My reading life is now roughly as long as a corncob and the size of a large eggplant. So that's exciting. There are some serious must-reads on this list, which I would love for you to buy from your favorite local independent bookstore. I am lucky enough to have three independent bookshops, two of which are in my beloved East Nashville (Novelette recently celebrated their first year in business, and I was surprised to learn that one of my book obsessed buddies didn't know it exists. They, too, have a great selection, and, being a queer-owned shop, they have an exceptionally well curated section on gender and LGBTQIA issues. They also have a killer instagram. Okay. Let's get into it.
Poverty, by America by Mathew Desmond
Wondering what role you play in perpetuating poverty in America? Does the problem feel too enormous and impossible to tackle? This book, by Pulitzer Prize winning author and Princeton sociology professor Michael Desmond has good news. Ending poverty is not only possible, it’s well within our reach. Not only does Desmond provide a clear-sighted analysis of the problem, he poses workable solutions and offers practical (if not easy) action items for us all.
Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver
Loved. It. Barbara Kingsolver is a national treasure. To the bitter and pretentious critic who referred to Unsheltered as “liberal pabulum” too busy spouting cliches and “flaunting its timeliness”, I have to ask, “do you even like fiction? Or being alive?” Barbara Kingsolver deftly weaves together two parallel stories of a falling-down house at the same address in “Utopian” Vineland, New Jersey, in wildly different—and wildly similar—times. Moving back and forth, chapter for chapter, from the 1800s to the present day, the novel explores the many definitions of sheltered and what it means to evolve. Where some critics found it politically heavy handed, I found it necessarily pointed.
Foster by Claire Keegan
One Sunday after mass, a small girl in rural Ireland is left in the care of distant relatives she’s never met. Her father, a gruff man of few words, doesn’t tell her why or for how long she’s being left. He drives off with her suitcase in his trunk. The girl, who narrates the story, is quiet and observant, accustomed to neglect but desperate to be good. And she seems to blossom in the care of the Kinsellas, who tend to her with a generosity she’s never experienced in her own home. Like the best novellas this one reveals a secret and packs an emotional wallop. Every word works hard (without seeming so) and Keegan’s pacing is meticulous. A quick read best enjoyed by slowing down. Really beautiful.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir by Maggie Smith
This is a memoir about the end of a marriage and the aftermath of an ending. Smith is the author of Good Bones, that beautiful poem that went viral in 2016 (I think it was 2016). It's that poem that ends:
Life is short and the world / is at least half terrible, and for every kind /
stranger, there is one who would break you,/ though I keep this from my children. I am trying / to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, / walking you through a real shithole, chirps on / about good bones: This place could be beautiful,/ right? You could make this place beautiful.”
Maggie Smith—in writing this memoir—does make this place—the aftermath and continuing on—really really beautiful.
Outlawed by Anna North
A young midwife’s apprentice is rejected by her community when she can’t conceive a child. Accused of being a witch she flees her town and ends up with a gang of outlaws—the legendary Hole in the Wall Gang—reimagined here as a group of non-binary outcasts. I enjoyed this mostly breezy read, which feels well suited to become a Netflix mini series, but I wanted a bit more character development. I got the sense the novel had been edited to half its original length, losing some nuance. Or—the sketched nature of the characters may have been more of a nod to the western genre (of which I’m not super familiar). Either way, I can see why this was a book club pick (and look forward to watching it as the series or movie it will no doubt become).
Happy Place by Emily Henry
Typically I don’t finish books I’m not enjoying, and normally I refrain from criticizing books in this space. But holy shit this one was annoying. It was like Chat GPT writing “in the style of Emily Henry”. I only finished it because I needed to see how “Emily Henry” (still not convinced it was her) would rescue her own self from this tired, tedious, nothing burger of a plot. NOT my happy place.
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
I heard Maureen Corrigan (glowingly) review this book on NPR when it first came out, and when it popped up in my library feed, I grabbed it. I’ve never read anything like it, and I don’t want to give it away—but it starts with a city pool, in a windowless basement, where men and women—each with their own quirks and backstory—come to swim their daily laps. There are rules at the pool. There are reasons the swimmers swim. And then—there are reasons they don’t anymore. Read it. It’s devastating and beautiful.
Quietly Hostile by Samantha Irby
Samantha Irby is a wonderful writer and very very funny. She can also be extremely raunchy. Her bowel movements and masturbatory preferences are … generally not something I wanted to be reading on a plane in the center seat squashed between two strangers—or really ever. I am weirdly (?) squeamish when it comes to other people’s vomit, assholes and labia (labii?), but OTHER THAN THAT these essays are pretty great.
