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Reading Week #128

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Happy Friday!

It is so ridiculously windy here. It’s like in the film Volver, where the wind in La Mancha is known to make people mad, except that here, the thing that makes you maddest is the bloody pollen count that comes with it. Which reminds me: I once wrote a review about Volver in a film criticism class, and a classmate tore my review apart in a blind crit because I called them westerly winds when they’re easterly ones. To be fair, I hadn’t checked, I just love me a bit of alliteration.

There are a few film-related pieces in this week’s link list, an area that I no longer delve into as much as I used to. I finally got Evan to watch Sunset Boulevard this week and I sense a marathon of Billy Wilder’s greater works coming on. Is there anything good coming out soon? I hope so.

Meantime, here those are, along with a few other bits and pieces that have taken my fancy lately.

WINDSWEPT & INTERESTING

Anjelica Jade Bastién asks, Why Are So Many Female-Led Projects Called ‘Camp’? and I now realise that I had the definition all wrong. Perhaps you did, too. And perhaps that’s the answer to her question. It’s a great piece.

Also on film and culture: Ben Myers wrote about Withnail & I and argued that, 30 years on, it’s the perfect film for Brexit Britain. I tend to agree.

Humans Made the Banana Perfect—But Soon, It’ll Be Gone. This makes me very sad. What will I put on my porridge?

I Want to Want Again. Writer and single mother Jessica Woodbury wrote about how budgeting has scrambled her brain in The Billfold.

I’ve been reading some early reviews of The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy and it sounds as boisterous and brilliant as she is.

I finally received my copy of Nasty Women from 404 Ink right after reading Sim Bajwa’s brilliant piece from the collection in The Pool. She says that, Multiculturalism hasn’t failed – but the rhetoric surrounding immigration has become poisonous.

If you’re as tired of the 3D chess bullshit as I am, read Kaleb Horton on 45’s Master Plan. I promise this is the last time I’ll mention him, hopefully ever.

ON MY SHELF

As I mentioned above, my copy of Nasty Women finally made its way to me, along with a copy of the Scottish Review of Books, and the latest issue of Bookforum. All in all, an excellent day for bookish mail.

Meantime I’ve been hopping between a few books. In fiction, The Power by Naomi Alderman has me pretty hooked on its speculative premise where women develop the ability to emit electrical energy and use this power to zap the patriarchy. I’m also enjoying Girls Will be Girls by Emer O’Toole, which blends memoir and social science to discuss gender as a performance. On the more serious side, I’m also back onto reading Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, which I’m slowly realising also works as an early academic thought experiment about Millennials (though the term hadn’t been coined quite yet).

I also reviewed some of the novels and short stories I’ve read recently in a video this week, watch it here.

What’s on your nightstand? Hit reply and let me know!

TIL NEXT WEEK…

 
Your turn! Read anything good this week? Hit reply or tweet me, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend!
Nicola x
 

Reading Week #127 – No Es Fácil

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Happy Friday, friends!

It’s been a mixed bag of a week. I had a wonderful weekend in Santa Barbara, as planned. California has just had its wettest winter in God-knows-how-long, so the drive through the Grapevine and the valley farmlands of Fillmore and Santa Paula were unbelievably stunning. I’ve driven through that valley countless times and have never found it so lush and fragrant. If you follow me on Instagram you’ll have seen lots of snippets from the drive and the trip at large. We travelled well, we dined well, we book-shopped and walked and drank well. It was glorious.

Naturally, returning home was a landing with a thud, particularly as my insides were not best pleased with the overindulgence. The research on the link between the gut and the mind is anecdotally true, too. I felt really, really down for a day or two. I finally spoke with one of my best friends from home and when she asked how I’ve been doing, I said I could only describe it as beginning to feel like I’m catching my stride, then falling into a well. Progress isn’t linear, nor is adjusting to living in a new country. There’s a lot of hard work to be done, and just as you feel like things are getting easier, reminders that life is just that your life is constantly just a little bit more difficult can creep up and knock the wind out of you.

But after those stumbles, (I hate that word, but can’t think of a better one for it) I often find I can muster a little more strength. I’ve had a few interactions this week that required me to take a deep breath and firmly stand my ground, and while those moments often exhaust me, I felt they actually gave me a bit of a boost. Why is it that everyone seems to want something from you in the same week? More on those another time, perhaps.

Meantime, how about some links?

EXHILES & OTHER ISLES

I’ve told you about how much I admire Valeria Luiselli as a writer, right? Here’s an interview where she discusses her latest essay-book, Tell Me How It Ends, and an excerpt from the essay itself. I also came across this cute Vogue piece about Luiselli and her husband, Álvaro Enrigue, whose novel Sudden Death I also loved.

From Xiaolu Guo: My village didn’t even have a traffic light. Now it has 1.4 million people. In case you’re wondering how much your life could change without moving.

I recently realised that I’d unsubscribed from the Millennial podcast, and I don’t remember why or if I’d done so intentionally. In catching up I marathoned all 4 episodes of their recent mini-series on Cuba and what it’s like to grow up there. I guess the title of the first episode also resonated: No Es Fácil. (Although, for me, it is comparatively muy fácil.)

I’ve been very much into Season 6 of Girls. The show has lost its way once or twice, but somehow it always reins it back in my eyes. Episode 3 was another of its famous two-handers, which is essentially an exploration of the topic of consent. If, like many of my friends, you’re a couple or a few seasons behind, please catch up so we can talk about it.

ON MY SHELF

I got quite a few new books on and around my birthday. My policy is: if no-one else is going to buy them for me, I’ll buy them myself.

Despite the influx of books, I haven’t read much this week. But I did finish The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips: a short fabulist novel that takes the mundane reality of being a twenty-something pencil pusher in a post-crash economy and turns it into an eerie, unpredictable parallel reality with an element of playing God. I didn’t love reading it at first but it kept compelling me to continue until its absolutely brilliant ending. I can’t remember the last time I celebrated a novel for its ending.

Last week I also read and took a moment to digest Flesh of the Peach by Helen McClory. It’s filled with another form of twenty-something struggle within a character who doesn’t realise how fucked up she is and whose meandering takes her to unexpected places. I found it wonderful on the sentence level, with observations and descriptions that are just so. Sometimes surprising, other times like you’d already thought of them, there’s some kind of satisfying alchemy that makes them slot into your brain and reside there, like you’re better off for having read them. Also, the characters are constantly drinking tea, which is very much my sensibility. It’s out from Freight Books on 20 April.

What’s on your nightstand?

TIL NEXT WEEK…

 
Your turn! Read anything good this week? Hit reply or tweet me, won’t you?

Have a lovely weekend!
Nicola x