#17: I've been reading instead of doomscrolling

And I have recommendations

Hello again friends,

I am back on here faster than we’re all accustomed to and I am not mad about it, because I have been reading good books and the best thing about good books is sharing their goodness with other people. I normally have a policy where I focus on buying books by Australian authors and borrowing others, but that policy went out the window these last few weeks and I have been buying books with abandon on account of it being Taurus season and me being, well, me. In the spirit of being as upfront as possible, I am only sharing the ones I have read but I hope to be back soon with even more, like Jessica Stanley’s Consider yourself kissed and Graydon Carter’s memoir which I am just so, so excited for.

As always, this might be a little long for email and you might need to click the link to read this in your browser. Hope you find a rec in there to tide you through the cooler months. And if you’ve read any of these books, I’d love to hear your own thoughts!

BOOKS I READ

• Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful: This book has a lot of positive reviews and was a New York Times bestseller, though it’s about time I learnt that that does not necessarily mean it’s going to be my cup of tea. Spanning a couple of decades or so in the lives of the Padavano sisters (in a sort of homage to Little Women) and their parents, the book explores family relationships, mental health, grief, illness and desire, but it felt a tad too overwritten for me. I enjoyed the writer’s narrative style and her work at the sentence-level, but on the whole the plot did not feel as compelling as I would have liked, despite it being predicated on something as dramatic as two sisters falling in love with the same man. Still, I think the characters were full and robust: all of them unique yet bound by their upbringing, even years after they’ve gone their separate ways. I’ve seen it compared to Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House which I think offered a better narrative, but the writing style was very similar. My copy is in excellent as new condition because I listened to the audiobook, so I am happy to part with it to whoever asks for it in the comments first.

• Melanie Cheng’s The Burrow: Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, this superbly-written story follows a family as they grapple with the grief of losing their baby Ruby in an unfortunate accident sometime prior to the covid-19 lockdowns in Melbourne. Ruby, who drowned in the bathtub at six months old when the grandmother who was bathing her had a stroke, looms large in their lives despite them virtually erasing all traces of her from the family home, but so does the pandemic, which acts as a sort of barrier to their healing. Central to the experiences of the main characters (Ruby’s parents, sister and grandmother), whose perspectives we get via an omniscient third-person narrator, is the family’s new pet, hence the title. What makes it even better is that it’s efficient: only 180 odd pages long, but excellent in its unpacking of guilt and grief and the ways both can manifest, and dwell, in our lives.

• Naima Brown’s Mother Tongue: This book went so far beyond what its blurb promised that I am still thinking about it weeks later. I borrowed it because it had a croissant on the cover and because I was intrigued by the premise of a mother coming out of a coma and then leaving her husband and child for a second life in France, but I got a story that unpacked friendship, loyalty, marriage and even the pull of the alt-right, manosphere space on a white man who feels like the world is to blame for his lot in life (which is arguably very blessed), and how some of these problematic beliefs can originate in the most inconspicuous and uneventful moments. Brown deftly navigates the complexities of old friendships, feminism and family on our evolution and choices, and offers space, nuance and redemption to mothers who are marginalised and judged for ‘abandoning’ their kids. It’s clever insightful and totally compelling.

• Tegan Bennett Daylight’s How to survive 1985: This YA novel takes the characters from the author’s award-shortlisted debut Royals, who’d found themselves trapped in a shopping centre, and places them 40 years in the past, where there is no wifi, bubble tea shops or people who clean up after their dogs. Main character Shannon hasn’t quite figured out what sorcery keeps spitting her out into random experiences, but she makes the most of the 80s in a way that would warm any parent’s heart: by going to her grandparents’ home and looking for (the teenage version of) her mother. I don’t know if it’s because my child is on the cusp of adolescence or because I never had that kind of relationship with my mum, but the idea that a teenage girl would go out of her way to seek and befriend her mother as a teenager absolutely had me. I was always going to love this book, because I have followed the author’s career for some time (quite literally too — having replaced her as one of the creative writing staff at her former university), but separate to this is the fact that it’s an easy read that offers insight into Sydney in another time, and the characters draw our attention to all the way our society has shifted and evolved over the years. There’s an epic sountrack to go with it on Spotify, and if you fancy a read of her memoir on reading and writing, you can also check out her book The Details.

• Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June: On the eve of her wedding, Gail and Max’s daughter Debbie reveals to her parents an infidelity on the part of her almost-husband. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler unpacks this revelation through Debbie’s parents and in particular, through the reflections and sentiments of her matter-of-fact mother Gail. The book examines the intricacies and intimacies of relationships as we experience them over time and in various capacities — marriages, affairs, divorce and even work relationships — with Tyler’s character immediacy and the uncompromisable grace she gives to older women challenging social norms and expectations (in another one of her books, French Braid, the mum moves out of the family home and into a studio without making any definitive decision about her marriage, and everyone just has to deal; in this book, Gail doesn’t want her husband staying over for the wedding because she’s “done with caretaking”). I could have bought this for the cover alone (a wedding setting, complete with champagne, wedding cake and flowers in vibrant colours), but ended up borrowing it from the library instead. A wise move in the end; it just didn’t give me enough to mull over.

• The Wedding People by Alison Espach: Weighed down by multiple unsuccessful IVF rounds, a lacklustre career and a heartwrenching, mid-pandemic divorce from the longtime husband who cheated on her with a colleague and friend, Adjunct Professor Phoebe (who I took as a casual academic) whisks herself away to the beachside hotel of her dreams with the plan to end her life. Terrified a suicide will ruin the opulent destination nuptials she’s been meticulously planning for two years at that same venue, entitled bride Lila barges into her room intent on telling her to hold off for a week, inevitably revealing enough vulnerabilities and oddities about her wedding and its people to intrigue Phoebe enough to hold on a little longer. Funny, addictive, and so relatable despite its specificities, this book was not just a joy to read, but a reminder of just how good books can be. While the narrative arc is not exactly original (reflective of any sort of chick-lit/women’s fiction novel where a main character gets dumped/sacked, goes on a trip to change her life, is reinvigorated by what she finds there, takes life in a new direction), Espach has written it with so much tenderness and nuance that it feels weighty, and via robust and carefully-constructed characters, that render it refreshingly different, honest and warm.

• Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance (translated by Sinan Antoon): This was on the Booker Prize longlist this year, and for good reason. It takes readers into the physical and emotional struggles for Palestinians living in Israel and invites them to ponder a question that’s perhaps most pertinent in our time: what would happen if all the Palestinians simply disappeared? From the way that a “gesture from a soldier’s hand, or his finger, decided [the] fate” of Palestinians crossing checkpoints to the intergenerational trauma of knowing every piece of land you walked on carried the blood of those massacred in the Nakba, the book is a weighty reminder of the costs of war and peace. There’s honestly no better time to pick this one up. (I also made a reel about it here, which took 1.5 hours but yielded only 94 likes, a metaphor for my whole life.)