I sat down to write this (allegedly monthly) newsletter after four months away and thought to myself—perhaps I can salvage this; perhaps instead of another long lament about the way my brain is slowly leaking out of my ears under the inexorable pressure of a disintegrating world, I can write a really cool and fun and pithy review that covers highlights and lowlights from a summer of reading.
Then I looked at my Goodreads tracker of the actual books I’ve read since May and realized that I can’t do highlights and lowlights by month, because mostly what I did for a chunk of time—I’m now recalling, the brain leakage had temporarily erased it—was lie on my sofa eating Takis! Fuego by the party-sized bag and consuming the entire oeuvre of Irish mystery novelist Tana French (which is in many ways the literary equivalent of a bag of Takis! Fuego: binge-able, consistent, and leaving one covered in its detritus [an irrepressible desire to use Dublin slang]).
I even listened to half of the Tana books on tape—too overcome by ennui to lift more than the negligible weight of a Taki! Fuego as I lay prone—then spent a productive week wondering whether I should make the subject of one never-written newsletter a debate about whether books on tape count. Count as what? Who can say? I certainly can’t, although I might have tried to. Luckily for us all, the ennui won out again, and we were collectively spared.
The only thing I can say, after my deep dive into the fictional workings of the Dublin police force (ahem: the Gardaí)’s Murder Squad (ahem: a recorded voice intones in my ear, Moiduh) and its various detectives, and their various traumas, all of which are tangentially or even closely related to the very moiduhs they must investigate, even if that means that they must simultaneously investigate their own souls—is that there is a single definitive* ranking of the quality of her novels, and it is as follows:
Broken Harbor. As my own soul has been brought low by twenty four seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and counting, I appreciated that this was the most messed up murder of the bunch, with an appropriate creepy—and creeping—dive into the psyche of the killer. It was also an excellent commentary on the financial crisis: Tana, as I learned, does class politics as well as she does sexual politics poorly.
The Secret Place. I actually cried towards the end of this mystery, which centers on a group of four friends at an all-girls boarding school. Something about youth and friendship is captured perfectly here, even if other aspects of the mystery go a bit off the rails.
The Trespasser. This is probably the best straight detective novel of the bunch, with a deeply likeable detective (rarely a given in the Moiduh Squad) and a twisty, well-plotted mystery that gives her room to shine.
Faithful Place. Tana’s class politics masterpiece, and probably a better novel than it is a mystery.
In the Woods. This is the first of her books, and in some ways the weakest—the ending in particular left me wondering how she’d snuck it by her publisher—but I have to give it props for getting me hooked, keeping me up all night, creeped out and compelled.
The Likeness. A fun book with a great cast of characters brought low by two things: first, its absolutely bonkers premise, which requests a suspension of disbelief that was completely beyond my power; second, its more-than-striking… likeness… to Donna Tartt’s masterpiece The Secret History. The Likeness is a fun copy of Tartt, not an enraging one, but all I could think about the whole time was just that I’d rather be reading the real thing.
The Witch Elm. This is a standalone book (not Murder Squad), more a thriller than a mystery. I’m not a thriller fan and I wasn’t a fan of this book, which tried to do too many Meaningful Things at once and as a result fell flat on its face.
*I read these books more or less along with my longtime group text of best friends, all of whom would vehemently disagree with most of this list (particularly Broken Harbor). When told that this ranking would appear in my newsletter this month, the one who hates Broken Harbor the most told me “Wow incredible news if this were June 2020,” and another told me “What newsletter”. To them I say: relax on the jacks!
But, also, fair play to ye. What newsletter?? I have indeed been remiss. It’s boring to talk about how the state of the world makes everything seem pointless, not least a self-indulgent newsletter about increasingly stunted reading habits. However: what reading I did get done this summer was often the very best thing in a very bad world. And so, despite the fact that much of it was Takis-equivalent, here is a cobbled-together list of some of the other books from the last few months that made me happy, or transported me, or allowed me to escape.
A selection of books read from May-September 2020:
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan [****]
The perfect book to start off a list that was introduced by the idea of escape: this lush memoir, both wandering and intensely focused, is the story of the journalist Finnegan’s life in surfing. Even more, it’s the story of how surfing is his life, a compulsion he can never eradicate, a longing and a love that sends him drifting, compelled, around the world and endlessly back again. It’s impressive to read such a thick tome about someone’s single-minded obsession and come away really getting it—I still have no desire to surf myself, but there were pages where I felt that all I wanted in the world was for Finnegan to surf some more, and to tell me about it.
I read this just before summer began, and during the one week I found myself on a beach, months later, I wished I hadn’t read it yet: to be at the ocean myself was half an escape, but with Finnegan’s help I could have truly lost myself.
