Book Lust: April 2023
A list of books I can't wait to read that were published in April 2023!
I’m starting a new feature of this newsletter! I subscribe to Liberty Hardy’s amazing Patreon newsletter What’s My Page Again?. In this weekly newsletter, Liberty lists EVERY BOOK PUBLISHED traditionally (and a few non-traditionally). It’s an enormous list and a great resource for book freaks and librarians like me (I’m both).
I comb through this list to find books that grab me, and usually I’ll make a Twitter thread listing the ones I’m most excited about. For some reason (probably related to the death of Twitter), I’ve been having difficulty linking to the books in my threads. I’m so frustrated by this that I’ve decided to move this activity over here.
Every month at the end of the month I’m going to post my list of titles I’m most excited about. I won’t have read these, and some of them I may never read, but these are the books I got the most excited for when reading Liberty’s newsletter during April. I’ll list them by publication date.
Note: After putting this together, it has become clear to me what a monstrous list it is. I promise to make it shorter next month (a real challenge lol).
All of the books listed below are out and available for you to buy or probably get at your library! Enjoy!
APRIL 4TH
A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan: Who doesn’t want to read about the US’s most notorious terrorist group getting got? Love to see them get wrecked!
A Living Remedy: A Memoir by Nicole Chung: Chung, whose previous memoir focused on her being a transracial adoptee, now tackles an examination of her current life, the life she had as a child, and the gaps in between. She looks at inequality, class, and the grief of losing family members (especially knowing that systemic inequality played a big role in that).
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh: The publisher’s summary does its job well… “An elegant and hypnotic new novel of obsession that centers on the real unsolved mystery of the 1951 mass poisoning of a French village, by the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Water Cure.”
Dirty Laundry by Disha Bose: I’m getting Desperate Housewives vibes but Irish from this one. The Queen Bee miss perfect wife and mother ends up dead, an incident that begins a tidal wave of gossip and airing of the titular dirty laundry. I’m getting this asap because I need to read it in the sun by some water.
House of Cotton by Monica Brashears: SO excited for this one! A young Black woman whose is all alone in the world, working a shitty dead end job at a gas station, gets a weird offer one day from a mysterious but wealthy White man. The offer? Model for posed photographs for a local funeral home. The pay? Astounding. She says yes. Things start to become surreal and scary quickly.
Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang: I love anything that examines the beauty and skincare industries. As much as I am a participant in those things, I also think they’re garbage. Natural beauty also looks deeply at consumerism (which is a part of those industries), self-worth, and self-understanding. A first generation Chinese American woman abandons her promising career in music (following her talented parents) to work in a high end beauty wellness store when her parents are seriously hurt in an accident. Things spiral.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld: Sittenfeld never fails to get a reaction out of me. I almost never have straightforward feelings about her work, but it’s so damn good I’ll never say no! This one seems like a pretty standard romance novel, but I know better than to expect just the standard from Sittenfeld.
The Insatiable Volt Sister by Rachel Eve Moulton: Two sisters grow up on a remote island, mysterious vibes surround them, family trauma finds them, and they cannot outrun it. The description isn’t explicit about this, but I’m guessing there are some dark magical dealings going on here. Listen to Moulton on the Talking Scared Podcast!
The Lonely Hearts Book Club by Lucy Gilmore: Cozy! Multi-generational friendships between quirky mismatched folks, facilitated by a book club!
The Power of Language: How the Codes We Use to Think, Speak, and Live Transform Our Minds by Viorica Marian: Language is fascinating! This new nonfiction looks at how the brain processes language and how learning MORE languages is extremely good for us. I better get back into my French Duolingo eek.
The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown: Space horror a la Alien. Fuck yeah.
The Society of Shame by Jane Roper: This book looks at what happens when you become the main character of Twitter, basically, and how to manage your real, physical life with the all-consuming social media world. Which persona will win? This book also seems funny and interesting.
The Winter Knight by Jes Battis: A modern fantastical Arthurian retelling (not the only one on this list) with a great cover. I’ll let the summary do the work… “The Winter Knight is a propulsive urban fairy tale and detective story with queer and trans heroes that asks what it means to be a myth, who gets to star in these tales, and ultimately, how we make our stories our own.”
APRIL 11TH
Chrysalis by Anna Metcalfe: “What happens when a woman dares to take up space? An enigmatic young woman drastically transforms her body, working to become bigger, stronger, and stiller in the wake of a trauma…This daring novel asks if it is possible for a woman to have agency over her body while remaining part of society, and then offers its own explosive answer.” This might get featured more fully in this newsletter in the future.
First Comes Summer by Maria Hesselager (Author) Martin Aitken (Translator): This sounds like a real weird one. Viking era. Incest. Jealousy. Old gods. Witchcraft. Sounds great.
Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee: A novel about a queer Black woman fighting to earn back her life, regain custody of her children, and move forward after serving time for opiate possession. I’ve heard amazing things about Lee’s writing! I’m hoping this is one of those cry your eyes out it’s so good kind of reads.
Spider: Every Marriage Has a Secret by Azma Dar: This just sounds juicy af. Click in to read the summary.
