Tuesday Is Here, and So Are We.
We remain undaunted.
Hi, all. It was a lovely week - lots of kids’ birthday parties, a winning trivia night (!!!) and quality time spent with The Pitt.
I’ve also returned to crochet after a multi-year hiatus; people who were pregnant during the pandemic, your now-toddlers will soon be receiving their long-promised baby blankets. Get excited!
What I Finished Reading Last Week: More Scandinavian Thrillers Edition
My mother-in-law recommended the show Department Q to me and my husband, but we haven’t watched it yet because all I want to watch is Dr. Robby, Dr. King, and Dr. Santos. However, it’s been on my radar, so when I saw the book that inspired the show in the “new and now” section of Libby, I downloaded it.
From the publisher: “Carl Mørck used to be one of Denmark’s best homicide detectives. Then a hail of bullets destroyed the lives of two fellow cops, and Carl—who didn’t draw his weapon—blames himself. So a promotion is the last thing he expects. But Department Q is a department of one, and Carl’s got only a stack of cold cases for company. His colleagues snicker, but Carl may have the last laugh, because one file keeps nagging at him: a liberal politician vanished five years earlier and is presumed dead. But she isn’t dead…yet.”
This book is wildly improbable. Carl is taciturn, self-sabotaging, and emotionally stunted — but he’s ALSO a brilliant detective who figures things out that no one else can, lucks into a brilliant secretary who just happens to be an ace crime-solver himself, and manages to deftly navigate the bureaucracy that keeps trying to sideline him despite the fact that he plays Sudoku for hours every day in his office.
The most egregious part of the book will come as no shock to anyone who has ever read a book written by a man: the author’s depictions of women. Sure, some of the ladies in the book are smart, but what the author seems to find most notable are boobs, legs, and lips. Adler-Olsen writes about the boobs of the missing politician the book is about, the boobs of the crisis counselor he is forced to see by his boss, and the boobs of one of the administrative assistants in the police department. Also, Carl imagines fucking every single woman he encounters, and if he doesn’t imagine it, it’s only because she’s too ugly or fat, which he helpfully notes for the reader, because nothing moves a story forward like dehumanizing women!
Despite my criticisms of the book, though, it was really fun. I am a sucker for unsolved murders, Copenhagen, multiple timelines, and family trauma. Read if you: thought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was just too hard on men; like your plots twisty, silly, and suspenseful; wonder how effective the bends are as an instrument of murder.
What You Should Read: Immersive Doorstopper Edition
At the end of the week, my family and I are heading out of town to go to…ALASKA! I am so excited. I am hoping to see an orca, a sled dog, and Bigfoot.
One of my favorite pre-vacation rituals is picking the books I’m going to read, because when I see that book on my shelf years later, it feels like a little time portal back to wherever I was traveling. For me, the best vacation book is one that is a) long, so I don’t run out of shit to read, because then you end up having to read a book called The Starter Wife on the airplane, and let me tell you, that was a painful flight b) plotty, because even I don’t want to read depressing, realistic slices of ordinary life when I’m traveling, and c) something easy to share with my fellow travelers if they get bored, aka no zombies, plagues, or apocalypses.
Below are three books that I feel would serve anyone well on vacation, if you are lucky enough to escape whatever city you’re in for a place that seems better.
First up, a book that was so good it made me forget I was in the middle of a pandemic, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko.
From the publisher: “In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger. When she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.”
Guys — a shameful pregnancy, geopolitical instability, generational trauma?!? It’s a dream. I have to say, this kind of book is not usually my thing; I find most “multi-generational sagas” to be treacly and predictable. This one, though, features zero treacle. Characters make really bad choices, don’t say the things they need to say, and lie to themselves. The author does an amazing job with setting; this book and Crying in H Mart have made me want to go to South Korea a LOT. Also, the author tweeted one of my favorite things EVER:
Read if you: loved One Hundred Years of Solitude but want less magic/authorial misogyny; are curious about the historic tension between the people of Korea and the people of Japan; feel that a combination of war, lost love, and feminine grit is just the ticket to get you through the rest of 2025.
Next up, a book that I recommend on Reddit probably weekly, David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.
From the publisher: “The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the ‘high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island’ that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, deceitful interpreters, costly courtesans, earthquakes, and typhoons comes Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk who has five years in the East to earn a fortune of sufficient size to win the hand of his wealthy fiancée back in Holland. But Jacob’s original intentions are eclipsed after a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city’s powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken. The consequences will extend beyond Jacob’s worst imaginings.”
Don’t be discouraged by this not very exciting synopsis; this is a phenomenal, brilliant, perfect novel, even if you don’t give a shit about Japan’s closed period or Dutch imperialism. Mitchell is a goddamn master (see: Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas). This book was so evocative and rich that I felt like I actually learned something about history, which is weird because I have trained my brain to immediately reject any knowledge related to wars, government, dates, and world events of the past. The general vibes of this novel: longing, loneliness, mystery. Read if you: enjoy stories about white people finding out they’re not right about everything; long for that Remains of the Day-style unrequited love in your books; have always wanted to find yourself in the misty mountains of Japan.
Finally, and I’m just now realizing that the theme of this round-up is historical fiction, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White.
