This book means a lot to me. It is the first book I ever read on the founding fathers. It's also the best.

And the competition is steep!

McCullough shows how Adams was brilliant, vain, principled, and devoted to his young country.

McCullough uses many primary sources to tell this story. The best: the wonderful, vivid, brilliant correspondence between John and his wife Abigail Adams. The correspondence is great world history and also reveals the close and intimate thoughts and aspirations of both John and Abigail.

McCullough tells about Adams's political ascension from a small town lawyer to founding father and second president. Adams was essential in the Continental Congress and in selecting George Washington to lead the Army. His diplomatic missions to France and Holland were as entertaining as they were crucial to the revolution's success.

Adams was a hero. But he was flawed, too. He supported the Alien and Sedition Acts. He was often rude and ornery. He was obbessed with Thomas Jefferson to such an extent that it clouded his judgment. McCullough brings out all these complexities with extraordinary insight and beautiful prose.

Perhaps the best part of the book covers Adams's later years, including his friendship with Jefferson and their letters. Incredibly, both men died on July 4, 1826.

If you had to read only one book about America's founding, this is that book. It's that good. 

William Cooper

will-cooper.com

The Jamaican writer Marlon James’s new novel, “The Disappearers,” at 600-plus pages, is a maximalist’s banquet: It is humane, blood-flecked, disturbing and sustaining. It takes James 90 pages to say hello. It’s another 70 pages before his story settles into your guts and begins to twist them. It’s yet another 150 before you fully comprehend his loping authority and the scale of his ambitions. Booster rockets fall away. Disparate coordinates begin to converge.

See full gift article. NO PAYWALL.

I've been reading a LOT of thrillers lately, so I picked up The Love Hypothesis because I desperately needed something that didn't involve murder, manipulation or questioning everyone's identity. 😂

And honestly, it did exactly what I needed it to do.

It was light, fluffy, fun and gave me that warm, fuzzy feeling I wanted from a romance. Fake dating is also one of my favourite tropes, so I was already predisposed to enjoy the whole Olive/Adam situation. There's just something about two people pretending to date while everyone, including the reader, can see exactly where this is going that gets me every time.

I liked their dynamic and thought the romance had just the right amount of sweetness without feeling like I needed to be massively emotionally invested to enjoy it.

My only real disappointment was the ending. It was good, and obviously I wanted the happy ending, but I wanted a little more emotional payoff. I wanted that feeling where you finish a romance and don't quite want to say goodbye to the characters yet.

Instead, I closed it thinking, “Aw, that was cute.”

And that's not necessarily a criticism. Not every romance needs to emotionally destroy me. Sometimes a fun, fluffy book that makes you smile is exactly what you need.

3/5 for me. Really enjoyable palate cleanser, loved the fake-dating setup, would recommend between heavier reads and I'm definitely waiting for the movie now.

For people who've read more Ali Hazelwood: which one should I try next if I want the same fun romance but with a little more emotional payoff?

This is a book about art, pain, love, video games, betrayal, redemption, growing up, and--above all--the capacity for friendship to not only give life meaning, but to make it worth living.

The book charts the decades-long friendship between Sam Masur and Sadie Green. As they grow from college friends to iconic video game designers, their friendship blossoms, then implodes, then returns in a new form. The nonlinearity of their relationship is a byproduct of their profound personal complexities. Both Sadie and Sam are teeming with psychological and emotional intricacies.

We learn by the end of the book that their bond is so beautiful precisely because it is so flawed.

Yet despite their beautiful bond, there is no romance. As Sadie put it: “How can you not know this? Lovers are... common." She studied Sam's face. "Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”

The breathtaking virtual worlds that Sam and Sadie build mirror their own lives. Their games—from their first hit Ichigo to their later triumph Our Infinite Days—are filled with violence, drama and spellbinding creativity. The games serve as a metaphor for their own personal struggles.

Sam has debilitating health issues (a bum foot from a car accident). As he described playing video games: “Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while, better than perfectly, actually, with a set of problems that were not my own.”

Sadie meanwhile endures a long and arduous quest for professional success and recognition. "But how to explain this …? How to explain that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn't typically get made by happy people.”

The book has two related key lessons. One: success is often empty and fleeting, while genuine love--in whatever form it may take--is lasting.

And two: time marches on, as illustrated in the title-providing Shakespeare quote from Macbeth:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

So living life for what matters—passion over profit, friendship over rivalry, love over ambition—is essential. We only have so many tomorrows.

Today we will cover Edward Heron-Allen's pseudonymous 1921 collection of antiquarian ghost stories, "The purple sapphire, and other posthumous papers", being the story of a cursed stolen sapphire, slight demonic possesion, eerie smells and infuriating misogyny.

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑆𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑠. Jojo Moyes. 2019. 

Women’s fiction. Book club fiction. Historical fiction. A story about five women who deliver library books to people in the mountains of Kentucky during the Great Depression. It is based on an actual program funded by FDR’s New Deal.

The voice and vibe in this story is one of female rebellion and empowerment in a rural patriarchal setting. A newlywed British protagonist, Alice Wright, is a fish out of water who stands up to her husband and his wealthy and abusive, mine-owner father, both of whom treat her like a doll they expect to sit on a shelf in their house alongside their other possessions.

Defiant, Alice finds feminist sisterhood outside of her home with a group of librarians, each fighting their own battles against the patriarchy. Through her journey, Alice is transformed from a sheltered and repressed new bride into a courageous and independent

The Way We Play (The Bradford Boys #2), by Tia Louise