Summer Reads: Historical Fiction

A few weeks ago I shared my favorite memoirs that are great for summer reading, and today I'm sharing my favorite historical fiction picks. These are all great books, but the ones I honestly couldn't put down are The Other Boleyn Girl, The Kite Runner, The Help and The Kitchen House. Do you have any recommendations for summer reads? I'm always looking for a good book!  

1. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. Set in England in the time of King Henry VIII, this story follows a rivalry between sisters vying for Henry's attention.

2.  The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Set in Afghanistan in the 70's, this book follows the friendship of Amir, the son of a wealthy businessman and Hassan, the son of the Amir's father's servant. As kids, the boys are inseparable until something happens and their friendship is changed forever.

3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. This book focuses on the lives of two women from Aghanistan - Mariam and Leila - and and how their lives cross. 

4.  The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Set in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, a young white woman from Mississippi named Miss Skeeter becomes interested in the plight of the black maids that work for the families in town. She writes to expose the way they're mistreated, and all the awful things they have to deal with on a daily basis.

5. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. In 1929, a young girl is sold into slavery at a geisha house.  The book follows her life as she works in Kyoto, Japan as a geisha before and after world war 2.

6. The House Girl by Tara Conklin. The book weaves together two lives from different points in history - one, an escaped slave named Josephine in pre-Civil War south and the other, a lawyer named Lina in New York who tries to piece together the mystery surrounding the escaped slave. 

7. The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom. Lavinia is a white girl who was orphaned while onboard a ship from Ireland bound for the US. She is taken in as a slave on a plantation and is caught between the two very different worlds of her fellow slave, who love and care for her, and the white family in the big house who have accepted her as well but who have their own issues, as the master is rarely present and the lady of the house battles an opium addiction. 

8. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the 20s, new money Jay Gatsby is head over heels in love with old money Daisy Buchanan, who met years ago but were separated when Gatsby went to war. After the war, he comes back to find Daisy has married, and throws lavish parties waiting for her to appear.

PS- Another great book- this one is about obsession and pain in competitive Bikram yoga. 

Summer Scenes

I usually try to put out a yoga video once a week but this week was crazy and my body is feeling it. (Here are my other yoga videos, if you'd like to check 'em out.) In preparation for the big opportunity (which happens on Tuesday, send me good vibes!), I've been getting to the gym twice a day all week and I'm sore and tired, so today I'm resting. If the thunderstorms stay away, I'll be heading to the beach to get lost in my new book (Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone). This weekend I hope to get to the movies, try some new (easy) recipes, and finalize plans to meet up with some German friends who'll be vacationing in Miami in a few weeks. Hope you have a wonderful weekend!

Is March Over Yet?

March has always been my least favorite month. You're so close to spring, blue skies and warmer weather, but until April rolls around you're still in the depths of winter and it's grey, dreary, and ​a random blizzard is always a possibility. I need some warmth and sunlight in my life! Does anyone else feel like they're going a little crazy? What do you do to keep your spirits up?

I've been trying to stay busy. We are moving soon, so I've started to organize our stuff. The beauty (and pain) of moving is having to weed through all the crap we've accumulated and get rid of what we don't use. I've got a rule that if I haven't worn something all season, I've got to get rid of it. (Anyone a size 7.5? I've got some over-the-knee boots that need to go.)​

On the yoga front I've been focusing on poses I don't love like forearm stand.​ I have this fear that my forearms will give out and I'll crash to the mat head first and break my neck, which I know will not happen because I know I have the strength in my upper body and forearms. I need to keep working on this pose so I can get out of my own head a bit. Weird how our minds can get in the way of what our bodies can do. 

Because the cold weather tends to affect my joints, I've been trying to stay warm- exercising helps, hot baths, my favorite green tea, and curling up with a book (I'm reading this) under a bunch of blankets.​ Brighter days (literally), are just around the corner- come on, April!

Conscious Reading: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog

Bruce Perry's The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook is a book about brain development in traumatized children. In it, Perry walks us through some of his most challenging cases, and explains what he learned from each child. Captivated by the children's experiences, I couldn't put the book down. Perry took it a step further, however, by explaining the intricacies of the brain in a way that's accessible to the everyday reader, proving how trauma at a young age can affect brain development, and discussing what therapy worked for the children to allow them closure so that they could move forward. A fascinating read.

Conscious Reading: In Praise of Messy Lives

In Praise of Messy Lives is a collection of essays that ranges from Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign, to the trials and tribulations of parenting, to twitter wars, to the modern day woman's fascination with S&M as demonstrated by the success of 50 Shades of Grey. Noncohesiveness aside, Roiphe is undeniably a talented writer but while she makes strong arguments in many of her essays, her grating over-analyzation and holier than thou snootiness taint many of them. Take, for example, The Perfect Parent, where Roiphe describes what she considers over-involved parents and recalls with nostalgia the good old days when her mom would call up the stairs, "Did you do your homework yet?" instead of doing the Wuthering Heights assignment together. Instantly I remembered how hard I struggled with Moby Dick (still can't stand that book to this day, sorry, Herman), and how my mom would read one page and I'd read the next. We'd discuss it, battle through it together, and finish the damn assignment. Was my mom over-involved because she sat on the couch and read it with me? No. 

The essay goes on to inform us that "most of us do not raise our children amidst a sea of lovely and instructive wooden toys...and healthy organic snacks." Well that's too bad for your child, who is probably playing with plastic toys that are made with hazardous materials including lead, PVC, and mercury, and too bad for the environment being that plastics are not recyclable nor biodegradable. And too bad about those non-organic snacks which are loaded with GMO ingredients including sugar and corn- you know, the ones linked to inflammatory disease, the cause of a number of food allergies, and, later down the line, fertility problems.

"Can we, for a moment, flash back to the benign neglect of the late 1970s and '80s? To children helping themselves to three slices of cake, or ingesting secondhand smoke, or carrying cocktails to adults who were ever so slightly slurring their words."

*Crickets* Yeah, those were the days. 

Anyway, if you're willing to skip around a bit, and tolerate Roiphe's self-congratulatory insight, then check out the book. Otherwise, keep looking for something else.