She sent a hiss my way as she recorded a video of the hilltop towns and jutting mountains in the Luberon region of France with Noah Kahan singing he’s willing and able in the background as I fearfully curved the rented car down the near single-lane road like some slithering snake in an unfamiliar place. To make sure she knew my exasperation, loudly, I sang out I’M WILLING AND ABLE EVEN THOUGH I’M HORRIBLY JET-LAGGED ABOUT TO FALL ASLEEP AND HAVE NO IDEA WHERE I’M GOING. Eyes glaring quickly over to my mom, long enough for her to see, and then back to the small GPS.

Later that night, when we settled into the hotel, rested from a day of moseying about a this town the size of one walk up down and around, lounging at the pool reading The Odyssey, and a dinner of jumbo prawns, chickpea fries, heirloom tomatoes with burrata and grilled peaches, wine (her a Provence rosé and me a Burgundy white), finished with some stone fruit crisp, my mom was going through her photos and videos and found out that she incidentally captured me saying you’ve got to stop shushing me on camera. Laughter wrapped around us before we slipped into sleep.

We’d been headed to Lourmarin, in Provence, up the mountain through Bonnieux down the other side through the valley of rocks and a dried up river where the cicadas always sing where Albert Camus is buried I learned.

He bought a house in this place where the mountains reminded him of home. In Algeria. I didn’t know of this entanglement before we arrived. So, we went to pay our regards that second night before our final morning there, after dinner which nearly mimicked what we so quickly devoured the previous evening near the sunset. Past the chateau past the church closer to where the squeaking swallows I mistook for bats took shots sweeping low into the grassy fields when my mom almost refused to carry on not wanting the bats to get her I said we must along the way shutters the colors of dusk-hazed olive tree tops beckoned and piqued my interest in copying their shade for an upcoming apartment project (did in fact paint my desk and half the kitchen table this blue).

Up until this point in our weeklong vacation together, I was learning to take photos of my mom the way she preferred, only 1–3, 321 countdown helpful, posed. And she was learning to take photos of me the way I preferred, without knowing and mostly candid. So, when we reached the grave and I turned around, a whispered chuckle spilled out of me as I caught my mom taking candid photos of me in the graveyard saying not here we should probably respect the dead. Laughter came forth from her, too.

Small towns bring unexpected pleasures, especially when some piece of home or familiarity presents itself unknowingly. Here in this town Camus made home because it reminded him of home where my mom and I ended up incidentally only booking the hotel a few days prior both of us A-typers deciding to go where the wind took us my mom befriended a woman who joined us as we drank coffee and ate eggs with herbs and doughy pain au chocolat. We took a swig of the ginger, carrot, cucumber shot she recommended, recommended to her from the maitre de. Her daughter lives in New York. She once lived in the building across the street from what’s now my old building, that I looked into each day upon waking when I opened my blinds, only subtly envious of whoever lives in that large windowed space with plants that seem to crawl about everywhere.

She can’t remember whether her daughter later moved into my building. This woman lived on the same street, too, once upon a time in the '80s. Retired and widowed, I believe. Traveling with friends, or like now, alone, with her dreams and energy and years-long saved us slush fund to carry her from town to town.

Cost average, she proclaimed to us at the table, a few nights at an exorbitantly beautiful and priced hotel and a few more at a questionable one! That’s how she likes to travel.

On deciding which book to bring along on my travels, I knew Lonesome Dove was too large and too dusty for a trip to France, so when my coworker recommended The Odyssey my interest was piqued at her raving review that it was quite the page-turner. I couldn’t believe it since it didn’t reconcile my own experience reading The Iliad in high school. She told me to read the introduction and translator’s note before beginning. I did and I’m so grateful, for the context that situates you in what Wilson has done: created an accessible translation for the contemporary reader. And it was true, it is a page-turner. And I always associate Southern France with this sort of material, having studied the Romans quite a bit during my study abroad.

And it was fitting: reading a story about being a stranger in a strange land as well as what it means to be a host and be recognized as my mom and I traveled from place to place without an itinerary and collecting recommendations from those around us informing where and what to do next.

In Lourmarin, the woman in the store with the bag I have that my mom also wants complimented my French, which I told her I hadn’t spoken in nearly 5 years when I was a student living in Dijon. Before we left, she gave us a dinner recommendation in town. Her friendliness made my visit, before we moved along, reigniting confidence in what used to be my B2 bordering on C1 speaking abilities. Another stranger at the hotel recommended we go to Cassis if we wanted to experience a small sea town.

So after two nights in this land that felt just right, I drove us back to Marseille where we caught another train then a bus where I once again sent glaring eyes at my mom who was attempting to video the shining sea as we descended down a nearly 90° hill standing up in a packed bus as I held on to two suitcases that felt the need to keep rolling away. We laughed again at this. When we arrived at the hotel, the owner asked where we were from. At our answer, he exclaimed that’s where his son is currently playing soccer. How strange how delightful it was to find home in this place we’d not known about a few days prior.

Leaving two days later, on our way back to the train station in Marseille, we decided to get a car. The original route took 2 trains and a bus down a steep hill and we were tired. We got in and I immediately started chatting with the driver in French, who told me he did tours of his favorite towns in the region. We wrote down his contact for when we hopefully return. For a stranger to welcome us strangers and show us the places that he finds the most incredible is an act of kindness Zeus would appreciate, or so I thought to myself. Xenia. Any stranger must be provided food, shelter, and hospitality without questions for you never know when a god or goddess might take disguise to test human morality. It’s a cycle that’s replayed over and over as Odysseus makes his return home along. Whether he’s met with hostility or hospitality, well that’s part of the fun of reading it.

For me though, I kept lingering on Athena. The way she always shows up, doing what needs to be done in order to get Odysseus home in the place he’d like to eventually die. Advocating for his return at the feet of the gods. Pushing Telemachus to do as he needs in order to prepare for his father’s return. Guiding in whatever form is necessary at that exact time: Mentes, Mentor, a shepherd, a young girl, Iphthime, a bird, herself. If not for Athena, Odysseus would never have returned to Ithaca.

Thinking about Athena as this abstract idea, a figure who is always right there by your side at the moments when you need it most, it’s easy to think about all the Athenas in my life on this trip. My mom more than anything in the world, the widowed woman, the hotel owner, the taxi driver, all of them guiding me us on our way to where we are meant to be. Grand and everyday scales we are constantly being tested as strangers and hosts no matter where or who we are.

I still haven’t gone to see The Odyssey film adaptation and probably won’t until a rainy weekend morning (because I’ll be zonked halfway through if I see an evening showing) and I’m looking forward to seeing how Nolan treats Athena (although I heard some spoilers and wasn’t too happy with what I heard but we’ll see). All this is to say as my best friend and I have made a strange new space our home in a month’s time. Moving into a new neighborhood, to a new apartment, requires wide open arms but there’s nothing better when you have an Athena in the room next to yours.

July took me to France (thoughts to come!) and moved me into a new apartment (& some more!!), which meant I had to choose my books this month wisely. For my trip, 9 days total, including the transit days, I needed one substantial enough to fill the time but not too quick I could read it in a single 3-hour train ride or too long it’d extend past the trip, so I took a bet on The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, at inkling in the back of my mind that I’ve been wanting to and the recommendation from one of my coworkers who confirmed that it’s a page turner, and I won major. (Being in the South of France brings me back to when studied the Romans, and we visited the Pont du Gard, the tallest remaining aqueduct bridge, a reminder of their engineering feat, the history becoming the present, as I watched people cannonball off the large, time-ridden rocks hugging the deep blue river, so in my head The Odyssey, despite its Greek association was synonymous enough that I took it as a sign that this would be my travel companion. Which meant I had to put Lonesome Dove the sprawling cowboy novel I’d started in June back on the shelf, only to return to it and give it a fixed needs-to-be-read-by-this-day-or-else date.) Anyways, on our last day in France, my mom and I stopped at Shakespeare & Co. where I picked out two more, one of which became my airport read, completed in waiting and flight. Now, two weeks into living in my new apartment and there are books absolutely everywhere in the best way possible. Stacks and stacks. Just yesterday, I got some of the final pieces I need for the custom shelving I’m doing on the one wall in my room. Unfortunately, Home Depot’s circular saw is still out of commission so I’m working on finding another lumber supply store to get the shelves themselves cut. Wish me luck. Or send recommendations.

All in all, I read 4 books total. I rented 2 from the library. 1 borrowed. 1 bought—part of this year’s goal to buy at least 1 book a month.

• The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

• Small Country by Gaël Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone

• Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala, translated by Anna Kushner

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story for our modern times.
Find the beginning.”

A month later now, can I even remember what I thought while reading? (No. Slightly.) What I do remember:

• Part of me couldn’t help but wonder how Nolan would translate the role of Athena, always shapeshifting to a new person to guide Odysseus. I was curious about Athena’s dedication to Odysseus and Telemachus, so devoted to his return even after nearly two decades of obstacles, caused by his own men’s brashness and his own, too. She saw in him the same traits she was praised for: cunning fierce warrior with the smarts to outwit any event. Brains and brawns.

• After reading the translator’s note and the already included notations from my co-worker whose book I was borrowing, I was zoomed in to the repetitions, which were mostly limited to Dawn and it’s rosy fingers and godlike Telemachus. He’s godlike if you didn’t get it. Spidery might work too. Wilson spoke to the immense amount of repetition in the original source material because of its format, an oratory poem, which required repetition in order to ground the audience again and again, whereas if she were to leave every single repetition she’d be a lazy translator. A point which I lingered on due to the nature of my work, and how much of an emphasis we place of avoiding any repetitions. There are limitless words out there to use so might as well work to find another! On the flipside, there are moments when repetition is used as a literary device that’s beautiful, one I love to use in my own writing, so dawn and Telemachus made sense. So many days pass in this book, that I kept forgetting that Odysseus is mostly retelling his story for most of it, after having wrecked a ship and being hosted by King Alcinous on the island of the Phaeacians, until he asks permission for leave so that he may carry on his venture home. If it hadn’t been for dawn, I’m not sure I’d have been able to situate myself in all the movement.

• Woah, I need to re-read Circe. And why didn’t Nolan make the “noman” speech work…

• This is a story that was told as entertainment and understood by the masses and there’s this subconscious belief that something like The Odyssey must be a hard read and even harder to understand but nope. Not true. Emily Wilson brought the story to us in our modern language so we could enjoy the reason it has captured audiences for thousands of years. Even though Wilson’s review of Nolan’s film adaptation wasn’t the most positive, I’m still looking forward to seeing it myself.

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Circe or The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Small Country by Gaël Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone

Set in Burundi during the 1990s, this debut novel by French-Rwandan songwriter Fay follows Gabriel, now an adult in his thirties, celebrating his birthday alone in France where he’s immigrated, return to the days of his childhood spent with his friends running around the insulated cul-de-sac in an expat district of Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura before it’s devastated by war. He lives with his French father, and sister, as his Rwandan Tutsi mother has moved out. His younger self grasps on to the innocence of childhood with rope burned hands, struck with death, violence, atrocity before he is ever meant to. However; Gabriel doesn’t “know how this story began” so he begins with the simple answer his father provided to him. There are three ethnic groups: the Hutu, the largest group who are short with wide noses; the Twa pygmies, whom there are few of; and the Tutsi, who make up a smaller group and who are tall, skinny, and with long noses. And with this, a young Gabriel sniffs unwelcome change in the air.

His youth is heightened by the intensity with which he juxtaposes the intensity of his parents’ divorce with violence and tension, which known him down without any profound understanding of what’s happening. His family unit is dissolving, without his approval, at the same moment his country is descending into civil war. At one point, Gabriel finds himself a pen pal, a French girl named Laure, who he relentlessly crushes on, and experiences regret of his actions, when it comes to retrieving what belonged to him in another scene. Later, he must watch his mother transform after she witnesses what no person is ever meant to even imagine.

Naming conventions, language, genealogy, politics, play-pretend, identity, the salvation of reading, Gabriel lingers on them all. Read quickly, this intense novel wrought with heartache and growing up too fast provided me with a perspective and history I’d known very little about, which always brings me back to my days in Victorian literature, learning about sympathy, the imaginative act that occurs while reading during which you, the reader, become part of the novel, experiencing that which the characters experience, in an effort to bring about broader social change. Which is probably 50% of why I read. The other 50% is the feeling of being dunked in a bath of honey, stuck with the story, emotions, hardships, joys a character undergoes. I’d never have read this one if I hadn’t of asked the bookseller for a recommendation, for a novel written by a French author, translated to English, that is a must-read.

You might also like:

Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Call Me Cassandra by Marcial Gala, translated by Anna Kushner

I’d ridden too long with the The Hat Creek Cattle Company (see below) and needed a break. So, I picked up this book which seemed like an extension of the ancient Greek world I’d enjoyed so much earlier in the month with The Odyssey.

Set in post-revolutionary 1970s Cuba, it follows Raul, a ten-year-old boy, a reader, who believes himself to be in the wrong body and that he is the Trojan princess Cassandra, fated to die at the age of eighteen as a soldier in the Cuban intervention in Angola. Time is fluid, moving between his childhood in Cuba and his plight in Angola. Penned in first person, which can be a feat in itself, combined with the quick switch of time and body, the writing is carried out exquisitely. I never questioned where I was or who Raul was embodied by or how old.

As a child, his father leaves his mother for an intelligent, headstrong Russian woman working at the university who gives him books, while his mother dresses him up and he seamlessly presumes the role her dead sister Nancy, his feminine face and light complexion a stark contrast to his direct family members and convincing enough that his mother believes him to be her.

A book about fate. The young boy learns his early on and carries it out, despite possibly having the opportunity to change the course of his life. This is an unspoken power. For a character to believe themselves so devoted to their own fate that they allow it to come true willingly, almost zealously.

You might also like:

Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco, Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson,

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Buffalo bones, beans, drunkenness, card games, pokes, sandstorm, blizzard, rain, grasshopper cloud, death, rivers, horses, cows, territory.

In a town called Lonesome Dove, which is right along the Texas-Mexico border, there exists the Hat Creek Cattle Company, which is owned by bygone legendary rangers Captain Call and Augustus McCrae, along with some others. It’s when Jake Spoon, one of their former fellow rangers arrives in town, on the run for a murder, he tells them of a place that Call decides they must go.

Like Clara (my personal favorite character, and the woman the extraordinary Augustus McCrae has thought about for nearly twenty years after he left Tennessee at a young age to seek adventure out West, where he met our other main guy, Captain Call, and began his life of ranging, during which he met Clara, who later married a man named Bob and moved to Nebraska), there was too much death. I didn’t what what to do. She and I shared the very same sentiment. And then some.

Call annoyed me, so I felt reassured when Clara said as much, the exact opposite of the reverence with which the crew pedestaled him. He just never knew when to stop, or when to own up.

It’s his perseverance to continue up North, a suggestion brought up by the one Jake Spoon who doesn’t amount to much, even after finding themselves in a place near great as heaven, which causes the deaths that brought tears to my eyes, and the feeling of a Texas bull with one eye and one horn and mangled, stitched up skin sitting on my chest.

The first half of the book was quite dusty, set mostly in Texas whereas the second is when you start traversing the states to Montana. It’s true what the blurb reads: A romance (well, maybe of both intimate love and brotherhood and sisterhood) and a portrait of a group of ragtag end-of-their-days cowboys in search of one last adventure, the old days of ranging long gone. I was charmed by many of the characters and annoyed at others.

I skipped away from my time with the Hat Creek Cattle Company to go to France and once again, dried up from all the miles of dessert and river crossings and stupid drama, to read Call Me Cassandra in a day and a half in order to remind myself of how I typically read, quick and carefully, whereas this hunk of a novel took the same amount of time to finish as I would presume to cross the terrain. Then, it was the last week of July so I made it a goal to finish which technically I didn’t BUT I didn’t get out of bed on the 1st until I reached the very last line, which was still before 8 AM, and was shocked and not surprised that Iended with (read and find out).

I really enjoyed. The characters, the plot and the way the book length definitely mirrors the long journey. Would recommend taking your time! But a really good read. Constantly, people of all ages came up and expressed their love of the book or tv miniseries from back in the day which added to the experience of reading.

Also, did they have compasses?

You might also like:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx

Catch up!

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

I came to New York City with just one book. My mom bought it for me. Before she hugged me goodbye on the curb at the airport early on a Saturday morning nearly exactly one year ago, my mom handed me Flashlight by Susan Choi. I’d told her my team at my new job had a book club and that they’d be discussing it that very Wednesday during my first week, in a few days. I was moving with just a suitcase of clothing (though I had a storage unit in Philly, where I used to live, that housed various pieces of furniture I knew I’d want with me for my eventual move that I stalled to return home for a few months), while I figured out my living situation, having just a weekend turnaround time from my prior job to my new one in the big city, which meant that this was the only book I’d have with me. The first.

Moving lightly is what I aimed to do, knowing that I’d definitely collect items, as a self-proclaimed keeper of any and all sentimental objects, paper, pens, rocks. So, I did. Go lightly. Now, I’ve just moved and wanted to remind myself of all the books I collected to commemorate the memories.

I’m a big big library girl (checked out like a million and read most of them), so one of my 2026 goals was to buy at least 1 book a month which increased my collection a bit!

“Annie John” by Jamaica Kincaid

Found this one at a bookstore and it’s slim size makes it perfect for traveling. Took it to read during a trip to Scotland in the spring. A story of a young girl coming to age in Antigua, who must reckon with her ever-changing relationship to her mother, her body, others, and herself.

“Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of beautiful books at Topping & Co., asked a worker for a recommendation, didn’t get one but found myself drawn to the poppy red and linen-y texture of this one. She then said it was quite good. A life’s memoir, a political reckoning, a story encompassing more than just the author’s life, a story of her mother, Mary Roy.

“What Am I, A Deer?” by Polly Barton

At Topping & Co., I spotted a signed edition of this book behind a glass case and gasped! My friend who I was visiting in Scotland had mentioned she’d be going to an event with the author that next week so I got her and myself a copy. My first Fitzcarraldo Editions book! This follows a young British woman in her twenties, who’s taken a job as a Japanese translator at a gaming company in Frankfurt, Germany burdened by the search for an unnameable greatness that I’ll call a case of always something better (or as “the sharp high of reinvention”).

“Small Country” by Gaël Faye

In Paris, I knew I wanted to get a book or two so on our last night with only 20 minutes to spare, my mom and I made it into Shakespeare & Co. where I thought it best to just ask for a rec of a book written in French by a French author and translated in English. This was one of those. I read it in its entirety while waiting for the airplane.

“Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” by Claire-Louise Bennett

Became a CLB fan after becoming a fan of ’s newsletter, a reading life. Started reading this as a library book and quickly decided I wanted to purchase it for the sake of taking notes. The novella is mostly plotless, with a young woman musing on life while living in a shed(?), contemplating the afterlife of her relationship with Xavier, the man with whom she was once quite intimate with, who she returns to again and again, and he who returns to her again and again, until they don’t, or they do.

“they” by Helle Helle

Came across Helle Helle while living in Denmark and seeing this on in English translation at Three Lives I had to immediately purchase. This subdued novella, which consists mostly of descriptions of things and the day to day, dictates, day by day, the relationship of a young daughter still in school and her mother, who has been diagnosed with an unnamed terminal illness, set in time with no phones in a small town in Denmark.

