what I read last week
dream count, consider yourself kissed
Hope you all had a restful weekend!
This week’s reading theme turned out to be: COVID novels that I didn’t realize were COVID novels.
I read Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Adichie’s long-awaited novel) and Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley (a recent Natalie Portman book club pick). I admittedly don’t love pandemic novels, and I can’t say these books changed my opinion on that. But let’s get into it!
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Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Dream Count follows the lives of four women: Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou. The novel is narrated in the close third-person perspective and is divided into four parts, with each section focusing on a specific woman. The women are all loosely tied to Chiamaka, whose perspective opens and closes the novel, as well as by a sexual assault that unfolds later in the novel (the details resemble Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged assault of a Guinean hotel maid in 2011).
Overview: The novel opens in Washington, D.C., during the pandemic. Chiamaka, a forty-four-year-old travel writer, spends time in Zoom rooms as restaurants and schools close. Her thoughts wander to some dark places:
Every morning, I was hesitant to rise, because to get out of bed was to approach again the possibility of sorrow . . . . This is all there is, this fragile breathing in and out. Where have all the years gone, and have I made the most of life? But what is the final measure for making the most of life, and how would I know if I have?
Chiamaka thinks through her past (awful) ex-lovers, including an academic who considered love to be “pedestrian . . . bourgeois juvenilia that Hollywood has been feeding people for years.”
While she doesn’t have the romantic partnership she envisioned, Chiamaka has close friends and family. Adichie devotes the next several sections of the book to several people in Chiamaka’s inner circle. Her best friend, Zikora, is a lawyer who is raising her son alone and has a tense relationship with her own mother. Chiamaka’s cousin, Omelogor, works in finance in Nigeria but later attends graduate school in the U.S. to pursue a PhD (her thesis focuses on pornography). Chiamaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, moved to the U.S., where she is raising her teenage daughter.
Adichie focuses on each woman’s perspective as she explores motherhood, relationships, and dreams.
Opinion: Dream Count is Adichie’s first published novel in more than a decade. If you are unfamiliar with her, she’s a famous novelist (Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus, and others). She’s also famous for her 2012 Ted talk, “We Should All be Feminists,” which was sampled by Beyonce in a song and later published in an essay-length book. While she is a bit of a feminist darling, she is a polarizing figure and has made controversial comments on trans women. I mention these details because some reviews engage with Adichie the person rather than the book itself.
Dream Count takes on a lot. It is essentially four novellas, and subject-matter-wise, it covers the American left, racial tensions, gender dynamics, cancel culture, and sexual assault.
I personally struggled to get into this one. I think it was partly because of the novel’s framework. I personally love a book filled with interconnected novellas—it’s like getting four books for one. However, the risk is that the novel can seem disjointed and lacking a central narrative, as was the case for me here.
While the women are depicted as close, the novel doesn’t focus too much on their relationships. Instead, Dream Count centers on their relationships with absurdly awful men. The men in Dream Count are almost cartoonishly vile. I don’t necessarily have an issue with this characterization—some people are truly that bad! However, nuances can be lost when you depict the world in such Manichaean terms.
Overall: Maybe I’m missing something, but I wouldn’t jump to recommend Dream Count. It is a slow and fragmented read.
Rating: 3/5
Genre: Literary Fiction
Notable prizes/book clubs/lists: A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Chicago Review of Books
Page count: 416 pages
Audio: 19 hours 4 minutes
Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley
Consider Yourself Kissed is a fiction novel that follows a woman, Coralie, through ten years of her life as she navigates family life in her 30s.
Overview: Consider Yourself Kissed opens in 2013 with a meet-cute. Twenty-nine-year-old Coralie, who has recently moved to London from Australia, meets Adam, who in his late 30s, and Adam’s adorable four-year-old daughter. Coralie and Adam quickly hit it off.
Coralie has dreams of writing, but she quietly sidelines her work as she builds a family: “The drafts of her manuscript stayed under the seat cushion of the sofa. After a while, she moved them to an IKEA bag. Then she put the bag under the bed. Then she forgot about her writing entirely.”
As a decade passes, Coralie builds a strong relationship with Adam, but at the same time, she loses her identity:
She remembered when they’d first met, how joyfully they’d opened themselves up and knitted themselves back together, every thread of her fused with every thread of him. What had happened to her? How could a person have everything they ever wanted and still be empty? How could a person be surrounded, always, by people they loved—and yet still feel alone? In the back garden of the house on Graham Road, a funny thing had happened to a tree. It was, or had been, a birch. Over time, ivy had grown round it, bending the tree within. Now the ivy was as thick as her forearm, and the tree inside was crushed. Could two living beings entwine without one of them having to die?
Opinion: I chose to read Consider Yourself Kissed because it was a Natalie Portman Book Club pick. While I don’t follow her book club too closely, I’ve liked several of her past choices. I also fell for the blurbs:
“This summer’s must read . . . a sparkily enjoyable romantic comedy like One Day and Normal People.” – The Times (London).
“A love song to women everywhere.” – Annabel Monaghan.
“Consider Yourself Kissed is your new best friend in novel form.” – The Cut
Now, I know blurbs are sort of meaningless, so falling for them is completely on me. I don’t really ever read The Cut, and in hindsight, The Times quote is nonsensical—I wouldn’t describe One Day or Normal People as “a sparkily enjoyable romantic comedy.”
Anyways, you probably see what I’m getting at. I wouldn’t describe Consider Yourself Kissed as “sparkily” either. Coralie spends considerable time reflecting on British politics, Brexit, and the pandemic. The primary narrative arc focuses on balancing work and family life, as well as the division of labor between partners.
While I think this story likely resonates with many people, this isn’t really the book I thought I had picked up. Marketing aside, I generally thought this was a pretty middle-of-the-road fiction book with pretty standard writing that I’d pick up in an airport. Personally, I prefer those types of books to be more escapist, as opposed to pandemic- and Brexit-themed, but that’s just me.
Overall: I didn’t hate this one, but I also wouldn’t recommend it to a friend.
Rating: 2.8/5
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Notable prizes/book clubs/lists: Natalie’s Book Club (May 2025 pick)
Page count: 336 pages
Audio: 8 hours 41 minutes
Movie/TV: Bridget Jones
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I watched Materialists last week and have a lot of thoughts. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t quite add up for me. Basically, it’s a movie about how people are more than their statistics (height, age, job, income, hair), but the main characters in this movie were oddly flat.
I thought Justin Chang in The New Yorker did a good job capturing some of the film’s shortcomings.
I loved this London Review of Books piece by Andrew O’Hagan on Joan Didion.
The Tucker Carlson-Ted Cruz interview aired this week. Seth Meyers joked: “[It was] like watching a sequel to ‘Alien vs. Predator’ called ‘I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, But the Predator Is Making Some Very Salient Points.”
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I love reading your book reviews (I adored the Andrew O’Hagan piece, too). Both of your recent reads have been on my periphery for a while and this post has helped me make up my mind to move along!