End of summer reading and writing

It occurred to me a little while ago that I hadn’t written anything about what I’ve been reading lately, and so maybe I’ll do that because I have to write something and because that’s a way to avoid thinking about the end of summer and the day that I have to send my son off to college and not have him around every day. I just can’t do it. 

So I’ve been reading. By my estimation, I’ll probably have finished 25 or 26 books by the end of this calendar year. It’s not very many. When I was young, I tore through a book or two every week. Those were the days, I tell you - my eyesight was excellent, and I had all the time in the world. Then I had babies and I didn’t have any time to read. Then the babies grew up a bit, and I had spare moments here and there. Then there were years of sports and school concerts and birthday parties and doctor visits and parent-teacher conferences, and I’d read in between innings at baseball games or in the waiting room at the dentist’s office or in the parking lot while waiting for a kid to finish practice or rehearsal. And then the kids just up and left and now I have all the time in the world again. It sucks, really. 

But back to the books. Books are good. Well, they’re not all good, but books in general are good, is what I meant. 

*****

Against Memoir, by Michelle Tea. I myself am going to come out very strongly against memoir pretty soon if I end up reading just one more shock-the-normies overly frank too-much-sexual-information memoir. I was really about to just give up on this one, and not because I was shocked or disgusted (well, I was a little disgusted but not even a tiny bit shocked because I've read all the same stuff in at least five other memoirs proving that I never learn) but because I was bored. Bored and skeptical. It's not that I didn't believe Tea's stories because why would she make these things up, but because I didn't believe her voice. She was trying so hard - SO HARD - to be daring and outrageous and shocking that I couldn’t really even hear what she was saying. But then she wrote this - or said it, because this is from a talk she gave to an lgbtq writers' group: "Give us your goofiness and your dark depths and your weird family and when you stay up eating cheese on the couch watching bad TV and crying, give us when you feel stupid and the big angry fight you had, give us everything…" in addition to all of the sex and drugs and outre transgressiveness and I thought "Yes, exactly, Michelle Tea, now why not follow your own brilliant advice?" Later, she does exactly that in an unflinching and rather lovely essay about her difficult relationship with her working class hard luck mother and stepfather. The essay is suffused with sadness and guilt but the guilt is unnecessary. Tea clearly loves her mother even though she finds her impossible. So the book wasn't a waste, but I probably won't read any more of Michelle Tea’s work. 

*****

I started writing this on Monday. Five minutes later it’s Wednesday and my son leaves for school tomorrow, making tonight his last night at home. I swam last night and the water was still nice but the air was very cool, making getting out of the pool much harder than getting in. Today it’s warm, but not hot outside, and the breeze has an edge of Canadian coolness that suggests the imminent arrival of fall. Actually, at my house, the falling part of fall has been in full swing for a week. Our cherry trees are shedding their leaves and I’d crunch through them but I don’t want to crunch through leaves. It’s still August. So let’s talk about another book. 

*****

Two Souls Indivisible, by James Hirsch. Our medical students read this during orientation week and so I joined them. It’s an inspiring story about two POWs in Vietnam - Porter Halyburton, who is White and from the South; and Fred Cherry, who was Black (he died in 2016), formed a deep friendship during their shared captivity, which sustained them through terrible suffering and pain. Cherry would likely not have survived without Halyburton, who cared for him through illness and infections resulting from dreadful injuries. The book was originally published in 2005, and in some ways, it does not hold up particularly well. Fred Cherry was apparently rather conservative in his attitudes on race, at least according to Hirsch, and preferred to distinguish himself from Black people involved in the civil rights movement, whom he saw as agitators. This is not to criticize Mr. Cherry, who was clearly a product of his time; but the author’s tone in discussing Cherry’s beliefs is condescendingly approving. Without looking at the publication date, I’d have guessed 1981. It’s a very good story but not such a great book. 

*****

July seems like ages ago, doesn’t it? All-Star weekend (Prince Mont Swim League All Stars, that is) was the last Saturday in July. Our son won one of the League scholarships that day and we left the meet very proud and happy though a little sad, since it was our very last summer meet. It was very hot that weekend and after a swim, we went to the first half of Barbenheimer, a 7 PM showing of "Barbie," which was great but would have been worth the price of admission, even if it wasn't great, just for Ryan Gosling's performance of "Push." Hilarious. We saw "Oppenheimer," also great, the next day. Anyway, this is apropos of nothing, except that it was just a few weeks ago, the very heart of summer, but it seems like ages ago, and summer is all but over. I swam last night and the water was very cold. And we just moved our son into his dorm, and we're driving home without him, and I feel lost. Bereft. 

