What To Read While You Enjoy a Leisurely Summer Vac...Wait, It's Almost Rosh Hashanah, What?
August 2021 Books and Stuff
Some parts of the US are already back to school, but here in Massachusetts we are having an endless summer for another week or so. My family took a lovely trip up to Acadia National Park in Maine this month. We set the kids up with books, embroidery thread to make friendship bracelets, and a deck of cards, and that left me with plenty of time to read. (If you’re curious, the kids are all about Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series right now.)
August is traditionally my best month for delightful genre fiction, so you will find plenty of that in this month’s selections, but first some history.
I picked up We Had a Little Real Estate Problem by Kliph Nesterhoff because of the eye-catching title, but I couldn’t put it down because it was educational and entertaining at the same time. It’s a history of Native American comedy. Nesterhoff jumps back and forth between the history of Native Americans in comedy going back to silent films, the life of Charlie Hill—the first Native comedian to do stand-up on a major TV show, and stories of today’s Native stand-up comics. The book’s name is taken from Charlie Hill’s routine:
My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York.
We had a little real estate problem.
The modern comics profiled in the book are a diverse and compelling group. Many of them have overcome a lot of challenges, like having to drive ten hours round trip to get five minutes onstage. If you’re interested in seeing more, definitely check out The 1491s. There are some very funny anecdotes about Charlie Hill and his contemporaries, who included some huge names in American movies and TV. What’s not funny is the extent to which Native American comics have been marginalized by the mainstream entertainment industry and the multi-generational trauma of white supremacy. Overall, this is a highly engaging slice of American cultural history. Highly recommended.
On to fiction! I read a few novels that I really loved by new or new-to-me authors.
Super Host by Kate Russo is the story of a painter named Bennett Driscoll whose wife and painting mojo have both left him. To stay afloat, he moves out of his big house in London, into a shed in the back garden where he can paint. He rents out the house on a thinly veiled version of Air BnB and becomes a “Super Host” on the platform. Russo is a painter as well as a writer, and her descriptions of Bennett’s paintings (think vegetables and textiles) made me wish she’d included pictures. The story is broken into thirds, with each section focusing on a woman who stays at the house. Thankfully, he is not seducing them, but their interactions leave significant impressions on him and he’s a changed man by the end. Russo herself is a painter in addition to writing novels. Her paintings do not contain any produce, but they are kind of neat.
Back on this side of the pond, I absolutely loved The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris. Anyone who has ever been a minority in their office will get this one. Nella is a young Black woman working in a very white publishing company. She’s the only Black woman in the office until Hazel shows up. Then things get really weird and creepy. The ending of this one wasn’t entirely satisfying, but it was good and original and definitely worth a look.
Intimacies by Katie Kitamura is a very character-driven novel, which is to say that there’s not a whole lot of plot. I’ll be honest, I picked it up because President Obama recommended it. The nameless narrator has recently moved to The Hague to work as an interpreter in the International Criminal Court. She’s rendered so coolly and neutrally that it is hard to get attached to her. And yet, by the middle of the novel, I was thoroughly drawn in by passages like this one:
There are prisons and far worse all around us, in New York there was a black site above a bustling food court, the windows darkened and the rooms soundproofed so that the screaming never reached the people sitting below. People eating their sandwiches and sipping their cappuccinos, who had no idea of what was taking place directly above them, no idea of the world in which they were living. But none of us are able to really see the world we are living in—this world, occupying as it does the contradiction between its banality (the squat wall of the Detention Center, the bus running along its ordinary route) and its extremity (the cell and the man inside the cell), is something that we see only briefly and then do not see again for a long time, if ever. It is surprisingly easy to forget what you have witnessed, the horrifying image or the voice speaking the unspeakable, in order to exist in the world we must and we do forget, we live in a state of I know but I do not know.
Some authors I’ve recommended here before also have great new books this summer that have cemented their places on my must-read list.
I liked Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall, but I loved Rosaline Palmer Takes The Cake. The drama unfolds on the set of Bake Expectations, a show not unlike The Great British Bake-Off (which my family has been watching for months on Netflix). Rosaline is a young single mother who loves to bake and gets selected to compete on the show. En route to the first filming, she has a meet cute with a man at a train station, but then things get interesting. Reading this book before bed, I laughed so hard that I woke Kelly up a few times. In addition to being funny, Rosaline’s bisexuality and close friendship with her ex-girlfriend make it the queerest novel I’ve ever read about a male/female couple. Enjoy, but be warned that it’s full of baked goods, so you may want snacks handy. As a bonus, it appears that the cast of Bake Expectations will be back in two more books in the series.
Last summer, I described Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis as “the perfect pandemic book.” This year, she’s back with a book about a man talking to a frog. For real.
The human half of The President and the Frog is the recently retired president of a small country in South America. The story bounces between his present-day conversation with a journalist and his years of solitary confinement under a brutal dictatorship. While confined, he has a running dialogue with a presumably fictional frog, and it probably saves his sanity. The story is inspired by the life of Uruguayan president José Mujica. It’s a short but beautiful read.
I didn’t actually recommend Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City, when I read it a few years ago, but I should have. It’s a remarkable climate-change dystopia set in a floating Arctic city with a strange disease going around. For this year’s The Blade Between, Miller returns to his hometown of Hudson, NY and turns the city’s struggle with gentrification into a creepy paranormal story. Also there are whales.
Finally, over to Malaysia. I enjoyed Zen Cho’s Sorcerer Royal series, set in England and the world of the fairies, but her new novel, Black Water Sister, is even better. Jessamyn Teoh has graduated from Harvard and moved back to Malaysia with her parents. Unfortunately, her plans to find a job and reunite with the girlfriend her parents don’t know about is thrown off-course when her recently deceased grandmother starts haunting her and she’s plunged into a complicated mess of ghosts, gods and long-ago grudges. This is a great coming-of-age novel about a young person trying to find her path.
That’s all for now. Have a great Labor Day / Rosh Hashanah and back to school and whatever else you’ve got going on in September. Share your favorite fall reads in the comments!