138. Pick a Color, by Souvankham Thammavongsa. More of a character study than a novel, I found this less powerful than Thammavongsa's story collection but still worth my time.

137. Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists are Recreating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations, by Sam Kean. I loved the parts of this book where Kean learns how to use a hammerstone or tastes potatoes with clay sauce but I despised the fictional interstitials.

136. A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck, by Sophie Elmhirst. I have a thing for lost at sea books, and I found the combination of a sailing disaster with a thoughtful meditation on marriage completely irresistible.

135. The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro. One wonders what Earhart's life and career might have been like if only she had had better taste in men.

" . . . emerged upon the veranda to sip their tea and decide, through vigorous process of elimination, their meals for the rest of the day."

-- Kiran Desai, _The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny_

#FridayReads #FirstLineFriday

134. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother), by Rabih Alameddine. Pacing issues, but I loved the depiction of the mother-son dynamic and Raja is just an incredibly well-drawn character.

133. More, Please: On Food, Fat, Bingeing, Longing, and the Lust for "Enough," by Emma Specter. Ultimately this didn't quite work for me -- too much repetition and not enough insight.

David Copperfield, Mrs. Dalloway, Stoner

132. The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann. Very strong novel with a couple of unforgettable scenes. I think I need to read it again to fully appreciate it -- I could never quite get immersed but I think that is more about my own life events than the novel itself.

131. Stan and Gus: Art, Ardor, and the Friendship that Built the Gilded Age, by Henry Wiencek. This book reminded me forcibly of modern-day tech execs and further cemented my opinion that we've just forgotten how dire the Gilded Age was for the 99% and decided to relive it for some reason.

130. State Champ, by Hilary Plum. There are a lot of ideas here and the intersection of bodily autonomy, reproductive rights, and disordered eating is thought-provoking but not quite fully explored in a way that I found compelling.

This book features what is genuinely one of the weirdest plotlines I've ever read. And I've read a lot of novels!

(That is not a criticism.)

Every legal story now is either

Ancient Circuit Judge Delivers Crystal Clear 100 Page Rebuke To Trumpist Overreach

or

In Unsigned Shadow Docket Decision, 6-3 Majority Declares Trump Can Hunt People For Sport

129. What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan. McEwan gives us so much to unpack and so much to think about in this novel -- how do we think about the past? How will our present be seen in the future?

128. Notes from a Regicide, by Isaac Fellman. Mostly a miss for me, unfortunately. The writing is lovely and the characters are well-developed, but the worldbuilding was too nebulous for the plot to really work.

I have been thinking about this thread all day because I lost someone very close to me a month ago, and it sucks, and I would never have guessed it but RHAP is one of the things getting me through it.