What I'm Reading

A few novels and a lot of opinions

I started listening to books in January. While it felt a bit grandma, I also felt like it was a much better use of my time. Also, there are so many household tasks I absolutely hate: laundry, folding, dishes, chopping, litter box fun, dusting, changing sheets…you get it.

Listening to a good book makes me actually look forward to these dreaded tasks, so I felt it was time to share some titles that really came alive for me.

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

I never read The Help, and I know Stockett got a lot of grief (and a few unfounded lawsuits) after the book’s (and subsequent movie's) success, but TLDR it didn’t keep me away from her second novel. There are two narrators: Jenna Lamia voices the role of Meg (a young girl whose tumultuous early life frames the narrative) and January LaVoy voices Birdie (our twenty-something heroine). LaVoy also inhabits a handful of other characters through the book, one unrecognizable from the next.

Like The Help, this book is set in the Deep South: Oxford, Mississippi, to be exact. Issues of race, class, sexuality, and gender factor in throughout, and Stockett has created an ensemble of characters that are unforgettable, for better or for worse. Her research into the treatment of incarcerated women in post-WWI Mississippi is expertly done, and clearly, she took her time to make this book exactly what she wanted it to be. After the controversy over The Help, she was dropped by her publisher, so this sophomore effort took 17 years. Hats off to Stockett for handling the fame and the fallout and still finding her voice in the end. I won’t forget this book for a very long time.

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Burke’s first novel is going to be hard to beat. A BookTok darling since Day One, it also hit the viral jackpot of becoming a Good Morning America book club pick. For this reason, I avoided it. I’m the person who didn’t listen to any music from Hamilton until five years after it hit Broadway and just started watching The Sopranos. Call it oppositional, call it short-sighted…whatever it is, I own it. Listening to Yesteryear was an attempt to fight the pattern.

Centered on Natalie Heller Mills, Yesteryear tells the story of “a ‘tradwife’ mega-influencer who sells millions of followers a romanticized, pre-industrial pioneer lifestyle.” Behind the curated feed, Yesteryear Ranch is actually a failing money pit accessorized by a dysfunctional marriage (to put it lightly), nannies, social media producers, and a truly unlikeable cast of characters.

But then comes the time travel.

Heller Mills wakes up in 1855 and has a decidedly less attractive lifestyle, punctuated with an abusive husband, alienated kids, and zero earning potential. I guess I was wistful for a romantic, Outlander-like experience, but this narrative ended up taking me to places I am still blown away by. I don’t want to say more.

I listened to this book, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it through since the narrator was so unlikeable, but let’s be honest, whether you read or listen to this, the Heller Mill’s lack of self-awareness is such a trainwreck that you cannot help but keep turning pages.

The Postcard by Anne Berest

A gift from my college roommate, Aurelia, The Postcard was a huge success in its native France. This is the only book on the list that I moved between the written page and the audiobook, back and forth. It made the retelling very interesting and perhaps made me feel less connected to the characters in the end. That being said, the characters are purposefully complex, so it could be a more universal experience.

The basic premise is this: Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home in January 2003. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris, and on the back, the names of the author’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz. The rest of its pages take you back in time to explore this family's story, both its tragedies and its triumphs. A few things challenged me along the way: Was this a novel? a docu-drama? a memoir? Our main character and primary narrator even shares the same name as the author.

Berest avoids categories like Houdini, and this book is all of those things. Much of the story is based on people’s real lives, and Berest conducted extensive research to validate her narrative. At the same time, specific conversations, scenarios, and scenes are imagined and enhanced.

This made me question why I was so intent on learning “what was true” in this story, so much so that I had to talk to Aurelia about it. It’s always so interesting what our personal experience adds to (or detracts from) our reading of other people’s work. Which brings me to my second challenge: reading about the Holocaust. I thought I was done, and honestly, I feel very done, but you really cannot ever be done. It’s impossible. At the same time, I was relieved that concentration camps, betrayal, and denial were only a small part of the book, not its whole.

Before The Postcard, Berest wrote a novel based on the French writer Françoise Sagan and, along with her sister Claire, wrote  Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. Anne is the great-granddaughter of the painter Francis Picabia. In true Berest style, both Grabriele and Francis Picabia are characters in The Postcard.

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Take care of your hearts. And tell me what you’re reading!