Looking through my fall/winter reading, the percentage of mysteries/thrillers/light fiction has gone up. I want to be reading challenging things but I can't.
A friend yesterday told me he hasn't read a book since his mother passed away.
Reading occupies such a special place in our brains and souls. I'm sure there's research but I think reading makes you vulnerable. It opens your heart and creates a mental dialogue among you, the writer and the text. A well written comedy novel can take you into a world of delicious fluff; a political expose can feel like having your guts ripped out.
The news, lately, feels like the latter.
So: what I've been reading fall/winter 2024-25. Mostly memoir, with novels thrown in.
Hollow by Bailey Williams traces her Armed Forces experience, dealing with an eating disorder, structural misogyny and sexual assault. She's strong in ways she shouldn't have to be.
No One Gets to Fall Apart by Sarah LaBrie: I hope I never have to read "unflinching" about another memoir but this one takes steady aim at mothers and mental illness and how you love someone who loves you back in strange or troubled ways.
The Andy Warhol Diaries: reading Andy Cohen's light, charming diaries made me want to read the o.g. of the genre. It was tough going at first, especially since I'm not familiar with many of the art world luminaries of the 1970's, but when I tell you everyone socialized with EVERYONE in the 1980's -- a young Keith Haring, John Travolta, future Senator Chris Dodd with Bianca and Jerry and Mick and Liza and Halston and the Studio 57 crowd. This was a joy to read and the sudden end left me feeling sad for Warhol's too-early demise. His insecurities were a revelation.
How do you write about the tsunami that claimed your family and left you alive, nearly drowned, wishing you hadn't survived? In Wave, Sonai Deraniyagala does just this with a deft and unsentimental hand. I had to go back and re-read the beginning after I finished, just to remind myself of where her narrative journey started.
The memoir Grief is for People by Sloane Crosley covers enormous loss: the sudden death of a friend, and a daring robbery. I'm in awe of her skill at jumping across time and never losing the thread.
Here After by Amy Lin details the loss of her husband in a freak running incident. It's another back-and-forth in time meditation on love and the body and unimaginable loss.
Fiction: I read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This gamer novel got some negative coverage of which I was unaware before I read it. As someone who learned to game back in the days of Asteroids and Joust, this robust novel took me deep into the world of talented nerds who achieve all their dreams of success in game-making, frustration in romance, and are then faced with the ultimate loss.
Three Black women living in Sweden are the subjects of the novel, In Every Mirror She's Black by Lolá Ákínmádé Åkerström. I enjoyed the world she creates, although the characters are unevenly developed. It's rich and deep and sometimes funny.
And finally Damascus Station by former CIA analyst David McCloskey is as detailed and twisty of a spy novel as I've read in a long time. The characters are a bit cartoonish but the spycraft felt real. I couldn't stop reading.
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