Everything I Read & Where I Read It: August 17-24
My brother Jack was visiting Scott and me this past week. We had a good mix of activities going on together: drinking coffee; editing each other’s writing; reading together in the apartment; listening to my friend Bella’s audio messages about her dating life; getting chicken salad sandwiches at Utopia Bagels; getting bagels at Bricktown Bagels; getting bagels again at Bricktown Bagels. Lots of bagels.
Love Forms by Claire Adams
It pains me, truly, to have two DNFs in a row, which is what happened with Jonathan Strange and then this one. Makes me feel like a quitter. Anyway, I was very close to enjoying this one. This is a teen pregnancy story, with the mother searching for her adopted daughter 40 years later. It has lots of elements I usually enjoy: tense family relationships, a well-developed setting. Unfortunately, something about it just wasn’t clicking for me. The pace felt slow, and I couldn’t quite figure out the main character’s emotional landscape. I’m still considering trying this one again—maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for this kind of pace?
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
I read this book as we were dropping my youngest sister off at Holy Cross College. Bye, Tessa! Have fun! We were staying in a hotel near Worcester, MA and it was weirdly freezing out and I could not stop coughing. The book was great, though. I first heard about Lucy Grealy when I read Ann Patchett’s essay on their friendship. This book is the story of Grealy’s grueling medical journey, subsequent facial reconstruction surgeries and struggles with her self-image. I loved it. For context, I love medical memoirs: Between Two Kingdoms and Brain on Fire are two of my favorite books.
Lucy Grealy is a beautiful writer—simple and understated and calm. I found her descriptions of being sick as a kid really entrancing: the crazy, imaginative, dissociative worlds she inhabited; the stark differences between the hospital and home; her rituals and strategies to cope with her pain. As a kid, she had an Ewing sarcoma in her jaw, which severely deformed her face. She underwent more than 30 (!!!!) subsequent surgeries to try to reconstruct her face. It’s so, so brutal to read about. The story resists any kind of sick/healthy binary or arc because the real struggle is her ongoing fight to accept her own appearance. I want to read Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett’s book about their friendship, soon. 5/5.
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
I ripped through The Coin while Jack was visiting this week. I gave Jack Yellowface to read, and I read The Coin. A diabolical combination. We spent a lot of time reading side by side on my couch.
My God, I’m obsessed with this book. It’s my favorite book I’ve read this year, I think? The book’s about an unnamed narrator, a very glamorous and very mentally unwell Palestinian woman living in New York City and teaching middle school. This book has EVERYTHING: Burberry trench coats; a main character who’s rapidly unraveling; funny, blunt observations about America; middle schoolers; slow-drip revelations about the main character’s relationship to her home country, Palestine; a character named Trenchcoat; lengthy descriptions of CVS hauls and cleansing rituals. It put me in mind of My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh. Both follow lonely, beautiful, independently wealthy women doing weird, weird things around New York City. And this is a book that uses its New York City setting well: the train, the bridges, the specific vibe of certain CVSs, the homelessness, the fashion all feature prominently. The ending is completely insane and I loved it. I would read anything Yasmin Zaher writes. 5/5.
We’ll Always Have Summer by Jenny Han
This was a quick Kindle read. Increasingly, that’s my weekend MO: burn through a romance book on my Kindle. Scott had to move all his analog equipment out of his old studio in Ridgewood. We’re talking boxes and boxes of wires and printers and…adaptors? I have no idea. I went to help him, a.k.a. I walked to get us pupusas and carried some boxes down to the car. Mostly, I sat and read.
I read this book because I want to be part of the conversation. C’mon, y’all! Include me! I read the first Summer I Turned Pretty book a couple years ago so I get the premise enough. In this one, Belly and Jeremiah are in college and they get engaged to deal with the trauma of Jeremiah cheating on her. I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone could be Team Jeremiah. Maybe I just always prefer the quiet, weirdly intense, Conrad-type love interests—I never understood team Jacob either. Anyway, my actual favorite character is the mom in these books. She reminds me of my mom, actually, in how principled and independent she is. 3.5/5 romance stars.
Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld
Day two of moving massive quantities of analog equipment to the new studio in LIC. Once again, Scott was labeling boxes, wrapping monitors, hauling trash out of the old studio; I was sitting in his desk chair, offering to help half-heartedly but mostly ripping through Eligible.
Eligible is a faithful retelling of Pride and Prejudice set in Cinncinati, Ohio. There were parts of this book that actually helped illuminate aspects of the original Pride and Prejudice for me. Like, for example, Lydia, Kitty, and Mary’s characters all made more sense to me in this version. I never quite understood the Elizabeth-Jane vs. Kitty-Mary-Lydia divide in the original (probably because I read it too young—humblebrag). In this version, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia are all living at home, bumming off their parents, and being generally rude to people in social settings, a dynamic which made the antipathy between the sisters more comprehensible. Overall, this book was fun—I knew exactly where it was going, and it was satisfying to see the ways that some of the events from the original version were fitted to the modern world. I didn’t love it, though. It was probably my least favorite Curtis Sittenfeld book that I’ve read, and I found the main character, Elizabeth (Liz), to be preachy and obnoxious. She’s always meddling in everyone’s lives, trying to fix stuff. Leave them alone! 3.5/5.