Books I Read in February

identity, the lives we live, and the lives we strive to live

Mar 02, 2025

And so time passed by as it does—often strangely: so slowly and then a chunk is gone. March had arrived and there was mud everywhere, it seemed.”—Tell Me Everything

Welcome to Books I Read: February Edition! February has always been a month that’s started in the middle for me. The beginning and end bookends to my birthday in the middle. Anticipation followed by joy followed by anticipation. Spring’s in the lengthening days and daffodils and periodical warmth and surge of cold once again. And this year, a flurry of newness. In moving and committing and realizing that it’s time for renewal and new beginnings even though it’s sort of scary.

BUT…

Books have always served as a place to escape, to distract my mind from the going ons around me or in me. And lately, there’s a lot circulating up there. So, thank goodness I had good books to read this month.

I read a wide variety. From memoir to literary fiction to fantasy, these works dealt with identity, the lives we lead, and those we strive to live (which is so relatable to me right now).

All in all, I read 9 total books. I rented 8 from the library. 1 book is mine.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

“Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.”

This book took me back to a literary theories and criticism course that was required for my English Literature major. In it, we were required to keep a journal of sorts where we summarized and then reflected upon whatever philosophical teaching was on the syllabus that day. Those readings are dense, full of layered meanings that force you to move through each sentence slowly. My professor insisted we’d find it useful one day, and here I was, recognizing almost all of Nelson’s references.

Nelson seems to create exactly what we had been told to do: a memoir that blends philosophical criticisms with personal reflections.

“Before long I learned that you had spent a lifetime equally devoted to the convention that words are not good enough.”

Much of the beginning is devoted to her experience of falling in love with her now partner-in-marriage, artist Harry Dodge. Just as Nelson gets dizzy on the experience, the reader experiences that same dizziness with her through her tangible words. I feel that she captures exactly what she felt, that words propped her up. Yet, from her own POV, perhaps words failed to express all that she truly experienced, felt.

“He simply loves her. I am learning from him.”

Nelson repeatedly returns to how love intersects with identity—how we react or reaffirm others’ identities simply by listening and loving, without “shellacking over version of reality” with our own.

The importance of literary theory and criticisms in Nelson’s life expands her experience because they are swirling around in her mind. I wonder how this differs for someone like me—someone who isn’t constantly reading and analyzing these texts. Does it change how we interpret and understand the world? It does, but it’s neutral—neither a good or a bad thing.

A story about love, language, sexuality, gender, and family, Nelson provides an intimate view into her life and the ideas that guide her choices and understanding of the world.

You’d like this if you’re looking for:

A memoir threaded with literary criticism, exploring the impact of identity, language, and motherhood.

You might also like:

Our Aesthetic Categories by Sianne Ngai, Any Person is the Only Self by Elisa Gabert, How Should a Person Be by Sheila Heti

The Other Profile by Irene Graziosi

“I gasp for air, it’s as if someone is sitting on my chest. It’s me, that’s my voice, those are my memories, she’s wearing my identity and has left me naked. Only now that it’s in someone else’s mouth does my story restore to me some truth about who I am.”

It took me several days to finish this book, dense with family trauma, self-deprecation, influencer-dom, discovery, betrayal.

Once part of a prestigious psychology program at an elite university in Paris, twenty-six-year-old Maia finds herself living in Milan, in a relationship with an older man, stuck in the monotony of her own apathy. She’s working a few nights a week at a pub, more out of not having to answer to her boyfriend questions. She’s fixated on gummy crocodiles of which she only eats the stomachs, then throws away. She’s dropped out of her program just before graduation, following the death of her younger sister, who she seemed to enjoy tormenting. She doesn’t express remorse so much as a hollow nostalgia. It’s not her sister she mourns, but the absence of someone weaker than her. than necessity.

Crude and cutting and probably just curious, Maia haphazardly assumes the role of public image consultant for eighteen-year-old influencer Gloria, despite having no experience.

“But I remember the color of pure fear in her eyes, not of dying but of being annihilated, disintegrated, until she disappeared. I know better than all of them that my sister has never suffered from any disease but that of being broken into tiny pieces in a place so deep and sacred that no treatment could ever work, because there is no process that can reconstruct what makes us human and free once we have been turned to dust.”

Gloria is a blank slate. She chooses Maia out of all the candidates because Maia’s the only one capable of telling her the truth—or at least, Maia’s version of it. Maia grounds Gloria amidst a digital fantasy of a self that isn’t a self. She’s warned that Gloria will absorb the identity of whomever she’s closest to, but it isn’t until she watches Gloria give a speech using her words that she realizes she’s given away the only thing that holds power for her: language.

“She has seized my reference points without knowing their history. her borders are growing stronger thanks to my bricks, which she extracts, one by one, from my boundary wall, leaving me crumbling. I often think back to Valentina’s words and regret having ignored them: Gloria is using me to fit herself up, until a mask with my features appears in place of her face, and nothing of me will be left. My poems, my memories, and my pain will all look better o her, because she is lucky, luminous, Ruch.

Yet, I couldn’t help but begin to see that Maia’s decision to commit (for lack of better terms) to the role is that she sees Gloria as a counterpart for her younger sister, Eva. A stand-in sister to resume her role as tormentor, someone with the power to be cruel to someone who’s looking to find validation. It’s a game of cat and mouse. Maia resents Gloria, yet clings to her. In the end, it’s Gloria who escapes, who realizes that the world is larger than the squares she’s filled for years.

You’d like this if you’re looking for:

A morally grey female protagonist and writing with depth and syntactical rhythm.

You might also like:

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, The Idiot by Elif Batman, The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

“The situation, however new to her, is clear. She has been provided with a husband and each time that husband goes into the attic, he is replaced with a different husband. Where the. husbands come from, how many there are, even in some cases their names: mysteries she can address in due course. But the basic mechanic are undeniable, and so is the fact that the current husband is—well, perhaps safest to say a dud.”

Hilarious yet relatable and completely inconceivable, this novel follows a chronically single British woman living in London who stumbles into her flat after her friend’s hen party (bachelorette party) to realize that she is

1. no longer single

2. living a married life.

As she comes to understand the magical powers her attic possesses, she begins to see that picking someone you want to spend the rest of your life with has everything to do with choice.

“She’s been too vague on her search, too unclear about what she wants from a husband. It’s time to focus. No swingers. No am dram enthusiasts. No open-mouth chewers. Just a nice man to keep for a week and take to a wedding. Not a perfect husband; just a perfect plus-one. She can worry about everything else later.”

A few minutes, a day, a few days, a few weeks, Lauren cycles through husbands, exploring the life she has with each of them. She checks her recent texts, sees if she still has her nieces and nephews, surveys her apartment, looks at herself, and gauges her sister’s reaction to a question about the life she’s living. She decides how long to keep each husband, if she hasn’t already sent him back.

“Another husband descends. She feels sad. She does feel sad, doesn’t she? She puts down the lemon-and-honey drink and looks away and looks back and it’s gone. And when she breathes in the air of the new flat, which has lost that smell which she thinks of as jute , the misled of only the best decisions, the sadness swells inside her and passes hip her throughout and then she breathes out and releases it. And when the husband turns around and is someone new, just some guy, she steps forward and kisses him lightly.”

Why do we want the person we want? That any certain path is possible? I came across an interview recently that advised there’s no such thing as the right decision—it’s about making the decision right. Obviously, choosing a life partner, if that’s what you’re interested in, can certainly include specifics. But in the long run, once you’ve chosen someone who supports both the life you have and the one you dream of, it becomes about making the decision to stay, with them, decade after decade.

You’d like this if you’re looking for:

A funny but serious at its root story about dating and marriage and love, and how at the end it’s a decision you make day after day, accepting that not everything can be perfect but it can be as close to it as it can be if you put in the effort and that effort is matched in conjunction.

You might also like:

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang, The Most Fun We Ever Had by Clare Lombardo, Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner

“We tried to convince him, as we had convinced ourselves, that she’d be back. Ollie couldn’t help it. Her leaving didn’t mean she didn’t love him.”

I read this in a single morning before noon, pulled in by the quick-paced timeline and the green tea coursing through my system on an empty stomach, vision laser-focused, I couldn’t help it.

The Shred sisters consist of younger sister Amy, highly intelligent, quiet, socially awkward, and high-achieving, and Ollie, who never knows when to put on the brakes. Amy struggles with the laxity her parents permit Ollie, feeling unseen. And in those moments she is noticed, it’s typically for escalating actions that Ollie has already set in motion, at least that’s how she feels. After being committed to a psychiatric hospital following years of lying, stealing, drug use, it becomes normal for the Shred family to never know where Ollie is or when she might reappear.

