Pleased to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, her third, is bymy friendAnja Willner. Anja lives and works in Berlin.
Lizzie Borden (no, not that one), Agnes Martin (1970s)
I’ve been logging my reading for seven years now. (A fairy-tale number, seven. I can’t name any other thing I’ve been doing for that long.)
2024 was different because burnout and depression ate up most of my year. [Ed. – So sorry to hear it, Anja. Lots of things to be depressed about and burned out by.] But thank god there’s always a but: And that’s the books that made it through the mind fog (doesn’t that make a great blurb) and stood out for me:
Christoph Ransmayr: The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, 1984)
A great book about the price of discovery and adventure. The title is accurate, and if after reading it you still feel like starting your day with an icy shower or in a barrel filled with ice, I cannot help you. [Ed. – Ha! No fear there on my part!]
So you have this story about the Austro-Hungarian North Pole expedition going terribly wrong (skip this book if you feel strongly about dogs…) and getting almost no viable results, strung together with the story of a young Italian who goes missing while researching the same expedition more than a hundred years later. Some nice playing around with what is fact and what is fiction included.
(If you read this in winter, and your winters are still cold, make sure your heating works so you don’t get too authentic a reading experience.)
“Quiet” heroes
Something that almost always gets me is what you might call a “third row” hero: The protagonist is, at least on the surface, some ordinary person leading an uneventful life.
Of course, this only works if two requirements are met: First, the protagonist not really being dull (or so dull it’s already entertaining), and second, the writer is skillful enough to carry off this kind of story.
Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These was such a read for me. A quiet hero, a quiet life, but so much going on under the surface it’s almost impossible to lay the book aside. [Ed. – You hear people say „I read this book in one sitting a lot, and I feel like that must mostly be exaggeration, but I actually did that with this one!]
I’m also a sucker for narrators looking back on things not said or done in the right time. For me, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country is a gem full of wistfulness and melancholy (without self-pity), and musings about craftsmanship and memory, art and history. (It’s not so widely read here in Germany as it probably is in English-speaking countries.) [Ed. – Just going to leave this here…]
But hey, I don’t want this to sound dull (depression and books with hardly any plot, duh!) or as if I don’t like action-packed novels.
There was also my first Henry James! I had planned that ages ago, but I also wanted to read 300 hundred other things, and then… umm… life. [Ed. – We all know how that goes!]
Anyway, Portrait of a Lady. Wow. So many twisted marriage offers turned down in queer ways. So many plot turns, so many multi-layered characters (and the super creepy girl)! [Ed. – An action-packed novel indeed! So good, so pulpy, in its own way.]
I can’t help thinking James would have been great at scripting reality shows, and he’d also have to be in charge of the casting. Just imagine, a reality dating show written and produced by Henry James! I’d be so addicted I’d hardly get anything else done.
But back to supposedly “dull” books and on to one of my private reading obsessions: Anita Brookner novels. Despite crying for two days after reading my first Brookner in 2022, I’ve been sticking with her strange books.
Strange because often, they read like an abstract summarizing a novel or like a construction plan rather than like a novel in the flesh. Not to speak of her heroines (and occasionally heroes) whose rigidly organized lonely lives are so similar to one another I’m not always sure what happened in which book (not that it would matter very much, it’s not Henry James). Yet somehow, it works out great – at least for me. [Ed. – Amen!]
In 2024, I added three more Brookner novels to my reading log: Lewis Percy, Bay of Angels, and A Friend from England. Of those three, I liked Bay of Angels best (presumably the Brookner with the most sun, but that’s just the weather). Of course not as much as Look at Me, my all-time favourite of hers. [Ed. — Look at Me is hard to top!]
Gwen John, Self Portrait with Letter (1907)
And finally, out of the brain fog emerges Nicole Seifert’s book about the women writers of “Gruppe 47” (group 47), an influential post-war German literary coterie. I already was familiar with some of the female members of “Gruppe 47”, but so many of them I was taught not to take as seriously as the alpha males who were the stars of the group, like Günter Grass.
In my reading log, I wrote down a single word about Seifert’s Einige Herren sagten etwas dazu (“Some gentlemen said something about it”): Brilliant. And I’ll stick with that. And boy, this book has led to some serious running after backlisted books! Meaning that I can never* buy a book again because I’ve still got two packages of literature waiting to be rediscovered standing around in my apartment. [Ed. — Tell us what they are in the comments, Anja!!!!!]
*never = not before the end of February 2025 or something like that [Ed. – That is modest indeed. I mean, it’s almost the end of February now! You can probably start reordering… Thanks for this lovely piece, Anja!]
Pleased to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his third, is bymy longtime friendKeith Bresnahan. He is a self-described harrumphing scrivener who lives and works in Toronto.
Roger Deakins, The Rail to Grants, New Mexico (2014)
2024 was a difficult year, marked by personal loss. In July, an old friend from graduate school, a brilliant and feisty scholar of the Horn of Africa, succumbed to the cancer that she had been living with on and off for the past decade. And then in October, another death. My oldest and closest friend, with whom I’d been friends since kindergarten, died of an aggressive cancer he’d been diagnosed with only 11 months earlier. I’d managed to get down to Atlanta, where he’d recently taken on a new academic position, a few times to see him—the last just weeks before his passing—but it still felt inadequate, and very sad.
Throughout all this, I was working on writing my own book, on architectural destruction and emotion in late-nineteenth century France. Despite spending the last half of the year on sabbatical from teaching, I didn’t manage to finish it, which was also difficult. But: I’m still here, and the work continues amid the usual teaching and service. I’m casting an envious eye on those colleagues leaving academia for greener or at least other pastures. But for now, this is where I’m at.
Apart from the reading I did for my own book project, which was substantial, my extracurricular reading this year was not insignificant: 65 books, if my list is correct.
I read a lot of mysteries, by French, Irish, English, Japanese authors. I read a lot of Georges Simenon, though not the Inspector Maigret series. (I read the last of these—75 novels and three short-story collections—a few years back. Would that there were more.) Unusually for me, I read quite a few Canadian authors, and a couple American ones, and one Sicilian. A bunch of French graphic novels/comics. And I finished my reading, begun many years ago, of Zola’s 20-voume Rougon-Macquart saga.
Here are the ones that stayed with me:
In the first days of 2024 (feels like a lifetime ago), I read Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, which was as great as everyone says. An Englishman, having attempted to assassinate an unnamed European dictator (Hitler, quite obviously) is now being pursued by agents across the continent. It’s a white-knuckle ride that in its second act switches pace to a two-person détente, in which our hero slowly plays out becoming-animal (the ‘rogue male’) in a kind of homemade burrow. Super-weird, I loved it. My only complaint is with the book’s end, which reveals a deeply personal rationale for the assassination attempt, practically undoing the whole perversely-unmotivated-action-begets-tragic-outcomes schema of all that had come before. Still, highly recommended.
Seicho Matsumoto, Point Zero. I had read his mystery A Quiet Place a couple years back and loved it. [Ed. – Agreed, so good.] Point Zero, like that one, is translated by Louise Heal Kawai for Bitter Lemon Press. As I progressed in the book, I started wondering: had I read this before? It all had a vaguely familiar ring. It turns out I had not; but I had watched Yoshitarō Nomura’s excellent 1961 film adaptation, Zero Focus. It’s an excellent, propulsive tale of a woman whose new husband has gone missing, and her search to find the truth. I figured out (or remembered?) who ‘did it’ about 2/3 of the way through, but it hardly mattered. Great, though A Quiet Place still has the edge for me. More Matsumoto in English, please!! [Ed. – I gather there’s a ton of him. Sort of like Simenon.]
Other Japanese books I read this year: Seishi Yokomizo, The Devil’s Flute Murders and The Little Sparrow Murders (fine, if workmanlike, mysteries); Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi (a striking tale of manic obsession and cuckoldry, but the main characters aggravated me to no end).
I also read Yoel Hoffmann’s edited anthology Japanese Death Poems, which I received as a tongue-in-cheek birthday gift (although they knew I’d also love it). It’s what it sounds like: a collection of short poems, mostly haiku, written over centuries by monks and poets and ordinary folks on the verge of death, or in anticipation of dying. Fascinating stuff. I read it in the fall, in the midst of grief. Good to meditate on, and dip in and out of.
Also in the mystery vein, I continued to work my way through Magdalen Nabb’s Marshal Guarnaccia books, set in Florence. I like every one of these I’ve read, and this year I went back to the beginning, to read (new to me) the first in the series, Death of an Englishman. Excellent and atmospheric, and I loved that Guarnaccia has the flu and only shows up at the very end for this first book in his own saga. [Ed. – Intriguing!]
My last read of the year was also a mystery (they really do seem to fit the winter holidays in a way I can’t explain): John Banville’s The Lock-Up. This is a late book in his Quirke series (originally published under the pseudonym ‘Benjamin Black’), but the first I’ve read. For whatever reason, I’ve never got on with Banville’s literary fiction (I know, shame on me). [Ed. – I dunno, I’m not sure he’s all that, actually.] But this hit the spot. Quirke, a weary alcoholic pathologist, investigates the murder of a young Jewish woman in 1950s Dublin. All sorts of side-narratives here: former Nazis escaping justice with the help of the Church, arms dealings in Israel, romantic entanglements, struggles with work colleagues. Yes, aspects of it are clichéd and feel dated, despite being published in 2023. What can I say? I liked it enough to immediately reserve four other books in the series at my local library branch, so watch this space for more in my 2025 round-up.
George Simenon: since finishing the Maigrets, I’ve been slowly working through some of his other output: these 300-odd standalone books are often gathered under the rubric of ‘romans durs’ (‘hard novels’). They’re hard looks at human nature, alright, though not always violent or murderous. I read 19 of these this year, including a bunch of the ones he wrote while living in the USA in the 1950s, and set there (for whatever reason these have never struck me with the same truth as his French-set novels). Some leitmotifs: voyeurism, small-town prejudice, frustrated men, philandering men, sensual women, penny-pinching women, family squabbles, and men who suddenly realize that their wives resemble their mothers. Nothing if not Freudian, this guy.
My favourites: The Krull House; The Venice Train; Account Unsettled; Striptease; The Little Saint; The Man with the Little Dog; The Little Man from Arcangel. For me, this last one was the best: A Russian-Jewish bookseller and philatelist, assimilated to France since arriving there as a young boy and living in a small town’s market district, marries a promiscuous younger woman from the town. She leaves one evening and does not return, and suspicion slowly falls on him. It’s a masterful study in the vicious closedness and rumor-mill of a community against a person they had superficially but never deeply accepted, driving to an inevitably sad conclusion. I’d put this up against any literary study of othering and alienation, any day of the week. [Ed. – 100: this one will be on my year in review list, too.]
I also read Pedigree, Simenon’s memoir of his life from birth to age 15 in Belgium (Liège, to be precise), focused mostly on his mother and her family. The basic elements of his other books seem to pretty much have their origins here, except the murders. A note about his mother, whom he felt never sufficiently loved him: from the 1930s to the early 1970s Simenon wrote fiction with compulsive mania, averaging 10-15 books a year. Then his mother died, and he never wrote another novel. Did I already mention Freud?
My Can-Lit year:
I like Canadian literature as much as the next guy, provided the next guy likes it but doesn’t make a habit of it. [Ed. – Handshake emoji.] But, I was a visiting fellow at Massey College at the University of Toronto this past year, where the spirit of Robertson Davies flows through the corridors, and where I had some interesting discussions of Canadian literature with my fellow fellows — including David Chariandy, whose very fine reflection on race and parenthood in Canada, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, I also read this year. All of which prompted me to pick up some books:
Helen Humphreys, Coventry: I really enjoyed this short novel set during the burning of Coventry Cathedral in November 1940, with intersecting stories of two women. Canadian author, if not Canadian content. Also a bit of a cheat, since I read it for another academic project on ruins. But everything counts!
Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy. One of the landmarks of Can-Lit. I’d read Fifth Business (the first novel in the series) decades ago, but never the other two, The Manticore and World of Wonders. I read them all in quick succession in the depths of a Toronto winter. Fifth Business, set in small-town Ontario and then Toronto (with a side-swerve to WWI Europe) is seriously great. I would read it again right now. The Manticore: was I surprised that the next book in the series sees our hero undertaking Jungian analysis in Switzerland? Yes. Did I like it? Also yes, but decidedly less than the first book. The third, World of Wonders, picks up threads from the other two, and set in the world of circuses and magic. There is thus a lot here about stagecraft, circus life, and stage magicians, all of which are things that repel me, frankly. [Ed. – We are the same person, Keith.] So, not my bag. But still, a satisfying enough conclusion.
Marian Engel, The Tattooed Woman. Well, we know how we feel about a certain book by Engel, don’t we? [Ed. – We feel grrrrreat about it.] Bear has been featured here on occasion, including the last time I did one of these year-in-reviews. Here we have her last published work (from 1985), a collection of short stories featuring women at middle age, dealing with children and partners and aging. A mixed bag, with some standouts. Not a patch on Bear, but worth a look. [Ed. – Totally agree with this assessment.]
Helen Weinzweig, Basic Black with Pearls. Thanks to the folks at NYRB Classics for bringing this 1980 book back into print. [Ed. – Also available from the good folks at Anansi Press.] An unexpected treat. A woman, estranged from her husband and family, wanders through Toronto, maybe looking for her mysterious lover, who may be a spy (and who also may not exist) and then maybe goes home where another woman maybe now lives in her place. A psychological novel in the best sense. As a local, I loved the street-level view of my city. However, I feel compelled to add an editorial note: you can’t get to Dundas from Queen going south on McCaul, lady.
Following this, I read an earlier Weinzweig, her first: Passing Ceremony. An episodic, fragmentary exercise in which varied voices unfold in non-linear fashion a wedding and its reception. Everyone seems to have a past and beef with the bride, while the gay groom in it for the social beard pines for a lost love. Fine, but I liked it less.
