Summer Reading: Part One
When I started my PhD I made a promise to myself that I would still read for fun. When you spend large portions of your day reading for work, it can be difficult to motivate yourself to pick up a book in your free time, but reading has always been something I loved. Also the more I read (and write about!) books the less likely I am to watch Love Island clips on YouTube, which is almost definitely a good thing.
Below are six books I've read so far this summer, along with some thoughts on them!
Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering
Tell Me Lies follows Lucy and Stephen through their five year on-again, off-again relationship. Chapters are written from the perspective of both characters, and Lovering has successfully given each of them a distinctive and honest voice.
If you prefer to read books where you like and root for the characters, this one may not be for you. Stephen flits between charming, insufferable, and deeply loathsome, and Lucy is at times naive, self-involved, and insensitive. Yet, in my view, the complexity of the two main characters is one of Lovering's greatest strengths, because despite the characters' flaws, and there are many, it is easy to identify with them (particularly with Lucy, personally). I think a book that is able to put you out of your comfort zone, and make you see something of yourself in a character you dislike or pity, is particularly interesting to read. (One of the many reasons I dislike the five star rating system of Goodreads and Amazon is that books like Tell Me Lies get one-star reviews from people whose major complaint is that they didn't like the characters. I find this an absolutely baffling criterion for giving a book a one-star review.)
The backdrop for Lucy and Stephen's tumultuous and toxic romance is the fictional Baird College in southern California. A graduate of Colorado College, Lovering has perfectly captured the experience of attending a small liberal arts school. From incestuous circles of friends to a seemingly constant stream of flip cup games to acquaintances who won't stop talking about their semester abroad in Madrid, the book perfectly captures the atmosphere of a small liberal arts school - from the heartening and comfortable to the noxious and tired. I should note as well that almost all the characters are upper-middle class white people who are uninterested in examining their privilege, which may be less a criticism of Lovering and more of an honest reflection of the state of university campuses in the US.
If you like Tell Me Lies, you should also read Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which is about a man very much like Stephen, though with slightly less sociopathic tendencies.
Crudo by Olivia Laing
Crudo is British writer Olivia Laing's first foray into fiction, and it's a genre-bending tour de force. Written in real time over the summer of 2017, the novel's protagonist, "who may or may not be Kathy Acker," navigates her personal life amidst the weird and terrifying social, political, and environmental climate of 2017. Having read many a think-piece about the present state of our world, it's refreshing and relatively unique to read a novel about a character consuming that same media. A passage that particularly resonates:
"Kathy wanted the NHS forever obviously, but she was fairly certain that by the time she was an old lady they'd be eating out of rubbish dumps, sheltering from a broiling impossible sun. It was all done, it was over, there wasn't any hope. The week before she left Britain an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off the Larsen C ice shelf and floated away. The Gulf of Mexico was full of dead fish, there was a trash heap circulating the ocean that would take a week to walk across. She tried to limit her husband's addiction to the tumble dryer, she never flew to anywhere more than eight hours away, but even lying here on her back she was probably despoiling something. What a waste, what a crime, to wreck a world so abundantly full of different kinds of flowers. Kathy hated it, living at the end of the world, but then she couldn't help but find it interesting, watching people herself included compulsively foul their nest."
At times I wanted the novel to be less of a novel, which I recognize is unfair criticism having just lauded Laing's melding of fiction with the contemporary moment. I think I ultimately cared less about Kathy than about her commentary on our world, but that could be a consequence of never having read anything by the real Kathy Acker. Though in a weird way the book left me with a feeling that I wouldn't enjoy Acker's writing if I did read it. After finishing Crudo I did however purchase The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, the most recent of Laing's three non-fiction books. It sounds like something by Rebecca Solnit, whose writing I love, so I have high hopes. Will report back.
Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda
Mercè Rodoreda is one of Catalonia's great novelists, so I decided to read Death in Spring before my trip to Barcelona this summer. Originally published posthumously in 1986, Death in Spring has been recently translated from Catalan to English for the first time. It is a deeply complex novel, one that is impossible to forget yet even more difficult to explain. The best I can do is say the book is about a young boy coming-of-age in a small mountain village in rural Catalonia. Imbued with magical realism, Death in Spring drifts subtly between the beautiful and the grotesque, generating the impression that nothing is ever as it seems.
This is a book where it can be incredibly helpful to read a bit of critical commentary before reading the book itself. Some articles that do a way better job of contextualizing and explaining Rodoreda and her writing than I have in the paragraph above are: Colm Tóibín in The Times Literary Supplement, Hugh Ferrer in Words Without Borders, and (for Spanish-language readers) Gabriel García Márquez in El País.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
The Idiot is my least favorite book on this list, and I almost didn't include it because for some reason I feel uncomfortable writing about disliking books. I'm not hesitant to condemn a book I don't like in conversation (as anyone who's heard me talk about Rupi Kaur's Milk and Honey knows), but writing, especially writing online, carries with it a daunting permanence. Change often gets read as inauthenticity, but I'm of the belief that if I were to read any of the books on this list in five years time I would likely feel differently towards it.
