What Alden is Reading
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (Sept 28th)
Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See. This is his newest book. Need I say more?
I'm also reading Benjamín Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World, an absoring and genre-bending book that brings new life to some of the most important academic pioneers in history. By putting his twist on real scientists and mathematicians and their groundbreaking discoveries, Labatut explores genius, madness, and the consequences of changing the world as we know it.
What Caroline is Reading
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Sept 7th)
I am currently loving an advanced readers copy of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, set to come out this September. While so many novels feel like perfect lives to escape to, Rooney writes of real life, of friends discussing romance, religion, sex, and the state of the world, while they try and fail to figure out adulthood. Do the beautiful small moments add up to more than the hardships? Will they figure out what it all really means?
What Mark is Reading
Cuttings from the Tangle by Richard Buckner
Fans of Richard Buckner’s songs will not find the ageless, dust storm finished, slow-ground drifter riffs they’re used to in his first book Cuttings from the Tangle but instead get more these well-travelled, day-glowed and night-gowned gatherings that oft segue and seconds guess, oft shift and give the best kind of fits--not so much raging against what little light there is but engaging with it—thus arguing for more of what gave them their start.
What Stef is Reading
Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World by Lisa Wells
I just started this book and it is already proving to be a fantastic read-- a mix of climate change reporting, travelogue, and memoir. Wells visits various communities and individuals who have drastically changed their lives to help stop the warming of the planet. It's an incredibly timely and surprisingly hopeful book too!
What Erin is Reading
I'm about 2/3 of the way through Summer Fun, and it is a delightfully unpredictable epistolary novel. Gala, our writer, is writing letters to her hero B-, the genius but now reclusive songwriter for the Get Happies (think Beach Boys). The letters vary in content- in some she writes to the songwriter with an uncanny understanding about B-'s past. In others, Gala narrates her own present day experiences as a young trans woman running a hostel in New Mexico. When I picked it up I expected a light summer bop, and instead I found a rich story that shifts in compelling ways.
What Carolyn is Reading
On a remote, Irish island, a group of wedding guests and some of the wedding party itself, find themselves living an actual murder mystery. Eerie, fast-paced and intriguing.
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
Fifty years unfold in a single day, as a family’s matriarch struggles with tragedy, love, lies and secrets of a life’s
legacy, all culminating on a summer’s day on Cape Cod.
A vivid, intoxicating, humorous and intelligent novel.