What did you read this summer?

This was the first summer in years that I taught a class during the break, but I still managed to get in some nature time on the Olympic peninsula, Mount Hood, and Willamette National Forest-- basically DIY writing and reading retreats. Writing was mainly revision of last year's revision of my novel manuscript in advance of Ann Hood's Spannocchia Writers Workshop in Tuscany this November.

My reading of late has been focused on literature written by American women and Asian American authors for courses I'll be teaching this fall and winter at Clark College. Here are a few titles I especially enjoyed:

The Magnificent Ruins by Nayantara Roy, published by Algonquin, 2024.

This is the debut novel for an author who is a close friend of one of my daughters, and so it's been a special joy to see all the positive attention it has attracted. The story follows Lila De, a twenty-nine-year-old editor at a New York publishing house that has just been purchased by a larger corporate entity. Lila is estranged from her mother in India, but when she learns that her grandfather has left her the ancestral home in which her mother and other relatives live, she returns to Kolkata to deal with a complex web of family business, relationships, and matters of the heart. The intergenerational resonances of trauma are softened in the telling with immersive details of the ancient house, the city, the food-- a "rare feast" of a novel, according to author Rachel Lyon. And it's now available in paperback!

Hula by Jasmine Iolani Hakes, published by Harper Collins, 2024

This is another debut novel by an author I met in Ann Hood's revision workshop at Writers in Paradise last year. This story also springs from the heart of a troubled mother/daughter relationship. Set in Hilo, Hawaii, the book explores three generations of women and the origin and perpetuation of hula as a family dynamic and expression of Native Hawaiian culture. The structure of the book itself borrows from the structure of hula and utilizes a collective narrative voice in some sections that helps to illuminate for the non-indigenous reader important aspects of a non-Western culture and tradition still very much alive today. Jasmine's next novel, The Pohaku, will be coming soon, so watch for it!

Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, published by Penguin Randomhouse, 2021

Please don't imagine if you've seen the movie that it's any kind of substitute for reading this book. The movie pulls all the wrong punches and even changes, inexplicably, important aspects of the story, I suppose to make it more "palatable" to a mainstream audience not ready to cross the threshold into this debut novel's wild interrogation of the feral complexities of modern motherhood. The book-to-movie translation needed a female director with visionary gifts equivalent to Yorgos Lanthimos. But that's not what happened. So go read the book!

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1905

Edith Wharton was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, in 1921 for her novel The Age of Innocence. Somehow in my adolescent deep dive into all things Western canon, I missed reading Wharton entirely, and I'm glad I doubled back. More than a hundred years old, written before women were "given" the right to vote, this novel still resonates, perhaps even more so in the context of the tyrannies of social media, cancel culture, and the "nostalgic" attempt to relaunch the "tradwife" role. The power of the writer's style has not diminished with age, and remains eminently accessible as she probes the interiority of the story's protagonist, Lily Bates, in the context of New York's high society as the 19th century became the 20th.

All for now! There are literally dozens more of my summer reads deserving of mention, and I'm so thrilled to witness books written by friends and colleagues finding their way through the publishing labyrinth. More soon.

In the meantime, I'm curious to know what stayed with you from your summer reading...