To All the Books I've Loved Before
Hi. So I’m going to try a new thing. If you hate it then feel free to reach out and tell me. Hopefully you don’t. Ideally you won’t mind getting one e-mail during the week that’s more of an article, and then another during the weekend that’s a more scattered stuff I like sort of deal. But I promise that’s it. To paraphrase Beetlejuice, I won’t do more than two newsletters a week, babe.
Also, the photo above was taken by me last year at the Lake Forest Public Library, one of my absolute favorite places in the world. I’ll never forget that 2020 was my year without libraries, and what an impact that had on me. I really kept thinking about what an incredible thing it is to be able to go to the branch by my house, walk around, see a title I didn’t think about reading and going, “Dang, I should read that.” And then I can! For free! I miss the library as much as I do having a drink with a friend in a bar or a great dinner with a group.
Something I noticed this year, given that I follow a lot of writers and Serious Readers on Twitter — the kind of folks that share the list of titles they read at the end of the year and it’s in three digits —was the constant mention that people were having a hard time paying attention, and that attempting to read or write was futile.
I understand that. For me, however, it was the opposite. I needed to occupy every second I could to avoid drowning myself in terrible news all day long. So I threw myself into reading more than I ever have. And when I say “threw myself,” I should mention I myself am one of those people that is in the three digits in terms of books I finish every year. That’s not necessarily a brag considering a lot of those books are for review or research, but if you follow me on Twitter or Instagram or have been reading my stuff for a bit, then you probably know my deal. I’ve usually got at least two or three books going at a time. A mix of newer titles and older. I’m pretty all over the place in terms of what I read.
But this year I really disappeared into older titles as a form of escaping from the time we’ve been living through. I couldn’t do much with dystopian novels as a plague ravaged the world and all kinds of self-inflicted natural disasters ravaged the planet; I didn’t quite feel like going down the more experimental route with my fiction, looking more for plot these days than anything else; and, maybe most importantly, no books about America that looked at the last four years. No tell-all memoirs from some Trump person or even the Obama memoir. I had to get as far away from 2020 as possible. So I read and reread a lot of P.G. Wodehouse and also went through Edward St. Aubyn’s masterful Patrick Melrose novels. I enjoyed Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, got through most of of Cecil Beaton’s diaries, went through a handful of Patricia Highsmith’s lesser-known works, loved that Penguin Classics made Claude McKay Romance in Marseille available and Divorcing by Susan Taubes came out on NYRB Classics and that was also very good. The whole point of NYRB Classics is to put out books that are “lost” or “forgotten” classics, and while I’m excited when I get that email saying they’re putting out another title, they usually have at least one or two every year that I think everybody in the book world must read. They did it with The Dud Avocado, they basically spearheaded the Eve Babitz resurgence, and I know Renata Adler never quite went away or anything like that, but after they put Speedboat back into the world, I noticed quite a few people carrying it around or talking about Adler like they’d been dropping her name in conversations for years. For my money, Divorcing should be that title. It was really ahead of its time for coming out in 1969. I had to go and track down the NYT review of the book from when it first came out and, yup, it’s a real sexist doozy.
A few other things: I read pretty much all of Tom Wolfe’s non-fiction for the umpteenth time trying to figure out how he’d write about these times, and turned my eye towards Japanese books translated into English. I especially enjoyed Yasushi Inoue’s Bullfight. I also read the Rachel Cusk Outline Trilogy and I’m very glad I did that after everybody was done talking about them because tuning out the discourse helped me enjoy the experience. I’d really love to try and do more of that, reading or watching or listening after all the talk around something has died down. Maybe I’ll try to make that a resolution for 2021. I definitely won’t stick to it, but whatever. Worth a shot.
I also read The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life by John le Carré a few months back. I picked it back up a few nights ago after the news broke he had passed away. Would highly suggest that one as well. It’s random memories from his life, and if you know even a little bit about him, he led a wild one.
As for new books, I’ll start with non-fiction. The first one I’ll mention is Kyle Chayka’s The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism. I got a lot out of this one. The combination of criticism and history led me to really view his subject in a different light. I mean I’m pretty familiar with modernism as a concept. I find it interesting and the discourse around it as a lifestyle choice or an art movement has always been something I’ve paid some attention to. But as I sit here surrounded by all my beloved stuff, it was always something I was curious about, but maybe couldn’t get. That is, I could get lost looking at the clean lines and pretty colors of a Frank Stella painting and considered my first trip to the Glass House something of a pilgrimage even though Philip Johnson was a pretty despicable person. But it was never my thing — if that makes any sense at all.
