Who is the most smartest reader we know? Bookmaven Bethanne Patrick. Nobody reads more widely and joyfully, so we’re thrilled to launch BookWag as a regular column featuring her publishing takes. Bethanne reaches more than 200,000 bibliophiles on Twitter and her writing appears frequently in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, NPR Books and Literary Hub. A PEN/Faulkner Foundation board member, she’s also served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and hosts the Missing Pages podcast. Her memoir, Life B: Overcoming Double Depression, will be published May 16. She’ll be using this corner of our sandbox to give you book recs, analysis and more. Because…she’s amazing.
Yours Ever,
Dear Wags,
For years, the question was What are you reading?
Has that question been supplanted by What are you watching?
About a decade ago, a couple I knew retired from long, successful careers in publishing and opened a bookstore. They loved it. They had a great customer base, a great location, and all the contacts they needed to curate an incredible collection of superb books for different types of readers.
Then one day at lunch with me, one of them declared: “Neither of us reads like we used to. There’s too much great television to watch!”
My blood ran cold with anxiety. If my friends, who understood books better than almost anyone else I knew, had shifted their attention from page to screen what did that mean for reading itself?
Perhaps for them it means the end of reading altogether. Maybe they’re happily curled up in front of a giant screen right now, binge-watching Liaison, Euphoria or (shudder) Yellowstone. Let’s be real about the siren song of passive entertainment. We live in dark times, and everyone needs to find their own way of coping.
But I do wonder if my pals realize how new forms of publishing are reshaping that I don’t read anymore/ever/much cliché.
First, there’s no battle between paper books and electronic books. Both platforms rely on text— the squiggly characters we put together to convey meaning. Perhaps you’ve given up on paper books because they’re expensive, or you need a different size font. An e-reader makes it much easier to hold and swipe through a novel or biography. You can even take notes and highlight text now, and use a stylus to write marginalia on the page, just like a medieval scribe.
Second, don’t ignore audiobooks out of the unenlightened belief that only reading printed material matters. Audiobooks are booming because they make it possible for us to engage with books while leading very busy lives. Listening to narratives reaches the same part of your brain as reading them does. Audiobooks are not “cheating” or “easier” or a diminished experience compared with paper books.
Finally, it’s time to classify great podcasts as literature. If audiobooks affect our brains the same way paper books do, narrative podcasts are becoming their own kind of high literary art. Before you let out a cry of O tempora! O mores! remember that many of our most-revered works of literature—Gilgamesh, The Iliad, Beowulf, and works of holy scripture—began as oral recitations passed through the generations, long before language made it to print.
Everything old is new again. The human need for storytelling is innate. The paper book is a grand and eternal tool. But it’s not the first, only, or last way to share stories.
Until next time, happy reading!
Yours amid the stacks,
Bethanne
Plug of the Week
I’m getting ready for a fabulous book launch event next week, so indulge me as I celebrate the birth of a great title: Grace in Love is the latest volume in the Grace and Gravity anthology series founded by OG Wag Richard Peabody, creator of Gargoyle magazine. Now published and edited by novelist Melissa Scholes Young, these collections showcase women writers from Washington D.C. It’s crucial to support feminist publishing in our nation’s capital.
I published a short story, “Make It Do or Do Without,” in a previous volume, Amazing Grace, and have an essay, “The Barbie Car,” in the latest one. My amazing fellow contributors include American University creative-writing colleagues Sandra Beasley, Chloe Yelena Miller, and many more. Learn more here.
Best New Books
Before I get this week’s recs, a little housekeeping! New books are almost always released on Tuesdays. The five I tout here hit bookstores on Tuesday, May 2.
I have very high standards, but mine are not the only standards. I’ll try to change things up from week to week. For example, I won’t always choose only fiction, or the same genres. I may have a New Memoirs Week, or a SciFi Week, etc. Feel free to suggest ideas, and we’ll cook up great things together.
May 2, 2023, was quite a remarkable as a pub date because I think both Abraham Verghese and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah are going to wind up on end-of-year best book and awards lists. You heard it here first, Wags: Their novels combine page-turning plots with deep attention to justice and humanity.
