reading may - december 2023
alternately titled: the ella luna book guide
Why is it that everyone decides things are over before they really are? Why are we so eager to mourn something that has yet to leave us? We begin to recount the year in October. What the hell? I blame Spotify Wrapped coming out the last week of November. The year isn’t even over yet guys! I have more books to read and polaroids to take. Settle down. But anyway, let’s talk books.
I am always amazed, dumbfounded even, by the power a story can hold over me. The way it alters my mood and the way I see the world. If it’s jarring and heavy, I find myself unable to shake an eerie feeling. If it’s a mystery, I’m more on edge in my day to day. It’s not like a song or a movie where I can snap back into my reality the moment it’s not currently playing. The story will be inscribed in my mind, something I cannot turn off or escape, until I turn the final page. Considering that, it’s important for me to balance intense readings with more fun, buoyant ones.
Here is what I have read since I last wrote about books in April:
-Blue Horses by Mary Oliver
-Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
-Life Sciences by Joy Sorman
-Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
-Red Bird by Mary Oliver
-Bluets by Maggie Nelson
-Roses, In the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman
-Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu
-Nocturne by Jodie Hollander
-Ice by Anna Kavan
-The English Teacher by Lily King
-Sex and Rage by Eve Babitz
-What Do We Know by Mary Oliver
-What You Are Looking For Is In This Library by Michiko Aoyama
-Death Valley by Melissa Broder
-Marigold and Rose by Louise Glück
-Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress
-Lying In by Elizabeth Metzger
-So Sad Today by Melissa Broder
-The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb
-Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
-The Wild Iris by Louise Glück
-A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs
-Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej
-Life of the Party by Olivia Gatwood
-Film for Her by Orion Carloto
-Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee
-Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Joan Didion and Eve Babitz are the origin of the Los Angeles cool girl writer. They were born just about a decade apart and died in the same month of the same year. Both authors are more famous in Southern California than anywhere else, they are adored by LA natives. I first read Didion last year at the reference of my friend Grace (an LA native). I read The White Album, which in all honesty I did not like. I’m not even sure I finished it. I promised Grace I’d give one more chance, and at the reference of my friend Hana (a California native), I read Play It As It Lays. While I enjoyed it more than the other, it still didn’t stick with me. I thought there were some entrancing ideas for storylines and surely some catchy one-liners, (“I’ve got a fantastic vocabulary and I’m having a baby,” and “Well, go to sleep, cunt. Go to sleep. Die. Fucking vegtable,”) but anything of substance was overshadowed by the dislikable character Maria. I could not get lost in a story where I could not stand the main character. And I hate how Didion makes thinness a personality trait, it’s so Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. My distaste for Didion made me wary of Eve Babitz, who seemed to share many characteristics. I picked up Sex & Rage on a whim over the summer. It ended up being a favorite of mine. I was enthralled with Jacaranda's story, her diction. The humorous play mixed with brutal honesty. “Jacaranda had once heard that an artist was ‘any white person over twenty-five without health insurance.’” Babitz’s Los Angeles aligns more with the way I experience Los Angeles, summarized with “-immaculate freeways, girls in shorts on skateboards, Thai food.” I’m a sucker for a story about a writer, especially one with an unwavering love for home and a new endeavor. Babitz writes transparently truthfully. She is not trying to make LA some strange alternative universe the way a lot of LA based artists do. It is simply the setting, the origin of a story, one that is articulated beautifully and eloquently. In short: Eve Babitz over Joan Didion.
The books that resonated with me the least this year include Life Sciences by Joy Sorman, Roses, In the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman, and A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs. In poetry, Nocturne by Jodie Hollander, Lying In by Elizabeth Metzger, and Film for Her by Orion Carloto. I bought my copy of Life Sciences in New York at Rizzoli, the bookstore down the street from the apartment I stay at. I was intrigued by the summary: a generational curse that causes women to suffer obscure diseases. The story also comments on the medical industry refusing or belittling the pain of women. The problem was that it had little to no plot development, the more I read the more I questioned why nothing was happening. Roses, In the Mouth of a Lion follows Razia, a young, queer, Muslim-American. Similarly to Crying in H Mart and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the character struggles to value generational heritage while also becoming the person she wants to be, in the world she wants to live in. I also considered the plot of this novel to drag, and the diction didn’t pull me into the story the way a fiction is dependent on. A Life of One’s Own is a collection of nine essays about famous female writers in history, including Toni Morrison, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Zora Neale Hurston. I believe if I had read each of the writers, I would have been able to follow more. But ultimately it was very academic for me. I love novels and I love to read books about novels! I will surely return to it another time. Nocturne and Lying In were beautiful and short, but Hollander and Metzger did not resonate with me the way other poets do. I picked up Film for Her while visiting my future in-laws for Thanksgiving, the beautiful cover caught my eye. But, sometimes the most aesthetically appealing book covers hold the worst writing. I knew of Orion Carloto from the popular comedy podcast “Emergency Intercom.” I am always hesitant to buy works written by internet personalities, but I decided to give this one a chance. It met my expectations with very meticulously crafted film photography accompanying, for lack of better words, corny poetry. I respect and admire Carloto’s style, but am not a fan of her writing.