*****

OK so the Barbenheimer digression wasn't really apropos of nothing, because now I'm reading American Prometheus, the Robert Oppenheimer biography upon which the movie is based. 

*****

The drop off itself wasn't so bad really. I had been dreading it all summer and it hit me hardest when we finally made our way through security and pre-clearance at the Dublin airport last week. As much as I love Ireland, the best part of that vacation was being together, all four of us, every day. That was over. I knew that the boys would be right back at work and doing their own thing as soon as we returned home, and when planning the vacation, I had only left us a few short days between the end of the trip and college move-in day for our youngest. It was all so fast, so rushed. I’m sure that the flight crew and other passengers wondered about the lady who was sitting and crying quietly in her seat, but no one asked me any questions, and I was OK after a few minutes. I tried to watch a movie but the video screen quality on this rather old and beaten-up plane was very poor and so I just returned to my book. 

*****

American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, is what critics used to call a “sweeping biography,” the story of a larger-than-life figure with the events of the day as backdrop. Oppenheimer, one of the greatest scientific geniuses who ever lived, not only witnessed the cataclysmic history of the 20th century, he created it, at least in part. You can admire Oppenheimer or despise him. His life story is compelling either way. 

I mostly admire him. One of the most interesting things about Robert Oppenheimer was his self-transformation, from dreamy genius stereotypically absent-minded professor to brilliant administrator and leader. Authors Bird and Sherwin give almost as much attention to Oppenheimer’s remarkable personal gifts - frequent and unexpected kindness, charisma, social brilliance, communication skill - as to his unequaled intellectual gifts, and rightly so. And added to that is that he was just born at the right time and in the right place - the son of sophisticated, wealthy, indulgent Jewish parents, born at the turn of the 20th century, he had all the advantages of travel and education and culture that that background afforded him, combined with timing that placed him in the middle of the most important events of the century. His Jewish background made the race to beat the Nazis in the nuclear weapons race personal, a matter of life and death in the most personal sense. 

This is another book published in 2005, and once again, certain aspects do not hold up. 2005 was longer ago than I thought, I guess. For example, Oppenheimer had the brilliant idea to hire local indigenous women to help the Los Alamos wives with housework, thus freeing the white women to help as lab assistants and secretaries and technicians. The authors present this in the most uncritical and unquestioning terms possible, as just another ingenious solution to a practical problem, a win win. Everyone's working and everyone's happy.  Never mind that the local women might have preferred to have a chance at one of the lab or office jobs rather than the poorly paid domestic jobs (the book makes no mention of comparative pay rates but I think it's safe to assume that the domestic workers made much less money than the project employees). And there's also very little discussion of how few women (almost none) had real jobs at Los Alamos in the first place.  

The book is also almost completely preoccupied with the question of whether or not Oppenheimer was a Communist and although the authors return again and again to the conclusion that he probably was not, they also don't really consider the idea that it should have been OK for Robert Oppenheimer to be acquainted with Communists without having his loyalty to the US constantly questioned. 

Outmoded thinking aside, though, the book is very good. The was-he or wasn’t-he inquiries into Oppenheimer’s political background are balanced by long and thoughtful discussions of his accomplishments, his personality and his mind, and his relationships with friends and family and colleagues and enemies. He was interesting enough to merit this much thought and consideration. 

*****

It’s Monday now, and Labor Day is a week away and I really miss having my son in the house. It’s a little harder now that the reality has set in and I know that I won’t see and talk to him in person every day. We’re texting back and forth all the time, and he’ll probably come home this weekend, but this is just the beginning of the process of separation, as more and more of his life will be his life, opaque to us except for whatever details he chooses to share. It’s right and normal and natural that this should happen but it’s not easy and it’s not pleasant. 

The pool closes in a week. Right now it’s cloudy and dull and not particularly warm but I’m going to swim anyway. 

*****

And I did. That was Monday, and now it’s Tuesday, still cloudy and dull and not particularly warm, but I swam last night and I’m going to do it again tonight. Even when the water is cold and the sky is gray and I can feel the summer slipping away, a swim always helps. The pool is open for just six more days and even though I can swim indoors after next Monday, it’s not the same. Swimming indoors is an exercise; it’s a thing to cross off your list, just like any other task. Swimming indoors is lap swimming. It’s not going swimming. You have to be outside somewhere if you want to go swimming. Lap swimming is good for your body. Going swimming is good for your soul. After next Monday, I won’t be able to go swimming anymore. But at least I’ll still be able to read.  

The end of summer

Monday night: I'm done for the day, at the delightfully early hour of 8:45 PM. Maybe I'll sleep tonight. Meanwhile, I have a ton of things that I could do, but I think I'll hang around on the couch and watch "King of the Hill" with my kids, dang it.

Tuesday night: I should be working right now, and I will in a minute, but here I am, blogging instead.

I'm compulsive about a lot of things, including reading. I've managed to fool a lot of people into thinking that I'm a lot smarter than I really am, and that's because I will read almost anything. And when you read a lot of stuff, you learn a lot of stuff. Facts, and details, and historical dates, sports trivia, the actor who starred in that one episode of that show--I know pretty much all of that.

When I say that I'll read almost anything, I mean almost anything, including the directions on a container of hand soap at Aldi. Dispensing with the obvious question (no, not why would I read hand soap instructions, but why such instructions exist in the first place), the instructions were written as though the writer could barely suppress her disdain at whatever idiot needs written instructions to wash her hands: "Use as you normally would use hand soap to wash your hands." The ", dumbass!" was understood, I suppose.

"You need directions to wash your hands? That's asinine."

*****
Saturday: Even at my age, it's a shock to hear that someone you grew up with has died. My mom is here this weekend, and even though I can't remember how we ended up on the subject, I asked her if she had heard from the twins who lived next door to us when I was growing up, and was stunned to hear that they're dead.

Matt and Jimmy (not their real names) were the youngest of a family of five boys and a widowed mother. Their mother (who died several years ago and was thus spared experiencing the loss of her two youngest sons) was even stricter than my mother. We met the family when we moved into the house where my mother still lives, which was when I was 13. My sister was 12, and my brother was 9.  Matt and Jimmy were 11. Their older brothers were a bit older--the closest to them in age was five or six years older, and the oldest two, who still lived at home, were out of high school, working and taking classes at Community College of Philadelphia.

My sister and I and the twins went to different schools, and had different groups of neighborhood friends, but our houses were semi-detached, so we could literally step over our porch fence and be on the twins' porch; and vice versa. So we were all in and out of each others' houses constantly, especially during the summer.

When I was growing up, working mothers didn't worry about summer camp or programs for kids, unless they were too young to stay home alone. My brother and sister and I were alone after school and during the summer from the time I was 10 or so. Matt and Jimmy and their brothers also spent their summers unsupervised.  Who knows how we didn't end up in serious trouble during those summers, because despite their mother's best efforts to control her boys, they were wild, and none more than the twins.

Actually, I know why my sister and I didn't end up in trouble. I was a goody two-shoes, and even the older boys were afraid to drink or smoke pot when I was around, because they thought I'd tell on them. My sister was not as much of a rule-follower as I was, but she was popular and pretty and I think that the boys tried to be on their best (or at least better) behavior when they were around her. Matt and Jimmy were fraternal twins, though they looked nearly identical. The neighborhood adults used to call them things like "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum," or "Frick and Frack." No adults other than their mother and older brothers could tell them apart, but my siblings and I knew them so well that we could easily distinguish them. We were unlikely but close friends.

The twins were probably the least motivated, least ambitious people I knew. They discovered beer and pot very early, and after that, they spent most of their free time drinking and partying.  But although they weren't ambitious, they also weren't lazy. They went to work right after high school (who knows how they managed to graduate) and went right to work, and they showed up at their jobs every day.  When they were 19 or so, they bought a car that they shared, and they always seemed to have money. In between work, porch-sitting, and drinking, they also helped their mother to maintain her spotless house and garden.

We lost touch eventually.  I moved away from Philadelphia altogether, and my sister and brother moved to the suburbs, while Matt and Jimmy remained at home, working all week, and drinking all weekend. We'd talk at holidays and when I came to visit, but that was all. Then the boys were left a pretty substantial sum of money by a relative (maybe their late father's parents--I can't remember) and they quit their jobs and moved to Florida.

I wasn't really close with the twins anymore, nor with the rest of their family, but I heard that without the their mother around, they fell into a routine that included a lot of drinking, a lot of drug use, and a lot of hanging around with the local party crowd. My mom kept in touch with them. They sent me a card when I had my first child, and we sent greetings back and forth through my mom, but I never actually spoke to them. About 10 years or so ago, according to my mom, they entered rehab and got sober. But apparently they fell back into old habits a few years later. They died within months of each other, of alcohol-related complications. They were 49.

