My summer reading list

📝 Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). This month, I’m on vacation, so I’m pleased to run a series of guest essays by Friends of Fran Magazine™. Thank you to Fran Magazine summer intern Ishikaa Kothari for steering the ship (Fran Magazine is a boat, in addition to a blog) and please enjoy a month of other people’s writing.

OK SURPRISE: This one is actually by me (Fran), writing from the past to schedule for the future.

Your subscriptions are welcome and encouraged for regular updates sent to your inbox (email, Substack, or both).

Hello from New York in the past. I am now in France, hopefully at the beach.1

First of all: I profiled John Wilson for Vulture ahead of his new movie The History of Concrete. It was great! And so is the movie.

Moving on… I understand there is a type of person who gets much more reading done in the winter because the weather is bad and going out is horrible and it’s a nice time of year to curl up with a book on the couch. That has never been my lived experience. For as long as I can remember, the summer has been a season of tremendous reading-related productivity, built from a desire to fulfill my public library’s summer reading list scavenger hunt or challenge or whatever edict they dictated for a little prize each year. There was never a year in which I did not complete it.

The darkest days of the first part of my year were consumed with reading War & Peace, and it took me a number of months to get out of that Tolstoy headspace in the months that followed. By mid-April, however, I found my brain waking up to the possibility of genre and play and fun and imagination, and I have had a rollicking few months of reading. It helped, for lack of a better word, that I also spent a significant amount of time this summer feeling extremely ill and lying on the couch — yay. By the time this goes up, I’ll be a hearty chunk of the way into The Count of Monte Cristo, but I wanted to reflect back on a bad summer of health and wellness and an amazing summer of books.

For many years, I pushed my way through books I was not enjoying or getting much out of. I am too old for that now and can feel my life start to exist in the decline. It’s just not worth it. It’s also why I’ve stopped buying books unless they are by people I know or Vigdis Hjorth or Sally Rooney. Everything else can come from the library.

It has taken me a long time to learn that just because there’s an amazing London Review of Books essay about a book does not mean I have to read it. Over the last ten years of my life, I have sometimes flirted with the idea of wanting to read things about “current events” and “conspiracies of power” and “abuses of wealth” — I actually don’t really want to do that at all. I absorb enough of that from living in a society, and I don’t need to bombard my brain with this any further. The writing here was simply not compelling enough to hold my attention for the number of pages the book is.

This was recommended to me by my friend Tyler after I told him he might like The Unpossessed by Tess Slesinger. The Locusts Have No King deals with a very similar milieu. I often read multiple books at same time — one at home, one on the train, one for book club, whatever — and by some misfortune, this wound up being my train book, and I was just not getting through it quick enough in order for it to click in a meaningful sense and I was too stupid to be breaking it up so much. (Contemporary fiction, and genre fiction, tend to work better on my commutes.) Had to let it go back to the library but eager to try again. I was enjoying it! If you are my friends Tessa and/or Caroline, I think you would like this one…

Anyway, onto the books I actually read and finished.

Nicholas will have an essay up here this Sunday about his experiencing writing his debut novel Observer, so I will let him explain the ins and outs of all that. What I can write about my experience of reading Observer, as someone who almost never reads horror as a genre, was that I found the novel genuinely unnerving, this kind of pitch-perfect combination of Annihilation and The Lost City of Z — the overwhelming desire to explore and uncover a thing that perhaps ought not be explored and uncovered. The palpable aridness of his landscapes and mounting dread is really quite remarkable. It’s sometimes a comfort to think about the land outliving us all! Available for pre-order here.

I interviewed Hannah Murray about her debut memoir for Vulture. I read a lot “celebrity” memoir for work, but it is rare I read one that is actually crafted and composed with an intent to write a book versus cashing a check. I found Murry’s recounting of her psychotic break and subsequent retiring from acting harrowing and heartbreaking. She is a genuine talent, on- and off-screen, and seems eager and excited to keep writing. We had a long, long conversation about books that got cut for time, but she is also a fellow Mervyn Peake fan. Looking forward to what’s next from her.

Usually I’m just reading about age-gap relationships and power imbalances in academia in Norway. My coworker Jason told me to read this and said, okay, it’s time for an age-gap relationship and power imbalance in academia in Germany. Really enjoyed.

Said with literally the utmost respect: an AMAZING book to read on a plane.

Any time someone comes over to my apartment now, I’m like, “wow, just like in Evelina…”

I am still a relative novice in the world of reading romance such that I was not aware that “billionaire romance” is a sub-genre, but of course it is: fantasy can and does extend beyond that which is sexual. I guess I never considered the rich person could be not a “famous person” in a romance, even though that is the core tenet of something like Fifty Shades. Anyway — this is not that. I found Major Gift, which has a MacKenzie Scott-esque approach to its questions of class and wealth, to be thoughtful and optimistic. I like when the approach to romance is not necessarily driven by comedy of manners but something more innate and yearning, as it is here. I also like when there’s a subplot about hating your coworker.

I kept walking around the apartment announcing to Phil, “they’re doing Minority Report… to women!” I thought this was fine. Made me want to reread The Mars Room, which I don’t recall liking much, but remember much more vividly than many other books.

