Leaning into Microgenres

Identifying lovable aspects of books you enjoy, plus summer favorites and great family novels.

Books cover an incredibly wide and diverse range of topics, settings, and styles. Sometimes it is hard to categorize them, but using genres to identify books is helpful. Still, genres cover huge areas (Romance, Fantasy, Science-Fiction, Mystery, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Contemporary Fiction) but tell me very little about the book. Below the genre classification are subgenres. Under mysteries we have detective, amateur sleuth, and locked door stories. Fantasy has dystopian, high or low fantasy, fairytales and so on. When I hear about books I listen for certain themes, key words, or plots that I love. These descriptors drill further down and can be termed microgenres.

Identifying which microgenres you love, or can’t stand, can be helpful in picking out books that are a good fit for you. A microgenre can refer to a specific setting, plot point, structural device, or type of character. It is just a loose term for categorizing things you love to read about. There are just certain types of stories that I love and when I find a book with this included I can’t wait to dig in.

Microgenres that I embrace:

• Mysteries where people go missing in the woods: The Last to Vanish, Celine, Force of Nature, (non-fiction pick: The Cold Vanish).

• Communities dealing with leprosy (I know, weird): It started with Molokai and includes Sweet Bean and The Island. Someone recently came into the shop raving about King of the Armadillos, and mentioned leprosy, so that went onto my TBR (nonfiction pick: Fearfully and Wonderfully).

• People impacted by snow storms. This possibly began with Laura Ingles Wilder’s The Long Winter. My favorite Ruth Ware is One By One. I also love Abandon, Moon Of the Crusted Snow, and The Snow Child.

• Books about the Japanese immigrant experience, particularly internment related. I am currently reading The Turtle House. I love these older standouts: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Snow Falling on Cedars, Buddha in the attic. Currently Clark and Division is on my bedside table right now.

• Stories that take place predominantly in restaurants. Last Night at the Lobster, The Half Moon, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, (nonfiction: Kitchen Confidential) I just finished The Same Bright Stars, a new release that centers around a Rehoboth Beach family owned restaurant (review below).

• Books where relationships develop through letters: Meet Me at the Museum, 84 Charing Cross Road, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and more recently Love and Saffron.

Microgenres I Avoid

• “Ground-hog” day books where it feels like the same senario is repeated - like The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, The Enigma of Room 622 and The middle grade classic - The Westing Game. I have been fooled before and now watch carefully for these descriptors.

• Books where no one is likable. I don’t have to like everyone, but I do need to root for someone. When I hear people describe books as filled with people behaving badly, I tend to avoid them. Gone Girl disappointed for this reason. This peculiarity has also kept me from finishing The Secret History.

In all these areas, good and bad, there can be exceptions. I use these clues as guides. There are so many books I want to read, and want to make the best choices. I hope this gets you thinking about the types of books you want to discover more of and those that you don’t. Leave a comment about any microgenres you really like or avoid:

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The struggle is real!

The very biggest bookish news of the past week:

nytbooks

A post shared by @nytbooks

The New York Times has everyone talking, and it’s not about the election. In case you missed it, one of the biggest topics in the book world in the past week or so has been a list - the best 100 books of the 21st century. They cleverly rolled out the books in a countdown fashion to get everyone talking. Readers can mark which ones they have read and titles they want to read. The Times also had a number of well known authors create their own lists. The whole project is in a very shareable format so everyone is able to brag share which books they checked off. The most interesting thing about this list is the scope of discussion people are now having about what makes a book “great” and why or why not certain books were chosen.

I do not feel qualified to step into this conversation but will say I am surprised 1) that they allowed some authors to have multiple books, 2) that there are zero indigenous authors included, and 3) that there are so few nonfiction books or titles published outside the US.

I include the Instagram link above because to me, the comments carry the day here. I love reading the opinions - some I agree with and others not so much. Also, if you are ever wondering what book to read, this list is an amazing place to start.

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Summer Favorites

It has been an unusually hot summer in Virginia with very little rain and this season feels endless. Here are a few of my favorite things (other than books) that are getting me through:

• TJ’s Facial Sunscreen - I love this Supergoop Dupe soooo much.

• Yoga with Adriene - On the big screen in my basement (the coolest place in the house).

• Watermelon Mojitos - The best use of a half eaten watermelon.

• This yummy street corn salad - An easy side dish my family loves. I like the addition of quinoa.

• Matinees - one of my girls and I saw Thelma last week. We just loved this funny, uplifting story about a grandma determined to get her stolen money back. (99% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.)

RECENT READS

I am on a roll recently with family novels and here are four outstanding ones!

