Welcome to Read This Book, your go-to newsletter if you’re looking to expand your TBR pile. Each week, I’ll recommend a book I think is an absolute must-read. Some will be new releases, some will be old favorites, and the books will vary in genre and subject matter every time. I hope you’re ready to get reading!

Do you love haunted house stories? You know I do. But Marcus Kliewer’s novel We Used to Live Here is like a haunted house inside your brain. If you don’t know what that could possibly mean, I’d rather not spoil it for you. I will try to do my best to explain this book without ruining any surprises!

Sitting in the octangular room at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, surrounded by seven of Agnes Martin’s grid and row works, I settled first on Night Sea (1963), a turquoise blue painting laced with shimmering lines—a near-faultless impression of an ocean, as if illuminated for an instant by the moon or a lighthouse. Drift of Summer (1965), with its off-white grid, appears like a notebook crying out for ideas. Even the bright and broadly lined work Untitled #9 (1995), which Martin completed in her eighties, looked to me from afar impeccable, its colorful sections seeming to have been generated by a machine or a god. Here the spiritual resurfaced. In Martin’s grids and rows, the possibility not only of excellence—the apparent perfection of her lines—but of a grander, near-divine plan.

A decade ago, my mother died of metastatic melanoma, an illness that lasted about four years. It dragged our family across the country for radiation trials; it made the question “Where are you staying?” frequently answerable with either “Hospital room cot” or “Bed in hotel.” In the wake of her death, I sought out Martin’s grids. I saw them at SFMOMA but also at Dia Beacon, the Whitney, MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Tate Modern, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where Rose (1966) remains my favorite work of hers. The painting’s title at first seems a bizarre one: no flower is figuratively depicted. But in the painting’s cream-colored acrylic, as the lightness of its lines disappear in parts, a natural order underlies its beauty (a rose being, perhaps, beauty’s essence).

Combining linear rigidity and spatial abstraction, in Martin’s works I saw an idea of the world that is guided by plans and sure outcomes—a world made whole again. Martin’s own life was imperfect and traumatic (though she’d likely bristle at the word): she said she was raped as a girl on four occasions, dissociating each time; she lived a seemingly lonely existence, chafing against middle-class sensibilities. I figured she desired, like me, exactness and rightness, apparent salves for the broken. I supposed this aspiration was a core reason for her grids and lines. In fact, she suggested something of the opposite: to view the world as though it were perfect but to understand that it is not—and to see that perfection need not be pursued. “Perfection is not necessary. Perfection you cannot have,” she once said. “If you do what you want to do and what you can do and if you can then recognize it you will be contented.”

This spring I flew to Chicago to see three drawings of hers at the Art Institute. Some were not on view so I made my way to a back room, where a staff member had placed them in front of a bookshelf. Looking at them—Untitled (1961), Untitled (1964), and Untitled #8 (1990)—I got closer than I’d been before to any of her artworks.

I said, What does it feel like in there? What do you mean, she said. I said, For example, is it light or is it dark? She said, It’s light by the windows. And then she said, It’s airy if the windows are open. Is that all?

She said it was a bad time. She would rather I not come inside the house. Boxes were everywhere. Everything was in the boxes. She said that her brother had died on New Year’s Day. More boxes. And that it was fine. She said she really didn’t have anything to offer me. She said she knew nothing about the previous resident Joseph Cornell, other than that he’d existed—and that a different man had lived in the house in between them. That it had been remodeled in the nineties. She had moved there for the street’s flatness—she appreciated flatness in a street. Utopia Parkway.

The artist Joseph Cornell lived a lot of his life at her home at 37-08 Utopia Parkway. Age twenty-six onward. The house is still small and gray. Gambrel roof. Clerestory windows. Sash windows. Tin door. Shingles and clapboard. Familiar, symmetrical face. Like the current resident, Cornell had a brother who died first, who lived there with him, in addition to his mother. Cornell, too, had had boxes everywhere.

