Reading Roundup: June 2025

Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul. I love a good divorce memoir, and this is a good divorce memoir: funny, emotional, and painfully self-aware. I particularly like how the author complicates the traditional story: she introduces herself to you first as loud, messy, pugnacious, and compulsively oversharing. She introduces her husband the you we might have seen him if you read her previous work: loving, attentive. She introduces the things she feared and wanted when she was in her early twenties, getting involved with an older man. You start to think, this is just an incompatible couple, that’s too bad. THEN she introduces her older partner’s betrayal. All of those things are true: he treated her lovingly and betrayed her, she was a lot and also very young, their differences brought them together and also wedged them apart. But more than the marriage, this is a memoir about family: the ways they love you and fail you, what it feels like to grow estranged and return.

Liquid by Mariam Rahmani. Although very different in subject matter and tone than Trauma Plot, this novel is likewise absolutely brutal about the current state of the English PhD. In this case, the narrator finds herself with no money and no prospects two years after her dissertation, so she decides to marry rich and uses her analytical powers to woo dozens of prospects, male and female, whom she tracks in a spreadsheet. The dates are quite funny and occasionally delicious to read–this is one of the sexiest books I’ve read in a few months, even more so than a book about cruising and nonmonogamy–but this marriage plot is not where the true heart of the book lies. It shifts suddenly halfway through, focusing instead on the narrator’s family, feelings of belonging, and what it takes to make a home.

Dyke (Geology) by Sabrina Imbler. The author had to back out of the retreat I attended this month, but the shop still stocked their books, so I picked up this chapbook-length essay about volcanic geology and heartbreak. A quick, compelling read.

The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard is a book-length essay that reckons with the impossibility of conceptualizing our individual impact on global climate. When we’re thinking on a global scale, the author says, it’s too easy to lose sight of the individual–but the impacts we have on the world are physical, material, and intimately linked to the movements of our bodies. So she settles on imagining global impact as a second body: your first body eats, sleeps, etc. but your second body is in the air above a factory, being breathed in by people halfway around the world. Both bodies are physical and real. This figure of speech allows her to imagine her individual impact on the world in more concrete terms–and then, as she was writing, her house was flooded by a river, bringing her two bodies into one place. I loved this short, thoughtful read and found it very fruitful to think about in some of my own essays.

The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science by Akiko Busch. I picked this up for my local volunteer corps’ reading and discussion group; it’s not a new book, published in 2013, but as I’m relatively new to stewardship, I enjoyed the author’s reflections on the changing environment of the Hudson River valley. I’m particularly glad I took this book with me to my writing retreat in the same part of the world; it was pretty special to read about counting herring and scooping up glass eels in the same river that my train hurtled past. Otherwise, I think I might have found this a sleepy read… it’s lovely, with lots of great imagery, but lacks a certain urgency and depth.

The Teller of Smaller Fortunes by Julie Leong is a lovely, warm fantasy novel–the sort where the setting and characters feel comfortably familiar, but they interact in fresh ways. In particular, this party of adventurers has a more explicit focus on communal support and well-being than your average RPG, and the small fortunes can be as compelling and meaningful as the great fates.

I started Mother River by Can Xue. In this surreal collection of stories, people live in strange landscapes: a farm that grows more stones than bok choy, a city enveloped in smog so that no one can see, a river haunted by an immense, irresistible shadow. But these are not character v. nature plots, at least not so far: whatever the environment is, it is, and the characters must adapt and evolve to suit the landscape rather than vice versa. They’re written in a spare, simple prose style that contributes to the folktale-like feel.

And I finished Ultimatum Orangutan by Khairani Barokka, which turned out to be a really compelling collection. I went through it with a pen and dogeared some of my favorites, including a series of poems called Terjaga that interrogate visions of climate doom that don’t take into account the dooms that have already happened/are already happening. I also really appreciate the way the poet writes about a world not designed for disabled people to move through it. For example, a very short poem title “The World Is Stairs” begins “violence taught as elegance,” which…. fair.

Some short poems and prose I loved:
Listen by Barbara Crooker
This is Milkweed by Ani King
Telephone of the Wind by Eddie Kim
The Refrigerator by Frances Blankenship

Elsewhere

I find this newsletter about career grief rather than career burnout alarmingly relatable.

