everything i read in april 2024
13 books, serious and frivolous essays, and British pub gossip
In April I read a lot, started running again (an aspirational practice, Agnes Callard–style, that I take up every spring), and published another book review.
A little bit of self-promotion before I get to the books I’ve read—For the spring issue of Asymptote, I wrote about the Brazilian writer Victor Heringer’s The Love of Singular Men. Originally published in 2016 and translated last year by James Young, it’s a remarkable and moving novel about two young boys falling in love. The novel has formal innovation, a coming-of-age story, a story of young love, and little photographs/drawings/scanned documents included in the text, which makes it really fun to read! (Although you might cry towards the end.)
Heringer was also a filmmaker, photographer, sound artist, and—extremely relevant to my interests—a web artist. The novel includes:
a moving passage—formally striking and powerfully affecting—in which Heringer uses his interest in participatory web art to convey the strength of [the narrator] Camilo’s love. “I loved my Cosme,” Camilo tells us, “like you loved your first love, who was called Bruno or Pablo or Ilyich…Loved him like Lucas loved Sophia…like Thiago loved Diego.” The names, which continue on for four pages, were drawn from a website Heringer created to solicit the names of other people’s first loves. By including these names in the novel, Heringer captures something about the universal, all-encompassing nature of young love. “I’m less singular because of these names,” Heringer wrote. “They are my way back to tenderness…no one is left out of the story.”
I really admire Asymptote, which is committed to publishing and celebrating world literature in translation—so far, from 130 countries and 116 languages. As I wrote in a note last week, “The word urgent can be overused in literary criticism…but I do genuinely think that it’s urgent!!! to engage with literature beyond the Anglosphere.” The rest of the spring issue is really, really good. Please read it! (And read Heringer’s book, too.)
Back to my monthly reading! In April, I…
Read 14 books: 7 novels, 4 essay collections, 1 academic book…and 2 self-help books
Had an exceptionally peaceful week-long vacation (which is why I managed to read so much!) in London
While there, visited the Enzo Mari exhibition at the Design Museum (curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Francesca Giacomelli!)
Finished my perfume sample of Phở-gere, a sublimely galangal-forward green fragrance inspired by Vietnamese scents. It’s so good! I’m planning on buying a full bottle
Below, brief reviews of the 14 books—plus some favorite posts by other Substack writers.
Books
Fiction
I read 7 novels (to be clear, many of them were quite short!):
Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address, which was the NYRB’s April 2024 selection for their Classics Book Club subscription. It’s a winsome, tender novella about a young boy staying with his uncle’s family in Calcutta/Kolkata for the summer. Very slice-of-life, charming, and a quick read! If you’re curious, I have a Goodreads review with 2 of my favorite quotes, so you can assess the style for yourself.
Jonathan Buckley’s Tell, which is also an April 2024 book subscription selection—this time from New Directions. (If you’re in the UK, you can probably get it by subscribing to Fitzcarraldo.) This was profoundly good and I recommend it unreservedly to people who are interested in the art world, voyeuristic stories of rich people, stream-of-consciousness narrators, and class inequality. If you read
’s essay for Dirt/Lithub on how money is “conspicuously absent” from most contemporary literature—well, this novel is the antidote. The narrator is employed as a gardener for an obscenely wealthy British entrepreneur and art collector, and the novella depicts how wealthy people get and spend their money—and what it’s like to work underneath them. Here’s my brief Goodreads review.Yuxin Zhao’s The Moons: Fire Rooster to Earth Dog, an autofictional novel about a young Chinese woman in LA entangled in a long-distance lesbian relationship. It’s published by the indie press Calamari Archive, which “shrugs off genre, authorship, marketability and other conventions of traditional publishing.” Won’t say too much about the novel, as I have a forthcoming review—if all goes well!—coming out soon.
Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, which has been vaguely “on my list” for at least a year. Finally acquired a copy because I’m taking a class at the School for Poetic Computation with the artist, writer, and educator
, who’s been quoting the most luminous and remarkable lines from Lispector’s novel:What am I doing in writing to you? trying to photograph perfume.
Imagine a novel crammed full of passionately strange images like this. It’s so good; I love Lispector, I really want to take the time to read all of her works.
Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness, which is about an American gay man teaching English in Sofia, Bulgaria. The 9 loosely connected chapters—not strictly chronological—depict him mentoring his young students, falling in love with a Portuguese man, observing both solidarity and homophobia at a protest march, and having a lot of sex. (Or a moderate amount of very well-written, psychologically impactful sex.) Am very impressed by the range of this novel, which touches on Bulgarian politics—as experienced by young naïve students and older gay activists—literature, art, consent, secrecy…
Anne Serre’s The Beginners. I read my first Serre novella (A Leopard-Skin Hat) last year, through the New Directions book subscription, and loved it so, so much. I’ve wanted to read more Serre for a while, and The Beginners is a very brief, psychologically precise novella about an art critic who begins an affair with a scientist. It’s a novel about deception and love and betrayal and trying to sort out who you want—and why.
Marosia Castaldi’s The Hunger of Women, which I read on
’s recommendation. It’s about an older widow who, after her adult daughter leaves home, decides to open up a restaurant in Lombardy. Through the restaurant, she meets—befriends—seduces other women and becomes a well-known figure in her community. Castaldi has a strange and remarkable way of writing: the novel has no full stops to finish off a sentence, and hardly any other punctuation (commas, colons)…It’s a really remarkable read and now I want to copy Castaldi’s style exactly…apologies to everyone I’ve already inflicted my style-driven fanfiction on…
Essays and criticism
I read 4 essay collections on aesthetics, psychoanalysis, art criticism, and culture:
Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Not only did I pre-order this, I’m personally responsible for 2 other friends doing the same (Macmillan, sponsor me!). This was such a pleasure to read—the collection touches on ineffectual mindfulness advice, erotically charged horror films, Sally Rooney’s covert ambition as a novelist…and a polemic against that hateful phrase, Let people enjoy things!, which is so often used to place all cultural production on the same playing field.1 In response, here’s Rothfeld:
The “democratization of culture” is a consolation prize, offered up in place of a political order in which people could exert meaningful control over the circumstances of their lives. It not only fails to make anything happen but actually confirms…that nothing is happening, at least when it comes to shifting a lopsided material distribution…Aesthetic culture as a whole would improve if audiences had the time and the education to cultivate their tastes. But if democratizing politics would go some way toward improving culture, the reverse does not hold: democratizing culture has gone no way toward improving politics. It has only left consequential inequalities intact, while depriving us of the extravagance that is our human due.
Adam Phillips’s On Wanting to Change. I had a real Adam Phillips phase last year, after reading “On Giving Up” in the LRB. In the essay, Phillips writes about about Kafka and suicide and psychoanalysis and Macbeth and manages to make all these serious, somber topics feel deeply life-affirming. I subsequently picked up Phillips’s Unforbidden Pleasures (amazing, amazing literary criticism and psychoanalysis) and then started On Wanting to Change…and never finished it? But an internet acquaintance (hi Reuben, thank you btw!!!!) replied to one of my previous emails and brought up the book, and so I finally read the last 5 pages and felt very pleased to be done. Phillips’s book is about our desire to change and the stories we tell about it:
[N]othing is more revealing of a time, or a culture, or an individual, than their fantasies of change…
When we want to think of our lives as progress myths, in which we get better and better at realizing our so-called potential; or conversely as myths of degeneration – as about decay, mourning and loss (ageing as the loss of youth, and so on) – we are also plotting our lives.
Peter Schjeldahl’s Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988–2018. I started reading this over a year ago because I wanted to learn from Schjeldahl’s energetic, idiosyncratic, and immensely personable way of writing about art. I finally finished it while writing my last Substack post, on abstract painting and art critics who write with style:
Sally Olds’s People Who Lunch: Essays on Work, Leisure & Loose Living. When Olds’s book was originally published in Australia, in 2022 (Olds is Australian, and the essays are all very delightfully situated in Melbourne’s literary/academic/clubbing scene), it was very well-reviewed—here’s a lovely discussion in the Sydney Review of Books that summarizes Olds’s brilliant analysis of the contemporary obsession with hybrid personal essays. Then People Who Lunch was republished in the US. Seemingly NO ONE has reviewed it on the American side, which makes me afraid that NO ONE is reading this brilliant essay collection—which touches on the history of polyamory, how a social safety net can sponsor brilliant art and writing, and has an unusually brilliant essay about Lana del Rey and crypto enthusiasts (not tech nerd ones, but perpetually underemployed artists and sex workers in Melbourne). It’s really good and a fun read, because Olds has such a clear and humorous style of writing.