“Thirty Girls” by Susan Minot

After realizing I hadn’t been visiting used book stores, I discovered the one on Mercer. Found this one and took it to the beach where I was celebrating my cousin’s birthday. Almost cried. Inspired by the true event on October 10, 1996, when 139 girls at St. Mary’s College in Uganda were forcefully kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Kony, and the school’s headmistress went in search and saved all but thirty of the girls, Minot’s novel tells this story split into two fictionalized narratives: Esther Akello, one of the abducted girls, and Jane Woods, an American writer who travels there to write about them.

“The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy

While at the beach celebrating my cousin’s birthday, I found this one at a little free library the day after recommending the memoir. Set in Kerala, India, this novel follows twins Estha and Rahel from childhood to adulthood, separate for nearly 20 years, the timelines colliding at the beginning of the end, when The Worst Possible Thing Happened, which follows them for the rest of their lives.

“Northanger Abbey” by Jane Austen

Book event. LOLd the entire time I read this. Finally humor I get instantly. Northanger Abbey follows two plots: your run-of-the-mill late 18th century marriage plot and a reading plot. Catherine Morland, the narrator’s proclaimed heroine of our story, joins society in Bath where she nurtures a spectacle of a friendship with Isabella Thorpe, becomes infatuated with one Henry Tilney, also befriending his sister Eleanor, and reads (as well as talks about reading) endlessly, mostly gothic. And Austen is satirizing both.

“Estate” by Cynthia Zarin

Started reading this as a library book and wanted to underline so much I bought it. Plus, the cover called to me. The novel is structured as a letter from the narrator, Caroline (separated from her husband), to a past present future lover, Lorenzo, to absolve(?) herself from the weight of carrying his absence and her love, his endless anecdotes of acquiring, mostly women and children, as much as it is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves about others.

“Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë

Reading event at P&T knitwear, hosted by book club Belletrist and romance published 831 Stories. Ended up in a photo in the NYT.

“Don’t Be A Stranger” by Susan Minot

Thirst for Salt is some of my favorite contemporary writing, so when the author wrote a whole essay about Susan Minot I knew I must eventually read her work. So when I was walking through Three Lives one day and spotted this, I took it on the spot. A love story between Ivy Cooper, writer and single mother, and Ansel Flemming, a musician recently released from prison and nearly twenty years younger. As Ivy learns to build a life for herself and her son in New York City, navigating single motherhood, with her ex living in another state, and her son’s emotions, she trips into a spell of deep infatuation, craving reciprocation and receiving cool indifference.

“Flashlight” by Susan Choi

Book given to me my by mom for my first book club at work.

“The Allure of Chanel” by Paul Morand

Given to me by my manager, and devoured it at work. Chaptered on themes or characters, and chronological for the most part, Chanel told these stories of her life to friend Paul Morand.

“Exit Lane” by Erika Veurink

First Warby Parker Book Report event. Big LONG LIVE fan. Awill-they-won’t-they love story. Marin and Teddy, mutuals, find themselves on a roadtrip from Iowa to New York City after graduation. After a quippy makeout session at a bar they’ve stopped at along the way, it’s obvious just how much chemistry they have. But as life often goes, when they arrive in the city, it’s a goodbye for now. Over the years, they come back together and flee apart, only ever moments from both confessing their feelings for the other.

“Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino

Went on a date and he bought me this. This novella is structured in quick spurts, chapters that state a city’s name and its imaginative descriptions, as Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant, gives Kubla Khan an understanding of his land.

“Night People” by Mark Ronson

From a book event. See Ronson and Grace Gummer all the time in the neighborhood now. Have a big crush. A memoir on what it what likes to be a DJ in ‘90s New York City.

“On Freedom,” Art Song by Maggie Nelson

At work, we were prepping for a meeting with a global counterpart with this one. A dense piece of literature, rich with personal reflections and literary criticisms, I read just the first of this four part autotheoretical narrative: Art Song. This collection of words muses on art—what it means, what it does for us, what it does for its engagers—is meant to be heard (or read) by an audience. (Me and you.)

“Monkeys” by Susan Minot

Found this one at a used book store. The price listed was more than was it originally cost and I was curious why but I the shop keeper was flirting with a customer and I didn’t want to interrupt (lol) so I meandered until the keeper asked if I needed anything. He said that it was because it was that much in 1986. I decided to pass but then upon a quick google search, I realized it was quite rare, this edition, and I walked back. The shop keeper and customer still flirting. I tried to float around but it was quite a small store and I thought I’d spoken telepathically with another customer in there, both of us having books in hand that we’d like to check out but they wouldn’t stop chatting BUT then this other customer ended up trying to also flirt with the shop keeper by having a philosophical conversation about psychologists. Have yet to read this one.

“Things: A Story of the Sixties with A Man Asleep” by Georges Perec

Same story as Small Country (bought in Paris). But haven’t read it yet. Always fascinated by objects, which is what this one’s about.

“Pool House” by Mary H.K. Choi

Giggled endlessly. Couldn’t stop taking notes. Finally realized I like taking notes IN the books rather than in a random journal somewhere. Those final few blank pages at the end work perfectly. Choi kept saying words and phrases and ideas that were absolutely unbelievable so I wrote down every word. She spoke about the book, the characters, the motivations, her writing practice, her life, her inspirations.

“Clutch” by Emily Nemens

Book event. Have yet to read.

“Autocorrect” by Etgar Keret

Went to an event and picked this one up.

“The Story of My Teeth” by Maggie Nelson

Ending up at an NYU reading in a packed room where I thought I’d have to stand for 2 hours but ended up in a front row seat and got to ogle every word that Nelson said.

“Minor Black Figures” by Brandon Taylor

Another book event. Taylor’s hilarious and makes me laugh. Still need to read this one.

“It Girl” by Marissa Meltzer

Book event. Meltzer is fabulous.

Q: What are some of your favorites that you think I should add to my collection?

Wish me luck as I try to build this custom shelving unit for one of my bedroom walls this weekend !!!

My voicemail box is one of my most prized digital possessions. Years of messages left for me from the people I love most, and some scammers, but I delete those. Full renditions of happy birthdays over the years. Short notes, too: hi bella, it’s mom or it’s dad or a hi, darling from my grandmother. Give me a call back when you get this message. Yes, I totally just watched Voicemails for Isabelle. I like to this about this monthly newsletter as something similar, an archive of all that I’ve read and how I’ve read and what I’ve thought and felt while reading. I’m someone who really only reads books once, eager to advance in the name of trying to read everything. And it’s hard to beat the first time reading a book that rocks me in some way, sometimes because at that exact moment I read it, whatever in life amplifying its effect on me. I’m also contemplating other ways of creating a more cohesive archive of everything that I’ve read (yes, I know: goodreads) but! I’m wanting something more personal perhaps physical. More to come on that.

All in all this month, I read 8 books total. I rented 6 from the library. 1 borrowed from a little free library. 1 bought—part of this year’s goal to buy at least 1 book a month.

• Thirty Girls by Susan Minot

• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

• The Copywriter by Daniel Poppick

• Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt

• The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy

• The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

• Berlin Childhood Around 1900 by Walter Benjamin

• These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy

Thirty Girls by Susan Minot

Inspired by the true event on October 10, 1996, when 139 girls at St. Mary’s College in Uganda were forcefully kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Kony, and the school’s headmistress went in search and saved all but thirty of the girls, Minot’s novel tells this story split into two fictionalized narratives: Esther Akello, one of the abducted girls, and Jane Woods, an American writer who travels there to write about them.

On her way, without much of a plan, Jane quickly finds herself infatuated with a younger man named Harry, who is living life moment to moment. They speak but barely and sometimes most intimately, and Jane can’t help but find herself wanting to be closerclosercloser. Finding him in every room. She’s divorced and a widower. This connection, though quite physical, feels like relief to her after years of living alone.

Minot creates tension within both perspectives between the horrors of what these young girls experienced and were forced to do with the innocent desires of liking boys and dancing and running around.

The ending had be feeling quite fragile and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself than immediately entrench myself in a different world to forget both the feeling of fear and sadness.

—pulled from Got a vintage kindle, keep running into strangers, and the beach

You might also like:

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, The Women by Kristin Hannah, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Having recently read her memoir, I set forth into this story with the personal background and contextual information surrounding the characters and places I had learned through it.

Set in Kerala, India, this novel follows twins Estha and Rahel from childhood to adulthood, separate for nearly 20 years, the timelines colliding at the beginning of the end, when The Worst Possible Thing Happened, which follows them for the rest of their lives.

Their mother is a foreboding figure. Their cousin and aunt are set to visit from London, and they must put on a show for their visitors. With access to the twins’ inner thoughts, there is a naivety to parts of the book. There is a naivety with which love is treated. For the children, the “Love Laws” “lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.” It turns a rich thing simple. For their mother, her approach is similar but exists on an entirely different plain, the “Love Laws” dictating the feasibility and appropriateness of being involved with someone in a different caste than herself. Dangers follow.

Nature is as much a part of the story, its dangers and fun, predicability and volatility. As much as it’s about the little, ordinary things that become so vital in determining what happens next in the long line of of each of our own singular histories.

—pulled from Got a vintage kindle, keep running into strangers, and the beach

You might also like:

Thirty Girls by Susan Minot, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

The Copywriter by Daniel Poppick

I’m a copywriter, so I thought I might like this one. I laughed often. The work in the book is a lot like the work I did at my previous job. It was fun. Always a puzzle of how to make these pants that everyone already has seem like something that they must. absolutely. purchase. because. this. pattern. is. new. and. limited edition. and. by. that. small. artist. you. love. AND! they’ll flatter your butt. But because that’s already been said, and you don’t want something beige, your description turns into something so brief and to the point yet creative enough no one’s ever read it before that they buy the pants until they’re sold out in a week. Just because of one description! Maybe. That’s what stuck with me most from this novel about a young New York poet working as a copywriter dealing with a break up, the corporate world and cost-cutting matters and labor, and his relationship to life, structured through a series of journal entries. The power of language to convert, and the ridiculousness of it BUT also the creative flex of being able to convince in a way you’ve not yet had to do. Language that sells.

You might also like:

The Idiot by Elif Batuman, The Other Profile by Irene Graziosi

Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt

Returning to the rural farm town in England he once lived, the narrator returns in his mind to his youth, when his experience with first love consumed him and the responsibility he had for his younger baby brother with a chronic illness overwhelmed him. It’s a story of youth, not quite understanding, or I suppose, when you’re having feelings so big for the first time, which is amplified for the narrator who feels outcast after being outed at his school, and Luke, the nephew of a nearby neighbor is all he can think about at the cost of others in his life. It is this guilt that seems to be examined by the narrator nearly two decades later. A sad one.

You might also like:

Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

The Water Statues by Fleur Jaeggy

I’m not really sure what happened in this book. It’s one that seems to require steady focus, which I did not have while reading along the river at dusk, brought into a conversation by someone I did not know and someone who made me uncomfortable and someone I asked politely if it was okay if I returned to reading. At the moment I picked this one up, I simply needed a break. And I needed to read words, even if I wasn’t digesting them. It was the act itself that was relieving me rather than an immersion into a story not my own. So all I really digested about this one is that a young boy begins to collect statues in the wake of his mother’s passing, time moves fluidly, moving from then and now. He sees in them more than what he could ever glean from his cold father in a way that brought them to life. I still don’t know if they were real people or not. It reminded me of when I lived in France and my host mother had a collection of human-sized statues of men in cocoons of every different color. One a charcoal grey-brown stood stoically in the corner of my bedroom, who at first I feared when waking in the middle of the night, feeling a stranger lurking, and then became comforted by this steady, unmoving presence.

You might also like:

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I’ll admit that I’m mighty late to return this one to the library, and I meant to return it last month but I forgot to put it in my bag with the other returns, so I took it as a sign, plus I really truly did want to read it. Now, I’m so grateful I forgot because this was one of my favorites of the month.

The Wall is an account of the narrator’s days after realizing that a wall has descended one evening, for miles around her friends’ mountain cabin she laters maps out, and she’s alone with only their dog, a cow, a cat, and a car.

Something about this blurb on the back of the book never fully grasped my interest but the moment I began to read, I was fully immersed, especially when I learnt the cow’s name: Bella! How lovely! She gets to writing her story down even though she knows no one may never read it, though she has limited pieces of paper on which to write, though the mice may eat it eventually. It reads like a journal. Pressing and mundane and endlessly interesting.

No chapters, a structure that always reminds me of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, means you, the reader, must decide when to take a break, even though our main character does not have that as an option. This idea that this woman toils day and night, not knowing what has happened to cause this separation, to survive is quite extraordinary, and brilliant commentary on the state of so many women across the globe, isolated to their work. She must always carry on in pursuit of life. Every so often, she brings us back to her body and femininity. She removes her rings as they dampen her fingers ability to do. She cuts her hair. Her body builds muscle from the work. Her curves gone. Her skin darkens from hours under the sun. It is body as utility. Not beauty. A tool. Which is such a specific approach to body, especially right now, that I found quite beautiful in a way of seeing it as a product of the work she must do: readying the earth for seeds to grow food, hunting for animals, building structures for her animals, harvesting grass for them to have through winter. A must read.

You might also like:

Forbidden Notebook by Alba De Céspedes, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Berlin Childhood Around 1900 by Walter Benjamin

Unpublished in his lifetime, this is a kaleidoscopic collection of specific images during Benjamin’s childhood in an upper-middle-class Jewish home in Berlin composed after he escaped the Nazi Regime in the 1930s. Here and there, this person and that, understanding it required a certain familiarity with landmarks and contraptions of the time, like Tiergarten and the Kaiserpanorama, a medium considered the precursor to film, which I took the time to look up in order to make sense of the writing. Though I’ve been introduced to some of his work through art and literature—The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Theses on the Philosophy of History—I found myself delighted to read these creative writings, which seemed to float off the page due to their matter-of-factness imbued with some sort of childhood whimsy.

You might also like:

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü

These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy

In college I took a Romantic Poets class, and we spoke a whole lot about Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, De Quincey, Lamb, Hazlitt. So, I was delighted when I realized this ever-so-brief collection of three fictional-biographical-philosophical-in-nature essays took liberty to imagine the lives of Thomas De Quincey, John Keats, and Marcel Schwob. Though they are distinct and separate, I imagined this book as some wooden table you’re certain to get a splinter from set up in the smack center of a small log cabin in a valley not full of daffodils because it’s winter and cold but maybe it is, where one at a time, the writer gets their moment in the spotlight before sitting back down. Their demise, their everlasting legacy.

You might also like:

Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb, Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth by Dorothy Wordsworth

Big Book In Progress:

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty

It’s taken me about 75 pages to get acclimated to the dust. Now, I can’t quit. Just entered part II.

Catch up!

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

“I see you’ve got a vintage kindle.”

I looked up to see a man about 75, red glasses, jeans cut to his knees, tobacco-hued fisherman sandals, and an old teal Bianchi bike sitting half a bench down from me.

I leaned in. “It’s even got pages. Plus, I never have to recharge it.”

Reading the third book of the day, the sun still beat down and I had to shade my gaze with my right hand.

“Do you like to read?” I asked him. Somehow I never got his answer, beyond his daily consumption of the local newspaper. Rather, I got a million interesting stories. He moved to the city in ‘79, after getting his degree in history. Later, he said he looked at life as something behind him so we could look at history from a beginning, middle, end perspective in relation to his own life. After graduating, he toured as a clown.

Elliott then became a whale tour guide in New England, telling me about the trip where nearly 30 whales gathered near the boat, having a blast. There was a trumpet sound in the air which he couldn’t identify. Someone on board said that whales will close their blow hole and make music. It’s the storytelling he’s in to.

For a little more than the past decade, he’s been making political art. He was telling me how the news channels will publish his art since it can be interpreted in different ways, the meaning can be subversive at the same time it has no meaning for another viewer. That’s its power. I wondered then why we don’t publish more fictional stories.

He’s also a certified NYC tour guide. Also a SAG actor. Also a resident of an apartment with a massive claw tub in the kitchen. He told me about the wild stories of the Village in the ‘80s. The violence, the death. His friend once found himself tied up on his bed by burglars who were ransacking his apartment when they stopped to make eggs from the half dozen or so he had in his fridge. They left shortly after, he figured out how to get himself untied, and breathed a sigh of relief when he realized they hadn’t taken his grandfather’s gold watch that was in plain sight. Another story where music and cheerful voices burst out in what seemed like rhythmic interludes, coming and going, until he stood by the window and watched a firetruck go by with the firefighters, hanging and dangling off the side in the middle of the night, presumably bored and making fun while waiting for a call to come in.

I never really got to read. But I was fine with that (mostly). That morning, the rain still coming down, I’d gone to my favorite coffee shop, which is usually bustling but was near empty so I sat with a coffee and muffin with jam until I was nearly finished but got too antsy so I walked over to the Whitney where I plopped down on a comfortable couch and got to finishing the book. I started writing there, so many interesting figures and sources of inspiration. Like coming up with a narrative for a piece of art in front of me.

I stayed until I got antsy once again before finding myself surprised at the warmth that had seeped into the day, rain done. Instead of heading home, I went to the garden, thinking it was unlikely there’d be an open and dry bench but there one was, the secluded one. I took it, started the other book I’d brought with me, smiled and laughed at the kids doing laps every so often, finished it, wrote some more, before picking up chips, making a quick stop at my apartment to drop off the finished books, and picking up a new one. I had wanted to visit the used bookstores to look for more books by Susan Minot and Fleur Jaeggy. I popped into Codex, no luck, then Mercer Bookstore where I found Thirty Girls by Minot and was out of luck with Jaeggy; they’d had something earlier but a woman had bought it. She’s quite popular, the man told me. I hadn’t known. She felt a secret to me, only heard about through the major readers’ ravings and celebrations. He carried on saying her readers are a strong group, they like one they’ll pick up another, no questions asked. I said I’d start popping in more often. I went into Housing Works Bookstore, nothing. Went to Elizabeth Street garden to read. Found myself voracious, went to my favorite Thai for dinner, where I ate as I wrote, before making my way over to the west side to catch the evening light.

And that’s when I met Elliott.

I saw him again the following weekend, going for a walk but I found myself shy and skipped away unseen. He said he’s always there, that I could probably catch him sitting there most evenings. So I didn’t include that sighting in the dozen or so I’d had in the past month. Sighting strangers twice in a day despite my irregular routine, and other people. My cousin said perhaps it means that you’re right where you’re supposed to be.

To the beach the following week, I brought my copy of Thirty Girls by Susan Minot and a library book. Nearly a day and a half later, I was quickly encroaching upon the end of Minot’s book when I saw a free little library with The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I read her memoir in April, her writing fascinated me, the way it slithered and climbed all over my senses. I picked it up. When I finished Minot’s, I quickly moved into the world Roy created. Both novels were emotionally intense and fraught with death and horrible things and crushes and love.

Thirty Girls was nothing like Don’t Be a Stranger, though they both deployed language full of yearning, sentences that captured the full expanse of the characters’ thoughts, and the shared mundanity yet unique singularity of having a crush.

Inspired by the true event on October 10, 1996, when 139 girls at St. Mary’s College in Uganda were forcefully kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Kony, and the school’s headmistress went in search and saved all but thirty of the girls, Minot’s novel tells this story split into two fictionalized narratives: Esther Akello, one of the abducted girls, and Jane Woods, an American writer who travels there to write about them.

On her way, without much of a plan, Jane quickly finds herself infatuated with a younger man named Harry, who is living life moment to moment. They speak but barely and sometimes most intimately, and Jane can’t help but find herself wanting to be closerclosercloser. Finding him in every room. She’s divorced and a widower. This connection, though quite physical, feels like relief to her after years of living alone.

