In December 2021, I sat in tears on my couch drafting an email to my boss. One of those emails you aren’t supposed to send. I reread it over and over and over again, softening expletives and sharpening my back-up points. The language was biting. My tone, angry and resolved. Just the thought of rereading that letter gives me a stomach ache. I revised each sentence until it oozed with the resentment, exhaustion, and guilt that I felt. Then, I hit send.

I regret the way I did it, but I don’t regret leaving the classroom. The more professional version of that email might have simply said: I am not renewing my contract for the 2022-2023 academic year. And I didn’t. I went back to work in January knowing the next six months would be my last as a high school English teacher. Given the state of school culture today, I doubt I will ever go back.

Then visiting Boston last week, I did revisit the classroom on Tuesday night at the Huntington Theater, where I saw Johnathan Spector’s Eureka Day. Nothing has captured my experience working in education better than this play. I recognized the exhausting, overwrought conversations: the self-interested “consensus decision-making” posturing as an argument for community or equity or open-mindedness; the way technology can fuel a tragedy of the commons, if that commons were a school leader’s emotional and mental bandwidth. At the heart of it, I saw the awkward blend of liberal ideals, entitlement, and power that ultimately led me to give up on a career I genuinely loved.

The entire production is set in a private elementary school classroom in the Berkley Hills, roughly 20 miles from where I live in San Francisco. In the first scene, the Executive Committee—a group of four well-meaning parents and a clownish head of school named Don—has gathered to kick-off the 2018-2019 school year at Eureka Day Elementary.

MEIKO
personally no
I don’t find it offensive
the term itself is not offensive

ELI
(Helpfully.)
it’s descriptive

SUZANNE
I think she’s saying
I’m not putting words in your mouth
she’s saying it’s not offensive
but when you contextualize it in that way

MEIKO
I find
the best way not to put words in someone’s mouth?
is not to put words in their mouth

I was hooked and transported. I have been in these meetings. I have been, for better or worse, some of these characters. Later in the scene, Eli goes on to add:

is is possible some people would find it’s absence offensive?”

DON
you’re concerned
that it could be a sort of
erasure
of people’s experience?

ELI
right

Language is only the beginning for this Committee. The play escalates from a fraught vortex of curt, overly-polite disagreements to a full-blown fight over how to re-open the school after an out-break of mumps.

The skill of the play is how it balances real moments of poignancy with pants-wetting levels of comedy. In one scene, the Executive Committee is positioned in front of a computer for a conference call with the other parents to address the mumps outbreak. Behind them, the video chatroom is projected on the classroom wall, where an off-stage Greek chorus of parents is actively chiming in via text during Don’s monologue:

Erin Catlett-Harris. I made a giant batch of soup and can bring some to anyone who’s sick.
Christian Burns. Wait. HALF the school is antivaxxers? Seriously????
Sandra Blaise. “Anti-vaxxer” is not really a term I’m comfortable with. It’s actually something said out of IGNORANCE.
Christian Burns. Oh well then Sandra, enlighten away!
Sandra Blaise. It’s easy to call someone crazy if you’ve never walked a mile in their shoes.
Sandra Blaise. I wake up every single morning wishing I could go back to being that carefree dairy and sugar-eating person I was 15 years ago.
Sandra Blaise. But I can’t.
Karen Sapp. Exactly Sandra! Protect your children by EDUCATING YOURSELVES.
Tyler Coppins. OR, Protect your children by VACCINATING THEM.
Terry Nguyen. Gotta trust your parental instincts. If it feels wrong, it IS wrong.

Don, the Head of School, reiterates that no decisions have been made about vaccine mandates and the school reopening, which only upsets the parent community further:

Kate Pacyniak. Typical behavior from the Executive Committee of FASCISM.

If you’ve ever been in an online meeting, it’s impossible not to recognize the absurdity and accuracy of the situation. We were laughing so much that we drowned out the actors on stage, which only made us laugh harder. I have to imagine this is by design. As far as I’m concerned, Spector is a genius.

There’s a certain type of humor that hits deeper than mockery and that’s recognition. It’s risky. You’re relying on the audience’s vulnerability and willingness to laugh at our most ludicrous instincts and behaviors. I’ve both been a version of those parents and witnessed versions of those parents.

Once a mother emailed me to say, I was the reason her daughter would never go to college, perhaps never graduate from high school, after I gave her a B on a paper. The email concluded with, “… and you should be ashamed.” The italics did make it hurt more.

Another parent once told me: “I didn’t understand how things were done,” at their school, and insisted I let her son revise an essay from the previous semester to bring his B- up to a grade that “more accurately represented his ability.”

