Book Review: Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez

I stopped reading this book after 120 pages and gave its author, Xochitl Gonzalez, the old, “it’s not you, it’s me” speech in my head. It’s hard for me to break up with a book but I found myself rolling my eyes in exasperation at almost every decision the protagonist made. 

On paper, the book sounded fun and entertaining. The novel’s protagonist, Olga, is a strong young Puerto Rican woman who is smart and sassy in equal measure. She lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and runs a lucrative party planning and catering service. 

Then we learn that Olga is having an affair with the father of a former client whose wedding she planned. The man is getting divorced and is forced to move onto a vineyard estate he owns. During the affair Olga starts dating a shabbily dressed and obnoxious real estate agent she meets at a bar. He both annoys and intrigues her, always able to spar with her when she gets feisty.

It was at this point in the story that I realized I was smack dab in the middle of a developing love triangle and was surrounded by the trappings of a rom-com. I’m not against the rom-com or other genre fiction as a whole, but I was unable to give myself over to its tropes and enjoy the story. Olga’s decision to date two deeply unlikable people was not a story I was eager to finish.

Despite the novel’s eye roll-inducing rom-com beats, I still enjoyed aspects of the book and would recommend it to people looking for a light, if predictable, read. The book wasn’t a match for me but may be the perfect partner for someone craving a modern romance set  in New York City. 

Book Review: Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth

“If we knew , if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is , no one would ever dare have children.”

— Vigdis Hjorth

In Is Mother Dead, Johanna, a middle-aged artist, considers reconnecting with her estranged mother when she returns home to Oslo for a career retrospective of her work at a prestigious museum.

She has not spoken to either her mother or sister for almost thirty years, during which time she married an American painter, had a son, and refused to return home for her father’s funeral. 

Now back in Norway, Johanna interrogates her choices and questions the way her mother raised her and her sister.  In doing so, she remembers painful memories, saying, “The first song I ever heard was Mum crying by my cradle.” 

When she imagines what reuniting with her mom will be like, Joahanna admits to herself that, “Perhaps visiting Mum is fun. Nevertheless it’s easy to imagine how visiting Mum might be a chore…”

Sometimes Johanna hopes that  her strained relationship with her mother is due to nothing more than a misunderstanding or poor communication. She feels that, “A child may have to rebel against its parents in order to discover its own will and find its own path, and if the parents can accept that, the family members can ultimately establish a more equal relationship.”

At other times, Johanna feels that her mother is the one who needs to explain herself and atone for all the times she criticized or belittled her. In one memory, Johanna recalls, 

Mum asked me why I keep clearing my throat when I do my homework. But I couldn’t explain it to her. She got cross…I think it’s because the throat is between the head and the heart . And when I do my homework , I can’t feel my heart . And then I lock my throat so that my heart can’t get into my head. But if I tell Mum, she will say I’m being silly.

Johanna’s desire to both understand her mom and be understood by her drives the novel’s plot and emotional engine. Everything she does is an attempt to reconcile her memory of her mother with the woman she’s stalking in the present. Johanna’s revelations often bring her more pain than solace, yet she remains to determined to understand what lies at the heart of her mother’s cruelty and indifference.

With raw emotion expressed through lean, plainspoken prose, Is Mother Dead exposes the raw nerves that live at the heart of every relationship and pokes at the lasting wounds we all carry from childhood.

Book Review: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

“Refugee, exile, immigrant—whatever species of displaced human we were, we did not simply live in two cultures... Displaced people also lived in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past...”

— Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

Stories of Vietnam and the Vietnam War have almost always been told from a Westerner’s perspective. The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s powerful debut novel, rectifies this imbalance and gives voice to a county and people long silenced by colonial powers.

Narrated by an unnamed character referred to only as Captain, the novel gives an intimate portrait of a man and his country, both of them forced to live a split life because of colonial interference. 

We learn the Captain is half Vietnamese and half white, the result of a relationship between his mother and a French Catholic priest. Rejected for being a bastard by both sides, the Captain grew up navigating two cultures while never feeling accepted by either one. 

