Reading, Writing, and Me

Intimacies  by Lucy Caldwell Thoughts: Short story collections are so difficult because they usually end up feeling somewhat unbalanced. There's the blockbuster short stories that necessitate the volume in the first place and then there are stories that feel like they exist to fill space in the book. I think this is part of the problem with selling the general public on short fiction and collections and anthologies (where this feels like an even more pronounced issue). I can say all these harsh things about collections here because Caldwell manages to bypass these pitfalls beautifully in her 2020 collection, Intimacies .  This is a tight collection of eleven stories that all center mothers with young children navigating motherhood and their larger place in the universe. Now, this probably sounds like a strange collection for me in particular to be raving about as it's a topic I find personally sticky and also have no firsthand experience of myself. I didn't honestly know th...

Heart the Lover  by Lily King  Overview: The narrator makes it clear from the outset, she is writing a book, finally, about, in many ways, the one that got away. The first page reads: "You knew I'd write a book about you someday. You said once that I'd dredged up the whole hit parade minus you. I'll never know how you'd tell it. For me it begins here. Like this." The story then travels through three parts—the college years where the narrator meets Yash and the romance begins, a fragment in the middle when she has a young family and her life has turned away from him, and a third part where she's drawn back to him under dark and unfortunate circumstances, not in a romantic way but in a sense that ultimately offers reflective closure. Based on the flap copy that describes how Yash returns to her life "crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decision and deceptions of her youth," I was honestly expecting a very different book. Overall:...

Discontent  by Beatriz Serrano Overview: Marisa has a cushy middle management position in the creative department of a swanky agency. She really doesn't have to do much in her job. This is both great and horrible. Great because Marisa isn't interested in doing much but horrible because this thing that defines her provides no fulfillment as she finds the entire corporate world and everyone in it boring and stupid. Marisa spends the entire novel just hoping to get hit by a bus as she endures the hot August Madrid days going into the office. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 4 I don't disagree with Marisa. I enjoyed her disaffected, snarky voice in general. I did, ultimately, struggle with the fact that she thinks she's so much smarter than everyone else, inherently better than them, but she chooses to continue working at the same horrible company as the rest of them. She's not actually going to do anything about the fact that she hates her life. She's not repulsed enough t...

Sugartown  by Caragh Maxwell Overview: Saoirse leaves London and returns to her hometown in the Midlands of Ireland suddenly. She's twenty-four, has dropped out of her college program and then broke up with her boyfriend who was also her landlord, and has no choice but to go home. She's always struggled with her mental health, and this return home only makes things worse. Saoirse falls into familiar patterns with old friends, drinking heavily and spiraling about her life until one particularly bad night makes her truly reckon with her choices, maybe for the first time. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 Saoirse is headstrong to her own detriment. She's unsure what she wants, but she wants forcefully, creating tension in her life with her family, her friends, her love interest. She's resentful of coming home and of her mother's new rules and new life with her stepdad and three younger sisters that are so much younger that Saoirse hardly knows them. Her best friend Doireann is ...

Oh October, what a whirlwind. I went to three plays, had my parents in town for the week, did tons of assignments as the semester ratcheted up, and went on a number of other social events from the zoo to Halloween. Mixed into all this, I tried to dedicate a massive chunk of my life to both reading and writing since that's what I moved to Ireland to do. I've gotten back into audiobook listening along with podcasts as I've settled into living alone again. I've also gotten into the library hold system, so now I have tons of books coming in with time limits, incentivizing me to read quickly. On top of that, I've read lots of short stories, some for class but mostly for fun.  The Stats In total, I read 13 books with two books I've been reading throughout October that I will be finishing today or tomorrow, making a solid start to my November reading. I read 5 novels (I'm roping Simple Passion in here cause it's more akin to a novel than the other nonfiction bo...

Thirst Trap  by Gráinne O'Hare Overview: Harley, Róise, and Maggie all turn thirty this year. The novel opens as they try to get into a club with a succulent at one of these fabled birthday celebrations. The housemates and best friends are all in the same boat—jobs they don't really love, falling down house, unstable romantic lives, and a relationship to partying that is fueled by their dissatisfaction with life. They're also absorbing an immense amount of grief as the one year anniversary of their fourth friend, Lydia's, passing rolls around. This is the year when they need to make changes, and O'Hare proves with this novel that the coming of age arc is never really over. Overall: 4.5 Characters: 4 I really came to love all of the girls, and I'm impressed at what nuanced, complicated lives O'Hare manages to render on the page for every single character, even Lydia who is no longer physically a part of their narrative. There's messy relationship entangle...

Atavist  by Lydia Millet  Overview: In this collection of short stories, Lydia Millet constructs a Los Angeles neighborhood where each story follows a different neighbor or someone vaguely attached to the neighborhood. The characters show up across each other's stories in surprising ways, filling in a background role where they were once the main character. This creates a rich tapestry and a good reminder of how truly interlinked we all are. Overall: 4.5  Characters: 4 Millet writes about a complex group of characters from many different backgrounds . Some of them are good people trying really hard through bad circumstances. Sometimes they're about awful people who triumph despite it all. There's teenagers and young adults trying to figure out how to be people and parents becoming empty nesters who are thrown back into a similar journey. We only get one point of view story from each character, but they become richer as the collection goes on and they make background appea...

