Reading Roundup

June Reading Wrap-Up

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

QEPJune began slowly, as a reading month anyway, as I was in Vancouver for the first 10 days of it and, as is pretty typical on these trips, I was too busy to settle down with a book. I did read about half of John Vaillant’s The Golden Spruce on the plane, and most of Donna Leon’s Drawing Conclusions while I was there (I borrowed it from my parents’ well-stocked mystery shelves but did not manage to finish it before I left). I’m definitely not complaining! It was a cheerful visit, made more so because Maddie was with me and I loved sharing my favorite people and places with her. Because we were also sharing a suitcase, I was also very restrained and did not buy any books while I was there. The only one I acquired was a very cool gift from my mother: a second impression of the first edition of The WavesWaves, from the Hogarth Press. 

I tried to make up for lost time when I got back: by the end of the month I had read seven, nearly eight, books (I finished the eighth one, Michael Cunningham’s Day, this morning, so I guess technically it counts towards my July reading). I already had my say about Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts and David Nicholls’s You Are Here; the other stand-out is Dean Jobb’s A Gentleman and a  Thief, which is a well-told account of Arthur Barry, a daring and debonair “second-story man” who stole thousands of dollars worth of jewelry from the rich and privileged during the Jazz Age. His life story has many other surprising twists and turns, including a violent prison break and a tender and lasting romance. Jobb includes a lot of contextual information about the times and places and people in the book, all based on impressively thorough research. At times I did find myself thinking “this is how you turn one good idea into a whole book”—not that this material is padding, and certainly not that it doesn’t add anything, but the book got me pondering the whole genre of narrative non-fiction, not least because I had the same reaction to The Golden SpruceJOBB, that while all of its detail about the history and processes of the lumber industry in BC were interesting enough, the book also gave the impression of a single man’s story elaborated or built up with background and contexts until it made a large enough whole. Sometimes I just wanted to get on with the actual events!

I enjoyed Elizabeth Hay’s Snow Road Station, enough that I passed it along to a friend I thought might also like it, but not enough that I felt compelled to give it its own post. I found Emily Henry’s Funny Story fine: it passed the time, she writes OK, but I can’t imagine re-reading it (or any of her novels, for that matter). Funny Story had me thinking again about when a novel with a romance is a romance novel, a gambit nobody seemed interested in in my post on You Are Here. I’m pretty sure Funny Story is a (genre) romance, and by the time I’d finished it, I was more convinced than before that You Are Here is not, but it’s possible that You Are Here is just a better version of the same form. Better how? I want to say it’s richer, more thoughtful, more expansive, something like that, but I’m not sure I could defend those claims or demonstrate what I mean with examples. Anyway, I did enjoy Funny Story, about as much as I did Carley Fortune’s Meet Me At the Lake (which I read in May), but not enough to understand her massive best-sellerdom (or Fortune’s, for that matter). Any Emily Henry fans out there who would like to explain her specific appeal for them?henry

My other June reading was Tammy Armstrong’s new novel Pearly Everlasting, which I am reviewing for the Literary Review of Canada. As I told the editor, I almost certainly would not have picked up a book with its premise (it’s about a girl who is raised with a bear cub as her “brother”) to read just for myself. But it can be good, productive even, to read outside your comfort zone for a review, and I do always try to approach a book on its own terms, at least initially. We’ll see how this turns out! (What is it about CanLit and bears, though?)

And that’s my June reading! One thing I have figured out is that I get further these days if I settle in to read in the mornings than if I assume I will get around to it in the evenings. This isn’t really an option during the academic term, when I have to be up and out in time for classes and meetings, but my schedule is pretty flexible most days in the summer, plus I wake up quite early nowadays, meaning I can often get in an hour or two of reading before 8:30 or 9:00 a.m. and then start in on the day’s business. By 8:30 or 9:00 p.m., on the other hand, I am often past the point at which I can really concentrate pleasurably or productively on the page, so that’s a good time for P&P (podcasts and puzzles!), or crochet in front of the TV. It still seems to me that there are more hours in the day than there used to be, a phenomenon I’ve learned is shared by others who have found themselves living alone after years of busy parenting and cohabiting. Sometimes those hours do drag! But I am learning to fill them, and trying my best to consider them a luxury, or at least an opportunity, rather than a slog.

Mid-May Mop-Up

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

zolaBook blogging was easier, somehow, when I just wrote up every book I read as soon as I finished it. I was so much busier in other respects when I adopted that habit: looking back, I have now idea how I found the time for it. But one plausible theory is that I saved a lot of time not dithering about blogging! Just do it – good advice for so many things, including writing.

So. I have read five books so far this month. Two of them were really good: Zola’s La Bête Humaine, which is “good” in the sense that it does what it sets out to do really well, and Sebastian Barry’s Old God’s Time, which is grim and sad but also beautiful in that way a lot of Irish novels are.

I kind of hated reading La Bête Humaine, though it was very gripping and once I started I didn’t want to stop. (It goes by quite quickly because so much bad stuff is happening that you are propelled onward by an unpleasant mingling of curiosity and dread.) The only other Zola I’ve read is Germinal and that was a long (long!) time ago. I remember its being pretty rough, but I don’t recall that it was as histrionic, violent, or pessimistic (about everything – humanity, society, the law, men, women, you name it!) as La Bête Humaine, which is like a Dickens novel in which every character is as awful as . . . actually, I can’t really think of a Dickens character, however unpleasant, who would be at home in the world of this particular Zola novel. And when Dickens gives us brutality, he also always gives us tenderness: A Tale of Two Cities may be his most violent novel overall, for instance, and it has one of his most beautiful, redemptive endings. This is definitely not part of Zola’s vision of the world. A good (meaning, not terrible) moment in La Bête Humaine would be one where one of its murderous characters actually manages not to murder someone, as here:

So it had happened – he had possessed Severine and had not taken the hammer to smash her skull. She was his and there had been no struggle, none of that instinctive desire to throw her on her back dead, like some trophy snatched from others . . . It was with loving gratitude and a desire to be lost in her that he took her again into his arms.

Ah, young love, right?

barryThe novel’s non-stop melodrama is in service of a worldview, or an idea about human desires and instincts. I think possibly this sentence is key: “The door of terror opened over the black chasm of sex, love even unto death, destruction for fuller possession.” I hope the One Bright Pod folks (whose fault it is that I read this) will tell me if there is some kind of link to D. H. Lawrence here: it seems so to me, but I don’t know Lawrence well enough to be sure. I also hope they talk about what trains signify and how they are used in the novel. They are clearly (I think) symbols of modernity, but there is a lot more going on with them, especially the engine personified by one of the characters as a woman (“she” is perhaps his most genuinely caring relationship). Once I’d freed myself from finished the novel, I couldn’t bring myself to linger long enough over it to think things through. That’s what smart friends with podcasts are for!

