Reading Roundup: June 2023

Ex-wife by Ursula Parrott. The Chicago-loving musical theater nerd in my heart adored this novel, which was originally published anonymously in 1929. The (illegal!) booze, the nightlife, the fashion, the scintillating glamour of being a young pretty divorced woman with a sexy roommate and a fleet of suitors, the existential malaise of same. I underlined a great many zingers as Patricia and her sophisticated set exchange witticisms, and bracketed some simply stunning passages describing the beauty of New York in different seasons. What surprised me most was how modern the book felt; perhaps the narrator’s louche behavior as she mourns her marriage was meant to shock or titillate in her own time, but truly, being young and broken-hearted has not changed very much.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang. I couldn’t put this down–I simply had to find out how the narrator was going to dig herself out of the ever-deepening hole she created by stealing the unpublished manuscript of a star novelist who died tragically young. The star novelist is Asian and the narrator is white, but the narrator is positioned as an authority on Chinese history and frequently mistaken for Chinese as she makes publicity rounds for the book. I use the passive voice there because, while the book is deliciously clear that the narrator is performing a kind of cultural violence (even if the narrator herself is not clear on this), it’s just as clear how culpable the publishing industry is in creating these monsters–both the monstrous fame of the dead novelist and the monstrous appropriation of the narrator. This book is terrifying detailed about book PR cycles and social media outrage cycles; practically every literary scandal I’ve ever tweeted about or shared to my writers’ Discord–plagiarism, racism, microaggressions, Bad Art Friends, etc.–made an appearance in these pages. It’s enjoyably dishy without letting anyone–reader included–off the hook.

Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu. Short, strange, haunting stories about loss, missed opportunities, dystopian workplaces, and the ways the people we love most hurt us most. Mostly.

Semiosis by Sue Burke. Let me tell you, this was a weird book to have been reading the weekend I walked across a cedar swamp that was covered–covered!!–in carnivorous plants. In this book, humans fleeing Earth have landed on a planet where plantlife is even more sentient and opportunistic than the flora we know. Plants communicate (with humans, as well as each other), domesticate animals (and humans), and adapt and evolve rapidly. But humans adapt and evolve rapidly too: each chapter is narrated by a different character, usually from successive generations–so, the narrator from chapter 2 is from the second generation of settlers, and so forth–and the generations differ so much in norms and culture than it sometimes takes a minute to catch on to what has changed between chapters. It makes for slow reading, but it’s worthwhile to see a speculative novel that considers how heterogenous and rapidly mutating human experience can be.

Finna by Nino Cipri is a breezy, charming novella that takes the age-old question “Will my relationship survive this trip to IKEA?” and adds “…when every IKEA in the multiverse is actively trying to eat you alive?”

Some short poems and prose I loved:
Simulation Theory by Leigh Stein
Daisies by Marne Litfin
A Sex Fantasy Before I Fall Asleep Next to My Husband by Elisa Faison
Mistake by Heather Christle
Red by Mary Ruefle

For Publishers Weekly, I read Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls by Kai Cheng Thom and The Boy from Kyiv: Alexei Ratmansky’s Life in Ballet by Marina Harss. You can read reviews I collaborated on for As Figs in Autumn and Falling Back in Love with Being Human. And that’s a wrap for me on PW reviewing for now! I’m dialing back to focus on other projects.

Elsewhere

Related to the above, courtesy of Daniel Lavery’s new jawn: All the Food in Ursula Parrott’s 1929 Novel “Ex-Wife” and Whether I Would Eat It

Oh, I love this: New Buffalo sculpture honors Lucille Clifton: ‘One of the most important poets of the 20th century’

Minutiae

I enrolled in a course about regional field ecology, so my weekends have been incredible.
I explored the nine different vegetation zones of a protected barrier island–what the Jersey Shore would look like if it wasn’t developed–from the beach and grassy dunes to the dense thicket to the towering maritime forest and through to the salt marsh and bayshore on the other side. I wrote about it–and will post my field reports for others as I get through them.
My shoulders were sore for days from kayaking in the Pine Barrens. The Batsto River was very low from our dry spring, so we felt every fallen branch in the water–and there were many, since there had been wildfires; the scaly pine trunks were blackened in some areas.
I discovered on top of Mount Holly that poison ivy can climb up trees and so I needed to look up as well as down when watching the trail. (I discovered this using an app on my phone that scans plants, fortunately, not through contact.) I took a million photos of butterflies, bees, and dragonflies flitting around the meadow at Rancocas State Park, and visited 100-year-old graves in a 200-year-old community founded by free Blacks, Timbuctoo.
Thunderstorms were forecast the day we were supposed to go to Ringing Rocks, so instead we went to Wissahickon Valley Park (not so far away) and explored the meadow and slope forests there. We picked blackberries off the vine and breathed in the fragrance of milkweed, which was blooming purply and profusely.

I went to a wedding with my gentleman–probably the first wedding at which I did not dance, but only because dancing wasn’t really going on and also because other things were going on like jumping on a trampoline and swimming in a slow-moving creek. We spent the night in a tent along the river and woke to a cacophony of birds.

The hottest club in Philadelphia was the bat walk I went on with a dear friend, before he moved away at the end of the month. I did not get any good photos, but we learned a lot about bats and saw about six individual bats–maybe two of the four local species–swooping and diving after mosquitos. Each and every time, one of the bat spotters would yell BAT and the entire group (around 50 people) would sigh ohhhh all at once, gazing skyward.
I was supposed to go on a firefly walk, too, but that got canceled due to poor air quality from wildfire smoke (relevant climate links to come, obviously). On one of the weekends we didn’t have AQI warnings, I went to Doylestown and New Hope to spend a day with my writing group; we brunched and then spent the rest of the afternoon idly eating cherries and reading tarot cards, interspersed with furious writing (and being furiously licked by our host’s big dogs). I got home in time to stop by the bon voyage party for another friend who is moving away.

I saw Across the Spiderverse which is INCREDIBLE, even more so than the first, which was already amazing. I got a weird whim to replay Fallout 4, and then I started watching Silo, so it’s been a post-apocalyptic shelter summer. But I mostly read and worked during my evenings rather than looked at screens; I particularly loved this on evenings when I could have my windows and doors open, enjoying the movement of air and wind chimes. I hope to continue making space for those tranquil reading periods even though my AC is on and I finally replaced my failing old TV with one that shows color.