What I Read | October 2024
Roxane Reviews First Edition
One of my goals for 2023 and 2024 has been to recap each month that goes by in my diary. I have been more or less faithful to this goal, and by that, I mean I have not been faithful to this goal.
For a while, too, I have been toying with the idea of compiling reviews on the various media I consume (books, movies, shows, etc.) and putting it in a place that isn’t just my brain, or my Notion (aka, also my brain). I thought up Roxane Reviews in an Uber months ago, and it stuck with me even though something about it sounds so pretentious. (I also thought of Roxane (w)Rites, which will thankfully never see the light of day.)
Anyway, I’ve been busy, and I’ve been scared, and I’ve been telling myself I’m not good enough. But I really do want to formalize my consumption and the way I think about my consumption, and with that, hopefully develop my ~brain~ and writing skills.
So without further ado (is the fact that I thought ado was originally spelt adue concerning? yes.), here are the books I read in October 2024, and some thoughts to go along with them!
I kicked off October with Dayswork, an excellent little novel by writing couple Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel. When trying to confirm that they were indeed together, I stumbled on this article here about their writing process as a couple, and it’s definitely worth a read! Daywork takes place during the doldrums (FYI, doldrums is one of my favorite words) of Covid, and follows the thoughts of a woman writing an biography of Herman Melville. It reads like excerpts from an academic’s research and quarantine diary more than a biography, but it is so much more than that! Bachelder and Habel expertly weave in parts of the narrator’s (and one can assume their own) life with various musings on Melville, his work, acquaintances (i.e., Nathaniel Hawthorne), and future biographers. This was such a lovely read, and one of the few 5s I gave out this year, and the only one I gave out in October, so you might as well stop reading here (just kidding, please don’t!). I’m also grateful to Dayswork for sparking a re-reading of Moby Dick (out loud, to C, one chapter at a time, accompanied by riffs from Bibliokept), my current obsession with one of Melville’s letters to Hawthorne, which moves me in indescribable ways, and the addition of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights to my TBR.
Next up was Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, which I was so excited to read as it had the entire literary community in a chokehold (though interestingly enough, not so much on Substack), and because F gifted it to me when I was really depressed about being on a tight budget. Unfortunately, Martyr! did not do it for me. It follows Cyrus Sham, a recovered addict, orphan, wanna-be poet with a martyr obsession, on a quest to meet and understand an artist putting her death on display at the Brooklyn Art Museum. I found the plot incredibly loose, with a chaotic structure nowhere near sturdy enough to support it and its weak cast of characters. Kaveh tried to weave in multiple voices, but none sounded unique, whether he was writing them in the first- or third-person, and regardless of their background or generation. I’m sure Kaveh’s poetry is better, but I found his prose, lauded everywhere but here, overwrought with uninspired imagery. Another qualm I had with this novel is that, similarly to Daywork and a lot of the novels I read this month, it felt more like auto-fiction than anything else. I suppose it bothered me more in Martyr! than in Dayswork because it was so much more pretentious and blatant in the former. I rated Martyr! two stars nonetheless because the premise itself was interesting, and it asked and investigated some important questions about grief, identity, love, belonging, etc. It also prompted me to Google Allegri’s Miserere after a passage retells how Mozart allegedly transcribed the whole thing from memory at 14 years (more info here), and it’s now my new favorite piece of music.
In need of something I knew would be good, I picked up Time Shelter at McNally Jackson by the Bulgarian writer and poet Georgi Gospodinov. I loved The Physics of Sorrow when I read it back in August, and was excited to follow the same unnamed intellectually brilliant narrator and his enigmatic sidekick, Gaustine.
Gaustine, whom I first invented, and then met in flesh and blood. Or perhaps it was the opposite, I don’t remember. My invisible friend, more real and visible than my very self. […] We shared a common obsession with the past.
In Time Shelter, Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past” for patients suffering from Alzheimer’s. Soon, the clinic expands, until the entirety of Europe chooses to revert back to various decades from the 20th century. I really enjoyed Time Shelter, despite finding it slightly weaker than The Physics of Sorrow. Gospodinov is a phenomenal writer, and Proust-like in his ability to muse on memory and the past. The premise is strong and thought-provoking, but as Adina wrote on Goodreads, “I felt like a spectator who admired the skill of the author but never managed to feel involved”.
Moving on, C and I flew to Colorado and I bought a ton of books at the Boulder Bookstore, and wanted to make sure I read as many as possible before we flew back to New York so I could leave them there (I am a serial book abandoner, don’t sue me!). I started this mini binge with Milk Fed by Melissa Broder. Having loved her previous novel, Death Valley, and her collection of essays, So Sad Today, I was excited to delve into her unique voice and ingenious imagination again. Unfortunately, I didn’t love Milk Fed as much. It follows Rachel, a young woman working in LA, whose entire life revolves around her disordered eating and calorie counting. Urged by her therapist to take a break from her controlling mother, she immediately meets Miriam, a young Orthodox Jewish woman who flips Rachel’s world on her head, and coaxes her into eating more. Milk Fed read more like queer erotica than anything else, which I didn’t mind, but didn’t find super interesting. I was, however, struck by the number of people on Goodreads calling the novel disgusting and/or uncomfortable. I personally simply found it a little flat, trite, and cliché, and didn’t think it added much to the trope of young girl with eating disorder and mommy issues finally healing herself by reckoning with both her physical and metaphysical hunger.
