The 9 Best Things I Read In November

Nazis, Weddings, Sex Therapist Transcriptionists

Sometimes I can go months without reading something that really sticks to my ribs. But in the past month or so, I’ve been inundated with some shockingly memorable and powerful reads that I’ll be thinking about for years to come, so I wanted to share them!

The 8 Best Things I Read Last Month

• The Mitfords were a very quirky upper crust English family who were famous and infamous (for various reasons) throughout the earlier parts of the 20th century. And I went through a real Mitford phase in my twenties. I read and loved this book, and read and loved all of Nancy Mitford’s darkly frothy novels. So I knew many (most!) of the Mitfords were Nazi sympathizers (one was an actual pal of Hitler’s), but I knew a lot less about the black communist sheep of the family, Jessica Mitford. This review of Jessica’s memoir, Hons and Rebels, which traces Jessica’s socialist becoming, feels depressingly relevant and made me request Hons and Rebels from my library post haste.

When I first read Hons and Rebels two decades ago, I believed fascism was a defeated force, something you encountered in books like this one; now it is alive and pulsing and stories about the carnage it causes and the relationships it shatters are all too real, as they were for Mitford, on a global and deadly scale.

• Speaking of Nazis! Perhaps nothing left me more utterly gobsmacked last month than this piece, which is not only a journalistic tour de force, but a clarifying history lesson about the American Northeast’s relationship to racial segregation, the explicitly white supremacist goals embedded in the founding of many American states, and holy shit, a hero to end all heroes in a true story that should’ve been front pages news.