Dear Wags,

Stuck in traffic, dodging politics at the dinner table, or hiding from chaos this Thanksgiving? Quietly excuse yourself from the feast, and tuck into one of this week’s recommendations. BookWag ensures your reading is juicy, even when the turkey isn’t.

Yours Ever,

Leslie Moira

The Memory Palace by Nate DiMeo

DiMeo, the host of the acclaimed podcast The Memory Palace, has a talent for polishing curios from the past, shaping forgotten history into evocative vignettes. The real-life figures in this book—including a scientist who ditches everything to chase the quirky prairie chicken, a man who rises from slavery to Congress, Jewish refugees trapped aboard the ship St. Louis, and code inventor Samuel Morse—are accidental heroes, changing civilization thanks to twists of fate. These lyrical yarns include original illustrations and archival photographs. It’s like wandering through the world’s most enchanting attic.—Abigail P. Fillmore

Memories of Distant Mountains by Orhan Pamuk

From the ages of 7 to 22, Nobel Prize-winner Pamuk thought he was going to be a painter, in the mode of post-Impressionist George Seurat. Instead, he became a globally acclaimed novelist, screenwriter, and social critic. This collection of writing and artwork from his journals isn’t chronological, but arranged by moods—Pamuk’s feelings of joy, despair, and deep frustration with his native Turkey are paired with his dreamlike watercolors. Pamuk’s effort to pin down the phantoms darting through his mind makes for an intriguing portrait of a powerful, poetic intellect. Now in his seventies, he’s still restlessly trying to capture a beguiling world and commit its wonders to the page.—Galip İnal

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, tranlated by Barbara J. Haveland

Baby, baby, you’re out of time, wailed the Rolling Stones, summing up our dread of having life inexorably slip away. Danish author Balle turns that notion on its head in this tale of a woman mired in an eternal loop. Tara Stelter, an antiquarian book dealer in France, keeps reliving a single day—November 18th. She knows every detail of those 24 hours by heart, from birdsong to the rhythm of raindrops. Each morning, she tries to figure her way out of this conundrum with help from her patient husband Thomas, methodically retracing steps that may have led her into a vortex. This first installment of a seven-volume series doesn’t solve all these mysteries, but it elegantly charts how incidental actions can shift the world. Balle is making bigger points about human connection and longing that shine through.—Bess McNeill

Constant Reader: The New Yorker Columns 1927-1928 by Dorothy Parker (Forward by Sloane Crosley)

More than 50 years after she shuffled off her mortal coil, Dorothy Parker won’t drop the mic. Much of that appeal is in her rebuke of American sunniness. During her year as the New Yorker’s Constant Reader columnist, Parker turned her unforgiving intellect on other writers, and the results were high insult comedy. She skewered A.A. Milne (“Tonstant Weader Fwowed up” after having to read The House at Pooh Corner), took a shot at Emily Post (those who have mastered etiquette “would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness”), and hammered socialite author Margot Asquith (“The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature”). She ridiculed Mussolini and thought Little Orphan Annie had gone soft. It wasn’t all darts—Parker praised Hemingway for his economy and eulogized the “great, torn, foolhardy” Isadora Duncan. Most of Parker’s targets are now footnotes, while she is immortal. It pays not to hold your tongue.—Hazel Morse

Heartbreak is the National Anthem by Rob Sheffield

Is it possible not to reference a Taylor Swift lyric in a review of a book about her? Of course not! We know her all too well. Sheffield, a Rolling Stone writer (On Bowie, Dreaming the Beatles) and unlikely Swiftie, comes to praise the 34-year-old pop star, not bury her. In particular, he’s in awe of her knack for channeling female yearning. Trump may hate her, but Swift rises above it all, becoming one of the few transcendent figures in our fractured popular culture. The downside to this megastardom is that Swift’s life and art have already been thoroughly picked over—by her and many others. Sheffield’s angle is more personal: He’s a big, soppy fan, one challenged and threatened by the hairpin trigger in her songs, her constant edge of emotional danger. The best parts of this book are about how Swift works magic on that jaded male, middle-aged heart.—Alison Maine

“I wrote the kind of story I love to tell,” Barbara Taylor Bradford said of her 1979 bestseller A Woman of Substance. “About an ordinary woman who becomes extraordinary in living her life a certain way and goes out to conquer the world." The book went on to sell more than 30 million copies and established her as a paperback queen. Over the next four decades, she published 39 more novels, selling 91 million copies in 40 languages, all starring plucky heroines who broke rules, followed their dreams, and built empires. Like her protagonists, Taylor Bradford was self-made—a Yorkshire typist who made her way into journalism before turning to fiction. Never embraced by the literary elite, her books delighted ordinary women who found escape in fantasies of sex, power, and revenge. The author of those escapades understood her audience, not least because she had struggled for years before finding success. “I simply had to write fiction,” she said, recalling how she tried and failed at writing thrillers before putting together an outline for Substance in her late thirties. The soapiness of her plots was never the point. “Either she’s going to be a wimp and do nothing, or she’s going to be driven and ambitious,” she said of her protagonists. “Character is what drives everything forward.” Hers took her to the top.—Miles Munro

Questions and suggestions for our book supplement? Ping intern@culturewag.com, and we’ll get back to you in a jiffy. CultureWag celebrates culture—high, medium, and deliciously low. It’s an essential guide to the mediaverse, cutting through a cluttered landscape and serving up smart, funny recommendations to the most hooked-in audience in the galaxy. If somebody forwarded you this issue, consider it a coveted invitation and RSVP “Subscribe.” You’ll be part of the smartest set in Hollywood, Gstaad, Biarritz, and Bix in San Francisco, Doug Biederbeck’s sumptuous speakeasy off Jackson Square. Try the potato pillows topped with caviar.

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