James Baldwin gets me every time. The Fire Next Time cuts to the bone. The two “letters” that condemn racism and white supremacy are incredibly powerful. It’s so painfully relevant still today, which makes it that much more affecting. So compelling and so moving, Baldwin is rightfully angry yet remains so incredibly eloquent.

Baldwin has quickly become one of my all time favorite, most revered writers. I’m so moved and inspired by his courage as a queer black man in the 1960s. Every book is so potent, so articulate and expressive.

This book is a must read. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I finished it. Do yourself a favor and read some Baldwin.

I want this to be expanded into a whole novel, but it works so well as a story! I loved it - quintessential Rooney storytelling.

I bought Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber after reading @bazfiction’s review of it. This is the first book I’ve read by Silber. It’s one of my favorite types of books - interconnected stories.

This type of book always leaves me struck by the way something that is so monumental in one person’s life might go unnoticed by another, until something happens to reveal the connection. While reading I wondered if this degree of connectedness (is that a word? lol) only happens in books, but I’ve experienced enough “small world” moments to know that isn’t true. I loved the way Silber tied all of the stories together. I also really appreciate that we get to know so much of a character’s story - it’s not just a quick glimpse. Somehow, with concise writing, we get to know so much about the characters in a relatively short amount of pages.

It’s interesting to think about the impact we make on other people’s lives and whether that’s reciprocated to a similar degree. Something like that from my own experience was having my appendix out last year - it was such a stressful, scary time for me, but it was just one of many surgeries that same day for my doctor. And the surgery took about 30 minutes in the operating room. I’m sure she wouldn’t remember me today, (a mere blip on her radar - 30 minutes!) but I’ll always remember her. Weird! But not!

This book is good! Wish it had picked up a little more steam here on booksta. Highly recommend!

If you’ve been following me for more than a month, you’ve probably seen how desperate I was to get a copy of Beautiful World, Where Are You as soon as I could. Thanks to @fsgbooks for sending me an early copy, I am eternally grateful! I had high hopes and high expectations for this book, and it delivered. I love all of Sally Rooney’s books, this one maybe even most of all.

The characters in this book are a little older than in Rooney’s past books - early 30s as opposed to early 20s. They’re closer to my age, and maybe that’s why I could relate so much to them, and why it feels like Rooney writes just for me. Their existential dread looks the same as mine. The way they struggle to find meaning amid a world that can feel overwhelmingly hopeless - it feels like Rooney writes my exact experiences into her books. The characters worry about the same things I worry about (so much climate anxiety), and cope in the same ways - Eileen describes learning about the collapse of a past society, and I’ve recently gone down a wikipedia rabbit hole of almost the same thing (my rabbit hole of choice was the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, ha). Is everything pointless, or is the point of everything to make the most of your time now? How can we simultaneously know that humans are destroying the planet yet still care so much about sex, friends, and relationships?

Rooney turns the lens inward, too. One of the characters, Alice, is a writer, and deeply struggles with the spotlight and weight of expectations that have come with her rising fame. I imagine this is how Rooney feels. We expect so much from her now.

So that was a lot of brain-dumping from me about some big overarching questions that the characters are grappling with, but the story in this book is so good, too. It deals with friendships, relationships, mental health, and finding purpose. It’s steamier than I remember Rooney’s past books being. I loved the story. I loved the characters. I loved the whole experience. I quite obviously very highly recommend this book, and I hope if you read it, it sparks the same types of feelings for you.

Thanks to @hogarthbooks for sending me The Life of the Mind. Unfortunately I did not love it. I honestly don’t know why I finished it. I think because I’ve been picking up and then never picking back up lots of books recently, and I just wanted to finish a book.

This book follows Dorothy after she has a miscarriage, as she goes about her days as an adjunct professor of English. What didn’t work for me is that the life of Dorothy’s mind seemed to constantly be trying to hard to make quippy little funny observations, that just filled the pages, but then nothing really happened in the book. I’m down with a book where nothing happens but give me SOME small modicum of plot or character growth or an epiphany or even just something interesting to say... this book kind of felt... pointless?

This book got a great review in the New York Times this morning, so maybe I just don’t get it. The review says that Smallwood is a shrewd cultural critic. I mean, maybe? I felt like Dorothy’s character was bitter that she was stuck as an adjunct professor and jealous of her more successful peers. I don’t mind a character like this, but it didn’t work for me here. I think because... I was bored the whole time? I don’t know. I’m rambling. The NYT review also says this book has great prose. My feeling the whole time was “this book is trying too hard to have something interesting to say.” I thought the prose was nothing special. The NYT review compared Smallwood to Elif Batuman but to me this book feels like imitation Batuman, never living up to actual Batuman. (I love Elif Batuman.)

I’m being harsh but I’m trying to explain why I didn’t like it, and I’m doing a bad job! It’s hard to pinpoint. Just wasn’t for me. But might be for you!

Thanks to @picador for the copy of Universal Love by Alexander Weinstein. It’s a book of sci-fi-ish stories set in the near future. It felt very Black Mirror, with a lot of stories centering on technology and the impacts of tech on humans. I was interested in the tech aspects, and I’d been in a sci-fi mood since finishing Klara and the Sun and this collection fit that. I did feel like a lot of the endings were... unsatisfying? The stories would often feel like they were wrapped up too abruptly or too tidily. I am not a writer but I feel like short stories would probably be more difficult to do well, as you have less space to make your point. These stories felt like they were trying to fit too much within a short story format. There wasn’t much subtlety. I did like the tech aspect though.

I was thinking as I was reading it that I really loved it, the writing and the story, but I didn’t totally get what was a big deal about it. I had to google it afterwards only to realize that I failed to pick up on a pretty major reveal 🤦🏻‍♀️ sometimes I think I’m too dumb for ~literature~ because DUH how did I miss that!!! I even noticed some of the details but didn’t put things together! After googling though, it was like, OH, wow, that was pretty great actually, even though my apparent bird brain missed it.

If you’ve read this one, what did you think? Apparently it took the book world by storm a few years ago. I kind of see why - it’s pretty neat. I can’t say much more than that bc it’s something you have to let someone see for themselves (or not see and find out after by looking it up lol). I really loved this one in the end!