Tuesday Book Club: A Moveable Feast (and Others)

When lamenting how difficult it is to get through a proper Dostoyevsky novel, Ernest Hemingway’s friend Evan Shipman says:

“You can read some of it again. Most of it. But then it will start to make you angry, no matter how great it is.”

This is almost exactly how I felt reading A Moveable Feast. It made me angry. It made me annoyed. It made me scoff. I really didn’t like it. And not for lack of trying.

I was enthusiastic about reading Hemingway’s memoir of his time in Paris in the 1920s, simply because that is a fascinating and lively time in history and I’d love to hear more from a first-hand account. But, oh, the arrogance! Oh, the self indulgence! I couldn’t like it, even though I wanted to.

Perhaps I’d do better to read some of his novels where his prickly personality doesn’t shine through as much. Or is that in all of his books? Those who are familiar with his oeuvre please chime in!

I remember I felt this way about The Signature of All Things: I wanted to like that book and it had been bolstered by plenty of critical acclaim. But it fell so flat for me and I struggled with its epic length and severe lack of substance. Isn’t it frustrating when books don’t live up to their hype? It kind of makes me feel like a bit of an outsider, or maybe even a curmudgeon, the fact that I don’t like this book.

I read the restored edition, that is, not the one pieced together by Mary Hemingway, his fourth and final wife, but the one assembled by Patrick and Seán Hemingway. There are new inclusions that were previously withheld by Ms. Hemingway and parts that were restored to Hemingway’s original handwritten drafts. In this way, it feels a little more authentic to what Hemingway intended with the memoir. Does that make my disdain better or worse, I wonder?

In any event, I’d love to hear what you have to say. Have you read A Moveable Feast? Anything by Hemingway? What did you think?

I’ve been on a major reading spree this last week and finished three books: A Moveable Feast, The Mockingbird Next Door, and It’s Not Me, It’s You.

I read The Mockingbird Next Door for my book club and I thought it was a very gentle, very sweet biography of a private yet wily woman. Marja Mills had unprecedented access to Nelle Harper Lee and her sister Alice, eventually moving in to the house next door. Over several years she develops of special friendship with these women and hears all about their deep family history and their relationship with the South.

I have to say I was a little disappointed with the scope of the reporting, not that I was expecting a juicy tell-all or massive exposé. But the biography lacks a certain depth to it and I thought a lot of the anecdotes were recycled or not thoroughly explored. That is understandable, however, given the secrecy that the Lee sisters prefer. After reading it I can’t decide if I want to read Go Set a Watchman more or less… Especially since there seems to be some confusion over whether the biography was unauthorized, and whether publishing the latest novel really honors Lee’s wishes now that she is nearly deaf and blind and lacks the sharp mental faculties she once had. It feels exploitative almost. What are your thoughts?

After the last several books I knew I wanted something funny and not so fussy so I went to the bookshop and loaded up on lighter fare. I devoured It’s Not Me, It’s You and I cannot wait to read Mhairi McFarlane’s two other books. This was laugh-out-loud funny and so sharp! It is certainly chick lit, no doubt about that, but it’s smarter and more nuanced that any book about a serial dater or shopaholic. I’d highly recommend it if you need something for the beach or the pool or just something to make reading fun again.

Tuesday Book Club: All the Light We Cannot See

There’s no sense in waiting until the end of the post to tell you: this is the best book I’ve read all year. Further, it might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. There, I said it!

As you can see from the sticker, All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year, meaning that you’re going to hear a lot about it (much like you did with The Goldfinch). It’s a beautifully told book about a horrendous time in history with prose that reads like a slowly unfolding secret: you want to be sensitive to its nature but you’d really just like to devour it whole.

The novel is mostly split between two perspectives held during World War II: a blind French girl, Marie-Laure, and a budding Hitler Youth, Werner. The chapters are short–sometimes two pages, sometimes eight–so the book buzzes right along. At first I worried that this would be jarring and disruptive to the pacing but I grew to love the constant shifting of time and space, which really enhances the feelings of chaos. Much like in A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, I believe it’s meant to disturb the notion of time as linear in the same way war does.

My favorite element of the story was the vivid imagery. Marie-Laure goes blind as a child so she has some frame of reference about her surroundings, but Doerr creates a world that is so striking and visceral, tangible almost, when described through Marie-Laure’s perspective. It’s a literary feast.

And Werner, what a complicated soul! If you’ve watched Breaking Bad or House of Cards, you know how difficult it can be to champion the anti-hero. It’s a genius play on the writer’s part, making us sympathize with someone who is doing something inherently bad. But Werner is as complex as Marie-Laura, and you’ll identify with his struggle.

All of the characters in the novel will stick with you long after you read it (I’m assuming, I only finished it Saturday…), as will Doerr’s descriptions of Paris, Saint-Malo, Zollverein, Schulpforta, and the sea, which “seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.” It’s a gorgeously rendered story and I can’t recommend it highly enough!

What about you? Have you read it? I’m guessing it will quickly go through the book club circuit and show up on nightstands everywhere.

 

Tuesday Book Club: Mid-Year Update

 

How is your summer reading? Any books you’ve been flying through or can’t wait to start reading? Reading in the winter is always fun because you can get cozy under a blanket with a hot cup of tea, but reading in the summer is a blast because you can take your books outside and fall asleep under the giant tree in your front yard (this may have happened to me on Sunday…)

I thought it would be nice to share my progress so far this year since we’ve officially hit the halfway point today (what the?!). You might remember that I’m trying to read 40 new books this year and I am pretty close to staying on target. I’ve marked books I would highly recommend with an asterisk (*) and you can read more about my thoughts on each book by following the link:

1. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie*
2. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
3. I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
4. Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan
5. She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb
6. Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
7. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed *
8. We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
9. The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
10. The Innocents by Francesca Segal
11. Hausfrau by Jill Alexander Essbaum
12. The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
13. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
14. Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
15. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande *
16. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra *
17. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz *

Reread: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

I just finished Oscar Wao last night and I loved it! I think I read the last one hundred pages yesterday alone. It’s rhythmic dialect and cadence were sharp and funny and the frightening and at-times terrifying history of the Dominican Republic made for a unique setting. My friend Claire recommended the book and I am ever grateful for her suggestion. It won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago so you might have heard of it before. It’s a heartbreaking story about a tragic boy, a family curse, and our universal desire to fit in.

What about you? What are some of your favorite books from 2015? I’d love to hear some of your suggestions. Right before bed I started Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. It should be a interesting flashback to our recent trip to Iceland. Otherwise, here are books that are currently sitting on my shelves at home, waiting to be read:

• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
• The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee by Marja Mills
• A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (the sequel to Wolf Hall)

I certainly don’t have the problem of what to read next! I do like to keep a bunch of books around so I always have a book to read next or to take on vacation. And I really like to have books on the shelf; I love the look and I genuinely enjoy having the visual reminder of a specific story or character.

Happy reading!

(image via Covet Garden)

Tuesday Book Club: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

Here I go again, bringing a book everywhere. Restaurants, rest stops, long walks, a book comes with me wherever I go.

Even books that are incredibly, impossibly upsetting.

I picked up A Constellation of Vital Phenomena when we were in the US this past spring and I was sort of waiting to take it on vacation because it seemed like the kind of book I could get lost in. It’s certainly that and more and I would recommend it as vacation reading as long as you aren’t on your honeymoon or any other strictly romantic getaway.

The novel takes place mostly in a bloody town in worn-torn Chechnya. Havaa, an eight-year-old girl, has just escaped from the Feds after they took her father to an almost certain death. She is taken under her neighbor’s wing and sent to the hospital to escape the Feds who want to finish the job and assure her silence. Hers is a bleak and hopeless future.

At the hospital Havaa mets Sonja, a relentless doctor who has rough calluses on her hands from countless amputations and is committed to keeping her scrubs a sparkling white. She’s lost her sister’s whereabouts and subsists mainly on amphetamines and adrenaline. Her future looks similarly bleak.

Indeed, the entire novel is discouraging and depressing in its descriptions of unspeakable torture and violence (a warning: there is a section about two-thirds of the way through that was truly unreadable for me). War’s ability to transform men and neighbors into faceless monsters is on full display. One can’t help but feel disgusted by what we are capable of.

But, Anthony Marra’s beautiful, extraordinary language is compelling and one can’t help but marvel at his deft hand. As Meg Wollitzer writes for NPR, the “brilliant writing…kept me committed to that world and the people in it. In fact, the people also kept me there. The main characters are vivid and real and stuck, and I guess I wanted to be stuck along with them.”

