Seven books this month, which is still slightly off pace but not terrible for a month of craziness at work (I like to describe my job as “keeping 300 teenagers alive,” knock on wood, two more days of this summer’s program, please stay alive) and the kind of bone-melting heat that makes even the act of holding a book feel gross and sweaty.
As always, scroll down for the actual reviews, but for those of you who like to listen to the chatty preamble on podcasts—a reader question this month from longtime subscriber Gabriel, who asks,
“Cokey can you do a special about how you choose what books to read”
“like where do u go looking for books to read”
[this question was submitted via group text].
I thought about this for a while and decided the answer is mostly that I browse habitually; it sounds very cutesy and gross but one of my favorite things about my relationship is how fundamentally my boyfriend and I agree that a good date is just standing next to each other in a bookstore, staring at a display of New Releases and trying to see which of us can guess what book the other would read first. My job change has been largely great, but I mourn the loss of the Cambridge Public Library’s main branch right across the street, where I spent long lunch breaks thumbing through interesting-looking books on the staff picks table (and, in a confluence of things I love, twice ran into my father doing the same thing).
Which is all to say—I like to be around books; I like to be surrounded by them and by all the possibilities they hold. In a similar vein, I like to surround myself with Instagram accounts about books, with the best-of-the-year lists that every magazine and cultural website present every December, with friends’ recommendations and the other five-star reviews of Goodreads reviewers I agree with. The more I am with books—and thoughts about books— the more opportunity there is for something to catch my eye (I do love a bold and graphic cover), and then my interest.
When it does, I add it to a list (I personally like the scan-to-list feature on the Goodreads app, check it out!), and then whenever I don’t know what to read next I open that list and just start bulk requesting books from the library. I also like the book-surrounding that happens when I have a small but not insignificant percentage of the local library branch towering next to my bed.
I picked four books up from the library today—two I read on a list of recommendations for fantasy fans by an extremely picky Goodreads reviewer; one I saw last week at Harvard Bookstore (date night!) and thought looked cool; one came highly recommended by a friend. While there I saw another one on the display table that I added to the pile. Five books. That’s pretty much how it works.
As for what types of books I choose to read (possibly the actual question being asked, oops), I cover that in my substack About page. Did you know that existed? Now you do!
On a very different note, some important news: I’m definitely not the first person to discover this (thanks to many friends for sending it my way), but I would like to claim some credit for hopping early onto the apparently-picking up steam-Delia Owens backlash bandwagon. That link is crawling with spoilers, but you shouldn’t read the book anyway, so I recommend you click through regardless for more evidence of her book’s weird racism and some totally bonkers context for its murder plot.
July book reviews
[Click each title for a plot summary]
Golden State, Ben H. Winters [***]
I thought that this book was a pretty engaging noir/speculative fiction mashup about a California nation-state become authoritarian dystopia in its post-truth, post-Trump reactionary throes. If that sounds like A Lot, it is, but the book was surprisingly light—maybe even too light, as the central mystery plot never quite strayed far enough from its boilerplate beginnings delve satisfyingly into the potential messiness, the imperfectly sketchy edges, of Winters’s imagined world. This would be fantastic re-imagined—and, crucially, expanded—as a TV series.
The Disorderly Knights, Dorothy Dunnett [*****]
As I might have mentioned last month, this is the book where Dunnett’s historical fiction series about the invented, reluctantly heroic Francis of Lymond really takes off: in this, the third novel in the series, her plots go from high-stakes romps to heart-wrenching puzzles of good and evil and what it is that we must sacrifice to be considered either.
The shift would be jarring, but Dunnett’s masterful historical details—Malta! the Crusades! Sieges and duels!—and generous humor are there from prior books, and they carry you through the sacrifice and loss that appear so suddenly in this one and leave you, wrung out and aching, reaching desperately for the next book. Any of the tedium of the early books is gone: each time, by the end of this one, I am no longer parsing sentences or trying to remember names. I am only searching, frantic, for the next glimpse of Lymond’s secret self, the heart Dunnett is slowly revealing at the core of him.
