My May and June in reading

Did you know that writing your own book and quitting your job and trying to build a business from scratch makes you busy? I’ve been reading plenty, but as you can tell, I’ve been doing very little reviewing. I’ll try to fix that over the next few days. Here’s May and June.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

I’d never read this classic about rabbits on an epic adventure—but I did watch Dimension 20’s “Burrow’s End” season, which felt like the same thing? Anyway, I snagged a copy of Watership Down at a book exchange earlier this year, so I decided to give it a try. Apparently the novel began as a story Adams told his young children, and I am wondering if they were traumatized? It’s a harrowing story. Never thought I’d be so scared for fictional rabbits, but here we are. It’s worth a read.

My Heavenly Favourite by Lucas Rijneveld (translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison)

Would you like to read a book that makes you feel absolutely terrible? If so, Rijneveld’s latest novel is for you. I loved his debut The Discomfort of Evening—which wasn’t an easy read, either. Pretty brutal. But this heavily Lolita-inspired story about a veterinarian and his farmer client’s young daughter—a young daughter who wishes she were a boy—made me queasy the whole way through. This is not a critique of Rijneveld! It wouldn’t be so horrifying if he weren’t such an excellent writer. But before you dive into this one, you should steel yourself.

Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life By Getting Real About the End by Alua Arthur

Given that I’m a well-traveled person who, after the loss of my parents, quit a stable job to dedicate my time to working in and around death, I related in no small way to Arthur’s memoir: the story of a well-traveled woman who, after the loss of her brother-in-law, quit her stable job as an attorney to become one of the most well-known death doulas out there. While there might be some similarities, though, Arthur is a much more impressive person than I am. She certainly has more emotional insight! You should pick this one up if you want to better understand how grappling with death can teach us to live.

After the Revolution by Robert Evans (narrated by the author)

I’m a huge fan of Evans’ podcast Behind the Bastards, so I figured I’d give the audiobook of his novel a try when I was driving to Chicago and back for Memorial Day weekend. It was an excellent choice. After the United States has shattered into a few separate countries, a Christian nationalist army fights its way to power in the Republic of Texas. The novel follows three characters: Manny, who makes a living moving reporters in and out of war zones; Sasha, a teen girl determined to flee her boring, suburban life and join the Christian militants; and Roland, a grizzled veteran whose many technological upgrades and extreme drug use has made him a nearly unstoppable fighter with a dangerously unreliable memory. Eventually their stories come together as they confront the Heavenly Kingdom head on. Plot forward, funny, alarmingly realistic. This is one of the best books I’ve read all year.

The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw (narrated by Susan Dalian)

I listened to the audiobook of this novella, but I wish I’d read it in print. I should have known better. I’ve read some of Khaw’s other work, and I’m well aware that their language leans poetic. I found it difficult to follow just by listening. So maybe I’ll try this one again someday. But the vibes I got were very much up my alley. A violent retelling of The Little Mermaid, beautiful as blood in water.

All Systems Red; Artificial Condition; Rogue Protocol; Exit Strategy by Martha Wells (narrated by Kevin R. Free)

My friend Leta wanted me to read Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series, so they bought me the first book while we were hanging out over Memorial Day. Their strategy worked. I was immediately charmed by our narrator, a laconic security bot that has hacked its own system in order to give itself free will. It uses that free will to watch soap operas all day—and to hide its free will from its human clients, who believe that a bot left to its own devices will do nothing but kill. (Or at least, that’s what most humans believe.) I was so charmed, in fact, that I listened to the audiobooks of the next three novellas in quick succession. The first four books form a single arc, so I decided to take a break afterwards. But I will definitely be returning to this delightful series in the future.

Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett

As someone who’s experienced her fair share of grief, I can confirm that while sadness and anger are part of it, grief is also very weird. Hartnett conveys this perfectly in her novel, the story of a 12-year-old girl named Elvis who checks off the dates on the calendar her school guidance counselor gave her to show her how long her grief for her dead mother would last (18 months!), all while helping her father with the parrot he suddenly adopted and trying to stop her sister from eating everything in the fridge while sleepwalking. It sounds like a screwball comedy, but it’s weighted with loss to the point that it feels realistic. Immediately after my mom died, we spent days watching James Bond movies; that’s not so different from trying to set a world record in rabbit-shaped cakes.

How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom by Johanna Hedva

I saw this book in a shop one day, made a mental note to add it to my TBR pile, and then immediately forgot about it—until my agent fortuitously sent me a copy. It turns out Hedva and I have the same representation. But that’s not the point. The point is: this is an amazing book of disability-centered essays, as academic and philosophical as it is gross and punk and kinky. It will shift your perspective on what sickness means, on what accessibility means. I especially appreciated their thoughts on caretaking and caregiving—the words mean the same thing, but together they remind us that care is something we both give and take, a radical communal act. Or it could be.

You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue (translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer)

Do you like office bureaucracy satires? What if that office bureaucracy satire took place in 1500s Tenochtitlan and the incompetent boss were Moctezuma? And what if Hernán Cortés had just arrived, and he thought he was the new boss, but it turned out he was also incompetent in a different way? I very much enjoyed this trippy historical fiction.

Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen

This novel is just your average reality TV queer cryptid horror rom-com. Join the cast of The Catch on their trip to a remote island in the Pacific Northwest. As the idiot bachelor decides which women stay and which women go, something else is in the woods, deciding who lives and who dies. But maybe that something else is looking for love, too. This book was a blast, easy and fun.