#31for65 – A month of books for my birthday

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I celebrated a milestone birthday in May and so I decided to share 31 influential reads with my friends on Litsy. I thought it might be nice to add those titles here as I think it offers a sense of who I am as a reader and what sorts of books shaped my reading life. In the order in which they appeared on Litsy:

Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery

It would be unCanadian not to love this character and this book and spending time with her on PEI is one of my earliest reading memories.

The Bobbsey Twins of Lakeport – Laura Lee Hope

When I was a kid, my mom’s younger brother used to give me a couple Bobbsey Twins books for my birthday every year. Sadly, I don’t have all of them anymore, but I do have a couple really old copies that once belonged to my mom’s sister. I loved spending times with these mystery-solving siblings.

The Silver Sword – Ian Serraillier

I was in grade 7 when I read this book and it was one of those books that I thought a lot about over the years. I found a copy on Bookoutlet a few years ago and re-read it. Not as amazing as my 12-year-old self remembers it, but still an important part of my reading history.

A Little Princess – Frances Hodgson Burnett

This book might have been the first book to ever make me cry and I have read it a few times since I was a kid and I can confirm: still makes me cry. Sara Crew is one of my favourite protagonists ever: kind, resilient, and she understands the power of a good story.

The Bridges of Madison County – Robert James Waller

I mean, great literature this is not, but I distinctly remember reading it when I lived in the UK and sobbing my eyes out and then immediately mailing the book to my BFF so she could also sob her eyes out. I will never re-read this book because I know it’s schlock and I want the memories of that first experience to live in my heart forever.

Billy Dead – Lisa Reardon

I selected this book for my book club many years ago and everyone but me hated it. I get it, though. This is a dark, dark book but it is also so well-written and so unflinching. It remains one of the most visceral reading experiences of my life and I will definitely read it again at some point.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith

Francie Nolan is a friend of mine. She was when I first read this book when I was 12 or 13 and she was again when I reread this book a few years ago.

Flowers in the Attic – V.C.Andrews

I read this book in 1979, which is the year it came out and the year I graduated from high school. I mean, is there a person alive who came of age in the late 70s who didn’t read this book? It was shocking, scandalous even, at the time. Literature it is not, but it’s definitely a seminal book in my reading life.

The Book Thief – Marcus Zusak

I don’t think I will ever get over the experience of reading this book and spending time with Liesel, Max, Rudy and the Hubermans and, yes, our narrator, Death. It’s reading nirvana.

Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell

Not sure why this book has two different titles, but mine was called Hamnet & Judith. You could call it just about anything and it would still be an absolutely devasting novel about Shakespeare (unnamed) and his wife (called Agnes) and the loss of their son Hamnet which inspired the play Hamlet. The movie is also fantastic, if you haven’t yet seen it.

The Banquet – Carolyn Slaughter

Later this month, I will be talking about Carolyn Slaughter as part of my auto buy author series. I discovered this novel back in the 80s and it absolutely floored me. It’s about an intense love affair that culminates in a shocking and devastating event and, I gotta say, I had and have never read anything like it.

Our Daily Bread – Lauren B. Davis

This story about people in crisis and the sacrifices they make to save those they care about is absolutely phenomenal. I chose it for book club and we actually had a Twitter (back when Twitter was a thing) chat with the author, which was so awesome.

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

I read this book when it first came out, never stopped thinking about it, and then read it again a couple years ago. It absolutely stands the test of time and it’s hard to overstate how influential it is.

Atonement – Ian McEwan

Atonement, like most of McEwan’s novels, take a little bit of perseverance, but they are always, always worth it. This is, by far, my favourite (and I have read a few), and both of my adult children (who read the book in AP Lit in high school) would say that it is a perfect novel. Can’t say I disagree.

The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

I read this book 25 years ago and I remember bawling so hard I couldn’t see the pages. I know some people get all icked out by the fact that sometimes these characters were at vastly different points in their lives (and also ages) but I just saw a love story that could not be restrained by the restrictions of time and I was there for it!

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

This was one of the first ‘adult’ books I ever read and I fell I love with Jane and the moors and Rochester. This is definitely on my radar for a re-read.

The World of Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne

My mom read Pooh to my brothers and me when we were kids and the 100 Acre Wood has a special place in my heart. There are lessons in this book which we could all stand to relearn, I think.

