Recent Reads: January ‘21

Collage commissioned for Exploring Self by Xablauai — *Collage commissioned for Exploring Self by* *Xablauai*

Hi, hi! It’s been a while — how are you?! How is 2021 feeling so far?!

Despite my silence over here, I’ve been well! 2020 was a year of surprises, and, overall, they weren’t the good kind. The year felt like continuously stepping in dog crap and having the smell follow you around all day; it felt like ordering a large coffee and then spilling it all over yourself before you’ve even left the drive-thru; it felt like floating in limbo without any semblance of a light at the end of the tunnel. I mean, with COVID, T***p, virtually teaching and attending graduate school, missing holidays with family, avoiding restaurants and travel and friends…it was a rough time. Ultimately, I’m glad it’s behind us (even if not much has changed).

Anyway, I basically checked-out around August: no writing, no blogging, not (many) Instagram posts, zero journaling. Staying inside (and working/studying within the same 20-ft radius) is surprisingly exhausting. I’d always thought cabin fever was a myth until I was suddenly stuck in the house for days on end. I dropped most of my creative activities in favor of tv and focusing on teaching.

The only thing I didn’t drop the ball on was reading.

In fact, I beat my 2020 reading goal of 50 books by reading 53 books total! You can see the full list of my 2020 reads here. You can also see all of my 2020 book reviews below:

This was my second year with a goal of 50 books and my first time achieving it! While I feel incredibly proud of myself, for 2021, I’ve decided not to set a reading goal. Why? I just want a pressure-free year of reading! There are also so many things happening (already!) in 2021 — graduating from grad school, buying our first home (more on that later!), etc. — that I don’t want to feel obligated to reach a certain goal. That being said, I’ll still be writing book reviews and posting here and on GoodReads — I’m just not tracking a specific goal. :-)

So now, without further ado, let’s review! xx

January

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis | 5/5

I’m not a big tv person, but when Netflix released their mini-series, The Queen’s Gambit, I decided to give it a try. The Queen’s Gambit introduces us to Beth Harmon, an 8-year old orphan and chess prodigy. As Beth grows up, she struggles with addiction, self-sabotage, and complicated relationships as she attempts to take over the chess world.

I was immediately hooked — the pacing, the costumes, and the drama were exactly what I love in a show. In fact, it was so good that after episode 6, I started it over again in order to watch it with Jeremiah! When, a few days later, Jeremiah ordered me the book, it was like having Christmas all over again. I didn’t even know there was a book at the time, and I immediately dug in.

Overall, Netflix did a brilliant job of keeping most of the book’s characters, plot points, and settings intact. As a book lover, I figured I’d enjoy the book even more than the show, but in actuality, they were equally phenomenal. The character of Beth Harmon is well-written and beautifully rounded. The reader feels invested in Beth’s journey and cheers her on as she transforms into a powerful chess champion.

Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon | 5/5

Heavy by Kiese Laymon is aptly named — it’s a heavy yet powerful read. On its surface, Heavy is about Laymon’s childhood in Jackson, Mississippi where he was raised by a brilliant, complex, and oftentimes abusive, single mother. Laymon’s childhood experiences are painful — he suffers through sexual assault, physical abuse, and disordered overeating. But is the relationship between mother and son that impacts Laymon most significantly as he grows into adulthood.

Laymon’s childhood trauma and insolent mother directly inform his adult relationships and decisions. He dates women who physically assault him; he transforms from an obese child into an anorexic adult; he is expelled from college; he witnesses his mother’s gambling addiction and actively recreates it in his own life. While it is difficult to read, Laymon remains reflective and contemplative throughout. As Vani writes in her review: “By [using his memoir] to name [the] secrets and lies he and his mother [have] spent a lifetime avoiding, Laymon asks himself, his mother, his nation, and us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.”

Laymon challenges his readers to question the events and experiences that have shaped their own identities. His writing is defiant and vulnerable, painful and powerful. By releasing his own secrets into writing, he opens the door for his readers to do the same.

“I will wonder if the memories that remain with age are heavier than the ones we forget because they mean more to us, or if our bodies, like our nation, eventually purge memories we never wanted to be true.”

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri | 5/5

While waiting for books to come in from the library, I noticed The Namesake on my bookshelf. I hadn’t read it in a few years, to the point at which I couldn’t even remember the protagonist’s name, so I decided to give it a re-read. The Namesake is ostensibly about the life of Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, immigrants to the U.S. from India, and their children, Gogol and Sonia Ganguli. Yet the novel primarily focuses on Gogol, who struggles with his identity, namesake (Gogol’s father, Ashoke, named him after a favorite author whose work felt literally life-saving), and sense of belonging.

When Ashoke and Ashima first emigrate to the U.S., they immediately get to work to find a Bengali community to make America feel more like home. Yet when Gogol is born, he interprets this community and its classic Bengali culture as a hindrance to his own self-discovery. Gogol becomes more and more determined to shed his unique name — despite not understanding its true origins and significance — and cloak himself in an American identity. This desire to assimilate is carried throughout his life and Gogol finds that it affects his romantic relationships, self-esteem, and career.

The Namesake is about race, class, culture, identity-markers, and generational gaps. It is about belonging, loss, cultural conflict, and empathy. It is about family, love, and finding pride in oneself. “In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another...They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”

Luster by Raven Leilani | 2.5/5

I genuinely don’t understand the hype surrounding Luster. The novel follows the story of Edie, a black woman in her 20s, attempting to work through the muck of…being in your 20s. She meets Eric, a man 20+ years her senior and in an open marriage, and begins dating him. As she enters more and more deeply into his world, she must confront issues of sexuality, race, and class. The novel is primarily, as Roxane Gay put it, “uncomfortable, stressful…haunting and ugly,” and it leaves nowhere for its readers to turn for relief. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t strong enough for the discomfort to be worthwhile.

Initially, I thought it would be a quick, witty, and smooth read. For example, within the first few pages, the narrator goes on a first date to Six Flags and eats lunch in one of their tacky, character-based restaurants. She describes the scene: “A waitress wearing a ten-gallon hat tosses a couple of sticky menus on the table. She tells us the specials in such a way that we know our sole responsibility as patrons in her section is to just go right ahead and fuck ourselves.” I found myself laughing out loud and excited to read more. Unfortunately, the narrator’s self-deprecating wit quickly becomes a bane to the story as a whole. Edie is vapid, consistently makes terrible decisions, and doesn’t grow or change much throughout the novel. As the book progresses, the writing becomes erratic — sentences continue on and on until the point is completely lost. For a while, the writing even feels strangely personal, as though Leilani forgets that Edie is a character, not an extension of herself.

Plot-wise, Luster asks the reader to suspend their disbelief for the majority of the book. While New York City is brimming with open marriages, sugar daddies, and more, Edie’s relationship just doesn’t make much sense. It continues to become more and more absurd, to the point at which the characters fall flat and the novel becomes about its own whirlwind series of events. While I’d hoped the narrator’s reflections on race, microaggressions, and racism, in general, were the book’s saving grace, it was always brought up in a way that missed the mark — any meaningful point and/or takeaway about race was never made, neither implicitly nor explicitly. While the book was interesting enough, I primarily finished it out of not wanting to “waste” the time I’d spent reading it. Luster is, unfortunately, a book that isn’t worth the effort of reading.