For anyone keeping track, at the start of 2022 I embarked on an experiment of seeing what would happen if I didn’t try to read 52 books for the year. My little attempt at what I’ll call “intuitive reading.” In this first real effort at separating the act (reading) from an arbitrary, productivity-oriented goal, without that target number I had to really think about why I read what I read and even why I read at all.
It was hard to resist decades of an internalized capitalist voice telling me that by not keeping pace of a book a week I was “not being productive,” also hard to simply exist outside a conceptual framework of reading needing to have some sort of external value in order to justify doing it over something else “more productive.”
I had thought that by releasing myself from the self-imposed obligation of 52 books in a year I would open up time to do something like learn a language. I ended up using the time for other things (some that were good for me [moving my body more/being in my jock era], some that were less good [I am addicted to TikTok]).
My takeaway is that whether I am reading to learn, or to escape, or to reflect, or to flex my imagination, I love always having a book simmering in the background of my mind. When I go too long without reading, I feel a lack, something missing. It is difficult not to make reading a project, a lesson, a goal, a homework assignment, but it is not impossible and I am getting better at it.
At the same time, I find personal value in holding myself accountable for what I read, specifically, for the voices and perspectives that I encounter in books. I kept a count as I read this year, not so much to arrive at a total number of books read but more so to make sure I didn’t unconsciously follow the path set out for me by publishing culture (publishers and reviewers overwhelmingly [still!] prioritize white and/or cis- and/or male authors). Guess what? In being a little less vigilant overall, I ended up reading more books by white women than any other kind of author 😞. Something to continue reflecting on as I head into 2023!
Finally, before I get to the last report of 2022, these are the books that were most meaningful to me this year AKA my favorites:
Elif Batuman, The Idiot (2017)
Lily King, Writers & Lovers (2020)
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2015)
Hernan Diaz, Trust (2022)
Natalia Ginzburg, All Our Yesterdays (1952)
Ling Ma, Bliss Montage (2022)
Kate Beaton, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022)
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (2021)
What I read in December:
Lynn Steger Strong, Flight (2022)—I respect how Strong takes what to me is the most boring kind of subject matter (middle class white people problems!!) and makes it . . . not not interesting? Interesting enough, maybe, to keep me reading if I’m in the right mood?? I was in the right mood for this book, though idk what mood it was.
Like, this is a) a dead mom novel, b) a “Christmas” novel, and c) a people spent too much money on private schools and camps and are arguing about a house in Florida novel. What was my mood to make me choose this! LOL. Must be because Twitter is dying.
Anyway, it’s a distinctive novel and also a novel that had me constantly thinking about other novels. Sometimes it felt like something by Cheever or Updike, but without the misogyny, or like a Franzen book, but more genuinely self aware.
WEIRDLY (maybe it’s not weird at all), I felt I could tell that Strong’s mother is still alive. Obviously writers do not have to have experienced things they write about, but I will say that when it comes to writing about this kind of stuff? It’s pretty clear whether or not the author has experienced it firsthand. And Flight is not bad, but it also isn’t accurate like Writers & Lovers (2020), say.
Well what did I like about Strong’s sophomore novel? There really is something fascinating about her ability to make characters I’d normally find repellent interesting enough to read about. I also appreciate a quiet, meditative reflection on family dynamics. The histories that the siblings and their in-laws carry with them, the conversations in the kitchen or at the dining table—it’s all very neat and crafted, like a slightly edgier Nancy Meyers film. What a backhanded-sounding compliment to end the report for this book on, but it’s my truth!
Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait (2022)1—Back in my teaching days, the hardest essays to grade were the ones that fell within the C+/B- range. There would be much to say about them and it was difficult to find balance between the constructive feedback and the overall impression that the essay was fine enough! The inner turmoil, the feeling that made me shuffle those papers to the bottom of the pile to delay the inevitable just a little longer—that feeling creeps up when I think about what to say about this novel.
Like, if I really didn’t like this book, I wouldn’t have finished it at all. But I persevered through the first (comma heavy, choppy, sludgy yet somehow also rapid, downright baroque)2 90 pages in fits and starts over 5 days, and with 7 hours to go until our meeting, I set a timer for an hour and challenged myself to see how far I could get. I set another timer. Then another. One more, and I’d finished. The book opened up, moved much faster and more enjoyably in the second half. Prior to the meeting, I felt like if I could go back in time, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have finished the book. But after Book Club, where we had a great discussion, I don’t feel that way so strongly.
