June report

You wouldn’t know it from reading this month’s Report, but I was in my Walter Benjamin era in June, in a real “Unpacking My Library” kind of way.1 After two years of stacking books on the floor against the walls while perfecting my vision for shelving, it was time to make the dream a reality.2 Once the shelves were professionally installed, I immersed myself in the project of cleaning and cataloging my collection before I could give it over to “the mild boredom of order” in its new home off the floor. I often joke that my many books are my “empire of dirt,” a shorthand for the years I spent accumulating compounding debt rather than savings in grad school, but this process of re-encountering these material objects I began acquiring and continued to acquire long before and after grad school was a welcome corrective to my sardonic “joke.” In other words, I thoroughly enjoyed not just remembering what books I actually own (lmao), but also remembering who and where I was when I first read those books. Don’t be surprised if July is a reread fest—I found some good stuff in the stacks 😎

What I read in June:

Jenny Jackson, Pineapple Street (2023)—Sometimes you don’t want to think too hard! Sometimes you just want to get lost in a plausible world drawn by an author with a strong enough sense of humor and self awareness. I worried, given the enthusiasm for Jackson’s debut novel and its subject matter—the ultra rich in Brooklyn Heights—that Pineapple Street would rile me up. I couldn’t bear to pay for a book that might do that to me, not in this economy. Shout out to Friend of the Report, Sarah, for lending me her copy :) because the line for it at the library is >1,200.

I was in a bit of a slump before picking up Pineapple Street. So what a joy it was to read a book that made me stay up late because I was just too engrossed! It’s a perfect any kind of read for summer—beach, rainy day, commute, a hammock.3 Over the course of three days, I read it on the train in the afternoon, in the morning before work, and at night after the NBA Finals. It’s all plot, baby, but so skillfully done. I really liked this book! The hype is real! It really is a “smart, escapist novel”!

(An attempt to break up the wall of text. I WILL be editing this later on desktop to format it properly as a caption. Anyway, this is the exterior of the Noguchi museum, which I visited for the first time ever this month. Easily a Top 5 NY museum for me.)

Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme, My Life in France (2006)4—There’s nothing like listening to a very good memoir of a very special person, especially one you didn’t know much about because you decided a long time ago for no real reason that you didn’t need to read or watch the adaptation of Julie & Julia (2005/2009).

Learning about Julia Child was a delightful revelation. Like, yes, I knew she was charming and knowledgeable, but I didn’t really know how special she was. How curious, brave, ambitious, loving, and adventurous she was. What a lady!

I didn’t know that she didn’t learn to cook until her late 30s!!!!!!

Anyway, what else is there to say except that I enjoyed nearly every minute of My Life in France.5 

Emma Cline, The Guest (2023)—Speaking of summer reads,6 I was in precisely the right mood when browsing at my favorite Cape bookstore to get Cline’s second novel—the first book I’ve ever read by her. Something was in the air that day and for the rest of the month7 to make me very interested in a novel about a young woman, Alex, “moving from one place to the next” in the Hamptons the week before Labor Day, “a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.”

The Guest is creepy, atmospheric, moody, and a little bit stressful! Stressful because if you, like me, don’t find the protagonist’s astonishing ability to dissociate a distraction, you read with increasing anxiety as her options for deferring consequences for her actions rapidly diminish. How WILL she get out of the new pickle she created in order to get out of the last pickle?

As Alex slouches around East Hampton, thick descriptions of her encounters with the 1% accumulate into an ambient class critique—nothing too strong to distract from the dominant vibe of dread but also never too subtle for you to forget that all of Alex’s troubles are outcomes of the same system that generated the oasis of wealth that Alex so desperately wants and so obviously will never have permanent access to.

If I were in a comparative frame of mind, I’d say The Guest is more like Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (2020) than Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street, in terms of approach to subject matter. Maybe even something like a distant descendant of The Great Gatsby (1925), where Cline’s Alex is both the outsider-observer Nick Carraway and the self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby; alternately one of the careless people who “smashed up things” and one of the things “smashed up;” for a time, able to “retreat back into . . . money and let other people clean up the mess [she] had made,” then later, the mess itself. Overall, very well done and perhaps my favorite book I read this month!

Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity (2023)—The only thing I like more than a hyperfocused memoir is a memoir that gets at a larger cultural history through reflection on an individual life. Myers’ debut book seamlessly moves between her personal experience to illuminative histories of her family, the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, and the various regions she has called home. By tracing the lives and decisions that ultimately brought her into the world, she connects her story as the “the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe's strict blood quantum laws,” to a long history of attempts at erasure and of resilience in the Native community. Her twenty-first century story underscores the deep connections between historical and present day practices of displacement. What else could so starkly illustrate the shared violence of settler colonialism across the centuries than a white couple buying Myers’s grandparents’ home at auction for $70,000, chopping it up into an airbnb, explicitly marketing its $200/night rooms for the “authentic farmhouse” experience they bring, and then years later selling the house for half a million dollars?

Myers engages with important and difficult questions about identity, venturing into highly sensitive and contested concepts of belonging, and documenting various competing perspectives on these matters in order to give context to her own position.

A little behind-the-scenes note about the Book Report is that I try not to read reviews of a book until after I’ve typed up my Report—a self-imposed test to make sure I’m not always subconsciously plagiarizing other people. I mention this because I’m very curious to read reviews of Myers’ memoir written by Native writers. One thing I really appreciated about Thinning Blood was how Myers’s narrative navigates messy histories. By her own account, her family is a bit controversial within the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe, and she shows (rather than tells!) how the family’s generational reputation is so closely connected to larger issues of class, religion, race, and gender. Because to me she so carefully reveals and unpacks these personal familial stories, I am all the more interested in learning how people closer to her Native community have received the book!

What I’m looking forward to reading in July:

R. F. Kuang, Yellowface (2023)8

????????? I’m going to let my shelves, the library, and used bookstores guide me.