Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Publisher: Random House Audio
Cast List: Daisy Jones, read by Jennifer Beals; Billy Dunne, read by Pablo Schreiber; Graham Dunne, read by Benjamin Bratt; Eddie Loving, read by Fred Berman; Warren Rhodes, read by Ari Fliakos; Karen Karen, read by Judy Greer; Camila Dunne, read by January LaVoy; Simone Jackson, read by Robinne Lee; Narrator/Author, read by Julia Whelan; Jim Blades, read by Jonathan Davis; Rod Reyes, read by Henry Leyva; Artie Snyder, read by Oliver Wyman; Elaine Chang, read by Nancy Wu; Freddie Mendoza, read by P.J. Ochlan; Nick Harris, read by Arthur Bishop; Jonah Berg, read by Holter Graham; Greg McGuinness, read by Brendan Wayne; Pete Loving, read by Pete Larkin; Wyatt Stone, read by Alex Jenkins Reid; Hank Allen, read by Robert Petkoff; Opal Cunningham, read by Sara Arrington
Release Date: March 05, 2019
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Daisy is a girl coming of age in LA in the late ’60s, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s 20, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road. Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the ’70s. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.
Daisy Jones and the Six is the story of the 60s and 70s rock band The Six and their eventual lead singer, Daisy Jones. The band bears a striking resemblance to Fleetwood Mack – I’m not sure if that was intentional or not. Billy, the lead singer, is a hard-partying drug addict. When his wife becomes pregnant, he knows he has to sober up and become a better man. Daisy Jones is the it girl of the moment. She wants to be a songwriter and write and perform her own songs. A record producer pairs her with The Six and magic happens. However, there is tension between Daisy and the rest of the band, primarily Billy.
Daisy Jones and the Six is written as an oral history, which made it perfect for audio. It’s read by a full cast and was like listening to a play – really well done. I was pleasantly surprised. Malibu Rising was the first TJR book I read and I didn’t think it lived up the hype. Everyone told me to give Daisy Jones a try anyway. It was also super-hyped when it came out so I was nervous. But I really liked it and will definitely read more of TJR’s books. People love her so maybe Malibu Rising was a fluke.
Recommended – especially on audio.
August 22nd, 2023 in
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The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing by Lara Love Hardin
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: August 1, 2023
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards.
Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. Furniture is made from tampon boxes and Snickers bars are currency. But Lara quickly finds the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the “shot caller,” showing that jailhouse politics aren’t that different from the PTA meetings she used to attend.
When she’s released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she’s legally co-opting other people’s identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her. Shame is a poison worse than heroin—there is no way to detox. Lara must learn how to forgive herself and others, navigate life as a felon on probation, prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more.
Lara Love Hardin seemed like she had the perfect life but behind the scenes, she and her husband were doing heroin. She was stealing credit cards, even from her neighbors, to fund her habit. It doesn’t take long for her crimes to catch up to her.
She’s convicted of thirty-two felonies – each transaction on each card counts as one crime. Although the maximum sentence was several years in federal prison, she is able to get a deal and serve around a year in jail. Even with a relatively short sentence, life in jail is still hard. Luckily, Lara learns to navigate the system quickly and becomes known as Mama Love to her fellow inmates because of the good advice she gives them and her caring nature.
After Lara is released she faces one obstacle after another. It was eye-opening how hard it is for former convicts to find a job and housing while keeping up with all of the required appointments for drug tests and with probation officers, etc. Lara is white and was coming from a place of privilege when she was released. She earned a master’s degree and was a business owner before she became an addict and she still struggled immensely after her release. I think it would be near impossible for someone without an education to stay out of jail after having been once. Also, if she were Black, I’m sure her sentence would have been much longer.
Eventually, she finds a job with a literary agency and works her way up to being a successful ghostwriter. She still has to work through the shame and guilt she feels about being an addict and being away from her children while in jail. As an aside – her husband (now ex-husband, thankfully) was unbelievably terrible. When she was in the hospital with an infection, he came to visit her and shot heroin into her IV! That’s just one example. Ugh.