The Cleaving by Juliet E. McKenna: A feminist Arthurian retelling? Sign me up! This one is closer to the original stories we all know, but with a Mists of Avalon vibe.
The Dead Are Gods by Eirinie Carson: Carson’s best friend dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Carson goes on a journey to understand her friend’s death (and her own grief), only to uncover things about her friend’s life she never knew. “Eirinie's portrayal of what love feels like after death bursts from the page alongside a timely, honest, and personal exploration of Black love and Black life.
Perhaps, Eirinie proposes, ‘The only way out is through.’” The only way out is through is a saying I lean on often, so seeing that in the description of this memoir hooked me.
The Half of It by Juliette Fay: This is a second chance kind of romance featuring older protagonists looking back at a fateful night when they were young and everything that’s gone wrong since. I don’t normally go in for these kinds of novels, but this one grabbed me.
The Trackers by Charles Frazier: Yes, yes I do want to read a novel about an artist during the Great Depression, sent to do a WPA job, who encounters notorious wealthy art lovers, and then is sent by the husband to track down the wife when she flees with a very valuable piece of art. And from the author of Cold Mountain? Yes.
The Weight by Jeff Boyd: An outcast finds some kind of belonging as a musicians among his White friends in Portland, but he can’t outrun his strict religious upbringing or his difficult past. As he searches for community, and as his band is on the brink of breaking through, shit really starts to blow up (in like every way).
You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir by Maggie Smith: I honestly didn’t know much about Maggie Smith prior to the publication of this memoir, but I think her work went viral a few years ago when we all were needing her style of poetry, and then her life exploded in many different ways. The discussion of Maggie’s life and this memoir online has absolutely got me hooked.
APRIL 18
Earth Angel by Madeline Cash: From the summary, “In her electric debut, Madeline Cash synthesizes the godlessness of a digital age into a glimmering, sublime, life-affirming collage of stories…An unhinged jet stream that is ultramodern and poignantly timeless, capturing the angst of the post-millennial generation.”
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks: I LOVE LOVE LOVE reggae, dub, ska, two-tone, all of those musical genres that were born of a combination Jamaican genius and Brit punk nonsense. Where I’m from has a weirdly strong reggae and jam band culture, so I feel a strange connection to the music. I can’t wait to read this book about young Jamaican kids coming of age in the dub clubs of 1970s/80s London.
Greek Lessons by Han Kang (Author) Deborah Smith (Translator) Emily Yae Won (Translator): The Vegetarian blew me away, so of course I’m going to pick this one us. From the summary, “Greek Lessons tells the story of two ordinary people brought together at a moment of private anguish--the fading light of a man losing his vision meeting the silence of a woman who has lost her language. Yet these are the very things that draw them to each other.”
Hestia Strikes a Match by Christine Grillo: Near future speculative fiction where the US is in its second Civil War that has completely upended all normalcy. But in that chaos a woman has the courage to try to find love again. Hestia’s husband left her to fight in the war, so she leaves her journalism career to become a caretaker at a nursing home. She bonds with residents and tries to build her life again in the chaos. It sounds sweet and intriguing!
Minor Prophets by Blair Hurley: Nora was raised in an apocalyptic religious cult, lead by her own father who used her to spread his message. Now she’s an adult struggling with her past and “normal” present, but her past finds her. She gets a letter that tells her to “prepare herself".” Something happened the say she escaped, and the truth is about to come out.
The Butter House by Sarah Gerard: I can’t tell if this is going to be weird or not. A woman moves to Florida with her boyfriend and becomes caretaker to a cat colony and also starts a garden. Sounds like a dream life???
The Haunting of Alejandra by V. Castro: An exploration of the La Llorona legend, examining depression, motherhood, and the weight of your ancestry. I’ve been reading V. Castro for a few years now, she’s been a superstar of the indie horror community for while, and she does not miss. This book is guaranteed to be a banger.
The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel: Two teen sisters accompanying their scientist mom on an important exploration in Siberia discover a perfectly preserved baby mammoth, and then shit hits the fan and the little family has to go on the run. This is being compared to Michael Crichton’s work so I’ll be picking it up for sure.
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann: Shipwrecks, stranded sailors, special military missions, DRAMA, dudes being guys. This sounds like a juicy piece of history about a mutinous situation back in the 18th century. Into it.
The Weeds Katy Simpson Smith: Two women, decades (or more?) apart both work their way through the ecology of the site of the Roman Colosseum, identifying and documenting hundreds of plants, dealing with the struggles of their complicated lives, and… “Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses--medical, agricultural, culinary--these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways repeated violence can upend women's lives. They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find. How can anyone survive?”
The Wishing Pool and Other Stories by Tananarive Due: Due is a modern master of horror, and I’m very excited for her new short story collection. They are horror stories, yes, but also science fiction, speculative, and full of suspense. She touches on plagues, racism, existential dread, but also hope. Can’t wait!
Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington: The title kind of says it all. This is a look at why some women decide not to have children. Spoiler, many of the reasons millennials are staying child free are the same reason women have decided against having children for centuries. It’s far more normal not to have children that folks think.
