Smart Friends & Reads
This week, we're taking a look at what my smart friends are reading and writing. All hail my smart friends.
Welcome to another edition of Amateur Bibliotherapy, my 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.
Time flies when you’re having fun. In my case, I’ve been obsessively watching Squid Game and chasing down Sally Rooney merch while the world burns.
Since we last gathered here, I read and adored The 7 ½ Lives of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton (my fifth-ish book by a man this year, for those counting). The rumors are true: this book slaps.
I also read The Roommate by Rosie Danan, which was cute and quick. I’m now working on finishing Weather by Jenny Offill.
Words From Friends
I’m endlessly impressed by my pals. Here are some neat things from them.
Zoë, one of my favorite fellow YNYC sopranos with impeccable taste for bread delivered via pulley system (see above), recently wrote about “The Dramaturgy of the Rise and Fall of the Bon Appétit Youtube Channel” for Pop Matters. In the article, she details BA’s success through an analysis of its dramaturgical voice—which borrowed heavily from the “inherent tension between the performance of character and the promise of reality” within the “dramaturgy of reality television”—and the consequences of that voice during BA’s fall.
Denise, my fabulously smart and fun pool companion, published her article titled “Thoreau's Econational Poetics” in an academic journal earlier this month. I, too, relish thinking about the conceptual connections between the world of plants and the world of literature (I think about The Book of Difficult Fruit a lot more than you’d think). A snippet from Denise:
According to Thoreau, poetry relinquishes independent subject-agency like plants, is regenerative like air, and resists stabilized meaning like celestial bodies. The article proposes an econational method of engaging with global literature that is developed through Thoreau’s theories of texts as unstable oikoi (oikos being the root of eco) and nations as contingent communities.
All this to say, my friends are smart. Lend me your brain cells.
Libra Season (HBD Catherine!)
Another smartiepants is Catherine, a former-coworker-turned-pen-pal who graces us this week with thoughts on a glorious book stack in her new apartment. She’s currently a graduate student at the University of Mississippi studying southern foodways with an emphasis on Appalachia. We talk about the cultural power of food a lot over FaceTime.
It is also her birthday this week!! Since I made such a stink about Virgo season, it feels right to give the Libras some love. Happy almost birthday.
I am in graduate school, but I also started working back of house in a kitchen over the pandemic. As a result, my reading habits have shifted a lot: When I worked 9-5, I’d devour serial detective novels and scene-y fiction to dissociate from the long city commute. Now, when I get home from cooking on the line, I drink a gin and tonic and take a shower and almost always dream about the rush—plating and sautéing and throwing back calls—so much that I crave reading about the more meditative aspects of cooking.
Cookbooks like Vertamae Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl remind me what it’s all about: making things with feeling and senses. Grosvenor wrote this collection of stories and recipes in 1970, but it feels like it could be written yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Ruth Reichl’s capital novel Delicious! is ridiculously cheesy, and I’ll recommend it to anyone. It’s about a young California gal with a perfect palate who drops out of college and moves to New York City to work at a little publication modeled very conspicuously after Gourmet Mag in the 90s—it’s nothing special, but it’s also delicious, like an Entenmann's donut. Plus, can you name any other novels with an exclamation point involved? I can’t!
Charlotte Druckman’s Women on Food is a collection of essays and interviews from… women in food. It’s so reassuring and healing to read from other women’s experiences in the various echelons of the food world as writers, chefs, otherwise. My only critique on this book is that it could be queered a bit—beyond the positions of power traditionally held by men vs. women, most of them white, I'd like to learn a lot more about how the gender binary still limits our perception of labor, work, and power in the kitchen, food media and big food systems. I recommend the newsletter Lunch Rush, which continues the journey that Women on Food started.
I’ve also been revisiting Jessica B. Harris’s High on the Hog, which personally and historiographically traces how the foundation of American food is Black food. Pairs well with the series on Netflix!
For my thesis, I’m reading Ramp Hollow by Steven Stoll to beef up some of my Appalachian history as it relates to land ownership and agricultural commons. My thesis is about ramps or wild leeks/garlic that mysteriously grow in Appalachia for a couple of months in the springtime. They’re a hot commodity in restaurants from New York to Asheville (note from Anna: consult this now-defunct ramp-spotting Twitter account for NYC-area grocers LOL), but also a source of cultural pride and financial cushion—“ramp suppers” are held annually in many Appalachian communities. I’m collecting oral histories from folks involved in ramp harvest and foraging each year, as well as any ephemera I can get my hands on, including this fun self-published book of recipes and writings (can I call it a zine?) “Mom and Ramps Forever.”
If I’m stuck in a thesis-writing rut, I read a little Patti Smith—usually on the toilet, let’s be honest—or when I’m waiting for the kettle to boil.
When I’m zoned out from transcribing oral histories, I’ll read a little more of Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell: a taste of the fiction I can consume more ardently after I part ways with academia.
That’s all for this week. Hope to see you all at Brooklyn Book Fest next week tho!