Writers & Lovers, Lily King [*****]
Every single person I know who has read this book about a struggling young writer has loved it, except for my cousin—herself a writer—who noted, accurately, that the ending [stop here for spoilers: I think it’s impossible to assess this book without talking broadly about how it ends!] is too perfect, too easy. An unrealistic bow tying up a gorgeously detailed, nuanced novel about the space in your not-quite-early adulthood when everything is a hollow-stomached longing; about the ache and despair and occasional joy of creative labor. Such a carefully realistic portrait of life (and, to my absolute delight, of Cambridge, Massachusetts in a few-decades-ago setting that I half-remember with its own nostalgic tug), imperfections picked out with as much care as the lovely parts: and then capped off with a big satiny pink bow.
And yet—who’s to say that a big pink bow is always unrealistic? Those bows exist. Sometimes stories do end perfectly. My friend Vivian read it and texted me, “some people would say that the ending is too happy but I feel like I needed the ending.” It can be hard to remember, but realism is not always gritty. Sometimes we get the things we need—the things we’re longing for—sometimes even all at once.
The Lightness, Emily Temple [****]
As demonstrated by my weeping at the end of Tana French’s The Likeness, I am a sucker for stories about girls and the alchemical intensity of their friendships and angers and desires. Here, all of those elements find themselves combined at a Buddhist retreat for troubled teens, which sounds kind of hokey and twee as a plot goes but ends up, in Temple’s deft hands, ethereal: a novel that skims lightly across the surface of reality, sending up sparks where it makes contact with the loneliness and the jealousy and the kind of worship unique, I think, to lonely and jealous young girls, and soaring in dizzying spirals where it takes off into the magical impossible.
White Teeth, Zadie Smith [****]
There are a handful of books and authors that I almost forget I’ve never read before, because it just seems like I would have by now. White Teeth—and Zadie Smith—are on that list. In my thirty years of kind of assuming I’d probably read White Teeth, I also created a false narrative for myself where it was a book of humor essays (?). Turns out it’s very much not, although it as precisely written as a good essay is, and leavened with comedy throughout. But ultimately it’s the structural opposite: a meaty literary saga, a generational epic that is at once a universal story about displacement and family and a deeply specific investigation of place (London neighborhoods, immigrant communities, teenaged schoolyards, the way the light comes into the basement level of a Jehovah’s witness’s house). It’s imaginative enough to be an adventure and careful enough to be a map: a treasure hunt of a novel, swashbuckling and ambitious.
The Raven Cycle, Maggie Stiefvater [*****]
One of the highlights of even this list of highlights was my return, this summer, to Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle, a four-book Young Adult series about teenagers bumping up against magic that is, I think, some of the best YA writing I’ve ever read. In a genre plagued by gluey, repetitive concepts, seven hundred-page plots, and writing far too flimsy to support either, Stiefvater is transcendent, and the Raven Cycle is her masterpiece.
From the lush West Virginia setting, soaked in its own brand of verdant, rural American magic, to the pitch-perfect voices of her teenaged characters, sharp-edged and funny and painfully sincere, there is a lot to love about these books. But my absolute favorite part is the way Stiefvater creates a magical system and world that mirrors teenager-hood itself: wild and messy, brilliant with possibility and consumed with self-creation, dreamy, troublingly possessive. Her characters, nominally on a quest to discover the tomb of the king Owen Glendower somewhere in rural West Virginia, stumble along the way through friendships and tragedies and loves, and the magic they are uncovering bit by bit mirrors that stumbling. Imperfect and often breathtaking, magic and teens together make for a uniquely compelling story, one I come back to time and time again.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon [****]
This is the second Michael Chabon book I’ve read, and both times I’ve found myself pleasantly surprised at the richness and depth of his language, as though after formative years reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald I’d forgotten that a Famous American Male Author was allowed liberal, even indulgent, use of adjectives. Which is a convoluted way of saying: the best thing about this hard to summarize book—a grizzled detective fumbles his way through a frozen noir landscape of apocalyptic religious conspiracy (how’s that?)—is the richness of the picture it paints. I actually found the plot quite hard to follow, particularly at the end (we can maybe blame this on my ongoing brain leakage rather than on Chabon) but it didn’t really matter. It was enough to sink into the details of the setting: a rocky outcropping of an Alaskan settlement with a Jewish community clinging to it like lichen, weather-beaten and tenacious and rendered so precisely that you can feel each rough and fanciful flake of life.
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison [*****]
It’s very intimidating to review this kind of masterpiece: I feel suddenly as though I’m back in English class, being asked to say something important about theme or structure and hoping I’m not just repeating what the kid before me said while I was frantically looking up page numbers. Perhaps it will suffice to say that I wish I’d read this in English class, in any of the many I took throughout the years. There are books that a bad English class can ruin, and there are books that a good English class can make interesting, and then there are books that are simply worthy of being discussed and thought about and paid close attention to. I loved Song of Solomon, the richness and breadth of its characters, the redemptive slog of Milkman’s road-tripping quest for family, the soaring shock of the ending, which I re-read again and again, trying to piece it together, to play it through in my mind.
