Can't Wait to Read!

Thanks to Kerri Maher for pulling together this week’s Can’t Wait To Read. Maher wrote The Kennedy Debutante and the forthcoming The Girl in White Gloves (Feb. 25, 2020). If you’d like to curate a future Can’t Wait To Read, contact susanna@spinemagazine.co.

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This is my “I keep meaning to get to it List.” Everything on this list has been sitting in my TBR pile for no fewer than 3 months. I want to read them all, but life (in the form of blurbing coming-soon books, researching and writing my own books, and reading books to my daughter) keeps getting in the way!  I’m preaching to the choir, I know.

Ulysses by James Joyce

No, I didn’t read it in college (though I did read and love Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Ulysses is number one on my to-read list because my third historical novel, The Paris Bookseller, is about its publication by intrepid American Sylvia Beach, who opened the storied bookstore Shakespeare & Company in Paris in 1919 (which isn’t the same as the current Shakespear and Company in Paris today).  At great personal risk, Beach published the first-ever edition of Joyce’s masterpiece in 1922, after it had been convicted of obscenity and banned in a major trial in New York City the year before. Then she had to figure out how to smuggle it back into the States alongside illegal liquor during Prohibition. The saga of Ulysses’s publication isn’t unlike the epic poem by Homer that inspired it, which I have read … so I think it’s about time I fill in the 742-page gap and read this seminal work myself.

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

I’m a huge Elizabeth Gilbert fan, which isn’t to say I wasn’t super jealous of her (as were so many others) when she ate, prayed, and loved her way around the world and made a mega-bestseller in the process. Once I threw out my sour grapes and opened my mind to the radical messages of acceptance, creativity, and respect she promotes online and in her amazing book The Big Magic, my life actually changed for the better. I’ve never read her fiction, but I am really excited to read my signed hardback of this novel, which she says she wrote to “go down like a tray of champagne cocktails.” Bottoms up!

The Age of Light by Whitney Scharer

Whitney lives near me in Massachusetts and I saw her speak at an event in Arlington, so I want to read this in part because it’s by another local writer of historical fiction. But I also want to read it because it’s about some of my favorite things: Paris, art (photography and painting, by Man Ray and Lee Miller), and complicated affairs of the heart.

Park Avenue Summer by Renée Rosen

I met my #berkleysister Renée at the North American Historical Novel Society Conference this June in Maryland, and I loved talking to her about research, gossiping about other books, and learning from her many novels’ worth of experience in publishing. Park Avenue Summer is about Helen Gurley Brown, who edited Cosmopolitan magazine for decades; as such, it’s also about brave women saying and writing hard things in the not-so-distant past (1965), and navigating the treacherous waters of New York City publishing.  I’m intrigued by the idea of writing about the ’60s, and so I can’t wait to see how this master of the genre does it.

Learning to See by Elise Hooper

I had the pleasure of reading an early copy of Hooper’s forthcoming novel Fast Girls (coming Summer 2020!), and I absolutely loved it.  I’ve had Learning To See on my bedside table since March, when I met the author at an event at Newtonville Books.  It’s about the life of Dorothea Lange, the photographer most famous for “Migrant Mother.” But Lange is much more than this one photo; she took thousands during her long career, which started in a portrait studio in San Francisco in 1918, and included controversial pictures taken of sharecroppers and in the Japanese internment camps.  A wife, mother, and determined career woman in the early decades of the 20th century, Lange’s story as a fascinating one for feminists and art lovers alike.

The House of God by Samuel Shem

This one probably comes as a surprise to you, right?  Well, I’ve been dating a doctor for a while now, and he said Shem’s is the book that gets doctoring right.  Another friend of mine who is a current resident said the same thing – and both the friend and boyfriend are writers themselves as well as medical professionals, so I am inclined to take what they say seriously. This novel is also something of a classic: it’s been in print for close to 30 years and sold millions of copies, and John Updike wrote an introduction to a later edition. Even the title of the book is daring. Beyond those reasons to read it, I’ve had more than a few medical problems of my own, I love the essays of Oliver Sacks, and I feel strongly about universal health care, so I want to learn more about this world of medicine, and a widely revered novel seems like the best place to start.

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