Beartown by Frederik Backman
A friend of mine at work (thank you, Shelby) recommended this to me, and I’m so glad she did. Because it centers around a hockey team I might not have picked it up on my own. But it’s no just a novel about hockey. It’s a novel about loyalty, family, and what it means to be a team. It’s a novel about what it means to be “from” somewhere. And what we owe to the people and places that shape us. The first half is like riding up in a chairlift, taking in the scenery, watching the people down below, watching how they move and where their stories intersect. The second half is a double black diamond race to the finish line. Intense and jarring and beautiful. Highly highly recommend.
You’ll Grow Out of It by Jessi Klein
Loved loved loved. So much relatable laughing out loud. Klein is comedy gold. This is her first memoir, written pre-baby, which I discovered after reading her second one, I’ll Show Myself Out, which I also loved. Klein has written for SNL and Transparent among other things and is a standup comic. I love her so much.
The Colony by Audrey Magee
This novel is why I love independent bookstores. Books you’ve never heard of just call to you from the table or shelf of an independent bookstore. This reads like a Jane Campion film. Scenic, delicate, brutal. If she hasn’t optioned it yet, she should. In the summer of 1979, an English painter and a French linguist come to an island off the coast of Ireland. The linguist is ostensibly there to preserve the Irish language. The artist has come to capture the lives of the natives on canvas. Meanwhile violence is erupting across Ireland. The novel is about what these two men capture, what they take away, and what they leave behind, and it’s so layered and nuanced, it will knock you over with a feather.
Mating by Norman Rush
This is not a book I would have had the patience to finish had it not been for the now-friend who invited me to read and discuss it on her screened-in porch. It's one of her favorites, something she’s reread every decade or so since it hit her just right In her early twenties. A feminist novel of ideas, written by a man (yup), Mating is the first person account of a graduate student who travels to west Africa to research hunter gatherers and ends up pursuing an older male anthropologist/intellectual who founded a utopian colony for women in poverty. The novel is long, wildly self indulgent, full of obscure vocabulary (bring a dictionary), often amusing, and entirely vague in its intended moral. And yet, the two of us sat on her porch and talked about it for hours. Now (is this irony, given the title?) I associate this novel with igniting a wonderful female friendship.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Published in 2001, Nickel and Dimed has become a classic piece of investigative journalism. Ehrenreich attempts to live in Florida, Maine, and Minnesota on wages earned waitressing, cleaning houses, taking care of Alzheimer’s patients and restocking clothes at Wal-Mart. It’s a shit show, needless to say, and an impossibility. I read this on the tail end of seeing a landlord I know ranting about their section 8 tenants being filthy and disgusting and entitled because, “they have no skin in the game.” (Landlords who publicly shame tenants for any reason on social media are missing an essential piece of their humanity, in my opinion). What section 8 landlords like this one and many of us don’t get is how unfathomably costly it is to be poor. How at the end of the day—there can be less than nothing left. No money, no food, no energy, no dignity—and yeah, landlord dude, complaining on Facebook, that means no $27 to replace the air filter you've invited all of your followers to gag at. I’m so appalled at our country and how uncritically we accept the narrative of the “lazy entitled poor” when these people are breaking their backs to make everyone else’s lives more comfortable.
Letters from Max (a poet, a teacher, a friendship) by Sarah Ruhr and Max Ritvo
My love for independent bookstores is unmatched. There’s magic in them. Some weird alchemy that draws you toward books you might never have discovered otherwise. This was one of those magic books. Letters and poetry flying back and forth between a poet/playwright and her young student, who is undergoing treatment for Ewing’s Sarcoma. The friendship develops Polaroid fast before your eyes, love and wit and questions bouncing all around. It’s beautiful. I love letters. Epistles. Exchanges that become art in the in-between. Highly recommend.
The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramey
If you only read one book from this list, read this one. A “uro-vago-colo page turner” indeed. Ramey writes (with precision, wit, and unmistakable sanity) about her eye popping, utterly jaw dropping, multi-decade pursuit of treatment and medical care for an undiagnosed condition that causes excruciating, debilitating and relentless pain—pain that most of her doctors believe is all in the author’s head. Ultimately—and I must insist that you read every page, all the way to the end, maddening and rage inducing as her experience is to witness—this is, essentially, a whodunnit unlike any I’ve ever read. Please read this book and pass it on. You will be a better person for it.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
Larry and I have had a running argument about whether good writers can be called good writers if they are not, in fact, good storytellers. He's a hard-liner. If the story sucks, you’re not a good writer. My position is more generous. And this novel is a great example of why. Moshfegh is a brilliant and highly imaginative writer. Of that I am absolutely certain. And yet I hated this non-story about an (understandably) depressed and miserable mean girl of privilege who—with the help of a quack psychiatrist she unearthed from the Yellow Pages—drugs herself into oblivion so she can sleep the better part of a year away and emerge reborn. Because the writing was excellent, I kept reading (albeit bitching and moaning inwardly the whole way) to see how this unnecessary self-imposed existential catastrophe would end. (It ends quite cleverly, actually. Like the best short stories, which is what I think this novel should have been). So how can I hate a novel when the writing is so good? Or how can I say the writing is good when I hate a novel this much? Larry figured it out for me (and ended our perpetual argument for good, I think). A good writer can tell a fabulous story in a single passage, as Moshfegh does in this one: “Ping Xi’s work first appeared at Ducat as part of a group show called “Body of Substance,” and it consisted of splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate. He claimed that he’d stuck a tiny pellet of powdered colored pigment into the tip of his penis and masturbated onto huge canvases.” Passages like these are plentiful in My Year of Rest, and when I told Larry about the Asian artist ejaculator he said, “that’s a good little story.” (Ah - so she is a good storyteller) But the sum of these parts did not equal a good use of my time. I want to forget these characters ever existed. I’m angry that I had to indulge them for so many pages. The return (which I won’t give away) was not worth the investment, which to me is what makes a novel great.
