a little bit of this

In the last week or so, I read the new Sarah J. Maas book in a day.* Devoted my weekend to Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and Iron Flame. Albeit, I have 6% left in the latter. Plus, I finished Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld and Beautyland by Marie Helene Bertino.

This week, I am working my way through The World According to Joan Didion, 2666, and Rent Boy. None of my reading has really inspired me to do a deeper write up for you guys so below you’ll find The Five Sense, an interesting quote I heard from an Edith Wharton novel, and some recent reads.

THE FIVE SENSES

Seeing: Lots of art. I popped into Unit London where I saw Mauro C. Martin’s paintings of tennis players whose balls have replaced by the house cat. The series underscores how both the artist and athlete must practice.

Hearing: Merve Emre’s new podcast The Critic and Her Publics.

Smelling: Gypsy Water

Tasting: Kimchi Fried Rice and fresh cilantro because I somehow ended up with a plant when I ordered some groceries last week.

Touching: Heat Holder Socks — ideal for winter days.

I went to a talk at the Edition in London about Sofia Coppola called DAUGHTER MOTHER BABY GIRL where the speaker read us this quote from Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country:

RECENT READS:

• Patrick Raddeen Keefe back at it again! This time, we have a New Yorker article about a London teenager who was pretending to be an oligarch’s son?!? It’s a searing look at the failures of the nuclear family and the city’s moral decay.

  • “London is so beautiful that it can be easy to forget that much of it was built on imperial plunder. This dissonance between the veneer of refinement and the sinister forces pulsing beneath has become especially stark in recent decades, as the United Kingdom, stripped of its empire, has found a new role as a commodious base for global kleptocrats.”

  • “Some people expressed an even darker view: Britain had become so reliant on the largesse of Russia’s oligarchs that decisions had been made at a high level not to persecute London’s new mafia class, thereby extending to them the courtesy of being able to kill their enemies on British soil with impunity.”

  • “Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London.”

• Since I was young, my genre-fic of choice has also been fantasy. With the rise of romantasy, I’ve found myself wanting to get to the bottom of these popular books. There are not a lot of articles about the subject. But, I did find this Dazed article which has using the following phrase to describe part of the success of these books: “a viral conduit for unexamined fantasies.”

  • “The future of romantasy is likely to be determined in the next couple of years: we’ve yet to see whether those TV contracts will bear fruit, particularly since those dragon wings and fairy…appendages will take time and money to render. If they do, it may mark the official welcoming of erotic romance – a perennial financial powerhouse, but one usually siloed away from the modern commercial bookshop – into the heart of contemporary media culture. If they don’t, it will signal the delicate limits of what books and clusters of fans are afforded respect, regardless of the money they bring in. For now, we are going to continue to see massive new bestsellers in romantasy, and a lot of young readers crafting their tastes in its image. And who knows – maybe we’ll get a really, really good one.”

• I skimmed this old Vogue article about Kaia Gerber but there’s a quote from Lauren Oyler about celebs reading which made me lol:

  • ““There’s a strain of thought that says it’s terrible that books have seemingly become accessories in a kind of Instagram-­inflected way,” she says. “But I think it’s great for beautiful people with charmed lives to be exposed to what is sort of a difficult, ultimately pretty depressing novel, because there isn’t a lot of that perspective in mainstream American culture right now.””

• Writerly advice from Nabakov courtesy of LitHub:

  • “I do not begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete. Every card is rewritten many times.”

• The books published by McNally Editions have a real sway over me. Their most recent release is Henry Van Dyke’s Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes. This article by the author’s nephew describes what makes this farcical novel so unique as well as the author’s background.

  • “For its very lack of militancy, Ladies has to be one of the most unusual, most hopeful, and funniest novels to come out of the Civil Rights era.”

  • “Hoping to “outgrow” his homosexuality, Henry would have several encounters with girls and women. The first, when he was thirteen, took place with two boys and a girl “from the wrong side of the tracks,” and resulted in a pregnancy. The girl died from a back-alley abortion paid for by the three boys, who never spoke to each other again, and who kept the terrible secret. Henry’s parents never found out.”

  • “In Heidelberg, he continued his musical education, taking private piano lessons under photos of his teacher, Franz Büchner, giving the Nazi salute. The rigidity of these lessons shook Henry in his ambition to become a professional pianist, although he continued to play all his life. He loved Scriabin, Poulenc, Granados, Albéniz, Liszt, Rachmanino. always. Even at the end of his life, during his last weeks in hospice, he used paper keyboards to practice his fingering.”

• Rachel Tashjian explores how Marc Jabos and John Galliano, fashion veterans, are making runways interesting again.

  • “But already this year, two designers, Marc Jacobs and John Galliano, created shows that recharted the conversation on what fashion’s purpose is right now — that the most meaningful thing a fashion show can be at this moment is a space to play. To imagine. To experiment.”

  • “Glamour can be demanding and hard, mercurial and tough to embrace, especially if it’s not your natural state.”

  • This is a great sentence: “Scores of Brassaï-inspired urchins lurched into a nightclub, corseted and dressed in meticulously draped rubber and mesh.”

  • “Actually, one of the most fascinating things about fashion is its total embrace of its commercial necessity, unlike art, which pretends to be above it though it’s absolutely not.”

• One of my favorite reads from 2022 was Sea State, the memoir of a journalist fascinated by off-shore oil rigging who embarks on a research project but actually ends up having an affair with the first man she interviews. The book is dark, raw, and totally chaotic. I was inspired to Google the author as I’m eager for another book by her. Instead, I stumbled across this article for Esquire which analyzes if her candid relationship writing deters prospective relationships.

  • “When my last boyfriend and I argued, he used to say I didn't care enough to write about him, which suggests that, far from being scared off, he quite fancied the role of muse. Personally, I think this is an insane complaint.”

*Not monetized