Tag Archives: Margaret Laurence

Nat Leach’s Year in Reading, 2024

Posted on by under Guest post, lists, review, year in review

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his sixth, is by my longtime friend Nat 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.

Millu, Liana – Smoke Over Birkenau (1947) Trans. Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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!]

Nat Leach’s Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on by under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Today’s installment, his fifth, is by my longtime friend Nat Leach. Nat is a nineteenth-century scholar turned college administrator who has spent the last 6 years reading the books on his shelves in alphabetical order. He has recently doubled his social media presence by becoming mostly inactive on not one but two platforms, posting occasionally as @gnatleech on Twitter and @gnatleech.bsky.social on Blue Sky.

Berthe Morrisot, Hide and Seek, 1873

For reasons not worth going into, 2023 was actually a pretty rotten reading year for me. I read sporadically, finished only 20 books, and only progressed through one letter in my alphabetical reading project, finishing K, and making a brief start on L (so, after 6 years, I’m not even halfway through the alphabet; my 10-year plan, which was originally a 5-year plan, is looking like it will become a 15-year plan). [Ed. – Very Stalinist of you, Nat.] I wasn’t even able to write entries for each book as I went along, as I’ve done in the past, and was considering foregoing my annual post, but Dorian threatened to sue for breach of contract, so here we are. [Ed. – Look, a deal’s a deal. You want the glory, you gotta write the post.]

One meaningful reflection I was able to draw from my year’s reading is a better understanding of why I enjoy reading the way that I do, progressing alphabetically through my shelves rather than making conscious decisions about where my reading should take me. Thomas de Quincey, in a wonderful essay on “Sortilege and Astrology,” explains that he believes in astrology, but not in astrologers; there is indeed a pattern connecting all events in the world, but anyone who claims to know it is a charlatan. And yet, practices such as sortilege (the opening of a book at random and putting one’s finger on a passage as a means of divining the future) entail putting ourselves in the hands of this unknowable force of fate. [Ed. – Ah, finally I have a name for what my students do when I throw out a question in class.] My reading practice is then a kind of sortilege in which I trust that fate will put in my hands the right book at the right time. And very often, as I discovered this year, I’m able to trace out patterns and connections that I may not have been exposed to had I more rigorously organized my reading.

 I often found myself reading two books at the same time—books that offered unexpected congruences, and paths leading from one to the other. And thus, since I did not manage to write entries for individual books this year, I present my reading by category, which often means: by categories I would not always have chosen to adopt in advance, but discovered while reading.

Books Written in 1989 that Challenge Canonical Western Conventions of Storytelling: Thomas King – Medicine River and Maxine Hong Kingston – Tripmaster Monkey

A super-specific first category, but these are two very different books. For many years, my office was just around the corner from a poster with a quotation from Thomas King: “the truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” The narrative structure of Medicine River seems to be an illustration of that axiom. Each chapter cuts (in a way that feels very cinematic) between an action in the narrative present and one in the past. We thus gradually learn how the past of the protagonist, Will, shapes the person he’s become in the present. The book also suggests how this is true at a deeper cultural level, referring to significant events in Indigenous history such as the battle of Little Bighorn and the occupation of Wounded Knee, but for the most part the focus is personal and the tone is lightly comic, but also somewhat melancholic.

Kingston’s novel, on the other hand, is much more explicitly disruptive of literary expectations in its use of Chinese legends and stories to revise American literary and cultural norms. The novel’s protagonist is a Chinese-American hippie whose hybrid status is reflected in his name, Wittman Ah Sing (geddit?) and whose life in 1960s San Francisco is inflected with wild imaginings that superimpose figures of Chinese legend onto the American present, culminating with the performance of an extravagant play that ends with a chaotic collapse of the distinction between actor and audience. [Ed. — !] Like King’s novel, we see how stories create, and do not simply reflect, identities.

Kingston’s book segued nicely into the next book I read, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. At one point, Kingston includes an extensive quotation from Kipling’s narrative of his visit to the United States. In that book, Kipling becomes a spokesperson for a racist past whose perspective persists in the present, a tendency that can certainly be seen in Kim, the story of a boy who gets caught up in the political intrigue of maintaining English power in the Indian sub-continent. It still works as an adventure story, though Kipling’s colonial perspective on India is consistent with the account of the Chinese inhabitants of San Francisco that Kingston critiques.

