A Big Book-y Post
Oh, man, there have been a lot of books in my life recently. So many books! Let’s get down to business. I also just ordered everything on Jen Doll’s Spring Books Preview list, which I will feel silly about when the galleys arrive, but who can wait for a new Meg Wolitzer? They are not always wonderful, but each of them is always correct. There is always correctness in them. One character who really works, or an extraordinary premise, or a tiny revelation about the nature of relationships. I think that Meg Wolitzer is operating in that Anne Tyler niche in which she is so female and prolific that people do not realize she is steadily working away at creating a body of work that will stay with us.
I also, and DO NOT LAUGH, but I thought I should get around to actually reading that Eckhart Tolle book that people like to rabbit on about, so I’m reading that, and it’s something. There’s some stuff there? I’m just being dippy right now, in general, I think, but I’m kind of digging it. Some of it is all lalalaaa, but some of it is “oh, I guess I shouldn’t do that.” Whenever I buy a book about any kind of self-improvement, I immediately resent it, and then I think of that scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen is trying to buy Diane Keaton books about death, “instead of that cat book.” Where is my cat book? Here is the cat book.
I just finished Jen Kirkman’s I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids (Indiebound | Amazon), which is one of three books about children and having and not having them and writing about them and not writing about them that I read this week. The second one was Blair Koenig’s STFU Parents: The Jaw-Dropping, Self-Indulgent, and Occasionally Rage-Inducing World of Parental Overshare (Indiebound | Amazon) and the third was Amy Sohn’s Motherland (Indiebound | Amazon), which made me want to kill myself and the rest of the world, but I also could not put it down, which is what happened with me and her first novel, Prospect Park West (Indiebound | Amazon), as well. It’s like a People Magazine that never comes to an end, and no one ever gets to the easy crossword before you do. Now, back to STFU Parents. I was happy to get it (thanks, publishers!), because I am a massive fan of the site, but had sort of assumed it would be a stupid blog book? But, in fact, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it works as a book. There’s something about the sheer existential weight of so much fatuous and inappropriate oversharing of the details of the life of an independent organism which is well-suited to book form. Recommended. Perhaps for pregnant people.
Kirkman’s book is very funny. She’s a comedian, it should be! It’s a little uneven; we spend time getting to know her boyfriend, who is then her husband, and then she mentions they got a divorce, and you’re all “WAIT, WHAT HAPPENED WITH MATT?” and then it ends. But the core of the book is about not wanting to have children, and the ways in which society gets up in your face about it, and those parts are very well done. I laughed out loud several times.
What else am I reading? Hm. Oh, yes! I have been reading The Night Circus (Indiebound | Amazon) for about eight months now, because I keep doing other things, and then I open it and am sucked back in, like magic. It’s all witchy and crispy and reminds me of watching The Prestige. I’m going to finish it! This week! Stop bothering me!
I would now like to talk about two books that Pinners have specifically asked me to talk about, because they have written them. Themselves! With their own fingers. I can’t vouch for them personally (though I will read both of them), but I think we should support each other in our work. It’s hard for women, I think, in particular, to say “hey, I have brought this thing into the world, and found an agent, and gotten a book deal, and here it is, please read it and buy it,” so let’s reward them with our attention. The first one is Jennifer Banash’s White Lines (Indiebound | Amazon), and it’s a YA novel set in the whole Michael-Alig-Club-Kids milieu, which already has my attention and sounds different and interesting, and this review of it is hilarious. The second is Taylor Reid’s Forever, Interrupted (Amazon), which will be out in July. You may remember Taylor from the hilarious thing she wrote about unsuccessfully asking out a pizza delivery guy. It bodes well for the novel.
Three other new books of note! Judy Juanita, after years of teaching writing, has written her first novel, Virgin Soul (Indiebound | Amazon), about a young woman involved with the Black Panther movement on her college campus in the 1960s. I’m really enjoying it. As you know, I do not really love Sylvia Plath, but I DO love this weird little book about just the summer she spent working at Mademoiselle. It’s called Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 (Indiebound | Amazon). Also, the book about the crazy dude from olden times who obtained two young women in hopes he might train one to be his handmaiden. Christ, what an asshole: How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate (Indiebound | Amazon). How are we just hearing about this now? It is a DELIGHT. Also, spoilers, do not worry, he does not have sex with either of these young girls. I was worried about that, so I want you not to be.
And, of course, one old book about a horrible maritime disaster, because, well, that’s me: Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing (Indiebound | Amazon). Don’t read it in the bathtub.