But my love for it, I think, only scratched its surface: I read quickly, images flashing through my mind, always scrabbling ahead for more plot. I wouldn’t mind being forced to slow down on this one, to open to page x and stay there for a while, pulling a paragraph apart. I think it would unfold into something more magical than I could mine alone.
O Pioneers!, Willa Cather [***]
It’s probably reductive to call Willa Cather “Little House on the Prairie for grown-ups,” but I’m going to anyway. I get the same sense of simultaneous comfort and wonder from her novels as I did from days spent curled up with the Little House books: a wonder that’s tempered, now, by the understanding that these portrayals of rugged prairie life are absent any real acknowledgement of what the arrival of pioneers did to the people who’d always lived there.
Still, for as much as it’s possible to look past their not-insignificant flaws, Cather’s books are filled with a kind of magic trick of nostalgia. They make you see the prairies you’ve never visited—could never visit—and long for them. They bring to life a kind of golden thread of beauty that runs through a hard, even an otherwise barren, life. O Pioneers! is less interesting that Cather’s other books, as a novel; her characters and their lives are flatter here, as though figures placed for scale. But, stretching beyond them, we see the landscape she’s painted for us, in all its awesome enormity.
The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante [*****]
This is one of those books that I found hard to rate. Is it as good as Ferrante’s masterpiece Neapolitan quartet, a series of books that I found legitimately life-changing? No, not at all. It doesn’t have the heft or the scope of those earlier books, and, stacked next to them, it reads almost like a short story: the brief, angular tale of a young teenager (here, as in all Ferrante’s books, also in Naples) whose coming of age is inseparable from—perhaps brought about by—a cascading series of family revelations, layers of secrets peeling back and back.
But even a briefer, more lightly drawn Ferrante story resounds. As she always does, here Ferrante probes so deftly at truths about growing up, girlhood, rage and sadness and the incomprehensible ties of family, that as a reader you feel raw and tender; vulnerable, as though you have in some way been the one written. In the end, the main character’s final, inexplicable decision is justified not through plot argument but through sheer catharsis: I was confused and elated, at the same time, on her behalf and on my own.
Empire of Gold, S. A. Chakraborty [**]
Even a bad book can be an escape, especially when it whips you out of your puddle of ongoing horror and angst and into a comfortingly righteous fury. How dare S.A. Chakraborty, having written two complex, morally sophisticated, finely-wrought fantasy novels so far, have finished off her trilogy with this dreck? Did I just not notice that the first two books were bad? I don’t think so! I think they were good! I think they were good and then, faced with tying up the many delicate threads she had so far woven, Chakraborty panicked and started clabbering things together: this character, left at tense moral crossroads in book two, became, boom, unrepentantly evil. This character, whisked away by complex magic end of the previous book, acquired a magical flying lion so that she could get to the physical place she needed to be in to finish off book three. Bam!
To sum up: Would it be better to write, on the page, the reunion between two star-crossed lovers have spend the better part of the book each thinking the other is dead? Or would it be better to have a messenger come and tell each of them off-screen? Maybe in the latter case it would be nice to let the reader know how they each reacted. Or—is that too much work? Never mind. Continue. What was that about the flying lion? And is the evil villain still extremely bad and genocidal? Glad we cleared that up! Glad we have 750 pages of that!! The prosecution rests!
Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir [*****]
Longtime readers will remember the paroxysms of joy I went into over Gideon the Ninth, Muir’s first book. Some of you may actually have taken me at my word and checked out a copy of Gideon the Ninth from the library and sat down to read a locked-house mystery about (mostly) lesbian space necromancers. Look: if you listened to me before and didn’t like the book, I’m sorry. Gideon was a deeply weird book. It was also, I think, a complete masterpiece.
Harrow the Ninth is twice as brilliant, twice as space necromancer-y, and twice—thrice—quadrice—as weird. It is maybe actually the most structurally creative book I’ve ever read, a structure I can only summarize without spoiling it entirely by saying what I said to my mother, which is, “imagine you were reading an extremely dense and complicated series but you took a year-long break between two of the books, and then the characters in the second book keep referring back to alternate timeline when they talk about the events of the first book.” Harrow is essentially incomprehensible for the first two-thirds of the book, particularly if you haven’t immediately re-read Gideon beforehand (I highly recommend doing this; I did not, and it was a mistake). I nearly gave up. My faith was heavily waning.
And then the last third hit, and the pieces starting clicking together so quickly and with such satisfying thunks that I literally could not put the book down; I stayed up reading it for hours. Having gotten about five hours of sleep, I then immediately went back to the first page and re-read the entire book. Because here’s the thing: the first two thirds of the book are close to nonsense, if a fun and action-packed mystery of nonsense. The last third is clever and creative and satisfying and intriguing. And then the next three thirds—the book the second time you read it, once you know everything, once it’s become for all intents and purposes an entirely new book—are brilliant, intricate, deeply moving, and laugh-out-loud funny; a witty, spring-loaded meditation on memory and grief.