Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Raymond Carver

I won’t bore you with long-winded complaints about the weather, but I will mention that it snowed and rained all weekend — which meant that I had the perfect excuse to stay home and become completely absorbed in The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer.

Books were an antidepressant . . . she’d always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration. . . Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood.

Greer Kadetsky is a freshman in college when she has a life-changing encounter with feminist icon Faith Frank (who closely resembles Gloria Steinem). After graduation, Greer goes to work for Faith’s foundation, while her longtime boyfriend, Cory Pinto, moves abroad for a consulting job. After he returns to the United States, events force both Greer and Cory (who are two of the most endearing characters I’ve come across in contemporary literature) to re-examine everything they’ve valued.

The publicity surrounding Wolitzer’s twelfth novel have focused on its political themes — female ambition and activism, the evolution of the women’s movement, sexual assault on campus — but this isn’t a political book; it’s a traditional, character-driven novel. There’s even a satisfying, mostly happy ending. For an interesting interview with Meg Wolitzer, check out the Parnassus Books blog. Fun fact from the interview: Nora Ephron was Meg Wolitzer’s mentor, who encouraged her to find her voice just as Faith makes Greer’s “head crack open”.

Like Meg Wolitzer, Anna Quindlen is an author who never disappoints me. I think her latest book, Alternate Side, is one of her best, although quite a few reviewers disagree with me, finding her focus too rarefied.

Nora and Charlie seem to have everything: a brownstone on a quiet cut-de-sac in New York’s Upper West Side, surrounded by long-time neighbors who throw great parties, college-aged twins who love their visits home, and terrific jobs. But when a parking dispute turns into a violent incident, life begins to unravel.

Like Nora Ephron, Quindlen zeroes in on her characters with just the right details. (Is it a coincidence that Quindlen named her protagonist Nora?) Nora, a passionate New Yorker, can’t understand why anyone would want to live anywhere else:

“I hear it’s snowing there!” Bebe would bellow jubilantly when she called in later in the day, in that way Florida people always did, as though temperate weather alone were equivalent to Lincoln Center, Broadway theater, endless restaurants, Saks.

According to the Washington Post, “Quindlen has written a book that only a New Yorker — or at least someone who has lived there for a stint — could love. The rest of the world may have a hard time relating to the characters.” I disagree —  you certainly don’t need to have lived in New York, or even to understand the city’s “alternate side” parking regulations, to enjoy this novel.

Not everyone is going to love Kate Greathead’s debut novel, Laura and Emma, but I’m crazy about it. Not much happens; it’s a character study of a woman named Laura, who comes from a very privileged background in New York but has never felt that she fits in. When she gets pregnant by accident, she raises her daughter, Emma, on her own. The writing is just perfect; Kate Greathead has a unique voice that resonated with me. It’s perfect for readers who enjoyed Emily, Alone by Stewart O’Nan, Someone by Alice McDermott, or My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. These books are the opposite of page-turners, but I found them more compelling than any thriller.

Laura, who incongruously makes her living as an event planner, is a keen observer:

The featured guest was an author who had recently published a bestselling novel, the kind of book everyone they knew was reading. Laura didn’t need to read it to know it was trash. She could tell from the cover: two pairs of feet and rumpled bedsheets. The author himself looked like he’d just emerged from an afternoon in a hotel room, with his tousled hair, slap-happy grin, and dress shirt unbuttoned one button too many.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser successfully combines the true story of Wilder’s difficult life and American expansion in the West in an original and captivating narrative. This meticulously researched book — which just won the Pulitzer Prize for biography — will fascinate not only Little House on the Prairie fans but anyone with an interest in the complicated history of pioneers and homesteaders.

Wilder’s perseverance gave rise to one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches stories in American letters . . . Wilder reimagined her frontier childhood as epic and uplifting. Her gently triumphal revision of homesteading would convince generations that the American farm was a model of self-sufficiency. At the same time, it would hint at the complex realities behind homesteading, suggesting that it broke more lives than it sustained.

In one of the most moving memoirs I’ve ever read, Clemantine Wamariya, a very young survivor of the Rwandan genocide, tells her heartbreaking story of loss and survival. The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After is reminiscent of A Long Way Gone by former child soldier Ismael Beah. With her older sister, six-year-old Clemantine fled her home and wandered throughout Africa in search of safety, finally receiving asylum in the United States. As a young adult, she tries to come to terms with the tragedy that shaped her life:

I had been so absorbed as a young child, in knowing the world, and then I’d lost the whole world that I knew . . . Now I was sitting here, in Kenilworth, across a rift in the galaxy a million miles wide, learning about one group of people killing another group of people, people they lived with and knew. 

 I absolutely adored The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, about a writer who loses her dearest friend but finds solace when she becomes the reluctant owner of the Great Dane he has left behind. It’s a lovely, unsentimental story about grief, friendship, literature, and the bond between people and their pets, filled with the narrator’s thoughts on reading and writing. If you love dogs and books, you’ll savor this jewel of a book. I promise you that it’s not sappy. This will definitely make my list of favorite novels at the end of the year.

Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I’ll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.

I recommended Alternate Side, The Friend, and Prairie Fires in an earlier post this month (How to Celebrate National Poetry Month), but that post has the dubious distinction of being my least-read post in years — which shows that one, National Poetry Month was not an enticing topic to most readers, and two, that I’m not good at writing catchy titles. There are actually websites devoted to creating click-bait blog post titles — you plug in the topic and an algorithm fills in the blanks. Here are some of the headlines suggested to me:

Five Stereotypes About National Poetry Month That Aren’t Always True; The Worst Advice We’ve Ever Heard About National Poetry Month; Think You’re Cut Out for Poetry? Take This Quiz and Find Out!; and my favorite, Does National Poetry Month Make You Feel Stupid? Actually, no — what makes me feel stupid is when I click on a ridiculous headline created by an algorithm, not a thoughtful human being.