The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

I wrote yesterday that I would try to finish two more books before the year ends, but I will likely leave it at one. I'm not sure why I thought it was a good idea to select a 369-page book yesterday morning when that was my intention, but I picked The Song of Achilles to be the first of the two books I'd read. I finished it in time for lunch today, and believe me: I am still contemplating trying to finish another book today, but I have plans to go to the movies this afternoon and will likely do something this evening, so I'm also telling myself to just stop here.

My knowledge of Greek history/mythology is so nonexistent that the bulk of The Song of Achilles was new to me. I was supposed to read The Odyssey in 9th grade, but didn't, and I've never read The Iliad, or any other accounts of the Trojan War, so everything I know about it has been picked up from literary or other cultural references. I honestly didn't even know Achilles fought in it or (obviously, since as far as I can tell that's what he's most known for) who he was before reading this. I knew he was fast, but that's about it. But some of the stories from the war did slip through to my consciousness: when the wind wouldn't come for the ships to set sail, I knew that as a thing that had happened. And the names were familiar, though I didn't know anything about who most of them were. Reading The Song of Achilles reminded me a little of reading José Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, though I'm much more familiar with the stories New Testament than with stories of the Trojan War. In any case, this book was wonderful. I'm not sure whether anything would have been gained by my knowing the story already; sometimes I felt lucky not to. I had no idea what was coming, except through the hints and prophesies in the text. Maybe now I'll go read The Iliad.

The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu; Royal Holiday, by Jasmine Guillory

One of my favorite things about the holidays is that I have long stretches of free time when the weather is not great: ideal conditions for sitting on the couch and reading all day. This year, for the first time since 2003, I have the full stretch of time between Christmas and New Year's Day off, so I hoped I would have even more of this kind of time than usual, but the first several days of my time off proved to be quite busy and I didn't get nearly as much reading-on-the-couch time as I had hoped. But on December 27, I took Amtrak upstate to visit my mom and stepdad, so I had 2 hours of reading time on the train up, the same amount on the train home, plus several hours of sitting on their couch with their dog in front of the fire. In these perfect reading conditions, I finished the book I had started just before the holiday break, Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, I read Jasmine Guillory's Royal Holiday cover to cover, and I read the first three stories from Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. (I will talk about this last when I finish it, which probably won't be until next year because I have in mind devoting today and tomorrow to reading a couple short books.)

The Three-Body Problem was the fourth Chinese book I started for my World Books Project and the first I succeeded in finishing. A few years ago, I tried Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine and gave that up quite quickly. It may just have been I wasn't in the right mood at the time. Last year I started Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong, about an educated youth who is sent to Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution and becomes fascinated with the wolf/human relationship there and the balance that is being lost. I read about 150 pages of it, but I found the blood and violence hard to tolerate, so I set it aside. Earlier this year, I started Han Shaogong's A Dictionary of Maqiao, another book about an educated youth living in a remote part of China during the Cultural Revolution. The "story" unfolds in the form of a dictionary, describing the specific meanings of various words and phrases in the village Maqiao. It's a really lovely book, but very slow. I read about 150 pages then set it aside in June as my travel schedule picked up and I needed a different kind of reading material, and I never went back.

Which brings us to The Three-Body Problem. I didn't really know anything about it before reading it except that it was science fiction and several people I know recommended it. So, I was quite surprised when I started it to find that it, too, began during the Cultural Revolution and one of the central characters is an educated youth sent to Inner Mongolia. Before going into it, I perhaps doubted that genre fiction -- and more specifically sci-fi -- for my world books project would adequately represent the country, but in fact Chinese history is central to the story in The Three-Body Problem. (This is not so true of a couple other instances of genre fiction I've read as representatives from Scandinavian countries; from reading Scandinavian crime fiction you'd think things were much grittier than they actually are there, I think.) I can hardly claim to be a sci-fi expert, but this book struck me as unusual in that it's a sci-fi novel set nearly entirely on contemporary earth, featuring rather regular humans.

I suspected I would finish The Three-Body Problem while upstate so I brought two other books with me for my time there and my return trip home. I had just received Jasmine Guillory's Royal Holiday in the mail and I imagined it would be just the book to read on the train to make the trip fly by. But the train ride is only 2 hours, so I decided I had better start it ahead of time so I could finish it on the train. I picked it up late Saturday afternoon and was 70 pages in when I set it down not long after to have dinner. Sunday morning, I woke up pretty early and had breakfast with my mom and then the couch and the fire and the dog were calling me (that's Royal Holiday in the photo above), so I read some more and about 3 hours later I finished it just in time for brunch. Somewhat ironically, because I love rom-com movies, I never thought romance was a genre I would want to read. I think I imagined the entire genre consisted of self-serious bodice-rippers. But of course there's diversity in the genre, and Guillory's books are modern and funny, and they tackle race in important and unexpected ways. One of the things I really love about her books is how all the central characters are really passionate about what they do -- often this passion itself is part of the conflict: her characters have important jobs that they love and can't give up for another person. The central character of Royal Holiday is a social worker in a hospital who helps families navigate difficult situations, and the fact that this is a background theme in a romance novel is, to me, so unexpected and refreshing. In any case, Royal Holiday wasn't my favorite, but Guillory's books are fun to read and just the perfect type of escapism for me sometimes.

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid

I read Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia back in 2016 as my book for Pakistan, then Exit West came out the following year to so much acclaim and I had this sense of almost regret: I should have waited!

In fact, I quite enjoyed How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, so it's not that I didn't like my pick for Pakistan, it was just that Exit West got so much media attention and was shortlisted for the Man Booker, that it left me feeling I might have chosen better if I had waited. I don't think I wrote about How to Get Filthy Rich, but it's written unlike anything I've read before or since. The entire book is told in an impersonal second person as sort of an instruction, sort of a reportage on moving from rural poverty to urban wealth in an unnamed country. What's incredible is how, even in the absence of characters or story in a traditional sense, the reader gets this strong sense of character and story. It's really something.

Of course, nothing was stopping me from reading both, and so I put Exit West on my PaperbackSwap wish list and sometime earlier this year it arrived. It hadn't really been front-of-mind, but when I was staring at my shelves trying to decide what to read next, I pulled it out on a whim. It was small (I tend to read short books toward the end of the year to really try and pack more in) and I remembered speeding through How to Get Filthy Rich... so it seemed like a good choice.

I'm glad that, despite hearing so much about Exit West when it came out, I actually didn't really know anything about the story. The book opens with spare prose, that was familiar to me from How to Get Filthy Rich..., though Exit West does have named characters, whose inner selves are explored, and a bit more of a straightforward narrative. Saeed and Nadia meet and become involved in an unnamed city in an unnamed country that is entering civil war. Then about halfway in, the book takes a turn that was hinted at in a couple earlier passages in the book but was completely unexpected to me, giving me a real aha moment. Though most reviews do mention it, I'm choosing to leave out what is, in fact, the central plot device of the story because I think not knowing was nice. I will just say that the book addresses the contemporary refugee crisis and the rise in nationalism in a fresh and interesting way. And it's really lovely too.

Winter in Lisbon, by Antonio Muñoz Molina

Some months ago, I was a few cents short of free shipping on Amazon and so I looked at books by some authors I liked for something to add to my order and stumbled across a copy of Winter in Lisbon for $548. (I looked again today, and the book can be yours from Amazon for just $59.99.) Unsurprisingly, the book lodged itself in my mind as something I should seek out at a price I could afford and after I found The View from Downshire Hill for half what Amazon was charging from an international seller on Abe Books, I had the idea to look there for Winter in Lisbon (plus I avoid buying from Amazon just generally). Amazingly, they had a copy available for $6.06 plus $5 shipping and $1 tax and so I got my copy for $12 and change. (Today the cheapest available edition on Abe is $46. Sorry.) It turned out to be a discharged library edition, but was in fine condition and, most importantly, was $12. I have to admit, the cost and scarcity of the book definitely lingered in the back of my mind as I was reading it, especially at the beginning. Sometimes I thought, I am reading this extremely valuable book; I must understand why it's so valuable. And then sometimes I thought, this book was allowed to go out of print in English; obviously there's a reason. Eventually I mostly got over this superficial aspect of reading it and got absorbed in the story. In the end, I really liked it.

