What I've Read So Far
January and February reading wrap up
The first two months of the year were strange—Trump became president1, I left Instagram, the weather was more cold and sunny than grey and rainy, and I didn’t put too much thought into what I read. I usually start every year reading a work by Virginia Woolf, so my first choice was an easy one. The others were either a random bit of fate, a tangent from some other media I consumed, a begrudged giving in to trend, or just a genuine interest mixed with an approachable page count. I also read Middlemarch in late February and just finished it a few days ago. I am by no means ready to write about it and may never be. It is a book that demands our time, and I am becoming more and more interested in works that insist upon this. A Reading Life wrote a lovely piece on what she calls the vibeshift towards the classics.2
“Between our current political anxiety, the endless cycle of late stage capitalist consumerism that readers are not immune from, and the TikTokification of our digital lives, many of us find ourselves yearning for deep thought. Enter the 800-page novel, demanding nothing less than our full attention and promising no quick dopamine hits in return. The parallels between our moment and these 19th-century novels are striking. If you are grappling with reconciling your ambition, your class belonging and your morals – well, look no further.”
But more on this later. For now here is everything I read this year that is not Middlemarch.
I’ve been starting my year off with a work by Virginia Woolf since 2022. The first was Mrs. Dalloway, then To The Lighthouse in 20233, and Orlando in 2024. Each one those novels has “beat a measured and soothing tattoo”4 on my mind since I read them. I think about Mrs. Dalloway walking on the streets of London, Orlando skating on the medieval Thames river with their Russian lover (Woolf must have been inspired by Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina), and the Ramsay house in Lighthouse, slowly decaying through time.
The Voyage Out was Woolf’s first novel. She completed it in 1912 under the name Melymbrosia. There is a version of The Voyage Out compiled by scholars in the early 2000s5 holding the original title. Melymbrosia contains some of the intense edits that were made at the urgings of Woolf’s publisher. The original work contained much more blatant critiques of colonialism, sexual abuse, and the treatment of women and queer people. This was not the version I read, but I would definitely like to pick it up someday and do a comparison.
The Voyage Out feels different from her other works, reading more traditionally Victorian. There is a decent sized cast of characters with a main heroine and love interest. One could even make comparisons to Middlemarch—Dorthea Brooke and The Voyage Out’s heroine, Rachel, are a mirror to one another in both their childish ignorance and earnest desires to live a life of devotion and beauty, and the town of Santa Marina creates it own sort of community with the same little scandals and dramas that the town of Middlemarch has. At the same time however, the book’s prose brings a modern splash of energy to the page.
The basic plot line of the book begins with the preparation for a trip to South America and a subsequent boat journey to a coastal town called Santa Marina. On the boat are Helen and Ridley Ambrose, who are heading to South America for the winter, leaving their children behind in London. Helen’s brother owns and operates the boat, and it is here we meet Rachel who is Helen’s niece. Rachel is left in the care of her aunt and uncle upon arriving at Santa Marina; her father stays behind to travel further up river. Once in the town Rachel meets a variety of British expats and travelers staying at the local inn, with two of them being a pair of young men who, along with Helen, lead her to an awakening of the world around her. One of those men is Terence Hewet, who could be described as a soft boy with a trust fund. He is independently wealthy and longs to be a writer. Terence and Rachel form a complex bond that takes some time to tease out. And not to do another Middlemarch comparison, but it’s giving Dorthea and Ladislaw energy. Idle life continues in Santa Marina, with cards, dances, and little outings. I will not say more about where the story goes for lack of spoilers, but as we know with Woolf, death is always around the corner.
I enjoyed reading this novel after her others because I could see the seedlings of ideas which she fleshed out in later works. Mrs. Dalloway and her husband are actually a part of this novel, passing guests on the boat headed to South America. On the boat Richard (Mr. Dalloway) assaults Rachel by kissing her, starting the first crack in her journey into reality. After discussing what happened with her aunt Helen, who serves as a mentor figure to her throughout the novel, the veil of childhood ignorance slowly begins to lift:
“‘So that’s why I can’t walk alone!’ By this new light she saw her life for the first time a creeping hedged-in thing, driven cautiously between high walls, here turned aside, there plunged in darkness, made dull and crippled for ever—her life that was the only chance she had— a thousand words and actions became plain to her. ‘Because men are brutes! I hate men!’
