Reading post: September

It's the last day of September, so it's time for a reading post. It was a decent reading month, overall. I finished 10 books, several of which I either enjoyed or at least was glad to have read. 

The books I drew from my "Briefly Noted" envelopes this month were Woman of Interest, a memoir described as "dark" and "deeply funny," and Taiwan Travelogue, a Taiwanese novel pretending to be a translation of an old Japanese book, described as "metafictional."

• Woman of Interest by Tracy O'Neill (2024). I liked this a lot! It's the story of how the author, adopted from South Korea as a baby, went looking for her birth mother, found her, and traveled to Korea to meet her. She's warned repeatedly that this may not be a good idea, and whaddaya know? It isn't. But she gets to meet a congenial half-sister and I assume is glad she now knows more about where she comes from. Really interesting writing style -- sometimes I couldn't understand what she was trying to say, but I kept trying. Oh, and there are several good dogs involved. Definitely worth reading.
  
  
• Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi, translated from the Chinese by Lin King (2024). I have no idea why I clipped this from the New Yorker originally, but it was fun. It's a kind of lesbian romance between a Japanese novelist, Aoyama-san, who is spending a year in Taiwan and her interpreter, Chi-Chan, in 1938, when Taiwan was ruled by Japan (I did not know this before I read the book). The titles of the book's 12 chapters are all the names of local foods (e.g., Chapter III: Mua-Inn-Thng/Jute Soup) and most of the book's almost 300 pages deal with cooking and eating (Aoyama-san has an amazing appetite). There's so much food detail that it gets boring. But it was still fun, and I learned SO much about Taiwan.

Best books of the 21st century so far

In September I planned to read some more books off the New York Times list by authors with last names beginning with the letters N or P. There were three books in that category that interested me, and when I finished them, I added one by an R author. 

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018). I tried to get my book group to read this, but one of the members objected because of the dog. "The dog doesn't die," I said (spoiler: not true, it dies). "I don't care," she said. "It's about a dog being sad" (this is true). So we didn't read it, but I was looking forward to reading it by myself, and it did not disappoint. It's the musings of a woman writer whose dearest friend and mentor dies by suicide, and she ends up with his Great Dane. She and the dog grieve the man together. She writes about writing, which both she and the man have devoted their lives to, she writes about their complicated relationship, she writes about suicide, she writes about dogs (and cats and rabbits). I read it in two days, really enjoyed it. Recommended.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015). This is a novel about the Vietnam War, told from the perspective of a Communist sympathizer who is posing as a member of the South Vietnamese Army. He works for a General in the army, escapes with him to the U.S. when Saigon falls, and continues to send information to his friend and contact on the Communist side about the General's activities in the U.S. The book starts out well, gets really boring during their time in the U.S., and improves a little when the narrator goes back to Vietnam. I didn't really enjoy this book, but I felt as though it were telling me an important story that I ought to listen to. It's been made into an HBO miniseries that would be interesting to watch.

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (2021). I tried to get my book group to read this too, but no dice. So I read it on my own, and again, I'm glad they didn't take my advice. I'm not sure this is a "good" book -- more of a valuable book. It's the story of a trans woman, Reese, whose former girlfriend Amy detransitions back into a man, Ames, and gets a straight woman, Katrina, pregnant. Katrina isn't sure she wants to raise a child, but then Ames gets Reese involved, because she has always wanted a child. For a while they plan to raise the child together, as a threesome, and then everything starts to go south. I learned so much about trans women from reading this -- that's the valuable part. Whether it was a good book or not, I'm not sure. It's kind of a mess, and very preachy. But it's a start.

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth (2004). I was looking forward to reading this book, Roth's imagining of what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940 instead of FDR for a third term. But I couldn't do it. I got through a few pages, but then I stopped and couldn't go on. It was too depressing, seeing as how we're living through the dystopia of Trump's second term. So, maybe I'll come back to it sometime and maybe I won't.

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine (2014). Honestly, this book wasn't much better, but it was short, so I made it through. Citizen is Rankine's attempt to explain, in poetry sort of, what it's like to be Black in America and face little racist jabs all day long every day. And it was devastating. After the first section I had to stop, because I felt so terribly guilty. But I kept going and finished the whole book in one evening. I suppose it's easier to read about something that I have some control over. Some of the things she described I didn't remember, or only vaguely, like the way a white umpire kept calling Serena Williams' shots out when they were obviously in, in the 2004 US Open. While reading, I kept making little promises not to do some of the things she talks about, and that actually made me feel better.

So I've now read 55 of the books on the list of the top 100. I should reach 60 by the end of the year with no trouble.

Other reading

I started the month with the book for the book group, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. At our last meeting, one member said she had started reading this and it was interesting. So we chose it. I put off getting the book until six days before our scheduled meeting. My first thought was wow, 535 pages! But, it's Ishiguro, no problem. Well, it was a bit of a problem. This novel was Ishiguro's first after The Remains of the Day, and I kept imagining all the people who loved the book about the sad butler, maybe pre-ordered this one hoping for more of the same... hmm. That said, it was interesting. It's basically one long dream sequence. The main character, a pianist visiting a city in Europe to give a concert, wanders around trying to follow a schedule he can't recall, interacting with people who may be strangers -- or possibly family, driving miles and miles to a house that has a door that leads back to his hotel... It's so long and so weird. But I kind of liked it. Thought-provoking.

 

I also read another book from my "Briefly Noted" envelopes: Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky (2024). I pulled it out of the envelope by accident, but decided to read it too if I had time. It was quick -- I started it Sunday evening and finished it Monday afternoon. But such a weird book. It's about a little girl named Margaret who accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend at age 4, and can never forgive herself. Her guilt takes the form of a deer wearing the blue bathrobe of the dead girl's mother, and she carries Poor Deer around with her until an odd sequence of events when she's a teenager propels her in a different direction. A little too weird for me, but interesting. 

 

Then I finally finished No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin, my third and last biography of FDR. I can't remember when I started reading this -- July? It took me a long time to get through those 636 pages. I already knew the basic story, but Goodwin gives a lot of detail about the war years. Too much detail, really. But two things about the book really struck me. First, how rudimentary medicine was in the 1940s. FDR had heart disease (among other things), but there were almost no treatments for it. Today, he would have been on a statin and blood pressure medicine and beta blockers, and they would have made him quit smoking, and he would have lived to be 90 (instead of 63). Second, Goodwin's exploration of Eleanor and Franklin's complicated relationship. I already knew that FDR had been seeing his former lover, Lucy Rutherfurd, behind Eleanor's back in the last few years of his life, but this book brought home what it must have been like for her to find out that he had been with Lucy when he had the cerebral hemorrhage that killed him. My heart just ached for Eleanor. Anyway, I am now done with FDR and I'll try to read a biography of Harry Truman in November.

 

Last, I read I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb. I read this with Teen A for school (he had to read a memoir). We worked our way through most of the book and then he got mad at me and didn't want me to read anymore, so I finished it on my own. I had never had any interest in this book and couldn't understand how a teenage girl could write an interesting memoir. It turns out that the book is mostly a history of Pakistan and its troubles with the Taliban, not just about Malala's early life (and her life is actually very interesting too). So it's a terribly depressing book, but worth reading, much better than I expected it to be. Not sure what Teen A thought of it.

 

Next month

In October, since it's the spooky month, I went through my "Briefly Noted" envelopes and pulled out several books that sounded vaguely spooky, so I will try to read some or all of those. I'll also try to read a few more from the NY Times list -- again, focusing on spooky, if I can find any such. The book group is going to read a book about Captain Cook which doesn't sound spooky at all, but it will probably be fine.