[bonus report] January 2020

Back in the early part of March,* I realized that if I were going to stick with this newsletter thing I would inevitably want to be a completist about the year, and therefore would need to share what I read in January. I have to laugh at how this report then sat in the drafts folder for the next 8.5 months of March. Anyway, as you know by now, with my goldfish memory it's kind of impossible to fully recreate my reading impressions from January, a month and time that now seems from a different century altogether. But I remember enough, I think, to satisfy what I'm sure is your haunting curiosity about what I read in the first month of 2020.  What I read in January:Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)—Talk about opening the year with some real foreshadowing stuff, huh?? I started this the first day I was back in New York after the holidays, having picked up a mass-market paperback copy prior to my train ride because I was suddenly "in the mood to read Wharton," had never read The Age of Innocence,** and thought it would be a neat little thing to read it 100 years after its publication. It was neat because she so accurately read New York that even a century later her observations felt fresh and true. Looking back now, I really did read this novel in the last minutes of what increasingly feels like our era's age of innocence, though I'd say that the world I grew up in and was formed by began to be destroyed long before the global pandemic.I wrote the above paragraph of the report a week before I went to the Berkshires and visited Wharton's house, which was not something I anticipated I'd do this year, but which felt as appropriate as such a thing can be during a global crisis. I was sure the visit would only make me want to read more Wharton in the upcoming months, and it did, with disappointing results.***Laura Van den Berg, The Third Hotel (2018)****—From what I remember of reading this novel, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my unfounded suspicion that I wouldn't like it was just that. Accessible and weird, atmospheric and plotted, a mystery and as straightforward an account of grief as such a thing can be, The Third Hotel was appropriately spooky without being pedantic, and it prompted a robust discussion in Book Club about memory, grief, place, travel, and narrative. Nevertheless, it did not inspire me to run out and read more of Van den Berg's fiction.Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, The Revisioners (2019)—I loved this novel, which tells the story of a family by alternating between depictions of the family in 1920s Louisiana and in present day New Orleans. I loved Sexton's writing style and how she built a narrative that compels readers to reflect on the real history that informs such a story and that engages readers on the level of story itself. There are elements that are devastating, often preceded by scenes that inspire dread for illuminating what's to come, and there are as many if not more moments and images that warm and beautiful and reverent. 

Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley (2020)—Regardless of where I might have read this memoir, I would have loved it. But I read it while on vacation in Palm Springs, under a hot winter sun, close enough to the titular location to more fully appreciate the particular, absolutely deranged zeitgeist animating Silicon Valley that Wiener so effectively describes. I am obsessed with Palm Springs, and specifically with how the sun and chlorine of pools I go full Cheever in conspire to respectively bake or evaporate every last one of my brain's cells. I fundamentally understand California when I am there, and it's terrifying how much I like it.***** All of this is to say that this book is I think actually good because it is able to accurately convey so much of what happened in San Francisco in the 2010s and why. HowEVER, and as Wiener herself once acknowledged (in a long-since deleted tweet), she could (and should) have gone way harder in her critique of tech culture and the individuals who create and maintain that culture.  

Miranda Popkey, Topics of Conversation (2020)—Conversely to my experience reading Uncanny Valley, I think I would have liked this collection of fictional vignettes charting one woman's journey into adulthood less if I hadn't read it while lazily kicking my feet in a California pool. It's a smart summer or vacation read. Popkey writes thoughtful sentences and tells interesting enough stories. I certainly didn't dislike it, but trying to remember it now, as I write this paragraph in late November, I can't recall anything about it except how I kept thinking "it's so appropriate to be reading this book here and now."

Tana French, The Witch Elm (2018)—I like a good, well-written mystery, and French is reliable for those sorts of novels. While I raced through this one, which I'd picked up at the airport when I realized I'd probably underpacked in terms of books, I also was disappointed that I correctly guessed all of the twists. I like to read mysteries that make me feel bad at puzzles! I don't regret reading it, but I am glad I waited until it was in paperback to read it.-------------------------------------------------------- *I wrote the following footnote in March (lmao): P.S. I had the idea to send a bonus letter before this rude notallgeminis post about Geminis was brought to my attention.**Honestly, when I watched the movie in college (as assigned!) I felt like that was good enough at the time. I was too busy to also read the novel so soon after watching it!***I tried to get into a re-read of The House of Mirth (1905), a book I loved when I first read it 14 years ago, but y i k e s !, I am no longer a person who can believe the flimsy argument that the anti-semitism in this novel belongs to the characters and not their author. ****Book club selection for January.*****Until I visited Palm Springs, I didn't know what a former professor of mine meant when he said he would "rather die in California than live anywhere else." 

Have you read any of these books? Do you want to talk about them? Is there a book you think I'd like reading? Do you suddenly find yourself with more time on your hands and want to talk books? Reply to this letter! I love recommendations and conversations!If you think you know someone who'd like this newsletter, please forward it! And/or let them know they can subscribe here.