Best books...chosen by Jia Tolentino
Jia Tolentino is a culture critic at The New Yorker. Her first book, Trick Mirror:
Reflections on Self-Delusion, is an essay collection that combines personal memoir
with an interrogation of the cultural forces that define our time.The Book List^ ARTS^23
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
(2002). When I first read this book, I was on
an airplane, and I had a strange sensation: How
could my brain and my heart be unfolding into a
thousand different dimensions while my body is
trapped in Seat 14C? Reading Chiang’s sci-fi feels
like witnessing a miracle of applied grace.Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell (1959). I have
joined the small but growing ranks of fanatical
proselytizers for this slim masterpiece of a novel
about a Kansas City housewife. It’s one of the
funniest, subtlest, most perfectly paced, and most
existentially terrifying things I’ve ever read.
Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil (1947).
Many lines from Weil’s first published book are
lodged in me forever. “You could not be born at
a better time than the present, when we have lost
everything.” Also: “The simultaneous existence
of opposite virtues in the soul—like pincers to
catch hold of God.”Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz
(1977). At some level I’ll spend my whole life
wishing that I’d ever really lived, if just for a littlewhile, the way Babitz did in Los Angeles in the
1960s and ’70s. No one writes about pleasure,
recklessness, and evanescence better. This book is
like a night with perfect velocity; a lavender sun-
rise; a pharmacological whisper that you can do
this forever and never die.The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud
(2006). As a treat to myself, I reread this 500-
page novel every summer, and every time I feel
totally swallowed up in it, as if the book were
soaking me with golden light. There’s so much
pleasure in the plotting, the emotional acuity, the
satire, the language itself. It also makes the best
use of September 11 of any work of fiction I’ve
ever read.Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017). I’m in awe
of this book and the way it combines a 19th-
century novel’s powers of submersion with a
blazingly contemporary sense of ethics. I was
basically gasping as I read this saga of an eth-
nically Korean family in Japan—desperate to
know what happened next, overwhelmed with
love and sorrow.Also of interest...in food journeys
Laura Lippman
Even Laura Lippman some-
times overlooks a good story,
said Eva Jurczyk in The
Rumpus.net. Long before she
became a newspaper writer
and then an award-winning
crime novelist, Lippman was
a 10-year-old reading The
Baltimore
Sun. That
year, she
became
obsessed with
the paper’s
coverage of
a white girl
about her age
who’d been murdered and left
in a vacant lot. She saw no sto-
ries in the Sun about a young
black woman whose body was
found that summer in a reser-
voir’s fountain in a city park;
she heard about the case only
decades later. “That was what
was interesting to me,” she
says. “That the story could go
uncovered.”
Lippman’s new novel, Lady in
the Lake, revisits both deaths,
and even lets its titular figure
speak from beyond the grave,
said Erin Keane in Salon.com.
The book’s protagonist,
though, is Maddie Schwartz,
an ex-housewife who sees
in the lake mystery a chance
to forge herself a career as
a newspaper writer. Maddie
isn’t perfect; she chases her
ambition without realizing the
trouble she’s creating for the
victim’s family. Lippman has
been interested throughout
her career in capturing the
stories of people that the press
typically overlooks, but here
she also wanted to engage
current debates about whether
white authors should write
about black characters. And to
question whether any author
is justified in using another
person’s murder as material.
“Maddie allowed me to work
out my own feelings about the
fact that when I use real crimes
for inspiration, as I often do,
am I not appropriating some-
body’s story?” she says. “Am
I not using somebody else? Is
there a right way to do it that
makes it better?”Author of the week
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“Even if truffles are beyond your pay
grade, there is plenty of enjoyment
to be had in the sheer devilment por-
trayed in this book,” said Eugenia
Bone in The Wall Street Journal. The
truffle trade is rife with corruption at
every stage of the supply line—primarily because
few consumers know enough about the precious
mushrooms. Though early chapters about French
and Italian truffle hunters feel slightly padded,
when author Ryan Jacobs reaches the industry’s
rascally middlemen, “his writing comes alive.”The Truffle Underground
by Ryan Jacobs (Clarkson Potter, $16)
“Writing about food can be tricky,”
said Annabel Gutterman in Time.
That’s especially true when the dishes
being described involve the esoteric
ingredients favored by the founder of
Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant
widely regarded as the best in the world. But
Esquire’s Jeff Gordinier employs “such playful
and lush prose” that as he follows René Redzepi
during the chef’s four-year world quest for fresh
inspiration, “the scents of mole, chiles, and even
lingonberry juice waft off the page.”Hungry
by Jeff Gordinier (Tim Duggan, $16)“Eminently readable, smart, and fas-
cinating, Drive-thru Dreams is, bely-
ing its subject matter, a full meal,”
said Tyler Aquilina in Entertainment
Weekly. Author Adam Chandler
argues that the history of fast food is a
great American story, reflecting more of the best of
us than might be expected from an industry now
rightly associated with low wages and obesity. The
first White Castle was a model of hygienic food
prep, for example, and McDonald’s franchises are
still minting small-town millionaires.Drive-thru Dreams
by Adam Chandler (Flatiron, $28)
The main conceit of this tart novel
“never fully caramelizes,” said
Andrea Long Chu in The New York
Times. When two new friends start a
secret society of young women who
meet monthly for bacchanal-like din-
ner parties, the boundary breaking never goes
beyond make-out sessions and similar indie-
movie clichés. Still, Williams is a “subtle and
superbly attentive” stylist, and her descriptions
of food “impart a depth of flavor that resurfaces
stylishly when you least expect it.”Supper Club
by Lara Williams (Putnam, $26)