Maid, by Stephanie Land: I started reading this right before attending my first Zoom event of quarantine, which was a memoir panel including Land. It’s a very compelling story, and I really enjoyed hearing her speak! The book itself to me felt like it was missing an editor – there were sentences that were so syntactically hard to parse that I had to read them multiple times to figure out the (usually straightforward) meaning, and many that drifted into cliche…. Read more »
Posts By: Claire
Books of 2020, Part 3
Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng: I grew up in a suburb similar to the Shaker Heights setting of this (also in Ohio, though Cincinnati instead of Cleveland; ours was not a planned community like Shaker Heights, and I think it was slightly more conservative/less self-congratulatory about being progressive, but maybe I just didn’t clock that attitude as a kid…) just a couple of years after Ng, so the references all hit. The plotting is good, though a little predictable… Read more »
Books of 2020, Part 2
The Need, by Helen Phillips: This book is fucking amazing. It’s my last read of the ten books long-listed for the National Book Award in fiction, and I definitely would have made it a finalist…it’s so amazingly odd in its beats. It’s also hard to discuss without giving too much away. I think I’ve heard people describe it as being “a trick,” “about a child,” and “the story of a paleobotanist,” and when someone asked me about it I wavered… Read more »
Plan-demic
Two really excellent decisions that took place with no pandemic in sight but now seem as if they were perfectly planned: My boyfriend gave me an Aerogarden for my birthday last year, and now there are salad greens growing in my bedroom Two Christmases ago I had all of my middle-grade and young adult fiction shipped to my Brooklyn apartment (it was…a large number of pounds of books, because as a kid I never wanted anything but books, and my… Read more »
Day 30
I think I intended to title a post “28 Days Later” (original, I know) but time is so stretchy that 28 days came and went and I didn’t have this tab open, so I forgot. Then I started it again on day 30. Now it’s day…37? 30 days. That’s a whole unlimited metro card. My brain is not moving seamlessly anymore, but thinking only in discrete units of time. One month. How many more? We are of course lucky. We’re… Read more »
Back to Nature
Back in Manhattan, 250 square feet. We go to Rite Aide wearing masks and scarfs, goggles or sunglasses even though it’s 1:30 am (we’re trying to go when no one else is there). It turns out the Rite Aide cleans their floors at that time, which is generally good but specifically bad because it’s kicking up mist and we have a fear of aerosols (I know about the floor-cleaning Zamboni only secondhand, because my role was to wait outside of… Read more »
Time cube
We walked from the East Village over the Manhattan bridge back to my apartment in Brooklyn on Tuesday. It was heartening to see most people doing as we were – moving to the side of the road/sidewalk when other people were approaching, avoiding stopping to wait for traffic lights in the same spot as others, etc. We managed to frogger our way through downtown Brooklyn pretty easily, though there was one woman who walked directly at us while crossing the… Read more »
Ages and Stages
City-mandated social distancing is technically only three days old, although we’ve been doing it for more than a week now since we were fortunate enough to be able to work from home starting then. To stay spirited, we’ve developed series of actions that functions both as a routine to “keep us sane” and a way to measure just how much that sanity has slipped. A coded system that doesn’t rely on colors or numbers. Roughly in order of plot-based to… Read more »
Ides-le days
…you know, like idle… Why no, I have not done reams of writing and editing this weekend, but I have probably read several fathoms of Twitter feed. I’m working on a short story that takes place during the August 2017 eclipse, and what I wouldn’t give for that to be the collective event everyone’s talking about right now! And growing salad greens. And trying to keep up with exercising; I was so proud that my resting heart rate had dropped… Read more »
Notes from Home, Day 2
I was supposed to go to Philadelphia yesterday to visit my cousin, and even yesterday morning I thought for sure I would still go. I’d be taking the train, not flying; my cousin is my age, not older, and not high risk; I was still working and taking the subway as of Tuesday, so it wouldn’t be much different; it would be easy to come back to NYC if needed. Also, I was only going for 48 hours and it… Read more »
