Much dumber now than then: November book Reviews

Told myself I wasn’t gonna do this this time/anymore, but had some notes and figured I’d post em. These are the books I read in the month of November, 2022—

The Missing Girl by Shirley Jackson

Hadn’t read any Shirley Jackson (flagrant foul for someone who went to Bennington) and also didn’t have any firm idea of what to expect. These stories have that pervasive low-grade dread that I’m drawn to. Often, when late to reading someone super influential, their moves will have been copied and mutated so many times that it all feels familiar and almost too simple or obvious. That wasn’t the case here! They felt quite contemporary. I enjoyed that characters were named things like Piglet and Snark.

I Hope You Enjoy the Food by Zac Smith

This book is disarmingly “straight,” by which I guess I mean practical. There is advice, and it seems constructed in a way that is meant to be convincing and useful. Zac’s voice and humor is there, but it serves a concrete function. I’m tempted to actually put it on my cookbook shelf. This makes the third book of Zac’s that I’d consider giving to friends/family/non-readers as a gift. It helped me reflect on what I value and enjoy about cooking, and the role it has in my life. It gave me ideas for how to break out of a meal-planning rut. I’m torn between wishing I had a Zac-like person in my life (to feed me) and wishing I were more like Zac (creative, resourceful, subtly inventive about matters of sustenance).

Some of Them Will Carry Me by Giada Scodellaro

I got hung up on the passive voices and dislocation in this book. I couldn’t figure out how to relate to it. The food parts made me hungry. There were little glimmers of excitement, but it often felt (oddly, for a Dorothy Project book, in my opinion) very #flashfiction—linguistically pretty, intriguingly prickly, and “sensuous,” but without much of anything tangible to grasp.

Blindness by José Saramago

This book was tedious and exhausting. I disliked it similarly to the way I disliked The Marriage Plot. It had a wrongheadedness laying bare a fundamental misunderstanding of the human condition. A writer I admire recommended this, and I’m now wondering if she might secretly hate me.

Name and Noun by Stephanie Yue Duhem

Stephanie is smart and funny online. I thought it was interesting that when this was released, she disclaimed the “identity” aspects of it. Undergrad Crow would have loved the wordplay here. I don’t mean that as a dig; I’m much dumber now than I was then. Her twitter handle (@poetrygrifter) prompted the thought that buying and reading the book means that I am the poetry-grifted.

Feds on Vacation by Big Bruiser Dope Boy

I’d like to believe I’d have had the aesthetic integrity to dislike this book even if I hadn’t stumbled into Mr. Boy’s crosshairs, but I guess I’ll never know for sure. This reflection prompted some interesting thoughts about the subjectivity and arbitrariness of art’s “worth,” but teasing that out further here would be attributing more credit to this book than it deserves.