Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

If you prefer your recommendations in audio form, you can listen to Ask a Book Critic, part of Vox Quick Hits. Hear a new episode of Ask a Book Critic — always under 15 minutes long — every two weeks wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

If you prefer your recommendations in audio form, you can listen to Ask a Book Critic, part of Vox Quick Hits. Hear a new episode of Ask a Book Critic — always under 15 minutes long — every two weeks wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

If you prefer your recommendations in audio form, you can listen to Ask a Book Critic, part of Vox Quick Hits. Hear a new episode of Ask a Book Critic every two weeks wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

If you prefer your recommendations in audio form, you can listen to Ask a Book Critic, part of Vox Quick Hits. Hear a new episode of Ask a Book Critic — always under 10 minutes long — every two weeks wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

If you prefer your recommendations in audio form, you can listen to Ask a Book Critic, part of Vox Quick Hits. Hear a new episode of Ask a Book Critic — always under 10 minutes long — every two weeks wherever you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

I always like a good murder mystery when the weather starts to get chilly, so right now I’m reading Tana French’s forthcoming book The Searcher. I had a bad moment with it earlier when the male protagonist began describing a woman in a way that made my hackles rise — but then I remembered that by the Tana French formula, that moment just means that the protagonist is exposing his own blind spots with regard to women, and in the end she’ll turn out to be the key to everything in the way he least expects. What makes French great, though, is I have absolutely no idea how this lady could possibly be connected to the mystery, so I am still on tenterhooks waiting.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

My friends, it has been a little while since we’ve done one of these! I’ve received some concerned messages from readers who worried that the series was over for good, but I promise it is not. It will continue, just not on a weekly basis as it was for awhile.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

This week I’ve been reading Brit Bennet’s The Vanishing Half and feeling faintly stunned by it. I liked Bennet’s debut novel The Mothers quite a bit but didn’t fall in love with it. But The Vanishing Half has me head over heels. I’ll tell you more about it later in my review, but right now I can say that I have to keep pausing while I read to luxuriate in how beautiful the sentences are.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

I have spent the last week poking around my galley pile, trying to find a book that fit my particular mood. I spent a long time with the forthcoming novel Beach Read, which aims to dramatize the old debate over whether “women’s fiction” is just as worthy of respect and acclaim as literary fiction is. That’s a debate I’m always interested in — but the characters in Beach Read spend all their time acting as though the problem the literary establishment cites with “women’s fiction” is the happy endings, and I truly do not believe that is the case! I ended up getting too frustrated and putting it down before I finished.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

I binged my way through Catherine House this week, a new example of what the kids are calling dark academia. It’s one of those books where you’re on a college campus and it’s all incredibly luxurious but also austere because you’re working so hard, but all of these dark secrets are lurking in the corner. (I learned about dark academia while researching our book-club pick The Secret History, which is arguably the greatest example of dark academia as an aesthetic.) Catherine House is a hallucinatory and woozy take on this aesthetic, and I’m not entirely certain it holds together. Still, I enjoyed the book’s conclusion that to go to metaphorical grad school is to enter into a state of suspended animation.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

We have somehow made it to May, beloveds, and by the traditional publishing calendar, that’s when the beach reads start to come out. This year, many of us probably won’t be spending time at the beach, but nevertheless, a variety of light and frothy books have begun landing on my desk. For that reason, I spent this week with Emma Straub’s family dramedy All Adults Here, and I can heartily recommend it if your current mood is wanting to feel like you run a bookshop in a cozy New England fishing town but also you solve murders on the side, and you want to read something to soothe your nerves because of your jam-packed crime-solving/book-selling schedule. (That is, I must confess, often my own mood.)

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now, or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

I’ve been slowly easing myself back into work reading, which is always fun, but it also means I rarely get to choose my book by mood. These are the downsides of getting to read for a living: You might be craving something about complicated female friendships but instead find yourself frantically binge-reading a political thriller about a pandemic.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now, or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

This week I’ve been dipping in and out of The Moment of Tenderness, a new collection of Madeleine L’Engle’s early short stories (some of which have never been published). It’s interesting to me mostly as a L’Engle completist, because it provides a look at her early take on some of the themes that animated her later writing: isolated and lonely children, glamorous mothers, and absent or emasculated fathers. In these stories, though, those themes are mundane and miserable, with none of the magic and escape that L’Engle’s later books have. I’m not at all sure it’s making me feel better about the world, and I think I might send myself off on a quest for a different book to read soon, something that might better fit my mood.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now, or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

Currently, I’m knee-deep in Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, one of my favorite old comfort reads. I mentioned last week that I grew up on McKinley, and Sunshine is one of her best books, about a coffeehouse baker who forms an unlikely alliance with a vampire. Right now, I’m finding particular resonance in protagonist Sunshine’s tendency to stress-bake her way through anything she does not want to think about. I don’t share Sunshine’s creativity in the kitchen, though, so I have been stress-baking chocolate chip cookies rather than the Death of Marat (a fluffy light pudding with raspberry and black currant filling). However, some beautiful soul on the internet appears to have pulled off a partial Julie/Julia Project with Sunshine’s baked goods, so maybe now is the time for me to learn?

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now, or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

Personally, I am currently in the mood to read something quiet and restful by someone completely in control of their prose, so I just finished up with Robin McKinley’s Chalice. I grew up on McKinley, who came up in the ’70s as one of the first fantasy writers to let girls have adventures, and her exquisitely balanced sentences influenced my ear for prose more than probably any other writer.

Welcome to the latest installment of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic, in which, I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now, or how you’d like to be feeling instead.

Books are a good thing to think about right now. Of course, I am biased because it is my job to think about books, but every time I turn my eyes away from one of my screens and the endless, frictionless scroll of despair, and pick up a physical book instead, I feel better. It’s as though I’m looking through a window into a different world, and it reminds me that together, we can build a reality that is better and stronger than the one in which we find ourselves trapped right now.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Vox’s Ask a Book Critic. In each edition, I, Vox book critic Constance Grady, will provide book recommendations to suit your very specific mood: either how you’re feeling right now, or how you’d like to be feeling instead. If you’d like me to recommend something to you, email me at [email protected] with the subject line “Ask a Book Critic.” The more specific your mood, the better!

All right, gang. Let’s get to it. Let me help you find something to read.