Tag Archives: Richard Osman

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.

What I Read, June 2023

Posted on by under book review, month in review, review, Uncategorized

I know, I wasn’t sure if I’d be back either! The first half of the year kind of sucked. Writing here would have helped my mood, but I didn’t have the energy. The classic conundrum. Here’s hoping for better things in the fall semester. As to June, well, it feels like a long time ago, but here’s what I’ve reconstructed. Not my most enjoyable reading month ever, but considering that I spent almost two weeks in Newfoundland (it’s amazing, go if you can, take sweaters) I’m impressed I got through as much as I did.

Robert Longo, Study of Greenland Iceberg, 2020

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Space Crone Eds. So Meyer and Sarah Shin (2023)

Can you believe I’ve never read LeGuin? She must be pretty terrific, because I enjoyed this collection of essays, addresses, and stories even though I doubt it’s the best way into her work. Ranging from the 1970s to the mid 2010s, these pieces cover a lot of ground, but they return to the topic of women’s writing. LeGuin surprised me by writing about Woolf, Mrs. Oliphant, and Margaret Drabble rather than female sf or fantasy writers; I bet she’d say that realism, modernism, and fantasy are equally relevant modes of representing experience. Which isn’t to say that she ignores the fantastic: there’s a fun Borgesian story about an all-female polar expedition, and the title piece convincingly argues that the person best suited to head off into space to represent humanity would be an older woman (crones have seen and done it all, are (too) modest, and, because they best represent the experience of change, represent the best of us). As she writes in the essay’s immortal closing line, “Into the space ship, Granny.”

LeGuin wrote that when she was only 47—hardly a crone, except perhaps by temperament, and of course that’s what counts. But maybe she knew she was on her way to being one. This volume shows her to be wise, witty, and angry. Definitely a “no fucks to give” vibe to this collection. I haven’t even mentioned the piece I liked best, “What It was Like”, about the need to protect the right to abortion. How painful to read this memoir of life before Roe post Dobbs.

You can hear more on episode 15 of One Bright Book.

This book is published by Silver Press out of the UK and they do make a fine-looking book.

Susanna Moore, The Lost Wife (2023)

Moore’s novel concerns Sarah Brinton, who abandons her abusive husband in Rhode Island in 1855 and heads west in search of a childhood friend. In a matter of pages, Moore sketches out a long and unpleasant journey to Minnesota by train, line-boat (a barge pulled by mules), steamboat, wagon train, and riverboat. The opening of this novella is brief but not cursory; Moore’s descriptions of deprivation are sharp and evocative. Here’s Sarah describing her passage along the Galena River to the Mississippi:

The boat is meant for stock rather than passengers, and freight rather than stock. I sleep in a slatted chair in the bow, the hem of my dress stiff with dried mud, which has the advantage of keeping my legs warm at night. My cape covers the rest of me, including my head. Even so, my face and hands are swollen with mosquito bites. There are rats too, and I keep my feet tucked under me. The cattle, trapped in their sodden pens, moan through the night.

Unpleasantness, even misery all around, not least in those moaning cows. And things get worse before they get better: Sarah’s friend has died, likely of cholera. The man from the riverboat authority speculates she was buried in a sandbank; with malicious pleasure, he warns Sarah, “You won’t want the river to drop too low this summer.”

She must find a way to pull herself out of her grief and make a new life, always in fear that her husband might arrive to take her home. Before long meets a Yale-educated, laudanum-addicted doctor, John Brinton. Keeping her bigamy to herself, she marries the doctor and has two more children. The family moves west to the settlement of Yellow Medicine, where John has been hired by the Indian Agency to serve the adjoining Sioux (Dakota) reservation. Unlike the handful of other white women in Yellow Medicine, Sarah invites indigenous women into her home, befriends them, learns Dakota, even smokes a pipe. In this way, Sarah is like the protagonist of Moore’s otherwise totally different best-known novel, the sort-of-terrible but also fascinating quasi-noir In the Cut: a woman who is always “too much.”

 You can imagine how she is looked at askance, especially as tensions rise between the Sioux and the settlers. By the summer of 1862, the Sioux are starving, increased hunting having reduced the available game. Then comes word that the annuity promised by the US government has failed to arrive. (The money only enriches the white settlers, from whom the natives were forced to buy food.) Thousands of Dakota descend on the settlement, demanding provisions, but the Major in charge releases only the bare minimum. Several weeks later, Dakota attack settlers throughout the region, ultimately killing more than 350 and taking a similar number hostage. Some months later, the uprising is stopped by government troops, who kill an unknown number of Sioux and arrest hundreds more, mostly non-combatants. A military commission sentences 300 to death; 38 are hanged after Lincoln himself reviews the charges.

