Reading Roundup

Recent Reading: Slump-Ish

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I’ve been meaning to catch up on my recent reading for weeks now: it has been a month since I wrote up Sarah Moss’s Ripeness, and it isn’t as if I haven’t read anything since then! The problem (for posting, anyway) is that I haven’t read anything that made me want to write about it. I didn’t used to use that as an excuse: I just wrote up everything! And in the process I often found I did have things to say. Let’s see if that happens this time as I go through my recent reading.

I had put in some holds on some lighter reading options that all seemed to come in at once. The timing wasn’t bad, as I was too distracted by the rush to get the term underway when the lockout ended to dig in to anything very demanding. Even as diversions, though, none of these were particularly satisfying reads: Katherine Center’s The Love-Haters seemed contrived to me; Beth O’Leary’s Swept Away was (as Miss Bates had already warned me in her review) good until it wasn’t; Linda Holmes’s Back After This wasn’t terrible but it also seemed contrived—a reaction that I realize may be less about the books than about my chafing for some reason at the necessary contrivance of romance plots. But I’m rereading Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over now and liking it as much as I did before, so maybe it is at least partly the books’ fault that they seemed so formulaic.

I read Patrick Modiano’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood for my book club, which met to discuss it on Wednesday. It was the first Modiano any of us had read, and we chose it because we wanted to follow up Smilla’s Sense of Snow with something that offered a more literary twist on the mystery genre. So You Don’t Get Lost certainly does that—maybe, we thought, it goes (for our tastes) too far in the other direction: it is so far away from being plot-driven that, as any reader of the novel will know, following the plot is like pushing on a cloud. I think I would have found it annoying if the novel had been longer, but it’s novella-length, and once I realized all the noir premises and promises of the opening were going to remain unfulfilled, I enjoyed just going where it took me. It is wonderfully atmospheric, and Modiano managed to keep me wondering about what had happened while also frustrating my curiosity at almost every turn. “In the end,” his narrator says, “we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed”—which is not a bad description of how I decided to read the book. I don’t think I want to read anything else by Modiano, though. For a better-informed commentary, read Tony’s post.

I read Kate Cayley’s Property, which I thought was well written and artfully constructed but (again, for my taste) too much so, too deliberate, never gripping until its final sequence, which then annoyed me by being manipulative and melodramatic. Kerry liked it better than I did. I didn’t dislike it; I just never really wanted to pick it up again when I’d put it down, and I also kept forgetting which character was which, which in a fairly short book with a tight cast of characters seems like it might not be all my fault.

I read Lily King’s Heart the Lover because I’m reviewing it for the TLS, so you’ll have to wait to find out what I think about it! (I’m still figuring that out as I reread it, anyway: I can say that it is a book that has so far elicited a lot of equivocation from me!)

I am currently reading Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. This too I am not eager to pick up again after I put it down, but when I do pick it up, I keep coming across hard-hitting gems of sentences (is that a mixed metaphor?) “Wherever you turn,” says narrator Tove, “you run up against your childhood and hurt yourself because it’s sharp-edged and hard, and stops only when it has torn you completely apart.” On the brink of youth,

Now the last remnants [of childhood] fall away from me like flakes of sun-scorched skin, and beneath looms an awkward, an impossible adult. I read in my poetry album while the night wanders past the window—and, unawares, my childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life.

It seems unfair to characterize as a “reading slump” a period that includes both this and (in its very different register) the Modiano, and yet that is how the past few weeks have felt. Good thing that today in class we began what will be nearly a month of work on David Copperfield! Dickens has rescued me before and already, six chapters in, I can tell that whether or not I read any other books in the next little while that excite me, he’s going to show me all over again what a great reading experience is like.

July Reading: Quantity vs Quality!

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

I thought I had done very little reading in July, and I was prepared to defend myself: “Fred! Very distracting! Too hot! Can’t concentrate!” Both of these things are true: having Fred in my life has been a significant adjustment, more than I expected, and we did have a pretty warm July. Both factors contributed to a pretty poor month for sleeping, so I was going to point to that too as a reason I read so little.

And yet it turns out I read 11.5 books in July, which is more than many other months. So why did it seem like such a slump? I think it’s because most of them were not very deep, or not very good—plus two of them were re-reads, which I feel is sort of cheating.

The unexpected highlight was a very last minute choice: an interesting conversation with my lovely mom about A. S. Byatt convinced me I should reread the ‘Frederica quartet,’ but I felt too lackadaisical that night to jump right in so I plucked Byatt’s The Matisse Stories off the shelf on July 30 and finished it July 31. I’ve owned it for ages (I think it was a book sale find) but hadn’t gotten around to it. It turns out to be a really fascinating trio of stories all related (surprise! 🙂 ) in some way to paintings by Matisse, though in  unpredictable ways. In the first one, a middle-aged woman reaches a breaking point at the salon and ends up absolutely trashing the place: I would never do such a thing to my nice stylist or the pleasant salon she co-owns, but there was something profoundly understandable about this woman’s rage. In the second, a self-absorbed, pretentious artist endlessly catered to (if silently criticized) by his deferential wife gets an unexpected come-uppance when it turns out their cleaning lady is the one whose wild artistic creations get noticed. The third turns on an accusation against a professor by a student who is clearly unwell; there’s a lot of thought-provoking discussion in it about art and standards, but what will stay with me is a stark moment of acknowledgment between two people who, it becomes clear, have both considered ending their lives:

‘Of course, when one is at that point, imagining others becomes unimaginable. Everything seems clear, and simple, and single; there is only one possible thing to be done—’

Perry Diss says,

‘That is true. You look around you and everything is bleached, and clear, as you say. You are in a white box, a white room, with no doors or windows. You are looking through clear water with no movement—perhaps it is more like being inside ice, inside the white room. There is only one thing possible. It is all perfectly clear and simple and plain. As you say.’

