In Book Swap, a regular feature that is entirely unique, about books, and not at all related to the music feature In Rotation, a Reader staffer recommends two to five books and then asks a local wordsmith, literary enthusiast, or publishing-adjacent professional to do the same. It is awesome. Way better than it would be if it were about records.
When I am especially tired and angry, I read romance novels for comfort because I know they will always end happily, with the characters learning to bring out the best in each other. (Rape as a plot element went out of style about 20 years ago; now everybody’s all about enthusiastic consent.) One I have been thinking about a lot lately is The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan (2014, self-published). It’s about a feminist newspaper publisher in England in the 1870s who is fighting off a conspiracy to destroy her paper led by a misogynist peer who is angry that she wouldn’t sleep with him. A self-described scoundrel offers to help her because he, too, hates this misogynist peer. At one point he asks the publisher why she keeps putting out her paper in the face of so much opposition. He compares her fight for equality to emptying the Thames with a thimble. She reminds him that her paper is for women. They’re not trying to empty the Thames, she tells him. They’re taking those thimbles full of water and using them to grow their own gardens. It’s a beautiful metaphor, I think, and it makes me a little less tired and a little more hopeful.
