Hello, readers! Welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I have to pick five books from my to-be-read pile that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Picture

To be honest, I don’t have that many books pertaining to pictures or photography or even graphic novels. As such, I am again taking the liberty of sharing books from a different subject: recent works of American literature that I am planning to end before the year ends or at least have become part of my perpetually growing reading list.

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: Tom Lake
Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: Harper
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 309

Synopsis: 

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughter examine their own lives and their relationship with their mother, and are forced to reframe their understanding of the world they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives our parents led before they were our parents. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional acuity, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most acclaimed literary talents at work today.

Title: Family Lore
Author: Elizabeth Acevedo
Publisher: ECCO
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 368

Synopsis: 

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake – a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led – her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastor, and Camila.

But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.

Spanning the three days prior to the wake, Family Lore traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City. Told with Elizabeth Acevedo’s inimitable vice, this is an indelible portrait of sisters and cousins, aunts and nieces – one family’s journey through their history, helping them better navigate all that is to come.

Title: Crook Manifesto
Author: Colson Whitehead
Publisher: Doubleday
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 319

Synopsis: 

It’s 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening toward bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amid this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It’s strictly the straight and narrow for him – until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter, May, and he decides to hip up his old police contact, Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated and deadly.

It’s 1973. The counterculture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant – Pepper, Carney’s endearingly violent partner in crime. It’s getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxpoitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook – to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July Fourth ad he can live with (TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF GETTING AWAY WITH IT!), while his wife, Elizabeth, is campaigning for her childhood friend, former D.A. and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney’s tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.

Crooked Manifesto is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family. Colson Whitehead’s kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem is sure to stand as one of the all-time great evocations of a place and a time.

Title: I Have Some Questions For You
Author: Rebecca Makkai
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 435

Synopsis: 

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past – the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Ketih, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the guilt of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers – needs – to let sleeping dogs lie. But when she’s invited back to teach a course, Bodie falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid. She begins to wonder if the wrong man was convicted, and if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

I Have Some Questions for You is award-winning author Rebecca Makkai’s most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

Title: Hello Beautiful
Author: Ann Napolitano
Publisher: The Dial Press
Publishing Date: 2023
No. of Pages: 383

Synopsis: 

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him – so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it’s as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment; every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos.

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him – so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it’s as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment; every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos.

An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.