Book Blog — Robin Gaines

“Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.”

—Susan Sontag

LOST & FOUND: A MEMOIR by Kathryn Schulz Structured in three sections titled “Lost,” “Found,” and “And,” this lyrical memoir on the loss of the author’s father and her finding love would seem all too familiar subject matter if it w

Robin GainesApril 21, 2023Mrs. Caliban; Rachel Ingalls; Surrender; Bono; Lost & Found; Kathryn Schulz

THESE PRECIOUS DAYS: ESSAYS by Ann Patchett Patchett writes with unflinching honesty and a keen eye for life’s big and small moments. All, she portends, are meaningful in their sorrows and joys. Among the twenty-three essays, we are tr

Robin GainesMarch 19, 2023These Precious Days; Ann Patchett; The Easy Life; Marguerite Duras; Sea of Tranquility; Emily St. John Mandel

MY TRADE IS MYSTERY by Carl Phillips   Poet Carl Phillips writes about the writing life in My Trade is Mystery as if talking to a friend over dinner. Eloquently and honestly, he waxes on his experiences surviving forty years as a

Robin GainesMarch 1, 2023

DINOSAURS by Lydia Millet A sweet sweet novel about big big themes. I loved this one. Millet’s gaze is on Gil and the cast of neighbors and friends living in a suburb of Arizona. Gil has left a failed relationship in New York City and

Robin GainesFebruary 9, 2023

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson Lillian and Madison are roommates at a boarding school when Lillian, the scholarship student, takes the blame for an incident that gets her booted out of school. While Lillian wallows in her mother

Robin GainesJanuary 24, 2023

FESTIVAL DAYS by Jo Ann Beard This book sat on my TBR pile for months. I loved Beard’s The Boys of My Youth , but Festival Days blew me away and rose to my favorite book status for 2022. Is it creative nonfiction with a mash-up of f

Robin GainesDecember 31, 2022Intimations; Zadie Smith; The Hero of This Book; Elizabeth McCracken; Foster; Claire Keegan; Festival Days; Jo Ann Beard

COMPOSED by Rosanne Cash I first fell in love with Rosanne Cash’s literary writing before her songwriting. In Bodies of Water, Cash mixes stories with essays about motherhood and music, loneliness and aging, love and divorce. In Com

Robin GainesNovember 28, 2022

PERFECT TUNES by Emily Gould Laura leaves her midwestern hometown after college for NYC to find success as a musician. It’s the late 90s and early aughts. With her roommate, Callie, they form the band, The Groupies. But, after a tragi

Book ReviewsRobin GainesNovember 16, 2022

BOMB SHELTER: LOVE, TIME, AND OTHER EXPLOSIVES by Mary Laura Philpott The author and her husband hear a pounding in the middle of the night and find their teenage son on the bathroom floor having an epileptic seizure. So begins Philpot

Robin GainesSeptember 29, 2022

LATE IN THE DAY by Tessa Hadley This novel was my first foray into Hadley’s fictional worlds, and it won’t be my last. The novel opens with the death of one of the four main characters, Zach. His death shakes loose the four main charac

Book ReviewsRobin GainesAugust 24, 2022You Have a Friend in 10A; Maggie Shipstead; Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative; Melissa Febos; Late in the Day; Tessa Hadley; Ghost Lover: Stories; Lisa Taddeo

VLADIMIR by Julia May Jonas The cover leads one to believe it’s a romance novel. A man’s hunky torso. Suggested hint (wink) of a hand covering a crotch. Within its covers, the story hardly reads as genre romance. But more like dark iro

Robin GainesJune 3, 2022

OH WILLIAM! By Elizabeth Strout From the author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton comes Oh William! —a novel continuum of Lucy’s life as a famous novelist and her strange relationship dance with her first husband, Wil

Book ReviewsRobin GainesMay 5, 2022Lily King; Five Tuesdays in Winter; Renata Adler; Speedboat; Mouth to Mouth; Antoine Wilson; Elizabeth Strout; Oh

ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS by Ocean Vuong I had heard so much about this novel and put it off because, along with the sad subject matter (the world is sad, so get over it), I was warned you will read and then read again each s

Book ReviewsRobin GainesMarch 21, 2022Miriam Toews, Fight Night, Objects of Desire, Clare Sestanovich, Who is Maud Dixon, Alexandra Andrews, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

CRYING IN H MART by Michelle Zauner Zauner, the frontperson for the band, Japanese Breakfast, writes about her relationship with her dying mother, her Korean identity, and food with equal parts rebellion, curiosity, and familial love.

Book ReviewsRobin GainesFebruary 7, 2022

Deborah Levy wrote a trilogy of autobiographical memoirs about motherhood, marriage, and female ambition. I read them all. Starting with:  THE COST OF LIVING by Deborah Levy  The second book in Levy’s memoir trilogy examin

Robin GainesJanuary 4, 2022

KEEP MOVING: NOTES ON LOSS, CREATIVITY, AND CHANGE by Maggie Smith A small gem of a book that cheerleads the energy within all of us to create change. If you know someone depleted, discouraged, and depressed in your life, this book mig

Book ReviewsRobin GainesNovember 9, 2021Lost Children Archive, Bluets, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, Wayward, Dana Spiotta, Valeria Luiselli, Maggie Smith, Maggie Nelson

There’s something visceral about reading about a place, atmosphere, history, the people living in another country while you’re in said country traveling, traveling, traveling. The writer, Shirley Hazzard, spent years in Italy. Sh

Book ReviewsRobin GainesOctober 7, 2021

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.—Jorge Luis Borges THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO by Taylor Jenkins   Reid This was a book club selection, and the discussion

Book ReviewsRobin GainesAugust 7, 2021Animal, Lisa Taddeo, Joan Silber, Secrets of Happiness, The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Maggie Shipstead’s prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe.—Maria Semple

SEATING ARRANGEMENTS by Maggie Shipstead

Robin GainesJune 23, 2021book reviews, Shipstead; Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney; Megha Majumdar; Alka Joshi

HAMNET: A Novel of the Plague by Maggie O’Farrell Oh, how I loved this book. In the late 1590s in Stratford, England, the Black Death killed the only son of William Shakespeare. Hamnet is eleven years old when his twin sister, Judith,

Robin GainesMarch 30, 2021