Cover to Cover
Books I read (and finished) recently
The weather is changing, and I can feel my habits changing, too.
When it was warmer and sunnier outside, I craved long walks in the middle of the day and lots of time with friends. Being stuck at my desk for several hours at a time felt like a punishment. Movement, activity, excitement, and novelty — that’s what I chased after. That’s what summer was all about!
But now, the sun is setting two hours earlier than it did in July, and my body can feel it. It actually gets really cold at night now. I’m sleeping in sweatpants and walking around the house in a big sweatshirt. On the weekends, I wake up and just want to lounge in bed for hours. I have a growing craving for doing absolutely nothing whenever I can.
Because I’ve spent more time sitting around lately, I’ve also been doing more sedentary activities that I don’t really do in the summer.
For example, I’m getting back into video games. I dusted off our Nintendo Switch recently to play Stardew Valley for the first time since last winter. Ryan also brought home a copy of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which I just started.
And I’ve also been reading more. Many of y’all will be familiar with my previous musings about my struggles reading books. It’s hard for my brain to focus on one novel long enough to actually finish it. But it seems that every now and then I find a really good book, which gets me on a hot streak where I end up reading several back to back.
In May of this year, I announced that I’d read two books cover to cover, which I was really proud of (heck, I’m still proud). I thought I’d be able to keep the momentum going, but the truth is that I just didn’t felt like reading much once summer was in full swing. I started some books and then returned them to the library after they sat on our coffee table for several weeks. It just wasn’t the right time.
Now it’s the right time. Over the past month or two, I started and finished four (!!) whole books! I’m really doing this! And I do believe that has a lot to do with the changing seasons.
To commemorate the feat — and encourage myself to keep going — I wanted to share with you what I’ve read. Maybe you’ve read one of these titles, too? If so, let me know. I’d love to talk about any of them.
The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer
After teaching a writing class back in July, I was chatting with a student about another class I had an idea for. I wanted to teach about grief writing, which I felt was important to talk about since death and dying are such taboo topics for many people. And yet so many of us carry around grief with us from our personal losses.
That reminded my student of The Collected Regrets of Clover. It’s a fictional story about a death doula living in New York City. Written by a real-life journalist, the novel follows Clover as she keeps people company in their final days. She navigates tough family situations, last-minute regrets, and long-hidden secrets while trying to make the dying process as comfortable as possible.
The big catch is that Clover, who’s in her mid-30s, doesn’t really have much of a life outside work. She’s so focused on making sure people have a good death that she forgets how to live a good life.
I was immediately drawn to the premise of this book when my student recommended it to me. I love novels that can handle a tough topic like death and remind us that it’s just a part of life. And while the story started off a little slow — there are many chapters of character development designed to immerse you in Clover’s world — it really picks up about halfway through.
The ending was extremely satisfying, and even a bit surprising. I was a little teary-eyed when the book ended. In all, it made me feel grateful to be alive.
In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
This book was a pleasant surprise. I picked it up in the used book section of my local bookstore. Honestly, my eye was drawn to it because the cover art was cute. Plus, it looked practically brand-new, like the previous owner hadn’t even read it.
In Five Years is fiction, and follows the life of protagonist Dannie Kohan. Dannie is a typical type-A go-getter; she’s a corporate lawyer who plans out every day to a T. She has a seemingly perfect life in Manhattan, living with her fiancé who works in finance. She also has a close, lifelong best friend who she loves, named Bella.
Bella is the polar opposite of Dannie, living life on a whim. She travels all the time and eventually ends up managing an art gallery in New York. Her relationships are short-lived and passionate, and her living situation seems to constantly be in flux.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I’d even like this book when I read the first few chapters. I don’t really care to read about the lives of rich kids living in Manhattan. The fact that Bella was a trust fund baby was kind of a turn off, and I found myself rolling my eyes at the superficial descriptions of Dannie’s life — her perfect engagement at an exclusive bar, her high-end apartment, her new job at the best law firm in town.
But later, I learned that the perfection that defines Dannie’s life is supposed to be a bit obnoxious. What seems perfect actually isn’t, and it takes a whole 255 pages for it to come crashing down.
There’s a neat bit of time travel in this book that kept me tearing through chapter after chapter. At the beginning of the story, Danni has a vision — a flash-forward of her life in five year’s time. She’s in a different apartment, engaged to a different man. The situation seems completely impossible, but as the story goes on, you get to watch all the pieces fall into place that make this vision a reality.
Rebecca Serle’s writing kept me on my toes. I thought the story would be super predictable, honestly, and it really caught me off guard. The ending completely snuck up on me in ways I didn’t expect. I don’t want to spoil much in case any of you do read it, but I will say it was a super quick book to get through and definitely worth the time.
Corrections in Ink by Keri Blakinger
I first heard of the author of this book, Keri Blakinger, when I was way more active on Twitter. Back then, she was a reporter at The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news outlet that reports on the criminal justice system in the U.S. I remember being really impressed with her reporting — she shed light on issues I didn’t even know existed and seemed to deeply care about her work.
I later learned that Blakinger had once been behind bars herself. Reporting on prison is not an impersonal thing for her; she does it to give voice to people who are frequently forgotten about and/or loathed by society.
When I was in Ithaca earlier this year, I saw Corrections in Ink — her memoir — for sale at a local bookstore. There was no good reason not to buy it, so I did.
Blakinger chronicles the long and winding path of her life, from an accomplished teenage figure skater with a secret eating disorder to an unstable college student falling into the world of hard drugs to a convicted felon bounced around to various prisons until her release date.
As she details her free-fall into self destruction, one scene particularly struck me. In college, Blakinger attempts suicide by jumping off the bridge that connects Collegetown in Ithaca to Cornell’s campus. Reading about this landmark sent a chill down my spine, since Ryan and I had just made our way over that bridge on a few months ago. We saw the suicide nets on either side. I wonder how many attempts had to be made before they put those up.
But this book left its biggest impression on me with the striking amount of detail that Blakinger was able to recount her time in jail and prison. Seeing the justice system through her eyes made me reevaluate a lot of assumptions I had about what it’s like to be in behind bars — and who ends up there.
It gave me a deeper appreciation for the work of journalists like Blakinger who shed light on the often secret world of corrections. Her memoir is a success story, a cautionary tale, and a stunning piece of reporting all in one.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
I started reading this book at 3 a.m. on my sister’s couch when I had a tummy ache and couldn’t sleep. Now, I’m not usually the biggest fan of romance books, but once I started this one I had to know how it ended.
The story follows two high-profile guys: Alex, the son of the first female U.S. president, and Henry, an English prince. Obviously this is a fictional universe, but I found it a little amusing that the book was set in 2020 with no mention of a pandemic (because the book was published in early 2019. Plus, that’s not a very fun setting to fall in love).
When the story starts, Alex and Henry are basically enemies. They keep running into each other at international events, and sometimes get in squabbles or just outright ignore each other. But at one point, they’re asked to save face and pretend to be friends. Cue the enemies-to-lovers pipeline (my favorite romance trope).
While this book felt a bit cheesy at times, I thoroughly enjoyed the story and found myself rooting for Alex and Henry as they broke down each others walls and challenged the systems that kept them from going public once they decided to be together. The story has a hopeful and happy ending. I would hope that the real world would allow them a happy ending, too.
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