Next up was Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, which I dreaded writing about because I hated it so much. I think it was the worst book I’ve read this year, and maybe ever. Zambreno spends the entirety of Drifts writing about not writing a novel she due to to write, wanting to capture time, her pretentiously called dog Genet, how difficult it is to be an academic, and dumping every single literary reference she can to show us all she is well-read. It was practically unbearable to get through and the only reason I did is because I hate not finishing books. Disagree with me?
After that, I was craving a great palate-cleanse. I have been reading and trusting
and her Substack ever since I got back on the platform, and she recommended The Science of Last Things by Ellen Wayland-Smith a few times. C and I were in Estes Park, and I was perusing a small and poorly-stocked bookstore (Macdonald Book Shop) when I saw *it*, and felt more like *it* had found *me*. I have to give it to Elle, this was a fantastic collection of short stories from an incredibly bright and gentle voice (everything Drifts and Zambreno were not). Wayland-Smith expertly links her raw, emotional experiences losing her father, giving birth, or receiving treatment for cancer, with crystal therapy in LA, religion, Dickinson’s poems, and the science of rocks (which should be called rockotology). If you read anything from this list, trust Elle more than me, and read The Science of Last Things!To wait in this way means simply to bear witness to breath, the gift of wakefulness, as it lights up (here, now) in this accidental vessel that is myself. It asks nothing more of the time that remains.
At that same bookstore, I also picked up The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, and am now realizing that 4 of the books I read in October were also purchased in October, which is a HUGE accomplishment for me! Regarding The MANIAC, I first have to pause and drool over Labatut for a second because he writes in his third language more expertly and beautifully than most writers do in their first language. As an ESL person me-self, I could only dream of being able to bend the English language to my will the way Labatut does. It’s unclear why I picked up The MANIAC because it does not discuss topics I am interested in whatsoever - quantum mechanics, the atomic bomb, AI, chess - but I am so glad I did because I was never, ever, bored. Earlier, I mentioned how Kaveh’s characters all sounded the same, and I think he could learn a thing or two from the way Labatut masterly writes characters with voices that each sound so unique and personal, and add so much value to his subject. I loved The MANIAC so much that it prompted me to watch Oppenheimer, which I had 0 interest in previously (Barbie forever), and I was blown away all over again!
Life is so much more than a game. Its full wealth and complexity cannot be captured by equations, no matter how beautiful or perfectly balanced. And human beings are not the perfect poker players that we envisioned. They can be highly irrational, driven and swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions. And while this sparks off the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us, it is also a mercy, a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason.
I had picked up Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful in a small bookstore on the Cape when I was there with my family around LDW. The bookstore wasn’t well stocked (what is it with me and not well-stocked bookstores at the moment?), but I grabbed an on-sale hardcover edition of Hello Beautiful. By the time I started it end of October, I had fully forgotten the premise, so was going into it blind with neutral expectations. It’s essentially a modern version of Little Women, following four sisters as they move through their lives. A big chunk of the story centers on another character, William, and the role the sisters create for him within their family. I struggled with Hello Beautiful because every single one of the characters’ decisions felt entirely absurd and far-fetched, and their consequences even more so. Each sister was also very obviously epitomizing a cliché (divorcée, lesbian, single mother) and none were allowed to be anything but that. Napolitano’s writing was bland and unable to make up for her chaotic plot or flat characters.
I wanted to finish the month strong and kind of cheated by reading two plays back to back on October 31st. The first of the two was The Dream of the Burning Boy by David West Read. This play felt… unfinished to say the least, and my favorite Goodreads review about it was sam lucas’s “grown men stop writing about teenage girls challenge” which summed up how I felt about it. The dialogue between the characters was decent but the premise itself (which can’t be given away without spoiling everything) couldn’t be properly explored in a 45-pages-long play without feeling easy or trite.
The second play I read on 10/31 was Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris, and what a way to finish October that was! I had had Slave Play on my TBR since F raved about it after seeing it live in New York back in 2019. You can’t really say anything about the plot or the characters without ruining it, so I won’t. I’ll just say it was excellent, disturbing, touching, funny, and thought-provoking, and I really wish I had seen it live too!
Welp. This concludes installment #1 of What I Read, and I had a lot of fun looking back on all the great and not so great books I read this month. Can’t wait to do it again soon!
Roxane