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Hi friends,
How is it May already! 2023 feels like it simultaneously just started and has also hit like a ton of bricks.
April was a really busy month, and when things get busy, I find myself constantly thinking “I should be doing/reading/thinking something else right now.” I become overly aware of the limited free hours I have in my week and whether or not I’m using them well. This month, I considered not finishing a book I’d started for the first time in a long time. I walked out of a three-hour movie two hours in. I compared my nightstand TBR pile against my overbooked planner and quietly despaired.
I have a lot of high hopes for my equally busy May, but the biggest one is to try and slow down the calm moments I do have when I have them, without thinking about whether I should be somewhere else. I’m not totally sure where I’m going to find these moments, but I’ll be looking, and I’ll have a book ready for when I do.
Speaking of books, let’s get to it! Also, if you’d prefer to read this post in newsletter form, make sure you’re subscribed here:
The Foundation:
Babel: An Arcane History — R.F. Kuang
Starting with a hot take, but this was my most disappointing read of the year so far. It had so many of my favorite things: history, magic, etymology, Oxford University. In theory, I should have adored all 500+ pages of this book, but I found it so boring! The premise of this fantastical alternate history is that silver bars engraved with translated words function as magic batteries that are powering the Industrial Revolution. Only those fluent in the languages can create the magic, so the story follows a cohort of translation students at Oxford, mostly people of color who were removed from their home countries at a young age and groomed for a career in service to the British Empire. As a result, much of the book grapples with their fraught identities and the moral question of forced loyalty to their colonizer. These issues are valid and important, and the perspectives of people of color from colonized countries are definitely underrepresented in historical fiction, but ultimately, I was underwhelmed by this book and did not think it lived up to the hype.
Hell Bent — Leigh Bardugo
I have a theory that if anyone is going to write another epic fantasy series that has a cultural impact on par with Harry Potter/Game of Thrones, it’s going to be Leigh Bardugo. She’s exceptionally talented, has a track record of appealing to both YA and adult audiences, and is now contractually obligated to churn out a bunch more books. This series, though, is not necessarily going to be it. Hell Bent is the sequel to Ninth House, in which Alex Stern, a girl with the power to see ghosts, is brought to Yale to join a magical secret society. During her freshman year, her mentor gets trapped in Hell during a ritual gone wrong, and most of Hell Bent is spent trying to bring him back. While Alex’s Yale felt more richly three-dimensional than Babel’s Oxford, I didn’t love how much of this already long book felt like a dragging wild goose chase. 0 for 2 on dark academia books this month, sadly.
A Poetry Handbook — Mary Oliver
What did we do to deserve Mary Oliver! If you didn’t know, April was National Poetry Month, and a few friends and I challenged each other to write a poem every day in celebration. Those poems will not be seeing the light of day anytime soon, but I had fun and I especially enjoyed learning about poetry through Mary Oliver’s eyes: pulling famous poems apart line by line, sound by sound, and examining their inner workings to see how and why they are so effective. I came away with a deep respect (and more than a little intimidation) for the craft of poetry, and I would highly recommend this handbook to writers of all kinds.
Solid Supports:
Time Is a Mother — Ocean Vuong
This was a poetry collection that I read on paper (Kindle) instead of listening to, which is such a different experience. I do still want to return to this collection on audio because I love hearing poets read their own poems, but seeing them on the page gives one a deeper appreciation for form that gets lost when you’re just listening. Vuong plays with form often in his poems, using their shape as a way to balance and explore the shifting shape of his own identity: as a queer man, a war refugee, a partner, a poet, and in the wake of his mother’s death, a son. His grief is the driving force of this collection—one of my favorite poems is merely a list of everything his mother ordered from Amazon in the last year of her life—and it completely colors the way Vuong approaches memory and the present moment, and how love connects the two. If you liked Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, you’ll love this collection (and vice versa).
The Hurting Kind — Ada Limón
This is the most recent collection from national treasure/Poet Laureate, Ada Limón, which I listened to while doing laundry and getting pooped on by a bird. Many of the poems are grounded in a sense of wonder and connection with the natural world, but they also examine her childhood and her family history and offer touching tributes to her late grandparents. The collection is also underscored by the universal feelings of loss and loneliness which have come to characterize so much of the art created during the pandemic. In the titular poem, a sweeping generational rumination on family and the small details of lives past that are remembered by loved ones, Limón writes, “I have always been too sensitive, a weeper / from a long line of weepers. / I am the hurting kind.” This confession is woven throughout the collection; Limón’s pain comes from feeling too much: deeply, openly, and without reservation. May we all be so brave as to wear our hearts on our leaves.
THE TIPPY TOP:
Fruiting Bodies — Kathryn Harlan
This story collection finally pulled me out of the slump that reading two 500+ pagers back to back with little enthusiasm had put me in. I needed a story collection because I needed worlds that I could dip in and out of with minimal effort and maximum satisfaction, and Fruiting Bodies certainly delivered. The stories defy clear-cut genres, blurring the lines between the expected and the fantastical, where even the ones that feel firmly grounded in reality are tinged with a sense of otherworldliness. In the titular story, a woman cooks with mushrooms clipped from her lover’s body. In another, a woman is subjected to visitations from different versions of her past self. In my favorite, a woman plays a high-stakes card game with the fair folk for research purposes, gambling everything from memories to body parts.
You may have noticed a pattern here, which is that all of the stories center women, most of them queer. The few male characters often feel like an imposition at worst and a nuisance at best, an inconvenience to solve and move on from. In their absence, women of all ages and desires are able to explore their identities and their relationships inside increasingly unstable worlds. The presence of magic—or at least a suspension of disbelief—throughout this collection aligns these stories with a rich tradition of mythology and folklore transposed for the present day, infused with temptation, intrigue, and divine femininity. I have not been able to stop thinking about these stories.
That’s April wrapped! If you’d like to chat some more about any of these books, my inbox/comments/DMs etc. are always open. Here’s hoping for less chaos and more quiet in May (a girl can dream).
Until next time, happy reading!
❤ Catherine
Catherine Thoms 