Brian Moore, Catholics. A fine short novel of faith and orders and the world, set in a remote Irish abbey in the wake of Vatican II. The Abbot, no zealot, has in fact has lost his faith, serving as mere manager of a group of working monks. The interactions between him and the young American priest sent from Rome to compel him to conform to the changed rituals are excellent. It compelled me, let me tell you. And it didn’t stay a minute past its welcome. It was one of the last books I discussed with my very Catholic friend—himself a great reader—in his dying months. Again, there’s no mention of Canada in the book, though this was (Irish) Moore’s adopted country, so I’ll count it here.
Zola:
As I’ve mentioned, this was the year I finished in Zola’s monumental Rougon-Macquart series, following two branches of this family through the whole of Second Empire France (1852-1870; the novels themselves were written 1871–1893). The books themselves vary, but I would recommend these to anyone. One of the great reading experiences of my life. Look forward to revisiting it in, oh, 30 years or so. You in, Dorian? [Ed. – Your faith in my longevity is touching, Keith. I still need to finish my first go-round. But, yes, if I’m still here and able in my 80s, you got it.]
Here are the ones I read this year, in the order in which I read them.
Money. Took me a while to finish this: kept putting it down and then coming back to it. The rise and fall of a speculative bank in 1860s Paris and those who are brought up and laid low by it. Beneath it all, Zola’s usual interest in ambition, passion, crisis, and heredity.
Earth. More disagreeable people. Really disagreeable. Maybe the worst people in the whole series. Zola’s great novel of peasant life. The earth is the great character here (the title gives it away), but it’s often obscured by the endless wretched goings-on of these stingy and promiscuous bastards. Wears its King Lear heavily on its sleeve. There’s no redemption here, and I was glad to be done with its characters, but it’s undeniably impressive.
The Dream. An abrupt shift from Earth. [Ed. – Yeah, dreams and earth do not seem to go together, lately.] A childless couple engaged in the family business of embroidery in a northern cathedral town take in an abandoned young girl, eventually adopting her; she is prone to religious passions and flights of fantasy, which eventually coalesce in her idealized love for the rich son of a local lord (and bishop!). The religious background and hagiographic details, as well as the highly detailed particulars of embroidery (hey, you were the one who picked up a naturalist novel) made for an interesting contrast with all the recent scheming bastards. (R-M connection: Angélique, the girl, is the illegitimate daughter of Sidonie Rougon of La Curée, in a plot point not developed except to assert the link to the rest of the series). Brandon Taylor, in his much-discussed recent take on Les Rougon-Macquart, wrote that this was his least favourite, the one on which he got stuck. Not me.
That would be:
The Bright Side of Life. This took me forever, despite being relatively short. My least favorite R-M novel. Technically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with it! All the components of the series are there: the family drama, the scheming and obsession with money, the kind-hearted soul exploited by unscrupulous others, the hint of martyrdom, and the scientific explorations of the age. Lazare’s constant flitting from one new artistic or scientific enterprise to another made me think of Bouvard et Pécuchet. Pauline’s passivity drove me crazy. But overall, this tale of family and striving and love on the Normandy coast left me without a sense of life, bright or dark, that vitality that’s usually there in Zola even in the descriptions of weather or mechanical objects. (R-M connection: Pauline is the orphaned daughter of Lisa Quenu, née Macquart, in Belly of Paris—ironically maybe my favourite of all these books).
Germinal. The last of my years-long reading of the Rougon-Macquart. Did I save the best for last? Almost. I still prefer the Parisian masterpieces Belly of Paris and L’Assommoir, and even Au Bonheur des Dames, but for epic tragic scope you can’t match this tale of cruel life in a northern French mining town. Zola depicts the crushing poverty and squalid forms of barely-human life (there’s a lot of comparing people to animals here), of an uprising and strike and the inevitable(?) ‘retour à la normale’—albeit one that ends with a germ of revolutionary hope, rising from the soil, of a future world in which the workers have their day. Still waiting on that one. Anyway, it speeds the reader along with propulsive force, in which sense it reminded me more of La Bête humaine than its more obvious counterpart, Earth. Zola is at his best here. Déprimant, bien sûr; mais quelle grandeur!
I also read Zola’s standalone Therese Raquin. Enough with the miserableness, Émile! Just unrelenting, goddamn. It’s great, of course, but I would recommend reading it on a day when you can immediately go for a picnic in the sun and pet some kittens and eat a bag of marshmallows. [Ed. – Unrelenting is the word. Grim.]
Other things:
Kent Haruf, Benediction. My first Haruf. An elderly man in a small town dies from cancer. A moving read, especially in this year.
Frank Tuohy, The Ice Saints. Thank the gods for the Head of Apollo imprint: so many great forgotten books in this now-defunct series. In this one, a young English woman, Rose, visits communist Poland in 1964 to see her sister, her sister’s Polish husband, and their teenage son. Lots of sadness and disillusionment to go around, and some nice reflections on the outsider’s pitying gaze and well-meaning help being not without illusions of its own. Rose is not particularly likeable, but neither is anyone else. Highly recommended. [Ed. – Entirely new to me! I’m intrigued.]
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Folks online seem preoccupied with the fact that it, and not Catch-22, won the National Book Award in 1961. But I’ve never read Catch-22, and I have now read this, and I liked it a lot. [Ed. – Plus we know by now that the folks online don’t know shit.] A recommendation of my friend when I visited him in Atlanta last summer, I didn’t get around to reading it until after he’d died, but I thought of him the whole time I was in it. I read the Library of America edition, and I am a sucker for that series’ size, typesetting, and lovely thin pages, so perhaps I was already well-disposed to like it. [Ed. – I confess, that font size stresses me out.] At the same time, I was surprised by it. A man who does not feel a great deal of attachment to much, but is on some kind of secret undisclosed ‘quest’ that gives his life meaning, spends a week or so around Mardi Gras flirting with (and maybe sleeping with) women, arguing with his aunt, worrying over (and definitely sleeping with) his cousin-on-the-verge-of-a-breakdown, and spending time with his much younger step-siblings. There’s sex, death, driving, movies watched. And not much else, except that somewhere in there is also the whole of life. It reminded me strangely of memories of reading J.D. Salinger, but also less precious and more mature. Fragments of this one have returned to me often since finishing it.
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These. An exceptional short read, but you all know that by now.
Henri Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes. Finally got around to reading this, which I consumed in a single short burst. A magical fairy-tale of old France, caught just before the old ways gave way to automobiles and telephones. It’s all faintly ridiculous, but somehow also great?
Peter Matthiessen, Nine Headed Dragon River. I’ve had an on-again, mostly off-again, relationship to Zen Buddhism over the years, trying and failing to establish a regular meditation practice, but feeling a real connection to the culture and writings it has produced. I really enjoyed this memoir of the author’s engagements (and struggles) with Zen Buddhism in America, Nepal, and Japan from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. Ymmv, but it spoke directly to some long-dormant yearnings in me.
Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul. A strange, enigmatic, hallucinatory book about foreigners in India. Who knows what is true? What happened in Lahore with the Vice-Consul? The whole thing here is about others’ stories being told by others, telling their own false stories, lies and fabulations replacing whatever might be conceived of as a ‘truth’ — ultimately inaccessible if it exists at all. Annoying, also somehow memorable? [Ed. – Sounds annoying, truth be told.]
Fran Ross, Oreo. First published in 1974 and recently rediscovered. Lots of clever wordplay in this recreation of Theseus’s journey through the eyes of a young Black Jewish woman. If Ulysses were a hip trip through 1970s Philly and NYC instead of 1904 Dublin, it might be something like this.
I read a bunch of French comics/bandes dessinées this year, both in translation and not. Among these, I recommend Riad Sattouf, Esther’s Notebooks. Folks might recall my love for his autobiographical series The Arab of the Future. Here, he follows a young girl, the daughter of his friends, through the vicissitudes of elementary and junior-high school. I laughed out loud, a lot, at a time when I especially needed it. Also recommended are Julie Delporte, This Woman’s Work and Portrait of a Body, autobiographical graphic memoirs of trauma, friendship, sexuality, Tove Jansson, Chantal Ackerman, and much besides. Her pencil-crayon drawings, both lush and hesitant, perfectly match the tone.
Maybe the best book I read this year, though, was a bonafide classic: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard. Holy shit. As good as everyone says. Better. Every word in this book is covered in a layer of dust. It evokes the overwhelming stillness of a class (the Sicilian aristocracy) in decline, while the world moves around them. The central characters here are as immobile as a daguerreotype or Walter Benjamin’s nineteenth-century inhabitants sunk into their own velvet compass-cases. Deserving of all the praise.
Edward Hopper, Yonkers (1916)
There were lots of other books I read this year: some fine, others bad, others I started but did not finish, that didn’t make this list. One can’t say everything.
Plans for next year: I’ve got an ambitious lineup of French literary classics to boost my woeful education: Flaubert, Stendhal, Hugo, Proust. I’d also like to read more works by 20th-century women writers: luckily, I’ve got a dozen or so Virago editions sitting on the shelf here. Others: Banine’s Parisian Days, Litvinoff’s The Lost Europeans, all those Charco Press books I bought years ago. Those Banville mysteries. More Simenon, probably. And whatever else provides intelligent fodder and distraction as our world continues its shockingly precipitous slide into fascism. [Ed. – We read, we resist, we read as resistance. Thank you, Keith!]
Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his sixth, is bymy longtime friendNat Leach. Nat is a nineteenth-century scholar turned college administrator who has spent the last 7 years reading the books on his shelves in alphabetical order. He lives in Ontario.
Saul Leiter, 1961
After complaining about my reading in 2023 in this space last year, 2024 was, on the surface, a much better year. I read 30 books as opposed to 20 in the previous year, and was on pace for an even higher total before hitting a wall at the end of the year (of which more anon). However, if we get into what the sports statisticians call “advanced metrics,” the numerical advantage is diminished; 6 of those books were either less than 100 pages or only slightly more, and 9 were works of theory, criticism, and/or anthologies that I had been working on for years and just completed this year. So, probably my actual reading for 2024 was not much better than 2023 in terms of quantity, but the quality was high, and that’s what really matters, right? [Ed. – Right!]
As for my overall reading project of working through my unread books alphabetically, now in its 7th year, I once again only progressed by one letter of the alphabet, finishing “L” and making a very small start on “M”. If I’m able to get through “M” in 2025 (a big if- it’s a pretty immense shelf), I will hit the halfway point of the alphabet and surely it’s gotta be downhill after that, right? [Ed. – Surely! Well, probably. Possibly?] The second half of the alphabet has the likes of “Q”, “X” and “Z” so there is hope! [Ed. – Insert Zola side-eye gif here.] In fact, of the 298 books on my list, exactly 200 are “A-M” so I’m actually closing in on the 2/3 mark of my project (although that list keeps growing every year, so who really knows?)
More importantly, for the purposes of this piece, I actually found some time, in the early part of the year at least, to write capsules for each book that I finished as I went along. Which is just as well, because I can scarcely remember what I read last January right now, and as I write this opening, I’m just as curious as you to see what comes next (probably more so).
Larsen, Nella – Passing (1929)
I had seen this book recommended so widely, I couldn’t resist adding it to this project, and it certainly does live up to the hype. The book is about the tensions in racial ideologies in early 20th century America, and seems no less relevant today. Clare Kendry “passes” as white despite a mixed-race bloodline that would see her excluded from white society. The very fact that she is able to do this so successfully mocks the white supremacist ideology that believes that racial differences are fixed and self-evident. The book’s focus also demonstrates the problematic intersection of these racial tensions with similarly oppressive gender expectations. Irene Redfield’s love/hate relationship with Clare is at the core of the book, so that it demonstrates also the ways in which expectations around “racial purity” are particularly focused on women. In this respect, Passing reminds me of another book I wrote about on here some years ago, Morley Callaghan’s The Loved and the Lost; although that book focuses on a white woman who circulates in black society in Montreal, the similarly tragic outcomes both speak to the violence and panic produced in white society by such blurring of racial lines. [Ed. – About to teach this tomorrow for the nth time: it’s an all-timer!]
Laski, Marghanita – The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953)
When I received this book as a gift (in a lovely Persephone Books edition), I assumed, because of the title, that it was because of my academic interest in the nineteenth century. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was in fact because of my academic interest in the Gothic. The plot itself smacks of the absurd: a tubercular new mother is transported back in time to the Victorian period while lying on the titular piece of furniture during her recovery. But this does not do justice to the book, which explores (as so many Gothic texts do) the relationship between mind and body, and the nature of identity. A fascinating read. [Ed. – Sounds great!]
Lathom, Francis – Italian Mysteries (1820) and The Midnight Bell (1797)
These days, Francis Lathom is little more than an answer to a literary trivia question (Name the authors of the 7 “horrid novels” on the reading list of Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey!) but he was a successful novelist and playwright in his time. The Midnight Bell is the book mentioned in Austen’s novel, while Italian Mysteries was written considerably later. Both make extensive use of the Gothic conventions popularized by Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho (and spoofed in Northanger Abbey), including apparently supernatural activity explained by natural means, banditti inhabiting abandoned castles [Ed. – They do be inhabiting the abandoned castles, the banditti], and lustful noblemen pursuing innocent heroines, who invariably faint whenever captured (By my count, Lauretta, heroine of The Midnight Bell, faints five times in the course of a single abduction!) [Ed. – Maybe some iron pills for that girl?] Lathom’s use of these conventions is, at least, skillful and coherent, which is more than can be said of many Radcliffe imitators of this period. As David Punter points out in his fascinating introduction to the Valancourt Books edition of The Midnight Bell, Lathom’s works are heavy on events, to the exclusion of character development, and his plots are so extensive and intricate that they invariably require quite elaborate explanations—indeed, the entirety of the 3rd and final volume of Italian Mysteries is essentially an extensive explanation of all the mysteries developed of the first two volumes. While both books owe much to Radcliffe, there are certain predilections of Lathom’s own that show through as well; for example, his books include many siblings who function as doubles of each other, and are usually moral opposites of one another. The books are a pleasure to read, though not, perhaps, especially notable examples of the genre. [Ed. – Look, you’re not getting this kind of content anywhere else, are you?]
