Recent Books I Loved

the Good Stuff

Midwestern Death Trip by Meaghan Garvey

You know how sometimes you read a book that feels so alive it just knocks you flat? Meaghan Garvey’s virtuoso Midwestern Death Trip is pure electricity. The book careens through the depths of midwestern weirdness, disaster artists and bars without walls and bizarro architects, woven through with tales from Garvey’s own life. These can range from devastating to hilarious (usually both). It’s all raw and wild and beautiful told, with a kind of vulnerability and joy that invites you right in. But what really makes the book work is Garvey’s sincere curiosity, her very particular quality of attention. Garvey really listens to people, and she writes about even the most deranged of them with an attention and grace that is indistinguishable from love. And that’s really the miracle here. As Garvey says, “Anyway, never take life advice from people who hate life.” This book, for all its moments of darkness and pain, is so in love with life, and so unafraid of experience, the grand and the hideous alike, that it all comes out beautiful, fireworks all the way. Midwestern Death Trip insists that even now—maybe especially now, amidst the chaos and insanity—the world is a strange and wonderful place to be. Especially when you get to know your neighbors.

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In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin

Never read anything like this before. Half a true first-person recounting of an anthropologist in Russia attacked by a bear and the subsequent hospital aftermaths as they put her body back together, half mystical journey into the soul of the bear who attacked her. Martin was studying animistic cultures, and she comes to believe she summoned the bear to herself, to attack her, that she and the bear are now bound forever in spirit. You know what? I believe her. I’m simplifying here, but I loved this book. The prose is all livewires in a rainstorm, and you’re kind of holding your breath the whole time. I had a not-unpleasant nightmare about it later, if that makes any sense.

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Six Records of a Floating Life by Shen Fu

This was one of those books I picked up at a used bookstore because the title was cool. A Chinese man’s memoir from the early 19^th century, in sections arranged by topic. I was blown away by the honesty of it, the forthrightness. Shen Fu is kind of a dolt. He’s from the aristocracy, he failed his exams, he can’t get a good job, he’s not that smart, he’s a mediocre painter. But he does have a cool wife, Yün, and sometimes that’s enough. Yün is a remarkable person, though her intelligence and uniqueness do her no favors in the strict Chinese patriarchy. But man, Shen Fu just loves her so much. There are amazing moments where, strictly forbidden from travel because she’s a woman, Shen Fu will dress her up as a man and take her on trips, just so she can see the world. He’s selfish in his own ways, something he’s very honest about, and he can’t get much of anything right. It’s a tragic story, and no one suffers more than Yün. But then there will be a moment like this, which just wrecked me:

“Then if we can’t do it in this life,” said Yün, “I hope we will do it in the next.”
“In our next life I hope you will be born a man,” I said. “I will be a woman, and we can be together again.”
“That would be lovely,” said Yün, “especially if we could still remember this life.”

Anyone’s life is interesting. I’m so grateful Shen Fu wrote his down, and 220 years later, I got to read it.

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Nina Simone’s Gum by Warren Ellis

I guess this has been a nonfictiony-memoiry month. I usually skip anything written by rockstars because I don’t care. But my priest texted me that I had to read Warren Ellis’ (of the Bad Seeds, Dirty Three, etc.) book immediately. My priest doesn’t text me often so when it happens I take it very seriously. And I did very much love this book. It’s blessedly free of the ghostwriterliness that usually afflicts these things, and Ellis just sort of shoots off poetic dispatches from high and low moments in his life, including the time Beethoven’s ghost passed through his body during a fever, or when the great Greek singer Arleta gave him a marble. But really what makes this one work is how it’s mostly a catalogue of things Warren Ellis collects: tire weights, briefcases, miniatures of the Eiffel Tower, busts of Beethoven, and yes, Nina Simone’s chewed gum. I love nothing more than people’s weird obsessions, and Ellis gives you his spiritual journey through a series of physical objects, all of which become sacred by his love and attention. That’s the good work, I say.