What I Read | December 2024
Roxane Reviews Christmas Edition
Happy New Year! I have so many thoughts about time and how fast it goes… but this is not the place for them! This is the place for What I Read in December 2024. In case you missed it, here is What I Read | October 2024, and What I Read | November 2024.
I kicked off December by finishing Didion & Babitz, by Lili Anolik, for
on 12/10. Ooooof. This was an interesting read, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Per the Goodreads synopsis:With deftness and skill, journalist Lili Anolik uses Babitz—Babitz’s brilliance of observation, Babitz’s incisive intelligence, and, most of all, Babitz’s diary-like letters—as the key to unlocking the mighty and mysterious Didion.
This entire sentence is misleading. Anolik has no deftness, and she actually does everything but use Babitz’s “incisive intelligence” and her “diary-like letters”, and we absolutely do not get an unlocked Didion. What we do get: a jumbled mess of a biography of Babitz told through the lens of a never-ending cast of supporting characters (mostly men Babitz has slept with, and other minor players in the Hollywood 60s and 70s scenes). What we also get: near-constant intrusions by Anolik where she addresses her audience as “dear Reader”, and proceeds to over-explain the simplest things she’s doing “Now, I’m about to make a tricky point, so pay attention, Reader, follow the ball.” Are you kidding me? Most of the marginalia I wrote down in my copy consisted of question marks and shorthand for how annoyed I was at the way Anolik treats her subjects and her readers.
When I first saw it at McNally, I wasn’t really interested in picking up Didion & Babitz, because I’m not a huge fan of either Didion (too blase) or Babitz (too messy). But I really wanted to join Open Book Club and the ticket included a copy of the book, so it felt like a win-win, or at least a net neutral. When I first started the book, I was excited to get what I thought would be a true and nuanced but ultimately positive and enjoyable portrait of two literary icons (ok, mostly Didion, but still, Babitz earned her placed in the cannon). Boy, was I wrong. Anolik drags her subjects through the mud over and over again, all the while pitting them against each other in a way that feels mostly fabricated by her own delusions. Like many have mentioned on Goodreads, if you are interested in learning more about Didion and Babitz, Anolik is not the way to go. For Babitz, read her works! I didn’t think Eve’s Hollywood was anything to write home about, but it’s a fun look into 60s Hollywood, and I’m excited to read her apparently better collection, Slow Days, Fast Company. For Didion, The World According to Joan Didion would be a better place to go for a deeper look at the inscrutable icon. If you want a longer, more in-depth critique of Anolik’s book, read this i-D article here.
Up next, I read Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn, a modern lesbian pulp fiction novel about some capital M messy characters. I had seen it in quite a few bookstores over the last few months (the pink cover really did it for me), but thought it’d be a little too… “easy”? A few weeks ago, I saw it on
’s Favorite Books of 2024 list and figured I would give it a try. I’m going to be honest, after so much reading about tragic heteronormative relationships with husbands acting as babies and wives acting as mommies, it was really refreshing to read a book with just women acting like both babies and mommies, and where the only male characters were the lead’s brother or gay friends. I had not read The Price of Salt or Perfume and Pain, with which Dorn’s novel is clearly in conversation, and was therefore unfortunately missing a big chunk of meaning and homage. The characters were insane but in a somewhat relatable and fun, and even endearing way, despite being written to be unlikeable. I think as long as someone is self-aware, I’m okay with it? (This goes for people IRL too.) I found the end a little trite, a little too “and then she got better and all’s well that ends well” that isn’t super realistic, but again, might be an homage or a rebuttal to lesbian pulp fiction that I’m not able to recognize. While this won’t make my personal top books of 2024 list, I still enjoyed reading Perfume and Pain.Next up,
and I stopped by McNally Jackson because I wanted to pick up The White Album and Slow Days, Fast Company after reading Didion & Babitz and committing to giving both writers another try with their more notable works. Of course, I have no self-control, so I also picked up Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, which I started reading immediately and finished shortly after as it is less than 100 pages (I think?). A friend of mine had read Foster and recommended it, but I figured Small Things Like These, set around and on Christmas would be a better fit for cold December days. The novel follows Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and father of five girls as he reflects on his orphaned childhood, his work, his family, and the meaning of life. The novel culminates as Bill decides to save a girl from one of the Magdalena Laundries, Irish institutions where over 3,000 women were forced into labor. Despite its short length, the novel is quite moving because of the topic it focuses on, and because of the main character’s empathy. I did enjoy this but thought it was overhyped… though I realize this may just because I struggle with really short novels. I found Keegan’s writing beautiful, and was in awe of how she successfully manages to fully take herself out of the narrative, which results in a prose that is bare and calm, without being sterile.That same weekend, I was even more bad and picked up two new books at Spoonbill. When I got home, I was so excited to start something new, but quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer number of books I own and am excited to read... After spending over 10 minutes lying in front of my bookshelf in a mild form of discomfort, I remembered my TBR challenge, which was meant to fix this very problem! I quickly added all my recent purchases to my TBR list, with the new total coming in at #285. I made use of my trusty Random Number Generator and got the number #55, aka the short poetry collection My Soulmate’s in an Armchair at McNally Jackson by Adriana Mariella. I vividly remember picking this copy up at the Seaport McJ location when I was attending a book reading there a few years ago. While reviewers on Goodreads seemed to have generally enjoyed Mariella’s collection, I found myself rolling my eyes at every other poem. The collection is a love letter to New York, but I found it cliché and trite, and believe the poems would fit better on a Millennial’s Instagram stories than on printed paper. I love poetry as much as the next girl but this did not do it for me.
