Paying attention - real, devoted attention - is in danger of becoming a dying art.

We can’t let it!

In the words of Mary Oliver: To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

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I went to see her documentary - Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World - a few weeks ago. No one captures the importance, the necessity, the absolute vitality of paying attention like her. No one models it better.

She was known as a nature poet, but an important thread throughout the documentary is that belitting her to the “nature lane” is missing the entire point. She was here to teach us about life, to redirect our attention. From the unimportant and distracting, to the beautifully mundane, the minute, even the microscopic.

A lot of times she did that through the vehicle of nature, yes: a slug, a leaf, the geese, a dog, the sun. But she also went beyond: drawing the focus to the person she loved, a deep breath, a quiet moment.

Her poetry rewires the brain, if you let it.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.This has been rattling around in my head like a refrain since I saw the documentary.

I like the idea of paying attention being the real work. Not the 9-5, but the constant, quotidian practice of noticing the little things. Because as they say, the little things are the big things.

And giving them the attention they deserve - that makes me feel alive.

I feel most human when I look up and notice light dancing through the leaves up high in a tree.
Bees dancing around a flower in bloom.
A street performer’s hands dancing over piano keys.

When I feel the bite of cold water as I wade into the ocean.
When I catch a firefly in my hands.
When I see the wind blowing through my dog’s hair.

It makes me feel human when I see other humans being humans.
A snapshot sprinkled along the benches at the park nearby: people reading, meditating, eating, birdwatching, connecting and reconnecting.

I, of course, could go on. I want to go on. That’s the point.

Sometimes it can feel like life is too much “walking on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.” Not enough recognizing that “the world offers itself to our imagination, calling to us like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over, announcing our place in the family of things.”

The daily practice of paying attention - something that’s often overlooked in the flurry of everyday life, and what Mary Oliver’s poetry cultivates - is an act of defiance, against a life lived within a screen or one weighed down by worry.

This is endless and proper work worth doing.

Love, Shelby

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The Met is huge. It’s over 2 million square feet, and houses over 2 million objects across 5,000 years of human history. It has some world-class exhibitions, and enough in the permanent collection that I genuinely believe you could go every single day and find something new to marvel.

The museum itself is made of over 20 different buildings of all different architectural styles essentially smooshed together over 140+ years — the structure itself an iterative work of art.

All museums are gorgeous gifts to humanity, but The Met is singular.

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I didn’t know I could love it more until cracking open the book All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me by Patrick Bringley. It’s a memoir about his time working as a security guard there. He weaves stories of his late brother, history of the museum and the art inside, the intricacies of the massive operation required to open the doors everyday, and the people he’s crossed paths with, both museum goers of all stripes and fellow security guards from all walks of life.

While it’s a memoir, I found myself reading it like a guidebook. A way of seeing.

Bringley became a guard after his brother passed away from cancer. He was seeking stillness in a world obsessed with forward momentum and career progression. The job was a deliberate rejection of those expectations, and it made room for something new: wonder.

It’s hard not to be struck by the vastness of history in a place like the Met. Thousands of years, and people have never stopped creating — we, as a species, simply can’t help it. It makes you not only in awe of the creations, but of humans themselves. We are a complex, multifaceted bunch: capable of eliciting so much admiration and disappointment all the same. Bringley wrote of the spectrum of humanity he sees walking the halls: children, elderly, influencers, tourists, art lovers, art skeptics, anyone in between. And still, The Met is common ground.

He wrote of a Michelangelo exhibit from a few years back where in a journal he had written “I am not in a good place. And I am no painter.” Even Michelangelo, larger than life itself and most certainly a painter, held insecurity and doubt. We’re all not that different, after all.

An abundance of time surrounded by paintings and sculptures meant he developed a relationship to the art, certain pieces calling to him, resonating in an otherworldly kind of way.

For me, that piece is The Bathing Pool by Hubert Robert. It’s a dream world, almost heavenly: quiet yet alive, dark yet ethereal, magical yet grounded. It was completed in 1780, as a part of a commission for the bathing room of a chateau owned by Marie Antionette’s brother. Anytime I’ve visited, I always found my feet gravitating towards it, unconsciously.

There were six paintings in this commission, making The Bathing Pool one of a set. They all shared a wall in the European Paintings wing, until recently, replaced in the standard shuffle of restoration. I was surprised to find myself feeling untethered and kind of… devastated. I didn’t even realize I’d come to anticipate and care about this painting so deeply. So when Bringley wrote about these deep, visceral personal connections to art, I knew what he meant.

Bringley worked at the museum for a decade. So this experience naturally evolves over time, as relationships tend to do. He put to words how, though the painting technically remains the same, how you meet it will be different every time; you will be different every time. And so the act of appreciating art is like a muscle: something you hone and exercise as you become. A personal pursuit.

The book had this soft glow of generosity and reverence throughout. It helped me see something I already loved with fresh eyes and a new appreciation. A bigger heart.

“I am sometimes not sure which is more remarkable: that life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life”

Speaking of a big heart — I also recently read Ann Patchett’s newest novel Whistler, which starts and ends in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Whistler is about a woman in her fifties, Daphne, who gets reunited with her former stepfather, Eddie, who was married to her mom for a brief year when she was nine years old. The book opens as she’s wandering from Medieval Art to the American wing with a man she doesn’t yet recognize as Eddie Triplett trailing behind her. Her ever-observant husband approaches him, and the realization is made.

Over the course of the book, she remembers what a good and decent man he was, and is. Their fleeting yet formative time together during her childhood comes back in stories and echoes and memories.

This unlikely friendship meets them in the waning years of their lives. Patchett portrays age as something that softens one’s view. Enough reps in this life changes the lens through which you see others: their decisions, their deficiencies, their baggage. This book has a similar glow of generosity.

Without revealing too much, there’s a moment in the book where Daphne has to find help. She’s scared to approach strangers for fear of getting kidnapped. Eddie responds saying that despite the stories we’re sold, most people are good. Sure, there are some bad eggs, but when given the chance, the majority of people will be good. The arc towards justice, and all that. She mentions almost nonchalantly how this anecdote impacted her, fundamental to her orientation towards the world from that point on. I mean, what a powerful thing. People have the power to do this, and so does art.

While most of the book didn’t take place at The Met, I choose to see how its presence grounded the book in an open mind and open heart, a benevolent outlook. This is what the museum both elicits and demands, and what both books illustrate so well.

When I think of The Met, I think of one specific visit where golden hour fell over the European Sculpture Court. It was soft and rich and I thought I’d be content if time had stood completely still there forever. A small, solo small moment surrounded by golden light, centuries-old art, and all the beauty in the world.

Love, Shelby

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There were several writers at the heart of this time period. Many of them were members of a literary group called Young Vienna. Imagine a bunch of white men (with an abysmally small number of anyone non-white, non-man, I am sure) sitting at coffee houses for hours on end: shuffling between reading newspapers, penning letters, exchanging ideas, writing novels, smoking cigarettes, arguing for arguing’s sake. Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig were two of them.

Schnitzler’s most famous novel is probably Dream Story, a hallucinogenic trip of a tale that Stanley Kubrik’s Eye Wide Shut is based on. Zweig’s most famous is likely his memoir: The World of Yesterday, a work that captured, in all its complexity, the high highs and low lows of living in Europe before, during, and between the world wars.

But this is not about those books. This is about two others, both of which I had a truly amazing time reading: Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Fame and Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl.

Both of these novels begin with characters content in, if not unaware of, their mundanity. Both pluck those protagonists from obscurity, and set them on a path to more. And both see their characters altered in the end, painting a portrait where ignorance to that shiny kind of wealth and notoriety, possibly is its own kind of bliss.

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Late Fame is set in the 1890s, in the heart of Vienna. The central character is Eduard Saxberger: a civil servant approaching retirement. On a regular day like all the others, a young man approaches him asking if he is THE Saxberger, the one who wrote a certain book of poetry decades ago. He is, indeed, despite feeling a million miles away from that version of himself. Upon invitation, he’s quickly enveloped by a group of eager young writers, based on the real-life Jung-Wein or “Young Vienna” of which Schnitzler and Zweig were both a part.

While he wraps his mind around the idea of anyone genuinely seeing him as a capital-p Poet, it doesn’t take much convincing for him to begin frequenting the coffee house for healthy debate among fellow writers night after night. They ask for new poems; he promises. This attention is a brand new sensation. Their fervor is enough for him to start believing what they see, although it can be hard to tell exactly what that is.

The novel is a satire, but not necessarily a caricature. The group — and the world it’s representing — is pretentious, yes, but the allure makes sense. To feel heard, noticed; to feel a part of likeminded people and a part of a burgeoning culture. And for Saxberger, well, it’s only human nature to chase a feeling of recognition for a dream you’ve long since put to bed, even if it is manufactured.

All the while, an emptiness that feels modern seeps through, which I found quite compelling. This novel, of course, far predates social media, yet captures the very same woes: a cacophony of self-ordained professionals saying so much, all the time, yet meaning very little. A sound bite at the coffee house.

The Post Office Girl was written in the 1930s, with a noticeable post-war pessimism. It’s about Christine, a woman working in a post office in a modest village a couple hours outside of Vienna. She recognizes her relative poverty; she manages. Until one day she receives a letter from a long-lost aunt, offering Christine a place with her and her wealthy American husband on their vacation in the Swiss Alps. She’s dubious, and curious.

She accepts the invitation. She arrives entirely out of her depth. And with the help of her aunt’s wardrobe and the local salon, she assimilates swiftly. Like a child, she is dazzled by this new world: the hotel’s furnishings, its meals, its people, its aura, its pace. They say time is a luxury. The vast difference in the relationship to time struck me, and speaks volumes: suffering through each passing minute at the post office, and luxuriating as the hours dance away at the hotel. Getting a taste of that is bound to change a person.

Everything at the hotel is so alien. This experience, so formative. She, so malleable. She loves it, and they love her. For the first time, she’s noticed.

There’s an enormity to the experience, and a fragility, too. The second half of the book holds a very different energy that I found fascinating to watch unfold and don’t want to spoil. When she returns to the village, her reality is drained of any dredges of color it had before, everything gray in comparison to those two weeks in the Alps. To me, it seemed like she wouldn’t even let herself wonder: to keep on living, was that flash of an experience worth it?

Both of these novels are so grounded in their own time period, and timeless all the same. Their writing is clear and beautiful, in a way that makes their being penned a century ago feel surprising. They’re especially intriguing when put in the context of the somewhat dramatic circumstances surrounding their publishing. Late Fame barely survived the Nazi book burnings, and The Post Office Girl was published posthumously before it was technically completed. He didn’t even leave instructions for the novel before his planned suicide pact with his wife in 1942, meaning we can never fully know his intentions for Christine’s fate.

Saxberger and Christine are both fundamentally changed by the inciting experiences in these novels: the literary group, the vacation. They interrogate wealth, fame, poverty, criticism, and other dynamics and forces that shape how, and in what ways, an individual is really, truly seen.

Extraordinary experiences thrust upon ordinary people — and who’s to say if they’d have it another way?

Love, Shelby

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PS — I picked Late Fame up from Shakespeare & Company in Vienna because I wanted to read an Austrian author while I was there. I had no idea a movie adaptation was coming… kismet ✨

And! Wes Anderson cited Post Office Girl as a big inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

For most, this is a process of becoming. It’s uncomfortable and awkward and necessary and beautiful. You take what you’re given — circumstances both nature and nurture — and you build from that foundation.

Zac Brettler took a different approach.

One night in 2019, caught on CCTV from the MI6 building across the River Thames, Zac walked out on the balcony of a 5th floor apartment in a luxury high-rise called the Riverwalk, and jumped. He was 19.

Only after was it discovered that he had been living an audacious lie: as Zac Ismailov, the son and heir to a Russian oligarch. For years, he had been moving through the world of the London elite under these pretenses. He ordered limos, discussed his plans to buy multi-million-dollar property, mingled at high-profile clubs and events. He was doing deals with real businesspeople, under a completely fake identity.

In his late teens, rather than throwing the spaghetti to become a new version of himself, he invented a new self entirely.

What would compel him?

This is the question Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, London Falling, explores. With the help of the generous Brettler family and his all-encompassing cultural and political backdrop of the past few decades in London, Keefe paints a comprehensive portrait of this mystery.

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When I think of scamming, gambling, whatever term fits best to describe the extent of what Zac was doing before his death, I think of the documentary Free Solo. In it, doctors did a scan of extreme rock climber Alex Honnold’s brain to discover an unusually inactive amygdala, which is the part of the brain that processes fear and detects threat. His body was unable to register the fear that most would be overcome by when scaling the tallest mountains in the world with no equipment. He was quite literally built different.

While I don’t think this is exactly the case for Zac — the investigation uncovered text messages and emails that proved he experienced quite a lot of fear, especially towards the end — it makes one wonder what exactly is missing for someone to go so blatantly against the rules: of gravity, of society. He was successfully fooling people twice, three times his age — the lies growing and compounding. How, and why, did he do it?

Keefe tries to slice this question every which way.

He reconstructs Zac’s personal life. His sweet and unassuming parents, brother, friends started to notice a withdrawal from Zac. They knew he was hurt by a boarding school rejection, but they ultimately chocked it up to being a teenage boy in the world: harmless. Zac told fanciful stories to rapt audiences as a boy; he was obsessed with The Wolf of Wall Street as a pre-teen. In retrospect, these could be considered signs. But weren’t these typical of most boys? How could his parents have known what it would lead to? How can parents really know their kid at all?

