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- Capsule #108 ft. Jess Geary
Hello!
The past couple of weeks have felt a bit like summer ended, as if we all got stuck in some weird in-between mode. I had a word with myself and decided to make the most of the rest of August. If you also need reminding how to remain in the summer spirit, this post might help. 🌞
On the note of summer, I wanted to share a reading list, because what better way to be present and enjoy the rest of long bright days than with a good book.
I consulted my friend Alice Townson for book recs. Alice is a book scout, working with film and TV producers as well as international publishers to help them find the best books to adapt or translate, so naturally she has excellent taste. Her list is below and it made me immediately want to book a week off work to dive into one of her reads…
Have a gorgeous weekend!
Holly x
A late-summer reading list, by Alice Townson 📚📖♡⋆ ˚｡
Welcome Alice xxx
FLESH by David Szalay
I felt extremely vindicated when this was longlisted for the Booker Prize as I’ve been going around the pubs of London recommending this to anyone who will (or won’t) listen. It’s a rags-to-riches-to-rags novel which charts the life of István, a Hungarian man, who after spending time in prison for manslaughter and serving in the army, comes to London to make his fortune. The prose is clean and brutally exact and there is a real creeping sense of menace that permeates the novel. István is blunt, amoral and largely driven by his base desires for sex and money. By the end of the novel you’re so scared of him you have no idea what he might be capable of, and I was so tense I was barely breathing. Szalay is brilliant at subtly but cruelly skewering the world of the super rich. The characters’ lives are banal and amoral, but peppered with unimaginable luxury. You don’t like anyone, but they get under your skin and you can’t look away. I just spotted an Amazon review that calls it “slow and sad” - don’t listen to them. They’re wrong.
ANNA KARENINA by Leo Tolstoy
OK, hear me out. I’m going to disagree with a recent Guardian article and say that Anna Karenina is in fact the ultimate beach read. In the summer, I always look for a big fat book I can really sink into and this is one of the biggest and fattest of them all. I read it when I was 19 and found it unputdownable, with the caveat that to achieve this effect you must absolutely follow my advice and NOT read the passages about farming, they are incredibly dull and add nothing to the story. Otherwise, this is extremely sexy, an unhappy woman with a boring husband having a hot affair with a handsome man is a tale as old as time, and the characters feel surprisingly contemporary.
DJINNS by Fatma Aydemir
This German novel was a bestseller, shortlisted for the German Book Prize (Germany’s equivalent of the Booker), adapted for stage and is also in development for TV. Luckily for you lot, it has also been translated into English so you can enjoy it too. It is a powerful Turkish-Kurdish family saga about the migrant experience in Germany, but also about sibling rivalries, about grief and about gender. Hüseyin, the patriarch of the family, has finally retired to Turkey, ready to enjoy his relative wealth in the country of his birth - but he immediately suffers a heart attack and dies. Since Islam dictates he must be buried as soon as possible, his wife and four children hurry to Istanbul and each chapter is devoted to their different points of view. The ending is a gut punch and made me cry.
AMERICANAH Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
One of my all time favourites and an amazing “the one that got away” love story that follows two people who meet at school in Nigeria and then never forget each other despite living very separate lives. It’s also about race and immigration and how these two things have the power to skewer your identity, and affect our ideas of home and belonging. The writing is extremely transportive, peppered with musical and food references, and it’s a real page-turner. It’s basically a modern classic, at this point it’s embarrassing not to have read it.
THE LAST ONE Fatima Daas
More books in translation (sorry, not sorry). This is a short and sharp autofictional novel that was blurbed by the legend that is Virginie Despentes (if you don’t know you need to get to know) and is being adapted into a movie directed by Hafsia Herzi. The narrator is the youngest daughter of a family of Algerian immigrants living in the Parisian suburbs, coming-of-age in a city that doesn’t feel entirely hospitable and struggling with her identity as a gay Muslim woman. The novel is essentially a prose poem, short, inventive and powerful, and the author is also cool as f*ck. You can read this in one sitting and you won’t regret it.
THE PISCES Melissa Broder
In the nicest way possible, this book is deranged. It was recommended to me when I first moved to London by an extremely intelligent and charismatic woman who gave me a proof (the first time I ever read a proof and I thought I was so cool) and boy oh boy it did not disappoint. To put it simply, this is a satire about a woman, Lucy, who falls in love with a merman while staying at her sister’s house in Venice Beach to dogsit after a bad break-up. Lucy is quite frankly a mess, someone who has all of your bad habits but has injected them with steroids, and just when you think things can’t get any worse in this book, guess what, they do. If you’re dating right now, you absolutely should read this. It will make you take a cold hard look at your bullshit, whilst also encouraging you to love yourself… as if not you will suffer some truly terrible consequences.
BOY PARTS Eliza Clark
Eliza Clark is a genius. When I first read this book, I thought I hated it, but then I read it again a few months later and it dawned on me that I actually loved it! Magical. Set in Newcastle, it follows Irina, a London art-school graduate who is back living in her hometown and taking fetish photography of unsuspecting men she scouts in the street in order to revive (or begin, depending who you listen to) her career as an artist. But her intentions are not entirely honourable, and if you haven't guessed it already, Irina is a total psycho. She’s violent, she’s untrustworthy, she drinks too much and takes too many drugs, she is mean to her friends, she’s basically a female Patrick Bateman. But she’s also a hottie and working-class, and so everyone in her life totally underestimates her, and the book is basically an exercise in seeing how far she can go and what damage she’ll do before anyone is able to stop her. This is gritty and grimy, it’s about power and gender and class, and it feels completely original.