I had knocked on a door to no answer and then left a note between the wipers and the windshield of a silver car in the driveway, overlaid on the glass above the inspection/registration and a sticker of Padre Pio—the friar, priest, stigmatist, and mystic. Just after I drove off, it snowed, then it rained, and I assumed the message had run off its page.

I. The World Worlds

It’s probably not the most promising beginning to this talk for me to observe that my subject, like silence, has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it. Love, anger, regret, even boredom—wonder’s antipodes—may entrench themselves in us more deeply over time, but wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair. Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself.

Let’s begin with an early wonder of the Western literary tradition. In Book 18 of the Iliad, the god Hephaestus forges a shield for Achilles, who’s lost his armor in the bloody fog of war. But as Hephaestus works the shield’s surface, this peculiar blacksmith—being a god, after all—simply can’t resist creating a world, too:

There he made the earth and there the sky and the sea

I named her Holy Jemima when I was nine, or thereabouts. I liked the way the words sounded and it was meant cruelly. Holy Jemima was two years older than me, and her family—her mother, father, two sisters, and brother, making six—were in a cult.

I did not know they were in a cult. I just thought they were crazy Christians. The turbo type. I was forced, occasionally, to interact with Holy Jemima, because her little sister, Jessica, was friends with mine.

The whole family had this shark-eyed stare. Holy Jemima would fix me with it and tell me that Harry Potter was evil, that they did not celebrate Halloween in their house because of Satan, and that the school church was getting it all badly wrong.

“You’ve got to come over,” she told me once, “and watch these videos. You have no idea about the world. The school is not telling you about the real miracles that are happening. There is a preacher in Africa, a Black guy, and he is curing people. His name is TB Joshua.”

Bury Your Gays: the latest tongue-in-cheek name for authors’ tendency to end queer relationships by killing somebody off, or having someone revert to heterosexuality, or introducing something that abruptly ends a queer storyline. The message: queer love is doomed, fated for tragedy. The trope has existed for decades, and although there are plenty of books and movies and television shows now that aren’t guilty of it, Bury Your Gays is by no means a thing of the past. In 2016, the death of The 100 character Lexa reintroduced Bury Your Gays to a whole new generation and reminded seasoned viewers—who could recall the infamous death of the character Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer—that the trope was alive and well. More recently, Killing Eve’s series finale reminded viewers yet again.  

Joanna Russ (1937–2011), who wrote genre-bending feminist fiction throughout the seventies and whose The Female Man (1975) catapulted her to fame at the height of the women’s movement, agonized over Bury Your Gays. In 1973, Russ was writing On Strike Against God (1980), an explicitly lesbian campus novel about feminist self-discovery and coming out. But her head was, in her words, “full of heterosexual channeling.” She felt constrained—enraged, often—by the limited possibilities for how to write queer life, but she struggled to imagine otherwise. “How can you write about what really hasn’t happened?” Russ appealed to her friend, the poet Marilyn Hacker, as she pondered the relationship between life and literature for people whose identities, desires, and ambitions were erased and denounced by mainstream culture. Everywhere Russ turned, women (and especially queer women) were doomed: “It was always (1) failure (2) the love affair which settles everything,” in life and literature alike. Russ’s was a quest to examine, deconstruct, and reconstruct the elements of storytelling so that readers with deviant lives and desires might find themselves—their dreams and plights, lusts and fears—plausibly and artfully borne out in fiction, and it was a quest she undertook in dialogue with Hacker over the course of many years.

