In June my plan was to read "general nonfiction," in other words, nonfiction that isn't biography or memoir (except that it's hard to distinguish between memoir and not-memoir, as you'll see below). I had 22 books on my list, and I got through about a third of them. It helped that the book group meeting was postponed until August. It did not help that Prospector ignored my request for one particular book. It's fine, it was a good reading month.
Books I said I'd like to read
The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1973). I don't know how this got onto the list, but somewhere I'd heard it mentioned as an important book. It was rough going, though. So intense. The basic idea of the book is that human beings are motivated by an awareness of their mortality and their consequent fear of death, that almost all of modern civilization can be traced to our attempts to deny death (or live forever by doing something memorable or believing in a religion that lets you live forever in Heaven, etc.). Very interesting when applied to the current political situation, Trump and the oligarchs. The author died of cancer soon after finishing it, which is also interesting.
The book is full of fascinating arguments, but it also shows its age. Fifty years ago apparently it was OK to write things like "Today we generally see homosexuality as a broad problem of ineptness, vague identity, passivity..." He also thinks non-human animals operate entirely by instinct, oh, and schizophrenia is caused by bad parenting. I kept being utterly fascinated... and then I'd hit one of those comments. The whole chapter on mental illness was nonsense. Still, I'm glad I made the effort to plow through the book.
On the Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald, translated from the German by Anthea Bell (2003). After reading all of Sebald's "fiction," I turned to his nonfiction. Sebald is kind of an addiction, and I know I'm not the only person who suffers from it. He was just so good. This book consists of four essays. The long title piece, about how German authors failed to write much of anything about the 600,000 German civilians killed in World War II by Allied bombs, is excellent. As he says in the Foreword,
...the works produced by German authors after the war are often marked by a half-consciousness or false consciousness designed to consolidate the extremely precarious position of those writers in a society that was morally almost entirely discredited.
The other three essays are about German writers who I wasn't familiar with. They were OK, just didn't mean much to me.
The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer (1994). In 2024 I discovered Dyer, liked him a lot, and planned to go on reading him, both his fiction and his nonfiction. I think of him as a humorist, but this book about World War I (or as he prefers, The Great War) is mostly not funny, as befits its subject. Dyer writes about the poets, like Wilfred Owen, and novelists who experienced and then wrote about the Great War, and he also describes in detail the memorials to it and the enormous cemeteries in France (there are photos). It was interesting, but not as moving as I expected (although somewhat moving). Most people think it's amazing. I don't know why it didn't work for me, because I do like Dyer. I'll keep reading him.
My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir by Sarah Moss (2024). What was I saying about not reading memoirs this month? I have mixed feelings about Sarah Moss. I adored her first novel, Cold Earth, which I read in 2023, but couldn't finish Night Waking. I thought it was time to try her nonfiction. This one is a memoir, sort of, about being anorexic, but I think it's more about anorexia than about Sarah Moss. OK, it's both. She's still anorexic now, in her 50s, as the last few sections of the book illustrate. I've never been remotely anorexic, but I'm so uninterested in food (other than sweets) that I kind of understand the attraction. Food is so boring and I hate making food, but -- I don't like being hungry. I would never dream of starving myself intentionally.
Trying to decide if I liked the book... during the first long section, about growing up with her appalling parents, I kept thinking about putting the book down and trying something else. But the later sections I *really* liked. So it's mixed. Oh, and the title of the book is (sort of) from a poem by May Sarton, a really cool poem, but this is the same crazy borderline May Sarton that I read that biography of in April. I thought it was nice that crazy, impossible May Sarton could write something that would help Sarah Moss go on living.
69. When I see photos of these blue bowers, I feel so much desire that I wonder if I might have been born into the wrong species.
I like the color blue, but I don't love it the way Nelson does. I have something of the same feeling, though, for purple. Certain shades of purple blow me away, can't stop looking at them. Lavender, periwinkle, colors like that. But other purples I don't like, and then I tell myself that purple's not my favorite color after all, that I like green better. I do like green, especially pale mint green. But purple... Anyway, this is an interesting book and I will go on reading Nelson.
Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild by Ellen Meloy (2005). This jumped onto the list quite recently, and I'm trying to remember where I read about it. I guess it doesn't matter. It's about a year that Ellen Meloy spent watching a herd of desert bighorn sheep that lived fairly near her in Utah. Also, perhaps because she felt those sheep weren't entertaining enough, she visits different sheep in New Mexico and California, and places where sheep used to live, such as Baja California. And the sheep petroglyphs at China Lake! Besides being a book about sheep, it's also a book about wildness, and how there hardly is any anymore, and what effect that has on us, on humans. Sometimes the language is a little too ornate for my taste, but overall I enjoyed this book a lot. Ellen Meloy died in her sleep three months after finishing it, which seems terribly sad. I wonder whether the fires in Utah are affecting the sheep.
Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland by Sarah Moss (2012). I first heard about this book when one of the members of my book group took a vacation to Iceland and we looked for books about the country to read. We ended up reading a mystery instead, but I still wanted to read this. It's a very interesting book, but too long, I think. It's 356 pages and it would have been stronger at about 250. The basic story is that Sarah Moss and her family never figure out how to live successfully in Iceland, and so after a year they move on. But during that year they experience a lot of cold and dark. And skyr (Icelandic yogurt, the American version of which I am very fond). She talks about what bad drivers Icelanders are:
Max and I, waiting for a bus, conduct an informal survey: at the junction outside Kringlan shopping mall, where two eight-lane highways intersect, one afternoon in mid-August, six in ten drivers are texting or talking on their phones, four in ten are eating -- usually skyr with a spoon -- and one has a laptop open on his lap.
One interesting thing I learned about Iceland: they don't like used things. Moss and her family have a terrible time finding affordable appliances and such because there are no secondhand shops and nobody can understand why they would want to buy something used. Also, she can't figure out what they do to entertain their toddlers, since she never sees any toddlers outside walking around, only riding in cars. There are many other unsolved mysteries, but finally they move back to England and the book ends. They go back to Iceland the next summer and visit places they didn't go when they were living there, but that chapter of the book was pretty boring. Definitely worth reading if you want to know more about Iceland, but not as good as it could have been.
Books from the New Yorker's "Briefly Noted" reviews
Other reading
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