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Savannah

@paperbacksav

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heavy is the head that is literate
nj & nyc
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book reviews and essays ￬￬

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no because what are some authors even talking about…?!

Didion & Babitz has been the most frustrating read that’s simultaneously a five star read for me—it’s great in the history, the use of interviews and letters, despite all its name-dropping and odd attempts at framing the story as one big gossip session, but the way the author chose to write it has been incredibly frustrating, “Reader, you’ll note I said frustrating,” and reads almost like a smear campaign to give Eve the odd justice the author feels she deserves against Didion.

a book about women writers that so diligently places two women against each other on the main mistake of assuming a woman who has more s3x is liberated and free and the other who chooses not to write about her s3xlife is secretly deeply repressed.

obviously my main gripe is the author was awarded the privilege of many direct interviews and a close relationship with Babitz, yet all of Joan’s feelings and perspectives are assumed or told by others—mainly men—talking about her. I do wonder how different this book would’ve been had the author had access to the NYPL archive of Didion’s.

anyway. much to say about this one and we’re not even done

[#bookstagram #booktok annotating annotations writing in books margins taking notes cursive handwriting writer nonfiction] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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a month ago

The perfect little book of essays. Five stars.

John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed is a collection of essays about life as humans on this odd planet and reviews on the things we encounter, from Sunsets to Diet Dr Pepper.

It’s a great book if you’re curious about reading non-fiction but don’t know where to start.

Each essay reads like a YouTube video, striking the perfect harmony between autobiographical tidbits—you get to know John Green detached from his novels and his YouTube videos—and researched topics.

It’s a book of mini deep dives that feel like going down a rabbit hole in your teenage room at 3am. It was so, so fun to read, and constantly had me noting things down in my commonplace journal, sparking my own research like shoots off a potato, and is the source of many fun facts being dropped into my daily conversations now. Did you know monkeys could whisper? Isn’t that terrifying?

It’s also a book full of quotes from poems and writers and visionaries. BIG day for people (me) who collect quotes.

That’s not to say I also didn’t cry like a child. I cried a lot. So much so that I had to start keeping count in the table of contents, marking “cried” next to each that made me sob: “Sunsets,” “Harvey,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Sycamore Trees” (the end got me), “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance” (I love being alive).

If aliens crash landed into earth and demanded a book that summarizes our human experience, I’d probably recommend this one.

[#bookstagram booksta booktok book review reviews recs recommendations nonfiction nonfic essay collection tbr] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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16 days ago

ai overview? don’t know her

working on a substack article about literacy this week… likely place for me to be. but this is what the inside of my brain sounds like during research

[#bookstagram books booksta journal articles reading literacy crisis literary rates that Atlantic article on reading annotating cursive handwriting penmanship note taking writing writer] taken in New York, New York by @paperbacksav

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a month ago

Clandestine in Chile is a true story documented by Gabriel García Márquez and written in his signature stunning prose.

In 1973, the Chilean film director Miguel Littín fled Chile after a U.S.-supported military coup toppled the existing socialist government, beginning the reign of terror headed by Chile’s new dictator, Pinochet.

Desperate to return to his home country to reunite with his friends and family, he sneaks back into Chile in 1985 in an elaborate disguise to catch a glimpse at the life he had been exiled from. His goal: secretly film life under Pinochet’s reign to expose how miserable Chilean life under fascist rule has become, how the financial prosperity Pinochet was boasting about held no real merit in the daily life of Chileans.

Gabriel García Márquez interviews Littín, condensing 18 hours of audio into 116 pages, told from the first-person perspective of Littín. It’s beautifully written, with a plot that feels like a thriller at times: Littín goes through the hassle of hiring foreign film crews with permits to record the country under false pretenses and confronts members of the military, creating a narrative where you are worried he’s going to be caught at any moment.

I’d expected a history of Chile, of Pinochet’s reign and a perspective of the other end of American involvement in foreign country’s affairs. What this book ended up being was something incredibly moving, about the connections we have to places and what happens when politicians change the home you’ve always known. If, when you are exiled from your home country, you go back, will you still see yourself there?

“I had an irrational impulse to identify myself, to shout out my name, to tell the world that was my right to be home.”

[#bookstagram booksta books book recs recommendations book review reviews literary nonfiction narrative nonfiction nonfic journalism books to read tbr nyrb New York review books] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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5 hours ago

10 books in September 🫨 majority of them Didion (feels performative)

favorite fiction read was The Safekeep— AHHHHHHHH

favorite nonfic was The Anthropocene Reviewed— obviously? wtf

favorite Didion was Notes to John, tied with Blue Nights— disappointed by Magical Thinking in the shadow of its hype

not pictured is Cloud Six by Amy Fusselman! And a DNF of Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep ☹️

ft. my journal entry from this morning:

“Unnatural to think September is already behind us, swept under the calendar’s rug just like that. The response to seeing time pass, no matter seconds or years, is always the same: What had I even been doing? Surely, there are minutes unaccounted for, robbed of. How else did we start the month, then end it, with feeling like nothing in between? I figure it’s due to a lack of journaling, which when not documenting is the same as ignoring, as lying by omission. There my days have gone, to the bleak and dark vortex of time, because I had not trapped them here like summer fireflies, fleeting and then missed. Now all we rely on is memory and faulty recall. I’ve been reading more than I’d assumed myself capable. I read 10 books this month.”

[#bookstagram writing writer journal journaling cursive penmanship handwriting books tbr wrap up litfic literary fiction nonfiction nonfic September wrapped] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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4 days ago

“She had done what a man would have done, a man who takes unauthorised baths, unauthorised time, unauthorised people. And where did they learn that? At school? From their fathers? In clubs? Did it have something to do with money?”

It’s December 1962 in a small village outside of Bristol.

Two young couples live isolated in the country side with nobody but each other around, a short distance between their houses: one is a quaint, beautiful cottage, the other a run-down farm that is not sufficiently heated at all.

The women are both pregnant, the basis of their friendship.

One of the coldest winters on record for England—known as the Big Freeze of 1963 with temps below -20C with snow blanketing villages for over two months—arrives and the two couples realize they are completely isolated with only each other.

It’s a page-turner that is full of delicious prose similar to Steinbeck’s classic sentences, sentences that make you sigh and say, God that’s beautiful, out loud. The tensions between the two families as they turn inward in a time of isolation has the same vibe as the contrasting families in East of Eden. How can two families be so different, despite experiencing the same nature in the same location?

It feels like heavy fog, cold fronts, dampness. It smells like fresh ice, rain water, cigarettes in a carpeted room and strong perfume. It explores what the role of a “good wife” truly looks like, what it means for a woman to be a slut in the shadow of a perfect housewife, motherhood, marriage, the general role of women, complete with a father-son relationship and living up to your father’s name, very similar to East of Eden’s main themes.

Perfect book to cure your East of Eden hangover 🫶

[#bookstagram book reviews recs recommendations literary fiction lit fic tbr New Yorker books booker prize shortlist read reading] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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4 days ago

because what else am I going to do with the blank pages???

I loveeeee when books have 2-3 pages of blanks at the end, I’m always taking random notes (my copy of Anthropocene Reviewed has notes from documentaries I was watching while the book was nearby at the end in the blanks) and using it was a way to summarize my thoughts, recall what I just read and make sense of it all.

I reference these notes later for book reviews, or for recommending someone a book and talking about it! I usually put the main themes in bullet points so it’s easy to scan for when I want to recommend a book that’s similar to another.

This little habit has made a huge difference in remembering what I read (our brains are all fried I am no different) and letting the book’s content marinate in my mind.

Book here was Cloud Six by Amy Fusselman!

No trending audio so you can hear the asmr scratches 🙂‍↔️🫶

[#bookstagram handwriting penmanship cursive journaling journal writer writing pen pens fountain pen ink book reviews recs critical thinking skills reading read English major annotation] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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5 days ago

Peak mood reader season 🍂

Convinced there is no better feeling than reading a gothic book when the weather outside is misty and leaves are changing and there’s a chill in the air.

Books I’m finally reading now that it’s fall:

Jane Eyre— I don’t think I’ve read Jane Eyre since I was in high school, over ten years ago, and even then I don’t remember reading it in its entirety. I’m thrilled to read it as an adult, especially after taking courses that focused on the lives of the Brontë sisters. It feels like fall isn’t fall without a Brontë novel keeping you company (last year it was a deep dive into Wuthering Heights).

Rebecca— another one I remember reading when I was younger, this one when I was 13, but I felt largely disconnected from it. I’m excited to see the new details and storylines that escaped me at that age, which is the beauty of re-reading books at different times in your life.

Stoner— The start of fall aligns with back to school, new stationary, and curated reading lists in my brain. Tom Hanks character says in You’ve Got Mail, “Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies,” and I don’t think we ever move on from that feeling in September. Stoner follows the course of William Stoner’s life as he leaves his family’s farm to study agriculture at university and is awakened to the magic of literature, becoming a professor instead. Maybe my most exciting and prioritized read of the season.

🍂 What books feel like fall to you????

[#bookstagram books book recs fall tbr autumn reading reads books to read in fall nyrb classics literature charlotte Brontë John Williams Daphne du maurier lit fic literary fiction] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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6 days ago

THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!

Imagine you’ve just died (ouch) and you’ve woken up in heaven, except your first experience is that similar to being stuck in line at the DMV and there’s not really anything to do except sit on an IKEA couch.

Now imagine you find out you’re actually on the lowest-tier of heaven, that you didn’t make it to Cloud Nine, that there was a housing crisis in heaven and now your tier of heaven is run by a slumlord demon named Widdershins who essentially runs the place like a bad NYC landlord. And all you have is a talking rabbit to help you get around, and you just really want to look down on earth and see if your child is okay.

