What to Read When the Power Goes Out
I had no power for most of this week. When I wasn't busy calling the electric company, cleaning out fridges and freezers, grasping for a crumb of data or complaining about the heat, I read books.
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Hello, friends. Most of this week I had no power or internet following Tropical Storm Isaias, which came with the most intense winds since Hurricane Sandy and tore down tons of trees and telephone poles in my area. (If you still don’t have power and need anything, please contact me!)
Thus, I only have a few updates for you while I catch up on a week of internetty content.
The Books
By candlelight, I finished reading The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley this week (you can tell this photo isn’t staged because of how much leg is going on here). I am surprised to report that I preferred Foley’s other book, The Guest List, because of its myriad twists and turns; The Hunting Party is a bit more character-driven. Both take place in isolated locales (THP in the Scottish highlands over a New Years holiday and TGL on a tiny island off the coast of Ireland for a wedding) where a terrible crime takes place and each chapter switches between character perspectives. Both are also page-turners that are particularly good for jolting you out of a reading slump.
I also finished If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha and really adored it. The novel follows several women living in a Seoul officetel and their intersecting experiences with South Korean beauty standards, cosmetic surgery culture, and magnified wealth disparities. There were moments of such cutting cruelty juxtaposed with moments that were deeply moving in unexpected ways. I can tell that I’ll be thinking about it for a long while, and will probably write more about it in an upcoming newsletter.
I started Meaty by Samantha Irby, which I downloaded onto my phone from the library during a brief moment of WiFi snatched in a neighboring town. It is raunchier and funnier and sweeter than I imagined, and I am thrilled to have started it while bunkered in a basement lying on the cold linoleum floor using precious and limited phonejuice (because, again, power outage). It made me laugh even when I wanted to scream at my electric company for leaving an exploded transformer unattended for days.
If you’re looking for a book this week, here’s a summer reading list from writers and translators involved in Tokyo’s literary scene; here are 15 extraordinary books you can read in one sitting (because they are very short); and here are Phoebe Bridgers’s 10 favorite books.
Finally, Bookstagram tells me that today is apparently Book Lovers Day! I will thus be spending a dumb amount of money on more books from my favorite spots today. I love books.