Recent reading

Read The East Indian by Brinda Charry, historical fiction set mostly in colonial Virginia (but also London and Chennai) in the 1630s, which "recover[s], reclaim[s], and refram[es] the little-known, barely footnoted history of the earliest Indian immigrant on record to what is now the United States." More than one reviewer drew comparisons to Yaa Gyasi and Esi Edugyan, and I can see both, but I found myself reminded of Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on until I realized it was the episodic pacing: the buffeted-from-one-situation-to-another-ness of a Dickens hero, condensed into a shorter novel. There's a running reference to A Midsummer's Night Dream, which the main character sees performed in London as a child, and in particular to the untold story of the Indian boy at the center of Titania and Oberon's feud— which is a retelling that I want to read now.

Read salt slow by Julia Armfield, a collection of short stories "blending elements of horror, science fiction, mythology, and feminism," per the blurb. A lot of the stories felt like riffs on something specific, from Kafka's Metamorphosis to Frankenstein, fairy tale wolves to various stories from Greek mythology. My favorite was "The Great Awake," a melancholy story about an insomniac city haunted by the ghosts of its residents' ability to sleep; I also liked "Mantis" and "Granite"— both are about transformations, with a strangeness that seeps like tea into Armfield's descriptions of otherwise ordinary lives— and "Stop Your Women's Ears With Wax," which reimagines Homer's sirens and Euripides' maenads in the modern context of a band on tour.