Volume 2, No. 22: Hmmmm + Strawberry Rhubarb Ginger Cake

Greetings, book-gobblers and treat-inhalers! Today is the fifth day in a row that I have woken up and written at least 1000 words of my novel-in-progress first thing in the morning. I haven’t consistently worked on my fiction since February 2020. To say I don’t feel like myself when I’m not writing fiction is an understatement. Writing every morning has changed everything. The 1000 Words of Summer community that Jami Attenberg has nourished into existence is jubilant, kind, and encouraging.

I mention it because this one small commitment I have made to myself has radically changed how I feel about my life. Maybe there’s a gift out there that you, too, can give yourself.

Anyway, books! I do read books that don’t make it into the newsletter. They usually fall into one of three categories:

• Books I don’t like. It’s pretty rare, because I’m good at DNFing, but every now and then I read a book I don’t like. You won’t hear about those. Critical reviews have their place, but not in my newsletter.

• Books I like that don’t make my heart beat faster. Writing about these books doesn’t excite me. Sometimes a book is just a fun time. No need to discuss.

• Very buzzy books you'll probably find on your own, even if I do love them.

Every so often, I read a book that defies these categories. I’m calling them “hmmmmm” books. These are books that I appreciate objectively, that I can wholeheartedly recommend to other readers. I’m often struck by their prose, characterization, structural ingenuity. When I finish a hmmmm book, I immediately love it intellectually but rarely love it in my bones. What sets hmmmmm books apart from other books I respect but don’t love is that I can’t stop thinking about them.

Hmmmmm books get under my skin, but slowly. I finish them and think, “That was good, but I can’t put it in the newsletter. I can’t rave about it.” But days, weeks, months later I am still thinking about them. Scenes, ideas, and characters root down inside my brain.

Usually, when I read a book I don’t love, it slips away from me, becomes vague. Months later I can’t remember the plot, let alone any details. The magic of hmmmmm books is that they become more vivid with time. To borrow a phrase from Tolkien, they “grow in the telling” until I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love them, when they weren’t lodged inside my heart.

The Books

Backlist: The House of Rust by Khadija Abdalla Bajaber (Fabulism, 2021)

I read this book last summer. Here’s how I described it in my review for BookPage:

“When her fisherman father goes missing at sea, Aisha, unwilling to believe he’s dead, sets out to rescue him. She’s aided by a scholarly talking cat, who summons a boat made of bones. Sailing into the unknown, Aisha battles several sea monsters—and the sea itself—before finally bringing her father home.

Back in Mombasa, she finds the shape of her old life no longer fits. Awakened to the existence of a dangerous and alluring new world, her simmering desire for adventure and independence becomes impossible to ignore. Rebelling against the pressure to get married and settle down, she is drawn into the lives of the magical creatures who inhabit Mombasa, including talking crows and ancient spirits.

The House of Rust can be disorientating at first. Bajaber’s prose is lush but dizzying; it’s easy to get lost among the many names, overlapping stories and shifts in perspective. But that disorientation is also the book’s strength. Aisha, too, is disoriented, caught between two worlds, navigating the familiar roads and markets of Mombasa and the unfamiliar language of powerful crows. With remarkable skill, Bajaber, who is a Kenyan writer of Hadrami descent, navigates the novel’s duality, rendering it both a realistic drama about familial expectation, lineage and grief, as well as a darkly whimsical adventure about monsters who hold grudges and the courage it takes to face your fears head-on.”

It was that disorientation that kept me from loving this novel when I first read it. It takes some work to read. It’s slippery and sly. Both the prose and the plot. Perhaps I just read it too quickly, or wasn’t in the right mood for something so intricate and dizzying. It didn’t get it's hooks in me, but, like all great hmmmmm books, I haven’t been able to let this one go. Aisha has stayed with me: her humor and ferocity, her belief in herself, her openness to magic, her willingness to invite and create change. I find myself thinking about her at odd moments. I see her piloting her strange bone boat through a stormy sea, or roaming the streets of Mombasa, chasing some feeling deep inside herself she’s not sure how to name.

