What a baby rollercoaster of a month in reading for me! I am beginning to think more and more that I’m gearing up to get into an “older book” phase. Like, I definitely want to binge some Natalia Ginzburg now because All Our Yesterdays was so good, but I’m also in need of a rest from hypercontemporary fiction. Excepting Ling Ma (and a few other authors), I am cooling a little bit on reading what writers have to say about our present moment. I’m not ready to unpack why I’m feeling that way, either.1 As you can see at the end of the report, I still plan to read plenty of recently published books, but I’m making more room for older ones than I typically have in the past!
What I read in August:
Ling Ma, Bliss Montage (September 13, 2022)2—Ma’s first novel, Severance (2018), is so good that I’ve read it three times. Ma’s writing is so good that I was excited to re-read the two stories in her new collection that I’d read in their original places of publication, Granta and the The Atlantic.3 Bliss Montage is so good that as soon as I finished reading it, I thought “I hope I get to read this again for book club in September.”4 It’s official—Ling Ma is one of my favorite living writers.
Every story in this book is a triumph!! The second story in the collection, “Oranges,” is a sequel of sorts that I never knew I needed and that held me in total suspense while reading. Other stories—about friendship and a drug that makes people invisible; about an unexpected pregnancy in a “country on the decline . . . [where] everyone expected to die in debt, and had learned not to mind”; about living with 100 ex-boyfriends and a husband; about rituals of renewal in fictional countries—are just as captivating and wonderful. All of these narratives, scenes, and images are in service of capturing the way we _________ now.
Few authors inspire me as much as Ma does to want to just cite quotations I loved for whatever reason, eg:
Her flamethrower gaze annihilated all women’s magazine adages about loving yourself, all body-positivity Oprah episodes; it could reverse all waves of feminism.
I’ll eat my hat if this book doesn’t end up in my top 5 list at the end of the year.
Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy (1964)—While I have been known to be something of a hater when it comes to summer, there are some things I love about summer and look forward to every year: pools and tomato sandwiches. And this month, as the season hit its peak, I thought: “What better way to enjoy my sandwiches than by revisiting fiction’s most famous tomato sandwich–lover!”
What a rich and multifaceted experience it is to reread a childhood favorite! On the one hand, it was a delight to reacquaint myself with one of childhood literature’s most hilarious and, at times, most thoughtful characters. On the other, it certainly made me think about the books I recommend to young people based only on remembering that I really liked the books at a particular age. Do all the books have, as Harriet the Spy does, some element to them that, when read today, make you understand why, for example, young girls learn to hate their bodies and try to make them small from such an early age? Like, some low-key horrific thing presented as being as normal as breathing air?
I think the saddest thing about this book is how simply wonderful and smart and delightful and thoughtful Harriet is except for when she’s casually writing aggressively fatphobic descriptions of people! It makes me feel sad for the children of that era and all the ones after who internalized those messages :(
Let me be clear—this book is amazing and I love it. If I were to recommend it to a young person today, I’d want to contextualize the fatphobic messages, be a kind of Ole Golly to their Harriet, so that they could take away the great lessons from this novel without having to also feel like they or any people are bad or wrong if they happen to have a larger body!! I would want today’s reader to internalize how perfect a tomato sandwich is, so perfect that one absolutely should eat as many of them as they want and feel nothing about it but pure joy. Because that message is also there, alongside so many other good ones.
Another disturbing thing about returning to childhood favorites is having to wonder whether you ever actually had a personality at all or whether you simply wore the traits of your favorite characters like a costume. Did I love Harriet because I also loved gossip/talking shit and reading and because I also hated math? Or did I learn those things from Harriet? I’m 99% sure it’s the former, but I had to think hard about it.
Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays (1952)5—What a specific and distinct pleasure it is to read something for the first time from an author whose works have always been there but who had previously only registered to you as just a name. Natalia Ginzburg—I knew her name and literally nothing else until I stumbled upon a recent essay by Sally Rooney about All Our Yesterdays. Looking back, it’s mystery why, in 2015, when I finished Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, I didn’t immediately seek out and consume Ginzburg’s oeuvre,6 as the commonalities between the two authors are well documented.
