It used to be a ritual for me to post a recap of my summer reading once autumn rolled around again, on the theory that people’s online attention is (rightly!) spottier in the summer and there might be some folks who would like to see what they missed around here. I didn’t do that last year, not because I didn’t read anything last summer but because last year just moving forward from month to month was hard enough, with the backwards drag of grieving, not to look back for other reasons. I’m still mourning—I will always mourn—but as time passes I am more able to be here, now, in the moment, in my moments. I think often these days of Julia Copus’s “The Grievers,” especially these lines:

What we can’t absorb we carry in us,
a lumpish residue. It’s truly a wonder
we manage to move at all; let alone
as freely as this, with the ease at times
of our old and lighter selves . . .

That quiet qualifier “at times” is the key. I am grateful for those times; I have also learned that they take work, and that they can exact a cost.

Anyway, here I am, still, or again, with another new term unfolding in front of me and another summer of reading—some good, some not so good—behind me. I’ll mostly just walk through the highlights here; anyone who wants to do a deep dive can always use the ‘archives’ menu (on the right sidebar) to browse by month. (I don’t really imagine that anyone would want to do that! But you could, or use the “categories” tags, or the index.)

Two of the best books I read this summer were about grieving mothers. I didn’t pick them for that reason, although one of them, The Missing Word, was recommended to me by a thoughtful friend who thought it might resonate with my own loss—which it did. The Missing Word is slight but powerful, a wrenching but delicate attempt to “say out loud, dry-eyed, the things that can’t be said.” The other, Valerie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers, is more capacious and perhaps, as a result, a bit messier, less controlled. Thinking about the two novels together, I would say that this difference in scope and style reflects their aspirations: De Gregorio especially is trying to stay “dry-eyed” while saying unbearable things, while Perrin is making room for new, fresh possibilities.

Another couple of stand-out reads were two novels by Olivia Manning. I have written here and elsewhere about her Balkan and Levant trilogies, and about the excellent biography of her by Deirdre David, but I hadn’t really ventured into her other fiction before. I was not disappointed: both School for Love and The Doves of Venus are excellent, and both have something of the odd, unsettling quality that makes her more famous series so distinctively good.

Like everyone else I know, I was really impressed by Elena Knows; it was a treat to find that Piniero’s Betty Boo is also excellent, and to find Some Luck in stock at Bookmark last week—I am looking forward to reading it soon. And the last really good, or at least really enjoyable, read of this summer was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake.

I read a lot of perfectly fine books this summer, including Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual, Elizabeth Lowry’s The Chosen, Daniel Mason’s The Winter Soldier, and Alice Elliott Dark’s Fellowship Point. I read some that I had high expectations for but that didn’t live up to them: Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, Hernan Diaz’s Trust, Kate Zambreno’s Drifts. I read a couple of books that unfortunately I just didn’t like at all, notably Hannah Kent’s Devotion and Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose. And I read some books for published reviews, including Christine Higdon’s Gin, Turpentine, Pennyroyal, Rue, which I quite liked, Elizabeth Ruth’s Semi-Detached, which I also quite liked, and Daniel Mason’s North Woods, which is very good (my review of this one will be in next week’s TLS).

Overall it was a decent reading summer. I read less than some years, but more than last year, and with more—more what? I want to say something like more capacity, meaning nothing about the quantity of books I read but something about the available space in me, space to receive them. That capacity is still not what it was (I am not what I was). I notice that I am less patient, and so sometimes less persistent. I hope that my grief hasn’t made me an ungenerous reader. I suspect that some of my current reactions are related to grief: I find in particular that I am allergic to magical thinking in books—including Devotion or Semi-Detached (or, in parts, North Woods)—that otherwise deal in wholly human or natural problems. De Gregorio doesn’t resort to wish-fulfillment or fantasy and that is both the pain and the strength of her treatment of love and loss.

