Rachel Shoshanna: fiction

Hey folks!

I know it's already a month into the new year, so I'm well aware I'm already failing at my New Year's Resolution to be more consistent about posting on this blog, but here I am, ready to try. What better way to do that then give a rundown of all the books I got to read *FOR FUN* after graduating from college in 2015, and giving myself a list of books to get through this year?

This is in no particular order, as I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday, much less what I read last May in Spain.

Interred with Their Bones, by Jennifer Lee Carroll. Imagine if The DaVinci Code and Shakespeare had a baby. It would be this book, except way better than The DaVinci Code, and not as good as Shakespeare. It was still a really fun read, though. It's about the hunt a Shakespearean scholar goes on for the lost manuscript of a real lost play of Shakespeare's called "The History of Cardenio."

The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale. This was a reread, as are some other books the will pop up in this list, but it's a reread for a reason. I love fractured fairy tales beyond all measure, and this is an especially good one, based on the fairytale of the same name by the Brothers Grimm. It's also the first in a series that is equally good, though I haven't reread the rest like I have this one. I'm still waiting on a movie; it is a mighty need of mine to see Sinqua Walls as Prince Geric.

My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok. Easily one of my favorite books, full stop. I was introduced to the book through a play adaptation that was on Broadway a few years ago when I saw it with my dad, and haven't really stopped thinking about it since. The book also partially inspired my creative writing senior thesis, so it's always going to hold a special place in my heart for those reasons. It's about a young boy named Asher Lev who, while growing up in a repressive Ladover Hasidic community (a thinly veiled fictionalization of the Lubovitcher branch of Hasidism), feels more drawn to art than God. Also, in googling the book to remind myself of the fictional name, I have discovered there is a sequel that I'm going to have to pick up a copy of called The Gift of Asher Lev.

City of Thieves, by David Benioff. Yes, that David Benioff. But regardless of how I feel about Game of Thrones, I loved this book beyond all measure. It's about a teenage boy named Lev Beniov who is arrested during the Nazi siege of Leningrad and given a chance to save his life with his cellmate, a young man named Kolya, by going on a mission to find eggs for the wedding of a Soviet colonel's daughter. (The only thing I didn't like was the ending, but that's for purely selfish reasons. Narratively, I understand it.)

The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore. I'll be upfront in saying this wasn't my favorite book I read this year, but it was still a lot of fun. The story jumps between the present day, following Harold White, a new inductee into what's basically a Sherlockian scholar fanclub, in trying to figure out what happened to Arthur Conan Doyle's missing diary, and London in 1893, following Conan Doyle himself, who is trying to solve a mystery of his own while on his infamous hiatus from writing the Holmes stories. And even though it wasn't my favorite of the books I read, it was still a nice love letter to Sherlockiana, if you will, and an entertaining attempt at figuring out why Conan Doyle started writing the stories again, even after making it clear that he hated his own protagonist.

The 100, by Kass Morgan. I feel like everybody has to know what this is about at this point, but I will say that the book is very different from the TV show. If I'm being honest, I like the TV show a lot better, for a number of reasons, but it was still a fun read. I don't think I'll be reading the rest of the series, though.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. It took me way longer to read this book than it should have, considering the author is an alum of my college, but ah well. I finally did it, and it was so worth it. It's about a teenage boy named Jacob who, after his grandfather is murdered under suspiciously supernatural circumstances, follows said grandfather's collection of mysterious photos of supernatural looking children to an orphanage off the coast of Wales. The novel also uses the photography in its pages, as the author himself was inspired to write this story after spending years collecting old curio type photos. There are also sequels to this book, which I do plan on reading at some point this year.

A Laodicean, by Thomas Hardy. The writer, not the actor. When I was abroad in England, I took an English called Hardy and Women Who Did, and predictably read a lot of Thomas Hardy. This book, however, was not on our reading list, despite having some very similar themes to his other novels that we read. My guess is that is because this book is actually much more similar to the romantic comedies of the present than it is to almost any other Thomas Hardy book you'll encounter. I loved it. A lot. I don't really want to say anything else other than go read it.

The Harry Potter Series. Need I say more? I tend to reread these every couple of years, and it's really fun noticing new things each time around. I also really hated Draco this time around, which was different. Until I got to the sixth book, and then i loved him again. Also, when I was cleaning out my room to move to the city (oh yeah. That's a thing that happened), I found a list of predictions my friend, my cousin, and I had made for the seventh book after the sixth book came out, and let me tell you. We got a lot of things right. It was really cool.

