A Year in Reading with Amanda Fortini
A 2020 awardee
Tell us what you read in 2024 that …
… was so beautifully written that you were envious.
”The Trials of the Young: A Semester” by Mary Gaitskill
… tapped into an emotion you’ve been wrestling with this year.
”The Pneuma Illusion” by Mary Gaitskill
… you’d recommend to other arts writers.
"The Response to Art is Everything," by Greg Gerke
... was old, a little obscure and absolutely delicious.
”Cassandra at the Wedding” by Dorothy Baker
This year, I steeped and re-steeped myself in the literature of Las Vegas (Air Guitar by Dave Hickey; Learning From Las Vegas by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour; Fear and Loathing by Hunter S. Thompson) for the nonfiction book I’m writing about the city. I also revisited Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces (Viking Penguin Inc, 1985), her seminal essay collection about Wyoming. To my mind, the book is a model for anyone writing about place.
Among the recreational reading I did, Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding (Victor Gollancz, 1962), reprinted by NYRB Classics in 2004 and 2012, stands out. It’s the most original novel I’ve read in ages, with an afterword by the great Deborah Eisenberg. The story follows the charming, brilliant, but reckless 24-year-old Cassandra over one summer weekend as she returns to the hothouse environment of her family’s ranch for her twin sister Judith’s wedding. Let’s just say chaos ensues. Someone on social media affectionately called it a “staple crazy girl book” – a genre of which I count myself a superfan. Another favorite, Mary Gaitskill’s short story collection, Bad Behavior (Poseidon Press, 1988), belongs to a subset of the category: the naughty-young-woman novel. To her readers’ immense delight, Gaitskill has been writing essays of late; this summer, in Granta, she published “The Pneuma Illusion,” an uncanny piece about the vagaries of healing and the often messy dynamic between patient and practitioner.
A latecomer to my list is Greg Gerke’s “The Response to Art is Everything,” published last month in Liberties (where a harrowing 2023 essay by Gaitskill, “The Trials of the Young: A Semester,” about the despair she witnessed among students she taught, also appeared). Art, Gerke argues, “makes” us, becoming “a part of our consciousness’ stream,” changing our very perceptions – as all these works have done for me. “Artworks don’t want to be solved,” Gerke writes, “They want to be lived in.” Yes.