Possession – A.S.Byatt

I read this years ago and I recall it being a tough book, but I also remember feeling really smart when I finished so there’s that. A book about desire, and poetry, and dedication and academia.

This Time Tomorrow – Emma Straub

This book made me feel all the feelings and any book that does that is an automatic winner.

We Begin at the End – Chris Whitaker

Duchess, the main character of this novel, will stay with me forever.

Velocity – Kristin McCloy

My most read book for reasons that are deeply personal. Man, I hate this cover, but also, man, do I ever love this book. I think my review does a pretty good job of explaining my feelings.

The Paper Palace – Miranda Cowley Heller

I have read this book three times, and I have loved it every single time.

The Famous Five – Enid Blyton

Honestly, I don’t remember a single thing about these books other than the fact that they made me want to talk with a British accent and go to boarding school.

That Was Then, This Is Now – S.E. Hinton

Perhaps not as well known as her debut, The Outsiders, I liked this one more (and I loved The Outsiders).Kids still read and appreciate Hinton’s novels today, for reasons that are totally legit.

Sweet Savage Love – Rosemary Rogers

My mom loved historical boddice rippers back in the day and I think I read them because she read them. Authors like Rogers and Kathleen Woodiwiss definitely left their mark, though.

Forever – Judy Blume

I read this book as a teenager (it was published in 1975, so I was definitely the target audience) and I remember loving it for its realistic portrayal of young love. It’s probably pretty tame by today’s standards (YA has definitely gotten racier) but for the time it was quite graphic and also quite amazing.

IT – Stephen King

I have read a lot of Stephen King, but IT is my favourite. I was in NYC the summer this book came out and I carried it with me everywhere. The kids in this book are anything but losers and I loved them all. Say what you want, King can spin a yarn.

The Serpent King – Jeff Zentner

Not all YA is created equal, and Jeff Zentner is top of the heap for me. The characters in this book, three high school seniors – Dill, Travis, and Lydia – are some of the most vibrant, heartbreaking characters I have ever met.

The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank

Whatever I knew about empathy at a young age, I learned from reading this book when I was 12.

Brother – Ania Ahlborn

Maybe this seems like an odd choice for a “most influential” books list, but I’ll tell you this: Michael, the main character of this extremely graphic and extremely heartbreaking horror novel, is someone I still think about.

Our Town – Thornton Wilder

If Robby Benson hadn’t starred in the1977 television adaptation of Wilder’s Pulitzer winning play, I might never have encountered it, but 1977 was my Benson era so…This play has meant so much to me over my life, including being the subject of my undergrad honours thesis.

So, there you have it, 31 book that have meant a lot to me over the course of my 65 years. There are so many books that might have made the list on a different day, but I think this one does a pretty good job of showing you where I have been and what I am reading now.

Feel free to tell me about some of your most influential reads. I would love to hear about them!

White Lies – Lucy Dawson

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Many years ago I read Lucy Dawson’s novel His Other Lover which I remember really enjoying. That’s probably why I picked up White Lies, but I am sorry to report that it didn’t land quite the same.

Alexandra Inglis is a family doctor at a group practice somewhere in England. She is married to Rob and mother to two little girls, Maisie and Tilly. Her life is blissfully happy until, in retaliation for Rob’s indiscretion, she gets blinding drunk while on a girls’ weekend and sleeps with a complete stranger.

He straightened up, and I realized he was tall. I drank in a tight T-shirt, gym-honed arms, beautiful eyes–and didn’t stop staring. He looked confused at my brazenness, but then came a shy smile.

I saw how it was going to go immediately.

What Alex fails to realize in her inebriated state is this hot guy is actually a seventeen-year-old patient and sleeping with him opens up a whole world of complications.

White Lies offers more than one perspective for although Alex insists that she was too drunk to know she was crossing the line because she absolutely 100% did not know who this guy (kid?) was, he has a completely different story.

So, what we end up with is a he said/she said narrative with two wholly unreliable narrators and a a cast of secondary characters who have a vested interest in the truth.

This book was easy enough to read, but truthfully, not actually all that plausible and the ending felt like it belonged in a completely different story.

Mileage will vary.

Auto Buy Authors: Amy Engel

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This is the third installment in my Auto Buy Author series.

What makes someone an auto buy author?