Minot creates tension within both perspectives between the horrors of what these young girls experienced and were forced to do with the innocent desires of liking boys and dancing and running around.

The ending had be feeling quite fragile and I wasn’t sure what to do with myself than immediately entrench myself in a different world to forget both the feeling of fear and sadness.

With sandy hands glazed with sticky sunscreen, I reached into my bag for Roy’s novel The God of Small Things. Having recently read her memoir, I set forth into this story with the personal background and contextual information surrounding the characters and places I had learned through it.

Set in Kerala, India, this novel follows twins Estha and Rahel from childhood to adulthood, separate for nearly 20 years, the timelines colliding at the beginning of the end, when The Worst Possible Thing Happened, which follows them for the rest of their lives.

Their mother is a foreboding figure. Their cousin and aunt are set to visit from London, and they must put on a show for their visitors. With access to the twins’ inner thoughts, there is a naivety to parts of the book. There is a naivety with which love is treated. For the children, the “Love Laws” “lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.” It turns a rich thing simple. For their mother, her approach is similar but exists on an entirely different plain, the “Love Laws” dictating the feasibility and appropriateness of being involved with someone in a different caste than herself. Dangers follow.

Nature is as much a part of the story, its dangers and fun, predicability and volatility. As much as it’s about the little, ordinary things that become so vital in determining what happens next in the long line of of each of our own singular histories.

Sitting on the bus, the man went through a list of changing grocery prices. Instead of turning away, curiosity slipped into my limbs, compelling me to lean in and ask questions when room opened up in his lengthy and winding monologue:

how long have you lived here?

do you actually like diet coke or just the price?

what brought you downtown so early in the morning if you live uptown?

do you have a favorite neighborhood?

The conversation was so shocking I found myself writing about it in my workshop five days later. The prompt was the abstract vs the concrete. Abstract words like love, limerence, and justice distilled into the five senses: smell, taste, feels, sound, sight. This is what I wrote:

Justice is I’m not sure what to say. What do we say when a character is able to achieve what they wish when we reach the end of the story? Is it good prevailing bad? is it the three dozen boxes of Diet coke for $20 instead of $27 cause that’s a sale instead of $15.99 for only a single box like at Gristedes. The man on the bus surely would say it’s justice to the burger he plans to have for dinner one night this week. Justice smells like a Diet Coke at a bargain. Justice tastes horrifically effervescent and artificially sweet. Justice feels like fat oils falling out of a frozen burger with ketchup lettuce tomato pickle and a sesame bun washed down with a Diet Coke. Justice sounds like a hearty burp. Justice looks like a burger and a Diet Coke on a plate resting on a stand sitting in front of the man in between the man and the TV because it’s almost time for Jeopardy. The couch a rich color which doesn’t give away signs of use but if you put your nose up close you breathe in the abuse.

I decided that to capture the sentiment I have around a book in a new way for a new season, I’d think of the book as the abstract. I mean, isn’t that what a book is: abstract? Carries a different meaning for each person that picks it up and reads what’s within. (More on that when it comes to Eros the Bittersweet.)

All in all, I read 10 books total. I rented 7 from the library. 2 borrowed. 1 bought—part of this year’s goal to buy at least 1 book a month.

• A Guardian and A Thief by Megha Majumdar

• Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

• Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco

• Lázár by Nelio Biedermann

• Don’t Be a Stranger by Susan Minot

• Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

• Famesick by Lena Dunham

• Love by Maayan Eitan

• A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

• Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli

A Guardian and A Thief by Megha Majumdar

A Guardian and a Thief is a nightmare. Which I never have, nor dreams. But that’s what this story is. Set in a near-future, climate-stricken world, over the course of a week, Ma, Mishti, and Dadu fight to regain the one object that will allow them to leave. Their community has been shattered by flooding, heat, and famine, life upended and conventions of living no longer followed; there is the feeling both that there are those that look out for you and it is every person for themselves. A Guardian and a Thief smells like metallic in the back of your throat, rotting cauliflower, Mishti loves cauliflower even though it’s hard to get. A Guardian and a Thief tastes like saltwater on your tongue but only because the wave crashed so hard against you it traveled in through your nose and down the back of your throat. A Guardian and a Thief feels like standing on the BDFM platform at the West 4th Street station on a near 100° day in the heat of summer, unbreathable, clothes sticking to your body, slick with sweat, bodies crammed. A Guardian and a Thief sounds like an inconsolable cry. Incapable of ever being placated. A Guardian and Thief looks like questions on a chalkboard: Who is the guardian and who is the thief? Are we ever contained to one? What happens when the bare minimum to live, food, shelter, water are taken away? While the questions haunted me as I read, the story compelling, imminent, the writing itself fell flat.

You might also like:

The Land of Milk and Honey (climate-stricken world vibes not writing)

Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

Eros the Bittersweet is an essay exploring eros as the reach, the in-between, the lack, the space between here and there, reality and possibility, an argument rooted in Sappho’s word choice: “glukupikron,” which is actually sweetbitter but that sounds wrong for an English speaker; however, eros as sweet then bitter and everything in that chasm; the shape of desire “a three-point circuit.” Eros the Bittersweet smells like the block before you reach the ice cream shop that makes their own waffle cones. You want to indulge but you can’t because you haven’t brought any money nor your phone to use Apple Pay. Eros the Bittersweet tastes like a dirty chai latte with cinnamon on top or better yet a honey flat white. The sweetness of honey frothiness of milk and bitter pull of the espresso. Eros the Bittersweet feels like ice melting on hot skin. Eros the Bittersweet sounds like banter on a really good date. Eros the Bittersweet looks like watching someone read a book and you can tell by their face and their posture that they are laughing and then they are not. Their brow is scrunched in pain, perhaps, because the author oscillates between the emotions in a way that makes the reader fall deeper into the novel.

You might also like:

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco

Battles in the Desert is a coming-of-age novella about Carlos, a young schoolboy whose father owns a soap factory in Mexico City, who questions the History happening all around him in this year of “supermarkets, not television, only radio” “polio,” “Everywhere the face of El Señorpresidente.” Outcast for his intense examination of the world around him, Carlos also falls in love with his best friend’s mother, which doesn’t help any matters. Battles in the Desert smells like a bar of soap sitting in a dresser, its fragrant soapiness hitting you each time you open the drawer it’s contained within, recalling a past memory or person. Battles in the Desert tastes like coca-cola from a glass bottle. Bubbling with the energy of youth and the carbonization of Americanization. The clink of the past present. Battles in the Desert feels like today. Somehow, the fact that “the newspapers stated: this is a harrowing time for the entire world” captured the harrows of today, technology moving so quickly, the endless devastation. Battles in the Desert sounds like being told a truth about a truth you already know too intimately or the hum drum of construction outside your window before 8 in the morning, knowing it’s not going away while also not being able to acclimate to its presence. Battles in the Desert looks like not a critique but a critique nevertheless of the globalization of his home, the wars, the impending disaster arriving everywhere at the hands of those in control who live far from their decisions’ effects or merely don’t care.

You might also like:

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

Lázár by Nelio Biedermann

Lázár is an intergenerational story of an aristocratic Hungarian family set against two world wars during the 20th century. The birth of Lajos von Lázár, a translucent baby with pale blue eyes, is where the story starts. Sándor, the patriarch, regrets his son’s appearance but thinks no more peculiarly than that because the man who is the biological father has died. Mária, the mother, begins to lie about anything and everything so that may her husband ask if the child is his, the lie runs out of her mouth sounding like a truth. Lázár smells like heavy air after a storm, rich with the musky emanation of the damp wooden bench, like in the garden I sat while reading the entirety of the novel and the forests that surround the Lázár family. Lázár tastes like loss. Lázár feels like you’re caught in a forest with trees with branches that may reach out to grab you by the waist or by the ankles, keep you from moving on. Lázár sounds like whispers in another room that you cannot hear clearly but can hear and it’s imperative that you and the world hear them clearly but it’s just not possible. Secrets fill up the family. Lázár looks like a family struggling to hold on to the narrative of themselves as it’s encroached upon by war, as they constantly appease those in charge, move because they can and they seek safety, and face the wrath of those in power next, displaced again and again.

You might also like:

The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli, Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Don’t Be a Stranger by Susan Minot

Don’t Be a Stranger is a love story between Ivy Cooper, writer and single mother, and Ansel Flemming, a musician recently released from prison and nearly twenty years younger. As Ivy learns to build a life for herself and her son in New York City, navigating single motherhood, with her ex living in another state, and her son’s emotions, she trips into a spell of deep infatuation, craving reciprocation and receiving cool indifference. Don’t Be a Stranger smells like soft skin, showers, fresh laundry, walking past a person and finding yourself turning around because they radiate something that reminds you of someone you used to know too intimately. Don’t Be a Stranger tastes like a whitish-pink, barely ripened watermelon slice on the hottest day of summer, disappointment covering every tooth, having thought you’d picked the perfect one at the grocery store with all of its webbing and big hay colored splotch. Don’t Be a Stranger feels like walking into a room where you thought you’d left the light on but it’s off and you don’t know where the switch is. Don’t Be a Stranger sounds like a hungry stomach gurgling, in search of something, well something so specific, to fill it up, but that specific something isn’t around or doesn’t answer or is no longer there but maybe it is. Don’t Be a Stranger looks like rumpled bed sheets, writing at the table, lingering on the edges.

You might also like:

Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

Sweet Days of Discipline is brief novella set in postwar Switzerland at a religious boarding school. Narrated by a young adolescent girl, who experiences an intimate fixation on a new student, Frédérique, an obsession that’s common at the school, older schoolgirls being approached by the younger ones for a submissive friendship, in this the taut, controlled environment. Sweet Days of Discipline smells like ice-cold air and the nothingness of a just dry cleaned shirt. Sweet Days of Discipline tastes like toasted chestnut bread and jam with tea each morning. Repetitive, expected, wanted. Sweet Days of Discipline feels like everything important is resting on a precarious pedestal from which it’s likely it’ll all fall but there’s nothing to do but move forward. Sweet Days of Discipline sounds like velcro coming together and undone, the tiny hooks and loops scratching as they connect and screeching as they are pulled apart. Sweet Days of Discipline looks like terse, minimalist sentences that carry depth, which never breaks the surface so it’s a requirement to climb to the top of the Swiss mountains to get the full breadth of the story’s meaning.

You might also like:

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid or they by Helle Helle

Famesick by Lena Dunham

Famesick is well I’m sure you all know. So I’ll stick to: it’s a memoir that relays Dunham’s early successes and creative process with Girls, and the chronic illness and addiction that pervaded those years and experiences, then searches for meaning and clarity on naming those chronic illnesses as well as her relationship to fame, her body, her sicknesses, and men. Famesick smells like musty rooms with clothes strewn about and sterile hospital beds. Famesick tastes like Starbucks’ cake pops. Famesick feels like never-ending pain. Towards the third quarter of the book, I needed to put it down and turn to another in order to finish. The intensity of her experiences felt quite heavy for what was going on in my life and I needed to escape, so when I returned to finish it, the last quarter provided some relief. Famesick sounds like the television not at just half past a whisper but the same song, one that made me teary-eyed at my desk earlier that day, playing repeatedly on full blast to drown out the sound of Dunham reading aloud her memoir. My roommate was listening to the audiobook as she showered and I was writing in the shared space and hadn’t started reading it yet. I didn’t want any spoilers. Famesick looks like learning who you are despite a million voices saying you’re someone else and knowing when to advocate for your wellbeing and life.

You might also like:

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Love by Maayan Eitan

Love is a brief first-person narrative from a young sex worker who teeters in her mind’s imagination and reality as she rides in cards, befriends pimps and other sex workers, and works. Love smells like too much perfume masking the body’s scents and moldy motel rooms. Love tastes like the edge of a knife after you’ve licked off whatever good thing had still remained. Love feels like being trapped within your dream that pushes you forward onto a different path. Love sounds like hushed whispers and saying things you don’t really mean. Love looks like a series of men and the experiences of a woman. Told in a beautifully soft, straightforward manner that floats between prose and poetry.

You might also like:

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

A Girl’s Story is a story that failed to reach me the way I wanted it to land. It explores Ernaux’s girlhood through the perspective of how she remembers the pivotal moments in the present. The girl of ‘58. Some vague shadow kept me from entering the story. A Girl’s Story smells like what you remember campfires and burnt smores smell like at the height of winter. A Girl’s Story tastes like mac and cheese and a root beer for dinner but as an adult. A Girl’s Story feels like jumping in the lake near the mountains and letting the goopy muddiness of its bottoms squish between your toes. A Girl’s Story sounds like chatter caught in the breeze of an exceptionally windy day. A Girl’s Story looks like going back to childhood memories that have been stored away in a box lost in the attic and remembering with vividness the intensity of each and every experience, knowing how much they influence and inform your current self.

You might also like:

Babette’s Feast by Isak Dinesen

Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Separate Rooms is divided into three movements that explore the love, loss, and grief that Leo, an older Italian writer, grapples with in the aftermath of the death of his lover, Thomas, a young German musician. Their relationship was fraught until it was not, Thomas always wanting to be near Leo and Leo needing his own separate room in order to stay, his writerly mind needing Thomas as a character in his own life. Separate Rooms smells like earthy-woody sap of rosin. Separate Rooms tastes like beer on a sticky summer night. Separate Rooms feels like hot salty tears rolling down cheeks. Separate Rooms sounds like words fraught with tenseness and yearning. Separate Rooms looks like Leo traveling Europe, bouncing from place to place as a way to forget or perhaps move past Thomas’ death while reflecting back on their relationship.

You might also like:

Lie with Me by Phillippe Besson

Catch up!

A big thank you to for introducing me to the greatness of Fleur Jaeggy and for Susan Minot!

Cover photo by !

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Each time, I get endless compliments. It is cool. I took it from my mom’s closet under the guise that she wouldn’t need it anytime soon. She happily handed it to me. As an adult, I like dressing like my mother. I like dressing in her clothes.

So, reading Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid, the novel’s namesake protagonist begins her ascent into womanhood when her mother declares she must stop trying to dress like her, I both immediately understood Annie’s instantaneous onset of irreverence and laughed knowing what glory the future holds.

Unlike them, my mother and I did not go shopping for fabrics to make our clothes from. Though from time to time my mom would lament on not knowing how to crochet, like her mother had. As a young girl on the brink of womanhood, tempestuous feelings stirring towards my mother, as often happens at that age, my mom would take me shopping for clothes. We’d weigh our arms down with the same top in three different colors, dresses for the upcoming season, pants of all sorts until we lost the other, only finding one another again by the sound of our names being called out from the dressing room. Searching for approval. Me, my mother’s. My mother’s, mine. It was in dressing ourselves that we found calming ground. We’d strip off the heat of earlier and replace it with a hopefulness that can only be found by looking in the mirror and acknowledging the truest version of yourself brought to the surface by what you’re wearing.

From the time I was a toddler, I exhibited the desire to choose my own clothes. To the point that almost every day of kindergarten, I’d wear a tee shirt and denim skirt, knee high socks, chunky sneakers, and a decorative braid at each side of my face and one down the back of my head. My mother didn’t question this authority I’d proclaimed over my own image. Even when I wore it endlessly. Just a few weeks ago, she found this book I’d made that year in school, in the likeness of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?. She’d been searching for laughs and upon opening the one page, fell into hysterics at my ridiculous drawing. She showed it to me when I visited home, and told me of my dressing habits as a five year old, saying they hadn’t changed much: that once I find an outfit I like, I wear it until I find the next. I laughed. She’s right, as always.

“to say that I felt the earth swept away from under me would not be going too far.”

Now, thankfully, all troublesome feelings are gone. My mom is just as human as I. Annie couldn’t possibly know that. She’s still a girl who’s lived in the same place her whole life, who’s hinged her existence on that of her mother’s. So, to experience this rejection, this denial of dressing as the one person of whom she kisses the feet, disgust fills her mouth, not to be washed out until she goes out into the world to gain, to define her own tastes. But the story doesn’t travel there. It idles in youth, which I appreciate. The feelings it conjured up in me settled at the bottom of my stomach and have stayed there, churning. Had I witnessed Annie mature in her own right, I might have felt satisfied and moved on.

When my mom comes up to New York City to visit, we talk about what she should pack. When I start asking for her to bring the same piece again and again, she sighs wisely, saying she’ll bring it for me to wear. I, of course, deny. Say I think she’ll wear it while secretly hoping there will be a moment, an occasion, for me to. It’s helpful, too. For when I feel as if I’ve worn my entire closet. Locked in a self-made clause to not buy any new clothing, only secondhand, excluding shoes, accessories, shopping in her closest, I guess, is the opposite of a Catch 22. I get new clothes without getting new clothes.

“Now, twenty-four years later, this trunk was kept under my bed, and in it were things that had belonged to me, starting from just before I was born. There was the chemise, made of white cotton, with scallop edging around the sleeves, neck, and hem, and white flowers embroidered on the front—the first garment I was after being born.”

A problem I’ve been running into as of late, though one I’d have a million times over to live in New York City, is that my clothes are out of sight on a multi-tier shelving unit, stuffed in Hay bins I bought to aestheticize it’s plain mundanity, to hold the overflow from the massive dresser I’ve lugged from Pittsburgh to Philly to here. It makes it harder to dress than when everything is hanging according to type and color. Everything smushed into the dark corners.

When I first made the attempt to move to the city, my friends told me to sell the dresser. Balking at my attempts to fit such a gargantuan of a thing in a tiny space. (It’s not that large.) I argued it’s sentimentality, it’s lifelong position as treasure chest of my prized possessions. I keep cards and tickets and trinkets in the top drawers. It’s the woody home to my clothes, athleisure in the slim drawer, sweaters and off-season clothing in the thick second. Leaving Philly, ignoring them, I kept it in a storage unit, knowing I’d want it with me when I eventually moved. Which ended up being nearly five months, and, boy, when I saw it in my first NYC apartment, I nearly hugged it with joy. This familiar object in this familiar space. Upon sight, I could breathe again. Its usual cedary notes tainted by the moth bolls that sat in the corner of the storage unit mixed with the Method Beach sage dryer sheets and old bar of handmade melograno soap.

When reading about the Annie’s mother’s trunk, one that was holding up just fine nearly twenty-four years after she’d left home at the age of sixteen; her only position, I felt a fierce devotion to my own dresser and the lives it would hold beyond my usage of it. Over the years, the thin sheet of wood covering the back has come loose, the expansion and shrinking each season causing the screws to dangle precariously on the edge of the small circle in the sheet as it purges backwards. Sometimes I’ll just push them back in, but the hole’s too loose or too tight, depending on the time of the year. There’s a man I know J who helped restore the Statue of Liberty in the ‘80s. In Pittsburgh, he’d come over often to fix this dent or help match that stain. He spoke to me strictly in French because I told him I knew it at one point in my life. I wish he were nearby. Anyways, taking suggestions on antique furniture restorers in New York City.

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After the trunk carried Annie’s mother safe to shore, it became a nest holding the artifacts of Annie’s life. Diapers, white wool booties with a matching jacket and hat, blanket, another hat, though in linen, christening outfit, baby bottles, 1st birthday dress, 2nd birthday photograph, first pair of shoes, dress worn on the first day of school, first notebook, first straw hat, first straw basket. Annie was addicted to the times her mother would give the trunk a good cleaning, pulling out each piece and telling its story, to the point where Annie knew exactly what her mother would say and still feel exhilarated by the closeness she felt knowing not only her mother’s stories behind the artifacts of her life contained within, harboring meaning since they were chosen to be preserved but in being able to finish her mother’s sentences. An extension of this beautifully divine being.