Holocaust Memoirs and Diaries: Gerda Weissman Klein – All But My Life, Victor Klemperer – I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945, Ruth Kluger – Still Alive

These were sitting next to each other on my alphabetically ordered shelves. I have much less experience with Holocaust texts than Dorian, so I will not pretend to any expertise here, but in the small teaching experience I have had, my approach has been to encourage students to notice differences—the atrocities of the Nazis took many forms, and were experienced differently based on a whole range of factors including location, age, gender et cet.—but also to notice significant similarities and patterns. [Ed. – Nat is too modest: I still use a terrific assignment he designed on the topic of Holocaust diarists.] Each of these texts describes some distinctive aspect of Nazi terror: Klein was part of one of the infamous “death marches,” which she describes more thoroughly than any account I had previously read [Ed. – absolutely agree], Klemperer describes the everyday psychological tortures endured by Jews living in Germany, as well as the horrors of the fire-bombing of Dresden, while Kluger’s account spans a range of locations and forms of violence from Vienna to Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. Looking for patterns, it is evident that each also benefits from a number of timely pieces of good fortune that contribute to their survival: for example, Klein was able to live through most of the war in the relatively protected confines of a weaving factory, Klemperer avoided deportation because his wife was Aryan, and the bombing of Dresden in fact provided him with an opportunity to remove the yellow star from his clothing and escape from the city, and Kluger benefited from timely advice to lie about her age at Auschwitz, and a well-timed decision to escape from a death march. A somewhat more curious parallel is that both Klemperer and Kluger fled to Bavaria, and both would have been in fairly close proximity when the war ended. [Ed. – Good point! A function of how the regime decided to compress this remaining pool of slave labour into a central, contiguous section of the Reich: the Sudetenland, x, y, and Bavaria.] In short, three very different books, with some similar lessons, including an awareness of the very narrow line between survival and destruction.

Classic postmodern novels from when it was still OK to use the word “postmodern”: Robert Kroetsch – The Words of My Roaring, Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Yeah, I know it’s cool to dump on the word “postmodern” in our enlightened 21st century, but I still find it a useful way to speak about texts that reflect on, and engage critically with, their own status as text. Both books use postmodern strategies to explore the construction of individual identity and that of a national past. Kroetsch’s book experiments with the genre of the folk tale, and is narrated by Johnny Backstrom, a political candidate in Alberta during the Depression who promises the voters—all farmers struggling with drought conditions—that it will rain. Kundera’s novel reflects more philosophically on the nature of chance and coincidence (coincidentally all the stuff I wrote about in my introduction) against the backdrop of Czechoslovakia in the Communist era. As with King and Kingston, these are books that think about how stories create identities.

Books set in the 1970’s (but written later): Hanif Kureishi- The Buddha of Suburbia and Rachel Kushner – The Flamethrowers

I was reading these at the same time, and all the ‘70s cultural references kept getting me confused as to which one I was reading. But the easy way to tell the difference was that one of these books harnesses that cultural anxiety/nostalgia in an interesting way, and the other… not so much. Kureishi’s book is great, exploring his familiar territory of cosmopolitan London and the racial and political tensions of the period. It moves deliberately from the idealism of the hippies to the backlash of punk, and ends with the election of “the new Prime Minister,” unnamed but obviously Thatcher, as represented in the striking images at the conclusion of the BBC miniseries. Things would never be the same again…

As for The Flamethrowers, if I were being charitable, I would say that the book wasn’t for me, as I simply didn’t find the subject matter interesting. If I were being uncharitable, I would say that the book cobbles together a whole bunch of supposedly “cool” images and events of the ‘70s just because they are cool, not because they serve any narrative logic. And the author’s Afterword kind of confirms that hypothesis in describing her process of starting with striking images.