Winter in Lisbon uses a narrative device I hadn't thought much about previously, but which I found quite interesting: first person narration by a character who is rather incidental to the main events of the book. I spent some time reflecting on this last night after finishing the book, trying to remember where else I had seen it and two books came to mind - both of which I read upwards of 20 years ago: The Razor's Edge and The Great Gatsby. In Winter in Lisbon, the narrator's story alternates between San Sebastian in the past, when the central characters first encounter one another, and Madrid in (the book's) present, when he is reunited with the person whose story he is really telling. (You'll notice that neither of these locations is the titular Lisbon. Some of the book's key events take place in Lisbon, but the narrator admits he's never been there.) Everything that comes in between is told as a second- or even third-hand report, based on conversations the narrator and central character have in present-day Madrid. Occasionally, the narrator knows more than he could possibly know from having heard the story from another person, but you get lost in his telling and you don't mind.

My Decade in Books

It's too soon for me to write my year in books round-up because I'm still hoping to finish a few more before the year is up, but with just 19 days left in the decade, I think I can go ahead and write that round-up -- even if I do expect to finish a few more books this decade. As of today, I have finished 292 books in the 2010s. I have started and not finished at least another 16 (those are the ones I got so far as to document). As someone who used to average about a book a month, it's pretty self-affirming to see that my ten-year average is so much higher.

I told my friend Nicole that I'd write up the top ten books I read this decade, so he we are. Yesterday I took to Goodreads and figured out what the first book I read in the 2010s was (The Count of Monte Cristo if you're wondering) then scrolled through and jotted down the books I thought might be contenders for the top 10. On the first pass, I came up with 15 individual books, as well as 3 authors who I thought would make the cut but would require some consideration to figure out which specific book to include. (When making these lists, one has to make rules and so I have ruled that only one book per author will be allowed.) Last night in therapy I mentioned this list and went on to talk about how I write up my year in books every year and always declare a favorite and my therapist said, "So you already have the list then?" and I realized that (as usual) she had a point. (Of course, I often can't narrow down my favorite to just one book and I was also surprised to find that I did not make these lists between 2007 and 2012, meaning I'm missing the first two years of this decade. There is also one flaw in her argument which is that it assumes the best book I read in any given year would also beat out most books I read in any other year, but thinking through my first pass list while talking to her, I immediately recognized there was a lot of overlap.)

So, I went back to all my year in books posts and jotted down my declared favorite(s) from each year and came out with 18 books. There are two books from my first pass list that do not appear among my annual favorites, and two books from my annual favorites that did not make the first pass list, so I knocked those 4 off. There's one author who appears twice and one who appears three times in my annual favorites list, so when I narrow those down to one book a piece, that list gets down to 13: we're close!! EXCEPT, there are 2 years missing from that list and one of my 3 authors who I know makes the cut is George Eliot, whose entire oeuvre I read in 2011. My first pass list includes another two books I read before 2012 as well. So, with my 13 books from my favorite books each year list, plus one book by George Eliot, plus the 2 others, I have a list of 16 that I must narrow down to 10 (setting aside the issue of the authors who have multiple books I need to choose between).

It was not easy, but here are the ten best books (in alphabetical order) I read this decade. (Where I have them, I've included links to where I wrote about them either individually or as part of a year-end round-up.)

2666, by Roberto Bolaño (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

A Broken Mirror, by Mercè Rodoreda
(Order it from the University of Nebraska Press!)

Curfew, by José Donoso (Order it from IndieBound!)

Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Dream of My Return, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
(Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Explosion in a Cathedral, by Alejo Carpentier (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
(Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 1, by Javier Marías (Order it from Bookshop.org!)

I think it's worth noting that only one of these books (the Castellanos Moya) was published this decade. Only three were published this century. It's interesting to me that fully half were written in Spanish (and a 6th in Catalan). If you're wondering, aside from Eliot, the authors for whom I had to struggle to choose which book to include were José Donoso (and I'm still not sure I made the right choice) and Javier Marías (for whom the choice was actually rather easy). Anyway, there you have it, the ten best books I read this decade.

Villa Triste, by Patrick Modiano

I'm terrible about reading when I travel. And yet, I always think I might want to read while I'm traveling, so I never go anywhere without a book. Often, I bring multiple books with me and I don't read even a page. And then I'm also in the habit of buying books when I travel, which only makes the situation worse. I'm just back from a trip to Italy, on which I brought with me 5 books. One of these was a guidebook and three were books about Venice, where I spent 4 days during my trip. The latter were John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and a book I picked up in London called Rilke's Venice, that is part biography of Rilke and part guide to Venice. But even with all this reading material I worried that it wouldn't be the right reading material. I wanted what I thought of as a "normal" book, in case I found myself in the mood to just read (rather than to read with purpose, which seemed the demand of all my other reading material). So, at the last minute, I threw a very water damaged edition of Patrick Modiano's Villa Triste in my bag. I selected this book mainly because of the water damage -- it arrived for me in the mail in July on one of those days when it just poured rain and it was soaked through when I retrieved it from my mailbox. I figured I could just leave it behind somewhere if I finished it; perhaps even if I didn't. But, as it turned out, I started it the day before I left and I carried it all the way back home with me. I read it for nearly the whole two-and-a-half hour train trip from Venice to Milan. I finished it on my flight home from Milan the following day. I considered leaving it on the plane, but didn't want to give the cabin crew another thing to clean up. And so I brought it home, where I have put it in the paper recycling, though I've taken it out twice since doing so. It's not so easy for me to part with even a very water damaged book, apparently. I did leave one book behind in Italy: I donated my Time Out guide to Venice to my wonderful hotel's collection of guidebooks because they didn't have that one yet. But I also picked up two books in Italy, an Italian edition of Italo Calvino's Le Città Invisibili and a large hardback book about amari.

This is the second Modiano book I've read this year and I've loved them both. I had had him on my mental to-read list for quite a while, but only got around to him this year when I found myself with a couple of his books. Like Missing Person, which I read in May, Villa Triste is infused with the most intense feeling of nostalgia. It takes place mostly in the early 60s in an Haute-Savoie summer resort town. The 18-year-old narrator is hiding from something and has invented a name and a glamorous past for himself and he falls in with two locals who have to a greater or lesser extent escaped their provincial roots. They are all playing parts. The present-day of the book is actually 10 years after the main events take place, when the town has completely faded and the resorts all closed. The narrator's faded memory and pieced together recollections are what gives the book its nostalgic, melancholic quality. You also sense there is a greater story behind each of the characters, which you only get to glimpse here and there.

Two side notes:

• Like Missing Person, this book also contained a passing reference to the Place Malesherbes. I saw it and thought, "Again?!" In fact, first I thought, "Didn't I read another book that referenced that street this year?" And then I realized it was the other Modiano book. 
• I read this entire book while listening to Brian Eno's Music for Films on repeat (on noise-cancelling headphones, to drown out background noise on the train and plane), which I feel added some additional unintended (perhaps filmic?) quality to my experience of the text. It seemed to go together, but of course I can't know what the reading experience would have been otherwise. 

In any case, I'm very glad I got around to Modiano this year. I look forward to reading more.

Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg

As I've mentioned before, I have found lots of good books at the thrift shop by my office, but there have been a handful that are particularly unexpected and which I can't help but think must have been donated by the same person who shares some particular interests with me. Among these is Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg and an Italian edition of La notte dell'oblio, by the Italian Jewish writer Lia Levi. (I also found an Italian edition of Leonardo Sciacia's A ciascuno il suo there, which I was thrilled to find because I have the English language edition and so I can do a side-by-side reading, and a couple other Italian books -- I wonder whose they were?) In any case, I wasn't familiar with Natalia Ginzburg, but it was a New York Review of Books edition and sounded like something I'd enjoy, so I picked it up. Family Lexicon is something of a memoir of Ginzburg's family life from her early childhood in the 19-teens and 20s through about the 1950s. It's organized more anecdotally or by characters than chronologically, but it beautifully recounts Jewish life and anti-fascism in Italy during the 20s, 30s, and 40s. One of the odd things about this book is that, while it is telling true stories about real people (as is amply demonstrated in the notes section of the book, which provides little bios of nearly all the characters in Ginzburg's life and circle, many of whom are well-known figures), it is almost not at all about Ginzburg herself, which is why I called it "something of" a memoir. The reader learns all about her family members and people in her social circle, who are described in lovely, humorous detail. Toward the end we learn a little more about Ginzburg herself, who was exiled to a village in the south of Italy by Mussolini's government, fled the village for Rome with her 3 small children after the German occupation in a German truck with a faked identity and story of lost papers, and lived through so much more, and yet it's all touched on very lightly in the book. Family Lexicon was wonderful, but I'd love to read a memoir of more of Ginzburg's own experiences.

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson's foray into the spy genre, Transcription, is another book I picked up in London, leaving me with just two London books to go. It covers some of the same ground that was covered in Life After Life and, especially, A God in Ruins, but with new characters and none of the supernaturalities found in those books. The story jumps back and forth between 1940, when the 18-year-old lead character worked for MI5 as a transcriber and occasional spy, and 1950 when her spying days come back to haunt her. As is often the case in spy novels, you're not always sure who is spying on whom (or if everyone is spying on everyone: at times it seems like the whole cast of characters are employed by MI5 to spy one another). Transcription captures very well the madness and self-doubt that must result from these conditions -- especially when the person experiencing the conditions is young and naive. This wasn't my favorite Kate Atkinson book, but that would be a high bar to hurdle. I did thoroughly enjoy it.

The View from Downshire Hill, by Elizabeth Jenkins

I went down a little Elizabeth Jenkins rabbit hole after seeing a copy of her The Tortoise and the Hare in the background of a photo of her cat Miette that the writer Patricia Lockwood posted on Twitter. I read that book in 2006 and adored it, and the picture made me think I ought to look out other books by Elizabeth Jenkins. As it turns out, very little of her fiction is in print. She was also the author of several biographies and it seems like those are more widely available. In any case, I saw that she had written a memoir, which intrigued me. It was available on Amazon for upwards of $50, but I was able to order it from Abe Books for a little over $20, plus $6 to have it shipped from London, which is still a bit expensive, but not unreasonable. And so I read a second consecutive book shipped to me from London. (The two books - this and 24 Charing Cross Road have quite a bit in common also. They cover some of the same time period and several authors and places and publications pop up in both. The one that struck me most notably was St. Paul's in Covent Square, the Actor's Church, which I now really wish I had visited when I was in London.)

As the foreword, written by her nephew Sir Michael Jenkins, points out, Elizabeth Jenkins lived what was in many ways an unremarkable life, but she lived through a remarkable period (her life spanned nearly the entire 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st), was in contact with many notable figures, and is gifted with the ability to tell the episodes of her life beautifully. From 1939 until about 1995, Jenkins lived at 8 Downshire Hill in Hampstead. I looked the address up and discovered it's just around the corner from the Keats House, which I visited in London and I walked right past Jenkins' former home on my way from the Keats House to the Freud House. In fact, I remember the street well. My father and I were charmed by the Hampstead neighborhood generally. The first house we passed on leaving Hampstead Heath bore a plaque indicating that George Orwell had lived there (this was on Parliament Hill) and from there onward as we walked through the neighborhood, we paid close attention to the homes. When we came out from Keats Grove and made the left onto Downshire Hill, I remember there was a Bentley parked on the corner and I said, "That's not something you see every day." My father said that maybe it was, in London.

In any case, Jenkins' stories of her life in London from the 1920s on through the 1970s gave a wonderful picture of the times she lived through. It was also very interesting to see into her life as a reasonably successful, but not wildly famous, writer.

84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff

While I was in London, I met up with someone I knew there for an afternoon beer. We got to talking about books, of course, and about buying used books and lucking into wonderful books you'd never heard of before. My friend asked if I had ever heard of 84 Charing Cross Road. I hadn't. He said he would mail me a copy. He was true to his word: the book showed up in my mailbox last Friday. It's a book of (real!) correspondence between an American writer living in New York and an antiquarian bookseller in London (and some of his associates and relations), spanning a 20 year period beginning in 1949. Given the subject matter, it seems especially appropriate to have received this book in the mail from London.

The book is delightful. Helene Hanff is a hilarious writer -- one could only wish for a correspondent like her today. But she is also clearly so caring: in the first few years of her correspondence with the bookshop, London is still straitened with post-war rations. She sends care packages for the staff for every holiday and has a friend hand deliver stockings for the women. Her status as a distant friend and benefactor earns her real affection, not just of the bookstore staff, but of their families and others as well.

Published along with 84 Charing Cross Road in the edition I received is its sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which is a journal of Helene Hanff's 1971 visit to London to do publicity after the former book is published, and this was a delight as well. Her observations on London and New York are keen and fantastically entertaining. Her awe at finally seeing the places she knows about only from books is so charming. (And I found it particularly fun to read about her visiting places I went to myself just a few weeks ago. I really identified with Hanff's interest in places, with her desire to visit places where people she admired had spent time. I do this a lot when I travel. This is why I particularly like house museums.) Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street is witnessing Hanff finally getting the celebrity you, as her reader, feel she deserves. 84 Charing Cross Road was a hit in the U.K. and her time in London is filled with invitations to dinner from fans (including some celebrities) and interviews with local media, and even a request to sit for a portrait. You get the sense that Hanff was chugging along as a writer, just making a living, but that she was meant for so much more, and her time in London finally offered the reward and recognition she was due.

I half wish I had read 84 Charing Cross Road and its sequel before my visit to London. It would have added so many must-see places to my list! (In fact, I hardly had time to see all my must-see places as it was, so perhaps it's best I didn't read it ahead.)

Normal People, by Sally Rooney

I saw Normal People mentioned with some reverence here and there online when it was released here about 6 months ago, often with the words "millennial" or maybe "modern," which tempered my interest somewhat (in ways that are a little hard to pinpoint and I won't get into here). But in London I found a copy for £1 in a charity shop, so I bought it. My skepticism was misplaced. This book was wonderful, and actually quite timeless. It follows the relationship between its two protagonists as it veers between friendship, sex, and love and as they navigate early adulthood. It does this with such tenderness toward both of them, despite their fumbles and their occasionally stupid or hurtful behavior toward one another. It captures their feelings so precisely. This book is just achingly human.

Reef, by Romesh Gunsekera

I was proud of my austerity in bringing just one book - and a slim one at that - with me to London. Of course, I knew I would likely visit some bookshops and in an English-speaking country, I could be sure of picking up something in the unlikely event that I did finish my book while there. I did not finish The Good Soldier on my trip, but I did bring 5 additional books home with me. Among them was Reef, which I picked up at Skoob Books, a large subterranean used bookstore in Bloomsbury. It had been some time since I'd read a book from a new country, so I thought I had better correct that. I was keeping an eye out in London bookstores for books by unfamiliar authors that might be in circulation there and not here. I don't believe that this is strictly the case with Romesh Gunsekera, but he was unfamiliar to me and they had 3 of his books on the shelves at Skoob. I chose Reef because the cover indicated it had been shortlisted for the Booker.

