July report

>1 picture inside this time

August 01, 2021

In my experience, some years July moves fast, some years it moves slow, and some years it moves at just the right pace. Maybe it’s the objectively perfect weather as I write this on the last day of the month, but this was the first July in a long time that I didn’t feel kinda surly about! It was decent! I felt not only like I had time to read but like I had time to savor my reading, instead of cramming to keep pace with my arbitrary goal. Looking forward to running this mood back in August!!

What I read in July:

Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl (2021)—OK I found the “thriller” (and office novel!) I needed to get me back into a reading groove. Harris’s debut is at once a thorough critique of publishing culture, a deep meditation on the specific challenges that Black women of a certain age, class, and location are forced to navigate under twenty-first century capitalism, a contextualizing history of the challenges faced by Black women of earlier generations, a sci–fi-adjacent thriller, and simply a compelling read. At risk of sounding too much like a Sophie,1 I loved this book! I especially love the meta aspect of it—Harris quit her position of 3 years as an editorial assistant at Knopf Doubleday to write The Other Black Girl—the sort of secondary ending that the book itself represents.

One other thing I love about this novel is how its content is explicitly linked—via the protagonist’s name—to the novels of an early twentieth century writer who also examined the social and workplace experience of Black women of a certain age, class, and location. Harris isn’t “updating” Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) but rather is engaging in dialogue with Nella Larsen and directing readers to see the long history that informs the issues explored in her book.

Bo-young Kim, On the Origin of Species and Other Stories (2021)—Anytime I find myself near the Center for Fiction, one of the most beautiful bookstores in Brooklyn, I bop in for a lap, and almost always leave with a book I hadn’t known about until seeing it on display there. This time, I picked up these science fiction short stories on the strength of the back cover blurb from Bong Joon Ho. IDK what to say about this book except that every single story was riveting, moving, and thought-provoking. Kim zooms in and zooms out and makes you think about what it means to be human and how humans and nonhuman entities are partly defined via their relationships to each other and in the context of time, but not in a way that privileges the human perspective. Her mind!!

Ashley C. Ford, Somebody’s Daughter (2021)—After finishing On the Origin of Species, and lacking anything else like it on my shelves, I pivoted to this much-hyped memoir by a writer/journalist whom I have always admired! First of all, the hype is real. Ford writes with such clarity and warmth and purpose about a life growing up in the midwest that had as many happy times as it had difficult times. This is a really great book and I am so glad that she wrote it and that I read it.

Monica West, Revival Season (2021)2—One thing I love about book club is that we don’t always have the same opinion about things and that even when some of us (me) don’t really like a book, we still have an interesting and rewarding discussion. This book is not bad! I am just so profoundly alienated from organized religion that I found it difficult to stay focused (on this fictional story) because I couldn’t get over the fact that “actual” “faith healing” is a major plot point. That’s on me! Despite my issues I finished the book because it is a well-written and compelling story of a year in the life of a teenage girl who struggles with reconciling her most deeply held beliefs about God, relationships, and the world during a turbulent year in the life of her family.

Nevertheless! This is also a book I wouldn’t have finished had I not been reading it for book club.

Troy McClure flicking his scarf and saying "And that's the end of that chapter"

Katie Kitamura, Intimacies (2021)—There is something downright mesmerizing about the way Kitamura writes. I am simply entranced when I read her fiction! Intimacies . . . I loved it. This is a quiet novel about big concepts, yet it is also a compulsively readable “mystery about human choices” (to quote a blurb on the inside jacket). I don’t know how she does it, but Kitamura writes about complicated, often unpleasant relationships in a way that makes them interesting. In Intimacies, the storyline of an interpreter exploring the moral dimensions of her work at the International Criminal Court yields an additionally compelling element to the narrative. I am not good at talking about books that I really love! This one will be rattling around in my brain for a very long time.

Also, how rare is that that a book cover is as magnificent as the book’s content? I loved this cover even before I realized it is a near match in color to my cat’s personal yoga mat.

A black cat on a hot pink yoga mat hovers over a book with a hot pink cover

What I’m looking forward to reading in August:

Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch (2021)3

Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun (2021)

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello (2021)

Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Mona at Sea (2021)