March report

What a month! My first real test in not reading a lot of books and trying not to feel bad about it. Well, I didn’t read a lot books1 but I do feel bad about it. Mostly because what is there to write about in a book report if I don’t read books?

The good news is that I simply miss reading being a more prominent part of my day-to-day, so I will have much more to report on in April than I do this month!

What I read in March:

Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow (2022)—A lovely, meditative, elegiac novella in which a woman and her mother take a trip to Japan and the daughter reflects on memories of moments, people, and events that shaped her and shaped the people she knows and loves. Beyond “the travelers arrive in Tokyo, travel across the country, and conclude their trip in Kyoto,” there is zero plot, only vibes. And it works!

Deeply metamodernist, Cold Enough for Snow—which I read over the course of several weeks, weirdly, because it’s only 95 pages—had me consciously thinking about my own everyday moments on a granular level and wanting to go on the kind of trip these women take, characterized by museums, restaurants, walking, and (let’s be real!!) shopping.

I think if one weren’t in the right mood for this book, they might find it incredibly boring! Then again, maybe the way Au’s sentences and images are so clear, and the way she builds meaning and momentum in the narrative built out of quiet reflections, maybe that would be riveting enough!

P.S. Speaking of vibes, please see how my new curtains accidentally turned my living room into a direct lift of the cover art?

Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution (2022)2—For fans of the genre, the genre being literary crime (???), Kukafka’s second novel will not disappoint! Not so much a whodunit as a howdedodat, Notes counts down the final day in the life of a serial killer, Ansel, reflecting on his life and planning an escape from death row. Chapters alternate between Ansel’s second-person narration3 and third-person narratives of the women who were central in Ansel’s life, whether by virtue of their absence (his mother, later his ex-wife) or by their ongoing presence (the detective who solves the case).

Hailed as a novel that “examines a culture that romanticizes men who kill while also exploring the lives of the overlooked women altered by this violence,” Notes focused a little more on the man and a little less on the women than I liked, as my overall takeaway was that he was still the focus, as in much of the true crime industrial complex’s outputs, to the extent that I really got the vibe that this novel was asking its reader first and foremost to think about how we might empathize with sociopaths.But I don’t think that’s on Kukafka. I think it’s on the genre itself. There’s a clear attempt to subvert generic conventions, but the genre itself is too embedded, too fundamentally dependent on the psychology of the killer for its core animating drama. As I essentially replicate that same dynamic in this Report, I see how difficult it is to disrupt that strong impulse to focus the narrative emphasis on the murderer even as one might think they are doing the exact opposite!

And yet! I read it all, of course.

What I’m looking forward to reading in April:

Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (2022)

Lily King, Writers and Lovers (2020)4

Elaine Shieh Chou, Disorientation (2022)

Whatever we pick for Book Club