Volume 2, No. 35: A Month of Reading Free + The Best Apple Almond Cake

Greetings, book people! It’s been raining for two days and I truly don’t have the words for the ease I’m feeling in my heart. I’ve gone Full Fall. This weekend I made soup, stoped by my favorite orchard, baked an apple cake, wore socks, and drank hot cocoa two nights in a row.

Speaking of fall, congrats to Sarah, who won last week’s giveaway of The Other Mother! It was so much fun to read through all of your delightful fall-and-winter loving comments…so let’s do it again! This week I have a copy of Kevin Chen’s upcoming novel Ghost Town (translated from the Taiwanese by Darryl Sterk) to give away. Tell me about your favorite fall or winter vegetable, fruit, baked good, meal, beverage, etc. Everyone who comments will be entered in the giveaway.

When I wasn’t gleefully watching the rain, I spent most of this past weekend finishing several books I started back in May and had set aside, distracted by deadlines, new releases, the allure of quick reads. It was a treat to spend a whole weekend reading exactly what I wanted to read. I read a lot for work, and it often feels like I’m swimming upstream, struggling to keep up. But the truth is that most of this is self-imposed. I only ever accept review assignments for books I want to read anyway. And when it comes to this newsletter—well, I’m the boss.

Sometimes I miss the way reading used to feel, before I became a Professional Book Person, when, after finishing a book, I’d idly scan my shelves, waiting for the right spine to leap out into my hands, or take a spur-of-the-moment trip to the library to browse. It’s not that I don’t do that anymore—it’s just that now there are all these other voices in my head, telling me what I should be reading.

My season is coming, and so, for the month of September, I’m reading free. No shoulds. No unnecessary self-imposed deadlines. No structure for the sake of structure. I’m reading what I want! I know some exciting themes will emerge in whatever I choose to pick up, and I can’t wait to share them with you.

This week: three books I’ve read recently and loved. That’s it.

The Books

Backlist #1: Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan (Nonfiction, 2019)

I started keeping a journal when I was 9, and barring a few angsty months in my early twenties, I have written in it nearly every day since then. That’s about 9,400 days. I have a shelf of all my old journals in my office—in fact, I’m looking at it right now. There are about 100 of them. Since I was a child, I have been compelled to document my life. It’s one of the few things I do every day, without question. It’s non-negotiable.

Despite my fascination with the act of journaling, mine and other people’s, I was not expecting to be so deeply moved by this weird little book. Aug 9—Fog is a compilation of passages from a stranger’s journal. Kathryn Scanlan found this journal at an estate sale. It’s one of those five-year diaries; each page represents a calendar day, divided into five sections, one for each year. The writer of the diary lived in a small town in Illinois. She was eighty-six when she started writing in this particular diary, which she kept from 1968-1972. These are the facts as Scanlan lays them out in the introduction. She writes about first falling in love with “the physicality of the diary—the author’s cramped hand, the awkward, artful way she filled the page.” But eventually she decided to read it, and, over years and years, came to view it as a kind of extension of herself.

The diary has become something like kin—a relation who is also me, myself. I have at times been exasperated with it. I have wondered why I continue to return to it—year after year, draft after draft. Why does it compel me so? Isn’t it terribly banal?

The book is 110 pages, divided into four sections based on the seasons. There are often only a few words on each page, a sentence or two. It takes fifteen minutes to read. It is a small book in every sense: physically small, concerned with life’s most boring minutia, inconsequential. It is, as Scanlan says, “terribly banal.” The diarist writes without artifice about the stuff of life: her garden, the weather, dinner. She also writes about her family—her daughter and son-in-law, her friends. Someone is in poor health and eventually dies. The diary is full of names that mean nothing to me: Vern, Bucky, Ruth, Mildred. There is no context. This is not a piece of literary art. It’s the record of a person’s life. The diarist makes bread and butter pickles. Observes the wind. Gets a new coat. Listens to jets flying overhead while eating dinner. Vern coughs in the night. Someone gets a divorce. It rains. Vern dies. She paints. The sun comes out.

And yet. I read it in May, and I find, shockingly, that it still haunts me. Scanlan, in the introduction, reflects that, after having read and edited and rearranged the diary for years: “It still moves me, which seems unbelievable.”