We care about Havaa and her father; we care about Akhmed and his dying wife; we care about Sonja and her missing sister; we care about all the nameless people that flow through the hospital and the streets, both in the novel and in our all-too-true lives. Marra’s writing makes clear what is all too evident in our more tenuous corners of the globe. He brings humanity to a scene that is woefully lacking any. While his timeline mainly stays between 1994 and 2004, the narrative at times swings wildly between flashbacks and flash forwards, dutifully ignoring linear progress much like war does. His blend of sincerity, humor, and the grotesque are simultaneously respectful and informative, making for a mesmerizing read.

I recently purchased All the Light We Cannot See but I’m going to wait a little bit before reading that. I can only handle so many war novels in a row. But, I’m curious to know if you’ve read A Constellation of Vital Phenomena or something similar: a book that makes you squirm with discomfort and cry with sympathy. Reading this novel was an incredibly moving experience.

 

Tuesday Book Club: Advice from Amy Poehler

I finished listening to Yes, Please by Amy Poehler several weeks ago, but something she said early on in the book has stuck with me long after the audiobook ended. It relates to motherhood specifically but I think its wisdom extends far beyond that. She writes:

“I have many friends who have had natural childbirth. I applaud them. I have friends who have used doulas and birthing balls and pushed out babies in tubs and taxicabs. I have a friend who had two babies at home! In bed! Her name is Maya Rudolph! She is a goddamn baby champion and she pushed her cuties out Little House on the Prairie style!

Good for her! Not for me.

That is the motto women should constantly repeat over and over again. Good for her! Not for me.”

Obviously I don’t have kids so I don’t have a stake in the motherhood portion of this mantra, “Good for her! Not for me,” but like I said, can’t we apply this more broadly?

I have been criticized more times than I like to count about the fact that I don’t work a proper job. Most often this comes from people who have no experience moving to or living in a foreign country wherein the most commonly used language is not English, nay, is not even a written language, so I try to take these comments with a grain of salt. But they still hurt.

“Good for her! Not for me.”

A confession: one of my private New Year’s resolutions this year was to stop critiquing baby names. It is so petty and shallow of me, but I admit I often poke fun at some of those wild and ridiculous names (and some not so wild and ridiculous names, but ones that I just don’t like) with seemingly little shame. But I am ashamed. It’s so rude and cruel and I don’t have a baby so I have no room to talk on the subject. That’s why I resolved to stop (note: I’m actually getting better at this).

So, “Good for her! Not for me.”

Another confession: When I was 22 years old I knew a girl from college who got married and one of the first things she said post-nuptials was, “I can’t wait to make my husband’s lunch every day and send him off to work.” This was said in full earnestness, no irony or sarcasm. I was off to live in Switzerland as an au pair and wanted nothing to do with committed relationships or marriage (yikes!) at that point and I was not shy about condemning her choices to other friends. Didn’t she want to have a life?! Wasn’t she looking for bigger and better things like me?!

Still, “Good for her! Not for me.”

There is a lot, I mean a lot, of judgment of other women and other people. I am so guilty of this (see above). But this mantra, “Good for her! Not for me” has really helped me release a lot of unnecessary stress and emotional energy about how other people are getting stuff done. Doesn’t it seem crazy to criticize what someone named their child? Doesn’t it seem wild to try to tell someone how to live their life? As if you have any idea of what’s going on or what factors are involved in personal family decision making?

Luckily, we don’t have to take ownership of anyone else’s choices. We can silently shake our head and move on, intervening only if someone is in true danger or harm. But that’s it! Otherwise, it’s good for them, but not for us.

 

(Image 1 via // image 2 via)

 

Tuesday Book Club: Being Mortal

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Happens in the End is the exact opposite of everything on your summer reading list, but it should be the first book you pick up.

This is Atul Gawande’s fourth and yet most personal book. It is a critical examination on the specifically American tendency to make the end of our lives a medical experience instead of a meaningful, personal one. Gawande offers anecdotal and research-based evidence that suggest we are approaching death and dying in denial.

“This is a modern tragedy, replayed millions of times over. When there is no way of knowing exactly how long our skeins will run–and when we imagine ourselves to have much more time than we do–our every impulse is to fight, to die with chemo in our veins or a tube in our throats or fresh sutures in our flesh. The fact that we may be shortening or worsening the time we have left hardly seems to register. We imagine that we can wait until the doctors tell us that there is nothing more they can do. But rarely is there nothing more that doctors can do. They can give toxic drugs of unknown efficacy, operate to try to remove part of the tumor, put in a feeding tube if a person can’t eat: there is always something. We want these choices. But that doesn’t mean we are eager to make the choices ourselves. Instead, most often, we make no choice at all. We fall back on the default, and the default is: Do Something. Fix Something. Is there any way out of this?”

Gawande is a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston so he brings a note of expertise to the subject. He speaks sincerely about being in the exact position he urges doctors to step away from: that of offering the patient more alternatives rather than encouraging them to accept finality of their diagnosis. He is very candid about how monumentally difficult it is not to become as optimistic as the patient does. Still, he urges medical professionals to do the hard work and make death and dying more about being comfortable with the final days, weeks, months, or years instead of pushing for more experimental treatment or miracle cures. In his book, Gawande advocates for the use of hospice and shows compelling evidence that suggests that choosing it as opposed to continuing treatment can actually prolong life, writing, “you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.”

His stories are very personal: some are about friends or acquaintances, patients he’s treated, and even family members, including is grandfather who lived to be 110 years old. He discusses the evolution of nursing homes and assisted living and how they can so easily crush the spirits of the inhabitants if they fail to honor their independence. In addition to being a surgeon, Gawande is also a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is a gifted writer, adept at seamlessly weaving narrative and scientific research into a compelling argument.

Over and over again Gawande pleas for us to reconsider how we approach our end-of-life moments. It never feels redundant, however, because it represents not only a radical idea but a much larger cultural shift in our thinking and attitudes. In 1945 nearly all deaths occurred at home, but by the 1980s, only 17% did. We’ve hospitalized and institutionalized the most sacred event of our lives.

I can’t help but recall Brittany Maynard’s story from last fall. To recap, in June 2014 Brittany was told by her doctors that her brain cancer was inoperable and terminal. She was 29 years old and a newlywed hoping to soon start a family. Instead, she and her family moved from the Bay Area to Oregon in order for her to legally obtain aid-in-dying medication. She had consulted with her doctors about what the end of her life would look like, body-wracking seizures and loss of control over most bodily functions, and knew she wanted to die before it reached that point. She died on November 1 after suffering a seizure only hours before, 30 minutes after taking the lethal pill. She was surrounded by her closest family and friends while a playlist she made beforehand played softly in the background.

Her choice of death with dignity has since reignited a national conversation about the moral and ethical ramifications of taking control of the end of our lives. Many states have reopened discussions on legislation for death-with-dignity bills. It is a charged conversation, but one that I believe Atul Gawande is fighting for.

“All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. The story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.

This is why the betrayals of the body and mind that threaten to erase our character and memory remain among our most awful tortures. The battle of being moral is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life–to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be. Sickness and old age make the struggle hard enough. The professionals and institutions we turn to should not make it worse. But we have at last entered an era in which an increasing number of them believe their job is not to confine people’s choices, in the name of safety, but to expand them, in the name of living a worthwhile life.”

Our impulse is to refuse these kinds of conversations. They are morbid, disturbing, and unsettling. But, as Gawande shows time and again, they are essential. It’s too difficult to make critical decisions when the time of crisis arrives. We are emotional and hopeful to a fault. The more we talk about what we want our end-of-life moments to look like and how we’d like them to play out–that is, well before the eleventh hour–the more likely we are to find ourselves in a position of dignity and peace.

What are your thoughts? Have you read this book yet? I’m so curious to hear what you think about these ideas.

p.s. For further reading, see “Overkill”, Gawande’s most recent article for The New Yorker.

(image of Atul Gawande by Aubrey Calo via his website)

Tuesday Book Club: Blurbs

How do you choose books? I know we’ve talked about this before, but since it’s a quandary I find myself in quite often–that is, what should I read next?–I think it’s worth re-examining. In fact, my brother-in-law has asked me a number of times how I choose what books to read and I usually mumble something about looking through the New York Times bestsellers and the “Sunday Review” (which is true!). But more often than not, I’m checking out those blurbs on the front and back covers of a book to find out those little nuggets of truth that tend to speak volumes about what’s inside.

Most recently I had been looking for buzz words like “funny” and “unputdownable” so I bought Absurdistan. And thankfully it is funny and mostly unputdownable. I like the novel’s intensity and Shteyngart’s irreverence and the unapologetically critical eye he turns towards in-groups ranging from Russian Jews to Brooklyn hipsters. It is most definitely absurd and ridiculous and in line with The Times‘s blurb on the back that Misha is “one of the funniest narrative voices in recent fiction.” He’s basically insane.

What other buzz words am I after? Last week I bought The Opposite of Loneliness and I would remiss if the single word “triumph” right above the title didn’t immediately catch my eye. Shortly before that I finished Beautiful Ruins and NPR’s Fresh Air considered that book “a literary miracle.” A miracle! It says so right there, by the author’s name.

