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.

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?

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!