Reading post: August

It's almost the end of August, and I know I'm not going to finish any more books before midnight on Sunday (I'm on page 173 of 636 of my current book and it's going slowly). So I'd say it's time for a reading post. I read a lot this month, perhaps mainly due to Covid. I had no energy to do anything but read!

The books I drew from my "Briefly Noted" envelopes this month were The Great Displacement, a "survey" of places in the USA that are being destroyed by climate change, and Termush, a Danish novella described as "hypnotic."

• The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration by Jake Bittle (2023). So, this was a somewhat interesting book, although I didn't learn a lot from it. I already knew about the fires in California and how Arizona uses a lot more water than it should. I knew less about flooding on the East Coast. In the last chapter, Bittle talks about what's REALLY going to mess up the world: not fires or floods, but heat. That should have been highlighted, not stuck in the back. All through the book I kept thinking about how I would have written it differently. But it's still worth reading, even though he talks about the progress we're making on reversing climate change -- ha ha, this was written & published before Trump won reelection... oh well. Guess we're screwed.
  
  
• Termush by Sven Holm, translated from the Danish by Sylvia Clayton (1967/2024). This was a really odd little masterpiece. Only 105 pages, in 31 short chapters, it tells the story of some rich people who paid a lot of money to be able to hole up in a fancy hotel that's been made into a bomb shelter. Because the nuclear holocaust has happened and the rest of the world is toast. What could go wrong? What couldn't? In the last chapter, when the hotel guests are now fleeing in a yacht into the Atlantic Ocean (I assume the hotel was on the coast of Denmark), the narrator notes: "They are having trouble with the engine." Ha ha, of course they are. Even though you think you know all this already, the novella does bring it home. If we get into a nuclear tit for tat, there will be NO ESCAPE. We are all doomed, even rich people. Even Elon Musk.

Best books of the 21st century so far

In August I planned to read some more books off the New York Times list by authors with last names beginning with the letter M. There were five books in that category that interested me, but I had trouble getting a hold of most of them. I wanted to read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, but it was always out. I wanted to read The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, ditto. I wanted to read Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, but even THAT was checked out. So I read a few things I hadn't planned to.

The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar (2016). This one I did want to read, and it did not disappoint. Matar's father, an outspoken critic of the Qaddafi dictatorship, was kidnapped in 1990 and held in a Libyan prison for many years, probably dying there. This memoir details Matar's attempts to find out what happened to his father. One of the blurbs on the back of the book says it "reads as easily as a thriller"; another says it's "structurally thrilling" -- well, no. It's fairly slow. But it's interesting. I didn't know much about Libya before I read it, and I would have liked even more background than Matar provides, but I know a lot more now. And just thinking about what this must have been like, to have one's country upended like this, one's relatives imprisoned... It's unimaginable and thought-provoking.

A Mercy: A Novel by Toni Morrison (2008). For some reason I had the idea that this book made it onto the list simply because it was by the great Toni Morrison, not because it was any good. But it is good. It's set in the late 1600s, in what was to become the USA, and the characters include Black and white and Native people. I read somewhere that it's "Beloved lite" but it isn't lite. It's creepy. It's maybe Beloved distilled, because it's very short, only 167 pages. There's a lot packed in those pages. In some ways the characters seem like archetypes and in other ways they seem very human. I will confess that I misunderstood who the book was addressed to, finally figured it out in the next to last chapter, and then had to go back and reread sections to be sure I'd understood it. I probably won't read this again, but it is a masterful book.

Runaway by Alice Munro (2004). OK, this one I actively did NOT want to read, because of the revelations about how Munro's husband molested her youngest daughter and yet she stayed with him. But the library had it, so... And it is so good. Some of the 8 stories are better than others, but oh man. Munro at her finest. The title story is horrible -- I was sorry I read it. I'm trying to forget it. That goat. But some of the others. The one that broke my heart was "Trespasses," about adoption, among other things. There's a 3-part sequence of stories all about the same character, as she ages, and the third story in that group, "Silence," was so creepy, because it's about a mother whose daughter ghosts her, permanently (as Munro's youngest daughter did her, when Munro refused to believe or support her). 

You know, we always have the idea that there is this reason or that reason and we keep trying to find out reasons. And I could tell you plenty about what I've done wrong. But I think the reason may be something not so easily dug out. Something like purity in her nature. Yes. Some fineness and strictness and purity, some rock-hard honesty in her. 

To me, this read like the worst kind of self-deception. "It's not me, it's her -- her purity." No, Alice, it was you. It was your husband and then it was you, supporting him in his crimes.

I'm sort of glad I read this, simply because it helped me to understand Munro better. And it cannot be denied -- she was a wonderful, wonderful writer. But the betrayal of her daughter... All her writing career she wrote about betrayals, and then to do that... I wonder what her legacy will be, in the end. What will people think of her work in 50 years, 100 years? I don't know.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010). This is the other book that I really wanted to read, and it was checked out too, but I requested it and it came fairly quickly. It's long, detailed -- but man, so interesting. Mukherjee calls it a biography of cancer, but it's really a history of the scientists who researched cancer and the doctors who tried to develop cures for same. The most interesting aspect is the fact that they didn't work together -- in fact, they basically ignored each other. The doctors went roaring ahead with possible "cures" without understanding anything about how cancer worked, and the scientists gradually figured out how it worked, but the doctors ignored their results. It sounds as though now they're finally working in tandem, but hmm, you kind of have to wonder if anything important is still being ignored. Apparently an updated version of the book is due out later this year, with "four all new chapters" detailing what's happened since 2010, so I will definitely want to read that.