I don’t know if they are right, but when I read this what I thought to myself was “How did Byatt know this?” It feels as if it must be true. Byatt is such a consistently smart writer; I do absolutely look forward to starting in on The Virgin in the Garden.

Nothing else I read made me think or feel as much as this little volume. I quite liked Ian Rankin’s Midnight and Blue; it has been especially fun watching Rankin push Rebus along through the years rather than preserving him in eternal crime-fighting youth. I also liked Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook. I read Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow for my book club (I’m not considering this a re-read as it had been more than 30 years since my first go at it!). It starts out so strong! It goes so awry! It ends . . . with a parasitic worm? Really? Katerina Bivald’s The Murders in Great Diddling was mildly entertaining. Martha Wells’s All Systems Red—which I listened to as an audio book—was very entertaining and very short. Felix Francis’s The Syndicate was not very good: he took over his dad’s franchise and some of the results have been fine, but this one read like someone ticking off boxes.

I reread David Nicholls’s You are Here and enjoyed it about as much as the first time. That’s probably enough times, though: I can’t see it becoming one of my go-to comfort reads. Katherine Center’s How to Walk Away and Abby Jimenez’s Life’s Too Short were pretty trauma-riddled for romances (maybe that’s not the right category for them?); Center’s The Rom-Commers was another re-read and I think I actually liked it better the second time.

The 0.5 is Ali Smith’s Gliff. I lost traction on it about half way through. Smith is a hit-or-miss author for me: I think she’s brilliant and absolutely love listening to her talk about her fiction, but the Seasonal Quartet are the only novels of hers that I have gotten along with well at all.

I am not, by training or inclination, a reading snob but it is interesting to recognize that my sense that I wasn’t “really” reading much is due in part to so many of these books being non-literary (in the genre sense). If they’d been better examples of their kind, though, I don’t think I would have felt the same.

Recent Reading: Time, Murder, and Mayhem

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Here’s a round-up of some of my recent reading, including some recent titles that had been on my radar for a while and finally popped up at the public library.

Time

One of these was Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, which I got interested in because Bradley was a brilliant guest on Backlisted. She was talking about Monkey King: Journey to the West—this was another instance in which I ended up more interested in the guest’s book than the book under discussion! I mostly enjoyed The Ministry of Time, until towards the end I got confused by the intricacies of its time travel plot and felt that I would have enjoyed a straight-up historical novel about the Franklin expedition more.

Reading Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Vol. I) for my book club last week I decided that for now I have reached my limit for novels that mess with time—I found Balle’s novel beautiful, meditative, and thought-provoking, but also annoying as I puzzled over the logistics and tried not to let what seemed like the improvisational or ad hoc nature of its underlying “theory” get in the way of what else it had to offer. At least Balle’s novel is deliberately anti-plot, which made it easier to let the metaphysics slide. Its focus on repetition and the consequences, especially psychological and emotional, of not being able to get back into time also made me think, often very sadly, of Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, and my own struggle to fully re-enter time since Owen died.

Murder

Paradoxically, perhaps, given how regularly I teach our mystery & detective fiction course, I don’t read a lot of crime fiction these days, but I am always scouting for recent titles that might be useful for updating my reading list. This was part of what drew me to Kevin Powers’s A Line in the Sand, which sounded like a good combination of crime and politics—which it is. It’s a pretty good read, fast-paced and character driven. It turns on an attempt to cover up a massacre by private military contractors in Iraq: one of the witnesses was a former interpreter now in America who finds himself pursued by those who need that past erased to secure a massive new contract. So we get both the scary world of the shady companies profiteering from war and the interconnected (and also scary and shady) world of the politicians and military leaders who are also complicit. Most of the other main characters are also in one way or another suffering because of the Iraq war; its far-reaching consequences for those who fought and for those on the home front are among the novel’s themes. I thought it was a solid crime novel, if a bit too much of a thriller for my own personal taste: by the end the bodies have piled up, and the deaths are grim and violent, and the solution is action-driven rather than ratiocinative. If this is your kind of crime novel, I recommend it as a good example of the kind!

Mayhem

Anders Lustgarten’s Three Burials is also quite violent and action-driven, but underlying it is a less cynical or discouraging vision than I felt was at the core of A Line in the Sand. Its Thelma and Louise-style plot (a connection made explicit in the novel itself) focuses on Cherry, a nurse who happens upon the body of a murdered refugee (we already know him as Omar) on a British beach. Cherry is carrying a lot of grief and trauma, including her wrenching memories of the worst of the COVID pandemic (people currently downplaying the severity of the crisis and restricting access to the vaccines that have helped us get to a better place would benefit from the terse but powerful treatment it gets here). She is also grieving her son’s death by suicide, and the resemblance of the dead man to her son adds to her determination to somehow get his body to the young woman whose photo he was clutching when he died.

There are a lot of moving parts to Three Burials, including Omar’s story; the story of the two cops on patrol with an outfit called “Defenders of the Realm” to intercept refugees’ boats, one of whom is, as we know from the beginning, Omar’s murderer; and the story of Cherry’s husband and daughter, also mourning and now trying to figure out what to do when Cherry ends up on the run with Omar’s body, with one cop (initially recalcitrant, eventually repentant) in her car and the other, angry and violent, giving chase. It’s a zany plot; what I liked about it was that it is a kind of cri de coeur, not just on Cherry’s behalf but on ours, collectively. What is a person of conscience and compassion even supposed to do in a world full of so much ignorance, hate, mismanagement, suspicion, and malice? Why are we scapegoating people instead of helping them, turning them away instead of welcoming them, making things worse instead of making things better? Why is the world apparently trying to forget what we (could have) learned from COVID instead of applying its lessons? The weird thing about Thelma and Louise is that despite its tragic ending, there is something joyful about it; Cherry’s wild ride has something of the same quality as she is driven forward by despair but also by a hope she refuses to give up that there must be something she can do, some difference she can still make, no matter how small.

