All the books I read on vacation in the Philippines

I went to the Philippines for two weeks and all I got was some magical family time and a significant head start on my Goodreads challenge

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Last week I returned home from a gorgeous vacation to the Philippines with Martin’s family: one week in Urdaneta to celebrate Grandma’s 98th birthday 🥹 and one week in Boracay for some blissful beach time. I consumed my weight in mangos and managed to not get sunburnt—it was a huge success.

For this trip, due to only packing a carry-on and a fear of commitment to reading material for two whole weeks, I got back together with my iPad, filling my Books and Libby apps to the brim, ready for any reading mood that were to strike.

A hot tip before we get started: the “Special Offers” section in the Apple Book Store has some great sales every now and then. There’s a lot to wade through, but you will be rewarded for your efforts with the occasional book that’s all the rage and only out in hardback for $1.99, like the first here…

Evenings & Weekends by Oisín McKenna

This is exactly, precisely, completely my kind of book. Set during a hot London summer, the book weaves a web of friends, partners, brothers, parents. They’re all harboring feelings and secrets and resentments and dreams. They’re living pretty average lives, all seeking something different and new, but finding themselves stuck, much like the big news story that hovers across the novel: a whale trapped in the Thames.

The book summary highlights the three main characters, but I actually found myself enthralled with Phil’s mom’s story. She’s seeing life in a new light, and thus reflecting on her strict Irish Catholic upbringing, a childhood where she was taught to resist her curiosities, to be a good girl, to never make a fuss, to—fatefully—keep it all inside. I found this book to be quite an arresting depiction of how what goes unsaid can trickle down generations and fester in relationships.

This book struck the perfect balance of entertainment and provocation for me—what I want all literary fiction to be. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s the kind of book that reminds me why I love reading.

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne

My comfort film is The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary about Joan Didion made by her nephew Griffin Dunne. I always have it downloaded for flights just in case, and when I sit down to watch TV and the streaming decision fatigue is too much to bear, I’ll throw it on. So, because of the small amount of family lore I already knew—the prickly and needy dynamic of Joan and her husband John Gregory Dunne, Dominick Dunne’s connections with Truman Capote’s “Swans”, the murder of Dominique Dunne, etc—I was very excited to hear that Dunne had written this “family memoir”.

The family certainly does not lack drama—scandalous and star-studded. The exciting tales in and around the family fill up the entire book, which is good because that almost makes up for the writing that is, let’s just say, not Didion-caliber. I imagine it’s hard to find your own identity or know how to navigate the world in the daunting shadows of such big names and personalities. When you’re born into this type of world, it’s not necessarily a given that you’ll be of it. When you’re surrounded by a multitude of consequential points of view, do you even have to find your own?

For any This Is Us fans out there—yes, that is Jack’s brother Uncle Nicky

The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano by Donna Freitas

This book starts with a fight about prenatal vitamins, nine times. Rose Napolitano is a professor who has always known she didn’t want to have kids. Luke is her husband that she thought was on that same page, but has recently changed his mind and now wants kids more than anything. In nine alternate realities, Rose takes different steps forward in response to this defining moment.

Ultimately, this book is a meditation on whether or not to become a mother. During the prenatal vitamin conversation, a million paths lie before her, as they do for all of us—the rest is still unwritten and all that. It’s the terrifying and comforting truth that if you think about it, the tiniest tweak could alter everything. But life is about choosing a path anyway, one foot in front of the other. This book amplifies that: heightening this already-massive decision and indulging in all the what-ifs, or, I suppose, exactly nine what-ifs.

I like this book in theory, the sliding doors of it all. In practice, it was difficult to follow because perhaps nine is a handful too many doors. The story jumps around, so I found myself flipping back, attempting to remember the throughline of each life—did she get divorced in life 1 or 2? Did she have the baby in life 4 or was it 5? This got easier as I read and a perfect memory of lives 1 through 9 was probably not mandatory, but I found it distracting, and is perhaps helpful to know going in if you decide to give this one a whirl.