I felt a bit of resistance to Old God’s Time by the end too, though it is so melancholy and the writing is so evocative (and also evasive and unreliable) that I enjoyed it much more. But is there a risk, maybe, in making all sad stories turn out to be about the priests? Every such story is different, sad in its own way, but it’s hard not to find something predictable about the revelations. This was the first of Barry’s novels that I’d read: I don’t know if its subject is a typical one for him.

ishiguroThe other three books I’ve finished are Mollie Keane’s Good Behaviour (didn’t much like it, though I could see how skillful it is), Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (found it boring even though I knew he was doing his withholding / unreliable narrator trick again so I knew that if I only understood what lay beneath the boring layer, it would be much more interesting – this is a risk he takes repeatedly, as I discussed in my post on re-reading Never Let Me Go, but there I think the payoff was much greater, although I did not read When We Were Orphans attentively enough to be certain), and Joan Thomas’s Wild Hope (which recently was nominated for a Canadian crime fiction award, raising my own hope that it might be that elusive thing, a Canadian crime novel I am keen to assign in my detective fiction class – but no, it is too much “fiction” and not enough “crime,” and qua novel it didn’t really excite me).

Library StackWhat’s next, you wonder? Maybe Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts, which I picked up recently with a birthday gift card (thank you!), or something from my miscellaneous stack of library books. Living so close to the public library has made me pretty casual about taking things out that I may or may not commit to reading: I like having options! (If there’s anything there you think I should definitely try, let me know.) I also have Cold Comfort Farm to hand, which was my ‘Independent Bookstore Day’ treat – but I’m saving it to read on the plane when I go to Vancouver in a couple of weeks.

April Reading

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

bronskyApril hasn’t been a bad month for reading, overall. I’ve already written up Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man, and it certainly stands out as the best of the bunch – but Alina Bronsky’s Barbara Isn’t Dying is a very close second, and if I were ranking based purely on pleasure, it would be tops.

Barbara Isn’t Dying (translated from the German by Tim Mohr) is wry, funny, and poignant. It follows the struggles of dour Walter Schmidt, who wakes up one morning to find that his wife Barbara is ill and unable to do the cooking and cleaning and laundry and everything else she does that until then Walter has taken for granted. Walter, who begins the novel not even knowing how to make coffee, has to figure out how to get by, which he does partly through his own stubborn persistence and partly because he just keeps asking how to do things and people answer, from the young woman in the nearby bakery to the Facebook followers of a famous cooking show Walter happens upon. (His Facebook experiences are pretty hilarious: he has no idea at all how the site works or who these people are replying to the posts he makes under Barbara’s name.) As the novel goes on, Walter doesn’t just learn to cook but also learns to be a better person, a better husband, and a better father, a predictable arc, perhaps, but Bronsky isn’t heavy-handed about it, and Walter never becomes a very lovable guy. (For one thing, there are a few too many times when he tries hard to remember if he ever hit Barbara in the past – he’s pretty sure he didn’t, but the question itself is unsettling.) We also learn more about what Barbara had to deal with in their marriage before her illness, and we watch Walter make his rather lumbering way towards repentance and repair. Some of it will be too late, but not all of it, and that matters.

eastboundI read Maylis De Kerangal’s Eastbound in one sitting, not just because it’s short but because it’s very suspenseful and I really wanted to find out what happened! I ended up thinking that the novel’s success in this respect worked against the quality of my reading of it, because I didn’t linger over the aspects of the novel that make it more than just a thriller. The story is very simple: a young Russian soldier on a train to Siberia decides to go AWOL and is helped in his attempted escape by another passenger, a young French woman. Will he succeed, or will he be discovered and pay the price? Anxious to know, I paid less attention than I should have to the descriptions of the landscape scrolling past them – though I did appreciate them, I didn’t really think about them, and a reread of the novel would probably show me more metaphorical and historical layers to the characters’ journey. Some other time, maybe, as I had to return my copy to the library! But even my brisk reading showed me why Trevor and Paul were so enthusiastic about the book.

My other reading has been more desultory. I enjoyed Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die, a lot more than the first one in the series which I read a year or so ago. I also enjoyed Adrien McKinty’s In the Morning I’ll be Gone, which I read as part of my ongoing scouting for possibilities for my mystery class – I wouldn’t assign it, but it was a gripping read. I read Steph Cha’s Your House Must Fall for the same reason and also would not assign it, although that’s as much because it does not really have the form of a mystery (I’m specifically ‘shopping’ for police procedurals) as because I found it – despite the compelling social and historical contexts it deals with – a fairly plodding read. I DNF’d Qiu Xiaolong’s Hold Your Breath, China for similar reasons. I am definitely taking advantage of living walking distance to the public library: it is great being able to wander in and pick up a few things to sample. (I also now live within walking distance of Bookmark, where it is also very tempting to wander in and pick up a few things – such as Barbara Isn’t Dying!)

Apple-on-a-Windowsill_low-resMy current reading is Shawna Lemay’s Apples on a Windowsill, which is (more or less) about still lifes as a genre, but which roams across a range of topics in a thoughtful and often beautifully meditative way. A sample:

Why is it that this moment of transcendence induced by a still life, this seeing through to the other side, this opening or loophole where we drop into the sheer mystery of being, is so interesting to me? I think it’s because it also contains the promise of the moment after. A still life stops time, is out of time, occasionally offering the viewer that rupture/rapture. It is also suspenseful. The question hovers: what happens next? And it gives us an interval to dream new possibilities. It affects us, and it affects how we walk through this world, into the loophole, beyond the threshold, our eyes open, awake.

This genre – what is it, exactly? personal essay? pensées? – isn’t always, or even usually, my thing, but I have had an interest in still lifes myself for a while, not an expert interest but just a curiosity, a desire to look more closely at them. I particularly like ones with glassware, like this one by Pieter Claesz:

1024px-Pieter_Claesz._-_Still-Life_with_Oysters_-_WGA04964

I find that wine glass mesmerizing. I also follow Lemay on Instagram and had enjoyed and been intrigued by her posts of still lifes she composed and photographed. I am appreciating the book’s commitment to finding beauty in every day objects, and to encouraging us to find everything, from quotidian objects to our own faces, worth looking at. The chapter I just read, “An Ugly Woman,” includes discussion of selfies, that much-maligned genre, which Lemay says she finds “potentially beautiful and ridiculous and fun and ultimately sublime attempts to capture your own soul when others have perhaps failed. We’re not movie stars,” she goes on, “but we exist right now at this exact moment and one day we won’t.” Why not record that moment, then? And she is eloquent about “people who are not airbrushed, who have wrinkles, and other tics and quirks.” “What would happen,” she asks, “if we were all able to imagine our wrinkled selves as fucking cool looking?” What indeed?

