It’s that in-between season after the first nice day of the year that fills us with false hope but before the weather is actually consistently pleasant (at least in New York), which has the tendency to throw us for a loop, even though it’s quite literally like this every year. Whether this spring has you diving into a beach read on one of those drop-and-plop vacations or shielding your paperback from the rain as you walk from the subway to your office, we have a few suggestions for your next read.
This month, we have reviews on a family thriller, a nonfiction deep dive on Iinternet culture, or a harrowingly sad Irish novel (you might call this the Big Three). Also see our monthly reading wrap-up on Instagram this weekend for more of what we read.
Pack an umbrella just in case,
Barbara, Kelsey, and Madeline
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Barbara
“We didn’t call the police right away” is the first line of Angie Kim’s much-anticipated sophomore novel, Happiness Falls. On the surface, this book is about a family’s unraveling when their patriarch, Adam, goes missing—and the only witness to the potential crime is their nonspeaking 14-year-old son, Eugene. But really this book is about the lengths we go to protect the people we love and the impossibility of reaching true family harmony.
The first-person narration, told through the perspective of 20-year-old Mia, was the most compelling part. Mia’s explanation of events in the missing persons case, the agony over the decisions her family makes as they try to protect Eugene from going on trial, and the composure she maintains while simultaneously grieving and searching for her dad had me completely captivated. She speaks with such clarity and frankness, I spent a good two-thirds of the book questioning if she was unreliable. No spoilers here!
Read on your next plane or train ride
Best if you liked: Little Fires Everywhere, Bright Young Women
Kelsey
Are you chronically online? If the answer is “no,” that must be nice, and if the answer is “yes,” before you go touch some grass, I am suggesting you grab a copy of Filterworld by Kyle Chayka. He covers everything from Instagram to TikTok to Netflix to Spotify to platform alternatives to these. But there is also an example he cites about coffee shops I cannot stop thinking about. He visited coffee shops in Berlin, Kyoto and Reykjavík and they all looked the same. These are three places I have never been and I could picture exactly what they looked like before he even described them: big windows to let in ample natural light, subway tiles, light colored walls, concrete or light marble counters, and an industrial wood table. The book is about how algorithms run our world and flatten our culture. He talks about how we got here in a refreshing way that skips all the history we are familiar with because we have been living it and explains how these algorithms work as much as he can, as most tech giants keep these under lock and key. As most of you know, I work in marketing and media so this book covers both a personal and professional interest, but I would say if you are going to read one book about the Internet, this is the one I have found most interesting.
Read after your TikTok algorithm serves you another satisfying cleaning video
Best if you liked: Extremely Online, The Internet
Madeline
I haven’t read a book as haunting as Ordinary Human Failings in a while. It’s barely over 200 pages, but Megan Nolan packs so much heart, grief, and dread into every sentence (stay with me). We follow an Irish family living in London in 1990 as they deal with the aftermath of a death in their community, and Lucy, age 10, is accused of committing this horrific crime. Our main characters are Carmel, a young mother struggling to be there for Lucy; Richie, Carmel’s alcoholic older brother; their stoic father, John; and Tom, a crime journalist looking for career success while he covers the case. Each character is crafted so well—throughout the novel, we understand them more and more deeply through flashbacks and shifts to each of their perspectives. Each of them asks themselves, in their own way, what it means to be a good person. Full of suffering, but not in a gratuitous way, Ordinary Human Failings encouraged me, too, as a reader, to ask myself what it means to be good.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tragedy in fiction recently, after some friends (hey, Barb) started reading A Little Life and after Pandora Sykes wrote about Misery Lit in a recent edition of her newsletter. It’s hard to describe what makes a book filled with so much tragedy feel like it crosses into trauma porn territory or tows the line of Regular Sad™. The tragic events, and the characters’ general sadness in this novel, don’t feel as though they’re included for shock value. In fact, the parts that I found the saddest weren’t even about the central plot points of death and crime—rather, it was the way Nolan writes about the mundanities of daily life (see the painful mantra that Richie remembers from childhood and finds himself repeating after nights of binge drinking: “I’m a good person and other people think so too”). It’s been nearly a week since I finished Ordinary Human Failings, and I keep thinking about it, which means I am coming here to evangelize it to you.
Read after skimming your old diary (including notes app journal entries)
Best if you liked: The Rachel Incident, Trespasses, anything by Claire Keegan
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.