O’Farrell’s fictional account of the short life of Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici imagines the Duchess of Ferrara, who died at the age of 16, as a kind of black sheep in her family, a woman who is more interested in painting and wildlife, than in embroidery and marriage. The novel opens with Lucrezia obsessing over the idea that her husband of one year is planning to murder her and questioning whether that really is happening or whether she is being paranoid. It then flashes back to her earliest childhood, then forward to the present day, where she continues to ruminate, then back again, and forward, and so on. The reader knows that the real-life Lucrezia died under mysterious circumstances at a young age, and is thus set up to expect the novel to return at the end to answer the question asked at the beginning—is he trying to kill her? I’m going to put a spoiler about the ending in a footnote, so do or don’t go read it below.3
In conclusion, The Marriage Portrait belongs to a microgenre of historical fiction that excavates and illustrates lives of the kinds of people (usually women) who weren’t the primary authors and subjects of writing in the past. When done flawlessly, this microgenre looks like Circe (2018). When done capably, it looks like The Marriage Portrait.
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (2021)—This little novella that I bought in Scotland kind of rocked my world?? Not sure why I’m so surprised by that. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize!
Anyway, Keegan’s second novel takes place during Christmas week in 1985 Ireland, and follows a local coal/lumberyard owner, Bill Furlong, as he works and runs errands around town. Furlong, born out of wedlock but raised in the big house where his mother worked, reflects on the “luck” of his childhood being relatively easy compared to the lives of most children in his generation whose mothers were single. His thoughts are partly prompted by his interactions with the local convent, which, like so many others in Ireland, operated as a Magdalene laundry. Naturally, this all culminates in Furlong having to make some hard choices. What are the things that differentiate the people who stand up to toxic institutional forces and those who don’t? What turns the people who don’t into people who do? Or, as Keegan’s omniscient narrator puts it:
[W]as there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
As happens whenever I read a book like this, I realized as I read how much I love books that dwell in the ordinary. Slice of life! The everyday! I will never be tired of them, partly because the really good ones sneak up with insights that feel like a punch in the gut—a good punch!!
What I’m looking forward to reading in January:
Sabrina Imbler, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (2022)4
Ann Petry, The Narrows (1953/2023)5
Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (2022)6
Rešoketšwe Manenzhe, Scatterlings (2022)7
Book club selection for December.
It is very much possible that O’Farrell intentionally wrote the first half of the book in a style that evokes the intricate/detailed/excessive/stuffy/formal vibes of early modern Italian nobility/culture, as this novel is set in seventeenth century Italy!
In a move that was strongly telegraphed throughout, O’Farrell has Lucrezia unwittingly pull a switcheroo with her maid, whom the Duke and his consigliere murder in the middle of the night. Lucrezia escapes, running away with a painter’s assistant, presumably to Naples, where she finds a successful career as an anonymous painter.
For a novel that ostensibly seeks to give voice to a marginalized group of people, having one woman’s liberation from a suffocating marriage/life come at the expense of her maid’s life (via the husband literally suffocating her to death!!!!!) is . . . well, it’s not very girl power is it? I don’t think O’Farrell is like, okay, with that. But the “happy” ending feels kind of hollow. I’d need to read more O’Farrell to know whether the ending is ironic or not, I guess. The narrative until that point doesn’t lead me to believe it was, though.
Book Club selection for January.
Not linking this anywhere because it’s being published by HarperCollins, whose workers are currently on strike <3. I’ll be reading it because I have a galley. The union says not to boycott buying HarperCollins titles, so it would be ethically ok for you to buy this book, in case you were wondering!!
This is also published by HarperCollins, but I’m linking because Franny Choi is a living author and we should buy her books.
I know I shouldn’t feel the need to explain myself, but this is historical fiction, and after The Marriage Portrait, it took me nearly 2 weeks to read another book (also historical fiction), and even though that other book (Small Things Like These) was transcendent, I needed a break from historical fiction!!