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Books

Summer Reading, 2026

Posted on September 8, 2026

It’s Labor Day, so summer reading is officially over even if, with Fogust behind us, summer is only just kicking into gear in San Francisco. Here’s what I finished in the past three months, organized by theme. The books weren’t selected on that basis, but I take inspiration from Susan Orlean’s memoir, the first book I mention below and the last one I read, where she talks about the experience of being in a library: “There are the books you pass on your way to the book you want, and there are the books tucked around it, those kindred volumes that iterate on the subject, each a little different, or newer, or older; endless variations on a theme, handed off from one book to the next, following the mysterious, marvelous path a thought traverses in our minds.”

Writers

📖 Joyride by Susan Orlean: I’m a fan of Orlean but by no means a completist with her work. At first I wasn’t sure I would be able to sustain interest in her 300-page memoir, but my concern turned out to be unwarranted. Orlean’s love of writing is infectious, and it’s thrilling following her journey through the milestones in her illustrious non-fiction career. One passage I marked is indicative of her enthusiasm for her craft:

We write to express the whirring in our heads, the thousand thoughts and impressions that are private, internal, invisible until they spill out into being, made present through language…Being able to communicate through writing is sorcery. Little scratches on a page or screen, delivering knowledge and emotion and mystery—it’s astonishing. To make those little scratches on the page for a living is a miracle.

📖 & 🎧 We Love You, Bunny by Mona Awad: In Awad’s world, sorcery literally takes the place of writing when a group of female MFA students conjure up men from bunnies. I did much better reading this sequel to the campus novel satire, Bunny, on paper than listening to it because the characters who narrate much of it are annoying on purpose. Thankfully, in the sequel we also get to hear directly from the grad students’ creation, Aerius, which were some of my favorite parts.

📖 Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner: I loved this novel about a British female novelist who has retreated to a hotel in Switzerland following a mysterious incident at home. She turns her writer’s eye to the other hotel guests while her own story slowly comes into focus. Given the whole thing is set in a hotel with a fixed cast of characters, I couldn’t help thinking of it as an early 1980’s version of the TV show White Lotus, minus the murders. This notion was undoubtedly helped by the fact that one of the book’s characters is named Jennifer, and I kept picturing her as the White Lotus actress, Jennifer Coolidge.

Chefs

📖 Being Old…and learning to love it! by Prue Leith: I’m a fan of the Leith’s from The Great British Bake Off, so I bought her most recent memoir when I heard her speak at the Idler festival this summer. While Leith has written other books, I suspect a publisher cashing in on her Bake Off fame was behind this one. There are some entertaining stories about the restaurant she opened in 1969 in Notting Hill, but I had heard most of the highlights in the interview she gave at the festival.

🎧 The Secret History of French Cooking: The Outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern by Luke Barr: I enjoyed Barr’s earlier non-fiction book, Provence, 1970, about his great aunt, the food writer M.F.K. Fisher along with her contemporaries like Julia Child. This one is interesting if depressing: the chefs credited with creating nouvelle cuisine were often contemptible sexists, and part of their fame is due to press by a Vichy collaborator—ironically, relegated to food journalism instead of “real” journalism for his crimes. I probably would have enjoyed this more if I had read it rather than listened to it, and I suspect it would have been enough for me in a long-form article.

Artists

🎧 Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu: A painter looks back on her childhood and young adulthood, centered around her fixation on a female friend. Good on the peculiarity of such singular, intense friendships. Reminded me, of course, of Ferrante, but also Vendela Vida’s We Run the Tides, about a childhood friendship where one of the girls is a pathological liar.

🎧 Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer: A true summer novel: part art caper, part coming-of-age story with a young American abroad in Italy and an eccentric baronessa for a mentor. Enjoyed it, not least because I was once a young American abroad in Italy, spending a semester in Venice next door to the home of another eccentric woman of the arts, the late Peggy Guggenheim.

📖 A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar: To Italy again, this time via a memoir about a month in Siena to look at art, but also people and places. I marked this passage about one such place, the cemetery, and the moment Matar encounters the new section of it after thinking the old part comprised the whole thing

The scale was unfathomable. It is one thing to consider the particular intimacy of a single grave, another to glimpse death’s endless appetite. The deceased outnumbered the living. The present is the golden rim of a black cloth. How outrageous it is to be alive, I thought. It filled me with such enthusiasm and dark pride in my race, for how brave and heroic we are in the face of the undeniable evidence that life cannot be maintained, that regardless of what armor we choose, all things must pass.

Birds of a Feather

📖 H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: This came on my radar again ~10 years after it was first published because a film adaptation starring Claire Foy was released earlier this year. Having little interest in falconry, I wasn’t sure I’d like this book, but it’s a gorgeous grief memoir that flew by, no pun intended. It’s also a book about books, mostly those of T.H. White who wrote The Once and Future King, which is responsible for how most of us think of the legend of King Arthur today. I watched the film after I read it and very much enjoyed it, even if it didn’t include the thread about White’s books (which is another reason to read the memoir even if you’ve seen the film).

🎧 Night Night Fawn by Jordy Rosenberg: An astonishing novel that I was shocked didn’t make the Booker Prize long list this year. It’s about a dying Jewish mother high on OxyContin who is convinced her adult child who is taking care of her is a malevolent bird. She’s one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever read, and her name happens to be Barbara Rosenberg. Highly recommend the audio version, read by the author, who proves to be as good an actor as he is a writer.

Books

2026 in books, so far

Posted on May 31, 2026

That thing the press that still writes about books calls Summer Reading is nearly upon us, so I thought I’d take a moment to recap what I’ve read so far this year. I’ve grouped books not in chronological order but by how I see them in relation to each other—reading, as usual, proved to be about the conversation between books as much as the books themselves. Reviewing the list, I had a near-even mix of old-favorite and new-to-me authors, as well as formats (audio 🎧 and print 📖).

Epistolary Novels

📖 Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff (first time reading Gridneff, have read DeWitt before) and 🎧 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (first time reading this writer) are technically both epistolary novels, but they couldn’t be more different. As I wrote in an earlier blog post, “DeWitt and Gridneff’s book is difficult because it is long (600 pages) and complicated and has little interest in making it easy for the reader to follow. It is, among other things, a book about how characters that are a lot like DeWitt and Gridneff (including having the same names at some but not all points) met in a bar and decided to write something together. Much of this occurs in an epistolary format via emails complete with footers from hosting companies of yore. These exchanges are not charming in the manner of epistolary novels like current bestseller The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (which I also recently enjoyed) or Helene Hanff’s beloved 84, Charing Cross Road. Imagine something more akin to what emails between Hunter S. Thompson and Sylvia Plath might have been.”

P.S. I loved Your Name Here, despite its difficulty. At a certain point I just let it wash over me like poetry, and that worked.

Lit Fiction Ladies

📖 Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett, 📖 The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley, and 📖 & 🎧 Will There Every Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood

I’ll read pretty much anything by these three writers, and none of these books changed that. Of Bennett’s I previously wrote: “I loved this book for the intimacy and smallness of its concerns — not small as in inconsequential, but in the tight radius of its world: a few places, friends, and lovers, each treated with deep care and attention. It’s a sort of antidote for those of us whose jobs dictate a preoccupation with AI and its head-spinning implications, which feels like the opposite of this deeply human book.” The same could be said of all three.

Side note: I read a review of The Palm House that alluded to the mediocrity of the lives depicted, and it made me want to commit murder over what I took to be a judgment of humanity for daring to be human.

Someone other than Tech Bros Writing About Tech

🎧 Elaine Castillo’s Moderation is a novel about a Filipina-American woman living in Las Vegas and working in the brutal world of content moderation and, also, a romance novel. Loved it. With this book, the second of hers I’ve read, Castillo has joined my list of writers by whom I’ll read anything.

📖 Jeanette Winterson’s One Aladdin Two Lamps is a book about books, mostly The Thousand and One Nights (AKA Arabian Nights), and how the stories we tell ourselves (and others) matter. Coincidentally, Elaine Castillo’s previous book, How to Read Now, is a great, challenging book about books and reading.

Here Winterson does with The Thousand and One Nights what George Saunders did with Russian short stories in his excellent A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life: uses the original stories as jumping off points for her own sharp reflections on modern life, including tech culture and AI. In a late chapter on the Arabian Nights story “City of Brass” (Night 567), she writes:

Sometimes I amuse myself with a story of my own. All the genies caught in bottles are versions of Tech Bros uploading their consciousness into some grandiose Eternity Server. Then, when the power comes back on, they find they are trapped inside some little guy’s laptop. There’s a file that says DO NOT OPEN and the little guy thinks it’s got hardware programming in it or whatever, and really, it’s Mark Zuckerberg just dying to be set free, shouting I REPENT.

Bardo Bards

Speaking of George Saunders, his latest novel, 📖 Vigil, starts with a bang, a sort of angel literally falling to earth to help shepherd an unrepentant oil baron into the afterlife. It opens gloriously and has beautiful writing, but the ending didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

Just imagine your first novel is about to get published and a George Saunders’ novel on the same subject, the bardo, comes out shortly before. Not sure if that’s extremely unlucky or lucky, but that’s what happened with 🎧 Trip by Amie Barrodale (first time reading this writer). Barrodale’s book is about an entirely different set of concerns, though, those of a mother shepherding a teenage son from the afterlife.

Food, Glorious Food

🎧 The Reservation by Rebecca Kauffman (first time reading this writer) is a day in the life of a restaurant told from the rotating POVs of different staff members. The central drama involves some stolen steaks and a reservation for the author, John Grisham, so not quite as traumatic as The Bear on television, but perhaps because of The Bear, I couldn’t help feeling like I was listening to a treatment for a TV show.

🎧 I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally (first time reading this writer) is the memoir of a storied British restauranteur, famous for NYC institutions like Balthazar, Pastis, and Minetta Tavern. I love a food memoir, but my favorite part of this book was his juicy account of having an affair with another favorite writer of mine Alan Bennett, long before McNally opened his restaurants. Writing that last sentence reminded me that the only time I ever ate at a McNally restaurant was brunch at Pastis in 2003 on the same trip where I had my introduction to Alan Bennett in an off-Broadway production of Talking Heads starring Lynn Redgrave. Good trip!

A Sense of Place

Speaking of New York, a return visit to the city in February after many years away prompted a listen to 🎧 Here is New York by E.B. White. Notably he was eerily prescient about 9/11, writing in 1948:

The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions

Also on the subject of New York, Helene Hanff’s Letter from New York (mentioned above for 84, Charing Cross Road), is worthwhile.

In January, prompted by my first visit to Vietnam, I read 📖 The Quiet American by Graham Greene (first time reading this writer). There is some beautiful writing about war and Americans, but mostly I was utterly annoyed by how Greene writes (or fails to write) the main female character, Phuong. Someone please do that thing where you retell the book from a sidelined character’s perspective. P.S., while you’re at it, I also require the same treatment for Daphne Du Maurier’s, My Cousin Rachel.

Miscellany

📖 Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (first time reading this writer) was great, a sort of Nazi-tinged version of Patrick DeWitt’s French Exit that’s sadly relevant to what’s happening in America today, namely the grift off war and suffering. I’d love to see the play adaptation starring Ben Whishaw at the Young Vic in London later this year.

🎧 The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis (first time reading this writer) is about an English village that becomes convinced five sisters are turning into dogs at night and wreaking havoc. A classic othering story, in this case making a point about girls and women, but I read it during the height of the ICE raids in America, so was thinking about immigration. These lines stayed with me:

Wherever we go, however we behave, there’ll always be something to drive us inside. That’s where people want us to be.”

Pairs well with Pew by Catherine Lacey, another short novel about othering. Also has a bit of the gothic animal/human transfiguration territory of Mona Awad’s Bunny books, the second of which, We Love You, Bunny, I’m currently reading.

Books

Did Helen DeWitt Predict Prediction Markets?

Posted on April 11, 2026

An Arabic-named prediction market company rises alongside a novel obsessed with Arabic and lotteries

This week author Helen DeWitt has been all over the book internet in news that she, a writer who has struggled publicly with the particular publishing cruelty of being a critical success and still poor, turned down a $175,000 writing prize due to its promotional requirements. I have been meaning to write a post about DeWitt for the past couple of months—not a hot take on her prize pass, but rather about a curiosity in a myriad curiosities that is her most recent book, co-written with Ilya Gridneff, Your Name Here. That specific curiosity is the strange confluence in timing between the popularity of an Arabic-named prediction market company, Kalshi, and the long overdue release of this novel that happens to be obsessed with Arabic and lotteries.

Your Name Here was apparently first published around 2008 as a PDF on DeWitt’s website, and finally made its way into print last October. In January of this year, I checked out a digital copy from the library and read it on my phone, but, like two other DeWitt books I’ve previously read this way, I was compelled to buy it in print after I finished it. It was, by all appearances, a difficult book to write, publish and, also, to read. I loved it.

