This year has seen many changes to my reading habits. They continue to change so I haven’t been able to pin them all down, but one of the changes has been that I’ve been giving into mood reading. Mood reading isn’t conducive to keeping up with book clubs, so it’s quite lucky that my reads happened to coincide with that of my friends’, making for three buddy reads of the seven books I read this month.
July’s reading highlight has been discovering an all-time favourite—Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi—making for a humble total of three this year so far. Another highlight has been “rereading” The Hunger Games on audio. I’m still deciding whether to add them to my annual count of books read, but I’m leaning towards not, because I’m much more of a visual learner and engage with audio so differently. But I just wanted to throw in this update and say that: 1) the series holds up and 2) it hits different in 2020.
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
★★★★★ // Goodreads // Reading buddy: Sofie
We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, you begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.
A multigenerational story starting in 18th-century Ghana, leading all the way to present day America. Two half-sisters are born into different villages. One is married off and lives in the comfort of Cape Coast Castle; one is imprisoned in the castle’s dungeons, unknown to the other, and shipped off to America, sold into slavery. From there, we follow their diverging lives generation by generation.
This is such a uniquely structured story. Each chapter is written from the perspective of a different character with two chapters from each generation, one from each sister’s side. The family tree at the beginning of the book comes in handy. Despite such a brief time with each character, I cared about every. single. one. (I could read a whole spin-off on Quey and Cudjo.) Gyasi brought each one to life. With this structure, Gyasi was able to cover a great expanse of time, connecting history to the present. The blurb says it best: “Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.”
One of my favourites of the year. Looking forward to Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, out Sept 1.
P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter
★★★★★ // Goodreads
E is for Ewe. Eileen the ewe was so euphoric the wolves were eaten, she even gave the eulogy.
The worst alphabet book ever. 32 pages with pictures and the whole shebang. Hilarious, plus an unexpected plot twist. Highly recommended for all the cheeky monkeys out there, all ages.
I’ll email the book to you if your library doesn’t have it LOL.
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
★★★★ // Goodreads
The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.
The Orient Express is snowed in and there’s a murderer aboard.
Last month I read my first Agatha Christie ever (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) and this month I read my second. I didn’t think Agatha Christie would shock me again, but she did it! I got the creeps and they kept me up at night. Once again, I think going in blind is the best way to go into a murder mystery, so I’ll leave it at that. Would definitely recommend.
I watched the 2017 film adaptation with Johnny Depp afterward. Didn’t love it. (For an Agatha Christie-esque film, I recommend Knives Out—that was a good one.) I did love the wide shots of the train traveling through the snowy mountains though. It made me nostalgic for riding the panoramic train through Switzerland last summer.
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
★★★★ // Goodreads // Reading buddies: Evie, Macey
And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because “Thou mayest.”
A modern retelling of the story of Cain and Abel set in the Salinas Valley of California. A story of sibling rivalries across generations, but also a story of the fight we all have within ourselves, between good and evil, love and its absence, choice and destiny, reality and myth. This philosophical character drama is for anyone who’s looked inward and shuddered, resigned to their flawed self, for anyone who’s fought to be loved or fought to love their self.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
★★★★ // Goodreads
The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can’t imagine, that is the point of writing, to me.
Not a how-to book but a memoir and essay collection about his identities as a queer Korean American man, writer, and activist. Author of The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh.
I wish I had jotted notes while reading these essays as I found my mind wandering at times, with some essays capturing more attention than others, but the parts that stuck with me really stuck with me. There’s some practical advice on writing sprinkled throughout the essays, as well as essays directly about his education in writing, so this collection would be particularly interesting for writers/aspiring writers, but it’s a collection for anyone, really. He writes about love, loss, life. He writes about how he confronted his childhood sexual trauma in his writing, resulting in his debut novel Edinburgh, which I added to my TBR (and The Queen of the Night has already been on my TBR for awhile). He writes about how the first editor to try to sign his novel was Asian American: Hanya Yanagihara. He writes about the point of art in a world in crisis.
Related: Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing book review
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
★★★.5 // Goodreads // Full review coming soon // Reading buddy: Sonia
Oh god, can nothing in this jungle behave as it ought? Must fruits move and trees breathe and freshwater rivers taste of the ocean? Why must nothing obey the laws of nature? Why must everything point to heavily toward the existence of enchantment?
The memoir of a fictitious anthropologist Norton Perina, renowned for his scientific discovery of immortality in a lost tribe on the remote Micronesian island of Ivu’ivu, disgraced for accusations of sexually abusing the children he adopted from said island. (Norton is based on a real person(!): Nobel laureate Daniel Carleton Gajdusek.)
The People in the Trees was completely different from A Little Life. Where A Little Life was all emotion, The People in the Trees was written with a scientist’s remove. It’s not plot-driven, as Perina’s rise and fall is summarised in the first few pages of the book, but it’s a story that forces you to contend with the ugly truth of bad people accomplishing great things, the ethics of scientific discovery, and neocolonialism.
Related: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara book review
Paris Never Leaves You by Ellen Feldman
★★.5 // Goodreads // Full review coming soon // (Gifted)
You can’t do anything about what people think. All you can do is tell the truth.
A historical romance, alternating between a Paris bookshop during WWII and NYC publishing post-war. I felt like the romance distracted from the more interesting themes of survivor’s guilt and the sociology of passing, but maybe then I’m asking for a different story. I was expecting WWII literary fiction, but this reads more specifically as a historical romance.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
DNF-34% // Goodreads
Regarded as one of the most influential books about race relations in the 1960s, consisting of a short letter to his nephew and a longer essay about the relations between race and religion, drawing from his early life in Harlem. Went into it blind and didn’t know it’d focus so much on religion. I’m very curious about his fiction, particularly Giovanni’s Room.
What was your favourite read this month?