March: panic reading
What to say about March 2020, a month that was approximately 3,000 years long and yet only left me with the time and mental energy to read half the number of books I read last March? What to say about the fact that I frivolously wasted, in my prior newsletter, the chance to write chattily about what it means to read good books in bad times?
The day that my workplace told us to start working from home, I thought about the two boxes of hastily-purchased dried goods sitting in my kitchen and then thought about my bookshelves. I must go buy War and Peace, I thought with sudden fanatical clarity. I might run out of things to read so I had better go to the bookstore right now and get War and Peace. It was the longest book I could think of.
As it turned out, I got off the bus and re-directed that compulsion into the purchase of a one-pound jar of Spicy Chili Crisp from H-Mart. It was a funny instinct—as though the purchase of War and Peace would be what made months of isolation bearable—but it wasn’t completely wrong. I kind of wish I had bought War and Peace, while my favorite local bookstore was still open, because the only books I’m finding it possible to read right now are dense, almost impenetrable historical novels.
After Trump was elected, I read nothing but Young Adult fantasy for almost two months. That was an escapism rooted in the need to believe in heroes, and in the improbable triumph of good over evil. My current inability to pick up anything other than Dorothy Dunnett’s eight book Niccolo series—about a Bruges merchant in the 15th century (each book roughly 500 pages)—springs from the density and richness of the not-now world she creates: an alternative place to belong to, a story so immersive and so demanding of my full attention that our current reality fades into fiction next to it. To read these novels is not so much to escape here as it is to belong elsewhere: the polar opposite of the consuming hyper-now of my Twitter feed.
And yet: it’s taking me a long time to get through them, and through the handful of other books I can stomach right now. My days feel empty and full to the brim all at once: I miss hugging my parents and drinks at my favorite bar. I am baking and cooking a lot, and (lucky to be) still working full days, and my roommate recently got an Xbox (a constant exercise in self-control, as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has some of the same immersive escapist elements as a dense historical novel). On a good day, I do a Pilates video on YouTube. I am talking to friends more than ever, and seeing my own face grainily reflected back at me on a computer screen far more than ever. I’m going on walks. I’m watching Tiger King.
There are not the endless hours of reading time I’d imagined on that panicked bus ride, but I do find myself selfishly worrying about the supply chain dying before I can get the rest of the Dunnett series delivered (from the same local bookstore, incidentally, where I almost bought War and Peace). I’m reading them slowly—so much for a daily one hundred and fifty pages. There are only eight of them, and then they will be over, and I will have to find another world to dwell in for a window of every day.
March books
[synopsis linked in title]
A note: it’s so strange to me that I did a full half of this month’s reading in the first week of March, pre-isolation. Two of these books were oddly appropriate for my current mood; one just feels bizarre to look back on.
Stay and Fight, Madeline ffitch [*****]
One of the “oddly appropriate” books, this is the story of a patched-together family of three women and a boy who choose to live, or to claw out a life, in the wild country of West Virginia. I found it initially readable, then compelling, and then I was shocked to find myself startled into weeping on the very final page. I didn’t see it coming—the way this book picks at the seams of what makes a family and a home, of what love can and can’t be, works them until everything unravels except for an inexplicable core of belonging so raw that looking at it made me cry.
The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides [***]
Bizarre to think that my coworker ever casually handed me this book over the divider between our desks! Bizarre to think that I read it primarily on crowded public transit! Regardless—this coworker often hands me her recently-read thrillers, and this one was the best one she’s lent me yet. Brutal and mysterious murder, psychological disturbance, the best kind of unreliable narrator(s), and a twist that I didn’t even begin to see coming. If you like thrillers, this is one of the better ones to come from the recent glut of them.
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado [****]
As oddly appropriate as the isolated-in-a-cabin-in-the-wilderness plot of Stay and Fight, but for nearly polar opposite reasons. This is Machado’s memoir of an abusive relationship, and also her exploration of the history of and literature surrounding abuse in lesbian relationships. Written as a series almost of writing exercises, it jumps around in focus and tone, trying on new versions of itself, but always leading us inexorably and chillingly closer to the center of the abuse, through doorway after doorway in the isolated house that was the locale of most of the relationship, a maze of darkness.
This book read as—is—a horror novel. There is a visceral sense of being trapped, of the possibility for something ever-worse to emerge from the darkness. I couldn’t put it down. It was also one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read, on a whole host of levels—as a story, as Machado’s reality, as a reflection of endless relationships that continue to play out this story every day.
Niccolò Rising, Dorothy Dunnett [****]
The Spring of the Ram, Dorothy Dunnett [****]
As I did back when I was making my way through Dunnett’s other historical fiction series (Ah! Lymond!), I will combine the reviews of any of this series that I read in the same month, to spare you all two paragraphs about 15th-century European trading routes. Or rather, two paragraphs of breathless adoration: because here, Dunnett does it again, creates a world so richly imagined and a hero so cleverly concealed that it feels as though even a 40,000 page series will not be enough space in which to fully explore either. True, I haven’t quite come to love Niccolo himself—his friendly, easygoing acquiescence a mask for calculating brilliance and an unsettling penchant for revenge—the way two full read-throughs of that series made me love Lymond, Dunnett’s other hidden hero. But I am savoring the journey of coming to know him fully, which I understand by now, with Dunnett, will take four books at least, maybe five. In the meantime, I’ll escape into the intricacy of the journey.
The Seep, Chana Porter [***]
The only book besides the Niccolo series I could pick up during these past few weeks was an extremely short strange little post-apocalyptic sci-fi story; a society invaded by an alien parasite that makes all good things possible, all truths understood, so that humans live in symbiosis with the parasites in a perfect utopian society. In that setting, we follow a woman who is grieving the (chosen, enlightened) death of her partner—so that this is a story about the things that can’t be healed by alien magic, the un-fixable grief of loss. Sweet and compelling, clunky and farcical by turns, my favorite part of this story was when two characters stopped to acknowledge the things they had lost when the imperfect world ended: cheetos, cheeseburgers. Family barbecues at the beach.
I hope you are all doing well out there right now. As always, thank you for reading!