The Fake: Not to be confused with The Fraud

Is it an accident that I’ve read two (great) books in as many months concerned with the stability of truth? Maybe. Probably more that I am so worried about ideas of reliability, trustworthiness, agreed upon Facts that I dwell only among books that share my anxiety. In this – great – one by Zoe Whittall we follow Shelby and Gibson as they each meet and fall for (in different ways) Cammie, a…

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Going Infinite: That one time I decided to be a crypto investor

In case you need proof that I ought not to be responsible for large sums of money, it was the winter of 2021 that I decided I’d become a crypto investor. Indeed, that was just before the giant crypto crash: good memory. Thankfully my risk tolerance is that of a hospital administrator or air traffic controller, which is to say: low. And if I hadn’t lost my $50 in the crash, I’d have lost it…

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Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is lovely. A short – novella? – novel that follows Furlong, the small town coal-delivery man as he discovers truths both of his own past and of the horrors of the Catholic “mother and baby homes.” When Furlong discovers a young woman being held captive in a coal shed the nuns who have kept her there implicitly threaten to deny Furlong’s own daughters access…

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The Talk: Excellent

I hadn’t heard of Darrin Bell before my mum suggested The Talk, but I can’t wait to spend more time with his work. The Talk is Bell’s memoir of growing up in amid racist structures and people and of his path to becoming a Pulitzer winning editorial cartoonist. A Künstlerroman for those collecting their literary terms. I wish I’d had it to recommend in a recent conversation with a white man who…

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The Wreckage: Does indeed pull your heart apart

Michael Crummy wrote (another) lovely novel in The Wreckage. Set in Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada, triva folks!) during WWII this precise romance just… wrecks you (get it? GET IT). Wish Furey, Catholic, falls for Mercedes (Sadie) Parsons (Protestant) and her mother Won’t Have It. So they have some secret romps and then through a series of accidents get separated and oops Wish goes off an…

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Tom Lake: A book to bury your nights

Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake sucked me up and spat me out a few days later. The sort of book you don’t notice you’re reading until hours later and you have turned prune in the tub or the clock is – traitorously – telling you its well past your very last possible bedtime. Which is strange because it’s not a book that’s “about” very much. Which is to say it isn’t very plot-y. It is instead a book about…

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Cormoran Strike: Six Audiobooks to Replace the Podcasts

If you, like me, are struggling to stop listening to All the Politics Podcasts because none of them make you feel anything other than deep worry for the world and sadness and whatcanyoudoanyway, then let me offer you the suggestion of murder mystery audiobooks. There are two types of audiobooks: those you need to listen to closely and carefully – say literary fiction and those that you can have…

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The Fraud:

You can’t read Zadie Smith’s The Fraud in 2024 and not feel cold shudders of recognition for how easy it is to distort/create truth for an audience willing to believe – or disbelieve – anything so long as those fabricated facts meet their aims. Set in the 19th century, historical fiction does its best work here by using the past to illuminate pressing truths of the present. The novel follows the…

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Home: Slow and beautiful

I have tried a couple of times to read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead but each time gave up with boredom (despite it being routinely included on best-of-all-time lists). So what made me think I’d fine the second book set in the town of Gilead and focused on religion to be more captivating, I’m not sure. But I was! More captivated that is. Still not going to run away with any prizes for being…

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What Strange Paradise

I had such resolve to blog this one quickly because I had thoughts on the ending, but December, man, is just too much between gastro illnesses and parades and who’s turn is it for the chocolate calendar. Onwards we go, regrets about time aside: Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise oscillates its chapters between two perspectives one of the young boy Amir, who is the sole survivor of a…

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The Invisible Life of Addie Le Rue: Improbable, Excessive Adjectives and Many Smoky Eyes

People on Goodreads really like V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie Le Rue and so do all the readers that kept it on the bestseller list for ages. I do not. Heretic! Sure it has some of the vibes of The Time Travellers Wife (which against my better judgement I loved) and a little bit of The Shadow of the Wind in that the devil features alongside used bookshops, but despite these cousins in…

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One Last Thing Before I Go: Meh

Created with Dalle3: create an image to accompany a book review about the book One Last Thing Before I Go Jonathan Tropper’s One Last Thing Before I Go has a nice conceit: protagonist Drew Silver is a washed up musician, divorce husband, absent father and disconnected son and brother. In the early chapters he has some kind of Heart Incident (that sounds entirely made up) that means if he doesn’t…

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The Book of Joan: Underwhelming

I have a generally favourable opinion of books that get included in the the New York Times top 100 of the year, and there’s never been a better time to read a dystopian novel that shares shattering similarities to the present but sheesh this one was a thump lump No. Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan is set sometime in the near future when earth has run out of resources or climate change has…

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Hello Beautiful: What is the word for syrup when it's spread across the pages of a novel.

Given the extremely limited time I have available for reading given my other commitments to staring absently out the window looking for explanations of How It Has All Come To This and What We Are To Do, I was extremely annoyed by Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful for taking up weeks of my reading time with the faint promise that it might realize itself into something good. It does not. We follow…

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Real Life: It's (not) fine.

Brandon Taylor’s Real Life follows Wallace as he tries to decide whether to stay – in life, in his graduate program, in relationships – and while he wanders grief for his dead father. A grief that lurks but that Wallace insists – over and over – is fine. It’s all fine. And while I’m still not sure what Wallace wants (out of life, out of his sexual/friendship/relationship with Miller, from his…

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Lucy By the Sea (and My Name is Lucy Barton)

I had brunch with S. recently where she reminded me of the amazing-ness of Elizabeth Strout. So I promptly ordered My Name is Lucy Barton and Lucy by the Sea. In no small part because of my own L. Minor hiccup about 2/3rds into My Name is Lucy Barton when I realized I’d already read it, but no matter, it was a good refresher before Lucy takes to the sea. And off she goes at the start of the…

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The Librarianist: Some laugh out loud moments and some gem lines amid a lot of other words

Patrick de Witt’s The Librarianist comes out as one of those literary fiction books that you know a book club you’re in is going to suggest reading, or will be on one of those tables at the front of the book store. And that will be fine. It won’t knock your socks off, but there are enough truly laugh out loud moments (de Witt’s The SistersBrothers remains one of the funniest books – no qualifier,…

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