December report

The experiment continues . . .

January 01, 2024

Since the first year I began writing the Book Report, the December edition has always prompted me to reflect on my Year in Reading. Three years ago, I knew that the Report was somehow essential to giving meaning to what felt like an arbitrary goal of reading 52 books in a year. Two years ago, it was becoming clear that the Report couldn’t justify the goal of reading 52 books in a year because the goal itself truly was arbitrary and also no longer serving me—by January 1, 2022, when I posted that Report, my understanding about why I read had evolved. One year ago, I looked back on that year’s experiment of “intuitive reading,” some real free-range, off-leash stuff that at minimum helped me become the famously chill and go-with-the-flow woman I am today.

And this year? Certainly the least I’ve read since starting the Report. But is that solely a result of continuing with intuitive reading? I don’t think so.

One of my favorite bits in grad school, where I studied modernism, was saying that modernism was my wife and contemporary literature was my mistress. I’d spend days at a time avoiding writing my final essays by reading books from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, telling myself that at least my procrastination was “productive.” Productive because what was modernist literature if not an attempt to process the present moment in which those authors were writing? And wouldn’t it help me to understand that literature better if I also studied how authors of my own time were processing our present?

There was so much I hadn’t read yet 10 years ago.

There’s still so much I haven’t read yet. But there’s a part of me that believes I’ve read enough contemporary literature to know how we’re processing things. And I feel a little bit like a locust who’s reached the end of a field—where’s the next feeding ground?

Another part of me is also feeling like there’s too much present to process. It’s too much and too fresh. There’s no 2023 Joyce or Woolf, a writer who can synthesize it all for us, probably because it is impossible to synthesize it all (as it was in Joyce and Woolf’s time!! They didn’t synthesize it all, either!!). Also, this year was the first year that the majority of books being published were written/completed during the first year of the pandemic and I think it shows? Not to sound like a teacher who is saying the children can’t read because they had one and a half semesters of remote learning, but I do think those first 8 or so months of the pandemic changed what’s being written and published and in ways I am not able to articulate.

Maybe that’s why, when I look at the list of my favorite reads from this year, only 1 is from this year, let alone this century.

What I read in December:

Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience (2023)1—I’m not really sure what I read. Rare for me to be at a loss for words. The issue might be that this is definitely a book written by someone who was once told that “voice” alone can carry a novel. Even if it were true—that “voice” alone is enough—I imagine the voice would have to be, um, not oppressive? Not oppressively passive aggressive, maybe. And, I guess, if a defining characteristic of the voice were it being presented in lengthy, complex sentences, then the grammar of those half page–long sentences would need to be flawless? In my opinion! So that’s one thing. Another thing is that this novel’s unnamed narrator feels a little too Eileen (2015)-coded. In a way that feels derivative.

I didn’t hate this book! I didn’t like it, either! I am going to have to read a lot of reviews to try to understand anything about this book.

……..

Okay I read some reviews and we also had book club and I can now confidently hypothesize that where this novel was praised it was praised by people who only like a political novel if the novel’s politics are vague enough for them to project their own established worldview onto the narrative. To be clear, I don’t think that Bernstein was attempting to write that kind of novel. I think she had a point but the point is buried by the ambitious style. And if the point was that matters of religion and claims to ownership of land are complicated, then this was a profoundly circuitous and probably counterproductive way of making the point.

Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020)—As you’ll see below, the one-two punch of Study for Obedience and my recent inability to easily find books that are compelling to me sent me on a weeks-long path of starting and abandoning my next read. The moment for me to read The Waves passed. I was now on break and had filled my mind too much with tasks to be able to settle into such a formally challenging novel.

I became desperate and had to confront one of my most (shameful! and) deeply held biases about reading—that reading YA/genre as an adult isn’t “real” reading and is more like binge-watching a show. Because what do I even mean by “real” reading? Of course I mean engaging with ideas not plots, with intellectual concepts not fantasies, with form that challenges and/or otherwise shapes the narrative in interesting, surprising, or admirable ways not form that is merely formula. So if I wanted to read but not really think, what did I want? Why read at all?