Sarah’s experience is the vehicle for this history lesson: she is briefly taken hostage but then rescued by a warrior whose mother had been treated by her husband. Chaksa, the warrior, hides Sarah and her children; Sarah, although terrified much of the time, rather likes living with Dakota. She especially likes Chaksa himself, not only for his kindness but for his strong, beautiful body. The exact nature of their relationship remains opaque, but at the end of the book, after so many of the people who cared for her have been killed or arrested, when she has been released and reunited with John, and nothing is as it was before, Sarah says that she has three husbands.

Moore handles this terrible historical moment with grace, sorrow, and irony. (For example, in his abolitionist zeal, John longs to join the Union Army, even as he is unable to see the oppression around him; and all of this despite his appreciation for indigenous medicine, which he even incorporates into his own practice.) I learned a lot from the book without feeling lectured to. Moore describes the landscape, especially its birds and plants, with pleasure and anguish at its increasing destruction. And she sympathizes with the Dakotas’ situation without taking on their perspective. It’s about as deft a story of settler-indigenous conflict that one could imagine being written by a white person. But I can’t say that we really need this particular story, told from this particular point of view.

The Lost Wife is based on Sarah F. Wakefield’s account of her abduction by Mdewakanton warriors in 1862, Six Weeks in the Sioux Teepees: A Narrative of Indian Captivity. Anyone read it?

Katherena Vermette, The Strangers (2021)

Vermette’s follow-up to her brilliant first novel, The Break (a book I loved when I first read it and which I love even more now that I’ve started teaching it), is named after an extended Indigenous family, one of whose characters plays a central role in the earlier book. The Strangers are aptly-named: strangers to white settler society, to each other, and to themselves, estrangement compounded by the neglect, disregard, and abuse they’ve suffered from the institutions that have forced themselves upon their lives.

People don’t seem to like The Strangers much—if they’re even reading it. I haven’t heard it discussed much (I don’t think it’s had US or UK release, which doesn’t help). The most compelling response I’ve read is this one by Rohan. I always appreciate her interpretations, but my experience of this book was so different to hers. It’s tough reading, no question—from its opening white-knuckle description of a female prisoner transferred to hospital where she gives birth to a child must immediately give into custody (where nurses and prison guards negotiate whether she should be handcuffed) to its repeated depiction of women whose anger and pain make them unable to keep hurting themselves. In that sense, it’s relentless. The Strangers is bleaker than The Break: whereas the members of its central family had the emotional resources to look out for each other, despite everything the world threw at them, here the characters have been so damaged by hurt, shame, and pain that their emotional ties are terribly frayed. And the institutions meant to help them (peopled in the book by social workers, guidance counsellors, law professors, and others) mostly hurt them more. Not everything is awful: a man reaches out to a woman in prison, bringing her a little out of herself; a girl reconnects with her birth father and finds a new, imperfect, but stable family which leads to a grace note in the final pages, where she begins a new chapter in life by going off to university where her roommate is someone readers of The Break will remember. But damage far outweighs repair.

And yet I was captivated by the book. As I thought about Rohan’s criticism that the book “just plods unhappily along,” I wondered if that was the point: after all, it was one of Freud’s early insights that trauma destroys narrative; victims of trauma can’t tell the story of their lives because trauma, as compulsive repetition and reliving, is the antithesis of narrative ordering. The Strangers is full of incident, but not much change. I found this sad and enraging, but not artless. I’m so curious to see what Vermette does next. I’m not done with these characters; I hope she isn’t either.

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club (2020)

When I first learned the premise of British television personality Osman’s foray into crime fiction I rolled my eyes: four friends in a posh retirement complex meet on Thursdays to put skills honed in their past professional lives (psychiatrist, labour leader, nurse, and, it would seem, spy) to use in solving cold cases. How could that possibly be any good? Well, when the writing is tight, the jokes actually funny, and the plots both twisty and suspenseful anything works. But as the four characters move from cold cases to a very live one, Osman does something surprising: he makes us feel the pathos of regret, loss, and increasing debility, even as he shows his characters to be unstoppable.

I’m grateful to my daughter for tipping me off to this book. Since then both my wife and I have devoured it. I enjoyed the book even more because we all enjoyed it so much. Highly recommended!

Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice (2021)

Just as good as the first. Ibrahim forever!

Minae Mizumura, An I-Novel (1995) Trans Juliet Winters Carpenter (2021)

I love Mizumura and even though this early work isn’t as memorable as Inheritance from Mother or A True Novel I still liked it a lot. If you listen to our discussion on One Bright Book you’ll see that Frances and Rebecca agreed. As English-speaking readers we lost some of the force of the book (famous in Japan for its liberal inclusion of English words and horizontal typesetting, as well as its renovation of the confessional form of the I-Novel, a kind of precursor to today’s autofiction), but we appreciated its reflections on loneliness, nationality, and identity.

A great novel of the pleasures of old-school telephone conversations.

S. A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (2023)

Less extravagant than its two immediate predecessors, but still plenty violent and gory, Cosby’s most recent novel blends horror tropes with contemporary race politics. This is the first of his books that I’ve read that focus on law enforcement—surprising, perhaps, for someone who’s been drawn to ordinary guys led by circumstance to become outlaws. Titus Crown, the first Black Sheriff in his rural Virginia County, is a strong character: committed to his home but despairing of its ability to change. All the Sinners Bleed joins other recent crime novels that challenge the genre’s tendency to value law and order. In other words, this is mature Cosby, and I liked the book just fine. But I missed the humour and orneriness of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland. More a sideways step than a leap forward.

Larry McMurtry, Horseman, Pass By (1961)

A grave disappointment. How could the author of that warm and wise wonder, Lonesome Dove, have started with this bitter, disagreeable work? A teenage boy, Lonnie, works his grandfather’s ranch in 1950s Texas: he fantasizes unpleasantly about the family’s Black maid, and looks on with fear and fascination at his step-uncle, who’d rather race around in his roadster than help with the cattle. This short book is filled with terrible things, most notably two extended scenes of violence: a rape described at excruciating length and with too much covert interest to make its overt disapproval convincing, and the liquidation of the ranch’s herd due to an epidemic of Foot and Mouth disease, described at even greater length. The cattle are herded into a series of pits before being shot:

The biggest old cows fell like they had been sledge-hammered; they kicked a time or two, belched blood into the dust, lay still. Not one in my pit got up. A calf dashed toward us and the man swung the gun and knocked it back on the body of a horned cow, its hind legs jerking. The old cows rolled their eyes and spun around and around. Not for a minute did the dust or the noise settle. Finally the last animal in the pit stood facing us, a big heifer. She was half hemmed in by the sprawled carcasses. She took one step toward us, head up, and the man fired, slamming her backward like a telephone pole had bashed her between the eyes. She lay on her side, one foreleg high in the air. The man took out his clip and went quickly to another pit, to help. I was as tight as my horse; I was sick of the heat, and of the dust smells and gunpowder and thin manure. I tried to spit the putrid taste out of my mouth, and couldn’t.

The first-person narration might explain that clumsy metaphor (the telephone pole), but I’m not buying it: a lot of it is just not that well written. Which is fine, most books aren’t. But what I really didn’t like is how its pretense at telling the hard facts of life is a cover for lurid excess.

In the end villainy disguised as grim reality carries the day. Lonnie, distraught, lights out of the territory. Demystifying the West is well and good, but the pleasure this novel takes in hurt made me feel sullied. Is all early McMurtry like this?

Robert Longo, Untitled (The Crown), 2021

Despite Vermette and Mizumura and some top-quality light reading in the Osmans, I wouldn’t call this a banner reading month. Tune in to find out if I got out of the slump in July!

Anne Cohen’s Year in Reading, 2022

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

Today’s reflection on a year in reading, her second for the blog, is by Anne Cohen (@aecnyc). Anne is a lifelong reader (preferably stretched out on couch or bed), retired lawyer, and former reporter. She lives in New York City with part of her family and two dogs, and continues to believe that the existence of Book Twitter saves her from homicidal and other anti-social behavior.

Man Ray, Glass Tears, 1932

I first got my glasses in the second grade, at almost the beginning of my reading life, and for the next 60 years, couldn’t function without them. A year ago, after repeatedly misreading price tags and after having lost several years of ophthalmologist appointments to the pandemic, I had cataract surgery in March and April, followed by several months of significant light sensitivity.

So when I looked back at my reading, I shouldn’t have been surprised (but was) that 2022 was a year of audiobooks.

