This story isn’t exactly about a bank robbery gone wrong. This story isn’t exactly about an open house (with open concept floor plan) gone wrong. It isn’t exactly about a father-son police duo trying to find the person responsible for the chaos gone wrong. I mean, yes those things happen. But really, Anxious People is about why we should just be kind to each other.
Thank you to Nicole Stockdale for recommending this book to me!
Hotel bartender-turned wife of rich guy has it made. With a lot of money at her disposal, plenty of alone time, and cool girl charm, who cares if her husband is ugly? She seized her opportunity and who can blame her. When her husband turns out to be a ponzi schemer she disappears. The Glass Hotel, written by Emily St. John Mandel, is not really a ghost story, but there are ghosts haunting the people dealing with the consequences of their actions. Come for the beautiful book cover, stay to uncover the mystery.
A woman is stuck in a bad marriage. Bored with nothing to do and no friends, she joins a group of outsider librarians who deliver books to outside towns. Trouble always finds women on horses, especially when the town is filled with racists, the religious and closeted alcoholics.
Thank you to Gage Heyburn for recommending this book to me!
A good kid with a good future ahead of him is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He finds himself attending The Nickel Academy, a reform school for juvenile boys. Quickly learning that doing the “right” thing gets you nowhere except whipped until you black out (or much worse), he befriends a fellow Black boy who has a different way of survival. The Nickel Boys [2019] by Colson Whitehead is set in the 1960s but is based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys that shut down as RECENTLY as 2011 when unidentified bodies were dug up on campus. Were politicians, businessmen, and policemen in on it? You bet.
There’s a lot of money in Silicon Valley so it’s easy to understand why Anna Wiener wanted out of book publishing and in on big data. In her memoir Uncanny Valley [2020], Anna Wiener reflects on her experience working, hustling and sometimes thriving in the seductive world of startups. As a woman and a (non-essential) non-programmer, Wiener sees plenty of the bad we expect from young bros with too much money and no formal HR. Disillusionment is inevitable.
Best friends and brothers-in-law run a scrappy regional ad agency in Detroit. Pleasing clients like a mirror retailer is par for the course. Pleasing parents is harder. What’s not challenging? Loving each other. Mad Men they are not. You don’t have to be in advertising to enjoy this tv show from Comedy Central. Detroiters, starring Sam Richardson and Tim Robinson, is weird and endearing and not realistic at all.
Thank you to Caleb Smith for recommending this show to me!