On October 1, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a reading and conversation for Caragh Maxwell's debut novel, Sugartown. I absolutely love attending events at Books Upstairs, and this was made even more interesting by the fact that Maxwell is a graduate of the M.Phil program at Trinity that I'm currently attending. Thusly, many of my professors were in attendance as well, including Eoin McNamee, who was the conversation partner for the evening.  The event began customarily with free wine before McNamee introduced Maxwell to the audience, sharing his story of first hearing Maxwell read a piece in class, knowing she was special. They discussed her extremely successful essay in the Irish Times where she wrote about having cancer in her late teens. This led to heaps of interest in her work, but Maxwell stuck with her degree. That was where Sugartown began to form as her culminating course project. The book received over forty rejections after completion, but just when Maxwel...

On the Clock  by Claire Baglin (Translated by Jordan Stump) Overview: I would classify Claire Baglin's book as a novella as it is quite short. It makes the perfect paperback to carry around with you because it's so slim. It's translated from French by Jordan Stump and chronicles two strands of story. The first is focused on a young adult's job working in fast food for the summer. This is interlaced with her father's story of working in a factory. The book examines how these jobs take advantage of their employees without offering a path to advancement or a way out of the intensely labor focused work. The point being mostly that these jobs will chew you up and spit you out, no matter how much pride and diligence you put into the work, how good you are. And in the disillusionment of that particular myth, it succeeds. Overall: 3.75 Thoughts: My thesis on this book is that it would've been an incredible short story made out of the first thirty or so pages but that st...

Welcome back to the world's most inconsistent monthly series—my wrap-ups! They should get more consistent now that I'm in school and reading is definitionally part of my job. Operative word is should ... Hopefully, they'll also be more interesting because I'll be exploring a wider range of books and texts as I keep expanding my knowledge, doing class readings, and picking up books for fun. I'm currently reading like twelve different things at the moment, and my brain is thriving being stretched in so many ways! I'm using it again! So needless to say, we're forcibly putting an end to the summer reading slump. This month started slow because I had my last week at work where I really prioritized hanging out with everyone and then I moved to an entirely new country and had to settle in, but the ending is promising. I'm also so excited about all the writing I've managed to do in the last week now that I'm no longer scrambling to buy enough household s...

The Wardrobe Department  by Elaine Garvey Overview: Mairéad moved from Ireland to London to work in the wardrobe department of a theater. She rents a room in a shabby house with many other people, she doesn't quite fit with her coworkers and despises the producer of Uncle Vanya, and she spends much of her time feeling out of place. Even her clothes don't fit right. After chronicling a day at the theater in great detail, Mairéad learns her grandmother died, and she has to return to Ireland for the funeral. There, she has to confront awkward family situations and feeling out of place in a different way. Still, the time helps her unearth more information than she had before, and she returns to London with a new energy. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 3 For being a first person novel, Mairéad renders herself somewhat flat on the page. She feels uncomfortable and withdrawn from everyone, but beyond flinching away and being defensive and also chronicling all of the clothing she feels deeply...

Back to school is funny in grad school, or at least in my limited experience of it. My program (an M.Phil in creative writing) is so different than anything I've done before in school when it comes to structure and expectations, but at the same time, I've been doing this school thing for a long time. I've tried to put a lot of thought into the systems I've used before—what worked and what didn't—and adapt them to the needs of this new school endeavor that requires something different than what I've really encountered before.  The way my program is set up, we have classes 3 days a week for about nine hours total. The majority of the time required for the degree is outside of classroom hours. We have to generate a fairly significant amount of creative work (though nowhere near the number of assignments that undergrad requires where you have to regularly turn things in to prove you're paying attention), do a pretty overwhelming amount of reading for each class ...

Disappoint Me  by Nicola Dinan  Overview: Max falls down the stairs at a New Years party, and her life begins to drift in a new direction, away from her break-up with Arthur and her poetry collection and to a phase of life where she learns to love domesticity with her new boyfriend, Vincent. She hits it off immediately with Vincent and then her story begins to descend into the dramas that befall daily life—secrets that eventually come out, health scares, forgiving your parents, etc. By the end of the novel, Max's life is full of questions once again, and she has to decide if she wants to keep running or turn around and face them head on. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 I like Max and her voice. She has that sad girl lit vibe that I tend to eat up (I mean, look at the cover). She works as a lawyer training AI for this online company but has also published a book of poetry and is a part of the queer arts scene in London. She goes through an interesting evolution over the course of the ...

Bitter Sweet  by Hattie Williams thanks to Ballantine for the advanced copy for review purposes. Overview: Charlie has her foot in the publishing world with a cool, indie feeling player of the Big 5 publishers. Even though she's just an assistant, she's rising fast through the ranks, lives in a great townhouse with two of her co-workers and best friends, and her life is truly coming together. Then she meets Richard while on a smoke break from work. He's an author she's idolized, one of her mother's favorites. And he takes an interest in her. The book chronicles their affair and the fallout that follows. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 3 Charlie is well meaning but insecure. She tries hard, but she's also plagued by a sense that she's out of place, not coming from the typical posh background of those in publishing. She's proud of where she's gotten but always looking for external validation. Charlie's always felt like an outsider and long struggled with ...