What I Read in October

Kaia Gerber, eat your heart out. 

Sometimes when my head starts to get too big, I’ll hop on over to Amazon and re-familiarize myself with the user reviews of the eBook I was strong-armed into publishing at my first desk job out of college. (It’s basically just a compilation of the nonsense blog posts and listicles that I wrote for them.) 

“Truly moving” and “read 3 times in a row it was so good,” reads one review (written by my aunt). 

The other, written by a “Asif Arshad,” reads, “It was complete drivel, please don’t buy it, out of all the literature you could spend your time on please don’t waste any of it on Rachel Hodin.” 

So in honor of my obscurity as a one-time (and begrudging) eBook author, and in the spirit of Monsieur Arshad, I present to you a handful of my favorite lesser-known titles that are worth your time. 

WILLFUL DISREGARD by Lena Andersson 

They say that hate isn’t the opposite of love—that indifference is. Willful Disregard is a story about love and the heartbreak, but mostly the insidious torment and grim displays of self-deceit, that can ensue from this brutally indifferent strain of unrequited love.

The book follows Ester Nilsson, a Swedish poet and intellectual living in Stockholm, who is tasked with giving a lecture on—and then, writing a piece on—the artist Hugo Rask. Instantly upon meeting Rask, Nilsson becomes infatuated, fixated, obsessed. The problem is that Rask doesn’t flat-out reject her, he simply does not give a shit about her. And so Ester seizes any sliver of hope that she can detect from Hugo’s resolute apathy, swallows it whole, and then chews it over until it’s transformed into slop that’s unrecognizable from its former self—slop that she can easily mold and reconstruct into her very own pipe dream.

To witness an ostensibly clear-headed, brilliant woman gradually become certifiably delulu is akin to witnessing a car crash in slo-mo. It’s impossible to look away from! But you do sort of want to look away, so you continue reading it with one eye closed, or through a hole in a blanket that you’ve buried yourself under. And while the second-hand embarrassment may be palpable, you never really truly hate Ester for her behavior because—and this is the hard truth that Andersson’s writing makes you realize—we’ve all been there! You’re cringing, but as you read lines like, “Their whole relationship had been implied, so its disintegration also took place without comment,”   and, “The only weapon of someone who loves is to stop loving,” you also feel this sharp, nagging tinge of recognition.

At one point, we’ve all thought to ourselves some variation of, Ok yes they haven’t responded to me in a week, but what if something terrible happened to them? We cannot rule out that there may have been a death in the family! This way of thinking is a muddy, filthy swamp of self-deceit, but we’ve all tested these waters. We’ve all dabbled and flirted with these far-flung excuses and justifications. Granted most of us have probably just dipped a toe where Ester has plunged headfirst and nearly drowned, but we’ve dipped a toe nonetheless.

ELINOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE by Gail Honeyman

To be fair, I hate this title. It sounds like the title of a cheap and cheaply written YA novel, but I swear to you it’s worth it—and hilarious. 

When I finished the book, I scribbled this down in the notes section of my phone and I believe this all still holds true: Oliphant has all my favorite ingredients for a fantastic book. An unreliable narrator, prone to self-delusions, delusions of grandeur, and the like. A mystery. A TWIST. French idioms and witticisms used unironically. Just overall great vocabulary. Addiction. And finally, hermitage.

If I told you I feel a kindred spirit with all of these themes, would I be revealing too much about myself? Perhaps so! 

What makes Elinor such a funny character is her completely alien nature; the way she seems to have just been, like, beamed onto earth from a UFO. When it comes to the casual and the recreational, Elinor is simply ill-equipped. To her, colloquial speech is like a foreign language that she’s constantly trying to learn and catch up with. 

It makes for a read that’s both funny and a bit eerie. Like why does she describe using air quotes as “a little finger waggling gesture” that she saw “Janey doing once and had stored away for future reference,” and which she thinks she carried “off with aplomb”? The answer lurks beneath the unsteady surface, threatening to dislodge Elinor’s faint grasp on reality at any moment. 

INNOCENTS AND OTHERS by Dana Spiotta

I read this so long ago that, honestly, I can hardly recall the plot. I know it’s about two friends, Carrie and Meadow, as they navigate life and their respective love of film. At one point, while still in high school, one of them seems to be having an affair with Orson Welles. Another one, further along in the novel, makes a documentary about a shooting at Kent State. But the book is also so much more than this. Throughout, there are pockets of brilliance, brief glimpses into other stories and worlds that are engrossing and compelling and seem to shed light on the novel as a whole only after you’ve read them and have had time to think about them. Like the part about an overweight woman who’s catfishing famous men.

Just read it.

THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR by Yoko Ogawa

It’s a slim book, 180 pages, and an easy read, yet also a profoundly touching story and one unlike any other out there. The gist: after a traumatic head injury, a now-retired math professor lives with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. It’s a strange and extraordinary type of suffering because he can recall everything that happened prior to his head injury. So while he remains acutely, tragically lost in the present, constantly trying to keep up and race against time by sticking post-its on nearly every inch of his clothing, he’s also an extremely gifted mathematician.

The only other person in his life is his housekeeper, who must re-introduce herself to him every day. But it’s the housekeeper’s young son, who she begins to bring with her to the professor’s home, who seems to awaken in the professor a long-suppressed spark and vitality—which becomes the driving force and beating heart of the story.