Welcome to Bookworm, friends and readers!
I feel lucky to have swooped into your inbox, so let’s get to it, shall we? (A quick word of warning: This first edition is long, because I’m covering three months vs. one.)
Some Novels I’ve Read During Quarantine (So Far)
For the first few weeks of lockdown, I found it near impossible to read anything that wasn’t the news or the hell-stream that is Twitter. I’m sure many of you can relate.
The book that got me back into reading was the lovely Writers & Lovers by Lily King, which follows a broke, aspiring writer in late nineties Boston who’s grieving her mother, working her ass off as a waitress and navigating new relationships with two guys who are almost polar opposites. It was hard not to love Casey, the narrator, and it was a breath of fresh air to live in a time before social media and cell phones. (The dudes call her at the restaurant during her shifts to schedule their dates!)
With my scattered attention span, It’s been easier to dip into non-fiction, but I did get through a few other novels, including Cleanness by Garth Greenwell—who writes stunning (and graphic) gay sex scenes—and Weather by Jenny Offill, a compact, diaristic story about a wry narrator grappling with creeping dread about the state of the country.
Escaping Reality… in Books About a Virus
If you’re the kind of person who goes straight for the pandemic books in the midst of one (Hi!), my pick for you is Severance by Ling Ma, which I wanted to start rereading the minute I finished it this week. I’d follow this disillusioned but diligent narrator anywhere, and Ma’s post-apocalyptic visions of NYC went beyond the usual cliches.
I also devoured two other prescient tales of life during and post-pandemic, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and The End of October by Lawrence Wright. (Reading the latter, I kept envisioning it on the big screen; I later learned that it was director Ridley Scott who sparked the idea for the book and an adaptation may already be in the works.)
Short Stories that Pack a Punch
For truly surreal and speculative scenes, no one does eerie quite like Karen Russell. Her latest collection of short stories, Orange World, was the perfect book to dip into over the course of a couple of weeks; each story stranger and more captivating than the last. Her imagination is bananas and her descriptions simply jaw-dropping, whether she’s writing about Emma Bovary’s greyhound, a mother who does a deal with the devil, a Joshua Tree plant that “leaps” into the body of a young woman, or a quartet of sister gondoliers in a flooded future Miami.
Non-Fiction & Memoir
When commitment to a novel felt insurmountable, I turned to memoirs and non-fiction. Three Women by Lisa Taddeo is, in short, about women’s desire. But it’s so much more than that: an amazing work of reportage spun into novelistic chapters and a breathtaking look at how sex, love and power can shape a life, even—especially—in unseen ways. The three (real) women of the title range in age and circumstance and Taddeo has gotten inside the skin and soul of them all.
Female desire also fuels Stray, the new memoir from Sweetbitter author Stephanie Danler. The narrator of that novel lacked a backstory, but Danler has no qualms about exploring her own in Stray. The book tries to untangle her complicated relationships with her alcoholic and drug-addicted parents, and make sense of an all-consuming affair with a married man she calls the Monster. Some of the most beautiful writing is reserved for Danler’s native California, which she sees as if for the first time when she returns as an adult.
Two memoirs about coming of age in South Florida also kept me company during quarantine—Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden and Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz—which channels an unsupervised upbringing in a rough-and-tumble South Beach I barely recognized.
Currently Reading:
My attention span is still… fleeting. So, I have a few books on the go, including:
No Ordinary Dog: My Partner From the Seal Teams to the Bin Laden Raid by Will Chesney
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride
Figure It Out by Wayne Koestenbaum
New Releases On My TBR (To Be Read) List:
Novels:
All Adults Here by Emma Straub (heartily recommended by Judy Blume!)
Sea Wife by Amity Gaige
All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masad
Non-Fiction:
Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars: Astrology, Our Icons, and Our Selves by Claire Comstock-Gay (Love her weekly column for The Cut)
Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek H. Murthy, M.D.
Phew. That’s a lotta books! Hopefully, this helps you find something new to read. And if you’re looking for something in particular, let me know what you’re into and I’ll see if I can recommend a title or two.
Thanks so much, and happy reading!
Rebecca
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