Bring these up next book club meeting: Top three reads for summer

My book club has been on hiatus for a couple of months. Most of us were finishing our last semester of college. We were busy applying for jobs and preparing for the next Zoom breakout room. We didn’t have the time we did before to pore over our democratically chosen novels. I missed the camaraderie and the feeling of opening a new book. But May is finally here, dear readers. I want to share with you my top three book club picks for the summer.

‘Crying in H Mart’ by Michelle Zauner

Back in 2018, Michelle Zauner, of solo indie-rock project Japanese Breakfast, penned a New Yorker essay about losing her mother to pancreatic cancer in 2014. In both her viral essay and memoir, Zauner writes about grief’s spontaneity and immeasurable weight carried through the frozen aisle of H Mart, a Korean-American supermarket chain, and through the rest of life as she knows it.

In an interview with NPR, Zauner talked to Ari Shaprio about how food allowed her to not only process her mother’s death but connect to her long after she was gone. Zauner grew up with limited knowledge of recipes but a profound love for Korean cuisine, which, she said, filled her mother with pride and joy. After her mother passed away, she realized that part of healing was undoing the sense of shame associated with not knowing how to prepare those traditional Korean meals for her mom when she was sick. Learning how to cook through YouTube videos allowed her to explore a part of her identity while also celebrating memories of her mother and grandmother.

‘Writers & Lovers’ by Lily King

At 31, Casey Peabody still clings to the creative ambitions of her youth. Her friends have long let go of their hopes to become writers and artists. But Casey remains stuck on a novel she’s been chipping away at for six years. During the summer of 1997, Casey’s life explodes. Her mother dies and her relationship ends. She waitresses at a restaurant by day and writes in a dingy, mold-infested room attached to a garage by night. And if things weren’t messy and miserable enough, Casey falls hopelessly for two men at once.

In an article for Harvard Review Online, Jennifer Kurdyla described the experience of reading ‘Writers & Lovers’ toward the beginning of quarantine. By late March, she was struggling to navigate isolation: “Instead of spiriting me away from the hustle of modern life, (‘Writers & Lovers’) was helping me feel connected on a more profound level to the vulnerabilities we all share: the desire to be seen, heard, touched; the desire to not be alone,” wrote Kurdyla.

‘Little Weirds’ by Jenny Slate

This’ll be a reread for me this summer. Every time I think about this book, I feel warm inside. My friends and I talk about its chapters like they’re memories we share with each other. They’re sincere and hopeful. Her observations are sharp and poignant, like her list of self-approved conversation topics in “Letter: Super-Ego” (“Mustards of the world,” “Aunts and their houses” and “The amazing Dukakis family” were among my favorites). Slate writes about self-compassion and befriending herself so comfortingly, and of loss of love and sense of place so carefully.

Perhaps most eloquently said by Stephanie Philip for the Columbia Journal, “The beauty of this collection is in Slate’s newfound ability to let a little air into the room. She regrows the capacity to capture microscopic moments of wonder.”