What I miss

This morning, Tanzina Vega posted a tweet asking "What NYC places do you miss?"

There are so many places that I once went to that are now gone. Looking through various responses I recognize lots of places I used to frequent. Life Cafe, for instance. There was a time in my life when Life Cafe was where I always proposed to meet friends for dinner. But I didn't even know it was gone, because I stopped going long before it closed. (Am I part of the problem?) French Roast, too, I have fond memories of, going back many, many years. But in the last 10 years that it was open, I probably only went there two or three times. Tower Records, Unique, Antique Boutique, and Canal Jeans were all places I visited in middle school and probably into high school, but they all outlived my regular visits by years (decades?). It's hard to say I miss these places when I know, if they were still around, I probably wouldn't be going to them.

If I think about places that are gone that I would still go if they were here, there are a few to be sure: Hope & Anchor, St. Mark's Bookstore, Franny's. But at least as much as I miss places that are gone, there are also places I "miss" that are still here:

I miss Washington Square Park and the Astor Place cube, where I always knew I would find friends after (or during) school.
I miss the Waverly Diner, where I would order a broccoli and cream cheese omelet (!!!) with fries instead of home fries, and a Sprite.
I miss Odessa, where I drank cosmos and went through so much relationship drama (including my ex-husband's and my first kiss -- definitely the most consequential kiss of my life) in the late 90s.
I miss Barcade when it was brand new in 2004, huge and empty, so we could take over an entire corner and camp out for hours.
I miss Pete's Candy Store trivia night from roughly 2004-2007.
I miss Sharlene's, where we all decamped after old Freddy's closed before new Freddy's opened.
I miss Fulton Grand, the only bar I have ever called my local.
I miss 2010, when I could walk into any bar in a certain part of Brooklyn certain I would run into friends.

I could go on, but I'm sure you get the gist: it's the times I miss; not the places.

Siracusa, by Delia Ephron

After finishing Loving, I briefly went back to Wolf Totem (which presumably I'll write about someday when I finish it) and then on my lunch break last Thursday, I found Siracusa at a thrift store (how many books do I find at thrift stores? A lot. Most books I read, perhaps.) and picked it up entirely because of my love of Sicily. When I got on the subway home that evening, I pulled Siracusa out and decided to start it rather than reading Wolf Totem (have I mentioned it's very bloody? Very.). Anyway, Siracusa is not the first book I've read solely because it was set in Sicily. That honor belongs probably to Blood Rain (which, now that I think about it, I picked up at the same thrift store where I found Siracusa!), though debatably to The Leopard. I also have a whole collection of Andrea Camilleri novels - I buy them every time I come across them! - but I haven't actually read any of them yet. And while we're on the topic of literature set in Sicily, I should mention the first piece I read in this category: Sun by D.H. Lawrence, which I believe I first read in middle school and which has really stayed with me these last 30-ish years.

I haven't actually been to Siracusa. I was supposed to go there on my first, aborted trip to Sicily in December 2014 when I ended up having to drastically alter my plans and go to Spain at the last minute due to a national strike in Italy that would have left me stranded at Malpensa. When I planned my actual first trip to Sicily in April 2015, I realized (very correctly in retrospect) that I had been far too ambitious in the amount of ground I thought I could cover when I'd made my itinerary for the 2014 trip. Sicily is a sizable island, train routes are limited, the autostrade connect the bigger cities, but much of the island is covered only by winding mountain roads, so travel is slow. On that first trip, I did my traveling by train and bus (and a couple extremely long taxi rides) and managed to cover really only the western tip of the island: Palermo, Trapani, Marsala, and Agrigento. On my second trip to Sicily, in 2017, I went back to Palermo for a couple days and then rented a car stationed myself for a week in the Nebrodi mountains, from where I made day trips to Taormina, Enna, Cefalù, among other places. The southeastern corner of the island, where Siracusa is, remains the part I have not visited. I have (at present only theoretical) plans to go back in 2019 and visit that corner, including Siracusa -- though I must say this book certainly did not increase my interest in going there.

