what I read last week

long island, the divorce, small things like these

Jan 13, 2025

Good morning!

I read three fiction books last week. I did not plan this, but two of them focused on marital breakdowns, which got a bit depressing to read by the end of the week.

Let’s get into it.

What I read:

Long Island by Colm Tóibín

Long Island is the long-awaited sequel to Brooklyn, which was adapted into a movie starring Saoirse Ronan back in 2015. Brooklyn followed Eilis Lacy in the 1950s. She immigrated from Ireland to Brooklyn and fell in love with Tony Fiorello, an Italian-American plumber. After secretly marrying Tony, she returned for a family funeral in Ireland, where she had a summer affair with Jim Farrell.

Long Island is set in the 1970s. Eilis is in her 40s and lives with Tony and their two teenage children, Rosella and Larry. Tony’s brothers and parents live next door in their town on Long Island. We quickly learn that their marriage is not a happy one. The novel opens with the news that Tony has fathered a child with another woman. The woman’s husband tells Eilis they will leave the baby on the Fiorello’s doorstep. Eilis wants nothing to do with the baby, but her mother-in-law hints that she will raise the child next door to Eilis.

Desperate to escape her failing marriage, Eilis returns to Ireland to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday. It’s the first time Eilis has returned since her affair with Jim. In Ireland, she reconnects with her childhood best friend, Nancy, who runs a chip shop, and Jim. Unbeknownst to Eilis, Jim and Nancy are secretly engaged. However, Jim is also still in love with Eilis. Tóibín switches between the perspectives of Eilis, Nancy, and Jim throughout the novel.

I read Brooklyn shortly before the movie came out and loved it. The scenes in Ireland (and with Jim) were my favorites in both the book and the movie, so I was excited to read Long Island. I could not put this one down. Tóibín explores a different type of immigrant story, like in Brooklyn and Celine Song’s movie Past Lives, which follows two childhood sweethearts over 24 years (one friend immigrates from Korea to Toronto). Immigration, homesickness, regret, and our countless alternative lives are represented through lost love.

Tóibín’s world feels fully inhabited, and the characters are quietly funny. The love story between Jim and Eilis ripped me apart. I was genuinely sad when I looked this book up on Goodreads and realized that everyone else did not enjoy it as much as I did. This book is definitely worth a read!

Rating: 4.3/5

Genre: Historical Fiction

Page count: 294 pages

Audio: 9 hours 40 minutes

Movie/TV pairings: Brooklyn; Past Lives

The Divorce by Moa Herngren

Originally published in Swedish, The Divorce was translated into English last year. It is primarily set over the course of one summer and follows Bea and Niklas, who have been married for 32 years and live in Stockholm. They are in their 50s and have two teenage daughters together. He works as a pediatrician, and she is a web designer for the Red Cross.

The novel opens with Bea and Niklas preparing for their annual summer vacation to Gotland Island. Bea has arranged everything. Niklas just needs to buy the ferry tickets. The night before they are set to leave, they argue over Nikolas’s failure to purchase the tickets. Niklas leaves the house and does not come back. He eventually responds to Bea’s calls and texts with a single message: “Not coming home.” The couple eventually divorce.

Herngren toggles between the perspectives of Bea and Niklas. Bea has the first third of the book, and Niklas dominates the middle third. The last third alternates between the two perspectives.

I decided to read The Divorce after reading Pandora Sykes’s review a few months ago. Sykes compared it to Fleishman Is in Trouble, which I loved. The Divorce is somewhat similar to Fleishman; they both show both perspectives on a divorce. However, the parallels stop there. I did not love The Divorce. This book starts out slow, which did not bother me initially — I like a taut domestic drama. But it just continued to drag on. As we get to know Bea and Niklas more through the novel, they become increasingly unlikeable.

At one point, Bea says something like “I’m a first-world person with first-world problems.” These are very much first-world problems but without any interesting tension, drama, or resolution. I would not strongly discourage this book, but I also wouldn’t strongly recommend it.

Rating: 3.3/5

Genre: Fiction

Page count: 352 pages

Audio: 10 hours

Movie/TV pairings: Fleishman Is in Trouble

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Small Things Like These is set in Ireland in December 1985. Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, lives in a small Irish town with his wife and five daughters. One day, he makes a delivery at the local convent and sees a teenage girl who has been locked in a coal shed for most of the night.

The girl is being held at one of the Magdalene Laundries, which were secret institutions usually run by the Catholic Church for women and young girls who got pregnant out of marriage. The women were worked and abused at the workhouses, and their children that were taken from them were often neglected or killed. The Magdalene Laundries lasted from the 1700s until the 1990s.

We learn that Bill is the son of an unmarried Catholic mother who got pregnant with him at 16. Another family took her in, so she was spared the Magdalene Laundries. Keegan follows Bill as he struggles with what to do about the girl he’s discovered: Should he do something or, like the rest of the townspeople, turn a blind eye?

If you haven’t read Claire Keegan’s books yet (and you like literary fiction), you should. She is genuinely one of the best living fiction writers. Her prose is exceptional — words aren’t wasted here.

Small Things Like These is like a revised Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. While Scrooge changes his lifestyle out of fear of his own loneliness, Bill reassesses his life decisions at significant personal risk (his entire family could be ostracized in the community). This quiet book haunts you. I highly recommend it.

Rating: 4.5/5

Genre: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Short Stories/Novellas

Page count: 128 pages

Audio: 1 hour 57 minutes

Movie/TV pairings: Cillian Murphy’s Small Things Like These

What I generally can’t stop thinking about:

“Inside the dash to save the Getty Villa from the Palisades fire: A timeline” in the Los Angeles Times

The LA fires have been heartbreaking to watch. This article about saving the Getty Villa is a positive story amid this devastation.

“What are ‘Super Scoopers,’ the planes used to fight the L.A. wildfires?” in The Washington Post

CL-415 Super Scoopers are being used to fight LA’s wildfires. They are amphibious water bombers that scoop up large amounts of water from the ocean or lake and drop them on wildfires from about 100 feet in the air. One Canadian plane was recently grounded after colliding with a private drone (that was illegally operating in the area).

“Novak Djokovic’s ‘Crazy’ New Coach: His Former Rival” in The Wall Street Journal

When I read the news in sports lately, I feel like I’m reading fiction (like how Lindsey Vonn is out of retirement). Djokovic has hired Andy Murray as his coach.