I can't help wondering if I have lost my sense of humor--I just read another book featuring a psychopathic serial killer who gets away with it that I suspect the author intended to be funny but I found disturbing (The House Wife, by Natalie Barelli). Authors, please stop!
On a more serious note, I just read my first widow's memoir in a while (as a divorced person, I have read a surprising number of these). In Here After, Amy Lin is extremely forthcoming about grief. I don't really want to write about it, but I think it could be helpful to someone who loses a spouse young.
On an even more serious note, I am still reading books from the LitHub 2025 list of books that were on the most "best of" lists for the year. The most recent one was Hostage, by Eli Sharabi. Sharabi was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 and several members of his family were murdered, which is of course very sad. But just as sad to me is that he calls Palestinians savages, excoriates them for killing women and children, and describes them as brainwashed because they think Israelis want to kill them. And yet . . . he does not acknowledge that the Israelis have, in fact, killed thousands of Palestinians, including many, many women and children. I'm sure some people will give him quarter because his terrible experience and losses were so fresh and he is just describing what happened to him--providing a first-hand account of the hostage experience (which is, to be fair, very interesting). But that's not all he's doing--he's using his experience as a vehicle for anti-Palestinian propaganda. Of course, he has a right to do that, but readers should bewre.
Fiction
I loved Rachel Khong's two novels, so I definitely wanted to jump into her collection of short stories, My Dear You. The stories provide further evidence of Khong's writing skills, but they are definitely weirder/more imaginative than the novels. Examples of the content: A woman who is eaten by a crocodile on the first day of her honeymoon learns you can look however you want in heaven (yes, people are hot once they get to the after life). A worker in a factory creating AI-powered sex dolls becomes attached to a doll she is helping develop conversational skills. A group of Asian American women plot revenge on a man who fetishizes them. Following a miscarriage, the multi-colored fluids draining from a woman's body (sorry, maybe TMI) lead to an interesting discovery about her origins. Like I said, weird, but entertaining and thought provoking: Who would you want to look like in heaven? If everyone you saw appeared as you wanted them to, would you eliminate diversity so they could all look like you? What animal would you want to be if God suddenly decided that the world would be a better place without humans?
I refer to books like Florence Knapp's The Names as "Sliding Doors" narratives even though I know it dates me (how many people even remember that Gwyneth Paltrow film?)--one decision results in vastly different outcomes for the people involved. The decision here is what name Cora will register for her baby boy--Bear, as her daughter Maia wants, her own choice of Julian, or Gordon, the name her abusive husband (also named Gordon) insists upon. The story breaks into three strands depending on which name she actually chose and how her husband reacted--the outcomes are very different not only for the named child but for Cora and Maia. All three narratives include some heartbreak and all involve what might be called redemption. I've seen reviewers say the book is about whether your name determines your destiny--I think that's an interesting question, but don't think it's what the book is about at all. To my mind, it's about how decisions within a difficult situation (here domestic abuse) can have different but hard to predict outcomes--Will the abuse intensify? Will the abused partner leave? How will staying with the abuser affect the children? Even if I'm wrong, I found the book engaging.
Heather Aimee O'Neill's The Irish Goodbye employs a well-worn trope--the family get-together at which the pain of a past family trauma (a brother's suicide) colors their interactions as they deal with a variety of contemporary problems. And there are many problems, including parents who are fading, a lost job (sister Kate), an unwanted pregnancy (sister Alice), and the aftermath of being dishonest with her partner (sister Maggie). Alice's and Kate's children, the family's priest, and a rabid raccoon add chaos and humor to the Thanksgiving gathering but it's the adults in the family who need to pull themselves together. Despite what may sound like a rather tired plot, I did enjoy this book, though I can't exactly explain why. BTW: In case you aren't familiar with the term (I wasn't), an Irish goodbye means leaving without saying goodbye. (And weirdly, I just read another book titled The Irish Goodbye, with the subtitle Micro-Memoirs. It turns out a micro-memoir is a short vignette from author Beth Ann Fennelly's life--not dull but they don't add up to much in my view.)
Like true crime podcasts, reality shows are a cultural phenomenon that authors find attractive as settings/plot devices. The reality show at the center of The Compound by Aisling Rawle is particularly mean-spirited, something of a combination of The Bachelor and Survivor taken to the extreme. Contestants are in a compound in the desert, required to do tasks (both individual and group) to win rewards as basic as food and furniture and as lavish as designer clothes and luxury skin care products and alcohol. The rules encourage the men and women to couple up (if you sleep alone, you are banished). Contestants are not allowed to share information about their real lives unless it's part of a task to do so (e.g., describe your first kiss). Only two or three of the 19 characters (one man got lost on his way to the compound and never made it) are at all sympathetic, and the narrator Lily is a completely empty person we know we re stuck with for the duration. So why did I like the book? It's an effective commentary on the emptiness and cruelty of much of contemporary culture.