The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky, Jana Casale [***]
I felt bizarrely anxious the entire time I read this book, claustrophobic and itchy, as though Casale had trapped me in a telling of my life that I didn’t like at all. Partly, this deserves kudos—I think that, in the first half of this narrative of a woman’s life (that’s it, that’s the book), Casale captures some truths that are so deep they feel shakingly intimate. But the anxiety I felt didn’t come from being too exposed. It came instead, I eventually realized, from the bizarre experience of reading a book that knew so much about what it means to be a (contemporary, straight, white) woman but whose central character never had female friends; never looked with anything but jealousy and spite at the women around her; never experienced any kind of love except that of family and men.
How can you write a book about what it means to be a woman and not talk about female friendship? No wonder I wanted to jump out of my skin reading this; what a waking nightmare.
Lost and Wanted, Nell Freudenberger [****]
A lovely antidote to Casale’s barren vision of womanhood, this is the story—or perhaps the post-mortem—of a best-friendship that has faded but lingered, as so many best-friendships do. I enjoyed the plot of this novel (a gift from friend-and-reader-and-publishing-professional Nick, who accidentally sent me what turned out to be my first ever Large Print Version of a novel), what there was of it, but what I really liked about it (selfishly!) was its setting, in the Cambridge (and, a bit, the Harvard) that I know as home. It’s always nice to read a very good depiction of a place that’s yours. To have that on top of a story that acknowledged how female friendships can be as significant and as heartbreaking as romantic relationships was, again—lovely.
The Age of Light, Whitney Scharer [**]
It seems like you could write a book about a woman entering the circle of the Surrealists in 1930s Paris and make it a lot more interesting than this book.
I could end this review there, honestly—this was historical fiction in the uber-marketable style of The Paris Wife but without any of that book’s charm, overloaded with romance and dragged down by dark hints at a future for its central character (later traumatized as a WWII war photographer) that was then never actually fleshed out. That version of the book, hinted at but unwritten, would have been more significant; this book, afraid to be too dark, was also unwilling to really take joy in the strange art and stranger artists it described, to write them as weirdly and wonderfully as they would have no doubt written themselves.
Rabbits for Food, Binnie Kirshenbaum [****]
This, a book about a woman sunk into the morass of Major Depressive Disorder, was funnier and warmer than I would have (maybe unfairly) guessed it could be. As odd and unforgiving as its protagonist, it was also equally easy to root for—despite the darkness and the mess, you just like her. I thought the plot started to disintegrate a little bit as the narrative moved, in the second half, into an inpatient mental hospital: it started to feel a little reminiscent of every other book about mental hospitals out there, the quirky patients and their unlikely bonds. But the first half, when we are stuck in Bunny’s apartment with her—and in her pained, sharp, grieving mind—was brilliant.
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn [*****]
Recommended to me by a friend whose favorite author is Vladimir Nabokov, which makes sense, because this book is extremely Nabokovian—as my friend herself put it, “I love that it’s both gross and beautiful #lolita”. But it’s not just the gross-ness (gore and human evil abound) or the beauty (awe and wonder, the too-much love of families) that makes this book read like another Nabokov work: it’s the prose, its complexity and love of language, the delight it takes in describing and in flaying open.
The story of a family of purposefully-mutated circus performers, this was written in 1989, and I had the consistent and uncomfortable sense as I read it that its politics of the body, of disability and deformity, would not fly today. Which is too bad, because I think (as someone without any physical disabilities) that under the (purposefully!) uncomfortable language lies an important, unsettling exploration of what it means to be normal, to be different, and to choose to love the person that you are.
For all of this book’s gore and horror, for all it explores the worst that people can be and do to each other, it ultimately presents a shiveringly joyful view of what it means to love and to be alive—encompassed in one of the best final lines I’ve ever read, one that took off roaring, leaving me in awed disarray in its wake.