A nursing home novel and a big change of plans

Plus unnecessary Pulitzer drama and Never Let Me Go, 20 years later

Big news! Because of Louise’s school schedule, I have decided to move up the launch of the 2025 Paperback Summer Reading Guide. It will now drop Friday, May 23rd, which is less than two weeks away. This year’s guide is going to be awesome. I’m still finalizing but it’s looking to be around 40 books total. There will be around 24ish primary paperback picks from me grouped into six summer reading categories. Additionally, for the first time very, I’m including my favorite fully vetted new summer releases, plus five books each from my Literary Society assistant Maddie and This Month in Books co-host Liz. We’ve managed to find some excellent books this year and we can’t wait to get the PSRG into your hands!

The Paperback Summer Reading Guide is a perk for paid newsletter subscribers and Patreon Literary Society members. Be sure you’re subscribed get the guide delivered to your inbox on May 23rd. If you prefer to avoid subscriptions, you can also purchase the guide as a standalone. Right now and up until the release, I’m offering annual subscriptions to the newsletter for $40. I’d love to have you join me for a summer of exceptional books and an entire year of great reading!

This week in books.

This week I read…

Sun City by Tove Jansson. I adored Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book and was hoping Sun City would be a good addition to the Paperback Summer Reading Guide. I mean, the title alone screams summer. Finnish author Jansson wrote this book after touring the United States and becoming fascinated by how we treat our elderly citizens. In particular, she was interested in the idea of relocating to a different part of the country for a retirement community after visiting Florida. In this novel, Jansson introduces an entire cast of characters located at a Florida retirement community called Berkeley Arms, weaving between the past and present stories of residents and employees alike. I did end up enjoying this book, it wasn’t quite right for the guide. The breadth of Jansson’s project means there are lots of characters to keep track of and, unlike in some of her other fiction, we never get to fully sink into these characters’ lives and experiences. Ultimately, this book works best as a companion to The Summer Book, both of which explore what it means to live a good life as we get older in two very different circumstances. If that theme interests you and you’ve enjoyed Jansson’s work in the past, I highly recommend this, but I wouldn’t say it’s the right place to start if you’re new to her work. Bookshop

Now I’m reading…

Another NYRB classic and some final potential PSRG titles.

New on my TBR…

I picked up this and this at a used bookstore this week. I’m very excited to tackle both.

The Weekly Dispatch.

• Oh the Pulitzer. I am thrilled for Percival Everett. Not only is James a masterful, accomplished, entertaining, and widely beloved novel, he is an author who deserves this kind of stratospheric recognition. I wrote about this more objectively earlier this week, but here I will add that I find this Pulitzer drama annoying. I intend to read all of the finalists (I’ve only read two of the four) to have a fully formed opinion, but it is ludicrous to me that the committee left James off their original list of three. Headshot is not nearly as successful or compelling book as James, and as intrigued as I am by a new-to-me book, I think I would have rioted if Mice 1961 had taken home the prize. To top it all off, immediately following the announcement, the committee chair—a critic I really respect—wrote an Instagram post about the unhealthy state of fiction and how we can’t let commercial success dictate what we think of as good literature. She then congratulated all the finalists and “the board-selected winner,” a phrase she subsequently deleted. I would love to read an entire piece by this critic about her views on the current state of fiction, but the day of the prize announcement is not the time to say how bad all of the books you had to read for said prize were! I’m just disappointed in the whole thing and bummed that now publications like the New York Times are putting an asterisk on Percival’s deserving win.

• When I was pregnant with Louise, I read and relied on Emily Oster’s Expecting Better. It’s data driven approach to the do’s and don’ts of pregnancy was useful and calming—I appreciated the opportunity to take in all the information and make my own informed decision all towards the goal of having a healthy baby and informed birth. But when I started Cribsheet, her second book about what to do with the actually baby, I immediately hated it. The data that was so helpful in making decisions geared towards achieving a particular outcome became clutter in the nebulous, intimate, personal realm of parenting. To each their own, of course, but I am firmly an anti-optimizing, trust my instincts, you can’t control everything kind of parent, which is why I’m eager to read Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age by Amanda Hess. A recent review (Atlantic, gift link) gets at why this book might end up being so important to a generation of parents being bombarded by experts insisting they know how to do it “right.”

Link Roundup.

Best books of the year, so far. (NYT, gift link)

New festival celebrates translated fiction (Guardian)

Kazuo Ishiguro reflects on Never Let Me Go , 20 years later (Lit Hub)

One of literature's most lucrative prizes goes to debut fiction writer Canisia Lubrin (NPR)

Books for every type of mom. (NYT, gift link)

9 books about women without children (Electric Lit)

The best recent poetry (Guardian)

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Happy reading!

Sara