Hello, all ye bookish. It’s been a harrowing couple of weeks on my random reading list. By the third book (Alexievich), I kept thinking please stop, I’ve had enough. Yet I ploughed ahead, compelled by a strange sense of responsibility towards the writer. I read and I read, begging for it to be over soon. Just like the war on Ukraine. Please stop.
So here’s how this batch turned out.
#4 book in 2023:
It began with Gloria Naylor and her love letter to seven black women living in down-at-your-luck apartments on a dead-end street, written with a combination of anger, admiration, and hopelessness. I’m not sure if I read The Women of Brewster Place when it came out in 1982, but if I did, I doubt that I was ready to embrace Naylor’s unapologetic scenes of lust, or understand the conflicting feelings of a young mother, let alone fully appreciate what it meant to grow up black amidst white supremacy. Now I more than get it. Since the monstrous death of Tyre Nichols, my thoughts have circled back to this novel more than once and how it describes the world, for a Black person, as a trap. Naylor’s very popular debut novel is also a jolting reminder of how dangerous it was to be a lesbian in the early eighties. Oprah turned the book into a mini-series, and later it became a musical. There’s a rape scene which is truly horrible. But unless it’s triggering, read the book anyway.
#5 book in 2023:
I have a personal interest in books about WW Two, and I can’t stop reading them. Not yet. School for Barbarians, by Erika Mann, was an SOS to the world, a call for help written with urgency in 1938. No group is more affected by Hitler’s dictatorship than the children, Mann shouts. She describes in sickening detail how a German boy who is five years old in 1933 is groomed by the educational system to become a Nazi by the time he is ten. Every child says “Heil Hitler” from 50 to 150 times a day, and if they don’t say it at home, the parents are at risk of being arrested. It’s awful to read because you know what is coming next and Ms. Mann is trying to stop what’s coming next. The book includes a shockingly sexist introduction by her dad, Thomas Mann.
These days Mann’s agonized cri de coeur will primarily interest a history nerd. I read it on Kindle, but I also loaned it from the Robarts library, whence it came tied with a black ribbon, like a box of poisoned chocolates.
#6 book in 2023:
I was looking forward to Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time. She excels in collecting oral histories, about Chernobyl, for example, or about women at war. This one is about the dissolution of the Soviet Union and it’s long and tough. Arrests, denunciations, torture, terrible things happening to good people are followed by interviews with characters who revere Stalin and loudly mourn the ‘idealism’ of the USSR, which was never a real thing. More than once I felt like quitting. Please stop. But if you want to explore the mindset that underlies the war on Ukraine, jump in.
Reading Alexievich was also a trip down memory lane. I witnessed much of the breakup of the USSR in person starting with a visit to Latvia in the 1970s. I remember a school assembly where a principal mouthed Marxist platitudes while his students giggled or yawned. All ideals had been rendered bankrupt, socialist and Christian ones. There was little to replace this absence except vodka and nihilism, ‘every-man-for-himself’, though in Latvia, the people could turn to their indigenous belief system and formed a common front to fight against the Russification and extinction of their culture.
In the Wild East, capitalism was so violent as the empire collapsed precisely because of the death of idealism and social trust in general was so eroded by the long-standing surveillance state.
So I reject that cover photo of a woman staring out of a window so wistfully. A more precise reflection of the contents would be a picture of a shaven-headed goon in a track suit and a golden necklace, brandishing a salami in one hand and a gun in the other.
Alexievich is Belorussian and her country has waged a losing struggle for democracy. She lives in precarious circumstances. Check this link.
Naylor, Mann, Alexievich: After reading three such powerful books in a row I felt disoriented and met the next few books from my list on the rebound. That’s what happened to George Bowering’s Soft Zipper and Mark Henick’s So-called normal… I had to pass on them.
#7 book in 2023:
A man is lost at night in a dark forest in the rain holding a suitcase which contains all that he has left in the world. He does not know what to do or where to go or even who he is anymore and wishes someone would come and save him. He is 62. He used to be a famous writer.
That man is Alfred Döblin at a terrible point in his life in Destiny’s Journey, sensationally subtitled My Flight from the Nazis. The original edition does not have that subtitle: it contents itself with the bare-bones ‘a report and a confession.’ I know, I know, two WW2 books back-to-back are a little much, but it was oddly soothing to read this 1949 autobiography of exile and war, because of its familiarity. It begins with Döblin’s exodus from Paris — together with thousands of others — as the Nazis invade France. (If you liked Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise, this book is in similar territory.) Trained as a doctor, Döblin observes the minutiae of collapse: the capricious bureaucracy; how people sit hunched in their refugee shelters; how children refuse to eat the bad noodles, how their frantic mothers cajole, slap, or ignore them. Yet he also tracks his own spiritual combustion. Why are all these ridiculous, callous, horrible things happening to him, of all people?
