Recent Reading: January 2023

I’m going to borrow a post format from Dorian Stuber at Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau and write about my reading month by month, or at least I’ll take a stab at it and see how it goes. New year, new newsletter format!

January was a weird reading month because I spent the first two weeks in Ireland, where I had time to read but did not follow my usual habits and schedules. January is often a great reading month for me because the first 3/4 is light on work while I wait for the semester to begin, but this year was not at all typical — in a great way! Ireland was fabulous. Coming home was hard. Still, I read some great books:

• Haven by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown, and Company, 2022): This was a Christmas present for my husband that I picked up as soon as he set it down. I probably would not have read it — historical fiction is not my genre — but how could I resist reading a book with a picture of Skellig Michael on the cover when I was in a place I could see Skellig Michael!? Or at least I could see it when it stopped raining (which was not often).

  

  I loved this book. It’s set in 7th-century Ireland and tells the story of three monks who leave their comfortable (by 7th-century standards) settlement to sail down the River Shannon in search of a remote place to found a monastery. Their leader is particularly devout, you might say fanatically so, and it’s fortunate for him that his two disciples are practical and knowledgeable because otherwise he would have died almost immediately. Much of the book describes the disciples efforts to survive on the very, very rough terrain of an island that’s mostly vertical, which they do in spite of and not because of their leader. Donoghue makes all this riveting reading. She must have researched the hell out of this, but it doesn’t feel researched. It’s such a pleasure to read about monks barely surviving on a tiny, inhospitable island at the edge of the world while one is sitting on a cozy couch under a blanket. It’s even better if you can do it on a couch in Ireland.

• The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2015): I started reading the Neapolitan novels in 2017 and am finally getting around to finishing them. I don’t do well with series, I’m afraid, but I did love these books. Turns out Elena Ferrante is great! I have Ferrante fever, no doubt, even if it’s a very slow burn. I do think this series gets better in the second installment, The Story of a New Name; it’s not that My Brilliant Friend is a bad book at all — I enjoyed it — but with the second book you begin to see more clearly the larger project Ferrante has undertaken. The story gets bigger, the themes become clearer, the stakes feel higher. I love how intense these books are. The story is so dramatic — melodramatic? — and Ferrante keeps the plot moving along while dealing with each incident in such vivid, satisfying detail. The ideas are big — writing, family, feminism, political change — the actions and gestures and emotions are big, the novels themselves are big; it’s all so fun.

  Let me take this opportunity to recommend The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism by Jill Richards, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, and Katherine Hill, which, yes, I did read before finishing the novels. The four authors write each other letters about the books as well as more formal critical essays on them, and the result is a very smart, very fitting response and tribute to the series.

• Lote by Shola von Reinhold (Duke University Press, 2022): This book is featured in the January episode of One Bright Book, so I’ll direct you there for my thoughts. The short version: we loved it.

  

• Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson (Dalkey Archive Press, 2022; originally published in 1986): I’m intimidated even thinking about writing on this. This is my second Carson book, and it’s the Carson I’ve been looking for; I read Autobiography of Red and thought it was fine, but it didn’t particularly speak to me (I’m very sorry if you think less of me for this). Perhaps I read it at the wrong time or the wrong age? I don’t know, but I loved the analytical, scholarly, and yet crystal-clear tone of Eros the Bittersweet. It’s a book about erotic desire, obviously, but it’s also a book how the gaps and movements and triangulations of eros shape our relationship to language and writing — and shaped it historically — and vice versa. Carson begins with Sappho and the word “bittersweet” and from there ranges widely, with examples from ancient times up through Augustine, Donne, Stendhal, Rilke, and others.

  The ideas are complex and I read this very slowly, but Carson’s writing is such a pleasure, so straightforward-seeming, so relatively simple in its syntax, so assured. I wish all scholarly writing could be like this.

• The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (NYRB Classics, 2021; originally published in 1976): I read this as part #NYRBWomen23, a group reading plan organized by Kim McNeil, with the goal of reading 24 NYRB Classics books by women in 2023. Anyone is welcome to join! You’ll find the schedule here. It’s mostly on Twitter, and to a lesser extent on Instagram. I missed the first book, but jumped in in late January with The Hearing Trumpet, which was a WILD RIDE, let me tell you. I’m generally not into books that can be described as “surreal,” but I’m glad I made an exception for this one. It’s the story of Marian Leatherby, an old woman whose family wants to put her in a home for the elderly. The family succeeds, but as it turns out, the home where they place her is very odd. If you haven’t yet read this one, I suggest you go into it knowing as little as possible and find out for yourself where it takes you. I guarantee you’ll be surprised. I’ll just say that I love Marian and her best friend Carmella so so much.

  

• Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell (Riverhead, 2022): I thought this short story collection was pretty good, but I’ll admit I don’t think it’s good enough to have won the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Is this anti-short story bias on my part? Possibly, I’m not sure, but it’s hard for me to see why this won against, say, Jon Fosse’s A New Name: Septology VI-VII (translated by Damion Searls), which was also on the list. The stories are dark, moody, and strange, full of people who behave strangely inside the “seven empty houses” of the title or people who escape or try to escape those houses with their weird and unsettling families. Schweblin is masterful at creating a creepy mood. I don’t see a whole lot in the stories other than mood, though.

• Falling Hour by Geoffrey D. Morrison (Coach House Books, 2023): I loved this book so much. The publisher’s blurb is “All talk, no action: The Mezzanine meets Ducks, Newburyport in this meandering and captivating debut,” and I would add in Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald to get the full feeling of the book. It’s set in a small city in Ontario, Canada, where the main character, Hugh, is waiting in a park for someone to pick up a picture frame he’s selling (this is the frame narrative!!), and while he waits, he thinks. His thoughts are the real heart of the book. He begins with his feeling that his brain is “broken,” and eventually gets to his history as a person born in Scotland who was moved to Canada as a child; his feelings about writers such as Keats and Woolf, who are formative for him while also being troubling figures; his religious history and the ways it intersects with religious and cultural movements in Canada and Scotland; capitalism, money, and work; the natural world, and many other things. The novel is beautiful, brilliant, funny, angry, sad, and strange. I loved being in its world.

  

• The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, translated by Alexander O. Smith (Minotaur Books, 2012): I chose this book for the most recent meeting of my mystery book group; we’ve been meeting since 2008 (!) and had never read a book by a Japanese author (!), so it was time. The group had a wide range of opinions, but I really liked it, perhaps more than anyone else. We see very early on how the murder happened, and then the question becomes whether the murderer will get caught and how. We get to see the thoughts of the murderer and the man who is helping her as well as the thoughts of the detective and the friend who is helping him, and it’s a pleasure watching the characters make their moves in what feels like a high-stakes chess game. It felt to me as much a book about ideas as a murder mystery; one character is a mathematician and another is a physicist, and they have long conversations about logic and problem solving. It’s also a book about empathy and friendship. What it is not is a book that portrays the female characters with enough complexity to satisfy, its biggest weakness, I think. But overall, it’s a good reading experience and great for discussion.

So far in February my reading has been slower than ever, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. More later.