Book 6 of 52: Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson

The narrator of Antoine Wilson's Mouth to Mouth is an unnamed, middling writer waiting for a flight to Germany after taking a a red eye from Los Angeles to JFK. While sitting bleary eyed in the terminal, he hears the name "Jeff Cook" over the loud speaker. He went to college with a Jeff Cook, though he didn't know him that well. He was kind of person whose circle overlaps yours but you don't know well, but since you see each other over and over and over again, becomes part of the background of your college experience.

It's a common name - could it be the same Jeff? It is, and he's waiting for the same flight, which is delayed, so he brings the narrator into the first class lounge with him. Over the course of the delay, Jeff tells the narrator what has happened to him starting not long after graduation, which lead to him being the kind of guy who only flies first class.

Told in this round about way (the narrator relays Jeff's story, switching between telling it from the time Jeff experienced it, and them talking in the first class lounge), Wilson gives the story a layer of suspense that wouldn't wouldn't have existed in a more traditional format. Plus, since it's Jeff's version of the story, which he tells as he proceeds to get drunk, we as readers (and the narrator too) can't be sure if he's telling the truth.

It's an odd little book, only 178 pages with short chapters, and some of those chapters are less than a page long. I wasn't sure where Mouth to Mouth was going until the very last line. Wilson perfectly holds the tension until the very end, which I can't say about any other novel I've read in recent memory.

Linda Holmes of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour (and the delightful novel Evvie Drake Starts Over) recommended this one, which is where I first heard about it. I'm glad she did.

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Book 12 of 52: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi is an author and graphic novelist who grew up in Iran and, as a tween and teen, lived in the country through the Iranian Revolution before her parents sent her to Europe for school, and for her safety. As an adult, she wrote Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood , a nonfiction graphic novel, originally in French. I read the English translation, which was published in 2003, three years after the original. It was a critical success, won a slew of awards, and became a movie . I haven't read the sequel, Persepolis 2 , but I hope to (you can also buy them in a set . I found Persepolis in a Little Free Library, or I'd have bought them combined). In the tradition of Art Spiegelman's Maus , which is about the author's father talking to him about the Holocaust, Persepolis is a memoir of trauma told through a mix of images and words that when combined, combust into powerful, beautiful and soul cracking art. For example, Satrapi portrays the 1978 Cinema R

Book 23 of 52: Because of Miss Bridgerton by Julia Quinn

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Book 26 of 52: The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil by Tina Brown

I'm not going to write a long review of Tina Brown's The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil for two reasons. First, it's been hashed to death already, as anything about the royals is, by people who are far more invested in this whole thing than I am. And second, I'm in the frantic "do I really need a jean jacket AND a windbreaker" level of packing before a long trip. I can say that I didn't mind listening to this nearly 18 hour audiobook while the rest of the world is on fire, although of course they are not insulated. We can pretend that the Royal Family lives in a bubble, but they are enormously influential; touched by the same issues of race, class and gender; and Queen Elizabeth II is one of most influential politicians of modern times — and she is a politician, no matter what anyone says. Her death will be a global, cultural moment. Same thing with the Pope, on both fronts. I listened to Brown's The Diana Chro

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