Why read at all?? Because reading to be entertained is a perfectly okay thing to do!! Because reading to be entertained doesn’t automatically mean “no thinking allowed.” Because what does it matter to me how other people relate to their practice of reading? Whether they think or don’t think or think in the “right” or “wrong” ways? Because curling up on an oversized chair with a hot cup of tea and a comfy blanket and immersing one’s self in a fictional world is a top-tier way to spend a morning, an afternoon, an evening, a whole day.

And one thing about me is that if I’m going to read what I’m trying not to think of as the reading equivalent of tat, I’m going to read a Hunger Games novel 👹 because—and I am so serious here—Suzanne Collins’s series is entertaining and anti-fascist.

Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (1998)—Wanting to maintain momentum, I stayed off-list and moved to something powerful enough to keep my attention away from the siren song of endless scrolling. This book surfaced in my consciousness when Friend of the Report, Markee, asked for Florida-centric reading recommendations for her upcoming trip. The memory of reading the New Yorker essay on which this book was based in the non-fiction writing course I took in college has stayed with me all these years. I remember being enraptured by all elements of “Orchid Fever”—the subject matter itself, Orlean’s writing style, and the questions Orlean pursued in her exploration of people’s obsession with a specific kind of flower.

When I read it, I’d already seen and loved Adaptation (2002), though that love apparently hadn’t translated to a desire to read the source material that “inspired” the film. Did I rewatch the film in 2006, after reading the essay? Maybe! We know I don’t remember things. I don’t think I read the book either, which was great for the December 2023 version of me who wanted to get lost in another book.

The Orchid Thief is a rich and wonderful ode to both Florida and the pursuit of passion. Orlean’s entry point into the world of orchids is curiosity, first sparked by a police blotter item about a white man and some members of the Seminole tribe stealing plants from a state preserve, and then developed into a desire to “know what it feels like to care about something passionately” (47). While it helps that her primary guide into this world, John Laroche (the white man from the police blotter), is an extraordinarily charismatic person, Orlean’s interviews with stalwarts of the Florida orchid community and her extended digressions into various histories show that the book is not compelling solely by virtue of Laroche’s presence.

Orlean wrote The Orchid Thief during a peak moment of fashion for the encyclopedic technique. In the places where she enumerates at length such things as types of animals and plants smuggled into the port of Miami, the number and variety of orchids discovered in the Victorian Era, or the litany of swindlers who have bought and sold the same parcels of Florida land in the twentieth century, it gets a little eye-glazing. It feels petty to even mention this, but those parts are plentiful enough that I feel compelled to note that they exist and that overall they did not take away from how much I enjoyed reading this book!

What I didn’t finish reading in December:

Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair (1948)—Huge thanks to everyone who answered my plea for thriller recommendations last month!! The only reason I didn’t finish this recco from Friend of the Report, Alex, is that in researching Tey mid-read, I accidentally spoiled the plot. This was up my alley and I am glad to now know about this Scottish lady author!

Catherine Lacey, Biography of X (2023)—It’s not the book, it’s me. I wanted to like it so bad I gave it an extra 45 pages more than I usually do for books I’m not feeling. But I think it’s the combination of first-person narration by a woman who had an almost fan-like obsession with her late, abusive wife, plus the alternate history structure with especially confusing details like citing fictional articles by real-life writers but dating the articles to a time when it would have been impossible for the real-life writer to have written it.2 

When I say I couldn’t find something to hold onto in this book, I don’t mean to be like a teenager who “can’t relate” to Shakespeare. I just mean that I struggled to understand the purpose of writing an alternate history like this, let alone one that also explored obsession in the way this book did. It felt to me like a fusion of two cuisines that, even if I did like those kinds of foods, maybe were better off being separate meals? Because here’s the thing—it’s not a bad book. It’s just doing things that are not for me!

Orange and white cat curled up like a little croissant or shrimp on a bed of white fake fur.

What I’m looking forward to reading in January:

Ann-Helén Laestadius, tr. Rachel Willson-Broyles, Stolen (2023)3

Adania Shibli, tr. Elisabeth Jaquette, Minor Detail (2020)

Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country (1913)

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