Books set against the backdrop of 17th/18th century nationalist revolutions: Lady Caroline Lamb – Glenarvon and Giuseppe di Lampedusa – The Leopard

Again, a category that features one very good book, and one very bad book. Lamb’s novel was really written only as an attempt to avenge herself on Lord Byron, with whom she had a scandalous affair before he unceremoniously dumped her. The structure of the novel is bizarre, as the description of the affair between Glenarvon (Byron) and Calantha (Lamb) is sandwiched between a Gothic narrative that seems to make very little sense (the explanation provided at the end doesn’t seem to match with the beginning, but I have no desire to try to figure it all out). And, oh yeah, Glenarvon is made into an Irish patriot leader in the 1798 rebellion. For some reason. [Ed. – Very moody, the Irish. Just like Byron.]

The Leopard, on the other hand, is a fantastic book, often hailed as one of the great historical novels of the 20th century. What makes it great, I would argue, is that it represents a moment of critical historical change from a multivalent perspective that shows just how complex change is. Don Fabrizio is essentially the last in a long line of Sicilian nobility. His time is coming to an end, he knows that it is coming to an end, and he even recognizes that in some ways it is right that it is coming to an end. But we also see that good things are being lost along with the bad, and that a different form of badness is ascending. In short, Lampedusa shows historical change in all its ambivalence, as well as the conflicting emotions that it gives rise to. [Ed. – I gotta read this again: been far too long.]

Books read for Women in Translation month: Svenja Leiber- The Last Country and Clarice Lispector – Agua Viva

Well, in my case it was Women in Translation two and a half months, but that’s OK. I was hoping that the Leiber book would be the one to break me out of my slump of disliking 21st century novels, but it was not to be. It hooked me at first, but this is a book with an epic scope (the life of a musician through the vicissitudes of 20th century Germany) but an episodic structure, which I grew to find infuriating more than anything. The prose also felt very abstract—there were many moments when I honestly couldn’t tell whether a sentence was meant to be literal or metaphorical—but I’m not sure if this was a translation effect or inherent in the original. As for the Lispector, it was my first experience with her, and seemed to me an interesting cross between literary and theoretical prose; she reminded me of nobody more than Maurice Blanchot. Which, if you know me, is a compliment. [Ed. – He’s understating things. That’s like his highest compliment. Well, maybe if he’d said it reminded him of Levinas.]

Books read with the #NYRBWomen23 Group: Eleanor Perenyi – More Was Lost, Elizabeth Taylor – A View of the Harbour

I wish I’d had more time to participate in this wonderful series choreographed by @joiedevivre9 but these were the two that were on my shelves already (and hey, I’m going to get to “P” and “T” eventually, right?). Two very different books, Perenyi’s a non-fictional account of her life and marriage to a Hungarian nobleman before and during World War II, and Taylor’s an account of lives of quiet desperation in an English seaside town. Both excellent. [Ed. – So excellent]

A few classics: Honoré de Balzac – Le Père Goriot, Heinrich von Kleist – The Prince of Homburg, D. H. Lawrence – Sons and Lovers

Kleist’s play (like much of his work) is ahead of his time, a proto-Freudian reflection on dreams, reality, desire and death. This was a re-read for me, and confirmed its greatness.

OK, I haven’t actually finished the Lawrence yet (2 chapters left), but I figured mentioning it would score me points with Dorian. [Ed. – It does. You now have 7,967.] Lawrence’s prose is utterly compelling, and even though I find that most of the characters fall into the literary-critical category of “big idiots,” I am absolutely glued to the book. [Ed. – Ha! Accurate!] I’m also enamored of the fact that the book is set in the area of Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire that my grandparents used to live in, and I recognize many of the places mentioned from visits in my youth. When the characters go to Alfreton or Crich Tower, I internally cheer as if a rock band has just casually mentioned how great it is to be in <insert your city here>.

Saving the best for last, I started the Balzac shortly after joining Twitter some 6 years ago, and read it in French, which made it slow going for me. Appropriate then, that I finally finished it in 2023, the year of Twitter’s demise (or whatever you want to call the transformation it has undergone). In any case, this is such a wonderful book about the perils and temptations of society and money, and the challenges of maintaining a moral compass in the face of them. Apparently, I now have a whole lot of Balzac that I’m going to need to read. [Ed. – Hell yeah lfg!!!!!]

