July 2022 Reads
Dueling foci of non-fiction and sci-fi/fantasy, with a smattering of literary fiction
(first a brief note on the audio version, if you choose to listen to this newsletter: the unhinged meows starting around the :45 second mark are just our cat, Zora’s, version of playing. She is not in distress; she’s actually having a blast)
Welcome to the first *official* official newsletter of StoneWright Reads!
Below you’ll find a list of the fourteen books I read in July 2022 with a microview of each, followed by longer reviews of my eight favorites (lol to me originally saying two - five reviews; it won’t always be like this though). At the very end, you can catch bonus notes and an “In Case You Missed It” section about previous and/or mid-month posts. Enjoy!
The Books (more or less in the order I read them):
The Bad Muslim Discount (2021) by Syed M. Masood - Novel (Literary Fiction)
Heavier than the title/cover led me to suspect, but very good: family, immigration, injustice
Either/Or (2022) by Elif Batuman - Novel (Literary Fiction)
Follow-up to The Idiot (see “2022, Part 1” post), still enjoy this character and style
Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA (2021) by Tim Mak - Nonfiction
Some truly bonkers stories about the bumbling and embezzling of Executive VP LaPierre
*Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022) by Dan Charnas - Nonfiction/Biography
Truly fascinating look at the artistry, musicology, genius and influence of beatmaker J Dilla
*The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (2020) by Emma Copley Eisenberg - Memoir/True Crime
Portrait of West Virginia, introspective memoir, and true crime: fascinating & thought-provoking
A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (2016) by Sue Klebold - Memoir
Mother of one of the Columbine shooters about her son as she knew him, and her work to understand
*Easy Beauty (2022) by Chloé Cooper Jones - Memoir
Artful/philosophical rumination on the meaning of beauty, disability, motherhood
*A Master of Djinn (2021) by P. Djèlí Clark (first full novel in the Dead Djinn Universe series) - Novel (Fantasy)
Mystery, incredible world-building, and compelling characters in a Cairo where djinn live among us
*Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2019) by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) - Novel (Literary Fiction)
The haunting atmosphere will live with me for a while: Poland, Blake, hunters, and a vegetarian
*Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia E. Butler (first book in the Earthseed series) - Novel (Sci-Fi)
All-too-real look at a crumbling near-future (2024-2027) California: incredibly prescient, big yikes
The Girl Who Drank the Moon (2016) by Kelly Barnhill - Novel (Middle-Grade/YA Fantasy)
Beautiful witchy, magicky tale with some heavy subject matter, but a lovely cast of characters
Trust (2022) by Hernan Diaz - Novel (Literary Fiction)
Asks the reader to bear with it till Act III, when (in my opinion) it does indeed become worth it
*How High We Go in the Dark (2022) by Sequoia Nagamatsu - Novel (Sci-Fi)
Artfully linked & well-wrought stories surrounding a sudden pandemic and its aftermath
*Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler - Novel (Sci-Fi)
Woman in 1976 California finds herself repeatedly pulled back in time to antebellum Maryland
(Note: starred entries above are reviewed in more detail below)
The Top Eight (in no particular order):
Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022) by Dan Charnas - Nonfiction/Biography
I saw this book while back home in Oregon, perusing the displays at Powell’s, and it immediately took me back to my high school days when a patient and dedicated friend taught me all I know about hip-hop. Amidst this education, I learned a little about J Dilla (aka Jay Dee, birth name: James deWitt Yancey, as I learned from this book), the producer behind some of the most iconic sounds in underground hip-hop. That was basically the extent of my knowledge, but it was enough to make me, almost twenty years later, immediately buy this book.
What followed was an incredible mixture of music theory—a lot of which (despite Charnas’ valiant efforts) went right over my head—as well as a portrait of hip-hop, a love letter to Dilla’s innovations, a history lesson on the drum machine, and a biography of the man himself, his illness, and his legacy. Truly profound, this is the kind of book that makes you want to immerse yourself in a mood and bask in the brilliance (even if some of the intricacies escape you).
Good Quote: “Questlove in particular had come to worship Jay Dee as a guru who liberated him from the idea of keeping perfect time, and instead imparted a permission to be loose, to be human, to be wrong.”
