I was folding laundry when Ann Patchett got me, which is the least literary sentence I have ever written and also exactly how it happened.

There is a thread running through Whistler about a house being sold, and about the particular finality of that. Not just leaving a house, but losing your standing to ever walk back into it. You can drive past it, slow down, and know exactly which window is which, but you cannot go in. Whatever happened in those rooms is still in there, and it is in there without you now.

I put the basket down in the middle of the hallway and stood there like an idiot with one sock in my hand.

Here is the thing I should tell you up front. The house I thought of first was not the farmhouse I grew up in. It was the one my kids were little in, the one we moved out of, and that feeling showed up fast and it was plain old missing.

My own childhood house, the farmhouse, arrived about ten minutes behind it, uninvited, and that one had not been missed at all.

I am going to tell you about the farmhouse first anyway, because it turns out it explains the rest.

And the farmhouse is a strange thing to be handed by Patchett’s paragraph, because I can walk back into it. My dad still lives there. I could drive out tomorrow and go in the front door and nobody would stop me, and I could stand in my childhood bedroom if I wanted.

So let me tell you: The house I grew up in was a farmhouse, and it was beautiful, and I was not allowed to have anyone in it.

The rule

My mother had a thing about the farmhouse. I have never landed on the right word for it. Decorator is not right, because that sounds like a job. Collector is closer, because there were antiques, and the antiques had value, and the value was the whole point. But neither really encompasses the entirety.

She was always redoing something, and I want to be precise about what that means, because it was never repair. The farmhouse was old but it was not falling down. We were not patching a roof because water was coming in. We were tearing up perfectly good tile because the hardwoods underneath would look better, painting cupboards to match a photograph in Country Living, and tearing off a side porch we actually used and loved because she had an idea about the landscaping. None of it came from necessity. All of it came from wanting, and from style, and from how a room would look to someone who was not going to be allowed to sit in it anyway.

What that meant, practically, for a kid, was that no other kid ever came over.

I want to be fair, because adults came over, occasionally. My parents had friends, and those friends were in the house sometimes, and that was fine. It was children who could not be in it. Children break things and ruin things, and ruin was her word, and it is not the right word either, because ruin in her vocabulary meant a water ring on a table or a scuff mark on a wall or a spill that came up with a cloth. A thing could be visibly and completely fine and still be ruined.

So I asked constantly, and the answer was always no. I asked for sleepovers the way other kids ask for a dog, with a full campaign and a rotating cast of arguments, and the reason was always some version of a cup. Somebody would set a cup down on the antique trunk we used as a coffee table, or put their feet somewhere, or just exist in the room in a way that left a mark on it.

So I had few friends. That is the part I did not understand until I was much older, because when you are 10 you do not think of it as cause and effect, you just think you are the kind of person who does not have a lot of friends. Friendship at that age is built almost entirely out of proximity and unstructured hours, and unstructured hours happen in houses. If you cannot host, you are outside the loop that everyone else is inside of. You get invited a few times, you never reciprocate, and then you stop getting invited, and nobody is even being mean about it. It is just math.

The house I was jealous of

My best friend lived thirty minutes away. We were both country kids on opposite ends of the same county, which meant every time we saw each other outside of school somebody’s mother spent an hour in a car.

That somebody was always my mother, driving me to her house and back, which she would do cheerfully and repeatedly rather than let my friend come to ours one single time. The math is identical either way. Somebody drives, somebody picks up. She chose the version that kept a child out of her living room.

My friend had six brothers and sisters. Bedrooms were shared. Nothing in that house matched anything else in it, and I have thought about that house more in my adult life than I have thought about almost any other building.

The couch was worn out because people sat on it, together, to watch a movie. You could put your feet on the coffee table. There was a piano and you could play it whenever you felt like playing it, badly, in the middle of the afternoon. You could run up the stairs. Nobody grabbed your arm on the landing to tell you to be careful, because there was no antique hanging in the single dumbest possible place on the wall for you to knock down.

The kitchen was the best part, and the reason is that it was built and organized for using, not for looking at. They canned and cooked and baked constantly, and the counters had stuff on them and the stuff was where it was because that is where a person’s hand goes when a person is actually making something.

They lived in that house. And they let me live in it with them while I was there, which I understood at the time was generosity and did not have the words for.

Lived in. That was the thing I was jealous of, and I did not have that phrase until much later in life either. Not their piano and not their siblings. The wear.

My room, three times

My mom redid my bedroom at least three times while I lived in it, and I was never once asked.

Some summers I went to stay with my grandparents, who I adored, and more than once I came home to a completely different room. Different color, different arrangement, different (new) everything, chosen entirely without me, and then handed to me with a set of instructions. Don’t do that in here, be careful of this, watch out for that.

There was never a place for my boom box or a shelf for my CDs, and I couldn’t do my art because that was too messy and would ruin something. Nothing went on the walls that I picked, because the walls were part of the room and the room was part of the house and the house was for show. And it was for show to an audience that never came, because I still was not allowed to have anyone over.

What the house was actually like

The farmhouse was not a nice place to be, which is the part I skipped over for about thirty years.

My parents fought. Not occasionally, constantly, and at least half of it was about money, which is its own kind of joke in a house where we were demolishing a porch we liked for aesthetic reasons. The only stretches of genuine peace I can remember are the ones where my grandparents came in from out of state, because then the adults seemed to perform and behave. Christmas especially. My grandparents would show up and buy my sister and me the gifts my parents could not afford, and for a few days the house would go quiet and warm and my parents would act like people who liked each other.

So the antiques were being protected inside a house that was not, by any other measure, being taken care of.

The purple

My parents finally divorced when I was a senior in high school. My dad’s girlfriend moved in the day my mom moved out, which, after some therapy, is a sentence I can now say in a normal voice. I did not go anywhere until college. I floated between the two of them, my Mom and Dad’s, a night here, a week there, wherever I felt like being.

Two things happened that summer, about a month apart, and I have never been able to think about one without the other.

My mom had moved into a different house. New to her, not new by any stretch of the word. And when I asked about my room there, she told me I would be sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and that I was not to decorate it, not to hang anything, not to make it mine in any way, because I was leaving for college in a few months and she had plans for the room.

I understood that sentence perfectly at seventeen. The room was going to be nice. It was going to be nice after I was gone. But would it be for me when I came home from college? I knew that answer was no.

And then my dad’s girlfriend told me I could paint my bedroom at the farmhouse any color I wanted.

I think she meant it kindly. I’d like to think it’s so I would know I had a space to come back to during my college breaks. A space that would always be mine. I think she was trying to be a friend to me, or a decent stepmother, or both, and she reached for the one thing she had to give. I do not think she had any idea what she had just done.

I picked the brightest purple in the store. Not lavender, and not a nice grown-up plum, but a purple that a paint company invented in a fit of optimism and probably regrets. It was, objectively, a terrible choice. I painted every wall.

Because here is what had never happened in that house: I had never picked anything. Not the color, not the furniture, not where the bed went. My room got redone the way the rest of the house got redone, on somebody else’s schedule, to somebody else’s taste, and I lived in it the way you live in a hotel. So when I finally got a vote, I did not cast a reasonable one. I cast the loudest one available.

I have thought about that day a lot since, and I have never once been embarrassed about the color. It was one of the best days of my life. I got to make the room mine for four weeks, and four weeks was enough. I even got to hang my artwork on the walls which I can’t even explain how that made me feel.

That room is red now. My step brother had the room after I left and it has been red for a long time. I could go stand in it this weekend if I wanted to. My dad would put coffee on.

I do not particularly want to.

What I carried out of it

Here is the part I actually did not expect Whistler to hand me.

When my husband and I bought our first house I furnished it beautifully, immediately, on purpose, and I knew there were going to be kids in it soon. I did it anyway. I bought the nice version of everything, and I did not experience it as a decision, because it was not one. That was what a house was. You made it pleasing and made it look like something. It was the assignment, and I had been handed it so early that I did not know a different assignment existed.

Nobody ever told me the other thing, which is that you are supposed to be building a home, and that a home and a house are not the same object and are sometimes in direct competition with each other.

And I have said my mom’s exact sentences that traumatized me so much. Out loud. In my own house, to my own kids, in her exact cadence, about a cup on a table. I hear it leave my mouth and I want to reach out and grab it back. You do not get to grab it back.

The thing is, I was never actually upset about the cup or the spill.

That is what I have only recently worked out. One of my kids would knock something over and I would feel nothing in particular about it, because it is a spill, and it comes up with a cloth, and cleaning it takes ninety seconds and I do not mind cleaning. Left to myself I would have laughed about it with my kid, and we would have gotten a towel, and it would have been a small funny thing that happened on a Tuesday.

But I thought I was supposed to be mad. I had been trained that a spill is an event, that somebody is supposed to react, and so I performed a reaction I did not feel, at a child, over something I genuinely did not care about. And in doing that I took a moment that was going to be fine and made it into a moment about being careful. However many times I did that, I passed the whole thing down another generation, and one of my kids is going to stand in their own kitchen someday feeling a false flare of anger about a countertop and not know where it came from.

And I keep doing this math I hate. All the money that went into nice things, into the good version of a room, during the years there were small kids in it. Every one of those things could have been secondhand. Every single one. Get the beat-up thing, let it get more beat up, let it be a house where people come in and put a cup down, and then when everyone is grown and gone, then go buy the nice table. Nobody would have known or cared, and the house would have been so much happier.

A house that gets lived in is what a happy house looks like. The wear is not the damage. It is the evidence.

The part I am still in the middle of

There is a worse version of this, and I am still inside it.

I redecorate when I am sad.

I did not see the pattern until the last few years, which is a humbling thing to admit to strangers. A kid leaves for college and the quiet is unbearable, and within a week I am repainting an entire level, buying pillow covers, hanging different art. I am not tearing up flooring and I am not adding rooms, so for a long time I told myself it was not the same thing. It is the same thing. It is a smaller version of the identical instinct, which is to answer a feeling by rearranging a building.

I can count it, which is the embarrassing part. Some rooms in our current house have changed their whole look five or six times in ten years. I have put wallpaper up and taken it down a few years later, and I have painted a room a color I was sure about, decided I did not like it and painted it right back to the safe gray it started as.

And I know the difference, because I have done the other kind. We once bought a house in a college town to run as an Airbnb, and it needed real work before anyone could stay in it. That renovation had a reason and a finish line. The wallpaper did not. Renovating because a house needs it is one thing, and renovating because I am sad or bored is something else entirely.

It does not work, and it never has. I finish the room and the kid is still gone and now I have also spent money, so I get to feel the original thing plus a new layer of being annoyed at myself for not noticing sooner.

We want a lake house someday. That is the semi-retirement plan, the actual one, and every one of those sad-week paint projects is money that was not going toward it. I am not worried about the spending itself anymore. I am worried about the pattern I inherited without ever agreeing to it, and whether I can put it down before it costs me the one house I actually want.

And I wonder about this every time I open Instagram, honestly. A whole industry of people redoing their homes on camera. New rooms constantly. And I find myself wanting to ask a rude question, which is whether anybody lives in there, whether the couch is comfortable, whether a kid has ever put a cup down on that table without somebody flinching, or whether it is a set, being redone for views and sponsorships, the same way my mother’s house was being redone for an audience that never came.

I do not actually know. I just recognize the shape of it.

I want to be clear about that, though. I am not knocking anyone who loves decorating or a good renovation. Wanting a house that is nice and feels like you is a completely normal thing to want, and plenty of people redo a room because it makes them happy and it actually does. I am not writing about them. I am writing about me, and about how much money I have spent on rooms I was sure would make me feel better.

The second house

There is another house, and this one was ours, and it is the one that actually gets me. It is also, as I said at the top, the one I thought of first. Everything else in this essay came in behind it.

My family of five moved when my kids were in junior high and elementary school. It was a good move for the right reasons, and I don’t regret it. But I want to go back to the old one so badly sometimes that it is almost physical. Not to live there, just to walk through it.

There was a tree in the backyard that was theirs, in the way a tree becomes a specific tree. The front yard was where the sprinkler went in July and the sled came out in January, and I could not tell you a single individual day of either one, which I think is the point.

We moved bedrooms around when our surprise third arrived. My daughter was thrilled it was a boy, and not for any of the reasons you would expect. It meant the boys went upstairs and she got the downstairs room to herself, and it meant she got to pick. The paint color, the bedspread and the curtains were all hers.

I got to stand there and watch a kid choose her own walls. Nobody ever handed me that, and I did not know until it was happening how much I wanted to see it.

I want to stand in the room where they were babies and see how big it actually is, because I have a feeling my memory has the dimensions wrong.

You do not realize how much a house is holding until you do not have access to it anymore. It is not that the memories are gone. It is that they were partly stored in the building, in the specific way the light came through one window in the afternoon, in the sound a particular door made, and I did not know I had outsourced that much of it. I thought I was keeping all of it in my head. I was keeping about sixty percent of it in my head and the rest of it in the drywall.

Somebody lives there now and their kids are the ones who know what that door sounds like.

That is the house Patchett was talking about. Not the farmhouse. I can walk into the farmhouse whenever I want and it turns out that was never what I was missing.

What Whistler actually did

None of this is what Whistler is about, exactly. It is a novel about a woman and the stepfather she lost for forty-five years and got back for a minute, and about a story he told her once in an overturned car in the snow, and about a horse. It is about impermanence in the largest possible sense, and it is generous and calm about it in a way I was not prepared for.

But there is that one thread about the house, and about the door closing on a place you used to be allowed inside of, and Patchett does not overwork it. She just puts it down and leaves it there, and that is the whole trick: she lets you be the one who supplies the farmhouse.

I listened to this on audio, and she narrates it herself, and I want to be careful about how much I gush here, because “read by the author” is usually a warning label. This is not that. She reads it like someone telling you something true across a kitchen table, and there are places where she gets quieter instead of louder, which is a choice almost nobody makes.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Ann Patchett) | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

The structure is two timelines, present-day New York and one night in 1980, and they braid tighter as you go until the seam disappears. It is short, 304 pages, and it does not feel short. My one honest critique is that the ending refuses to resolve on purpose, and if you are a reader who needs the door closed at the end, this will bother you. It did not bother me. It felt like the only ending that matched the argument the book had been making the whole time, which is that connection is the thing, and closure is a story we tell about connection after the fact.

Where this one is sending me next: Horse by Geraldine Brooks, which I have not started yet, and more Ann Patchett, because I am nowhere near done with her. Whistler also left me with a question about the difference between a house and a home, and I have not found another book that picks that up. If you know it, tell me.

Where else Whistler has shown up:

• August: I Was Wrong Twice, 7 Books, $0 Spent, and My First Reading Tree Miss (where I first ranked it)

Grab a copy of Whistler. Library first, always. But if you are buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links back indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

One question

I want to know about your house. Not the one you live in. The one you would walk through if somebody handed you a key and thirty seconds and no explanation.

Which room would you go to first?

