October: the audience in the air
I completed my 100 book goal this month, which is two months ahead of last year’s dash to the finish line. I think that I finished sooner (or read faster) this year in part because of this newsletter, which formed a kind of implicit promise to myself to read enough books each month that it was worth writing up a whole email about them. So thank you all for being the audience that I worried about producing content for!
Thank you all also, in general, for being an audience. I don’t belong to any book clubs, and I no longer sit around a seminar table for a few hours a week trying to say smart things about what I read; this is the place now where I dive back into books, where I get to dwell for a little longer in the worlds that they contain. I consume so many books silently that it can be easy to forget what it feels like to have somewhere to put all of your thoughts and feelings about them—there’s a reason that the Harry Potter craze was so many people’s introduction to the internet and the fan communities it contains. When you love something, you want to talk about it.
(Sometimes, you want to talk about it so much that you insist on talking about it over the phone with your best friend in ninth grade, despite the fact that she has told you many times that she could not possibly care less about Lord of the Rings, waxing poetic about Aragorn [let’s be honest: Legolas] for so long that she finally puts her end of the phone down and walks away and you realize, ten minutes later, that you are talking to air.)
As an adult who has learned a few social graces since then, I of course have real-life people to talk about books with—my boyfriend and best friends, my parents and cousins—people who also love Wilkie Collins and Sally Rooney and the delicious mess that is Bad Blood. But sometimes I read a book that I love, and that love is made bittersweet by the realization that no one—not a single person in my entire real waking life—will ever read or care about the gruesome space-apocalypic necromantic romance-adventure of a book like this month’s Gideon the Ninth. I put that book down, breathing hard, practically mourning the fact that I had to leave its world and narrative. I scoured the internet for fan communities—I even went back to tumblr!—I racked my brains and came up with one friend, who I texted and begged to read it—I read every review of it I could find, the longer the better. But there was no way to re-immerse myself completely in its world; finally, reluctantly, I had to leave.
So thank you, for providing me with a space to return to it, even if only for a few paragraphs. Even if you read the first sentence of that particular review and next! right along. The idea that maybe there is someone on the end of the line, that it’s not just air, is enough: it’s a joy.
October book reviews
[Click each title for a plot summary]
The Trojan War Museum and Other Stories, Ayse Papatya Bucak [***]
As I’ve discussed at length before in this newsletter, I have issues with short stories as a genre, and that struggle returned with this collection. I did like some of the stories quite a bit, particularly "Mysteries of the Mountain South" and "An Ottoman's Arabesque," the first for its character-focused narrative and lovely sense of place, and the second for its unflinching, critical, wondering use of visual art as its centerpiece, almost as a character itself. The best story was the first one, though, “A History of Girls”—a perfect voice, wrenching and unflinching in its youth and honesty and tragedy.
I had a harder time with most of the other stories, which I think became bogged down by their own concepts and devices (the titular story, for instance, I found unbearably repetitive and conceptual, like an overlong artist statement), losing the focus on character or the clarity of writing that made the standouts in this collection so lovely. But to habitual short story-readers, I think I can recommend this book wholeheartedly—the experimentation that was a bridge too far for a tentative reader like me would, I think, be refreshing for someone who already loves this genre and wants to dive further in.
Doxology, Nell Zink [****]
Nell Zink is a strange and challenging writer, one so loath to condescend to her readership that I often feel like she errs on the side of impenetrability: books chock full of lightening-fast jokes and obscure references that you either get or don’t. Which is all to say, I felt lost a lot, or even maybe most, of the time that I spent reading Doxology. But I also didn’t really care, because her writing—as unforgiving as it is—is also gorgeous, smart and immersive. It’s like dunking your head into ice water: a lot to take, and maybe you can’t last long, but damn.
Once I’d waded through the first few chapters of this book, which really take it out of you in the form of a barrage of uber-specific 80s punk scene references, I could mostly breathe enough to take in the good stuff. Zink’s stories are weird and wonderful, simultaneously too bizarre to be real and all the more accurate for their absurdity. Here, she follows a found family from its origins through into the unknown of the post-2016 election world landscape, observing, satirically and almost experimentally, how humans can shape each other and the world.
“I don’t think I get it,” I texted my friend once I’d finished the book. Looking back, now, I think that’s okay—Zink’s questions are too big and weird for an easy conclusion. It’s the confused wondering that matters—as frustrating as it is.
Make it Scream, Make it Burn, Leslie Jamison [****]
A new essay collection by the author of the outstanding The Empathy Exams, and also incidentally my former Modern Poetry TA (a fact that I like to bring up whenever possible, as though it makes me into a published writer too. Once I saw her on the subway and she remembered me, though!). I didn’t like these essays as much as I liked those in The Empathy Exams, which—either because of what they actually are or because of the place I was in my life when I read them—felt groundbreaking and utterly necessary, like I wouldn’t have been a completed person if I’d somehow never discovered them. This collection felt more like a standard personal essay collection, not as breathtaking or heart-grabbing, but still lucid and beautiful and true.
Wayward Son, Rainbow Rowell [***]
A tough book to write about, if only because it is really a half-sketched out sequel to the fun YA Harry Potter takeoff Carry On. If you read and liked Carry On, which is essentially published Potter fanfiction (not a criticism!), then sure, read this second book, in which our hero(es) deal with the aftermath of saving the world—namely, who are we and what do we do now, and also Depression? If you didn’t read Carry On, honestly don’t even bother to read this review; rarely have I read a book so dependent on its predecessor without actually being formally part of a trilogy or duology.
Not only was this book dependent on the preceding novel, it also leaves off at what will be an unconscionable cliffhanger if another book isn’t written to basically finish the story. Rowell tries, here, to make a creative point—she writes an adventure story in reverse, beginning with a sense of purpose fulfilled and building to an ending that is really the opening up of a new quest—which is a cute idea, but makes for frustrating reading. Sure, there is always more adventure waiting in one’s life, etc etc, but I’d also like to read about whether or not they actually save the world, please. I await book three, and hope that a) it comes, and b) it is as solidly, reliably, un-groundbreaking-ly readable as the first two.
Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir [*****]
As this newsletter’s prologue probably makes abundantly clear, I loved this book. Possibly I loved it all the more because I didn’t expect to love it at all—I saw it breathlessly recommended in the same over-the-top language that so often ends up leading to disappointment, or to a sort of "this book has all these cool buzzwords in it and so I'm going to LIKE IT despite whatever half-hearted actual paint-by-numbers content is actually in it" mindless enthusiasm that always surrounds the type of book with a "lesbian necromancers in space"-esque blurb. I was prepared for it to be all concept and very little substance; or for it to have a thin veneer of concept and very little anything.
Happily—thrillingly, delightedly, and honestly almost instantly—I realized that I was wrong, that despite the crackiness of the concept (an indentured space warrior and her mortal enemy, a necromancer princess, must compete against eight other interplanetary teams for immortality) and the Edgy Teen-ness of the language and the over-the-top black edging on the physical pages, this book was going to be good. It was going to be good because of those things. It was going to take care of me; I could sink into enjoying the story; I was safe. This book was confident and competent and crackling with energy, imaginative without being info-dump-y, fun without being pandering—a complicated challenge, a constant discovery, a mystery that sets us down in the dark and slowly lights a few candles, far away. I loved it. Here is a world to come to know, and here is an adventure to whirl us into it.
And—here are characters to lead us through it, bitterly and grudgingly and heartbreakingly. The Dirtbag Teen narration distracts us, so that beneath Gideon's foul mouth and fouler attitude we barely see her big-heartedness, her warmth and longing and love, sneak up on us until it's far too late. I was poleaxed by the emotion in this book, laid out by it. If you are looking for a real, true enemies to friends to ?? book, this is the one. This is how it's done: slowly and meanly, in starts and stops and fits of betrayal and sacrifice, in the midst of a larger plot and story with real stakes, woven into the fabric of that story in thin and shining threads. Just enough to give you something, and to leave you wanting more, and to utterly destroy you.
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, Rachel Monroe [****]
I rarely read nonfiction, but this book—about true crime, and our cultural (and often specifically female) obsession with it—was definitely in my wheelhouse. It was good! It was most of what I want from nonfiction when I do read it, which is stories lurid and interesting enough that they could easily be fictional (see Bad Blood for the best-ever example of this), but also some framing that makes those stories into more than I would get from just, you know, the Wikipedia article.
Here, Monroe managed to simultaneously entertain and critique, which is a difficult but important balance: both to say, these stories are bonkers but also these people are real, and to force us all to take a step back and look at the entertainment value of true-crime within the truly horrifying context of the (injustice-ridden) American criminal justice system. I walked away not ashamed of liking true crime, but ready to consume it more deliberately—a balance mirrored by Monroe herself, who loves true crime as much as any of her readers. It’s great to feel like an author is your companion, not your chastising instructor: a friend, albeit one who helps expand your field of vision.
Ninth House, Leigh Bardugo [****]
I have been looking forward to this book for a few years now, ever since I read a stellar YA duology by this author (Six of Crows, if anyone is looking) and then realized that she was writing adult fantasy set at Yale, among the school’s secret societies. What made this a particularly interesting reading experience was how many of my non-fantasy-reading college friends read it too, because they had (like me) gone to Yale and (unlike me) actually been in secret societies.
Here’s what I can tell you: if you are not a fantasy fan, you will not like this book. Having gone to Yale is not enough. In fact, the glut of uber-specific references to falafel restaurants and frat-dwelling streets was sort of off-putting, like the reverse of suspended disbelief—a constant reminder, in a story about magic, that actually all of this stuff is real and distinctly non-magical. “This is just not good writing,” my friend said, and I said, “Sure—it’s the magic and the adventure that’s the point.” Not that fantasy novels can’t be great works of literature, but honestly, the standards are—or at least the point is—different.
The fantasy elements of this story were, for me—a consummate fantasy fan—enough. This is a gruesome and often actively horrifying book, definitely adult and not YA fantasy, but I was enthralled by the mystery at the center of all of it, and by the mostly-well-built magic system, and by the way Bardugo turned magic into a metaphor for power—something at once awe-inspiring and ugly, and too often cruel.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk [*****]
A wintry book in many ways, both literally—the Polish countryside in ice and snow—and metaphorically, as the woman it revolves around, our narrator, is eerie and prickly and hard to love. Exploring the book’s mystery through her point of view is strange and fantastic: she assigns motivations to animals and import to astrological signs, she creates her own names for each person in her small town, she complains about ill-defined ailments and watches over broken-down houses. To be so close to someone, to see the world the same way that they see it, and to realize that in real life you would shy from them—they would be offputting, weird, aggressive—is moving. This book felt like a chance to see the world anew, to have it melt and watch new struggling shoots, tender and ugly and hopeful, emerge.
I’ve met my 100 book goal, but these newsletters (and, obviously, my monthly reading) are not done! If you want to follow along with what comes next, or if you know someone who might, you can sign up for free right here: