Reading, Writing, and Me

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 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 depression which became worse after the sudden death of her mom....

I will admit, I was not on my book blogging game this summer. Really, this year overall hasn't been my strongest when it comes to my blogging or reading life. I read a fair bit over the winter, got to have fun visiting bookshops in New York in the spring, and got in a few good library hauls over the summer, but I knew that this was my last summer in my hometown, and I wanted to spend every possible second with my friends and family. That meant reading fell by the wayside, and even though I've had reviews collecting dust on here for months, I rarely thought to actually post them! Which is 100% on me because I couldn't take the last step to publish the work I'd already done. Thank you all for keeping the blog active and afloat with how much you've dug into the back catalog. It's so much fun to see what posts you all like most. Now that my life is structured around school (and school that will require plenty of reading at that), I'm hoping I'll be much more...

The Mess We're In  by Annie McManus Overview: Orla moves from Dublin to London, into a house with a school friend and the friend's brother's band. This creates a lively environment for her to get used to a new city and a helpful in as Orla attempts to build a career in music. Back home, her family is crumbling, and Orla struggles to find her footing when the home base she's always known isn't waiting for her anymore. Overall: 3 Characters: 2  All of these characters are ideas of people, but they're never elevated to have any animating force. Orla and the book's biggest problem is that she has almost no agency. Everything happens to Orla without her input and the most she ever reacts is to get a bit mad and wound up. She doesn't express much depth of feeling and seems generally indifferent to her life. She often loses her memory to capacious amounts of drugs, and while some fairly traumatic things happen because of this, she doesn't seem bothered in t...

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...