2. The Penelopiad / Circe / The Lonesome Bodybuilder.

Michael struggles with an unconventional mashup of holocaust memoir and sports-based dystopia in Georges Perec’s W, or The Memory of Childhood, while Emily is captivated by the sexual politics of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, yet frustrated by its open-ended narrative.

Michael is captivated by the brutality and isolation of pre-modern Newfoundland in Michael Crummey's The Innocents, while Emily delights in the “tragedy of manners” and the woes of bored rich people fallen on hard times in Patrick deWitt’s French Exit.

Michael posits that George Eliot’s Middlemarch (“the most Victorian of Victorian novels”) is the anti-Atlas Shrugged, while Emily considers just how much thicker blood is than water with Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer.

Michael joins his name-twin on the greatest adventure undertaken by humankind and finds him companionable, warm, and wise in Carrying the Fire, while Emily breaks down the walls of the “chick lit” ghetto to revel in City of Girls, a surprising story of feminine sexual liberation.

Emily strongly recommends an encounter with the disorienting bleakness and collapse of Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s Blindness, while Michael strongly recommends an encounter with the soul-wracking cruelty and violence of Megan Gail Coles’s Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club.

Michael reads J.M. Sullivan's Newfoundland Portfolio, and Emily reads Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman.

Michael picks at the banality of evil protrayed in Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, while Emily desperately wants to finish Isabel Allende's enchanting work of magical realism, The House of the Spirits, but is prevented from it by living on a windswept rock in the North Atlantic.

Emily thinks the world would be a better place if everyone read Lucy Knisley's graphic novel account of her difficult pregnany, Kid Gloves, while Michael rhapsodizes about experiments in empathy and postmodern mysticism spurred on by Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place.

Michael found the formal experiments and wild content of Darcie Wilder’s literally show me a healthy person to be compelling but not without knots, while Emily enjoys the nuance of Meg Wolitzer’s novel The Wife.

Emily and Michael talk about The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood), Circe (Madeline Miller), The Lonesome Bodybuilder (Yukiko Motoya), and what books not to bring to the hospital.