The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters

My work gave us the full week off for Thanksgiving and the plans I set out for myself involved reading a bunch, going for walks (it comes to my attention every time I do go for a walk -- in the form of sore legs afterwards -- that I don't spend nearly as much time as I used to on my feet as I did before the pandemic), cleaning my apartment, and cooking. Four days in, I have certainly read a bunch. I've walked a little (a lazy trip to my closest little free library yesterday to drop off some books), and I've cleaned a little, and I've cooked a little (I almost caved and ordered delivery tonight but was saved by the discovery of a perfectly ripe avocado in my kitchen), so I guess the week is going to plan. (I intended to walk and clean more than I have, but it's only Tuesday.)

I read pretty solidly for most of Saturday and Sunday, so yesterday, I spent a slow morning putting away laundry and refiling the slides I sent away to be digitized and received back a few weeks ago, which have been sitting on my dining room table ever since. Around noon I showered, and then I ate lunch, and then I started The Last Policeman. And that was how I spent pretty much the rest of my day. I took a break for dinner, then went back to it. At around 8pm, I decided to stop for the day. If I had started earlier, I would have finished it yesterday. I was almost mad at myself, but what's the point. This morning, I got up and had my breakfast and did the Spelling Bee and studied my Italian and then did an online yoga class for good measure and then after yoga I had the strange idea that I should start preparing my lunch (it was 10am) so I wouldn't put it off until I was hungry. This, of course, meant that I sat down to lunch before 11:30 (which is undoubtedly why I have already eaten dinner and washed my dinner dishes as I type this at 6pm). And then I had to pick up one last item at the grocery store, which turned out to be a bigger errand than I anticipated. But I finally got home at maybe 1pm and sat down again with The Last Policeman. All that time, I think I was stalling because I didn't have all that much left to read in the book -- less than 100 pages -- and once I finished it: then what? So, as it happened, I finished it around 3pm and, yes, then what? I puttered around. I didn't clean or go for a walk. I briefly contemplated going back to Bosnian novel #2, which I set aside two weeks ago (and even more briefly considered going back to the other two novels that sit unfinished on the table by my couch). And then I started another book.

Anyway, The Last Policeman. It seems to me that it was recent, but I can't think where or from whom I got the suggestion to read it. I found a used copy a couple weeks ago and I remembered the title as something I wanted to read. And at that point, even as I was still at least two books out from getting there, I pre-selected it as the book I would read next when I was done reading my next book club selection. It seemed like just what I wanted to read at the moment, but it would have to wait. I could write now what I think I always write after reading genre fiction, which is that I don't read much genre fiction. That remains true. The Last Policeman is part of a sub-genre -- a cross-genre really -- that I'm now realizing particularly appeals to me: sci-fi mystery. The mystery drives the plot, but the context (in this case, a pre-apocalypse while earth's inhabitants wait for the planet's likely destruction by an asteroid) is what sets the mood, and that mood makes the book. Thinking this is a genre I'd like to read more of, I did a quick search and found this list of 23 best sci-fi mystery books, which includes the book I was most expecting to encounter -- The City and the City -- but also two other books I've read and enjoyed (The Yiddish Policemen's Union and Pattern Recognition -- though not, I should mention, The Last Policeman). All of these are rather light on the sci-fi (debatably sci-fi in fact), but I'm thinking this is a genre I should explore. 

Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

A couple weeks ago, my dad and I took a little day trip to Yonkers and the Bronx and as our last stop on our way back to Brooklyn, we dropped into The Lit. Bar. The bookstore had been on my radar for a while (it opened in April 2019), but I virtually never find myself in the Bronx. It's a fantastic little shop (and bar!) with a fun, creative organization to its fiction selection. It does have a kind of general literature section, but much of the fiction is divided into small sub-categories. (In fact, their Bookshop page gives a hint of the store's organizational methods.) This kind of organization often irks me -- if I'm looking for something specific, I want to be able to find it easily.* But on this occasion, I wasn't looking for anything specific and I realized that the organization was particularly conducive to browsing. It served as a sort of recommendation system: if you like this book, maybe you'll also like the thematically similar book sitting next to it. So anyway, while I was browsing, the spine of Washington Black caught my eye. I thought I remembered that a friend had suggested it as a future book for our book club, so I texted her, received immediate confirmation, and I bought it (along with another book -- Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcón, an author I read about in How To Travel without Seeing).

I've missed my last few book club meetings. I kept finding myself reading the wrong thing at the wrong time. I determined to get back on track, and with my lately slow reading pace, I gave myself a little more than a week to read the next book. I finished it in two days. It's a nineteenth-century (set in, that is) coming of age story about an enslaved boy (the titular Washington Black) from a plantation in Barbados who is forced to escape and ends up on a series of adventures that take him halfway around the world, to the Arctic and the Sahara. Washington Black has the sort of high adventure quality I associate with nineteenth-century literature -- a young protagonist, caught up in events beyond his control and exposed to a world beyond his imagination. It was fully absorbing; exactly the kind of book I can sit down on the coach with and read cover to cover. It had been a while since I've done that.

*Years ago, I remember visiting the Borders (this alone dates this memory) on Broadway off Wall Street and thinking they carried no James Baldwin because he was nowhere to be found in their Fiction/Literature section. Eventually I discovered they had a separate African American Literature section, and there was the Baldwin. I was left feeling ambivalent about this organizational decision. Giving whoever made this decision at Borders the benefit of the doubt, I imagine the decision to have a separate section was to celebrate not segregate, but I couldn't help feeling the writers had been ghettoized. Didn't Baldwin belong with the capital L Literature? At the very least they could have put some shelf markers explaining where to look for Baldwin.