Yet the way Chayka engages with both the concept and the reader really opened up different avenues for my own brain to wander and made me realize I’d been wrong thinking about this as a thing in the first place. I often find with books like The Longing for Less that enjoying the experience of reading and being challenged to think and rethink things don’t usually happen together. You’re either one, the other, or you hate yourself after you close the book and almost feel dumber. I’ve always liked reading Chayka at various publications he writes for. He’s the type of critic that I think is just as suited for books as he is for articles. That’s not the easiest thing to pull off. Also, the subject matter isn’t the easiest thing to write about. I mean, I’ve been trying to understand the work of John Cage for years, and after closing this book, I had this very chill voice in my head saying, “Relax, man. Just let Cage and his work be.” So thanks for that, Mr. Chayka.
Obviously the big story of this year will end up being all the great books that came out and didn’t have a chance. I think good books will find a way to an audience, but I also think having your book come out just as the shit is hitting the fan is the most unenviable spot I can imagine an author being in. Coming out in April, I had really hoped that everybody I knew would be talking about Marisa Meltzer’s This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World — and Me. And the people I know that did read it shared a similar sentiment that a lot of people should pick this one up, but we were all busy trying not to get sick and figuring out how to have Zoom cocktail parties to keep spirits up. I’m personally always looking for these sorts of books, ones that shed light and tell the story of some figure or cultural phenomenon, and then the writer ties it back to their own lives for a hybrid cultural history/memoir type of deal. I tried doing this with my own first book, but probably wouldn’t have even bothered putting that out had I read This Is Big. Meltzer does it so well.
Helen Macdonald is one of my favorite authors these days, so it should come as no surprise that I’m including Vesper Flights here. We live in such a hopeless time, but reading her brings me comfort. I actually went through this collection twice this year.
I’m always on the lookout for those wild man vs. the elements adventure books, but sometimes I wonder what else can be written about that hasn’t been done before. Then I pick up a book like The Moth and the Mountain: A True Story of Love, War, and Everest by Ed Caesar and I start to believe that maybe not every crazy story about humans trying to fill some void through adventures in nature has been told after all.
Other new non-fiction books I liked: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson, Desert Oracle: Volume 1: Strange True Tales from the American Southwest by Ken Layne, Later by Paul Lisicky.
As for fiction, while I don’t have specific places on my shelves for books that I consider part of a specific canon, or that revolve around certain subject matter, four titles that stood out for me certainly check the boxes of things I will always be interested in reading, and they all did it in unforgettable ways.
I read The Cactus League by Emily Nemens before we had to wait for our National Pastime to start. I had very little patience for the slow pace of baseball this year, but there is always a special place in my heart for these fictional takes on the game and the people that play it. The easiest way I sold people on this book was I’d ask them if they love Bull Durham. If they said yes, then I’d ask if they love Middlemarch. Then they’d look at me confused and I’d have to backtrack and say it’s nothing like those two disparate titles, but I felt like I was experiencing something akin to them. I’m really not helping my cause here with any of this babble, I realize that. All I will say was my favorite baseball experience of 2020 was The Cactus League.
Like baseball books, I’m drawn to novels that center around the college experience to tell a larger story. I have three different copies of Lucky Jim on my bookshelf and I’m one of those A Secret History stans and I’m fine with that. I loved Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and have been craving going back and reading Joanna Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age. I’m a sucker for these kinds of books, especially when they offer something different. And Brandon Taylor’s Real Life absolutely did. I was floored by this one and I’ve seen it on pretty much every list this year, and deservingly so. I’d just like to add my voice to the chorus and sing its praises.
Villa of Delirium, written by Adrien Goetz and translated from French by Natasha Lehrer, is another one of my favorite types of books to read: a narrator looking back wistfully on beautiful times and recalling fascinating people who usually live in amazing homes, the likes of which we probably won’t see again. You know what I mean: Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited, The Go-Between, etc. Goetz tells the story of the very real Reinach family, whose wealth and eccentricities were the source of much discussion at the turn of the century. A more eccentric version of the Rothschilds, basically. They built a house on the French Riviera that was supposed to look like something out of ancient Greece (you can actually take a tour through the house thanks to the magic of the Internet), and the narrator tries to recall those happier times before everything in Europe fell apart with the rise of Hitler. There is an air of tragedy throughout the whole book, with the story of the Reinach children ending in concentration camps and the home falling into the hands of the Nazis. But there’s such a unique balance that Goetz works with. Never too beautiful that it’s precious, never too somber that you feel like you’re falling to pieces reading the book. It’s as smooth of a story as you could hope for given the mix of things, and Lehrer’s translation almost might have you believe it was actually written in English.