I found Lara’s story inspiring. I was impressed with her attitude. She took full responsibility for her actions and didn’t make any excuses. I learned a lot about how the judicial system and prison work, especially what happens after someone is released. I’m glad I chose The Many Lives of Mama Love as my Book of the Month pick for August.Highly recommended.
You can join Book of The Month here for just $5 for your first book, cancel any time!
August 17th, 2023 in
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Revolutionary Suicide by Huey P. Newton
Publisher: Penguin Classics: September 29, 2009
First published in 1973
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
In October 1967, one year after the founding of the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton was involved in a shooting during which an Oakland police officer was killed. Newton spent three years in prison before being released and having his charges dismissed, and his jailing brought cries of “Free Huey” from supporters around the world. This engrossing and well-written autobiography recounts the forming of a revolutionary and shows how the degrading and psychologically destructive penal system forged Newton’s already growing spirit. When Newton was a child, his father instilled in him a sense of dignity and pride; as an adolescent, he was torn between religious principles and life as a hustler; as a young man, he founded the radical Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale, and finally, in solitary confinement in the Alameda County Jail, he reached deep within himself to find the strength to face adversity; and even death without fear.
I didn’t know much about the Black Panther Party or Huey P. Newton before reading this book – only what I was “taught” in school. And I don’t think Huey P. Newton was mentioned at all. He was an amazing human being. He was functionally illiterate when he graduated from high school and taught himself to read using Plato’s Republic. Not Dick and Jane – Plato! After that, he read widely and formed a lot of the Black Panther’s philosophy from the books he read – Karl Marx, Mao Zedong and the like. He was very intelligent and a great strategist.
In many ways, Black people’s interactions with the police have actually gotten worse since that time. The Black Panthers openly carried firearms in public. Can you imagine if Black people tried to do that today? They also carried law books with them and would read from them to police officers when police officers were trying to wrongly arrest somebody something or otherwise violate a person’s rights. If a Black person tried to pull out a law book today during a police encounter, it would not go over well. The policeman would get mad and the situation would escalate. But back then, it actually worked sometimes.
Sometimes the Black Panthers would come across a policeman stopping a citizen and they would stand at a distance with their weapons to let the police know that they were being watched. Today, people do the same thing by pulling out their cell phones to record these situations. It’s sad that over forty years later, the police still need bystanders to hold them accountable for their behavior.
I learned a lot about Newton and the Black Panthers from reading this book. I still have more to learn and plan on seeking out more books about this topic and time in history. Highly recommended.
August 14th, 2023 in
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Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood
Publisher: Berkley
Publication Date: June 13, 2023
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
The many lives of theoretical physicist Elsie Hannaway have finally caught up with her. By day, she’s an adjunct professor, toiling away at grading labs and teaching thermodynamics in the hopes of landing tenure. By other day, Elsie makes up for her non-existent paycheck by offering her services as a fake girlfriend, tapping into her expertly honed people-pleasing skills to embody whichever version of herself the client needs.
Honestly, it’s a pretty sweet gig—until her carefully constructed Elsie-verse comes crashing down. Because Jack Smith, the annoyingly attractive and arrogant older brother of her favorite client, turns out to be the cold-hearted experimental physicist who ruined her mentor’s career and undermined the reputation of theorists everywhere. And he’s the same Jack Smith who rules over the physics department at MIT, standing right between Elsie and her dream job.
Elsie is prepared for an all-out war of scholarly sabotage but…those long, penetrating looks? Not having to be anything other than her true self when she’s with him? Will falling into an experimentalist’s orbit finally tempt her to put her most guarded theories on love into practice?
