Reading Roundup

July Reading: Pushing Through the Dog Days

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Summer: not my favourite season, as I have said here many times before. July included – as it so often does – a stretch of really hot weather. I was grateful for my portable air conditioner, which I trundled from living room to bedroom as needed (sorry, downstairs neighbours!). Fred finds the heat a bit dispiriting as well: she has not been as playful as usual (but the vet has given her a clean bill of health, don’t worry) and she even gets off my lap sometimes and just stretches out on the floor. I get it, Fred! It’s weird to find myself almost (almost!) looking forward to winter, just for the snuggles.

My reading slump has somewhat improved this month, I am glad to say. The most fun I’ve had with a book in a while was Belinda Bauer’s The Impossible Thing, which was one of those serendipitous bookstore choices. Its cover caught my eye–I had never heard of it, or Bauer, before–and the premise both amused and intrigued me, so I decided to risk it and was glad I did. It’s not a particularly weighty or cerebral book, but it’s an entertaining story set in a world I never knew existed: the world of high stakes and now illegal egg collecting. Who knew! The Impossible Thing is based on a real historical incident to do with a fabulous rare egg that disappeared. It’s got good characters, a nice sense of time and place, and a twisty plot that just avoids being too wacky to care about. So many much-hyped books these days aren’t much fun (I DNF’d John of John, just for instance–I’m sure it’s very good and all, but it’s so dour!). If you are in a slump yourself and trying to gin up more enthusiasm for reading, you might give this one a try. I am curious now about Bauer’s other novels, one of which, I see, was a Booker nominee.

I also quite liked Kate Worsley’s Foxash, which I bought with similarly little advance knowledge and thus no clear expectations. It wasn’t fun, exactly, but it’s very atmospheric, and its attention to growth and renewal and life cycles nicely draws together its farm setting and its plot about pregnancy and birth. I am not sure how to characterize Foxash in terms of genre. Is there such a thing as “a novel of foreboding”? There is a mounting sense across the novel that things are not quite what they seem and are not going to turn out well (both of which are indeed the case) but Worsley avoids heavy-handed signals of suspense or threat. Like The Impossible Thing is is very detailed about its time and place, in this case the farms established by the British government’s Land Settlement Association during the depression. Its main characters have fallen on hard times with the closing of a mine and taken up the opportunity to resettle in the country. There’s a lot in the novel about lettuce, in case that piques your interest.

I already wrote about finishing Woolf’s diaries, and I have also written before about Peter Grainger’s mysteries (I have read more since then!). Thinking about Elizabeth George for that post inspired me to go back to one of her earlier ones so I reread With Noone As Witness–the one with the BIG plot twist, IYKYK. It’s pretty good, better (more focused and engaging) than the more recent ones I’ve struggled with. But then I tried Careless in Red and my interest ran out. Basically, she gives as much if not more attention to all the characters in the case as she does to the ‘main characters’–and they just aren’t the ones I care about, which is on me really, not on her. I have never enjoyed Louise Penny in print but I saw that the narrator of the audiobooks of her Gamache series has won prizes so I listened to Glass Houses and the narrator is indeed very good, though the book itself still seemed heavy-handed and portentous.

I also struggled with Tana French’s The Keeper–which as I noted on Bluesky clarified for me that this series is really not set up as crime fiction, or at least not as ‘mysteries,’ but as inquiries into Irish village life. I would have to reread the Dublin Murder Squad to be sure but I expect you could frame them the same way: that in them, she is using the structure of detective novels to explore and expose aspects of Irish culture, especially the way the country’s past weights on people in its present. I got through The Keeper by allowing myself to skim when I got too impatient with the lengthy reports of conversations: yes, I have defended the scenes at the Rainbow in Silas Marner on the grounds that (as GE herself argued) you can’t expect country rustics to be scintillating, but hey, I wasn’t reading this one for work! I will say, though, that the last 100 pages or so were quite gripping, and I know that the slow build-up and the attention to the community lading up to it contributed to that effect. Still, I have put my stack of Cal Hooper novels into my ‘donate’ pile as I can’t imagine rereading them.

I have tried to keep up my summer art (and other) adventures. I had an enjoyable trip to Fisherman’s Cove which turned out also to have a little gallery; I particularly liked the watercolours by Edward Wedler, whose work you can see at his own website. I bought a small print of his painting of the Margaree River in Cape Breton (which you can see on page 5, if you are scrolling through his web gallery). I also took the little boat out to Georges Island in Halifax harbor, something I really should have done years ago. It’s a nice 10-15 minute trip (they go once around the island on the way there, so you get a full circle view) and an interesting historical site.

