I got a surprising amount of reading done the past two months despite being slammed at work. I think two things helped – 1) Audiobooks for my commute, and 2) getting a bedside lamp and reading first thing in the morning (non-fiction) and last thing at night (fiction). I didn’t get around to writing an April book recap, so here is April and May recap together….
The Secret Pearl by Mary Balogh – This historical romance, first published in 1991 was a re-read for me – I picked it up to read one day in April when I was under the weather and looking for a comfort read. Mary Balogh was one of the first historical romance authors that I obsessed over – I would stalk ebay for her backlist. Her literary output now is gentler, almost sedate, but she used to write angsty romance novels with genre-busting plots that often seemed bonkers at first, but would (mostly) work. This one is no different – it’s about Fleur Bradshaw (even that name is kind of par for what’s to come) has resorted to prostitution to survive (a common theme for Balogh) and her first customer is the married Duke of Ridgeway. He immediately regrets his treatment of her and secretly engages him as a governess for his daughter. Of course they fall in love. There’s all sorts of red flags here, right??? It all sounds tawdry and sensationalist, and honestly I can’t tell if it still works or not because I loved this book so much when I first read it in my 20s so am coming with strongly nostalgic bias. The book now feel so overwrought and everyone suffers and is miserable for so much of the book, but the writing and craft of the book is still really good. I do love a good suffer and redemption and that’s here – I just don’t know if this book has aged well.
Rules for Ruin by Mimi Matthews, read by Will Watt and Elizabeth Knowelden: I had read a Mimi Matthews novella and liked it, so I thought I’d try this novel, especially since one of the narrators is my audiobook boyfriend Will Watt. This romance tells the story about Esme who is out to ruin an certain Viscount and Gabriel Royce who owns a betting shop and who has an interest in said Viscount maintaining a sterling reputation. Esme and Gabriel spar and quarrel and support and rescue each other numerous times throughout the book. This book was … fine. Enemies to lovers isn’t my favorite trope. I liked Esme and Gabriel individually – they are both smart, ruthless, competent, and kind – but they didn’t have a whole lot of chemistry as a couple.
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, translated by Modupé Bodé-Thomas. I read this book for my 2026 Classics Challenge. The prompt was to read a book set in Africa. Technically this book didn’t count because it was published in 1979, and the cut off for this challenge was 1975, but I really wanted to satisfy this prompt by reading a book by an African author as opposed to a white author in Africa, so I decided this book will count. Bâ was a Muslim Sengelese writer and activist. So Long a Letter is one of two books that she published and is semi-autobiographical. The book is told in the form of a letter from the recently widowed Ramatoulaye to her sister. Ramatoulaye writes about her attempts to reconcile her life as a modern women with the traditions and morals of a traditional society and her struggles with her Husband taking a second wife after they had been married for thirty years and had multiple children. Some of this book read like a soap opera and some of it read like feminist rant against polygamy and patriarchy and some of it read like a woman tired of the every day work of being a wife and mother. What I liked most about this book was seeing how Ramatoulaye decides to move forward independently after her Husband’s death. Near the end she says, “The word ‘happiness’ does indeed have meaning, doesn’t it? I shall go out in search of it.”
Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan – This novella follows the final day, from opening to closing, of a Red Lobster. The Red Lobster next to a Connecticut strip mall has been marked for closing and some of the employees re-assigned to the Olive Garden the next town over. Manny, the manager of the Red Lobster manages surly employees, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, demanding customers and an oncoming blizzard. This is one of those “just a slice of life” books where people go to work and try to survive the mundane and the frustrating, the kind of thing where the parking lot has to be ploughed even while your heart is breaking and confused. I really liked this book.
