The Verifiers & The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
the breezy audiobooks keeping me sane while packing and moving
Moving is something of an Achilles heel for me. The sense of displacement, the very active hard-mode decision-making required, and the sheer labor of it. But I do have a vaguely fond memory of moving many moves ago, from an apartment I did not like into a situation I was very excited about, of just binging the absolute shit out of a then-newly discovered podcast, Bad End. There’s something freeing about having the utter abandon to just indulge and plow through something at a pace that would, in other circumstances, feel wildly irresponsible. But when you’re packing up all your worldly possessions, spending every waking moment Tetrising them into boxes or figuring out how to get rid of them, it is suddenly flipped; it is required of you to spend your time this way.
It is still a maddening time, however, so whatever you’re listening to can’t be so detailed as to be distracting. It’s not a good time for a podcast (or audiobook) where you really need to pay attention to details, much less learn something. And while I did eventually hit a dearth where I suddenly needed to queue of half a dozen episodes of the same podcast, at first I decided to try some audiobooks for this move. Nothing helps you keep your head on straight like checking out an audiobook you don’t own from an underfunded-to-a-different-degree-by-the-day library while you pack up bin after bin of unread books you do own!
This move’s entirely circumstantial, semi-spontaneously chosen winners for brain-off yet competent-enough audiobooks to keep me sane during my move were the delightful mystery novel The Verifiers (Jane Pek) and the better-than-I-expected-but-uninspiring The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Taylor Jenkins Reid). They wound up being basically polar opposites within the Goldilocks zone I needed for packing.
The Verifiers is a fairly easy-read murder mystery spanning a borderline startling amount of my personal favorite topics: online dating, late capitalism, intergenerational trauma, whether an authoritarian-flavored government even matters in a world where corporate interests create algorithms not even secretly training consumers to want what they want us to want, etc. A woman starts a new job at an agency that investigates people’s online dating matches (are they really single, are they lying about their job, up to something shady?) and gets looped into a Russian nesting doll of conspiracy between what’s the agency really investigating and what are the apps really doing? Extremely my shit. There’s even a subplot where the main character’s sister’s boyfriend is a shitty writer who could have done a good job using her life as inspiration but instead just did an unsanctioned direct lift and turned his career around and everyone’s mad, and that’s only, like, the fifth most important subplot in this novel. It’s maybe a little too packed, but it personally did the trick for me; nothing felt crammed in, but instead just like, yep, this main character has a lot going on, like many of us do in this day and age, and wow does this novel have a lot to say about this day and age. It works! I would recommend it!
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo I mostly queued up next because I learned I apparently have an office book club at my job (going back to this day and age, I work fully remote and everyone else in the book club is based in the UK, so it makes sense how I didn’t know this existed). I did not read anything about it that suggested it was going to be a particularly good book, but I thought, well, hey, if it’s good enough as noise while packing, that’s all I need right now. It was fine! Often better than I expected! Much more often less competent than I expected! The frame story concept is a mess of a missed opportunity that goes from boring but necessary to almost entirely forgotten to a deeply disingenous means of cramming in a very unearned twist. The best part of the novel is the machinations of public perception and fame; characters are constantly plotting how to craft their image either for gain or to avoid scandal. Although this does make it pretty weird how the novel is so good at that but so bad at defining its characters. No one particularly stands out as a terribly interesting person, even while they’re doing interesting things towards the construction of their public persona. Evelyn’s real love interest (twist you saw coming from a mile away: a woman) sucks, and the novel never really makes a case for why this is the person who’s so captivated Evelyn.
But both hit that sweet spot of easy enough to follow that I never got lost while packing. Evelyn Hugo definitely hit quite a lull sometime around husband five or six (turns out when you know how many more husbands you have to go through before the book’s wrapped up and it’s already gotten slow… that doesn’t help). Of course it has a Netflix film adaptation on the way, which I suspect will not be very good even though trimming this book down should help it out quite a bit. And, of course, it’s a lot harder to watch a movie while packing.
Standard Plugs Zone
I just ran a 50% off moving sale for my other blog, the book recap blog wtf is pedro páramo. Guess what: here’s a secret extension of that sale just for readers of ReadOnly. Get a year’s worth of all the locked content (every third post) for a half off! It’s only like $15.
If you’re in NYC, my band Good Cry is playing a benefit for you know what cause on July 14. It’s also our first show ever at Purgatory. iykyk. Tickets available now!
Note that we’re playing with Julia Casablancas, not Julian Casablancas. I’ve had one (1) friend lose their mind already. Apparently the minimal difference is too much for Dice. I don’t wanna mislead people and/or ticket platforms any more than we already have.