June Reading

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

June was an odd reading month for me. I read six books by the same author, Peter Grainger, and two books about another single author, Daphne du Maurier. I didn’t read much else, partly because I went to Vancouver to see my family for a week. Sometimes I get in a good chunk of reading on the flights, but this time there was fairly constant turbulence in both directions, not enough to be truly frightening, but enough to keep this nervous flyer from concentrating. I spent a lot of time just listening to calming music (thanks for your help, Kasey Musgraves and Emmy Lou Harris!) and doing deep breathing exercises. What a miserable experience air travel has become, right? Overcrowding, seats that don’t recline, having to pay for every little thing as if it’s an “extra.”

I have read another two of Peter Grainger’s mysteries since I got back from Vancouver as well: I have now read all of the ones that are easily accessible from either my library or Kobo (for some reason, a whole bunch of them were very cheap at Kobo – the ones I haven’t read yet are the middle ones that remain full price there). I have been trying to put my finger on why they are so enjoyable. They were highly recommended to me by a couple of other readers, but that’s not always a guarantee, especially for mysteries, a genre I have been feeling a bit weary of in recent years. It’s especially notable to me that I started the series via audiobook: usually I find novels too slow on audiobook, compared to how fast I can read them to myself, so I prefer non-fiction, which also (for the books I choose, anyway) tends not to demand quite such minute attention, especially at the sentence level.

My enjoyment of the audiobooks is a clue to the general appeal of this series: Grainger (actually Robert Partridge) is a master of pacing. There are other strengths of the series, from the deft and engaging characterization (especially of DC Smith) and the wonderful evocations of the Norfolk setting to the equally deft way in which the cases often touch on broader social and political issues, without ever feeling gimmicky or heavy handed. But a lot of other mystery authors are good at these things too, including, just for example, Elizabeth George and Tana French. Both of these writers tend towards the prolix, however (IMHO etc.) whereas Grainger just gets on with it: there’s a crime, there’s an investigation, evidence and witnesses are pursued, the case is resolved. Even though the two most recent ones, The Late Lord Thorpe and Some Sort of Justice, are about the same case, they approach it differently enough that I still got none of that sense of bloat that I occasionally get from French and consistently now get from George, whose most recent was a DNF for me.

Bringing up French reminds me of Dorian’s recent post about her latest novel, The Keeper, which I haven’t read yet. I’m not quite as big a fan of French as he is, but I do agree with the widespread view that she is among the very best writers working in crime fiction today. In his post, Dorian says that The Keeper is “a terrific example of how crime fiction can chart its post-copaganda future.” Not least because I have so often taught a survey course on mystery & detective fiction, I have thought a lot about the “copaganda” charge, which is often levelled quite generally against crime fiction, and especially against the subgenre of police procedurals, as if to situate the story in a “cop shop” is enough to warrant the charge. (I am not saying that this is something Dorian does, to be clear, in this post or anywhere!) A more nuanced version would be that even if the novel exposes or critiques problems with the police as an institution or a manifestation of state power, the common trope of the heroic or anti-heroic officer counteracts or undermines that critique.

Both George’s Thomas Lynley and P. D. James’s Adam Dalgliesh are excellent examples of the ‘honourable man in a (sometimes, potentially) dishonourable system’ version of the procedural. Both are fine fictional creations (I am personally very fond of Dalgliesh, and was glad that when he finally fell in love, it was with an English professor!), and their novels often have plenty of moral complexity – but I would say that overall, their series, while not idealizing the police, tend to portray them as mostly serving the public good. (I haven’t reread George’s early books in a while, so I can’t back that up with examples off the top of my head. I wrote about James’s oeuvre here.) Ian Rankin’s Rebus series, I think, looks more skeptically at the police as an institution – and even more so (not unrelatedly) at the army, as is made particularly clear in the one I have frequently assigned, Knots and Crosses. I would actually really like to reread Rankin’s whole series and do a survey piece along the lines of the one I did on James for the TLS: rereading all of the Dalgliesh novels in a row really helped me see what James does and doesn’t do with them, and my sense of Rankin is that he is smarter about his choices in ways that keep his books from having the quality I described as “insular” for hers – or perhaps it is more simply that she is more conservative, politically, than he is, and that this shows up in how they think and write about the police.

