#36 in 2024
I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalized in their uncompromising devotion to a cause.
Patrick Radden Keefe hunts secrets and exposés. His book about Oxycontin, Empire of Pain, helped bring down the Sacklers. Though Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is a history, it reads like a thriller. In 1972, Jean McConville, widow and mother of ten children, was dragged from her Belfast apartment by the IRA, never to be seen again. Keefe figures out what happened to her and doesn’t reveal it until the end. Reader, I gasped.
In Belfast, history is alive and dangerous.
I’ve always found it very hard to understand The Troubles of Northern Ireland, and as I chewed my way through bombings, executions, ultimatums, deaths by hunger strike, I kept wondering why violence is the only way out. Also, I will never be able to watch the actor Stephen Rea the same way, and if I tell you why, that’ll spoil the surprise. Clue: it involves love and till death do us part.
There is a morbid but undeniable entertainment in watching a hunger strike unfold. As a test of the limits of human endurance, it can become a spectacle for rubberneckers, a bit like the Tour de France, except that the stakes are life and death.
*
With a level gaze, Price told Moloney, “We believed that informers were the lowest form of human life. Death was too good for them.”
For your next road trip: Keefe has a great podcast about a hit song by a heavy metal band that was very popular behind the Iron Curtain before the end of the USSR and just maybe was written by the CIA.
#37 in 2024
Dammit, Dace Rukšāne. She’s made me lust for an elusive perfume because of her novel — Džikī . ‘Jicky’ by Guerlain is the unisex scent used by Daphne DuMaurier who once sat pensive and incognito on the Latvian seashore in the 1970s, and that scent drives the entire novel. Now I want it, too. Since this book is in Latvian, I will switch languages for a bit.
Uz Rukšānes grāmatām var paļauties: tās ir saistošas, patiesas, un viegli lasās. Džikī tēma ir galvenā varone Meldruka un pats laikmets: kā dzīvoja sieviete Latvijā no padomju gadiem līdz neatkarībai. Zemūdene visam ir iekāre un biseksualitāte, bet maigi. Grāmatas noskaņojums ir visnotaļ pozitīvs, kas latviešu literatūrā ir retums. Un tā smarža… tā nepazūd.
Es katru dienu riskēju, pieņemot jaunas kundes — ka tik kāda neizplāpājas, nenodod. Pasarg Dies, kaut ko ne tā sašūt, sabojāt audumu, ne tādu vārdu tām, kas ir partijnieces, pateikt — aizskries uz komiteju un nosūdzēs. Pat smaržas bez krāpšanas un šmaukšanās nevar nopirkt.
*
Viņa izskatās pēc ekstosika dzīvnieka, pēc pasaku tēla, kas iznācis no Gaujas dzelmes, lai mazliet atpūstos un papriecētu atpūtnieku acis, lai pēc tam laiski pieceltos, nopurinātu smiltis un klusi bez skaņas ienirtu visdziļākajā bedrē, virs kuras ūdens ir melns un draudīgs. Iedomājos par Indru un pēkšņi man kļūst tik labi, ka pabeidzu dažās sekundēs.
#38 in 2024
Antanas Sileika is a friend, a colleague and a fellow Balt. Turns out he used to be called Tony. I cannot read his memoir The Death of Tony with any objectivity. The subtitle is On Belonging in Two Worlds but it could have been How I Dropped My Nickname.
Insisting on the name Antanas meant coming to terms with being born Lithuanian but not in Lithuania. Everyone hyphenated will know what this entails, but maybe not everyone met with the specific type of invisibility and derision East Europeans did in Canada where we grew up.
I lived with so many levels of exile I barely existed. … A young man with parents from nowhere, a place that literally did not exist on the map, lived in a place that was almost nowhere.
I needed to clear away the distractions of Lithuanians in order to become a Canadian writer.
If you’ve never been to a dinner party with Antanas, this memoir is like sitting next to him as you both dig into the leg of lamb. He’ll tell you what it was like in the Lithuanian diaspora; how he fought his way into Canadian literature; how he worked for the CBC and ran the Humber School for Writers; how he experienced the struggle for independence and why he is so popular in Lithuania today. Names and places are sprinkled all over like salt. Antanas knows everybody.
#39 in 2024
“What shall I give you, Master?” he asked, and wiped Molière’s forehead with his handkerchief.
“Light!” said Molière. “And some Parmesan cheese.”
“Why did you write this?” I wanted to ask Mikhail Bulgakov, “and also, what’s your source?” Bulgakov was living in Moscow under Stalin when he wrote The Life of Monsieur de Molière in 1933. I imagined he needed money and that Molière was a relatively safe topic. But I was wrong.
Molière’s plays get banned, he has to beg the King to save him, but Bulgakov doesn’t dive into his psychology, he searches for how the actor-playwright gets produced anyway, including the box office numbers.