Felix Nussbaum, Shore at Rapallo, 1934

That’s about it. Will 2024 be a better year? Who knows how far I’ll get through the L shelf, and who knows how long it’ll take to get through that monstrously large stack of M’s (now is the time that joining those recent group reads of The Balkan Trilogy, The Levant Trilogy, Moby Dick, and The Man Without Qualities is really going to pay off!). But with Nella Larsen, Margaret Laurence and Ursula Le Guin among the next authors on my list, I am guaranteed some treats in the coming year. [Ed. – You sure are. Thanks as always, Nat.]

My Year in Reading, 2023

Posted on by under book review, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

I wouldn’t say I had a great reading year. I was on my phone too much, I was being anguished or avoiding being anguished about the myriad injustices of the world, which I knew too much and could do too little about. I travelled—maybe not too much but an awful lot, for me—which was often energizing and enjoyable, but also got in the way of reading.

I felt, in other words, that I had frittered away my one wild and precious reading life. I bottomed out in the middle of the year, regularly tossing aside books unfinished after having spent more time with them than they deserved or that I could find patience for. A querulous reading year, you could say.

And yet some things stood out. Links to previous posts, if I managed to write about it.

Henri Fantin-Latour, Le coin de la table (1872)

Dwyer Murphy, The Stolen Coast

A rare heist novel where the heist, though satisfying, isn’t the main attraction. I loved this stylish, smart, funny tale of a man who has put his Ivy League law degree to use in taking over the family business: giving new identities to guys on the run and getting them the hell over the border. A great book of off-season resort towns.

Simon Jimenez, The Vanished Birds

I’m still getting my bearing in contemporary sff so take these comments for what they’re worth, but it seems rare to me that a book takes as many swerves as this one: the narrative moves back and forward in time and all over the place, from a near-future nearly uninhabitable earth to a galaxy far-away in space and time. You get invested in a storyline and then it ends but sometimes it comes back. But even more than the structure I loved this book for its emotional seriousness: its many relationships are doomed to fail because of their constitutive circumstances. For example: a man ages fifteen years between each meeting with his beloved, while she, thanks to intricacies of stellar time travel, has only aged a few months. The emotions might be bigger than the ideas, but I was totally okay with that.

Two novels by Katherena Vermette

One of the greatest working Canadian writers. This year, fresh off the thrill of teaching The Break to smart, appreciative students, I read The Strangers and The Circle, a bleak and beautiful trilogy of indigenous life in the aftermath of the cultural trauma of the residential school system.

Four novels by Kent Haruf

It should tell you something that in early April, one of the worst times in the academic year, I read four novels by Kent Haruf in just over a week. I loved Plainsong the most but enjoyed Eventide, Benediction, and Ours Souls at Night almost as much. Easy reading, sure: plain syntax rising to gentle arias, nothing fancy, maybe a little sentimental. But these books are so warm and kind. Each is set in Holt, Colorado, out on the eastern plains, where the mountains are a smudge on the western horizon and it’s sometimes hot and sometimes cold but always dry. The people are ranchers and school teachers and social workers and hardware store owners and ne’er-do-wells and retirees. Everyone is white and no one thinks that’s worth noticing. The time is hard to pin down. Sometimes I thought the 70s or early 80s but we’re probably talking the 90s. Things were different before the internet. The characters’ lives are modest and they seem fine with that. They go about their business, do their work, make good choices and bad ones. People look out for each other, but they judge each other, too. Little kids get lost biking, but they come home again. It’s not all roses, though. High school boys bully girls into having sex, over in that abandoned house just down from where the math teacher lives. People get sick, go hungry, lose jobs. Some characters get what the preacher will call a good death, some die unreconciled to their kin, some without warning, too soon. Life just keeps happening, you know?

Some readers will call this hokum, but I ate it up. Haruf won my heart. I thought him especially good on second chances and unexpected turns of fate. Of all the stories that weave through these loosely connected novels, the best concerns two brothers, old bachelors, ranchers, who agree to take in a pregnant teenage girl and who, to everyone’s surprise, not least their own, form a new family with her. That scene where they take into the next town over to get things for the baby and insist on buying the best crib in the store? Magic.

Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

Smart, sexy, stylish books about how we relate to bodies privately and publically, and whether we can recast the narratives that have shaped aka deformed our understanding of what it is to live in those bodies. Greenwell’s Substack is worth subscribing too; he makes me curious about whatever he’s curious about. Can’t wait for the essay collection he’s writing.

