February Reading

What I've been reading, doing, loving in February

This is my monthly wrap up where I talk about some of my favorite things from the last month. Things I’m reading, enjoying, looking forward to—sort of anything floating my boat.

February came and went so fast. I didn’t follow Ferris Bueller’s advice—barely looked around to notice anything, and had a hard time being present.

I’m going into March galvanized. I want to take my time and find routine again. I want to dig into old pockets to uncover parts of myself that spent the winter covered in lint.

Here is an overview of how my month went:

• Posted a vlog about getting myself out of a reading slump

• Spent approximately 1 million dollars at coffee shops because it was the only way to shake off something I can’t even put my finger on now (lethargy? blues?)

• I started a new job, and trying not to have content paralysis at the thought of coworkers finding out about my online life
  Stay tuned to see if I will ever join the company’s book club

• Went to a line dancing class and got my I-actually-used-to-dance ass kicked

• Watched a lot of TV… we are so back

• Posted another vlog about my progress on my first novel
  I wanted to revise it, but realized that there’s more work to be done—but I’m really excited about the work

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What I Read

Below is a rundown of every book I read last month. I’ll be adding a star next to my standouts, like a starred review where a star isn’t a 1 to 5 scale, it just means good!

Before the written ramblings, here is a video version of my monthly wrap up if you’re more of a visual person:

Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato ★

This book ripped me out of a reading slump, and I really enjoyed it. The author is a very celebrated translator, and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that this was such an amazing debut novel.

Blue Light Hours is about a young Brazilian girl who leaves her home to go study in Vermont. She leaves behind her mother who does her best to cling to her daughter by having regular Skype calls. The book mostly takes place during these calls across the world, where these people interact through screens and see each other in a tiny 2D frame.

I was so taken by this book. Noticing a growing distance between who you are now to who you were then being reflected to you in the people you love… That hit so hard. It also discusses emigration, belonging, struggles of connection, the othering experience of not communicating in the same language as your child.

Some of my personal connection to parts of this narrative definitely enhanced my experience. Maybe that is weighing heavily in the balance when I call this a 5-star read, but if that’s the case, that’s just reading baby!
This book was so simple, but so good. Highly recommend.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

I read this book alongside

Martha

, who writes the amazing Martha’s Monthly!
We both enjoyed it, and had similar takeaways from our reads. I was even able to clue her in on the Iowa Writers Workshop and how much this novel feels like a product of it.

Real Life is the story of Wallace, a queer black academic on a predominantly white Midwestern campus. We watch him navigate the various spaces in his life as an outsider and experience others othering him at every turn.

This was a reread for me. When I first read it, in 2020, I was just starting to navigate my taste again and reading to push myself. This novel felt like it was hitting the nail on the head—beautiful and complex writing, a literary fiction character study, and gay stuff!
On my second read, I had a hard time separating my experience from what felt like pretension. I enjoyed it, but there’s something about the way this is written (and something I’ve noticed across other Iowa Writers Workshop alumni’s works) that is like seeing that friend you can’t help but feel talks down to you. It requires work and you have to do your best not to be put off. Still, I enjoyed this.

One of the many things I was so taken by this time around was Wallace’s experience at work. Casual racism and targeted attacks wash over him, they feel par for the course in his mind. He’s cornered like a lab mouse having to work at wanting to be somewhere he isn’t wanted.

“Do you want to be here or do you… do you just not want to be somewhere else?”

p. 258, Real Life

The biggest shock to me was how much this felt like a play. Every chapter reads like a story on its own. The book happens in slow motion, there are long stretches of dialogue and everything feels like we, the audience, are waiting to see how Wallace interprets what unfolds around him. I loved reading it that way.

Universality by Natasha Brown (Comes out March 4th)

I loved Assembly, and when this started making the rounds, some of my trusted mutuals had mixed reviews—I had to investigate and see what I thought. It’s another short and punchy book from Natasha Brown, and I am simply begging her to write a longer one someday.

This book kicks off with a long bit of investigative journalism where the writer is discussing a bludgeoning that took place at a remote farmhouse. She spends a long time dissecting the intricacies of the case, the people involved, and the larger implications at play.
After the first part concludes, we get several other perspectives from various people—the journalist herself, the banker who owned the farm, etc. We dig into their lives before and after the event, and the viral article that came out of it.

