Posted 11:44 a.m. Friday, June 21, 2024
(101) Books of Summer
Spoiler alert: this is not a love story. This is a literary one.
They had bumped into each other on the dance floor accidentally/on purpose some Saturday night downtown. A brush of the shoulder. A wink of the eye. Who talked to who first is lost to history but suffice to say they were immediately smitten with each other from that very first meeting.
So much so they began corresponding daily. Now, these weren’t handwritten notes delivered by carrier pigeons nor were they messages in a bottle flung out into the roaring sea. It was the distinctly unromantic Yahoo! Messenger that brought them together daily. Every day they wrote to each other. Here they were, two strangers, telling each other little stories of their lives.
And when they weren’t writing to each other, they were taking long walks together late at night on weekends after the bars had closed. Hand in hand, they wound their way through the empty streets in mostly silence. Who needed words anyway. They had written them all.
If words had brought them together, words also tore them apart. An e-mail. A devastating piece of non-fiction. It was over. They were going back to their ex. How could their story be over already. What had felt like a prologue to a great romance had turned out to be merely a short story.
Years went by. And just like that Saturday many moons ago, they ran into each other accidentally/on purpose at a cozy little bar. They had both changed. Older. Wiser. Balder. They sat together in the empty bar, drinking sodas and catching up. Apologies for past wrongs were offered and accepted on both sides. Both were happy.
“I’m in the middle of reading 101 books this summer,” he said between sips of their Shirley Temple with a splash of sour (an absolute must).
“Oh really? You have any book recommendations?”
And just like that, they were in each other’s lives again, trading the dance club for a book club of two. Each day they would keep each other updated on their reading progress. They laughed. They argued. They dissected each book together. Again, this is not a love story, at least not in the traditional sense. But it didn’t matter, not to them. The words had returned.
61. Happy Place by Emily Henry
Keywords: Contemporary fiction, romance
Synopsis: College sweethearts pretend they are still together while trying to get through one final weekend with friends at the vacation cabin that had been their paradise for years.
Review: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy and girl pretend to still be together for the benefit of others and fall back in love as a result of their method acting. While the main romance is frustrating in its familiarity, is it an entertaining read with some interesting things to say about the growing pains of adult friendships? Absolutely.
62. Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Keywords: Historical fiction, entertainment industry
Synopsis: Loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s tumultuous making of their Rumours album, Daisy and the Six follows the professional highs and personal lows of a fictional 1970s rock act, particularly the combustible relationship between their dueling lead singers.
Review: A quirky blend of pseudo-oral history and How I Met Your Mother, this novel is relatively mild compared to its source material/inspiration. The book really sings (I know, feel free to boo me) when it focuses less on the soap opera relationship dramas and more on the intense creative process that creates hit music.
63. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Keywords: Historical fiction, science, cooking, television
Synopsis: Take a smart, if not particularly socially adept, scientist, put her in front of a national audience, add a pinch of feminism to her cooking and maybe you’ve got the recipe for a hit.
Review: There’s a lot to like in this novel even if the central premise (Julia Child but make her conventionally hot) isn’t exactly the serve that the book thinks it is. But I will hand it to the book that for something that does stick closely to a lot of tropes, it did have some genuine shocks in its plot.
64. It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover
Keywords: Contemporary fiction, Romance
Synopsis: A woman tries to juggle her complicated feelings for a charismatic but dangerous doctor and the boy from her past who has re-entered her life
Review: The protagonist of this story is a florist, and her name is Lily Bloom. That pretty much clues you into everything you need to know about this book specifically and Hoover as a writer in general.
65. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston
Keywords: Short stories, Harlem Renaissance
Synopsis: A collection of short stories from the noted author of Their Eyes Were Watching God
Review: A great peek into the Harlem Renaissance as well as Black life in Florida, the collection highlights Hurston’s ability to create wonderfully textured characters. A highlight of the collection is the short story Black Death, a darkly funny tale of superstition and karmic retribution.
66. Let Trump Be Trump by Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie
Keywords: Nonfiction, politics, 2016 election, Donald Trump
Synopsis: An insider’s look at the inner workings of the 2016 Trump campaign, former Trump campaign managers Lewandowski and Bossie detail the highs and lows that culminated with the election of Donald Trump to the White House.
Review: It’s hard to know how to react to a book that earnestly uses a quote from the mob film Goodfellas to lead us into a chapter about what a rat former Trump staffer Paul Manafort is. I’m no Susan Sontag, but I know camp when I see it.
67. Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor
Keywords: Science fiction, Afrofuturism
Synopsis: After a meteor shower, a young girl tries to make sense of her new-found powers as the adopted daughter of Death.
Review: A powerfully written dystopian novel that smartly incorporates African culture and setting to differentiate it from other similar dystopian works.
68. It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover
Keywords: Romance
Synopsis: In this sequel to Hoover’s breakout hit It Ends with Us, It Starts with Us catches up with Lily Bloom, Ryle and Atlas.
Review: We love to talk about how a meeting could’ve been an email. This sequel could’ve been an epilogue. But again, I will say that I was never bored by what Hoover wrote as the story does sparkle with an earnest charm that is endearing despite all my efforts to dismiss it outright.
69. Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Keywords: LGBTQ, POC in academia
Synopsis: Set at a Midwestern college, Real Life unfolds over one summer weekend as a Black graduate student navigates his primarily White social circle, the racism within his biochem program and his complicated romantic entanglement with a straight-identifying contemporary.
