September 2022 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the September 2022 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I've read and rank them from worst to best.
Who knew starting law school would be so good for my reading life? One month ago, as I was winding down with summer and beginning orientation, I looked at the books on my shelf and my library list with worry. I had gotten used to all of the reading I was able to do working a 9 to 5 job and relished the challenge of trying to get to as many books as possible each month. The idea of starting law school and never being able to read what I wanted filled me with dread. I’m pleased to report that my fears of doom and gloom have not come to pass. In fact, the scarcity of my free time has made the time I get to spend reading more valuable, relaxing, and escapist. Thanks to audiobooks and a breakfast/pre-bed reading routine, September has been a productive reading month. Although there are two (!) books rated a perfect ten on this list, don’t scroll right to the bottom. I enjoyed most of the books I read this month, each serving a different purpose or mood even if they aren’t all part of the award winning cannon.
All of the books written about below are available on my September 2022 Reading Round-Up Bookshop page, or you can click on the title of the book itself to be routed to the shop. All of the books I’ve ever recommended, sorted by post, are also available on the general shop page. Happy reading!
12. The Atmospherians - Alex McElroy
Fiction, 287 pages
One ill-advised comment on the internet has landed Sasha Marcus in big trouble. An internet celebrity known for her wellness videos, Sasha is hounded by trolls, including one man who kills himself after Sasha responds to his abusive comment. Suddenly, no one wants to be associated with Sasha and people are protesting outside of her building. Lost and alone, Sasha turns to her childhood friend, Dyson - a failed actor with his own self-worth issues - who convinces Sasha to start a cult with him in southern New Jersey aimed at rehabilitating wayward men. As this is a satire, the men that join this program aren’t anything special. Instead, they each have issues in their past connected to toxic masculinity in a society beset by a “man horde” issue - groups of men who join together and engage in a brainless collective activity: sometimes civic engagement and other times violence or destruction. Sasha and Dyson’s camp, which is poorly planned and borders on a scam, quickly falls into disarray as chaos ensues.
I usually like satires. I like fiction that examines society by stretching it to its most farcical limits. Satire done well - for example, Black Buck or Disorientation - is entertaining and makes you think. For all its attempts to be successful in this genre, The Atmospherians fell short, mostly because the details required to make the underpinnings of the story feel realistic were not there. Instead of buying into this exaggerated world that McElroy attempted to build, I was instead distracted by the inadequacies of the premise - why did these men stay at the camp even when they discovered its shortcomings? How is an experiment with 12 men anywhere near sufficient to garner the media attention that they did? Why would Sasha possibly commit and return when any rational person would realize that no good could come from it? The holes in the story were too deep for me to effectively engage and as a result, even though the book is only 287 pages, I felt like it dragged on for far too long until it got to its bizarre and wholly unnecessary conclusion.
Rating: 6/10
11. 1962: Baseball and America in the Time of JFK - David Krell
Non-Fiction/History, 278 pages
After months of increasingly not-so-subtle hints from my dad, I picked up 1962 - a historical survey of baseball and American culture in the book’s namesake year. Each chapter covered a different month in this seminal year, which was both an interesting way to survey major events, as well as watch the baseball season progress. Readers are introduced to trends in popular culture - including the nation’s fixation with space and film - as well as major political events from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the debate over abortion. Amidst all of this are detailed chapters on the baseball season, including not just the slow march to an exciting World Series, but also the expansion and reorienting of Major League Baseball to something closer to what we now recognize today.
Rating: 7/10
10. Better to Have Gone - Akash Kapur
Non-Fiction/Memoir, 366 pages
In the late 1960s an intentional community was formed in Southeastern India outside of Pondicherry by a Frenchwoman referred to as “The Mother” who claimed to have achieved enlightenment. The goal was to build a town as an experiment in “human unity and transformation of consciousness.” While the town, Auroville, now has a website and a PR team attempting to attract tourists, at the time, the land was arid and spiritual naïveté rampant. Attracting people from all over the world searching to build a just and equal society, the town also attracted extremists who did not believe in traditional school or supervision for children, eschewed the medical establishment, and explained fully preventable deaths as part of the “universe’s plan.” Amongst the early inhabitants are the author, Akash Kapur’s, in-laws, who both died preventable death’s when Kapur’s now-wife was 14. This book is Kapur’s exploration of their lives and the intersection of their beliefs with the development of Auroville.
