Where did this month go!!1 I took a long time to get through the first and third books I read in September because I wanted to really think about them as I read. It was the right call, but I also had to tell myself not infrequently this month, whenever I felt that old anxiety about “what if I am not reading enough?” creep in, that I’m not trying to be a volume shooter.
Before I get to the report, a reminder to please read Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s My Monticello (2021), which will be published on October 5. It is one of my favorite books of the year so far.
What I read in September:
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021)—The TL;DR for this book is that I loved chapters 1-29 and am unsure how I feel about chapter 30.
One thing I wondered often as I read this novel was whether appreciation for Rooney hinges, at least in part, on an appreciation for/familiarity with James Joyce. That is, are there 2 kinds of Rooney fans:
1) Readers (usually from the US) who encounter her novels as YA-adjacent, contemporary fiction about horny teens, content made for/by/about millennials that’s meant to be adapted to the dominant form of fiction in the twenty-first century, television.2 Such readers are the vanguard of a “backlash,” weirdly “tired” of what they perceive to be the “same” story told over and over in Rooney’s novels.
While Kyle Chayka’s essay below isn’t so much backlashy as it is focused on the more “universal” elements of Rooney’s fiction and the ways Rooney is marketed to consumers, it belongs to this first type of reader.
2) Readers who understand that Sally Rooney is Irish and that her fiction continually, and in ways I personally love, engages with major Irish writers.
To wit—I just feel like she is so skilled at acknowledging Joyce’s influence, at entering into conversation with his fictional Dublin without seeming like she wants to draw on it as a shortcut to legitimacy or like she wants to rewrite/overcome his representation. She uses the conversation to sketch out her twenty-first century Dublin, which, it being Dublin, still bears legible traces of and builds on its early twentieth-century self. So many pages in my copy of Beautiful World are filled with screaming marginal comments naming the story from Dubliners (1914) that a given scene evokes—Araby! A Little Cloud!! The Dead!!!!! Has there been a more iconic scene of post-Sunday mass socializing since “A Mother”? To me, the answer is “no.”
I obviously consider myself the second kind of reader.
Moving on, it’s wild how a conclusion can really almost change everything. I was cruising through this book, loving and appreciating it all. And then! That final chapter. I want it to be ironic? But I’m not sure it is. I find myself yearning for a Voyage in the Dark (1934)-type ending, in terms of acknowledging the reality of gender/working/biological reproduction, buried somewhere in a draft on Rooney’s computer. Or just, something more ambivalent? Like, yeah, on the one hand, there is unreserved joy and sincerity and hope in modernist literature, and in Joyce’s particularly. But on the other, there is a justified concern, an evidence-based thesis that it might not work out in the end for people?
This ending had me running back to Normal People and Conversations With Friends to see if they are also so . . . positive? About things? (They aren’t necessarily negative, but they are a little more open-ended, I found). IDK, I’m sure many will feel less conflicted about the ending than I do.
Final miscellaneous thought: I simply love how meta this novel is and how Rooney is and isn’t engaging with autofiction and apparently evergreen questions about authorship/identity/celebrity/reality/fiction and what any of those terms even mean.
Oh, and, yes, I did enjoy how much Beautiful World’s jacket design perfectly paralleled my own millennial “preset palette of aesthetics . . . that is accessible and slightly interesting without being threatening”3 home setting:
Doree Shafrir, Thanks For Waiting: A Memoir (2021)4—For at least a decade if not longer, Shafrir has been a name I’ve recognized when it’s mentioned even if I can’t recall any specific essays she’s written. I think that’s a testament to her ability to write readable work that stands out in the ocean of internet content while not necessarily being schticky or groundbreaking. Her memoir, about “the joys and weirdness of being a late bloomer” is much in that same vein.
It’s not that I think people need tragic lives to have memoirs worth reading, but a primary takeaway I had from reading Thanks for Waiting is that it is very nice that the most difficult/“traumatic” aspects of Shafrir’s life a) were securing a romantic partner and biologically reproducing with him, and b) that these aspects ultimately resolved in a way that was satisfying to her. She did find someone she loves and she married him! It took a couple of rounds of IVF but she did get pregnant/have a baby!
This isn’t a bad book, but at the same time, I am not in the audience for it, being someone who doesn’t/historically hasn’t prioritized achieving “traditional,” gendered, bourgeois goals such as marriage, biological reproduction, and homeownership, and certainly not according to a specific timeline. It seemed like Shafrir’s definition of being a “late bloomer” was predicated on the value she placed on people in her social circle reaching certain “life milestones.” That is, being friends with and related to people who married at a certain age, had children, etc, shaped Shafrir’s understanding of what it means to be a late bloomer, even if those people never explicitly shamed Shafrir for not having similar achievements on a similar timeline. Not to be like “I’m not built like that,” but . . . I can’t relate!
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019)—Like many nonfictions, this book has occupied a spot on my mental to-read list since its publication, waiting for that chance moment where I suddenly become “in the mood” to read it. IDK before reading it, it just kind of gave homework vibes!
Anyway, shoutout to Unnameable Books for having a copy and to my friend, Ginny, for being so excited about this book that I was inspired to start reading.
Odell’s book—more of a set of connected essays/literature review of philosophical, artistic, and labor-driven approaches to “thinking outside the narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism”—feels really essential to me. It should come as no surprise that someone who loves “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as much as I do would find many useful concepts and lessons to consider in How to Do Nothing.
Her bibliography is extensive and filled with books that I haven’t read in a long time. Reading How to Do Nothing generated for me list of books I want to revisit, a process that went something like, “Thomas Merton . . . I haven’t heard that name in years. This guy rules! I loved him in high school. How much more will his writing resonate with me now, [redacted] years later, as everything from that era appears to be repeating itself, except even worse??”
What I most love about How to Do Nothing is that it is not some airport best seller, self-help, just-delete-your-facebook kind of book, but rather a compelling treatise about the significance of attention and what we do with it.
What I’m looking forward to reading in October:
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021)5
Ruby Tandoh, Cook As You Are: Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks and Messy Kitchens (2021)
Natasha Brown, Assembly (2021)
Alison Stine, Trashlands (2021)
Asali Solomon, The Days of Afrekete (2021)
For me, personally, the first half absolutely went to standing in front of the TV, looking like I live at the Overlook, and bouncing a ball on my tennis racquet while watching a healthy ≥5 hours of US Open per day.
Yes, the internet—specifically AITA prompts on reddit—is the real dominant source for fiction these days, but that’s not useful to my thesis.
Chayka, K. Dirt: Uniqlo is Sally Rooneycore. Published September 1, 2021. Accessed October 1, 2021. https://dirt.substack.com/p/dirt-uniqlo-is-sally-rooneycore
Book club selection for September.
Book club selection for October.