As I was reading Lake Effect by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, I was thinking what a soap opera it is--Nina and Finn, who live across the street from each other, divorce their spouses and run off to get married with no warning to their families. Their children's lives are thrown into chaos, and the problems of their first spouses (no spoilers) are magnified. Lots of issues/topics come into play: bullying, alcoholism, pressure on teen girls to lose weight, AIDS, family estrangement, women's roles, the loss of small businesses when big chains expand. And yet, it held my interest and I felt rewarded with the bittersweet ending.
Upward Bound, by Woody Brown, is one of the best books I've read in some time. It's the story of clients and staff at a day center for adults with serious disabilities, including nonspeaking autism, which the author happens to have. It provides a glimpse into the minds of two intelligent young men--Walter and Tom--neither of whom can communicate with the staff and are incredibly frustrated and bored by the childish activities provided by the staff. The reader also meets, among others, staffers Ann, a college girl who is at first trying to pad her resume but grows to have empathy with the clients; Carlos, a once wild child who has a special connection with Jorge, an eloper (the term used for clients who run away from the center); and Dave, the center's director, who knows nothing about disabilities and only tries to connect with the clients when he is planning his favorite event of the year, the Holiday Spectacular. It's eye-opening, enraging, sad, and touching. Highly recommended.
Mystery
Lisa Gardner is one of those mystery authors who has several different series going, which I both admire and think keeps series fresh. That said, Frankie Elkin, finder of lost people (often dead), is not my favorite character, and the actual mystery in Kiss Her Goodbye, which involves a missing Afghani refugee who may be mentally ill, several murders, British spies, social workers in Tucson, a nonprofit helping refugees, several snakes, and an iguana, is excessively complicated (at least to me). However, the depiction of Afghan refugees' lives both before they left Afghanistan and after is compelling and makes the book worth reading.
Nonfiction
My favorite type of memoir is one that deals with the author's relationship to food--as eater, preparer, whatever. So Hunger Like a Thirst by Australian-American food writer Besha Rodell was right up my alley. The book chronicles her early life in Australia through the move to the U.S., her years as a waitress and the transition to writing, a career that took her from North Carolina to Atlanta to LA and back to Melbourne. Most interesting to me is the food/restaurant history she presents, as well as the insight into the ups and downs of what seems to an outsider to be a fabulous career (i.e., eating and then writing about food). One of the most interesting things she discusses in terms of history is how vestiges of slavery are evident in traditions of restaurant service; tipping, she suggests, began because white restaurant owners did not want to pay black employees and therefore made them reliant on tips for their income. Definitely worth a read.
I really didn't expect to like Tiny Beautiful Things, by Cheryl Strayed, but it was one of those days when I was having trouble finding anything intriguing on Libby and I knew I'd seen it on some lists, so . . . Surprise--I enjoyed it. It's a collection of letters Strayed wrote to people in her role as advice columnist Dear Sugar. I could live without her calling her correspondents "sweet pea" and "hon" and the like, but her answers are, in general, supportive and blunt. And it's fun to consider what advice you would have given to the people writing in and how it is similar to and different from that given by Strayed/Sugar. Perhaps enjoyment also comes from comparing your own life to those of the letter-writers--probably an unjustified feeling of sanity but heartening nonetheless. Also, it must be said, Strayed is a very good writer.
"You don't really have any friends, do you, Dad?" That question from his son sparked the 10,000-mile journey across the United States documented in author/actor Andrew McCarthy's Who Needs Friends: An Unscientific Examination of Male Friendship Across America. The trip was a quest to reconnect with far-flung friends with whom his bonds had frayed and to explore what men he encountered on his trip thought about male friendship. But the trip also involved numerous side trips to see such sights as the Roy Orbison museum, Elvis's birthplace, and a corner in Winslow, Arizona. McCarthy discovered (or affirmed) that loneliness is rife across America, aspects of men's personalities and conditioning make friendship harder or at least different for men than for women, and yet friendship has tremendous benefits--maybe not earth-shattering insights, but his journey makes for good reading and has already served as fodder for discussion with a couple in the next generation of my family in which the wife and husband see and experience friendship very differently. I'm guessing I'll probably launch a few more conversations with "I was reading this book about male friendship . . ."
Favorite Passages
Sometimes he is benign, sometimes stern, almost maleficent. A word so close to magnificent, she thinks, sent off-course by maleness.
--Florence Knapp, The Names
. . . with the accompaniment of friends--friends to hear us, to receive us, friends to understand and forgive us, to trust and accept us with grace and compassion, to laugh with us, to travel alongside us toward our better selves--we are capable of being much, much more than good enough.
--Andrew McCarthy, Who Needs Friends
I hope when people ask what you're going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you'll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters.
--Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