Anyway! If I were to fault Grainger’s DC Smith series, it would be on the grounds that his coppers are all pretty much the good guys. The main institutional enemy is incompetence and political timidity. Perhaps there are counter-examples in the handful of titles I haven’t read yet from around the middle of the series, but in the ones I have read, there’s no corruption, no abuse of power, no violation of rights, no skulduggery to “get their man.” Half the time even the criminals aren’t really so bad! The worst we’ve met so far is a kind of Epstein-like figure; even the man who actually kills somebody in that case is a lot more sympathetically portrayed than he is. So maybe there is a bit of “copaganda” going on here: DC Smith is wily and funny and a moral touchstone. It’s true he’s considered difficult to work with by his superior officers and has a tendency to work out his own sense of what is right to do, but (again, in the ones I’ve read) this never veers into vigilantism, and is more about that incompetence and timidity at the top than about Rebus-style willingness to outright skirt the rules or play dirty. This is part of the appeal of the genre, of course: it’s fiction, after all, and I think it’s OK to show us what we think things should be like, not always to hammer away at the way they really are – I say this as, among other things, an unrepentant fan of The West Wing. A citizen’s mental reach must exceed their grasp, or what’s the imagination for, right? We need some sense of the “ought” as well as the “is,” as well as a bit of respite from how awful the is generally is these days. But I do understand why portrayals of the police as benign, or as heroic guardians of justice and protectors of the innocent, are problematic. Dorothy Hughes’s The Expendable Man is just one of many examples of how else to tell the story.

Much more briefly, the other things I read in June. I’m working on a review of Rose Tremain’s The Housekeeper, so I reread Rebecca earlier this summer and have now read Tremain’s novel twice and also read Margaret Forster’s fascinating biography of du Maurier. I’ve flipped back through Restoration and Music and Silence, and poked around in a couple of Tremain’s other novels, including The Colour (about the gold rush in New Zealand). She is a strange writer, I find, one that’s hard to categorize: I had thought of her primarily as a historical novelist because the one I heard most about was Restoration, but she tries a lot of different things. I am not convinced about The Housekeeper – why? You’ll have to wait for my review!

I read one romance novel in June, Loretta Chase’s Not Quite A Lady – this is one of the Carsington series, which also includes Lord Perfect, Miss Wonderful, and my favourite, Mr. Impossible. I think I had read Not Quite A Lady before, but I’m not sure. It is not, I didn’t think, as delightful as the other three I’ve named, but it’s still pretty good.

Finally, I read Darcey Steinke’s Flash Count Diary. It wasn’t really my thing. I am shocked at how quickly specifics about it have already faded from my memory! This is the hazard of posting only monthly, instead of when the books are still fresh in my mind.

Recent Reading: Spring (?) Edition

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments
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Spring in Halifax is always an equivocal season. Eventually the leaves do burst out and first the crocuses then the daffodils then the cherry and apple blossoms appear – but it is often grey and rainy, and it has even been cold enough a few times recently for us to get frost warnings overnight. Every year I eagerly anticipate the end of winter; every year I am surprised and disappointed (yes, even after more than three decades) at how reluctantly the weather actually changes. And in recent years, I also feel how fleeting the nice weather is before it turns too hot to be pleasant, or to sleep well!

However. With the onset of spring comes the end of the winter term and thus more time for reading! I have already written up the the books that really stood out to me: Daphne du Maurier’s Mary Anne, Jo Harkin’s The Pretender, Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. That doesn’t mean none of my other reading in April and May was any good, or at least worth any comment, so here’s a sketch of the rest of it.

I’ll start by highlighting the oddity (for me) that I listened to three audiobooks in May by the same author: all mysteries by Peter Grainger, who was recommended to me by my sister as well as by my longtime online friend Janet Webb. I listened to the first three–An Accidental Death, But for the Grace, and Luck and Judgement–mostly while working on jigsaw puzzles, with the result that I made unusually rapid progress on them! The recommenders were right about the excellent narration by Gildart Jackson, who captures DC Smith’s character wonderfully. I don’t typically stick with fiction on audiobooks: I read to myself so much more quickly than they can be read aloud, for one thing, and often I feel I’m not keeping track as well as I do when I’m doing my own reading. This is why I more usually choose podcasts for my puzzle time. But these novels are not overly long–at 12 hours, the third one was quite a bit longer than the first two, 7 and 9 respectively–and the pace of the storytelling felt pretty brisk. The stories also engage with serious and sometimes difficult issues (such as assisted suicide, a key element of But for the Grace), but in a personal and humane way. As I understand it, Grainger has only recently been picked up by a mainstream publisher, which is why his books have been a bit under the radar. My library does not have nearly all of them; I found a couple of later ones on sale on Kobo the other day, so now I have to decide if I care about reading them out of sequence.