I played Poetry Serendipity often this summer, as I passed through the library for one reason or another. I’ll close with some lines from an enigmatic poem by Marianne Moore called “Picking and Choosing” that is about (I think, and among other things) why and how we read what we read.

Literature is a phase of life. If one is afraid of it,
The situation is irremediable; if one approaches it familiarly,
What one says of it is worthless.
The opaque allusion, the simulated flight upward,
accomplishes nothing. . . .
We are not daft about the meaning,
but this familiarity with wrong meanings puzzles one.
Humming-bug, the candles are not wired for electricity.
Small dog, going over the lawn nipping the linen and saying
that you have a badger—remember Xenophon;
only rudimentary behavior is necessary to put us on the scent.
“A right good salvo of barks,” a few strong wrinkles puckering
the skin between the ears, is all we ask.

It has become something of a tradition for me to post a retrospective of my summer reading, partly because I enjoy revisiting the books and partly  on the theory that people spend less time online in the summer and so even those who ordinarily like to know what I’m reading and what I think about it might have missed some posts  and want to catch up as the changing season brings us back to our usual routines.

I honestly don’t know if either of those reasons holds up this year! I didn’t read nearly as much, or with nearly as much pleasure, as I would in a typical summer: it’s not that I didn’t read some good books, but the pleasure always felt precarious, and the many hours I’ve spent struggling to re-train and prepare for online courses meant I spent a lot less time on our back deck basking in warmth and words. I also think a lot of people spent more hours online this summer than they ordinarily would–not just those who, like me, have had to make over their skills for work, but also those whose plans to travel or have visitors were disrupted, and those who were housebound for whatever combination of COVID reasons, from illness to care-taking to personal precautions.

Still, books remained a constant source of comfort and distraction, and it’s nicer thinking about them than doing a lot of the other things I still have to do before classes officially start up again on Tuesday, so here’s a review of my April to August reading.

Though I actually read it in March, Clare Hunter’s Threads of Life deserves to be included here, because it is so good and also because it rescued me from near-despair early in the lockdown, when everything seemed scary and uncertain and, to make matters worse (or because matters really were worse) I was struggling to concentrate on reading anything at all. As I said in my post about it, it is a “marvelous, inspiring, touching, and extremely wide-ranging account of the myriad ways needle crafts of all kinds have mattered and made meaning throughout history.” It was a great reminder of the many forms hardship has taken over the years and of the many creative ways women have responded by making practical or beautiful or expressive objects.

Another welcome reminder that it was still possible for me to lose myself in reading came from Miriam Toews’ Women Talking, which I thought was quite extraordinary: harrowing but also uplifting, smart and high-concept but also heartfelt. I’d like to go back to it, and maybe (circumstances and class assignments permitting) teach it some day; the only reason I wouldn’t do that is my suspicion that a lot of academic readers felt the same way about it that I did and so it might become one of those ubiquitous “I have to read it for all my classes” books (the way The Handmaid’s Tale was back in the 1980s, or Never Let Me Go more recently).

In May, I joined the swarm of other readers excited to finish up Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy with The Mirror and the Light. I didn’t find it as propulsive as Bring Up the Bodies, which to my mind was the best of the three, but a second-best installment in this remarkable series is still better than most other books, and its last 100 pages or so are as good as anything I ever expect to read. For me, The Mirror and the Light especially provoked questions about length–not because I thought it was “too long” (a measure for which there can be no generally applicable standards) but because I was fascinated by what its length ultimately meant about Mantel’s project and the form she gave it.

I very much enjoyed Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting – and I hope it doesn’t sound cynical to say that I also admired the marketing savvy that enabled her to repackage these particular biographies, some of which have been told often, and make something new, engaging, and appealing out of them. I brought my Woolf / Holtby materials home with me the day the term ended so abruptly: in retrospect, that was a pretty optimistic thing to do, but I was still thinking in terms of weeks, not months (or years, sigh), and it seemed reasonable that once the winter term wrapped up, I would turn my attention back to whatever that project was going to become. There’s a possible world in which I am presenting on just that question at the MSA in Brooklyn this October–not in this world, though.

