Well this week has been a dumpster fire in a lot of ways, but on the upside, Lucy is reading my favorite book of all time. So that’s something.
One book I will not be passing on to Lucy is Confessions of the Fox. Dude, I tried so hard with this book. I always want to support books with trans characters, but that is literally the only interesting thing about this book. I like historical crime fiction, but I think the story this is based on wasn’t all that exciting, then it’s interesting that the author adds this trans element, but it just was thrown in there and didn’t really bring anything else to it. I also always hate footnotes in fiction, even the way they are used here. This was just so utterly boring I could not take it.
I was in such a slump, the kind where I just start to think I don’t like anything, and then along came Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win. I loved this! This is a story of a very successful (I was getting a Sheryl Sandberg type of vibe) married woman with kids who decides to run for office. So this was relevant to many of my interests, specifically the question of whether women can have it all, and how different the expectations are of husbands from wives. I really enjoyed this, and I know a lot of people hated the ending but I felt like it was perfect.
October is off to a killer start. I was a little hesitant to dive into Putney but I absolutely devoured it. This is tough subject matter; in a way it’s like a lowkey Lolita with three unreliable narrators instead of one. There was a lot I loved about this, but one of my favorite aspects was the way it illustrated how we lie to ourselves to make things acceptable. This alternated between three different points of view, and I was totally invested in all three. It went in an unexpected direction for me, and really there was nothing I didn’t love about this.
Tough act to follow but so far I am loving Lake Success. One of my absolute favorite topics in fiction is rich people in crisis. I mean, I really really love novels about rich people, I don’t know why. I was planning to read this soon anyway, but it came up in this twitter thread that was basically a zillion books I love so I knew it was going to be a hit with me. I’m about a hundred pages in and I am crazy about it. Every interaction in this book is so loaded; he packs so much into every single scene. All I want to do is read this right now so let’s hope my kids get off my back for a minute this weekend. Fingers crossed!
