Spring time, BookTok sensation, April book club read, AI-generated cats

Grapevine #107 🍇

Apr 02, 2023

Hello and happy Sunday!

flock of white birds on green grass field during daytime — Photo by meriç tuna on Unsplash

Is it spring yet? (Lifts head and looks outside.) No? Back to reading then!

Not that I would be doing anything different if it were spring already. I have visions of myself reading a book somewhere in nature, or on a bench in a park. But the truth is that I am not that person. If I start to consider the time it takes for me to get to a place similar to the one in my visions, I then start to calculate how many pages I would read in the time it takes me to get there, and I end up just reading wherever I am anyway.

It’s been a cold week, and I ended up reading quite a bit. I managed to do something that I envy in many readers: I started a book in the morning and I couldn’t put it down so I finished it in one day!

Verity by Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover is the hip author who is a BookTok sensation. Her book was the first one I ever saw whose cover contained a reference to TikTok. Which means it immediately discouraged me from reading it. I’ll admit it, I was biased like I’m sure many of us were and still are about BookTok

Long story short, I kept coming across her books and I bought this one because I liked the cover. One of my good friends had read it and recommended it to me wholeheartedly. The reason why I was even more intrigued was that she wouldn’t tell me anything about it, the plot or the characters. She just kept repeating that I have to read it.

I looked into it and realised that there was some sort of controversy over the fact that the author released this book sometime in 2018 and then revisited it, added a final chapter to it and republished it. Which probably explains how the conversation started and why the bookstores are taken by storm with a new cover and a new print.

This is the book I couldn’t put down for a whole day last weekend. Not because it’s great literature, but because it’s a very well done plot and it created enough mystery around the characters that I needed to know what happened. I understood my friend’s position too, who had only told me to read it.

To those who are familiar with it, I would equate the story to Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier. As a writer, I’ve always appreciated a book that manages to create such a strong plot around a character that never even appears in the book and I’ve long and hard thought about ways to recreate it.

I can say Colleen Hoover did it.

The controversy continues online and people are still debating which ending is better: the original or the revisited one. All the while I am thinking how astute Colleen was for doing this! And it also totally works for the plot and the characters!

I’m not sure I can say much without giving it away, but I will say I am not picking a side: I can’t! Both endings work! And I can find satisfaction in believing either one of them.

Our next read is Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

We’ve just had our Dune discussion last week which was nothing short of spectacular! Stay tuned for a podcast episode soon and do let me know in the comments what is your one takeaway from this book and what it is you’re looking forward to seeing in the upcoming movie.