Leave a comment

If this one stayed with you, these two are close cousins. One is about the house going quiet before any of my kids actually left, and the other is about the season of my life I would step back into if I could.

September by the numbers

• Books finished: 8

• Dollars spent on books: 0, all free from the library

• Google searches: 9 rabbit holes, including a 1955 pill that got called “emotional aspirin”, whether a fantasy animal I read about for hundreds of pages was actually real, and a war over coal I was never taught in school

• Emotional essays incoming: 1, about the seeds that grow inside you for years before you notice they have branches, going out Sunday

• Reading trees growing: 4, including a brand new one planted by a single word I had to look up

• Stars: three 5 star, three 4 star, one 3 star, and one 2 star

• Format split: 5 audiobooks, 3 ebooks

• Narrators: a thirteen voice full cast on The Correspondent, Charlie Thurston on Demon Copperhead, Susan Bennett on The Mad Wife, Nikki Massoud on I Who Have Never Known Men, and Barrie Kreinik on Ariadne. No Julia Whelan for the second month in a row

• Listening time: 57 hours 26 minutes at normal speed, or 38 hours 17 minutes at my usual 1.5x

• Pages: 3,486 across all eight

• Days of my life: about 2.9 days spent with a book this month

• Top genre: a tie, literary fiction and fantasy with 2 each

• Currently reading: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry on ebook and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara on audio, both from the library

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I told you last month I was ninety percent through this one. Here is the other ten percent: I did not think it was the kind of book that would make me cry, and then I spent its last hour vacuuming my house and crying at the same time. It is a novel told entirely in letters, from Sybil Van Antwerp, a retired lawyer in her seventies who has been writing to family, friends and strangers for decades. It turns in a direction I did not see coming, and a lot of what came before looks different afterward.

One honest thing about the audio. The narration reads out the full mailing address and ZIP code at the top of every letter, which your eye would skip right past in print, and that got a little annoying partway through. It never ruined anything, though, and what you get in exchange is a full cast with a different narrator for each person Sybil writes to, which in a book made of nothing but letters really works. It is Virginia Evans’s debut, so there is no backlist to go read yet, but I will read whatever she writes next.

Where this book is sending me next: Lonesome Dove. My library finally let me have it, and I’m about 10 percent into it while writing this recap.

Reading Trees: the letter writing in Such a Fun Age is part of what sent me here, so this is the first branch on a brand new tree about letters. The next branches are the books Sybil names in her own letters, starting with Lonesome Dove.

The Will of the Many by James Islington

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Last month I was sixty percent through this one. It is long, and it took me a while to figure out how Will works in this world, but once it clicked I loved it. The world building is some of the best I have read, basically ancient Rome turned into a power system where the rules you learn early keep coming back later. I picked it up because it was everywhere, and I liked it so much I went straight into book two.

Things I Googled: whether “vek” is a real curse word and whether alupi are real animals. Both answers are in this month’s Things I Googled.

Where this book is sending me next: the only place it is sending me is the rest of the series.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Twenty one hours with Damon Fields, a kid born in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia, talking straight into my ears through foster care, football and the arrival of OxyContin. I picked it up because I kept seeing it recommended as a great audiobook. I had never really read a book like it, and the closest thing it reminded me of was Educated by Tara Westover. I will be reading more Kingsolver.

Things I Googled: the word Melungeon, which the book uses for Damon and his father like everyone already knows what it means, and a line about the second biggest war in American history being fought over coal. Both are in this month’s Things I Googled article, so be sure to check it out.

Where this book is sending me next: an emotional essay about the seeds that grow inside you for years before you notice they have branches, going out Sunday.

Reading Trees: this one didn't grow off any of my existing trees, but it planted a brand new one. The word Melungeon is the seed, and Demon Copperhead is the root.

The Mad Wife by Meagan Church

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

It is 1955, Lulu Mayfield has the perfect house in a perfect suburb and a brand new baby, and something is slipping. I did not see the ending coming until it was already there. Looking back there was a little foreshadowing, but I never put the full picture together, and I am not going to give you any more than that here.

Things I Googled: a pile of them, starting with “housewife syndrome” and a little pill called Miltown that went on sale the same year the book is set. Some of what I looked up gives away the ending, so in this month’s Things I Googled that part sits behind a clear spoiler warning.

Reading Trees: this one grew straight off The Yellow Wallpaper, which makes it the third book on the tree that started with Mad Honey, and I can finally see what that tree is about.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐

I picked this one for the least romantic reason there is: it was popular and it was available on Libby the night I needed a new book. Thirty nine women and one girl in an underground cage, watched by guards who never speak. It was a good palate cleanser. I did not love it and I did not hate it, but the premise is a really interesting one.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐

A café in Tokyo where one seat takes you into the past, as long as you stay in the chair and come back before your coffee goes cold. I love that premise. I keep it short here for books that land under three stars for me. A book that didn’t hit for me could easily be someone else’s favorite, and I’d rather you decide for yourself than skip it because of me.

Reading Trees: not a branch on any of my trees, more like a sibling growing right next to one. It is the third book about getting a second chance by walking into a magic place that I have rated low, which is starting to tell me something about myself.

The Strength of the Few by James Islington

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Book two of the Hierarchy series, and I read a few hours every night because it is so easy to fall right back into this world. Keeping track of three different synchronous worlds bugged me at first, but once it got moving I really enjoyed it. Fair warning if you are starting the series: Islington always seems to kill off the character who breaks your heart, and he did it again.

Where this book is sending me next: I highlighted two passages I am still thinking through, so one of them may turn into an essay down the road. After that, book three in the series scheduled to be released in 2027.

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Minotaur myth told by the princess who helps Theseus through the labyrinth, and by her sister Phaedra. The start takes some work, since a lot of names come at you at once and on audio you cannot flip back to check who is who. Once the family tree settles, it moves. I had two and a half hours left one morning and finished it through a shower, getting ready and a round of errands, and it ended just as I was pulling out of the Target parking lot. I said “wait, that’s how it ends?” out loud to nobody, which is how I knew it had me.

Where this book is sending me next: Elektra or Atalanta, depending on what my library has.

Reading Trees: a new branch on my Greek myth tree, growing off Stone Blind, and the first one on that tree by a different author.

All eight of these got a full review on Goodreads too, along with everything else I finish, including the books that never turn into an article here. If reading the reviews is the part you like, that is where all of them live. Come follow me over there.

The thread running through September

Three books this month ended somewhere I was not ready for. The Correspondent turned in its last hour and had me crying over the vacuum, and the ending of The Mad Wife had been sitting right in front of me the whole time without me putting it together. Ariadne just stopped, while I was pulling out of a parking lot still braced for another hour of it.

That is my favorite thing a book can do to me, and it is the one thing I can never plan for. I can follow a reading tree or a hunch or a Libby waitlist, but nobody can hand me a book and promise the ending will catch me off guard. The two books I was still in the middle of when August closed both paid off at five stars, which is the other lesson of the month: finishing is sometimes the whole trick.

The best book I read in September, and I am calling it a tie

Demon Copperhead and the Hierarchy series. Demon Copperhead was unlike anything I had read before, and it handed me an essay and a brand new reading tree. The Will of the Many and The Strength of the Few are the two books I kept falling right back into every night, and book three can’t come soon enough.

Reading Trees

A reading tree starts with one root book and the itch it leaves behind, a topic, a place, a feeling you are not done with yet. From there it grows branches, other books that reach back to that same root, whether it is a direct mention in the text, the same region, or just chasing the same gut punch. It is not a genre list and it is not an author’s backlist. It is a line you can trace from root to newest branch.

Four of them grew in September. One is brand new and started with a single word I had to look up, and another is sending me into a book I have been meaning to read for years.

Trees keep growing every time one book hands me the next one. Paid subscribers get the full tree, root to newest branch, plus a new tree every month, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the rabbit holes, the essays, all of it, stays free right here.

Free and paid

This recap is free, always will be. The reading trees are the one thing that lives behind the paywall, one new tree a month plus the full growing vault, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the Google rabbit holes, the essays, all of it, stays right here for everyone.

I don’t have a shelf yet. I have a map.

A note on my links: I’m a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you’re a book buyer and you’re going to own a copy anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.

Tell me in the comments: what is the last book whose ending caught you completely off guard?

Leave a comment

The Will of the Many by James Islington

It was everywhere, so I finally borrowed it: ancient Rome turned into a power system, with a whole vocabulary the book never stops to explain. Two of those made up words sent me to Google.

I reviewed The Will of the Many and its sequel, The Strength of the Few, in my September reading recap, along with everything else I read this month.

Format: eBook

Source: Library

Rating: 5 stars

Is “vek” a real curse word?

Vek gets thrown around as a curse all through the book, so I went looking for whether Islington borrowed it from a real language. As far as I can tell, he didn’t. I couldn’t find it anywhere outside the book.

Are alupi real animals?

Alupi show up in the book as animals, and I wanted to know whether they came from some real legend. They don’t. Islington made them up, and I couldn’t find a real animal or folklore creature by that name anywhere. Hold onto that one, though, because it comes back later in this post.

Grab a copy of The Will of the Many

Library first. But if you’re buying, this link supports indie bookstores and me.

The Mad Wife by Meagan Church

It’s 1955, Lulu Mayfield has the perfect house in a perfect suburb and a brand new baby, and something is slipping. If that sounds familiar, it’s because I keep reading this story: here’s what Mad Honey sent me googling and the essay where The Yellow Wallpaper came in.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Susan Bennett)

Source: Library

Rating: 4 stars

Want the spoiler free version? My full review of The Mad Wife is in my September reading recap, along with the other seven books I read this month.

“Housewife syndrome” was a real diagnosis

From roughly the 1940s into the 1970s, American doctors had a catchall label for women at home who were anxious, exhausted, sleepless or just unhappy. They called it housewife syndrome, or housewife’s nerves, or the trapped housewife. It took over from hysteria as the go-to diagnosis for women, and the suggested fixes included having another baby or moving to the suburbs.

Moving to the suburbs was the prescription. Lulu already lives there.

When a baby or a new zip code didn’t fix her, the options got a lot darker, and The Mad Wife puts all of them on the table. Electroshock therapy came to the US around 1940 and was used on women diagnosed with depression and nerves. Then there was the lobotomy. Walter Freeman did his first transorbital lobotomy, the version done through the eye socket, in 1946, and a 1951 study found that nearly 60 percent of American lobotomy patients were women. Around 40,000 people in this country were lobotomized in all. And a woman could be sent away to an institution on her husband’s say so and a doctor’s signature.

Miltown, the “emotional aspirin”

The drug is spelled Miltown, with one L, named after Milltown, New Jersey, which has two. Wallace Laboratories launched it in 1955, the same year the book is set, and it became the first blockbuster psychiatric drug in the country. By 1957, Americans had filled more than 36 million prescriptions for it.

Cosmopolitan called the pills “emotional aspirins” in 1956, and by 1960 women were about twice as likely as men to be taking tranquilizers like it. The ads sold it as relief for women overwhelmed by housework and children.

Can you smell colors?

The book made me wonder, so I looked it up. What I found is called synesthesia, where one sense sets off another, like seeing colors when you hear music or tasting words. Somewhere around 3 to 5 percent of people have some form of it, and it is not a mental illness.

⚠️ SPOILER ALERT FOR THE MAD WIFE

Stop here if this book is on your list. Everything below this line until the Demon Copperhead section is tied to the ending. Scroll down to Demon Copperhead to keep going spoiler free.

Lupus can look like madness

Lupus is an autoimmune disease, and it can attack the brain. When it does, psychosis, hallucinations and confusion are all documented symptoms. A 2025 study of 566 lupus patients found about one in five had experienced hallucinations, and 11 percent had hallucinated smells.

Many of them never told a doctor. One patient in that study said, “I’ve never told a medical doctor because they love to tell me I am crazy.”

So Lulu, a woman in 1955 with a real disease, gets treated as a mad wife. It’s the same story The Yellow Wallpaper and Mad Honey told, one more time.

Lupus means “wolf”

Lupus is Latin for wolf. A 13th century physician named Rogerius used the word for facial lesions that looked like a wolf’s bite. Last month I figured out I google words more than I google history, and this one went straight onto that list.

And remember the alupi from The Will of the Many? Alupi sounds an awful lot like lupus. I couldn’t find anything saying Islington meant that, so I’m just going to enjoy that two of my September books accidentally met in the middle.

Grab a copy of The Mad Wife

How I think about buying books: the library is always the right answer if it’s an option for you. But some books you just want to keep. If this is one of those, my Bookshop.org link supports independent bookstores and tosses a few cents to me.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Twenty-one hours with Damon Fields, a kid born in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia, talking straight into my ears through foster care, football and the arrival of OxyContin. The book tosses out a word and a war like everybody already knows about them, and I didn’t know either one.

My full review of Demon Copperhead, along with every other book I finished in September, is in my September reading recap.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Charlie Thurston)

Source: Library

Rating: 5 stars

Melungeon

The book uses this word for Damon and his father like everyone already knows what it means. I didn’t. Melungeon is the name for about 40 families of mixed ancestry who lived along the Tennessee and Virginia border, mostly in Hancock and Hawkins counties. It started out as a slur in the early 1800s, and for generations the people it was aimed at didn’t fit any box the law had room for.

So they built a story that protected them. A lot of Melungeon families said they were Portuguese, because in courts that punished any trace of African ancestry, being dark and Portuguese was safer. In 1874 a lawyer named Lewis Shepherd won a Melungeon woman named Martha Simmerman her inheritance by arguing that her family descended from ancient Phoenicians who reached America by way of Portugal.

The real answer took until 2012. A DNA study led by genealogist Roberta Estes and published in the Journal of Genetic Genealogy traced the core families back to relationships between sub-Saharan African men and northern or central European women in colonial Virginia. Plenty of people who had grown up on the Portuguese version were not happy about it.

A war over coal

A line in the book says the second biggest war in America after the Civil War was fought over coal, and I assumed someone was exaggerating. It’s real, it happened in 1921, and I had never heard of it.

It’s called the Battle of Blair Mountain. From August 25 to September 2, 1921, about 10,000 armed coal miners marched through southern West Virginia toward Logan County. They wanted to unionize the coalfields and get out from under companies that paid them in scrip and could evict their families along with their jobs. Waiting for them were about 3,000 deputies and company guards gathered by Logan County sheriff Don Chafin and paid for by the coal operators.

Private planes dropped homemade bombs on the miners. President Harding sent federal troops, and Army bombers flew over the mountains to watch. When the soldiers arrived, most of the miners put down their guns rather than fight the US Army. Nobody agrees on how many people died, and the estimates run from about sixteen to more than a hundred.

The miners wore red bandanas around their necks so they could recognize each other, which is one of the stories behind the word redneck. Blair Mountain is usually called the largest armed uprising in this country since the Civil War, and it went mostly untaught for decades. The battlefield wasn’t put back on the National Register of Historic Places until 2018.

Grab a copy of Demon Copperhead

Get it from the library if you can. If not, Bookshop.org over Amazon, always.