The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert
Please do yourself a favor and experience this brilliant (brilliant) work of non fiction. It’s my second time through, and I loved it even more this go-round. Eustace Conway is a fascinating, complicated, and sometimes tragic hero—and Elizabeth Gilbert is the absolute perfect person to tell his story. She is a plucky narrator and astute observer who doesn’t miss an angle. A National Book Award finalist, this is no ordinary biography ; it’s a gripping portrait of a man who is committed to existing in harmony with nature (and desperate to take the world with him—if only they’ll do exactly as they’re told). Ultimately this is a story about contradictions, the dueling desires that propel us and hold us back.
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esme Weijun Wang
I’d been curious about this critically acclaimed collection since it was published in 2019 but kept putting off buying it because I suspected it might be overly academic and (therefore) dull. It's not. Wang’s essays are (as the cover blurb promises) illuminating, and her first person account of living with one of the most feared mental illnesses reveals just as much (if not more) about how badly equipped our culture is to support sufferers as it does about how it feels to suffer.
Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
If life in Silicon Valley is 1/100th as shitty as fiction would have you believe, we need to burn it to the ground. Good grief. I was itching to get my hands on this after Roxane Gay chose it for her Audacious Book Club, and I read it in two flights (to D.C and back—with a two hour airport sit in between)—but the whole time, I just wanted out of this sad dark on-the-verge of Covid world. Was curious enough to finish, but I didn’t love it.
The Chronology of Water: A Memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch
Holy. This. I have never read writing like this before. Knife writing, punch fist writing, poetry smothered and smashed to bits, words splashed and frayed and kicked across the page. Lidia Yuknavitch is one of a kind, and so is her story. Unbelievably good. (I also learned after reading it that Kristen Stewart is directing the movie adaptation. Do yourself a solid and read the book first. It deserves to be read without preconceptions.)
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks By E. Lockhart
Gosh I loved this novel, (given to me by Mating friend). Technically YA but a delight for all ages, it’s the story of a young woman and budding feminist who infiltrates the ages-old secret boys society at her elite boarding school. So smart and refreshing, I adored it. Also could not stop wondering as I was reading what teen Amanda would have made of a book like this. Was she self-aware enough to have recognized Frankie as a future kindred spirit?
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
This was a pretty bleak read, despite what some reviewers call its humor. (There are moments of humor, but they’re black). Awad nails the brutal sickness of diet culture and internalized anti-fatness, while we watch her central character cycle through nicknames—Lizzie, Beth, Elizabeth, Liz—as her weight and consciousness shift. Told through 13 vignettes of Lizzie/Beth/Elizabeth/Liz’s life from chubby uniform-clad teen to anorexic wife to bereaved divorcee verging on awakening, the novel is insightful and thought provoking and despite what can be construed as a hopeful ending, incredibly sad.
Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli
Unbelievably good. Thoroughly original. Beautiful. And so so smart. Luiselli has one of those intellects that make all the other intellects skulk away with their spiky tails between their sad little intellect legs. Her brain has extra cylinders and dimensions, which she uses to build a narrative about borders—real, metaphorical, fictive. With the border crisis as a backdrop, a couple at a crisis point in their marriage heads southwest across the United States with their two children in tow, each parent intending to capture something that’s been lost. What they don’t yet see clearly is the loss happening right before their eyes (two of which are gray, of course, because literary-grey-eye disease does not fucking discriminate). I underlined. I diagrammed (I DID). I downloaded the audiobook. I'm in awe of this book.
So, there you have it. Amanda's May-August. Hit me up with your recommendations and reactions, and please share this with any fellow book lovers, so we can give these amazing authors the eyeballs they deserve. And, in case you missed the first trimester list, you can find that here.
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