Earlier this week I got to attend a talk by a journalist I respect a lot, Alex Kotlowitz. He was on tour promoting his newest book, An American Summer, a look at a violence in Chicago in a single summer. I haven’t gotten to read the book yet, but listening to him talk about his reporting and how he goes about doing his work was inspiring, even though I’m not in journalism anymore.

And, it reminded me how much great journalism is out there! Today I want to share thoughts on two books of excellent journalism I read last month that I would highly recommend.

American Prison by Shane Bauer

In 2014, journalist Shane Bauer got hired to work as a prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. As an entry-level guard paid $9 per hour, Bauer was responsible for guarding hundreds of prisoners at a time with little training or support. At the same time, prisoners lived in appalling conditions, without adequate access to activities, resources, food, or medical care. After four months on the job, Bauer left and published an exposé on Winn Correctional Center and the prison’s owner, Corrections Corporation of America.

American Prison expands on that initial reporting, alternating between his experiences at Winnfield and a history of the private prison industry, which has roots back in slavery and historical efforts to keep using African Americans as free labor after the Civil War. He also explores how private prisons are accountable to the public and not incentivized to properly care for inmates or properly train prison staff, resulting in truly terrible places to live and work.

I was blown away by this book. Bauer’s reporting is thorough and detailed and honest, and his footnotes about CCA’s responses to his questions and stories are ridiculous. His writing really brought me into his experience, and showed how the private prison industry does a disservice to everyone – guards, inmates, support staff, and more – by cutting corners at every opportunity. I admired and enjoyed this book very much.

Parkland by Dave Cullen

Ever since writing Columbine, a book that has become the definitive account of the 1999 school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, Dave Cullen has been a leading journalist writing about the era of mass shootings in the United States. In Parkland, he looks at the aftermath of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, positioning it as the moment when student victims-turned-activists helped changed the narrative around gun control.

Instead of focusing on the shooting itself, Parkland is an empathetic and generous profile of the students behind March for Our Lives. Although Cullen does share a few critical stories about MOFL – areas where the kids made mistakes or misread a situation or acted in a way they later regretted – the book generally comes from a place that assumes the students are doing good work for the right reasons. That feels sort of like a caveat, but it’s actually something that I appreciated about the book. It’s also a fascinating peek behind the movement, including their process, goals, and strategy for combating gun violence in a generally non-partisan and inclusive way.

One final bit of praise – if you do pick this one up, be sure to read through the notes in the back. There are some great stories that didn’t make the final narrative of the book, as well as a lot of insight into how a talented and ethical journalist does his work. I found them delightful.

Around Here | February has been a tough month. Minnesota has gotten more than 30 inches of snow, work is stressful and busy without a clear end in sight, and the online communities I’m part of have been full of bad energy all month. I just want to hunker down and take shelter for the foreseeable future… which isn’t conducive to having much of anything to talk about. This face from Hannah is pretty much how I’ve felt since the Polar Vortex at the end of January.

Reading | I just started on The City in the Middle of the Night, a new science fiction book from Charlie Jane Anders. I loved her previous book, All the Birds in the Sky, so I’m excited about this one. My nonfiction reading has felt more sporadic lately, but I am hoping to get through Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova sometime soon.

Watching | This month I spent a lot of time marathon-watching full seasons seasons of new shows on Netflix. This included season three of One Day at a Time (so charming), season two of The Dragon Prince (fun, but it didn’t move the plot ahead much), season one of The Umbrella Academy (better in the later episodes, trying too hard in the early episodes).

Listening | I’m right in the middle of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on audio book, part of my months-long revisit with the series. It’s so great, but I may need to take a detour in March for the next Veronica Speedwell book, A Dangerous Collaboration. So exciting!

Laughing | A genius hockey dad put a microphone on his four year old at hockey practice, and the video from it truly one of the most delightful things I have ever watched (especially after having a younger brother who played hockey as a kid).