And yet, Annie carries such detest for her mother, who quickly transforms from the most beautiful woman in the world filled with love and care into a dampening scrooge. It speaks to the brilliance of Kincaid’s writing, to get a reader to trust a young girl’s narrative so much as to believe that this mother changes overnight. And then, proceed with grace that Annie’s identity as her mother’s extension is being dismantled and figuring out her place as an individual requires the strength of getting across all the monkey bars with sweaty palms, swinging from bar to bar, dangling with the weight of who the self is/can/could be until you reach the other side, where you realize everyone is learning to live in this world day by day so the best thing you can do is have your mom or your best friends or your important people holding you up by the waist to help you get across.

QUESTIONS FOR YOU!

THOUGHTS ON WHETHER ANNIE JOHN IS A RELIABLE NARRATOR OR NOT?

WHAT’S YOUR EARLIEST MEMORY OF CLOTHING/OBJECTS?

I HAVE BEEN OBSESSED WITH COMING-OF-AGE NOVELLAS. ANY RECS?

recently read and devoured they by Helle Helle, Sweets Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux and now this!

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid was my March book purchase, read in April.

There’s a rule at the writing workshop I’ve been attending once a month since March (so 3 times now): your pen (preferred over a pencil for the glide/ease) must never stop moving, even if all you have to say is I don’t know what to write about, over and over until you do have something to say, which is quite a lovely sentiment because it’s less about writing something good and more about practicing the exercise of writing, by hand, by the way, which is an exercise, especially these days when typing on a laptop or a phone is much more commonplace than handwriting for me. All that to say, I wasn’t exactly sure what to write for my introduction for April’s book reviews, so I’m trying out the can’t stop writing (well, typing) in order to get something, get somewhere.

It’s been more than a year since I’ve been reflecting on the books I’m reading, collecting and observing and writing about the experience I have while reading a particular book and sharing them. Last spring, I was tucked away, mostly reading and taking care and watching the bird nesting on the lamppost outside the entrance to the apartment, wishing to be in New York while also wanting to stay put. For the first time, last year, I gave myself a reading goal: Read at least 4 books every month. Which I did (for the most part. in the end i say the months i was able to read much more filled out the months I was on the cusp of 4). I loved the structure it gave me, without too much pressure. The goal was achievable and a way to make sure I made time for myself, make time for reading which endows me with a much more expansive mindset and energization (i suppose you can call me an extroverted reader—one who gains energy from reading). This year, I kept the number the same with a slight adjustment: Read at least 4 books every month. 1 of which has to be in translation, a collection of essays, or nonfiction.

Since moving to the city, life has been in perpetual motion (much like the writing exercise), never stopping, even when I’m unsure. Every day I wake up, anything is possible (in the best and worst ways I’ve learned). So, having the reading goal allows me to return to myself, or seek out favorite reading places and communities in a way I’m sure I would have regardless but who knows!

All in all, I read 4 books plus 3 book-length poems total. I rented 4 from the library. 3 bought—part of this year’s goal to buy at least 1 book a month. And well! Look at my success! 3 books, bought (although one was purchased in March).

• Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

• What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton

• Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy

• The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles by Janée J. Baugher

• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

• Groceries by Nora Claire Miller

• A Suit or a Suitcase by Maggie Smith

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

The March purchase.

A story of a young girl coming to age in Antigua, who must reckon with her ever-changing relationship to her mother, her body, others, and herself.

The story opens with her learning about the concept of death:

“For a short while during the year I was ten, I thought only people I did not know died.”

And so, from that line on, it’s clear that Annie John, our young girl, our protagonist, is becoming aware of the circle of life, the delicate balance on which our livelihoods hinge.

And out of balance it goes, somewhere, or rather more realistically multiple somewheres, for her. The book seems to be split in half to me: the before and the after. In the before, Annie worships her mother, following her around, observing her every move, admiring her beauty, cherishing the stories and objects that were once her mother’s that have now become hers. (Somehow, the before was so magical that it made me believe that it was half the length of the book when it was only a mere couple!!)

One morning, standing at the precipice of adolescence, Annie wakes up perceiving her body and on that same day finds fault with her mother. Now, this book stays in the youth—forgoing moving into the future where you begin to stop perceiving yourself as you believe others to perceive you and see your mother as a human and your fiercest supporter for life—a decision I think that makes the novella erupt with the power that is does. In joining this “young-lady business,” Annie’s understanding of everything changes, particularly with the combative attitude with which she describes her experiences with her mother.

To be much more granular, the change begins with clothes: and like many of the books I come to love dearly there’s a fascination with objects and fashion and the purpose they serve to transmit what would otherwise go unsaid. So, Annie feels “the earth swept away from under” her when her mother responds “Oh, no. You are getting too old for that. It’s time you had your own clothes. You just cannot go around the rest of your life looking like a little me.” to a request for a specific fabric for a dress she’ll have made since she no longer fits the ones she owns. From the perspective of the mother, she probably believes she’s empowering her daughter to explore her own taste and yet to Annie it is the biggest betrayal.

Throughout, Annie falls in love, makes others fall in love with her, disobeys her mother, learns how to keep secrets and tell lies, learns, hoards books (duh), experiences depression, grows taller, finds comfort in her own clothing, moves forward. Grows older. Annie delivers us from the beginning to the end of her sparkling bitter story that’s so simple and profound, carrying meaning across the pages and deep into my bones. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

You might also like:

they by Helle Helle, Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton

1/2 April purchases.

What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton follows a young British woman in her twenties, who’s taken a job as a Japanese translator at a gaming company in Frankfurt, Germany. She’s recently gotten her master’s. She likes literature. She doesn’t like games, but when she goes in person for the final round of interviews, she is burdened with the feeling that this is where she might belong. That she must restart her life here in this city where she doesn’t even speak the language because that is, in that instant, what she feels so she must go after that. In search of an unnameable greatness that I’ll call a case of always something better (or as “the sharp high of reinvention”).

Wrote this whole thing:

You might also like:

Estate by Cynthia Zarin, Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf

Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy

2/2 April purchases.

This is the 5th memoir I’ve read this year. For many reasons, this one belongs in a category all its own. Life experiences are all valuable on their own and Roy’s is 1. a life’s memoir 2. a political reckoning 3. encompassing more than just her life 4. a story of her mother, Mary Roy.

Roy opens with her mother’s death: partly because that is where the entire story begins, her mother, and where the curtains close. The memoir runs the course of her tumultuous upbringing to her years as an architecture student in 1970’s Delhi to living on her own to becoming the renowned author and activist she is.

Her mother is the central point of the memoir, for the author must reckon with losing this famed subject, the same woman who was abusive and brutal while overcoming her place to found a school and educate generations of students as well as fighting and winning a Supreme Court case securing inheritance rights for Christian women in India. Above all, Arundhati carries a profound, tricky love for Mary, a love that drove/drives the current of her life. Mary taught her daughter to read and to write, at a time and a place when that was not expected. Along the course of growing and learning and living, Mary’s intense devotion to bettering the world through education and empowerment is absorbed into Arundhati who shows up in the world in quite the same way.

I’ve never read her fictional works, so if that is something that’s been stopping you: don’t let it. While moving through her life, Roy drops the context in which they were written, the real-life influences, and the way each, while writing, made her feel. And now, I’m looking forward to sitting down and reading them.

You might also like:

Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen, A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux

The Andrew Wyeth Chronicles by Janée J. Baugher

AN EXCERPT FROM PENNSYLVANIA LANDSCAPE
1. An aged buttonwood presides over this valley. Late autumn.
2. A tangle of branches. Scarcely any leaves.
3. Can a tree swell with pride?
4. Farm houses of stone in the distance.
5. A road that cannot be tracked, for it disappears as it dips and curves away.

A book-length narrative of ekphrastic poetry that chronicles painter Andrew Wyeth’s own dialogue as he created each of the 63 featured paintings. The poems are quite lovely, evoking the imagined sentiment, the decision-making, the influences behind each work. It flips the script of going to a museum to analyze a work of art, rather placing the questioning on the artist. I picked this one up because a few years ago I visited the Brandywine Museum of Art, which is the site of Andrew Wyeth’s studio along with holding a large collection of work from N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth. I imagined this landscape as I read. Winding rivers, swaying deciduous trees, fields of grass, moody skies.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

While this one’s been on my list for a moment, it was chosen for my work book club and so I signed it out of our department’s library and read it in a weekend so I could return it for my coworkers to read. Two letters in and I was all in.

An epistolary novel, one made up entirely of letters (and emails), on whose to or from is Sybil van Antwerp, a retired lawyer, mother, and grandmother, in her late age living alone in a house in Annapolis, Maryland. For her whole life, she has written letters, and kept them. And now, Sybil begins to reflect on her relationship to herself, her children, and forgiving what has happened in the past to find peace in her now.

The tone, Sybil’s character, the impending reckoning with a child, the idyllic New Englandish setting all reminded me much of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. The novel inspired me to write some handwritten letters. Even to people I see all the time. I thought what’s the point and then realized that the conversations we have and the things we do together can still be preserved, in a way, in a letter, in a way that’s closer to the truth than a memory.

You might also like:

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones (for the letter structure), anything by Elizabeth Strout (subject/vibe)

Groceries by Nora Claire Miller

Once I read this, I realized I enjoy book-length poems in the book format while I enjoy individual poems on their own, not in a book, because a poem on one page is not isolated, it must be read in the context of what came before and what comes after, whereas with an individual poem in a book of individual though related poems, I get distracted and can’t sit with the severity of the words in one spot, I seem to hastily look and flip the page. I won’t lie. I have done a bit of that this month, but then I turn the page back and re-read.

With no stopping point, each poem without a title, this story is about life on earth as we all know it: groceries, Word docs, horrible things, more horrible things, violets, form, shapes, and ▯s.

This one has received much accolade. Like it’s the perfect example of what new can be done in poetry. That seems like a hyperbole as someone without a profound understanding of it’s longstanding tradition; however, the many rectangles highly confused me and then made sense.

Don’t ask what a ▯ is. I hardly know myself. It reminds me of when I was six years old with my best friend in her attic sitting at the massive, strawberry-colored Apple computer typing up stories, changing the font to wing-dings, and letting the robotic voice sing back to us what we’d come up with. Inscrutable.

Embracing the absence of something, she’s figured out how to give form to absence, even if it’s blank on the inside and made up of four connecting lines. Like for me, my iPhone is semi-old and has been long out of commission to be able to update the software so most of the time I get an emoji it’s a ▯, an uncomputable message.

Less about groceries, more about lists, and the objects that we include on them—a record of life on earth at our current moment, the most ordinary, intimate moments. (I make quite a few lists, almost every day, so I quite liked this sentiment.)

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alphabet by Inger Christensen

A Suit or a Suitcase by Maggie Smith

AN EXCERPT FROM BESIDE MYSELF
The energy worker tells me
I'm not inside my body.
"Then where am I?"
She gestures to the left of me:
"You're here."

Another book-length poem! Probably my favorite out of all the above book-length poems. Read in a single sitting. Smith explores the relationship of the mind and the body, in the world and the possible world to come, in a shimmeringly aware, funny, inquisitive way. Like an epiphany on the human existence. Each and every word contained within each and every poem contained within is economical, perfectly placed.

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for some reason, it reminded me much of Ariel Gore’s memoir Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer

Catch up!

When I plucked this one out of the locked glass case in the two-story bookstore in Edinburgh, I bought it based off of pure visuals (big fan of IKB bc I once had to write an entire “paper” in French where I assumed Klein’s character in a Q&A-style feature for an art class) and a mention from my best friend that she was going to a talk by the author, Polly Barton, that very next week. I also like deer. They remind me of home, where I always got the first day of hunting season off from school, even though I didn’t hunt and don’t eat meat, and a vague memory of singing doe, a deer over and over again as a child alongside my grandmother’s wooden record player that sat near the window looking out into the woods.

If I had to summarize the book in under 20 words, it would read:

obsession
translation
greatness
joy
belonging
in no particular order. just v
                                                 i
                                                   b
                                                     e
                                                    s
oh,
and Céline Dion.

What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton follows a young British woman in her twenties, who’s taken a job as a Japanese translator at a gaming company in Frankfurt, Germany. She’s recently gotten her master’s. She likes literature. She doesn’t like games, but when she goes in person for the final round of interviews, she is burdened with the feeling that this is where she might belong. That she must restart her life here in this city where she doesn’t even speak the language because that is, in that instant, what she feels so she must go after that. In search of an unnameable greatness that I’ll call a case of always something better (or as “the sharp high of reinvention”).

The novel’s funny. Not in a HA-HA way but in a silent makes-you-smile-and-contemplate-whatever-similar-esque-weird-thing-you-may-have-thought-or-done-or-might-do way.

Written in an obsessive, reflective voice with deliriously long, delirious sentences that I’m wholly and utterable enraptured by. It’s a style of writing you inherently enjoy, don’t like, or learn to. Want to know what I mean? This is the very first sentence:

“You are a girl, twelve years of age, still small enough to fit into your mother’s gold satin nightie, still too far removed from puberty’s comprehensive rewiring of reality to suspect that someday that might not be the case, still so perfectly and utterly flat-chested that the nightgown’s plummeting neckline seems destined to be either a sad mockery of your figure or an inappropriate choice for a pre-pubescent girl, depending on your view, and yet neither of these, as it happens, turns out to be your view, which is most likely bound up with how neither seems to be your mother’s view either, when you slip it on she nods once, deeply, then laughs in approval, a reaction which seems to come down at least in part to the way that the pieces of satin are stitched together, which is to say, when you step over to the mirror you realize with a shock that the slight darting at the bust has made it looks as though there is something more than just air down there – but no, it’s not just that, it’s as if the satin nightie has moved you into a world where you do have breasts, allowed you to believe that you really do have them, a magical sort of belief which i very closely related to the feeling that in fact anything is possible, any transformative feat of the imagination is possible, and it’s on that basis that you decide that the garment will do for the occasion in question, namely, your transformation into Céline Dion.”

And well, as much as I’m someone who analyzes (not judges) a book cover to determine whether it’s worth spending a few days with, I’m someone who can, let’s say, determine if I’ll thoroughly enjoy a novel based on it’s first sentence 9 times out of 10. I didn’t open the book, just purchased based on the few notes I mentioned above, so when I did open it to begin, I knew right away that I was going to love it as a long sentence lover.

The story is seemingly plotless, though stuff happens in those long and full and winding sentences. Like…

Her obsessions. I question: Are they impacting her actual life as much as she thinks, as much as is delivered to the reader who is given access to that internal dialogue? Or is it simply a perception? I lean toward the first, but then again, as a person who runs over and over thoughts, I can understand that the inner world of our protagonist is just this that we’re given access to while her external world carries on normally. Given, the only person really affected is herself. It must be exhausting.

The other players? The umbrella man and the stylish man, along with various others. The umbrella man is her fantasy, the stylish man is her boyfriend. They are two different people. Her fantasy around the umbrella man is born before she engages in a relationship with the latter.The stylish man, by proxy of being the one she’s not obsessed with, is impacted, but, also, I think that perhaps she just doesn’t click with him as much as she does the fantasy of the umbrella man. I mean, he never even gets a name. Doomed from the start, to never progress beyond the pseudonym. I mean, neither of them do, even though she knows both names.

(Like, she’s really obsessed/entranced/limerenced. Here’s just one of endless thoughts on her connection to the umbrella man: “someone she knew instantly, someone so clearly like her, and not in a mundane, overlapping-interests sense, but in a way that made her feel he had been reborn as someone acceptable, part of a world now vast and thrilling, tethered by this indubitable connection.”)

When, about halfway through the book, the main character resolves to spend her Saturday, one where she feels unassuageable after her unexpected run-in on the tram with the umbrella man, and receives a text from the stylish man, who wants to know if she’d like to do something, she recalls, not in the same sentence, but in a single train of thought that extends across multiple pages, she’d wanted to spend her weekend alone doing the activities that brought her joy. What can she do to keep herself busy? The four-syllable word comes to mind: karaoke. So,

THERE SHE GOES

Karoake plays a m.a.j.o.r. role in all the parts of the book. Karaoke is a channel through which one can eclipse embarrassment, reaching unbridled joy; finding the words, the sound, the movement needed to bring the inexpressible to the surface of one’s self.

The last time I went to karaoke, a few months ago, right after Olivia Dean’s new album came out.

Who would you be if you could be anyone right now?, I posed to my roommates, already with my own answer in mind. They responded and sent the question back to me.

Olivia Dean. I wish I could be dressed in a brilliant outfit and sing a brilliant song to a brilliant crowd.

My roommate replied, What are you TALKING about? You can! You have brilliant outfits. You can sing a brilliant song to a brilliant crowd.

Shortly after, we found ourselves at karaoke next door. $3 a song, and I requested one by Olivia Dean, dressed in all red, and sung it so unbrilliantly to a brilliant crowd. I get what the protagonist is saying though, my roommate, too. You can slip on a nightgown and say it’s the beginning of your transformation to being Céline Dion, then go do karaoke and, ta-da!, the transformation is complete. Order of events: The moment of inspiration! The moment right before you act! The act! The sublime other side! I like this idea that’s introduced: that karaoke “provides a language for sincerity which isn’t necessarily available to us in ordinary life.” And then: “If you’re sufficiently brave and sufficiently nuts then it serves to delude people about your levels of talent.” I mean, I’m quite taken by publicized personal acts of bravery as I am a talented singer belting lines. It’s fun to be bad at doing certain things if you embrace that it’s the bravery you’ve hugging not the precision.

While reading this, angst trickled into my life. I wonder if it came from our protagonist, which led me to need to listen to Charles Mingus. The intensity matching that of mine and hers. Melodical and all over the place at once. Tubas and flutes and percussion. Nasal and high-pitched, and it reminded me of April in The White Hot, and I wish that our protagonist could’ve listened to him, perhaps escaped the intoxicating fixation she built around the umbrella man.

“It was the night of inking down into this thing that she knew to be a fantasy and yet couldn’t experience as anything other than the deepest truth, sinking down into its swampy dreamlike in quality and just inhabiting it, in the dark, the relief of that devotion, for a moment, and that was what she did, alone, but the world was with her.”

I keep going back to whether or not the protagonist’s delusions affected her outside of her mind because of how clear she felt them to be the truth, but I won’t talk about the specificity as to avoid any spoilers. It was an interesting scene. One I hadn’t anticipated. Up until this said scene, I would have said she keeps her fantasies/fixations confined to her mind but then that physical thing happened and I no longer knew.

There’s some self-awareness to the novel, in that, without giving away any spoilers yet again so I’ll speak vaguely, the protagonist judges the stylish man for something he does, which when told by a coworker about the power of Gestalt therapy, wholeness, in which writing a letter to someone who’s “wronged” you, and sending it, the address not important, just the sending it, you can gain that wholeness, so she decides to do the same. The letter that’s maybe a novella. To someone she’s never even spoken to.

I rushed to finish it once I reached the 3rd fourth of the book. She became slightly unlikeable, her judginess annoying me, and somehow this the straw that broke this camel’s, me, my back. And then, she repented in a way, or maybe I became distracted by the miles miles miles she (or Barton) created between the present moment and the train of thought so that by the time we returned to the present moment I’d forgiven her for whatever I’d been anguished by to begin with. I wonder how her other work is written. If anyone reading this knows, please let me know because I love the idea that the sentences are what they are because the protagonist is who she is (not that other characters in other books can’t be the same way but it would make this one more special).