Emeric Pressburger, The Glass Pearls

Yep, that Pressburger. Closer to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom than any of the (indelible) films they made together. Karl Braun, a German émigré, arrives at a boarding house in Pimlico on a summer morning in 1965. A piano tuner who never misses a concert, a cultured man, a fine suitor for the English girl he meets through work. I’m not spoiling anything to say that Karl isn’t just quiet: he’s haunted—and hunted. For Karl Braun is really Otto Reitmüller, a former Nazi doctor who performed terrible experiments, a past he does not regret even as he mourns the death of his wife and child in the Hamburg air raids. Now the noose is tightening and Otto/Karl goes on the run… Suspenseful stuff; most interesting in this play with our sympathies. Not that we cheer for the man. But his present raises our blood pressure as much as his past.

Toni Morrison, A Mercy

A short book that covers as much ground as an epic; a historical novel that feels true to the differences of the past but that is clearly about the present; a classic modernist Morrison text, where the first page tells you everything that’s going to happen except that it makes no sense at the time and the rest of the reading experience clarifies, expands, revises. Such beauty and mystery in so few pages.

Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy series (Translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw)

Cheating a bit since I read the first one in December 2022. I’m a huge fan of these novels about a family and the remote Norwegian island they call home from 1900 to 1950. I like books where people do things with their hands, maybe because I can’t do much with mine. The characters bring sheep into the upper field, fish with nets and line, salt cod, keep the stove burning all through the year, row through a storm, carry an unconscious man through sleet. It’s all a little nostalgic, a little sentimental, but not too much. Just how I like it.

Two Books by Walter Kempowski (Translated, respectively, by Michael Lipkin and Anthea Bell)

Fresh on my mind so it’s possible I’ve overvalued them but I don’t think so. All for Nothing, especially, is something special.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Last read in college—under the expert tutelage of Rohan Maitzen, this can only be called one of the highlights of my undergraduate experience. This time I listened to Juliet Stevenson’s recording, which perfectly filled a semester’s commuting. True, Arkansas traffic is not the ideal venue for some of Eliot’s more complex formulations, but Stevenson (as much a genius as everyone says, she do the police in different voices, etc.) clarifies the novel’s elegant syntax and famous images. The book’s the same, but I’m not; a whole new experience this time around. Much funnier, especially its early sections. (Celia is a triumph.) More filled with surprising events: that whole Laure episode (a Wilkie Collins novel in miniature), it was as if I’d never read it. And more heartbreaking: in 1997, I hated Rosamond, and I admit I still felt for Lydgate this time around, but I had so much sympathy for her, a character I’d only been able to see as grasping and venal. Speaking of sympathy, one of the glories of English literature lies in watching Dorothea as she matures from excitable near-prig to wiser and sadder philanthropist. Amidst all this change, though, some things stayed the same. Mary Garth still won my heart; the suspense at the reading of Featherstone’s will gripped me just as much.

It’s good to read Middlemarch in college. It’s better to re-read Middlemarch in middle age. It’s best to read Middlemarch early and often.

Konstantin Paustovsky, The Story of a Life (translated by Douglas Smith)

Six-volume autobiography of Soviet writer and war correspondent Paustovsky, a Moscow-born, Ukrainian-raised enthusiast of the Revolution who somehow made it through Stalinism to become a feted figure of the 1960s. The new edition from NYRB Classics contains the first three volumes. I only read the first two, not because I didn’t enjoy them (I loved them) but because I set the book down to read something else and the next thing I knew it was a year later. Paustovsky had something of a charmed life. His childhood was largely downwardly mobile, and he lived through so much terror and upheaval. And yet he always seems to have landed on his feet. Maybe as a result—of maybe as a cause—he looks at the world with appreciation. He can sketch a memorable character in a few lines. He writes as well about ephemera (lilacs in bloom) as about terror (I won’t soon forget his time as an orderly on an undersupplied hospital train in WWI). He can do old-world extravagance (the opening scene is about a desperate carriage ride across a river raging in spate to the otherwise inaccessible island where his grandfather lies dying) and the brittle glamour of the modern (for a while he drives a tram in Moscow). Trevor Barrett, of Mookse & Gripes fame, said it best: Paustovsky is good company. I really ought to read that third book.