The letters published today on the Paris Review’s website offer a window into Russ and Hacker’s shared, decade-long attempt to wrest language—prose fiction in Russ’s case, poetry in Hacker’s—from the grips of patriarchal convention and to remake it in the service of underwritten lives. This window reveals Russ’s frustration at its most potent: On Strike Against God was her first foray as a seasoned author into a genre—realism, or literary fiction—she had enthusiastically abandoned years before. As an adolescent reader of “Great Literature” in the repressive fifties, Russ had become “convinced that [she] had no real experiences of life.” Great Literature—not to mention her educators, psychologists, and friends’ parents—told her that, despite the evidence of her eyes and ears, her inner life, and the experiences that shaped it, “weren’t real.” And so she turned to science fiction, which concerned itself with the creation and navigation of new worlds, within which gender roles could be either peripheral or malleable or both. She embraced speculative fiction as a “vehicle for social change,” a tool for escaping the “profound mental darkness” that engulfed her youth. On Strike Against God marks Russ’s return to the real world as a subject for fiction, and the real world’s bigotries were there to greet her upon arrival—in life, in fiction, and in her own head. 

Russ’s struggles upon returning to “realistic” fiction were not, of course, simple failures of imagination, just as Bury Your Gays isn’t simply a failure of individual creativity, nor is it (necessarily) evidence of an individual creator’s homophobic intent. “Authors do not make their plots up out of thin air,” Russ explains in “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write” (1972). They work with familiar, well-worn attitudes, beliefs, expectations, events, and character types—Russ calls them “plot-patterns”—that are already available to them, modeled for them by extant works of art. Like all “plot-patterns,” Bury Your Gays dramatizes what mainstream culture “would like to be true” and, indeed, what it took pains to enforce as true, especially in the early twentieth century. The Motion Picture Production Code—“the Hays Code”—instated by the Motion Picture Association of America in 1930 and enforced until 1968, threatened all depictions of “perverted” sex acts with censorship—unless, that is, these perverted acts, people, and relationships were shown to suffer consequences. This meant that, to depict gay life and love without fear of censorship, creators had to punish their characters with death, madness, or heterosexuality. The result? Hundreds of works of narrative art—lesbian pulps, gay films—with devastating endings. The message, for decades: homosexuals were bound for lives of loneliness. 

The following correspondence between Joanna Russ and Marilyn Hacker is drawn from a new edition of Russ’s On Strike Against God (1980), edited by Alec Pollak, to be published by Feminist Press in July. You can read Pollak’s introduction to the work of Joanna Russ on the Daily here.

October 23, 1973

Dear Marilyn,

Your letter is lovely—esp. since now I can write two letters where formerly I would’ve written one: one to you, one to Chip.

Billymark’s West was a normal bar. That was its greatest virtue, probably. It had a pool table, a jukebox, booths, a beer-and-shot special. It was a little dingy and dark. There was a TV and, somewhat oddly, a lot of Beatles-themed memorabilia. The prices were not so bad, by New York standards, though drinks weren’t as cheap as they could have been, either. There was graffiti in the bathroom. It was in some ways the Platonic ideal of a bar, such that it might seem familiar to you even if you’d never been. It had its own story, of course: it opened in 1956 and was taken over in 1999 by two brothers, Billy and Mark, one of whom was usually at the bar. They were the kind of guys you would describe as “characters” in part because they were playing a well-worn role. Billy—whom I saw more often—would call me “honey” and then charge me a price for my Miller High Life that seemed, each time, to be made up on the spot. Sometimes he was gruff, but mostly he was jovial, and it appeared as though he knew everyone in the bar, in a vague sort of way. The patrons of Billymark’s filtered in from the odd mix of places nearby: Rangers games at Madison Square Garden, galleries in West Chelsea, trains at Penn Station, and the offices of The Paris Review a few blocks away. I liked going to Billymark’s for a drink after work, though I didn’t go all that often. Still, it was always a place to go, a place in the neighborhood that stood out mostly for how normal it was. When I found out the bar had closed a few weeks ago, I was bereft.

