I read the fewest number of books this year since I began recording my reading in 2011, another thing to blame on The Election. I consumed massive quantities of news articles, think pieces, petitions, and rants. I also subscribed to the New Yorker again, an unexpected reaction to living abroad (it’s more charming when you don’t live in New York).
Anyhow, this is the bottom of the list of my year in reading. Ranked in terms of how they affected me – images left, insights sparked, language bedazzlement renewed…
13. The Underground Railroad (2016) – Colson Whitehead
Unpopular opinion ahead, as this was one of the most celebrated novels of the year: I would have preferred to read about this subject of the novel in non-fiction form. Whitehead is passionate and eloquent on his theme, which is so explicitly slavery in a historical context, rather than the fictional characters he creates. His interest is in the way attitudes towards slavery and treatment of African Americans shifted by state, based on the laws, economy and historic moment. The main character has a too-contemporary attitude and ability to synthesize that feels beyond her moment in time. Uneducated and illiterate (until she teaches herself to read), she’s relentlessly atheist, and is able to extrapolate views on complex issues like the need for solidarity with native peoples, the reproductive rights of mentally ill slaves, and the horrors of the middle passage. While I took in the points, I wasn’t convinced it was the character who thought them. Similarly, manifesting the underground railroad as a physical rather than the real metaphor it was in history casts doubt on any real details he includes. (A novel like Beloved, on the other hand, is character-based, delving into the psychology of having a child while enslaved, and is effective in that sense. The clearly fictional aspects, like the magical realist touches (ghost baby), enhance the understanding of the people that Morrison creates, rather than casting doubt on the historical reality of slavery.)
Origin: Purchased new at Utrecht bookstore after unanimous Toastie book club vote.
14. The Circle (2014) – Dave Eggers
It captures the relentless cheeriness and blind optimism of the tech industry, blithely ignoring the sinister implications of inventions like tiny cameras, constant connectivity, and the destruction of privacy. I liked best the inclusion of the main character’s private moments kayaking alone, a more subtle nod to the way such moments are becoming more and more scarce. Also the descriptions of online activity – the constant need to react to the primitive emotional needs of a virtual audience. As a piece of fiction, it lost me in the last third, with heavy-handed metaphors (the Mariana Trench animals), the sudden escalation of the plot (Annie character), and the obliviousness of the protagonist (part of the point, but her stupidity was frustrating).
Origin: Gift from bookworm friend Shannon.
15. Unsuitable for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers – Selected by Jane Robinson (1994)
An anthology of travel accounts by women, across centuries and countries. The excerpts include accounts from a Mormon missionary in Switzerland, an ambassador’s wife in Turkey, pilgrimages to the Holy Land, rich ladies on the Grand Tour (in Italy). It’s organized by continent, very fat, and the excerpts usually quite short, so it’s only a taste of each writer. In a search for comprehensiveness, the distinctive voices are lost. Though there are some fascinating journeys, you leave them too soon and you’re not tempted to read the whole book (I didn’t).
Origin: Random purchase at a used bookstore in Gent.
16. The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) – Patricia Highsmith
I saw the film first and it rather tainted my reading of this book. The characters and their relationships were more fully developed in the film; the sexual tension between the two men runs higher and the girlfriend (played by Gwyneth) smarter and more volatile. The film is also so scenic and lush, a European fantasy, while the book is more internal, a tour inside the mind of a cold-blooded murderer, in a thriller sort of way. I wasn’t particularly inspired to read the rest of the series.
Origin: Boekenzolder, the free book warehouse in Leiden, picked up by Dan as we as we had just watched the film.
17. PornoBurka (2013) (en español) – Brigitte Vasallo
Read as part of my search for a novel I won’t be able to resist translating into English. It looked promising as it takes on very-now issues like the gentrification of cities (in this case in Barcelona), and their citizens reckoning with a new age of multiculturalism and clash of cultures. But in this novel, the parody goes so far that it’s not sure what it’s parodying anymore, or maybe what the point of the parody is. Every group and character becomes a target, to the point of being offensive (feminists, gay men, etc.), though I think the intention is the opposite. The absurdity is stretched so far it doesn’t hold together at the end.
Origin: Fantastic big bookstore in Barcelona
18. Fates and Furies (2015) – Lauren Groff
This was listed as Obama’s favorite book of 2015, possible proof the government lies. Otherwise I would say I don’t trust Obama’s taste in fiction. Although a lot of people liked this book. I did not. The protagonists are rich and beautiful and irresistible to all mortals. It features not one but two private detectives, a stolen painting, a secret abortion AND a secret baby, etc. while purporting to offer insights about marriage amid references to Greek tragedy. Writing that consciously tries to be interesting via curious metaphors (e.g. her armpit hair was like a baby bird’s nest), amid what is ultimately a schlocky plot.
Origin: Toastie book club selection, purchased at ABC Books in The Hague.
Books in Progress
Not abandoned! In progress!
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome – Mary Beard
230 out of 536 pages. I shouldn’t have put this down, should have kept plowing through while I had momentum. A nice balance between scholarly and secular. I was enjoying it for the way it raised questions about Ancient Rome rather than providing pat answers. I will finish it!
Origin: Impulse buy at Heathrow airport bookstore following a flight delay. Had been eyeing it for some time at various bookstores.
A History of the Lowlands
Another history book. But this one soooo dry. But with good tidbits if you’re paying attention. Therefore: not abandoned yet.
Clases de Literatura – Julio Cortázar
Again, I was enjoying it but put it down and became distracted with something else. A transcript of a lecture series Cortázar gave at Berkeley, with insights into his stories, development as a writer, influences, etc.
