September 2023 Reading Round-Up
The best and worst of my reading month
Welcome to the September 2023 Reading Round-Up. Each month I write about the books I’ve read and rank them from worst to best.
Somehow September is already over, school is once again in full swing, and I am officially very busy. Readers of this newsletter frequently ask me how I get through so many books with limited time. My answer is always: (1) audiobooks and (2) dedicated physical reading time. This answer remains true, especially when time becomes scarce. I listen to audiobooks during the routines of everyday life - walking the dogs, cooking, folding laundry, running, commuting to school - and it’s amazing how much reading can be done in those otherwise mindless gaps in the day. On top of audiobooks, finding time to sit down with whatever physical book I’m also reading is a wonderful way to start and end my day on the right terms. I try to read a few pages while I’m eating breakfast and before I go to sleep. I cherish these moments with the physical book, whether it’s just 10 minutes or an hour, because it gives me a chance to clear my head and get ready for whatever law school task is coming next.
September 2023 Reading Stats
Number of Books Read: 12
Genre Breakdown: 75% Fiction (9 books), 25% Non-Fiction (3 books)
Average Rating: 8.92/10 (This is the best average rated month I’ve had all year. It appears that limited time has created more intentionality in my reading, and it’s paid off!)
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12. Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club - J. Ryan Stradal
Fiction, 335 pages
If you’re not from the midwest, you probably don’t instinctually know about supper clubs. The iteration in Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club presents an affordable community restaurant with somewhat fancier local food and occasional entertainment options. A Minnesota supper club has been in Mariel’s family for generations, and she grew up helping out in the kitchen from a young age. The club was her grandparents’ pride and joy and she knew that eventually it would be passed down to her. After Mariel marries Ned, the heir to a large diner chain, the future of the club and small businesses in the region appear at risk, until a family tragedy rocks their vision of the future.
This book tells the story of the family supper club through multiple perspectives and generations, stretching back to Mariel’s stubborn mother Florence during the Great Depression to Mariel’s daughter in the present. I thought the book made for a good listen, but that Stradal was trying to do too much overall. Any one of the narrative strands probably could have stood alone as its own story, but seemed underdeveloped in a 335 page book. I also felt like there was some generally unnecessary and unexplored trauma (the end), but that’s more of a personal quibble. Overall, however, Stradal’s work is very readable and full of quirky characters making for a solid listening experience.
Rating: 8/10
11. Shmutz - Felicia Berliner
Fiction, 250 pages
As an eighteen-year-old in her Chasidic, ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn community, Raizl is expected to get married. While she waits for her match, she works to allow the men in her family to study and takes accounting classes at a Manhattan college. In order to do her homework, Raizl has been granted a special dispensation to have a school-issued laptop with internet access, a fact that is kept secret so as not to disrupt her marriage prospects. Suddenly, however, Raizl is given a device that gives her a new way to see the world. Starting by asking Google “what is Hashem,” she moves through the internet rabbit hole until she lands on … porn. Shocked and intrigued by these new images, Raizel stays up late into the night watching under her covers to avoid detection by the rest of her family. At the same time that Raizl is discovering this less modest version of the world (“shmutz!”), she meets and becomes friends with people at school who not only aren’t in her community, but also are not Jewish. These combined experiences force Raizl to question the constraints of her life thus far, all while she undergoes the process of finding a binding match.
I thought this book did an excellent job of exploring the power and limits of faith and expectations. Raizl’s addiction to porn, although jarring for a girl who wears thick tights under her already ankle-length skirts, is less about the porn and more about the sudden exposure to a larger world filled with different conceptions of self. I was also particularly impressed by the narrative voice created by Berliner for Raizl, which almost perfectly evoked the duality of the naivety of youth as well as the wiseness of someone on the cusp of forced adulthood.
Rating: 8.5/10
10. Small World - Laura Zigman
Fiction, 288 pages
Two middle-aged sisters, both recently divorced, reconnect after Lydia moves back to Cambridge and into Joyce’s apartment. Although they were never particularly close growing up, Joyce hopes that this opportunity will allow them to forge a new relationship. Their childhoods were defined by the life and loss of their sister, Eleanor, who was significantly disabled and took up the majority of their parents’ attention. After Eleanor died at age ten, their family structure disintegrated, emphasizing Joyce’s newfound desire to reestablish some semblance of traditional family bonds. But Lydia remains as distant from Joyce as ever, which is compounded by the arrival of noisy new neighbors upstairs. With their lives in upheaval, Joyce starts to look back at their family’s past to try to understand how they got to where they are now.