It has been a while since I have sunk my teeth into an excellent family novel like this. Pearce Oysters is a debut novel that tackles not only complicated and imperfect families but also the far ranging impacts of an environmental disaster. We meet the Pearce Family - Jordan, Benny, and their mother, May. They are all struggling, both with grief over the loss of their father/husband and of what to make of their life as it currently stands. Jordan is running the family oyster farm business (Pearce Oysters), Benny is mostly just running away, and May is unsure what her role is now. Add to this, an oil spill far away that soon becomes something that will change their life in Louisiana forever. The author sets this novel around the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I love that everything about this book felt real. This isn’t a book about happy endings but about accepting who your family is and how to move through life together rather than at odds. What also makes this book stand out is the clear attention the author pays to how environmental disasters that we see covered briefly on the news, impact so many lives for extended periods of time. Like the ripple effect of a stone tossed in a lake, the impact of this event is still being felt today. But besides that, I really appreciated the characters and their struggles; I cared about the choices they were making and was rooting them on. This is not a found family story but a story about finding and accepting the family you are born into, imperfections and all. [Published: 6/24; Pages: 363]

Bear is a highly anticipated novel by Julia Phillips. Her debut novel, Disappearing Earth was a National Book Award finalist in 2020. Like that book, Bear is a book rooted in its setting. And like Pearce Oysters, it follows a family of three struggling. There is an air of oppressiveness over the book that is not caused by any man-made disaster; it is the presence of a bear on San Juan Island that is the source of tension. Sisters Sam and Elana are stuck in dead-end jobs trying to make enough money to pay the bills, especially their ill mother’s medical bills. While working on the ferry, Sam sees a bear swimming in the waters one night. Soon after this massive creature appears on their property. While Sam is terrified, Elana is intrigued. This bear becomes a source of tension for all the islanders, but particularly for these sisters. As their mother’s illness worsens, the sisters become more and more at odds. This book took a little time for me to get into. It is narrated through Sam’s eyes and she annoyed me a bit at first. Her perspective, as the youngest sibling, is often skewed by the information she doesn’t have, rather than what she does. Yet as I continued, I became more enmeshed in their lives. I listened to this and found myself sitting in the driveway not wanting to get out of my car, I just wanted to keep listening. This book is like a snowball slowly gathering speed until it is racing down a hill. I love complex characters and Sam may win an award for most interesting fictional character I have read this year. This is not a long story and it would make a fantastic book club pick; there is so much to discuss here! [Published: 6/24; Pages: 289]

Wow - this back list book captured my heart. Thank you to the bookshop customer who put this on my radar. It has been a while since I read a gentle sweeping novel that pulled me into the lives of the characters as much as this one. Set at the beginning of WW2, Beatrix’s parents decide to send her to live in America to ensure her safety, and her mother regrets it at once. Bea has a difficult transition but then soon feels at home with her American family (mom, dad, and two brothers- William and G). Based on real life events - London children weren’t just sent to the countryside to remain safe, they were sent all the way to the US during WW2. The book follows both families for about 30 years, on both sides of the Atlantic and I grew to love them all. This book most reminded me of a Rosmund Pilcher novel and I do not make this comparison lightly. (The Shell Seekers is one of my all time favorite books.) I love the imperfections of the characters- that even though they struggle in their relationships with each other, they didn’t give up, they continued to love. The romance genre is having a moment right now - but most of those books involve expected tropes, unrelatable characters, and oddball situations. This book, to me, is true romance. It is about loving and staying; about struggling and forgiving, it's about seeing the best in people and not writing them off, even if that takes the better part of a lifetime. Also there is a strong sense of poignancy, nostalgia, and an ache for a life that seems just out of reach. I listened to this book and the audio is expertly done. [Published: 3/23, Pages: 350]

One author that has continued to delight me is Ethan Joella. His debut book was my Book of the Month choice in December of 2021 and I enjoyed it — his second book, A Quiet Life was better. Number three, The Same Bright Stars, just released straight to paperback and it is terrific. This book follows Jack, a single man who has devoted his life to running his family’s restaurant - Schmidts, in the real life beach town of Rehoboth Delaware. He is questioning past decisions in his life, wondering what he missed spending all his time at this one place, and trying to help those he loves navigate difficult challenges. A lot of the time Jack doesn’t seem to know quite what to do or how to do it, but he is stumbling through like the rest of us. This book follows a pivotal year in his life, starting at Thanksgiving and ending a year later. I love the structure of this book - with the calendar being revealed through the restaurant's operations and through snippets of a fictional guidebook about Rehoboth Beach. (For those of you reading this that have not lived in the mid-Atlantic region, RB is hugely popular and a delight - a quintessential beach town). Joella does a great job creating a cast of imperfect people trying to get through the challenges of contemporary life. There are themes of grief and longing, but also of family connections, deep friendships, and overcoming hardship. Mary Beth Keane and Tracy Lange are writing similar books right now and I am here for them all. [Published: 7/24, Pages: 301]