  1. Writing. I love it when a book is well written. Sometimes the writing doesn’t have to be stellar for me to enjoy a book’s plot or characters, but when the writing is excellent, that is definitely a bonus. Auto buy authors always have, at the very least, prose that isn’t clunky.
  2. Plot. There are certain types of plots that I really enjoy. I love books that keep me guessing. I love angst. I love dark academia. I love it when the writer alludes to things that have yet to be revealed to the reader. I love to be surprised.
  3. Characters. I love it when I love the characters, when they feel as though they could be a friend of mine. When I root for their success (or sometimes their demise). I love characters that feel like real people.
  4. The feels. I love a book that punches me in the gut, makes my eyes burn with unshed tears, or a book that makes me sob. I love a book that grabs me by the throat and shakes me until my teeth rattle, a book that makes me read way past my bedtime, until my eyes are burning.
  5. The unexpected. I love a twist, especially when it’s not contrived. I love it when a book breaks my heart.

This month: Amy Engel.

Before writing her first novel for adults, Amy Engel was a YA writer…although I have never read any of her YA. (Or even encountered any, for that matter, although I do read a lot of YA.)

I think I discovered her quite by accident. Her novel The Roanoke Girls was plucked from my TBR shelf where it had been languishing for – well, I have no idea, really. According to my review, I bought it in one of those 3 for $10 sales at Indigo. Who knows why books end up in the bargain bin, but if it hadn’t, I might never have discovered this author. Engel talks about the novel here.

This book had all the things I loved: great writing, a compelling main character who is damaged, but fierce and smart, a never-ending air of menace and unease, a hot, broken guy and a lot of twists.

So, based on how much I loved this book, I was definitely on the hunt for anything else by this author. Next up, The Familiar Dark.

The Familiar Dark is almost un-put-down-able. Eve’s past has hardened her; Junie, her daughter, was the person who had smoothed out her rough edges. But now Junie is dead. Engel leads the reader and Eve down a dark path, where Eve is forced to ask questions she may not want the answers to. There are some true surprises along the way and the ending is devastating.

I waited forever for a new book by Engel after I finished with The Familiar Dark and did what I do only when I can’t wait any longer: I bought it in hard back. That book was I Did It For You. Maybe if I hadn’t read The Roanoke Girls or The Familiar Dark first, I would have liked I Did It For You more than I did. I read a lot of thrillers, and this one stacks up just fine against many of them. But I was really hoping for the sucker punch The Familiar Dark offered or the dark family secret hidden in the depths of The Roanoke Girls. For me, this just didn’t have the same emotional depth as those two books.

BUT. It was still an enjoyable read and definitely makes Amy Engel an auto buy author for me.

American Fantasy – Emma Straub

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I was in my later 30s before I discovered what fandom was, although in retrospect, I have always been a fan girl. I was the teenager who bought Tigerbeat magazine and spent hours making scrapbooks featuring whatever celebrity I thought was cute at the time: Davy Jones, David Cassidy, Robby Benson, Jan-Michael Vincent, Richard Gere and then David Boreanaz, who introduced me via my deep and abiding love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer to fandom proper by way of message boards and fanfiction and, eventually, LiveJournal, where I happily spent a good decade of my life.

At school, my students know me as the teacher obsessed with Ryan Gosling and over the years they have added to a huge wall of photos and other stuff devoted to the superior Canadian Ryan. (see above)

Emma Straub’s (This Time Tomorrow) latest novel American Fantasy is definitely relatable to me. This is the story of 50-year-old Annie who is on a four day cruise, a trip she was supposed to take with her sister, Katherine, who broke her leg and couldn’t come. This is a special cruise because Boy Talk will be on the ship along with 2000 woman (and a smattering of long-suffering husbands and some gay dudes) known as Talkers, uber fans of Boy Talk who have “sold millions of records. Millions. More records than artists today even imagine selling.”

But that was then; this is now. Now Boy Talk are middle aged men (and their fans are middle aged, too.) Sarah, the assistant tasked with making sure the band is looked after, and that their legions of fans have a fabulous holiday, describes the band to one of her new employees, Tyler:

It’s Shawn and Keith Fiore; they’re brothers. Shawn’s the de facto leader, I’d say, you’ll see what I mean. Intense. Keith is the nicest one. Corey West, who you’ll probably recognize from TV, et cetera. Scotty Sanchez and Terrance Campbell. Scotty is the life of the party, a sweetheart; Terrance is kind of a weirdo.