Loving | I forgot how delicious homemade soup can be. I’ve made minestrone, crock pot chicken wild rice, and bacon-leek-tomato-potato soup in the last few weeks and they have been awesome.

Hating | Buying and breaking in new bras is the absolute worst. That’s all I have to say about that.

Celebrating | My sister and I hosted a small Galentine’s Day party on February 13, which was one of the few highlights of the month. Girlfriends, waffles, and mimosas make the world less terrible.

Anticipating | My sister and I are going to see Potted Potter, a show that covers all seven Harry Potter books in 70 minutes, tonight. Live theater is another thing worth celebrating.

What is getting you through the winter? Send me some cheer! 

I feel like I’ve written posts before before about how I prefer my fiction with a bit of weird – a curious premise, a bit of magic, or even outright fantasy (although I still struggle with high-concept, high fantasy titles).

The three books I’m writing about today all have their own bits of weird – a mysterious illness, a plot that echos Quantum Leap, magic that works on the atomic level – but still rely on strong characters to create compelling stories. I loved all three in their own ways, and can’t wait to tell you more! 

The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker

The Dreamers opens on a single floor in a college dorm in an isolated college town in southern California. After a night with friends, a first-year student falls asleep in her room… and just doesn’t wake up. The situation is perplexing, then worrying, then downright alarming as more and more people in the community just start falling asleep. Some don’t survive, while others exist in a kind of heightened sleep, dreaming more actively than doctors imagined possible. The book jumps between several families, biological and found, watching how they respond as the crisis with no simple explanation grows and evolves over time.

This book reminded me a bit of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, mostly in the way it made me feel while reading it. I read both books on long, slightly overcast afternoons, where it felt exactly right to just settle into a book of beautiful prose and see where it took me. I was moved by the point of view characters in this story, and intrigued by the small ways the story panned out to give some sense of how institutions might respond to an inexplicable crisis like this one. It felt like there were very few answers for all of the questions the book raised, but I loved reading it anyway.

The 7 ¹⁄2 Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

I am not entirely sure how to describe the plot of this book, so I’m just going to give you the publisher’s summary and go from there.

There are three rules of Blackheath House:

1. Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m.
2. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit.
3. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer.

Understood? Then let’s begin… Evelyn Hardcastle will die. She will die every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. Some of his hosts are helpful, and others only operate on a need to know basis.

This book is such a doozy of a read, with more twists-per-chapter than should be legally allowed in a single story. It’s completely bananas, and yet somehow the whole thing holds together in a way I do not entirely understand. My mom and I listened to this one as an audiobook, but ended up having to buy the print version just so we could go back and see what we missed. There is one section that relies much to heavily on fat shaming to create character, but overall it was such a peculiar, weird and twisty delight of a book, I can’t wait to pick it up again.

King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo

I don’t even really want to bother writing a summary for this book, because it’s not a book I would recommend picking up if you’re new to Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse. King of Scars – a story about Nikolai Lantsov and his quest to save Ravka and himself – takes place after the events in both The Grisha Trilogy and The Six of Crows Duology. If you don’t mind spoilers, I think you could reasonably pick this one up and enjoy it, but the reading experience will be richer if you have the background of the five previous books.

That all said, if you’ve been in this world awhile, this book is such a great continuation. The plot expands the world we previously understood, and Bardugo’s grasp of her characters is just spot on. She writes the most charming, slow-burning love stories that just make my heart melt. It’s also been fun to watch characters evolve over the previous five books, and let characters who were in the background shine here. The conflicts continue to evolve too, leaning into some complicated issues that I’m excited to see tackled in the second half of this duology. If you’re looking for a great fantasy world to get into, start with Shadow and Bone and make your way here. It’s one of my favorites.

At the end of last year, I read two books – one nonfiction, one a memoir – that helped me organize some of goals and plans for this year via my One Little Word, whole. They’re both books about what it means for women to live life without a template to follow, and finding new stories to tell ourselves and each other about success and living a fulfilled life.

