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I’ve never been a person to track sleep or steps. I haven’t owned a scale in decades and have no idea how much money I spend in a given month. (Sorry, financial planner!) But there’s one thing I do track religiously: the books I read. Don’t get me wrong. I am by no means a wildly prolific reader—I average about 35 books a year, which is nothing compared to the 100 my best friend regularly plows through. But after writing them all down (along with a few notes about which I liked most and why), I realized I’ve read well over 175 books in the past half-decade. Not too shabby!
Certain themes emerge: I love quirky non-fiction that teaches me about a subject I don’t know (a history of butts, a deep-dive into how parking explains the world) and I will read literally anything by Curtis Sittenfeld or Elizabeth Strout. But there are also some outliers. I went through a Stephen King phase last year. I hated Lessons in Chemistry, which everybody else on the planet adored.
But as for a favorite book…I trolled my lists from the past five years, and while it was so very hard to choose amongst my favorites (James by Percival Everett! Tom Lake by Ann Patchett! There There by Tommy Orange!), there was one book that stood out from the rest: Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell.
Jillian Quint for PureWow
Set in 1580 England at the start of the Black Death, Hamnet imagines the story of Shakespeare’s real-life son, who died of the plague at age 11, just as his father’s career was beginning to take shape.
If you’re groaning at the thought of either Shakespeare or sixteenth century England, let me stop you right there. This book requires neither knowledge of nor a particular affinity for either. In fact, Shakespeare’s name is never uttered once within the 320 pages—he’s simply referred to as “the father” or “the Latin tutor.” Rather, the story belongs to his wife, Agnes, a free-spirited herbalist who manages the homestead while her husband is away in London.
I read this book in the depths of the pandemic, while enmeshed like never before in the day-to-day of my own two young children who were suddenly home non-stop. And I found Agnes’ aspirations and grief both relatable and otherworldly; O’Farrell’s language is haunting, and she draws you into a world of catastrophe from the very first page. (Seriously, the opening scene involves Hamnet racing to find a doctor for his ill twin, and your heart pounds along with his every movement.)
Ultimately, it’s this compulsive readability mixed with poignancy that made this my top pick. When I read a book, I want to feel and think and find parallels with my own life and times. Hamnet is the total package.
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