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This email goes out to my mom, my number one source for book intel. We share a kindle account, and I get really excited when I’m the one who finds something engrossing to read, because nine times out of ten, it’s her.
She also reads more and faster than I do. She eats books. I love to read, but my old primary reading time, my subway time, hasn’t existed since before the pandemic. These days, my primary reading time is before bed. By the end of the day I’m exhausted, and so usually make it somewhere between two and ten minutes before my eyes get heavy and I put down the book and call it a night.
For me, there’s a certain type of book that lends itself to these short, interrupted spurts of reading. I need something 1. With a juicy story that moves 2. That’s good enough that I look forward to my two to ten minutes of reading time, and I can’t wait to pick it up again.
One of my favorite parts of the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I studied 2016 - 2018, was its mandate to read A LOT. I always want to read a lot, but suddenly it was schoolwork and therefore demanded to be prioritized. Their slogan is “read 100 books, write one.” The other great part was talking about books constantly with people who felt the same way as me. I discovered Alice Munro, Jo Ann Beard, Marilynne Robinson, and and and…
One year ago, when the pandemic was fresh and scary and I was a brand-new mom, I suddenly had enormous trouble focusing on anything. The words would look all fuzzy; I’d find myself flipping pages without having much of an idea what I had just read. Whole pages would pass by before I realized I had missed the whole thing.
Jennifer Weiner saved me. I read Mrs. Everything, a bighearted story of two sisters that spans multiple generations. The novel hooked me and carried me through a few of those newborn sleepless nights that blend into foggy days. Then I was straight into more of Weiner’s novels—Big Summer, The Next Best Thing, Fly Away Home. I’d be breastfeeding or pumping and flipping the pages which brought me so very much: joy, levity, connection, much-needed distraction, even meaning.
These are not books that my Bennington professors would have let me count towards my degree—they are “women’s fiction,” not literary fiction (I think? That distinction is just for marketing, right? It’s also a pretty offensive state of affairs that Weiner herself talks about eloquently )—but they are also legitimately good: well written, nuanced, and sharp. That was important; I would have been distracted in a bad way by anything that made my brain ache.
After Weiner, I binged (am binging!) on a very different author: Tana French. She had just published The Searcher, about a retired Chicago detective who moves to a remote village in rural Ireland and finds himself entwined in a mystery. Oh man, was it good. The characters were so gorgeously drawn, the dialogue was brilliant, the story grabbed me and didn’t let go.
I’ve been very slowly making my way through her whole canon, most of which takes place in Dublin and involves detectives investigating murders. I’m about to start The Secret Place, and then I’ll be finished and genuinely sad.
Obviously, there are so many other fantastic books in the world, more than I can ever hope to read. I took breaks from these two authors to read my friend Jessica Gross’s new novel Hysteria, and I just bought another writer friend’s, Naima Coster’s, novel What’s Mine and Yours. I also read Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid and Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane (I enjoyed both!). I read a few parenting books, but that’s another newsletter for another day.
I love memoir, but I’m taking a small break as I worry about mine (it comes out in September). I’ll be back to you soon, memoir!
Tell me what you can’t put down. Tell me what I should add to my list next!
I, too, eat books. If I can't read it in one or one and a half sittings, it's no good LOL! i am a big fan of historic fiction and murder mysteries. i highly recommend the Maisie Hobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear.
I always love reading your letters, Hannah! x