- Thin Description – I finally finished it! I read this after hearing about it at a conference and was curious about it. It was… a difficult read at times, because I am not super well versed with anthropology or sociology in an academic sense, or ethnography. I felt very sympathetic to the AHIJ and to the Black Israelites, and really wanted them to succeed throughout the book. I really enjoyed learning about the religion and how it started, and the concept that digitization has made people their own ethnographers. It was very fascinating of a read, and I also liked the lens of how the best approach to studying a group of people is so contentious, how so much is lost and falls into the trap of “over”interpretation and being over-colored by the researcher’s own perspectives and biases and frame of reference. I also liked the concept in the book that the AHIJ are marginalized in part because they are Black and believe themselves to be the original chosen people, and how their race makes this so “absurd” and contentious, but this in itself is so complex since what is race?
- Manhattan Beach – I really liked this historical fiction! The characters felt real: Anna, her father Eddie, Dexter Styles. It’s a great mystery that slowly unravels, and I really enjoyed how much research went into the book especially in terms of what it was like to dive in the 1940’s and the war effort. I really felt like I was in the water with Anna, and when Eddie was lost at sea after the shipwreck, I felt dehydrated and drained, at the mercy of the sun, just like him and the Bosun. I thought the book was a fun and gripping read, and I didn’t find the change in narrator to be too distracting.
- Baumgartner – Super sweet book! It was very short but felt long. I deeply admire and enjoy Paul Auster’s writing and prose so much. It’s a story about an old man named Sy Baumgartner whose wife has passed away and he reflects on his life and his wife in between awareness of the present and what’s happening around him. It’s a story about love, and the ways we crave it and seek it, and also about how people touch our lives even if it’s fleeting, even if it’s a short romance or a visit from the electrical company.
- Happy Place – I really liked this but not for the reasons that I thought I would! I could see the Emily Henry whose young fiction I loved in the writing, just the rhythm of the sentences, the touching short sentences. I know she had a lot of fun writing this book. This book was surprisingly not a romance in terms of the number of explicit sex scenes (which I frankly enjoyed)! I found the plot intriguing (breaking up with your fiance and then finding yourself in a situation where you’re forced to pretend that you’re still together? novel!) and admittedly resonated with Harriet, because I see a lot of myself in her in terms of a family that isn’t close, this need to please everyone and coming up with imaginary goal posts that I have to hit to change circumstances, and being very high achieving. I sympathized with her a lot because of my own biases.
- Mrs Dalloway – My first Virginia Woolf! It’s very interesting in the sense that I rarely read much Great War-era literature and I know this book was one of the first to use train of thought as a literary device. I didn’t really understand the cultural significance of this story, since it’s pretty mundane, and only partially see the foil that Septimus and Clarissa are supposed to be for each other. There were certain passages that flowed really nicely. If anything, Clarissa seems like a complicated individual who hasn’t done enough self-reflection to understand herself and her motivations, and perhaps that is something that Woolf is trying to articulate. You definitely see the differences in men and women and their expectations in high society, you also see how loveless Clarissa’s marriage is, and just how important social status means for her. Maybe that’s the brilliance of this book? That for Septimus and Clarissa both, they seemed to be brimming with potential, that they had so many rich opinions and musings to offer but they had a deep inability articulating any of it. Overall, I did love how seamlessly and effortlessly the point of view shifted between various characters throughout the book.
- The Hours – I read this book after watching Uncarley’s video of her top 40 (or 50?) favorite books of 2023, and this was her top pick. This book, at times, reminded me of one of my favorite books, Cleanness, in terms of the languid, slow speed of the book that allows you to examine your sense of place, to build a rich, un-obnoxious world from the beauty of stillness. I cried when Richard died, and I loved how the book came to its conclusion, where Laura Brown is Richie’s mother, and Richie grew up to be Richard. Reading Mrs. Dalloway before this book enhanced it for me, because I knew which sentences and themes were callbacks to Mrs. Dalloway. I could tell this book was well-researched on Virginia Woolf, and I thought Michael Cunningham did an excellent job at portraying three stories of women, how they feel trapped and claustrophobic by patriarchy even though the men in their lives are rather drab but unmenacing. The writing is… exquisite? The sentences, the detail, the pacing, oh it’s perfect. The sentence structure, the flow, I would reread sections and wonder how Cunningham came up with them. Excellent book.
Currently Reading:
More Than a Glitch
Doppelganger
tenminutethoughts 