Today we are drinking coffee and spilling tea. Over the past few months I have been reading books recommended by celebrities and today we are tackling Kendall Jenner, not physically just intellectually. This week we are going to be judging Kendall Jenner’s taste in books, could be a long week.

1. Show Me a Healthy Person by Darcie Wilder

Okay, I’m not going to lie. We are off to the worst start possible. The first book I read was this one simply because the title is so provocative: it’s Show Me a Healthy Person. The structure is essentially a kind of montage of ideas in kind of tweet-sized chunks. It’s all lowercase, there’s no grammar, there’s no punctuation. It’s kind of set out like that. If you can see that It’s postmodern a product of the 21st century, it’s cool, I get that. This is essentially a series of fleeting observations that are sometimes kind of funny and they amalgamate into this kind of collage of self-deprecation trauma and sex emphasis on sex like I think the word cum is mentioned on every single page. I’m not talking about come On Eileen – And although it’s nonlinear, there are kinds of themes and motifs that are threaded throughout the book to kind of make it feel like a cohesive piece of work.

Darcie Wilder, I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you, I’ve! Never in my life read a book and felt genuinely embarrassed for the author, like the secondhand embarrassment that I got from this book was painful. Listen, I’m not against the concept at all, I’m just against the way it was executed as in like it made me want to be executed. Darcie Wilder just gives off the most pick-me energy, I’ve ever encountered. It’s this weird juxtaposition of like trying too hard to look like you’re, not trying at all and having a kind of deliberately nonchalant tone whilst talking about incredibly shocking behaviors and I just thought it made. It seems a bit calculated and therefore insincere. Yeah, I didn’t enjoy this at all, but I appreciate the effort. Oh, I need to grab this back to show you that, on the cover, there is a quote by Scott McClanahan that says this book is the future of writing. Is that a threat? If this is the future of writing, I’m shredding my English degree. Anyway Literally Show Me a Healthy Person shows me one good thing about this book.

2. The Houseguest by Amparo Davila

Okay, it’s day two and we have another book with a very sexy book cover. This is just exquisite. So I’ve read the first few short stories in this collection now and, let’s just say, it’s ironic that there’s a chair on the cover of this book because it’s the tables that have turned – I am loving it. This is so good. This book is called The Houseguest and it made me think of Edgar Allan Poe and, as we all know, I’m an Edgar Allen, Hoe. I love that man. These stories are so creepy and sinister and mesmerizing and they’re just consistently good.

And each story leaves you to have to kind of fill in the gaps of what happened before the story started or what happened after or even during the story. Amparo Davila is a Mexican author, this is her first work in English and I will be reading anything else that she puts out because this was so great. So thank you, Kendall, Hello there, and welcome back to Jack reading eight books in seven days. You know it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. Okay, I’ve got it welcome to Keeping Up with the "Carcrashians" because I am a car crash.

3. How to Cure a Ghost by Fariha Roisin

So, the next book that I read was this one. This is How to Cure a Ghost by Fariha Roisin. Right, I’m going to say it. I think this is one of my favorite book covers of all time. The whole book is just stunning. I would say this has a very similar, vibe and tone to Milk and Honey, and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, just because something appeals to a mass audience and can be understood by everyone doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad. This poetry collection is bloody good. As in I was reading this on the train last night, and I was so engrossed in the poetry that I was reading that I missed my stop and didn’t notice until like three stops later. But it presents this powerful and poignant and interesting perspective of a queer Muslim and how she’s kind of navigating a world that she feels wasn’t built for her.

It discusses intersectionality in a range of different scenarios. It covers colonialism, diaspora, love, belonging, and also a privilege. And now I can see why Kendall Jenner is such a fan of this book. After all, she did end police brutality with a can of Pepsi, so you know, CEO of activism, I mean RIP Malcolm X. You would have loved Kendall Jenner. Anyway, um back to the collection of poetry. There are a few kinds of filler poems in here, which I wish had been edited out because they do sort of kill the momentum at parts. But overall I thought this was breathtaking and I would recommend I have just finished reading this book.

