I'm not sure I'll ever read Creation Lake but I have to stump here for Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood, which I reviewed (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/birnam-wood-book-review-eleanor-catton) and which I think is a very good novel about what seem to be similar subjects. So I recommend it! (My review is as un-spoiler-y as possible though not perfectly so.)
omg—who was I speaking to who recommended Catton's Birnam Wood recently? but I really trust your taste, and this review is extremely convincing
I loved this part I'm quoting below, because it gets at something I've been thinking about lately—plot is important! it is exciting and energizing to have characters who don't just listlessly drift around, all vibes but no agency. Many of my favorite contemporary novels (like Raven Leilani's Luster, which I think is one of the BEST novels in that whole genre of financially-precarious-bisexual?-woman-in-a-situationship-with-an-older-guy) are essentially concerned with the choices people make and the moral/ethical weight of them. This is extremely interesting to me and is where I feel literature has the most…I hesitate to say it…educational capacity? Like we get to see characters make decisions and contend with the weight of them, and as we read them, we're figuring out what kinds of decisions we can commit to in our own lives…
:We do not live in the golden age of plot, at least where literary fiction is concerned. Outside of what we might call high-genre books—the thrillers of Ruth Rendell, say, or the crime novels of Tana French—it’s rare for a literary novel to take its plot seriously. Instead, contemporary literary fiction largely concerns itself with other things: moods, problems, situations. Few people would dream of writing a novel without characters, but a novel without a plot is practically normal. When you speak of what a novel is about, you speak thematically—it’s about surveillance, or displacement, or heterosexuality, or something along these lines.
In a recent interview, Catton commented, somewhat blandly, that “the moral development of people in plotted novels where people make choices is fascinating and important. I’d like to see more books like that.” Her interest in plot as something that arises from human choice, and not just from the context in which those choices take place, means that her own plots take a sideways approach. Just as we are constantly summing up books as types, the characters in “Birnam Wood” are constantly summing up one another, often incorrectly…"
I love her book The Rehearsal too—I do not like The Luminaries much and if you want to read it I would read it last, because it is huge and moves at a glacial pace and basically the whole trick is this series of false starts for six hundred pages before you find out what's really going on. It's very much a book that wins prizes but not entirely in a good way.
Also, I never read Luster but now you make me curious! It did not sound good at the time, but most book coverage does not make books sound good to me.
Celine, I just read the entire post and I loved your recommendations, but more than that I just loved your writing, your thoughts, your impressions on what you consumed and how you express that through your writing. Just beautifully written, and brilliantly curated. I have not written online in year , and just 3 weeks back I started writing on substack - and writers like you are a huge inspiration to me.
Priyanka! Thank you so much—this is a very generous and extremely encouraging comment. It's been really fun to write about literature, film &c here on Substack and to feel a genuine sense of community among other readers and writers.
All the best with your writing adventures too, and hope you get a lot of meaning and joy from your newsletter!!
Love your monthly digests so much! Re: Creation Lake, I feel that similar struggle with the highbrow Hollywood blockbusters of this moment (Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve are the first to come to mind) where I just want to shake the movie like if you think you can take 3+ hours of the audience’s time at least have the guts to BELIEVE in something!!! Show some conviction, some passion about anything!!!
The money thing too, my sister took me to the weepy We Live In Time and at about the hour mark I realized what was nagging me which is these characters have beautiful living spaces and the movie is ostensibly about their love, starting a family, and struggle with illness, which the latter 2 at least are expensive, and yet money barely comes up ever? And I was just like dang is the healthcare in London that good because I don’t think… lol. All this to say as someone who watches a lot more movies I’ve observed this in the current film landscape as well.
thank you as always for reading! and yes—maybe it's that the more time I invest, the more I want to feel that the creator cares about something and NEEDS to convey that?
(this film is only 2h, but I think of it as one of the best best examples of a film that does not moralize and try to convince the viewer to feel one particular way…but it also has convictions, it has moral and ethical and political complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyland_(film))
I think it's quite common for someone to sort of mentally calculate…okay, how does this other person afford their life? and it's inevitable that we enter into that mindset with fiction
"I don’t quite understand why, out of all the novels I could have read this month, I ended up reading Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake." Yep! Same... disliked it.
More importantly though, BIG YES to the Not Waving & Romance embed. Those records have been some of the best records of the last 12 months or so in my opinion.
I finished Creation Lake a month ago and still can’t decide how I feel about it. The only passage that I marked in the whole novel so I could find it again was the one that caught your eye about the over-users of quotes. I consider myself a Kushner fan but also find her a wee overly concerned with cultivating her bad-ass image, particularly in her collection of essays. Yeah, she’s a bad-ass compared to the PhDs, but who isn’t? I do get her point about in Creation Lake about the holier-than-than folks who need to convince themselves that they are virtuous. Maybe that is the theme, as you suggested. I kind of get that—there are way too many people these days who actually believe they are more virtuous than others, which more and more people find tiresome. At any rate, thanks for a great newsletter!
It's funny bc I highlighted a LOT of passages—I initially didn't like Kushner's style, but ended up really really drawn in! And there are so many observations from Sadie's point of view that are really sharp and interesting and funny.
Maybe what I wanted is something tying it all together—not just the sharp observations and turns of phrase, but some overarching ethic of the novel. A novel can be cynical and still have an ethic, I think…Madame Bovary does! But I need to find more examples, because it's kind of unfair to compare anything to a Flaubert novel…
thank you so much for reading and commenting! and yes—only now do I feel distant enough from the horrors of undergrad (and all the problem sets I barely managed to finish) that I can read about complexity/computability without getting STRESSED!
Thank you for reading and commenting!! Also, that's such an impressive pace. I'm always interested in different people's relationships to quantification—sometimes it's positive and encourages more meaningful reading, sometimes it's not useful…
Thanks so much Celine! Your reviews always inspire thought and I’m so flattered that you’ve included my article (and even more excited that you read Ben’s - busy beaver is such a great example of how cool and communal mathematics can be)
Celine! You’re so good. Now that you’ve seen Taste of Cherry, I recommend the Nicole Krauss New Yorker short story “Seeing Ershadi” — I’d love to know what you think of it. The movie is a central motif and it essentially haunts the protag. I’m also inspired as a writer by that level of literal intertextuality. 🤍
Thank you!! And tbh that story has been on my list for ages…my old housemate had a subscription to the New Yorker, and for weeks and weeks there was an issue open to the "Seeing Ershadi" pages. I'm very similar to you; I love stories where the characters are relating to other books, films and so on, just like me.
'Exhausted after rehearsal, I’d either walk to the sea or go home to watch a film until it got late enough to go out and meet people. I couldn’t go to the beach as often as I’d have liked, because the choreographer said that he wanted the skin all over our bodies to be as white as the skin on our asses. I’d developed tendinitis in my ankle, which made it necessary for me to ice it after dancing, and so I found myself watching a lot of films lying on my back with my foot up. I saw everything with Jean-Louis Trintignant, until he got so old that his imminent death began to be too depressing, and then I switched to Louis Garrel, who is beautiful enough to live forever. Sometimes, when my friend Romi wasn’t working, she came to watch with me. By the time I finished with Garrel it was winter, and swimming was out of the question anyway, so I spent two weeks inside with Ingmar Bergman. When the New Year started, I resolved to give up Bergman and the weed I smoked every night, and, because the title was appealing and it was made far from Sweden, I downloaded “Taste of Cherry,” by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.'
I just finished reading Phillip Lopate's "A Year and A Day" yesterday, and was also inspired to watch a Kiarostami film! Now it's just waiting for the right day/mood to hit to watch a slow film.
my designated Film Friend and the first person I told about starting a newsletter (also the reason I wanted to watch more films in the first place!) once told me that Kiarostami film she recommends is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Olive_Trees if that's helpful! it's next on my list tbh
So good to see a review of a Kiarostami film on substack! Thank you. If you haven’t seen it already, I’d really recommend My Favourite Cake, another very beautiful, sad, stunning Iranian film
I always look forward to reading your monthly roundups! Read a bit about Creation Lake here on Substack, ended up finding a few excerpts, and even the prose grated on me. I'm the sort of person who always finds it hard to abandon a book I start, which I guess is why I mostly just stick to the classics (though I long to read more contemporary lit).
Also I can painfully relate to you about this: "all these great books in the world, brimming over with information and beauty, and I couldn’t finish reading them!" Thank you for sharing!
> if you have an enticing article about computational research to share with me?
Yes! I really liked Sean Carroll's discussion of the concept of "emergence" in this recent episode of his podcast. https://youtu.be/GJAj_3ZkpRM?si=nB4dD8uDu3CCWsvZ It's an important concept that is frequently invoked in discussions of computation and epistemics, I use it myself all the time when talking about games, and Carroll's approach to the topic felt like it brought a very helpful degree of clarity and improved my understanding of the term.
I'm not sure I'll ever read Creation Lake but I have to stump here for Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood, which I reviewed (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/birnam-wood-book-review-eleanor-catton) and which I think is a very good novel about what seem to be similar subjects. So I recommend it! (My review is as un-spoiler-y as possible though not perfectly so.)
omg—who was I speaking to who recommended Catton's Birnam Wood recently? but I really trust your taste, and this review is extremely convincing
I loved this part I'm quoting below, because it gets at something I've been thinking about lately—plot is important! it is exciting and energizing to have characters who don't just listlessly drift around, all vibes but no agency. Many of my favorite contemporary novels (like Raven Leilani's Luster, which I think is one of the BEST novels in that whole genre of financially-precarious-bisexual?-woman-in-a-situationship-with-an-older-guy) are essentially concerned with the choices people make and the moral/ethical weight of them. This is extremely interesting to me and is where I feel literature has the most…I hesitate to say it…educational capacity? Like we get to see characters make decisions and contend with the weight of them, and as we read them, we're figuring out what kinds of decisions we can commit to in our own lives…
:We do not live in the golden age of plot, at least where literary fiction is concerned. Outside of what we might call high-genre books—the thrillers of Ruth Rendell, say, or the crime novels of Tana French—it’s rare for a literary novel to take its plot seriously. Instead, contemporary literary fiction largely concerns itself with other things: moods, problems, situations. Few people would dream of writing a novel without characters, but a novel without a plot is practically normal. When you speak of what a novel is about, you speak thematically—it’s about surveillance, or displacement, or heterosexuality, or something along these lines.
In a recent interview, Catton commented, somewhat blandly, that “the moral development of people in plotted novels where people make choices is fascinating and important. I’d like to see more books like that.” Her interest in plot as something that arises from human choice, and not just from the context in which those choices take place, means that her own plots take a sideways approach. Just as we are constantly summing up books as types, the characters in “Birnam Wood” are constantly summing up one another, often incorrectly…"
I love her book The Rehearsal too—I do not like The Luminaries much and if you want to read it I would read it last, because it is huge and moves at a glacial pace and basically the whole trick is this series of false starts for six hundred pages before you find out what's really going on. It's very much a book that wins prizes but not entirely in a good way.
Also, I never read Luster but now you make me curious! It did not sound good at the time, but most book coverage does not make books sound good to me.
Celine, I just read the entire post and I loved your recommendations, but more than that I just loved your writing, your thoughts, your impressions on what you consumed and how you express that through your writing. Just beautifully written, and brilliantly curated. I have not written online in year , and just 3 weeks back I started writing on substack - and writers like you are a huge inspiration to me.
Priyanka! Thank you so much—this is a very generous and extremely encouraging comment. It's been really fun to write about literature, film &c here on Substack and to feel a genuine sense of community among other readers and writers.
All the best with your writing adventures too, and hope you get a lot of meaning and joy from your newsletter!!
Love your monthly digests so much! Re: Creation Lake, I feel that similar struggle with the highbrow Hollywood blockbusters of this moment (Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve are the first to come to mind) where I just want to shake the movie like if you think you can take 3+ hours of the audience’s time at least have the guts to BELIEVE in something!!! Show some conviction, some passion about anything!!!
The money thing too, my sister took me to the weepy We Live In Time and at about the hour mark I realized what was nagging me which is these characters have beautiful living spaces and the movie is ostensibly about their love, starting a family, and struggle with illness, which the latter 2 at least are expensive, and yet money barely comes up ever? And I was just like dang is the healthcare in London that good because I don’t think… lol. All this to say as someone who watches a lot more movies I’ve observed this in the current film landscape as well.
thank you as always for reading! and yes—maybe it's that the more time I invest, the more I want to feel that the creator cares about something and NEEDS to convey that?
(this film is only 2h, but I think of it as one of the best best examples of a film that does not moralize and try to convince the viewer to feel one particular way…but it also has convictions, it has moral and ethical and political complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyland_(film))
I think it's quite common for someone to sort of mentally calculate…okay, how does this other person afford their life? and it's inevitable that we enter into that mindset with fiction
"I don’t quite understand why, out of all the novels I could have read this month, I ended up reading Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake." Yep! Same... disliked it.
More importantly though, BIG YES to the Not Waving & Romance embed. Those records have been some of the best records of the last 12 months or so in my opinion.
just played the Not Waving & Romance album again tonight…it's so lovely and really rewards multiple listens
I finished Creation Lake a month ago and still can’t decide how I feel about it. The only passage that I marked in the whole novel so I could find it again was the one that caught your eye about the over-users of quotes. I consider myself a Kushner fan but also find her a wee overly concerned with cultivating her bad-ass image, particularly in her collection of essays. Yeah, she’s a bad-ass compared to the PhDs, but who isn’t? I do get her point about in Creation Lake about the holier-than-than folks who need to convince themselves that they are virtuous. Maybe that is the theme, as you suggested. I kind of get that—there are way too many people these days who actually believe they are more virtuous than others, which more and more people find tiresome. At any rate, thanks for a great newsletter!
It's funny bc I highlighted a LOT of passages—I initially didn't like Kushner's style, but ended up really really drawn in! And there are so many observations from Sadie's point of view that are really sharp and interesting and funny.
Maybe what I wanted is something tying it all together—not just the sharp observations and turns of phrase, but some overarching ethic of the novel. A novel can be cynical and still have an ethic, I think…Madame Bovary does! But I need to find more examples, because it's kind of unfair to compare anything to a Flaubert novel…
Man, I love Yi-YI (sorry I probably make this comment every time you mention it)
it IS that good, though!!! the way it's plotted is so intricate and engrossing…really such an accomplishment
The Busy Beaver analogy always makes me laugh (and then cry when I remember the uni classes about it lol).
Anora was splendid, I agree with you! I totally deserves all the praise it got.
I've always been very intimidated by Susan Sontag, but you're making me want to read her so bad! I'll try to pick up this one soon.
Overall, thank you for the round-up, I always get something nice from it 🤎
thank you so much for reading and commenting! and yes—only now do I feel distant enough from the horrors of undergrad (and all the problem sets I barely managed to finish) that I can read about complexity/computability without getting STRESSED!
Read your entire post. It’s lovely - simply but clearly stated analyses.
I tend to read 4-5 books a week, keeping no track of number (pages, books, etc.) And hello from a fellow SF’er.
Thank you for reading and commenting!! Also, that's such an impressive pace. I'm always interested in different people's relationships to quantification—sometimes it's positive and encourages more meaningful reading, sometimes it's not useful…
Thanks so much Celine! Your reviews always inspire thought and I’m so flattered that you’ve included my article (and even more excited that you read Ben’s - busy beaver is such a great example of how cool and communal mathematics can be)
thank YOU for writing those articles! I'm always searching for good examples of how to explain technical concepts very lucidly and invitingly
Celine! You’re so good. Now that you’ve seen Taste of Cherry, I recommend the Nicole Krauss New Yorker short story “Seeing Ershadi” — I’d love to know what you think of it. The movie is a central motif and it essentially haunts the protag. I’m also inspired as a writer by that level of literal intertextuality. 🤍
Thank you!! And tbh that story has been on my list for ages…my old housemate had a subscription to the New Yorker, and for weeks and weeks there was an issue open to the "Seeing Ershadi" pages. I'm very similar to you; I love stories where the characters are relating to other books, films and so on, just like me.
A link and a quote, for others interested in the short story! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/seeing-ershadi It's about a dancer rehearsing in Tel Aviv, and working with a choreographer she's long admired:
'Exhausted after rehearsal, I’d either walk to the sea or go home to watch a film until it got late enough to go out and meet people. I couldn’t go to the beach as often as I’d have liked, because the choreographer said that he wanted the skin all over our bodies to be as white as the skin on our asses. I’d developed tendinitis in my ankle, which made it necessary for me to ice it after dancing, and so I found myself watching a lot of films lying on my back with my foot up. I saw everything with Jean-Louis Trintignant, until he got so old that his imminent death began to be too depressing, and then I switched to Louis Garrel, who is beautiful enough to live forever. Sometimes, when my friend Romi wasn’t working, she came to watch with me. By the time I finished with Garrel it was winter, and swimming was out of the question anyway, so I spent two weeks inside with Ingmar Bergman. When the New Year started, I resolved to give up Bergman and the weed I smoked every night, and, because the title was appealing and it was made far from Sweden, I downloaded “Taste of Cherry,” by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami.'
I just finished reading Phillip Lopate's "A Year and A Day" yesterday, and was also inspired to watch a Kiarostami film! Now it's just waiting for the right day/mood to hit to watch a slow film.
my designated Film Friend and the first person I told about starting a newsletter (also the reason I wanted to watch more films in the first place!) once told me that Kiarostami film she recommends is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Olive_Trees if that's helpful! it's next on my list tbh
Yes very helpful! Thank you!
16 year old me is ecstatic to see the T.A.T.U love
an iconic song for anyone who was once a teen!!
So good to see a review of a Kiarostami film on substack! Thank you. If you haven’t seen it already, I’d really recommend My Favourite Cake, another very beautiful, sad, stunning Iranian film
Satoshi Kon's "Paranoia Agent" haunted me greatly as a teen and may have been my favorite anime series
I always look forward to reading your monthly roundups! Read a bit about Creation Lake here on Substack, ended up finding a few excerpts, and even the prose grated on me. I'm the sort of person who always finds it hard to abandon a book I start, which I guess is why I mostly just stick to the classics (though I long to read more contemporary lit).
Also I can painfully relate to you about this: "all these great books in the world, brimming over with information and beauty, and I couldn’t finish reading them!" Thank you for sharing!
> if you have an enticing article about computational research to share with me?
Yes! I really liked Sean Carroll's discussion of the concept of "emergence" in this recent episode of his podcast. https://youtu.be/GJAj_3ZkpRM?si=nB4dD8uDu3CCWsvZ It's an important concept that is frequently invoked in discussions of computation and epistemics, I use it myself all the time when talking about games, and Carroll's approach to the topic felt like it brought a very helpful degree of clarity and improved my understanding of the term.