I read a few romance novels: Jody McAllister’s An Academic Affair (it was OK), Emily Henry’s Big Beautiful Life (it dragged), B. K. Borison’s First-Time Caller (cute, I enjoyed the Sleepless in Seattle homage, though it felt a bit too derivative at times), Curtis Sittenfeld, Romantic Comedy (meh), and Kate Clayborn’s The Paris Match. Clayborn’s ‘Chance of a Lifetime’ books (Beginner’s Luck, Luck of the Draw, and Best of Luck) are probably my favourite contemporary romance novels, with her Love Lettering also in my top few. I have not been as in love with the ones she has written since then, which sometimes seem to pack too much in, or to play the “past trauma” card too heavy-handedly or elaborately. I felt this way especially about The Other Side of Disappearing, which I reread recently to double-check my initial dislike. She’s a good writer, a better stylist (IMHO) than most current romance novelists I sample, but there’s an energy about those first three that I haven’t felt in any since, and the same was true of The Paris Match. It was fine. YMMV.

I read and didn’t much enjoy Terry Pratchett’s The Night Watch. I have read enough about Pratchett to really want to fall in love with his novels: imagine how many I would then be able to work my way through! I have had many recommendations over the years and never really followed up on them. When I saw the Modern Classics edition of The Night Watch I admit I fell for the marketing: this must be the best one, right? But since I reported on my “meh” experience, Pratchetters have corrected me: it’s late in the series, it relies a lot on our already being invested in the characters, it’s darker and less comic and joyful than [fill in preferred title here] etc. I didn’t hate it or anything. I’ll try Guards, Guards next, eventually.

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It’s remarkable how quickly a few of the books on my list have faded from my recollection. This is the price of not making myself write up every one of them here, as I once did! Ben Markovit’s The Rest of Our Lives: what was that about? (Don’t tell me! I’m being hyperbolic – sort of. I do basically remember it.) Ron Currie’s The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne: why did I even buy it? (I remember why: I’m always scouting for good and especially genre-bending or innovative crime fiction and this sounded like it might hit the mark.) Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork: well, to be fair, it isn’t written to be remembered, right, with its fragmented and wandering and insubstantial quality? For people who like that sort of thing, Dayswork will be exactly what they like. I didn’t dislike it; it just wasn’t for me.

As preparation for reviewing Rose Tremain’s forthcoming novel The Housekeeper, I reread Rebecca (a damn near perfect book! definitely the best book I’ve read in the past two months and probably longer) and am also sampling Tremain’s back catalogue. I had previously read only Restoration and Music and Silence, both of which I really liked and neither of which prepared me for Sadler’s Birthday, her first novel, which is a day in the life of an aging former butler who inherited the estate and is now decaying along with it and remembering. Among his memories is a relationship with a young boy who came to stay on the estate during the war; I wasn’t sure Tremain saw this episode in quite the light we would today (the novel was published in 1976), but I found it hard to tell if it’s Sadler himself or Tremain who is a bit too forgiving. In spite of that, I thought it was a good novel: evocative but not nostalgic, sad but not sentimental.

Finally, I made my way to the end of Volume 4 of Woolf’s diary. I commented back in March that I was flagging a bit in this project, and this continued to be true, even though some parts of Volume 4 were every bit as interesting as anything in the earlier volumes. During much of this volume Woolf is working on what became The Years; paradoxically, perhaps, because I have spent quite a bit of time in the last few years working up an argument about the composition, purposes, and (on the terms I set) failure of The Years, drawing on some material from the diary, that made this volume less interesting rather than more! So far the most exciting part of reading the diaries for me has been seeing Woolf become Woolf–discover what kind of fiction she wants to write, gathering her courage, making the experiment, being exhilarated by finding she can write it. Now that she’s more established, there’s less sense of daring, even though of course she continues to be concerned with trying new things and working out new ideas. She herself seems more excited towards the end of Volume 4 by her ideas for what would become Three Guineas, and I get it: Three Guineas is a better, more radical, more exciting book than The Years. Volume 5 is next–which means that the shadow of how it all ends feels closer and darker. Dramatic irony: we all live our own lives in that mode, unknowingly. That has always been one of my favourite things about Holtby’s book on Woolf, that she wrote it without knowing.

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!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

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.