bookshelf

despite all the particular love on this one, i think this one fits squarely in the class of novels with real characters on a journey together. demon copperhead, east of eden, god of small things (which is my favorite genre - real characters over time - so it's ok)

these cattle ranchers trudge forward, texas to montana, asking themselves and each other again, and again, why? and of course, like all great stories, the most important reason is that they did it at all, in eachother's company.

their words accompanied me both on my drive across the american landscape from LA to MI, as well as the subway rumbles in NY.

“He had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.”

the story grew on me the way a story about overworking, chronic illness, growing up as a woman, sickness, love, and living in the modern day always will. lena dunham i am always with you.

perfect perfect read while backpacking and before a big change. a kind friend

also really notable to read nonbinary main character and to experience genderlessness/conception of a person/character through the medium of reading

"You're an animal, sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You're an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful for others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my life, that would also be fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don't know how to answer that, because it is enough to exit in the world and marvel at it. You don't need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do."

"In those hours, they frequently asked themself what it was they were doing. They never truly felt like they got a handle on that. THey kept doing it all the same."

"Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either"

very very physical grotesque bodily gross intimate raw kind generous relatable. smart. this person knows people.

read for bookclub. finished during memorial day camping weekend. is more like a short story, than anything.

wonderful to go into this book without any knowledge of what was inside to feel my brain wrap around the stories and how they all relate to each other. I felt confused, unsatisfied, when I first finished it, having entered into the book expecting something longer. The richness of the stories were cut short.

Through talking about it with Lucia on the drive back on multiple occasions, I'm reminded that I don't read enough stories set in the 2020's, with stories and anecdotes that hold mirrors up to what is around me. And! more interestingly, these familiar stories are woven together, smartly, in a web of a short story: using the methods of modern technology and transcription to talk about something that cannot be described or captured well enough: the experience of seeing, the experience of feeling your own mind shift what you see, your effective "reality" and "truth", and how you remember it, and then how that story mutates with each retelling, and each visit again in your memory. What is fiction, is it fiction, if it is true to you?

It was so quick - done in 2 hours, ill be reading it again before the bookclub discussion to sit with it again.

reread childhood favorite the entire series during travel periods, minus books 5 and 8, in china

read a review that called out this author as a screenwriter, and how that affects his ability to pace a novel (meaning, paces it really well, no dull spots)

the feeling can be summed up by the "east of eden" idea of timshel: thou mayest.

so much in the scifi/proposed societies of the 7 territories:

• denduron: society overrun by greed and mining, and technology unevenly distributed, monarchical
• zadaa: society struggling over natural resources (water)
• quillan: society overrun by gambling, capitalism
• veelox: digital escapism through lifelight
• second earth: of course, the rise of fascism and otherness (with people unevenly given the chance for happiness)

personal history x history of the city personal nostalgia food and plant interest as product of cultural osmosis

read in one huge gulp

notes: hunger, city-poor and Country-poor, what it means to relocate between the small town world you are from to the coast, to the ocean. Opioid addiction, the 'juice' communities that hold us and that are around us. Julia Fox Memoir, East of Eden, a Little Life. Howard and the relationships with Ms. Annie. The scene with the kite and Mr. Dick. Tommy’s two Graves at each home.

I’m going to tell you something, there’s country poor and there’s city poor. As much of my life as I spent in front of a TV thinking Oh, man, city’s where the money trees grow, I was seeing more to the picture now. I mean yes, that is where they all grow, but plenty of people are sitting in that shade with nothing falling on them. Chartrain was always discussing “hustle” and it took me awhile to understand he grew up hungry for money like it was food. Because for him, they’re one and the same. Not to run the man down, but he wouldn’t know a cow from a steer, or which of them gave milk. No desperate men Chartrain ever knew went out and shot venison if they were hungry. They shot liquor store cashiers. Living in the big woods made of steel and cement, without cash, is a hungrier life than I knew how to think about

I’d oftentimes have to stop and ask myself what season it was. I never realized what was holding me to my place on the planet of earth: that soundtrack. That, and leaf colors and what’s blooming in the roadside ditches this week, wild sweet peas or purple ironweed or goldenrod. And stars

A good story doesn’t just copy life, it pushes back on it. It’s why guys like Chartrain wear their clothes too big and their teeth edged with gold, what Mr. Dick puts words on kites and sends them to the sun. It’s why I draw what I draw.

notes:

