February 18, 2026 · 2:23 pm

When Will There Be Good News? (That’s the book title, but also)

Did I choose Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News for its title? Maybe. Because don’t we all want to know? When. Will. There. Be. Good. News.

Until that day we can read charming mysteries with well drawn characters and (what’s the opposite of graphic?) engrossing plots. Jackson Brodie is a decent detective, but I prefer his counterpart (and why isn’t she the #main detective?) Louise because she takes no shit and has seen some things.

Anyway it’s a mystery that is also literary fiction, or maybe literary fiction that is also a mystery? In this instance I kept waiting for the ‘gross murder’ to happen because that’s how mysteries have trained me, and there was some of that, but not really – more about suspense and secrets and building of connections and how does it all fit together. All while being well written! What a win.

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February 13, 2026 · 1:52 am

The Correspondent: The courage to connect

I know I’m late in praising Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. It’s on a million best-of lists and many of you have recommended it to me. What can I say. I was busy reading romantacy novels and separating from my soon-to-be-ex-husband (whee!). Fun fun.

But actually go get The Correspondent. It is fun (or at least in its formal elements) and helpful. Epistolary (that is to say, written in letters) the novel follows the aging life of Sybil through her correspondence with all manner of people.

A book in praise of human connection – not just the letter writing kind of connection, actually this is only a tiny part of it – more a book about how bravely reaching out to someone (sometimes a stranger, or a famous stranger, or a family member, or a friend, or a salesperson, or anyone) to tell them you’re thinking of them or what you like about something they did or what they’ve done to hurt you or what you admire about them or what you are reading or really anything (write about anything, Sybil says) is courage and connection and what we all need most.

The courage to connect at a time of intense loneliness for so many. The courage to say oh hey, yes, me? I was thinking of you and am just writing to say as much. And then the shock – the shock that never tires – of having this desire for connection reciprocated.

What Evans does best (I think) (and truest to my experience) is to have Sybil instruct young people in this art of courageous connection. She promises them that sometimes people will not write back (and this may be for many reasons and the arrogance of assuming it is you) and that is fine. The joy is in casting the line and that in knowing that sometimes – enough, actually – there is response, and sometimes – enough, actually – there is reciprocation and deep connection.

That these lines can – enough, actually – become thick connections that can hold us over years, through the hardest things, through the most joyous.

Sybil teaches these young people (and through them the reader) of the arrogance of assuming we can Go It Alone, or the cowardice of expecting others to come find us. We find one another when we bravely say ‘oh hey’ and then write back.

It’s a book about many other things – grief (of dead children or lost marriages or lost time), friendship, motherhood, guilt, romance, aging bodies, and trust – but for me (for me the reader right now) it was most of all this message of courage and connection. Certainly when I the individual human have needed it most, but no less, no less, when we the world most urgently do.

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February 13, 2026 · 12:45 am

Careless People: Lessons in Narration

Sarah Wynn-Williams used to be the director of public policy at Facebook. She got fired and then wrote a book about her experience working at Facebook and with the senior executives there. She doesn’t think much of the people or the organization – offering many scenes of casual and direct cruelty, indifference and pursuit of profit above all else. Yes, Careless People is a gentle title for the memoir – could have been titled ‘Cruel People,’ or ‘These Fucking Assholes’ or something similar.

And Wynn-Williams gives lots of scenes that support this characterization. Moments where executives knew about harm decisions (or indecision) might cause to whole countries (let alone people) and did nothing. This idea of “they did nothing” is a repeated one by Wynn-Williams – she, the Cassandra calling out the disaster, only to be assiduously ignored. Convinced – or at least claiming to be convinced in the memoir – that the best way to change the company was to do so from the inside.

It’s a bit hard to believe that there wasn’t the tiniest bit of self-interest fuelling Wynn-Williams. Just the tiniest. Like whatever salary she was making played no role in staying on? Like she wasn’t willing and able to let go some of the agonized changes she was trying to make to preserve democracies or to prevent crime or whatever whatever

And I’m prepared to believe Zuckerberg and Sanders are as bad as Wynn-Williams makes them out to be, but in reading it I couldn’t help but wonder (suspect?) that no small part of this book was a desire to exact revenge. Like some of it just read as… vindictive? Even if it was accurate?

Anyway, it made the whole thing read like an exercise in trying to parse what is unreliable narrator and what is accurate. But even with that layer of skepticism, the book is engrossing in its outrage for the callousness, or “carelessness” of the Facebook folks.

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January 24, 2026 · 1:51 pm

Silver Elite: Romantasy for Your Broken Attention Span

If you are concerned that you can no longer read a full book because your attention has been fragmented and blown apart by social media and the internet, you are not alone. The feeling that sitting and slowly absorbing a dense novel might be a kind of torture – or an impossibility akin to a couch to marathon pace – is shared. And you can make arguments about whether long form reading needs to be privileged over something like long form listening or watching (though if my experience is any guide, I don’t bring focused attention to those tasks either – I long form listen while I’m also running or cleaning, and I haven’t watched a full length movie without scrolling at the same time in years). But for me there is something particular about the long, deep read – distinct from audiobooks (and I know some of you will want to fight me on the hierarchy of physical book v audiobook – ‘it’s all a story!’ whatever whatever). Something to the mindfulness that requires (invites? encourages?) doing nothing but reading.

So if that’s a hard(er) experience for you than it used to be let me offer that you are not alone. And that for some, the answer to the challenge of concentration has been romantasy. The portmanteau genre bridging romance and fantasy first came to my attention with Fourth Wing (which I read but can’t find the review) and at the time I thought “this is ridiculous,” and also “I cannot put this down.” Is it the erotica? Maybe. Or the relentless plot pace of Something Is Always About To Happen That Is Very Dramatic? Maybe. It certainly isn’t the quality of the writing or the character development.

The same is absolutely true of Dani Francis’ Silver Elite a sort of hunger games meets fifty shades of grey meets harry potter (in that there are elements of near-children battling while at school while also having explicit sex). Though to my credit (*she said with some defensiveness*) I came to this book through the recommendation of the New York Times and so had some vague sense that it would be #literary and #worthy

If you are okay to free yourself from ideas that reading need be an entirely intellectual exercise – or that you need focused thematic development for something to be good – you might just find true enjoyment in Silver Elite. There’s a bit of work to get oriented to the world building and some gymnastics to sort out the character hierarchy, but once you’re through that it’s just a fun romp through plot and romance. A bodily exercise of enjoyment rather than a brain one.

And the strangest thing will happen. You’ll be standing in line, or waiting between meetings, or finished putting the kids to bed and instead of reaching for your phone to scroll as if there might be an answer to the abyss at the bottom of the feed, you instead want to reach for your book. And you start to read promising yourself just a few pages before you get on to doing X or Y and that beautiful, magical feeling of two hours disappearing happens and you return to this world reminded of what it is to be focused, absorbed and transported.

Now for suggestions for books that do the same without requiring me to blush deeply while reading it in public. Or better still, the things I need to do to finally, at last and fully break my phone addiction. Yes, I’m open to throwing it down a well and never using the internet again.

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