Reef is a lovely little book. The narrator's descriptions of the meals he prepared in his position as servant to a wealthy bachelor were evocative and hunger-inducing. (I might have to hop on the Staten Island ferry to get some Sri Lankan food some day soon.) And, despite what many a Goodreads reviewer has written, I really did feel that I got a sense of the changes and unrest going on in Sri Lanka during the course of the book. It was never centered, but then again, it likely wouldn't be for a boy in the narrator's position. If I have one critique of this book, it's content, not form. It reads as largely unquestioning and uncritical of the servant/master dynamic and the labor and wealth disparities in the book. This is somewhat or partly resolved at the end, but throughout my reading I had these questions: was the narrator paid a wage? does he have any say as to the conditions of his labor? when, at the end of the book, servant and master up and leave for England, it's as if he had no choice in the matter, and he's really still a child. Not to say this isn't a possible condition, just that the book treats it rather uncritically. (I really did wonder about the logistics of, like, him getting a passport.) Anyway, those concerns aside (for me, they were lingering in the background almost throughout, and occasionally came to the foreground when they were almost addressed by narrator), this really was a pleasure to read.

The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

I was reading The Good Soldier while I was on vacation in London with my father. Though, in typical form, I only picked up the book twice while I was away: once on a crowded tube train and again at the start of my flight home. And then one day while we were there we visited the Imperial War Museum, the World War I rooms of which brought back memories of Parade's End. (There is a strange little case of gas canisters there, where the text helpfully informs you that Britain decided to fight gas with gas, but ended up deciding to stop using gas because, in effect, it didn't do enough damage. "Tell that to Ford Madox Ford," I thought when I read that. Granted, he and Christopher Tietjens did survive the war, so maybe they're onto something over at the Imperial War Museum.) I read Parade's End in 2012, before I wrote at any length about books I was reading, but I did declare it a close second for my favorite book I read that year, after 2666.

In any case, Ford Madox Ford was on my mind on this trip. Over some meal, probably after I had been reading on the tube, I asked my father, who knows books, if he had written anything of note besides The Good Soldier and Parade's End because it seemed like there must be more than two books. (To be fair, Parade's End is in fact 4 books, which I guess gives him 5 well-known books.) My father didn't know of anything said he imagined maybe those were the only "good" books, but that seemed impossible to me: his writing is so aching and lovely. Google informed us that he has written "dozens" of books, and Wikipedia cites The Fifth Queen trilogy as a third (or sixth, seventh, and eighth) famous work. I also learned that he co-authored a few books with Joseph Conrad, whom I've always found impenetrable on his own, so maybe those are worth a look? I did check every bookstore we stopped into for other of Ford's books, but found only The Good Soldier and Parade's End (and, in one case, a single volume of Some Do Not... the first book of Parade's End).

Anyway, The Good Soldier. I loved this book pretty much from page one. Ford writes so poignantly and accurately about the misery of love, about the cruelty that can only be inflicted in close relationships. (Is it just me?) He captures so perfectly the reserve and self-controlled repression of a certain upper class type. The narrator, who in the book recounts the story of his wife's years-long deception of him with a friend, from time to time marvels over the perfect calm he witnessed, now that he finally understands all that was going on beneath the surface. And then on page 111, Ford describes in one little sentence what I have long believed to have been behind the collapse of my own marriage many years ago. He says, "In all matrimonial associations there is, I believe, one constant factor - a desire to deceive the person with whom one lives as to some weak spot in one's character or in one's career." Good times.

Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz

I can't remember where I saw Magpie Murders recommended, but it arrived in the mail for me last week and a quick read of the author bio revealed that Anthony Horowitz created two BBC mystery shows that I've watched in their entirety more than once: Midsomer Murders, which is like comfort food to me, and Foyle's War, which I truly love. Magpie Murders is a real treat for anyone who loves murder mysteries. For one thing, it includes two murder mysteries: there's a book within the book and both are murder mysteries. For another thing, it's full of references to all those other murder mystery books and programs and call-outs to all the major detectives (and their assistants). Perhaps oddly, I found the book within the book somewhat more satisfying than the book that encased it. This may be partly because I solved the murder in the outer book pretty quickly (and was fairly certain I was right, so all the investigating that followed felt a bit like a waste of time and diversionary tactic to me), while the murder in the inner book remained a mystery to me until its resolution at the end. But even so, the whole thing was an enjoyable read that I tore through in four days. 

I made note of one little section rather later in the book because it resonated with something I've mentioned twice earlier this year: "Character names are important. ... [T]he name is often the first thing you learn about a character...." I read this and immediately thought of A Heart So White and The King of a Rainy Country, the two books I read earlier this year where the first person narrator goes unnamed for more than 100 pages into the books (but both of which mention the narrator's name on the back-cover blurbs!). I've become quite an observer of this. The first person narrator of Magpie Murders tells you her name quite early on in a way, though in fact, not until you have read roughly 200 pages consisting of the book within the book. This morning, I started The Good Soldier, in which the narrator names himself on the second page, in the fifth paragraph of the book, after he has named the three other central characters.

Old Filth, by Jane Gardam

I'm not positive, but I believe Old Filth may be one of the books responsible for the trip to London I am taking one week from today. My father turns 70 the week after next and we had been talking for months about taking a trip for his birthday, but he kept changing his mind about where he wanted to go. Among the places he suggested were the Faroe Islands, India, New Orleans, Berlin, and Iran. When I went to visit him in late August, he surprised me by saying, "How about London?" He told me he'd read two books set or partly set in London and that had gotten him curious. I gather that the books were set before the war and he'd been doing research on the damage from the Blitz. Separately, he brought me a copy of Old Filth, which he was reading at the time, on a visit to Brooklyn a few months back, but I already owned it (it had been recommended to me by another friend some time ago). In any case, very little of the book is actually set in London, but the acknowledgments include a reference to this bookstore, which I have added to my to-visit list for our trip. I'll have to find out what the second London book he read was.

This book is brilliant with foreshadowing and the way the narrative unfolds. I was nearly sure I knew - and grew ever more suspicious - what would be revealed at the end, but it took the whole book to get there. When all was revealed, it satisfied a desire to know that had been carefully built up from almost the start. As I said, brilliant.

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

I feel like I'm a few years late to The Goldfinch. For a couple of years, a couple years ago, it seemed like everyone was reading and talking about it, and then it went away. I had it on my PaperbackSwap wish list and then, at some point, I took it off because I didn't think I'd actually read it. (I read and didn't particularly care for The Secret History and wasn't sure I wanted to commit to 800 pages to something I might feel similarly ambivalent about.) Then in quick succession, I saw the movie trailer and found a copy of the book at my dad's house, and I decided maybe now was the time. I don't know that I have anything useful to add to the discourse around this book, especially 5 years after everyone else was talking about it. It was an absorbing and engaging read - perfect for the subway (minus the size): I almost missed my stop more than once while reading it. At the same time, I didn't think about it much when I was not reading it, especially after the first 200 pages or so, which I found the most interesting. Though there were a couple parts that really resonated with me. It took me 4 weeks to the day to finish, and my sense of relief when I set it down yesterday was great.

Zama, by Antonio di Benedetto; The Wedding Party, by Jasmine Guillory

I got Zama among 6 books I ordered during the New York Review of Books anniversary sale - the discount went up to 40% on orders over 4 books and so I went a little overboard. I surely have written before about how I'm a sucker for the look and feel of these books. (I believe the first one I ever came across was Raymond Queneau's Witch Grass, which I bought at a Borders in central New Jersey in 2003 despite never having heard of the author or book. I loved it. Though it may have been a few years earlier that I read a review of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica, which was reissued by NYRB in 1999, so maybe I was already aware of the editions.) In any case, I added Zama to my order based on virtually nothing. This sentence from the publisher's website may have sealed the deal, "First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature." I think I was also trying balance Italian and non-Italian books (of the 6 books I ordered, 3 were Italian). And I hadn't read a whole lot of Argentinian literature. (Though with a name like Antonio di Benedetto, he is likely one of the Argentinians who hails from Italy.) Anyway...