Elsie Hannaway is an adjunct physics professor. To supplement her measly income, she moonlights as a fake girlfriend. When she interviews for her dream job at MIT, she discovers that one of the physicists she’ll be interviewing with is the brother of one of her clients. He’s also the person who ruined her mentor’s career. Will being a fake girlfriend ruin her chances of getting the job?
Love, Theoretically was a cute romance. I loved that Elsie is an intelligent, career-driven woman. Ali Hazelwood brings the spice. Parts of it were laugh-out-loud funny too. And Adam and Olive from The Love Hypothesis have a cameo. We get to find out what they’ve been up to since the end of their story!
I’m loving Ali Hazelwood right now. I plan to read all of her books! Highly recommended.
August 10th, 2023 in
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Making a Scene by Constance Wu
Narrator: Constance Wu
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
Release Date: October 04, 2022
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Growing up in the friendly suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, Constance Wu was often scolded for having big feelings or strong reactions. “Good girls don’t make scenes,” people warned her. And while she spent most of her childhood suppressing her bold, emotional nature, she found an early outlet in community theater—it was the one place where big feelings were okay—were good, even. Acting became her refuge, and eventually her vocation. At eighteen she moved to New York, where she’d spend the next ten years of her life auditioning, waiting tables, and struggling to make rent before her two big breaks: the TV sitcom Fresh Off the Boat and the hit film Crazy Rich Asians.
Here Constance shares private memories of childhood, young love and heartbreak, sexual assault and harassment, and how she “made it” in Hollywood. Raw, relatable, and enthralling, Making a Scene is an intimate portrait of the pressures and pleasures of existing in today’s world.
I know Constance Wu from her starring role in Crazy Rich Asians. She also starred in the TV series Fresh Off the Boat. I never watched that but I remember there was a big to-do when she tweeted that she was disappointed that the show was NOT canceled. People thought that she was an ungrateful brat and she got a lot of hate for it.
One of the reasons I chose Making a Scene is because I wanted to hear Constance’s side of the story. She does address the tweet towards the end of the book and is very apologetic about it. And her explanation of her feelings at the time makes sense.
The rest of the book kind of feels like an apology tour. Several of the essays are about situations that she wishes she would have handled better and apologizing to the people affected. Conversely, some of the essays are about people who should be apologizing to her, like one of the producers of Fresh Off the Boat who sexually harassed her and a couple of really awful boyfriends.
Speaking of boyfriends, she is very candid and descriptive about her sex life. I didn’t mind but it did take me by surprise for some reason. Maybe because I was assuming she would be more demure like her character in Crazy Rich Asians. I actually love it when celebrities give me the down-and-dirty.
Recommended.
August 7th, 2023 in
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Big Gay Wedding by Byron Lane
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Publication Date: May 30, 2023
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Two grooms. One mother of a problem.
Barnett Durang has a secret. No, not THAT secret. His widowed mother has long known he’s gay. The secret is Barnett is getting married. At his mother’s farm. In their small Louisiana town. She just doesn’t know it yet.
It’ll be an intimate affair. Just two hundred or so of the most fabulous folks Barnett is shipping in from the “heathen coasts,” as Mom likes to call them, turning her quiet rescue farm for misfit animals into a most unlikely wedding venue.
But there are forces, both within this modern new family and in the town itself, that really don’t want to see this handsome couple march down the aisle. It’ll be the biggest, gayest event in the town’s history if they can pull it off, and after a glitter-filled week, nothing will ever be the same. Big Gay Wedding is an uplifting book about the power of family and the unconditional love of a mother for her son.
Barnett’s mother Chrissy runs the Polite Society Ranch. Her husband recently died and she assumed that Barnett would take over the family farm someday so she could retire. When Barnett comes home with his boyfriend and tells her that they are getting married, she knows that her dream of having her son run the farm is over. She also has to come to grips with the fact that Barnett is not going to just outgrow this gay thing like she hoped he would.
