Reading for pleasure can feel like an elusive luxury amid the perpetual, cyclical motion of college. Over the summer, however, time regains its elasticity, yielding a sweet languor I’ve already begun to miss.
I looked forward to my summer reading because it would be an entirely personal selection where I’d prioritize the aesthetics of words, the immediate relatability of contemporary fiction and the inimitable depth of female interiority as the thematic focus. I did not have a pre-curated reading list. Rather, I stumbled upon books to read by chance, affinity, and more often than not, on whims.
The book that stayed with me the most was Catherine Lacy’s latest, “The Möbius Book”. As a newly declared English and Religion double major, the book hit close to home. It’s divided into two mirroring halves. One is a memoir, the other fiction. Despite differences of form, the central concerns and basic plot lines remain the same — a woman writer grapples with a tragic breakup as her conversations and thoughts unravel regarding human relation, writing as healing, love and sex, and most importantly, finding and losing faith.
Other than its formal inventiveness, what truly resonated with me was the book’s attitude of reverence towards what is ultimately unknowable about the human experience. There is a special relief when an author, after intense bouts of intellectualizing, suddenly pulls back and acknowledges the plain unsolvable mystery of it all — “what the body is, what death is, what emotions are, how anything really works at all.”
In an interview, Lacy expresses that she has long wanted to write a book about faith; the destined loss of it and the seeming impossibility of ever regaining it. One of the most poignant moments in the book is the conversation Edie (the female protagonist in the fictional half) claims to have had with a dying dog during her semester abroad in Greece. Whether real or symbolic, this exchange between a confused human and a dog on his last breath challenges our conventional understanding of life on earth by alluding to reincarnation, the divine and the unity between different life forms. Strikingly, the dog says at one point: “Men were created in order to destroy everything, and women were created so there would be one thing they couldn’t destroy.”
In July, I took a trip to Nepal. After catching a passing glimpse of Nepal Book Depot in a taxi, I knew immediately I had to return for a thorough book hunt. Resembling a dimly lit, narrow alleyway, the bookstore features an astoundingly wide selection across space and time. Soon after stepping in, I had found four books to take home with me.
“August Blue” is a work of fiction by Deborah Levy. I had started reading this book on the trip, so it now bears the nostalgic imprint of Kathmandu’s stultifying heat, exquisite temples, and meandering streets bursting with chaos.
In a dreamlike land where rules of conventional behavior are suspended, unbelievable characters are presented with such assured forwardness that they start to radiate resonance. Elsa, a renowned pianist, walks off the stage mid-performance and sets off on a wandering journey across Europe, convinced that a strange woman, her conceived double, follows her around to different countries. Liberated from the present-tense trance of performance, Elsa finally delves into the buried history of her self-formation in a complex web of familial relationships, kin and adopted, like seeing mist slowly disperse on a dewy morning.
Reading the book was like being enveloped in an amorphous mood. Levy is a writer extremely measured in doling out details and explanations, keeping everything she writes thinly veiled and resolutions just beyond reach.
Next up is “Arlington Park” by Rachel Cusk, a writer I’ve become quite enamoured with recently. Similar to her famous trilogy “Outline Series”, “Arlington Park” features Cusk’s signature razor-sharp analysis of human interiority. Reading Outline (the first in the trilogy) in my “Truth and Other Fictions” class this past Spring, I felt reservations towards Cusk’s overly neat imposition of order and narrative integrity onto the messy and ultimately untraceable human life.
In “Arlington Park”, however, there is a noticeable softening of tone as Cusk delves into the unfurling consciousness of domestic women, each of them running a household in a London-adjacent, bourgeois neighborhood called Arlington Park. What surprised me about the book was how much it reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” There is a similar tendency to metaphorize female interiority through botanical images, to illuminate the richness of femininity and the uncommunicable divide between husband and wife, and to expose the fierce clash between the creative life and the domestic life in adult womanhood. Seeing as “To the Lighthouse” is my favorite read of all time, I had a blast reading “Arlington Park”.
Beyond these three books, I read several others over the summer. “Sleepless Nights” by Elizabeth Hardwick was poetic and illuminating; “Bunny” by Mona Awad was a little overhyped, in my opinion; “The Avocado Dud” was a chaotic, but ultimately aesthetic whirlwind of mishaps and growth; and “The Physics of Sorrow” by Georgi Gospodinov was inventive, funny and terribly touching.
As my sophomore fall begins, I hope to read more for pleasure, reverie and to stay connected with all the ineffable dimensions of my being.