Show & Tell: Zucchini, Black Boy Tennis, and Summer
Unstacked Digest for the week of August 26-September 1
This Labor Day weekend has meant mucho Mermaid birthday parties, glizzy szn, and pool hangs. I love summer.
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 on Unstacked
A lot of Kamala and them.
Books to go with every August episode of The Stacks.
I read 10 books in August, here they all are in order of my least to most favorite.
September marks Toni Morrison Month in The Stacks. Jazz will be our seventh Morrison pick for book club, and I am thrilled to bring on a real smarty pants to help break this one down. Tune in on Wednesday to find out who it is, and list on September 25th for the book club episode.
Books I Read This Week
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time ever to complete a prompt for The Stacks Mega Challenge (an award winning book from the year you were born) and ended up loving it. I found the book to be so well written from a craft perspective, the pacing is near perfect. To write a book about a future dystopia but to give the reader a main character who is victimized but not radicalized felt unique and unpredictable. I have some real questions and complicated thoughts about Atwood taking the very real history endured by Black and Indigenous women and repackaging it as the future for white women, and that somehow being too horrible to imagine. Which lives alongside and in contrast to my enjoyment of the book itself.
Fave of the week!
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
The story of three generations of a Chinese-American family that asks questions about how much we can control when it comes to the lives of the people we love most. Real Americans has been an extremely buzzy book this year, and it has garnered much praise. When I asked my IG followers about it, the majority who read it liked to loved it. However, it was a real miss for me. It is hard to fully articulate why without spoiling the book, and I don’t want to ruin it for folks, but what I will say is, one of the central issues of the book is not handled with nearly enough care. It relates to science but because it is not grounded it reads like magic, which I had a lot of trouble with, because again it is a very serious thing. There are a lot of major high stakes decisions being made in this book but the motivations are unclear or flimsy. It was hard to suspend disbelieve let alone buy in. Real Americans is extremely readable and I stuck with it because I was curious to see how it would come together, but in the end, I was left wanting.
Housekeeping
We dropped The Stacks Book Club episode with Jay Ellis discussing Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo. I was not prepared from what a good time this book would be.
THIS WEEK I GET TO TALK TO JESMYN WARD!!!! It all goes down on Wednesday, September 4th and I really can’t believe that is true and real. The event is here in LA and hosted by ALOUD as part of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, and it is FREE! Get your tickets. There is also an online option for folks outside of LA.
I got to argue about Bachelor vs Bachelor in Paradise on the Pop Culture Debate Club with Aminatou Sow podcast and it was a real blast.
I’ll be in Jackson, MS September 14th for the Mississippi Book Festival (yes, I have to sing the song to spell the state every time). I’m doing a panel on Saturday at 4pm with Kaveh Akbar, Rachel Khong, and Sheila Sundar. You can see the full schedule here!
Page Break, a very cool reading retreat company out of NYC featured me on their Instagram this week. I had a great time revealing what a dweeb I am.
Things I Love…
Book News
Book award season is now in full swing. One of my favorite prizes, The Kirkus Prize, just dropped their finalists. I am really excited about the nonfiction list because two of my favorites of the year made it (Challenger and Another Word for Love…both of which we did episodes on). I plan to finish the rest before the award in October.
Also, September 10th the National Book Awards start announcing their longlists. Prepare to be sick of me.