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June report
Still reading!
I won’t bore you with complaining about how there aren’t many new books that appeal to me lately or how I can’t seem to find even one book from any time period to get excited about.
This month, whenever I was looking for and couldn’t find something to read (browsing online or IRL at bookstores), I did something else rather than settle for a book I only kind of wanted to read. Something else included: walking (and being alone with my own thoughts, a deranged experiment I’m doing), swimming, organizing closets/shelves/drawers, making elaborate salads and sandwiches, and, of course, seeing Art.
What I read in June:
Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (2022)1—It—I—hm. To begin, this is not a book I’d choose on my own, only because this is not the kind of genre that I prefer to read. What genre is that? I’m not sure. It’s like if a beach read, a rom-com, and historical, historical fantasy, and documentary fiction were tossed together in a bowl with a significant dash of winky, plucky, pop feminism.
If anything, Lessons, which is about a woman scientist who becomes famous for her science-oriented, woman-empowering daytime cooking show in the 1960s, is itself a strong example of how “good intentions” don’t necessarily lead to “good” outcomes. The outcomes here being a surface-level analysis of gender + power relations, filled with aggressively confident anachronisms2 and abuses of language.
I had the misfortune of finishing this book before Roe v. Wade was overturned and of not writing this book report entry until after that SCOTUS decision. Before my right to bodily autonomy was taken away, I was inclined to be more generous toward Garmus’s first novel, thinking of it as fluffy and annoying in many respects but not altogether bad or counterproductive. But now? IDK! It’s not fun to read shallow revisionist history masquerading as an empowering feminist romp! Whoever reviewed it for Publishers Weekly was right.
Lily King, Five Tuesdays in Winter (2021)—A necessary palate cleanser, these short stories by my new favorite author. I simply love the way King writes both on the sentence level and in the structural sense. Every story is a treasure, a revelation. Some are devastating! Some are delightfully happy! Some are kind of weird! I loved this book.
Also—let me strongly recommend taking yourself and a book out to a fancy lunch on a weekday. Not to be too much of a snob/conspiracy theorist, but I feel like it was partly because I was reading a beautiful-looking physical book (instead of, say, a k*ndl*) that my server said, “we have a policy of offering solo diners a complimentary glass of champagne. Would you like one?”
Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao (2022)3—Smart, literary genre fiction, and I am not just saying that because I tend to like speculative/climate novels.4 I liked Vara’s debut because its plot and its critique are strong and balanced, meaning it doesn’t read like the plot is mere structure for the novel’s political analysis and, at the same time, the analysis strengthens the plot.
Set in the near future and flashing back across 100 years, The Immortal King Rao tells the story of a computer programmer’s rise from obscurity (born to coconut farmers in India) to being the architect and CEO of the new global governing order, the Board of Corporations, to his eventual downfall and death. Narrated by King Rao’s daughter (in prison, charged with murdering him), the novel depicts a chillingly plausible future, playing out the capitalist colonialist foundations of modernity to their logical ends, where the East India Company of the seventeenth century is not so much a blueprint for but merely an early iteration of a system that churns through nonrenewable resources and human lives so completely that humanity itself becomes a nonrenewable resource, with only a few generations left before “Hothouse Earth” becomes uninhabitable.
Though the subject matter is heavy, it doesn’t overwhelm the narrative itself—to me this was a compelling novel that thinks through significant questions. If I were teaching English literature, I would 100% assign this book in a class.
What I didn’t finish reading in June:
Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020)—I Libby’d this in anticipation of a short road trip to a car-dependent location, and began listening to it the week before my trip. It’s gotten rave reviews and was a New York Times book of the year in 2020, for good reason!
In the 4 hours I listened to this book,5 I did learn a thing or two, and, once I was listening, I was interested in continuing to listen. But! Clark’s recuperative framework, where she explicitly and frequently emphasizes that Plath’s life was very much not like the two-dimensional narrative that has been often told of her? It was a bit much for me, who left that popular narrative behind a long time ago. I just kind of felt like—who really is out here still believing the cartoonishly reductive “popular” narrative about Plath? Do they exist? Maybe I just saw too much of my own clumsy graduate student attempts to position my “scholarship” as “new” or “different” in Clark’s most insistent claims.
The point is, I would have continued to listen had I been able to renew the book, but I don’t know that I would have finished it, as I am a “slow” audiobook reader and this one is 45 hours long!
What I’m looking forward to reading in July:
Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010)
Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays (1952)
Ling Ma, Bliss Montage (September 2022)
Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs (October 2022)