North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell

As you will know if you read my last post, I was quite sick in January, which gave me lots of time to lie in bed and watch BBC miniseries. I watched the new Sanditon (if you are a monthly donor to your local PBS station, as I am, you can watch the entire series ahead of the air dates -- I watched the whole thing the weekend episode 1 premiered), which was great but very unlike how Austen would have written it I'm sure. The inconclusive ending (which I gather is more from the hope of having a season 2 than from the fact that it's an unfinished Austen novel) left me wanting a conclusive ending, so I watched the 1995 Pride and Prejudice (which I have seen so many times I can recite it, though I hadn't watched it for several years). I think it was after this that I watched North and South, though I subsequently watched Daniel Deronda and the 2009 Emma (with Jonny Lee Miller as Mr. Knightly, which I found very disconcerting), and then eventually I watched North and South again because I realized it was really what I was craving. I had watched it years ago and remembered liking it, but didn't remember much else. For quite some time, I would say that I had been consciously not watching North and South because I have had the book for years and I always thought I should read the book while the series was distant in my memory before watching the series again. My need for endless hours of period romance broke my will, but after watching the series twice in as many weeks, I decided maybe it was actually time to read the book. I'm still not sure whether this was a mistake.

This post made me think it was probably better to have watched and developed an affection for the miniseries first, because going the other way always highlights the deficiencies that must come from cutting down a book for adaptation. I will say I fully agree with the author's point 3 and partly agree with her point 4. She is also 100% correct in saying that Mrs. Thornton is wonderful in the series - Sinéad Cusack was perfect and I heard her voice every time Mrs. Thornton spoke in the book, and Richard Armitage is also great as Mr. Thornton. I don't really agree with her gripes about the portrayal of Margaret; I found the Margaret in the book occasionally trying and written against her own type, if that's possible. It's been a while since I've read a novel from this era, but some of the tropes around women attributed to Margaret -- her quickness to cry, tire -- even fainting once, and especially her self-reproach for her supposed sin (of lying for a good reason), seemed to contradict her self-possession and mastery of her emotions that is described throughout the book. I appreciated the de-Victorianization of Margaret in the miniseries, even while it may not be faithful to the book. I also found some of the religious sentiment in the book a bit heavy-handed, which again reminds me I'm out of practice in reading 19th Century literature, though the point of Margaret's father having lost his faith in the church was quite interesting in the book, and much better explained there than in the mini-series. These complaints aside, I did enjoy the book and I'm looking forward to rewatching North and South for the third time this year quite soon.

Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng

The start of 2020 has been, objectively speaking, not great for me. The very beginning of the year was good: on New Year's Day, I woke up with a bit of a hangover, but I did an hour-long guided meditation session that was fantastic, went to see Varda by Agnès, followed by my annual tradition in-the-making of half-price calendar shopping at the Strand, and finally dinner at Han Dynasty with a friend, and on all the subway rides between these activities I was reading Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. It was truly one of the best New Year's Days ever. The Marías took me through the first 10 days of 2020, and in fact those 10 days were all fine. It was only after that that things went south. Over that weekend, I went back to reading Interpreter of Maladies, which I had started at the end of 2019. I read one story, then set it aside again. (I do intend to finish it yet.) On the following Monday morning, I started Night Train to Lisbon, which I stuck with for the next 10 days, though I was finding it rather slow. And it was during those 10 days that things took a turn for the worse, from which I have only just mostly recovered.

Things were going well at work, but I was completely swamped, and so also stressed. When the 3-day MLK weekend rolled around, I needed it so much, and the snow that Saturday only made the decision to stay home and watch TV all day feel more right. I guess the first thing that happened was I got a text message from my dad informing me that my great aunt - my last living relative from my grandparents' generation - had died. It wasn't a surprise; she was 96 and had not been well for some time. The rest of my weekend progressed relaxingly enough, but on Monday I felt the first signs of a cold sore coming on, as sometimes happens when I'm under a lot of stress. I applied Abreva (which really does work wonders) and went about my day: seeing 1917 for the second time, going to the gym, eating leftover pizza. Nothing major. About 10 minutes after I arrived at the office on Tuesday morning, I got a phone call from my dad asking if I wanted to go with him to my great-aunt's funeral. I hadn't really thought I would, but when he called, I realized I really wanted to -- it had been ages since I'd seen many members of that part of my family -- and so I booked a flight right then to fly to Wichita, Kansas that Friday and suddenly my already abbreviated workweek was shortened by another day and I had just 8 working days to prepare for a workshop I was leading in Houston the following weekend, as well as lots of other little things I was juggling. I thought I had successfully headed off the cold sore, but Wednesday it came back; an annoyance. Thursday, I had after work plans to go to the Philharmonic with my mom, and just as I was finishing my workday, I got my period. It was not unexpected, but added another unpleasant wrinkle to my travel plans: cramps.

