August report

What can I say about this month that hasn’t already been said by Taylor Swift? It slipped away into a moment in time not because it was never mine but because I am deep into Month 3 of a debilitating attraction to sport.1 Between playing softball for my company league, and watching the Euro Cup, Wimbledon, the Olympics, and now, my beloved US Open, I’ve struggled to find narratives in books that are more compelling than the ones in this summer’s sporting events. And I think that’s okay, as long as I am able to rid me of this troublesome fixation and get back to books as my primary source of cultural enrichment. Otherwise, what are we doing here??

What I read in August:

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853)2—Well, it took me the majority of the summer to find the escapist small town fiction that Alice Munro robbed from me, but I found it in this nearly 200-year-old novel. Every time I read an older book for the first time at the right time for me, I am grateful for everything that happened to keep me away from the book until that precise moment.3 

Gaskell’s sketches of life in a small village populated largely by women are simply a delight to read for several reasons, the most important of which is that they are often genuinely funny. Any book that can make me laugh 170 years after it was first published is a work of genius, imo. But it’s also wholesome and filled with the kind of small dramas that can only arise in a place where the primary activity is gossip. If I’d never been to England, I wouldn’t believe that a place like Cranford could ever have existed, but I think something like it must have, specifically the part where people help each other in times of need, because there’s something very Bake-Off about it all. It’s overwhelmingly wholesome and I loved every one of this short novel’s 160 pages.

What I’m looking forward to reading in September:

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo (2024)

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story (2023)

Honestly probably something about tennis, probably written by a man

Postscript:

Miso, my little only living boy in New York, was adopted again <3 (and not by me, again).