Laurence, Margaret – This Side Jordan (1960)
Like every good Canadian of my generation, my literary education was steeped in Margaret Laurence; I read The Stone Angel in high school, and The Diviners in university. [Ed. – Same! I wonder what they read now?] And if that weren’t enough, I now find myself living just 15 minutes away from the small town of Lakefield, Ontario, where Laurence spent the last years of her life, and wrote The Diviners. All that being said, I really didn’t know what to expect from this book, Laurence’s first novel, which is much less recognizable in the canon of CanLit, not least because of its foreign setting. Laurence’s husband was an engineer who worked in Africa in the 1950s, so she spent some years living in what was then called the “Gold Coast” but was soon to become the independent country of Ghana. The book is largely about the difficulties posed by this transition, both for the British colonizers and for the people of Ghana, equally caught between a past they cannot return to and a future in which they cannot yet find their place (hence the biblical allusion of the book’s title; the characters are all looking ahead to a “promised land” they cannot enter). The book focuses on Johnnie Kestoe, a British accountant in a textile company; Miranda Kestoe, his well-meaning but sometimes clueless wife; and Nathaniel Amegbe, a struggling Ghanaian schoolteacher. Johnnie, following Miranda’s advice, tries to get ahead by supporting the company’s “Africanization” of its workforce, which his racist bosses refuse to accept, while Nathaniel tries to modernize his family and move away from the tribal customs that he sees as belonging to the past. The future, though, is not easy for any of them to grasp. It’s a strong debut novel, though it does not entirely show the brilliance that was yet to come from Laurence. As an aside, this book also scores points for having a main character named Nathaniel, a literary feature notable by its absence in all the other books on this list. [Ed. – Ha! Justice for Nathaniels!]
Le Fanu, Sheridan – Carmilla (1872) and “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family” (1839)
There are not many classic Gothic texts of the 19th century that I have not read, so it was time that I finally read Carmilla. All I knew about it was that it was about a lesbian vampire and, yeah, it’s pretty much what it says on the tin, using the familiar conventions of the genre, with that added twist. As for “A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family,” my first thought upon reading it was “was this written before or after Jane Eyre?” There are many parallels, including a bigamous marriage and a potentially murderous first wife being kept in concealment. Turns out the answer is “before”. This story apparently influenced Brontë’s novel, and in turn, after the success of Jane Eyre, Le Fanu developed this story into a longer work in order to capitalize on it.
Le Guin, Ursula K. – The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Another book that I added because of a large number of recommendations, I must admit that I went back and forth on this one a bit. The author’s preface is one of the smartest things I have read about science fiction (or about fiction full stop!), but then the first chapter seemed so replete with science fiction clichés that I started to question what all the fuss was about. I also wonder if science fiction just isn’t my genre, or if I am just overly picky about the details of world-building; much as I admire the carefully prepared appendix on the “Gethenian Calendar and Clock,” which differ significantly from those of Earth, I also find it slightly off-putting that this entirely foreign world not only measures temperature in degrees (in itself not necessarily natural), but it uses a scale that seems strikingly similar to the Fahrenheit scale (with no additional context or explanation). [Ed. – Fahrenheit sucks!] Nevertheless, the book certainly grew on me as it increasingly developed the more philosophical implications of its sf premise. Le Guin claims not to be attempting to predict the future, but this book from 1969 is quite prescient in exploring the idea of gender fluidity, as the inhabitants of the planet on which the book is set share male and female characteristics and can transform into either. Less prescient than oddly coincidental is the fact that the narrator’s name is Genly Ai; it occurs to me that it would be impossible to include a character of that name in a book written today without readers assuming that he was some kind of embodied form of generative artificial intelligence. [Ed. – AI sucks! Like, a lot more than Fahrenheit. Which sucks, to be clear.]
Levi, Primo – Moments of Reprieve (1981) Trans. Ruth Feldman
Levi’s American publishers have been consistent, at least, in their dogged attempts to make his books sound as optimistic as possible; If This is a Man becomes Survival in Auschwitz, The Truce becomes The Reawakening, and Lilith, and other Stories becomes Moments of Reprieve. While it is true that to a certain extent, the stories recounted in this book have a lighter tone than his earlier memoirs, there is really very little “reprieve” to be had here. [Ed. – Yup. That piece about the Roma inmate he meets? Dark.] The book consists of descriptions of people and incidents from Levi’s time in Auschwitz which had not been included in the two earlier memoirs, as well as narratives that follow up on the post-war experiences of individuals who are mentioned in those books. And certainly, all of the qualities that make the earlier books so great are still on display here, especially Levi’s keen eye for character and his deep understanding of moral complexity. And yet, everybody seems to want more optimism, from the publishers to Chumbawamba, who recorded a song based on one of the most optimistic anecdotes herein, “Rappoport’s Testament” about a man who uses a very philosophical theory of life to endure Auschwitz, arguing that his previous pleasures in life are simply being counter-balanced by the horrors of the camp, and therefore he has nothing to complain about in the grand scheme of things. [Ed. – I did not know this!!!!] An admirable perspective, perhaps, but just one of the many that Levi explores—yet the only one to get a song written about it, with an incessant chorus of “I never gave up” as though this were the only praiseworthy, or even acceptable, attitude. (Having said that, I have to admit that I actually love this song. I mean, how critical can you be about a rousing anti-Nazi anthem? Look it up.)
Lindsay, Joan – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)
I was already very familiar with Peter Weir’s 1975 film adaptation of this novel, so I fully expected this book to be as good as it is. I found that Weir adapted the book quite faithfully; in both the book and the film, the plot about the uncanny disappearance of Australian boarding school girls is perhaps secondary to the reflections on the connectedness of people and things that are triggered by this incident. The most significant differences come from the fact that the novel is able to demonstrate more links in this web of inter-connectedness; from my perspective of having seen the film first, I was quite fascinated to see how Lindsay connects some of the more minor characters to each other and to the mysterious themes of the book in ways not shown in the film. Ultimately, what makes both book and film work so well is how expertly they manage the fantastic in Tzvetan Todorov’s sense of the term, hesitating between rational and supernatural responses to the mystery, but never fully embracing either perspective. [Ed. – Now I want to read this and see the movie again.]
Lively, Penelope – Moon Tiger (1987)
I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to describe this fascinating tour through both world history and the personal history of a dying historian, Claudia Hampton. These histories are linked and predictably (and unpredictably!) take many twists and turns along the way. But the most interesting thing about the novel is the way it plays with point of view, emphasizing that history depends on perspective as we move between Claudia’s first-person perspective, a more “objective” narrative voice, and the points of view of other characters. It may defy description, but it really works.
Lodge, David – Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), Nice Work (1988)
I must admit that I felt that I had missed the cultural moment in which I should have read this trilogy. After all, any satirical work on academia these days would surely have to focus on the absurdities of governmental policies and the excesses of administrative oversight rather than the hijinks of carefree globetrotting academics (seriously, is there even any such thing as a carefree, globetrotting academic any more?) [Ed. – There is not.] Not to mention the fact that cultural values have shifted significantly in ways that make these books somewhat uncomfortable to read at times (thinking especially of the distressingly casual way that the idea of professors sleeping with their students is treated in these books). Despite all this, though, there is something enduring about these books, not only for their humour—based in the first book on the incongruities between Morris Zapp, brilliant but obnoxious American professor, and Philip Swallow, reserved English lecturer, and developed in many different directions from there—but also for their satisfying use of the conventions of comic narrative. Lodge is particularly knowing about this, and all three novels are highly self-referential (or “meta” as the kids say). [Ed. – I fear they do not actually say this anymore, at least judging from the blank stares I get…] Changing Places features a number of quotations from a (fictional) textbook that Swallow wants to use for his course on novel-writing, and which provides rules for writing a good novel—rules that Lodge himself proceeds to break in every instance. Small World (subtitled “an academic romance”) employs the conventions of the grail quest romance, adapted comically to the academic context. And Nice Work is an adaptation of, and contains frequent references to, the genre of the Victorian industrial novel. Moreover, in each book, the threads are pulled together in improbable but highly satisfying ways, as if Lodge is acknowledging both the artificiality of the conventions and the fact that we still desire such conclusions despite our awareness of their artifice. I learned recently that Lodge passed away on New Year’s Day, 2025, so I guess there was indeed some timeliness to my reading of these books. I also learned in the course of my reading that Lodge had been at the University of Birmingham while my parents were graduate students there. It really is a small world, I guess.
MacIntyre, Linden – The Bishop’s Man (2009)
Having lived on Cape Breton Island for 15 years, I found that this book resonated with me, not because of the plot about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church, but because of the settings, the feelings of isolation brought about by the landscape and the weather, and the descriptions of tightly-knit but also highly insular communities. All very familiar to me. The plot that unfolds against this backdrop revolves around the titular character, Father Duncan MacAskill, who acts on behalf of his Bishop to address situations involving abuse committed by priests. He initially believes that he is helping to rehabilitate perpetrators and support victims, but struggles with his conscience as he increasingly realizes that he is just the front line of an extensive cover up operation. MacIntyre is a native of Cape Breton, and a prominent journalist so perhaps not surprisingly his fictionalization of these real situations and characters is believable and powerful.
WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH
I always try to set aside two books for Women in Translation month in August (given that 2 is pretty much my monthly average, this makes sense to me). However, since my reading project as a whole has slowed down, I’m finding that I’m reaching further forward on my shelves each year. This year, I read a couple of books from further along the “M” shelf.
Dorian recommended this book a few years ago and of course he is right about what a tremendous book it is. [Ed. – Damn right he is. That guy really knows a thing or two.] Millu recounts the stories of six women whom she encountered in the women’s camps at Auschwitz. In many ways, the content of these tales is not unlike other Holocaust testimonies in the brutality, suffering and impossible moral situations that they depict, but it is also quite different in its specific focus on female experience in the camps. It must also be said that the stories are well crafted as stories. In both respects, the book reminded me in a strange way of the stories of Ida Fink, even though the latter are fictional. [Ed. – Absolutely!] Both writers provide keen observations of the brutality and suffering caused by Nazi oppression, particularly as it affects women. There is probably something more to be said about the relationship between the fictional and the non-fictional here, but that’s more Dorian’s territory. [Ed. – Certainly true that Millu uses an overtly narrative style in these pieces. Maybe Sara Horowitz’s idea about the Fink stories—that we sometimes need fiction to tell us what nonfiction can’t (it’s smarter than that, but that’s the gist)—might be useful here.]
Müller, Herta – The Passport (1986) Trans. Martin Chalmers
I had never read Müller before, so I didn’t really know what to expect, nor do I really know how to describe the experience of reading this book but here goes: it is a series of dark prose poems that build a feeling much more than they build the plot, which is ostensibly about the efforts of a miller to emigrate to West Germany. The images, though, vividly construct a picture of a hostile natural world, and the tensions of living amongst a foreign people. I commented earlier on the changes of Levi’s titles for an English-speaking audience; in this case, the effect of calling the book The Passport seems to be a rather banal attempt to focus on the plot, unlike the original German title, Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt (“Man is a Great Pheasant in the World”) which better captures the poetic feel and the tension between the human and the natural world developed throughout the book.
IN PROGRESS
So, about that wall I mentioned… things were going swimmingly (yes, for me, the above is what swimmingly looks like) until the end of October/beginning of November. In the space of a fateful week, I began three new books. Little did I know that 2 ½ months later, despite putting almost all of my reading time and energy into them, all three would remain unfinished. Anyway, here’s a brief report on the books I didn’t quite finish in 2024 (with up to date completion percentages as of early 2025)
Lessing, Doris – The Golden Notebook (1962) Completed: 26%
First, not having included Doris Lessing in my original project, I was tempted to join a readalong of The Golden Notebook organized by the ever-encouraging @paperpills10.bsky.social. However, a combination of my usual lack of time, my inability to get my hands on a good physical copy of the book, and my struggles with the book itself led to my dismal failure to keep up. As for the book itself, it seems to me very original in terms of form (3rd person narration combined with 1st person in the form of notebooks kept by one of the characters) while seeming quite mundane (thus far) in terms of content and style. Perhaps that is what I’m struggling with, though I also wonder if it is part of the point (this is what notebooks are like). I will persist with this, but I have quite a way to go yet. [Ed. – Hmm I like this one: not sure you’re going to change your mind if you aren’t into it yet.]
Mann, Thomas – Doctor Faustus (1948) Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter Completed: 73%
At about the same time, I was starting this book, which I had bought at a time when I was collecting Faust stories, but I had only managed to read the first few chapters at that time. I have done better this time, and what I have learned from this experience is that 1) I need to read more of Mann’s novels and 2) I may not have enough years left in me to read them all. This is a tremendous book, but one that requires much time and focus. I have been making slow but consistent progress, and there is now at least some light at the end of the tunnel. Despite the title, the Faustian theme is more an undercurrent than the book’s focus, which has more to do with reflections on the nature of art and its relation to culture. But what has perhaps most struck me about this book is its descriptions of the rise of Nazism and the psychology behind it, all of which feel chillingly contemporary.
Márai, Sandor – Embers (1942) Trans. Carol Brown Janeway Completed: 67%
Now this wonderful little (at least, comparatively) book is one that I would have finished long ago, had I not been saving it to cleanse my palate after working on the previous two books (gotta respect the alphabetical order after all). It is a much quicker, and highly engaging read. Last year, I commented on how my reading system often provides me with strange and unexpected correlations, and it has been somewhat strange reading this book alongside Doctor Faustus. Both books are written in the 1940’s but make use of a dual time frame split between the narrative present and a past in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Both are set in central Europe and are thus framed against the background of the wars in these time periods, and both focus heavily on the relationship of a pair of male friends, one of whom is musical and artistic, the other more material and practical. But they are of course very different books; Embers tells the story of a friendship broken in youth that comes to a reckoning in old age. I’m still not sure what this reckoning is going to look like, but the suspense is building. So far, this is pretty great.
