Reading to Recommend

Welcome back to Hot Girl Library! I was supposed to send this out last week but I was working on another piece and can only do one thing at a time. I hope this was worth the wait!

This is the Hot Girl Reading Posture™️, obviously

As I said in the last email, I used to be a bookseller (and I’m going to milk this as long as I can to give this newsletter some credibility.) While I left that job for unrelated reasons, I was beginning to tire of the responsibility of reading to recommend. Because I needed to sell books, I suppressed my critical voice and trained my attention solely on the merits of a text. Customers were obviously more likely to buy books when I only had good things to say about them. Of course, I was happy to recommend many books and used superlative language when promoting them. I often said “this is the best book I’ve ever read about mental health” for The Collective Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang or “if you care at all about the state of contemporary literature, this is the writer to watch” for books by Akwaeke Emezi. For titles I hadn’t read yet, I parroted blurbs or general buzz online. Here’s a book that is already in the canon of queer literature (In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado), here’s a book that will make you cry for days (A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara), here’s a book that will ruin other books for you (The Secret History by Donna Tartt). (People who’ve read The Secret History are always telling me that they can never find anything that lives up to it. If you’ve read it, please let me know if this applies to you too.)

I drew the line at lying. I’d only talk up a book if people I respected had recommended it or if it fit the profile of the customer. However, the tension between wanting to talk honestly about books and wanting to read widely meant pressure for every book to be perfect. An impossible task! The world is full of enjoyable books that don’t speak to larger societal concerns or dazzle readers with their impeccable craft. The world is also full of books that disappoint. In my personal capacity, I’m perfectly fine with reading (or abandoning) disappointing books. This proved frustrating as a bookseller because every minute I spent reading a subpar book was time taken away from reading a potential bestseller. Here are some books that missed the mark for me:

Nimita’s Place by Akshita Nanda

I have a personal policy of not giving Singlit negative reviews* but since this title won the last Singapore Literature Prize, I think it can handle it. Nimita’s Place is a sprawling novel that covers two timelines, two countries and a rotating cast of secondary characters. To its credit, this is an incredibly readable book. I cared enough about each character to read on. It does, however, seem more like a soap opera than a successful novel. It’s bloated – 464 pages that probably could have been 300 without sacrificing quality. 

*More on this another time! 

The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll

This could have been a Youtube video. In fact, I think it is? I read this when I was getting into bullet journalling. This feels like a classic example of somebody getting a book deal because they went viral and then not having enough material to pad out an entire book. It tries too hard to be a self-help book when it doesn’t need to say anything significant about spirituality or the meaning of life.

Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki

I’m currently struggling through this one. I thought I’d like it based on the publisher’s description. (The first English language publication of the work of Izumi Suzuki, a legend of Japanese science fiction and a countercultural icon.) Speculative fiction always requires some suspension of disbelief but I think it’s most effective when the rules of the imagined universe cast the real world in new light. The opening story in this collection is about a world where men are outlawed. To me, it didn’t seem to ask more than “what if men were oppressed instead?” There are some good moments in other stories though:

Reading about reading

This story about American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.

This was one of the biggest book stories of last year. Tl;dr: American Dirt is a book about the Mexican-American border that’s been criticised for its insensitivity around the racial politics it attempts to address. The piece is a really well-reported account of how the controversy evolved. It’s also fantastic at raising questions about the business of bookselling. The mechanics of making a bestseller involve publishers, booksellers (like what I was doing but on a global scale), other authors, journalists, Oprah, those weirdos on Goodreads…

Something I read recently

Walking on the Ceiling by Ayşegül Savaş

I thought I’d combat some of the forces outlined in the above article by picking up a book I’d not heard any news about. If the author’s name looks familiar, I linked to her piece about women writers in the last newsletter. I really enjoyed this novel. It falls into one of my favourite genres – stories where nothing really happens – and is such a good example of the style. More than anything, it’s a book about the stories we tell each ourselves in order to make sense of life. That’s really a non-statement from me but this is a ungraspable book. My virtual copy has just been returned on Overdrive so you can probably grab it on the NLB system if you’re interested.

One non-book thing

I’m trying to “get back into movies”. I resisted for the longest time because filmmaking is a medium of time and I resent being held captive for however long the director decides. Two realisations: a) I can pause movies whenever I want if I’m watching them at home. b) 70 minutes is the optimal duration for a film. Two 70 minute films I watched recently are The Woman Who Ran by Hong Sang Soo (screening once more at Oldham Theatre this Saturday) and Mussolini’s Sister by Juna Suleiman. Mussolini’s Sister is part of a Columbia University programme on the Palestinian experience and might still be available for streaming when you open this email.

One last thing, sorry!

If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen my (empty) promise that this issue would be about the new Ethos title Raffles Renounced. I’ve decided to postpone it til next week because I scored tickets to the very exclusive book launch at the Substation this Saturday. I’m curious to see what a literary event will be like in the “new normal”, especially since there will be no “mingling” or book signing. Truly, I only go to lit events to chat to people I already know so I’m not sure how fun this will be. Thankfully, I now have this newsletter so I can justify almost anything in the name of #content. The event will be livestreamed on Facebook too. The book is still available to preorder for a couple more days. I recommend getting the bundle that comes with a recording of the play Merdeka if you didn’t get to catch it during its run.

Ok bye! Talk soon!