Recent Reading

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My recent reading has not been particularly exhilarating, but most of it has been just fine: no duds, just no thrills.

Julie Schumacher’s The English Experience was enjoyable but also seemed quaint, in a sad sort of way: what is the point, really, of academic satire given the existential threats to research, education, faculty, and students currently devastating the higher ed landscape in the United States? It’s true that things have been grim for a long time, including in the UK, where every day seems to bring more dire news about program closures, and in Canada, where “do more with less” has been the rule for decades thanks to chronic underfunding for our ostensibly ‘public’ universities. But Schumacher’s Professor Fitger and his students are very much American, and while there is both comedy and pathos in the story of their misadventures, and while the gentle optimism of the ending is a nice reminder that both travel and education can and should give people a chance to become someone a bit different and a bit better, the The English Experience, charming as it was, seemed more nostalgic than pointed.

Liz Moore’s Long Bright River is one of the best crime novels I’ve read in a while—though since I don’t actually read much crime fiction these days, I’m not sure that’s really saying much. I’d heard that it was character-driven, and it is; it is a good novel about families, especially sisters, as well as about the far-reaching personal and social harms of the opioid epidemic. It has a good number of twists and turns and kept me engaged without making me feel overly manipulated, which I appreciated. I’m always scouting for recent options to include in Mystery & Detective Fiction: I don’t think I would assign this, but mostly because it is pretty long and I’m not sure it’s good enough qua novel to spend the amount of time on it that I’d need to coax the students through its 450+ pages (more than two weeks, most likely). This is the conundrum of the “teachable” (vs. readable) text; this is why so far I have not assigned one of Tana French’s books either.

I loved both Helen Simonson’s Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and The Summer Before the War so I eagerly picked up The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club when I saw the paperback had finally come out. Unfortunately, it disappointed. There is plenty of good material in it. I enjoyed the details about women’s wartime experiences and then their struggles as they were displaced from their jobs as the men came back from the war; I liked the ‘neepery’ about both motorcycles and airplanes. The characters are all promising types, in this context, but as the novel dragged on (and the pacing did seem too slow to me, too much talking without much purpose, too many scenes not contributing all that much) they felt more like cut-outs representing those types than fully realized people. I felt the same about the novel’s plotlines around racism and discrimination: these are good things to represent, of course, but they seemed, if not exactly perfunctory, at least predictable. Reading it I thought again of the conversation I had with Trevor and Paul about historical fiction: this is not a bad novel, but I think it may represent the qualities or aspirations or limits that make some readers think historical fiction is not a really serious or ‘literary’ genre.

I got Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing from the library as soon as I had agreed to review her forthcoming novel The Book of Records, on the theory that it was probably a good idea to know something about the earlier one in case there were connections. It turns out there is one possibly important one, though I’m still figuring out exactly what it means: throughout Do Not Say We Have Nothing the characters are reading and writing and revising a narrative called the Book of Records! I actually owned a copy of Do Not Say We Have Nothing for years and put it in the donate pile eventually because for whatever reason I still hadn’t read it. I assigned a story by Thien in my first-year class this year that I thought was really good, so this had already piqued my interest in looking it up again. I had mixed feelings about it. I found it a bit rough or stilted stylistically and never really fell into it with full absorption, but it is packed with memorable elements and also with ideas. It tells harrowing stories about the Cultural Revolution in China and focuses through its musician characters on how or whether it is possible to hold on to whatever it is exactly that music and art mean in the face of such an onslaught on individuality and creativity. It invites us to think about storytelling as a means of survival, literal but also (in the broadest sense) cultural—this is where its Book of Records comes in, as the notebooks are cherished and preserved, often at great risk. I’m not very far into Thien’s new novel yet but it seems even more a novel of ideas, perhaps (we’ll see) too much so.

My book club meets this weekend to talk about Northanger Abbey, so I also reread this. It has been so long since I read it it didn’t really feel like a reread, actually. It amused me, but that’s about it. After I’d finished it I read Marilyn Butler’s introduction to my Penguin edition and she makes the case that it is much more interesting and sophisticated than it is often given credit for. OK, sure, and I take her point that to really appreciate it we need to be as immersed in the other novels it alludes to as its characters are—but I’m not, and I’m not really interested in them (sorry, Jane!). I think I get the gist of the novel’s playful jousting with gothic conventions as well as other models of ‘women’s fiction’ from the time. I love and greatly admire both Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, but for sheer pleasure I prefer almost any Georgette Heyer to this and don’t expect to read it again. Still, I am curious about what the other members of my book club have to say!

And that basically catches me up. I have just started Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, which so far seems as good as everyone said; I still have Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium on my TBR pile; and I’m still stalled out several chapters into Hisham Matar’s My Friends. Stay tuned for the next thrilling updates on my reading! 🙂

Reading (Last) Week

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Last week in my classes it was Reading Week, a.k.a. the February “study break.” Although overall this term has not been nearly as hectic as last term, I was still grateful for the chance to ease up. Work is tiring. Winter is tiring. Grieving is tiring (yes, still). It doesn’t help that I continue to wake up a lot at night with shoulder pain, something I have been trying to fix for years now. (I am getting closer, I think! I am working with an orthopedist who seems pretty confident about what needs doing, although we are waiting for an ultrasound to confirm that the issue is my rotator cuff.)

Unfortunately being tired is not especially conducive to reading. Overall, February has been a slow month for me, although I remind myself that I have done quite a bit of reading for work, including Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte and Bronte’s Villette, as well as all of the books to date for the mystery fiction course. My book club met early in the month to discuss Wuthering Heights, which I reread and still did not like, but besides that I’d only read For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain before the break – and it’s so short it hardly counts!

Things started out well enough with Connie Willis’s Blackout, which is the first of her two time-travel novels set during the Blitz. It’s good in the same ways or for the same reasons that Doomsday Book is good: Willis has a real knack for historical scene setting, for conjuring up the immediacy of the moment while keeping us engaged a bit more analytically through her device of visiting ‘historians’ from the future who are always assessing and contextualizing. But as I neared the end of Blackout I was finally getting a bit tired of her fixation on people not being able to find each other, either literally (wandering the streets) or chronologically, or just by telephone, and I wasn’t feeling a lot of momentum, which was worrisome given the size of the second book, All Clear. Still, I felt enough trust in Willis to move on to All Clear when I’d finished Blackout— and then that lack of momentum became a problem, because I didn’t really feel like reading more of All Clear most nights, but I am usually a “finish one book before starting the next” kind of reader.

I compromised by beginning, not another novel at the same time, but Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, which was my Valentine’s Day present to myself. (See also: I can buy myself flowers!) This had been on my radar since I first saw mention of it at the Biblioasis site, and then Shawn discussed it with the author himself on his channel and that really sold me on it. It was a good choice: it is a nice balance of a niche topic and a wide-ranging survey, covering the history of different kinds of notetaking, the invention of paper notebooks, and lots of different uses over the centuries, with attention to both famous and (to me anyway) completely obscure names. It’s a good book for reading a chapter or two at a time, so I could go back and forth between it and All Clear without too much stress. I’m still happily puttering through it, and trying not to let its contagious enthusiasm for its subject lead to too many extraneous stationery purchases.

But. I still found myself struggling to stay engaged with All Clear so I finally decided I should put it aside for another time. I really do expect I will finish it one day, and hopefully the gap between now and then won’t mean I forget who everybody is.

The one other book I got all the way through last week was actually an audiobook: my hold on Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain came in, and it proved truly gripping, surprisingly so given that I knew a fair amount about the whole story from various other sources (including the harrowing series Dopesick). I was so caught up in it that I spent longer hours than usual working on my current jigsaw puzzle—which I think contributed to my shoulder pain somehow, so that was a weird confluence as it had me thinking a lot about how tempting the promise of relief would be even for chronic pain as relatively mild as mine. Of course the whole story is also infuriating and outrageous and horrific, and perhaps it would have been more calming to stick to my usual, more benign, program of literary podcasts!

I have a couple of books in my TBR pile now that I’m pretty keen about: Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium is one, and Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is another. But I was listening to some of my friends bonding over their enthusiasm for the Cazalet Chronicles the other night and that reminded me that I have wondered if my own relative indifference to The Light Years was a “me” problem rather than the book’s, so I plucked it off the shelf on the weekend and began rereading it. I am a bit shocked how vague my recollection is of it, given that it was not that long ago that I read it for the first time. But it was also not that long after Owen’s death, and there’s a lot I don’t really remember about those months—and that timing may well have been the real reason for my middling reaction to it. So far I am enjoying it just fine; we’ll see if when I get to the end this time I feel like reading on in the series.

And now Reading Week is over and it’s just another week—with lots of reading in it! For Victorian Women Writers we have begun working through North & South, and when we’re done with that in a week or so it’s Middlemarch until the end of term: that’s something to look forward to. In Mystery & Detective Fiction we’re on The Maltese Falcon and then next week we start Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man, which is one I have not taught before, so I am rereading it now on top of our current books as I begin to sketch out how I will approach it in class.

Novels in November!

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VeraNovember wasn’t a bad reading month, considering how busy things were at work—and considering that “work” also means reading a fair amount, this time around including most of both Lady Audley’s Secret and Tess of the d’Urbervilles for 19thC Fiction and an array of short fiction and poetry for my intro class. (I have not managed to get back into a routine of posting about my teaching, but I would like to, so we’ll see what happens next term.)

My book club has been trending French for a while: in November we wrapped up a thread that began with Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce back in April, then took us to Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami in July and Colette’s Gigi in August until we arrived at Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias. I’ve known the story of Dumas’s novel for most of my life because La Traviata has been my favorite opera literally since I was 5, so what was most surprising to me about actually reading The Lady of the Camellias (in English translation, sorry) was how exactly Verdi’s opera maps its every scene. I kept half expecting the characters to burst into song! It was pretty funny to be reading a scandalous French novel at the same time as I was reading about Robert Audley’s scandalous habit of lazing about reading French novels—and I have to say that Dumas’s novel really lived up to the bad reputation French novels have in English novels of the period. Within just the first few chapters there’s an abortion and an exhumed corpse, and the novel as a whole is much more sexually explicit than any mainstream Victorian novel I’ve ever read. (I mean, by contemporary standards it’s more implicit or suggestive than graphic, but compared to the nearly imperceptible details of Hetty’s pregnancy in Adam Bede that so outraged some 19th-century critics, Dumas is really out there!). The Lady of the Camellias: Dumas fils, Alexandre, Kavanagh, Julie, Schillinger, Liesl: 9780143107026: Books - Amazon.ca

Somehow we didn’t find The Lady of the Camellias that conducive to discussion, and we decided we would head off in a fresh direction with our next book. At the suggestion of one of our members, we chose Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera, which I also read in November, and it is superb. It is a lot like Rebecca but more domestic realism and less Gothic melodrama, which actually makes it more chilling. I don’t think I’ve read a better account of the kind of coercive control he exercises over her, and her attempts—so loving at first, so gutting as it goes along—to figure out how she can possibly anticipate his ‘rules’ and demands and so avoid his unpredictable rages. As I got nearer and nearer to the end, I got more and more puzzled about how this naïve young second wife was going to get out from under the shadow of her predecessor and/or out of the clutches of her increasingly terrifying husband in the few pages that remained. I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t read the novel yet but I will say that I found it pretty devastating.

To Say Nothing of the Dog: A novel of the Oxford Time Travel series eBook : Willis, Connie: Amazon.ca: Kindle StoreI felt the need for something cheering in the wake of The Election and landed on Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog: it was a great choice, genuinely comic and warm-hearted but also endlessly clever. I had a lot of LOL moments over its characterizations of the Victorian period, and it is chock full of literary allusions, many of which I’m sure I didn’t catch. A lot of them are to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: who know that Gaudy Night would be one of its main running references. I liked it enough that I’ve put The Doomsday Book on my  Christmas wish list, even though I don’t ordinarily gravitate towards this genre.

I also really enjoyed Clare Chambers’s Shy Creatures, which I picked up on the strength of her earlier novel Small Pleasures. I remarked on Bluesky that it reminded me of Anne Tyler, in that it is a very unassuming book but everything it does, it does well—this kind of fiction can be too easily underestimated, IMHO, especially if, as with both Chambers and Tyler, the seeming simplicity of the writing is accompanied by quietly persistent insight into what makes people tick and what makes things matter. My first review assignment for 2025 is Tyler’s forthcoming Three Days in July and I am really looking forward to both reading and writing about it. I haven’t loved all of her novels equally, but I’m never sorry I’ve read one of them.

I managed to finish Claudia Pineiro’s Time of the Flies and wrote up my thoughts about it already; I also wrote about my rather vexing experience with Mary and the Rabbit Dream. In lighter options, I read my first novel by crime writer Jane Casey, Let the Dead Speak, and thought it was good enough that I will look for more by her the next time I’m at the library; and I read Katherine Center’s The Rom-Commers, which I enjoyed.

Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris: Turnbull, Sarah: 9781592400829: Books - Amazon.caAll in all, then, there was a lot of variety in both style and quality across the month. December is off to a good start: I’ve just finished Sarah Turnbull’s very engaging memoir Almost French (thank you, Helen!), and at the top of my TBR pile is Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, though I may actually turn next to Mark Bostridge’s The Pursuit of Love, which looks fascinating and which I also have a very small peripheral connection to because I had a nice dinner with Mark when he was in Halifax a few years ago doing research for it. (We have a mutual interest in Vera Brittain, which is how we first got in touch.) December is often one of my best reading months, with the constant busywork of the term calmed down and “just” (ha!) papers and exams to deal with. So thanks to all of you who have already put out your “best of 2024” lists, as I browse them happily looking for treasures to wrap up my own reading year.

October Overview

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

October was a fitful reading month. I blame . . . everything? including my own bad habits, which currently include far too much election doom-scrolling on social media. I began the month by finishing up The Bee Sting, which I already mentioned in my September reading round-up. I really enjoyed it until, perhaps paradoxically, nearly the end. The reason this might seem odd is that the novel is a really slow burn, building up to the cataclysm of the conclusion, so it seemed as if I should have been more and more engrossed as the suspense built. But honestly, there was just so much going on that I got a bit worn out, especially as it eventually started to seem as if Murray was just deliberately and heavy-handedly deferring revelations about what exactly was going to happen. Suspense easily becomes cheap if it’s just about exploiting our dread while ramping up the stakes. I was relieved when the book was over, although it is a pretty shocking ending.

The only other book that really stood out to me of the seven I read in October (not counting Adam Bede for class) was Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, and I gave that its own post, which seems at the moment to be how this works: I can only muster the energy and enthusiasm for a one book post if the book really lights me up!

Treasure Island!!! - Sara LevineThat said, I did quite enjoy Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, which I picked up quite randomly at the library, mostly because it’s a Europa Edition but also because I vaguely recalled hearing good things about it online. It turned out to be a sharp and very funny send-up of the “great literature transformed my life” genre. Its narrator, whose life is in something of a shambles, reads Treasure Island and decides it offers her a template for turning things around. She adopts the novel’s “Core Values”—BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, HORN-BLOWING—and applies them to her job (which, improbably and hilariously, is at a “pet hotel,” where clients sign out cats, dogs, rabbits, even goldfish), her boyfriend, and her family, with hilarious if also sometimes weirdly poignant results. I have such a love-hate relationship with books that purport to turn literature into self-help manuals that I relished the premise, but Levine uses it as a launching point for something much zanier than I could possibly have expected or can possibly summarize.

I read another Abby Jimenez novel, Part of My World, and have already forgotten what it was specifically about. I read another Katherine Center novel, The Bodyguard, and did not like it nearly as much as Hello Stranger. I’m still on the waiting list for her latest, The Rom-Commers: it looks promising but clearly for me she’s a hit-or-miss author.

The Dry by Jane HarperI finally read Jane Harper’s The Dry—I say ‘finally’ because I regularly shop around for new mystery writers, partly for my own interest but also because I like to refresh the reading list for my mystery & detective fiction course, and Harper is someone that keeps coming up as a likely suspect. I thought The Dry was a good crime novel, but I can’t see assigning it. I thought the drought might be more of a theme, rather than primarily an aspect of setting, and a crime novel that turns in some way on the climate crisis would be a welcome addition to the syllabus, but The Dry did not seem to me to be built around that kind of political message. (If you know of a crime novel with a plot that intersects with ideas about ‘climate justice’ in an effective way, please let me know!)