Zama follows the rising and falling hopes of Diego de Zama, a government functionary in a remote town in the Spanish South American colonies in the late 18th Century. The first half of the book takes place in 1790 and Zama is hoping to be transferred to Santiago de Chile or Buenos Ayres or Peru in the near future. The book picks up again in 1794 and again in 1799 and Zama is still waiting on some change of circumstance. The book provides an opening to consider some complexities of colonial life -- of race, class, and nationality. For just one example, Zama is an americano - born in the new world - but considers himself a Spaniard, while recognizing that people born in Spain likely consider him as an inferior. The book also illustrates how painfully slow communication must have been. Waiting months for letters and news that is no longer current. The book was also frustrating. I found Zama a different character to reconcile; I didn't understand a lot of his motivations or his actions. I often found myself wondering, is this how a person in that time in those circumstances behave? And sometimes I thought that yes, maybe it was, even though it made no sense to me. And other times I thought, I have no idea. (To be fair, I almost never thought "No;" I vacillated between "yes maybe" and "I don't know.") In any case, this made it somewhat hard for me to connect. There were some really lovely passages though and the book really did make me reflect on what life must have been like in a remote place some 250 years ago.

I was 3/4 of the way through Zama when I felt like spending a day in bed reading a book. I could easily have finished Zama that day, but Zama wasn't the book I wanted a book I wanted to spend the day in bed reading. I had recently acquired Jasmine Guillory's third novel, The Wedding Party and it was exactly the book I wanted to spend the day in bed reading. I read each of her previous novels in a single day under the same circumstances. These books are a joy to read and The Wedding Party might be my favorite yet. I loved that it shared a timeline with the previous two books, so it felt like getting let in on secrets that were happening behind the scenes in the first (and to a lesser extent the second) book. These books are also very funny. The denouement in The Wedding Party had me laughing almost to the point of crying. Each one of these books is a perfect little Rom-Com and now I'm very excited for the next installation.

The Invention of Truth, by Marta Morazzoni

I almost started The Invention of Truth, which I picked up last week - like so many books - at the Unique Boutique thrift store, over the weekend. Then, perhaps when I saw the reference to John Ruskin in the book, I remembered I had intended to read George Gissing's account of his travels in Italy. I set aside The Invention of Truth and along with it Ruskin's Stones of Venice to read next. (And now, having finished the former, I have set aside the latter for later still, but I'm going to Venice for the first time later this year and I want to be sure to read it and also to do a reread of Invisible Cities before then.) It's an extremely short book - just 99 pages - and I read it in little snippets as I went about my business over the course of the day yesterday. It's a good book for that type of reading as there are easy stopping places every couple pages at least. The story alternates, back and forth, imagining two stories with real-world corollaries: John Ruskin's late-in-life visit to Amiens, France, and the creation of the Bayeux Tapestry by 300 French needlewomen. The stories seem to have little in common, but here and there you catch a moment of resonance that feels a little bit secret and special. This was a very enjoyable little book.

By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing

Last fall, I went to Calabria. Some months before my trip, I discovered that George Gissing (for whom I've had an affection since reading The Odd Women several years back) had taken a trip there and written a book about it. I thought I might read it before I went, but despite downloading it to my phone (it's past copyright and available for free), I never got around to it. Then, a month or so ago, I got a paperback copy. And after my recent accidental theme of reading books about travels in Italy, I decided to make it intentional.

Gissing made his trip in the fall of 1897, as far as I can tell. He was drawn to modern day Calabria (and, in fact, Puglia and Basilicata, though he describes the whole region as Calabria) because of his interest in the ancient history of Magna Græcia. After departing Naples by ship to Paola, Gissing traveled by carriage over the mountains to Cosenza, the first stop on his Calabrian journey, and the city where I spent 3 nights at the end of my visit to southern Italy. Gissing's interest in Cosenza related to the death there of the Visigothic king Alaric. He was reportedly buried near the confluence of the Busento and Crati rivers. Gissing visited the spot and marveled that a king and his treasures may have been buried beneath his feet and in full view of the city nearby. He also remarked on the new and hideous railway bridge. Today, there is a small park on the riverbanks where the two rivers merge and there is a statue of Alaric that was erected in 2018. You can see both the statue (on the bottom left) and the railway bridge in this photo I took during my stay in Cosenza.

Apart from visits to Cosenza, Gissing's and my paths diverge. He took the train from Cosenza on to Taranto, in modern-day Puglia, then made his way back west and south along the Ionian coast. I saw the Ionian sea only briefly on my travels, somewhere in the vicinity of Trebisacce while I was on my way to Aliano. I did note one other similarity between my experience and Gissing's: in every museum he visited, he was the lone visitor. This was my experience at both museums I visited in Cosenza, and even in Matera, which is comparatively full of tourists, I was one of very few visitors to the museums I stopped in.

While Gissing's observations on the people and culture of the south of Italy are rather paternalistic, they are also entertaining and his writing is beautiful. At the time of his visit to the south of Italy, the war of Italian unification was only a few decades past and Calabria was unfrequented by visitors from outside, or even elsewhere in Italy. He succeeds in capturing a place and a time and people who were largely left out of writing at the time.

The King of a Rainy Country, by Brigid Brophy

I think I've mentioned before that I get a lot of books at thrift stores. At the Goodwill, paperbacks are typically $.99 or $1.99 and I've picked up some gems at Goodwills around the city. The Salvation Army usually charges 10% of the price listed on the book, so a paperback might be $1.29 or $1.49 or thereabouts. Books at Housing Works thrift stores are a little pricier, but still usually $4 or less (at the Housing Works bookstore, you'll find a much larger selection, but also higher prices). But the place I pick up books most frequently is the Unique Boutique thrift store on 3rd Avenue, mainly because it's just a couple blocks from my work and makes for a good destination when I want to leave the office at lunchtime. Paperbacks are $1, hardbacks are $2, and cookbooks are $3. (They get a lot of cookbooks for some reason, and some good ones. I picked up 2 excellent Lidia Bastianich cookbooks there a while back, as well as the James Beard bread book.) I go to Unique Boutique about once a week and there's nearly always something I want to read, or that looks interesting on the shelves. Sometimes I come across something very unusual, as with The King of a Rainy Country. I had never heard of it, but the cover art caught my eye and a quick read of Brigid Brophy's bio intrigued me. (And at $1, what did I have to lose?) Last Friday, I finished The Shape of Water on the train back from Baltimore. After arriving at Penn Station, I stopped off at my office to drop off some things and realized I needed a new book to read on the subway home. I keep a small stash of books at work - mostly ones I've picked up at Unique Boutique on my lunch break - for just such an occasion, so I grabbed The King of a Rainy Country and went on my way.

When I started King of a Rainy Country, a novel about a young woman living in London with her dirtbag not-quite-boyfriend and working for a pornographic bookseller, I assumed I was leaving my spate of books about Italy behind, so I was completely caught off guard when suddenly on page 100, the couple heads off to Italy to chaperone a group of American tourists to the major sights (a gig they fell into by whim, luck, and chance). The tour winds up in Venice, where Mihály and Erzi's tour through Italy began in Journey by Moonlight. In fact, the two books make a very interesting pair. The King of a Rainy Country was originally published in 1956; Journey by Moonlight in 1937. It's not so long, but the ~20 years (and the war, of which Antal Szerb was a victim) that separate the books are era-defining. The King of a Rainy Country feels surprisingly current, but Journey by Moonlight is very clearly from another time. Also worth noting, the latter book mostly focuses on the man's internal struggle, while The King of a Rainy Country is told from the woman's perspective. But I think there is a common thread between the narrator* of The King of a Rainy Country and Mihály from Journey by Moonlight, though it's hard to pinpoint exactly. Instead, I'll transcribe a conversation between the narrator and dirtbag Neale that captures it for me:

Later he asked: "Could there ever be one moment so supreme that everything would be justified for evermore?"
     "I believe so."
     "All romantics believe so. But once the moment was over - supposing it ever came - once it was over, wouldn't you begin looking for new moments?"
     "No. Not if it really had been the moment."
     "You mean you couldn't tell till afterwards? You might cheat yourself like that for ever, going from one false moment to the next, getting tawdrier all the time. Promiscuity is an instinct as well as monogamy."
     "Perhaps I'm wrong then. Perhaps there really is no mistaking the moment when it comes."
...
     "O I'm so afraid that it's true about to travel hopefully being better than to arrive. It might be all in the quest, all in the search, all in the anticipation. When it came, there might be nothing there."
     "That's what you're afraid of," I said.
     "Yes, aren't you?"
     "No, I believe there will be something there."
     "I suppose I do, too, in a way," Neale said. "At least I'm willing to be convinced. Perhaps the moment will happen and convince me."
     "Perhaps it will." I got up.
     He looked down at me, as I stood on the step below him. "Will the moment just rise and overwhelm me?"
     "Yes."