James Whistler, View across the Lagoon (1879 – 80)
LOOKING AHEAD TO 2025
My one final comment on all of the above is that one of the benefits of writing these entries shortly after finishing the books is that I can look back and see how my immediate response to the book varies from what my memory of it is now. For example, despite the lukewarm write-up, I thought about the Le Guin a lot after I finished it, and despite really loving the Lively, I haven’t really thought about it at all since then. I’m not sure that this is necessarily a measure of a book’s quality, but it is a measure of something. [Ed. – Yes! But what? I think about this a lot too.]
As for next year, I did have a fleeting desire to join a Proust reading group, since that is probably the book that I am most looking forward to on my remaining list, but my recent track record with group reads and the fact that I am probably not in the right head space at the moment has caused me to hold off (it’ll probably be a couple of years before I get to “P”)
So, my goal will be to try to get through “M” this year, although as I said, it’s a pretty formidable letter. I will at least see the benefits of having participated in group reads of some of the chunkier books on this shelf over the past few years (The Balkan Trilogy, The Levant Trilogy, Moby Dick, The Man Without Qualities) but I still have a lot to look forward to, from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Cormac McCarthy to Brian Moore to Toni Morrison to Iris Murdoch and many more in between. Wish me luck, and let me know if there are any indispensable M authors that you think I need to make sure I read this year. [Ed. – Thank you as always, Nat!]
A few months, when I was too busy to do anything about it, WordPress told me I’ve been writing this blog for ten years.
André Brasilier, Blue Cavalcade, 1981
I’ve not always been the most diligent blogger, sometimes falling silent for months at a time, but I’ve always returned to it, and that’s not nothing. In fact, since I started keeping monthly logs in January 2019 (halfway through the blog’s life, which bewilders me, since surely that was just a couple of years ago) I’ve written a little something about almost every book I’ve read.
It is quite likely that some things will change in my life next year. Fear not, though, I’ve no plans to shutter the blog. I’ll probably be happy for the continuity. But I do wonder if there are other kinds of writing I might do here. Like many writers, I write best when I’m working on more than one project. I’m using part of my summer to craft a proposal for a book on teaching Holocaust literature at this moment in US history: I recently finished a course from the wonderful Anne Trubek of Belt Publishing that has given me a good start. (Agents and publishers, all my forms of communication are open lol.)
[My daughter says using lol is cringe. Sorry. But how else am I supposed to indicate “I know that is preposterous and I am kidding except that I would really love for it to happen”? Hahahahaha or something?]
I’ve been wondering how I might bring some of that writing variety to this space. When I first started EMJ, I wrote about one book at a time. No surprise to anyone who reads me, these posts were long. Often really long. They really helped me figure out what I thought of a book, though I’m not sure people wanted to read them as much as they did my still-long but shorter responses to a month’s worth of reading. I’m still fond of those early pieces, especially the first one, on a book I still think about a lot, Caleb Crain’s Necessary Errors. Here are a few more that hardly anyone read, but might be worth dusting off. On Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight. On Philip Marsden’s The Bronski House. And, way long, on A Little Life. There’s a ton more in the archives.
I have to admit, though, that the rhythm of the last five years has worked well. The monthly reviews offer a balance between breadth and depth, but would you prefer more pieces about just one book? And what about non-book topics? I’ve always shared writing created for other occasions (like becoming Jewish or reflecting to new students on old friendships). For a while I wrote regularly about my teaching, which I loved doing: I’m basing the book project on some of that stuff. Honestly, I don’t know how I wrote all that stuff, though. My daughter was young then and needed a lot more from me and my wife. Where did the time come from? I guess I was younger too. And that was all pre-covid. I think people overstate the changes between then and now (rather: they overstate the wrong things and ignore the main thing: we still live in a pandemic, we still don’t value the most important kinds of work, our way of life is killing us and the world). But I feel my working life has changed a lot. I don’t think I’m just being middle-aged when I say that it’s harder to be in a helping profession than it used to be. Anyway, I don’t know that I’ll have enough to say about teaching for me to write about it here and in the book. But who knows? Maybe writing about other kinds of art might be fun. The obvious example is film, which used to be a huge part of my life but fell away in the press of family life and career pressures. I’m returning to movies, though: slowly but ever more surely. I might write more about what I’ve been watching. (I think this is the only film-related post at the blog?) Another idea is to invite others to contribute. I’ve had many guests over the years, whether through readalongs (remember those?), shared reading projects, or year in review lists. I love hosting other views, voices, and perspectives. Maybe I could do more in that vein.
What else? Obviously, the look needs refreshing. And yet I am so lazy about that kind of thing. Is it actively off-putting? I admire M. A. Orthofer for many reasons, one being his indifference to graphic design. His site looks the way it looks, the content is what matters, and now it’s so iconic I for one would be crushed if he changed things. This place is no Literary Saloon, but maybe I am inching toward “so old-fashioned it’s actually cool” status. Thoughts?
As you can see, this post is a mixture of questions and ideas: what I wonder about and what I might do. But really what I’m writing here is both a plea for feedback and an expression of gratitude. What do you want to see here? More of the same? Something new? Like what? Whatever your answer, I want to thank you for reading. Blogs are so out of date; social media had made other kinds of communities, other forms of interaction; so many platforms share the thinking of so many smart readers and writers. That you’ve taken an interest in what I think means so much to me. As I’ve written before, I don’t know many passionate readers in real life; this community of readers around the world has meant the world to me. Thank you for everything you’ve taught me, the reading suggestions you’ve made, and the support you’ve offered. I’m filled with gratitude.
What a terrific month! Yes, the first ten days were busy: bringing the semester to a close; dealing with the fallout of the lousy previous months; celebrating with our graduates. But then the pace shifted entirely. Amazing how much better I feel when I exercise regularly, eat better, sleep well, and sit on the back deck with a fantasy novel for an hour just because.
It occurred to me recently that in my moaning about last month I forgot something amazing. The eclipse! Little Rock in the totality for something like two and a half minutes, and the experience was as incredible as everyone said it would be. How lucky to simply walk down the block to an open space for an incredible view of the thing. How amazing that people in our neighbourhood (who normally never have anything to say to each other) were out and about, portable lawn chairs and to go cups in hand. Strong school’s out for summer vibes. 10/10, absolutely recommend.
Here are the books I read:
Franz Marc, Two Women on the Hillside, 1906
Arnaldur Indridason, The Darkness Knows (2017) Trans. Victoria Cribb (2021)
In wintery Iceland, retired cop Konrad is pulled into an ongoing investigation that to his surprise helps him learn more about the mysterious death of his father.
Arnaldur Indridason, The Girl by the Bridge (2018) Trans. Philip Roughton (2023)
In summery Iceland, retired cop Konrad is pulled into an ongoing investigation that to his surprise helps him learn more about the mysterious death of his father.
Look, sometimes you need to read something as undemanding as possible.
Guy Gavriel Kay, Lord of Emperors (2000)
Longer and even more satisfying sequel to Sailing to Sarantium, which I read a few months ago. This will sound weird, but I get the same feeling reading Kay as I do watching David Simon shows: intense investment on my part in the characters, sighs of bittersweet pleasure when things come to a close. Like its predecessor, Lord of Emperors is modelled on Byzantium under Justinian and Theodora. The mosaicist hero of the first volume—summoned to Sarantium to tile a version of the Hagia Sophia—is joined in this book by a doctor from lands to the east. Political upheaval leads to changing religious and artistic standards; the eventual fall of the Empire is hinted at. (Kay develops this unthinkable outcome in his more recent books.) There’s an exciting chariot race, too.
Christine Lai, Landscapes (2023)
Matt Keeley calls this the Sebaldian country house novel you didn’t know you needed. Which is a good description. Set in England in the near-future in an isolated house among desiccated fields and dead woods, Landscapes centers on an art historian who is first brought to the house by one of a pair of wealthy brothers only to flee from his violence into the arms of the other. Lai’s world-building won’t win any awards—it’s clearly not what she’s most interested in, though her description of literal zones of climate-controlled safety around city centers and other wealthy enclaves feels all-too plausible—and her characterization is uneven. (The only vivid character is the empty, preening, vain cruel brother.) But the book had me thinking anew about the role of art in an era of climate catastrophe and the Benjaminian claim that every document of culture is also a document of barbarism.
Megan Abbott, Beware the Woman (2023)
My first Abbott, unaccountably. But not my last.
Thriller with a side of body horror about a pregnant woman who accompanies her husband to his family’s summer place in Michigan’s upper peninsula for the first time. Plenty of Gothic accoutrements: kindly father, a former doctor still grieving his wife’s death decades ago, who might not be what he seems; mysterious housekeeper; isolated home. Abbott excels at creating menace, unease, and doubt. A story about what men will do to control women’s bodies: very much of our time.
Perfect reading for the first hot Sunday of the summer.
Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine (1890) Trans. Roger Pearson (1996)
“Too many trains, too many murders,” an early critic wrote, preposterously, of this terrific late novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. As if a book could have too much of either!
Although I still have plenty of Zola ahead of me—I’ve read about half of the RMs now—I’m willing to say that this is the most Zola-esque Zola of all. The train system, with its switches, branches, tunnels, wheelhouses, and miles of track, is the perfect metaphor for the books’ obsession with the interconnected systems and institutions of Second Empire France, especially because it affords new expressions of crime, sexual desire, and violence.
Reading La Bête Humaine, I was reminded of the opening of Peter Brooks’s argument that sight is the realist sense par excellence; of the many descriptive set pieces in this novel, Zola’s favourites seem to be the ones depicting the railyards of the Gare St Lazare as seen from the balcony of an apartment building inhabited by railway workers. In the opening scene a railyard supervisor named Roubaud awaits the return of his wife, Séverine, in a borrowed apartment in that building. She’s been shopping while he’s been getting a dressing down from his superior, a pickle he escapes thanks to the influence of a man named Grandmorin, a former judge who is on the board of the railway and has taken Roubaud on as a protégé because of his fondness for/guilt toward Séverine, whom he knew as a child. What promises to be a cozy tête-à-tête between newlyweds turns ugly, when a change remark by Séverine’s reveals that the judge had sexually abused her for years. Roubaud sees red and after nearly throttling his wife immediately plots to kill the judge, forcing Séverine to send the man a note asking him to meet her in a private car on the evening train to Rouen. This violence unfolds against a backdrop of gaiety and hilarity rising from the apartment below, where two sisters run a non-stop party of singing, dancing, and drinking.
Over the course of four-hundred increasingly intense pages—filled with one sensational, over-the-top scene after another—Zola builds to an indelible ending in which the strains of violence, misogyny, wounded male pride, hilarity, and excess that are already present in the beginning return in reconfigured form: a runaway train, its driver and fireman thrown off after a terrible fight, filled with drunken, bawling recruits headed to the front of what will be the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, hurtles unchecked and to certain disaster under a full head of steam.
I couldn’t get enough of the novel’s proto-Freudian and phrenological-criminological-eugenicist ways of thinking about human behavior. The other main character—the connection to the Rougon-Mcquart family—is the train driver Jacques Lantier (whose mother and brothers appear in The Assommoir, The Masterpiece, and Germinal, respectively), who literally sees red when he is aroused by a woman, wanting only to dismember her. (A long time ago I saw the Renoir film—though I remembered almost nothing; it must be so different from the book—and I could only picture Lantier as Jean Gabin, which is unfortunate because he’s much more like Peter Lorre.) And lest I make it sound like this is a book about men, that’s only partly true. In addition to Séverine, there are two other terrific female characters. The one who broke my heart was Flore, an operator at an isolated railway crossing, and whose unrequited love for her cousin Lantier leads to a disastrous outcome.
I could say a lot more about this book. Check out our conversation at One Bright Book to hear more. And speaking of more, I feel compelled to read more Rougon-Maquart before long. Summer of Zola, anyone?
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star (2020) Trans. Martin Aitken (2021)
The reason I so seldom follow through on reading plans like the one I just suggested is that I just cannot stop from being distracted by unexpected things that come my way. I’d been paying even more attention than usual to Brandon Taylor’s reading because he’s been championing Zola lately. So when he tweeted repeatedly about this latest series from Knausgaard, I thought maybe I should investigate. I hadn’t paid any attention to this, other than to vaguely note Jeez, that Norwegian guy has another set of books. If I expected anything it was that the books would be autofiction in the vein of My Struggle. (I read the first two of those with great pleasure a long time ago and then… just didn’t keep up: now I want to close that loop, too.) But The Morning Star is a proper novel, in the sense that it is composed of long sections narrated by different first-person narrators, most of whom link up in sometimes unexpected ways. The action takes place in a hot summer in and around Bergen, in something like 2016. There is plenty of the deep ordinariness of middle-class Norwegian life that I found compelling in My Struggle (cabins to close for the season, impromptu dinner parties to arrange, elderly parents to look after, marriages to keep on life-support). But there’s also a lot of weird stuff: a priest conducts a funeral for a man who turns out to look identical to the one who asked her an impertinent question in the airport the night before; a creature, whether human or not is unclear, roams the forest, possibly in connection to the disappearance of a man from a mental institution and a shocking satanic cult murder; and, most powerfully of all, a dazzlingly bright star suddenly appears in the sky.
The novel seems to be about the relation between the mundane and the extraordinary: I say seems because for me Knausgaard incites a delicious reading fugue state, where undistinguished sentences roll on into compelling blocks of text and the pages keep turning as if by themselves. As soon as I reached the end of its 600+ pages I ordered the 800+-page sequel…
Berthe Morisot, In England (Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight), 1875
Honestly I enjoyed all these books, even those Indridasons. See anything you fancy here?
