Show & Tell: I Hated A Lot This Week.
Unstacked Digest for the week of September 23-29
This is Show & Tell where I tell you some things I loved from the week and the one thing I hated, plus round up everything else going on around these parts. The first half of Show & Tell is free to all. The adoration and hateration are for paid subscribers only.
This week felt extremely filled with things I hate, so I tried to pull together things I loved, but mostly I wrote about everything I hate but just framed it in a loving way. Sometimes I gotta keep it real.
This Week on Unstacked
The Show & Tell in which I tell you about my new personality.
I love putting together book recommendations to pair with the most recent episodes of The Stacks. I think this month is a pretty fun list.
Books I Read This Week
Rebel Gardening: A Beginner's Handbook to Organic Urban Gardening by Alessandro Vitale
So, now that I’m a garden girlie (no I have not planted anything in my beds yet) I have to read about garden shit. This book is for folks trying to learn how to garden in urban spaces. It isn’t very well organized and jumps around a lot. It was helpful in some ways but also in some ways it felt like things were either under or over explained. This is my first real gardening book, so what do I know?
Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
I read this one because it made it on the National Book Award longlist for nonfiction and because
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The GOAT, Ta-Nehisi Coates is back with an essay collection that explores memory, speaking truth to power, and the stories we tell ourselves. He does not disappoint. Coates is such a gifted writer. His turns of phrase always feel like the exact right way to say the thing. He is so self-assured and confident on the page. In The Message the arguments he is crafting doesn’t always feel clear, especially in how they are connected. However, each essay on its own is fantastic. That being said, the essay on Palestine, the main focus of the book, is fantastic. He captures so many of the conflicted feels I have (and have had) as a Black American Jew thinking about genocide and what we are owed and what we owe others. The Message places Coates in a difficult situation politically (especially as he is about to embark on this book tour which I can’t imagine won’t be extremely contentious) but I think he does say what needs to be said, even if he surrounds it with extra essays that, for me, did not deepen his case.
Fave of the week!
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
I reread The Nickel Boys this week because it is our October book club pick and because I got to go to a screening of the movie, which comes out on October 25th, and wanted to read it again before seeing it (I will reserve my opinion on the film for another date). I loved this book so much in 2019, it was a major gut punch (I do not want to spoil anything) and while the writing held up for me this time around the story itself was not nearly as resonant. I am going to save all the rest of my thoughts for book club, so tune in on Wednesday October 30th for my detailed reflections.
Mules of Love by Ellen Bass
I do not read a lot of poetry, but when we did a bonus episode on poetry earlier this year, José Olivarez discussed an Ellen Bass poem with me, and I loved it so much I bought Mules of Love and I am so glad I did, it is sublime. I love her poems so much. They are plain and pack a powerful punch. She is not showy, she is resonant. Her poem “The Thing Is” is in this collection and I love it so so so much.
Housekeeping
This week we dropped The Stacks Book Club episode on Jazz by Toni Morrison. Our guest, Eve Dunbar, brought so much insight to the book. It’s a great conversation.
I forgot to tell you all, but the latest installment of my “Voter Literacy with Traci” column went up last week. It is all about books on the health care system. You can read it here.
There is a new One for the Books coming your way Los Angeles. It is this Wednesday, October 2nd! I’ll be joined on stage by Danzy Senna and Zach Stafford playing games, talking books, and having a really good. Come through.
I’m thrilled to be moderating a conversation with Lena Waithe and Johanna Hedva about Hedva’s new books How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom. The event is on Wednesday October 9th at the Barnsdall Theatre in Hollywood, tickets here.
I’ll be in San Francisco on October 19th for the Litquake book festival talking to friends of the pod Carvell Wallace and Morgan Parker, and National Book Award longlister Sam Sax. Get your tickets.
Things I Love…
Book News
I am so grateful to author Christina Cooke for saying this. I am not a Sally Rooney person, I have never read her work so frankly I don’t have an opinion one way or another on that, but I do find the frenzy around her books to be telling. While she has many fans, this whole thing is not the readers making her a star (like a Colleen Hoover, per se), this is the industry. Getting reviewed like this isn’t a sign of the public’s opinion, it is a sign of publishing’s. They have crowned her, and given her a ridiculous marketing budget (do you remember the bucket hats from her last book?). They have made her books something that we cannot ignore.
Good for Rooney, but what about everyone else?
The literary world loves to act like these things are random, that an audience either wants your work or doesn’t. They love telling authors “your audience will find you”. That is not the case. It is a choice. It is publishing’s choice. She is the chosen one. I wish they would stand ten toes down in that, and not lie to the authors from historically marginalized and excluded backgrounds. Don’t blame them (or their potential readers). Frankly, how would anyone know about these books if all they see are Pumpkin Spice Rooney covers, and an onslaught of Rooney reviews? Sally Rooney has been given all the space to take up. How would anyone know that other books have ever even been published? Essentially publishing is saying to those other authors what my kids’ preschool teachers say “you get what you get and you don’t get upset”.
Pop Culture
I am almost done with the new season of Ryan Murphy’s series Monsters. This one is a on The Menendez Brothers, and I don’t know y’all, it is pretty campy and not in a good way. There is one episode (five) that maybe tries to get at the humanity in this story, even if it is extremely uncomfortable to sit through, but otherwise the whole show just feels like it is making a mockery of these people, who were and are actual humans.
Positive Update: I wrote this on Saturday and Sunday afternoon, and then I started watching Nobody Wants This, the new Adam Brody and Kristen Bell show on Netflix, and it is so cute and good and everyone watch it so we can all have giant crushed on Adam Brody again like it is 2006.
Sorry if I faked you out, this is not a positive update on Monsters.