Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, and Alice Munro

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State of Wonder, a novel by Ann Patchett (Harper, 2011). A surprising, often beautiful book.
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Imperfect Birds, a novel by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2010).
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Too Much Happiness, a collection of short stories by Alice Munro (first international edition by Vintage Books, 2010; originally published in Canada by Toronto's McClelland & Stewart and then in New York by Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

From Alice Munro's story "Deep-Holes": Sally stumbled along faster than was easy for her, with the diaper bag and the baby Savanna. She couldn't slow down till she had her sons in sight, saw them trotting along taking sidelong looks into the black chambers, still making exaggerated but discreet noises of horror. She was nearly crying with exhaustion and alarm and some familiar sort of seeping rage.

I'd read several of these stories before--they were all from either The New Yorker or Harper's--but most were new to me. "Too Much Happiness," for example, which closes the collection, is about Sophia Kovalevsky, a nineteenth-century mathematician and novelist.

A Few Books, Mostly Memoirs

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Despite loving Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, I hadn't read any of her books that dealt more with religion than writing. Recently, though, I read all three of them, and found that, like Bird by Bird, each was at least as much memoir as how-to manual.

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

Trust me when I say that this was the first time I'd ventured into the Religion section of a bookstore for some new reading material.
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Also very late in the game, I finally read David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day. I'd had two of his books on my shelves for years; I'm now moving on to the second (more recent) one.

A few months ago, I bought a book of essays that was supposed to be witty and wonderful, and I don't know--it just didn't work for me. I plowed through the entire book trying unsuccessfully to understand what the reviewers were raving about. So I tried not to pay attention to all the hype about Me Talk Pretty One Day to avoid being similarly disappointed, but this book was terrific.
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I meant to add this to one of my blog posts a long time ago: a chapbook from Dancing Girl Press called The Terrible Baby, a collection of poems by Rebecca Cook. The cover is what initially drew me to that particular chapbook; it's a painting by Lauren Matthews Levato called "Maternal." (The second draw was the tantalizingly provocative title of the chapbook.)