As adults, we had only the most infrequent contact, and really none at all in the past 10 years.  But despite their flaws, they were possibly the two funniest people I ever knew. Even as my sister and I realized that the twins would probably spend most of their lives drunk or high or both (as in fact they did), they always had a spark and a sweetness that made it easy for them to make friends and keep them. Sad and wasteful as their lives were, they still left some good in the world. God rest their souls.

*****
Sunday: Normally, this would be the night before school starts. But this year, we have a one-week reprieve, thanks to an executive order from the governor of Maryland. Rumor has it that school will start in August again next year, but for now, we have one more week.

It already feels like summer is over, though. It's unseasonably cool, and it's almost dark just before 8 PM, and the water was freezing today. It's like a corner has been turned. I was planning to try to swim every night this week, the last week that the pool will be open, but I don't know if I can. It's too dang cold.

Bibliography 2023

I bought my first Kindle in 2016. I’d had a Barnes and Noble Nook and loved having an e-reader but more and more I found that books that I wanted were available only on Kindle so I finally caved to Amazon. Almost every book I’ve read since 2016 has been in Kindle format, including almost every book on this list except Mrs. Obama’s (hardback, a Christmas present from my son). 

Say what you want about Amazon, but Kindle e-readers are awesome - compact and light, easy to use, dependable, and nice to hold and carry. I’ve had at least three phones since 2016, and I had to replace a 3-year-old Chromebook last year, but the Kindle kept on keeping on, until just a few months ago. It wasn’t charging consistently, it didn’t hold a charge, and sometimes I had a hard time connecting to wi-fi networks away from home. So when my husband asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I asked for the newest Kindle and asked him to pay the extra $20 for the ad-free version. The new Kindle was wrapped up under the tree on Christmas morning, and it’s so pretty - a light green color that looks beautiful with the case, even lighter and quicker than the old one, and it charges on a USB-C cable so I can use the same charger for all of my devices. And it has all of the advantages of the old one, too. It fits in almost every handbag I own, so I can read wherever I am. This year, I read wherever I was - in between baseball game innings, waiting for swim meets to begin, in the dentist’s office, on the beach, in planes, trains, and automobiles. Here are all (most) of the books I read in 2023. 

The Light We Carry - Michelle Obama. 

Child 44 and The Secret Speech - Tom Rob Smith. I read these early last year and was thinking about them and all of my other reading about the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism under Stalin when I heard the news that Alexei Navalny is imprisoned in a penal colony inside the Arctic Circle. I hope he survives. I hope he outlives Putin. 

On Beauty, Intimations, and Changing My Mind - Zadie Smith. Zadie Smith is my 2023 Author of the Year. I know she's excited about this. 

The Country Girls (trilogy) - Edna O’Brien. This was the beginning and end of my foray into the literary work of Edna O'Brien. 

An Unsuitable Attachment, Some Tame Gazelle, A Glass of Blessings, and Jane and Prudence - Barbara Pym. I can’t get enough of Barbara Pym, but I’ve read almost all of her work and sadly, there won’t be any more. Zadie Smith was my Author of the Year, but Barbara Pym earns Honorable Mention. 

Snobbery, The American Version - Joseph Epstein. Since 2020 or so, my social media feeds have been full of influencers urging women to jettison any and all unpleasant tasks and responsibilities and interactions. I have very mixed feelings about this trend. On the one hand, it's certainly true that most of us are doing things that we don't really need to do, and that don't really bring value to anyone. If ironing or canning preserves or maintaining your roots makes you miserable, don't do those things. They're unnecessary. Superfluous. On the other hand, there are many necessary and important things that we have to do, whether we want to or not. Doing things you don't want to do is part of adulthood. But listening to music you don't like or finishing a book you hate are not necessary or important things and you should feel free to turn off the radio or close the book rather than waste one more moment of your mild, precious life (see what I did there), and you shouldn't feel bad about this. Snobbery was one of the few (and the only one in 2023) books that I have started and deliberately didn’t finish, and I have absolutely no regrets about that decision. 

Wrinkles - Charles Simmons. Absolutely bananas. I have no recollection of how this ended up in my library, nor any recollection of plot details. I read it mostly at night, as I was falling asleep, which added to the story's bizarre and dreamlike quality. And it was not good. I did not enjoy it. And that is all I have to say about this ridiculous book. 

