Three Books I'm Reading Now, 3/23/26 Edition
- The Bossy Bookworm
- 4 minutes ago
- 2 min read
The Books I'm Reading Now
I'm listening to Valerie Bertinelli's memoir Getting Naked; I'm reading Ian McGuire's newest, unrelenting, suspenseful novel White River Crossing; and I'm reading Saara El-Arifi's novel Cleopatra, an empowering, fascinating story told from Cleopatra's point of view and aimed at setting the record straight.
What are you reading, bookworms?
01 Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect by Valerie Bertinelli
Is my intrigue with this book due to my One Day at a Time nostalgia, my vague affection for the idea of Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen as an 80s power couple, or the charm of Bertinelli on her now-defunct, fourteen-season cooking show Valerie's Home Cooking? Or is it just that Valerie Bertinelli, now in her mid-sixties, clearly seems to have no interest in foolishness or BS? I'm eager to find out if, as I hope, she's offering a straight-talking, funny, compassionate missive to women in this memoir.
In Getting Naked, the author dives into aging, menopause, family, relationships, insecurities, and rewriting her own script.
I'm listening to Getting Naked courtesy of Harper Wave and Libro.fm.
Check out these other celebrity memoirs I've Bossily reviewed; or you might like my reviews of these memoirs.
02 White River Crossing by Ian McGuire
Ian McGuire's newest novel White River Crossing is set in the brutal cold and wilderness of sub-Artic Canada.
In the winter of 1766, a bedraggled fur peddler arrives at a remote Hudson Bay Company outpost with a chunk of gold, telling tales of more to be found farther north, at a place called Ox Lake.
Greed and arrogance send members of the Company, along with native guides, to seek out further riches. But the Hudson Bay Company's boorish John Shaw and bookish Thomas Hearn, who are pushing the expedition, clash as Shaw brutalizes an innocent during the long journey north, and the repercussions of his wrongdoing aren't fully realized until the journey's end.
I received a prepublication edition of White River Crossing courtesy of NetGalley and Crown Publishing.
I mentioned Ian McGuire's novel The North Water in the Greedy Reading List Six Chilly Books to Read in the Heat of Summer.
03 Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi
This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived.
My knowledge of Egypt is limited but my interest was sparked by one of my favorite childhood reads, The Egypt Game.
In Saara El-Arifi's Cleopatra, the author tells the story from Cleopatra's point of view of the infamous, fabled, often maligned figure who ruled Egypt as Pharoah from 51 to 30 BC--and whose relationships with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony have added to the reductive caricature of Cleopatra as a seductress.
The tone of the book is one of setting the record straight, illuminating Cleopatra's many facets, and bringing the reader into the titular subject's inner workings, fears, and complicated motivations.
I received an electronic prepublication edition of this title courtesy of NetGalley and Ballantine Books; and I received an audiobook version of Cleopatra thanks to Libro.fm and Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group.
Saara El-Arifi is also the author of Faebound and The Final Strife.