Twenty-seven books. When I taught full time, I read six books a year. Another retirement bonus: recovery of the reading time I enjoyed as a child. Even then, my favorite reading was in bed. Now I go to bed early and read for an hour. Delicious.
Ways of Going Home, Alejandro Zambra, 2011, translated by Megan McDowell
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner, 1971. “I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known …? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again…but it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces … consumed too much transportation, have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter, Peter Manseau. Grim and delightful at the start, but flawed, rushed ending. How often that seems true of novels.
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast. Graphic memoir about the horrendous experience of caring for resistant aging parents.
Home, Toni Morrison, 2012
La Sed de la Mariposa, Agustín Cadena, 2014, his best young adult novel to date
A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller’s Tale From Mexico, Sybille Bedford, 1953. Travel writing from another time is instructive, especially if the writing is good and well-informed. Bedford gives a nutshell of Mexican history in “the tierra templada,” where “the known Mexico begins, the Mexico of the wonderful climate, the Mexico of history and archaeology, the traveller’s Mexico. Here, between the Twenty-second Parallel and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, between the Pacific and the Gulf, on the Mesa, in the two Sierras, down on the hot strips of coast and the flats of Yucatan: everything happened—the Aztecs and the Conquest, the Silver rush and Colonial Spain, the Inquisition and the War of Independence, the Nineteenth Century of Revolutions and Hacienda Life, of the Church Rampant and the Church at Bay; General Santa Ana, always treacherous, always defeated, rattling his wooden leg for office, and Juarez tough with Robespierrean obstinacy and virtue; the shadowy reign of Maximilian and the harsh, prosperous reign of Díaz,; Civil War, Banditry, Partition of the Land, President Calles and President Cardenas, the Oil Rush and the March of US Time.”
Another Country, James Baldwin, 1962. One of our finest writers, complex, unrelenting and true. A privileged white character details the position police occupy—a thankless one—between the wealthy and the poor:
“She had never had to deal with a policeman in her life, and it had never entered her mind to feel menaced by one. Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman—for she had never thought of them as being very bright—seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one’s own place was more secure than his, and if one could bring to bear a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.”
Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories from Around the World.
Whiter Than Snow, Sandra Dallas. This bestseller fits my definition of a potato chip book, although I must give a nod to her research on life in a Colorado mining town.
How It All Began, Penelope Lively. Brit writer I’ve meant to try for years. Good.
Looking for Alaska. YA book I read to see why the kids like John Green. A love story, drug and alcohol use, wild pranks, and maybe a suicide. The teen characters are outsiders, smarter than the adults. In other words, a fantasy novel.
In the Night of Time, Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated by Edith Grossman. On theexpatriate/refugee experience: “If no one recognizes you and no one names you, little by little you cease to exist.”
Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera, translated by Lisa Dillman.
Prodigal Summer, Barbara Kingsolver
Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir, Penelope Lively. “Autobiographical memory is random, non-sequential, capricious and without it we are undone.”
Indian Nocturne, Antonio Tabucchi, 1984, Translated by Tim Parks
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler
The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri, an immigrant experience novel.
An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, Grove Press, 2013. This literature and translation loving book must have its own blog, coming soon.
The Hakawati, Rabih Alameddine. In the tradition of As I Lay Dying or The Death of Artemio Cruz, but from the POV of the son whose father is dying. Interlaced with A Thousand and One Nights stories, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Calvino’s Italian Folktales, Lebanese tales and a dozen other sources, updated and spun a la Alameddine
Poems of Fernando Pessoa, trans by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown. Ah, Pessoa, all your personalities!
I’ve no ambitions or desires.
My being a poet isn’t an ambition.
It’s my way of being alone.
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L’Engle. What can I say? I’d never read it.
The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford, 1915. “She listened to you and took in what you said, which, since the record of humanity is a record of sorrows, was as a rule something sad.”
The Inheritors, William Golding, 1955. Someone said this was his best novel, not Lord of the Flies, which all 8th graders read today. Riveting.
Telegraph Avenue. Michael Chabon
The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story, Hanan Al-Shaykh
The Boys, Toni Sala, translated by Mara Faye Lethem. Catalan novel set in Spain after the 2008 recession