Yo! I read sixteen books in March. Here are my Top 7, ranked in order of pure enjoyment while reading:
1) CRYING IN H MART by Michelle Zauner
This memoir is so popular that I see someone reading it on the 6 train every week, and finally I dove in. Chic Korean-American indie rocker Zauner cries in H Mart, the supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food, because of her mother’s premature death from cancer, detailed in the painful and beautiful story. It’s so good. I got sucked into this equally comforting and exotic universe—the kimchi, the trips to Seoul, the grief—that I read the whole thing in one eight-hour stretch without leaving my apartment. It was raining, okay?
2) HEARTBURN by Nora Ephron
This was a recent Natalie Portman’s Book Club pick—a winking choice since Nat just divorced her ballet dancer husband, Benjamin Millepied, after learning of his affair. A 1983 work of autobiographical fiction, or autofiction, it’s about when Nora Ephron’s husband, journalist Carl Bernstein, cheated on her when she was seven months pregnant, and the fallout in their DC social circle. It’s funny, painful, juicy, fast-paced, full of recipes, and has all the urgency of writing about one’s humiliating personal life for art’s sake. Never cheat on a writer. ;)