The books I brought with me on summer vacation
2 fiction, 2 non.
Hi there, it’s been a minute. Many minutes, in fact. Mostly, I’ve spent those minutes living a different kind of work life than before; I said goodbye to freelancing and have been working a full-time job for the past year. I still have that job, but man oh man, do I also still have the desire to talk about books with you. So let’s do that; it’s far better than talking about KPIs and ROIs (<— these are the only “real work” terms I know.)
It is the end of July which puts us smack dab in the middle of what they call summer reading season and I am juuuust reaching the end of a dreamy vacation at a farm house by the beach in Nova Scotia (author’s note: if you are going to visit a friend on vacation, visit a cookbook author who lives in a farm house by the beach in Nova Scotia), and so I thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to share the books that I brought along? I hope so! Because here they are, in picture form 👇👇👇.
Let’s go through them quickly; I’ve still got one more dip in the ocean to get in before I head out to visit another friend (hi, Rena!) for 24 Hours in Maine.
From left:
Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss
2020 (Riverhead)
I picked this one up because I was lucky enough to hear a talk on The Essay (caps, my own because Essays are Very Important) that Biss gave in June, and so I got to find out that she is incredibly smart and thoughtful and funny before even reading her. This one’s nonfiction, exploring the intrinsic ties we all have to stuff and to capitalism but, you know, in a personal and enjoyable and deeply thought-provoking way. “My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” she writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” (I could not relate to this harder.)
I’m just a little ways in and I love it so far, highly recommend. (Biss is also tight with Maggie Nelson who, if you haven’t read Bluets yet, get thee to wherever it is that you get books.)
PS: I’m on a nonfiction kick—more on that in a future newsletter.
The Idiot, by Elif Batuman
2017 (Penguin)
I skipped this novel when it came out because I thought it must be overrated. Then I heard a radio interview with Batuman earlier this year when her followup, Either/Or, came out and I realized I would very much like to spend time in a creation that came from her mind. The Idiot is dryly hilarious and opens with some great in-hindsight gags about the internet, because this book takes place in 1996 when we still capitalized the Internet and email felt new and special because it was.
The story follows Selin, a very endearing fish-(kind of)-out-of-the-water character going into her first year at Harvard. Lessons in love and life and academics ensue. There’s a lot about Russian lit.
This is a great book and in fact, I am leaving it behind for another visitor here at the ol’ farmhouse because I think he will very much like it. But full disclosure: I consciously uncoupled with it around the 100-page mark and did a fast skim forward. I don’t always read for story (I know, not very romantic), and I decided that I’d gotten most of what I personally needed from the book at this moment. I am planning to go back to it in a different season. Some books are summer books and some books are winter books and, for me, this book is the latter.
Agatha of Little Neon, by Claire Luchette
2021 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
I just started this novel and I love it. Multiple people told me to read it over the past year, and I wish I’d listened even earlier. It is about nuns and it is contemporary and the nuns are normal people! (Is anyone else into #nuntok?)
Agatha starts in 2005 when Sister Agatha and her three best friend nuns are in their 20s. After their archdiocese in Buffalo, New York goes broke, they get re-stationed from their idyllic post where they run a daycare for babies and frolic in fields or whatever to a halfway house in Rhode Island that was painted with bright green paint the color of “Mountain Dew” that was on sale, hence its name.
So far, this is everything I want a vacation read to be: warm, well-observed, funny, and fast-paced with evocative writing. (<— I realize this isn’t the most specific description and I’d usually go deeper, but see my comment above about wanting to get in onnnnne last dip in the ocean.)
Body Work, by Melissa Febos
2022 (Catapult)
You might be starting to wonder: Did this person telling me about books actually finish any books on her vacation? She did! This one! And it is so good that I am leaving it for my host and ordering another one to have back at home for myself, a little breadcrumb trail of books in my wake.
This one’s also nonfiction (see, a kick!), and is partly a book about writing memoir and, mmmm, I guess part personal essay and reflection on the importance of telling your story, and doubly on the importance of telling your personal story if you are a woman or gender nonconforming person or a not-hetero person or basically any person with a story whose story is not the dominant one we have read many times over and started to judge all stories against because what in the heck kind of metric is that?
It’s heavy on theory in the best way, including gems such as this from late British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott that will really gut-punch you if you’re a certain type of person (*cough* *cough* me):
“It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.”
And this observation from the late essayist Nancy Mairs that, once you read it, you might be like, Oh wow. Yes. This explains everything that I can’t always quite put into words to someone who hasn’t experienced it:
“My sexuality has been the single most powerful disruptive force mankind has ever perceived, and its repression has been the work of centuries.”
And this sharp and funny observation from Febos:
“Since my teens, when I started openly dating other women, I have fielded (mostly from men) the rude but ‘innocent’ question of how two women have sex. The implication being that sex includes penetration by a penis, that this act is the culmination of all the lesser acts that precede it… Back then, no matter how I explained it, the askers of that question frowned. How sad, their faces seemed to say, that you’ve never ever gotten past third base. How sad, I’d now like to reply, that you’ve been trapped on a baseball diamond for all your sexual life.”
Febos is a former dominatrix and recovered heroin addict whose first book, the memoir Whip Smart, covers that time in her life. Her next two books were essay collections: Abandon Me and Girlhood. She’s now a prof at Iowa, which the MFAers in this crowd or people who watched Girls know is a Thing, and she has won approximately one million awards.
Is it odd to read this book, her book about writing, before reading her other books? Maybe! But I did it and I don’t think it matters, and I will now read her others. Get this book, please, if you fall into one of the categories above—but even more especially if you don’t.
Ok, going to swim now, bye! Enjoy the rest of your summer.
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