A long one for your dissociative pleasure
October in Review — Lit Chat Vol. 22
Hi friends,
The vibes are a little different since the last time we chatted. A little heavier, a little more uncertain. There’s a familiarity to the absurdity of recent events, but it’s not a comfortable one. Personally, I’ve been struggling with an almost preternatural exhaustion. Like because we’ve been here before, my body knows how much anxious/sad/angry energy is about to be expended in the coming weeks/months/years and is trying to stockpile rest in anticipation.
In the meantime, I’ve been finding solace in the wisdom of authors I admire, whose Substacks currently offer a much-needed source of perspective. Alexander Chee and Sarah Thankam Mathews have stood out lately for providing ways to think about what comes next that feel actionable without being overwhelming. Both of them emphasize the importance of focusing in on ourselves and our communities, on the ways we can continue to support and care for those we love and make each other feel safe.
One avenue through which I hope to continue building and supporting my community is the newly formed Reading Club, which met for the first time the weekend before the election and was a smashing success!
A huge thank you to all of the kind, thoughtful, and enthusiastic readers who made this one of the loveliest afternoons I’ve spent in a long time. If you missed last month’s newsletter, Reading Club is a book club where everyone reads whatever book/story/article/poem they want, and then comes prepared to talk about it. In practice, this ranged from Substack articles to poetry collections to sci-fi thrillers, and so much more! If you’d like to see all the books we chatted about, I collected them in a Bookshop list here:
And if you’d like to join us next time, let me know! We’re doing a Holiday Book Swap on December 15th—if you’re local and want the Partiful invite, feel free to text/email me!
But before we get too ahead of ourselves, we still have October to cover. I love reading in October, because I love an excuse to indulge in a couple especially atmospheric reads in honor of spooky season. This October also stands out as being an especially re-read heavy month, as half of the books I read were ones that I had read before. So without further ado, let’s get into it, shall we?
And if you’d like to read on the blog and witness the full pyramid, you can always do so here:
THE FOUNDATION:
That’s the very nature of Saturn — Michy Woodward
I’m SO excited to start off this Lit Chat with an incredible accomplishment from my pal Michy: her debut poetry chapbook published by Bottlecap Press! It has been an honor and a delight to witness the evolution of these poems through workshops and readings over the past couple of years, and I am continuously inspired by the tenderness, vulnerability, and gentle humor that ground this collection of poems through a time of personal and cosmic chaos. “We used to be a society,” “hot girls,” and “ode to stupid boys” are perpetual crowd favorites, but I also have a soft spot for the sweet sensuality of “tiger balm” and the heady, heartbreak momentum of “[unrelenting]”. Support your friendly neighborhood poets and buy Michy’s chapbook below!
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson
Despite first reading this weirdo novella in the seventh grade, my memory of the story mostly consisted of the Brain’s musical number from a 1998 Arthur episode:
What I love about reading spooky stories from different historical eras is that they function as a window into the psyche of their contemporary readers. For the Victorians, the complete release from any kind of moral obligation was as terrifying as it was strangely seductive. Dr. Jekyll’s secret desire to maintain his public life of virtue while also guiltlessly indulging his basest desires speaks to the cultural strain of physical and emotional repression, and yet his inability to give up the persona of Mr. Hyde signals a recognition that a certain level of “evil” is an inescapable part of the human experience—one that could take over at any time. I could write a whole AP Lit essay about this, but instead, I think this story is ripe for a modern retelling, preferably with some female characters who aren’t just victims of violence. If anyone decides to write this, please give me a shout-out in your acknowledgements.
The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson
This is one of my absolute favorite Halloween stories because it combines all of the best tropes: a large old house with a questionable past, a ragtag cast of characters, ghosts(!?), and an unreliable narrator to drive home the ambient unease. Hill House begins as it ends: with an invocation of insanity that dares the reader not to investigate. Our narrator, Eleanor, answers this call with the hopeful naivete of an emotionally stunted young woman who has been so secluded from the reality of adult life that she can’t help romanticizing every element of her new adventure as a paranormal researcher. Things go downhill when Hill House’s spiritual manifestations begin to target Eleanor specifically, calling into question her grip on both her fantasies and her reality. From the house’s unnatural architecture and inexplicable disturbances to Eleanor’s obsessive, one-sided relationships, this book has one of the most unsettling atmospheres and all-encompassing momentums you could ask for during spooky season.
SOLID SUPPORTS:
Bluets — Maggie Nelson
Bluets is another all-time favorite that just felt right to revisit in the days leading up to the election. Told in a series of numbered mini-essays, Bluets is as much an ode to its narrator’s obsessive love for the color blue as it is an exploration of desire and grief after the loss of a major relationship. Nelson uses the color blue as a literal and metaphorical touchstone to ground her and her loved ones through various devastating life changes, analyzing the function of color in art, music, and poetry as a vehicle for translating emotion and assigning meaning to life.
Alternating between a personal and academic lens, Nelson intersperses private musings and anecdotes with supplementary texts across history from Goethe to Wittgenstein to Leonard Cohen, and more. These eclectic entries vary in length, ranging from one sentence to entire pages, but it’s often the shortest ones that are the most likely to knock the wind out of you. This is one you’ll want to have on your bookshelf and return to as needed every couple of years.