Anyway, I loved this book. It was so unexpected, constantly taking surprising - and often funny - turns, never quite what I thought it would be.


*I believe that if an author chooses not to tell you the narrator's name until p. 194 -- even if it is in the blurb on the back of the book -- it's for a reason. (Regular readers may recall I voiced this complaint related to A Heart So White as well.)

The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri

Years ago, knowing my love for Sicily, a friend recommended Andrea Camilleri's mystery novels to me. Shortly thereafter, I picked up a copy of the first of them, The Shape of Water, and in the intervening years, I've come across another five or six used editions and amassed a small collection of his works. All without ever reading him. His recent death at the age of 93 (which I learned about via the Instagram of an Italian teenager I met 3 years ago in Sardinia), proved to be the nudge I needed. Last week I attended a conference in Baltimore and The Shape of Water got me pleasantly through the train trip down and back.

I'm sure I have written about this previously, but murder mysteries are my TV comfort viewing. In fact, they're practically the only television I watch. Generally speaking, I turn to television for different reasons than I turn to books. What I seek in television is an experience where you don't know exactly what will happen, but you can be secure that everything will tie up neatly in the end. I don't enjoy serial television where it takes a whole season (or - gasp! - a whole series) for the events to resolve themselves. I prefer watching with the certainty that in 45 to 90 minutes (depending on episode length), I can rest easy in the knowledge that the murderer has been captured. I also enjoy seeing the same tropes show up again and again in different shows. Every series has its locked room episode and its closed circle episode and I just love watching them play out.

In books, I enjoy complexity and uncertainty and I'm content even when things don't tie up neatly (as long as the story is well told, the writing good). I don't read a lot of murder mysteries. Which is not to say I don't enjoy reading murder mysteries. I get a similar sense of comfort from reading them that I get from watching them on TV, and I've amassed quite a collection of them at home with the idea that from time to time I do want to read a comfort book. I'm glad I finally broke the seal (or whatever metpahor you prefer) on Camilleri, and I'm glad I have a stack of his books at home to turn to when the mood strikes.

Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb

Yesterday, I finished Journey by Moonlight. I loved it. Reading it, I recognized that it's part of a sub-genre I don't think I've ever identified before, but that I particularly enjoy. I would describe it as bourgeois alienation and exceptionalism. These are books about people who feel out of place in their fundamentally bourgeois lives and who act on a desire to escape, only to reflect on their own basic bourgeois-ness. A couple other books I've loved that fit this mold are The Garden Next Door and The Dream of My Return. In Journey by Moonlight, there are two parallel cases of this: the main character Mihály - whose central conflict is between his sense of exceptionalism and his desire to conform -  and his wife Erzsi, who is attracted to Mihály because he is different, even as his decision to marry her was part of his attempt to conform and live a normal bourgeois life. As she observes late in the book, "Mihály returns my love at the moment simply because he is looking to me for bourgeois order and security, and everything I actually ran to him to escape from." Meanwhile, Mihály diagnoses his ailment as "acute nostalgia."

I think these stories appeal to me because I identify with them. The simultaneous belief in my own exceptionalism and fear that I was just normal was a tension I felt particularly strongly as a teenager -- and was probably the driving force behind a lot of my more regrettable and risky actions at the time. But as I've aged into a decidedly non-exceptional, fundamentally bourgeois adulthood, I still often have the sense that this isn't the real me. Or rather, that there is a self I largely suppress in my day-to-day life, especially my professional life.

I have a lot more to say on this topic, but I think I will save it for another post. In the meantime, here is quote from Journey by Moonlight that I particularly loved: "... in the spiritual life, opposites meet. It's not the cold passionless ones who become great ascetics, but the most hot-blooded, people with something worth renouncing."

Glory, by Vladimir Nabokov

In 2002, when I was working at Harvard, I took a graduate seminar in the Comparative Literature department called "Memory and Modernity," taught by Svetlana Boym. I believe that class may be the last time I read Nabokov before picking up Glory (on the recommendation of someone I know only from Twitter!). We read Speak, Memory as well as some of his short stories. I also seem to remember re-reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in connection with this class, but I don't think it was assigned. I had read quite a bit of Nabokov at that point - 7 or 8 of his books I believe. I'm not sure quite why I stopped reading him - it wasn't a conscious decision at first. But as more time passed and I continued not reading him, I started to think of Nabokov as a writer of my youth.

Reading Glory brought me right back to that class with Professor Boym. In fact, I found myself wondering why we hadn't read Glory for that class. We did read Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which the book's hero picks up to read on p. 91. We also read Nabokov's short story, A Guide to Berlin, which covers some of the same geography as Glory does. Then there is the fact that Glory starts out in Crimea, The Lady with the Dog takes place there as well, and Professor Boym talked so affectionately of Yalta - a place I previously only knew of by name from whatever I had learned in history class about the Yalta Conference - that I've wanted to go there since.  Professor Boym had a particular interest in nostalgia, and the whole of Glory is a study in nostalgia. Nearly every character is trying to recapture some half-imagined past or place. And then, the hero's constant invention and reinvention of himself also seems like it would be familiar to Professor Boym. Of course, she was certainly familiar with the book, it just didn't come to my attention until recently (though I had owned it for years).

I learned of Professor Boym's untimely 2015 death by chance from a passing tweet and it took me completely by surprise. When I'd had her as a professor, she had been young (43, the same age I am now). Though several years had passed, it seemed impossible that she could have died. I can't say I thought about her often between 2002 and 2015, nor really between learning of her death and the present, but reading Glory brought back some details I had forgotten, and also reminded me how much of what I know about Nabokov I learned from Professor Boym.

In actual fact, I read Glory in just 4 or 5 days, but it felt like an eternity because I took a 9-day vacation at about 80 pages in and didn't touch the book (except to move it from bag to bag) the whole time I was away. (Of course, I also packed and lugged all over the Azores a second book just in case I finished Glory on vacation. Will I never learn? Good thing I'm a light packer in all other respects.)

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

A friend recommended this book to me years ago and I ordered a copy and put it on my shelf and did not read it. Then, a few weeks ago it was suggested for summer reading in a newsletter I subscribe to, which just happened to arrive on a day I needed a new book to start, and so I decided to pick it up based on these two recommendations, but not actually knowing anything about the book. I really enjoyed it, but I made the mistake of going on vacation between finishing it and actually sitting down to write about it. Or maybe I didn't sit down and write about it right away because I didn't have a whole lot to say about it, even though I enjoyed* it. In any case, this was a good book. I'd recommend it to a lot of different types of readers. It's accessible, without being dumb; exciting, and also intelligent.

*Can we talk briefly about the word enjoy? I use the word enjoy rather a lot. Years ago some British person - I have zero recollection who it was - pointed out to me that the British use "enjoy" completely differently than Americans, and that it is usually used in the context of something unpleasant. This made a big impression and has fascinated me since. I've kept an eye/ear out for this British usage, and yet have never come across it, though I believe I kind of do understand the sense. One might say, "We are enjoying our third straight week of this heatwave," for instance. There's a touch of irony in the enjoy, but it's almost just a synonym for experience.