The story shifts, changes, and builds, while discussing classism, sexism and racism from all these perspectives and angles. I found this really effective in giving a layered experience of modern living under capitalism, with media sensationalism and cultural divides.

I really liked this, my only gripe is that I wish it was a 600 page door-stopper.

The White Book by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)

This book is my first Han Kang, but not my last! I will be reading all of her novels that have english translations this year. I started with the strangest of the bunch, and it was a fun ride.

The book is semi-autobiographical and mostly poetry and prose poetry bits. It tells the story of Han Kang’s older sister who only lived for two hours. It’s that experience, it’s her mother’s experience of having that child, and her experience of being born into that familial context.

She uses the color white to examine life, loss, grief, impermanence and also absence (white being the absence of color), but everything feels so full because of her incredible writing.

This reminded me of Bluets by Maggie Nelson. It’s like a cloud where you think it’s one think, then it changes shapes, and veers into another direction—impossible to describe and pin down. I’m excited to read this over and over again for years to come.

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Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

The author wrote this book when she was 17, and I cannot get over that fact. It’s such an impressive feat, and the novel is fantastic.

This book is inspired by a real story, and follows a young girl in Oakland who accidentally falls into sex work. She then gets roped into a larger scheme happening with the police department, which exposes deep-rooted corruption and imbalanced power structures.

Nightcrawling is incredibly hard to read. It discusses heavy topics in a very matter of fact way, which was so powerful. The narrator lets things wash over her and it’s completely devastating to read.

I really enjoyed this (even though it was tough), and I’m excited to read this author’s forthcoming novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, which comes out later this year.

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

This is my second poetry collection by Danez Smith, and it was just as good as the first.

Smith’s poetry discusses being HIV+, having a black body, being queer. This collection specifically digs into violence, and drags the reader through so much hate, pain, prejudice, and more.

Don’t Call Us Dead is contemporary, yet has beautiful lyricism that reminds me of classic poetry. It manages to balance both in a really great way. Highly recommend Danez Smith for anyone looking for poetry that discusses living in today’s America.

Luster by Raven Leilani ★

I read this in 2020, and I remember loving it the first time around. Happy to report nothing has changed!

Luster is about Edie, a twenty-something girl in NYC who has sex like Samantha Jones and doesn’t care about her job. She starts dating a man in an open marriage and when things in her life start to hit the fan, she moves into his New Jersey suburb house with his wife and adopted daughter. The rest of the novel is a dissection of the dynamics between all four of these people as they cohabitate.

There’s an examination of power in this that was fantastic. Who has the upper-hand? As the reader, the answer to that question constantly shifts. There’s also a really great through line of race relations, investigated in different contexts throughout the novel.

I can recognize that this book relies very heavily on shock value in the first act—it’s insane to watch her move into this man’s house with his family—and then loses a bit of steam plot-wise in the middle. But what saved it for me was the writing.
Reading this feels like walking a tightrope, it’s taut and tense and feels like you might lose your balance. There were so many sentences where I needed to catch my breath after reading them.

“It’s not that I want exactly this, to have a husband or home security system that, for the length of our marriage, never goes off. It’s that there are gray, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void.”

p. 17, Luster

This book has flaws, sure, but they didn’t bother me too much. I loved it.

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On My Bedside Table

A dispatch from my bedside table and the books that litter it, hoping to be read soon.

• Croire aux fauves by Nastassja Martin (In the Eye of the Wild), autofiction from an anthropologist who survived a bear attack

• The Vegetarian by Han Kang, a woman decides to become a vegetarian, and the ripple effects throw her life into chaos

• The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, the lives of the four members of a dysfunctional family are examined in great detail

• Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal (translated by Elisabeth Lauffer), nonfiction that dissects the politics of bodily aesthetics

• Goodlord by Ella Frears, a book-length email that is a fictional memoir of habitation addressed to a real estate agent

Have you read any of these? Are any of these non-negotiables? Are any of them skippable?

What did you read and love in February?

Tell me what you think in the comments!

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That’s been my month!

Until next time 🤠