Reading, Writing, and Me

Tilt  by Emma Pattee Overview: Annie is standing in the crib section of the Ikea warehouse when the big earthquake hits. It destroys the city around her. She has no purse, no phone, no car, and she's about to have a baby any day. The novel follows Annie as she attempts to reconnect with her husband who is on the other side of Portland. She learns about herself, disaster, the bonds you can quickly form with others, and her altered perspective on motherhood. Overall: 4.5 Characters: 5  Annie is an interesting character, somewhat filtered by the idea that she's telling the book not as a running inner monologue but in speaking to her unborn child. An unborn child she, admittedly, has mixed feelings about. Annie is an artist who never got to fully realize her dreams despite throwing herself headfirst into them. She feels backed into a corner by life, and suddenly, the earthquake cracks her world open and makes her reevaluate. Annie is not in a very happy spot at the beginning of th...

On The Calculation of Volume I  by Solvej Balle translated by Barbara J. Haveland Overview: Tara is stuck in a time loop. More precisely, she's stuck in November 18. It's not a true Groundhog Day because, while those around her reset, Tara does not. The burn on her hand from the first November 18 stays with her and heals through the successive November 18ths. Some items stay with her, are consumed across the same days repeated. Others disappear. As the book chronicles her year stuck in the time loop, Tara experiments with different approaches to living the same day over and over and tries to figure out the rules of the rip in space/time she's fallen through. Overall: 4  Characters: 4 There's not much to say for the characters here. Despite living intimately with Tara, we don't know her all that much beyond the confines of her predicament, which becomes her sole focus. We know she has a solid marriage to Thomas and that she moved to France from Denmark as a student. ...

This has been a slow reading summer for me. Perhaps, somewhat, a backlash to the fact that I spent all of winter reading and writing without doing much else. Summer has been about the else—work, parties, random fun, swimming. I've read a little. In June, I finished re-reading  Conversations with Friends , started re-reading Normal People , and listened to Kate McKean's book, Write Through It . I'd subscribed to her newsletter for a long time, so it was exciting to see the finished project of the book. Since I've spent nearly a decade in the online literary world, I didn't find anything mind-blowing there, but it's a great primer for new writers to condense a lot of good information into one place. In July, just like I made a concerted effort to start running again, I put thought into reading and writing. In June and early July, I'd been plagued by horrible writer's block. The book that I'd done five drafts of still wasn't working for some inexpli...

Sorry I've abandoned you all for the summer! I'll talk more about it in my July wrap-up, but I wanted to just put that out there. I've posted a few reviews that I've had ready to go for months when I can remember to. I've definitely dropped the ball, but thank you all for continuing to read my posts and share them with your friends through this time. I've been book blogging since 2017, so I'm trying to give myself the grace that taking breaks when I'm not feeling it is how this blog has stayed alive so long.  Today, we're playing a new game. I'm bringing a habit I have after library trips to the blog. I find it hard to really figure out if I'm going to like the book at the library. If I have a ton of time, I'll bring a stack to the couch and read the first few pages of a book to decide if I want to take it home, but usually, I'm rushing through, tossing familiar or interesting looking books in my tote to sift through later. I'll s...

Common Decency  by Susannah Dickey Overview: Lily and  Siobhán live in the same Belfast apartment complex. Lily works in the hospital gift shop and volunteers for the cancer charity nearby to pass the time. She's struggling to navigate the world without  her mom, who was also her best friend.  Siobhán has bounced through a few apartments and from working in a hotel to finally landing a coveted teaching position. While she's learning how to manage a classroom of kids, she's also navigating an affair with a married man. Lily escalates their relationship beyond neighbors when stalkerish tendencies arise and she becomes desperate to get closer to  Siobhán. Overall: 3 Characters: 3  Here's the fundamental problem with the book. It's a dual narrative where both voices sound the same. Not just the same generic voice—no. The same extremely hyper-specific voice that utilizes the world's strangest vocabulary words shoehorned in left and right. While this would've sti...

Perfection  by Vincenzo Latronico translated by Sophie Hughes  Overview: Anna and Tom moved to Berlin to work their remote design jobs acquired through their childhoods spent navigating the burgeoning internet. They have a relatively perfect life, a nice apartment, a serviceable group of friends. But there's something still dull about their lives, and all the fellow expats in their lives eventually move on. So they start to move around too, chasing different, more than they have. The pursuit of perfection will ultimately rip up their lives. Overall: 4 I don't feel like I can write a typical review for this bite-sized novel. It's only 125 pages with a scaled back type-set and font on the bigger side. I easily read it in a day without trying all that hard. It was the perfect book to get back into reading after a long gap, but the opening did almost make me put it down. The first prelude spends pages describing the apartment in a great degree of detail, and I had to flip a few...

Dear Dickhead  by Virginie Despentes (translated by Frank Wynne) Overview: Oscar and Rebecca are two (potentially) fading stars who've brushed with major fame, names known by the French press. Oscar is a successful novelist who's just released his third book. Rebecca is an actress facing what it means to age in the sexist world of cinema. They both grew up together, living in working class neighborhoods when fame seemed very far away, and after an unfortunate social media post from Oscar, they connect again over email. Charting the COVID pandemic in Paris via email, this is a fascinating novel that takes on feminism, Me Too—in the moment and in retrospect—aging, sobriety, fame, and a global pandemic. Overall: 4 Characters: 4  These characters are tough. Not really the kind that you fall in love with. But interesting, nonetheless, whether you agree with all of their opinions or not. While Oscar begins the book reeling from being accused of sexual harassment by an online feminis...

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...