You Want a Valentine’s Day Book

Want more Anna Delvey content or need some Olympic spirit

Hi friends,

Happy Valentine’s Day! I hope you’re spending some time with people you love.

I’m visiting my parents this week in sunny Florida and am planning on spending a good chunk of my vacation sitting outside reading. (For those interested, my book list includes — but is not limited to —The Verifiers, The Violin Conspiracy and We Own This City.)

In other news, I’m starting to hear from people who participated in the book swap that they are sending and receiving their books. So, if you’ve gotten some special book mail already, let me know what you received in the comments. 

One programming note: Next week’s newsletter will come out on Tuesday due to President’s Day.

And, now, what to read if …

You Love Love

Love in Color by Bolu Babalola

If Valentine’s Day has you in the mood for love stories, look no further than Bolu Babalola’s Love in Color. It’s a short story collection featuring 13 tales. Ten are retellings of traditional myths from West Africa, as well as the Middle East and Greece; the remaining three are entirely new tales from Babalola, including one based on her parents’ relationship. 

Babalola, a journalist and self-proclaimed “romcomoisseur,” imbues the collection with a sense of hope and joy and focuses on the women at the centers of these classic tales. In “Siya,” the title character leads her people’s insurrection, fighting alongside her love interest, though the original casts her as a damsel in distress. “Nefertiti” reimagines the Egyptian queen as the enforcer at a nightclub. In “Thisbe,” the heroine hears details of her neighbor’s life through a crack in their shared wall. One of my favorites, “Orin,” features two millennials on hilariously bad dates with other people. Their nights improve when they meet each other.

When my book club discussed this in July, I was struck that each of us had a different favorite story. While not every story in this collection will work for every reader, everyone will find something to love. Babalola has a gift for writing witty dialogue that almost bubbles right off the page and has a clever, funny approach towards reimagining age-old myths. Her recasting of the ancient Greeks’ Mount Olympus as a web publishing company with back-stabbing employees stands out.

If you’re looking for a book to share with a loved one this evening – or on your own — Love in Color is your pick. 

“Inventing Anna” Left You Wanting to More

My Friend Anna by Rachel DeLoache Williams

“Inventing Anna,” Netflix’s new dramatization about a real-life New York con artist/fake heiress, Anna “Delvey” Sorokin, who swindled millions from New York’s elite, is receiving mixed reviews. I became obsessed with this case years ago after first reading the New York Magazine story the limited series is based on in 2018 — of course I had to watch the first few episodes. 

My verdict: Skip “Inventing Anna” and instead read My Friend Anna, the memoir of one of her victims, about her relationship with the con artist. While the show attempts to paint Anna as an anti-hero, someone to root for as she steals from the rich, Rachel DeLoache Williams’ memoir shows what it was like to get caught up in Sorokin’s orbit and then lose everything to her. (One note: Williams has criticized “Inventing Anna” for “effectively running a con woman’s PR.”)

After landing her “dream job” as a photo editor at Vanity Fair, Williams met Sorokin. Their friendship began with expensive dinners and private sessions with celebrity personal trainers — always paid for by Sorokin. All that changed, though, when on what Sorokin described as an “all-expenses paid” trip to Marrakech, the so-called heiress claimed she was having credit card trouble. Williams picked up the $62,000 tab for their trip. When Sorokin stopped responding, Williams went to New York’s D.A.

My Friend Anna features everything from lush descriptions of Marrakech to details about Williams’ experience wearing a wire to catch Sorokin in a lie. This is one of those times that the cliché “truth is stranger than fiction” applies. Skip the fictional take and read the real thing.

You’re Meh on the Olympics This Year (Or Are a Superfan) 

The Boys of Winter by Wayne Coffey

I haven’t been able to get into the Winter Olympics this year, and based on the ratings, I’m not the only one. But I still really enjoyed Wayne Coffey’s The Boys of Winter, a history of the U.S. men’s hockey team’s victory over the Soviet Union in the 1980 games, largely because it captured a joy and spirit that I’m not getting from these games.

In the book’s intro, the gold-winning goalie Jim Craig, writes, “I don’t believe those Winter Games in Lake Placid will ever be duplicated. I don’t say that because we beat maybe the greatest Soviet hockey team ever assembled … I say it because there weren’t doping scandals or judging scandals or an Olympics Village that was overrun with millionaires and professionals in Lake Placid. … It felt as if the heart [of the Games] was a brotherhood of athletes, the best in the world, deep in the Adirondack Mountains.” 

Coffey brings the feeling Craig describes to life, in an unusually structured book. The Boys of Winter alternates between a series of profiles on the members of the team — all amateurs — and a play-by-play description of the game. I picked up this book thinking it would be an exploration of the Cold War politics surrounding the game but was happy to discover it’s a look at the small towns across America in ‘70s that produced world-class hockey players. 

If you’re finding yourself looking for more Olympic spirit than you’re getting this year — or just want even more Olympics in your life — add The Boys of Winter to your list. 

Reminder Recs: If you want more on the geopolitical side of the games, consider Chaos Under Heaven by Josh Rogin. Julie DiCaro’s Sidelined includes some great details about members of the U.S. women’s hockey team’s fight to be paid as the elite athletes they are. 

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I’m happy to have a guest recommendation this week from Annette Laing, a historian and the writer of Non-Boring History, a newsletter dedicated to giving an “entertaining and fascinating tour through a past.” Annette recommends A Street Through Time.

Any academic history book I would suggest as non-boring, even one on the history of sex, will still find a way to bore all but the most obsessive reader, and I don’t want to kill my credibility by recommending the wrong book to you. But EVERYONE (yes, including this PhDed historian) loves the picture book A Street Through Time, by historian Anne Millard (who weirdly no longer gets a byline since she died) and illustrator Steve Noon. Each scrumptiously-detailed two-page spread shows a moment in the life of the same European street from 10, 000 BC to the present, and it‘s a joyous crash course in everything we most need to understand about history: What change over time actually means, how nothing is inevitable, and the often surprising connections between past and present, all presented in a fun package with a sly sense of humor.

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That’s it for me this week. You can catch up on last week’s recs here and my Q&A with Zoraida Córdova here. 

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What to Read If is a free weekly book recommendation newsletter. Need a rec? Want to gush about a book? Reply to this email, leave a comment or find me on Twitter @elizabethheld.

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