I keep seeing people posting about the “Sealey Challenge,” which is to make a point to read books of poetry during the month of August. I figured it was a good time to clear some poetry off of my tbr pile.
I found The Goodbye Kit by Daneen Berhland to be a completely clean and readable book of poetry, with beautiful imagery, some funs turns of language, and relatable themes throughout.
I have a quick follow up after yesterday’s post because I just also recently finished How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.
Lately, I’ve had a hard time telling if some main characters are intentionally or unintentionally insufferable, and this is one of those instances where I couldn’t always tell. The main character is supposed to be insufferable to a degree, sure, but to this degree? I’m not so sure.
That said, with books like these, I’m always glad they get published. I’m glad this was published. For most, this is worth the read. However, if you are feeling a bit on the sensitive side, maybe skip this one (for now). There is a wandering, an aimlessness, and unknowing that may be comforting, but there is also deep friendship and closeness, which I could imagine may feel alienating to some. There is also some short sections of depravity that may be better left unread by some.
For the average reader, acquainted with and able to stomach what I’ve mentioned above, do read this unique book.
I can’t remember how Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder got on my reading list, but about half way through the book, I realized I was vaguely familiar with Snyder’s work from NPR. I could recall some of difficult human rights stories she reported on, especially surrounding women’s rights abroad.
In that regard, this books nearly reads like two books. First, there is the story of Snyder’s traumatic and tumultuous childhood. Then, there is her life and journey to motherhood, and finally there is the story with Barb at the end. To me these all feel like a cohesive whole.
This is an important book, with a main character that grapples with tough cultural questions, chief among them have to do with women having a right to understand and have control of their own bodies. The painful stories she recounts illustrate these issues and bring to light the ways in which social controls take away basic bodily autonomy.
At times I thought some of the details were strangely specific, without being clear as to why, the book too lengthy. By the end, I was convinced that most of it was necessary. The books is a beautiful and important book. Next, I’d like to see her write more about the middle part, about her life abroad, about motherhood and marriage. About relationships. I hope she does.
I read somewhere that Wendell Berry (and I mostly like Wendell Berry!) was one of Margaret Renkl’s influences, and I could definitely see that as I read, especially in the attention to and elevation of the natural world.
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss is a beautifully written book that does so many important things: it captures the lifespan intimate family relationships, the landscapes that hold them, and the socio cultural aspects of these southern spaces as well.
It is also very clear that Renkl is a trained poet, as this makes the prose beautiful to read. I always love it when writers are able to produce unconventional structures in books AND also get published. Overall–a bittersweet, but life affirming book.
My creative writing classes keeps me reading The Best American Short Stories each year, but looking back through my notes, it appears that I don’t typically write about it, which is a shame! This year’s story collection was edited by Lauren Groff, who I have been reading and enjoying lately. (Though honestly I typically don’t have a sense of an editor’s taste from one year to the next.)
This year’s collection was epic and stunning as always. In my opinion, these anthologies are the single best way to get a sense of contemporary writing, although the works remain fairly conservative in their form and approach. These are all typical short stories.
One of the most memorable stories this year had abuse in it. As I think back over the years, I now realize that some of the stories that stand out the most have featured some type of abuse. Not because they are better stories, but because they can be so traumatizing to the reader. I don’t like it and seem to get increasingly sensitive to it with each passing year. I even think the series may need to start integrating trigger warnings. Maybe literary fiction more broadly needs to integrate trigger warnings. And, yet, as I write this, I am aware that the trigger warning significantly changes the reading experience. I don’t have the answers. I think this work should exist. It lends insight into the human condition. Even still, at this point I can’t help but think that the subtler works are the greater works.
Alexandra Fuller’s book, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight offers beautiful writing and insights on living in Africa through the 1970s-90s, amid war and revolution, amid those complicated social dynamics, but also amid the personal dynamics of family, of alcoholism, of mental illness, and parents who offer their children a childhood that is at once amazing and also, probably, negligent.
Fuller’s writing is consistently beautiful throughout. Even in its sometimes stark depictions, the book is infused with a contagious love of Africa. Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi have not necessarily been places I’ve ever wanted to visit. I’ve grown up in wilderness areas, and so the great safaris that have drawn others have less pull for me. However, this book made me see some of the other beautiful aspects of the country. After reading the book, I wouldn’t hesitate to go.
This year there’s a new movie out based on the book. From the trailer, it appears that the film follows the book closely. I hope I get a chance to watch it.
I had two of Chloe Caldwell’s books in my backpack, and so I read them back to back. Women by Chloe Caldwell is her more well-known book, and I do think it it has the most literary merit and staying power of her work that I’ve read so far. Caldwell offers a very focused, very detailed immersion into an intense, obsessive, and destructive relationship with a woman.
This book is not the triumphant lesbian novel I think people want it to be. It is unclear to the reader the extent that Caldwell is lesbian, bisexual, or heterosexual, and this is a key question throughout the book–for Caldwell and for her readers.
A clear look at the experience of being intensely caught up in forbidden love is the point of the book, I think, and also just that experience of living life as a human with desires, stupidity, and pleasure, plus some good old fashioned bed rot and mental illness. Most readers with a beating heart will recognize at least some pieces of this book.
I read I’ll Tell You in Person by Chloe Caldwell right before reading her other more well-known and previous book entitled Women. The book reads as a memoir and Caldwell as the main character is unhinged and insufferable, but recognizable, and this seems intentional and is the interesting thing about this book.
Caldwell’s depictions of coming of age in the 90s and early aughts is detailed and nostalgic, and this part will resonate with most readers who have lived through that era.
There’s something to say about privilege/social class and mental illness, but I’m not sure what except maybe just that people with support networks can experience drug addiction and depression more safely than those in more precarious situations.
I found myself wishing I’d read the book 20 years ago, but it was published in 2016.
There There by Tommy Orange has been on my tbr pile since shortly after it was published in 2019. The timing was right when I finally got around to reading it, as, interestingly, I have been reading more indigenous work for my scholarship this winter, learning more about my family’s history, and this book has helped inform all of that thinking.
It’s a good book. It is another one that I’ve read recently that has a very cinematic quality, and I could easily see it being made into a movie at some point. The book has an intentional and unique plot and timeline, with characters unknown to each other moving apart and together in each other’s lives.
I’m not sure what to say about the theory, exactly. Orange’s characters are urban Indians. Orange has them defying societal expectations and also interacting with stereotypes.
I think most readers have a lot of learn from a book like this, both in terms of good literary prose and the commentary about contemporary, urban indigenous lives.
I can admit when a book is perfect, and I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a perfect book. While maybe I do not love this book, and while maybe this book will never be one that I recall with fondness, and while this is not typically my genre, it is one that is wholly unique and one that will stick with me forever.
SHEREWIN 