During a parent-teacher conference early in my career, a mother started yelling at me with such venom that my Head of School excused me from the room. I had found her son’s writing warm-up notebook in the classroom and opened it to identify who to return it to. One sentence was scrawled across the page. It was so hateful and bigoted that I won’t even rewrite it here. The verb “to hunt” was used. So was “gun.” Because it was in a notebook, not said explicitly to a student or teacher, the consequences were left up to the parents. They sent him to Sunday school.

The thing is, I empathize with these parents. I really do. When it feels like your system-of-belief is on the line, everything becomes a fight for your identity and worth. They don’t see it as just a grade, or a public health concern, or the use of inappropriate language. They see it as a direct challenge to who they are or who they want to be.

I get it. I understand the resistance and the frustration. You don’t teach high school English because you wish everyone knew the proper use of a semi-colon. (Though that would be nice.) Teachers and parent’s both want to think we’re focused instilling good values in the next generation, helping them learn ‘how to think’ and how to be good citizens, but the trap of such a complicated and polarized society is that we often get obsessed with what to think instead.

There are certain lessons that I look back on now and wonder if I was too eager to enlighten my students rather than make room for their own discovery and critical thinking. My friend Joanie has a phrase for this: your mind is so open, it’s closed. You are so convinced your definition of open-mindedness is correct that you become closed off to anything that challenges it.

I kept coming back to this trap while watching Eureka Day. Each time Suzanne reiterated that their decisions needed to be “both/and,” I chuckled at my own complicity. I, too, often employ “both/and” in a discussion to get what I want (which naturally is probably what is best for all). I smiled at Meiko’s earnest desire to knit her own clothing and eat the right food, and I recognized (continue to feel, even) her inner-turmoil when she realizes right and wrong are not as simple as we want them to be.

Oddly enough, while the parents operate as the protagonists, antagonists, and Greek chorus, the word “teacher” only appears three times in the play. “Student” appears eleven times. Both “parent” and “community” appear nineteen and thirty-one times, respectively. The ratio is telling. It’s all well and good to make community-based choices, but let’s be clear: when parents say “school community” they mean themselves. What is most comfortable and familiar to them.

Luckily, with the mumps issue resolved, they can start focusing on the rest of the school community. What else could the 2019 - 2020 school year possibly bring?

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Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin is unusual and brilliant. Its luster, in part, is the structure. Told entirely in one to three page vignettes, the novel is deliciously designed for a modern attention span, while artfully depicting the fictional quality of memory and mimicking the nameless narrator’s unraveling mental state.

Also unusual is the narrator herself, a wealthy and stylish Palestinian ex-pat living in New York City, who has been cut off from accessing the majority of her inheritance by her brother. She sustains a living through an allowance controlled by the brother, a Russian boyfriend named Sasha, and a teaching job at a private school for underprivileged boys.

She is obsessed with cleanliness and taste. Taste mostly defined through fashion, luxury fashion. Her quips and observations about America, Americans, hygiene, and self-presentation fuel the first 100 pages of the novel.

“I couldn’t buy a TV,” she says. “I was scared of American culture. When I say that, I don’t mean the right to bear arms, I mean wedding dresses and obesity.”

The writing is devastating and witty throughout. The kind of humor that one of my readers affectionately dubbed a “lol sob.”

The novel pivots after a chance encounter a man she calls Trenchcoat, named so because she spots him wearing a Burberry trench she had tossed in the garbage.

Trenchcoat is hardly known to us. Through small revelations on the narrator’s part, we know he is homeless, a fellow immigrant, and a style pedant like herself. He is also a con man.

Trenchcoat involves the narrator in a scheme reselling Birkin bags to “whichever person had plenty of money but no class.” By which they mostly mean, Americans.

“Every year, regardless of poverty, war, or famine, the price of the Birkin bag increases,” the narrator says. “It’s value is more solid than gold or the S&P 500… so we, the gorgeous and cultured, buy the bags and sell them at a premium to the trashy and unworthy.”

I am a firm believer that some of the best novels, the ones we obsess over for decades and centuries, are at their core stories about economics. Will this convince more MBAs to read fiction? Let’s hope.

Consider one quick example: Pride & Prejudice. Famous for the enemies to lovers plot that spurred a thousand low-budget Hallmark Christmas movies. The inciting incident (meaning: “the thing that starts the plot”) occurs off-page in the first scene of the novel, when a Mr. Bingley moves to town. Mr. Bingley is single and rich. Women in the Regency Era were, economically speaking, illiquid assets. They were the property of a father, uncle, brother, male cousin, or (if they were lucky) a rich and kind husband. To have such an eligible man move to town? Jackpot.

It is a story about managing scarce resources. The core tension of Pride & Prejudice is that Mrs. Bennett must source marriage contracts for her five daughters or otherwise rely on the charity of their pious, tactless cousin, who is to inherit the entire Estate when Mr. Bennett dies. It’s not unlike reading the Wall Street Journal, see?

