Surprise! I read some books. More that I would have expected to at the start of the month, but that is one of the amazing things about setting boundaries in the workplace . . . you end up having time to do things like read books.
What I read in March:
Dantiel W. Moniz, Milk Blood Heat (2021)—More short stories!! These ones are also great! Moniz’s stories, all set in Florida, are snapshots of different women at different stages in their lives, often dealing with commonplace and difficult decisions or experiences. This debut collection is on a lot of “must read” lists for a reason—it’s really good!
Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind (2021)—Well, all the books I read can’t be as special as I hoped they’d be, can they? I’ve been sitting on what to say about this debut novel for a minute, trying to figure out how to phrase my take in a “professional” way. I should say, writing a book is an incredible feat and this novel is well written! I also appreciate another novel in the world that centers women’s experiences of miscarriage and abortion!
But when it comes to plot and what Smallwood is trying to “do” with any of this . . . I will say there are other books about struggling academics that I’d prefer to read (Brandon Taylor’s Real Life [2020] and Lynn Steger Strong’s Want [2020] come to mind).1 Smallwood explicitly telegraphs through her protagonist’s own words an awareness that this novels main character, Dorothy—a white, thirty-something adjunct, from at least the middle class, partnered to a high-income earner—is “unsympathetic.” I’m certainly not a reader who requires sympathetic characters, but I do need for my unsympathetic characters to have something like real, rather than purely performative, self-awareness. And if they don’t, then I’d like them to be unsympathetic in a fun way.
I read this book to completion out of a morbid curiosity to see if it would turn it around somehow and be something more than a perfectly finely written study of pretty terrible people. It didn’t. I don’t think it’s “part of the story” that the wrong pronouns are repeatedly used for Lauren Berlant in a passage about Cruel Optimism (2011).2 It’s all enough to make one wonder what the mind of an author who compares karaoke singing to “feral cats being raped” and the chain of editors who approved such an “edgy” line is really bringing to the table, in terms of literature and “society.”
Yikes! What a miserable read!!
Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby (2021)3—Even if this hadn’t been my palate cleanser read after The Life of the Mind, I would have loved Peters’s debut novel, which is like nothing I’ve ever read before. This story, of three people—a trans woman, her destransitioned ex-partner, and the ex-partner’s new cis girlfriend, pregnant with a baby she didn’t think was possible—trying to figure out really how to be in this world and what it would look like to raise a child together is a riveting, super smart, funny, heartbreaking, and moving narrative. Literally, as always with something I really love, I am unable to explain in detail. Grace Lavery says it better anyway!!
Hiroko Oyamada, The Hole (2014/2020)—Having now read her second novel4 translated into English, I can safely say that Oyamada is one of my favorite living writers. I simply love the way she thinks about/dramatizes/represents: capitalism, white collar work, gender, and the climate crisis. In this novella, which so deftly reproduces cinematic techniques that I could visualize this story unfolding as a film at every step of the way, 29-year-old Asa quits her dead-end contract job, where she’d routinely worked 12+ hour days for a low base pay plus overtime, in order to relocate for her husband’s permanent-status job to the house next door to her in-laws’s in the countryside. Left alone at home every day, during the hottest months of the year, Asa comes to learn some uncomfortable truths about her new life and surroundings. It gets weird! But in a weirdly accessible (imo) way that is unique to Oyamada! When I read her fiction, I swear I feel how readers of Kafka in the early twentieth century must have felt but even more because Oyamada is better for foregrounding the gendered aspects of alienation under late-stage capitalism.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021)—A fun fact about me is that I can’t get enough of Ishiguro and the specific ways his novels make me sad/glad. Another novel about a servant reflecting fondly on their lifetime of servitude, long after the person they served has unceremoniously disposed of them in so many ways? SIGN ME UP. This story, about an AF (artificial friend) and the sickly child she becomes companion to, is a lovely meditation on what it means to be human, with all of the wonderful, dreamy, and melancholy ways Ishiguro imagines our even more technologically dystopic near future. I sought a quiet place to read Klara and the Sun so that I could immerse myself in the narrative and read it for long stretches of time. Not to brag, but it was the right thing to do.
What I’m looking forward to reading in April:
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie (2021)5
Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces (2021)
Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (2021)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
In fact! I will say that The Life of the Mind made me appreciate Want in a way I hadn’t when I read it last summer.
A personal fave academic book.
Book club selection for March.
This is actually a novella, clocking in at 92 pages. Her other translated book, The Factory (2013/2019), is also pretty short.
Book club selection for April.
Have you read any of these books? Do you want to talk about them? Is there a book you think I'd like reading? Reply to this email or smash that comment button! I love recommendations and conversations!
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