When I got to the part of the book where the title is mentioned, I was quite taken by surprise, not having been able to guess that one. Apparently, well actually, Isabella Rossellini, actress, model, and filmmaker and the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, produced a short film series which Barton references, which I won’t tell you about for the sake of surprise while reading. But it’s the bit in the book becomes about finding the in, the one thing that allows you to connect with people who you otherwise don’t find yourself connecting with.

“Are you trying to seduce me?”

“What am I, a DEER?”

“Maybe.”

You know what they say, to be loved is to be known.

And that’s the root of this book for me. The primordial desire to belong and to be known as the self that you are and are becoming.

QUESTIONS

• What are your thoughts on very. long. sentences?

• Send all your favorite karaoke songs this way (will be going soon!)!

• If you’ve read, what did you make of the stylish man’s letter?

P.S. Translation is a BIG part of the novel, which I think I’ll probably write about in another post.

My panic came in waves, moving further away as I discreetly purchased the Author’s Collection edition of What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton for E, who mentioned she’d be going to the book talk next week and that she loved Fitzcarraldo Edition covers, and this one felt even more special considering it was a limited print and the pages, too, were dipped in that shade of International Klein Blue, so it was better that I intermittently felt lost than she stumble upon me buying two copies of the same book, which I cajoled the bookshop worker into giving me, even though, technically, we have a limit of one per person because we only received five, to which I said, does it count if the second’s a gift?

As I was ringing up, just the two copies, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of incredibly. beautiful. books. I asked if she had wrapping; she did, telling me to come back in a few minutes to pick it up. So, out searching once again for my friends running up and down the bookstore staircase, peeking into rooms, calling out names to no avail. I returned to the first-floor checkout, where the book was still being wrapped. I used that time to scour more of the books, my eye being pulled this way and that. I started mentally adding books to my cart and asking the attendant which she’d recommend to someone like me who doesn’t have access to the UK editions. She wasn’t too enthusiastic.

What do you think about The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley because I can’t stop staring at the cover? I haven’t read it. Hmm, have you read this one, pointing to Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, the poppy red cloth-bound hardcover is calling MY name. I love the color. I read it. What do you think? Should I get it? Sure. Sold.

I checked out once again. Still no sighting of my friends.

Like when most lost things are found, there’s a short blip of unretrievable time. One minute I’m lost; the next, I spot my friends walking down the steps, and I’m found.

This was after a week of being together, us three best friends, spending our final day in Edinburgh before departing the next morning. Oh, how I wished to be back in St Andrews, where I could get around quite easily, even in the dark, even without maps, just a sense of direction and a hope that I could remember what it felt like to walk back to E’s apartment, where the sounds of seagulls and nothing else filled the air, quite different from the ice cream truck which sings out below my window on the weekends, the moaning man each night, plus the horns, sirens, and chatter, where my breath was easier to catch in this town cradled on all sides by the sea.

Friday

We didn’t even have to introduce the lie.

“Are you three sisters?,” asked the man, who we told resembled Noah Kahan to which he said he was flattered, since he often compared himself to some scraggly middle-aged actor whose name I can’t remember. He wound up at the fan-favorite bar of the post-grad students, where green walls and fluorescent lights could be overlooked by the inexpensive beer on tap which seemed to never stop flowing, dimming the senses of everyone inside.

We chuckled, and, without losing a beat, which she never does, E lifted her arm, swaying her finger back and forth between herself and C: “We have the same mom.”

“And we share the same dad,” I quickly followed up, nodding my head in C’s direction.

“How’d you know?,” E asks him.

He replied how we anticipated: “Your hair all lays the same.”

In unison, the three of us dubiously nodded our heads.

It was our first night in St Andrews, and already we found ourselves enthralled by the town’s ruins, youth, and pub culture. A few hours earlier, we’d gotten ready for semi-formal, which all the post-grad students do each Friday night, dressing in gowns and suits, and arriving to dinner, served only for one hour, in the basement of their common space, which consisted of a few very long wooden tables in a structure built from sturdy castle-like stone.

About halfway through the meal, I leaned over to C, “Look, every single person is using their knife to eat. Every single person has one except for us.”

She laughed.

Over shared bottles of red wine, we eventually got to know the people our best friend had been surrounded by all year, eventually making our way up the steps and out into the courtyard where the sun made its final descent, teasing us with a beautiful light and not as much warmth as the eye perceived. Together, we harped up a plan to head into town, which consisted of walking 3 minutes from the dorms.

Soon after our conversation with not Noah Kahan, we made our way back to the dorms when we ran into her friend.

“It’s a 10% chance we’ll be able to see the Northern Lights tonight. Typically, it’s only 4–6%.”

With glee and a tampered sense of reality I responded, “We will absolutely see them then. Is there a good watching spot?”

“Let’s go to East Sands.”

We skipped back to E’s room to put on extra layers, hoping to prolong our ability to stay out in the cold that had falled to the ground with the night, before making out way back to the meeting point. We walked down a steep path to a barrier in the ocean, where the town’s light wasn’t as visible and it was just the ocean for miles. White splurts flew this way and that, seagulls haunting us even in the dark.

“I see them! I see them!” someone or I exclaimed. Confirmed on the camera, the greens not visible to my eye, just a shadow dancing along the precipice of some cloud formation I kept describing as a mountain to my friends who laughed at the constant exclamation I started expressing each time I saw movement, after confirming that my eyes weren’t playing a trick every time I saw what I thought were the lights on the horizon.

“Look! There!”

“Where?”

“Between that red light and that one!”

“Oh, wait! Over there!”

It was laughable. We laughed.

Clichés are clichés for a reason. And for that reason I’ll say, when you stop looking is when you’ll find it. Not that I’ve been looking for the Northern Lights in NYC, but it feels like the right saying. A magical sight.

Saturday

A pounding on the door woke us up. At this hour? What time was it? E got up, opening her door just a crack before we heard L, E’s friend, say it’s noon. Noon? It had felt like we’d just fallen asleep. The blackout curtains fooled us into thinking it was still night. We were supposed to be getting ready. The castle rave we were going to that afternoon was just beginning. We jumped out of bed, ran to grab coffee and greasy burgers at the shack on the beach, before making our way back to get dressed and done and ready.

There was to be a bus that would take us there, all the way to Dundee. We waited for nearly 30 minutes in the freezing cold rain with thankfully two umbrellas between the four of us, chatting up some tall boy with a fleece-lined hooded parka that could’ve fit at least one of us in there, who also happened to have fried rice and coffee-flavored cigarettes in his backpack. Eventually, the bus came.

Seconds from approaching, C leaned over and asked, Do you hear that? To which I was oblivious, in some sort of dream state from the longish ride, until I paused, regained my alertness, and responded, Is that from the music? We could feel the vibrations, the beat. Thank goodness I’d brought earplugs.

There were three sets. One in a dark room inside, up one set up winding steps, one in a makeshift tent out front that relied on the tree for coverage, and one tent in the back of the castle, the inside warm from all the dancing bodies, the interior covered with large painted banners. We moved from room to room, until our limbs fatigued and we rested under the sturdy tree out front. At this point, we’d been dancing, partially outside in the misty 50° air, for four hours, so when I saw that others were lined up for a bus to take them back, and then saw that they were boarding, I put on my most hopeful voice, and said something along the lines of, maybe now’s a good time to catch the bus. We caught the bus.

Sunday

E and I left C sleeping to run to the grocery store. We made breakfast. Eggs, yogurt, fruit, triangle-shaped hash browns. We tried to eat outside, which the wind, cold, didn’t permit, and we, with our freezing cold fingers, gathered up the plates, the cups, the cutlery, and made our way back inside.

On the itinerary, today was a rest day. A day to spend in nature. After finishing our coffee, we put on the same clothes we’d been wearing for days, getting ready for a hike along the Fife Coastal Path. The sky was blue. Who knows how long it was meant to last?

Up and down man-made stairs of stone and dirty convenience paths, gorse, spiky shrubs with bright, yellow blossoms, blanketed much of the surrounding landscape. We went off the trail to meander down to the beach to rest, looking at rocks and shells (and collecting a few). At dinner the first evening, I spoke to one of E’s close friends studying some sort of geology, and we got into a conversation about rocks. He mentioned that Scotland was once volcanic, it didn’t take me by surprise to find some cool ones. What did take me by surprise were the green and orange sea snail shells, which I learned are called Flat Periwinkle.

We turned around after that. We had to make our time slot at the seaside sauna. We changed into our bikinis at the nearby gym, returned, quickly undressed in the 50° air, and tiptoed with arms crossed into the small wooden space, with an oven topped with rocks and a big window overlooking the sea below. After about 30 minutes, my excitement to dip into the freezing cold North Sea could no longer be contained, and with my friends catching my excitement, we ran, not as fast as possible since rocks lined the beach and the changing tides imprinted the sand with hard ridges hard. Heat quickly dissipated off my body. I yelled back at my friends, hurry up. It was nearly a quarter mile we had to travel. Together, we plummeted into the freezing cold North Sea. I’d never done such a thing.

Exhilarating. That feeling I had when I’d, at last, worked up the courage as a ten-year-old to ride the Pitt Fall, a no-longer Pittsburgh staple at the amusement park, once the world’s tallest drop tower, and at the very top, we dropped for the first time, my stomach rolled over itself a million times, but this time the feeling without the sensation. As quickly as we entered the sea, we exited. I immediately wanted to do it over again. The warm, the cold. Our bodies shivered in shades of blue. So, we returned. However, once warm enough, once covered in small droplets of sweat, I made my way back down and this time submerged my entire body, head and hair included. Fell back and let the ocean catch me.

Hunger growled eventually and we responded with classic fish & chips at Cromars, where Justin Bieber showed up to a few months prior, and whatever he ordered they branded the “Bieber Special.” The moment we returned to E’s room, the sky greyed and rain came. We changed, made our way back into town, found a table at a pub, and read. E was having fun with Heart the Lover, and C started The Forbidden Notebook. I brought Annie John.

Monday

Photoshoot day! The sun had made an appearance once again. Clear skies, too. We put on music. E went to pick up her mail. C and I stayed behind, putting on makeup. We coordinated outfits, something out of a J.Crew magazine. Buttondowns and blues and reds and whites. The beach first, sitting and standing on rocks. The quad to follow, dancing, laying, playing in the grass.

Afterwards, with the sun still keeping us company, we grabbed a blanket and laid it out in the courtyard in patch of sunlight. We read, we looked at the photos, we vlogged.

Tuesday

See above! (Plus, knowing how Edinburgh is so celebrated for its secondhand clothing scene, I purchased…

a Boden buttondown, a belt, and a pair of Levi’s, an outfit I’ve worn one not too many times at this point, barely a weekish later.)

WATCH ’s VLOG!!

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I told myself that this month I would send my official books i read newsletter out on the 31st (whoops). Partially because I would be traveling (more to come on this), partially because I wanted to get slightly better at reflecting on the book while I read it rather than waiting until it’s been too long and I’m remembering what I remember about a particular book. However, that didn’t happen because I filled up the days leading to my trip! Give and take. Living and learning.

All in all, I read 7 total books. I rented 6 from the library. 1 book is borrowed.

• Workhorse by Caroline Palmer

• Victim by Andrew Boryga

• The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

• Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

• Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer by Ariel Gore

• Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen

• alphabet by Inger Christensen

Workhorse by Caroline Palmer

Clodagh Harmon. Editorial Assistant working at the fashion magazine in the early 2000s in New York City. She’s a workhorse. Just a girl from a middle-class family in Philadelphia who’s had to work hard to claim her spot on the masthead, she’s a workhorse in a land of show horses, ivy-league educated or from elite social circles who climb the ladder with ease. And she becomes fascinated with Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a once-famed Broadway actress, until she becomes her.

“In this secret world, the world I keep well-hidden from my coworkers, I belong to the cheapest gym in my neighborhood, a run-down spot where I climb the elliptical machine and watch “Friends” on the single television mounted to the cinder-block wall. I get my eyebrows waxed for seven dollars at the Korean place on Court Street, shop for nondescript clothes on the sale racks at Midtown Banana Republics and get felt up by drunk guys on the dance floor at Don Hills.”

Clo is a sympathetic character who becomes a next-level liar within the span of a chapter and I was left to mourn the person I thought she could become. I started the book with the expectation that I would get an insider’s fictionalized experience of working at a major fashion magazine in the early 2000s. I’ll place part of the blame on myself; I didn’t read the blurb which alludes to precarious plot lines, and I’m a quite serious person so satire doesn’t always arrive blatantly at my feet.

“She starts to sing again, but bolder and brasher now, and I swell with longing for a girl, for a world, that will never belong to me. Slowly, I walk to my room only to discover that the bed is piled high with other people’s things. Apparently, Barbara turned my bedroom into the coat room…”

Granted, there’s a bit of that glamorous and gilded world: exclusive discounts at stores; access to gowns and jewels; endless billable expenses; invites to events, dinners, parties, launches; a life surrounded by beautiful objects and beautiful people. This world of the early aughts is not the story but a mere starting point from which our protagonist commits fraud, betrays the people in her life, and sets forth on a path of self-destruction in the name of aimless desire.

Imo, she cheapens the experience of actual workhorses, turning hard workers that come from backgrounds that don’t involve actresses or heirs into characters that must have told lies to achieve success that they must have pretended their way to their achievements. Or perhaps it’s just thinly veiled satire and I simply didn’t get it. Too gullible a reader.

You might also like:

The Other Profile by Irene Graziosi, Flat Earth by Jade Levy, Rouge by Mona Awad

Victim by Andrew Boryga

In a Sisyphean search for public validation and a frictionless life, Javier Perez must work hard to realize that’s just a fantasy. In his debut novel, Boryga writes a gripping satire on identity, victimhood, the publishing world, and affluent liberal gaze in a quick-spitting digital-forward click-bait-is-gold world. The story begins with Javi, a young aspiring writer, who realizes, when applying to college and ever after, that he can harness his Latino identity and upbringing in the Bronx to fashion a reality to his benefit. This path is only further accelerated in college when he develops a crush on a girl, enticing him to join a student group, which teaches him just how much more he can benefit from their perceived notions of the “consequences” of his identity. He simply slips over his head and on to himself the persona they’ve created for him.

“My columns didn’t need to be literary masterpieces. They were on trend, increasing my influence, and getting me on the radar of editors and publications I could write for outside of school.”

is hosting a virtual book club (x2) in just a few days:

Martha’s Monthly

The Book Club: Vol 2

Thank you so much to all those that came to our first book club last week where we discussed The Wall by Marlen Haushofer ! I hope you enjoyed it just as much as I enjoyed being host for the first time…

Read more

7 months ago · 45 likes · 15 comments · Martha Adams

wrote a great conversation with the author:

Political Currents by Ross Barkan

A Conversation with Andrew Boryga

This is an occasional series where I interview contemporary novelists of note. I had the pleasure of reading Victim, Andrew Boryga’s debut novel, which follows the trials of Javi, an aspiring writer who cynically exploits his working class Latino identity to rapidly rise in the world of New York media. Boryga, in addition, writes tenderly on the Bronx a…

Read more

2 years ago · 33 likes · 5 comments · Ross Barkan

You might also like:

Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi

When I’m not sure what to read, I’ll return to authors whose work I love. Having read Little Rot early last year, it was a miss on my end to explore Emezi’s other work, and then… here I am.

Vivek Oji’s death haunts this novel as much as the grief that runs ceaselessly through the multitude of characters their person touched. Opening on the day of Vivek’s death, the narrative returns to the childhood of Vivek and his cousin Osita, the beginning of their story, gradually filling in the gaps to the present day, where Vivek’s mother, Kavita, begins her crusade to discover what has happened to her beloved child, only a young adult. Set amidst a politically tumultuous Nigeria in the ‘90s. Secrets swirl. Guilt and grief pervades. Sadness suffocates. Absence governs. One by one layers of truth are revealed to us, the readers, before the truth of her child’s death reaches Kavita.

You might also like:

Little Rot by Akwaeke Emezi, Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly, Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

Read in almost a single sitting on a Wednesday evening after my coworkers told me they were planning a very. important. meeting. i.e. meeting to chat about Strangers, the memoir everyone seems to be reading.

A brief synopsis: At the beginning of Covid lockdown, Belle Burden’s husband tells her he is leaving, he wants a divorce, he wants nothing to do with her, the children, or the houses. What follows is a story of a single mother, a woman, who for the first time must make decisions on her own, who for the first time must be in control of her finances and her life’s path. Granted, she comes from a privileged background, which she addresses, a daughter and granddaughter of New York socialites as well as a Vanderbilt family descendant.

Like my coworkers, I was enthralled by Burden’s writing: it’s void of any vengeance or anger and reads matter of fact, which makes sense given her background as a lawyer. She’s simply presenting her case. We also agreed that part of the allure of the book is that she does come from privilege, it doesn’t lessen her story. Since this one’s been talked about a million times over, I’ll leave this one at… I can’t wait to see what miss goop does in the film adaptation.

You might also like:

The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy

Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer by Ariel Gore

In this memoir of sorts, Ariel Gore chronicles the four years her wife and beloved chef Deena E. Chafetz spent living with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. She prefaces that it’s a story that ends with death, which I’m thankful for: the honesty. (Hope is a dangerous thing, like Lana Del Rey says.) As much as it is a memoir, it is a series of quick-witted chapters that feature feminist literature, interludes from Deena, harsh truths, promising hopes, weird dreams, anecdotes, doctor’s nicknames, recipes, and applicable epigraphs, along with a brief history of breast cancer and its $200 billion industry.

You might also like (myself included as they are mentioned in the book):

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag, Baby’s Precious Always Shines by Gertrude Stein

Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen

This novel sits somewhere between autobiographical and historical fiction. Let’s call it autohistoricalfiction. Gish Jen, the novel’s narrator, is writing the story of her mother, the one her mother refused to share until the very end of her life, and even then it was quite sparse.

Goose, goose, goose!
You lift your neck to the sky and sing—
White down bobbing on the green water,
Red feet pedaling the clear waves.

Loo Shu-hsin (later adopting the American/married name Agnes Jen) was born to a wealthy Shanghainese family in 1924. Growing up, she is constantly admonished by her mother who sees her as too much and beloved by her father who wishes she was the first son, attending an English-speaking all-girls Catholic school where she excels beyond her peers. In 1947, Shu-hsin departs for America to pursue a PhD, never to see her family again due to the Cultural Revolution, then personality and time. This is what sets into motion the first half of the novel, a mostly historical account of Shu-hsin’s life.

“Is this why I’m writing this, so I can remember my motherfondly? And if it gives your heart solace, so be it.”

The second half intertwines with the author’s own path from birth to adulthood. It’s obvious, partially due to Jen’s own premonition to the reader in the form of an author’s note, that this is a book as much about an immigrant woman finding her way in America as it is a story about mothers and daughters. The tone is matter of fact, yet rich and full of depth, as we get the narrative of her mother’s life, Gish is filling in the gaps with versions of what might be the truth, or at least hers. I think it can be tricky, this business of filling in the gaps; however, it requires a reader to be responsible with how they discern this “reality transmuted,” this “forged truth.”

As readers, we get to know the mother before we do the daughter, getting to know her before we get to know her as Gish does (which reminds me of last month’s read A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux, which had a much different purpose, yet still had to balance creating an objective image of a mother by a subjective daughter). In a similar way to how Agnes was unable to connect with her mother, Agnes made it impossible to Gish to find solace in her, constantly scolding, hitting, admonishing. By the end, I realized the book veered from being a historical account to Gish’s attempt to reconcile the hard relationship she had with her mother and the grandiose perception other’s shared following her passing. Almost to the point where I think they could be separate books: one that focuses on her mother, one that explores the aftermath, how Gish felt.

