My latest book purchases and how I justified them

Mar 17

Book Culture, one of my favorite bookstores, is having a massive sale on select items—the kind where you could end up with twelve new books for less than $100. As a book lover, one of the boundaries I set for myself is that I get books from the library 98% of the time and do my best to shop at independent bookstores the other 2%, buying secondhand whenever possible. I have to be able to justify purchases to myself instead of recklessly buying—no matter how great the deal is.

Since I mostly bought remainder books, some only had one discounted copy, but you can check out what else they have on sale online or at their 112th St. location.

Here’s what I bought and why:

Second Place | Rachel Cusk

Last summer, I bought a used copy of Kudos at Asbury Book Cooperative during a long weekend. My sophisticated reasoning was 1) I recognized her name and 2) I really liked the cover, so I bought it without realizing it was actually the third book of a trilogy. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m a bit of a sucker for a nice cover. With my coursework complete and thesis project behind me, I’ve finally been able to dive into my basically infinite TBR pile. I requested the first two books of the series—Outline and Transit—from the library and finished each one in a day. I’ll say more in an upcoming letter, but I’m on a major Cusk kick and was so excited to find another of her novels on sale.

Fierce Attachments | Vivian Gornick

Despite being on a heavy fiction kick, I’ll always love getting lost in a memoir. Like many a writer who has taken a nonfiction writing course in the last two decades, I was introduced to Gornick via The Situation and the Story in a personal essay course as an undergrad and have gone on to share her wisdom with my own students. Still, I’ve never read her personal work, though several classmates and professors have mentioned it. Seeing her memoir for sale was the final push I needed to read beyond her craft work.

One's Company: A Novel | Ashley Hutson

I immediately recognized the cover from several “best of” lists last year, so I googled it and the phrases “deep and raw, thought provoking and mind-bending” and “one woman’s escape into a world of obsessive imagination” were all I needed to click “add to cart.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory | Caitlin Doughty

I bought this for two reasons: 1) I’ve watched several of Doughty’s videos from her Ask A Mortician series over the years, and 2) I’ve been preoccupied about death’s inevitability lately and hope that literary exposure therapy will help me get over it.

The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery | Mary Cregan

One of my longtime interests is mental health—especially personal accounts. As someone impacted by depression, I love coming across stories of living with and recovering from the illness (I revisit Jenny Zhang’s “How It Feels” at least once every six months). Again—google was my friend, and reading “candid memoir interweaving the author's descent into depression with a medical and cultural history of the illness” affirmed my choice. Cultural history incorporated into the personal is extremely my jam, so I’m especially excited to dig into this one.

Everybody: A Book About Freedom | Olivia Laing

I read The Lonely City shortly after it came out and absolutely fell in love. Laing’s one of the writers I’ve been meaning to read more from when I found the time, and the time has finally been found.

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation | Anne Helen Petersen

I was one of the millions who read Petersen’s viral Buzzfeed essay and several of its rebuttals in 2019, and I appreciated her followup that acknowledged her positionality and featured other perspectives so much that I immediately subscribed to her newsletter, Culture Study. As a millennial who has gotten caught in burnout’s undertow too many times to count and a huge fan of her writing, this is another pick on top of the TBR pile.

To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction | Phillip Lopate

As with The Situation and the Story, I’ve been taught from and taught excerpts from this craft book throughout my educational career. I checked it out from the library after I’d gotten into grad school and figured it’s time to own a copy.

Verge | Lidia Yuknavitch

The Chronology of Water is one of my all-time favorite memoirs, but I haven’t read any of Yuknavitch’s fiction aside from Dora: A Headcase. Once again, writer I like, have wanted to read more of, etc, etc.

The Office of Historical Corrections | Danielle Evans

Another book that I’ve been “meaning to get to” for years, I’ve heard incredible things about this short story collection. I remember seeing it on several “best of” lists and had it personally recommended to me a few times.

The Best of Me | David Sedaris

David Sedaris is one of the first writers I fell in love with when I learned that “nonfiction” was more than math textbooks, so he’ll always hold a special place in my heart. He was one of the authors I spent all of my money on in the used section of the Strand as a college kid, but I haven’t kept up with his newer work (as in post-2015, aside from a New Yorker essay here and there). I’ve had my eye on this collection since it came out in 2020 and am so ready to catch up with this compilation.

The Namesake | Jhumpa Lahiri

Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter” is one of my favorite short stories—it might even be my favorite, period. I read it for my introductory fiction course in my first semester of college and immediately bought and devoured a ragged copy of Interpreter of Maladies which still sits on my shelf. Part of me has been afraid to read her novels because I loved her short stories so much that I feel like nothing else can compare. But 2023 is my year of facing fears head on, so I’m diving in at long last.

Here’s to the glorious reading experiences to come in 2023!

p.s. I published something!