Small World was a delightful, quiet novel about sisterhood, fractious family bonds, and love that endures. It was also an interesting exploration, based on the author’s own childhood, of living with a sibling with a debilitating disability and its impact on the other children in the household. I enjoyed the interplay between the characters, particularly Joyce’s relationship with her untraditional upstairs neighbors.
Rating: 8.5/10
9. Homegrown - Jeffrey Toobin
Non-Fiction/Domestic Extremism, 382 pages
When Timothy McVeigh began his plans to attack the federal government, he had not yet chosen the location. An ex-military loner who spent copious amounts of time driving across the country staying with one loose acquaintance after the next, all McVeigh knew was that he wanted to foment a revolution against what he saw as a tyrannical American government. After scoping out a location, planning the attack, and acquiring the materials, McVeigh put his plans into action, killing 168 people in Oklahoma City on the morning of April 19, 1995, in what he believed was his patriotic duty. Just as the bombing was unprecedented in its scale up until that point, so was his legal defense after the Department of Justice essentially gave his team a blank check to try to hedge against potential conspiracy theorists and fellow white nationalists. Homegrown is a fascinating account of not just McVeigh’s life and the bombing, but also the investigation that followed, and the complicated legal strategy.
The book is impressive for the robust historical record it relies on. Shortly after McVeigh was sentenced to death, his lawyer donated all of his hundreds of boxes of files to the University of Texas, giving Toobin an impressive amount of primary source material. On top of the archive, Toobin also scored interviews with former President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Merick Garland, who was one of the first prosecutors on the scene after the bombing. Where this book fell completely flat for me, however, was Toobin’s insistence on attempting to connect McVeigh to January 6 at every possible chance. It would have been immensely more effective for him to save his connections to the present for the conclusion (where he does, once again, mention January 6), instead of trying to extrapolate Toobin’s personal thesis to what was otherwise a fairly standard narrative driven historical account. For me, this detracted from what was otherwise a very well detailed account of McVeigh, his associates, the bombing, and its aftermath.
Rating: 8.5/10
8. Rouge - Mona Awad
Fiction, 368 pages
After Belle’s mother mysteriously dies, Belle returns to Southern California to find answers and uncover secrets. In the process of going through her mother’s apartment, she finds her mother’s red heels, a favorite pair of shoes from her childhood. When she puts them on, her feet automatically lead her to a mansion on a cliff that houses her mother’s former spa, where she is offered a free “treatment” before she returns to Montreal. Obsessed with skincare and beauty treatments, in part because of her feelings of childhood otherness stemming from the way her white mother treated her darker complexion, Belle eagerly accepts. The treatment is a type of facial that extracts the root of her memories from childhood related to self-image, but which leave her with an undeniable glow. As Belle goes back for subsequent treatments, she quickly loses her ability to recall core memories, words, and connections to reality. Something sinister is afoot, and its unclear if Belle, obsessed with image, will recognize this and get out before its too late.
If I learned anything from reading Bunny and All’s Well, nothing is as it seems in Mona Awad’s fiction. This remains the case in Rouge, a “horror-tinted, gothic fairy tale” about a cultish spa, a skincare obsession, and the control that beauty standards have over one’s life. My perception of the book was augmented after hearing Awad speak earlier in the month and learning how fairytales, surrealism, and her own previous addiction to beauty products played into the writing of this book. If you pick this story up, look for a structure that connects to a more sinister variation of The Little Mermaid and Snow White within our modern times. Even if you don’t particularly enjoy surrealism in your novels, which is normally the case for myself, this book is worth it just to appreciate the pure creativity, cleverness, and talent evoked by Awad.
