3 books I cannot stop thinking about
Real Americans. Girls. This Summer Will be Different. Beg, borrow, reserve, steal: do whatever you must to lay your hands on them.
So there you are, pottering along, when along comes a book. Not just any book. The book. Your new obsession.
You want to do nothing but read it. You are mildly (mildly!) outraged that you are expected to do such mundane things as work, or cook, or parent - can those children not feed themselves? Plot lines and characters leap into your mind, unbidden. You are so emotionally invested you hold mental conversations with them. (“Worry not, Fanny. It’s abundantly clear that Edmund is far too serious and worthy and - let us call a spade a spade - po-faced for Mary Crawford. Yes, he is currently blind to your faithful adoration, but he’ll soon realise he prefers this to Mary’s bewitching flirtation.”) You urge it upon others - “read this, read this”, you implore.
I can’t pinpoint exactly what makes a book one of these books: I don’t have a type on paper. (Accidental Love Island reference there.) There is no discernible pattern bar the power of the storytelling and that they made me feel. As evidence, I offer you four recent lovestruck encounters. (I know! Fickle flirt that I am.) I’ve talked about the first love affair here, but today I give you the three other books which turned my head in April.
Real Americans - Rachel Khong
One of those novels you will wish you had written. It’s big, bold, ambitious and brilliant, but it’s also enormously readable. (I don’t know about you, but I sometimes find that the two are mutually exclusive. I tried with The Overstory. Honestly, I did. More than once. ‘There are,’ I mused whilst feeling intellectually inadequate, ‘a lot of trees in this book.’ ) But Khong pulls it off with masterful aplomb. I will be thinking about this book for a very long time. I urge you to read it - and here’s why….
Quick housekeeping notes.
This is a long post - you may have to click to view it in a separate window. Evidently, I have Very Many Thoughts.
It is a post for my paid subscribers. I have until now kept the lion’s share of my content free. Whilst I won’t be putting up a blanket paywall, I have vowed to quell my inner people pleaser and critic, which entails valuing my time and my writing - in the process thanking and appreciating the lovely paid subscribers who so generously invest in both of these things. If you’d like to join them, I’d be delighted and enormously grateful, especially I know there are a lot of voices on here clamouring for your hard-earned money on Substack. I can but promise you that I write from my heart as well as my bookshelf. And I love to chat so you will never be under-served on the word count!