What I Read This Month + a Dispatch From Swiftie Land
Guest starring: Cheetos.
This was going to be just a standard monthly reading round-up, but then I sat down and started to write about Taylor Swift.
If you follow me on Instagram, apologies because I know I was really obnoxious last weekend. But I went to see Taylor Swift! In LA! And it was pretty freaking epic. (Minus the fact that I didn’t see any celebs at the show, despite the LA shows being packed with famous people. Like, c’mon, I would have even taken Spencer Pratt.) I’ll preface this by saying I wouldn’t categorize myself as a Swiftie; sure, I like and listen to her music, but I’m not one of the people dissecting the lyrics for clues or combing TikTok for clips of her shows. And by NO means did I stay up until midnight for Midnights. My bedtime is a firm 9:30 pm—I delay my escape into the sweet abyss of oblivion for no one, not even Miss Taylor Alison Swift.
So you can imagine my surprise when I produced legitimate tears multiple times during her show. Okay, to be fair, I also had taken a very strong, ahem, California-style gummy (calm down, narcs, it’s legal there) and was definitely astral-traveling through multiple dimensions of very weird shit for periods of the show. At one point, when the wave was veering slightly toward paranoia and despair, I turned to my friend and, flinging my hands into the air in existential anguish, wailed out “AM I CHEUGY????”
But, gum-gum-generated feels aside, I was surprised by how awed and deeply emotional I felt at the show. I’m always really affected by seeing people who are creative and talented do the things they were born to do, without any reservations. Not to sound too much like I just took another gummy, but it’s an almost spiritual experience, almost holy. But this was on another level—the stadium was filled with mostly women, and the atmosphere was definitely sisterhood-esque, even verging on coven-like at times (especially when all the dancers came out with their satanic Barre 3 balls during the Folklore set). White lights flickered across the dark stadium filled with 70,000 people—not to get embarrassingly poetic on you all, but it looked like I was standing across the bay from the incline of a distant island at night, the lights of houses glinting against the black.
There were two tween girls in the row in front of us with a very tired-looking mom, and they scream-sang the entire time with such uncultivated sincerity. I’m pretty confident they had absolutely no idea what they were talking about when they were screaming out lyrics like “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY”, but they did it with the tenacity of like, a grizzled 40-year-old women who’s been wronged by a string of douchebag men. As I watched them, it struck me that I’d heard some of these songs for the first time when I was 16 and now, here I was, a 31-year-old woman, singing the lyrics alongside a new generation of girls (who I most definitely was freaking out, as I was silently weeping and simultaneously gnawing on Cheetos). And all the feelings of girlhood—the angst and the excitement and the loneliness, the playfulness and the distinct heartache of it—hit me at once. It was pure and sweet and a little melancholy, too, that technicolor ache of feeling so much all at once.
Maybe said gummy was just the thing I needed for my somewhat-nihilistic walls to tumble down, allowing me to look through my typical self-effacing bullshit and appreciate the wonder and pure earnestness of that moment: a stadium packed with people belting the lyrics to the same song, ecstatic to be there, reveling in the joy of watching someone share their gift with the world. So much of the world today can feel awful—wildfires, shootings, the fact that we’re slowly cooking ourselves here on this planet—but this? It was pretty cool.
At this point, you’re probably like uhhh, I thought this was a newsletter about reading? What does this have to do with books? To which I’ll say—nothing! After all, what’s the point of holding you captive on my little corner of the internet if I can’t bombard you with ramblings from time to time? But, fine, fine, before you call your mom and beg her to come pick you up—we’ll get to it. Here’s everything I read over the past month:
📚 Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
I saw a lot of people talking about this book last year, but I only got to it now because of **Libby life**. This follows two estranged siblings as they begin unearthing secrets about their recently deceased mother. It switches between a now-and-then timeline, diving into both the siblings’ current-day lives and their mother’s past as a girl growing up in the Caribbean and after she leaves behind everything she knows for England. The imagery of the Caribbean landscape was really beautiful—I’d recommend this book if you liked Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo.
