Reading post: March

Well, it's the last day of March, so time for a reading post.

The books I drew from my "Briefly Noted" envelopes this month were Death by Water, a novel by Kenzaburo Oe, described as "sombre," and Word by Word, a nonfiction work by Kory Stamper described as "an unlikely page-turner." The Oe book didn't work out, so I picked again and got Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver, said to "exhibit a unique delicacy."

• Death by Water by Kenzaburo Oe, translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm (2009-2015). The night before I got this from the library, I dreamed that it was a slim paperback. "That'll only take me an evening to read," I said happily. The next day I picked up the book. Over 400 pages. Oof. I tried it for a few nights, but couldn't get into it. Then I read a review which said you'd be better off reading Oe's earlier works first, not starting here. Fine, thanks for the advice, goodbye book.
  
  
• Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper (2017). I was excited to read this, forgetting that books like this aren't written for linguists, they're written for the (reasonably well-educated) general public, and so I had to wade through tedious explanations of descriptive vs. prescriptive language and that sort of thing. But the chapters about how a dictionary is built were interesting and sometimes very funny. I was amused by all the things people (supposedly) write to Merriam-Webster and complain about:

"...writing a verbal illustration like <tomorrow is supposed to be sunny> may be problematic, because there are supposedly people out there who will assume that if they look up "suppose" in the dictionary and read <tomorrow is supposed to be sunny>, that means tomorrow will, in fact, be sunny, and they will write in and complain when tomorrow is not sunny."

• Neighbors and Other Stories by Diane Oliver (2022). This sounded so depressing -- stories from the 1960s by a Black woman who died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 22. I don't quite understand why they were suddenly published now. But the stories are good! Depressing, OK, yeah, but good enough that I didn't mind the depressingness, mostly. Sort of amazing when you consider that she was so young when she wrote them. And they were interesting to me, because they were from an era that I lived through, but I certainly had no idea what Black people were experiencing at that time. This was actually worth reading. I liked almost every story. You do wonder what she might have become, had she lived.

Best books of the 21st century so far

In February I decided to read some books off the New York Times list by authors with last names beginning with E.

• The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer (2018). I was interested to read this because I enjoyed a memoir by Ernaux in the New Yorker about when she had breast cancer. But I had trouble connecting with this book. It's a memoir of her life (she was born in 1940), or at least the years she lived through, but it's told mostly in 1st person plural ("we...") and 3rd person plural ("they..."). I think this was supposed to make it a more general story of all France, but I just found it distancing. It almost seemed like she was making fun of people in the past. The only parts of the book I liked were when she switched into 3rd person singular ("she..."). I can't help thinking this is a translation problem, but I'll never know, since I don't know French and will never be able to read it in the original.
  
  
• 
  A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010). While waiting for this (I was on hold for it for a while) I read a book of Egan's short stories called Emerald City and Other Stories (1993). I had mixed feelings about that book, which was about disappointed beautiful rich people. NOT who I want to read about. But when Goon Squad finally showed up, I liked it better. Didn't love it, but found it interesting. It's an attempt to show the passage of time through a lot of disjointed stories about people who dip in and out of each other's lives. I kept forgetting who was who -- too many names, too many people who didn't seem that different from each other. I'm not sorry I read it, but it's yet another book from this list that *I* wouldn't have put on the list.
  

So I've now read 39 of the books on the list of the top 100. 

Other reading

I've had it in mind to read some books off the "other" NY Times list (the one from readers who disliked the official list) whenever I had the time. Mostly I haven't had the time, because the books from the regular list and my "Briefly Noted" choices have taken so long to read. But at the very end of February I started reading a book from that list, Piranesi by Susanna Clark (2020), and finished it on March 1st. Now THAT was a good book! Highly recommended. Very unusual, very interesting, hard to put down (obviously). I would have put this on the main list.

My other reading this month consisted mainly of the book for the book group (The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Luiz Zafon, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves -- pretty good, although I didn't think it was as great as its sales and reviews would suggest) and a mystery by Nevada Barr, Blind Descent, which is set at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I picked it up at the Carlsbad Caverns gift shop, even though it looked familiar -- and sure enough, I realized right away that I'd read it before. But it's a good book, not just a good mystery. It really really really gives a sense of what it's like to be deep inside a cave, something I never want to do. I spent the rest of the trip reading it, ignoring the book I'd brought to read: No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin. That wasn't even the FDR book I meant to read next, but I found it at Barnes & Noble, so I bought it and brought it along, but didn't read a word of it. So I've still got to read this and another book about FDR over the next three months to stay on schedule. Hmm.

Next month

In April I will read two more books from "Briefly Noted" and try to read a couple more from the NY Times list, focusing on the letter "F." And maybe a book about FDR.