If the title sounds strange — “Destiny’s Journey” — perhaps that’s because most English speakers don’t think life is driven by destiny. We like to think our free will decides everything, our sense of purpose, or, maybe, chance. Or do we? I’ll have to ask Beyoncé, formerly of Destiny’s Child.
Another reason I felt relieved reading this book was because it was a book. I’ve been poking and prodding a Kindle for the last three weeks and now that I am home, turning over those three-dimensional pages has an undeniable ahhh to it.
#8 book in 2023:
Nigel Nicolson’s jaunty biography of Virginia Woolf (not on my list) also provided some bedtime relief. My dearest Alan picked this up from one of those charming little libraries that dot our neighbourhood with a damaged cover that someone tried to repair with a wrinkled scotchtape. It gives Virginia a kind of raffish look. Though I thought I knew everything about Woolf, it was great to revisit her travails and her triumphs as described by the son of her lover Vita Sackville-West. Virginia, too, fought death, poverty, war, inner demons. But now I also know that she was good at baking bread and loved to travel.
Ross Gay, The Book of Delights is in my December batch but it is still on hold at the library. So instead, I read Milkman by Anna Burns because one bookish subscriber of this newsletter said that I had to read it right away. (Thank you, Pauls R.)
#9 book in 2023:
OMG the opening sentence. The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died. That sentence tells you everything: Milkman is funny, the story is violent, and it’s all gonna be kinda weird. The eighteen-year old protagonist might be growing up amidst the religious warfare in Northern Ireland, but the actual location is never specified, and I preferred not to imagine the setting as Belfast. Why I enjoyed the mayhem was because I read it as a dystopia about our current maladies, set in an unknown country where everyone is spying on everyone else, and people are being murdered or at least ostracized for saying or doing the wrong thing, or for not saying or not doing a thing, or for it not occurring to them to say a thing or not say a thing or do a thing or not do a thing, or, worst of all, like the protagonist, suffering terribly due to their rumoured misbehaviours which have no foundation in truth. I heard please stop in my head as I was reading this book, too, but the voice saying please stop was the writer’s. Burns revels in the English language and her wordplay falls ferocious and thick and she won’t let you get through her story if you are in a rush. So to really enjoy Milkman (not The Milkman), you need to sit back, take your time, swirl the text around in your glass, sniff the bouquet, admire the legs, and take small sips.
And that’s all for my December batch of books. Come follow me to the next one.
I love my strange bookish game so much that the first thing I did after unpacking my bags after the long trip to Australia was cook up my January batch from my many lists. Here’s what’s coming next:
Featured Author: Percival Everett, Cutting Lisa, 1986 (the title, yikes)
Second Latest Saved Title: Hanif Kureishi, My Ear at His Heart: reading my father, 2010
FYI This wonderful writer suffered a terrible accident and is paralyzed from the neck down; with the help of his son, he writes a blog that you can find on Twitter
and you can also read him here on Substack.New Category! Reader Recommended: In response to my ‘Best Of’ list, some subscribers offered their favourite titles, and so I am including one every month as a new category. The first one will be Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle: A Death in the Family, Book 1, 2013.
(Thank you, Brigita O.)
Oldest Title on the List: Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory and Other Essays, 2020 (know nothing about this book)
The Random Six:
Jean Chen Ho, Fiona and Jane, 2021 (stories, know nothing about the author)
Sir Thomas Malory, Le morte d'Arthur, 15th century (let’s see if I can hack it)
James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-fiction 1948-1985 ( looking forward to this one)
Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction, 2020 (Me, read pilosophy? who am I kidding? but it got on my list, so I’ll give it a go)
Gert Ledig, Payback/Vergeltung, 1956 (another WWII horror story. I’m going to brush off my German to read this on Kindle, since I can’t get it on loan in English)
Anthony Berkeley, The Wintringham Mystery: Cicely Disappears, first published in 1927 (light reading, I hope)
Fabulous and wonderfully entertaining summaries - thank you! I am astounded at what you have managed to read in such a short space of time and what you plan to read next in such a short space of time!