Introducing: shelf-help. How often do you find yourself staring at the ceiling of an evening or challenging your phone charger to aerobics while willing your inner monologue to shut up? Would it be nice to have a good hearty book in your hands with a dazzling narrator or thickening plot to drown it all out? Follow me down the garden path of my goodreads catalogue, and allow me to recommend!

This year has been a good vintage on the literary front, for me. And what better way to round up a bunch of books I’ve had the pleasure of reading in the last month or so, than attempting to delicately summarise and fervently recommend like I am a wannabe literary sommelier?  

The Rachel Incident – By Caroline O’Donoghue

I came across Caroline O’Donoghue when a friend recommended a four-part series on the podcast Sentimental Garbage, ranking all the men in the Gilmore Girls universe, and I discovered my new favourite hobby: cool, clever and hilarious Irish women burning intellectual midnight oil, deliberating the pressing matters of our time and giving silliness the earnestness it deserves.

I first read Scenes of a Graphic Nature (her second of three books for adults) and enjoyed a story that was clever and candidly written, with a unique and compelling plot. So I pre-ordered my copy of The Rachel Incident and found SO much more to love.

The story’s context of a pregnant woman revisiting her past through the lens of hindsight walloped me. It gave a new perspective to lostness that apparently I so desperately needed at the time, and what almost felt like a blueprint out of the fog; maturity, peace and epiphany awaiting at the finish line of a grubby and angsty youth. The book was so sharp, pulsating with plot and revelation, in a voice that felt more relatable than anything I’ve read in years. The writing has a gorgeous alchemy of complex and real, while succinctly telling a bullseye kinda story.

(N.B. by the time I got around to posting this, I have since read her debut novel for adults “Promising Young Women” and met the darling Miss O’Donoghue THRICE, experiences so besotting they warrant a post of their own. Stay tuned.)

Pairs nicely with reunions with friends from your past and the plight of your 20s. For lovers of anything by Dolly Alderton (who also loves this book), a flawed heroine, Mystic Pizza and SNL.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

I scrounged around for a copy of this one after seeing Zoe Foster Blake recommend it on her Instagram. It opens in that sweet, gentle, dissociative place of a gripping story set in paradise, and quickly becomes a dynamic and rich story of interwoven timelines and a handful of truly intricate protagonists. I felt genuinely and physically swept away by it. A chapter that read almost like a Vonnegut novel left me breathless, and an excerpt of a play about a story within the story had me gasping at it’s closing line in a preview performance done by an amateur theatre group. I spent so much of my week reading this book wishing that more books were like this book. The writing was consistently both touching and provocative while the humour and the plot never stalled.

Pairs nicely with an arvo of sun on the beach or your early Sunday morning coffee when you have half the day to write off because you’ll hardly be able to put it down. This one’s for lovers of A Visit from The Good Squad, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf (the movie), the Tate Museum London, and fans of drama, underdogs and forgiveness.

Shopgirl by Steve Martin

I’m known for my obsessive down-the-rabbit-hole nature, and flavour of the month has been Steve Martin. I’m soaking up as much of “Only Murders in the Building” as I can get my hands on if for nothing more than the self-deprecation and razzle-dazzle, and my Jacques Clouseau impression has been bubbling to the surface more often that it usually should.

I found this book entirely surprising. While I thought it might read like a film script, the narrative seemed so much more like an earnestly articulated pitch for a film. Some of it didn’t sit easily with me – the way he writes women is the way we don’t really allow men to write about women anymore. And also writing about mental health. These passages really took me out of the story and I found myself assessing with both the 2023 lens and the hazier lens of 2000, year of publication. I guess I became a little philosophical – just because he writes a vapid, sexualised, antagonising woman, is that an affront to all women? Or is it a vacuously misunderstood use of irony? Is the whole thing actually just really blood funny? I play it all back to myself in his self-aware intonation and realise: my god, it’s hilarious.

Steve Martin’s writing, even at its most probing and explicit, remains lyrical and moody and expressive in a very unique voice. He so deftly reminds us that he is a cultured self-aware snob and his love triangle is peppered with the self-deprecation and mockery of the LA culture he can’t seem to pry himself away from.

For lovers of Roxanne-era Steve Martin, maybe even a little Alain de Botton’s sardonic side and daydreaming about the sort of money that can buy Prada gloves as a pick up line, this novella pairs nicely with a sort of drawn out public transport journey and making up backstories about the strangers who pass you by.

Joan Didion’s The White Album.

I came to Joan Didion through her memoirs, but my love of her work has been truly cemented by her journalism. The White Album is an anthology of journalistic feats invigorating the backdrop of California over a few years between the 60s and 70s. It’s a sort of protagonist investigative journalism (see: new journalism and gonzo), and as she embarks upon her assignments, she takes you with her inside her complex and critical mind. Her learnings and reactions are so insightful yet so palpably reactionary. Suddenly I am gripped to a story on the reform of a six lane highway. Suspicious of Nancy Reagan. Heartbroken by the hardship of a humble botanist.

For lovers of a New Yorker profile that takes you three breakfasts to read, Feminism, the American dream, how-the-sausage-gets-made journalism and flower garland décor at a dinner party. Pairs nicely with a garden of tropical flowers, one with the sort of orchids you learn more about the longer you stare.

Have you read any of these! I would love to know what you think! If you agree! If you disagree! Debate is healthy for the mind if not for blood pressure! Subscribe for more book recommendations to get you through sunstroke-on-the-beach season.