Reading | Unsheltered And The Bean Trees

Unsheltered | Barbara Kingsolver

The Bean Trees | Barbara Kingsolver

Although I love to read books written by authors of all ages and stages of life, it has recently come as quite a shock to myself to discover that I feel particularly at home with the works of boomer ladies. 

Barbara Kingsolver is a perfect case in point. She writes with a quick wit, a deliciously complex and inventive sense of story, and a passion for social change and human justice. But she also seems to keep her fingers on my pulse as her stories unfold. Kingsolver creates characters and dialog that give voice to my own convictions and concerns, and her books make me feel at home. 

A few months ago, I stumbled across a gently loved Kingsolver hardcover at a thrift store and on account of its beautiful cover art and high quality papers, I snatched it up. After I got home and glanced through the front pages, I discovered that this book, Unsheltered is one of her most recent works, and I recognized the name of her first novel, The Bean Trees, which I read a lifetime ago in the early 1990s and still lives on my bookshelf. 

So I decided to read them both. 

Unsheltered is the story of two families living in two different centuries on the same block of a Utopian community in south New Jersey. Both grapple with the problems of living unsheltered, in both literal - their homes are falling down on their heads - and delightfully figurative ways. 

"Without a roof over your head, it kind of feels like you might die."

"Yeah, but you might not. For sure you won't find your way out of the mess if you keep picking up bricks and stuffing them into your pockets. What you have to do is look for blue sky."

The Bean Trees follows the adventures of a young woman who spends her Kentucky childhood trying to not get pregnant. She finally makes a break in a broken down car toward a brighter future out west only to suddenly find herself mother to an abandoned toddler and learns to build a new life for them both.

"In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can." 

I love these stories. True, there are bits in both novels that make me cringe, that make me cranky, that make me cry out, "No, Barbara, don't write it like that!" But in the end, both stories make me feel like I have come home and reading them brings me peace.

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You know me. I'm a list maker and a box ticker from the word go, and if I can think of a way to quantify a goal, you can bet the ranch that I will.

So it should come as no surprise that a few years ago, when I aimed to reignite my love of reading for pleasure, I decided to keep track of the number of books I read per year.

Now if this is a metric that works for you, then I salute you.

But for me, it turned out to be the wrong target.

Because what I wanted to accomplish was not a set of notches on my literary bedpost, but a reinvigorated passion for the written word. 

So I will still keep a list of the books I've read, and refer to it often in order to remember the interesting travels my mind has taken. I'll write about how these works have left their marks on me, for better or worse. And I'll hungrily search out family, friends, and acquaintances who have opinions about the same books to swap impressions and ideas.

But no longer will I keep a tally of the number of books I've read.

Because now, I'm only interested in the reading. 

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Hey! Wanna read more about the books I've read in 2022? Check these out:

Conversations With Friends

Priestdaddy

The Vanishing Half

Untamed

The Paper Palace

Three Wishes

Crying In H Mart

Prodigal Summer

The Pull Of The Moon

Unsheltered and The Bean Trees

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For a full list of books I've read in the past few years, click here:

2022

2021

2020