December: so we beat on...
First of all, apologies for the lateness of this newsletter. My January has been off to a sluggish start, and my December ended the same way—as you’ll see from the relatively few book reviews to come.
Perhaps in part this sluggishness was because all three of the books I read in December seemed to tug me backwards: there were two belated continuations of series I’d read before, Maggie Stiefvater’s Call Down the Hawk and Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, both of which made me wonder about the wisdom of returning to something that you had finished. In Pullman’s case, in particular, his original His Dark Materials series was so formative for me, such a beloved touchstone of my childhood, that it felt almost transgressive to try to re-enter its world as an adult. And then there was Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity, a book I didn’t read as a young(er) person, but made me wish I had—there are some books that I seem to read alongside the shadow of a younger self. I can feel the way a book like that, great even now, would have been all-consumingly wonderful if I’d read it at 12 or 13; a strange echoing deja vu, a nostalgia for something that never was.
December’s four books marked a slow end to my voracious year of reading, but they were a fitting bookend, in a lot of ways. I began the year re-reading a favorite series, The Magicians by Lev Grossman—pleasantly delighted when it held up, and even improved, the second time through—and ended it not by re-reading but by returning, in various ways, to the landscape of previous reading experiences. A good place to depart from towards a new year of books. And on that note—enough meditations!—some cold, hard data:
In 2019:
I read 41,995 pages across 110 books
The longest book I read was Anna Karenina, 896 pages (also my first Tolstoy!). The shortest was Otessa Moshfegh’s novella McGlue.
On average, I rated books 3.7 stars. Three of my ratings were one star (hi, The Night Circus!) and—happily—I gave 30 books five stars. Not a bad quality ratio:
As you can see from the chart below, I mostly gravitated towards new releases—or at least books published within the current millenium. But I did read some older books, the oldest of which was Northanger Abbey (1817).
I stole all of these stats from Goodreads, the clunky book-tracking website I still find unreasonably charming and useful.
And in 2020, I plan to:
Read at least 100 books again.
Return to my erstwhile Instagram-based book reviews, aiming for 1 review a week—short-form, gif-based, and featuring my hottest takes.
Get back into the habit of reading during my commute to work, a habit that has been destroyed—as this month’s book review total will attest to—by my new New York Times crossword app habit.
Read more nonfiction, or even just get to a point where I can describe the kind of nonfiction I’d be interested in reading without just resorting to “I really loved Bad Blood!”
Read more of the books I own, instead of letting them languish while I rush to finish all of the library books I over-requested. Some of the titles currently looking at me disapprovingly from my shelf:
Crime and Punishment
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
A.S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden
Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Labyrinth of the Spirits
Keep writing this newsletter, which has not only been good for my reading habits but has pushed me to think through my feelings about those books, and has helped me find a happy medium between mindless absorption and agonizing analysis. I have also been reminded, this year, that I like to write as well as to read—I’d like to do more of that, too, when and where I can.
As always, reviews below! Not too many to get through this month.
Code Name Verity, Elizabeth Wein [*****]
This, a spy novel about a female British pilot captured by Nazis in WWII France, was a purely good book by almost every possible metric. It is a book that is clearly about and for younger people, but that treats them with respect and seriousness, that tells a complicated and nuanced story, that creates compelling and memorable but deeply real characters who are brave and flawed and talented and scared, that understands what it means to write an adventure story that is thrilling and sobering and meaningful. It is both perfectly, elegantly crafted—a masterpiece of a plot—and deeply, heartbreakingly felt. I recommend it highly to people of all ages (and especially to Lord Peter Wimsey fans—I am absolutely convinced he makes a purposeful cameo. Talk about giving me literally EVERY SINGLE THING I want in a book!).
Call Down the Hawk, Maggie Stiefvater [****]
Was this book a little bit too much? A little bit chaotic, overwhelmed, spoiling with ideas? Sure. But it’s forgivable, because it’s so refreshing to read a book that’s too creative instead of too little, that presents a jumble of shifting mysteries instead of a few old stale ones, that delights so much in creation. Much of what this book describes its central magical conceit (the ability to dream things into reality) as being it is, itself: bursting with potential, wonderful and messy and not totally in control of itself, dangerously chaotic. And, occasionally, breathtaking.
That said, this book is a post-series continuation of Stiefvater’s mostly wonderful, slightly flawed YA series The Raven Cycle, and I did find that I missed a lot of things about those books—most of all, their focus on friendship, that messiest and most wonderful part of youth. The friends of those books are dispersed now, and the slow discovery of each other and of the magic that surrounded them is replaced with a headlong rush, a chaotic frenzy of the impossible. It’s not a bad story, but it’s a very different one, and I would highly recommend beginning with the original four books that give it a heart.
The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman [***]
It is so hard to know how to feel about this book. Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, about a girl named Lyra in a parallel, wonderfully just-different-enough world, who discovers the limitlessness of her universe and comes to understand her own power and humanity at the same time, is a touchstone in my literary life. I first read the series as a preteen, and I have re-read it many times since, and I still cry at the exact same moment in the third book, each time, without fail. In many ways, these books changed the way I think about the world—the point they make about what the purpose of life is is honestly both profound and deeply helpful. I still think about it! I turn to it when I am feeling despairing!
So what does it mean when the author of a series like that returns to his characters and his world after what always seemed to me to be a perfect ending? It’s both wonderful—to think that he would re-open the doors to me—and terrifying, because what if it is not how I remember it? Reading The Secret Commonwealth, which takes us back to Lyra nearly 10 years after her adventures in the His Dark Materials trilogy, was both wonderful and terrifying. It was delightful and it was disappointing; it was disillusioning, and it was darker than I expected, and it was still thrilling just to be in the world. In many ways—not to get too philosophical (although that’s really Pullman’s whole thing)—it was like adulthood, and I think Pullman meant it to be.
Lyra herself has become an adult, and the things that were simple and wonderful when she was a child are more complicated and harder now; she sees the world differently, and more darkly, and as a result, so do we. This is the first in a two-book series, and I think that Pullman’s intention is to have Lyra return to an adult version of the joyful understanding she had at the end of the previous series, but the journey to get there— weighed down with unsubtle references to our world’s political moment, the world building stagnant, lacking much of the delighted creativity of the first series, with a Lyra who has (wrongly, Pullman reassures us again and again) begun to adopt a pseudo-Randian philosophy—is hard, and not always very fun to read about. And yet still sort of wonderful, all the same—to get to go back.
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