Lights, camera, bitch, smile
If you need me, you can find me in the Tortured Poets Department
And just like that, another wildly busy month (or two, but who’s counting?) has come and gone. Between finally moving into our new house, starting a new job, and spending as much time as possible with my precious niece, I feel like I’ve barely had a moment to myself.
While reading hasn’t completely fallen by the wayside, I noticeably (to me, at least) have not been able to maintain the pace I kept in years past. These days I’m lucky if I manage to read 20 pages before falling asleep. To combat that, I’ve been turning to audiobooks in the last several weeks, two of which you’ll see momentarily. Though I will probably always prefer the feel of a book in my hands, audiobooks are a nice change of pace from my usual routine of true crime podcasts and Taylor Swift’s entire discography (TTPD is her best writing yet; I will die on that hill), and allow me to imagine characters and settings differently than I might when reading words on a page. Plus, I’m able to multitask which is always a bonus.
So, without further ado, let’s get into it. Here’s everything I’ve read and loved lately.
I bought a copy of this last fall while in Ireland but hadn’t quite gotten around to reading it yet when I saw that the audio version was read by Meryl Streep. And in that moment, I was happy it hadn’t made it off my TBR pile earlier. This is one of those rare occasions where I will tell you to listen to the audiobook instead of reading a physical copy. Meryl Streep is (and I cannot emphasize this enough) spectacular. I can see this as a mini-series starring her as current-day Lara and her daughter Mamie Gummar playing the younger version. And given that this was picked as a Reese’s Book Club pick, it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that Hello, Sunshine will option it for production, either as a series or film.
At the peak of the Covid pandemic, on a cherry farm in Michigan, Lara and Joe are happy to have their three adult daughters at home, helping with the harvest and hiding from the rest of the world. With death and devastation the only features on TV, the girls instead decide they would rather be entertained with a story, and ask their mother to tell them about the summer she dated the famous movie star, Peter Duke. As she recounts the summer of 1987, Lara is able, in some ways, to detach herself from the experience and view her old relationship through a new lens. She also begins to see her actions through her daughters’ eyes, allowing her to reflect upon choices made more than 30 years earlier and how they’ve impacted her present-day life.
I’ll be honest: I really wasn’t sure what to think before starting this. I picked it up in a bookstore and I’d been looking to get back into general fiction, away from the fantasy and romance I’d been reading a lot of at the time, so I kind of just figured, “Why not?” All I have to say now is thank god I decided to go for it. This book has stayed with me for weeks, and I’m already considering going back for round two. Don’t sleep on this one, trust me.
Are you a member of the cult of Peloton? Do you like Dancing with the Stars? Are you continuously asking your gay friends for dating advice? If you answered yes to any of these questions, look no further for your next audiobook.
Cody Rigsby is probably the most well-known of the Peloton instructors thanks to his stint on Dancing with the Stars in 2022 and the meme-worthy advice he dishes out in his signature XOXO, Cody rides. But the Cody we see on our screens was not always the confident leader many of us are accustomed to. With sometimes startlingly brutal honesty, he recounts the struggles of growing up poor with a single mom who battled drug addiction and mental health issues, learning to come to terms with his own identity as a gay man in the South, and the hardships he faced when first moving to New York to build a life for himself. Along the way he throws in advice and opinions from the hard lessons he’s learned from his experiences, finding plenty of opportunities to inject his unique brand of humor.
I know that this most certainly will not appeal to everyone. But for all of the Pelotoners out there, particularly those who enjoy Cody’s classes (duh), and also for anyone who really wants life advice from a highly opinionated homosexual, as the subtitle warns, I strongly suggest giving it a try.
Blessed Water by Margot Douaihy
She’s back, baby! Everybody’s favorite queer, punk rock, crime-solving nun is back. And by “everybody” I mean me. But hopefully you, too. If you’re confused and have no idea what I’m talking about, you must have missed this post where I raved about Douaihy’s first book in the Sister Holiday mystery series, Scorched Grace.
Despite committing herself to God and on the verge of taking her permanent vows with the Sisters of the Sublime Blood, Holiday Walsh can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Or maybe trouble finds her. Perhaps she’s just the unluckiest nun who’s ever lived. Either way, we’re reintroduced to Holiday amidst a raging New Orleans hurricane on Easter Weekend. She’s had the misfortune of coming across the badly mutilated body of a priest, once again getting sucked into another case that hits a little too close to home. As the hurricane continues to build and cause devastation across the Big Easy, Holiday races against the clock in an attempt to catch the killer, putting many people she loves at risk.
A crime-fighting nun sounds like the premise of a bad/good Netflix show that I would probably binge in a weekend, but the reality is that Douaihy has found a fun way to put a new twist on the stereotypical whodunnit sub-genre of mysteries. Sister Holiday is one of those characters, like Duchess Day Radley from We Begin at the End, you want to know absolutely everything about. She contains multitudes, as anyone does, but the dichotomy of a tattooed, lesbian punk rocker from New York who is also a deeply devout Catholic is so wildly out there and fascinating to me. If I were to meet Holiday in real life, I could probably spend a whole week talking to her and still want to know more. If you haven’t read Scorched Grace, start there, but do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Blessed Water at the same time, because you won’t want to wait to jump straight into this sequel.
That’s it for this month, y’all. Please forgive me if the next stack of reviews comes in another two months: my life is a nonstop party these days. By this I mean very busy, leaving me little time to read, write, and sleep on top of everything I have going on lately.
As a friendly reminder: don’t forget to subscribe, share, and shop local (all of the titles here are linked to Bookshop.org, which helps to support independent bookstores across the country). To find a brick-and-mortar store near you, IndieBound.org has a very helpful bookstore finder tool, or you can support some of the places I like to shop by popping in or checking out their websites. Main Point Books in Wayne, PA, is a favorite, as is Phoenix Books in Vermont, and my old stomping grounds in La Jolla, CA, Warwicks, is also a great option. And until next time,
Happy reading,
Sam