December report

[As much as I want to commit to the bit, I am also committed to ethics in blogging, so I want to warn that below I think about quitting writing the Report but I decide not to quit. I also announce that the Report is moving to a different platform on February 1.] 

Sometimes I sit down at my desk in my office and I think, what am I doing? What am I DoOoOoOoOoOoOING? I’m writing a book report, of course—and this one is the fifth ever December edition of this newsletter, meaning I’ve been writing book reports for five years. Five years. What have I done? Don’t answer that!!

When I try to think but all that happens in my mind is lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” materializing, simply just popping into my consciousness and either floating away or getting stuck on repeat, that’s when I know times are tough. Yes, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. How should I presume? It was literally only a year and a month ago that I was talking about how I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled! Will there be time? I fr should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas 😤.

What does she mean, “times are tough”? I mean it’s still always a shock when I realize that time passes, that I do my little routines and every month I write my report and then suddenly it’s now been five years? And all the while I was doing those things, I was creating a record? A public one? One that charts a clear progression from regularly reading a certain number of books to regularly reading a much smaller number of books than in earlier years? I grow old . . . I grow old . . . !!

Of that small number of books I read this year, were there any that made me feel the way I felt when I first read the Neapolitan novels? When I first read Moby-Dick? Or Middlemarch? No! I had some fun reading, to be sure, and I am very grateful to have read books such as Cranford and Traces of Enayat, but I perhaps don’t feel good about what a “favorites” list from this past year in reading would look like.

You know, five years ago when I started the Book Report, I knew the day would eventually come where I’d have to be moving on, and it’s truly with a heavy heart that I’m here to say that that day is finally here. I wanna thank you all for your years of loyalty and admiration, but the point is this . . .

It’s me being a hypocrite is what it is. So you know what? I’m not leaving. I’m not leaving. I’m not fucking leaving! The show goes on! This is my home!

I am going somewhere, though. I’m moving the Report to Beehiiv because Substack has been scummy for a while but is now unbearably so to me.1 

Looking back, looking ahead, I want to recapture my youth, specifically the part of my youth where things felt NEW (yes, everything comes back to modernism! I don’t love it, either!!). After seeing two movies this month,2 one of which captivated my attention the way books used to, I wonder if film is where I might recapture that feeling. It’s not an either-or thing, though, so in conclusion, I can’t go on. I’ll go on. 

See you next month!

What I read in December:

Han Kang, tr. Deborah Smith, Human Acts (2017)3—You vote for a book in Book Club, something written by the first person from South Korea to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. You vote for it because you’ve heard good things about this author and this is as good a time as any to read her work. But even though you wanted to read it, you’re still scared—it’s heavy material. Also, as you discover upon starting, it opens with narrative in the second person—your least favorite narrative mode for two reasons4—so you flip through the pages quickly, checking to see does the second-person voice end at some point? It does. You go back to the beginning and start reading. The material is heavy, but you don’t find it too difficult to read because of how Kang makes something from it that doesn’t feel exploitative or didactic. Also, especially once you read further in, getting past the opening chapters’ voice and into other perspectives in other time points narrated in the third person, you see how those early pages fit into the context of the whole, and while you still don’t like second-person narration, you find yourself “glad” to have read this novel.

In all seriousness, one thing I took away from the experience was wow, so that’s what it’s like not only for people to fight back against an authoritarian government but also what it’s like to memorialize the people who fought—the ones who died in the process and the ones who lived with the trauma for the rest of their days—and to honor their memory by making sure it doesn’t happen again.

What I’m in the middle of reading:

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World (2023)—I’m halfway through and “loving” it so far. I say loving because Klein is writing about important and not really “fun” stuff relating to the way people understand reality and communicate with each other, and she’s doing it in a way that makes it all make sense, and tbh just thinking about it can feel overwhelming. Anyway, the book is smart (and funny!) and I’m getting through it 50 pages at a time.

What I’m looking forward to reading in January:

Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland (2023)5

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale (1851)6