Here we are in 2022, slouching toward another month of known knowns and known unknowns.
I can identify several knowns that help explain why I’ve been so existentially antsy lately—this year marks my being out of grad school for as many years as I was in it; the US is strutting into year 3 of the pandemic like a nation of Leonardo DiCaprios; I’m heading into the back end of my 30s and contemplating whether I’d feel the same way as James Wright’s speaker when I’m metaphorically Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.
But mostly, I think a combination of reaching the goal of reading at least 52 books/year for several years in a row + the petite list of books I’m looking forward to being published in 2022 (see below) + an aversion to spending my one wild and precious life reading books for the sake of saying I read n-many books = I’m still going to read but I’m not necessarily going to aim for 52 books this year.
I want to read long books. I want to reread books. I want to read textbooks. I’ll report on it all! (Except the textbooks). Every month! Just like I always have. How could I possibly let my friends subscribers down?
What I read in January:
Elif Batuman, The Idiot (2017)—What a wonderful, weird, smart, different, familiar, and funny novel1 that I didn’t read until now because—surprise—I was never “in the mood”2 for a “campus”/“coming-of-age” novel. It’s not even really a campus novel!! It’s just a novel about trying to figure out what it means to be a person and how to connect with other people that also made me LOL for real.
Ruth Reichl, Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (2019)—Being back on my bullshit,3 I needed an audiobook, and some rando on Twitter said this was good. It is pretty good! I do not have any personal connection to Gourmet, but I do love media gossip, so I found Reichl’s memoir of her years as the last ever Editor in Chief of the Condé Nast publication quite interesting. Reichl is a great writer and that Twitter rando was right—Save Me the Plums is a superb audiobook.
Juhea Kim, Beasts of a Little Land (2021)4—Kim’s debut novel is a sweeping yet intimate account of life in Korea in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. It is well documented how I ostensibly feel about historical fiction, which is to say that I don’t read much of it because I tend to find even the idea of the effort to be faithful to the cadence/idiom/dialect/vocabulary of a novel’s historical setting without making the narrative sound like ham-fisted ventriloquism profoundly embarrassing, and because I also bristle at any linguistic anachronism (eg, a character in 1918 using “like” as a young person from today would). It just seems like a really hard balance to strike and that most authors aren’t successful at it!
Anyway, with the exception of that “like” mentioned above and a few instances of thinking that pushed against my limits of plausibility, Beasts of a Little Land is the rare (imo!!) historical novel that navigates those language issues well enough. Well enough in fact that I functionally read this in one day (finished the last 70 pages the day after I started the book), which was a little surprising to me the whole time I was reading! I found myself continually marveling at how much I was getting through because when viewed on their own, all the different parts of this book aren’t particularly remarkable. Meaning: the writing, the story, the structure, etc—all very fine, but nothing that felt, idk, transformative? Nevertheless, I clearly couldn’t stop reading/wasn’t able to distract myself (like I usually do with okay books) with something else, like baking, or scrolling, or a new jigsaw puzzle. So, this is all to say that I clearly enjoyed this novel and found that I very much enjoyed devoting the bulk of a Sunday to it.
Thích Nhất Hạhn, The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975)—This book absolutely reordered my entire life when I first read it for a religion class in high school. At the time, Nhất Hạhn’s mission of bringing mindfulness to the wider world had been ongoing for several decades, but “mindfulness” as a practice wasn’t as embedded in US “culture” as it is today (where, of course, capitalism has co-opted and leveraged it as a substitute for things like: comprehensive and affordable whole-body health care, fair wages, and reasonable workloads). Concepts like doing the dishes just to do the dishes (and not because they need to be made clean) and calling the mind back to itself—I can't explain it but to me they were revolutionary.
Rereading it this month, upon learning of Nhất Hạhn’s death, was a different though no less wonderful experience. Mindfulness as packaged/sold by ApPs and WeLlNeSs CuLtUrE is functionally often little more than “serenity now.” But the kind of mindfulness that Nhất Hạhn teaches about in this book? Idk, it seems really nice!
What I’m looking forward to reading in February:
Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (2012)5
Charmaine Wilkerson, Black Cake (February)6
What I’m looking forward to reading in 2022:
If you see something you like, you should preorder it or request that your library carry it.
Hard to believe, I’m sure, but none of this is spon con, as I am not an influencer.
The month in parentheses=when it releases, not necessarily when I plan to read it.
Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers (February)
NoViolet Bulawayo, Glory (March)
Melissa Clark, Dinner in One: Exceptional & Easy One-Pan Meals7 (March) (September)8
Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility (April)
Ocean Vuong, Time Is a Mother (April)
Elif Batuman, Either/Or (May)
Ali Smith, Companion Piece (May)
Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao (May)
Lydia Millet, Dinosaurs (??? October in England, allegedly)
In her blurb, Miranda July calls it “a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the Nineteenth Century Novel treatment” and I agree.
I write deprecatingly about my mood-based reading habits, mostly because I fear my instincts lead me to things that do not challenge me or expand my horizons, and yet! I think there is a lot of merit in the concept of not “read[ing] a book out of its right time for you,” of instead “read[ing] your way from one sympathy to another . . . learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need,” as Doris Lessing puts it in her 1971 introduction to The Golden Notebook (1962).
Doing jigsaw puzzles, mostly this “surprisingly” difficult one.
Book club selection for January.
I’m reading this now—didn’t start it early enough to be finished by the end of January.
Book club selection for February.
Am I going to read it all the way through like Ruby Tandoh’s cookbook? No. But Melissa Clark is literally the reason I learned to cook and I’m so hype for her new book!
RIP to my preordered copy, now lying on the ocean floor :(