Finally, I began but so far have not finished Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies. This is the first of Piñeiro’s novels that I have found a slog. I’m not sure why it isn’t working for me: it has a good and very political murder plot brewing—its protagonist, recently released after serving time for murdering her husband’s mistress, is hired by another woman to provide poison that will, presumably, be used to kill someone else. As this storyline is unfolding we got long sections of overt commentary, including citations to many famous feminist writers. This interferes with the momentum, but that’s clearly deliberate, and the combination could and should still be interesting, and yet somehow I’m just not getting through it. I am determined to persist: the root problem is pretty clearly a mismatch between my expectations, both for crime fiction and for Piñeiro, and what she has chosen to do in this case, and she’s smart enough that I believe it’s probably done well. At the very least I would like to know how the plot develops and concludes, but it seems like cheating to skip the talky bits, so I won’t. Probably.

The Lady of the Camellias (Penguin Classics) eBook : fils, Alexandre Dumas, Kavanagh, Julie, Liesl Schillinger: Amazon.ca: BooksNovember is off to an OK start: I just finished The Lady of the Camellias, by Dumas fils, which I read for my book club. It is our follow-up to Colette’s Gigi, which was our follow-up to Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, which was our follow-up to Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce. In other words, we have been on a French-themed kick! I think we are probably ready to go in another direction: I wonder what thread we will follow from Dumas’s tragic tale of passion and self-sacrifice. I have always known that La Dame aux Camelias was the original for Verdi’s La Traviata but I was surprised how closely the opera follows the plot, so closely that at every key scene in the novel I could match it exactly to the music. (It is the opera I know best, as it has been my favorite quite literally since I was 5 years old and got an LP of the highlights for my birthday.) What I enjoyed most about The Lady of the Camellias is that it entirely lived up to all the snarky comments about French novels in English novels of the period; in fact, I am reading Lady Audley’s Secret with my class at the moment and in his moments of idle self-indulgence Robert Audley himself is reading Dumas fils.

September Reading: Mostly Light

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

I read a lot less in September than I did in August—which makes sense, of course, given the return to the many immediate demands of the teaching term. That said, it seems fair to say that in addition to the books I’ll mention here, I also read all of Bleak House for class and most of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (though I didn’t actually finish it until October).

Because I was busy and distracted, most of my personal reading was on the lighter side. I read another of Katherine Center’s novels, Hello Stranger: I liked this one quite a bit, even if the Big Surprise was painfully obvious all along (if you’ve read it, you know what I mean). I don’t think that’s a flaw in the novel, really; it creates a cute bit of suspense and dramatic irony as we wait for the penny to drop for our heroine.

I also read two novels by Abby Jimenez: The Friend Zone and The Happy Ever After Playlist. I enjoyed both of these as well, maybe The Friend Zone a bit more, though (and this is definitely just a matter of personal preference) I wish Jimenez would keep her hero and heroine apart longer. The trend in contemporary romances seems be to heat things up really quickly and then draw us along to the HEA not through sexual tension and the push-pull of figuring out if this is the right person but through some kind of crisis that breaks the central pair up (often in a very emotionally fraught way) and eventually gets resolved. I am generalizing from a pretty small sample, as I don’t read tons of romance (contemporary or other) these days. But the pacing of a lot of the ones I do read just feels a bit off to me, because the hot sex happens too soon and then there has to be some other kind of tension to provide the momentum. Imagine Heyer’s Devil’s Cub if Mary and Vidal actually got together a single moment sooner than they actually do in the novel! The delight is knowing they will get there eventually but not until everything else has been properly sorted. Does anyone else feel this way with current romances, or is my reaction idiosyncratic, or (another reasonable possibility) am I just reading the wrong ones (not in general, just for me)? Finally, another lighter read, also basically a romance but packaged a bit more as comic fiction, was Eleanor Lipmann’s Ms Demeanor. This looked fun but in the end I didn’t really find it so: it was OK, but did not particularly interest or entertain me.

The other three novels I finished in September were more “literary” or serious, and none of them really excited me either. Jane Smiley’s A Dangerous Business looked like exactly my kind of thing, and I have quite enjoyed some of her other novels (especially Private Life), but I have already forgotten almost everything about it except its premise. It’s a Western, with a protagonist who works in a brothel and begins trying to detect some mysterious disappearances inspired by her reading of Poe—you can see why I expected to enjoy it more than I did! In contrast, I picked up Anne Michaels’s Held in spite of suspecting it was not for me, because a lot of smart readers have raved about it (including Sam Sacks, one of my most-trusted critics!) and I thought it was worth a try. I suppose it was, but it has that “unfinished” approach to fiction that usually leaves me wishing the writer would actually do their job and write the book, not scatter fragments artfully around gaps. Kent Haruf’s Where You Once Belonged held my attention raptly until the very last page—and then I felt let down by its just ending and not really concluding. It’s not nearly as tender a novel as the ones of his I have liked the best (Plainsong and especially Our Souls At Night); I think if it had been the first of his I read, I would probably not have sought out more.

The Bee Sting was by far my favorite September reading (besides Bleak House of course), but by the time I finally finished it a few days ago, I was honestly a bit tired of it and just really wanted to get to whatever catastrophe was clearly going to happen at the end. (It’s clear from the outset and also from the jacket blurb that it will end in catastrophe, so the suspense is from wondering exactly what that will look like and how bad it will actually be—which is, it turns out, pretty bad.)

