Ah, relief. I hit a run of authors whose mood was doggedly up. Also, many of these books were short. Given that an enormous part of my mind is occupied with finding the packing tape, the current batch of books was exactly what I needed — ones that I could put aside and safely come back to, knowing they would be happy if I picked up where I left off.
#10 in 2023
The thing I like best about my complicated list system is that it leads me to books I would never find otherwise. Even though he’s been on the NYT bestseller list, I’d never heard of Ross Gay before and, honestly, I feared that The Book of Delights: Essays was some sort of self-help tract, daily bromides that would say Follow Your Dream or You Do You or Disappointments are God’s Way of Burping.
You know what I mean.
Well, Ross Gay, the book was deee— licious, disarming, deep, and far from bromidic. (It would be de trop to call a book about delights ‘delightful’.) Gay describes exactly how a praying mantis crunches down on a dragonfly or how he woke up from a dream that he had been fucking his mother for two years, and was so relieved to realize this was a dream, that he let out a groan, shook off the grossness and shouted Thank you! Thank you! to no one but me. His delights are often complex and rooted in sorrow.
It took me a while (since I didn’t glance at the back flap) to realize that Gay is a black man though he very much writes from that perspective and that, too, makes this a special book, since, as he argues, one of the objectives of popular culture is to make blackness appear to be inextricable from suffering. Which is why it’s so great to be reading a book of black delight. Daily as air.
#11 in 2023
This past Christmas my dear Alan went into a smartypants bookstore and asked for a book that ‘a writer would like.’ I flipped open the book immediately and laughed very hard. Stuart Ross is an extraordinarily prolific Canadian poet, writer, and impresario, and there are stories in I am Claude François and You are a Bathtub that are howlingly funny. Others are as surreal as any lobster holding a telephone. However, here’s the thing… spoiler alert… I thought the title was very witty until I found out that Claude François was a real French pop star who died at age 39 by being electrocuted in a bathtub. And then I didn’t think the stories were that funny anymore. “Really?” Alan asked, with his Alan-ish twang. “Once you knew the guy was real, you stopped enjoying it?”
Yeah. Weird. Discuss.
This phenom seems related to how, after I had my first baby, I couldn’t watch scenes of violence anymore.
Here is the real Claude François singing “Belles, belles, belles” with dancers in the snow in 1962. You are not a bathtub.
#12 in 2023
Maybe you’ve been lucky enough to read André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs, or, if you live in Toronto, you may have seen the brilliant stage version, so you’ll be familiar with the conceit that a dog could think like a human. In Juris Rozītis’s Kuņas dēls it’s the other way around — a human thinks like a dog. Sadly, this is a book you can only read in Latvian, and what a book it is — antic, ludic, comic — which is a hifalutin’ phrase I read in a magazine the other day and it describes Rozītis’s style to a hifaluT. He takes the language and imagery of Latvian fairy tales and legends to explore the painful theme of identity: how to be a Latvian dogboy and fit into the exile community of Melbourne, Australia, or the repressive police state of occupied Latvia. True, now and then one tires of reading about the joys of teenage erections. But it’s hard to resist Rozītis as he wallows in word play with his tongue so firmly in his cheek that I imagine that cheek exploding. Books like Tristam Shandy, or for connoisseurs of Latvian, Viltotais Fausts, came to mind.
Kuņas dēls was published in Latvia in 1995, and I wondered why I hadn’t read the book earlier. There was something about the title that bothered me. I had to look up the word Kuņa, which I have never heard anyone use, ever. It’ s slang for ‘ female dog.’ In other words, the title translates into “Son of a Bitch” in English, which may be mildly amusing for some, but leaves me indifferent in English, and off-put in Latvian. And perhaps there are other great books that you and I have resisted because of the title. For example, Moby Dick. Don’t everybody start talking at once.
#13 in 2023
It took news of a terrible accident for Hanif Kureishi’s memoir My Ear at his Heart: Reading My Father to come to my attention and land on my reading list. (He suddenly took ill and is paralyzed and has to dictate everything and his family is helping him run an elaborate Substack with chats, and story prompts, and scripts and what have you. I’ll put the full link at the bottom of this newsletter.) Kureishi is a successful English-Pakistani screenwriter/novelist/playwright, in case you don’t know, who, it turns out, was given a lot of support by other male writers who liked to predate on women. Oops, that’s not Kureishi’s pov at all; that just kinda slipped out of my keyboard. I don’t mean to be unkind. Let me hike up my mini-skirt and resume.
I too have written a memoir about my father, so I have a liking for dad memoirs, and what’s particularly interesting about Ear at His Heart, apart from the insights into Pakistani politics, racism in England, and sex and drugs in swingin’ London, is that Kureishi’s father was a very particular type of writer, namely The Failed Type. He wrote one book after another, which no one would publish and then told his son Hanif to be a writer, too, since he wasn’t good at anything else. To complete the family drama, the father’s brother Omar was a bestselling author in Pakistan. Wearing an open-necked shirt and smoking, Omar was sitting at a portable typewriter, a glass of whisky beside him.
Sometimes I just love sentences like that one.
Kureishi the son tells his own Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man story and shares excerpts from his dad’s unpublished work and that is engaging until the last twenty pages, when, like so many other books I’ve read, the story runs out of steam.
#14 in 2023
Don’t read Cutting Lisa by Percival Everett if you’re pregnant and especially don’t read it if your baby is not your partner’s and your father-in-law is an obstetrician. I didn’t expect Everett to be dee-lightful or comic, but I also didn’t expect to gasp out loud at the last sentence. Race doesn't come into this story, though we are in Everett country with all those horses and guns and an old-timer who says that a raven tastes much like an owl. The narrator is an ill-tempered widower, age 66, who goes to stay with his son’s family for a while. He has a very unlikely love affair with a stunning 26 year old, complete with sexual details (also very Everettish). I do not want to reveal how that affair ends. But it’s not the worst thing that happens.
If I hadn’t liked Telephone so much, I might stop reading Everett now. But I will Percivalere and read another one.
There was one thing I have to mention about the last two weeks, one thing I simply can’t ignore, and that is how with every book I felt more and more like I was sitting in the corner of a room of a beer-sodden smoke-filled room with a bunch of guys all of whom objectify women (though maybe not Ross Gay); listening in on them trading jokes about women and their pussies sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes in an irritable way, and sometimes in ways that border on despicable. Ah, that sticky male gaze. I look forward to reading a female author.
***
Next:
I’m still working through my book list from January and next in line is James Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-fiction 1948-1985, though this book is a doorstop — 700 really dense pages which I might still be reading in April. I’m going to jump aside to try some other books as time goes on. They will include:
Jean Chen Ho, Fiona and Jane, 2021
Sir Thomas Malory, Le morte d'Arthur, 15th century (also a scary doorstop)
Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction, 2020
Gert Ledig, Payback/Vergeltung, 1956
Anthony Berkeley, The Wintringham Mystery: Cicely Disappears
Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays, 2020
and
Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle: A Death in the Family, which is still on hold at the library, but who knows, by the time I get to it, it may have surfaced and be waiting on my shelf.
Until then, happy bookishness everyone.
And here is the link to the Kureishi chronicles.