I understand that there are many people who are not always asking themselves, How can I get it back? But I am. Sometimes in fact this question feels like the animating force behind my emotional life—where did it go and how can I retrieve it? No one knows what it is, least of all me. Not long ago I was taking a train north toward Poughkeepsie and I was overcome with the memory of a previous train ride, on a Friday in July several years ago, toward a house in the woods where we stood one night on the porch and watched heat lightning and fireflies rise off the grass in the steam of a recent rain. Other more and less important things happened that weekend, but that is the image that came to me as I stared out the train window, along with the feeling that I could never get it back, any of it. I am speaking of what is generally called nostalgia, though I think the word is overused such that it conjures the gentle, moony feeling you might get listening to a second-rate James Taylor song. No, the feeling I am trying to describe is totalizing, characterized by sharp, surprising loss wrapped up with something like pleasure. That day on the train, I was so overwhelmed that I had to lie down.

Bars are good places to go if you want to chase feelings like this. Or bad places, depending on your perspective. But it’s true that people who frequent bars—who really frequent them—are often the kinds of people who are looking for something lost, and perhaps getting lost in that looking. This is related to the consumption of alcohol, which can feel at times like a shortcut to bygone days. It also has to do with the spaces themselves, which are designed to be familiar and to mimic, perhaps, other bars where we’ve been before while retaining their own particular magic. That’s what a good bar is like, anyway. There are fewer and fewer good bars, for all the obvious reasons, and Billymark’s was one of the last in the stretch of blocks around our office. I can’t really explain why, but it was an especially good one.

Billymark’s was the kind of bar that allowed you to feel like maybe you could get it back. It made me think I could get Beacon Hill Pub back—the first bar where I ever drank as a teenager, a place where in the eighties my father used to eat the hot dogs they would boil at closing time, or so he said, and where I once whiled away a Saint Patrick’s Day staring into the shockingly blue eyes of a stranger, wondering what would become of my life. That bar is closed. Billymark’s made me feel like I could get back the Chieftain, an old newspaper bar downtown in San Francisco which isn’t even gone but is gone from my life, or really I am gone from its. Other bars like these, where I have wasted my wastrel youth, all seemed contained, somehow, in Billymark’s. They seem contained, too, in the loss of it. Probably I should have expected this, from all those stories I used to hear about bygone days, but it’s been a surprise all the same: as I get older, there are more and more places I’ll never go again. 

As we were putting together this Summer issue of the Review, an editor in London sent me Saskia Vogel’s new translation of a 1989 book by Peter Cornell, a Swedish historian and art critic. The Ways of Paradise is presented as notes to a scholarly manuscript; the author, Cornell tells us in an introduction, was “a familiar figure at the National Library of Sweden,” where for more than three decades he was “occupied with an uncommonly comprehensive project, a work that—as he once disclosed in confidence—would reveal a chain of connections until then overlooked.” After his death, the manuscript was never found. “Which is to say,” Cornell writes, “all that remains of his great work is its critical apparatus.”

The footnotes that comprise The Ways of Paradise orbit certain preoccupations: the center of the world, labyrinths, flânerie, rock formations, Freudian repression, passwords, folds of fabric, aimlessness. As I followed the trails left behind by the mysterious man Cornell calls the author, I felt an emerging sense of relation between only tangentially related things. (I also felt a relief that the categories of “Fiction” and “Nonfiction” had already been banished from the Review’s table of contents in favor of the more-encompassing “Prose.”)

Taking note of connections, intended or not, is one of the pleasures of deep, patient reading—which is to say, one of the pleasures of reading for pleasure. And so I am always delighted when, despite our best efforts to avoid organizing an issue of the Review around a given idea or theme, a reader will point out that the most recent one was clearly all about this subject or was wrestling with that idea.

Which makes the kind of letter I am now writing—to announce our new Summer issue, out this week—a conundrum. I could flag its seasonal topicality (“That summer we had decided we were past caring,” Anne Serre writes in the issue’s first story. “It was just too tiring, rushing back and forth between mental institutions”). Or I could, like a savvy host at a drinks party, point out possible conversation starters: works in translation, maybe. Or romance novels (“I am a sucker for women carrying each other around,” Renee Gladman writes in “My Lesbian Novel”). Or the visionary (“It could be a dog crossing the street one morning with a string of wieners, which is something I’ve always wanted to see,” Mary Robison tells Rebecca Bengal in her Art of Fiction interview. “That’s my golden dream”).