Big Gay Wedding has two main plot lines going. One is serious. Chrissy and the rest of the town are having a hard time with a Big Gay Wedding happening on the farm. The other is the planning of the actual wedding. Barnett’s fiancé comes from money and his sister-in-law is planning an extravagant and outlandish wedding. It was just a touch too zany for my taste. I did appreciate how Chrissy’s struggle with Barnett’s sexuality was written. Lane did a good job of portraying her inner turmoil when trying to accept Barnett’s marriage. I liked that there was nuance in her feelings even though I didn’t always agree with them.
Recommended.
I’ve also reviewed Byron Lane’s debut novel A Star is Bored.
August 3rd, 2023 in
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Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays by R. Eric Thomas
Publisher: Random House Audio
Release Date: February 18, 2020
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went – whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative Black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city – he found himself on the outside looking in.
In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an “other” through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents’ house was an anomalous bright spot, and the Eden-like school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election for Elle online, and the seismic changes that came thereafter. Ultimately, Thomas seeks the answer to these ever more relevant questions: Is the future worth it? Why do we bother when everything seems to be getting worse? As the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways, Thomas finds the answers to these questions by reenvisioning what “normal” means and in the powerful alchemy that occurs when you at last place yourself at the center of your own story.
Here for It will resonate deeply and joyfully with everyone who has ever felt pushed to the margins, struggled with self-acceptance, or wished to shine more brightly in a dark world. Stay here for it – the future may surprise you.
Here for It is a collection of essays by writer R. Eric Thomas. Most of them are about his struggle with finding his true identity. He’s Black but he went to an all-white private school. When around a lot of Black people, like at church, or later at college, he never felt like he was Black enough. He’s also gay but didn’t let himself acknowledge that for a long time. Even when having a relationship with a man in college, it was hard for him to accept that he was gay.
Being gay also put him in conflict with his Christianity. He grew up in a Black Baptist church where being gay was so taboo it wasn’t even talked about. There was no need because no one in the congregation would ever be gay.
Even though those sound like heavy topics, this book is mostly hilarious. I’ve actually read it twice. I rarely reread so that’s saying something. The first time I read it in print and it was funny. The next time, I listened to it on audiobook and it was next level. People at the gym probably thought I was a weirdo seeing me laughing to myself while on the treadmill. His voice and comedic timing are perfect.
Highly recommended.
July 31st, 2023 in
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Anti-Racist Ally: An Introduction to Activism and Action by Sophie Williams
Publisher: Amistad
Publication Date: October 15, 2020
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Do you want to be an anti-racist ally?
This punchy, pocket-sized guide shows you how, whether you’re using your voice for the first time, or are looking for ways to keep the momentum and make long lasting change.
Sophie Williams’ no-holds-barred posts about racism and Black Lives Matter on @officialmillennialblack have taken the online world by storm. Sharp, simple and insightful, they get to the heart of anti-racist principles and show us all how to truly be better allies.
Now, in her iconic Instagram style, this pocket-sized primer unpacks complex topics into their most important concepts, and provides a crucial starting block for every anti-racist ally.
Anti-Racist Ally is the perfect book for someone just getting started on their journey to becoming anti-racist. If you’ve been on this path for a while, it’s a great book for a quick refresher and inspiration of why we’re doing this work and why it’s so important to keep going.
It’s a short book – the audio clocks in at around an hour. It’s divided into easily digestible, bite-sized chunks of information. I read the print because I knew I’d want to refer back to it and read it more than once. Even though it’s short, it covers a wide range of topics, including how to be anti-racist in the workplace, online and with your family. I really appreciated the section on overcoming your anxiety that you won’t get something right. My very favorite tip was to avoid burnout by preparing a stock answer for the arguments people come up against time and time again, e.g. “All lives matter” and “What about black-on-black crime?” and “Why isn’t there a white history month?” Ugh. We all know how tiring those discussions can be.
Being a pocket-sized book, it would make a perfect stocking stuffer. It’s never too early to start Christmas shopping! Highly recommended.