I like books about journeys, and I like coming of age stories, and I like books about change. What has stayed with me about this novel, the piece that’s grown in the telling, is the subtle but true way Bajaber blends those elements into something new. The first half of the book is about a strange, dangerous magical journey. Aisha sets out to find her father, and she does. Then she comes home, and she can’t settle. Everything is different: the city streets, her relationship with her grandmother, the ocean, and, most obviously, Aisha herself. This is where the real story begins, where the real monsters come out.

Almost a year after I first read it, this book strikes me as beautifully simple. It no longer seems disorienting or complicated, or convoluted. It’s a lovely meditation on this messy truth about change and growth, one that I have lived over and over again: So often, it’s not the journey, but what we bring back with us, that propels us toward something new.

Frontlist: Nuclear Family by Joseph Han (Fiction)

Sometimes, when I am reading a book, I am aware that I am not reading it right. I don’t mean that there is one right way to read a book. I just mean that some books are better read slowly, and I read them fast. Some books are best read a little bit at a time, maybe even flipping back to reread certain passages or chapters, and I read them straight through in one big gulp. Some books are good first thing in the morning, when my brain is fresh and new, but instead I stay up reading them deep into the night. This is one of the problems with reading so much: sometimes I forget to give myself permission to slow down.

I read Nuclear Family in all the wrong ways. I read it fast, in one big gulp, when I should have let it linger, like the ghosts it’s about.

Here’s a beautiful passage that gives you a sense of how much movement there is in Han’s prose, how circular it is, how many places he goes to within a single paragprah:

Baik Harabeoji led him back and kicked the door down—a door the size of a country, shut in one’s face, the country the size of a wound flooding with minjok—his people, his parents and grandparents’ people, who built families that became their own countries, and leaving became another name for a wound left wide open. A missing doorknob, the one he always needed, a lump in his throat.

This is not the sort of writing made to be read quickly. What amazes me is that, despite what I can only describe as a lackluster read of an inventive, playful, unusual novel, something essential about this book got through to me anyway. Han has so much to say—about Korea, about US imperialism, about borders, about the movement of people into and out of and between countries. Most poignantly, he has a lot to say about what it means to be haunted, possessed, a ghost.

In the past few months, I’ve thought about this book whenever someone mentions anything related to ghosts. I’ve thought about this book when thinking about my own grandparents. I’ve thought about this book while walking my dog, swimming in the river, slicing onions. I thought about this book the week the decision that will overturn Roe was leaked. I thought about this book while I was repotting all my houseplants. I thought about this book while looking at pictures of the Pride parade on the island where I used to olive.

I can’t stop thinking about this book.

Once again, from my review for BookPage:

“Hoping for a fresh start away from his family, 20-something Jacob Cho takes a job teaching English in Seoul. Not long after his arrival, he attempts to cross the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, and is taken into custody. Back in Hawaii, his family is consumed with worry. His parents are struggling to keep their restaurant in business, while his sister, Grace, spends more and more of her time getting high.

None of them know that Jacob has been possessed by the ghost of his dead grandfather, Tae-woo, who is desperate to get across the DMZ to reunite with the family he left behind during the war. In Jacob, Tae-woo sees his best chance to get across the wall that has kept him—and countless others—separated from those they love, even in death.

Through this literal possession of a young man by a sly and grieving grandfather, Han tells a moving and specific story about more symbolic possessions—how violence possesses bodies, how history possesses the present, and how a person’s stories remain alive in their descendants, even if those stories go unspoken.”

There is a lot that is beautiful in this novel, some of which struck me when I first read it, and some of which didn’t. I could see all the smart and interesting things Han was doing with structure and plot and POV and formatting, though I didn’t feel them in my gut. But something about the way he interrogates and writes about possession has lingered. It’s a feeling, a sense, a presence. I’ve come back to it again and again, and every time I come back to it, every time I think about Jacob walking around with the ghost of his grandfather inside of him, I feel it more keenly. It has become something wild and persistent, a vast and expansive reckoning that keeps rearranging itself inside my head.

I just read Mateo Askaripour’s beautiful review (via NYT, google it if the link blocks you). He describes it as a book about “fallout — from war, from family obligation, from all that goes unsaid — and what it takes to move forward after a disaster.” I’m struck by how differently books can land for each of us, how much unique magic words can weave. Now I’m thinking about the implications of fallout and possession, what they have to say to each other, what silence there is between them.

This book has been haunting me since March. I can’t wait to read it again.

Upcoming: Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (Speculative Fiction, Flatiron, July 12th)

I would like a do-over with this book, although, in the course of writing this review, I feel like I’ve already given myself one. It is an eerie, beautiful book about Leah, a marine scientist, and Miri, her wife. Leah works for a shadowy research organization called the Institute. A short submarine voyage turns into a six-month ordeal when Leah and her team are stranded at the bottom of the ocean. When she returns to Miri, she is not the same.

This book reads like a mystery, alternating between Leah’s POV during the submarine voyage and Miri’s POV in the present. There is a lot of narrative tension: what happened to Leah? What’s happening to her now? What’s going to happen? I was completely invested in the story—the beauty of the language, the strangeness of it—until, about halfway through, my brain started doing an "Explain! Explain! Please explain!" dance, and the lack of explanation became too distracting.

Friends, there are no explanations. None. Absolutely nothing about this book makes sense. It is not a mystery because nothing is solved. Armfield doesn’t offer a single why. I wish I had understood that going in, because if you aren’t expecting resolution, if you aren’t waiting for the ease of explanation, if you can just give yourself over to the narrative and let it carry you along, this is a beautiful, surprising book about grief and transformation.

I read this in February and it has been haunting my thoughts since then, gently but persistently knocking around inside my brain. What I’ve come to understand (and love) about it, with a bit of space, is that it’s a story about what’s unknowable. The sea, deep and ever-changing and ancient, is unknowable. This messy brilliant planet we inhabit is unknowable. Even the people we love are, in some ways, unknowable. Sometimes our own memories are unknowable.

This book is about what it feels like to live with and inside that unknowing—to love a place, a person, even a moment—despite it. It’s about what it feels like to grieve something you never fully understood, to come face to face with a feeling, a creature, an idea, a memory you don’t know how to name. I’ve been thinking about it for months, and I’ve come around to the idea that maybe Armfield achieved exactly what she set out to do. Maybe she was trying to articulate the loss and alienation and despair and confusion that comes from living in a world that is, at its core, mysterious to us. Maybe she was trying to convey that slippery feeling of loving someone even as they transform into a shape you cannot understand.Maybe she wanted to capture what it means to love and grieve and rage and tend in the midst of endless uncertainty. This is not a safe or settled feeling. It is not a legible feeling.

A long time ago, in a class on short fiction, a writing teacher told me I have a novelistic instinct. I’ve always remembered this because it felt so immediately true. This is how I approach reading, writing, and life. I want to know what happens. I want to know how the story ends. I won’t, of course, because I will die before the story ends. We will all die before the story ends. We are never going to find out what happens. This is what it means to be human: we live our little lives as best we can, and the waves and the whales and the trees and the people we love and eventually just the stars and the galaxies, the supernovas and the black holes, go on without us.

This is the fear this book awoke in me, the deep place it touched, the reason I haven’t been able to let it go. The whole story sits in that strange, unsettled, unsettling place of unknowing. We don’t know how it ends. We can’t know how it ends. It never really ends.

Despite the coldness of that knowledge, despite the sorrow of it, despite how hard it can sometimes be to move through the world with loose ends dangling, questions tugging, contradictions coiling around us like smoke, there is an almost unbearable sweetness in the smallness of our lives, the little intimacies, the forgettable wonders. Those are in this novel, too. They don’t loom as large and threatening as the mysteries, but they persist. They cut through all that unknowing like bursts of fragrance, color, light.

I used to imagine the sea as something that seethed and then quieted, a froth of activity tapering down into the dark and still. I know now that this isn’t how it goes, that things beneath the surface are what we have to move and change to cause the chain reaction higher up.

It’s out on July 12th and you can preorder it here.

The Bake

I picked up my first strawberries of the season last weekend! I made a cake! It’s adapted from Snacking Cakes! I may as well just rename this section “Laura Bakes Her Way Through Snacking Cakes”. Anyway, it was very tasty.

Strawberry Rhubarb Ginger Cake

I added rhubarb and ginger to the original recipe, which makes for a delicious cake! The rhubarb adds a lot of moisture to the mixture, so be sure to give it a nice long baking time and test for doneness right in the center.

