Howdy.

Happy Thursday.

Welcome to book talk, that glorious thing people are doing across the internet where we share what we’re reading with each other. Love.

READ RECENTLY

I really should not be starting more personal books on top of my school reading, but I legitimately cannot help myself. I see a recommendation on YouTube or Pinterest and can’t not place a ThriftBooks order, or that magical site that is surely funded solely by literature students like me. But anyway. This is book talk, or me telling you everything that I’ve read recently, am reading, or can’t wait to read.

I just finished Joy Harjo’s Crazy Brave, a poetic memoir detailing the life of a Native American woman growing up in the hippie-era of America, facing countless struggles until finally arriving at her destiny of being a poet, the thing that saved her. She would go on to become the Poet Laureate of the United States. It’s a short, powerful read that is not for the faint of heart.

I also just finished André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name, which completely gutted me. I started it in the summer, reading it on the subways cars of Brooklyn and Manhattan, but never finished it. I picked it back up the other day and read the last eighty pages in a puddle of sunlight on a Sunday afternoon as my sheets spun in the washer. It’s one of those narratives that spans a lifetime, beginning with an older man telling you stories of his youth, returning to the present by the end. Something about that abrupt passage of time left me in tears, nostalgic for the world that the characters grew up and out of by the end. I suppose I can’t say much else spoiling it, but I will say that this famous quote from it is simply one of the best ever, both on screen and on the page:

“Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot…Right now you maybe don’t wanna feel anything… Maybe you’ll never want to feel anything. And… Maybe it’s not to me you wanna speak about these things but… Hm… Feel something you obviously did.”

“We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything — what a waste!”

“How you live your life is your business, just remember, our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. And before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now, there’s sorrow, pain. Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt.”

-André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

CURRENTLY READING

Right now, I’m crawling through Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, a melancholic ode to adolescence that reminds of one of the first books I ever truly loved at fourteen, or John Green’s Looking for Alaska. That was back when I thought John Green was the peak of literary excellence, the very beginning of the love affair with books that would come to consume my life. Both portray adolescent women as manic pixie dream girls, a concept that infected my mind at a young age but that I did not become intellectually aware of until college. I’m already mapping out a whole other post on what that means, coupled with my own experience of being one, so stay tuned.

I’m also currently reading Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir, a memoir that tells of an era so long-gone and foreign to me that it reads more like a novel. It follows a young girl navigating the artistic world of New York City in the 1950s, leaving bits and pieces of her innocence all over the place. It allows you to step inside of a world long gone, when sexual promiscuity and authentic expression of the human experience were seen as radical acts of lethality. So so enthralling for a 2023 reader.

TO BE READ

As for my to-be-read, I just ordered Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, which after reading this, (from here), I am quite thrilled to begin.

“With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting.”

–from the publisher

I mean, yes please.

A NOTE ON COMING OF AGE

The line self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting reminds me of something one of my professor’s told us today. He said that coming of age happens at every age, that if you’re doing it right, you’re never not coming of age. That really struck me, for sometimes I feel somewhat strange about being so infatuated with coming of age narratives and poems and films, as if I am clinging to a life stage that I am supposed to have left behind by now. But how insane to really believe that we ever leave that stage. We just move on to the next. We get to come into each new age that we turn, forever adjusting, readjusting, and coming into ourselves. It’s the never-ending art project that is being a human being in a dynamic world.

I also ordered a book I felt hilariously self-conscious about picking up in the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan a few months back because it’s called Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks. After devouring All About Love, one of those books that you can keep as a kind of bible, I’m always hungry for her wisdom. She’s a genius and I like to call myself a feminist, but it’s still a funny title to hold up while reading alone in a coffee shop.

Lastly, I’m also excited to reread Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, one of my favorite books ever that I read for the first time about four years ago, senior year of high school. I remember falling into the pages by the crackling fire at Christmas, a complete sucker for a bildungsroman from the early 20th century. Not to even mention Brooklyn. I recently got the nostalgic urge to reread it, from a fours-years-older perspective, and already know that it will be an experience.

What are you reading?

Love, m.

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