Five surprising books I made my husband read (and he loved)

An intimate look at how reading helped my husband through the early days of sobriety and beyond

My husband hasn’t always been a big reader. He has a collection of beatnik and post-modern books by Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Vonnegut from his hipster cigarette-smoking days, but the fact that he reads before bed nightly is a newer occurrence in our house. I’m not going to take credit for his new-found love of reading, but I’m not not going to take credit for at least some of it.

Enter the power of a well-placed book recommendation.

A good recommendations has as much to do with timing as it does with taste. For Doug, the first good recommendation I gave him arrived at a time when he was new to his sobriety, and rather than staying up late drinking wine, he’d begun retreating to bed early to read. He’s always been into non-fiction, but during these early days of sobriety, he wanted something new.

“I read all the self-help books all the time, so when I need fiction, I go to you,” he says. So he turned to me, and the book I recommended may surprise you: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. He wanted something juicy and escapist; something that would distract him from one habit and, hopefully, get him interested in another. This book did it for him.

I don’t remember what he read next, but it wasn’t long before he asked for another fiction recommendation. And another. Another. Now he reads almost as much fiction as he does nonfiction. Recommending books is genuinely one of my greatest joys in life, and the fact that I now get to do this for my husband, plus talk to him about the books after he reads them, delights me.

Like Doug, everyone’s reading tastes are specific. (For a fabulous essay on reading tastes, check out

Sara Hildreth

’s post, Trying to hack our reading is leading to stagnation.) And, as mentioned, timing matters, but that’s what makes a good book recommendation so powerful. It can even be transformative.

While Doug was navigating the unfamiliar terrain of sobriety, he found respite in books — the far healthier, more productive dopamine hit. Almost four years into his sobriety, he’s still reading.

Here are five books I made my husband read (and he loved):

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This book is glitzy, glamorous, and infused with Hollywood personalities — and my pop-culture-averse husband loved it. Here’s a quick overview: Evelyn Hugo was the hottest actress of her time. From the 1950s when she arrived in LA to 30 years later when she stopped acting, Evelyn was the scandalous beauty everyone talked about. In that short time, she married seven different men.

Fast forward to present day: Evelyn is ready to clear up the mystery surrounding her and her many marriages. She hires a magazine reporter named Monique to record her story — her real story. The book takes us back and forth in time as Evelyn reveals the truth behind her many husbands, illustrating a picture of the beautiful person she really was beneath all the glam.

It’s a fast read but it also has a lot of emotional depth, and even though Doug couldn’t relate to much going on in the novel, he was able to appreciate a good story well told. More than that, this book was pivotal in his reading life because it showed him that the right book at the right time could be transformative.

Open Throat by Henry Hoke

When verifying this list with Doug before writing this essay, he told me Open Throat was a paradigm shift for him. I yap about this book all the time, to the extent that I sometimes wonder if readers think I’m fixating and have a one-track mind. If so, you might be right! That’s how much I loved this book.

Open Throat is a slim novel narrated by a gay mountain lion who goes by they/them pronouns and lives in the hills under the Hollywood sign. Because they’re a mountain lion and not a human, they don’t use any punctuation, nor do they spell everything right. How would a mountain lion know LA is spelled as it is and not “ellay?” All they know is what they learn from hikers around their home in the hills.

As an observer, they are a sharp witness to humanity. They talk about how people are always looking down at their phones, hiking but not talking or observing. They consider the homeless encampment nearby as their town, their people. They are protective of these people, too, not judging them for being without a home because they don’t even know they are homeless.

Our narrator eventually befriends a girl who names them Heckit. Throughout the brief story, Heckit learns to love. Heckit witnesses a careless man do something horrible to his people in the homeless encampment. Heckit goes on a roadtrip with their friend and seeks justice.

It is so beautiful. It is THE most beautiful.

While I still had Open Throat from the library, I put the small volume into Doug’s hands. I told him it sounds weird, but it’s so good, and he devoured it. While in bed reading, he laughed and read me a quote. I asked him if it was from page 39. That passage stood out to me, too, and because it was a library book and I couldn’t underline it, I had memorized the page number so I could return to it.

Here’s the passage:

I have trouble sleeping in the twisted trees because there are so many hikers who go by and talk loud all day

they talk about how no one in ellay has real jobs but from what they describe as real jobs I don’t think they have them either

ellay is a mecca for the underemployed they say

to be employed they need skills

they say to each other you’ve got so many marketable skills

I go over my skills

my skills are hiding so long that you forget I’m there

— Henry Hoke, Open Throat

I find the author to be absolutely genius to have selected a mountain lion to reveal these granular and honest tenets of humanity — ones humans are often blind to.

Whenever Doug finds out someone is a reader, he asks if they’ve read this book. That’s how much space this tiny book takes up in our house.

Atomic Habits by James Clear

You may know this by now, but I’ve been a steadfast habit tracker for over five years. Every single night before going to bed, I open my habit tracker (here’s the journal I use) and give myself an X for all the things I do in that day that are in line with the person I want to be. This process has been the single most productive thing I’ve ever done for myself. Interestingly, it wasn’t until a few years after beginning to track my habits that I read Atomic Habits by James Clear. After reading it, my practice became deeper and even more intentional.

Atomic Habits was a game-changer for Doug, too, and would be for anyone, whether they track their habits or not. The premise of the book is as bare-bones as it gets: Success is the result of daily habits — not once-in-a-lifetime transformations. It’s about making small improvements daily so that everything you do drives you toward the person you want to become. That’s why checking in with my habits daily has been so beneficial for me. Do I want to be a writer? Then I better be writing.

