on the shelf, episode fourteen
postcard 58: luisa (luisacorrea)'s favorite books
People confuse thinking with knowing, they let themselves confuse the two.
prelude
Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I'm bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers. And if this is it, if this is all there is- just me and the trees and the sky and the seas- I know now that that's enough.
—Everything I Know About Love, Dolly Alderton
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 my friend
! I’m so lucky to be able to call her one of my close friends; she is such a talented writer—on her newsletter , she metamorphoses simple feelings and concepts into these thoroughly articulate and unique pieces of writing. Her essays explore the intersections of emotion, personal history, pop culture, and literature, and she pulls it off every single time.As always, as I do for my Substack friends, I’ve linked a few of my favorite essays of hers in the article links.
LUISA’S FAVORITE BOOKS
1. Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux
“From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.”
I love an unreliable narrator and who is more unreliable than a grieving woman? On this memoir Ernaux details the ways in which her obsession with a past lover took over every aspect of her life while it was happening, and the grief she experienced after the affair was over. What I love the most about this book is that Ernaux is not concerned about facts. She writes about this time of her life in emotions. How she felt is more relevant than what she wore the day he left.
This book was the one where I was like “This is it. This is what I want to feel when I read a book”
If you are going through a heartbreak, pick it up. And if you are not, pick up too. I want to learn french just so I can read it in its original form.
2. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor
“The rain can't hurt you now, and the darkness doesn't last forever. See there? See that light shining in the distance? The little light that looks like a star? That's where you're headed, he told them, that's the way out of this hole”
This book narrates the events surrounding the murder of the witch of La Matosa, a fictitious town immersed in poverty through which Melchor explores violence, homophobia and misogyny in Mexican society. The chapters are told from the POV of different characters and each explores how every narrator was linked to the witch who was murdered. Melchor, uses single blocks of text without paragraph divisions leaving the reader close to no breaks from the violence the people on the story are experiencing. It is incredibly immersive and written in a colloquial language that incorporates characteristics of Mexican orality. If you know spanish, please read the original version, there is no comparison. It is quite disturbing and a lot to take but extremely relevant.
The story is set on a small town in mexico but it could easily be the story of any other place in Latin America, suffering from the consequences of narcotraffic. I read it a couple of years ago but I still remember how I felt when I did. I thought “I’ve seen this. This happens in my town too.” It just perfectly encapsulates the cycle of poverty and how the environment you grow up in and the family values you are raised with shape your life and the choices you make.
3. Communion: The Female Search For Love by bell hooks
“I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go.”
On this book, hooks explores the complexities of women's relationships with love, under patriarchal and heteronormative society. On it she argues that women's independence and self-actualization are dependent on their ability to love themselves and others, opposing cultural beliefs that drive women to seek approval and fulfillment from outside sources.
Although I don’t agree with all of her arguments on this book I do think it poses interesting questions, especially in relation the value of different forms of love and connection, including friendship and community. A must read for young women everywhere.
4. Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
“When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.”
Pretty much everyone has heard about this book, but if you haven’t it is Dolly Alderton’s memoir about all the ways in which love has change her life and the lessons she has gained from all forms of it. This is peak woman in her twenties navigating life and feeling uncertain about her choices. It is funny, sad, heartwarming and more than anything full of love. It is popular for a reason, trust me.
5. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
“What makes night within us may leave stars”
Lori, a therapist with a private practice in Los Angeles, world’s collapses after her boyfriend leaves her. She is lost, and soon realizes that the emotions the her patients are experiencing are similar to the ones she is now sharing with her new therapist. In this book, she delves into the inner workings of both her own life and the lives of the people she treats. Her perspectives on meaning and death, guilt and shame, hope and acceptance as both a patient and a clinician make this one of the most interesting nonfiction books I've ever read. Despite being nonfiction this books is full of conversations about life, grief, love, identity, and relationships, giving it the sense of a novel. It was the first book on this genre that I read willingly and it stayed with me.
6. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
“ And if ever I lose someone, let me descend into a futile and prolonged rage, yes, despair, wanting to break things, furniture, appliances, wanting to get into fights, to scream, to walk in front of a bus, yes. Let me suffer, please. To love just these few people, to know myself capable of that, I would suffer every day of my life.”
Intermezzo is the story about two brothers: Peter, a brilliant barrister on the edge of a breakdown, and Ivan, a quiet competitive chess player. After their father's death, resentment between them grows as they grieve and try to move on. It is a book about grief, brotherhood, regrets, and like all of Sally’s novels, love.
There aren’t enough words for me to explain what this book did to me. From the beginning it felt very different to her previous work. The way in which Peter’s chapters are written to represent his mental state is a masterclass for caracther building. I love this book not only because of the story, but because of its writing style. I am in awe with Sally and forever grateful she exists. She has made me more curious about writing and that is something I can’t say for every writer.
7. Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro
“What’s left of you when your arm can’t even put on a jacket and your leg can’t even take a step and your neck can’t straighten up enough to let you show your face to the world, what’s left? Are you your brain, which keeps sending out orders that won’t be followed? Or are you the thought itself, something that can’t be seen or touched beyond that furrowed organ guarded inside the cranium like a trove?”
This is the story of Elena, a woman with Parkinson's disease, who recently lost her daughter to what the authorities say it was suicide. Although greatly limited due to ther disability and having lost her main and only caregiver Elena knows her daughter wouldn’t do such a thing, so she embargoes on a journey to uncover the truth behind her daughter Rita's death. This is a novel that the less you know about it the better. It is not common to have elderly women be the protagonists of a novel so this felt like a breath of fresh air.
Yes, it is about grief, but is also about bodily autonomy, mother-daughter relationships and ableism. It just an amazing piece of work.
8. Alejandra Pizarnik: selected poems
“I don’t know about birds,
nor about the history of fire.
But I think my solitude should have wings.”
Originally I wanted to recommend a collection of poems by Alejandra Pizarnik called “en esta noche, en este mundo” which translates to: “tonight, on this world” but it is not translated to english. I only found two translations of her work, one being her selected poems, which won a couple of prizes for translation. On this one, Cecilia Rossi selected a couple of poems from each of Pizarnik’s six main published volumes and translated them to english. I think she did a good job. But if you can please pick out en esta noche, en este mundo. I love that collection so much.
Pizarnik, was an argentinian poet and writer who made a great impact in the literary world for women in south america. She is beloved by many, including me because of her ability to turn mundane feelings into mystical poetry. In her work we noticed the constant battle she is in with her dark side and how she writes in an attempt to get closer to the light. Solitude and silence are ever present in all of her work as well as yearning so if you like writing that speaks about these emotions, you will love Pizarnik.
9. Normal People by Sally Rooney
“No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.”
This is Rooney’s most popular book probably because of the television adaptation starring darling, Daisy Edgar-Jones and the internet’s favorite Irish boy, Paul Mescal. But let me tell you; it is worthy of every ounce of prize it gets. The story is simple, it follows Marianne and Connell two young undergrads as they fall in love, go to college and navigate life. What seemed like the typical popular boy and unpopular girl trope turns into a book about class, social dynamics, mental health, power and of course, relationships.
I wrote about this book a while back and I said “Marianne and Connell’s relationship teaches us something about relationships bigger than soulmatism. Their story is one about the impact that we can have on people when we are good to one another…It’s about the importance of community and feeling worthy of love. A love story about giving our best to each other.” It stands. This book is everything to me and although is far from being Rooney’s best it will always maintain a special place in my heart.
10. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand.”
I think from this list this is book the book that I’ve re read the most in my life. First time I read it I was about 14 years old and to this day I believe it is one of the best YA books to ever exist. Set in El Paso, Texas, the novel follows Ari and Dante, two Mexican-American teenagers who meet in the summer of 1987 at a local pool. They are both friendless and fascinated with each other, and soon become inseparable. This book explores themes of racial and ethnic identity, sexuality, gender roles and friendship. I love that is the perfect combination of beautiful prose, lovable characters and interesting plot.
And the ending? I tear up every time (from joy)
interlude i: what i read this week
I’ve kind of been reading a few books all at once! I’m on the last 50 pages of Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, which is actually kind of really great and witty and funny and beautiful (and as I mentioned before, I’m a Gravity Rainbow hater). I think Pynchon shines way more in his shorter novels than his longer ones. I’m also so excited for the movie.
I’m also rereading Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, which I read when I was maybe twelve? and I haven’t reread since. I want to start reading more philosophy and though that picking the book up again would be a good introduction and a way to ease me into reading denser material. Just going to read it slowly and jot down a few things that I want to remember over the course of a month.
I’m almost done with On Being Blue by William Gass, which is my first NYRB read of the summer! It’s such an odd little book that answers the question, what is blue? in a hundred different ways. I feel like this would be such a good late summer read, maybe mid-August ish. I think I just associate blue with August (maybe it’s because of Deborah Levy’s book, August Blue). On that note, if you missed it, I’ll be posting a summer reading guide series on NYRB classics, since that’s all I seem to be reading these days! Keep an eye out for it.
And then lastly, I’m rereading Beautiful World, Where Are You with
(very apt to announce on this post). I love this book too much and have already talked way too much about this book to say more.Follow me on Goodreads if you haven’t yet! (Although I still have like 4 months of reads to update—I’m behind)
Here are ten articles to read this week:
Out of the Fog by Gianluca Didino
It’s a ‘failed painting’ that obscures the profound power of German Romanticism. Why do we love the ‘Wanderer’ so much?I Want To Do Everything, So I Do Nothing by
On midnight anxieties and career paths.
The Titanic of the Pacific by Tyler Hooper
A tale of disaster, survival, and ghosts.
Our Narrative Prison by Eliane Glaser
The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent kind of story. What other tales are there to tell?
Ego Death by
Unsolicited advice, session 01: on how to stop being a narcissist.Siege Art by Hal Foster
To what extent is the meaning of an artwork – or a piece of architecture or any made thing – bound up with the circumstances of its creation, its ‘historicity’, and to what extent does its significance develop unevenly over time, ‘anachronically’, in myriad acts of reception?
How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree by Matthew Ponsford
A set of experimental techniques and technologies that might seem harmful to trees is actually helping ancient forests survive.Recurring Screens by Nora Claire Miller
“The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience.”
What To Do When English Colonizes Your Brain? by
On the struggles of the bilingual brain and favouring what's foreign.How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It by Deborah Solomon
“It is rare that a biographer of artists becomes the subject of a biography.”
interlude ii: what i watched this week
I’m not going to lie, I had a genuinely hellish week last week so all I did was binge Sex and the City. And I accidentally finished it. Like, I binged it so much that i thought I was on season 4 but nooooo I was actually on the final episode of the whole show. I had a few moments when the screen turned black after the last episode and I was just staring at myself in the reflection of my iPad thinking “I watched that way too embarrassingly quickly wow”. But it’s such a good show and I do think it is really good cultural commentary—a lot of the plots and the language used are very outdated, but a lot of the core concepts and issues that the four women face are still things I talk about with my friends. It’s kind of insane how I just watched it for the first time, but I’m also glad I watched it for the first time at 25.
postlude
things i love: chicken avocado croissant sandwiches, book stacks, vintage editions of pretty books, my gentle monster sunglasses, celine’s dans paris perfume, my new marshall acton ii speaker, petrichor.
[Postcards by Elle is a reader supported publication. every week, i send out a weekly postcard, which includes a list of everything i read (books and articles) and watched (movies and video essays) that week. to support my work, please consider upgrading your subscription! that way, i can have the time to produce content i love, which mostly just includes rabbit hole essays on niche topics i hyper-fixate on and research. or recommendations of all kinds.]
Love Luisa!! Her essay on English is one of my favorite essays on here! I need to check out some of these book recs :)
If you haven’t read Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets” it’s the most beautiful book & would round out your blue musings.