This is how it feels to me, too. There are certain passages that speak to me particularly, lines I feel I could have written myself, little observations that capture a certain feeling so easily and truly. Like this: “Things sure smell fresh. Some hot nite. Flowers beautiful. Ruth brought muskmelons.”

And this is some poetry that will live in my heart forever:

Terrible windy everything loose

is traveling.

I’m still thinking about this line, too: “Sure pretty out. Sure grand out. D. making a new piecrust. All better.”

But beyond these beautiful snippets of what it feels like to be a human in the world, what moves me so much about this book, in the end, is simply that it exists. Why do any of us bother to write down our lives? Where does the urge to archive ourselves come from? What’s the point of writing about the weather, that our feet are sore, that we had a nice visit with C., that S. brought over a casserole, that the birds have found the new feeder, that we bought a new hat? I have filled hundreds of journals with words over the last 27 years. At times I’ve written about my emotions, about falling in love for the first time, about heartbreak and fear and desire, about what’s happening in the world—all that messy, tangled stuff that swirls around in a brain. But I have also written hundreds, if not thousands, of variations on: It was hot. Went to the river. Dinner with J and we worked on a puzzle. N’s leg is better.

I don’t know this woman who wrote about the wind and her flowers and her son-in-law’s illness. We likely would not have enjoyed each other’s company. But we share this human instinct to record, and we have met, somehow, on the page. The facts of her life move me to tears, not because they are exceptional, or even because I enjoy her lovely turns of phrase, but because of their banal insistence: I was here. Here’s what happened. A journal doesn’t have to mean anything. It can just be. It can just be banal. It can just be beautiful.

Backlist #2: The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller (Historical Fiction, 2021)

I picked this book up because I love all things cold, and I could not resist a novel set in Svalbard, an archipelago between Norway and the North Pole, and one of the northernmost inhabited places in the world. I picked it up a little begrudgingly, because that’s how I pick up most non-queer fiction these days. But the polar nights tempted me, and I was rewarded because surprise! It’s queer!

The novel opens in 1916. Sven is living in Stockholm but isn’t sure what to do with himself, because he’s never really felt at home in the city, or society in general. So he takes a mining job in Svalbard. Soon after, he’s injured in an avalanche, which ends his mining career. But instead of returning to Sweden, he stays in Svalbard, first finding work as a steward at one of the mining camps, and eventually setting out on his own. He builds himself a hut on a remote fjord, and lives there with his dog, hunting and trapping and fishing. A Finnish fur trapper teaches him how to survive in the Arctic, first taking him on as an apprentice, and eventually becoming a lifelong friend. There is, as I was hoping, a lot of nature: the snow, the wind, the ice, the polar bears, the foxes, the midnight sun and endless winter darkness: these are the things that define Sven’s life. The writing is beautiful and fierce and full of wonder—Sven, who is slowly falling in love with this strange and dangerous place, recounts that love in detail.

I was expecting a book about how deeply a place can shape someone’s life, but I was not expecting a book about queer found family. That’s really what this book is about: Sven, over the course of his life in Svalbard, cobbles together a family of exiles and radicals and outcasts and revolutionaries, people who have come to this remote island looking for something else: freedom, space, autonomy. I loved meeting each character as they came into Sven’s life, so I won’t give away any more plot. I’ll just say that basically everyone in this novel, except Sven, is queer. There are gay men, lesbians, an asexual character. Even the characters who aren’t queer are the kind of people who are so often part of queer families. They live on their own terms. Their relationships exist outside of heteronormative standards. They welcome Sven as one of their own, easily accepting his eccentricities and his desire to live alone on the ice. He finds belonging in so many places—with his dog, with the foxes and walruses, in the long isolation of winter, and with people.

I love reading about messy people. No one is perfect, we all cause harm, and most of the books I enjoy most are about people making mistakes and muddling through them. I do not hold fictional characters up to impossible moral standards. But there is something deeply calming and satisfying about reading a book in which the tension does not stem from Things Between People. Sure, there’s conflict in this novel. Sven isn’t above reproach. But, in general, he is compassionate, thoughtful, interested. He is gentle with people and animals. He wants the people he loves to be happy. When he doesn’t understand something, he thinks it over. He’s open-minded, willing to be wrong, and good at apologizing. Most of the other main characters are like this, too: they look out for each other, try to do right by each other.

The world we live in is harsh and loud and violent. Sometimes it’s nice to read about people who are, in fact, decent all the way down.

