2023 Favorite Books Roundup!

Molly

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Molly ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

MOLLY: I know I have a reputation for fictionfictionfiction, with a particular weakness for debut fiction but this past year, my head and heart were drawn to non-fiction.  My personal reading goal is to actually finish M.F. K. Fisher’s essays, THE MEASURE OF HER POWERS.  W.H. Auden once said that he could not think of anyone writing in the United States who wrote better prose that Mary Frances Fisher and that’s a good enough recommendation for yours truly!  I also have a weakness for GREAT, truly exalted food writing but I’m only on page 112 so this recommendation will have to keep till another year.

I did really love Drew Gilpin Faust’s memoir, NECESSARY TROUBLE: Growing Up at Midcentury, even though I’ve always  maintained a prejudice towards people with three names.  In the book’s frontispiece, there is a copy of a hand-written letter the author wrote to President Eisenhower, imploring him to please end segregation.  The author was only nine years old when she sent off that letter, it’s kind of breathtaking and it’s my reason for buying the book.  Drew Faust was born into a wealthy, conservative Virginia family and NECESSARY TROUBLE details her singular activism and resolve to fight for equity.   I think it’s rare for a prize-winning professional historian to write so vividly about her own life with such boldness.  She is a brilliant example of the personal becoming the political…

I’ve probably hand-sold at least seventy copies of Elise Loehnen’s book, ON OUR BEST BEHAVIOR: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good, it’s brilliant and slightly mind-blowing, it’s urgent and appealing and incredibly provocative!  We are all dealing with a system of internalized patriarchal behavior which runs deep in our culture.  Those pesky seven deadly sins, they aren’t even part of the Bible, they were originally Eight Thoughts, the eighth being—tellingly—sadness.  Women have been trained for goodness and men, for power.  Loehnen takes you through these concretized seven sins and unpacks them, offering us all the chance to freshly evaluate their cultural impositions on our lives.  Loehnen is an incredibly warm-hearted and smart guide, she’s passionate and funny and appealingly vulnerable, this is a mesmerizing cri de coeur.   

As life in America feels ruder and meaner these days, I’ve turned my attention to two children’s books, both personal favorites when I myself was growing up.  Now I get to read them to my grandchildren, hoping they’ll offer a bit of staying power when it comes to basic etiquette!

The first is by Sesyle Joslin, with pictures by everyone’s beloved Maurice Sendak, called WHAT DO YOU SAY, DEAR?  The situations are delightfully absurd but always bring home the point. For example, “You have gone downtown to do some shopping.  You are walking backwards, because sometimes you like to, and you bump into a crocodile.  What do you say, dear?” Turn the page to find out:, “Excuse me.” 

Such a basic, simple answer but I have to wonder how often one hears those two words in Congress these days!  The other kids’ book is HOW TO BEHAVE AND WHY by Munro Leaf.  Most parents perhaps know Munro Leaf’s famous THE STORY OF FERDINAND, remember? He’s everyone’s favorite bull, who just wants to smell flowers and sit quietly under a cork tree.  That book was banned in Spain at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and soon after, by Hitler, who called it “degenerate democratic propaganda.”  So ten years later, in 1946, Munro Leaf published HOW TO BEHAVE AND WHY.  He gets right to the point, “No matter where you are or who you are, there are four main things you have to do:  You have to be HONEST. You have to be STRONG.  You have to be FAIR and you have to be WISE.”  I cannot imagine what the world must’ve felt like as a young child growing up in 1946 but I do think honesty, strength, fairness and wisdom are still desperately needed as we head into 2024.  

Let’s all please bow our heads a moment for a prayer of peace for all. 

Lucy

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Lucy ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

LUCY: In early December, the author Isaac Zisman asked his followers on Twitter: What was the last novel you read that made you say to yourself “I didn’t know novels could do that”? The question caught my eye, because it really isn’t about simply loving a novel-- there are hundreds if not thousands of novels that we might “love” over a lifetime—but rather about how certain reading experiences can upend your preconceived notions about what novels can, or are “allowed” to do. When Ruth Ozeki first sent us her complete draft of A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING, I was hit by that exact realization. And I haven’t felt it since then, until I read Percival Everett’s TELEPHONE this year. It was originally published in 2020, but if you missed it then (like me), what’s important to know is that the novel was published (in slightly different packages) with three different endings—the title being a reference to that childhood game where participants whisper a message ear-to-ear around a circle, marveling over how it becomes distorted as it passes along the chain. Even before one reaches that mystifying ending sequence (I walked to several independent bookstores afterwards, to find and read the other two versions!) the novel is a dizzying portrait of grief, marriage and academia with elements of Western adventure—and I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since reading!

Another title I wanted to highlight for this end of the year recommendation series is TELL ME EVERYTHING, by Erika Krouse. Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Krouse introduces herself to the reader as a woman who has always had the uncanny and unintentional ability to inspire deep confessions from total strangers. It isn’t something she tries to do, but she grows accustomed to explaining it to others with the offhand comment, “I just have one of those faces.” When a chance encounter with an unhappy lawyer results in his own confession, he’s both perplexed and impressed enough to offer her a job as one of his private investigators. As timing would have it, the lawyer has recently taken on a massive lawsuit involving college football players (the University is unnamed, but it’s not difficult to piece together the real lawsuit details) and their sexual assault of multiple female students. Krouse herself is a survivor of sexual abuse, and as she wades deeper into her interviews with the victims and witnesses, she excavates her own unresolved trauma, and expertly weaves the two narratives—personal and professional—as they take on ever more layers. I was completely in Krouse’s grip as I read on, and in awe of her ability to balance the two investigations, which always felt both distinct and inextricably intertwined.

My final recommendation is a book I just recently finished by Tananarive Due, titled THE REFORMATORY, and published in October. Set in Florida in 1950, the novel follows siblings Robert (12) and Gloria (who is 17 or 18?) who are tragically separated after Robert defends his sister against the unwelcome advances of a powerful white man’s son. Robert’s barely landed a kick, but the parents have been watching, and they insist on charging him for the assault. It doesn’t take long before a judge sentences Robert to 6 months at “The Gracetown School for Boys” (which I learned from the Author’s Note is based on the infamous Dozier School for Boys)—where he’s attacked from every angle by not only the administrators, but also fellow students and even ghosts. As Robert fights to survive his sentence, Gloria does everything in her power (and then some) to overturn the ruling that put him there. What’s brilliant about the way

Due constructs her narrative is that each time you think you know what kind of story you’re in, she shifts the tone. You think you’re in a legal thriller, only for it to become a horror novel, and then a sibling story, and then a heist. You aren’t ever sure which characters can be trusted, and which should be feared. One thing is clear—Due is always in control of the narrative, and expertly threads its genre traits into one cohesive and stunning novel. I was even more fascinated to read her Author’s Note at the end, where she shared the autobiographical elements of the story from her own family’s history. This book isn’t for the faint of heart, but I’ll be recommending it far and wide!

Heather

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Heather ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

HEATHER: I’m waiting for the year where I won’t need to open my favorite reads paragraph with “what a tumultuous year!” It looks unlikely that 2024 will be a picture of stability but a girl can dream. As always, books helped me stay grounded, helped me get out of my own head, and helped me make meaning out of chaos. I read for pleasure more than any other year in recent memory, completing my Goodreads challenge for the first time ever. I also finally dipped a toe into audiobooks having been traditionally agnostic about them. I adored the audiobook of Jen Beagin’s BIG SWISS, a wild, bizarre, hilarious multi-cast narration. The accents alone! The dark, strange humor is exactly up my alley and Beagin’s skewering of Hudson’s particular brand of gentrification had me cackling. Another favorite audiobook was Matthew Desmond’s POVERTY, BY AMERICA read by Dion Graham. Desmond is clear-eyed, never condescending and makes a compelling argument for just how possible the eradication of American poverty is, despite how intractable our government believes it is. It was equal parts galvanizing and enraging. And finally, a book that I savored early in the year but that has stayed with me through to December is Sabrina Imbler’s HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES. I’ve heard this book described as “shimmering” and it’s exactly the right word. Imbler tells their own coming-of-self narrative while revealing the mysteries of ten otherworldly sea creatures. They make the strange beautiful and the beautiful strange through prose that at times reads more like poetry. Their blend of personal essay, science, and nature writing is so perfectly balanced that I’m sure I’ll be using their book as the roadmap for hybrid works of nonfiction for years to come.

Hannah

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Hannah ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

HANNAH: I cannot go back to the post office. A little while ago, I was chastised for my handwriting on some bookmail bound for Paris. The cursive – apparently – was illegible and should have been written in block letters. I feel a great many things about the growing renunciation of cursive but thought better than to voice those great many things aloud to the United States Postal Service. This was, arguably, my first mistake. As the man in front of me started to overenunciate, I realized that my silence was not interpreted as restraint but the pause of an ESL speaker. My second mistake was to decide that my handwriting was somehow more easily forgiven as a French woman and that I should lean into the whole thing. So, I started answering questions with a quiet, increasingly cringing “oui.” Fifteen minutes of feigning French later, I was sent back to chez moi with an “au revoir” and have not been back since.

I’ll admit that this is not the first time I’ve partaken in some light international espionage. In University, sometime between wearing this hat all winter and concocting a story about a relative’s birthday to explain a last-minute trip to Oslo (lesson: don’t browse cheap flights when four pints deep), I had inadvertently convinced my Opera professor (a story for another time) that I was Norwegian. I only came to realize the mistake when she asked me to regale the class with some Norwegian folktales. Did I do the right thing and confess? No. Instead, I offered this groundbreaking assessment: “Trolls. Just lots of trolls.”

There are also my more casual tales of guise: misspellings on my morning coffee (a favorite: Hanhan), my guillotined name for airport wifi (Han Brat), and my Netflix profile (Hans Christian Bratterson). There is a thrill in it – in personas, accidental or otherwise – and, if I had to hazard a guess, it’s that thrill that kept me glued to Emma Cline’s sophomore novel, The Guest.

Alex, our eponymous guest, has been kicked out of her older, wealthy companion’s home and must coquet her way around The Hamptons until Labor Day, when she plans to win him back at his annual party. She wears many masks, personifying the exact person one expects to traverse these elite spaces. Alex knows what people want from her and she’s in the business of giving it to them: “People just wanted to hear their own voices, your response a comma punctuating their monologue.” We cover (but do not necessarily answer) the expected question of who is using who? What is less expected, however, is Cline’s restraint; it would have been so easy to overwrite the wealth (too much and you’re fawning) or give us long introspection as Alex spirals. Cline gives us just enough. It’s in her precision that this book shines.

Not one for precision myself, here’s a clunky segue: that little Oslo mishap that happened eight years, three paragraphs, and four pints ago did little to discourage my interest in Scandinavia. Scots and Scandis share more than just the North Sea, and some might even argue that the Norse invasion created the Scotland we have today (I’ll spare you my theory on that). The aurora borealis would occasionally appear over my parents’ house and every time it did, it felt like a hand reaching out from the Arctic; an open palm waving from the north. I have gone – north that is, back to Norway, Sweden and Denmark - many times, and I cannot think of a year of my adult life when I haven’t read at least one book from the region. This year was no exception.