April sucked shit. I’d had it with everything: the semester grind, how hard it’s become to teach these last few years, and a lot of my colleagues, especially the administrators of my place of employment. I didn’t sleep enough, saw the height of the Arkansas spring blooms only through windows, and drank too much coffee. Gotta make some changes in my life.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Peonies, ca. 1920
Edith Wharton, Summer (1917)
Wharton continues to be one of my happiest discoveries of the last few years. (A personal discovery: I know everybody else already knows her.) Shawn Mooney, host of the Shawn Breathes Books YouTube channel, asked a few of his many bookish friends to read this novella from the middle of Wharton’s career. What a terrific book! Charity Royall, the adopted daughter of a lawyer and his now-late wife, might be in the upper echelon of her New England village’s society, but that doesn’t mean much. She’s bored to death. When a young architect comes up from New York to summer with a relative—to sketch the local country houses, ostensibly, but mostly to loaf—Charity is smitten by the glimpse of another world he offers. And by him, too: the book is impressively sexually frank for its time. Before long, Charity and Lucius have made a love-nest out of an abandoned house halfway up a nearby mountain. When Charity gets pregnant, a lot of troubling and surprising things happen in a short time. I won’t spoil the ending, but oof what a gut punch. Recommended!
Folks who have read this novel (others, look away): do you think Royall might be Charity’s father? Am I crazy to think so??? The circumstances around Charity’s coming to the Royalls seem… murky.
Andrey Kurkov, The Silver Bone (2020) Trans. Boris Dralyuk (2024)
Kurkov, whose delightful Death and the Penguin I laboriously read in German way back in the day and whose subsequent many, many books I have failed to keep up with, has written the first of a series set in Kyiv in 1919. The Great War might be over, but peace is nowhere to be found in Ukraine. Various factions vie for control: unaffiliated war lords, the Bolsheviks, the Whites, and the embattled Ukrainian People’s Republic, one of the first nations in Eastern Europe to deem Jews a protected minority, which didn’t stop it from countenancing a wave of pogroms under its brief rule. (I’m slowly making my way through Jeffrey Veidlinger’s history of these events, In the Midst of Civilized Europe, which is retrospectively clearing up a lot of the context.)
On the novel’s first pages, Kurkov’s protagonist, Samson Kolechko, a would-be engineer, loses his ear in an attack by Cossacks. (His father, alas, is murdered.) Samson, an upside-down low-rent version of his biblical namesake, manages to keep the ear, which turns out to have fantastical powers, allowing him to hear things he otherwise couldn’t. This comes in handy when the two Red Army soldiers who have usurped his apartment plot to kill him. He goes to police to turn them in and in a pleasingly preposterous turn of events is taken on as a detective himself. Along the way, he relies on the help of a young woman employed by the newly-established department of statistics. Kurkov vividly evokes the danger, scarcity, and uncertainty of Kyiv in this period: atmosphere is the book’s strong suit.
As for the crime element, well, let’s say it’s on the shambolic side. Perhaps more generously: it’s about what it means to investigate crime in a place where the political situation is changing so fast that the law threatens to be even more nakedly a fig leaf for power than usual.
In Boris Dralyuk, Kurkov has found a translator who gets his goofy side—and, I suspect, has even improved the book a little. He tells me the second Samson novel will be out in English next year. Count me in.
József Debreczeni, Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (1950) Trans. Paul Olchváry (2023)
Extraordinary. I do read a fair few Holocaust memoirs, and even though I’m interested to see how similar they are, how much they trade in the same tropes, I’m usually caught short in horrified wonder by at least one scene or detail. Cold Crematorium—now translated into English for the first time, more than 70 years after its publication in communist Yugoslavia—gave me that feeling from start to finish.
Debreczeni, the penname of József Bruner, was born in Budapest but moved to the Vojvodina, the largely Hungarian-speaking part of what is now Serbia, after WWI, where he worked as a journalist and newspaper editor. Like most Hungarian Jews he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Having survived the initial selection, he volunteered to be transported further west in Silesia to a camp that was then under construction. Falkenberg, as the Germans named it, was part of the vast Gross-Rosen camp system. Conditions in that archipelago of suffering were so bad that far fewer victims survived its array of satellite camps than did Auschwitz; it is much less well known today than its role in the Holocaust would demand. (Menachem Kaiser’s excellent third-generation memoir Plunder also considers this lacunae.) From there he was sent to the work camp at Fürstenberg, and finally to Dörnhau, the “hospital” ward of which was known to inmates as the cold crematorium because so many died within its frigid walls. He was liberated in May 1945, barely alive. After a lengthy recuperation, he returned to Belgrade, where he lived and worked until his death in 1978.
Indulge me as I share some of this remarkable book with you. It is the most visceral, corporeal description of the Holocaust that I know:
Here’s a passage from Fürstenberg, where Debreczeni labored, under dire conditions, to build an underground tunnel system (the so-called Project Riese, the eventual purpose of which remains a source of debate among historians):
Dysentery takes hold me of me yet again. Swelling spreads frighteningly over my entire body. Over the course of these days I am lugging sacks of cement to the mixers, and I become hopelessly dirty. The cement dust swirling nonstop in the air forms a thick layer of sediment upon my clean-shaved head. It collects on my gums and seeps into my nose, my eyes, my ears. Not even Sani Róth [former mobster who takes Debreczeni under his wing] can get his hands on soap. I hang my rags on the nail above me. The pants and tunic are literally moving from the thousands of squirming lice. Destroying them is hopeless to begin with, so lately we haven’t even been trying.
Here’s one from the “hospital” unit at Dörnhau, where Debreczeni spent eight miserable months:
The November cold pours in through the broken windows, and yet the stench is unbearable all the same. A suffocating stink oozes from the walls. Rising between the rows of bunks, several centimeters high, is an odious yellow slurry of dung. Naked skeletons are sloshing through the putrid river.
At one point, that slurry was knee height (for the few who could still walk). I will never get that detail out of my mind. This is the kind of thing I mean when I say Cold Crematorium makes other Holocaust memoirs seem tame.
And here’s another one from Dörnhau, about a man named Miklós Nagy, who scrabbled to the position of chief functionary of the medics who “treated” the patients, some with good will and others with pure cynicism, in an environment completely lacking medical supplies that was also, as we have seen, utterly unhygienic.
I once saw this lightweight man jump up and down on a patient’s chest like a rubber ball, stomping on him with bloodshot eyes until he was worn out. The victim’s crime: he’d tried conniving his way to a second helping of soup.
Remember, Nagy was a prisoner of the Nazis, too. The pitiless depiction of camp functionaries is just one of the things that makes this book such a valuable testimonial document.
I am seriously thinking about assigning this book instead of Primo Levi in my intro Holocaust Lit course. (Shouldn’t be one or the other, but syllabi are zero-sum games…) If you think you have the fortitude, I urge you to read this book.
Joan Chase, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983)
I chose this novel by the hitherto unknown-to-me Joan Chase for the April episode of One Bright Book simply because it was reissued by NYRB in 2014 and I’ve had it on my shelf ever since. (I’m trying to use the podcast to get to some of the hundreds of unread books around here…) Reading it was a happy surprise: it’s excellent, although, in my opinion, awfully sad. Somehow Chase tells the well-worn story of a vanished childhood—shot through with depictions of women’s limited lives in this time and place—in a way that feels new.
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia tells the story of three generations of the Krauss family, who mostly live on a farm near an unnamed county seat in northern Ohio probably modelled on Wooster, where Chase was born. The family is made up almost entirely of women: its matriarch, Lil, known as Gram (the titular Queen, so named as a joke about her similarity to a family pony who loves to run wild), has five daughters, two of whom have two daughters each. These girls, all born within two years of each other, and now in their mid to late teens, think of themselves as a collective: their responses to the vicissitudes that life throws the family’s way make up the core of the novel’s events.
Listen to the episode for more about this terrific book. For now, I’ll just say that if you’re intrigued by a first-person plural narrator that never feels gimmicky, and you like domestic fiction that also dabbles in the Gothic, you’re going to love this.
Amy Pease, Northwoods (2024)
(Not to be confused with Daniel Mason’s North Woods; that must have annoyed Pease and her publisher…)
Set in Shaky Lake, WI (which the internet suggests is a real place???), Pease’s debut crime novel concerns a former fish and wildlife investigator, Eli North, who returns from Afghanistan with PTSD and is taken on as a charity case by his mother, the local sheriff. Eli is at the end of his rope: drinking too much, losing contact with his son (his wife threw him out of the house), scared and ashamed most of the time. When a teenage boy is found dead and the girl he’s been seeing disappears, Eli fights for the right to take on the case and maybe regain his footing. The most interesting thing about this book is that Pease has chosen to put the exasperated, anguished, loving relation between Eli and his mother at its center. How things work out between them is ultimately more compelling than the whodunit.
All told, Northwoods is totally satisfactory debut; I’ll keep an eye on Pease. I listened to the audio, and I was excited each day to catch the next installment, sometimes even forsaking my hockey podcasts. So that tells you something.
Willard Metcalf, May Pastoral, 1907
All I can say is: IT’S SUMMER BITCHES. A fuller reading slate returns in May.
March 2024 was a big month in our family: my daughter became a bat mitzvah on the 29th of Adar I. She worked hard for months beforehand to prepare, and even though the process wasn’t always easy, she did great. Like, better than great. Services were moving, lunch was a whirlwind (no time to eat much but we had delicious leftovers for days), and the party at our beloved local indie bookstore was a blast. (Including a Haftorah Smackdown, where guests who had ben bnai mitzvahed were encouraged to show off how much of their portion they could remember.) Celebrating with friends and family—including one of my oldest friends, who came all the way down from Ottawa, how about that??—was incredible. Suffice it to say, Marianne and I were kvelling big time. We were also very tired. For a couple of weeks afterward, the energy level in this house was low. Like, come home from work, lie down on the couch, wake up two hours later with a crease down your cheek kind of low. All the reading took place around the edges.
Henri Matisse, The Ballet Dancer, Harmony in Grey (1927)
Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (2013)
First volume in the already canonical space opera set in the Radch Empire (expansionist, like all empires). Breq is an ancillary, a human body that acts as an extension of the hive mind AI that controls the empire, or a bit of the consciousness of a starship (these amount to the same thing, I think: it’s confusing), and the only survivor of a starship destroyed twenty years earlier. The Wikipedia entry helpfully explains the plot; I found the reading experience pleasurably disorienting. Basically, the action moves between the present, in which Breq seeks revenge for the destruction of her ship, and the past, in which the treacherous circumstances of that destruction become clear.
James told me to read the next one right away so I didn’t forget everything, but I didn’t. Uh oh.
David Downing, Union Station (2024)
Downing knows his readers can’t get enough of his John Russell books, even though he wrote his way to the end of WWII. He first solved the problem by writing a prequel. Now he’s taken a page from Philip Kerr and continued the adventures of journalist and former reluctant spy Russell and his actress wife Effie Koenen into the postwar period. Union Station finds the couple in Los Angeles, where Effie is making a go in an American sitcom while Russell grits his teeth and interviews movie stars. One day he realizes he’s being tailed and life gets more interesting. (Downing has great fun taking Russell on routes all over the metropolis.) But who’s after him? The Soviets, reneging on the deal that released him from their services? The Americans, suspicious of his thinly-disguised hostility to McCarthyism? As in all spy novels, the answer can only be found by returning to Berlin. (The occasion is the third annual Berlin Film Festival, where Effie is honoured with a retrospective.) A bittersweet return for both husband and wife: a new war has spring up on what aren’t even the ashes of the old.
The John Russell books are often great and never less than serviceable. This isn’t the best of the bunch, but if Downing keeps writing them I’ll keep reading.
Tana French, The Hunter (2024)
As a helpless Tan French simp I had the release date for her latest circled on my calendar months ago. The Hunter came out the week of the bat mitzvah—perfect timing: I demolished it on my spring break the week after. A sequel to The Searcher, which I wrote about at length here, it offers more of that French good stuff. Pitch-perfect command of voice, slow burn, delicious uncertainty about who is playing what game and whether they know that others think they’re on to them. (Lotta pronouns there, I admit.) Honestly, the book could have been longer: the last 75 pages or so were too hurried for my taste. French is good with dogs. Gamboling across the fields after a scent, huffing the occasional dramatic sigh while lolling on the wood floor, barking at a strange car juddering down the drive. Gimme more!
Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023)
I reviewed this for On the Seawall. What a terrific, impressive book. If you only have the appetite for one history of the Holocaust, this is the one. I especially loved how Stone shows the Holocaust to be an ongoing phenomenon, the meaning of which continues to be contested in the most unlikely ways.
Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories (2023)
Push comes to shove I prefer Hadley’s novels to her stories, but I like her stories a lot too. (I once wrote about one of my favourite early ones.) I read these in a rush, one after the other, which is a terrible way to read a collection. I’d read a couple before, in The New Yorker. They were still good on a second reading. Not quite Alice Munro-levels of shifting-narrative-times-to-narrate-striking-events-in-otherwise-ordinary-middle-class-lives, but close.
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (1992)
Another book I wouldn’t have read were it not for One Bright Book. Huge thanks to Rebecca for choosing this terrific collection of poems addressed to and spoken by flowers and gardens and times of day. Listen to the pod for the details of our reactions, but I’ll just reiterate here that what delighted me most in these poems is their syntax. Glück’s punctuation is an arresting joy.
Turns out I’ll be teaching our intro to the English major course next year, and I’m thinking hard about assigning these.
Guy Gavriel Kay, Sailing to Sarantium (1998)
Kay is the homme moyen sensuel of fantasy writers, which makes him catnip to me.
Why yes we are hurtling to the middle of 2024, but I’m popping in with one last take on 2023. And I’m thrilled that it’s by a writer whose intellect and fearlessness I admire a lot. Shinjini Dey is a writer of criticism and essays. She has written for the Cleveland Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries of Post 45 and others. She can be found @shinjini_dey.
Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale (1962)
I’ve always had projects and reading lists—organized by author, by zeitgeist, by theme—but I couldn’t stick with it in 2023. I wish it had been a dilettante-ish year, with a range as wide as its corners, but instead I kept falling out of love. My reading has been distracted, unintentional, mawkish in its inattentive flailing. There have been writing blocks followed by reading blocks and its strained reversal. Late in January, Dorian asked me to write something, anything, for this blog. And I wondered whether retroaction could salvage a shape from the romance. [Ed. – Yes, I’ve wanted to feature you here for a while! And let me say to everyone, Shinjini turned this piece in almost three months ago. It’s me, the problem is me.]