The Message — Ta-Nehisi Coates
I listened to this audiobook (narrated by the author, always a treat!) in the last week of the month, which now feels eerily prescient in the wake of the election. The Message is a collection of craft essays centered on how Coates’s experiences and identity as a writer shape his approach to personal, ancestral, and collective history. The longest and final chapter, “The Gigantic Dream,” is one that I found incredibly moving and relevant, as it draws connections between the American and Israeli fights for democracy and the shared pathway both countries have taken for the oppressed to become oppressors themselves under an ugly banner of nationalism.
The parallels Coates depicts between Palestine as an apartheid state under Israeli settler occupation and the American South under the Jim Crow laws are stark and striking. Supported by Coates’s first-hand experience traveling to Israel and the West Bank in May of 2023, the inherent racism and inequality that Coates witnessed serves as a reminder of how frighteningly easy it is for a ruling government to dismiss and punish any group perceived as “other” as second-class citizens. Considering the devastating violence that has escalated in the region since October 7th, and the uncertainty now facing immigrants in our own country, Coates’s words are not just a message, but a warning against the unsustainability of these kinds of structural injustices.
Coates’s 2015 book Between the World and Me is one of the most frequently banned books in the United States. In fact, a whole chapter of The Message is devoted to Coates’s experience traveling to South Carolina in support of a teacher who faced community backlash for including it in her curriculum. Considering the incoming administration’s commitment to both supporting Israel’s genocidal military agenda and banning books that don’t align with their extremist conservative values, I don’t think it’s alarmist to predict that The Message may ultimately face a similar fate. For these reasons, it is more important than ever to read and champion books like these.
THE TIPPY TOP:
Intermezzo — Sally Rooney
I’m late to the game and I know the internet discourse has largely moved on from Intermezzo, but I was slow to get into it and frankly, once I was in, I really just wanted to take my time. I am very much a Sally Rooney stan (see last month’s Lit Chat for me at Greenlight Bookstore’s midnight release party), but because I didn’t much care for Beautiful World, Where Are You, I was skeptical about diving into Intermezzo in case the trend of disappointment continued. I’m relieved to report it did not!
Intermezzo gets back to what Sally Rooney does best in this story about two brothers grieving the loss of their father. Peter, the older brother, is in his early thirties and dating Naomi, a woman in her early twenties, despite still being in love with his former long-term girlfriend, Sylvia. Ivan, the younger brother, is a 22-year-old former chess prodigy struggling to regain his momentum after pausing competition during his father’s illness. At a local tournament, he meets and falls for Margaret, a divorcée in her mid-thirties.
I liked that each of these relationships felt, if not entirely new in themselves, then at least novel enough to engage with readers’ preconceptions of morality and propriety in love, attraction, and relationships. Sibling relationships are comparatively less common in contemporary fiction, especially ones with an age gap as big as Peter’s and Ivan’s, and I thought Rooney really pulled off the difficulty of seeing past each other’s childhood memories of the other to view each other as adults and equals, and unpacking the frustrations and resentments that come with ultimately leading very different lives outside of the original shared home.
The pure optimism of Margaret and Ivan’s romance is tempered by the very real pressures of how Margaret’s past and the prejudices of her small-town life hinder their ability to publicly embrace their relationship. For both of them, their romance is an opportunity to embrace being selfish for the first time in a long time, as both had been caretakers to some extent in previous familial and romantic relationships.
In contrast, the selfishness that defines Peter, Naomi, and Sylvia’s relationships provides the foundation for most of the main conflict. Peter is in love with both of them, which makes his condescension towards Ivan and Margaret’s relationship hypocritical and needlessly cruel. Naomi is in love with Peter but also manipulating him for his money, their relationship an ongoing battle for dominance and control. Sylvia wields her physical inability to be sexually intimate as a means of both provoking Peter and keeping him at arm’s distance, refusing to absolve him of his suffering while also refusing to let him go.
None of these characters are clear heroes or villains, but equally flawed people whose decisions you may not agree with, but by nature of being in their heads, you fully understand. Rooney’s trademark stream-of-consciousness style allows the reader to intimately experience the emotional journeys raging inside her characters’ heads, for better or worse (some heads definitely make for more pleasant reading than others). This is what Rooney is so good at, and what I’ve loved about her writing ever since reading Conversations With Friends in my early twenties and recognizing my own motivations and mistakes in Frances, even if her circumstances were wildly different from mine. Intermezzo is the same: the circumstances are specific, but the experiences of love, grief, desire, and shame are universal.
That’s all for now! As it’s already quite late into November, I can report that I’ve definitely been turning more to reading as escapism while also looking for opportunities to refocus and recommit to my writer brain, and I’m excited to tell you about it next month. I’m also already thinking about my end-of-the-year reading bracket, so start placing your bets now!
Until next time, be kind to yourselves, and happy reading.
<3 Catherine
Housekeeping note: all book links go to my Bookshop storefront, where each purchase supports independent bookstores (and this newsletter, because I get a small percentage of each sale).