June report

Sometimes it takes planning and executing a 2+ week trip for me to realize that I am at my core an aged toddler who must run around until she’s finally out of energy and ready to be quiet at home. It’s not that I cannot encounter the world in a balanced way. It’s more like, the older I get the more I feel a sense of urgency to SEE things I have not yet seen and BE places I have not yet been. But then I see a lot in those new places (perhaps too much!) and I need time to reflect and recalibrate my perspective. I’m still processing, is what I’m saying, and looking forward to rediscovering the pleasures of being an indoor cat.

What I read in June:

Alice Munro, Runaway (2004)1—One of the best things about aging is rereading books first read in youth and finding them even better than you could have understood years earlier. This is the understatement of the century in terms of Alice Munro, whose works I knew, when reading them nearly twenty years ago, were transcendent. I have my college professor to thank for that, because to people who have never read her, Munro kind of sounds like a hard sell (even with the Nobel Prize!), but he sold her to us.

Short fiction often about small-town Canadian life. And so many stories—how could they all possibly be riveting, let alone interesting? Well guess what? They are. They all make me go feral about literature, foaming at the mouth about how everything in the world that’s happened is worth it because the world produced Alice Munro and she created some of the finest examples of writing in the English language of all time. I literally need to take a breather after every story of hers that I read. I need to sit with what I’ve read and I have no desire to move on to anything else until I’ve sufficiently recovered.

Each story is a world. One element of Munro’s genius is the alchemical way she uses language to bring any reader into that world, regardless of the reader’s capacity for “relating” to it. That is to say, these fictional Canadians in their rural (sometimes urban!) lives and relationships with their small but enormous and life-altering dramas—no matter how alien the details may be to a reader’s own experience—in Munro’s hands, they become universal. The stories haunt me!

I don’t want to be a character in one of her stories but I do want to live in her books, especially this summer. This is my genre fiction, my reality tv, my escapism. It’s a little bit easier to rationalize turning away from our nightmare world when I do it by turning toward what may be the greatest short stories of all time!!

Katie Kitamura, Intimacies (2021)—It was difficult to find a novel by a woman from the Netherlands that I was interested in reading,2 even in bookstores in Amsterdam. Good thing I thought to pack Kitamura’s novel, which is set in The Hague and which I last read in 2021.

Time was weird this whole month for me, almost glitchy. I didn’t start this book until I was leaving the Netherlands and I felt an internal pressure to read it while my memories of the country were still fresh. In a way, that was an optimal frame of mind for reading Intimacies, a novel that explores experiences of time and place, emphasizing the nature of contingency and ephemerality. If this all sounds very abstract, please know that Kitamura ties her meditations to a very clear, albeit “uneventful” plot surrounding an unnamed narrator’s year attempting to set root in a new city.

Intimacies was no less quiet and compelling than the first time I read it. It is a wisp of a novel and yet it has a real, mesmerizing power. It made me regret choosing not to walk around The Hague after a morning in Delft, because Kitamura’s description of the city and its seaside dunes are so precise that I can now tell what I missed out on!

Cat report:

Miso was adopted!! 🎉 And not by us!

What I’m looking forward to reading in July:

Iman Mersal, tr. Robin Moger, Traces of Enayat (2024)3

C. Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey (2023)

Mercè Rodoreda, tr. Peter Bush, In Diamond Square (1962)4

Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922)

Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage (2001)