How good to escape summer in the South! How good for the soul to be back in the mountains! How good for the body to be somewhere with paths and trails and sidewalks! About halfway through July I realized I’d been in a reading slump for a long time, most of the year really. I’d been reading, but from compulsion not joy. Books were like ash in my mouth. What I needed was to do the opposite of what I’d been doing—slow down the reading, do some other things, occupy my body more than my mind. And then a chance encounter gave me my reading mojo back.

Hideo Yokoyama, Six Four (2012) Trans. Jonathan Lloyd-Davies (2017)

The second terrific long novel about the failure of Japanese political and social institutions disguised as a procedural I’ve read in the past year. For a while I thought Yokoyama was more despairing, even more cynical than Takamura in Lady Joker about the possibility that institutions like the press, the police, and the political system could be reformed. But by the end of the Six Four I’d changed my mind. In the end, I think Takamura’s is the more coruscating and thorough-going treatment. But Six Four is the more conventionally suspenseful book.

Named after the last year of the Shōwa era (1989), when, in the first days of January, coincidentally the last of Hirohito’s life, a seven-year-old girl is kidnapped and murdered when the ransom drop goes haywire. Fourteen years later the case remains unsolved. Mikami, one of the detectives on the original team and the novel’s protagonist, has become his department’s press officer. As a result of some truly complicated inter-organizational machinations, he reinvestigates the case in secret. These efforts take on extra resonance because his own (much older) daughter has disappeared. Among other things, this is a novel about shame: national, cultural, and personal, the latter exhibited in Mikami’s painful near-inability to open up to his wife, a former cop. (One of the indirect lessons of this book, even more than in Lady Joker is to not be a woman in Japan.) If you like intricate and satisfying plots and/or the minutiae of bureaucratic politics, you’ll love this chunky boi.

I read it under a canopy in a friend’s backyard in Salt Lake City, and that was very nice.

Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965)

When I chose The Millstone from among three or four orange-spined Penguin Drabbles at a used bookstore I wasn’t thinking of the scene in which a toddler eats several pages of her mother’s novelist roommate’s typescript, which Ursula LeGuin quotes to memorable effect in one of the essays I’d read the month before. Nor was I thinking ahead to the decision I’d have to make a week later about what book to schlep with me on the ten-mile-hike to Shadow Lake Lodge for a glorious hiking vacation, though it turned out that this slender book—made possible by some truly excruciatingly tiny type—was perfect.

No, what I was thinking at the time was that I’d been meaning to read Drabble for a while and the Nic Roeg-Don’t Look Now-psychosexual-horror vibe of the cover was calling to my 1970s soul. No sooner had I returned to cell range from the mountains than I learned that Backlisted had just released an episode on this very book. So the whole thing was clearly Bashert. (This was not my favourite episode of the podcast, to be honest, even though my secret celebrity crush Lucy Scholes is a guest, but I did appreciate the panel’s thoughts on how important the NHS is to the novel—not an angle I’d have considered.)

Besides, how could I not have bought a book that starts with a line of positively Brooknerian perfection:

My career has always been marked by a strange mixture of confidence and cowardice: almost, one might say, made by it.

I do love me a nice hedge—that “strange mixture,” that “almost,” the circumlocutionary “one might say.” Funnily enough, the character making this statement is anything but cowardly or unconfident in her professional life, where she moves through an academic career with unflagging industry. Her personal life, though, is another story. There she is hapless and diffident—but also, in the end, in her way, satisfyingly triumphant. As Rosamund Stacey tells us on the final page, she has “lost the taste for half-knowledge.” Gone is the woman who carries on uninspiring and unconsummated relationships with two men at the same time, neither of whom she likes as more than a friend, if that, and who, with seemingly the worst luck in the world, falls pregnant after an absurd one-night stand with a gay man. Gone too is the woman whose hapless attempt at a bathtub abortion is foiled when some friends descend on her flat, drink most of the gin she’d bought for the deed, and then traipse off to a Fellini film. That woman is replaced by one who decides to have the child, who navigates a patronizing and patriarchal medical system, and who falls deeply in love with her baby, all the while balancing mothering and working. She’s no super-woman: she has the luxury of a flat left her by parents who are pursuing mildly Fabian-inspired good works abroad, a lodger (the writer whose pages get eaten and who is a pretty good sport about it: how differently Doris Lessing would have written that scene!) to help make ends meet, and, when the baby gets badly ill, a specialist who takes a special interest in the case thanks to family connections. But Rosamund stands up for herself and finds all the affection she needs from her child; we aren’t meant to think she is deluded or lacking.

A pleasant surprise—more Drabble is in my future.

Guy Gavriel Kay, A Brightness Long Ago (2019)

Guy Gavriel Kay has flitted along the edges of my reading life. Back in the 80s I had a copy of his first fantasy novel but I couldn’t make much headway: it was too sophisticated for the boy who was deeply into Dragonlance and Piers Anthony and David Eddings. (Pretty sure these were all in fact terrible books.) Later as a bookseller I worked with people who counted Kay a friend and raved about each new book. But I was disavowing fantasy then and even though I respected my friends as readers I felt the need to define myself by other kinds of books. I was older then, though; I’m younger than that now. I’ve been coming back to sff lately, convinced it’s the most vital genre of the moment. Plus I remember Levi Stahl repping this book and that’s usually all the recommendation I need.

So when I saw A Brightness Long Ago on the shelf of a Calgary bookstore I knew now was the time. What I didn’t know was how much joy I’d take from it; how much pleasure of the “leave me alone I’m reading I just gotta finish these last 200 pages” variety I’d set myself up for.

If you tuned out when you heard the word “fantasy” maybe I can get you back by admitting that I don’t actually understand why Kay’s books are categorized this way. To me they feel more like historical fiction, only the history is of an invented world, albeit one similar to the early modern period in Europe and the Near East. Specifically, the events of Brightness are modelled on the Italian Wars of the 15the century. (I think I read Kay say somewhere, or maybe someone saying it about him, I can’t remember now, that Dorothy Dunnett is a model. As I’ve yet to read Dunnett I can’t say.) Anyway, Kay has two great strengths: complex world building that reveals itself gradually and organically, and dramatic set-pieces that carry you away. Together they make him compelling conceptually and exciting narratively. Plus, his general mode seems to be rueful—in full awareness of the sadness of mortal life. And boy am I a sucker for rue. From the first scene—an assassination that I can only describe by the cliché “fiendishly clever”—I was enchanted. And feeling all the feels: sorrow, fear, exhilaration, and genuine surprise. (Good ending.)

Turns out this book (and the one that followed it, which of course I immediately read) is a prequel to his previous novel, but that didn’t make any difference.

Guy Gavriel Kay, All the Seas of the World (2022)

Features the same world and some of the same characters as A Brightness Long Ago. Also, pirates!

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Ms. Hempel Chronicles (2008)

Many of Ms. Hempel’s students were performing in the show that evening, but to her own secret disappointment, she would not be appearing.

The opening sentence of Shun-Lien Bynum’s collection of linked stories tugged at me when I picked it off the half-price shelf at the bookstore in Canmore, AB. (Check it out, very cute!). I identify with that feeling of wanting to be seen (even as I also fear it), so that was part of the appeal. But what really drew me in was that second comma. Technically speaking unnecessary, right? To me, the effect is to create a greater sense of privacy (one of course open to readers), as if Ms. Hempel’s desires are kept from everyone but herself. A comma of self-knowledge. And these tales of a young middle-school teacher’s experiences in and around the classroom do contain a matter-of-fact wisdom. In this regard, Shun-Lien Bynum’s stories reminded me a little of Laurie Colwin’s descriptions of young New Yorkers in love, but I’m having a hard time articulating why: I mean more than the shared setting, more the way big events—breaking up with a fiancée, say—happen almost without comment while minor ones prompt lengthy reflection.

I’ll admit I wasn’t always equally engaged by Ms. Hempel’s travails. (The first and last pieces are the strongest.) But I loved the book’s depiction of teaching, of the mixture of pleasure and pain and gentle dismissal that teachers feel toward their students. Shun-Lien Bynum gets it. Ms. Hempel’s students are never cute or worldly wise or bleak ciphers symbolizing anomie. She cares for them in a free-floating, genuine, but distanced way that felt right to me; all the more striking for her, and for readers, when years later a chance encounter gives her a vertiginous glimpse into what that relationship had felt like from the other side.

The book’s all heart, without being cheaply heartfelt. Take this passage, again from the first page, a description of Adelaide Burr, “an avid appreciator of dance,” whose excitement about her upcoming performance in the school talent show burns in her so wildly she has to corner her teacher to tell her about it:

[Adelaide’s] first book report had celebrated in a collage (dismembered limbs; blue glitter) the life and contributions of Martha Graham, and her second, a dramatic monologue, was based on a bestseller written by a ballerina who had suffered through several disastrous affairs and then developed a serious cocaine habit. Adelaide seemed excited by the lurid possibilities. “Just imagine!” she said to Ms. Hempel, and clapped her hands rapturously against her thighs, as though her shorts had caught fire. The bodies of Ms. Hempel’s students often did that: fly off in strange directions, seemingly of their own accord. Now Adelaide told her that she had choreographed a solo piece to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Balancing precariously, she said, on a kitchen footstool, she had peeled the glow-in-the-dark stars off the ceiling above her bed. “I have incorporated them into my dance,” she said mysteriously.

Isn’t that great? That parenthesis! Gotta be a nod to Lolita, right? Except from the point of view of someone who actually cares for children.

I read The Ms. Hempel Chronicles fast, on my mother’s back deck, but I suspect that the book would repay re-reading. I might teach it someday.

A small but not slim reading month if you know what I mean. I was glad to have read all of these books. And I owe Guy Gavriel Kay for making me fall back in love with the whole enterprise. More anon!