Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil- Ohhhh my god I loved this book. It's so lovely so well written so fun and makes me want to drop everything and move to Savannah in the 80s?? The book essentially follows the main character, John Kelso, a writer/food critic from New York who spontaneously visits the beautiful southern city Savannah, Georgia on a trip to the south, falls in love with it, and decides to rent out an apartment and live there part time when he's not in New York for work. He gets involved with a bunch of strange and eccentric characters such as Jim Williams, a bachelor and an antique collecter who throws the most popular, classiest, exclusive parties in town in his large beautiful civil war era mansion, who helped revive historic Savannah and restore it into the lively city it is in the book. John makes friends with Joe Odom quickly, attracted by the constant sounds of piano playing and voices coming from Joe's apartment, a bar owner who's house is in a constant state ofcelebration, with friends and acquiantances freely flowing in and out of his houses(that he cannot afford, he's essentially a "glorified squatter" as the book calls him, he's constantly moving around) Joe is constantly in trouble with the law for some reason or another, yet he always seems to wiggle his way out. There's Chablis, a beautiful black drag queen who essentially uses our main character as a chauffeur. A mystery unfolds at some point in the story, but I will not spoil! There are so many interesting characters in this book holy shit and this book just feels like a love letter to savannah, definitely reccomend this book.
Big Swiss- EXTREMELY different from the first one but loved it equally, the main character is Greta, a woman in her mid 40s, and a very morally questionable yet very funny character, and the reader gets to constantly listen in on her absurd internal monologue. She works as a transcriber for a sex therapist, a man named Om in Hudson, New York, however she writes the meetings from audio files in the security of her own home (an old dutch house in shambles that is infested with a bee hive that Greta and her roomate Sabine, an old friend have to coexist with) . Greta has moved around her entire life after the suicide of her mother when she was thirteen, constantly being taken in by aunts or uncles. She ends up falling in love with one of Om's clients that she has never met based solely off of the audio files. The client's name is Flavia, however Greta refers to her as Big Swiss. Big Swiss is from switzerland, she is a tall, blonde, beautiful gynecologist in her late 20s, who has never had an orgasm despite being married and regularly having sex. Big swiss's sharp, cold, no bullshit nature is what draws Greta towards her. They eventually end up meeting, and disaster unfolds after. This book is so witty, the dialogue is so good, and getting to read Greta's transcriptions of various client's sex therapy sessions is so entertaining. Her actions are horrible at times, yet she's strangely likeable? Definitely reccomend, the simplistic writing style made it a very fast read for me.
