Recommendations-September 2023

Getting Started

The Hu: I have been listening to the Mongolian metal band The Hu a lot lately and their video for “Bii Biyelgee” in particular gives me a lot of life. Lots of dancing and leaping. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

 Recent Reads

Joan by Katherine J. Chen: This reimagining of Joan of Arc’s life strips the central character down to a fierce, martial, not-quite-so-religious core, grounding Joan’s driving motivations in her childhood in Domremy and her experience of the Hundred Years’ War. While the novel details Joan’s successes—for example, the Siege of Orleans—Chen also paints her downfall not as the result of bad luck—being captured by the Burgundians at Compiegne—but as a slow fall from the Dauphin’s graces on account of court intrigue, a reality Joan isn’t equipped to deal with or even recognize due to her peasant background. As a result, this lushly detailed historical novel serves also as a  powerful and thoughtful meditation on worldly power and authority even as the author considers—through Joan’s eyes—what truly serving the world—and the divine—might mean.

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer: I devoured this book over the course of an evening and the next morning. I had previously encountered an excerpt published in The Paris Review under the title, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” The excerpt’s title, however, doesn’t quite do the larger book justice as Dederer seems much more concerned with exploring the how and the why behind our reactions than in offering any pat answers about what we should do with the work. The section on (some) men scolding women for reacting negatively—for very justifiable and sometimes complex reasons she carefully details—to Woody Allen’s Manhattan is brilliant. (In case you’ve just arrived to Earth from Mars, Manhattan revolves around a 42-year-old man played by Woody Allen dating a…sorry, throwing up a bit in my mouth here while typing…high schooler. On a personal note: Woody Allen’s films have meant so much to me over the course of my life, but even when I considered myself a huge fan, Manhattan was one I could never bring myself to watch.) Other highlights include the author’s analysis on so-called “abandoning mothers,” who put the importance of their art on par with the importance of their children. (Which she juxtaposes to the fact that absolutely no one ever ever refers to male writers and/or artists this way.) At one point, Dederer writes that—I’m paraphrasing here—over the course of [I forget how many years, but it was a lot], her primary artistic concern has been childcare. This book is full of such gems.

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy by Kliph Nesterhoff: Named for Oneida comedian Charlie Hill’s most famous joke, this book serves not only to highlight the well-established but largely ignored existence of Native Americans in comedy but also to ground the reader in the all-too-often racist history of Native Americans first in entertainment—beginning with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows—then in the film and television industry, detailing along the way how Native Americans have always advocated for realistic depictions. Comedy historian Nesterhoff structures the text as an oral history, thus giving his subjects the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is its examination of humor both as a natural cousin to the long-established practice of teasing within many Native cultures and as a survival strategy in the face of inherited trauma.

The Verifiers by Jane Pek: An all-around fun read. Pek’s novel tells the story of Claudia Lin, who works—in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways—as a detective of sorts for Veracity, a company that verifies information on online dating profiles for interested parties. The stakes rise when a client turns up mysteriously dead and Lin throws herself into investigating what happened. Interwoven with this story is the story of the protagonist’s immigrant family and her resistance to aspiring to the myth of the model minority.

From the Shelf

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite: Braithwaite’s novel was published in 2019, but including here after my participation in a library book group prompted a recent second read-through. I zipped through the 240 pages in one-and-a-half sittings, not because the novel is a page-turner in the sense of a traditional thriller, but rather because I delighted in reading of the protagonist’s genuinely bizarre predicament—she acts as a kind of support staff intent on keeping her narcissistic serial killer sister out of trouble. Well worth a first read, but this second read-through had me digging deeper into issues surrounding the narrator’s own culpability and the origin story of the serial killer herself. There’s also a great bit for our age in which the serial killer sister starts a fake Instagram campaign after the man she’s been dating goes mysteriously ‘missing.’

Podcast

Lolita Podcast: I listened to Jamie Loftus’s ten-part breakdown of Nabokov’s novel and the resulting cultural phenomenon a while back but was reminded of its existence after reading about Nabokov as the “anti-Monster” in Claire Dederer’s book described above. I found the podcast to be incredibly illuminating. At this point, I think I may actually finally be ready to read the book, which I had previously decided to avoid for all eternity because of how I kept seeing it pop up on various men’s magazine lists of “100 Books Every Man Should Read,” invariably because it is somehow supposed to be the ultimate book about ‘desire,’ a description which has always left me feeling a little, um, squishy. Loftus, though, digs a lot deeper.

Film/Television

Gaslit: This eight-part limited series (based on Slate’s Slow Burn) tells the Watergate story anew and centers most particularly around the polarizing figure of Martha Mitchell (Julia Roberts), the glamorous and outspoken wife of Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell (Sean Penn). One of the few people to tell the truth from the beginning, Martha was actually imprisoned against her will at one point. (As it turns out, “the Martha Mitchell effect” is a term used in psychiatry to this day to describe a delusional story that turns out to be true, which says a lot about how Mitchell was treated in her own time.) My favorite aspect of the show was to see how unfolding events highlighted the limits of personal power and charisma—Martha’s, in this case—in the face of patriarchy and misogyny. In other words, being a ‘strong woman’ won’t save you if the entire system is against you. Bonus: Gaslit also features Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey and Eurovision fame as a wily, whiney but ultimately somehow (??!!) likeable John Dean.

Cookery

Trejo’s Cantina: Cocktails, Snacks & Amazing Nonalcoholic Drinks from the Heart of Hollywood by Danny Trejo with Hugh Garvey: Danny Trejo is a gift and so is this cookbook. Worth it for the nonalcoholic drinks alone—so far I’ve made Manzana Verde (a kind of green apple Agua fresca with cinnamon-honey syrup and lime), Morchata (horchata, but even better), Watermelon Agua Fresca (with lime and Tajin), and Cucumber-Jalapeño Agua Fresca. The snacks are great too. (So far I’ve made the Avocado and Elote Salsas. Both delicious.) Well worth having on the shelf, but this cookbook would also make a superb gift for someone who likes to entertain.