Lost & Found: A Memoir by Kathryn Schulz   

Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz’s father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the story of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of the role that loss and discovery play in all of our lives. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering–a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Lost & Found is an enduring account of love in all its many forms from one of the great writers of our time.

I’ll be honest, it felt a bit odd recommending a book on grief when advice on the subject wasn’t specifically asked for. But the book comes with accolades and I have read, and been impressed with, this author before so I figure it’s worth it. Also, perhaps it’s just as good to have this book and its musings in your emotional tool kit before you need them rather than trying to take it in when you are already in distress. 

The book is divided into 3 sections. Considering the title, it’s a bit obvious that it starts with Lost. It’s here where Kathryn Schulz’s language shines. She manages to take a concept that is almost famously beyond what language can capture and engages with it in a way that is both philosophically structured and steeped in emotion. The next section is Found. This part of the book meanders a bit more, but it eventually dawned on me that the breadth of her story here was to provide context. After all, the depth of loss that we feel is directly proportional to what we have found and subsequently lost. And the final section of the book is both surprisingly named and inevitable: And. This section is the densest of the three and most oriented around language on a technical level. I won’t go into much detail on it, as I won’t be able to do it much justice, but it does dig into the very idea of connection. It’s not just about putting the first two parts of the book together; it’s about putting everything together. 

I could finish up by talking about some of my favorite parts (I highlighted word and passages throughout), but it really is worth reading Lost & Found yourself to get all of the nuance, language, and context that Schulz captures in the memoir. 

Review by Adam

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Very enjoyable read!  Or in this case, an enjoyable listen as I chose the audiobook version of this heartwarming, original story. So much fun to hear the snarky voice of Marcellus, the aging, curmudgeonly Giant Pacific Octopus, one of the main POV characters of the book. The other main character is Tova, an older widow who works as a cleaner at the local aquarium set in the Pacific Northwest. She is grieving both the recent loss of her husband and also the long-suffering grief of losing her 18 year–old son many years ago. The third main character is Cameron, the down-on-his-luck lost young slacker from California who sets out to find his father who was never known to him. This 2022 debut from author Shelby Van Pelt was a Today Show book club pick and made many “best-of”  book lists last year.   The publisher’s blurb describes it as a book  “For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow’s unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.”  Of course, it’s fiction so yes, you have to suspend your disbelief for some parts and just enjoy it for what it is – a good story, with characters you will like and love and peppered with the delightfully wry, insightful, humorous commentary by the endearing, grouchy Marcellus. I wanted to read a book this month that wasn’t too heavy, or too light, and Remarkably Bright Creatures was just that; a story with remarkable connections between characters that threads a pitchperfect line between dark loss and bright gain.