French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt; Erasure, by Percival Everett

It is my habit to spend the week between Christmas and New Year's reading. Usually it's a cold time, when being curled up under a blanket on the couch with a book seems like the best way one can spend a day. Not so this year. I have my living room window open and still my apartment is too warm. 

A year is an arbitrary unit of measure in reading life, but I find it's a useful one. In addition to always squeezing a few fast, intense reading stretches in at the end, I also use the end of the year to clear out the backlog. Either I finish the books that I started earlier in the year and left to lie with bookmarks still in them as I moved on to other things, or I declare them abandoned. I used to find it very hard to give up books, and so setting a December 31 deadline is useful. Each year I start with a clean slate and I don't allow myself to feel any guilt about unfinished books hanging over me. This year I abandoned three books; each returned to my shelf with a bookmark still in place in case I do one day get the urge to return to them. (Usually this doesn't happen, but I like to be prepared. I still have my bookmark on page 350 of Moby Dick which I started in July of 2008 and abandoned at the end of that year. I think I could pick it up today and not need to retrace my steps.)

After finishing Dummy Boy on the morning of December 29, I figured I had time to squeeze in one more book before the year was out. I'd had French Exit for a while. I believe it came originally recommended by someone I follow on Twitter. I think it was its appearance on this list that made me think it would be a good choice for this particular moment (not that I was in a rut; more a rush). Before the day was over, I was halfway through it and I realized I probably had time for two more books in 2021 if I really committed myself to it. French Exit was everything that was promised: dark, funny, extremely readable, and featuring a cat.

When I finished French Exit on the morning of December 30, I had already decided that Erasure would be the next book I'd take up. At 265 pages of what appeared to me to be a very small font, I was slightly concerned I might not meet my (arbitrary) deadline. I started it after lunch yesterday, brought it with me to read while I waited on a ~3-hour line for a covid test, then read a bit more before dinner. When I picked it up again this morning I had 195 pages remaining, and when I got to page 130, where the novel-within-the-novel concludes, I realized I could pace myself. I had plenty of time.

I didn't write much about Telephone when I read it last month, but I liked it a lot. When I picked up Erasure, I found that the voice was familiar, the pacing was familiar. I fell right into it. While I did have two of his books (Erasure being one), I didn't know much of anything about Percival Everett when I read Telephone, but after I finished it I read what I could find, most notably this illuminating New Yorker article. It made me want to finally pick up Erasure, which I'd had a copy of for quite a while, and his other books. (What are the reasons it took me another 2 months to do so? Hard to say.)

Anyway: Erasure. I loved it. It has these layers of satire, and they live comfortably inside a story that isn't satire. A story about the difficulty of family; about loss and grieving; about being alone in the world. While the stories are utterly different, I think this was where I saw the similarity with Telephone. The characters are suffer from deep, personal loss. They feel profoundly alone. And yet there's humor; a lot of it. There are other things going on. Life is going on. (It seems likely, in both cases, the way life goes on – the decisions the central characters make, is driven by the experience of loss, but it's not so explicit.) To say that Erasure is a hilarious send-up of the publishing industry being taken in by its own racist assumptions about the Black experience would be true, but not complete. It's much more besides. 

Dummy Boy: Tekashi 6ix9ini and the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, by Shawn Setaro

Let me start with a disclosure: Shawn Setaro is a friend of mine. As anyone who is familiar with my reading habits will know, Dummy Boy is not my usual fare. So, my decision to read it was not unbiased, and my review probably won't be either, but I do believe the fact that I tore through Dummy Boy cover to cover in less than 24 hours is a testament to Shawn's writing and storytelling abilities. I listened to hip hop a lot as a teen and young adult – and I still love a lot of what I listened to back then, but my listening habits have not kept up with the times. I have, as far as I know, never heard a Tekashi 69 song. Inasmuch as I was aware of the events surrounding his career and trial, it was because of my friendship with Shawn – I read some of his reporting on it at the time. I'm not a podcast or a Spotify person, so I never did listen to the podcast that Shawn created (sorry!). This might be considered a good thing in that it meant that most of the material covered in this book was new to me. Anyway, this story was a wild ride!

Dummy Boy is divided into two parts. The first half provides some biographical background on Tekashi's early life and then goes into a lot of detail on his career development, his rising fame, and his gang connections in Brooklyn. I was a little alarmed to discover how many key events in Tekashi's short career as a gangster took place within a few blocks of my home. The second half of the book is a play-by-play of the racketeering trial in which Tekashi was a key cooperating witness. Both halves are told with enough context for even someone wholly uninformed about the events to understand, and the story is compelling enough that I never lost interest in reading it – even lacking any specific interest in the people involved. While I imagine most readers who pick up this book will do so with some knowledge and curiosity about the events, I can attest that it's a thoroughly engaging read even for the reader who has neither. 

The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim

I only became aware of Elizabeth von Arnim a little more than a year ago when I picked up a copy of her book Love at the Goodwill in Downtown Brooklyn without knowing anything about it. Later I realized I had been vaguely aware of her, without knowing her by name. I remembered the existence of the movie Enchanted April – I could picture the poster, though I never saw it. But the book was recommended to me – I would have been interested anyway after reading Love – and so when I found a copy at a used bookshop in Philadelphia earlier this year I bought it. And then I brought it home and shelved it. It was its appearance in "Read Like the Wind" on December 18 that brought it to the front of my mind, and so I determined I would read it next.

The Enchanted April takes place not long after the Great War. Four English women who are nearly strangers, together rent a small castle in Italy for the month of April. Each has her own reason for wanting to get away. In their new setting, each is transformed. This is the premise, but it's Elizabeth von Arnim's telling of it that makes this book. She has a sharp insight into people, and how they relate to one another and the way she describes these intrigues is funny and a little wicked. We see at once the surface interactions and the currents underneath. 

As someone who travels frequently and often prefers to be alone when I do so, I was presented with a possibly unflattering picture of myself when I started this book. Earlier this year – in April, in fact – I went on a trip with one woman I knew and two women I didn't. Did I, like the book's Lady Caroline conspicuously sneak off on my own for entire days? I don't claim her other qualities – startling beauty and wealth – but I recognized her fear of being attached to. I'd rather imagine myself (as would anyone I think) as like the book's Mrs. Wilkins, who on arriving in their castle is suffused with love and sympathy. For the first time, she finds the competence and independence to be truly herself. Her transformation is nearly instant, while the others' take time, but it is Mrs. Wilkins who really brings it all about. 

The Enchanted April was delightful and now I so want to go to the Ligurian coast some April (if nothing else to see the flowers so vividly described in this book!). It's a shame that possibility feels so remote today.

Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski

Yesterday was my last day of work in 2021 and I have been looking forward to my traditional year-end week of reading for a long time. The first thing on the agenda for my time off was finishing Fieldwork, which I started early last week. I had expected to get through it more quickly – I had a round-trip train ride to Philly over the weekend, which I was sure would get me through the book – but the last week and change proved busier than I anticipated and I wasn't always in the mood to read during what little downtime I had. Fieldwork is another book I found via Molly Young's Read Like the Wind newsletter. Like the last book I read on her recommendation, it's an anthropology novel. 

