Somehow my reading plans for the year have shifted. Here is my Summer Reading List. I will read other books of course, but this is a more focused list, one to see me throughout the rest of the year. I am one of those people who likes to learn as much as I can about whatever I find myself involved in, and the thought of learning about cancer is calming. Since I cannot, at the moment, ignore cancer, I can learn as much as I can about it.
As you will see from my April list, I've already read two of these books, and yet they remain on the stack. I actually shelved them and brought them back. I have referred back to both books repeatedly, and both have excellent references and I also have a growing list of articles to work my way through. Best to keep them at hand.
But what about April? My reading in April was scattershot and unfocused. Often my head wasn't in it. Sometimes I was simply depressed, sometimes I was simply too tired. It doesn't matter. It seems likely that I will not reach my 120 book goal for the year, but then so what. No one is keeping track but me, and it is a minor distraction. No groupings this month, simply fiction, and nonfiction.
30. Jane Harper, The Survivors.
31. Danielle Girard, White Out.
32. Siddhartha Mukerjee, The Emperor of All Maladies
33. Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist
34. Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind.
35. Paulette Jiles, News of the World.
36. Avrom Bluming, Estrogen Matters.
37. Việt Thanh Nguyễn, The Sympathizer.
38. Winifred Peck, Bewildering Cares.
I started the month in need of some escapist reading and, as it turns out, The Survivors was not the best book for my state of mind. It is beautifully written, but although it centered around a murder, it is really a slow-burn character study filled with gloom and the narrator's sense of guilt. Given my own state of mind I found it difficult, but I stuck with it and I actually liked the ending, which pulled the story together. I think, in a different frame of mind, I would have liked this very much as it is a very good exploration of how tragedy, as well as mindset and the assumptions and stories people tell about the tragedy, marks and changes people. In this case a murder resurrects long buried but not dead feelings about an earlier tragedy, and the reader gets to see how those memories and fears have shaped both individuals and a town. There are inconsistencies in the accepted version of what happened in the past, but no one really sees them because they have already formed their own narrative. In some ways, when the truth arises, it seems like it came out of left field, except that it had been present all along, in the subtext. I found the novel fascinating, tragic, sad, but also hopeful in some ways.
Still looking for some kind of escape, I next picked up Danielle Girard's White Out. It opened well, and I did finish it, but again I struggled. I perhaps could have forgiven the rough transitions, the holes in the plot, the disparate themes that were never quite connected, had the characters felt more compelling. But to this reader they seemed so immature and inconsistent, behaving in ways that made no sense, and the inconsistencies were never pulled together in any coherent way. Mostly I was just constantly annoyed with the lead detective, Kylie, who struck me as self-centered, illogical and often downright stupid. Heaven help this fictional town, but at least my annoyance, and my desire to learn what had happened to the one interesting, but still too inconsistently drawn character, Lily, drove me forward. Kylie does not interest me, so this will not be a series I will pursue further.
After two iffy attempts with fiction I leapt into Siddhartha Mukerjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, which had been sitting on my shelf for what, a decade, now? This was the distraction I needed. I plowed through it as if it were the most gripping novel. I read hungrily. I jotted notes and held conversations with myself. I could not put the book down. Yes, there was a lot of information, yes the author has some writing tics that I found annoying, but I think the book was compelling and beautifully written with wonderful metaphors and great flow. Perhaps this too was just me, but reading about cancer as I started my own cancer journey proved to be a very calming thing.
The next book on my list, Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Antiracist, just showed up because my turn finally arrived on the county library wait list. It is an excellent book, a well written book, a book I am glad I read. But I wanted to like it more than I did. Maybe if I had read it sooner. I am grateful for Kendi's argument that you are either a racist or an antiracist, and his exploration of how racist ideas sneak into our consciousness without our even realizing they are there. I like the way Kendi explores the development of his own understandings as a kind of guidebook to how we can look at ourselves, the way he tells us that just because we do not know we are racist, we are not absolved from the responsibility of rooting out our own misconceptions and hurtful ideas. There are some issues, more than we would like in fact, and racism is a big one, in which there really is no neutral territory. You are either upholding it or trying to tear it down. Unfortunately, and Kendi reminds us of this, the act of tearing down always starts within. I am either upholding a system that harms others, or I am trying to fight it. There really is no middle ground. I write this as the Tennessee legislature is attempting to legislate what can and cannot be taught about racism and American history. I find this morally heinous. There is no middle ground, I am either upholding racism, or I am acting to fight it. If one does not acknowledge one's history of failings one cannot become a better person. We all have failings, admitting them is not the same as saying we are bad people, only that we are flawed, as are we all. I am either a racist or an antiracist. I hope I can become the latter.