Siracusa is about two couples who go on vacation together to Rome and Syracuse, a trip whose events end up destroying the relationships among nearly all of them. (This is why I always travel alone.) The story is told in alternating chapters from the perspective of the 4 central characters and only the reader really gets the full picture (and even that requires some conjecture). The overlapping narratives were really effective, and I found they gave me sympathy for all the characters, even as I didn't really like any of them. This was a tense, but fun read. And even as Siracusa comes off as quite unappealing, it captures very well the crumbling old and cheap new that I've seen elsewhere on the island. Places that have been in decline since the Baroque era is my aesthetic ideal.

Loving, by Henry Green

I wasn't sure if I'd go back to Loving after I set it aside for The Uninvited Guests and then started another book -- Wolf Totem, by Jiang Rong -- but then last week I found myself wanting to read something a little less bloody than Wolf Totem (which is incredibly bloody) and rather than starting something new, I decided to finish Loving. It's such a short book it felt a shame to abandon it, so I finished it in an afternoon and then sent it on its way (via PaperbackSwap, to someone to wanted it). I don't really have much to say about this book. It follows the affairs of the staff of an English estate in Ireland over the period of a few months during World War II. The war is in the background, as is the potential threat to the estate from the IRA, but none of it seems quite to penetrate the reality of the household staff. There were pieces of this book that I enjoyed and that were funny, but overall I didn't felt like it had much to give.

The Uninvited Guests, by Sadie Jones

I started reading Loving by Henry Green a little more than a week ago -- just after finishing Sepharad. I always find it particularly hard to pick a book to read after I finish something I've really loved. Sepharad left me in a mood and I didn't want to break it. I had read a few pages of Loving a month or so ago and found it wasn't what I was in the mood for at the time, so set it aside. After Sepharad I thought maybe it was the time, but in a week I labored through 100 pages and decided to set it aside again. Meanwhile, I picked up a copy of The Uninvited Guests at Housing Works and I decided to switch from one manor house drama to another. While I didn't totally love The Uninvited Guests, it was a fun read and the break I needed. I'm not sure whether I'll go back to Loving.

Sepharad, by Antonio Muñoz Molina

Sepharad can hardly be called a novel, though it says "A Novel" right on the cover under the title. But as Muñoz Molina notes in the Author's Note, "I have invented very little in the stories and voices that wave through this book." But, of course, novels can be based on true events -- so that's not really the reason I say it can hardly be called a novel. It's almost like a book of short stories, with occasional recurring characters. Almost a book of essays. Almost a memoir? Whatever it is, it's lovely. It's about memory and identity and being away from the place you call home. Muñoz Molina connects centuries of forced and voluntary emigration and demands that the reader identify with emigrants and refugees. The writing and stories are poignant and warm. I really loved this book.

A very belated 2017 year in books

In 2016, I declared I would write something brief about every book I read -- resulting in my most prolific year of blogging by far. In 2017, I gave myself a break from writing about every book and, as it turns out, that turned into a break from posting basically at all. Now we're more than halfway into 2018 and I haven't posted in 18 months. Looking back over my brief notes on books I read, I think it was a good habit and I'm going to try to get back to it - though not retroactively. But I will retroactively post about my 2017 reading material. It wasn't quite as good a year as 2016, or even 2015, but I read 25 books (I've listed 26 below - I started Your Face Tomorrow vol. 3 in 2017 and didn't finish it until a couple weeks into 2018, but felt it should be included on the list with the other Your Face Tomorrow books):

• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1: Fever and Spear, by Javier Marías
• The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
• The Polish Boxer, by Eduardo Halfon
• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 2: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marías
• The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
• Embassytown, by China Miéville
• A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore
• Curfew, by José Donoso
• By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño
• The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Kintu, by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
• The Scar, by China Miéville
• We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby
• A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré
• Jakob Von Gunten, by Robert Wallser
• The Queen of the Night, by Alexander Chee
• Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
• The Turner House, by Angela Flournoy
• Rich and Pretty, by Rumaan Alam
• Beware of Pity, by Stefan Zweig
• A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson
• The Group, by Mary McCarthy
• Call Me By Your Name, by Andre Aciman
• Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 3: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell, by Javier Marías

For my favorite book of the year, I'd say it's a tie (isn't it always!) between Your Face Tomorrow Vol. 1 and Curfew.