You might also like:

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee, The Overstory by Richard Powers

alphabet by Inger Christensen

I can’t remember if I knew this was a poetry book when I put it on hold at the library; but, upon opening it up and reading the translator’s note and contemplating all the other poetical happenings in life (I’m trying really hard to write a sestina and can’t for the life of me and a poetry workshop once a week in april), I thought, brilliant!

Published in Danish in 1981, the book-length poem resonates today. Using Fibonacci’s sequence, lines building from 1 to I forgot to count, and the alphabet, ascending a – n, as structure, the words arrive, depart, return, return to create a sense of unity within the entire piece as well as portray the elements, naturally wonderful and humanly horrific, that make up the world we live in.

You might also like:

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, Bluets by Maggie Nelson

QUESTIONS

1. What was your favorite quote from a March or recent book?

2. What genre are you hoping to read more of in the month of April? For me, it’ll be novellas! memoirs! and poetry!

3. Speaking of… please send any and all novella, memoir, and poetry recommendations my way.

“The archangel _____ has a message for you.”

My pink ballet flats kept me rooted to the sidewalk, unmoving. I believed her. Believe her.

“He’s given you a gift on the left side of your body. You wear your heart on your sleeve. Your lucky numbers are 7, 3, and 9. Give me your hand.”

I couldn’t help myself, speechless, she said _____ had a message for me. I gave her my hand. The left one. She turned it over. She drew on it. My palm is still on fire. I think it was an __.

I’m not sure how long we stood there, me at a standstill and her rattling away, but it felt like 5 minutes, which ended with her asking me for money. I didn’t have any. My heart dropped. Rattled. What had just happened? Why wouldn’t my feet move? I offered to buy her a coffee. That’s what ____ would’ve done. She said she was hungry so we went to Chipotle and I bought her a double steak burrito with guacamole. I left, shaken, buzzing as if I had consumed one too many cups of coffee, fingers twitching and legs on the edge of giving out. I was still on the phone with my mom.

“What just happened? I hung up because it sounded like a robot talking. I thought it was some app on my phone that didn’t close.”

“It was a woman. Her voice was shot.”

“You have to be —”

“She said she had a message from _____. I couldn’t move.”

“I get posts with the letter __ all the time.”

“I feel rattled.”

Tears welled up in my chest. They’d tried escaping earlier that morning, sitting in the coffee shop while reading Ariel Gore’s memoir Rehearsals for Dying: Digressions on Love and Cancer.

I lost someone close to me, recently from cancer, and I’m not sure why I decided to pick this book up, but I think I was looking for answers, some sort of balm to the months I’ve spent avoiding thinkingtalkingwriting about it all. I still am avoiding, so now, as I think Gore might appreciate, let’s digress.

In this memoir of sorts, Ariel Gore chronicles the four years her wife and beloved chef Deena E. Chafetz spent living with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. She prefaces that it’s a story that ends with death, which I’m thankful for: the honesty. (Hope is a dangerous thing, like Lana Del Rey says.) As much as it is a memoir, it is a series of quick-witted chapters that feature feminist literature, interludes from Deena, harsh truths, promising hopes, weird dreams, anecdotes, doctor’s nicknames, recipes, and applicable epigraphs, along with a brief history of breast cancer and its $200 billion industry.

“Maybe the difference between a digression and a meander is that a digression acknowledges the inherent death anxiety in its course. The meander luxuriates as it avoids.”

THE WRITER… WRITES

Once Deena receives her diagnoses, Gore, being a writer and a teacher of writing itself, turns to writing to make sense of this thing, cancer and, subsequently, death, that looms over their lives, without any clarity on what’s happening, what to expect, or what they can do.

Ariel sets up a shared word doc that Deena can access. Over the course of the years, Ariel mentions that she wishes Deena wasn’t reading what she was writing but every now and then it was obvious that she was, providing input or asking questions. At one point, seemingly early on, Deena advises Ariel “to structure [their] book more like that, braiding specific individuals’ experiences with the broader history and context.” And Ariel does. It enhances my total understanding, the braiding of their story, Ariel’s intimate perspective, Deena’s omniscient presence, the conversations between them and friends.

Throughout the novel, Gore returns to literature’s best thinkers’ on cancer: Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, Gertrude Stein’s Baby’s Precious Always Shines. Writing as a source of comfort because caregiving is extremely hard. And also, turning to others who may have gone through an experience through which you must also gives the sense that you may gain some control over it.

ALL DIFFERENT TYPES OF KNOWING

Every type of experience with cancer is different, and breast cancer is not one I’ve intimately known, so to learn about their personal experience, while understanding it within the context of its history and industry, expanded my perspective of how I’ve generally understood it throughout my life, particularly from a medical-factual one.

“When I thought back through all the information I’d encountered about breast cancer before Deena asked me if I thought her breast looked weird, I realized that I’d learned most of what I knew from two sources: the Susan G. Komen organization and National Breast Cancer Awareness (NBCA) month. Both sources, it turns out, are controversial—and not unconnected.”

Uniquely, she brings light to a queer perspective when dealing with breast cancer—doctors make assumptions regarding what Deena does and does not want to do with her body, and a close friend, who found themselves at the mercy of doctors without trans fluency, was made to feel even more uncomfortable in their body than what was already occurring with treatment.

“It has been no one’s job to tell us anything about the process, or to manage our expectations, or to share any kind of big picture about how anything might go, but we were learning that all this treatment failure was some kind of normal.”

Toward the beginning of the book, Gore raises a few classic Western illness narratives including the quest narrative, in which the patient must seek treatment and survival as the hero in their own story, meaning that they must self-advocate in a system closed off from them through access and understanding. You can tell she’s trying to understand which narrative will fit their scenario, and I’m not sure if it was changed after the fact but none seem to capture what Ariel had to endure.

Death is not something I knew until I saw it, and now I’m familiar, which means I live life the same but different, I understand differently. I think like Gore says, “Beforetime is before embodied knowing or psychic knowing or medical knowing—it’s when your skin still felt soft, and we trusted that. Before we remembered we were always dying and always keeping on”. Like Ariel, I’m keeping on. I feel seen by her digressions. Or maybe less alone.

So, standing there before this woman, with gray hair in a pony tail and white sneakers and an undeniable delicate posture and determination to stop me, who was endowed with psychic knowing delivered a message to me, which I felt embodied, unable to move, with no explanation of the specific events that led to our beings colliding, I silently celebrated the gift I was given.

I’d have to deal with the repercussions of the mess I made later. After work. After the dinner. After the event. I left my door open as a willing testimony to my faultiness that morning, having failed to upkeep the room whose floor was generally unspoken for and whose bed held only pillows and a comforter and a stuffed leopard I named Artemisia Gentileschi, gifted to me by my roommates when I needed comfort the most. It (the mess) reminded me of my early days (as a child) when clothing and various objects would create the illusion of there being no floor, and despite this lacking care, I still cared that my parents take precaution to avoid stepping on anything lest it be ruined by their presumed dirty feet. (Because surely lying crumpled on the floor in semi-organized piles was taking care of my clothes.)

But that morning, my bed was left half made, covered with hangerssweatersjeanstights; my floor was a wooden plank with narrow margins of error like a game of volcano I used to play in which I’d have to traverse carefully in order to leave without touching the lava. And that’s all to say that the messiness that I had once contained (now I’m. a. neat. freak. who. keeps. her. shoes. in. boxes. and. sweaters. in. drawers.) presented itself in my space and, coincidentally, in the form of a young girl, a daughter, in Danish writer Helle Helle’s most recently translated novel, they.

Set in a pre-digital small town in Denmark, this minimalist novel tells the story of high-school aged girl and her mother, who has been diagnosed with an unnamed terminal illness, over the span of a year.

“She feels an urge to write down the lyrics and learn them by heart, she finds the pen in the drawer along with some sandwich paper, but the sandwich paper tears when she tries to write on it. She goes into the living room for some proper paper, and from the living room into the hall, and from the hall back into the kitchen, and into the living room again.”

Helle Helle writes simplistically, with small chapters in which choppy, kind of chaotic sentences are indicative that no detail is any more important than the next. There is no explanation. Nor emotions or feelings tied to any plot point, which is what makes the writing so singular and compelling to me because I must go further than what’s on the page to understand what is happening, what is being felt without being told, which is how we experience life. Otherwise, it’d be quite boring.

With that (the no explanation part) in mind, objects are significant. They reoccur and each says something different. Me, I started paying attention to every iteration of the word clothing. What is Helle Helle trying to signify through the constant mention?

Clothing is always being referenced by the daughter because she’s trying all of it on or it’s a mess and she has to move it from one place in the house to the next; it’s a means to communicate, to reinvent her identity, to fill the void, or remove layers getting in the way. Like when she invites a boy over, the most curious description of her and him sitting at the table with no clothes on seems normal (young teenager, no clothes) and unusual (sitting at the table). Or when she’s getting ready to go to a party, she makes declarative statements about her clothing/appearance but it’s really about her trying to figure out who she is, clothing just a means of doing so.

The clothing isn’t spoken about in a passive sense, not even in the sentences. It, too, has the ability to “migrate to every item of furniture along with dirty plates and glasses, apart from her mother’s bed” one day. Another day “a straggle of clothing extends into the hall.” Which makes her (the one who’s actually moving the clothing) so far removed from the action, emphasizing her complete unrootedness to her own situation.

The daughter is not quite a child nor is she an adult, so to watch her navigate how she thinks she’s supposed to live everyday life while her mother is miles away in the hospital for long periods of time is similar to that feeling you get when you watch your dog on the camera you put up out of curiosity while you’re away only to realize they look lost without their person to follow.

Something’s off? It’s the rhubarb purée you threw away earlier to make more space in the freezer but it’s still good and didn’t need to be wasted so you must take it out of the garbage can and make something of it. Yes, that was it. That feeling. Phew. Feeling can be mitigated by a rearrangement of objects. Grasping on to the physical is a means of bypassing the internal self to soothe, fix, better.

When I returned home after work, after dinner, after the event, and still had to clean out my lunch dish, talk to my parents, talk to my roommates, read a chapter, take a shower, pack a lunch for tomorrow, think about what to wear to work tomorrow, write down three things I’m grateful for, I took to slightly rearranging my room. Instead of putting the jeans and sweaters and socks in their rightful homes, I folded them and placed them in one big pile as a compromise between the tiredness that had settled deep within me and a desire that when I woke the clutter I’d amassed would be gone and I would feel better, the clean would make me feel better. I laughed as I did this, thinking about how just a few weeks prior while visiting home, staying with my mom, she remarked, You are a tornado. It makes me so happy because it means you’re home.

I think about the young girl, moving this from there to here, from that pile to there, from here to that pile, going through what’s she’s going through, and I think of myself, and the way we behave when dealing with certain matters of being human, that that way changes as we experience more, that I, in also dealing with a loved one’s terminal illness, found myself rearranging my clothing and my objects each day, from neatness to mess to organized piles to mess back to neatness as I felt fine, then not, then okay, then not, then fine again. The story is as much about the continuous loops of life we must live as it is the realness of death, which I’ve learnt so much about this year, and they felt like some recognition of the not knowing of how to proceed when there’s no other option.

Time to clean my room again.

from when i lived in denmark forever ago

All roads leads to roads. — Helle Helle, they

And all books lead to books. This February, I read and read and read (8 total). All fabulous. There was an intensity in each of the stories, brought upon by death and love, mostly, or mortality and becoming. Objects, particularly clothing, served as the fascination for not only the characters whose lives I was reading about but my own as well. Objects as a celebration of who we are, material items we leave for the people we love, something for us to hold on to. My last read, Northanger Abbey, by the formidable Jane Austen, brought some lightness to the month with her brilliant satiric tone and wit, kind of symbolic, finishing it as February came to a close and the impending spring of March arrived.

First up…

A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux, translated by Tanya Leslie

“This book can be seen as a literary venture as its purpose is to find out the truth about my mother, a truth that can be conveyed only be words.”

A memoir and biography of sorts, after Annie Ernaux’s mother passes, she uses this writing practice to attempt to reckon with the repercussions of navigating with this major loss, as well as capture her mother, “the real woman, the one who existed independently from me…”

“All I did were the daily chores necessary for living: shopping, cooking, loading the washing machine. Quite often I forgot how to do things in the right order. After peeling vegetables, I would have to stop and think before going on to the next stage, that is, washing them. To read was simply impossible.”

The first several pages are rife with her disbelief. Her instant inability to do the bare minimum serves as a grounding space for the reader to understand her mindset when she first set out to tell the story of her mother.

Her ambition is to regard her mother objectively, and yet that’s a hard task: to separate your mother from the individual woman that she was. To ignore whatever sentiments you feel about this behavior or that, this memory or that. It’s so much more personal as a daughter than a friend or onlooker or person from a different century writing an account of someone’s life. It’s as much a biography of her mother as it is a memoir of herself.

So, objective? Yes. Intimate? So much more. The image of Annie’s mother, this intimate image, could have only come from someone who knew her well enough to not be objective, so while she employs techniques like a plot that features a chronological telling of her mother’s history, lists, and simple descriptions to attempt objectivity, the story is quite subjective, rich with love and emotion. The lists are some of my favorites (as a list person myself), sporadically interspersed throughout, lacking in narrative but so much richer in imagery, capturing a person I can touch and feel, as if the words on the page have created some solid form:

“– on Sunday afternoons, she would lie down in her slip and stockings. She let me crawl into bed next to her. She fell asleep quickly while I read, huddled up against her back.”

Every so often she reflects on attributes of her mother, one’s most likely only visible to her family, and attempts to override her subjectivity for a reasonable consequent of her mother’s upbringing, life, and experiences:

“When I think of my mother’s violent temper, outbursts of affection, and reproachful attitude, I try not to see them as facets of her personality but to relate them to her own story and social background.. This way of writing, which seems to bring me closer to the truth, relives me of the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance by establishing a more objective approach. And yet something deep down inside refuses to yield and wants me to remember my mother purely in emotional terms—affection or tears—without searching for explanation.”

She was, she was, she was… Ernaux cannot refrain from yielding to her mother in emotional terms because her mother is more than a mere person whose life she is telling, she is sharing the entire story of who her mother is, even if that means subjectivity at times.

When her mother becomes inflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease, Ernaux is startled, she cannot reconcile this person with the woman she knew up until this point. Thinking about the last time we saw the person we love be themselves, the person we knew them to be, and then to witness the one they’ve become, despite that progression being against everyone’s wishes, is like watching the forest behind your childhood home being cut down and turned into wood chips or your neighbor’s campfire. But before that, Ernaux captures her mother’s natural changes, the ones that come with years and experiences, the person who grew yet stayed steady through the years, alongside the influence of a child’s perception of their mother as they, too, grow older.

Death changes our interactions with the world. And once she passes, Ernaux returns to reflecting on death. We are knowing beings and death, and imminent death, impacts who we are in a multitude of ways. And Ernaux decides it’s her turn to “bring her into the world” through her writing this story, A Woman’s Story.

This was my first Ernaux read! Which should I pick up next?

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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

We’ve all heard all about it already. Here are some of my thoughts/experiences with the book craze, rereading it as an adult, seeing the movie, and attending a convo with Emerald Fennell at the NYPL.

Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild

I hadn’t expected to find myself sobbing at the end of Chapter 1. Not even two chapters later, it was a Friday night, with no plans until later, and my roommates, as they got ready for their individual outings, peeked their heads inside, asked me what I was reading, and instantly tears came down, and I spit out, it’s so sad. They asked me if I was okay, and I was giving them a synoposis of what I had just read.

Honor and Tom adore their daughter Chloe but Honor can’t help but want another child. In a series of events in which Honor religiously desires for another child and takes the route of an egg donor and surrogacy, this decision undulates amongst other undisclosed information, leaving Tom to grapple with what’s to come after a horrible happening changes his life forever. (It was reminiscent of Flesh but a much more feminine approach and lacking all the nihilism.)

The implications of an anonymous egg donor, for both the family that is having the child and the woman who’s donated, becomes a serious conversation in the novel. The contemporary literature genre lends itself to what becomes an approachable conversation, especially when the subject is so delicate and intimate.

The story is told from the perspective of Honor, giving the readers an omniscient perspective of the story and its characters and the decisions they make. The first chapter, in which the event that sets into motion the story, sets the tone for the novel, a harsh world which resets Tom’s priorities, from work to his family but that life-changing event rocked me quite unexpectedly. I hadn’t anticipated it. And I still don’t know how to feel about it. The severity of it. Grief, betrayal, forgiveness, and love are at the root of the plot.

The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes

At the age of 26, April Soto, the protagonist of The White Hot feels a familiar fire creep up in her and leaves home, which consists of 4 generations of Soto women (her grandmother, mother, herself, and her 10-year-old daughter, Noelle), embarking on a transformational 10-day journey to Pittsburgh to Ohiopyle. There she recognizes herself as a human for the first time, gains a relationship to nature, to her body, to her life.

Wrote a whole long thing about it …..

Estate by Cynthia Zarin

“I thought then if I told these stories, I would unravel the length of thread that led to . . . I want to say the Minotaur’s lair, but as always, in a maze, there is more than one way to lose one’s way.”

Finding myself unable to not not dog ear every other page of my copy of the library book, I thought it wiser to purchase one for myself. I made it a resolution to buy at least one book per month, and for January, this was the winner! The painted blue cover with the solemn woman dressed in a pale pink dress or top of sorts spoke to me: the month’s and my sentiment in a book cover. Plus, I wanted to underline like heck. (Which I would never do to a copy not my own.)

The novel is structured as a letter from the narrator, Caroline (separated from her husband), to a past present future lover, Lorenzo, to absolve(?) herself from the weight of carrying his absence and her love, his endless anecdotes of acquiring, mostly women and children, as much as it is a novel about the stories we tell ourselves about others. Zarin is an economical writer, using language that speaks directly to love but in such diaphanous ways she captures that restless feeling out of it (love and what not) being just out of reach, which reflects the narrative with which we imbue the truth. The protagonist’s attempt to write about these stories swiftly strays to all the joyous, sticky, heartbreaking, life-changing events in between, making her all the more relatable.

“When we are together, you often take my fingers and press them to your mouth. But now I have a burn you have not seen, and it is almost healed.”

Central to the novel: The power of the imagination to fill in the gaps of our lover’s absence or disappointments. Part of the reason she’s writing the letter, so it seems. To distinguish between what she remembers and what she remembers imagining.

“Many of the conversations I recorded were imagined, but that is the way in all love affairs: what one person says and what another person hears are often two different things.”

“But even I know we know much less about the experiences we have than those we do not; about what has failed to happen, or could have happened—about this we are experts.”

Part of the reason she’s so fascinated by Lorenzo, as an observer and from what’s she said, is his constant absence. It’s this absence that allows her imagination to fill in the gaps but also makes the distinction between truth and thought much muddier. And now, years later, with life experience and children and time underway, the reality comes into focus for out protagonist. Harsh truths that I don’t necessarily see as hard facts but perhaps a reckoning with the mindset she must try on like a hat on the store in an attempt to keep yourself a few degrees warmer than the cold that’ll hit you as soon as you walk outside the door, or back into the arms of a past present future lover.

