Where I read in July: the beach, the pool, the sweaty bleachers at jiu jitsu.
The Gods of Libby smiled upon me this month, and every hold I had at the Phoenix Public Library — books I’d been waiting for for so long I forgot I even wanted to read them — came raining down upon me. But when it rains library holds, it pours the feeling of oh my GOD I only have three more days to finish this!!!
So I focused. I locked in. I had audiobooks going at 1.5x speed and ebooks loaded into my iPad and phone so I could make use of every spare minute. I read on the sweaty bleachers of a stuffy jiu jitsu gym (is that what they call it?), the sweaty bleachers of the pool, the sweaty bench at the skate park. I read on an airplane or two, in my bed before I fell asleep and on the couch right when I woke up. Best of all, I read in a sweaty beach chair on the Sea of Cortez, the exact reset I needed this summer.
I also — and I don’t know what took me so long to do this — finally started using Libro.Fm. I thought it would be “too hard” to stop using Audible but…it wasn’t at all, much like the to-do’s that fester on my to-do list for months and end up taking 2 minutes to complete. You get two book credits just for ditching Jeff Bezos!
Here’s what made it off the TBR pile this month.
📖 📖 📖 📖 📖 📖 📖
LOVED
📖 Women Food and God by Geneen Roth is a book I should have read about 20 years ago, when I was deep in the throes of disordered eating. I love Geneen Roth the way I love Anne Lamott (and of course they are friends). One of many highlighted passages from this book:
Obsession gives you something to do besides having your heart shattered by heart-shattering events….obsession gives you a plane ticket out of a particular kind of heartbreak. It gives you a helicopter ride out of the desert…There is madness in obsession, yes, but its value is that it drowns out the madness of life.
Never have I had something so senseless as disordered eating put so sensibly and sensitively. It’s no surprise that Geneen is a Zen Buddhist, a seeker, but not the annoying kind who has constant inner peace. She’s here with us, still figuring it out. Also available here.
📖 Kate Baer told me to read The Road To Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett, a road trip novel in the vein of Little Miss Sunshine when we made our Summer Reading List episode. Right after we recorded, a friend handed it to me and said “read this” and OH MY GOD it was exactly what I didn’t know I wanted. So funny. So sweet. So absurd and so heartbreaking and gorgeous. I’m insanely jealous I didn’t write it. I will say I first attempted the audiobook and had to return it (I wanted a female narrator!!!!) Also available here.
🎧 Whistler by Anne Patchett is a hug for your soul and your nervous system, especially if you listen to her read it. I don’t know what spell she put into this book to make what felt like a small and simple story feel like the meaning of life itself, but this was so good that I listened at 1x speed just to soak up every word. I’m not telling you the plot because it doesn’t matter: it’s about looking back at your life choices and seeing the invisible ways they impacted yourself and others, it’s about grace and love, and I want to listen to it again and again.
📖 I’ve been waiting years for another book by Maria Semple, and yet it took me weeks to actually crack open Go Gentle, possibly because I knew I wouldn’t be able to put it down once I opened it. One might not think a book about a menopausal stoic philosopher who has sworn off men finding herself in the middle of a potential art heist a beach read, but I’m not one. I would have eaten this book with a spoon if it was possible.
📖 Nymph by Sofia Montrone feels like Call Me By Your Name and Bonjour Tristesse and Elena Ferrante and nostalgia for a place you have never been but know very well. Leo is an American girl who spends summers at her Grandmother’s agriturismo in Italy with her little brother, her exhausted mother, and her drunk father. She returns years later to find that she and everyone else has changed, and that ache for the familiar and the unknown is as palpable to the reader as the sights, sounds and flavors of the Italian contryside.
📖 Motherhead by Nicole Zwolinksi is a poetry collection about (doyyyy) motherhood, in all of it’s mundanity and madness, which felt extra poignant to me this summer. Also, I love to support a small press!
🎧 Last year, I told my agent to reach out to Lisa Rinna and propose a ghostwritten memoir called Me And My Big Mouth. Unfortuntaely, You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It was already in the works. I listened to this at 1.5x speed and I really did love it. It was dishy, bitchy and real, and I love when older women toot their own horns! Beep beep, baby!
📖 To prepare for the movie, I re-read The Odyssey…the illustrated version I read to Q a few years ago. You get the gist and gorgeous illustrations. But maybe you don’t really get the gist, because Q said that the move was “unnecessarily intense,” giving the impression that he found the story…mild?
LIKED
📖 A few months ago, Sophie and I saw David Sedaris live, where I pre-ordered a copy of The Land And Its People. David Sedaris is a forever favorite of mine, but this was not my favorite essay collection of his. I had heard a few of these essays live, and they still hit the mark, but I might have preferred this as an audiobook.
📖 I read Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh a few months ago but I think I forgot to cover it. A couple wakes up in a perfect world, not knowing if they’re in a shared dream or shared psychosis…because they’ve never woken up together. He’s married, she’s his mistress. This book really does capture the mania of what you think is love but is anything but, and magical realism is a great way to tell a cheating story.
DNF
Still On My TBR
📖 Kate recommended The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, who is tied with Lily King and Catherine Newman for An Author Whose Books I Will Always Buy, Treasure And Never Lend!!!! It’s about a teacher grappling with the realities of life, and, despite the life he’s living and the persona he gives off, he is thinking about ending his own life. Please, GOD, give me time to read this! Also available here.
📖 Women who Run with the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés explores an endangered species: the “Wild Woman,” AKA the true nature of women that the modern world has stifled. It’s staring at me, begging me to read it, and it keeps coming across my Instagram feed, which feels like the Universe telling me to pick it up. Also available here.
Yours in earnestness and imperfection,
Nora
👇👇P.S. here is your very own reading tracker for the summer! 👇👇
❤️ Our monthly office hours was yesterday…we’ll have two more next month (August 15 and August 29, 9am PT both days, so save the date!).
Speaking of which, I was thinking of adding a book club to the Substack — what do you think?
Another reader asked if we’d consider adding a writing accountability group for paid subscribers…
🥤 Code NORA20 still works site-wide on my favorite THC/CBD drinks. Squeeze a Roadie into a glass of sparkling water, and 10-15 minutes later you’re feeling goooood.
❤️ There’s a huge sale at Ruggable right now (great news for maximalists!). Someday I want a big, cozy house to put this one in. (Code NORA15 still works on anything that’s NOT on sale).
❤️ I’m loyal to The Company Store (my mom worked on the catalogs in the 80s!) — especially their down comforters and quilts — and their semi-annual sale is right now.
❤️ Rounded up my favorite affordable jewelry pieces here.
I've been loving Matt Haig's work lately. 'The Midnight Library' is about a woman named Nora who finds herself trapped between life and death. That space is a library in which each book she pulls from the shelves transports her to a life path she could have followed. I just finished 'The Life Impossible' in which a retired math teacher named Grace is given a house in Ibiza by an old friend who mysteriously died. The book follows her quest to find out what happened to her friend, a journey which is magical and healing. I've found Matt Haig's books to be heart-warming and life-affirming. I can't recommend them enough!
I wanted to add, I read that Elizabeth Strout spent eight years writing her first novel, Amy and Isabelle. (I just started this one yesterday). I think about this often. How long it takes to write a book & how quickly we can read it. It makes me think I should slow down, but there is such joy in not being able to put a book down.