You Love Dolly Parton
Are looking for an addictive thriller or are following the Alexei Navalny story
Hi book lovers,
I hope you’re doing well. I’m back home on Capitol Hill, which feels like the neighborhood I know and love again. The National Guard members stationed throughout the city have gone home, and the barricades have come down.
I celebrated by breaking my book-buying hiatus and purchasing a “mystery grab bag” from Capitol Hill Books, a used bookstore a few blocks from my house (beloved by former Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle). I filled out a form asking for my budget and preferred genres, and the team at Capitol Hill Books selected a stack for me that included an Agatha Christie mystery and a history of IBM. If that sounds like something you would enjoy, if you order one by January 31, you’ll be entered into a raffle for a $100 gift certificate to the store.
Tonight, I’m excited to attend my friend Eman Quotah’s virtual book launch for her debut novel, Bride of the Sea. There are still tickets available if you’d like to join as well. Eman has graciously agreed to be featured in a Q&A in the coming weeks.
Speaking of Q&A and Capitol Hill bookstores, you’ll receive a Q&A with Emilie Sommers, East City Bookshop’s book buyer, on Thursday.
And now, what to read if…
You Celebrated Dolly Parton’s Birthday Last Week
She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Woman Who Lived Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh
Things that have grown since quarantine started: thousands of sourdough starters, hours of Netflix streamed and my love of Dolly Parton. In between filming a Christmas movie and saving her co-star’s life, she helped to fund one of the two Covid-19 vaccines currently in use.
In She Come by It Natural, Sarah Smarsh chronicles Parton’s rise from an impoverished childhood in rural Tennessee to American icon over four essays. In particular, Smarsh focuses on what Parton — and her songs — mean to white, working-class women, building on the reporting and analysis found in her first book, Heartland.
I particularly enjoyed Smarsh’s writing on her family’s love of Parton and other female country stars. It’s a slim volume, and the essays can each be read in an hour or less, making it a great book if you’re having a difficult time focusing on long books these days.
You’re Ready to Stay Up Way Too Late Reading
Leave the World Behind By Rumaan Alam
I blew through bedtime multiple nights last week reading Leave the World Behind, a psychological thriller. First, because I had to know what happened and then after I finished it, I was so on edge I had to start a romance to calm myself down enough to go to sleep.
Leave the World Behind opens with white New York City residents Amanda, Clay driving out to Long Island for a week’s vacation with their two teenage children. Their week of rest and relaxation, though, is interrupted when an older Black couple, Ruth and G.H, knocks on their rental home door. Ruth and G.H explain they own the home and have fled New York due to a mysterious blackout.
With T.V. and internet down and no cell service, the two couples have no way of knowing what’s happening in the city and around the world. Alam, though, gives the reader hints of just how bad the situation has grown, implying a nuclear war is imminent.
This book made me tense in the way only a good thriller can (my shoulders are tensing as I write this), but it’s also a smart commentary on class, race and parenthood. It made several Best of 2020 lists, and it’s easy to see why.
You’re Fascinated by the Alexei Navalny Story
A Very Expensive Poison: The Assassination of Alexander Litvinenko and Putin’s War with the West by Luke Harding
Over the past week, thousands of protesters across Russia have taken to the streets, demanding the government release Alexei Navalny, one of Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics, from jail. Navalny recently spent five months in Germany recovering from a nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin.
Luke Harding’s A Very Expensive documents the 2006 poisoning and death of journalist and Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko, another vocal Putin critic. A subsequent inquest concluded the murder was a KGB operation, likely personally ordered by Putin.
Harding places Litvinenko’s poisoning in the broader context of Russian political assassinations — a subject that clearly remains relevant today. A Very Expensive Poison, Harding recounts the harassment he faced from the KGB while serving as The Guardian’s Moscow Bureau chief from 2007 to 2011, as well as his subsequent expulsion from Russia.
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