Comparisons are foolish, I know, but often these days I recoil uncomfortably from cheerful exchanges among my many bookish ‘tweeps’ about what they’ve been reading because they seem to read so much and so enthusiastically—which is great, of course, but because I’m struggling to finish most of the books I pick up, the contrast can make me feel discouraged instead of interested and inspired. Social media has a way of making you feel inadequate or alienated, doesn’t it? And I say this as someone who has long championed Twitter (and would still do so, if challenged) on the grounds that it is very much what you make it. “My” Twitter is full of avid readers and I love that about it. It’s absolutely not their fault that lately it sometimes seems to hurt as much as it helps. I’m trying to think of it as aspirational: one day, I too will feel cheerfully bookish again!

Anyway, it’s not that I haven’t been reading at all. For one thing, I’m reading for my classes, which most recently has meant Great Expectations, Agatha Christie, and Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Clock. Next week it will be Lady Audley’s Secret in 19th-Century Fiction and Gaudy Night in Women & Detective Fiction: as Joe Gargery would say, what larks!

Earlier this month I read Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Light Years, the first of her much-admired Cazalet Chronicles. I enjoyed it just fine but wasn’t swept up in it—or swept away by it! The aspect of it that surprised me the most was how much it read like a book written in the 1930s (or perhaps the 1950s) rather than in the 1990s: it felt very much of the time it depicts. As a result, in some ways it seemed like a missed opportunity, artistically speaking: it’s a smart, elegant, readable portrayal but it didn’t seem to have any layers of reflection, or to take advantage of being what it actually is, namely historical fiction. Maybe the idea was to give us the feeling of being transported back, rather than to encourage us to look back and consider gaps and differences. I already had a copy of the second book in the series, Marking Time, and I will probably read it eventually, but I’ve picked it up, read a few pages, and put it down again more than once: I just don’t feel compelled to persist. The last time I tried, I found myself thinking that (deliberately or not) it read like the novel I imagine Woolf was trying not to write when she wrote what ended up as The Years. The problem, she noted, was “how to give ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life the form of art.” Not (we might conclude, following her lead) by just recounting in meticulous detail everything that happens to a large number of people over a long period of time.

Also this month I finally got my hands on Sarah Moss’s The Fell. I’m a big admirer of Moss’s fiction (see here, here, and here for more formal reviews plus any posts in this category here) but like other readers I know, I did not get terribly excited about The Fell. It has her usual combination of intelligence, precision, and undercurrents of menace or stress, and it really captured the grim absurdity of early lockdowns, but I keep wishing for her to go back to a more expansive canvas. I also found the somewhat breathless or chaotic stream of consciousness style of The Fell quite tiring to read.

My book club met in the middle of September to talk about Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, but I actually read it in August, so it doesn’t really count as “recent”. I will say that it was not a big hit with the group, although most of us found at least some aspects of it enjoyable, provocative, or entertaining. There seemed to be a general consensus that it too often felt thin or sketchy: that she had not taken the time to make the most of her premise and her scenarios, or perhaps even that she had just cobbled together a lot of different ideas she’d had and tried to make a single novel out of them.

During Hurricane Fiona, I read mostly on my Kobo, which can be illuminated: when it’s really stormy, there’s rarely enough light to see print books very clearly, even with our best battery-powered lanterns. First I ended up rereading Normal People, which I had been thinking about and talking with other people about and so wanted to revisit. It still strikes me as such a melancholy novel; I find it odd when people refer to it as some kind of romance.

Then I read David Nicholls’s Us, which I happened to have recently downloaded, inspired by having enjoyed the TV adaptation starring Tom Hollander (which I thought was excellent). I wouldn’t say it’s a great novel, or even a particularly good one, at least in the prose: it’s a bit awkward and heavy-handed. I really empathized with its protagonist Douglas, though, and I appreciate that Nicholls refused the simplistic happy ending you might expect from a novel about a man hoping to save his marriage while going on a ‘grand tour’ with his wife and son.

