TBR: 12 Books to Keep You Hooked, Make You Think, and Improve Your Writing (Ep. 20)

As writers, reading is one of the most important ways we learn our craft. Whether we're reading with a pen in hand or listening on audio while folding laundry, every book we consume is shaping the writer we're becoming.

In this episode, I'm sharing 12 of my favorite books I’ve read in the past year, both fiction and nonfiction. Some were masterclasses in craft. Others offered the perfect blend of entertainment and solid storycraft—and kept me reading long past my bedtime.

I'll share what I loved about each book as a reader, what I noticed as a writer, and the specific techniques and lessons that stood out along the way.

You'll leave with plenty of additions to your TBR list and, hopefully, a bit of inspiration to bring back to your own writing.

Mentioned in this episode (sorted by genre):

Fiction (from most literary to least)

• Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
• The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
• All Fours by Miranda July
• Thank You for Listening by Julia Whelan
• Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros

Memoir

• The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green
• A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings
• What We Carry by Maya Shanbhag Lang
• Grayson by Lynne Cox
• Strangers by Belle Burden

Other Nonfiction

• Landscapes of the Soul by Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw 
• Upstream by Mary Oliver

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Transcript

0:03

Welcome to The Soul and Science of Great Writing, where the mastery of craft meets the mystery of creation. I'm your host, Mara Eller, freelance editor, book coach, and writing teacher with over 16 years of experience. I'm obsessed with the transformative power of words and with understanding what makes writing truly exceptional, not just to help my clients, but to grow my own craft too. So what makes writing truly great? Is it the spark of inspiration, the unique voice, the intangible soul that breathes life into words? Or is it the careful structure, repeatable strategies, and attention to detail that turn an idea into something readers can't put down? In truth, it's both. This show brings creativity and craft together, exploring the soul and the science with equal parts awe and analysis. Today I'm sharing a collection of some of my favorite books that I've read in approximately the last year. Now, as writers, it is of course important to be reading great writing. We learn through osmosis by picking up the sentence patterns, word choice, phrasing, and narrative techniques that these authors use So it's essential to be reading widely and to be selecting works that are of high quality Now, we can read as readers for primarily enjoyment but we can also read as writers, where we analyze exactly what these authors are doing, what makes their writing effective, what we like about it, what we don't like about it, and what we can apply in our own writing. So today, I'll be talking a little bit about both, what I've enjoyed as a reader and what I have enjoyed learning as a writer If nothing else, you'll walk away with a few books to add to your TBR pile, which if it's anything like mine, is quite large, but yet never too tall for a few more additions. I'll start out by confessing that most of the books I read these days are consumed in audio form. I just don't have a lot of time to sit down with a physical book in my hands and read with nothing else going on, as much as I would love to do more of that. But I've found that I really enjoy listening to books on audio. And while I'll say that it's not exactly the same experience as reading with my physical eyes, it definitely still counts as reading. So if that's you, let's put this to rest. It still counts as reading, okay? It's a little easier to get distracted, so sometimes I end up listening to things over again, or sometimes I'll even listen to a book twice if I really liked it. But that way I can still fit a lot more reading into my schedule than I would be able to otherwise Of course, if you want to analyze the books as a writer, it is definitely recommended to have the physical book in hand so that you can go back and analyze things like structure and chapter breaks and craft at the sentence level. But still, it all counts And it all goes into our brain and feeds both our creativity and our craft. The first book I'll mention is The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green. If you haven't heard of this one, you may know of John Green as a quite successful, popular author of young adult fiction, several of which have been turned into movies, including The Fault in Our Stars I think he's a great writer. I'd love to have him on this podcast one day. And I love his quirky, neurotic brain. I identify with a lot of that. So The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays which is marked down in the memoir category, which I thought was interesting because while of course you can have memoir in essays, these are not explicitly personal essays. The concept is that he chooses a different artifact from the world, from human existence, for each chapter, and then gives each one a rating. So each chapter is kind of an exploration of this item. He has a certain kind of turf grass in one chapter, and Halley's Comet in another chapter Now, he does include his personal experiences with this artifact, but it's a very unusual, fresh way of presenting his personal reflections, which I thought was quite fun. I did read this one on paper last summer, and thoroughly enjoyed basically every chapter. Couldn't put it down. It was deeply moving and mind expanding, but also just really funny. Like I think I laughed out loud a couple of times, which is rare for me. He's got so much vulnerability about himself and just breathtaking insight based on research that his atypical brain gets into when he gets fixated on these concepts, and the rating system is a riot. I laughed, pondered, and underlined like crazy. As a bonus, these essays make really great studies in writing craft. One of the wonderful things about personal essays and short stories is that they are short, so you can read the whole thing in one sitting and analyze a complete piece of