This year, I met the work of Melissa Broder. I picked up Milk Fed and read it within a few days when Erin and I went down to Encinitas to see her parents dog. It is maybe my favorite book of the year. I loved it from front cover to back cover. The novel is narrated by Rachel, a queer, Jewish, anorexic twenty-four-year-old. Her tongue throughout the book is jarring, disturbing, I kept having to reread passages out loud to Erin saying “Can you believe this?” Broder depicts the experience of being a young, insecure, queer woman so well, while also inserting some magic too. I felt I knew these characters, like they were friends. She depicts sexuality and intimacy with such tender transparency, how desire comes in many forms, from romantic love, to passionate hate, to parental dissatisfaction. I read Death Valley and So Sad Today after seeing Broder at a reading at Skylight Books (my favorite bookstore in LA). They carry the same grotesque honesty and magic of Milk Fed. I am a big fan.
It’s not uncommon for me to enter a bookstore with no idea what I’m looking for. Some of my favorite reads are ones I plucked off the shelf unknowingly. To my point, I’d never heard of Anna Kavan until the bright green cover caught my eye in the fiction section of Vroman’s. After reading the summary, I went on a Google deep dive. Kavan was one of the pioneers of slipstream literature. She made her author pseudonym her legal name, she spent several periods of her life in psychiatric hospitals undergoing inpatient treatments, lost two children (one in childbirth and one serving in World War 11), and ultimately became a drug addict. Her life was tragic, and like many others, she was failed by the medical and psychiatric industry. Originally published in 1967, Ice is narrated by a nameless character in a search for a woman in an apocalyptic, freezing world. The book is virtually plotless, it is completely unclear to the reader what is really happening and what is a hallucination or a dream of the narrator. It’s strange, impossible to understand, and telling of the state Kavan was in while writing. It was a heavy read, followed by The English Teacher by Lily King and a Mary Oliver collection to derail the intensity. But I thoroughly enjoyed it, and recommend it to anyone looking to branch out of the fiction realm.
There’s nothing I love more than a story about young people finding their way, especially young queer women. Dogs of Summer, originally published in Spanish, tells the story in summer 2005 of a ten-year-old narrator becoming aware of her desires, particularly for her best friend Isora. It’s raunchy and uses the accurate vocabulary of an elementary school girl. It reminds me of Oldladyvoice by Elisa Victoria, also narrated by a young girl discovering herself and her interests. The ages nine to eleven are such a vulnerable and primal time for girls, at the cusp of puberty, but holding on to the remnants of childhood. Hearing stories in that perspective are intriguing and disturbing. Abreu does a beautiful job with it. Sirens & Muses also focuses on a developing romance between two friends, but these friends are competitors and roommates at an elite art university. The story is told chapter by chapter, the prime focus alternating between four characters. Louisa and Karina are the roommates turned lovers, Preston is Karina’s temporary boy-toy, and Robert is a resident artist at their prestigious college. With all four storylines intertwining, Angress showcases the unique and ineffable tale of being an artist on the East Coast. While I personally found myself less interested in the male plots and anticipating the happenings of the women, all characters are meticulously thought out, making it hard to put down.
There are novels in this life that can change you, books are powerful like that. One that has made me contemplate my own life’s direction just by its enticing and magical storyline is What You Are Looking For Is In This Library by Michiko Aoyama. Another book I happened upon just browsing the shelves, Aoyama tells the story of a library, particularly the reference librarian, who changes the lives of people who come in who, more or less, are feeling a little lost. How ironic, right? This book made me realize that I may not want to pursue music the way I’d always thought I did. Will success as an artist make me happy and fulfilled? What are the big goals I have in my life? To be in love, to write and make music with people I love, to have a home. What can I do to make sure those things can happen? I really have been pondering this. I love this book. It’s optimistic, full of hope for the future and the people in it. It’s a perfect book for getting you out of both a reading slump and a life slump.
