So that title is a lie. This isn’t a newsletter about books coming out this summer, or books about summer. (Sorry.) It’s just such a bright and relaxing phrase: Summer Books! Feels good, feels like a good way to start up again. In my defense, before the court of semantics, I’d say it could apply technically, as in: It’s the unofficial start of summer, let’s talk about books!
This project by the artist Cory Arcangel I read about many years ago lives in my unconscious and surfaces every once in a while. He set up a blog that automatically reposted “I’m sorry I haven’t posted” posts from other blogs. I love it because it sums up so perfectly the self-delusion - sometimes funny, sometimes a bit pathetic - it takes to write. (No one cares that you haven’t posted in a while!) Some people take the self-delusion too far; you will learn this quickly when you organize a poetry reading series or help edit a literary journal, as I have. But it’s true you often need to imagine at least one person being sad or angry you didn’t write, someone missing your posts, in order to keep the pen moving. (I also just learned Arcangel published a book of Tweets of people declaring they were working on their novel, ha.)
I suspect there’s a constant stream of similarly apologetic Substack newsletters churned out every week (“sorry I haven’t…”), so rather than risk of becoming one of these, I’ll just say that, in the interest of keeping the book talk going (and with sincere thanks to the handful of friends who told me they were missing my newsletter!), the continuation of my “2023 Year in Reading” is now:
Books You Might Enjoy This Summer
12. Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, trans. from Italian by Tim Parks (And Other Stories, 2018, originally 1989)
Jaeggy is a fierce writer, master of the harsh, declarative statements with a lifetime of emotional intensity compressed beneath it. This is a short novel about girls in a Swiss boarding school. It’s all about atmosphere, an atmosphere of loneliness, sterility, and latent sexuality. Endings are a real challenge, particularly with fiction. I find myself thinking about them a lot. (What makes a good ending? What makes a bad ending?). I’m still puzzling over the ending of this one, which takes place some 20 years after the events of the narrative.
Another question I’m still mulling is how I enjoy this kind of mode of writing from Europeans (intense, serious, understated yet somehow also dramatic, like Marguerite Duras, or Natalia Ginzburg, or even Elena Ferrante), but can’t tolerate it in white American writers, it seems like a put-on with them (I’m thinking of Kate Zambreno, for example). Maybe it has to do with the shadow of World War II, and the weight of tradition. It’s in the water in Europe. The water, the sunlight are different in North America. Not that it doesn’t have its own forms of darkness, of course, but the neon PSYCHIC signs and The Brady Bunch have to creep in somehow, whether you like it or not. (There’s no Swiss equivalent of The Brady Bunch that I know of…)
11. Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)
I liked this book especially for the way it invents its own genre. Sharpe moves between cultural criticism, literary inquiry, and memoir, touching on anti-Black racism, its history and legacy, her own academic work on the role of monuments and museums, childhood, and grief, among many other subjects. It’s challenging work, and it was daunting to write about, but I lived to see the author retweet my review!
10. In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, trans. Sophie R. Lewis (New York Review Books, 2021, originally 2019)
A memoir by a French anthropologist about being attacked by a bear in the wilds of Siberia and trying to come to some understanding of the experience afterwards. Martin frames the encounter within the worldview of the culture she is studying, where it has some context; arguably her worst moments are after she returns to Paris to recover (the bear bit through her jaw and half her face, and she required multiple surgeries). She feels compelled to go back to Siberia to reintegrate her sense of self and be around people who understand the encounter as a transformation. As I recall the text falls into puzzling abstraction in the last third or so, but it’s an intense, unexpected read overall.