Red Notice and Freezing Order - Bill Browder. I still worry that the Russians will get Bill Browder one way or another. If Trump ends up in the White House again, he'll probably wrap the poor man up and ship him to Moscow as a gift to Putin. Maybe Canada will offer asylum.  

Here are three extremely dissimilar books that I happened to read one after the other, and wrote about in one post, right here. 

• Two Souls Indivisible - James Hirsch
• Against Memoir - Michelle Tea
• American Prometheus - Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Definitely a job for two authors. 

Enough - Cassidy Hutchinson. I was thinking about what I wrote about this book this morning, as I watched news coverage of Nikki Haley's outraged reaction to Donald Trump's "where's her husband" taunts at one of his stupid Klan rallies. Mr. Haley is of course a National Guardsman who is currently deployed and although Ms. Haley's outrage is justified, I must also point out to her (because I'm sure she's reading this) that he's the same Donald Trump now that he's always been, just with fewer marbles and more loose screws, and he's spewing the same kind of garbage and vitriol as ever, and you supported him then, and what's the difference now? Don't pretend that you know who he is now but you didn't know who he was then. You're too smart for that. 

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath. I managed, as a white woman who studied English at an East Coast university in the 1980s AND who attended high school at an all-girls institution, to avoid The Bell Jar. It was never assigned in a class, and I never thought of reading it on my own. I probably thought, at some point, that I should try to read The Bell Jar one day; I should put that book on my list. The thing is that I’m 58 now, and it’s definitely time to recognize that things I haven’t done, places I haven’t gone, books I haven’t read may well remain undone, unvisited, unread. I don’t have forever. I won’t get around to everything. So I read The Bell Jar, and have very little to say about it except that it’s probably not ideal reading for a person already in the throes of a mental health crisis, and except that even a person who is legitimately mentally ill can also be a jerk. Those things can coexist, and they do in the person of Esther Greenwood, The Bell Jar’s protagonist, who is spoiled and petulant and often pointlessly cruel. It’s hard to root for her but oddly, you do root for her. Annoying protagonist aside, I’m still glad I read the book (although I definitely won’t read it again - once was enough). I’m fascinated with these relics of mid 20th century exceptionalist postwar America, the time in which I was born and raised and that I thought was as solid and immovable as the ground beneath my feet and that I now know was fleeting and temporary. And it is filled with carelessly beautiful writing. And it’s a classic, I suppose, and so there’s one more of them that I can cross off my list. 

Say Nothing - Patrick Radden Keefe. I read this in 2019, but I read it again this year. I was in Cleveland and had just finished reading a book, but I couldn’t download a new book because my old Kindle wouldn’t connect to any non-home Wi-Fi network. I never mind re-reading a book that I love, and I had also just returned from Belfast, so it was the perfect time to read this, with the memory of the Falls Road and the Divis Tower fresh in my mind. 

Howards’ End - E.M. Forster. This really counts as another Zadie Smith book because I wouldn’t have thought to read it had Zadie Smith not urged me to do so. Last year, when I read Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty, I learned (maybe from the introduction or maybe from a review, I don’t remember) that On Beauty is a modern-day retelling of Howards’ End. Zadie Smith is out here writing fan fiction, and I’m all for it.  But I read Howards End months after I finished On Beauty, and so had forgotten completely that it was it was based on Howards End and so when I reached the part when Mrs. Wilcox invites Margaret Shlegel to visit, I had a moment of literary deja vu, and then I remembered why that scene seemed so familiar. Thanks to Zadie’s E.M. Forster essay in Changing My Mind, I’ll be reading a lot more E.M. Forster next year. I'm also smack in the middle of Middlemarch, which is great, because of course it is, because Zadie Smith says so. Zadie Smith has convinced me to read Philip Roth, E.M. Forster, George Eliot, and who knows who else? When it comes to books, I do whatever Nora Ephron and Zadie Smith tell me to do. Neither Nora nor Zadie have ever steered me wrong when it comes to literary recommendations.

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing - Matthew Perry. 