writing in one go, It's much easier to conceptualize the entire piece than it is for a book length piece. So these will make a really great study in writing craft if you want to analyze what he's doing structurally and on the sentence level, which is something I plan to do in the future Another five-star read from last summer is The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, This is literary fiction exploring the slippery alchemy of attracting opposites and the struggle to rebuild one's life after unspeakable tragedy, yet it really wasn't a sad book. Yes, there is tragedy underlying it, but The focus of the novel is on the recovery and the rebuilding that comes after. I first heard about this quiet novel in a fiction workshop, which I also did last summer with The Story Grid. It's about how to write compelling scenes, which are essentially a smaller unit of storytelling which are collected to build a larger piece like a novel. And we analyzed one of the scenes from this novel in that workshop to see how Tyler built a compelling scene with what Story Grid calls the five Cs, which means you have to have a protagonist and an antagonist, you have to have conflict between them that they want opposing things, and they're trying to get an outcome that is in their favor, and by the end of the scene, they either sort of win or lose that scene. But because this one is literary fiction, it was a lot more subtle than some of the other examples they gave us, which were, a lot of them were sort of action genre, which is, you know, physical conflict is a little bit easier sometimes to identify. So I really loved this example because what I aspire to write is more in the literary fiction category, and it was also a scene between a couple, which is something that I'm interested in writing about as well. So I decided to read the whole novel, and it was a masterclass in turning what is basically an unremarkable plot into a page-turner because of the craft at the scene level. The characters are richly drawn and deliciously peculiar, and it does have an uplifting narrative arc. So while it deals with some heavy topics, it was a very enjoyable read and, uh, not depressing in the end. Highly recommend it. That one I did listen to And I found the narration quite nice Next on my list is another novel, All Fours by Miranda July. This one is an irreverently sexy, tender, hilarious, and surprising novel about a 40-something woman upending her life. It's kind of a midlife crisis and sexual awakening rolled into one with a really neurotic and hilarious main character. This one is a great study in voice. The personality of the narrator comes through really strong in, in the way it's written. It's first person. You're really immersed into her perspective, um, which could be a bit much for some readers because she is quite neurotic and depressed and anxious for a lot of the book. I should also warn you, depending on your background, it is quite spicy. Definitely too much for my in-person book club But if that's something you can handle and you are a woman in or approaching midlife, I really recommend this as a must-read. This is where I first learned about perimenopause and It just raises a lot of questions that I think are not discussed enough. Plus, it was very engaging. I did listen to this one. I will warn you that the author is the narrator on the audio version, and her voice is a little different. At first, I found it a little sort of grating, so maybe listen to a sample and see if you can handle that. Otherwise, read the version on paper Another audio listen on my list is A Well-Trained Wife by Tia Levings. This is an unforgettable memoir about surviving an abusive marriage fueled by high control religion. You've probably heard of Educated by Tara Westover, which I also enjoyed, but for me, A Well-Trained Wife was even better it just hit a lot closer to home because it starts out in Jacksonville, Florida, which is only a couple of hours from where I live. And it starts out, like, pretty typical. There's nothing, like, crazy about her experience of just being in a religious family. But It spirals into something quite disturbing as she finds herself caught in an abusive marriage that is condoned and even in many ways encouraged by conservative evangelical culture. Now, you know from the beginning, the subtitle is something about how she escaped it, so you know from the beginning that she gets out. Of course, she wouldn't be able to write a book about it if she didn't. So she does physically and emotionally escape this situation, but She begins in her childhood and takes you all the way through the conditioning that led her to think this was a good idea. She gets into the marriage, she's trapped in the marriage, and it then shows you how she gets out. So you can see it in that three-part structure of, like, childhood, in the marriage, and escaping the marriage. And one thing that I really appreciated about it is that the story didn't end when she physically left the marriage. There was quite a bit more, because as you may know, physically escaping an abusive situation does not mean that you have emotionally escaped or that you have emotionally recovered, and that emotional recovery can sometimes be even harder than the physical escape. So I really appreciated that she showed us a good bit of how she did that and how difficult that part was as well. I thought it was just extremely well-written and a really important topic in our culture today of trad wives and, you know, uber conservative moral majority Christian culture. As someone who considers herself a person of faith in the Christian tradition more largely, I think this is something we need to be aware of and wary of, this kind of high control religion and the abuse of power that it often leads to, particularly in regards to women Now, if you're looking for something a little lighter, a great recommendation is Thank You for Listening by Julia Whelan. She is a renowned audiobook narrator, but she is also a fiction author. She narrates her book, so I do recommend listening to this one. It's delightful upmarket fiction about rediscovering love and self-acceptance. If you haven't heard that term before, upmarket fiction refers to fiction that walks the line between literary and popular. It's also sometimes referred to as book