Stolen by Ann-Helén Laestadius, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles, follows a daughter of Sámi reindeer herders as she confronts a spate of reindeer killings (and the perpetrator). This is a slow burn of a book with all the trappings of a Scandi thriller but the tenderness of coming of age, two elements that should not work in combination but do. Beautifully. In the writing of her novel, Laestadius scoured hundreds of police reports of murdered reindeer (none resulted in prosecution); Stolen is as much an invitation into Sámi life as it is a real warning to protect indigenous land and its people.

This same warning can be found in the pages of Alexa Hagerty’s A Still Life with Bones, an extraordinary work of investigative journalism and testimony from a forensic anthropologist tasked with exhuming victims of Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil conflict, most of whom are Mayan.

It was the process of excavation that appealed to me when I heard about Hagerty’s book. I have always imagined myself a kind of other life, one in archaeology. This is a whim I have managed to keep at bay by periodically browsing the fieldwork page of the Archaeological Institute of America and spending a suspicious amount of time in the Mesopotamian seal room at The Morgan. (Seal 764 is my favorite, in case anyone was wondering. Have you ever seen such animate, ancient turkeys?)

What struck me only a couple of pages into Hagerty’s book, was that excavation – particularly exhumation – is a spiritual process as much as it is scientific. Something I had naively never considered. It’s also extremely challenging to write about; how can one walk their reader through the restoration process of a body in sufficient detail and retain the humanity of the person lying before them? The only thing more treacherous than the ethical minefield of forensic anthropology is the ethical minefield that is reporting on it. Yet, somehow, Hagerty never puts a foot wrong. A Still Life with Bones stunned me over, and over again.

I’ll say it now, I’m a generalist at heart. This can feel like a burden in a profession that covets distinct taste. I began this year with the promise that I would allow myself to indulge so I followed my many (MANY) interests and, for the most part, was rewarded. My reading in 2023 has invited me into the homes, the minds, and the lives of people I couldn’t possibly know from my very small corner of our very large world. Gustave Flaubert — my fellow countryman, if anyone from the 70th street post office is reading this— once gave some sage advice to a lady friend that I’d like to offer here, to you, now:

Lisez pour vivre.

Read to live.

Marin

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Marin ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

MARIN: My first favorite is a book that I read in the first week of January and has stayed with me through the year…! That book is ASCENSION by Nicholas Binge, a speculative thriller (with some horror elements) set on a mysterious mountain taller than Mt Everest that appears overnight in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Scientists at the top of their respective fields are gathered to investigate this phenomenon, but as they ascend, their memories start to unravel, people start acting out of character, and extreme paranoia sets in as the team realizes they’re not the only ones there. The storytelling in this novel is just straight up mesmerizing with the novel anchored by an emotional throughline and framing of our protagonist’s backstory and the losses he’s faced in his personal life (which has pushed him to be on this mission). I’m a sucker for novels with good structure and THIS DEFINITELY HAS IT!

The second book is my YA pick of the year: IF YOU COULD SEE THE SUN by Ann Liang! Set in an international boarding school in Beijing, our protagonist Alice is a scholarship student among China’s elite who starts turning invisible (literally!). When her parents tell her they can’t afford her tuition fees anymore, Alice devises a plan to monetize her ability, using it to discover scandalous secrets among her classmates. I loved everything about this book—the romance (rivals to lovers!), the friendships, the nail-biting suspense and stakes of potentially getting caught, to the heartwarming relationship between Alice and her parents.

It feels wrong not to talk about Palestine, as we continue to see the slaughtering of and violence enacted upon the Palestinian people both in and out of Gaza, so my last pick for the year is THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR ON PALESTINE by Rashid Khalidi, a deeply engaging, powerful, cogent book interweaving the author’s and his family’s experiences with that of historical analysis. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this is the important book I’ve read this year. A comprehensive look at the last 100 years (not including between 2017-2023, as the book was published in 2017) of Palestinian history, Khalidi provides a necessary framework in viewing these events as a part of a much larger, connected tapestry of settler colonialism, imperialism, and military occupation. It’s a reminder that we must continue to educate ourselves, to use our critical thinking skills when so much of the media we consume is biased, and to continue to speak out and pressure companies and our representatives however we can (boycott if you haven’t already!!!!!). Free Palestine forever and always.

Our Favorite (Non-Agency) Books of 2022!

Hannah

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Hannah ☆

HANNAH: It’s funny, that route you take to pick up a book. It’s not the linear cartography of choosing, say, a cheddar or laundry detergent. It’s circuitous, and as informed by mood as it is by all the other factors that have led you there:

1. It’s 36 hours until I set off for a four-day trek through Death Valley and I’m standing in Shakespeare & co. invoking some desert muse, asking that she choose my campfire reading for me. I think moonscapes, I think isolation, I think nothing too scary because rustling juniper and rattlesnakes are terror enough. I bypass some obvious choices –Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World, Joy William’s The Quick and The Dead, and yes, Dune too– to pick up Gayl Jones’ The Birdcatcher. Maybe I’m drawn in by Ibiza, the sand, the heat, the hedonism. Or the lingering danger of a woman with a psychiatric compulsion to kill her husband. Or the immediate pleasure of Amanda, our blunt and funny confidante who narrates the tale. Really, I know I’m here, walking to the register, handing over my card, and sliding the slim yellow and blue volume into my bag for Gayl, a woman whose work – her career and personal life, too - is as unexpected and nonlinear as the route I took to find her and the one her book will accompany me on.

