February Reads
February was a good one for my bookshelf!
BIG SWISS by Jen Beagin. What happens when a 40-something year old woman calls off her ten year engagement, moves into a 1700’s farmhouse in Hudson that’s very literally falling apart, gets a job as a transcriber for the one sex and relationship therapist in town, then uses what she knows from these supposedly anonymous sessions to befriend one of those clients? Well, if Jen Beagin writes it, it’s dark, horny, hilarious magic, that’s what.
IF I SURVIVE YOU by Jonathan Escoffery. Such a tender read about a kid growing up in Miami with this Jamaican born parents and the visceral pain of feeling misunderstood and like there’s nowhere you fully belong. Weeks later I’m still thinking about the characters, wondering what they’re doing “now”.
OLGA DIES DREAMING by Xochitl Gonzales. I came for the gentrifying Brooklyn storyline, I stayed for the lesson in Puerto Rican politics, and I stayed up late blowing through pages for the interpersonal dramas of a high end wedding planner’s journey of self-discovery along side her politician brother.
REALLY GOOD, ACTUALLY by Monica Heisey. Didn’t think a book about young divorce could be this funny!
BLACK CAKE by Charmaine Wilkerson. Listened to this one during all my drives this month and was totally hooked by the family secrets, intergenerational drama, and Caribbean history.
ELEMENTS OF SURPRISE by Vera Tobin. At her reading at the The Golden Notebook, Jen Beagin said this very brainy, technical book booked helped her write BIG SWISS so obviously I had to give it a go.
THE DAYS OF AFREKETE by Asali Solomon. One of those books that makes you think about how time moves slowly then so suddenly, about how easy it is to wake up and look around and wonder, “Who have I become?” A book full of such yearning, asking questions about bisexuality, Black displacement in Philly, and what wealth does and doesn’t do to your heart.
EMBASSY WIFE by Katie Crouch. A satirical but juicy look at the embassy scene in Nairobi. It gave me real flashbacks to my Fulbright time in Mali— the hierarchies of “ex-pats”, locals’ views on the Peace Corps, and just how damn hot it was all the time.
THE PACHINKO PARLOR by Elisa Shea Dusapin. Moody, anxious, terribly lonely. A young Korean woman who’s grown up in Switzerland visits her Korean-born grandparents who’ve lived in Japan for the past fifty years running a Pachinko parlor to prepare them to visit Korea for the first time since they left.
BODYWORK by Melissa Febos. Listened to this one for book club and it birthed a really rad convo about the slippery nature of “truth” in any kind of personal narrative, about the sidelining of female memoir as “navel gazing”, and the dangers and beauty of auto-art as therapy.