DeWitt and Gridneff’s book is difficult because it is long (600 pages) and complicated and has little interest in making it easy for the reader to follow. It is, among other things, a book about how characters that are a lot like DeWitt and Gridneff (including having the same names at some but not all points) met in a bar and decided to write something together. Much of this occurs in an epistolary format via emails complete with footers from hosting companies of yore. These exchanges are not charming in the manner of epistolary novels like current bestseller Correspondence by Virginia Evans (which I also recently enjoyed) or Helene Hanff’s beloved 84 Charing Cross Road. Imagine something more akin to what emails between Hunter S. Thompson and Sylvia Plath might have been.

Your Name Here also includes a book within a book, called Lotteryland, by DeWitt’s alter ego, Rachel Zozanian. It is set in a dystopian England where goods are distributed by a labyrinthine, rigged lottery system, reminiscent of the “lottery postcode” used to describe how the quality of care by the UK’s National Health Service differs by geographies. The book’s protagonist is obsessed with trying to game said lottery, losing hours at a time sitting in front of her “lottomonitor” running “luck checks” by concocting increasingly specific draws like “GRANDMOTHER CHECKING ODDS OF MARRIAGE TO A NICE JEWISH GIRL.”

Alongside this book within a book is a recurring riff on the premise that if more Westerners understood Arabic the world would be a more peaceful place, i.e., understanding other people humanizes them. DeWitt marvels repeatedly that if some writer (her?) had just done for Arabic what Tolkien did for his made-up Elvish languages in writing The Lord of the Rings, we may not be in yet another war in the Middle East. (Languages are a recurring theme in DeWitt’s work. She is a polyglot, as is one of the main characters, Ludo, in her best known novel, The Last Samurai.)

So, just to recap, we’ve got a novel by two authors about writing a novel by two authors, with a novel about a society obsessed with lotteries within it, plus a side dish of Arabic studies. It’s no surprise, then, that I made a connection to the prediction market company, Kalshi, whose name comes from the Arabic word for everything, when I first came across it via Scott Galloway of the podcast Pivot. Galloway has lately been talking a lot about prediction markets, the two biggest of which are Kalshi and Polymarket (whose tagline is similarly “Markets on everything”). His thesis is roughly that they are a concerning if logical indicator of younger generations, especially men, turning to higher risk gambits (see also: Bitcoin) having concluded, in short, that the traditional economy, including the stock market, is rigged against them.

Around the same time, a Lunch with the FT feature with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour was published, in which I (sort of) learned what the hell a prediction market is and why it’s different than Vegas or any other of the bazillion online gaming sites. In short, the public can use them to trade shares of any future event (more on this later); they are redeemable for $1 if the event occurs and nada if it does not. Mansour, who was born in California and raised in Lebanon, has been previously quoted saying that “the long-term vision is to financialise everything, and create a tradeable asset out of any difference in opinion,” demonstrating how one person’s vision is another person’s dystopia.

While DeWitt/Zozanian’s world is ruled by luck, Mansour and pals have created a world where you can bet on that luck (aka uncertainty). In this world, those with better information systematically profit. Have I mentioned Donald Trump, Jr., is a strategic advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, as well as an investor in the latter? Or perhaps you heard how the White House recently had to tell its staff, perfectly placed as they are to be the beneficiaries of information asymmetry, not to bet in prediction markets. It gives me no pleasure to recount here the grotesquerie that was Polymarket accepting bets on the fate of the downed U.S. airmen in Iran earlier this month, even if the confluence of those subjects fits well here. Regardless, you can start to imagine how someone might be compelled to try their luck, perhaps even compulsively, given no subject for a bet is off limits. The topics are accessible, no longer the preserve of those fluent in the financial statements of publicly traded companies.

According to the above linked New York Times article, both prediction market companies collectively handled over $50 billion in bets last year, i.e., business is booming. It’s hardly a leap from the DeWitt/Zozanian lottomonitor of the noughties to, well, the smartphone—with the Kalshi app installed—of today. At one point, the protagonist of Lotteryland recounts how, at age nine, “I had been at it for eight hours without a break and my parents made me stop.” Sounds familiar enough.

DeWitt would probably take cold comfort in knowing her novel foreshadowed prediction markets as younger generations’ chosen instrument of fortune-seeking. Perhaps the fact that I’ve learned an Arabic vocabulary word from the modern-day lottomonitor would cheer her, but there’s no getting around the disappointment of not buying a contract on Kalshi on Helen DeWitt winning a Windham-Campbell prize. If only she had made that bet, she may have gotten to walk away with the equivalent of the prize money, no strings attached.

Books

Morality for cheese-knife owners

Posted on September 15, 2025

I am not the target market for Dutch historian Rutger Bregman’s latest book, Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference. Bregman makes this clear upfront with his litmus test to determine who among us has the propensity for moral ambition: do you own a set of cheese knives? If the answer is yes, odds are that moral ambition is out of reach for you, cosseted as you are in your middle-class milieu.

As it happens, I own a set of cheese knives. It gets worse: they reside in my second home in the Cotswolds. (Does it make it worse or better that I don’t eat dairy? More on this later.) And yet, despite not being the young, smart audience Bregman is targeting in his plea to do something professionally that makes a difference in this world, I am smitten with this book.

I felt similarly nine years ago reading William MacAskill’s book, Doing Good Better, my introduction to effective altruism and its evidence-based approaches to benefitting others. This is fitting, as MacAskill, effective altruism and one of its most prominent non-profits, GiveWell, are all mentioned in Bregman’s book. He gives a clear-eyed assessment of where effective altruism gets it wrong (remember convicted crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried?) but still doesn’t want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I agree.

One of the most compelling stories in the book focuses on a Dutch village that hid more Jews during WWII than any other. What made this community different? For one, there was a charismatic person, previously on the fringes of society, who made it his job to relentlessly ask his neighbors to take in Jewish refugees. And asking, it seems, is the key. Subsequent studies demonstrated the one thing people who did good had in common that had a measurable impact: they were asked to help. What’s the moral of this story for this cheese-knife owner? Put yourself in situations where you will get asked to help.

The book’s appeal also lies in the context of our current moment. Between rising authoritarianism, humanitarian atrocities, and the escalating risk of AI’s impact on society that our politicians seem woefully ill-equipped to deal with, distracted as they are enabling the former, there’s a collective gaping maw thirsting for a reminder, nay a call, demanding moral ambition. In a prod to all my fellow hand-wringers, Bregman chides that the answer to the “What-would-you-do-if-you-lived-in-Hitler’s-Germany?” thought exercise is this: exactly what you are doing now. While Bregman makes his loathing of Trump clear elsewhere (in the pleasingly dispassionate manner I associate with the Dutch), this particular point is not about political leaders. Rather, it’s pointing out an essential truth about us.