Rating: 8.5/10
7. Monsters - Claire Dederer
Non-Fiction/Cultural Criticism, 256 pages
What do you do about art created by someone who has done bad things? Is it ok to consume or do you have to give it up completely? Is it possible to separate the art and the artist? These are questions grappled with by Claire Dederer in this smart piece of cultural criticism cum memoir. Dederer begins the book by challenging her love of Roman Polanski’s movies and her inability to reconcile great films with his obvious misdeeds. She explores the special behavioral dispensation given to artists, mostly men like Miles Davis and Pablo Picasso, who society has given the crown of “genius,” and how this label contributes to or feeds bad acts in their personal lives. These are just some of the many topics covered by Dederer in this thoughtful and fascinating piece of criticism. There aren’t clear answers to the questions posed, but clear answers to complicated questions wouldn’t be in line with the premise. Instead, Dederer encourages her readers to consume art with a critical eye rather than mandatory abstention.
Rating: 9/10
6. The Wanderers - Meg Howrey
Fiction, 370 pages
Helen, Yoshi, and Sergei have each been selected for the first voyage to Mars, pioneered by the private company Prime Space. Each of the astronauts were chosen for their unique skills, their temperaments, and their vast previous experiences. For each of them, the opportunity to be the first humans on Mars far outweighs the substantial risks and burden on their personal lives that the process will take. Prior to the voyage itself, the three astronauts must spend 17 months in an incredibly realistic simulation in the desert of Utah. But as the months progress and the claustrophobia sets in, the lines between simulation and reality begin to cross forcing the astronauts to confront the lives that led them to this mission in the first place. The Wanderers is by no means an action novel. Instead the story is pushed forward by their introspection, relationships with one another, and the narratives of their family members back on earth. The writing is beautiful, creative, and engaging, simultaneously grappling with larger questions of discovery and the goals of humanity with the purpose of our own individual lives.
Rating: 9/10
5. Glaciers - Alexis Smith
Fiction, 112 pages
Isabel’s life has simultaneously been defined by its vastness and its limitations. Her childhood in Alaska was shaped as much by the glaciers that surrounded her as her small, working-class family. After her parent’s divorce, Isabel moved to Portland with her father and has lived there ever since, rarely leaving and instead using collected postcards to imagine the larger world. In the present, Isabel works as a librarian who repairs damaged books alongside a coworker who has recently returned from serving in Iraq. Although the book is told over the course of a day in which Isabel musters the courage to forge a deeper connection with the coworker, the narrative is interspersed with short flashbacks from her past that build the foundation for who she is now. This is a very short book but, in a similar vein to Claire Keegan and Julie Otsuka, is filled to the brim with gorgeous writing.
Rating: 9/10
4. Instructions for a Heatwave - Maggie O’Farrell
Fiction, 290 pages
It’s said that heat makes people act out of the ordinary. In the London summer of 1976, the sweltering temperatures cause the characters in Maggie O’Farrell’s 2014 Instructions for a Heatwave to do just that. One afternoon, Gretta Riordan returns home to discover that her newly retired husband has vanished. After immigrating to England from Ireland after the Second World War to find work, she met her husband and built a life with him defined by routine and commitment to their family. Neither she nor her three children can understand what possibly might have happened to cause him to disappear. Gretta alerts first her son Michael Francis, a history teacher with a shaky marriage; then her daughter Monica, a woman nearing middle aged struggling with new stepchildren; and, finally, Aofie, the youngest daughter who moved to New York to avoid confronting untreated and unacknowledged crippling dyslexia. Each child, now grown, returns home to try to uncover the clues to their father’s disappearance, but in the process, unearth the foundations of their challenges with one another amidst a family trying its best to love each other.
At this point I think I’m a fan of anything that Maggie O’Farrell writes in whatever subject she chooses. O’Farrell’s writing is defined by her eye for detail and the characters she is able to build out of subtle descriptors. Gretta, a boisterous, larger than life matriarch similar to Olive Kitteridge in my mind, pulsates from the center of the novel to give the story its defining light. O’Farrell’s talents allow her to build vibrant worlds - the image of the family on the night-boat to Ireland is so vivid I have a feeling it will be in my head for a while - that make the ordinary or mundane seem special.