No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful by Paulina Porizkova
Narrator: Paulina Porizkova
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Release Date: November 15, 2022
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Writer and former model Paulina Porizkova pens a series of intimate, introspective, and enlightening essays about the complexities of womanhood at every age, pulling back the glossy magazine cover and writing from the heart.
Born in Cold War Czechoslovakia, Paulina Porizkova rose to prominence as a model, appearing on her first Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover in 1984. As the face of Estée Lauder in 1989, she was one of the highest-paid models in the world. When she was cast in the music video for the song “Drive” by The Cars, it was love at first sight for her and frontman Ric Ocasek. He was forty at the time, and Porizkova was nineteen. The decades to come would bring marriage, motherhood, a budding writing career; and later sadness, loneliness, isolation, and eventually divorce. Following her ex-husband’s death—and the revelation of a deep betrayal—Porizkova stunned fans with her fierce vulnerability and disarming honesty as she let the whole world share in her experience of being a woman who must start over.
This is a wise and compelling exploration of heartbreak, grief, beauty, aging, relationships, re-invention and finding your purpose. In these essays, Porizkova bares her soul and shares the lessons she’s learned—often the hard way. After a lifetime of being looked at, she is ready to be heard.
When I posted that I was listening to Paulina’s memoir on Instagram, she responded herself (!) to tell me that she wouldn’t really call it a memoir. And she’s right – it’s a collection of essays that are meditations on grief, beauty and aging. One of the central themes is grief. When her husband of thirty years, Ric Ocasek, lead singer of the Cars, died unexpectedly in 2019, Paulina discovered he’d written her out of his will. At the time of his death, they were separated but still living together. She still considered him her best friend so she was shocked that he left her out of his will. His will stated that it was due to her abandoning him, which she did not understand. A large portion of the book is her reconciling the fact that she is simultaneously grieving Ric while feeling betrayed by him.
She also writes about transitioning from a young model who was valued mainly for her beauty to an older woman who is finding her voice. She’s candid about her struggles with the process.
I was impressed with how well-written this book was. Since she wrote a novel without a ghostwriter in 2007 (which I’d like to read now), I’m assuming she didn’t use a ghostwriter for this book either. She didn’t graduate high school but educated herself by reading a lot when she started modeling at fifteen. She’s not just a pretty face.
No Filter wasn’t what I expected and got a little repetitive at times but I still enjoyed listening to it.
July 24th, 2023 in
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Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge: Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage by Helen Ellis
Narrator: Helen Ellis
Publisher: Random House Audio
Release Date: June 13, 2023
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Welcome to the Coral Lounge, a room in Helen Ellis’s New York City apartment painted such an exuberant shade that a Peeping Tom left a sticky note asking for the color. It is in the Coral Lounge where all the parties happen: A game called “What’s in the box?” makes its uproarious debut, the Puzzle Posse pounces on a 500-piece jigsaw of a beheaded priest, and guests don blindfolds for a raucous bridal shower.
When the pandemic shuts down the city, the Coral Lounge becomes a place of refuge, where Helen and her husband binge-watch Joan Collins’s Dynasty, dote on two spoiled cats, and where Helen discovers that even twenty years into marriage, her husband still makes her heart pitter patter.
Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge is a book of humorous essays written by Helen Ellis about her life with her husband in New York City. Topics range from an email with instructions to the cat sitter, to Helen’s plant addiction, to how they kept themselves entertained during the pandemic. Even though I think I’m the target audience for this book – a middle-aged woman – I just found these essays to be mildly amusing. None of them were laugh-out-loud funny to me. But I am clearly in the minority because I’ve seen a ton of reviews talking about how hilarious it is. She’s been compared to David Sedaris but I got more Erma Bombeck vibes from it. Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge wasn’t my brand of humor but it may be yours – don’t let me stop you from picking it up.
July 20th, 2023 in
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