my prolific month of reading
books i’ve read in the past month and my thoughts on them
Hey friends!
All I did this month was read. And I had a great time.
To be fair, I maybe wasn’t really having the best time overall; there’s a lot happening in the world, and with the planets, and with my head, so I ended up reading a lot as a method of withdrawing from pretty much everything around me, but it was a kind of enjoyable retreat nonetheless. Sometimes you just need to disengage a bit in order to maintain some semblance of sanity, so disengage I did, and I ended up reading quite a few more books in a month than I have in a long time.
This month really reminded me of what I was like as a kid, when you were 100% guaranteed to find me reading a book any time I was in transit, and 4/5 recess days each week were dedicated to sitting on my favorite bench (or, let’s be honest, in my favorite teacher’s classroom) with a book. The 5th recess period of the week was reserved for swinging on the monkey bars because I was also deeply dedicated to mastering those in elementary school.
I think the greatest superpower I’ve ever had in my life was also during those years, and it was that I never used a bookmark — I’d look at the page number when I had to put my book down, and no matter the amount of time that passed - be it minutes or hours - the next time I picked up that book I always remembered which page I had left off at. That skill has sadly been looong gone, so I then moved on to using my trusty red bookmark from Barnes and Noble that I transferred from book to book for several years.
Please enjoy this photo circa the era when I used to regularly post about my reads on IG, which I kind of miss, but due to an ongoing existential crisis about my online presence 90% of my IG posts have been archived.
Towards the end of our run together that bookmark mysteriously lost its beaded string, and then one day I realized it had tragically disappeared altogether. Since it’s been lost in the ether, I now rely on a multitude of bookstore bookmarks to keep me going because I’ve also lost the skill of keeping track of just one of them. Shoutout to The Center for Fiction’s bookmarks which I truly think are some of the best designed bookstore bookmarks out there, and I’m not just saying that.
So, what did I spend my time reading this past month? I’m glad you asked. Here we go:
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo - I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like this book because it’s excellent. I read it back in 2020 and decided it was time for a reread. This is a character novel and Evaristo moves through her cast of characters by giving them individual focus throughout the chapters, and as you get farther and farther along you realize that she’s created a masterful web of interconnected and entangled lives and it’s incredible. The novel focuses on the lives of Black women and nonbinary individuals in England and the stories she creates are rich with depth and meaning. I always recommend this book and always will.
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly - I was so into the premise of this book - as well as the cover - before reading it, and I ended up solidly liking it! It focuses on two queer siblings in New Zealand going through great moments of change/growth/hardship in their lives and relationships, which is so up my alley. I do think that Reilly did a good job with her main characters, but the extended family was large and so it meant some characters didn’t get as much treatment as they needed to for their stories to be wrapped up by the end, and there were a lot of loose ends/some things that the reader was left to interpret on their own, which I don’t think was the most successful. But I did have a great time reading it and sometimes that’s 3/4 of the battle. I would recommend if you overall want to have a good time, and I’m definitely interested in what she’ll put out in the future.
Inheritance by Taylor Johnson - Another reread. One of the most incredible poetry collections around and I highly recommend.
Parasol Against the Axe by Helen Oyeyemi - A fever dream, which is, in general, my experience with Helen (if I may call her Helen). I am always somewhat distanced from her work because half of the experience of reading her novels is also experiencing the feeling of reading her novels (again, fever dream), but I think this time it may have been more because I think there were more aspects of this novel that I didn’t entirely buy into. At times it’s a book within a book and those were the sections that I struggled with the most, and then towards the end a lot of really bizarre events took place in quick succession that I didn’t quite understand the motive for. Here’s the thing: Helen (if I may call her Helen!) can write and that is undeniable and I will continue to marvel at her writing and her mind, but I am just a little unsure of this one. One of my favorite things to do, though, is convince people to read specific books simply because I also want to talk about them at depth with someone who will understand, so read this book and then come talk to me about it. Please and thank you.
Piglet by Lottie Hazell - A little unsatisfying and somewhat annoying. My current Goodreads review for this book has been left at “if this were a reddit AITA story, the verdict would be ESH” which I fully stand by. Something about the writing also felt far too technical for me, which maybe makes sense because I think the author is coming from a food writing background. But so sorry, I do not ever want to read the phrase “support network” in a novel again; I could try and explain why but it would be an extremely long ramble. And that’s nothing against the actual idea of support networks, I think they’re fantastic, but I think I love a novel that treats language as an art and I really think that was missing in a lot of this book. And then there’s the fact that Piglet is just not a likable character. Oftentimes my favorite books are the ones with unlikable characters, but unfortunately in this case I was just not rooting for her.
Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates - This collection of poems ultimately fell a bit flat for me. I felt like many of the poems had a lot of images just stacked one after another in a way that felt too disjointed, so none of the poems really stayed with me in a meaningful way.
Honorary shoutout to Such Color by Tracy K. Smith which I have not yet finished but I’m having a great time slowly moving through along with the rest of it all. It’s a collection of new & selected poems so some poems are already near and dear and some I have not read and it’s lovely.
I think I’ve been in some form of a reading slump for a good 1-1.5 years, so this was an exciting month for me. It was also National Poetry Month, and as has been my tradition for the past several years, I wrote a poem every day this month, so in honor of the month, here’s a few poems I love that I’d like to share with you.
Emergency Management by Camille Rankine
If I could be anything / I would be the wind, // if I could be nothing / I would be.
Another Night at Sea Level by Meg Day
There’s a man / somewhere on the planet / who has been to that moon, / who has stepped out of that sky, / & will never sleep the same / because of it
Thanks by W.S. Merwin
we are saying thank you faster and faster / with nobody listening we are saying thank you / thank you we are saying and waving / dark though it is
Torn by Ada Limón
something / that loves itself so much, it moves across / the boundaries of death, to touch itself / once more, to praise both divided sides / equally, as if it was almost easy.
Kef 21 by Henry Dumas
No. I am not wishing that everyone should die. Nor am I wishing that everyone should be still. Only I am squeezing out the steam in me.
In the time that I haven’t been reading, I added Dropout to my selection of streaming services just so I could pick back up on watching the show Game Changer, which really is one of the most fun shows out there if you haven’t seen it, so that’s just a bonus recommendation for ya.
And in other exciting news: the bookshelf is (I think) complete! Ikea took me on a rollercoaster ride with their stock notifications, but the last shelf I was waiting for came back in stock and I had it delivered and then spent several hours assembling it on Sunday and getting the whole shebang together. Since I brought you into the beginning of this saga, here’s how the wall stands now, at the end:
I’m so pleased.
I hope April has been good to you and that May is even better. Let me know what you’ve been reading/planning to read because I’m genuinely curious and always looking to add more books to my TBR.
see you in may,
s
Currently reading: I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel