www.annemoore.net

If you’re like me and read everything good, then bad, about blood-testing entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes you might think you don’t need to read John Carreyou’s Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Start Up. You do. The story is soooo crazy and Carreyou tells it like a thriller. Founded in 2003 after she dropped out of Stanford, Holmes sold her finger-prick blood testing idea — it was never a reality — to investors, Walgreen’s, Safeway grocery stores. She loaded her board with statesmen such as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Mattis. By 2014, she was on The Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people with an estimated net worth of $4.5 billion: her 50% stake in Theranos was valued by investors at $9 billion. It was all a fraud. Carreyou’s reporting, for The Wall Street Journal, unmasked her.

Speaking of fraud, here’s a link to avoid plagiarism.

My friend Suzanne pressed me to read Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. I’m glad she did. It’s a work whose magnificence sneaks up on you. At first it seems like a well written story about a group of college friends, two of whom —  Bobbi and Frances – perform poetry together. Bobbi and Frances befriend a cool older couple, Melissa and Nick, who may be having marriage troubles. The story seems a bauble until Frances and Nick, a film star, fall into an affair. I know this sounds pedestrian but Rooney’s characters are witty, smart, dimensional. I didn’t see the end coming; it made sense and kind of broke my heart. 

Speaking of cheaters, check out this site.

The Library of America recently issued a collection of two Ann Petry novels, The Street and The Narrows. Do read her if, like me, you haven’t. The Street tells the story of Lutie Johnson, a pretty black woman who takes a small apartment in Harlem, on 116th Street, in the hopes of giving her young son a better life. The super tries to rape her, the madam at the window offers work, a band leader fools Lutie into believing her singing will lift her out of poverty. This is the story of a street and its people. No happy endings here.

I’m a loyal reader. If I loved a book, I’m likely to read the author’s others. (And vice versa: if I hate a book I’m stingy on second chances.) Mrs. Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls, was a favorite of mine last year. It tells the story of an unhappy wife who falls in love with a sea creature who has escaped from a nearby institute. In Binstead’s Safari the action is (a little) more firmly grounded in reality, but also concerns a miserable marriage and a woman’s journey out of it. Millie follows her sourpuss husband, an academic, to London and then to Africa, where he will study lion myths. Millie blossoms in London, and takes a lover in Africa. Is Millie more than a woman? Is she a lion god? A deliciously smart, funny, tragic read. 

I’m enjoying Benjamin Dreyer’s guide to clarity and style Dreyer’s English and lapping up Eleanor Perényi’s More was Lost, a memoir of her youthful marriage, in 1937, to a Hungarian baron.