L.L. Wohlwend

I love the week before the New Year. With the end of the holiday rush, and the long, dark nights, the days feel out-of-time, misplaced, almost like you stumbled upon them after a long walk in the woods.

There are no rules in liminal spaces (at least in my rulebook) and this week definitely counts as liminal. The end of the old, the beginning of the new. And, of course, with that comes the annual End of the Year Reading List. Former President Barack Obama has given us his top picks. (Of the one I’ve read on his list, we agree: The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff is fantastic and listed below.)

I felt the urge to offer my own list this year. I didn’t read nearly as much as I’d like. (I never do; I suspect I never will.) By tomorrow, it will be 39 books. I’d wanted 50. But I couldn’t read this fall. I was exhausted from teaching and the two classes I was taking. My brain simply refused to concentrate beyond my assigned work. I’m hoping, like always, this coming year will be different.

My Top Five:

1. ROMANTIC OUTLAWS: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

My absolute favorite from the year by a landslide. Extraordinary read. An excerpt from my Goodreads review:

I knew some about Wollstonecraft’s life and was familiar with ideas about Mary Shelley, (Go Prometheus!) but I did not know nearly enough. Wollstonecraft is a woman worth learning about and it is infuriating, even now, hundreds of years later to learn how she was not only mistreated by society but by the men who supposedly loved her. Her husband Godwin perhaps most damningly of all.

It’s to Gordon’s credit that while you know from the outset that Wollstonecraft is going to die in childbirth, it was with increasing dread and sadness that I reached that section of the book. I was truly sad for her untimely and unnecessary death. And if you’ve ever been one to daydream about rescuing someone in history with a healthy shot of penicillin, I’ve got someone for you.

Wollstonecraft was a genius—and she grew up with an absolute iron will to live life on her own terms. Something that remains quite rare even to this day. Most women collude with patriarchy. Most women put their husband’s needs ahead of their own. (At least in my neck of the woods.) And yet Wollstonecraft, who lived in a time when a woman was owned by her husband and had no legal claim to even her own children, manages to carve out a life of freethinking and independence.

2. INDIAN HORSE by Richard Wagamese
A heartbreakingly beautiful book. Wagamese writes about Indian boarding schools in Canada.

3. THE VASTER WILDS by Lauren Groff
The book was panned by the resident Washington Post book critic, but I found it riveting. It does not have much in terms of dialogue and it is heavy on description, but I whipped through the incredibly fraught story of a young girl trying to survive in the wilderness.

4. THE LIVING MOUNTAIN by Nan Shepherd
I loved Shepherd by the end of this slim book. I loved her mind, how she viewed her home, her landscapes. The descriptions take time to read, however; so don’t be surprised if this short book takes you some hours. Well worth it.

5. A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN by Virginia Woolf
I finally read this classic and found it oh-so-inspiring, in spite of a number of outdated ideas. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to having a conversation with this great bard.