Three books sent me looking things up in September. Five more went by without a single question, and all eight are in the full September recap, with the reviews and the month in numbers.

Read the September recap

Subscribe and the October one lands in your inbox at the start of November.

Subscribe now

This is why I love reading. One story turns into ten tabs open.

Tell me in the comments: have you ever looked something up in a novel expecting it to be made up, and found out it was real? Which book?

Leave a comment

The mom, Johanna, is sitting at the dinner table with her family, trying to have a conversation and hold everyone in one place for one meal. One by one, each of her three kids says they have somewhere else to be. They get up and leave, not dramatically and not in anger. They just have other things to do.

And Johanna sits there and realizes this is over. The family she built around these people being together is done, not because something terrible happened, but because her kids grew up and stopped needing to be there.

I had to pause the audiobook because I was crying in my car.

Not because I was afraid that scene was coming for me. Because I’ve already lived it.

Before anyone left

The table started getting quieter before anyone moved out.

My three kids all had busy school and sports schedules, so we didn’t always get to eat together. But we tried. We didn’t allow phones at the table or eating in rooms. We made it a thing, and for a while it worked. The conversations were real. We talked about our days, our struggles, what was funny, what was hard.

But somewhere in the high school years, the drift started. The conversations got shorter and the answers got vague. One of them would cut dinner short for some reason that didn’t seem important enough, and I’d sit there feeling something tighten in my chest. When it was time to clean up, suddenly everyone had somewhere critical to be. And I’d think, this is winding down. They can’t see it, but I can. The clock is running out on all of us being under this roof, and they’re already halfway out the door before they’ve actually left.

My daughter and I are both eldest daughters. We carried things without talking about it. We were the ones who tried to make dinners feel like something, who asked the questions, who kept the conversation going when everyone else was ready to check out. I didn’t fully realize how much of the family’s connective tissue ran through the two of us until she was gone.

The first shift

When my daughter left for college, the house changed overnight.

It wasn’t just quieter, it was a different house. My best friend was gone, and suddenly it was me and three boys, two sons and a husband. I didn’t realize until she left how much she and I had carried the conversation together. Without her, dinners went from meaningful to a lot of guy jokes, or the three of them ganging up to make fun of me, which is their love language when they’re all together but is a very different energy than what the table used to feel like.

I missed her in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Not just as my daughter, but as my partner in trying to hold the family together, the person who cared about making it special the way I did.

The second shift

When my middle son left for college, it was a different kind of hole entirely.

I can’t fully explain why, but losing the second kid felt different than losing the first. My middle son and my youngest are very different personalities, and when the middle one left, the dynamic shifted again in a way I didn’t expect. Now it’s just three of us. The conversations are more personal in some ways because there’s only one kid to focus on instead of three. But they’re also quieter, or they’re my son and husband talking about sports or Star Wars or things I’m not as familiar with as I was with the interests of my other two kids.

Three people at a table that used to seat five. That math never stops being strange.

Ships in the night

As I write this, all three of my kids are home. That only happens about twice a year now, around Christmas and sometime in the summer. My two college kids both play college sports, so they’re lucky to get a week to ten days off at a time. Between their jobs and friends and schedules, we’re lucky to overlap for four or five days.

This is one of those weeks. And here’s the honest truth: even with everyone under one roof, we’re passing like ships in the night.

My husband and I both work during the day. I go to bed early and the kids stay up late. My middle son has always been a social butterfly, and he makes plans with his hometown friends at the worst possible times, missing family dinners that are the only chances all four of us (minus him) are together. I can usually grab my daughter for breakfast or a walk or coffee, but I can never seem to get her and my middle son in the same room at the same time.

And the thing I worry about most isn’t whether they’ll stay close to me. It’s whether they’ll stay close to each other.

My daughter and my youngest are tight. They do a great job of staying in touch even living hours apart. But my daughter and my middle son don’t, and they have differing political views that lead to arguments that leave someone angry for days of the visit. Days we don’t have enough of to waste.

When they were little, they were inseparable. We lived in the country and there weren’t a lot of other kids nearby during summers, so they made their own fun and did everything together. I would have bet anything they’d always be that close.

The mirror I don’t want

I have one sister. We’re not close. We weren’t that close growing up either, but once I left for college, I didn’t look back. She was younger, and I was gone. The time passed, the bond never really formed, and neither of us put in the effort to fix it. Now we see each other on holidays because we’re expected to, and we don’t know much about each other’s actual lives.

I see that same story starting to write itself with my kids, and it terrifies me.

The political arguments between two of them that go nowhere and cost everyone days of tension. The one who’d rather see his hometown friends than sit at a table with his family for an hour. The slow, quiet drifting that doesn’t feel like a crisis until you look back and realize the distance became permanent somewhere along the way, and you can’t pinpoint when.

I can’t preach about it, either. I’m not a good example. I did the same thing to my sister that I’m afraid my kids will do to each other. So I just watch, and hope, and try to make the times we’re all together matter enough to hold.

What Johanna knew

Johanna doesn’t scream or cry or beg her kids to stay at the table. She just sits there. And that quiet sitting, that moment of recognition without any power to change it, is the most honest thing I’ve ever encountered in fiction about a specific kind of parental grief.

It’s not the grief of something going wrong. It’s the grief of something going exactly the way it’s supposed to. Kids grow up and leave and build their own lives. Every parenting book will tell you this is healthy and good and developmentally appropriate, as if knowing it’s normal makes it hurt less.

It doesn’t.

Every mom I know carries this somewhere, even if she doesn’t name it. The fear that the closeness was the peak. That the noise and the mess and the fighting over who sits where was actually the golden age, and you were too tired and too busy to recognize it while it was happening. That one day you’ll sit at the table and realize you didn’t know the last time everyone was there together was the last time.

I didn’t know, and I don’t think any of us ever do.

I just got back from a trip with my college-aged son and his girlfriend. While we were there, I don’t think he cared that I was there. I was the Uber and the grocery shopper and the adult with the credit card. He never said, “Hey Mom, let me just do something with just you.” And that stung. But he’s in love, so I get it. I just wonder if someday he’ll look back and realize that trip could have been as great for me as it was for him, if he’d just looked up for a minute.

Contrast that with my daughter. When she turned 13, we let her pick a place to visit and plan the trip. That place has become ours. We’ve been back just the two of us and with the whole family a handful of times. It’s on the ocean, which happens to be a weakness for both of us. But what makes it special isn’t the place. It’s the memories we built there. That’s the trip where the gratitude already arrived. She sees it, and she holds it the way I hold it.

The other two aren’t there yet, and that’s okay. The gratitude runs on a delay, and I know that. I just have to survive the in-between.

When did your table start getting quiet? I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

Leave a comment

The review

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Julia Whelan) | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

I picked this up strictly because Julia Whelan narrated it and it was available when I needed a new audiobook. I didn’t do any research beforehand, because a Julia Whelan narration rarely lets me down, and that turned out to be the right call. The first half builds a portrait of a family held together by grief and obligation, triplets conceived through IVF after their parents lost their first child, and you think you know what kind of book this is. Then the second half takes a turn you don’t see coming, and the whole thing opens up into something bigger and stranger and more interesting than a family drama.

Julia Whelan’s voice is what sent me to The Latecomer. The Latecomer sent me down a Mormon history rabbit hole that ended at The Nineteenth Wife, and it kept handing me essays along the way. This is the first. The next one, about the gap between loving your kids and savoring them, is coming soon.

Where else The Latecomer has shown up:

• Love is a Pie and You Only Get So Many Slices (the Mormon rabbit hole it sent me down)

• What I Read in May 2026 (where I first ranked it)

Grab a copy of The Latecomer. Library first, always. But if you’re buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links back indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

That is not a monster. That is a Tuesday’s worth of worst-case scenarios, and I have been running them in my head for as long as I can remember.

What travel looks like for me

Here is what travel looks like for me. Any trip without my husband, I do not really sleep. If I do, it is not until the third or fourth night, and I have come to understand that it is not calm. It is my body finally overriding me and shutting down because it has to. The first nights I lie there fully awake, cataloging exits, listening to the building breathe, running the reel. What if someone comes through the door. The window. What if someone is already in the closet, or under the bed. What would they want, and why.

I am a worst-case-scenario person by nature, I have written about that before, and you stack that on top of a lifetime of movies and books and headlines that all quietly agree women are the targets, and this is what you get. A grown woman who travels with a corkscrew within reach of the bed, or something worse than a corkscrew. Who wedges a chair under the door handle. Who packs a little door-alarm device, because they make those now, and they make them for women like me, by the thousands.

When my daughter went off to college I gave her a personal alarm for her keychain. I taught her how to read an empty parking lot before she walks into it, how to tell whether someone is behind her and what to do if they are, how to get home if a route starts to feel wrong. I have drilled all of my kids on the basics. Check the license plate before you get in the car. Watch your drink, and never set it down. I know how it sounds. I also know I would do every bit of it again tomorrow, because the alternative is pretending the world is something it has spent my whole life proving it is not.

The part I like least about myself

I want to be honest about the part I like least about myself, because it is the part the book was really pointing at. The fear is not evenly distributed, and the unevenness is the whole point. I lie awake rehearsing how I would protect my daughter and how I would defend myself. I do not lie awake like that for my son. The shape of the worry for him is just different, lighter somehow, and I am self-aware enough to know I did not invent that difference. The world handed it to me, the same way it hands it to every mother, a quiet running tally of who it has decided is prey.

And when I travel with my husband or with my son, both of them large men, the fear drops so far and so fast it is almost funny. I sleep. I unclench. I become a person on a vacation instead of a sentry at a post. I hate that. I hate being a woman who leans, even a little, on the idea that the big men around her will keep her safe, because the truth underneath it is uglier and simpler than that. It is not really that they can protect me. It is that I cannot protect myself, not against most of what I lie awake imagining, and no corkscrew or door alarm or parking-lot tactic actually changes that math. It just helps me get to sleep by the fourth night.

The night before she got there

This past trip, I was meeting a girlfriend for a few days, and I got there a night before she did. One night alone. And every single noise kept me up, every scenario on its loop, and it was bad. The part that gets me is where I was. A gated community. A secured one. A good place, by every measure we use to decide a place is safe. She is the same friend I wrote about in the friendship anniversary piece, the trips we take just to sit in a room together, and it says something about this whole essay that even meeting her somewhere safe could not talk my body out of standing guard for a night.

They say that is always exactly what the dead girl thought, too.

The review

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Julia Whelan) | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars

That rating lives closer to 4.5 or 4.75 for me if I am honest. Julia Whelan narrating was the reason I picked this one up in the first place, and she is exactly as good as everyone says. Underneath the hotel-room fear it put in me, The Villa is a genuinely satisfying dual-timeline book club thriller, the kind you want to talk through with someone the second you finish it.

Julia Whelan’s voice is what sent me to The Villa. It didn’t send me to another book. It kept handing me essays instead, and this is the third.

The other two essays The Villa handed me:

• I have a work voice and my family makes fun of it

• I Want to Throw Anniversary Parties for My Friendships

Grab a copy of The Villa. Borrow it if you can. Buy it if you must. And if you’re buying, my Bookshop.org link keeps it with the indies.

August by the numbers

• Books finished: 7

• Dollars spent on books: 0, all free from the library

• Google searches: 6 rabbit holes, including a goddess who asked Zeus to start a war because the weight of too many humans had gotten too heavy to hold up, the real 126 day siege that Bel Canto is built on, and why the Mona Lisa is brown

• Emotional essays incoming: 3

• Reading trees growing: 2, plus two clusters that turned out not to be trees at all once I looked at them properly

• Stars: three 5 star, three 4 star, and one 2 star, my first 2 star of the entire year

• Format split: 5 audiobooks, 2 ebooks

• Narrators: Marin Ireland twice, on My Friends and Beartown, Anna Fields on Bel Canto, and two authors reading their own work, Natalie Haynes and Ann Patchett. No Julia Whelan this month, which almost never happens

• Listening time: 57 hours 7 minutes at normal speed, or 38 hours 5 minutes at my usual 1.5x

• Days of my life: about 2.1 days spent with a book this month

• Top genre: literary fiction, 4 of the 7

• Currently reading: as August closed I was about 90 percent through The Correspondent by Virginia Evans on audio, and about 60 percent through The Will of the Many by James Islington on ebook, both from the library

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I came to this one straight off Stone Blind, because I loved Stone Blind and immediately wanted more Haynes, and a Twitter thread about Medusa kept pushing me the same direction. What I loved was that it gives every woman in the Trojan War her own space instead of treating them as scenery around the men. I went in blind and did not realize it was a lot of smaller stories handing off to each other and overlapping as they go, and being caught off guard by that is most of why this landed at four for me instead of five. It never quite gutted me the way the five stars did.

Two things sent me googling. One was the goddess who holds up the earth asking Zeus to start a war because the weight of too many humans had become too much to carry, and that is a genuinely unhinged origin story for a war. The other was a section about men wasting and taking more land and resources than they need, and that one hit hard enough that there may be an emotional essay in it eventually, just not yet.

Things I Googled: the goddess who asked Zeus for a war because people had gotten too heavy to carry. That one is in this month’s Things I Googled. The other rabbit hole, about men taking more land and resources than they need, is going into a piece about the ancient world.

Where this book is sending me next: an emotional essay eventually, once I work out what I actually want to say about that greedy tidbit.

Reading Trees: Stone Blind is what sent me here, so this is a new branch on the Greek myth tree, still the healthiest tree I have growing.

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I picked this up for the least interesting reason there is, because it was everywhere and everyone kept telling me to. My first Backman, and now one of my favorite books of the year and honestly one of my favorites ever. What got me was the writing itself, the cadence of the sentences, the way they carried me along instead of just delivering information. I found out afterward that it is translated from Swedish, and suddenly the whole thing made sense. I have been thinking about the translator ever since. The story is a girl piecing together what happened around a famous painting and the four teenagers who were there when it was made, and I was as impatient for the next piece of the story as she was. It also made me want to go stand in front of a painting that does not exist, and I was legitimately annoyed that I could not. This one gets a spot on the shelf the day I have a shelf.

Things I Googled: the translation, the translator, and how much of what I loved was actually his doing. That one is in this month’s Things I Googled, and it is also the newest entry in a words and etymology grouping I have been building.

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I went straight from My Friends into this one because I wanted more of whatever that was, and I went in knowing absolutely nothing about the story, and that turned out to matter a lot. It is a small town in the forest where a junior hockey team is the last thing anybody there has left to be proud of, and then something happens that forces the whole town to pick a side. It is heavy, and I would go in knowing that much and nothing more. What I kept noticing while I listened was that the sentences were not carrying me the way My Friends had, and I assumed the translation was the difference, since the translation was the entire reason the last one worked on me. It is not. Same translator on both, Neil Smith, and the same narrator, Marin Ireland. So the gap is the book itself, a stranger and better answer than the one I walked in with. My Friends carries you along on the sentences and this one puts you in a room and makes you stay there.