Books Abandoned
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely – Claudia Rankine
I love Rankine’s genre defiance, her use of images, her rawness. However, this was the second time I abandoned this book out of a fear of being launched into a depression.
Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. we didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain…
Mother was The Woman the whole world had imagined to death. It proved very hard to re-negotiate the world’s nostalgic phantasy about our purpose in life. The trouble was that we too had all sorts of wild imaginings about what Mother should “be” and were cursed with the desire to not be disappointing. We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicised by the societal system, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother. All the same, we felt guilty about unveiling this delusion in case the niche we had made for ourselves and our much-loved children collapsed in ruins around our muddy trainers – which were probably sewn together by child slaves in sweatshops all over the globe. It was mysterious because it seemed to me that the male world and its political arrangements (never in favour of children and women) was actually jealous of the passion we felt for our babies. Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure –and unhappy too– but never as miserable as the twenty-first century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel. It required us to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic, self-sacrificing but fulfilled – we were to be Strong Modern Women whilst being subjected to all kinds of humiliations, both economic and domestic. If we felt guilty about everything most of the time, we were not sure what it was we had actually done wrong.
When a female writer walks a female character into the centre of her literary enquiry (or a forest) and this character starts to project shadow and light all over the place, she will have to find a language that is in part to do with learning how to become a subject rather than a delusion, and in part to do with unknotting the ways in which she has been put together by the societal system in the first place. She will have to be canny how she sets about doing this because she will have many delusions of her own. In fact it would be best fi she was uncanny when she sets about doing this. It’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject, it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer.
the brilliant Deborah Levy, from Things I Don’t Want to Know
I don’t want to be a creature who says the wrong thing when someone’s pet is dying. Condemned to a life of big feet, misshaping high-heeled pumps. That’s not what Michelangelo was after. When that soft duo ate the fruit of knowledge, we got stuck despairing at an unplucked nipple hair and stopping and fumbling to put on a condom. Who wants that? A creature who mumbles and slumps, who writes in clichés, who laughs at the wrong spot, can’t understand post-modern theory, forgets names, doesn’t photograph well, tries and fails, what sort of creature is this?
“The rubble women” was how they referred to the ones who cleared the remains of the city after the war. It seemed like heavy work for women, but there weren’t many young men left around. The daily pay was about the cost of a pack of cigarettes. They saved the bricks that remained whole to resell. The corpse of the city. Before the cranes, the rebuilding, someone had to clean it up, someone had to do it. Hair under handkerchiefs, they don’t seem unhappy, in black-and-white, despite the stench and the hard labor, and the ravaged capital, but anything is better than the bombs falling.
Today more than 60 people were gassed to death by their government. I don’t know how else to put it. At least 10 of them children. I didn’t want to hear about it either. I wanted to pack slowly, choose my favorite things to wear on the trip (dresses because it’s spring), read about the occult and Alistair Crowley, but the knowledge is like a chemical reaction between two elements: it can’t be undone.
On the ferry from Naxos to Piraeus port, we met an Orthodox nun, with beads and wimple in the wind. She admired the sketches we had made on the island. When she saw the drawings of the ancient gods, she said, Those are demons.
Apollo and Zeus and Demeter. Her demonization reinstated their existence, some 2,600 later, far more than the textbooks of the average Athenian teenagers, drinking iced coffee and tuning into the buzz of economic crisis around them.
(The Ancient Greek word “daimon” is translated as “god,” “divine,” “power,” and “fate.”) She then proudly showed us, on her primitive cell phone, pictures of her own drawings, cartoon characters of squat girls with pigtails and bows and
goggly eyes. She bemoaned that the church hierarchy forbid her using comics to teach children about their faith. Then she said we must get married under the Church and have many babies. In the early Roman Empire, “like pagans, Christians
still saw the gods and their power, and by an easy shift of opinion they turned these pagan daimones into malevolent ‘demons’, the troupe of Satan. Far into the Byzantine period Christians eyed their cities’ old pagan statuary as a seat of the demons’ presence. It was no longer beautiful, it was infested.”
The machinery of the saltwater tanks kept breaking. His secretary insisted it was a spirit. After he lost a whole shipment of lobsters, as a last resort, he agreed to hire the santero, who was at least cheaper than the mechanic. At the first consultation, the old man asked funny things of him, to pass a coconut around his body as he showered, for example, which would cleanse it spiritually. And he had to drive far out of town to purchase a live dove from another Cuban, an old lady. The dove was unnerved, fluttering crazily as it was passed over the auras of everyone present, its feet bound by the santero’s brown hands. Except when it was near the fast-breathing little body of the secretary’s young child, then it became still. After two hours in the warehouse, the santero emerged sweating, and the dove was dead. It had to be thrown in a river, he said, which took some doing. Spirit or not, the machines didn’t break down anymore, that was what was important. The lobster business went under months later, when a new competitor became aggressive, hired thugs to wreck one of the shipments, stole most of his customers in a single week, with cut-throat prices.
If the sacred land were really sacred, you reason, would not some divine assistance keep the bulldozers away? But the fact of its destruction doesn’t make it less sacred. Throughout the centuries, when one culture conquered another, it would build its houses of worship on the same sites. Ergo, an oil pipeline is an altar of worship.
Whence the fear of magic? An old woman boiling weeds. The physical stuff of magic (setting aside the charlatans), is of the earth: herbs, blood, flowers, sparkling stones, hair, fire, lunar light, organs, felines, water. The shape that crystals take, or a spider’s web: a geometric fruit of the earth.
Things act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy A scholar defines magic separate from religion saying that it’s an individual matter, rather than a collective experience, tending toward secrecy. So then, what is a daemon?