His unique upbringing makes him an ideal candidate for his mission as a Communist spy in the South Vietnamese army. As the Captain’s story unfolds, so do issues of national and personal identity, immigration, assimilation, and acceptance, all explored through the lens of the Vietnam War.

The novel’s scope is impressively wide in order to accommodate both the Captain’s personal struggles and Vietnam’s complicated history. One can read the book as a spy thriller, a historical novel, an immigrant tale, a condemnation of war and colonialism, and an exploration of personal and national identity, with each of the interpretations being correct.

It is this multifaceted perspective that makes The Sympathizer such a rich and engrossing novel. And though there are many narrative threads, Nguyen nimbly weaves them together into a single story about a man and his country, both trying to reconcile their splintered pasts and coming to terms with their still uncertain futures. The Sympathizer is an essential read, both for its literary qualities and for its deeply personal depiction of the Vietnamese American experience.

Book Review: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams by Diane Williams

“I knew I liked sex. I just couldn’t get enough practice...Well, my wife has a customary sympathetic manner and she enjoys breast play. Her mother told me.”

— Diane Williams, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

Williams’s stories are meticulously crafted puzzle boxes that, even after multiple readings, are slow to reveal their secrets. Her stories lack the familiar trappings of narrative fiction; plot, setting, consistent point of view. Their fragmented construction demand full attention, forcing the reader to look for throughlines and contend with the unknown.

What is happening is a question I asked myself a lot while reading this collection. And though I am unable to recall plot points, I am able to say that Williams’s stories dwell in the domestic, often focusing on small moments between friends, partners, and strangers, each one drawing the reader’s attention to the sadness, confusion and joy that can accompany emotional and physical intimacy.

With most stories no more than a page long, Williams works with extreme precision and is able to distill whole lives into just three paragraphs. It is a trick she performs over and over in a million different ways, each story revealing a new facet of the human experience.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t understand every story. I found it more enjoyable to embrace Williams’s enigmatic prose than to struggle against it, letting myself delight in its eccentricities and marvel at its strangeness. 

Books I’ve Read in 2023: Part I

If there’s one thing I love more than reading, it’s telling people what to read and having them be impressed by my spot on recommendations. After reading 20 books so far in 2023, I’ve chosen my six favorites and created a personality-based book pairing system (patent pending) that will match you with the book of your dreams.

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Instructions

1. Choose the comically broad stereotype that matches your personality

2. Read the suggested book

3. Have your mind blown and be forever transformed

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L.A. Woman by Eve Babitz

L.A. Woman by Eve Babitz

For the tragically hip bohemian who watches Almost Famous on repeat and always invites you to do coke in the bathroom with them

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The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

For the tortured genius who makes their own jerky and constantly talks about living off the grid

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Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

For the sensitive soul with abandonment issues and an unhealthy obsession with their pets

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Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks

Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks

For the radical progressive who loves explaining intersectional feminism but gets all their talking points from the Armchair Expert podcast

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The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

For the pop culture nerd who constantly quotes Tarantino dialogue and never misses a night of bar trivia

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Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One See by Lawrence Weschler

Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler

For the starving artist who DIYs Donald Judd furniture and always wears ripped beanies and rolled up Dickies

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Bonus Content
A complete list of the books I’ve read in 2023

Fiction

• The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela

• The Consequences by Manuel Munoz

• The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir

• L.A. Woman by Eve Babitz

• Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin

• The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy

• Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

• Heartbroke by Chelsea Bieker

• Total by Rebecca Miller

• The Superrationals by Stephanie LaCava

• The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington by Leonora Carrington

Non-Fiction

• Bonk by Mary Roach

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

• Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks

• Sellout by Dan Ozzi

• The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

• How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

• More Than You Wanted to Know About John Baldessari Vol. 1 by John Baldessari

• The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois

• Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler

Zooey Deschanel's new show What Am I Eating? signals the death of HBO

In what’s surely a sign of terrible content to come, Max just released a six episode food series starring Zooey Deschanel titled, What Am I Eating? If the first question you asked after reading that sentence was, “Who is Max and how does he know Zooey Deschanel?” you are not alone. Max is the newly rebranded streaming service that combines Warner Bros. and HBO’s critically acclaimed content library with whatever it is that Discovery has to offer (namely HGTV and Food Network shows). 

