Thank you for joining me here! I hope you enjoy this series and I’d love to hear from you about what you are reading these days.
Book #1:
Like a House on Fire by Lauren McBrayer (Length: 316 pages). I could NOT put this novel down. Merit, a 40-year-old architect with two young children goes back to work full-time for a very charismatic older woman, Jane. The two immediately click as co-workers and then as friends. Merit is very “comfortable” in a 10-year marriage but she (as many of us do) finds her husband not to be very super helpful with the kids, thoughtful, etc. Enter romantic crush in the form of Jane. This is not very open door at all and is more about the love story that starts between the two. I absolutely loved the writing style, the pacing was perfection, and while I was a bit annoyed with Merit at times, this was a win for me. (The ending did throw me for a bit of a loop given the preceding build up, but overall it’s a great read.)
Book #2:
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (Length: 395 pages). Two thumbs up for me for this wonderful book! It’s been on my radar for quite a while thanks to several book podcasters raving about it, but they’re right. The protagonist is Tookie, an Ojibwe Indian living in Minneapolis, working at the author’s real-life bookshop (the author Louise is mentioned throughout which is fun!) when she realizes that the bookshop is haunted by its most annoying customer, Flora, who recently passed away. Flora was a white woman who wanted to be a tribal member. The timeline is centered pre-pandemic and during the pandemic and the author covers the murder of George Floyd, the pandemic, Indigenous culture, etc so it’s very immersive and very “now”. I absolutely adore this book and will be recommending it to my discerning reader friends for sure.
Book #3:
The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (Length: 302 pages). This is a another very hot book now, and it lives up to its hype. It’s a book of essays, subtitled Essays on a Human-Centered Planet. The author has random musings, some deep such as “Our Capacity for Wonder” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” but most are fun “Diet Dr Pepper” and “Scratch n Sniff Stickers” but with a core of heart. He reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell as he reveals the “truth” behind many assumptions we all have about people and events. The theme is the author is “reviewing” various aspects of the anthropocene (a geological time frame starting from the time humans arrived on earth) with a star rating system. I found this to be the PERFECT audiobook. The essays are a perfect length for a commute, and they are read by the author himself.
Lora Terrill 