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"rn I feel like reading about someone's quiet daily life, maybe a diary or letters, set in a place or context I don't know much about, without turmoil or tragedy" oh! do you have any recommendations for books like this?
This is one of my favourite types of books! Here are 30(ish) recs...
May Sarton's The House by the Sea or Plant Dreaming Deep
Gyrðir Elíasson's Suðurglugginn / La fenêtre au sud (not translated into English unfortunately!), also Bergsveinn Birgisson's Landslag er aldrei asnalegt / Du temps qu'il fait (exists in German too)
Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces, which iirc was originally written as journal entries and letters before being adapted into a book
Kenneth White's House of Tides: Letters from Brittany and Other Lands of the West
Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book
The Diary of a Provincial Lady, E. M. Delafield
Growing Up with the Impressionists: The Diary of Julie Manet
Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim (do not read if you don't like flowers)
The Road Through Miyama by Leila Philip (I've mentioned it before, it feels like this gif)
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, I keep recommending this one but it's so nice and I love snails
Epicurean Simplicity, Stephanie Mills
The Light in the Dark: A winter journal by Horatio Clare
The Letters of Rachel Henning
The letters of Tove Jansson, also The Summer Book and Fair Play
The diary of Sylvia Townsend Warner—here's an entry where she describes some big cats at the zoo. "Frank and forthcoming, flirtatious carnivores, [...] guttersnipishly loveable"
The Letters of Rachel Carson & Dorothy Freeman were very sweet and a little bit gay. I mostly remember from this long book I read years ago that Rachel Carson once described herself as "retiring into her shell like a periwinkle at low tide" and once apologised to Dorothy because she had run out of apple-themed stationery.
Jane Austen's letters (quoting the synopsis, "Wiser than her critics, who were disappointed that her correspondence dwelt on gossip and the minutiae of everyday living, Austen understood the importance of "Little Matters," of the emotional and material details of individual lives shared with friends and family")
Madame de Sévigné's letters because obviously, and from the same time period, the letters of the Princess Palatine, Louis XIV's sister-in-law. I read them a long time ago and mostly I remember that I enjoyed her priorities. There's a letter where she complains that she hasn't received the sausages she was promised, and then in the next paragraph, mentions the plot to assassinate the King of England and also, the Tartars are walking on Vienna currently.
Wait I found it:
R.C. Sherriff's The Fortnight in September (quoting the author, "I wanted to write about simple, uncomplicated people doing normal things")
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett
Rules for Visiting, Jessica Francis Kane
The following aren't or aren't yet available in English, though some have already been translated in 5-6 languages:
ツバキ文具店 / La papeterie Tsubaki by ito Ogawa
半島へ / La péninsule aux 24 saisons by Mayumi Inaba
Giù la piazza non c'è nessuno, Dolores Prato (for a slightly more conceptual take on the "someone's everyday life" theme—I remember it as quite Proustian in its meticulousness, a bit like Nous les filles by Marie Rouanet which is much shorter and more lighthearted but shows the same extreme attention to childhood details)
Journal d'un homme heureux, Philippe Delerm, my favourite thing about this book is that the goodreads commenter who gave it the lowest rating complained that Delerm misidentified a wine as a grenache when actually it's a cabernet sauvignon. Important review!
Un automne à Kyôto, Corinne Atlan (I find her writing style so lovely)
oh and 西の魔女が死んだ / L’été de la sorcière by Kaho Nashiki —such a little Ghibli film of a book. There's a goodreads review that points out that Japanese slice-of-life films and books have "a certain way of describing small, everyday actions in a soothing, flawless manner that can either wear you out, or make you look at the world with a temporary glaze of calm contentment and introspective understanding [...]"