“I marveled at people who could introduce themselves at a party or gathering, walk up to a stranger and say I’m so-and-so. I took him in more fully. I had no idea what to make of this man-boy, but I found myself drawn to him. I could have told him a million different things: that I had a sister who haunted me, that I’d never been kissed, and that science, the religion I prayed to, had excommunicated me.”

When Amy finally arrives at a roadblock in her young adulthood, she befriends Josh, who, to the reader, seems quite similar to Ollie. For years, Amy finds success, only to watch it slip away. For years, Ollie finds success, only to fall into oblivion, supported mostly by men she entices during manic episodes.

A sensitive and relentless read, it seems to say we’re often drawn to those who remind us most of the people we’ve loved and been mistreated by. But, in the end, we find forgiveness, treatment, and a sense that everything might just be alright.

You’d like this if you’re looking for:

An expansive story that follows two sisters as they grazable with mental health, growing up, addiction, disappearance, reappearance, and love.

You might also like:

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

“Yes, she was naive and an idiot. Too young and too stupid. Capable of completely mishandling serious things like drug addiction and taxes. But she was strong.. And determined. If there was anything she’d learned, it was that strength and stubbornness were not nothing.”

A nineteen year old girl gets impregnated by her English professor, and after the realization that taking care of a baby is a full-time job, especially with no one to support her, Margo starts an OnlyFans with the encouragement of her returned father who also happens to be an ex-WWE-type wrestler. So, someone who knows how to put on a show.

It isn’t until months after the birth of Bodhi, Mark requests full custody and Margo finds herself questioning every decision.

“The thing was, by the time everything was over between us, he had behaved so childishly, and I’d had to assume so much of the responsibility for what we’d done, that I didn’t feel take advantage of. I felt… pissed off. It had actually been a grown-up, the whole thing never would have happened in the first place.”

Serious and funny and grasping on to the lightheartedness of life’s joys and struggles, this novel is a topsy turvy adventure.

It was the first page that hooked me. The author, or ‘Margo,’ immediately breaks the fourth wall by addressing the desire of a reader to be hypnotized by the first words, those first moments, likening it to a first date. And then, she breaks it once again, but also notifies the reader the story is being told retroactively.

“It’s true that writing in third person helps me. It is so much easier to have sympathy for the Margo who existed back then rather than try to explain how and why I did all the things that I did.”

To stick with the idea that we aren’t experiencing the story as it happens but retold by the protagonist about the protagonist can alter the narrative in a way that the retrospect always induces. But as she states, the third person allows her to write with more honesty, not as harsh, so perhaps more truthfully.

“I pictured the burned-out frame of the building, the clouds of ash, my father standing in his black pants and black shirt and black jacket, standing there, looking at me, loving me.”

Being so young and looking to the people around you for guidance, and finding it in the most unlikely of people (her ex-WWE father who never really acted as a father and who has chronic pain and an addiction and her college roommate) is proof that community is always changing and sometimes its the people we thought we could count on most that seem to falter when their support is most needed.

None of it (the sleeping with a professor, having a baby, starting an OnlyFans) ever seems like a good idea, but she finds success in her endeavors, in strategizing how to make the most of her social presence to earn more money and followers. It’s about trying, succeeding, failing, and trying again.

The back and forth of the seriousness and the silliness of life. On one hand, as Margo enters the Only Fans space, discovering how to photograph her body, that in itself has changed from only having a baby a few months prior, in a way that’s endlessly different, there’s a mundane silliness in how she’s feeling.

And then, in the same sentence or thought, there’s a comedic relief that opens its meaning up to the duplicitous nature of life. To find the humor in the sad is to understand how to move through life. Easier said than done.

“The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink because they’re so covered in scars.”

You’d like this if you’re looking for:

A hilarious and heartwarming story about being young, growing up fast, and finding family in the most unlikely. That everything will work itself out in the end.

You might also like:

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodessor-Akner, Colored Television by Danzy Senna

What It’s Like In Words by Eliza Moss

“The sun rose and I stopped to look at my dust-covered bedroom and the truck that had crashed through the wall. My eyes were shining; I had written all night.”

Almost thirty years old and Enola, a writer by nature and a barista by trade, finds herself enamored by the brooding, offensive writer that shows up for the bimonthly writers meetup at the pub. He’s older, and everything she’s not. From the moment their relationship begins, and over the course of two years, he does everything wrong and she finds herself lapping up whatever remaining pieces of himself he can give.

Enola’s childhood best friend, Ruth, realizes it and even Enola realizes it, knowing if she talked through what she was experiencing she’d be met with the obvious response: you’ve got to break up with him. But she’s not willing or ready.

