Novel Readings

The year isn’t quite over, but while things are quiet around here it seems like a good time to take stock of my year in reading. If a book gets me really fired up between now and New Year’s, believe me, you’ll hear about it!

Like 2016, 2017 included a fair amount of “assigned” reading, but (also as in 2016) this meant I discovered some titles and authors I would otherwise have missed. I’m most glad to have been introduced to Sarah Moss’s intense, cerebral historical fiction. I wrote about her novels Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children for Numero Cinq. I very much enjoyed Gillian Best’s The Last Wave, which I reviewed for Canadian Notes & Queries, and I found Adam Sternbergh’s “taut conceptual thriller” The Blinds both smart and engrossing.

Books of the Year

The highlight of my reading year was rereading the entirety of Dorothy Dunnett’s The Lymond Chronicles in preparation for the feature I wrote on them for the TLS. What a luxury it was to have an excuse to put everything else aside and immerse myself in them again–it was hard for anything else I read to compare! The essay is behind their paywall but if you want a sense of what I said you can listen to me talk about Dunnett on the TLS podcast, which (once I got over being nervous) was a lot of fun to be part of.

The best of my new reading this year was Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey, which I loved–and which has prompted me (very belatedly, I know) to secure a copy of The Odyssey to read in 2018. I so admire Mendelsohn’s gift for weaving together different narrative strands into a compelling and unified whole, something he also did in The Lost (which topped my “best of” list when I read it in 2009 and still holds its place as one of the best books I’ve ever read): while some writers who meander make me impatient, he always kept me engrossed as he worked through related ideas about family, pedagogy, journeys (real and metaphorical), and Homer’s epic itself.

Second best, though mostly because I haven’t finished it yet, was John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga. It took me a while to get drawn into The Man of Property but by the end I was thoroughly absorbed in and impressed by it; I really loved its immediate sequel, the novella Indian Summer of a Forsyte. One of my top reading goals for 2018 is to finish the next two novels.

Other Highlights

Katherena Vermette’s harrowing and thought-provoking The Break, which uses one terrible incident as a device to explore systemic problems that strain our capacity to imagine what achieving a just outcome would require.

Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone, an engrossing story about a family riven by mental illness that is also a meditation on whether it is possible to right the wrongs of the past–personally but also nationally.

Helen Simonson’s The Summer Before the War, which I found “rich in charm and humanity and, ultimately, pathos.”

Kathleen Rooney’s Lillian Boxfish Takes A Walk, which I enjoyed for its own sake and because in her independence, wit, and love of language, Lillian reminded me of my grandmother.

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer , “a stinging satire, of American hypocrisy and self-delusion in particular but also of pomp and corruption and ideological posturing on all sides.”

Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, which is a subtle and sharp and meticulous portrait of a flagging community.

Two particularly good book club choices: Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, both of which I thought were wonderfully sly and artful.

In the Middle

A number of books I read were fine but not as thrilling as I expected from the hype or my own previous experience with the author. I enjoyed but wasn’t bowled over by Ann Patchett’s  Commonwealth, for instance; Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers was touching but too formally precious for my taste; Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread was vintage Tyler, which isn’t a bad thing but is also not an exciting thing; Marilynne Robinson’s much-lauded Housekeeping resonated with me much less than Gilead had; Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent was promising but, for me, never quite delivered. I started and didn’t finish a fair number of romance novels–but I found a few new ones that seem like keepers. My reading in that genre always seems a lot more hit or miss than in other genres; I think that may be a function of just how many there are to choose from.

Low Points

There really weren’t many this year, which is interesting in itself. I didn’t read anything that riled me up the way, say, Nutshell did last year; the worst books I read were mostly in the “meh” category. The one I liked least was The Stepford Wives, which I read with my book club: I wasn’t convinced it’s a satire about sexism rather than just underhandedly sexist, and even if it is satire, it’s pretty heavy-handed. For different reasons, maybe not good ones, I really struggled with Antonio Pennacchi’s The Mussolini Canal, even though, as I wrote in my post about it, it is great material.

Looking Ahead

Last December, flush from the success (at least from my perspective) of my first reading of Moby-Dick, I said 2017 might be the year I finally tried Ulysses. It wasn’t, but maybe 2018 will be. First, though, I’d like to read The Odyssey: I am woefully undereducated in the ancient classics, and between Mendelsohn’s new book and all the talk about Emily Wilson’s new translation I have been feeling the lack even more than usual. (I don’t have Wilson’s version: I traded a colleague in the Classics Department a nice Oxford edition of Middlemarch for his spare copy of the Fitzgerald translation. That’s fine with me: this one has stood the test of time, after all, and if I get really engaged, I can always follow up with Wilson’s and appreciate how untraditional it is.) As already mentioned, I’d also like to complete The Forsyte Saga. Otherwise, I have no particularly lofty goals: just a lot of books I’m looking forward to reading. I got a nice stack of them for Christmas, including Suzette Mayr’s Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Martin Seay’s The Mirror Thief, and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold–which I’ve already started and am liking a lot. I have a couple of ideas for the gift card I got to Bookmark, including Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, but I should probably read more of what I already have before I decide what else I want! Nearest to hand, though, is Katherine Ashenburg’s Sofie and Cecilia, which I agreed to review for Quill & Quire–and the deadline is nearly upon me, so in the short term, that had better be my priority.

All in all, I think 2017 was a pretty good reading year: not as prolific as some, but steady and without catastrophes. And that’s just my not-for-classes reading: any year that also includes Bleak House, Cranford, and Middlemarch has got to count as a good one!