May report
What can I say about this month in reading that I haven’t already said about any other month? Idk if it’s that things are “opening” “up” or that the weather is nice or that it’s NBA playoffs time or what, but I’m finding it hard to get excited about many books! I mean, I will obviously beat on, boa[t] against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, but sometimes I also just want to Log Off and see some Art!!
What I read in May:
Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (2009)—It was fitting that I wrapped up the last 6 hours of this book while building my new desk on a day I took off work, as this genuinely perfect anthropological study rEaLlY mAkEs YoU tHiNk about how Wall Street work culture has become white-collar work culture. I decided to read Liquidated because Anne Helen Petersen often raves about it and quotes it at some length in her book, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation (2020).1 Ho is, like all my favorite academics, so skilled at explaining complex phenomena and distilling meaning for non-academic audiences.
Yes, this book can be dense, but it’s as light as I think it could possibly be. Certainly by the second half, once Ho has really laid out the groundwork, tale after tale of what can only be described as the everyday sociopathy that structures life on “The Street” makes for some compelling—if also horrifying—reading! If you’ve ever wondered how we got to the place as a society where a disturbing number of people seem to lack awareness of even the concept of empathy or if you just want to get mad all over again about 2008, please look no further than this book.
Sanjena Sathian, Gold Diggers (2021)2—When I say I read this novel in a day, I mean to convey that it’s a) an engaging story, b) written in frictionless prose, c) intelligent and breezy in such a way that it could easily be read on a plane or the beach. I’m thankful for these qualities, because I only gave myself the day before book club to read it!!
Set partly in mid-2000s Atlanta3 and partly in San Francisco c. summer 2016, Sathian’s debut is the coming-of-age story of two childhood friends, second-generation Indian Americans who dabble in alchemy in their quest to figure out who they are and who they want to be when they grow up. Sathian’s thematic conceit of gold and the role it plays in narratives of India and of America is fitting to the plot and character development of this novel. In fact, there’s not much about Gold Diggers that isn’t appropriate to itself. Meaning, the novel reads very much already like the prestige limited television series it’s currently being adapted into.
Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible (2020)—Well, I simply loved this dark, funny, and strangely breezy story of a group of families on vacation, already divided into children vs parents before an apocalyptic hurricane descends and triggers the rapid decline of “civilization.” I got strong Leave the World Behind (2020)4 vibes from Millet’s novel, so much that I wanted to read Alam’s vacation apocalypse again. What I especially loved about A Children’s Bible is the way Millet narrates from the perspective of the children, who are (justifiably!) perpetually disdainful of their boomer parents specifically regarding matters of a climate changed planet.5
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)—This might possibly be the first modernist book I’ve read to completion since finishing grad school 5 years ago, so it might have been because it felt a bit like homework or like homework without a deadline that I had such a choppy reading experience in the first half. Or maybe I struggled to read more than 3 pages at a time because I didn’t push through the weird feelings of resistance and dread and apprehension that arose each time I picked the book up—by the time I sat down and read steadily through the second half, those feelings disappeared and it was easy to block out the world and instead marvel at the brilliance of this masterpiece.
To the Lighthouse is a mood, what I believe the youth these days call either a vibe or an aesthetic. By this I mean that in addition to it being the simple yet riveting narrative of 2 days in the same house, separated by a gap of ten years, it is a profound meditation on time,6 relationships, art, purpose, places, things, grief, etc. It’s also a post-pandemic novel (without ever once [?] mentioning the flu), a fact which I now realize I didn’t fully grasp any of the other times I’ve read it. I think Woolf’s novel is best read in one or two sittings, either on an unseasonably chilly day or on a vigorously sunny summer day. IDK how else to say it—To the Lighthouse is one of the top 5 novels of the twentieth century.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts (2021)—Speaking of moods! Lahiri’s first novel written in Italian (and her first that she translated into English), is very . . . Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through (2020) + Zadie Smith’s Intimations (2020),7 but in its own, good way. Whereabouts is something of a novel without a plot, the narrative of a middle-aged woman reflecting on her everyday life and routines, semi-consciously attempting to figure out what to do in the coming years. She walks around an unnamed Italian city, linking her personal story with the spaces she moves through and the people she encounters.
Day 1 readers of my Book Report may recall that I absolutely love Lahiri’s writing. And while Whereabouts is something of a departure for her in terms of content and structure, the writing itself is as lovely, clever, thoughtful, and engaging as ever. I loved taking this 157-page novel as slowly as possible to savor every word!
What I’m looking forward to reading in June:
Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl (2021)
Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders (2020)
Diane Cook, Man v. Nature (2014)
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (2021)8
Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside (2020)
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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Callback to the October 2020 Book Report!
Book club selection for May.
Which, I guess, makes it historical fiction?? 😒 😒 😒
Callback again to the October 2020 Book Report!
Some real “Who killed the world?” vibes here and I of course love that. Speaking of, I re-watched Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) this month and, whew!! Still got it.
Spoiler alert—it passes. (That’s a joke based on the title of the novel’s middle section).
Callback, respectively, to the September 2020 and November 2020 Book Reports.
Book club selection for June.