These included the Anthony Trollope Barsetshire books (except Framley Parsonage, yet to be started), as well as Can You Forgive Her? and The Eustace Diamonds from the Palliser series, all read by Timothy West; Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, read by Harriet Walter; Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford; Anne Tyler, French Braid; Amy Bloom, In Love; Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves; Ferdinand Mount, Kiss Myself Goodbye; and Richard Osman, The Bullet That Missed.

Barsetshire and Palliser. Loving the Trollope was perhaps the biggest surprise of my year (or second biggest, after the realization, right after the first cataract was removed, that the trim around my bathroom mirror was actually white and not a yellowy cream). I had slogged partway through Phineas Finn for a book group several years ago and was bored stiff and, worse, annoyed.

My experience of the Barsetshire novels was entirely different, and I would often find myself grabbing print versions when I couldn’t wait to get to the rest of a chapter (and even when I already knew what happened, I still wanted to find out now how Trollope got his characters there).  

I had not expected the novels to be so wryly funny and spot on, even in apparently throwaway descriptions of barely-named characters, especially but not only members of the gentry and Parliament:

Sir Cosmo had a little party [i.e., a following] of his own in the House, consisting of four or five other respectable country gentlemen, who troubled themselves little with thinking, and who mostly had bald heads. [Ed. – The hair keeps the head warm enough to think, you see.]

Nor did I expect the characters to be so richly drawn, with even the least sympathetic of them humanly presented.

“It cannot be said that she was a bad woman, though she had in her time done an indescribable amount of evil,” Trollope writes of Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s wife. Bad things happen in Trollope but not so much outright evil, and so his word choice here—not misfortune, or unhappiness, or even disaster—is meaningful.

But even as Trollope demonstrates this woman has been an engine of ruin in the lives of others, he also shows Mrs. Proudie’s realization that her own life is among the debris: “At the bottom of her heart she knew that she had been a bad wife. And yet she had meant to be a pattern wife! She had meant to be a good Christion; but she had so exercised her Christianity that not a soul in the world loved her, or would endure her presence if it could be avoided!”

The unapologetic havoc Mrs. Proudie causes may make her an outlier in Barsetshire, but at least so far as I’ve read all the novels are about characters coming to grips with their limitations—whether of birth (ancestry, gender, class, nationality, education, family dynamics); money (having, getting, losing, and the manner of doing either); and personal characteristics (intelligence, pride, diffidence, physical and mental health).

While I’m looking forward to finishing The Prime Minister and onward, I still find both Phineas Finn and Phineas Redux tedious and unfinishable, maybe because the books focus so completely on a single character, without the switches within a skein of stories that, for example, makes The Rev. Josiah Crawley’s continual self-abnegation in The Last Chronicle of Barset less tedious.

The Balkan and Levant Trilogies. Olivia Manning’s account of a young married-but-hardly-know-themselves-let-alone-each-other couple during World War II supposedly mirrors much of her own life, which makes one wonder about her marriage. [Ed. – She married Guy, no question.] Harriet Walter’s reading of the first trilogy (alas, she hasn’t recorded the second) is remarkable; thinking back, I had to remind myself that she voiced all the characters, who are richly drawn and deeply flawed. I enjoyed both trilogies, despite a deep desire to smack most of the characters upside the head; I even missed Prince Yakimov. [Ed. – Yaki! One of the great characters in 20th Century British literature!]

Other audiobooks. I’m a big Amy Bloom fan, especially her short stories, which I’ve always thought of as small jewels. In Love recounts her mid-life marriage to Brian Ameche, a terrific guy who develops early onset Alzheimer’s, and his determination to end his life while he’s still competent to make the decision to do so. Two points I keep turning back to—that Brian Ameche died at Dignitas in Switzerland on January 30, 2020, just before the world shut down, and that a relatively early Bloom short story is about a woman whose married lover has Parkinson’s and wants her to promise to help him die when the time comes. Bloom reads In Love herself, and it’s funny and angry and heartbreaking.

We Don’t Know Ourselves, although non-fiction, is great story-telling.  Using his own life as a hook, O’Toole goes year-by-year through recent Irish history, starting in 1958. Highly recommend.

Cranford was non-superficial fun (and led me to order Mrs. Gaskell’s letters, which I’ve not yet started); French Braid was fine if not memorable; and The Thursday Murder Club books are made for audiobook (in a good way).