Love to read a good close reading of a beloved novel, so it was a pleasure read an excerpt of Jennifer Egan’s introduction to Jane Austen’s Emma.

Similarly, I also enjoyed this Garth Greenwell essay that begins by critically reading a passage of another Jane Austen novel (Persuasion) and ends with a highly detailed analysis of a sex scene in a book I have heard too much about to want to read (All Fours). Big content notes apply. But as close readings go, it was funny and gross and sexy and respectfully sensitive, especially toward another writer/critic who took a different view of the same passage (and whose criticism I found persuasive).

Funny and true: Fear of the subway is a mark of low moral character

Always read Jamie Hood on the subject of rape culture and #MeToo backlash. (And anything else, but these topics are urgent.)

I too have a parasocial relationship with Anne Hathaway’s face: I Feel Sad About Anne Hathaway’s Eyebrows

AI in the news:
Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry (The Verge, May 26, 2025)
Authors Are Posting TikToks to Protest AI Use in Writing—and to Prove They Aren’t Doing It (Wired, June 18, 2025)
Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5bn ‘AI’ Startup Exposed as ‘Actually Indians’ Pretending to Be Bots (International Business Times, June 2, 2025)
GenAI is Our Polyester (Culture: An Owner’s Manual, June 3, 2025)
What is vibe coding? A computer scientist explains what it means to have AI write computer code − and what risks that can entail (The Conversation, June 4, 2025)
How Much Energy Does AI Use? The People Who Know Aren’t Saying (Wired, June 19, 2025)
‘Wall-E With a Gun’: Midjourney Generates Videos of Disney Characters Amid Massive Copyright Lawsuit (Wired, June 28, 2025)
Senate drops plan to ban state AI laws (The Verge, July 1, 2025)
The hidden labor that makes AI work (Rest of World, July 1, 2025)

And, as is now the standard, pay special attention to how genAI is used in government services to the detriment of the public:
Government officials are letting AI do their jobs. Badly (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 30, 2025)
DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts (Propublica, June 6, 2025)

Bonus, with the caveat that we should absolutely stop asking ChatGPT to exercise judgment and make qualitative assessments because it does not possess these capabilities: This newsletter reads like a deliciously revealing short story.
Diabolus Ex Machina (Amanda Guinzberg, June 1, 2025)

Minutiae

In an unprecedented move, I took two weeks off of work this month. In the first week, I entertained my brother and nephew and hauled them all over Philadelphia and New Jersey: we took a bus to explore the historic district, a subway to visit Chinatown, a train to see Atlantic City and swim in a very cold ocean, and more. When they left, I had a few more days off and spent most of them out of the house: to the suburbs to catch up with a visiting friend, to Morris Park to take some notes for my thesis project, to the museum district for an enormous rally. Then I got on a train and went to the Hudson Valley for a week-long writing retreat.

I hardly have words for how affecting and meaningful this retreat was for me. Every day I ate three square meals within gluten, dairy, or any of my forty food sensitivities. I did yoga daily and took care of my physical body. I saw groundhogs and deer and rat snakes just vibing in the grass on my way to and from class. I found stillness and attentiveness to watch these animals. I wrote thousands of words. I read a lot. And whenever I was open to it–in class, at meals, in passing on the trails–I had interesting conversations with writers who feel as passionate about the environment as I do, but who were also fascinating people in their own right. We talked about everything. The intimacy was both immediate and lightly held, something easy to do and feel. In these conversations, I was able to dig a little more deeply into the questions that motivate my current project–deeper than I had been getting on my own. And I had space to observe and reflect on what I was bringing into the retreat (at first, big FOMO; I quarter-assed my first writing assignment because I wanted to go kayaking and hike up to the sanctuary and also not miss any activity or panel) and what I hope to bring away from it (peace, groundedness, an openness to connection).

It was hard to come back and adjust to daily life. And I’d lined up plenty to do. One day I pulled invasive aquatic plants in my favorite park and then had lunch under the trees and talked about books with some of my fellow volunteers. Another day I went to game cafe to play games badly and celebrate the birthdays of three friends all born within a week of one another. Two of my dance classes began rehearsal for our recital next month. And so on. I have learned that this is part of who I am, so all I can do this summer is lean into it, and feel lucky to have so many different directions to be drawn in.