More Life

November reading list! A lot of books because I’ve decided to get into poetry, and poetry books are short. I am not going to share any of my poems with the public with my name on them on account of what if they’re bad. But I started reading more poetry and reading about poetry to see if I can understand it better and if that’ll help me write it better. Anyway, the books.

More Weight: a Salem Story by Ben Wickey: This fucking ruled and I’m telling everyone I know how much I love it in real life. Second of my mad-dash Critic’s Poll reads that made me go “ooh” out loud. I got to meet the editor of this one at Jennifer Hayden’s talk and he was also very excited to talk about how good this book is. It’s a graphic novel about the Salem witch trials, and it is very, very well done. Beautiful art, great character work, works on the macro and micro levels, so well-researched?? Amazing, go read immediately.

 

Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno: I don’t know if I would have enjoyed this more or less if I’d read Woodcutters first. In any case, the Single Paragraph structure made it kind of hard to read but also kind of meditatively zen? Not as interesting as I had hoped it would be.

That’s What She Said by Eleanor Pilcher: I had this on hold at the library for like half a year and it was not worth the wait. Might have been worth a shorter wait. I liked the friendship between the two leads and how messy it ended up being, but neither love interest was like. Developed at all. The way the One Guy Beth had a crush one once just so happened to also be demisexual in the exact same way she is demisexual AND into her felt like a convenient coincidence because we don’t see them interact much between learning Beth had a crush on him and them getting together. Which is also annoying because like, being demi is about developing romantic feelings from the basis of a close friendship, but we don’t get to see them develop that friendship first or have much of that friendship on the page.
Also unfortunately tries to be funny but since this is British chicklit every joke just made me think “you will never be her (Sophie Kinsella)”. Or even Mhairi McFarlane. There’s a very high bar to funny British Women’s Fiction.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser: While reading I went and discreetly searched my docs for the various phrases Mr. Zinsser disapproves of and was relieved to find I know better than to use most of those.
Interesting! Don’t know how useful it is for me generally, but I liked the bit about interviewing everyone possible about a subject and focusing on the intro and immediate hook because I think I need to work on that. I don’t labor over my nonfiction as much as Mr. Zinsser labors over his, but I do tinker. I could tinker harder.

The Writing Retreat by Julia Bartz: Ughhhghghgh. Bad girlboss writing retreat toxic friendship thriller novel. The most detached and robotic sex scenes I’ve read since “then he put his thingy in my you-know-what and we did it for the first time” in the fanfiction masterpiece My Immortal. Two paragraphs of the pov character being weird about introducing herself with her pronouns. Not one, not two, but THREE stupid end game plot twists! Why did I even bother reading this. I finished it in line for the Burnout Syndromes concert lol.

Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith: Okay, I don’t think Highsmith is for me. I was expecting more schemes and plots, but this felt very slow-paced, and it was mostly just being in a very stressed-out and miserable guy’s head, which was not fun. I did not really enjoy reading this one, but I will still check out Mr. Ripley just to see if I like that one better.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld: This one was also pretty slow, and almost… too realistic to be fun? Brought me back to the worst bits of high school and college, lol. But it was easier to read than Strangers on a Train, and I finished it pretty quickly. Reminded me of The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I wonder if it inspired Batuman.
I liked it much more than Romantic Comedy by Sittenfeld, that’s for sure. No one in Romantic Comedy felt like a person, but everyone in Prep felt like people, even if many of them had very fake-sounding names.

Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner by Jennifer Hayden: I read this because Hayden was doing an author talk in town with Summer Pierre, and their author talk was very fun. I love watching longtime friends talk about each other’s work. I actually have not read Hayden’s famous Story of My Tits yet, sorry! But I liked this one, because it illuminated a very different relationship to food and cooking than I or anyone in my family has. It’s a little bleak and depressing, but she makes it funny. And I like the watercolors!

Possession : A Romance by A.S. Byatt: Long! But I liked it. I can see its influence on certain more recent cozy academic-setting romantasy books like the Emily Wilde trilogy. I skimmed through some of the 19th century parts and some of the poetry parts, but I liked the kooky academics all scrambling to get ahold of The Evidence, especially in the endgame.

