Book Soup for the Quarantined Soul: Part #1

             While I could make up an excuse as to why I haven’t written a post since January, the entire world has literally been locked inside for the past two months, so…I don’t really have one. With that said, I’m here to make up for it with a banger of a book recommendation series.

We all have ‘quarantine personalities,’ right? So, instead of simply pressing publish on a long list of suggestions, I’m divvying things up into a multi-post series, and recommending books based on what you’ve been doing in lockdown.

Without further ado, let’s get into part one, which is:   

If your quarantine involves a tie-dye pajama set…

You’re likely looking for an on-trend read. And you’re in luck! Almost every good show now is an adaption of a book, and Hulu and HBO have a few hot ones out that are worth reading before you binge.

Normal People, Sally Rooney: the show is incredible, but the book is even better. It follows two high school students in Ireland; the popular, athletic Connell and the standoffish, academic Marianne, and takes us through their unlikely relationship – beyond high school, into college, and after graduation. It’s a beautiful, emotional book, and reading it before you start the show will have you very impressed with how well the characters captured Sally Rooney’s nuanced writing.

Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng: I’ll be honest and say that I could not even get through Everything I Never Told You, Ng’s first book. So, when I heard she was publishing a new one and that it was great, I was admittedly hesitant to pick it up. However, my sister-in-law assured me that it was excellent, so I grabbed it on a whim one afternoon this past fall [I told you, it’s been a while since I’ve posted]. I also finished it in that same afternoon. It is excellent.

Little Fires follows Mia and Pearl Warren, a nomadic artist and her daughter, who settle briefly in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a very straight-edged Midwest town. They live in the home of Elena Richardson, a reputation-obsessed local journalist with four children, all of whom are dealing with secrets, insecurities, and issues that fly right over her head. Both Pearl and Mia find themselves deeply entangled in the lives of the locals, both the Richardson children and others, and the conflict and drama that ensues is compulsively page-turning. Also, the show is…not that good. It’s acted like a soap opera [honestly, it’s Kerry Washington and Joshua Jackson turning in the two worst performances of their career], and the book is much more delicate. Read this and skip the screen time. You’ll forget you’re literally locked inside your house and not allowed to go anywhere for an entire afternoon.   

My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante: I read [and reviewed] this book back in 2015, but it was only recently that my boyfriend and I decided to stream the first episode. From the beginning, we were both hooked. My Brilliant Friend is book one of a tetralogy that follows Lila and Elena, two young girls living in rural Naples in the 1960s, throughout their entire lives. So much happens throughout the book, but that’s honestly all you need to know. It’s beautiful written, very raw, and often dark, but is absolutely worth a read.

In the show, the actors and actresses switch out as the characters grow up, and they do an excellent job of making that believable. The show is entirely in Italian, and, apparently, the type of Italian they’re speaking is a no-longer-spoken Neapolitan dialect that even the Italian actors had to learn. The show features some of the most visually arresting cinematography I’ve ever seen and you’d never know that most of these characters, who were selected because they come from the town where the book takes place, have never acted before in their lives. They could teach Kerry and Josh a few lessons! Both the show and book are excellent; consume both and compare.  

Daisy Jones & the Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid: Get ahead of this one! Reese is making it into a movie with Riley Keough. This book is excellent. It’s told entirely as an oral history, which is Taylor Jenkins Reid’s signature style [The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, which we’ll get to later, is also told in this way]. The book is structured as an interview with a Rolling Stone-style magazine, during which each chapter represents a conversation between the author of the retrospective and one of the band members. It’s a pacey, engaging read that doesn’t require too much brainpower to get through but, at the same time, is well-written and elegantly structured. My favorite kind of book.

Alright, that concludes today’s Book Soup for the Quarantined Soul. Currently deciding whether our next installment should be for the compulsive quarantine baker [not I] or the quarantiner who is anxious-all-the-time because, duh, we’re locked in our houses [c’est moi!].