I found myself thinking a lot about Douglas’s wife Connie’s explanation for deciding to divorce him: that their “marriage has run its course,” that with the departure of their son for college there isn’t really anything left for them to do as a couple and she just wants something new, different, better for the next and probably last phase of her life. Is that a reasonable or a selfish position? Obviously, a lot depends on specifics (for example, on whether she’s right that, as a couple, they have exhausted their options). A different novel (or novelist, I guess) would have explored that question more fully, perhaps even given us a split perspective so that we heard from Connie as well as from Douglas. There’s something enigmatic about her to the end, as it is: our story is really just about Douglas coming to terms with the inarguable fact that what you want is not always what someone else wants, and it might not be possible, never mind right, to change that. Because there’s never any doubt in the novel that Douglas loves Connie and would stay married to her if he could, there’s real pathos in watching him struggle with her resolution, including with the judgment of him (and his parenting) that is part of it. It was a good hurricane read: just absorbing enough to pass the time without being terribly demanding.

I have a few books around that I hope will help me out of my current slump: Andrew Greig’s Rose Nicolson, which looks great; Nicola Griffith’s Spear, which I’ve been meaning to read for months now; and Ian McEwan’s Lessons, which my book club chose for our next meeting. Kate Atkinson’s Shrines of Gaiety is incoming, as well: I always find Atkinson immensely readable, even when I end up dissatisfied with the result, so the timing of this release seems perfect.

The past few weeks, though still often sad and difficult, have been a bit better for reading. I’m not sure if it’s me or the books—probably a bit of both.

My favorite recent read by far is Sarah Winman’s exquisite novel Still Life. It took a while to draw me in, but it was well worth an initial bit of patience: it unfolds into such a tender story about friendship, art, beauty, values, love, loss, and chosen families. It has darker shadows and fiercer pains than Forster’s A Room With a View, source of its main intertextual and contextual allusions, but it has in common with Forster’s novel a commitment to seeing widely and to seeking sunshine—to clearing the way for it. I loved it. I also loved Panenka, which like Rónán Hession’s first novel Leonard and Hungry Paul is small, quiet, funny, and yet also piercing. And I almost loved Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss, which engrossed and moved me nearly to the end—but I thought the last 10% or so dragged, to the point that I started skimming a bit just to see it through. (I was also frustrated by the decision not to name or specify the narrator’s mental illness. A note at the end says her symptoms are “not consistent with a genuine mental illness,” and that seemed to me to undermine a lot of the novel’s work to bring them to such vivid life. What was the point of labeling it “——”? Is it an act of resistance to the whole idea of labeling and diagnosing mental illness? If so, then why is the narrator so relieved to get a correct diagnosis?)*

I didn’t much like Andrew Sean Greer’s Less. I persisted to the end, but it never engaged me deeply at all. My least favorite quality in a book is archness, and that seemed to me Less‘s primary mood. It will shock some of my Twitter friends when I say that I also didn’t much like Laurie Colwin’s Happy All The Time: it isn’t arch, exactly, but it is crisp and clever and detached to the point that it felt thin, even superficial, and thus unsatisfying. I was interested in the premise of Kate Grenville’s A House Made of Leaves and there are good things about it, but overall the execution felt dry and the messages (about history and gender and colonialism) perfunctory, delivered rather than dramatized.

My lighter reading included Jenny Holiday’s pretty entertaining Duke, Actually and a reread of Alan Bennett’s delightful The Uncommon Reader; I’m currently rereading Cecilia Grant’s Blackshear trilogy, my second favorite historical romance series (my very favorite is Loretta Chase’s Carsington series, especially Lord Perfect and Miss Wonderful).

I have some promising options in my TBR pile to choose from next, including Nicola Griffith’s Spear (a sequel to Hild is apparently on its way, but this looks good too), Andrew Miller’s The Slowworm’s Song (for my book club), Pip Williams’s The Dictionary of Lost Words, and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat. I’ve put some of Ali Smith’s earlier novels on hold at the library and would also like to read her new one, Companion Piece, partly out of personal interest and partly because I’m still thinking about how her Seasonal Quartet might fit into the book I’m trying to work on. It’s a pretty tough time—personally, but also generally—to find the motivation to write something that seems unlikely to become anything, so I figure I should follow this flicker of interest in Smith as far as it will go.

As you can tell, I’m still not up to writing the kind of longer, more detailed and thoughtful book posts I used to enjoy crafting. But I am reading more again, and reading better. To quote Taylor Swift, this is me trying.

*After posting this, I looked up some reviews and interviews about Sorrow and Bliss and the idea seems to have been to avoid the novel being tagged as “the schizophrenia book” or “the borderline personality book” etc., and thus getting reduced to “a novel about X” in every discussion. I suppose that’s fair enough, though it still feels like a dodge.

