I usually dread february on a cellular level but this year it wasn’t so bad. maybe even good. I read some good books and watched some good movies and danced in a tiny club with floors that lit up in primary colors. I bought a new pair of boots that make me feel like a disco queen. we started apartment hunting which is frustrating and exciting and frustrating again. today I’m getting my hair cut in soho which feels fancy and indulgent. perhaps i’ll get bangs.
this was a particularly incredible month of reading. two of the books I read this month made me feel especially grateful to be a human in the world. there are so many horrible things happening right now and I’ve been feeling a bit powerless and overwhelmed, and then one Saturday I picked up a purple book about an alien, followed by a memoir about a mother, and the word that kept coming to mind after reading both was generosity. how stunning that these writers have such a deep well of love for their subjects and their readers and are able to write from that place, even amidst grief and anger and unimaginable heartache. i admire that so much. it’s easy to sink into cynicism these days, much harder to operate from a place of joy. this month’s books reminded me that it’s not impossible, joy. even when things are gray. even in february, joy!
what I liked
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
what most surprised me about this book was that it’s really pretty funny! I’m not going to spend much time on this one, it’s a classic for a reason, blahblahblah, but David Copperfield narrates the story of his own life in most simultaneously observant and oblivious protagonist which makes for a moving and entertaining read. It’s way too long, it did not need to be so long, but every time I think about Charles Dickens, I think about Bill Nighy in About Time saying, “For me, it was reading…Dickens, twice!” when he’s explaining to his son what he’s done with his ability to time travel. I don’t think I need to read this twice but it certainly was an odyssey and I felt satisfied when I finished it, like I’d gone for a really long jog on a hot summer day.
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
this took me about thirty pages to really get into, but good grief am I glad I read it. It’s about a man named Cam who has moved back to home, a word used loosely in this novel, after his boyfriend, Kai, unexpectedly dies. this book reckons with queerness, sex, violence, bodies with a frankness and a generosity (that word again!) that stunned me. I liked it just as much as his first novel, Memorial.
Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity, one of my favorite movies turned TV shows that deserved much more than one season, dips his toe into another realm of entertainment: television. it begins in Blackpool, England in the 60s and follows a precocious, funny woman named Barbara as she pursues comedy and a life of starrrrdom in London. if you miss The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and enjoy Matt Haig and/or Dolly Alderton, might I recommend procuring this book as the most delightful anecdote to our upcoming rainy weekend?
what I loved so much I screamed/cried/cartwheeled/called my loved ones
I have been looking forward to reading this book for SO long and it was even better than I hoped. I’ve heard the phrase “divorce memoir” thrown around a lot lately, which okay, fine, this memoir is about a divorce. but what was particularly moving to me is how Leslie Jamison writes about being a mother—unimaginably difficult but also, my god, so sharply beautiful. I’m twenty-eight, a strange age in an impossible world. thinking about being a mother feels impossible to imagine and impossible not to. I sit in the park and feel this longing unlike anything else for a daughter of my own, already love him or her more than seems possible, and then I walk home down cracked sidewalks, check my phone in my dark apartment and the thought of bringing another human into this world morphs into another shape, one that looks preposterous. there are so many edges to the prism of motherhood and I’m grateful to this book and its writer for telling the story of what it is to choose it honestly, amidst changing circumstances. gorgeous.
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
Adina is the protagonist of this brilliant, beautiful book, an alien who reports on her normal life on earth to her alien superiors via a fax machine rescued from the trash by her mother. it’s a quirky premise and, probably due to the fact that I am riddled with anxiety, I’ve always been more drawn to novels concerned with real life than novels that deal with the supernatural. the earth i live on is stressful enough, why add the rest of the galaxy. what a total idiot I was!!!!! this novel was the most gorgeous and devastating and human book I’ve read, maybe ever, and made me feel so tender towards my fellow earthlings. have you ever sat on a subway or in a crowded room and felt remembered that everyone around you used to be a tiny baby? reading this book felt like that. I finished Beautyland and felt like maybe I was done with reading. what, exactly, is the point in reading anything else if everything isn’t this book?
what I didn’t love