Books I've read and where I read them*
9/29/2021
Cultish in Puglia, Italy
This is one of those books that will stay with me a long time because it gave me a new framework through which to see the world. I'm also very happy it introduced me to the phrase "heuristic reaction." I love words. I love language. I love understanding how language shapes who we are and how we move through the world together.
Underlined
With words, we breathe reality into being.
They were raised to see the good in people, even to their own detriment.
In this way, it’s not desperation or mental illness that consistently suckers people into exploitative groups—instead, it’s an overabundance of optimism.
9/24/2021
Writers & Lovers in Puglia, Italy
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that this book made me want to become a writer. Maybe it was the almost saccharine happy ending, or maybe I read it in the first place because that life already sounds romantic to me.
9/9/2021
Beautiful World, Where Are You in Amsterdam
I wasn't sure for a while, but after this I've decided I like Sally Rooney's writing. Its sparseness has a way of sucking you in. It's blunt and specific. Her pontificating is very thinly veiled, but so is a lot of literature. When she gets poetic, it's surprisingly magnetic.
Underlined
The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease. There is something wrong with them, and when we look at them and learn from them, something goes wrong with us.
What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?
8/25/2021
The Hole in Brooklyn, NY
This was short and weird. I liked it. It wasn't what I was expecting.
8/6/2021
The Case Against Free Speech on the New York City subway
P. E. Moskowitz is one of my favorite journalists right now, and reading this book solidified that for me.
Underlined
We don’t need to look very far back to know that free speech is a conditional freedom in this country, and that those conditions are nearly always defined by those in power.
If we are debating the free speech rights of people like Milo, whom are we ignoring? What about the free speech rights of the people he is recommending we deport or imprison?
What is and is not free speech is in the eye of the beholder.
6/28/2021
The Midnight Library at home
This was sweet and an easy read, but a little too on the nose and cheesy for me.
5/25/2021
Sarahland in Sea Ranch, CA
Yet another funny surrealist short story collection! I'm consistent, I loved it! Each story stars a woman named Sarah, from a freshman in college, to a sex worker, to the first Sarah.
Underlined
Probably he talked shit about sex workers and voted Republican, which made Sarah sad to think about because besides probably wanting all women dead, he seemed really sweet.
It was amazing, Sarah felt, how whole worlds existed right beside or within the world you thought you were in.
4/9/2021
Death In Her Hands in quarantine
The more Otessa Moshfegh I read, the more I love her writing. This one didn't get as much attention as My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but I liked it more. The mystery and deeply unreliable narrator were more up my alley.
Underlined
The mind must be spoken to, Vesta, otherwise it starts to atrophy. ... "But if the mind talks to itself," I said, "isn't it just saying what it wants to hear?"
4/5/2021
Luster in quarantine
Underlined
His joy is raw in a way that makes me feel like I can unzip my skin suit and show him all the ooze inside. But not yet. There is a sadness about his fervor, the way it feels slightly put on, as if he has something to prove.
A woman so unthreatened by all of New York's women that she has given this nubile horde a wholesale blessing to fuck her husband.
I have come to the part of the night where I am incapable of any uppercase emotion, and every circuit responsible for my cellular regeneration has begun to smoke.
01/18/2021
What Tech Calls Thinking in quarantine
This put into words so much of what I've felt about the tech world. I've always observed the tech world has very little interest in the past, and this does a good job tracing back all the platitudes everyone repeats and holds.
Underlined
It describes our tendency to think that the meaning of a work of art comes out of the specific mind of the creator, not out of the preexisting rules that creator worked within nor the broader spirit of society and time.
The genius aesthetic that rules the tech industry relies again and again on this purely gestural kind of courage, on hyping everyday things into grand acts of nonconformism and even resistance. You repeat what people around you are saying anyway and get to call yourself a freethinker.
The rhetoric of disruption relies on actively misunderstanding and misrepresenting the past.
12/22/2020
I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are in Cambria, in quarantine
I love Rachel Bloom, and I loved listening to her read her own book.
