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2019 Reading Round-Up, Part II

6. Transit and 7. Kudos by Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber, 2016 and 2018)

Books two and three in Cusk’s brilliant trilogy. I’ve placed them together as I read the around the same time and they’re not entirely distinct in my mind. Transit gets us closer to Faye in her home territory of London, while in Kudos she’s on the road again, at a couple of book festivals, with much to subtly say about the publishing industry, other writers, etc.

Nearly a year on from reading them (and thinking of them in the midst of the global pandemic and economic crisis) I do wonder what’s left, they seemed so of the time, and now we are clearly in a new era… I think a lot of the thrill and satisfaction comes from the writing itself – Cusk is just absolutely dazzling and gets straight to the emotion heart and complexity of any situation. I wrote more a lot more about this trilogy here.

Provenance: Probably The American Book Center in Amsterdam?

8. Peregrinos de la belleza: Viajeros por Italia y Grecia by María Belmonte (Acantilado, 2015)


A nonfiction account of writers, artists, scientists from Northern Europe who found their true home in Italy and Greece, whether because of a love for ancient art, that Mediterranean light or the allure of the perfect island. Each subject covers a different “pilgrim of beauty” (all men) and span the 18th century (beginning with the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann) to 20th century (ending with writer Lawrence Durrell). Belmonte is a charming guide, clearly in love with the Mediterranean herself, and generous to her subjects (overlooking their major deficiencies as husbands or fathers, for example), focusing on their creative output and inspiration drawn time in Italy and Greece. I also get dreamy about those countries, so this was a nice escape in the winter months.

Provenance: the fantastic Panta Rhei bookshop in Madrid, which specializes in art, design and travel books.

9. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (Fourth Estate, 2019)

I, like many other admirers of Tolentino’s writing in the New Yorker, couldn’t wait to get my hands on this essay collection. I was absolutely blown away by the first essay, about our life on the internet, framed by her personal experiences online, which began when she was a child (Tolentino was born in 1989). I also enjoyed her piece on the “marriage-industrial complex.” Less a fan of the essays on her experiences with religion and ecstasy (the drug), and on women in fiction. If I’m allowed a quibble with the book, I think several of the pieces were long-winded and unfocused at times (I learned more than I ever wanted to know, for example, about ballet barre classes), which is maybe evidence of the value of being rigorously edited at a major publication. But a minor quibble. It’s a pleasure, actually to see a young woman writer take up this much space, embrace her success, follow her thoughts to the end and beyond, and it also shows she has room to grow, which is exciting.

Side note on the culture buzz around this: The reception and Tolentino’s  perfect book tour and media blitz became a story itself because many of her essays touch on how our current incarnation of capitalism (of life lived online) ultimately exploits what’s unique and intimate about the self, with Tolentino consistently admitting her complicity and inability to escape the web, both in interviews and in the book. I think there’s a touch of envy to the criticism, because Tolentino is successful in every way – brilliant, talented, also young and beautiful, funny, self-deprecating, and also seems like she’d be fun to hang out with. You have to just give in and love her.

Provenance: American Book Center in The Hague.

10. Open Secrets by Alice Munro (Vintage, 1994)

I didn’t start reading Munro until about eight years ago, and began with her most recent work (thanks to my lovely mother-in-law who introduced me to her). So it was interesting to pick up some of her earlier stories. The collection as a whole isn’t the 100% masterpiece that Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship or Like Life are, but Munro will always offer something memorable, no matter what the story. I tend to like her historical stories less than the ones set in modern times. There were a couple in this collection that really stuck with me, though, “The Albanian Virgin”, about a woman traveler kidnapped by an Albanian tribe, and “The Jack Randa Hotel”, about a woman who goes to Australia in secret in pursuit of the man who left her. (The opening of the latter story, when a plane lands and is doused with insecticide before disembarking, even made it into my dreams.)

Provenance: Boekenzolder (free book warehouse!)

11. After Henry by Joan Didion (Vintage, 1992)

A lesser-known essay collection by Didion, published in the early 90s. Maybe forgotten because it’s frontloaded with topical essays full of names most wouldn’t recognize now (e.g. Reagan’s former chief of staff) and insider-baseball observations about the political class. But it has a couple of stunners that make this worth owning: a profile of Patti Hearst, and a magisterial, long piece about the Central Park Five, which turns into a portrait of New York City in the 80s, the hierarchies, the media, the governance, the collective self-delusions shared by city dwellers. A real model for the form.

Provenance: Boekenzolder (free book warehouse)

12 . Coventry by Rachel Cusk (Faber & Faber, 2019)

This is a collection of Cusk’s essays previously published in various places, so not a cohesive work, which I was disappointed to discover. Still, she’s incredible on just about any subject, including art – Louise Bourgeois, for example. The essay on her teenage daughters, called “Lions on Leashes” is also wonderful. I guess this book is a bit further down my list because a few of the opening pieces struck me as absurdly cranky – one about traffic in her small town in the countryside (or maybe I’m the cranky one – I have no interest in reading about driving as a metaphor). That being said, Cusk has set the bar ridiculously high, so one can’t really justifiably be critical about any of her work.

