reading wrap-up: In Memoriam, Yellowface and more

(05) june/july 2024 books: In Memoriam, Yellowface, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and Funny Story

Aug 09, 2024

My love for sharing books has evolved from the intimate setting of my home (and my mum reading to me) to the vast online. Still, sharing what books we read and like is, and will remain, a special and personal act to me. These newsletters outline the books I’ve read for the month and I would love it if you shared yours in the comments. Let’s have a conversation.

I’m sure I speak to a lot of you when I say: I wish I had a whole day to just read. I want to pick up a book, finish it in one go and bask in the story.

I haven’t had one of those days in a looong time. Seems like there’s always something to do or somewhere to be. And although I love being busy, I need to schedule in some well-deserved reading time.

Luckily, my vacation is coming up - three blissfully hot weeks in the Spanish countryside. Needless to say, my suitcase will be packed with books.

I hope next month’s reading wrap-up will be a good long list. But for now, here are the books I read in June and July, alongside my short reviews.

The Best

In Memoriam by Alice Winn | Contemporary fiction/Historical/LGBT

I powered through this one so fast that I barely registered that I finished it when I did.

Set against the backdrop of The Great War, In Memoriam tells the story of two boys - Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood - secretly in love, both of the opinion it’s unrequited.

Although the setting is dense, Alice Winn writes in a very approachable way, and I love that she isn’t shy of the melodramatic. I smiled, I cried, I literally gasped in the middle somewhere. And yet it’s a subdued novel too. A sort of veil hangs over it; it’s like you’re transported to the trenches and seeing everything unfold right before your eyes without being able to do anything.

I don’t know what it is about a queer relationship in a war setting, but thank god for it. Perhaps it’s the trope of a forbidden love with all the rawness that war brings out. To hear people calling it the next Song of Achilles rings true, because it does very similar things.

I simply can’t fathom that this is a debut novel and I am keeping my eyes peeled for Winn’s next book.

underlined quotes:

“I’m sorry. This is not what I intended to say. What I meant to say is this: You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”

“(…) writing condolences. over and over again, about men I know, or men I don’t, about men who died valiantly, or men who died in ways I refuse to describe, men I liked and men I didn’t, men too old to go to war, and boys too young. One runs out of ways to say, “Your son died painlessly and was a credit to the Empire.””

““My dearest, darling Sidney,”
There was nothing else. Only dead white paper, blank and meaningless. A comma, followed by nothing. Death summed up by grammar.”

“In the hypermasculine atmosphere of war, they were not overly concerned with manliness.”

The Good

Yellowface by Rebecca F. Kuang | Contemporary fiction

This one reads like a car crash just waiting to happen.

Yellowface is an exploration of the authorship of June Hayward, a white woman who has taken her Asian-American friend’s manuscript to make it her own.

With an amazingly cynical eye on cultural appropriation, whitewashing and cancel culture, and a telling and uncomfortable perspective on the publishing industry, Kuang poses the question of who should and shouldn’t be able to tell a story. Kuang forces us - through the insufferable main character of June - to face our own opinions on the matter. You also just really want to read on in the hopes of finding some redemption.

A few of the narrative moments were underdeveloped and I would have liked to see a little more realism, since it tends to lean into the absurd. The ending was a little too dramatic for my taste too, but nonetheless, it’s an amusing and infuriating read and one I certainly think deserves its praise.

underlined quotes

“And I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment”

“We are all vultures, and some of us - and I mean Athena, here - are simply better at finding the juiciest morsels of a story, at ripping through bone and gristle to the tender bleeding heart and putting all the gore on display”

“I do fully believe that awards are bullshit, but that doesn’t make me want to win them any less”

“I’m on the verge of an anxiety attack, so I double back to my apartment and curl up on my bed and whip out my phone for another hour of doom-scrolling, because that is paradoxically the only thing that calms things down”

The Okay

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors | Contemporary fiction/romantic

Coco Mellors has taken the Bookstagram world by storm. I’ve seen the iconic painterly cover pass my feed too many times to count. It was high time to pick it up and I did so with my lovely bookclub over on Fable (join us if you want!).

Cleopatra and Frankenstein is an exploration of the relationship between Cleo and Frank, from their meeting to their hasty marriage, told largely through the eyes of the people around them (think siblings, friends, colleagues, ex-lover of one but best friend of the other, etc.).

My overall feeling with this book was dissatisfied but thumbs up. To take on the challenge of writing multiple perspectives, especially for your debut novel, is a tricky feat and I’ve yet to find one that really blew my mind. Personal taste has to be taken into account here because I like my books to have a lot of character depth and I found that the various snapshots in the novel took up the space for further character depth and introspection. Where each character deserved a full-fledged account, we’re left only knowing a little about each of them. And I simply didn’t connect with most of them, apart from Zoe, Frank’s sister. Eleanor was frankly annoying.

My degree of enjoyment does not dictate the quality of the book. I am so happy to see many in our bookclub audience love it and I’m definitely reading Mellor’s second novel Blue Sisters because its premise sounds much more up my alley.

underlined quotes

“(…) she loved being in the protective sphere of the older girls, who laughingly eschewed the clumsy advances of any man who tried to talk to them and protected her in a sandwich of their bodies”

“She had not yet managed the art of being alone in public unselfconsciously, of feeling that she could watch rather than be watched”

“She stayed silent, and they both sat in the absence of her confession, each understanding the other, each entirely alone in that understanding”

“(…) in the middle of all that chaos, the wife looked at the husband, they caught each other’s eyes over the heads of the bawling kids, and they started laughing (…) that’s what life requires.”

This was our Fable bookclub pick for the month of May. Anyone is welcome to join! We read literary fiction, classics, and truthfully, some emotionally evocative books. Join our conversation here.

reading wrap-up: In Memoriam, Yellowface and more

(05) june/july 2024 books: In Memoriam, Yellowface, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and Funny Story

The Best

The Good

The Okay

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