This is not a book for audio - there are too many characters to keep track of and too many political grievances and tangents briefly explored. Further, although Kapur is obviously not an objective narrator, the ending of the book left me thoroughly confused. Kapur spends the first 300 pages telling a story about an idealistic “utopian” community gone wrong - including the traumatic deaths of his wife’s parents - but then he becomes an apologist for the community in his conclusion, by arguing that Auroville is special and a wonderful place to live and raise kids. His previous descriptions of the town gave me no impression that this is a place I would want to visit, let alone live, and the “ideals” that he speaks about so reverently seem to be debunked by the naive and dangerous behavior described throughout the entirety of the book.
Rating: 7/10
Thank you to Scribner for the advance reader copy of this book! This book was published in July 2021.
9. Honey & Spice - Bolu Babalola
Fiction/Romance, 340 pages
Kiki Banjo is the host of her British university’s popular student radio show Brown Sugar, where she gives relationship advice and counsels against the antics of young men. Although she has gained quite a following, Kiki herself has sworn off relationships for reasons that are revealed about partway through the book. That is, until she meets Malakai, who has just transferred and has already earned a reputation as a player. To shore up an application to study abroad at NYU for the summer, Kiki pairs up with Malaki to film a documentary about relationships on campus. To maintain her credibility and ratings on her radio show, she and Malaki - who desperately wants a reputation redemption - decide to fake a relationship, which, surprise surprise, develops into something real. If you think the premise of this story sounds a bit far fetched, you aren’t wrong. I didn’t fully understand why the fake relationship was critical nor did I buy into the idea that a campus radio show would have such a large and devoted following. However, even if the book’s realistic elements are lacking, it makes up for its shortcomings with snappy dialogue and rich descriptors, made even more entertaining when listened to on audio and performed by the narrator.
Rating: 7/10
8. Any Other Family - Eleanor Brown
Fiction, 355 pages
The family at the center of Eleanor Brown’s Any Other Family is anything but traditional. Comprised of three separate sets of unrelated parents, the families are connected by their children, who all share the same biological parents. As a condition of their adoption into three different homes, the children remain close with one another and have occasional contact with their birth mother, who was only a teenager when she had the first child. The central plot of the story takes place over the course of two weeks in a vacation home in Aspen, Colorado that has been rented in an attempt by one of the mothers, Tabitha, to instill family unity amongst this untraditional group of unrestrained personalities. Very quickly into the vacation, however, they receive some unexpected news - the biological mother is pregnant again, and she would like this baby to be adopted either by the family who is already raising a newborn or by another couple that would be welcomed into the group’s fold. The announcement sets off a proverbial un-canning of the worms, as each parent addresses their insecurities in relation to their children and with one another.
I enjoyed this book and thought it had an interesting premise, but I felt like it only scratched the surface of topics connected to adoption, particularly an adoption scenario as unique as this one. There was no attention given to the background of the birth mother, to the complicated reality that adoption poses for many people, or to the dynamics of class, race, and social support embedded in the process. As a result, the book existed in a type of liminal space - dancing around difficult topics while attempting to move the story forward.
Rating: 7/10
7. Mika in Real Life - Emiko Jean
Fiction, 365 pages
Mika Suzuki is struggling. She is thirty-five years old, living with her high school best friend, navigating a rocky relationship with her parents, and can’t hold down a job. Mika wanted to be an artist but couldn’t turn the dream into reality after she became unexpectedly pregnant (the details are revealed halfway through the book) during her freshman year of college. Her life thrown into disarray, Mika decides to give her baby up in a closed adoption. It is not a decision she regrets per se - she understands that she would not have been able to care for the child - but she craves more than the annual updates she receives in the mail from the adoptive parents of her daughter, Penny.
All of this changes when she gets a phone call from Penny, now sixteen years old, out of the blue. Her adoptive mother has recently died of cancer and she is looking to establish a closer relationship with her mother and their shared Japanese heritage. Although Mika is thrilled to be in contact with her daughter, she is also ashamed of having her see the life that she has led and the little that she has accomplished. Instead of telling her the truth, she embellishes and makes up details about her life. The facade that she has built - which Penny eagerly buys into - is threatened after Penny buys a ticket to visit Mika in Portland and she is forced to consider not just if the real her is enough for Penny, but also if she is willing to finally change herself.