Academic
I read David L. McMahan’s The Making of Buddhist Modernism after seeing it mentioned in Rothfeld’s essay collection. McMahan is a professor of religious studies, and his book is an amazing example of accessible academic writing that feels intensely relevant to contemporary culture. Here’s my Goodreads review, which includes a (hopefully) succinct yet respectful summary of McMahan’s key arguments:
For a few years now, I've been interested in the selective popularity of Buddhism in the west—the fascination with meditation and mindfulness, especially in secular (or even atheist!) communities. Buddhism appears to be uniquely portable and palatable, readily adopted by people who have no cultural or ethnic ties to historically Buddhist communities. Why is that?
McMahan's book basically answers that question. He suggests that what we call "Buddhism" today is really a syncretized belief system that incorporates many Western philosophical, scientific aesthetic, and psychological ideas. In the mid-Victorian period, Westerners often saw Buddhism negatively—as a primitive and nihilistic belief system. Asian Buddhists, as well as Westerners who were curious and excited by Buddhist beliefs, sought to change the popular image of Buddhism. (It's worth noting that many Asian Buddhists did so because they wanted to increase Buddhism's prestige, during a historical period when Western colonizers depicted Asian culture and intellectual activity as lesser.)
Reading this book made me want to go back to grad school! (This is a compliment, to be clear; it’s maybe the highest compliment for any work of academic writing.)
Self-help
At some point I’ll write a post that (a) interrogates my insatiable hunger for self-help books, even though it’s a genre dominated by very bad writing and very neoliberal thinking; and (b) ranks every self-help book I’ve ever read.2
Until I get around to that post, here’s two very brief reviews:
John Bradshaw’s Healing the Shame that Binds You. Read if you, like, me, find yourself pointlessly mired in shame and fear that nothing you do is good enough, ever; that you are fundamentally flawed and inadequate in many ways (which all need to be analyzed at the precise moment you’re trying to fall asleep)…and you’re interested in addressing this with a psychoanalytically-inflected, AA-inspired book (Bradshaw is sober and writes a lot about turning away from drinking and towards God). Also, there are all these strange and compelling diagrams:
Jami Attenberg, 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round. Read if you need a book that is gently encouraging and very, very digestible—not too taxing on the mind, and even a little bit healing, after you’ve been self-flagellating for all your FLAWS and SHAMEFUL QUALITIES and now need to be patient and kind with yourself so you can write something. Inspired by
’s #1000daysofsummer challenge, which she runs on her Substack newsletter . I quite liked this book because Attenberg urges you to make the time to write, despite all the responsibilities and emergencies that show up in life. At this point in life, I don’t really want to read anything that says: Be kind to yourself, take it easy, it’s OK if you can’t write. I’d rather read someone saying: Yes, it’s hard to make the time, but isn’t it kinder to yourself to try?
Substack posts
I’ve developed a pleasurable addiction to the Substack app—pleasurable because I’m always coming across incisive/funny/compelling/playful posts. There’s so much good writing here; I’m reminded of Venkatesh Rao’s “A Text Renaissance”, written way back in 2020, where he argues that Substack is reviving email and RSS (which for many years seemed like old, fusty technologies that would never become chic again) in exciting ways.
Below, 6 of my favorite posts this month—on Gaza, recommendation culture, online dating, Berlin, and writing for free.
Ordinary life during a genocide ✦
’s sensitive reflection on Gaza—beautifully written, politically searching, and the opening reminds me of an entry from Kafka’s diaries:August 2, 1914: Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.
It’s strange that, six months later, people are still dying in Gaza. It is infuriating and painful and there is so much grief and we are also forced to treat this as normal, as something to just observe and then make coffee, go to work, align stakeholders, go to the gym. As Somayajula writes:
There’s a strange and terrible cognitive dissonance to the feeling of going through the motions of your daily life with the knowledge that at any given moment, while you are brushing your teeth or standing in line at the grocery store or losing to your friends in Scrabble, there are people on the other side of the world being slaughtered by the thousands in a genocide that is being carried out with the endorsement of your government and the support of your tax dollars. There is something uniquely paralyzing about the sense of helplessness that arises from attending rallies and protests and marches (never enough, never as many as you wish you could), and then coming home and opening Twitter to read about another neighborhood leveled, another bloodline wiped out.