Cloud Six is darkly funny, absurd, experimental. It’s goofy as hell. It had me hootin and hollerin out loud, reading every passage to whoever would listen. Amy Fusselman writes herself into the novel, announcing herself as the narrator and intermittently checking in on you, which is a fun concept. Fusselman has written something that feels like walking into a fun-house mirror at a state fair and seeing all of humanity warped and exposed staring back at you.

Some scenes read like Family Guy cutaways and there’s a deeper meaning there if you really want to look—that the only way to understand life is to understand death, and what is death if we don’t know what it is to live? But, like life, is there even a meaning at all? But who has time for that here. It’s just an author goofin’ around and having fun.

Thank you @catapult for the free copy #gifted, it was a delight.

[#bookstagram books book review reviews recs recommendations tbr comedy comedic handwriting cursive penmanship books literary fiction litfic currently reading weird girl fiction short books] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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9 days ago

George Orwell read this book and was inspired to write 1984 and Animal Farm, and when you read it, you can see what exactly inspired him—

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler is an underrated classic that I haven’t seen floating around social media. I didn’t know there was a source inspiration for Orwell’s political writing until I found this in the depths of a bin at a community book sale and read it on a whim.

It’s 1938 and you’ve been imprisoned by the very country you’ve devoted your life to, only now there’s a new administration that is going to execute you for your past actions… now what?

That’s where Rubashov finds himself in DARKNESS AT NOON: he’s an aging communist revolutionary and once a Bolshevik who is now a political prisoner being investigated during Stalin’s purges. He’s psychologically tortured in the days leading up to his trial for treason. It’s set in a prison and follows Rubahsov’s psychological process as he grapples with the moral dilemma of confessing to crimes he didn’t commit commit in a public trial, or the honor of dying in silence for a cause and a country he once devoted his life to.

It explores the moral allegiances during party realignments. If the party you’ve identified yourself changes, what does that mean for you? Who do you stand by? It’s a critique on totalitarianism and Stalin’s Soviet Union in a way similar to Animal Farm. It explores the history of Stalin’s purges, of communist parties, the future of humanity, and is a musing on the hypocrisies and contradictions that lie between communist thought, theories, and application.

It’s fun, it’s darkly hilarious, and it’s scarily similar to our lives now.

It has the delicious melodrama of Russian literature and its tragic irony. It’s similar to short stories like Orwell’s “A Hanging” and Sartre’s “The Wall,” in which political philosophies are internally debated in the lead up to the characters’ execution.

[#bookstagram book reviews booksta books recs recommendations classics classic literature lit fic literary fiction political philosophy] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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10 days ago

pov: you took a scanner to the writer’s desk

Steadily working my way through Joan Didion’s entire body of work, studying it to be a better writer myself and this is usually the result 😅

Writing short stories, keeping up with ARCs and book reviews, going stir crazy. you get it

[#booksta writers desk writing writer typewriter artist painting oil paint stationary journaling journal handwriting cursive penmanship fountain pen the writers life artists way] taken in New York, New York by @paperbacksav

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12 days ago

Found this edition of Jane Eyre at a library book sale in NJ and fell in love with it for its cover. It imagines Jane in the similar style of mass market Gothic romances popularized in the 1970s and 80s, in which a woman is seen running away from a manor or estate. Here, Jane is a Victorian woman running away from Thornfield Hall in a vibe that feels very 1980s.

I was curious about the history of this edition, so I got lost down a rabbit hole:

Printed in 1983 from Watermill Press in Mawah, New Jersey. I did some digging into the history of Watermill Press and found Mawah NJ used to be a powerhouse for mass market paperback printing throughout the 1980s and 90s. Watermill Press was an imprint of a publishing company founded in 1958 by Louis and Frances Sabin, who were children’s writers who edited many of the works they published themselves.

The imprint’s publisher, Troll Associates, was a rival to early Scholastic. Eventually Pearson bought 49% of the company and sparked its inevitable decline, filing for bankruptcy and selling their shares and remaining inventory to Scholastic in 2001.

The publishers who started Troll Associates were a husband and wife duo and an editing power couple, with Troll Associates publishing thousands of children’s books, education materials for classrooms, and paperback fiction including their mass market paperback line of classics. Series they published: “Easy Biographies” meant for reading levels grades 2-5 that taught kids about historical figures, often written under Louis’s pen name Keith Brandt. “I Can Read About That” was a series of non-fiction paperback books for kids to learn about science. They published books for preschoolers under their series “First-Start Easy Readers,” to get a head start on learning how to read. They prioritized independent reading in children and encouraged a generation on reading early. Frances passed away in NJ in 2017, Louis following in 2019.

So much fun to discover local history from a book I picked up for 50 cents!!!!

[#bookstagram booksta books vintage covers gothic romance charlotte Brontë fall tbr spooky reading writer collector recs recommendations tbr] taken in BOOKSTA by @paperbacksav

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17 days ago