Category: Fiction for Adults

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Book Snap #106

Title: The Pisces

Author: Melissa Broder

Date Read: July 1, 2021

Oh Snap!

Ummm. This one was weird. Really weird. It’s hard to write about why I struggled with it. Suffice it to say, I felt weird reading it and wanted to hide it from my son when he looked over my shoulder while I was reading. The main character is relatably flawed, awkwardly vulnerable, and at a white-wine- guzzling-rock-bottom when her boyfriend leaves her and she uproots to house and dog sit in Venice Beach. She is terrible to her sister’s dog, I hated that part. She is cutting and pointed in her observations and summations about others. Again, made me uncomfortable, but okay. But the merman erotica? Just couldn’t get into it. 

Broder is best known as the woman behind the Twitter account @sosadtoday, which has six hundred and forty-nine thousand followers. Recent tweets include “in a threesome with anxiety and depression” and “unfortunately i’m very self-aware.” On her personal Twitter account, @melissabroder, she offers similar sentiments: “i’m gifted at finding ways to never seem like enough,” she wrote last month. She has also written four books of poetry, most recently “Last Sext.” In 2016, she published a collection of personal essays called “So Sad Today,” in which she grounded the universalized Internet sadness of her Twitter presence in concrete individual experience. She was twelve when she started dreaming about her family burning up in a house fire, thirteen when she started obsessing about the Holocaust. During adolescence, she could only orgasm when she imagined people vomiting. (The New Yorker, 2018.)
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Book Snap #105

Title: Less

Author: Andrew Sean Greer

Date Read: June 25, 2021

Two snaps.

Less was reccommended by my friend, Bonnie Creber. It was the perfect, lighthearted way to begin enjoying summer break. There were a few things appealing about this story– Arthur Less is a failed novelist who is trepidatiously celebrating his fiftieth. A wedding invitation to attend his ex-boyfriend’s nuptials has him seriously reflecting on his life, decisions, and ultimately moves him to try something bold. What ensues is a madcap tour around the world (feverishly accepting all of the piled-up invitaions and cobbling them in to a grand voyage). It is slightly silly, and then full of sadness and longing. It is written beautifully (it won a Pulitzer). 

There is no Arthur Less without the suit. Bought on a whim, in that brief era of caprice three years ago when he threw caution (and money) to the wind and flew to Ho Chi Minh City to visit a friend on a work trip, searching for air-conditioning in that humid, moped-plagued city, found himself in a tailor shop, ordering a suit. Drunk on car exchaust and sugarcane, he made a series of rash decidions, gave his home address, and by the next morning had forgotten all about it. Two weeks later, a package arrived in San Fransisco. Perplexed, he opened it and pulled out a medium blue suit, lined in fuschia, and sewn with his initials: APL. A rose-water smell from the box summoned, instantly, a dictatorial woman with a tight bun, hectoring him with questions. The cut, the buttons, the pockets, the collar. But most of all: the blue. Chosen in haste from a wall of fabrics: not an ordinary blue. Peacock? Lapis? Nothing gets close. Medium but vivid, moderately lustrous, definitely bold. Somewhere between ultramarine and cyanide salts, between Vishnu and Amon, Israel and Greece, the logos of Pepsi and Ford. In a word: bright. He loved whatever self had chosen it and after that wore it constantly. Even Freddy approved: "You look like someone famous!" And he does. Finally, at his advanced age, he has struck the right note. He looks good, and he looks like himself. Without it, somehow he does not. Without the suit, there is no Arthur Less. (Greer, p. 25).
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Book Snap #98


Title: The Rose Code

Author: Kate Quinn

Date Read: Spring 2021

Two snaps.

After just bingeing the Netflix series “The Crown” I fell in love with Kate Quinn weaving the story of Osla, a debutane World War Two codebreaker and girlfriend of Prince Philip of Greece, in two vacellating stories: 1940 and 1947; allowing the reader to see past come to future, and, spoiler alert: Prince Philip doesn’t marry Osla. Three women’s stories are shared: Osla, Mab, and Beth are the codebreakers united at Bletchley Park past (1940), and now (1947) must resurrect their old alliance and crack one last code together before Philip marries Elizabeth.