The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón: I really liked this collection! I like how specific Limón is with her descriptions and references, and how she uses line breaks. It felt very deliberate and structured.

В конце ноября by Tove Jansson: I noticed it was the end of November so I was like “I gotta reread The End of November” and since I had the book in Russian I read it in Russian. I forgot it was the last Moominstory and also forgot everything about every character in it, but man, Jansson’s illustrations are so perfect. I should reread the other Moominbooks also. I actually learned to read Russian on Moomin when I was a kid! My grandma read them out loud to me and made me try and read a paragraph first before she’d read the rest of the chapter. So, lots of fond childhood memories.

 

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: I’d never read this in school actually so I was surprised to learn I had osmosed absolutely none of the actual plot or events of the story besides the scene referencing the title and that Holden meets a prostitute. Maybe I would’ve liked it more if I read it in high school. I found Holden vaguely annoying, probably because I am no longer in high school.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo: No one told me Ms. Kondo sincerely believes in the healing power of crystals. Otherwise it was fairly motivating and I am totally for real going to Deep Clean next week after the JLPT exam I promise.

Moscow in the Plague Year by Marina Tsvetaeva: I read this in English while also looking up the originals of some of the poems in parallel to see what kinds of choices the translator made and whether or not I agreed with them. Mostly I didn’t, but also translating poetry seems like a horrible idea I would not want to do for fun. Tsvetaeva had such a sad life, but she wrote a lot of happy, sweet poems despite it all, somehow. She wrote a lot of poems in general, which was also weirdly motivating.

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur: I’m trying to understand the state of internet poetry and also my library’s poetry ebook selection is very limited. Kaur’s work is… not good. But there’s something about it that makes me want to keep reading, and I think it’s the same kind of like car-crash voyeurism that makes me click on Twitter vent comics from strangers. I don’t want to hear about how much you love having straight sex, but also… I can’t look away for some reason? I do think a lot of these probably sound better read out loud than on the page, but whenever she throws in One Rhyme at random I get annoyed lol.
Some of the poems could be good with a few more editing passes. Some of the drawings are quite good, some of them look like notesapp scribbles, but all of them have an uncanny vectorized line quality that makes them look more artificial and less appealing. Her persistent anti-intellectualism is infuriating though and I hate that she’s so popular without even reading poetry by other people ever. Still, better her than fuckin’ Atticus I guess.

 

Strange Bedfellows by Ariel Slamet-Ries: Really nice, I’m glad I read it. I loved Witchy when I was in high school, but haven’t caught up with Slamet-Ries’s work in a while. Strange Bedfellows follows a guy who’s suddenly developed the power to manifest objects from his dreams, and a guy he manifested from his dreams (who happens to strongly resemble his high school crush). But he can’t actually fall in love with someone who’s just a figment of his own mind, right? Oberon, Kon, and Oberon’s family and friends were pretty well-realized, though I had some trouble keeping track of who was who exactly in Oberon’s large family. I love the colors and the aesthetics of both the real world and the dream world. The way the plot was resolved made sense to me. It was fun! This one I also had on hold since June and it felt worth the wait.

Erotica Romana by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Project Gutenberg ebook. I think a lot of it went over my head, I don’t have the classical background to understand all the allusions. But the words sounded nice! I preferred the shorter ones.

The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur: I think I felt like if I just read enough of her poems I’ll suddenly Get It. I do not Get It. Some of the poems in this one were more interesting than the Milk & Honey ones, but most of the drawings were less interesting because she was clearly copying other artists (captioning a drawing riffing on Matisse’s dancers as Ode to Matisse for example) or photos. Sometimes there’s unnecessary wobbly borders around pages that add absolutely nothing whatsoever. She uses simple words, but it feels like it’s because she does not know more specific words exist. She says “flowers” where Limón, for example, would name a specific flower and describe it precisely. I wish she was more specific and less trying to be universal, but I guess the universality is how you get 4 million Instagram followers.

Anyway, I’ve written 37 poems in the last couple of weeks but if I start posting them online it’ll be on a secret side account under a pen name. Because What If They’re Bad (and not in a 4 million follower way).