Bookseller Chat: Quarantine Reads
Hi to those reading out there! On a regular day at Books Are Magic, we talk about the books we’re reading, the books we want to read, and the books we’re looking forward to all the time. As all of our social spaces moved online in the last few weeks, some of our booksellers hopped on a Zoom call to talk books. We figured we’d open up our conversations that we have with each other every day to the world. This week, we talked about the books we’re reading, here is an abridged transcript of the conversation:
Modified Transcript:
Serena: I just started this book You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat; it’s a Catapult title, it doesn’t come out until June and so far I’m really liking it. It’s about a bisexual Palestinian American girl so I’m super stoked for these bi vibes.
This other one might be a sneak preview to my staff pick for April–poetry month! I just finished this book Felon by Reginald Dwayne Betts and it was stunning. He’s formerly incarcerated, so it’s about his experience being institutionalized, and grappling with masculinity, violence, drug abuse, fatherhood, etc. and it's just lyrically gorgeous. Let me show you guys; so you can’t see out there, but I’m showing everybody these blackout poems, these erasure poems, that he makes from court transcripts.
Nika: I can go next. I just finished two short books I was reading, which was great. One was Ms Ice Sandwich, for the alleged Ms Ice Sandwich-Convenience Store Woman debate. Ms Ice Sandwich is written by Mieko Kawakami, and it’s basically about this kid who is obsessed/in love with this woman who works at the sandwich stall of his grocery store, who he’s never spoken to before. It went by very quickly, despite the fact that it took me so long to read. It was a lot of fun; very strange.
Colleen: What’s the debate?
Nika: I don’t really know, so Nick [our GM] mentioned this to me and Anthony. Apparently, one of his friends texted him to ask where he falls on the Convenience Store Woman-Ms Ice Sandwich debate, and none of us knew what that meant. I think it’s just because they’re both centered on a convenience store with the protagonist that’s a little strange.
Serena: Who would win in a fight?
Nika: Definitely Convenience Store Woman, because she has these really weird, violent moments.
Maritza: Not a spoiler, but in the beginning of that book she talks about hitting a kid with a shovel, so she would win.
Serena: Would you say they’re dystopian, or would you say they’re a realist...well, realism is dystopia, to be honest.
Nika: I would say they’re realist, but Convenience Store Woman, in my mind, is kind of capitalist dystopia. I think Convenience Store Woman had a lot more themes to do with capitalism and the individual, where I don’t feel like that was a focus of Ms Ice Sandwich. It had a lot more to do with this kid; it was more of a coming of age, in my mind. And I just started reading a book called Last Words from Montmartre by the Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin, which I’m excited about.
Michael C: So I just picked this back up after reading like 30 pages of it at the end of last year; it’s The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water by Zen Cho. It’s a Tor book, basically a kung fu movie transformed into a novel. It is very silly, it’s zany in the way that kung fu movies can just go completely off the rails. It also has some cool subversive stuff going on, too, and I’m just getting into it again, so really looking forward to where this goes.
I also just picked up another book I read 15 pages of and then stopped for no reason, Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero. Sort of a riff on Scooby-Doo slash Stranger Things about these people who were child detectives, except this picks up with them a little later in life. So that is also in my quarantine reads pile.
Danni: I hear really great things about Meddling Kids, that it’s part-horror, sort of Lovecraftian, and I’ve been looking at that book for so long because it got compared to this other book that I’m also interested in, so let me know how you like it.
Michael C: I mean, Abby talks about it like it’s one of her favorite books of all time and if the tentacles on the cover are any indication, the Lovecraftian rumors are certainly true. I’m really looking forward to getting into these, especially since they're both very escapist right now. They’re both sort of novels that take you out, which is what I need right now.
Margaret: I agree, Michael. Those of you who know me know that I almost never read fiction, but I am in a fiction mood. I’m happy to read a domestic intrigue, but I’ve been reading more books with a creepy house, or a creepy attic, or a creepy, isolated place where there’s a mystery. I think that that is very calming right now. It’s the kind of thing where narrative gives us structure to be in, and by the end of this book, this will be resolved. So I read The Guest List by Lucy Foley, which is about this big fancy wedding on an island in Ireland that is very creepy, and there were twists and turns and things I didn’t see coming and I read it super fast.
I also just started what, around the office, we’ve just been calling the mushroom book, but it’s called Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake and it’s really good. It’s much more up my normal alley in terms of reading non-fiction about all the different ways that mushrooms - fungi - exist and are, and how they kind of co-constitute all these other plants.