2. Joyce Carol Oates is stuck on the I-95. She’s an hour late for her conversation with Leila Slimani, maybe more. I’ve lost track because Albertine has excavated bottles of red from a pile of leftover party vino and distributed them among the waiting crowd. We’re not talking – the crowd with the crowd – as if breaking the silence would usher the end of the event, and Joyce would somehow know and make a U-turn at the nearest Exxon. We’re reading – the crowd with their books and on their phones – and all I have is the title I had purchased downstairs ninety minutes before: Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs. So, I sit, and I wait for Joyce Carol Oates with just Kawakami’s Natsuko for company. She’s a writer, our Natsuko, and is being visited by her sister and unspeaking (but journaling) niece. Later, Natsuko finds literary success and fails to have a child of her own. There is an anxiety that vibrates through the book; it peaks when Natsuko contemplates motherhood and aging female bodies, but, largely, just maintains the baseline unease of being a woman in the world. There is no grand narrative here, no breathless arc, but there is brutal, beautiful honesty in these pages. It’s the kind of beautiful and brutal honesty that could make one blind to even the most prolific and tardiest of authors making an entrance.

3. I’m spending my summer weekends horizontal. That is, on a beach towel (when >90 Fahrenheit) or in recline on the roof (when <90 Fahrenheit). Too many Junes, Julys, and Augusts have been vertically toiled away. I’m living vicariously through books: I’m loving and hating my best friend (Andrea Abreu's Dogs of Summer); I’m sad and I’m travelling (Amy Liptrot’s The Instant); I’m an octogenarian and I’m murderous (Helene Turstern’s An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good). I’m also partying, hard, with Ashley Mears’ Very Important People. Mears combines human testimony with deep investigative journalism to expose the international nightlife industry as a conduit for exploitation and gross (in both senses of the word) displays of wealth. Her prose is elegant, her “subjects” are fascinating, and the inequalities that dance into her spotlight have consequences that stretch far beyond the velvet rope. I am alternately livid and languorous through Labor Day

Heather

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Heather ☆

HEATHER: It’s easy in this business to forget what drew us to the work in the first place: astonishment at the sublime gift a book offers. That a person would spend such vast amounts of time and care sharing the knowledge they’ve gained, transplanting ideas, images, and discoveries from their mind to yours is astounding. I was moved to remember the true labor of writing a book when I read Rachel Aviv’s STRANGERS TO OURSELVES: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us. I’m personally invested in how we think and talk about mental illness, and this provocative book shifted my perspective in ways I’m still sorting out—the sign of a conversation-defining work of nonfiction.

Following the same thread of savoring a book’s richness leads me to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s BRAIDING SWEETGRASS: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Most years there is one book I read in small sips over the course of the whole year, and this was my pick for 2022. Reading it became my morning meditation. I would often find the particular essay I sat with over coffee in a patch of sun in my kitchen dovetailed with whatever else I was reading—whether work from my own clients or essays by thinkers like Mariame Kaba who are invested in hope as a discipline. Kimmerer’s writing allows for a range of emotions in the face of climate crisis: deep grief and anger, and also gratitude, wonder and fortitude.  

Any year of reading would not be complete for me without a novel, and Katy Hays’ THE CLOISTERS was brilliantly seductive, the kind of novel that had me slipping out of bed after midnight to keep reading while my partner slept. I’ve always been fascinated with the occult (as a teen I got in trouble for bringing my tarot deck to school and my witch phase may or may not be ongoing) and Hays uses the true history of art and mysticism to weave a shimmering atmosphere of suspense.

Marin

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Marin ☆

MARIN: 2022 was a great reading year: rich, varied, nourishing, and inspiring. There are still so many books I want to get to, all neatly shelved in my new book cart (I’m very proud of it, as you can tell)—I’m just itching to crack these babies open over the holiday break!

My first pick is undoubtedly HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK by Sequoia Nagamatsu, a novel-in-stories following how society drastically changes in the years (decades! Centuries!) after the discovery of a melting permafrost that releases an ancient virus. I'm fortunate to have first read it when I was interning under Sequoia's agent, back in 2019 before it had even gone out on submission! This is the rare collection/novel-in-stories where every story stands on its own—each piece breathes life and expands the dimensions of the world Nagamatsu has created. The scope is absolutely crazy, btw! I reread the collection in one breathless go at the start of the year—curious to know what had changed/how it had changed from the iteration I read years ago—and have thought about it numerous times since. Yes, this is a pandemic book (not Covid, per se) but there is so much heart here. Emotional, imaginative, heart wrenching and compassionate at the same time, HHWGID is a beautiful tribute to our resilience, as well as of finding hope and humanity even in the darkest of times. I adored everything about this book.  

I inhaled THE PLOT by Jean Hanff Korelitz on a hot July day, where even the heat couldn’t deter me on my mission of finishing the novel as quickly as I could. The novel follows a MFA creative writing professor (his writing career has unfortunately plummeted) who steals a book idea from his now-deceased student and claims a literary stardom many dream of, only to receive an email that says, “I know what you’ve done.” Twisty and oh so utterly satisfying, this was such an entertaining read that spiked up my heartrate. 

Bora Chung's CURSED BUNNY is a short story collection I picked up just this past weekend (made it in time for this post’s deadline, phew!)—I couldn't resist after hearing Hannah rave about it + reading our very own Violet Kupersmith's review in the NYT. And boy oh boy, are you in for a wild ride with this one! Creepy, haunting, visceral, with a feminist edge to it—Chung takes on the patriarchy and capitalism with these stories, ranging from horror to sci-fi to fairytales. We have talking heads, a cursed bunny-shaped lamp, and more! Chung’s prose (and Hur’s translation) has a delicious restraint quality that drew me in and had me on the edge of my seat. I loved it I loved it I loved it!! I need more Bora Chung in my life!

