A long month with loads of reading time means a long summary.
First off, the mysteries: I finished Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond series early in August with Against the Grain. This series kept me entertained through the summer, but definitely not in my top tier. I did start two new, shorter series which are both promising. Tim Sullivan's DC Cross series must've cropped up a few years ago, because my notes say I read one of them back in 2023. This month I read The Patient and am hopeful Sullivan continues to build the secondary characters as he did in this book. Cross himself is a wonderful character, but the two women he works with and the pastor of the church where he plays the organ are piquing my interest.
Dissolution by C.J. Sansom is the first in a series and I loved it. England during the dissolution of the monasteries? Bring me more! Anything I read with Thomas Cromwell brings up immediate comparisons to Wolf Hall, and while it's a bit unfair to compare anyone's writing to Hilary Mantel and her stacks of prize-winning books, I felt this was very well written. When I get a break in all the new fall books that are stacking up on Libby I will definitely dive into the second book in this series.
I also read Shrink Solves Murder by Phillipa Perry. I believe it's her first novel. I know it's my last by her. Not awful, but there's just too many great books waiting for me.
I read three memoirs this month. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, about being raised by Bernadette Dohrn and Bill Ayers during their years on the run as founders of the Weather Underground. I was fascinated by the Underground growing up, and reading Zayd's perspective brought all that back. Next up was In a Dark Wood by Joseph Luzzi. Luzzi was an Italian professor whose pregnant wife was killed in a car crash. The doctors delivered the baby, and Luzzi becomes totally dependent on his working class family in Rhode Island for the care of his child, and on Dante to help him through his grief.
My final memoir for the month was Siri Hustvedt's Ghost Stories. I've read several of Paul Auster's novels, but never read anything by Hustvedt until this book. The reviews that led me to it were right. She's a brilliant writer (and researcher in neuroscience) and I grieved with her through this book. Some quotes:
When I told [Paul] this morning that I never thought I would know so much about NSCLC (non small cell lung cancer) and the ups and downs of checkpoint inhibitors etc. as I do now, he said it was like a new war that pops up in the news. One discovers the names of cities and towns one had never heard of before the fighting began. Although I have often resisted bellicose metaphors for illness, cancer’s aggression inspires comparison to a war. Paul is relieved to be marching forward rather than backward, remains brave and hopeful, a model soldier. And I, rather more rattled and less exemplary, nevertheless promise to file my reports from the war zone.
Paul’s favorite Mel Brooks quote comes in several versions. This is the one I remember: “Comedy is when you slip on a banana peel and fall down a manhole; tragedy is when I stub my toe.”The reader of Melville’s story never knows why Bartleby resists. He’s not a martyr for a greater cause. The big question is: At what moment does not giving in become the same as giving up?Writing isn’t about what you already know but what you find out you know once you’ve written.Two versions of time: time as the line of a single human life that ends in death, and time as a wheel that turns and includes the cycles of births and deaths. Bakhtin called these circling repetitions idyllic time. It’s rooted to place, usually rural places.
I'm so glad I picked this one up. She's an elegant yet emotional writer, and her grief is palpable.
A quartet that I read and almost didn't finish: Sunrise, by Tea Obreht, Sisters of a Halved Heart by Nayantara Roy, Under the Falls by Richard Russo, Nesting by Roisin O'Donnell. Maybe I wasn't in the mood for Sunrise? Sisters didn't feel like it lived up to the hype, Under the Falls was definitely a publishing mistake! I think it was supposed to be a screenplay, but when it didn't get picked up they published it. Sad if it's the last book we get from Russo. Nesting may have only disappointed because I felt like it was classified as literary fiction, and it just wasn't. It wasn't bad, just not something I'd normally read. I can probably throw Frida Slattery As Herself by Ana Kinsella in here, too. Maybe I need to stop placing auto-holds on every book by Irish authors I see!
Speaking of, Prestige Drama by Seamus O'Reilly was definitely an Irish book worth reading. Told in multiple first person, a group of people discuss a film about the Troubles that's about to begin filming in their town. The chapter by the former IRA member was the most impressive voice - I'd love an entire novel about him! Some quotes, which I believe are all from that character:
Music for imbeciles. I don’t give a full-time fuck if it was revelatory at the time. So were seatbelts and unleaded paint and indoor plumbing and we don’t harp on about them any more.
I’ll put it this way: if you’re in a maximum-security prison and you look over and see Puff Clancy standing to your left, you’d not be particularly worried about harm to your person. Puff was a proper rare boy, a pure simple from Galliagh, the kind of fella you wouldn’t leave alone in case he fell into the fire
But then, after all, how many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? None!