APRIL 25
Ascension by Nicholas Binge: Speculative science fiction thriller that is giving me a hint of Sunshine (the film) vibes. A giant mountain appears in the Pacific Ocean. A team is assembled to scale it. Shit goes wrong.
Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir by Lucinda Williams: I don’t think I need to go into why this is a must read. She’s a legend.
Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith: Fatphobia in this country is BAD and it’s causing so much harm. Many people don’t even realizing they’re being fatphobic. They legitimately think they’re concerned for someone’s health. Spoiler…you’re being a twat. Anyway, I’ll be reading this book despite not having children of my own. I want to support the children that ARE in my life and help give them a future hopefully free of body dysmorphia, anxiety, and depression.
Grimmish by Michael Winkler: This novel goes back and forth between present day and early 20th century during the career of a superstar boxer named Joe Grim. It examines the role of pain in narrative and masculinity. This sounds very interesting to me!
Happy Place by Emily Henry: Call me basic, I enjoy Emily Henry’s romances! They’re just nice! And this one intrigues me because it’s about a couple trying to keep up appearances to preserve a long-standing vacation they take with their friends every year. I don’t think I’ve read that dynamic yet!
I Am My Country and Other Stories by Kenan Orhan: Speculative fantastical stories exploring the complicated and dark history of Turkey. These stories sound so good, and I know very little (pretty much all bad) about Turkey. I’m excited to maybe learn more by reading this collection.
In the Case of Heartbreak by Courtney Kae: I don’t normally go in for full-blown romance, but this one seems juicy, exciting, wild, and adorable. Idk…it just caught my eye. MM romance, family own bakery, hot musician, DRAMA. Yeah, I’m ready.
Kidnapped: A Story in Crimes by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (Author) Marian Schwartz (Translator): This book sounds BONKERS and so much fun! It seems like it has the same kind of energy as that show Flight Attendant, which feels manic. You need to just click through to the summary for this one, I cannot do it justice here.
Rhythm Man: Chick Webb and the Beat That Changed America by Stephanie Stein Crease: Chick Webb!! I love swing, I love watching Ken Burns’ Jazz while drinking a full bottle of red wine. Now I can read this important biography while drinking a full bottle of red wine! Chick Webb was a massively important jazz pioneer who is often forgotten or brushed aside for flashier folks. I’m so happy this biography exists!
Searching for Savanna: The Murder of One Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many by Mona Gable: The epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women is at a crisis level. This story sounds heartbreaking but important to read.
Secret Life of the City: How Nature Thrives in the Urban Wild by Hanna Hagen Bjørgaas (Author) Matt Bagguley (Translator): Living in a city and caring about the nature around me, this seems like a helpful and comforting read!
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane: I never expected to be putting a Lehane novel on this list, but this one sounds GOOD. Who am I kidding, all his books are actually very good. I just only started to learn about the violent history around the public school desegregation in Boston, and as an Irish American myself I think it’s important to witness the horrible history of oppression and violence Irish Americans inflicted on Black Americans, and to offer some kind of reparations. Anyway, that’s what this book seems to be about at its core. I will read it!
Sunsetter by Curtis LeBlanc: Two angry teens from a rough area investigating the deaths of loved ones? Corrupt police? A DAMN RODEO?? This seems like dusty noir with a River’s Edge kind of vibe.
The Last Word by Taylor Adams: This one is for anyone who’s ever written a non-five star review for a book. Emma is living a mostly isolated experience when she writes a negative review for a poorly written horror book online. Soon, the author responds (poorly). But is that all the author is doing? Soon Emma suspects she’s being stalked. How can she stay safe??
The Merry Dredgers by Jeremy C. Shipp: I believe this is a dark fantasy horror, and it’s got it all…a creepy abandoned amusement park, evil cultists, a girl in a coma and sister who will stop and nothing to figure out what the fuck happened. Even if that means joining the cult herself.
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk: This history is so important! Anytime a book like this pops up I grab it immediately. We lost so much truth with our settler colonial history. We need to build it back up, correctly this time.
The Skin and Its Girl by Sarah Cypher: This is a family epic following the Rummanis, a Palestinian family, as they navigate tragedy, joy, and change. When a a stillborn child suddenly shows signs of life, her skin turns a vibrant blue. The life of this baby becomes instantly associated with big events in the family’s history, and that child grows up to hunt down the truths of that history. Sounds intriguing to me.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption by Katy Kelleher: I’ve been waiting for this book for a while now. I can’t wait to read it. I’m hoping it will be a balm to my consumption-obsessed brain. I need to stop!
You Shouldn’t Have Come Here by Jeneva Rose: This looks like a satisfying thriller to read as the weather gets warmer! Grace books and Airbnb on a remote ranch to take a breather from her high stress New York City existence. She needs a break and she isn’t too disappointed with the hottie the Airbnb comes with either. But the more that Grace interacts with the handsome Calvin, the weirder things start to seem to her. Their love affair turns sour quickly, and also…why did Grace really need to book that Airbnb??