Ingredients

• Zest from 1 lemon

• 150 grams (3/4 cup) sugar

• 2 eggs

• 165 grams (3/4 cup) yogurt

• 1/2 cup (120 ml) canola or sunflower oil (any neutral oil works)

• 1 tsp ground ginger

• 1 tsp vanilla

• 3/4 tsp salt

• 95 grams (3/4 cup) all-purpose flour

• 65 grams (1/2 cup) spelt flour

• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder

• 1/4 tsp bakin soda

• 55 grams (5 Tbs) candied ginger, finely chopped

• 1-2 stalks (120 grams) rhubarb, chopped

• 1 pint strawberries, sliced

• 2 tsp demerara sugar

Butter an 8-inch round cake pan and line the bottom with parchment paper. I used a springform pan, which makes unmolding easier. If you use a regular cake pan, line it with parchment strips that hang over the edges on two sides. Preheat the oven to 350.

In a medium bowl, combine the lemon zest and sugar. Mix with your fingers until fragrant. Add the eggs and whisk until pale and slightly thickened, about 2 minutes. Add the yogurt, oil, ginger, vanilla, and salt. Whisk until smooth.

Add both flours, the baking powder, and baking soda. Give it a few good stirs with a rubber spatula, and then add the ginger and rhubarb. Mix until well-combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with an offset spatula. You can arrange the strawberries prettily on top, or scatter them messily. Either way, it’ll be delicious.

Bake for 55-65 minutes, until golden brown on top and a tester inserted in the middle comes out clean. Let cool for about 15 minutes before unmolding and/or lifting the cake out of the pan.

The Bowl and The Beat

The Bowl: It’s So Easy I Don’t Know What to Call It

The high tunnel sungolds have made their first appearance at one of my go-to farm stands, and I’ve been treating myself. This dish is so boring it feels silly to tell you about it, but it’s what I made for dinner last night—and for five minutes of chopping and ten minutes to boil water for pasta—it is quite delicious.

Slice a pint of cherry tomatoes in halves or fourths. Chop up a big handful of basil. Toss with some cooked pasta (any kind), olive oil, salt and pepper, and a whole lot of Parmesan. That’s it.

To make it more interesting, you could caramelize some onions first, and add other kinds of cheese: goat, mozzarella, pecorino…If you have any pesto lying around in your freeze it’s tasty in this, too.

The Beat: First Time for Everything by Henry Fry, read by Will Watt

I finished this last week but I’m currently listening to a book I’m going to review here soon. I enjoyed this one! It’s a mostly lighthearted romp about being young and queer in London. Danny breaks up with his boyfriend and then gets kicked out of his straight friend’s flat, so he moves into his bestie Jacob’s super queer communal house. Jacob encourages him to go to therapy (with their therapist—I loved the central role therapy plays in this book but that part stretched the limits of believability for me). Between the new house and the therapy Danny finally starts to deal with…well, basically everything. It’s not perfect (Fry’s interrogation of race felt superficial to me) but overall it’s surprisingly heartfelt story about dealing with your shit.

The Bookshelf

A Picture

For the second year in a row, I’m posting a queer book rec every day during Pride! Some I’ve written about here, some I will eventually write about here, and some are books I love that will probably never make it into the newsletter.

openbookopen

A post shared by Laura Sackton (@openbookopen)

Around the Internet

On Book Riot, I wrote about how much I love having bookshelves that reflect who I am. I also made a list of some of my favorite queer audiobook narrators!

Now Out

Hurray! Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn and Buffalo Is the New Buffalo by Chelsea Vowel are now out! So is The Perfect Crimes of Marian Hayes by Cat Sebastian, if you’re looking for a delightful queer romance to read this month!

Bonus Recs: More Books that Made Me Go Hmmmmm

This is a very particular kind of book for me, and it’s honestly not that common that I come across them. One that’s been on my mind recently is the very buzzy Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart. I was not prepared for the bleakness of it, and I did not enjoy it. As often happens with books centered around queer suffering, I felt numb while reading it, and angry once I’d finished. But I can’t stop thinking about it. Every now and then a book comes along that makes me think about queer suffering books in a different way. This is one.

The Boost

Here are some true and funny words that are getting me through.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: I moved in after these irises bloomed last year, so it was a beautiful surprise when they burst open in all their blue-purple glory last week.

Catch you next week, bookish friends!