Reading post: January

So, since the first month of the year is almost over, I might as well do a reading post. In 2025 my overall reading goal is to get better acquainted with recent literature, i.e., books published since the year 2000. I don't really want to do this -- I like older books better -- but I have decided to do it and do it I will. 

More specifically, in January I started my new challenge of reading one fiction and one nonfiction book from the "Briefly Noted" section of The New Yorker during the past 15 years or so.

The books I drew from my envelopes were The Absent Moon by Luiz Schwarcz, a Brazilian writer, and Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin, an Argentinian writer. Both books are described as "haunting" (probably why I clipped the reviews). I certainly did not expect to pick two books in translation by South American authors, but there you are. It also seems odd to me that both authors' names begin with "Schw." The Boulder main library had both books on the shelf, so I picked them up (thinking, as I did so, that I would never have chosen either book if I weren't doing this challenge) and started reading.

• The Absent Moon: A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression by Luiz Schwarcz (2023), translated from the Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker. The story of the Brazilian Jewish author's difficult relationship with his parents, especially his father (a Holocaust survivor from Hungary), and his own struggles with mental illness. Schwarcz, a famous editor and publisher in Brazil, has a light hand with tragedy -- too light, really. I read somewhere that mental illness is still very stigmatized in Brazil, and so Schwarcz perhaps didn't feel that he could write an American-style tell-all. Or maybe didn't want to. I was disappointed by the book (didn't find it "haunting"), but I'm still glad I read it.
  
  
• Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin (2015), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. This collection has such an evocative, "haunting" name, but I thought the seven stories fell a little short. The author seemed to want so badly to be weird, at the expense of being honest. I agree with the writer of the brief review, though: the one long story, "Breath from the Depths," was impressive. It's about an old woman gradually becoming more and more demented, and of course not realizing that she is. Scary, spooky story.
  

 

Best books of the 21st century so far

As another part of my goal of reading recent literature, I continued working on the NY Times list of the best books of the 21st century so far. I decided to be very methodical about this. I put the remaining list (that is, the books I hadn't read yet) in alphabetical order by author and divided it into 12 sections, one for each month. So, for January I looked only at books by authors whose last names began with A or B. I'm not interested in reading every book on the list, so I just picked a few that sounded interesting.

• A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (2015). Berlin, who died on her 68th birthday in 2004, wrote mostly autobiographical stories -- so they're like little memoirs, but not quite. She had an interesting life, and the stories she wrote about that life are interesting too. One quibble: I don't like the title. I expected that many of the 43 stories would be about cleaning women (which sounded boring), but I think the title story was the only one. Toward the end of her life Berlin lived in Boulder for a few years, teaching at CU, and the stories she wrote then mention magpies. Of course.
  
  
• Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich (2016). Oh god, what a terrible book. I don't mean it's bad. It's magnificent (Alexievich is a Nobel Prize winner). It's based on interviews she did with people in Russia and the former Soviet republics, circa 1991-2012, about the end of communism and the beginning of capitalism in Russia. And the stories are almost unremittingly terrible. Just a nightmare of a book. I read it, so you don't have to. Unless you want proof that America under Trump is not actually the worst thing imaginable (yet).
  
  
• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013). I tried to read this, but gave up after 100 pages or so. It's about Nigerians immigrating to America and England, and back to Nigeria, and the problems they face everywhere. You know, with what's going on in our world, with Trump and all, I just couldn't face a book about immigrants. Also, it's very long, and too slow. Maybe in some other lifetime I'll read this.
  

So I've now read 35 of the books on the list of the top 100.

 

Other reading

My other reading this month consisted mainly of the book for the book group (The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, definitely underwhelming), and my first book about FDR: Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt by Geoffrey C. Ward. Steve, whose blog helps me make all my presidential bio decisions, said this was a nice introduction to FDR. I found it very interesting, so yes, it was a good place to start. Maybe in March I'll move on to FDR by Jean Edward Smith, which is going to be my second FDR book. The Boulder library doesn't have it, so I'll have to request it.

But February is a short, cold month, so I am just going to read more books from "Briefly Noted" and the list of 100. And Barbara Pym, of course.