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen - Mary McGrory 

Ex-Wife - Ursula Parrott. Ex-Wife was a bestseller in 1929 and then it disappeared into literary obscurity. Then the internet discovered it and all of a sudden, my newsfeeds were filled with think pieces about this book and its modern-day relevance. I can imagine how shocking it might have been to an early 20th century audience (lots of adultery and domestic abuse). And I can also see why it was a bestseller. It’s a page-turner, and it depicts a life of freedom and glamour and independence - and yes, loneliness and grief and despair - that would have been unfamiliar to most women of that time. I wouldn’t call it a great novel but it’s certainly a worthwhile read especially if you’re interested in early 20th century New York (and who isn’t). I think I’d be interested in reading a biography of Ursula Parrott. Maybe I’ll do that this year. Check back with me around February 2025. 

Oath and Honor - Liz Cheney. As with Cassidy Hutchinson’s book, I pre-ordered this and read it the moment it showed up in my library. And as when I read Cassidy Hutchinson’s book, I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know (I followed the J6 hearings pretty closely) but I wanted to read a personal perspective from someone who lived the investigation and the hearings day in and day out. No matter what you think of Liz Cheney’s politics (I disagree with her about almost everything), she’s an American hero, and I hope she remains in public life in some capacity.

Every Day is a Gift - Senator Tammy Duckworth. I read this for work - my boss was introducing Senator Duckworth at an event, and I was drafting remarks for him. I read her book so that I’d know something about her other than that she is a Democratic senator from Illinois. I ended up reading this in about a day, during my early summer bout with COVID. Senator Duckworth has an amazing and inspiring story, and she tells it very well. I recommended the book to a very conservative friend who likes military biographies and memoirs, and she was impressed. Tammy Duckworth is a uniquely American figure, the child of an American father and a Thai-Chinese mother; born in Thailand and raised there and in Malaysia and Singapore and Hawaii. She spent her early childhood in comfort and security; and then when her father lost his highly paid job as a property manager, the family fell abruptly into poverty. An excellent student and athlete, the young Tammy joined the Army for the secure pay, benefits, and tuition assistance; and then she found that she was born to be a soldier. She would likely have remained in the Army, ascending to high rank, had she not lost her legs in the attack on her helicopter in Iraq in 2004. 

I didn’t set out to read a series of  of heroic American women's memoirs, but I did set out to read a lot of Zadie Smith and Barbara Pym. Everything else on this list is random, just a bunch of books that found their way into my Kindle queue. There’s a nice serendipity to just reading what’s available and in front of you. It’s like listening to old-fashioned radio. You never know when you’ll hear that one song that you’ll want to sing along to forever. 

*****

A few days ago I saw a social media post that said something about how it doesn’t matter if you read a paragraph, a page, or a book every day - as long as you’re reading something, you can call yourself a reader. By the way, this also applies to writing. Sometimes I write three sentences and sometimes I write two or three pages in one sitting, but I write every single day and that makes me a writer. Anyway, even though I don’t need validation from social media strangers (or at least that’s what I tell myself), this message was strangely comforting - some days, I’m so distracted (by scrolling inspirational social media content, for example) or so busy that I only read a few pages, and I wonder if I’ll get through more than a handful of books this year. A handful of books would be fine if they’re the right books. I think I read somewhere around 30 books last year - yes, I could just count but I’m pretty sure that I read at least one or two that I forgot to write down. I just finished my fourth book of 2024 (it was a long one) so I’m not quite on the 30 per year pace for this year but who cares. That’s just fewer books for which I have to write meandering and incoherent reviews for next year’s book post. See you in 2025. 

Cities of Girls

Did you ever read a book by mistake? I've done this more than once. Two years ago, I reread Bergdorf Blondes, which was apparently so unmemorable the first time that I did not actually remember having read it previously, except when I noticed that the ending seemed very familiar and wondered how the author had gotten away with such an obvious plagiarism, but then I realized that I had actually just read the same stupid book again. 

This time, what I did was to read the wrong author altogether. Someone on the Twitter posted something about an Elizabeth McCracken novel, which got me thinking about how I'd never read any of Elizabeth McCracken's work, and I decided to remedy that right away. And I got a digital copy of City of Girls and was about 25 pages in before I realized that Elizabeth Gilbert wrote City of Girls. And I still haven't read any of Elizabeth McCracken's work. 

I’m not sure how I mixed up McCracken and Gilbert, which are not really similar at all. UNLESS of course, the Twitter person tweeted that McCracken and not Gilbert wrote City of Girls and I searched for it only by title and didn’t realize until later that I had the wrong Elizabeth. That’s probably it. That’s totally it. 

I’ll do anything to avoid actually writing about something, won’t I? Ridiculous. 