How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity by Jill Burke

This is a book of fun facts and origin stories. So many beauty standards and customs that we’re used to today have their roots in the Renaissance. There are tales of oppression and rebellion, and traditions both foreign and familiar. My biggest takeaway is this: women have been cheeky, creative, intelligent, and powerful since the dawn of time.

I loved how the book included some recipes from Renaissance times to get a feel of what these women were whippin’ up in their castles with their girls.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Ever heard of it?

This one was a vacation miracle as I’d been playing the waiting game with Libby for weeks. Our resort on the island of Boracay had a library with exactly one shelf of books, and there, shining like a Lumos spell (😗), sat the full set of Harry Potter books. I checked GOF out Sunday, and had until Wednesday to make it happen. The staff member who helped me was dubious; I was not.

Since embarking on this journey of reading the books for the first time (I know, I know), it’s safe to say that the fourth book is almost universally the favorite of the series. While not in a position to make that claim yet, this was certainly where, for lack of a better phrase, shit gets real.

I’m fully aware this sounds crazy because it’s a ✨ magical ✨ world we’re talking about, but this book felt more realistic, more conceivable. Harry’s emotions matched the circumstances more than previous ones, and the situations he found himself in made more sense. The past three put him in dire situations, opening his eyes to this new world, and the fourth is where it’s all put into action. Despite still being so young, we start to see what he’s made of and what he’s really fighting for comes into focus. His innocence is lost here: he has his first crush, he sees Cedric die, his trust is eroded when Mad Eye isn’t really Mad Eye, and he fights face-to-face with a very real Voldemort. As the books get longer, you feel the passage of time in a way that you’re not able to in the movies. On to Order of the Phoenix.

Harry Potter and a margarita are a match made in heaven, it turns out

Clear by Carys Davies

The plot of Clear is this: on a remote Scottish island lives one single man named Ivar. John Ferguson, a fellow working on behalf of the Church, is sent to evict Ivar. John gets injured, Ivar ends up taking care of him, a bond forms.

This book lives at the convergence of some fascinating historical movements and discoveries. The first is the Great Disruption in Scottish Church in 1843 when hundreds of ministers left the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church of Scotland. The second is the Clearances from 1750 to 1860 where residents got booted from their homes in the Scottish Highlands to maximize land for financial gain. And the third is a bygone language the author discovered in the National Library of Scotland.

To me, this book like a snow globe. There are these huge historical and societal influences circling the story, and the story itself is a single anecdote that feels both separate from and representative of those forces. On the page, on a micro level, it’s a story of two humans connecting and transcending language. On a macro level with all the rich context from the afterword, it gains even more meaning. A masterful book that was satisfyingly quick, too.

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan

I’m mad just thinking about this book.

The Kennedy dynasty—”Camelot”, entirely orchestrated by Jackie post-assassination BTW—is larger than life. Defining America, they are some of the most famous men in the world. Read: men. This book takes a look at the women who were unlucky enough to find themselves born into, married into, or simply in the Kennedy orbit.

We all knew JFK was a philanderer: it was disappointingly yet perfectly naughtily part of his charm. But oh my, that only scratches the surface. Other than Rose Kennedy, mother of the JFK generation and the matriarch married to Joe Kennedy, who was very impactful in the family’s rise to power by beating perfection as the only option into each and every little Catholic head, these women were doomed. Some stories I knew—the devastating lobotomy and subsequent abandonment of Rosemary—but many I didn’t. The author talked of the “well-worn Kennedy playbook”: harming others, walking away unscathed, and learning nothing from the experience. So many women were left in the wake of reckless Kennedy men.

This book tells of these women’s “false codas, written by the Kennedys or their enablers, that invariably blame them. False endings full of slander, misogyny, and character assassination—wrought untold collateral damage, not just for victims but for all of us.” It will fill you with rage, but it’s a worthwhile read.

Also, one of the smartest, most impeccable titles I’ve ever seen.

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Do let me know if you pick any of these up and what you think :) See you next time!

Love, Shelby