Fans of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” will find an updated and funnier, more relatable millennial version in Kristen Van Nest’s debut memoir, “Where to Nest.”
The title playfully pays homage to the author’s origins. Her name, Van Nest, is an Americanized form of the Dutch name ‘Ness,’ a farm town in Holland. Much like her ancestors who modified their names, she shaped her own life and wrote her own story.
Growing up in a modest household in an extremely wealthy US town in Connecticut, where gym class sometimes consisted of yoga by candlelight, Van Nest’s classmates had life-size Barbies and real pet horses, while she wore secondhand clothes and had a Tamagotchi digital pet. This distinction propelled her to take action and strive to “have it all.”
She had fantasized about achieving the American dream, where she would fill her fancy mansion with objects associated with luxury, like three sinks in the master bedroom, for example. But she soon found that it was not the path she wanted to go on. She traded the big closet in her previous teenage dreams with that of a rolling suitcase.
In an attempt to fit in, Van Nest realized she likely could not. So she stood out. Not just outside of the box, but outside of the country completely. She was bitten by the travel bug at 16 when her grandmother encouraged her to spend some time in Paris and promised to help cover the cost. She went, and returned. Then left again as soon as she could.
“Where to Nest,” which was released on Tuesday, starts with her boarding a one-way flight to China, a place she had never before visited.
She ended up living in Shanghai for three years and, later, in Luxembourg as a Fulbright scholar. She went on to have dizzying adventures, and misadventures, in about 40 countries.
She writes how one year when she attended a New Year’s party in Berlin it felt like a fresh start not only to the year but also for herself.
“I was also going through a rebirth: one where if you stripped away my work, wealth and social status, I was at my core without those silly things we sometimes wrap our identities around.”
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Where to Nest’ by Kristen Van Nest
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Where to Nest’ by Kristen Van Nest
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Africa’s Buildings’ by Itohan I. Osayimwse
Between the 19th century and today, colonial officials, collectors, and anthropologists dismembered African buildings and dispersed their parts to museums in Europe and the United States.
Most of these artifacts were cataloged as ornamental art objects, which erased their intended functions, and the removal of these objects often had catastrophic consequences for the original structures.
“Africa’s Buildings” traces the history of the collection and distribution of African architectural fragments, documenting the brutality of the colonial regimes that looted Africa’s buildings.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Birds at Rest’ by Roger Pasquier
“Birds at Rest” is the first book to give a full picture of how birds rest, roost, and sleep, a vital part of their lives.
It features new science that can measure what is happening in a bird’s brain over the course of a night or when it has flown to another hemisphere, as well as still-valuable observations by legendary naturalists such as John James Audubon, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Theodore Roosevelt. Much of what they saw and what ornithologists are studying today can be observed and enjoyed by any birder.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘On the Art and Craft of Doing Science’
Author: Kenneth Catania
Like any creative endeavor, science can be a messy and chaotic affair.
“On the Art and Craft of Doing Science” shares the creative process of an innovative and accomplished scientist, taking readers behind the scenes of some of his most pioneering investigations and explaining why the practice of science, far from being an orderly exercise in pure logic, is a form of creative expression like any other art.
Kenneth Catania begins by discussing how ideas set the stage for scientific breakthroughs and goes on to describe ways to approach experimental design.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fuji: A Mountain in the Making’
- It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes
Author: ANDREW W. BERNSTEIN
Mount Fuji is everywhere recognized as a wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan.
Yet behind the picture-postcard image is a history filled with conflict and upheaval. Violent eruptions across the centuries wrought havoc and instilled fear.
It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes.
And while its soaring majesty has inspired countless works of literature and art, the foot of the mountain is home to military training grounds and polluting industries.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Aquarium’
- Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history
Aleksandar Hemon’s 2011 essay “The Aquarium” is an exploration of parental love, grief, and the isolating toll of confronting a child’s mortality. The essay was first published in The New Yorker and later appeared in “The Book of My Lives” in 2013.
Written with unflinching honesty, the piece chronicles Hemon’s experience navigating his infant daughter Isabel’s diagnosis of a rare brain tumor and the family’s agonizing journey through surgeries, chemotherapy, and loss.
Hemon juxtaposes the clinical detachment of medical jargon — “external ventricular drain,” “stem-cell recovery” — with visceral snapshots: Isabel’s breath on his chest, her laughter amid IV drips, her small hand gripping his finger.
At the heart of the essay lies the metaphor of an aquarium where the family exists in a suffocating bubble, visible to the outside world but severed from its rhythms.
Central to the narrative is Hemon’s elder daughter Ella, who processes her sister’s illness through an imaginary brother, Mingus.
Stylistically, Hemon oscillates between reporter-like precision and raw vulnerability. He rejects platitudes about suffering’s “ennobling” nature, writing: “Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world.”
The essay’s power lies in its refusal to soften despair, instead confronting the “indelible absence” grief leaves behind.
Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, he doesn’t just tell stories; he uses language to find pockets of hope in shattered lives.
Think of him as a guide through the chaos of modern exile — equal parts poet and provocateur.