Anyway, I’m finished with City of Girls now. That title is reminiscent of late 90s/early aughts chick lit (much like Bergdorf Blondes, which is also all about NYC girls), am I right? Like a pink book jacket illustrated with a mid-century-looking fashion advertisement drawing, and the title in an elegant (or playful) black script. I expected a book about a girl working at a fashion magazine, oppressed by a haughty and dictatorial boss, who spends her scarce free time drinking too much with her hilarious but heedless best friend, maxing out her credit cards, and scheming out a plan to get her rich and handsome scoundrel of a boyfriend to marry her. Spoiler: He does not marry her, but she realizes that she’s better off without him. She leaves her terrible job for a much better job, gets her life and her finances in order, and goes on to achieve great professional and personal success, while the former boyfriend leads a stultifying suburban life with the beautiful but dull woman whom he married instead of our heroine. If you are not familiar with the genre, I just abstracted a novel that incorporates every chick lit story line into one paragraph. That was a tour de force, don’t you think? 

Anyway, City of Girls was pretty good; rather, it’s not bad. It’s all told in the second person, meaning a first-person narrator tells her story to another person, not directly to the reader. In this case, the other person is the daughter of a man whom she (the daughter) suspects had an affair with the narrator. No spoilers, but the narrator has to tell the daughter her whole life story in order to make sense of the supposed affair. 

The protagonist and narrator, Vivian Morris, is an early 20th century archetype; an upper-class wild girl who rebels against her wealthy family and their bourgeois plans for her life. She fails out of Vassar and is banished to New York City to live with her bohemian aunt. In New York, Vivian lives a predictably wild and colorful life and then a less-predictable, still-unconventional but much more quiet and peaceful life. Both Vivian and the man whose daughter hears her story, make youthful mistakes that haunt them for many years after, but Vivian moves on and makes the best of her life, while the man, a WW 2 veteran, is paralyzed by guilt complicated by his physical and psychological battle scars. The story’s ending is neither particularly happy nor particularly unhappy. But it doesn’t matter because the story probably isn’t the point. 

Elizabeth Gilbert famously wrote Eat, Pray, Love. I don’t think I ever read it. No disrespect, it’s just not my kind of thing. Maybe I should read it because Gilbert is quite a good writer but maybe just not a novelist. City of Girls, it seems, is less a novel than a sort of poetic and beautifully written commentary on the prisons we build for ourselves, and how some of us escape those prisons early, some escape later, and some sad souls never escape at all. Really, this is why I think the book is only not bad. I liked it but there was something about it that wasn’t quite right. When I read a novel, I like to be all in, and I wasn’t all in on this one,  and I think I know why. I think that Gilbert was more interested in the message than the story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad novel; it’s just that it could have been much better if the story and the characters led, and the ideas followed. 

I thought about getting out of the early to mid-20th century and back to the present day, but then Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels came up in my queue, and I’m right back where I always am, in the immediate pre-war 20th century, when the whole world was about to fall apart and only a few people seemed to really know what was about to happen. I feel like one of those people right now, and I wish I didn’t. 

Vacation reading

It's been a while since I wrote about books, so I'm going to tell you all about last month’s vacation week reading. It's a mixed bag, as always. 

*****

We rented a beach house for a week in August, and I like to try to read a book off the shelf in whatever beach rental I end up in, and I did that this year, too. Most of the books on the bookcase in the sunny corner of the bedroom of our 2022 beach rental were pretty much trash but I found a copy of Colm Toibin's Brooklyn amid the dreck, so that was my beach novel for the week. Brooklyn is one of only a very few books whose movie version I prefer. That is not to say that it's a bad book because it's not. The writing is really beautiful. But novels are about characters for me, and I liked Movie Eilis (Eilis, pronounced “eye-lish,” is the main character) and I didn't much like Book Eilis. Movie Eilis is reserved and the viewer understands that this is because she is homesick, introverted, and just a generally quiet person. Book Eilis is also reserved, but that’s mostly because she’s a bit of a snob. Lace Curtain Irish, my dad would have called her. 

This is not a compliment. 

After her return visit to Ireland, Movie Eilis clearly comes back to her American husband Tony because she loves him, not just because terrible Miss O'Brien blackmails her with a threat to expose her secret marriage. Book Eilis seems only to return because she has to. But let’s be fair to Book Eilis. Movie Tony is obviously very lovable, and Book Tony is a bit of a cipher. There’s nothing wrong with him, he’s just not a particularly compelling character. He could be any reasonably nice guy. Still, the bitch married him. 