Catching Up: Recent Reading

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

I have read some books since Fayne, honest I have! I just haven’t had the bandwidth, as the saying goes, to write them up properly—which is a shame, as some of them have been very good. So here’s a catch-up post, to be sure I don’t let them slip by entirely unremarked.

clyde-gentleman-overboardThe best of them was undoubtedly Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard, which I was inspired to read by listening to Trevor and Paul talk about it on the Mookse and the Gripes podcast. It is a slim little book with a simple little story, but it contains vast depths of insight and feeling, and even some touches of humor, as it follows Henry Preston Standish overboard into the Pacific Ocean and then through the many hours he spends floating and treading water and hoping not to drown before the ship he had been traveling on comes back to pick him up. We also get to see how the folks on board react when he’s discovered to be missing, and we follow his thoughts and memories, learning more about him and how he came to be where he is—not in the ocean, which is easily and bathetically explained (he slips on a spot of grease at just the wrong moment when he’s in just the wrong place), but sailing from Honolulu to Panama in the first place.

I just loved this novel, which struck me as elegantly balanced between Standish’s individual experience, written with a pitch-perfect blend of comedy and pathos, and parable-like reflections on life and death more generally. Three small samples, just as teasers, from different moments in the book—one from before Standish’s slip and fall, one from his time in the water, and the other from the perspective of one of his shipboard companions:

The whole world was so quiet that Standish felt mystified. The lone ship plowing through the broad sea, the myriad of stars fading out of the wide heavens—these were all elemental things that soothed and troubled Standish. It was as if he were learning for the first time that all the vexatious problems of his life were meaningless and unimportant; and yet he felt ashamed at having had them in the same world that could create such a scene as this.

Not dead yet, Standish thought. And not alive either; before walking away and leaving his inert remains to shift for themselves it would be best to think of life as he had lived it; not of the ordinary events . . . but of the extraordinary things that had happened in his insufficient thirty-five years. And with each thought a pang came to his heart that had shattered, a pang of regret that he could not go on like other men having new extraordinary experiences day after day.

He went down to his favorite spot on the well deck and gazed out at the sea and the materializing stars in the heaven. It defied his imagination. You could not think of this vastness one moment and then the next moment think of a puny bundle of humanity lost in its midst. One was so much bigger than the other; the human mind simply could not cope with the two together.

Friend-Sails-In_low-resI also really appreciated Molly Peacock’s A Friend Sails in on a Poem, which is an account of her long personal and working friendship with fellow poet Phillis Levin. It is a blend of memoir and craft book, which might not work for every reader, but I found the insider perspective on how poems are created and shaped fascinating and illuminating. Peacock includes some of the poems that she talks about; this was my favorite:

The Flaw

The best thing about a hand-made pattern
is the flaw.
Sooner or later in a hand-loomed rug,
among the squares and flattened triangles,
a little red nub might soar above a blue field,
or a purple cross might sneak in between
the neat ochre teeth of the border.
The flaw we live by, the wrong color floss,
now wreathes among the uniform strands
and, because it does not match,
makes a red bird fly,
turning blue field into sky.
It is almost, after long silence, a word
spoken aloud, a hand saying through the flaw,
I’m alive, discovered by your eye.

Peacock talks often in the book about her interest in poetic form; I liked this explanation of its value:

Form does something else vigorously physical: it compresses. Because you have to meet a limit—a line length, a number of syllables, a rhyme—you have to stretch or curl a thought to meet that requirement. Curiously, as the lyrical mind works to answer that demand, the unconscious is freed to experience its most playful and most dangerous feelings. Form is safety, the safe place in which we can be most volatile.

A Friend Sails in on a Poem is not an effusive book, but there’s something uplifting about its record of a friendship between women that is shaped by shared artistic and intellectual interests and not threatened by the differences between them as people and as writers. There’s no melodrama, not even really any narrative tension, around their friendship; the book’s momentum comes solely and, I thought, admirably simply from the movement of the two poets in tandem through time.

Smith BeautifulI was more ambivalent about Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. At times I found its fragmentary structure annoying in the way I often feel about books that read to me as unfinished, deliberately or not. But I also thought some of the rhetorical devices Smith uses to structure it were very effective, especially her reflections on the questions, usually well-meaning, people have asked her about the breakdown of her marriage, her divorce, and her writing about it: there are the answers she would like to give,  typically raw, fraught, and conflicted, reflecting the complexity of her feelings and experiences, which defy straightforward replies; and then there are the answers she does give, neater, shorter, sanitized. That rang true to me, as it probably does to anyone who has been through something difficult and knows that when people ask how you are doing, they are not really, or are only rarely, asking for the real answer.

Smith’s story also felt very specific, very particular to me. She remarks in a few instances that she is writing it because perhaps it will become something other people can use, but her care not to extrapolate or generalize, while I suppose appropriate to such a personal kind of memoir, seemed to me to work against that possibility. Others might well disagree, and I can see making the argument that the portable value of her book lies precisely in its modeling of how to be honest and vulnerable about something so intimate. In the spirit of her viral poem “Good Bones,” You Could Make This Place Beautiful (a title which itself comes from that poem), Smith’s book is, ultimately, about repair, about how even a situation that seems like a hopeless ruin can, with some time and a lot of effort, become habitable again:

Something about being at the ocean always reminds me of how small I am, but not in a way that makes me feel insignificant. It’s a smallness that makes me feel a part of the world, not separate from it. I sat down in a lounge chair and opened the magazine to my poem [“Bride”], the thin pages flapping in the wind. IN that moment, I felt like I was where I was meant to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.

Something had shifted, maybe just slightly, but perceptibly. I remember feeling the smile on my face the whole walk back to the hotel, hoping it didn’t seem odd to the people around me. I stopped at the drawbridge that lifted so the boats could go under. The whole street lifted up right in front of me. Nothing seemed impossible anymore. Everything was possible.

OK, maybe! The optimism is welcome, and maybe authentic, though (and again, others might disagree) it feels a bit forced to me here, whereas “Good Bones” has a quality of wistfulness to it that I like better.