Despite this, I was surprised. I read about a hundred books during the year (a hundred-and-six to be precise). Some of these I read for review/essays, and some to discover myself anew, and others just to anchor me. All rather bland held against the high drama of my assumptions. Does a life spent reading always feel incongruous to the readings? [Ed. – Yes.] In April I read Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, all six of them, because I wanted to feel invisible, hidden in the shadow of large institutions. This British spy series encapsulates a closed world—one where the spies create the conditions for their own stature and relevance by fucking up, creating problems for the next cog in the wheel. It’s high workplace drama about bosses never cleaning their own spilt guts, ideologues, and semen; something pedantic about their missions and something bumbling about their failures. What better way to feel comforted about your own rootlessness by digging through Empire’s anxieties and paranoias? [Ed. — best description of these books ever.]
The other series (and every series when read in one long sighing week produces the effect of binging, and binging always feels slightly abject) [Ed. – Did Lauren Berlant write about binging? Because binging feels like a real cruel optimism situation…] harkened back to a time when SFF was intricately reimagining science through science’s own conceits. I dwelt in a time when scientific progress did not mean approaching singularity through hyperrealism. I read Nancy Kress’ Sleepless series about the utopic possibility of eugenics and post-scarcity: a tragic, generational epic. Connie Willis’s Doomsday trilogy and quite a few of Kage Baker’s Company books, where time travel is the occupational labour of history/historiography departments. Both series possessed this affective irony towards the workplace and bureaucracy—and one may call this class consciousness, but I read it as a national culture emerging out of unions and well-paying blue-collar jobs. But, because of it, the genre negotiates with political economy, and speculative utopianism was always its plumed stage. Was Jameson right? More likely accurate about then than now. [Ed. – That seems right. Surprising to me how important he seems now; in my day he was treated as a bit of a one-hit Vegas hotel wonder.]
In a nostalgic mode, I also read the Avidly series of short monographs (Avidly reads Poetry, Avidly reads Theory, Avidly reads Screen Time, etc.) imagining either being a young student in the academy, or someone handing over introductory texts to young students. I gave to myself the gift of (potential) responsibility. So much of literature is tempered by the academic institution, so much personhood is granted through the production of a self within that institution (does dark academia then seem simulated, sublimated?). I, too, keep oscillating between the academy and the paraphernalia of that world—wary of getting too close, bothered when its it gets too far out. I keep the academy at arms’ length [Ed. – smart], and these simple, fast-paced books, which offer the vicarious experience of a passionate hunger for knowledge, have become part of my tumultuous pattern. I read a few every year. I also read Glitch Feminisms by Legacy Russell, which was blurbed by Lil Micquela (the fictional influencer), and though it is a manifesto, I disliked how repetitive it was, how much it relied on new idioms.
Nonetheless, there was specificity. There were campus novels too (Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, Elaine Hseih Chou’s Disorientation) and those that aren’t campus novels but skirt around that polyphonic experience of camaraderie and community, which couple the grind with the sexual, romantic, intellectual or even self-mythologizing pursuit, whose narrative world is small, even incestuous. [Ed. – Great description!] I sought out The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (trans. Natascha Wimmer) to read again after being bowled over by Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, a novel that was truly political, that captured so much about the relationship between art and politics. Kushner posed (and answered differently) the question that animated Savage Detectives as well, the question about an attractive young woman who circulates within an artistic economy as either symbol or commodity, and why there is no political economy without sexual politics. The difference between Real Life or Disorientation and these novels is not that Taylor and Chou’s work is devoid of sex—there’s enough sex, beautiful sex—and not that the community forms without the sexual charge—it’s there, homosocially, homosexually—but for Kushner or Bolano, the art doesn’t exist without sexual politics. And so, I turned to Lauren Berlant (I often turn to Berlant). And I read novels that mimicked this charged atmosphere: I read all of Nona Fernandez’s memoiristic narratives (Space Invaders and Voyager, both translated by Natascha Wimmer) set during the Chilean dictatorship that took me into communities congealed through terror (and what happens when terror becomes mundane, leaving fantasy to paper over the sinister boredom that persists). [Ed. – You sold me on these!] I also became impatient alongside Natascha Wimmer, devouring what she translated, placing her at the center of my explorations into literature. I read other Bolanos. I swam through Kushner’s other novels and decided, no, The Flamethrowers reigns supreme.
I read two other novels with an academy at the center of a character’s moral crisis: Anjum Hassan’s History’s Angel and Dorothy Tse’s Owlish. Hassan’s book is about pedagogy in crisis because of right-wing nationalist politics. It picks up with a middle-aged teacher of history having to reconcile himself to being made historical and read against the grain, to being revised as a Muslim man in contemporary India. How does one negotiate everyday life within fascism, when ebb and tide all conspire to erase you? Hassan’s protagonist turns outward as a witness, following its Benjaminian namesake—but in Owlish, the professor, at odds with an island under occupation, turns to fantasy, to dolls, to magic; he relieves himself of the burden of public life. Read together, these novels depict intellectual thought in the public sphere as a lost creature, howling, crying, playing pretend. [Ed. – Such an enticing comparison of two books I am now keen to read!]
I read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These because of its deceptively short length but the novella made me delight in quiet and steadfast prose, prose that keeps up with its characters, that makes room and board for them; I read Foster to prolong with Keegan’s tight sentences. I developed a taste for surfaces, writings that reflects off water or other surfaces, rippling through each page—and the way I am sometimes, impulsive yet able to sustain that impulsiveness, I turned to read narrative theory (Surface Relations by Vivian L. Huang, then Narrative Discourse by Gerard Genette, as one does). The more I thought about flatness, as an important part of the surfaces, the more I wondered about disaffectation as a minor affect. I taught a few students about flatness in Sofia Samatar’s Monster Portraits as an exercise in narrativizing personhood. But by then I had already hit financial crisis and it sought to narrate all other crises through debt and management and I could do nothing. I read poetry: Sharon Old’s Odes, Franny Choi’s Soft Science and The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On, Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door, Amelia Rosseli’s Hospital Series, Diane Ward’s TROP-I-DOM, Jenny Zhang’s My Baby First Birthday, Yi Lei’s My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree, Solmaz Sharif’s Customs and more Sean Bonney. [Ed.—Well, I know Olds, anyway. This litany of names unknown to me makes me feel… old.] In abstraction and particularity, I got through a bad week and then I read, voraciously, novels about workplaces, one in between each new gig I applied for.
There are a few glib things I can say about workplace narratives (I can also say a few thought-out things), but I’ll limit myself to the glib and pithy since the rest is work.
There were once too many workplace narratives set in a publishing house/bookstore—but the content farm is the new publishing house (Emma Healey’s The Best Woman Job Book or Hana Bervoets’ We Had to Remove This Post). Corollary, the workplace novel that is set inside the content farm and the tech industry is about a cog in a wheel, but the cog is unable to narrate the wheel. Its precarity is homelessness (Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe, Satoshi Yagisawa’s Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, Sarah Thankam Matthews’ All This Could Be Different)and its dystopic imagination is noir homelessness (Jinwoo Chong’s Flux, Victor Manibo’s The Sleepless, Molly McGhee’s Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind). There are few workplace novels about unobviated homelessness.
The best workplace narratives are about artists (Emily Hall’s The Longcut, Tade Thompson’s Jackdaw) and the outstanding ones are about sex work and reproductive labour (Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, Olga Ravn’s My Work translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart, Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, Polly Barton’s Porn: An Oral History). It is impossible to be an artist without being a whore or a mother, which is to say, only a whore or a mother understands the conditions of the economy where you have to labour past the point of love (Eva Balthasar’s Boulder). [Ed. – I want to read the longer version of this little essay you’ve just given us!]
Alongside these books I read some Eva Ilouz (Cold Intimacies, What is Sexual Capital written with Dana Kaplan); I also read histories of candy—but none of those texts are worth mentioning here. But after the saccharine, it makes sense that I turned to novels where love was an abjection, an ejection from the real, the narrative of erotomaniacs—Evelio Rosario’s Strangers to the Moon translated by Victor Meadowcroft and Anne Mclean, Charlie Markbreiter’s Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan, Anna DeNiro’s OkPsyche, and Lena Andersson’s Wilful Disregard.
Does my movement make sense? This movement from precarity to practice? There’s certainly something searching about it, an example not of how we write about crisis but about what we read through crisis. Self-identification and self-abnegation in equal measure, with a little treat. If after, or in between these, I read some horror, something murderous, somethings with a mystery to suspend this accounting, would it be unforgivable? [Ed. – It would not.]
So there was a litany of murders.
A mystery, Raza Mir’s Murder at the Mushaira, which plays that trick of the narrator withholding information of the murder till it end; the trick makes me experience the detective as fascist. Imagine making Ghalib fascist!
Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, translated by Margaret Sayers, which carries kinship like a haunting. Perhaps here the diversion took me to read all of Yuri Herrera (Signs at the End of the World, Transmigration of Bodies, Kingdom Cons, Silent Fury), all the bodies that moved or need to be moved, and the corporeality of language in the fold. Babak Lakghomi’s South proceeded from Pedro Paramo into the wind and the desert.
Tom Lee’s The Alarming Palsy of James Orr waited to be killed because he needed care in a staid, boring, unnecessary stasis.
Michael Cisco’s The Divinity Student killed language and taxidermied the remainder. So did Hwang Yeo Jung’s The Spectres of Algeria, translated by Yewon Jung, and then made a community of writers rewrite it from memory.
Sigrid Nunez’s The Last of Her Kind has a murder that is about the conviction of law and conviction of spirit—where the scandal of murder is always less than the scandal of biographical detail. [Ed. – My fave Nunez: nobody ever mentions it.] Norman Patridge’s Dark Harvest is also murder by institution, a novel that is aware of how much the ritualized depends on cinema. Eugene Lim’s oeuvre, which has a suicide at its heart, is aware of this scandal too.
So, in the litany of murder there was language, form, genre, a litany of gestures of remembering and remaindering.
Etel Adnan, Landscape (2014)
Is there a shape to these readings? There certainly appears an attempt to escape the form of the institution. At the end, plus or minus a dozen other books, it appears that there is still a romance of maladjustment, scabbing, survival, and complaint. [Ed. – Without the romance, scabbing is hard.]
In any case, these are the best and most indulgent shapes I can make. If I were to practice restraint, I’d say “the reader tried to change” and this would become an essay of self-fashioning—this is more, merely, a year in review. [Ed. – Thanks, Shinjini. One of the headiest of these reviews yet to appear here. Here’s to more institution-busting in 2024…]
Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his third, is by Scott Lambridis (@slambridis). Before completing his MFA, Scott earned a degree in neurobiology, and co-founded Omnibucket.com, through which he co-hosts the Action Fiction! performance series. Read more at scottlambridis.com.
Each year I have a reading goal of at least 52 books. This year I read 151, including 37 new countries. Out of those, here’s the top ten, in the order in which they were read.
Edward Hopper, Tramp Steamer, 1908
1. Still No Word from You / Peter Orner (US, non-fiction)
A mix of short (often very short) stories, many centered on growing up in Chicago in a Jewish family, but Orner’s biggest gift is his ever-present love of books and reading. His soliloquys on books he loves, and his skill at tying life memories to the books and stories that resonate with him still are the most captivating and infectious. At the prose level, Orner can shatter you in a sentence. [Ed. – Sounds painful!] And yet if you listen to him talk about stories (his or others’), you’ll notice he’s laughing the entire time. How can you deny that delight?
2. The Ice Palace / Tarjei Vesaas(Norway, fiction)
A Norwegian child takes a walk in the woods after school to see a frozen waterfall, and never returns. Seems simple, but no book has immediately filled me with a sense of coldness and vague menace, and kept it going like this one. The prose is sparse and spare, the story distilled to the very essence of wonder, mystery, and heartbreak. In memory, the book feels like an ice crystal itself. [Ed. – I hear so many wonderful things about this book: keen to read it!]
3. The Summer Book / Tove Jansson(Finland, fiction)
A girl spends a summer with her grandmother, sharing little moments of wonder and delight, in this collection of interconnected stories (technically a novel, but each story is self-contained). It’s hard to explain why I love Jansson so much, but everything she touches is strange and delightful. She’s most known as the creator of the Moomins, that blob-like cast of characters for children, first appearing as a comic strip that swept through Europe and inspired not just a series of wonderful children’s novels, but the Disney-like Moominland (which I must visit some day). There’s also a great documentary on her as a “failed” artist called, simply, Tove. Her magical children’s stories can surprise you with their adult-ish realism, and her “realistic” adult stories read like fairy tales. Start anywhere: you may fall in love.
4. People from Bloomington / Budi Darma(Indonesia, fiction)
A collection of short stories based on the author’s time at Indiana University for grad school. Ho hum, you say? They’re absolutely crazy though! The utter strangeness of them, the people, the absurd human interactions, the grotesque portrayals of common human nature — I’ve never read anything like it. A simple mundane event sets off a series of events leading to completely unpredictable endings. The narrators in particular (or maybe “the” narrator, since they have similar voices) observe and make note of the most unusual things. The narrator in one story falls and smashes a cake and when he opens the box he says “it looked worse than Mrs Ellison’s face,” a face never mentioned before or after. In another: “Good thing her big ears didn’t fall off.” Hilarious and bizarre! The friend who recommended it said it best: “The book is described as a realistic world portrayed through an absurdist frame, but I would add that even the way he achieves this is unique.” This is a weird book where weird things happen to weird people, revealing the deep strangeness waiting beneath seemingly tranquil suburban life. Beware though: you’ll probably never want to visit Bloomington.