Early in the month I read It Will Come Back to You, by Sigrid Nunez. Why she is not more popular is a mystery to me, as I love everything I've read by her. This is her first published collection of short stories. Some quotes:
Something Jo had learned in psychology: When a person has had a bad parent, the person remains that parent’s child all their life.
The grass growing, the heartbeat of the squirrel, to hear such things—“that roar that lies on the other side of silence”—would be too much for us, it would destroy us, George Eliot said.
And aren’t we all unreliable narrators of our own lives? I see in her the little novelist that sits in each of us busily working to arrange experience into story. The idea that a human life isn’t like a novel, that there is no plot, no narrative arc, that our memories can’t be relied on for shit, and that everything depends on how much spaghetti the chimpanzee put in the pot—this the human heart will not have.
I read Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, mainly because I've had The Corner That Held Them waiting patiently on my shelves for years (I read a preview of The Corner on my Kindle and I know I'll love it, it's just so thick and there's only so much time.) Lolly is like the antithesis of a Barbara Pym character! Which would I want to be? Townsend Warner makes a good case for becoming the wild woman, the witch. The more I think about this book, the more I like it. Some quotes:
Laura was bored by the church which they attended. She would have liked, now that she was come to London, to see the world, to adventure in churches.
When Laura was ten years older she would be nut-crackerish.
That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure.
It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary is scientifically calculated to support life.
I almost gave up on Land, by Maggie O'Farrell and I'm so glad I stuck it out. I locked in about 100 pages in and then never wanted to leave. Another example of how much you can learn about history from a novel. Like understanding the Dust Bowl for the first time after reading The Grapes of Wrath, I feel I know so much more about The Great Hunger from reading Land, and following the story of Tomas and his family through several timelines. That deep Irish connection to the land itself, the deep-seated anger and humiliation about the British on that land, both come through these characters. I was absorbed in this novel like I rarely am these days by my reading, as O'Farrell pulls us into the land, the light, the air that make Ireland home. While the location isn't named, the map shows the southern peninsulas that stick out into the Atlantic, where my roots are, so her descriptions meant even more to me. This is definitely in the running for one of my top books of the year.
The quotes:
He sees the arrowhead leaves of an aspen entangling with the ripple-edge foliage of an oak, bending together like conspirators.
It never ceases to amaze me how assured you priests are of your place in the scheme of things. What you refuse to see is how recent is your hold here, that the land was inhabited long before you and your kind ever arrived, with your crosses and your prayers. You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow, how fast the stream…
Her body reacts before her mind. There is a certain type of cry that sets a mother in motion before she’s even aware of what she’s doing: it’s something in the pitch or the timbre that alerts the animal part of her brain to some manner of disaster.
Liam looking at his father's maps:
There is my father’s p and here is his f and how odd that it comes to a man one day that he cannot uproot his father from him, like an unwanted plant from the soil. There are no boundary walls between them; the two are one and the same.
A disappointment: Country People by Daniel Mason. I just couldn't get past the immaturity of the main character. I did like Etna, by Paul Yoon, and expect it to get attention from the various book awards. An Odyssey for a dog taken from a family farm and trained to spot mines, the impact of war on everyone and everything was evident. The possibility of a redemptive ending always is a winner for me.
I feel like I didn't spend as much time reading A Tender Age, by Chang-Rae Lee as I should. I thought it was well written, but it's getting all kinds of accolades.
Finally (I hope) two nonfiction books: Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I, by Tracy Borman, and The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf. The former posits that even though Elizabeth spent very little time with her mother before she was beheaded, Anne's influence on her through other women in Anne's circles was strong. Well written, and I will be making time to read Borman's new book on the Boleyns.
The Traveler deserves all its award nominations! I knew nothing about George Forster before I picked up this book, but was swept along as he sailed through the South Pacific with his thoroughly obnoxious father and Captain Cook. He wrote and drew throughout their travels, and observed the people encountered closer than any of the adults on the ships. The rest of his life he was committed to the belief that all people truly are created equal, and stood up to many prominent scientists, writers, and philosophers who claimed white superiority. There's a lovely backlist of Wulf's narrative nonfiction, mostly related to the natural sciences, and hopefully I will make time for them.
One quote that demonstrates George's lovely philosophy:
Reason, feeling and imagination, united in the most beautiful dance, are the three Graces of life,’ he had written in an essay in 1791, his words encapsulating this new understanding of the world.
Looking back, while there were some duds, I managed a decent month of reading. September is starting strong, but with a short trip next week and lots of trip planning for Poland in October and London in December, much of my reading may be travel-related.
A long month with loads of reading time means a long summary.
