Madeline’s Picks | Winter 2019

The title says it all. The painfully funny and sweet follow-up to the equally on-target Love Poems (for Married People).

I love novels that take me deep into a world I otherwise know nothing about, and this one does that with an absolute perfect balance of character, setting, and suspense. Before reading this book, all I knew about the Kamchatka Peninsula came from playing Risk as a kid, but now it’s this story of two sisters who go missing, and the impact of that disappearance on different rings of their community, that will stay with me.

Because I grew up in the Twin Cities in the 80s, I’ve always felt a particular attachment to Prince, but of course his appeal as one of the greatest talents of his musical generation is global and timeless. We’ll never know everything that he would have put on the pages of his memoir, but this book is the closest we’ll get: Here you’ll find the pages-in-progress at the time of his death, combined with a treasure-trove scrapbook of photos, writing, and ephemera. The final form feels to me, as a fan, exquisite.

Speaking of fandom . . . have you binge-watched Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag yet? No? Okay, go do it now, and when you’re back (and you will be), you’re going to want to dig deeper and talk about it with all those friends who’ve been telling you to watch it. And the perfect companion for that conversation is this book, which contains the complete scripts of both seasons. Photos of the Priest sold separately.

Speaking of lacking pictures . . . I hope you’ve had the belly-laugh-inducing experience of reading B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures to someone young in your life. Now, in a Mad Libs–like riff, Novak’s latest lets you and your young one fill in the blanks and make your own new set of giggles, together.