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

I had intended to go back to my Chinese book after the short break I took to read Postcards from the Edge, but then I finished that book on my commute to work and I needed something to read on my way home that day. I keep a small stash of books at the office for just this scenario, and so from that stack I selected I Capture the Castle, which I finished yesterday. Today, I'm not sure whether or not I will return to my Chinese novel next or read something else.

I had seen the movie of I Capture the Castle before picking up the book, but thankfully I didn't remember it at all. I also think the book must have a very different feeling from the movie just because I don't know how the movie can have gotten into the journal-keeping narrator Cassandra's head the way the book does. (I similarly remember wondering how the movie adaptation of Call Me By Your Name would handle a story that relied so heavily on first person introspection, but it succeeded well enough so maybe I should watch I Capture the Castle again -- and also give myself the opportunity to see a young Henry Cavill in action, which seems like it would be a pleasant thing to do.) In any case, this book was a delight. Cassandra has such feeling; it read very true to the late teenage experience. One of the things I truly loved was her warmth and empathy for everyone. I was sort of surprised (though also not) to come across a whole thread of people on Goodreads who found her tiresome. I think Dodie Smith has captured so well the way the young may take themselves over-seriously and a kind of pretension that comes with being that age, while also making Cassandra articulate and interesting (to me, at least). I mean, she is criticized by another character in the book for being consciously naïve -- clearly Smith was aware that she created the character thus. Anyway, I guess it's not for everyone, but I loved this book. I looked forward to reading it every day. I was happy and sad to finish it.

Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher

You might think I've been neglecting to updates this blog, but in fact I had not finished another book until yesterday. I'm in the midst of my third attempt at a Chinese novel and I do intend to go back to this one, but it's a slow read. I went on a 5-day work trip and didn't pick up a book the whole time, and when I got back, I decided I wanted to read something a little breezier. Postcards from the Edge turned out to be just what I needed.

I don't think I really registered that Carrie Fisher was a writer until she died and I read all these tributes to her writing. I remember the existence of the movie Postcards from the Edge, but I never saw it and I didn't realize she had written the book until I saw it hailed again and again in the days after her death. So, when I saw Postcards from the Edge on the shelves at my local thrift store where books are $1, I grabbed it. It was even better than I expected - touching and funny and brilliant all at once. I laughed out loud on the subway more than once. The narrator, Suzanne Vale, makes being a celebrity sound boring and normal, while also demonstrating self-awareness about her privilege. The descriptions of rehab and recovery were so perceptive. This book was really a delight!

The She-Devil in the Mirror, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Horacio Castellanos Moya's The Dream of My Return was one of my two favorite books of the year when I read it a couple years ago and I've been wanting to read more of his work ever since. So, I was thrilled when I found two of his books at Dog Eared Books in San Francisco last month. (Then less thrilled when I realized, after buying it, that one of them - Senselessness - was actually all marked up, but oh well.)

I strongly identified with the narrator in The Dream of My Return, something I can't say (thankfully!) of the narrator in The She-Devil in the Mirror. She narrates the whole book in the second person, and as the reader you get to listen in on her intimate and occasionally unhinged prattle as she gossips and theorizes about who was behind her best friend's murder. It's an incredible portrait of wealth, privilege, corruption, and hypocrisy, and it's told so brilliantly.

Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño

Even though I had only read 4 of his books (now 5), I thought of myself as someone who had read "a lot" of Bolaño, so I was a little alarmed yesterday -- after I finished Distant Star -- to find that I had 7 books of his on my shelves that I have not read, and these don't include his latest book that just came out in February and at least a couple others. I read his two big books first, The Savage Detectives in 2009 and 2666 a couple years later. I adored them both. I guess because so many of the others are slim volumes, I thought what I had read was the bulk of it and what remained were minor works. (Yes, I am aware of my own bias toward tomes thank you.) Later, when I was in a short-story-reading phase, I read Last Evenings on Earth. Later still, immediately after finishing José Donoso's Curfew, I read By Night in Chile, which absolutely stunned me (definitely not a minor work!), but which melds a bit with Curfew in my memory. The books are actually good complements: the main events in By Night in Chile take place roughly a decade before the main events of Curfew, and there is a sort of salon of intellectuals in the former who could easily be characters in the latter (assuming they survived the first decade of the Pinochet regime), but having read them in quick succession occasionally makes it hard for me to distinguish them.

Distant Star too reminded me of these books, though it also reminded me a little of Donoso's The Garden Next Door, about a Chilean ex-pat who lives outside Barcelona. The Garden Next Door was the book that really opened my eyes to the Latin American diaspora in Europe, people who fled the totalitarian regimes in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, among others. If I had been a closer reader of Savage Detectives, I would have seen it there too; it's just more explicitly explained in The Garden Next Door. When I was in Barcelona in 2014, I stopped for a glass of wine at a small bar in El Born and met a woman there from Argentina, who told me the whole neighborhood used to be full of Argentinians. It was a whole wave of migration that I'd never been aware of. (And I find it very interesting that so many people left the dictatorships of Latin America to settle in Franco's Spain, though I guess he died right around that time.)

But the book Distant Star reminded me of most was Savage Detectives. The young people mixing poetry and revolution. (Or the idea of revolution.) The beautiful sisters. The idea of a new poetry for the future. The events (and locations) of the books are different, but the themes overlap quite a bit. Of course, I haven't yet read Nazi Literature in the Americas, which is explicitly referenced in Distant Star. Reading Bolaño can feel like piecing together a story the way his characters often do.

In translation

Some of this will retread what I covered in my post about Tristana, but that's my own fault for not getting around to finishing this sooner.

I read a lot of books in translation. My world books project necessitates it, and I suspect the proportion of books written in English that I read versus those not has gotten smaller since I started the project, but even before I started the project it's fair to say I read a lot in translation. Of the books I've read so far this year, half were written in English, and exactly half of the 34 books I read in 2018 were written in English.

Though I read a lot in translation, what that meant or how it affected my experience of the books I read wasn't something I gave much thought to probably until I read The Count of Monte Cristo in an edition whose translator is not even listed on the publisher's website. (If this Amazon reviewer is to be trusted, I should have read the version translated by Robin Buss.) Reading this edition of The Count of Monte Cristo was the first time I recall where the writing really got in the way of my enjoyment of the book. The story was still exciting, I still wanted to know what would happen, but the language was so stilted. It read like it was a literal, word-for-word translation from the French (perhaps it was) and it kept dragging me back to the act of reading (which is something an author might do intentionally with language, but was certainly not the case here).

Around the same time that I read The Count of Monte Cristo, the new translations of Proust started coming out, beginning with Lydia Davis' rendition of Swann's Way and followed up by the more-correctly-translated second volume title, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (which was previously translated as Within a Budding Grove), translated by James Grieve. I had recently finished the Moncrieff-revised-by-Kilmartin translations of In Search of Lost Time and I had the idea that I had to start reading the books all over again in the "right" translations. (Big thanks to Margaret Jull Costa for letting me off the hook on that one!) A couple years after that, Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation of War and Peace was getting all sorts of media attention and it seemed like maybe translation was having a moment. (I eventually read their War and Peace and also their translation of The Idiot. Now when I search for them it sounds as though there has been a Pevear and Volokhonsky backlash, and perhaps a backlash to the backlash, but in 2007 they were all the rage.)

Of course, the big news translations are always the new translations of old classics; the translations that render old books in modern vernacular; those that reinstate the sex and other taboo subjects excised in older translations. I was working in a bookstore when the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey was released to much acclaim. (Here Penguin Random House doesn't fail to mention the translator on the book's webpage.) Maybe if that had been the version I'd been given in school when I was assigned The Odyssey a few years earlier, I would have actually read it. Then again, maybe not. But the translation of contemporary authors rarely gets so much attention. It's simply viewed as part of the publishing process. I was in Buenos Aires a couple years ago and saw a Javier Marías book on the new release table at a bookstore. I hadn't heard he had a new book, but I knew I could look forward to an English edition in the not-too-distant future. (Meanwhile, on the same trip, but in Santiago, I came across some José Donoso books that I'm not sure have been translated into English; or if they have, are not widely available.)

