What I read: May and June 2022

Matthew Wong, The Kingdom, 2017

Fiction

• Ghost Lover by Lisa Taddeo, a collection of short stories about… women and cruelty? I am a big Lisa Taddeo fan.

• Either/Or by Elif Batuman, the second book in the great campus novel series of our times.

• Just by Looking at Him by Ryan O’Connell, a book about a TV writer with cerebral palsy who is struggling with love and fidelity.

• Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walters, a very good (and romantic) summer read that I highly recommend.

• Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky, a book about a professor who moves into the house of the mother of student he fucked and proceeds to have an affair with her.

• Endless Love by Scott Spencer, a book about a guy who goes mad because he’s so in love with his high school girlfriend.

• Jackie and Me by Louis Bayard, a book about Jackie before she met JFK.

• The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, a super witty book about a young woman ambling around Europe falling in love and getting into trouble

• Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej, a book about a queer woman who has conflicted feelings about falling in love with an older man with big daddy energy.

• Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras, a really weird Duras book about a married couple, mental illness, and “erotic intrigue”

• Sedating Elaine by Dawn Winter. This book is so good. It’s about a woman who drugs her very needy girlfriend. Please read it.

• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. This is a prequel to Jane Eyre from Bertha’s (Mr. Rochester’s wife) perspective. I love Jean Rhys and just started reading a biography about her.

• Fake by Erica Katz, an art forgery thriller that’s very fun.

• All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, about femcel who falls in love. Mieko Kawakami is one of my favorite writers and I can’t recommend this enough. It’s so good.

• We Do What We Do in the Dark by Mayaan Eitan, about a gay woman who has an affair with a married female professor in a college and is haunted by it for a long time afterwards.

• Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman, a book about a queer woman who starts fucking a straight couple. Very intense and sexual.

• Petite Anglaise by Catherine Sanderson, an adaptation of her blog about the year of her life when she leaves her husband.

Nonfiction

• Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller. More on this below!!

• Belle de Jour books 1, 2, and 3. The diary of a highly successful and extremely witty escort. My favorite line: “I want to tell him that it's not all about the sex - never has been - it's about the heart of darkness.”

• What is Sexual Capital? by Eva Illouz. Title is self-explanatory.

• Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, Second Edition by Nancy McWilliams. This is really good!! @nosilverv recommended it to me.

• Why Materialism is Baloney by Bernardo Kastrup. This is an argument for why the universe might be entirely comprised of consciousness.

I’ve realized that I write this newsletter more for my own sanity than for you guys. Clearly, the way I read is a little manic, and for years I've struggled with the thought that I don’t have enough time to contemplate the last book I read because I’ve already moved onto another—I don’t leave a lot of time for myself to sit and marinate. So it’s really nice to have some kind of record of what I’ve read over a particular period of time. (Generally my philosophy has been that if I really love something I’ll go back and read it and think about it, and that’s generally proven true—for instance I’ve read Animal by Lisa Taddeo probably 8 times. So I think what I love does float to the top.)

There is, however, a method to my madness, and I’m going to try to unpack it here:

1. At this particular point in my life, I prefer to read fiction by women, about women. If you are a female author between the ages of 20 to 50 who has released a buzzy book about a female protagonist sometime in the last 10 years, there’s a solid chance I’ve read your book. Even looking at the last two months, many of the books I’ve read fall into that category. Here are the subcategories:

   1. I really like bildungsromans, because I have been writing one. This month Either/Or falls squarely into that category, and so does The Dud Avocado. I was wondering if there is a separate term for I’m-an-adult-but-I’m-a-hot-mess coming of age books, because I definitely read a ton of those. Tell me if you know!

   2. I’m also interested in conflicted explorations of heterosexuality. I’ve noticed this new trend in fiction recently where there’s a queer female protagonist who falls under the spell of a classically masculine guy and feels conflicted by it. Acts of Service and Little Rabbit both fall into this category. All of Sally Rooney’s books also fall into this category.

   3. I also really like stories about obsessive love. Endless Love, Sedating Elaine (which is really funny and unexpected, you should read it), and We Do What We Do in the Dark fall into this category.

   4. I’m also really into autofiction, which I will in this case define as “books that are basically 95%+ the author’s actual lived experience that are categorized as a novel for some artistic/aesthetic reason.” I Love Dick is the most classic example of this. I also really like How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti. This month I read Petite Anglaise, which was basically a popular blog written by a English lady living in Paris that she got a book deal for.

2. For non-fiction, the categories I’m generally interested in:

   1. I really like memoir. I still need to delineate the appeal of autofiction vs memoir for myself, but I would loosely describe it as, I like reading about an experience that is explicitly not fictional and enjoy the guarantee that the author has tried to set down something completely from memoir. In May I read a bunch of books by Belle de Jour, the pseudonym of a high end escort who wrote a popular blog for many years. Also in this vein are NB and Prostitute Laundry by Charlotte Shane, both of which I really enjoyed.

   2. Sociology/affect theory: I’m a huge fan of Eva Illouz and highly recommend her books. What is Sexual Capital? is probably not my favorite of hers, I would recommend Why Love Hurts or Hardcore Romance. I am also a huge fan of Lauren Berlin and think that absolutely everyone should read Cruel Optimism.

   3. Psychology/psychotherapy: I’m always halfway through five different psychology books. I also have a therapist who is sort of a psychoanalyst (though she would definitely assure you that we are Not Doing psychoanalysis because I would have to “be on the couch three times a week for that”). Psychoanalytic Diagnosis was really enjoyable (my therapist says Nancy McWilliams is a “great clinician”) and I found out, perhaps not shockingly, that I fall under what she describes as the “hypomanic personality type.” You should read it to figure out what’s wrong with you!

   4. Consciousness: I’m basically not a materialist anymore, or at least I’m very interested in alternatives. Hence, Why Materialism is Baloney. Donald Hoffman also has some pretty interesting writing about this.

I think my favorite book this month is probably Walking Through a Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. It’s a collection of true stories from her life and I don’t know how to describe it but it’s completely riveting. Cookie Mueller acts in some early John Waters movies. She takes an unbelievable amount of drugs, including heroin. She gives birth to a son. She go-go dances. Her writing is calm but so present. Here’s a picture of her being extremely cool in 1978:

Read it! And tell me if you’ve read anything amazing this month, please :)