First off, the mysteries: I finished Peter Lovesey's Peter Diamond series early in August with Against the Grain. This series kept me entertained through the summer, but definitely not in my top tier. I did start two new, shorter series which are both promising. Tim Sullivan's DC Cross series must've cropped up a few years ago, because my notes say I read one of them back in 2023. This month I read The Patient and am hopeful Sullivan continues to build the secondary characters as he did in this book. Cross himself is a wonderful character, but the two women he works with and the pastor of the church where he plays the organ are piquing my interest.
Dissolution by C.J. Sansom is the first in a series and I loved it. England during the dissolution of the monasteries? Bring me more! Anything I read with Thomas Cromwell brings up immediate comparisons to Wolf Hall, and while it's a bit unfair to compare anyone's writing to Hilary Mantel and her stacks of prize-winning books, I felt this was very well written. When I get a break in all the new fall books that are stacking up on Libby I will definitely dive into the second book in this series.
I also read Shrink Solves Murder by Phillipa Perry. I believe it's her first novel. I know it's my last by her. Not awful, but there's just too many great books waiting for me.
I read three memoirs this month. Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, about being raised by Bernadette Dohrn and Bill Ayers during their years on the run as founders of the Weather Underground. I was fascinated by the Underground growing up, and reading Zayd's perspective brought all that back. Next up was In a Dark Wood by Joseph Luzzi. Luzzi was an Italian professor whose pregnant wife was killed in a car crash. The doctors delivered the baby, and Luzzi becomes totally dependent on his working class family in Rhode Island for the care of his child, and on Dante to help him through his grief.
My final memoir for the month was Siri Hustvedt's Ghost Stories. I've read several of Paul Auster's novels, but never read anything by Hustvedt until this book. The reviews that led me to it were right. She's a brilliant writer (and researcher in neuroscience) and I grieved with her through this book. Some quotes:
When I told [Paul] this morning that I never thought I would know so much about NSCLC (non small cell lung cancer) and the ups and downs of checkpoint inhibitors etc. as I do now, he said it was like a new war that pops up in the news. One discovers the names of cities and towns one had never heard of before the fighting began. Although I have often resisted bellicose metaphors for illness, cancer’s aggression inspires comparison to a war. Paul is relieved to be marching forward rather than backward, remains brave and hopeful, a model soldier. And I, rather more rattled and less exemplary, nevertheless promise to file my reports from the war zone.
Paul’s favorite Mel Brooks quote comes in several versions. This is the one I remember: “Comedy is when you slip on a banana peel and fall down a manhole; tragedy is when I stub my toe.”The reader of Melville’s story never knows why Bartleby resists. He’s not a martyr for a greater cause. The big question is: At what moment does not giving in become the same as giving up?Writing isn’t about what you already know but what you find out you know once you’ve written.Two versions of time: time as the line of a single human life that ends in death, and time as a wheel that turns and includes the cycles of births and deaths. Bakhtin called these circling repetitions idyllic time. It’s rooted to place, usually rural places.
I'm so glad I picked this one up. She's an elegant yet emotional writer, and her grief is palpable.
A quartet that I read and almost didn't finish: Sunrise, by Tea Obreht, Sisters of a Halved Heart by Nayantara Roy, Under the Falls by Richard Russo, Nesting by Roisin O'Donnell. Maybe I wasn't in the mood for Sunrise? Sisters didn't feel like it lived up to the hype, Under the Falls was definitely a publishing mistake! I think it was supposed to be a screenplay, but when it didn't get picked up they published it. Sad if it's the last book we get from Russo. Nesting may have only disappointed because I felt like it was classified as literary fiction, and it just wasn't. It wasn't bad, just not something I'd normally read. I can probably throw Frida Slattery As Herself by Ana Kinsella in here, too. Maybe I need to stop placing auto-holds on every book by Irish authors I see!
Speaking of, Prestige Drama by Seamus O'Reilly was definitely an Irish book worth reading. Told in multiple first person, a group of people discuss a film about the Troubles that's about to begin filming in their town. The chapter by the former IRA member was the most impressive voice - I'd love an entire novel about him! Some quotes, which I believe are all from that character:
Music for imbeciles. I don’t give a full-time fuck if it was revelatory at the time. So were seatbelts and unleaded paint and indoor plumbing and we don’t harp on about them any more.
I’ll put it this way: if you’re in a maximum-security prison and you look over and see Puff Clancy standing to your left, you’d not be particularly worried about harm to your person. Puff was a proper rare boy, a pure simple from Galliagh, the kind of fella you wouldn’t leave alone in case he fell into the fire
But then, after all, how many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman? None!
Early in the month I read It Will Come Back to You, by Sigrid Nunez. Why she is not more popular is a mystery to me, as I love everything I've read by her. This is her first published collection of short stories. Some quotes:
Something Jo had learned in psychology: When a person has had a bad parent, the person remains that parent’s child all their life.
