This was a near-perfect reading month, as I consumed thirteen books in various idyllic summer vacation spots: a couch in a cabin in Maine, a beach towel on Cape Cod (fistful of potato chips clenched sandily in my other hand). I tore through most of an intimidating stack of library books, a much-anticipated Advanced Review Copy (thank you, Eliza!), two more in the Dorothy Dunnett series I am still delightedly re-reading, and the traditional vintage paperback detective novel I always manage to buy at the world’s most perfect used bookstore.
(Perhaps no summer’s beach reading will ever come close to the resonance of Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name, the most climactic scenes of which take place on beach in an Italian vacation town—Lila and Lenu in the sun and sand, and a plot twist that made me clap the book closed and look out over the waves until I could pull myself together enough to keep going—but that’s okay. The memory is enough!!)
So to balance out all that summer perfection, something very far from used paperbacks and book serendipity (scroll down, as always, to skip directly to this month’s reviews):
All of this is as inane as you would think, and there’s really no point in reading the article except to confirm that yes, his name is “Thatcher Wine,” you read that right, and to look with a mixture of fascination and confusion on the examples of the celebrity bookshelves Thatcher Wine has “curated” in the past—bookshelves that look like giant murals, each new book binding carefully selected and placed in order to form a beautiful painting. No titles are visible on these custom bindings: beyond the insanity of the entire idea, no one will ever, and I mean ever, read these books.
Still, though, it’s undeniably beautiful in its own way, and it made me admit that I see books as decoration, too, albeit differently. When I first graduated from college, I moved into an empty beige box of an apartment in Brooklyn. I also hadn’t read more than a handful of books just for fun in almost four years—being an English major can, counterintuitively, do that for you. Starting to unfold myself into the person I was going to be meant starting to re-discover reading for pleasure (my long subway commute in the pre-cellphone service-MTA era didn’t hurt), and with each book I bought (an impractical, thrilling indulgence) and read and placed on my formerly-empty bedside bookshelf, a picture of who I was now solidified. I liked that person, who read books, a few at first and then so many that they had to be stacked next to the bookshelf on the floor. I remembered her.
Ever since then, I’ve loved displaying my books: the ones I love enough to own, the ones I’ve read and the ones I have promised myself I definitely will read once the library books are finished. I don’t have custom bindings made, obviously, and I abhor the recently all-over-Instagram trick of turning books backwards on the shelves so that they all look nice and neutral, as well as the practice of arranging your books into a rainbow (not as bad as turning them backwards, but how do you find them??). But I am admittedly seduced by the aesthetics of books—I’m more likely to purchase a book with a lovely cover and to simply borrow an uglier one; I gravitate towards visually arresting books when I’m browsing; I, too, like a nice matching set of Penguin Classics bindings.
Still: when a book is truly good, even its ugliness becomes lovely. And an uncoordinated, mismatched wall of books is its own mural—or portrait.
My boyfriend moved in with me and my roommate this weekend and brought all of his books with him, and now the three of us live surrounded by books that outpace the capacity of our bookshelves: towering, toppling, crowded, miscellaneous, half-read and half-anticipated. A portrait of a used bookstore (maybe even a tiny and much-beloved one nestled on Cape Cod); everything I’ve ever wanted my home to look like; the person I want to be.
August book reviews
[Click each title for a plot summary]
Bunny, Mona Awad [**]
A dark, sort of comedic/sort of horrifying, weird book about a woman at an MFA program and the culture and cliques of her fellow students. I wanted to like this book, because I love books about the joy and cruelty of female friendship, but I ended up feeling like this book was too cruel, too ungenerous, mired in shallow metaphor that dampened the one real spark of warmth at the heart of the story. Add to that that it was, generally, too heavy on concept and thin on substance—an idea for a short story, stretched to barely fill out a novel—and I walked away disappointed.
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch [**]
I love good, plotty fantasy novels, and it’s getting increasingly hard to find original ones, so I had high hopes for this intensely beloved tome about a gang of clever con men in a fictional Venetian world. I think that it worked on a baseline level—the world was interesting, the story held together, there were some delightful moments of capering. But I’m really surprised that this novel is so well-regarded, because I thought that it was missing the one thing it takes to truly deliver on a book that centers around one hyper-competent protagonist: characterization. I just wasn’t very interested in Lynch’s main guy: I didn’t worry about him or wonder about him, and he didn’t do anything to surprise me on an internal level. For a story about a con man, everything was boringly as it seemed.