I got caught up immediately in Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, which was a gift! I ended it not entirely sure what all of its parts added up to, which isn’t necessarily a fault of the novel: the habit of looking for that kind of unifying “reading” is just hard to shake for someone with my particular training.

The fun we had reading An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good sent my book club to Helene Tursten’s Detective Inspector Huss as our next read. I didn’t enjoy it all that much but it is definitely an interesting example of a crime novel with a “relatable” female detective as its protagonist. We have since also read Yrsa Sigurdasdottir’s Last Rituals; we haven’t “met” yet to discuss it, so I don’t know how well it went over with the rest of the group, but I found it quite tedious, though again (as with the Tursten) it might be an issue with the translation more than with the novel itself. I liked Susie Steiner’s Remain Silent much better, though I never wrote it up properly here, and will be looking around for the first in that series.

In June and July a lot of what I read was the entirety of P. D. James’s Dalgliesh series (16 novels, if you count, as I did, the two Cordelia Gray books, as they take place in the same fictional universe–a lot of them really quite long!). You will be able to read what came of that endeavor (which to be honest sounded more fun in theory than it turned out to be in practice) in the TLS a bit later this month: the September 25 issue, I’ve been told. I did try to read other things (and managed some miscellaneous light reading, mostly romances)–but A Time of Gifts, which I’d hoped would be the perfect antidote to lockdown, proved once again not to be my thing. I guess I need a story to motivate me to keep going–or a lot more life, which is just not what this beautifully written book communicates to me.

Hamnet and Judith, on the other hand, though in one sense a book all about death, was engrossing and immensely satisfying, as was William Trevor’s Love and Summer. Both are quiet novels with little overt drama; I think what is so pleasing about them both is that they perfectly execute what they set out to do (as far as I understood that, at any rate), whereas Sandra Newman’s The Heavens left me feeling thwarted, as if either the novel or my comprehension of it was a near miss, a lost opportunity. I was also really pleased and impressed with Kathleen Rooney’s Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, which turns a risky premise into a smart, touching, and thought-provoking novel.

One more highlight of my summer reading was Sarah Moss’s new novel Summerwater. Like Ghost Wall, it is a terse novel that turns out to have a lot packed into it: it gets bigger (not longer, of course!) the more attention you pay to it. I was estopped from reviewing it for the TLS because of having reviewed Ghost Wall for them, so I was pleased to get the opportunity to write it up for the Dublin Review of Books.

That’s not such a bad summer, really. There’s no Moby-Dick or To the Lighthouse (though there was Flush, which was a lovely little diversion), but there’s plenty to look back on with appreciation. Also, while it hasn’t been possible to support every cause or business that has been struggling because of the pandemic, I have tried to do my bit for our local bookstores at least! Getting new books delivered by bicycle has brightened many dreary days; I am really grateful to both Bookmark and the King’s Coop Bookstore (and manager Paul specifically!) for providing this heartening service.

My last book of the summer–or my first book of the fall–has been Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. I actually didn’t like it as much as I expected to. I loved aspects of it, but Ántonia herself never really came to life for me: she felt like a device, partly for a story about America and immigration and values, but also for a much less appealing and rather tired story about ambitious men and their stay-at-home muses who get to be inspirations, not protagonists. It’s definitely not Stoner-level annoying in this regard, but the novel in which Ántonia is actually the main character is the one I would rather read–or the one about Lena and Tiny.

And with that, this long, strange, uncertain summer winds up. I am really struggling to picture the fall term that is about to begin. I plan to keep up my “this week in my classes” series. Sometimes I have wondered whether the posts have gotten too repetitive, given the similarity of the routine every year and the reiteration of courses I have now taught many times. That certainly won’t be the case this year: a silver lining, perhaps! I’m wary about taking on any formal writing or reviewing assignments, in case I am overwhelmed with the different demands of online teaching, but I hope and expect to be able to keep reading, and to keep writing the results up here.

