here’s what I read in june

not as much as May! I was traveling and thinking oh I’ll have so much time on buses and planes but somehow that’s just never true is it

*denotes favorite

denotes book club

The Magus by John Fowles

• hoo boy. have you read this? if so please text me immediately. in the introduction (written by Fowles himself), he notes that he considers it a somewhat immature work and is annoyed that people keep reading it and telling him how good it is. later, he notes that it’s important for writers to keep in touch with their adolescent selves. fittingly, this is a novel centered around the violence and torment of attempting to grow past the self-centeredness of childhood. it is also just bananas in such a fascinating way. though I normally don’t care about spoilers, I do think if you read this massive tome you should do so without preconception, mostly because of its psychological and formal party tricks. Fowles is not a writer of delicate prose (that whole English school of poverty thing) but man does he take swings with the layering of story and narrative.

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty

• felt against the consensus on this one

*Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts

• sorry to everyone who had to listen to me tell them “““fun””” fact after fact about the Comte du Buffon while I was reading this, but look: Buffon was a fascinating thinker! I think this book also effectively makes the case that Linnaeus prefigured spreadsheet thinking and all its tedious appeals to efficiency (and creepy techlord domination).

Metallic Realms by Lincoln Michel

• I need you all to stop me from reading books where people loosely fictionalize bullshit twitter fights

Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet

• Binet is an always-read for me (also thanks to Whitney for speedreading this on the literal street so I could have it). I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the rush of HHhH again but this was still a solid piece of writing. Binet has such affection for history but without excessive reverence — there are intentional anachronisms, a sort of playful twenty-first century wink in these letters from 16th-century Florence — and it makes his work a pleasure. the mystery here exists to provide a focal point for a grander subject: the centrality of art to life, maybe even its supremacy over the grimy day-to-day of it all.

***Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park

• speaking of the rush of HHhH: THIS BOOK. immediately shot to the top of my list of what I’ve read this year. it functions on dream logic and audacity and if you want clean, neat explanations, fuck off. it told you what it was in the title! like HHhH, it is also concerned with the nature of history and its proximity to fiction, which is to say, how different are the two, really? formally, it’s just stunning — Park calls it a tripartite novel, and for me it works like the movements of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” it’s funny, it’s ambitious, and it trusts the reader’s intelligence. there are “clues” threaded through the narrative, though they don’t add up to a definite solution. this novel expects you to imagine beyond it, to participate in the dream. (note: there is a character named Gemma in this novel, and she is canonically hot. this is not why I liked this book, but hey, great job fictional Gemma.)