Anyway, Friday morning I woke up and packed (I had had no time between when I made my travel plans and Friday morning to prepare at all) and headed to JFK. I had a tight connection in Atlanta where I was meeting up with my dad, but it worked fine. We got to Wichita and picked up our car and tried to take country roads to the town where the funeral was, but the country roads turned into dirt roads a little ways from the highway, so we went back to the interstate. Golden hour was amazing - the shadows are so long when there are no buildings to block the sun. We got to the church as the viewing was wrapping up and then went out to dinner with various extended family members. The funeral was the following morning and there was a huge turn-out of my relatives: cousins I hadn't seen in years, and the next generation (and even one member of the generation after that: my great-aunt's great great granddaughter!), many of whom I had never even met. After the funeral and the burial and the lunch back at the church (with 5 types of Jell-O salad), I went for coffee with my dad, his cousin, her daughter, who I had been close with growing up, and her two daughters, who I hadn't seen in years. That night we had dinner with other cousins (so many cousins!). I guess this is all to say that the funeral was actually great; it was what a funeral should be. I'm so glad I went. But Sunday morning I woke up with a dry cough and just feeling a little off. We were flying out that morning, so I picked up some Zicam (which I swear by when I feel like I'm coming down with something). We made a detour on our way to the airport to drive through the Maxwell Wildlife Refuge where we saw dozens of elk and buffalo, as well as a few deer while we were en route. The trip back to NY after that was uneventful. When I got home around 7pm, I was just so tired.

I woke up Monday morning a bit under the weather, but I had a meeting that afternoon I felt I shouldn't miss and I didn't feel too terrible. It was a mild day, but I wore my long down parka because I seemed to be running cold, and I found myself shivering the whole way into the office on the subway. Almost as soon as I got to the office, I realized that coming in had been a mistake. I took care of a couple things I absolutely needed to do and then turned around and went back home, where I got back in bed immediately and spent the next couple hours feverish with occasional chills. I ordered in pho for lunch, but could only drink the broth. I took a conference call that afternoon, which took all the energy I had. Around 5, I called my mom and told her I needed help with food: I had very little at home, no energy to go get any, and a struggling appetite. My mom came over with soup, saltines, and a thermometer. I had a 101.5 degree fever. I managed to eat a bunch of saltines and a bowl of soup. Then I went to bed feeling feverish and slept fitfully. In the morning, I got up and went to urgent care as soon as they opened, where I was tested for and diagnosed with the flu. I don't think I'd ever had the flu before. I had mild congestion and a bit of a cough, but mostly my symptoms were exhaustion, fever, and a loss of my appetite. Luckily, I had gotten the flu shot, which supposedly helps, and I went to the doctor soon enough that they prescribed me tamiflu. I went straight to the pharmacy for the latter and also bought some Tylenol and then went home to rest between conference calls. I ended up staying home the rest of the week, working remotely starting Wednesday, but still so exhausted. I didn't leave my apartment between when I got home from urgent care on Tuesday and when I left for the airport to fly to Houston on Friday morning (the doctor had told me I would be ok to fly as long as my fever was gone and my other symptoms weren't worse). I made it through my 2-day workshop. After the initial symptoms passed, the hardest thing honestly was my loss of appetite. I am never not hungry, so it was the strangest experience for me not to feel like eating. Coffee tasted awful; I drank Coke for my caffeine for 4 days. (Prior to this it had probably been more than 5 years since I'd had a Coke.) I'm only just getting my appetite back and I'm still finding coffee - which I normally adore - a little repugnant. Anyway, I flew home from Houston on Saturday night and got home around 1am. I woke up groggy on Sunday morning around 8, went back to sleep and finally woke up around 10:30, which is the latest I've slept in ages. I spent most of the day in bed watching TV. I took Monday off work to clean and recover and finally get my life back in order. I went back to work on Tuesday, still with a mild cough and a rattle in my chest. Even today there's a little rattle. I feel like I lost a week of my life. I lost more than a week of my reading time.

Night Train to Lisbon had been slow going and so I thought I should bring something different for my plane reading. For me to read on a plane, rather than watch movies, I need something engrossing. As I packed for Kansas, I decided to bring Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. I had read her earlier book, Everything I Never Told You, partly on planes and found it to be the right kind of book for that: both lovely and absorbing. I think I read about 90 pages of Little Fires Everywhere on my Kansas trip. It did have the qualities I was looking for; I was sucked right in. At one point, things went a bit dark and I had a strong sense of foreboding. I thought about my list of books I had to stop reading because I feared for the central characters. And then I didn't read the whole week I was sick, and all the while the bad things I was sure were going to happen hung over me. Tuesday morning, when I went back to work, I read on the subway as usual. Wednesday I did it again. I was close enough that I could have finished the book Wednesday night, but I wasn't sure I wanted to read what was coming. So, yesterday I read it again on the subway to work and I nearly finished it on the subway home and I read the last 5 pages after I got home and, while bad things did happen, it was also ok. I just needed to pace myself. There is, apparently, going to be a mini-series of this book and I know there is no way I will be able to watch it. That this book gave me the anxiety it did speaks mainly in its favor, and I think it was very well conceived and written, but I can't say reading it was exactly a pleasurable experience. Or maybe if I had been in different circumstances myself I wouldn't have felt it so acutely.

