Summer Books, Recent Reads, and the State of Covid
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I contributed to Bustle’s most anticipated books of the summer. I was really happy to get to pick from the many galleys I read for this list, and some of my other favorites were covered by other writers. Over the summer, I’ll share more about some titles I loved but didn’t feel were quite right for Bustle, or that I didn’t quite love but still found worthwhile.
Now, I’m happily receiving stacks of galleys from publishers to prepare for the fall. Hopefully, I’ll have some pieces elsewhere along with preview coverage (and posts here). We’ll see! It is somewhat weird to be receiving and reading so many galleys when, simultaneously, so many stories are circulating about layoffs in publishing (today, at Little Brown, where Tracy Sherrod, another Black female editor was laid off in the wake of Lisa Lucas a couple weeks ago). I do not understand the financial ins and outs of the difficulties facing publishers right now, though I feel quite confident that running away from diversity is not the answer. But if you read a lot of new books, like I do, the problem is clearly not with the novel itself. For decades, people have been fretting about The Death of the Novel, but writers from all over are writing ingenious and thrilling novels. I’ve read some great nonfiction lately, too, including Rachel Somerstein’s Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section, which I talk about more on an upcoming Patreon episode of Overinvested.
I recently finished Marion Turner’s enormous, mind-bending biography of Chaucer (titled, yes, Chaucer). I studied Chaucer briefly in college — a few of the Tales, Troilus and Criseyde — so I had a little familiarity, but not too much, and I knew very little about the historical context of the time or about Chaucer’s biography. The documentary record on Chaucer himself is relatively spare, but Turner works wonders with what she has, exploring the geographical contours of Chaucer’s world, the structural and commercial hierarchies in which he operated, along with religious and philosophical ideas of space and power. (She even discusses the celestial dimensions of the medieval world: the phrase “Milky Way” first appears in Chaucer, and in one poem he writes from the perspective of a bird looking down on the country, which is commonplace for those of us who have traveled in planes, but was remarkable then since nobody except birds could look down on the earth from above.)
Turner’s wealth of knowledge and expertise make this book a primer not only on Chaucer and his revolutionarily democratic approach to writing poetry but on the world of 14th century England and Europe. (There’s a lot of royal drama and intrigue, too.) It’s not a fast read, but I found it time more than well-spent. It was a reminder to me of the value both of reading older texts and of dedicating time to reading about a subject that’s (mostly) unfamiliar to you.
Speaking of royal drama, I also recently finished listening to The Rival Queens: Catherine de' Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, by royal historian Nancy Goldstone. I was curious about Goldstone because of Brandon Taylor’s enthusiasm for her work — it’s not often that a novelist facilitates an event with a historian — and this gossipy history exceeded my expectations. Catherine de’ Medici starts off as a figure of sympathy, or at least pity, as her husband ignores her and spends all his time with his mistress (upon whom Catherine spies through holes in her bedroom floor — because the mistress lives directly below her in the palace) but as time passes and her children grow up, she increasingly makes their lives miserable through her ambition and (not always successful) manipulation.
The real center of the book is Marguerite, her daughter, married off to a Huguenot and suffering under the rule of her older brother, a king who liked to dress in drag, had a court of pretty-boy favorites, and like most medieval and renaissance kings suffered from a severe lack of impulse control. It’s my belief that being a member of a European royal family in the medieval or renaissance period was the surest way, historically, to become completely nuts, and this book does not disprove my theory. Incredibly fun read, I can’t wait to get into another one.
Emma Copley Eisenberg has a good article in The New Republic about fatphobia in American fiction. She briefly touches on disability in here, too; I’m not sure how connected these issues feel to me (I hadn’t really considered this framing before, it’s interesting to think about) but the locus of the body as a subject avoided by much of fiction does feel right to me. Regardless, she’s definitely right about this. I haven’t read Crossroads since it came out but I remember the character she cites having a lot of internalized self-loathing, but I could be wrong; Fates and Furies, on the other hand, is regularly cited when this issue comes up and rightly so, because it’s pretty appalling, and I gave up on The Bandit Queens after the first page when I read the sentence she mentions. This is something we should all be thinking about more.
Some of you may have seen The Guardian’s long piece about long covid this past week; if not, I highly recommend it. The Times has also published a story on the results of a major study on the impact of long covid. If you think this issue doesn’t affect you, check out this report that shows that post-covid complications can arise as long as three years after an infection.
In better news, studies have shown that N95 masks are near-perfect at blocking covid transmission (KN95s are not as effective, though still good). If you are immunocompromised like me, you might want to check out the heavy-duty Flo Mask, which I bought recently; in the heat it can get a little sweaty but there’s no air leakage at all that I can feel. (You may have seen one of these on paparazzi photos of Violet Affleck, though I happened to have ordered mine before those started circulating.)
Happy reading!