Some other novels. Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows (another potential trip to Dignitas, but blackly funny all the same); Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who was Dead and The Vet’s Daughter; Margery Sharp, Harlequin House (always entertaining but I don’t remember a single detail); Georgette Heyer, The Grand Sophy; Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Conditions; Herve Le Tellier, The Anomaly; Haldor Laxness, Fish Can Sing; Nina Stibbe, One Day I Shall Astonish the World (don’t bother—sorry Dorian) [Ed. – No worries]; Gwendoline Riley, My Phantoms (well-written but sterile and mean—sorry again, DS) [Ed. – Definitely mean. Not sterile, IMO, but I get where you’re coming from]; Willa Cather, The Lost Lady; and Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety (lacks the gut punch how-did-I-miss-that moment of her best, but her “not best” beats out the best of a lot of others).

And speaking of gut punches, the best single novel of my year was probably Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, about an overweight psychic named Alison and her relationships with others, especially her non-psychic assistant, Collette, and nasty spirit guide, Morris. (Thank you again, Backlisted.) 

There’s a lot going on here, as in much of Mantel’s work, about memory and the interplay of the living and the dead. Especially interesting were Alison’s musings about the connection of her physical size and her psychic work and whether they might echo the novelist’s sense of how her own body. “I try my best with the diets, she said to herself; but I have to house so many people. My flesh is so capacious; I am a settlement, a place of safety, a bombproof shelter.” Alison’s size is also a form of self-protection against Morris and his ilk. “What the doctors fail to realize is you need some beef, you need some heft, you need some solid substance to put up against the demons.”

This is one I’ll read again.

Mysteries. I’m always taken aback at how many mysteries I’ve read in a given year. (A lot.)

As I was finishing this, Dorian and his One Bright Book podcast colleagues were talking about how hard it sometimes can be to settle into a new novel; to become used to the rhythm of that specific universe. For me, a pleasure of mysteries, and mystery series in particular, is the absence of some of that acclimatization. [Ed. – Nicely put! Helps me see why genre fiction can be so comforting.] Mysteries are like sonnets—the typicality or transparency of their framework makes it fun to see how well a writer sets up character and plot; the bad or lazy writing can be howlingly obvious and the clever more enjoyable. [Ed. – Absolutely!]

This year, I read bunch of books by: Francis Vivian (Inspector Knollis); E. C. R. Lorac (always a treat); Margo Bennett; Brian Flynn (Anthony Bathhurst); John Dickson Carr (Gideon Fell—meh, am not a locked room person); Martin Walker (Bruno Courrèges, sadly not improving with age); Anthony Horowitz (Magpie Murders, not nearly as well-told as TV series); Christopher Bush (Ludovic Travers); Derek Miller (Sheldon Horowitz); and Rosalie Knecht (Vera Kelly). [Dorian, there’s one more, with a name a can’t remember about a gay guy in Scotland] [Ed. – Ann Cleves’s The Long Call?] [Ed. — We figured it out! Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room!]

Two very different series stood out for me, both written from the 1930s through the 50’s: Nicholas Blake (pen name for Cecil Day-Lewis, former British Poet Laureate), featuring Oxford-educated Nigel Strangeways, and Stuart Palmer’s series featuring middle-aged school teacher “spinster” Hildegarde Withers, working with NYPD homicide Inspector Oscar Piper.  The Blake books are arguably “better” written, but the Withers are more fun, and she gains in wisdom as the books progress.  

Four Lost Ladies, published in 1949, could have been a standard bad-guy-preys-on-vulnerable women, but Palmer (in Hildegarde’s voice) imbues the story with a deeper meaning, about women who “haven’t importance enough to be missed, they haven’t any close friends or near relatives, so nothing is ever done about it.” Everything starts with a former neighbor from whom Hildegarde did not receive an annual Christmas card:

Miss Withers began absently to fold and refold her napkin. “Oscar, do you happen to know just how many lonely, middle-aged, unattached women disappear right here in this city every year?”

“Not nearly enough,” Piper answered promptly. [Ed. – Hiss, boo!]

She let that one go by. “More than three thousand, according to recent estimates by the YWCA and the Travelers Aid Society.” …

He put a breadstick in his mouth. . . .”Relax, Hildegarde. … [W]e don’t get three thousand unidentified female stiffs in the city morgues in the course of a year—no, nor a tenth that number. Almost all the ones we do get are victims of accident, disease, or suicide. No, you’re barking up the wrong tree again. Those women you’re so worried about, they probably just got bored with the big city and went home. Or else they wanted to skip out on a husband or boy-friend, or beat some bills.”

Hildegarde, no big spoiler alert necessary, of course is right. (Check out the movies made about Hildegarde and Oscar, which unfortunately don’t include Four Last Ladies; available on Internet Archive.)