club fiction for good reason, because it tends to be enjoyable, engaging, you know, it's not gonna feel like a slog the way that some classics or, you know, highly literary fiction can feel to some readers. But it also does have some depth and, you know, enough for there to be a good discussion This one is voicey, funny, and moving. For me, it hit That perfect balance of depth without darkness. There's romance and definitely some moderate spice. It is in the romance genre, and the plot is also about romance books in a way. so be warned, moderate spice, not as much as All Fours. It also portrays genuine female friendship. It passes the Bechdel test, if you've heard of that, It's the test where you have to have at least two female characters who have a conversation with one another about something other than a man. Surprisingly rare. it has witty banter, existential dilemmas, and a touching relationship with the main character's elderly grandmother that's really well done. So I highly recommend it If you're looking for something fun but also great writing and some deeper ideas and some emotional depth Now, if you've been following along, you've already heard me talk about What We Carry by Maya Shanbag Lang. This is one of my most recommended memoirs about an unremarkable life that is still somehow made remarkably compelling in the telling, which is what I think most of us have to do if we're thinking of writing a memoir I read it a second time this year, and I was even more impressed with her writing craft. It's a quiet, yet profound story of one woman's journey to understand her mother and herself before it's too late. If you read the back cover, you'll know that her mother is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's, so that's where the too late comes in This is a great one to dissect if you're thinking about writing memoir or even literary fiction each chapter is a scene. They're pretty short. Uh, it's divided into three parts, so you get that three-part structure that I've talked about before. And she does a wonderful job of blending showing and telling one of my memoir students recently said, It's so simple. It doesn't have to be complicated." She found it really encouraging because there's nothing fancy going on in the writing craft here. It's just straightforward and yet incredibly well done. So again, highly recommend you read that one on paper if possible. I've got all kinds of notes in mine, and I may be sharing more about it soon Another memoir on my list is Grayson by Lynn Cox. And I'll link to all of these in the show notes. This is a short memoir, it would be like a novella size, about a young ocean swimmer's encounter with a baby gray whale. And this one took me completely by surprise. This one and the previous one are both recommended to me by Ariel Curry. This one is just, again, remarkably well-written and just kind of magical, immersing you into a world most of us will never know. I do not plan to do any ocean swimming of this type I listened to this one narrated by the author and really, really enjoyed it In the prescriptive nonfiction category, I highly recommend Landscapes of the Soul by Sid and Jeff Holskla This one is targeted at readers of a Christian faith, so if that's not you, it's probably not gonna be the right book. But if you struggle to feel connected to God or just want to deepen your walk, this is a must-read. The psychological insight combines with pastoral wisdom to make it truly life-changing. It examines how our attachment style impacts our relationship with God and of course with others It helped me correctly identify my own attachment style And then the last chapter overflows with practical exercises and strategies Plus, it's incredibly well-crafted. I could do a whole episode just on the table of contents. Okay, maybe not a whole episode, but the table of contents is itself a work of art. You can tell that this book was extremely well thought out, carefully edited, and just a masterclass in Clean, clear Focused prescriptive nonfiction. I hope to have Syd and Jeff on the podcast at some point to talk about it Now, another memoir that you may have heard of since it's gotten a lot of buzz in the last year is Strangers by Bell Burden This is the story of how she essentially woke up one morning and discovered that her husband of almost two decades was leaving her with no explanation and no warning So the book explores how she got to that point and what happens after. It's almost a, a postmortem of the relationship because she's, left wondering, "How in the world did this happen? What did I miss? Did I ever know him at all?" And then she also has to navigate dealing with his sudden abandonment of her and her two teenage daughters as well as the stigma that comes with being a woman who was left in her cultural bubble, which, as she acknowledges many times in the book, is a quite privileged upper-class bubble. it takes place in New York City and Martha's Vineyard. She comes from a wealthy background, but she writes with so much honesty and humility, naming that tension that she feels knowing that her situation is so much better than so many other women's situations because she has this money So I did appreciate that acknowledgement, and it's a great lesson for memoir writers who may worry that digging into their own difficult experiences somehow implies that theirs is equally difficult to someone else's that they recognize is actually much harder. And the solution is just name it. Share that. The tension that you feel is part of the story I also loved how she really emphasizes the importance of women's stories and of women speaking out about their experiences rather than staying quiet as women are often expected to do One of my students in my memoir program right now said that the reason that she joined, that she decided she needed to write a memoir was because of this book, which I thought was quite a testament Another book that focuses on a woman's experience that has also gotten quite a bit of buzz is Hamnet. This is a fictional account of What this author imagines to be William Shakespeare's family. He really doesn't come into the book much at all He is not the main character. His wife is the main character But you know from the beginning that it is the story of how their son died of the Black Death and how