You’re Trying to Understand the New Crypto Scandal

Are preparing to see your family or ever wondered about the life of a private investigator

Hi friends,

Hope your week is off to a good start.

This week marks two (!) years of What To Read If. I sent out my first edition to one person, myself, and now thousands of you open it each week. It's absolutely wild to me, and I'm so grateful to each of you.

Including today’s picks, I’ve recommended 302 books over the past two years. (If you’re curious, the most common genres are nonfiction, mystery, romance and contemporary fiction, which serves as my catchall genre.)

Thank you for joining me on this ride and welcoming me into your inboxes each week. I hope you've found a few books you loved from my recs. If you have, I’d love to hear about it.

Here's to another two years!

And, now, what to read if…

You're Trying to Decode the Latest Crypto Scandal

The Missing Cryptoqueen by Jamie Bartlett

It seems like every week brings headlines about the latest cryptocoin currency scandal, but according to New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose "even by crypto standards, what happened [last] week was bonkers."

One of the world's two largest crypto exchanges, FTX, collapsed in a dramatic fashion. (Roose details how it all happened in his column in a surprisingly understandable way.) FTX, which declared bankruptcy, owes customers, including pension funds and retirees, as much as $8 billion. Financial analysts, including Roose, say FTX's downfall could mark the beginning of the end for cryptocurrency.

The FTX saga reminded me of The Missing Cryptoqueen, BBC journalist Jamie Bartlett's book about a four-billion-dollar crypto scheme. Dr. Ruja Ignatova claimed she had invented the "Bitcoin Killer," a new form of cryptocurrency called OneCoin, that would become the definitive currency of the future — and make its investors rich. She created a multilevel marketing scheme to sell OneCoin and convinced thousands worldwide to invest their life savings. Then, she disappeared with their money.

The Missing Cryptoqueen is a wild tale about a Ponzi scheme second only to Bernie Madoff's. Bartlett's reporting takes us deep into the poorly-understood and lightly-regulated worlds of cryptocurrency and multilevel marketing (and adds credence to my theory that both are essentially scams), but the book is accessible for those of us without a finance degree. Fans of Bad Blood won't want to miss this one.

Reminder recs: Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold does a great job explaining what exactly a Bitcoin is and why it matters. In Cultish, Amanda Montell dissects the cult-like language used by MLM leaders.

You're Getting Ready for a Lot of Family Time

The Fortunes of Jaded Women by Carolyn Huynh*

We're entering the seasons that bring time with the extended family. If you're prepping to see your aunts, uncles and cousins at Thanksgiving — or are sad you'll be missing them this year — grab a copy of Caroline Hunyh's The Fortunes of Jaded Women, a big-hearted, funny novel about the Duong family.

The book's first sentence establishes the stakes: "Everyone in Orange County's Little Saigon knew that the Duong sisters were cursed." Generations earlier, a Vietnamese witch condemned their family to unhappy, loveless lives. As an added hardship, the women would only give birth to daughters, not the sons needed for ancestors to visit from beyond the grave. 

In the 2020s, the Duongs — three middle-aged sisters and their daughters — are estranged and single. That changes, though, when Mai Nguyen consults a renowned psychic about her future. The seer tells her that this year, her family will have a marriage, a funeral and the birth of a son. Moreover, she warns that it may be the last chance for the family to reconcile. Excited that the curse may finally break, Mai takes the psychic's words seriously and attempts to reunite with her sisters, daughters and nieces.

The Fortunes of Jaded Women is narrated by many of the Duong women, each living on their own until the story's characters — and disparate threads — all come together in a scene that had me laughing out loud as I listened. It's a heartwarming book about forgiveness, healing and all the ways families drive us nuts.

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You've Ever Wondered What It's Like to be a PI

Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse

There's something alluring about private investigators and the idea of digging up other people's secrets for a living. From classic film noir to Veronica Mars, we're swimming in fictional PIs, but don't have many depictions grounded in real life. Novelist Erika Krouse filled this gap with Tell Me Everything, a memoir of her time working as an investigator for a lawyer in Colorado.

Since her childhood, strangers felt the need to confess their secrets to Krouse. When she meets Graham (not his real name) in a bookstore, he immediately spills his guts. Then he asked if she’d work as an investigator for his law firm. The bulk of the book focuses on their work to prove the local university is violating Title IX by ignoring sexual assaults committed by top athletes. (Krouse doesn't name the school, but Google indicates it's the University of Colorado, Boulder.) The investigation also forces the author to confront the sexual abuse she suffered as a child and her mother's continued relationship with her abuser.

As I wrote in a review for Best Evidence, “I finished Tell Me Everything [months] ago, but it's one of those books I know will stick with me for years. Krouse seamlessly weaves together two narratives: her near compulsive work to prove the university culpable; and her attempt to make sense of both the childhood sexual abuse she suffered, and her mother's continued relationship with her abuser. 

It's an admirable feat, and one that could have felt overwrought in the hands of a lesser writer. Krouse, though, makes it a heart-wrenching read. While she avoids making the connections between the two cases too pat or neat, the memoir builds to Krouse's internal revelation that her obsession with the campus rape was driven by an attempt to correct her own narrative. "I hadn't been trying to prove a rape case to a bunch of white men in black robes who didn't matter to me. I had been trying to prove it to my mother," she writes.”

Tell Me Everything is a dark, haunting and beautifully-written book. It might not be for you right now, but keep it on your list.

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Thanks again for reading! I’ll be back in your inboxes Thursday with a Q&A featuring Tabitha Carvan, author of This is Not a Book of Benedict Cumberbatch, one of my favorite books of 2022.

*I received a free audiobook copy of The Fortunes of Jaded Women from Libro.fm in exchange for an honest review.

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