Things I Googled: whether da Vinci really got a discount on brown paint, after a sarcastic line about it in the book. That one is in this month’s Things I Googled.

Where this book is sending me next: nothing yet, though there is something the mother says about wanting a thirty six to forty eight hour day that I am not finished thinking about.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I read this because it was popular, not much of a reason, and then I almost quit it, not much of an endorsement either. The opening drops you into a city that does not exist with names that do not sound like names and slang nobody bothers to explain, and I have read a lot of fantasy without ever hitting that particular wall. I stayed past the point where I would normally have bailed and it turned into a genuinely great story. What got me was the way it is built, the heist running in the present and then a whole chapter peeling back into one character’s history, timed so that every person I thought I had figured out became somebody else. The cliffhanger annoyed me, I get why it is there, and Crooked Kingdom is now on my Libby holds.

Where this book is sending me next: another essay about my rules for quitting books, the nine it has cost me, and what happened when this one made me break it. Then Crooked Kingdom, eventually, once I forgive the ending for Six of Crows.

Whistler by Ann Patchett

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I almost did not read this one. I DNF’d Tom Lake earlier this year, decided Patchett and I were not going to work out, and then asked Threads about it anyway, and Threads told me to go audio and start with The Dutch House. That worked, so I kept going, through Bel Canto and then into this one. Whistler is now one of my all time top tier books, above both of them, and honestly up there with the TJR and Kristin Hannah books I have loved most. It is a woman and the stepfather she lost for forty five years, one night in 1980, and a horse in a story inside the story. Patchett narrates it herself and does the thing almost no narrator does. She gets quieter in the big moments. Two paragraphs are still following me around, one about a house being sold and never getting to walk back in, and one toast at a fiftieth anniversary party that counts a family forward instead of backward.

Where this book is sending me next: two essays, one about the farmhouse I grew up in and the friends I was never allowed to bring home, and one about the dumb logistical accident my entire family is standing on. After that, back to Tom Lake, the book that started all of this by being the one I could not finish, this time on audio with Meryl Streep reading it.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Third stop on the Patchett tour I only took because Threads told me to. I went into this one knowing nothing at all, and I now think that is the correct way to read it, so I will keep it vague. A birthday party in an unnamed South American country, a famous opera singer, a Japanese businessman who came only to hear her sing, and then terrorists coming through the air vents after a president who did not show up. It hooked me fast and then did something I was not expecting. The siege goes on so long that the book stops being about a siege and becomes about people learning each other’s languages and cooking together and falling in love inside a bubble where the usual rules stopped applying. About a third of the way in I paused it to google whether any of this was real. It is. What it never did was gut me, though, and that is the whole difference between this one and the five stars this month. Very good, and not the kind of good that follows you around after.

Things I Googled: whether the siege actually happened, which I stopped the book a third of the way in to find out. It did. That one is in this month’s Things I Googled.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐

This one was not for me. Two agents on opposite sides of a war across time leaving each other letters, very short, very ambitious, and the writing itself is the entire point. I could not get into it, and the opening never handed me anything to hold onto before the language started asking me to work for it. I finished it and never found the door in. Plenty of readers I trust adore this book, so take my two stars as a mismatch rather than a verdict. What I actually got out of it is about me, because the two things that lose me in a book are a story told in fragments and no early hook, and this is deliberately both, so I may have walked straight into my own known trap.

Where this book is sending me next: the harder question, whether you keep following a reading tree after the branch breaks. I have not answered that one yet.

Reading Trees: this branch grew off two books I had already loved, and it is the first one on any of my trees where a branch broke like this. I am leaving it right where it fell for now. Whether you keep climbing after a branch breaks is the harder question, and I have not answered that one yet.

All seven of these got a full review on Goodreads too, along with everything else I finish, including the books that never turn into an article here. If reading the reviews is the part you like, that is where all of them live. Come follow me over there.

The thread running through August

I was wrong twice this month, in both directions. I had written off Ann Patchett after I could not finish Tom Lake, and she went and wrote one of my favorite books I have ever read. And I had been following one book to the next, trusting it the way you trust a friend with good taste, and it handed me the first book all year I could not find my way into.

So what I keep turning over is how much to trust the way a book gets to me. A book that grew out of another book feels like the reliable route and a hunch about an author feels like the risky one, and August says neither comes with a guarantee. It also says the miss was worth having. A tree where every branch is a five star is a marketing brochure, not a reading life.

The best book I read in August, and I am picking two

Whistler and My Friends, and I am not going to break the tie. Whistler broke something open about family and time that I am still carrying around and will be writing about twice before I am done with it. My Friends is the one whose sentences I would read out loud to a stranger in a parking lot. One of them changed how I think about my own people and the other one changed how I think about sentences, so take whichever of those you need more right now. Ask me again in a year and I will probably still be stalling.

Reading Trees

A reading tree starts with one root book and the itch it leaves behind, a topic, a place, a feeling you are not done with yet. From there it grows branches, other books that reach back to that same root, whether it is a direct mention in the text, the same region, or just chasing the same gut punch. It is not a genre list and it is not an author's backlist. It is a line you can trace from root to newest branch.

Two of them added new branches in August, while the 2 star book broke its branch clean off, and I am leaving right where it is.

Trees keep growing every time one book hands me the next one. Paid subscribers get the full tree, root to newest branch, plus a new tree every month, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the rabbit holes, the essays, all of it, stays free right here.

Subscribe now

Free and paid

This recap is free, always will be. The reading trees are the one thing that lives behind the paywall, one new tree a month plus the full growing vault, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the Google rabbit holes, the essays, all of it, stays right here for everyone.

I don’t have a shelf yet. I have a map.

A note on my links: I’m a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you’re a book buyer and you’re going to own a copy anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.

Tell me in the comments: has an author you previously gave up on ever turned around and given you a favorite?

Leave a comment

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes

I came to this straight off Stone Blind, because I loved that book and wanted more Haynes immediately. If you liked The Silence of the Girls and wanted it angrier and funnier, this is that. It gives the women of the Trojan War their own space instead of leaving them standing around as scenery, and it left me with the specific feeling of having been handed back a story I thought I already knew.

Wanting more land than you need

There is a section about men taking and wasting more land and resources than they need, and I stopped the audiobook over it. Not because it is a surprising idea, but because it is sitting inside a story set right at the end of the Bronze Age, and it turns out that is an argument real historians have been having for a long time.

The Late Bronze Age collapse happened somewhere around 1200 to 1150 BCE, and it took down a set of connected societies across the eastern Mediterranean in a span short enough that people still argue about what did it. The candidates are all the ones you would expect, and they are all unsatisfying on their own: prolonged drought, failed harvests, movement of peoples, warfare, and trade networks so interlocked that when one part failed the rest went with it. The version I keep coming back to is the systems argument, which says no single thing killed it. The whole thing was simply built too tightly to survive any one bad decade.

The Egyptians recorded fighting off the Sea Peoples on the northeast wall of Ramses III's mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, c. 1180 BCE. It is one of the few things anyone wrote down while the world was coming apart. Drawing of the relief, via Wikimedia Commons

So a novel about a mythological war is set at the exact hinge where a real world came apart, and a line about taking more than you need lands differently once you know that. I do not think Haynes put it there by accident.

I have not written the essay this wants to become. It is sitting there and I know it, and I am not ready.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Natalie Haynes)

Source: Library

Rating: 4 stars

Grab a copy of A Thousand Ships

Library first, always. But if you’re buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

My first Backman, and now one of my favorite books I have ever read, which is an annoying thing to say about a book everyone already told me to read. A girl piecing together what happened around a famous painting and the four teenagers who were there when it was made. If you loved A Man Called Ove but wished it hurt more, go here. It left me wanting to stand in front of a painting that does not exist, and irritated that I could not.

The name on the cover did not write the sentences I loved

Here is the thing that sent me looking. What got me about this book was the cadence. Not the plot, the rhythm of the sentences, the way they carried me instead of just informing me. I finished it, went to look something up, and found out it was written in Swedish. The original is called Mina vänner. The English I fell in love with was made by a translator named Neil Smith.

I had a genuinely embarrassing moment of realizing I had spent thirteen hours admiring prose and giving all the credit to a man who did not write those particular words in that particular order.

Literary translation is a craft and a career, and it is not a swap of one word for another. Rhythm, register, where a sentence breathes, what a joke does in one language and what you have to build to make it do the same thing in another. Translators make thousands of decisions a book, and the good ones are invisible in exactly the way that means nobody thanks them.

I now check the translator’s name before I start anything translated. That is a permanent change and it took one book.

This one is also going into a words and etymology grouping I have been slowly building, because it turns out I google language more than I google history.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Marin Ireland)

Source: Library

Rating: 5 stars

Grab a copy of My Friends

Borrow it if you can. Buy it if you must. And if you’re buying, my Bookshop.org link keeps it with the indies.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Third stop on a Patchett run I only took because Threads told me to after I DNF’d Tom Lake earlier this year. A birthday party in an unnamed South American country, an opera singer, a Japanese businessman who came only to hear her sing, and then armed men coming through the air vents after a president who never showed up. If you liked the slow claustrophobic middle of Station Eleven, this is that feeling for four hundred pages.

I paused it a third of the way in to ask whether any of this was real

It is.

In December 1996, members of the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement took over the Japanese ambassador’s residence in the San Isidro district of Lima, Peru, during a party for Emperor Akihito’s 63rd birthday. Fourteen militants. More than six hundred guests inside.

About half of the hostages were released within days. Seventy-two were held to the end, and the end took a long time to arrive. The siege ran 126 days. In that time the thing everyone remembers happened, which is that the hostages and their captors began to know each other, because four months is longer than most people can sustain being strangers.

A commando carries a hostage out of the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima on 22 April 1997, at the end of 126 days. Photo credited to César Astudillo, archives of the Peruvian Joint Command of the Armed Forces, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It ended on 22 April 1997, when roughly 140 Peruvian commandos came up through tunnels that had been dug under the building. The operation was called Chavín de Huántar. All fourteen militants were killed. One hostage died, a Supreme Court justice named Carlos Giusti Acuña. Two soldiers died, Lieutenant Colonel Juan Valer Sandoval and Captain Raúl Jiménez Chávez.

I had gone in knowing nothing, which I still think is the right way to read this book, and then found out the least believable part was the part that was reported.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Anna Fields)

Source: Library

Rating: 4 stars

Grab a copy of Bel Canto

I’ll always tell you to check the library first. If you’d rather own it, this Bookshop.org link supports independent shops and helps me out a little.

Beartown by Fredrik Backman

Somebody in this book asks, with a completely straight face, whether da Vinci got a discount on brown paint. It is a throwaway piece of sarcasm inside a novel about a hockey town, and I could not tell whether it was a joke everybody already knows or something Backman made up, so I went looking. On the book itself: my second Backman of the month, and it is Friday Night Lights rewritten as literary fiction and moved to a Swedish forest. A five star that is not remotely comfortable.

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503 to 1506. Louvre. via Wikimedia Commons

The Mona Lisa really is brown, and there is a second one in Madrid that is not

The first answer is that it does not appear to be a stock art world joke. I could not find it anywhere as an established line, so I am giving it to Backman.

The second answer is the one that ate my evening, because the premise is completely correct. The Mona Lisa does read brown and dim and murky, and that is not Leonardo’s palette. It is roughly five centuries of varnish going yellow on top of his paint, and nobody is going to strip it off, because the risk of taking the painting with the varnish is not one the Louvre will ever accept.

The Prado copy, painted in Leonardo’s studio at the same time and cleaned of its overpaint in 2012. Museo Nacional del Prado, via Wikimedia Commons

Which would be the end of it, except there is a second one. One of Leonardo's own students, most likely Salai or Melzi, painted a near twin alongside the original starting around 1503, and that panel hangs in the Prado in Madrid. For a long time it sat there under a flat black background that somebody added later. In 2012 conservators took that overpaint off and the landscape came back, and so did the color. In places it is better preserved than the Louvre painting, down to the spindles of her chair, the frills across her chest, and the veil at her left arm.

So we do know what she looked like before she went brown. It just is not the famous one.

Format: Audiobook (narrated by Marin Ireland)

Source: Library

Rating: 5 stars

Grab a copy of Beartown

A note on my links: I'm a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you're buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.

Four books sent me looking things up in August. Three more went by without a single question, and all seven are in the full August recap, with the reviews and the month in numbers.

Read the August recap

Subscribe and the September one lands in your inbox at the start of October.

Subscribe now

This is why I love reading. One story turns into ten tabs open.

Tell me in the comments: what is the last thing a novel made you go look up, and did it turn out to be real?

Leave a comment

I should tell you I came to this one sideways. Kate Quinn is an automatic read for me, one of maybe three authors where I don’t ask what it’s about, I just get in line at the library. The Alice Network, The Rose Code, The Huntress, The Diamond Eye, The Briar Club, all five stars, all of them one of the reasons I found out I loved historical fiction in the first place. So when she took her first step into magical realism I was going to be there no matter what it was.

The question that wouldn't leave me alone

And then I read that rule and stopped thinking about the plot entirely. I started thinking about my own life, and the question that wouldn’t leave me alone: if I had a library like that, if I could bookmark my own life, step into that stopped time for a breath, and come back to the exact same moment, which part would I choose?

My first instinct was the obvious one. I’d bookmark the hard parts. The years when I was raising little kids and building a business at the same time, traveling for work, running on the kind of broken, worried sleep you get for years after a baby comes, three of them in my case.

I even know the exact week I’d pick. One of the kids had rotavirus, which meant liquid diapers every few minutes and a continuous loop of laundry and Lysol that never once caught up to itself. Then my husband and I both got it and neither of us could move, and my mother-in-law had to drive over and take the kids. I’d have slid a bookmark right into the middle of that and gone somewhere quiet to sleep for a week, then come back rested and patient and whole.

But the longer I sat with it, the more the question turned over on me. Because I don’t actually want to skip those years. I want to redo them. There’s a difference, and it took me until now to feel it.

What the rushing cost me

The truth I don’t love admitting is that I rushed. I rushed through feedings to get back to my laptop. I laid my babies down the second they fell asleep on my chest instead of staying in the chair and rocking, because there was always something waiting for me to finish it. I told myself the work was the responsible choice, the grown-up one, and a lot of it I would give back in a heartbeat now for one more hour of a sleeping kid going heavy against me. Work, work, work. I can see how much of it didn’t matter, and I can see exactly what it cost, and the math is not in my favor.

So I changed my answer. I wouldn’t bookmark those years to escape them. I’d bookmark them to come back in as the mother I wish I’d been the first time, the one who saw a sick week or a clingy toddler as the whole point instead of an interruption to something more important.

The one I'd go back to first

There’s one moment I’d go back to before any other. It was a snowy weekend years ago, and I was newly pregnant with (surprise) baby #3 and we hadn’t told a soul yet. I was scared in a way I couldn’t say out loud, doing frantic private math about insurance and leave I wouldn’t get and whether I had it in me to start over. My kids wanted to go sledding more than they had ever wanted anything, and they stood at the door begging me to come. I said no. I sat on the couch, numb, and watched them leave with their dad and disappear into the best kind of winter day, the kind you don’t get back.

