What I've been reading this week

04/07/25

Good evening!

Yesterday I had a great chat with Julia at Manchester Central Library (hosted by Blackwell’s Manchester) about her book Private Rites, which is out now in paperback. Thank you for coming along if you did. It almost distracted me from how I’m very sad about the passing of Diogo Jota, a really horrible situation, especially for someone so young and talented. I’ll miss him when the season starts again (if you’re new here, I love football and I love LFC and you do unfortunately have to get used to it).

If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂 - however, I would much rather you put your hard-earned money towards Medical Aid for Palestinians here

My twitter/X is @jessf_white, my Instagram is @lunchpoems, my Bluesky is @jesswhite

What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it

I finished Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), and, as expected, my opinion on it didn’t change and I continued to think it was brilliant. It was an extremely sad book anyway, but somehow got sadder at the introduction of a love interest for Tayo as he continues to battle through his complex PTSD. (Oh - last week I said he fought in the Korean War, but he fought in WWII - my bad). This was such a beautifully rich and moving novel, crafted in a way by Silko that shows great concern for what is being shown to her readers, and how.

The next book I read (or attempted to read) couldn’t have been further from the experience of Ceremony because it was so dreadful. I got a few pages into Lucy Rose’s The Lamb (2025) and was so infuriated I had to stop. I kind of already knew that I would have issues with it based on excerpts I had previously read, but because the popularity of it has been so fervent, I thought I would give it a go. This is a novel that is much more concerned with the ‘vibe’ it both gives off and responds to in the larger zeitgeist than it is in actually being any good. The vibe here is the kind of ‘unhinged girl’ type of media that is largely not very good and usually just has a woman who talks about her period a lot, doesn’t shower an adaquate amount of times and sometimes commits some kind of crime. There are a lot of texts that fit this brief that are good (Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is a touchstone for this, and is one of the actually-good-ones) but there are more that are bad. This is one of the worst examples I’ve come across because it is so clearly being written into this trend.

My friends and I, in our infinite wisdom, have coined the term ‘merely-core’ -- it’s usually found in horror books but can appear anywhere, and it’s when a writer overuses words like ‘merely’ to sound smugly intelligent, but is actually just really, really annoying. Rose’s crime in what I did read was overusing ‘plucked’ (3 times in 4 pages is crazy), which is a classic example of merely-core. What really defines merely-core, however, is that it is writing employed in a way that the writer thinks they sound intelligent, but is part of a text that is so riddled with inconsistencies and other rubbish that it completely negates this false sense of cleverness. The inconsistencies were astounding - why is a four year old reflecting on someone she ‘used to sit next to in school’? If this the reflection of a narrator who is older thinking about when she is four, why is there no hint of a sign post for this? This is an incredibly juvenile enterprise that should not have received the attention it did.

Next I read Girlbeast by Cecile Lind, translated by Hazel Evans, which was gifted to me by Prototype and is published on 17th July. Now this is I did like very much, even though I know it will be characterised as part of the ‘unhinged’ girl thing, even though it is a careful consideration of paedophilia from the perspective of a teenage girl who is the victim of it. Sara is thirteen and is having an ‘affair’ with a married priest, while also harbouring a crush on her best friend’s dad. Sara is a victim but cannot see herself as one, believing it to be because of her charm and looks (especially her thinness) that she gets the attention from older men. The truth is, of course, is that there is something profoundly wrong with men who look for victimhood in girls and young women in order to exploit them, something that she has to reckon with later. The ending was brilliant - we fast forward to Sara at 30, dealing with a childhood that was awful and changed the cause of her life. It takes on a surreal edge that I immediately wasn’t sure of, but loved when I had finished the novel and had time to reflect on it. This is a deceiving book that seems like it has a simple narrative voice (it’s largely told in single sentences or short passages presented almost as though they are singular points), and as though it has a simple purpose or perspective, but it unfolds into something much more complex. I would say that it wears its influences a little obviously in places - Sara is at one point texting her older ‘boyfriend’ while listening to Lana del Rey - but it’s otherwise intelligent in the ways that The Lamb is not.

I’m now reading Gore Vidal’s Hollywood (1989), which is an extremely meaty book, something I was in the mood for. I keep having to remind myself that it isn’t a nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century novel (when it is set), because it’s written so much like one. It’s quite something so far.

More next week!