LondonRulesFinally, I just finished Mick Herron’s London Rules, the third (or possibly fourth?) of his Slough House books that I’ve read. It was thoroughly entertaining, and I read it at a brisk pace as a result, but by the end it did strike me as a risk that the series’ signature elements, including Lamb’s flatulence and the various other Slow Horses’ quirks, could wear a bit thin.

I’m reading for work too, of course, most recently The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in Mystery & Detective Fiction and a cluster of works on ‘fallen women’ for my Victorian ‘Woman Question’ seminar—DGR’s “Jenny,” Augusta  Webster’s “A Castaway,” and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Lizzie Leigh,” a story I love (I wrote about it here the last time I taught it in person, which seems a lifetime ago). As always, I am thinking about ways to shake up the reading list for the mystery class, if only to bring in at least one book more recent than the early 1990s, which used to seem very current but of course is not any longer. A student asked today, in the context of our discussion of the moral discomfort possibly created by the “cozy” subgenre, whether we were going to talk about true crime in the course. We aren’t, because no example of it is assigned and because the course is specifically about crime “fiction”, but one idea I’ve been kicking around is Denise Mina’s The Long Drop, which is a novelization of a true crime case. I haven’t read it yet, so that’s obviously what I need to do next, but I listened to a podcast episode with her talking about it and it was really fascinating.

LibraryStackI hope to get back to more regular blogging about books, and about my classes, an exercise in self-reflection that I’ve missed. It has been a very busy and often stressful couple of months, for personal reasons (about which, as I have said before, more eventually, perhaps), but whenever I do settle in to write here I am reminded of how good it feels, of how much I enjoy the both the freedom to say what I think and the process of figuring out what that is! My current reading (slowly, in the spirit of Kim and Rebecca’s #KateBriggs24 read-along, though I am not an official participant) is Kate Brigg’s The Long Form, which I am enjoying a lot; I’m experimenting with having more than one book on the go, as well, so now that I’ve finished London Rules I will go back to my tempting stack of library books and pick another to contrast with Briggs, perhaps Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s Hotel Silence, since I liked Butterflies in November a lot. I hope to get through all the books in that stack before they come due—but I know I’m not the only reader who finds that their aspirations of this kind, and the pace of their library holds, can exceed their capacity!

The Last Books of Summer

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

last-roses-of-summerMy last two reads of this summer were Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose and Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. For me, one was a hit, the other a miss.

I began The Book of Goose with enthusiasm; sadly, it dwindled as the book went on. It’s often hard to put my finger on exactly why I don’t like a novel (as opposed to why I don’t like a particular feature of a novel, as with the ghostly illogic that put me off Devotion). When it happens, I always wonder if more time and effort would turn things around—but when I’m reading just for myself, there’s no real incentive to go to that kind of trouble, and there are enough books that do work for me more or less immediately that I don’t worry too much that I’m somehow missing out. A lot of readers I respect think very highly of Yiyun Li (in response to my “meh” judgment on Twitter, Catherine Taylor, for one, commented that “She’s an amazing writer”—though the novel she highlighted was The Vagrants, which I haven’t read but she said is, in her opinion, “pretty much one of the best novels of the last 20 years”). I was very moved (both before and after Owen’s death) by Where Reasons End, but I have DNF’d Must I Go twice now. Perhaps that should have been a warning sign, but I heard part of a podcast interview with Li about The Book of Goose and it intrigued me, and the premise seemed promising.

li-gooseAnother warning sign should have been how many reviews (including some quoted in the pages of “Praise for The Book of Goose” that lead off my paperback edition) compare it to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I am cynical about these tendentious excerpts so I don’t pay very close attention to them when I’m making up my mind about what to read. Maybe I should change my habits! Because the Ferrante comparison occurred to me not too far into Li’s novel, and not for good reasons. (I’m not a fan.) Mostly it’s because of Fabienne, the strange, fierce,  often cruel best friend of the narrator Agnès, who has the kind of willful wildness that Ferrante too seems to find, if not attractive, at least appealing, or compelling. I can’t imagine being friends with such a person in real life, and the recoil she caused made it equally hard to imagine why Agnès was so devoted to her in her world. Their friendship has a lot of the push-pull of Ferrante’s protagonists, and there are some similar themes about writing and identity and competition and contested narratives. (When people write about these books as if they reveal some essential truth about women’s friendships, I am baffled: is this really what their friendships are like?) For a while I was engaged enough in the graphic account of village life in post-war France, but the “game” of “let’s write a book” seemed forced to me, an awkward device to generate plot, conflict, and metafiction. Agnès’s time in England seemed similarly wooden to me; her correspondence with Fabienne and the fictional Jacques also seemed too much like a gimmick to stir up potential interpretation. Is The Book of Goose really a high concept novel, or is it trying (and failing) to be one? A lot of critics considered it the former, but I wasn’t convinced and (worst of all) before it was over I had lost interest in figuring it out.

tom-lakeTom Lake was a much more enjoyable read, although like the other Patchett novels I have read recently, it didn’t seem to me to go particularly deep. Still, there was something really satisfying about it: I liked it a lot more than either Commonwealth or The Dutch House (though not as much as I remember liking Bel Canto). It has in common with The Book of Goose an interest in how we look back at the past and use what we remember to give shape and meaning to the present. It’s also, I think, about the roles we play and how they can either trap or liberate us, a theme it literalizes through its theatrical contexts and plotlines. How do we know who we really are, or who we might be? How do we navigate a world in which people, looking at us but not really knowing us, cast us in their own ongoing dramas? Patchett has too light a touch to lean hard into these kinds of thematic or (at their deepest) existential questions: mostly, she just tells a story about people with interesting but also somehow very ordinary lives. A story like this one, about choosing family and farming over fame and fortune, might have been told as shadowed with complications, perhaps regret about the road not traveled, or yearning for lost love, but Patchett’s version is airy and confident: the path taken is unequivocally the right one, which makes the notes of nostalgia unthreatening to present happiness. For a pandemic novel, it’s actually remarkably sunny: there’s really no hint of danger, certainly no sign of illness. Is that escapism? If so, is there something wrong with it? Maybe it’s just one of the gifts fiction can offer us—a temporary respite, a refuge. It’s not that there isn’t trouble and heartache in the story Lara tells her daughters, but while they listen they are safe and loved. There’s definitely room for novels like that in my reading life.

