The Nefarious Nannies Reading List

Some nannies are downright evil. They’ll slaughter you in your crib, seduce your dad, and surreptitiously drug your mom to the point where no one trusts her and she gets to become your new mommy (did anyone else see that Lifetime movie?).

Ah, nannies. Readers of bedtime stories and makers of snacks, kissers of boo-boos and sergeants of naps. Not every nanny, however, flits in like Julie Andrews insisting that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. Some nannies are downright evil. They’ll slaughter you in your crib, seduce your dad, and surreptitiously drug your mom to the point where no one trusts her and she gets to become your new mommy (did anyone else see that Lifetime movie?). The Nefarious Nannies in these books are rotten to the core, or at least misguided to a destructive degree. Links for purchase are included!

**#1: The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani**

**#2: The Au Pair by Emma Rous**

**#3: The Nanny: A Novel by Gilly Macmillan**

**#4: Bad Marie: A Novel by Marcy Dermansky**

**#5: What the Nanny Saw: A Novel by Fiona Neill**

**#6: Nanny Needed: A Novel by Georgina Cross**

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

5 Books That Changed My Life

Link to original video posted on TikTok:
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMRbeke5d/

I’ve been revamping my socials to all have matching handles and this is my second attempt at #BookTok. The first one got a little bit of traction but I think I know what I’m doing a little bit better this time around. To accompany the video, though, I’m going to give you, my blog readers, a little something extra: a gallery of the book covers of the books featured in my #BookTok *and* a blog-exclusive quote graphic from each book that I won’t be posting anywhere else.

*The Voracious Bibliophile’s* 5 Books That Changed My Life

“I don’t want to lose the boy with the bread.” – Suzanne Collins, *The Hunger Games*

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” – Alice Walker, *The Color Purple*

“To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.” – Mary-Louise Parker, *Dear Mr. You*

“How wild it was, to let it be.” – Cheryl Strayed, *Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail*

“The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.” – Anthony Doerr, *All the Light We Cannot See*

Why Would You Ask Me That?

I’ve spent the past eight years working in some capacity as a Professional Book Person, and one question I always hate getting asked is: What is your favorite book? My eyes are rolling just thinking about it. I always want to respond by saying something along the lines of: Really, Gretchen, why did you decide to wake up this morning and choose violence? It’s a really invasive question to just throw in someone’s face.

After all, there are infinite reasons why one person loves a book while another person hates it. It’s subjective. It’s about taste. It’s about someone’s cultural background and how it’s shaped their life experiences. It’s about their class status, money, and power. It’s about the way(s) in which people conceptualize God, their spirituality, and the After. It’s about the intersection of identities that determines the amount of social capital a person wields. It’s about race, language, and citizenship status. It’s the difference between who is considered an immigrant and who’s considered an expatriate. It’s about (dis)ability and access to basic social services. It’s about where everyone fits in the big soupy melting pot of humanity. Plus, there’s the whole issue surrounding which works get canonized and which works fall (are pushed) into obscurity, and how the reason for that most often corresponds to the ways the author’s identity(ies) are either marginalized or elevated.

I said all that as a preface to my own (subjective) list, which is always changing, because *I* am always changing. Without further ado, here it is:

The Hunger Games (trilogy) by Suzanne Collins
The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Boy Erased: A Memoir by Garrard Conley
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein
Truth & Beauty: [A Friendship] by Ann Patchett
Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change by Maggie Smith

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please follow, like, comment, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at thevoraciousbibliophile@yahoo.com or catch me on Twitter @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.