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As the year (and decade) draws to a close, I’m looking back with satisfaction at the books I’ve checked off my list or stumbled upon at the library or thrift store. I’m an incredibly picky reader, especially when it comes to fiction, and I’m selfish with my time. If a book isn’t interesting in the
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Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence by Alex Berenson My rating: 5 of 5 stars “Should psychiatrists speak out about what they were seeing to discourage cannabis use, I asked? Simpson said that in Colorado, psychiatrists had tried and failed. ‘We’ve put it out there, and the community is not
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The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay My rating: 4 of 5 stars Quietly devastating. That’s how I would sum up The Far Field. Vijay’s prose isn’t flowery or ornate. It tells the story simply, going back and forth in time as we follow the main character, as a child always close by her mother who
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If you’re a working Christian woman, you’ve probably felt the tension. I know I have. There’s a sense in many Christian circles that for women, work is just a temporary thing you do until you get married and start having babies.
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And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is a difficult book to describe in a nutshell. Beautifully written, but not fast-paced, it’s one you sink your teeth into and relish. Only nine chapters, but they’re long and told from different perspectives as you travel from Afghanistan to Paris
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All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr My rating: 5 of 5 stars “All the Light We Cannot See” is a rich, evocative novel set during World War II. The third person narrator primarily follows two characters: a blind French girl whose father is a locksmith at a museum in Paris, and an
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When 2018 kicked off, I set an insane amount of ambitious goals for myself—most insane and ambitious of all being to receive 300 pitch rejections over the course of the year. What possessed me to choose a number that high after failing to receive 20 pitch rejections in the last quarter of 2017, I have
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A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France by Miranda Richmond Mouillot My rating: 5 of 5 stars Miranda Richmond Mouillot was young, romantic, and naive when she set out to retrace her grandparents’ story, one she imagined to be like a fairy tale, full of love but with stars crossed that
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Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert My rating: 4 of 5 stars A refreshing read for the discouraged creative soul, Big Magic is essentially a long, written pep talk encouraging you to stop quivering in fear about your creative projects and go out and make stuff already, for no reason other than:
Meredith Sell 