Kai is six months old! He can sit, he can grab things and put them in his mouth, he can nearly crawl. Kai is six months old, Naomi is three and a half, and Niko and I are 37 and a quarter. We’ve made it past the winter solstice and the light is returning. Both kids have been sick for several days and sleep has been just terrible, but the light is returning. Tonight Kai joyfully ate boiled carrot, bright pieces of orange all over his face and fuzzy little scalp, smeared in the creases of his ridiculously chubby palms. “Kaiiii,” Naomi coos frequently. “He’s so cute and chubby.” Sickness is hard, but generally we are all doing well. Over winter break we went up north for two days and watched Lake Superior waves and played on rocky beaches. Naomi had a ball dancing to the live music at the brewery and Kai had a ball watching his big sister.

This reading installment starts in mid-September, when I went back to work, and continues until December 31st, when I decided to use the arbitrariness of calendars to cut this list off. (You can see the amount of reading goes down – back to work, and also Kai started sleeping a bit longer at night, meaning fewer bleary middle-of-night minutes reading my ebooks on Libby.) The list is roughly in the order in which I read these. Green books are ones I loved and recommend. Purple books are ones I disliked (and either didn’t finish or wished I hadn’t.) Black books are somewhere in between!

1. Reunion by Elise Juska (F) – a perfectly fine novel about three friends in their forties attending their COVID-delayed college reunion in Maine. Strong writing, but also – I read this just four months ago and I already can hardly remember it.
2. The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donaghue (F) – The NYT review calls it an “examination of the bond between two young booksellers in Ireland.” This book was very funny and very clever and I loved the main characters and their friendship so much by the end of it all. Solid ending.
3. Happiness for Beginners by Katherine Center (F) – Romance + backpacking adventure. Very light, very meh. A few good woodsy scenes.
4. The Hopefuls by Beth O’Leary (F) – Contemporary fiction about drama between young professionals in D.C. I found it a funny, fast read.
5. Swallow the Ghost by Eugenie Montague (F) – A strange literary mystery that I really liked until the extremely unsatisfying ending.
6. Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld (F) – SO good. So funny and fun and smart and fast and fascinating. It made me want to binge-watch a bunch of Saturday Night Live, and led me to immediately read…
7. Girl Walks into a Bar by Rachel Dratch (NF) – …a memoir by a longtime SNL cast member. Funny and insightful. (Not quite as fun as the fiction version.)
8. Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz (F) – Anthony Horowitz writes kind of grumpy, clever murder mysteries. I like his writing and his plots, but this was one of my least favorites.
9. The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan (F) – Why are Irish writers so good?? I liked this “millenial novel” the more of it I read, and found it funnier and funnier. Also a v solid ending.
10. Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (F) – Patchett is a beautiful writer and this book is set in northern Michigan, a place I love. It started a bit slow but picked up. I liked it even more than I thought it would. It made me cry a little! More than once. In a good way.
11. 10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall (F) – A light rom-com about two men who start as enemies (and boss-employee) and slowly fall in love. Sometimes funny, but dragged a bit.
12. Marple, a collection of short stories by 12 authors (F) – I ❤ Agatha Christie and I loved this. Miss Marple is one of Christie’s famous detectives – a little old lady in a small village with a knack for quietly solving mysteries – and this is a collection of 12 short stories by contemporary female mystery writers, each taking their own stab at writing a Miss Marple mystery. A few of them were duds, but most were great, and the tribute was lovely.
13. Very Bad Company by Emma Rosenblum (F) – I don’t understand why so many people like Rosenblum’s books. They are boring and awkwardly written.
14. You Are Not Alone, by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (F) – Satisfyingly fun thriller.
15. Trust and Safety by Laura Blackett and Eve Gleischman (F) – I would not be surprised if other people hated this book, but I thought it was very clever, very funny, very accurate satire. What even is authenticity?
16. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 and 3/4 by Sue Townsend (F, YA) – The diary of a precocious British teenage boy. Mildly funny and charming. They’ve made it into a play.
17. The Power by Naomi Alderman (F) – I only read a bit of this one – the premise/purpose is impactful, but I’m wayyy too hormonal for this many scenes of pain/violence. (Alderman wrote this to be provocative – it explores the idea of a future where all women have the ability to cause extreme pain (literally through electric “power”), and this physical upper-hand flips the world’s power dynamics. Women begin to do things that the reader is meant to find shocking and despicable and apocalyptic – before remembering that in the real world, there are men who do those things to women all over the world every day.)
18. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (F) – I would say I found this book/the narrator’s quips funny about 30% of the time and annoying 70% of the time, like someone who would be way too much at a party. A lot of satisfying and clever reveals though, as a mystery.
19. Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey (F) – I liked Heisey’s writing a lot, and found her extremely funny (so many funny books these past few months!) but the narrator got more and more unlikable and the book was just like…too long. Should have ended maybe 2/3 of the way through. Still, I’d say I liked it, overall. (Explores a young woman’s life after her early divorce; she unravels.)
20. The Guncle by Steven Rowley (F) – I read 50% of this book. It’s about a very fashionable, somewhat famous middle-aged gay actor who suddenly becomes the caretaker for his young niece and nephew for a summer. It was sweet, and fine, but ultimately I found it boring and slow. Many other people have loved it, based on reviews, though!

Send me your recs!