Worth It #5

the very best of what I'm reading + watching + listening to

Welcome to Worth It, a weekly(ish) round-up of the very best of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and occasionally even cooking. Only the things absolutely worth your valuable minutes.

I’m back from another week out of town, which means I have the Email Scaries and the Errands Scaries, and instead of dealing with either of those things (I mean c’mon, it’s raining outside, what do you expect?!) I really just want to tell you people about all the wonderful things I’ve been collecting while I was gone. This Worth It is a good one, folks!

Okay, not just *a* book.

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver

My sister kept telling me to read this book, and for some reason I did not want to. Despite the fact that I loved The Poisonwood Bible (also Kingsolver), and I even credit that book for returning me, after I’d burned myself out on too many English degrees, to my love of fiction. I think maybe it was the title deterring me (how weird is that title?!) and maybe the fact that the novel is 560 pages and it is summertime and I wanted fun books! easy books! possibly even silly books!

My sister eventually wore me down, and my gosh the book is brilliant. Beautiful. Possibly life-changing. A kid in Appalachia (always bonus points for a southern setting) is born in poverty to a single mother. He narrates the story in a voice that is unlike any I’ve ever read: sincere, funny, and very (very) southern without becoming, over the course of 560 pages, annoying. You fall so in love with this character that leaving him behind is actually gut-wrenching. (I still refuse to believe he is not a real person somewhere out there and Kingsolver just transcribed his story. The voice is that authentic.)

I currently have limited texting abilities, so when I was done I couldn’t text a long response to my sister. I just wrote, “Demon. Top 5.” She wrote back “Top 5 of the year?” And I wrote back “Of my liiiiife.”

It’s always annoying when your big sister is extremely right about things.

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.”

I’d call this “a writer’s book,” which is to say if you love language, Krauss’ prose will blow you away. Which is also to say that the theme is stories themselves and the words we use to tell them, and one of the characters wrote a book that appears as a novel-inside-a-novel (it’s all very meta).

I loved it, and it is undoubtedly powerful. But if you are looking for a good-time novel, this probably isn’t it. Krauss’ style of weaving together various stories—with no early indication of how they intersect—is experimental enough to knock this off the Beach Read List. (I’d like to teach it in a college classroom, though.)

Which reminds me: The entire time I was reading, I was thinking, “This book reminds me SO MUCH of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.” I used to teach that book at Clemson so I practically know it by heart. Then I googled the book and Safran Foer is her spouse. Wild.

Hello Beautiful, Ann Napolitano

This is Napolitano’s follow-up to Dear Edward, which I really liked and which was made into a (good, I thought) series on AppleTV. I loved the story here, which follows the choices of four sisters and how those choices play out over decades. (Napolitano has called it, by the way, “an homage to Little Women.”) It will break your heart to consider how the relationship mistakes we make in a moment (because we are afraid to speak up or don’t know what we want or speak up too much or or or) can affect us for decades. And it will break your heart in a good way too, as people find the truth of one another despite everything.

But in writing classes there’s this axiom “show don’t tell,” which means show the reader the action of the story instead of telling us how all the characters felt, because that kind of explaining can get tedious. And this book does a loooot of telling, and some of it seems to rehash the character’s same interior states over and over. (I kept thinking, yes, I get it.) I’m not sure if this will bother someone who doesn’t teach writing classes??, but it was hard for me to ignore.

Still, really glad I read it. It’s sticking with me.

Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld

Yep, get this one.

The narrator Sally is a writer for a late-night live comedy show called TNO (yes, it’s SNL); she’s funny for a living, so of course the way she tells the story is funny. She writes a comedy sketch about the trend in comedy/Hollywood of men who are not attractive/fit/famous dating (usually younger) female stars who are all those things. It’s a spoof of real-life comedians like goofy Pete Davidson who, depending on how you look at it, has dated a few women quite above his station (including Ariana Grande and Kim Kardashian).

It’s nice work if you can get it.

Then, in lots of funny ways, our narrator Sally realizes maybe she’s getting this dynamic all wrong and has to be humbled, per the time-tested template of the romantic comedy.

I read this in two days, mostly on the beach while my kids dug giant holes they called “relaxation pits” (that were not at all relaxing to sit inside—quite the opposite in fact). I don’t always love a romantic comedy, but this one is hilarious, clever, and totally readable (by which I mean it takes no effort at all). The only thing that bothered me is that midway through the book, the story suddenly becomes a long series of emails sent back and forth between the two main characters. After that two years pass abruptly, no warning. The departure in style was disorienting, and I was lying on a towel on my stomach and shouted ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! and banged the book in the sand a couple of times.

But then I got over it and kept reading and didn’t care. It’s really good.

I recommend

Culture Study

way too much, but gosh this is a fascinating piece by Anne Helen Petersen about how modern life encourages us to “optimize” literally everything, from the toasters we research… and compare… and buy… to the relationships we analyze… and abandon… and polish…

I was already writing something about this phenomenon before I read it, so I was a little mad she wrote something so good. Ugh, annoying.

Remodeling is the attempt to find “the one best way” with our physical spaces; wellness culture is “the one best way” with our bodies; productivity culture is “the one best way” with our work lives. And like all quests for optimization, they’re sinkholes. You think you’re standing on solid ground, just scrolling your phone dreaming about a steam oven and downloading a new list-making app and listening to someone on TikTok emphatically tell you you’re doing [blank] wrong, but then you look up and realize you’re not just trying to make a few things better, or easier, or more straightforward — you’re dissatisfied with your whole damn life, and have been for some time.

The Optimization Sinkhole

This second Substack by

Paul Kingsnorth

is a little headier (and always inflammatory) but also worth a read. I am endlessly fascinated by the “culture wars” and explorations of what we, as Americans, have decided to deem important in 2023.

Our whole world now, it seems to me, has been built to prevent any stumbling or wandering from ever happening. Nobody wants to get lost. Preventing us from ever getting lost is what the Machine is for. It is why we like it. It is why, piece by piece, day by day, word by word, it is killing us slowly. 

Exchange meaning for control: that was the deal. Exchange beauty for utility, roots for wings, the whole for the parts, lostness and wandering and stumbling for the straight march towards the goal. That was the deal. Turns out it was a trap, and now look at us. Look at everything we know, and how little we can see. Look at us here, flailing, drowning, gasping as we sink into the numbers and words.

The West Must Die

A few tweets that made me think or giggle.¹

If I WERE going to recommend a show, it would be the Bridgerton prequel Queen Charlotte—but that would imply that I have watched it, which I obviously have not because it is crass and silly and R-rated, and the only way I know that is of course from secondhand sources, and I’m sure it’s a good way to pass some summer evenings while munching on your mint chocolate chip yasso bar, but I’m only guessing, what do I know, I only ever consume poignant and intelligent media.

Back soon with some deepish thoughts. Y’all enjoy it out there—June is objectively the best month of the year (not least because my birthday is 8 days, and yes I am turning 39 and still count down.)

P.S. Please leave a comment if you’ve got a book to recommend.

1. For the record I’m completely off Twitter, so I did not encounter these in their native habitat.