12/19/2020
Such A Fun Age at Buena Vista Park, in quarantine
I can't wait for Reese Witherspoon to star in this once she adapts it as a Hulu series. I liked the book enough, but I'm not sure if I mean that as a compliment.
08/30/2020
The Crying Book on Long Island, in quarantine
It took me a while to read this. I finished it when I visited home to see my grandma before she passed away. The timing is appropriate, I suppose.
Underlined
If you see a person crying inside a car, you know they are already held.
Empathy can be a hole through which one falls into despair.
06/19/2020
How To Change Your Mind for book club, in quarantine
The amount I talk about and recommend this book now is very annoying. You've been warned.
Underlined
People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.
And then there was this light, it was the pure light of love and divinity, and it was with me and no words were needed.
04/25/2020
Calypso in quarantine
I need to read more David Sedaris! I listened to the audiobook and it was funny and necessary.
03/22/2020
Bluets at Buena Vista Park, in quarantine
I discovered a love of prose poetry and this kicked off a phase of learning Joni Mitchell on the piano (including Blue, of course).
Underlined
Do not, however, make the mistake that all desire is yearning.
At the bottom of the swimming pool, I watched the white winter light spangle the cloudy blue and I knew together they made God.
At times I fake my enthusiasm. At others, I fear I am incapable of communicating the depth of it.
03/20/2020
Little Fires Everywhere in quarantine
I'll be honest, I started the TV show and then couldn't wait for more episodes so I read the book in 2 days.
Underlined
Mia realized that she was crossing into a place she would have to go alone.
A lifetime of practical and comfortable considerations settled atop the spark inside her like a thick, heavy blanket.
03/17/2020
Trick Mirror for book club
I really liked Tolentino's essays, but I almost already agreed with them so much that I found reading this kind of boring?
Underlined
Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them. A well-practiced, conclusive narrative is usually a dubious one.
02/13/2020
Maybe You Should Talk To Someone for book club
I'd recommend this to anyone considering therapy but feeling apprehensive about it.
Underlined
Maybe happiness is sometimes.
Instead of leaning into the goodness that comes their way, they become hypervigilant, always waiting for something to go wrong.
01/24/2020
Homesick For Another World at Matching Half
I started this a few years ago and I finally picked it back up and finished it. I think I didn't get Moshfegh's writing at first, but after I read My Year Of Rest And Relaxation I understood her work better. It's brutally honest and darkly funny (...like many books on here)
Underlined
I hated my boyfriend but I liked the neighborhood.
11/17/2019
The Immortalists for book club
Underlined
Judaism had taught her to keep running, no matter who tried to hold her hostage. It had taught her to create her own opportunities, to turn rock into water and water to blood. It had taught her that such things were possible.
Something is pulling her back to the person she’s been all along.
11/06/2019
In The Dream House at Home
Carmen Maria Machado is my favorite author right now and I was so excited to read this memoir. She puts words to the felt but unspoken like no other. She brings to light how unproductive archetypes of traumatic experiences can be, and how the subtleties of the less extreme ones can fall through the cracks.
Underlined
I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.
The nature of archival silence is that certain people's narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.
11/03/2019
How To Do Nothing at The Panhandle
This crystalized so many things I've been feeling and thinking lately. What I actually have to say about this book needs much more than a little blurb here. This presents a reframing on our lives today that we'd all benefit from reflecting on. It also inspired me to start learning the trees around San Francisco, particularly at the park I mostly read this book in.
Underlined
Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.
09/12/2019
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber at Home
Underlined
It is the story of the ugly decisions made around user data and personal information as technology firms seek to exploit consumer data. But most of all, it is a story about how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong, and a cautionary tale that ends in spectacular disaster.
09/18/2019
Normal People in Portland, OR
This was a really sweet, easy read.
Underlined
Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn’t know if she would ever find out where it was and become part of it.
09/01/2019
Severance in Seattle, WA
This is a story about the apocalypse, but it is much more a story about our routines and how they form us.
Underlined
To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.
07/03/2019
The Fifth Risk at Dolores Park
This made me appreciate good government even more than I already do. It was also horrifying for that same reason.