If the Astral Library were real, that’s where I’d slide the bookmark. I’d step into that stopped time, take every hour I needed to talk myself down and remember what actually mattered, and then walk back into that exact minute, stand up, and go get my coat. I’d make the day. I’d be cold and out of breath and present, and I wouldn’t have to spend years afterward wishing I had.

The version of this I can’t stop turning over isn’t even about the big, dramatic days. It’s the small ones. The times I’d give anything to have paused for three seconds before I answered, before a tired reaction became a sharper word than I meant, before a fight got bigger than it needed to, before I handed out advice I hadn’t actually thought through. A bookmark wouldn’t have given me a different child or a different life. It would have given me the one thing I never had enough of in the moment, which was time to choose how I showed up.

My kids are mostly grown now. The house is quieter than it used to be and I am almost on the other side of all of it, and even now, when I catch myself parenting on autopilot, too tired and too distracted to be the person I want to be, I still want the bookmark. Not because the season is unbearable. Because it’s the living part, and I finally know that’s exactly why you’d always walk back in.

Two libraries, six years apart

Here's where it gets interesting, and where I have to be honest about a book by an author I'd follow anywhere. For a story built entirely on the fantasy of escaping into books, I needed to ache for the real world Alix Watson walked away from, and I never quite did. I felt the cleverness of the structure more than I felt her longing.

Then I went looking, and found something I didn’t expect. I have been reading books about stepping out of your life for six years without noticing I was doing it. In Five Years, The Midnight Library, Maybe in Another Life, The Measure, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Our Infinite Fates, This Is How You Lose the Time War. Seven of them, and a shelf I only made on Goodreads this week, once I could finally see it was there.

Then I lined them up by how the escape actually works. There are exactly two where the way out is a building you walk into, and it’s The Midnight Library in 2022 and The Astral Library this June. Three stars and three stars. I never even wrote a review for the first one. Every book I gave five stars to on that shelf has no door in it at all. Maybe in Another Life, The Measure, Addie LaRue, Our Infinite Fates, the other life just happens, inside a life, with no room to step into and no chance to get your head straight first.

The two that don’t fit tell on themselves. In Five Years was 2020, the very first one, before I knew I was collecting anything. Time War was three weeks ago and it lost me on the writing, not the premise. Neither one is a door.

Which is the whole thing I just spent this essay figuring out. When the way out is a room you can enter, escape becomes the point, and I admire it from a distance. When there’s no room and no door and you’re just stuck in the life, it takes me apart. Kate Quinn built a beautiful library. I think I only ever wanted the walking back in.

That’s what the book got right, underneath the magic. The fantasy isn’t escaping your life. The fantasy is being allowed to return to it as the person you wish you’d been, before the moment is gone. We don’t get the bookmark. We just get the moment, once, in real time, moving at its normal speed with no library to step into and slow it down. So I’m trying to stop rushing through the pages I’m still in.

If you could bookmark your own life and step back into one moment as the person you are now, which one would you choose? I’d love to hear yours in the comments. Mine is a snowy driveway and a sled I should have grabbed.

Leave a comment

The review

Format: Physical | Source: Library | Rating: 3 stars

I picked this up from the library on a whim, mostly because Kate Quinn wrote it, and the concept is easily the best part. The time-stop mechanic gave me more to sit with than most novels manage in twice the pages, and that alone made it worth the read. What kept it at three was the emotional middle, where I felt how clever the structure was more than I felt what Alix had given up to be there. Go in for the idea and the charm rather than a gut punch and it delivers. Worth a library hold rather than a shelf spot for me, and a fond three stars.

Where this one is sending me next: if The Astral Library worked for you, go read The Midnight Library, and it works in the other direction too. Same idea wearing a different cover, same three stars from me, and if you liked one of them you’ll like the other.

Then there’s The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which I haven’t read and can’t tell you a thing about yet. It’s a doors-and-portals book, which by my own theory should land at another three, so I’m reading it next specifically to find out whether I’m right about myself. I’ll tell you either way.

Grab a copy of The Astral Library.

How I think about buying books: the library is always the right answer if it’s an option for you. But some books you just want to keep. If this is one of those, my Bookshop.org link supports independent bookstores and tosses a few cents to me.

The book doesn’t pause for a lesson. It just lets it be true. And that quiet certainty is what makes it so powerful.

I would not have found this one on my own. It came to me the way most of my books do now, by being the next thing after something else. I loved The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, this was pitched straight at people who loved Addie LaRue, and that is the only reason it ended up on my Kindle. One book handing me the next.

The map so far: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue → Our Infinite Fates → This Is How You Lose the Time War, which I am currently reading.

This book sent my brain somewhere the author maybe didn’t intend.

The soulmate question we don’t ask

We love the idea of soulmates. Someone out there for you, connected across time and space. But here’s the question we skip: if soulmates are real and come back in different bodies, what happens when yours shows up in a body you’re not attracted to?

Say you’re a straight woman in this life. Your soulmate has been your partner across 50 lifetimes. This time, they come back as a woman. Do you recognize them? Does the soul connection override the body?

Our Infinite Fates creates a world where the answer is obvious: love doesn’t care about the container. The soul is what connects. Everything else is just the outfit it’s wearing this time.

That’s a beautiful idea. It’s also an uncomfortable one, and I think that discomfort is worth sitting with.

What it means for how we think about love

If love transcends gender and physical form, the categories we build around attraction start to look less like hard rules and more like current settings on a dial that keeps turning. You’re a soul that’s been everything, attracted to another soul that’s been everything. This lifetime you happen to be in this particular body with this particular orientation.

I’m not saying that’s how it works. I’m saying that’s the thought experiment this book creates, and it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve sat with in a while.

The souls that find their way back

There’s a passage in the book that stopped me: “Lost souls were drawn to the love still felt for them by the living. This meant that parents were often reborn as their children’s own children, and siblings who died together were reborn as twins, and various other dynamics that I’d found troubling and yet strangely resonant.”

Troubling and yet strangely resonant. That's exactly right. The idea that love is a kind of gravity, that the people who loved you hardest pull you back, is one of those ideas that sounds impossible and feels true at the same time. And the implications are wild: your child might be your mother, come back to you. Your twin might be the sibling you lost in another life.

It’s the kind of thought that makes you look at the people around you differently.

The notebook

“Whatever a soul was, it could be carried in a notebook.”

This one line carries the whole book. The poetry book at the center of the story is the proof that love leaves evidence, not in grand gestures or monuments but in words, in a notebook. It was written across lifetimes, carried from life to life, and nobody knows whose hand started it.

It makes you wonder how many remarkable books in our world’s history could have been written from exactly that kind of love and pain. Written by someone who remembered too much.

The families

In each lifetime, these characters are born as babies. To new parents. With new siblings. People who love them and will grieve them when they die before 18. Evelyn remembers all of it.

Imagine having 20 different mothers and carrying the love and loss of every single one.

As a mom of three, that detail destroyed me. My child could be living their 20th life and remember 19 other mothers before me. Devastating. But it also means the love doesn’t disappear. It accumulates.

Big joy and small joy

There’s a passage where a character says something I can’t stop thinking about: “I think I understood a long time ago that big joy and small joy are the same. It sounds trite, but it’s true.” He describes winning a major tennis tournament and bringing home a huge cash prize, and says that victory felt no different from curling up in an old armchair with a faded blanket and reading his little sister a bedtime story. No different from a perfect pot of coffee or a warm croissant fresh from the bakery.

And then: “Even when there’s no big joy, even when it feels like we’ll never leave this trench alive, there’s still the small joy. A sunset, a flask of tea. Your hand in mine.”

The older I get, the more I agree with this. The big wins feel great in the moment, but the feeling fades to the same warmth as a quiet morning with good coffee. And the small joys, when you really notice them, feel exactly as big as the trophies. Maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe when you’ve lived enough lives (or just enough years), you stop ranking joy and start collecting it.

Why evil can’t win

There’s a thread about evil trying to recruit and win by numbers. It never works. Love, even outnumbered, is stronger. Not magic. Just what it makes people capable of.

Don’t follow bad. Love more. That’s it.

Our Infinite Fates. Five stars. Read it especially if you think you know what love looks like.

Where this one is sending me next: enough people told me that if I loved Addie LaRue and I loved this, then This Is How You Lose the Time War was the next stop. I'm reading it now. I'll tell you whether they were right.

Get your own copy of Our Infinite Fates here. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

The idea never really gets off the ground in the book. One friend imagines it for another and it stays a thought. But it lodged in me and would not leave, and I have spent weeks since planning these parties in my head. I want to walk you through them, because somewhere in the planning I found something I did not expect.

The thirty-five-year party

My oldest friend and I hit thirty-five years this year. Thirty-five. She has known me through every single version of myself, including the ones I would rather forget. She has seen my lowest moments and my most embarrassing ones, the stretches I am not proud of, the years I was barely holding it together. She is, hands down, the better friend of the two of us. She remembers the birthdays and the small anniversaries and the inside jokes, and she is the one who pushes to get us together. She will tell you it is because she does not run a business and does not have as many kids pulling her in every direction, but I will tell you the truth, which is that she is simply one of the kindest people alive.

I listened to The Villa on a quick trip to see her, actually. She was already on the road for one of her kids, which happened to bring her closer to me than she usually lives, so we each drove about seven hours and met in the middle for a few days. We did nothing special. We walked and talked and ate and drank, and it filled my cup all the way up.

So her party would be easy to plan and impossible to fake. It would be entirely about her. And here is the strange part: the guest list would be tiny. I would only invite our families. Our kids, our husbands, our siblings, our parents, our grandparents if they were still here. Because those are the only people left who have actually witnessed our friendship. Everyone we met through, the whole original group, are strangers to me now. None of them made it past the ten-year mark with either of us. She and I did, and that is the whole guest list, and it is enough.

The twenty-two-year party

Then there is the friend I met at a barbecue, the two of us holding our oldest babies, who turned out to be about four months apart. Those two grew up as best friends until we moved away and I accidentally ruined it. I had heard about this woman for years before we ever met, all of it good, and then one summer at one barbecue we finally clicked and never looked back.

Even after I moved a few hours away, we kept it alive. Dinners, drinks, vacations together. Our husbands actually like each other. Our kids are the same ages and tangled up in each other’s lives. We pick up exactly where we left off every time, like no months have passed.

Her party would be a barbecue, obviously, and it would be enormous, because she is the kind of person dozens of women claim and brag about. She has the coolest sisters I know and a family people orbit. And here is where the planning turned on me, because thinking about her big, loving guest list, I felt a flicker of something ugly. Jealousy. I would be jealous that so many of those guests have gotten to know her better than I have over the last ten years, the years since I moved. I lost a little of what made us so close, and other people filled the space. We talk about getting lake houses near each other someday when we are older. I hope we do.

The five-way party

And then there are the friends I made in the last decade, the ones who came into my life through what I can only call forced proximity. Four moms and me, all bound together because our kids are bound together. Same schools, same teams, same endless events. Our kids even threw their graduation parties together. There is no untangling us at this point, and inside that group there are the ones I am naturally closer to and the ones I am not, the way these things always go. One of them is my workout buddy, the one I have written about before, and she would almost deserve her own little party except it would inevitably just become all five of us anyway.

That one would be the biggest bash of all, because it is not really five women, it is five families fused at the school-and-sports seams. These women do not know the younger versions of me. They never met the girl my thirty-five-year friend grew up with. But they know exactly who I am right now. They know the mom wrestling with the same things they are, the kids leaving for college, the aging parents, the health that is shifting, the husbands who are wonderful and exhausting, where to go on vacation, what is happening at work. My workout buddy knows today-me down to the bone, because we say all of it out loud while we lift and walk.

The thing I found while planning

Here is what undid me, and I did not see it coming until I had all three guest lists side by side.

The two friends who have witnessed every version of me, the thirty-five years and the twenty-two, are both people I had to move away from. And the women who are closest to me now, the ones who could be at my door in ten minutes, only know the version of me standing here today.

Nobody who lives near me has seen my whole arc. The people who have are a seven-hour drive away.

I do not know what to do with that, exactly. I am not sure there is anything to do with it except notice it, and maybe love all of them a little more deliberately for the specific stretch of my life they hold. The far-away ones who remember who I was. The close ones who know who I am. The truth is I need both, and the parties I keep planning in my head are really just me trying to thank each of them for the part they witnessed.

Maybe that is the whole point of an anniversary. Not the years. The witnessing.

Sometimes the only one who will say it out loud is a book. The Villa handed me a throwaway idea about a party, and I am still standing in the middle of it, counting who would come.

Grab a copy of The Villa. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

El-Arifi writes Cleopatra’s story as though someone who actually knew her was finally allowed to speak, and not the Roman version or the Hollywood version but the one where she is a mother and a ruler and a sister and a strategist, all at once, all the time. The footnotes throughout the book, where El-Arifi flags which pieces of history were probably exaggerated and then lets Cleopatra correct the record inside the narrative, made me question everything I thought I knew.

Here are the five things I Googled.

Sennedjem and his wife harvesting grain in the Field of Reeds, a facsimile of a painting from his tomb at Deir el-Medina (original c. 1295 to 1213 BC). The Egyptian year, Shemu included, was built around the harvest. Image: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

What is Shemu?

The book references Shemu frequently, and I had no idea what it was. Turns out, Shemu was the third season in the ancient Egyptian calendar: the harvest season. It ran from roughly May to September, during the period when the Nile was at its lowest before the annual flood.

Ancient Egypt did not use a four-season calendar the way we do. They had three seasons, all tied to the Nile: Akhet (the flooding), Peret (the growing/emergence), and Shemu (the harvest). Their entire agricultural cycle, and by extension their entire economy, revolved around the river. Shemu was when farmers harvested emmer wheat, barley, flax, and vegetables from the nutrient-rich soil the floods had deposited months earlier.

What struck me is how different this is from the planting-and-harvesting cycle I grew up understanding. In Egypt, you planted after the floods receded and harvested in what we would think of as late spring and summer. The Nile dictated everything.

A hakawati in an old Damascus cafe, keeping the centuries-old storytelling tradition alive on the nights of Ramadan. Photo: [photographer] via Wikimedia Commons.

What is a Hakawati?

This word appears in the book and I had to look it up. A Hakawati is an Arabic storyteller. The word comes from a fusion of two Arabic words: hekaye, meaning “the story,” and haki, meaning “to talk.”

For generations, the Hakawati was a central figure in Arabic culture. People would gather in coffeehouses, homes, or outdoor spaces, and the Hakawati would narrate stories of heroism, romance, tragedy, and comedy. These storytellers represented the collective memory and imagination of their communities. They brought historical figures to life, spun tales from the Quran, and breathed humanity into legends.