Annie is relatively ambivalent about the whole cruise, but her sister insisted that she go and life hasn’t been great for her recently. Newly divorced and with her daughter out living her own life, she feels a bit adrift, so why not go and see these boys (men!) who adorned her bedroom walls as a teenager. She never actually expects to have any fun, but soon enough fun is exactly what she is having.

The novel’s perspective shifts between Annie’s, Sarah’s and Keith Fiore’s, who is feeling increasingly isolated and out of sorts. His own marriage is on the rocks and, frankly, life hasn’t been that great. He does, though, understand which side his bread is buttered on. The women on this cruise were “crammed together like fish in a tin, and they were paying to do it. They were paying for Keith’s entire life.”

For four days, the Talkers, Annie included, drift through a variety of photo ops and mini concerts all designed to give the fans an up-close (but not too close) and personal (but not too personal) experience with the band. The lives of these three main characters and a whole list of secondary characters twine together in unexpected ways.

In many ways, this novel made me feel seen. In the early 90s, while I was living in England, I got the opportunity to see David Cassidy in Blood Brothers in the West End. I wrote about meeting him at the stage door in my review of the novel I Think I Love You.

My time in the Buffy fandom was so important to me. When I was in my early 40s, David Boreanaz came to New Brunswick and made a film called These Girls. I got to meet him.

I cried for about three solid hours after this picture was taken.

So lots and lots of this book was 100% relatable to me. And so was Annie’s personal journey of rediscovering herself post divorce as she “wondered if being alone was better or worse than being unhappy. Some days, she wasn’t sure.”

American Fantasy didn’t pack the emotional punch for me that This Time Tomorrow did, but I found it interesting, entertaining, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny and definitely made me want to dig out my Robby Benson scrapbooks. Yes, I still have them.

Pick a Colour – Souvankham Thammavongsa

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Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa was our April book club pick and it made for an interesting discussion even if not everyone liked it.

Pick a Colour is the story of Ning, an ex-boxer who now owns a nail salon. She is single, in her early forties, lives above the salon and keeps things to herself. She is observant, though: “You look at something long enough and you begin to see everything in its details.”

Everyone who works for her is called Susan because “So many girls come and go. I don’t want to bother getting new name tags each time.” Everyone in Ning’s salon is replaceable and interchangeable. “We all have black shoulder-length hair and wear black T-shirts and black pants. We are, more or less, the same height, too.”

Thammavongsa’s follows a day in the life of a salon. Mia, Ning’s employee and possibly her only friend, spend time talking about the clients as they go about their tasks: manicures and pedicures, facials and threading. Ning is slow to reveal anything personal about herself. “I don’t like to talk to people,” she says “The other girls are better at it than I am, and I don’t mind nodding along. If I had a signature move, the nod is mine.”

But over the course of the day, Ning does drop little hints about her time as a boxer and her regrets. For example, when one of her clients laments her fifth miscarriage, Ning thinks

…suddenly I felt a sadness. That we get one life and sometimes in that life we’re just not going to get to do everything. And in this life, I understood, that was something I wasn’t going to get to do. It’s a grief, but for something you never even had or even loved.

Pick a Colour is a quiet novel that is more character study than plot, but Ning is an interesting character to spend time with. It won the 2025 Giller Prize.

Take Me There – Carolee Dean

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Seventeen-year-old Dylan Dawson just can’t seem to catch a break. When Carolee Dean’s YA novel Take Me There opens, Dylan and his best friend, Wade, are on the run. They’ve been in trouble before and even did a stint in juvie together and because Wade had rescued Dylan from a sticky situation when they were locked up, Dylan just can’t give up on him up now.

Dylan and Wade are headed to Texas. That’s where Dylan’s father, Dylan Dawson Sr, is currently sitting on death row. Dylan hasn’t seen his father or communicated with him in any way since he’d been locked up eleven years ago. But his execution date is imminent and Dylan has questions only his father can answer.

Dylan is also trying to put as much distance between them and members of the Baker Street Butchers, a gang of street thugs who had tried to bring the teens into the fold in a plan that had gone horribly wrong, thus the running. But leaving California also meant leaving Jess, a girl Dylan had known as a kid and later, by sheer coincidence, reconnected with. Their blossoming romance helped Dylan imagine a different sort of life for himself and that’s where he thought he was headed until things took a sharp turn at murder.