The collection was super short so less than an hour later, I was back in front of my bookshelf with nothing to read, again. I called upon the RNG, only to be given another Master Number: #66, aka The Best American Essays, edited by essayist Vivian Gornick.
In his foreword, the father and series editor of the Best American Essays, Robert Atwan, touches briefly on the idea of censorship, which I found increasingly relevant ahead of the Trump administration, specifically with Kash Patel as his FBI pick and his thirst for retribution. I particularly liked this quote:
The aim of censorship is to make its imposition unnecessary; when people are sufficiently intimidated - socially, professionally, economically - they will do their best not to give offense. The censors have then invisibly achieved their goal. Of course, such fears ill immeasurably suppress the creativity of younger, less secure and established writers and artists.
In her introduction, the 2023 guest editor Vivian Gornick outlines her guiding principle in selection the collection’s essays:
What all [the selected essays] have in common is the strong, clear sound of a narrating voice that, in and of itself, is the organizing principle behind the essay. That voice - better known as persona - is the one I here honor. […] Through its tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm of its sentences, what it selects to observe and what to ignore, the persona makes itself integral to the subject at hand; becomes, in fact, its instrument of illumination.
I absolutely loved this idea of the persona and hate to admit it’s not something I had actively thought about when reading non-fiction. I always took the narrator as the author and that was that, but Gornick’s foreword reminded me that we are fragmented selves and can write from a myriad of perspectives. While reading the essays in the collection, I made sure to pay close attention to the persona chosen to tell the story, and found it a helpful guiding principle.
There were 21 essays in the collection, and at first I wanted to put together a few notes on each, but I figured that would be overkill, so here are some thoughts on the essays I found particularly interesting or moving instead.
I found the second essay, Any Kind of Leaving by Jillian Barnet, incredibly thought-provoking. As an an adult struggling financially, Barnet finds out that the abusive partner of her now-dead babysitter has left her everything he has. Any Kind of Leaving is a gentle exploration of grappling with people’s both horrid and good acts.
Bidders of the Din by Eric Borsuk was definitely in the top essays of the collection for me, and incredibly eye-opening about the disturbing state of the American prison system. Borsuk writes while incarcerated for “robbing a rare-books collection” with some college friends. The essay brings the readers into the trials and tribulations of the day-to-day life of the prison system, and how Borsuk spends his days, including his time in solitary confinement. I immediately added his full-length novel, American Animals: A True Crime Memoir, to my Goodreads TBR, wooed by his style, the clarity of his voice, and the intensity of his subject.
Another phenomenal essay was Concision: A Sprawl by George Estreich. The oxymoronic title of the essay is brilliant and telling of Estreich’s writing: concise, and somehow sprawling too. In Concision, Estreich investigates language, as well as why we write and read, and write and read the way we do. As a pawn in corporate America, I adored this passage:
To think about concision is to think about readers. Readers of memos don’t want to read memos; they read to extract information, like gold or coal, which is then spent or burned. For readers of texts like these, concision is unambiguously useful. But readers of essays have different goals. We want to get something from the essay, but the something is less extractible. Re: grief, Re: injustice, Re: transcendence - we turn and return to essays for instances of the inexhaustible. We want to experience the language, not mine it. What we get is a chance to waste time, or to experience time and usefulness in a different way, or to inhabit time in a way not governed by use. The essay says, Take a minute, look at this landscape, what can you get from it without destroying it.
Quite a lot of the essays picked by Gornick are on the topic of aging, and/or written from the persona of an older narrator. In Revelation at the Food Bank by Merrill Joan Gerber, a wife confronts her husband of over sixty years about whether he has ever slept with other women (if that isn’t me as a wife, I don’t know what is). In On Aging by Edward Hoagland, the author ambulates on dying and death and his own noble acceptance of it. The last line of the essay called to mind the Before Trilogy that I recently rewatched with
.I’d love to be a passenger on trains again, ambling down the corridors toward the bubble car to chum with strangers while the scenery rises and falls. I’d rejoice in gazing out, crossing a continent with the random souls chance has thrown my way.