For Doug, does he want to be sober? Then he better not be drinking. It’s so simple and so hard, but the book helps you understand how influential our seemingly benign daily habits can be and gives you all the tools you need to check in with your habits and make adjustments accordingly.

“You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results,” James Clear says. It’s not about what your habits are doing for you today, but how they will add up in the long run.

While it’s a particularly good book for someone trying to overcome a previous bad habit, I think (and Doug agrees) everyone should read it. We could all be reminded that a half-hour of Instagram scrolling today isn’t just a half-hour of Instagram scrolling today; it’s 3.5 hours per week. It’s 182.5 hours per year — over four and a half work weeks. It truly changes your life when you become aware of your habits and adjust them according to the person you want to be.

As

Oliver Burkeman

says in Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, “the average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair.” Despair if you don’t have control over your habits. And if you want to gain some control, pick up Atomic Habits. And pick up Four Thousand Weeks for that matter, which is another book I made Doug read that he loved now that I think about it.

For further reading on Atomic Habits and habit tracking, here’s an essay I wrote last year.

Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

Halfway through last year, I decided that Blue Sisters was the best book I’d read in 2024. As the year went on, it maintained its status. This is exactly the kind of book I like: an engrossing story about tumultuous relationships — in this case, sisters — written by someone with a pristine command of language. Author Coco Mellors writes with lush prose that left my copy of the book absolutely inundated with underlines.

Blue Sisters is about four very different sisters: Avery, a recovering heroin addict turned lawyer who lives with her wife in England (“She does not know it yet, but in a few weeks, she will implode her life and marriage in ways she didn’t think possible”); Bonnie, the second sister, a former boxer turned bouncer in Los Angeles who “can get ice out of the tray without bashing it on the counter”; and the youngest, Lucky, a model living in Paris who “has said the words I need a drink one hundred and thirty-two times so far this year. That’s more than she’s said I love you in her entire life.” Between Bonnie and Lucky was Nicky, before she died at age 27. We only see her in memory.

The plot is full of tension and high stakes, but something that stuck out to me is how the author, who is very open about her sobriety, wrote about addiction. Her own experience with addiction gives her an authority on the brittle subject matter such that she can write honestly, powerfully.

Doug regards this book highly, and not only because of her very real depictions of sobriety.

Here’s a scene with Avery, the recovering heroin-addict, that struck me:

“You know what I think really makes me an addict?” she asked. “It’s not how many drugs I took or how much I drank. It’s not even the lying.”

“What?”

She inhaled so deeply that her lungs burned.

“I find what gives me pleasure and I do it until it gives me pain,” she said. “Every time.”

Charlie looked at her with his funny half smile.

“Yeah, but how else would you know when to stop?”

I wasn’t sure how a book with so much talk of addiction would feel to Doug. Was it too fresh a wound for him, three years after getting sober? But no, he thought it was great. So great that he next picked up Cleopatra and Frankenstein, Coco Mellors’ first book, which he found on my bookshelf. He read it before me and, unsurprisingly, he loved it.

Addiction is a delicate subject, particularly for someone battling it daily, but Coco Mellors does it right.

James by Percival Everett

I haven’t written anything about this book because, truthfully, I don’t know how to do it justice. There’s a reason Percival Everett won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It’s one of the most memorable books I have ever read. My friend lent it to me, and while it was languishing on my overflowing TBR perch, Doug was once again in the market for his next read.

He hadn’t heard of James, but I told him he would see it everywhere now that we talked about it. (And he did.) When pitching it, I said I couldn’t vouch for it personally because I hadn’t read it, but that I knew it was good.

If you haven’t seen James everywhere you look, all you need to know is that it’s a re-imagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain told from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave. The brilliance of the novel is revealed almost immediately, as readers learn that Jim — a literate, intelligent man who speaks proper English — takes on a dumbed-down dialect when around white people so they don’t feel threatened by him.

I read James without having read Huck Finn, and while I don’t know if that lessened the experience for me, I do know that I still had an exceptionally good time reading it. It was interesting for me to witness Doug read this book before I read it. When he finished it, he told me he understood what all the buzz was about. Naturally, when I read it, I felt the same way.

After spending the time reflecting on these books and why they resonated with him so much, I asked Doug which one was his favorite. It was Blue Sisters.

This Mother’s Day weekend, Doug took our kids to the library so I could have some time to read (bless him). It happened to be the used book sale that day. Typically, I’d be the one collecting all the books and he’d sensibly decide that we have enough books on our shelves. But he came home with three books he scavenged from the sale. I was — I am — so proud. I won’t take credit for the words written in the books I recommended, or the timing in which I recommended them, but I’m happy to have contributed to the elevation of his very real reading life.

I’d love to hear your experiences recommending the right books at the right time or being on the receiving end of a well-placed recommendation. What book came to you at the right time? What book will you never forget?

Also, what are you reading? What are you underlining?

What I’m reading: Orbital by Samantha Harvey

What I’m underlining: [From Orbital by Samantha Harvey]: “The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.”

Thank you to all of you who told me about your journaling practices! So many people shared their experiences with the journal and I loved every single story. I’m pleased to announce my my daughter randomly selected

Jessica Dylan Miele

to win the signed copy of

Suleika Jaouad

’s The Book of Alchemy! I hope you love it, Jessica! ❤️

Love, Kolina

---

When you purchase books through my links, you support this newsletter and an indie bookstore of your choice at no cost to you.