First Half Reading

Yeah, I read some books, here's my recommendations

Becoming a parent annihilated my sense of myself as “a reader.” Before, reading was my hobby, my past-time: I easily cleared 70 books a year, on average! Probably north of 100, to be honest! It was a fine combination of classics, new books, edifying, education, the most beautiful writing you’ve ever read, and some commercial stuff, too. I was hungry and curious and it was great.

But now, as a parent? I’m lucky if I read. In the recent past, bedtime wars have meant that Stu and I emerge, wounded soldiers, from Porter’s bedroom and all of a sudden it’s 9 or 10 and our rotting brains can only handle some TV or our phones. I’m not proud of that, but it’s just been the way things are lately. I think it could change.

This is all to say, that at the halfway point of the year, I took a look at the books I’ve read so far. It numbered 16, 12 books proper and 4 audiobooks. They were all pretty good and worth my time, at the least. Interesting and flawed and had real voices behind the work, which is all you can ask for sometimes. So: to the superlatives, or the ones that had something that’s sticking with me.

A small honorific to this one, as it is The Classic:

Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
This novella is small, perfect, exquisitely written. It’s about a hardworking family man in Ireland and what happens when he encounters a girl running off from a convent, or a Magdalene Laundry. It’s about one man and a community in the face of cruelty. It may just be relevant to these times. I listened to it in audio, which was a good choice as it’s blessedly short and beautifully performed.

Wild West Village - Lola Kirke
Okay, so, a book of essays by the Kirke sister you may vaguely know from big roles in things like Mozart in the Jungle and small roles in Gone Girl and Sinners, where she sings “Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?” like an angel, because she’s also a delightful musician? (I’ve seen her live and she’s so fun.) Why does it exist, really? But the thing is that the Kirke family, especially if you are an arty person in New York, is kind of one of those families where its members have beauty and money and connections so they are invariably it girls, and Lola, the wise and watchful youngest of the three, is the observant, perma-outsider. I could relate to that. I could relate to her interest in acting, this desire to be seen and perceived, especially coming from a family where you’re in the background, and there was something to the way she wrote about that want, that ache, that hunger that had me recognizing it in myself and my experience as the baby of five in an Irish Catholic family, which is a heady thing to get from a book!

The Talent - Daniel D’Addario
Guys this book follows the five women nominated for Best Actress and the glad-handling and press performances that they have to do in order to potentially win. It is about a political campaign. It is a pleasure and dishy. It makes fun of the media machine that feeds off and promotes this tradition, and the characters were fun to imagine as analogues to today’s actresses. It might be the … perfect beach read? Just grasping women in an All About Eve kind of situation.

Paradise Logic - Sophie Kemp
I am a little bit of the opinion that this book, in total, is more durational performance art piece than literature but it is singular, batshit, and I really appreciate the demented talent coming from Kemp. It makes you feel a little insane while reading it, and that’s a pretty fun thing, but I found it a little unreadable, too, at the same time. (Once again, British cover supremacy, but the American cover is a masterpiece and the author’s name is in comic sans)

That’s All I Know - Elisa Levi
Levi has a background as a playwright and I found this book, a very soft apocalypse kind of book, to have that kind of wonderful mastery of monologue that befits her experience. It’s quite a marvel in its tone, and I was reading the translated version, and it was just gripping to read about a girl telling a stranger about the strangling monotony of her small town but around the edges all the details were so weird! It had me by the throat.

A smattering of others, all good reads: Thirst - Marina Yuszczuk, See Friendship - Jeremy Gordon, The Hypocrite - Jo Hamya (mixed feelings on this but I’m fairly convinced she’s going to be writing a stone cold classic in about two or three books), and Girl on Girl - Sophie Gilbert, a book that I think I should come back to in the future. Sobering. Interesting. A lot of connections made in millennial girlhood culture and yet — some of it didn’t land, ala the New Yorker review this week.

My book pile remains enormous, time remains short, if I had included just a teensy bit of the endless children’s books that I read, this list would’ve put me back on track with my old reading pace, just with a lot of more dives into the Moomin books and the collected works of Julia Donaldson, who I can recommend whole heartedly. If you’ve read a book that blew your hair back this year, please let me know! I’ve been languishing in the middle places, and I’m looking for a return to sheer reading enthusiasm.

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