on the shelf, episode eleven
postcard 48: wenyi (wenyixue)'s favorite books
This story is made for that one reader.
prelude
“Everything's a story - you are a story - I am a story.”
—A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett
Every month, I’ll be featuring someone’s favorite books so you get to hear from someone who isn’t me. Starting off this year with Wenyi, who runs the newsletter
. Her writing is incredible and evocative and so gorgeous, and look forward to reading her pieces so much. One of my favorite essays on Substack is “you look like a memory” by her, which actually took my breath away. As always, as I do for my Substack friends, I’ve linked a few of my favorite essays of hers in the article links!
1. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
“‘Family’ is hard work, I thought.”
There is a scene with a mother and a child, the mother reading a bedtime story to the child. The room is quiet except for the sound of the mother’s voice and the faint chirping of crickets outside. It’s the middle of summer and a delicate breeze offers a brief respite in the heat. You are about to sink into this state of peace when you realize the child’s blanket is made of human teeth and the book the mother is reading is a knife. The mother remains a mother. This is only an approximation of the feeling that Murata is able to evoke in her writing and Earthlings is (in my opinion) the best showcase of her ability to create these deeply unsettling yet simultaneously peaceful settings. I’ll spare this list from becoming a Murata bibliography, but if I had to choose only one author to read for the rest of my life, it would be Murata.
2. Crush by Richard Siken
“It’s thinking of love.
It’s thinking of stabbing us to death
and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.”
It’s hard to write anything that would do Siken justice. When I first read “Little Beast”, I felt like someone was gripping me by the throat and flailing my body around like a ragdoll. I immediately purchased the entire collection and it is the most beloved book on my bookshelf. Out of every book I own, Crush is the book I re-read the most often; whenever I find myself with a particularly bad case of writer’s block, I re-read Crush. Every line, every sentence, every stanza will rip your heart clean out your chest, stomp on it, and you’ll still find yourself thanking Siken for the absolute demolition of your internal organs.
3. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
“He and Natasha had grown close since his cum paintings had sold so well.”
Every time I DoorDash anything above $20, I envision myself to be the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation. This is the impact of this book: once you read it, you will find it lurking in all the strange corners of your apartment, asking for spare sleeping medication. (Every time I take sleeping aids, I envision myself to be the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation). For a very long time, I told people if they wanted to understand who I was as a person, they needed to read My Year of Rest and Relaxation. There’s an incredible wit and absurdity to every sentence, but Moshfegh doesn’t shy away from also occasionally having these incredibly hard-hitting moments that bring you back to reality only to dunk you back into a tank of sarcasm.
4. The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
“It’s language that’s letting me say that the days elongated, as if the very sun and moon had forsaken me. It’s narrative that makes things open up so I can tell this.”
I love the feeling of standing in the ocean, the water knee-deep, staring ahead at where blue meets blue. All of the water on Earth is connected and, with sixty percent of me also being water, when I stand in the ocean, I think part of me is connected to everything, too. I first read The Chronology of Water in high school, pausing every three or four chapters to blankly stare at the wall (there is no sky or ocean to gaze at in a high school classroom). The memoir is aptly titled; Yuknavitch’s voice is smooth like water and creates this sense of primordial connection not unlike the sensation of being in the water. The way she writes also reads like poetry; Yuknavitch could describe peeing the bed and it would sound like the most beautiful prose you’ve ever read. (And she does, in this exact memoir.)
5. We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider
“And knowing things about someone is not the same as knowing him.”
Tim Kreider, to me, has the vibes of that one teacher in high school you get unexplainably attached to. You start off by simply enjoying the class and the way the lessons aren’t taught in a monotone, before realizing a large part of why you enjoy the class is because you’re simultaneously actually learning the material (instead of doing the bare minimum to get a passing grade) and the teacher treats you like an actual person instead of someone to talk down towards. And then you learn that this teacher previously won some extremely prestigious award (Tim Kreider is the originator of “the mortifying ordeal of being known”) and you’re suddenly thinking “what is this guy doing here teaching a random high school?” That’s We Learn Nothing in a nutshell, a collection of essays that’ll cover an extremely wide variety of topics and drag you back through time to the first time an adult treated you like another adult.
6. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
“If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.”
It felt wrong to not include A Little Princess if not just for the fact that it’s the first book I ever read in one sitting because I was so enthralled by the narrative and writing. I was gifted the book when I was 8 or 9 and some of my fondest memories of childhood are the afternoon I spent reading the entire book and all the afternoons after where I’d carry it around. To this day, books are still my favorite gift to receive for any occasion and I have A Little Princess to thank for that.
7. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis
“One must participate in one’s own salvation.”
The heart of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is choice and that’s why I chose this line rather than the far more popular “why didn’t you make me good enough so that you could’ve loved me?” (although I am cheating in the sense that I am including that quote, too). This is the quintessential question when it comes to faith in general; it’s easy to think of faith as a predetermined facet of identity, but faith is only truly faith if it’s a choice. Even for the non-religious, this play has a lot of value in terms of digging deeper into our relationships with guilt, betrayal, and what it means to be forgiven by everyone but ourselves. I’ve always been fascinated by religion – in many ways, I’ve found it goes hand in hand with psychology in terms of it being a different way of trying to understand ourselves – and I think The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is perhaps one of the most beautifully written explorations of what it means to be human through that lens.
8. Grimm’s Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm* Fall River Press edition
“My little bird, with the necklace red, sings sorrow, sorrow, sorrow.”
I’ve always been a fan of modern twists on classic stories and Grimm’s Fairy Tales are perhaps some of my favorites to read both the re-invented and original versions of. In the same sense that physicists give credit to their predecessors for their own discoveries, it only feels right to give credit to these fairy tales for creating a domino effect in terms of inspiring stories. As these stories are (somewhat) meant for children, too, I think it is a starting point in two ways – both in terms of being the first venture into stories for an individual and being a very early venture into story-telling in terms of history.
9. Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
“And I think about how loving someone is kind of like being president, in that it doesn’t change you, not really. But it brings out more of the you that you already are.”
For my birthday, my friend gifted me a version with her favorite lines highlighted – this has become my favorite way to receive a book-gift. I chose a different color for my own annotations and now the interweaving of colors also paints a picture of my friend and I outside of the book itself (I find the overlaps not unlike de Recat’s sibling lines). Every short story in this collection has Bob-Waksberg's signature voice of equal parts wacky and heartfelt. It’s hard to capture the essence of Bob-Waksberg's style – even as a die-hard Bojack Horseman fan; the only thing I can say about the collection is I texted my friend once I finished: “it was not what I expected at all and I expected to love this collection but I did love the collection, just in an entirely different way that I expected to.”
10. Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint by Sing Shong
“This story is made for that one reader.”
When my friend recommended reading Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, they advertised it to me as “a love letter to reading” and, by the 20th chapter, I had guessed a major plot twist (I mean this as a positive – I was only able to guess it because the novel is such a love letter to narrative in general). They were right (as they usually are), because if you have ever read a book and sobbed your eyes out because it was the first time you felt seen by something other than your own eyes through a (maybe metaphorical) mirror, then Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint is like that exact moment captured in writing.
interlude i: what i read this week
I have had such a good reading week because all I seem to be doing is working and reading lately. I am still buddy reading War and Peace with Griffin, although we’ve fallen a bit behind schedule. However, this means that I read a total of three short books this week, all of which were such good reads. I started the week by A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux (in the beautiful Fitzcarraldo edition), which was a perfect bildungsroman. Ernaux has such simple, unadorned prose that always allows the reader to imbue their own emotions between the lines. I think that is so special for a memoir to do.
I also read Dark Days by James Baldwin, which was a perfect short read. I wrote in my Goodreads review that James Baldwin is one of those writers that makes you realize why reading is such a gift, and I am always so excited to read one of his books.
I finished the week with Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov over the weekend. I’m not a huge fan of him, so I went in with low expectations, but this one blew me out of the water. It's still very Nabokovian, but it's funny and light and charming in a way I feel like his other works usually aren’t. Pnin is obviously a caricature of Nabokov himself, and he is such a bumbling, sentimental, hapless train wreck of a character that you can't help but love and feel for him. I might bump this up to five stars in the week to come.
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Here are some article links you should read this week:
A Third Thing Grows by Susan Moon
How learning a third language became a place of reconciliation for my mother tongues.
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"One day the sadness will end, but I don't think today's the day..."
The Climate Crisis is Worse than You Think by Elizabeth Weil
A climate scientist spent years trying to get people to pay attention to the disaster ahead. His wife is exhausted. His older son thinks there’s no future. And nobody but him will use the outdoor toilet he built to shrink his carbon footprint.
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We won't be friends a year from now but I love you all the same.
In Defense of Sad Girl Art by Katie Tobin
There have been endless artistic reimaginings of women’s rage, heartbreak, and self-destruction – do these stories keep us in a state of perpetual victimhood, or are they brave and necessary?
Is It a Crush or Have You Fallen Into Limerence? by Amanda McCraken
How an intense longing for a romantic connection can lead to a serious addiction.
Who's That Girl in the Painting? by Claire Marie Healy
In an exclusive excerpt from her new book, Claire Marie Healy delves into the Tate’s art collection and traces the journey of ‘the girl’ in painting, discovering what links Brooke Shields with 18th-century portraiture.
Is the Way We Talk About Books Online Problematic? by
On anti-intellectualism, the aesthetics of reading & the fear to critique.
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On leaving home and secret feelings.
The Joy of Sulk by Rebecca Roache
Full of implicit rules and paradoxes, sulking is a marvellous example of intense communication without clear declaration.
In Defense of the Bildungsroman by
A love letter to coming of age stories.
We Fear No God But Each Other by
In a house with a father, his words become law and his actions blind faith.
interlude ii: what i watched this week
I’m trying to get ahead of the Academy Award nominations game and start my watchlist early this year (last year I was trying to cram six movies into one week right before the ceremony and I feel like I didn’t get to fully appreciate every movie), so I finally watched The Substance (2024, dir. Coralie Fargeat), which I’m sure will be nominated for something. I’m not a huge fan of horror, but I loved this. I’m going to include Seo’s review from my best of 2024 postcard, because she describes it better than I ever could:
“Honestly, this movie was so camp and over-the-top in ways that were utterly delightful to watch despite some of the more gruesome scenes. The social commentary isn’t subtle either; it is just as provocative and colorful as the rest of the movie. Still, it was an utterly entrancing movie to watch and I found myself enjoying it to the very last minute, which is so rare for me.”
Here is my Letterboxd if you want to add me!
A few video essays I watched here and there throughout the week: this art history video on Rome, this video on Nosferatu (2024), and this deep dive into Gossip Girl.
postlude
things i love: my reorganized bookshelf, journaling, vanilla bourbon tea from twg, taking a walk in the morning, sunsets
earthlings by sayaka murata is so good. it still leaves me reeling and i read it 2 years ago
A Little Princess sounds like the sort of nostalgia I need right now…