•••

The Coin is certainly not a romance, but it similarly obsessed with managing scarcity, while signaling abundance. Everyone is culpable. The narrator in her Louboutins. Trenchcoat in his namesake Burberry and crisp white button down. And, of course, the other wealthy people, who buy “sweatshop hoodies for thousands of dollars, because the young and ultrarich [want] to look like the working class.”

I’d argue that this fashion phenomena, as I observe it in San Francisco, mostly adheres to men. Friends know one of my favorite places to go to dinner is the Marina, not because it has the best restaurants, but because you’re unlikely to spot a hoodie after 7:00 pm.

Women are a different story entirely. One of my favorite past times in the office, on the bus, or out for a drink is clocking how much money a woman is wearing. It’s a sickness, I know. And it’s the only math I do willingly.

Cartier Love ring: $1,420. Matching bracelet? Large: $7,950. Small: $5,300. Van Cleef & Arpels pendant necklace: $3,450. Saint Laurant Cassandre Envelope Chain Wallet: $1,190.

The accessories are lovely, though not my taste. It’s more of a morbid curiosity. Once I did the math and discovered the woman waiting in line for coffee in front of me was wearing over $10,000 in clothing and accessories, excluding her engagement ring. Imagine, putting on over $10,000 at 8:15 am.

Perhaps that’s why I love this narrator so dearly. Her obsessive observations of how the people around her choose to adorn and present themselves to the world does, at times, mirror my own. Though I imagine she would wear well over $10,000 to get a cappuccino.

I used to do this exercise on my students. When I moved to the Bay Area, I worked at private school in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country.

I grew up in an affluent suburb. Attended one of the best public schools and one of the best private colleges. I had taught in private high schools for four years before I moved to the Bay. That is to say, I am well acquainted with wealth. Or so, I thought. It turns out millionaire wealth and close to (or at) billionaire wealth are entirely different worlds. A past student once told me it’s disorienting to grow up along this spectrum in this place:

The same tension between American consumerism and the existential distress of belonging is at play in The Coin. One of my favorite scenes in the novel is about a pair of shoes. Golden Goose sneakers: $630.

“…they look dirty and distressed. Like they had been worn for five years at least, or for two years by someone who had really lived. They’re new, Trenchcoat told me, they make them like this. I read the text on the dust bag, For dream use only, then touched the scuff marks, they were printed. Are you sure about this? I asked. They don’t look very presentable. Trust me, Trenchcoat said, the right people know.

The right people know. I know because my students here used to wear them to class. Some had multiple pairs and I would count how many I saw them wear throughout the year. When I described them to fellow faculty members, I’d say they looked ‘like they’d been run over by a car,’ but Zaher’s description is better. More crushing and layered.

In lieu of really living, we can now buy the evidence of a life. And from the comfort of a pristine white Range Rover, no less. (If you can afford it.) No wonder the buzzword of Silicon Valley right now is taste.

Let’s hope we fare better than this narrator.

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This essay is part of my newsletter Filler Content. If you like it, toss a little love my way by clicking the heart at the bottom of this newsletter to help me share it with a wider audience. Feeling chatty? Write a comment. I’d love to hear from you!

A little known fact about me is that I am a published poet. The year was 2002. I was in the fourth grade, and Ms. Freitas was teaching us a unit on haikus.

One day in class, she gathered us around her computer (projectors only cast those flimsy clear worksheets back then), and she introduced us to a poetry challenge hosted by www.poetryzone.com. I love a competition. The prize could have been a year’s supply of broccoli, and I still would have wanted to win. Of course, it wasn’t. The prize was publication on www.poetryzone.com, which in my eyes was unfathomably glamorous. The Internet (still a proper noun then) was a place not many people frequented in those days, but I didn’t care. I craved the rush of seeing my writing selected by a stranger. Someone to say, these are worthy words.

Sadly, www.poetryzone.com no longer exists. Such is the peril of online publishing. But when I decided to write about poetry, I poked around the archives of the World Wide Web, and to my delight I found my poem.

Maybe the Library of Congress isn’t knocking on my door to archive this baby, but “rain drops like huge feet” does make me laugh. Are they making the sound of huge feet? Are they the size of huge feet? Perhaps both?

I don’t write poetry these days for the same reason many people don’t write poetry: it’s a bit of mystery to me. Where do the line breaks go? Do I use punctuation? Why does this sound like I’m giving a vague and meandering sermon about gherkins? Are gherkins not a serious enough topic for a poem? Am I shallow?

Poetry is the cilantro of reading and writing: to some a delicate garnish with a pop of flavor, to others as sour and painful as stomaching dish soap. And I don’t think this is poetry’s fault. I blame us poetry lovers.