Un Lun Dun, China Mieville [*****]
Delight where I least expected it—in a children’s book (I would say this is a middle grade/junior high level novel), not that children’s books aren’t delightful, but that I wasn’t sure I could still be delighted by them in the same way. But I got this book from the library after reading fantastic reviews for the author’s adult fantasy novels, then deciding based on said reviews that they sounded too dark and gory and depressing for me.
This, his children’s novel, is not gory or depressing, but it is dark in a way that the best children’s books are: dark in a way that respects the fears and anxieties, the real dangers and tragedies, of childhood. But this book is also deeply joyful—in many ways it felt like a modernized The Phantom Tollbooth, a young girl’s rambling quest through a secret land full of wordplay and fantastical literalizations. It has the same joy in imagination and literary creation as Tollbooth, but with higher stakes and deeper relationships, more darkness and fear, and (maybe) more love and triumph. It isn’t better than The Phantom Tollbooth—could any book be?—but it is different, truer in some ways, a worthy successor, and a lovely book to read at any age.
Fleishman is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner [****]
I really enjoyed this uber-of the moment novel about an upper-class New York City divorce. I liked that it wasn’t afraid to make its protagonist, the confused and bitter husband, truly dislikable, and I liked that it was skillfully written enough that he was also sympathetic, even momentarily wonderful. That complexity is this book’s greatest strength—as in (I imagine) most real divorces, the tangled threads of two (or more) truths obscure any real objective truth, and it was really rewarding to read a book that challenged its reader with that kind of overlayed, unreliable, twisting narrative.
The only thing I really had trouble with here were the book’s class politics, the concern its already-unlikable characters had with nuances of money and status in their upper-upper-class world. Not that any of that was unrealistic; I just didn’t care. In a book where so much resonated or intrigued me, the (unfortunately probably completely true) idea that a prominent New York doctor would feel constantly insecure around money in his social world of bankers and hedge fund—idk, guys—was where my ability to care about these people hit its absolute limit.
My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell [****]
I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this split-screen novel, the story of a teenager abused by her teacher a private boarding school and the story of the same student, years later, an adult looking back and trying to understand the narrative about that abuse that she wrote for herself.
The hardest part of this headlong rush of a novel—which grabs you by the face and forces you to look at it even when you want, sick to your stomach, to turn away—is also what sets it apart: that Vanessa herself, our teenaged and then adult narrator, has tried for years to hold on to the way her abuser framed rape and pedophilia as love. A white-knuckled grip, and one that slips sometimes, moments of realization that we read with intermingled relief and horror. What is better—for it to have been a love story, or for Vanessa to know that it wasn’t? That question is the heart of this book, and even if we think we know the answer, watching Vanessa ask it is the tragedy—deftly written, hard to read, impossible to put down.
Mostly Dead Things, Kristen Arnett [****]
I like a book that explores human relationships through the lens of something strange and unique and sort of but not too transparently metaphorical, that knows and place and digs down into it, comfortable in who and what it is. This was that: a brief, dextrous novel about a woman who inherited her father’s Floridian taxidermy business and, with it, the fraying strands of love and loyalty that knot her surviving family together. A small and odd tableau, as intriguing and bewildering and strangely beloved as a skilled piece of…taxidermy.
The Franchise Affair, Josephine Tey [***]
This was my yearly vintage paperback detective fiction vacation purchase, and it lived up to my expectations in terms of atmosphere: cozy British countryside setting, pitch-perfect language, finely drawn characters, a mystery with stakes just high enough to keep things interesting. I think that Josephine Tey is generally an excellent detective fiction writer (see my previous review of Brat Farrar), but this particular book faltered for me when it came to the solution—no spoilers, but I wanted a twist and didn’t get one, and the detecting was done largely offscreen. Add to that some very questionable class politics and I ended up feeling as disappointed as I was cozily ensconced.
Pawn in Frankincense, Dorothy Dunnett [*****]
The Ringed Castle, Dorothy Dunnett [*****]
Perhaps it is enough to say of these books that I am reading them for the second time, I remember all of the primary plot points and most significant twists, and I still had to close each book—the fourth and fifth in the six-book series—carefully at the end, put it down, and take several deep, shaky breaths. Even knowing what happened couldn’t prepare me for reading it again: these two books are in many ways the exposed heart of the series, hot-blooded and pounding, terrifyingly vulnerable, a too much that is gory and alive and painful to look at too closely.
