I spent this weekend absolutely grieving summer. I haven’t felt this physically sad and strange about the end of summer and beginning of fall since I was in grade school. Hopefully one day I’ll be very, very old and I’ll remember this summer as the summer my life shifted in some permanent way, and I think that’s why I’m having a hard time letting go of it. Or maybe I have had so many aperol spritzes that my body is now just aperol spritz, I have no more brain cells, there’s just an orange wedge up there, and yes, this is a really embarrassing thing to say on the Internet. I usually love the thought of sharpened pencils and fresh notebooks but not this year. This year the smell of a sharpened pencil makes me want to sob in a ratty sweatshirt in a dark room. I am really being such a baby. I’m leaving for a residency this week and I’m excited to be in motion, on a moving train, going somewhere, doing something different. I am running so much, I ran so much this summer. It seems healthy but when I got home this morning, my brain (orange peel) said: What are you running from? I don’t know. What about you?
books
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
I made a list of Important Books I wanted to read this year and this was on it. I wasn’t expecting it to be so long! It was really fascinating, both in terms of subject matter (went down a communism youtube rabbit hole, lol) and structure. The book is a novel told between a woman’s four notebooks, one of which is also a novel. Are you confused yet? I sure was! Then, the end of the book is the titular golden notebook in which she tries to tie the strands of the notebooks together. I’m glad I read this. I will need to read it three more times to have any intelligent thoughts and I’m not sure that I’m going to live long enough to do that, but I learned a lot about what a book can be by reading this one.
Henry, Henry, Allen Bratton
If you liked Saltburn you might also enjoy this retelling of Shakespeare’s “history plays.” I could not stop picturing the protagonist’s boyfriend as Art from Challengers, so that’s fun!
Bad Animals, Sarah Braunstein
It took about 50 pages to get into this but once I was, I could not put it down. If you liked All Fours, this might be a fun next read and is one of those novels that is so clearly written by someone who loves books more than just about anything else. Weird, delicious, like hanging out with that one friend who says the thing everyone else is too self-conscious to actually say!
Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates
Did Joyce Carol Oates need to write an entire novel about the “Chappaquidick incident”? I’m genuinely asking, did she? I’m still not sure…
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
I was in a re-read-y mood this summer and read this on a train to Connecticut. So breathtaking. Are you ready for the least revelatory observation that I can’t seem to stop making on the internet? Poets are the best novelists. They just are.
Writers & Lovers, Lily King
Another reread, I just adore this novel. I’m sure I’ve written about it before. If you like Sweetbitter or Ann Patchett or generally enjoy Emma Roberts’ book club picks and haven’t read this yet, I’m jealous of you.
American Mermaid, Julia Langbein
I judged this book by it’s cartoonish cover (no offense) and was not excited to read it, but I was WRONG! It was so fun and surprising and smart. Almost everything I’ve read lately that’s new seems to have an element of magical realism or a gesture towards something unreal, which makes sense as our reality seems so precarious. Is the world going to flood or burn or be destroyed by people who can’t see around their big stacks of money? I don’t know. Stories like this make me happy to be alive though. Good job artists!
James, Percival Everett
Completely genius. Percival Everett is the writer high schoolers are going to be reading a hundred years from now. Plus he’s just one of the most incredible storytellers. Required reading!
Brat, Gabriel Smith
Another spooky, what-is-real novel, in which a grieving, eczema-riddled guy tries to cope with ghosts that seem to be inhabiting strange corners of his increasingly more unreal life. This book felt like a fever dream in the best way. Would have been a very different Brat summer if we’d gone off of this!
Service, Sarah Gilmartin
A woman named Hannah learns that her boss at her old restaurant job is being accused of sexual harassment. This was a slight, sharp novel, told in rotating perspectives, including the chef being accused of the crime. Maybe for fans of Three Women?
State of Paradise, Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg is a genius and I hope she writes many many more weird novels set in Florida!
watched
Twisters
I love summer movies and I have to say I do get Glen Powell now. Fun!
Babes
Also a fun summer flick! Great apartments! Having a baby seems absolutely horrible and also transcendent.
Casablanca
Lol it’s nice to now understand 89% of the references in 89% of all of the movies, ever! Obviously a pretty good movie!
etc
Foxes or Red Foxes by Bud Smith, who has the ability to be so irreverent and so earnest at almost the same time.
I’m still not sure how I feel about the short story Haruki Murakami published in the New Yorker this summer but, “‘I’ve dated all kinds of women in my life,” the man said, “but I have to say I’ve never seen one as ugly as you,’” is such an obviously great first line I kind of can’t believe he got away with it.
Abraham Lincoln’s 2024 reading list, haha.
I cannot stop staring at this picture of Mary Robison. Did you know her novel Oh! inspired the movie Twister? She looks like a person who writes entire books on legal pads and has never had the experience of deleting 59 emails from Duolingo. Comparison is the thief of whatever…
underlined
“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them.” James, Percival Everett
“Looking back at those week-ends they seem like beads on a string, two big glittering ones to start with, then a succession of small unimportant ones, then another brilliant one to end. But that is just the lazy memory, because as soon as I start to think about the last week-end, I realise that there must have been incidents during the intervening week-ends that led up to it. But I can't remember, it's all gone. And I get exasperated, trying to remember—it's like wrestling with an obstinate other-self who insists on its own kind of privacy. Yet it's all there in my brain if only I could get at it. I am appalled at how much I didn't notice, living inside the subjective highly-coloured mist. How do I know that what I "remember" was what was important?” The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
I understand maybe 75% of this list (the eye within the eye…?”) but “Scribbled secrets notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy” does a number on the romantic in me every time! Cigs indoors and that gunshot sound typewriters make…sorry, but it sounds electric! If not a better time, certainly a more embodied one!
reading now
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors which strangely I feel like nobody in my bubble is talking about? What do we think? I’m also re-“reading” Animal by Lisa Taddeo via audiobook, which Emma Roberts reads. Fun! I’m also taking a tote bag of books with me to residency—I’m obsessed with mysteries lately so I’ve got a stack of Patricia Highsmith ready to go, as well as a memoir by a guard at The Met and a biography on Virginia Woolf. Lol! What else should I pack?
as always, you can find any and/or all of these books here! see you next week for friends of, featuring a very special guest.
Saving that Kerouac list immediately