I’m also always fascinated by meditations on clothes in novels, and in this one, clothing is always an object in the way and a narrative connector to the emotional experience that follows:

“I am still wearing my raincoat, and you say, take off your coat. Why are you wearing your coat in the kitchen? And you laugh at my clothes, untying the orange ribbon of my blouse. Who are you, who arrives and sits on the broken bamboo sofa in the kitchen, who takes me upstairs and does not speak, and then an hour later admires the garden almost wordlessly?”

There is an air of mystery, of lack, around the men she interacts with. Almost as if that’s what she’s attracted to: latency. But without there ever being a destination. Left to linger, left to seek out that which never arrived.

they by Helle Helle, translated by Martin Aitken

“Her mother lies with her hands on top of her coat, the coat rises and falls. they’ve bought flour and apples, she puts the apples on the windowsill and tips the flour into the jar, spills a bit, sweeps it up. She folds the two shopping bags together and puts them back where they belong, runs some water into a saucepan, but changes her mind and gets the coffee maker rready with seven spoonful of coffee.”

Ever since I read This Should Be Written in the Present Tense, I’ve been wanting to read another… but none of Helle Helle’s other books had been translated. And then… there I was at Three Lives and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a life-size cabbage and ‘Helle Helle’ in bold red text. I bounded over to the table with sheer joy. they by Helle Helle. I made it my book purchase of February.

Mainly centered on the daughter, this subdued novella, which consists mostly of descriptions of things and the day to day, dictates, day by day, the relationship of a young daughter still in school and her mother, who has been diagnosed with an unnamed terminal illness, set in time with no phones in a small town in Denmark.

There is no real reflection or access to the daughter’s thoughts. Nor is there a plot. Just description. And yet, it’s in that that the novella becomes deeply intimate, making the reader responsible for filling in the gaps of what her actions are showing us. It’s quiet and longing and devastating.

I quite loved this and it’s quietude and working on writing something longer. About clothes and stuff.

Smoke by Gabriela Alemán, translated by Dick Cluster

“There are some who know that the present is merely the past devouring the future, and that sensations are nothing but memory. There are some who accept that eternal flux. They decided who they’re going to be, and where.”

This might be my favorite read of the month. For its uniqueness in subject (for me) and its vocabulary and writing style. A woman named Gabriela returns to Asunción (capital of Paraguay) to collect and read a journal left to her by Andrei, a man who did what he had to do for himself and the people that mattered most to him to survive the time leading up to and during the dictatorship. The story is written from her perspective, with interludes of what has happened in the past as transmitted through his letters creating a hazy sensation as you read and float between the past and the present, which come in and out of focus based on the elucidation of the stories Andrei shares in his writing: “sixty years of decontextualized bits of information, unanswered letters, scribbled lines, some dashed off in despair.” In the end, the story dissipates, no clear beginning or end or even characters, just history blown away by the wind of the present with a future still unknown.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her.”

I was a Victorian novel enthusiast in school so I never quite delved into Austen and now I feel I must make up for lost time. She’s a hoot. She’s hilarious. I feel like I’m discovering her genius (the one people have always talked about forever) just today.

Northanger Abbey follows two plots: your run-of-the-mill late 18th century marriage plot and a reading plot. Catherine Morland, the narrator’s proclaimed heroine of our story, joins society in Bath where she nurtures a spectacle of a friendship with Isabella Thorpe, becomes infatuated with one Henry Tilney, also befriending his sister Eleanor, and reads (as well as talks about reading) endlessly, mostly gothic. And Austen is satirizing both.

What I learnt was that taken out of context, an Austen quote can be read as a serious matter of fact; however, when read in the confines of her novels, the same very line carries the opposite meaning. Case in point: “Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.” I’d known of this quote before and so with it in mind I thought I was about to get a lesson in a world-class friendship only to find out it’s in reference to Catherine’s quite superficial friendship with Isabella. I was proved wrong in my beliefs and shown just how unserious Austen is being with her language, which when isolated from its context takes on a whole other layer of serious intensity.

And you?

• What have you read this month and loved or totally disliked?

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What’s on deck for March?

Catch up!

“I have told you about these ten days, Noe, hoping some of it might be useful as you determine what kind of woman to be. We are stuck with the project of becoming ourselves, a task we ignore to our great peril. […] Whichever path you choose, at least you know it’s not the only option. Freedom is a brutal assignment with many punishments. Conformity’s punishments can be even harsher, though they’re often less visible. Blow out your candles. Be careful what you don’t wish for, the curiosities you’re too successful to speak, the hungers that threaten disruptions.”

Unlike the narrator, I never found solace there, where the population rests strictly under 50, in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands, watered by the Youghiogheny River, also home to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Kentuck Knob, and two or three other Usonian homes they took apart piece by piece and rebuilt piece by piece (some photos way below).

As a child, maybe 4, maybe 6, who knows, though I could simply ask one of my parents, my family and some family friends decided to camp out there for a weekend, so upon arrival, we parked our car, set up our tents, dressed in our hiking clothes with swimwear beneath, and made our way to the natural waterslides chiseled from sandstone that make the park a beacon of outdoor recreation every summer. Millions of years of water eroding smooth channels adjacent to the plastic ones found in most backyards.

At that age, I didn’t like being submerged in water so I was happy to frolic in the surrounding water-flooded terraced rocks. Not long after everyone disappeared to take turns going down the slide, they reappeared dripping with worry and blood. My dad had slipped on the slick surface, which had torn through and left a significant gash on the back of his head. Though, not enough to worry him more than where his sunglasses had gone. All he could do was keep asking where his sunglasses went.

The first aid station recommended he go get stitches but we were in far too desolate an area that it would’ve signaled the end of our camping trip. Instead, later that night he had my sister examine the caked over area of his head. She was 8. She said it looked fine but told him to watch out for flies. They might hover.

The timeline gets tricky here because the next I know the marshmallows are gone, taken by a raccoon, probably, during the night, because we had left open the food container, and we had no graham crackers because my family thought our family friends were bringing them and they thought we had them covered. Only chocolate was left. And also red flashing lights. Our fathers had gone off into the woods to collect dried out branches for a fire only to be caught and fined for stealing from a state park. A disturbance of nature.

Unlike my experience, though formative in ways, at the age of 26, April Soto, the protagonist of The White Hot feels a familiar fire creep up in her and leaves home, which consists of 4 generations of Soto women (her grandmother, mother, herself, and her 10-year-old daughter, Noelle), embarking on a transformational 10-day journey to Pittsburgh to Ohiopyle.

There she recognizes herself as a human for the first time, gains a relationship to nature, to her body, to her life, while embraced by the warmth of the rock formations at Ohiopyle. When I watched the opening of Hamnet, Jessie Buckley’s character, Agnes, is cradled by a womb-like nest formed by tree roots and a dark cave and it reminded me of this scene. Nature, the one unperturbed by human hands, has incredible healing properties, which I’m so easy to forget… though I’m joining the community garden near me which I can’t wait for… mostly I can’t wait to sit on the ground and pluck weeds. The cavern is… well, I read this interview between Chloé Zhao and Bradley Cooper published by Interview, which is crawling with incredible sentiments, but she speaks to how she came about finding these natural black holes and what they mean, more than just what presented itself to her in the forests of Wales but their pre-saturated meaning, symbolic of death, which when considering the purpose they serve to April, not as related to death but a return to life and “the capacity to love.”

“Had I fumbled through twenty-six years with my senses damned up?”

April winds up in her forest, shoeless, wearing a rhinestone cami and jeans, after she latched on to graduate students her age on the bus from Philly who were trekking to Ohiopyle, and once there, she veers away from them, in search of no service, and walks and walks and walks until blisters form, her shoes break, and she has no option but to leave them behind, move on, and lay down. On a rock. The one that keeps her warm. Makes her feel whole.

One night, she’s awoken by the warmth of a bear cub’s fresh, playful shat. She’s recognizing her physical presence in relation to that of the world around her. The sights and sounds of birds chirping and wind blowing that we shut ourselves off from every day, especially when living in a city. Another day, a man enters the novel. She’s kept curious by him, this person who is also visibly hurting and trying to seek out some salvation in the woods like her, he who begins to repeatedly visit this very spot, the same one that’s bringing her to her body for the first time, he who’s bringing remnants of clothing from his past life so she can move to her next.

“He asked how I could hike in skinny jeans. Did my belly ache for lack of room? Did the back of my knees suffocate and sweat?”

Despite being miles from civilization, void of humans, it’s this one, this place that allows these two people, both seeking something unnameable, to find themselves absolved or at least pushed to a future where their understanding of themselves and their place in the world makes more sense. It’s crazy in the most beautiful way the way that other humans have the ability to do such a thing. Magic, even.

April, once out of the woods, and in the empty home of this man who has cleared it of everything that once held meaning, except for his records of Charles Mingus, which carried too much for him to get rid of, has another self-discovery moment.

“The white hotness—my armor, my undoing—Mingus gave it sonic form. He had dignity. His grappling—it was useful, medicinal.”

“Notes like smashed dinner plates. Piano like feet propelled out the door. Our hostility, Noelle, yours and mine, had songs. And yet they were melodious, stacked and wound tight with love.”

“Powerful forces has conspired to keep Mingus out my life when it would’ve done the most awakening. Why? Was the spot where his expression met my psyche so dangerous?”

Aghast that she’s waited her whole life to hear music that captures that white hot feeling that builds in her. Her daughter’s too. I wonder, though, if this were real life, did April recognize in the moment the transformational power of the music, of nature? or was it all in retrospect? I think both.

Once, not too long ago, my childhood best friend sent me a song, saying she thought I’d like it. That she was curious what I’d been listening to because the monthly playlists I’d make myself hadn’t popped up on her Spotify in months. I told her I hadn’t made them. Which is why I’ve been making it a priority to gather the songs that capture the sentiment of the month ahead, or prompt a feeling I desire. I was curious what she was hearing, what transformed her sense of self, so while I thought I was going to make a playlist of everything she listened to, I couldn’t stop playing Track B from The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady. Hudes made a curated playlist, too! And that’s what’s been on repeat.

Music has and always will have some stronghold on informing my senses and experiences of the world. Some times, a sound just clicks. And despite being a word person, when it comes to music I’m all sound. The lyrics could be whatever because if the sounds charms me, I’m all in. Captures that one specific exact unnamed emotion I’m having and to have that which can express what I cannot name, that sound make me feel understood and seen. And now all of this is happening underneath the surface but Hudes and April are reminding me of all that under the surface stuff.

And it’s all this and April shares and reflects and lingers on in the letter she writes to her daughter, Noelle, 8 years later, after the fact, in an attempt to explain her disappearance. What that meant to her. Unknowingly searching for a balm to the pain she had yet to give words to. And having become, perhaps, more herself, the woman she wanted to be, an encouragement to her daughter to pay attention to the person she desires to be. And as someone once told me, that nothing in life is permanent so we have the freedom to continually change or remain the same.

I’m leaving it out because it’s much too large to discuss but a large part of the plot, and central to the story, are themes of motherlessness, motherhood, girlhood, womanhood, violence, generational trauma.

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q.u.e.s.t.i.o.n.s

• if you’ve read the book, what theme stuck out most to you?

• i love the role of nature in this novel (highly. spiritual.). are there similar contemporary (or not) literature that’s incorporated nature as this important character?

• what’s your first camping story?

• how do you discover new music? leave playlists below!!

ready for pickup.

can someone send me a reminder, please? thank goodness march is a long month with many weekends. i have this reoccurring problem where all the books i want to read become available at the same time so it’s a frenzy to finish the ones i already have and find time to pick them up and then figure out which order to read the new ones and finish them before they’re due (guilt of often being late). and part of past me wants future me to visit different libraries throughout the city so i’ll choose different location pickups so that future me completely forgets and the hold lapses.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/798984/a-guardian-and-a-thief-oprahs-book-club-by-megha-majumdar/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688224/checkout-19-by-claire-louise-bennett/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/771529/bad-bad-girl-by-gish-jen/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/808666/brown-girl-brownstones-by-paule-marshall-foreword-by-nicole-dennis-benn/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/536652/human-acts-by-han-kang/

harpercollins.com/products/television-lauren-rothery

https://www.nyrb.com/products/the-post-office-girl

impatiently waiting for.

well, not not patiently. (also always thought it was unpatient.) just also want to read these but it’ll be good if it takes a while so i don’t run into the problem of too many books and too little time.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/787666/stone-yard-devotional-by-charlotte-wood/

https://www.ndbooks.com/book/the-wall-1/

https://www.ndbooks.com/book/alphabet/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/43781/the-dud-avocado-by-elaine-dundy/

https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324105640 (OBSESSED with this cover.)

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374617318/thingsinnaturemerelygrow/

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691247939/eros-the-bittersweet

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/604152/the-death-of-vivek-oji-by-akwaeke-emezi/

https://fonografeditions.com/catalog/fono40-nora-claire-miller-groceries-print-book/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645371/madonna-in-a-fur-coat-by-sabahattin-ali/

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/725334/victim-by-andrew-boryga/

How am I currently finding books? The window of Three Lives, the books you might also like on the NYPL PDPs (or perhaps BDPs (book description pages)??), , , library science, work book club group chat, looking up my favorite authors’ favorite books and what book-to-film adaptations are happening…

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Skirt pants, please. where can i find a good pair of cords? been wanting a pair but then i overheard on the subway that all the Parisians are wearing them so i’ve got to get on it. i would love a brooke callahan tie skirt. need a good summer tote so i can leave my house in morning and not have to come back until way after the sun sets (so requirements are: fits a book, journal, small water bottle, some snacks, random other things i’ll need but can’t think of) and can’t stop thinking about this sequin-trimmed one from Vanessa Bruno, plus it’s got a zipper. Looking for shoes that are less bluh than these but still fall somewhere between orthopedic and ballet. The color of blackberry juice is dyed in my mind (love this tee). still not buying any new clothing so have got to put in the time to find it all secondhand (which is just a matter of work and luck as someone once told me for finding success).

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I wear the same thing pretty much every non-work day, which is apparently something I’ve done since I was 5. When I was visiting home a few weeks ago, my mom found a book I made in kindergarten and on the cover I was wearing some sports-jersey inspired top with rhinestones and capris and chunky sneakers and my mom said i wore that every day and that once i found an outfit or piece of clothing i liked i would wear it non-stop until another one garnered my attention in the same way. In other words, catch me wearing midi skirts and capris and ribbed knit tees and breezy blouses and dresses all season long.

A few months ago, I saw florist write about Toast Nights, and ever since I’ve been musing on how to gather my favorite people and host one—my birthday presenting itself as a perfect opportunity. Voilà. The morning of, I texted everyone using the template she shared from The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker, with some edits since the details had already been ironed out:

“Soooo I was inspired by a little something called a Toast Night. The theme is love (duh). Everyone: prepare a toast, whether it’s a passage from a book or poem, your own story, thoughts, or hopes that ends with a toast to love. It can be one word or quite a few. All up to you! The goal is to share what loves means to you, how you have felt loved, or how you have given love to others. We can go around the table and share.”

I had no expectations, though I took a guess at what everyone might say. Me, I had barely any time to contemplate, every moment of the day squeezed to its fullest potential.

Upon waking, I sobbed. Wiped my eyes. Took a breath. Moseyed about my apartment. What else is one to do on their birthday? That lasted about 15 minutes before I declared to my one roommate J, who’s also usually always up quite early too, that I was headed to my favorite coffee shop. I got dressed. Forgot to take a photo of my outfit but I’ve proceeded to wear it like 5 times in the past week. (Still haven’t remembered to take a photo.) Hopped on the bus (my ankle still hurt(s)). Said hello to the driver with the most fabulous top hat. Hopped off the bus. Ordered an almond milk latte, sat down in the corner at the booth with a small table flaunting some soft petal-y flowers, and set out my journal (given to me last year for my birthday) and read of the moment (Estate by Cynthia Zarin). Waited for the latte. Jotted down some thoughts in my journal, using inspiration from . Then, got to reading. I had strategically read enough of the book (which I’d been loving) so that the possibility of finishing it on my birthday would happen. It did. I read every last page and the day was beautiful (weather-wise and otherwise). Made my way to Kinn for their store opening. I wear a locket around my neck with my initial I was given some time ago, and it’s from there. Like I so often do, got there too early and ended up being the first customer (caught on film). I wanted to find an anklet but still searching. I’m right in between a bracelet and an ankle when it comes to sizing. Tried on a beautiful gown at Tarin Thomas. O. M. G. Hopped back on the bus. Laughed out a hello again at the driver with the fabulous hat. Found the right olives for making dirty martinis at the bodega. Facetimed with one of my best friends. Finished building my cake, which leaned Matilda not From Lucie. It was rich and delicious despite. Got my hair cut. And styled. Put on a fabulous Helmut Lang dress I scored at Housing Works with sheer tights and Mary Janes and went to dinner.

We walked in a few minutes late, the city a gridlock of friends and lovers meeting for dinner, plus the effect of the winter day’s unexpected warmth still palpable in the air. Seated at a long, family-style table on an elevated platform, we watched all the couples below us, make up stories for each, though they later watched and sung with us. I’d quickly forgotten my request earlier in the day for toasts to love, and having not had time to prepare I skirted asking others to share, but then the focaccia and the caprese and the wine were being passed around and I remembered and asked if everyone was ready to say their toast. I went first. Though I was completely unprepared. Although 26 years have given me much time to contemplate love so that in that moment my mind thought of the one thing that meant the most to me: a poem I’d whispered over and over and over and over again to someone a few weeks prior.

IN BLACKWATER WOODS
by Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

In the time between summer and fall, I shipped a copy of Devotions, a collection of Mary Oliver’s poems, to someone special to serve as a prayer to life, and the mundane and momentousness it contains. Afterwards, when I’d visit, I’d read a poem or two from it, and, ever since I’ve no longer been able to read to them; for me, like for so many, her words are a balm to loss and a prompt to savor the little joys in life. Reading the poem to my nearest and dearest friends felt like an admission of where I was: some place between living and learning what it means to let go.

After I spoke, we went around the table, sort of clockwise and sort of out of order. And toasted one by one to love.

thank you, !!

It was summer and I was young. I don’t know where anyone was. The book I’d chosen was brief. Short. A slip of a story. It didn’t take long for me to reach it’s final page. So, I, free from the gnawing buzz to pluck weeds or help make lunch, returned to the attic for another. And another. And another. I devoured a whole pile that afternoon.

Reading was and still is an easy escape in the shape of a clandestine vessel that shape-shifts as ardently as the clouds do when you’re a child with a sure vision (the book I’m currently reading, Smoke by Gabriela Alemán, really has me metaphor-ing it up), amongst other incalculable xyzs. I’m not on the bus to work or at the corner coffee shop with flowers in a bud vase on the table. I’m in the world the words have delivered me to. So sometimes, during hard times, reflecting and sitting reminds me that I’m not some girl with dark hair and pale blue eyes living in an 18th-century provincial English town that might also be a dog nor some wistful and famous Italian writer reflecting on his first and profusely profound and life-altering love but perhaps just a traveler on a cold winter night, and I move on to the next narrative as quickly as I immersed myself in the prior.

Last year, I made it a goal to read at least 4 books a month which I’ve brought into 2026 with a slight modification: Read at least 4 books every month. 1 of which has to be in translation, a collection of essays, or nonfiction. But I loved reflecting on all that I read each month, so now at the crossroads of not acknowledging that what I’m reading is in fact not reality and wanting to read mindfully, here are all the books I read in January but for you to figure out à la a crossword puzzle I made with an accompanying quote from each novel.

