2019 in Books

I always wait until the new year to write up my prior year in books because it's sort of a tradition of mine to finish a book on New Year's Eve so I can start each new year with a new book. Last year I messed this up by starting a very long book on December 29, but this year I got back on track. I also slacked off on writing about the books I read last year, but this year I wrote about every single one, which I'm pretty happy about. Here is the list:

Thus Bad Begins, by Javier Marías
Life and Times of Michael K, by J.M. Coetzee
Augustus, by John Williams
To Each His Own, by Leonardo Sciascia
By a Slow River, by Philippe Claudel
The Proposal, by Jasmine Guillory
Pig Earth, by John Berger
Trick, by Domenico Starnone
The Accident, by Ismail Kadare
A Heart So White, by Javier Marías
Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós
The Time of the Doves, by Mercè Rodoreda
The Rules of Magic, by Alice Hoffman
The Fifth Child, by Doris Lessing
Fludd, by Hilary Mantel
Probability Moon, by Nancy Kress
The White, by Deborah Larson
Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi
Beauty Is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan
Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano
Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño
The She-Devil in the Mirror, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
Postcards from the Edge, by Carrie Fisher
I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith
State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett
Glory, by Vladimir Nabokov
Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb
The Shape of Water, by Andrea Camilleri
The King of a Rainy Country, by Brigid Brophy
By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing
The Invention of Truth, by Marta Morazzoni
The Wedding Party, by Jasmine Guillory
Zama, by Antonio di Benedetto
The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt
Old Filth, by Jane Gardam
Magpie Murders, by Anthony Horowitz
The Good Soldier, by Ford Madox Ford
Reef, by Romesh Gunesekera
Normal People, by Sally Rooney
84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff
The View from Downshire Hill, by Elizabeth Jenkins
Transcription, by Kate Atkinson
Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg
Villa Triste, by Patrick Modiano
Winter in Lisbon, by Antonio Muñoz Molina
Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid
The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu
Royal Holiday, by Jasmine Guillory
The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller

So, some stats: I read books from 18 countries this year (if we allow Homegoing for Ghana, which I still haven't decided whether I will allow myself in my world books project), plus Catalonia (I always feel I must distinguish Mercè Rodoreda from Spain since she wrote in Catalan). I read 22 books in translation, which seems a little low: usually it's closer to half the books I read, but I read a few international titles this year that were written in English (the Coetzee, Hamid, and Gunesekera, at a glance), which maybe accounts for the difference. I read 23 books by women, plus several more that were translated by women (something I started to think about earlier this year). This is maybe a little better than usual. I read three (or debatably four, if you include the Natalia Ginzburg) books of non-fiction - all memoirs - this year, which is very unusual for me. And I actually loved them all (the others are the Elizabeth Jenkins, the Helene Hanff, and the George Gissing, if you're wondering). Maybe I should read more in this vein. EDITED because I forgot one important stat: countries I haven't read before. I didn't do so great in this respect this year, but I got to Albania, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and China, plus Ghana with the caveat mentioned earlier.

My favorite book of the year is easy: Journey By Moonlight by Antal Szerb. Careful readers will have known this was coming, as I put it on my list of the ten best books I read in the last decade. Other highlights from the year include both the Modiano books (I went out and bought 2 more books of his just before the holidays - I can't wait to read more!); Normal People by Sally Rooney - I could not believe how good this was, even though I had heard so many good things about it!; Thus Bad Begins - I tweeted something to the effect that I was riding in a cab and suddenly remembered the twist in this book and gasped aloud; it was true; The King of a Rainy Country - I knew nothing about this book or its author and it turned out to be so good!; Augustus and The Song of Achilles, which I will pair as fictionalizations from ancient times; The Good Soldier, Homegoing, Trick ... okay, I'm stopping now. I read a lot of really good books this year!

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.

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.)