Monthly Reading Review: October 2024
Recommended books and articles from the past month.
Dear friends,
I am so excited to share my first-ever Monthly Reading Review, covering the best books and articles I’ve read over the past couple of months. Scroll down to read my reviews of Writers & Lovers by Lily King, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, The Young Queens by Leah Redmond Chang, Einstein’s God by Krista Tippett, and Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes — plus some must-read articles from writers I love!
Before going further, I should note that I will never, ever share a negative review of anything I read here. I pretty much love everything I read. Plus, being a writer is hard, and the world’s got enough critics!
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
Funny, piercing, and tender, Writers & Lovers by Lily King is that rare kind of book that’s both compulsively readable and indelibly touching, especially for those with an itch to create. It kicks off in the summer of 1997 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we meet Casey Peabody — a young writer who’s struggling to make ends meet as a waitress. Wrecked by her mother’s sudden death and a love affair gone wrong, Casey is trailed by suffocating debt, medical ails, and a dark secret about her father. At times, she feels like she is wasting her life — “six years and this is what I have to show for myself?” — yet she can’t give up on her novel, her “one constant.” Inhabiting a world of her own making, she hears her characters’ voices and anticipates their moves and even aches for them when they are gone. “I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse,” she tells us.
From the very first page, King manages to capture the frenetic contradictions of early adulthood, entwining moments of dread and sorrow with moments of humor and transcendent clarity. Through Casey, she embodies all that it means to lead a creative life, from the euphoric breakthroughs to the nagging questions that can keep you up at night: Did I get it right? What if they hate it? And is it all worth it?
Embracing these unknowns, King gives us not only a book that’s impossible to put down, but also a character that’s impossible not to root for. I know I am very late to the party here, but for what it’s worth, Writers & Lovers is an unequivocal WONDER.
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake begins in the spring of 2020, just a couple of months into COVID, when Lara’s three daughters have retreated to the family’s orchard in northern Michigan. Spellbound, Emily, Maisie, and Nell listen as their mom recounts the story of her long-ago fling with famous movie star Peter Duke at Tom Lake — a theater company where Lara was cast as the lead in “Our Town.” What springs forth is a cozy, almost pastoral meditation on first love and growing up as well as a glittering example of what Patchett does best. Here, as in all of her novels, Patchett explores how a family pieces itself together, examining what it’s like to be in relationship with people whom you just can’t live without.
Many reviewers have framed Tom Lake as an elegy, reminiscent of Anton Checkhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” “It is about being constrained by one’s role — in this case, motherhood — and it is about the transformations wrought by the passage of time,” reviewed Katy Waldman for The New Yorker. As Lara reflects on her theatric prime, we readers are invited to inhabit the enchanted world of Tom Lake, where the girl gets not only the lead, but also the guy.
But is Tom Lake a “fairy tale,” as Waldman says? To me, it seemed like a version of college, where time stretches for eternity, making half a day seem like “a solid six months.” Yet there is also a lingering darkness — an inescapable feeling that you are running out of time or are going to be left behind.
In many ways, what I found more alluring than Tom Lake was Lara’s family farm. Full of marvels of its own, the farm gives its characters room to breathe. There is desire for normalcy and nostalgia for the past, of course; yet there is something holy in the farm’s cherry trees, soft grass, and the slow-moving clouds. Sequestered from the world, it allows Lara and her daughters to dig deep into the stories they hold instead of listening to podcasts “until the hour of [their] death.” While on the farm, they are able to replace acting with living, abandoning the script in exchange for something more real.
The Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power by
In the first pages of The Young Queens,
introduces us to a young orphan, Catherine de’ Medici — the only child of Lorenzo de' Medici and his wife, Madeleine de la Tour d' Auvergne. Against the tumultuous politics of sixteenth-century Florence, the “duchessina” is sequestered in Italian convents until her marriage to Henry, the future King of France, at the age of fourteen. Widowed at thirty-eight, she goes on to become the de facto leader of France as well as mother to Elisabeth de Valois — the future Queen of Spain — and a surrogate mother, and future mother-in-law, to Mary Queen of Scots.I stumbled on The Young Queens by accident, and I’m so glad I did. Page by page, Chang masterfully intertwines the stories of Catherine, Elisabeth, and Mary, only the last of which I really knew anything about. Together, these women chartered new paths, holding firm against rising religious discord, populist revolt, and entrenched misogyny, all while trying to preserve their power and — in Mary’s case — their lives.
