Out of the deep, dark river
Lit Chat Vol. 27 — May in Review
Hi friends,
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, but especially to mine, because he’s the very best!
I’ve got another mini for you this month because May was BUSY, but I’ll make up for that brevity with two announcements:
First: my next in-person reading club will be Sunday, June 29th! If you’re new around here, this is when I invite all my friends over to my apartment (or maybe somewhere with better air conditioning this time around, TBD), and everyone comes prepared to chat about something (book/story/poem/article) they’ve read recently. More info on the Partiful here, hope to see you there!
If you’re interested in a more structured reading group, my second announcement is that I’m launching a little summer book club to read Swann’s Way, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Since enough of you nerds have expressed interest in tackling Proust with me, I’m planning to experiment with a hybrid format that combines a few in-person meetings with a weekly Substack note from me about the pages covered, including some questions for reflection/discussion!
I will most likely throw the weekly posts behind a (very small) paywall (if I can figure out how to do that), and I’m also planning on using Substack’s Chat feature as an ongoing discussion center, but open to feedback/other ideas if we try it and don’t love it. This is very much a trial run to see how a project like this could work!
With the rough schedule I have, it should take about seven weeks to read, starting the second week of July (7/7). If you’d like to join, make sure you’re subscribed below and keep an eye out for the official launch email coming in a couple weeks!
Okay, now onto the books! If you’d like to read this on the blog and check out the squashy mini pyramid, here you go:
SOLID SUPPORTS:
Burning Thing — Zoë Bodzas
Zoë is a dear friend whose talent and wisdom I have admired since our very first online writing workshop all the way back in 2020. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of getting to watch so many of the poems collected here evolve from products of a biannual poem-a-day challenge to being published in national magazines, and to now celebrate their recent publication in chapbook form with No, Dear!
Zoë’s abundant curiosity and keen focus are applied with equal generosity to everything from dad radio to errant space rocks, and her playfulness shines in her experimentation with form. But it’s the poems that combine nostalgia and tenderness with a sense of awe for both the vastness of our universe and the intimate minutiae of daily life that have etched themselves into my heart and brain. (I often catch myself repeating “i’m still here / you’re still here” from “eager years” like a mantra.) Nobody does wonder quite like Zoë, and it’s a wonder and a treat to know her and support her on this journey.
On Writing — Stephen King
After about a month of On Writing laying untouched on my coffee table, I was inspired to actually open it by Clara’s Jan-March reading recap in Hmm That’s Interesting:
Like Clara, I had never actually read a Stephen King novel, but I enjoyed getting to know the man behind the horror machine through his own frank humor and honest accounting of his struggles and successes. Also like Clara, I didn’t learn anything necessarily new or groundbreaking, but it did force me to have a real reckoning with my adverb usage. Plus, “10% shorter” is a solid general rule of thumb for second drafts that will also be sticking with me.
Rejection — Tony Tulathimutte
My hot take on Rejection is I wanted to be more obsessed with it than I was! Rarely is a short story collection quite so buzzy, and I think the shock factor of depravity in so many of these stories accounts for most of that buzz. Tulathimutte’s characters experience myriad forms of social and romantic rejection, for reasons that mostly boil down to the characters just kind of sucking. This feels fun and salacious in an almost voyeuristic way at first, and I especially enjoyed the opening stories that lambaste the “good guy” trope and the toxic potential of the group chat, but it lost me when it started to take things to the extreme around the middle/end of the collection (iykyk). That said, I think as a whole, it’s a wild satire on modern relationships and the question of what we owe each other as individuals within a morally fraught society.
THE TIPPY TOP:
Good Morning, Midnight — Jean Rhys
I emerged from the D.C. Metro over Memorial Day Weekend to find a library book sale waiting right at the station exit, which felt like a fairy trap laid explicitly for me. I picked up Good Morning, Midnight, (along with The Heat of the Day, Tenth of December, and The Virgin in the Garden), and proceeded to read the entire thing in one sitting on my Amtrak home that afternoon.
Good Morning, Midnight is the story of a woman who has returned to interwar Paris in search of a fresh start, despite the ghosts of lost loves and past traumas that seem to lurk around every once-familiar corner. It’s a portrait of a woman in physical and psychological decline, which only escalates when she is targeted by a charming young man who believes she has something more to give.
I was fascinated by the way Rhys layers the Paris of Sasha’s past—as a young girl in love, a soon-to-be mother, and then a single, devastated woman on her own—with the Paris of her present, full of disappointed potential. Sasha’s first-person narration is Mrs. Dalloway-esque, slipping in and out of memory as she goes about her daily errands, purchasing new clothes and cutting her hair in pursuit of a reinvention that can never truly be. Yet it’s Joyce’s Ulysses that is clearly evoked in the “Yes - yes - yes…” of the final line, when Sasha meets her fate with questionable relish: is she a victim or a manipulator? Was there ever really a choice? These are the questions that haunt my Amtrak rides!
And that’s May! I’m looking forward to next month, when I’ll be doing a check-in on the reading goals I set for myself in the beginning of the year. In the meantime, you can find me in all the usual places if you’d like to chat about these or any other books!
Until next time, 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).