What I'm Reading

I’ve been reading the Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum books. It’s a bit of a moral dilemma for me. See, I normally don’t believe in supporting any author who has played an active role in making one of my friends miserable. And she tried to get one of my friends fired a few years back. Every publishing person has at least one Very Bad Author. You see their name on an upcoming pub schedule and cringe, because you know that every bit of the process will be painful. My personal VBA, I’m convinced, sold her soul to the devil to achieve her fame. There’s no other way to explain why she has lost any shred of humanity. My friend Polly used to really like her work, but had to stop reading her after the second or third time I called her crying. For ethical reasons, I don’t want to like someone else’s VBA, but the truth is that she’s a great writer. She’s funny and sarcastic, and the books make me snicker out loud. So I guess it’s only fair. If you’re one of the people who’s been banned from my VBA, you’re allowed to start reading her again. What’s good for the goose…

My friends Tink and Carolyn did a reading at Borders yesterday. Carolyn read from her brand-new novel, Rain Village, which is about a girl escaping her abusive childhood by learning to master the trapeze and joining the circus. It’s beautifully written magical realism. I read it years ago in manuscript form and couldn’t get the characters out of my head, so it’s so great to see it published. Check it out.

Tink’s book, A Rip in Heaven, came out a few years ago. It’s true crime, about a tragedy that happened in her family. While they were on vacation, her two cousins were raped and murdered, and her brother was falsely accused of the crime. It’s wonderful, but not exactly easy to read emotionally. And as she said, “A pregnant woman in a sparkly red top crying isn’t exactly festive.” So she read from her novel in progress, about Irish gypsies, which sounds like it’s going to be great. I took the bus to the reading, one of my first adventures in carlessness, and learned a valuable lesson. People who take buses during the week are commuters. Once you leave Manhattan, though, people who takes buses on weekends are just poor. At one point, I saw another young, professional-looking couple on the bus, and it made me feel better for a second. Then I took a closer look, and realized I knew them, and they were going the same place I was. Sigh...


I also just finished Disobedience by Naomi Alderman. It’s wonderful, literary fiction set in an Orthodox Jewish community in London. The main character is a modern, bisexual woman living in New York. When her estranged father, a respected rabbi, dies, she goes back to the community she fled years ago. It was smart and illuminating and just in general wonderful. I loved it for the writing, but also for that “peek into another world” aspect, the same way I’m always fascinated by books about the Amish.