You're Playing Softball This Summer

Have a love/hate relationship with true crime or are looking for a genre-bending novel

Hi friends,

Hope those of you in the U.S. survived the heat wave last week. It was so hot here that even my dog didn’t want to go outside.

If you’ve subscribed in the past few weeks, I want to make sure you know about our annual Summer Reading Bingo Game. You can check out the card and the rules here. Enjoy the game.

And, now, what to read if…

You Want a Home Run of a Novel

Welcome Home, Caroline Kline by Courtney Preiss

If you’re playing rec league softball this summer — or just watching a lot of baseball — you’ll want to put Courtney Preiss’s charming celebration of the sports, Welcome Home, Caroline Kline, at the top of your TBR.

When the titular Caroline Kline gets the phone call that her dad is in the hospital after taking a nasty fall, she’s making out with a stranger in the back of an Uber, trying to pretend she didn’t recently lose her boyfriend, job and New York apartment in one swoop. Her newly injured dad, Leo, asks Caroline to come home to New Jersey, not to help him recover but to replace him as the third baseman in his local men's softball league. This, Leo believes, is the year they finally win it all.

Suspecting Leo is hiding the severity of his health issues and knowing the size of her bank account is dwindling, Caroline moves back and takes his place on the field, much to the chagrin of the men she’s playing with. But when a night of partying goes wrong, Caroline sees her first love again for the first time in years and is forced to consider if the Big New York Life she envisioned for herself is really what she wants.

Welcome Home, Caroline Kline is a joy of a novel, perfect for fans of Evie Drake Starts Over. Its addiction/recovery storyline adds heft, but not heaviness and anyone like me who grew up on the ‘90s era Yankees Dynasty will appreciate the countless throwbacks to that time. I saw Courtney Preiss talk about Welcome Home, Caroline Kline a few months back and can report she embodies the State of New Jersey, in the best possible way. This is a brassy, big-hearted book perfect for baseball fans and those who can’t stand the sport.

You Have a Complex Relationship with True Crime

The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson

I consume a fair amount of true crime content — from books and long-form articles to documentaries and podcasts — and it’s something that often makes me feel a bit squeamish. (If you’re curious, most recently I watched season 2 of “The Jinx” and the TikTok cult documentary.) I get caught up in the narratives shared and also worry that I’m contributing to the exploitation of a victim and their family. So, I appreciate true crime properties that deal with this tension and address it head on.

Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts is a fascinating contribution to the “ethical true crime” subgenre. In 2004, the poet was preparing to publish a book about the life and death of her aunt Jane, who had been murdered three decades earlier. Her attacker was never found. But, just as Nelson’s book was set to hit shelves, a new suspect was arrested after a DNA test.

In The Red Parts, Nelson chronicles her time at the trial and how a murder that occurred years before her birth shaped her life. But, she also analyzes the media’s obsession with violence against white women, attempting to explain what exactly drives it.

It’s a sober book that reminds readers of the victims behind lurid documentaries and podcasts. With the blend of a poet’s way with language and a reporter’s eye for detail, The Red Parts is a must-read for any true crime aficionado.

You Think it’s About Time for a Meaty Novel

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley’s debut novel, is somehow at once an adventure story, a time-travel romance, a fish-out-of-water tale, a workplace comedy, a critique of colonialism and a spy thriller all at once. And, against all odds, it works. If that description doesn’t grab you, I’m not sure what will.

In the near future, the British government has succeeded in bringing a number of time travelers forward from the past. The government assigns each “refugee” a bridge, including our unnamed narrator, to help them adjust to modern life and monitor their actions. The bridge, a young woman, introduces Commander Graham Gore, who was saved from a doomed 1845 Arctic expedition, to the joy of Spotify and such conveniences as washing machines.

Over the course of a year, the bridge and Commander Gore shift from an awkward pair of roommates to a loving, if oddly matched, pair. Simultaneously, it becomes clear that the time travel program is not just a scientific endeavor, but something more sinister, causing the narrator to consider how the choices she’d made have affected not just the future, but the past.

Coming up with a blurb for a book this vast is difficult. A more succinct way of putting it, in the words of Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, is the result of an affair between A Gentleman in Moscow and The Time Traveler’s Wife. It’s fun and thought-provoking, with fans ranging from Emily Henry to Megha Mujamdar. One note: I listened to this one, and I think I would have enjoyed it more as a book. I’m planning on reading it on a second go (it’s one of those books that demands a second visit).

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