Thank you all SO much for all your feedback on the first issue of Recommended Reading !
I am so excited about all the conversations this newsletter has already sparked and love hearing from those of you who’ve read things I recommended so please keep letting me know what you think. Since the last issue, I’ve been recovering from getting all my wisdom teeth out (not so fun) so have had lots of time to dive into some great reads (very fun) — the best of which I’ve highlighted below. Enjoy!
Cheers,
Zaneta
What I’ve been reading
Whenever I read a great short story collection I wonder why I don’t read them more often because the best ones are pure delight, like gorging on an assortment of expensive chocolate with each perfectly crafted morsel exploding in flavor and sensation. Randa Jarrar’s Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a great short story collection. Jarrar’s stories center the lives of (mostly) Arab women around the world from Cairo to New York to Sydney to Istanbul and every one is uniquely inventive. Her wry sense of humor is evident throughout and her straightforward style is all the more impactful for how it blends with her occasional incorporation of magical realism. As a whole collection is almost addictive, I couldn’t put it down and finished the whole thing in one sitting.
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s tales of pioneer life and the American prairie are among the children’s classics that I come back to even as an adult. Wilder’s sparse but beautiful language, like the unbroken prairie she idealized, has always been deeply soothing and it’s never surprised me that her tales of hard work, perseverance, and simple pleasures have stayed so popular over the years. However, there’s so much more to her story, and the story of Westward expansion in the US in general, which is why I was completed enthralled by Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder by Caroline Fraser. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and is incredibly comprehensive, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records to fill in the details behind the broad strokes of Wilder’s books.
Jo Walton’s Or What You Will reminded me a lot of two of my favorite books, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea with the way it plays with the conventional structure of a novel and creates stories within stories. There are a lot of different strands running through the book, with three distinct narratives and characters that cross between them, but she does manage to weave them all together into a very satisfying whole. It took a little while for me to get into it, but once I did I really enjoyed the book so I would encourage you to stick with it. Ultimately, it’s a beautiful meditation on the essence of creating art and telling stories, and why those things are so important.
Shorter reads
If you’re looking for a quicker read, here are some poems, articles and essays I’ve enjoyed lately:
Taco Bell Quarterly is a literary magazine where all the works are in some way related to Taco Bell and I am obsessed with it. Their Fall issue dropped on Wednesday and is packed with so much good stuff, my favorites of which were this story about a baby raised in a Taco Bell and this ode to Taco Bell’s secret menu.
I really enjoyed this Collectors Weekly feature on the Exercise Book Archive, which is a collection of children’s composition books dating from the 18th century to the present. I loved learning about how the collection came about and then went down a slight wormhole clicking through and reading random books on the archive site.
Aline Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half blog was one of my favorite places on the internet in the early 2010s and I was stoked to learn that she’s broken her seven-year silence to release a new book, Solutions and Other Problems. This excerpt was bizarre and hilarious and has me so excited to read the whole thing.
Lizzo is Vogue’s October cover star and the accompanying profile is wide-ranging and really thoughtful, touching on her views on body positivity (she “would like to be body-normative” instead), Black Lives Matter, her “crossover appeal,” and vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
“When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud.” This interview with Judith Butler on the culture wars, J.K. Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times” was an absolute masterclass. I found myself stopping to re-read every single answer because she packs so much impact into such succinct responses.
This New York Times feature on the eBay cockroach stalking scandal was an absolutely wild ride, that, as the author notes “vividly shows how the internet makes people crazy, often without them ever realizing it.”
A 19-year-old girl who belonged to a Dalit community was raped and brutally killed by four upper caste men in Uttar Pradesh. Since then, another Dalit woman has been raped and killed in the same state. These are not just horrifying rape cases, but caste atrocities, and this essay by Jyotsna Siddharth explains why it’s important to make that distinction.
Subscriber recommendations
This week’s personalized recommendations are for Lauren, who is looking for a book that’s “mystery, entertaining, fiction, page-turner, funny.” With that in mind, my top picks for Lauren are:
The quick pitch for Destination Wedding by Diksha Basu is ‘Crazy Rich Asians, but in Delhi.’ There’s definitely a lot of similarities — a sprawling cast of larger-than-life characters gathered for a big wedding, several romantic subplots, a fish-out-of-water heroine — but Destination Wedding absolutely stands on it’s own. It’s funny but sensitive and doesn’t stray away from engaging with themes of class, globalisation, and ethics to deliver a story that’s just as much about family and belonging as excess and extravagance.
Christopher Moore is one of my favorite humor writers and Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings is him at his absurd best. The novel follows marine behavioral biologist Nate Quinn and the series of events that unfolds when he spots a whale that has “Bite me” spelled out in foot-high letters on its tail that no one else on his crew can see. Full of wacky but endearing characters getting themselves in preposterous situations, it’s at once educational, satirical and hilarious.
Finally, Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary is one of my all-time favorite books. One of her less widely known works, it centers not on experienced investigators Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, but on Tommy and Tuppence, two young people flat broke and out of work in post-war England who decide to go into business together as Young Adventurers Ltd. “willing to do anything, go anywhere” and find themselves drawn into a mysterious plot of danger, secrets, and lies.
As a reminder, I’ll be sharing curated reading recommendations for a random subscriber every issue so if you’d like to put your name in the draw, please fill out this quick form!
I want to hear from you!
If you decide to read anything I’ve recommended — let me know what you think! And if you have any thoughts or feedback on this issue, or reading recommendations you’d like to share with me, I’d love to hear those too. Feel free to comment below or email me directly at zanetapereira@hotmail.com
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