Hi, everyone! So it’s been kind of a while. We had a busy fall around here, culminating in Lilah’s b’mitzvah at the beginning of December—they did an amazing job and are very relieved to be done and have more time for Minecraft now. Ari and Gabe have been keeping busy with new musical instruments (saxophone and piano respectively) this fall. They’ve also been reading up a storm. We got them Kobo e-readers for Chanukah, so they can now check out e-books on their own. The frequency of “I have nothing to read!!!” complaints has declined remarkably.
Ari wanted to share his favorite book of the year:
One of the best book (series) I’ve ever read is Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger. Here’s a sort of blurb for you, Tommy has always known about Dwight, the kid who ruins everything for the sixth grade at Ralph McQuarrie middle school. One of the only things Dwight is good at is origami, which is fine by Tommy. That is until one fun night when Dwight asks Tommy to ask his newly folded origami yoda whether he should ask Hannah to dance. Miraculously, while he’s telling Dwight to knock it off, Hannah starts dancing with an eighth grader. This is one of many pieces of evidence that Yoda’s using the force, a opinion that Harvey strongly disagrees with. Tommy starts to make a case file, to track evidence of Yoda using the force, because Tommy has to know if he should ask Yoda his question, should he ask Sara to dance? One of the reasons this book and book series is my favorite is because it’s funny and interactive, thats right you can go to the back of any book in the series, or to Origamiyoda.com to see Tom Angleberger and his Superfolders (club of origami fans that you can join) hotspot of hundreds of origami instructions. I have a pile of Star Wars origami in my room. I hope that when you read it you will enjoy it as much as I did.
Gabe also wanted to share a recommendation:
One of the only books I can remember that I read is Fake Mustache Or How Jodie O’Rodeo And Her Wonder Horse (And Some Nerdy Kid) Saved the U.S. Presidential Election From A Mad Genius Criminal MasterMind By Tom Angleberger . It’s a long name I know but It still is a good book. It’s about how Casper Bengue gets 400 dollars from a rich relative and after buying suit and the HeidleBerg HandleBar Number 7, a fake mustache that can hypnotize people, goes on a bank robbing spree. Meanwhile Lenny Flem Junior Is blamed While Fako Mustacho A.K.A. Casper Bengue buys the HeidleBerg Novelty company becomes mayor and sets his eyes on presidency. It is a really good book and is made up of three parts Lenny Flem junior tells part one then takes a break to let Jodie O’Rodeo the only other non-hypnotized person besides Lenny Flem Junior tells part two then Lenny Flem junior tells part three.
Thanks, boys!
Ari and Gabe are embarking on the middle grade rite of passage known as the Harry Potter obsession (they started last week and are currently on books 3 and 4). Expect to hear from Ari and Gabe again in a few months when they are back to exploring non-Rowling authors.
On to the grown-up books. Somehow, I have only one must-read novel to share since summer vacation.
The first, which is rightfully on many Best of 2023 lists, is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All-Stars. I finished this book at the beginning of September and it’s still in my head. It’s a satirical dystopian take on the prison-industrial complex and the criminal justice system through the lens of reality TV. It’s a bit like the Hunger Games but with convicted felons fighting for a chance at freedom. Not many male authors can write really strong female leads, but Adjei-Brenyah builds his story around two of them. The worldbuilding is intense, he juggles a lot of plot lines and sticks the landing at the end. And lest you think reality would never be like this, he sprinkles the footnotes with painful reminders that it’s only a matter of degrees. Super duper mega recommended if you have a high tolerance for on-page violence.
A few honorable mentions from the fiction aisle:
Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo- I’ve recommended Acevedo’s YA work before. This one is for adults and it’s chock full of intergenerational family drama that comes to a head when the matriarch of a family sees her death and plans a living wake.
Multiple friends texted me to recommend Peng Shepherd’s The Cartographers. If you have an affinity for maps, libraries, and/or New York City, it’s definitely worth a read.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith - I’ve struggled to get into Zadie Smith’s writing, but she narrates the audio version of this one brilliantly and it was my go-to commute listen for most of the fall. She packs a few novels worth of plot into this tale built around a contemporary of Charles Dickens, his widowed cousin, and a fake identity trial that captivated 1870s London.
I don’t normally recommend sequels but Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead’s followup to Harlem Shuffle, is fantastic. Lev AC Rosen’s The Bell in the Fog, a sequel to Lavender House, is another great mystery novel of queer 1950s San Francisco.
Starter Villain by John Scalzi is a cute, funny novel about a hapless villain. I think writing well from the villain’s perspective is one of the harder tricks to pull off in literature, but this one is enjoyable. In the adolescent humor department, Adam Mansbach’s The Golem of Brooklyn is a crude but amusing and sometimes thoughtful but really mostly puerile take on the golem myth.
On to non-fiction!
In this newsletter’s ongoing tradition of great books about birds, Jennifer Ackerman’s new one does not disappoint. What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds is fascinating. Ackerman spends time with owl scientists all over the world including researchers in the field and wildlife rehabilitators working with owls in captivity. In addition to the nuances of owl mating, diets, sounds, and migration habits, she also takes a close look at owls’ unique place in our collective imagination. Did you know that there’s an Instagram account that posts images of owls from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection? (@owlsatthemet)
In the memoir department, Natasha Lance Rogoff’s Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia is the absolutely bananas story of Rogoff’s experience creating the first season of the Russian version of Sesame Street shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Versions of Sesame Street have been created in over 70 languages, but this one must have been among the most challenging. Between corruption and political intrigue and the challenges of cross-cultural humor and childhood education, this is an entertaining and often touching thrill ride of a story.
And a few non-fiction honorable mentions:
Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon about now-convicted cryptocurrency CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was unfortunately not the incisive takedown of the crypto industry that I was hoping for. Skip it and read Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux instead. Faux takes a serious look at many aspects of the cryptocurrency market and, most importantly, highlights the real human tolls of cryptocurrency and its enablement of human trafficking.
While you’re reading business books, Rob Copeland’s new book, The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend is an in-depth expose of one of the world’s largest hedge funds. Dalio and Bridgewater have been highlighted in many management texts as a radically transparent leadership culture but the reality is something else entirely. Made me really appreciate all the lousy bosses I’ve had because they were nowhere near this bad.
Have you ever gotten stuck at a party with a friend who was prone to rambling, self-centered monologues that went on a bit too long but were too interesting to walk away? If not, Jeopardy champ Amy Schneider’s new book, In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life, can give you that experience in book form. It contains relatively little Jeopardy content and a lot of material about Schneider’s childhood and coming out as trans.
John Lisle’s The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare is fun for history buffs. The OSS was the agency that later became the CIA. If you like a good spy story then this is an intriguing look into the folks who filled the briefcases of many real-life Inspector Gadgets.
That’s all for now. Share your first read of the year in the comments - mine is Jesmyn Ward’s new novel, Let Us Descend. Wishing you a happy, healthy, and only minimally AI-generated 2024!