Reading Roundup: October 2023

I got over last month’s reader’s block, it would seem!

The Guest by Emma Cline. I drank this book down in a day–partly because it was a deceptively easy read, drifting effortlessly from one word to the next the way its protagonist drifts from house to house, skating over unpleasantness in a painkiller haze. Partly because she is constantly skirting dangerous situations during her tense week of homelessness after being ejected from her lover’s home, waiting for the Labor Day party where she is certain she will reunite with him. This book made me think of the TV series Revenge–a soapy, suspenseful show which both rebukes and luxuriates in the trappings of wealth–and the movie Hustlers, albeit without the humor of the latter. You want the interloper to win.

Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell. A slim, lovely book that I picked from the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction shortlist; it has since been awarded the prize! It is a collection of interrelated stories with a few different narrators, a format which I somewhat struggle with–it reminded me of Semiosis in that way, where the changing narrators were necessary to follow a multigenerational story of a community, but in each chapter you have to get your bearings all over again. The story begins a few decades in our future, as a university library on the Canadian west coast is dismantled in the face of constant rain and floats. Some of the books travel to an island community on the Salish Sea, and the rest of the chapters chart the survival of this community over several generations as they relearn permaculture and struggle to stave off wildfire and floods. Each story is grounded in the geographical and ecological specificity of this region, which offers some lifesaving opportunities but also isolates the island from other regions. (Eventually, we learn that other communities solved their local climate crises differently, with technological advancement rather than organic tools.) It is a melancholy book, as its characters tend to mourn a way of life they cannot return to and resent the amount of energy that must be sunk into survival. Yet it is also hopeful–more hopeful than The New Wilderness, which is also interested in the hardship of survival. Communities shrink but endure, impart communal values and ethics, take pains to preserve music and poetry when possible.

Blue Skies by T.C. Boyle. I don’t typically read two climate fiction titles back to back–I need a break, usually–and you all know I don’t prioritize reading male authors. But I encountered a gorgeous, wrenching short story by Boyle last spring (“Chicxulub”) and was interested in how he would make narrative sense of the climate crisis. Like the short story, this novel focuses on the details of the lives of one particular family; the chapters are alternately narrated by a lonely, self-absorbed young woman, her entomologist brother, and their well-meaning but deeply bourgeois mother. Their story begins sometime around now or in a not-too-distant future, and encompasses a decade or more of marriages, births, deaths, loss of limbs, terrifying wildfires, and demolishing floods. Like the short story I loved, there’s a great deal of beauty in the novel’s closely observed human behavior as well as its gorgeous, occasionally astonishing prose. I think I may need to reread this book just for its vocabulary of natural disasters, which never once borrows a well-worn turn of phrase–the wind never howls, the fires never rage–instead finding utterly distinct and terrifying new language for increasingly frequent and deadly events. I also appreciate that the crises that befall this family are about half due to the climate, half due to their own human mistakes, although one is frequently tied to the other. Much to admire… and yet, this book is hard to love, with its short-sighted and frequently selfish narrators. The character Catherine in particular feels conceived to punish a certain type of young woman, which left a tinny taste in my mind.

Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest To Track Down The Last Remaining Lesbian Bars In America by Krista Burton. This book was my treat and comic relief after a couple of heavy reads. I cannot believe there are only 20 remaining lesbian bars in the entire US of A, but here they are, catalogued in one of the only travelogues I will ever read willingly and joyfully. So it is a bittersweet book, in some ways–I still miss Sisters, the legendary lesbian bar in Philadelphia that closed quite a few years ago, and I had no idea that the Madison Flame in Memphis had shut its doors. The author asks patrons and bar owners in every city she visits why they think so many lesbian bars are closing. There are a few prevailing theories, no clear answers–and, slight spoiler, by the end of her journey the author realizes that new lesbian bars are opening, so the institution (such as it is) is not yet in danger of extinction. In the meantime, those currently standing got a loving, attentive tribute in this book, complete with a dash of local color, a snapshot of post-vax music and fashion, some charmingly self-deprecating fish-out-of-water scenes, and a lot of lovely paeans to the ways lesbian bars can help everyone feel at home.

Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig. I was several chapters in before I realized that this historical novel was based on the same historical figure as Susan/Zheng Yi Sao, one of the best new characters on season 2 of Our Flag Means Death! Called Shek Yeung in this novel, this pirate queen is practical, humane to her fellow sailors. The prose is a bit dry, perhaps matching Shek Yeung’s unflappable exterior, but the chapters are short and packed with delicious detail, so the pages flew by.

