Hiking For Connection, Playing for Joy, and a Cocktail for When the Weather Won't Cooperate

Plus: The new Emily Henry and a decades-old history

Hello friends! For those who like counting, yes, I’ve written about four books instead of three this issue, because I straight up couldn’t choose one to leave out. Suffice to say that all of them have a very strong chance of ending up in my Top Ten lists at the end of 2024. It always feels so good to be on a hot streak with reading - like my brain is full of delightful new facts and stories, but still ready to absorb more. If you’re in a slump, I’d absolutely pick up one of these books to break it.

In writing news, my editor’s notes for Book 2 have come back, so I’m listening intensively to my playlist of wintry jazz and blues to get me in the right headspace. (Hard to write a wintry London when there’s pollen drifting instead of snow.) I’ve loved Janis Joplin since my dad introduced me to her when I was sixteen, but I only heard this song for the first time when I was drafting last year. Something about the simple melody, the two voices weaving in and out of each other, swearing “I need you darling / like the fish needs the sea” brought my lead couple to life in my head.

Recently I read and loved…

Funny Story by Emily Henry

As a contemporary romance writer, I’m more than aware that it’s Emily Henry’s world, we all just live in it. But I can’t get mad about it, because she’s just so good at what she does. The snarky wit, the hat tips to the tropes while she subverts them, the characters who are believably flawed without falling into hot mess/too-stupid-to-live territory. Funny Story is a dreamy small-town friends-to-lovers romance that will make you want to visit northern Michigan immediately, but it’s also an examination of what it takes for two damaged people, both desperate for love in their own ways but not sure they’re worthy of it, to trust both each other and themselves. It’s also a love letter to libraries and library kids, just to make it even more of a comfort blanket.

P.S. If you’ve read Funny Story already and Miles Nowak is your new book boyfriend, Kieran O’Neill is going to be right up your street.

The Prospects by KT Hoffman

How much did I love this baseball romance? At points I teared up reading it, and I’m not a big crier. This is partially because I grew up watching baseball, and this book captures everything I love about live sports: the sense of being part of something bigger than you, the critical moments where your team is behind but looks like they could come back, the whole stadium holding its breath with possibility. Loving a team, particularly if they’re underfunded and scrappy, is all about optimism, and Gene, the gay transgender man and minor league baseball player who’s the protagonist of The Prospects, has lived his whole life as an optimist. He makes most of what he has, and it’s only when his cold and standoffish former teammate Luis joins Gene’s team that Gene begins to question whether making the most of things is actually good enough. Can he want more for himself, in terms of his love life and his career? Read this and find out.

Nicholas & Alexandra by Robert K. Massie

I picked up this doorstop of a book on the writer India Holton’s recommendation on Instagram. India normally writes surreally witty steampunk Victorian romance, so I was intrigued by this left-field suggestion. But it turned out not to be so left field after all: this is gloriously old-school history in which individuals come to vivid, complex life, where the writer deep-dives into primary sources to capture the smallest details, from the dinners the Tsar liked to eat to the games the Grand Duchesses liked to play, to the Empress’s quotidian worries about her precious hemophiliac son, worries that lead to decisions that lead to death and destruction. (If you ever wanted to know why Rasputin was so terrifying, this explains exactly why.) If you’re looking for a truly immersive nonfiction read, this is for you.

You Are Here by David Nicholls

I’m calling it now: this is the great post-pandemic novel we’ve really needed. Not the book about being in the pandemic, mind you. You Are Here is about our wobbly re-emergence outside, with our consumer capitalist society telling us to socialize and have fun and generally act normal, when most of us a) don’t even know what normal is anymore or b) if we did, it wasn’t working for us the first time around.

Michael and Marnie, the two main characters, are both shaky as they emerge out of emotional isolation, joining a mutual friend for a long-distance hike across the Lake District and Yorkshire in northern England. Both of them are in early middle age, living with the aftermath of failed marriages (Michael’s much more recent that Marnie’s) and both of them are bundles of self-consciousness, deeply awkward and tongue-tied. But as they walk dozens of miles with just each other for company, they gradually open up to each other in a way they never have for anyone else.

This isn’t a story about the redemptive power of exercise and nature, in case you’re worried about that. Nicholls doesn’t shy away from just how drearily miserable hiking can be, when you’re rain-soaked and footsore and carrying too much gear. But it captures so well the absurd rituals and jokes and admissions that you get when you embark on a borderline-absurd adventure with someone else, bits of goofiness and honesty that somehow add up to a whole new relationship.

I also enjoyed…Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, Happy Medium by Sarah Adler

And I mixed…a Bobby Burns.

I spent two years living in Edinburgh, and studying abroad there for the first time is still one of the best decisions I have ever made. I love almost everything about the place: the bookishness, the history on the doorstep, the drama of the landscape…but not the weather. Spring in Scotland is a vicious practical joke of a season, teasing with a hint of sunshine before dumping buckets of rain on your head while you squelch uphill in the lightweight sneakers you wore in a fit of misplaced optimism.

Normally southeastern England runs a little ahead of Scotland in terms of spring, but London had a burst of Edinburgh-esque weather last week, wet and gray and downright dreary. So much for my white vermouth-based optimism of the last issue of this newsletter! I ran back to the comfort of brown liquor and sweet vermouth and made a Bobby Burns. It was warming and spicy-sweet, with a nice herbal kick from the Benedictine, just what we needed to hold the cold at bay.

That said, as I write these words, the view out my open window is of blue sky, the soundtrack birdsong and soft breezes through green leaves. Here’s hoping real spring is here to stay…