Félix Vallotton, Still Life with Flowers, 1925

A few other categories:

Didn’t quite make the top, but such pleasurable reading experiences: Adania Shibli, Minor Detail; Paulette Jiles, Chenneville; Abdulrazek Gurnah, By the Sea; Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (teaching “Return to Sender” was a revelation: fascinating how even students who had seemed immune to literature shook themselves awake for this one).

Read with dread and mounting desperation, don’t get me wrong it’s a banger, but couldn’t in good conscience call it a pleasure to read: Ann Petry, The Street. Barry Jenkins adaptation when?

Maybe not standouts, but totally enjoyable: Margaret Drabble, The Millstone; K Patrick, Mrs. S; Yiyun Li, The Vagrants; Elif Batuman, Either/Or

Best dip into the Can-con vaults: Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel. Got more about of this now than I did in high school, lemme tell you.

Best book by a friend: James Morrison, Gibbons or One Bloody Thing After Another: Not damning by faint praise. It’s terrific!

Book the excellence of which is confirmed by having taught it: Bryan Washington, Lot. Maybe the great Houston book. I get that novels sell but I wish he’d write more stories.

Grim, do not recommend: Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By; Girogio Bassani, The Heron

Not for me: Jenny Offill, Weather; Annie Ernaux, Happening; Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose

Planned on loving it, but couldn’t quite get there: Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea. Sold as metaphysical body horror, this novel about a woman who goes to pieces when her wife returns from an undersea voyage gone catastrophically wrong as a kind of sea creature didn’t give me enough of the metaphysics or the horror. I figured it would be perfect for my course Bodies in Trouble but I couldn’t find my way to assigning it. Possibly a mistake: teaching it might have revealed the things I’d missed. Gonna trust my instincts on this one, tho.

The year in crime (or adjacent) fiction:

Disappointments: new ones from Garry Disher, Walter Mosley, and S. A. Cosby (this last was decent, but not IMO the triumph so many others deemed it; he’s a force, but I prefer his earlier stuff).

Standouts: Celia Dale, A Helping Hand: evil and delightful, can’t wait to read more Dale; Lawrence Osborne, On Java Road: moody, underappreciated; Christine Mangan, The Continental Affair: moody, underappreciated; Allison Montclair, The Right Sort of Man: fun; Joseph Hansen: wonderful to have the Dave Brandsetter books back in print, hope to get to more in 2024; Richard Osman: as charming, funny, and moving as everyone says.

Maigrets: Of the six I read this year, I liked Maigret and the Tramp best. Unexpectedly humane.

Giants: Two Japanese crime novels towered above the rest this year. I didn’t write about volume 2 of Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker (translated by Marie Iida and Allison Markin Powell) but maybe my thoughts on volume 1 will give you a sense. Do you need a 1000+ page book in which a strip of tape on a telephone poll plays a key role? Yes, yes you do. (Also, it has one of the most satisfying endings of any crime novel I’ve ever read.) More on Hideo Yokoyama’s Six Four (translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies) here. Do you need an 800+ page book in which phone booths play a key role? Yes, yes you do.

The year in horror:

Victor LaValle, Lone Woman: horror Western with a Black female lead and not-so-metaphorical demon, enjoyable if a bit forgettable; Jessica Johns, Bad Cree: standout Indigenous tale, also with demons; Leigh Bardugo, Hell Bent: serious middle-volume-of-trilogy syndrome. Many demons, tho.

The year in sff:

In addition to Simon Jimenez, I liked Ann Leckie’s Translation State, Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir, and, above all, the three novels by Guy Gavriel Kay I read this summer, which gave me so much joy and which I still think about all the time.

The year in poetry:

Well, I read some, so that’s already a change. Only two collections, but both great: Wisława Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems (Translated by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak), filled with joy and sadness and wit, these poems made a big impression, and Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic (fortunate to have met him, a mensch; even more fortunate to have heard his indelible performance).