Meet Us by the Roaring Sea by Akil Kumarasamy is another Ursula K. Le Guin shortlist book. I would classify it as a fragmented novel, that episodic form that suits novels of grief and heartbreak so well, and this novel is heavy with the narrator’s loss of her mother and alienation from her life and choices (her chapters are even narrated in 2nd person, emphasizing her dissociated sense of self). The narrator’s chapters take place in a speculative near future future that we catch only glimpses of–households are taxed on carbon use, the narrator is training a large language model that she suspects is becoming self-aware, self-driving cars killed her childhood friend’s parents–but these are what I would call speculative elements decorating a story that more interested in big ideas. The near-future chapters are interspersed with chapters of a fictional manuscript written during the Sri Lankan civil wars; written in first person plural, these chapters explicit explore different concepts of compassion and suffering. A lovely, occasionally dazzling, melancholy read.

I also started The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron, a book that has been recommended to me a thousand times (c.f. The Morning Pages). It is much more preoccupied with both God and your inner child than I was expecting, so I had some skepticism going in. But I’ve truly enjoyed so many of the exercises, which are dedicated to unpacking some of the baggage I’ve accrued around creativity and creative practice after four decades as a human who must unfortunately work to live. It is a pleasure to give a little space and importance to one’s most whimsical fantasies, and to dig a little into where the resistances are to making time to write. The book prescribes a 12-week course of exercises and reflections, so I’ll be working through it for awhile yet.

I also loved these short poems and prose:
Not This by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Carrying Stones by Andrew Hemmert
Eggshells by Michael Kleber-Diggs

Elsewhere

Intrigued by these writers and thinkers reflecting on the pattern of women in their late thirties and forties experiencing a burst of creativity and ambition: Are you in the portal?

I have a chronic illness which is pretty well-managed now but which wrecked my life when I didn’t have high-quality care. As I’m aging and seeking out medical care for some of the issues that go along with that, I found a lot to relate with in this personal essay: The Favourite Patient

I’m not sure I agree with the author that literary fiction is dead or dying–he cites Amazon’s nonsensical genre categorization twice as evidence, which I agree has some cultural impact but is hardly definitive–but I did appreciate learning about the history of this relatively recent genre! What Was Literary Fiction?

I too was unexpectedly moved by reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an adult and titillated by the literary connections between Stoker, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman–but I also appreciate the movement of this essay toward the literature of evil: When Horror Is the Truth-teller

Oh, how I loved season 2 of Our Flag Means Death–and I loved this interview with the costume designer for the show. Possible spoilers.

Minutiae

The best thing I did for myself this month was take an entire week off to do nothing of any consequence. I read. I gardened. I took a bus to the thrift store to buy more pots. I switched out my cold weather and hot weather clothes. I took a bus to another thrift store to buy more clothes. I cooked a lot. I took myself out to lunch. I unpacked the final five boxes of books that have languished in my closet since my move. I came slightly unplugged from social media and online news. I barely scratched the surface of my to-do list in 9 days, which just goes to show that there aren’t enough hours in a week to run even a household of one. But for the first time in a really long time, I didn’t feel constantly crunched for time.

I did some cute things with friends and loved ones. I went to see a What We Do in the Shadows-themed drag and burlesque show, which was inclusive and positive and hilarious. I had a marvelous tapas meal on the sidewalk where my friend and I could see all the neighborhood dogs approach the restaurant for treats. I went on a bat walk that was really more of a bat milling-about; it was scheduled way too early in the day, so we just ambled around in the park, and bats came spinning and diving over the treetops just as we were saying our goodbyes at dusk. I nipped into the Philadelphia Film Festival and saw Fingernails, a slow and sad speculative film that reminded me of Timer and The Lobster. I also took myself out on Artist Dates as prescribed by The Artist’s Way, occasions to practice the art of paying attention and inspire some joy and playfulness: a walk around my favorite park during a water festival, a night market in Chinatown.

At the end of the month a new fall quarter started, and I am TAing the same course I TAed last fall, with an instructor whose style I enjoy and a syllabus I love. TAing requires a lot of time and attention, so I know it will be a hectic 8 weeks; I’m glad I took my time off when I could. But it is a pleasure and a privilege to talk to adults about writing every week; some of them are timid, but all of them are passionate about literature.