Books
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What We Can—and Can’t—Learn About Louisa May Alcott from Her Teenage Fiction - Electric Literature electricliterature.comI love that Pynchon shared his juvenilia with commentary. I’ve shared my student writing. Maybe I’ll start writing commentary for it.Read: electricliterature.com
💬📚 “The graduate program… hinges on a level of detachment from the corporeal, on a laser focus and dedication to one’s intellectual development.” - Rachel Leventhal-Weiner in Succeeding Outside of the Academy
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Kristen Arnett Gets Her Best Ideas at the Bar - Interview Magazine interviewmagazine.com
💬🔖📚 Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times
The postpartum experience isn’t just expensive; it can also be one of psychic trauma and creative crisis. Someone who was a person becomes a mother. “You’re not a person. You don’t have a name,” says Zambreno. This feeling of erasure is a current that runs through her work, reaching peak intensity in “To Write as if Already Dead.” “I need to restore myself after being made into a ghost,” Zambreno says. “I always feel like writing the most when I’m being made invisible.”
Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times latimes.com
🔖📚 Read Together As We Burn: On a Complicated Maternal Bond and Intergenerational Love. A heartbreaking excerpt from Ashley C. Ford’s memoir, Somebody’s Daughter.
🔖📚 Read Stories and Hormones Shape Our Lives by Elanor Broker. Beautiful essay weaving together personal experiences of trans matrescence and the books Detransition, Baby and The Argonauts.
Quick Review: The City We Became 📚
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I love the way N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became captures the spirit of the five boroughs of New York here in a way that is legible to non-New Yorkers. This book recasts Lovecraftian horror as a fight for the city’s soul. It features street artists, grad students, an MC-turned-lawyer-turned-councilwoman, a PhD director of an art non-profit, and a sheltered girl who’s never left Staten Island. If you’re looking for representation for Black, Latino, and queer characters, Jemisin’s got you. This book is a fast, fun read that imagines some of the daily horror in our world as being caused by eldritch forces from beyond our universe. Borrowed this one from @durhamcountylibrary. Highly recommend.
What’s a fantasy or sci-fi book you’ve read that helped you think through recent events?
📚💬 “We learn to wring magic from the ordinary… When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.” Crooked Kingdom, Leigh Bardugo, p. 460
Want to read: The Lightmaker’s Manifesto: How to Work for Change Without Losing Your Joy by Karen Walrond 📚
📚💬 I’ve heard a lot about the excellent disability representation in the Six of Crows duology. Obviously Kaz is phenomenal; Wylan is awesome, too. This quote is what Wylan thinks about how Kaz and the Dregs treat him. It’s pure asset-based treatment and I love it. “They valued the things he could do instead of punishing him for the things he couldn’t.”
📚 In Crooked Kingdom, Inej thinks about her hope that she and Kaz could be “more than two wary creatures united by their distrust of the world” and I’m wondering how does @LBardugo know about my marriage? 💬
📚 Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé's ACE OF SPADES: Gossip Girl meets Get Out in a gripping debut thriller
ACE OF SPADES by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé
Chiamaka and Devon are both students at the prestigious Niveus Academy and total opposites. Devon is a nobody, a scholarship kid who spends all his time working on music composition, only noticed by his friend Jack. Chiamaka is the definition of Queen Bee, working hard to be noticed and celebrated. She is a brilliant science student with designs on Yale.
Chiamaka and Devon have three things in common, though: they are both prefects at their school this year, they are the only Black students at Niveus, and they are both victims of an anonymous texter calling themselves “Aces” and sharing Chi and Von’s secrets with the whole school.
⚠️: Author Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé provided an extensive list of content warnings for the book on her website. Chief among them are racism and homophobia but this thriller is full of potential triggers so I definitely recommend reviewing the list before reading.
The promotional materials call this book “Gossip Girl meets Get Out” and that description is spot-on. If I get too specific I’ll spoil more than I’d like, but it has the anonymous gossip and deep secrets, especially around personal relationships, of Gossip Girl and the “Oh no seriously get out of there” of Get Out. Multiple times revelations made me gasp and think “OHHHH!” There is some exposition at the beginning to introduce you to the characters and the setting, but as soon as Aces’s first message comes out, the pacing picks up and things get and stay intense.
The book also reminds me of Veronica Mars, with its focus on intrigue, detailed depiction of class differences, and teenagers managing their own affairs without much adult interference.
I definitely recommend this to readers who love gossip, mystery, or thrillers. Author Àbíké-Íyímídé says she has “has dreamt of writing books about black kids saving (or destroying) the world all her life” (lack of capitalization in the bio on her website). She has succeeded beautifully here.
Pre-order ACE OF SPADES now, out June 1 in the US and June 10 in the UK. Àbíké-Íyímídé offers some pre-order incentives on her website, so be sure to check those out!
Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan for the e-ARC of this book!
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[A phone displaying the US cover of ACE OF SPADES sits on top of scattered playing cards.]
📚 How do you keep track of quotes that resonate with you? I usually write them in my Bullet Journal or post them to my blog, but sometimes I snap a quick photo. This is a page from FRANKENSTEIN that resonated with me back in December, although I can’t remember exactly which part spoke to me. I remember feeling like the way Victor Frankenstein spoke about his creature was how I was feeling about my dissertation.
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[A page from FRANKENSTEIN.]
Want to read: Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews by Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel 📚
📚 Sometimes I have to start a book several times before it holds my interest. A GAME OF THRONES was like that, but eventually I caught it in the right moment for me and A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE became one of my favorite series. What’s a book you had to start several times but ended up loving?
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[A brass navigational tool and a Tyrion Lannister Funko Pop figure sit on top of a stack of books.]
I carry a tote bag around my house as I move through my day. I never know what I’ll be in the mood to read if I have the time to, so I usually have at least a couple books in there. This is my stack from the beginning of April 2020. How many books do you carry around with you at a time?
📚 Right before I started my Grishaverse catch up, I went on a dark academia spree. These were three of the books I read as part of that. They’re each very different from the other and each excellent. I highly recommend any of them. IF WE WERE VILLAINS has classic dark academia vibes with undergrads in a Shakespeare conservatory covering up a shared secret. BUNNY is a surreal and beautiful story set in a graduate writing program. THE HISTORIAN is an epic novel of following Dracula’s story and a family of scholars as they unravel mysteries from New York to Romania, with stops in Istanbul and Hungary along the way.
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I have Mona Awad’s next book, ALL’S WELL, in my @netgalley queue and am excited to read it. What’s a book you’re looking forward to reading soon?
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[Three books are stacked on a coffee table in front of a brick fireplace.]
📚 Remember how I said my hammock was my favorite reading spot? Here’s a flashback to me reading SIX OF CROWS in my hammock a few weeks ago. The purple thing is @the_book_seat, which has changed my reading life. I have chronic pain and sometimes my wrists hurt too much to hold up a heavy book like this one. The Book Seat does it for me. (This isn’t a paid endorsement or ad. My husband got me the Book Seat for my birthday last year. I just really love it.)
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[A copy of SIX OF CROWS is open to Chapter 30, a Jesper chapter. Green trees are in the background. The edge of a purple cushion is in the foreground.]