5. Treasures of The Thunder Dragon: A Portrait of Bhutan / Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck (Bhutan, non-fiction)
Written by the current Queen Mother of Bhutan! [Ed. – Probably the only book from Bhutan ever mentioned on this site—and absolutely the only book from Bhutanese royalty.] Bhutan is fascinating in its own right, as a mostly isolated piece of protected land in the Himalayas most notable for prioritizing Gross National Happiness over Gross National Product. Why is this important to them, how did they come to it, how do they legislate and realize this drive towards happiness day to day, and what does that mean for the rest of us? The Queen Mother weaves the answers to these questions as takes you along her own tour of the country, its villages, its wonders, and its people. Her love of this unique country, at once more primitive and further evolved than our own (and a great many others) is so gently omnipresent that you’ll start looking for flights before you finish.
6. Death and the Penguin / Andrey Kurkov(Ukraine, fiction)
I picked this up on the recommendation of a Russian friend just after the war in the Ukraine began. I normally don’t rank my top 10s, but I will dub this one my favorite of the year without hesitation. An aspiring writer is offered a job writing obituaries for a newspaper, for people whom it turns out aren’t dead yet. Oh and he also lives with a melancholic penguin named Misha he’s adopted from the local zoo. It’s a noir mystery in flavor, full of dark humor as the two of them are thrown into a mafia intrigue the protagonist never fully understands or even appreciates. There’s a sequel too, but this one was so good I’m scared to read it. [Ed. – Agree, terrific book. I too have had the sequel sitting here for years, unread…]
7. The English Understand Wool / Helen DeWitt(US, fiction)
What was this book? Who is this author? [Ed. – A genius!] A novella from my favorite publisher, New Directions, coming in at barely 70 pages, and dubbed a fairy tale by Google (it is not a fairy tale), it’s the story of a sassy 17-year-old girl obsessed with extreme taste and avoiding mauvais ton in all situations, who loses her family, and all her money, and must weigh her wits single-handedly against the sharks of the New York publishing world who want to sign a deal with her and sell her story. Brutal, savage, artfully heartless, absolutely precise, and with an ending that’s pure genius.
8. The Royal Game / Stefan Zweig(Austria, fiction)
RIYL The Queen’s Gambit, Zweig’s classic chess story written 80 years earlier tells the tale of an unnamed narrator who discovers a Russian chess master is traveling in the same boat from New York to Buenos Aires in the midst of WWII, and attempts to lure him into a casual game the narrator is sure to lose. He begins receiving whispered advice from a watching businessman, and what unfolds over the course of three matches that challenge the pompous Russian master’s assumptions and abilities is the parallel tale of this Austrian’s businessman’s arrest, imprisonment, and torture by the Gestapo. Memorizing chess moves in solitary confinement is his only means of survival and, as Zweig deftly describes in only 100 pages, both his triumph and undoing.
9. Every Man For Himself and God Against All / Werner Herzog(Germany, non-fiction)
The south German drawl of this prolific director of both documentaries (Grizzly Man) and features (Aguirre the Wrath of God) is legendary, narrating his films with metered precision the wondrous horror of existence (“Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess; there is no harmony in the universe” is a classic, but my fav is the YouTube of an interview with him in which he’s shot and when asked about it simply waves the question away and remarks, “It was not a significant bullet”), so I highly recommend listening to this autobiography with Herzog reading it. [Ed. – Agreed that’s a classic, but don’t sleep on his retellings of Curious George, also on YouTube.] His films are renowned for the unique point of view of his protagonists, and the singularity of his images, but it’s challenging to have a conversation about him without addressing or succumbing to the mystique of his deeds as a filmmaker. The shit this guy puts himself through for a shot! For “truth”! So when he describes episodes from his life (filming or not), you start to wonder how much he’s nurturing his own myth. My favorite moments: nearly killing himself on skis on a dare, reading dead letters sent to the town of Northpole (it exists), and meeting a pair of identical twin diagnosed nymphomaniacs who finish each other’s sentences and stare into each other’s eyes instead of a mirror to fix their hair and makeup. The book will make you want to see every film, and imagine the ones he hasn’t gotten to make, but even more you might just find yourself envying (kinda) such a superhuman life. Enjoy it as an autobiography of an artist with a singular vision, or as a larger-than-life caricature of a man who is probably fully aware of his own mythology and how to keep it alive.
Edward Burtynsky, Shipyard #12, Qili Port, Zhejiang Province, China (2005)
10. Maniac / Benjamín Labatut(Chile, non-fiction) [Ed. – Listed by many as a novel, FWIW]
Last year, this science-loving essayist made my top 10 with When We Cease To Understand the World, his series of vignettes on famous physicists and mathematicians staring into the abyss in the act of or as a consequence of their insights and creations, each which reads more like dramatization than documentary. In Maniac, he narrows his focus and dives into one of the most singularly brilliant minds of all time, Hungarian John von Neumann, the one-man think tank behind everything from the atomic bomb to the invention of computing, game theory, genetics, and artificial intelligence, a genius coveted by the US government for his necessity in national security even more than Oppenheimer, and a guy many have heard of (including myself; there are math constants named after him), but couldn’t say much about. Heavily researched, and told through a chorus of voices, Maniac recreates a man everyone should know of, and captures with propulsive momentum the ascent of modernity alongside the decline of a mind too ineffable to endure. The last section leaps away from von Neumann and dramatizes the moment when AI categorically shifts its capabilities from chessmaster to confounding the masters of the world’s most esoteric ancient game, Go, and becomes something beyond a simple calculating machine, something new, and beyond our comprehension. Whether you believe the hype and horror of those who believed a computer could never a master the art of a game so complex as Go, it’s Labatut’s primary interest in and his ability to render our human fear of science and technology that makes this book stand out [Ed. – Thanks, Scott!]
Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his first, is by Ricardo Chavira (@waryenthusiast). Ricardo is a reader, not a writer, but he thinks writers are cool. When he’s not reading, running, cooking for friends and family, building even more bookcases, or making maple syrup, he makes his living in sunny CT. Having done graduate work in philosophy, he, naturally, works in IT.
Edvard Munch, Kragero in Spring, 1929
A few years ago, I started keeping track of my reading with a detailed list. I wanted a handy list I could consult (likely on my phone) if and when a friend would ask what I’d been reading lately. Too often, my mind would freeze and I’d maybe utter one title from 3 months ago, only later kicking myself for not recalling the wonderful books I’d just read in the last few weeks. [Ed. – Relieved to know I’m not the only one. “Uh… books… I read some books.”] What started as a mental crutch has evolved into a comprehensive spreadsheet, tracking title, author name & gender, genre (fiction, non-fiction, poetry), date I finished the book (which also gets written on the last page of the book), where I finished the book (city, but often on a plane or train), whether it was an audio book, library book, read by my book group, etc.
In my non-book-reading profession, there is an adage that “what gets measured gets improved.” [Ed. – Hmm.] Perhaps that applies here as well. In recent years, I’ve sought to diversify my reading palate, reading more books written by women and persons of color, reading more non-fiction (left to my devices, it’s overwhelmingly fiction), borrowing more books from my local library, reading more from “the backlist” (as I tend to get excited by recent releases). Being aware of what I’m reading allows me to be more deliberate about what I read. It’s also fun to run the numbers each January, look for trends, chastise myself (for not reading enough poetry), feel good about myself (for reading more works in translation), and make plans for the coming year (which are never followed through completely).
My other book tradition is the annual reshelving that takes place shortly after New Year’s. Every year, I put the books I read on their own shelf. Audiobooks, library books, and books on loan are not there, of course, but it’s fun to watch that empty shelf slowly fill up and, eventually, spill over to the next. [Ed. – Wait, what did you say?? I drifted away when you said “empty shelf.”] And after the new year, the year’s reads get shelved into the general mix of the library. It’s an opportunity to reflect again on these books, but really an excuse to muck around with my library. For whatever reason, it’s a very satisfying activity and one I’ve come to look forward to. [Ed. – What a lovely tradition!]
<insert obligatory comment about how awful the year was> Yes, 2023 was a dumpster fire of a year in so many ways, but not a bad year for books and reading. The year began with anticipated titles from many of my favorite contemporary writers*, some of which are mentioned below.
(*a partial list of authors with 2023 releases that had me worked up: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Colson Whitehead, Rebecca Makkai, Luis Alberto Urrea, Hilary Leichter, Matthew Desmond, Rebecca Solnit, Zadie Smith, Lauren Groff, Emily Wilson (trans.), Jesmyn Ward, Jhumpa Lahiri – whew!)
So let’s get on with it. Herewith, some rambling thoughts on many of the books I read. Enjoy and happy reading.
Some highlights – Loved these books, here’s why.
Chain-gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
A highlight of the year for me was Adjei-Brenyah’s follow up to Friday Black, his fantastic debut of short stories. Chain-gang is set in a near future where prisoners are given the option of joining “chain gangs,” teams that fight in gladiatorial hand-to-hand combat in exchange for a shot at freedom. These so-called “hard sports” have corporate sponsors, stadiums full of shrieking fans, and lucrative online steaming shows. Despite all this, we’re somehow given a story of love and humanity amidst the chaos. Calling it satire or dystopia only hints at Adjei-Brenyah’s brilliance, as he approaches his set-up as more than just a sendup of current society and the role of the carceral state. At a public reading, I asked him how he threads the line between plausibility and seemingly improbable exaggeration (a televised reality show with prisoners fighting to the death? no, but I can kinda see that …). [Ed. – Alas, I can totally see it.] As I recall, he said the trick is not just coming up with a dramatic story, it’s having a twist that makes it work. He’s not just stepping on the gas, exaggerating the status quo. Rather, he takes something away or adds to make the story stick. Here, the conceit is not that prisoners are being violently exploited for public/private profit. The conceit of the novel is that it’s happening out in the open, and we not only don’t care, we consume it. As terrifying as that sounds, there’s an urgency to this novel that can’t be ignored.
Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead
We’re living in the age of Colson Whitehead, in case you’re wondering. A follow up to Harlem Shuffle, we get to revisit Ray Carney, the furniture store owner and erstwhile fence of stolen goods. Unable to score Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter, Ray calls in a few favors and one thing leads to another… The depiction of Harlem in the 70s is spot on; and Whitehead has such an ear for the rhythms of speech, music, and street noise that do so much to convey the bygone era. Whitehead is deft as ever in exploring matters of race and society. Musing on a performance in which a young Michael Jackson wants to talk about the blues, “Carney chuckled – the kid was ten.” But after a moment’s reflection, “Carney shouldn’t have laughed. What ten-year-old black child didn’t know about the blues?” This is the second in a projected trilogy and my arrangement with Whitehead is simple – you keep writing them, I’ll keep reading them. [Ed. – Ha, love that! Loved Shuffle; look forward to this one; excited to hear about the third.]
Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
I love the campus novel and this is one of the best. I recently came across a copy of the NYRB edition, so took it as a sign to revisit an old favorite. Happily, it mostly holds up. The old school misogyny felt tired and dated (as it should). Margaret may be a manipulative drama queen (says so right there in the margins of my old copy), but it hardly justifies her treatment. Still, Amis is such a good writer, tossing off lines such as: “It was from this very bottle that Welch had, the previous evening, poured Dixon the smallest drink he’d ever been seriously offered.” On the whole, the novel still works and neither characters nor readers emerge unscathed. Coda: Happily, I received another copy for Christmas, as Hatchard’s, the venerable London bookseller, has issued a gorgeous limited edition of Lucky Jim. Anyone want an old paperback copy? [Ed. – Good offer, friends!]
Milkman, by Anna Burns
I was excited to read this book when it came out and finally got around to it (only 6 years later). I knew it was going to be good, but it’s always a thrill when a book so wildly exceeds your expectations. The psychological depth, the suffocating closeness of the tight-knit community, the deadly gossip, and the rapid-fire language make for a heady combination. So many passages were chock full twists, descriptors, and fulsome lists that I feared she’d run out of words. But she never did. So grateful.
The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen
On one level it’s a campus novel (and you know how I love a good campus novel), but also an incisive depiction of antisemitism, and a scathing indictment of the powers that be. It’s also a riot. Cohen guides us with such a steady hand through the myriad offenses endured by our humble protagonist, Ruben Blum, the only Jewish professor on a small upstate New York campus. Describing a note from Blum’s obtuse department chair: “’Rube,’ it read, in his characteristic mélange of the casual and turgid.” [Ed. – Heh] But Cohen also doesn’t hold back in depicting the flaws and hubris of his characters. The Jewish professor, and titular patriarch, whom Blum is asked to host is none other than the father of the current Israeli prime minister. This book should be read and appreciated despite, and because of, its association with current affairs.
The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff
The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff
This is also the age of Lauren Groff. This year I read her first and latest novels to achieve my Groff completist status. [Ed. – Ooh, did you get the button??] I love how varied her writing is; she never writes the same book twice. A grad student trying to make her way in the world and learning you can’t come home again (except when you do). A young woman fleeing an early American colonial settlement and trying to survive in the wilderness. As with Whitehead, I will read everything she writes. Keep em coming. She’s also opening a bookstore! [Ed. — !]
Phantoms, by Christian Kiefer
By all accounts (viz., a scroll through his Twitter feed), Kiefer is a busy man, juggling teaching, a large family, and crazy rock & ice climbing expeditions. [Ed. – No joke, that climbing stuff is insane.] He also manages to write some wonderful novels. Phantoms tells the story of Japanese and American families torn apart by WWII and the shameful internment camps. Years later, the story is refracted by the memory of a young writer who is slowly uncovering the truth, while dealing with his own trauma as a Vietnam veteran. A story of secrets, lies, bigotry, war, and other American values, Phantoms is truthful without being cynical, and just hopeful enough without giving in to sentimentality. And Kiefer gets bonus points for having joined our book group discussion via zoom!
Found in Translation – I don’t know why translated literature is such a hard sell in this country. It’s the literary equivalent of yelling at children “eat your vegetables, they’re good for you!” With publishers such as NYRB, Europa, Charco (and many other wonderful indie presses), it’s so easy to find good translated lit. Try it, you’ll like it.