📚 Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
I’d mentioned that I was in a reading rut earlier this summer, and this book fully launched me out of it. Sure, the premise might seem a little cringey at the outset—dragons, magic, yadda yadda yadda—but I tore through all 600-ish pages of this in two days at the beach. It was such an escape to dive into this universe—I’m always so impressed by authors who can create entire worlds of their own—and the plot was fast-moving and encompassing. I get why this has been such a viral smash on TikTok. The whole story behind it is fascinating, too. The author, Rebecca Yarros, has written dozens of romance books before this, but this is her first huge success. She’s gotta be just absolutely rolling in dragon $$ at this point—the physical book’s been sold out everywhere. Sure, she’s not reinventing the wheel or anything here—if you’ve read fantasy before, you’ll find a lot of the plot points similar—and the writing didn’t floor me. But it’s just the kind of candy-snack I was looking for: fun, easy to read, and addictive.
📚 Scandalized by Ivy Owens
Okay, this definitely fits under the same candy-escapism fix as Fourth Wing. I was still at the beach when I read this, and it was perf for my easy-reading streak. This is by one of the writers behind the Christina Lauren books, so it’s definitely in the rom-com genre: It follows a woman who runs into her former best friend’s older brother, and they spark up an affair. But, unbeknownst to her, he’s actually an uber famous K-drama star. Diving into the world of Korean TV fandom made this more interesting than the typical “normal person hooks up with celebrity” trope, although I did hate that the author made the protagonist, who’s a journalist, fall into the tired “reporter sleeps with her source—whoops!” trope. And warning (or encouragement, depending on your penchant for horn-doggery): This is, like, extremely smutty. There is a lot of get-down gettin’ down in these pages. In fact, I’m not exactly sure how the main characters can physically walk after all said gettin’ down. But good for them!
📚 Good Rich People by Eliza Jane Brazier
This is a weird, darkly funny, campy novel—it follows a far-too-wealthy couple living in Beverly Hills that rents out a guest house on their property just so they can maniacally mess with the tenants that move into it. If you like the whole technicolor, “rich people behaving badly” kind of thing—think The Club by Ellery Lloyd—you’ll like this. Brazier does a really great job of writing in a sly style that is both humorous but also shows you how nearsighted and fallible her characters are. (BTW—I originally heard about this book because the author was on the podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which I’d highly recommend for my fellow writers out there.)
📚 Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
This follows a young Irish woman who starts an affair with a married man in Belfast during the Troubles. He’s a lawyer who represents IRA members, and they both become embroiled in the danger and drama of the Irish political landscape. It’s pretty literary—much of the writing is beautiful—but it’s also a great way to learn more about this period in Ireland, which I didn’t know much about beforehand. I want to compare this to Sally Rooney because it’s about Ireland but, lol, I don’t think that’s quite right. It does, however, make me want to give Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe another go, a nonfiction book about The Troubles that I never finished.
📚 The Guest by Emma Cline
This has definitely been a buzzy book this summer—I feel like I’ve seen its aesthetically pleasing cover in a bunch of the online girlies’ posts. It’s about a woman who spends a week floating between houses in the Hamptons leeching off rich people. This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I didn’t love it, even though I’m all about grifter-core. Sure, the writing is great, and it’s smart and dark and has some really great commentary on class and privilege, but I honestly found the whole thing morose in a way that ultimately put me off—absolutely no one in the book is redeeming. I also never finished Cline’s first book, The Girls,, for some of the same reasons. But if you liked The Girls you’ll prob like this one! (A related aside: On my flight back from LA, I had to walk past all the fancy first-class people to my seat in the Hinterlands, and I passed Katie Couric, who had this next to her!!)
And now I’m off to read all the **discourse** about Karlie showing up at Taylor’s last LA show. TTYL, TGIF, LYLAS!
xo Mimi