I'd be happy to get recommendations in this 'genre' as well :)
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“Because it is crucial that we refrain from using the oppressor’s language to articulate the social structures that violate our communities, I first identify two terms that may still be be new to a western or diasporic audience. For example, I believe the term Bahujan, simply meaning “the majority of the people” , brings to attention to the reality that caste is not a “Dalit problem”. While Dalit and Adivasis are some of the most vulnerable communities in a caste society, the majority of the people of the subcontinent are caste-bound and ruled by “upper”-caste minorities. The term Bahujan refers to present day Scheduled Castes (Dalits), Scheduled Tribes (Adivasis/indigenous) and Shudra (peasant) castes — cutting across religion, ethnicities and geographies. In addition, the use of words Brahminism/Brahminical in the place of “Hinduism/Hindu” is also intentional. These are the appropriate term for the religion of ancient (and modern) India — at the core of which is the morality of a Brahmin-conceived institution, the Varnashrama Dharma ( the system of 4 varnas and laws and practices related to it ). The term “Hinduism” is actually a contemporary political term constructed through the mass appropriation and erasure of several distinct indigenous tribes, outcastes, religions and microcultures throughout the subcontinent for the sake of usurpation of post British-colonial land and electoral power.”
— Valliammal Karunakaran, The Dalit-Bahujan Guide to Understanding Caste in Hindu Scripture
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on food/the food writing industry & colonialism/racism
cooking other peoples food: how chefs appropriate bay area ‘ethnic’ cuisine by luke tsai, east bay express
the stark racial divide in pay for restaurant workers by alastair bland, npr
the primal pleasure and brutal history of sugar by ruby tandoh, eater
ole missus vs mammy: who owns southern food? by michael twitty, vice
what happens when a brown chef cooks white food? by khushbu shah, gq
the rise (and stall) of the boba generation by jenny g. zhang, eater
yelp reviewers authenticity fetish is white supremacy in action by sara kay, ny eater
pathology of displacement: the intersection of food justice and culture by shane bernardo, whyhunger
the bon appetit test kitchens race problem by soleil ho, san francisco chronicle
the vegan race wars: how the mainstream ignores vegans of color by khushbu shah, thrillist
whose food is it, anyway? by ann hui, the globe and mail
food, race, and power: who gets to be an authority on ‘ethnic’ cuisines? by lorraine chuen, intersectional analyst
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I’ve noticed lately that it’s often Americans who leave tags like “I don’t even care if it’s made up” on posts I make that are not particularly unbelievable, but are pretty specific to my way of life or corner of the world (like the one about the cheese vendor). It reminds me of that tweet that was circulating, that said Americans have a “medieval peasant scale of worldview”—I mean, if you don’t want to be perceived this way by the rest of the world maybe don’t go around social media saying that if a cultural concept or way of life sounds unfamiliar it must be made up?
It’s the imbalance that’s annoying, because like—when I mentioned having no mobile network around here I had people giving me info about Verizon to fix my problem. I post some rural pic and someone says it must be somewhere in the Midwest because the Southwest doesn’t look like this. My post about my postwoman has thousands of Americans assuming it’s about the USPS. On my post about my architect there’s someone saying “it’s because architecture is an impacted major” and other irrelevant stuff about how architecture is taught in the US. This kind of thing happens so so so often and I’m expected to be familiar with the concepts of Verizon and the Midwest and impacted majors and the USPS and meanwhile I make a post about my daily life and Americans in the notes are debating like “dunno if real. it sounds made up”
Going online for the rest of the world means having to keep in mind an insane amount of hyperspecific trivia about American culture while going online for Americans means having to keep in mind that the rest of the world really exists I guess
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hi sarah! do you have any recommended reads on loneliness? thank you <333
the lonely city: adventures in the art of being alone, olivia laing
ethical loneliness: the injustice of not being heard, jill stauffer
loneliness and me, claire bushey
the reading summer: fragments on loneliness, eve lion
on solitude (and isolation and loneliness [and brackets]), sarah fay
cabin fever: a reading list for the perpetually isolated, kara devlin
also my loneliness tag!
and some fiction that deals with the theme:
salt slow, julia armfield
severance, ling ma
the world by night, anjali sachdeva, in all the names they used for god
briefly, a delicious life, nell stevens
a tale for the time being, ruth ozeki
crushing, sophie burrows
aloners, dir. hong sungeun (ik u asked for readings but adding just one movie!)
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Just chucking my 10 pence into the ring for Women in Translation month with a handful of recs on the off chance it'll be of use to someone
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
- a short novel about a Korean woman who decides to become a vegetarian after a bad dream and how the people (mainly men) around her react to the decision and her subsequent spiral into stranger and stranger behaviour.