The people Zac Ismailov was spending time with are where things start to get a bit more sinister. Akbar Shamji — decades older, his own history a bed of lies — had become a “mentor” to Zac. Through him, Zac was connected to Verinder Sharma, a relatively well-known gangster. It was Sharma’s apartment where Zac was living, and from which he jumped.

Was Zac so influenced by these people he let in, and so distant from those who could have kept him tethered to the real Zac, that he couldn’t see straight?

With these three as the main characters, Keefe weaves an unexpected and riveting web all across London, the connections as far-reaching as the sprawling city, told in the type of narrative that will grip you and not let you go.

The book deconstructs family history, too, inquiring whether the answers could be found in the past. For example, both of Zac’s grandfathers survived the Holocaust. His maternal grandpa had little to no family left when the war was over; he had to start over completely. He created a new life from scratch based on a select few, necessary lies, and went on to become a celebrated fixture in his community. Was the instinct for self-reinvention baked into Zac from the start?

Throughout it all, is a city that was fundamentally changing, making way for the dark side that lured Zac in. He came of age when “golden visas” of the nineties and aughts welcomed Russian oligarchs with open arms after the Soviet collapse. With them, came corruption and excess. The scene was set, and Keefe illustrates how those macro political forces shaped this individual life. So, was Zac a victim of the seedy, enticing underbelly of his city?

Or was Zac simply after the money? The allure of this type of wealth is formidable, especially for someone who doesn’t yet have the experience or perspective to know otherwise. He was enraptured by his imagination of the life that level of wealth provided. And he was, albeit fraudulently, inching closer and closer, like Icarus. Can he be blamed? Every news story, every tale of the modern world seems to prove: the pursuit of financial superiority is what it’s all about. It’s all there is. It makes the world go round. It’s an addiction in and of itself.

There’s no clean answer.

People are complex, impossible to wholly understand when they’re alive. When they’re gone, all you can do is try to put as many pieces together to attempt to recreate the kaleidoscope of that person.

That’s why Keefe is the only one that could’ve written this book. He pulls the rubber band far, covering topics that feel impossibly irrelevant, only to snap it, bringing the story back to the heart of the subject.

His writing is so in touch with the layers of humanity: the unknowns, the motivations. It’s both generous and suspicious. He goes down many dead ends, but makes the journey well worth it anyways.

At one point, Zac’s parents got access to his phone’s search history from the hours and moments before his death. Naturally, they were grasping for answers, some indication, any way to understand the psyche of their son, both real and fake. While a couple searches possibly revealed a bit more of what happened that night, the majority were just regular teenage boy stuff.

A teenage boy, searching how to become.

Love, Shelby

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Vienna, Austria, it was.

I was intrigued by the spectrum of its history: from artistic and musical (home of Mozart) to psychological and scientific. What type of city could be the birthplace of psychoanalysis and modernism and atonality and marginal utility theory and logical atomism?

Once I arrived, I uncovered an era of history arguably more exciting than any fiction I could sit reading with my sachertorte and wiener melange at one of their famous coffee houses. Through books and museums and research, I learned about how Vienna was home to infinite ideas, theories, philosophies — more than it gets credit for, in my opinion. What I came to find was an explosion of cross-pollinated, multidimensional thinking, at a time of pivotal change, concentrated in an ancient city actively making itself new.

“The sense of a city that had made culture its highest priority, where a young writer could find his life transformed by a conversation in a coffee house, where the energy of collective intellectual life was palpable and sustaining.” — Stefan Zweig

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In “fin-de-siecle” (turn-of-the-century) Vienna, the groundwork was laid for such a cultural explosion, politically. Franz Josef was the Emperor of Austria, ruler of the Hapsburg monarchy. Rotating between the Schönbrunn and Hofburg palaces, he went on to rule for 68 years. He was famous for his regimented routines, starting his workdays at 4 am, so while he was not a patron of the arts himself by any means, his focus on the administration and discipline of the bureaucracy left the door open for the side of life he ignored, to flourish. Additionally, after the Austro-Prussian War, a new constitution was signed that freed previously-oppressed people, and allowed everyone to move freely across borders throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire for the first time. This meant individuals from far-flung places brought their unique perspectives and ambitions to new places, many to one central location: Vienna.

This change was reflected in the design of the city itself. The Ringstrasse, a boulevard circling the city, was constructed on the orders of Franz, complete with apartments which “nouveau riche” and Jewish bourgeoisie families would come to fill. The Ringstrasse became a literal and figurative hub for the culture that the inspired Viennese were shaping.

The book that introduced this world to me was one I picked up in advance of my trip: Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World by Richard Cockett.

It cited a concept that took hold around this time, aligning and underpinning a lot of what came out of the era: the German idea of bildung. There’s no direct translation (love that) — the idea prioritizes the pursuit of knowledge above all. But not just a formal education, a forming of the self. It’s “a belief in the formation of the whole person through encounter with the full range of human knowledge and culture. The bildung ideal specifically resisted specialization. A truly educated person was not a specialist in one domain — they were someone who had been formed by philosophy and science and art and literature together, whose thinking was shaped by the conversation between disciplines rather than the mastery of one”.

In the new constitution was written “Knowledge and its Teaching is Free”. The governments built it into the systems: learning as a public good, a human right. With the dissolution of boundaries between countries, the idea was that bildung could unite people in this newly restructured place, bound by a belief rather than national ties.

Of course, we all know that didn’t quite pan out. To me, hindsight heightens the allure of this era. As Jewish professionals were thriving in modern Vienna, antisemitism and nationalism were looming; Karl Leuger’s ideals were influencing a young Adolf Hitler. A free fall towards evil would ultimately prevail in Austria across both world wars, making this progressive time look and feel like lightning in a bottle. For a while at least, the imminent fear and anxiety fueled the production of art and ideas that not even the most sinister forces in human history could take away.

“Around 1900 the vibrant Danube metropolis was shaped by stark contrasts: it was the capital of both aristocracy and of liberal intellectuals, of the splendid Ringstraße and endless slum areas, of anti-Semitism and Zionism, of a rigid conservatism and emerging Modernism. Splendor and squalor, dream and reality, symbolism and self-questioning characterized the existing pluralism of the time, marking Vienna as a place of experimentation and a laboratory of ideas, and thus as a central motor to a turbulent movement of renewal.” — Leopold Museum, Vienna 1900 Exhibit

In the story of fin-de-siecle Vienna, there are many intriguing characters. They ran in the same circles, debated at the same coffee houses, and pushed each other’s fields in obvious and subtle ways. They embodied bildung: each on a lifelong pursuit of understanding the complexities and contradictions of being alive.

One of the figures most associated with Vienna, at least in the art world, is Gustav Klimt. In the face of the conservative art establishment, Klimt brought something entirely new. Erotic, gilded, symbolic: his work was groundbreaking at the time. He was quite a lady’s man, it seemed, and that showed up in his work. So much so that some of his early paintings were dubbed “pornographic”. This, and a group of other modern thinkers, is what led him to help found the Secession movement in 1987: a rejection of the Vienna Academy of the Arts (or Künstlerhaus) and their refusal to accept how the world of art and culture was changing.

Probably the most famous psychologist ever and “father of psychoanalysis”, Sigmund Freud completely changed our understanding of the human mind, right in Vienna. His work was in direct conversation with art and literature, not siloed off in its own scientific world. Language (reading more like prose than research paper) was key to his practice, incorporating terms from “law and biology (inhibition), medicine (symptom), philosophy (anxiety), physics, or political economics”. Freud’s discoveries around desires and drives and dreams show up in just about every field during the time. The subconscious — the complex layers underneath the surface — characterized the entire era.

Arthur Schnitzler, a novelist and playwright, was a member of Young Vienna, a literary group that famously met at Café Griensteidl. The camaraderie and spectacle of this literary society is satirized in Schnitzler’s Late Fame, which I loved. The group explored previously unspoken psychological and sociological truths, never shying away from the uncomfortable — their slogan was ‘in all things and at all costs to be modern’. Another one of Schnitzler’s novel Dream Story intermingles many dominant ideas, inspired by both Klimt’s sexual proclivities and Freud’s exploration of the unconscious mind.

Cafe culture was the living, breathing heart of Vienna. The exchange of ideas across disciplines can be attributed to the environments created in these cafes. They seemed like intellectual havens, where anyone could edge their way into conversations shaping culture. Another Young Vienna writer, Stefan Zweig, captured it perfectly in his romantic and ominous memoir The World of Yesterday: “You have to know that the Viennese coffee house is an institution of a peculiar kind, not comparable to any other in the world. It is really a sort of democratic club, and anyone can join it for the price of a cheap cup of coffee. Every guest in return for that small expenditure can sit there for hours on end, talking, writing, playing cards, receiving post, and above all, reading an unlimited number of newspapers and journals … Perhaps nothing contributed so much to the intellectual mobility and international orientation of Austrians is the fact that they could inform themselves so extensively at the coffee house of all that was going on at the world, and at the same time, could discuss it with a circle of friends.”

Like me, you might be wondering: where are the women? As is often the case throughout history, they had a powerful yet overshadowed impact on this era. Berta Zuckerkandl-Szeps is one such woman who hosted salons, purposefully orchestrating meetings of big thinkers of the day. A dinner that she hosted resulted in the decision to officially found the Secession movement. She worked as an art critic whose reviews and commentary brought the electricity happening in her salons to the public, critical in bringing the masses along in a changing world.

The beauty of it all is how multifaceted and varied what came out of Vienna was. Many artists and thinkers, while moving in the same direction towards modernism, ended up with completely opposite takes and solutions. Wiener Werkstätte was a group of designers who subscribed to the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) philosophy, aiming to integrate art into even the most ordinary objects. Alfred Loos, an architect of the time, was driven by an actually quite vehement opposition to ornament, as outlined in his “Ornament and Crime”. Where Klimt was known for his gilded, extravagant pieces, his protege, Egon Schiele, painted haunting, pared back portraits that became known for their stark lack of extravagance.

The artists, scientists, authors, playwrights, musicians, intellectuals of fin-de-siecle Vienna were all interrogating life. They were searching for the deeper layers of the human experience in a way that wasn’t allowed for in previous generations. As the world around them became more complicated and severe, rather than shy away, they pushed and broke the boundaries of what came before. And Vienna created the conditions for it.

So, let turn-of-the-century Vienna be a lesson: ideas are made better when they draw inspiration from unexpected places. And even when the world is scary, humans will always search for meaning, and they’ll never stop creating.

“What does culture mean but taking the raw material of life and enticing from it its finest, most delicate and subtle aspect by means of art and love?” — Stefan Zweig

Love, Shelby

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Such is the life of the subject of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star. This novella is small but mighty, a contradiction much like the entire book itself. It’s both profound and mundane, hilarious and existential.

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The book centers on Macabéa, a woman described as uneducated and unfortunate, living in poverty in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She works as a typist and has a diet almost exclusively of hot dogs and Coca Cola. She’s simultaneously dreaming of a better life, and unfazed by her pretty bleak one. She’s almost oblivious to it, actually.

This obliviousness is the defining trait of Macabéa, and an endearing one. It can look like blissful ignorance, ennui, or emptiness — depending on your interpretation.

The book is narrated by the suave, worldly Rodrigo S.M. And in his interpretation, Macabéa‘s life is tragic. His disdain for her is palpable. Her life of hardship and lack so offends him. He judges ruthlessly.

She’s, of course, aware her position in the world is unlucky, even sad, but it somehow bothers him more. While he has what she doesn’t — status, worldly possessions, a diet beyond hot dogs — he’s clearly unhappier. But it’s not a question of whether money can buy happiness, Lispector is way more nuanced than that. It becomes a question of perspective.

Colm Toibin wrote an introduction to be book, and put it perfectly: “It is hard to decide who to feel more sorry for, Macabéa or the narrator, the innocent victim of life, or the highly self-conscious victim of his own failure. The one who knows too little, or the one who knows too much.”

Rodrigo thinks he has an accurate picture of Macabéa. But throughout the book, it becomes obvious that Macabéa is more of a mirror - a void, if you will - that he fills with his own projections of insecurity, anxiety, fear.

So, if a tree falls in Macabéa‘s forest, and Rodrigo isn’t there to see it, did it happen at all?

The book wonders if we can exist in a meaningful way without being perceived by others. The structure of the book forces us to think not, but what if Macabéa wrote it herself? I have to imagine we’d see a life of, yes, scarcity and misfortune, but also meaning.

In the acknowledgments, Lispector says “to all those who reached the most alarmingly unsuspected regions within me, all those prophets of the present and who have foretold me to myself until in that instant I exploded into: I.” I read this as her flipping the role of Rodrigo on its head, showing the beautiful, elevating possibility of being perceived.

I would’ve been content is this book was only the inner musings of Macabéa and Rodrigo. But there’s so much more: a shady boyfriend who lies about his name, a woman named Gloria who calls her ugly and loans her money, a trip to a kooky psychic who hears celestial trumpets. This is my first foray into the absurd brilliance of Clarice Lispector, and certainly not my last.

