A sweltering August day, a stunning estate, and a crystalline pool, its pellucid water tinged red by Jay Gatsby’s blood. Shot once and now dead. We all know this is how The Great Gatsby ends but in Jillian Cantor’s Beautiful Little Fools, it’s just the beginning. Although the police have closed the case, Detective Frank Charles has been hired by an old friend of ... Read More...
February Reading
What to say about February? Mostly that it felt like the only real month of winter and that’s here in Michigan. For those of you in the South and Pacific Northwest I’m sure it felt like hell. As for reading, it was an interesting month. My reading felt oddly decisive—loved or hated books. There was no middle ground, I either loved or stopped reading a book. The good ... Read More...
More Than A Woman by Caitlin Moran
I’ve loved all of Caitlin Moran’s fiction (How to Build a Girl, How to Be Famous) but had never read any of her nonfiction, so was interested to see she has a new book out. More Than a Woman is her follow-up to How to Be a Woman, which she wrote when she was in her 30s. A time when she was sure she had life all figured out. A decade later and she’s back, sharing her ... Read More...
Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture
I feel like a broken record for all the times since 2017 that I’ve said, “Important reading. Timely reading. Everyone should read.”, but here I am again. Not That Bad, with its essays from women around the world, talking about their experiences of rape, harassment, intimidation, and violence is the kind of reading that goes beyond tears. In Roxanne Gay’s foreword we learn that ... Read More...
We Need to Talk About Kevin
The point is, I don’t know what exactly I’d foreseen would happen when Kevin was first hoisted to my breast. I hadn’t foreseen anything exactly. I wanted what I could not imagine. I wanted to be transformed; I wanted to be transported. I wanted a door to open and a whole new vista to expand before me that I had never known was out there. The holidays are not generally the ... Read More...
Judging a Book by Its Lover: A Field Guide to the Hearts and Minds of Readers Everywhere
Judging a Book by Its Lover is a sharp, funny look at the world of books and reading by one of its biggest fans, Lauren Leto. A law school dropout who gained fame through her website, Texts From Last Night, Leto is also a voracious and thoughtful reader. Old-school jargon would call her a bookworm but that’s a term she’s working to discard: In this era of social media and ... Read More...
