The right mug for phases of life where your travel is largely limited to books.

There are the places that embed themselves in your soul, that carve a space that exists only in a specific light, in a specific scent, in a specific taste of that one dish in that one city that you can never, ever replicate. A piece of chocolate cake or a bite of falafel or, in my case, homemade tzatziki sauce on a deconstructed gyro with the mountainous Turkish countryside out the screen-less, open window. I have not eaten meat in more than 10 years, and I still think about that gyro.

And then there are the places in books that also embed themselves in your soul, the places that become characters themselves, that morph and grow alongside their humans, making them who they are, who they’ve always been somewhere deep down.

Since I became a parent, I have spent a lot of time in the latter: in books where the place is just as much a character, a protagonist, as the person or people. I come back to Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden. In both books, one a novel and one a memoir, the State of Florida feels as alive as any other character, imbuing every scene with richness and particularity. And, like any other character, Florida exhibits different sides of itself as the human characters change and grow, propelled by a place that is replete both with wild, natural beauty and with manufactured, commercial, branded extravagance. Florida, at its core.

In early motherhood, a phase that makes it especially difficult to travel, either far away or for very long, books have transported me. I know this is not a new concept, but the centrality of being home most if not all the time when I am not at work, is at least somewhat new to me, and different from the relative ease and simplicity of traveling before my son’s birth.

Priyanka Mattoo in her memoir Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones writes about her home, Kashmir, in gorgeous, excruciating detail, of a place she both longs for yet cannot return to, for a variety of reasons. She is both tethered and untethered to Kashmir, using language that makes it feel at times as if it is a former love—but also at times a current, ever-present love. Such is the complexity of place in the kind of work in which it functions in an almost-human way, infusing the writing with complexity, contradiction, and character.

While my travel radius has constricted for the time being due to having a small child, I rely on such books to infuse a similar sense of varied places, places with character, into my own life. Through books, I can feel both tethered and untethered, very much here, in my home, in the Midwest, but also untethered, exploring places that are not my own, places that have their own narrative arc, their own plot. As if places themselves breathe and move and choose and change. Much as we all do. I find those books beautiful in general but especially right now.

Also, here are the books I’ve read in 2025 so far (I am including the list because if I’m honest, this may be my only blog post of the year, because, well, full-time lawyering and mothering):