Fieldwork follows a journalist named Mischa Berlinski around Thailand as he investigates an anthropologist who has settled in the community where she started her fieldwork until being sent to prison for murdering a missionary, and her victim. Berlinski interviews several sources to learn about his subjects, and the book tells the story through these conversations, shifting its focus from the anthropologist murderer to the Dead Head missionary and back as he uncovers new information about one then the other. The resulting story reveals itself slowly and indirectly, but keeps our interest. So much so that when the narrative is occasionally interrupted by the narrator's own life and troubles, they feel very out of place. 

Now it's time for me to decide whether to return to any of the three books I started and set aside earlier this year, or to spend the next week and a half on new material. Stay tuned!

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, by Penelope Mortimer

Several months ago when the first series of McNally Editions were announced, I subscribed and ordered the whole set. The first three arrived last weekend, just as I was in need of something new to read. I had never heard of Penelope Mortimer, but I selected Daddy's Gone A-Hunting to start with on the strength of its first paragraph. It turned out to be an excellent choice and an unexpectedly timely read.* 

Originally published in 1958, this book must have been scandalous at the time. It centers on Ruth, now in her late 30s and married to a man she doesn't love, a man who terrorizes her, in fact, whom she was pressured into marrying after becoming pregnant by him at 18. As the book begins, the daughter she had a few months after that wedding is now 18 or so herself and studying at Oxford. She becomes pregnant and Ruth is driven to save her daughter from the misery she herself lives with. Mother and daughter agree that an abortion is the solution, and though they share this confidence, they seem unable to communicate or connect. In 1950s England, abortion isn't legal, so getting one involves several hurdles: finding a willing doctor, getting down to London without arousing suspicion, and figuring out how to fund an abortion, among others. 

These are the events of the book, but what really made it a compelling read was Mortimer's writing and perception. There is a brilliantly told change in Ruth's psychology over the course of the novel.  Mortimer does an incredible job of showing us how Ruth is perceived by others, and how she's aware of it herself. Her husband thinks she's mad and hires a caretaker to stay with her because he only comes home at weekends. Sometimes, Ruth does sink into her own depressed state, but sometimes she can use the way others see her to her own advantage. We readers witness Ruth take control of her own narrative, even as the change in her goes totally unnoticed by everyone around her. It's quite something.

* I read this incredible story in the NY Times midway through my reading of Daddy's Gone A-Hunting and they were echoing against each other in my mind all week. 

Mourning, by Eduardo Halfon

I was on the second paragraph of Mourning when I asked myself why I had waited until now to start it. It's a dumb question; I would have asked myself the same thing whenever I decided to start it I think. I got it a little over a year ago and it's not like it would have had significantly more meaning to me then than it did now (in fact, perhaps more today as, at one point, Halfon mentions reading Joseph Roth, a writer I hadn't read until February of this year). As with Halfon's other books, Mourning seems to lie somewhere between fiction and memoir; perhaps a collection of short stories, but not clearly so. The first story/chapter of Mourning recounts a trip to Calabria, where the narrator Halfon has been invited to deliver a talk. Only after accepting does he learn the talk is to take place at a former concentration camp (which, he discovers on arriving, is in fact a reconstruction of a former concentration camp that was destroyed in the 1960s to clear the way for a highway). The town Halfon arrives at in Calabria is the same one where George Gissing landed in 1897, which I drove through in 2018. I had no idea there had been a concentration camp in the vicinity. I didn't know Italy had had camps at all, though I can't say I was entirely surprised – particularly that one was located in Calabria, a malarial backwater in Mussolini's Italy. As we know, he was fond of exiling political dissidents in Italy's deep south. But I was surprised I'd never heard of it. Looking at the map, I must have driven right past it (right over it perhaps on the autostrada that it was cleared for) on my way to find Carlo Levi's Aliano. 

The bulk of Mourning consists of a long chapter called "Mourning," which takes us in and out of the past, to Poland, Germany, Lebanon, Corsica, La Havre, New York, Miami, and Guatemala tracing Halfon's family's movements, his own movements, the secret story of his uncle who died as a child. It's heartbreaking and beautiful at every turn. 

In the Company of Men, by Véronique Tadjo

I was rushed to pick out a book to read as I headed out the door on Wednesday evening and I pulled out In the Company of Men before I had a chance to second guess myself. Somewhere I had heard something about it but I didn't remember where or what. I mostly made note of it because it was from Côte d'Ivoire, a country I had not yet read a book from. And then a few months ago I was visiting my dad and he had, independently, come across a copy and set it aside for me. (This isn't so surprising in that he often sets aside books for me and knows I'm interested in African literature, though it's not very common that he sets aside a book I was already seeking.) But I still didn't know anything about it, so when I sat down on the subway and opened it to read on Wednesday evening I almost had to laugh. I had been looking for a slim book that would be quick reading and I had, unknowingly, selected a book about the twenty-teens Ebola outbreak in West Africa. It was a slim book and it did turn out to be a quick read, but it certainly wasn't what I'd imagined when I pulled it off the shelf.

In the Company of Men tells the story of the Ebola outbreak through many different voices. Each chapter is narrated by a different individual who has been affected by the disease – those who've been infected, the doctors and nurses treating them, those who've escaped infection, the researchers investigating the virus, those who are paid to bury the dead, and even some non-humans the baobab tree, the bat who carries the virus, and Ebola itself are given voices to tell their piece of the story. The book is clearly informed by real events (I stopped midway to read a short online history of Ebola and immediately saw reflections in the text) and it is, in a way, instructional. But it's also poetic and felt, in some way, like a call to action.

In the Company of Men was originally published in 2017, but the English translation just came out this year. The acknowledgements in the English edition note how Ebola research served as a precedent to inform Covid-19 research, echoing something I heard on the radio just this morning. 

While We Were Dating, by Jasmine Guillory

I got one last book in on my trip to California, making this trip probably the most productive reading vacation I've ever had. On my visit to Oakland I was staying just a few blocks away from East Bay Booksellers, a store I had heard of because of Jasmine Guillory. I've been following her on Twitter for years (since before her first book even came out) and so I knew it was her local bookstore, from which you can always order her books and request signed copies. So, it felt like the right place to buy a copy of her most recent book, While We Were Dating -- and I did indeed get a signed copy right off the shelf. I've read and enjoyed all of Jasmine Guillory's books, and they are absolutely ideal for inflight reading, which is how I read the last 200 pages of While We Were Dating. (I had exactly enough time on the flight to finish While We Were Dating and watch "Black Widow," so that worked out nicely.)

One thing that's very fun about Guillory's books is the way they are all interconnected. I do think each one could stand on its own, but it's a fun little reward as a reader to encounter central characters from previous books in small parts in others -- and the reverse. While We Were Dating brought back characters from multiple earlier books (and a reference to a cupcake shop that I felt had to be the same one from The Proposal). It's also fun as a reader to imagine which small characters from the book might feature as a future protagonist. While We Were Dating wasn't my favorite book in the series, but it had all the qualities I've enjoyed in Guillory's earlier books and it was the perfect cap to my Oakland vacation. 

