Book #41 |
Book: Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting | Author: Clare Pooley | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Print |
Pages: 343 | Duration: 05/18/25 – 05/22/25 (2 days) | |
| Rating: ★★★★☆ | Genres: fiction, romance, chick lit, LGBT, diversity | ||
| 📕10-word summary: Train choking incident sparks a friendship between eclectic fellow commuters. 🖌6-word review: Easy reading. Interesting characters. Somewhat predictable. |
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| 💭Favorite quote: “Deborah sat down and took a thin file out of the practical but ugly briefcase that paired nicely with her sensible but dull shoes.” | |||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: Louboutins, diamanté, insouciance, salubrious, clever clogs, dole money, parterre, oleaginous, ladder your tights, tetchy, taking the Mickey | |||
| Description:* Every day Iona, a larger-than-life magazine advice columnist, travels the 10 stops from Hampton Court to Waterloo Station by train, accompanied by her dog, Lulu. Every day she sees the same people, whom she knows only by nickname: Impossibly-Pretty-Constant-Reader and Terribly-Lonely-Teenager. Of course, they never speak. Seasoned commuters never do. Then one morning, the man she calls Smart-But-Sexist-Manspreader chokes on a grape right in front of her. He’d have died were it not for the timely intervention of Sanjay, a nurse, who gives him the Heimlich maneuver. This single event starts a chain reaction, and an eclectic group of people with almost nothing in common except their commute discover that a chance encounter can blossom into much more. It turns out that talking to strangers can teach you about the world around you — and even more about yourself.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: I didn’t notice until about a third of the way into this book that it was by the same author who wrote The Authenticity Project, which our book club read in 2023. I liked this book slightly better, probably because it reminded me of my years riding the bus to work, during which I wrote what I dubbed “buscapades” that included giving the “regular” riders that I saw on the bus nicknames like the protagonist in this story does to her fellow train commuters. Hers included “Magic Handbag Lady,” “Crazy Dog Woman,” “Terribly-Lonely-Teenager,” and “Smart-But-Sexist Manspreader.” Some of the bus rider nicknames I gave included “The Phone Lady,” “Sci-fi Fantasy Man,” “Logorrhea” (portmanteau of logophile and diarrhea; i.e., someone who won’t STFU), “Arguing Man,” “Right-Hand Rule Lady,” “Thong Lady,” “Waffle House Lady,” and “Madonna and Genetically Beautifully Daughter.” Here’s one of those blog posts with a classic buscapade scene in it that I referred to as “a buscapade character reunion.” | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.