August 2023 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the August 2023 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
I don’t typically have a themed list that I consult when choosing my next book. My decisions about what to read are usually dictated by what’s due at the library or what I’m in the mood for. Sometimes, however, when reviewing what I’ve read in the month I’m struck by certain patterns that emerge by chance. This month, for example, I’ve read a striking amount of (a) books set in Oceania; (b) historical fiction; (c) books set in the late 1800s during the frontier expansion, mining, and colonization period in the American West, New Zealand, and Australia; (d) books involving complicated relationships between younger women and older men; and (e) books that are more than 600 pages long. While I might have hit my limit for books set in the 1800s on the frontier for the time being, I did learn a ton about a subject that I previously knew very little about. The power of fiction!
With law school back in session, I’ll be transitioning from 600+ page historical fiction to 600+ page casebooks, but I’ll still be here every month (and maybe some more; after all, I did have a whole summer to plan…) with recommendations and round-ups. Until then, happy reading!
August 2023 Reading Statistics
Number of Books Read: 17
Genre Breakdown: 88% Fiction (15 books), 12% Non-Fiction (2 books)
Average Rating: 8.5/10
Pulitzer Winners Read: 1
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17. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone - Benjamin Stevenson
Fiction/Mystery, 384 pages
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is structured as a “Knives Out,” whodunnit, locked door mystery. An estranged family reunites over the weekend in an Australian mountain town to welcome home the narrator’s brother who has spent the last three and half years in prison serving a sentence for murder. Ernest, the narrator, was with his brother when the crime was committed and yet never fully understood his motives. The weekend is a chance to seek answers as well as absolution. Before the brother can arrive, however, a body is found, setting off a chain reaction of murder and mayhem for a family that knows a thing or two about chaos.
I thought that the premise of the book was interesting and even enjoyed the pithy narration that breaks down the fourth wall of the genre. However, the crime, the family history, and their connections became far too complicated. There were too many characters to keep track of, too many personal histories to remember, and too many moving pieces. I was also frustrated when it became clear that everyone in the family had not in fact killed someone, and that the author was using a generous interpretation of the word. This book is being turned into an HBO limited series and I suspect that it will translate much better on screen than it did on the page.
Rating: 6/10
16. Cursed Bread - Sophie Mackintosh
Historical/Speculative Fiction, 184 pages
In 1951, a mysterious mass poisoning swept the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, causing psychotic episodes and violent physical reactions. No official explanation has ever been determined, although some historians believe that it was caused by either covert government testing or spoiled bread. Sophie Mackintosh has seized upon this very real mystery to craft a fictional story about the baker’s wife, Elodie. Elodie is an ordinary woman living an average life in the shadow of the horrors of World War II. However, when a new couple moves to the town - an ambassador and his wife - Elodie is immediately intrigued. Fascinated with their lives, Elodie quickly befriends the wife, while also maintaining an interest in the husband. As the poisoning hurtles towards them, all of their actions make them seem like suspects. Told from Elodie’s perspective and alternating between past and future, Cursed Bread reads like its own multilayered fever dream that fell outside of my typical literary range.
Rating: 7.5/10
15. Little Rabbit - Alyssa Songsiridej
Fiction, 256 pages
The unnamed narrator of Little Rabbit is a thirty-year-old writer and administrative assistant living in Somerville, Massachusetts with her best friend. Working as an assistant who helps hapless Harvard professors get back into their emails isn’t her dream, but it pays her bills while she writes. After meeting a choreographer over twenty years older than her at a residency in Maine, the narrator spends her summer in his orbit in Manhattan and the Berkshires. Their relationship becomes increasingly, consensually, and graphically violent, as the narrator loses part of her identity in service of her sexual desires. Even the choreographer’s nickname for her, “Rabbit,” indicates a type of identity loss that her friends, particularly her roommate, are increasingly concerned about. In many ways Little Rabbit is a deft exploration of complicated and nuanced power dynamics. These are dynamics between an older and a younger person, a man and a woman, an established artist and an unestablished one, and a wealthy man and working-class woman. I thought it was really well written but do warn anyone interested in reading that it is extremely sexually graphic, which I was not fully expecting when I picked it up.