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald is a writer who has been on my radar for close to 25 years, but this is the first book I’ve read of hers. I remember in the late 1990s when I worked in a bookstore she was getting a lot of attention for The Blue Flower and The Bookshop and I think at one point I owned a copy of each, but I never did read them. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve felt a particular appreciation for writers who only gained recognition late in life — it gives one some hope. Along with Jose Saramago, Penelope Fitzgerald must be a prime example of this type. Offshore, published in 1979 when Fitzgerald was 63, qualifies as an early work of hers.

I am still in Oakland with the kitten. Offshore is not one of the books I brought with me to read. On Wednesday I went into San Francisco to meet a friend and I stopped by a thrift store in the Mission where I’ve always had good luck finding books. (I remember specifically that it’s where I bought Kinshu: Autumn Brocade several years ago, a book I’d never heard of but ended up loving. I got it on the visit here where I decided to undertake my world books reading project, and it was the first Japanese novel I read.) The shop had three Penelope Fitzgerald books, none of which I’d heard of, and I considered grabbing all of them (they were slim and wouldn’t add much weight, I reasoned), but I decided to get just one and narrowed it down to Offshore because — as is stated on the cover — it was the winner of the Booker Prize. 

Offshore is set in a small community of barge-dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s. Each one is an outsider in their own way — a woman living apart from her husband with her two daughters who’ve stopped going to school; an elderly maritime painter whose own barge is beyond repair; a male prostitute who always has a sympathetic ear; a former Naval officer from the war who  doesn’t want to give up ship life though his wife does; a muddy cat who’s chased by the rats. the book is small, but beautifully shows how this odd little community comes together, and falls apart — along with their boats. 

Euphoria, by Lily King

I am, at the moment, kitten-sitting in Oakland, California. I took this photo yesterday with the book for scale to try and show just how small this little cat is, but I don’t think I succeeded. Euphoria is one of the two books I brought with me to upstate New York and didn’t start, so now having brought it on a second trip (on which, of course, I have picked up a few more books) I decided I really needed to read it so I didn’t keep carrying it around with me. I originally picked it up a couple years ago after it was recommended in Molly Young’s “Read Like the Wind” newsletter. I have considered starting it multiple times, and it was I think the mention in some other newsletter I get of a new book by Lily King that prompted me to do it now (or approximately now). It’s set primarily in early 1930s New Guinea among a trio of anthropologists, inspired by Margaret Mead. I think it was the phrase “love triangle” on the back cover that turned me off from reading this on the previous occasions I considered it. It’s hard to say exactly why; I’ve surely read many books that featured love triangles, so I think it was actually the phrase itself more than what it suggested that rankled me. I sort of wish the book were less blatantly inspired by Margaret Mead because I found it hard to think of the characters as characters, if that makes sense, and yet I know very little about Margaret Mead and so now I’m probably terribly misinformed. In any case, Euphoria was a gripping read. The advertised love triangle was more complex than it seemed and did not go quite how I expected it would. Novels about anthropologists in the field is sort of a micro genre of its own, of which I believe this is the fourth example I’ve read and one of the ones I’ve enjoyed the most. They’ve all had a similarly lingering sense of terror — the sense that things could turn bad at any moment (and probably will); the threat always coming both from without (the people being studied) and within (the anthropologists themselves). It’s a natural set-up for a compelling read, and Euphoria was that.

Telephone, by Percival Everett

A week and a half ago, I went to upstate New York to take care of my mom’s dog for a few days while my mom and stepdad went to Montreal. I brought three books with me: Two Serious Ladies, which I finished while there, and two books I’d selected to read next. On my first day up there, I went to the Goodwill in Hudson where I bought, among other things, the book Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue. When I finished Two Serious Ladies I briefly considered reading one of the books I had brought with me, but instead opted to start my new book. A couple days later I went back home and I was slowly moving along through Sudden Death. About a week later, I was 100 or so pages in. I was enjoying it, but not loving it. It’s a book about tennis and Caravaggio, Anne Boleyn, Hernan Cortes. I found myself confusing the characters across generations, and the story — in as much  as there was one — a little hard to follow. But generally, I was liking it. On Saturday morning, I left the house with a small purse which just fitted Sudden Death along with the basic necessities. I was going to donate blood in the morning, ahead of meeting a friend for her birthday, and finally picking up my CSA share on my way home that evening. The blood drive was in Cobble Hill, so I took the bus down there and read a bit on the way. After my blood donation I stopped by Books Are Magic to pick up a birthday gift for my friend. I managed to stuff it along with Sudden Death and the other necessities into my purse, though it wouldn’t snap shut. It was fine — I just had to manage until I met my friend and then she would carry the gift. I stopped for a bagel to keep my blood sugar up and I was standing outside the Bergen Street subway stop eating my bagel when I noticed a book on a stoop. It was an ARC of Telephone, by Percival Everett. He was someone I’d been meaning to read for a while — I even had two books of his at home that I’d picked up over the years. I tucked it under my arm, figuring I’d only have to carry it that way until I met my friend and then I could stuff it in my purse in place of the book I got her and maybe it wouldn’t snap, but that would be ok. I ended up having to walk to Jay Street because there was a train stalled at Bergen. However, I made it to the meeting point, reading a little more of Sudden Death along the way. I gave my friend her book, but it turned out Telephone was a bit bigger and I couldn’t manage to fit it along with Sudden Death in my purse. I took Sudden Death out and put it in my coat pocket, where it almost fit. It stayed put for the next several hours while we visited a museum and then went out for a late afternoon meal. I was running late getting back to my neighborhood from Columbus Circle and the trains weren’t helping any. When the A finally arrived, I took Sudden Death out of my pocket to read on the train home, but between the activity on the train and my anxiety about being late, I couldn’t concentrate. I held it on my lap through the whole trip. As I stood up to get off, I put it back in my coat pocket and walked to my CSA pick-up location, which was on the way back to my apartment. But somewhere between the train, the CSA pick-up, and my apartment, I lost Sudden Death. I didn’t realize until the following morning. I was so frazzled when I got home, I thought I might have set it down someplace weird. (I still wonder if it’s maybe in my apartment somewhere strange, though I looked everywhere I could imagine.) I retraced my steps to the yard where I picked up the CSA box and found no sign of the book. I had intended to finish it that Sunday, ahead of a trip to California on Monday where I wanted to start fresh. It was very disorienting. 

After my efforts to retrieve my lost book on Sunday, I debated very briefly what to start next and was, once again, won over by the attraction of the new. I read close to half of Telephone on Sunday and thought I would easily finish it on the plane. I easily would have finished it and had the time to watch at least one movie had it not been for my chatty neighbor (which is a whole story of its own). I arrived in Oakland yesterday afternoon with 22 pages to go, but I was too exhausted from my day of travel to finish it last night. Of course I woke up at 5:00 this morning. I had breakfast and coffee in the dark and picked up Telephone to read through to the end just as it was getting light. It was a really beautiful book, heart-wrenching throughout, but occasionally funny in unexpected ways. I’m glad finding this book in the midst of a crazy day finally got me to read Percival Everett. I suspect if I had not lost Sudden Death I wouldn’t have started this when I did and it might have just ended up on my shelves alongside the other two Everett books I own. Maybe sometimes reading the most recently acquired book isn’t such a bad habit. I brought the same two books with me to California that I had taken to upstate New York last week, so maybe I will finally get to those too. 

Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles

Two Serious Ladies had been on my to-read list for quite a long time, and when I saw this cute edition at Greedy Reads in Baltimore I decided maybe now was the moment. This is a strange book about two upper class women friends who, separately (I mention this because given the title I somehow assumed they would do it together) run away from or escape from the life that society has prescribed for them. On a trip to Panama with her husband, Mrs. Copperfield moves herself into a hotel that is essentially a brothel and forms a strong attachment to one of the residents. Meanwhile in or near New York, Miss Goering sells her large home and moves with her irritable companion, Miss Gamelon, and Arthur, a man she met at a party, to a small unheated home on an island near the city (I wondered if it was Staten Island? Or just some made up place). After a while she abandons these two for a man she meets in a grubby bar in a town on the mainland (New Jersey?), and she subsequently abandons him for a mobster-type who assumes she's a prostitute and doesn't believe her when she denies she is one.

I know a little about Jane and Paul Bowles' life and I couldn't help wondering if the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield was a reflection of them. On their travels, Mr. Copperfield is intent on avoiding the places that attract tourists and going deeper and deeper into unknown territory. When we last see him, he is learning about Central America considering moving on to a remote cow farm in Costa Rica.

I'm not sure what to think about this book. The women at the center of it seem desperate to create a new mode of existence for themselves, but but also unable to find any happiness in it as they test their own boundaries. The book is at times quite funny, but also rather grim. 

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

Today I was supposed to be packing for an upcoming trip, or cleaning in preparation for same, or dealing with the masses of vegetables I've accumulated from 3 consecutive weeks of CSA pick-ups. So, obviously, rather than doing most of these things (I did pickle some ginger and beets this morning), I picked up a new book to read. Like many people, I was excited to hear Susanna Clarke had a new novel coming out last year. I read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell when it was quite new, having been given a copy by a friend who worked for the publisher. This was, if memory serves, around the time of my Jane Austen binge (as I've written a couple times before, I came to her late), during which period I also read (and adored) Tom Jones. I devoured Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and it felt of a piece with the other things I was reading at the time. After I finished reading it, I passed it along to my then-husband who also devoured it, an experience that left him – bizarrely, I thought – somewhat angry. He felt manipulated by the book. Later, I'm displeased to realize, his critique of the book rubbed off on me. I haven't reread it, but I did watch the TV miniseries, which didn't raise my opinion of it. In the intervening years, I guess I've come to think of it not as a good book but as a diverting one. This may be unfair to it, though I do enjoy reading diverting books. The fact that it might be one was why I landed on Piranesi this morning. I hadn't heard much of anything about Piranesi except that it was "very different." I would agree that this is true, but – as with Clarke's earlier novel – I devoured it. I read it in the space of about four hours. Perhaps because of my grudgingly acknowledged bias against Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I found myself thinking that Piranesi felt mature by comparison. Now I don't know if I'm being fair to either book, but I quite liked Piranesi. Maybe I should give Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell a reread.

Assymetry, by Lisa Halliday

I get many of my books from PaperbackSwap. The way this often works out is I hear about a book I think I'd like to read. I go to PaperbackSwap, where the book isn't typically available immediately, so I add the book to my wishlist. Some period of time later – maybe months, maybe years – I get an email telling me the book is available and I'm next on the list to get it. By this time, I often don't remember anything about the book – what about it made me want to read it, who recommended it – but I usually trust my former self and go ahead and request the book. This is how I ended up with a copy of Asymmetry in my mailbox last week. The cover informed me that it had made the New York Times' "Ten Best Books of the Year" list, which may be how I found my way to it. I usually do read that list and make note of the entries that sound of interest. 

In any case, I was plodding my way through another book (these seems to happen to me more and more lately), but I had a long, round-trip subway ride on the horizon over the weekend and I decided to start something new. By the time I got home from that outing, I was 100 pages into Asymmetry and I finished it two days later. It's very readable. (Ironically, perhaps, the book opens with a character reading a book that's very unreadable. Perhaps this was the clue that made me think it would be a good read for a long subway ride.) The book is divided into three more or less connected parts. The first centers on Alice and her relationship with a much older successful writer. The section was interesting to me, because I've long been fascinated with these types of asymmetrical relationships – not so much the age disparity, but the power disparity. I think they interest me because it's very hard for me to imagine being in that kind of relationship. It's hardly my best quality, but I'm aware that I'm a person who prefers power in my relationships (romantic and otherwise). What Alice gets out of this relationship is an education – and she wants it. It reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with a much younger friend who told me she liked her partners to teach her things. It was so bizarre to me at the time, I don't think I could even fathom what she meant. (It's not that I don't like to learn from my partners at all, but I'm a person who likes to learn collaboratively – co-discovery. This was one of the great strengths of my marriage, until it wasn't.) The second section of the book is an apparently unrelated (though there are hints here and there as to the provenance) first person narrative by an Iraqi-American man who has been stopped at immigration at Heathrow, where he has a stopover en route to Iraq. We learn a great deal about this man, from his birth to the present day (2011-ish) in the roughly 100 pages that are devoted to his story. And then we leave him at Heathrow and return to the older writer from the first section, who narrates his life story to a BBC radio host for an installment of Desert Island Discs. This third section brings to the reader's attention that we barely got to know the writer in the first section. I didn't find Asymmetry to be quite as profound as many of the blurbs seemed to suggest it was, but it was a very enjoyable read.

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova

I don't know where I first heard about Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe but I made note of it because I didn't have a Bulgarian on my to-read list (though I have occasionally pondered whether Elias Canetti could count for this purpose). Kapka Kassabova grew up in communist Bulgaria until she was 17, when the Cold War ended and her family emigrated to New Zealand. She subsequently relocated to Scotland and she writes in English. Border is an account of two years she spent traveling and talking to locals along the border between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. It's part memoir, part travel journal, part history, part folklore. It took me more than a month to finish, but I absolutely loved this book. I started reading it after finishing Jenny Erpenbeck and Herta Müller thinking, perhaps, that I would stick with the theme of women writers from Eastern Europe writing about the communist era and its aftermath. But Border covers much more than that. It did have some themes in common with Erpenbeck's Not a Novel. In particular, coming of age at a moment when your world also changed entirely is something both books talk about. They were also written at about the same moment, and Kassabova's time spent on the Turkish/Bulgarian border was also the height of Syrian refugee movement toward Europe. Both saw parallels to the Cold War experience, but where Erpenbeck was writing about the refugee situation from some distance, Kassabova encounters refugees in villages and at camps all along her journey. She notes the change in direction, where in her childhood people tried to cross out of Bulgaria, now they tried to cross in. I was also glad to have the background on the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans that I got from reading Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović, because the Ottoman history in the region comes up quite a bit in Border. The ancient history, too, gets covered. Thrace, for instance, was a place I vaguely recall hearing of probably in an art history survey course (I can't imagine any other course I took where it might have come up, but who knows?), but I certainly didn't know anything about it or that it still exists as a region spanning the border areas of these three countries. Bulgaria was a country I knew virtually nothing about, and I was not much better informed about Greece or Turkey. Kassabova provided a great introduction to the region, as well as a more general exploration into what borders mean and what it is to live on a border. I'm so glad I found this book.