Recent Reading: Diaz, Mason, Piñeiro

Rohan Maitzen6 Comments

My recent reading has included one book that is suspicious of story but clever (perhaps too clever) about plot and (for my taste anyway) shallowly dismissive about the possibility of meaning; another that is very conventionally plotted and pretty compelling reading but didn’t yield much deeper meaning; and then one more that I think really effectively combines plot, story, and meaning.

Trust-SmallerIf you’re a friend of mine on social media, it won’t surprise you that Hernan Diaz’s Trust is the first one. It is an inarguably ingenious novel, but I thought (and the other members of my book club agreed) that the payoff for its ingenuity in the second half wasn’t enough to make up for the extraordinary, if self-conscious, dullness of the first half. Even a novel that can only really light up on a second reading can (and, arguably, should) generate some excitement the first time through. For me, a case in point would be Atonement, which is a much more layered and complex novel on a reread but which is also exceptionally well written and engrossing to begin with—that’s one of the reasons its big ‘twist’ is so important. If you want to write a novel that is implicitly or explicitly about the power of fiction(s), shouldn’t it actually be powerful fiction? But Trust not only drags on (and on and on) but eventually fizzles out. I assume that it does so to prove its point that there isn’t really anything solid at the heart of the stories we tell—that authenticity and identity are both also fictions, the way money and narrative both are (this is one of the novel’s central conceits). OK, fine, but that’s not only an unsurprising (dare I say unoriginal?) idea but a kind of lazy one. What if narrative is precisely the way we explore and discover and create meaning? Meaning doesn’t have to be absolute to matter, either, and human stories of the kind Trust plays with do matter, even if they are bound together in some ways by artifice. The novel’s embrace of vacuity as a premise and theme left me shrugging, and (something we talked about quite a lot at our book club meeting) it also produced a novel in which even the most painful human experiences were fairly boring to read about, and that’s not just disappointing, it’s also disturbing. Plenty of critics found a lot to admire in Trust but it just wasn’t for me.

Mason-Soldier-CoverI picked up Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier because I’m writing up his latest novel, North Woods, for the TLS and it’s good enough that I wanted to read more by him. The Winter Soldier is quite unlike North Woods, mostly in ways that favor the newer novel—which suggests Mason is getting better at his craft! The Winter Soldier (2018) is a good old-fashioned historical novel. It is packed with concrete details that make the time and place of its action vivid in the way I want historical fiction to be vivid. It takes place mostly in a remote field hospital in the Carpathian mountains during WWI; its protagonist, Lucius Krzelewski, is a medical student rapidly converted to a doctor to serve the desperate needs of the Austro-Hungarian army. His time at the hospital is full of harrowing incidents; through them runs his growing interest in an illness that eludes physical diagnosis and treatment—what today we would call PTSD. There are chaotic battle scenes and idyllic interludes; there’s a love story as well. It’s good! It really immerses you in its world, and (unlike Trust!) makes you care about its characters. I ended it not really sure it was about anything more than that. Novels don’t need to be, of course, though the best ones are. Still, I liked it enough that I will probably also look up Mason’s other novels, starting with The Piano Tuner. North Woods is a lot smarter and more subtle, though. (I am not sure it’s entirely successful: in my review, I will say more about that, when I figure out how to!)

Betty-Boo-SmallerAnd then there’s Claudia Piñeiro’s Betty Boo, which I found a really satisfying combination of smart plotting, thoughtful storytelling, and ideas that matter. In some ways it is less ambitious than the other two novels: it is structured more or less conventionally as a crime novel, and there aren’t really any narrative tricks to it, unless you count the sections that are ostensibly written by the protagonist, Nurit Iscar, about its central murder case. Iscar is a crime novelist who has had a professional setback (a crushing review of her foray into romantic fiction) and is currently getting by as a ghost writer. A contact at a major newspaper asks her to write some articles about a murder from a less journalistic and more contemplative perspective; in aid of this mission, she moves into the gated community where the victim lived and died. She ends up collaborating with the reporters on the crime beat as they investigate the death and discover that it is a part of a larger and more sinister operation—about which, of course, I will not give you any details here! Betty Boo is an unusual book: it doesn’t read quite like a “genre” mystery, as it is at least as interested in Nurit’s life and especially her relationships, with her close women friends and her lovers, as it is in its crime story. Also, Betty Boo is about crime, reporting, and fiction as themes, though its attention to these issues is integrated into the storytelling so that it never really feels metafictional—unlike Trust, which is all gimmick and so no substance, Betty Boo seems committed to the value and possibility of substance, even as Piñeiro provokes us to think about the obstacles we face in achieving it, in writing or in life, especially now that the news as a vehicle for both information and storytelling has become so degraded. I appreciated how original Betty Boo felt, and how genuinely interesting it was: I haven’t read another writer who does quite what Piñeiro does, in it or, for that matter, in Elena Knows. Of the three novels I read recently, this is the one I’m most likely to recommend to others, and I’m definitely going to read more of Piñeiro’s fiction, probably starting with A Little Luck, when I can get my hands on it.

April, Come She Will

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

DucksApril comes and April goes, whether you want her to or not. In the teaching term, it is always a blur of a month—a bit out of control, like rolling down a hill. I used to welcome the feeling—the exhilaration of finishing up, the anticipation of summer—but this year it is just one more reminder of how relentlessly, and how strangely, time passes.

I have been busy and tired and sad this month, which means that I haven’t done much reading outside of work. The good news is that all three (just three!) books I finished this month were very good. The first was my friend John Cotter’s memoir Losing Music. I was completely engrossed by this searching account of John’s experience with what he eventually learned was Ménière’s Disease, a syndrome that has devastating effects on balance—lengthy, debilitating bouts of vertigo—as well as on hearing. As the title indicates, an important dimension of the book is what it meant to John to be unable to hear music, which had always been a significant part of his life and identity. One of the most moving passages describes a night when (as occasionally but unpredictably happens) his hearing comes back— “but who knew for how long.” “I knew exactly how to proceed,” John tells us:cotter

Carefully, I laid myself down on my childhood bed . . . and set in place an expensive pair of Audio-Technica headphones I’d been saving against the day. Jascha Heifetz, back in 1952, in Hollywood, playing Bach’s partitas for solo violin. It’s vertiginous, sinister, and somehow a kind of duet, the way he plays it, a dance at the edge of a cliff.

Another night, he wakes up and can hear birds:

I can hear them fading, going—they’ll be gone at any second. As I listen to the last catches of song, I can feel my heart break in every sound. Don’t let that one be the last one. Don’t let that one. Don’t let that.

