Why am I passionate about this?
I love big books with strong thematic cores, sprawling casts, and curious timelines (from books that take place over four seconds to several decades) that explore what it means to be human on the most primal, unfiltered, and unflinching level. These books feature characters who are trying to reconcile the expectations they had for their lives, with their complicated realties. And yet, they simmer with warmth and hope, all of them reminders that there’s nobility in the struggle, and that there’s still plenty of room for joy, even when things don’t go as planned. Especially if they don’t. Ballsy, wise, and funny, these books speak to my existential comedic heart.
Ali's book list on when you've locked your keys in the car
Why did Ali love this book?
A multigenerational sprawling Midwest masterpiece, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club is one of those rare books that will make you laugh and cry, sometimes even on the same page, sometimes even in the same sentence.
It explores family dynamics, grief (in all its applications), love (romantic, familial, convenient, complicated), estrangement, and supper clubs in all their old-fashioned antlered glory. With Stradal’s trademark warmth and imitable prose, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club is ripe with heartbreaking and at times, humorous reminders that life rarely goes as planned, and that’s exactly the point: you carry on in spite of it.
The perfect read if you’ve ever considered throwing in the towel. Wise, big-hearted, and deeply human.
1 author picked Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
From the New York Times bestselling author J. Ryan Stradal, a story of a couple from two very different restaurant families in rustic Minnesota, and the legacy of love and tragedy, of hardship and hope, that unites and divides them
Mariel Prager needs a break. Her husband Ned is having an identity crisis, her spunky, beloved restaurant is bleeding money by the day, and her mother Florence is stubbornly refusing to leave the church where she’s been holed up for more than a week. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in her family for decades, and while Mariel’s grandmother embraced…