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, Javier Marías

I decided to start the year, again, with Javier Marías. I started last year with Thus Bad Begins and I started 2018 with Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 3 and I started 2017 with Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 1 and while I didn't technically start 2016 with The Infatuations I started it very early in the year and finished that book on January 11, 2016, so I feel like that's close enough and we can declare this a 5-year tradition. When I read A Heart So White last year I had the sense that I should go back and read all Marías' books in order rather than in the haphazard way I have been doing to better pick up on the recurring themes, names, words. Maybe 2021 will be the year I do that.

The recurring words are, in a way, what led me to this book (though I would have found my way to it eventually). I found my copy at my regular thrift shop and when I saw the title on the spine, before I noticed the author's name, I thought, "I know that phrase." In fact, the phrase "Tomorrow in the battle think on me," comes from Richard III (several Marías titles come from Shakespeare), but where I know it from is Your Face Tomorrow. Imagine my delight when I got to page 166 of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me to a new chapter, which opened thus, "What a disgrace it is to me to remember your name, though I may not know your face tomorrow..."

Like A Heart So White and Your Face Tomorrow and The Infatuations, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me features a Luisa. As in several of Marías' books, the reader doesn't learn the narrator's name until well into the book: page 182 for his first name and page 232 (out of 311) for his full name. This time, I managed not to read the back cover at all (which, of course, reveals it) so I was as in the dark as I wanted to be. Several - perhaps all? - of Marías narrators are borderline creeps. I don't think he has a single book where the narrator doesn't secretly follow someone to a point that is beyond any kind of acceptability. But this narrator, the one in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, might be the creepiest of all. And yet, somehow sympathetic.

While reading Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, at some point I thought, "This is the best one: this one has it all, and in just 311 pages too." In retrospect, I'm not sure if I actually prefer it to Your Face Tomorrow, vol. 1, which I declared as my favorite at some point, but I do think this is a good book to start with.

Reading Marías is such an intense experience that of course it seeps out into your thinking and your everyday life. Yesterday, I tweeted about an old man I met in the Peneda-Gerês National Park in northern Portugal back in 2012. I was traveling on my own - it was my first truly solo international trip - and I stopped for a couple nights at the Hotel Águas do Gerês, a hotel in a small village within the park. Manuel was there with his wife and 4 or 5 other family members - siblings or inlaws - from their generation. They were spending 2 weeks at the hotel on a sort of health retreat, where they took the waters daily and went on little walks and were fed a special macrobiotic meal with barley water instead of coffee. It seems like something from a century earlier now that I type it out, but that's what they were doing. I don't remember which meal it was, but I was sitting alone at a table next to their large group table and Manuel was at the end near me and we struck up a conversation. He was the only member of his party who spoke English, though I did talk to some of the others with him as a translator. He was a retired air traffic controller and he had a son who was about my age or a little bit older, who was also an air traffic controller. I can't remember if we made the plan then or later, but he invited me to go out with him on a hike to a lookout point the following day. I had taken the bus to the village (I was a very different kind of traveler then! Mainly, I guess, I was a poorer one) and had no means of really getting around the park, so I was excited to actually get out into the park. We met after breakfast the following and drove a short way out of town and partway up a hill to a parking area and then walked up together to the Miradouro da Fraga Negra. Back at the hotel, he invited me to have lunch with his whole family, though the restaurant served me a regular meal not their macrobiotic one. I think I left that afternoon and moved on to Braga. I gave Manuel my email address and in the intervening years, usually around the holidays, we've exchanged occasional very short emails. (His English is pretty limited and my Portuguese is non-existent, and what is there to say, really, anyway?) As I wrote yesterday (when he sent me a funny cat picture that someone he knew had posted on Facebook), I'm cheered every time I receive one of these messages, partly just to know Manuel is still around in the world.

One of the themes in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a concept of the time after someone has died but before those who knew that person know that she has died. Marías describes it as sort of unreal or enchanted, when a person is out and about in the world, not knowing that their world has in fact changed because someone important in their lives has died; a husband who for a full day does not know he is actually a widower. Of course, my whole world won't change when Manuel isn't in the world anymore, but it's likely I'll be in the dark for quite a while. Between messages, how am I to know he's still in the world? And if the next message never comes, how am I to know that he's not? I'm someone to him, but I'm no one to anyone else who knows him. His wife and her sister and some others of the party who were there in Peneda-Gerês may remember the young American woman Manuel invited to join them for a meal, but they surely don't remember my name if they remember me at all. If, in fact, they are still alive in the world.

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.

My Decade in Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Villa Triste, by Patrick Modiano

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

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

Two side notes:

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

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