Related, Bregman eviscerates the collective feeling of helplessness prominent amongst my peer group since the last U.S. election. There are limitless things we can do. Remember the jam jar experiment where, faced with 24 choices of jams, buyers gave up and ate their peanut butter straight, but faced with 6, they bought something? We are facing the same paradox of choice when it comes to how we might do good. Abundance is limiting our ability to act.

For now, I’m taking the baby steps you’d expect of a cheese-knife owner. I’m making some donations I’ve long been putting off, reactivating my monthly contribution to GiveWell, and taking the plunge to full veganism. (For years I’ve eaten “vegan” plus seafood for health reasons; this book reminded me of the indisputable suffering of some seafood I still eat, including fish and shrimp. No need to mock me, The Daily Show already did it exceptionally well here.)

I’m also reminded of one of the takeaways from reading Oliver Burkeman’s books, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and Meditation for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, earlier this year. In these, Burkeman makes the case for effectively lowering your barrier to entry to altruism, urging that we act on generous impulses rather than complicating them by trying to optimize them. This approach tempers the more pedantic side of effective altruism with a dose of common sense and an embrace of our own sentimentality—why not use it to tap our better angels?

I may lack Bregman’s criterion for being morally ambitious, but for now, I’ll be looking for ways where I can put myself in positions where I am asked to help. In a way, reading the book is just that. And if by chance you read this blog and you have something in mind, please ask.

Books

Yes, this really is all there is. How marvelous!

Posted on February 16, 2025

*Four Thousand Weeks in repose on my ottoman*

I recently finished Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, and I have not been as lit up by a non-fiction book since I read William MacAskill’s Doing Good Better in 2016. I am thus far responsible for at least 3 purchases of the book by co-workers (although it is not, mercifully, a business book) and pressing my own copy into the hands of my husband, a psychotherapist, convinced as I am of its pragmatic power to address existential concerns. This is not exactly a hot tip: the book is a bestseller that’s been out since 2021, but as every reader knows, you find books when you need them.

Doing Good Better set out a rigorous framework—which, being of good Scottish and Dutch stock, I’m a sucker for—on how we might do the most good, considering charitable giving, consumer choices, and career choices (turns out following your passion is questionable advice). Its author, MacAskill, is a founder of the effective altruism movement, a data-driven approach to philanthropy—which, in my humble estimation, has been undeservedly tarnished by its association with convicted crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, but that’s a whole other blog post.

In Four Thousand Weeks, Burkeman notably differs from MacAskill on the topic of charitable giving, urging that we act on generous impulses rather than complicating them by trying to optimize them. But more generally, while MacAskill is talking about how to save lives, Burkeman is addressing how to save your own by embracing its limitations or, to use a word I didn’t know existed until I read this book, finitude.

…a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths. As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one in the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever…Any finite life—even the best one you could possibly imagine—is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility.

If this sounds depressing to you—and worrying that it might, that ellipsis in the above quote purposely left out an explanation of how the Latin root for the word “decide” is closely related to “suicide”—fear not! The upside of all this is that you get, or, to be more blunt, need to choose how you spend your time. The constraints are precisely what make those choices, nay life, meaningful.

I liked the book so much I started reading it’s follow-up, Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts, before I even finished reading Four Thousand Weeks, which, now that I think about it may be where I got that nugget about embracing your charitable impulses in the moment. My point here is that one of the marks of a great read for me is that it puts itself in conversation with other books, admittedly not usually by the same author.

Besides Doing Good Better, Burkeman’s books also made me reminisce about another professor’s (this time MIT) book, Sherry Turkle’s 2021 The Empathy Diaries, and want to read Pico Iyer’s new book, Aflame, a reflection on monastic life, which strikes me as being as literal a representation of closing possibility off in pursuit of freedom as it gets. From an interview with Iyer, it sounds like the new book touches a fair amount on community, a theme also in common with Four Thousand Weeks.

This morning I found the synapses firing in the realm of fiction, specifically the pages of Helen DeWitt’s novel, The Last Samurai. It includes this description of a marathon classical concert where the pianist, in the interest of enabling the audience to truly hear a piece of music, plays the same piece 59 times in a row over seven and a half hours before playing three different pieces in rapid succession.

It was as if after the illusion that you could have a thing 500 ways without giving up one he said No, there is only one chance at life once gone it is gone for good you must seize the moment before it goes, tears were streaming down my face as I heard these three pieces each with just one chance of being heard if there was a mistake then the piece was played just once with a mistake if there was some other way to play the piece you heard what you heard and it was time to go home.”

The humaneness of Burkeman’s book is so of a piece with the humanity of the notion of our singular lives, “played just once with a mistake.” Reading this chapter wasn’t enough to make me stream tears, but I did go listen to Brahms’ Op. 10 No. 1 in D minor (the piece played 59 times by the pianist in The Last Samurai) while I wrote this blog, two choices I made consciously and happily about how to spend my time today. Also, literary kismet: it’s real.

Books

My Singaporean reading odyssey

Posted on August 24, 2024

After college, I spent a year in Singapore going to graduate school for economics. I arrived there through some alchemy of not landing a job and having a family friend in my hometown’s Rotary Club—which happened to sponsor international scholarships for graduate school. I chose Singapore primarily because I built a narrative to convince the scholarship committee that pivoted around wanting to study in an Asian tiger economy. And they spoke English in Singapore. And I thought it made me sound more interesting to want to study in Asia rather than Europe.

Apart from my studies, which were rigorous compared to the standards I was accustomed to from undergrad, in Singapore I found time to see a movie every weekend and consume the entire oeuvre of George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O’Rourke (back when Republicans were funny), and Tom Robbins. The former was a symptom of the intense heat in Singapore (I lost 10 pounds while living there simply from walking around and sweating), which produced the instinct to cocoon oneself anywhere there was AC. The latter was a symptom that economics wasn’t my calling.*

Reflecting on how I ended up choosing that particular group of authors—Orwell, Thompson, O’Rourke, and Robbins—the connective tissue seems to be some mix of counterculture and humor and politics, all of which adds up given I was twenty-one and living in a hyper-repressed, authoritarian city-state that had recently banned The Economist for daring to publish something critical about its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. It didn’t take much to feel rebellious in that setting, and reading that particular set of books must have made me feel, enjoyably, like I was being provocative—never mind that reading is inherently a private act.