Bureaucrats and cowards at Columbia ✦
Along similar lines—I really loved
’s brilliantly titled “Can the tenured speak,” which aggressively criticizes the response that certain administrators and professors have had at Columbia (or in some cases, a chilling non-response) to the student protests:Columbia might be the prime example of how Western elite universities are not places for learning and critical thinking so much as they are hedge funds or a front by which to hold swaths of real estate and displace locals…Spivak…has spent her life …founding modern postcolonial thought, lecturing on feminism and Marxism, etc etc.
…I’m not actually interested in Spivak’s silence, particularly, but I think she is a good case to show how some faculty of color are happy to build their careers on abstract radical theory with no intention of ever putting social or professional capital on the line for these apparent values…We forget an important question when we focus on only biological identity: can these elites be trusted? And of course, they cannot.
Stop recommending me things! ✦
Obviously, the internet/most of the publications and newsletters I like/also, this very newsletter are all implicated in Recommendation Culture—that obsessive need to “curate” and definitively establish the “top” “best” “most amazing” things. I liked
’s post about recommendation culture:"Best of" lists and recommendation culture have us over-identifying with our purchases, as if every item we buy broadcasts our support for BIPOC, ethical businesses, flaunts our taste, minimizes our carbon footprint, or certifies us as decent humans…It seems we're simplifying our self-concept to what's in our shopping bags. I don’t think I should be overly concerned if a toilet paper brand is “the best” at telling my story.
As usual, our consumption habits—although very, very revealing of our class position, gender, interests, values, etc (I’m reading Distinction still, of course I believe this!)—are inadequate to define our identity. Only creating things can really do that:
I used to think copying what people like Sofia Coppola bought or just going where they went would make me more like them. I definitely think learning what an artist you admire has experienced or is inspired by can help you try and see their unique point of view.
But…[i]t turns out that buying the same stuff doesn't really change who I am or get me closer to the traits I admire in them. Especially when it comes to creative people, the reality is: to be a writer, you must write; to be an artist, you must create. You can’t just act the part…can we perhaps dial back on excessively defining ourselves and our personalities based on where we go and what we bought? Maybe focus more on how we think and we feel, how we behave and what we can contribute to this world?
Against online dating ✦
I loved
‘s “i’m declaring online dating dead”, which is about crushes and flirting and meeting cute people and also why the APPS are an inadequate way to attain love:It’s not even that these people aren’t hot, that they don’t have jobs, or hobbies, it’s just that the nature of this thing will never become organic—we aren’t meant to have so many options, so many imagined futures (again, fig tree, always with the fig tree), such grotesque accessibility to the parasocial…
We all know the best way to meet anyone is a house party thick with adjacent strangers, but when there’s a lull of those, there’s a romantic vacancy that pushes us back into the horny, desperate ethers of the internet. Only to find: we still don’t really want to do this. We want someone to see us at the bar and come over. We want to chat and cheek-kiss as our friends pull us from the bar and scratch our number on a receipt and hear from them two days later.
Set your friends up ASAP ✦
Julia’s post has convinced me that the best thing anyone can do for their friends is to throw regular house parties and dinner parties, so people can meet charming and alluring crush objects.
But the
newsletter goes further and demands that everyone (but especially the happily coupled) try to set their friends up:I’d like our non-single readers, preparing for prix fixes and rose petals and jewelry to ask themselves: is the job finished? Is the job finished if your single friends aren’t right there with you rippin the $129 Wen Wen tasting platter with a girl 3 rings out of their league? Is the job finished if your bestie tosses on sleepless in seattle and tucks into a Van Leeuwens mint chip ice cream sando? Is the job finished if the whole squad isn’t full to the brim with low key tenderness and fleeting intimacy?! NO! The job isn’t finished!!!!
…Here is the dirty little secret about matchmaking: if your expressed goal is to help two people fall in love, you’ve already lost. You’ve flown too close to the sun. No One Man Can Have All That Power (who said that first again i forget?). No, the goal of a matchmaker should be to be more exciting than the Hinge algorithm.
Rather than trying to find your friend's soulmate, try to find someone your single friend might possibly have a good first date with, or even a slightly sexually charged conversation. Most hinge dates hurdle towards a job interview with a sour and two hazy IPAs, if you can beat that, you’ve done your job.