Along with Bidders of the Din and Concision, the third essay I learnt the most from in this collection was Gender: A Melee by Laura Kipnis. In it, Kipins expertly takes down misogyny, capitalism, motherhood as a biological instinct, transphobia, and much more. For a quick taste of her searing voice:
Capitalism smashes things while ushering into existence all sorts of new human freedoms (economic equality unfortunately not among them). If the male-female binary is losing its grip on the human psyche as a social organizing principle, and the premise that gender roles are rooted in nature has been crumbling for the last century, the causes are obviously multiple: an increasing focus on personal fulfillment, the decline of patriarchal authority that accompanied men’s declining economic fortunes and women’s economic independence, and resulting changes in the family structure.
Funnily, in An Archaeological Inquest, author Phillip Lopate gives an anachronistic review of a Partisan Review. I suppose that this essay was then included in magazine reviews and in this collection, and that I am now writing its presence in a 2023 issue of a collection is somewhat… meta?
Okay, one more essay I learnt a lot from: Life and Story by Singrid Nunez, in which the author investigates and aims to answer the question: “Why do you write?” In her answer, she pulls from her mentors and favorite literary influences, and imparts on her readers all of her accumulated knowledge about writing and what it means to be a writer. The below passage was also highly relevant because just two days prior I was telling my dad that I preferred to read fiction to dense philosophical works, because I thought fiction could be just, if not more, philosophical than philosophical texts.
Of course, the more we read, the more we understand how much of literature deals with many of the same big questions as does philosophy: What is the role of human beings in the universe? What is the relationship between the individual and society? What is reality? Why are things as they are? What is the nature of good and evil? How should a human being live? What is death? If everyone must die, what is the meaning of life?
I thought Gornick did an incredible job selecting the 2023 essays for this collection. Every single one of them was a joy to read and I learnt so much. If you stumble on a copy of this collection, it’s definitely worth picking up. I’m a little scared of reading the 2024 version for fear that it isn’t as well curated.
I had started The Best American Essays while still in New York, but by the time I finished the collection mid-December, I was already in France for the Christmas holidays. Knowing that my family and I have accumulated hundreds of books in our apartment in France, I tried to limit the number of American books I was bringing with me on holidays. I nonetheless grabbed Havoc by Christopher Bollen, which I had just gotten from McNally Jackson before leaving, Kafka’s Diaries, Psych by Paul Bloom which I’ve been “reading” since August, and I am Alien to Life by Djuna Barnes, which I have to read for a McNally Book Club when I get back to New York. In the mood for something fun and easy to occupy my jet-lagged brain, I started Havoc first. I was excited for it as the synopsis made it sound weird and disturbing, aka my cup of tea, but I felt I had been led astray by the time I finished. The narrator, Maggie, is an 80-year old American widow living out the pandemic in luxury resorts across Europe. We meet her at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Luxor, Egypt, where it quickly becomes clear she’s escaped something dark of her own doing. In Luxor, Maggie’s days are regimented by a strict routine of stretches, thinking of her husband in the shower, breakfast, pool-side chats with her gay best friends, and bantering with the hotel manager, Ahmed. That is, until the arrival of a young mother, Tess, and her 8-year old son, Otto. We soon learn that Maggie has a particular predilection for “freeing” unhappy people from the self-imposed shackles of their lives, most notably, failing marriages. Tess and Otto arrive just as Maggie has decided to “free” such an unhappy wife from such a failing marriage by planting falsified evidence to indicate the husband has been cheating with another hotel guest. Otto, the new arrival, realizes what Maggie has done, but Maggie thinks her and Otto are on the same page. Maggie immediately takes to Tess and her young son, and is overtaken by the urge to become part of their family. Her dreams are soon shattered when Otto, who knows of Maggie’s meddling, starts blackmailing her in exchange for a bigger room and video games. From there, a war escalates with dizzying speed. Otto and Maggie are both cunning, violent, and borderline psychotic. As part of one of his tricks, Otto steals Maggie’s non-hallucinatory medications, which can explain why the story devolves the way it does, with Maggie soon murdering a hotel guest and a hotel manager. Bollen also weaves in a secondary plot: that of Maggie’s dead-daughter, Julia, who it becomes clear at the end of the book, Maggie only “murdered” in her mind in order to ignore Julia’s confession that her father and Maggie’s beloved husband, Peter, sexually abused her as a child. I assume Bollen meant for this to be a jaw-dropping revelation that would make a reader rethink the entire book, but it was so inexpertly woven in that it had the opposite effect (confusing most readers, as per Goodreads reviews). Additionally, it was obvious from the very start that something was fishy between Maggie and Peter and her obvious idolization of him. Outside of this, Havoc just read like a wackier White Lotus, but not necessarily in a good way. I hoped I would be on the edge of my seat, and there were definitely moments that kept me interested, but it wasn’t as gripping as it should have been. I gave it a couple stars because the world-building was well done, and because I love an obviously unreliable narrator who eludes a reader’s grasp, and who goes from likable to unlikeable every other page.
