August report

How can a month so long go by so quickly? I could say I didn’t read more than 2 books because I was working a lot, and because I visited family and friends for a week, and because our no-longer-a-foster1 cat, Ginger Spice, is just a little girl who loves to play, and all of that would be true. But also true is that my self-imposed reading rules and my sense of what’s interesting to read have me stuck.

It is a problem of my own invention and will be solved by me just getting a grip, though I do wonder—

The last time I felt this consistently averse to reading was 7 years ago, after I finished grad school. Am I entering a new era of anti-intellectualism? Of philistinism? Have I gorged on so many novels like that cake-eating boy in Matilda (1988) who got Trunchbulled that I no longer want to read them? I’m getting a grip, I swear. I just might need to reroute some of my energy to something else, like finally learning another language.

What I read in August:

Natalia Ginzburg, The Road to the City (1942/2023), tr., Gini Alhadeff—Every time I read a book by Natalia Ginzburg I give thanks that I didn’t start reading her until this point in my life. I am so grateful for past me’s ignorance because it allows me to now have the pleasure of going through Ginzburg’s catalog.

The Road to the City was her first novel, and it contains all the hallmarks that I love in her subsequent books—the everyday, relationships, oppressive atmospheres. This one in particular, with its dusty, stifling summer and the general malaise of its protagonist, was highly suited to my experience of a muggy, aimless August.2 

This narrative of a young woman whose options for the future are limited by her gender and her family’s social status calls to mind both Jean Rhys and Elena Ferrante. It’s very modernist. I wanted it to be longer simply because I love when Ginzburg really gets into generational stuff, but of course it was the perfect length for the story that was told!

Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall (2019)3—This little novel is an atmospheric, spiritually modernist-adjacent number best read in one sitting.

It has a weirdly, obviously purposely timeless feeling. By building a narrative around experiential anthropologists and an amateur history buff (who brings along his wife and daughter) trying to reenact Iron Age ways of living in northern England and set during a fixed period in the summer sometime in the early nineties, Moss creates the condition for readers to telescope in and out of time and speculate on what, if any, human behaviors persist throughout time. Further, by reminding present-day readers via the figure of the “history buff” dad that Brexit-esque sentiments existed long before 2016, Moss also offers a rich opportunity for readers to reflect on how much has or hasn’t changed in the last 30-odd years.

Ghost Wall is such a smart book! Anytime an author can successfully pack so many layers and angles into a narrative as slim as a poetry book, I am in awe.

There’s Midsommar (2019) vibes throughout—in the bright light of the summer sun, an initially innocent-looking reenactment of pre-modern life is eventually exposed as pretty disturbing. Not necessarily in ways that you might expect, either, based on how I am describing it!4

Anyway, this novel coincidentally had several thematic similarities with The Road to the City, largely centering on the fact that it also has for its protagonist a young woman on the edge of a real awakening whose future appears limited in a patriarchal culture where violence against women is commonplace. Also the suffocating heat that makes everything hazy and makes it hard to think.

What I’m looking forward to reading in September:

Lauren Redniss, Oak Flat: A Fight for Sacred Land in the American West (2021)

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)5

Zadie Smith, The Fraud (2023)

Christine Lai, Landscapes (2023)

Paul Murray, The Bee Sting (2023)6