I was a fairly unsupervised child, living like a rat on the crumbs of adult culture, its cinema in particular. 1976’s Taxi Driver I saw for the first time at eight—rented and shown to me by a housemate of my mother’s—and what I remember most is the gamine Jodie Foster at a diner’s laminate tabletop: her cheer, and her will, her fistfuls of prostitution money. The relieving and misguided lesson I absorbed, likely because I felt particularly attuned and exposed to adult violence, was that childhood could be short-circuited. Soon after, thanks to a few errant adults in my life, I was renting the most obscene things I could find, studying the horror aisle of the Silver Screen Video in Petaluma as though it were the Library of Alexandria: containing and promising and threatening all. Unusual to my experience of these films was that their one-dimensional and sex-warped predators did not seem so different from the world reflected in my actual life.

A few years before, the month I turned five, my neighborhood had been infested by the FBI, who were searching for traces of the just-kidnapped twelve-year-old Polly Klaas. She was abducted in October of 1993 from a sleepover at her house, which was around my literal corner. What Polly became, in the child’s simplistic understanding, was the greatest celebrity: her face on every magazine and national news segment, the vigil always lit for her in town looking like an ancient shrine to the cruelest gods. It took almost two months to find her body. When the guilty man was finally tried, he famously declared in court that Polly had pleaded: Just don’t do me like my dad. Her ruined father lunged for him.

In the years I consumed most of the horror canon, I saw Sissy Spacek in her red shower, Tatum O’Neal with her hips electrocuted by sin up toward God, Jamie Lee Curtis in breast-bouncing flight. I watched the Pet Sematary trilogy, though the supernatural was never of much appeal—I was a girl, and I was curious about girls being killed. One could say that this curiosity was only an expression of internalized misogyny, and one might be very right, but this theory would exclude the great protection afforded me by the chance to experience this kind of hatred against women with no disguises, in private, with the ability to rewind and replay.

Decades later, I’d read the white feminists who castigated the slasher canon, Solnit and her derivatives who called for its expulsion, asking why it was that depictions of violent misogyny, the fetishization of the missing woman and the female carcass, had not been dismissed from the cultural record. By then it was too late to revise my response to genre’s blunt messaging, which had been a comfort when I was a girl, requiring even for the child little decoding. That bluntness was welcome among the subtleties of other monoculture staples: how a likeable male character on The Larry Sanders Show might meet jokey opprobrium for being “pussy-whipped,” or how, as in the dispiriting pablum of You’ve Got Mail (1997), a charming woman could find real love so long as she sacrifice her financial and spiritual purposes. The horror movie was also the beginning of my indoctrination into image culture, the fascination with the unidirectional, the film still or painting that could change me—and that I could never change. It did not occur to me until recently that this submissive solace came at certain personal costs. Back then these movies felt like an empowerment, because what I hoped to comprehend, in order to master, was the machinery of fear.

Book Riot covers a ton of news every week in addition to what we round up here at Today in Books. Here’s a sampler from the week that was.

The Bestselling Books of the Week, According to All the Lists

Three Parents Sue Florida Over Book Bans, and These Are the States That Have Banned Book Bans

The Most Popular Books of the Year So Far, According to Goodreads

The 2024 Lambda Literary Award Winners

Hit the caffeination station and roll into the weekend with this highlight reel of Book Riot’s most popular posts.

10 Book Club Picks for June, from Mocha Girls Read to GMA Book Club

The Best New Book Releases of the Week

The Most Popular Books of the Year So Far, According to Goodreads

New AI App Turns Famous Authors Into Reading Guides

The list of Amazon’s best books of the year so far has just been released. The list was compiled by Amazon’s editors, who collectively read thousands of books a year in order to curate best-of and other kinds of lists. This year, they chose 20 books as the best overall books, and provided lists of the best 20 books for other genres and categories, like literary fiction, romance, history, children’s, and more.