But I am so glad to have read All Our Yesterdays now rather than 7 years ago, when fascism still felt like something mostly contained in the past. Ginzburg’s novel, which follows the lives of two neighboring Italian families between 1939 and 1944, documents the seemingly abrupt, rapid spread of fascism, showing the varying degrees to which people adopted the ideology internally and outwardly and illustrating how something so violent and despicable could be just one aspect of everyday life. And depicting the various aspects and quotidian dramas of everyday life for many different people is the real bread and butter of this book, which I loved. There are characters in All Our Yesterdays who will haunt me forever! In the best possible way!
In conclusion, Rooney is 100% correct about All Our Yesterdays being “a perfect novel:”
It is a book that shows in simple and intelligent prose both how large and how small a novel ought to be. Its stakes are as high as the most cataclysmic crisis of the 20th century, and as low as the marriage of one young woman, the fate of one family dog. As readers, we come to see and feel the inextricable relations between the inner and outer worlds of human beings. Ginzburg’s novels manage not only to accommodate, but to place into a meaningful relationship the intimate lives of fictional characters and the radical social and political changes unfolding around them.
Morgan Jerkins, Caul Baby (2021)—I always find it amazing when an author can engage with heavy/serious/important issues within a narrative that’s compelling on the level of story (and not because it’s, say, trauma porn). Jerkins’s debut novel is at once a riveting magical realism-adjacent mystery/thriller/bildungsroman and a wide-ranging exploration of different modes of parenting and caregiving, Black women’s health, and identity and the twenty-first century gentrification of Harlem. Through her portrait of three generations of Melancon women—famed for the mystical properties of their cauls, which they sell piecemeal to high-paying white clients, a practice that alienates them from the neighborhood—and the women whose lives are forever changed by their association with the Melancons, Jerkins asks and begins to answer questions like: What does it mean to be a mother? A Black mother? How is identity formed? What do we inherit and what can and should we do with our inheritances? What do we owe to others and why?
A content warning! There are some pretty graphic scenes of pregnancy loss and grief early in the novel, in case that factors into whether this is something you want to read!
Kashana Cauley, The Survivalists (January 2023)—Requesting books from NetGalley can sometimes be a little bit like placing a hold on Libby—you don’t always know when the book will come through, and when it does, you have to read it! This is how I ended up reading an advance reader copy of Cauley’s debut novel, a millennial burnout narrative that satirizes (in an empathetic way??) some of the more extreme measures people take to feel like they have control in the ever increasingly destabilized/destabilizing present day!
The titular survivalists are an unlikely group of roommates who run a coffee roasting business by day and sell illegal guns and build backyard bunkers by night. Aretha, an overworked lawyer with crushing loan debt and dead parents becomes involved with the survivalists through dating one of them. How and why she transforms from a high-achieving professional to her own version of a survivalist provides the basis for the plot. I got a real thrill out of not being able to predict where this novel was going as I read—to me that is the sign of an author doing things differently.
Cauley is one of the funniest people on the internet and I’m so glad that her book made me LOL for real7 multiple times and at scenarios where it felt scandalous to laugh. The humor is dark and dry—my favorite :)
What I’m looking forward to reading in September:
Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends (2022)
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871/1872)
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)
Ali Smith, How to Be Both (2014)8
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022)9
Maybe it’s that reading about a time when the financing of public education hadn’t been neoliberally shifted to the individual, which meant that individuals could do things like “buy a house,” “save for retirement,” “pay for health care,” and “retire” instead of having to pay the equivalent of rent for the next 20 years to never even reach the principal of the loans they took out in order to pay for rent and food while working for less than minimum wage teaching and researching 50-70 hours a week in grad school, is the closest I can get to homeownership and retirement now that the President has officially refused to fully exercise the power granted to him by the 1965 Higher Education Act.
BTW being mad at that he didn’t do what he could have done doesn’t mean I’m not happy for the people whose lives will be changed by the $10,000 or $20,000 in student loan debt that’s being canceled!
Readers of the July Report may remember that I requested and received an advance reader copy on NetGalley.
Another story from Bliss Montage appears in the July 11 & 18, 2022, issue of The New Yorker, but I didn’t read it there last month because I wanted to “save it” for reading in the book.
No pressure!! I’ll read it again even if we don’t read it for book club. We’re going to read it for October :)
Book club selection for August.
It’s actually not a mystery. I was still thick in the weeds of writing a dissertation. There was only so much “reading for fun” I could get away with.
In other words, “laugh out loud.”
There’s a theme to these first 4 books—CAN YOU GUESS IT?
Book club selection for September.