Posted 11:30 a.m. Friday, June 28, 2024
Ever After
And they lived happily ever after. Dear reader, can we take a moment to discuss what an absolute banger of a phrase that is? Like seriously. 10/10. No notes. If I had been the writer who first penned that, you wouldn’t be able to shut me up about it! Why? Because writers spend their whole careers trying to craft something so elegant in its simplicity yet so complex in its meaning. Think about it. How long exactly is ever after? What exactly is happily? I suppose that’s for you and me and maybe the second act of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods to figure out.
We like to say, “It’s the journey not the destination” (another banger of a phrase) and what is the destination if not another word for goal. We think to ourselves, “This will all be worth it when we get there.” That’s why we put up with all the stress. All the hard work. All those quiet moments of self-doubt. Those were all in service of getting to this destination and when we arrive, we stop, take a deep breath, and immediately wonder to ourselves, “Well, was it worth it? Was this a waste of time? Should I have been brushing up on my Spanish on Duolingo instead?”
Endings were a constant source of conversations over the course of this leisure reading project. I cannot tell you, reader, how many conversations I had with people that revolved around them.
“Oh, I love the ending of that book,” a co-worker would tell me with a mischievous wink when they would see me with a book they had read.
“I really liked that book until I got to the ending,” someone else would forewarn me.
If you think about it, reader, book endings are like the dessert course of a meal, the kiss at the conclusion of a date. Whatever you felt about the dinner, the date, or the book can be drastically shaped by that ending. A lovely piece of cheesecake may make you overlook that the steak was overcooked, that the service was lousy. A swoon-worthy kiss at the end of the date will make you forget that they showed up late, that they aren’t good at conversation. A good ending can help stoke a sort of literary amnesia. You forget the plot holes, the clumsy characterization if they stick the landing.
So here we are, dear readers, at the end of this hero’s quest like so many other heroes who have come before and will venture after. Dorothy clicks here ruby slippers. Alice leaves Wonderland. 101 books have been read and put back on their appropriate shelves in Murphy Library. Was it worth? Simply put, yes. A million times yes because this has not just been a project. This has been an education. Every book was a teacher, every story a lesson.
And what next? Who knows. What I do know is that I’m grateful for every story that my father read to me as a child, for every afternoon spent at the public library with my mother. I am grateful for every word of encouragement from coworkers, friends, and strangers, for every person who stopped me to excitedly ask what number book I was on. I am grateful to work at a place that gave me the time and space to do this project. I’m grateful to Shealyn McMahon for her hard work editing/formatting all these columns. And I am grateful to myself for knowing that I could do this.
So, what is left to say? How does this column end for now? Well let me trot out one last banger of a phrase: choose your own adventure. And if our paths happen to cross again, don’t be afraid to ask, “Hey, have you read anything good lately?”
81. All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover
Keywords: Romance, drama, classic Colleen
Synopsis: A couple fights to keep their marriage from crumbling under the weight of fertility issues and adultery.
Review: A wise person once pondered, “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?” I, an infinitely less wise man, ask, “Is it a Colleen Hoover book if I don’t scream into the void JUST BREAK UP ALREADY once every third chapter?” The world may never know.
82. Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, What Matters Now by Evan Osnos
Keywords: Nonfiction, 2020 election
Synopsis: Osnos takes an up-close look at the Biden 2020 election campaign.
Review: An interesting if sort of dry book that reads like a very long magazine profile that takes an inside look at the Biden 2020 presidential campaign while also giving a brief history of Biden’s political career.
83. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Keywords: Fiction, magical realism
Synopsis: Dismayed with her life choices, a woman finds herself in a library-esque purgatory after a suicide attempt, each book in the library being an alternate future if she had made a different choice.
Review: Using an attempted suicide as the inciting incident for a Sliding Doors-esque fantasy novel may sound a bit problematic but The Midnight Library talks about depression, drug addiction and a host of other touchy subjects with both sensitivity and humor. One of my favorite reads of the summer.
84. Ready Player One by Cline Ernest
Keywords: Science fiction, 80s nostalgia, video games
Synopsis: Video game enthusiast Wade Watts embarks on a virtual reality quest to find a fortune left behind by the game’s creator.
Review: Do you love 80s references, especially when they take the place of satisfying character arcs and inventive plotting? Well then, you’ll love this book.
85. Ready Player Two by Cline Ernest
Keywords: Science fiction, 80s nostalgia, video games
Synopsis: Picking up where Ready Player One left off, Ready Player Two finds our hero embarking on another nostalgia-fueled scavenger hunt through virtual reality.
Review: Do you love 80s AND 90s references that stand in the place of satisfying character arcs and inventive plotting? Well then, you’ll love this sequel.