Ah yes. A heist novel that truly earns all the tropes like “it crackles with energy” and “I couldn’t put it down.” It sounds hokey to say those sorts of things, but that’s really what you want from a book like Stan Parish’s Love and Theft. I loved this book and I see it as something that I’ve been hoping for more of in terms of the lines being blurred between literary and genre fiction. You see a lot of good stuff in the horror, sci-fi, speculative whatever you call it world with writers like Kelly Link or Carmen Maria Machado, and I think writers like Megan Abbott and Laura Lippman have once again elevated crime fiction and thrillers to a place they haven’t been in a long time. Parish does that with the heist novel. He’s a great writer who understands plot. I know you read a line like that and think “Well, isn’t that what pretty much every novel is supposed to be,” and, well, sure. Ideally. But that’s often not the case, unfortunately. So, yes, Love and Theft crackles with energy and I didn’t want to put it down.
A few other things: I feel like Ivy Pochoda almost flies under the radar as one of the most interesting fiction writers in America. Sort of like what I mentioned with Parish’s book, the balance of plot and great writing has been a constant throughout her career, and she teeters between genre and literary fiction (sorry, I also hate these terms, but I need to try my best to explain what makes her so special). She’s one of my favorite writers right now, and I think These Women might be her best book yet. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t talk about those two books and also mention Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s brilliant Mexican Gothic. I was so taken by the title and the cover that I went out of my way not to read any reviews of the book, and good lord was I turned inside out by this one. Again, plot and great writing, but Moreno-Garcia led me to think maybe I was getting some sort of noir, and boom. She beautifully twists and contorts this book into something terrifying and bizarre. Absolutely brilliant stuff. In many ways, I could also shoehorn Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind into this conversation. Having loved his previous books, I had no clue what I was getting myself into this one, and the book left me gasping. This is a novel, but there’s something Hitchcockian about it that made me love it. It’s odd, but I’ve never been one for the whole “beach read” thing, yet the books by Parish, Pochoda, Moreno-Garcia and Alam all made me wish I got to spend a little time in a haunted beach house or something like that this summer. That sounds pretty ideal. But overall, I’m thankful for all those books because they all took me out of my head when I needed it most.
With Friendship, Emily Gould showed she has a knack for writing the best novels for and about Millennials old enough to have been influenced by Generation X. There’s lots of heart and charm in her writing, but she’s funny and has a real eye for detail that comes through as experienced and not researched. With her new book, Perfect Tunes, Gould continues to also relationships in such a deep and meaningful way that felt so incredibly necessary to me as I sat inside taking stock of the people in my own life that I missed throughout this year. It comes through that she really gets into the heads and hearts of the characters she creates, and it makes reading her something I truly look forward to.
Danielle Evans also has this gift for really giving you these deep, unforgettable characters and stories with The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories. I had flashbacks to sitting and reading or rereading Grace Paley while sitting with this one. I’m not a fan of comparing authors to other writers, and Evans certainly does her own thing here, but the emotions I felt while reading this were similar. If you know me, you probably know a comparison to Paley might be the biggest compliment I can give somebody.
I’m going to put Adam Wilson’s Sensation Machinesand Tracy O’Neill’s Quotients here in the same paragraph since they share a publisher. For the Wilson book, I think a comparison to Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story is apt. But I’ll also add that I think Wilson is funnier and this book, as I stated when I wrote about it for another publication, is really a near-future dystopian take on the life of the hipster approaching middle age. I found myself thinking about Wilson’s book when I watched Save Yourselves!, a movie that concerns itself with young urbanites, technology and everything falling to shit. The difference is that Wilson’s book doesn’t have the fuzzy space aliens dropping from the sky. And that there’s something really terrifyingly possible about his vision. As for O’Neill, a few years back she wrote what I consider the great figure skating novel in The Hopeful. So I was pretty anxious to check out her next book. And while I was already anticipating Quotients, it actually resonated with me far more than I expected. It isn’t Fox Mulder paranoid, but that’s really the thread that holds this whole thing together. O’Neill tapped into the feeling of living in the most paranoid of times, and she turned into this novel that really had me reexamining so much after I read it.