Reading, Writing, and Me

The Coin  by Yasmin Zaher Overview: The narrator arrives in New York City with a curated designer wardrobe and her mother's Birkin bag to teach at an all boys charter school for promising underprivileged children. The narrator recounts her first eight months in New York after her lover convinces her to move from Palestine to America while on a trip together in Cuba. The novel follows her eccentric teaching practices, the middle schoolers she teaches, and the bond that she forms with a homeless man who takes a liking to her Burberry trench coat. This is a novel of a young woman's undoing that scratched a somewhat similar itch to My Year of Rest and Relaxation  in a new tone. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 3 The narrator takes all the oxygen in the novel. It's a very close first person, and she has a very big personality. Everyone who comes into her life is a side event, therefore, her perspective doesn't leave much room for their development. Unfortunately, there isn't muc...

I went to New York City to see A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM, spend time with my grandmother, and see as many bookstores as I could plausibly drag her to way back at the start of March. That meant doing way more book shopping than I should be months before an international move... I've discussed my impression of all the stores in a previous post, but I thought I'd recap what I bought at each. I will say, since I'd only traveled there with an oversized backpack and also bought clothes and brought way too many pairs of shoes to start with, my guiding principle was "pick slim, light paperbacks that would be easy to pack". I only caved on one hardcover in the end, so I'm pretty impressed. Also, my grandmother bought the copy of White Teeth  I'd contemplated purchasing and promised she'd send it to me when she was done, so hopefully, I end up with one more book from this trip one of these days.  It turns out the unintentional theme was French translation...

Crush  by Ada Calhoun Overview: Unnamed narrator is invited by her husband to start kissing other men. He sells this as opening their marriage in a way that's sexy to him and more fulfilling to her, since she loves kissing and he's never been all that into it. Really, it seems like a bandaid to assuage his feelings about an affair years ago and an excuse for him to eventually start dating other women again too. Instead of giving up on the marriage, she takes him up on this, falls in love with an old friend she reconnects with, and struggles with the entire concept of polyamory, a relationship structure she wanted nothing to do with. While she knows her marriage is basically over, she doesn't want her son to be a child of divorce, so she's willing to try anything. Overall: 3 Characters: 2 I just don't understand this woman... Most women stay in marriages they're unhappy in because they became stay at home mothers and have no prospects of making an income that wou...

Liquid  by Mariam Rahmani Overview: Liquid 's narrator decides to test out the joke we've all made at one time or another. "All my problems would be solved if I married rich." After struggling to get a foothold in academia or a book deal after graduating from UCLA's PhD program, the narrator decides that marrying rich is the only way to both solve her problems and get ahead. So in the summer of her unemployment, she breaks out a spreadsheet and starts a new project. You can't marry rich without dating, and you need a large sample size to find a match, so she sets out to go on 100 dates, multiple per day, in her study period. Alongside this, there's the tension with her longtime best friend Adam and a diversion to Iran when her father has a heart attack. Liquid  sets out to answer the fundamental question we're all faced with: how do we adult under these conditions?  Overall: 4.25 Characters: 5  The character construction here is the masterwork of the n...

I don't want to talk about March... I had so much discipline in February, and it all went out the window this month. I started strong, on a whirlwind 3 day trip to New York City and then came back so tired that I let everything fall by the wayside for the rest of the month. I had taken the app timers off my phone for the trip, and I never put them back on, so I had unfettered Instagram and Internet access all month. I spent more of my time scrolling through the r/Broadway thread than I want to admit. I felt a little nauseous when my screen time report popped up with over 7 hours for last week. Doing kind things for my body went right out the window with the phone usage, losing all my discipline from February. Needless to say, the reading aspect of my life also could've gone better.  The one thing I will defend myself on is that I always struggle to read other fiction while I'm editing my own, and I spent March editing the draft I wrote in February. I've been making myse...

We Could Be Funny  by Emily Austin TW: this whole book is about a suicide attempt and the aftermath Overview: The first half of the book chronicles twenty-one labeled attempts at writing a suicide note. Sigrid is grappling with why she has to die and establishing she is the most unreliable of narrators. Some of these notes are addressed to her sister, Margit. Others are to her former best friend Greta. Even when she isn't directly writing to them, you get the sense they are the intended audience. Sigrid is very paranoid about not making the note too much of a downer, and surprisingly, for a book about suicide, the humor, sarcasm, and snark are defining features as well as a wistful view of childhood. I'd tell you what happens in the second half, but that would give away some of the major twists and turns. Overall: 4 Characters: 4  Sigrid copes with humor. That's immediately obvious. The beginning of the book establishes Sigrid's voice through the letters as well as her ...