with their family, as it evokes the nostalgia and inevitable messy interpersonal kinks that come with familial history in close quarters.

As each adult family member grapples and grieves with the loss of father and family home (as well as their own long-lost dreams), the author weaves a subdued yet complex interpersonal tale with such tenderness and detail that I was thinking about the Maxwells long after I finished, finding it hard to believe at times that they do not really exist.

My Life in France (2005) by Julia Child

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The formidable chef’s memoir of her travels through France and awakening to the fine food and wine of her adopted country is pure pleasure to read. Wonderfully written, she recalls in delectable detail her discovery of delicious dishes and her struggle to not only learn to cook, but master the art of French cooking and translate it into one of the most influential cookbooks of all time. Her enthusiasm for life and learning leaps off each page and left this reader unexpectedly inspired and, not surprisingly, hungry.

Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

At times, reading this felt positively Sisyphean; for every one page read, two would regenerate on the back end. Lewis makes his point repeatedly until you feel as trapped in Gopher Prairie as his central character, Carol Kennicott.

Lewis’ fine writing kept me slogging through the middle of this overly long book and I’m glad I finished it. It’s helpful to keep the book in the context of its time (1920) and importance (in blowing the lid off the idyllic fantasy of life in small-town America.)

Jim Fergus  (1998)

Told as a series of journal entries, this work of fiction takes the premise that in 1875, when Cheyenne Chief Little Wolf proposed assimilating his culture with the whites by having a thousand white women “marry” into the tribe, President Grant agreed. The narrator, May Dodd, joins a trainload of women from the fringe of society (convicts, the mentally ill, spinsters, and prostitutes) traveling west to meet their fate. Fergus spins a good story, impressively conjuring up a vivid time and place as well as the mind-set of a woman thrown into a forbidding situation. An interesting “you are there” perspective on a sad chapter in this country’s Native American history.

Kate Atkinson (2010)

This most recent entry in the Jackson Brodie series is one of my favorites. Jackson’s life continues to be a fractured mess as he tracks down the biological parents of an Australian client, all the while grappling with the ambivalence about his own second-go at fatherhood. PI Brodie shares center stage with a new character, Tracy Waterhouse, a retired cop working mall security. One day on the job, Tracy makes a rash decision involving a crack addict’s five-year-old daughter, setting in motion the book’s most compelling story arc. As events play out, Jackson and Tracy are each confronted with a haunting murder in their respective pasts, told in flashback. All these threads, including an aging actress on the verge of dementia who’s closing out her career on a soap opera, are deftly woven into a page-turner concerned with motherless children and latent parental love. One of my favorite reads of 2011.