Welcome to the first of a monthly column! This is where I read a lot, like, it’s literally all I do, and then I talk about the books I’ve read, which is also the only other thing I do. These are all the books (and what I think about them!) that I’ve read since the start of school till today, October 14.
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
This was an admittedly thoughtless Goodwill purchase that I would like to marry. This Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection is so introspective it made Valley of the Dolls (Which we’ll get to later) look oblivious. What really stood out to me though, is Lahiri’s eye for the mundane. The nine stories focus on Indian or Indian-American people and how they’re affected by assimilation and cultural complexity, whether they explicitly realize it in the story or not. One that stood apart from the others was “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar”, the journey of a woman suffering with anything from demons to epilepsy, and how her condition alienates her. This is a light read, but packed with kindness and honesty.
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
Eek! Ew! Aw. Honestly I have a mostly hate relationship with Moshfegh’s writing. I’m sick of the disgusting, superior, manic pixie dream girl. And with Moshfegh’s work, I mean literally disgusting. I’ve read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Lapvona, and Homesick for Another World so far, and I’ve never been so shocked by novels. Especially in Lapvona, I felt three generations older. But I digress. I went into Homesick with the hopes of finding more appreciation for Moshfegh, because I very much recognize her strong writing, I just find it distasteful. I’m not quite sure what I found there. Out of all of Moshfegh's work that I’ve read, it’s my favorite, and I think it shows her strengths. Though, I’ve heard her compared to Flannery O’Connor with this collection, and I say not at all!! But maybe that’s me being biased and mean. I just think O’Connor had an originality and empathy that was driven on epiphanies and not shock value. This is her debut work, a collection of fourteen short stories, each full of complex histories and how cruel humans are to each other. Something I read in a review of this collection on the website Pace, Amore, Libri, that I really agreed with was that “It’s easy to become desensitized when you feel like the author’s main objective is to shock you.” Take what you will out of that, I still enjoyed the book, even if it grossed me out the whole way through.
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
MY FAVORITE BOOK! This is the first book to ever make me cry on the spot, I can say that. Another short story collection, this time a posthumous collection with forty-three stories. The most interesting part for me was how Berlin mixes her real life with her creativity. Honesty about her alcoholism, her sister’s cancer, her childhood, and her sons all come out in her earth-and-soil stories that are so human it scares me. Setting them typically in emotionally investing roles: a hospital switchboard operator, an ER nurse, or a young immigrant mother. This is the opposite of Homesick for Another World in that its people are beautiful, if not kind, to each other.
The Awakening
Sophomores, didn’t you love it?! The Bell Jar, but with more romantic liberation, and in a much more restricted time period. While only Mr. Paul gets to read my essay on it, you all still can hear my thoughts. I’m sick of Robert, I’m sick of Alcee! And I wish Edna felt that same sickness, of men that keep leaving, of her wanting to be free more than to be loved. If only Robert could understand her, then he would’ve understood. But he didn’t, only she knows herself. What a revolutionary book, I’m so thankful we’re forced to read it. For anyone who hasn’t read it yet: Edna is a wife, mother, and Presbyterian transfer into her husband’s Creole society. She soon feels fit to be none of these things, and begins to awaken in her self actualization through fits of independence. Even better than this, as much as I loved it, is Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Same time period, same themes, but even more creative and less depressing endings for the female characters!
My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russel
Have I ever felt so targeted by a book I couldn’t relate to! And only on a shallow level, I mean. Let me be shallow with this first. Vanessa is also a fifteen year old, redhead, poetry and music loving girl from Maine (who also always wears the same clothes as me). I’d love to first just acknowledge how fantastically well Russel can write a teenage character. See! Shallow’s over.
This book made me so incredibly uncomfortable, but differently than how I’ve described Moshfegh’s unsettling writing. This is what I’d describe as a modern day Lolita, but told from the groomed’s perspective, and truly coming from a place of empathy and understanding of victims. Vanessa Wye falls in love with her English, Jacob Strane, and the two maintain a secret relationship for the next twenty years. The story is told from two perspectives: in 2000, when Vanessa begins the affair and sees Strane as her first love and chosen boyfriend; and in 2017, amidst the peak of the #METOO movement, where an assault charge against Strane is accused and Vanessa slowly unpacks whether their relationship was even consensual, if she is a victim, and her relation with the label of “victim” itself. It’s a very heavy, emotional, and honest read, which never felt exploitative or condoning. I warily recommend it, but advise to not share it with anyone who could be in any place where the book could be taken as encouragement towards an unhealthy relationship. Take it as you would take Lolita.
Valley of the Dolls by Jacquelin Susann
Finished this today! A novel perfectly capturing fame that’s realistic both in the 40’s and now, Dolls is told from three different beautiful, young women, Anne, Neely, and Jennifer’s point of view as they climb to the top of socialite America. Through affairs, musicals, and little red, blue, or yellow “dolls”, the girls go through decades together, and end those decades together as well. Revolutionary for its time in its treatment of women’s mental health, acknowledgment of beauty standards in all types of business, not just performing, and female friendships that break and mend and are whole-heartedly true. I recently watched the movie too, and without spoilers I would just say I don’t recommend, with the exception of just admiring and mourning Sharon Tate. Important plotlines which are essential to the soul of the book are discarded to be more socially acceptable for TV, and characters are as shallow and beautiful as the public perception they were supposed to develop into changing.
Next Month:
I’m currently reading Mad Honey by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jodi Picoult, The Last Love Song (a Joan Didion biography) by Tracey Daughtery, Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides, and Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen. Hope you stay to read my thoughts, and maybe read along with me!!