On Instagram, I toss off short, typo-ridden mini reviews of the books I am reading, and sometimes manage to save them to an IG "Story" on my account page. Because it is a bear to find anything on Instagram, and because Instagram is Facebook, and Facebook is malevolent, and because not everyone who reads this blog follows me there (and why would you—it is mostly marginal photos of my kid, cloud and mushroom photos, aggressively underlined excerpts from periodicals, screengrabs of expensive clothes, and vanishing, misspelled book reviews) I thought I'd try keeping a record of what I am reading here.
January began and ended with ghosts. It started with a hulking, creepy book called Ghost Story by Peter Straub that traces how a cadre of malevolent supernatural beings come to haunt a ho-hum Californian novelist and a group of old men who live in the same little town in upstate New York and call themselves The Chowder Society. Since one of their number kicked the bucket, they have gathered to tell each other ghost stories, but they all share a secret that makes the spookiest tales pale in comparison. SURPRISE: it is the secret that comes back to haunt them (literally). There are some fabulous atmospherics in this book—notably, oppressive, ominous, incessant snow—and a true sense of "wtf is happening" for the first chunk of the book, but Straub ultimately goes the Stephen King route of making the evil explainable (and, thus, ridiculous and unsatisfying—think: possessed car! Giant spider! Telekinesis!) which lets most of the air out of the fear balloon. I did find myself looking over my shoulder coming up the dark stairs from the basement most of the month, though.
I slammed through a small stack of Margery Allinghams—Mystery Mile, Flowers for the Judge, Death of a Ghost, and The Case of the Late Pig. They all feature Albert Campion, Allingham's blond, nebbishy knock-off of Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Whimsey. Allingham is a deft hand at cleverly arranging tropes of 1920s/30s British crime fiction—think country houses, crusty gentry, taciturn butlers, sinister gangs, sleek motor cars, psychological kinks, Rube Goldberg plots, and vague, beautiful women who fall in love with unlikely people at the drop of a hat—but what's more interesting here is watching her find her way as a writer, evolving Campion from a punchline to something closer to a hero. Not a patch on Sayers, to my mind, but amusing.
They were not nearly as fun as reading a Barbara Pym novel, though. Some Tame Gazelle is the story of two middle-aged sisters, Belinda and Harriet Bede, who live in a small English village, and fill their days with good works, like fussing over curates and helping at church functions. It's sort of like a latter-day Austen novel pulled through the funhouse mirror and plopped in the mid-twentieth century, where Charlotte Lucas escapes marrying an odious clergyman, only to have one turn up at her door as she nears fifty who complacently expects her to turn her life inside out, because who wouldn't want to be married? Both sisters face unwanted suiters who threaten to take them away from the lives they love. Pym is gently ruthless in depicting the delusions and self-importance of the men and women in the sisters' narrow world, and though she shows just how small a world it is, she also shows why they cherish it. And it is funny!
I swerved out of my Anglophiliac bibliomania to read a slim chapbook a friendly stranger sent to me: Hannah Godfrey's Not For The World Would I Compare It To Anything. It collects stories (or memories, maybe) of being in places—a lake reputed to take away sorrow hidden somewhere in Canada, a reindeer drive in the Arctic, a marketplace in Cairo—and meditations on growing pains, requiems, and childhood recollections. The fragments all seem to orbit some large, unnamed grief, and the writing is lovely and accomplished. Still, perhaps because I have been confined to my home, Godfrey's excursions depressed me. All the marvelous places were mere backdrop for the narrator's persistent inner discomfort, and it made me sad to think of having the luxury of wandering the wonderful world and never being able to see beyond oneself.
Next, I spent an evening reading Claudia Rankine's Just Us. Through an assemblage of essays, responses, footnotes, fact-checks, poems, and pictures, Rankine reports on her attempts to engage the white people around her in conversations about white supremacy and racism, and her own emotions as she engages with the project. It is unsparing yet full of grace, and breathtaking in its generosity. When Rankine writes about a person, or more specifically, the way an interaction with them let her down, she offers them the chance to respond, publishing their response after her own. She fact-checks and footnotes her own essays, placing those addendums on the facing page—a design choice that reminded me that these asides are not tangential or incidental, but links to follow to pursue a wider knowledge. I could see myself in her white friends. The word "limn" gets overused, but here it is just right: Rankine illuminates the contours of something too often invisible to white folks—the fracture zone between Black lives and white complacency—and asks white people to choose to engage.