In grad school, my friend John coined the phrase, the pensive orgasm. The pensive orgasm is the performative “mmm” and nod by select audience members at the end of a poetry reading, signaling they are an insider. They get the poem. They taste the words; can’t you tell from their humming? The performance is insufferable.

Then there are the hobby poetry writers. These days when a friend tells me they are writing poetry, I often have two ungenerous thoughts:

• One, is everything… okay?

• Two, please don’t make me read it.

It’s an unfair reaction. There’s something earnest and vulnerable about admitting you are trying to tie down a feeling with words. To the recipient of this news, it’s a bit like being flashed. Someone’s unedited verbal nudity suddenly full frontal with no warning. My instinct is to look away.

The only thing worse than someone sending you their poetry is when they send you someone else’s. I find this behavior particularly offensive, because it’s never a dirty limerick or a lighthearted ode to a tomato or a toilet. Almost always it’s stanzas heavy with despair or speckled with melancholy; poetry is an excellent container for weighty feels. You’ll be enjoying a sunny walk through the park or calmly disassociating to an episode of The Traitors when WHAM! a text comes hurling into your afternoon with an excerpt from Ada Limón or Audre Lorde, and your mood is undone. Without consent, you’re forced to confront the feeling your friend is feeling, and now you’re feeling it too, which they think is magic, and you think: “I should go buy an ice cream sandwich.” Poetry costs calories.

***

I enjoy both cilantro and poetry when it is not being hurled at me like an emotional grenade with no warning, or hummed at.

Warning: poetry ahead.

I appreciate those among us who can turn a word over and examine it from every angle. I like the poets who have a good ear. Those who can create rhythm with words I never would have thought to pair, words like ‘waddle-thieving.’ An excellent combination, no? I enjoy seeing language put into a completely new context. Ada Limón coins this particularly delightful phrase in her poem “Give Me This,” which opens her 2022 collection The Hurting Kind.

Did you think of a hedgehog when I wrote ‘waddle-thieving?’ Probably not, but doesn’t it just make sense? Will you ever see one again and not think, the perfect description for this chubby, prickly ball is ‘waddle-thieving?’

Or maybe you prefer “Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle” by Mary Szybist, which made me eavesdrop on the bus with an entirely new set of ears.

Or perhaps, “The Lanyard” by Billy Collins, which I read at my grandma Mimi’s memorial service because it uses plastic in a way that forever changed how I thought about love.

Poetry does not have to intimidate us into meaning-making. It need not only be invoked, as Limón describes, to request one’s participation in your suffering: “Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth.” I want to pay attention to buoyancy and rapture and small absurdities. I want to laugh, not hum. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the mood for more show-boating or more sorrow. I want sit on my couch with a cup of coffee and listen for size 11 raindrops falling in San Francisco.

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I spent half of Lily King’s Heart the Lover crying and the other half wanting to dunk the male leads’ heads in a bucket of cold water. Neither deterred me from finishing the novel in two large gulps.

A novel that is reverent toward literature and philosophy is a risky undertaking. For the English major, name dropping Aristotle and Proust might be a treat; for everyone else, it comes off as trivial at best, arrogant if poorly executed, and contemptuous if your reader is feeling particularly unforgiving. In the university-based half of Heart the Lover, titles, character names, and references to authors slap you over the head on nearly every page. My margins are peppered with notes like ick!… ew, team chill… oh, I do love Yeats.

And yet, I adored this book.

The story begins on a campus with the protagonist recounting her experience meeting best friends Sam and Yash in an English class their senior year of college. Their paths have not crossed until now because Jordan (not her real name, but a nickname the boys give her) is on a creative writing track, while Sam and Yash have opted for a more scholarly, philosophical, and somewhat sycophantic approach to literary studies.

As the reader, you’re in Jordan’s head. Her sweet, self-aware, self-conscious, idealistic head. I found this a familiar place to be. When she’s flirting with one of the boys, and he brings up Cromwell, she fakes understanding, and then heads to the library to study up on the English statesman. Who among us with a crush hasn’t pretended to read a book or see a movie for the sake of a good flirt? In my early-twenties, I once had an entire conversation about the author Marilynn Robinson with a boy I liked. I had never read a single one of her books. I finished the conversation and headed straight to the bookstore. I bought three.

Sam and Yash on the other hand nickname dates after literary love interests and quote Aristotle over breakfast. Upon meeting Jordan, their friend Ivan says to her, “Tell me everything, bar-none everything, that comes to mind when you think about James Joyce.”

My high school English teacher was also obsessed with Joyce, but I would have said melancholy and the bar where I first got drunk on jägerbombs, then left.

Their behavior is the height of hubris. They are infuriating to read. Cue the head dunking.

