I finished twelve books in August. Two were audiobooks and two (including one of the audiobooks) were rereads. I wrote up a couple of them here already: Jeanne Ray’s Calling Invisible Women and Mark Haddon’s Leaving Home–which was definitely the standout this month.
In lighter reading, I read another of Peter Grainger’s D. C. Smith mysteries, In This Bright Future. There are still a handful from the middle of the series that I haven’t gotten to you; the library doesn’t have them and the e-books go on sale intermittently so I’m waiting to snap them up when their turn comes. If you like classic British procedurals and haven’t read this series yet, I highly recommend it! They were self-published as e-boosk only initially, as I understand it, but have now been picked up by a “real” publisher and I even saw some on the shelf recently in a local bookstore. B. K. Borison’s And Now Back to You was an amusing romance (I enjoyed First Time Caller as well): predictable, but that more or less comes with the territory! I enjoyed the audiobook of Katherine Center’s Hello Stranger a lot even though I’d read the book before: credit to the narrator, Patti Murrin, who brought enough energy to it that it seemed to zip along. She made me think that Center might be generally better in audio, so I’m now listening to The Love-Haters, which I thought was just OK when I read it before. This is definitely the wild card factor with audiobooks: I was excited when my hold on The Gales of November finally came up but that narrator just was not for me, and I abandoned it after about half an hour.
Audiobooks–which I didn’t used to have much patience for–have been proving a good alternative this summer to the podcasts that are my regular listening, some of which are on summer hiatus. I’m not sure what has made the difference, as I used to find them at once too slow (I read pretty fast, on my own) and too easy to lose track of, between street noise and other external distractions and my own wandering mind. I still would not want to listen to a book that, for me, required or rewarded really meticulous attention. I have had the most success with non-fiction, like The Wager or Empire of Pain, which was gripping but also heartbreaking and infuriating. Another notable audiobook this month was also by Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling. I knew it might be a hard one for me in some ways given that its instigating incident is a fatal fall from a building; I was mostly able to depersonalize this, but still overall I had some ambivalence about the book, even though it is written clearly with a conscious effort not to sensationalize Zach’s death, to acknowledge it as a human tragedy and respect his parents’ suffering. Still, at times the fall felt like a plot point almost incidental to the outlandish chicanery that characterizes so much of the the story that unfolds. The line between investigative journalism and true crime seemed a lot blurrier to me than in either of the other of Radden Keefe’s books that I’ve read.
On a lighter note, my book club’s pick for our next meeting is Cold Comfort Farm, which somehow I’d never read before even though I bought it a few years back because it seemed sure to be delightful. It is delightful! I’m not sure what exactly we will find to discuss about it, but the send-up of rural fantasies is great, the constant undermining of the story’s gothic potential, the refreshing can-do attitude of the heroine–all so fun, and so funny, with plenty of genuine LOL moments.
On my latest trip home to Vancouver, I helped my mother downsize her book collection by taking Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf away with me (I did more than that! we filled their whole car trunk with books to donate!). Once I took a closer look at it I decided that it really needed to be read out loud, so I did that, much to Fred’s puzzlement and annoyance (she looks over her shoulder at me so peevishly if I dare to talk on the phone when she’s snoozing on my lap too, and usually gets up after a while to find a properly quiet place to nap). This too was so fun! One good thing about reading aloud is that it makes sure you are getting every word, which for me can be harder with long poems than with prose, but Beowulf is also of course so well suited, even intended, for it. I wonder if this would be a good strategy for returning to Shakespeare’s plays, which I have read only about a dozen of and those mostly as an undergraduate, in the great Kate Sirluck’s Shakespeare survey at UBC. (Oh my, how she intimidated me! But then when she heard I was going off to Cornell for grad school she told me not to take any BS, and in retrospect that’s advice I wish I had known better how to appreciate and act on!)
I read one short story collection, Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day. This was prompted by reading my friend Alice Brittan’s syllabus for her fall seminar called “On Beauty,” where this is on the syllabus. Like so many readers I know, Alice is a great admirer of Keegan’s, and I have long wondered if I underestimated Small Things Like These, which did not wow me. I was pretty impressed by So Late in the Day so I went back to get Antarctica from Bookmark–which turns out to include one of the same stories, so that was very mildly annoying. I have read a couple of the stories in it so far and I just can’t decide. Maybe the thing to do is reread Small Things Like These, since I am far from the best short story reader (I genuinely think of it as a different skill from reading very long books, or even medium-sized books).
