January's Best Books

This January, slim down, speak up, work brilliantly, and get lost in a riveting new novel and memoir by Caroline Leavitt


Still Alice
By Lisa Genova
Pocket Books

Imagine you are a fifty-year-old professor at Harvard with a rich, rewarding work and home life, a loving husband and a trio of grown kids. Now suppose that you suddenly discover you have early onset Alzheimer’s disease. In this heart-wrenching debut, Genova, who has her doctorate in neuroscience, limns a life gone slowly out of control.  As Alice begins to lose her grip on the world around her, the effects on her and her family are devastating.  Moving and haunting, with a knockout ending, Still Alice turns the unthinkable into art.

The Black Girl Next Door
By Jennifer Baszile
Touchstone

Being part of the sole black family in an upper class white neighborhood meant that Jennifer Baszile always had to prove herself by being smarter and more successful than her Caucasian peers. But being pressured to live her parent’s dream of equality had a price tag, marring her efforts to choose her own path and figure out her own identity. Amidst the racism that affected her Deep South and Detroit relatives and her own growing need to be special, Baszile crafts a life all her own, becoming the first black female professor in Yale’s history department.  Powerful and provocative.

The Big Skinny: How I Changed my Fattitude
By Carol lay Villard 


Cartoonist Lay’s hilarious, graphic memoir reveals how she finally purged the excess pounds and found her sleek, chic self. Tartly poking fun at yo-yo diets and food obsessions (I particularly loved her story of the woman who waited until her husband was asleep so she could eat crackers in bed), Lay promotes a you-can-do-it brand of exercise and healthy eating with wit and sass, and even has a few delicious cameos from George Clooney. 



One Year to an Organized Work Life : From Your Desk to Your Deadlines, the Week-by-Week Guide to Eliminating Office Stress for Good
By Regina Leeds
DaCapo Press 


Drowning under deadlines and emails? Missing your meetings and your peace of mind? Fear no more. Leeds, known as the Zen Organizer, has all the steps you need to prioritize your schedule, beat burnout, and even achieve your long-term goals. Set up in week-by-week chapters, Leeds’ book shows you how to turn all your good intentions into great results, and even gives you the time required to do each and every task right down to the nanosecond.  Truly, the only thing better than this book would be to hire Leeds herself, but come to think of it, with this book, you won’t have to.


Love Junkie
by Rachel Resnick
Bloomsbury 


When she hits her forties, single, broke and depressed, Resnick realizes her life has spun out of whack because of her addiction to love and sex.  She tunnels into her past to find the reasons why, which include a seductive father who put an ad in the paper for foster care for her, and a mother who took her to bars to troll for her own lovers. Pain, sexual drama and obsessive love make Resnick feel alive, but as the body count for abusive violent lovers increases, she joins a support program and heads haltingly towards recovery. Haunting, powerful and like a fist to the heart.



Shout Out: The Art of Conversation: a Guided Tour of a Neglected Pleasure
By Catharine Blyth
Gotham Books 


Wildly funny and absolutely charming, this gem of a book shows you how to untie your tongue and enjoy the raptures of really good conversation. 

 

Caroline Leavitt is having too much fun reading books to make any New Year's resolutions that she is going to break anyway. She can be reached at http://www.carolineleavitt.com.

 

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