It’s been a hot, weird summer but I love reading and wanted to share some book recs with you today (plus what’s on my want-to-read list). I’d love to hear yours in the comments — what’s the best book you’ve read recently? What book are you excited to read next?
Devotion by Madeline Stevens. I took a sex writing in fiction class with Madeline before reading her book, and loved it so much I wanted to pick up her novel. The book, which centers on a nanny who becomes obsessed with her employer (a woman! It’s gay!), is really gorgeously written. It’s about class, desire, and obsession, and I loved it. I still think about the deeply unsettling event in the last couple of chapters. Some of the Goodreads critiques were that nothing really happens in the book, which I think is a critique that gets leveraged at character-driven books a lot, and is also like an advertisement for me because I love these kinds of books! Give me a book with great characters and lush sentences and minimal plot and I will give it 5 stars every time!
Abandon Me by Melissa Febos. Melissaa Febos is one of my favorite writers and yet I somehow had not read this book until this summer! I finished it while at my residency in California and thinking about it now makes me think of the redwoods (and the bats!!). It’s a beautiful hybrid memoir-in-essays with so many gorgeous, lyrical meditations on lineage, love, passion, attachment, and abandonment. I read it from the library and ordered it online immediately after finishing. Some books you just need to keep on your shelf. This is one of them.
We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman. This novel was so heartbreakingly human. It made me deeply sad and also deeply glad to be alive. It’s about a middle-aged woman taking care of her best friend, who is in hospice. It really spoke to what is so heartbreaking and beautiful about being alive—so many moments of joy and love and connection mixed with moments of fear and devastation and grief. Also, the narrator is queer and so is her teenager daughter and their relationship is very touching.
Last one! Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis. Yes, I too read and loved this absolutely unhinged dyke drama novel. I mean. Just read it. That is all.
And what’s next: I’m currently reading The Rib Joint by Julia Koets (highly recommend at least reading the title essay on Creative Nonfiction’s site) and an ARC of Deliver Me by Elle Nash. I plan to write a review of Deliver Me but y’all. This book is so weird and good and queer and religious trauma-y. Check it out!
Tell me yours in the comments!
*All the links to books are affiliate bookshop links, just FYI!
I'm revisiting an old series named "The Dark is Rising" by Susan Cooper. I read them when I was a kid, and they're linked to ancient memories that I hope to rediscover by reading them 30-something years later.