Approaching Year 3 of the Report, I can now say with confidence that of all the months it’s weirdest to write the intro for the December Report, as January 1 is, popularly, a date for looking forward. Yet here I am, still looking back! Begrudgingly!
What can I say about my year in reading that I have not already said in previous Reports?
It took some work to reach my goal of reading at least 52 books, enough to make me start rethinking the purpose of such a goal. I don’t think reading is an inherently “good” activity or that it makes someone a “better person,” but I do think there is value—for me, personally—in silent sustained reading, in being able to sit with a book, uninterrupted, for several hours, something that is increasingly difficult for me to do with regularity. I have some thoughts about how I might adjust for 2022, but I’ll save those for the January Report.
Finally, looking back on 2021, of all the books I read, these were my favorites:
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies (2021)
Madeline Miller, Circe (2018)
Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello (2021)
Natasha Brown, Assembly (2021)
Alexandra Kleeman, Something New Under the Sun (2021)
What I read in December:
Meredith Westgate, The Shimmering State (2021)1—For this reader (me), Westgate’s debut novel had the misfortune of being published not just in the same year but the same month as a much more interesting and more interestingly written novel about California under the influence of a twenty-first century substance—Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (2021). Westgate’s book, which follows 2 loosely connected millennials respectively piecing together how they ended up in a cushy rehab facility for people who have become dependent on the off-label use of an experimental drug for Alzheimer disease, is not bad, on its own or in comparison to Kleeman’s book. Westgate is Doing Things with narrative structure, themes of memory and selfhood, and style that mirrors the characters’ experience of recovering from the cognitive effects of the drug and the treatment to resolve the misused drug’s effects. In fact, I can’t even say I only finished the book because I was reading it for Book Club! We met a day earlier than we normally do and I was only halfway through when we convened.2 After a robust discussion, I picked Shimmering State back up and finished it that evening.
But I think I only read through to the end because I was in deep enough and thought (mistakenly!!) that some larger reveal was imminent. In the end, unlike Kleeman’s dark, madcap, noir-ish, end-of-days novel, Westgate’s book is smaller in scope and more inwardly directed. Again, not bad! But not what I wanted.
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes (1926)—Imagine someone who has devoted several years to the study of early twentieth century literature never hearing of this novel until November 2021 and then only learning of it from a stranger on Twitter!3
Yet, the jacket’s description:
[A]n aging spinster’s struggle to break way from her controlling family—a classic story that [Warner] treats with cool feminist intelligence, while adding a dimension of the supernatural and strange.
plus my persistent, low-grade desire, particularly in winter, to read old British novels inspired me enough to pick up Warner’s debut novel. I am so glad I did. It’s a weird, weirdly straightforward book about a woman who, after 30-odd years of being a maid/nanny for her family, realizes one day that she can just . . . stop doing that. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that she then becomes an actual witch or that Warner’s vision of a sleepy town full of normies who have made deals with the devil is, in a word, delightful.
Madeline Miller, Circe (2018)—Shout out to all the women in my life who have raved about this novel. You were all so right. What a book!!! It’s so good that I am (like always!) having trouble talking about it. Circe is mesmerizing. It’s the kind of book where I feel like one shouldn't need to know a plot summary to decide whether they want to read it. I probably would have read it sooner if I hadn’t, simply because I have weird hang-ups about historical fiction and books specifically marketed as “empowering women.” The joke was on me, as Circe really isn’t either of those things at all and is, instead, a genuinely remarkable novel.
Jo Hamya, Three Rooms (2021)—While all books are, in one way or another, in conversation with other books, some are more distinctly in conversation than others. Hamya’s debut, which explicitly invokes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), is also in dialogue, by virtue of its subject matter, with Natasha Brown’s Assembly (2021), Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), Brandon Taylor, Real Life (2020), Lynn Steger Strong’s Want (2020), Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), and Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021)—novels that, variously, explore downward mobility, the gospel of education, gender, race, and navigating adulthood and all that it entails in the twenty-first century.
The structure of this novel, as well as the style, voice, and characters were all interesting to me and, in my opinion, well executed. Nevertheless—and perhaps, strangely enough for me, because it’s so realistic/bleak—I struggled to complete the book. It is a good book, I think, but I might have read it at the wrong time (see what happens when I read for the sake of reaching a goal!!).
What I’m looking forward to reading in January:
Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land (2021)4
Elif Batumen, The Idiot (2017)
Basma Abdel Aziz, The Queue (2016)
Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2012)5
Book Club selection for December.
Happily, no one else had finished their homework 😂
To be fair to me, a) I studied British literature, b) I did know who Sylvia Townsend Warner was, and c) the Twitter stranger has impeccable opinions about both film and the NBA.
Book Club selection for January.
I am Madeline Miller Hive now.