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.
May has had me reconsider my reading taste. I feel like I’ve slowly started to separate the books with the pretty covers that I kind of want to read because someone recommended them from the ones I am so excited about my stomach flutters from elation. I want to make sure that the books I read fall within the latter category.
On that note, I am proud to say I’m now someone who can dnf a book if it doesn’t give me those flutters. Although I know the terrible dread of not finishing a book, there are only so many one can read in a lifetime, and I don’t want to waste my time on ones I don’t enjoy.
So I gave up on the audiobook of Dune. It was too convoluted in prose to follow while listening, even though I appreciated the sound effects and cast of voice actors. I might one day attempt to read the physical book, but for now it’s a dnf.
That being said, here are my (finished) reads of May! Only two this month, but what can I say, I’m a slow reader (which is another reason for me to dnf books more often)
Severance by Ling Ma | Contemporary fiction/Dystopian | Really liked it
Millenial Candace Chen lives in New York and has an uninspiring job as a product manager for a publishing company’s Bible division. When an epidemic hits the continent and causes people to become “fevered” - a cognitive dysfunction that leads one to repeat the same taks over and over - she sequesters herself in the office tower. That is, until her living conditions force her to seek help elsewhere.
Even those sceptical of post-apocalyptic novels shouldn’t fear, as Severance, somewhat surprisingly, doesn’t read like one. Instead, Ma writes a fascinating meditation on the contemporary hustle culture and the constant craving for societal belonging. Even as people seep out of the city and greenery overtakes the streets and buildings, Candace endures and drones on with the mundane tasks she self-imposes.
Although this is a speculative story, it’s eerie how parallel certain experiences and sentiments are to our recent pandemic (especially considering this was published before Covid in 2018). It also poses the question to what extent we already are “fevered”.
quotes:
“But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop. We drive, we sleep, we drive some more.”
“A day off meant we could do things we’d always meant to do (…) We just wanted to hit the reset button (…) And even if we didn’t get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else”
“If there was no work for me to do, then I would make my own work”
Penance by Eliza Clark | Contemporary fiction/Crime | Loved it
Having absolutely devoured Eliza Clark’s debut Boy Parts last year (it even ended up on my list of favourite books of 2023), Penance was a must-read for me in 2024.
While Boy Parts hints at what an impeccable author Clark can be with its witty and unreliable prose, her second novel really brings these aspects to a new thrillery depth.
Penance is a riveting read about a gruesome murder of a teenage girl by her peers in a small English seaside town amidst the unease of the Brexit vote. Relayed by a journalist, we’re provided with snippets of interviews, witness accounts, podcast transcripts, and the journalist’s novelisations.
Clark astutely captures teenage life and the Tumblr craze during the 2010s internet boom, and explores the radicalisation of vulnerable young girls and their complicity in violence.
Although it closely resembles a true crime novel, Penance is more self-aware, and the reader is encouraged to question the discursive methods of true crime cases and what it means to read one in a time when truth is often thwarted.
The writing and structure of it all is exceptionally well done, it crawled under my skin, and I haven’t been this invested in figuring out the ending of a novel for a long time.
Also, it’s so darkly comical at times I literally snorted out loud.
quotes:
“They were playing pretend. And then they were not.”
“(…) I was living in the wreckage of Crow’s own little nuclear bomb. Like, how can you go on after something likt the Nanking Massacre? How do you go back to your life after that?”
“There’s a bit of you that’s always a teenager, isn’t there? It’s the most traumatic time of loads of people’s lives, and … even the most mentally healthy and put-together adults are still … there.”
“Get off your high horse bitch youre literally reading school shooter fanfic”
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.
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