I found this very stressful and very gross in the best possible way — tactile and fluid-driven, almost made me too aware of my own body. It has one of the great sex scenes of the year, and it reaffirmed my decision to never live in Los Angeles. I just can’t be trusted to feel or behave normal out there.

Somewhat remarkably, Sonia and I have been email penpals for a little over three years — connected by a mutual friend who thought we might have some things in common to discuss, e.g. writing, fiction, books, the Midwest, etc. We have kept in touch ever since, and I was elated to see that her debut novel Girl’s Girl made such a splash earlier this summer. It’s such a lush and funny book — about freaking the fuck out as a teenager and also lying around and playing The Sims. It captured a mode of overthinking that feels inherent to youth and not adult anxiety while maintaining a kind of trust in the decision-making for the teen girls in question here. I love the compassion and grace here — could have stayed with these girls for another hundred pages. Available to buy here.

I reread this while I was having a meltdown about my second draft of my own 831 novel (out next year — I haven’t posted in-depth about it because of the aforementioned meltdown, but more to come on that… soon!). A real good yapper’s novel: starts like When Harry Mets Sally in a way that’s almost a little too uncanny before spiraling out into something weirder and sadder and hotter. A good grounding exercise.

Read this in an hour while I was having a meltdown one day. Recommend!

I have enjoyed all of Bobby’s novels, but We Are Gathered Here Today was my favorite yet, and possibly his best, combining all the great Bobby book components (wide cast of characters, distinctive dialogue, event-driven plot mechanics) with this kind of internally reckoning about marriage and love that felt very resonant to someone (me) who just spent a lot of time thinking about all these things and more. I love all the humanist tapestry-weaving, for lack of a better phrase, that Bobby manages to do in his books, especially this one, that reminds me of all the other great books and movies we like to discuss, but it all remains very true to his vision, and not a pastiche of something we all like. I like when his work feels prickly too, and this is perhaps the most prickly yet. How we lose ourselves in the performance of ourselves — great theme for a book. The only time he loses me is when he writes about pimento dip, which I do not like. Available to buy here.

No “real New Yorker” discourse here, but I do get annoyed when there is this dismissive catch-all language around “New York books” that presume a kind of downtown or Brooklyn-based whatever, excluding and ignoring aspects of New York, even parts of New York that are in Brooklyn, that belong to a whole other kind of person that is not a media-class renter. Anyway. Janet Fash was New York City’s first female lifeguard chief, which is the type of occupation and lifestyle I knew nothing about. Based on Fash’s first “as told to” for Curbed written by my friend Clio, Lifeguard is not only a coming-of-age memoir but a coming-of-morals, coming-of-dignity. It’s about corruption and infrastructure without the kind of heftiness we associate with those words. It feels breezy and funny and engaging to read, because it is, and because Fash is rendered so inherently likable and dogged. The kind of person you’d trust with your life. Available to buy here.

I read this for my classics book club. I preferred this to Confessions of a Mask, which seems to surprise people. But it’s true! I’m overdue for a rewatch of Mishima at this point.

I don’t think this is out yet at the time of my writing. Ummm, lol. We’ll circle back.

Wait, maybe I want to watch that Jeff Buckley doc that came out last year. Anyway, I like when good things happen to people in their fifties (late forties? I’m p sure fifties) — this one is hot!

I had the pleasure of being edited by Matthew Schnipper for a brief period of time last year, and I very vividly recall learning in the waning weeks of our working together that he had a book out this year and the subject matter of his book, which is, in part, the sudden and unexpected death of his son Renzo. At his book launch event, however, Schnipper said something that stuck with me throughout my reading, which is that Rise Above is really just about time: the time in and around the birth of his son, and the years to follow, and the good and bad that happened. It is also about music, and the time spent listening to music — hearing it and understanding how music makes use of time, and how time makes use of music. Knowing Schnipper more as an editor than a writer allowed me the rare opportunity of getting to know his voice in a newish way, and though much of what’s recounted in Rise Above is sad, it’s also strange and funny and colorful — a book about a world that was and still is here. Available to buy here.

Lindsey put this on her end-of-year list, and then Clare read it, and then both of them spoke about it with such breathless enthusiasm at an event we were all at that I thought: well, I’ll have to read it! So I did. Crazy book!

It’s rare to read something that is so funny without being smug about it, but that’s kind of the Claire Carusillo special. This isn’t folk hero “I’m better than you” type comedy so much as it is gentle buffoonery. Great book especially for anyone from the Chicagoland suburbs and/or who is routinely kind of owned by their mom. I’m, of course, guilty of both. There’s just no one who has a voice like Claire’s — I wouldn’t even go so far as to say “often imitated” because no one has figured out how to do the thing she so clearly excels at. I laughed out loud as I read, which is always a wonderful feeling. I feel inspired by the extent to which this feels like something truly original — “from the twisted mind of…”, etc. A great cap to a summer of good reading. Available to buy here.

Okay, that’s me for now, and I’ll be back in September. What have you been reading?