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi

After my work book club's first selection for a discussion about diversity, equity, and inclusion was a book by a white man that was not at all about diversity, equity, and inclusion, they gave it another shot. I was honestly – pleasantly – surprised that How to Be an Antiracist was chosen and I'm very curious to see how our discussion goes tomorrow.

I was an African-American/Africana Studies major in college, studying first at Oberlin in 1994-95; then at Syracuse in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1996; and finally at Rutgers, where I earned my degree, in 2003-2004. I mention this to say that I've read a lot of literature on this topic, but also that my reading in this area is at least a little outdated. 

It probably shouldn't have been, but the concept of structural racism was eye-opening to me when I read Black Power as an 19-year-old. I've long believed that structural racism is the central problem in the U.S., and if anything my belief has only gotten firmer in recent years. Relatedly, I also tend to think it's not that useful to label individual people as racists (it's not that I think it's a taboo word, but that I don't think it's very productive). In saying that I believe using the term "racist" isn't productive, it's not that I give credence to the racists and accept that calling someone racist is a step too far, it's that I've generally thought it's not individual people who needed to be fixed; but rather it's the structures that perpetrate and perpetuate racism that need to be repaired.

I will admit: this book changed my thinking. Kendi's ideas aren't a radical departure from the ideas of structural racism, but he deliberately chooses to use different words and – critically – he implicates the people behind those structures for the racist policies they uphold. Kendi's focus on changing policies first and trusting that racist beliefs will fall away later strikes me as absolutely the only answer. And honestly, the idea that change needs to come before everyone is ready for it first isn't exactly new (something in this book put the line, "You keep on saying 'Go slow'" from Nina Simon's "Mississippi Goddam" in my mind), but Kendi's understanding of the role of power – and who has it – was very new to me. He says, "The most effective protests create and environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power's self-interest." 

It was in the second half of the chapter called "Black," about halfway through the book, that I really felt I started to understand the definition of racism that Kendi was using. In this chapter, he addresses the idea that Black people can't be racist. This formulation, he suggests, says that Black people have no power; that no Black people have power. But some Black people (and plenty of non-Black people) do have power – some have a small degree of power, and some have a great degree – and choose to use it in ways that perpetuate racism rather than equity. He goes into his reassessment of structural racism at even greater length in the second from the last chapter, "Success," and those two sections really made the book for me.

The other thing that this book does that is new is the way it defines racism and antiracism as, essentially, situational. They are action-related I don't feel the need to expand on this, because it's the thing that's mentioned in basically every review and I recalled it from when I heard Kendi interviewed on Morning Edition when the book was released, but I will say it's a good frame. It puts us on the hook for our actions and our words, but also big chunks of this book are personal anecdotes where Kendi shares his own wrong, sometimes racist, thinking. The reader who is probably occasionally cringing at their own past thinking, actions, and words, may feel a sense of empathy from the author.

There are a couple things I didn't love about this book, but I don't think they're worth dwelling on. I honestly don't think I would have read this if it hadn't been selected for my office book club, so I'm very glad they chose it and put me in the position of feeling like I had to read it.

Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

I found this copy of Murder on the Orient Express in a little free library. I've always enjoyed reading Agatha Christie, but I wondered whether I should read this one because I already knew who did the murder. I've seen at least two adaptations of it, the one from the Poirot TV series, which I've watched in its entirety, and the Kenneth Branagh movie from 2017. It turned out, while I remembered the main outcome, there was a lot I didn't remember (and judging from the cast list of the Branagh movie, it seems they must have made some alterations to the story). Spoilers follow. 

Murder on the Orient Express is two mystery tropes in one: (1) there's a common trope where you have a group of people in a confined space with no means of escape for the murderer and a murder that must have occurred during a small window of time, meaning that everybody is a suspect.  and (2) there's also a trope – one that I tend to this of this book as the original example, or at least what it is famous for – in which everybody did it. But a key detail – and a third trope – in Murder on the Orient Express that somehow, to my surprise, I didn't remember is that Poirot lets them get away with it. Perhaps this is common in the "everybody did it" genre of murder mysteries, because I think in these stories – as is the case in Murder on the Orient Express – the group of people has come together to exact justice on a bad guy, a baby killer in this instance, whom the formal justice system has let go free. Poirot rarely allows the perpetrator to escape justice. In the TV show, the closing scene of many episodes is the moment the murderer is hanged.* (These hangings always seem violent in the context of the show and I've always assumed this was a comment on capital punishment.) So, the message of this book is that the real perpetrator isn't the 12 murderers in the book, but the murderer they murdered. 

I watch a lot of murder mysteries and I'm always fascinated by the ones where the murderers are allowed to get away with it. I think probably this happens more in the stories centered around gentlemen detectives rather than police. Father Brown, for instance, lets an alarming number of people get away with murder – after they've made their peace with God, of course. But Poirot, as a former policeman, seems to usually share the bias of the police that murderers should be formally punished. So perhaps Murder on the Orient Express is a bit of an outlier in this way. 

In any case, I'm pleased to report that this was an enjoyable read – even already knowing who did it. 

The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño

I am just back from a short visit to Seattle. As usual, I brought with me more reading material than I could possibly get through in the four full days I was there. Also as usual, I visited a local bookstore and came home with more books than I started out with. I just brought two books with me, which is honestly not bad given my track record, but both books were rather long. I had already started one of the books and I doubted I would actually finish it while away, but I brought the second in case I wanted to read a different kind of book. After finishing the first section of the book I had underway I did, in fact, want to read a different kind of book. But by that time I had already visited Third Place Books and added five additional books to my collection, so I hardly needed the back up book I brought with me. Among the books I picked was The Spirit of Science Fiction, of which there was a stack of remaindered hardcovers on the bargain books tables. It was one of the few Bolaño books I didn't already own. 

After Bolaño's death, I remember being surprised at the seemingly bottomless supply of his works that had not yet been published in English. I'm not positive, but I believe that I learned about Bolaño in the same moment I learned about his early death, in a review of one of his books on NPR. (Googling leads me to believe it was probably this story about The Savage Detectives; I have a weirdly specific memory of driving on the BQE or possibly the Whitestone Expressway when I heard the story.) Then I remember clearly when 2666 came out and I was under the impression that he had just the two books. I got around to reading The Savage Detectives in 2009 and read 2666 a couple years later, and then at some point — I have no idea where in the timeline of all this exactly, though it must have been after I had read at least one of his books — my dad gave me a whole stack of Bolaño books, mostly those published by New Directions. After reading the big two, I read some of the smaller books here and there. I didn't pay too much attention as the posthumous works came out. But when I saw or heard reports that there was a new Bolaño book, I would marvel and rejoice that he'd left so much behind, that there was so much still untranslated. 