I was reminded of my Singaporean reading odyssey recently when, thirty years after my stint in grad school there, I had occasion this year to return to Singapore twice for work. This time the reading material that accompanied me was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Neither was a deliberate choice, but with their respective themes of mental health and homosexuality, both were daring in their time. Singapore, it seems, continues to bring out the unconscious reading rebel in me.

Nostalgia thus triggered, upon return from my latest visit I checked out the audio book of Tom Robbins’ memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie. So far I’ve made it through his childhood in North Carolina and Virginia, which includes a very Robbins-esque foray into joining the literal circus. Despite having not read a certain vice-presidential candidate’s Appalachia memoir, I’m confident Robbins’ is far more entertaining.

My reading year so far has been enlivened by two other artists’ memoirs. First was Scottish poet Don Paterson’s Toy Fights: A Boyhood, in which he writes beautifully and vividly about his childhood. It reminded me of two of my other favorite authors on childhood, Elena Ferrante in My Brilliant Friend and Elizabeth Jane Howard in her Cazalet Chronicle quintet. Despite the fact that Paterson is slightly older than me and grew up in working class Dundee (I grew up in south Florida), I somehow found his memoir completely relatable, as if I had fabricated a whole alternate childhood.

Second was Australian musician Warren Ellis’ Nina Simone’s Gum, which follows the journey of said gum from Ellis’ covert collection of it after a concert in 1999, to a long period of storage wrapped in a towel in a Tower Records bag, to its eventual post-Covid display on a plinth at a museum in Denmark. It illuminates how objects have value in the meaning we create for them, which in this case engendered a chain reaction of enormous care and attention (read more here). This is not the object fetishization of, say, the luxury watch collector, and helped me explain to myself the meaning we attach to things. There are also some striking reflections on childhood, including an unforgettable surreal vision he and his brother experienced that bookends the story.

Current plans call for my next return visit to Singapore in January of 2025. That gives me a good four months to consider my related reading plans. Whether that’s more nostalgia for youth or immersing myself in a new generation of counterculture, political writers, I’m looking forward to a good book or three to help me kill 30 hours of round-trip flying time.

*Another symptom of my ill fit with a professional life associated with the dismal science was when, during my Singapore grad school year, I went to an interview for an equity analyst position at Goldman Sachs. I recall I was outfitted, sweatily, in a Liz Claiborne navy skirt suit purchased for the occasion, and I was interviewed by a man wearing a blue shirt with French cuffs who asked me what piece of music I would be if I could be any piece of music. In a fit of panic induced by the fact that I had spent the last few months listening on repeat to the then-brand-new Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (sample song title: Fuck and Run), I chose Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Whether it was on the basis of choosing the most popular music used in advertising or some other poorly answered question, I didn’t get the job. I still find men who wear French cuffs suspect.

Book and Bottle Books

Bellying up to bars in books

Posted on December 22, 2021

Over the course of my reading in 2021, I’ve often wanted to grab a stool at the bar (or restaurant or café) frequented by the characters in the book and shamelessly eavesdrop for an hour or three. Here are five of the mostly fictional establishments I’d like to visit:

The Corkscrew, favorite gathering spot of the wine-swilling barristers of London’s Lincoln’s Inn that features in Sarah Caudwell’s quartet of mystery novels: Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder, and The Sybil in Her Grave. The group, who have an unlikely penchant for getting tangled up in murder given they practice tax law, are forever ordering another bottle of Nierstein. Since the author was a barrister in London, I suspect the Corkscrew is based on a real wine bar—any tips on its identity are welcome.

The Cosy Corner from Ivan Turgenev’s short story, The Singers, which details a wild singing competition in a rural pub—a nineteenth-century version of Russian Idol if you will. I read the story in George Saunders’s collection of great Russian short stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is enriched by Saunders’s essays following each story and was one of my favorite books of 2021.

Girls & Women, Deborah Levy’s imaginary café from the third and final installment of her excellent “living autobiography,” Real Estate. The menu features an entrée of vodka and cigarettes; guava ice cream is also up for consideration on the bill of fare. I have half a mind to start a crowd-funding appeal to encourage Levy to open it IRL.

El Faro from Jessica B. Harris’s memoir, My Soul Looks Back, in which she reflects on running in the same social circles as James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. Harris is best known as a food writer, and this year’s excellent Netflix documentary, High on the Hog, was based on her book of the same name. My Soul Looks Back isn’t a food book per se, but she writes especially evocatively of the bustling scene—and shrimp in green sauce—from this late, historic West Village Spanish restaurant.

Giacomino’s Café from Sapienza Goliarda’s novel, Meeting in Positano, written in the 1980’s but released in an English translation only earlier this year. Here on the Amalfi coast, our protagonist orders “rum babas in abundance and cappuccinos by the gallon,” a breakfast of champions if ever there was one. Goliarda lived a life as large as that breakfast, and my cultural wish for 2022 is for someone to make a film about her.

Books Europe

Rx for America: Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues

Posted on October 6, 2021

Photograph of The Little Virtues by Natlaia Ginzburg

I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s essay collection, The Little Virtues, in a class on post-World-War-II Italian literature during a college semester abroad in Venice. It felt like the first time I had really discovered a writer as an adult reader, despite the fact that Ginzburg was assigned reading. She resonated deeply, especially the last and eponymous essay in the book, in which Ginzburg gives parenting advice on, among other things, the subject of money. The thrust of the piece is that we tend to focus on little virtues at the expense of the great ones, like thrift over generosity. The problem here, Ginzburg points out, is that “the great can also contain the little, but by the laws of nature there is no way that the little can contain the great.”

Even then, thirty years ago, I thought I probably wouldn’t have kids (I didn’t), so my smittenness with the essay wasn’t over the idea of saving nuggets of wisdom for my future as a mother. Rather I was struck by how at odds Ginzburg’s advice was with what I had gotten from my own parents, and how much her advice made sense.

For example, Ginzburg writes “As soon as our children begin to go to school we promise them money as a reward if they do well in their lessons. This is a mistake. In this way we mix money—which is an ignoble thing—with learning and the pleasures of knowledge, which are admirable and worthy things.” I had been rewarded for scholastic achievement starting in the fourth grade when I was paid to memorize multiplication tables, all the way up to a $2,500 check at the end of grad school.

I wasn’t particularly mad at my parents for what I deemed their deficiencies at parenting (although being nineteen, I was judgmental), but rather I think that in reading Ginzburg some part of me opened up to the idea of reading as a way to perpetually parent yourself. I still feel that way about books at forty-eight, and I don’t mean self-help, but mostly memoirs and non-fiction and especially novels, which somehow have a way of using fiction to get at the truest things. For this, her role in making me a lifelong reader, Ginzburg will always hold a special place on the shelves of my heart and home, where I have two copies of The Little Virtues, the better to always have one near at hand.

