Knopf 100--Day 13

45. The Senator’s Wife is a really clever novel with some smart plot twists along the way. It’s the story of the wife of a powerful and philandering senator. His cheating is an open secret in Washington, but the final straw for the wife comes when he sleeps with a friend of their daughters. They separate but don’t divorce. She is unable to move on from him and they eventually begin to have an affair of their own. They carry on like this until a plot twist puts the wife in the position of authority, which changes both of their lives.

46. We’ve written and fawned over Going Clear a few times already; it made my best of list last year. Even if you’ve seen the HBO documentary that is based on the book, make time in your schedule to read it. While it’s easy to write off followers of Scientology as people who have been duped by a really odd religion, what Larry Wright gets so write in this book is not only the detailed history of Hubbard and Scientology, but the complete fraud the religion really is. Leah Remini, who left Scientology last yea,r has a memoir that's just out, and oh, how the shit will hit the fan.

47. Germaine Greer took a bit of heat after her memoir Daddy, We Hardly Knew You was published. Critics would of course use this memoir as the reason she became such a pain in the ass feminist...daddy issues. She attempts to unearth the man she never really knew, a father who was distant, cold, and well…not all that interesting. While reading, you can’t help but hope she and her father find something to bond over, are able to repair the past and make amends, but that’s a fool's game because Greer gives it all away on the first page when she makes it pretty clear, the father she pines for would simply never be.

48. What do you get when you introduce a strange dude with a porn addiction to a housewife stuck in horrible marriage? That’s right, you get a dark, funny, really smart, completely original, novel by one of the best writers working today, A.L. Kennedy. Original Bliss was the first book I read by Kennedy and to be honest, it was a bit tough to get into; at that time I hadn’t read anything like it. This is, in the end, a really sweet love story about two lonely people living on the fringes of society.