April Books and Delights

Every month I like to share the books I read that month. And this month I’m also sharing other little things that delighted me. So here are my April books and delights!

“We can’t know what a book will mean to us until we read it. And so we take a leap and choose.” 
― Anne Bogel, I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter

“We all suck at new things. But clumsily exiting our comfort zones offers way too many upsides to ignore.”
-Michael Easter, The Comfort Crisis

I read this book as part of an Enneagram Nine book club. Each chapter the author goes into a different area where our comfort is hurting us: food, physical exercise, relationships. It was very good, except that I’m not going to be dropped off from a tiny airplane in the wilderness of Alaska for six weeks to combat my comfort zone 😆

Amazon Description: In many ways, we’re more comfortable than ever before. But could our sheltered, temperature-controlled, overfed, underchallenged lives actually be the leading cause of many our most urgent physical and mental health issues? In this gripping investigation, award-winning journalist Michael Easter seeks out off-the-grid visionaries, disruptive genius researchers, and mind-body conditioning trailblazers who are unlocking the life-enhancing secrets of a counterintuitive solution: discomfort. Find it here.

The Life Council: 10 Friends Every Woman Needs by Laura Tremaine

“We hear about how marriage is work and parenthood is work, but somehow, maintaining healthy relations with our friends is supposed to be effortless, but I don’t find that to be true. I want to remember that my friend is up for a promotion or that she’s having a minor surgery next Tuesday or that her beloved cat just died, and I want to send flowers or a note or a text for all of these things, but without reminders, I will not. Maintaining care for the best friends in my life is emotional labor. Sometimes it’s physical labor. It’s not all margaritas and memories.”
–Laura Tremaine, The Life Council

I really enjoy Laura Tremaine’s conversational writing style. In this book, she shares advice about friendships. But this is not a research type book, this is like listening to your best friend talk to you about all the friendship things. I enjoyed it and it was a quick read.

Amazon Description: You’d love to have a “ride or die” posse like you see on social media, but instead you have a host of really good . . . acquaintances. After all, trying to find a soul friend in the midst of dirty dishes, deadlines, and, oh, a crazy busy life can be overwhelming. But what if developing great friendships was actually easier than we thought? And what if finding a “soul friend” wasn’t necessarily our highest goal? In The Life Council, Laura Tremaine–the writer and podcaster behind 10 Things to Tell You–tells us what we’ve been hoping was true all along: making, keeping, and even releasing friends doesn’t need to be as hard as we make it. Find it here.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

“What I know now, my son: Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your own home.”
–Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

This is an amazing novel! Sharon McMahon’s book club is reading this for May and a friend and I went ahead and started reading. I zoomed right through it. Each chapter focuses on a new character, all descended from the characters in the beginning. Following this family through all the generations and all the traumas they faced was terrible and maddening. But I couldn’t stop myself from turning the pages.

Amazon Description: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.

One of Oprah’s Best Books of the Year and a PEN/Hemingway award winner, Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation. Find it here.

April Delights

I want to live with an extremely low bar for delight. It takes almost nothing at all—a good song, a ripe piece of fruit, a perfectly packed tote.”
–Shuana Niequist, I Guess I Haven’t Learned that Yet

Inspired by Shauna Niequist, I’ve been keeping a list of things that bring me delight. Here is my list of April delights.

• Easter egg hunt
• Playing a new game called Contexto
• A cleaned off counter with no clutter! Or less clutter, I should say.
• Spending time at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville
• My daughter’s last volleyball game of the season
• Seeing my youngest wear a dress her big sister wore–on the exact day six years later. Thanks Facebook Memories for letting me know that!
• The roses blooming in our backyard.
• Six-year-old’s birthday party!
• This poem about parenting from David Gate
• Church Ladies Retreat 2023

I’d love to hear what books you read recently! I hope you enjoyed the books I read in April. I look forward to sharing these every month.

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