The tradition has faded with modernity, though there has been a revival in recent years. Reading about it in the context of Cleopatra’s story felt fitting. El-Arifi is doing something similar: taking a story that has been told a thousand ways by a thousand people and giving it back its original voice.

Cleopatra and Caesar (1866) by Jean-Léon Gérôme, one of the earliest paintings to show her emerging from the carpet. The "carpet" detail itself traces back to an 18th-century translation of Plutarch more than to history. Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Was Cleopatra actually Caesar’s lover?

The book portrays a romantic relationship between Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and I wanted to know how much of that was historically supported.

The answer: quite a lot. Cleopatra and Caesar’s relationship began around 48 BC, when he was 52 and she was 21. Caesar had pursued Pompey to Egypt during the Roman Civil War, and Cleopatra, locked in her own power struggle against her brother Ptolemy XIII, saw an opportunity. She famously had herself smuggled into Caesar’s presence, rolled in a carpet (or possibly a linen sack, depending on the source).

In 47 BC, Cleopatra gave birth to Ptolemy XV, known as Caesarion, whom she claimed was Caesar’s son. Caesar never formally acknowledged him as his heir, but in 46 BC, Cleopatra and their son visited Rome and stayed at one of Caesar’s estates.

The relationship was both political and personal, and it lasted until Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC. What El-Arifi does with this in the novel is make it feel like more than a political alliance without losing the political dimension.

The Death of Cleopatra (1874) by Jean-André Rixens

The painting of Cleopatra and the cobra

The book references a famous artistic depiction of Cleopatra’s death, and I went looking for it. What I found was not one painting but an entire genre.

“Cleopatra with the Asp” has been painted by dozens of artists across centuries. Guido Reni painted a version in the 1620s showing Cleopatra pressing the snake to her breast. Jean-André Rixens painted a lavish version in 1874. Guercino, Michel Corneille, and countless others took on the subject.

The traditional story is that Cleopatra killed herself by allowing an asp to bite her rather than be paraded through Rome by Octavian. But here is where El-Arifi’s footnotes become so valuable: the historical evidence for this specific method of death is thin. It is one of those details that became “fact” through repetition, not through proof.

What fascinated me most is how these paintings, created centuries after her death, shaped the popular image of Cleopatra far more than any historical source did.

The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, 41 B.C. (1885) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Cleopatra’s barge

The book also references Cleopatra on a ship, and I Googled the classical paintings of this scene. The most notable are “The Triumph of Cleopatra” (first exhibited 1821, now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery) and “Cleopatra’s Barge” by Frederick Arthur Bridgman.

These paintings illustrate one of the most famous scenes in ancient history: Cleopatra sailing to Tarsus to meet Mark Antony. According to Plutarch, her barge had purple sails, silver oars, and was perfumed so heavily that people on shore could smell it before they could see it. She arrived dressed as the goddess Aphrodite.

Whether or not Plutarch’s account is accurate (and El-Arifi has thoughts about that), the image has persisted for two thousand years. It is another example of how the art and literature about Cleopatra have overshadowed the historical reality, which is exactly the tension El-Arifi explores throughout the entire novel.

The review

Format: Physical | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars

If you like your historical fiction anchored in real research, this belongs on the shelf with Kate Quinn’s Mistress of Rome and Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra, the strong-women-of-the-ancient-world group. The love story threaded through it kept the politics from ever reading like a lecture. The only reason it’s four stars and not five is honest and a little hard to explain: I loved it the whole time I was in it, but it didn’t stay with me in the days after the way my five-star books usually do. Still, very few novels have ever sent me to my phone five separate times, and that alone tells you how alive it felt.

Grab a copy of Cleopatra.

Get it from the library if you can. If not, Bookshop.org over Amazon, always.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a "fact" from history you believed for years before finding out it was mostly myth, the thing everyone repeats that turns out to be thin on proof? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

In the context of the book, this is about polygamy. A man with five wives, ten wives, nineteen wives. Children numbering in the dozens. The math alone is enough to make your chest tight. How do you love fifty kids? How do you even know fifty kids? One wife watches her husband move into a new home with a new favorite, and she’s left calculating whether she’ll get a visit this week or next month. The jealousy is corrosive, but it isn’t petty. It’s survival-level. These women needed their husband’s attention to have food, shelter, and standing in the community. Love wasn’t just emotional. It was currency.

And the children? The book describes fathers who couldn’t name all of their kids. Who didn’t know their ages. Who showed up for the ones who were useful and forgot about the rest. That’s what happens when you slice a pie into fifty pieces. Nobody gets enough.

I kept thinking about this after I finished the book. Not about polygamy specifically, but about the metaphor itself.

Because I don’t have nineteen partners, but I do have a finite amount of love-energy. There are the obvious slices: my kids, my husband, my closest friends. But then there are the slices I don’t always think about. The slice that goes to my parents. The slice I save for myself, when I remember to. The slice that goes to work, because let’s be honest, work takes a slice whether you offer it or not. The slice that goes to the version of myself I’m trying to become.

Some weeks the pie is generous, big and warm with plenty to go around, the kind everyone who gets a slice lingers over. Other weeks it’s one of those sad little mini pies from the two-day-old bakery shelf, the kind nobody should really buy, but you talk yourself into it anyway and just feel let down a few bites in.

And it isn’t only the size of the pie that changes week to week. It’s who I cut it for. Some weeks my husband is easier to love than my kids, and it has nothing to do with them. Maybe it’s their schedule, maybe it’s mine, maybe work already took its cut before anyone at home got served, or maybe we finally got a rare date night and I handed him a bigger piece than usual. The part nobody warns you about is that the bigger piece has to come from somewhere, and that week it came out of the kids’ servings. Other weeks it flips, and the kids get the biggest slices while my husband just waits patiently for his turn to come back around. And then there are the weeks one of my parents ends up in the hospital, and I give a mom or a dad the entire pie and come home with nothing left to serve the hungry mouths at my own table.

What struck me about The Nineteenth Wife wasn’t just that these women had to share a husband. It’s that the book forced me to look at my own pie and ask some uncomfortable questions. Who’s getting a real slice? Who’s getting the smaller pieces, the ones I cut a little thinner and then cover with extra whipped cream so nobody notices? Who’s getting just crumbs? And who have I quietly stopped serving altogether?

I think we all walk around pretending the pie is infinite, that we can keep adding people, projects, obligations, and commitments without any of it getting thinner. But it does get thinner. And the people who feel it first are usually the ones who won’t say anything. The ones who’ll tell you your baking is just as good as it ever was. The ones who would never complain that their slices keep getting smaller and more misshapen, or that you used to serve them every night and somehow slid into handing them a piece only every few dinners.

The Nineteenth Wife is about a lot of things: Mormon history, murder, religious control, women’s autonomy. But the thing that stuck with me most was a line about pie, because it made me count my slices, and I didn’t love the number I came up with.

If you’ve read The Nineteenth Wife, I’d love to know what stuck with you. And if you haven’t, maybe start by asking yourself this: how many slices is your pie cut into right now?

Leave a comment

Grab a copy of The Nineteenth Wife. My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

By the numbers

• Books finished: 6, all free from the library

• Google searches: 3 rabbit holes, including one on the My Lai massacre I somehow never learned about in school, and a whole tangle of misspelled Irish mermaid folklore

• Emotional essays incoming: 1

• Reading trees growing: 1 new branch this month (I, Medusa extends the Stone Blind tree)

• Stars: one 5 star, one 4.5 star, one 3.5 star, three 3 star

• Format split: 3 audiobooks, 2 ebooks, 1 physical

• Narrators: Mara Wilson (Women’s Hotel), Barrie Kreinik (The Sirens), Nicole Lewis (Such a Fun Age)

• Listening time: just under 30 hours at normal speed, about 19.7 hours at my usual 1.5x

• Days of my life: roughly a day and a half spent with a book this month

• Top genre: literary fiction

• Currently reading: A Thousand Ships (audiobook, 75%) and Six of Crows (ebook, 20%)

Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy

📖 Physical (Library) ⭐⭐⭐

I didn’t know much going in beyond a few social accounts recommending it, and that was probably better. Fast read, heavy topic, a teenage girl and her relationship with her teacher, handled without flinching and without letting you off easy either. I read it as a break from a much heavier WWII audiobook, and it still ended up sitting with me more than a filler read should. Landed at three stars, mostly because the ending did not resolve quite as much as I wanted.

Coming up: no article for this one, just the review. It was a palate cleanser, not a rabbit hole. (Quick note: I actually finished this one in June. June’s recap had already gone out by the time I processed the dump, so it’s living here instead.)

Women’s Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐

Picked this up because it was sitting there on Libby and I’d seen it floating around social somewhere. Slow, patient ensemble novel set in a 1960s women’s residential hotel modeled on the real Barbizon. Wasn’t blown away, but the ending caught me more off guard than I expected from a book that spent most of its runtime just introducing people to me.

Coming up: a Things I Googled article about the hygiene rules these hotels actually enforced, and a Who I Became piece about the strange split feeling of reading how limited women’s choices were then versus now.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I only picked this up because it was popular a while back, had great reviews, and there was no wait for it at the library, so no excuse not to. It’s told in parts, and I almost bailed early because the start felt slow, but by Part II I was completely hooked, and I finished it bawling on the last night. This might end up being a top tier read for me this year. I still need to sit with it a little longer before I can say that for sure.

Coming up: a Things I Googled article, since a passage about Tom’s teenage years sent me down two different holes, whether there were ever any famous redheads before a certain era, and later the My Lai massacre, which I somehow never learned about in school.

The Sirens by Emilia Hart

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐

Several storylines were running at once with flashbacks woven through, and it kept my attention the whole way, even though I wished the ending had leaned harder into the art thread since I love artists and their whole live your passion existence. What really stuck with me was the thread connecting mermaid folklore to Ireland. I came out of it with a list of googled terms, an Irish word for mermaid, a sea lullaby the characters kept singing, and the name for an underwater world in Irish myth.

Coming up: a Things I Googled article untangling all of that Irish mermaid folklore, since half of what I searched for was spelled wrong and I need to actually get it right.

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

🎧 Audiobook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.5)

No reading tree connection on this one, just a book that kept showing up with good reviews and was sitting there available on Libby, so I grabbed it. It juggles several storylines at once and never lost me, and the narrator’s voice for Briar, the little girl at the center of it, was one of my favorite parts of the whole listen. It handles race in a way that felt honest without turning into a lecture, and I’m already planning to read more from Kiley Reid because of it.

Coming up: no article this time, it was just a genuinely good read.

I, Medusa by Ayana Gray

📱 eBook (Library) ⭐⭐⭐ (3.5)

This one grew out of the same tree as Stone Blind, my Natalie Haynes read back in March, with a few Twitter recommendations pointing me toward it too. With a Greek mythology retelling you already know where the story ends, Medusa becomes Medusa, but you never know how or when, and this book kept me anxious to find out, just not in quite the same way Stone Blind did. It read a little young to me, almost YA in tone, though I’m not sure it was actually marketed that way. It moved fast, and overall it was a good read.

Coming up: a Reading Tree update connecting it back to Stone Blind.

What is a reading tree?

A reading tree starts with one root book and the itch it leaves behind, a topic, a place, a feeling you’re not done with yet. From there it grows branches, other books that connect to that same thread, whether it’s a direct mention in the text, the same region, or just chasing the same gut punch. It’s not a genre list and it’s not a same-author backlist. It’s a chain you can actually follow. Trees keep growing over time as I read more into the thread, and paid subscribers get the full tree, root to newest branch, plus a new one every month.

This month’s only branch was small: I, Medusa hanging off Stone Blind, both of them different angles on the same myth. Not much of a thread to pull this month, but that tracks. A slow reading month means a slow tree month too.

The one I can’t quite pick

If you’re asking me to name a favorite, I genuinely can’t. Buckeye earned every one of its five stars and wrecked me in the best way, the kind of book I’m still turning over a week later. But Such a Fun Age was the one I looked forward to picking back up every single day, in a lighter, more purely fun way. One gutted me, one delighted me. I’m not choosing.

Free and paid

This recap is free, always will be. The reading trees are the one thing that lives behind the paywall, one new tree a month plus the full growing vault, and founding members get a personalized tree of their own once a year. Everything else, the Google rabbit holes, the Who I Became pieces, the essays, stays right here for everyone.

Tell me in the comments, did you read anything great in July? Anyone else take a real break from books this summer and not feel bad about it?

Leave a comment

But the male lead is an arborist, which means there are tree facts woven into every other conversation, plus more tree puns than I knew existed. So naturally I paused to look up redwood trees, and that little detour turned into a whole situation.

Redwoods at Tall Trees Grove photo by Shaina Niehans

Redwood trees can live for over 2,000 years

This is where it started, as a basic fact-check I fully meant to close out in thirty seconds, and then I just kept scrolling.

Redwoods are among the oldest living organisms on the planet, and some individual trees have been alive since before the Roman Empire. They can grow over 350 feet tall, and their bark can be more than a foot thick.

What surprised me most was how they survive. They grow these things called burls, which are basically backup systems built right into the tree. If the main trunk gets damaged, or fire comes through, or something goes catastrophically wrong, the burl can sprout a brand new tree. The redwood has a plan B going the whole time. I don’t totally know why, but reading that felt weirdly reassuring.

A tree's rings record the seasons it lived through, wide in good years and narrow in drought. Photo: via Wikimedia Commons.

Epigenetic memory in trees

Then I fell into the question of whether trees can actually “remember” stress, and the short answer seems to be maybe.

There’s emerging research suggesting that trees respond to environmental stress in ways that shape how they grow and defend themselves later on. It isn’t memory the way we usually think about it, but it does look like an inherited biological response to past conditions.

This is all still being studied and not much of it is settled science. But the idea that a tree could carry the effects of old droughts or fires in its biology, and then pass those effects on to future generations, kind of blew my mind for a Tuesday afternoon.

Male catkins releasing pollen, the spring haze a lot of cities accidentally engineered. Photo: via Wikimedia Commons

Cities plant too many male trees

And then, right after a particular scene in the book, I ended up reading about urban tree planting policies. Apparently a lot of cities preferentially plant male trees, because female trees drop fruit and seeds that cities consider messy, and male trees produce significantly more pollen. Which means allergies, everywhere, basically by design.

This one is debated, and some arborists push back on how much of the problem actually comes down to gendered planting versus other factors. But it’s a real pattern that’s been documented across multiple cities.

I came for a cute romance and left thinking about municipal tree selection committees. Not mad about it.

The review

Format: eBook | Source: Library | Rating: 3 stars

It’s a short, fast novella, charming and low-stakes in the way Abby Jimenez does well. The characters are easy to root for and it moves quickly. I didn’t realize going in that it’s the second in a series, but it reads fine on its own. It isn’t deep, and it isn’t the kind of book that’s going to stay with me, so three stars feels right. But it did its job, and apparently it turned me into someone with opinions about urban tree biology.

Grab a copy of Fall Risk.

I'll always tell you to check the library first. If you'd rather own it, this Bookshop.org link supports independent shops and helps me out a little.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a subject you now know way too much about because one book sent you down a hole? For me it's apparently urban tree planting. Tell me yours in the comments.