Periodically something will happen that reminds me of the wisdom of The Little Virtues. Last year it was the occasion of my niece’s thirteenth birthday. She badly wanted a MacBook Pro, and in the months ahead of her birthday started a lobbying campaign with her grandmother (my mother) and me.

She knew better than to ask for the laptop as a gift outright—too extravagant by the norms of birthday gifts in our family—so a couple months before her birthday, she sent my mother a letter with a plan for how she could save up for it, taking into account the money she would receive from my parents for good grades (old habits die hard).

In follow-up calls she planted the suggestion that we might be inclined to contribute to her MacBook-Pro fund as a birthday gift, thus accelerating the realization of her well-thought-out plan. I was onboard, and I was going to suggest to my sister and mother that we all pitch in and give my niece, say, $500 between us to help her reach her goal. But then the spirit of Ginzburg seized me and I decided to just buy her the laptop. I could afford it comfortably, as could my parents and my niece’s parents. Why was the norm of our family not to buy it?

As Ginzburg writes, “moderation in the midst of wealth is pure fiction, and fiction always leads to bad habits. In this way he [a child] will only learn to be greedy and afraid of money…the true indifference to wealth is an indifference to money. There is no better way to teach a child this indifference than to give him money to spend when there is money—because then he will learn to part with it without worrying about it or regretting it.”

In the end, the laptop was not mine to give. I called my sister and her wife with the intent of telling them I would buy the MacBook only to find out they had already bought her a Chromebook for the occasion. It was a well-researched choice, a fancy Chromebook as Chromebooks go, and quite the find in that particular era of the pandemic when laptops and tablets of all sorts were scarce. I was asked to enliven it with gifts of a mouse and stylus which I did, but silently worried about my niece’s potential disappointment. I couldn’t help thinking back to my own parents’ similar displays of frugality, like the time they gave us an Odyssey game console instead of the longed-for Atari.

When my niece’s birthday arrived and the family Zoomed for the opening of presents, the tantrum I feared never arrived. Her reaction was largely one of gratitude with a hint of indifference. Would it have been radically different if she had received the MacBook Pro? I don’t know, but I do know that if I had bought it for her, I would have been disappointed if she had reacted with the same detachment.

My desire to follow Ginzburg’s advice to be “moderate with oneself and generous with others” was pure, but my own hang-ups with money lingered. Ours was never, as Ginzburg described, “a family in which money is earned and immediately spent, in which it flows like clear spring water and practically does not exist as money.” Instead, ours was a home where my father constantly had CNN on mute to monitor the stock ticker, where money existed sometimes “heavily, where it is a leaden stagnant pool that stinks and gives off vapours,” and my schemed generosity had been tainted with the whiff of my own bullshit in the form of expectation. Just as well that my plan had been averted.

More recently I thought of Ginzburg when watching Fran Lebowitz kvetch on the Netflix documentary, Pretend It’s a City. In episode 4, Lebowitz explains to Scorsese, “There’s only two kinds of people in the world: the kind of people who think there’s such a thing as enough money and the kind of people who have money.”

I am definitely the kind of person who thinks there is such a thing as enough money, and with the not-so-small exception of worrying about how I will pay for healthcare in America for the rest of my life, I feel like I have enough money. In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Roxane Gay touched on this same divide among Americans in an opinion piece in The New York Times, writing:

“The United States is not at all united. We live in two countries. In one, people are willing to grapple with racism and bigotry. We acknowledge that women have a right to bodily autonomy, that every American has a right to vote and the right to health care and the right to a fair living wage. We understand that this is a country of abundance and that the only reason economic disparity exists is because of a continued government refusal to tax the wealthy proportionally.

The other United States is committed to defending white supremacy and patriarchy at all costs. Its citizens are the people who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories and take Mr. Trump’s misinformation as gospel. They see America as a country of scarcity, where there will never be enough of anything to go around, so it is every man and woman for themselves.”

What struck me most in these two paragraphs was the insight into our polarization stemming from one’s fundamental view of America as a country of abundance or scarcity, and how as Lebowitz suggested, this point of view doesn’t necessarily correspond with how much money you actually have. We have all read the narrative about Trump voters being the economically deprived who neoliberalism forgot. But we also know that plenty of rich, educated white people voted for him, not once but twice.

Two places where the discrepancy between the abundance and scarcity mindset shows up in policy disputes is college debt and healthcare. The idea of cancelling college debt rankles people, particularly those who were burdened with it and paid if off. It is not fair: about this they are correct. But on this point I am reminded of Ginzburg’s argument for why we should not reward children for good grades.

“…I think we should be very cautious about promising and providing rewards and punishments. Because life rarely has its rewards and punishments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded that that evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this.”

(I can’t help but think of current events at the time of writing this, namely Marjorie Taylor Greene, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist who is newly elected to Congress and who, in the face of reporting on some of her lunatic rhetoric, was apparently rewarded with a slew of campaign contributions. The fact that Ginzburg’s father was Jewish, that she was married to an anti-fascist who was tortured and murdered in a prison in Rome in 1944 for being an anti-fascist, and that she later served in the Italian parliament makes this even more jarring.)

In other words, not cancelling college debt because it’s “not fair” is beside the point, a prime example of mistaking a little virtue for the great one. (And if we want to argue in little virtues, we can look to Germany, which funds college tuition for everyone, even foreigners, because it knows it has a declining birth rate and funding skilled workers is in its best economic interests for the future.)

The same can be said for the line of reasoning that reckons other people’s illnesses are not their financial responsibility and therefore are not in favor of universal healthcare. And yet many of the same people will donate to a GoFundMe for medical bills of somebody, often a stranger, with a financially ruinous illness. The difference between this and voting for candidates who support universal healthcare is that the narrative in the GoFundMe gives the benefactor the illusion of both fairness—the victim seemingly verifiably didn’t deserve this, whereas with universal healthcare maybe the person who is sick smoked or abused drugs—and the feeling of beneficence. Like me and the MacBook Pro for my niece, we need to be appreciated for our generosity. Taxes to fund healthcare just don’t give us that same warm, fuzzy feeling.

One of the criticisms leveled at America by “old world” countries is that we are literal babies, a country less than 250 years old. Our insistence on adhering to a narrative of fairness in a world where history has proven century after century that this is not the case is one way we show our immaturity. The task before us now is to “love good and hate evil,” to side with the great virtues instead of the little ones, lest we permanently become a country of little virtue. We must grow up, and we must parent ourselves. Truth and facts and knowledge still exist, much of it recorded in books. Reading Ginzburg is one way to start.