Maritza: I have been reading a few things. I just recently finished Obit, which I should pass along because I feel like a bunch of you would like it. It’s by Victoria Chang, it comes out in April. It’s a poetry collection that is essentially a series of little obituaries for all the different things that you lose when you’re grieving someone, so sort of different elements of a person that you miss or different things that she, specifically, felt the absence of as her parents died or suffered from different chronic illnesses. It’s really, really good, and I will pass it along to Serena.
Serena: Oh, I already have it! I actually already read a few poems from it. It’s just heartbreaking.
Maritza: It is, it’s really good; just so smart and such a simple idea, executed really well. And then, Pizza Girl, which is a big favorite among some folks. That’s by Jean Kyoung Frasier. It is a novel about this pregnant teen who is very supported through her pregnancy, but is very listless and seeking some sort of friendship that she’s not getting from her partner and from her mother, and she finds it with this single mother who orders pickle pepperoni pizzas. There’s more to it than that; she’s also craving her father who was an alcoholic, and there’s more, but we’ll go on.
The last one is The Magical Language of Others by EJ Koh, which I’ve wanted to read and have not fully dived into yet but it’s this memoir featuring lots of letters that EJ Koh’s mother wrote to her from South Korea after her parents moved back to South Korea while she and her brother were still teens, so it’s a lot of parental tensions and forgiveness and it’s very good. She’s also a poet, and I love poets writing prose.
Danni: I’m reading Young Once by Patrick Modiano because I love him and his work and everything about him; he’s just so great. And I think that was translated by Damion Searles. Then I’m also reading a detective mystery called Right to Die, which is the fortieth in the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout. It’s an old detective mystery, think like Philip Marlowe or that sort of old time-y noir, and then I’m reading a book that Nika recommended and let me borrow called Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. I’m at the very beginning, but so far I’m really liking it, so we’ll see how it continues.
Colleen: So I finally finished the new Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults, which–are you guys fans? Does anyone here like her?
Margaret: I mean, she’s so good. The Neapolitan novels were just so delicious and we’ve talked a little about it, Colleen, but you said you felt like this was in that vein, still?
Colleen: It’s the closest writing I’ve ever read that feels like real life. It doesn’t just get tied up with a bow, people just keep changing and keep evolving the way that life does in these ways that you know there’s going to be an end but it’s really hard to anticipate. It’s so good, and feels like it must be the start of another series. I haven't read her other standalone Days of Abandonment, so maybe that’s just how her books end. They have to end somewhere because the book has to end, but for me it could’ve gone on for a few hundred more pages.
And then I’m still reading the new Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom, which is very good. I’ve said earlier to Serena and Nika that it feels really similar to Brandon Taylor’s Real Life in that she’s this PhD student in molecular biology and she’s kind of alone in this academia setting where she doesn’t really fit in. She’s trying to find a cure for depression or addiction and it kind of keeps coming up again, with her faith or her lack of faith or her faith from childhood that she never really felt like she connected with as an adult. Anyway, it’s really interesting.
Anthony: I’m reading Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, and it’s so fantastic. I’ve been waiting five years for his next book, so it’s really great to be back in his world. It’s this band in the ‘60s and has really great mentions of songs throughout, so I’ve been collecting the songs and making a playlist of it, so that’s really fun. I really want to read My Meteorite by Harry Dodge so I have to call the store and get a copy of that. And then I’m going to read the new Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands, because Penguin sent me a copy.
Colleen: I started that but it felt really dark and I had to stop for a minute. It starts with this woman who’s super isolated. She’s an older woman and she finds this note in the woods when she’s walking her dog that’s...I forget what it says but that so-and-so was killed here.
Anthony: Oh– “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.”
Colleen: Yes, but there was no dead body. She just goes on this -- where did this note come from, who would write that kind of note, you know what i mean? I don’t know. It was obviously written really well, but I was just like I’m not ready to go there yet, but I don’t know, maybe soon.
And though Emma couldn’t make it to our Zoom, she has some great #Quaranreads: For the past few weeks, I have only been interested in page-turners–books full of plot and diversion. And of course everything now reads like a fantasy novel! I just finished Andrea Bartz's novel The Herd, which is about a place very much like The Wing, and murder. Murder! It was so fun, and I stayed up way too late reading it. Now I'm reading Something to Talk About by Meryl Wilsner, which is a delightful rom-com about a woman who works as an assistant to a Hollywood writer something like Shonda Rhimes, and then people think they're falling in love, and it becomes something of a scandal, and then...I haven't finished yet, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that they do indeed fall in love. Like a lot of people, right now I'm homeschooling my children, and that is all I can handle right now–a little love, a little murder. Maybe next I'll do some actual fantasy–I think River might be old enough for Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon. That would be a total pleasure.
Tune in to our next bookseller chat, and let us know if there are topics you’d like us to discuss next!