I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember hearing that The Spirit of Science Fiction is the last of his books to be published, suggesting they have finally reached the bottom of the volumes he left behind, though perhaps it is just the latest to be published. (Is it even that? I actually don't know for sure.) I had somehow assumed it was something he wrote late in his life, though on reflection given the timing of the publication of 2666 vis-à-vis his death, there's probably not much at all that came later in his life than that. In any case, I was surprised as I was reading The Spirit of Science Fiction to come across characters who were familiar to me from The Savage Detectives. When I looked into it and found it was written well before The Savage Detectives and published posthumously both in Spanish and English, things made much more sense. I enjoyed The Spirit of Science Fiction well enough, but it has nothing on the later works, including Bolaño's other short fiction. As someone with completist tendencies, this wouldn't have changed my decision to buy it or read it, though perhaps I would have chosen a different option from among the books I picked up in Seattle to read at just this moment. But I did manage to start and finish it over the course of my short vacation, so there's that. I read an entire book and a good chunk of another on a four-day trip, which definitely counts as rare for me. 

The Appointment, by Herta Müller

The Appointment wasn't in the original stack of six books that I pulled out to read during Women in Translation Month, but after getting through the first five, I started the last book I had intended to read and found it just wasn't what I wanted to read in that moment. So I went back to the shelves (conveniently, I had slightly pulled out all the books by women in translation that I had not read) and looked for another option. I'd been meaning to read Herta Müller for a while; she was the writer I'd selected to read for Romania for my world books project.

I found The Appointment slow going at times, but I really liked it. The narrator is a young woman who has been summoned to an appointment for questioning by the secret police. In the present of the book, we don't know how many times the narrator has been summoned before, but we know it has happened several times. The book spans the slow, frequently disrupted tram ride she takes from her apartment to the government building where she will be interrogated. As she rides the tram, her observations of the passengers around her are interspersed with her memories: from childhood, her first marriage, her relationship with her current lover, Paul, her friend Lilli, who was killed trying to flee their home country, and memories of previous interrogations with the secret police – always with the same creepy captain. The story that unfolds is beautiful and grim. 

Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, by Jenny Erpenbeck

Not a Novel was another New Directions book I got from my dad by an author I'd never heard of. Jenny Erpenbeck grew up in East Berlin and was 22 years old in 1989 when the wall came down. This book is a collection of essays and talks from her writing career over the last two decades, which come together to create a sort of memoir. It's divided into three sections: Life, Literature & Music, and Society, the middle section being the longest. (In addition to being a writer, Erpenbeck studied to be a director of opera and music plays a big role alongside literature in her work and life.) It is, perhaps, an odd way to start reading Erpenbeck, as she references her own work throughout – particularly in two long essays about two of her books – and I was unfamiliar with all of it. However, Not a Novel left me eager to read Erpenbeck's novels. I loved it. 

There are some themes (and even entire passages, as these writings were prepared for various purposes, rather than for inclusion in the book) that come up repeatedly in the book. In particular, the idea of boundaries in time come up again and again in her description of her experience of the end of the GDR. None of us can go back in time, of course, but Erpenbeck watched the entire world she knew growing up disappear in the space of six months when she was a young adult. This would be a defining experience for anyone, but the way that Erpenbeck explains it and the perspective it gives her on things that are going on in the modern world is profound. The last two essays in the book – those comprising the Society section – address the contemporary refugee situation in Europe, and the empathy she brings to that discussion, drawing parallels with her own experience, was truly moving. 

I've read very little German literature and the section on literature was full of references to works by authors I've heard of but never read, and some I'd never heard of at all. I'm wondering, now, if I should go read Thomas Mann and Goethe. Erpenbeck is also interested in fairy tales and in Ovid. Her entire literary experience is one that's almost completely unfamiliar to me, but the way she writes about it made me want to know it. The comparisons she draws between literature and music were also incredible, especially in one of the longer essays in the book called "Speech and Silence." In it, she says that music is made up of time and air. I'm paraphrasing badly, but the idea is that music (and speech) cannot exist without time, and that time includes both the time when there is music – when notes are being produced (or when words are being said), as well as the time when there is silence. The silence is as powerful as the sound. In another essay, about her book The Book of Words, Erpenbeck writes, "That which is kept silent takes up just as much space as that which is spoken of openly—and it claims that space, one way or another." She goes on to explore how keeping something hidden creates different realities for those who are hiding and those who are left unaware. Again, paraphrasing poorly, the difference between these realities is the space taken up by the concealment.

In any case, this book was incredible. I can't wait to read more of Erpenbeck, and I expect I'll come back to this one again and again as I do.

The Emissary, by Yōko Tawada

Continuing my reading for Women in Translation month, I read The Emissary. My father gave me this and another Yōko Tawada book – Memoirs of a Polar Bear – when I visited him in June. I had not heard of her previously, but the two books were published by New Directions which, as I've written before, is enough of a selling point for me (and for my dad, apparently).

This book bears a certain resemblance to The Memory Police, which I read for my Women in Translation book club earlier this year. It's set in a sort of post-apocalyptic indefinite future, a time when the natural world has become contaminated with poisons and children are sickly and weak. Meanwhile, for reasons that are not fully understood, the elderly have just kept on living. The young are so malnourished and ill-developed, that those who are over 70 (and well into their 100s) must take care of them and perform all physical labor. The book is set in a Japan where cities have been abandoned due to toxicity and where the country has completely cut itself off from the outside world (as have most other countries as far as anyone in the book seems to know). In this isolationist future, foreign words are banned – this is where the similarities to The Memory Police were strongest. The book revolves around 108-year-old Yoshiro and his great-grandson Mumei, whom he cares for. Yoshiro – like the narrator of The Memory Police – is a novelist. At one point Mumei observes (to himself without voicing it) how Yoshiro has saved up all these words that are no longer allowed or that represent things that no longer exist and he wonders why. The book was published a few years after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, and one senses that this recent event must have been the backdrop for readers when it was new, but it also broadly implicates climate change and human impacts on the environment for the disastrous future. It felt very timely.

The Body Snatcher, by Patricia Melo; and Poetics of Work, by Noémie Lefebvre

As I mentioned in my last post, the remainder of the month of August, I am only reading books by women in translation. This morning, because I could think of nothing better to do with my time, I created a new bookshelf for Women in Translation on Goodreads. I went through my whole read list (608 books) and only 30 were books by women in translation. That didn't seem very good. How many books by men in translation had I read, I wondered? So I created another bookshelf for all books in translation, which ended up with 187 books on it, meaning women authors only account for about 15% of all the books I've read in translation. Well, of course, then I had to know how women compared to men in my overall reading, so I created a third new shelf for women writers and went through my whole read list again to populate it. This shelf had 211 books, meaning women writers account for about a third of the books I've read (better than I feared tbh!), so I clearly do have a women in translation problem. Unfortunately, these calculations already included the two books I'm going to write about here, but I have another three I'm hoping to get to before the month is up. 