*****

Did you come here looking for sharp and cogent literary criticism? How many times do I have to tell you not to do that? 

*****

After Brooklyn, I read another beach book, this one a purchase from my favorite store, a used book shop called Barrier Island Books. I should write about the store because I’m clearly not capable of writing about the books. Note to self. I’ll get to that later. Anyway, the book that I purchased was Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, by Sheila Weller. I am a Carrie Fisher super-fan, and so this book told me practically nothing that I didn’t already know, but I didn’t read it for information. I read it because I wanted to revisit a world that Carrie Fisher was still part of. Carrie and her mother Debbie Reynolds were both American archetypes (the rebellious and spoiled but neglected Baby Boomer Hollywood child and the Midwestern no-nonsense up-by-her-bootstraps tap-dancing, singing, smiling never-not-working movie star mother) AND absolutely individual and different from anyone else of their time or any other time. They were living proof that people are like snowflakes and fingerprints: no two alike. There will never be another Carrie Fisher or Debbie Reynolds, God rest their souls. 

*****

If you’re still reading, you just learned a little bit about Carrie Fisher and pretty much nothing about the book (it was good, BTW). I’m 0 for 2 on the book reviews, aren’t I? Well, you were warned once, and if you’re still hanging, then that’s on you, isn’t it? Caveat emptor, know what I mean? 

*****

I’m a very big fan of Christopher Guest movies, especially "Best in Show." And as anyone who reads this blog knows, I am also a very big fan of Nora Ephron. And if you draw a Venn diagram with Christopher Guest movies in one circle and Nora Ephron’s entire oeuvre in the other, the intersection will absolutely contain Parker Posey. When her book You’re on an Airplane popped up in my Kindle recommendations, I did not hesitate. Plus, I love quirky memoirs. This one is premised on the idea that you and Parker Posey are sitting next to one another on a long flight, and she tells you stories about her life. The premise is good though the execution is not consistent. She drops the airplane theme for a bit in the middle, and then in a late chapter, she ends a paragraph with a sentence that goes something like “Oh thank you, I’d love some peanuts.” I had no idea what that was supposed to mean and then I remembered that Parker and I are supposed to be on an airplane together, and the flight attendant is offering us a snack. 

Not long ago, I read Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties (which requires a whole separate post and I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to that) and he didn’t mention Parker Posey even one time. This is a serious omission because if you want to understand nineties pop culture, you can do no better than to consider the very existence of Parker Posey’s movie career. No other decade before or since could possibly have produced Parker Posey, movie star. Parker Posey has lived an interesting life, and she is, not surprisingly, a very good writer. I recommend this book. 

*****

OK, I’ll give myself ½ credit for that last one. And yes, I would love some peanuts too, thank you. 

*****

I used to read a book in a single day all the time. Now, between legitimate busy-ness, eyestrain, and ever-worsening adult ADD (I assure you that this is a thing), it often takes me a week or more to finish a book. But I can cram a ton of reading into a vacation week. I almost forgot about this last one (really the first one), because I started it a few days before I went on vacation and finished it that weekend. 

Emma Goldberg’s Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic is a book that I would never have read on my own, but the medical students were reading it as part of orientation week activities, and so I read it too. Goldberg writes about six young New York doctors who begin their residencies several months early during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I won’t tell you any more than that (oh, you didn’t actually expect me to review this book, did you?) except that reading this book dragged me right back into the middle of 2020, which is a time that I do not care to revisit right now or likely ever, and yet I still really liked it. 

******

Brooklyn is the only one of these four books that has earned serious literary recognition (though I’m betting that Life on the Line will eventually win some prizes). I think it was even a Man Booker Prize finalist. And I’m not saying it shouldn’t have been because it is a very fine book. But I rank it fourth of these four, and it’s not even close. If you haven’t seen the movie, then you might like it better than I did. Just don’t read it expecting Saiorse Ronan, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent, and Julie Walters (who is absolutely hilarious as Eilis’s landlady Mrs. Kehoe). 

You know what? Just watch the movie. I almost never like movie versions of books and I really NEVER like a movie better than the book on which it is based, but never say never, I suppose, because here is one case in which the movie really is superior to the book. 

*****

And another thing. I AM going to write about The Nineties. I’ve already started, in fact. And it’s no better than this hot mess. Fair warning, as always. Watch this space.