His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Philip Pullman. I first read these in middle school, and they were very formative for my preteen years, but rereading them now was like reading them again for the first time. I remembered a decent amount about The Golden Compass, but I had forgotten most of what happened in The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, so it was a real pleasure to read them again in preparation for the BBC series that was announced back in November (Idris Elba for Lord Asriel, pls). Also, I cried on the train when I finished the last one. If you're a weeper, be prepared.

There were also two books that I started reading, and have not yet finished. So far, both are good. The first is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte. I'm about halfway through and it's amazing. It's definitely the feminist testament of the Victorian era, and well worth reading. The second is called Mermaids in Paradise, by Lydia Millet. It's best described as literary fiction with a fantasy bent. I'm only a few chapters in, but so far, I'm really enjoying it.

Obviously, those two are at the top of my list for books to read in 2016. I've got a few others as well, mainly consisting of books I've owned for a couple of years and still haven't touched. This list will also expand as the year progresses, so don't laugh at how short it is right now.

Again, these are in no particular order. We'll see how this goes.

Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie
Between Shades of Grey, by Ruta Sepetys
The Secret Sky, by Atia Abawi
Children of the Jacaranda Tree, by Sahar Delijani
The Raven Cycle, by Maggie Steifvater
Mary, Queen of Scots, by Alison Weir
Letter to My Daughter, by Maya Angelou
a Haruki Murakami book. Which one?? I have no idea
finishing Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
rereading the Anne of Green Gables books
more nonfiction

I hope that this list gave you some suggestions if you've been looking for new books to read! I know I'm always looking for stuff, especially stuff written by women about women, and also stuff by people of color, so if you've got anything for me to check out, I wanna hear it!

Much love,

Rachel Shoshanna

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The cursor blinked at Nina, mocking her, digging deeper cuts into her chest as she stared at her computer. Her mind was frighteningly blank.

It had been barren for weeks. She didn’t know what was wrong with her, only that every single time she sat down to try her hand at writing something, anything – nothing would come. It was as if the fountain deep inside her, the one that was the source of all her stories and ideas, the one that used to overflow with possibilities, had been shut off. The only sound filling the empty space of her office was the music playing in the background, the soft guitar licks the only thing keeping her from going completely crazed.

Her phone rang, startling her out of her stupor, and when she answered it, the clipped voice of Alison, her agent, came through the line.

“Nina.” She sighed.

“I know, I know. I’m working on something now. Or, trying to.”

“Your deadline was three weeks ago.” That was all Alison needed to say for the shame to settle in the cracks in Nina’s chest. It was also the third consecutive deadline she had missed.

“I’m sorry,” was all she could say without her voice threatening to crack. Something in her gut told her that this was more than just writer’s block, that it wasn’t going to go away, but she could barely admit that to herself. How could she possibly admit it to Alison?

Alison sighed over the line.

“I can give you one more week.”

“Thanks,” Nina said, and hung up, blinking tears out of her eyes. Her fingers moved over her keyboard, forced into action by Alison’s call. Christine McVie’s voice sang in her ear, encouraging her further, and she tried to tell herself that she would figure something out.

The sun winked down from a bright blue sky, and I thought it was hardly appropriate weather for an unveiling ceremony.

Nina made a noise of frustration, and deleted the sentence. Way too predictable, writers use ironies like that all the damn time. Again.

Snow fell in thick clumps from the sky, beginning its slow coat of the frosty earth.

The keyboard clacked violently as Nina struck the new sentence from the document. Nothing happened, it was too boring – it wouldn’t grasp and clutch onto any reader’s attention the way a first sentence needed to. Something else entirely was needed.

The roar of the crowd shakes Day’s bones as the team makes its way onto the ice for the first game of the season.

Nina let out a long groan and collapsed on her crossed arms, pressing down on the G key by accident. Nobody was interested in a short story about a woman’s hockey team, she wasn’t kidding herself. A full page and a half were wasted by the time she finally looked up, her eyes flat and heart heavy. Lindsay Buckingham’s voice was now reminding her that tomorrow would soon be here, and Nina stood up, sick of torturing herself. Lindsay was right, she could make another attempt again tomorrow. She clicked the little red X in the corner of the document, not bothering to save it, and shut the computer. Her fingers were itching to get back on her new guitar, anyway.

Nina picked up her phone and sent of texts to a couple of friends. Hopefully they could play for a few hours, and Nina would wake up in the morning with a clear head and renewed fingers.

If anything, it was worse the next day.

Nina could barely concentrate on the Word document, despite her favorite pump up pop music blasting through the speakers. She forced her tired fingers over the keys, fiddled with them for a moment, before typing.