And my last pick overlaps with Lucy, but I have to mention it!: TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW by Gabrielle Zevin hit me right in the heart. I was unsure whether a novel about gaming could really work—I mean how does one write about a visual medium and succeed? But succeed she did! Reading it evoked nostalgia for a simpler time, of the many hours I spent playing on my Game Boy and DS. But it also beautifully captures the bittersweetness of growing up, of the messiness that comes with seeing your dreams turn into reality. Sadie, Marx, and Sam are all characters who have stayed with me long after the last page, and it's just one of those books you want to immediately read again after you finish.

Lucy

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Lucy ☆

LUCY: Last April, I went to the LA Times Book Festival (where Jackie Polzin won the Fiction Prize!) and on that Sunday, I went to see Karen Joy Fowler’s panel, which was titled, “Fiction: History Revisited”. The whole panel was packed with brilliant insights from all three authors, but somewhere along the way, they got to talking about the intersection of “genius” and “madness” (two terms I want to keep in quotes because they are deeply flawed and deeply subjective!). Benjamin Labatut, an author I’d never read before, spoke with such passion and eloquence on this topic that, without knowing anything about his novel, I went directly from the panel to purchase a copy of it. WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD tells the story of modern science through a narrative that shines its focus on a handful of influential mathematicians and physicists, as their work both breaks ground and builds upon the work of their predecessors. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and truly rocked me—I feel confident that I’m personally responsible for at least 14 of the paperbacks sold this year, since I won’t shut up about it! 

In the late summer, I had a chat with an editor who happened to become the 4th person that year to recommend S.A. Cosby’s new novel, RAZORBLADE TEARS, with real insistence and gusto. I hadn’t read Cosby’s work before, but he’s not new to the scene by any means! And I’ve since read BLACKTOP WASTELAND, his previous novel, because it’s now so clear to me that I would (and do) love all of this man’s work. RAZORBLADE TEARS is the story of two fathers who are shattered by the murder of their gay sons, who were married to each other. Both fathers are ex-convicts and both of them had strained (at best) relationships with their now-deceased sons, so their sudden quest for revenge is as much about their internal shame and regret as it is about avenging this heinous crime. Cosby is not only a master of pacing and plot, he also manages to keep you completely invested in two VERY flawed main characters, and even more impressive, his fiction interrogates race, class, and misogyny without ever feeling remotely preachy or didactic. It’s art, masquerading as entertainment. That’s the kind of fiction I always love! 

Then, right around October, I had my usual uptick in horror fiction because ‘tis the season. Two novels really stood out to me: LAKEWOOD by Megan Giddings and THIS THING BETWEEN US by Gus Moreno. LAKEWOOD is set in Michigan (which I know fairly well from my college years) about a Black college student who is suddenly in need of a serious cash influx, having lost her grandmother and discovered her mother’s mountain of unpaid healthcare bills. Against all of her better instincts, she decides to participate in what is billed as a medical research study on memory, but is (of course) a kind of modern ancestor of the unlawful and horrifying medical experiments performed without informed consent on Black Americans throughout history. As for THIS THING BETWEEN US, the horror isn’t as topical or as close to reality, but it follows a grieving widower who begins to realize that his wife’s death and the sequence of horrible events that follow it are the result of a malevolent force, which first manifests in their smart speaker (“Itza”) and then expands to devastating effect. But beyond the fact that it’s truly terrifying, THIS THING BETWEEN US is also really about grief, identity, and migration. The main character is grappling with almost as much inner turmoil as his external challenges—and he’s fighting for his life, so that’s saying a lot! 

Sigh... I could add TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW to the list, but everyone already KNOWS it’s brilliant, heart-breaking, deeply involving and basically a perfect book. My list is already too long! What a year for excellent reads.   

Molly

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Molly ☆

MOLLY: I came to the magic of Susanna Clarke's writing very late. For whatever reason, I had never read her earlier novel, JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR NORRELL—I was always getting the names twisted up, Jonathan Norrell, Mr. Strange, that book, yeah, okay someday I'll read it. As for PIRANESI, Clarke's next novel after a fifteen-year wait, I happened upon the British trade paperback just a couple of months ago and frankly, I read it because my little airplane television wouldn't work. Having studied art history, which always comes with a smattering of architecture, I was drawn to Piranesi as a title, so that was a plus. Also, my paperback edition came with so many rhapsodic reviews, how could I NOT read this novel?  I confess, I nearly stopped reading after the first page, which begins like this, "When the Moon rose in the Third Northern Hall I went to the Ninth Vestibule, entry for the first day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls." I very nearly had a failure of fictional courage but I'm actually delighted that I pressed onward. All I can say about PIRANESI is that it is a reading experience unlike I've ever encountered.  Piranesi is living in a house of several hundred rooms; the ground floor is pounding ocean waves, the first floor is filled with ancient, sometimes badly damaged classical sculptures, the top floor is open to the sky--it's a place of intoxicating beauty and menace.  The birds, the netting, the mussel broth, the roiling sea!! "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable, its Kindness infinite." Dare I add that this novel is also deeply suspenseful, riveting even, with poetic and muscular prose? 

