It all began with covid. When everything slowed down, I resolved to read 100 books a year. That led to resolutions number two and three:
1. read at least twenty minutes a day
2. aim for fifty pages a day.
Today I’ ve hit the big Five Oh = Fifty Books. Tah-dah! I should get a reward, what shall it be? Hm, how about a month in Provence? Scroll forward.
#50 in 2023
Somebody always leaves a banana-skin on the scene of a tragedy.
Graham Greene probably doesn't get a lot more witty than this. Though I stumbled hard over the second word of the first sentence of his spy novel Our Man in Havana. once that sentence was done, Greene and I buddied up. Mr. Wormold is taking his morning daiquiri at the Wonder Bar with Dr. Hasselbacher. Please pass the nuts and proceed.
Poor Mr. Wormold is a Brit in Havana who has been dumped by his wife and sells Phastkleaners for a living. (that's a vacuum cleaner.) He is the wrong guy to serve as a spy to the British government. But he needs the money. At first it’s all tongue in cheek until Mr. Wormold's fantasies lead to fatal realities. You can’t toy with spycraft.
Comedy is never easy; go too far, and it’s annoying. The movie version with Alec Guiness isn’t wry enough. Greene never loses sight of the darker global context: the cruelties of police-stations and governments, the scientists who tested the new H-bob on Christmas Island, Khrushchev who wrote notes...The cruel come and go like cities and thrones and powers, leaving their ruins behind them.
Many of the jokes Greene cracks here show up in spy spoofs for years to come. I tolerate his gaffes. That shocking second word is the N-word. Which invokes a long discussion about whether we go back and sanitize all the writers who use language that offends us today, and my short answer is No.
Fun Baltic detail: Local overlord and torture-meister Captain Segura says: In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with emigres from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country [UK] or Scandinavia.
#51 in 2023
I so wished to love Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front yet was puzzled in the end as to why the translators and the publisher worked so hard and fast to publish this hardcover. Zhadan is a brilliant and popular writer, and these dispatches are his Facebook entries from the first three months of the war on Ukraine. Although his paragraphs are full of defiance, his determined optimism seems almost quaint as the war drags on in 2024.
You can’t stop this evil, and you can’t find the right words to articulate what you’ve seen.
It’s World War III, Zhadan says. He uses his fame to call for weapons; to collect thermal imagers, night binoculars, ballistic eyewear, backpacks for rocket-propelled grenades, anything that will help the men on the frontlines.
Less than a month after the first attack, he writes:
March 20, 5.05 pm. Injured yet unbreakable. We’ll restore everything. And we’ll put up a wall along our eastern border so we won’t be able to hear a single voice coming from over there. Glory to Ukraine. :)
Only two months in, he sounds exhausted. How does he feel now, I wonder? Does he still sign off with the refrain, every day we are closer to victory? Because on darker days, he senses extinction.
Writing contradicts death. The desire to capture feelings and meaning, circumscribe accounts, and relay story lines fundamentally clashes with the idea of ruin, destruction, and ddisappearance. We cling to the writing process as an illusory chance to pin down and persevere the outline of reality, flee the energy field of extinction, and try to trick oblivion.
#52 in 2023
A world burning and nothing bringing it back. It was possible to feel nothing it was necessary to feel nothing, the news feeds and social media feeds made you feel absolutely nothing: she could do nothing she would do nothing she was nothing.
One day my friend Juliet said, Look at this. On her phone, there was an image of the oceans. They were red; they were boiling. I couldn’t sleep that night.
Reading The Living Sea of Waking Dreams didn't help. At first I found the stylistic flourishes, the contemporary context exciting; this is why I stockpile all these book titles, I thought, because I’d never heard of Richard Flanagan, a Tasmanian author who, according to American newspapers, might be one of the best living writers, period. (thus Wikipedia)
Did she think the problem was love? No one knows how to love was love gone? was it? His own heart felt smaller than a phone, did she know what he means did she know did she?
