What We’re Reading This Summer
Hollywood’s Eve, by Lili Anolik
I usually avoid biographies. Too often, they can be dry, overly calculated (particularly if they’re written about a subject who just happens to be running for president), or didactic to a fault. None of these traits appear in Anolik’s exuberant, eyebrow-raising tale of the L.A. writer and “it girl” Eve Babitz. The book is a quick but memorable read and a fascinating work of journalism. I haven’t stopped thinking about the hazy, drug-fueled soirées for Hollywood’s elite that Babitz frequented; or the time she was photographed playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp to get revenge on a former lover; or the biting phrases that Babitz used to simultaneously flatter and destroy her subjects.
Babitz is by no means someone to naively idolize; her stories illustrate the privilege afforded to attractive, white women, and her experiences of L.A. are certainly not representative of the entire city. Beyond its generous helpings of parties, sex, and celebrities, though, Hollywood’s Eve tracks the rise, fall, and reemergence of one of L.A.’s most evocative writers. It’s a tale of glitzy grime and grimy glitz that won’t fail to keep you entertained.
Book I’m hoping to read soon: Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino
The Cook, by Maylis de Kerangal
Maylis de Kerangal’s combines three genres that inevitably draw me in: thoughtful narrative journalism, formally inventive fiction, and hypnotic Instagram cooking videos. It’s a novel that reads like an essayistic profile and renders its clamorous kitchens and elaborately prepared dishes with cinematic flair. The book follows an ambitious young chef, Mauro, on a punishing restaurant-industry career that threatens his relationships and health. Although the narrator—a longtime friend of Mauro’s—appears in scenes occasionally, she’s more often just ais a story about two consuming obsessions: Mauro’s with cooking, and the narrator’s with the cook himself.