I selected The Body Snatcher to read last Sunday after I finished The Barefoot Woman because I was planning, this past week, to participate in Jami Attenberg's Mini 1000 Words of Summer writing challenge and I suspected this might limit my mid-week reading time. (It did: on top of the 1000, I did morning pages every day. I saved my evenings for proper writing, and with working, preparing meals, and trying to do yoga now and then, it left not a lot of time for daily reading.) The Body Snatcher is a Brazilian crime novel, of which one blurb said, "You won't put it down until the very last page." Somehow I thought that was the kind of book I needed to be reading while I was also trying to write. I'm pretty sure I was wrong. The book is set in Corumbá, in the interior of Brazil – practically in Bolivia. The narrator is a scumbag who's relocated there to get his life together after things fell apart for him in São Paolo. This starts off as one of those stories where the central character makes one bad decision after another and you just know things are going to go from bad to worse. The narrator, as I said, is a scumbag – he deserves all the bad things that come his way, and worse! But he's the one telling you the story and somehow he managed to attract my sympathy. (The best comparison I can think of is Martin Amis's The Information, which I read so long ago I barely remember it, but I loved it and its dirtbag narrator at the time, though I'm not sure I still would today.) As things got darker and darker through the first half of the book, I found myself not wanting to read it because I was sure the bad news would just keep coming. The chapters were very short, but every one seemed to bring a new, worse development. However, the book was divided into two parts, and things took an unexpected turn in part two. Yesterday, I had the afternoon off (summer Fridays!) and I sat down and read the second half straight through. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I think it does benefit from dedicated reading rather than occasional browsing.

Poetics of Work was the last book we selected to read for my Baltimore-based friends' book club before the book club fell apart. So, I had ordered the book thinking I would read it a few months ago, but as our meeting never got scheduled I shelved it. When I was going through my shelves and pulling out all the unread books by women in translation, I decided to add it to my small to-read stack. It's very short – just over 100 pages long – and quick to read, but I don't feel like I absorbed much while reading it. (Maybe "quick to read" is not how it should be read.) The story is narrated by an out-of-work poet who has anxiety about looking for work, but also anxiety about finding it. She is in constant conversation with her absent father, whom she frequently describes as her superego. Her mother is also absent – dead, in fact – but has a more passive role in the book. The narrator writes about the rise in militarism and fascism in the present day, in the wake of terrorist attacks in France. There is some very interesting language play, but not enough story to keep my interest. Reading this made me feel a bit dense. Then again, I have never had much patience for poetry; maybe I shouldn't be surprised. I do wish I had a book club to talk about it with. I might get more out of it in conversation, or I might find out that my lackluster feelings about it weren't just me. 

The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga

August is Women in Translation Month. I'm a week behind because I got too absorbed in the Broken Earth trilogy to not continue with it after I finished The Fifth Season on August 2. But I'm devoting the rest of August to reading books by women that have been translated into English. I started with The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. As well as being a book by a woman in translation, this is also the first book I've read from Rwanda so it counts toward my world books project too.

The Barefoot Woman is a beautiful book, a memoir of the author's childhood as a displaced Tutsi in Rwanda of the 1960s, and a tribute to her mother, Stefania, who was killed along with many family members in the genocide of 1994. The book isn't a continuous narrative; rather it's organized into chapters covering different aspects of refugee life. For instance, there's a beautiful chapter on sorghum, how it's grown and harvested, and all the ways it's used. There's a chapter on medicine, traditional and Western. In a chapter on a topic I don't recall, there's a delightful discussion of the introduction of underwear to the refugee community where Mukasonga grew up. 

In one sense, this book goes about describing traditional life in Rwanda, but it does this largely through absence and contrast. The refugees, who have been displaced to a desert region far from their lush, mountainous homeland, try to maintain their way of life without access to the resources they once had, and under constant threat from violent gangs. A cow-herding people, they were stripped of their livestock in the forced relocation and that absence – the missing milk – comes up again and again. Deprived of their traditional family compounds, they must adapt to the rough structures of the refugee camp. 

The surprising thing I found, as I read The Barefoot Woman, was how full of joy it was. The opening and closing address the tragedy that befell Mukasonga's mother – and so many others she knew – in the most wrenching terms. The devastation is there, lying in wait, throughout the book. You know the fates of the refugees, sometimes (heartbreakingly) specifically. And yet the memories – many of them at least – are happy ones. Stefania was clearly a force. Her determination to raise and protect her children and her way of life is incredible. Knowing the territory it covers, I was surprised how many times this book made me laugh. This was a great start to Women in Translation Month. 

The Broken Earth Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin

I always feel a little out of my depth when I read science fiction. I am very aware (too aware, probably) that there's an entire literary tradition with which I'm only glancingly familiar. It leaves me doubting my ability to understand everything I'm meant to understand. 

It's not that I don't enjoy reading science fiction. Another factor I struggle with is books like this devote time and language world-building, while at the same time having a plot that draws you in. I'm aware that the world-building is necessary, but the detailed descriptions of places – physical spaces, landscapes, environments – sometimes just go right past me (or more accurately I go right past them) as I follow the plot.

The Broken Earth trilogy would probably benefit from a closer, slower reading where I really devoted time to envisioning the places described, but I didn't read it slowly. The first book, The Fifth Season, took me a week to finish; the second book, The Obelisk Gate, four days; and the final book in the trilogy, The Stone Sky, I read in two days. I read the entire series from beginning to end in less than two weeks. I don't know how to make myself slow down. 

I liked these books a lot, but who didn't? I don't feel like I have anything valuable to add to the conversation.

Sphinx, by Anne Garréta

Sphinx was the next selection for my Women In Translation book club. It is touted as, among other things, the first novel by a woman writer from Oulipo to be translated into English. I've read books by a handful of Oulipo members: Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino, but before this one I'm not sure I'd read a book written specifically with an Oulipian constraint. If on a Winter's Night A Traveler would be the closest, and I can't tell (in a very rushed search at least) whether it's considered "official" Oulipo canon. 

I'm going to be very vague as I write about Sphinx, out of respect for the introduction of my copy, written by Daniel Levin Becker, which advises the reader who does not already know the unspoken constraint in Sphinx "to do everything in your power to stay ignorant for a while longer: sheathe the front and back covers of the book in kraft paper, avoid discussing it with booksellers, and don't read any reviews unless you're confident that they were written by lousy inattentive critics.*" (Fwiw, the front cover of my edition is harmless; the back cover not.) And, with this injunction to say little, I fear I won't be able to say much at all. 

I did like the book quite a bit. I somehow expected it to be a slow or difficult read – it was not, at all. It's a first person narrative about love, and loss, and grief, and coming to terms with loss eventually. It's also about the one-sidedness of relationships, how we can sometimes fail to really see the people we love. This part spoke to me especially. 

The translator's note at the end is a must-read as well. The book was written with a constraint that manifests differently in French than in English. The translator's explanation of how she handled this was fascinating (at least to me).

*This last is a jab at the reviewer who read Perec's La Disparition and failed to notice the complete absence of Es.

The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen

I thought the Elizabeth Bowen recommendation came from Molly Young's newsletter, Read Like the Wind, and perhaps it did – but if so it must have been one of the "Why Don't You..." suggestions, because I can't seem to find her mentioned elsewhere. In any case, I picked up The Heat of the Day as well as The Death of the Heart some time ago. Last month, I was in Baltimore for the day with my dad where we met up with one of my oldest friends and drove around looking at different neighborhoods and visiting various bookstores. As we browsed the fiction shelves at Normal's, my friend pulled down a copy of The Heat of the Day. "Hey, I have that book and I keep almost reading it," I said. This friend was part of one of the book clubs that I joined during the pandemic; a book club that recently sort of fizzled out. And so, we thought, why not revive the book club and read this? I heard from my friend that she started the book in late June. Meanwhile, I was traveling for 2 weeks and not reading much. And furthermore, we hadn't actually set a date to read it by or, as far as I know, communicated to anyone else that it was the new book club selection. But, in any case, I went ahead and started it last week and finished it this afternoon. 

