My Sister, The Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite

I'm still away from home. Ten days and counting. In addition to My Life as a Fake, which I was already reading when I left, I brought five books with me (three of these were individual copies of the books in Tove Ditlevsen's Copenhagen Trilogy, which are tiny books on their own and so I sort of think of them as three books, but I also sort of think of them as one book). Unusually for me, I have not yet visited a bookstore on this trip, so I'm devoting my energies to what I brought with me. I remember reading about or hearing about My Sister, the Serial Killer a couple years ago when it came out and I got a copy from PaperbackSwap several months ago. It sort of hovered at the edge of my mental to-read list until I was packing for this trip and without too much premeditation decided to throw it in my bag. I think this is something I should do more often: spend less time thinking about what to read and just read something. (I mean, I do read a lot -- it's not like I'm seriously interrupting my own reading time while I deliberate about what to read, but I do maybe think a little too hard about what I should be reading.) I still had a very small amount of deliberation: should I read this, the other non-Ditlevsen book I brought, or continue with Ditlevsen straight through. (I finished Childhood two days ago, but am waiting until I've read all three to write about them.) But I picked up My Sister, the Serial Killer after finishing with work yesterday, sat down on the couch, and promptly read more than 60 pages. I finished it after work today; I read the whole book in two sittings.

Set in Lagos, the narrator is Korede, a clean-freak nurse. When the book opens, her younger, prettier sister has just killed a man -- and not for the first time. Korede is called upon to take charge and clean up the mess, and this, we learn, has been the dynamic between the sisters throughout their lives. The story proceeds in narrative vignettes mostly in the present, but with occasional glimpses of their past life when their abusive father was still alive. Things become complicated when Korede's sister starts a relationship with a doctor from Korede's hospital, whom she also has feelings for. The book takes some unexpected turns, and I found myself surprised by Korede's choices as the drama played out. This was a fun, if dark, read.

My Life as a Fake, by Peter Carey

Peter Carey is someone I think of as an author of my youth. I read True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda some 20 years ago. In my memory, I read the former after the latter but my records indicate otherwise. I remember I had gotten an ARC of True History of the Kelly Gang and it seems I read it before it was released. In any case, I read them within the space of a year in 2001-2002 and I loved them both. The end of Oscar and Lucinda left me in tears and unable to sleep the night I finished it. Some time later, I started The Tax Inspector but I had to stop because I was afraid things were taking a bad turn and I couldn't handle it. (I seem to recall that the edition I had bore a quote from a reviewer that said simply "Devastating." or something along those lines, and I thought it boded poorly for my mental health.) A few years later, I read The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and I didn't much like it, and there, for a long time, ended my reading of Peter Carey, though I have held on to several of his books. I'm not sure what exactly prompted me to pick him up again now. A week ago I was looking for a book to read and I had some rather particular qualities in mind. I was leaving soon for a couple weeks away from home, and I wanted something that would be engaging reading for my flight and something I wouldn't mind leaving behind, as I'd packed 5 other books to take on my trip and didn't intend to bring them all back home with me. I had two false starts before I landed on My Life as a Fake. In the end, I didn't read on the plane at all (I never know if I will or not), but I think I chose an appropriate book for my needs.

My Life as a Fake follows the editor of a small poetry journal who, while visiting Kuala Lumpur, encounters an Australian poet who 30 years earlier pulled off a hoax, tricking the editor of an Australian poetry journal into publishing the avant garde poems of an invented outsider poet bike mechanic. This poet proceeds to tell the editor his life story, which took him from Melbourne to Sydney to Southeast Asia chasing his invented poet who, by his own word, he manifested into a living being. The story of the hoax is well-known in the book (and is based on real events), but the book gives the editor -- and the reader -- reason to believe (or at least some reasons not to disbelieve) the story of the poet tormented by his invention. The man he created turns out to have become a remarkable poet, though we're never quite sure he existed. 

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, by Gaito Gazdanov, and One Last Stop, by Casey McQuiston

I saw a couple people post about it, so I decided to try out The StoryGraph for tracking my books rather than the Amazon-owned Goodreads. (Of course this means that for now, I'm using both while I figure out if I like StoryGraph. My early impressions are mixed.) An interesting feature of StoryGraph is its recommendations. I uploaded my whole Goodreads history and filled out a little form that asked me what I liked in books, and StoryGraph presented me with a list of recommendations, which is supposedly personalized. Topping the list was The Holy Terrors by Jean Cocteau and just below it was The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, a book I already owned but knew little about. (I believe it came to me via a large shopping bag of books – mostly small press, international and translated titles – that my father got from a publishing friend and passed on to me.) So, I thought I'd test out StoryGraph's recommendation quality* by reading it. And the verdict is, the recommendation was good! 

