What I read this month: April 2022
better late than never right?
Books:
Completed
Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson, a novel about a female lawyer who has a very complex life.
Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami. Short stories in which Murakami continues to be very Murakami.
At Home in the World by Joyce Maynard, a memoir about her affair with J.D. Salinger when she was 18 (he was so awful).
Diamonds & Deadlines by Betsy Priolea, a biography of a media mogul in the Victoria era. Riveting.
The Red Zone by Chloe Caldwell, a memoir about falling in love and suffering from PMDD. I love her writing and will always read whatever she puts out.
Odes by Sharon Olds, a poetry collection filled with odes.
Fragnemt by Ctrlcreep. Cool science fiction-y tweet-length stories. Really hard to describe.
Psychomagic by Alexander Jodorowsky. It’s about his practice of shamanic psychotherapy which sounds wacky but is actually super cool.
Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones. A memoir about living with a rare congenital condition called sacral agenesis. But also about beauty, travel, perception, and love.
Incomplete:
True Biz by Sarah Novac
The Odyssey by Lara Williams
Run and Hide by Pankaj Mishra
I'll Show Myself Out: Essays on Midlife and Motherhood by Jessi Klein
I purchase a horrific amount of books. For instance, Kindle informs me that I bought 370 books in 2021, and 230 books in the last six months (don’t know if I’m happy or sad that my pace is increasing over time). I probably read 50% of the books I purchase, though I do in fact buy most everything with the intention of reading it. The three types of reading experiences I have are:
I read a few pages and am immediately riveted and finish it in one sitting.
I read a few pages, am engaged, and read it over the course of a couple days to a week.
I read a few pages, don’t really get into it, and let it sit until I decide to pick it up again (which I sometimes do and often don’t).
April was a month where I had a lot of 3), which is annoying but sometimes happens. I can’t really articulate what I find compelling in novels—in addition to being well-written, they have to resonate with me on some emotional level. Anyway, onto the books that did resonate:
Easy Beauty is a gorgeous memoir that I would recommend to anyone. It’s incisive and intelligent and sad and beautiful. A passage I loved:
Jim’s perceptual shift, not what he said in the library, embedded a damaging idea in me, one I’d recognize deeply when I read Scarry years later: beauty was a matter of particulars aligning correctly. My body put me in a bracketed, undercredited sense of beauty. But if I could get the particulars lined up just right, I could be re-seen, discovered like the palm tree is discovered. To be deserving of the whole range of human desires, I had to be extraordinary in allother aspects.
In this new light, I started to see my work, my intellect, my skills, my moments of humor or goodness, not as valuable in themselves, but as ways of easing the impact of my ugliness. If only I could pile up enough good qualities, they could obscure my unacceptable body. “The correction,” Scarry writes, “the alteration in perception, is so palpable that it is as though the perception itself (rather than its object) lies rotting in the brain… the perception has undergone a radical alteration—it breaks apart or disintegrates….” Philosophically, Hume and Scarry provide richer views of beauty than the Greek conception of mathematical perfection. But accepting the argument that beauty was malleable came, for me, with a cost. The Platonian view rejected me cleanly, but Hume and Scarry left a door ajar and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to contort my form to see if I could pass through it.
We all want to be beautiful, don’t we? As a girl it was more important to me than almost anything else. I’m embarrassed to admit that, but it’s true. And wanting to be beautiful as a woman, whether you are or you aren’t, is an awful experience. It eats you alive. If I say that the people I’ve dated would have never been interested in me if they didn’t find me physically attractive, is that the same as saying they wouldn’t be interested in me if I had a different personality? Am I my body as much as I am my mind? I also really like Emrata’s My Body, a memoir about the weight of a body from the opposite perspective of Chloe Cooper Jone’s.
Sharon Olds will always be one of my favorite poets. I can’t recommend Stag’s Leap enough, if you haven’t read it. Odes was at turns funny, moving, and insightful.
At Home in the World made me very emotional. I look back now and think of the years when I was 18/19/20 as probably the most vulnerable time in my life. I was away from my parents for the first time, living in another country. I had been very sheltered as a teenager, and now I had all this freedom. Which I promptly used to move to San Francisco, splash around with no real direction, and get my heart broken. I feel so lucky that I managed to find my way—even now I look at myself and amazed that I made it out so unscathed. I was really impressionable back then, and very emotionally exposed. I feel really lucky I didn’t meet someone who damaged me the way J.D. Salinger damaged Joyce Maynard. I think there’s nothing more insidious then someone who promises to love and protect you and then just ends up sabotaging you.
I’ve already plugged Psychomagic a ton on Substack but it is really cool and you should read it. It’s really hard to describe, but it taps into a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and exploring this year: how internal states affect the external world. Jodorowsky, according to his Wikipedia page, has worked as “novelist, screenwriter, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, a film and theater director and producer, an actor, a film editor, a comics writer, a musician and composer, a philosopher, a puppeteer, a mime, a lay psychologist, a draughtsman, a painter, a sculptor, and a spiritual guru.” What a life!
If someone—no matter who—desired to do theater, I would communicate the following theory: The theater is a magical force, a personal and a nontransmissible experience. It belongs not only to actors but also to the whole world. A decision, a rough resolution, is enough for this force to transform your life. It is time for human beings to let go of conditioned reflexes, hypnotic systems, erroneous self-concepts. World literature devotes many pages to the theme of the “double,” which, little by little, expels a man from his own life, takes over his favorite places, his friendships, his family, his work, until it makes him an outcast and, at times, his own assassin, according to some versions of the universal myth. For my part, I believe that we are the “double” and not the original.
That’s all for now—tell me what you’ve been reading!