It was upsetting to read. There was never even a moment where you could see what she saw in him other than this intense desire to be and do whatever she thought he might want. The trueness of their relationships stemmed from her, with him a mere actor, unwilling to ever take responsibility and so quick to pull her down to raise himself up. She convinced herself she needed him because she had constructed an idea of him that didn’t match reality. Her successes are his downfalls. There’s no retribution reserved for him in the novel

Is she crazy or does he alter her sense of reality so much that his words are the ultimate truth? She has this hope that it’ll get better, over and over, even when it fails.

Ruth said that she was worried that he hadn’t changed. It’s a short time for someone to change, you know? I told her that she was probably right, but I needed him. She told me that I didn’t. You’re enough by yourself, Enola. You’ve always been enough. I fingered the photograph in my pocket. I told her that even if she was right, it still felt like I needed him. Ruth lowered her face as if she were trying to protect her argument and said that there was a difference between needing someone and feeling like you need them.

A few months into their tumultuous relationship, Enola and the unnamed boyfriend travel to Kenya, where Enola spent a few years of her childhood, the place where life as she knew it changed and where she met her best friend Ruth.

And it’s through Ruth that we begin to see how Enola might be recreating the trauma of her childhood in her relationship with the enigmatic writer.

Ruth, Enola’s childhood best friend, plays a character that a reader can learn a lot from. Ruth performs the delicate dance of figuring out how to support this person she loves in a relationship that brings Enola down. She recognizes Enola won’t listen to what she has to say, and we even see Enola refrain from trying to speak with Ruth because she already knows how Ruth would respond. And yet, each time Enola goes down the path with the writer, Ruth is standing by, not always happily but there. And it’s Ruth that Enola sometimes grounds herself through, which is what friendship is about, accepting people when they fail to see the value in their worth, when they make the same mistake over and over, and showing up.

When the boxes stop getting checked, and our sense of self becomes entangled in another’s happiness, we can unravel. Which Enola does. Everything is not always as it seems. Somewhere between then and now, she reshaped her memories, leaving us with a veiled version of the truth that isn’t quite right. And it requires some turning point to bring it into relief.

You’d like this if you’re looking for:

A sad story about toxic relationships and the wake it creates in other relationships and also the awakening of self afterwards.

You might also like:

Tell Me Lies by Carola Lovering (only seen the tv series!)

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

“Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”

Precise and punctual and absolutely poetic. I can’t believe it’s been until this month that I’ve read a book by the Pulitzer Prize winner. And even though I had checked it out of the library, I felt hesitant in starting because of the world of characters she built that exist in books of their own. It felt intimidating, like I might not get it, but as soon as I began I knew that I was in for a treat.

As Strout makes it known in the first paragraph, Tell Me Everything is a story about Bob Burgess, a 65-year-old lawyer living in Crosby, Maine. It’s also a story about the “unrecorded lives” of people. The lives we lead, the choices we make, the relationships we have, lose, find once again.

There was a @subwaytakes that came across my feed recently that’s about romanticizing moving to a small town. Now that I’m moving to the big city (although I am romanticizing that), moving to a small coastal town, living in a cottage by the sea, reading and writing and walking for the rest of my life seems ideal. I digress. Let’s go back to Crosby, Maine.

“Olive Kitteridge has been thinking about all the unrecorded lives around her. Lucy Barton had used that phrase when she first met Olive and heard Olive’s story about her mother: unrecorded lives, she had said. And Olive thought about this. Everywhere in the world people led their lives unrecorded, and this struck her now. She summoned Lucy Barton again.”

Other key players in the story include Lucy Barton, writer extraordinaire who has moved to town from New York City amidst the pandemic, and Olive Kitteridge, a 90-year-old woman living in a retirement community who decides she has a story to tell Lucy. It’s in this interaction, Olive telling Lucy the story of her life, that she begins to contemplate all those stories that have only been told, neglected to be documented. So begins their relationship and the central theme of the novel: “People suffer. They live, they have hope, they even have love, and they still suffer. Everyone does. Those who think they’ve not suffered are lying to themselves.” And they have a story, many of which Olive knows, having listened for so many years.

There’s a self-recognition that the narrator has that creates the sense the story is never really over, and it allows the plot to flow back and forth between events that in the end are all significant. A merging of lives, never anticipated.

Ultimately, the book underscores the importance of community, even if it’s just two people. It means you have someone to hold you, to listen to you, to carry your story on.