Translating Myself and Others, by Jhumpa Lahiri
I just can’t say enough good things about Lahiri, she’s the bee’s knees, the cat’s pajamas. I get giddy thinking about her work. [Ed. – Paging @bibliopaul!] Long story short for those not keeping track at home: In recent years, Jhumpa Lahiri has been writing in Italian and translating (herself and others). Never fully at home in English (the language of her upbringing) or Bengali (the language of her parents), she learns Italian in college. Years later, she returns to it by packing up the family and moving to Rome (as one does), where she immerses herself in language study. Before long, she’s hanging out with Italian writers and translating their work. And she stops writing in English as her primary language. These essays are both critical (such an ear for how other writers work) and personal (artfully exploring her technique and motivations behind her writing and translations).
Roman Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz
New short stories from Lahiri (her best form, in my opinion) is cause for celebration. These don’t disappoint. Set in a contemporary Rome and populated by people who look and speak differently from the locals, these stories remind us the beauty and coarseness of the human condition. And yes, she wrote them in Italian and later translated (all but two of them) into English.
Ties, by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri
Starnone is a luminary in the Italian literary scene and not known well enough here in the States. And is translated by Lahiri. And published by Europa. What’s not to like?
The Door, by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix
I often saw this book cited as a favorite NYRB, so was thrilled when I found a used copy. And even more thrilled when I began to read it. Szabó gives us Emerence, a housekeeper, street sweeper, and eminence grise of a small Hungarian community. At first, Emerence seems aloof, secretive, even arrogant. She’s all of these things, but also insecure and vulnerable, as slowly emerges from her complicated relationship with Magda, her employer (and enabler). The depth of the characters and complexity of their relationships carries on to the end, giving us a stunning portrayal of people at their best, worst, and most human. [Ed. – Incredible book, now I want to read it all over again.]
A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet
Krasznahorkai is a wizard. It would be too easy to say this story is like a dream. But there is an ethereal quality to this book that evokes so much thought and feeling, and yet remains just out of one’s grasp. Long, wonderful discursive passages on weather, architecture, and math that evoke sheer longing. There’s a short chapter on the wind and air that has passed through this temple that’s just a joy to read. A great way to end the year for me.
Fantastic Night, by Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell
These stories of reversals, betrayals, misunderstandings, and moral discoveries are a delight. To contemporary readers, he has a certain Old World charm, and it’s not surprising he’s come back into vogue recently as both literary and pleasure reading. I’ve been told that with Zweig’s unique voice, you’re either in or you’re out. Count me in.
At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop, translated by Anna Moschovakis
Diop does so much in this short novel. In the trenches of World War I, our protagonist takes revenge on enemy troops after his best friend is killed. A grisly descent into madness ensues that terrifies even his fellow soldiers, making him an outcast in every way. The narrative feels like something out of Camus, but darker, and stayed with this reader for a long time.
Good Genre – Another absurdity of the reading community which I cannot abide are the knee-jerk slights often directed towards so-called genre fiction. [Ed. – We do not allow that sort of thing here at EMJ.] Here are some standouts in fantasy, sci-fi, and crime fiction.
Hell Bent, by Leigh Bardugo
In Bardugo’s world, magic is real and practiced by students at Yale University’s secret societies, such as Skull and Bones. (Campus novel alert!) A sequel to her blockbuster Ninth House, Hell Bent picks right up where the action left off and doesn’t stop. I’ll admit to a local bias that adds to my enjoyment of these books as I studied there, live nearby, and my wife is friends with the author (read the acknowledgments!). [Ed. – What?!?!?!] But even without any extraneous connections, it’s great fun. Alex Stern is part of an organization that is supposed to keep the secret societies in check, but she has a way of making things worse and/or better and pretty soon things are literally going to hell. Along the way, Bardugo gives us more esoteric history (some it speculative) and plenty of her trademark creativity in the magic, spells, and monsters that populate this world (demons and vampires, yes, but not exactly like what you’ve seen before). I always love the second part of a trilogy (what can I say, I’m a middle child), but I am eager for the next installment.
Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R. F. Kuang
Another Yalie (along with Bardugo), Kuang has written 5 novels, is working on a PhD (to complement her Oxford and Cambridge degrees), and hasn’t bothered to turn 30 yet. Wunderkind bio aside, Babel is a lot of fun. We’re at Oxford in the 1830s, but in this version, magic is real and harnessed by scholars at the Royal Institute of Translation who manipulate silver bars inscribed with translation. The effects of this magic power the British empire and are the source of its global domination. Not all sits well with a group of young students, most of whom are foreign-born and recruited for their language skills. Plenty of action, intrigue, and wrestling with moral and political dilemmas make for an engaging read. And did I mention it’s a campus novel? [Ed. – I’m gonna give this one another try. I abandoned ship, but I think I missed something good.]
Bloodchild and Other Stories, by Octavia E. Butler
Who knew Butler also wrote short stories? Not many (stories, that is), but those collected in this volume are bangers. [Ed. – Such bangers.] Part of the fun of short stories is delivering a punch, a great insight, or deep emotion in just a few pages. And sci-fi is great at creating alternate worlds where the rules are different and you get to decode those new norms. Doing both of those things well at the same time is no small feat. Happily, Butler doesn’t skimp on her trademark thought-provoking imagination. More than once I felt equal parts excited and unsettled as I figured out the premise of each story. “Ah, so that’s what’s going on. Yikes, that’s what’s going on.” [Ed. – Well put, R]
Lessons in Birdwatching, by Honey Watson
I hadn’t read a solid sci-fi novel in a while and this one really satisfied that itch. At first, I felt out of practice, trying to decipher which way was up in this new world. “That can’t be right, is that really happening? I often said to myself. And oh, yes, it was happening. Whether it’s right or not is up to you, dear reader, to decide. In the meantime, Watson has a ball with political intrigue, war, sex, drugs, violence, resurrecting an ancient god, and giving us some really manipulative characters you can’t help feel guilty rooting for. A sequel is necessary, as I have a feeling it’s going to get worse before it gets better. And I can’t wait.
Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane
Solid storytelling, plenty of violence, salty characters, and local color keep the pages turning. Is this a screenplay masquerading as a novel? Given Lehane’s novels’ track record, the adaptation can’t be far behind.
A Family Affair – Few things in life are more satisfying than enjoying books with your family, especially children. Scratch that, there’s nothing better.
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
This was at the top of my wife’s Leigh Bardugo’s friend’s “books I love that I can’t believe you haven’t read” list. Feel lucky to have such a great reading partner. [Ed. – Aww, love this.]
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Ryan North, Albert Monteys (graphic novel)
As my son continues to develop his literary tastes, his current go-to list includes Steinbeck, Murakami, and Vonnegut. He recently acquired this lovely graphic novel version of Slaughterhouse Five, one of his favorites. It’s a wonderful version with fantastic artwork, remains true to the novel, and made for great conversation.
Afterparties, by Anthony Veasna So
So was a wonderful writer whose life sadly ended far too soon. My niece loved these interconnected short stories of Cambodian Americans in California and wouldn’t rest until I read them. Loved the book and love having such passionate and discerning readers in the family. [Ed. – Lucky man!]
Kinda wacky, but good! – A very ad hoc collection of books that were unconventional in form and/or content.
The Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder
Ogawa gives us a world where words are gradually erased from society, forbidden from use, after which their referents disappear from the world and, eventually, from memory. Birds are erased from language, then trees, then collective memory. Gradually, more and more of the world is removed from experience and memory, making even the most modest forms of resistance heroic. Haunting and imaginative in its use of language, I couldn’t stop thinking about it when I was done. It brought to mind the parts I most loved about Orwell’s 1984. More frightening than an oppressive, totalitarian government is the devious control and manipulation of language. If someone controls the words people can use, they’ve already won. Excited to hear there’s a movie adaptation in the works!
Pure Colour, by Sheila Heti
Heti gives us a world that is just a first draft, in which Mira’s love for Annie and her father give her different experiences and perspectives on being in the world. When her father dies, his spirit goes into Mira and they live as a leaf on a tree, until Mira remembers her other modes of existence. None of that really explains the novel, but that doesn’t matter, because Heti is not encumbered by conventional expectations of what a novel should do or be about. That alone is reason enough to read it. [Ed. – Plus, she spells “colour” correctly.]
Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing After Another, by James Morrison
Morrison, that irascible voice of reason on #BookTwitter, has given us a splendid book that hops across centuries and generations of a family, giving us one bloody thing after another. Such is life. Each chapter is a separate short story, all loosely interconnected and featuring glass eyes, a fake mermaid, and culminates in a Sydney Opera House set aflame. [Ed. – Indeed. So good!]
Memoirs of a Polar Bear, by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky
Three generations of polar bears who are heroes of the revolution, dissidents, expats, and celebrities. These are their stories. As original as it is improbable, it was fun to let go and go along for the ride.
Make Way For Poets – Never enough poetry, but here are two I enjoyed.
Her Whole Bright Life, by Courtney LeBlanc
LeBlanc brings joy, anger, sorrow, and love into her work in ways that make you want to read, reflect, and read again. That is to say, she’s a wonderful poet. When she curses North Dakota for the difficult life it inflicted on her hard-working, dying father, her rage is palpable and as beautiful and terrifying as anything the Greeks knew. But she’s equally adept giving us tenderness, as when she describes her husband rescuing an injured bird:
He carried it to a tree at the edge of our
property, gentled it onto a branch
Love the verb “gentled”!
Poems [For, About, Because] My Friends, by Hattie Hayes
Hayes’ first collection of poems is, as the title suggests, centered around her friendships and is a wonderful evocation of the time of life when friends serve as a chosen family and are deeply pivotal to one’s life. Hayes matches those emotions with some lovely turns of phrase:
You sign every letter “yours,” as though I needed a reminder
and
I have all this faith I’d never dream of cashing in
I’m also grateful to her for introducing me to Hilary Leichter. Will keep an eye on Hayes’s work to come.
Good, But Didn’t Change My Life – These books were fine, well-written, and loved my many. I enjoyed them, but I wasn’t as overwhelmed as I’d hope to be.
Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
Love the subject, the writing was great, but I somehow didn’t connect with the story for much of the book. It seemed too distant and diffuse, somehow. But the ending had such beauty and moral clarity, it seemed to make up for it.
Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Am working my way through Ishiguro. I enjoyed these short stories, but they didn’t bowl me over, as much of his work has done. Bonus points for the interconnected short stories. Always love that.
I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai
I loved The Great Believers, so was ready for more Makkai. And while it was a pleasant and enjoyable read, it just didn’t have the same depth as her previous work. To be fair, not every novel can (or should) be The Great Believers, but I was left wanting more. And yes, bonus points are awarded for another campus novel.
Didn’t Quite Work For Me – Some books that left me cold and a bit disappointed; didn’t hate them, they just didn’t work for me. These are three great writers who will continue to do just fine without my approbation, so let’s not lose any sleep here.
Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton
Catton is a great writer and weaves a wonderful story setting up a conflict between a scrappy, left-wing, environmental collective and a billionaire tycoon with shifty motives. The dialogue is tight and snappy, with some great bits on the shortcomings of liberalism, failures of capitalism, and dismal state of the environment. Loved those passages. The problem (ok, my problem) is that the villain is so rich and powerful, with unlimited resources, weapons, and technology, and utterly devoid of scruples, that it makes for an uneven conflict. Wait, maybe that’s the way of the world! Even so, it makes for a lopsided novel, and ultimately detracts from its enjoyment.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride
Love McBride. And there’s much to love in this novel. But it feels like three different stories, which ultimately don’t come together as a cohesive whole. The many colorful characters, the fascinating slices of history, and the clever plot twists are fun, but they seem more anecdotal and don’t really add up. Much preferred Deacon King Kong.
The Gathering, by Anne Enright
I’ve enjoyed other Enright books (esp. Yesterday’s Weather), so was glad when our book group chose this. Unfortunately, this book never took off for me. We’re introduced to a large Irish family mourning the loss of their son/brother by suicide, mostly from the perspective of a close sister. It made me feel a bit churlish, but I kept waiting for something to happen. And when the revelations were disclosed, they were late in coming and seemed so predictable as to have lost some of their moral weight. But hey, it won the Booker, so what do I know.
Quick, Fun Reads – Because sometimes you just want an easy, fun read.
Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid
The rise and fall of a fictional band (Fleetwood Mac, basically) is told as a series of interviews years after they collapsed at the peak of their fame and success. It’s a good rock and roll story, with the requisite amount of sex and drugs. The story breezes through the haze of the 70s and makes you care about the main characters without getting too nostalgic. The tv adaptation was also good fun, but as always, read the book first.
The Wife of Willesden, by Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith taking on a modern adaption of Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath? Yes, please! A raunchy playfulness comes through (how could it not?) and you know Smith is having fun updating the material to modern sensibilities while keep true to the source material. And the account she gives in the introduction about haphazardly falling into the assignment of writing a play is equally hilarious.
The Fraud, by Zadie Smith
OK, not quick (pretty long, actually), but since we’re talking about Smith, it was fun to read her 19th Century novel (she also narrates the audiobook). Her take on a sensational trial and its ensuing wild publicity was enjoyable. And I know she’s also making some comments on the state of the novel, but I don’t have the energy right now to unpack all that, let alone be upset by it.
Glad I Finally Got Around to Reading Them – I had heard so much about how great these books were (especially from some very ardent fans of Light) that I finally caved in and read them. Glad I did.
All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr
OK, I see what the fuss is all about. Doerr is a wonderful storyteller, especially adept at slowly weaving together seemingly disparate strands across time and place. So much fun to see him work. Also, I stupidly avoided Cloud Cuckoo Land because of the goofy title. Joke’s on me, because a novel featuring a long lost Greek story name-checked by Aristophanes is right up my alley!
Edward Hopper, Barn and Silo, Vermont, 1929
So that’s what I got. Not everything I read and not everything there is to say about what I read. But enough for now. And you? [Ed. – Thanks, Ricardo! Quite a year.]
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 