Rachel Syme Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Rachel Syme

… a book about two couples in late 1970s NYC, but also about taste, autonomy, how to live alone, how to set a table, how to give up a little bit of yourself so that you can connect with someone else, what parts of yourself to never give away... You’ll read this book in one inhalation.

Rachel Syme

experiencing off the charts levels of joy reading kim hastreiter’s stuff. perfect book, exquisite. (I also highly recommend going back and reading dana goodyear’s 2007 TNY profile of hastreiter called “the enthusiast”)

Rachel Syme

this book has swooped in right at the end to be one of my favorites of the year…stayed up until 3am with it more than once 👓

Rachel Syme

this book is all about the idea that we don't have to become more fearful and conservative as we age... it's about defining for oneself what success looks like... plus, this book is so fun and funny! it's like having three drinks with your most delightful and reflective friend.

Rachel Syme

I am having an Annie Dillard summer, in which I am INHALING everything this woman has ever written... I am in fully back love with this book and her work, and if you haven't read it, I really encourage you to have an Annie Dillard Summer and then come sit by me.

Rachel Syme

To me, this read like one of those great, sprawling novels from the 1990s, reminiscent of Anne Tyler and John Irving and Amy Tan, that you found on your parent’s bookshelf in the form of a nubbly mass market paperback that was still sandy from last year’s beach trip. But somehow also so new!

Rachel Syme

It became spring and all I wanted to do was reread Mrs. Dalloway and it is really hitting this season

Rachel Syme

An absolutely luscious treat, like pistachio gelato on the hottest day …this is genuinely a very good book about New York City, about the cosmopolitan dream and how it can curdle. Read it on a park bench in the springtime.

Rachel Syme

I haven’t read a book with such a strange, original voice in a while. Kate Riley dropped out of college to join an ascetic Christian commune, and ended up writing beautiful, spare emails about her experience to a friend; those notes form the backbone of this novel...

Rachel Syme

The Cafe With No Name... tells the story of a lonely man in Vienna in 1966, who buys a dilapidated café... Customers come, they fill the space, they talk to one another, they relieve each other’s loneliness. That’s kind of all that happens, and yet I found myself gripped to it.