she recovered from that It has gorgeous poetic prose and a dual timeline where the first two-thirds of the novel alternate between the story of her son's last days leading up to his death, and the story of how she and her husband got to know each other and got married and built a family And then two-thirds of the way through that climax, her son dies, the timelines merge, and we get to see how they deal with this unfathomable loss It is a remarkable portrayal of grief and depression. Does get a little heavy but I definitely recommend it and recommend reading it before you watch the movie, which is something I plan to do soon the last work of fiction that I'm gonna mention today is Fourth Wing The wildly popular romantasy book that was recommended by Steph Crowder a few weeks back I decided to give it a try because life was feeling pretty heavy, and I wanted something fun and engaging to transport me away, to provide a little escape, and it did not disappoint. It was really fun, Had a gripping plot A really interesting fantasy world, dragons, And the dragons are characters in their own right, which was really fun. It's got some cool lore. It doesn't get too, like, nerdy about anything. I do enjoy fantasy, but I don't enjoy, like, elaborate world-building. I don't, like, geek out on that stuff. I like fantasy mostly because of what it can bring up for us philosophically. can ask some really interesting questions. This one is not quite so deep, but it had a good balance for me of fun fantasy stuff without going too far. The characters were really compelling, and I was just hooked from, eh, a few pages in to the end In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I also listened to the sequel As with some of the others on this list, this one is definitely spicy Apparently I have a little bit of a romance trend in my reading recently. It is something I'm exploring because the novel I want to write is adjacent, and I'm trying to decide where it's gonna fall on the spectrum As far as the writing, It's not gonna win any awards for, you know, amazing prose. This is not literary fiction. It's definitely popular fiction, romantasy genre There were a lot of gazes colliding and various phrases that got repeated a lot and That made me chuckle a little bit But I always judge a book by how well it succeeds at doing what it is setting out to do. I don't think it's fair to judge romantasy by the same standards as I would literary fiction And clearly you wouldn't judge prescriptive nonfiction by the same standards that you would romantasy So I went into this expecting it to be Popular fiction. Very entertaining, not necessarily great writing at the sentence level, and that's what I got. So I highly enjoyed it, and if that sounds fun to you, would recommend it And the last book I'm gonna mention today is the one I am currently reading, Upstream by Mary Oliver. the renowned poet who died about 10 years ago. this is a collection of her essays, so this is non-fiction prose, but as you might expect, it has a lot of poetry and poetic qualities in the writing. it is largely about the writing life because that's what she did with her life. So while it's not a book on craft by any means, it is not prescriptive, it is still full of meditations and reflections on the creative life that can be inspiring and thought-provoking and that also involve a lot about the natural world since she was sort of a naturalist poet in the tradition of Walt Whitman, whom she calls her childhood friend I'll end today with a quote from her essay Of Power and Time. She says The most regretful people on Earth are those who felt the call to creative work who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time I offer that quote as a little inspiration, perhaps a little kick in the pants which is how it arrived for me If you're a writer or someone who wants to write or even to do anything creative with this one wild and precious life, to quote Mary Oliver again You have undoubtedly discovered how difficult it is to carve out time for that in this busy world of ours to prioritize it not just on your calendar, but mentally and emotionally to create space for it within yourself my inner world is so busy and it can become so loud. And finding the quiet, both inside and outside, to allow myself to listen to the creative force is Something I'm honestly not very successful at most of the time. That's one of the reasons I have committed to taking a week-long solo writing retreat each summer, something that I'm very privileged to be able to do I often have to spend the first day or two just finding that quiet. I do a lot of reading a lot of listening to the birds And it's like I return to myself And it is only once I find that quiet that I rediscover the well of creativity waiting inside me or flowing through me like a stream waiting for me to write it down reading for large uninterrupted blocks of time, meaning, you know, more than ten minutes is a great path into that space for me as are walks in nature. So I encourage you to figure out what that is for you and dedicate a little bit more time and space to it this summer or whenever you're listening Having a full week is quite a luxury, but maybe you could carve out a morning or an afternoon Pick one of these books that I've shared or another one on your TBR pile and just spend some quality time with it Sit outside if you can, or at least by a window, and allow your mind to wander as long as it's wandering into your own thoughts rather than the list of things that you should be doing or the worries that creep in to disrupt your peace If that starts coming in, go back to the book. But keep some kind of notebook next to you Write down some quotations or just thoughts and ideas that come up and if you do read one of the books I recommended, I would love to hear about it Wishing you a summer and a life full of beautiful words, deep reflection compelling stories and a sense of creative possibility. That's it for today's episode. If you found this episode helpful, I'd love it if you could take an extra minute to rate and review the show. This will help others find it and will make my day. I will be back in two weeks to take you deeper into the transformative power of writing. Until then, remember, words are more than ink on a page. They are a path to wholeness.