Underlined
We don’t really celebrate the accomplishments of government employees. They exist in our society to take the blame.
07/03/2019
Bad Blood during the Tour Du Mont Blanc
I actually really hated that I was reading this while on a beautiful hike, but it was my only book on my kindle, and it was an incredibly juicy read.
06/21/2019
Someone Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory in Rotterdam, Netherlands
This is one of many form-bending absurdist short story collections I've read lately and I'm happy to be continuing the phase.
Underlined
The things that are the most important aren't shared; they are important to only us.
06/12/2019
Hunger in Amsterdam, Netherlands
Sometimes all you can do is bare witness.
Underlined
I am weary of all our sad stories—not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, that there are so many.
05/30/2019
How To Date Men When You Hate Men in Positano, Italy
This is the funniest book I've read in such a long time. I thought it was actually really loving towards men and it was a good reminder that dating is supposed to be fun. I loved her point about how easy it is for women to fall into supporting a partner, and how important it is to forge your own path and focus on your own art.
Underlined
Whatever happens will happen, but the pay is certain: you'll always be able to write, or talk, or paint, or knit (why do people knit??) about it. You can make it into something beautiful or hilarious or genius or so incredibly dumb that it's hilarious and genius.
05/27/2019
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation in Berlin, Germany
This book is about a woman who basically takes a butt load of drugs and fucks off for a year. It's from her point of view, so as you can imagine, this was incredibly depressing, and made me feel kind of insane. But I must have liked it because I plowed through it in one day, and it was actually weirdly funny.
Underlined
Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.
03/2019–
The Order of Time at Golden Gate Park
Still reading this one, but already loving how poetic science can be. In a weird way, it talks about some of the same themes that Her Body And Other Parties does.
Underlined
Perhaps poetry is another of science's deepest roots: the capacity to see beyond the visible.
02/13/2019
Her Body And Other Parties at a cafe in Barcelona
I love this one so much I've been rereading it. I'm forced me to grapple with the absurdity of what it feels like to move through the world as myself, and it resonates in a way that can only be felt. The way form and structure are twisted delights me over and over again. It makes me feel like I'm losing my mind in the best way. We live in an illogical world and trying to make sense of it is what makes us crazy.
Underlined
I took a step toward her. “It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said.
12/13/2018
Choose Your Own Disaster in my bed
I feel like Dana is my friend and I got to hear her funny, honest, deeply personal story.
11/26/2018
The Power during my commute
I haven't fallen into a story so quick in a while: electrifying, enrapturing, thought-provoking, heavy-handed revenge porn.
Underlined
They understood their strength, all at once.
09/19/2018
Yes We (Still) Can at my apartment
I listen to the podcast so it was an easy, funny, approximation of that.
07/30/2018
Never Let Me Go at my apartment
This story makes my whole chest hurt.
Underlined
And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field for whatseemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the windkept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us from being swept away into the night.
2017–
The Faraway Nearby at Buena Vista Park
I like this book so much that I have trouble getting through it. Every sentence feels like a whole universe that I want to soak up and live in. I think a lot about how the stories we tell shape our lives and Rebecca Solnit says it more beautifully than I ever could.
Underlined
Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.
06/25/2018
The Sirens of Titan in Alamo Square
I read a bunch of Vonnegut a few years ago when I had a long commute into Brooklyn, and somehow missed this one. His books are always easy for me to pick up when I'm not in the mood to read anything else.
Underlined
The on button simply started a flight from Mars. The off button was connected to nothing. It was installed at the insistence of Martian mental-health experts, who said that human beings were always happier with machinery they thought they could turn off.
02/15/2018
O Fallen Angel in Alamo Square
This is a weird book. I think it's in a good way. I read it in an hour.
01/28/2018
Bad Feminist at Matching Half Cafe
I should have read this years ago, but I'm glad I finally did.
Underlined
Everybody gossips, so if you are going to gossip about your friends, at least make it fun and interesting. As a corollary, never say “I never lie” or “I never gossip” because you are lying.
01/05/2018
Her Body and Other Parties on Long Island, NY
This is one of my favorite books I've read in a really long time.