While I was reading The Bee Sting and mostly enjoying it, I was also thinking about Murray’s earlier hit novel Skippy Dies, which sticks in my memory less because of the novel itself and more because I so distinctly remember ordering it online late one night in 2010 because I was hearing so much about it and feeling so eager to be part of the wider book conversations I was just starting to participate in. At that time I didn’t buy a lot of books, as (given our overall financial situation and immediate priorities) they still seemed like relatively expensive luxuries, especially with good libraries close at hand. Of course I did always buy books, for myself and as gifts, but I was careful about it, not casual, and clicking a few buttons on my computer and having a book turn up in my mailbox a few days later was both a rarity and a novelty—and a sign that the balance of my world was shifting a bit in some new direction. As I recall, I ordered Skippy Dies from the Book Depository, which was still independent in those days, but I’m so old I can also remember when Amazon was a brand new and thrilling phenomenon—a giant online bookstore that seemed to have everything!—rather than an evil empire.

I realize this is not a particularly momentous memory, and I’m surprised how vivid it is. Clearly that small action felt significant at the time, though, and recalling it now adds to my current rather vertiginous sense of time passing and of the pieces of my life shifting around yet again.

August Reading Recap

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

I read 16 books in August. Two were audiobooks, which is new for me: Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (which I highly recommend) and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (which was narrated wonderfully by Dan Stevens and proved an excellent choice for me to listen to, just brisk and suspenseful enough to keep my attention on walks or while crafting). Two were for reviews for Quill & Quire: Ayelet Tsabari’s Songs for the Brokenhearted (my review is submitted and will be online pretty soon, I expect) and Jenny Haysom’s Keep (this review is in progress). One was Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (it me): I wasn’t sure I should count this, as to be honest I started skimming after a while, which is not to say it had nothing to offer me, especially its explanation of why positive thinking approaches to some kinds of mental health struggles can be not just annoying but genuinely counter-productive.

My book club decided to get in one more meeting this summer as a follow-up to our July discussion of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami. Keeping with our current French theme, we chose Gigi, which I think for all of us was our first experience of Colette. Although it’s a slight little book, it gave us plenty to talk about, from how we felt about the difference in age and maturity and agency between Gigi and her eventual fiancé to how much it is a romantic fantasy and how much a critique of the terms of that fantasy. Gigi takes a stand against her own commodification—but then she acquiesces to its terms just before she “wins” the real prize of a proposal. Does she really love Gaston? Does he really love her, or is he just getting her by whatever means he can? We were intrigued that Colette wrote the novel during the Nazi occupation of France, which perhaps gives some poignancy to its nostalgic evocation of the Belle Époque. We considered moving on to Lolita, but instead decided to stay in the French demimonde and read Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias (in translation), which I am keen about as it is of course the origin of La Traviata, which has been my favorite opera since my parents gave me an LP of highlights from it (the Sutherland / Bergonzi recording) for my 5th birthday. Joan Sutherland signed the record cover for me when I met her backstage at the Vancouver Opera in 1977.

I did some lighter reading that I mostly enjoyed, including two novels by Katherine Center, who I somehow had never heard of before I read Miss Bates’s review of The Rom-Commers. As often happens, after that I seemed to see her titles everywhere! I had to put a hold on the new one and my turn is still a long way away, but I was able to get What You Wish For and Happiness for Beginners from the library. I had actually watched some of the Netflix adaptation of Happiness for Beginners before, not knowing it was based on a novel, but I didn’t finish it, as I was finding it laborious and un-charming. I really liked the novel, though, more than What You Wish For, which I already forget almost entirely! Another light(er) read was David Nicholls’ Sweet Sorrow, which was a bit YA-ish for me but still pretty good. My favorite of his remains Us.

August was Women In Translation month. I didn’t go all in on this, but I did bookend the month with translated works, starting it with Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time and ending it with Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Neither of them thrilled me, though both definitely kept me interested. Parts of Ogawa’s novel were also really haunting, though by the end it felt too much as if she was just pushing on to get finished with the concept she had for the novel. I sometimes feel the same about the enthusiasm for reading “books in translation” as I do about the enthusiasm for “lost gems”: both are not really coherent categories, and also just because a title has reached us from the other side of the world or from across the years doesn’t exactly guarantee its merits. (As I have said elsewhere, I wonder why middling books from 60 or 70 years ago seem so much more alluring than similarly middling titles from today.) On the other hand, there is a lot more advance curation of what’s available of both of these kinds of novels and it is certainly reasonable to expect that works that do get translated into English are above average and so worth trying. And of course it is intellectually beneficial not to be too provincial in one’s reading, for sure!

I had high expectations for both Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren and Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho, but neither of them excited me very much. On the other hand, I expected to find Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise overhyped, but it was a highlight of my reading month—gripping, morally urgent, beautifully told. I also was very impressed with Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey, which I was moved to read after hearing a convincing discussion of its merits on Backlisted.

Finally, I am so glad Shawn (of Shawn Breathes Books) recommended Sara Henshaw’s The Bookshop that Floated Away: it was a delight. It was more acerbic than I expected, but that was actually fine with me, as sometimes I get irritable with books that feel too obviously designed to appeal precisely to book lovers and those who (sigh) occasionally and delusionally imagine that owning a bookstore would be a lovely retirement option. (There’s this vacant house / storefront on Spring Garden Road that desperately needs salvaging and would make such a charming site . . . but even if the whole plan weren’t unsound, that property also has “money trap” written all over it.)

All in all, then, a good reading month, with lots of variety, some hits, and some misses, though even the misses were well worth reading. With classes about to start, I don’t expect to get through quite so many unassigned books in September—but having said that, I’ve been setting some goals for myself and one of them is to read more and spend less time watching TV and doomscrolling on social media. Sometimes I need these distractions: they have a useful anesthetic effect when I just can’t keep it all up (and, as I remind myself, there are worse ways to get numb when you need to). But they don’t do much for positive energy—though aspects of social media, such as book talk and podcasts, definitely do! Anyway, writing these down as intentions (and making those intentions public like this) may help me make better choices in the moment.