Books

2020: My year in books

Posted on December 13, 2020

Lament for live events

In January I began a new volunteer gig writing a weekly roundup of literary events in the Bay Area, “Notable San Francisco,” for The Rumpus. It was more research than actual writing, but I happily engaged in this act of literary citizenship with the city where I had been living for only a year. What an ideal way to get better acquainted.

Despite San Francisco’s reputation as a bookish city, every weekend as I researched the column I was astounded at the depth and breadth of literary life in the area—from drag-queen story time at the library to lecture-hall events with marquee names to tiny bookstore author-tour stops, complete with warm white wine in paper cups. I wrote up and attended as many as I could before the pandemic brought a halt to in-person events and the column went on hiatus. One of the more memorable was seeing poet Robert Hass read from his new collection of poems, Summer Snow, as part of the Cal Berkeley lunch poems series. Hass was avuncular, the setting—the wood-paneled, couch-filled Morrison Library—seemed custom made for the occasion, and Rebecca Solnit was in the seat next to mine.

In conversation

Live events may have gone, but we still had books. Early on in the first shutdown I placed an online order to help support a favorite San Francisco bookstore, the food-themed Omnivore Books, which is how I ended up with food matriarch Ruth Reichl’s latest memoir, Save Me the Plums, about her editorship at the now defunct Gourmet magazine. I had just read Anna Weiner’s excellent memoir, Uncanny Valley, about her transition from the east coast publishing industry to the west coast tech industry, and it was one of those serendipitous moments where you read two books that seem to be in unwitting but useful conversation with each other. Reichl captured the end of an era in publishing while Wiener picks up with a logical, if depressing, progression of what happened to a smart Millennial woman in publishing (hint: she falls for the lure of tech only to get disillusioned and, thankfully for us readers, then write about it beautifully).

The pandemic also took me to artist Jenny Odell’s nonfiction manifesto How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell is the same generation as Wiener and lives, like Wiener, in the Bay Area, which may be part of the reason I saw Odell’s book as being in conversation with Wiener’s. Her Uncanny Valley ends on the bleak eve of the 2016 election, and Odell’s picks up with a guide to how breaking free from tech and paying attention to your local natural environment (something we all had a lot more time to do during lockdown) is a radically political act. I immediately downloaded a plant identification app and became very annoying to take a walk with, stopping every five feet to try and identify every blooming weed on the side of the road. I’m still working on the activism side of things, but I can spot a Peruvian pepper tree from a mile away.

Shelf life

Sometime in the spring I also read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. You don’t need to hear it’s good from me seeing as it won the Pulitzer Prize and all (and the famous PowerPoint chapter really is *chef’s kiss*), but I mention it here solely as evidence that I will get around to reading things eventually. I am sure I’ve had the book since at least 2012 because I remember it being on the bedside table of the house I lived in that year.

In other words, there is hope for all those books I bought to help support bookstores in the pandemic but have no hope in hell of finishing this year. I’m looking at you Elisa Gabbert’s The Unreality of Memory, Miranda Popkey’s Topics of Conversation, Maria Gainza’s Optic Nerve, Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather, Catherine Lacey’s Pew, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’s Sleepovers, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Fish Out of Water, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Ben Fergusson’s An Honest Man. For now, talk amongst yourselves on my shelves.

Year of the series

In my end-of-year blog post for 2019, I declared 2020 the year of the series and my intention to finish reading Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five-book Cazalet Chronicle, and Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, among others. 2020 may feel like a lost year, but this was one commitment I pulled off with pleasure.

I had started reading the Neapolitan Novels and Cazalet Chronicle in 2019 and had three books to go in each, which I alternated between as I progressed. You won’t be surprised to hear that I found these books worked well in conversation with one another, offering alternate views of the lives of their subjects—the Cazalet family in southern England and two Italian women, Elena and Lila—over overlapping spans of the twentieth century. I even found a thread between book three of the Neapolitan Novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, when Lila transitions from a grim life working in a sausage factory to being an assistant at IBM, the start of what will be her lucrative entrepreneurial career in tech. Turns out women moving into tech for economic reasons isn’t just a twenty-first century Silicon Valley story.

I am not the first person to wax lyrical about the Cazalet Chronicle (see also Gayle Lazda and Sarah Miller on the subject), but allow me to say that when you read these books you will tear your hair out that you ever wasted your time reading a Julian Fellowes novel and wonder why this hasn’t been made into a TV series. Then you will Google and find out it was made into a TV series that aired in 2001 starring none other than—wait for it—Hugh Bonneville (of Julian Fellowes’s Downton Abbey) as one of the lead characters. Then you will tear out what’s left of your hair wondering why the BBC won’t have mercy on us all and make it available on Netflix. Maybe Britain’s Channel 5, who rebooted All Creatures Great and Small to great success in this pandemic year, can have a go at the Cazalets, too.

I’m still about a hundred pages from the end of the last book, Friends and Heroes, of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, and so far it’s served as a counterpoint to the experiences of a moneyed English family (the world’s favored import of British culture) in the Cazalet Chronicle. Set during World War II and revolving around the life of a newly British married couple as they live in Bucharest and Athens as part of the husband, Guy’s, work for the British legation (a diplomatic arm lower level than the embassy), the Balkan Trilogy novels paint a picture of life during the war for an educated but unmoneyed class of Brits. Its protagonist, Harriet, is smart and frustrated and relatable and reminds me that what links all three of these series of books is that they excel at telling women’s stories of the twentieth century.

Book tech

No, I’m not going to talk more about Uncanny Valley or the Neapolitan Novels unlikely plot point involving IBM, but rather my three favorite book-related app/site discoveries of the year. First up is The Storygraph, which even in beta is everything I ever hoped for (but long ago gave up on) for Goodreads. I’ve moved all my reading tracking into their mobile app—you can import all your books from Goodreads—and am really enjoying watching the founder and CEO, Nadia Odunayo, develop and grow the site (her engagement with the site’s audience on social media is like a masterclass in product management). Highly recommend.

Next up is libro.fm, a site and companion app for audio books (à la carte and monthly memberships). The beauty is that when you buy books here, you choose your favorite bookstore to benefit from your purchase. It’s a great way to support our lovely local bookstores that are suffering so much during this pandemic.

