Reading, Writing, and Me

Black Swans  by Eve Babitz Overview: I don't know how to summarize this collection of stories. I don't think I've ever been so at a loss for summary ideas. This is a collection of essays that purport to be short stories that cover Babitz's life in the eighties and into a bit of the nineties. They cover themes of becoming a writer, rollercoaster relationships, tango, and the fallout of the sixties in LA. Also, there's a fair bit of musing about parking. Overall: 4 Notes:  Where to start... I guess my first major point is that I have no clue why this is shelved in the fiction section. I know she changed some names, but having very recently read Didion & Babitz  I know that many of the details are exactly extracted from Eve's life, and not in a veiled way. Also, the voice in every story is the same. Or, more precisely, the main character, the first person narrator is the same person over and over who happens to be undeniably Eve from every indicator I can tell....

Audition  by Katie Kitamura *preface: the way I've seen this book talked about before interviews sees what happens at the second half of the book as a spoiler. I, personally, don't think you can have a meaningful and honest discussion about what this book does without acknowledging the entire second half, so I'm going to talk about it. You've been warned.* Overview: The actress at the center of the novel is in the middle of a career high in middle age, about to open an incredibly successful play. She lives in a nice apartment with her husband and has a fairly settled, if not boring, life. And then she's approached by a 25ish-year-old man named Xavier at the theater. He wants to know if she could possibly be his biological mother. She explains this is impossible, but Xavier remains in her orbit as the director's assistant and intrigues the actress, making her image if her life had played out differently. In the second half of the book, the script flips and sudden...

Good Girl  by Aria Aber Overview: Nila enters a world of partying and drugs as a young teenager, but it's the year she turns nineteen that she fully immerses herself in the underground techno-club-rave world, sometime in the early 2010s. She escapes the strict rules at home in the Bunker, one of the famous Berlin warehouse techno clubs with a strict door policy. There, she meets an American writer, once famous, named Marlowe. She spends the next year in an electric, dark relationship with him, surrounded by his friend group and ex-girlfriend that define Nila's first adult experiences. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 3  What frustrates me about this book is that it feels like the ending of this novel is the true beginning of Nila's story. When I got to the end, after wondering where the book was heading, I got the distinct impression that I'd read a novel's worth of backstory and got dropped off right at the true turning point. While it could be argued that facing an abusiv...

April was the longest month and then May appeared out of nowhere and has moved at light speed. That's partially owing to the fact that April is the armpit of off-season where winter activities have ended but summer fun and summer jobs haven't started yet and everyone leaves town. I got in a bit more reading than I anticipated in April because my summer job start date kept getting pushed further and further back due to a flooring remodel in our office space that went on longer than anticipated. That was a double edge sword, though, because while I had nothing but time, I wasn't mentally in the best spot. I'd really looked forward to going back to work, so the delay wasn't exactly welcome. I tried to make the best of it, but April is a month that I, emotionally, hope to never return to.  Much like the blah state of my month, the actual books I read also left much to be desired. It was an interesting reading month in the sense that every book was lacking in some fundam...

My Year of Rest and Relaxation  by Ottessa Moshfegh Overview: The narrator is stuck in a period of stasis. She's suppressing the grief from her parents' close together deaths. She's afforded the luxury of not having to do anything by the inheritance they left behind, so when her job at the art gallery feels like a drag, she puts in little effort until she's fired. Her friend is so embroiled in her own problems that there's no one in the narrator's life to keep her in check, and finding a dubious psychiatrist who's willing to medicate her to near death opens up the possibility to unsubscribe from life for a while through pharmaceuticals that send her into deep sleep. The narrator secretly hopes, though, that by the end of the blackouts she will have found a sense of purpose, an idea of life's meaning in her reset black hole. Overall: 4  ReReview Notes: For the last few months, I've wanted to reread My Year of Rest and Relaxation . I owned a copy of th...

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 ...

Dinner Party  by Sarah Gilmartin Overview: Kate's life has been marked by grief. First, her father passed away when she was a young teenager. Then her twin sister died at seventeen. The novel takes on the impact of the grief and her family's sensibilities on Kate from her childhood through middle age. The novel opens and closes with two anniversary dinner parties a year apart. In between, chapters take place in 1999, 2016, and 2018 to build out the full scope of Kate's life and her family. Overall: 4 Characters: 5  All of the characters feel incredibly real, deep, and believable. There's an impressive mastery in creating each character's complexity as a person as well as designating their role in the family. Everyone is much more than how they first appear on paper. I don't often mention trigger warnings in reviews anymore, but I will note that a large part of Kate's arc has to do with developing an eating disorder and an unhealthy relationship with alcohol ...

The first week of March, I took a whirlwind trip with my grandmother to New York City. We both were visiting Brooklyn for the first time, specifically to see A Streetcar Named Desire  at BAM. But, for the two and a half days we were in the city, I wanted to see as many of the amazing bookstores I've seen on Instagram as possible. This, of course, shattered my book buying ban, but for a good cause. I visited stores across three different Brooklyn bookstores and bought a new book at nearly every store. So here's my diary of a bookstore trip.  Fort Greene(ish) The Center For Fiction The Center For Fiction looks as impressive in real life as it does on Instagram with the towering book cases that rise to their extremely high ceilings. It's a sight to behold for any fiction lover. More accessibly, they have a column of staff picks and tables for new fiction (divided by paperback and hardcover) as well as nonfiction. They also, strangely, in my view, have a table of UK editions at...