One of her fellow writers once said “Clarice had a passion for the void.” In this final novel before her death, she explores exactly that through Macabéa. Maybe, the void is inevitable. And maybe life is just about figuring out what, and who, to fill it with.

Love, Shelby

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February was a prolific month of reading for me. In this post, I’m stealing The Cut’s model to share all the books I read last month, and whether they’re worth buying, borrowing, or skipping. Enjoy!

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1. The Names by Florence Knapp

The concept of this one felt very original, and intrigued me. It opens on a mother considering three different names for her newborn baby boy. Option 1: carrying on the family name of her abusive husband. Option 2: a name chosen by his big sister. Option 3: a name she loves all her own. The book follows all three parallel universes over the decades to come. So, what’s in a name? Quite a lot, argues this book. I will say, the tone turned me off at the beginning, but I‘m glad I stuck it out.

→ Borrow

2. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

This book has a Goodreads rating of 4.57, which, when you’ve been in the game as long as I have, you know is an astonishingly high score. I hate to report that the good people of Goodreads let me down. I appreciate the breadth and depth of the author’s ambition here, but it fell short. It felt forced. To work, the main character had to have his secrets. But in doing so, he remained surface-level and unknowable - he didn’t earn the right to leave so many questions unanswered to the reader for so long. It was sweet, sure, but not it, for me.

→ Skip

3. Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built by Gayle Feldman

This book is a doorstop, a tome. Clocking in at 1,027 pages, it’s the biography of Bennett Cerf, publisher and founder of Random House. I picked this up because I had read that Cerf was Dr. Seuss’s publisher for a good portion of his career, but also Ayn Rand’s - the juxtaposition of output there was intriguing. Not to mention, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Truman Capote… What I liked most about this book, though, was learning how publishing, of which this man was at the helm, intersected with culture. This is for the publishing heads, not even necessarily book-lovers, but those interested in learning about the historical context surrounding the institutions that bring us the books we love.

→ Borrow if you’re a literary nerd, Skip if not

4. Earth Angel by Madeline Cash

Off the back of my favorite book I read last year, Lost Lambs, I was craving more from the mind of Madeline Cash. Her characters are so WEIRD and her plot points so absurd, in the very best way, especially when set against her masterfully nonchalant writing. This very enjoyable set of stories are united by a particular flavor of cynicism, bordering on nihilism. Not better than Lost Lambs, but similar style and tone, and can be read in one setting - what’s not to love?

→ Buy

5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I know you haven’t heard enough Wuthering Heights discourse. Obviously, as I couldn’t possibly be more of the movie’s target audience, I had to read the source material from 1847, which evaded me in school. Which is actually fine by me because my brain was hanging on for dear life to the writing at my age now: the language demands a lot of you. One of the many interesting parts about the book is how it’s told from perspectives other than Heathcliff and Cathy; we never actually hear directly from the source. Like the flame was too hot to touch, it had to be told from a distance. And of course, the book gives us a whole new generation that the movie does not. I could go on forever, maybe I will one day.

→ Buy (a chic mass-market paperback on Thriftbooks like I did)

6. The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight

A lovely little coming-of-age novel about a girl from Canada, who goes to Scotland for college. She reconnects with her parents’ family friends, and realizes there’s a lot of history she doesn’t know. Such is life at that raw, formative age. I was very fond of the narrator, I liked her vibe. But the book overall, was a bit forgettable for me.

→ Borrow

7. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

This was my first Clarice Lispector and… I love her. This book is the last one she wrote before she died, at her fullest writing powers, one could argue. It’s the story of a poor woman living in Rio, told through the lens of a male narrator that’s equal parts concerned and judgmental about her. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s conversational with a stream of consciousness style, and very deep and poignant too. I have more to say about this one, soon. It made me so excited to read the rest of her writing.

→ Buy!

8. Among Friends by Hal Ebbott

Among Friends is about two couples who’ve been friends for decades, and a weekend away upstate where everything shifts. This book gave me the ick. The writing was good, almost beautiful. But the story line, the unveiling of the Thing That Happens, the way the characters handled it… all didn’t sit right. A review on Goodreads said it better than I ever could: “This one earns its spot in the literary canon of novels about a crisis easily averted if the two dudes involved just admitted they wanted to fuck each other.”

→ Skip

9. Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

Would I have read this before the show? No, simply because romance isn’t traditionally my bag, but what a joy this is! I’m just feeling really happy for everyone involved. The hyper-niche genre of gay hockey smut getting its moment, the actors who seem like genuine rays of sunshine thriving at fashion shows and celeb events, the conversations it’s sparked for the LGBTQ+ community within the world of sports. Brava.

→ Borrow (because you know one of your girlfriends has it to loan you)

10. The Colony by Annika Norlin

I wrote here about how much this book has to offer. It’s the story of a group of people communally living, beyond the bounds of society in a Swedish forest. This book is phenomenal on every level: from the sentences themselves, to the existential questions it poses.

→ Emphatically, buy

11. Vigil by George Saunders

Saunders is so unique, his books so inventive. This one is his creative take on purgatory: an imagination of the mechanics behind the shift from life to death. A sweet, but quietly resentful woman has been tasked with ushering a billionaire into the afterlife. He has an ego the size of his mansion, brashly believing in his contribution to the corporate world, the country, the planet - the book questions this in a quintessentially Saunders kind of way.

→ Buy

Love, Shelby

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The book is about a group of people communally living, beyond the bounds of society in a Swedish forest. We first encounter this pseudo-family through the eyes of Emelie. Burnt out from corporate life in the big city, she flees to the woods. She sees the group from afar, curious. She meets the youngest, Låke, who intrigues her with his naiveté, almost like he’s never interacted with humans before. She inches closer, is invited in. Then her mere presence fundamentally shifts everything.

The Colony, as they’ve come to call themselves, is made up of Sara, Jozsef, Aagny, Ersmo, Sagne, Zakaria, Låke. The book patiently unfolds each character: how and why they ended up there. We discover what they lacked, what they sought, in what ways they felt inferior, what a deviation from society offered them.

The author brought a new tone and style for each — a feat for so many characters — exposing their personality, their essence. A roiling anger within Sagne. A childish melancholy in the oldest, Joszef. A jilted guilelessness in the youngest, Låke. The Millennial malaise and outsider perspective from Emelie was quite funny.

Each carries scars from the flawed societal structures they’re running away from: oppression, incarceration, capitalism, violence, abuse. But, they’re bound by the idea of a better way, however elusive at the time.

At the helm is Sara. She’s the queen in a way that’s never explicitly stated, but known to be the truest part of life in the forest. She’s carried an inexplicable magnetism throughout her life, and witnesses the power that comes with that. For years and years, she’s led the Colony. Never with a heavy hand, but an irrevocable one. With the promise of an anti-hierarchical alternative, comes hierarchy of a more psychological variety.

Her role in the colony exposes others’ need to be led. Their tendency, whether they know it or not, to seek out someone to have power over them. A critique of both leader and led that’s fabulously provocative.

But no matter how radical at the outset, we learn, humans will always fall into a status quo. They can even get trapped in it, paralyzed by their own invention.

Until they’re not. Emelie’s wine-fueled musings on the Colony’s way of life punctures something. It cracks the door open to the question: isn’t any way of living, any norm we’ve become accustomed to, kind of ridiculous? Then it becomes a matter of agency. Whatever the structures we live within, are they our choice? Can we make it so?

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I found the writing to have impeccable pace, flowing and lingering and propelling at all the right times. While unattached from all we’d consider “normal”, it felt grounded. It also felt mystical at times, the way you’d imagine a faraway place in the forest to feel. This is also a testament to the translation by Alice Olsson — an art in and of itself.

The book leaves an imprint of big existential questions without shoving them down your throat. Or answering them at all, really.

The emotional baggage carried into the Colony informed the makeup of the microcosm. Like ants, each person’s role was already written before they stepped into the forest. The ways society failed them, the ways they failed themselves, followed them all the way into seclusion. You can outrun capitalism or culture or convention, but you can’t, The Colony argues, outrun yourself.

Love, Shelby

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The novel is about grief: its powerful ability to warp reality, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about what one inherits from family, too, wanted or not. Do you run from it, or towards it like the narrator?

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When we meet the brat in question, his dad has just died, he’s gone through a breakup, his mom is fading away in an assisted living home (though she still has some fire every now and then), and his brother is completely unbothered by him.

It’s written in very short chapters, which kept it moving in a rapid, almost manic pace — a deliberate choice, I have to imagine, mirroring the calamity and dread throughout its pages.

The narrator tasked with clearing out his parents’ house for sale, a perfect job for someone in a state of complete disfunction and apathy. He’s meant to be writing his second novel, which he’s already been paid handsomely for, and thinks the space provided by the empty house will help. Instead, it becomes the place where it all unravels.

A smaller, but notable storyline: he’s still reeling over this breakup as mentioned, so naturally, he does some online ex-stalking. He finds that she’s written a story and had it published — the very thing he’s supposed to being doing, but can’t. Her stories are interjected, pulling us into a whole new world for a while. These were some of my favorite parts of the book, which I’m sure would just horrify him to hear, make him writhe with jealousy.

On to the meat of it. Although it’s his father he’s grieving, it’s his mother and the revelations about her past that become the real source of tension. He finds a manuscript she’s written but never published, a home video he’s never seen. These seem like they might bring him some reprieve, but when they change upon each viewing — whole passages, faces, characters, plots morphing — they do the opposite.

All of this is affecting him not only emotionally and psychologically, but physically. As in, his skin is falling off in sheets, shedding like a snake. Yeah. When this is mirrored in the manuscript he finds, the tether to this narrator’s sanity continue to thin.

His brother doesn’t believe any of this however, which punctures the interior bubble whose walls have been closing in on us alone in the house. While it’s clear he has issues of his own, his brother acts as a kind of pressure valve. In their simplicity and stupidity, the brothers’ exchanges add a surprising and welcome layer of humor. But their dumb quips to each other are the only thing that’s stupid about this book — it’s keen and calculated, with a delivery that’s chaotic and untenable.

Dread: the book is filled with it. He wants things to be different, but he doesn’t know how, he doesn’t try, he can’t try. It’s a spiral that he has to see all the way through — the reader by his side — to the book’s vague, yet satisfying ending.

Brat is gothic and surreal and unsettling. It’s also sharp and funny and propulsive. It’s hard to categorize, and it won’t be for everyone. But if this is your kinda thing, it’ll get under your skin. 😏

Chat soon!

Love, Shelby

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I’ve narrowed that down to my ten favorites of the year.

These ten introduced me to some fascinating characters, in stories that explore every nook and cranny of their consciousness. They consider some meaty themes with empathy and curiosity: connection, ambiguity, family, responsibility, loss, longing, imagination, identity...

From World War I to the year 2406, these books reminded me that some moral conundrums are timeless, some questions unanswerable. And even so, there’s a steady drumbeat of optimism throughout them all. An acceptance of the contradictions that define a life, and the commitment to find and make meaning in it anyways.

Let the countdown begin…

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Note: Click of the link in each title to read the synopsis! I’ve prioritized my thoughts over plot points to save time and space.

10. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

This one is hard to describe or categorize, and is unlike what I typically read. It’s about time travel - the story of a few different people across centuries, lives connected and altered by one event, one sound. A web intricately and beautifully woven, it questions reality, memory, and time. It’s one of those books that makes you feel like a little speck in a vast universe, in the very best of ways. It’s a bit of beast, but well worth it.

“There’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we are uniquely important. That we’re living at the end of history. That now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst it’s ever been. That we have finally reached the end of the world.”

9. Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination by Brian Jay Jones

This one is a bit of an outlier, but I had to include it. It’s the biography of Theodor Geisel, the real man behind Dr. Seuss. He’s a product of his generation, but this book expounds on his journey and creative process in intriguing detail. What I loved most was learning more about the driving philosophy behind his work: meeting kids (people, too, after all) where they are and never talking down to them, which was radical at the time. He’d always say “adults are obsolete children”. I found the way he revolutionized children’s literature - and the concept of imagination at large - so thrilling and inspiring. It’s probably been a while, but do yourself a favor and read a Dr. Seuss book out loud when you get a chance: the cadence, the rhymes, the ingenuity … it’s a real joy.

“There is something we get when we write for the young ones that we never can hope to get in writing for you ancients… Have you ever stopped to consider what happened to your sense of humor?”

8. Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

This one is the most light-hearted of the bunch. It might not sound like it based on what I’m about to say, but it’s so fun. It’s about a quest to track down a group of half-siblings, all raised by single mothers after being abandoned by their collective father. When one brother shows up at his half-sister’s door, the road trip begins. The writing is funny and sweet and comfy. Each character has their own struggles, sure, but they all add their own twist to the dynamic that makes for a truly entertaining, heartwarming read.

“That was all family had to be, at the most basic level, someone seeing you, even if you didn’t know what they saw.”

7. Dream State by Eric Puchner

I almost didn’t read this book because it began with a woman planning her wedding. But what started pretty surface level, became a profound story of the generational impact of the choices we make. There was a real melancholic feel to this book, but in a good way! You could physically feel the toll that life had taken on these people: ways in which they dulled, and became more themselves. Through several perspectives over many decades - deftly, yet very clearly - I could see exactly how certain character’s decisions showed up, shaped, altered the lives of others. But throughout it all, there was this refreshing sense of ownership and accountability, an acceptance and pride in how their lives played out, despite it all.

“Why were the most important questions precisely the ones that people never asked?”

6. The Details by Ia Genberg

“We live so many lives within our lives – smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children who grow up – and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.” This quote is essential this book’s thesis. It begins with the narrator sick with a fever as she flips through a long-forgotten book and sees an inscription from an ex, and their all-consuming yet relatively brief love affair comes flooding to mind. From there, she continues to reflect on relationships past: some fleeting, some foundational.

It’s a riveting way to reflect on your own life: through the lens of people who were at one point essential to your every day, now completely detached. Like a mirror for all the selves you’ve been.

“That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called ‘self’: traces of the people we rub up against. I loved Joanna’s words and gestures and let them become part of me, intentionally or not. I suppose that is at the core of every relationship and the reason that in some sense no relationship ever ends.”

5. Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna

I found this to be a compulsive read, the way you’d imagine a typical “beach read” to feel. The difference, though, is the sheer depth folded into its story. There’s a darkness and doubt that lives in the characters, and in the author’s point of view, that’s beautifully offset and made even more meaningful by a unique flavor of hope - “he is desperate, and therefore optimistic”. I loved getting to know these characters during a British summer, and learned a lot from them. I wrote more about this one here.

“He said you should only ever get what you want for the most extraordinarily brief window of time. The rest of your life, you should spend in the pining”

4. Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon

Some of the most beautiful sentences I read this year were in this book. Part-memoir, part-essay-style nonfiction, this is a love letter to reading. The author threads the needle of her love for reading, her struggle with her mental health, and her experience as a woman through to the broader historical context of “madwomen”. An incredible connection of dots between culture, academia, healthcare, media, and more. I wrote more about this one here.

“In that year before I moved to the city, my relationship with books had changed. Now I read books in a way that felt at once desperate and thrilling. It had become a way to live, or a search for how to live. I suppose it is easy to dismiss a young woman for forming and shaping her identity under the influence of books, or reading—and yet. This was what I had and it was everything.”

3. In Memoriam by Alice Winn

A love story between two boys who go from leisurely reading and debating the Classics at a boarding school in the English countryside, to the ghastly trenches on the Western Front. Devastating and stunning, gruesome and tender - this book had me up into the wee hours of the night because I simply couldn’t leave Gaunt and Ellwood. I wrote more about this one here.

“He thought perhaps all the pain would sour the love, but instead it drew him further in, as if he were Marc Antony, falling on his own sword. And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.”

2. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger

To make the most obvious point of the century: there is an overwhelming amount of conversation around AI these days. But none of it has helped me grasp the ethical questions and larger complexities of it, the way this novel did.

Through a family trip to the Chesapeake Bay, the author brings the topic down to a human level. We have the dad, representing the average joe, as the main narrator. The mom, a leading academic in the burgeoning field of AI ethics, representing the “few people on earth that grasp the moral complexities — and care enough to make them good”. And three kids with their own struggles and secrets and futures.

There were some thought-provoking observations from this book I noted down. Like human’s tendency to anthropomorphize, treating inanimate objects (or tech in this case) like humans even when we know full well they’re not. How the compassion and care that AI seems to have for us is a mask for technology that’s cold, calculating, indifferent - and the frightening possibility of forgetting that. How AI is only as moral as we design it to be - our morality will continue to be shaped by what we learn and how we adapt.

“And this, I propose, is the inhuman soul of the algorithm. It may think for us, it may work for us, it may organize our lives for us. But the algorithm will never bleed for us. The algorithm will never suffer for us. The algorithm will never mourn for us. … We shouldn’t make these machines because we want them to be good for us or good instead of us, we should make them because they can help us be better ourselves”

1. Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Number 1! Whimsical, campy, unhinged - I devoured this book about a family of five deeply dysfunctional people. Everyone in the Flynn family is losing it in some way or another, and it is a true joy to follow along to destinations you couldn’t dream up in your wildest imagination. I found it so impressive how the author was able to make this feat of a novel look effortless: incredible, clear, considered writing + smooth and shocking comedy + genuine love and profundity.

The author wrote in such a matter-of-fact way about the most absurd situations. The dialogue had me cackling. I loved how and each character’s normal traits seem to highlight the other’s insane ones. I could go on and on - it definitely earned this top spot. Not to brag, but I have friends in high places (the legend Na Kim who designed the cover) and got this book early — it’s out soon, January 13. So all this to say: run, don’t walk.

“Darling, sweetheart, light of my life, fruit of my loins, please refrain from going into my work email.”

If you’ve made it this far, I love u. Let me know if you read any of these, and what you think. I hope to bring many more good ole-fashioned book reviews to your screens and minds this year!

Love, Shelby

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“Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.”
— The Details, Ia Genberg

✨

If you’re wondering why such a wonderfully specific and niche part of literature has its own month, I’d first say:

But also: translation is an art.

It’s not just replacing one word in one language with another in another language.

It’s reproducing the same feeling, the same vibe, the same nuance, for a whole new dialect, packed with its own style and meaning.

It’s a grasp of pacing and personality, levity and potency that transcend the source.

Translators must accurately reflect the very same micro moments and macro themes with a completely different set of tools.

They’re acrobatics with syntax.

So, it’s not August anymore, but I’ll keep celebrating.

Here are some novels I recommend — written by incredibly talented women the whole world over, and translated by linguistic experts and artists in their own right.

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The Summer Book

Written by Tove Jansson in Swedish | Translated by Thomas Teal

I read this in one summer day, soaking in the level of detail to the natural world approaching that of Mary Oliver. About a young girl and her grandmother at their summer house off the coast of Finland, it shows a bell curve of life: somehow being both naive and nostalgic when young, and in old age again. The grandma is sassy and kinda petty. The young girl wishes to God for a storm and when one strikes, thinks: “I didn’t realize I was so important”.

Also—there’s a movie! That literally came out last week… kismet, wow. This trailer looks more sentimental than the book — I like both takes.

The Details

Written by Ia Genberg in Swedish | Translated by Kira Josefsson

In a fever-induced haze, the narrator remembers flashes of people she’s crossed paths with in various ways, illustrating how duration in one’s life doesn’t always equate to impact. A simple premise, done in a remarkable way. I want to gather my thoughts and write more about this one one day.

“That’s all there is to the self, or the so-called ‘self’: traces of the people we rub up against.”

My Husband

Written by Maud Ventura in French | Translated by Emma Ramadan

Unreliable narrator alert! Per the title, the narrator is obsessed with her husband. Not in the colloquial “omg I’m obsessed!” kind of way, but in an actual, illusory, almost hallucinatory kind of way. It’s tense and unhinged, and that’s a huge compliment.

The Hole

Written by Hiroko Oyamada in Japanese | Translated by David Boyd

The main character finds herself in a new, countryside town for her husband’s new job, a bit reluctantly. One day, she comes upon … you guessed it, a hole. Like Alice, she falls down, down, down, where she explores a world more exciting than the one above.

Roman Stories

Written by Jumpa Lahiri in Italian | Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz

I loooove Rome, a city pulsing with its ancient history. This is a collection of stories snipped from the lives of families, couples, individuals connected to the capital city. Italy plays a central role in all of them, a character in and of itself, as they say. Lahiri’s writing is the kind you want to hang out with, with an Aperol spritz preferably.

Dogs of Summer

Written by Andrea Abreu in Spanish | Translated by Julia Sanches

Another take on obsession. This time from the point of view of a 10-year-old girl, who is infatuated with her best friend in the specific way of girls. The writing is juvenile, matching her age, but impressively rich and observant too.

I Who Have Never Known Men

Written by Jacqueline Harpman in French | Translated by Ros Schwartz

Despite being published in 1995, this one has been all the rage lately. Set in a post-apocalyptic future, a group of women wake up in an underground cave with no memory of how they got there, and no idea how to move forward once they escape. It’s powerful, experimental, chilling. Great New Yorker piece about its resurgence by Carmen Maria Machado.

And some more from the table at Greenlight that I haven’t read yet, but want to!

• Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton

• The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Frances Frenaye

• Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder

• If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

I hope you enjoy this bounty of translation!

Love, Shelby

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This novel begins by engulfing us in the charmed lives of a group of boys at an Eton-esque boarding school in the British countryside called Preshute. It’s early 1914: the first world war is brewing, but these boys are in a blissful, privileged bubble filled with sport, long walks, and debates about literature.

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At the center of the story—of the world, it feels—are two best friends: Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood.

Gaunt is not quite a jock, but is strong and known to have instigated a tussle or two in his day; he’s also quite deep, but keeps that to himself. And Elwood is a prolific poet with an eye for all things beauty, also known to not shy away from a fight, who charms everyone he crosses paths with.

As the reader, you quickly come to learn that Gaunt and Ellwood are madly in love with each other. But as is both the great tragedy and curiosity of being human: one cannot read another’s mind. Despite the fact that they spend every waking moment together or the frequent observations from their friends acknowledging just how inseparable they are, they still can’t see that they other feels the same way.

Or they won’t allow themselves to see it.

It’s 1914, of course there was a fear of being found out as gay. A fear strong enough to propel Gaunt to enlist despite his moral objections to the institution of war. He hopes distance from Ellwood will lessen his love for him. But months later, Ellwood, and many of their classmates, end up following suit, right to the front.

The real magic of this book was the nuance the author brought to this particular aspect. This was a love story, period. The anxiety of being outed was far outshone by all-consuming love on one end, and the true horror of war on the other. They were not surrounded by hate from their classmates and comrades, but something akin to admiration, more often than not. Even humor that only real friendship can offer.

The perceived impossibility of being openly together (if they were to choose that) added a heartwrenching layer to the story, but it wasn’t the story. This lens felt so refreshing.

When Gaunt enlists, he’s not hiding from being outed, he’s hiding from the enormity of love he has for Ellwood. The threat of ruining their friendship means they keep their true feelings close to their respective chests. When they get to the front, that is swiftly escalated and exacerbated by their newfound proximity to death. They explore their relationship, but they downplay and distract.

Since they can’t say it themselves, they let poetry do it for them. Ellwood’s mind is a steel trap, a stanza at the ready to recite for any given moment, whether lounging in the dorms or hunkering in the trenches.

Tennyson is a favorite of Ellwood’s—of “’Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all” fame. In fact, the title of the book is from one of his most significant pieces “In Memoriam A.H.H.” The poem was written after the death of Tennyson’s good friend, a relationship with parallels to our main characters, loverboy Ellwood notes.

“but it was the Classics Gaunt wanted: Plutarch and Xenophon and Thucydides, men who proved that Gaunt's own trouble were ancient and survivable”

Ancient and survivable… the gift of poetry, and the gift of fiction, like this book, too.

Poetry’s impact is also clear on the way this book is written. Glorious, gorgeous, gutwrenching sentences. Pacing that gives space, yet momentum. Bits of levity shining through the darkness. This book dangles you off many cliffs, making it that much more fulfilling when it snatches you up and whisks you away to the next scene.

That language equally captures the dread and atrocity of what the boys were experiencing on the frontlines. The claws of war ravaged every aspect of life. It’s overwhelming to try to fathom the ways this war, all wars, altered the course of human history, the course of individual lives and legacies.

This book graphically exposes the ghastly realities of the trenches: not holding back on the gore, but all for a higher purpose. To make it believable when these boys—18 years old, mind you—change and harden and become something entirely new because of it.

There’s so much pain: because of war, because of love. But potential for pain is part of the agreement you enter into when you love someone.

And despite everything these characters face, there’s hope, too. Because that’s also part of the agreement.

“He thought perhaps all the pain would sour the love, but instead it drew him further in, as if he were Marc Antony, falling on his own sword. And it was a magical thing, to love someone so much; it was a feeling so strange and slippery, like a sheath of fabric cut from the sky.”

If you want to make it a thing …

I have to imagine there are others interested in a rabbit hole such as this, right? Right??? If so, I have a few more recommendations that added historical context and color to the experience of reading this book.

The Rest is History latest series on WWI

That link is for the YouTube playlist with all the episodes, but I listened on Spotify starting here with Episode 1

These hosts are an absolute delight. Since it’s about the first year of the war, it matches up pretty perfectly to the majority of In Memoriam.

The World Wars documentary series on Prime

Zooming out, this series is about both world wars: how WWI began, and ultimately set the stage for WWII. It’s pretty high level, but is a good reminder of that bigger picture.

Bonus that it has the most dramatic intro of any television show that has ever existed, ever:

Thank you for reading!

Love, Shelby

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Virginia Woolf with a room of her own, yet pockets full of stones. Sylvia Plath thinly veiled as Esther Greenwood. Elizabeth Wurtzel, president of Prozac Nation. Winona Ryder’s portrayal in Girl, Interrupted. Even Peyton “People Always Leave” Sawyer from One Tree Hill.

Throughout modern media, there’s been a confounding fascination with madness, and the women afflicted with it. I wondered… why?

Well, these women are complex and complicated. Heightened and extreme. Qualities that make for enrapturing stories.

They turn the inside, out: they wrap the inner psychological self into words made for public consumption, made for us to attempt to understand.

They’re often connected to creativity—the act of creating art a source of both fulfillment and torture. This art often bearing the weight of their desire to be understood.

“The fear of incomprehensibility links madness and writing.”
— Hermione Lee in her biography of Virginia Woolf

Really, there is an inextricable link between reading, writing, and madness.

And this link is exactly what “Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen” by Suzanne Scanlon explores.

I initially came across this book on the staff recommendation shelf at McNally Jackson: “This one is for the Readers, those with Bad Brains, and anyone who just wants to read a bunch of really good sentences,” it said.

Sold, I said.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

A raw and masterful memoir about becoming a woman and going mad—and doing both at once.

When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

After nearly three years and countless experimental treatments, Suzanne left the ward on shaky legs. In the decades it took her to recover from the experience, Suzanne came to understand her suffering as part of something a long tradition of women whose complicated and compromised stories of self-actualization are reduced to “crazy chick” and “madwoman” narratives. It was a thrilling discovery, and she searched for more books, more woman writers, as the journey of her life converged with her journey through the literature that shaped her.

And literature shaped her indeed.

Growing up a young woman in the world, in the wake of her mother’s death and on the pursuit of finding herself, from a household that avoided emotions entirely and with a brain that she suspected pretty early on wasn’t “normal”, the author devoured books like The Bell Jar and The Lover.

In that year before I moved to the city, my relationship with books had changed. Now I read books in a way that felt at once desperate and thrilling. It had become a way to live, or a search for how to live. I suppose it is easy to dismiss a young woman for forming and shaping her identity under the influence of books, or reading—and yet. This was what I had and it was everything.

In these stories of madness, she saw her own staring back. She saw—as so many readers do, but perhaps her with more desperation and urgency as she describes—that books could be windows into other people’s minds, and thus, mirrors too.

They can give “the electric intensity of recognition”.

I mean, what a phrase.

It’s as if reading made her recognize her mental illness, and liberated her from it too.

I am trying to say something about that sacred relationship between a young woman and a book. I am speaking of my own experience back then, as I moved further from life, untethered, lost, in search of some sustaining framework.

As a sentiment, it too easily becomes saccharine—a book saved me! That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the reception that is possible when the reader is open, as I was, in need of the voice, of possibility. Reading became a way to actively rewrite my life.

In college during the 90s, she found herself in a mental hospital—”in the official records, the word is stayed, not lived. I stayed in a hospital. It wasn’t about living.”

The book wanders from explaining more visceral moments of that experience, to more macro observations about the reputation, the history, the industry of “madness”. She reports on it and she’s lived it—the author and the subject.

Madness as a term or madwoman as a title feel pretty archaic now. A crude, incomplete way to describe someone suffering with their mental health. A sexist one too.

One’s mental health is, of course, affected both by how you’re wired and what’s happened to you, nature and nature. A case of “madness” is as unique as the individual themselves.

And before we had Sylvia or Elizabeth or Suzanne to speak for themselves, an even cruder diagnosis spoke for them.

“Hysteria”, dating back to ancient times, was the term used to describe essentially any psychological or physical symptom experienced by women, attributed to a “wandering womb”1. Literally from the beginning of time, rather than attempting to understand the woman, she was dubbed “hysterical” and shipped off to an asylum.

For centuries, this word was used to blanket, genericize, pathologize, dismiss the experiences of women.

Scanlon’s book, its predecessors, the ones she outlines within her pages do the opposite.

They individualize and contextualize. They make tangible and real another human’s experience. Something she found as essential as air earlier in her life.

Essential because of the feeling of isolation that lives at the heart of mental illness—”so far out”, as she says.

Woolf understood both the protective quality—a numbing of feeling—and the great danger of madness: to be so far out with no way back, and to lose all means of communicating that gap. A famous poem by Woolf’s lesser known contemporary, British poet Stevie Smith, comes to mind: I was much further out than you thought / and not waving by drowning.

How often has a doctor—or a friend—diagnosed a person as waving, when she is indeed drowning?

She argues books can, if not save you from drowning, bring you closer to waving. They did for her.

They make an isolating experience a (slightly more) collective one. Knowing there are others out there feeling a semblance of what you’re feeling, becomes strength in numbers, which can become real strength.

Nothing about mental health is simple. But to me, the fascination comes down to this: everyone wants to be seen and understood.

Scanlon’s book is beautifully and intensely open and honest about wanting to be seen. Through striking and delicate words, she endeavors to be understood.

Whether the reader has the same “affliction” or not, seeing other humans deeply and complexly is what reading—life—is all about.

To pain and loneliness, fear and isolation, reading can be an antidote.

And also, this book really is… a bunch of really good sentences.

Love, Shelby

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Because I’m me, and Paris is Paris, I couldn’t help but think of all the fascinating literary history baked into the streets and balconies and spirit of the city.

I swiftly fell down the rabbit hole—join me…

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There’s something in the air of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

You can feel it now, and I’m certain—by certain I mean, I’ve watched Midnight in Paris—you could feel it a century ago. The concentration of writers, painters, artists, creatives, that converged in the half-mile radius of this neighborhood during this time is mind-boggling. It seemed… electric.

But before Hemingway or Joyce stepped on the scene, the groundwork was being laid for the city of love to become a mecca of expression and creativity. And who laid that groundwork you ask? Some iconic women that’s who.

Or “New Women” as the particular flavor of feminism was called at the time, the term coined in 1894. New Women were basically just… empowered women. Those with an independent spirit, an intellectual pursuit, and desires all her own. As the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth, women were becoming much freer (it’s all relative) than they were in the Victoria era before. Paris—its imagination and inspiration—expanded their minds and encouraged them out of the shell the times forced them into.

This was certainly the case for Colette, who moved to Paris in 1893. Despite being married to a man—Henry Gauthier-Villars who was traditional, untalented, and 14 years older than her—she started to embody a more evocative and androgynous identity in her new city. She began to work as a ghostwriter for her hack of a husband, and discovered she had real talent as an author.

Once she got rid of him—divorce, not murder—she began to explore a whole new world of intellectual stimulation. She had a series of rendezvous with several women, but only caused a literal riot in the streets outside Moulin Rouge with one. On January 3, 1907 (the specificity of this date gets me), Colette and her partner at the time, Mathilde de Morny, or “Missy”, kissed on-stage during a pantomime performance. People lost their minds.

They stayed together for another five years after the scandal. She then moved on to men many years her junior. These experiences were funneled into her writing, publishing her iconic Chéri in 1920 and Le Blé en Herbe in 1923, both about cougar behavior.

Around the time that Colette and Missy were smooching on stage, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas were meeting for their first date, a walk around the streets of Paris. (Literary Ladies Guide just recently wrote a great piece on the whole of Gertrude and Alice’s relationship, here). At this time, Gertrude was already established on the scene having published a variety of books and essays. She shared her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus with her brother Leo, which I love. The salon attracted all kinds of kinds, in large part due to their fabulous art collection including Matisse, Picasso, Man Ray—people would come over just to admire. It became a hub for the meeting of some incredible minds.

Over the years, Paris became a haven for the liberated, in part thanks to the example these women set. They were certainly New Women: catalysts and pioneers completely in charge of every aspect of their own lives, especially their literary ones.

“You all are a lost generation”—a quote from Gertrude Stein that was bestowed upon the generation who came of age right after World War I, and more specifically the group of writers that cropped up in Europe around this time. Characterized by disillusionment, their work reflected the times.

Chief among them, our boys Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hemingway moved to Paris with his wife Hadley in 1922, Fitz with Zelda in 1924. Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast while in Paris, Fitz The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night. This tumultuous bromance began at Dingo Bar in 1925, and they would go on to spend quite a lot of time together moving in same circle on the Left Bank, with Stein at the helm. But Hemingway’s macho persona and militant writing style, and Fitzgerald’s highbrow vibe and lyrical writing style made them perfect rivals—foils. Over the course of their friendship, they helped each other, judged each other, envied each other, and wrote scathing letters to and stories about each other. Despite the drama, there was reverence. They both understood they were in the presence of genius.

Another who understood this: Sylvia Beach, owner of Shakespeare and Company, when she read Ulysses by James Joyce. In 1920, writer Ezra Pound invited Joyce to visit Paris for a week. He stayed for 20 years.

The mammoth that is Ulysses had been rejected by publishers elsewhere, so Sylvia said she’s do it. Founded as part-bookstore, part-lending library, Shakespeare and Company was like a magnet, attracting this vast group of writers and artists, embodying the peak of Paris creativity. The publication of Ulysses caused both her bookstore’s and his career’s ascent to fame. And ironically, in a way, its demise as well. In 1941, a Nazi officer demanded that Beach sell him her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. She refused. She was subsequently sent to the Vittel internment camp for 6 months, and had to close the doors, under her name at least, forever.

As the world emerged from WWII, Paris started to get its spark back. Once again, with a concentration of bookstores and publishing houses in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Left Bank was where alllll the action was.

Writers congregated, contemplated, ideated in cafes. Three in particular: Brasserie Lipp, Les Duex Magots, Cafe le Flores—all on the corner of Boulevard Saint Germain and Rue de Rennes. We stayed at a cute hotel, Hôtel La Folie des Prés, a block away from this corner, and I swear I could feel it.

Les Duex Magots is where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre held court. de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 not far from the future action, right in the heart of the 6th arrondissement. Of her childhood, in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, she said: "My father's individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother's teaching. This disequilibrium, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual."

She, too, was a New Woman. She went to the Sorbonne after university to continue studying philosophy, where she shaped the feminist ideas she’d go on to share with the world through her writing.

There she met Jean-Paul Sartre who would go on to be her partner for 50 years. She was vehemently against the institution of marriage. Which makes sense considering the book she’s most famous for, The Second Sex, rails against the patriarchy. In that book, she outlines how in a society where man is “default”, women became “other”, and therefore all that women are is considered in relation to men. At a hefty 832 pages, she examines so much, like how a lot of this inequity can be traced back to the differences of childhood experience and expectations of boys and girls. Girlhood is something she also explores in the recently, posthumously published Inseparable—a lovely read.

With marriage and its roles as a direct reflection of this society she’s outlined, she said: hard pass.

Jean-Paul Sartre is a philosopher in his own right and the founder of the school of existentialism. But in so many articles that I read, Simone is referred to as his partner first and a philosopher second, which she would absolutely loathe, so I’ll spend no more time on HER partner and philosopher.

Next door to Les Duex Magots at Cafe Le Flores, James Baldwin was often found writing. He arrived in Paris is 1948 after fleeing from Jim Crow America—”My journey, or my flight, had not been to Paris, but simply away from America.” He had a rocky start, spending Christmas of 1949 in jail, but quickly became a part of the world. Like many before him, he ultimately saw his time in Paris as one of self-discovery—removing himself from the oppression of America, to the comparative liberation of Paris, allowed him space to breathe and think and be. He was productive too, writing Giovanni's Room, Notes of a Native Son, and most of Go Tell It on the Mountain there.

Of Paris, James Baldwin said: "The arrogant indifference on the part of the Parisian, with its unpredictable effects on the traveler, which makes so splendid the Paris air, to say nothing whatever of the exhilarating effect it has on the Paris scene."

The arrogant indifference is somehow so appealing. Throughout history, Paris has been living its fabulous life, not giving a rip who people are, what they create, who they love, what they wear. That’s not to say it was perfect—nowhere is—but that it was conducive to a kind of magic that still lingers today.

I only scratched the surface here, if you can believe it. I hope you enjoyed!

Love, Shelby

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Last week I returned home from a gorgeous vacation to the Philippines with Martin’s family: one week in Urdaneta to celebrate Grandma’s 98th birthday 🥹 and one week in Boracay for some blissful beach time. I consumed my weight in mangos and managed to not get sunburnt—it was a huge success.

For this trip, due to only packing a carry-on and a fear of commitment to reading material for two whole weeks, I got back together with my iPad, filling my Books and Libby apps to the brim, ready for any reading mood that were to strike.

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A hot tip before we get started: the “Special Offers” section in the Apple Book Store has some great sales every now and then. There’s a lot to wade through, but you will be rewarded for your efforts with the occasional book that’s all the rage and only out in hardback for $1.99, like the first here…

Evenings & Weekends by Oisín McKenna

This is exactly, precisely, completely my kind of book. Set during a hot London summer, the book weaves a web of friends, partners, brothers, parents. They’re all harboring feelings and secrets and resentments and dreams. They’re living pretty average lives, all seeking something different and new, but finding themselves stuck, much like the big news story that hovers across the novel: a whale trapped in the Thames.

The book summary highlights the three main characters, but I actually found myself enthralled with Phil’s mom’s story. She’s seeing life in a new light, and thus reflecting on her strict Irish Catholic upbringing, a childhood where she was taught to resist her curiosities, to be a good girl, to never make a fuss, to—fatefully—keep it all inside. I found this book to be quite an arresting depiction of how what goes unsaid can trickle down generations and fester in relationships.

This book struck the perfect balance of entertainment and provocation for me—what I want all literary fiction to be. At the risk of sounding cheesy, it’s the kind of book that reminds me why I love reading.

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne

My comfort film is The Center Will Not Hold, a documentary about Joan Didion made by her nephew Griffin Dunne. I always have it downloaded for flights just in case, and when I sit down to watch TV and the streaming decision fatigue is too much to bear, I’ll throw it on. So, because of the small amount of family lore I already knew—the prickly and needy dynamic of Joan and her husband John Gregory Dunne, Dominick Dunne’s connections with Truman Capote’s “Swans”, the murder of Dominique Dunne, etc—I was very excited to hear that Dunne had written this “family memoir”.