Provenance: The American Book Center in Amsterdam

13. Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit  by Aisha Sabatini Sloan  (1913 Press, 2017)

This book made me realize that an essay collection is a bit like a short story collection:   the author is trying out different techniques and ways in, the essays will vary in length and topic, some will be more successful than others, and there are ones you’ll like more than others. This collection had many “braided” essays – ones that weave in often seemingly disparate topics (growing up African American in L.A., the art of David Hockney, and Rodney King). She covers a lot of ground in this book: her white cousin’s experience as a cop in Detroit, the art of Basquiat, Buddhist meditation, Beyonce’s Lemonade, body memory, especially as an African American (a history of bodies subject to violence), the 2016 election … My favorite was an essay as list form about Sabatini Sloan’s father, renowned photographer Lester Sloan, which successfully employs the second person. I like her voice best when she’s ironic, funny, personal.

Provenance: Ordered direct from the publisher (my lovely publisher), 1913 Press.

14. Sabrina by Nick Drnaso (Drawn & Quarterly, 2018)

I got interested in this book when it became the first graphic novel ever to be nominated for the Booker Prize. The sound bite attached was that it’s the first book to successfully convey the Trump era. I’m not sure about that claim, but I do agree that it conveys people in places in America you don’t often see represented in fiction. The art is surprisingly simple, dull at times, even, which I think critics of the book objected to. But I think this is a conscious choice, a way to contain the grief, paranoia, disconnection of the characters. The worst events happen “off screen,” which I think places the moral responsibility, the weight of reaction on the reader… Still thinking about this one. I think I need to read it again.

Provenance: Ordered from the local comics store.

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2016 Books, Part III

My top 5 books read last year…

1. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001)  – Alice Munro

I’ve read a couple other Munro story collections, but this is the one that really drove home her brilliance. The way a moment between two people contains complexity and a dozen other stories; death and illness as a part of life, not the story itself. 

2. One Hundred Demons (2002) – Lynda Barry

I read this in one setting. Memoir/autobiographical comics generated via an old Japanese method of drawing demons with pen and ink. Goofy, heartbreaking, authentic tales about dogs, the 2000 election, adolescence, betraying friends, doing acid, mean mothers…

3. Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea (1931, trans. 2016, NYRB edition) – Teffi (trans. Ann Marie Jackson)

The art of understatement. A Russian elite displaced during the Russian revolution. Witness to hunger, murder, animal fear, but told through a lens of distance and biting humor, with an eye for the feminine perspective, feminine survival methods.

4. Drawn Together (2012) – R. Crumb and Aline Kaminsky-Crumb 

An anthology of all of the comics R. Crumb and his wife, Aline Kaminsky-Crumb have created together over their decades of partnership, from psychedelic-explicit nonsensical narratives in the 70s, to accounts of their semi-retired life in the south of France. The latter are my favorite – their frank/crude wisdom about aging, their lives, America vs. Europe, having money, sticking together, commercialism, etc.

5. The Odyssey – Homer (trans. E.V. Rieu, 1945)

Weird and presumptuous to put one of the foundations of Western literature as #5 on a list of books, but that’s how I felt about it. This was a gap in my reading, though I already knew a lot about the journey, the monsters, and the various characters. The opening is cinematic, fantastic, though I was disappointed that the various monsters only took up a fraction of the book (the Cyclops episode was my favorite) and so much was devoted to Odysseus’ bloody revenge on Penelope’s suitors and his servants who helped them. Telemachus was also such a jerk to his mother. She was always weeping and retiring to her chamber and he telling her to be quiet.

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Books Read in 2011, Part II

I read 21 books in 2011. Here are #1-10, ranked from most insight/pleasure/ideas/inspiration derived from to least enjoyed…

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1. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974) – Grace Paley

The story “Distance” changed what I thought it was possible to do with a short story. The voice most of all, how she just launches in. How it spans a period of time, how the narrator tells her own story as well as her son’s in one breath. How Paley is not afraid to say anything.

The “Faith stories” – Faith isn’t entirely likable, but she inhabits her. There is something weak about her – the way she is with men. The relationship between Faith and her parents.

A flavour of Brooklyn, Manhattan in the 1950s & 60s, tenement dwellers, urban people – Jews, latinos, blacks. The currents of activism, how they coursed through moms in the parks, too.

Sentences from “Distance”:

“Still, it is like a long hopeless homesickness my missing those young days. To me, they’re like my own place that I have gone away from forever, and I have lived all the time since among great pleasures but in a foreign town. Well, O.K. Farewell, certain years.”

“But don’t think I’m the only one that seen Ginny and John when they were the pearls of this pitchy pigsty block. Oh, there were many, and they are still around holding the picture in the muck under their skulls, like crabs.”

From the story “Debts”:

“There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.”

From the title story (it’s a prose poem a character wrote):

“The kids! the kids! Though terrible troubles hang over them, such as the absolute end of the known world quickly by detonation or slowly through the easygoing destruction of natural resources, they are still, even now, optimistic, humorous, and brave. In fact, they intend enormous changes at the last minute.”

2. On Photography (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977) – Susan Sontag

I started underlining passages & dog-earing pages, but it started happening on every page. So prescient & thought-provoking – so much of what she says is still (or more) applicable in terms of information/image overload, the manufacturing of nostalgia, the reign of irony, the fulfilment of the Surrealist ideology, the 20th century as the American century.

She is not afraid to bring the personal into her essays – her account of seeing photographs of WWII concentration camps as a child is her starting point in one essay. How it changed her, but how she still considered it exploitation, at some level.

Sontag is so opinionated, but nothing ever emerges as categorically good or bad, thank goodness. She’s clearly fascinated by photography, but unflinching about what it has taken away from (or how it has altered, transformed) human consciousness, our sense of reality, as well. 

Quotes (out of many many possible options):

“Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation.”

One that strikes me as appropriate to Tumblr:

“The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”

 3. Just Kids (HarperCollins, 2010) – Patti Smith

This book made me want to write, to collage, to love creative people, to not be afraid to hero-worship artists of the past (at the very least for their art), to call myself an artist, at least in my own mind. She is a hopeless romantic, not afraid to say so. I was also encouraged by how out of touch she actually felt with her own time, at times (the Warhol Factory people), was instead living with Rimbaud, her own vision of poetry. Reminded me of how Bob Dylan, seen as the bard of his time, spent years with early 20th century America (Guthrie). How Mapplethorpe affectionately called her “Soggy” because of her weeping bouts. How confusing she found her own time, and being young.

Her androgyny seems to have spared her some of the typical difficulties women face in “artist circles”. She has her own beauty, but I didn’t get the sense she was relegated to a sexual plane. Maybe also because many were gay artists… Especially vivid was the section on life at the Chelsea Hotel. Also loved her account of her love affair with Sam Shepard.

Quote:

“In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos – the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself. Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination.”

4. La increíble y triste historia de la Cándida Erendira y su abuela desalmada (1972)- Gabriel García Márquez 

I read this in Cartagena, the prefect setting. “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” and “El ahogado más hermoso del mundo” are my favourite Márquez stories. They’re like prose poems, the image is in the end, what he’s after. (An ancient man with enormous, shedding wings in a cage, being fed like a chicken every day by a practical small-town woman; a gigantic man washing ashore & being bathed, dressed, beloved & mourned by an entire little town by the sea.)

I wasn’t crazy about the title story, his interest in rape, the deflowering of young women, but it’s almost as if he finds a kind of beauty in it, the traveling carnival air the story takes on.

5. Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey (2010 reissue, first published 1988) – Lawrence Blair, with Lorne Blair

An adventure that doesn’t seem possible today. I was fascinated by the insights into the various cultures they visited on different Indonesian islands. Also how the people living in the thickest jungle survived through constant movement. There is a spiritual core to the book that makes you feel connected to the author, to the beautiful world out there & to the people he writes about.

6. Fellini on Fellini (Delta, 1977, first published in German, 1974) – Fellini 

Essays, interviews, forewords for books: assorted thoughts by Fellini. I learned about his interest in Jung, his take on the 60s-70s (he was revolutionized by the sack dress!), the idea of the artist, his process of making films. Ultimately a hungry, curious, positive view of life. 

Quote:

“We live in an age that has made a cult of methodology, that makes us weakly believe that scientific or ideological ideas have the edge over reality, and that is suspicious of fantasy, of individual originality, in other words of personality.”

7. Los detectives salvajes (1998) – Roberto Bolaño

The experimental form (different narrator in each chapter) took some getting used to -there’s no thread to hold onto, really. But it becomes dreamy, film-like. It’s about the loss of the Poet, youth, the Idea of Revolution. Made me feel as if I should read it a couple more times.

8. Madame Bovary (1856) – Flaubert, trans. Lydia Davis (2010)

Oh, the dangers of reading. How the ideas, imagination, fictions become preferable to reality… Sympathetic to the life of a woman, and then to M. Bovary, too. Luminous translation.

9. A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) – Jennifer Egan

Ambitious, ballsy, engrossing, philosophical. About the passage of time, but the book itself is not excessively long – yes!

10. Too Much Happiness (2010) – Alice Munro

Short stories, first I’d read by Munro. They go to unexpected places, but with an expert hand. Many touch on death & grieving, but in a genuine way, not to give a narrative gravitas (I’ve found this is to be a go-to device with others to suddenly give an otherwise empty story meaning, raising the stakes, but doesn’t feel grounded).