The year in German books: I read two, liked them both. Helga Schubert, Vom Aufstehen: Ein Leben in Geschichten (On Getting Up: A Life in Stories), vignettes by an octogenarian former East German psychotherapist who had fallen into oblivion until this book hit a nerve, most impressive for the depiction of her relationship to her mother, which reminded me of the one shared by Ruth Kluger in her memoir; Dana Vowinckel, Gewässer im Ziplock (Liquids go in a Ziplock Bag): buzzy novel from a young Jewish writer that flits between Berlin, Jerusalem, and Chicago. The American scenes failed to convince me, and the whole thing now feels like an artefact from another time, given November 7 and its aftermath. I gulped it down on the plan ride home, though. Could imagine it getting translated.

Everyone loved it; what’s wrong with me? (literary fiction edition):

Made it about 200 pages into Elsa Morante’s 800-page Lies and Sorcery, newly translated by Jenny McPhee. Some of those pages I read raptly. Others I pushed through exhaustedly. And then I just… stopped. The publisher says it’s a book “in the grand tradition of Stendhal, Tolstoy, and Proust,” and I love those writers. (Well, I’ve yet to read Stendahl, but based on my feelings for the other two I’m sure I’ll love him too.) Seemed like my social media feeds were filled with people losing it over this book. Increasingly, I see that—for me, no universal judgment here—such arias of praise do more harm than good; I experience them as exhortations, even demands that just make me feel bad or inadequate. Increasingly, too, I realize how little mental energy I have for even mildly demanding books during the semester. (A problem, since that’s ¾ of the year…) I might love this book in other circumstances —I plan to find out.

Everyone loved it; what’s wrong with me? (genre edition):

Billed as True Grit set on Mars in alternate version of the 1930s, Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange indeed features a young female protagonist on a quest to avenge the destruction of her family, but Ballingrud is no Portis when it comes to voice. True, I was in the deepest, grumpiest depths of my slough of despondent reading when I gave this a try, so I wasn’t doing it any favours. But that’s a nope from me.

Other failures:

Mine, not the books. Once again, I read the first hundred or so pages of Anniversaries. It’s terrific. Why can’t I stick with it? I read even more hundreds of pages of Joseph and His Brothers, as part of a wonderful group of smart readers, most of whom made it to the end of Thomas Mann’s 1500-page tetralogy. I loved the beginning: fascinating to see Mann’s take on the stories of Genesis; interesting to speculate on why Mann would write about this subject at that time. (For me, Mann is in dialogue with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, another oblique response to fascism through stories from Torah.) My friends tell me it got a lot more boring shortly after I left off (the end of volume 2), but that’s not why I gave up. Turns out, I don’t do well if I’m supposed to read something in regular, little bits. I need to tear into books—and I wasn’t willing to make the time for this chunkster. Sorry, guys.

Odds & Ends:

A few albums that stood out: Roy Brooks, Understanding (reissued in 2022, but I’m not over it: this quintet, man, unfuckingbelievable); Taylor Swift, Midnights (I love her, haters go away); Sitkovetsky Trio, Beethoven’s Piano Trios [volume 2] (a late addition, but pretty much listened to it nonstop in December and now January).

After a decade hiatus, I started watching movies again. Might do more of that this year!

I was lucky enough to travel to Germany in late spring with a wonderful set of students. While there, I met so many people from German Book Twitter who have become important to me, including the group chat that got me through covid and beyond. (Anja and Jules, y’all are the best.) All these folks were lovely and generous, but I want to give special thanks to Till Raether and his (extremely tolerant) family, who took me in and showed me around Hamburg. (Great town!) Have you ever met someone you hardly know only to realize they are in fact a soulmate? That’s Till for me. What a mensch. Cross fingers his books make it into English soon. In the meantime, follow him on the socials!

Reading plans for 2024? None! I need fewer plans. I can’t read that way, turns out, and maybe I’ll avoid disappointment by committing less. Gonna be plenty of other disappointments this year, I figure. No need to add any self-inflicted ones. At the end of last year, I joined a bunch of groups and readalongs, because I want to hang with all the cool kids, but I can already see I need to extricate myself from most of them. One good thing I did for myself in 2023, though, was to stop counting how many books I read. I was paying too much attention to that number. Fewer statistics in 2024!

Piet Mondrian, Oranges and Decorated Plate, 1900

Finally, to everyone who’s read the blog, left a comment or a like, and generally supported my little enterprise (which turns 10 in a week or two…), my heartfelt. I do not know many readers in real life. You all are a lifeline.