Falling in Love in Lagos, Coming of Age in San Francisco, and a Cocktail for when it's Not the Heat, it's the Humidity

Plus: A two-decade slow burn and a two-month vacation

Dear friends, I am about to plunge into a frantic period of copyediting my first book and NaNoWriMo-style drafting my second (aka 50,000 words in 30 days). While I love writing to you, I only have so many hours and brain cells, so Reading at the Bar is going on hiatus for the next eight weeks. I will return with a brand-new monogrammed LL Bean backpack and #2 pencils freshly sharpened on Wednesday, September 6.

Two sides of a coin: while midsummer madness means I wake up when the light filters into my room at stupid o’clock, it means that the evenings are long, slow, easy drifts into the dark. I walked home a few nights ago after a delightful, surreal conversation about sandwiches at the British Library, and the twilight of nine PM was soft and blue as I cut past the pub with drinkers lingering with their pints, through two different gardens (God bless the British belief that green space is practically a human right). The air smelled like high summer London, the deep-fried lawn clippings reek of pot tangling up with sweet jasmine, whiffs of exhaust and piss par for the course.

I love the way this city makes life feel smaller and bigger at the same time; smaller in that I am one of millions of bodies in one of the great cities of the world, bigger because I can do things like walk home at night on my own and notice more than I ever did behind the wheel of a car.

Recently I read and loved…

Talking at Night by Claire Daverley

On the surface, Talking at Night has a very simple, borderline nonexistent story engine - Will and Rosie are clearly meant for each other when they meet as teenagers, but will they ever actually be together? Fair warning: if you don’t like slow burns in your love stories, move on to the next book, because the burn in Talking at Night lasts two decades and over three hundred pages. But, hand on heart, you are not here for the plot for this one. You are here for the characterization of Daverley’s small cast of characters, as precise and delicate as a Patek Philippe mechanism, and you are here for the writing. My God, the writing, which had me re-reading pages and savoring images of stolen apple tarts and bleak winter beaches, and which holds so much grief and longing without ever turning overwrought or purple. An incredible book.

Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad by Damilare Kuku

As part of fellow Ruby/NCWR alum Robin Yang’s Summer Reading Challenge I needed to read a genre I was skeptical of, and while short stories are a form rather than a genre, I am certainly skeptical of them. It’s not really their fault - it’s more that I just read too damn fast to be a good short story reader unless I have a pen to slow me down. I also struggle with anything that favors style over plot, which I feel like short stories do more. Enter Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, a collection of stories about Nigerians looking for sex, love, and success in their capital city, AKA a book basically tailor-made for me. It’s a filthier, more explicitly feminist variation on The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank (though the the stories are all standalones, unlike Bank’s book). Nearly All the Men is worth buying for the first story alone, which I won’t spoil here but might make you wince if you have a penis, fair warning. I devoured this and think you will too.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

This YA queer historical romance/coming-of age story is an absolute banquet of a book. It captures 1950s America in flux, pulls apart the multiple layers of the Chinese immigration experience, and highlights the beginnings of the US space program. It describes the San Francisco of seventy years ago so evocatively you can shiver with the fog on your skin and see the neon glow of North Beach clubs, and above all, it paints the tender blush of first, and forbidden, love in all its joy and pain. This book has won all the awards and it is honestly not overhyped in the slightest. I read slowly so that it wouldn’t be over too soon, and I wish I could have the experience of reading it again for the first time.

I also enjoyed…1913 by Florian Ilies, Planes, Trains, and All The Feels by Livy Hart, You, With a View by Jessica Joyce

And I mixed…a Bourbon Peach Smash.

Deb Perelman’s invention is a delicious one-bottle cocktail for when it’s so hot and sticky all you can imagine doing is lounging on a porch after sunset, listening to nighttime sounds (depending on where you are, that’s crickets and cicadas or tipsy people yelling and someone blasting I’ve Got a Woman out their car window), and contemplating the individual beads of sweat trickling down your spine.

It’s also for when you can get a ridiculously good peach. The kind of fruit where you’d be eating it over the sink making obscene slurping noises, like Dracula with a particularly luscious virgin. Instead of eating said fruit, you macerate it with sugar, water, and a little cider vinegar for few hours, then combine the fruit and its syrup with fresh mint, bourbon, and a splash of soda water. The peach weaves seamlessly into the vanilla of the whiskey and the aniseed of the mint and makes something equally sweet and refreshing.

I also enjoyed…a rock shandy at The Eagle, Field Recordings Skins 2021, T’s birthday fizz, and a Pimm’s Cup at the Idler Festival.