Jennifer Senior Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Jennifer Senior

Am reading Wallace Stegner’s “Crossing to Safety” and cannot shake this line: “Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? Who appoints them as mouthpieces? If they appoint themselves, as they clearly do, how valid is the commission?”

Jennifer Senior

Everyone is aware that @CaitlinPacific has written not one but *two* deeply pleasurable essays in the last month, right? One hilarious, the other gorgeous and melancholy, but both profound? On "coastal grandmothers": https://t.co/cRej1JKCEH On Joan Didion: https://t.co/OnqPwHZoTa

Jennifer Senior

Friends: Today, my story “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind,” which won the 2022 Pulitzer for feature writing, goes on sale in book form under the title “On Grief: Love, Loss, Memory.” I love the look of it. It’s beautifully packaged. 1/5 https://t.co/tS8ZIdEEc9

Jennifer Senior

Well, would you look at that: Two of the most captivating books I read this year—@bobkolker 's "Hidden Valley Road" and @julianzelizer's "Burning Down the House" are on the NYT's 100 Notable books of 2020: https://t.co/0lpUbxhE27

Jennifer Senior

@russell_nm Nicole! I *really* appreciated your mention of my book in yesterday's col, but it's actually called "All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood." I know the column's already out there in syndication, but I'd still love a correction; my subtitle is much less negative...

Jennifer Senior

Keep thinking about a line from “Radio Free Vermont”, a Bill McKibben novel I reviewed when I was still a daily book critic at the NYT. The protagonist looks at the freakish weather around him and thinks: “It made him feel old, as if he had outlived the very climate of his life.”

Jennifer Senior

Only RTing this because I badly need cred with my 13-year-old. (I adore John Green myself, I should add. Have read everything he's ever written, and even reviewed "Turtles All the Way Down" when I was a daily book critic at the NYT.) https://t.co/gvx5HlVDKL

Jennifer Senior

⁩My God, the index alone of ⁦@MarkLeibovich’s book is a surreal reading experience. Among the many entries under “Twitter”: —Priebus fired on, 65 —and Trump’s abuse of Sessions, 163-164 —Trump’s attack on a Latina beauty queen, 55 —Trump’s attack on Nordstrom, 96-97

Jennifer Senior

Now listening to the perfect audio narrator perform the perfect book: Prentice Onayami doing Paul Beatty’s “The Sellout”. One of the best marriages of reader & material out there. Highly recommend, tho eventually will have to read. Beatty’s prose & imagination are too dazzling…

Jennifer Senior

How delightful to stumble across this in “Look at Me” by Anita Brookner: “When I feel swamped in my solitude and hidden by it, physically obscured by it, rendered invisible, in fact, writing is my way of piping up.”