‘I thought you said you liked him?’ said Helen.
‘I liked him, and I liked being kissed,’ she answered, as if that only added more difficulties to her problem.”6
Unfortunately Rachel, women have yet to solve the thorny issue of loving and desiring men with the forces of patriarchal oppression.
More awakenings come for Rachel during her time on Santa Marina, and each one is often paired with some melancholy or fear, having to do the extra step of reconciling these revelations to the fact of her being a woman. The ending is tragic, like I mentioned, but it makes sense coming from Woolf who struggled with where to place herself in this world. If you don’t know where to start with Woolf, I wouldn’t start here. The Voyage Out should be read like a prequel to her future works, providing a lush backstory for her future novels. If you are curious where to start, I usually recommend Mrs. Dalloway or her nonfiction, A Room of One’s Own.
Then I read All Fours by Miranda July because everyone was talking about it and I finally said “Fine! I’ll read it.” So I read it and was not impressed. First, this book was not written for me but for another tax bracket of women which I do not belong to; the kind that can casually waste $20,000 on a manic-creative whim to redecorate a motel room, all because they are afraid of getting old. Listen, I get it. Women have been told we are only valued by our beauty and sexuality and when that starts to slip away it can be disorienting in knowing where to find your footing on the cliff face that is womanhood under patriarchy. The rocks are slippery, the edges sharp, and the descent is steep; it is best to just fall off the wall, even better if you jump. This book read like a panic-induced death grip to that wall.
Despite our narrators intense examination of sexual power (paired with her intense fear of losing it), she never seemed to question or recognize the power of her class standing. This brought a level of intellectual laziness to the plot that didn’t suit me. There is a scene where she thinks she is experiencing voyeurism (she witnesses a man taking pictures of her house at night) and it turns out it was not for the commodity of her sexuality but of her property ownership. It was just a real estate company estimating the worth of her multi-million dollar home. When she discovers this she is almost disappointed, she’s so old now people won’t even stalk her anymore, and yet she ignores something perhaps more powerful than sex—wealth. Similarly, the redecoration of the motel room, which was meant to be a spiritual and cathartic process for her, turns out to be a lucrative business deal in the form of gentrification. We don’t see the character reckon with this, she simply shrugs as if it is a funny piece of fate that landed in her lap (lol I’m rich I guess?). It was not clear whether the aloofness around her wealth was an intentional narrative choice. If so, it was not well integrated into the novel; and if not, Miranda July needs to get some working class friends to read her drafts.
I could go on and on about how I didn’t like this book and how it further proved my theory that polyamory is a rich people sport (like skiing or sailing, who has the time and money for that?), but I won’t. Instead let me direct you to an incredible piece by Tembe Denton-Hirst, comparing All Fours to a manifest destiny narrative. It gets right at the heart of the entitled, rich white woman narrative that saturates the novel.
“But the freedom that she seeks is freedom from rules, the epitome of manifest destiny. She doesn’t want to operate in a society with rights and wrongs. She wants everything she desires to be the right choice.”7
And now for something completely different! I decided to read Katalin Street by Magda Szabo after watching The Brutalist. That may seem like a weird connection, but I was curious to learn more about Hungary post-WWII. I’ve read both Abigail and The Door by Szabo and loved them both dearly. The novel follows the lives of three families over several decades around WWII, beginning as neighbors on Budapest’s Katalin Street.
I did not read this book very closely and I don’t have much to say about it except that it serves as a sort of haunting, of the totality of war and how the veil of fascism leaves so little unscathed. The novel featured a Szabo-esque plot, where little objects and moments hold great significance to the fate of its characters. Much of Szabo’s own experience during the Soviet occupation was felt on the page; she herself lost both her home and career during this time. Overall, it was a bleak story, so buckle up if you plan to read it. I wasn’t quite ready for it when I picked it up and because of that, much of the book was not fully digested.