Recently, I was reading something about José Saramago that mentioned his English translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I knew I knew that name, but I didn't think it was from Saramago's books, so I googled her and realized she's also Javier Marías' translator. I've read thousands of pages of her work. She has a part - and not a small one! - in making some of my favorite books accessible to me. I loved this interview with her from 2011 that I found when I tried to learn more about her. Now I want to read more of her translations. So in February, I picked up Tristana, a book I knew nothing about, simply because it was translated by Margaret Jull Costa. She didn't translate either of the Saramago books I've already read, but I have some that she did and I'll get around to them soon.

Learning about the translator's process and relation to the work they translate has become a new fascination of mine. Just a couple weeks prior to reading the Margaret Jull Costa interview I mentionend above, I heard an interview, this one with Roberto Bolaño's English translator, Natasha Wimmer. And also this interview with Megan McDowell is full of interesting insights.

Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano

After  a very busy April, I took a much-needed day off work yesterday. It was a perfect kind of day to read a book cover to cover. I did't actually read Missing Person in one sitting. I read it in bits, in bed in the morning, after my coffee, on the subway when I went downtown to run errands, on the subway back home, on the couch for an hour, on the subway on my way to the gym (which was seriously delayed and gave me more than an hour of reading time!), and I finished it while walking down Nostrand Avenue from the subway to my home.

I was reading while standing on the platform at Union Square waiting for the 4 train at around 7:15 last night when I had a profound sense of deja vu. The book mentioned a woman in the Place Malesherbes who might buy jewels from the narrator and I was sure I knew this street from something else. Earlier, the book mentioned the Parc Monceau, which I knew I had visited in Paris, and it came up in this passage again. I pulled up my map of Paris and suddenly I could picture it all. The park I remember clearly -- it was an unseasonably warm March day and the park was full of people. Apparently I only took one photo in the park.

After visiting the Parc Monceau, I also remember walking around the block of what had been Place Malesherbes (it is no longer called by that name), looking for a particular building only to find it was completely covered in scaffolding and tarp. The building I was looking for was built for the banker and art collector Émile Gaillard by the architect Jules Février. My whole excursion to this section of Paris was apparently inspired by an article on Émile Zola’s Paris.

Missing Person gives off the most intense sense of nostalgia. Not only because it is set a decade or so after WWII, but certainly that is a factor, it reminded me frequently of French new wave films. The French have again and again borrowed American noir story tropes and complicated them, and this book is an excellent example of that. The book takes place some 10 years after the end of the war and the narrator, who has been employed by a private detective, suffers from amnesia and doesn't know who he is. After the retirement of his employer, he decides to use the tools he has learned through his trade to try and discover his own past. The mystery unfolds in a beautiful and wholly unexpected way.

Beauty Is A Wound, by Eka Kurniawan

I finished Beauty Is A Wound this afternoon, and I have to say I'm relieved. I've spent the last three weeks with this book, and it has occasionally felt like a burden. It's a beautifully-written and engaging book... but it's so incredibly violent. There is every type of violence. Really gratuitous violence. Quite a lot of sexual violence. And violence towards animals, which is one of my personal triggers. And other types of violence. When I was about 2 weeks, and 250 pages into the book, I told a friend I wasn't sure I could read another 200 pages of it. The violence was hard, but the writing style makes it almost bearable. The story told in a matter-of-fact and occasionally funny voice, and it has a fairy tale aspect that I suppose lends a touch of unreality to the violence. I'm almost surprised at myself that I mostly liked this book, but there were a few days in the last three weeks when I had to mete it out in little doses, or when I couldn't bear to read it on my commute at all.

Beauty Is A Wound was my book for Indonesia, and as the representative book, it felt relevant. The story spans the period from the end of Dutch colonization to almost present day and the history and events in the country (of which I have very limited knowledge) inserted themselves frequently in the story.

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi

I had been meaning to read Homegoing for so long. I should have just bought a copy ages ago. Then a couple weeks ago I was in DC and had finished the book I brought with me on the plane. (Clearly, this was poor planning on my part, as the flight to DC is only ~45 minutes long. In my defense, this was a short work trip and I didn't expect to have much -- if any -- reading time.) The day I arrived in DC, I had a few hours before my meeting and I had planned ahead and finally booked a timed entry to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which I've been a member of since before it opened, but had never yet managed to visit. Unfortunately, I was rushed and tired and anxious about my events, so I wasn't able to commit the mental energy I should have to it. (I will make it back one day.) Anyway, on my way out I stopped at the gift shop, which has a small selection of fiction and I saw Homegoing and so finally I got around to it. I started it on the plane home. The next day, I turned around and flew to San Francisco and I finished it there a couple days later. It's as good as everyone says.

A couple weeks before my trip to DC, I was in Detroit for another meeting but I found time one morning to visit the Wright Museum of African American History. Unlike my visit to the NMAAHC, I was well-rested and I think I was the first visitor of the day (it was a weekday and I went right when they opened), so I had entire rooms to myself. I saw two exhibits on my visit the Wright: one about slavery at Monticello and the permanent exhibit called "And Still We Rise," that charts African and African American history from the earliest time until roughly the present. I found myself thinking back to elements both these exhibits while reading Homegoing.

First, the And Still We Rise exhibit. In 1993, I visited Senegal. While there, we went to the House of Slaves, a prison and port on an island off the coast of Dakar from which slave ships left Africa. It's a truly haunting place; one I still remember clearly these 26 years later. In the exhibit at the Wright, they've recreated the holding cells of an African slave port and the "Door of No Return," which, in the museum, leads you onto the upper deck of a slave ship. You can then descend to the lower level where they've tried to capture the conditions below deck. It's quite affecting. In any case, when, a few weeks later, I started Homegoing and the book's events turned up at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, this all felt very fresh in my memory -- both my recent visit to the Wright, but also my long ago visit to Senegal.

The exhibit on slavery at Monticello, Paradox of Liberty, does a pretty incredible job of centering the experience of the enslaved people in the history of Monticello. It focuses pretty heavily on the Hemings family, mainly because theirs is the most well-documented, but it actually features the family trees and histories of four enslaved families from Monticello. I took a picture of the Hemings family tree. What struck me was that family trees from the era of slavery are largely matrilineal. Between a culture of rape, the routine break-up of families, and an intentional or benign lack of record-keeping, often only mothers are known. This stands out particularly in the context of the ruling class's patriarchal structure. Homegoing also starts with a family tree that centers the mother. The book follows two branches of a family; one that remains in Africa and one that is enslaved and brought to the U.S. While there is hardship on both sides of the ocean, the family that remained in Ghana can trace their history back through the generations to the mother at the top of the family tree. Meanwhile, from the very beginning, the branch of the family that is enslaved is in a continuous state of disconnection and loss. Through the subsequent generations in the book, unknown or absent parents are a recurring theme. It was sometimes heartbreaking as a reader to know the history of each character, when often they didn't know it themselves.


This disconnect is one of the legacies of slavery, and it's one reason the work of the NMAAHC, the Wright, and similar institutions is so important. The family trees in the exhibit on slavery at Monticello were constructed through oral histories. The artifacts in the exhibit are mostly the result of archaeological excavation, because while the Jefferson family's heirlooms have been meticulously preserved over the generations, the possessions of the enslaved people at Monticello were not thought to be historically significant until recently. One of the wonderful things about the NMAAHC is the several recording booths that are scattered throughout the museum where people can record their own family's history. These institutions are trying to recreate the connections that were forcibly severed. The most powerful thing I saw at the Wright was this statue of Thomas Jefferson in front of a wall that lists all ~600 people he owned. For most, only a first name is known. For a handful, no name is known, but they are still listed. The museum can't tell all their stories, but to say their names is a start.