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf opens with the narrator telling us the story of the time he murdered a man many years earlier. It was in the context of war, and he was a teenage soldier, but murder is the word he uses. This killing has weighed on him ever since. Now, all these years later, he is a journalist in Paris. He comes across a book in English by a writer named Alexander Wolf. The book contains three short stories, the last of which is called "The Adventure in the Steppe" and describes, down to every detail, the murder the narrator committed, from the perspective of the killed man. Our narrator realizes his victim is still alive, and seeks to find him. It takes him a while to track down Alexander Wolf, and in the end he finds him almost by accident. In the meantime other events have taken place in the narrators life, and the reader starts to sense an unlikely coincidence, or set of coincidences. Even as I was sure I had "solved" this book, the end still shocked me. There are other flaws in the book, but the end was perfect.

Before I read The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, I read Casey McQuiston's 2021 novel, One Last Stop. When I read their Red, White & Royal Blue last year, I wrote, "There were all kinds of bits in this book that were just a little too far-fetched..." and I can say that if I thought that was far-fetched, I didn't know what I had coming in One Last Stop. The book is batshit. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

One Last Stop is a queer romance about two women who meet on the subway, but one of them is actually from the 1970s having gotten stuck in (or out of??) time on the subway in the great blackout of 1977 and she's just been riding the Q train for 45 years (without aging) until she meets the protagonist and they fall in love and she's able to retrieve some of her memories. Alexander Wolf had some improbable coincidences, but One Last Stop really tests our credulity (beyond whatever credulity we've already allowed for the premise itself) when it (of course) turns out there's a connection between the subway girl and the protagonist's uncle, whom her mother has been searching for (nowhere near New York, and no, he also never lived there) since 1973. This book was easy to read and kind of fun, but I also kind of hated it. However, I don't think I can be bothered to get into my various gripes with it now. If quasi supernatural queer romance is your thing, and you're not too put off by the hyper-contemporary (I suspect lots of references in this book will feel dated by 2023), you might enjoy this. 

* There are some definite flaws in StoryGraph's recommendations. For one, it suggested to me a book that I've already read, which for some reason got imported as an audio book, but nonetheless it had on record as a book I'd read. It also recommends some books in French, which I could maybe manage, and more bizarrely a book by Nicole Krauss translated into Hungarian, which I definitely couldn't (though I do feel they're picking up on something about me in making this recommendation). 

The Man of Feeling, by Javier Marías

I'm almost out of unread Javier Marías books. If they don't translate Tomas Nevinson by January 2023, I don't know what I'll start next year with. The Man of Feeling is the earliest Marías book I've read. Published in Spanish 1986, it's also his earliest novel to be released by New Directions. There are four novels that predate this one, three of which have not been translated. And there are a couple later (though still early) novels I still haven't read, as well as some books of short stories, of which I own one. The Man of Feeling predates A Heart So White by six years. I suppose starting from here, I could go back and read all his books in order as I proposed doing when I read A Heart So White. 

The Man of Feeling shares some themes (infidelity, jealousy, the idea of replacing another person in someone's life) with the later works, but it feels different. There's no one named Luisa. (There is a Berta; perhaps Marías was tired of Luisas when he wrote Berta Isla and decided to repeat a long forgotten name instead?) There were scenes in this book which I think were reused and became fully formed in later works. There's a description of a character dying in her sleep, which occupies just a couple pages of The Man of Feeling, and which was yet so familiar to me. I felt I had read it described in much further detail on a previous occasion. (I am a little alarmed that I can't remember if it was in A Heart So White or Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me. I believe the latter, but can't swear to it – though I remember the scene quite well.)

Javier Marías is maybe my favorite writer, but if I have one complaint about him it is a preoccupation with heterosexual masculinity, with a jealous and proprietary approach to relationships. It's not un-self-aware. In fact, this is often the explicit flaw in his characters, but still – he has a tendency to write jealous, possessive men. The Man of Feeling is about one of these men, though in this instance he's not the one telling the story. Perhaps this gives the reader a little more room to be critical of his possessiveness; we don't sympathize with him one bit. We never find out if our narrator is a jealous lover, if he feels the sense of ownership his predecessor felt. One suspects not, but he doesn't tell us. As the book ended, I was left both unsure what he thinks, and what I think of him. 

2021 in Books

I realize this photo is very similar to the one I posted last year, but it was taken only a couple days ago, so I suppose it's just an accurate representation of my life. The pandemic continues more or less apace, and my reading kept up. I read 55 books in 2021, which is the most I've ever read in a year excepting last year. However, by page count I think this is only my fourth best year. Another fun (?) fact I learned from my Goodreads Year in Books is that 2021 was the first year in many, many years (since 2007 if Goodreads is to be trusted) that I didn't read a single book that was over 500 pages long. Berta Isla, the first book I read in 2021, was 496 pages and the longest book I read. 