Leave a comment

But one small detail from the book has been living in my head ever since.

There’s a traveler in one of the stories who only buys paperback books. Not because of weight or cost or preference. Because when she finishes them, she leaves them on benches at train platforms for the next person to find.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. And it wrecked me in a way the rest of the book couldn’t.

Why a book on a bench matters

Think about the life of that paperback.

Someone wrote it. Someone printed it. Someone put it on a shelf in a bookstore. Someone bought it, read it, maybe loved it, maybe didn’t. It ended up in a donation bin or a thrift store or a box in someone’s garage. Then this woman picks it up, reads it on a train, and sets it down on a bench for a complete stranger. She walks away. She doesn’t know who will pick it up. She doesn’t care if they love it or hate it or leave it there for the next person. She just trusts that someone will find it when they need it.

That book has lived more lives than most people I know.

And that’s what I keep coming back to. Books aren’t objects. They’re travelers. They pass through hands and lives and they carry a little bit of every person who held them. The dog-eared pages someone left behind. The cracked spine from being read in one sitting. The coffee ring on the cover. Those aren’t damage. Those are proof of life.

Sometimes the traces a reader leaves are even more personal than that. Someone underlines the line that gutted them, and years later you find yourself stopping cold on the exact same sentence. Someone fills the margins with notes, a question mark here, a little “yes” scrawled next to a paragraph, a quiet argument with the author that nobody else will ever see. Some people even write their name and the date they finished it inside the cover, so the book carries a record of everyone who has ever lived in it. When you open a copy like that, you’re not just reading the story anymore. You’re reading everyone who read it before you.

The Shelfless Reader builds a shelf

If you read my first post on here, you know the deal. I read over a hundred books a year. I don’t own a bookshelf. Almost everything I read is on Kindle or audiobook, and I’ve never felt like I was missing anything.

But I also told you I was thinking about making one exception. A small shelf. Not a library, not a wall. Just my all-time favorites, the six-star reads, the ones I want to be able to physically hand to someone.

I’ve started building it. Slowly. I thrift my five-star reads when I can find them, buying used copies at Goodwill or secondhand shops whenever I spot one. I find maybe one every three trips. It’s slow going, and that’s part of what makes it special. Every book on that future shelf will have been hunted for, not ordered.

The copy I’m secretly hoping to stumble on is one that somebody else already made their own. Underlined passages, thoughts pencilled into the margins, a name and a date written on the first page. There’s something about holding a book like that, knowing a stranger sat with the same words and left their fingerprints all over them, that feels like connecting with another reader I’ll never meet. I’d get to see the whole life the book lived before it reached me, which lines stopped someone else cold and which ones they argued with. Give me a marked-up, dog-eared copy over a pristine one any day.

I recently found The Women by Kristin Hannah at my favorite thrift store. I was browsing the book section and the worker had her restocking cart out. I spotted it on the cart before it even hit the shelf and asked if I could grab it. Hardcover, near-perfect condition, three dollars. The old lady pushing the cart just gave me this smile. Not a customer service smile. A reader’s smile. The kind that says “I know exactly why you just grabbed that.” And as I walked through the store with it in my cart, I caught more than a few glances from other shoppers who saw what I had and knew they’d missed it.

But it was meant for me. That’s how I felt about it. That copy had a life before me and it found its way to my cart at the exact right moment.

The old book lady I want to become

I have this vision of myself in thirty years. Gray hair, probably with some color in it. Cool glasses. The kind of style that makes people look twice. And I’m walking down a street having just finished a paperback, and I see someone sitting on a bench or waiting for a bus, and I just hand it to them.

“Here. I just finished this. I think you might need it.”

Maybe they read it. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they pass it on to someone else. But that book keeps moving. It went from a thrift store with a full life already behind it, to me, to a stranger, and on and on through its own journey. Just like us. We pass through each other’s lives and leave something behind, whether we know it or not.

I’ve actually been thinking about getting book stamps made. The kind you press into the front page that says something like “This book is meant to be passed on. When you’re done, give it to someone who needs it.” A little nudge to keep the journey going. Because a book sitting on a shelf you’ve already read isn’t doing its full job. A book in someone’s hands? That’s a book at work.

Books find you when you need them

I don’t think I’ve ever picked a book up off a bench from a stranger. Nothing that cinematic. But I do believe that books find you when you need them, even if the way they arrive is completely unglamorous.

Far from the Tree found me because it had no wait on Libby and Julia Whelan narrated it. That’s it. No grand recommendation, no algorithm, no curated list. Just availability and a narrator I trust. And it gave me a metaphor about training wheels that I’m still thinking about weeks later.

The Latecomer cracked open fears about my kids that I’d been carrying for years but never had the words for. I picked it up for the same boring reason: Julia Whelan, no wait.

Kristin Hannah found me because The Great Alone popped up at the right time, and within six weeks I’d torn through three of her books and discovered that historical fiction was the genre I’d been looking for my entire reading life without knowing it. ACOTAR proved I could love fantasy when I’d sworn I never would. The Tattooist of Auschwitz taught me more about WWII than school ever did and opened a door to an entire world of historical fiction I haven’t stopped walking through.

None of these were planned. None of them came from a bestseller list or a bookstagram recommendation. They just showed up. And every single one of them sent me somewhere I didn’t expect, whether that was down a Google rabbit hole at midnight, into a new genre, or straight into my own feelings about something I’d been avoiding.

That’s what I write about here. The rabbit holes, the reading trees that connect one book to the next, the moments where fiction cracks open something real. Every series on this Substack exists because a book found me and did something I wasn’t expecting.

The woman on the bench knew something

The woman in Flights who leaves paperbacks on train benches understood something simple: a book’s job isn’t finished when you close it. It’s finished when it runs out of people to reach.

I didn’t love Flights. I probably won’t ever recommend it. But that one image changed how I think about every book I touch. The thrifted copy of The Women in my cart wasn’t just a three-dollar find. It was a book in the middle of its life, passing through my hands on the way to whoever comes next. Maybe my daughter. Maybe a friend who’s never been a reader and needs the right book to start. Maybe, someday, a stranger on a bench.

I’m building a shelf, but I’m not building a museum. I’m building a lending library. A rest stop for books that are just passing through on their way to the next person who needs them.

The Shelfless Reader is getting a little less shelfless. And I think that’s exactly right.

Grab a copy of Flights. (I didn’t love it, but that one detail might be worth the trip.) My Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

So I Googled it: was the Black Swan based on an actual person?

That’s how I found Josephine Baker.

Josephine Baker in the banana skirt from the 1927 Folies Bergère revue "Un Vent de Folie." The fame this image gave her later became the cover for her Resistance work. Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Josephine Baker and the French Resistance

Baker was an American-born dancer and entertainer who became one of the most famous performers in France in the 1920s and 30s. She was also, secretly, a spy for the French Resistance during WWII.

She used her celebrity to travel to neutral countries, attend diplomatic events, and gather intelligence. She smuggled information written in invisible ink on her sheet music. She pinned notes inside her underwear. She used her fame as the cover, because nobody suspects the woman everyone’s watching.

Genevieve in the novel isn’t Josephine Baker. But the inspiration is unmistakable. A performer whose public life is spectacle and whose private life is resistance. Once I made the connection, every scene in the book where Genevieve moves th

Carrying full equipment, American assault troops move onto Utah Beach on the northern coast of France, with landing craft jamming the harbor in the background. Photo: U.S. Army, National Archives (SC189902), public domain.

Utah Beach

Later in the book, a specific location comes up repeatedly and I realized I didn’t actually know enough about it. So I Googled Utah Beach.

Utah Beach was the westernmost of the five D-Day landing beaches on June 6, 1944. It was assigned to U.S. forces, supported by airborne divisions that dropped behind enemy lines the night before.

What surprised me was that Utah Beach was actually one of the more successful landings that day. Strong currents pushed the landing craft about a mile south of the intended target, which accidentally put them in a less-defended area. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. famously assessed the situation and decided to “start the war from right here” rather than trying to redirect to the planned landing zone.

Casualties at Utah were significantly lower than at Omaha Beach. That context helped me understand why the scenes set near the end of the book carried both tension and a thread of hope at the same time. There was danger, absolutely. But there was also this sense that survival was possible if everything lined up.

Why the real history matters

Some of the details vary depending on the source, and the novel takes its own creative liberties. But the bones of it are real. Real people risked their lives in exactly the ways this story describes. Real performers used their public personas as covers. Real soldiers landed on real beaches not knowing if they’d make it past the morning.

Once I knew that, The Black Swan of Paris stopped feeling like just a story and started feeling like it was pulled from actual lives people lived.

The review

Format: Audiobook | Source: Library | Rating: 5 stars

Seventeen hours on audio and it never once dragged. The narration is a big part of why, especially the French and German accents, and Robards writes scenes you can practically see staged in front of you. I hit the halfway mark sure the book had already peaked, and I was wrong. It kept deepening instead. Underneath all the tension runs a steady current of love, both romantic and familial, and a real hope rooted in the courage of the Resistance, which is what keeps the heartache from sinking it. This was my first Karen Robards and I’m already working through her backlist. One note going in: there’s wartime violence and real emotional loss here.

Grab a copy of The Black Swan of Paris.

A note on my links: I'm a library person first, always. If you can borrow it, borrow it. But if you're going to own a copy anyway, my Bookshop.org links support indie bookstores and send a little back my way. Both can be true.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a novel that turned out to be standing on a true story, the one that sent you looking up whether it really happened? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

Not in a sad way, exactly. More in the way you get quiet when someone is telling you something real and you know you’re supposed to just listen.

Girl at War isn’t the kind of historical fiction where you’re watching events unfold from a safe distance. You’re inside Ana’s head. You’re a kid in Zagreb when things start to go wrong, and then you’re a twenty-something in the US pretending none of it happened. And the whole time you can feel the weight of what she’s carrying because she won’t put it down.

I think what this book did to me is make me realize I’ve been reading about war from a very specific angle. Almost everything on my virtual shelves is WWII. The same theaters. The same broad strokes. I know the shape of those stories. I know what to expect from them.

This was different. I didn’t know the shape. I didn’t know the history. I didn’t even know what the correct name for the war was. And that meant I couldn’t hold the story at arm’s length the way I usually do with historical fiction. I had to sit in it.

The part that stuck with me the most is the cyclical nature of it. The book touches on this idea that in the Balkans, it’s like every fifty years there’s a new version of the same violence. Different people, different justifications, same destruction. And when you read it from inside one person’s life, you feel how unfair that is. Not in a political way. In a human way. How do you build a life when the ground under you has never been stable?

I spent a lot of time thinking about that after I finished. About what it means to read about a war you didn’t know existed until a book put you inside it. About how many more of those stories are out there.

I was somber for a few days. I wanted a second book. I wanted to know if Ana goes back to Croatia with her sister, if she patches things up with the people she shut out, if she ever stops running from the thing that shaped her. I know standalone literary fiction doesn’t work that way. But I wanted it anyway.

Who I was while I read this: quieter. More aware of the limits of my own reading history. Ready to find more stories I don’t already know the shape of.

I read Girl at War by Sara Novic on audio from the library. If you want your own copy, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

What’s the book that changed the shape of what you read after it? Not your favorite, the one that showed you a gap you didn’t know was there. Tell me in the comments. I’m trying to fill mine.

Leave a comment

And it is all of those things. But here’s what nobody told me: this book has some of the most honest, gut-level writing about love and marriage I’ve read in a long time. Not the romance-novel version where everything resolves in a grand gesture, but the real version, the one that makes you set the book down and sit with it for a while.

I gave it 4 stars for the plot. But the quotes about love? Those are 5-star sentences hiding in a 4-star thriller.

The Tapestry

“Marriage is made of a million beautiful and ugly moments stitched together into a shared tapestry of memories, all of which are viewed and remembered slightly differently, like two people staring at the same painting from opposite ends of a room.”

This one got me. Because it’s not just about marriage. It’s about every long relationship. You live through the same moments side by side, and you still walk away remembering different versions. Not because anyone is lying, but because you’re literally standing in different places, seeing it from different angles.

My husband likes to tell this story about a scar on his foot. It involves him standing at the bottom of our stairs, needing something, and me deciding to toss it down instead of walking it to him. He claims I added spin to the object so it was impossible to catch and nearly cut his toe clean off. I claim I just tossed it normal. Same moment, two completely different versions, and we’ve been telling them both for years.

It shows up in the bigger memories too. Over the years we’ve taken our kids to every kind of professional sporting event you can think of because each kid had a different obsession: one loved NFL, one MLB, another pro soccer and NBA. My husband remembers the games, the leading scorers, the train or bus we had to take to get there.

I remember the look on his face when one of the kids lost their mind over a play or player he’d been waiting for them to see. He was living inside the event. I was watching him be a father. Same stadium, same afternoon, and we weren’t even having the same experience.

And then there's the version that catches you off guard. My husband and I were bickering over something dumb at dinner one night, not a real fight, just overtired and snippier than usual. My youngest looked at us and said "you guys fight all the time." We both stopped because we genuinely couldn't remember the last time we'd had an actual fight. To us it was barely a moment, one of those minor ugly patches you don't even register. But to our son watching from the outside, it looks like a flaw in the whole thing. Same tapestry, completely different angles.

Beautiful Because It’s Ugly

The "beautiful and ugly" part is the title of the book, but it's also the truth of being with someone long enough. The beauty and the ugliness aren't separate chapters. They're stitched together, same tapestry, same thread. And sometimes the ugly is what makes the beautiful. The scar story is ugly (sorry, babe) but twenty years later it's one of our funniest stories. Sitting in the same stadium and not even having the same experience is ugly in a quieter way, but it's also proof that we each bring something different to this family. The overtired fights are ugly in the moment, but they're proof we're still in it, still building something, still close enough to irritate each other.

And then there’s the pottery shop. The female lead runs a studio called Beautiful Ugly, where she makes intentionally misshapen mugs and ceramics. There’s a whole conversation in the book about the name, about how something can be both at once. It’s not a throwaway detail. Feeney is layering the title into everything: the marriage, the art, the way this woman shapes something imperfect on purpose and calls it finished. The shop name does the same work as the quote above, just quieter. Beauty and ugliness aren’t opposites. They’re the same thing, held at different angles.

The Mismatch

“Wives think their husbands will change but they don’t. Husbands think their wives won’t change but they do.”

Short and brutal, and one of those things you read and immediately think of three couples you know, including maybe your own.

There’s no judgment in it, just observation. And the older I get, the more I think this is one of the most accurate sentences ever written about heterosexual marriage. Not because it’s cynical, but because it names the specific mismatch that creates friction: one person waiting for change that won’t come, the other blindsided by change they didn’t expect.