Throughout the book, Chang moves seamlessly between the three women’s stories before concluding with a gripping finish. As she blends rich historical context with human interest, she situates them as not just chess pieces, but as living, breathing women with their own bodies, fears, and fatal flaws.
Now that I have finished The Young Queens, I can’t wait to start The Serpent Queen starring Samantha Morton on Starz. Has anyone seen it?
Einstein’s God: Conversations about Science and the Human Spirit by Krista Tippett
Drawn from Krista Tippett’s award-winning public radio program, Einstein’s God invites us to dwell in the uncomfortable intersection between science and spirituality, exploring how the two can be reconciled — if at all. As the title suggests, Tippett begins with Albert Einstein, who wrote extensively about what he called a “cosmic religious order” and an “infinitely superior spirit.” Contrary to popular thought, Einstein believed in “something eternal that lies beyond the hand of fate and of human delusions,” much like Charles Darwin believed “that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” Even so, Einstein’s and Darwin’s work unquestionably poked holes in our traditional conceptions of a “superior spirit,” undermining the idea of a God who preordained (or intervened with) aspects of our existence.
As she interviews theoretical physicists, surgeons, mathematicians, psychologists, and immunologists, Tippett examines various “contradictory explanations of reality,” exploring how these explanations can be equally instructive and even simultaneously true. Through these explorations, Tippett and her subjects ask countless fascinating questions — Are we evolutionarily programed for good? Are we destined by our biology or are our choices ordained by physics? — as they wrestle with the conundrum of “theodicy,” by which a good and loving God can exist alongside evil and innocent suffering.
I think what I found most interesting was the idea that a good and loving God could have created not an instant, “ready-made” world (as most scripture would suggest), but rather “a world with an inborn capacity to become and create itself.” The idea prompted me and the members of my book club to reconsider the theological “point” of creation: Was it loneliness? Or boredom? Or perhaps something more generative and sustaining?
Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes
If you’re in the mood for something a bit lighter, I wholeheartedly recommend Wives Like Us by Plum Sykes, a former editor at Vogue (and allegedly the inspiration for Emily Blunt’s character in The Devil Wears Prada).
Set in the Cotswolds, the novel follows a coterie of modern English aristocrats obsessed with their new American neighbor, Selby Fairfax. With proverbial “queen bee” Tata Hawkins and her lovable butler Ian at the helm, these “Country Princesses” weave in and out of a delectable series of animal rescues, marital imbroglios, political scandals, and fashion faux pas, encountering everyone from a Polish tycoon to a “bikini influencer” to a dashing London lawyer who moonlights as a gentleman farmer.
Wives Like Us might be best described as a blend of Emma and Crazy Rich Asians. As in both of those novels, there are the so-called “nouveau riche” who have “ruined” the good and old way — this time with their extensive spa treatments, private clubs, athleisure apparel, and labradoodles — as there are the Carson-like “stalwarts upon whom British country life depends.” Together, they make something utterly captivating and indescribably fun — a book that you just can’t help but get lost in.
Must-Read Articles
MomTok is the Apotheosis of 21st Century Womanhood by Sophie Gilbert (The Atlantic)
We Can Do Better Than ‘Positive Masculinity’ by
(The New York Times)Coldplay’s Self-Help Pop by Amanda Petrusich (The New Yorker)
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books by Rose Horowitch (The Atlantic)
Sisters May Fight, But They Also Form Revolutionary Bonds by Julia Cooke (Los Angeles Times)
What Can Memoirs by Supreme Court Justices Teach Us by Amy Davidson Sorkin (The New Yorker)
Inside the Political Book Machine by
(Esquire)This Influencer Says You Can’t Parent Too Gently by Olga Khazan (The Atlantic)
Are We Overdoing the Political Indoctrination of Our Kids by
(The Cut)I Miss the Wondrous World I Knew Before Email by Ann Patchett (The New York Times)
Saoirse Ronan Has Lived, and Acted, Through A Lot by Roisin Kiberd (The New York Times)
Must-Read Articles on Substack
The Quiet Radicalism of Tim Walz’s Big Dad Energy by
(Made with Care)Are You Stressed by Election Week by
(Meghan O’Rourke)What is English Class for: Another Literary Panic Strikes the Internet by
(Fiction Matters)What To Do If You Find Yourself on the Wrong Side of the Internet by
(Liminal Space)
Happy reading!
Your friend and fellow traveler,
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Thanks so much Cornelia!