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: Cold War Civil Rights
- Soon after World War II, American racism became a major concern of US allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America
Author: Mary L. Dudziak
In 1958, an African American handyman named Jimmy Wilson was sentenced to die in Alabama for stealing less than two dollars. Shocking as this sentence was, it was overturned only after intense international attention and the interference of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
Soon after World War II, American racism became a major concern of US allies, a chief Soviet propaganda theme, and an obstacle to American Cold War goals throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Racial segregation undermined the American image, harming foreign relations in every administration from Truman to Johnson. Mary Dudziak shows how the Cold War helped to facilitate desegregation and other key social reforms at home as the US sought to polish its image abroad, yet how a focus on appearances over substance limited the nature and extent of progress.
What We Are Reading Today: Top Ten Ideas of Physics by Anthony Zee
Could any discovery be more unexpected and shocking than the realization that the reality we were born into is but an approximation of an underlying quantum world that is barely within our grasp? This is just one of the foundational pillars of theoretical physics that A. Zee discusses in this book. Join him as he presents his Top Ten List of the biggest, most breathtaking ideas in physics—the ones that have fundamentally transformed our understanding of the universe.
“Top Ten Ideas of Physics” tells a story that will keep readers enthralled, along the way explaining the meaning of each idea and how it came about. Leading the list are the notions that the physical world is comprehensible and that the laws of physics are the same here, there, and everywhere.
As the story unfolds, the apparently solid world dissolves into an intertwining web of dancing fields, exhibiting greater symmetries as we examine them at deeper and deeper levels.
What We Are Reading Today: Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
In “Forest Euphoria,” Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us.
In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her — and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.
Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized — and they have lessons for us all.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘You Will Find Your People’
Author: Lane Moore
Most would agree adult friendship is hard. TV shows made us believe we would grow up with a tight-knit group of best friends, but real life often looks very different.
In her 2023 book “You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult,” Lane Moore walks us through this tough reality.
It opens with the line: “I really thought I would have friends by now.” Relatable, right? Moore reflects on how the ages of 18 to 22 years old are prime friendship years. After that, things get harder.
As the author of “How to Be Alone” (2018), Moore shifts from solitude to connection. She explores how making friends as adults — especially for those with trauma or rejection — is a messy, emotional process.
Friendship, she says, can feel like a game of musical chairs that started before we noticed.
The book is not a tidy guide. There are no checklists or guaranteed strategies. Instead, Moore offers her own stories — raw, funny, and deeply honest.
She speaks to those who have felt left out or always been “too much.”
For the exhausted over-givers and the hopeful hearted, this book does not offer easy answers — but it does offer comfort. And sometimes, that is enough.
Also, she dedicates it to her dog.
What We Are Reading Today: The Ghana Reader
Editors: Kwasi Konadu, Clifford C. Campbell
“The Ghana Reader” provides historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation.
Readers will encounter views of farmers, traders, the clergy, intellectuals, politicians, musicians, and foreign travelers about the country.
With sources including historical documents, poems, treaties, articles, and fiction, the book conveys the multiple and intersecting histories of the country’s development as a nation and its key contribution to the formation of the African diaspora, according to a review on goodreads.com.