Rating: 9/10
3. The Queen of Dirt Island - Donal Ryan
Fiction, 256 pages
The day that Saoirse is born is also the day that her father dies. So begins Donal Ryan’s beautiful novel, The Queen of Dirt Island, centered around Saoirse, her mother, and Saoirse’s paternal grandmother, all leaning on one another to continue on in the shadow of loss and hardship. Far away from anything in Nenagh, Ireland, readers watch Saoirse as she grows up, has her own child as a child herself, and experiences love, loss, and caregiving. Throughout all of these twenty-odd years of life, the three women stay together under the same roof, creating a story of matriarchy and tenacity. Although there are male characters in the story, such as Saoirse’s uncle and a love interest, they exist to supplement Saoirse’s development and add color to the existing community. This is a classic example of a book where lots of things happen and nothing happens, but its all written beautifully and creatively. Each of the chapters in the book are under 500 words, so even though the story moves chronologically it also has the feel of snapshots that create a fulsome picture full of heartbreak, longing, and love.
Rating: 9/10
2. Close to Home - Michael Magee
Fiction, 278 pages
Sean grew up in West Belfast in the shadows of the Troubles. Although the conflict is technically over, its vestiges remain in the poverty, alcoholism, joblessness, and PTSD that surround him. A good kid, Sean is the first in his family to leave home and go to college to study English literature in Liverpool. But when he returns home in the early 2010s, he finds that little has changed and there are limited opportunities for progress. After getting in a fight at a house party and sentenced to 200 hours of community service, any dream that he had of being a writer is put on hold, as Sean must balance his temporary job as a bartender in a nightclub, with the demands of staying out of prison.
Close to Home is a beautifully intimate portrait of a young man trying to get by when nearly all the odds are stacked against him. It is a story of broken family, addiction, and patched-together parenthood. It is also a subtle account of the hidden toll of the Troubles, and the unaddressed traumas passed through the generations. It’s hard to believe that this is Michael Magee’s first novel because the clarity of his prose is absolutely breathtaking. Magee writes with honesty and grit from the perspective of Sean, steering readers through a man and a city trying to get by.
Rating: 10/10
1. The Sullivanians - Alexander Stille
Non-Fiction/Sociology/Cults, 411 pages
From the late 1950s through the early 1990s, hundreds of people participated in a psychotherapy cult on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The Sullivan Institute for Research promoted sexual liberation, the destruction of the traditional nuclear family, rebellion against parents, and relentless psychoanalysis. Many of the therapists had little training outside of the Institute itself, and yet every member of the group religiously attended weekly sessions to learn about how their parents had ruined them and how they would ruin their children after them. As the group evolved, the Institute organized communal single-sex homes in the area, ranging from apartment units to, eventually, an entire building that could accommodate their nearly 400 members at its peak. Participants were immediately inducted into a close-knit social scene, full of parties, dates every night, and communal living. Not only were a litany of famous people attracted to the group, including Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, and Judy Collins, but most of the Sullivanians were highly educated, high functioning professional adults sucked into the promises of a counterrevolution.
But, like any good cult, as the group grew and deviated from its original offering of pure, unregulated therapy (particularly in the 1960s, therapy was not governed by any formal standards. It’s legal to pay another person to tear one’s life apart!), fissures widened and harm ensued. Children born to group members were almost immediately taken from their biological parents to be raised by other Sullivanians, and, at first opportunity, were sent to boarding school. People were actively discouraged from settling into monogamous relationships, time was sucked into doing odd jobs for the Institute on top of their full time professions and for free. And, on two separate occasions, they took over a theater by force and vandalized a neighboring apartment full of college students. All of this took place, in plain sight, just blocks from where I live now.
Alexander Stille interviews former members and their children to piece together the story of the Sullivanians, and the result is nothing short of miraculous. This is a work of non-fiction that reads like fiction. I’d pick up the book and not want to put it down, drawn into the complexities of this cult-like group and trying to figure out what made it tick and survive for as long as it did. My one piece of advice is to not listen to this book on audio; there might be too many players to keep track of unless you’re fully focused on the narration. Otherwise, this is an incredibly well-crafted and written story with staying power.
Rating: 10/10
All of the books written about above are available on my September 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.
What a great reading month! I’ve never seen ‘The Sullivanians’ before and it sounds incredible ?!? very weird & enticing