What to Read this Month: August

Looking for something new to read? Check out our New and Noteworthy and Overdrive collections for some good reads to enjoy!

Unmasking for Life: The Autistic Person’s Guide to Connecting, Loving, and Living Authentically by Devon Price. Most masked Autistics have spent a lifetime being told how to perform neurotypically: how to behave, how to carry themselves, what to feel, and how to live. With his previous book, Unmasking Autism, Devon Price, PhD, has given them the space and the tools to unmask and embrace their neurodiversity. But no matter where you are in the unmasking process, there is still work to be done. Unmasking is more than just a personal process of self-acceptance, after all—it also requires figuring out how to move comfortably throughout life building friendships, nurturing family, pursuing love, finding a means of survival, and expressing oneself on one’s own terms. In order to live a brilliantly unashamed Autistic life, you need more than internal healing—you need practical tools of assertiveness and interpersonal effectiveness, and solutions to the problems of ableism and inaccessibility. Enter Unmasking for Life, which provides the resources to help you advocate for your needs and invent new ways of living, loving, and being that work with your disability rather than against it. To learn more, check out this podcast conversation with the author.

Mona Acts Out by Mischa Berlinski. Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the hardest role in theater. In an impulsive burst, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!” is her excuse) to find her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, who was recently forced out of the legendary theater company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona’s escape turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face-to-face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has ever loved. Beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, Mona Acts Out is a novel about acting and telling the truth, about how we play roles to get through our days, and how the great roles teach us how to live. Check out this NYT review and this AP News review to learn more.

There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift by Kevin Evers. Singer-songwriter. Trailblazer. Mastermind. The Beatles of her generation. From her genre-busting rise in country music as a teenager to the economic juggernaut that is the Eras Tour, Taylor Swift has blazed a path that is uniquely hers. But how exactly has she managed to scale her success—multiple times—while dominating an industry that cycles through artists and stars like fashion trends? How has she managed to make and remake herself time and again while remaining true to her artistic vision? And how has she managed to master the constant disruption in the music business that has made it so hard for others to adapt and endure? With the same thoughtful analysis usually devoted to iconic founders, game-changing innovators, and pioneering brands, Evers chronicles the business and creative decisions that have defined each phase of Swift’s career. Mixing business and art, analysis and narrative, and pulling from research in innovation, creativity, psychology, and strategy, There’s Nothing Like This presents Swift as a modern and multidimensional superstar. Audiobook narrated by Candace Joice. You can see a summary of some of the key insights in this Next Big Idea Club post.

Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts. A timely and urgent novel following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez. In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry. Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis’s descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home. Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us. There are helpful reviews in Chicago Review of Books and the digital publication Caught by the River.

America, Let Me In : A Choose Your Immigration Story by Felipe Torres Medina. A hilarious and satirically accurate introduction to the United States immigration system from comedian and writer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Felipe Torres Medina. Born in Colombia, Felipe Torres Medina moved to the US at the age of 21 and has spent over ten years of his life both navigating the chaos and confusion of the immigration system and explaining that craziness to the clueless Americans around him. There are few subjects that Americans have stronger opinions on. And there are few subjects that they know less about. So, like many immigrants before him, Torres Medina sets out to do the job American-born citizens won’t: make the US immigration process accessible, relatable, and, hey, a little bit funny. With an outsider’s eye, an insider’s affection, and a biting, humorous flair, Torres Medina invites readers from all passport lines to explore the multiple paths and potholes of moving to America, and experience just how many choices it takes to choose a new home. In this laugh-out-loud book, you will be taken down a multitude of possible immigration stories that range from the kafkaesquely silly to an uproarious good time. Some of them are real things that happened to Felipe–like discovering in an immigration interview that he shares a name with several criminals–and some of them are totally invented and will make you question your sanity. You can read more about it in San Francisco Chronicle’s Databook.