I would like to write down, with brief notes, what has been on my reading table this spring. The reason to write down such things, when one writes a magazine of this sort, is partly to keep a record for oneself and partly to give the readers a sense of what the writer is actually doing with the hours between assignments, which is one of the things readers of a magazine of this kind are reasonably curious about. The notes are not, I should say at the outset, recommendations in the energetic sense. They are notes on what has been on the table, with such observations as I have to offer.
I will say a small thing about the genre of the recommendation, before I begin, because the genre has been ruined in the past decade in a way that I think is worth naming. The lifestyle category online has produced, over the past ten years, an enormous quantity of reading recommendations of the kind that does not seem to me to have anything to do with reading. The recommendations are enthusiastic. They are heavily curated. They are organized by season and by mood and by aspirational identity. They appear, to my eye, to have been produced by people who are not actually reading the books but who are constructing a particular self-presentation in which the books are props. The result is a genre that has come to feel, even when the individual books are good, like an arm of brand-building rather than like the conversation between readers it is pretending to be.
The genre I would like to keep alive, in the small notes that follow, is the older one. The older genre is the friend who has been reading something and who tells you what they thought, briefly, without trying to sell you the book and without trying to construct a public self around the fact of having read it. I will try to operate in that register.
Daniel Mason, North Woods
I came late to this novel, having missed it when it appeared, and I read it through over a stretch of three or four evenings in late February. The premise — a single house in the New England woods, followed through several centuries of its successive occupants — is the kind of premise that is either going to work entirely or fail entirely, and the novel does the work. The prose is more flexible than the premise would suggest, moving across periods and through several distinct registers without producing the strained effect that the multi-period historical novel often produces. The book stayed with me for some weeks after I finished it. It is the kind of novel that I will probably reread, which is the test by which I distinguish books that I read with attention from books that I read with mere consumption.
Eula Biss, On Immunity
This is a re-read. I first read Biss's book a decade ago, and I returned to it this spring because a conversation with a friend made me want to check whether the book had aged in the ways I would have predicted. It has aged better than I expected. The book is ostensibly about vaccines and the cultural anxieties around them, but it is more substantially about the way modern adults metabolize information about risk, and the metabolizing has not changed in the ways the book's 2014 publication date might have suggested. The prose is what I remembered it being — careful, essayistic in the older sense, attentive to the specific texture of the conversations the book is reporting from. The book is in my top tier of contemporary nonfiction and the re-reading confirmed it.
Hisham Matar, My Friends
I read this novel slowly, over six or seven weeks, which is unusual for me with a novel of its size. The slowness was not because the book was difficult; it was because the book is the kind of novel that asks to be read in slightly shorter sessions than I usually give to a novel, and I was happy enough to comply. The book is about a long friendship across decades among three Libyan exiles in London. The pace is unhurried in the way that the best long novels are unhurried, with a confidence in the reader that is rare in the contemporary novel. I will say only that the book is among the few novels I have read in recent years that I have wanted, while reading it, not to finish, and that this is the highest praise I have to offer the form.
John McPhee, The Patch
I have been reading McPhee at the rate of one essay collection a year for about a decade now, and I think I have at this point read all of the major books. The Patch was the most recent one. There is nothing more I can usefully say about McPhee that has not been said by his many serious readers. The prose continues to be the prose. The attention continues to be the attention. The small structural choices continue to be the small structural choices that distinguish his work from the work of almost any other essayist of the past sixty years. I will continue to read whatever he publishes for as long as he publishes, and I will reread the major books at intervals for as long as I am reading at all.
Annie Ernaux, The Years
I came to Ernaux only after the Nobel, which I am slightly embarrassed to admit, having had no good excuse for the long avoidance. The Years is the place to start with her and is the place I started. The book is doing something that I cannot quite name in the language I am used to using about books — a form of autobiographical writing that operates at a remove from the autobiographical I, that proceeds through the cultural and material substance of the years rather than through the personal events of the writer's life. The effect is one I had not encountered before in quite this form, and the effect was striking enough that I will probably work through the rest of her translated work over the coming year.
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring
A re-read of the novel that has, for me, become the Fitzgerald novel I return to most reliably. Pre-revolutionary Moscow, an English printing-press owner, his wife who has left him, the small domestic crises that the novel handles with the particular Fitzgerald combination of comic timing and complete seriousness. The book is short. It is also one of the better English novels of the second half of the twentieth century, and the re-reading confirmed the assessment I have held of it since the first reading. I will continue to recommend it to the people who ask me what to read.
What I started and did not finish
I will mention briefly two books that I started and did not finish, because the not-finishing of books is part of the honest report of a reader's season and because I do not believe in the principle that one should always finish what one starts. I started a recent biography of a midcentury American novelist that was, as far as I read, competent but uninspired. I started a much-praised contemporary novel that was, on the evidence of the first hundred pages, the kind of contemporary novel that I have decided, in the past year or two, that I am not going to spend further time on. The two unfinished books are, in their separate ways, part of the report.
What I have planned for the summer
The reading I have planned for the summer, to the extent that one can plan such things, includes a long novel by an Italian writer I have not previously read, a re-read of W. G. Sebald which I do every several years for reasons that have become slightly ritualistic, and one work of recent nonfiction that has been recommended to me by several friends whose judgment I trust. I will write down what I have made of these in due course.
The point of writing down such things, beyond the small pleasure of the writing itself, is that the writing makes the reading more legible to oneself. Reading without any account of the reading tends, in my experience, to produce a slightly slack reading. The small discipline of writing down briefly what one has read forces the reading to be assembled, briefly, into the form of an account that can be communicated. The account does not have to be public, although in my case it is. The discipline is part of the practice. I will continue to keep it as long as I am keeping the magazine, and I would suggest, mildly, that any reader of this site who is a serious reader might consider keeping their own version of the practice in whatever form suits them.