After Katalin Street I was looking for something a bit lighter. Fair Play is a sweet little book about an enduring queer relationship between two artists (Mari and Jonna). They have adjoining studios in Helsinki and spend their summers on a tiny island off the coast of Finland. It was no doubt inspired by Tove’s lifelong partnership to Tuulikki Pietilä, who was also an artist.8
It is rare to get a depiction of a long lasting relationship in the later years of a couple’s life. Our culture seems utterly obsessed with the beginnings and endings of relationships, but not so much with the long horizon of the middle (an inheritance from the Victorians perhaps?9). In Fair Play we enter in the thick of the middle of Mari and Jonna’s companionship. The book is a snapshot of their life, both the everyday drudgery of working as an artist and the fleeting world of travel.
What stood out the most to me in this book was the strong sense of individual personhood they had. They were not one entity but their own separate, spinning planets. It reminded me of a Rilke quote on protecting solitude10, which also happens to be one of my personal tenets of companionship: “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”
Mari highlights it beautifully at the tail end of the book, when she offered a short stay in Paris to work on her art, alone.
“A daring thought was taking shape in her mind. She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of impossibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.”
This gave me new insight on how having a loving companion does not mean the end of solitude, but an expansion of it. The security of love offers us new dimensions, unlocking doors inside ourselves that are too scary to face alone. It was a beautiful little read that I finished over the course of a day, alone in a room in my apartment, my partner just a few walls away.
The Houseguest by Amparo Dávila was a serendipitous read. I found a copy in a neighborhood little free library, and then that very day my friend Amanda sent a picture of her reading it to our book club chat. It was fate.
A book like this is my catnip: a work of fiction by a woman author who, until now, had not been translated into English. I am sure there is something to explore here as to why I am so into this literary niche, but for another time.
These stories are dizzying and delirious; I was not sure what was up or down when I was reading them. Slow to boil, the stories are a masterpiece in the subtlety of fear. “Musique Concrète” was my favorite, featuring a woman haunted by her cheating husband’s mistress, except the mistress only visits her in the form of a toad. The fear she incites is elusive; each story vibrated with a low hum of claustrophobia and panic. I am not one for short stories or horror, but this collection really blew me away.
After reading this, I realized that Ampara Dávila is the ghost author in Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest, which I read last year. I feel I could give Iliac a reread and glean a lot more from it this time around.11
Wow, if you’ve made it this far I commend you; I am personally shocked at how long this is post has become. This is the last one, I promise.
Blue Light Hours was a sweet and tender novel. A daughter departs Brazil on a scholarship to attend college in Vermont, leaving her single mother behind. What follows is the attempt to bridge their distance and maintain a thread of connection amidst physical and cultural separation, while also trying to find independence from one another.
I loved how simple and intimate the prose was, painting Skype calls between mother and daughter with a hallowed, womblike intimacy and giving a quiet, yet profound weight to the immensity of college life. I was personally filled with nostalgia from the Skype-era technology to the reminiscence of undergraduate life during the early 2010s. Though I went to school far from Vermont, I imagined my freshman year dorm as the setting, where I also went through a similar transformation.
This was a lovely little book and I am looking forward to reading more by Bruna Dantas Lobato. I currently have Moldy Strawberries by Caio Fernando Abreu checked out from the library because of her work on the translation.
The writing of this took me much longer than intended. I am still getting my bearings regarding Substack and am not sure how to calibrate it all just yet. I clearly love footnotes and had fun utilizing them in this format.
We will see how these shape out in the future, more to come soon and thanks for reading!
-J
A whole thing I am not ready to discuss. Right now I am just trying to focus on the work I do serving my community which I would argue, for most of us, exists offline.
I wrote a little bit about To the Lighthouse here, back when I thought I would really give Substack a try. Jokes on me, it took two years for it to kick in.
“the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consoling to repeat over and over again” Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
The Voyage Out, pg. 72
All Fours is a Western in Disguise by Tembe Denton-Hirst
Sorry, I cannot shut up about Middlemarch. Here is an interesting piece on how Elliot’s works are so often “marriage plots” but so little is done on exploring married life itself.
“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.” Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
If you are interested in “ghosts of artists past”, check out Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera, featuring the ghost of dancer Marta Becket.
As someone who loved All Fours (for different reasons than mentioned here) I really appreciated reading your thoughts on it! Perspective is always so eye opening 💗
I just finished reading Blue Light Hours. I love this book so much. It's simple but emotionally powerful for me.