Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

“Untangling” by Barbara McGavin and Ann Weiser Cornell

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Subtitle: How You Can Transform What’s Impossibly Stuck
Recommended to me by: Their courses and books about Focusing

McGavin and Cornell co-run Focusing Resources and teach Inner Relationship Focusing. Focusing is a way of looking inward with gentle curiosity and keeping company with what’s unclear to help it clarify and shift.

Back in 2020, I took their year-long course Getting Free: A Year of Untangling. It turned out to be a good year to be taking an online course! I knew they were writing a book about the course material, so I was curious when I saw that it had been published.

I had an immediate sense that the material had been reorganized, and flowed much better than the course handouts. Interestingly, late in the book they say that they had to step back and get a sense of the whole book, and were led to do a major reorganization.

The book clearly and kindly explains their techniques for dissolving Tangles – stuck places in our lives where we are at war with ourselves, and everything we do to try to solve the tangle just pulls it tighter. They include both personal stories about tangles, and stories from their students.

While I left the course feeling like their techniques were too persnickety and heady and intense, the book softens all that. Recommended if you’ve learned some Focusing and are curious about applying it to those tangled, stuck places.

Content note: One of the issues McGavin shares throughout the book is a difficult relationship with her size and weight loss. While she does not repeat myths about weight causing health issues, it might still be triggering for people who struggle with their own size.

Available at bookshop.org.

“After Hours at Dooryard Books” by Cat Sebastian

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Recommended to me by: Marissa Lingen

I loved this beautifully written, meticulously researched novel set in late 1960s New York City. An eccentric bookstore owner has the resources to rescue people and give them jobs in the bookstore, and Patrick is continuing that tradition. The writing about grief makes sense to me – people are both hurting, and continuing to do what needs to be done. It includes found family and delightful slow-burn m/m romance and people being kind to each other.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“We Belong to the Drum” by Sandra Lamouche and Azby Whitecalf

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Recommended to me by: Sanguinity

This vibrantly illustrated picture book tells the story of small child Nikosis’ experience immersed in his Plains Cree family’s traditions, and then going off to daycare, where he doesn’t feel at home until his parents bring in some of his beloved pow-wow drumming music. The family names (mother, father, grandmother, etc.) are in Plains Cree, and an appendix explains that the words change if it’s his mother, their mother, etc. Nikosis means their son.

The book is available in a bilingual English/Plains Cree edition. The author Sandra Lamouche is a champion hoop dancer and Indigenous educator, and the book is based on the family’s experience with her son.

Highly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“Atlas of the Heart” by Brene Brown

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Subtitle: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
Recommended to me by: Brene Brown’s other books, and picking it up at free market

For an atlas of 78 emotions, this book is surprisingly engaging. Brene Brown includes excerpts of past books, current research, and personal stories about the emotions, in a flowing, well-written way. Full page pull quotes with strongly colored backgrounds and full page illustrations add life to the book.

The emotions are collected into related groups like “Places we go when things don’t go as planned,” (boredom, disappointment, expectations, regret, discouragement, resignation, frustration) and “Places we go when the heart is open.” (love, lovelessness, heartbreak, trust, self-trust, betrayal, defensiveness, flooding, hurt).

The debate about whether anger is a primary emotion surprised me. It is a core response to boundary violations, as Karla McLaren says in The Language of Emotions. Yes, a lot of other emotions come along with boundary violations, but that doesn’t change the primal experience of anger.

I read the book in little bits for quite a while, and it lends itself well to that. I ran out of steam toward the end and didn’t finish it. The focus on “objective” research rather than experiences in the body made the book feel too abstract even when the research was interesting.

Recommended if basic information about a variety of emotions is useful to you, and if you like Brene Brown’s research-based approach.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Life After Cars” by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, Aaron Naparstek

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Subtitle: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile

Despite the title, this book is mostly about life during cars, with all the attendant horrors. Pedestrian and motorist deaths, pollution, environmental destruction, freeways built on top of thriving Black neighborhoods. The lockdown during the early part of the Covid pandemic gave us a glimpse of what it might be like to reclaim the world from cars and drivers, but we seem to have returned (or been pushed) back to the status quo.

Recommended if you want a chilling look at the true costs of car culture. I was hoping for more about the positive alternatives. There is some space given to the activists speaking up about car culture, and to cities in Europe and Asia that have taken back some of their streets for bicyclists and pedestrians.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Tidy First?” by Kent Beck

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Subtitle: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design
Recommended to me by: Liking Kent Beck’s TDD book, and this one was free at a conference

Like Test-Driven Design by Example, this book is lucidly written and carefully thought through. The first half is a series of small software refactorings called “tidyings.” The second half is about the tradeoffs between creating value now (tidy later or never) and creating options for the future (tidy first or soon, but in moderation).

The book is under 100 pages, which means it was a quick, enjoyable read, and at the same time, I’m glad I didn’t pay $40 for it.

It looks like the next book in the series will be “Tidy Together.” I look forward to reading it from the library.

Author’s website. Sadly, Kent Beck is now exploring the use of “AI” for programming. He said at the conference that he’s had to give up the pleasure of crafting a function just right, which made me sad for him. I appreciate him bringing his thoughtful approach to “AI” coding, but I wish he would Just Say No and continue to take pleasure in his craft.

Available at bookshop.org.