• sarah recommendation through lucia

• this book reminds me of all the passing thoughts ill have in a day that get lost if I don’t write them down or document them somewhere, some of his trains were familiar tugs (especially re: drugs)

• what does it mean to live through a historical event in a city? I think of my experience of the fires and ICE this year in Los Angeles and the similar trains there

• reminds me of all fours: deplorable at times, indulgent, reactive

• madrid is a palpable, breathing character in this book, and visiting my friends in spain in 2025 - it doesn’t seem like much has changed over the 20 years. being an american abroad, learning the language and feigning fluency and running away from your americanness. escaping yourself

• "I came to understand that if you looked around carefully as you walked through the supposedly least touristy barrios, you could identiy young Americans whose lives were structured by attempting to appear otherwise, probably living on savings or giving private English lessons to rich kids, temporary expatriates sporting haircuts and clothing that, in hard-to-specify ways, seemed native to Madrid, in part because they were imperfect or belated versions of American styles., Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours."

• "..the hash usually gave me a semblance of lucidity.. I experienced it as a tuning of the world, not, as with strong weed, its total transformation or obliteration, and I could read or "work" while smoking hash, or at least I believed I could... but the alterations effected by the hash were somehow all the more profound for being understated, in part because one could forget or at least discount the role of the drug in one's experience."

• Teresa's eyes and what they could reveal, could parry in conversation.

• The relationship with Isabel hinging on his lack of Spanish ability, her believing that his thoughts were more profound given that there was a language barrier between his ability to convey

read in the tent, with molly and lucia. gasps abound.

A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back against this, no one ot point a finger at, because it came form everywhere. Even walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn't do. "But maybe this was just a fuller, more honest expression of my own classism." "I don't like aiding and abetting coincidences

notes:

• musings on desire in the first half before she returns home is the most compelling part of this book to me
• what does it mean to be an artist trying to subject your life to experiences in the name of commodified, profitable art? your life as the subject? stretching your experience to emotional lows and highs, examining your moral reaction to taboo, fantasy, desire, cheating?
• it is indulgent for a while to read someone, a woman, being perverse, but after a while it becomes difficult to follow along with her actions. it almost feels like to continue to read you are complicit
• reading this again, when older will be different experience

by recommendation of angie, and sort of dua lipa.

who has the right to tell a story? who has the right to tell their story? and, who has the right to kill? who decides which beliefs govern our lives?

"You know what, sometimes it seems to me that we're living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what's good and what isn't, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves...And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other"

made me think of anti vaxxers and how with some well crafted belief systems, everything you see in common society is evidence

• lots of thoughts on the experience of being in an older body, being an older person seeing the world change around you a
• i found myself not questioning once her narrative, that she was an unreliable narrator. even with the evidence building towards her, I only thought it true, that this book was magical realism, and the animals were really doing it. Reminds me of when and how you can see why everyone around you does something, anything, if you spend enough time with them. all decisions make more or less sense

every book I read, every piece of media (movie: “sorry, baby!”) makes me think the entirety of the experience of life, the meaning of life, can be captured in a 2 year instance of experience of a twenty something woman’s narrative. (obviously I see how it does for me) it felt every experience and iteration of experience in this book can be mirrored in some way to one of mine (esp. being a woman in any situation with men - the one with the guy who was mugged, her situationship, the prosecutor, the president).

Decisions of reality mimicked the experience of reading Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

"The thought was disquieting- that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives. As I stared down at him through the glass, that alternative version of events seemed to manifest, filling the air between us" "I said only this: I understand. I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness. I looked at his face and I thought it possible that after all, that despite everything, Adriaan was that person for me."

🥹

bookclub read with A, S, L. notes here

free book table at bella’s apt, read and finished on the flight back. fun deeply visceral read to pass the time

"she asked so many questions… it doesn’t take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone’s gaze. It’s not totally accurate to say I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned to become myself. Her interest actualized me."

