I Know What You Read Last Summer

This Summer was prefaced by airplane rides and interrupted by covid, Monteczuma’s revenge and a couple of time outs. Which prompted more reading than usual. Also, discovering a new IRL bookstore in April prompted new titles and new perspective. So, what follows is my partial reading list. No one recommended these books to me. I’d only heard of one or two of the books before. The only writers I knew (but had never read) were three writers from The New Yorker — you’ll know who I mean. Each of these books immerses you like a stone in water. Need that.

Sorry, no books on branding, growth hacking, becoming multiversal or the latest NFT (the c00lest new NFT is Citadel). Next time.

The Kindness Of Strangers

My favorite book all Summer — the one that my mind keeps coming back to, the one that I most remember the feeling of reading (think Amor Towles) is Salka Viertel’s biographical tale of growing up in her wealthy family home in the troubled 1930s borderlands adjacent to Czechoslovakia, becoming an actress, marrying a theatrical director and then fleeing to Poland and then Vienna and London and finally Hollywood. More or less abandoned by her husband, who takes a position as theatrical director in London, Salka becomes a fixture in the pre-WW2 Hollywood crowd. She buys a home on the beach outside of Santa Monica (one senses Malibu Beach Colony…