Next up, I started I am Alien to Life by Djurna Barnes, which I could tell from the quotes included in Merve Emre’s foreword that I might enjoy. The stories are definitionally “no plot, just vibes” and heavy on dialogue that feels play-like in its intensity and theatricality, which is right up my alley. Nearly every story features one or more horse or other animal, and characters dying, in love, doubting their religion, or questioning their place and purpose in the world. Unfortunately, while I did really love the writing, the stories quickly became repetitive in nature. I am Alien to Life was solid, but I would have probably enjoyed stumbling upon a single one in a literary magazine more than I did reading the collection.
As I mentioned earlier, starting in mid-December, I was in France for the holidays, in the same ski town I have been going to for around 15 years. For the longest time, there was an amazing bookstore owner there, but he retired a few years ago, and no one took over. This was a recurring topic of conversation and nostalgia for me and my father, who severely missed being able to replenish our collection of French books while there. Amazingly, this year, while walking through the town in search of some last-minute Christmas gifts, I stumbled upon a newly opened bookstore! I immediately called my Dad to share the good news, and raided the bookstore, so grateful books are significantly cheaper in France than they are in the US. The first book I started was Stella et l’Amérique by Joseph Incardona, which follows a saint-prostitute who can heal people of incurable diseases by sleeping with them. When the Vatican hears of her powers, they send hitmen on the loose to kill her, but an ex-military priest comes to her rescue. The book is very fun and western-like, and the characters sympathetic, but I found the writing abysmal, to the point that it detracted from the story.
My first week in France was spent mostly alone before my family and friends joined me in the Alps. That meant a lot of time on the slopes all alone, which I tried to make a little less lonely by listening to the audiobook for The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. The novel is narrated by an unnamed British-Cambodian civil servant who is hired to serve as a “bridge” for a secret time-travel project. She is assigned to Commander Graham Gore, a (real) Royal Navy officer and polar explorer from the 19th century, and meant to help him adjust to 21st century England. The plot is quite strong, and follows the time-travelers and their bridges as they try to adapt and understand why they were brought back. I won’t write much more because it’s impossible not to spoil the novel, but I’ll say that I quite enjoyed The Ministry of Time. Because I listened to it, it’s hard to have anything concrete and interesting to say about the writing and prose because I don’t internalize it as much when I listen as opposed to when I read. The characters were well fleshed-out, especially considering the depth Bradley went into for a lot of them. There were quite a few interesting themes to the novel too, mostly around colonialism and racism. I’m quite ashamed to say that my favorite part of the novel was the romance between the two main characters, and the tension that Bradley was able to muster out of thin air. I think The Ministry of Time would work really well as a movie, and I kept picturing Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Graham Gore, the way he looks in Anna Karenina as Vronsky, but dark-haired instead of blonde.
Back to paperbacks, after finishing Stella et l’Amérique, I started another French book I picked up at the bookstore: Un roman à succès sur papier recyclé by Simon Drouard. The novel was a comedy on the stupidity of the publishing industry and literary world, consisting mostly of prefaces, forewords, and footnotes, and about two pages of a ‘story’. It was quite funny, but I also found it a little trite and tiresome.
Finally, the last book I read this year was Le Mal Joli by Emma Becker, one of my favorite contemporary French authors. She wrote La Maison a few years ago, in which she chronicles her experience working for a brothel. As a writer, Becker is concerned with human relationships, especially sex, love, and lust. Her writing is honest, raw, deep, and incredibly crude. In Le Mal Joli, she describes the beginning of her romantic relationship and passion with a French aristocrat, despite the fact that they are both in relationships. The novel covers everything from their ravenous sexual appetites to the guilt she feels as a wife and mother of two young children. By hiding nothing (or at least making it seem so), Becker appears as a trustworthy, transparent, and likable narrator, despite the nature of what she is engaging in and describing. While La Maison didn’t get dethroned by Le Mal Joli, I really enjoyed being reunited with Becker’s voice and adventures, and look forward to more from her.
And with that, my 2024 reading season came to an end! I look forward to continuing these reviews next year, so make sure to…