I know I’ve said this before, but I think it’s worth repeating that keeping up with other people’s blogs has been a great source of intellectual stimulation and comfort for me over the past few months, so thanks as always to everyone whose bookish thoughts help make the internet a better place. This has mattered so much at a time when our virtual communities are almost all we’ve had to keep us company!

I’ve read quite a lot since term ended in early May, but it didn’t feel as much like summer reading this year because thanks to a long spell of unpleasant heat and humidity coupled with a massive construction project just one street over, I did hardly any of it on our back deck. I read most of the books I was reviewing in my (unair-conditioned) campus office, where the need to vacate before the heat became unbearable in the early afternoon helped keep me focused on my task, and otherwise I just read at home wherever it was quietest. (Today, on the other hand, it was gloriously sunny, with no humidity and no construction, so my Fall 2018 reading has started off very nicely!) Here’s a quick recap of my summer highs and lows.

It turned out to be the summer of Sarah Moss for me: I read four of her books, including Ghost Wall, which I reviewed for the TLS. I enjoyed them all (and I think Ghost Wall is pretty brilliant), but especially The Tidal Zone. That leaves just one novel (Cold Earth) and some non-fiction of hers that I haven’t read yet. I’m not sure I’m enough of a fan to pursue her into more academic territory, but her monograph does sound rather tempting: Spilling the Beans: reading, writing, eating and cooking in British women’s fiction 1770 – 1830. I also enjoyed her contributions to this otherwise fairly unremarkable discussion of literary criticism today on BBC4’s “Open Book.”

Edna O’Brien’s Little Red Chairs was another book I really enjoyed–or, since “enjoyed” seems a bit too chipper for the story the book tells and the feelings it evokes, I’ll say it’s another book I admired and was engrossed by! How have I not read O’Brien before? I would particularly like to read her first novel, The Country Girls. I didn’t love Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, but I read it with great interest; similarly, I didn’t love Irene Némirovsky Suite Française but it has left me with a lot to think about. I really didn’t like Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen or Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me; I admired artistically but personally resisted Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief. Finally, Nell Painter’s Old in Art School was an engaging read that was also timely, given that something else I did this summer was take a drawing class.

I wrote nine pieces for publication over the summer. Most were reviews: for Quill & Quire I reviewed Merilyn Simonds’ Refuge, Alix Hawley’s My Name is a Knife, and Kathy Page’s Dear Evelyn (which I loved); for the TLS I reviewed Ghost Wall (coming soon) and Peter Keating’s Agatha Christie and Shrewd Miss Marple; and for Canadian Notes and Queries I just finished writing up Helen Humphreys’ Machine Without Horses. I also wrote three essays: for the TLS, I wrote about “Reading Trollope in the Age of Trump,” with a focus on Trollope’s great domestic tragedy He Knew He Was Right; for The Reader Magazine, I wrote about Carol Shields’ Unless, which readers of this blog will know is a favorite of mine; and, on a more personal note, I wrote about “Learning to Speak” for Sarah Emsley’s blog series on Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. (The whole series is excellent: I recommend scrolling through to see what else is there.) None of these pieces individually was as exciting as last year’s Dunnett extravaganza, but I enjoyed the range of texts and topics, and I continue to find myself challenged both intellectually and creatively by figuring out what to say (and how to say it) about both books I’m meeting for the first times and old friends I’d like to tell people more about. The tight word limits often felt constraining (for the Trollope and Shields essays especially), but I’m getting more used to the process of generating a lot of material and then, like a sculptor, carving away everything that doesn’t look like the piece it turns out I’m writing. Sometimes (as with the Ghost Wall review) I’m even pretty pleased with the results.

I spent a fair amount of time reflecting on writing priorities, and especially thinking (again!) about whether at some point I should focus my energies on a book project instead of dissipating them (as it sometimes seems) across so many smaller pieces. I have long resisted the idea that “a book” should be a goal in and of itself, as if the form is what matters and not its necessity. There are (IMHO) enough, if not too many, books already (especially scholarly books in “my” field), and it seems foolish to aspire to add to their number unless I have something to say that requires such expansiveness! I’ve also now had multiple reports from people in publishing that there is really no hope of selling (to them, much less to readers) the kind of essay collection I have long had in mind–which doesn’t mean I have given up on it. One thing I don’t like about publishing essays (especially but not only in online venues) is how ephemeral they seem. If only for my own satisfaction, I’d like to fix the best of them in some firmer form–to give them, if I can, a bit more solidity, perhaps by self-publishing them. Is this just vanity? Perhaps! But really, I don’t see how it’s more self-aggrandizing than the kind of pitching and polishing and positioning required for traditional publishing, and it certainly involves many fewer concessions. I’m still thinking about these questions, though, and I am fortunate to have a sabbatical coming up that will give me time to act on whatever decisions I make.

And that’s it for Summer 2018! Classes begin for me on Wednesday, and with them another season of “This Week in My Classes”–the 12th, if I count correctly. (For an index of my years of teaching posts, see here.) My reading continues, of course. I’ve just started Rachel Cusk’s Outline and my book club has chosen George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for our next meeting; both of these look very different from my usual fare, so I’m excited to see how I do with them. And the first book up for me at work this term is David Copperfield: here’s hoping my students find it as delightful as I do.

There was an undeniable nip in the air when I went on my run this morning–the overnight forecast even included the ominous words “risk of frost.” Though we are sure to have some more warm weather as September unfolds, it will be nice fall weather: the season is definitely changing. The other sure sign of that, of course, is that classes start this week. I’ll have more to say about that soon as I begin the 11th season of posts about ‘This Week In My Classes.’ Before summer has completely receded, though, I thought I’d take a look back at its reading highlights.

I found Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone funny, touching, and thought-provoking, particularly its merging of personal and historical traumas:

Through Michael, Haslett characterizes slavery as America’s inherited disease, one with symptoms every bit as complex and destructive in American life as John’s or Michael’s illnesses are for them and their family.

The obvious conclusion to this extended analogy is that the nation cannot heal unless it too can find some way to treat its transgenerational haunting.

Katherena Vermette’s The Break effectively conveys the human drama and social complexity of the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. When (if) I get to teach Mystery and Detective Fiction again, I would like to include it, though one thing we would certainly discuss is whether the novel is rightly categorized as “genre fiction.” (My feeling is that those who resist labeling it that way underestimate the political uses to which the form has been put by writers in a range of subgenres–I’ve often assigned The Terrorists, for instance, which is a great deal more than a “whodunnit,” and the same is true, albeit in different ways, of Devil in a Blue Dress and Indemnity Only.)

Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place is another genre novel that raises a lot of questions, in this case especially about the risks of narrating misogyny. I was a bit frustrated with The Maltese Falcon in my Pulp Fiction class last term and after I read In A Lonely Place I wondered about switching it in, but I think it’s too soon in my development of this class, which is still very new to me, to change the reading list, especially when the thematic arcs I tried to build across the course are served so well by The Maltese Falcon.

It’s a bit misleading to call Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up As A Flower a “highlight” of my reading summer, but it has been growing on me in retrospect: I said in my original post that I had begun it with what were probably the wrong expectations. I’ve looked at a couple of other options for Victorian Sensations (I’m considering replacing Aurora Floyd on the reading list to avoid having two novels by the same author) and so far this is the front runner.

I read and really enjoyed two novels by Maggie O’Farrell: Instructions for a Heat Wave and The Vanishing Act of Esme Leonard. She is a novel who works in a fairly narrow sphere but brings a lot out of her investigation of its darker aspects. Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, in contrast, is more expansive in every way: I described it as “a fairly high concept novel . . . but also a compelling read as a war novel and a spy novel [as well as” a stinging satire, of American hypocrisy and self-delusion in particular but also of pomp and corruption and ideological posturing on all sides.”

