_{Currently listening: El Camino High by Moody Joody
Currently reading: Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell
(Remember how Xanga entries used to include this? I’ma try to remember to bring it back.)}

Ohhhh I’m so excited to be back to reading audiobooks again. I listened to two this month which means I have been plowing through books like I used to. Which is exciting!

Back when I was a bookseller, I got way more free audiobooks from Libro.fm than I ever could have finished. So I have this app on my phone with over 500 books that, at some point, I was interested in reading and they’ve just been sitting there since August of 2024. So let’s start chipping away at it (to be fair, I’ve listened to a lot of them but there’s a lot that I haven’t).

So what did I read this month? Well we started with a DNF. I have DNF’d God of the Woods twice now. What the hell is it with me and this book? Usually when I’m not vibing with a book I just put it away but I really want to like this one. The premise is so good. I’ve tried to listen to it on audio both times and not only are there a lot of characters and jumpy timelines, but the narrator sounds bored as hell. I think it just doesn’t work well with the way my brain handles audiobooks. So I’m going to grab this book from the library and try reading it with my eyeballs one day. And if I DNF it then, then okay. I’ll officially give up on it.

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Middle of the Night by Riley Sager

Oh I liked this one a lot! It reminded me of the few things that I often really like about Stephen King’s stories. Which is to say–stories about back when men were boys and generally there’s a baseball involved in some way. When I pictured this book playing out, it was giving Stand By Me (even though it definitely took place in the late 90’s).

When Ethan Marsh was 10 years old, he was camping in his backyard with his best friend Billy. The next morning there was a slit in the tent and Billy was missing and he was never heard from again.

Riley Sager is so good at doing this thing where he has great plot twists–but first he has a fake-out twist. He makes you feel so self-satisfied that you saw the twist coming and just as you’re getting cocky then BLAMO! He hits you with something you didn’t see coming at all. And that’s my favorite. That’s what I love in my thrillers–a juicy plot twist with a good pay off. You’ll hear me talk about this again when I talk about Claire Douglas in a bit.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

So many people whose tastes I love told me to read this book and I’m so glad I did. But, damn, this book took forever to finish. I started on April 24th and read almost every day but still didn’t finish until May 20th. It wasn’t particularly long. It’s just that some books can be chewed up quickly and some are so rich they need to be nibbled in small doses.

It has all of my favorite things–a story that spans generations and an exploration of family dynamics. It’s said that this book is a modern retelling of Little Women but (and here’s where I’ll make one of those literary confessions that make people respond in a really annoying way) I’ve never read Little Women. Or seen it. (Pause for gasp and gentle shaming.) Should I just get it all over in one fell swoop and admit that I hate Jane Austen and Shakespeare, too? Well there you have it, folks.

What I liked so much about this book was the way that it compares and contrasts what it is to live a life held with a controlling fist and what it is to live with an open hand. In the end, whether you left yourself open to love or not you will still experience the pain and heartache of life. So you might as well choose the freedom, the love, the joy to walk along beside you right? 

But at the end of this book I read the letter from the author, the discussion questions, the acknowledgements and absolutely nothing references this. So I wonder if I’m the only person who saw that in this book? To me, that’s what this whole book is ultimately about.

It’s so funny to me. I love the way these things happen. When one person takes something from a work of art that no one else seems to see. I think that’s really cool.

The Girls Who Disappeared by Claire Douglas

Since it was taking so long to finish Hello Beautiful, I was getting a liiiittle bit bored. So I decided to reach for a book that I knew would hook me fast–something I could just plow right through. So obviously I downloaded my Claire Douglas book from my Libro.fm stash. Claire hits every single time ‘yall!

This book… okay I’m just now realizing that 50% of the books I read this month were about missing and murdered children from, like, 20 years ago. Am I okay???
Yeah so anyway, when Liv was a teenager she was out on the town with her besties. They got into a car accident and when she came-to, the other three girls were gone. They’d just vanished. But a podcaster has come to town and is bound and determined to figure out what happened here.

My entire review on StoryGraph was this: I just think Claire Douglas deserves to be far and away more famous than she is. In my opinion, no one writes satisfying plot twists better than her. She’s so good at her work—better than a lot of other authors who have much wider audiences. 

I mean it, too. I don’t hear nearly enough people talk about this author. If you love thrillers that are quick and pulpy and satisfying–grab one or two. I recommend starting at The Couple at No. 9.

Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry

Oh I’ve been looking forward to this book for ages. Emily Henry is one of the few auto-buy authors that I read. In my opinion her writing just keeps getting better and better. Every story is better than the last and this is no different.

I recently learned that… I’m in the minority on that one. A lot of people don’t like this one. But you know what? Book club is always more fun if the group is divided on whether or not the book was any good. At first I was offended that people didn’t like this book as much as me. I made a whole reel about it.

But I read one review that made it all make sense to me. It said something like how this book was far more boring and “forgettable than Book Lovers or Beach Read“. And I realized–OH! I think we’re coming to our romance books with different expectations. Because, if I’m being honest, I don’t remember a damn thing about Book Lovers or Beach Read (that’s not true exactly, I remember that in Beach Read there’s an incredibly short and random bit involving a cult).

I like a quick and dirty romance as much as the next guy but in the books I love–the ones that really stick with me and live on my shelf the longest are the ones that have some grit to them. And I see that happening with Emily Henry’s writing. Happy Place was the book that took me from “oh I like Emily Henry” to “Oh, I love Emily Henry.” And a lot of people didn’t like that one either. I think probably because it dealt with some pretty heavy topics (just like GBBL did). But I just happen to be of the mindset that the sunshine is so much brighter when you have some darkness to compare it to. And I don’t begrudge anyone for thinking otherwise–especially when they’re coming to romance for pure, unadulterated escapism.

This book is about two writers (Alice and Hayden–of course his name is Hayden) who were invited to a tiny island in Georgia where a rich and famous, once-media-darling (Margaret Ives) has been living out of the public eye for decades. Both authors are auditioning for the chance to write her biography and they both signed NDAs–which means that they can’t tell anyone what they’re working on. Not even each other. Not even when they start to fall in love.

Margaret’s family story is long and cursed–at least that’s what she believes and to be fair she’s got plenty of evidence to support it. There’s a lot of heartache in her family (as much as there is in anyone’s life–but my heartache has never been splashed across every newspaper in the nation) and Alice is ready to tell Margaret’s side of the stories. The way that Alice has so much understanding for Margaret is so special and an underrated aspect of the story. I imagine writing this story and really wanting to make that point–it would be so easy to go heavy handed with it. But Emily Henry is a professional.

I think that, ultimately, what I loved the most about this book is the way it demonstrates that we might think we aren’t hurting anyone but ourselves by closing ourselves off or telling half truths. But the reality is that we live in an interconnected world where we affect one another in big and small ways. 

I’m so glad that I’m not reading with a bookseller’s brain anymore. I’m glad I got to experience Big Beautiful Life without wondering how I would sell it. I got to just let it touch me and I got to fall in love with all of these characters and understand and regret all the ways they’d hurt one another (and come back together again–which is not a spoiler if you understand that one of the major tenants of the romance genre is that it ends with a happily ever after).

Well I could have made an entire post about Big Beautiful Life, turns out. I hope you like long, rambley book reviews.