Losing Music follows John’s extensive and often desperate quest for first a diagnosis and then a treatment (there is no cure); he is frank about his occasional, very understandable, collapses into self-pity and also about his painful depression and frequent suicidal thoughts. He looks for help but also for ways to sustain some meaning and purpose in a life spiraling out of his control. He finds sustenance in teaching, in volunteering, in love and friendship, and also, vitally, in writing; he finds, eventually, a kind of peace born of hard-won compassion:

Compassion for the world, over which we have only narrow dominion, and awe at the world’s mutability, can germinate in the cultivation of a gentleness in one’s self, a gentleness for one’s future self, over which we have only narrow dominion. In feeling a little sorry for myself, I also feel sorry for the world, the evening world of half measures and regrets, the morning world when we sweep up and start again.

I was frequently moved to tears by Losing Music, and I feel very proud to have had a small part in it (it began as an essay for Open Letters Monthly) and to be mentioned in the acknowledgments.

barkerThe other books I read all of in April (I’m assuming I won’t finish another one by Sunday) were Elspeth Barker’s O, Caledonia and Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture. It’s hard to imagine two books with less in common! I enjoyed O, Caledonia a lot, although it is strange and wild and—I thought—a bit random, almost artless: as I read it, I was often surprised, even confused, by it, uncertain why this was what was happening or this particular detail was in it. Yet it felt unified, nonetheless: maybe that strangeness itself unifies it! Its fierce protagonist Janet takes the “not like other girls” trope to an extreme: she’s equal parts compelling and appalling. It has something of the flavor of We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

The Guest Lecture, by comparison, is more cool and cerebral. Its whole premise is so unlikely—who would write (and who would want to read) a novel about Keynes?—and yet I found it completely engaging, and I always like that feeling of seeing someone succeed with a completely idiosyncratic idea. The plotline about tenure denial had a lot in common with my own experience of being turned down for promotion, although the consequences of the former are of course more dire. Still, when Keynes says “Part of you clearly thinks they are right about you, even though they canriker‘t be, they have to be wrong or else your life’s work is pointless, and that is a level of personal negation you cannot possibly survive”—well, yes, exactly. Just thinking about the report of the final appeals committee for my promotion case still makes me shrink back inside myself. I appreciated The Guest Lecture as an attempt to show the examined life from the inside: what is it like to be someone who takes ideas seriously, and who tries (successfully or not) to live with and among them in some kind of meaningful way? It’s no picnic, that’s for sure: the unexamined life may not be worth living, but (as I have often thought myself in recent months) surely in many ways it is an easier way to live. I liked the last part of the novel the least: it spirals into a version of the “teaching dream” every academic has had, where things make sense but don’t, and you are ready and present but somehow, also, you aren’t. Rebecca pointed me to an interview with Riker that I hope to listen to soon. I’m sure there are many subtleties about it, especially its form, that I missed.

I started but abandoned a couple of other novels this month. One was Mexican Gothic. It looked like so much fun—but I really wasn’t into it. Maybe another time. Another was Niall Williams’s This Is Happiness. It looked like the kind of novel I would love, and actually there wasn’t anything wrong with it. If I hadn’t been tired and busy and sad, I might have loved it, so again, another time. Up next is Clare Chambers’s Small Pleasures, which I’ve just begun* and am liking so far, and then maybe Nicola Griffith’s Spear, which has been in my TBR pile for quite some time. Oh, and I need to get back to Demon Copperhead, which I bailed on months ago: my book club is meeting in May to talk about it, which is just the incentive I need. I wasn’t finding it Dickensian enough, which is perhaps not a fair criticism, except that it is so closely modeled on David Copperfield in its plot and characters that it is hard not to expect it to have something of the same heart and humour as well. I know Mark Athitakis really liked it, which encourages me to approach it with a more open mind.

I will save reflections on this term’s teaching for another post.

*Just a quick update to note that I actually did finish Small Pleasures already (it’s amazing what a difference it makes to my mood and concentration to be done with grading!) and it’s very good. It seems at first like a charming period piece, full of 1950s atmosphere and mores depicted with an edge that keeps it from tipping into nostalgia, but it gets more emotionally intense as it goes along—which it does at a pretty good clip, as the “what really happened?” question underlying its plot gives it momentum. I thought the answer we finally get to that question was underwhelming, but the mystery is more of a device than the real heart of the novel, and its actual resolution hit harder than I expected.

*  “April Come She Will” is one of the songs I used to sing to Owen at bedtime when he was little. Like so many things, it will always make me think of him; maybe it won’t always make me so sad.

Marching

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Roots March 2023March was a rough month. For one thing, I had more academic integrity hearings stemming from a single assignment than I’ve ever had in one term. It was an exceptionally disheartening experience, especially given the lengths I have gone to in my introductory class to reduce the risk for students of just trying to do the work for themselves: this is the class in which I’m using specifications grading, meaning there is really no risk involved. As I plaintively reminded the class as it became clear just how widespread the problem was, the class is designed to make it safe to be wrong, safe to be confused, safe to be learning. But if you don’t actually do your own writing, you strip the whole process of its meaning. Plus (as I pointed out to many students in the actual hearings), if your uncertainty leads you to copying other people’s writing, you will never build your own skills and your own confidence: you will never find out that you can in fact do the work, and get better at it.

I’ve written here before about plagiarism and my overall attitude remains the same. I’m just crushingly disappointed that things went so badly this term, despite my considerable efforts to educate and support students so that they would make better choices. It was incredibly demoralizing that so many students clearly saw the course as a means to an end, hoping to get the credit for it without engaging in the process. It has also been predictably destabilizing seeing or even just suspecting that students are using ChatGPT to do “their” work. (Literally the only good news about this is that the bots are pretty unreliable about any but the most widely familiar literary works, and even with them they can produce real howlers.) One consequence is that I am reconsidering specifications grading, even though I remain convinced that it is pedagogically sound and also ethically preferable to traditional approaches to writing assessment.  At the very least, if I use it again next year, I’m going to have to rethink the kind and number of components I require: with as many moving parts as my current course design includes, it is just overwhelming trying to scrutinize submissions as closely as it turns out we need to. Next year the class will be in person rather than online, which may make a difference: for one thing, I can do some in-class writing that will both give me a baseline indication of how the students’ own voices sound and, maybe, give them the hands-on experience they need to believe they can actually do the work themselves. English 1015 Academic Integrity Explainer