Felicity Cabot Sells her Soul by Aydra Richards – Continuing on my historical romance kick. I was looking for something with a good grovel ending and Reddit told me Richards writes a good grovel. This book was fine – I felt like I was missing some major plot points because it’s the third in a series. The book starts off with the hero and heroine getting married because she needs money to keep her school open, and he has money and they were sweethearts years ago even though they hadn’t talked to each other in ten years or so, like this was literally the first or second chapter. There was some serious set up and back story missing for me. There was a nice arc for the male main character, but the heroine failed to impress me, and I usually like school teacher heroines – she just seemed like she wanted to stay mad at the hero for the sake of being mad, which was annoying because I thought he was doing everything right.
This American Woman by Zarna Garg, read by the author– Garg played the mother in the movie A Nice Indian Boy, which I had loved, so when I saw that she had also written a memoir, I looked it up on Libby and borrowed it. Garg’s book tells about her childhood in India, and how she comes to American to escape an arranged marriage and how she eventually became a stand up comedian – not something that a lot of Indian women do. She faces every challenge with a determination and focus that I found impressive. This memoir was funny but it was also grim in parts. I really liked listening to this one a lot. My favorite chapter was the one where she spent an entire chapter detailing how she decided what to wear for her stand up routines.
10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation—And Making Your Own Life Easier by David S. Yeager: This title is clearly is the book version of “clickbait” – I saw this book on a list of favorite parenting books and I thought, “Hmmm … maybe this will hold the key to getting the kids to pick up around the house….” Spoiler – it does not hold any such key. Despite that, and despite some of the chapters being a bit repetitive, I felt like I got a lot out of this book. Even more than shifting my mindset about how I motivate my kids, it’s really helped me think about how I work with my interns. I’m still making my way through all the passages I marked up (this book is the reason I can’t borrow any other library books right now because it is so massively overdue), but my main takeaways were:
a) it’s important to balance high expectations with encouragement
b) when giving feedback focus on process not results, and make sure the recipient of feedback knows that you’re giving feedback because you want them to grow.
c) Giving young people a sense of belonging and ownership is important to empowering them to take charge of a situation.
All in all, one of the better parenting books I’ve read in a while.
A Thousand Naked Strangers by Kevin Hazzard, narrated by George Newbern: So years ago, I heard an interview on Fresh Air with a paramedic who had written a memoir. What I remember the most is that he said the thing about having a woman in labor in the ambulance is that no one wants her to give birth in the ambulance, but the moment the baby arrives everyone is so happy. Anyhow, I wanted to read this memoir, but lost track of the title and author until Birchie mentioned this book on her blog and I realized this was that book I had heard about on Fresh Air so many years ago. I found this book grisly and fascinating – Hazzard has some really shocking stories from his work. But also, I think Hazzard really shows the importance of connecting with the people that he’s trying to treat; EMTs and Paramedics are often the first person someone deals with in a traumatic situation. Also, it is wild to me that he EMT course was actually quite short, and how minimal the training is to be a paramedic. I’m sure it’s a pretty thorough course, but to think that paramedics often have to treat life threatening injuries, it’s kind of amazing to me that they don’t have medical degrees. I really enjoyed this book.
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell – I heard about this book on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s What Should I Read Next podcast. I had read O’Farrell’s Hamnet and loved loved loved that book so much that I was afraid to read any subsequent books by O’Farrell lest I be disappointed. I thought, though, that her back catalogue might be a good way to read more of her writing. This novel is a dual time-line novel where in the past we follow Esme Lennox as her family moves from India back to England, and in present day we have Iris who discovers that she has a heretofore unknown great aunt in an asylum. I found this book very readable – the prose was elegant and spare, the historical elements about how women’s mental health was often trampled on was interesting to me. However I found the plot a bit formulaic. I couldn’t tell if for me the elegant writing elevated the tired tropes or if the over-used tropes brought down the writing. So all in all a good read, but I found myself very annoyed by a lot of it.
