Everything this month has been decidedly awful, or average. Most meals have been average, most books middling. Perhaps it’s just me. For the first time, I read ten pages of a novel someone had recommended and found myself looking up “[author name] + MFA”; so sure I was of the style. I had thought I’d never do or think this, since that has always felt tiresome and a lazy critique, but I’d never felt it so exemplified as it was in this novel. Perhaps I was being unfair, and so I returned the book to the library — clearly this is not the mood -- or metric -- by which to critique books. This morning, for example, I had this song running through my head, which should probably tell you more about the awfulness of August.

Perhaps that’s why it has been more clarifying to think about what I did enjoy reading, and the standout was I Want You to be Happy, by Jem Calder. I wasn’t going to pick this up until the hype had died down, but I am glad I did. Too often books are advertised as ‘for fans of Sally Rooney’ or ‘[insert Rooney novel] meets’ -- and it is often a disservice to the novel being advertised or Rooney’s work. This, I want to say, is the exception. I Want You to be Happy feels like reading a chapter out of a Sally Rooney novel, but this is less of a story of a relationship coming together than one unraveling, right from the start. Calder’s protagonists are brutal about their lives, and Calder describes, quite well, the stagnation that is truly a marker of modern urban life now: careers stilled, incomes halted, the struggle to make it through the day, to make it through a Teams call, to live with the kind of dull knowledge that the next day will feel just as numbing and excruciating. To make a plot work within the confines of this stagnation is really quite something. Depressingly good.

Tired of disappointments, I reread Games by Anna Maria Volkova, which has only improved in my [already high] estimation since I first read it earlier this summer [and is advertised for fans of Normal People, but I think this is unfair!] Games is a story about grief, and the ways in which the protagonist tries to face it — overcoming is possibly not even in the cards at the point when we meet the protagonist — through a relationship that makes her confront the demands of pain and the uncomfortable — and under-negotiated — feeling of being taken apart sexually and emotionally, and then being taken care of; this is a story of what it is like to stand at the precipice of that pain and not know what comes after. I do think that the dialogue between the characters about economic theory can be a bit distracting for those of us who said goodbye to microeconomics in their first semester and did not think about it again, and I am not a big fan of the last act of the book -- it felt almost structural in a book that had really challenged being formulaic. [But what could one do differently? I’m not sure I have a good answer!] Still, a contender for one of my favourite novels of the year, a list still stopped by Emma Brodie’s fabulous Into the Blue.

I am currently reading so many books at the same time, but it was unintended and not how I prefer to do this! Anyway, right now I am reading [this isn’t even the complete list!]: Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17 -- very engaging, Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days (another stellar recommendation from Hira), Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (though I am mostly just reading this in snatches). So perhaps the rest of August will feel less middling, though not if I keep waking up with this.