Book Report #09
roleplaying noah's ark
Hi y’all,
When I was writing regularly on Substack a year or so ago, I had a weekly-ish email I called the “Book Report.” It basically kept me in the habit of writing and was a nice place to include a bunch of silly observations about books and reading life. As summer approaches and my day job chills out, I’m going to try to bring it back!
Normally for this column, I write about which books I see people reading on the subway. But I’ve been busy and unobservant, so instead I’ve asked my former sorority sisters what they are currently reading.
Spotted: Bridget is reading The Women by Kristin Hannah, who is now her favorite author. Dana is reading Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000 by Stephen Kotkin. Chaconne is reading Robert Greene’s The Art of Seduction, “for research” she qualifies. Hannah just finished Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reed and she loved it. Zoe is reading Just Kids by Patti Smith. Genny is reading Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. Emily is reading First Lie Wins by Ashley Elston, which is a Reese Book Club Pick. Emily says, “It’s not the best book I’ve ever read but it gets the job done,” which honestly is a much more effective and succinct book review than I’ve ever managed to write, and more often than not, it is what I’m trying to say.
This week, I recommend you buy His & Hers copies of your books. You may live together, but that doesn’t mean you should share everything. His & Hers (or His & His, etc) book copies enable very fun two person book clubs, a charming shelf worthy of Noah’s ark, and the luxury of a spare copy to give away to a friend when asked.
In the past month (or so), I’ve read Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, which I admittedly only picked up because George and I liked the Netflix show. I would be really interested in discussing with someone who’s read it in the original Chinese. I found it stylistically confounding—alternating between rather dry discussions of physics, barely descriptive and whiplash-quick action scenes, and contemplative, almost lyrical and really quite lovely, digressions that span pages. That said, I really enjoyed it!
I also read Deepti Kapoor’s The Age of Vice, which was totally enthralling. I had read the first half of the book a few years ago, when I worked at a literary agency. The Age of Vice got a few surprisingly negative reviews, which disproportionately seems to happen to books that get big buzzy advances. The ending was a bit weak, but overall the book is gripping in an utterly (and unfortunately) rare way. I’m not sure if I’m going to review it here, so I want to say for the record: if you want page-turner that’s full of rich people misbehaving, this one is for you!
Finally, I read Molly by Blake Butler on a train to and from DC. I read it mainly because of the conversation (controversy?) about it on Twitter. I’m planning on writing a longer review of this memoir in the next few days, so I’ll keep it brief: Molly was captivating until it wasn’t, and I sorta feel like the Archway Editions did Butler a disservice by publishing it in its current state.
The best news, perhaps ever:
I have found a simple way to catalog your books!
The Library Thing is a free online service that allows users to create professional-quality, fully-editable media catalogs. This means that your digital collection can perfectly describe your physical collection—you can ensure it lists the correct format, the correct edition, the correct ISBN, the correct cover, even the correct weight: all the details in their correct place. This is made easy by the Library Thing app, which has one function: you use it to scan the barcodes of your books, which the app will instantly add to your digital catalog. The full functionality of the service is only available on the website.
This is obviously a website made for obsessives, and I am OBSESSED! I plan on making my friends catalog their collections so we can set up some deeply psycho system of interlibrary loans lol.
You can see (part of) my library here. So far, I’ve only scanned about 1/3rd of the books in my apartment, which includes George’s books. I’ve separated the books into several categories: “My library” is the books on our shelves that I personally own, “George’s books” are the books on our shelves that George owns, “Read” is the books on our shelves I have already read, etc, etc.
Once you’ve set up your collections, you can have Library Thing take data about your books and make really fun charts and graphs representing your library:
Its recommendation system is less than perfect. For example, I own ten of Italo Calvino’s books, and so it recommends I buy more of his books. Which like, sure, yes, I likely would enjoy them, but that’s not necessarily a very good “personalized rec.” Not a deal breaker, though: if any algorithm (or AI, for that matter) got too good at recommending books, I’d be out of a (blogging) job!
I’m really charmed by the forums on Library Thing, which seem to have something like 500-1k users, who have started various groups like “75 Book Challenge” and “Science Fiction Fans” and “Readers Over Sixty” and “Tea!” Users mostly create threads that serve as reading diaries, which other users comment encouragingly on. Many users are small town librarians, and they’ll regularly post photos of their dogs and chicken coops and adult sons and unfathomably large yards. They regularly refer to contemporary writers with honorifics, as in, “Mr. Franzen” or “Ms. Patchett.” They complain about issues with filing taxes and visits to the orthopedist. They post their Wordle scores. In an average month, any given user may report having read books by Norah Roberts, Hannah Arendt, and Beverly Cleary. A number have used Library Thing for almost two decades, and a few allude to having met up in person once or twice after years of online friendship. It’s all very civilized.
Oddly, there’s also a forum dedicated to roleplaying “original characters”—mostly bisexual, polyamorous, 160-year-old vampires and 19-year-old “bi-pedal anthrompromorhpic feline[s].” This is the second-most popular group on the Library Thing forums, which the site owners clearly are a lil embarrassed by and try to hide by pushing the group to the very bottom of their “active recently” list, despite 800 messages posted in the last week! I have no idea why these role players have decided to use a Library Thing message board to write collaborative stories about being 4’11” undead angel-demons, but, like, I love it.
How embarrassing…
The cover and marketing material for Sally Rooney’s latest novel is here, and it uses the same tagline that George and I used on our Christmas card from 2021, which we picked because we thought it was delightfully inane:
I just started Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. You may remember that I loveeeed Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. I am super excited to read another one of her books! Shout out again to Julie for recommending Wharton to me.
Okay, good news comes to those who read to the end of my blog: George and I are engaged!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m (soon-to-be) no longer living in sin! Can I get a “Congrats, Book Notes” in the comments?! 💕✨🧝♀️🤵♂️✨💕1
ily4e&e,
Book Notes
PS. I thought Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department was overlong and kinda bad, so I did my god-given editorial duty and cut it down to an hour long masterpiece. I also retitled the album, because TPD is lame name that originates from an ironic and unfunny joke. My chosen title—fatal fantasies, a line from “Guilty as Sin?”—is deadly earnest and a little corny, in the way that is trademark Taylor Swift. I was going to write a full blog post about this but restrained myself!
Shamelessly using my new fiancé to pump my blog engagement ;) smash that like button, babyy!
This whole thing every section just LOVE it. Cheers congrats!! 🖤🖤🖤
I am so thrilled to see you here and also huge congrats !!