REQUIRED READING

In Order to Live

A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom

by Yeonmi Park with Maryanne Vollers (Penguin

Press)

Park’s story of her childhood in North Korea and her escape to China and eventual freedom in South Korea is harrowing to say the least. Now 21, Park was just 13 when she fled with her mother. Although her family was well off at times due to her father’s black market activities, they also suffered deprivation and scorn after he was arrested. “In a free world,” she writes, “children dream about what they want to be when they grow up . . . when I was four or five years old, my only ambition was to buy as much bread as I liked and eat all of it.”

You’ve Heard These Hands From the Wall of Sound to the Wrecking Crew and Other Incredible Stories

by Don Randi with Karen Nishimura (Hal Leonard

Books)

Pop music fans may not have heard of Don Randi, but they no doubt have heard the songs he played on (keyboards mostly) — “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” “Good Vibrations” and the Jackson Five’s “ABC” among them. Randi was one of the session men (and a few women) who, behind the scenes, played on hit after hit in the 1960s and ’70s. Randi has good things to say about nearly everyone he worked with, except Raquel Welch, who was taping a TV special in 1969. He calls her “more than a diva,” and said even Bob Hope didn’t like working with her.

Deep South

by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

From a travelwriting icon who’s taken his readers to all four corners of the earth, a journey closer to home. Here, Theroux chronicles driving on back roads through Mississippi, Arkansas and South Carolina, savoring the region’s food and music while also decrying poverty and racism that he sees as holdovers from the Civil War.

Cabin Porn

Inspiration for Your Quiet Place Somewhere

edited by Zach Klein (Little, Brown and Company)

Klein, the cofounder of Vimeo, along with writer Sten Leckart and photographer Noah Kalina, take a delightful look at homemade and renovated cabins all over the world. We learn how to convert a ran silo to a home, how to make maple syrup, and how to revive a bungalow. They include with repurposed car parts and boat parts, treehouses and lots more. All in all, very zen.

White Dresses A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters

by Mary Pflum Peterson (William Morrow)

Little girls sometimes dream of their beautiful white wedding dresses. But in Peterson’s memoir, these frocks tell a fraught tale of her relationship with her mother, an exnun and compulsive hoarder who showered her daughter with white nightgowns and graduation gowns while filling the house with broken appliances and unopened mail. After her mother’s death, the writer discovers how her mother was abused and how those abuses resulted in her condition.