Bonus: Here is a link to one of my favorite J Dilla beats: instrumental track from Q-Tip’s “Let’s Ride”
The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (2020) by Emma Copley Eisenberg - Memoir/True Crime
This has been on my to-read list for far too long, one of those books that came out just as the pandemic was kicking off and suffered from cancelled readings and publicity events. Should’ve cracked it open sooner, is all I can say. The way Eisenberg uses a 1980 murder case as the core around which she weaves a history of Appalachia, a dismantling of easy narratives about West Virginia’s people and the land itself, a memoir of her complicated experiences in the state, and the complexities of sussing out the truth from a web of contradictions is fabulous. Well-written, meticulously researched, it lived in my head for days afterward.
Good quote: “I had a collection of ideas about West Virginia, but I had a hunch that they were all gross misinformation, plus none of them agreed: coal and the end of coal. Poverty and a mansion on a stripped mountain. Pickup trucks and VW buses. OxyContin and Jesus. Mother Jones and Don Blankenship. Knobby elbows and the fattest city in America.”
Easy Beauty (2022) by Chloé Cooper Jones - Memoir
This is an incredible read, start to finish. The opening kicked me right in the gut (“I am in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to two men, my friends, discuss whether my life is worth living.”) and the voice and subject matter carried me quickly, achingly, thoughtfully through its entirety. Chloé Cooper Jones is a phenomenal thinker and writer, meditating on philosophies of beauty and narrating the precipitation, evolution, and road to resolution of a personal crisis. A lot about motherhood, disability, family. A little about an awkward night at a Sundance party, Roger Federer, art in Rome, Cambodian killing fields.
Good quote: “Symmetry is predictable; I am soothed but not surprised. To say that beauty was merely the result of definite measurement deflated the mystery of the aesthetic experience: that bodily recognition, an ancient sense tuned to beauty, a physical seizing of beauty and of beauty’s dissonance; a welcome fever, a palpitant thrill, pleasure ill at ease, a turned stomach, a chill, prickling hairs, goosebumps, high attention. And I have felt that high attention in the presence of art, people, ideas, sounds, storms, sentences, sunsets, streams and rivers and oceans, colors, efforts, failures, loss, pain, and how much of this can be measured?”
A Master of Djinn (2021) by P. Djèlí Clark (first full novel in the Dead Djinn Universe series) - Novel (Fantasy)
I read this as part of a newly formed Sci-Fi/Fantasy Book Club I joined, but I had previously read two shorter works in the same universe by Clark: “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” and “The Haunting of Tram Car 015” (both of which are excellent and arguably even better than the novel which followed them). Hot off the heels of the gathering where we discussed it, the main takeaways were that at times, it relies a little too heavily on police procedural tropes, but that the world it weaves is fascinating, complex, and we enjoyed living it in throughout the novel. Basically set in an alternate universe version of the early 1900s in which mythical beings like djinn and goblins are back in the world cohabitating with humans, Egypt has grown to be one of the great powers of the world, fusing technology and magic to produce steampunk wonders. The story revolves around agent Fatma of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities and a crime scene involving a secret order. My favorite aspects were the ways in which access to this newfound magical power in their society has upturned the colonial history of Egypt. It’s anti-imperialist, female-led, exciting (if formulaic), and a wonder to behold.
Good quote (shout out to Matt Masters for bringing it up): “‘Usually the secrets we keep deep down, ain’t meant to hurt other people,’ he said. ‘Not saying they won’t, but not through intentions. Those deep secrets, we hide away because we’re afraid what other people might think. How they might judge us, if they knew. And nobody’s judgment we scared of more than the one we give our hearts to. Besides, everybody got secrets. Even you, I’m betting.’”
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2019) by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) - Novel (Literary Fiction)
I mean, that title, first off (taken from a poem by William Blake, which you can find here, if you’re curious). Would’ve read it based on the title alone, but what I found was an incredible tour-de-force in creating an undeniable atmosphere. We’re in the mind of a woman getting on in years living on an isolated plateau in Poland on the border of the Czech Republic. She cares for people’s properties in the off season, and her neighbors keep turning up dead under unusual circumstances involving the native wildlife. Utterly compelling (even if I saw the “twist”—if one can call it that—coming very early, and even if I wanted the end to go even weirder) and eerie and lyrical, as well as flirting with allegory about the role of humans in the natural world and our impacts (mostly negative) upon it.
Good quote: “The best conversations are with yourself. At least there's no risk of a misunderstanding.”
Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia E. Butler (first book in the Earthseed series) - Novel (Sci-Fi)
I knew of Octavia Butler but had somehow managed to not read her until now. And wow. This book in particular feels like it has predicted so much about the world we’re creating for ourselves: drought, rising sea levels, a faux-populist president coming to power, corporate-controlled communities. Outside of the walled neighborhoods, crime, bizarre drugs, and wild dogs abound. Amidst this backdrop, we follow a young, hyperempathetic (literally feels others’ pain) Lauren Oya Olamina as her tenuous, walled-off world falls apart and she tries to envision a better version of what comes next. Brutal and tender and well worth the wait.
Good quote: “The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.”
How High We Go in the Dark (2022) by Sequoia Nagamatsu - Novel (Sci-Fi)
Another incredible title that accompanies an incredible novel-in-stories. Each chapter follows a new protagonist as a pandemic that alters people’s cells begins, takes hold and leaves behind a world newly scarred. Meanwhile, climate change continues apace, leaving humanity to try to envision and enact a path forward. These stories centralize the way people cope with loss and grief and trauma in myriad ways, the way they hope and despair, find connections to each other in the midst of crisis. It involves an archeological dig, a shared dreamspace amongst plague victims, a journey to other worlds looking for a new home, human organs grown in genetically modified pigs, new ways to conceptualize (and commodify) death, virtual reality, and more. Haunting and gorgeous, this is definitely one of my favorite new releases, but if living through a pandemic is enough pandemics for you, maybe skip it and (hopefully) come back to it.
Good quote: “Once, I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was just trying to keep track of it all because it didn’t seem like anybody else noticed or cared that we kept making the same mistakes, that hate in a neighborhood or injustice in a state ran like poison through veins, until another ice shelf collapsed or another animal went extinct. Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.”
Kindred (1979) by Octavia E. Butler - Novel (Sci-Fi)
Shout out to Sarah Devine for gifting me this novel and to Ra’Niqua Lee for basing a syllabus around Butler that sounds so excellent that I finally took the plunge into Butler’s oeuvre. Kindred is about a Black woman married to a white man in 1976 California who suddenly and inexplicably gets pulled back in time to pre-Civil War Maryland. I don’t want to give too much away, because the experience of reading it, being in Dana’s head as she stumbles into situations she doesn’t understand and then has to piece together her connection to this past and what might be bringing her there is one of the pleasures of reading this book. It’s a brilliant premise that questions the idea of one’s self-image: we all think we’d be the abolitionist or the enslaved person that escapes, but what would it really be like for the hypothetical to become literal? How much would we have to adapt to our circumstances, and what would it be like to try to square your life in the 1970s with a life you’ve now experienced in the early-to-mid 1800s?
Good quote: “His father wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper.”
Gah, okay, a few bonus notes, because I truly can’t help myself:
The Bad Muslim Discount is definitely worth a read. One thing it does really well is portray a variety of Muslim experiences. It gets dark, with people experiencing trauma and not always coming through whole.
I read Misfire mostly as potential research for a novel, but also because the author was featured on a podcast episode and was super interesting. It was full of schadenfreude and gave me a newfound disrespect for Wayne LaPierre. What a deeply pathetic man.
My wife, Ally, and I listened to The Girl Who Drank the Moon together on a road trip and it was utterly delightful, the reader did excellent voices. There’s a tiny dragon who thinks he’s huge, a swamp monster, an accidentally enmagicked girl, an unfortunate isolated community, and I recommend it, even if it is geared toward young readers.
I was initially mad at Trust because it was all about rich white stock bros leading up to the Great Depression, which, meh, but I kept reading, and it wasn’t until the last third, when it re-contextualizes the first two thirds that I was like, “Oh, this is actually good!” Not everyone’s cup of tea by any means, but I was impressed it won me over.
Either/Or was a great follow-up to The Idiot, which is microviewed in the first post I did. The observations of college life are amazing, and it’s by turns dryly hilarious and profound and poignant. Definitely should read The Idiot first, though.
A Mother’s Reckoning was also for novel research. I’m not sure I could recommend it unless the subject matter calls to you. I came away from it with necessary info and mixed feelings, and it made me think a lot about what kinds of attention should be paid to perpetrators and their families, the way mothers especially are blamed after a child commits a horror, and it also made me very sad.
In Case You Missed It:
At the end of each newsletter, I will do an ICYMI, with any additional posts I added to StoneWright Reads between monthly newsletters (i.e. not sent out via email), in case you want to check them out—lot’s of ideas for upcoming midmonth stuff!
You can find the first StoneWright Reads post, where I discuss the first six months of reading in 2022, here.
I also added a post about a novel I’m excited about, coming August 9th: The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings (available for preorder now).