For the best read of March, a tie...

a novel that's easy to love, a biography of a frenemy-ship is a slow burn

Books Finished:

The Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict ($$) I sat down and started it the night I bought it, which is exactly my current reading goal.

The Match by Sarah Adams This lingered unfinished for a while… and then I finished it.

We All Live Here by JoJo Moyes Purchased knowing I couldn’t start it that minute, but I wanted to.

Back After This by Linda Holmes an e-book travel victory for the new system; because I hadn’t bought it I was able to download it for a trip.

The Other March Sisters ditto on the e-book victory, except that—while I liked this book—it is AWFUL on Kindle, at least. (See what I mean here)

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik ($$) A slow burn that I’d been drifting idly through that suddenly grabbed me and even convinced me to carry its hardback burden on a plane on a trip even though I would finish it midway through the trip and have to carry it back because I wanted to keep it, not abandon it as I usually do a finished book on a trip. This… never happens.

Books Read but unfinished:

The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality by Hanno Sauer Ok, I may not finish this. Not because there’s anything wrong with it it’s just… there’s a lot of tribes and pre-history all mixed in with philosophical theories that I’m only vaguely familiar with and it’s become a bit of a lift.

Books Acquired but not yet read: ($$=I bought it with my own hard-earned cash, 1/2$=I used my author discount, Gifted) OOH look at me, for me this is a small list!

The Story Collector by Evie Woods ($$, bff suggestion)

Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess (gifted, ARC)

How to Sleep at Night by Elizabeth Harris (gifted, publicist)

Pomona Afton Can So Solve a Murder by Bellamy Rose ($$ Kindle)

Secrets of Adulthood by Gretchen Rubin ($$ pre-order)

So here, truly, is the deal with these lists: If I hate something, I don’t put it on here. A friend gave me a horrible, annoying self-therapying book** that I felt like was basically one giant gaslight—as in, maybe it’s your fault that the people around you are problematic, which okay—you can’t change other people, true, so you have to change yourself but that is not the same as basically saying, they’re FINE it’s me hi I’m the problem and I wanted to drown this book in a river, and therefore it isn’t on those lists, along with a novel I was given and hated. I’m not here to bust on books.

If I liked it fine it probably just sits here, and if there’s something you want to know what I thought of, comment and I’ll message you or something that can’t be crawled by some author’s Google alerts and ruin their day just because I was like, well, the secondary characters are cardboard but the main story made up for it and all they see is the word cardboard.

But then there are the things I think you should go read RIGHT NOW and then we can discuss!!

First off, We All Live Here by JoJo Moyes. This book is SO EASY TO LOVE. And it’s nice and long, and maybe it didn’t have to be but personally I did not mind one bit, because it was the rare book that is both a page-turner of a story—I did want to know what would happen!—and a really good hang—I didn’t want it to end. The characters, every last one of them, are fun and distinct and entertaining but also real and how does she do that? Dang, I just know every character in my WIP sounds exactly the same right now.

Second, Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik. I’m not a Didion-stan (I’m your basic bitch who only read The Year of Magical Thinking and maybe didn’t finish it), and I’d honestly never heard of Eve Babitz, but tell me it’s going to be a story of a friendship between two writers who didn’t want to admit they were also competitors, and show me some really intense letters of them ripping off one another’s outer shells to show the quivering snail within and…. I am HERE for you man. Plus, bonus endless unexpected celebrity gossip from the 1970’s and ‘80s, much of it featuring Harrison Ford. (“The thing about Harrison was, he could fuck like, 9 people a day.”) This isn’t my usual jam necessarily—I am more of a memoir person than a biography, because it’s the look into someone’s inner life that I want, but Lili Anolik , with the help of a trove of letters, totally delivered. Try it, I think you’ll like.

That’s it for me this week! I’m off to Mexico for a week-long intensive in language and culture, and I’m deciding whether to take along La muerte me da (Death Takes Me) by Cristina Rivera Garza, which is probably hard enough in the English version let alone the Spanish but it IS supposed to be an immersion. (PS—I know that title isn’t a literal translation, but Death Takes Me is the title of the English translation, which was released to much fanfare last month.) But just think how cool I’ll look reading it…

I guess if I can’t handle it, I always have my loaded Kindle. Better pop a few more books on!

** This book is an old one, so I’ll out it—it' was Loving What Is, by Byron Katie, and my impression of Byron Katie is that a) she is some sort of distant figure who didn’t actually write the book anyway and b) if somehow she came across this, she either would not be bothered that someone didn’t like the book or would pretend not to be and c) I don’t think she reads. So here you go, I hated that book with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.