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Melissa Joulwan's avatar

I had major surgery two weeks ago, so I've been spending A LOT of time reading. It's been a great month for books — and my body is coming along nicely, too :-)

The best book I've read this month is definitely 'Unseen City' by Amy Shearn. I haven't seen a lot of people talking about this one, and I loved this mashup of literary ghost story and historical fiction set in modern Brooklyn.

Our girl is Meg Rhys, a self-proclaimed Spinster Librarian. She's 40 and has a satisfying existence. She rides her bike around the city and works in the archive of the Brooklyn Central Library. She lives with her cat Virginia Wolf and has a pretty good relationship with her younger brother.

This is a bit from early in the book:

'All her heroes had resisted wifehood: Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Lolly Willowes. Okay, so Lolly Willowes was a fictional character and eventually became a witch, but still, Meg reasoned, better a witch than a wife. Just look what had happened to Sylvia Plath, to Dorothea Brooks. You couldn't say that, though. It rankled. It offended married people because you were implying that their own carefully constructed lives had snags woven into them... no one wanted to hear this. So she had a stock response: 'If I ever married, I would love my Spinster Librarian card.' She'd said it so many times she'd begun to imagine the card was an actual object, providing access to books no one else knew existed, which, she felt, would be a much more useful resource than a spouse any day.'

So, Meg doesn't much believe in love, but she does believe in ghosts. Mostly because she has daily conversations with her sister Kate, who died ten years earlier.

At the start of the story, two things happen that upset Meg's equilibrium. First, she learns that the cozy, rent-controlled apartment she's made her home is about to be sold out from under her. And second, a very attractive man named Ellis comes to the library with a compelling historical mystery he needs help solving.

Meg is soon distracted by her investigations into Brooklyn's history, and she has a growing attraction for Ellis, even though he, too, is a bit haunted.

I don't want to give anything about the plot because it would ruin the fun of reading. But I can tell you a few other things I loved:

As you might expect from a librarian, Meg drops book titles all over the place. And I really appreciated that they are accessible. She's not a snobby reader — she's a book lover. So she talks about Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso Sea, A Christmas Carol, The Haunting of Hill House, The Turn of the Screw

This book also taught me a lot about New York City history and the Civil War that I didn't know anything about. It's all woven into the story in a way that makes it integral to the plot — that is my favorite way to learn.

There's a fascinating story about the real-life town of Weeksville. It was a village with farmland founded by free African Americans in the 1830s in what's now Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Today, it's home to the Weeksville Heritage Center where four houses from original Weeksville residents have been turned into a museum, so you can walk through the houses and learn what life was like for Black Americans in the late 1800s.

This is a beautiful, entertaining, non-scary story about the things that haunt us, of both the emotional and the supernatural variety. It's about grief and longing and how we move on after tragic losses. And with Meg the librarian as a companion, it's also very funny, sweet, and relatable.

I also really enjoyed a COMPLETELY different read: 'Very Old Money' by Stanley Ellin. It's from 1985 (!). Imagine Gosford Park or Downton Abbey, but instead of British nobility, it's an extremely wealthy American family in NYC. A married couple, both teachers, lose their jobs and are hired to be a personal secretary and chauffeur for the family. We get an inside look at the logistics of serving a family of this caliber — and the mental gyrations our main characters have to do to be OK with being 'servants.' Not much happens — we see their day-to-day experience — until SOMETHING SURPRISING HAPPENS. If you like British manor house stories (I love them!), this is a fun counterpoint.

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Matthew Bauman's avatar

Mine is “Why We Love Baseball” by Joe Posnanski. He talks about 50 moments from baseball history that are incredible and have made people love the game. I’ve had to force myself to slow down to not just read the whole thing in one sitting. I have thoroughly enjoyed it

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