"Something holy is always coming around" —Joy Harjo
What a week this has been. I was anxious about publishing my last post, especially about leaving a job before having another one lined up — for the record, I do not recommend doing this!!!! — but I’ve felt such an immediate lightness, an energy and optimism and sense of hope that I haven’t experienced in years, which I have to believe means it was the right call. Either way, it’s happening.
I’ve got a lot of books I want to get to, and I’m writing this while my son naps, so I’m going to skip a long intro and get right to it. Trust me, there will be no shortage of feelings in the future. New followers and subscribers: thank you for joining me and I hope you’ll stick around.
Happy reading,
Arianna
Mrs. March by Virginia Feito (out Aug. 10)
I’ve been exploring more thrillers lately, figuring out what within the genre I like — do I really like it or do I just want to know what happens? does that distinction matter? — and Mrs. March hits all the right notes: surreal, unsettling, genuinely surprising. It follows the wife of celebrated novelist George March, who loses her footing in reality when the owner of her local Upper East Side bakery suggests the loathsome protagonist of George’s latest bestseller is based on her. It’s significant that the slight comes from a woman embedded in Mrs. March’s daily routine — routine, appearances, and propriety are gravely important to Mrs. March (we don’t learn her name until the last sentence) and her paranoia about what others think of her expands into a general distrust of everyone in her life, most significantly George, who she starts to suspect might have something to do with a woman’s murder. It’s timeless — real Henry James vibes — and creepy as hell. Also, Elisabeth Moss is turning it into a TV show.
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo (2017)
I love Joy Harjo because her poetry is substantial but accessible; I never walk away wondering, What did I just read? (Not to knock ambiguity! It’s just not what I’m drawn to in poetry.) I often feel grateful for having access to her work — work that is inseparable from her Native heritage, which I know I’m reading from the other side of an impermeable divide — because her ruminations on (human) nature are transcendent, illuminating. This collection from 2017 is built around the problem of existing in a society intent on destroying the earth while holding steadfast our connection to it; it’s about the lingering trauma of the Trail of Tears, sorrow and celebration, roaming cities in search of the holy. It’s damning, heartbreaking, and beautiful.
From “Talking with the Sun”:
I believe in the sun.
In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed, and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
When explorers first encountered my people, they called us heathens, sun worshippers.
They didn’t understand that the sun is a relative, and illuminates our path on this earth.
And later:
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindness of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning.
LaserWriter II by Tamara Shopsin (out Oct. 12)
Shopsin’s debut novel is formally inventive — short vignettes broken up by pixelated illustrations, asides from anthropomorphized tech — but also a classic coming-of-age. It takes place in ‘90s NYC, at the iconic Mac repair shop, TekServe, where 19-year-old Claire has taken a job as a printer repair technician. Shopsin has crafted some of the most endearing weirdos in this cast of technicians, musicians, philosophers, and Apple die-hards; her instincts and efficiency of detail and dialogue make the time and place real, felt. Bittersweet nostalgia, more sweet than bitter. Empire Records vibes. It’s really a lot of fun.
Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg (2016)
I’ve been writing from the Queens Library and I can’t go to the library and not take out a book; I usually take it as an opportunity to dive into the TBR backlog. This week I grabbed Saint Mazie, Jami Attenberg’s historical novel about Mazie Philipps, the owner of a Lower East Side movie theater who opens it up to homeless folks during the Great Depression. Told in alternating timelines — Mazie’s story via her diary and, decades later, after a writer discovers that diary, via interviews with the people who knew her — and it’s super readable, great momentum. I’ve wanted to read it for years, and it was as delightful as everyone said it would be.
The Uninnocent: Notes on Violence and Mercyby Katharine Blake (out Nov. 2)
In 2010, while Katharine Blake was working toward her JD at Stanford Law, her 16-year-old cousin had a psychotic break, walked to a local bike path, and murdered a young boy he’d never met before. The Uninnocent is her grappling with this profound tragedy and an attempt to catalog and make sense of the overwhelming heartbreak of the human experience. This is a tough one; I needed to force myself to take breaks and read it only when I knew I was in a good enough headspace that I wouldn’t spiral into general despair. But the writing is beautiful and the insights are weighty; it provokes a real interrogation into innocence and guilt, justice and mercy, pain and healing, violence and its conditions.
The Moon Book: Lunar Magic to Change Your Life by Sarah Faith Gottesdiener (2020)
I said I was going to get into the moon this year and, friends, I meant it!!! If you are the kind of person who is open to phrases like “lunar magic” and “moon-mapping” or ideas like “utilizing the lunar cycle holistically” then do I have the book for you. I’m obsessed with this book, which I only opened for the first time last month. It dives into history, rituals, tarot spreads, journal prompts for each cycle, and I’ve been picking and choosing along the way. Tonight is the new moon, and this past cycle has done a lot for me. Maybe it was the moon, maybe it was just me doing a lot of introspective work under the moon. Either way, love that girl.
Listening to:
Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge, read by Emily Woo Zeller
Strange Beasts of China is about a cryptozoologist-turned-novelist who collects the stories of the “beasts” — Sorrowful Beasts, Joyous Beasts, Impasse Beasts, to name a few — that live alongside humans. The more she explores, though, the greater she understands their depth of experience, forcing her to contend with dark truths about humanity and herself. Moody, ruminant, magical.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides, read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith and Louise Brealey
Part of my exploring thrillers is realizing how much fun they are to listen to. I had a great time with The Maidens, which follows Mariana, a widowed therapist who travels to Cambridge University to help solve the murder of her niece’s friend — a murder which soon becomes a series of murders, each of the victims a member of one charismatic professor’s secretive study group known as “the maidens.” It’s a little on-the-nose but it’s saved by some really good twists, and Mariana is believably complicated, easy to root for.
Welcome to Your Fantasy, a Pineapple Street / Gimlet podcast
Not a book, but the first podcast in a long time that took precedence over my audiobooks, Welcome to Your Fantasy is about the surprisingly sordid history (murder! conspiracy! exploitation!) of Chippendales. Listened to all nine episodes in two days.
Bookstore bundle:
Mil Mundos is a bilingual anti-gentrification bookstore and community space in east Bushwick that I am lucky enough to have in walking distance. They’ve got a great inventory in general, but I highly recommend browsing their book bundles: I recently got the “Indigenous History for the Present” bundle (with free tote!) and just started Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquin People of New York by Evan T. Pritchard. Great un- and re-learning, especially if you, like me, grew up in the New York school systems.
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