The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel

I almost never read books when they are new, but this year has been unusual in that respect (admittedly it's been far more unusual in other respects). The Glass Hotel was the third book I've read this year that came out in 2020. I've read another two that came out in 2019, and at least seven more from 2018 -- which I realize doesn't qualify as all that new, but still seems unusual for me. (I'm not even counting Romance in Marseille, which was published this year but written nearly a century ago.) I don't know what this means or where I'm trying to go with it; just an observation I guess.

Like everyone, I loved Station Eleven. It's one of those books I would recommend to basically anyone. By which I mean it's a book that I loved, but also one that I think has broad appeal (which is not true of many books that I love). A good friend, who also loved Station Eleven sent me The Glass Hotel for my birthday in June. I think I was half saving it, for when I felt I needed a book to throw myself into perhaps, and half afraid: could it live up to Station Eleven? Maybe that's a silly thing to be worried about (I find myself with similar sentiments thinking about Yaa Gyasi's new book, which I'm very excited for, but also: can it be as good as Homegoing? Perhaps it can. Perhaps, as I've said, this is a silly train of thought.)

I tried not to find out too much about The Glass Hotel before reading it. (I remember having to rush to turn off the radio when I heard Emily St. John Mandel start to be interviewed by Alison Stewart on All of It. Maybe I will go back and listen now.) I had heard it was about a Ponzi scheme, but that was pretty much all I knew ahead of time -- and I can't say that left me feeling particularly interested in reading it. I found the start a little slow. There was jumping around - in time, location, and among characters (familiar to readers of Station Eleven), that I think kept me from being pulled in right away. But the book grew on me. There was one reveal toward the end in particular that really worked for me. And damn if I don't want to go live in a remote luxury hotel at the far end of Vancouver Island after reading this! My urge to compare it to Station Eleven feels like a disservice to The Glass Hotel, but I find it hard to help. I liked it. A lot. I'm going to loan it to my dad, who I believe was the first person I recommended Station Eleven to. (He loved it.)

Luster, by Raven Leilani

I'm not sure why immediately on finishing one 500-page Bosnian novel that took me two months to get through, I decided the right move was to start a second 500-page Bosnian novel, but that's exactly what I did. For the past three weeks, I've been reading -- and on several days not reading -- Ivo Andrić's Bosnian Chronicle. A week ago, I thought I'd set it aside and read my next book club book, but about 10 pages into that, I decided to stick with the Andrić after all. I should say it's not just that the Andrić is slow going -- it is; but I've also been swamped with work and so exhausted during my spare moments that I haven't felt up to reading a quiet novel about Bosnia in the early nineteenth century. Yesterday afternoon, at the end of what was a 7-day work week, I thought maybe I was prepared to sit down with Andrić for a while, but I read 5 pages or so of a chapter and saw that it had 20 more pages and just didn't feel like facing it. And so I went to my bookshelves and pulled out Luster, which I bought on the spur of the moment at my local bookstore/coffee shop a couple months ago. I read a bit more than half yesterday and finished it this morning, and it was just the break I needed. (They can't be all slow Bosnian novels set during Ottoman rule.)

I enjoyed Luster. I found it interesting and beautiful in parts. I also found it strange and disconcerting. Most of all, it made me feel old. The book is about a 23-year-old who's in a relationship with a man about my age, and I felt while reading it like I was grouped in with this older, out of touch generation. (It's not just age that separates the characters, I should say: it's also race and financial security, or lack thereof, class backgrounds, childhood experiences.) I imagine it's a natural part of aging that one doesn't feel old within oneself, but that as one gets older the culture of young people -- the language they use, the way they dress, their proclivities -- feels more and more incomprehensible. This may sound strange, but I remember a moment somewhere between five and ten years ago, when clothes stopped making sense to me. I felt like the things that I understood about clothes, about how an outfit was composed, were suddenly outmoded and irrelevant, and it happened without my even noticing it. Fashion has changed again since I first had this realization, and I still find the fashion of the young rather baffling. Anyway, this novel was like that experience in book form. 

The other writer I've read who is about the same age as Leilani -- and who writes about people her own age -- is Sally Rooney, and reading this reminded me a bit of reading Rooney -- particularly Conversations with Friends. (In fact, the stories are themselves rather similar now that I think about it.) I tried while reading Luster and also while reading Conversations with Friends to remember my own precarious youth, to read with those eyes. I feel like the narrators of both books have an impulse for self-destruction that I never had, and I somehow think this is generational. This isn't to say there aren't self-destructive people in my -- and in every -- generation, but perhaps that there's a fatalism among younger people that wasn't there when I was young. These narrators also have an earnestness and vulnerability that I never allowed myself, and I feel like this too is generational. This line of thought led me to google (inadvertently adding some drama to my search history as I tried to key in the exact phrases that would get me to these articles I only faintly remembered) two articles I remembered seeing some months back exploring, or explaining, the collective internet's voiced desire to be harmed by their celebrity crushes -- another element of youth culture that leaves me feeling bemused. In fact, the particular tenor of these requests by internet teens for celebrities to step on their throats -- which is familiar to me from the time I spend on Twitter, but also foreign to me in that I feel that it references some emotion or worldview that I just can't relate to -- was very like the tone of Luster. There were long stretches that read to me like dry irony, and I wondered if they were funny. 

As it happens, I finished this book just in time to hear Raven Leilani talk about it on All Of It on WNYC, so maybe some of my questions will be answered today.