Another goal for the fall is to blog more, including continuing my longstanding series of posts about my teaching. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want from the last phase of my career: I reach retirement age in 8 years, which, depending on the day, seems either very close or very far away. I don’t necessarily have to stop then—or, for that matter, to keep going until then! Things have been so turbulent in my life in recent years that I haven’t really been able to focus on this particular issue, but I do know that I don’t want to just drift towards retirement. Something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done! One small gesture in this direction (though I would not say it looks like noble work at this point) is that I have volunteered for our departmental speaker series, where I will present whatever it is exactly that I’ve been doing about Woolf’s The Years. The paper’s working title is “Feeble Twaddle,” which is one way Woolf herself described the novel while she was working on it but which also often seems a fair description of the shitty rough draft I have so far produced. Being on the speakers schedule will, I hope, motivate me to wrestle it all into better shape. I think the last formal talk I gave to my department was an attempt (along these lines) to convince my colleagues about the potential merits of academic blogging—another lifetime, that seems like. That ship has probably sailed, although it has been interesting to watch my institution embrace a carefully vetted and marketed version of blogging under the rubric “Open Think.”  You have to apply to participate! (Ahem, you could also just get your own free WordPress site and have at.) I guess it was the DIY version they didn’t like, maybe because they couldn’t control it, or take credit for it.

Recent Reading: Kennedy & Barrera

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

KennedyI’m trying to get back in the habit of writing up most (maybe not all) of the books I read so here we go with a quickish update on two novels that I recently finished.

I heard a lot about Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses from other readers when it was first out, all of it good. It took me a while to get around to it, but I’m glad I kept it on my radar and grabbed it up when I came across it not long ago—a perk of being slow off the mark is that I found the nice hardcover edition on a sale table! (I often wait for the paperback, not just because hardcovers are so expensive here now but because I just prefer holding and reading paperbacks. But there’s still something satisfying about a hardcover, isn’t there?) Trespasses was definitely worth reading, though it is rough going emotionally. I thought Kennedy’s strategy of leading off chapters with quick rundowns of news items, in the same way Cushla does this with her students, was a deft way of contextualizing the novel’s plot, but also of reminding us that the “news” is not something that happens only to other people. Often I did a double-take when I realized that what seemed like just one more item was something that had happened to one of the novel’s characters. The effect was a building sense of dread, which was exacerbated by the general expectation of some kind of catastrophe, an expectation established by the setting and the specific mix of characters in the novel.

Kennedy keeps us primarily focused on the very personal story of Cushla’s life and especially her relationship with Michael Agnew, but it is impossible for this story to be only personal, for two people to just be “themselves,” exempted from politics or society.  It is hard not to feel angry and frustrated on their behalf at the prejudices and persecutions that they have to navigate, but at the same time Kennedy avoids trite “can’t we all just get along?” messages, not least because both Cushla and Michael have and act on ideas about how the world around them should be—they are not bystanders or neutral observers.

BarreraIn contrast, I had never heard of Jazmina Barrera’s Cross Stitch when I first spotted it in the bookstore a couple of months ago. Its title caught my eye because I do cross stitch myself, though it has been a while since I picked up any of my works in progress. (As my eyes age, it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever finish the series of Henry VIII and his six wives that I began around 30 years ago. But never say never! I bought one of those around-the-neck magnifiers and it may make all the difference.) The novel’s blurb was appealing, but it took me a few visits to decide to actually give it a try—and unlike A Month in the Country, which I hesitated over for so much longer, Cross Stitch was not so good that I wished I had read it sooner. It wasn’t bad; there were things I really liked about it. It is a bittersweet story about friendship and the odd and sometimes sad paths it can take as people grow up and apart. The three women (initially girls) at its center, Mila, Dalia, and Citlala, are avid embroiderers, and the novel intersperses its first-person narration (by Mila, the writer of the group, of course) with reflections on needlework, including quotations from scholars and critics and other writers who have offered ideas about its role in women’s lives and in cultural history. One of these sources is Roszika Parker’s The Subversive Stitch, which was also an important source for the chapter on needlework and historiography in my academic monograph.

But I couldn’t really see what the embroidery material, or the women’s stitching, meant to the story Barrera tells of their lives, even though some of the explicit comments she makes about stitching and (or vs) writing were clever or thought-provoking. “I’ve never, and will never, read one of those books on how to write fiction,” Mila remarks at one point,

but it occurs to me that a novel could be written based on the instructions in needlework manuals, taking the following statements as if they were wise, disinterested pieces of advice:

‘When embroidering the foundation, always use a sharp needle.’

‘Don’t pull the thread too tightly; if you do, the loop becomes narrow and the effect is lost.’

‘Do exactly the same but in mirror image, reducing by one line at each step.’

‘When you stop embroidering, the work should be taken from the frame to allow the cloth to breath.’

I wonder whether, if I reread Cross Stitch really attentively, I would find that she has applied these lessons to the novel she’s narrating. I don’t expect I will reread it, though: it just wasn’t engaging enough. It had very little momentum, something I should perhaps have anticipated from the way the text is broken up into smaller and larger pieces, separated (a bit too cutely?) by small images of a needle and thread. graphic

As a coming of age novel, Cross Stitch definitely had its interest for me: Barrera is Mexican (the novel is translated by Christina MacSweeney), so it comes at those themes from its own angle, including both the girls’ experiences growing up in Mexico and their travels to London and Paris. I never know with a translated novel how much of my experience of it is actually a result of the translation; I found Cross Stitch a bit stilted or flat, but that’s something I find with a lot of English novels these days too, as cool, crisp writing is very much in vogue, so it may be as much a decision about how to present Barrera’s writing as it is a reflection of what it’s like in the original.