Rating: 8/10
14. All the Sinners Bleed - S.A. Cosby
Fiction/Crime Thriller/Mystery, 338 pages
From the author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland, All the Sinners Bleed is the story of the first Black sheriff of a small town in Virginia tasked with investigating a school shooting that uncovers the existence of a serial killer. The shooter, a Black former student, kills a beloved white teacher, and then is subsequently killed by the police, stoking tensions in this faith-driven, conservative town. Titus, the sheriff, quickly discovers that the shooter and the teacher were connected by a third mystery character and their shared participation in demonic murder rituals of Black children. Although the layered premise of the book piqued my interest, I was slightly hesitant to pick it up given how gory I found Cosby’s last book. He certainly doesn’t shy away from brutality here, but it is always done to serve a larger point in a story about racial tension, a striving yet listless sheriff, and the pain that lingers in a small town.
Rating: 8/10
13. August Blue - Deborah Levy
Fiction, 198 pages
As an orphan, Elsa Anderson was adopted by a famed piano teacher and raised as a child prodigy. In her thirties, as her adopted father ails in Sardinia, Elsa walks off the stage mid-performance in Vienna after she forgets what she is supposed to play and substitutes it for her own creation. Criticized as an embarrassment by the orchestra’s conductor and the classical music world, Elsa jumps from city to city teaching talented children while she grapples with her life, her talent, and her past. At each stop in her sojourn a woman who looks eerily similar to Elsa appears by chance, slipping through her fingers before she can figure out who the woman is or if she’s even real. August Blue is an exploration of one woman’s simultaneous melancholy and discovery of a self removed from a talent that has dictated her entire life.
Rating: 8/10
12. Everybody Rise - Stephanie Clifford
Fiction, 371 pages
Set in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis, Everybody Rise is a modern variation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Evelyn Beegan is new money. Raised in Maryland by a successful plaintiff’s lawyer father and social climbing mother, she is enrolled at a boarding school with the hopes that she will rub enough shoulders to climb above her station. Now, at 26, having graduated from college and living in a small apartment on the Upper East Side, Evelyn gets a job at a social-network startup for the upper crust. Evelyn, who knows that the site must be selective to be successful, ingratiates herself with her prep school friends hopping from the Hamptons to the Adirondacks to the rarified clubs of Manhattan to woo potential members. In the process of doing her job, however, Evelyn gets sucked into the old money world and its associated veneer of power and prestige. Wanting desperately to fit in, Evelyn begins overspending, lying about her background, and isolating herself from those who knew her best as everything around her begins to crumble. I did think that Evelyn became increasingly annoying as she got further sucked into her deception, which would not have necessarily been an issue, except for the fact that I struggled to fully understand the motivations behind her actions. Beyond this, I found the book to be a compelling critique of generational wealth and the ridiculousness of the tradition fueled old-money elite.
Rating: 8/10
11. Thirst for Salt - Madelaine Lucas
Fiction, 266 pages
While on vacation with her mother at Sailors Beach on the Australian coast, a young woman, also the unnamed narrator of the story, expects to relax and unwind while she figures out what she wants to do with her university degree. She spends copious amounts of time in the water, eschewing people’s warnings to avoid the ocean for fear of sharks. It is while swimming that she first encounters Jude, a man 18 years her senior and a Sailors Beach local. Craving the consistent love that he is able to offer her, she decides to stay with him even after the summer is over. Despite their growing togetherness, Jude never completely lets her into his life, leaving some subjects like family and past relationships off the table; a decision which contributes to their ultimate downfall. I enjoyed Thirst for Salt and thought it was a beautifully written exploration of youth, love, and family dynamics. However, I’m not sure if it’s a story that is going to stick with me in the long term other than its contribution to my growing list of Australian literature that makes me want to travel there someday.
Rating: 8.5/10
10. Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Reshaped America - Will Sommer
Non-Fiction, 220 pages
If the HBO documentary Q: Into the Storm was your first introduction to QAnon, you might have walked away thinking that all followers are highly online, spending lots of time in obscure internet forums deciphering the convoluted “clues” posted by Q. While there is no doubt that the origin of QAnon fits this understanding perfectly - the mysterious “Q” first began posting in 2017 on obscure online forums best known for white supremacy, child porn, and dark misogyny - Sommer deftly argues in Trust the Plan that the QAnon movement is much larger and more accessible to the average person. The spread of QAnon, a loosely defined conspiracy that claims at its best that there is a deep state cabal running the government and at its worst that members of this deep state are lizard-people who are torturing children and harvesting their blood to drink, was facilitated by pernicious social media algorithms that unwittingly radicalized users. The “movement” spread throughout the Trump presidency - Trump is supposed to be the leader of the anti-cabal movement - but became particularly popular during COVID lockdowns, when desperate and gullible people latched on to fringe theories to explain the breakdown of their own lives.