I've recommended Curfew to several people and I decided to take a trip to Chile last November, largely because of Donoso. I visited La Chascona, Pablo Neruda's home in Santiago, which plays a major part in the book (visiting this place I had read about in a book I loved so much was a rather strange and amazing experience) and also the island of Chiloé, which I only knew of because of the book. So... you could say Curfew had a pretty significant effect on my year.

Your Face Tomorrow was different. As I felt when I read The Infatuations (the first Marías book I read), the writing just spoke to me-- it felt like me. I loved all 3 books in the trilogy, but the first book especially. A huge chunk of the first book consists of the narrator getting very drunk and going through an Oxford don's library chasing down tangential details of the Spanish Civil War and it's just incredible. I haven't recommended Your Face Tomorrow to anyone because I honestly have no idea who else might enjoy it, but the whole time I was reading the books I really wished I knew someone else who had read them because I would love to talk about them. (I have recommended The Infatuations to a couple people always with the caveat that you will know within a couple pages whether you'll enjoy the book. Marías' writing is so specific, has such a distinct voice -- I imagine it's not for everyone, but it is definitely for me. The one star reviews of book 3 crack me up... like how do you get to book 3 before you decide you don't like these books?)

Other books I really enjoyed: The Polish Boxer, Kintu, The Group, Beware of Pity. (And also The Underground Railroad and The Sympathizer, but as those each won multiple prestigious awards, I hardly feel I need to recommend them.)

I Was a Teenage Activist

I like to say that my first protest was an Equal Rights Amendment march in the 1970s. I was a toddler and I made the local news. Activism was all around me growing up. I was raised in Park Slope, Brooklyn surrounded by red diaper babies and children whose parents had been active in the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protest movements. My family attended an activist church where messages from the pulpit routinely addressed social justice, LGBT rights, and the plights of people in Palestine and Nicaragua, among other topics. My parents were more left-learning democrats than big-time activists themselves, but these were the ideas that were all around me as I grew up.

While the story about the ERA protest is technically true, my entree in to activism really started with the first Gulf War in 1990-91. I started high school during the preamble to the Gulf War and quickly became an active member of my school's Student Organization for Social Justice and the inter-school coalition of student activists, Students Against War. I marched on Washington, Albany, and all over NYC. For the duration of Operation Desert Storm, we would have frequent impromptu marches between the various news outlet headquarters around Manhattan. After the war ended, I kept marching for other causes. For a while. Over time the urgency seemed to fade, life got in the way, I became disillusioned. With few—if any—identifiable results, protesting started to seem pointless. While old friends protested—and occasionally were arrested—at the Republican National Convention, the Bush inauguration, the lead up to the Iraq War, the next Republican National Convention, and on and on, I stayed home lamenting these outcomes as inevitable and beyond my control.

I believe I've abstained from protesting as an adult more of out cynicism than complacency (though I won't deny that personal comfort and a strong fear of being arrested have also been contributing factors), but what difference does that make if the end result is the same? It allows me to feel morally superior and to assuage my guilt without actually having to experience discomfort or risk anything for my convictions. (To be slightly fairer to myself, I have always expressed support via other means: I give money to organizations doing work on causes I believe in; I volunteer; I participate in our democracy.) I guess you could say Trump's election has pulled me out of my rut. I'm still cynical, but I do believe we are better than this. I've realized I need to do more than I've been doing, and that more has to include things that make me uncomfortable. Bring it on: I'm ready.

Ancillary Mercy, The Talented Mr. Ripley

I read a ton over the holidays and didn't keep up with my write-ups, but I want to wrap 2016, so I'm bundling two books to finish out the year.

Ancillary Mercy, Ann Leckie
As I predicted, I finished up the Imperial Radch trilogy just as 2016 came to a close. I really enjoyed all three books, though I thought the second was slightly weaker than the first and the third. When I wrote up Ancillary Justice, I talked about a couple aspects of it that blew my mind: one was the AI narration and the other was the gender pronouns. By the second book, I was used to the gender pronouns and the narrator was in a new role that resulted in a more straightforward first-person narrative. However, the third book brings back (and even complicates further) a lot of what I found so interesting about AI and what I'll call beinghood from the first book, which I was happy about.