I thought this book was well-written but went on for a bit too long. I also thought that some of the plot points resolved themselves too quickly and that others were wholly unnecessary (i.e. a certain relationship with Penny’s adoptive father). I think this is the perfect book to listen to if you are new to audiobooks - it moves quickly, is entertaining, and gives you something to think about without diving too deep.
Rating: 7.5/10
6. Playing Dead - Elizabeth Greenwood
Non-Fiction/Death Fraud, 244 pages
Have you ever thought about what it might be like to fake your death? What would motivate you? Are the payoffs worth the liabilities? While I can confidently say that these questions have never crossed my own mind, they have for author Elizabeth Greenwood who explores them in depth in her debut book. I read Greenwood’s other book, Love Lockdown, back in January, which I personally thought covered a more interesting subject (romantic relationships between people in prison and those on the outside), but which nonetheless proves her penchant for exploring unique topics in depth. In Playing Dead, Greenwood travels through the United States, England, and the Philippines to interview death fraud investigators for insurance companies as well as the people who fake their deaths. She explores their motivations for this dramatic act - desperation, financial troubles, a desire to start anew - and compares the dream with reality. Surprisingly, although insurance companies are onto this scheme and have specific investigators for these exact types of cases (don’t up your policy less than two years before your personal coup - that’s a red flag) these companies are often reluctant to publicize or prosecute the fraud for fear that it will encourage copycat behavior. Despite this, my takeaway from the book is simple: there are less complicated ways to solve life’s problems than to fake your own death. Either the insurance company will catch you and you’ll have to repay the sum you or your loved one collected or you’ll miss home too much. Plus, it does not do wonders for your relationships, particularly with your children.
Rating: 8/10
5. The Last Chance Library - Freya Sampson
Fiction, 336 pages
June Jones is a thirty-year-old library assistant in the same small English village where she grew up. Although she earned a spot at Cambridge, she was never able to attend after her mother was diagnosed with cancer and she needed to stay home to care for her. As a result, June has never left her hometown and lives a predictable and somewhat depressing life of routine, which involves work at the library and quiet nights in her childhood home. June is not confident but she shines in her role as a library assistant, and, unbeknownst to her, is beloved by the eclectic patrons. One day, June receives news that the library is under threat of closure due to budget cuts and she must decide if she should join a movement to save the library or shy away like normal.
It appears that this book is marketed as a romance, but I think this is a misnomer used to sell copies. Although June does meet someone and develops feelings for him while organizing the library campaign, that plot point is hardly the primary one. Sampson’s plot is not full of the fluff standard for the genre, indeed, the ending is not even a typical happy ending. Instead, the issues at the heart of the story connect to larger political and socio-economic ills - budget cuts, the proliferation of chains over local business, community building, and public spending prioritization. This is a delightful story full of heart, warmth, and quirky characters that realistically populate the small town.
Rating: 8/10
4. Total - Rebecca Miller
Fiction/Short Stories, 177 pages
Total is an unconnected short story collection that captures the lives of women of all ages. The stories are neither fantastical nor do they explore the most dramatic moment of the protagonist’s life. Rather, they act as snapshots that show people in wildly different circumstances, from a couple reinventing themselves in a refurbished farmhouse, to an alternative reality where smartphones have created mutant babies, to a woman who has just given birth to her third child and places a bit too much trust in the housekeeper her mother-in-law finds her to help her manage. This was a solid collection and each story was well-written. Despite this, I gave it an 8.5/10 because I’m not sure that any one story will stick with me in the long-term. And as an aside, the cover is wholly misleading. Just because the book features female characters does not mean that each or any of the stories comes remotely close to what the cover insinuates.
Rating: 8.5/10
3. The Midcoast - Adam White
Fiction/Literary Mystery, 336 pages
Damariscotta is a small town off the coast of Maine known to tourists in the summer and a much smaller population of locals during the rest of the year. Opioid trafficking and addiction has blighted small towns across the state for years, but not Damariscotta, which has suspiciously remained off the radars of the region’s drug dealers. Andrew grew up in Damariscotta and has recently returned with his family to teach at the high school. He arrives to a town that has changed in meaningful ways, most notably through the ascent of his high school friends Ed and Steph Thatch, who appear to run the community. When Andrew last heard of the couple, Ed was a struggling lobsterman and Steph had dropped out of high school after learning she was pregnant with Ed’s child. Now they live in a sprawling riverside home, Steph is the quasi-mayor of the town and Ed’s business is thriving. None of their neighbors can explain how the family became so successful and none of them are particularly shocked when police come to take Ed away in handcuffs (this isn’t a spoiler, it happens in the prologue). As scandal rocks the small community, Andrew sets out to write a book about the Thatches and what they represent, uncovering dark secrets as his investigation goes on.