4. So Sad Today by Melissa Broder

Next up we have So Sad Today and, to be honest, I can’t fault it. It did do what it said it would do on the cover it made me so sad, today. So sad that I spent money on this thing. This book is a freaking rollercoaster. It’s kind of similar to Literally Show Me a Healthy Person in the sense that it’s very irreverent and postmodern, but this one at least didn’t make me lose brain cells. You know, it’s achieving the bare minimum. For me, this is a selection of personal essays by Melissa Broder, and let me just read you some of the essay titles. “So we have, I want to be a whole person, but thin help me not be a human being, honk. If there’s a committee in your head trying to kill you Okay, this one is called Love like you are trying to fill an insatiable spiritual hole with another person who will suffocate in there,” and that essay is all about two people sexting for 30 whole pages. H, how did we get here? How did we get here? Weirdly, Halsey has this poem where she’s like on day one I realized I wasn’t enough and that’s exactly what the first essay in this book is about. As well and I hated it in Halsey’s, poetry, collection and I hated it here.

I feel like we just need to let this idea go like this whole. When did I ask to be born? the idea, let it go guys, let it’s gone Because it’s just dumb. It’s a tweet at best, a tweet that should have been saved in the drafts, not an essay or a poem that makes it into a Collection. It’s about as clever as saying. No one asked for the sky to be blue like it doesn’t matter. Overall, I felt like this book was a better version of this book, but I still didn’t like it.

5. Sea of Strangers by Lang Leav

This is Sea of Strangers. It goes without saying. This cover is divine. Before I talk about any author, I always make sure to look up how to pronounce their name and when I searched up Lang Leav, this is what came up so anyway, that was not helpful and it’s a collection of poetry and prose that is very much fine like it’s just fine. The poems said nice things and they said them using nice words. All of the words I’m using here are positive, but they’re, just like aggressively average you know. I found this collection just a little bit forgettable and I think that’s because a lot of the ideas that are presented are ones you’ve probably come across before. For example, there’s this one called Meant to Be and it goes. If they were meant to be in your life, nothing could ever make them leave. If they weren’t nothing in the world could make them stay. Don’t you feel, like you’ve just heard that before somewhere? As I was reading the collection I just felt like, I was coming across lots of things that I already knew or had already heard before, but just in a nicer way than I am capable of articulating myself.

You know, for example, there’s this one, which is called With Anyone Else, “you came into my life and made everything else feel like a rehearsal. Love always came to me as a question, but with you, it felt like an answer I didn’t know. I had put up walls until you brought them crashing down. I couldn’t figure out why love was different from you until I realized it.” Hadn’t been in love with anyone else. That is quite lovely, So yeah that is Sea of Strangers, and it’s something that I think would maybe be a good gift to someone who you think would like poetry, but doesn’t read very much of it if that makes sense. I’ve heard that Leav’s other collections of poetry are a lot better than this they’re a bit stronger, so yeah, I would just say, don’t expect anything groundbreaking, here. It’s kind of similar to Kendall within the Kardashian clan because you know, it’s nice, it’s beautiful to look at, but It’s not necessarily serving us iconic moments. I don’t even know where I’m going with this um, that was Sea of Strangers.

6. Tonight I'm Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson

Today’s book was Tonight I'm Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson, and I hope you can see this, but the pages have deckled edges, which is a real treat. This book is introspective psychoanalytical and melancholy similar to So Sad Today. This is also a collection of personal essays, but it’s so much better. Chelsea Hodson sort of explores femininity and the experience of being a woman in society, but she doesn’t shy away from kind of gruesome encounters and scenarios and things not always having a perfect conclusion and Not always making the most morally sound decisions. So yeah out of Literally Show Me a Healthy Person So Sad Today and this I would pick this every time.

