October report

Another month, another report, another photo of art by Maya Lin! What more is there to say besides that I read some books and went to Storm King this month?

I don’t know if it’s the supply chain/the ultimate outcome of the March 2020 lockdown/the end of fiction as I know and love it or some combination of these things, but I am struggling a little bit with identifying enough (“enough”) new books to get excited about. Maybe that’s a sign! Maybe it’s time for me to reflect on what and why I read. In the meantime, if you have any suggestions for books you think I’d like, please let me know in an email or in the comments!

What I read in October:

Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021)1—Like the only other Ozeki novel I’ve read (A Tale for the Time Being [2013]), The Book of Form and Emptiness is unlike any other novel I’ve read! Heavy on buddhism, theory, whimsy, and critiques of capitalism, it’s also (and on its own) an engaging and caring story of a woman and her son trying to figure out their lives in the years after the unexpected death of the woman’s husband/the son’s father. I say caring, for lack of a better word, because this novel is not, for lack of a better term, tragedy porn, even though the protagonists’ lives are pretty difficult. There’s a real sense of care in the way Ozeki approaches all characters in this novel. Idk how to explain it.

Ozeki’s pursuit of the question, “What if a person could hear objects speaking, literally, and not as a metaphor for/depiction of mental illness?” enables her to look at daily life from a perspective that I frankly don’t frequently encounter in twentieth-century fiction.

I didn’t love this book, but I don’t have any bad feelings toward it. It made me laugh! It made me think! It made me wonder if one character was a book-length Žižek joke??

It made me almost want to go reread a Benjamin essay or two. But I’m also not sure I would have finished this novel if I hadn’t been reading it for Book Club.

Natasha Brown, Assembly (2021)—This slim novel—novella? It’s a novella—is more of a prose poem? In the best possible way? It is downright Dallowayesque but also totally its own, beautiful thing. I don’t want to do a disservice by explaining it poorly, so I will just say that I was entranced while reading. And the conclusion—is it what I expected? I don’t know what I expected. If I think about Assembly’s 102 pages as belonging to a novel, then the ending feels abrupt. If I think about them as a poem, then I think I get it? And I love it.

Alison Stine, Trashlands (2021)2—Readers of the Report by now know how much I love reading novels that imagine possible futures.3 Being so familiar with such fiction, I am always pleased to read something that feels genuinely new. Like Stine’s debut novel, Road Out of Winter (2020),4 Trashlands takes place in Appalachia, a setting that in its future form appears a lot like its present-day form in key ways.

In this novel, people are named after things (animals/plants/cities) that have become extinct, Appalachia is practically coastal due to how high the ocean has risen, and plastic (actual plastic, not “plastic” as a euphemism for “credit cards”) has become the national currency. Sounds bleak, I know. But! Life finds a way. As with one of my all-time fave instances of the “genre,” Station Eleven (2014), this novel explores how Art might figure into the climate-ravaged future, positing that the desire to create things for non-functional/practical purposes does in fact have a “practical” end in that it gives purpose to life. Trashlands is also simply a compelling story of a community in a junkyard + strip club at the end of the world!

Kim Bo-Young, I’m Waiting for You: And Other Stories (2021)—As much as I loved On the Origin of Species and Other Stories (2021) when I read it in July, I didn’t run straight to I’m Waiting for You, largely because it seemed like, kind of, love stories? And I wasn’t interested in that. Well, I am still not interested in love stories (ha!), but the 4 short stories in I’m Waiting for You are about more or other things than love, so it was fine.

I really love Kim’s science fiction writing! It is so smart and compelling and entertaining. But to me the most interesting aspect of this collection is the additional contextual writings included at the end. Two of the 4 stories in this book were written for specific people (the titular story for a friend of Kim’s who commissioned the story to use to propose to his girlfriend, and the closing story for the recipient of the first story) and each person contributes an essay about “their” story. All of the stories were translated into English by 2 people, and a collection of their letters to each other, post-translation/pre-publication, initiated in March 2020, is included in the book. Reading about their process and how the early months of the pandemic made them think differently about the stories they translated was as fascinating as the stories themselves.

Ruby Tandoh, Cook As You Are: Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks and Messy Kitchens (2021)—This is a cookbook! But every recipe has a substantial intro, and I read them all, making this the first time I have ever read a cookbook cover to cover. Anyway, Ruby! I love her! I love this book! I love the recipes, the further reading, and her total thoughtfulness for all readers and what they may be bringing to the table, so to speak. I’ve never read anything like this. I simply cannot wait to make the orange, olive oil, and black pepper cake, which she refers to as a “fancy bitch cake.” RUBY!!!!

What I’m looking forward to reading in November:

Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays (2021)

Natashia Deón, The Perishing (2021)

Asali Solomon, The Days of Afrekete (2021)

Meredith Westgate, The Shimmering State (2021)5