When Sarah saw her mother’s name on the screen of her vibrating phone, her stomach clenched.

Nina shook her head and ran her hands through her hair, already aggravated. She could see where this story was headed the second that sentence was typed – she’d written it a hundred times already. Sad queer family drama with a side dose of romance. She was sick of sad queers, and her agent, Alison, was sick of queers all together, Nina knew.

“Where’s your creativity?” she would say, waving the bland sheets of story in her face. “You’ve got it, I know you do, so start showing me some of it again.”

Nina was fairly certain if she kept giving her the same story repackaged with different characters, she would be dropped. The scariest part of that thought was not the fact that she would be losing her job; she bartended nightly and had a part time secretarial job at a big name law firm, affording rent wouldn’t be the issue. No, the most terrifying part of potentially being dropped by her agent was that as she thought about it, the more it seemed like a good thing.

Nina jabbed at the backspace key in desperation, hoping the force of it would inspire some kind of passion in her. She was good at writing, at least when she had ideas. The first story she ever wrote was a sequel to Charlotte’s Web in the first grade, and she hadn’t stopped writing until now. It was the only thing she really knew how to do, and the fact that she wasn’t writing anything, couldn’t write anything, was uncharted territory. She couldn’t think about it, just had to press forward. Over the speakers, Nicki Minaj was rapping and Nina tried to listen to her, drew in a deep breath before setting her fingers down again. She was a queen, she could conquer this damn blank page.

Erin Twohy, newscaster for WKN Evening News, Channel 6, stared at the teleprompter, completely silent despite the red on-air light blinking in her eyes.

Nina swallowed and deleted that one as quickly as possible. It felt like the start of something far too similar to her current predicament, and she had always been a firm believer in not writing stories that were secretly about herself. There was a reason she wrote fiction.

She stood up, shook out her arms and did a few jumping jacks, trying to clear her head. The sound of electronic pop music switched to the opening chords of Babs’ iconic Funny Girl song – maybe something triumphant would help. If Fanny Brice could do it, so could she.

I woke up with the scratch in the back of my throat that warned of vocal rest, and my body sagged further into the sheets, sinking with my

Something shuttered inside Nina and she stopped typing, suddenly very still. She turned off the music, closed out of the document, and shut down her computer, every limb fighting to work against gravity. Her boots were snug around her feet when she put them on, but she grabbed her house keys, slamming the door behind her as she left her apartment.

Nina shivered, both from the cold and the nagging feeling that her life was all wrong. As she walked down the sidewalks of the Upper East Side, she tried to remember the last time she wrote something she was one hundred percent satisfied with, the last time wrote something fulfilling, the last time she wrote something that actually made her feel good.

She couldn’t. This was more than just writer’s block. Nina knew that the second she realized that even the idea of not being able to play guitar, or sing, for whatever ridiculous reason – she had laryngitis, or she broke a finger typing too hard, something – the thought that she might not be able to be so intimately involved with music had her breathing hard and tears pricking at her eyes, made her feel like she might pass out if she didn’t get her music fix. She needed to get out of the house and think for a long, long while.

She jogged down the steps to the 5 train, not sure yet where she was heading, but not really bothered. A saxophonist was busking in the station (Billy Joel, it sounded like), soulful and sad, and Nina dug in her pants pockets to see if she could find any change. A five dollar bill and a quarter came up and she tossed them into the case at his feet. He nodded towards her in thanks, and she smiled before swiping her Metrocard and jumping on the next train.

It was crowded with tourists, presumably leaving the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Nina was left grabbing for the metal handbar above her head. The sea of people surrounding her and the movement of the car jostled her as the train sped along, and she held on for her life as her body and her brain threatened to spill to the ground.

The last ten years of her life were flashing through her mind and it was fucking with her, badly. Thoughts and images were all jumbled up in her head but as she was knocked around by the press of other bodies, felt the rumble of the train beneath her feet, saw the walls of the subway tunnels flashing by, they started to click together -she realized with sudden clarity that writing had felt less like a necessity and more like a chore for a few years now. Every time she sent a new story to Alison, it felt like she was filling a quota that had been set for her. Seven stories for each singular piece that was picked up, and only in one of ten publications to which it was sent. It was tiresome, and when she could finally hand off the stories, it was as though a weight was being removed from her stomach. Relief. That was what she felt.

She shouldn’t feel like that about her writing. When she started out with her agent, she had been so damn excited to get her words, her precious words, sent to print. The first story that she published was probably still the piece she loved more than anything else she had ever written. It was a story told from the point of view of a piece of music in the process of being composed, and it was glorious. Each sentence had been so carefully constructed, each word carefully chosen, to communicate just so how music could heal and free and instill joy in people and – oh.

