Hey All!
Hope everyone is having a beautiful Easter/Passover/Spring Sunday! I am in the van (as usual) and have just enjoyed a delicious croissant from Old City Java in Knoxville (Am I a parody of myself?). Don’t let the use of the word “Java” discourage you this place is legit, highly recommend a visit if you’re in Knox.
Anyway, I wanted to share a couple of books I’ve enjoyed recently. The first is The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai.
This one came out in 2019 and I hadn’t actually heard of it at all even though (as you can see) it received a lot of critical acclaim. I stumbled across it on Apple Books via my iPad and ended up reading the entire thing on the plane back from Spain. I love to read on airplanes because you have such long stretches of unbroken time, but the book has to really grab you, to keep you from becoming aware that you’re hurtling through the skies and will be trapped in a metal tube for many many hours. I feel it’s a good test for a book, one which this one definitely passed!
I should start by saying that this book is heart-wrenching. It takes place in Chicago (another cool aspect for me), during the height of the AIDS crisis, and it was not an easy story to read. But it’s incredibly well done, and I feel that I absorbed the wisdom of a whole era that I missed through reading it. There were also some epidemic/pandemic aspects that were familiar from the covid era, but it was interesting to see the different ways that these tragedies can play out depending on who is being affected by them.
Anyway, it’s absolutely worth your time, and an amazing read, and I can’t shut up about it, and if anyone has read it please let me know because I’m dying to talk about it!
The other book on my shelf (and by shelf, I mean shoved in my suitcase) at the moment is called “Hell of a Book”, by Jason Mott. This book is WILD, in the best of ways. The narrator is bizarre and unreliable, and I have no idea what is actually happening, but it’s keeping me on my toes. I should say that I’m only halfway through, so I can’t give a fully fleshed-out opinion, but I’m really enjoying it. Somehow, despite the narrator’s sarcastic tone, maybe because of it, the book manages to be really emotionally fraught. It feels so original and is showing me how one can write about a subject like a police shooting or generational trauma in endlessly unexpected and new ways.
These are the kind of books that leave me in awe of novelists. What are y’all reading this season? Hit me up with those recs!
Xo
Rachel