I downloaded my first book from libro.fm over the summer when I had to take a long car journey, and I’ve since gotten a monthly membership for one book per month. I’ve found I choose things I probably wouldn’t buy in print, so it’s opened up my reading in a bunch of different directions. By far my favorite listen of the year was Kevin Wilson’s hilarious novel about children who catch on fire spontaneously, Nothing to See Here. If children who catch on fire spontaneously (don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt them) doesn’t sound like a rip-roaring read to you, please go and read Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s review of it, which itself is a thing of beauty.

Other books I enjoyed listening to were:

Tayari Jones’s lauded An American Marriage, much of which is epistolary, a format that’s well suited to an audio book.
Lady Glenconner’s Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown which, yes, I know, falls into that category of Americans lapping up British posh toss, but my god this lady really did have an extraordinary life and her friendship with Princess Margaret is the least of it.
Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel which truth be told I think my brain might be better suited to reading on the page than listening to, but I was happy nonetheless to have finally put a toe into her oeuvre, which also includes A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians.
Chef and restauranteur (Momofuko, etc.) David Chang’s memoir, Eat a Peach, which is currently my companion to the jogging habit I’ve revived in 2020 as way to stave off the pandemic pounds. If I can’t eat the food he describes, listening to it is a nice alternative.

Finally, I heartily recommend buying books online from the launched-in-2020 Bookshop.org. Like libro.fm, you can select which real-life bookshop you want to support with each purchase. While it’s still best to order online direct from your favorite bookshop when you can, Bookshop.org is the next best thing.

Hooray for Hollywood

All year long I’ve been dipping in and out of I Used to be Charming, a collection of mostly previously published articles spanning the career of journalist and novelist Eve Babitz. She is smart and hilarious and excellent at skewering the bold and beautiful of music and movies while also being their best friends. To wit: one article lays out her theory of Jim Morrison as fundamentally a fat kid while at the same time explaining how she bedded him. Many of the pieces are set in Los Angeles, where I lived for my young adulthood, and San Francisco, where I’ve been living of late, and even though there’s not too much overlap in the time period (the most recent of the articles were published in the nineties) it’s been a joy experiencing those cities through her eyes.

Babitz has had a revival in recent years, rightly being recognized as the more fun peer of Joan Didion who somehow never got quite the same acclaim. She suffered a terrible accident in 1997 that left the lower half of her body badly burned, and she now reportedly lives a reclusive life that includes being a MAGA supporter, a piece of information I find hard to square with the whip-smart woman that’s on every page of this collection.

On that note, I’ll look with optimism to 2021 and having a president back in the White House who reads books and brings culture back to political life. May your 2021 be full of both!

Books

2020 Reading Resolutions: year of the series

Posted on December 30, 2019

For a long time, I’ve resisted the idea of reading books that are part of a series. With so many good books out there, it seemed risky to devote too much of my precious reading time to a single author, much less a single series by a single author. I was suffering from the reader’s version of FOMO.

It hasn’t always been this way. As a child I had no problem devoting myself to the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Ramona Quimby; to chronicles of both Narnia and Sweet Valley High. But not until Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, the first of which came out in 2014, was my impasse with reading a series of books broken for me as an adult. The thing is, there was so much else going on with Cusk’s books—ripping up the conventions of fiction and such—I almost didn’t notice I had become a serial book reader again. It took another author, Elizabeth Jane Howard, to make me fall in love with the multi-volume form again. (Hat tip to Sarah Miller, whose essay about Howard and The Cazalet Chronicle is what got me started on them.)

As I write this, I am lingering in the last pages of the second volume, Marking Time, of Howards’ Cazalet Chronicle, an English family saga that starts on the brink of the Second World War and excels in its depiction of women and children. The third, Confusion, was purchased in a secondhand bookstore in Chicago earlier this year before I had even started on the second—that’s how sure I was I wanted to continue reading these books. My enjoyment of the Cazalet Chronicle has prompted me to plan a year of reading books in series for 2020. This means starting a few new ones as well as returning to some I’ve already begun, often in the middle. Here’s what’s on my list.

First up is returning to Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. I read and loved the first, My Brilliant Friend, which has in common with Howard the strength of its depiction of girls and women in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. The Story of a New Name’s patient wait on my bookshelf is over.

Next I plan to tackle Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, which a friend recommended during a random conversation in which I professed my adoration of Alan Bennett, who starred in a 1980’s television adaptation. This led me to pick up Manning’s bewitching The Rain Forest, which I read and loved this year. A foreword from a reissue of The Balkan Trilogy that appeared in Rachel Cusk’s 2019 essay collection, Coventry, pushed the series near the top of my 2020 reading list.

Also featured in Coventry is an essay about D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and its sequel Women in Love. I’ve read neither, and if I get an itch for expanding my repertoire of classics, I will turn to these.

I will seek mirth from Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to Be Cheerful, the third in a series I started in the middle in 2018 with the sweet, funny Paradise Lodge. Featuring the adventures of teenager-into-young-adult Lizzie Vogel (I’m sensing a theme here in my tastes), it’s nice to have someone to cheer for. Continuing my theme of six degrees of separation from Alan Bennett, Stibbe also wrote a book, Love, Nina, about the time she spent as the nanny for the editor of the London Review of Books, who happened to be Bennett’s close friend, sometimes publisher, and neighbor.

The podcast of Bennett’s 2019 diary reminded me that Scottish used-bookstore-owner Shaun Bythell has a sequel to his curmudgeonly delightful Diary of a Bookseller. The follow-up, Confessions of a Bookseller is something I’ll save up for when I need some comic relief in 2020 (I’m guessing around election time in November).

Sticking with memoir, I also want to read the first in a planned trio by Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing, which is a response to George Orwell’s Why I Write. The second book of this series, The Cost of Living, was one of my favorite books of 2018. Here’s hoping the third of the series comes to fruition in 2020, although if not, I’m also keen to read her 2019 novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, not least because it’s partially set in Berlin.

Back to fiction, I finally plan to take the plunge with Ben Lerner and his 2019 The Topeka School. In the last month Lerner has been interviewed on most the culture podcasts I enjoy, so I guess the marketing has worked. It’s the third of a series, but a prequel of sorts to the first two, so I don’t feel too bad about starting at the end.

Finally, I’m bad at sticking to plans and there are a few things on my horizon that don’t fall into the category of a book that’s part of a series, including Nell Zink’s 2019 novel, Doxology, Ottessa Moshfegh’s forthcoming novel Death in Her Hands, and Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 Booker Prize nominated Ducks, Newburyport, which at over 1,000 pages may as well be a multi-volume series, albeit written largely as a single sentence.

It’s the time of year for resolutions, but before I go, here’s a quick look back at my favorite books read in 2019 and published in the last decade. Happy new year, and may your 2020 year in reading be filled with new favorites!

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