Francis Crawford's face in this fleeting moment of privacy was filled with ungovernable feeling: of shock and of pain and of a desire beyond bearing: the desire of the hart which longs for the waterbrook, and does not know, until it sees the pool under the trees, for what it has thirsted.
It’s very hard to review them without spoilers, but it is safe to say that in Pawn in Frankincense, the climatic scene is a chess game played with human as the pieces and their lives as the price for capture—and that by the time you read it, it doesn’t feel ridiculous or overblown or impossible. It feels like the life-and-death matter it is; at stake not just the lives of individual characters but also the trust the reader has poured into them and into Dunnett. In The Ringed Castle, the stakes are equally high but hidden, rather than flaunted: that book can feel boring after the swashbuckling adventure of Pawn in Frankincense until you realize that what Dunnett is gambling with now is not characters’ lives but their humanity: will what they have been through destroy them, or will their be people left for the reader to love, when all of this is over?
To anyone who hasn’t read these books, I sound insane, I know. But they are so good: I’m reading the final in the series now, and parceling out 10 pages a night for myself, delaying and delaying, because I can’t bear the thought of it being over. I don’t want to have to leave this story.
I Was Born for This, Alice Oseman [**]
This was a book about all-consuming teenaged fandom, based not-so-loosely on One Direction fandom in the same vein as the far superior Grace and the Fever. It got some things right, I think, particularly the idea that obsession can be a bandaid for self-esteem and loneliness, that it’s dangerous to have all of the “you” that you define yourself as centered around one thing that is very much outside of your life. What I didn’t like about this book was that it took that smart and important and nuanced idea and placed it in an overblown narrative so unrealistic I started rolling my eyes, with an ending that was a disconnected mess of melodrama.
Jade War, Fonda Lee [***]
I continue to be conflicted about this trilogy, and I have basically the same thoughts here that I had when I read Jade City: a wonderfully conceived world of 50s noir fantasy, centered on non-white characters and cultures, with a concise and powerful central magical conceit. My issue with this series is only (but problematically) in its execution—once again I felt like Lee was telling me everything and showing me little, over-explaining her world rather than letting it introduce itself to me, laying out her characters’ thought processes and motivations instead of letting them surprise me, summarizing strategy and intrigue before the climactic scenes that would have revealed them. It’s frustrating to like so much of what a book should be and then be trusted so little to discover it for myself.
Night Film, Marisha Pessl [****]
I really liked this strange and twisty book, half detective novel and half horror story: a famously reclusive horror movie director’s daughter commits suicide, and a reporter thinks there’s more to it than that. It’s a fun book, full of multimedia textual interventions (I guess? It’s the term I used—let me know if you have a better one): news articles and website print outs are scattered through the narrative, leading my father (who glanced at the book as I read it while visiting him) to complain that it was “the same as fake news—how do I know that photo isn’t of a real person?”
This book is, assuredly, fiction, but it does have the same appeal as a good internet conspiracy theory: just close enough to the surface of reality to be spine-tingling, to get your mind racing. I am not a horror movie buff, but I assume the draw is the same there, as well—the possibility of it all is what’s terrifying at its heart. Reading Night Film, I was drawn into the novel’s world enough to start believing that there, anything might be true. Even with a slightly dissatisfying ending (no spoilers!), the visceral fun of reading it—to be scared by a book, a thing you can hold in your hands, is somehow fascinating to me—was more than worth the price of admission.
Evvie Drake Starts Over, Linda Holmes [***]
A sweet and distinctly not-sappy romance, this story of slow-growing trust and healing between a grieving widow and a pitcher with the yips (great conceit for a character, see also The Art of Fielding) had a lot of things I love: coastal Maine setting, baseball talk, a sojourn to a very well-depicted Somerville, MA. It also had sharp dialogue (maybe too sharp, edging towards the -TV version of “reality,”) and very real-feeling characters, motivations, and decisions. And, weirdly, a lot of that ended up being this book’s downside for me: a love story so calm and realistically drawn that I didn’t realize until it was over that I’d missed out on that heart-swooping feeling I get when a love story sacrifices some realism for the satisfying ache of good old wish fulfillment.
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