I’m in a book club with some friends from the Columbia Publishing Course. Everyone had to submit a top 10 favorite books list to the course, and one of my friends had the idea to make a book club where each month we read one of every member’s top 10 books. When We Cease to Understand the World was someone’s choice, and a very interesting one at that. This was our second book club meeting, and the numbers were significantly lower, but it fostered a very intimate space for fascinating conversation. Everyone had read the whole book and had questions. Can a human brain really dream up crazy new theories? Did these geniuses really descend into madness, and is that a requisite of such life-changing minds? What is the responsibility of truth/fact? Why did Labatut exclude women scientists and physicists from the narrative?

We had a great discussion of the importance of truth, what it means to be true, and the pros and cons of Labatut’s approach to this blended novel. We learned that Schrödinger was, in fact, a pedophile, which explained, but perhaps made even more shocking and unpleasant, his relationship with Miss Herwig in the book. I thought it was important to, whether fact or fiction, expose the humanity of these familiar names that have been historically put on a pedestal. But when does it become important to share discovered truths in a retelling of history from another perspective? What does it do for the narrative, and for history, to expose Schrödinger as a pedophile without making it clear whether it is fact or fiction? Does it force the reader to do research on their own time, like one of my friends did, and determine for themself what is true? 

Labatut discusses the idea that plants will overtake humans. Some of us thought it remiss for him to write this book so recently and not discuss climate change more thoroughly. Others thought this was an apt interpretation: after all, once humans go extinct, the planet has a chance to take itself back, and why wouldn’t plants reign? Is that not a fair fear for humans to have? That we are weaker than earth’s other species?

How do you reconcile creating a scientific invention that can save thousands of lives but can also be used to kill thousands? We discussed how science itself is not inherently bad or good, but it is how humans harness it that matters. 

We liked the way Labatut created novelty for us as readers by writing about the discovery of black holes, for instance, without naming them until the very end of the chapter. We saw black holes as what they truly are instead of as the familiar concept that had grown comfortable in our minds all this time. 

When We Cease to Understand the World inspired many questions and sparked important conversations about humanity, and though it was not one of my favorite books, I enjoyed reading it and discussing it with curious and clever friends.

QUOTES

Mary Shelley “warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts”

“Inside the void his metrics predicted, the fundamental parameters of the universe switched properties: space flowed like time, time stretched out like space. This distortion altered the law of causality; Schwarzchild deduced that if a hypothetical traveler were capable of surviving a journey through this rarefied zone, he would receive light and information from the future, which would allow him to see events that had not yet occurred. If he could reach the center of the abyss without gravity tearing him apart, he would distinguish two superimposed images projected at once in a small circle over his head, like those that are visible through a kaleidoscope: in one, he would perceive the entire future evolution of the universe at an inconceivable pace, in the other, the past frozen in a single moment.”

“Could a sufficient concentration of human will—millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space—unleash something comparable to the singularity?”

“... yet neither of them could see Goethe there, straddling the corpse of Hafez, now drained of all its blood, and yet still capable of maintaining a glorious erection, which the German poet attempted to invigorate with his lips, like a man blowing on the embers of a dying fire.”

“‘As soon as I heard the ring, I picked up the receiver and pressed my head against the speaker, giving myself over to the voice emerging from it, and there was nothing that could mitigate that violence. Impotent, I suffered as I saw how my consciousness of time was destroyed, my resolve, my sense of duty and proportion! And to whom do we owe this magnificent inferno if not to you, to people like you? Tell me, Professor, when did all this madness begin? When did we cease to understand the world?’”

LaCava opens this short novel with a vivid scene in an airplane bathroom, and anyone who has ever been on a plane can agree that she captures the claustrophobia, and a certain je ne sais quoi, inherent to those bathrooms. What a way to meet the narrator. LaCava is visceral in her details but also exceptionally cold. Sometimes the language is so dense that it slowed down my reading and wasn’t always rewarding in its requirement for patience. While the diction is hot and sharp at times, the narrator is faceless, distant. This line after she falls off a pile of instrument cases as a child astutely reflects how the book itself reads: “I felt nothing, registered only calm dissonance with the crowd’s reaction.” Margot consistently demonstrates a “calm dissonance” with how we as readers might react to what she experiences. 

There is so much observational detail and not much reflection of feeling or physical touch, which seems to convey the narrator’s inability to feel physical pain and the question of whether that extends to emotional pain. LaCava's descriptions also reflect how commodification infiltrates our lives and show us how Margot’s body is like an object, too. 

LaCava often leaves unclear who is speaking or lets dialogue get muddled so that you have to keep track of the back and forth. When Margot’s grandmother and others are talking when she's younger, it helps establish the narrator as almost a background character. This ability to get lost in dialogue also feels true to life.

I’m not sure the structure of the book worked for me: an interesting dynamic and situation begins more than halfway through, and between the airplane bathroom scene and that, the books focuses on Margot’s childhood experiences, both to show her parents’ flaws, the effects of their fame and success on her, and examples of Margot’s condition, which doesn’t get named until Graves unofficially diagnoses her later on. 

But the organization felt a bit disjointed. I really liked the concept of a narrator with congenital analgesia (which i had maybe heard about before... from an episode of House?) because it posed questions about emotional pain, the ethics of being hurt/what it means to be hurt, and the experience of trying to numb oneself. Margot has no means of protecting herself because she has no way to know where her physical boundaries are or what they are, and this is a cool concept to explore, though I didn’t love how LaCava followed through on it. I also enjoyed how both the Director and Graves remained unnamed and thus objectified, perhaps in an attempt by Margot to distance herself from their personhood and agency. 

I wanted the cows to play a bigger part, too, because I think there are a lot of ways they could have had more meaning and effect. LaCava might have explored Margot’s connection with them, her inability to feel physical pain, and Graves’s experimentation on her in relation to the way humans treat cows. How they are commodified for our consumption and how some people might not think, or not care, that they can feel pain. 

The first chapter was gripping in its detail and in the narrator’s potential, but her numbness infiltrates and flattens some of the book, making it feel molasses-ed and not as sharp as that first chapter. There is some excitement when Margot's relationship with Graves starts. His character is intriguing. The creepiness is thrilling. I think I wanted more. Lacava seemed like she was tiptoeing when she could have been stomping.

QUOTES

Opening scene:

“The mirror in the plane bathroom had fingerprints all over it and fog-thick grease where the soap had back-splashed. One hour into the flight, plenty of hands had been busy here. I scooted in and pushed at the latch with a knuckle. The light flickered and brightened but the bolt stuck midway… 

I looked away and pulled two more towels from the dispenser and put them down on the toilet seat. The sheet on the left sucked itself to the plastic ring, catching urine, shrinking. The broken light flashed like a strobe. Bright, then half-dark. I pulled down my jeans and lowered myself slowly, trying not to touch anything. There was a sudden burst of turbulence and I dropped onto the seat, turning my head to see my face. 

I saw the indentation below my bottom lip where I had been biting down. Lit by the blue pallor of the light above, the red streak appeared half-black, like in an old movie or cartoon, or an X-ray machine, like the skeleton of electrocution through a shocked body. Another brand in black and blue.”

“And the comfort of him not knowing where in the world I’d landed, of him not seeing me again until there I was, writ large on some poster or movie screen…. It was how my mother still had to face my father after she’d left. Not across the table, but in the Paris metro. His face magnified on a poster on a platform wall. Look at my face. Does this make you remember me? A blank of the reality.”

“Like my father’s face looming in the metro, these strangers’ secondhand hot takes changed people into outsized reproductions.”

“I walked out of the plane, round the accordion bend of the bridge, like the top part of the plastic straws I remembered from the coffee shop as a child.”

“Silhouettes of haloed gloss were left where I pulled the stickers off the paper… each had the same figures on it, every pack a repeat story.”

“I liked to sit in the spot just in front of the CD player. Sunlight came through the sky right there. There was a butter-colored leather cushion set up for me. I used to call the shiny round shapes that snapped into their plastic boxes, rainbow-catchers or Disc-os.”

“Or I would braid the cables as best I could and hope he’d notice the next day. Little acts of sabotage as gifts.”

“I said in an ASMR whisper.” (Loved this line because I’m an OG fan of ASMR…hehe)

“Some mornings when I woke up downstairs, I thought about pretending to be an icy character, cruel even, to play a new role for the day. This was a fine set for an ‘80s period piece, and if I stepped into the right character, I wouldn't miss anyone. Not the Director, not Lucy. Even the bathroom was tiled Memphis Group turquoise and wallpapered black-and-white like TV static.”

“I’d used a few dishes in the kitchen when I’d tried to feel civilized, eating a nutrition bar with fork and knife or counting out gummy bears.” This one made me smile and reminded me of how Leah Fern essentially subsisted on candy and chocolate throughout her whole journey in The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern.

“My mother would first come in images without sound. No talking, no music, no noise. Most often she came as color. Or colors, like on the fabric of bus seats.”

“Can you cause pain to someone who feels none? 

Does it hurt to know he did it without telling me?

The old oath: do no harm.

He didn’t hurt me.

I mean, he did, but.”

Rita Zoey Chin infused this book with a magic that seeps out of her poetic sentences and melts into your heart. 

I had the pleasure of meeting Zoey at Greenlight Bookstore, during an event celebrating Melville House’s 20th anniversary. She was incredibly kind, open, and full of magical delight. And I’m so grateful for my experience at Melville House, which has offered me so many opportunities, including meeting authors, reading unpublished books, and witnessing the collaboration and hard work that goes into publishing a beautiful book. 

Zoey holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and her mastery shines through her prose—my copy of her book is riddled with dog-eared pages, stars, hearts, and underlined sentences. 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, book characters can become lifelong friends, and Leah Fern is a perfect example of this. I loved quietly joining her on her powerfully strange and individual journey and growing with her across the miles traveled and pages read. 

Zoey crafted an intricate world and an array of unique characters, each human and thus flawed, but nonetheless lovable. She, like Essie East, captured the forests within people, places, and moments. Getting intimate “enough to uncover hidden worlds, to see the islands within the islands, as it were.” 

There is loneliness, grief, loss, hope, faith, and discovery dissolved thoughtfully throughout this novel, and an underlying and roaring plea to love courageously no matter what. This book is sticky—I will probably forever taste it in my brain!

QUOTES

“And like La Scapigliata, Leah, too, was a half-formed creature, though she couldn’t have known this yet. In fact, as she slept, she was the absence of knowing. She was, in these hours, a tabula rasa: she was art being made and remade by light. And as the sun dipped below the horizon and the light dimmed and blued, Leah’s face transformed in the gloaming from glowing amber to a silver sculpture. It happened the way coronas happen during total eclipses—at once quickly and slowly, wondrously and terrifyingly—though there wasn’t even a spider in her web to see it.”

“The melting ice spoke in soft creaks and groans, like something waking up, while the pale sun hung like a paper cutout in the sky.”

“She wondered if souls were like water—if, once they unite, they can never be fully separated.”

“Soon the first traces of dawn streaked across the sky in ribs of fire-tinged lavender and pressed down in strips across the mirrored surface of Thompson Lake while the trees, still rooted in darkness, sketched smoky webs against the sky.”

“He appeared to be made of the desert itself, his skin fashioned from sand, his eyes from the burnt umber of far-off rock formations and the green flecks of desert broom and sage.”

This one almost slipped under my radar, and I am so glad I randomly started reading it, because it transported me to the moon and back. 

I loved the structure of this novel. We begin in 1912, with Edwin St. John St. Andrew, in a third-person narration of his exile from England to Canada, where he witnesses two strange events in succession. Then 2020, to Mirella, a third-person narration of her experience learning about the death of a long-lost friend, watching a glitch-like video she took, and encountering an odd man who she recognizes from a moment in her childhood. Then we're thrown two hundred years later to Olive Llewellyn's book  tour in 2203 , right before a deadly pandemic strikes (the book is coincidentally about a fucking pandemic). And then! First person? How interesting! We meet Gaspery-Jacques Roberts. And BOY DO WE GET TAKEN ON A RIDE.  I really like how she experimented with the narration and think it worked exceptionally well to have Gaspery written in first person. And a perfectly organized novel to peel back layers and reveal quite an anomaly.

Her interpretation of this world's future, the moon colonies, the Time Institute, the Simulation Theory, time travel, the examination of humanity over hundreds of years -- what changes and what stays so very the same --, her exploration of pandemics (which hits close to home), what it means to change someone's so-called fate, cats from 1985 living hundreds of years later, corrupted files, moments over time bleeding into each other. I loved it through and through. It was engaging, thoughtful, exciting, clever, gently human, and timely.

QUOTES

"Is there an unease that's specific to the sense of an invisible bureaucracy in motion around you?'"

“'You don’t have to be a terrible person to intentionally try to change the time line. You just have to have a moment of weakness. Really just a moment. When I say weakness, I might mean something more like humanity.'”

"A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then—it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble—there was black space."

"This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death."

"A life lived in a simulation is still a life."

Damn.

Incredibly well written, superbly honest, gripping, and graphic. McCurdy’s voice in the early chapters beautifully and painfully captures her as a child. These chapters are especially poignant given her younger self’s stunted emotional and physical growth, her constant desire to please her mother more than herself, and the reader’s understanding of her mother’s damaging, dependent, narcissistic behavior and abuse. Watching her age through her writing is impressive: she gains confidence, she is funny, relatable, thoughtful, and also lost. Throughout it all you just want to give her a big hug. McCurdy's descriptions are sharp, and she is truly captivating. I LOOOVED reading her memoir and getting sucked in, and I’m happy she was finally able to pursue her love of writing and find success in sharing her story. It was exciting to see that when you look her up on Google she is listed as an Ameican writer, not an American actor. 

I'm Glad My Mom Died may be triggering for some (abusive mother, disordered eating, abuse within the entertainment industry, addiction); it is an extremely important book with a unique, vulnerable voice, excellent pacing, and a personality that will stay with you. A courageous story of relationship complexity, perseverance, growth, slipping ("Don't Let Slips Becomes Slides"), and recovery. 

"Through writing, I feel power for maybe the first time in my life. I don’t have to say somebody else’s words. I can write my own. I can be myself for once. I like the privacy of it. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s judging. Nobody’s weighing in. No casting directors or agents or managers or directors or Mom. Just me and the page. Writing is the opposite of performing to me. Performing feels inherently fake. Writing feels inherently real."

Not every book will reveal the color of the world around you, but when one does, you will recognize the clarity with gratitude. 

I remember reading Pure Colour on my phone, shuddering with the train, my knees perpetually bent, my bag tucked against me, my arm keeping me gripped solidly on the pole, moving unconsciously to the beats of the tracks and the screech of the brakes—another form of pole dancing. I remember looking up and feeling like everything was brighter, like the people around me were more alive and frighteningly tangible and equally vulnerable. I was reading as I walked down the block, and I was at the point where Mira had joined her father in the leaf. WOW that whole thing was trippy. I was staring at the trees on the street and I was just like, LEAVES. And the book’s ruminations on existence made me feel so at peace. 

Heti made me think a lot about what kind of egg I might be (I felt immediately drawn to the bear but then I noticed parts of myself in the others, too), and did I even agree that there were three types of people, critics of creation? 

I thought about Annie’s fish perspective. Before this line I did not see myself as a fish: “People should care for other people because they are familiar—because they’re also humans—not because they’re family.”

Boutsikaris writes with a strong vulnerability and a fiery fight. She has some crisp descriptions and refers well to other writers’ words. It was quite a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness examination of the interior, told through vignettes. I was particularly interested in her exploration of physical and mental illness.

A haunting tale that is shatteringly loud in its protagonist's interior, contrasting with her exterior of near-silence. This is especially noticeable when we are thrust into one of two moments where the reader has access to Gilles’s perspective, a painfully loud and graphic paragraph of his utterances and behavior. La Femme de Gilles was an agonizing and well-written read that stands apart from Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, though they share similarities and it is an apt comparison.

Bourdouxhe toys with tenses, switching to the present tense to emphasize the moment and evoke its inevitability and all-encompassing nature for even the reader. This style works well for the novel and it is something I had not really read before, though I learned that in French, the book's original language, it is more common. And I love that the title was not translated, because its double meaning would not hold true in English. Femme in French means both woman and wife. Elisa is not just Gilles's wife; her love for him is what keeps her person alive.  

Sometimes I empathized with Elisa. Sometimes I wanted to take her and shake her: why??

Soomro’s writing is delicately powerful. He beautifully captures the deep, natural details of scenery, food, behavior, and emotions. I loved learning about Pakistan through his written eye, the eyes of his complex characters, and the complicated, tense conflicts. His third person narrator approaches both Fahad and his father Rafik, allowing the reader to get a sense of both of their interiors. The setting of each scene plays an important role, reflecting emotions and acting so strongly that it almost becomes a character itself. Soomro left me pondering existential questions about familial relationships and the formation of self.

I enjoyed the first part more, the relationship between Fahad and Ali, Fahad's youth and curiosity, the sharp contrast between him and his father that made any moment of softness between them stand out, the dreamy quality of Fahad's perspective. Perhaps the second half was just much sadder and more uncertain, now that Fahad has grown up and must come back to Abad to take care of his still strong-willed, but senile, father and his estate. It gives the reader an abrupt look at the changes life can make, the effect places have on us, the loss of potential life paths, the people who stay in our minds forever, and how we get in our own way. What I did like in the last part was getting a bit more of the clarity about Rafik's involvement in politics and the story of his cousin Mousey, which seemed to have parallels to Fahad's. 

Who knew all it took was a poet to get me interested in memoir? Gifted to me by my grandmother (great taste; only gives books that she has read and enjoyed herself), What You Have Heard Is True is Forché's lyrical, gripping, and vital telling of her experience in El Salvador in the late seventies, amidst the palpable tension before the country's civil war. Leonel Gómez Vides, who asked that she come to El Salvador in the first place, shows her the reality of El Salvador, urging her to bear witness to the truth of the country's condition and its people. Forché transforms on the pages, and as her own eyes open, minute by minute, sentence by sentence, she gently but urgently pries open the reader's.

As a poet myself, I loved reading about Vides's thoughts on poetry as a means of communication and an act of witness and resistance. The way moments in history are recorded, disseminated, and archived is important and never objective. But subjectivity is not necessarily bad, as long as it is acknowledged. And Forché's depictions of her raw experience, the real people she met, and her own personal growth, create, as Leonel hoped, an incredibly compelling form of critical, empathetic, poetic, and observational nonfiction that urgently reminds readers of our shared humanity.

What a sweeping epic! Lee traces four generations of a persevering family through Korean history, mainly after Korea's annexation by the Empire of Japan in 1910. Her detached third-person narration dives intimately into each complex character while still remaining distant enough to show their intricacies, flaws, and how they fit into the broader narrative of the family and the moment. However, by the end of the book, I found it hard to feel connected to characters like Solomon, after feeling so much love and closeness to characters like Sunja, who is essentially the thread of the whole family saga.

I learned a LOT and for the most part felt quite engaged in the narrative, falling deeply into the stories, which is a feat for such a long book. 

"Noa didn’t care about being Korean when he was with her. In fact, he didn't care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be, to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn't possible."

"She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human."

"'Go-saeng,' Yangjin said out loud. 'A woman's lot is to suffer.'
'Yes, go-saeng.' Kyunghee nodded, repeating the word for suffering. 

All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer--suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother--die suffering. Go-saeng--the word made her sick. What else was there besides this? She had suffered to create a better life for Noa, and yet it was not enough. Should she have taught her son to suffer the humiliation that she'd drunk like water? In the end, he had refused to suffer the conditions of his birth. Did mothers fail by not telling their sons that suffering would come?"

At the base level of my existence, I am both a writer and a lover, so I latched right on to Casey Peabody and her pursuit of the creative dream. She's one of those characters who stays a forever friend if you let her in. Grief, romantic relationships, debt, introspection, waitressing, writing, sell-outs, medical problems, uncertainty, biking, hope, geese, Massachussetts in 1997. Through it all, King's Casey elegantly guides the reader on her vulnerable journey. 

"I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse."