The New True Crime is in Town & Country

Paper Magazines are IT and a snuggly cozy witch book for your weekend in What I Read this Week and When and How

So I went on a trip, to visit my folks, and then I had to stay longer than expected and I did not have a book with me other than my Kindle. I got halfway through Paper Girl, by Beth Macy, but the challenge of reading “a memoir of home and family in a fractured America” became too much, and I could not face the challenge of entering a wifi password and getting it to download anything new and so there I was. BOOKLESS.

I read 2 whole issues of The New Yorker (this is NOT good bedtime reading). And a full issue of Town & Country. (Better—not sure how Town & Country also became the magazine of Rich (or even Middle Class) People Behaving Badly True Crime, but it did, and that was nice and distracting.) Paper magazines for the win.

I read a whole lot of fashion Substack, and if you would like to know my thoughts on the new Loewe, or Matthew Blazy’s debut at Chanel, I’ve got them.

Pause for an interval during which, still bookless, I run a 5K and my kids runs the marathon in Chicago. I am very proud as while I did not win the award for “Least Likely to Ever Run a 5K” in high school I totally would have, and I will never run farther, and I do not mind being overshadowed in this way by my kid in the least. At night I poke at things I’ve already read in my Kindle.

Remember that survey from a couple weeks ago where some of you said sometimes life was just too much to read? Yeah ok you were RIGHT. THANKS UNIVERSE.

Next I dinked around with Ali Hazelwood’s Mate, The Rushworth Family Plot, the latest in the Jonathan Darcy/Juliet Tilney series and Park Avenue by Claudia Gray, but what really grabbed me, and what I’m actually telling you to go out and track down, was the November issue of The Atlantic: The Unfinished Revolution.

Listen, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there either. The history of the American Revolution, in the context of whatever we’ve got going on at the moment? Hell to the no. I mean, yes, I am a person who read Nathan Philbrick’s The Mayflower semi-willingly, so I like history, but it’s not like I read the Hamilton biography. I’m just fascinated by trying to understand what it really felt like to be those people in that time, connected but not in the way we are, and what actually pushed them over the edge into fighting… on both sides! I mean seriously what must life have been like for a young British male to make sailing over the Atlantic to fight a bunch of rebels even remotely palatable?

But it’s GREAT. So far I’m far more educated on King George (not the guy in Hamilton, although now I have his song stuck in my head) and I’m digging into Patrick Henry, which is also a really cool discussion of the importance of oratory in an age before print became what it is today, and the challenge of fully understanding it when it took place before any form of recording. Also featured: The Schuyler sisters beyond Hamilton, Black people fighting for their freedom…with the British army and so much cool stuff, all just short enough to be do-able here in limited attention span land.

It’s all tied to the coming Ken Burns documentary so I guess I know what I’ll be doing when that comes out.

Finally, I promised you a witch book for your weekend: A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping. It’s cozy and whimsical and happy and yet also heartfelt. It’s The House on the Cerulean Sea, it’s Legends and Lattes. The author is Sangu Mandanna, who also wrote The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, which you probably read and enjoyed because anyone who reads this kind of thing did and maybe you’re looking at this one and thinking, it sounds kinda generic, that title…

Nope, it’s lovely, go get it.

Also I finished Tess Gerritsen’s The Summer Guests.

It was SO GOOD.

A book so good I waited weeks to finish it

And that is what I read and how and when, mostly, since we last talked. I also flung aside more than one thing, and started Wreck by Catherine Newman, which I’m sure you’ll hear more about. Hot take: did you love Sandwich? Or does Wreck sound good? Then grab it. But if you loathed Sandwich because it was too too too too much with the internal thought processes (hi Mom!) then you won’t like this either and you can sit it out. But I am loving it.

Tell me what we should be reading for November! I will have Your Next Life is Now, for certain, and I have three library books: Isabella Nagg and the Pot of Basil, Marble Hall Murders and Mrs. Christie at the Mystery Guild Library. I don’t know if I’ll get to any of them before they are due….tell me if I should! (True Confessions: Park Avenue went back before I could finish it and I’m so far good with that.)

Amreading 2025 Book Gifts By Kj

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