#10 The books I read in February

Mar 06, 2022

I read a lot of books.

More than most people, and that’s because it’s a huge priority for me. That being said, remember as you’re reading this that I like books more than dating, sex, working out, watching TV, cooking food, knitting, nature walks, or cat videos; and just slightly less than playing cards with my mom, traveling to Italy, standing in line to buy an oat milk latte that I cannot figure out how to make at home, going to dinner with friends, and clumsy attempts at gardening. Meaning, if this feels like a lot of fucking books, that’s only because reading is important to me the way laying in bed with your kids or creating your own fabrics or collecting rocks might be to you (it’s also my job). I make an exceptional amount of space for it and I spend more money on books some months than I do on groceries. If you ever look at my reading list and think you aren’t reading enough, perhaps instead think, “she’s definitely out of clean underwear” and know that’s a true assumption.

Most of the authors of the books I read in February are written by white, straight, cis, able-bodied folks and most if not all are written by authors of some financial privilege; this won’t be the case each month but was this past month. I try and make sure I’m hearing from and sharing a diverse set of authors (which can, admittedly, be tricky when it comes to recovery). I am always looking for recommendations.

Lastly: I love to hear from you. Did you like this format? Did you hate it? Is my rating system fun or obnoxious? (I might actually trash the rating system.) What was the best book YOU read in February?

The Books I Read in February 2022

Since this is the first monthly book review, I wanted to try splitting it up into a few categories:

If you read one thing My top monthly book recommendation; not the “best book” but the one I feel changed me.
Addiction/Recovery/Drugs A book directly dealing with addiction, recovery, pharmacology, or the war on drugs, be it non-fiction, creative non-fiction (memoir), or fiction.
Addiction/Recovery/Drugs Adjacent A book that even if it had nothing to do with addiction, recovery, pharmacology, or the war on drugs, I still tied it back to that baseline (for instance, a book on meditation, or a book on community or anthropology).
Fun A book I read for fun that has absolutely nothing to do with addiction or recovery. (Rare?)
Books I Started and Didn’t Finish Self-explanatory.

I also wanted to create some kind of rating system that feels fair. I’m going to use the standard five star rating, but please know that only rarely will I give something a five star.

4 is to be seen as highest
5 is exceptional
3 is good
2 is okay
1 is probably don’t waste your time but who the fuck am I maybe I’m wrong

Lastly, I also want to be clear that no book is perfect. Since publishing my book I’ve gotten the occasional, “if you were to take this part out I’d recommend it to my clients,” stuff like that. That presumes that information needs to be perfect, or in 100% alignment with your world beliefs, or that people can’t think for themselves. I have never read a book I 100% agree with (including my own, three years later). I trust that you’ll be able to parse out what you do and don’t like from these recommendations and make up your own mind, and that you don’t need to be protected from potentially conflicting information. If I am recommending someone like Thomas Szasz, assume I knew he was extremely problematic but still provided value in his writings and that what I recommend isn’t taken as gospel or to mean I support something fully without discrimination.

If You Read One Thing

My favorite book this month was The Dawn of Everything (public library) (review below). Not because it was the best written and not because I even understood most of it (I didn’t) but because it absolutely changed how I think. Hard recommend.

Addiction/Recovery/Drugs

1. The Urge (public library) | year. 2022 | pages. 399 | author. Dr. Carl Erik Fisher

The thing about addiction and recovery is that you can’t write one book on it because it’s this mutli-tentacled thing; there’s a rabbit hole to fall down into anywhere you look; you could easily spend a career understanding the intersections of trauma and addiction, or a life unearthing the way drugs have been used since humans beat out neanderthals. Dr. Fisher, or the other Carl at Columbia into talking about drugs, or the ivy-league addiction psychiatrist that was so out of his mind high (while in residency) that he had to be tasered and admitted to Bellevue, or—as I know him—one of the few medical doctors in the addiction field that understands the actual nuance of what we’re talking about when we are talking about drugs, has written a book on the history of addiction, that I think does the history of addiction justice but also veers into all these really spectacular detours (like whether there is such a thing as an “addictive personality”). I loved this book, I read it in a few days, I underlined about 10% of it; it’s beautifully written; a page turner. Rating: 5

2. The Drop (public library) | year. 2022 | pages. 231 | author. Thad Ziolkowski

It’s a beautiful memoir, full of the kind of prose that makes a writer like me feel a bit envious and inadequate. In a nutshell, The Drop is a memoir of Thad’s surfing life and Thad’s addiction and it’s also a work of non-fiction that draws parallels and intersections of surfing and addiction; there’s a lot of addiction stories in here; a lot of death, a lot of people that should be dead but somehow aren’t, a lot of stories about how surfing undid some and saved others. I tend to not read a lot of addiction memoirs because I’m porous; books infect me; I wear their energy while I’m reading them. For instance, I never made it through The Recovering, and it took me multiple tries to finishing Drinking: A Love Story. (I also read a shit ton of them anyway.) I think this book is worth reading simply because of the information provided and the treat that Thad’s writing actually is, or if you’re one of those people that started using drugs and alcohol because a passion you had ended, or one of those people who was saved by a passion you found that was better than the drugs. But given my own preferences, knowing what I know now having read it, I would not read it myself. Rating: 3

3. The Weight of Air (public library) | year. 2022 | pages. 292 | author. David Poses

Forget everything I said in #2 about addiction memoirs: this one I think you want to read. I bought this book when it came out (cannot remember how or why but did), picked it up, decided I could not read another addiction memoir, put it down. Then a few weeks later the author David died. From what I can interpret from his Twitter feed, he had Covid, somehow ended up in the psych ward, and along with the trauma of what may or may not be an involuntary psychiatric hold (I have no idea or way of knowing, this is what he alluded to in his tweets) he was on maintenance medication (buprenorphine) which is the drug used to treat opioid use disorder, and that was withheld.

david poses @davidthekick

Psych ward switched ALL my meds; withheld Bupe for days & cut dose; added Effexor (making me feel crazy); released me to @hazldnbettyford prog bc of my history but this is about depression, not drugs (like that book—the something of air?) I was/am ravenous to be loved up at home

He died on February 16, 2022. Cause of death is undisclosed.

