July report

Well! I might as well start off with a note about what I didn’t finish reading this month—Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage (2001)—which I was halfway through when news that changed forever how I think about Munro was published.

I cannot find the source now, but a tweet long ago once said:

I do not require artists to be flawless human beings. But there are some behaviors, some ways of thinking and being in the world, that I cannot abide. When it comes to things like standing by your child-abusing husband and telling your daughter, his victim, that the abuse was a matter between her and him? To me that is not something I can separate from the work. I cannot enjoy or appreciate extensive meditations on the complexity of experience and relationships, especially ones that, in retrospect, mask justifications for abhorrent behavior as explorations of nuance, knowing what I know about the person who wrote them.

I don’t even believe that a lifetime of thinking about where theory and morality meet the everyday could or should make the thinker “more” “moral.” But I do believe that knowing better, particularly re: concepts that are not difficult at all—concepts such as “children deserve to not be sexually abused”—does require the knower to do better. A lot of adults failed Andrea Robin Skinner, as a child and in her own adulthood. But I used to read books by only one of those adults.

So this note is about Munro, and why I won’t be getting lost in her books all summer or ever again. I was sad to learn the news, then glad that I knew. Life is too short to spend any more of it with books by someone who made the choices Munro did!

What I read in July:

C. Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey (2023)—Shout out to Friend of the Report, Sarah R., for encouraging me to read Zhang’s second novel, which I’d previously mentally dismissed because “Her first one wasn’t for me and this one sounds horny.” Not to sound like a LinkedIn post, but I do love when I’m persuaded to rethink an opinion and it yields a positive outcome for me. In other words, I enjoyed this book that I otherwise never would have picked up!

Although Sarah gave me an accurate summary of Land of Milk and Honey, I nevertheless was a little surprised to find this novel very much part of the ascendent speculative climate fiction genre.1 I think the surprise comes from not grasping how the genre is really not so much ascendent at this point as it is a fully established presence in the literary landscape. And I don’t know how to feel about that fact, largely because a part of me fears that regardless of whether the speculative exercise yields a doomerist vision or a happy ending in which the world pulls together and avoids the worst bits of the looming disaster, what if the sheer volume of these texts and their role in entrenching generic hallmarks makes it just that much easier for the reader to distance themselves from “reality”? Then again, who is even reading books! (I am; I think you are; I know many are but it’s not as many people as 20, 40, 60 years ago).

Anyway! I raced through this novel as fast as I could while also honoring one of its primary messages about savoring all the things we have now that we won’t have in the future . . . unless (?). Things we may currently take for granted like coffee, chocolate, scallions. That is, I made sure to appreciate Zhang’s prose even as it propelled me along a fairly generic [not derogatory] thriller plot.2 Land of Milk and Honey turned out to be the right kind of “feel bad”3 summer reading that I like to dabble in each year. But that ending, hmmmm. I won’t say anything here. If you read it, please let me know what you think and especially what you think of how it ends.

Iman Mersal, tr. Robin Moger, Traces of Enayat (2019/2024)4—Continuing with the LinkedIn-postness of this month’s Report, I was pleased to find that my rule of giving a book I’m not into 60 pages before quitting helped me get past Traces of Enayat’s tough first 30-odd pages and allowed me to sail through the rest of this unique and riveting book.

Mersal is a poet, which perhaps explains the non-standard way she opens her hybrid memoir-biography—so in medias res that it felt like talking to someone who’d started a story in their head and didn’t realize that they hadn’t spoken the start of the story to their listener. I’m on the record as not liking that technique. I don’t think that it brings the kind of mystery and intrigue that an author intends. Rather I think it’s confusing and it made it easy for me to wonder whether this choppy opening was a byproduct of translation. This wasn’t the only reason I struggled with the first several chapters, but it played a big part. The attempt to have the reader sort of directly inhabit the perspective of the author at a certain point in time on her quest to discover more about Enayat al-Zayyat, a “forgotten” author of 1960s Egypt, means that the reader is inundated with a lot of details, names, dates without much context.