After Kendi I returned to fiction. Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is a fascinating novel, very low key, but the very sense of detachment that the author employs serves to emphasize the disconnect here, the disconnect between what is happening in the world and what we want to be happening, between what really is and what we see, between how we act and who we think we are. A middle-class and fairly middle-brow white family is renting a house on Long Island for a summer vacation. They want to pretend that this is their house, their life, if only for a moment. But then a black couple knocks on the door in the middle of the night, claiming to be the owners, seeking refuge from a disaster as yet unfelt in this vacation world. Everything is challenged. The internet is out, the news is out. When there is no information people are driven both by fear and by hope, including the irrational hope that if they just can get back to their old life all will be well. This is not so much an apocalyptical or even post-apocalyptical novel, but a pre-appocalyptical novel. What happens when we don't know what is happening? How do we behave? Who do we become? Fascinating.
Next I picked up News of the World, which I had read before. It holds up well on rereading. I watched the movie as well. Much as I enjoyed the movie, I still prefer the book, but then I almost always do. Jiles captures Texas as I know it and remember it in her prose, the space, the landscape, even the history and the people. I am reminded that I intended to read The Captured after my first reading of this novel, the true story of children captured by Indians. I still have not gotten to that, but I will even though life intervenes. I am also reminded that the Indian problem has been a problem throughout American history, not the problem of Indians killing settlers, but the problem of settlers who, once exposed to Indian culture did not want to return to their European roots. This dates back to Plymouth Rock, to early Virginia. What does this tell us about our own civilization, about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves? Reading this book again, especially following Alam's novel, the difference between Captain Kidd, who is very much a realist who deals with the world and what he needs to do, and Alam's characters, self-obsessed with their own bubbles and their neediness, so self-absorbed they don't really see others clearly, is striking. Don't know where I am going with this yet, but that thought hovers.
I picked up Estrogen Matters after listening to an interview with the author on Peter Attia's podcast. I have long been interested in the topic. I went through menopause early, and was diagnosed about the time the a report was published from the Women's Health Initiative (2002) stating that HRT was dangerous and it increased the risks of cancer, stroke, hart disease and death. Despite the fact that I had severe symptoms and was only in my early 40s, my doctor's refused to give me HRT. They continued to refuse, even as it became evident that this was not at all what the study found, that this report came from a misinterpretation of the data and it was not vetted by the scientists undertaking the study, that the risks were exaggerated or downright wrong. I knew this because I had a tendency to read all my husband's medical journals from cover to cover. Yet I still could not convince my doctor. It may or may not be too late for me now, nearly 20 years later, but there is all kinds of interesting information in this book, and all kinds of reference material available for follow-up. I love a book that makes me think, and makes me reexamine my assumptions.
Next, I finally read Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer. I read it now because his next novel The Committed came up on my library queue and I wanted to read The Sympathizer first. I was completely blown away. It is a novel that it is almost disturbing in its intelligence, in its unsparing look at the world and the foibles of humanity. And yet it is not really polemical fiction. It is brilliant and sharp, clever and touching. The author has a way of capturing a feeling, a place, a pivotal moment with such clarity that the reader feels the emotion of the time and is connected to his or her own pivotal moments, a way of capturing the mindset of its participants, of exploring a culture, its strengths and its discontents without really preaching. It is a very clever book, at times bitterly sarcastic, at time outrageously funny, and although it takes place in the past it is still relevant to our lives today and our future. As you can tell, I loved this book and was primed for the next one. I am in the middle of reading The Committed now.
I actually started Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck before I picked up The Sympathizer. I usually like these mid-twentieth century novels of women's lives, and I usually like the novels of Winifred Peck. But I struggled to engage with this one. I suspect that I really needed a book that took me outside of myself, a book like The Sympathizer, and Bewildering Cares was just a little too slow for my agitated and peripatetic mind. It is the fictional journal of a week in the life of a vicar's wife during a week in 1940, the story of a middle aged woman of some wit, who loves her husband and her parish even though she is often exasperated with the petty cares and trials of life. The novel is somewhat more serious and less light-hearted than Peck's other novels, but still funny, and I did love Camilla's constant obsession with the small things, when there were big things brewing all around. But this is so much like most of us I found it endearing. So there you have it, I enjoyed the book even as I struggled to read it. A bit of an oxymoron, no? But then, when did being human actually ever really make sense?
