Come for the Schadenfreude, Stay for the Honesty

Listen, I didn't feel GOOD about why I read what I read the week of 9/26/25.

When I started this “What I Read This Week” series, I promised it would answer the question “how do you read so much”?

Yeah, this week it just begs that question. But reasons! Friends in town, in-between-travel workdays, I always read less when I’m deep in writing a book. Still I did read.

9.26.25 Friday Bedtime, Colorado Springs

I was on a plane for 4 hours today and did not read one printed word. I wrote what I hope will someday BE printed words, and then I… read random stuff of no note on my phone because there was in-flight internet.

Now…I think I am reading this memoir for the wrong reasons. Well, one reason is FINE… I’m traveling and I only brought my Kindle. This is just sensible and it’s taken me forever to get here.*

But I leapt on Jen Hatmaker’s Awake with a slavering enthusiasm that is just the slightest bit shameful.

The thing about Jen Hatmaker is (and I don’t think she would deny this) that for those of us women of a certain parent-generation, and especially Midwesterners, she’d taken on a certain mantle: that of the person who just just that much holier-than-thou in a variety of senses. Still religious but also kinda tolerant. Dancing really fast between a variety of identities. Threading the needle of appealing to the mainstream but also the more traditionally inclined.

It all seemed too good to be true. AND LOOK IT WAS. Thus, this book, which chronicles her husband’s infidelity and the end of their marriage.

I really am not happy that terrible things happened to this other human—I’m not that awful—I just was pretty happy to get to read about it. There’s a pretty broad variety of perfect-in-print or on social marriages and lives that have blown up in various ways, but it’s rare for someone to write honestly about it. And they don’t have to! It’s just that I was probably too excited to read someone who would.

So, that’s my confession…I’m rubbernecking here. I’m not proud.

I read chapters 1-9 or so.

9.27 Saturday Bedtime, Colorado Springs

Chapters 10-25 of 97. I’m definitely getting what I came for here. This is all the dirt and also a nice helping of recognition that maybe the religious practices she’s been helping to uphold all these years contributed to all that’s gone wrong here. I appreciate that. I am a satisfied reader. I am still a little embarrassed that I feel that way. It all feels a little…prurient.

9.28 Sunday Bedtime, Colorado Springs

Chapters 26-33 of 97. I’m getting more than I came for. This isn’t just a memoir of the end of a marriage and an illusion of a life…this is a writer acknowledging her part in it, looking hard at what it means to help create and uphold that kind of illusion and not letting the outer story of a woman blindsided by a man’s infidelity be the only story.

It’s pretty impressive. It could have been a victim memoir (and people, including me, would have read it, if only because we really wanted all those other influencers whose marriages ended badly to tell us the truth, damnit) but Awake is much more. It’s also a lot? But I bet I finish it relatively soon.

9.29 Monday Bedtime, Home

Once again, I read nothing of note on a 4 hour long plane ride. I did write, so there’s that. And then it was late and I read 4 pages of Mariana and it seemed like I should turn off the light and go to sleep so I turned off the light and did not go to sleep and I might as well have just read longer.

9.30 Tuesday Bedtime, Home

I finished Mariana! Man that took a while. It ended with a literary flourish—you never do find out if the husband is alive or dead, although you can have a good guess. Having finished it, I went back and read the prologue by another writer who’d read and loved Mariana many times, and came away from the whole thing with a better understanding of its appeal… but unlike all of Angela Thirkell, or even this writer’s own first book, a memoir of her time “in service” called One Pair of Hands, I’m pretty sure I won’t read it again.

10.1 Wednesday Late afternoon

All I made for dinner was reservations, giving me a little time to read. 11 pages into the Dan Brown (Secret of Secrets—my first, I didn’t read any of his earlier books). It’s not for me…among other things, two characters “assured” each other of things within 4 lines of dialogue and even those 11 pages contained multiple lines that just felt like a male fantasy life and a super-clueless scene of a woman tied to a table by a male monster that… totally missed the obvious fears and implications of that dynamic. Left it out completely. This can go right back the library.

Also of note: the Dan Brown is—to look at—exactly the same size and thickness as The Academy (the Elin Hilderbrand and daughter) but it weighs half a pound more (yes I checked) and has a whopping 250 more pages squashed in there! Since The Academy was also sitting in the library stack, I started that next… and it’s also going back, although after more pages (36, to be exact). It’s fun, it’s classic Hilderbrand which means the kind of easy reading that is hard writing, but I rarely like boarding school books and this wasn’t the exception.

Bedtime, Home

Oooh I forgot I had The Road to Tender Hearts (apparently no one at the library is waiting for that one… they should be!). I’m really liking this one, and I would have read for way too long, but the cat sat on me and demanded that I pet him with both hands, so that was that.

Thursday 10.2 Bedtime

Man I like The Road to Tender Hearts so much. How is it such a fun, gentle read when so many terrible things have already happened and I’m only less that 1/4 of the way in? No idea. I’d comp this to Claire Pooley or Kevin Wilson… and I’m sure you’ll hear more next week!

Acquisitions of note: Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, the latest Anthony Horowitz (Marble Hall Murders) which my husband and I will probably both read if the library lets us keep it long enough, and Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library, all from the library. And an advance of Digital Exhaustion which I’m quite interested in although, preaching to the choir!.

That’s it for me this week. But if you’re still here, a poll, because I’m curious. There basically aren’t days when I don’t read at least a little. Are y’all the same way?

*I did carry along three magazines that I didn’t touch, I don’t know, in case the Kindle broke, or the flight attendant had a thing about not using them during takeoff and landing which has literally never happened or maybe because I’m 2 issues behind on The New Yorker which you just have to accept if you’re going to subscribe and do anything other than read it.

**I have also learned, through bitter experience, that most of the time you do not want to meet those writers, either, and you almost certainly don’t want to sit next to one on an airplane. But I want to read it, I do!