Kate Quinn is also the author of The Alice Network, which I have not yet read, but it has been recommended to me, and I likely will. 

"If you were a man and you wrote funny pieces about daily life, they called it satire. If you were a woman and you wrote funny pieces about daily life, they called it fluff." (Quinn, The Rose Code).
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Book Snap #95


Title: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Author: Mariel Barbery

Date Read: January 17, 2021

Two snaps.

Always take second chances. This was a novel that got reshelved a long time ago, when I couldn’t see it’s pure loveliness. When I got to the bottom of the books on my nightstand I went searching for abandoned soldiers and uncovered The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Twelve year-old Paloma simply crushed my heart with her Profound Thoughts 1 through 15, and a final One Last Profound Thought in which she wrestles with her decision to end her life on her thirteenth birthday, having deciding firmly that life is nothing more than a miserable act of futility.

Renee, the frumpy, plump, widowed, concierge is put upon and dismissed out of hand by the inhabitants of the posh five-floor apartment building in the heart of Paris. Exchanges with each of the apartment dwellers serve only to reaffirm what Renee knows; they cannot detect her intelligence, for it doesn’t seem plausible to them. Carelessly, she slips a few clues to her love and keen knowledge of art, philosophy , and music– and Paloma sees her for who she really is, a kindred spirit.

When the arrogant food-critic from the top floor dies, everyone is suprised that the widow is selling, no one has sold an apartment in the 27 years Renee has been in their employ. The new owner is a kind, elegant, Japanese man in his sixties named Kakuro Ozu.

Renee’s expansive reading diet is complimented by an impressive catalogue of Japanese films– in particular ones by a director called Ozu. “Monsieur Ozu. Could it be that I am in the middle of some insane dream crafted with suspenseful, Machiavellian twists of plot, a flood of coincidences, and a denoument where the heroine awakes in the morning with an obese cat on her feet and the static of the morning radio in her ears?” (Barbery, 138).

What unfolds is a delightful and vulnerable unmasking of both Paloma and Renee. Barbery unspools their knots through beautiful prose, translated from her original French, into short and delightful meditative essays back and forth between the two heroines.

I loved every minute with this book, this time. I am so glad I gave it a second chance.

This is a novel that celebrates the gut feeling, the inspired moment when life changes forever because of a gesture, a laugh, a step off the pavement, or even a glimpse of a beautiful flower. A warning, though: This story, like all great tales, will break your heart, but it will also make you realize — or remember– that sometimes the pain is worth it, that there’s also enough beauty in the world, but only if you see beyond yourself.

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Book Snap #94


Title: The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Author: Heather Morris

Date Read: December 30, 2020

Two snaps.

There are tattoos that people decide to get because they hold meaning to them. There are also tattoos imprinted on people without their consent. Their meaning is beyond the ink that is crudely etched on their skin; lasting reminders of hate.

Martin Luther King Jr., said that: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” This is a story of love that vanquished the darkness.

The atrocities of the Nazis during the second World War are innumerable. Reading this book in the current political climate surrounding us in the United States, it also illuminates the use of dehumanization in the name of hate. Dehumanization is a mental loophole that lets us harm other people; it was present when the Nazis convinced the political soldiers (SS) to conduct unethical medical experiments; physical and mental torture; and worst of all, mass genocide. How we judge others and make inferences about them is fundamentally a social process. Dehumanization is the same tool Trump used throughout his presidency to explain away treatment of immigrants; banning of Muslim travellers; his misyoginst remarks about women; or just a general mailgning of anyone in opposition to him.

The Tattooist at the heart of this story saw the human person in everyone he encountered. Tasked with placing an identifying tattoo at prisoners arriving in Auschwitz, he tried to be as gentle as he could and when his job brought him priviledges, he shared them with the friends he had made in the camp. He falls in love helping a young woman in the camp– and theirs is a remarkable love story that champions against all odds.