From Carmen Maria Machado’s NPR review: “Crimson begins with a nameless narrator physically leading you, the reader, through vomit-coated cobblestone in turn-of-the-century London, to the doorways of some of the novel's protagonists. Eventually, this voice falls away, and you rotate between the points of view of a large, Dickensian cast of characters, including: William, a feckless, layabout heir to a perfume fortune; his fragile and childlike wife Agnes; his young daughter, Sophie; his deeply religious brother, Henry and Henry's devout friend Emmeline Fox. And at the center of the story is Sugar, a hypnotically compelling teenage prostitute with sharp wits and an even sharper intellect. She walks into William's radar and becomes the center of his and the reader's obsession; the entire novel warps and bends around her. As she transforms from being William's evening entertainment to kept woman to lover and beyond, she writes a pulpy novel about a woman attaining bloody revenge against the men who have wronged her…But beneath the compelling sexual subject matter, the wildly entertaining theatrics and rich historical detail, The Crimson Petal and the White is ultimately — subtly — a book about feminism. The male characters recede into the background, and each woman — a sex worker, a religious zealot, a naive wife, a young girl — shuffles off her respective yoke: well-intentioned men, not-so-well-intentioned men, religious literalism, class repression, gender expectations. Their storylines don't all end happily — but there is a sense of possibility, of motion. It is feminism that doesn't announce itself, and explores all of its own complexities and complications.”
Guys, if Carmen Maria Machado says a book is about feminism, you KNOW it’s about feminism. I read this in college, right around the same time as my Dickens seminar, in which we read both Nicholas Nickleby and Little Dorrit in ten weeks. Even for me, that was a lot of reading, and I cannot say I’m a huge Dickens fan, but what he did so well — enormous casts of characters, class, sense of place, power struggles — is what Faber also does brilliantly, albeit in way that is more suited to my personal tastes. Sugar is such a memorable protagonist, and Faber brings her to life vividly. Read if you: have a high tolerance for bodily grossness, because there is a lot of it in this book; relish stories about subjugated women fucking shit UP; can’t help but find Victorian England to be enchanting, despite the horrors of industrialization and the poop in the streets.
Candy News: Ice Cream Edition
My husband surprised me this week with a treat we often enjoyed early in our courtship, whilst watching many episodes of Treehouse Masters on his couch in his apartment in Hollywood.
Ben and Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Cookie is probably my favorite grocery store ice cream ever. First of all, the Oreo pieces are not pathetic little crumbles; they are full-on slabs. Second, the ice cream itself is not overly sweet, nor is it too minty. I often find that mint ice cream tastes mouthwashy, but this one never does. Third, and I don’t know if this is a feature or a bug, but I can eat half of pint of this in one sitting and not feel uncomfortably full. And I gotta be honest, putting ice cream into a bowl makes it taste worse to me; I want the cardboard container experience. You can’t have the cardboard container experience with every ice cream, but you can with Ben and Jerry’s. Also, love these two Jewish kings for their refusal to kowtow to the Israeli government. A true workhorse of my dessert arsenal.
Pop Culture Moment I’m Thinking About This Week: Cacio e Pepe
My husband made Grossy Pelosi’s cacio e pepe for dinner tonight because he is the best. Anyway, I cannot eat this dish or even think of it without recalling this brilliant video, which I will now share with you. You are welcome.
Is there ANYTHING better than a person breaking into an accent that they cannot rightfully claim to say the name of a food? NO. IT IS SIMPLY THE BEST. I’m drinking the milkekay!
What I’m Looking Forward To: Travel Edition
Somehow, against the odds, I am going on a Disney cruise to Alaska. I do not like Disneyland; I find no whimsy or wonder in it. I won’t even go with my kids, and I do all kinds of weird shit for them, like seeing the Minecraft movie in the theater and not screaming at them when they literally wipe their effluvium on my clothing. Furthermore, I am not a cruiser, as I dislike groups of people and I feel the best way to get to know a new place is perhaps not to sail past it on a germ incubator disguised as a boat but to actually GO to it…BUT it’s a family vacation and supposedly this is the best way to see our fiftieth state, and I’m looking forward to spending time with the other Emkins, so I am feeling excited despite it all.
[Just checked, Hawaii was after Alaska, but I was close!! Also: my husband and I were talking about Alaska many years ago and I said something about being confused as to how people could drive there because it is an island. He said, It’s not an island. I said, Of course it is. He said, No, seriously, what the fuck are you talking about. I said, It’s a large island north of Hawaii. We were already married at this point so he had no choice but to explain to me the truth, which is that, although Alaska is often depicted on maps as an inset above Hawaii, it’s actually NOT an island and is attached to CANADA. I was, and remain, shook.]
(See, Alaska is that magenta shape down in the left corner!! It all makes SENSE to me.)
We are also going to Vancouver for a few days before, which is exciting because I’ve never been to Canada despite my deep affinity for many Canadian people, particularly Celine Dion and Sandra Oh.
On that note, I will not be posting next Tuesday, as I will be asea on a large ship somewhere north of Hawaii. See you all in August, hopefully relaxed and having read some great books.
I loved Black Swan Green -- will add your Mitchell title to my "to read" list. :)
Currently reading Bellweather Rhapsody and love it. TY for that rec!
Have a great trip!