This meme was created by E. @ Local Bee Hunter's Nook and you can find the announcement post here.
Also, side note, these aren't necessarily books that I own physically
but they're all on my Goodreads TBR and they'll mostly be the five most
recently added.
This Week's Prompt is...
Epistolary! I love books written in the form of letters, emails, documents and such. It's possibly up there as my favourite format as I find it so interesting to follow the characters and the plot through these different entries. I have a lot of these on my TBR so I tried to go for a few slightly more obscure books to mix things up.
1. Dear Committee Members by Julie Scumacher
Jason Fitger is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature at Payne University, a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodeled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. His star (he thinks) student can't catch a break with his brilliant (he thinks) work Accountant in a Bordello, based on Melville's Bartleby.
In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that Fitger is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies.
Why I want to read it ✨
→ Told through letters of recommendation
→ Humerous
→ Highly rated
2. The Collector by John Fowles
Withdrawn, uneducated and unloved, Frederick collects butterflies and takes photographs. He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time.
Why I want to read it ✨
→ A British classic
→ Sounds creepy as fuck!
→ Diary entries
3. The Divorce Papers by Susan Rieger
Twenty-nine-year-old Sophie Diehl is happy toiling away as a criminal law associate at an old line New England firm where she very much appreciates that most of her clients are behind bars. Everyone at Traynor, Hand knows she abhors face-to-face contact, but one weekend, with all the big partners away, Sophie must handle the intake interview for the daughter of the firm’s most important client. After eighteen years of marriage, Mayflower descendant Mia Meiklejohn Durkheim has just been served divorce papers in a humiliating scene at the popular local restaurant, Golightly’s. She is locked and loaded to fight her eminent and ambitious husband, Dr. Daniel Durkheim, Chief of the Department of Pediatric Oncology, for custody of their ten-year-old daughter Jane—and she also burns to take him down a peg. Sophie warns Mia that she’s never handled a divorce case before, but Mia can’t be put off. As she so disarmingly puts it: It’s her first divorce, too.
Why I want to read it ✨
→ Told through legal papers, office memos etc
→ Contemporary fiction: don't reach much of this genre
→ Polarising
4. Where'd You Go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple
Bernadette Fox has vanished.
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown. And after a school fundraiser goes disastrously awry at her hands, she disappears, leaving her family to pick up the pieces--which is exactly what Bee does, weaving together an elaborate web of emails, invoices, and school memos that reveals a secret past Bernadette has been hiding for decades.
Why I want to read it ✨
→ I own it 🤷
→ Cate Blanchett's in the film!
→ Disappearance plot
5. 84, Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff
This charming classic, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share a winsome, sentimental friendship based on their common love for books. Their relationship, captured so acutely in these letters, is one that will grab your heart and not let go.
Why I want to read it ✨
→ Non-fiction
→ A book about books
→ Beloved modern classic
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