everything I read in July

Many essays. A memoir I'd been itching to open for months. A story set in a restaurant. A story set in the mind of a man who felt both implausible and like he might appear in the flesh at any moment.

Lately: It’s finally cool enough that I don’t sweat on my 7 a.m. walks to work out, which I realize is the lowest of low bars when it comes to physical comfort. But it’s allowing me to reckon with the fact that fall is coming, and I’m positively giddy about my NFL-free existence come September. … Until this year, my husband covered baseball, which meant I spent 90 percent of summer evenings alone. We’re still trying to figure out what to do with ourselves, and we recently introduced frequent ice cream walks. If there’s 40 minutes of low-level cardio involved in procuring a sweet treat, that makes the whole enterprise healthy, right? … I recently tested a granola recipe for the Washington Post. I’m not really a granola person. It’s one of those foods I aspire to crave. I buy it. It goes stale. I throw it away. But not this recipe. I’ll share it here when it publishes.

So many essays

“Horse Show,” by Jess Bowers: Do you ever feel staggered by the sheer number of books out there in the universe? Oh, you feel that way every time you walk into a bookstore or your local library? Well, then, how’s this for overwhelming: There are thousands upon thousands more books out there whose paths will never cross with yours, in part because they’re published by smaller presses. They’re not on the standard library order list, or on the display at the front of the bookstore, or in the emails you get every Tuesday from publishers and online booksellers, clueing you in to new releases. Egads, it’s too much.

“Horse Show” is one of those books, and it shouldn’t be. I learned about it because the author’s dad, Greg Bowers, was my professor and editor in grad school at the University of Missouri. When I ordered it, I knew very little about what was in the mail, other than that it was a collection of essays. Or short stories. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if it was fiction or nonfiction.

Somehow, “Horse Show” is both. It’s a collection of essays rooted in truth and history, all of them (at least tangentially) about horses. But the stars of the (horse) show are the characters Bowers creates: weird, oh-so-real voices who help these strange events make a little bit of sense.

“How Did You Get This Number,” by Sloane Crosley: I’m on a real Sloane Crosley kick right now, and I’m so deep in her oeuvre that I’m finding all kinds of links and connections that probably weren’t meant to be found and thinking entirely too much about the evolution of her voice. It should go without saying that Crosley’s writing is consistently great. But this collection is my least favorite of hers, in part because I’m reading everything out of order. Her newer stuff just feels fresher and more focused. I’m about to re-read “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” which I first read 16 years ago when it was published, and I’m curious if I’ll feel the same way.

Why was I so resistant to read this?

“Martyr!" by Kaveh Akbar: Everything and everyone said this book was stupendous. The Internet. My husband. The guy at the bookstore. The eons-long hold list at the library. And yet I read the synopsis and got the sense I wouldn’t enjoy it.

I am an idiot.

This book read like a series of diary entries. Cyrus, the main character, was like no one I’ve ever met, yet if I’d set down the book and found him sitting in the chair across from me, I’d have believed it. Somehow, this book straddles the line between plot and character study perfectly, and the ending was chaotically perfect. My husband and I spent at least 20 minutes debating what each of us thought it meant after I finished.

These books were also excellent

“Service,” by Sarah Gilmartin: I’d just finished the third season of “The Bear,” which I didn’t particularly enjoy, and I wasn’t sure if I had an appetite for a #MeToo story — which made me somewhat resistant to open “Service,” a novel set in an upscale Dublin restaurant whose chef faces accusations of sexual assault. I’m glad I got over my hesitance, though. “Service” is a quick, smart, beautifully told novel, which alternates between three perspectives: Hannah, a former server at the restaurant; Julie, the accused chef’s wife; and Daniel, the chef.

The way Gilmartin deploys and doesn’t deploy details made the story hum along with an element of suspense, and my favorite parts came when the narrative shifted to Julie, who felt significantly more human than most wives in her position are portrayed in books and on screen. [The publisher of this book, Pushkin Press, sent me a complimentary copy, which — and I hope this goes without saying — had no influence on this review.]

“Splinters,” by Leslie Jamison: Splinters! I finally got my hands on the book everyone was talking and writing and opining about this winter and spring, and I can confidently say: The talking and writing and opining were justified. After all that waiting for my name to tick up the long list of D.C. women also itching to read the story of Leslie Jamison’s divorce, I turned around and bought myself a copy. There were just too many passages I wanted to return to, too many passages that delivered a visceral punch from the page.

this is one of those passages

Female memoir is one of my favorite genres. If you are a woman and you publish a memoir, I will happily, eagerly read it. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about your trip to outer space or your years in a cult. Your story can be the maximum quotient of unrelatable, and I won’t care. But, I will admit, relating is good. And this story, for me, related just the perfect amount. Jamison is a white millennial woman, a writer, and she seems to parse through her feelings, ugly and joyful, in a way I find familiar. Beyond that, though, she shares experiences I found utterly foreign; one (divorce) I hope to never face, and another (motherhood) I feel myself increasingly pulled to jump into. And so I read this story out of curiosity — an almost manic curiosity. How do I do what she did not? How do I do what she did? How do these life-undoing experiences feel and hurt and motivate? I had the highest expectations for this book, and it wholly delivered.