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
I started then abandoned The Talented Mr. Ripley in mid-December, but I went back to finish it on New Year's Eve when I found myself with 10 hours until the new year and not much to do. I was very conflicted about this book. I stopped reading it when I did because, in retrospect, I was having rather a bad day (week?) and the book was getting me down. What I had a hard time grappling with was that much what was bothering me about the book was also a sign of a well-created character. I think it would be hard to read the book and not hope that Ripley gets away with his crimes; as a reader, you become invested in them. But he's also hard to like, and I think that's the point. Anyway, the book was getting me down and it was just so stressful to read, I had to stop. But then it was New Year's Eve around 2pm and I had just finished the thoroughly enjoyable They Came to Baghdad and I thought, maybe I can go back to Ripley and finish it in one sitting to minimize the drawn-out stressfulness and that's what I did. Having finished it, I'm just as conflicted as I was before, but the stress has subsided, so it was probably a good thing.

The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo, Germano Almeida

I was doing some last minute Christmas shopping on December 24 at Hullabaloo Books in Crown Heights and browsing the fiction selection there when I spotted The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo. I almost dismissed it as probably Portuguese (not that I'm against reading Portuguese novels, but Portugal - and Brazil for that matter - are both already checked off on my world books list), but I pulled it out and saw this:

This felt ~significant~ because back when I had the conversation with my friend Daniel that started this whole world reading project, I asked, "What is the great Cape Verdean novel?" (I should add that the inside flap of this book describes Almeida as "the greatest living Cape Verdean writer.") So, obviously I bought the book and I started reading it shortly thereafter.

This book had a fun narrative style. It tells the life story of Senhor Araújo by way of his book-length will on the occasion of its being read before witnesses after his death. It jumps around a bit between the text from the actual will and other sources, and often you're not really sure what the source is. The story is both funny and poignant. I also felt like I got a feel for the Cape Verdean islands, which was part of the whole point of this undertaking.

2016 in Books

Last year turned out to be quite a good reading year for me. I read more books than I ever have before in a single year, 51 being the final count. I read 22 books by women, which is probably a better percentage for me than in most years. Those 22 books only represent 14 distinct authors, which isn't great. I read just one book of nonfiction. I read two books from before 1900, one of which was a reread.

My "reading project" was the main guiding principle for my reading last year, and I have to say I did pretty great in that regard. I read books from 25 countries this year. Fifteen of these (shown in bold) were countries from which I had not previously read anything. Aside from the United States, I read books from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, Cape Verde, Chile, Cuba, Dominica, El Salvador, England, Finland, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Libya, Martinique, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, and Spain. To see other fun stats, you can check out my year in books on Goodreads.

The list:

• How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
• The Infatuations by Javier Marías
• Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau
• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson
• The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
• The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
• Home by Marilynne Robinson
• My Michael by Amos Oz
• Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco
• The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
• The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso
• The Ruined Map by Kobo Abe
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (reread)
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
• In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
• The City and the City by China Miéville
• Stoner by John Williams
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
• The Whites by Richard Price
• A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
• Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness
• The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness
• Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
• The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
• The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox
• Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
• The Dream of My Return by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley
• John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• In the Dutch Mountains by Cees Nooteboom
• The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
• The Story of a Child by Pierre Loti
• The Fortress by Meša Selimović
• Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
• The Marshal and the Madwoman by Magdalen Nabb
• Blood Rain by Michael Dibdin
• The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo by Germano Almeida
• Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
• They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie
• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

I'm surprised by how easy it is for me to pick a favorite book from the year, but here we are: my favorite book was The Dream of My Return. For reasons I find hard to pinpoint, this book just felt like it was for me. My other top books from the year include The Infatuations, Station Eleven, All the Light We Cannot See, They Came to Baghdad, Story of a Child, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, The Long Goodbye, Stoner, and Life After Life.