Top Nine

Presented in no particular order, though my favorite non-fiction this year was Dessa and my favorite novel was Ayobami Adebeyo’s.

• Charmed me in a way that I wasn’t expecting: Chemistry by Weike Wang
• Straight up goosebumps while reading about her & Aby Wolf singing together: My Own Devices by Dessa
• So relatable it made my heart hurt: All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
• Showed us how nostalgia can literally kill us: Severance by Ling Ma
• Gave me all the (non-killer variety) nostalgia: The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
• Greek myths retold by a woman, more please! Circe by Madeline Miller
• Kick you in the teeth good: There There by Tommy Orange
• Made me super afraid to blink: Baby Teeth by Zoje Stage
• Came out in 2017, but probably the best novel I’ve read in the past five years: Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo

Other Notable Reads

Woulda made the Top Nine except I couldn’t forgive the easy ending: Vox by Christina Dalcher

Like a shitty, shitty episode of “Orange is the New Black:” The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.

All the nopes down in Nopeville could not nope this one enough: Leave No Trace by Mindy Meija.

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This week I read Well-Read Black Girl edited by Glory Edim. It’s an anthology of essays written by black women about discovering themselves in literature and what that meant to them. The collection is wonderful, touching, delightful, and reiterates how much representation matters — be it in literature, pop culture, whatever.

Booknerds, you’ll love it. If your reading list is still shamefully white like mine, you’ll be introduced to a whole bunch of books and women you should be reading.

This book set me up to be even more receptive than I would be to this conversation between Hannah Gadsby and Roxane Gay. I feel so seen. I could weep from the recognition. Some of these quotes from Roxane Gay feel like they could be paraphrased from our last Rock & Roll Bookclub conversation.

“Not a day goes by where someone doesn’t stare at me. And now, I have to ask, what are they staring at? Are they staring at my height? Well, maybe. Are they staring at my weight? Absolutely.”

“I have a woman’s body. I get called Sir, every day.”

“There’s always something. When you’re not what people expect from a woman, they’re always going to be angry about it.”

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Over the weekend I read Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, which was overall kinda shruggy-emoji. It’s basically a rehash of the last two years with a smidgen of history shoved in for legitimacy.

If you’re the target audience for this book then you’re gonna know most of what is discussed — the misogyny of the 2016 election, #MeToo, and how the left is just as full of dirtbag sexist assholes as the right. While it was nice to be reassured again that I’m not alone in my rage, while I read I frequently thought, “Yeah, I know.”

However, the book reminded me to be angry about Shirley Chisholm all over again. I majored in PoliSci in the 90s and I didn’t learn about Shirley Chisholm until Hillary Clinton was about to accept the Democratic party’s nomination in 2016. I learned about Chisholm when other black women were fighting for her to be recognized as the trailblazer she is.

It makes me furious that I didn’t know about her before, not just at my own lack, but because I’m not a total dummy and I didn’t learn about Chisholm in any class I ever took. School failed me.

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The first time I read Lorna Landvik’s Patty Jane’s House of Curl, I was a 23-year-old gas station attendant. I remember reading the book late at night laying on my futon in the bedroom I claimed as mine (stolen from Sister #4) in my parents house.

The only thing I remembered about the book was sobbing my face off at the end and loving it.

For comfort in this garbage year as this country continues to ramp up its racist, fascist bullshit, I’ve turned to re-reading favorite books. I’ve been meaning to get back to Patty Jane’s, and today I made the time.

Shocker, it’s not as great as I once thought. It’s like a rough draft of a really good book. The draft where you tell everything and show nothing. It’s cute and pat and relies so heavily on coincidence you kind of wince when you revise it.

HOWEVER, I must report, I still snotted my face off when << SPOILER ALERT >> Harriet dies. I don’t know why. It’s not like anyone in the book feels like a real person and you see her death coming on page 12. Yet, I bawled. I blame it on dead sisters getting me every time.

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Everyone once in awhile you come across a book that so exquisitely explains your life experience it makes you feel less alone in the world. For me, these books include The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken, Geek Love by Kathrine Dunn, Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Clearly, and now All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung.

In her memoir, Chung documents what it was like to grow up the adopted Korean daughter of a white couple in a predominantly white town in Oregon and the journey she takes to find her birth parents. I cannot count how many times this book made me gasp with recognition. I’m not Korean, though the pain of not looking like your family is not lost on me. I don’t look like anyone in my family, even though I was only adopted by my dad.

What we really got me was how she too was sure that if she passed her biological mother on the street, she would just know. I often thought the same thing about running into my biological father. I wonder, do all people who were adopted think that?

This is a lovely memoir and I’m so glad I read it.

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