The last three months haven’t been very good reading months for me: I have picked up and then put back down a lot more books than I have finished. This is true of new (to me) books, at any rate: since January I have actually reread quite a few books that were easy and comforting, including the first four Anne books (thanks to a dear friend who sent me a lovely box set), several favorite romances and mysteries, and The Beethoven Medal (part of one of my all-time favorite ‘YA’ series). I have also, of course, been reading books on grief and loss, and odds and ends of poetry.

But I have read some new books, and I thought I would remark them here, if only sketchily, so that I don’t forget them, and so that this blog doesn’t altogether lose its bookish aspect.

In January, I read Lauren Groff’s Matrix. I expected to like it more than I did. This is not to say I didn’t like it; the premise was fascinating, and I remember being impressed at how vividly Groff built her world, and how strong, strange, and specific she made Marie as a character. Female agency and empowerment, creativity, desire, spirituality: the book explores them all, with a compelling combination of grittiness and lyricism. For some reason, though, I was disappointed when I learned that this particular work of historical fiction is much more fictional than historical—that almost nothing is actually known about Marie, that Groff’s character and story is all invention. This retroactively took some of the life out of the book for me, which is hardly fair given that I read and love a lot of historical fiction that is mostly made up.

In February, I read through Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet. The sabbatical project I am picking away at has to do with the relationship between fictional form and social or political engagement (or, to put it another way, with fictional form as itself a kind of social or political engagement). With this in mind I was poking around in information about the Orwell Prize and this led me to some articles and interviews about Smith’s win, which in turn made me curious about whether her series might make a good contemporary example for me. I reread Autumn, and then picked up the other three and read them all through. By the end of Spring I was a bit less sure about using this series for my purposes, but some of my hesitation came from feeling unqualified to work on Smith: both her style and her influences, including the explicit invocation of Shakespeare plays, are a bit far afield for me. That doesn’t rule the books out, of course; it would just mean I would have to work hard to figure out how to talk about them, a prospect which is actually kind of appealing, or it would be if my mind didn’t feel so scattered all the time right now.

In March I read Denise Mina’s Rizzio, another historical novel I ended up being a bit disappointed in. There was something awkward (to my reading ear, anyway) about the combination of meticulous historical detail and a too-contemporary idiom, especially in the dialogue. Mina is good at foreboding and action, as you’d expect from a crime novelist. I reread Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, which I loved all over again, though it is even more melancholy than I’d remembered. Then I read Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, which went really well at first and then started (I thought) to lose its focus and ended up feeling scattered, full of good bits but not a satisfying whole. I read two recently reissued novels by Rosalind Brackenbury, A Day to Remember to Forget and A Virtual Image, for an upcoming review (I finished a third, Into Egypt, yesterday). My last March book was Katherine Ashenburg’s Her Turn, which I enjoyed a lot. It’s less ambitious than some of my other recent reading, but it seemed to me to do well what it set out to do, including explore the possibilities and implications of both revenge and forgiveness in the context of our most intimate relationships.

I have a lot of unread books to hand that look tempting, including Laurie Colwin’s Happy All the Time, Sarah Winman’s Still Life, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and the first of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles. I have more of the Anne books to dip back into, too, and another kind friend set me up with Emily of New Moon and its sequels, more childhood favorites that I haven’t read in decades. I have picked up and put down some of these a few times already but I’m sure their time will come. It’s not them—it’s me. It is rare for me that reading is this difficult: usually books have been a refuge for me in troubled times, but this time is not like the others. We’ll see how April goes.

(Brief update: I finished Small Things Like These this morning—there’s not much of it!—and it was indeed very good, as everyone has said, although I also felt that underneath the beautiful writing and careful minimalism—did I mention there’s not much of it?—it might actually be a bit heavy-handed.)

It has been quiet at Novel Readings this week but that’s not because I haven’t been reading! It’s more that there hasn’t seemed to be much to say about the reading I’ve been doing. My recent novel reading has mostly been rereading: Rosy Thornton’s Hearts and Minds (nice, light, familiar, but also, as I remarked in that earlier post, a bit on the melancholy side for ‘comfort reading’); Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field (an old favorite that, oddly, I have never written about at any greater length than this brief note at John Williams’ old site); and, following on the success of rereading Affinity, Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (still a good read, still to me a bit dissatisfying with its irresolute ending – just how unreliable is Dr. Faraday? just how literally should we take his final revelation?).