While we were home I bought A Constellation of Vital Phenomenon because it was displayed in a section of Barnes & Noble to the effect of “if you liked this book, then you’ll like these others” that threw me into a panic of indecision and a case of the wants. The only blurb on the front says, “I haven’t been so overwhelmed by a novel in years.” I wanted to feel that too.

Another book in that same section, The Inheritance of Loss, similarly pulled me. Ann Harleman for The Boston Globe writes, “If book reviews just cut to the chase, this one would simply read: This is a terrific novel! Read it!” OK!

Book reviews are critical, for writers and readers alike, but Ms. Harleman brings up an interesting point: those blurbs do cut to the chase and sometimes they make or break a sale. I guarantee you thousands of people, myself included, will now read All the Light We Cannot See because it will have a blurb or a sticker or some kind of mention that it won the Pulitzer Prize. They are truly important.

So, Jared, I choose books based on the blurbs. And then when I’m really stuck on what to read next, I go through some of my favorite books and look for authors who wrote blurbs on the covers or inside the jacket and read their books. I have found lots of great new writers this way.

The secret is out! What about you? What do you do? Do you read all the Man Booker prize winners? Or National Book Award winners? Do you consult any lists or blogs or specific people? I’d love to hear.

 

 

 

 

Tuesday Book Club: Beautiful Ruins

 

“Fiction has the power to slow time, to speed it up, to dilate it, to flash it forward and back, to make it as precise as today’s date or as wispy as a distant memory. We read about a woman arriving by boat in a small Italian village in 1962, where a hotel owner in the sea watches her while three hundred years of the village’s history wash over us, and we flash back eight months to the death of the man’s father and then to the day the man took over this hotel, then forward again thirty minutes and fifty years ago–the woman still climbing out of the boat, the man still watching her from the water. Back and forth time goes in fiction, as we contemplate lifetimes in a few hundred pages.”

Not only does this quote hold true in the literal sense of the book Beautiful Ruins–the plot does indeed flash forward and backward between 1962 and the vague “Recently” with stopovers throughout the seventies and early 2000s–but in a more abstract sense, more specifically the time you spend actually reading. Do you ever find that an hour has passed and you’ve been lost to the world and everything not directly related to your book? Or have you slogged through pages of density only to find that ten (no way!), ten minutes have gone by. Time is dilated and stretched and sometimes wickedly manipulated when we read.

This rereading of Beautiful Ruins was much like my first go through: a constant battle between wanting to zip right through it (must find out happens next!) and savor each hilarious, thoughtful, and surprisingly insightful page. Jess Walter’s sixth novel is a novel about time, yes, but it is also about love and patience and forgiveness, all marbled with social criticism and satire. It’s clever and frank and probably one of my favorite books. Can I commit to that? Check back with me later.

Dee Moray, a “dying actress”, arrives by boat in Pasquale’s tiny Italian village just down the crags from Cinque Terre (the literal translation of the fictional fishing port is “village of shame”). It’s 1962 and she has just come from Rome and the set of the disastrous film Cleopatra. She’s dying of stomach cancer and has been sent to the remote seaside village to rest before heading to Switzerland to undergo a special procedure.

Flash forward and across the ocean to the present in Hollywood and “Claire wakes jonesing for data; she fumbles on the crowded bedside table for her BlackBerry, takes a digital hit.” Claire Silver is the assistant to the legendary film producer Michael Deane (whose face has been pulled and poked in the most horrifying way: “It may be impossible to trace the sequence of facials, spa treatments, mud baths, cosmetic procedures, lifts and staples, collagen implants, outpatient touch-ups, tannings, Botox injections, cyst and growth removals and stem-cell injections that have caused a 72-year-old man to have the face of a 9-year-old Filipino girl.”) and is sentenced to listening to a series of wild movie pitches on this particular Friday.

Of course, this is no ordinary Friday and calamity ensues when a certain Italian arrives looking for answers about the mysterious Dee Moray. Micheal Deane has those answers and we, the reader, are dying to know them as well.

The novel’s final epigraph is a quote from Milan Kundera, reading, “There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact.” It seems contradictory and yet it makes complete sense. The present moment, what surrounds our consciousness in this exact moment is so real and seemingly concrete, but we wait and plan and scheme and attempt to make predictions on what comes next, often modeling behavior on what we think may occur in our future. We so often miss the present, the now, in favor of preparing for what comes next. The moment when we physically feel ourselves crystallize into what we were truly meant to do is eschewed in favor of what feels safe or secure. When do we really act in the present? Are we not usually living in the future or reflecting on the past?

