This was a good reading month. It was also a great month for author events. I saw Roxane Gay interview Kaveh Akbar, Eve Ewing interview Hanif Abdurraqib, Demetria Kalodimos interview Steven Hale, Ann Patchett interview Percival Everett and Tiana Clark interview Ross Gay.
Here’s what I read this month!
Butcher & Blackbird: The Ruinous Love Trilogy by Brynne Weaver
I read this for the Parnassus Between the Covers Romance Book Club, hosted by my friend Katie (aka @yourlesbianbookmom). It didn’t read as fast as I thought it would. I liked it though! It’s a cross between The Bear and Dexter, but without the having sex with your sister part. The sex was hot as hell, but it starts too late. It’s 200 pages of kill, kill, kill then 100 pages of boning. TBD on if I continue reading this series.
Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse" by Emily Raboteau
Of all the books that have changed my perspective and my heart, this is in the top three. Told through essays, it’s a mother in Washington Heights who starts noticing these bird murals and climate change art installations and looks into who’s behind them and why they’re doing it. A professor at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem and a mother of two young sons, she’s reckoning with climate justice, raising Black sons and eventually the pandemic and personal loss. I couldn’t put it down and cried through the whole thing. This is a book for birders, naturalists, poets, mothers, and people thinking about climate justice. It's also for anyone who carries New York City in their heart. If I saw you this month and you can’t remember which book I told you to read, it’s this one.
Come & Get It by Kiley Reid
I liked this book! I’m being emphatic because the reviews skew negative. But her reviews for Such a Fun Age were negative too and I also liked that book. This is a book about a group of young women who live in the same dorm at a university in Arkansas. A fancy, big-city author comes to teach writing for a semester and becomes fascinated with these women and their money, class and privilege, and starts secretly writing about them for Teen Vogue. Meanwhile, there’s a whole subplot going on about the RAs in the dorm and how they interact with the women and (spoiler alert) the writing professor. This book is dialogue-heavy, which some people found boring, but I found hilarious. Kiley Reid is funny! The “boo-pig” thing? Please. Legit lol. I listened to this and really enjoyed it as an audiobook.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Holy crap, this book. I loved this book so much I can’t even figure out how to tell you about it. I’ve written and deleted at least four versions of this paragraph. I was at event Friday night1 with a bunch of literary heavy hitters and we were all talking about this book, except none of us could say anything helpful. We were just emphatically staring at each other and making big hand gestures, like a little army of Larry Davids saying, “You have to read this book!” This is a book for survivors and people who, to paraphrase a Saeed Jones book title, had to fight to save our own lives.
ICYMI, here’s what I read last month.
Nashville’s literary and writing collective The Porch turned 10 this weekend and celebrated with an event on Friday night including Langhorne Slim, Tiana Clark and Ross Gay. I interviewed co-founders and co-directors Susannah Felts and Katie McDougall for the Nashville Scene, which you can read here.
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