Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

The title of “Checkout 19” is taken from the narrator’s weekend job as a supermarket checkout girl, where a Russian customer with a staring problem foists a copy of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” on her while she stands at the till. This is kind of a roller coaster of a ride to read, more stream of conscious than anything else and so many thoughts! The narrator is a woman consumed with reading, something that I have been most of my life and even more so in the pandemic. All the space that would have been filled up with dinner parties and chats in the hall at work were filled with reading. And like the narrator, I read it all, classic novels, innovative novels, children's books, the occasional book that falls squarely into "chick lit", young adult novels, cookbooks, I read it all, and did so much of it during the pandemic that I realized it wouldn't alone sustain me in retirement, I would need another very time consuming hobby, maybe two, to fill the space that work once did. This book meanders through the narrators mind, veering off into odd directions, without obvious plot of plan, like living inside her head for the duration of the novel. It was one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2022, which is a stretch for me, but I did enjoy it when all is said and done.