This may be the first time in the history of the report where I didn’t read a single thing that I said I was “looking forward to reading” in the previous month and it feels chaotic but not in a bad way. I didn’t finish as many books as I usually do, either, even in a slow month. I DID read a lot of signs, though. Signs about why shops would be closed for the Queen of England’s funeral; signs at historical sites throughout London and Glasgow; signs about where to “keep” when you’re walking in a tunnel underneath the Thames (“left”), on which streets “itinerant ice cream sales” are “prohibited,” and about “say[ing] aye to free wi-fi” on Scottish trains.
If you’re thinking, “Hmm, surely she didn’t go the UK for a month and walk 10+ miles a day, blinking too infrequently so she wouldn’t miss anything, and therefore she didn’t have time to read books,” you’re right. I had 20+ other regular days to read in New York this month, which you can hear more about below!
What I read in September:
Natalia Ginzburg, Voices in the Evening (1961)—Nothing like going immediately off-list as soon as you discover upon beginning to reread an old favorite that you now suddenly cannot stand the narrator and his agonizingly annoying way of thinking. I left the Ishiguro on a park bench and walked straight to the nearest bookstore for some more Ginzburg.
Ginzburg! I’m having a moment! Will I ever dislike something I read by her? Maybe! But not this time! In this 117-page novella, set some years after WWII, the “plot” is loosely organized around the lives of the children of a small town’s socialist factory owner, narrated by a local woman whose own life seems fixed, small, and predictable until one day it suddenly isn’t! It’s slice of life! It’s like All Our Yesterdays but different! It’s so short but it felt so immersive. I loved it.
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain (2020)—Though the Booker Prize, which this autobiographical novel won in 2020, is my favorite literary prize, and though esteemed and trusted Friend of the Report, Laura, unreservedly praised Stuart’s debut, I held off on reading Shuggie Bain for a long time because it sounded pretty depressing and sometimes one is simply not in the mood!!
Well! After going to Glasgow, how could I resist finally picking up this novel!1
As heavy as it is—it’s about a poor Glaswegian family with an alcohol-dependent mother in the 1980s and her youngest child, whose childhood is given up to caring for his mother and to figuring out how to protect himself from his violently homophobic neighbors :(—it’s not overwhelmingly depressing. It’s not trauma porn either! I do not know how Stuart did it, but the prose is hypnotizing and beautiful and overall leaves the reader with a sense of hope (?? But not in an unrealistic way).
Were there moments where I literally yelled out loud “NO! NO!!!!” at something I knew was coming as Agnes, Shuggie’s mother, continued her downward spiral? Yes.2
But more often than that were there plenty of moments where I marveled at Stuart’s almost-cinematic ability to conjure setting and to present characters in all their realistic complexity? Very much yes.
Would I have loved this novel as much as I did if I hadn’t recently traipsed all over the city like a shark on land, visited the Tenement House, and given myself a crash course on the history of Glasgow in the 20th century? Again, yes. But also? Being able to see how mind-bogglingly accurate Stuart was with his setting descriptions helped me better comprehend how skillful he is at writing.
This book is riveting! And transformative!!
UK shopping report:
What I didn’t finish reading in September:
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (2022)3—12 pages was enough for me to know that while this book is explicitly marketed as NOT YA, it is in fact very much YA, a genre that is not for me. I was glad to listen in on the book club discussion, however, as it was a generous, thoughtful, and nuanced conversation about the novel’s form and content.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871/1872)—This is a personal top 5 all-time favorite book but I was delusional to think that I’d knock out a chunk of this on the flight to London or on my train rides to and from Glasgow, as if I would be strong enough to focus on the page instead of watching plane movies or taking infinity pictures of sheep, landscapes, and the North Sea. I’ll pick the old girl up again during winter break :)
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907)—Hyper from my visit to the prime meridian and from the late-September autumnal chill in the air, I felt like it was the right time to pick up a Conrad novel that I’ve struggled to finish in the past. I got farther this time than I ever had before, but here I am on October 1 and I’m not close to being done with it!
This book challenges the understanding of myself that I “like Conrad.” Do I like his novels? Or do I only like the ones narrated by Marlow, a legendary gossip? I think I do like his novels. But The Secret Agent—a “dark satire on English society” masquerading as a thriller about an anarchist plot to bomb the Greenwich Observatory—felt too uncomfortably real in our present day, where algorithmically-boosted conspiracy theories4 proliferate and directly lead to real violence.
Conrad's novels engage on so many levels with so many complex concepts while also being “entertaining” to read, and The Secret Agent is exemplary in this regard, digesting, as it does, all of the different meanings and possibilities circulating at the turn of the twentieth century re: nationhood, cities and public spaces vs private spaces, class/economics, gender, identity, alienation, science, religion, etc. Sometimes we read to think and other times we read to escape. With this book at this time, while I wanted to think, I also wanted to escape, and that wasn’t possible with something that felt like it could take place today!
Anyway, why read about the prime meridian when you can just vibe out at it!
What I’m looking forward to reading in October:
Kamila Shamsie, Best of Friends (2022)
Hua Hsu, Stay True (2022)
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, On the Rooftop (2022)
Ling Ma, Bliss Montage (2022)5
In Edinburgh, at what ended up being the last and most beautiful bookstore I went to on my trip 😂 (Feels sacrilege to say Topping & Co. was more beautiful than Hatchards but what can I say? I’m not a royalist!!).
Content warning! There’s sexual assault (not just toward the mom), alcohol dependence, and self harm throughout :(
Book club selection for September.
Not the fun ones, like that Tribeca Pediatrics is a mob front.
Book club selection for October.
I love a big meandering, location-specific novel on vacation! Middlemarch was a good if ill-fated choice