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I’ll admit it: this hasn’t been my strongest reading year. I’ve been slower than in previous years, and more infrequent than I’d have liked. I’ve put down more than one novel that I’ve then forgotten to pick back up.
It hasn’t been all bad—the sparseness has given me more time to spend savoring each novel, and thinking about them afterward. Maybe, to some extent, it also means my standards are narrowing, and I’m only finishing novels that absolutely captivate my interests. In either cae, at least July has been an interesting month for reading. Murder mysteries and unreliable, ethically questionable (or otherwise insecure) narrators abounded, I got up-to-date with summertime Literary It-Girl musings, and I made at least somewhat of a dent in the laundry list of 2023/24 releases I’d been hoping to get to.
And, in an unexpected turn, I’ve found myself at the beginning of August without a real ‘To Be Read’ list ahead of me. I still plan to get to Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty—the two remaining novels from my end-of-spring summer reading list—but otherwise, I’m entering the month relatively unmoored.
With all this in mind, I’ve decided to experiment with a new, smaller-format approach to the seasonal roundup (though, not to fear, those aren’t going anywhere). For this week’s edition of What I’m Reading, an abridged log of my July intake. We’ll see if it sticks.
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (Catapult, 2024)
If Emma Cline’s The Guest was last year’s Literary It Girl novel, this summer’s is The Coin. In brief, hypnotic chapters guided by Zaher’s spare, almost detached prose, a Palestinian woman living off a monthly allowance from the estate of her wealthy parents begins a precarious double life.
Some days, the narrator leads a monotonous existence in Brooklyn, maintaining a passionless relationship with her wealthy Russian boyfriend and moonlighting as a middle school teacher. On others, she leads an exciting, if dangerous life in Europe, where a mysterious new friend sucks her into an international scheme reselling Birkin bags. But somewhere in between, the weight of her traumatic past—manifesting in an obsession with fashion and personal hygiene—becomes too heavy to suppress. Sparse and transfixing, The Coin is nothing like what I expected—and nothing short of striking.
Read if you liked: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 2018), or Rouge by Mona Awad (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie (HarperCollins, originally published 1942)
The Moving Finger was Christie’s third full-length Miss Marple novel, but my seventh as a reader.1 It hardly breaks form from the two Marple stories that precede it—Christie’s more inventive plots would come later—and as a result seems to mark the series’ exact middle ground in terms of quality and singularity.
In The Moving Finger, Christie makes use of many of her favorite ingredients: a seemingly quiet small town, a foreigner who arrives just in time to see that town wracked by sudden death, a murder initially dismissed as suicide, a letter that hints at something more. It’s unsurprising, then, that presence of these tropes this time around hardly makes for Christie’s most shocking twist. But The Moving Finger does stand out, just for another reason: it buries Miss Marple.
Like Hercule Poirot before her, Miss Marple often tends to take a backseat in the narrative—more often a foil or confidant than a protagonist—so it’s not uncommon for her presence to be sparse in the novels that bear her name. And thinking chronologically, I’ve noticed that Marple’s presence in her own series expands slowly over the years, meaning her presence in early novels is generally minimal. Still, in The Moving Finger—in which Marple doesn’t appear until a mere 60 pages from the novel’s conclusion—her presence is almost nonexistent. And, in a novel retroactively burdened by the frequency of its tropes in Christie’s oeuvre, her absence feels stronger than ever.
Read if: You enjoyed some of the more accessible points of entry to the Miss Marple series—like A Murder at the Vicarage (HarperCollins, originally published 1930), or A Murder is Announced (HarperCollins, originally published 1950)—and are interested in following its evolution.
The Fetishist by Katherine Min (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2024)
Keen-eyed readers may notice that I placed The Fetishist on my “20 Favorite Novels of the 2020s” list almost immediately after finishing it. After some time to reflect… I stand by the choice entirely. Following three narrators whose lives are unraveled by one man’s obsessive, fetishistic romantic tendencies, The Fetishist oscillates between funny and harrowing. I’ll leave the rest to what I’ve already written of it.
Read if you: liked Yellowface by R.F. Kuang (HarperCollins, 2023) in theory, but found the execution wanting, or thoroughly enjoyed Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou, but have had your fill of campus novels for now.
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, 2023)
Rebecca Makkai is far better known for her third novel, The Great Believers (Viking, 2018)—a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize—but this was my first experience with the author. I Have Some Questions for You follows Bodie, a successful true crime podcaster who returns to her alma mater boarding school as a guest lecturer after two decades, only to find herself once again obsessed with the murder of her roommate senior year—and this time, concerned the wrong man may be in prison for it.
Part campus novel in arrested development, part interrogation of the true crime industry, Makkai’s take on the murder mystery is steeped with the craft and precision that undoubtedly made her such a focal point of the literary world in the first place. Between long, atmospheric pages of languishing in the past and brief, piercing moments of clarity, Makkai finds something brilliant.
Read if you liked: My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (William Morrow, 2017), or The Secret History by Donna Tartt (Knopf, 1992)
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Collage via the author
Of Christie’s original twelve novels, I still have five left to read. So far, however, my favorite has been The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side (originally published 1962).