​Friends, I like to think of myself as crafty, but after reading The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, I think Alanna Okun shares a whole new level of crafty.  What Dear Fahrenheit 451 did for our favorite books, Okun does for our favorite creative expressions.  She uses the common thread (ha!) of crafting in each of her essays to share her anecdotes of love, loss, relationships, grief, triumph, and tribulation. To me, she is the Cheryl Strayed of crafting because she is able to blend her wit and sage advice into a story about knitting on the subway and still find a way for it to relate to me, the random reader.  No matter what kind of crafts you are into, she finds a way to compare the experience of creating, abandoning, revising, and (maybe) finishing a project to life events. It’s a great read to pick up and put down at your leisure (which I would recommend) or even to binge in a couple of sittings. 

When I first finished The Glass Castle, I sat for a full afternoon staring at my computer hoping to find the right words to explain what it was like to read it.  It’s been almost a month since I finished it, and I still am having a hard time expressing my feelings about it.  Jeanette Walls writes in a way that makes you feel like you are reading your favorite fairy tale, except that her story doesn’t exactly have a fairy tale ending.  It’s a story of resilience and redemption, all through the eyes of woman who decided to take off the rose-colored glasses of her childhood. If you’re looking for a raw and unapologetic memoir, this is the one for you.

 What can a taxidermied raccoon teach you about happiness?  Everything.  
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Furiously Happy is one of those books that just stays with you.  Jenny Lawson is a queen at humor, especially when it deals with the more difficult parts of life like anxiety, depression, and chronic illness.  The Bloggess, as she is fondly known on her blog and social media, finds a way to make all of the hard in life seem bearable, even comical. The cover of this one explains it all: this is a funny book about horrible things.  Lawson uses her own life experiences to make you laugh until you cry (like I literally did) at the absurdity of life.  I found myself highlighting whole pages and reading them aloud to anyone that would listen, regardless if they wanted to hear it or not.  The situations Lawson finds herself in are indeed outrageous, and I always found myself wanting just one more story.  She balances her anecdotes with humor and candor, which left me laughing and contemplative at the same time.  Wonder how that happens? Read more to find out. ​​

I first heard of The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating when I was searching for books related to chronic illness.  Then it popped up as one of the "chronic illness reads" for the Dysautonomia Support Network Book Club.  When I actually cracked opened the deckled edge, I found that this book was not quite what I expected.  It's part self-discovery, part nature memoir, part autobiography.  ETB finds herself bedridden with a severe chronic illness, the only companion she keeps is a snail on her bedside table.  In between ETB's descriptions of her snail's daily habits are deep thoughts about the differences between being a snail and being human, and more similarities than I thought possible.