Upcoming Reads and Foux du Fafa

Sunday, Maya and I went to the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland to Foux du Fafa around. That is what we call it when we want to just walk around a neighborhood, maybe have a meal or a drink, do some window shopping, etc. Our more specific goal for this day was for Maya to see the temporary location of one of our favorite bookstores, as they are in the process of rebuilding their old location that was destroyed in a fire last year.

We started out with lunch at a pub with a nice outdoor patio. We enjoyed watching a dad party (4 young dads with their babies) and several dogs that came through. Maya had eggs Benedict with smoked salmon and some prosecco, and I had a grilled chicken sandwich and a glass of Chardonnay. There was live music that was mostly good but sometimes a little loud for our taste. The weather was perfect, low 70s with no wind.

After lunch we meandered over to East Bay Booksellers and did some shopping. I mostly took pictures of books that I was interested in, then came home and put them on hold via my Libby library app. I do try to always buy at least one book though, to support independent bookstores.

Cassandra at the Wedding ~ Dorothy Baker.

This is not a new book, it first came out in 1962. I will listen to this via Libby, but it looks like Maya bought the physical copy, so I will have that option as well. Here’s the blurb:

“Cassandra Edwards is a graduate student at Berkeley: gay, brilliant, nerve-racked, miserable. At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding.”

Cleopatra and Frankenstein ~ Coco Mellors

I can’t remember whether Maya said she had listened to this book already or not, but it sounded interesting to me, so I’m going to listen via Libby. Here’s the blurb:

”Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank’s life is full of all the excesses Cleo’s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could’ve predicted.”

The Guest ~ Emma Cline

I have no recollection of whether we had a conversation around this one, but I took a picture of it and put it on hold via Libby. Here’s the blurb:

“Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.

A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.

With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.”

Trust ~ Hernan Diaz

This is another book that Maya bought and I put on hold via Libby. The blurb:

“Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.”

Sour Cherry ~ Natalia Theodoridou

This one looks like it will be weird. Maya bought it, I will listen via Libby. Here’s the blurb:

”The tale begins with Agnes. After losing her baby, Agnes is called to the great manor house to nurse the local lord’s baby boy. But something is wrong with the child: his nails grow too fast, his skin smells of soil, and his eyes remind her of the dark forest. As he grows into a boy, then into man, a plague seems to follow him everywhere. Trees wither at the roots, fruits rot on their branches, and the town turns against him. The man takes a wife, who bears him a son. But tragedy strikes in cycles and his family is forced to consider their own malignancy—until wife after wife, death after death, plague after plague, every woman he touches becomes a ghost. The ghosts become a chorus, and they call urgently to our narrator as she tries to explain, in our very real world, exactly what has happened to her. The ghosts can all agree on one thing, an inescapable truth about this man, this powerful lord who has loved them and led them each to ruin: If you leave, you die. But if you die, you stay.”

Bunny ~ Mona Awad

ThIs picture is of the sequel, We Love You Bunny, but I put the first book, Bunny on hold via Libby. I couldn’t take a picture of it because it is on back order at the bookstore, and I’m trying to keep it real with this post and only use pictures that I took. Anyway, Maya told me about Bunny, which sounds deeply weird, and which I suspect both Nicole and Sarah might enjoy. Here’s the Bunny blurb:

”Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny,” and seem to move and speak as one. 

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled “Smut Salon,” and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus “Workshop” where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.”

The Voices of Adriana ~ Elvira Navarro

This is the book I purchased. Here’s the blurb:

“Adriana has become obsessed with her father’s online dating. Recently widowed, he’s on a self-destructive, manic search for a partner to accompany him through his twilight years. At the same time, her life as an isolated grad student feels unreal, and to fill the void of her mother’s death, Adriana begins writing, trying on different voices. She builds worlds from the online profiles of her father’s latest flings, that is until more fundamental voices–those of her grandmother and mother–begin calling out to her in the night. The Voices of Adriana, the latest from Spanish writer Elvira Navarro, is an innovative novel about grief and how we might reanimate the voices of those we’ve lost, not as ghosts, but as living parts of ourselves.”

Other things I purchased while foux du fafaing around ~ a delicious Sancerre adjacent wine that I used to be able to purchase here, but the local wine merchant closed; a pound of coffee beans for Ted from a local roaster that he enjoys; a birthday card for my brother that says ‘One year older, ten times weirder’, which is perfect for a sister to give her older brother; a postcard of an alligator chorus for my BIL who is from Louisiana, that he will get as a birthday card; and a fancy pen that I splurged on for myself because I wanted it.

Have you read any of these books? Do they sound interesting to you? Do you have a term that you use when you want to foux du fafa around on a beautiful day without any clear agenda?