"Natalie Kusz’s often-overlooked but astonishing memoir follows the story of her family, who jumped in a car in California in 1969 and moved to Alaska to homestead off the land near Fairbanks, where temperatures in the winter regular drop to 40 below. Kusz, who is 6 at the time, is attacked (and almost killed) by a sled dog, but the most compelling parts of the book are her poetic, unflinching reflections on everything from daughterhood to motherhood to what it means to build your own home—literally, out of scrap lumber and visqueen."

"I’ll start with Midnight Run. Just one of the finest Goddamn movies I’ve ever seen. Charles Grodin and Robert De Niro. If there’s a better buddy comedy, show it to me, and I’ll shake your hand. It’s so funny. It’s also where I learned what chorizo is. Being from Illinois, not a lot of truck stops serve chorizo and eggs. It was part of my “goin’ out west” legend, like, “One day, I will go to California, and on the way there, I will experience chorizo and eggs.”"

"I discovered Christopher Isherwood in college. His writing style is so direct, warm, and inclusive. There's one passage in this book, published in 1964, that has really stayed with me — the description of America. The narrator is a British man teaching at a California college. He and a few colleagues are having a conversation, and an American woman is saying how romantic Mexico is. She's critical of America. The protagonist argues with her, talking about the virtues of the United States. He says that its beauty is in its abstraction. I thought that was an amazing insight — possibly true and compelling at least."

"The Golden State Killer was active in California in the 70s and 80s, before I was born. Michelle McCnamera made it her life’s purpose to find out as much as she could about him and his victims, and she made incredible breaks in the case just sitting at home on her computer. She died unexpectedly in 2016, two years before The Golden State Killer was caught, and although the authorities didn’t officially give her credit for having a hand in catching him, the spotlight she shone on the case made an enormous difference at the very least. "