November Reads

Good books this month! Still trying to catch up on classics, still trying to learn to cook, still feeling weird reading anxiety—overall, things are all thumbs up.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera: Weird book. I really, really loved it at the beginning, then gradually loved it less but still appreciated it. Kundera’s writing is rich and fascinating, sort of Italo Calvino-esque, and his characters were captivating, but also very depressing.

The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien: I think this is an absolutely perfect book. Deep, spare, precise, gorgeous, haunting, and darkly funny. It is unbelievably good.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Chandler: Short stories! The best! This is a gorgeous collection. Chandler is a master.

Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lundgren: Sometimes I read children’s lit as an adult and I am deeply disturbed by some of the psychological trauma being exhibited by these kids. I hope Pippi got some help eventually.

How to Build a Girl - Caitlin Moran: I love Caitlin Moran so much. This book pulls zero punches and so is probably not for everyone. But if you’ve read and enjoyed her other stuff, I’d recommend this. A hilarious and surprisingly, wonderfully deep coming of age story. Moran is so stinking wise. And no one is funnier.

The Accidental Tourist - Anne Tyler: This little book is just golden. The characters are perfectly drawn and the writing is warm and perceptive. Super enjoyable.

The Call of the Wild - Jack London: I see why this is a classic and I enjoyed the read, but it’s not one I’m going to rush to pick up again.

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School - Kathleen Flinn: The premise of this book: Flinn, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, finds ten kitchen noobs and gives them a series of cooking lessons.  I was hoping to gather my own primer on kitchen basics, and it was good for that. I didn’t care for the writing, though, so I sort of rushed through any part that wasn’t teaching me something about cooking.

Blue Nights - Joan Didion: This book is about loss, specifically the loss of Didion’s daughter, Quintana, but also the loss of her husband and her own health as she ages. I love Joan Didion, but this is not my favorite book of hers. Her writing is always beautiful, but her ruminations here just didn’t resonate. I loved “The Year of Magical Thinking”—read that instead.

The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster: I’d heard great things about this book, but I just couldn’t get into it. It’s a trio of detective stories, but they focus on the person uncovering the mysteries rather than the mysteries themselves. It’s more metaphysical than anything; the idea was really interesting and the writing was good, but the delivery was pretentious.

Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner: I read 10:04 last year and loved it, and I loved this one too. It’s a novel (that reads like autobiography) about a poet spending a year on fellowship in Madrid. The main character is sort of antisocial, disenchanted with his poetry, yet un-self-consciously romantic, both with women and with art generally. Lerner’s writing is undeniably contemporary, but it’s imbued with a hopefulness that is so refreshing for post(or post-post-, or post-post-post, or however many posts we are now)modern writing, and I enjoy him a lot.

Fierce Attachments - Vivian Gornick: This is a gorgeous memoir about Gornick and her mother. It’s one of the trailblazers of the genre, published in the 80s before this sort of memoir was en vogue, so it was strange to read—experiencing the book that so many other books are trying to live up to. Gornick belongs to that class of New York-based nonfiction-ers who seem to spend nearly all their time wandering the city (the rest of the time they are attending hopelessly fashionable salons with famous people, or else feeding their cats). So basically, living the life I aspire to.