Cassandra in Reverse by Holly Smale, read by Kristen Atherton – This novel tells the story of Cassandra who one day, after getting dumped and losing her job, discovers that she has the ability to rewind her life and live it again from whatever specific point she wants. This book was not the novel I thought it would be when I first started reading it. The tone started off quite comic and wry, but the real story of Cassandra turns out to be very complex and sad. I thought the book was maybe two chapters too long and could have used a trim here or there, but Cassandra has many strands in her life to unravel and reset – family, work, friends… The one thing I kept thinking throughout this book, as I listened to Cassandra constantly re-setting her life to cover for mistakes she thinks she has made, was how imperfectly perfect life is. We might want to go back and have a second chance at many moments, but the flaws in these present moments are what make them perfect for the life we are in right now.
The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck – This is a collection of of interconnected short stories, mostly set in New England, the stories spanning three centuries. Often short story collections feel disjointed to me, but Shattuck cleverly wrote these stories in pairs where a question or minor moment or object in one story is resolved or shows up in the following story, often in surprising ways. Each story felt like a little bit of an Easter egg hunt. This book reminds me that what we experience is only one tiny sliver of what someone else might experience and there are whole worlds and truths that we don’t even know exist. Highly recommend – the stories are poignant, thoughtful, and smart. I read this collection once then immediately went back and read it all again.
The No-Show by Beth O’Leary read by Evanna Lynch, Hether Long, Kathryn Drysdale, and Luke Thompson – I’ve generally liked Beth O’Leary on audio – her novels are well paced and I usually find her characters flawed but not annoyingly so. Full disclosure, I might have wanted to listen to this book because Luke Thompson of Bridgerton was one of the narrators. This novel is told from the point of view of three different women, each of whom gets stood up on Valentine’s Day by a man called Joseph Carter. It turns out that they’ve all been stood up by the same man. I found this book really frustrating for the first two thirds; I kept thinking “I don’t know how O’Leary is going to redeem Joseph Carter.” But then the last third I found really beautiful. There is a bit of a twist in the story and once the twist is unraveled, I really liked how the rest of the story unfolded. But oh boy, it was a long time getting there, and Joseph Carter remains a little less than fully formed, even in the end.
Mindset by Carol Dweck – This book was on a lot of lists of influential behavioral psychology books to read. Dweck talks about the importance of a growth mindset over a fixed mindset – the idea that people who believe change and growth are possible will have more success than those who think their personality and skillset is innate. I found this book really repetitive. Maybe the idea was pretty revolutionary when the book was first published, but I feel like the idea of a growth mindset is pretty prevalent these days, so I didn’t gain any new insights.
Life’s Too Short by Abby Jimenez – I’ve never read a Jimenez book before so when I saw it at a Little Free Library, I brought it home with me. This novel is about Vanessa, a travel vlogger with an incurable genetic disease who is suddenly left in charge of her infant niece, and Adrian, the hot lawyer/landlord next door who befriends her. I thought the first few chapters were pretty funny, and I loved the meet cute, but ultimately I found Vanessa and Adrian had only lukewarm chemistry, the main conflict a little forced, and the resolution implausible – it was oddly melodramatic and tedious at the same time. And the ending made me want to scream. So I guess all in all, entertaining and pleasant enough, but the writing and the plotting never got off the ground for me. Tell me if I should give Jimenez another chance.
On My Proverbial Night Stand:
Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd- my current audiobook for my commute
The Euatace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope- still plugging away at this serial novel. Lizzie Eustace still won’t give those diamonds back.
Joyful Anyway by Kate Bowler- reading this for my Lenten Reading group.
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward – I’ve been using my iPad a lot for work lately and I haven’t been wanting to use it for reading so I’ve been working through my TBR of books I’ve picked up at various Little Free Libraries. There are a couple of LFL in my area that have really solid literary novel collections. This was one of those books. It’s kind of sad but full of good people.
Any good re-reads lately? Do you have a lot of Little Free Libraries where you are? Recommend me more good behavioral psychology books – I’m looking for my next non-fiction read.