This month's newsletter will be quick, because I'm about to get on a plane to Greece (!) and I'm absolutely not taking a computer with me, so I'm trying to bang this out in the next hour. I'm bringing three books with me, one of which is a library copy of Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (everyone cross your fingers I don't lose it), and one of which is Anna Karenina. I've never read any Tolstoy, and it was significantly lighter than War and Peace, and I was really worried about running out of things to read. I have books on my phone if it's an emergency, but reading on a tiny screen in the bright sun (everyone cross your fingers for bright sun) just isn't as grossly idyllic as I've been imagining. Anyway -- if I have as much idyllic reading time as I'm longing for, maybe we can count at least one of those towards my April total.
As for my April total so far, it's nine books and counting. See below for reviews, but one of these books was really pretty bad and the rest were okay-to-good; not a remarkable month in any way except that I started watching Ina Garten's newest cooking show, where she shows you how to prepare food using "high and low" ingredients, which is basically Ina-speak for "too expensive to contemplate buying and then 'cheap' 'alternatives' like truffle butter." Actual ingredient examples aside, Ina's thesis (she was, obviously, the first person to come up with this set of terms), is that a perfect meal is a mixture of high and low--which describes my month of reading pretty well. Like Ina, I mixed prime rib-quality classics like The House of Mirth or Death Comes for the Archbishop with cheaper alternatives like P.D. James's serviceable detective fiction paperback The Black Tower, or even C.S. Pacat's internet original fiction-turned published m/m romance Captive Prince (as mentioned at the end of last month's reviews).
And, like Ina, I think that a mixture of classics-for-a-reason and stuff-you-like-just-because-it-makes-you-happy is a really good month's worth of book-devouring. Reading the potentially trashier stuff I devour so easily gives me the mental space to take on meatier works; the healthy reading makes me feel better about my bouts of mass market paperback indulgence. And all of these books (as Ina reminds us about the humble potato, but especially when mixed with truffle butter) are good. Good in different ways, but good.
Bear with this AMAZING analogy for one more paragraph, out of fond indulgence, which is exactly how I bear with Ina herself: The only thing that's not good is food that's burned or spoiled or otherwise gross--I read one of those books this month, a book that wanted to be a Big Literary Classic and came out an underdeveloped, sloppy mess. It also uses a lot of Shakespeare in the actual text--like if you took a rack of lamb rib and, instead of lovingly slathering it with good French butter and rosemary and garlic, like Ina does so soothingly, you hacked it up and put it in a blender with marshmallow fluff and then served it raw. It's worse than if you'd just given me a plate of Fluff, you know? I'd eat a plate of Fluff.
April Book Reviews
40. If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio [**]
This book wanted to be everything the book below it--Donna Tartt's The Secret History--actually is, and it came up almost impressively short. To so completely take the blueprint of another book (small elite college, classics-obsessed cabal of too-close friends, a death, a slow collapse into paranoia and violence, substance abuse, references to the great stories of the Western canon throughout) and then come up with such a bloodless, pale imitation... it's a feat. A sad one. Beyond that, this book's (undercooked) plot barely held together; neither complexity nor logic, and at that point, what do you have left? In this case, there were a few scenes describing the feeling of acting, the moment of being in the whirling center of a performance, that were smart and good and unlike anything I've read before. Enough to garner this book two stars--but once the stage lights go down, there is really nothing left to see.
41. The Secret History, Donna Tartt [*****]
Re-reading this was almost instinctive--a necessary antidote to the gluey, congealed mess I'd just read. And what an antidote it was: just as darkly sparkling as I remembered, a perfectly formed, intricately crafted story of obsession and evil, of the kind of madness that draws its in to your circle and makes itself understandable, attractive, shiveringly compelling. Also, reading this immediately after the humorless, one-note If We Were Villains made me appreciate the way that Tartt studs her book with plenty of humor and warmth, with dimensional, compelling, hilarious secondary and tertiary characters. The truth and likeability and heart of it all makes the growing, creeping rot of its evil all the more terrifying. This is not a horror novel, but it is horrifying in all the best ways. It is also funny and beautiful and brilliant. Everyone should read it.
42. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton [****]
It took me a long time to get through this book—not un-put-downable—but that was actually nice, a few weeks of reading 20 pages a day on the 77 bus. I always think it’s kind of impressive when an author can manage to make you both deeply dislike and truly care about the main character, as I did despite myself. I think that probably you’re supposed to like her more by the end, but I didn’t really—instead, I was both glad to have read and happy to leave behind this elegant, compelling story about universally pretty awful people.
43. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather [****]
I picked this book up basically at random from my pile of unread books before I got on a flight, because I wanted something light (as in physically easy to lift) with me. I at no point considered that my destination was Santa Fe, which is also where this book takes place. What luck! To read Cather’s lushly drawn landscapes and then to see them; to have her tell me the story of Santa Fe’s cathedral and then walk into it. Her descriptions of people are harder to love, more reductive and more racist, but the landscapes!! Almost too good to read and to see at the same time, painfully resonant. (Maybe embarrassing story but Willa Cather really gets to me—I read My Antonia on a different plane to a different place to visit the same friend, late November 2016, and wept.)
44. The Black Tower, P. D. James [***]
P.D. James is much better than boilerplate detective fiction, but she’s by no means the best (that would be Dorothy Sayers, of course). This book had her usual combination of a good mystery with an interesting and clever plot, bogged down by the deeply boring philosophical ruminations of her perpetually-depressed hero, Adam Dalgliesh. See M.L. Rio v. Donna Tartt for who comes out on top in the battle of “should I insert a little humor into my story of the depths of human cruelty”—yes, P.D., you should.
45. Captive Prince, C. S. Pacat [****]
What to say about this book? The four stars are really more out of loyalty to the series as a whole, which emerges from the suspect beginnings of this book (a prince taken captive as a slave in the hedonistic court of his arch-rival) into something genuinely good. There are hints here of what will come, of the delicately complex political machinations, the masterful characterization of the antihero, the lush (purple? I’ll stick with lush) prose.
I first read and fell in love with this m/m historical fantasy romance series a long time ago, back when it existed on the internet (a space much more receptive to that string of adjectives than mainstream publishing), and returning to it now I was a little disillusioned by the author’s focus on the blond hair and pale white skin of one half of her heroic pair; on the sexual violence done (though not ever glorified) as part of the mechanics of the plot. But the magic of the story, whose twists and subtleties transcend some of the less-savory aspects of its setting, is still there. Very much looking forward to my re-read of the sequel, the book where those aspects really come into their own.
46. The Art of Rivalry, Sebastian Smee [***]
I don’t read a ton of non-fiction generally, but this was a nice departure from that pattern: four stories about artists and their particular rivalries. I wanted more citations, maybe—I didn’t quite believe a lot of what Smee claimed, or pushed for. I think there’s a level of “that’s a stretch but okay” that’s totally valid when you’re visually analyzing an artwork but that falls apart when you try to apply it to the actual historical facts of an artist’s life and motivations. Nevertheless, it was an engaging book, and I appreciate anything that reminds me to leave my office and walk upstairs to actually spend time seeing the artworks that I work beneath every day.
47. The Friend, Sigrid Nunez [****]
This book felt extremely “now,” the dog-lover’s version of Rachel Cusk or Jenny Offill or Sheila Heti. I liked it less than those other authors’ books because of the focus on dogs, which felt sort of pandering to the type of person who purposefully buys books about dogs. (I like to think of myself as enjoying dogs an exactly normal amount, which is to say they’re great but I don’t really ever think about them). But aside from that weird complaint, I liked this book: who doesn’t love a slim autofiction story about what it means to be a writer and a woman and a person in the world? There’s a reason people like all those authors I just listed. If you like all of that PLUS you really love dogs, it’s your very lucky day!
48. A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine [****]
A very good sci fi novel about imperialism and its seductive force, but the strength here is in the world building, not the plot. I wanted more out of the story this world contained, more nuanced characters, more intrigue and genuinely surprising twists. Still, the concept of it all was enough to make me enjoy the book a lot—it’s not a slog, and what it has to say about belonging and foreign-ness was powerful. Also, the naming conceit (everyone is a number plus a noun, like Three Seagrass or Two Cartograph or Thirty Five All-Terrain Tundra Vehicle) has made me want to come up with equivalent names for everyone and anyone I know. Kawhi Leonard—Two Spheroid. No??? Guys? Anyone?