While Sommer begins the book with an explanation of QAnon’s origins and some of its more radicalized members, (many of whom participated in the January 6 Capitol Riot), he continues on to talk about the positioning of conspiracy theories in the United States and Q’s place in this legacy, the negative impact QAnon has had on family dynamics, and the influence that its supporters are starting to wield within mainstream Republican politics. Unlike other books on QAnon that I have read, I appreciated that Sommer did not try to prescribe a solution to the indoctrination problem. Instead, he approached the issue openly and critically, choosing to combat the conspiracy by raising awareness of its dangers.
Rating: 8.5/10
9. The Sun Walks Down - Fiona McFarlane
Historical Fiction, 352 pages
When six-year-old Denny Wallace goes missing during a dust storm in a small town in the South Australian outback, the entire town is mobilized to find him. It is 1883, and a missing white boy is the source of much consternation amongst a population hoping to wrangle and tame the frontier. Fiona McFarlane harnesses the voices of everyone involved in the search - family members, including Denny’s precocious fifteen-year-old sister, an artist couple, a newlywed and her police chief husband, Indigenous trackers, and Indigenous farmhands - to tell the story not just of the search, but also of the community that has been built in the desert. Other than the Indigenous population, very few people in this town were actually born in Australia, creating a semi-diverse collection of people who have all come to this patch of semi-arable land with the hope of reinvention. I was impressed by McFarlane’s ability to tell the stories of so many different types of people all within the service of the central plot of finding Denny. Each character was uniquely built and contributed to a larger conversation about colonization, survival, and striving within a land already inhabited and containing its own history.
Rating: 8.5/10
8. This is Salvaged - Vauhini Vara
Short Stories/Fiction, 181 pages
In this collection of short stories, Vauhini Vara writes about childhood, faith, and connections with others. In one story, two teenagers start working at a questionable call-center amidst the throws of grief. In another, a young girl serves as a companion to an aging woman in her apartment complex. In my favorite, an experimental artist attempts to build a life-size ark according to the specifications set out in the King James bible by employing a subset of Seattle’s homeless population. Each of the stories tackles life’s challenges through the eyes of the rudderless and the searching. I liked a few more than others, but overall think this is an exceptionally strong collection filled with stories with characters that exhibit a deep emotional range and are written with heart.
Rating: 9/10
Thank you to W.W. Norton for the advance reader copy of this book!
7. Cleopatra and Frankenstein - Coco Mellors
Fiction, 384 pages
A few months before 24-year-old Cleo’s American visa expires, she meets 44-year-old Frank in an elevator leaving a New Years party in Tribeca. A heady romance follows, culminating in a marriage expedited by the prospect of a green card and Frank’s ability to support Cleo while she works as an artist. Initially their lives mesh well. But as the months progress, cracks begin to emerge that take a toll on one another - Frank’s excessive drinking, Cleo’s mental health challenges - culminating in an implosion. This premise on its face, coupled with the lyrical writing, makes for a compelling story, but what set this book apart was the way that Mellors structurally told the story of Frank and Cleo using the voices of their friends and family. Each of these supporting characters are fully realized within a limited number of pages, giving Cleopatra and Frankenstein the feel of a quasi interconnected short story collection mixed with a beautifully intimate novel.
Rating: 9/10
6. The Shakespeare Requirement - Julie Schumacher
Fiction, 306 pages
Professor Jason Fitger is the newly elected chair of the English department at Payne University, a mediocre school in the midwest with financial problems. He is divorced, bumbling, and struggling to stay afloat with all of the added responsibility that comes with leadership in an underfunded, failing, and unheated department. His nemesis, the chair of Economics, sits above him in his expensively renovated offices, with grand plans of using the development of this department to land him a role at a more prestigious university. The Shakespeare Requirement is a comedic satire, perfect for back-to-school season, about the follies of academia.
When deciding what rating to give the book, I tried not to compare it to its funnier and more structurally creative predecessor Dear Committee Members, a book that you do not need to read before this one but which I still highly recommend. However, even if Dear Committee Members is funnier and more creative in its epistolary format (I did laugh out loud), The Shakespeare Requirement easily stands on its own as a well-written, smart piece of academic satire. Plus, the author is from Wilmington, Delaware!
