Your Summer Reading Sorted
It is one of the best things about summer: the opportunity to catch up on our reading. Who needs Christmas presents when you have a stack of books – new releases, old favourites or both – to work through? If you too are looking for an engrossing read this summer, try one of the books that the Tonic team enjoyed most this year.
Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
Nine strangers, all at their own version of rock bottom and seeking a temporary escape, find themselves locked in together at a health spa for the Ten-Day Mind and Body Total Transformation Retreat. The sense of foreboding builds as each car arrives at the security gate of Tranquillum House, at the end of a long and desolate road.
As with Liane Moriarty’s famous-book-turned-mini-series Big Little Lies, our feelings about the characters in Nine Perfect Strangers change as we learn more about them and they learn more about themselves. My favourite character is 51-year-old romance novelist Frances Welty who arrives hurting from the double whammy of falling prey to an online catfishing love scammer and the rejection of her latest manuscript.
Through the conventions of the mystery genre, the book raises questions about the lengths we will go to, and what we are prepared to go along with, in an attempt to fix our lives. The mini-series will be released next year; read the book first. Marina
Flights | Olga Tokarczuk
At first, I wasn’t sure about Flights. I felt somewhat intimidated by its serious-looking minimalist blue cover, but its Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk, won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature and I wanted to push past the cover and know what merits such an accolade. Tokarczuk writes about the interior mental spaces we encounter as we travel – the feeling of an airport and how it mediates the space between countries, the surreal view out an aeroplane window, the weird people we fleetingly meet. It’s not a linear narrative. Her musings on how we move through the world are interspersed with longer, curious narratives: a tale of the transportation of Chopin’s heart from Paris to Warsaw; a 17th century anatomist who preserves his own amputated leg; an unravelling relationship in a bleak Polish city; a young woman who accompanies her elderly professor husband on small cruise ships that ply the Mediterranean as he lectures on classical antiquity. The links between the stories may be there if you want to construct them; instead, I just delighted in the utter beauty of Tokarczuk’s prose. Patricia
The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart | Margarita Montimore
You could say that all of us live our lives out of order, rewriting our past to suit the present. When a terrible loss – being dumped, losing a job – is followed by a better relationship or role, that initial event gets rewritten, transformed into a blessing, a turning point that takes us where we need to go. For Oona Lockhart, the flawed but feisty heroine of this novel, things are even more complicated. Every birthday, she wakes up in a different place in her past or future: 19 one year, 51 the next. Her journey through her mixed-up life is as much of a rollercoaster ride for readers as it is for Oona herself, with highs, lows and some remarkable insights into love, loss and fate along the way. Ute
Park Avenue Summer | Renee Rosen
In 1960s New York, women are challenging ideas about sexuality and feminism. Helen Gurley Brown, the new editor-in-chief at a failing Cosmopolitan magazine, is on the brink of changing the magazine world forever by daring to talk to women about all things off-limits. I’m in.
Alice Weiss moves to the Big Apple from the mid-west at a time when New York City is full of exciting opportunities for single girls. She dreams of becoming a photographer but unexpectedly lands a job as an assistant to Gurley Brown. That was me – I got the fashion assistant job at Cleo magazine when I really wanted to a fashion photographer. I’m Alice.
For Alice, it’s a whole new world of office backstabbing, sexism and not-so-nice men, contrasted with lavish dinners and glamorous parties. This book is a fascinating look at a time when women were being liberated and more visible in the workplace, but for me it is also a slice of the dreams I had and the life I led just a few decades later, when the doors were slightly more open. By the way, HGB was still the editor-in-chief at Cosmo when I started shooting for US Cosmo in 1997. Carlotta
The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton
At the epicentre of 1920s New York society, Newland Archer has landed himself a prize: he is betrothed to the sweet, beautiful, young May Welland. But when Countess Ellen Olenska returns home after leaving her European husband, his attentions shift. Ellen represents everything that May isn’t: she values her freedom over that of societal expectations, she speaks her mind, she recognises the hypocrisy around her. And slowly, surely, Newland comes to appraise his life differently, too. I recently returned to this book for a second read, remembering that it was the only novel to move me to tears. I was not disappointed. For me, the passion and love between Newland and Ellen is palpable, even though the physical expression of their connection is tame. So many times I had to stop and re-read snatches of Wharton’s eloquent writing. Like this poignant snapshot: “He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty.” Is it any wonder this book won the Pulitzer Prize? Rachelle
This One Wild and Precious Life | Sarah Wilson
I found this COVID-proof information heartening, inspiring, confronting and hopeful all at once. An unusual Christmas must-read for sure, but then again, there is nothing usual about this year, and my feeling is that absorbing Sarah’s content on a calmer parasympathetic nervous system is good timing. While there is so much contained in these pages, a standout for me was the interconnectivity we are all now part of. Without sounding drastic, don’t head into 2021 without it. Megan