April: reading in captivity
[Well it’s officially 1/3 of the way into May, I think it’s safe to say cokey’s newsletter project has been undone. It was a good run. — a reader]
It seems boring to start off this month’s newsletter with yet another lament (a theme thus far in 2020) about not reading as many books as I wanted to, or felt I should have. A lot of Cultural Commentary is already being made about why we can/can’t produce more/less than we think/feel we should while in quarantine. Shakespeare wrote King Lear, but also we are all barely surviving emotionally and should do self-care, which means do nothing.
I haven’t done nothing this month, but neither have I written (or read) King Lear. I read six books in April, which is less than my normal non-pandemic reading pace by a significant margin, even though it’s also definitely objectively a lot of reading. I have sat down many times and asked myself why I’m still reading less, and here are some of the answers I’ve come up with:
I’m using the hour of reading time I used to get on my morning commute to sleep.
I’m using the hour of reading time I used to have during my lunch break to take a walk (on a good day) or lie under a blanket on the couch and play an app game on my phone where I connect small dots (on a bad day).
I’m using the hour of reading time I used to get on my commute home to prepare the dough for a baked good.
Which is all well and good, but I have a lot of new hours in my day now—the hours in between the work tasks I get and complete remotely, which, in the office, I would have had to use looking very productive; the hour during which the baked good rises; the additional hour I can stay awake now that I am sleeping through my morning commute. I use some of that time to read, but not much of it.
What I keep returning to is how easy it was to rush through all of Anna Karenina in less than a week, nearly a year ago at this time. I was in Greece, and nothing seemed better to add to the pleasure of sitting outside and drinking dark, sugary coffee than to do it while I read a very thick novel. Or how my most productive reading week every year, volume-wise, is always the one precious week I spend on Cape Cod: I can read a book a day at least if I’m lying on a damp, sandy towel, one hand in a bag of potato chips, squinting against the glare of the sun.
I miss less idyllic kinds of reading, too: I miss reading to pass the time while I waited for my friends to meet me somewhere. I miss, yes, reading on the subway—the way that it created a small world for me that I could disappear into, happily, amidst the miserable morning bustle, the way I’d come to dread the arrival of my stop. I miss reading on various Boston campus grasses, the way I’d prop myself on my elbows, book laid in front of me, so that when I finally had to go there would be small sticks embedded in my skin and blades of grass in the pages of the book. I miss reading on my parents’ couch while they made dinner; I miss reading while walking down the sidewalk, risking the occasional glance up to make sure I wasn’t veering off into a light pole. I miss inhabiting my own world while I explored other ones.
Books read in April, despite the captivity:
Race of Scorpions, Dorothy Dunnett [****]
Scales of Gold, Dorothy Dunnett [****]
Once again, I will combine my reviews of April’s next two installments in Dorothy Dunnett’s eight-book historical fiction series about a genius, devious, mysterious world-traveling merchant from 15th century Bruges. These are the fourth and fifth books in the series, and with them we move from stage-setting to a few glimpses of the twisty interior life of our (anti?) hero, Nicholas vander Poele. Dunnett’s other beloved historical hero, Lymond, was made magnetic because he appeared cold and even cretinous and then was revealed, moment by moment, to be something soft and human: here, we begin with Nicholas as a bumpkin, then a well-meaning but blundering savant, and then Dunnett’s patented interior glimpses start to give us not softness but calculation, depth, even danger. There is something sharp hidden there.
There’s also the problem of Scales of Gold, which takes Nicholas from Europe to Africa, as he follows the Portuguese trade in gold, evangelism, and slaves. This book, which was written by a white woman in 1999, does its best to condemn the slave trade and to give agency and real depth to the societies Nicholas visits in Northern Africa. Dunnett’s historical research, always detailed, here made me recall what I’d learned in fourth grade about the Mali Empire, Mansa Musa, the trade in gold and salt. Still: there are a lot of real flaws, from the firmly embedded orientation towards Europe as normal and Africa as exotic other to a truly offensive current of sexualization of African women. I am glad in many ways that a series about global trade didn’t ignore the terrible existence of the slave trade, and that a series about historical empires delved into the rich details of Mali—but I wish that hadn’t come at a cost.
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton [****]
I read Ethan Frome in one afternoon, a rare spurt of can’t-put-this-down in a month of staggered reading. A lot of that is because of the length of this book, more a long short story than even a novella, but it’s also because the sparse clarity of the story propels you forward, like sledding down a hill in crisp winter air: the story of three people tangled unfortunately and inevitably together rushing past with a cold burn, and a terrible impact.
The List of Adrian Messenger, Philip MacDonald [***]
I wrote last month about how all I could stomach were historical fiction novels: this month, my palette broadened just enough to include “British country house murder mysteries from the mid-twentieth century.” There is something about the formulaic nature of these books that is infinitely comforting. A murder is committed and then, eventually, solved, all among green copses and British murmurs in overstuffed club chairs; everything comes gently untangled in the end. When the murder and its solution are unexpected or even creative, all the better. I don’t need to ask for ingenuity—a flicker of surprised enjoyment is enough, and I got that here, with MacDonald’s story of a mysterious list of murder victims and the search for the motive that might tie them all together.
Malice Aforethought, Frances Iles [****]
Another mid-century British murder, set very firmly in the Country—but this one is not so much “mystery” as it is “story,” because we know from the beginning who the killer is, and how they did it, and why. This is really a psychological portrait of a murderer, and as such—more chilling and creepy than the careful clue-compiling of a Poiroit or a Wimsey—it has more in common with contemporary murder mysteries and their unending fascination with the depraved and the psychopathic. This book is much less horrifying than those stories: it retains the gentle, sun-drenched plod of the classic Country House Murder. But it’s easy, reading it, to see how we got from there to here. I certainly couldn’t put it, or its deranged protagonist, down.
Wylder’s Hand, Sheridan Le Fanu [***]
Another British mystery, this one from very early days—published in 1864. I picked this edition up from the remainders shelf at my local bookstore because I recognized Sheridan Le Fanu as the author that Dorothy Sayers’ character Harriet Vane—sleuth and mystery writer herself by turns—wrote her (fictional) thesis about at Oxford. That was enough recommendation for me, but for a while I was disappointed. The story starts off slowly, like a bloated, clumsy attempt at Wilkie Collins, all character names and places and relationships rushing by in a muddled mass. And then about halfway in (me, plodding along and gritting my teeth, determined to finish the damn book), the suspense catches—you draw your breath—and the story tightens like a bow, sharp and driving. A disappearance, an elaborate plot, a hilariously evil lawyer who is a good facsimile of Collins’s funnier characters. A story worthy of Harriet Vane’s intellectual attention. Four stars for the second half of this book; if we could read it in the original serialization, I’d say just start a few issues in.