So I've now read 51 of the books on the list of the top 100. I've reached my goal of reading 50, so I guess I'll set a new goal: 60! I'm very pleased with my progress. I think I will read almost all the books on the list that interest me by the end of the year.

 

Other reading

I started the month off by reading Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, for which I'd been on hold for a few months. Wow, what a terrible story and how awful to have to relive it from this new perspective. But it should be read. We need to know this story. Rocket Boy read it too -- I thought it was very important for him to read, because he really liked Biden and did not think he should have stepped down after the debate. (His opinion changed after he finished the book.)

 

Then I read a mystery, the last one Eleanor Taylor Bland published, called A Dark and Deadly Deception. When you look at lists of her books, there's one more, but it apparently was never actually published, and then she died. This book ends with an evil character plotting revenge on Bland's detective, Marti McAllister, so clearly there was supposed to be another book. I'm so sorry this one was the last. It wasn't her best mystery, but it was good, and I really enjoyed the whole series. I had to request this from the Longmont library. I wonder if anyone besides me is still reading her books.

 

Because I was home with Covid and couldn't go to the library, I searched the to-be-read piles by my bed for my next book: How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino, translated from the Japanese by Bruno Navasky, originally published in 1937. My cousin Marina gave me this book when we were there last summer. I put it aside, figuring the perfect time to read it would arise at some point. It's an odd book, the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki's last Studio Ghibli film, "The Boy and the Heron" (the Japanese title is, in fact, "How Do You Live?"). But the book isn't anything like the film. It's essentially a philosophy textbook for teenagers, giving them advice on how best to live their lives, and the main character in the film is reading it -- that's the connection. Apparently the book was important to Miyazaki when he was young (he was born in 1941). I liked it, kind of. It's not really a novel, but it offers a lot of good advice. And, amusingly, it turns out that Teen B is going to have to read this, or part of this, in Language Arts this year. How convenient of me to have just read it!

 

Still at home, still without access to the library, I pulled another book off the piles: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (originally published in 1971). I think I found this in a little free library. A really sweet, sad book. It's about an old woman (around 80?) who goes to live in a hotel in London, which must have been the British equivalent of assisted living, sort of. She meets a young man, a writer, who uses her as the inspiration for a novel he's writing about old people. And the book just goes through her last year, showing what she and the other old people have to deal with. A quote, from the musings of one of them: 

"It was hard work being old. It was like being a baby, in reverse. Every day for an infant means some new little thing learned; every day for the old means some little thing lost. Names slip away, dates mean nothing, sequences become muddled, and faces blurred. Both infancy and age are tiring times."

Elizabeth Taylor died of cancer in her 60s (this was her last book), so she never actually experienced what she was writing about, but it seemed accurate nonetheless. I liked this and am going to keep it.

 

The last book I finished was one I had hoped would last forever. Secrets of the Blue Bungalow: More True Tales of Family Life in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior by Kevin Fisher-Paulson. It's his third and last book, because he died of cancer last year. I read it very slowly, over several months, just a couple of entries per night, and only on nights when I needed some comfort. Wednesday was kind of a bad day around here and I needed more comfort than usual -- so I finished the book. Darn. I might just have to start over again at the beginning -- or maybe I'll read How We Keep Spinning again first (not the triplets book, that one is too sad) and then come back to this one. 

"Know when you're in over your head. At some point we all lose it. For me, it was probably the afternoon that Aidan got his head stuck in a staircase, but each of us gets to give up at some point."

"Twenty years ago, I was one of those "Why-can't-that-mother-keep-her-child-quiet-on-the-airplane" people. Time has humbled me."

"Next time you see a child screaming while throwing a bowl of spaghetti at Olive Garden, do not assume that the father/mother is a failure. Assume that she/he is doing their best. And when you yourself are the parent sitting on the curb watching your son and the Chief of Police argue, remember the words of Oscar Wilde, "We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." 

I wish they'd publish one more book of his columns. Blue Bungalow only goes until the end of 2020 and I know he wrote until just before he died in September 2024. I know if they did do another, it would be a sad book, all about him getting cancer and whatnot. But I'd still buy it and read it, absolutely.

 

Next month

In September I will try to read two more books from my "Briefly Noted" envelopes and a few more from the NY Times list, focusing on books whose authors' last names begin with "N-O-P." There are two or three that interest me, and if I can't get those, I could always try for some of the books I missed this month. But first I must read the next book group book (we meet on Sep. 10th, here), and then whatever else I find that strikes my interest. 

Oh, and I'll try to finish No Ordinary Time, my 3rd FDR book, which I worked on this month (that's the book I'm on page 173 of) but did not complete. It would be good if I had time to get to at least one more president this year.