While Reading and Walking

“Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the microclimate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intention. Forest. A threatened creature.”—from The Overstory by Richard Powers 

Happy Earth Day! The best way to celebrate is to think about and educate yourself on the ways that climate, and radical rethinking of how to save our earth, involves thinking about how climate change is about people and marginalized communities, about their hunger, their homes, about disease and disaster. Plant flowers, recycle, but make sure to push your activism farther. Think about the larger changes that need to be made on a level much bigger than individual eco-friendly choices.

Sending love on this Sunday; manifesting joy and good health for all of you as I work to manifest them for myself. Stay hydrated, take deep breaths, and sink yourself into a story.

Light a soothing candle. Draw a bath. Open a book. Remind yourself that you are strong, and made it this far.

When this pandemic is over—and I mean really over, not sort of over, not technically-things-are-open, like yes-I-can-take-my-mask-off-and-not-feel-terrified-over—what will you do on the first day you feel comfortable to actually be kind of free? I’m going to go to breakfast at my local favorite place that I used to visit once every other week. Then I’ll walk to 57th Street Books, and stay there, and just browse, and then I’ll go to the park and lay in the sun reading without a mask. Or I’ll read and walk to the lake, and my glasses won’t be fogging over every other second. I’m not even thinking about being able to schedule my international trips or such things yet. Right now, I just can’t wait for when I can start heading out into the world again.

I am tired and anxious, but I am trying to channel it into good, thoughtful reading, and productive cleaning and organizing. Of course, the vaccine has me feeling like I have a cold, so it isn’t easy to do. A hot bath and some chocolate might be tonight’s mood.

Looking ahead to better days. Hope your days are peaceful and well-hydrated, and that you’re reading a good book.

The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore is a stunning magical realist work, pages of mirrored glass dusted in a thick coating of sugar. Ciela can tell with a glance what each visitor to her family’s pastelería needs. But when she is sexually assaulted at a party, her gift fades; flowers begin turn to mirror glass around her, crumbling, a sliver lodging in her eye. Her magic only returns when she first reaches out to help the boy, Lock, who was assaulted at the same party, who she helped get to the hospital afterwards, who remembers little of what happened that night.

This is a book about trauma, pain, and survival; about cruelty, rape culture, the poisonous ways that people think they own certain bodies. It’s heart-breaking in so many ways, and it’s beautiful as well. The way McLemore brings in “The Snow Queen” is breathtaking. The pastelería and its textures and tastes. The resistance bubbling beneath the text. Ciela’s rose-hip tattoo. Lock’s secret forest. McLemore’s glimmering writing gives this novel a burning, piercing light. The narrative unfolds in a way that is personal and vivid, and Ciela and Lock’s story will stick with me for a very long time.

On a personal note, I was intensely grateful for the pansexual representation in this book. I don’t often get to see pan girls in my reading, and I’m starved for it. Ciela’s queerness, the small ways it’s misunderstood, and her fierce pride in her identity, made me feel so seen and pleased.

I read The Mirror Season in one long sitting, unable to put it down. It may be my favorite of McLemore’s books so far—and I’ve loved their books for a long time. Their stunning writing is at its best in this book, and the characters were rich and true. Ciela and Lock’s journey, their struggle to survive, is earnest, complex, and emotional.

Content warnings for sexual assault, rape, trauma, victim-blaming.

Night and Day is a vivid, strange love story by Virginia Woolf that is at once a traditional-esque romantic social comedy and also a tribute to the complicated, gossip-inducing, unconventional love affairs and connections of Woolf’s own real-life friend group. Katherine Hilbery, grand-daughter of a great poet, finds her greatest joy in math and solitude; she’s expected to be married to Rodney, a poet for whom she has complicated feelings. But when Ralph Denhem arrives on the scene, things become complicated—the more so because the hard-working feminist Mary Datchet is herself attracted to Ralph.

I found Woolf’s second novel strange and delightful. This twisting story is comedic and absurd; Mrs Hilbery is straight out of Austen. But beneath the rom-com aspects of the tale, the coincidences and entanglements, Night and Day manages to question the very romance it appears to expose. Woolf questions the way elitist social conventions are laid, and contrasts them with the chaotic reality of love: all complicated feelings and anxious fears, jealousy and envy, the fear of what it means to share a life, the fear that feeling aren’t real, the fear of the commitment that is marriage.