Those are the novels I’ve reread for “fun” (though as I’ve said before, it is never 100% clear to me when or why my reading shades into “research”). I’ve also just finished rereading The Years, and I am a few chapters along in yet another time through South Riding, both of these with an eye to whatever it is that I’m one day going to write about them and the ideas and material I was deep into during my last sabbatical. I had some real momentum for this work going into Fall 2019 and in fact I sent off a proposal related to it early in 2020—but then came COVID and since then I haven’t returned to it in any systematic way. Last summer it was as much as I could do to finish a couple of smaller, more narrowly defined pieces of writing in between the work I was putting in on preparing for my first year of online teaching; while I was actually doing that teaching, I had energy to spare for only a couple of other similarly finite writing projects. (The main one, a feature on Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, will be out soon in the TLS, I hope!) The work of the term is mostly wrapped up now, though, and even if Fall 2021 is partly (or even completely) online again, it won’t require nearly the same amount of effort to prepare for it, so I am determined to use this summer to reinvigorate this research and figure out what to do with it. This means not just rereading the relevant novels but also revisiting and adding to my folder of related scholarship.

The other reading I’ve been doing pretty steadily is also for research purposes, but with an eye to my teaching rather than my writing: I’m always gathering up references to new or (to me) unfamiliar scholarship in, around, and about “my” field, and at intervals I resolve to dig into it and see what else I could or should be talking about in the classroom, or just thinking about. Since the end of term I’ve been trying to go through 2-3 articles a day from that folder. This exercise tends to be equal parts exhilarating and exhausting: I enjoy feeling as if I’m learning new things or seeing familiar things from fresh angles, but I have long had a vexed relationship with academic criticism. About a decade ago I resolved to stop worrying so much about it and just get on with my own work; sometimes this reading (which I do consider one of my professional responsibilities) reminds me why I started looking around—and advocating for—other (complementary) possibilities.

I’m not sure what I’m going to read next “just” for myself. I bought Lonesome Dove as a summer treat, but I’m saving it for real summer weather: it looks perfect for reading on the deck. My book club’s next choice is Nancy Mitford’s The Blessing (we wanted something light for summer, and this was one of hers that none of us had already read)—but I don’t have it in hand yet. Of course, like everyone likely to read this post I have a number of unread books on my shelf (not as many as some of you have, though, I’m pretty sure!) but none of them look that tempting  right now, which is probably why I haven’t read them already … Maybe I’ll reread something else I know I’ll like, if only to keep the temptation to order yet more new books at bay!

Although until a couple of days ago I was awash in end-of-term work, especially evaluating final essays and exams, I have been managing to fit in some “leisure” reading (although, given my line of work, what reading is ever purely personal is never clear). Partly just to break the inertia of not blogging, I thought I’d write the books up briefly; hopefully that will clear my mind enough that some more thoughtful posts will follow over the next few days, including some kind of wrap-up post about my first full year of teaching online.

First up: Mick Herron’s Down Cemetery Road. I have really enjoyed the three books I’ve read so far in Herron’s Slough House series and usually crime fiction is more my thing than spy novels, so I had high hopes for this one. It didn’t really live up to them, but I think that’s more because of a mismatch between my expectations and Herron’s book, rather than any faults with Down Cemetery Road on its own terms: it is more a thriller than a whodunnit, and while it has some good characters, it is more about plot and suspense than about developing them. It’s pretty dour, even dark, and also pretty political, with its crimes reaching back to things like experimentation with chemical weapons and war crimes. If that’s your thing, you’ll probably like it! It’s well written and pretty fast paced. I won’t be seeking out more in this series, though; I’m much more interested in reading more of the Slough House ones.