So that was a dreary part of the past month or so that took up an enormous amount of my time and energy. That’s one reason I didn’t get much good reading done: I was too tired and sad and distracted to concentrate. I did finish a few books, though, and a couple of them were excellent. An unexpected highlight was Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure, which I quoted from in my last post. Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness was not for me: it seemed to be aiming for some of the same effects as Anthony Doerr’s Cloud-Cuckoo Land, but I found Doerr’s novel much more engaging. Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind was gripping and thought-provoking, if unpleasantly unsettling: I didn’t think much about its genre when I picked it up at the store, but it is as much horror as dystopian fiction. I appreciated the slow but steady increase in tension and the imaginative creepiness of details like the flamingos. I was disappointed in the ending, though. Like The Road, it never specifies its calamity, which frustrated me more in this case because it focuses so much more, at least initially, on the question of what happened: in The Road, we are always already in the aftermath, and it hardly matters any more how we got there. The author interview that follows Leave the World Behind clarifies that the novel’s open-endedness is deliberate, but given how strenuously Alam avoids telling us either what happened (the cause) or what happens after (the effects), I found the little proleptic teasers about the characters’ futures annoying.  So, for me, it was good (I did appreciate reading a genuine page-turner, given my own general malaise) but not great.

pineiroEasily the best novel I read in March was Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows. This was recommended to me last year when I was (as I so often am) casting about for new ideas for my two mystery fiction courses. I started it then but had to abandon it, as a novel about suicide and a mother’s grief was not an experience I could bear. I kept it on my mental TBR, though, and I’m glad I tried again, because it really is exceptional: slight but fierce and complex, with its overlapping interests in disability, ageism, misogyny, and autonomy. I think it would be a really interesting book to read in my course on Women & Detective Fiction, even though in many ways it is not really a mystery. It is certainly about a crime – or, crimes, if you think socially and systemically – and there is an investigation, even if there isn’t a detective, or evidence, or any of the other conventional elements.

I also read Jo Baker’s The Midnight News and quite enjoyed it, but this one was for a review, so I will save more detailed comments for that purpose. I will say that I admire Baker’s versatility: like Sarah Moss, she clearly likes to try new things. There’s a snarky comment in Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary about Sarah Waters always writing the same book. I bristled, because Waters is one of my favorite novelists and that seems unfair and reductive! But there is a grain of truth in it: she is drawn to similar problems and scenarios in all of her books, and her recent novels do all have a fairly similar tone. I think that’s fine! She’s really good at what she does. But Longbourn and The Body Lies and A Country Road, A Tree are completely different books, as are Signs for Lost Children, Cold Earth, and Ghost Wall: I don’t think you would necessarily recognize them as being by the same authors. ghost-wall

March was rough for me emotionally, and April has its challenges as well. There are some bright spots to look forward to, though, notably Maddie’s graduation recital. She began her music degree in 2019: it has been a strange and often very difficult four years of university for her, between COVID and online learning and the particularly disruptive effects of lockdowns for the performing arts. She has accomplished so much, in spite of all that and everything else. Her 3rd-year recital was a triumph, and it is an understatement to say that I am looking forward to this year’s longer program.

A Warm-Hearted Reading Update

Rohan Maitzen11 Comments

strout-againAfter I finished Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, I commented on Twitter that I was finding cold, meticulous novels wearing and asked for recommendations of good, recent warm-hearted fiction. Along with the understandable and spot-on nods to writers I already know well (such as Barbara Pym and Anne Tyler), I got a lot of good tips, which I am still working through. Here are the ones I have read so far. I have to say that while they have all been fine, none of them really got much traction with me: I don’t think it is necessarily the case that “warm-hearted” means lightweight, but that’s how these mostly felt. I don’t think I will remember much about them. The exception so far is Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, which I found very moving; that’s why it got its own post!

Elizabeth Strout, Olive, Again. I read Olive Kitteridge years ago – long enough that I didn’t write it up here, that I can find. I remember enjoying it, but it seemed dispensable, so after a while I put it in my “donate” pile. I didn’t like My Name is Lucy Barton much, and that seemed like the end of my relationship with Strout. Still, she’s much beloved, and so I picked up Olive, Again to see if I’d underestimated her. My conclusion is “not really.” I liked it fine, but it felt incidental, meandering. The ‘linked short story’ effect irritates the novel reader in me: it feels lazy, as if the author couldn’t be bothered to do the work of actually integrating the characters and events into one more substantial and meaningful whole. I’m a lover of Victorian multi-plot novels, which I consider, at their best, a high form of art. If the whole is supposed to be more than the sum of its parts, I’d like the author to be the one who does the work of building that up. Don’t just give us the pieces and assume we’ll believe there’s more to it than that.onan

Stewart O’Nan, Emily Alone. I read this right after Olive, Again, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was still reading the same book. There was nothing (to my ear, anyway) to distinguish the voice or tone or prose of one author from the other; Emily’s story could easily have been one of the chapters in Strout’s book (see, I’m reluctant to call it a “novel”!) – except, of course, for being book-length itself. I liked Emily herself just fine, and “older woman living alone” is one of my favorite tropes (see Plant Dreaming Deep, for a cherished example) but the novel recounted day to day events in tedious detail. I like exposition, but I like it to be more than an accumulation of (fictional) facts.

mccrackenElizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book. I liked this one quite a lot except for the uneasiness it created in me about what kind of book it is, exactly. I realize that is one of the main points of the book, to destabilize assumptions about what constitutes a memoir or a novel or autofiction or whatever. I understood this because McCracken makes rather a lot of noise about it: “What’s the difference between a novel and a memoir?” she asks; “I couldn’t tell you. Permission to lie; permission to cast aside worries about plausibility.” “It’s not a made-up place,” she says about a trip she and her mother make to the theater (or do they?),

though this is a novel, and the theater might be fictional, and my insistence fictional, and my mother the only real thing, though this version of her is also fictional.

OK, whatever. I found these intrusions distracting. If I wanted to explore theoretical differences between genres in that kind of explicit way, I’d read critical writing; if you want to play with genre, you can do it without so much handwaving about it. And yet as a book about love and mourning, The Hero of This Book was sometimes quite powerful:

Was this grief? I could feel my mother’s joy on the London Eye, her love of heights and good views. That streak of daredevilry and thrill-seeking. I had once taken her on a helicopter tour of downtown Miami, after she’d seen somebody parasailing and had guessed aloud that she couldn’t do that. My mother laughed as the helicopter wove through skyscrapers; I believed that I would fall to the ground at any moment and thought, I’ve had nightmares like this. That was actual joy; the joy I could apprehend now had not occurred, was counterfeit, made of regret and set in regret. osman

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club. When Levi Stahl recommended this, he prefaced it by asking if I read or liked “cozies.” I don’t, much, but this one sounded really charming – which it is, or at least the cast of characters is. By about half way through, however, I had completely lost interest in the actual murder case. (I also got irritated at the repeated device of revealing some key bit of evidence to the characters but withholding it from us: I get that it’s a provocation for us to figure out what it might be on our own, but IMHO it’s a bit of a cheap trick.) This had some ripple effects on the quality of attention I paid to the rest of the novel: I read just closely enough to find out what happened to the people I liked, but overall I wasn’t very invested, and I don’t think I’ll read on in the series.