The family certainly does not lack drama—scandalous and star-studded. The exciting tales in and around the family fill up the entire book, which is good because that almost makes up for the writing that is, let’s just say, not Didion-caliber. I imagine it’s hard to find your own identity or know how to navigate the world in the daunting shadows of such big names and personalities. When you’re born into this type of world, it’s not necessarily a given that you’ll be of it. When you’re surrounded by a multitude of consequential points of view, do you even have to find your own?

The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano by Donna Freitas

This book starts with a fight about prenatal vitamins, nine times. Rose Napolitano is a professor who has always known she didn’t want to have kids. Luke is her husband that she thought was on that same page, but has recently changed his mind and now wants kids more than anything. In nine alternate realities, Rose takes different steps forward in response to this defining moment.

Ultimately, this book is a meditation on whether or not to become a mother. During the prenatal vitamin conversation, a million paths lie before her, as they do for all of us—the rest is still unwritten and all that. It’s the terrifying and comforting truth that if you think about it, the tiniest tweak could alter everything. But life is about choosing a path anyway, one foot in front of the other. This book amplifies that: heightening this already-massive decision and indulging in all the what-ifs, or, I suppose, exactly nine what-ifs.

I like this book in theory, the sliding doors of it all. In practice, it was difficult to follow because perhaps nine is a handful too many doors. The story jumps around, so I found myself flipping back, attempting to remember the throughline of each life—did she get divorced in life 1 or 2? Did she have the baby in life 4 or was it 5? This got easier as I read and a perfect memory of lives 1 through 9 was probably not mandatory, but I found it distracting, and is perhaps helpful to know going in if you decide to give this one a whirl.

How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty & Female Creativity by Jill Burke

This is a book of fun facts and origin stories. So many beauty standards and customs that we’re used to today have their roots in the Renaissance. There are tales of oppression and rebellion, and traditions both foreign and familiar. My biggest takeaway is this: women have been cheeky, creative, intelligent, and powerful since the dawn of time.

I loved how the book included some recipes from Renaissance times to get a feel of what these women were whippin’ up in their castles with their girls.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling

Ever heard of it?

This one was a vacation miracle as I’d been playing the waiting game with Libby for weeks. Our resort on the island of Boracay had a library with exactly one shelf of books, and there, shining like a Lumos spell (😗), sat the full set of Harry Potter books. I checked GOF out Sunday, and had until Wednesday to make it happen. The staff member who helped me was dubious; I was not.

Since embarking on this journey of reading the books for the first time (I know, I know), it’s safe to say that the fourth book is almost universally the favorite of the series. While not in a position to make that claim yet, this was certainly where, for lack of a better phrase, shit gets real.

I’m fully aware this sounds crazy because it’s a ✨ magical ✨ world we’re talking about, but this book felt more realistic, more conceivable. Harry’s emotions matched the circumstances more than previous ones, and the situations he found himself in made more sense. The past three put him in dire situations, opening his eyes to this new world, and the fourth is where it’s all put into action. Despite still being so young, we start to see what he’s made of and what he’s really fighting for comes into focus. His innocence is lost here: he has his first crush, he sees Cedric die, his trust is eroded when Mad Eye isn’t really Mad Eye, and he fights face-to-face with a very real Voldemort. As the books get longer, you feel the passage of time in a way that you’re not able to in the movies. On to Order of the Phoenix.

Clear by Carys Davies

The plot of Clear is this: on a remote Scottish island lives one single man named Ivar. John Ferguson, a fellow working on behalf of the Church, is sent to evict Ivar. John gets injured, Ivar ends up taking care of him, a bond forms.

This book lives at the convergence of some fascinating historical movements and discoveries. The first is the Great Disruption in Scottish Church in 1843 when hundreds of ministers left the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church of Scotland. The second is the Clearances from 1750 to 1860 where residents got booted from their homes in the Scottish Highlands to maximize land for financial gain. And the third is a bygone language the author discovered in the National Library of Scotland.

To me, this book like a snow globe. There are these huge historical and societal influences circling the story, and the story itself is a single anecdote that feels both separate from and representative of those forces. On the page, on a micro level, it’s a story of two humans connecting and transcending language. On a macro level with all the rich context from the afterword, it gains even more meaning. A masterful book that was satisfyingly quick, too.

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan

I’m mad just thinking about this book.

The Kennedy dynasty—”Camelot”, entirely orchestrated by Jackie post-assassination BTW—is larger than life. Defining America, they are some of the most famous men in the world. Read: men. This book takes a look at the women who were unlucky enough to find themselves born into, married into, or simply in the Kennedy orbit.

We all knew JFK was a philanderer: it was disappointingly yet perfectly naughtily part of his charm. But oh my, that only scratches the surface. Other than Rose Kennedy, mother of the JFK generation and the matriarch married to Joe Kennedy, who was very impactful in the family’s rise to power by beating perfection as the only option into each and every little Catholic head, these women were doomed. Some stories I knew—the devastating lobotomy and subsequent abandonment of Rosemary—but many I didn’t. The author talked of the “well-worn Kennedy playbook”: harming others, walking away unscathed, and learning nothing from the experience. So many women were left in the wake of reckless Kennedy men.

This book tells of these women’s “false codas, written by the Kennedys or their enablers, that invariably blame them. False endings full of slander, misogyny, and character assassination—wrought untold collateral damage, not just for victims but for all of us.” It will fill you with rage, but it’s a worthwhile read.

Also, one of the smartest, most impeccable titles I’ve ever seen.

Do let me know if you pick any of these up and what you think :) See you next time!

Love, Shelby

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As I sat down to write this, I realized that through my monthly roundup posts over the past year, I’ve been sharing about books that stood out in some way: ones that took me by surprise, made a substantial impact, reframed the way I think, lingered with me long after I closed them. Through the *very* scientific process of putting my top ten list together, I realized they were all already there. So in addition to compiling those mini-reviews, I thought I’d also reflect on what those books—and reading in general—meant to me this past year.

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Thinking back on 2024, I had to fight to make time for reading. Over the past several years, baking time to read into my life felt easier, pretty much effortless. But with a new city and a new job and devices designed to make our time vanish into thin air and brains melt into mush… more than ever, it became something I had to actively protect. Whether that was an audiobook at the park with my dog or dedicated hours at the coffeeshop on weekends, I had to—and will continue in 2025—be more intentional about carving it out. Such is life, but one thing that will always be true, for me at least, is that making the time to read—to learn, to get lost, to feel—is the most worthwhile pursuit of all.

The books that I was drawn to this year were profound and powerful. Seven fiction and three nonfiction, they are all stories that consumed me. When I was reading these, the distractions fell away. They are books that I could talk about for hours, and that will stick with me for years.

Some of these books are impassioned, burning, deeply felt. Some enlightening and revelatory. Chaos. Tears. Tea. This list has it all.

There are stories of moving through loss: sitting in it and adjusting to life after it. There are stories of love both platonic and romantic, of drama, of sadness, of betrayal. Some span generations and some are more focused. Two are from over a hundred years ago, but still feel remarkably relevant. Some are freshly published and I couldn’t get my hands on them quickly enough. But none are only one thing—they are books that show the multitudes of life. Across all of them, I’d bet they check off every single human emotion.

Somehow equally surprising and unsurprising, all ten are written by women. Surprising because it was completely accidental, but unsurprising because I’ve always sought to understand how, and what it means, to be a woman in this world. How it’s been done for centuries before me, and new ways that are being written into existence.

In this list, there are some young characters finding their way and learning about the world. Some are jaded from having experienced a bit too much of the world. Several are defiant: wishing, wanting, pursuing more than the circumstances they find themselves in. It’s fascinating to witness these characters grow and morph over hundreds of pages.

Above all, there’s an abiding sense of hope. These books all left me imagining what lies beyond the last page. Not a future that’s all sunshine and roses, but one that is undeniably changed by the story that’s told.

She was made up of all these good things and all these bad things. She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl … She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only—the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life—the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

— A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Here are my ten favorite books I read this year…

10. Margot’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

OnlyFans, professional wrestling, and teen pregnancy are not a combination of topics I imagined I would enjoy reading about. And yet, Margo’s Got Money Troubles absolutely enchanted me. I read the whole thing on a plane ride, and time flew. Margo gets pregnant at 19 from an affair with her professor, keeps the baby as an act of spite for those who think she can’t handle it, and then, of course, has a baby at 19 with no help. She turns to OnlyFans as a source of income, but truly finds herself through the process. The progress and evolution of this character was a joy to watch—from apathetic teen to powerful, confident, creative business boss. — Nov

9. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

It feels almost silly to put this one in my top ten because of how perennial it is, but it’s absolutely striking in the context of when it’s written, 1929. Virginia Woolf envisioned and demanded a reality conducive for women to realize their creative potential. I love learning about and around this book too. I’m reading Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen right now for example, and it’s one of many stories of how fundamental and formative Woolf’s work was to generations of women writers.

I read A Room of One’s Own and was unsurprisingly—to use her word—agog at the expanse of her mind poured into that book. Her exploration of truth, her thesis that space, money, other basic needs are required to wander and create fiction, her balance of realism and optimism — all truly singular. — Dec

8. Brutes by Dizz Tate

Brutes follows a group of friends living in Florida as they collectively grapple with the disappearance of a an older girl they idolized. Part of the book is written from the perspective of the entire group, using “we” as the pronoun, and I found it fascinating. Not only is the writing absolutely stunning, surprising, immersive, stirring, but the implication of groupthink and having your identity be so inextricably linked with your friends at that age, that you can’t even see where they end and you begin, was so well done. You get glimpses of the girls later in life and while there is a lot left unsaid, you’re able to connect the dots between childhood and current circumstances. Set deep in Florida, the plot felt as humid and sticky as the state itself. It’s violent and innocent, thriller and coming-of-age. — Feb

7. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I can’t believe it took me so long to get around to this one. Learn from this cautionary tale of mine.

Pachinko is sweeping. Its 500 pages are subtle, yet powerful. The book spans three generations, starting mainly with Sunja, who we meet as a young girl in Korea. Her life is filled with hard work, until she falls for an older man who promises to give her the world. Spoiler alert, he doesn’t. Pregnant, she marries a different man, a benevolent minister, and moves to Japan, quickly learning how unwelcome Koreans are in this new place. Her children, and her children’s children, learn this, and much more, in their own time and in their own ways.

“A woman’s lot is to suffer” is repeated throughout the book. Sunja suffers, and she wonders what for. Sacrifice and loyalty look different with each passing generation. There is love, but its so often unspoken. Whether that’s cultural or individual or both, you aren’t able to grasp the enormity of the opening line—“History has failed us, but no matter”— until it’s over.

In a conversation with the author at the end of the book, Lee is asked about the tone she chose throughout the story and her answer is “fair”. She set out to be as objective as possible when it came to her characters and the world she created. As with any culture, there are so many nuances that I as an outsider didn’t know. And one of the many things I loved about this book is that Lee has written it in such an impressive, deft, fair way that allows the reader to learn and expand and form opinions of their own. Despite the turmoil the occurs throughout the story, it’s never forced upon the reader. It takes you along, gently and masterfully. It’s a long journey, and such a rewarding one. — 4 very good, very long books

6. Here After by Amy Lin

At their best, books can get you as close to an experience without actually experiencing it. Terrifyingly and extremely tearfully, that’s what this book did.

Here After is Amy Lin’s account of losing her beloved husband, Kurtis, and the all-consuming grief that followed. Proceed with caution, guard your heart, but if you are in a place where you can take this journey with Amy, I highly recommend you do. The experience of this book is visceral, moving, heartbreaking, all of which are understatements; it it so deeply, tragically human. It is phenomenally written. Try as I might, I genuinely don’t think I can gather up the words to do this book justice. Tears were streaming down my face during the book tour event hearing Amy speak about Kurtis and the act of getting these words down, and again for a long while after finishing it. It absolutely demolished me in imagining what the experience of losing your person must feel like, while simultaneously making me so immensely grateful that that kind of love exists, and that we get to experience it, if we’re so lucky. I’m in complete awe of Amy and this book. — Mar

5. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

This book was special for me from the jump. Nerd alert, but I’ve mentioned before about how the universe placed me in a neighborhood with a book reviewer for The New Yorker, thus in proximity to a bounty of advanced reader copies of books whenever she decides to do a clear out. I had been dying to read this book after watching the Fleishman Is in Trouble adaptation on Hulu with Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes, when one fateful day, me and Ham were strutting back home and lying at the top of a pile in a giant Fresh Market bag, there she was, four months before her publication date. Thank you universe!

From the author of Fleishman Is In Trouble, comes an equally immersive tale, this time about a wealthy family on Long Island.

This book is a tragedy. And I had an amazing time. It follows the Fletcher family, whom we meet as a trajectory-defining event occurs: the dad gets kidnapped. For a week, the husband of Ruth and father of Nathan, Beamer, and Jenny is held for ransom. When he is returned and pronounced safe and sound (well, safe, probably not sound), the family—in classic fashion of that generation—decides the best course of action is to never speak of it again. You can only imagine the havoc that decision wreaks.

