That thing the press that still writes about books calls Summer Reading is nearly upon us, so I thought I’d take a moment to recap what I’ve read so far this year. I’ve grouped books not in chronological order but by how I see them in relation to each other—reading, as usual, proved to be about the conversation between books as much as the books themselves. Reviewing the list, I had a near-even mix of old-favorite and new-to-me authors, as well as formats (audio 🎧 and print 📖).
Epistolary Novels
📖 Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff (first time reading Gridneff, have read DeWitt before) and 🎧 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (first time reading this writer) are technically both epistolary novels, but they couldn’t be more different. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, “DeWitt and Gridneff’s book is difficult because it is long (600 pages) and complicated and has little interest in making it easy for the reader to follow. It is, among other things, a book about how characters that are a lot like DeWitt and Gridneff (including having the same names at some but not all points) met in a bar and decided to write something together. Much of this occurs in an epistolary format via emails complete with footers from hosting companies of yore. These exchanges are not charming in the manner of epistolary novels like current bestseller The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (which I also recently enjoyed) or Helene Hanff’s beloved 84, Charing Cross Road. Imagine something more akin to what emails between Hunter S. Thompson and Sylvia Plath might have been.”
P.S. I loved Your Name Here, despite its difficulty. At a certain point I just let it wash over me like poetry, and that worked.
Lit Fiction Ladies
📖 Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett, 📖 The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley, and 📖 & 🎧 Will There Every Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood
I’ll read pretty much anything by these three writers, and none of these books changed that. Of Bennett’s I previously wrote: “I loved this book for the intimacy and smallness of its concerns — not small as in inconsequential, but in the tight radius of its world: a few places, friends, and lovers, each treated with deep care and attention. It’s a sort of antidote for those of us whose jobs dictate a preoccupation with AI and its head-spinning implications, which feels like the opposite of this deeply human book.” The same could be said of all three.
Side note: I read a review of The Palm House that alluded to the mediocrity of the lives depicted, and it made me want to commit murder over what I took to be a judgment of humanity for daring to be human.
Someone other than Tech Bros Writing About Tech
🎧 Elaine Castillo’s Moderation is a novel about a Filipina-American woman living in Las Vegas and working in the brutal world of content moderation and, also, a romance novel. Loved it. With this book, the second of hers I’ve read, Castillo has joined my list of writers by whom I’ll read anything.
📖 Jeanette Winterson’s One Aladdin Two Lamps is a book about books, mostly The Thousand and One Nights (AKA Arabian Nights), and how the stories we tell ourselves (and others) matter. Coincidentally, Elaine Castillo’s previous book, How to Read Now, is a great, challenging book about books and reading.
Here Winterson does with The Thousand and One Nights what George Saunders did with Russian short stories in his excellent A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life: uses the original stories as jumping off points for her own sharp reflections on modern life, including tech culture and AI. In a late chapter on the Arabian Nights story “City of Brass” (Night 567), she writes:
Sometimes I amuse myself with a story of my own. All the genies caught in bottles are versions of Tech Bros uploading their consciousness into some grandiose Eternity Server. Then, when the power comes back on, they find they are trapped inside some little guy’s laptop. There’s a file that says DO NOT OPEN and the little guy thinks it’s got hardware programming in it or whatever, and really, it’s Mark Zuckerberg just dying to be set free, shouting I REPENT.
Bardo Bards
Speaking of George Saunders, his latest novel, 📖 Vigil, starts with a bang, a sort of angel literally falling to earth to help shepherd an unrepentant oil baron into the afterlife. It opens gloriously and has beautiful writing, but the ending didn’t quite live up to my expectations.
Just imagine your first novel is about to get published and a George Saunders’ novel on the same subject, the bardo, comes out shortly before. Not sure if that’s extremely unlucky or lucky, but that’s what happened with 🎧 Trip by Amie Barrodale (first time reading this writer). Barrodale’s book is about an entirely different set of concerns, though, those of a mother shepherding a teenage son from the afterlife.
Food, Glorious Food
🎧 The Reservation by Rebecca Kauffman (first time reading this writer) is a day in the life of a restaurant told from the rotating POVs of different staff members. The central drama involves some stolen steaks and a reservation for the author, John Grisham, so not quite as traumatic as The Bear on television, but perhaps because of The Bear, I couldn’t help feeling like I was listening to a treatment for a TV show.
🎧 I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally (first time reading this writer) is the memoir of a storied British restauranteur, famous for NYC institutions like Balthazar, Pastis, and Minetta Tavern. I love a food memoir, but my favorite part of this book was his juicy account of having an affair with another favorite writer of mine Alan Bennett, long before McNally opened his restaurants. Writing that last sentence reminded me that the only time I ever ate at a McNally restaurant was brunch at Pastis in 2003 on the same trip where I had my introduction to Alan Bennett in an off-Broadway production of Talking Heads starring Lynn Redgrave. Good trip!
A Sense of Place
Speaking of New York, a return visit to the city in February after many years away prompted a listen to 🎧 Here is New York by E.B. White. Notably he was eerily prescient about 9/11, writing in 1948:
The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions
Also on the subject of New York, Helene Hanff’s Letter from New York (mentioned above for 84, Charing Cross Road), is worthwhile.
In January, prompted by my first visit to Vietnam, I read 📖 The Quiet American by Graham Greene (first time reading this writer). There is some beautiful writing about war and Americans, but mostly I was utterly annoyed by how Greene writes (or fails to write) the main female character, Phuong. Someone please do that thing where you retell the book from a sidelined character’s perspective. P.S., while you’re at it, I also require the same treatment for Daphne Du Maurier’s, My Cousin Rachel.
Miscellany
📖 Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (first time reading this writer) was great, a sort of Nazi-tinged version of Patrick DeWitt’s French Exit that’s sadly relevant to what’s happening in America today, namely the grift off war and suffering. I’d love to see the play adaptation starring Ben Whishaw at the Young Vic in London later this year.
🎧 The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (first time reading this writer) is about an English village that becomes convinced five sisters are turning into dogs at night and wreaking havoc. A classic othering story, in this case making a point about girls and women, but I read it during the height of the ICE raids in America, so was thinking about immigration. These lines stayed with me:
Wherever we go, however we behave, there’ll always be something to drive us inside. That’s where people want us to be.”
Pairs well with Pew by Catherine Lacey, another short novel about othering. Also has a bit of the gothic animal/human transfiguration territory of Mona Awad’s Bunny books, the second of which, We Love You, Bunny, I’m currently reading.
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