WHAT I LOVED Siri Hustvedt
If you haven’t read any Siri Hustvedt, now is the time. I gobbled this book up a couple of Christmases ago and it stayed with me ever since. Beginning in 1970s New York, the book starts as a study of two families absorbed in the New York art world. Leo is an art historian, while his best friend Bill is an artist and their lives become more and more intertwined as the book goes on, eventually they live in flats with their families right next to each other in the same building. Later on though, the novel descends into a psychological thriller as one of their sons, now grown-up, goes increasingly off the rails. It is an amazing New York novel with a very strong sense of place, but it’s also a nuanced and exacting dissection of the pressures of marriage and friendship over the course of a lifetime. There is some controversy around the novel, given it is clearly inspired by the story of Siri Hustvedt’s husband Paul Auster’s first wife and their troubled son - but that only makes it all the more interesting.
THE FIVE Hallie Rubenhold
It won’t surprise you to learn I was a huge nerd as a child, totally obsessed with the Victorians, and happily this book allowed me to indulge my childhood passion. It looks as the legendary true crime case of Jack the Ripper, but instead of focussing on who Jack the Ripper was or could have been, it corrects the widely held belief that all his victims were prostitutes and tells you everything about their lives and how they came to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, by and large through no fault of their own. It is a fascinating portrayal of what life was like for women in Victorian London, as well as a good reminder that misogyny, both then and now, is quite literally deadly. This is true crime, but it leaves less of a sour taste in the mouth than some contemporary stories.
NANA Emile Zola
Zola is a classic French novelist, sort of like Dickens in that he wrote about ordinary working-class people, but weirder because he was, well… French. One of the things he is best at is writing a truly unhinged female protagonist and Nana is the cream of the crop in that regard. Set in late 19th century Paris, the novel follows Nana, a woman born in the slums but who gradually climbs the ranks of corrupt Parisian high society as a sex worker until she has used and abused what feels like all of the most powerful men in France. She drives almost every single man she sleeps with around the twist (one steals from the army and is imprisoned, a few commit suicide, another goes bankrupt) but her ascent to power never falters for a second. She is a true femme fatale, a woman who could have been chewed up and spat back out by society, but in fact she manages to reverse the roles. Don’t be put off by the fact that it was published in 1880 - it’s a sordid, nasty, glittering and hugely enjoyable romp.
Alice — thank you thank you. ♡✧˚ ༘ ⋆｡♡˚
And finally…
News from the Capsule universe this week:
The Beyoncé Act III clues are blatant these days
You could help Hayley Williams decide the track order for her album
GQ made a sick medieval graphic to illustrate the fashion designer musical chairs
You’re invite to the Topshop runway return
Also in nostalgia: that Hannah Montana anniversary celebration is getting real
And more nostalgia: Selena Gomez talking about dating the Jonas Brothers with Taylor Swift
Looks like Dua Lipa is adding even more strings to her bow
This is true euro summer
And it’s Copenhagen Fashion Week. Stuff worth seeing: Hermès-inspired, modern equestrian vibes at Baum und Pferdgarten, awesome menswear at Sunflower, and playful proportions at Rave Review
…and of course some great street style, courtesy of Vogue Scandanavia
This week, Jess Geary popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅♀️ …
Jess is an all around legend, presenter and annoying internet influencer. Catch her on Instagram and TikTok.
🔥🔥🔥Hot🔥🔥🔥
Camel blues, Moscow mules, Halloween candles out already, hot pants and knee high boots, saying no to things you don’t want to do, World War 2 documentaries, pigeons, Shrek green, VINTED, me
Hot Not… 🙅♀️🙅♀️🙅♀️
Foundation (i'm going all natural dewy these days), cold brew (finally acknowledging the fact that it gives me anxiety), using your phone on the dance floor (this is my sacred space), Shein (low prices = exploited workers!)
📺 Watching: Freakier Friday in the cinema, Selena Gomez on Therapuss, and this video of Zane Lowe sharing ideal songs for specific scenarios.
📖 Reading: Biz Sherbert’s essay on the spirituality of Addison Rae for AnOther, this Dazed piece which questions whether fitness culture is making us sad and boring, and the Ethel Cain profile in The Cut, which features this big revelation:
After Willoughby, Anhedönia will say good-bye to Ethel Cain. She has completed her record deal and will go independent for her next album, following a new character — Ethel’s mother, Vera — in a new setting and time period. “It’s been seven long years of my life, which is a bittersweet closing, but now I can move forward to a new chapter,” she says.”
🎧 Listening to: Willoughby Tucker I’ll Always Love You, the new Ethel Cain album, two new Lucy Dacus songs, and Cannonball, Wesley Morris’s new podcast for the New York Times.
Luna is here to deliver an observation: This photo of Hailey Bieber almost two years ago has had such a lasting influence on the way we dress: Google search interest in “rugby shirt” is now at an all-time high, and the top trending related items are loafers and jorts over the past week. Is it still a micro trend if we’re on it years later?
If you’d like to adopt Luna or one of her friends, click here to learn more.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, do refer them! 🥺
See you next week 💋