The premise of What Am I Eating? (let’s talk to chefs and farmers to find out the truth behind common food myths) is the kind of pleasant but forgettable fluff that’s already clogging Food Network and streaming services. Interested in watching celebrities cook and learn about food, each with a near total lack of skill and charisma? Look no further than Selena+Chef on Max, Cooking with Paris on Netflix, and Amy Schumer Learns to Cook on the Food Network. 

With so many food and cooking shows already available, why make this one at all and why promote and premiere it on the day Max goes live? It’s a baffling move that convinces absolutely no one that they need the new service or that they should watch the show. Creatively, the show serves almost no purpose but as a financial endeavor, it’s an almost guaranteed winner.  

Warner Bros. Discovery has been on a cost cutting mission lately, most notably by dropping 87 titles from HBO’s library, including the critically acclaimed and recently canceled Westworld. Why would Warner Bros. Discovery continue to produce violent and idiosyncratic dramas with $10 million per episode budgets when they could make a family friendly food series with Zooey Deschanel that will be, at worst, a moderate success?

Art and commerce have always made for queasy bedfellows but the premiere of What Am I Eating?, along with studios’ unwillingness to negotiate during the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, show that valuing profit over creativity is here to stay and will only lead to even more forgettable content. Never mind worrying about what I’m eating, what the hell am I watching?

Favorite Books: 2022

The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg’s second novel follows Clare, a recently widowed woman who travels in her husband’s stead to the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, Cuba. While there she sees a man that looks like her dead husband Richard and begins to follow him obsessively around Havana.

As Clare travels farther away from the city the more she questions her sanity and ability to tell reality from delusion. She begins to interrogate not just her present circumstances but the nature of her marriage and the emotional gulf that exists between herself and her husband.  

The novel’s surreal tone and Clare’s increasing confusion forces the reader to question her reliability as a narrator. In this way, Van den Berg slyly puts the reader in the same headspace as her narrator and forces us to confront questions about life, existence and love. Though The Third Hotel is oftentimes surreal, its emotions are firmly grounded in reality, making its revelations all the more powerful and its story worthy of your time. 

Mood/Vibe: Tropical climates and existential dread, popping Xanies on the beach, a mosquito bite that you can’t quite reach.

Who it’s for: That one friend from college whose Instagram feed is awash in Jenni Kayne neutrals and ennui, people who enjoyed The Watchers but could do without its kitschy melodrama, Lux Lisbon cosplay enthusiasts.

Reading List: 2022

Among the books I read last year, I’ve chosen five favorites (listed in bold) that resonated with me the most. In reviewing my favorites I found that I gravitated toward female writers whose work grapples with and interrogates familial and romantic relationships, the creative process, and the ability to cope with and transcend trauma. 

This is the first year I’ve looked for patterns in my reading habits and used them to understand my headspace during any given week. It’ll take me a while to evaluate what my reading choices mean, but for now I am happy to have more than Spotify Wrapped as a way to track and reflect on the previous year. Check back soon for in depth reviews of my favorite books of 2022.

FICTION

A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion

I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

Lapvona by Otessa Moshfegh

The Ones Who Don't Say They Love You by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera

The Third Hotel by Laura Van den Berg

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

War by Candlelight by Daniel Alarcon

NON-FICTION/MEMOIR

Drifts by Kate Zambreno

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon

Intimations by Zadie Smith

Future Sex by Emily Witt

The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang

Power to the People: the World of the Black Panthers

To Write as If Already Dead by Kate Zambreno

POETRY

Bright Dead Things by Ada Limon

The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon

Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong

Girl in a Band

I started “Girl in a Band” with only passing knowledge of Kim Gordon’s band, Sonic Youth, and little to no knowledge about Gordon herself.

Having recently read “Meet Me in the Bathroom,” Lizzy Goodman’s oral history of New York’s music scene in the 2000s, I expected Gordon to provide an equally fun and gossipy romp through late 80s New York. Instead, she delivers a no frills account of her life starting with Sonic Youth’s final show together and her impending divorce from bandmate Thurston Moore. 