9. Talk by Linda Rosencrantz (New York Review Books Classics, 2015, originally 1968)
This is a novel pulled together from transcripts of recordings made of three friends (two straight women and one gay man) spending the summer at the beach (I think somewhere in the Hamptons) in 1965. They are in the state of intense, obsessive friendship, live in New York, and are all very much into psychoanalysis, so there’s a lot to talk about. I was actually surprised at how contemporary this felt for being nearly 60 years old. They are the inveterate hip, young, art-world New Yorkers. The man’s sexuality was not perceived as aberrant, for example, and the two women are dating and having sex freely and fixated on relationships in a familiar way. The focus on psychoanalysis is the oddest and most specific aspect. It captures the way friendships are central in your 20s, those pitch perfect moments of intimacy and harmony, and the inevitable swerves in the dynamics of a trio. This is one definitely a good Summer Book.
8. The Green Hand and Other Stories by Nicole Claveloux, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York Review Comics, 2017, originally 1978)
I realized my more recent interest in graphic works/comics is for work that resembles lyric essays or poetry. The addition of images makes for such an interesting intersection with those forms of writing, as does the touch of lightness comics bring to just about any subject. The title story in this book, “The Green Hand”, is incredibly weird, and the art is phenomenal. It approximates dream life more closely than anything else I’ve read, I think, surrealism in its original sense - the somehow easy transition from one fantastical setting to another, the recurrence of symbols, a spiraling storyline. I need to spend more time with the other stories in the collection, I was so fixated by the first one, it has become one of the ones I can’t get over.
7. The Betweens by Cynthia Arrieu-King (Noemi Press, 2020)
This is one of those fantastic, unique small press books more people should know about. It’s in conversation with recent work by Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong, and Maggie Nelson. An “experimental memoir,” book-length lyric essay by about living between and across multiple cultures (Arrieu-King’s mother is French and her father Chinese, she grew up in the U.S.) It’s expansive in terms subjects but concise in language and darkly funny, exploring themes of identity, community, language through personal experiences. It spoke to me as a fellow “between,” and I would recommend especially to anyone who lives between/within multiple cultures.
6. Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez (Viking, 2008)
So this is a strange one. Not for everyone. I never thought I would read a reference guide to 20th century fragrances let alone enjoy it so much. This book is more than a reference though, it’s a passionate and convincing introduction to the idea of perfume as art and a highly personal work of criticism. The primary author, Luca Turin, is a biophysicist whose research involves understanding our olfactory sense, but he also happens to be a delightful writer - witty, imaginative with a keen sense of metaphor. This feels like a book that contains a lifetime of reflection and observation of certain scents, compressed into a few paragraphs, accounting for the science, art, aesthetic sensibility, and cultural and market forces they represent. I read his review of Chanel No. 5, over and over, it’s like a prose poem. (He describes it like a piece of modernist sculpture, a Brancusi, and comparable in beauty to a 30-foot wooden sloop he often admired when living in a village in southern France: “It was one of a pair by a local boatbuilder called Silvestro, his last boat, and had taken fourteen thousand man-hours. When the owner was aboard, you could see it entire. It was more beautiful than an object has any right to be. In fact, it hurt to look at. Other such artifacts: a ladies’ black and gray loafer I once saw in Lobb’s window in London; the two-thirds-size platinum watch my doctor wears and about which he will reveal nothing, and now, more affordably, Chanel No. 5.”). I’m not the only fan. Hilary Mantel apparently loved this book and Brian Eno of all people listed it as one of his favorite books! (Imagine if your book was one of Brian Eno’s favorites! I would make a t-shirt declaring it. If you’re curious about his other favorites, see here.)
I picked up this guide after becoming interested in fragrance, to my own surprise. I think it’s an outgrowth of learning to cook and spending more and more time cooking. I realized how these other senses (taste and smell) are neglected, and the worlds they open up. They’re a joy and relief to explore after dedicating so much time to the life of the mind, mostly reading and writing and looking. This was also a relief to read during times of anxiety and stress, a book in alphabetical order, full of opinions and experience, but no terrible human dramas.
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Observations and comments are welcome as always! What are you excited to read this summer?
I am one of those people, the ones who look forward to reading your posts.
As always, love your writing and thoughtful evaluations!