Convenience Store Woman by Sakaya Murata
- the story follows a neuro-divergent middle aged Japanese woman who loves her job at a convenience store more than anything and just wants to be left alone to do what makes her happy and how the people around her pressure her into conforming to what society expects from her (finding a man, getting a "real job", etc) and how those expectations negatively impact her life.
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
- a strange winding Argentinian novel about a dying woman and a young boy sitting in hospital together and telling stories. I don't really know the best way to sell you on this one other than you'll have to try it to know if you'll like it lol. But if you like a whole lot of weird and appreciate narratives and themes around environmental abuse then this could be for you.
Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica
- another Argentinian book but this time it's just a straight up consumption horror lol. It follows a man who works at an abattoir essentially in a dystopian society where animal meat is now poisonous to people so they've started breeding and mass-processing humans for meat instead. Does what it says on the tin and pulls absolutely no punches in the process lol.
Confessions by Kanae Minato
- an excellent little Japanese thriller. A class room of teenagers are sat down by their teacher on her last day of work to talk about her resignation after her young daughter died in an accident on school grounds, only for her to reveal that she knows that two of the students are responsible for her death, and the steps she's taken to set her revenge into motion. The rest of the book jumps pov every chapter as you watch the consequences ripple out from there.
and last but not least
Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang
- a Chinese sci-fi novel that follows a group of Mars-born teenagers who, after a civil war between planets, have spent their formative years on Earth as delegates and are now returning to Mars and how they deal with that, basically. It's the longest book on this list by far at around 600 pages but the writing is beautiful and the conversations about Mars being a communist ideal while Earth has reached the pinnacle of what capitalism can create are done in a way that doesn't feel at all soapbox-y and feels very fair in exploring the pros and cons of each system. Just an all around excellent book.
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some books I’ve liked recently with covers that look good together! 1 nonfiction and 3 translated literary fiction from East Asia :]
Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang | Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge, Jeremy Tiang (translator)
The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada, David Boyd (translator) | The Hole by Hye-Young Pyun, Sora Kim-Russell (translator)
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Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
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7-30 by Yizheng Ke ~ https://kyz.artstation.com/projects/xJaDy1
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Preface: Friendship as an Art of Living, David Scott
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From Rewriting The Rules by Meg Barker, pdf here. This is actually one of the best books I’ve ever read about relationships and non-monogamies – decenters romance, interrogates gender norms and expectations, acknowledges structural forces and validates our responses to them while still opening room for non-normative connection. High high recommend
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if you want a retelling of orpheus and eurydice in a modern setting but if orpheus ‘successfully’ brought her back.. catherynne m. valente recently wrote a short story l'espirit de l'escalier
would give this a miss if you would be uncomfortable reading about reanimated but still dead & decaying bodies & all that entails.. hope that also suggests to you what sort of the macabre route this story has taken.. anyway, different retellings are always a delight for me personally and valente is an excellent writer so if anyone reads this, would love to know what u think!
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some recent reads: (faves are bolded)
are foreclosed homes the new haunted houses?, the paris review
the political consequences of loneliness and isolation during the pandemic, the new yorker
we didn’t have a chance to say goodbye, the paris review
hunger makes me, hazlitt.net
the history of loneliness, the new yorker
americans ruined pizza, st. patrick’s day and house of cards. ow they’re ruining eurovision, politico
the end of the road; nomadland, my mother and the frontier’s broken promise, the drift magazine
the woman who made van gogh, the new york times
dorothea lange’s angel of history, the paris review
loneliness is other people, the paris review
i am a meme now and so are you, medium
the true meaning of nostalgia, the new yorker
solving fast fashion isn’t a plus size responsibility, refinery29
life under lockdown, atlas obscura
the vanishing world of neon motel signs, atlas obscura
why summer makes us lazy, the new yorker
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I think that this article should be mandatory reading for everyone age 16-25, especially if you're in university. Read it here.
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Eli Sostre, Keanu Kay Milborrow
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at what point do we stop missing the people who hurt us, just because we love them? would it hurt less to see you smile, or to not know at all?
#how the fuck has it been a year#and the sight of my ex still manages to ruin my day#i hope i stop missing what we had at some point#idk what to do otherwise#personal#do not rb
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