I picked this book up after his death, and read it over the course of a few days, and was just fucking heart broken. Am heartbroken. I highly recommend reading this memoir if only to understand how absolutely fucked up our “treatment” system is, or if only to support David’s surviving family (you can also give to the GoFundMe set up in his name); but I recommend you do because it’s an engrossing account of what living with addiction and surviving addiction for years looks like. It was a page turner for me. Rating: 4

Addiction/Recovery/Drugs Adjacent

4. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (public library) | year. 2015 | pages. 306 | author. Jon Ronson

To discuss why I picked up this book and why I’m interested in public shaming is a very long story, deeply tied to what I believe treatment of addiction should look like vs. what it does; you could say simply I don’t believe in the punitive system we have in place, and that means I’m interested in all the ways we as a society are punitive or unforgiving or shaming. A friend recommended this book to me, and I had no idea it was written in 2015 (which means the stories involved are so mild compared to what we’re dealing with today in terms of actions and reactions; like it’s hard to remember a time when Jonah Leher’s plagiarism was scandalizing.) I didn’t really like the author or this book, still I read the whole thing, even enjoyed it, and took some good from it. Rating: 3

5. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (public library) | year. 2021 | pages. 704 | author. David Graeber, David Wengrow

This is a seriously long book, 526 pages without notes (692 with). I have been fascinated with David Graeber’s work since reading his essay Bullshit Jobs over the summer (recommend the essay, not the book), and as soon as I saw this huge ass yellow volume in my local bookstore I bought it. It’s a rethinking of the history of the world, of inequity and inequality, of how “Western” views of liberty and freedom were actually borrowed from Native American philosophers; mostly though, it’s a re-examination of the idea that hunter gatherer societies naturally move to horticultural, agrarian, and eventually industrial. The authors challenge the idea that societies inevitably organize into our modern formation; or the idea that the humans that came before us didn’t already experiment in what we think of modern and inevitable structures and actively decide against them. If I had to do a book report on this I’d fail, because it’s so dense and I didn’t understand a great deal of it, but it did leave me with the unshakable belief that we’re a far more creative species than we give ourselves (our those that came before us) credit for, and that whatever we’re in right now has a lot less to do with inevitable progress as it has to do with the loss of understanding our unlimited creative capacity as individuals and communities. It also gave me really loosely formed arguments I keep trying to have at dinner parties that make me absolutely look like I have no idea what I’m talking about (i.e., it’s a book with enough information to make you act like an asshole who thinks she knows something because she read one book.) I recommend it only because it for certain upended a lot of assumptions I buy into. I think differently because of this book. Rating: 4.1

6. When Things Fall Apart (public library) | year. 2000 | pages. 210 | author. Pema Chödrön

I don’t know how to live without this book, and yet I cannot remember its teachings, and so I read it and read it and read it. Then I read it again. I read a few pages a night; then I finish and I go to one of her other books, or the Bhagavad Gita, or A Course In Miracles, or Zen Mind Beginner Mind, or something Ram Dass wrote, or anything that reminds me what matters (usually nothing I’m worried about and things I forgot to think about). Then I start over. Every single night I read a few pages of the dharma before I go to bed. Then I turn off the light and thank God or the Universe or you know, whatever, for every thing I can think of to be grateful for; then I fall asleep. If you haven’t read this book yet, it can be a bit hard to grasp. But it is somehow (for me) always the thing I need to read, no matter what page I turn to. Rating: 5

Fun!

7. Oh William! (public library) | year. 2021 | pages. 240 | author. Elizabeth Stout

This is a fiction book; I don’t usually read fiction. I liked it a lot and probably because my mom has an ex-boyfriend named William and it made me think of her and him. I read it in a day. It was fun and a nice break from reading about addiction. Rating: 3.5

Books I started and didn’t finish

I don’t finish books I don’t get into. That doesn’t mean they aren’t good books! It just means I couldn’t get into them and I have zero problem not finishing books I can’t get into. Sometimes this happens and I go back eventually and end up liking them.

On The Road, Jack Kerouac. I bought this because I heard I was supposed to read it. I got halfway through. I’m sorry I cannot.

The Whole Language, Gregory Boyle. One of you recommended because you loved it so much. I stopped at page 15. I might try again. It wasn’t bad it just didn’t feel worth the trade off of time.

True Grit, Charles Portis. I bought a painting and the artist told me the painting was based off this classic. I got halfway through but just couldn’t finish. But I do love Haylee Steinfeld.

The Addiction Inoculation, Jessica Lahey. This is a book about raising kids in a culture of dependence (keeping your kids off drugs). I think that it could definitely serve some parents looking to ensure their kids don’t pick up or if they do, what to do. Maybe I didn’t like it because it has 12-steps are the only way vibez, or maybe I didn’t like it because I don’t have kids. I got to chapter 8.

Tell Yourself a Better Lie, Marissa Peer. I love her work and have heard some of her talks. I couldn’t get into this. I might go back to it.

Recovering