Rating: 9/10
5. Everything’s Fine - Cecilia Rabess
Fiction, 336 pages
Everything’s Fine is about a relationship between a liberal Black woman named Jess and a conservative white man named Josh, who first meet in college but then become friends when they reconnect while working at Goldman Sachs. As Jess struggles to find her footing in the hyper-competitive, white male driven world of finance, Josh is labeled a rising star and rockets to the top of a prestigious hedge fund due to prep school connections. At the same time, the two kindle a romantic relationship that is shunned by her friends and kept secret from her father. Their romance intersects with the 2016 election season, and Jess is forced to consider how far compatibility can stretch. It is important to note, however, that while a romance centers the plot, the novel is not part of the romance genre, and instead should be considered a work of literary fiction.
After this book was published, it became the subject of a lot of controversy for its marketing as an enemies to lovers romance, the argument being that racism is not a little quirk to get over in a relationship. It was the target of review bombing (when people, many of whom haven’t read the book, tank its star rating on platforms like Goodreads to diminish its popularity - see this New York Times article for a helpful explainer), by angry users before it was even published. After finishing the book I did some research into the controversy, and found this comment by the author from an interview done by The Cut to be particularly illuminating.
People were questioning the limits of my imagination as a Black writer, and they were conflating me with my character, suggesting there’s no way this could be fiction and nuanced. That there was no way I could write a story that asks more questions than it answers. And, more damning, I felt like a lot of the feedback was about holding a Black character to a higher idealized standard than we do white characters, who are celebrated for their messiness, their flaws. When a messy, chaotic 20-something character is a white woman, that’s fine, but I was hearing that people didn’t want that same amount of nuance from a Black-woman character. It surprised me, because it felt quite dehumanizing. Demanding perfection either in the form of perfect victimhood or the perfect hero doesn’t reflect who people are, and it doesn’t reflect their full humanity.
My take is that this book is worth reading. You don’t need to agree with the characters, their beliefs, or their decisions to recognize that the book is a nuanced, complex, and thorny portrayal of identity, privilege, and relationships with oneself, one’s partner, and the larger world.
Rating: 9/10
4. Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner
Historical Fiction, 632 pages
Angle of Repose won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for its depiction of American Western expansionism and generational ties to this legacy. The story is narrated by Lyman Ward, a history professor forced to retire after a crippling bone disease leaves him paralyzed and wheelchair bound. Retreating to his deceased grandparents home in Grass Valley, California in 1970, Lyman sets out to write a biography about his grandmother Susan, an artist of a refined upstate New York upbringing who followed her engineer husband around the West as he attempted to make a name for himself. Jumping between the 1870s and the novel’s present, Lyman discovers the tribulations of a woman forced to forge a life full of unforeseen and challenging circumstances as her husband worked to excavate and build the infrastructure of the modern West. Through the process of learning and writing about his family history, Lyman reflects on the legacy passed to him and his own experience within the constant change of the country.
The fact that this book was published in 1970 means that there are inevitably crucial components of American expansionism that are glossed over or not discussed at all. Mentions of Indigenous people are rare and brief, mostly saved for passing mentions in relation to the protagonists fear. Language used to describe Mexican and Chinese immigrants working in the mining towns are often crude and racist; especially since they are frequently seen as sub-human or uncivilized in the eyes of Susan Ward. Irrespective of Stegner’s own beliefs on the subject, these depictions can probably be accurately ascribed to the settlers at the time and thus show a realistic, if not painful, account of people’s understanding of the land as meant for their personal conquering and taming.
Rating: 9/10
3. The Luminaries - Eleanor Catton
Historical Fiction, 864 pages
When The Luminaries won the Man Booker Prize in 2013, New Zealand author Eleanor Catton became the youngest person ever to receive the award. Just her second novel, The Luminaries is a behemoth of a book that took the literary world by storm for those with the time and energy to invest in reading it. The Luminaries is set over the course of a few months span in 1866 amidst the New Zealand gold rush. The book opens with the arrival of Walter Moody, a Scottish lawyer who has come to win his fortune. After a dramatic and harrowing journey, Moody arrives at an inn in the mining town where twelve men have gathered to discuss a series of bizarre events: a murder, a disappearance, a potential suicide attempt, and the discovery of a large cache of gold in someone’s home. Reluctant at first to share the details with an outsider, the men soon find Moody to be a useful confidant who is able to ask questions and probe the situation as only an outsider can. The men tell their experiences to Moody over the course of the first three hundred pages or so of the book as they each contribute a convoluted piece of the puzzle to the larger mystery. This first section was confusing at times - a lot of characters and events are thrown at the reader all at once - but that is okay, because a summary by Moody at the end of the section as he attempts to make sense of it all provides a helpful recap to set the stage for the rest of the book.