The other book that is in the running for my favorite of the year is The Violin Conspiracy by Brendan Slocumb. The vibrant yellow backdrop of the multicolored violin drawing made this yet another arbitrarily chosen pick, from the shelf of Tattered Cover on Colfax (the best Denver bookstore). It’s a mystery, thriller, and crime fiction about a stolen Stradivarius valued at ten million dollars. If that isn’t enough of a pull in, the violin is property of Ray McMillian, a young and passionate classical musician, as a gift from his grandmother. The violin was originally owned by her grandfather, a slave to the family who will try to claim the violin as their own. Not only is the story enticing, with all the twists and turns of any great mystery, but Ray is a dynamic, loveable character whose devotion to classical music is contagious. It also takes you on the journey of being a BIPOC person in the classical music world; a world so historically dominated by white people, and to this day inaccessible to every social and economic class. Slocumb, as a musician himself, writes about music with such attention to detail that I could almost hear the way Ray played the Stradivarius throughout. This book has everything I want in a novel: wonderful characters, political commentary, classical music, and a mystery with a surprise ending. I am gifting it to my best friend, an opera singer at Emory University, for the holidays, hoping it will bring her as much joy and understanding as it did me.
Grace studies physics at Yale, where she is also a trumpet player in a jazz ensemble. Since she is the coolest fucking bitch in town, I take her recommendations very seriously. When she suggested I read Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett, I added it to my list. While it’s taken me many months to finally find it, it’s one of my favorites, and I punch myself for not getting to it sooner. A memoir about the strong bond between Patchett and fellow writer Lucy Grealy, the story follows them from 18 year olds sharing a dingy apartment in Iowa to both gaining great success and admiration as authors. Lucy suffers from endless medical complications due to her disfigured jaw, a result of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare type of pediatric cancer. Throughout the course of their friendship, Lucy undergoes surgery after surgery to restore her face and make her quality of life more fulfilling, and Patchett struggles to maintain her own life and career while taking care of Lucy. The story is riveting, with insight into the complexities of female friendship and the innate nature of caretaking all women carry. Eloquently written, Patchett depicts the rise and fall of love beautifully. The cool thing about memoirs or biographies or true stories of any kind is all that you can uncover once you’ve finished the book. There’s so much to know and learn about Lucy Grealy. The most interesting fact to me is that Patchett published this less than two years after Lucy’s parting, and her sister Suellen Grealy published an article in The Guardian expressing her frustration and resentment toward Patchett for publishing the book, saying “My sister Lucy was a uniquely gifted writer. Ann, not so gifted, is lucky to be able to hitch her wagon to my sister's star. I wish Lucy's work had been left to stand on its own.” I for one am grateful to Patchett for sharing her and Lucy’s story with me and countless others, for immortalizing her in ways her body couldn’t. Shortly after finishing Truth & Beauty, my girlfriend’s mother gifted me with Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Similarly to The Violin Conspiracy, this book has many of the attributes I desire, including classical music and crime. The story begins at a birthday party in a South American country where famous opera singer Roxane Coss is performing. The party is broken into by a terrorist organization in an attempt to capture the President who is not in attendance. The whole novel follows said invasion and the complexities that follow, including the evolution of passionate relationships in spite of language barriers. I loved the building of characters and all of the linguistic properties.
Grace shared a poem with me on the morning of Louise Glück’s passing. It moved me and led to my purchase of Marigold and Rose, her sole work of fiction, published the year before her parting. I’ve never read a book that tells a story like this one. It’s very short, only sixty-four pages, and narrates the first year of life of twin girls Marigold and Rose. All other characters remain nameless, Mother, Father, Grandmother, etc. The twins compare themselves to one another and have mature, thoughtful internal dialogue. I love fiction written by poets because you still get lines like “Rose looked more likely to have a gentle murmur, so that people would lean close. She wants them to see her eyelashes, Marigold thought,” and “They didn’t know this was what they felt until the feeling disappeared.” Glück is a wonderful writer and I don’t need to be the one to tell you. Marigold and Rose stuck with me deeply, and I thoroughly enjoyed her collection of poetry The Wild Iris.
When I picked up The Violin Conspiracy, the other book that caught my attention was Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee. The story follows Ranita, a mother of two, finally facing liberation after being incarcerated for four years. She's reentering the outside world two years clean, having experienced true love, and ready to earn the redemption of her kids. Lee writes with such character, bringing Ranita and all of her peers to life. She tackles heavy topics like addiction, prison, racism, and abuse with such tenderness, making you feel all the things her characters feel. While sometimes the attention to detail can make the story drag a little, it pulls the reader into the world. A great read highlighting the experience of a resilient woman discovering her queerness and freedom. I highly recommend!
Thank you for reading and I truly hope you venture into at least one of these books. Happy New Year!
Listen to my new song 'Lillian'