The Forsyte Saga remains a work in progress. I was really interested in The Man of Property and I thought Indian Summer of a Forsyte was wonderful. I’ve struggled to find the concentration to press on with In Chancery, but I’ve started. I’m a bit puzzled about what my intended relationship is to Soames at this point: as far as I can tell, we are not supposed to be that bothered that he’s a rapist, which I suppose is not that surprising–but I was surprised at how explicit Galsworthy was about it in the first place, so I expected it to be more of a blight on his role as a protagonist than it seems to be at this point.

Last but not least, I read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s grimly charming Lolly Willowes for my book club; it was our follow-up to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In the Castle, which I also really enjoyed for its weird, off-kilter pleasures. For our next book, we’ve chosen Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives: I had been looking for other witchy books (and got a good list of ideas from friends on Twitter) but none of them really captured the group’s interest, and then we got talking about Lolly’s resistance to the life that was expected of her and that led us to thinking about the pressure on women to conform to certain plots and even personalities, and that led us to what may be the ultimate book about just this topic.

I have read quite a few other books since May, including Tana French’s The Trespasser, Jane Gardam’s The Flight of the Maidens, and the morally chastening The Optician of Lampedusa; if you want more about these you can call up the archives for each month and browse around. It was a somewhat slow summer for blogging for me, though, mostly because I was doing quite a bit of other writing and because it always seems redundant to write blog posts on books I’m also reviewing more formally.

Of the books I read for reviews, the one I enjoyed the most was Gillian Best’s The Last Wave; my write-up will be in the next issue of Canadian Notes and Queries. Adam Sternbergh’s The Blinds was both conceptually interesting and a gripping read. I thought Sarah Moss’s Signs for Lost Children was by far the best–the most interesting, the most thoughtful, and the most artful–of the neo-Victorian novels I reviewed over the summer (the others were Lesley Krueger’s Mad Richard, Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent and Michele Roberts’s The Walworth Beauty).

It was not a bad reading summer overall, then, though there was no book that stood out quite the way Moby-Dick did last year. Some of the most satisfying reading I did, now that I think about it, was actually rereading: all of Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, for instance, and Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic, both long-time favorites that I finally got to write about.

I decided to ease out of the summer with some light reading on this long weekend — first Honest Doubt, and then two Spensers, Early Autumn (one of the best of the series just for defining Spenser’s code, which is roughly “autonomy with honor”) and Hundred-Dollar Baby (notable for being a rare case in which Spenser’s knight-errantry fails rather spectacularly). In between, I did read another two hundred pages or so of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but it’s just too good to power through. I do intend to keep on reading it, so more about it later, if only for an excuse to quote more of West’s remarkable sentences.

Looking back over the summer, it wasn’t a great one for reading, beyond (and even, to some extent, including) the books I read for reviews. Still, there were definitely some highlights. Chief among them would have to be Moby-Dick, and isn’t that an entry that makes up for a lot of other deficiencies! A first reading of a novel so deep and capacious can only be a preliminary one, of course, but now that I’ve reveled in it once I know why I will want to read it again one day. In retrospect, I’m surprised at how low my expectations were. Why didn’t I know how much fun it would be?

The novels of Kent Haruf are on a very different scale and in a very different register — it’s hard to imagine a greater contrast, really, to Melville — but in their own quiet way they gave me a lot of pleasure — readerly pleasure, that is, as they are certainly not novels that shy away from emotional pain. And I would single out David Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl and Emma Claire Sweeney’s Owl Song at Dawn as two other books that I particularly enjoyed this summer: both eloquently and, in their own ways, elegantly conveyed the complexities of love and family, and the need, above all, for acceptance.

I expected To the Lighthouse to be another high point of my summer reading: that it wasn’t is surely my fault, not the novel’s. Another time.

And with that, another summer ends and another fall term begins.