| Sisterhood of the Sensible Moms

While chocolates, hearts, and flowers may be the way to some girls’ hearts, books are definitely the way to ours. If books fill you with a warm, happy feeling too, here are five that you might want to check out, download, or purchase for yourself or your sweetie.

And if you are interested in hearing us talk about one of these in real time, just click the podcast at the bottom of this post!

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

There is a reason this book made it on to nearly every “Best Of” list last year—it’s quite simply a remarkable gem of a book. With her unique gift for plucking the extraordinary from the every day, Offill doesn’t just offer up moments from a marriage but gives us glimpses of the diamonds hidden in the rough patches as well. Offill’s structuring of the story can be the reader’s hard work. Through her careful curation of snippets from the marriage at the heart of this novel, Offill leaves the reader asking on every page—how do these pieces fit together? what does this mean here?—yet these tenuous but important questions serve the story she is trying to tell. Marriage isn’t a straight narrative so much as a thousand shimmering moments—beautiful, terrible, and strange—and she lays them all out for us in this gripping, lovely book about what it means to take this particular trip.

On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss

You know how we feel about immunizations. Ellen wrote a great post about herd immunity and its current threat from the anti-vaxxer movement here. But this book doesn’t so much argue for vaccines as wrap itself around the very concept of innoculation itself. Biss’ pace is unhurried as she weaves personal anecdotes in with history, literature, and scientific research. The result is a captivating read on a subject we cannot escape right now. I cannot escape one of her quotes: “We owe each other our bodies.” An unputdownable piece of non-fiction that will keep you thinking long after you have turned the last page.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

This book broke my heart a couple of years ago, but it never left me. It’s truly one of my favorites of all time, but it’s not easily summed up or laid out. Krauss, the wife of the literary superstar Jonathan Safran Foer, has a weighty literary talent of her own and she embues all of her gifts on telling this beautiful love story of a boy named Leo who loved a girl named Alma. That she lets this love story travel back and forth in time and be told from many angles is just a gift for the reader. This is a book you will cherish.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

For a big, honking tome like this with a beautiful, intricate story to boot, you could totally be spot on in thinking, “Really, Erin? You serious?” Well, those who love the literary heavy hitters are already gonna be on board with this wide open, lyrical book, but even if you are just looking for a great story, trust me when I say that this book is for you. It starts as a father’s love story. Marie-Laure loses her sight at six years old and her father, a talented locksmith in charge of all the locks at the Museum of Natural History, uses his abundant gifts to help her learn to manage her blindness. By the power of Doerr’s narrative gifts, it morphs into something else entirely. There is so much good stuff in these pages and Doerr plays well with every character and theme he introduces. It may not be great literature, but it is a damn fine read and that is enough to keep you warm on a cold winter night.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Martel

This is the one book that I am telling everyone to read right now. It’s such a great all-around literary experience from the plot that sucks you in to the characters that pull you through to the questions it keeps asking you. I could go on and on.