But if you stick with it! Then you, like Mersal, get a better hang of things. Her narrative takes on a more familiar shape. Not linear, but clearly signposted. As Mersal interviews people who knew al-Zayyat and connects their stories with the few extant pieces of unpublished writing by and photos of al-Zayyat, a more nuanced and complicated image of the author emerges. Alongside that image, Mersal also provides a history of modern Egypt, weaving together narratives of politics, culture, and gender, that helps her and the reader better understand both al-Zayyat and Mersal herself.

Mersal is an academic as well. And what I loved perhaps most of all is the way she applied theories of the archive and of narrative nonfiction to create a truly unique piece of writing. She doesn’t turn it into an academic treatise, but she does gracefully explore questions about lives and narratives that left me thinking about them for days after I finished this book!

Mikita Brottman, Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida (2024)—It’s peak summer and disgusting out, almost too hot to even think. I don’t have the fortitude to read true crime about murdered women but I thought maybe I could handle a book about the man and woman in Florida who murdered the woman’s husband and framed it as “he got eaten by alligators” and who made it nearly 2 decades before being caught!

And I could handle it, mostly. Like many nonfiction books, this one would have been “better” as a super long article, like say, in The New Yorker. Better in the sense of, beyond the “facts” of the case and of the driving question about “good Christians” doing murder, there’s not a lot of depth to the story? Or maybe the depth is in the impact to these people’s children and friends and family, but that's not Brottman’s focus.

I never feel more engaging in something lurid than when I’m reading true crime, particularly when I think about how “easy” it is to read. Here I am, thinking about established genre again, feeling gross that a thriving industry based on true stories about murder exists and that I participated in it because “I didn’t want to think.” Sorry for the bummer of a conclusion!!!

The 10 Best Books of the 21st Century

According to the Book Report

Did everyone have fun early in July when the New York Times released its list of the 100 best books of the 21st century over the course of a single week? I admit I had a little fun checking every morning, looking to see would they get it right? “Get it right” according to whom? According to the author of this Book Report, of course.

They got some things partially right (see my list below), other things partially wrong (should have been in the top 5), one thing definitely wrong,5 and still other things who knows and who cares! Every survey respondent’s top 10 list was unique to their own experience. The Times purposely left defining “best” to the participant: “For some, this simply meant “favorite.” For others, it meant books that would endure for generations.” 🆗

When I have said and said often that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are the best things written in the twenty-first century, I meant “best” as the finest writing on the level of sentence and structure. I think of those novels as one book, because they are. As for the rest of my list, I suppose I am still defining “best” in the same way. How “good” can a story be if it’s not told well? And how “good” can writing be if it’s in service of a “bad” story? The thing about the Neapolitan novels is that they’re just the story of the lives of two everyday women in Italy. But Ferrante tells it in such a way that it’s also the story of modern Italy. If I go on anymore, I’ll be rereading them for the rest of the summer.

So “the best.” My list is a list that reflects my experiences and what I care about. In a sense it’s almost too personal because it reveals what we already know on some level—I’m a sicko for a certain kind of literary fiction written by women.

Here’s my list!6 After 1, it’s not in any particular order, because I don’t care to rank them beyond 1. I would love to hear yours!!

1. The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, 2011-20157

2. Pachinko, Min Jin Lee, 2017

3. Milkman, Anna Burns, 2018

4. Writers & Lovers, Lily King, 2020

5. No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood, 2021

6. Severance, Ling Ma, 2018

7. Autumn, Ali Smith, 2016

8. The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom, 2019

9. The Friend, Sigrid Nunez, 2018

10. There There, Tommy Orange, 2018

What I’m looking forward to reading in August:

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853)8

?????? Is it time for more Natalia Ginzburg? Probably.