As an added bonus, this book inspired me to learn a lot about Svalbard. It has no Indigenous population; it was first settled by miners in the early 20th century. (I was wondering about this, as there are no Indigenous people in the novel.) It’s also home to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Do I want to go there? Obviously.

Frontlist: Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej (Fiction)

I read this book in two sittings, in a state of mild agitation, my breath all messed up, in awe of the sentences and the sharpness of it and, underneath all that, moved and upset and dazzled and hurt by the deep emotion running through it.

The publishing copy says this is a book about a woman who has an affair with an older man. Sure, okay, technically, I guess. Honestly, I can’t think of anything more boring. I picked this up because a) it’s about a queer woman, which complicates things, and b) a bookish friend whose tastes often overlap with mine in a specific way raved about it.

And now I’ve put myself in a bind, because I loved it, and I want to write about it, but writing about it is hard. This novel touched me in a weird and particular way. It unsettled me, maybe because of how deeply I related to the narrator, and also how deeply I didn’t. It was like looking at a version of a life I could have had, if I had met someone different at a certain time in my life, if I had had a different kind of best friend. I watched the narrator make a series of bad decisions and I understood each one, viscerally, It’s one of those books that blurs and distorts, and, in doing so, makes clear. I’m not sure I can write about it coherently. The prose is breathtaking: straightforward, simple, deadly. It flows with a cold sureness, and it leads you to unexpected places. It does not go where it’s supposed to go. I just typed that last sentence, and I’m not sure what I mean by it, except that it feels true. This is a book made of words, but it’s about places and experiences that words cannot touch. So it goes somewhere that feels a little wrong, a little dissonant.

So, if it’s not about a woman and her obsessive affair with an older man, what is it about? I suspect everyone who reads it will have a different answer. For me, it’s about the boxes the world puts women in, especially queer women and women of color, and especially when it comes to desire. It’s about the violence of those boxes. It’s about how easy it is to fall into an obsession when that obsession gives you something you want, something you’re afraid you won’t be able to find anywhere else. It’s about the tension between knowing something in your brain and knowing something in your body, living in that strange tension and not being able to talk about it or explain it to the people you’re closest with.

There’s a lot going on here with sex and power and kink and queer identity and how all of that intersects with patriarchy and societal gender roles and blah blah blah. I loved all of that. Songsiridej is masterful. She’s brilliant and sparse with her characterization. But here’s the line I can’t stop thinking about, the narrator (who remains unnamed for most of the novel, the way names work in this book is stunning) trying to explain to herself, and her best friend, her relationship with this older man, and, essentially, failing to:

Annie and I lived in language, but I had no words for where I’d gone, all body and pain and want.

Language can give us a lot, take us to a lot of places. But language cannot take us everywhere. At some point, bodies take over.

The Bake

Here’s a fact about me that probably won’t surprise you, if you’ve been around here for a little while: I don’t care for tropical fruit. Mangos? Whatever. Bananas? Absolutely not. Coconut? Hard pass. Guava, papaya, pineapple, passion fruit? I’m sure they’re all lovely! I’ll even eat them, if put in front of me. But I will never choose them. I’m sorry to say that this dislike of tropical fruit also extends to what I consider tropical-adjacent fruit, like peaches and nectarines. I enjoy cooking with them sometimes. But biting into a whole peach, with all that unpleasant softness between my teeth, and all that drippy juice everywhere? No thank you.

Friends, I am who I am. My favorite fruit is the apple. Beautiful crisp apples. Tart apples, sweet apples, tart sweet apples. Apples of endless flavor, shape, and color. I love apples so much that I own this cookbook and also this one (which is apparently out of print). And this cake is possibly my favorite apple cake of all time. It’s perfect.

Apple Almond Cake

This recipe comes from my beloved Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss. It is moist and rich and full of almond flavor and packed with apples. I’ve done basically nothing to the recipe.

Ingredients

• 6 apples

• 1 lemon

• 200 grams (7 ounces) almond paste

• 1/4 tsp salt

• 200 grams (14 Tbs) unsalted butter, melted and cooled

• 150 grams (3/4 cup) sugar

• 1 tsp almond extract

• 4 eggs

• 150 grams (1 1/4 cups minus 1 Tbs) all-purpose flour

• 85 grams (9 1/2 Tbs) cornstarch

• 2 tsp baking powder

• 75 grams (1/4 cup) apricot jam (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350. Line a 9-inch springform pan with parchment and butter the sides.