The grass growing, the heartbeat of the squirrel, to hear such things—“that roar that lies on the other side of silence”—would be too much for us, it would destroy us, George Eliot said.
And aren’t we all unreliable narrators of our own lives? I see in her the little novelist that sits in each of us busily working to arrange experience into story. The idea that a human life isn’t like a novel, that there is no plot, no narrative arc, that our memories can’t be relied on for shit, and that everything depends on how much spaghetti the chimpanzee put in the pot—this the human heart will not have.
I read Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, mainly because I've had The Corner That Held Them waiting patiently on my shelves for years (I read a preview of The Corner on my Kindle and I know I'll love it, it's just so thick and there's only so much time.) Lolly is like the antithesis of a Barbara Pym character! Which would I want to be? Townsend Warner makes a good case for becoming the wild woman, the witch. The more I think about this book, the more I like it. Some quotes:
Laura was bored by the church which they attended. She would have liked, now that she was come to London, to see the world, to adventure in churches.
When Laura was ten years older she would be nut-crackerish.
That’s why we become witches: to show our scorn of pretending life’s a safe business, to satisfy our passion for adventure.
It’s to escape all that – to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to you by others, charitable refuse of their thoughts, so many ounces of stale bread of life a day, the workhouse dietary is scientifically calculated to support life.
I almost gave up on Land, by Maggie O'Farrell and I'm so glad I stuck it out. I locked in about 100 pages in and then never wanted to leave. Another example of how much you can learn about history from a novel. Like understanding the Dust Bowl for the first time after reading The Grapes of Wrath, I feel I know so much more about The Great Hunger from reading Land, and following the story of Tomas and his family through several timelines. That deep Irish connection to the land itself, the deep-seated anger and humiliation about the British on that land, both come through these characters. I was absorbed in this novel like I rarely am these days by my reading, as O'Farrell pulls us into the land, the light, the air that make Ireland home. While the location isn't named, the map shows the southern peninsulas that stick out into the Atlantic, where my roots are, so her descriptions meant even more to me. This is definitely in the running for one of my top books of the year.
The quotes:
He sees the arrowhead leaves of an aspen entangling with the ripple-edge foliage of an oak, bending together like conspirators.
It never ceases to amaze me how assured you priests are of your place in the scheme of things. What you refuse to see is how recent is your hold here, that the land was inhabited long before you and your kind ever arrived, with your crosses and your prayers. You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow, how fast the stream…
Her body reacts before her mind. There is a certain type of cry that sets a mother in motion before she’s even aware of what she’s doing: it’s something in the pitch or the timbre that alerts the animal part of her brain to some manner of disaster.
Liam looking at his father's maps:
There is my father’s p and here is his f and how odd that it comes to a man one day that he cannot uproot his father from him, like an unwanted plant from the soil. There are no boundary walls between them; the two are one and the same.
A disappointment: Country People by Daniel Mason. I just couldn't get past the immaturity of the main character. I did like Etna, by Paul Yoon, and expect it to get attention from the various book awards. An Odyssey for a dog taken from a family farm and trained to spot mines, the impact of war on everyone and everything was evident. The possibility of a redemptive ending always is a winner for me.
I feel like I didn't spend as much time reading A Tender Age, by Chang-Rae Lee as I should. I thought it was well written, but it's getting all kinds of accolades.
Finally (I hope) two nonfiction books: Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I, by Tracy Borman, and The Traveler: One Man's Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, by Andrea Wulf. The former posits that even though Elizabeth spent very little time with her mother before she was beheaded, Anne's influence on her through other women in Anne's circles was strong. Well written, and I will be making time to read Borman's new book on the Boleyns.
The Traveler deserves all its award nominations! I knew nothing about George Forster before I picked up this book, but was swept along as he sailed through the South Pacific with his thoroughly obnoxious father and Captain Cook. He wrote and drew throughout their travels, and observed the people encountered closer than any of the adults on the ships. The rest of his life he was committed to the belief that all people truly are created equal, and stood up to many prominent scientists, writers, and philosophers who claimed white superiority. There's a lovely backlist of Wulf's narrative nonfiction, mostly related to the natural sciences, and hopefully I will make time for them.
One quote that demonstrates George's lovely philosophy:
Reason, feeling and imagination, united in the most beautiful dance, are the three Graces of life,’ he had written in an essay in 1791, his words encapsulating this new understanding of the world.
Looking back, while there were some duds, I managed a decent month of reading. September is starting strong, but with a short trip next week and lots of trip planning for Poland in October and London in December, much of my reading may be travel-related.
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