books in 2017, pt. 3

Kellie Herson
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

Oh, hey, I remembered to do this after reading ten books instead of waiting four months.

Roxane Gay, Difficult Women: I am not a huge single-author short-story collection person (with a few exceptions), because my feelings on the selections are usually all over the place and it makes it hard to articulate a stance on the collection as a whole. This is not an exception to that; the writing is beautiful and there were many pieces I liked, but some just didn’t click with me, and the book gets a bit thematically redundant on the whole.

Katie Kitamura, A Separation: This book is a victim of my least favorite publishing marketing trend, the “next Gone Girl” tag. This is not the next Gone Girl; it just features a complicated woman narrator and some meditations on marriage and a dead body, all written by a woman. It felt very stark and semi-Victorian and wasn’t unsettling or twisty at all, but I think if you go in with a reasonable set of expectations, you’ll enjoy it more.

Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: It will surprise no one who knows my love of books about bizarre families to hear that I loved this a lot — it’s such a great, weird combo of surrealist lyrical style and tangible content. It’s very funny but there are also passages that were a total gut-punch for me; in particular, the meditations on leaving the Catholic Church but not being able to completely rid yourself of Catholicism were Extremely Real for me.

John Darnielle, Universal Harvester: I loved Wolf in White Van but was disappointed in this one — it didn’t have the same strong sense of character or clean nonlinearity as his first novel. It was hard for me to make sense of the plot at times, and the conclusion wasn’t as strong as the set-up, which is intriguing and unsettling.

Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness: I read this because Chrissy Teigen said it was good on Twitter and, as always, Chrissy did not let me down. There are a few sections where some contextual details could have been edited down, but aside from that, this is just an incredible work of true crime. The story is complicated and disturbing, and Parry is super attentive to making sure that the victim isn’t just a Token Pretty Dead Girl but a comprehensible, complicated person. I love true crime but am uncomfortable with how much we obsess over understanding perpetrators at the expense of any conversations about whom they prey on, and this book is a model for showing how you can pull off that balancing act without sacrificing any of the creepy, gory murder mystery.

Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste: This is the 33 1/3 about Celine Dion, and it’s fascinating to read now that the internet has recuperated Celine as an icon. I don’t think every argument in here has aged well, if only because her 2016/17 resurgence has changed her position in popular culture (and people’s willingness to own up to liking her) so drastically. But there’s some interesting discussion of her politics — and the politics of French-Canadianness more broadly, which I was uninformed about prior to reading — and it situates her in the same tacky-but-transnationally-popular white-ethnic art tradition I wrote about in my MA thesis, so that made for a fun read.

Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends: The narrator of this novel is borderline too close for comfort for me, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. This is definitely part of the Sad/Occasionally Unlikable Young White People With Romantic Problems cultural apparatus, except that it takes place in Ireland instead of LA or New York. So it’s not for everyone but I found it well-written and insightful about the contours of said romantic problems and of the general weirdness of being in your 20s.

Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: I was not in the mood to read this but had to get it back to the library since there was a hold on it, but it was fine. It would be a fun travel book, since it’s a quick read and easy enough to read in fits and starts, aside from a few selections that are profoundly depressing.

Chris Kraus, I Love Dick: It me, the person who just got around to reading this while in the final year of a gender studies PhD; please don’t tell anyone I told you that. It’s strange to read this because I’m aware that it was controversial and divisive for its time, but I feel like women my own age don’t have quite as much existential angst about being (or, I guess, verbalizing the experience of being) desiring subjects. So it was not as groundbreaking or mind-blowing for me personally as it had been built up to be — but I did enjoy it, and there are passages/pages that feel like they were scooped out of my own life and brain.

Rosecrans Baldwin, The Last Kid Left: I did not like this and honestly can’t believe I finished it. The premise is intriguing and some of the chapters are quite good, but it just does not hold up as a cohesive entire book. It’s like eight different books, frankensteined together, with no theme or ideology fully articulated, and no plot structure either. I kept reading after the solution to the mystery is revealed in the middle of the novel, thinking it would be reversed or more information would be revealed, but no.

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Kellie Herson

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real housewives critical theorist, nfl astrologer, armchair tennis commentator.

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