Sonic Youth’s final concert is not a happy memory for Gordon. She despises Moore, having recently found out he had been cheating on her. Even sharing a stage with him during soundcheck is torturous. The emotions she expresses about the band and her soon to be ex-husband introduce the reader to the facets of her personality, each needing something different and not getting it. To help explain these warring selves and how she got to such a desperate point in her life, Gordon skips back to her childhood in the second chapter and proceeds chronologically from there.

Gordon’s most vivid childhood memories in Los Angeles involve her getting bullied by her older brother Keller who she describes as being, “...brilliant, manipulative, sadistic.” Even today she has conflicted feelings about him, especially because her parents largely ignored Keller’s schizophrenia diagnosis, leaving her to fend for herself against his erratic behavior. 

Gordon arrives in New York just as the 1970s rock scene was dying out. The Velvet Underground and the Ramones are considered mythic bands but not particularly relevant to the new generation of musicians moving to the city. I thought, then, that Gordon would talk about the scene she came up in and what it was like to be there at the start of No Wave. 

Instead, she continues her short, direct writing style, never giving any event or chapter more than six or seven pages. While I’m disappointed she never gets into the weeds about the inspiration or recording of an album (though she does tell the story behind Goo’s iconic cover art), I’m relieved that she never verges into the kind of self-indulgent myth-making that plagues so many other music memoirs.

By the end of the book, we get to see a more mature Gordon who, if she hasn’t fully come to terms with her abusive brother, cheating ex-husband, and the challenges of motherhood, has at least learned to balance these realities and accept them as a part of who she is. Ever the pragmatist, Gordon feels that, “All that young-girl idealism is someone else's now.”

At times angry, conflicted, resentful, and tender, Girl in a Band is Gordon’s clear eyed look back at her life as a shy California girl turned rock star, turned wife, mother, and fully realized woman. Though not the gossipy trip down memory lane I expected, it is the fullest expression of Gordon’s talents yet.

The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You

Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s first short story collection reads like neighborhood gossip shared between friends with each story giving voice to New Orleans’ overlooked residents.

Many of the stories are only a couple pages long, giving the reader only partial glimpses into their characters’ lives. Ruffin makes the most of the limited space, however, with sharp and creative observations, describing one character as a man who, “...got a fat neck and skin like old peaches;” and another as “...a scruffy little cat...” The stories’ short length invites the reader to enjoy several at a time and let the collection’s kaleidoscopic view of New Orleans slowly come into focus. 

Longer stories like “Before I Let Go” offer a deeper look into how gentrification affects the lives of longtime Black residents and the fallout that occurs when they are displaced. The story’s protagonist Gailya struggles to keep a job, first as a nanny to a white family and then as a maid at a hotel, in order to pay her property taxes. She is one of the few Black residents left on her block and is constantly being asked by her white neighbors to join their neighborhood council. 

Living paycheck to paycheck and facing the prospect of displacement, Gailya accepts her neighbors’ invitation and attends their meeting in a recently opened local coffee shop. Gailya recalls:

The coffee shop had been a po’ boy shop….Now there’s a drawing of a po’ boy, like a science man might make, with details of where to insert the fried shrimps, where to put the mayonnaise.

When she looks around at the meeting’s attendees she thinks most of them look:

 ...like people she’s worked for at one point or another. She knows that if any of her old neighbors were here, they would make them understand. But she realizes it falls on her. It always fell on her, and that if she were gone, nobody would ever come to understand anything at all.

Gailya’s story, like all the stories in this collection, are both an elegy to and celebration of Black life in New Orleans. And though the characters’ lives are filled with hardship, they take comfort in the community they have left. In the closing pages of the final story, Gailya hears a parade marching toward her street and she can’t wait to, “...be in the crush of bodies when it turns the corner to the next block, thousands of arms, legs, and eyes reaching for a bell of brass.” The book, like the parade, is a joyful bearing of witness that’s a pleasure to get lost in.