Well, hello folks! Far more of you signed up to this slapdash newsletter I’ve created than I anticipated. Perhaps I should have planned this is a bit more?
In lieu of any properly developed plans, I am just going to jump in and start this thing. Assuming many of you reading this are among my wonderful group of Book Twitter acquaintances, I don’t need to tell you that reading has been the one of the few things keeping me sane during this relentless year. However, this year I’ve given myself leave from any creativity due to my having started a new job in March at Chronicle Books and then two weeks later quarantine arrived. I abandoned my blog where I had been writing book reviews and stopped working on any of the various fiction projects I had started. With this newsletter I aim to get back to writing and doing more with my thoughts on literature than tweeting incessantly.
What will I be writing, you ask? I don’t intend on solely writing traditional book reviews as I have done previously, I am not a professional book critic and have no intention of becoming one (to editors: feel free to contact me if you want to publish something by me! I do have my vanity). I want to approach this medium more informally. I am thinking I will aim to post 1-2 times a week with the goal to share thoughts on what I’ve been reading, be it books or criticism. Films as well, if I ever get back to watching anything. In a nutshell, I will be using this as a means to explore my ideas on what I love, hate and want from great literature—a vague concept with only what I happen to be reading giving it any direction.
Going into next year I have exhaustingly lofty reading ambitions. I intend to read more Dostoevsky (part of a Demons reading group in January), to finally read one of Tolstoy’s bigguns (Anna Karenina reading group in February), George Eliot, more Flaubert, more Zola and Balzac, more Austen, Marguerite Duras, Witold Gombrowicz, more Bernhard (one of my key 2020 discoveries), Kafka’s letters, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Dubravka Ugrešić, Marguerite Yourcenar, Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau, more Enrique Vila-Matas—just a top-of-my-head litany.
But beyond specific writers, my reading project for next year is to shift to having the majority of the non-classics literature I read to be published by indie presses, with an additional focus on translated literature. Something I’ve already largely done this year cranked up another level. Will be reading lots of Dalkey Arhive, NYRB Classics, and Open Letter titles. Likely I will turn this into a more developed project, but that is still in the works.
My next post on here will be my Best Reads of 2020 list. I’m leaning towards not going a numbered list, and instead just writing a bit about a selection of books that have stuck with me most. We all know what my #1 choice will be, and after that I find any rankings to be irrelevant and unnecessary. Rankings rarely ever survive any period of time, and instead of losing sleep over what I’ll put as #3 and if #8 should actually be #6, I am going to let my instincts guide which books I decide to write about.
Now, I don’t want to overstimulate all you lovely people by dragging out this inaugural post for too long. So I will end with some thoughts on a few recent reads.
Yesterday I finished In Search of Lost Time Vol. III: The Guermantes Way (published by Modern Library and translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright) by Marcel Proust. Won’t wax poetic on this too much because those of you who have read Proust have heard it all and those of you who haven’t don’t need anymore Proust guilt in your life (and have also probably heard it all). I will say that I have maintained the impression that while I admire each individual volume greatly, my love is reserved for the project as a whole. I think this feeling stands, but the way Guermantes Way finishes has caused me to reconsider. An extensive section covering the narrator’s first dinner party hosted by Mme Guermantes and a vicious late night meeting with the Duke de Guermantes’ brother, Palamède, Baron de Charlus see Proust analyzing the decadent hypocrisy and labyrinthian social maneuverings of the aristocratic class with an empathy, brutality and complexity only Proust can accomplish. But it is the book’s climactic scene that showcases his full genius. A surprise visit by Swann where a fleeting moment is captured with heartbreaking tragedy. We all talk about Proust’s brilliance at savaging the rich and aristocratic, but I would say he is at his true best when exploring what he arguably knew even more about—illness.
Before that I read Edith Wharton’s The Age Innocence (Penguin Classics). A fantastic book that I had a somewhat strange issue with. It felt too cloistered. Isn’t that the point, you ask? It is. However, The House of Mirth is equally about the claustrophobic social hierarchy of the New York elite, but its narrative manages to have far more movement. Of course this is due to the constant desperation of Lily Bart, and the limits she is taken for self-preservation. However, I do feel that Innocence could have made use of moving away from Newland Archer’s stifled perspective, which we follow for all 300 pages, and by Wharton allowing herself to turn her lacerating eye on the interiority some of the other already complex characters. She does ultimately do this with the beautifully heartbreaking ending where her focus remains on Archer but in reality is on the ravages of time.
Last but not least, just today I finished Jane Austen’s Emma (Penguin Classics). This book has taught me a valuable lesson: do not share thoughts on an Austen novel on Twitter before finishing it unless you are absolutely loving it. I have taken a shellacking for sharing my frustrations with the book—Austenites have learned from the best when it comes to verbally drawing blood. The sad thing is, the last 120 pages of the book are very well done. Emma becomes a truly interesting character when in desperation, and Austen wraps together narrative threads will admirable subtlety. But I maintain that, in my opinion of course(!), that for at least 300 pages Emma is a collection of vaguely interesting get-togethers inhabited by mostly bland characters, with Emma herself being too passive of a schemer to make the various scenarios as interesting as they could be.
And with that I will end this. Look forward to terrorizing your inboxes with more rambling book thoughts on a regular basis!
Tremendous. I am so excited for this project
It is certainly true that Wharton "<i>could</i> have made use of moving away from" Archer's perspective. She did not, though. What do you think she would have gotten out of it? I see some big disadvantages. May and the other conspirators are obviously off-limits. Aren't they?
But then I don't think that <i>Mirth</i> is equally claustrophobic, but rather less. <i>Innocence</i> is set thirty years earlier in a smaller, more aristocratic, narrower society. And of course Bart is trying to <i>join</i>, where Archer is securely in it, trapped. It is not clear to me, either, that <i>Mirth</i> has more "movement," but you may be using that term differently than I do.
If what you want is a story from the point of view of someone <i>like</i> May or Olenska, I can strongly recommend Wharton's short fiction. She writes about a wide range of people.