Claire Keegan’s most recent novel, SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE is an incredibly easy book to love. First of all, even though the focus is on Bill Furlong, our hero, the novel is actually about the Magdalen Laundries, brutal asylums run by the Catholic Church in collusion with the Irish government for many decades, closed down as recently as 1996, tough to even compute just how recently.  These laundries involved forced labor, baby kidnapping, physical abuse, theoretically designed to reform “fallen young women.”  Back to our hero, Bill Furlong, let’s start with the meaning of “furlong”, I had to look this one up: it refers to “a furrow long” which is the distance (one-eighth of a mile) that an ox can could plough without stopping to rest.  It’s a perfect name for this character because his conscience won’t let him rest until he grabs at the courage needed to upend his carefully curated life, a life as a coal and timber merchant, a life with his wife and their five wonderful daughters.  At the Good Shepherd Convent, where Furlong delivers coal for the Christmas season, he encounters one of these young girls, deprived of her baby, he notices the breast milk leaking under her cardigan.  Small things like these, indeed!  This is a completely involving story, with a leanness appropriate to its subject. It’s also wonderfully Irish: “If you don’t slow down, you’ll meet yourself coming back”, Furlong advises his wife.  Or here, Furlong says, “There’s a hurry on me, Mother,” to which the Mother Superior replies, “Then you’ll come in till the hurry goes off you.”  Furlong addresses his youngest child, Loretta as “leanbh”. I don’t dare try to pronounce this word but it’s Irish for “baby”, so dear! 

Speaking of courage, there is Tracy Kidder’s non-fiction book, MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS: The Quest Of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure The World. This isn’t a “new book” and therefore perhaps not quite so fashionable as the latest study on the woes of social media. It was first published in 2003 but remains as timely and vital as ever. I’ve read Tracy Kidder’s past books—AMONG SCHOOLCHILDREN and HOUSE—this guy cannot write an awkward sentence, he’s truly a master at the art of non-fiction narrative.  Immediately involving, arresting, compelling—let’s toss out all those over-used adjectives and actually have them mean something! Still and all, MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS is even more extraordinary than Kidder’s usual extraordinary writing self. This is partly because of the charismatic genius Dr. Paul Farmer, who died earlier this year at the age of 62. For those of us who hesitate to get involved with whatever community is on hand, thinking we cannot possibly “make a difference”, read this book to become lastingly inspired. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Kidder has a new book, coming your way soon enough this January.  It’s called ROUGH SLEEPERS: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission To Bring Healing To Homeless People. From what I can tell, even superficially, Tracy Kidder has done it again…more later, perhaps during my recommendations next year, this time, I won’t wait nineteen years! 

I sifted back to the first year of this three-book recommendation tradition, it was 2020. The three books I selected, I wrote, “were all about different forms of female rage.” I cannot help noticing that this year, there has been a shift. Piranesi is a man, imperiled by his own vulnerability, but seeped in nurturing kindness. Claire Keegan’s hero, Bill Furlong, makes a decision of uncommon courage at great potential cost to his marriage and his family. Tracy Kidder spent years traipsing from Haiti to Peru, from Cuba to Russia and back again to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a heroic effort to bring to life the extraordinary work of Dr. Paul Farmer.  There’s also Lydia Millet’s latest novel, DINOSAURS, which stars Gil, among the kindest men of recent fiction—not only that, but a man with a somewhat burdensome trust fund! 

All of these men effectively sunder the notion of toxic masculinity, they each embrace the very best of our shared humanity.

Books We Read in 2021 That Kept Us Sane

Following last year’s post, we thought we’d keep the tradition and briefly report on the reads that kept us sane as we traversed Year 2 (!!) of the pandemic. These are the books we reached out to for comfort, for pleasure, and to make sense of the rapidly-changing world we live in.

HANNAH: You can keep your new book smell. Give me goooood book smell. In our house, a good book is a crime scene. A bath-wrinkled-subway-stinking-bagel-crumbed-greasy-thumbed crime scene.

The most bedraggled looking paperback on my shelf from this year? Easy. NOTES ON A SILENCING by Lacy Crawford. Published last year by Little, Brown, I waited for the 2021 paperback edition so that I could more easily wedge its 400+ pages into whatever I was lugging to the park or on beach-bound trains for the weekend. (In case you were wondering, picnic blankets are book-safe, soda-filled coolers are not.) Lacy’s memoir recounts a sexual assault suffered by the author at her New England boarding school and follows her investigation into similar assaults preceding and proceeding her own. She discovers a long history of the school silencing survivors and the entrenched misogyny (external and internal) at the core. What elevates this memoir beyond any other that I have read of late? Lacy’s voice. She approaches her subject with the rigor of an investigative journalist and the line-level flair of a fine literary novelist. The combination is astonishing. So astonishing in fact that my copy has been relegated to the shadowy bottom bookshelf: it has been made hideous with my love and admiration.

HEATHER: I was hard to please as a reader this year, perhaps even harder than last year which is something of a feat. It’s a year where I remember the reading experience as much as the book so I’ll start with SALT SLOW, Julia Armfield’s stunning, slippery story collection which I read exclusively in the bath on dreary January evenings. It’s bewitching and haunting and by the last chilling, sea-faring story I was afraid I’d be sucked down the tub drain at any moment.

In late August I discovered FEAST YOUR EYES by Myla Goldberg which snapped me out of my summer malaise and made me sit up straight. The novel is structured as gallery notes to a photography exhibit and Goldberg somehow, miraculously, made photographs appear in my mind through words alone. I grew up haunting my art school’s darkroom and nowhere have I seen that quiet magic captured so precisely. The ending, too, made me gasp—I won’t spoil it but it’s a book that I wanted to begin again as soon as I turned the final page.

