Semester 2 Reading List Roundup!
Not pictured: Open City by Teju Cole; The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green; Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison; When I Spoke in Tongues by Jessica Wilbanks; and Educated by Tara Westover.
It’s November, the day before Daylight Savings’ Time, and I just turned in all my end-of-semester documents for my second semester of grad school.
This semester coincided with our move to Boulder. While I was in Houston, most of my work focused on Houston: the volunteer service corps that brought me there, being a white person in a Black neighborhood, working at nonprofits, and the joys, vagaries, and pitfalls of living in intentional community. But this semester, I broadened my scope a bit, as necessarily influenced by the major life transition of moving—with my husband—back to my particular hometown. I’ve been writing about growing up evangelical, repeatedly falling for atheist boys, and having a mad scientist husband.
One of the things I love about the Pacific MFA curriculum is that we get to make our own reading list for each semester. Here are some of the highlights:
> Jenny Lawson. At the beginning of the semester, when my advisor first mentioned that if I wanted to, I could potentially make one of my essays funny, he told me to go slap down some greenbacks and get myself a copy of Jenny Lawson’s first book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. Reading Jenny Lawson shifted my perspective of what nonfiction can be—she is so funny, so ridiculous, and this book is a delight. (Also pictured are her second and third memoirs/essay collections. Let’s Pretend follows a more traditional story structure and is, in my opinion, the best of the three.)
> Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson. This book is short stories, which I usually don’t go for, but they’re all told by the same first-person narrator, only ever referred to by his nickname, Fuckhead (a device pretty similar to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag). I read most of these stories while in the break room at the liquor store where I work [have I mentioned I got a part time job cashiering at the liquor store?], which was the perfect atmosphere for Johnson’s blistered, used-up world. Johnson uses language with such thematic consistency that every detail he offers reinforces his character’s perspective. When I write this, it sounds elementary, but Johnson does it so well. Every detail is used to communicate nuance and expectation. Happy to rave about this one more to anyone who’s curious.
> White Flights by Jess Row. I read this back in June, when I’d just moved to Boulder, a city that exemplifies the spatial politics Row examines. The book is a collection of essays (subtitled “Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination”) that brokered my transition from one of the States’ most diverse cities to this enclave of wealth, privilege, and self-definition.
> When I Spoke in Tongues (not pictured). I expect there to be more ‘deconstruction memoirs’ than there are, partially because evangelical/christian deconstruction is such a huge part of the subsection of the internet where I find myself. (Maybe I should be grateful the market’s not already oversaturated, since my work may fall into that category…?) Jessica Wilbanks’ memoir is a tender and intuitive look at some of the double-binds present in believing in an all-encompassing god, and then walking away from him. Even though she grew up pentecostal and I grew up evangelical, I was startled by the similarities in parts of our journey—including that she lived in an apartment on West Main Street in Houston. Uncanny.
Honorable mention: before the semester started, I read Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude—a totally bizarre, half-realistic novel about two kids growing up in Brooklyn as it gentrifies. Isabel Vendle is the 60s’ inverse predecessor to Kimmy Schmidt’s resident “stoop crone” Lilian: old woman Vendle lives cooped up and stooped up in her Gowanus brownstone, plotting for the day when the neighborhood will flip to predominantly white. Dylan, motherless white progatonist, meets a flying wino and sort-of saves him: enter White Savior Complex. [Hijinks ensue?] Lethem’s novel is a complex, comic-reference-riddled magical-realism look at growing up in mixed-race spaces and how to navigate the inherent affiliations implied by your skin color.
There’s a lot in the novel that I disagree with, but ultimately, reading it was a mind trip that I hadn’t experienced in a while. Fortress of Solitude did what great novels do best: captivate and perplex me. Also! While I was looking up reviews after I finished it, I learned that in 2015, Michael Friedman wrote a musical adaptation! Which I am so about. The original cast A. was stacked, including Hadestown’s André de Shields, and a touring version featured Crazy Ex Girlfriend’s Santino Fontana as the male lead; and B. the recording is on Spotify.
My relationship to the story morphed even more when I listened to the New York Times podcast “Nice White Parents” about school segregation, which focused on the very same schools (and many of the very same issues) that Dylan and his best friend Mingus attended in the '60s.
I’m about to be on ‘school break’ for a month or so, during which I hope to edit a bunch of the essays I wrote this semester, lurk in local coffee shops like a townie, and read Jose Saramago’s Blindness. I’d love to hear what you’re reading.
