It’s been a bit quiet around here, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading! September included four buddy reads and one failed buddy read, and I have a few more buddy reads lined up for October. I also have a few bookish blog posts in the works that I’m super excited to share, so look out for those.
Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s & A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
★★★★ // Goodreads: Sara Crewe, A Little Princess
I am a princess in rags and tatters, but I am a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth-of-gold; it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.
I’m sure everyone is familiar with the beloved children’s classic A Little Princess, at least by title, but before that came the play A Little Un-Fairy Princess, and before that came the original novella Sara Crewe. They all tell the same story but in different levels of detail:
Sara Crewe moves from India to England to attend Miss Minchin’s boarding school. She’s kind and clever, and loves to learn, read, and tell stories. She’s sent many beautiful things by her doting father, and when he suddenly passes away, so disappears her life of luxury. But what makes a princess is what is on the inside. This is a story of family, kindness, and imagination.
The books have their problematic moments (i.e. fatphobia, classism, racism) and have their magical moments, taking me back to my childhood and reminding me of that world of wonder and imagination. For that, I enjoyed both Sara Crewe and A Little Princess, but the 1995 film adaptation will hold the most special place in my heart.
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
★★★★ // Goodreads // Reading buddies: Cindy, Emily
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.
Mr. de Winter’s new young wife tries to adjust to life in the grand estate of Manderley, but there’s something unsettling about it. Everywhere in the house is the presence of her husband’s late wife Rebecca, who he won’t speak of.
My first du Maurier! She’s a master of atmosphere. Rebecca was such a haunting figure—dead before the story began, yet her presence could be felt everywhere. She’s the whole title of the book! On the other hand, the new young wife went nameless except by Mrs. de Winter, overshadowed by Rebecca as she was. There were so many more instances that haunted the story with what went unsaid.
The perfect gothic romance to kick off spooky season. So ready for Rebecca to come out on Netflix later in October!
Tip: The story starts off with Mr. de Winter and his soon-to-be new young wife meeting in Monte Carlo and may feel a little slow, but the story picks up when they get to Manderley. The second half was intense and I couldn’t put it down.
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
★★★★ // Goodreads // Reading buddy: Sheena
Both a memoir of a non-technical woman in tech and an ethnography of Silicon Valley.
Wiener is now a tech correspondent for The New Yorker, but her career started in NYC publishing, then took her to Silicon Valley, where she worked at Oyster—an e-reading company—Mixpanel—an analytics company—and Github—an open source software company.
As an ethnography, this book isn’t exactly dramatic or climactic, but I was fascinated by Wiener’s insider perspective on Silicon Valley, especially with her liberal arts background.
I still clung, condescendingly, to the conceit that art could be an existential curative. That music or literature was all anyone was ever missing. That somehow these pursuits were more genuine, more fulfilling than software. I didn’t consider that perhaps he liked his life–that he wanted it to look in no way like the one I had left.
Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.
Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. but these banal inefficiencies—I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human.
The fetishized life without friction: What was it like? An unending shuttle between meetings and bodily needs? A continuous, productive loop?
Reading the book, you’ll quickly notice Wiener’s omission of company names, some so obvious you wonder why Wiener would even bother leaving the names out, i.e. Amazon is “an online superstore that had gotten its start in the nineties by selling books on the World Wide Web” and Facebook is “a social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to.” The obvious answer is because of NDAs, but that would only be relevant to companies she worked at/with, and yet she made this stylistic choice for companies whose products she was only a casual user of as well. I choose to believe Wiener is poking fun at the culture of NDAs in tech (which makes me think of the exploitation of NDAs in tech, which makes me think of Theranos, exposed in Bad Blood by John Carreyrou). Anyways, just a fun note. Check out this article for an exhaustive reverse glossary of all the references made.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
★★★★ // Goodreads
Having a sous-chef with excellent cooking skills and a criminal mind is one of God’s great gifts.
A chef’s memoir. From before Bourdain’s celebrity.
The culinary world has changed since this “expose” was first published (I wouldn’t know myself, but Bourdain says so in the afterword of the updated edition). Now, a culinary job can be a career and rocket you to celebrity status, but when Bourdain was coming up, it was a simply a job to make ends meet that attracted fringe characters. It was a world of sex, drugs, mobs, and questionable hygiene.
Bourdain is frank in his writing and cuts the shit. He made me want to write.
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
★★★★ // Goodreads
You don’t get it yet, but you will. Soon, you’ll have your own beautiful boy or girl who will look at you with their perfect little face and you’ll feel love and hope and, mostly, you’ll feel the weight of everything that’s ever happened to you and everything that will ever happen to them and you’ll want to run.
A coming-of-age story of a pregnant pizza delivery girl who becomes obsessed with one of her customers.
