+ Nonfiction

+ Memoir

5/5

Stay True by Hua Hsu

Stay True by Hua Hsu was the first book I picked up and finished this year and it is now a favorite book of all time (biggg statement!). 💗💗

The memoir follows Hua Hsu as he develops a sense of self in the most beautifully articulated quiet moments, in dorm rooms and long drives and while listening to music. It’s a book about friendship and music, but eventually also about grief when (not a spoiler) his college best friend is killed.

If anything, I don’t think Stay True is a book about grief more than it is a story about being a good friend, and the joys of a life surrounded by good friends and bearing witness to their lives. 🫂

Hua Hsu is such a talented writer. He captures feelings and moods so delicately and precisely, incredibly subtle in their power to move you as a reader.

A review on the book’s jacket sleeve described Stay True as having the ability to break your heart and then mend it back together, and I fully agree. The way Hua Hsu captures what it feels like to be young, sense making, and self-indulgent is so casually beautiful. If this book was a feeling, it’d be a harsh sunrise.

I felt particularly moved by scenes where Hua Hsu would matter-of-factly describe the experience of trying to piece together your memory of someone but forgetting the exact jokes, words, stories exchanged.

+ Fiction

+ Novel

3.5/5

Ghosts by Dolly Alderton

Dolly Alderton’s memoir Everything I Know About Love was one of my favorite reads of 2022 so I was stokedddd to pick up Ghosts, her first fiction novel 🤓

I love a good contemporary book and Ghosts delivered on the front of realness lol 🕺I liked that as a contemporary novel the book makes really vulnerable observations about our search for partnership, the pressure on young women to build a life, and the insecurities that come with not having your shit together(!).

In her other work, I find that Dolly Alderton expresses her thoughts on modern romance and female friendships really well (really sharp and hard hitting). I don’t think these ideas came across as strong or as visceral in Ghosts, probably getting lost in the translation of fiction. 😕 The writing reads like unpolished chicklit at times but it definitely still had its moments of brilliance. I was still highlighting and bookmarking pages 🔖

+ Nonfiction

2.5/5

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss made me realize 1) I don’t enjoy writing by poets turned writers, 2) I don’t really care to hear about a white American woman’s thoughts on global poverty.🫠

The book is a collection of entries (between two to ten pages long each entry) following Biss wrestle with new financial stability, considering the systems in place that allowed her to even arrive there. It’s very much introspective on the pleasures of subscribing to an exploitative capitalist structure. 💰

My favorite point of the book is when Biss argues that there are two contradicting joys, that of personal wealth accumulation and the destruction of capitalist structures, and the two coexisting side by side.

For me, her writing didn’t bring justice to a valid experience. I disliked how Biss half-heartedly acknowledges her privilege. She reveals her discomfort sitting with it but does little to help the reader respect her. The lack of owning up to the truth of her conditions—that her idea of poverty equates to years going to a laundromat, insects in her house, pipes needing repair—reads silly. If anything, the book establishes that her conditions under capitalism are theoretically and literary informed, not rooted in personal plight.

I felt like every entry was built up to end on a strong note but the pages prior were flat and honestly kinda boring. I also felt that there was a lot of raising questions—you get a good sense of Biss attempting to dissect what comes with financial stability/home owning/wealth, but none of these ideas are concluded.

+ Fiction

+ Short Stories

3.7/5

Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

A+ cover with an A+ title 👏

Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory is a compilation of short stories written by the creator of Bojack Horseman. The book, as a result, is similarly silly, honest, and introspective. 🤭

Bob-Waksberg explores various narrative structures and even formats in the book, making each story totally unique. 🌟 One story lists out places in NYC the narrator associates to memories of failed relationships; my favorite chapter is about hypothetical lunch conversations with your ex.

Much of the book is written from the point of view of an anonymous narrator that uses “you” and “we.” In doing so, Bob-Waksberg captures the messy honesty of human thoughts and interactions, and places these into a bigger picture of emotion that is at once vague yet familiar. These scenes, more often than not about modern love and life, are touching, focused, and concise in the best way. 🥰

Some other chapters…miss the mark. What I didn’t enjoy about the book is that it requires the reader to move between different reader headspaces. Let me explain: one chapter may read like a dive into a personal diary—packed with jazzy emotions that’ll make you go, “Ugh, same!!”. And then you move to the next chapter and it’s an entirely different narrative structure with a plot and fictional characters. Because of how awkward this shift between headspaces reads, not every story can be as beautifully received.

+ Nonfiction

Conversations On Love by Natasha Lunn

Currently Reading