Everyday I Write the Book - It'll help you figure out what to read.

A FINE LINE BETWEEN STUPID AND CLEVER by Rob Reiner

If you are a Spinal Tap fan, even a casual one, I highly recommend picking up Rob Reiner’s memoir about the making of the movie, A Fine Line Between Stupid And Clever. In retrospect, with its cult glory and eternally-quoted lines, This Is Spinal Tap makes perfect sense, but when Reiner and his trio of improvising heavy metal musicians (Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean) first came up with the idea for this mockumentary about the fictional, often-cursed band, they were met with skepticism at best, and empty stares and anger at worst. I loved hearing about how the

A FINE LINE BETWEEN STUPID AND CLEVER by Rob Reiner

SOME BRIGHT NOWHERE by Ann Packer

This is going to sound like one of the saddest book in the world – and it is sad, for sure – but I liked Ann Packer’s new novel, Some Bright Nowhere, which is about a 60-something couple dealing with terminal illness. Eliot and Claire, married for decades with grown children, are facing the final stages of Claire’s terminal cancer. Eliot has settled into the caretaking role, after years of Claire’s treatments, recession, recurrence and

AWAKE by Jen Hatmaker

Before I picked up the memoir Awake, I hadn’t heard of Jen Hatmaker, who was well-known as an evangelical Christian media personality who also had an HGTV show with her husband and five kids. Instead, I was interested in her book because of her story about leaving her marriage to a pastor upon learning of his affair with another woman. Her life completely crumbled the night she overheard him whispering on the phone from their

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan

Oh, Buckeye. I have such a book hangover from this lovely historical fiction by Patrick Ryan about two couples in a small town in Ohio. When Cal – married to Becky – and Margaret – married to Felix – cross paths in a hardware store in the mid 1940s, all four lives are changed in ways that cause repercussions down the road for decades. I adored this novel, which is infused with empathy and kindness

DISCONTENT by Beatriz Serrano

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano (translated from Spanish) is a darkly funny condemnation of the modern workplace. Marisa lives in lovely apartment in Madrid, having worked her way up to a senior creative strategy role at an marketing agency. Despite her success, she dreads going to work, loathes her coworkers and spends her days holed up in her office watching YouTube videos and farming her work off onto junior employees and students in a marketing class

THE LOCKED WARD by Sarah Pekkanen

Every now and again, I find it good to throw a thriller into the mix, amongst the literary fiction and memoirs. The pace, the lack of detailed and complicated character development, the twists – this is a different type of reading than what I usually do. The pages fly by faster and I get engrossed in finding out how it will end. I read Sarah Pekkanen’s latest thriller, The Locked Ward, in preparation for a

MAGGIE, OR A MAN AND A WOMAN WALK INTO A BAR by Katie Yee

Maggie, Or A Man And A Woman Walk Into A Bar, is a novel by Katie Yee about a woman who has had a terrible year. First, her husband tells her he is leaving her for another woman, and then she is diagnosed with breast cancer. The novel is told vignette style, almost stream-of-consciousness, and jumps around the narrator’s life – her childhood, her Chinese parents, her relationship with her husband, her sickness, her kids.

HEART THE LOVER by Lily King

Heart The Lover by Lily King is a quietly devastating novel about two romantic relationships that the main character, a fortysomething woman, had in college with Sam and Yash, two men (who happen to be best friends). The first part is a pitch perfect depiction of young(ish) love, with its intensity and complications. Decades later, the novel picks up with Yash coming back into her life when she is settled and married with kids. I

TRYING by Chloe Caldwell

Before a recent vacation I grabbed an ARC of Trying by Chloe Caldwell, which came out in August. It’s a memoir told vignette style about the author’s attempts to get pregnant, then unexpectedly, about the demise of her marriage. Caldwell covers infertility, betrayal, longing, and the discovery of her queerness, all in short chapters that give little glimpses into her life and what’s going on. “Trying” takes on new meanings beyond trying to get pregnant,

THESE SUMMER STORMS by Sarah MacLean

These Summer Storms by Sarah Maclean is a rich-people-behaving-badly book about the family of a tech gazillionaire who has just died in a hang-glider accident at age 70. His wife and four children – including his estranged daughter Alice – gather at their summer estate in Rhode Island to grieve the sudden loss. Once together, they learn from their father’s “fixer” Jack that he left notes for them with tasks for each to accomplish before

LLOYD MCNEIL’S LAST RIDE

In Will Leitch’s latest novel, Lloyd McNeil is an Atlanta policeman with terminal brain cancer who decides that in order to provide for his 13 year-old son after his death, he has to die while on duty. Telling no one about his diagnosis, he puts himself into increasingly more dangerous situations so that his son will receive his death benefits. This sounds like a depressing and stressful premise, but, just as he did in his

HEARTWOOD by Amity Gaige

My streak of excellent reading continues! Heartwood by Amity Gaige is a novel about a woman in her early 40s who disappears in Maine while hiking the Appalachian Trail. The narration cycles between Valerie, the missing hiker, and Lt. Bev, the warden assigned to help search for her, and Lena, an older woman living in a Connecticut retirement community who tries to help the search from a distance. Heartwood is very suspenseful – will Valerie

THE NAMES by Florence Knapp

When debut novel The Names by Florence Knapp opens, a young mother named Cora is faced with a task: she is to register the name of her baby boy in the small town where she lives. Her husband has instructed her to give the boy his name and the name of his father – Gordon. But she doesn’t want to, because her husband is a brutal, abusive man and she doesn’t want her baby son

THE CORRESPONDENT by Virginia Evans

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is my top read so far this year. It is an epistolary novel consisting almost entirely of letters written to and from Sybil Van Antwerp, a woman in her 70s living outside Annapolis. Sybil is a bit prickly and cold, but as you learn through her correspondence with many people in her life – her brother, her children, her best friend, former colleagues, neighbors, and even famous novelists – there

WHAT KIND OF PARADISE by Janelle Brown

Janelle Brown’s novel What Kind Of Paradise takes a story we know – the Unabomber – and reimagines it as if he had had a daughter living with him in that isolated cabin in Montana in the 90s, telling the story from her point of view. For as long as she can remember, Jane Williams has lived alone with her father, having been told that her mother died in a car accident. She is homeschooled,