Dear writers, if you think having to take notes from muddle-brained producers is a terrible fate, imagine if everything you wrote depended on one person, the King, moreover, a King that likes to dance in your ballet corps. Or if you had to please a bloody dictator.
… under powerful pressure, the author deliberately mutilates his work. It is an extreme method! Thus a lizard, caught by its tail, breaks off the tail and escapes. For every lizard realizes that it is better to live without a tail than to lose its life altogether.
According to the translator Mirra Ginsburg, the biography wasn’t published until 1962, 22 years after the author’s death (as was The Master and Margrita.) By 1930 Bulgakov was completely barred from publication and literary production, though he was allowed to be an assistant director at the Moscow Art Theatre and to dramatize other writers. His play about Molière came to the stage in 1936 and was withdrawn seven days later (and thanks to bookish friend Sean, it landed on my to-read list.) Given this biographical background, the last paragraph of the book is particularly poignant.
But one day, though robbed of both his manuscripts and letters, he left the plot of earth he had shared with suicides and stillborn infants and took up his place over the basin of a dried-out fountain. There he is! It is he, the King’s comedian, with bronze bows on his shoes. And I, who am never to see him, send him my farewell greetings. … Moscow, 1932-33
#40 in 2024
I think of us as creatures fated to interpret. We question everything.
Reading André Alexis’s Days By Moonlight is like stepping into a warm bath: ahhh, you sigh, here’s a Very Good Book.
Days by Moonlight is a Homeric quest for love and we know it's Homeric because the main character is called Alfred Homer. Homer travels through many small Ontario towns — East Gwillmbury, Schomburg, Marsville, Feversham — in search of a missing poet and in each town there is some sort of myth-level test. For example, there’s a beauty in Lee’s Garage who demands of her suitors that they guess which solitary object will make her cry. There’s also a botanical theme for which Linda Watson has provided great sketches, but be forewarned that not all plants are real. In the last pages, things got just a little too meta for me, though otherwise I was exactly as enchanted and given to deep thoughts as the author intended. Also I laughed out loud more than once. Not just because of the Museum of Canadian Sexuality with the banner PIERRE TRUDEAU; ANGEL OF THE EROTIC.
Though I didn’t drink anything after the pear cider, I couldn’t make out the time on the clock behind the bar. I was left with impressions: grey hair recently grooved by a comb, white T-shirts stretched taut over bulging stomachs, ruddy skin, yellowed teeth, missing teeth, phrases that struck me (‘My chickens were inebriated,’ ‘You can poach rhubarb, eh’) the smell of beer, the smell of whisky on someone’s breath, the smell of french fries and just-microwavd chuckwagons; slices of ham and slices of bright-orange cheese carelessly tucked into a wrinkled hamburger bun.
You can sense the debt to the recently deceased Alice Munro in this book — though she is all about realism, and Alexis is not — and for that reason I recommend a great New Yorker podcast in which he reads a Munro story and then discusses it with the fiction editor of the New Yorker.
This book ends with the mysterious term Quincunx 5, Toronto — New York. A quincunx is a an arrangement of plants or objects with one in each corner and one in the middle, like 5 on a dice. This quest across Ontario is the fifth in a cycle. Blogs have been written to explore Alexis’s mysteries. But you can also read only this one.
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Lately more than one reader has asked me how on earth I read so many books. Answer:
read quickly
read twenty minutes every day
toss book aside if you get bored
However I recently took a road trip down to New Haven for a conference and for an entire five days, did not spend twenty minutes in silent reading. Every morning felt unbalanced for that reason. Staying Bookish also means staying focused. Not everybody reads quickly, I know, and maybe reading slowly is the better way. I try to slow down on purpose many times. In any case, just like size doesn’t matter, neither does quantity. The pleasure is all.
Currently Reading: Stroll by Shawn Micallef
Was not in the mood for: Francine Prose, Reading like a writer: a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them; Samantha Irby, Meaty: essays
And ta-dah —
The New List:
Featured Author: Colette, The Vagabond (1910) (life in the music hall)
Second Latest Title Saved: André Alexis, Days By Moonlight, 2019 (see above)
Reader Recommended: R. F. Kuang, Yellowface, 2023 (thank you, Maureen, very popular, on hold)
Oldest Title on the List: Lao, She, Rickshaw Boy: a novel, 1937 (important work of 20th century Chinese literature)
The Random List:
Novalis, Hymns to the Night, 1800 (German poetry) (Novalis was brought to life by Penelope Lively, The Blue Flower)
Marianne Wiggins, Properties of Thirst , 2022 (American novel)
Amy Bloom, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss, 2022 (Alzheimer’s memoir)
Stuart Ross, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, 2022 (can’t wait)
Congenial Spirits: the selected letters of Virginia Woolf, 1989 (dear Virginia)
Five of the Best Soviet Plays of the 1970s (bring it on, comrades)
If you’re wondering how my list is put together, check out my system here