Diaries, letters and memoirs. Sylvia Townsend Warner diaries and correspondence with David Garnett; James Lees-Milnes early diaries; Paul Theroux, Kingdom by The Sea; Natalia Ginzburg, Family Lexicon; and Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt, Wheels Within Wheels, and A Place Apart: Northern Ireland in 1970’s; and the first two volumes of Diary of A Wimpy Kid, which helped prepare me for my 50th high school reunion. [Ed. — !]

Diaries of Chips Channon.  Last year, I wrote about the first two volumes of the interminable but somehow addictive Diaries of Chips Channon, a snobbish, American-born, royalty-and-luxury loving, anti-almost-everyone-else Member of Parliament, who was close to power in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In addition to an antisemitism barely tempered by knowledge of the Holocaust (to say nothing of people of color, whom he doesn’t even begin to notice), the Channon diaries are filled with hateful invective towards ‘my enemies,’ who seem to be legion.

The third and last volume was released this year, and Chips is largely unchanged, except for more frankly (but still obliquely) writing about his sex life; homosexual activity was illegal in Britain until a decade after Channon’s death, and the diaries suggest a mixture of discretion and bravado in his public conduct.

Bob Collins, The Morning Rush Hour, Victoria Station, 1960

Nella Last’s War and The Diaries of Nella Last.  Channon wrote for a posterity he assumed would be interested in the placement and menus at his dinner parties, the trinkets he gave to and received from royalty, and his conviction that Neville Chamberlain was right. 

Nella Last, on the other hand, was a housewife from the northwest of England; her diary was created in response to a request for volunteers from Mass-Observation, the groundbreaking social research project which sought information about the lives of ‘ordinary’ Britons. She could not have known her submissions to M-O would have a life beyond the study’s archive.

Reading the two in tandem was disorienting. It’s hard to believe—except for a few references by Channon to scarcity of turkeys and competent household staff and an occasional trip by train rather than in his Rolls—that he and Nella Last lived through and wrote about the same war and post-conflict austerity.

Her journals are filled with descriptions of eking out a supply of eggs or cream and the most useful cuts of whatever meat was available, of making rag dolls to sell at the Women’s Voluntary Service shop to raise Red Cross funds or to donate to local hospitals, of being unable for years of fuel rationing to make simple Sunday drives to a nearby lake.

Beyond their historical value, the diaries record someone once plagued by depression and self-doubt (“the rather retiring woman who had such headaches and used to lie down so many afternoons”) blossoming with her wartime volunteer work and with the incentive to record not just her observations of the world around her but of the changes in herself and her relationships. “After all these peaceful years, I discover I’ve a militant suffragette streak in me” and “[I] peel off the layers of ‘patience,’ ‘tact,’ ‘cheerfulness and sweetness’ that smother me like layers of unwanted clothes.” 

Nella’s tolerance for almost anything but hypocrites and bullies was particularly welcome after Channon’s spitefulness. She refused to shun unwed mothers, and while she’s not thrilled to see ‘conchies’ (conscientious objectors) on work teams who come to her volunteer canteen, she recognizes their humanity. Despite a single reference to “the ‘Jewish’ stamp’” of dresses gotten off-coupon while clothes were rationed, she describes her religion as “a mixture of wishful thinking and nature worship and a stern belief that God is Jewish” [Ed. — !]  and is “astonished at the mistrust and real hatred of Jews, in quite ordinary men on the street.” 

Nella was also aware of, and abashed by, what she recognized as her own biases. The local medical community includes several Africans, and she is surprised but pleased to see “chummy” interaction among the nurses of different backgrounds, “as if colour and race were one.” But after a pleasant chat on the street with one of the African nurses, who knows Nella from her hospital volunteer work, “my little happy feeling seemed to sour” at the sight of the white wife and biracial children of the local African eye doctor:

“Whatever the views I hold of ‘some day, one colour, one creed,’ the sight of half-caste children seems to strike at something deep down in me. I say I’ve no ‘colour bar,’ but wonder if I’ve a very deep rooted one. I could work with coloured people, enjoy their society, attend their wants in canteen, fully admit them to positions of trust and service, but know, finally, I’d have died before I could have married one, or borne coloured children. So perhaps I have a colour bar.” [Ed. – Oof, impressive attempt at self-knowledge; also, gross.]

I hope—wherever she is—that she’s not appalled at being read so intently; I would have liked the chance to know her better. [Ed. – A woman worth knowing. Just like you, Anne. Thanks!]