The book fast-forwards 40 years and into the lives of the adult children. Nathan is paralyzed by fear, Beamer turns to any and all vices to mask his mediocrity, and Jenny is so hellbent on disavowing her family’s wealth that she ruins her own life bit by bit—each tale more tragic than the last, if you can believe it.

The book is separated into parts, and I loved how the tone and inflection and language and overall vibe changed to match the personality—and neuroses—of each character. Nathan’s part was pure anxiety as he held a death grip on his life, and watched it fall apart anyway. Beamer’s was so chaotic, all over the place as he actively avoided and explained away his addiction. Jenny’s was arguably the worst of all, and therefore the most impressive writing: delusional, gaslighting herself into believing she was the good amongst the rest of her family’s evil.

This book is so entertaining; like a car crash, I couldn’t possibly look away. There is no drama like family drama, especially *wealthy* family drama, and this book delivers that in spades. — 4 very good, very long books

4. After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell

One of my best friends was asking me for a recommendation recently, and I categorically said: Maggie O’Farrell. Between Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait, I Am I Am I Am, and this one, I am a complete stan.

I think I felt every single possible emotion one can feel while reading After You’d Gone by Maggie O'Farrell. The description leaves you with an alluring, if not confusing, premise: the main character boards a train from London home to Scotland, sees something at the station, turns right back around to London and ends up in a coma after an accident. A lot to know going in, and the answers to the questions left from that premise are so artfully laid throughout the novel. Love, loss, humor, hope, despair, generational baggage, unlived lives, rejection, acceptance—it has it all. Also! I went to log it into Goodreads and was shocked to find it was written in 2000! It felt as resonant and relevant and vivid almost 25 years later. Maggie is timeless. — Nov

3. The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control: A Path to Peace and Power by Katherine Morgan Schafler

I think about this book, and the title and types of perfectionist, frequently. This book was so helpful in reframing my relationship with being a perfectionist, but also how I approach work and life at large. It’s helped me see the validity and power in my procrastinator-perfectionist tendencies, but also how I can work to tackle the not-so-good aspects of that. A work in progress!

The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control has shook me to my core. I have always resonated with the self-proclaimed title of perfectionist, but have had my qualms about the negative context it consistently seems to hold. This book makes the case that perfectionism is not always a bad thing! It can, in fact, be a positive force in your life. She argues that at the core of perfectionism is ambition and desire to succeed, whatever the means to each individual, which can be, but doesn’t have to be, considered toxic or unhealthy. The book is so validating in the way it expresses how when “maladaptive” behaviors are shifted to “adaptive” behaviors, we’re able to use our perfectionism for good, as fuel to accomplish our goals and fulfill our wildest dreams. It outlines five different “types” of perfectionists—I’m a procrastinating perfectionist, with a lil touch of Parisian perfectionism on the side. The examples the author uses to illustrate her points made me feel like she set up a hidden camera on me. This book is so enlightening, comforting, and motivating. — Mar

2. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an instant favorite. Complete and deep understanding of its place in the literary canon. Never felt a love for a character like the love I have for Francie. This book was healing. Part of me wishes that I read it when I was younger, closer to Francie’s reality in her teen years, when it would have provided more of a sense of solidarity and comfort. But reading it now as I’ll be 30 in a couple weeks hit differently in a quite emotional way, as evidenced by the tears welling as I finished it on the plane. Watching Francie grow up, start to experience the rites of passage, and build the beginnings of a life for herself was sentimental, nostalgic, it was everything. I felt equal parts anxious and eager for what lies ahead of her. I felt so protective and so fulfilled and so grateful for her. — May

Since reading, I read this New Yorker article that gave me another perspective to round out my perception of the book. It has a darker take, highlighting the poverty and fear laced throughout Francie’s Brooklyn. The article urges that we don’t ONLY see A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a fun, young classic American coming-of-age tale. It’s complex, which makes me appreciate the book even more.

1. Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

This one earned the top spot because when I think back on all the books I read this year, this is the one that I remember truly, genuinely not being able to put down. I had to see where these sisters went and how they got there, immediately. The hope I mention below is like an ethereal bubble that surrounds my memory of this book.

A story of four sisters, three of which are grieving the death of the other. Coco ties the beautiful, painful, intricate threads of sisterhood so perfectly in this book. It was perfectly descriptive and masterfully told, hitting on themes that are universal and powerful whether you have sisters or not. I am constantly impressed by her ability to write a book that is equal parts swift and deep … I came away from both the book and her book tour talk with this pervasive sense of hope. That no matter what you’ve been through, are going through, are going to go through—life is worth not only living, but worth feeling and experiencing as deeply as one possibly can. Pure magic, this book and this author. — Sep & Oct

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And some honorable mentions…

Wellness by Nathan Hill

Jack and Elizabeth fall in love in Chicago in the 90s. They’re both broken in their own ways (aren’t we all?) and become instantly inseparable, truly in their own world. Twenty years later, they’re married with a kid. Jack is an artist obsessed with bettering himself; Elizabeth is a researcher at a company called Wellness, specializing in the placebo effect (important detail). The deep, otherworldly connection that defined their relationship back then is no longer—they’ve become two separate worlds existing under one roof.

And the book is written that way too, switching back and forth between Jack and Elizabeth’s perspective, hearing about what’s consuming them and how they’re interpreting the other. The writing is verbose in the best way. The author takes his time outlining every inch of the emotions, tensions, frustrations, memories, and I was absolutely eating it up.

My favorite thing, though, was that the book had an overarching sense of optimism that was so earnest, so endearing, so lovely. Even through anger and distance and brokenness, this book proved that love—not just romantic love, but the multidimensional, existential variety—will make its way through, no matter what.

I’ve also never read a quote that so perfectly, effortlessly, gloriously describes that magic of loving someone and building a life with them quite like this one… — 4 very good, very long books

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

This one is about two brothers, that’s right: men. But fear not, the drama and ennui and existential dread that Rooney is known for is still very much present here. You will still feel infuriated and annoyed with her characters, just as much as you’ll come to deeply understand them. Interestingly and uncharacteristically, I felt a sense of hope emanating from these pages too. This book was romantic and budding, if not optimistic. — Sep & Oct

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The God of the Woods takes place at a summer camp in the Adirondacks, moving through time from way back when the Vanderbilt-level wealthy Van Laar family settles there, to 1975, when a girl from the very same lineage goes missing.

The concept itself is intriguing: who doesn’t love a summer camp whodunnit? But the book surprised me with so many more layers than I initially imagined. Hearing from perspectives old and young, rich and poor, powerful and not, the story is multifaceted and deeply captivating.

The juxtaposition of the Van Laar family and the community of workers and families that keep the camp and the town running is executed flawlessly. It’s a piercing portrait of how wealth can warp your perception of reality, how wealth—its presence or its lack—defines your view of yourself, your environment, the world. Memory and truth are up for debate. That’s what this book does so well: who’s the victim here? Like a kaleidoscope, you’ll get a hundred different answers depending on where you’re standing. No one is all bad or all good, and that’s what makes humans, their stories, fascinating.

Another reason I loved this book—nature is a forceful, ever-present character. The woods are far more formidable than any person, than wealth, than all the power society can give. A storm changes lives forever, and familiarity with the forest is both a downfall and an opportunity. God of the Woods is not short on excitement, both manmade and natural. — 4 very good, very long books

Sociopath by Patric Gagne

I just finished an incredible memoir called Sociopath by Patric Gagne and it was riveting. The author has a PhD in psychology, studying sociopathy and its effects, and she is also a sociopath herself. She is the researcher and the subject. The book details her experience growing up with sociopathic tendencies—extreme apathy, inclination to do bad and violent things, anxiety over her lack of feeling—but without any language for it. She would search dictionaries and psychology resources high and low and found an abysmally small amount of information about sociopathy: she does all her psychology work and wrote this book so others would never have to have that experience. Throughout the memoir, she steals things, she breaks into people’s houses, she lies with complete ease, but she also falls in love and pursues knowledge with the hopes of helping people. Books like these are so important because they show that a label, like ‘sociopath’, can mean something very different and so much more than we see in movies or read in headlines. The writing is incredible, deftly and painstakingly drawing the nuances and boundaries of her feelings within and experience of sociopathy, making it honestly quite easy to understand. What a woman. — May

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik

The long-awaited (by me) story of the tumultuous, interwoven story of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Both lauded as “the voice of California”, these two writers couldn’t be more different in their sensibilities and therefore, literary output. I enjoyed this book so much and found it massively entertaining, DESPITE the fact that the author is clearly a Didion hater, very much Team Babitz, shameless in her obsession. This page below with quotes from both on the same topic—the Santa Ana winds—is the perfect encapsulation of the whole thesis of this book to me. It displays Joan as observer and connector with the wider world and the human experience, and Eve as a person living, feeling, experiencing life. Through this, the book presents two valid approaches to work and life: Didion’s—hard work and discipline and sheer will, finding and communicating the gold in the material around you; and Babitz’s: feeling and intuition and adventure, creating the material yourself. — Nov

Congratulations are in order if you made it all the way through. Thank you for being here. I’m excited about all the books to be read and book chats to be had in 2025.

Love, Shelby

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1. To get ahead of it: I, too, am appalled that I haven’t read the Harry Potter books yet at my 30 years of age (I have watched all the movies, I’m not a monster). But! It’s never too late to find the magic! I read Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets this month. The first two movies remain pretty loyal to the books, almost scene for scene. But I know there is so much more back story, character development, world building coming my way in the rest of the books and I can’t wait. Reading these as an adult person though, I can’t help but giggle at the fact that this small boy keeps finding himself in rooms and situations he simply has no business being in! What do you mean an 11-year-old is saving the fate of a centuries-old school! I love absolutely everything about it.

2. I stopped by the Central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and—oh my—it is stunning. I found myself on its Wikipedia page and discovered that it’s meant to look like an open book from above (cute!), and that it faced decades of pushback and delays starting as early as 1889 until its opening in 1941 (not as cute). I meandered around—they have a James Baldwin photography exhibit in the lobby right now—in awe of its architecture, and it reminded me of this quote. I already wholeheartedly agreed with this sentiment, but living in New York has made it infinitely more true.

Beauty in architecture matters. What you walk down the street, the buildings are not just bricks and mortar; they are the guardians of your day.

A beautiful building makes you feel less alone. It tells you that someone cared. Care enough to make a window curve just so, to lay the stones like poetry, to stretch a tower toward the sky like a dream reaching out.

Beauty in architecture stops you. It makes you pause, breathe, tilt your head just a little.

It says, This is a place worth being in.
This is a world worth noticing.

3. I’m 100 years late to the party, but I’m in the process of diving into the world of Virginia Woolf. I read A Room of One’s Own and was unsurprisingly—to use her word—agog at the expanse of her mind poured into that book. Her exploration of truth, her thesis that space, money, other basic needs are required to wander and create fiction, her balance of realism and optimism — all truly singular. I’m currently reading The Waves and the writing is absolutely luscious. Writers and writing like this make me wish I could go back to college and study it all the live long day.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

4. Related, and perhaps a rebuttal to Woolf’s room, this passage by C.S. Lewis: Favorable conditions never come

5. Spent Christmas at an Airbnb in upstate New York that had the most glorious built-in bookshelves I’ve ever had the pleasure of spending time near. And I was thrilled to find that it wasn’t just for show—the host had impeccable taste in reading material. I wish I could freeze time and spend days and weeks and months making my way through his collection.

6. Was gutted to hear about the passing of Nikki Giovanni this month. Her poem about the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 was the first time I realized how words could make a real and tangible impact, how words could heal. She was funny and deep and saw the world in a way all her own. There was no other writer like her.

7. Lithub doing the lord’s work with The Ultimate Best Books of 2024 List. They compile “69 lists from 39 outlets, which collectively recommended more than 1,200 individual books” and organize which books made the most lists across the internet. This led to my purchase of both Martyr and All Fours.

8. Dogs of Summer was a phenomenal, if not stressful, snapshot of girlhood. The author does an incredible job of articulating the angst and intensity with which girls—through our ten-year-old narrator—experience the world, including and especially the other girls around them. This experience of obsession and fascination is a very specific one. Our narrator is learning who she is—and who she’s not—through the lens of her friend Isora, of course revealing much more about her than Isora in the process. It’s both disorienting and formative and messy, and the author handles it with such care. The writing was so rich, but juvenile at the same time: painting this masterful picture, and then popping the bubble by spelling something wrong or exposing a naive, ten-year-old thought. It’s like if My Brilliant Friend and Eighth Grade had a baby in the Canary Islands of Spain.

On days when Isora wanted to die I felt like I wanted to die too. According to Isora, the best way to do it was to fill the bathtub all the way to the top with hot water and then slash your wrists. Sometimes I wondered how she knew so much stuff I didn’t know, and then I got sad because I didn’t have a sadness of my own—my sadness was the same as Isora’s except inside by body. It was kind of like a fake sadness, like two copies of the same sadness, like a knock-off sadness. That was me. I had no real reason to be sad, so I just made one up.

9. Was scrolling on Instagram as one does (every day, but especially during the limbo between Christmas and New Years), and came across this post, with a passage from some of Rayne Fisher-Quann’s writing. It was a visceral, needed reminder for me during this stretch of time where we’re inundated with talk of resolutions and goals. The act of becoming yourself is a creative, personal, soft one that, in my experience, is often hindered or limited when hard measurements and looming achievements are placed on it. As we usher in a new year, I hope to keep this top of mind.

