Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Three comforting, life-affirming books to ease you into the New Year
There are times I’m up for a challenging read, whether that’s a historical fiction that leans heavily on listing historical facts and elements, an occasional apocalyptic or science fiction tale that leaves me feeling like I’ve experienced a big journey or earth-changing event myself. I’ll even read an occasional psychological thriller despite my squeamishness surrounding anything scary. I’ll devour those once in a while.
But when it comes to the holidays and the beginning of the new year, give me something easy to read. With hectic schedules, extra social engagements and more work to do in the same amount of hours a day, there’s enough to deal with in real life.
As a result I often turn to something comforting. For me that means memoir, comedy or a reread through an old favorite. In that spirit, here are three books easy enough to turn to — or listen to on your errands, drives or resolution-driven treadmill walks — that will entertain you and give you a little hope along the way.
“THE DICTIONARY OF LOST WORDS” BY PIP WILLIAMS
This debut novel centers on Esme. At the beginning, she is a very young girl living in Oxford with her father, who is one of the scholars working tirelessly to create the first Oxford English Dictionary.
Theirs is a world made almost entirely of words: the process of finding them, painstakingly defining them and their many uses. They determine not only the proper ways to spell and catalog the words, but which ones will make it in the official, ever-growing volume. Not all make the cut.
Esme and her father talk about words and their meaning constantly at home, the practice a loving, shared activity at the root of so many of their interactions. Even early on, she’s naturally studious and has strong powers of observation.
As the little one, her place in the Scriptorium, a garden shed-turned-office, is under the sorting table where occasional words on slips of paper fall to the floor and are rescued by Esme. She stashes away the unwanted words, starting with “bondmaid,” all the while sure that she will earn a place working in the Scriptorium proper when she’s old enough, despite it being an office of men.
As Esme comes of age, she notices a theme to the wayward words and begins to understand that the words relating to women’s experiences often get overlooked. She does earn her place working on the Oxford English Dictionary, but the secret collection of unwanted words starts to take shape as a very different volume, The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Esme and her words give us perspective through important moments of history, including the suffrage movement and World War I. It also gives the reader a clear view of what it meant to be a woman in that time, particularly one with extraordinary drive and a mission that didn’t center on having family or being a homemaker.
The whole story is full of affirming, feminist lines like “Convention has never done any woman any good.” And Esme’s storyline comes with a couple of dramatic turns of her own, even as she keeps up a journalistic pursuit of recording the words used by people in lower castes.
“It wasn’t my place to judge what you said or how you said it,” Esme says in the book. “I just wanted to record and maybe understand.”
“HOW TO KEEP HOUSE WHILE DROWNING BY K.C. DAVIS”
This is one book that I would feel confident recommending to most people, regardless of their reading taste and phase of life because it centers on growing the practice of self compassion — something we all could use more of. It’s a very short read, which means it doesn’t add to whatever burdens you might already be carrying and it was written by a therapist after she faced her own phase of overwhelm following the birth of her second child.
What this book was really good at doing was opening my eyes to the root of why messiness gets such a bad rap in our society and in turn built up in our internal dialogues. It’s easy to get caught in a habit of thinking that messiness is somehow a moral failing but once you’re aware of that, Davis said, you can begin to let go of the shame-based messaging that surrounds it.
Before Davis asks you to give yourself grace, she gives it to you first by reminding readers that anxiety, fatigue, depression, ADHD and lack of support are just some of the many common struggles that make keeping up with a house and keeping up with personal hygiene difficult.
If you’re afraid that the whole read is to build up your tolerance for mess, let me stop you there. It’s more of a systematic reframing of mindset: rather than choosing to feel bad about a stack of dirty dishes, for instance, you can pat yourself on the back for having cooked for your family as much as you have. The beautiful thing about feeding yourself positive messages is that it builds up your capacity and momentum, which can come back around as energy for the necessary cleaning and care tasks.
Among the many practical things Davis does is to give simple ways to make it all easier. She shows readers how to prioritize what’s most important to take care of in their household for the sake of themselves alone, not some standard of the outside world, with an emphasis on functionality. “You don’t work for your home,” she writes. “Your home works for you.” My takeaways included: — Having to sometimes let go of that aspiration to get laundry down to “zero,” and start working to develop a kind inner dialogue.
— An acknowledgment between partners that any non-sleeping and non-working hours on the weekend should be assumed co-parenting hours and that a helpful way to divide and conquer is to game plan what you want to get done.
— Motivation builds motivation. “We are learning to flex the muscles of rhythm and ritual until it becomes easier to do.”
“HOURGLASS: TIME, MEMORY, MARRIAGE BY DANI SHAPIRO”
The strength of this memoir is difficult to put into words, so I’ll keep it brief. The book itself is a powerful and elegant 160 pages reflecting on life through the lens of marriage mainly, though it can’t help but include elements of motherhood and her life and career as a writer. She draws on literature, poetry, philosophy and theology and weaves them together masterfully.
Shapiro examines the complexity and depth of her own marriage while making nods to what did not allow her first ones to be successful. She weaves this into the truths of their current lives in a wise and beautiful way.
A big draw is the transparency that she uses. It’s refreshing, as in one chapter she admits that her husband read a portion of the book before it was published and found it to be too generous a portrayal of him, so she challenged herself to dig deeper, pulling more of the curtain away for the reader.
Shapiro has a lovely narration voice and some of her passages moved me, so I wound up reading those again and again. For me, this was my first Shapiro read, but not my last.
April Wallace is Associate Features Editor — Our Town, Profiles, Religion — and can be reached by email at awallace@nwaonline.com or on X @NWAApril.