Next up: The Mayor of Casterbridge. One of my vague plans for ages has been to revisit some Hardy in case there’s something I’d rather assign in the ‘Dickens to Hardy’ course than Tess or Jude, so the last time I ventured out to campus I brought back two likely suspects to read over the summer, The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge. Picking up Mayor a bit randomly the other day, I found that for whatever reason, I could stick with it better than with the contemporary novels I’d been sampling, so I stuck with it. I think it had been 15 years or more since I last read it: presumably I didn’t love it then or it would promptly have taken its place on my syllabus, and I didn’t end up caring that much for it this time, though I can see that it probably teaches well. As an aside, I mentioned on Twitter that it wasn’t for me and (inevitably, I have learned) people popped up in the replies to tell me that it’s a great novel, or Hardy is a great novelist. Honestly, that’s not a particularly relevant response: even setting aside the vagaries of terms like “great,” tastes vary. By all means tell me that you like it, and better yet tell me what you like about it, but I don’t enjoy replies that sound as if they are correcting my “mistake.”  (I’m sure some people do not mean to chastise you when they tell you how good a book is that you’ve admitted to not liking, but especially when it’s a “classic,” I do find that it often sounds like they are saying that you should know [that is, read] better. Tone is notoriously difficult to convey online!) I really hope I don’t do that when people say (as they pretty often do) that they don’t like Middlemarch.

I also picked up Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises pretty randomly: it has been ripening unread on the shelf since I picked it up used at the symphony book sale, which has not been held now since 2019. (How I have missed it!) Isn’t it odd how the right moment for a book just arrives, sometimes? I think I hadn’t read it before because it has a dreary cover and sounded dour–and if that makes you wonder, then, why I even bought it, well, it was only $2, and Drabble is a novelist I often like, so it seemed worth the very small risk. That said, it is a bit dour, but it’s also sometimes mordantly funny and also kind of encouraging, for a novel that is mostly about death–because what it is really about is what it means or looks like to live a good life. A number of its characters are near the end of their lives; it is not written in the spirit of raging against the dying of the light so much as of seizing what small comforts you can, an idea encapsulated really nicely in Robert Nye’s poem “Going On,” which is quoted in the novel in full. Here are the last line, though of course they mean the most in context:

Now when I think I can’t go on

What I remember is that man

With some small comforts in his hands

Passing along a crowded street

Towards a room all of his own.

Drabble’s eye is really sharp and she does not soften her stories of middle or old age at all. What I appreciate is that the resulting perspective, while resolutely unsentimental, is also not cruel or harsh: it’s just perceptive and kind of curious, as if she’s puzzling out what odd creatures people are and examining the various ways they get as best they can from one day to the next.

Finally, my ‘light’ reading: I had pre-ordered Sally Thorne’s latest romance, Second First Impressions, and was happy when it showed up on my Kobo just when everything else felt like a bit too much. I thought it was just OK. I really enjoyed her first novel, The Hating Game, though I know it was a bit polarizing among other readers. To me it felt fresh and believable, and it’s also very funny; I’ve reread it a few times when I needed a diversion. I can’t imagine rereading this one: its people just didn’t stand out and it all felt a bit too manufactured. I think it might have been better if she’d alternated points of view: the ‘hero’ never quite came into focus for me. It wasn’t bad, though, and it had a lot of cute elements.

What’s next? Right now I’m reading Jo Nesbo’s Macbeth, which is going pretty well so far. It’s a bit hard to roll with some of his devices for Shakespeare’s characters and plots; I’ve just reached the murder of Duncan and that, in particular, seemed insufficiently motivated for these updated characters, who don’t exactly live in a world where “killing the king” is a thing people do to get ahead. The exercise itself is fun, though; I’ve read a couple others in this venture (Vinegar Girl, for one, and also Hag-Seed) and part of the pleasure is just seeing what creative approach the contemporary author comes up with. As far as other reading plans go, I started The Garden of the Finzi-Continis but wasn’t getting along well with it, so I’m saving it for a day when I can read it on the deck, basking in the sunshine and tuning out the fretful world better than I can at the moment. I’ve got Lonesome Dove on order, and I’m looking forward to that, as it sounds as if it’s an adventure in great old-fashioned story-telling. Plus in honor of Independent Bookstore day, I’ve ordered Anne Enright’s Actress and Jo Baker’s A Country Road, A Tree, both recommended by other trusted readers and books that also look smart without being too demanding.

Pretty soon, too, the last of the administrative work for the term will be done and then I will finally–for the first time since last March, really–be able to turn my attention away from online teaching and sort out some priorities and plans for longer-term reading and writing projects, probably including a return to the work I’d been doing on and around The Years. What a nice thought! It’s almost (but not quite) enough to cheer me up in the face of today’s dismal and rather frightening COVID numbers.