My July in reading

According to writer Twitter, lots of people are having trouble reading these days—but not me. I can’t concentrate on TV shows or movies at all, but books are working out just fine, as evidenced by my extensive July reading list.

I Am Not Famous Anymore by Erin Dorney

This is a book of erasure poetry crafted from interviews with Shia LaBeouf. Yep. That Shia LaBeouf. The poems are poignant, and it’s hard not to read the traumas of child stardom into them. Dorney distills the interviews into small shards of meaning that slice deeper than you’d expect.

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie

Another Poirot novel from the Phoebe Reads a Mystery podcast. Hastings, our narrator, is so delightfully stupid. This podcast has been my introduction to the Poirot series, and I have to say, the whole series seems to hang on the humor surrounding Hastings’ gaffes. I don’t think Poirot himself would be that compelling were it not for Hastings’ overconfidence.

A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi

Would you like to relive the all-consuming passion of teenage love? Great! This novel is for you. My heart was a-fluttering the whole time. Unlike some YA, though, the threat to Shirin and Ocean’s relationship is truly menacing: he’s the star of the high school basketball team, and she’s a Muslim—and it’s the year after 9/11. The cruelty their classmates display toward Shirin is worse than any monster, and harder to overcome. But the book is far from despairing—and as an added bonus, you’ll learn a lot about breakdancing. I really liked this one.

The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce

And so I continued my re-reading of the Alanna series. I have to say, I think the third book is my least favorite. She goes to stay with what is clearly supposed to be a Bedouin tribe in the desert, and…yeah. The whole thing’s kind of racist. The book was published in 1986—I would hope that if it were published today, it would be different. Plus, Alanna spends so much time away from the other main characters that you start to miss them.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

This was my first foray into Celeste Ng’s lauded writing, and I was not disappointed. The novel is a cross between a murder mystery and a family drama—leaning toward family drama. When their oldest daughter Lydia is found drowned in the local lake, Marilyn and James—an interracial couple living in Ohio in the 1970s—have to grapple not only with the tremendous loss, but also with the specific pressures put on their family by a racist society. The third-person narration skips around between the parents and the two living children—I think my favorite character was Hannah, the youngest daughter, who receives little attention but notices everything.

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

I’ve been wanting to read this one for a while, ever since I saw the movie, which I adored. Sometimes I bristle at too-tender stories, but this coming-of-age gay love story is just so earnest and sweet—or at least that’s what I thought about the movie. The book is similar—I was fascinated by Aciman’s prose style. He has these sweeping, gorgeous sentences that encapsulate the often cringe-worthy insecurities of teenage Elio (though the book is written from the perspective of an older Elio looking back). It’s a strange and endearing juxtaposition. However, in the third section, there is this wildly racist poet character that they thankfully cut out of the movie. He talks and talks for pages—it really threw me off. Wish they’d cut that part out of the book, too. Not only is it gross, but it’s also irrelevant.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Multiple people recommended this Japanese novel to me in the span of just a few weeks, so I figured it was a sign—and luckily I was able to scoop up an e-book copy from the library right away. The brief novel tells the tale of Keiko Furukura, a thirty-something woman who’s been working at the same convenience store for most of her adult life. And she doesn’t mind—studying and imitating the people at the convenience store is the only way she knows how to behave like a normal human. And if she behaves like a normal human, it doesn’t matter what she really feels and thinks inside. This book is eerie. I wouldn’t say it’s horror—at first I kept expecting sudden violence, but nothing like that ever happens. It’s more of an unnerving, satirical social critique. I definitely recommend this one.

The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green

I’d never heard of this book until it came up on the Phoebe Reads a Mystery podcast. First published in 1878, Agatha Christie cited this early mystery novel as an influence—though, honestly, I think Christie handles the genre much better. Much like the Poirot novels, our narrator Everett Raymond is a very stupid man—but not as funny-stupid as Hastings. He plays sidekick to the detective Ebenezer Gryce—but compared to Raymond, Gryce is hardly in the book at all. For some reason he just trusts Raymond to do a lot of investigating on his own. And of course, none of the ladies could have possibly committed this heinous crime because they are too beautiful. But ladies can be vain, and they shall learn that lesson the hard way. Which is all to say, it wasn’t my favorite.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley

I enjoy reading historical figures in their own words, and this book is no exception. At first I found the many chapters dedicated to his tragic childhood and his life of crime in New York somewhat tedious—I was longing to get to his spiritual and political awakening. But then the man himself rebuked me on page 150: “To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.” Fair enough. The end of the book made me tear up—he knew he was going to be killed before its publication. And he laments over and over again that he never had a formal education—not realizing, perhaps, that he was clearly more intelligent than most people on earth. He was so thoughtful—any notion he had he mentally interrogated from all angles, ceaselessly debating himself, trying always to improve. It’s still hard to get a grip on Malcolm X—it’s not like they teach him in school. For that reason alone, it’s more than worthwhile to read his work.