You’d like this if you’re looking for:

A story to make you feel better about community, people, and the lives we lead. You romanticize being a writer, moving to a small town to observe and record the lives of those people. It’s the ordinary people with the most extraordinary stories.

You might also like:

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

“Maybe if she’d been born on a different day, or even at a different hour, without the prayers for a queen’s soul echoing in her ears, she might have done just that. But she could be no one but herself.”

Period pieces always capture my attention, whether in a novel, tv series, or movie.

Set during the Spanish Golden Age in Madrid, Luiza—an orphan from a young age who only occasionally sees her aunt—is left to her own devices, improving her dull, menial life as a kitchen servant through her magic abilities: to speak into existence miracles. Burnt bread to fresh-out-of-the-oven loaves with just a few words.

“Language creates possibility. Sometimes by being used. Sometimes by being kept secret.”

But when her mistress discovers that Luzia’s gift, she sets them both on a dangerous path, one that lands Luzia in a competition to serve Spain’s king. And there are players who would rather see her dead than win.

“His belief in her was wine on an empty stomach and it left her light-headed.”

Once she’s given a mentor (one she begins to fall for), she succumbs to the hunger of her magic, her power where she once had none, including the power to dream of a better future.

“She would build herself a life of plenty. She would force her world to bloom as she’d made the pomegranate tree grow, and Santángel would help her do it. Even if blood watered the soil.”

Any story like this inevitably recalls Joan of Arc in a way: a young girl capable of performing miracles, placed on an unstable pedestal, asked to perform, or find herself falling into death’s door.

A testament to the power of love, especially love amidst its absence, and love in combination with belief.

You’d like this if you’re looking for:

A thrilling historical fantasy in which the unexpected heroine overcomes challenges to live out the life she’s dreamed of.

You might also like:

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte

“Even looking past the internet-borne tendency for writers of your generation to ass-cover with tedious disclaimers, the real point, we think, is to foreclose scrutiny, to get ahead of rejection by naming your sins before any reader has a chance to. But this perverse apologizing only feels like you're cutting and chewing our meat for us, and we reject you (literally) all the harder.”

Jia Tolentina gets it mostly right in her mini review for The New Yorker when she says “Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s “Rejection” did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge *beep* losers” in. Except, I didn’t find it fun.

I’m a reader that needs a character to root for and there was not a single one. If anything, they made me feel gross and I was ready to be done reading it soon after I started. It’s a strange thing to have to piece together these provocative characters with writing full of depth and keen insights and observations. A novel made up of seven distinct but murkily related sections, which by the way seven is such a great number, from ‘The Feminist’ to ‘The Main Character’ to metaphors and letters.

Tulathimutte breaks the form of the novel, something I’m always trying to do in my day-to-day as a copywriter—finding new ways to structure words and create meaning. I won’t divulge what happens but the very last section of the book creates a sense that fiction and reality merge in a way that encompasses the message of the book: “For a rejection to be settled, first you—the reject—must hear, and comprehend, and accept.” And yet, despite all of this, I couldn’t get past the characters.

In the grain of an ‘online’ novel, I recommend reading through this reddit thread to see what other strangers thought.

“Now why am I rehashing years-old Twitter wank? Because, first and most importantly, lol. But also, I was behind the whole thing.”

I think this might be the first time I’ve seen ‘lol’ in a book, lol. Sort of like Bee’s character, who, despite not assuming an identity, ironically creates identities of many players in an online space designed to provoke and instigate and condemn. Each of the characters seems like a response to another. This way the reader can piece together not only the logical through-lines but create a sense of balance based on race, gender, sexuality, and identity, which each grapples with, a space where no one exists in isolation, no matter how much they disagree. In the end, Tulathimutte depicts characters I’m not gleaning anything from other than the ick.

In an interview for Dazed magazine, Tulathimutte proclaims: “these situations you’re describing are no-win situations, but they are no-win situations in games that the characters have made for themselves. If there’s one thing they share, it is an unwillingness to shift the parameters of what will constitute happiness or failure for them.”

Maybe my frustration lies in the characters’ refusal to ‘shift the parameters.' Their self-imposed inadequacy is or becomes their identity—but not in a way that elicits awe, like an Ottessa Moshfegh anti-hero or a The White Lotus character might (who else is watching?). Perhaps it’s the way Tulathimutte’s characters are so caught up in how others have banished them to this state than any real reckoning with themselves. And maybe that’s the point.