Not Me Prejudging Everything Wrong
Sometimes you're proven wrong in the most delightful ways. Live and learn, folks.
Despite what my most recent Myers Briggs results indicate, I’m not always great at judging. I am, however, aces when it comes to prejudging. So, it came as a pretty significant surprise to me how much I enjoyed the books in the newsletter this week based on their descriptions, which didn’t sound up the alley where I’m currently reading. Much like in the previous episodes of this newsletter, I read these selections as part of the imminent Tournament of Books from The Morning News. I’ve only got one book left from that list, so going forward, you probably won’t hear about it as much. March Madness!
Lest you think that I’ve enjoyed every book on the list, I can assure you that’s not true. I’ve found a few of them to be really miserable reading experiences! But this is a Positive Vibes Only newsletter where we talk about recommendations. You can figure out which ones I didn’t like on your own, Chief.
My recent experiences just go to show that you cannot judge a book by its cover NOR by the publishing house-approved two-sentence summary that you find on goodreads. These books proved me and my inner curmudgeon wrong, and now we metaphorically press them into your hands to see if they’re right for you.
THE LIBRARY IS OPEN
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance
by Alison Espach (2022)
This is not a true crime book, though the title kind of suggests that it might be. Sally Holt loves her older sister Kathy in all the tense ways that younger siblings idolize and resent their older ones. They bicker, they narc on one another, and they’re intimate how only siblings who share a bedroom can possibly understand. Set in the late 1990s kicked off with one of Clinton’s State of the Union speeches, the book tells tells the saga of the summer when both the sisters fall in love with the same dreamy guy - think a Connecticut-living Jordan Catalano if he could play basketball. When an unspeakable tragedy happens, we hear how Sally and her family try to come to grips with it over the course of the next couple decades.
If this all sounds unbearably sad, that’s because it is! This is a very sad book. That’s not a spoiler. Sally fills you in pretty quickly into her narration. Said narration is in the second person, which I find really annoying when the “you” refers to the reader, but I find totally acceptable when the “you” refers to another character in the book’s universe. Luckily, in this book, it’s the latter. (I won’t explain myself further about second person narration. You either get this or you don’t.) Even though the book is deeply sad, it’s also quite hilarious. Sally’s got an incredible narrative voice. I was so happy to spend time with her; I laughed out loud more than once. There were moments when I laughing to myself only to be blindsided moments later with a melancholy sucker punch. (The author used to write for Breaking Bad, which tracks.)
This is the kind of emotional roller coaster I enjoyed being on. It may have hit the spot for me partially because the book takes place when I was around the same age as the characters, experiencing my own pre-9/11 era of peace and prosperity. I was touched by the book. I hope you will be too.
Read it if you like: I love the 90s, healing journeys, dark humor, controversial endings, New England
Nightcrawling
by Leila Mottley (2022)
When Sandra Bullock won the 2010 Oscar for Best Actress, in a classy move, she said some really wonderful and what seemed like genuinely heartfelt things about her fellow nominees. To paraphrase her shout out to Carey Mulligan (nominated for An Education), she basically says that her grace, beauty, and talent for someone of such a young age frankly makes her sick. And that’s how I feel about Nightcrawling, which was written by the author when she was 17 and published when she was 19. Sickening!
(Side note: Sandra’s speech is one of the all time best in my opinion, apart from the fact that she’s so kind to her husband, who ended up being a cheater with Neo-Nazi tendencies! The theme of men being horrible is germane to our current conversation.)
Nightcrawling takes place in Oakland’s low income housing where our heroine, Kiara, is forced to fend for herself as her father has died, her mom is making her way out of incarceration, and her brother is trying to make it as a rapper as her rent gets raised. Money is low, and to make stakes higher, she’s looking after her young neighbor who’s been effectively abandoned by his mother. To make ends meet, she turns to sex work, an occupation that’s never shamed throughout the book, but is examined as an alternative economy of last resort for the marginalized. When Kiara inadvertently gets gets swept up in police business, she is forced to make decisions she’d never imagined she’d have to make.
This book is capital-B bleak, but the plot becomes propulsive. The pages keep turning in the back half. It feels a little raw like a lot of debut novels can, and I can’t wait to see what a young talent like Mottley does next.
Read it if you like: overcoming adversity, ACAB sentiments, criminal procedure, social justice, deep thoughts belying simple dialogue
Dinosaurs
by Lydia Millet (2022)
This was what I like to call in my head a tiebreaker book. In the instances when I don’t care for one work of an author (e.g. Millet’s Sweet Lamb of Heaven) and I very much enjoyed another work of the same author (e.g. A Children’s Bible,) I love reading another novel by the author to see which of the former books was the outlier. I know Lydia Millet is on the edge of her seat, so I’ll end the suspense by telling you that I loved Dinosaurs. (Of course I did. I told you that this is a Positive Vibes Only newsletter.)
This did not sound like a book that I would like. Quoth the book’s marketing: A man named Gil walks from New York to Arizona to recover from a failed love. After he arrives, new neighbors move into the glass-walled house next door, and his life begins to mesh with theirs. Gil sounds a little insufferable, no? And the glass house next door sounds a little too convenient and precious.
But reader, I fell in love with Gil. He’s a gentle man and a gentleman. He learns to love and live again with the help of the family he thought he might be spying on all the time because of the aforementioned completely glass wall of their house that faces him. More great news: Millet doesn’t go into detail at all about his cross-country walk.
Not much happens by way of plot, but the author uses quick, clear prose to tell the story of how communities support one another and how many kinds of love are necessary to make us whole in just over 200 economic pages. I was so impressed with how this book quietly snuck so many lessons about the power of kindness into it, and it toppled my defenses to become a story that will live just under my skin for a long time to come.
Read it if you like: soft quiet books, heartwarming relationships. short novels, parables, family stories
LIGHTNING ROUND - Tournament of Books Winners Edition
Do you ever wonder why Sally Rooney is so controversial? Or do you just want to think about Paul Mescal making out with people. Either way, this book may do the trick.
I’m not sure how this book culturally aged, but I sure loved the idea of a satire of North Korean life at the time. Tell me what you think if you read it.
It was so weird to me that they made a movie adaptation of this lively, picaresque odyssey, and that it wasn’t the Coen Brothers that did it. Definite Coen vibes here.
Until next time….happy reading!