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6w
reads you needs
The last line of this NYT essay re: Dunkin' and the internet
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"And so it all starts to look the same, and nothing shines."
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9
1
8w
reads you needs
Our Wives Under the Sea (Julia Armfield)
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Having a Cold, Damp Girl Summer and couldn't be more delighted. A marine biologist plummets to the bleakest bottom of the deep, dark ocean in her submarine, then returns after sort of being lost? Or perhaps just being delayed? Returns...? The versions of her that emerge from her journals, her wife's aching, first-person recollections of their relationship, and the actual unknowable water add up to a Gothic mystery, a tender millennial love story and a wildly inventive meditation on what the unknown can offer us (and what we ultimately have to offer it). Read as little about it as you can before going in, then DIVE. Bonus points for a totally unexpected Kraftwerk reference! Man I loved this book.
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10
11w
reads you needs
Back to the Batcave (Adam West)
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I adored the ‘60s Batman TV series, and this was my first Odd, Co-Written Hollywood Autobiography; it’s sweetly awkward and very earnest, and while I suspect a few anecdotes haven’t aged well (I last read it in 2001, so my memory of it is a bit foggy), West’s sincere case for a golden-years Batman has stuck with me, and the behind-the-scenes midcentury-TV details are A+.
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3
11w
reads you needs
Tricia Lockwood's Drawing of Jonathan Franzen Crucified on a Portobello Mushroom
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If you have the opportunity to attend a reading of Patricia's, sell your and your family's organs to make it happen. I am also partial to the squid with a micropenis she drew for me in my copy of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, but who am I kidding, this is the star of my personal library. (She asked what I would like her to draw in my book and I asked for Jonathan Franzen.) When I first read Priestdaddy I sent her a photo of the toe I sprained while thinking about it, but that's a story for another time.
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5
11w
reads you needs
The Silent Woman (Janet Malcolm)
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Janet Malcolm’s brilliant, biased, and bitchy (complimentary, mostly) 1995 survey of the many, many Sylvia Plath biographies and memoirs that appeared in the first decades after her death. She interrogates biography itself, has high-stakes lunches and coffees with a bunch of the biographers and Plath’s friends and acquaintances, plays four-dimensional chess with Ted Hughes’s sister/champion, Olwyn the tigress - it’s scholarly and dishy and very, very readable. The retro poetry potboiler of the summer.
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6
17w
reads you needs
The Witch (Marie NDiaye)
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Psst, dagger-slim goth beach read. If Helen Oyeyemi and Kelly Link teamed up to make Pynchon look like a hack, they might write something like this. Marie NDiaye is so comfortably absurd that her wild, very French and very female story feels more plausible than realism. She is confident that you'll follow her in a way that makes you realize other authors don't trust their audience very much at all, actually, and keeping pace with this hilarious, strange, elegiac tale of a woman passing her feeble powers on to her daughters and then watching them and her whole life fly away is immensely satisfying. Pardon me while I dip out to read everything else NDiaye has written. #FreeSteve
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12
1
19w
reads you needs
The Mountain in the Sea (Ray Nayler)
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A gorgeously philosophical eco-thriller (what if David Mitchell mashed up JURASSIC PARK, EX MACHINA, and ARRIVAL?) on how the oceans might feel about what we've chosen to do to them, what makes up a mind (both literally and figuratively), AI, how to make yourself understood, and oof, so much more. Nayler makes a compelling case for redefining responsibility and thoughtfulness in a way that sits really lightly on his truly ripping yarn - it feels exhilarating rather than preachy. A truly original and wonderful book, and a strong alternative to REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES if you are in the mood for an octopus book and know in your bones that that one is NOT for you.
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8
20w
reads you needs
Letter of Recommendation: Collecting One Book
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This is an experiment to see if recommending my own 2019 recommendation for the New York Times Magazine can create a black hole. (Real talk: We have earned a black hole.)
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3
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