What to Read in Another(!) Heatwave
Congratulations to everyone who has been waiting for me to read anything other than a romance novel. The time has come.
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.
Hi! I was too busy allocating my microCOVIDs, thinking about Danielle Steel’s insane handcrafted desk, and listening to the new Tinashe album to watch White Lotus with the rest of you this month. Can you ever forgive me?
The Books
I have two mini-reviews for you today! In addition to the duo described below, I read All’s Well by Mona Awad (weird, witchy, wonderful) and The Hating Game by Sally Thorne (rude to short kings, dumb). I’ll write more about my girl Mona in an upcoming edition, but please know that this was the first text I sent after finishing up her book last week:
Otherwise, I am currently reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell in hardcover; The Betrayals by Bridget Collins on my Kindle; and The Office of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans on my phone.
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At the request of my mother, I read Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri while greedily soaking up the sun one weekend. Lahiri maintained international literary stardom for more than a decade before absconding to Rome, where she swore off reading and writing in English for nearly a decade. She wrote Whereabouts entirely in Italian and translated it to English herself, which astounds me because my Italian and English are both terrible. Lahiri calls translation a “metamorphosis” since “it is a kind of radical re-creation of the work, because you are recreating the language to allow that work to be reborn.”
The novella follows an unnamed woman living in an unnamed city who muses on her various decisions and indecisions, “each chapter an espresso shot of regret and loneliness.” Though there were certainly chapters focused on existential ennui, there were also many moments of lightness and even salaciousness that pleasantly surprised me. And the unnamed city (which is likely Rome, honestly) bestowed its own rhythms and routines on the story that kept it interesting: its friendly shopkeepers who knew the protagonist for years, the narrator’s intriguing friends that played out various family dramas, even her fleeting lovers all make the book more than just a collection of melancholy observations about urban middle-aged malaise.
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I also read Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, which has a similar observational quality to Whereabouts. Kitamura’s book follows an unnamed woman who recently moved to the Hague for a contract interpreting job at an international criminal court, where she is “tasked with intimately vanishing into the voices and stories” of war criminals and others. While her work life can be deeply bureaucratic and steeped in cruelty, her personal time is spent flitting between high-profile art exhibitions and dinner parties. But the narrator is so reserved that the bulk of the plot focuses on her new boyfriend’s family drama, her vivacious friend and a violent mugging near her apartment, and other mysterious interconnected acquaintances. As an interpreter, the narrator “finds herself as the medium for all of these figures, uncertain if her job is to narrow these divides or to further the illusion that they do not exist.”
Early in the book, the narrator posits that it’s her job to remain neutral while interpreting and maintain fidelity to language above all else. But as the narrator begins to work on a harrowing war tribunal for a leader accused of crimes against humanity, it becomes clear that “the interpreter is both marked by and leaves a mark on the text as it passes through them.” It was particularly beautiful to watch the narrator leave her guise of neutrality behind as the story evolved into a kind of noir.
Both Whereabouts and Intimacies pair well with long walks along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade; The New York Times Book Review podcast; dining alone; journaling morosely; trips to cold beaches; eavesdropping on interesting strangers; and Duolingo.
The Acquisitions
I received my quarterly letter from Book Riot’s Tailored Book Recommendations service. They suggested For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing, a thriller set in a prestigious school with murder-y events afoot; Everfair: A Novel by Nisi Shawak, a Neo-Victorian novel that depicts a utopian vision of what might have happened if native populations of the Congo had adopted steam technology before Belgian colonizers arrived; and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe, a chronicle of how the Sackler family capitalized on the success of OxyContin and catalyzed the US opioid crisis.
Coaxed by the promise of a free tote bag, I picked up two translated works published by Two Lines Press at Books are Magic: Slipping by Mohamed Kheir, a “fantastical excursion” through Egypt translated from Arabic, and Rabbit Island by Elvira Navarro, a collection of short stories translated from Spanish that traverse the “fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom.” Both books sound unhinged, which means I’ll probably enjoy them.
My favorite sponsor, Al of the Salt Flats, sent me a box set of Serpent & Dove and Blood & Honey by Shelby Mahurin in an attempt to get me to read them next. In exchange, I have been Venmo-ing Al as they progress through a fantasy romance series of my choosing. Foisting books upon one another is my favorite form of friendship.
Other acquisitions include Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, about a coffee shop in Tokyo that lets patrons time travel (and, fun fact, the paperback that I obtained is apparently “for sale in the Indian subcontinent only”); An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, a semi-autobiographical story about a Japanese writer in the US that unfolds over the course of one day (Kasey, who wrote about Asian diasporic writers and works for this newsletter, recommended this one a while back); White Ivy by Suzie Yang, about a teen thief who grows into an adult with dark obsessions and big aspirations; We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, a creepy classic mystery novel that everyone has read except me; and The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr, a detailed explanation of the logistics of an American grocery store.
The Articles
Why Do American Grocery Stores Still Have an Ethnic Aisle? The New York Times (~10 min). The ethnic aisle at grocery stores has always conceptually baffled me because there’s no apparent rhyme or reason for what products are in the aisle from one store to another. Even the same chain stores will have different products—and showcase different “ethnicities”—from region to region. Priya Krishna’s fascinating article delves into the history and utility of the aisle, along with the mechanics and logistics of stocking a grocery store in general. (It’s way more complicated than I ever expected.)
I read this article alongside this history of making empaguetadas at the beach from Eater—which reminded me of my great grandmother, who would use park barbecues to cook pasta too—and this op-ed about America’s food appropriation problem from Grub Street.
These Finders Are Keepers, Curbed (~2 min). I definitely romanticize libraries. As a result, I love to see a little behind-the-scenes of how big library systems work. This glimpse into the New York Public Library’s re-opening made my heart swell.
i got a hotdog tattoo, Bitches Gotta Eat (~10 min). What a headline, amirite? Most of Samantha Irby’s Substack dispatches are actually extremely detailed recaps of Judge Mathis episodes, sometimes she sends out a wild life recap that makes me giggle. This is a giggly edition that talks about cool cross-country road trips and bowel movements. I particularly enjoyed her section on reading too, because this is an extremely good philosophy:
i like thrillers and scary shit and for a long time resisted them because i was trying to read more ~literature~ or whatever, but that’s boring. i’m 41 fucking years old and i still have to regularly remind myself that it’s okay to do whatever i want to do no matter what anyone thinks about it, even if that something is looking like an idiot reading a james patterson book i bought at walgreens in the parking lot outside of the school where i take the dog. this is absolutely an imaginary problem considering that we live in a burning world, but i am gonna stop reading books that i gotta put down every few pages and ask myself “do i understand what i just read?” the answer is always no! you know what i do understand, tho? blood and stabbing!
That’s all for now. And if you feel like you’ve made some mistakes lately, feel better by reading about Billy Crystal overdoing it on edibles.