Zest the lemon into the bowl of a stand mixer or a medium mixing bowl. Peel and core the apples. Dice three of them, and place them in a small bowl with juice from half the lemon. Thinly slice the other three apples and toss them with the remaining lemon juice. Set aside.

Grate the almond paste into the bowl with the lemon zest. Add the salt and melted butter. Using a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, or handheld beaters, mix on medium speed until smooth, about 2 minutes. Mix in the sugar and almond extract. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating between each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.

In a separate bowl, combine the flour, cornstarch, and baking powder. Add the flour mixture to the batter and mix until just incorporated. Fold in the diced apples with a rubber spatula. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.

Arrange the sliced apples on top in overlapping concentric circles. Bake until the cake is lightly browned on top and a tester inserted in the middle comes out clean, 70-80 minutes.

If you’re using the apricot jam, heat it in a small pot (or the microwave) as soon as the cake comes out of the oven. Brush the hot jam evenly over the the top of the warm cake. Run a knife around the edges of the cake and let cool completely on a wire rack before removing it from the pan.

The Bowl and The Beat

The Bowl: Buttery Leek & Sweet Potato Soup

It’s funny how certain cookbooks have seasons in my life. This soup is vaguely, vaguely, vaguely inspired by a recipe in Annie Somerville’s Fields of Greens, a cookbook I used constantly in my early twenties. I don’t think I’ve opened it in ten years, and I don’t remember much about the original recipe, except that it had carrots and thyme, and that I loved it. So now when I make this soup, without a recipe, I always think of cooking in my first apartment, in the fall of the first season I worked on a farm, completely overwhelmed with love for vegetables.

I always make way more in big batches, to freeze or keep in the fridge for lunches, so these quantities are for a big pot. Start by roasting four medium sweet potatoes. I poke holes in them and bake them at 400 for an hour or so. Next, heat a stick of butter in a large pot. Yes, a whole stick, that’s what makes this soup so good! Thinly slice four leeks and add them to the pot, along with some salt and pepper and a whole head (again, yes!) of pressed garlic. Cook until the leeks get soft and soak up all that butter. Add a big handful of roughly chopped fresh herbs (thyme, rosemary, oregano), 3-4 diced carrots, two quarts of chicken or veggie stock, and the flesh of the roasted sweet potatoes. Let everything cook until the carrots are soft, 15-20 minutes. Blend the soup in batches. Return it to the stove and adjust the seasonings to your liking. I added a big spoonful of honey, some Aleppo pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, and a splash of lemon juice.

The Beat: The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, read by Katie Erich

I know a lot of readers gravitate toward creepy, atmospheric books in the fall. I’ve never been a reader like that, but if you are, may I recommend this book? I just started it, and already it is overflowing with dark and eerie vibes. Here’s what I know from the first two chapters: a woman is living alone with her son, who eats humans. She is a book eater—someone who eats books, not food—raised by a reclusive family in a grand, book-filled house on Yorkshire moors. The writing is so lovely. How am I supposed to resist descriptions of what fairy tales taste like, especially the forbidden ones kept on the high shelves, and deemed an unfit diet for little girls?

The Bookshelf

A Picture

I told you I went Full Fall this weekend, and that means I’ve started planning for this year’s Cookie Extravaganza! It’s a long process that involves going through all my cookbooks, making a big spreadsheet and a complicated calendar, and watching a lot of Bake Off.

Around the Internet

I made a list of some incredible nonfiction books from indie presses coming out this fall.

Now Out

Hurray! Self-Made Boys by Anna-Marie McLemore is now out! Go forth and find yourself a copy.

Bonus Recs: Poetry!

I participated in The Sealey Challenge in August, and while I didn’t read as much poetry as I did last year, it was still wonderful. I don’t think I’ll do a newsletter about it, so here are a few favorites: Reparations Now! by Ashley M. Jones, Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, and If God Is A Virus by Seema Yasmin.

The Boost

• Kaitlyn Greenidge on the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi. You can donate to the emergency water fund set up by organizations in Jackson here.

• Liberty Hardy, velocireader and all-around fantastic human, is starting a bookish newsletter! If you care about new releases, get on this train!

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: Fall is in the air, it’s coming.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!