The Ambition Decisions by Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace

In The Ambition Decisions: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life, journalists Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace set out to explore what happened their Northwestern University sorority sisters since graduation in the early 1990s, and what lessons those stories could offer to other women at transition points related to career and family.

Over three years of interviews, Schank and Wallace found their classmates lives had followed similar patterns, and their stories could offer a body of knowledge for women when starting or changing careers, getting married, having kids, hitting midlife, and more. A central argument of the book is that women’s lives and opportunities have changed so drastically and so quickly, these decision points have become even more loaded and complicated:

“We don’t have a template to follow, a way to peek into the future to catch a glimpse of what leaving this job or marrying that person or even just choosing to be the person who unloads the dishwasher every evening might mean for us decades from now. As a result, we are often making what turn out to be important decisions blind, groping for a way forward, winging it, and hoping it all works out.”

Before I continue, I should note that the book is definitely speaking to a particular kind of female experience, a fact the authors note in their introduction. As an ambitious, white, middle class, college graduate, I’m the exact demographic of many of the women they interviewed and wrote about in this book, making the lessons especially relevant for me and many of the women in my close circles. I can’t say how it may read for women coming from different backgrounds, but I do think there’s something widely resonant about the idea that our lives and choices today are much, much different than those of our mothers and grandmothers.

Despite the book’s limitations in scope, I appreciated how The Ambition Decisions gave me some language to explain the experience I’m seeing many of the women I know go through right now. Smart, talented, ambitious friends with kids are stepping back to be caregivers, slowing their careers or putting them on hold until the grind of early childhood is over. Others are consciously choosing not to have kids to focus on their careers or travel or volunteering. None of those paths are wrong, but I also know many of them are struggling with their choice because, in some way, it feels like we were never supposed to have to make these compromises in the first place.

As a person in transition myself, hearing all of the stories in this book, seeing the different roads there are, and thinking on what a given choice might mean for the next life transition, was comforting and helpful. Modern life is complicated and can be a grind, but there’s a lot we can learn from each other.

No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol

Another book that comes at this idea from a more person angle is No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol, a memoir about the idea that there is no accepted narrative for life as an uncoupled and childless woman, and what it means to live life writing your own story. The book opens on the eve of MacNicol’s 40th birthday, a year that has an outsized importance in our culture. “I was convinced that midnight was hanging over me like a guillotine,” MacNicol writes:

“I was certain that come the stroke of twelve my life would be cleaved in two, a before and an after: all that was good and interested about me, that made me a person worthy of attention, considered by the world to be full of potential, would be stripped away, and whatever remained would be thrust, unrecognizable, into the void that awaited.”

Of course that’s ridiculous, but it’s hard not to feel that way in the face of a world that doesn’t seem to have space for women, let alone older women who don’t fit the mold of wife or mother. The book goes on to chronicle her 40th year, a year filled with family crisis, international travel, adventures with dashing me, and a lot of personal reflection about “love, death, sex, friendship, and loneliness.”

I feel like I could say a million wonderful things about this book, which I ended up reading at the perfect time – right at the end of 2018 while I was starting to think hard about what my life looks like after widowhood, unemployment, and a career change threw me off the track of what I expected for my life.

MacNicol is honest and funny and smart, and her writing just moves with this energy I loved. There were so many sentences that felt like they were written just for me, articulating at thought I hadn’t yet been able to put in words for myself. I finished reading it late one night in bed, and almost immediately opened it back to the first page to start again because it had hit so close to home. I haven’t re-read it yet, but I’m sure I will before 2019 is over.

Again, this is a book that I don’t know will resonate with everyone. MacNicol acknowledges the privilege she has and what that means for even having the chance to ask these questions. I’m lucky to be in a space where I can, but I know that isn’t true for everyone.

So, to wrap this up before things get two awfully long… both of these books helped me think a lot about the stories we tell ourselves, the questions we need to ask about how to live a good life, and the compromises we don’t talk about being made. If any of those things seem important to you right now, I think these two books will have something to add.