Walter plays with a lot of these ideas with Pasquale’s search to find Dee, Michael Deane’s frighteningly distorted face, Claire’s deal with fate. We are waiting for time to tell us something, to tell us what to do, instead of acting on our impulses. For a book that shifts around in time, it’s a beautiful meditation on the power of the present.

Have you read Beautiful Ruins? What did you think? Are you a read-it-all-in-one-go sort of person or would you rather let a book linger?

(first quote from an interview with Jess Walter in a 2012 issue of the Kenyon Review)

 

Tuesday Book Club: Wolf Hall

Are you familiar with the Tudor family? Thomas Cromwell? Anne Boleyn? Thomas More? These names may ring a distant bell for my fellow Americans, but they are as commonplace to a Brit as Abraham Lincoln is to us.

Often, parallels are drawn between Henry VIII’s rule and the American Civil War as turning points in each country’s respective history. That is, while much as been made in historical fiction about the Civil War a similar body of work revolves around the tumultuous reign of Henry VIII and the subsequent re-imagining of church and state. According to critics, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (and later the book’s sequel, Bring Up the Bodies) is the most superbly painted portrait of that time.

It’s always funny to read historical fiction from another country. What seems so relevant and obvious to a citizen of that country can be quiet confusing or obscure to an outsider. While I feel like I’m picking up on quite a few subtleties in the novel, I must be missing dozens more. There are in-jokes and hidden criticisms on modern day England, as well as sexual innuendos and political satire. Wolf Hall is heavily saturated with pleasures for the careful and nuanced reader.

And while the novel is fun and entertaining, I feel like I am slogging through the final 100 pages. I want it to be over, which is not a feeling I relish in a book. And it’s not because I am bored (at least I don’t think that’s it…), rather I feel a little fatigued. I’m ready to not work as hard to catch the jokes and reread passages that went over my head. Do you ever get this way with a book? It’s happened to me several times before (a hazard of earning a master’s in English literature) and I always feel a bit of a traitor to the novel.

But the historical novel, especially one about another country’s history, is a departure for me so I’m happy to be reading it and ever broadening my perspective. It won the Man Booker Prize several years ago, and Mantel has been touted as an exceptionally adroit writer. Indeed, there is poeticism and lyricism to her words and loads of dry, English wit. I would recommend it if you have the stamina.

As I mentioned last week, I recently purchased Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart and I’m looking forward to reading that next. I read Super Sad True Love Story by Shteyngart a couple years ago and I still think about that book on a regular basis (to those who have read it: I say JBF at least once a day, much to the chagrin of my sister). It is so impossibly funny and irreverent and deeply satisfying. I would highly recommend it. My book club is reading Beautiful Ruins next month and I can’t wait to read it again. It too is terribly funny and moving and I found myself slowing my reading pace if only to let the book last a bit longer. Let’s all read it and come back here to discuss, mkay?

Tuesday Book Club: Toting Books

On Sunday Adam and I hiked up the Gurten, Bern’s local mountain, and we each carried a backpack. His is a CamelBak with a water reservoir, but it also contained sandwiches and chips for lunch and a can of Coke. As we walked out the door I quickly ran over the contents in mine: wallet, waterproof blanket, camera, book, tissues, chapstick, sunscreen, cell phone, apartment keys, and even more tissues. “We’re just going up the Gurten,” Adam reminded me gently.

Mind you, some of those seem necessary (the sunscreen for sure) and I have a near-phobia of going anywhere without chapstick, but the book? Necessary? No, but coming along with me anyway? Yes.

I very rarely leave home without a book, even if I’m just going into town for groceries and errands. I never know if I’ll have the urge to stop in a cafe for a coffee or tea and want something with me to read. Or, I may find a sunny bench that looks perfect for a twenty minute rest. I know in that moment I’ll be glad I have a book with me.

What about you? Do you carry a book with you? I know it makes sense to take one if you have an appointment or know you’l be facing a long wait somewhere but I think I’ve transcended that. It’s almost as if the book is a talisman of sorts. Of course some books don’t make sense to tote around. The Goldfinch, Infinite Jest, and even The Luminaries were all a bit of a pain. But overall I just feel better knowing it’s there. Just in case.

 

p.s. Right now I’m reading Wolf Hall, which is entertaining if not also a little over my head at times… Apparently it’s a miniseries on PBS, running from April 5-May 10.