I often wait to read the ‘it’ book of the moment—and when I finally catch up its a glorious thing when the read really is as good as everyone said it was. When Educated by Tara Westover came out everyone was raving about. I work in publishing and people were bananas about it even long before it came out. I just put it in my bottomless tbr pile and started it a few days ago. Reading it now, and it is stunning—gorgeous, unsentimental writing. There is so much push and pull in the writing, so much tension in how Tara was raised and how she learns to take in the world around her. She’s raised in an extreme family that deals in absolutes, but she finds cracks that hint at a different world beyond the mountain. There is crazy tension between the paranoid, off-the-grid world Tara was raised in and the world of others she fights to join. It only grows when she gets in to college at 16, dirt poor and having never seen a classroom (she didn’t have a birth certificate until she was 10 or 11, her actual birthdate a fluid thing). There is so much pride and shame, power and fear, curiosity and anger—in short it is everything people raves about and more. It’s a fierce and questing memoir, so worthwhile if anyone is looking to fall in deep with a read.
I’ll leave the typos there. If you’ve read another book that lived up to the hype, I’d love to know!
Edit: I woke up to see so many people sharing amazing books from new books to classics, across genre and categories. Huge thanks to everyone for hyping up all these books…next up for me is either Chernow’s Hamilton or The Bear and the Nightingale. Or maybe The seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Or Olive Kittridge—i hear that is AMAZING!
final PS: Thanks to everyone who listed and discussed these books—what a fab and diverse list! I’ll be checking this often whenever I’m looking for my next read. Keep ‘em coming!