The truth is, Dylan has a lot of cards stacked against him. His mother has never been quite the same since his father’s arrest. Dylan is unable to read and dropped out of high school. The positive male role models in his life are few and far between, although the man who owns the garage where he and Wade work is definitely a contender.

Dylan is a sympathetic character and he always tries to do the right thing. People don’t always do right by him, though, and it’s hard to watch him struggle against the system and the people who haven’t always had his best interests at heart.

Although the book falls apart a little at the end, I flew through this story and I know lots of my students will really enjoy it.

What the Birds See – Sonya Hartnett

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Sonya Hartnett’s novel What the Birds See begins with a nod to a real-life mystery. In 1966, siblings Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont went to the beach and disappeared without a trace. In Hartnett’s novel, the Metford siblings are heading to the shop for some ice cream. “The route they’d take to the shop would bend around four corners: two right turns, two left.” They never make it to their destination.

In the background of this disappearance, nine-year-old Adrian lives with his grandmother, Beattie, and his uncle Rory. His is a lonely existence. He has ended up here because his mother Sookie can no longer care for him and his father wanted to be free. Beattie is annoyed by her grandson and loves him, although she doesn’t know how to demonstrate that love. Rory, 25, barely comes out of his bedroom. Two years ago, Rory had been in a car accident that had caused much harm and he “had given up much of his vitality […]He has no desire, now, to truly live–none to participate, none to appreciate.”

Adrian is anxious. He “worries about all sorts of things.” The disappearance of the Metfords just gets added to his list of worries: quicksand, his closest door ajar, spontaneous combustion, tidal waves, sea monsters, being locked inside a shopping center, that his grandmother will forget to collect him from school at the end of the day.

Hartnett’s book is about lost children. The Metfords literally disappear; Adrian is lost in a world of adults who pay little attention to him. When siblings move into the house across the road, they are lost children too. Coincidentally, these newcomers are two girls and one boy, similar ages to the Metfords. Their sudden appearance serves as a reminder of the missing children.

All Adrian wants is “a calm and rosy world; he is prepared to accept anything, if anything is what keeps the peace.” The road to adulthood is tricky, littered with landmines and in this version of childhood almost impossible to navigate successfully.

Heartbreaking and highly recommended.

Our Fathers – Rebecca Wait

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I knew from the opening line that I was going to love Rebecca Wait’s novel Our Fathers.

If she had survived, Katrina would have said what people always say: that it had been a day like any other.

Set on the remote Scottish island, Litta, Our Fathers tells the story of Tommy, who has returned home after 20 years to confront the trauma of his past. He arrives on his uncle’s doorstep and the two men settle into an uneasy routine. What happened on the island all those years ago belongs to Malcolm, too.

One day, seemingly out of the blue, Tom’s father, John –this is not a spoiler as it’s mentioned in the blurb–shot his mother, older brother, Nicky, baby sister, Beth and then himself. Tommy hid and was spared. John was Malcolm’s brother. Tommy was eight. Obviously, this horrific crime sent a shock wave through the small close-knit community and Tommy arriving back as an adult stirs things up again.

Both Tom and Malcolm have a difficult time talking. That was always Malcolm’s wife Heather’s domain, but she died six years ago. Now in his early sixties, Malcolm has grown used to his solitary life on the island. With Tom’s unexpected arrival, Malcolm is “so shocked that for a few moments he couldn’t even speak.”

Why has Tommy returned now?

By all accounts, John was a loving husband and a good father, but there is no way around what he did that fateful day. For all these years after, Malcolm has tried to grapple with his brother’s crime but

he knew as well as anyone what a strange darkness the past was, how we plucked pieces from it and refitted them to our own purposes. The past was a story we told ourselves.

We spend a lot of time with uncle and nephew as they tiptoe around their shared history, but it is not the only perspective we get. There is also a section where we meet Katrina, Tommy’s mother, before she ever meets John. It’s interesting to get this view of her, to see how her own upbringing (raised by a narcissistic mother) shaped her. Part of Tommy’s return to Litta, I think, has to do with learning a little about her. We also learn about how she met John and their relationship; we can see what people on Litta never did.

There is also a cast of interesting characters on Litta most especially Fiona, who reluctantly hosts a dinner party for Tommy. It is here that some of the cracks start to appear and, later, when we see that Fiona and Katrina had once been friends. Fiona has her own part to play in Tommy’s story. She muses

What do any of us do in the end except what we believe is right at the time, without having all of the information, without knowing how things will turn out? We leap into the darkness with our only protection our idea of what is right, and who can ask more of us than that? We do our best, Fiona thought. I have always done my best.

