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.