It's odd that this book is called The Heat of the Day when nearly all of it seems to take place at night – and in mid- to late Fall at that. There is, I thought, mostly a sense of chill throughout this book. Set in London in the midst of World War II, the book bears witness to the falling away of social norms and constraints as those who remain in the city live through the bombings, the constant fear that a loved one will be killed, the decay of trust. The book mainly centers on Stella, a widow of about 40, who has been told that her lover Robert, a slightly younger former Captain wounded at Dunkirk, has been accused of giving secrets to the enemy. We are with her in her dilemma, unsure what to believe. Other characters, the man who has made the accusation, Stella's son – a young soldier, a young woman named Louie who chances to meet the accuser, float in and out of the book, often on tangents unrelated to the main narrative. Or, perhaps, Stella and her lover are not the main narrative at all. Rather, it's wartime London and these are the characters that inhabit it.

The Fortune of the Rougons, by Émile Zola

It was several years ago now that I decided I wanted to read Émile Zola's 20-book Rougon-Macquart series. I had already read two of them (Au Bonheur des Dames and Nana), but I wanted to start at the beginning and read the whole series in the recommended order. For years, I collected the editions one by one as I found them at bookstores, but there were a handful that never seemed to turn up on shelves. In February of this year, I decided to just order the six books I was still missing directly from Oxford University Press. With all 20 books in hand, it still took me a few months to finally start the whole thing. La Fortune des Rougon was both the first published and the first in Zola's recommended reading order. 

The series follows a split family as it branches out over five generations. This book detailed the origin of the divide: Adélaïde Fouque, a/k/a Aunt Dide, married M. Rougon, had one son with him, and was then widowed. Following Rougon's death, she took up with M. Macquart, without marrying him, and with him had a son and a daughter. Though the three children grow up together, when they reach adulthood Pierre Rougon, who sees himself as the only deserving heir, cheats his siblings out of the wealth they might of inherited and distances himself from his mother. While the entire family history is told in this book, it's not exactly what the book is about. The main subject of the book is one week in December of 1851, as Republicans mobilize in the south of France and the bourgeois reactionaries try to seize power in the fictional village of Plassans. The divide in the family reflects the divide in the country, with some family members supporting and joining up with the Republican cause and others supporting the coup that led to the Second Empire. 

Nearly all the characters in this book are scheming and selfish, particularly Aunt Dide's two sons. A pair of young, idealistic Republican martyrs (one of whom is the grandson of M. Macquart) are the only heroes in this book, with Aunt Dide as practically the only other sympathetic character. Doctor Pascal was also an outlier, which made me look forward to reading the book about him (a long time from now, I'm afraid, as it's book number 20).

While I enjoyed parts of this book, it was also kind of a struggle to read. It's rather disjointed because it seems to be taking on two tasks at once: (1) introducing the entire back story and cast of characters for the 20 book series, and (2) telling the story of this particular struggle during 1951. It does a good job of both, but they don't really blend together. The book starts with a short history of a particular spot in Plassans where two young lovers meet (the martyrs mentioned above), then follows these lovers as they join the Republican uprising. That's chapter one. After that, we meet Pierre Rougon, and from there the book goes on what is, in essence, an extremely long aside on the entire family history and members of the extended family. Then, 100 pages or so later, it picks up the narrative again of the events in 1951. I imagine that the long aside will be helpful to understanding the whole series -- and indeed, it was helpful for understanding the family dynamics in this book -- but it felt largely outside the main narrative. 

Anyway, next up is His Excellency Eugene Rougon. Eugene is the eldest son of Pierre and a supporter of the Empire, and I gather it picks up in the early days of the Second Empire, so I assume it will involve more selfish scheming. I won't be jumping right into it, but hopefully I'll get there before long.

Think Again, by Adam Grant

As anyone who follows my reading at all knows, this is not my usual type of book. Think Again was selected by my company for our work book club. The book club started during the pandemic, and I haven't participated before now. I hadn't intended to participate this time, but two things motivated me to give it a go: (1) this book was selected by a consulting firm we're using to help with our DEI efforts and I do DEI work at my company; and (2) I happened to find an advance reader copy at my local Little Free Library. 

I have to admit I have a bias against this type of book (whatever it is; the back of the review copy categorizes it as "Business & Economics—Motivational), but I enjoyed reading this more than I expected to. The only other time I've read books that I would describe as broadly in this category was in grad school (specifically this book), where I had a similar experience. For one thing, it was easy to read. It served as a surprisingly nice break from the heavy novel I was reading. I'll also confess that while reading this book, I did sometimes reflect on my own willingness (or lack thereof) to rethink my assumptions from time to time. I wouldn't describe myself as the most open-minded person; I'm aware of at least some of my biases, and I'm not always willing to check them. (I do make an active effort to reflect on and explore my biases when it comes to people, but less so my biases when it comes to, say, books like this one. I'm not apologetic when it comes to some of my opinions, and I don't believe I should be.)

The book makes a distinction—one that I actually think is important—about not conflating your values with your opinions or beliefs. You can stay true to your values, but change your opinions and beliefs as you get new information. The idea of reflecting on your values and your beliefs, and understanding that your beliefs may evolve, is a good one. But despite the emphasis on values, the book spent little time talking about them; its focus was on the changeability of opinions and beliefs. The book rankled me when it sometimes seemed to imply a sort of equivalence between various positions on a topic. There's a section devoted to predictions that particularly bugged me. It talked about how predictors improved their predictions by regularly reassessing them and not getting too attached to their original prediction. The predictions in question were mostly about presidential elections. The emphasis of the whole argument was on how to predict better, with the accuracy of the prediction being given more weight than the outcome of the election. (Granted, I do see that with better predictions, perhaps there are actions that could be taken to affect the outcome—it just felt like the whole emphasis was on the wrong thing.) Similarly, a section about getting people with opposing views to reach some level of mutual respect and possibly even agreement, the topics are things where I don't think mutual respect or agreement should be the goal. This reaction of mine is precisely what the book is trying to dismantle, but when Grant came out with a suggestion that, for instance, people on opposite sides of the case for the death penalty might reach some agreement, my own defenses shot up because I don't see this as a place where there is any center that I could move toward: the government should not be in the business of killing people. 

On Father's Day morning, while hanging out with my dad in West Philadelphia, I was telling him about the book. It really wasn't about diversity, I said. I thought it had been recommended to our company with a particular audience in mind: old white guys. We can all get stuck in our beliefs and ways sometimes, but it seemed to me that what the book was counseling: breaking cycles of overconfidence, practicing humility, and even (seriously) the benefits of impostor syndrome, was not a message for the marginalized. When, for instance, lack of humility is a criticism frequently leveled at Black athletes (and Black people celebrating their own greatness generally), this advice can sound dangerously close to the rhetoric white people have been preaching forever. Women and others who have experienced impostor syndrome know that one effect is that might make one work harder (which is, in effect, the supposed benefit touted in the book). It's a truth that's become a cliché that Black people have to be twice as good to do half as well as white people in America. This isn't to say that humble self-reflection couldn't benefit everyone, but the message of this book seems calibrated to people who have not been told their whole lives to know their place.