Three siblings fight over the care of their mother, who is dying, and their choices are disastrous. There’s a strange comfort in reading about their wrong decisions. But then Flanagan links the story of one old lady dying in agony to the agonized dying of our own planet. He clocks the death of entire species, the unseemly high temperatures, the wildfires raging through Tasmania which were like living with a chronically sick smoker except the smoker was the world and everyone was trapped in its fouled and collapsing lungs. Sound familiar? To all of this he adds some genuine gothic horror.
they knew and they knew and they did nothing
Eventually I felt crushed. Eventually I felt like pounding my chest and wailing. I found it hard to put down, and then, hard to finish. But I did.
Latvian detail: Flanagan mentions a Latvian orthodox Jew, Isaac Steinberg, a former commissar for Lenin, who thought Port Davey, Tasmania, could be a haven for persecuted European Jews. It’s quite the story .
#53 in 2023
Sometimes a couple of poems a day are just the ticket. I picked this book up from one of those neighbourhood libraries because the design was irresistible: Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head.
These are angry poems by an angry young woman, angry at her mother, angry at the world, angry at the life of the refugee and the exile. It’s a bracing sort of fury. In any case, this Somalian British writer is pretty damn strong.
Your daughter’s face is a small riot, / her hands are a civil war, / she has a refugee camp tucked / behind each ear, her body is a body littered / with ugly things
She unfolds a small silk scarf, / to catch a tear, were it to fall / as dictators fall
And my favourite: No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.
Later I found out that Shire wrote the poetry for the album Lemonade and the Disney film Black Is King in collaboration with Beyoncé.
#54 in 2023
Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize and was suddenly on everybody's lips. One of you bellissimi bookish readers recommended A Woman's Story and it’s a tour de force. It’s as long as a good long cry, but shorter than the chokehold of grief, the one that grips you after your mother dies.
The hearse hadn't arrived so we waited in front of the church. Across the street, someone with tar had smeared, "Money, consumer goods, and the State are the three pillars of apartheid" on the facade of the supermarket. A priest stepped forward.
A Woman's Story is Ernaux's attempt to capture her mother in writing, to boil her down to her essence, like making marmelade from scratch. She starts the book as soon as she can bear to write the words 'My mother died'. She says it took ten months; it feels like she wrote it in one sitting.
Ernaux lines up the details of her mother’s life — the colour of her hair, the sound of her customers and her grocery store, her laughter and complaints — with such precision that when this passionate woman succumbs to Alzheimer's, it's shocking.
Memoirs about moms can turn into hagiographies, guilt trips, hate-fests; A Woman’s Story is none of these. Loving your mother is strewn with obstacles, and so is losing her. One could read Ernaux’s memoir like a map.
Bonus book:
David Hlynsky, Window-Shopping Through the Iron Curtain. This is a book of photographs, so I won’t count it as something I ‘read’. The photographs are all from just before the Soviet Union vanishes and some of you bookish folks will suffer pangs of nostalgia as you stroll past the shop windows of 1989 / 1990 in Moscow, Krakow, Budapest.
Oh and about my prize for reading 50 books this year. It has been bestowed on me by the Universe via the Dora Maar Writing residency. I’m spending a month in mindboggingly beautiful circumstances in the ancient village of Ménerbes where Dora Maar, a surrealist artist, used to live with Picasso. Here are seven things to know about her.
At the moment I’m working my way through Wade Davis, Into the Silence: the Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest.
**
COMING UP: Here are the new titles generated by my eccentric system. Three of them have America in the title. I feel a tad colonized.
Featured Author: Percival Everett, American Desert, 2004
Second Latest Saved: James McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977 (about Alaska)
Reader Recommended: Georges Perec, W or the Memory of Childhood, 1988 (thank you, Martha)
Oldest Title on the List: Jack Handey, The Stench of Honolulu, 2013 (looks whimsical)
The Random List: Yukito Ayatsuji, The Decagon House Murders, 2020 (hardcore)
Elizabeth Kai Hinton, America on Fire: the untold history of police violence and Black rebellion since the 1960s, 2021 (also hardcore)
John Ghazvinian, America and Iran: a history, 1720 to the present (unusual history)
Glenway Wescott, Apartment in Athens, 1945 (WWII)
Aleksander Wat, My Century, 2003 (More WWII)
Peter Ho Davies, A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, 2021 (really liked his book The Welsh Girl, this comes after)