summer page-turners
greetings from vacation!
Hola! Just stopping by from vacation. I’ve been trying to smooth brain as much as possible while out of the office for two weeks, and by that I mean to think about things that interest me only and nothing about work even in the slightest. Novels? Yes. Restaurants? Yes. When will I next swim? Yes. Email subject lines and preheaders? NO. Except for this one, hehe.
I’m going to recommend some books that I can’t stop thinking about—the other women of my book life right now. I’ve been plowing through This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, one of those decades-long literary family sagas you can really sink your teeth into, which for me is the perfect vacation read. When I have hours to devote to a book, I want it to be one that I can immerse myself into and get attached to the characters, one that’s set in a place I’m not too familiar with and can be temporarily transported there (for this one, it’s French Algeria, which sent me on a long Wikipedia spiral).
There are still several books I can’t wait to start reading when I get back though, several of which came out today!!!
I’ve read Jill Ciment’s fiction, and was pretty unaware of her memoirs until recently, when press around her newest one started popping up. Consent is a reexamination of her 45-year-long marriage with a man twenty eight years her senior, which she first documented in her 1996 memoir Half a Life. Ciment began the affair when she was only 17 and he 45, and apparently in her new memoir considers whether she told the whole truth in her 1996 defense of the whole thing. I mean….juicy. Imagine getting stuck into this book on a beach somewhere, I’d be there for hours.
Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones is the debut memoir from Priyanka Mattoo, a writer who I’ve followed on Instagram for a while and who has worked in the entertainment industry for a long time and writes a column in Vulture for aspiring Hollywood-ers. She’s very funny online, and often hints at the interesting life she’s led, from Kashmir to England to Saudi Arabia to Michigan to Los Angeles, so I’m excited to finally read her long-form writing.
I love to read books set abroad when I happen to be traveling abroad, and Lost On Me by Veronica Raimo sounds like the perfect candidate for a Copenhagen cafe sit. A bildungsroman set in Rome, about what sounds like a ~literary sad girl~, the book takes us through her “failed attempts at emancipation, her discovery of sex and fixations with unwitting men, and ultimately her contentious relationship with reality, [bringing] alive Rome from the 1980's through the early 2000's.” I’m sooooo in.
I read Rufi Thorpe’s novel The Knockout Queen during the pandemic and it kind of blew my mind, so I’m pumped about her new novel Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which has already gotten a ton of buzz and a TV deal. It’s billed as raucously hilarious, and is about the daughter of a Hooter’s waitress and former pro wrestler who finds herself with a baby from an affair and in need of quick cash, so she starts an OnlyFans account. I want to sit down on a hot summer afternoon in the air conditioning and read it cover to cover.