I was striving for the record this year, but I ended up leaving beach week 1 day early and that's the excuse I'll use for "only" reading 5 books this year (the same as last year).
Harriet the Spy for the 21st century
I was a voracious reader as a child (unsurprising) and a great deal of the books I spent hours and hours of my young life devouring featured precocious children trying to navigate a world that didn't wholly understand them. Delightfully ignoring what that might imply about me, I experienced a renewed flush of affinity for the constant companions of my youth through Vera.
Like my pals Harriet, Pippi, Constance, Winnie, and Junie B., Vera is a bright, well-meaning, aloof little girl who finds herself much more at home in the complex recesses of her mind than with her peers. New York City is Vera's playground as she tries desperately to keep her impetuous father and exhausted stepmother from divorcing, to befriend at least one of her classmates before the end of the year, and to confront the blossoming existential crisis born of her own biological mother's highly felt absence.
This book is charming in nearly every sense of the word. Before reading Vera, I was unfamiliar with Gary Shteyngart's work (though he did write one of my favorite travel writing pieces in recent memory). Turns out, he's a prolific satirist. That explains the subtlety of the world-building he does here. Most of the NYC that Vera explores is familiar to us, but there are elements sprinkled throughout the story that get incrementally larger as the novel goes on that blur that perception for us; things like fully autonomous cars, a talking AI chessboard companion, border checkpoints between U.S. states, federal menstrual cycle reporting, and the ongoing commentary of a proposed "5/3rds law" are background elements in Vera's world and thus do not warrant extraordinary attention or explanation, but have an impact nonetheless.
The Tiffany problem, queer edition
When I came out to my mother, she said 2 things in immediate response. She affirmed her love for me, and parroted back what she thought I had said, her longtime strategy for demonstrating her listening comprehension. "So, you want to have sex with women." I'm confident that's what she heard, but that's not what I said.
I've spent the many years since that first conversation endeavoring to find the words to understand & explain (to myself, to my mother, to anyone who will listen, really...) my relationship to my queerness. Queerness (at least to me) is not simply about reversing the heterosexual enforcement of gendered criteria for the person sharing my bed. My queerness is about liberating myself from the expectations and enforcements of harsh binaries, like gender, an act that carries into every aspect of my lived experience.
This book is a lovely reminder of the rich legacy to which we (queer people) belong in a remarkably quotidian way. Not to wade into the endless parade of bullsh*t that passes as "relationship discourse" on the internet, but it's incredibly easy for me to conceive of the relationships I have with friends, lovers, and partners as products of our contemporary moment instead of as honorable entries in the long history of queerness.
All of this to say, Brigid Brophy's 1956 novel felt remarkably familiar to me. Queerness is the main feature of this book, but it's not an empty plot device. Susan and Neale are pallid 20-somethings living together in London. They are roommates who may get married but also don't sleep together but also that's not really off the table and both of them have found themselves intertwined with lovers of all genders. Susan, working as a secretary for an underground porno book publisher, recognizes a cheesecake shot of her high school paramour, Cynthia. Susan sets out alongside a languid Neal on a zany adventure through Europe to track Cynthia down, traveling through Paris, Rome, Florence, and, finally, Venice. There, the duo finally catch up to Cynthia and also encounter Helena, a queer elder, who is present for only the last quarter of the book and still manages to change everything.
A question for all the English majors out there: do we all feel like fakers, or is it just me? Tess is one of those canonical titles that made me feel like a fraudulent English major for never having read. Now having read it.....🤷♀️ It's a pretty generic Victorian novel in some respects, though I must give credit to Thomas Hardy for his moving pastoral elegies. His hyper focus on Tess as his main character is quite successful, too, but her character is extremely underbaked as a whole.
Tess is a young woman living in rural England with incredibly impressionable and lackadaisical parents, to whom the revelation of their family's alleged previous social standing (since frittered away over the generations) imbues an unearned air of self-importance. This new grandiosity is the impetus for Tess' pursuit of the patronage of a "fellow d'Urberville," which lands her in the arms of her boorish, not-cousin, Alec.
Obviously, this dalliance results in a pregnancy out of wedlock (bc morality). The baby is literally named Sorrow, in case we didn't get the message, and doesn't live long after birth. Tess attempts to recoup some grace in the eyes of society by becoming a milkmaid in a neighboring county. It is there that she encounters Angel, the highly educated black sheep of a local parson's family who has captured the affection of every milkmaid on the farm, including Tess. Obviously, he falls for her. Unfortunately, her uncouth past threatens to derail her "one true chance" at happiness.
It's been a minute since I studied Victorian culture, so Thomas Hardy could very well be making nuanced arguments, observations, and critiques of morality culture that are lost on me. But goddamn! Misogyny reigns supreme in extremely overt and insidious ways in this text and is so ingrained in Tess herself that I often found myself shaking the book as if shaking her shoulders.
Call Me By Your Name if it took place in Malaysia
This darling bildungsroman takes place over the course of an incredibly impactful summer in rural Malaysia. Jay is our focus (mostly)—a boy in his late teens who (unhappily) travels with his family to their ancestral farm for the summer. There, he finds himself drawn to Chuan, the son of the farm's caretaker. I loved the artful evocation of quotidian existence and characters that order everyday life in southeast Asia. Tash Aw is not world-building, he's channeling reality and it casts a potent nostalgia over the entire novel.
I think Aw's decision to change POVs every chapter hindered our story, though. We don't get enough of the various b-plot lines to make them interesting enough to divert our attention from Jay and I resented being forced to look away. And unlike CMBYN, we don't really get any glimpses of interiority on Jay or Chuan's parts, nor are we allowed into the small romantic moments between them, really. Overall, I was left wanting.
I started this book months ago and have been savoring it. In this work, Jack Kornfield has collected countless reflections, stories, and lessons about how to live a spiritual, intentional life as part of the real world from priests, monks, nuns, rabbis, swamis, gurus, imams, mystics, zen masters, meditation teachers, and laypeople. I think I've underlined or highlighted something on nearly every single page.