The train stopped at Union Square, and Nina got off, needed to breathe air other than dank subway station oxygen and the carbon dioxide of strangers.

God. She was twenty-nine, it was far too early for her to be questioning everything about herself and what she had spent most of her life doing. But here she was, feeling more and more certain that she couldn’t continue writing. Not when something else had the potential to make her much happier, even though she wasn’t even sure she was good enough at that other something.

Nina wandered the streets around Union Square for nearly an hour, wallowing in self-doubt, until she heard the claps and strums of a song she knew well. She turned the corner and there was a young woman, no older than twenty-five, guitar case at her feet, her eyes closed and playing like there was nothing else in the world that would make her feel as good as she did in that moment.

Nina was captivated. Her foot tapped in time with the song and her mouth was opening and then she was singing with the performer. She couldn’t stop herself, even though she knew singing along with buskers was considered rude, even though there were people all around her that would probably stare.

The busker opened her eyes and instead of telling her to fuck off, smiled and started playing with more vigor. Nina began clapping as she sang, sinking further into the power of the song, and before she knew it the busker was drawing to a close. Here she comes, my saving grace, they sang together in harmony.

They had drawn a bit of a crowd and the more polite passers-by clapped and dropped coins into the case. Some people were putting away phones, and Nina blushed when she realized they had gotten at least some of the song on video. Then she flushed deeper and a grin slowly crept its way across her face as she realized that this feeling was the one she had been searching for in her writing. Joy bubbled in her stomach, and her heart fluttered in her chest. It was exhilarating.

The busker stuck out her hand.

“I’m Miriam,” she said. “You’re really good."

“Thanks.” Nina swelled inside and the cuts carved into her chest by that stupid blinking cursor were filled with the joy from her gut and healed over. “You are too.” Gina laughed.

“Well, that’s a relief.” She gestured vaguely at Nina. “You a musician too?"

The question gave Nina pause. She only realized that music made her happier than writing over the course of the last couple of days. And yet.

“I would really love to keep talking, but I have to go make a phone call. Would you mind waiting around for a few minutes?” Miriam looked vaguely amused, like she couldn’t believe a stranger was asking her to wait around. Nina couldn’t believe it either.

“Or you could walk with me, that’s okay too.” Nina wasn’t actually sure if that was any better, but Miriam said sure, and she put her guitar in its case, and together they walked around the corner.

Nina’s feet led her on a path she had tread hundred of times since she had moved to New York City. She was hardly surprised when she came to a stop in front of The Strand. The hours she had passed huddled in some corner of the store reading, the times she had sat down and actually written something inside the store, were so vivid in her memory, but somehow felt like they belonged to someone else.

A minute passed and Nina stood at the window, staring at the books piled on the racks outside, at her reflection next to Miriam’s in the window, who was looking at her with a soft curiosity, the more certain she was of what had to be done. She could hear Alison’s voice in her head, from a conversation they had the second time she missed a deadline.

“Nina, you’re clearly tired. Maybe you should take a break.” Nina had insisted she was fine, that she was just in a bit of a slump, that she would have something for her in three weeks. Three months later, and she was still stuck in the same place, and the only way out was up and away.

Her hands were dialing the familiar number before she could second-guess herself, and Alison picked up on the other end as Nina turned away from The Strand, facing the street.

“Alison, I’m done,” she said, breathy and nervous. “You don’t need to keep a hawk’s eye on me, you don’t need to coddle me, I’m done. You don’t have to waste your time on me anymore.”

There was silence for a moment, and then Alison’s voice came through.

“You know, I’m disappointed. You’re very talented when you’re producing. But I can’t say that I’m surprised either.” Nina nodded, though she knew Alison couldn’t see her. “Good luck, Nina.”

“Thanks.” The call clicked to an end, and she felt like she could take a real, replenishing breath for the first time in weeks. She turned to Miriam, breathless and giddy. She was shocked that she had actually stuck around, but Miriam didn’t seem to be bothered – she was still staring at her with big doe brown eyes, filled with mild awe.

“I’m not entirely sure what that was about, but it seemed brave,” she said, and Nina laughed.

“Yeah.” Miriam grinned at her, and it spurred her on. “That’s also the answer to your question, you know.”

“Sorry?”

“In answer to your question,” Nina clarified, cheeks flushed with excitement and her voice bright. “Yeah, I am a musician.”

A vaguely autobiographical story I wrote in my Advanced Fiction class last fall. Hope you enjoyed!

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