Review: Racism in academia, white privilege, sexual violence, toxic relationships. Real Life takes on all these issues and more without being preachy. Instead, it lets the characters be messy in real ways that defies easy categorizing of people as heroes/villains, good/bad representation. And despite all the heavy topics, it’s a fun read. I promise! There is a dinner party from hell that is executed with such precision it feels like you as a reader are intruding on the real implosion of several friendships/relationships. It’s awful and painful and I reread that section more than part of any book on this list frankly.
70. The Only Woman by Immy Humes
Keywords: Nonfiction, photography, women throughout history
Synopsis: As told through historical notes and photographs, The Only Woman shows the long history of lone women in male dominated spaces across various industries and time periods.
Review: A stunning photographic ode to all the women who broke down barriers in their respective fields of work.
71. Greenland by David Santos Donaldson
Keywords: Historical fiction, LGBTQ, novel within a novel
Synopsis: A stressed writer working on rewrites of his book finds his life blurring with his book’s subject matter.
Review: A frenetic novel of dueling timelines, Greenland works best as an exploration of writer confronting himself, history, and an impending deadline. It is a book that I ended up admiring more for its ambition than I enjoyed for its end results.
72. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Keywords: Mystery/thriller, animal rights
Synopsis: An animal lover in a Polish village becomes an amateur sleuth when her neighbors start being murdered, with some of the local animals as prime suspects.
Review: Angela Lansbury as mystery writer Jessica Fletcher on the classic 1980s program Murder, She Wrote is my patron saint so if you give me a book about a feisty woman of a certain age solving a murder mystery and being a nuisance to the police in the process, I’m ready to lead the book club discussion before even cracking open the book.
73. Wake Up with Purpose: What I’ve Learned in my First Hundred Years by Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt
Keywords: Memoir, sports
Synopsis: Famous as “Sister Jean,” the Loyola college basketball superfan and chaplain, Schmidt writes about her faith, her love of basketball and her advice to live a long, fulfilling life.
Review: Sometimes all you can ask from a book is for it to be a cute, light read and Sister Jean’s memoir about her life as a nun turned famous sports fan and chaplain for a college basketball team is the kind of low stakes, pleasant diversion that won’t change your life but does make for an enjoyable read.
74. The Practice of Groundedness by Brad Stulberg
Keywords: Self-help
Synopsis: Stulberg teaches readers how the concept of groundedness can enhance one’s life as it brings it into proper balance.
Review: One of the plethora books about productiveness, what this book lacks in originality it makes up in clear, concise directions to implement groundedness into a person’s life.
75. The Midwest Survival Guide by Charlie Berens
Keywords: Nonfiction, humor, Midwest, ranch dressing
Synopsis: Comedian Berens brings his popular Midwestern-centric sense of humor to a coffee table book that is equal parts personal memoir and explainer of all things Wisconsin.
Review: If you ever wanted to know what a book co-authored by a brandy old fashioned and a pan of tater tot hot dish would read like, Charlie Berens’s Midwest Survival Guide solves that mystery for you. Funny and informative, the book dials back on Berens’ goofy comedic persona to give a fairly straight-forward look at Midwest culture while also a peek into Berens’s own biography.
76. Stay True by Hua Hsu
Keywords: Memoir, 90s
Synopsis: Set primarily in the 1990s, Stay True is a coming-of-age memoir where Hsu writes about his Asian-American upbringing, his time writing for zines, and the friendship that deeply affected his life.
Review: A deeply moving memoir about friendship that is filled with lots of fun 90s details without letting that nostalgia become its defining characteristic.
77. The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang
Keywords: Mystery, set in Wisconsin
Synopsis: A modern adaptation of the classic novel The Brothers Karamazov, the action is moved from 1870s Russian to modern day Wisconsin as the story follows the Chao family, their restaurant, their simmering tensions, and a murder.
Review: A murder mystery where the murder and the mystery are the least interesting aspects of the story? How can that be true and still be such a good book, you might ask. The Family Chao is less a murder mystery and more of a seriocomic look at one family trying to hold onto everything they’ve worked for, the resulting simmering family tensions from within and the racism they’ve had to contend with from the outside in their sleepy Wisconsin town.
78. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
Keywords: Historical fiction
Synopsis: Set in the bustling 1960s of Harlem, Harlem Shuffle follows the lives of folks trying to make the American Dream come true, by hook or by crook (specifically through an ambitious heist).
Review: A fun crime caper that serves as the first in a proposed series, Harlem Shuffle is an entertaining romp one could imagine as a film starring famed actor Richard Roundtree in a different timeline.
79. Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
Keywords: Nonfiction, self-help
Synopsis: Through a series of anecdotes focused on his “poor dad” and the “rich dad” who took him under his wing, Kiyosaki gives the reader financial advice on how to become a financial success.
Review: All respect to anybody who has found this book to be useful in their own financial life, but I have to say just on a pure writing level: mama, this. is. garbage. If you want a full debunking of the advice in this book, I suggest you listen to the podcast If Books Could Kill’s episode devoted to this book.
80. Noor by Nnedi Okorafor
Keywords: Science fiction, dystopian future, Afrofuturism
Synopsis: The story follows the adventures of an African woman who is part human/part machine and a complete fugitive after a violent skirmish sends her on the run.
Review: Science fiction loves a fugitive. It also loves a character who is part human/machine. And if you can sprinkle in a little dash dystopian distrust of the government and corporations, that’s more than okay. Noor hits all these tropes but manages to invigorate all of them with the African setting to differentiate itself to great effect that takes it beyond just another bit of sci-fi.
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Column One: Once Upon a Time...
Column Two: Life, Death and the Pages In-Between
Column Three: The Summer I Turned Pretty Sober