June report

How can a month so nasty, brutish, and short also feel so long? Am I in a mood because of the heat wave? Because it’s not so much a heat wave as it is the coolest summer I’ll have for the rest of my life? Because another year has gone by and I somehow find myself not living in a house with a pool?

At least the books I read all the way through this month were really good!

What I read in June:

Diane Cook, Man v. Nature (2014)—Wow I love Diane Cook’s mind. I picked up her debut book partly because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the novel she published last year, The New Wilderness,1 and partly because I’m deep in a climate fiction mood!! Though I admit I was pleased to find that Cook’s short story collection has more than just various possible climate-ravaged futures, and indeed has a bunch of weird, dark, funny stories that are at once wholly unique and also very much for people who love short stories by George Saunders and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. She even has some stories where, when I finished them, I thought, “I really wish I could have read this with other people, so they could tell me what they think it means, because I am not sure that I know what it means but I know it means something.”

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (2021)2—I am not much one for memoirs, unless they are really good, and Zauner’s is really good. It’s sad, of course (it’s a dead mom story!!), but it’s also a sincerely beautiful meditation on family, culture, race, and gender. Zauner is a remarkable writer and she clearly conveys how so much of who she is is because of who her mother was. As the title hints at, this is also a book about food! The way Zauner writes about food is revelatory, so compelling that I was inspired to buy a cookbook by the woman whose videos helped Zauner process her grief through recreating dishes from her childhood.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (2020)—Despite it being thoroughly hyped when it was published last September by exactly the kinds of people whose recommendations I like, I did not scramble to read Nezhukumatathil’s memoir/nature writing/essay collection. IDK why!! Thankfully, my friend Dee’s enthusiasm for this book + my ongoing climate kick finally got to me, because this is one of my favorite books I’ve read all year. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I love when poets write prose. Nezhukumatathil’s short essays that teach about nature while narrating aspects of her life story are simply revelatory!! I really can’t remember the last time since childhood that something could inspire such a sustained sense of wonder in me. She is a wizard.

What I didn’t finish reading in June :(

Kikuko Tsumura, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job (2020/2021)—Described as a twenty-first century Bartleby, Tsumura’s novel of a woman searching for what I would describe as a job where she could retain as much autonomy and sense of self as could ever be possible under capitalism, should have been right up my alley!! And maybe it will be one day! But for now, the first-person narration felt too claustrophobic and the subject matter too real for me to be able to use the novel like I use most fiction, as a means of escape!

Natsuko Imamura, The Woman in the Purple Skirt (2021)—The blurbs for this psychological thriller got me! I thought a thriller would do the trick of holding my attention—the heat absolutely has something to do with my aversion to reading this month—but it was not. I get the sense this is a bit of a Japanese Single White Female (1992), told from the perspective of the stalker, and it also was claustrophobic, not an enjoyable mind to dwell in intentionally at this moment in my life. There’s also an element of the narrator reminding me of someone I know enough that I couldn’t stop thinking of the narrator as that person, so don’t let this book report paragraph on a book I didn’t finish steer you away from what I am sure is a delightful, weird story about a strange person!!

What I’m looking forward to reading in July:

Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Mona at Sea (2021)

Katie Kitamura, Intimacies (2021)

Monica West, Revival Season (2021)3

Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl (2021)