They sweep Jordan into their precocious world. They take turns falling in love with her. Next to one particularly gag-inducing scene, I simply wrote haha, NO! and then recoiled in shame; I’m worried I’m becoming a cynical cow toward romance. I will give King the benefit of the doubt, as I believe we are supposed to delight in and cringe at the intensity of young love, not swoon:

“We don’t just have sex. We read The Aeneid out loud to each other. We read Yeats and Auden. We read Proust in French because we both studied it in high school and we talk about moving to Paris.”

They move on to reading Proust in English (the French is too difficult, go figure), at which point I scribbled oh god, relax. Maybe my college boyfriends just weren’t pushing me out of my romantic comfort zone, but if this is the alternative, I’m at peace with that.

As we follow Jordan, Sam, Yash into the poignancy of mid-life, the shift is melancholic. The friends have moved in and out of each other’s lives through adulthood, mostly out, until they are brought back together during a pivotal moment in Yash’s life. Ironically, Yash seems to foreshadow this during a debate with a professor in college over the definition of an old Greek term, ‘hamartia:’

“…the word in ancient Greek, as Aristotle was using it, meant a random error of judgement [Yash] insists that the power and poignancy come from the very randomness itself, the sense that any one of us, not just a good king with a built-in flaw, is capable of making a mistake…”

In these later scenes, we realize how the ripple effects of a random choice ended up defining the trajectory of these friends’ lives. There is no judgement of this fact. The past is not looked at as good or bad, but rather just the thing that happened that has brought them here.

It becomes clear that the point of all the poetry and pontification was not the identity it bestowed on these young scholars, not the careers it led them to, but rather the intimacy it built between friends. In the end, we are heartbroken, but not disheartened. A worthwhile life, according to King, is one that is witnessed by another.

Final thoughts: Be patient, it’s worth it, and have a box of tissues at the ready. One for each eye.

Who should read Heart the Lover? English teachers. Writers. Lovers of love. Anyone who has ever been young and insufferable (raising my hand, sheepishly). Those looking for a good weep.

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Let’s get a bit of throat clearing out of the way: it’s been a while. What with all the manhattans I drank in December and a new job in January, there’s barely been time to write. Excuses, yes. But there you have it — onward!

The world is dark these days. The sun continues to go down far too early, and headlines are so gruesome I wonder if dystopian fiction will ever find a way to shock us again. Given these circumstances, I have been cherry-picking only books that bring cheer.

Emma Thompson’s diaries, written while she filmed her Oscar-winning adaptation of Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen, proved to be just the ticket.

The diaries begin on the first day of rehearsals, Friday 7 April (1995) and end on the last day of shooting, Saturday 9 July. It’s a short read, just over 100 pages, which is convenient considering I will be adding this to my “read-every-year” pile.

Witty, enchanting, self-deprecating in the least offensive way, Emma Thompson must be the most brilliant drinking buddy.

Through sentence fragments and observations, she’s able to convey just how seriously she takes her work without coming off as too self-serious.

“Slept like the dead,” she writes. “Seared mouth on very hot porridge at breakfast with Lindsay [producer]. We discussed the ‘novilisation’ question. This is where the studio pay someone to novelise my script and sell it as Sense and Sensibility. I’ve said if this happens I will hang myself. Revolting notion. Beyond revolting.”

Sense and Sensibility: The Diaries seems to be a response to this very conversation. I am glad both it and Emma are with us.

A good deal of the entries detail how well or poorly Thompson slept that day:

“Drank far too much last night and woke at 5:30 am”

“Asleep by eleven with the help of a pill, up at six to cloud, no idea what we’re doing…”

“Very fond of hotel. Slept like a log.”

You’d think these details would be boring, but I found them humanizing. Of course, she also needed to look chipper and in love on camera for eight to twelve hours. I can see how sleep was always on her mind.

The tone of the diaries alternates between an education on film making and gossiping with your best friend. One feels a tremendous amount of FOMO when reading the moments of dialogue from fellow cast members — Alan Rickman, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, to name a few:

Hugh: ‘The moral of film-making in Britain is that you will be fucked by the weather.’

Later,

Kate: ‘Oh God, my knickers have gone up my arse.’
Alan: ‘Ah. Feminine mystique strikes again.’

And, another time:

“Very nice lady served us drinks in hotel and was followed in by a cat. We all crooned at it. Alan to cat (very low and meaning it): ‘Fuck off.’

My copy is dog-eared and underlined with abandon. It’s unsurprising that “must be funny” was a prerequisite of being cast.

Thompson, however, is clearly the wittiest of them all.

Her inner-monologue trails nimbly from a paragraph debating the central questions of Austen’s novel — can love survive without money? — to personal musings, such as: “In the absence of an ashtray I sit flicking my ash on to the carpet. I am a slut.”