Read on for Amazon’s list of the 10 best overall best books of the year so far, as well as the overall best book.

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

New AI App Turns Authors Into Virtual Lit Professors

Roxane Gay, Marlon James, Margaret Atwood, and John Banville are among the well-known authors who have lent their voices and expertise to Rebind, a new AI-powered app intended “to replicate the dialogue between a student and teacher.” Rebind is the brainchild of John Kaag and Clancy Martin, philosophy professors and friends who believe that studying the classics can improve people’s lives if only they’d actually read them.

Drawing on their own experiences in the classroom, Kaag and Martin theorized that more people would be more willing to engage with classic texts if they could do it with the help of a knowledgeable guide. The solution? The pair spent the last two years having lengthy conversations—sometimes up to 20 hours—with authors and experts who agreed (for pay) to let Rebind turn them into chatbots. When Rebind launches on June 17, you’ll be able to read The Age of Innocence with guidance from Roxane Gay, get Marlon James’s take on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and consult John Banville about James Joyce’s famously difficult Dubliners.

This is the most creative and interesting book-related AI tech I’ve seen so far, and I’m happy to see big-name authors leading by example with their openness to exploring generative uses of this technology. What a refreshing change of pace from the publishing industry’s experiments with consumer-facing AI, which have been almost exclusively limited to (pretty disappointing) book recommendation tools to date! Yesterday, I told one such tool that my favorite book is Beloved by Toni Morrison, that I read for education, exploration, and curiosity, and that I wanted my next book to make me feel informed. Its top suggestions were The Alchemist and The Night Circus. So. The bar is low. Whether Rebind will clear it remains to be seen, and I’ll be watching with great interest.

I’m curious, readers: what do you think about Rebind and other book-related AI experiments? Have you seen anything awesome? Are you ignoring them in hopes they’ll go away? Let’s talk.

Congratulations! You made it to Friday. You deserve a bunch of bookish goodness as a treat.

🎧 Here are Libro.fm’s most pre-ordered audiobooks of summer.

🏆 Can you guess the most-read books on Goodreads this week?

🛀 These books will help you elevate your everyday routines into meaningful rituals.

🍿 60% of Netflix’s most popular shows are based on books and comics.

Several states nationwide have floated legislation to curtail book bans this year. Some of those bills, like the one proposed in Utah, were not only voted down but were superseded with bills that actually further fuel book bans. Other anti-book ban bills, however, made their way successfully through to law.

Let’s take a look at the states that have addressed the right to read and access materials at the library by law. This is as comprehensive as possible, with the acknowledgment that other bills may be pending as of writing or maybe in the works for the next legislative session. It does not include bills that address other library-related issues.

Illinois

Passed in 2023, the first-in-the-nation anti-book ban bill in Illinois ties funding to intellectual freedom policies in public and public school libraries. Basically, if a library wants access to a pot of state money for their institution, they need to have in their collection policies the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights and/or a comparable statement upholding the rights of everyone to access materials in the collection. Books and other items in the library cannot be removed for partisan or discriminatory reasons.

This is a great first step, though certainly, it hasn’t ended book bans in Illinois over the course of its first year as a law because it is fairly limited in scope (it was easy for a school board to ban an entire book reading program, for example). It also does not apply to prison libraries. But the signal this bill sends to libraries that the state is paying attention cannot be downplayed.

California

Also passed in 2023, the California anti-book ban bill applies to school boards specifically. They are unable to censor or ban books, curricula, textbooks, or other learning materials from the districts they oversee. The bill does not apply to public libraries or prison libraries. It also has not stopped school boards from censorship since implementation (not to mention that it’s public libraries bearing the brunt of censorship right now), but, like the bill in Illinois, it is at least an acknowledgment of an ongoing reality, even in a “blue” state like California.