This is a book with a lot of personality. Pizza Girl is aimless and self-destructive, but she’s loved, smothered by it in fact. And it was interesting to see how she coped with that, how she would avoid her support systems, her loving mother and boyfriend, ignore her future, latch onto other things and people to lose herself in.
Not much happened until everything did. It got erratic and I didn’t quite know what to make of that part, but it shook me out of my headspace and sometimes you need that.
I recommend Helen’s review.
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
★★★★ // Goodreads // Reading buddy: Nicholas
I tried to make my smile alluring, wondering if I was laying it on too thick.
He smiled back, though, looking allured.
I don’t plan on reading Midnight Sun because it’s 662 pages (Twilight from Edward’s POV), but with everyone talking about this new release, I decided to give Twilight a reread because all I remembered was the Bella-Edward-Jacob love triangle and that Jacob was actually in love with Bella’s unborn child all along.
Had fun with this one. Just wish Jacob had a bigger part in this book because I don’t plan on rereading the rest of the series to get to him haha.
Here’s my summary of Twilight:
Bella moves from Phoenix, AZ to Forks, WA and is worried about fitting in but then everyone wants to be her friend and she’s like, wow, why does everyone like me so much, how annoying. She has eyes for no one but Edward and obviously they’re meant to be because they both love “Clair de Lune,” such taste, such sophistication. But dramaa. He’s a vampire. Bella’s like, are you a vampire. And he’s like, I’m not saying I’m a vampire but— Ok you caught me, I’m a vampire. I’m dangerous and bad for you but I can’t resist you so I’m gonna hang out with you but you shouldn’t hang out with me. And Bella is like, uh ok whatever dude, you’re pretty. Then Bella is captured by an evil vampire and blacks out and is saved in time to make it to prom (:
Nightlight by The Harvard Lampoon
★★★ // Goodreads
The next day was wonderful… and terrible. So, overall, I guess it was okay.
It was wonderful because it was raining less. I was terrible because Tom hit me with his car.
“I’m so sorry—I didn’t see you!” he said, driving away to find a parking space before the lot filled up. I picked myself up and smiled knowingly. Tom’s constant attempts to get my attention were flattering and sometimes surprising.
Twilight parody. The real reason I reread Twilight hehe. Stumbled upon it in a secondhand bookstore for $3 so why not.
Started this within 60 seconds of finishing Twilight. A mix of hilarious jabs that actually made me laugh out loud and cheap, mean-spirited jokes, but I didn’t mind sifting through those to get to the funny parts because it was so short. The last third of the book took on its own life and didn’t resemble anything like Twilight, so I lost interest there (idk if it bled into New Moon or was just completely made up).
Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan
★★★ // Goodreads // (Giveaway win) // Reading buddy: Cindy
“I’m only forty-two, but I’m already beginning to resemble an alligator Birkin.”
“Charlotte, you’re forty-nine.”
A modern retelling of A Room with a View. Lucie Tang Churchill and George Zao meet at a wedding in Capri and are inexplicably drawn to each other. It’s a week they’ll never forget. Five years later, Lucie runs into George in NYC with her fiance Cecil Pike.
Cindy articulated my feelings about this story perfectly. Paraphrasing: The story suffered from trying too hard to stay true to the original plot. Everything was almost there—the characters, the romance.
As a retelling with mixed-race characters, I would have loved for there to be more character development than plot development, particularly a deeper exploration of internalised racism through Lucie’s family dynamics (lots of potential between Lucie and her grandmother Consuelo Barclay Churchill). I think something Kwan suffers from is that people expect his stories to represent all Asians and be culturally enlightening instead of just letting it be simple entertainment, but I bring up race because Lucie literally gives a speech about internalised racism toward the end of the book, and that wouldn’t have been needed if the character dynamics were better developed throughout the story.
As a lighthearted romance, the story didn’t quite hit the mark for me either. Insta-romance. Boring love triangle. George was too perfect and Cecil was no competition (and annoying in his own right). But George was certainly dreamy, and I loved his unapologetic mother as well.
Everything was almost there.
Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
DNF-18% // Goodreads
A mother imagines a conversation with her teenage son lost to suicide.
The rambling often wandered to musings and wordplay around etymology, which wasn’t what I expected or was looking for at the time. I read that this book was written in the months following her son’s death, so perhaps the rambling is a reflection of how the author was still trying to make sense of it all, understandably.
I recommend Esther’s review.
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
DNF-42% // Goodreads // Reading buddy: Cindy, okinmybook
The emotional unraveling of a gay black biochem graduate student in a midwestern university town over a late summer weekend.
Found the writing overly descriptive and didn’t connect with the characters. Perhaps, like one Goodreads reviewer said, “too much of a micro-emotional exploration for my current tastes.”
I had high expectations because of the glowing reviews on bookstagram. I recommend Paris’ review.
What was your favourite read this month?
PS: my favourite secondhand bookstores in philly, 2020 mid-year reading check-in, 2019 reading recap