ACROSS

4. Italo Calvino’s self-aware, allegorical novel on what it means to be a reader, what we expect from a novel, and the struggles of writing. Negative temperatures and an impending snowstorm of the decade made this one an obvious choice.

   “I’m producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who knows may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place, you encounter always the same density of material to be told.”

5. Five young sisters in an undeterminable time period—perhaps the 19^th century—living a ways from town center with their blind grandfather on his farm are made out to be the catalyst for everything bad that drought-rodden summer. (A relief from two very very very long books about boys written by boys.) I was riveted by this tale by Xenobe Purvis, so peculiar, some sort of modern folk story from which we, the readers, are meant to gleam a lesson: Is it better to be a free dog or a girl subjected to her society? Starting with the deaths of animals and then the ever-disappearing river, Pete, the river ferryist, insecure in his own masculinity, finds himself starting a rumor that the sisters, all of them with their dark hair and pale blue eyes, are turning into dogs and ravaging the town. Of course, the rumor is quick to spread and be believed, doubted only by the town’s bar owner, a woman named Temperance, who warns Pete not to continue on with this silly, and dangerous, belief. But Pete, feeling powerless and quickly losing his income from the waning river, needs someone to blame.

   “The air was heavy with heat, The lack that Joseph Mansfield smelled each morning had spread like a desert, swallowing everything around it. Gone was the scent of his beloved roses, the sweet honeysuckle and dew. Instead, he found only earth and withered grasses. He found basins of parched puddles. He found cherries rotted to the stone. A shroud of dust seemed to have settled on the garden. The moisture was robbed from his very mouth, his voice reduced to a croak.

DOWN

1. A portrait of three generations of a Jewish family in today’s Poland struggling against the past and their love for one another. Written by Mikołaj Grynberg. Read in a single sitting in the morning, I wasn’t ever really sure of who was narrating. Every now and then I did but I wasn’t even sure if as a reader I needed to. If that was intentional on the part of the author. Either way, reading in a manner of a constant state of muddled understanding is what I needed and I didn’t linger on the sentiments and scenes of post-war generational trauma, grief, or loss. It felt too heavy to pause on so I continued reading without reflecting. The below quote I felt.

   “No major event had occurred, but a door had cracked open whose existence he hadn’t realized before, and as he peered through the narrow gap, he was suddenly changed.”

2. A famed writer reflects on his first love after seeing a young man who bears a similar resemblance. Written by Philippe Besson and translated by Molly Ringwald. What’s more agonizing? To withhold or to withhold? Our protagonist keeps his love inside because he knows his lover won’t accept it, while the lover keeps his love in because he hasn’t learnt to accept it. Himself. Once I was walking in the West Village years and ago, turned around and a flash of curly cardinal red caught my attention, realizing it was Molly Ringwald I was looking at. I hadn’t seen her since I’d watched Sixteen Candles probably around my own sixteenth birthday, yet still I recognized her. So, when G mentioned she translated a book she bought while at Albertine’s, I was fascinated. Several years have passed since I saw Ringwald and over a year has passed since G read this one. The language is rudimentary. The emotional force is deeply weighted. The imagery, delicate and intimate. Close to the truth. Not hidden behind metaphors or elusive words. Just a description. I liked that it wasn’t a copy of my book. G’s, actually. She dog ears her pages on the bottom and the top. Even the very last one. Knowing she had stopped, taken the time to fold down the corner, made me slow down and try to pick out the sentiment or line that spoke most to her. She loves enumeration. So do I.

   “I slip down the straps of his tank top. It seems to me that there is no other gesture more sensual, more stirring.”

3. A coming-of-age novel by Adam Ross about a child-actor in 1980s New York City. It’s obvious Ross is exploring a young child’s attempt to understand his own feelings, at the same time he’s pushed to be an adult and an actor, confusing his own sense of self. Griffin Hurt considers himself to be the person he plays in front of a camera, and that character, he slips on in his interactions with other adults and children. After reading Flesh by David Szelay, it was hard not to compare these two coming of age stories about young men. Both boys are subjected to abusive adults who take advantage of them, and the two stories depart as Flesh follows its protagonist well into the middle years of life while Playworld remains in its protagonist’s childhood. It’s obvious Ross is exploring a young child’s attempt to understand his own feelings, at the same time he’s pushed to be an adult and an actor, confusing his own sense of self. He considers himself to be the person he plays in front of a camera, and that character, he slips on in his interactions with other adults and children. And yet, this feeling of character affects both Griffin’s father and brother, as he observes.

   “What i did want, what I desperately needed, was her audience. Hers was a great comfort I could find nowhere else, but securing it required I take on a specific role: one of a young man who seemed outwardly confident but was inwardly unsure, a watchful boy so lacking in adult guidance he’d been forced, in nearly all manners, to improvise. Every time I saw her that year, I did the very thing required of me whenever I stepped in front of the camera: I played myself.”

some happy moments but keep scrolling for the key (and hints)…

THE KEY

HOW MANY DID YOU GET RIGHT?

without looking them up…

BEST READ OF JANUARY?

mine was the hounding

GO-TO SERIES AS A CHILD?

i loved Mary Downing Hahn and the Geronimo Stilton series

WHAT DOES READING MEAN TO YOU?

so much…

ANY READING GOALS FOR 2026?

4 books a month, 1 of which has to be in translation, a collection of essays, or nonfiction

Leave a comment

(If there had been a dog, these two harm-minded persons in the waiting room would have been pulling it apart just like the Lintons. I wasn’t surprised that this scene hadn’t made it into the movie. It’s much too bodily gruesome.)

Ever since I heard there’d be a new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and by Emerald Fennell nonetheless, I sought to re-read the novel that I’d read once upon a time as a 13-year-old. But I found myself hesitant as a reader who rarely re-reads (though I’ll forever boast about the minimum 3 full re-reads I did of Middlemarch) and whose copy was at the bottom of a book bin somewhere. But then… I saw that and were co-hosting a reading event at P&T Knitwear. The event? Three hours of dedicated time to reading. I signed up immediately.

The day of the event came along, so out into the cold, one of the most frigid of the season, and into the bookstore I went, plopping myself down on a rusted orange cushion on the auditorium-esque steps with a newly purchased copy and eagerly venturing back into the world that had amazed me once before, so young, with its depictions of obsession, cruelty, lonesomeness, sublimity, and unfettered love. I had scheduled a date later that night so this happening was offering me something interesting to talk about.

Not a page in and I was utterly confused. Who was this I? Well, I’d forgotten that the novel is told through the perspective of Lockwood, a tenant at the Grange, who heard the story from Nelly Dean, who is sharing from her memories, to him as he’s in a state of fever. We’re way beyond the beginnings of the story, one in which Mr. Earnshaw brings home Heathcliff, who Catherine names and befriends and betwixts. Perhaps the ill-health of Lockwood is to blame for the confusion of characters or the effect of memories that have happened long ago. Everyone having the same name; last names with first names and first names as last names. Or, as Emerald Fennell divulged, was the brilliance of Emily Brontë, so clever and cunning, even the great and wonderful Virginia Woolf had to create a family tree. Same girl. Though, lucky for me, there was one already in it. So I repeatedly flipped back until I finally had a handle on the who’s who.

As I put my coat back on and my gloves and my ear muffs, having already stayed a full two and a half hours and powered through nearly ten chapters (though they are quite brief), one of the NYT journalists present starting asking me questions. (I also had a bit of a fan-girl moment chatting with who was there to report for ).

She was curious how my reading experience differed from that first time, and I told her I found myself distraught by the sheer volume of loss, of death. I’d glossed over these events when I was younger, too caught up in the fact that I was reading such a famed novel, and of course the love between Heathcliff and Catherine. Now reading it, I found tears welling up, threatening to roll over and onto the page. Loss is central to the novel. Love, too, in its own moorish ways. But mostly through the absence of it’s recipient.

Like most, Book I is what I remember when I recollect my thoughts, all Catherine and Heathcliff and Heathcliff and Catherine, but in Book II, the very last pages, are some of my favorite. If you’re reading this, and you’ve read this far, I’m going to presume you’ve either read the book or will never read the book and since Emerald Fennell’s adaptation deals strictly with Book I, MAJOR SPOILER… Heathcliff dies. But his death is so beguiling to me. It’s never quite clear, so individual interpretation is the plot’s lifeline, so for me, his long disappearances, though with mention he is on the moors, is where my imagination fills in. In my head, Heathcliff is out on the moors with Catherine, stirring up trouble and reliving the days where everything once seemed possible to the both of them. He asked her to haunt him, so there she is haunting him, not so differently than she did when she was next to him, all flesh and dress and words.

In the prelude to my edition of the book, there is a passage that highlights the many deaths Emily herself had to experience, ultimately impacting the book’s trajectory. That’s the power of great literature, right? To have the same forceful effect. To love and to lose is not new but always novel. It belongs to no time.

A N Y W A Y S

Luck struck. Or, in other words, I actually read the newsletter the NYPL sent me one night not too many days after the read-in announcing an in-person Q&A with Emerald Fennell, director of the latest and greatest Wuthering Heights starring none other than Aussie baddies: Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi; along with an advanced screening of the film hosted by Warner Bros. (If anyone knows Jacob, you can let them know I’m a tallish brunette and will happily go on a date with him. I also read.)

On the phone with my mom, I told her I had to go and reserved myself a seat at each.

I knew going into the movie that it was Fennell’s interpretation of the book. Now, that could mean a lot of things. Seeing the movie, I was blown away by her vision of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Blown away by the wind, just as much of a character. Blown away by the costumes and score. Like Jacob, I thought Margot was absolutely devastating in her wedding gown, crossing the moors.

During the Q&A at the library, I found myself immediately obsessed with Emerald. She has some sort of oral fixation, sucking on her lip, and then flirting with us, the audience, as she shared her experience reading the novel, first as a 14-year-old, “a quite troubling, destabilizing experience,” as part of her school curriculum, then later in her twenties, her thirties. She said in order to start approaching this colossal novel, such a rich piece of English literature’s history and a meaningful story to so many, she, having not read it in several months, wrote down everything she remembered about it. And that’s where the adaptation began. Fennell worked with costume designer Jacqueline Durran and production designer Suzie Davies to bring her vision to life.

After seeing it, I came home and my roommates asked me how it was. It only happened to be that I was making cookies at that time and I said this was the movie. The batter was sticky and wet and smacky and kneading hands and eggs. They were baffled, but I told them I could say no more.

From that day onward, a young teenager, an avid reader, when I picked up Wuthering Heights, I grasped on to the phenomenon more insistent than love, I suppose, that Emily Brontë presented to me through Catherine and Heathcliff: that our soulmates are our reason for being. And Emerald Fennell captured this in her film, I think, in a different capacity than I have imagined for myself, but powerful anyways. The scene that’s stuck to the wall inside my mind the most is when Catherine grasps on to her chest while speaking to Nelly and declares, “in whichever place the soul lives – in my soul, and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong.” It’s the climax in some ways. The point of no return. Listening ears and misunderstanding catalysts for misery and wrong paths taken. But that’s Wuthering Heights. Cruelty and violence and obsession and a lifetime of haunting. And yet, it’s delightful and a dream. Much like ’s accompanying album.

I find I do (something) more purposefully once I’ve written it out or down, so I’m using this series as a space to talk about my reading habits, cataloging what I’ve read and what it meant, month after month, while challenging myself to read outside the genres and the topics I generally reach for.

There were a few months amidst my move that escaped me and got swept up in a quarterly moment but otherwise each month gave me the time to reflect to pause. It made reaching my goal of reading at least 4 books a month much more doable because I was holding myself accountable for also writing about at least 4 books a month.

So, in December I did just that…

All in all, I read 4ish total. I rented 2 books from the library, and 2 books are mine.

Flat Earth by Jade Levy

Girlhood. It’s the subject of much examination. One which I’m often drawn towards in a narrative, but unlike my own friendships, thankfully, these stories focus on two women who pit themselves against one another and call them their best friend. I know this is not unique to fiction. I’ve seen it play out in my own life, as an observer of the people around me. A desire for this person in their life to experience spoilage of sorts. I question how you can call that friendship yet isn’t it friendship that allows someone to know one another’s most intimate desires and insecurities in away that can be weaponized against them?

I’ll summarize the blurb because it puts it as straightforward as it can be:

“Avery is a grad student in New York working on a collection of cultural reports and flailing financially and emotionally. She dates older men for money and […] her best friend Frances, an effortlessly chic emerging filmmaker from a wealthy Southern family, drops out of school, gets married, and somehow still manages to finish her first feature documentary.”

The novel prefaces with a seemingly dystopian world in which supply chains—specially Adderall—are broken so the all the girl’s in the class break down, too. It took me a second to readjust my reality and realize it wasn’t dystopian but rather a reflection of exactly this day and age: “Right-wing nutrition fads fall into fashion that year: an uptick in bovine meat, pasteurized dairy seed-oil skepticism, vaccine hesitancy. hem lengths are going down again.”

Situated in the actual plot, Avery is accompanying Frances on her travels across “postindustrial towns ravaged by QAnon and synthetic opioids and dead factories,” neither writing nor supporting nor serving any real purpose other than perhaps being a comfortable sight for Frances, though this is all of Avery’s own doing. It quickly becomes obvious how lost Avery is, especially when pit against Frances’ own surety.

Interludes which I assume are meant to be Avery’s “collection of cultural reports,” reflecting on cockroaches, climate disasters, women’s bodies, the American economy, young men, sperm count, literacy, objects, air quality, information, patriarchy, and so on, are inserted every other chapter or so. In between, is the plot. Avery is quite hilarious. Dry though. She seemed to be experiencing life with a level of passivity that eclipsed itself when it meant another person was involved and so she had to express herself in order to fulfill the reality she thought that that other person might expect. Exhibit A:

“Once, he spanked me so lightly that it didn’t even make a sound. As a courtesy, I cried out as if I were in pain.”

Which all seems rooted in how she sees her mother’s bodily relationship to her, starting from the moment she became pregnant. Avery is untouched by her intimate relationships with others, distanced from what is happening right in front of her.

“My intimate encounters continued to feel more like collisions than relationships, transactions that occurred as inevitabilities, like being asked to pay for a train ticket.”

She seems to be seeking some truth in these encounters and winding up with nothing, left to seek out what she wants for herself away from the shadows her mother has cast on her and the subsequent shadows she has cast upon herself in her relationships with friends and men.

On Freedom, Art Song, by Maggie Nelson

Read partly because of a conversation happening at work, partly because Nelson’s work inspires me, especially after listening to her speak about her newer novels, and writing in general. A dense piece of literature, rich with personal reflections and literary criticisms, I read just the first of this four part autotheoretical narrative: Art Song. I’m not sure why it received this title. It wasn’t about music but it could be that it leans into the purpose of a song which is to be sung out loud, to be head. So this collection of words that muses on art—what it means, what it does for us, what it does for its engagers—is meant to be heard (or read) by an audience. (Me and you.)

Keeping in mind the book is focused on freedom, Nelson grounds her argument in art and subsequently care. As an art history student forever ago, I learnt a lot about how to approach others’ art, particularly world revered pieces. Thankfully, I was taught to both understand and critique from a neutral and personal standpoint. I could learn about what was happening in a painting and understand its brilliance when looking at it in person. At the same time, I could dislike it. I could feel nothing. Often, I found myself surprised at what moved me.

During a week-long class trip to Venice, I was knock-kneed in the first room of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco where Tintoretto had accomplished more than 60 paintings.

“But there’s a difference between going to art with the hope that it will reify a belief or value we already hold, and feeling angry or punitive when it doesn’t, and going to art to see what it’s doing, what’s going on, treating it as a place to get “the real and irregular news of how others around [us] think and feel,” as Eileen Myles once put it.”

On the flip side, the one where I am the creator, or the creator of something, Nelson points out that art can serve as “a place for people to act out what they want and think about stuff they want to be thinking about […] a place to engage in open-ended experiments with extremity, wildness, satire, defiance, taboo, beauty, and absurdity, to make space for anarchic gestures and urges.” I don’t purposefully create as much as I’d like. At the same time, I create in more ways than I give myself credit for. Experimenting with baking and cooking (in such a way I truly don’t know what the outcome will be…hopefully tasty). Writing here and elsewhere. There’s something that happens during the creation—the intuition for just the right amount of vanilla or words that just work together—that provide a relief at whatever is unconsciously happening inside our minds or bodies.

Nelson muses much on the role of art as a site of aliveness. Art “can be a sign that we are, or once were, alive” as much as art can “make life feel more worth living.” Not to be contained within those two options because “art can, after all, be many things at the same time.” Right now, as often when times are hard, writing and reading offer me relief. Giving words to thoughts I have on daily and the harder parts of life. Entering into the world of another to escape my own. The point is to see what creating and encountering creations can do for you. Sometimes we know the feeling and so we create in search of that. Sometimes we know the feeling we want to feel and so we engage in search of that.

“if we already knew what the point or effect of a piece of art was going to be before we made or experienced it […] why would we bother with the slow work of looking, making, reading, or thinking?”

A few weeks ago, a friend invited me to an event at an art gallery. I thought the most I’d get out of it was time with her and some grapes, cheese, and crackers but I found myself unable to contain the joy at the curation of art. My jaw actually dropped, and stayed there. Somehow I wound up speaking with the gallery owner, unbeknownst to me, who asked what I thought. I couldn’t help but blabber on about how each of the works are so distinct from the other. That unlike a proper museum space, I can take in each work individually from the other because they aren’t organized by time period or country or art. The only room that was particular was in the lower gallery, full of pieces by a young artist Konrad Żukowski, the smell of paint filling the room, considering he had only finished quite a few of these mere hours prior.

And not to skip it: care. Whether in art or in life, care, and compassion, both require

“…it’s always vulnerable making to render public what we’ve worked so hard on […] it’s in this sense that I tend to think of all art—even offensive or nasty art—as related to care…”

“I remain devoted to radical compassion, and not the kind that waits for a call. Figuring out what such compassion looks like in practice […] is the unceasing, rigorous work of a lifetime. It isn’t something one always gets right.”

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett

Loved it so much wrote a whole post on it…

Similarly to Pond (the only other CLB book I’ve had the pleasure of reading), the novella is mostly plotless, with a young woman musing on life while living in a shed(?), contemplating the afterlife of her relationship with Xavier, the man with whom she was once quite intimate with, who she returns to again and again, and he who returns to her again and again, until they don’t, or they do. Whether she loves him or not, I do not know. But what I do know: she is impacted by him. By their intimacy. Devoted to him. In her thoughts.

Flesh by David Szalay

You don't know what to do when something like that happens
The shock is so great
He just sits on a chair
He ends up sitting there all night

At first, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this read. The plot contained one tragedy after another, which was shocking and off-putting and a characteristic that I noticed isn’t in the contemporary literature I read too often (perhaps on purpose sometimes), and I realized it was written to explore the human condition of this moment in time. A bildungsroman following István, from his youth to adulthood, from his birthplace in Hungary to time in London and back to Hungary once again, a character that is actively and passively involved in a tragedy in his teens, finds himself moving through life with a passivity that I found irritating. (Until I realized what Szalay was doing. Purposefully irritating me. Or not necessarily irritation the feeling he was eliciting but something to make the reader pause and feel something other than hopefulness or joy.) The further I read on, the more hope I had for goodness, which never really came into fruition.

And you?

• What did you read in December? Do you have any reading resolutions for 2026?

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What’s on deck for January?

• Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor

• The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

• Playworld by Adam Ross

Catch up!