I loved this book. It is beautifully written – the landscape is wild and rugged. Tommy and Malcolm are taciturn and unable to say what they desperately need to say. Both men are incredibly sympathetic. There is an element of suspense, although that’s not necessarily what drives the plot. It’s a masterful look at memory, guilt, love and family.

Highly recommended.

After Everything You Did – Stephanie Snowden

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Reeta wakes up from a coma, handcuffed to a hospital bed. She doesn’t know how she got there; she doesn’t know her last name; she doesn’t remember anything about where she came from. And she definitely doesn’t remember committing the horrific crimes for which she is accused.

Inside she felt hollow. No personality lingered, no feeling of happiness or stress or calm or anger filled the void. She felt only weakness. She tried to access the feeling of hate or fury that would surely drive someone to do these things, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t find a malevolent fascination with the macabre, or a perverted desire for blood and gore. She rooted deep into her absent character and could come up with nothing but empty space.

Reeta is accused of murdering two young women who look like her and there are two more missing girls. The FBI know for a fact that it’s her, even though these days the evidence against her might be considered circumstantial at best. But it’s 1966, not 2026. Desperate to figure out who she is, Reeta reaches out to Washington Post reporter Carol Joyce hoping the reporter will help. All Reeta has to go on is the photograph Agent Willow gave to her. Reeta knows the man in the photo is her father.

Carol knows the man in the photo is connected to Pine Ranch, a plantation house turn religious homestead aka cult, led by the charismatic Jeb. But information about Jeb and the cult is meted out at a snail’s pace (and too bad because that was the most interesting part of this story).

I was hoping After Everything You Did was going to be a quick page turner, but it wasn’t. No quick internet searches available to speed things along, sadly. No forensics to clear up any lingering confusion. At 350 pages, it just took a dog’s age to get anywhere and when the twist finally came (and judging from the reaction on Goodreads, it was a shocker to lots of readers), I found myself just sort of weary from all the times characters swallowed thickly.

Just okay for me.

Auto Buy Authors: Thomas Christopher Greene

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I decided last month to take a look at my auto buy authors. You know the ones, your ride or die authors whose books you know will deliver. If you want to look at my criteria and read about my first auto buy author, Thomas H. Cook, you can visit that post here.

This month’s auto buy author is another Thomas: Thomas Christopher Greene.

Thomas Christopher Greene is an American writer and co-founder and past president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He’s the author of seven books, of which I have read four. There’s a great interview with him here.

My first experience with Greene was back in 2011 when I read his novel Envious Moon. About that book I said: “Love is the one emotion that drives people, especially young people, to reckless behaviour. Greene’s novel captures that love-fueled momentum and propels Anthony, Hannah and the reader on a journey that is both heart-felt and heart-breaking.”

Like I said in my review, I am a sucker for star-crossed lovers or any book that taps into angsty longing and Envious Moon had that in spades, so of course I was going to seek out more books by this author.

Here’s what I’ve read:

The Headmaster’s Wife: One of the delights of this books (if you can actually call a novel about grief ‘delightful’) is letting the pieces of this puzzle click together in their own time. This is a book that sort of reads like a mystery, but isn’t that what life is at the end of the day? An unfathomable mystery. I read it in one sitting.

The Perfect Liar: Max W. and Susannah meet at a fancy art party in New York City. They are drawn to each other almost immediately and soon after, they are married. Now they live in Vermont where Max has taken a job as a lecturer at a small liberal arts college. One morning, while Max is away giving a lecture at an art institute in Chicago, Susannah discovers a note pinned to their front door: I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Couldn’t put it down.

If I Forget You: The novel opens in 2012. Henry, a poet and lecturer at NYU, sees Margot – for the first time in 20 years – on the street in Manhattan. When their eyes meet, “the face Henry sees travels to him from a lifetime ago.” Instead of speaking to him, though, she runs away. It is from this point that their story unspools – toggling between their college days and this point in the present. Lives lived and all that.

Greene seems to walk that line that I love so much between page turner and literature, often with a heaping helping of angst thrown in.

I still have some Greene books to look forward to: Mirror Lake, After the Rain, I’ll Never be Long Gone, and Notes from the Porch: Tiny True Stories to Make You Feel Better About the World. I can’t wait to track these books down.