I think this started in 2020, but I have noticed a definite change in the cadence of my reading. While I average a book a week or better, my actual reading pace is very different. I'll read some books (several books) in a day or two, while others take me weeks to get through. I think this tendency has grown out of the way I read now, which really has changed since February 2020. Before the pandemic, I did the bulk of my reading on the subway. Sometimes I'd spend a weekend day or a day off reading, but most of my reading was done in 30-40 minute chunks across two daily commutes. This routine I think propelled me forward and kept me moving through books that I might have set aside if I had other options. I've tried, with varying success, to stick to reading before and after work each day, but now I have my whole library available to me every day. If I'm not in the mood to read what I have started, I have many other options to choose from. I don't know that this is either good or bad, but it's a change in how I read. 

Here is the full list of books I read in 2021:

• Berta Isla, by Javier Marías
• Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
• EEG, by Daša Drndić
• Seeing People Off, by Jana Beňová
• Outline, by Rachel Cusk
• Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge
• The Radetsky March, by Joseph Roth
• Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid
• In the Café of Lost Youth, by Patrick Modiano
• Texas: The Great Theft, by Carmen Boullosa
• The Memory Police, by Yōko Ogawa
• Red, White & Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston
• Dog Symphony, by Sam Munson
• The Dream of My Return, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• All the Names, by José Saramago
• Ambiguous Adventure, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane
• The Gloaming, by Melanie Finn
• Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong
• Death of an Englishman, by Magdalen Nabb
• Dance of the Jakaranda, by Peter Kimani
• The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai
• Sweet and Sour Milk, by Nuruddin Farah
• Think Again, by Adam Grant
• The Fortune of the Rougons, by Émile Zola
• The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen
• Sphinx, by Anne Garréta
• The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Obelisk Gate, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
• The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga
• The Body Snatcher, by Patricia Melo
• Poetics of Work, by Noémi Lefebvre
• The Emissary, by Yōko Tawada
• Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, by Jenny Erpenbeck
• The Appointment, by Herta Müller
• The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño
• Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
• How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi
• Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova
• Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday
• Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
• Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles
• Telephone, by Percival Everett
• Euphoria, by Lily King
• Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald
• While We Were Dating, by Jasmine Guillory
• In the Company of Men, by Veronique Tadjo
• Mourning, by Eduardo Halfon
• Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, by Penelope Mortimer
• Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski
• The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
• Dummy Boy: Tekashi 6ix9ine and the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, by Shawn Setaro
• French Exit, by Patrick DeWitt
• Erasure, by Percival Everett

And now some stats: For the first time ever, the majority of the books I read last year (33 out of 55) were by women, with one more by a non-binary author. Sometime in the late summer – when I accidentally broke the streak – I realized I had read 11 consecutive books by women, which itself is probably a record. I considered reading only women for the remainder of the year, and I almost did but I let a few men slip in. I read books from 23 different countries last year (fewer than in 2020), including books from 6 countries I'd never read previously (the same count as 2020; this year's new countries were: Slovakia, Somalia, Rwanda, Romania, Bulgaria, and Côte d'Ivoire). I read 14 books by Black authors, about the same as last year. For various reasons, I read more non-fiction than I have in a long while: 7 books in total. Two of these were for a work book club. A third – Dummy Boy – I read because it was written (brilliantly!) by a good friend. The others are mostly memoirs and travel journals, which is to say within the scope of non-fiction I usually read. I did two re-reads in 2021: Outline because it was selected for a book club I was in, and The Dream of My Return just because. 

When I read it in May, I declared that The Gloaming was the best book I'd read in 2021 to date. It seems like a distant memory now, but I do think it was my favorite book of the year. It sucked me in and took me to totally unexpected places. I picked up both of Melanie Finn's other books last year and I expect I'll get to reading them this year. Some other favorites from last year include Kapka Kassabova's Border, which took me ages to read, but was wonderful and really made me want to visit Bulgaria; Jenny Erpenbeck's Not a Novel, which gave me such a wonderful sense of East Berlin and the strangeness of having the entire world of your childhood just disappear; Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years, which I found rather slow reading but which has stayed with me – I find myself looking for Serge's memoirs every time I'm at a bookstore now; and there are others: Eduardo Halfon's Mourning (he makes my notables list every year I read him, it seems), Daša Drndić's EEG, Nuruddin Farah's Sweet and Sour Milk; Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April; Percival Everett's Erasure. I feel like I could go on, but I have to stop somewhere. I already have my first book of 2021 set out, but beyond that who knows what's ahead. Here's hoping for another good year of reading, with better circumstances outside my reading life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim

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

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

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

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

Fieldwork, by Mischa Berlinski

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

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

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

Daddy's Gone A-Hunting, by Penelope Mortimer

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

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

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

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