Hi friends! I’m excited to share a guest post with you today from Betsy Vereckey, author of the memoir, Moving to My Dog’s Hometown. She kindly sent me a picture of her dogs, and I am delighted to share that with you as well.

~Elizabeth

Hello book lovers! I’m filling in as your guest author this week so that Elizabeth can save her linguistic energy for the book that she’s hard at work on. Here’s the weird part—I’m also an Elizabeth, but I go by Betsy, just like your previous guest writer Elizabeth Marro (except I’m Hungarian).

When I’m not reading or writing, I’m hanging out in Vermont with my husband and our dogs. I have three of them who are all under the age of four, which means I sleep in weird positions that result in leg pain the next morning and that I have accepted the fact that I will probably never pee alone again.

I’ve picked three books for you that are wildly different but have all tickled my brain in wonderful ways. I hope you pick them up and enjoy them!

And, now, what to read if …

You Need a Laugh on Father’s Day

The Land and Its People by David Sedaris

I always say a little prayer whenever my New Yorker magazine arrives in the mail: Please, God. Let there be a new David Sedaris essay inside. I have always loved the stories about his time in France, like the one where he just starts saying “d’accord” (“O.K.”) because he can’t speak French and ends up naked with a couple of strangers in a doctor’s office. In his words, “Once you take your pants off, ‘d’accord’ isn’t really O.K. anymore.”

His latest book, The Land and Its People, had me laughing in the bathtub. “I’m gay, and I’m pretty sure I have cancer!” he says in one essay, trying to brush off unwanted advances from women. While on a safari in another, he tries his very best to define cultural appropriation: “I think it’s when you make a taco with, like, blue cheese on it…”

Like Sedaris, I have a complicated relationship with my own father, who recently sent me a birthday card that contained a dollar bill for my dog. No dad is perfect, but at least if you’re David Sedaris, you can turn your paternal woes into amazing story material. Father’s Day was always hard for Sedaris, a reminder of the countless rejections, unmet expectations and humiliations he suffered, but now that his dad has since passed, Father’s Day has become a reason to celebrate: “I don’t ever have to call or write to him again. I’m free!”

You’re Addicted to Ancestry.com

Hereafter: the Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara by Vona Groarke

This is a truly incredible book that fell into my lap at just the right time, as I happened to be spending more time than usual in cemeteries. I loved this memoir for so many reasons.

The author Vona Groarke is an Irish poet and the Writer in Residence at St. John’s College, Cambridge. When she was doing a fellowship at the New York Public Library, she decided to do some research on her great-grandmother Ellen O’Hara, which resulted in this memoir.

Ellen was a young Irish immigrant who made a new life for herself in New York City at the end of the 19th century. It’s a rough start. She gets a job in a boarding house, marries a man who abandons her and is forced to send her children back to Ireland, but what emerges from all the hardship is a remarkable, inspiring tale about survival and loyalty. To tell the story, Groarke uses a range of clever devices: lyrical prose, archival photographs, newspaper clippings, passenger lists and baptismal records. She even relies on poems to creates Ellen’s distinctive voice.

I highly recommend this book to memoirists looking for creative ways to write about someone you’ve never met or to anyone interested in Irish history. Thousands upon thousands of women like Ellen sent every penny they made back to Ireland, which in turn revived the country’s struggling economy. Says Groarke, “If every sum of money sent back had a note, the sound of them crossing back the Atlantic would have had the heft of symphonies.”

One of the book’s most powerful scenes comes toward the end of the book when Vona visits Ellen’s humble grave in Queens where “there’s a little scrub of brush and you could think of the traffic noise as a lullaby if you so desire.” I finished the book wishing that Ellen were still alive to read it.

You Want to :ive in France for Eternity

On the Calculation of Volume Book One by Solvej Balle

This novel satisfied my itch to get out of the United States. It’s about a bookseller who, for some weird reason, is stuck in a time loop and keeps repeating November 18. I am a sucker for an immersive, first-person narration experience when I read fiction, and Balle’s book did not disappoint.

The book begins when narrator Tara Selter attends an auction for rare books in Bordeaux, then spends the night at a hotel in Paris. The next morning, she quickly realizes something’s up when she witnesses a guest at the hotel drop a piece of bread onto the floor in the exact same fashion – “at the same speed, a gently swerving descent” – as the day prior.

Reading this novel was the weirdest experience. It made me appreciate the passing of time in my own life, insanely grateful that I wasn’t the one reliving the same day. I felt trapped but sometimes happily so, with gorgeous, sensory prose from a narrator attuned to the beauty in every moment – “there is gray light from the window, there is the bird song, the sound of rain, there is the feel of bed linens against my skin.”

The suspense feels unbearable at times. Will she ever get out of the time loop? Why doesn’t the day rewind at the same time every night? How is this going to work out with her husband? Will they still continue to make love on the living room floor??? I need to know!

There are seven total books to explore, which kind of feels like discovering an old Netflix series with tons of episodes to enjoy. If you need me this summer, I’ll be on my porch binging them all.

What to Read If is weekly book recommendation newsletter. Need a rec? Want to gush about a book? Reply to this email, leave a comment or find me on Instagram or Threads.

If you’re reading this on Substack or were forwarded this email, and you’d like to subscribe, click the button below.

Subscribe now

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.