August report

Not much to report beyond the books reported on below. I read a lot this month!

What I read in August:

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello (2021)—Sometimes a book sounds so interesting that I must use my influencer powers1 to read it ahead of publication date. I am so thankful that Henry Holt granted my request to read Johnson’s debut short stories + novella this month, because My Monticello is nothing short of amazing. I know I say this about all the short story collections I read and love, but these stories have everything that makes a story perfect, in terms of form and style. If you, like me, loved Danielle Evans’s Office of Historical Corrections (2020),2 then you will, like me, also love My Monticello, which is profound, heartbreaking, moving, revelatory, and riveting! You should pre-order it! I did!

Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun (2021)—A strange and wonderful novel by an author I’ve never read before! A blend of climate fiction, horror, thriller, mystery, and satire, with an ending that feels both satisfying and unsatisfying, this book is, to me, unlike any other. I . . . did? Love it? I did. I loved it. It was riveting. It made me uncomfortable! It made me think! This is definitely a novel about the world ending!3 (Please consider that a content warning). But it also has a good, surreal but followable plot:

Patrick Hamlin, an east coast writer, moves to California, where water has become scarce and the state has privatized delivery of a synthetic substitute called WAT-R, to work on the production of a film adaptation of his novel. Things are immediately weird in a way that at first is indistinguishable from normal California weird (heat-baked conversations about “toxins” and the healing powers of crystals, etc), and they get weirder, as Hamlin and the film’s star—a disgraced former child actor—embark on unraveling a mystery of Chinatown-esque proportions (purely in terms of infrastructural villainy), all while Hamlin seeks to stay in touch with his wife and daughter, who have themselves moved to a commune in upstate New York to “mourn” the environment.

It was kind of hard for me to get into, due to the pitch-perfect representation of bloated conversations between Hamlin’s fellow production assistants in the opening pages, but after that? I read through the book in a single Saturday. I don’t want to “give away” the ending of the novel here, so if you end up reading this book, please let me know so we can discuss!!

Imbolo Mbue, How Beautiful We Were (2021)—With some time to fill before book club and still not in the mood for a novel of millennial malaise4 I went off-roading with Mbue’s second novel, based on the strong recommendation of my friend Katrina. This is a hard (because sad!) but compelling narrative about 40 years of life in an African village whose water and land have been continually polluted by the oil drilling across the river. I think what I loved most about it is that it doesn’t have a happy or sad ending, just a realistic one. And after running through all the possible ways of fighting back against an oil company, it really made me think! Think about what can we do. Idk but I do like the way this novel pushed me to think about things in ways I haven’t before or for a long time.

Peter Heller, The Guide (2021)—Mbue’s novel left me a little bit reeling, like: where do I go from here? In terms of what to read next. And I still wasn’t ready for book club book. And I hit that point of the year where I kind of just wanted to have fun?? And not think too much? That’s where this thriller/mystery by Heller comes in. I read it in a single sitting! I am not sure how I feel about it, what it’s really saying about the billionaire class AND about the way we pandemic,5 but I did find it riveting and I enjoyed the descriptions of nature/the west and other things totally alien to me (ie, fishing), as they made me want to go to Colorado and see some mountains/streams/forests for myself.

The publisher’s description of this novel as “a heart-racing thriller about a young man who is hired by an elite fishing lodge . . . where he uncovers a plot of shocking menace amid the natural beauty of sun-drenched streams and forests” is pretty apt! A very good late-summer read, in my opinion!

Claire McNear, Answers in the Form of Questions: A Definitive History and Insider’s Guide to Jeopardy! (2020)—I guess this was a long month given how much I was able to go off-roading with my reading. For personal reasons,6 it became time for me to read McNear’s thorough history of my favorite tv show. And what a time to be reading it, huh? With all that drama! [3 days after I wrote this current paragraph: DRAMA!] McNear’s book is a flawless, breezy read, containing so many things I didn’t know I wanted to know until I read it. It is a perfect book for anyone who loves the show and a useful starting place for anyone who thinks: now is the time for me to finally get serious about trying to be on Jeopardy! Which, perhaps many of us are now thinking that (again?), thanks to McNear’s intrepid reporting.

Rita Dove, Playlist for the Apocalypse: Poems (2021)—Rita Dove is simply the best! Readers of the report may note that this is the first book of poetry I’ve read since before starting this newsletter, and while that makes me feel some shame, I also acknowledge that reading a poem, let alone many poems that would necessitate a whole book, is a different mode of reading and it’s OK that it’s not a dominant mode of reading for me!

That being said, maybe it’s easy to read Dove’s poems because they are perfect. Her range! To call it extensive would be an understatement. What a joy and a wonder to read this book!!

What I didn’t finish reading in August:

Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch (2021)7—As with another novel about a privileged white woman unhappy with her life decisions, the “self-awareness” of the protagonist is the shallow, performative kind, so aggressively like the things the protagonist claims to hate—smug, empty, banal—that one might be tempted to think the author was working some irony into her novel. And yet! I didn’t get that vibe.

Instead, as I read the story of a woman who, like the author, has 2 MFAs and one child, I found details too specific to have been imagined by author. Where was my empathy for this character, married but functionally a single parent due to her husband traveling for work 44 out of 46 work weeks per year, lonely, depressed, feeling like a failure for trading her career for child care, and also disdainful of the dumb “Book Mommies” who “talk about leggings and essential oils”? Well, in the 153 of 238 pages that I read, the character talks a lot about “being tricked” into marriage, a child, and being a stay-at-home parent, vaguely references undeniable “biological impulses,” and spends the majority of the time yelling at her child or thinking about how much she hates her child!

I felt a lot of empathy for Yoder’s child.

Anyway, I stopped reading when the protagonist got a knife and stabbed her cat to death. Fool me once with “edgy” debut novels about white women on the margins of the art world/academy having complicated feelings about biological reproduction. Those who can, do it without substituting self-perceived edginess for actually thoughtful and interesting writing.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

What I’m looking forward to reading in September:

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021)

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021)

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) 

Doree Shafrir, Thanks For Waiting: A Memoir (2021)8