Welcome to Litsy!

This was a lovely introspective memoir about living with depression & using nature as a balm for the soul. He opens up about his struggle with depression & how he found solace in taking nature walks (along with therapy & medication) to get on a healing journey. Each chapter focuses on an aspect in nature & relates to a life experience, while also giving solid facts about each animal or organism. His writing is very lyrical & poetic in the best way

September/October #ReadingBracket2025 Nonfiction
Kelly Bishop just stole my heart and the quarter final spot. George Takei's graphic memoir was a close second. October's winner was the soothing nature memoir, Something in the Woods Loves You

I admire his transparency about his anxiety - it sounds so debilitating and exhausting
I‘m glad he thanks his wife becasue holy shit she lifts and carries the family often

Bag #5 this book is expressing really well how exhausting anxiety is 😢

Was hoping I might be able to use this for some of the teens I work with but it‘s too “much” for adolescent community mental health. Kate Bornstein is straight up truth.

Next up on audio and bag #3

Working my way through my first book by Yiyun Li. It‘s not bad, but I want memoir to invite me inside the author‘s emotional truth, and I don‘t think this one has done that. While I can understand why Li maintains a somewhat academic distance, given the subject matter, I still wish it felt a little less like one of those documentaries where the narrator speaks blandly while unobtrusive piano music plays over a montage of archival footage.

Tan's work is always to visually and conceptually compelling, and these three short stories are no exception. They tackle the bigness of depression, the lost feeling of not fitting society's expectations, and the process of colonization. This is a pretty quick read since it is formatted like a picture book. #Art

A better title for this book would be “Why I Needed to Find Reasons to Stay Alive.” There was one section of reasons, but they were from twitter so it was annoying. This isn‘t what I was hoping it would be when I started, but it was pretty good anyway. I think the title is just a bit of a misrepresentation. I would have chosen to read this on more of a high than a low, personally; but your mileage may vary.
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