Welcome to another edition of Amateur Bibliotherapy, my weekly newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here or on my Bookstagram! I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that I may make a small commission if you make a purchase through my affiliate links. That commission will be donated to Welcome To Chinatown before the year’s end.
happy anniversary!
Today we’re celebrating the fact that I have been writing this newsletter for a whole year! While I initially intended for this edition to coincide with the 32nd anniversary of Heathers (1989), I delayed so my celebration would be in my birthday month in case it compels you to buy me a congratulatory book.
*Alexa, play Graduation (Friends Forever) by Vitamin C for the montage*
For those of you who have been reading (or skimming) since the beginning, thank you! For those of you who have joined more recently, I started this newsletter to relieve patient friends from the burden of hearing me pontificate endlessly about the books, long-reads, and internet wormholes that have been instrumental in modulating my brain. Highlights of this kind include:
Investigating bookstore drama and “ethical” bookstore shopping
Endlessly pitching and referencing Paradise Killer, the narrative murder mystery game of my vaporwave dreams
Curating books and articles that connect contemporary workplace and labor issues
Me yelling at everyone to read Yoko Ogawa every week, but particularly the week that I read her story cycle titled Revenge
Neurotransmitting by dewey decimal is way more fun with a bookish hivemind, and it has been a JOY to stay in touch with farflung friends via books and reads. Remember that time when...
We all read Bunny by Mona Awad together and said “what the everloving fuck did I just read?”
I let Martin take over the newsletter to talk about Hadestown, as if all of you haven’t heard this pitch 90000 times (particularly when either of us has the aux cord)
It’s been fun. Cheers to another year!
*Alexa play Montero (Call Me By Your Name) by Lil Nas X because it’s PARTY TIME*
the books
Since last we gathered around the campfire, I squeezed in a viewing of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) because I couldn’t stop thinking about Judge Doom. I also read:
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: I really liked this one. More thoughts below.
Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom: This set of essays about American culture (pop and otherwise), anti-Blackness, politics, and sociology is supremely smart.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh: I loved this book, particularly after a literal year of quarantine. I think everything there is to say about it has already been said, so I will spare you from a longer review.
Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina: This is my second 5-star book of the year. I can’t stop thinking about it.
My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite: What a surprising character study in such a short and fierce book. Kayla and I wish that there had been more bloodshed, but it was a treat to read anyway.
no one is talking about this (anymore, because I am late to the disk horse)
A twenty-three-year-old influencer sat next to her on the couch and spoke of the feeling of being a public body; his skin seemed to have no pores whatsoever. “Did you read…?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.
Do you recognize the strange craving to participate in a viral thrill, like a “dalgona coffee” or secret Starbucks menu order, that promises a shared experience more than a tasty beverage? Do you find yourself wondering how vestiges of the digital world have leaked out of your screens and into your analog existence, like your local Dunkin’ Donuts offering a Charli D’Amelio collaboration drink or hearing a song on the radio you only recognize from Tik Tok? If an artistic examination of your internet-addled brain calls out to you, read NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS by Patricia Lockwood. Experimentally composed of snippets typically no longer than a page or so, this book loosely follows the story of a social media influencer whose every thought seems to revolve around “the portal”—Lockwood’s term for social media—until a sudden event in the “real world” forces her to look up from her screen. It is absurdly specific writing that flits between moments of philosophy and breaking news and dank memes as seamlessly as a 3am doomscroll. It’s weird and beautiful and funny, despite demonstrating how ephemera of online living has restructured some of our synaptic transmissions.
What to know going in: If you are blessedly free of social media brain worms—particularly those that burrowed into grey matter during the 2016 US election cycle and beyond—then the first half of this book will likely bore you. It is riddled with context-reliant humor and simulates the “brain fugue of internet immersion” to a degree that makes it nearly opaque to someone who doesn’t remember these Tweets. The second half of the book, however, “shifts into another realm” after the narrator’s encounter with an emergency outside the portal; the book becomes “a sort of conversion story in which sincerity supersedes irony,” the modus operandi of a lot of the internet (NPR). The evolution of this book is a glorious payoff, though some readers have pointed out that the two halves of the book feel too separate to evoke that. I disagree.
The piece that resonated most with me about Lockwood’s book is writer Brandon Taylor’s review, which explains the Internet Novel as a larger project that “captures some of the weird Gothic horror that white people have come, by way of their new digital Calvinism, to accept as being inherent to digital life.” He rightly points out that there are “huge tracts of digital life that these novels don’t touch,” particularly the ones that bring folks a lot of joy and solace. (Hell, I got a copy of this book for free because an internet acquaintance kindly sent it to me. It’s not all bad here.) With that in mind, this is really more of a Social Media Novel than an Internet Novel.
My review (if you can call it a review) is about 3 weeks late to the ~online discourse~ about the book. But Lockwood authored one of the greatest Tweet of all time back in 2013, and I think her book will similarly withstand the test of time unlike many other books that try to capture the internet as a “new dimension in which we live.”
tasting notes
Appropriate accompaniments for No One Is Talking About This are Brandon Taylor’s full analysis of the Internet Novel as a Gothic genre incarnation; drafting but never posting Tweets; Lurking by Joanne McNeill; FaceTiming your internet friends; a Twitter account chronicling Sylvia Plath’s food diaries; installing and uninstalling social media apps on a regular basis; Tressie McMillan Cottom’s essay about the infamous David Brooks NYT sandwich op-ed; Uncanny Valley by Anna Weiner; this cathartic thread of people discussing their relationships with the internet; Octet by Dave Malloy, particularly this song; and remembering the Ice Bucket Challenge.
If you’re looking for something else, Bad Form Review compiled a list of books that got their staff through lockdown; PureWow has a cute quiz with actually interesting recommendations about what you should read next; and WhichBook lets you pick a book based on emotional content.
Bye!!