Also as someone who hopes to write a book some day (historical, not fiction), I feel a deep sense of empathy with all writers. Writing is a struggle, and readers can consume with a kind of reckless abandon, often spewing shit as a result. Here I am specifically referring to the 6,500 Goodreads reviewers who have had the audacity to leave one or two-star reviews on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It only has four out of five stars. 47,000 people have given one of the most important books in history a less than five star review (often throwing in some truly asinine commentary about how it wasn't their cup of tea). I could go on about how terrible Goodreads is, but I digress. The Idiot has nothing to do with slavery and I am trying to district myself from the task of writing a critical review.
The Idiot was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction so I had high hopes, but I struggled to stay with the book and its characters from beginning to end. The narrator, a Turkish-American woman named Selin, arrives at Harvard in 1995 for her freshman year. Selin's Harvard is thankfully far more diverse than Lucy's Baird, though Batuman captures the general university atmosphere similarly well:
"The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered. In a corner, a girl was staring at a stack of flash cards with incredible ferocity, as if she were going to eat them."
Much of the book follows the budding (non-)romance between Selin and her older Hungarian classmate Ivan. Their relationship occurs largely via email, and I think you're supposed to see in their conversations some sort of intellectual compatibility. To be honest though, their emails read more like a highfalutin caricature of intellectualism, and it left me with a lot of second-hand embarrassment for both characters. Because so much of their romance is tied-up in the email correspondence, the relationship itself felt like a caricature.
The second part of the book takes place in the summer after Selin's first year, as she travels to Hungary (not with Ivan, though because of him). It felt as though the book unraveled once Selin left Harvard, and I realized that what I enjoyed about the first hundred pages was not the plot or characters in particular, but rather the way Batuman captured the "first year at university" feeling. Ultimately I struggled to finish this one, but that may be more about what I wanted from the book than the book itself.
Educated by Tara Westover
Educated is one of the most powerful books I've read in a long time. Tara Westover's life story is truly astounding - she grew up in rural Idaho in an End-of-Days survivalist family and didn't set foot in a classroom until she was 17. Yet in 2014, she received her PhD in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge.
I won't spoil the details of Westover's journey, but I will say that what makes the book spectacular is not just the story itself. Westover is a brilliant, thoughtful, and honest writer, and she narrates her story with a profound amount of grace and self-reflection. The book touches on very difficult subjects - from violence and abuse to family estrangement - so though it's incredibly well-written, it is not an easy read.
Anyone would find something to appreciate in this book, but I recommend it in particular to people at Cambridge. Educated is a great reminder that everyone's path to university is different, and that your past indelibly shapes your present. Westover and I both felt a deep and visceral sense of awe at seeing Cambridge for the first time, but my journey to Cambridge was essentially a stroll down a well sign-posted and neatly paved path, whereas Tara Westover built her own road.
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy
Reading Educated put me in a bit of a nonfiction mood, so I picked up New Yorker writer Ariel Levy's 2017 memoir. Like Westover, Levy writes about difficult subjects with a breathlessly readable voice that lingers with you for months after putting the book down. Vacillating from moments of brilliant and hopeful promise (a burgeoning career, a new love, and a longed-for pregnancy) to the gritty and raw pain of life's messier moments (infidelity, a spouse's alcoholism, and a late-stage miscarriage). The Rules Do Not Apply is about what happens when life doesn't go as planned.
Lately I've found myself gravitating towards authors with a contemporary voice (a la Laing's Crudo, though that one probably takes the cake), and Levy's career as a long-form journalist renders her a keen ability to observe and capture cultural moments. Levy's commentary on (in)fertility across women's reproductive lives is particularly astute:
"From the minute the dragon of our fertility came on the scene, we learned to chain it up and forget about it. Fertility meant nothing to us in our twenties; it was something to be secured in the dungeon and left their to molder. In our early thirties, we remembered it existed and wondered if we should check on it, and then - abruptly, horrifyingly - it became urgent: Somebody find that dragon!"
Levy's chapter about her miscarriage, which was originally published as an essay titled "Thanksgiving in Mongolia" in The New Yorker in 2013, is gut-wrenchingly devastating. You could theoretically read it there first to see if Levy's writing interests you, but I recommend jumping right in to the book as a whole.
That's all for Part One of this summer reading series, but Part Two is on it's way! Let me know if you read any of these - I would love to discuss them more.