Conventions, meanwhile, constrain the young people greatly. Katharine feels she must get married to expect any sort of independence from her family’s legacy and home. Men and women struggle to be merely friends in this novel, unable to be seen with each other without causing gossip—but platonic feelings too can be loving and necessary. The customary conventions of repressing feelings causes misunderstandings, and being straightforward is bold even when pretense has to be dropped. Passion fights good sense at every turn.

And as love tangles and detangles, Mary Datchet and her story present a thesis that after reading Woolf’s journals, I’ve no doubt she believed: that the true passion, the inner guiding light, is work, is applying yourself. Mary becomes something of a glorious north star in all of this, and I loved her character. The book, while being itself a romance, also quietly suggests that love is fantastic but does not compare to a single-minded dedication to a cause, project, or goal.

The Hidden Palace is Helene Wecker’s follow-up to The Golem & the Jinni, and picks up just where it left off, with the story of practical, compassionate golem Chava and of wild, restless jinni Ahmad. Sophia Winston leaves for the Middle East to seek some sort of cure for the illness that leaves her forever cold. New stories are introduced: a young, ambitious Jewish girl begins to explore dark magics with her father, while Anna’s son Toby begins to dig at the mysteries of his birth, and a jinniyeh across the sea learns she’s immune to iron. 

To start, a tough but honest critique: truthfully, this book begins very slow. Similar to its predecessor, it’s focused on telling many tales and then weaving them into one building thread, and I dedicated some thought to why that approach feels more scattered in this novel. I think that it is partially due to the long timeline, 1900–1915, but primarily it is because we already know some of these characters, and so there is less of an overlying mystery to power the story—instead, it is guided purely by interest in the characters, waiting to see how it will eventually tie to a central point. Instead of unfolding answers, it’s more about waiting to see what conflict will arrive, waiting for a climatic point.

Luckily, anyone who loved the first story of the golem and the jinni will love this one too. Wecker’s newest brings up fascinating new questions about trying to fit in, about assimilation and its costs, about the ways people change as they immigrate. Chava feels she must blend in seamlessly to not be found out, and so her lack of aging puts her at risk; Ahmad doesn’t understand why they must put so much of their true natures aside for the sake of their neighbors. What balance can they find? As those they love grow older around them, as the world itself begins to change, Chava and Ahmad struggle to adjust with it. Wecker’s stunning writing continues to pull the reader along, her elegant world immersive as ever. While I found the jinni even more annoying in this book than the last, his character development is rewarding, and feels very real, and I loved reading about Chava finding her place in the world. Readers who loved The Golem and the Jinni will read this one eagerly cover-to-cover.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. The Hidden Palace comes out June 8, 2021.

Feeling a little lost and anxious today. Thank goodness for beautiful bookshelves and Virginia Woolf.

Visited my friends the magnolias today. It was a bad day but Virginia Woolf and the gorgeous magnolias blooming helped tremendously.

A birthday book haul! Excited for these incredible reads: The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore, Yellow Bird by Sierra Crane Murdoch, The Dark Library by Cyrille Martinez and translated by Joseph Patrick Stancil, and Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis by Ada Calhoun.

Text: “Once you learn to read you will be forever free.”—Frederick Douglass

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker was just as good on reread: a gentle, lovely, thought-provoking fantasy. Chava is a curious wonder of a golem, intelligent and autonomous in ways that should be impossible; when her master dies on the ship to NYC, she is set free in a way that is overwhelming. Ahmad is a bound jinni discovered by a young tinsmith, and he must attempt to tame his capricious and ever-wandering nature to fit in. Their stories slowly interweave. 

I first read Wecker’s novel in 2014, on the beaches of New Jersey and the riverfront of Boston. I’ve planned to reread it for a while now, but finally picked it up because its sequel is coming out this June, and I have a review copy waiting for me on my shelf. I’m glad I reread it; there’s much I didn’t remember. I love Chava’s fierce compassion and practical nature, I love Ahmad’s wanderlust and wonder, I love the ways that they improve one another. I love Wecker’s carefully woven story, with its simmering magic but especially with its side characters, richly developed, from the former doctor Saleh to matriarch and coffee shop owner Maryam to restless heiress Sophia Winston to the rabbi who teaches Chava about the world. Wecker’s world is vivid and rich, and her book is a slow burn. I’m excited to read her newest.

The quiet of the forest in the national park was so peaceful. It gave me a lot of joy. The world has been stressful but this silence flooded my heart with calm.

An amazing day. We hiked 6 miles, up sandy slopes, seeing amazing views of the dunes and the lake. It was so peaceful to be out deep in nature with no one around. Tired, but happy.