January Reading

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

weekendI read 8.5 new books this month and blogged about . . . none of them? Hmmm. I’m honestly not sure if the fault is mine or theirs. Not one of them lit me up, but that didn’t used to keep me from rambling on about a book! So maybe the problem is what I’m bringing to them as a reader these days—but if so, does that mean my reports on them are unreliable? Who knows? As always, all we can really talk about is our experience of a book.

Here, then, in brief: my January reading.

Charlotte Wood, The Weekend. I enjoyed this one quite a bit. It is a story of female friendship—but it is more probing and uncomfortable than that theme might make you expect. I appreciated its focus on older women. They have been through a lot, separately and together, and Wood does a good job exploring the kind of bond the sheer longevity of their relationships creates.

Roy Jacobsen, The Unseen. I was not enthralled by this; I definitely will not be searching out the others in the series. However, the prose has a starkness that suits the bleakness of the landscape and the hardships of the characters’ lives, and sometimes it achieved a resonance that elevated its otherwise rather laborious cadences (perhaps the fault of the translators?) to something almost stirring. kennedy feast

Margaret Kennedy, The Feast. Fun! But not as delightful as I expected. I even started skimming after a while because many of the characters were so annoying that I got impatient for the cliffs to cave in on them. I think I should have been reading it differently to get more out of it—not just more slowly but less for plot and more for ideas about virtue and vice and the meaning of life. One day I’ll read it again and do better.

Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus. The octopus stuff is really cool (for example, did you know that because an octopus’s brains are spread through its arms, a severed octopus arm will just go about its business for a long time as if nothing has happened? even continuing to hunt?!), but after a while I felt as if Montgomery was trying too hard to make more of it than it could bear. Even the title goes a bit far! (I loved My Octopus Teacher, which is a captivating nature documentary and includes thoughtful but not overwrought reflections on how spending time with an octopus can change your perceptions, including of yourself.)

octopusKate Clayborn, Georgie All Along. The long-awaited (well, for at least a year anyway) new romance novel from my favorite contemporary romance author—that is, my favorite author of contemporary romances. I enjoyed it fine but it seemed too much like her other novels and not as good as the earliest ones. They are packed full (almost too full) of details, especially of the kind I learned to call “neepery” (whether it’s metallurgy or home restoration or photography, Clayborn is good at conveying the texture and fascination of people’s interests); they are also quite emotionally intense. This one included some of the same kind of stuff but in a less engrossing way; the characters also seemed too conspicuously constructed, like concepts that didn’t 100% come to life. But I might change my mind on rereading: I had a similar reaction to her previous one, Love At First, but liked it quite a bit more when I went back to it more recently.

god-rabbitSarah Winman, When God Was a Rabbit. I happened across this one at a thrift store and grabbed it because I liked Still Life so much. It is not as good as Still Life but it kept my interest from start to finish, which these days is saying something. The narrator’s voice in particular is effective, and I also appreciated the novel’s journey across key events in recent decades, landing on them as events in specific people’s lives. This includes 9/11; I learned from the author’s note that this was a controversial aspect of the novel, which didn’t really make any sense to me.

Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory. This was a hard one for me in ways that I probably should have expected, or would have, if I’d studied the table of contents more carefully beforehand. I know Elisa (in the internet sense of “know”) from collaborating with her husband John Cotter at Open Letters Monthly, where for a while Elisa wrote a column about perfume. Since then I have read some of her other public writing, but not, that I recall, any of the essays collected here. The hardship was that they are all fairly grim! They deal with hard, scary, or disheartening topics, from natural disasters to the disaster of American politics under Trump. Elisa writes wonderfully, with a poet’s eye for the telling detail at the right moment; as an essayist, she is more associative than argumentative. Sometimes this felt digressive and sometimes as a result I occasionally lost my own focus, but in fact she is always in excellent control; as I kept reading I learned to remind myself to trust her.

rileyGwendoline Riley, My Phantoms. I didn’t enjoy this at all. I could tell it was “well written,” meaning it has crisp, often resonant sentences and is constructed with conspicuous care. The narrator is unpleasant; the relationship she has with her mother is worse than that. I wasn’t sure what the point of the exercise was supposed to be: it takes about 2 pages to get the gist of how uncomfortable it is all going to be and then it’s just discomfort and nastiness, with a bit of pathos thrown in, for another 150 pages. OK, I exaggerate slightly, but I want this post to serve as a cautionary tale for me: beware Twitter enthusiasm! I have learned not to rush off after whatever mid-century middle European novel from NYRB Classics is currently getting all the buzz, because it will probably just sit unread on my shelves along with Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy. For people who like these kinds of things, these kinds of things are great! (And it’s true that sometimes, a bit to my own surprise, I like them too.) But cold, clinical, forensically observant narrators are not my thing. Gorgeous cover on this edition, though!

Which brings me to the .5 in my 8.5 books this month: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead. Its narrator is definitely not cold and clinical, but he is also no David Copperfield, and (so far) the novel has none of the warmth or wit of Dickens’s novel. That’s fine! Kingsolver is perfectly free to write her own book. But it is so disorienting to “know” all the details, to recognize everybody as they arrive in their new outfits, ready to play their accustomed parts in David’s (sorry, Demon’s) oh-so-familiar story—but to hear only bitterness and cynicism. A good page of Demon Copperhead might have a bit of wistfulness, maybe even a trace of pathos, but David’s narrative is full of heart, and (again, so far) Kingsolver’s version has none of it, and no humor either. And it’s loooooooong. I’m not giving up: my book club chose it, and the others who have read it pretty much all report having really enjoyed it. It seems likely that knowing David Copperfield as well as I do has actually been a disadvantage for me.kingsolver

I’ve also been reading for work (The Moonstone, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and selected stories and poems).

All in all, it actually hasn’t been a bad month for reading. Even My Phantoms at least interested me, plus it was too short for me to be really bothered by the things I didn’t like about it. Still, I hope February brings more books that genuinely excite me.