I started to listen to this book to stay entertained and avoid motion sickness while taking a long bus journey from Portsmouth, NH back to New York on a traffic filled Labor Day. This was the perfect book for that situation. The Midcoast is my favorite kind of mystery - one that focuses more on character studies and the slow build of suspense rather than flashy plot points and dramatic reveals.
Rating: 8.5/10
2. NSFW - Isabel Kaplan
Fiction, 272 pages
The unnamed protagonist of NSFW appears to have the world ahead of her. She’s a recent Harvard grad and has moved back home to LA to search for jobs in the entertainment industry. Through a contact of her mother’s, a prominent feminist attorney known for her advocacy on behalf of rape victims, she lands a low-paying job as an intern at a TV network. Determined to succeed, she works hard to rise up in the ranks, going along to get along, despite rumors of sexual impropriety and a cover-up amongst the higher ups. At the same time that she is navigating the fraught politics of a job known for the importance of connections, she is also navigating her mother’s mental health issues and neediness. Her mother’s advice for her work problems is to put her nose down and work harder, a response that is unsatisfying. When scandal rocks the network, the protagonist is shocked to discover that her mother has been called in to defend the accused and all of the assumptions that constructed her reality begin to crumble.
One of the main reasons why I loved this book was that I found the protagonist so relatable. Like me, she is a twenty-four year-old recent graduate working her way through her first job as she discovers life without the validation of college. She is witty and funny, anxious but often self-assured, and driven to succeed at her job as type of personal challenge. This is a character-focused book, and although the plot is interesting and develops to a climatic breaking point, it is the characters that give it the life that earned it a 10/10 rating. I laughed at some points and held my breath at others. I didn’t want to put the book down not because I wanted to get to the end, but because I needed to stay immersed in this world for as long as possible.
Rating: 10/10
1. The Colony - Audrey Magee
Fiction, 384 pages
Longlisted for the Booker Prize, I feel insulted on behalf of Audrey Magee that this book did not earn a spot on the shortlist. The story is set off the coast of Ireland in the summer of 1979, on a small island known to be one of the last surviving places where Gaelic is the primary language of the inhabitants. The island is poor and relies on fishing to survive, which has become increasingly difficult as more and more people leave to move to America or Dublin. Enter Mr. Lloyd, a middle-aged mediocre English painter who decides that he will spend his summer on the island and paint the cliffs in an attempt to gain notoriety. He is under explicit orders not to paint the island residents, but Lloyd is not one who heeds instructions well. A few days after Lloyd steps off his currach, another outsider arrives named Jean-Pierre Masson, a French linguist in the final year of his dissertation about the Irish language, the island, and the people who carry on its traditions. Masson is furious that they have allowed Lloyd to stay and is fearful that the presence of the English language, made worse by the fact that it is spoken from the mouth of an Englishman, will disturb his research and the preservation of Irish culture and language. The island’s inhabitants, including the family that rents cottages to the men, feel relatively indifferent to the power struggle between these two outsiders. They are merely trying to get by, including fifteen-year-old James, who has a talent for painting himself and is desperate to leave the island and start a better life.
Inserted between the scenes on the island are vignettes describing the violence taking place across the water on the Irish mainland. At first it is unclear how much of this news filters back to the remote outpost, but as the book goes on readers become aware that these vignettes are actually radio announcements listened to by the women of the village who are growing increasingly concerned about their futures and options for survival.
There are so many interesting themes explored and contrasted throughout this book including colonialism, cultural purity, and the tensions of preservation. The contrast between this sleepy, isolated town with the constant violence raging so close by underpins the struggle between the two outsiders: the Englishman is interested in promoting himself at the expense of others and the Frenchman wants desperately to preserve an unadulterated version of a culture that the Irish recognize as obsolete. Read this book, don’t listen to it. The structure is too interesting to do otherwise and I assume that listening to a narrator would void the book of the nuance provided by the way the words are laid out on the page according to the respective narrator. This is a fabulous book and a fascinating way to discuss political issues that remain a present concern.
Rating: 10/10
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Want to see last month’s round up? You can find that here.