Last but not least I will mention Ann Patchett’s Whistler, which if I had had less heat-and-humidity-induced inertia over the past couple of weeks would have gotten its own post. I did really enjoy reading it. I appreciated its “glass half-full” view of the world, which contrasts so much with the “glass mostly empty” tone of Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say (my review of that is here). I found the gently metafictional ‘twist’ at the end perhaps unnecessary: the novel before it (unless I missed something crucial!) didn’t seem to me to be changed much by it, unlike, say, Atonement, which is a very different novel on a reread, or Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins–which, IMHO, was spoiled by Atkinson’s inability to let her story be what it was. (My cranky review of that one is here.) After I finished Whistler I poked around in the reviews and was surprised how many I came across that disliked for just the reasons I liked it: too nice, too feel-good, ‘sentimental,’ even ‘saccharine.’ It did not seem that way to me, and these complaints made me think about what our expectations are for fiction we think is offered up seriously (as good a working definition as I know for what we mean by ‘literary’ fiction). Must it be grim, or angry? Why (to go back to another pet peeve) is Elena Ferrante characterized as honest because she seems so furious–can’t other emotions, positive emotions, also be honest? (My rant about Ferrante’s effusive reception is here!) Whistler seemed to me an intelligent and nuanced novel, not cheesy feel-good pablum. Does it go really deep? Not really. Does it serve up social or political critique? Not explicitly, but you could see it as doing so implicitly by its tenderness for its characters and theirs for each other. A world in which people do brave things on each other’s behalf, in which broken relationships can be healed and complicated different realities can be reconciled–sounds nice! If we are left thinking (as one critic reasonably was) about the privilege her characters enjoy, both economically and emotionally, instead of being mad at them we could maybe more profitably be mad at the circumstances that limit those good things.
I’m in the middle of one more book but it seems unlikely I will finish it before the month is over: feeling frustrated with waiting for my library holds and with paying high prices to buy books that end up disappointing (ahem, The Very Secretive and Passionate Life of Miles Franklin, which I gave up on less than half way through), I decided to revisit Trollope’s Palliser series, which I read through in 2001-2002 and have not returned to since, with the exception of The Eustace Diamonds which I assigned in a graduate seminar around 2006. I am about half way through Can You Forgive Her? and am thoroughly enjoying it. Trollope’s pacing definitely takes a bit of adjustment at first, as not a lot happens from page to page but always at great length! Once you fall into the rhythm of it, though, it goes along more quickly than you expect, and you get invested really quickly in his characters’ dilemmas–which that expansiveness allows him to show us in all their complexity. Alice Vavasor’s “jilting” of the tediously worthy John Grey is (ostensibly) the main storyline, but I’d forgotten that here we are also plunged right into Lady Glencora’s wilder struggle between her tediously worthy husband “Planty Pall” and the handsome but unworthy Burgo Fitzgerald. Trollope has some conventional ideas about what makes women happy, but he is sharp about the constraints on and injustice for women who want to but can’t make their own decisions. I’m quite interested this time in the way Alice is (she thinks) financially supporting her less worthy suitor in his political ambitions: we know it isn’t actually her money, but both he and she believe it is, an unusual dynamic. I don’t remember exactly how things work out, but I’m all in at this point. I will probably intersperse some other reading along the way, but a full read-through of the series seems like a better fall-back when there’s a lull than doom-scrolling, a habit I am determined to break, not just because it is a waste of time but because it is so bad for my blood pressure. (“Lake America” indeed! Argh.)
I’ve been meaning to catch up on my recent reading for weeks now: it has been a month since I wrote up 
—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 
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! 
I thought I had done very little reading in July, and I was prepared to defend myself: “
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:
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.
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.
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 
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.
My recent reading has not been particularly exhilarating, but most of it has been just fine: no duds, just no thrills.
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 
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.
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.)
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!
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.
November 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.)
I 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.
Novel Readings 