on the shelf, episode thirteen
postcard 54: lucie (lucieeleanor)'s favorite books
How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.
prelude
My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, from teachers, people met on planes, people I have only seen in my mind, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you. All of this meets along the edge of a sentence like this one, as if the sentence is a fence, with you on one side and me on the other. When the writing works best, I feel like I could poke one of these words out of place and find the writer's eye there, looking through to me.
—How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee
Every month, I’ll be featuring someone’s favorite books so you get to hear from someone who isn’t me. This month’s feature is from
, who is such a great friend and also an amazing writer. She writes both fiction and nonfiction on her newsletter, Sublime Miscellany, both which are always so heartfelt and brilliantly written. I am always amazed at the way she is able to articulate her feelings and happenings in her life. She also incorporates a lot of literature and culture into her essays, and has the best tangents. Please make sure to check out her fiction as well as her nonfiction, as I love both!As always, as I do for my Substack friends, I’ve linked a few of my favorite essays of hers in the article links.
(cover picture & quotes were all chosen by the featured guest!)
1. The Idiot by Elif Batuman
“Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I'll have reached you.”
Despite myself, I’m such a fan of ‘no plot just vibes’ type books; The Idiot manages to capture that same open, contemplative feel while also having quite a lot happen! It is 1995 and Selin is in her first year at Harvard; we follow her as she embarks on making friends, learning Russian, and understanding herself as a writer. The book is dominated by her meandering thoughts and feelings as she puzzles out not only Russian grammar but independence, friendships, and love. It’s set in the earliest days of email, and Selin’s online correspondence with Ivan, a Maths student a few years older than her, is equal parts sweet and heartbreaking.
I have such enduring affection for this book – it’s probably my favourite work of fiction. It’s such a beautiful insight into how it feels to be young and unknowing.
2. I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
“Wanting to be an artist and being one are different. Perhaps I am just like everyone else and my disappointment is desiring to be special but not being special at all. Perhaps my life's purpose is to square myself with this.”
The unnamed protagonist of I’m a Fan is completely, non-hyperbolically obsessed. The object of her desire is only ever referred to as ‘the man I want to be with’, for whom she is merely one of many women in his orbit. The narrator is stalking one of his other love interests, a wealthy influencer and art collector, who again is only known as ‘the woman I am obsessed with’. Patel’s prose is charged with such intense energy, hate, and eroticism; the book feels injected into your veins. I adored it and have been thinking about it for months.
3. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?, Jenny Diski
“Indolence has always been my most essential quality. ‘Essential’ in the sense that it is the single quality I am convinced I possess and by which I can be recognised and remembered, and also in the sense that I feel most essentially like myself when I am exercising it. I cannot recollect a time when the idea of going for a walk was not a torment to me; a proposition that endangered my constant wish to stay where I was.”
Jenny Diski is my favourite essayist and non-fiction prose writer. The essays in this collection originally appeared in the London Review of Books but were published here after her death from lung cancer in 2016. Diski tackles such eclectic topics as her voyage to Antarctica, Roald Dahl, Margaret Thatcher’s husband, and her own death (in one moment, she imagines her own headstone: “Jenny Diski lies here. But tells the truth over there.”) I often turn to her when I am in need of comfort and a familiar voice; reading her feels like talking to a witty, often slightly grumpy, incredibly endearing friend.
4. Assembly, Natasha Brown
“Explain air. Convince a sceptic. Prove it's there. Prove what can’t be seen.”
This book is incredibly slim but its impact is huge – it’s an unflinching portrait of a Black woman’s experiences in academia and the corporate workplace. The narrator has ‘made it’ – she has a prestigious degree, a high-paying job in finance and a recent promotion – but living for so many years in racist Britain has taken its toll and pushed her to the brink. We follow her as she prepares to attend a lavish garden party at her white boyfriend’s family home, and, at the same time, deals with a breast cancer diagnosis in her own unique and deeply painful way.
5. The Right To Sex, Amia Srinivasan
“Feminism cannot indulge the fantasy that interests always converge; that our plans will have no unexpected, undesirable consequences; that politics is a place of comfort.”
In this sharp and compulsively readable essay collection, Srinivasan explores how we have sex, and think about sex, post-Me Too. She tackles incel ideology, the ethics of pornography, and the intricacies of sex and relationships on a university campus. Her writing is so formidable, measured, and empathetic, and she manages to shine such a ray of hope even on the bleakest of subjects. I come back to these essays again and again.
6. Boy Parts, Eliza Clark
“Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?”
Irina Sturges is a photographer in her late twenties from Newcastle with dark, singular tastes. Her muses are ordinary, overlooked men and boys; she denies it, but her project is fetish photography. The story begins when Irina is granted a paid month off her bar job after being attacked by a customer. She spends this time going through her portfolio in advance of an exhibition, which leads her into a deep, spiralling exploration of her own past, the people who have hurt her, and more importantly, her own victims.
Every time I recommend this book to someone I always forget how sexual and gratuitously violent it is – so far I’ve traumatised both my partner and my Mum by making them read it, so do with that information what you will… That said, it’s equally hilarious, told with Eliza Clark’s signature bite and charm.
7. Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys
“My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don't, streets that are friendly, streets that aren't, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I shall never be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don't, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won't, and so on.”
Sasha Jansen is back in her beloved Paris for the weekend, picking up the pieces of herself after a failed marriage, a stillbirth, and years of financial instability. She wanders through the city drinking heavily, taking sleeping pills, and struggling to come to terms with her own middle age.
Rhys’ prose is so transporting; pre-war Paris comes to life so vividly through her words. I feel such kinship with Sasha purely because of how much time she spends sitting in coffee shops and how insecure she feels to be there alone. It’s an enduring and poignant portrayal of a woman’s depression, vanity, and loneliness – I can’t recommend it enough.
8. A Terrible Country, Keith Gessen
“I wasn't in America. That's the lesson I kept being taught, although I didn't seem willing to learn it.”
Having a partner who studies Russian has meant I’ve ended up understanding lots more about Russian history and culture than I ever thought I would, and knowing a fair bit about the state of Russian and Slavonic Studies within broader academia. But regardless of that, I think anyone would enjoy this book. Andrei’s family moved from the USSR to the USA when he was six; now, decades on, a failing academic and self-identified American, he must return to Moscow to care for his elderly, isolated grandmother. We follow him as he adjusts (with great difficulty) to life in 2008’s Russia.
Gessen’s writing is so humorous and so easy to read, and the ending is so incredibly clever – it feels like a rug being pulled out from under you. His prose reads almost more like a memoir than fiction, but that’s a style I really enjoy.
9. Acts of Desperation, Megan Nolan
“Do you think it would be possible for anyone to love you if they could see every single thing you do?... Every secret, every base physical ejection, every category of porn you’ve ever looked at in a kind of coma when you’re numb to the normal stuff. Think about it all. Every moment of shame, of desperation – do you really think anyone could love you still? Anyone at all?”
Acts of Desperation is an achingly detailed portrayal of a doomed relationship. Our narrator’s love interest, the cruel and distant Ciaran, becomes her sole focus; her life outside of the relationship is directionless and self-destructive. As the story unfolds, though, she learns that it’s not always satisfying to finally get what you want. Nolan’s writing is so visceral, rich with both desire and disgust. (This recommendation comes with a pretty heavy trigger warning for sexual violence.)
10. The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
“The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”
I love all of Maggie Nelson’s writing, but The Argonauts, her memoir of queer parenthood, is definitely my favourite. It’s a seamless blend of memoir and philosophical theory, finding such rare beauty and meaning in the domestic everyday. Her words are so deeply rooted in the body; she writes with such clarity, empathy, and love. Every time I go back to it I feel like I learn something new from it; as Nelson herself says, “sometimes one has to know something many times over.”
interlude i: what i read this week
Sorry for the monthlong drought in postcards! I’ve been going through a pretty rough month, although I’m hopefully near the end of it. I’ve still been reading consistently and following along my reading syllabus for spring.
I’ve also just been very obsessed with New York Review Book’s classics collection, and also New Directions’ catalog in general. In the last year, I’ve been making an active effort to read more books from independent publishers because I feel like smaller houses are more willing to take risks on unconventional and diverse reads. I want to do a whole post on independent publishers and my favorite books from them, so stay tuned!
Some highlights from the last two months have been: Journey to the Past by Stefan Zweig, Shorter Writings of Franz Kafka, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, and Solar by Ian McEwan.
Follow me on Goodreads if you haven’t yet! (Although I still have like 2 months of reads to update—I’m behind)
Here are ten articles to read this week:
Legacy of the Angels by Rebekah Wallace
When medieval scholars sought to understand the nature of angels, they unwittingly laid the foundations of modern physics.
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Or, I’m scared the internet is dying.
Happy Hundredth Birthday, Flannery O’Connor! by Jamie Quatro
“A painting in Blair Hobbs’s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O’Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress.”
Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents by Anna Russell
A growing movement wants to destigmatize severing ties. Is it a much-needed corrective, or a worrisome change in family relations?
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On absent absolutes, man-made mysteries, and Solenoid by Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu.
The Severance Finale Ends With a Big Twist. It’s Where the Show Was Always Going by Sam Adams
There’s more than one reason the season had to end like that.
Everyone’s a Sellout Now by Rebecca Jennings
So you want to be an artist. Do you have to start a TikTok?
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Short fiction.
From Antarctica, With Love by Allegra Rosenberg
Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed journey to the South Pole captivated the world. But hidden within the legend was a story that has never been told—a love affair between two of the crew who survived.
The Deaths—and Lives—of Two Sons by Yiyun Li
The truth is that however I choose to express myself will not live up to the weight of these facts: Vincent died, and then James died.
interlude ii: what i watched this week
I bought a Criterion Collection subscription this week, which is possibly the best thing I’ve ever bought so far this year. If you like watching movies, I highly recommend it! There are so many gems that you can’t find anywhere else (and commentary too). I watched a few movies in the last month and a half since I posted a weekly postcard, which I will update on my Letterboxd soon, but my favorite this year so far has to be La Chimera. It’s just such a deeply beautiful movie that feels like poetry in film form—if you like slower, thoughtful movies with beautiful cinematography, this is the movie for you.
I’ve been watching a few television shows, including Severance. If you have not watched Severance yet, please do. It’s the best show I’ve watched since Succession, and I don’t say that lightly. The finale genuinely rocked my world, and all I could say was holy shit for a solid five minutes after the credits rolled. And like every single Korean (and apparently non-Korean), I watched When Life Gives You Tangerines. I’m still not done with it; I’m only halfway through, but it’s the first Korean show I’ve watched in a while and it’s so good. The script is amazing, although the translation on Netflix is awful.
I did update my top four favorites—
postlude
things i love: maison crivelli’s rose saltifolia perfume, the maria’s submarine album, morning bus rides, tower 28’s sos spray, criterion collection
Yes yes yes I have read so many of these, you have excellent taste !! 🤗
Such good recs Lucie!! So exciting to see two of my faves collabing and this is officially the push I needed to finally read The Idiot!