A while back, I read an interview with Anne Boyer where she talked about the mysterious lack of attention so many contemporary writers pay to the material conditions of their subjects' lives—how they make their money, the cars they drive, the foods they eat. It came to mind because material conditions are the most satisfying part of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles. Through five chunky novels—The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off, and All Change—she follows the lives of a sprawling, well-to-do English clan of timber merchants between 1937 and the late 1950s through the kaleidoscopic, rotating perspective of the Cazalets and their children, friends, servants, and lovers—even a pet rat gets a turn telling the story near the end. But what captivated me were the details too often tagged as incidental—everything to do with living life every day. A discussion of chamber pots, and who gets the chipped one; the darned socks and the Jeyes cleaning fluid and the stained bathtubs and the masses of food the family's cook prepares (pounds and pounds of pastry), the pervasive lack of central heating, margarine on toast instead of butter. The eternal rituals of bath times and bedtimes and the recurring problem of who is watching the children, and how to take care of older folks. Seeing the daughters grow up to be folded into an endless cycle of caretaking, even as the material conditions of their lives radically change—as servants become a thing of the past and the money runs out; the way awareness of money creeps in on people who never had to think about it, and the way it never leaves the thoughts of the poorer folks in their midst, like the aging governess Miss Milliment (a marvelous character, maybe the best of all these books). These get tagged as comfort reads, and Howard does provide the comforts of explanation and completeness. The characters feel real, but there is very little of reality's murky ambiguities. Everything everyone does is explained. But her attention to material conditions of her characters' lives and her elevation of voices on the margins of the Cazalets' privileged world, feel closer to something radical. In this moment when so much of my own privileged life has narrowed into the problems of cleaning, making food, and watching a child, her depiction of caretaking and homemaking's relentless grind resonated.
Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs was not what I expected, but I am not sure what I expected. There's something wonderful about knowing so little about a book before you read it—as I was going through it, I was like, wait, this is an 1896 story about a middle-aged lady herbalist in a small village competing against the local doctor? Hold on, here's an octogenarian sea captain telling a story of Arctic shipwrecks and eerie polar cities? (Mental note: re-read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.) Wait, a beautiful summer day with the herbalist's mother and brother, and an afternoon with a heartbreakingly sweet old fisherman, who sits in his neat-as-a-pin home all alone, knitting and remembering his dead wife, then the story of the herbalist's cousin by marriage who was crossed in love and decided to spend the rest of her life alone on an island, with her neighbors occasionally throwing parcels ashore of things they thought she might need. The unnamed narrator–a middle-aged woman writer–encounters these stories and experiences in the course of a summer in the costal village of Dennet, Maine, and the book is like a writer's journal. For a night or two, I could almost believe I was somewhere near a blue sea, with trees silhouetted on the hill edges behind me.
Oof. Last book. (I usually do not read fifteen books a month; thank you, invasion- and inauguration-related insomnia, for all the extra reading hours.) The wild ladies of Aoko Matsuda's Where the Wild Ladies Are are ghosts, caught up in the swirl of modern life, many working for the mysterious Mr. Tei, who appreciates their powers, powers no one seemed to understand when they were alive. Though at first the stories appear to stand alone, as you read, little tendrils of connection stretch between them, making them stranger and richer and funnier in retrospect. Matsuda's tone is blunt and declarative, and her ghosts (and people) live in our world of motivational wellness-speak and luxury signifiers like boar-bristle hair brushes. An appendix at the end outlines the plots of the classic Japanese tales Matsuda is riffing on, but you don't need to know them to enjoy these stories. I wish I could have the fun of reading them for the first time again.
On to February! What to read next?
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First note on links: I'm guessing that whoever reads this has their own beloved bookstores and libraries for purchases and loans, but thinking that you might want to read more about these books, I linked to assorted publishers and I'll rotate in links to various favorite bookstores of my own, too. This month, I'm linking to my friends at Community Bookstore.
Second note on links: As is standard on this blog of mine, I am not monetizing any of these links or clicks, just trying to send folks to helpful places.
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Image of a Harvey Nichol's Manchester window display found at This Is Colossal.
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