interview<\/a>, 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\u00a0 and the unity between different life forms. Strikingly, the dog says at one point: \u201cMen were created in order to destroy everything, and women were created so there would be one thing they couldn\u2019t destroy.\u201d<\/p>\nIn 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAugust Blue\u201d 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\u2019s stultifying heat, exquisite temples, and meandering streets bursting with chaos.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Next up is \u201cArlington Park\u201d by Rachel Cusk, a writer I\u2019ve become quite enamoured with recently. Similar to her famous trilogy \u201cOutline Series\u201d, \u201cArlington Park\u201d features Cusk\u2019s signature razor-sharp analysis of human interiority. Reading Outline (the first in the trilogy) in my \u201cTruth and Other Fictions\u201d class this past Spring, I felt reservations towards Cusk\u2019s overly neat imposition of order and narrative integrity onto the messy and ultimately untraceable human life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In \u201cArlington Park\u201d, 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\u2019s \u201cTo the Lighthouse.\u201d 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 \u201cTo the Lighthouse\u201d is my favorite read of all time, I had a blast reading \u201cArlington Park\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Beyond these three books, I read several others over the summer. \u201cSleepless Nights\u201d by Elizabeth Hardwick was poetic and illuminating; \u201cBunny\u201d by Mona Awad was a little overhyped, in my opinion; \u201cThe Avocado Dud\u201d was a chaotic, but ultimately aesthetic whirlwind of mishaps and growth; and \u201cThe Physics of Sorrow\u201d by Georgi Gospodinov was inventive, funny and terribly touching.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reading for pleasure can feel like an elusive luxury amid the perpetual, cyclical motion of college. Over the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15724,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-15723","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15723","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15723"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15723\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15723"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15723"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}