It’s not a surprise that a lot takes place over the course of 864 pages, including the unraveling of the complicated conspiracy. However, what I found myself most drawn to was Catton’s ability to also tell the larger story of the New Zealand gold rush and the diverse array of people involved. Just like in Australia, New Zealand at this time attracted people from all over the world looking to start over for one reason or another. Indeed, on the night that Moody arrives there are Indigenous, English, French, Jewish, New Zealander and Chinese men in the room, all existing within a complicated power and racial dynamic. This racial hierarchy is depicted throughout, and it is no surprise that the preexisting prejudices that these men have will hinder the speed at which they can solve the crime. In addition, how often does one get to read about what a gold mining town was like in 1860s New Zealand? That on its own makes picking up The Luminaries worth it.
Rating: 9/10
2. The Buddha in the Attic - Julie Otsuka
Historical Fiction, 129 pages
This slim novel is the antidote to the long, sweeping, and detailed accounts of frontier expansionism depicted in The Luminaries and Angle of Repose. Otsuka utilizes a collective voice to tell a larger story about immigration and assimilation through the lens of women brought from Japan to San Francisco at the end of the 19th century. Told in eight parts, the book starts with the women on a ship coming to the United States, filled with hope, fear, and excitement. It then moves on to their initial reactions upon arrival, when they discover that much of what they had been sold about America was fluff that won’t apply to them. Readers watch as these women work hard in a range of labor-based professions, have children, raise children, attempt to forge their own American identities, but then are eventually sent to internment camps during the Second World War. It is incredible how much Otsuka is able to fit into just 129 pages. And yet, the narrative never feels rushed or sparse. Each sentence is expertly crafted to advance the larger picture of these women’s lives within a country dependent on their labor, yet resentful of their presence. It is a story relevant for our times, beautifully written, and creatively told.
Rating: 9.5/10
1. How to Stay Married - Harrison Scott Key
Non-Fiction/Memoir, 320 pages
This is a memoir about a southern, Christian, religious man whose wife had an affair. This is a funny memoir about a couple relying on faith and community to save their marriage. Stay with me. In 2017, when Harrison’s wife Lauren told him that she was having an affair with their former neighbor and wanted a divorce, he was initially blindsided. Lauren, the mother of their three daughters. Lauren, the woman who goes to church nearly every Sunday. But also, Lauren, a woman with a childhood of loss and abandonment. A woman whose life became inundated by the burdens of raising three girls without much help from her husband. A woman who wanted someone to listen to her and help her with her challenges.
How to Stay Married is not a lurid, judgmental tale of a marriage’s implosion. It is a journey of self-discovery, of revealing fissures in their commitment to partnership, mutual support, and unity. It is also an exploration of finding comfort in faith and the role faith had in shaping their understanding of what marriage is meant to accomplish. But don’t worry. While religion, particularly the teachings of the Church of Christ, feature prominently in the narrative, the book is never preachy, dogmatic, or sanctimonious. Also, did I mention that this book is funny? Harrison Scott Key has an eye for detail and a talent for self-effacing humor that caused me to occasionally laugh out loud. I did not expect to love this book as much as I did. On the surface, Key and I don’t have much in common. However, Key has crafted an almost perfect memoir. In writing about his own experience he touches upon the universality of the human condition with humor, wit, patience, and love.
Rating: 10/10
All of the books written about above are available on my August 2023 Reading Round-Up Bookshop page, or you can click on the title of the book itself to be routed to the shop. All of the books I’ve ever recommended, sorted by post, are also available on the general shop page.
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Want to see last month’s round up? You can find that here.
Was just reading through your roundups and I finally found someone who read Cursed Bread! I wrote a review on it but I think its sort of obscure. Such a strange and lovely book
I love Julie otsuka- the swimmers is unforgettable.