Finally, when it became clear that no, actually, the pandemic was not going to end like we’d hoped, I went searching for total immersion and N. K. Jemisin’s THE FIFTH SEASON was there for me. The first of a trilogy, this science fiction/fantasy novel takes place on a planet that is constantly ending—what could be more apt? Jemisin is a masterful storyteller and I happily surrendered myself to her capable hands: never have 450 pages been devoured so quickly and completely.

MARIN: This year was a weird reading year for me: it felt like I was chasing after an ever-elusive feeling within my reading experience without really knowing what I wanted. I know… so hard to please!

However, two books thankfully cut through my general state of ennui. The first, Te-Ping Chen’s THE LAND OF BIG NUMBERS, a (brilliant!) debut short story collection where each story is connected to China in some way. I gobbled this up in late February (remember the pre-vaccines times? *shudders*) when it seemed impossible to commit my attention to anything. I was astounded by its rich and expansive range—some surrealism, some realism, some with a light touch of magical elements—together, they offer enduring portraits of Chinese nationals, both in China and its diaspora. I would’ve put good money behind this book being recognized by the National Book Award. Alas, that sadly didn’t happen, but Barack Obama did list it as one of his summer reading picks, so I feel slightly vindicated.

My second pick, which was an accidental encounter (and feels slightly on brand with the title), is CROSSINGS by Alex Landragin. I picked it up intrigued by the cover and ultimately won over by its description as a genre-bending, intricate literary puzzle. I love a book that plays with structure/timelines and CROSSINGS is squarely in that camp. What I adored most is that you can either read it normally or by following a different sequence outlined at the beginning. Apparently, the reading experience is completely different depending on your choice! Wild! Delightfully engaging and transporting, I couldn’t get enough of it.

LUCY: My 2021 "discovery" (a mere 16 years later than the rest of the world!) was the Chief Inspector Gamache series by the magnificent Louise Penny. Within the span of about 4 months, I had devoured the first 16 books, and when the 17th was published in August, I was virtually unreachable for the hours it took to rip through that one, too. However, in spite of my Penny obsession, I also found time for a fairly wide range of other 2021 reads. ASSEMBLY, a novel by Natasha Brown was masterful: short, piercing, laced with a quiet but insistent force. I also turned to essays with Jonny Sun's GOODBYE, AGAIN, which was by turns both moving and hilarious, with a scrambled egg piece that I know I'll be thinking about for years to come. And early in the year, I read a slightly older title: I AM, I AM, I AM by Maggie O'Farrell (I had inhaled HAMNET in 2020, so wanted more of her work, even though the two books are radically different). Her non-fiction was just as gripping and gorgeous as her fiction, and this narrative about O'Farrell's series of near-death experiences delivered (somehow) that seemingly impossible memoir balance of both a fascinating story and exquisite writing.

MOLLY: Hands down, CASTE by Isabel Wilkerson.  It offers the most eloquent case possible for reparations that I’ve ever encountered.  Her anger is so brilliantly tempered by research, by anecdote, by fact.  It’s long and devastating in equal parts but CASTE is among the most important books of the last decade.  

And you might be right to wonder how the same brain can accommodate NIGHTBITCH by Rachel Yoder!  But I also loved this debut.  All novelists are urged to “just please make it fresh” as though that was remotely achievable. And yet here is our heroine, worried about a patch of fur growing busily right on the back of her neck and soon her teeth are aching, can they actually be sharpening? 

Finally, I just adored Twyla Tharp’s KEEP IT MOVING: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life; it’s the perfect antidote to the end-of-year lassitude that potentially paralyzes us all, pre-and post-holiday.  She’s so deliciously bossy, get UP and MOVE! Here’s a marvelous haiku she quotes from the seventeenth century poet, Mizuta Masahide: “Barn’s burnt down—now I can see the moon.”  What is revealed to us that we couldn’t see before?

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P.S. from TFA: If you feel compelled to pick up a book or two, we highly recommend your local indie bookstores :)

The 2020 Reads That Helped Us Through It All

It’s been a painful, deeply challenging and often heartbreaking year and thank goodness, there are just a few days left in it. While at times life became too overwhelming to make time for pleasure reading, when we needed them, the right books were always there. Here are some insights into what we each turned to for comfort, escapism, education, and entertainment. (And because she is a perpetual over-achiever, Molly’s is more of an essay!) Should you feel inspired to buy any of these titles for your own enjoyment, we hope you’ll shop at your local independent bookstore!

HANNAH: Right at the beginning of the pandemic – just before those heady days of hoarding toilet paper and yeastless baking aisles – I picked up a book that had been on my TBR list for a while: CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN by Sayaka Murata. I love a literary weirdo and Keiko is a near-perfect literary weirdo; she’s an isolated 30-something whose entire identity is defined, willingly, by her occupation as a convenience store cashier. It’s a love story of sorts, between a woman and a store (there’s a human man thrown into the mix too but there’s little love there), and Murata brings an eye for detail and a deadpan wit that is irresistible. Then lockdown hit us. Nobody puts baby in the corner, not even the CDC. At least, that was what I muttered to myself as I scrolled for titles to offset my new and sudden domesticity. Sometime between the third and fourth focaccia Friday, I decided to read Leila Slimani’s SEX AND LIES: True Stories of Women’s Intimate Lives in the Arab World. While on a press tour in Morocco for her first novel, ADÈLE, Slimani gathered intimate testimonies from Arab woman about sex, love and relationships in a society that does its best to dictate what those acts should look like. It’s a deeply compassionate and beautifully written book that taught me a lot about a culture I thought I understood. If you liked Lisa Taddeo’s THREE WOMEN in theory but weren’t blown away by it in practice, you’ll enjoy SEX AND LIES. More recently, with the bitter weather creeping in, I turned my attention to dark, wintry fiction. I saw the cover of A CERTAIN HUNGER – a close up of Bernardino Mei’s Ghismonda holding the heart of her lover– and I was in. Chlesea G. Summers has written a Bacchanalian feast of a book; the narrator, Dorothy Daniels, is a libertine and a food critic, whose voice is somehow one part Raymond Chandler and one part Sex in the City’s Samantha Jones. Oh, and she’s also a serial killer. Summers interweaves the expected sinews of a gastronome’s dinner party conversation – the preferred terroir for white truffles, the allure of duck fat - with viscous descriptions of gore. It’s a confusing read in that respect, you’re hungry one moment and repulsed the next, but it’s not one you’ll forget any time soon.

LUCY: As so many people have already pointed out, this pandemic has left me constantly unsure of what day it is, what time it is, and even what season! Which is how I found myself reading a horror book in the sweaty final weeks of July (THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS) and a memoir titled HEAVY on a beach several weeks later. A part of me wishes I had saved THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS for spooky season, as it’s one of those books that deeply unsettles you (in a great way) and would have only been enhanced by the crunching of dead leaves and brisk winds. But I’d highly recommend it for any time of the year, as long as the reader is up for something both intimate and brutal—this one’s not for the faint of heart. The same would apply in a different sense to Kiese Laymon’s memoir HEAVY, which devastated me but was written with such beauty and warmth. I don’t know why, in a year with so many exciting new releases, I turned my attention to books that had been on my TBR pile for a few years, but in addition to finally reading HEAVY, I also dove into CIRCE by Madeline Miller. I hadn’t previously read her work, and wasn’t sure whether I’d enjoy reading literary fiction based heavily on mythology, but It. Completely. Swept. Me. Away. Miller’s descriptions are so vivid and lush that I stopped waiting for Odysseus to arrive on the scene and just surrendered to the novel as if I lived in its pages. These three books couldn’t be more different, but each of them was exactly what I needed in a specific moment of this pandemic rollercoaster.

HEATHER: This has been an interesting year for reading. I found myself skipping around much more than usual, picking up one title only to abandon it after a few chapters, then return to it two months later when it was exactly what I needed. I've always been a pretty voracious and open minded reader, but I was chasing a mood this year, wandering around my apartment for 20 minutes trying to pick the perfect book to read before bed. While I read it in doses, over several months, UNDERLAND by Robert Macfarlane transported me, and reading it felt like medicine. He allowed me to travel in a year of isolation, and his loving, precise descriptions of our transforming natural world were both transcendent and galvanizing. In a wildly different mood, Rumaan Alam's LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND was the perfect encapsulation of the shimmering dread I've been feeling all year. Alam's authorial control and the growing claustrophobia and panic had me turning pages compulsively. Along with supporting as many pandemic new releases as possible, I also shopped my own shelves. When I picked up Claire Lombardo's THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD, I felt instantly swaddled with warmth and humor and a lovely autumnal mood. I have a large, complex family and Lombardo's care for her imperfect, lovable characters moved me in the best way.

MOLLY: What a great question, like “What did you read over your summer vacation?” except that it’s lasted nearly three seasons! I hate parting with books I’ve bought, read and loved hard so my stack is now alarmingly high.  I keep promising myself I’ll read more non-fiction so I intend to NEXT read Bonnie Tsui’s WHY WE SWIM because when I’m not reading, swimming is the closest I’ll ever get to meditating. Plus, I already love her author photo—she’s got swimmer’s arms and a huge wide smile.

But what I read and LOVED during this pandemic, well it was fiction, all fiction.  Right around June, in time for summer breezes, I discovered Amity Gaige’s novel, SEA WIFE. It’s structurally brilliant and just as emotionally astute on all levels, with all characters.  Superficially, it’s the story of an ailing marriage—husband wants to sail around the world with the wife and two quite young kids; she agrees, reluctantly.  Here’s a quote from Michael, the husband, on having kids, “But once we had two, it seemed like they were always toddling toward busy roads and otherwise tempting death.  When bored, they were like raccoons at night, just tipping shit over to see what would happen, playing in the ash can or putting pennies down the steering wheel column, it’s like they were hazing us.”  See what I mean?  Irresistible.  Here’s what weird about this novel: I wouldn’t ever go sailing on the open seas after reading this book but nearly everyone on whom I’ve coaxed this novel disagrees with me.  They’re all IN. 

The next novel which stunned me into rapt submission was Lydia Millet’s A CHILDREN’S BIBLE.  More water!  Only this time, it’s a terrible storm which soon collapses the bizarre ecosystem taking place amongst multiple families in a truly vast summer rental house.  Honestly, A CHILDREN’S BIBLE is so boldly ambitious, it’s about pretty much everything that matters, starting with our beautiful, imperiled, imperfect earth and the ongoing crisis between generations.  How will we all take care of one another and just when might we hope to begin doing so?  This novel left me trembling, Lydia Millet brought me to my knees.

Finally, out of the wet and into the remote forests of Poland, I came upon Olga Tokarczuk’s fabulous novel, DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, a title I love but have mangled for many months now, right along with the challenges of how to pronounce her last name (sorry Olga, forgive me)!  This novel crept up on me, it’s filled with restrained surprises, elegant, muscular, unsentimental sentences, it’s great!  I sorted out the end only AT the very end because of my own prejudices. I won’t here say towards whom. 

As I sift through my memories of these novels, it occurs to me that they are all written by women.  They are all about different forms of female rage, disenfranchisement and injustice.  Not exactly Pandemic Lite, I agree, but there you have it!