What We're Reading This Summer
Our Little Racket by Angelica Baker
I read all 512 pages of Angelica Baker’s debut novel greedily, in one dizzying weekend, unable to put it down. Which is fitting, in a way: Our Little Racket follows the sudden downfall of a Lehman Brothers–esque CEO through the eyes of his wife, their teenage daughter, and the other women surrounding them, and as such it’s very much a story of greed and its out-of-control consequences. But the book gets beyond moneymaking hubris to a more basic kind of desire—the fretful, shapeless longing of those who are sidelined to be seen somehow as indispensable.
Binge-watchers of Big Little Lies will enjoy the elegantly cutthroat politics of suburban life in wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut, while fans of Elena Ferrante will like the sharp portrayal of the delicate power balances in women’s friendships. But any reader will appreciate the tightly woven drama of this book, which brings its five protagonists out of the margins of the crisis and into an explosive confrontation of their own.
Book I’m hoping to read: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
—Rosa Inocencio Smith, assistant editor
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
For Selin, the Turkish-American protagonist and narrator of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, arriving at Harvard in the fall of 1995 is an occasion of great flourishing. Intellectual and experiential horizons are broadened. New technology, in the form of, yes, email—“a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know … like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world”—makes apparent the complexities of our ever-evolving epistolary media. But it’s also a time of emotional confusion: Selin falls for a bland, apparently brilliant, Hungarian mathematician named Ivan. Several years her senior, he treats her as an odd curiosity, someone to be intrigued by but never quite taken with.
While Selin’s on-again, off-again pursuit of Ivan gives The Idiot its narrative spine, for me, the novel’s true pleasures are in the rapid maturation of her powers of observation. “Why was ‘plain’ a euphemism for ‘ugly,’ when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent,” Selin muses. It’s a work of peculiar discovery, a portrait of the artist as a young Turkish-American woman obsessed with language and its powers. And Selin’s infatuation with Ivan, too, offers her a way to work out her nascent theories of love, life, and meaningful expression.
My anxious, sweaty, early college days were full of unrequited longings, both romantic and cerebral—I wanted my opinions about Bergman, Chekhov, and colonialism to be valued and important. The Idiot took me back to that awkward time, full of pain and strangeness, but also of promise and delight.
Book I’m hoping to read: Neuromancer by William Gibson
—Siddhartha Mahanta, associate editor
Fear and Loathing in America by Hunter S. Thompson
Fear and Loathing in America is a collection of Hunter S. Thompson’s private and business letters between 1968 and 1976. There are other earlier and later collections, but in these years he’s in his prime. “The Battle of Aspen” (Rolling Stone, 1970) is one of my favorite pieces of his, and here you see how it came together, and how it shaped his understanding of journalism’s role in political power.
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