Her sense of humor is refreshingly oddball. Celebrity memoirs are so polished now. Even the “messy” stories have an air of curated authenticity. Whereas, each of Thompson’s entries read like a long text-message from a far-away friend.

Lest I leave you with a false impression, the set was not only a laugh. Great art is labor intensive. All we tend to see of films is the shine of the red-carpet moment and a final clean cut. These entries also reveal the sacrifices and injuries and arguments. The fatigue after several hours of acting an illness. The endless hours on set. The months spent away from family and friends.

The days might be shorter, but if Emma Thompson can carry the switch for a false candle taped between her butt cheeks, then I can suck it up.

Final Thoughts: A pure delight. Riotously funny. I wish I were friends with Emma Thompson.

Who should read Sense & Sensibility: The Diaries? Austen fans. Film fans. Emma Thompson fans. Anyone looking for a laugh. Your friend who “wants to read in 2026.” Readers with short attention spans. Lit girlies. RomCom lovers. Your mom’s book club. Your book club. Me again next year!

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I picked 84, Charing Cross Road off the shelf last Sunday as daytime dimmed to evening before 5:00 pm and a cold fog settled into my San Francisco neighborhood.

Some people hate this time of year. I relish it. I mean, come on; the days only get shorter until December 21. Light a candle, turn on your Netflix fireplace, curl up with a good book, and stop complaining.

Other than the fact that it’s the perfect fall book, there are three crucial reasons to have a copy of 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff sitting on your bookshelf:

1. It is small. Coming in at a tight 97 pages, this epistolary classic won’t take up much space, which also means…

2. It is easy to re-read. Do you sometimes think: someday I might become one of those people who re-read books. Well, good news. This book is your gateway into your re-reading habit. I’ve been rereading Helene and Frank’s letters for over a decade now. You, too, are going to want to re-read them over and over and over again because…

3. Helene Hanff’s sharp, witty letters to bookshop employee Frank Doel, and the other pen pals she meets through her correspondence with Marks & Co., are some of the most soul-restoring words ever committed to print. Call that hyperbolic, I dare you. Then go read the book, and we can talk.

Unlike the other books I’ve reviewed, these letters are not fiction. They are the remnants of a real correspondence from 1949 to 1969 that began with New York writer Helene Hanff’s query to a London bookshop about a list of out-of-print books.

It’s a world easy to romanticize as a 21st-century reader, but it’s not a text dripping in earnestness. Helene is smart, assertive, critical, and unafraid of brash humor.

“I require a book of love poems with spring coming on,” she wrote on March 25, 1950. “No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering.”

The book’s premise is nostalgic, but the letters are not fluffy or saccharine. Some are simply expositional book receipts. Others, thank you notes and personal updates. And some offer a glimpse into the political and socio-economic landscape of post-war London, a city still on food rations and somewhat abandoned by the new American superpower.

“...we do a bit of trading with the [food] tins,” wrote Frank’s wife Nora on January 20, 1952. “As once for a special occasion I traded a tin of dried eggs for a pair of nylons. Not quite legal but it does help us to get by!”

These details, often tucked in between book orders, shape the stakes of this little text.

Through the exchange of books, tins, and nylons, the stack of letters becomes a reminder that connection, humor, and small kindnesses don’t solve hard times, but they sure do make our days richer.

Final Thoughts: A perennial favorite. Just read it.

Who should read 84, Charing Cross Road? People who “love the smell of books.” Romantics. Nancy Meyers and Nora Ephron die-hards. Post-war literature fans. Letter lovers. Anyone who needs to thaw their cynical 2025 heart.

I was at a family wedding this weekend stuck in a conversation with a morose guest. You might know the type: always a victim of their circumstances. Life seems to go on only to inconvenience them.

I happened to know this particular person once had an avid reading habit, so I asked if they had read any good books this summer. A mistake.

“Ha!” They balked. Then added, in a tone that heavily implied how inconsiderate my question was, “I don't have time for that anymore.”

When did benign curiosity become insulting?

James Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

To those who like to compete in the pain Olympics, I highly recommend Coco Mellors’ novel Blue Sisters as an antidote.

Narrated by three of the four Blue sisters — Avery, Bonnie, and Lucky — the novel centers on the one-year anniversary of their fourth sister, Nicky’s, sudden death.

Some contemporary novels feel like you’re following protagonists for 300 pages without clear direction. The “more vibes than plot” style. (See my thoughts on Evenings and Weekends.)

Mellors’ writing is a cousin of this, but she creates complex characters that feel human. Each Blue sister possesses concrete flaws. They start the novel as victims of their own circumstances. They place blame. They self-sabotage. They avoid their real feelings. Somehow, you love them anyway.

Their personal failures become the plot beats, moving these women forward. You want to see them grow and succeed, as they grapple with what real grief and healing feel like.

