Book Club: 10 Reads We Can’t Put Down Right Now

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Clik here to view. Photo By Paige Babilla

Photo By Paige Babilla

Confession: I love reading.

You’re like “yeah, yeah, you and like 22 million other peeps.”

But I don’t think you’re comprehending. I was the kid who got grounded from reading. Threaten taking away TV for a month? meh. Tell me to hand over Harry Potter for two weeks? You may have whatever you like, in addition to my first child. I was also the girl who would scurry home after being assigned to read the first chapter in that english book that made everyone else groan audibly, and proceed to finish the whole thing in a single sitting. …I was, like, really popular, you guys. Anyone familiar with the recent TSA scare that merited scathing letters from flyers about security lines taking 3+ hours? I was legitimately jazzed that I had an excuse to get to the airport an extra hour early because that’s an additional 60 minutes I can justify consuming 3 novels and 6 glasses of wine that cost the same as my monthly cable bill.

In honor of officially exhausting 2 massive bookshelves in my apartment and a recent desperate scouring for something new to read, I decided to write about reading because literally I have zero books available to me and I am far too lazy to trek to the nearest Barnes & Noble at this hour. To further showcase what a word nerd I am, I’m not giving a summary of these books and why they moved me, but just a quote. Because I think that’s kind of mysterious and also, I highlight quotes that groove with my soul and might as well put that to use sometime, right?

Everything I Never Told You, By Celeste Ng // “At bedtime, Nath and Lydia brushed their teeth sociably at the sink, taking turns to spit, saying goodnight as if it were any other night. It was too big to talk about, what had happened. It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn’t find it’s edges. It would always feel too big… All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.”
This Is How You Lose Her, By Junot Diaz // “The half-life of love is forever.”
Sharp Objects, By Gillian Flynn // “Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them.”
A Visit From The Goon Squad, By Jennifer Egan // “And right then you feel it – what you’ve seen in people’s faces on the street – a swell of movement, like an undertow, rushing towards something you can’t quite see. ‘Oh, we’ll know each other forever,” Bix says… We’re going to meet again in a different place.'”
Modern Romance, By Aziz Ansari // “I see people my age… getting married to people they’ve known for like a year and a half. A year and a half? Is that enough time to get to know someone to know you want to spend the REST of your life with them? I’ve had sweaters for a year and a half and I was like ‘what the f@ck was I doing with this sweater?”
Looking For Alaska // “Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep… Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
Carry On, Warrior, By Glennon Doyle Melton // “If our goal is to be tolerant of people who are different than we are, Chase, then we are really aiming quite low. Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated.”
Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, By Maria Semple // “My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I’m going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I’m about to kick the shit out of life.”
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, By Jonathan Safran Foer // “I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”
This Is Where I Leave You, By Jonathan Tropper // “It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are a sum total of what you see.”