Great Reads for April
April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
Ahoy,
April is the cruelest month, mostly because the weather has been too cold to be pleasant and too wet for walks in the budding park. That said, May is right around the corner and then the depths of summer and, once again, the falling note of Autumn. The great wheel spins.
I’ll be in Poland in August and September if anyone is around. We may be traveling to Barcelona as well. Ping me at john@biggs.cc.
If you have a moment please check out my other newsletter, Startup Strategies. It’s where I’m now hosting my Keep Going podcast where I’ve been talking to some amazing people about health, mindfulness, success, and failure.
I’m especially pleased with this great interview with Alexandra Matthiesen who talks about how she is learning how to make sure that discrimination and sexism have no place in the workplace.
For quick snippets from each interview you can check out my Instagram (which I still hate, btw). Anyway, on to the great reads.
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
Erik Larson
Larson is a very thorough historian and he writes from original sources. This book, about the sinking of the Lusitania and America’s entry in World War I, contains a lot of that Larson magic that you find in his other books but is a bit rushed. I found the talk of the ships and the submarines that hunted them quite interesting but anything outside of the sea was given short shrift - including Woodrow Wilson’s reluctant lover, Edith Bolling.
More: A Memoir of Open Marriage
Molly Winter
This is a fascinating book about something all the cool kids are into - ethical non-monogamy. As we move into some kind of egalitarian Star Trek future, situations like Winters will become more common. While this is little more than an atlas one woman’s love affairs, it’s far more important, culturally, than the purulent titles that came before it. Winter is a good writer and the story is deeply interesting.
L'Appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home
David Lebovitz
I’m pining for the fjords right now so this book about an American baker and cookbook author buying and remodeling an apartment in Paris scratched quite a few itches for me. That said, this is a pretty straightforward description of a decidedly horrible renovation so unless you love hearing about how a contractor installed “USB” power outlets by running literal USB cables through the walls, it might be a little boring. Lebovitz is a good writer, though, so there’s just enough of a sense that you, too, could be scammed out of thousands of dollars by an unruly Parisian electrician.