100 books like Enough

Have you ever been a teacher? If you have, you will roll on the floor with laughter reading this book.

The author, Julie Schumacher, has absolutely nailed what faculty life on campus, with all its stupidity, pettiness, and rivalries, is like. After I read it, all I wanted to do was get other people to read it. Amazingly, so many already had!

Finding other fans of the novel was a way to sort of relive the experience of reading it, with a lot of “How about the part where...” There is a wonderful curmudgeon in the book, my favorite sort of person.

The liked the main character, the frumpy, lazy, poor decisions she made that kept her right were she was. I enjoyed the friendship of two young women in college who reconnect to solve a peculiar family issue of children who combust in flames when they become agitated.

I laughed several times out loud. A fun story and great twist. 

Curtis Sittenfeld has been a go-to author for me since I read and loved her debut, Prep, in 2005.

Her latest, Romantic Comedy, centers on Sally, a comedy writer at The Night Owls (a stand-in for Saturday Night Live) who finds herself the subject of affection of a very famous singer, Noah. I am a longtime fan of SNL, and I loved the inside look at sketch development and the hierarchy and competition among the writers and actors.

I alternated between relating to Sally and wanting to throttle her for not recognizing her own worth, but in a deeply invested in the story kind of way! And if you need one more reason to give this book a try, it was a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick.

It’s going to be hard to write about this novel without giving something away, but I’ll try.

Only a robot could read the opening of this book and stop after that. Why? Because at the start, we see the main character, Evie Porter, creating the story that she will use to depict her past life. And, of course, we want to know her reason for doing so.

The suspense only grows as we continue to read. I am in awe of this book’s plot! Evie is a wonderful character, too, as she wanders through joy and heartbreak.

As a serious fan of Susan Glasser’s digital column on The New Yorker website, I had the bonus treat of listening to narrator Julia Whelan read the articles as a promotion for Audm back in the Days-of-Trump.

For this book, Glasser joins her husband Peter Baker, The New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, to co-author this impressive document, I loved this book. And it’s fat-free.

Full of stories on the brink of disaster during the Trump years are briskly told with a calm, reasoned voice – kind of like a walk down memory lane! Curious that reading about the events that had me bubbling up with anger at the time, is now replaced with understanding and acceptance of the man Trump as a phenomenon, and with this account I may have read enough about the man in the White House from 2017 to 2021.

When I heard Ginny Dent Brant interviewed about her books, I couldn’t wait to purchase them for myself. Finding True Freedom recounts Ginny’s uncertain days of watching her father’s passion for politics. (Lots of well-documented info about his and others’ involvement in Watergate.) But Harry Dent experienced a conversion and left politics for the mission field of Romania. I wouldn’t normally read a book about politics; however, I highly recommend Finding True Freedom as it was a page-turner for me and taught me that true freedom is not the easiest to find, especially in highly charged Washington politics.

There was no one closer to Richard Nixon as Watergate unfolded than his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. Every evening, Haldeman dictated an audio diary that is an essential source for understanding the Nixon presidency and the chain of events that led to its unraveling. While Haldeman admired Nixon, he was also well aware of his faults. He records the triumphs, failures, and personal quirks of his boss on an almost minute-to-minute basis. I think that Haldeman has it right when he concludes that Nixon did not know about Watergate in advance, in the sense that he did not order the break-in, but certainly caused it, in the sense that he created the culture that spawned all the abuses. Ultimately, these abuses led to Haldeman's own resignation and eighteen months in prison for Watergate-related offenses.

Obama’s Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes’ memoir is arguably the best (and best-written) inside-circle account of Obama’s foreign policy decision-making process, on which Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications, had an outsize influence.

It is also implicitly, in my view, a strong argument for the need to depoliticize and re-empower America’s core foreign policy and intelligence infrastructure (the State Department, CIA, FBI, etc.), without whose direct and coordinated input America will be forever chasing its tail.

Allgor is an expert on women’s important role in building political society in the founding era, and in this compelling biography, she places Dolley Madison at the center of that story.

Indeed, Madison lived in the nation’s capital until 1849, giving her a decades-long career as a prominent figure in society and political operative. James Madison’s presidency was truly a partnership with his wife, as her charismatic sociability complemented his quiet, reserved demeanor. 

This book by two Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters contains even more behind-the-scenes looks than most at what happened during Donald Trump’s last year in the White House. Leonnig, a national investigative reporter, and Rucker, senior Washington correspondent, details nuggets such as South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham telling Trump a couple of days before January 6 that Pence couldn’t change the result and pointing out how Al Gore hadn’t tried doing that when he actually won the popular vote - but lost the Electoral College - in 2000. Trump replied that Gore wasn’t smart enough to pull such a move.

The authors journeyed to Mar-a-Lago a few months after the Capitol attack for a surreal interview with the former president. That alone is worth the read.