86. Pageboy by Elliot Page
Keywords: Memoir, Hollywood, LGBTQ
Synopsis: Juno/Umbrella Academy actor Elliot Page tells his story of being in Hollywood, being a child actor, their success and their eventual transition.
Review: Celebrity memoirs are a tricky beast that can often feel like a hollow exercise in ego inflation, score settling and easy cash grab. Thankfully, Page’s Pageboy is a cut above that as they discuss their experiences as an actor and their transgender identity with a frank writing style that invites the reader into their world. Timeline-wise the book does tend to jump around, which can be jarring for readings not paying close attention.
87. The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem
Keywords: Science fiction
Synopsis: A spaceship is sent out to find a missing crew and land on a planet where they may or may not have landed on.
Review: Often in science fiction, the scariest thing is the thing that is just out of view, the thing that is unknown. The Invincible, written in the early 60s, does a fantastic job using this to its advantage as it slowly reveals what happened to a missing spaceship. It’s creepy fun that is clearly inspiration of a host of space-centric stories that came after it.
88. README.TXT by Chelsea Manning
Keywords: Memoir, politics, LGBTQ
Synopsis: In this memoir, Chelsea Manning recounts her life as an intelligence analyst during the Iraq War, going to prison after being convicted for leaking unauthorized military documents, and her journey as a trans woman all during this.
Review: Chelsea Manning’s sharply written memoir is fascinating on one level as a sort of re-litigation of the circumstances that landed her on trial and convicted for leaking military document, but it’s actually far more engaging if you see it as a coming-of-age story, of a snapshot of where we were as a country in the wake of 9/11, and one person’s complicated relationship with their country, with themselves, and what is right and wrong.
89. Things That Make White People Uncomfortable by Michael Bennett
Keywords: Memoir/essay, activism, NFL
Synopsis: Through a series of essays, Super Bowl champion Bennett tackles a variety of topics including the college football industry, the NFL, social justice causes.
Review: A quick read of essays that are incredibly illuminating when Bennett discusses the business of college football.
90. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Keywords: Historical fiction, family drama, Hollywood
Synopsis: Set over one day, Malibu Rising follows famous surfer Nina Rivera as she throws her annual end-of-summer blowout party. And what’s on the guest list this year? Lingering trauma from their absentee philandering crooner father, a cheating ex-husband, said husband’s angry tennis pro girlfriend, interfamilial sibling squabbling and the guest of honor? A massive fire.
Review: Sometimes all you need to do as a writer is get a bunch of richly drawn characters in a room together and watch them act an absolute fool. As a reader, this book, especially the second half that that is focused primarily on the chaos of a party, was something I would RSVP yes to attend again.
91. Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose by Joe Biden
Keywords: Memoir, politics
Synopsis: A memoir both political and personal in scope, the book details the impact Beau Biden’s cancer had on the Biden family with the 2016 election as the backdrop.
Review: Books penned by politicians are notoriously dry reads that function primarily to forward their political aspirations and Promise Me, Dad has aspects of this. It also has a more relatively personal as Biden writes movingly about his relationship with Beau and his cancer battle that transforms the book into not just propaganda but also a peek into a father/son relationship.
92. The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston
Keywords: Romance, fantasy, ghosts
Synopsis: A female ghostwriter of romance novels grapples with her own ghosts when she returns to her hometown for a family funeral and is haunted by both her past and her present.
Review: Imagine if Citizen Kane, after spending the whole film teasing what Rosebud is, decided, “On second thought, doesn’t matter, anyway here’s Wonderwall.” The Dead Romantics isn’t Citizen Kane; it is a fun, bubbly, supernatural romantic comedy following a writer going home for her father’s funeral and trying to heal familial wounds with the aid of a handsome ghost. It does introduce a plot device early on and teases its importance for the entire book to only be like “JK, never mind.” The book may be returned but the scuff on my apartment wall from when I angrily threw it will always be a reminder of its time in my life.
93. No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Keywords: Contemporary fiction
Synopsis: After going viral on social media, a woman navigates online fame, fandoms and an offline family crisis.
Review: As someone who has been chronically online ever since the first time he logged onto Netscape, Lockwood’s novel captures the strange nature of what it’s like to go viral, the communities we form in social media spaces, and how that reality can feel so removed from the rigors of non-online life. There have been many books that have tried to capture the chaos of our perpetually online existences, but Lockwood’s funny, sad, often surrealistic approach is the most accurate in nailing the spirit.
94. The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage by Mel Robbins
Keywords: Self-help, nonfiction
Synopsis: Motivational speaker/podcaster Mel Robbins transforms her hit TedTalk into a bestselling self-help book all about how using her Five Second Rule will help people make decisive decisions to improve their lives.
Review: Five seconds is five too long to give to this book.
95. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Keywords: Horror, science fiction, adaptation
Synopsis: A modern reworking of the H.G. Wells classic The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Daught of Doctor Moreau follows the mad scientist Moreau’s daughter Carlota as she and her father contend with outsiders infiltrating their secretive world and the doctor’s horrific experiments.
Review: Redoing a classic novel has a lot of potential pitfalls. What new things are you bringing to the table? How do you make it relevant to modern day readers? Moreno-Garcia’s adaptation manages to avoid a lot of the obvious pitfalls and instead crafts a story that still manages to shock while grounding the story in a specific place and time (Yucatan peninsula amid the Caste War of Yucatan that happened between 1847-1915). It’s that specificity that gives the story its color and mood and enhances this classic tale for a new audience.
96. Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper
Keywords: Memoir, bird watching, comic books
Synopsis: Former Marvel comics writer Christian Cooper writes about his life loving science, science fiction, his professional highs and lows working for Marvel and the Central Park incident that brought his name into the national conversation about racial profiling, cancel culture, and “Karens”.
Review: From the moment that the book starts with a chapter titled “An Incident in Central Park,” Cooper knows what most likely brought you to the book but cleverly subverts expectations immediately. A smart, self-effacing narrator, Cooper does an excellent job of drawing the reader into his love of comics (he worked for Marvel Comics as a writer), his love of his bird watching and his life as a self-described “blerd” (Black nerd). Though it may have been a racially charged incident in Central Park that rose Cooper further into the national spotlight, the book is much more than that and so is Cooper.
97. It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders
Keywords: Nonfiction, politics, 2020 election
Synopsis: Part a recounting of his 2020 presidential nomination campaign and part a critique capitalism, Sanders explores the ills of capitalism and his solutions to fix it.
Review: A long, perfectly fine read that won’t necessarily win over any new converts but does a good job of capturing exactly what makes Sanders a dynamic political figure.
98. Heart Bones by Colleen Hoover
Keywords: Romance, Classic Colleen
Synopsis: After her mother unexpectedly dies, Beyah Grim moves to Texas to live with her father for the summer before going to attend university. Her plans for a quiet summer with her father’s family get interrupted by a romance with the rich boy next door named Samson, who is harboring, of course, a dark secret.
Review: If you wanted to write a parody of a Colleen Hoover novel, you’d be very hard pressed to outdo Hoover’s own Heart Bones. Lead characters with highly stylized names and tragic backstories? Check. Romanticized toxic relationships? Absolutely. Deeply unsexy sex scenes? You betcha. Saying all of this, was I entertained every page of this book? How could I not be with dialogue like this: “Maybe we did grow heart bones. But what if the only way of knowing you grew a heart bone is by feeling the agony caused by the break?” Charlie Berens WISHES he could’ve written something as funny for his The Midwest Survival Guide.
99. Trespassing Across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike Across the Heartland by Ken Ilgunas
Keywords: Memoir, Keystone Pipeline, hitchhiking
Synopsis: In this memoir, Ilgunas writes about his project of following the proposed Keystone Pipeline XL from Canada all the way through to Texas, all on foot.
Review: In Trespassing Across America, Ilgunas has fashioned a memoir that is part humorous travelogue/part cry for climate protection that never becomes hokey or pedantic. Initially hitchhiking and then traveling on foot the length of the proposed Keystone Pipeline XL, Ilgunas introduces the reader to a bevy of folks of all differing political leanings as he traverses the country with an immense sensitivity that never feels like the author is punching down, even when he doesn’t agree with their stance. Highly recommended.
100. The Promise by Damon Galgut
Keywords: Historical fiction, family drama, South Africa
Synopsis: A white South African family descends into chaos while grappling with the death of its matriarch and a deathbed promise made to their Black servant to give her own property/home goes unfulfilled.
Review: Smart, intense, and often surprising, The Promise is both broad and narrow in its scope as the action of the story often coincides with major historical events in the South African history happening in the background while remaining focused on the family drama happening at the family farm.
101. Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Keywords: Historical fiction, sports
Synopsis: Retired tennis phenom Carrie Soto is getting back in the game to save her tennis championship record with the aid of her coach father.
Review: While the plotline of Carrie Soto is Back is not especially revolutionary, this book makes for a compelling read because of the lead character. Smart, talented, unashamedly driven, brashly egotistical, Carrie Soto is one of the most entertaining characters I’ve gotten to spend time with. Her rivalry with fellow tennis champion Nicki Chan really gives the book its sparks as it delves into the specific pressure female athletes must endure to be successful and respected in their industry.
Want more "Man of Leisure"? Click the links below!
Column One: Once Upon a Time...
Column Two: Life, Death and the Pages In-Between
Column Three: The Summer I Turned Pretty Sober
Column Four: (101) Books of Summer