"Her apartment was decorated with zealous care, in the manner of a young person who believed their tastes defined them"

"it is in the most surreal situations where a person feels most present, the closest to reality (at a funeral)"

notes: pretty much every short story makes me want to throw up. suffocating! not gruesome - just painfully claustrophobic. Surreal and mundane

Listlessness, disappearing, competition in female childhood friendships, relationships with professors (treading inbetween), what it is to mime the life of marriage, cheating, writing the experience of being a daughter of chinese immigrants, desire, piecing together your sense of self in your early twenties, how a life builds from habits and directions calcifying

I feel terrible. this is so awesome

book club read with suities. one of the best books every written I think.

i don’t know? i’m surprised this comes so recommended - don’t get me wrong, it captures so much of the complexities of female friendship and relationships over time better than other books i’ve read (especially the friendships that shape you and your years growing up), but perhaps it’s the lack of relatability outside of that (the setting, the time period, etc) makes it not land for me.

giovanni’s room (this only half finished), a little life, the hours all seem to capture the breath of life/relationships more for me than this book did. especially the hours.

started/finished on thanksgiving travel day

noted: lonely, human, hopeful. quotes add later

“after all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of king lear, or of prince hamlet that william shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail”

“i was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all”

read joshua tree weekend jaw dropping, i’d suggest reading the content warnings just to mentally prep. shame, rituals of earthlings, living outside systems and facing scrutiny, vaguely cultish

plane read from michigan to california, juju recommendation

"Leisure the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure… we just wanted to hit the reset button. we just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side persuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn’t get around to it in that day, our free day, maybe it was enough to just feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.’

could i do this cried at the dad kfc bit

notes:

• strawberries as gifts, homemade gifts, commodities vs gifts,
• efficiency not as the center (sweetgrass)
• power of ceremony; marries the mundane to the sacred
• language: nouns as persons, things alive vs things not alive
• looking at things and seeing them as gifts - food, paper, etc., waste
• several words for thank you, none for please (like danish!)
• different creation stories as core narrative vs. the adam and eve one
• humans and the environments as a beneficial relationship

brilliant use of the second, the first, and the third person to tell stories.

“but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time” (like the poem crush, richard siken) "If you want to be my friend, you must do two things. First, forget I am a lesbian. And second, never forget I am a lesbian." "You feel as if there is a box you can open to find the answer, but with the lid closed the answer is all of these things, all at once" Telling kids that their room is not theirs, that they are simply borrowing the space “that my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine” "Marveling at the fact that his maleness - the generic fact of it - has as much pull as a carefully curated, long term, abusive relationship"

notes:

• joel relationship (the older religious teacher that she was in love with) , like the professor in in tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow, the waiting for emails and stressing (like in the idiot, like this summer)
• The tightness of the relationship, the being on edge, the idea of the honey sick sweetness that comes with it.
• Novikov self-consistency principle
• That you can be human, that you are good
• This kind of relationship where you’re with someone - wiser, more experienced, wordier
• “What most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession”
• Discussion of queer villains
• Bluebeard’s wife: she could do anything except for stick a key into that lock
• Ephemera in queer relationships

notes

• the little shame of visiting family abroad
• talking about the small things over the big things (both in love, in catching up, in the “Play” the kids have to engage in)
• margaret and chacko’s love story and how it made her feel (world larger, but maybe just loving herself)
• the small god, resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered because Worse Things kept happening
• it is curious how the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of life that it purloined
• great stories you want to hear again and again and again
• somehow in their sleep she had traveled away from them (like the scene in the hours where the son knows the mother)
• the sweet gesture of “colluding in the conspiracy of their fiction, taking care not to decimate it with adult carelessness”
• this was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt
• mother telling child how they will love you a little less

jesus. one of the best things i’ve read in years.

"There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children knows that these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more"

did not finish got to 80% pretty prose but not compelling

new york city trip series reread of first two in trilogy and first time reading the fourth, fifth, and sixth

heartbreaking

a book that feels like a gift notes:

• similar vignette style to beginning of “the overstory” and a family epic/historical fiction like east of eden and pachinko

recommendation from justin.

• modern day slavery (debt) and human trafficking
• pesticide natural + human damage
• local grown farms as means of change (farm in NYC)
• volatile compounds / tomato breeding for flavor
• companies vowing to pay one cent more per pound
• proper housing for farm workers
• uglyRipe tomatoes

• what it means to write about others: the foreword reminds me of what I liked in the foreword in the 12 rules for life book, a writer’s best attempts to describe what is special about someone else — how can simple scenes or sentences tell more about a person than
• the unexamined life quote, stefan’s letter
• examining what and how (and if?) school/studies can further my personal questions about relationships and life or if it aligns closer to the passage about how speculation in school is nothing compared to life’s experiences
• loved the passage about choosing the camp vs choosing the research fellowship

quotes:

• last page of his writing, his message to Cady “when you come to one of the many moments in your life…”
• p. 69, the doctors message to the family to comfort them “what I do know — and I know these things too— is that your life is about to, and already has changed…”

read series on car rides today to detroit airport and back

notes:

• similar to mistborn worldbuilding: things are resolved at the very end by answering more about the world
• third book didn’t finish, skimmed
• second book favorite with how the school turns to help / the descriptions of the fighting
• enjoyed the diversity throughout the series, felt very natural

i cannot believe she is not a game developer. beautiful story of a complicated relationship, and the immense creativity of the two, and how worldbuilding can show the most out of us.

