Books Bought
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi

Books Read
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Jonathan Mahler
Mr Norris Changes Trains, Christopher Isherwood

Well that went by quick. July was a whirlwind of travel and love and celebration, and life just got in the way of reading. As a kid, my summers were so full of books and reading for pleasure. I remember my grandmother's house in Ohio, with its different smell and its cool front room which was protected by the heat of July by heavy shades and a deep front porch. I remember reading at the pool in her small town, while we ate, or after we ate, or if I had gotten too much chlorine in my eyes or grown too embarrassed of my body. And I remember reading back home in New York, sunburnt skin, the thin green rug on a cheek, the nearly endless golden light, and then the orange of the lamps in the evening. 

Books Bought or Borrowed
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy
There are more beautiful things than Beyoncé, Morgan Parker
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration, Michelle Alexander
Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Jonathan Mahler
Modern Romance: An Investigation, Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenburg
How to Ruin Everything, George Watsky
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

Books Read
Radical Hope
How to Ruin Everything, George Watsky

Makeup Bought
A shade of lipstick almost identical to one I already own
An eyeshadow actually identical to one I already one
Bright fuchsia lipstick in a tiny size
Lip gloss that I thought was lipstick, and was disappointed to discover was not, but kept anyway

I don’t enjoy wearing makeup, but once or twice a year I decide that dabbing things on my face is the way I want to change my life and wind up spending too much money on things I’ll never use. I keep buying the same shades of lipstick over and over, keep buying the same exact things over and over, as if they’ll save me from despair. As if the right color on my eyelids will make me better at socializing, make me more interesting, make me braver in public--and in private. Like it will totally change my life and erase the parts of my personality I’m ashamed of.

Finished
Too Much and Not the Mood, Chew Bose

May was a fitful month. I had a hard time settling into reading and felt like I was reading everything poorly. I had a time finding my way into anything I picked up, until Too Much and Not the Mood.  Chew-Bose’s book is a gift – it felt like meeting someone for the first time and knowing immediately you’re going to get along so well. What Anne Shirley would call “kindred spirits”. A better echo, in some ways, than Sarton’s A Journal of Solitude. I feel about Too Much the way a lot of friends feel about Girls or Broad City – voices of an era...or voices of me! Chew-Bose’s meditations on nook people and her preoccupation with bright sidewalk glare felt much more my speed, my world of people.

Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Tell Me How it Ends, Valeria Luiselli
High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
What We Do Now: Standing up for your values in Trump’s America

In her 2015 review of Between the World and Me Shani O. Hilton expressed concern and disappointment that the book would be read (was being read) by white readers who would then take it as a defining book of blackness. Concerned that black male writing and black masculinity would define blackness for readers who couldn’t or wouldn’t take it as one person’s story, Hilton worried that black women would continue to be pushed to the margins of blackness.

Brit Bennett touched on Hilton’s observations in her response to Between the World and Me, remarking that “books by black authors are always asked to be more representative than they ought to be” but asking of the elision of women from this – and so many other narratives – “Whose vulnerability is horrifying and haunting, worthy of marching and protest? Whose is natural and inevitable?”.

About two hours after I heard an interview with Brian Alexander on NPR, I called in an order to my local bookstore for Glass House, his new book about the town of Lancaster, Ohio. Forbes declared Lancaster the ideal American town in the 1940s, but that was decades ago, back when Lancaster was home to a booming glass industry and those glass companies were locally owned. I bought Glass House out of some sadness for Ohio and the places I’ve known there. I thought it would be a bit of an obligation read, particularly once I realized it was about private equity and high finance, but it wasn’t at all.