Books

A cardinal sin (if not what some might consider the cardinal sin) of reading is to judge the contents of a book based on the appearance of the cover. The notion that one is not supposed to make a value judgment after a quick glance is so widespread that the phrase has escaped the literary sphere and breached into life advice. 

When I first came across Camilla Gibb’s memoir, This Is Happy, I had been struggling for nearly a year to finish any book I picked up, and my mental health had deteriorated to the point where I was forced to drop out of school and quit writing entirely. Despite everything going on in my life, I managed to read This Is Happy to the very end. It was the reason I showed up to work on less than two hours of sleep the next day, which ultimately resulted in me spilling very hot coffee all over myself.  

It is a joy for a non-scientist like me to lose myself in descriptions of the exquisitely designed life cycles of pecan trees, maple trees, wild strawberries, witch hazel, black ash, and cattails. 

This is my year of reading short story collections, and this book exploded my understanding of what you could do with the “novel in short stories” form. The dust jacket describes it as a novel, and it follows a single protagonist, named Nina. But many of the stories that comprise it were published separately and several made it into collections like The Journey Prize anthology, and that’s because they make such powerful use of the condensed tension of the short story.