The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane
I missed Keane’s Ask Again, Yes and was determined not to miss her latest novel. If you’re a fan of Richard Russo, Keane is for you. I won’t say she’s the female Richard Russo, which diminishes her unique talent, but she has the same gift for writing about how American socioeconomics play out in small town families that Russo displayed in Empire Falls and Bridge of Sighs.
The Ferryman by Justin Cronin
If you loved Cronin’s The Passage books, I can’t guarantee you’ll love this standalone novel, because life is unpredictable. Still, I’m pretty sure those who devoured his hypnotic writing about a dystopian near-future where our country has been devastated by a virus will devour this story about a hidden island paradise (take that with a grain of salt) and its citizens. Making a Logan’s Run reference dates me, but Cronin takes the idea of planned human obsolescence to a creepy new level.
Clytemnestra by Costanza Cosati
Like other great writers who have reinvented stories from ancient Greece (Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Jesmyn Ward, Kamila Shamsie, Pat Barker, Margaret Atwood), Cosati has seriously studied the myths behind her fiction. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s queen, takes center stage: “If power isn’t given to you, you have to take it for yourself.” Cosati’s investigation of a long-vilified character brings more to her story, but the author also doesn’t make the mistake of jamming her immortal subject into a modern mold.
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
In his debut collection, Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah created dystopian short stories that recognized the universal human capacity for evil while not absolving American racism from its overdue reckoning. His first novel is another one-two punch, in which he imagines a penal-system entertainment franchise where prisoners are “allowed” to fight for their freedom. Guess what happens to the losers? Raw, powerful, carefully composed, and unforgettable. No one here gets out alive.
The Covenant of Water: A Novel by Abraham Verghese
Verghese is so accomplished as a doctor and professor, it’s easy to forget that his 2009 novel, Cutting for Stone, blew me and so many other readers away as a sensitive and sweeping history of East Africa. Since Dr. Verghese has several day jobs, including an endowed chair at Stanford Medical School, we had to wait 14 years for the follow-up. It’s totally worth it. How is this book even better than his first? Just read it.
#FridayReads
I created the #FridayReads hashtag in 2009, after a car accident that left me with a broken tibia necessitated a few weeks of bed rest. What better distraction for a lifelong reader than to ask what everybody on Twitter was reading?
Today, it’s used by authors, libraries, literary organizations, and readers to share titles they’re excited about. It’s also a quick and easy way to great recs on almost any social-media platform —when you’re not reading mine!
Every week, I’ll post a few screenshots of my favorite #FridayReads posts. Let’s start with a few from Twitter, since that’s my (quickly dying) home base, but stay tuned for others from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and those retro things, blogs.
Tom Beer is the editor of the trade magazine Kirkus Reviews. We served together on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, and he is one of the smartest, kindest people in the industry. His #FridayReads picks, like Ricardo Nuila’s The People’s Hospital, are always excellent:
Sometimes authors promote their own books for #FridayReads, and that’s terrific in Jenn Baker’s case – not only is she a writer, editor, and podcaster, but she’s giving a shoutout to the Texas Library Association annual conference in this tweet for her YA novel Forgive Me Not:
The president of the Washington Review of Books, Jenny Yacovissi, talks up the awesome Gaithersburg Book Festival and J. David McSwane’s Pandemic, Inc.:
CUNY-based Feminist Press not only promotes National Poetry Month but also the distinguished Copper Canyon Press and its new collection from Ocean Vuong:
My publisher is Counterpoint Press, and Dan Lopez is executive editor there, so naturally he’s giving some lift to The Apartment by Ana Menéndez (out in June):
Adaptation Nation
In May, watch out for Silo the Netflix adaptation of Hugh Howey’s series that started in 2011 with Wool (which he famously self published). Starring Wags Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Robbins, and Rashida Jones, the dystopian tale has an appropriately grim and intriguing trailer:
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CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. It’s an essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through a cluttered landscape and serving up smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy. If somebody forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll be part of the smartest set in Hollywood, Gstaad, Biarritz, and Ned’s New England Deck in Fairfax, Va., where you can get clam chowder topped with buttered lobster claws. Yum.
“Only my books anoint me, and a few Wags, those who reach into my veins.”
― Anne Sexton
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I just started Covenant of Water last night and was in love from the first sentence!
Welcome to Substack Bethanne!