"She takes his shaking hand in the dark. It feels good, like a root must feel, when it finds, after centuries, another root to pleach to underground. There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things."

read on flight from santiago to miami

jfc

reading during winter break

hunger games / roman pantheon / legend / dune / scythe

silver springs performance stevie and lindsey

read during norway trip

• finished on the flight from copenhagen to norway
• synopsis of the other two books finished on the train from bodo to oslo

read as book club w culinary LLC. cried at the man who was illiterate but would receive the letters from his wife, feeling the words, imagining her.

read on long study tour trip berlin

“curiosity was unspeakable worse and far more addicting than sexual attraction”

so true

"Beautiful people lived in a different world, had different relations with people. From the beginning they were raised for love."

read book on flight back home from seattle. teenager favorite and it still stands.

wattpad in a bad way read out loud on drive back from vancouver

read series during visit to LA

reread series during visit to LA. 10 books in 7 days. devoured.

reread a childhood favorite on visit to SF for pride. chilling to read again in 2022, abortion metaphor as clear as day.

read series in first few days of seattle

reading during quarantine oldenburg

shines in its representation of asian motherhood. good, otherwise a cancer memoir that represents a pretty similar, universal prolonged grief.

finished on christmas day

more interesting than the first dune book, always a sucker for the political. never made it past book three. the lil guy is just a worm at that point.

tried too hard to replicate the format and storytelling of the first book and to overfill it with references. idea was cool though (2 stars)

covid reread during jeni’s ice cream midwest road trip w mom

covid road trip read

a book that grows with you, and means something different every time as you grow up with the four boys. in high school, in college, post college. I can only begin to imagine it again, later, reading it as a parent, sitting with Harold.

i have a copy that i lend out to my friends, filled with their annotations as they read it. its like reading it with me, with them. message me if you'd like me to send it to you!

"The only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are - not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving - and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad - or good - it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well"

more quotes here

every time I reread this book I find something new. my second time reading in 2018, i had made a playlist to accompany.

"The most amazing thing of all has been you, Mr. Nakata. You changed my life. These past ten days, I don't know—things look different to me now. Stuff I never would've given a second glance before seems different. Like music, for instance—music I used to think was boring really gets to me now. I feel like I've gotta tell somebody about this or bust, somebody who'll understand what I've gone through. Nothing like this ever happened to me before. And it's all because of you. I've started to see the world through your eyes. Not everything, mind you. I like how you look at life, so that's why it happened. That's why I've stayed with you through thick and thin, why I couldn't leave you. It's been one of the most meaningful times I've ever had in my life. So there's no need for you to be thanking me—not that I mind it. I should be thanking you. All I'm trying to say is you've done me a lot of good, Mr. Nakata."

"Kafka, in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive.”

"And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about.”

my favorite villain ever, and, the first time I had ever wanted a tattoo, at 17 for the word timshel.

"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is. "

"And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing - maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'thou mayest'."

"The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck...It is a tedious job to build them up once more; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again."

“It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely"

jia came to visit the claremont colleges to give a speech, in 2019. she came again, in 2023, saying something that I repeat again and again to friends as a memento to remember for the future:

"when I think about growing older, I come again and again to the truth that I should try and move away from the things that harden me. if I feel an experience hardens me, my beliefs, my feelings, my undersatnding of the world, i should try my best to fight it."

"We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory"

"Did I want him to ask? Or would I prefer a lifetime of longing provided we both kept this little ping-pong game going: not knowing, not-not knowing, not-not-not knowing? Just be quiet, say nothing, and if you can't say "yes", don't say "no", say "later". Is this why people say "maybe" when they mean "yes", but hope you'll think it's "no" when all they really mean is, Please, just ask me once more, and once more after that?"