The one thing that I’m finding as a general kind of trend in this article is that the short story, collections, and collections of essays like this they’re, not necessarily as gripping as a novel, would be. Just because I think, when you’re reading a story, you’re kind of, the incentive to keep reading is to find out what happens and how the plot develops. Whereas with these, when you get to the end of a short story or the end of an essay collection, it’s kind of like self-contained and you could quite easily stop there. So I’m finding it more difficult to think about picking these books up. But that’s very much my problem.

Going forward I think I will continue to read stuff like this. I think the perfect kind of place for this in my life would be to put a book like this in my bag that I take with me on the tube or you know when I’m commuting anywhere, and I just want to read in like bite-sized chunks, because the kind of self-contained nature of these stories is perfect for that kind of scenario, and if any of you do pick up this collection um, The New Love was my absolute favorite and it was so good. So, she’s in a class, and her teacher asks her to Imagine her peak experience, so the moment that is just pure happiness to reflect upon and she realizes that she doesn’t have one and, as of that moment, throughout her life, she’s always thinking about like when is my peak experience going to be So Yeah super cool.

7. Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis

Next up we have this one, this is by Lydia Davis and this is Can’t and Won’t. And I can’t and won’t recommend this book. I cannot believe this won the International Booker Prize in 2013. Like were no other books published in that year. It’s not that it’s bad! It’s just not worth that amount of praise. Like it’s basically kind of observations of the very small elements of our lives and likes universally recognizable thoughts and feelings and sentiments and experiences, and those are kind of unpacked and highlighted. I just didn’t gain anything from reading this. I don’t think. They’re generally sort of short observations, it kind of feels like a whole book of someone telling you about their dreams.

In my opinion, there is nothing more boring than someone telling you about a dream that they had the night before because it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. You imagined that thing, so I don’t want to hear about it and that’s basically what this book is, but just for 300 pages. For me, this put the dull in Kendall. There’s this one, that’s called Her Geography, Alabama and it just goes. She thinks for a moment that Alabama is a city in Georgia. It is called Alabama. Georgia I’ve got nothing else to say.

8. No-one Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July

However, this book was immaculate. This is called No-one Belongs Here More Than You and it’s by Miranda July, I would read this in April May June July, and August because I just thought it was good. I reckon it’s kind of an acquired taste but like I have that taste. They’re these wacky and wonderful short stories, but different from the other book. They’re told in a captivating way. For example, the first short story is called, The Shared Patio, and it’s all about this woman who lives above an elderly couple, but they share a patio and she’s always timed it so that she never goes on the patio at the same time as they’re on there. But then one time she decides, I’m just going to go and I’m going to sit with the old man and we’ll have a chat. Anyway, the old man has an epileptic fit and instead of helping him as you might expect, she falls asleep on him and communicates with him through a kind of telepathy, I guess.

Then the wife comes home and she’s like. What the hell are you doing go inside and get his medication to help him ! she goes inside and instead of getting the medication, she just looks at the family portraits on the wall. I won’t give too many other spoilers, but the second story is about a lady who teaches old people how to swim in her kitchen and it’s all just quite bizarre. So if you’re into that kind of thing, this is quite great. I mean Kendall Jenner has just launched that tequila brand and I feel like this was probably written by someone who was drinking a lot of tequila perhaps. It’s kind of odd, because I don’t know who I would recommend this to, but I did like it.

These two were a real contrast. This is you versus the guy. She tells you not to worry about it. This was me versus Kendall Jenner. This is the Matalan catalog and this is the Chanel runway. So, to recap: these were the eight books that I read this week. These three are more Carcrashian than Kardashian. This one was boring and these two were an absolute cringefest. It’s like Fyre Fest, except this one happened. Sea of Strangers has some gorgeous lines, but it’s not unique. Tonight, I’m Someone Else and How To Cure a Ghost had style as well as substance.

These were quite fantastic and then the creme de la creme. No-one Belongs Here More Than You and The Houseguest. These are both short story collections, which I adored. So Kendall Jenner. This has been a real mixed bag. I did not expect to encounter books I despised, as well as books, I loved but you know what That is all the fun of the circus.

Books Recommended By Kendall Jenner