Which brings me to Mellors' real gift, she can write a feeling better than most.

Take this passage about loneliness — that intractable distance you start to feel toward the end of a relationship: “She knew that part of her was still out there, standing along at the bottom of the garden huffing smoke into the night air, out of sight and out of reach.”

Or, the specter of chronic pain: “Language grasped at, but never caught, it. Each time Nicky tried to find the right words, it seemed to change shape… And when it was gone, she waited for it, like a volatile husband who has left in a rage but will inevitably return.”

She drags you into the breaking point of each sister and lets you see all the bruises.

You don't need to be grieving to find companionship in these pages. Blue Sisters is a novel that shows us that self-compassion can be an act of courage and no struggle is uniquely burdensome.

Final Thoughts: Ambitious without being punishing, beautiful without being precious.

Who should read Blue Sisters? Character-driven junkies. Readers ready to relish in the chaos of family. Therapists. Therapists-in-training. People unafraid to cry into their books. Morose wedding guests who need a bit of perspective.

I was in line for a zipline in Costa Rica a few weeks ago, chatting with fifteen-year-old Katy Maxwell about a book she abandoned mid-read.

“It was too… millennial,” she said. “The characters... they just complained a lot. It was exhausting.”

I’d never heard the phrase “too millennial” levied against a book. What did this even mean?

Back on the beach, I tucked into my book: Evening and Weekends by Oisín McKenna. A few chapters in, I understood.

The story unfolds over one sweltering weekend in London, moving in and out of the minds of over half a dozen characters. I loved this time-bounding. The two-day constraint adds claustrophobia that heightens the intensity of the heatwave. And while structurally ambitious, the result left me wanting.

The characters, each painfully self-conscious and self-focused, spend most of the novel marinating in bouts of overthinking. Their insecurity was tedious. Without more to connect to, each reads like an urban-millennial stock character: the pregnant one, the queer-questioning one, the one unsure about polyamory. Even most adults felt one-dimensional, aside from Rosaleen, whose flashbacks to her childhood in Ireland provided a depth beyond her illness.

These vignettes ask readers to empathize solely due to circumstance: a pregnant couple worried about money, a family grappling with cancer, a grieving widow, and people navigating sexuality and desire.

They are rich canvases for a story, but the smorgasbord of stakes paired with thin characters made it difficult to care.

Then, there is the whale stuck in the Thames. A delightfully odd detail from page one that I spent three hundred pages worrying was just a quirky event. In the end, it serves as a central conceit: a creature stranded. Carried to the periphery of its ecosystem by the tides, languishing in London, perhaps worse. It’s a poignant metaphor, but one that could have just as easily been captured with a smaller cast.

I wanted to love this book. I wanted it to succeed. It considers queerness with fresh, spinning prose. The structure explores just how egalitarian a novel can (or cannot) be. These are narrative ingredients I love. Sadly, I left the pages unsatisfied, wishing I could gift every character a session of therapy, and what’s more millennial than that?

Final Thoughts: Gorgeous writing. Ambitious. Fewer characters next time. An author I’m intrigued to keep reading.

Who should read Evenings and Weekends? My M.A. in Literature peeps. Maybe Maggie Nelson fans? It has that “how to queer a novel’s structure” quality that she crushed in The Argonauts. Londoners. Wannabe Londoners. Sally Rooney STANs. Definitely not Katy.

This review is 345 words. Alas, I had a lot to say.

I was eight or nine when my friend Julia convinced me that a plant called pickleweed grew in her yard. She had tasted it. It tasted “just like pickles.” So we set out, sampling everything from skunk cabbage to Kentucky bluegrass to find the elusive pickle-flavored plant. We never did. But don’t you miss those days? When you could easily spend an afternoon chasing something wild and creative just because it feels necessary?

Ferdia Lennon’s novel Glorious Exploits captures that same spirit of, “I need to feel something that’s missing, let’s create it.”

The plot sounds like a rainy-day make-believe game cooked up by a kid: two Syracusian potters, Gelon and Lampo, in 412 BC, decide to put on two plays by Euripides in the quarry where the city is keeping Athenian prisoners, starring the very same Athenian prisoners. It’s original and uninhibited in its creativity.

I loved every word.

It’s easy to love every word because the novel is narrated, until the final few pages, by Lampo, who sounds a lot like everyone's drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. Opinionated. Bit buffoonish. Every sentence he utters drips with unearned confidence. But when it’s not your uncle, the stories are a laugh.

