Matching Books to Perfume

Hey everyone, I hope you had a nice weekend. I’ve had a summer cold for most of the past week, so there’s been less sniffage (except for the kind that involves tissues). So let’s talk about summer reading, but with a twist – I’m matching each book up with a fragrance. I’ve always got a stack of books going, plus Carolyn and I pass them back and forth if we think the other person might like it.

This post was inspired by Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House. We’re on a bit of an Ann Patchett bender these days; if the only one you’re familiar with is Bel Canto, that feels like a bit of an outlier to me. Patchett excels at much smaller, human-scale stories of lives and families in exquisite detail. Anyway, The Dutch House follows one family over decades through their relationship with a particular house in suburban Philadelphia.  If I were picking a fragrance to go with this novel it’d be the recently reviewed Marc-Antoine Barrios Tilia, since it has a certain elegance and linden trees get several mentions.

Sky Daddy by Kate Folk – a bizarre romp about a woman who is sexually aroused by / wants to “marry” an airplane. You … probably haven’t read anything quite like it? I’m thinking something airy and ozonic and airport-adjacent … something like D&G Light Blue, with its breezy, indoor-air-conditioned vibe and that sky blue bottle.

Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. This story revolves around one family hunkered down on the family’s cherry orchard during the summer of COVID, it’s Patchett’s pandemic book. She uses the farm and tangential stories to explore several themes around family and the choices we make. It’s lovely. I struggled with a scent for this one – cherry seems an obvious choice, but I need a woodsy one, not a sexy one. Anyway, I ended up settling on Imaginary Authors’ Soft Lawn because there’s a story line at a lake, involving tennis.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is the behemoth in this stack, at 800+ pages. Our book club is reading it as a summer challenge. Have I mentioned our book club? We started it 30-odd years ago when we were stuck at home with small children and losing our minds. It’s been a delight to re-join after they took a COVID break and I moved back. Our kids are now adults, some with children of their own. Wild. Anyway, for this I’m going for Ormonde Woman by Ormonde Jayne – complex, multifaceted, strange and beautiful and a little disturbing.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.  Ooooof, what a bummer of a novel in so many ways. Secretions Magnifique. Enough said. Moving on:

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke – the viral novel of the summer which Musette kindly sent me for my birthday or I’d still be on the library waitlist. No spoilers here, but it was not what I expected (tbh my expectations were pretty low). Interesting and worth reading. It would go nicely with one of Tauer’s great outdoors scents like Desert Marocain or Lonestar Memories.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I love this so much I’ve now gifted it to several people who I know are readers with broad and eclectic tastes. I recommend going into it knowing nothing about the story, which adds to the pleasure of figuring out what, exactly, is going on – that’s how I did it (a recommendation from my kid.) For this we need something cold, beachy and aquatic with some dark magic … maybe that Hermes Jardin Sous La Mer? Portia described it as tropical and mechanical and weird, which sounds … about right.

What are you reading, and what fragrance would you match it with?  Do you read multiple books at one time, or one all the way through? I know people have strong feelings about that, similar to whether you’re a committed book-finisher or you’re just fine quitting at any point. Your turn!