The best hate read ✦
The best haters aspire to a certain style, a disdainful exuberance of negativity, a form of hatred so pristinely entertaining and ludicrous that it becomes an art. It’s not that fun when people hate on the obvious things with obvious arguments. It’s deeply, deeply fun.
This Hate Read post on Berlin (from
’s iconic newsletter) is the best one of the series, imo. You really have to be a top-tier hater to complain about Berlin fashion AND Germany’s generous vacation days and make it funny:Berlin is home to the worst-dressed people in the world. Everyone looks like they’ve assaulted a thrift store, but coincidentally this thrift store only carried everything two sizes too big. In time, one learns that the bad outfits are there to draw attention away from even-worse haircuts (no one on the planet besides Zendaya should be attempting micro bangs).
But the worst part of Berlin — or Germany, in general — has got to be the workplace. No one, neither Americans nor Germans, will agree with me on this, but I staunchly believe that 30 vacation days per year is TOO MANY VACATION DAYS. Throw a rock at any Berlin workplace, and you can bet that it’s rife with absenteeism and chaos.
Write for free (no, really) ✦
I really loved
’s “give away something valuable,” which reflects on the internet’s early blogging culture and the generous, anti-commercial excitement of people writing just because they wanted to.What I have witnessed over the past decade or so is a vocal demand for creative writers to be paid for their “labor,” meaning that writers deserve financial compensation for every poem or short story or braided essay that appears on a literary website or in the pages of a printed literary journal. This has resulted in the closing of almost every single online lit mag that published me as a young poet.
Although I fully agree that corporations should fairly compensate writers for freelance work (and pay their employees! and pay their interns!), I’m disheartened at the loss of so many volunteer-run passion projects that never could have afforded to pay themselves a penny—let alone every poet.
In my view, we’ve lost that fizzy, fun DIY spirit that I discovered in zine culture in the late ’90s, and in blogging culture of the early ’00s.
I left a comment on Leigh’s post which is, in some ways, the raison d’être for this newsletter as well:
Some of the best writing I've seen online was by people who were total amateurs (I say this positively) and had no financial or professional stake in what they were writing about. They were simply autodidactic enthusiasts who shaped the internet and created communities around their love for niche topics. I admire those writers immensely, and that's basically the tradition I'm trying to write in—the earnest, devoutly committed fan.
I’ll close with a story a friend told me while I was in London. Several years ago, James and a friend-of-friend (let’s call this person A., I’ve totally forgotten their name) had stopped by one of the Vittles-recommended pubs in London and found it full of irascible regulars. One of them—a fairly old man, and fairly drunk, came up to James and A. and asked, somewhat aggressively, what they liked to do.
“I like to read,” A. said, to which the man replied, “Name one book.” A—likely intimidated by the man’s irritable gaze—couldn’t think of a single title. The aggrieved man responded by reciting, from memory, the first page of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (!) in French (!!) spoken with a thick Glaswegian accent (!!!).
I’m obsessed with this story. I love London!
That’s all for April. Thank you for reading, and thank you to everyone who has been commenting/emailing book and essay recommendations!
I really am very pleased at this elaborate, highly manual content recommendation system, where I write 4,000-word posts about my reading in order to hear from people with similar tastes and aspirations. It’s not very efficient, but it’s extremely fun. Wishing you all a beautiful and energizing spring!
I’m reminded of the pointless 2019 controversy that erupted when the bestselling YA novelist Sarah Dessen took to Twitter to complain about an undergrad who became involved in her university’s freshman reading program “so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.” Dessen was furious. But the undergrad—who, btw, was called a “fucking bitch” on Twitter by another bestselling novelist—simply wanted to advocate for an Edwidge Danticat book instead.
Sorry, but some books are really more worthy of the term “literature” than others! Also, the whole situation—where multiple widely-read authors showed up for one of their own…by making fun of an undergrad whose words were taken out of context—just felt so undignified…
S-tier books include Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.
D-tier books include (tragically) nearly all books about minimalism and Japanese/Scandinavian interior design…so many of them are BAD! Cashing in on a trend with the most inadequate writing and mediocre graphic design!
i really liked four thousand weeks too ☺️🌱 im enjoying and finding lots of comfort in the other significant others by rhaina cohen - abt very important friendships and life w friendship at the centre !
DID YOU LOOK INSIDE MY HEAD? re: currently writing about how buying a book and putting it on my shelf feels the same as having read it. love the madness of this post