10. Last but certainly not least—this has absolutely nothing to do with reading, but it felt vital to include. My son, Ham, modeled for J Crew :’) Thanks to the talented Ally + Hayden for this iconic opportunity.

Thank you for being here. Excited for what’s to come in 2025. Happy new year to you and yours :)

Love, Shelby

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Another month has passed on the zooming speed train that is the year 2024. Got to take a vacation and reconnect with reading—and TV, movies, theater—a bit more this month. Enjoy these recommendations across all of the above. 💋

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1. The long-awaited (by me) story of the tumultuous, interwoven story of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. Both lauded as “the voice of California”, these two writers couldn’t be more different in their sensibilities and therefore, literary output. I enjoyed this book so much and found it massively entertaining, DESPITE the fact that the author is clearly a Didion hater, very much Team Babitz, shameless in her obsession. This page below with quotes from both on the same topic—the Santa Ana winds—is the perfect encapsulation of the whole thesis of this book to me. It displays Joan as observer and connector with the wider world and the human experience, and Eve as a person living, feeling, experiencing life. Through this, the book presents two valid approaches to work and life: Didion’s—hard work and discipline and sheer will, finding and communicating the gold in the material around you; and Babitz’s: feeling and intuition and adventure, creating the material yourself.

2. OnlyFans, professional wrestling, and teen pregnancy are not a combination of topics I imagined I would enjoy reading about. And yet, Margo’s Got Money Troubles absolutely enchanted me. I read the whole thing on a plane ride, and time flew. Margo gets pregnant at 19 from an affair with her professor, keeps the baby as an act of spite for those who think she can’t handle it, and then, of course, has a baby at 19 with no help. She turns to OnlyFans as a source of income, but truly finds herself through the process. The progress and evolution of this character was a joy to watch—from apathetic teen to powerful, confident, creative business boss.

3. I haven’t seen a show that has grabbed, and subsequently ripped out, my heart like Fellow Travelers with Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer did. Based on the book of the same name and set over the span of several decades, it’s the most beautiful yet tragic love story. I oscillated back and forth between depression that these two lived in a society that wouldn’t allow for their love, and joy that they had the opportunity to experience a love like that. A great, consuming love.

4. Speaking of Jonathan Bailey, Wicked! Absolutely no notes. It was perfect. I have also been eating up all the press surrounding the release, ~holding space~ some would say. A lot of it is silly and has made for some great memes, but I do sincerely love seeing artists be so passionate about what they’ve created, people doing what they’re so clearly meant to do, like they can’t possibly keep these gifts to themselves. It’s magical. Working and creating with others is such a vulnerable act, and I’d probably be crying if I made that movie too! This interview was a favorite, specifically the part where she talks about Galinda’s insecurities and how no one will ever be as brave as Elphaba.

5. I think I felt every single possible emotion one can feel while reading After You’d Gone by Maggie O'Farrell. The description leaves you with an alluring, if not confusing, premise: the main character boards a train from London home to Scotland, sees something at the station, turns right back around to London and ends up in a coma after an accident. A lot to know going in, and the answers to the questions left from that premise are so artfully laid throughout the novel. Love, loss, humor, hope, despair, generational baggage, unlived lives, rejection, acceptance—it has it all. Also! I went to log it into Goodreads and was shocked to find it was written in 2000! It felt as resonant and relevant and vivid almost 25 years later. Maggie is timeless.

6. I visited Mexico City for the first time this month, and adored it. So lush, fantastic art and obviously, great food. One place we visited was the Biblioteca Vasconcelos. It felt like a brutalist jail met a magnificent midcentury art gallery met a Harry Potter-esque floating library. Sat in this beautiful space and read The House on Fripp Island for a good while. (I categorically recommend all of Rebecca Kauffman’s books, for the record.)

7. More Mexico City for you—the Tetetlán gave me deep bookshelf envy. CDMX is a book-loving city!

8. If you’re looking for a quick book to reach those end-of-year reading goals, I’ve got a good one for ya. The Most is a story of a woman questioning if the life she’s chosen in the right one. She’s an ex-professional tennis player, current housewife with an insurance salesman husband and their two boys. They appear to be a pretty normal family, but as with any family, there are secret desires, regrets, fateful decisions all bubbling under the surface of what any 1950s family is willing to show the world. All taking place within the time frame of a swim in the apartment pool, it unfurls and makes for a very enjoyable few-hour read.

9. Sunset Boulevard was a feat of production, and I enjoyed it so much. Utilizing technology in a way I’d never seen on the stage, this old-timey classic took on a whole new life. The performers were amazing and I was enthralled the whole time. I’ve been loving going to see Broadway shows—it just feels so good to support that art form and it makes me feel connected with the city.

10. Will leave you with this James Baldwin quote that stopped me in my tracks and encapsulates what life is really all about.

Only one more roundup this year! See you soon.

Love, Shelby

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As fall turns into winter, let’s take a lil stroll through the leaves down memory lane and the many moons since we last met. Enjoy!

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September

1. I’ve been patiently waiting for this new Coco Mellors book, and it did NOT! DISAPPOINT! A story of four sisters, three of which are grieving the death of the other. Coco ties the beautiful, painful, intricate threads of sisterhood so perfectly in this book. It was perfectly descriptive and masterfully told, hitting on themes that are universal and powerful whether you have sisters or not. I am constantly impressed by her ability to write a book that is equal parts swift and deep. THEN! I got to see her! She did a stop with Books are Magic on her book tour at a glorious church in Brooklyn Heights. I came away from both the book and the talk with this pervasive sense of hope. That no matter what you’ve been through, are going through, are going to go through—life is worth not only living, but worth feeling and experiencing as deeply as one possibly can. Pure magic, this book and this author.

2. Will put the heavy hitters up top here. Next, the hottest book of the season!!! Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. There was a literal midnight release party at Greenlight Bookstore near me, a fact that I am utterly obsessed with. This one is about two brothers, that’s right: men. But fear not, the drama and ennui and existential dread that Rooney is known for is still very much present here. You will still feel infuriated and annoyed with her characters, just as much as you’ll come to deeply understand them. Interestingly and uncharacteristically, I felt a sense of hope emanating from these pages too. This book was romantic and budding, if not optimistic.

3. Another great book I read this month was Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso. This one is about a young girl observing everyone and everything around her in her (very cold) town in New England. Throughout the book, you slowly see her peel the layers of the onion away, the onion being the idea that adults are just as clueless as she. Some impeccable writing in here. The sentences are concise and forceful. It was a little bit like a darker version of the movie Eighth Grade.

4. I did a little wander over to the movie theater, saw My Old Ass with Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella (of *THE* Lennon and Maisy), and was floored. In the movie, Maisy’s character does mushrooms with her friends during the summer of her senior year of high school, about to head off to college, and meets her 40-year-old self, Aubrey’s character, while tripping. The particular season of life that this movie is about is inherently nostalgic: the desperate yearning to finally get out of your hometown and the knowledge that things will never be the same, and the ignorance to know that those feelings are a little dramatic in the grand scheme, because you do not yet know the grand scheme. But the style of the movie feels nostalgic too: the contained story, the life lessons. I really enjoyed it, and felt it didn’t get enough hype, so am giving it the shine it deserves here.

5. Loved this idea — training my brain for more glimmers.

October

6. I listened to I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman on audiobook, a science fiction story about a woman trapped in a bunker with 39 other women and no memories of how she got there. A different world entirely, but it was giving off Handmaid’s Tale vibes. Originally published in 1995, it felt wildly experimental and very chilling. The book itself was captivating, and left me with more questions than answers, in an illuminating way. The author was a French psychoanalyst, which checks out based on my experience reading the book. I’m curious to know who and how the decision to re-release a book like this decades later comes about, but I’m glad it came about for this one!

7. I was in California for a large part of October and visited this amazing used bookstore in Sherman Oaks. Just an incredible selection considering the very unassuming storefront. We walked away with a really cool coffee table book about… books, and the history of them from the very beginning, and an art book on Magritte that is SO cool to flip through.

8. On another leg of my October tour de California, I visited San Francisco for a work trip. I used to live in SF for a few years before the pandemic, so I used it as an excuse to hit a few of my old haunts, one of those being the Russian Hill Bookstore. I have spent COUNTLESS hours in there and it was nostalgic to be back. It made me think about how devoted and attached you get with your local bookstore, and despite the ever-changing inventory and the years that pass, that comfort never wavers.

9. I’ve only scratched the surface on her, but I just love Deborah Levy. I read August Blue, her newest novel and adored it. It’s about a piano prodigy who has given it all up after decades in the spotlight. She has to funnel that obsession somewhere, making for a perfect spectacle of a novel. It’s a very different vibe from the other book of her's I’ve read, Hot Milk. Where Hot Milk was sparkly and scintillant, August Blue was mature and existential.

10. Romeo and Juliet on Broadway! Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor star in a perfectly Gen Z rendition of the Shakespeare play that is oh-so entertaining. The juxtaposition between Shakespeare’s words, which they stayed entirely loyal to, and the stage, body language, other cues used to bring the audience in and give context and clarity - was so impressive. I saw an interview where Zegler said that the director pitched it where a bunch of kids “broke into the Circle in the Square theater to let something off their chest”. And it really feels like that! There were people vaping and inflatable furniture and baggy clothes and some serious chemistry between R & J. I also love the branding of it all—so modern and intriguing, just like the play itself. If you’re in New York, I highly recommend.

See you soon!

Love, Shelby

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These monthly round-ups are becoming a game with myself to see if I can squeeze them in, successfully publishing a round-up of 10 items I’ve been loving throughout the month, every month of 2024, even through the swirling, unending tasks and duties of work and life. And let me tell you: I will not lose this game. Enjoy these 10!

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1. I can not rave about Pachinko enough. I wrote a bit about in in my last post, but I’m still not over it. Mainly because I started with the AppleTV+ adaptation. It’s so well done, and the second season came out in August. These actors are phenomenal. The sets are perfect, bringing the gorgeous writing of the book to life. It’s told in Korean, Japanese, and English, with color-coded subtitles to match, a cool experience I hadn’t seen before. And I physically can’t not dance along when the opening sequence starts playing.

2. I got the chance to visit London on a work trip, and simply couldn’t leave without touching down in at least one bookstore. I am nothing if not a sucker for British book covers. I wandered around Old Spitalfields Market, a few tables covered in books to peruse, and then popped into Brick Lane in Shoreditch, and came out with a couple gems: A Philosophy of Walking and Blue Sisters. I was PUMPED about the latter because it had yet to come out in the US. A sneak peek! Spoiler alert: it was phenomenal. I also grabbed some very cute merch.

3. I read They’re Going to Love You and really enjoyed it. The lives of ballerinas will never not be fascinating. The main character dreams—yet dreams probably isn’t the right word—of becoming a ballerina dancer just like her mom, despite her differences in physical stature and overall sensibility. She also idolizes her dad, likely in part due to the fact that she only sees him once a year, distance making the heart grow fonder and all that. She learns more about her dad and his “friend” over the years, in the thick of the AIDS epidemic. The book skips ahead a couple decades, and she has to grapple with and recontextualize her childhood reality.

4. Oh, Mary! This show is everything and more. About Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of Abe, how she desperately misses her past life as a cabaret dancer, how she drinks herself silly from boredom in the role of First Lady, and that’s just scratching the surface. I did not stop laughing for 80 minutes straight. Cole Escola is a genius.

5. Saw this Library Science set-up at McNally Jackson, and I’ve got to say—I really love what Kaia Gerber is doing with this. I talked a bit about this new era of celebrity book clubs a few months back, and continue to be excited about the new approaches and ideas. It feels like such a fun side project, and I can’t help but relate with my teeny tiny version here at curled up. I was devastated to miss this t-shirt drop, but am excited to see what she continues to do with Library Science!

6. I visited my brother in Chicago and had a BALL at Unabridged Books, which was right around the corner from his place in Lakeview. They had a 🔥 sale section, so I walked away with many gems —

• Close to Home

• Very Cold People

• The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

• The Performance

• Painting Time

• Self-Knowledge from The School of Life

7. Loved this article about the portrayal of subway throughout literature. Opening in 1904, the system has been around for 120 years. I’ve lived in New York for one of those years, and absolutely feel how the subway becomes a character in your life here. When you stop to think about it, it feels so surreal how local, public transportation—the idea of which inherently feels small and contained—can gobble you up and spit you out in entirely different worlds across the city.

8. They played Past Lives in Fort Greene Park the other week, and it reminded me what a phenomenal film that was. So subtle, yet so intense. Side note—I can’t think about Greta Lee without immediately thinking of Loewe and all her A++++ awards show looks.

9. Ran across this idea from Toni Morrison on Instagram 🤯 I’ve been thinking about this recently… about just how much horrible content we consume on a daily basis. Just when we think something is actually unbelievable, unfathomable, there’s a Netflix series about it. But goodness, that’s harder to come by. It can feel like we take the good for granted, it’s not salacious, won’t get views, it’s too obvious or cliche, but really, it’s not obvious at all. It’s precious, and I think we should make more of it.

I just think goodness is more interesting. Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good – and that’s complicated.

10. This quote… still holding out hope.

See you next time!

Love, Shelby

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