In Lampo’s world, the Peloponnesian War has just left its mark in Sicily. Anti-Athenian sentiment still dominates in the city of Syracuse. It is a war-novel, of sorts. I can already hear my mom saying, “I don’t like violence.” (I ask, who among us does?) So, a note for you, Mom: There’s some bashing of skulls. A bit of swearing. And the poor “Athenian pricks” are being starved to death in a limestone pit. If you pick this up, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In a final twist, the novel becomes a poignant love letter to storytelling. That might sound like saccharine book-lover speak, but it’s a novel about ancient theater, so let me have it. What saves it from being too sweet is its honesty about the limits of art. Stories can’t fix everything, and certainly don’t move us all in the same way.

Final Thoughts: Best quest novel I’ve read in years. Audacious. Ferdia Lennon, please write more books!

Who should read Glorious Exploits? “Modern ancient people” readers. (Think Circe or Song of Achilles). Hellenic studies folks. Myths & legends lovers. Dads and brothers who claim to “hate fiction”. Those not afraid to laugh at a prisoner of war joke. And probably your drunk uncle.

Support a local bookstore and buy your book from the Filler Content Bookshop!

Follow me on Instagram if that’s your thing: @caroline.santinelli

This review is 299 words. So crisp.

In 2010 I visited Cork, Ireland with my high school Irish Literature class. All I remember of Cork is visiting the college and sneaking out of the hotel to drink on our last night. I was 17, an excited, drinking neophyte. I had two Jägerbombs. Those I don’t recommend.

What I DO recommend is The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue. It was a delight to visit Cork again in this novel. Told as a retrospective from Rachel’s point of view, the story follows a formative year of her twenties, living with her new friend James Devlin.

The novel digs into friendship, class, sexuality, and growing up. But at the core of each theme, it is really a story about how we use and misuse other people to figure out who we are and what we want. Sometimes, I laughed. Others, I winced. I admit, it’s a mirror I didn’t always want to look into. But O’Donoghue makes these moments sharp, random, and funny. The narrator’s self-aware comments on the lunacy of her choices make you feel like you can laugh at your own.

Some reviewers say these moments make Rachel and James “unlikeable,” but I found them charmingly weird. James’ opening line about scabies? Iconic and so very confusing. Staging an entire event at a bookshop to get the attention of a man? If only I had a bookshop!

Ironically, many of these “unlikeable” reviews are by twenty-somethings on BookTok. Maybe the young adults of 2025 are just more mature than the rest of us, or maybe hindsight really is 20/20.

It’s the structure that makes this story work though. Throughout the novel O’Donoghue scatters micro-scenes that seem like throwaway moments, but by the end, there’s an easygoing symmetry. This could feel cheesy. Here, it's brilliant.

Final Thoughts: Complete delight. Well-crafted and witty. My go-to summer recommendation right now.

Who Should Read The Rachel Incident? Irish Lit fans. Coming-of-age lovers. Friendship nerds. Non-ethical non-monogamists. Contemporary fiction readers. Romantic realists who still want that dash of happily-ever-after.

Support a local bookstore and buy your book from the Filler Content on Bookshop!

Follow me on Instagram if that’s your thing: @caroline.santinelli

This review is 308 words.

I did not enjoy reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang, but that is not a condemnation of the book. I did like it!

The thing about novels is that you can read a grotesque, ugly, or intimate scene, and unless your neighbor is reading over your shoulder (weird, please move seats), you can stay in your own secret world. No one is the wiser!

And thank god for that because I picked this as my bus book, and the scenes are deeply unpleasant at points. The prose moves quickly. Sucks you in. It is visceral and violent. And then suddenly, it's quite sensual. The painted bodies scene? Gorgeous and brilliant. Though not a scene I was ready to read on a bus full of strangers.

My favorite Goodreads review starts, "I really identified with this novel because I'm also a vegan." Dead. Yes, the story's inciting incident is when Yeong-hye becomes a vegan, but this is not a novel about cashew cheese. It's an allegory. A twisted, unraveling one about Yeong-hye's desperate attempts for bodily agency in a patriarchal society. I'm also a huge form nerd, so I really enjoyed that the novel is told from three points of view, none of which are Yeong-hye, stripping her of any narrative agency. Brutal, but effective.

Han Kang can really write a scene, and Deborah Smith's translation is a racehorse on the page, fast out the gate and spellbinding for all 208 pages. That said, reading was a constant push-pull. The immediacy of the voices and pacing of the writing kept me wanting more, but I was also nervous about what I might find on the next page.

If you do decide to pick up The Vegetarian, I recommend having a book on the nightstand with seriously lower stakes to flush out the system when you're done.

Final thoughts? Beautifully written. Complex. Gnawing. Don't read it on the bus.

Who should read The Vegetarian? Lit nerds. Allegory lovers. English majors. "Down with the patriarchy" readers. People who love literary accolades (it won many, many prizes). The dark souls among us. And sure, also vegans.

Support a local bookstore and buy your book from the Filler Content Bookshop!

Follow me on Instagram if that’s your thing: @caroline.santinelli

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