My husband still has to have the last word in every conversation. He uses his loud teacher voice at home because after decades in a classroom he doesn't know how to turn it off, and it drives me insane. He eats chips in the kitchen and I have misophonia so I want to leave the room every single time. I still point these things out. I still ask. But there are other things I've let go. He's snored for years, and I used to wake him up every time because it kept me up. About five years ago I bought sleep earplugs instead, and now I only wake him when the volume gets past what the earplugs can handle. That's not fixing the problem. That's just finding a way to live next to it. And I think there's something worth sitting with in that, because when you stop bringing up the things that bother you, you're not just "letting the small stuff go." You might be giving up on them changing, which might also be giving up on each other a little bit. The little things are the big things. They just don't look like it from the outside.

But then there’s the other side of change, the kind you didn’t see coming. We were babies when we got married, straight out of college, high school sweethearts who thought they knew exactly who they were marrying. I used to travel constantly for work and put in long hours when I was home, trying to manage all the household stuff on top of running a business. My husband has been a teacher, coach, and administrator over the years, which means his summers are more relaxed than mine ever were. One summer I came home from a work trip fully braced to spend the weekend catching up on chores, and the laundry was done and the kitchen was clean. No announcement, no “look what I did.” Just handled. And I realized that had become a pattern I hadn’t noticed forming.

He didn’t change because I asked. He changed because he saw what was needed and just did it. That’s not the boy I married at twenty-two.

And I’m not the girl he married either. Somewhere around COVID I stopped traveling as much for work, realized I loved being home, and slowly became a different person socially. I used to be the one who made us new friends, who brought us into groups, who said yes to every parent gathering and neighborhood thing. Then I realized I was doing most of it out of obligation, not enjoyment, and I just stopped. My husband points it out sometimes, mostly because our social circle got a lot smaller when I stopped being the connector. We get excluded from things now because I don’t care enough to keep up, and he’s supportive of me protecting my energy even though he feels the trade-off too. Sometimes he talks me into going out anyway, and I’m almost always glad he did. I make sure to tell him that, which I think matters.

When I look at pictures of that high school boy I dated or that college kid I married (both him, by the way), I can barely imagine or remember those people. It feels like so long and so many changes ago. We’ve shed so many skins since then. I like 90% of who we are now, and the other 10% we can keep working on.

I ride in a golf cart with a book now because he loves golf and I love being outside with him, even if I rarely pick up a club. I bike with him because I eventually got an ebike for the hills after I rage-quit our first ride on a regular bike and he had to come pick me up on the side of the road at the bottom of a hill I refused to go up. That’s change I didn’t expect in myself. And the fact that he didn’t laugh at me on that roadside (okay, he probably did) and just showed up with the car is the kind of love that doesn’t make it into the highlight reel but holds the whole thing together.

The Quiet Bomb

“Is being with someone who used to love you better than being alone?”

This is the quiet bomb in the book. No dramatic setup, no big reveal, just this question sitting there on the page, waiting for you to answer it.

I think at some point in a 25-year marriage, you question whether the person sleeping across from you still loves you, or if they still love you the way you love them. And I’d be lying if I said I’ve never had moments where being alone sounded great. When he leaves cupboard doors open, trims his beard over the sink and doesn’t clean it up, leaves the toilet seat up at 2 AM. In those moments my answer to Feeney’s question is yes, absolutely, being alone sounds incredible. I’ll take a rural chicken farm with a few like-minded women and never share a bathroom again.

But then I think about what I’d actually miss. My mom has been single and living alone for many years, and I’ve watched what that kind of solitude changes in a person over time. And I think about the fact that my husband is still trying. Still trying to change the things I’ve been asking him to change for 25 years. That’s not someone who used to love me. That’s someone who’s still in it.

I don’t have a clean answer to Feeney’s question. I go back and forth. I think most people in long relationships do, even if they’d never say it out loud.

The Darkest Way to Say I Love You

“I hope you die in your sleep.”

Full quote: “I hope you die in your sleep. I’ve been thinking about it lately, death, and it’s got to be the best way to go. If you truly loved someone, that’s how you’d want them to die, and I love you more than anything. So I hope you die in your sleep.”

They said that to each other every night before bed. “I hope you die in your sleep” was their way of saying “I love you.”

This one broke me. Because it’s dark and weird and also one of the most tender things I’ve ever read. It reframes love as wanting the softest possible ending for someone. Not “I hope nothing bad ever happens to you,” because we all know that’s not realistic. But “when the bad thing comes, I hope it’s gentle.”

That’s love that has looked at mortality and decided to be gentle with it instead of afraid.

My husband and I don’t have anything like that. I’ve always loved the “ditto” from Ghost, but it never caught on with us. We’re just regular “love you, goodnight” people. But reading this made me wonder if we’re missing something by not having our own version of it. So I actually want to ask: do you and your person have a weird or special way of saying I love you or goodnight? What is it?

The Warning

“People rarely know what they have until they lose it. They spend their lives searching for a better one, wanting more, needing more, blind to the fact that they already had it all. I think sometimes it’s only when something gets taken from a person that they appreciate what they had.”

This isn’t a new idea. We’ve all heard “you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” But Feeney writes it with a specificity that makes it land differently. “Searching for a better one,” not a better life but a better person, a better version of the relationship. Always looking for the upgrade, missing what’s already in your hands.

I can’t speak to this one from experience, and I hope I never have to. But I read it and felt it in my chest anyway, which is maybe the point. You don’t have to have lost someone to understand the warning in it.

Why Does This Matter in a Thriller?

Because the best thrillers aren’t just about plot twists. They’re about people being human in extreme circumstances. And Feeney uses the mystery framework to sneak in observations about love and loss that would feel heavy-handed in a literary novel but land perfectly inside a page-turner.

You don’t expect a thriller to make you think about your own marriage. That’s exactly why it works.

Beautiful Ugly. 4 stars for the story, but these quotes are worth the whole book.

Every quote here is from Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney. If you want it, my Bookshop.org link supports indie bookstores and tosses a few cents my way.

What’s the memory you and your person remember completely differently? The scar story, the stadium afternoon, the fight your kid swears happened. Tell me your version in the comments, then go ask them for theirs. I’d bet it doesn’t match.

Leave a comment

The first time, I was going to combine fashion and reading. The idea was to share the outfits I wore based on the mood of whatever book I was in that week. Not cosplay, not dressing up as characters. More like: when you’re deep in a book, you kind of live in its world for a while, and whether you realize it or not, it comes through in how you dress, where you go for coffee, what you make for dinner. I thought that was interesting enough to share.

The catch was I didn’t want to show my face. So every video had me holding the book that inspired the outfit in front of it, and each one took forever to make. I was filming three or four outfit changes, making a mess of my bedroom, editing clips together, all while working a full-time job. The worst part wasn’t the time. It was that I was shrinking the books down to fit a format that had nothing to do with what I actually wanted to say about them. I wanted to talk about what a book made me think or feel or become, and instead I was showing you what I wore the week I was reading it.

So I stopped.

The second time, I had the idea I’m still most excited about: Things I Googled While Reading. Because that’s what I do. I read a romance novel and end up down a rabbit hole about the history of a town in Italy. I read a dystopian thriller and spend an hour researching the science behind it. People who don’t read much think that’s weird. “It’s just a romance book, why would you Google anything?” But that’s how my brain works, and I don’t think I’m the only one.

So I tried to build content around that, and I ran straight into the same problem. I didn’t want to be on camera. I tried holding a book over my face, which was awkward, then I tried putting a sticky smiley face over my face in the editing software, which was somehow worse. I made about ten videos and never posted a single one.

It wasn’t that they weren’t good. It was that the format didn’t feel like me. I was trying to say something real about how books change the way you think, and I was doing it from behind a cartoon sticker. The whole thing felt forced.

So I stopped again.

The problem was never the ideas

Here’s what I’ve figured out after three attempts and a lot of frustration. The problem was never my ideas. The problem was that every path I could see for sharing them required me to be the content, not my words or my thoughts about the books but me. My face, my voice, my house, my whole aesthetic.

And I just don’t want to do that.

I don’t want to film talking head reels. I don’t want my living room to have to be “content ready.” I don’t want strangers judging my house or my hair or whether my bookshelf is photogenic enough. (I don’t even have a bookshelf. That’s kind of the whole point of the name.)

This isn’t insecurity, it’s a boundary. My house is my safe space, and my face is not my brand. I think a lot of people feel this way but don’t say it, because the internet has made it seem like the only way to build an audience is to put yourself on camera and perform.

Show your face, says the algorithm

Let’s talk about that for a second, because it isn’t just a feeling, it’s structural.

Social media algorithms reward video, and specifically they reward face-on-camera video. Every piece of creator advice out there says the same thing: show your face more, be relatable, let people see the real you. If you follow that advice, it works. I’m not arguing that.

What I’m arguing is that “show your face” shouldn’t be the only viable path, because when it is, it filters out an entire population of people who have something worth sharing and will never share it because the format feels wrong.

Think about how many people you know who are incredible thinkers, readers, writers, artists, but would never in a million years post a video of themselves talking to a camera. Not because they have nothing to say, but because that’s not how they want to say it.

I know painters who spend more time setting up camera angles to film their process than they spend actually painting. I saw a creator post the other day, “If it looks like this took a long time to make, it did,” and she was talking about the reel, not the art. That’s where we are. The documentation of the creative process has become more work than the creative process itself.

And for what? So the algorithm picks it up and you get a few thousand views from people who watch for three seconds and scroll?

I’m not anti-video, and I’m not anti-social media. I consume both, happily. Some of my favorite creators are people who are magnetic on camera, and I love watching them. I just don’t want to be them, and I don’t think I should have to be in order to share what I care about.

Where the words are the product

That’s why I’m here on Substack, writing.

Because on Substack, the writing is the product. Not my face, not my house, not a carefully curated background, just the words. You’re reading this right now and you have no idea what I look like, what my living room looks like, or whether I got dressed today. It doesn’t matter. What matters is whether these words are making you feel something or think about something differently. That’s it.

I write about books here, but this one sits closer to the center of why The Shelfless Reader exists than almost anything else I'll post. I spelled out the bigger why in my manifesto, and this is the lived version of it. I tried three times to build a book account, and I failed twice because I kept trying to squeeze myself into formats that required me to perform instead of write. The third time, I stopped trying to be a content creator and just started being a writer.

I think there’s a whole world of people out there like me, people who are happy to consume social media but have zero desire to be on the other side of the screen. People who have thoughts worth sharing, recommendations worth making, stories worth telling, but the gap between “I have something to say” and “I have to film myself saying it” feels uncrossable.

It doesn’t have to be.

If this sounds like you

You can build something real with words. You can have personality without showing your face. You can create a brand that’s about what you say, not what you look like. You can reach people, move people, build a community of people who care about the same things you do, and you can do all of it without ever recording a single talking head reel.

I’m not saying it’s easy, and I’m not even saying I’ve figured it out yet. I’m literally two posts in. But I know this feels different than the first two attempts, because this time the format matches the thing I actually want to do: read books, think about books, write about books, and share that with anyone who wants to come along.

If you’ve been sitting on an idea, a blog, a newsletter, a creative project, but you haven’t started because you can’t stomach the idea of being “on” all the time, this is me telling you that you don’t have to be. Find the format that fits your voice, not someone else’s, and start there.

The world doesn’t need another face on a screen. It needs more people who are willing to say something real, in whatever way feels true to them.

What about you? If you’re sitting on an idea or a project you haven’t started because you don’t want to be on camera, hit the comment button and tell me what it is. I want to know what the world is missing because the format scared someone off.

Leave a comment

“Birth of Athena,” black-figure amphora, c. 550 BC. Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

How Athena was born from Zeus’ head

Stone Blind mentions this almost casually, like of course you already know Athena sprung fully formed from her father’s skull. I did not already know this. I knew Athena was Zeus’ daughter, but the specifics? Zeus swallowed Athena’s mother Metis (a Titan goddess of wisdom) because of a prophecy that her children would be more powerful than him. Classic Zeus move. Later, he developed a splitting headache, and Hephaestus (the god of the forge) cracked open his skull with an axe. Out came Athena, fully grown, in full armor.

The part that stuck with me: Zeus literally consumed the mother to claim the child. And then the mythology credits him as Athena’s sole parent. Metis gets erased. Knowing this makes Athena’s role in Medusa’s story hit differently. She’s a goddess who was herself born from an act of patriarchal consumption, and then she punishes another woman for being victimized by a god. The cycle is right there.

Athena with owl, detail from terracotta lekythos by the Brygos Painter, c. 490 BC. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Athena’s owl

I knew owls were on ancient Athenian coins and that they symbolized wisdom. What I didn't know was that the Little Owl is literally named after Athena (Athene noctua) and was considered her sacred companion, representing the ability to see in darkness. The owl shows up in countless sculptures and became one of the most recognized symbols in Western civilization.

What I found interesting is that the owl-as-wisdom symbol isn’t just decorative. In some tellings, the owl gave Athena the ability to see the whole truth, even the parts hidden in shadow. Which makes it even more pointed that Athena, goddess of wisdom, chose not to see the truth of what happened to Medusa.

Stheno and Euryale chasing Perseus, detail from the Eleusis Amphora by the Polyphemus Painter, c. 650 BC. Archaeological Museum of Eleusis.

Medusa’s sisters and the connection to sea mythology

This is the rabbit hole that really got me. In Stone Blind, Medusa’s sisters Stheno and Euryale are the other two Gorgons. All three were sea creatures in the oldest versions of the myth, connected to a broader network of ocean mythology including the Graeae (the three gray sisters who shared one eye and one tooth) and various other sea-creature figures.

I started wondering: did The Little Mermaid or other ocean mythology stories in modern media take any inspiration from the Gorgon family tree? The connections are murky but fascinating. The Gorgons were daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, ancient sea deities. Phorcys and Ceto also parented the Graeae, the sea serpent Ladon, and Echidna (mother of many Greek monsters). So the Gorgons sit in this massive family tree of ocean-dwelling mythological creatures that predates almost every mermaid story we know.

Hans Christian Andersen’s original Little Mermaid draws more from Scandinavian folklore than Greek myth, but the broader tradition of dangerous, beautiful, powerful ocean women? That thread runs all the way back to figures like the Gorgons and the Sirens. The sea has always been the place where mythology puts its most threatening feminine figures. Medusa’s family tree is one of the oldest branches. I need to dig into this more.

The review

Format: Audiobook | Source: Library | Rating: 4 stars

What Haynes pulls off is making you feel for Medusa from the very start, so that by the time the famous part of the story arrives, you read it as a wrong done to a person rather than a monster getting what it deserved. Along the way you get attached to some of the other gods and goddesses and grow to genuinely dislike others, which is half the fun. The narration carried it for me, strong with urgency and sarcasm and distinct character voices, and I devoured the whole thing because I needed to see how it landed even though I already knew where it was going.

Grab your own copy of Stone Blind

Library first, always. But if you're buying anyway, my Bookshop.org links back indie bookstores and a sliver comes to me. No pressure.

Now I want to hear from you, and the comment button is right there for it: what's a myth or story you grew up thinking you knew, then found out the real version was darker or stranger than the one you were told? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment