Glad to see that a Substack post can make me feel somewhat like this... "Sometimes I finish a book and feel so completely, irreducibly happy to have read it—and all the images and sounds and characters are still alive in my mind—that it feels as if life can’t get any better than this."
Thank you!!! I've had that experience so often with other people's writing—total satisfaction and contentment—and I'm constantly trying to create that for others. It's a real gift, I think, from a writer to a reader
I loved this post so much and have so much that I could respond to.
Like you, after much resistance, I am so glad that I just allowed myself to read Intermezzo (and BWWAY). I was too old for the Harry Potter craze and this was my first time reading alongside everyone else and, like you, I get it.
I have a stack of copies of "The English Understand Wool" at home and it is my go-to gift to give to readers. It is a perfect book.
I feel very similarly! It's so fun to read with other people and be immersed in the discussions, t the takes, the interpretations…and here are so few writers who have the star power of Rooney, Rowling over a decade ago, &c to make this possible.
I don't watch that much TV, but it seems similar for Succession/Westworld/Gossip Girl fans who could always discuss new episodes and cliffhangers with each other.
Also, such a good idea to gift the Dewitt book to others…I've gifted Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen in the past, which is a similarly SMALL and satisfying book!
i am so thankful that i discovered your page and decided to subscribe and to read your other posts before i made another decision to follow up on reading whatever you write!
you write so well—that’s how i feel—in the sense that from top to bottom it’s you talking like you! as someone whose first language is not English, i find the way you talk(write) about your reading and the process of writing and sharing tiny insights with us of this experience, so encouraging! it makes me want to understand my own voice. you have a strong sense of your style. it feels bold and i love that feeling! there’s no gooeyness to what you’re saying.
i think that when we write on books, it’s easy to become too comfortable to end up write something silly and what sounds generic. and it shadows our authenticity because of how comfortable we’ve become there—can that be bad writing? i don’t know. it’s vital to care about our writing and our thoughts and that’s the difficult part like Levy says in her Things I Don’t Want To Know.
i don’t know what i am going on about! i loved reading this. this is a great way to start my new week now—feeling encouraged. 🤎
Thank you so much for reading, and for leaving this very generous comment! My favorite writers all have a really distinctive, thoughtful voice and it's something I'm trying to cultivate as well—I'm very happy to hear my writing resonates with you and feels encouraging!!
And very much agree that "it's vital to care about our writing", because it's a really meaningful way to understand ourselves and the world—and it's an especially meaningful way to connect with people around the world. Thank you again 💌
Caltrain commute sized, I love it. I used to commute by plane from Edinburgh to Belfast and would love a novella I could finish in the up and down journey. I had 6 months of doing the Baypoint to downtown San Francisco on Bart, and I did get a ton of reading done, but the terror of getting to Walnut Cfeej and having finished your book…
I loved the sibling relationship in Intermezzo. I think as an only child, sibling dynamics are so fascinating to me. I think Rooney writes with such genuine care and affection from her characters, even when they are behaving badly.
Love your last sentence and very much agree—it feels like she WANTS her characters to escape from their self-inflicted suffering (especially when the suffering is "not being able to tell the woman you love that you feel strongly about her"), and that helps make the endings feel so satisfying.
I spent about 2 years in my early 20s doing the reverse commute from SF to the south bay. I read SO much but experienced that terror as well (finishing a book and then frantically searching the SFPL ebook catalog for the next one)
Great stuff. And yes, you never know what of what you write ends up being "important". Better to just give. As in the Bhagavad Gita: You are entitled to work, but not the fruits of your work. Something like that.
I love that quote, thank you! A much more lowbrow reference lol but it reminds me of a fortune I got in a fortune cookie recently: "You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success." We can't guarantee we'll receive an audience, money, fame, acclaim, &c for our work—the DOING of the work has to feel intrinsically rewarding
this is so great to hear—I LOVE many of the books I've mentioned here and would love others to enjoy them too!!! if you read them (& perhaps write about them on Substack?) I'd love to know!
I feel your Sisyphean task description - I also try to write mini-book reviews every month, as practice, as a way to prevent myself from just blazing through books without reflecting on them afterwards. It's also the type of post I love reading, and I love how in your reviews, you manage to fit a summary, your own thoughts, and some critics' thoughts in just a few paragraphs. It doesn't need to be long to be worthwhile!
Also, Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery has been sitting untouched on my bookshelf for almost a year now, so this is my push to finally get started.
haha yes, I feel very hypocritical because I sometimes HATE writing these mini-reviews…but I love it when others write them! so ultimately I patiently work my way thru the synopses and the review links and end up, ultimately, really happy that I made the effort. It's so much easier to remember what I've written this year vs last year (when I didn't reflect much at all)
also wanted to say that I loved reading your latest book/film/&c reviews here: https://itsalittlelife.substack.com/p/september-2024-reading-watching-living and this description of Truffaut's The 400 Blows was so great: "Sometimes films about misbehaving youths lean into their spiteful natures, but Antoine feels like a child who just needed someone to pay attention to him"
and this hot take on Guadagnino's Challengers: "I was expecting a sexy movie about tennis and instead it was a hot mess of inexplicable character decisions, distracting music choices, and far too much slo mo. I enjoyed watching it only after I stopped trying to make sense of it."
100% to your first paragraph - sometimes I hate it, am always glad I do it.
And thank you! I'm newer to writing film descriptions, and since I don't yet know the technical language or nuances of film periods, I try instead to figure out why I feel the way I feel about what I'm seeing.
Thank you for writing about Yoko Tawada and Elsa Morante! I haven't read the Tawada you mentioned - am working my way through trying to read her German essays - but I will add this to my stack. Have you read 'The Last Children of Tokyo'? I need to discuss the ending of that. Also, I read Morante's 'History' and am still thinking about it - not sure when I'll be ready for another of her tomes, but good to know what you thought about 'Lies and Sorcery.' Must get the Phil Christman collection.
I really haven't read that much Tawada at all (just the Paul Celan novella mentioned here + The Naked Eye, which someone described to me as the darker half of Qiu Miaojin's Last Words from Montmartre). But I really do trust your recommendations so hopefully I can get to The Last Children of Tokyo soon!!
Christman's collection is great—it made me feel very invigorated about the essay form!
I too started this Substack for practice. I’m glad I’m not the only one. Thanks, Celine. I don’t know what the real work is yet but I just want to keep writing and articulating my thoughts. for something, someday.
thank you for reading and commenting—this feeling of writing, for no real reason, but just because it feels good to practice…that's something I think about a lot, and I'm glad it resonated
also—very serendipitously, the great Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame + now the architecture critic for The Nation) wrote a really great post recently on how "practice writing" on the internet led to some of her more well-known writing: https://www.late-review.com/p/the-own-work-woodshed I really like that she emphasized how the practice writing doesn't NEED to have an obvious outcome to still be personally meaningful!
thank you Zoe! and I still have many many fond memories of the Merleau-Ponty class…hope your Small Press Traffic class this autumn is a really great and wonderful community!
I loved, loved all of your recommendations. and thank you for sharing the link to Jessi Jezewska Stevens's review of Intermezzo. I really enjoyed the novel, but now I need to take a little time to think about language, truth, and the role they play in the novel. lastly-- I would list "Lies and Sorcery" among the best books I read in 2024. it might be 800 pages long, but every page is a treat!
I love your thoughtful responses to these books! I am reading My Lesbian Novel right now and there are just so many little lines and phrases that cut right to the heart of things and capture the ineffable. I'm still thinking about how the narrator, near the beginning, talks about writing as a trying to "be porous," which feels so accurate and strikes me as such a surprising combination of words. Thank you for the reviews!! Wishing you a good reading month ahead~
I enjoy and appreciate your reflections on how writing these book reviews publicly are for practice (same) and how it has subsequently turned something so inherently solitary to something full of discourse and community (same x1000). Those initial opening sentences are exactly how I feel about my own newsletter and practice of throwing writing into the void in the hope that each time I do it, it gets a little better.
We are all a bit rabid at the collective fervor of Intermezzo rn. I felt distraught I couldn't read it in time to get it into my September Reads, then I had to remember that my reflections on the book will remain the same, whether I take part in the frenzy immediately or in 3 weeks time. I have tried to avoid reviews so they don't cloud my own, but I did read Henry's upon your rec and I loved it so much. So many thoughts I shared about autism, masking and what it means to 'fit' in the right way.
It is nice to read your infatuation for The English Understand Wool bc it has been on my tbr for forever. I haven't heard of My Lesbian Novel but I am INTO the sound of it - thanks for the rec.
Also linking continually from your last post where you discussed 'Didi' - I saw it!!! I agreed with your points about the depiction of online interactions being done so well. I was so impressed with the accuracy of the early internet messaging as well as general 2008 early adolescent language where every other sentence is an insult or a slur, it is such a specific canon of dialogue I thought it was done so well. I was equally enamoured and frustrated with Chris - I guess the prefer reflection of being a teenager and growing up - it IS so confusing! I left feeling very satisfied with the exploration of coming-of-age they explored. The last scene where Chris just looks at his Mum? Perfect ending.
Glad to see that a Substack post can make me feel somewhat like this... "Sometimes I finish a book and feel so completely, irreducibly happy to have read it—and all the images and sounds and characters are still alive in my mind—that it feels as if life can’t get any better than this."
Thank you!!! I've had that experience so often with other people's writing—total satisfaction and contentment—and I'm constantly trying to create that for others. It's a real gift, I think, from a writer to a reader
I loved this post so much and have so much that I could respond to.
Like you, after much resistance, I am so glad that I just allowed myself to read Intermezzo (and BWWAY). I was too old for the Harry Potter craze and this was my first time reading alongside everyone else and, like you, I get it.
I have a stack of copies of "The English Understand Wool" at home and it is my go-to gift to give to readers. It is a perfect book.
I feel very similarly! It's so fun to read with other people and be immersed in the discussions, t the takes, the interpretations…and here are so few writers who have the star power of Rooney, Rowling over a decade ago, &c to make this possible.
I don't watch that much TV, but it seems similar for Succession/Westworld/Gossip Girl fans who could always discuss new episodes and cliffhangers with each other.
Also, such a good idea to gift the Dewitt book to others…I've gifted Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen in the past, which is a similarly SMALL and satisfying book!
i am so thankful that i discovered your page and decided to subscribe and to read your other posts before i made another decision to follow up on reading whatever you write!
you write so well—that’s how i feel—in the sense that from top to bottom it’s you talking like you! as someone whose first language is not English, i find the way you talk(write) about your reading and the process of writing and sharing tiny insights with us of this experience, so encouraging! it makes me want to understand my own voice. you have a strong sense of your style. it feels bold and i love that feeling! there’s no gooeyness to what you’re saying.
i think that when we write on books, it’s easy to become too comfortable to end up write something silly and what sounds generic. and it shadows our authenticity because of how comfortable we’ve become there—can that be bad writing? i don’t know. it’s vital to care about our writing and our thoughts and that’s the difficult part like Levy says in her Things I Don’t Want To Know.
i don’t know what i am going on about! i loved reading this. this is a great way to start my new week now—feeling encouraged. 🤎
Thank you so much for reading, and for leaving this very generous comment! My favorite writers all have a really distinctive, thoughtful voice and it's something I'm trying to cultivate as well—I'm very happy to hear my writing resonates with you and feels encouraging!!
And very much agree that "it's vital to care about our writing", because it's a really meaningful way to understand ourselves and the world—and it's an especially meaningful way to connect with people around the world. Thank you again 💌
Caltrain commute sized, I love it. I used to commute by plane from Edinburgh to Belfast and would love a novella I could finish in the up and down journey. I had 6 months of doing the Baypoint to downtown San Francisco on Bart, and I did get a ton of reading done, but the terror of getting to Walnut Cfeej and having finished your book…
I loved the sibling relationship in Intermezzo. I think as an only child, sibling dynamics are so fascinating to me. I think Rooney writes with such genuine care and affection from her characters, even when they are behaving badly.
Love your last sentence and very much agree—it feels like she WANTS her characters to escape from their self-inflicted suffering (especially when the suffering is "not being able to tell the woman you love that you feel strongly about her"), and that helps make the endings feel so satisfying.
I spent about 2 years in my early 20s doing the reverse commute from SF to the south bay. I read SO much but experienced that terror as well (finishing a book and then frantically searching the SFPL ebook catalog for the next one)
How gratifying, thank you :)
Of course! I really loved your review and it was such an exciting and distinctive way to read Intermezzo
❤️
Great stuff. And yes, you never know what of what you write ends up being "important". Better to just give. As in the Bhagavad Gita: You are entitled to work, but not the fruits of your work. Something like that.
I love that quote, thank you! A much more lowbrow reference lol but it reminds me of a fortune I got in a fortune cookie recently: "You do not pay the price of success, you enjoy the price of success." We can't guarantee we'll receive an audience, money, fame, acclaim, &c for our work—the DOING of the work has to feel intrinsically rewarding
Forever adding every single book you recommend to my tbr—your reviews make them sound so alluring!
this is so great to hear—I LOVE many of the books I've mentioned here and would love others to enjoy them too!!! if you read them (& perhaps write about them on Substack?) I'd love to know!
I feel your Sisyphean task description - I also try to write mini-book reviews every month, as practice, as a way to prevent myself from just blazing through books without reflecting on them afterwards. It's also the type of post I love reading, and I love how in your reviews, you manage to fit a summary, your own thoughts, and some critics' thoughts in just a few paragraphs. It doesn't need to be long to be worthwhile!
Also, Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery has been sitting untouched on my bookshelf for almost a year now, so this is my push to finally get started.
haha yes, I feel very hypocritical because I sometimes HATE writing these mini-reviews…but I love it when others write them! so ultimately I patiently work my way thru the synopses and the review links and end up, ultimately, really happy that I made the effort. It's so much easier to remember what I've written this year vs last year (when I didn't reflect much at all)
also wanted to say that I loved reading your latest book/film/&c reviews here: https://itsalittlelife.substack.com/p/september-2024-reading-watching-living and this description of Truffaut's The 400 Blows was so great: "Sometimes films about misbehaving youths lean into their spiteful natures, but Antoine feels like a child who just needed someone to pay attention to him"
and this hot take on Guadagnino's Challengers: "I was expecting a sexy movie about tennis and instead it was a hot mess of inexplicable character decisions, distracting music choices, and far too much slo mo. I enjoyed watching it only after I stopped trying to make sense of it."
100% to your first paragraph - sometimes I hate it, am always glad I do it.
And thank you! I'm newer to writing film descriptions, and since I don't yet know the technical language or nuances of film periods, I try instead to figure out why I feel the way I feel about what I'm seeing.
Thank you for writing about Yoko Tawada and Elsa Morante! I haven't read the Tawada you mentioned - am working my way through trying to read her German essays - but I will add this to my stack. Have you read 'The Last Children of Tokyo'? I need to discuss the ending of that. Also, I read Morante's 'History' and am still thinking about it - not sure when I'll be ready for another of her tomes, but good to know what you thought about 'Lies and Sorcery.' Must get the Phil Christman collection.
I really haven't read that much Tawada at all (just the Paul Celan novella mentioned here + The Naked Eye, which someone described to me as the darker half of Qiu Miaojin's Last Words from Montmartre). But I really do trust your recommendations so hopefully I can get to The Last Children of Tokyo soon!!
Christman's collection is great—it made me feel very invigorated about the essay form!
(And I’m curious what you’d think!)
It’s short!! And funny-sad.
I too started this Substack for practice. I’m glad I’m not the only one. Thanks, Celine. I don’t know what the real work is yet but I just want to keep writing and articulating my thoughts. for something, someday.
thank you for reading and commenting—this feeling of writing, for no real reason, but just because it feels good to practice…that's something I think about a lot, and I'm glad it resonated
also—very serendipitously, the great Kate Wagner (of McMansion Hell fame + now the architecture critic for The Nation) wrote a really great post recently on how "practice writing" on the internet led to some of her more well-known writing: https://www.late-review.com/p/the-own-work-woodshed I really like that she emphasized how the practice writing doesn't NEED to have an obvious outcome to still be personally meaningful!
I just read it. I love it! especially about sharing what you’ve wrote 💕
I love reading your reading! Thank you for the shout! 📚
thank you Zoe! and I still have many many fond memories of the Merleau-Ponty class…hope your Small Press Traffic class this autumn is a really great and wonderful community!
Your Substack posts are so invigorating and fun for me. Thank you for all the energy you pour into them!
Thank you Ariana, this is really kind! I'm so happy to hear and thank you for reading them 💌
Celine—you’re the best. I love reading what you’re reading to figure out what I want to read next.
I loved, loved all of your recommendations. and thank you for sharing the link to Jessi Jezewska Stevens's review of Intermezzo. I really enjoyed the novel, but now I need to take a little time to think about language, truth, and the role they play in the novel. lastly-- I would list "Lies and Sorcery" among the best books I read in 2024. it might be 800 pages long, but every page is a treat!
I love your thoughtful responses to these books! I am reading My Lesbian Novel right now and there are just so many little lines and phrases that cut right to the heart of things and capture the ineffable. I'm still thinking about how the narrator, near the beginning, talks about writing as a trying to "be porous," which feels so accurate and strikes me as such a surprising combination of words. Thank you for the reviews!! Wishing you a good reading month ahead~
I enjoy and appreciate your reflections on how writing these book reviews publicly are for practice (same) and how it has subsequently turned something so inherently solitary to something full of discourse and community (same x1000). Those initial opening sentences are exactly how I feel about my own newsletter and practice of throwing writing into the void in the hope that each time I do it, it gets a little better.
We are all a bit rabid at the collective fervor of Intermezzo rn. I felt distraught I couldn't read it in time to get it into my September Reads, then I had to remember that my reflections on the book will remain the same, whether I take part in the frenzy immediately or in 3 weeks time. I have tried to avoid reviews so they don't cloud my own, but I did read Henry's upon your rec and I loved it so much. So many thoughts I shared about autism, masking and what it means to 'fit' in the right way.
It is nice to read your infatuation for The English Understand Wool bc it has been on my tbr for forever. I haven't heard of My Lesbian Novel but I am INTO the sound of it - thanks for the rec.
Also linking continually from your last post where you discussed 'Didi' - I saw it!!! I agreed with your points about the depiction of online interactions being done so well. I was so impressed with the accuracy of the early internet messaging as well as general 2008 early adolescent language where every other sentence is an insult or a slur, it is such a specific canon of dialogue I thought it was done so well. I was equally enamoured and frustrated with Chris - I guess the prefer reflection of being a teenager and growing up - it IS so confusing! I left feeling very satisfied with the exploration of coming-of-age they explored. The last scene where Chris just looks at his Mum? Perfect ending.