Read Receipts Issue 78: November 01, 2024
Read Receipts Issue 78: November 01, 2024
🍎🍸 ♟️ 🗳️🌳 🪵🐇🧣🍁⚾️
We don’t need to tell you that this is a stressful time of year, and a stressful week ahead, in particular. But in addition to being politically engaged and showing up at the polls, we’d be remiss not to mention the role that reading plays in times like these, when we’re feeling cautiously (or nauseously) optimistic. Reading is a way to stay politically engaged, to foster dialogue with others on topics you care about, and express your convictions. At the same time, it can be a way to escape when life looks (or feels) dark. It can be whatever you need it to be.
No matter the outcome of this election, we’ll still be here with our book recommendations, reading to make sense of it all. We certainly do have a lot to hope for (somewhere down that list is future President Harris’ end-of-year reading list).
Please vote!
Barbara, Kelsey, and Madeline
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Barbara
It can be hard when a book is overhyped. And unfortunately, this was my experience reading The God of the Woods. Perhaps my fate with this novel was predetermined. For starters, I was not a sleepaway camp kid, the backdrop for the book (I went once, got super homesick, and only made friends when my mom shipped me the new release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). Within sentences, I also learned that the missing character is named Barbara, which I typically find endearing, despite the name often being prescribed to characters over the age of 60. Barbara Van Laar happens to be only 13 years old in The God of the Woods' case. But her character felt a bit dimmed by the backstory of the Van Laar family.
This book was a great audio listen. Multiple narrators, told through multiple POVs and voices, coupled with shifting timelines added suspense and dimension. I’ve listened to a few thrillers in an audio format this year that have this structure – I highly recommend it.
My favorite college professor used to say that the more someone told him that he “had to see” a movie or a TV show, the less likely he was to actually watch it. I’ve never felt that way about books for the record (where would this little newsletter be if so!) but I am curious about the biases I brought into this book and how much they played out in my reading experience, however trivial those predetermined factors may have been.
Read (listen) on a road trip upstate
Best if you liked: Lucy Foley, Bright Young Women
Kelsey
Let me start by saying that my dog is named after Ina Garten. I love this woman. Growing up, my mom was always seated at the kitchen table, thumbing through her cookbooks. Ina’s inviting voice plays in the background via the Food Network in most memories I have of home. “How easy is that?” There was no reality in which I was not going to be reading her memoir. I am definitely biased, but Be Ready When the Luck Happens is one of my favorite celebrity memoirs. It gave extra context and background on a woman I am enamored by and made me feel so warm as she talked about her love for her husband, Jeffery. I definitely shed a few tears on the subway because I was just so overwhelmed with how earnest her story is. Reading this book put me in the best mood and made me feel hopeful. You will come away loving this woman even more and being absolutely infatuated with Jeffery. It is the ultimate read if you need something that feels like eating a perfect roast chicken made by someone who loves you.
Read after doomscrolling
Best if you liked: Taste: My Life Through Food, Julie and Julia
Madeline
I know we’ve all probably heard enough about the Intermezzo discourse by now. In the months and weeks leading up to the publication of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, there was plenty of hype and more than a few think pieces (my own included), all getting at the question of how she has cemented herself as one of the top voices of her generation. All of this fanfare made me skeptical if I’d be able to lose myself in the novel, the way I had with her previous books—while writing about Rooney, had I finally gotten too in the weeds of it all?
But thankfully, within the first few pages I was hooked and after devouring the rest of Intermezzo on a recent vacation, I am here to sing the praises of this wonderful novel. To set the scene, I read most of Intermezzo on a six-hour train ride from Paris to Nice. I was deliriously jet-lagged, but with a jambon-beurre and a cappuccino to get me through, I got entirely lost in the story. In a group chat, my friend (and Read Receipts contributor) Caldwell relayed a similar experience.
“Do you ever read too much of a book at once and you stop and you’re like wow I feel kinda tipsy I was so deep into that,” she wrote.
That’s the perfect way to describe it—book drunk. It made me think about what it takes for a book to make me feel this way—is it entirely the plot, the language, the characters? For me, it’s usually a combination of all three, although the real Rooney-heads know the plot is a little less important. She writes in staccato sentences that are a bit alarming at first, but once I was immersed, I was on board. Then, there are the characters. I cared so deeply about each of the four main characters, especially Ivan and Peter, two brothers grieving the loss of their father while maintaining their relationships with each other and the women they love. So there we have it, Sally Rooney does it again. She got me book drunk, and it was so worth the hangover.
Read after engaging with the discourse
Best if you liked: The Rachel Incident, Conversations on Love
All books can be found at Books Are Magic, McNally Jackson, Greenlight Bookstore, and other independent bookstores, but if you don’t live near one, you can also click the links to support independent bookstores through Bookshop.org.