Lies and Sorcery was published in 1948 to much praise. Natalia Ginzburg later recalled reading an early manuscript and being “filled with vitality and joy.” This, reader, can be described as nothing but a totally insane reaction to the text. Morante’s husband, Alberto Moravia, called the novel genius. Slightly less insane. Italo Calvino called it a “serious novel” that “successfully penetrates to the bone,” which I would say is more in line with my experience of it.

The novel is set around the turn of the 20th century in southern Italy, and tells the story of one family over three generations, as narrated by Elisa, the youngest member of the clan and sole survivor. We learn in the introduction that Elisa’s parents—Anna and Francesco—have been dead for several years. Upon their death, she was adopted by a fallen woman, Rosaria, who she has lived with in relative isolation for the past several years. At the opening of the book, Rosaria has died, leaving Elisa completely alone in the world.

Alone, that is, save for the ghosts of her ancestors. During the years she lived with Rosaria, Elisa often shut herself up in her room fantasizing about her ancestors and their grand romantic lives. In her mind they were princes, saints, dukes and queens. She spun stories to entertain herself in her solitude—spurning Rosaria’s unsavory lifestyle—and she began to believe her own stories. When she finds herself truly alone, these fantastical ghosts abandon her too and are replaced with memory.

Elisa finds that she can suddenly remember, with great precision, her entire past, and not just that—she can remember the pasts of her dead ancestors as well, the true version of events. She says, “Things I never knew about I now understood and I could retrace their lives from the beginning, as if their experiences were mine.” These memories come to her in light early morning dreams, whispered in the voices of her ancestors. She rises and each morning “like a faithful secretary” writes it all down. And this is how the story begins.

We meet Cesira, Elisa’s maternal grandmother, who grew up in a middle class family but had too high a sense of herself and too great of ambitions to continue in that station. She catches herself a nobleman, Teodoro, though much to her chagrin his family disowns and disinherits him in response to their marriage. Teodoro, Cesira and soon enough their daughter, Anna, are plunged into debt. In Anna’s early life, Cesira’s overwhelming disappointment and resultant hardness contrast with Teodoro’s good nature and charm. Though the family lives in near poverty, Teodoro regales Anna with embellished stories of his noble upbringing (not unlike the stories Elisa spins for herself two generations later) and instills in her that unwarranted and poisonous sense of her own superiority. Like her mother and father, Anna will contend with the feeling that she deserves better—that she is better—than what she has for the rest of her life.

This is in some ways the center of the novel: the terrible restriction of the traditional (archaic?) social and class structures that were still so prominent in Italy during this time. Morante puts the effects of such repression on full display in her characters, each one more miserable and unlikeable than the last. The poor are bitter, the rich careless. No one wins, but no alternative is presented. Even poor little Elisa, who comes into the world when Anna, after a life altering brush with her noble cousin Edoardo, is driven to marry Francesco by bitter necessity, is hardly a compelling character. I pitied her, but that was about the extent of it.

As I soldiered through, I found myself wondering what the point was. There were moments where I expected Morante to stake a claim or take a perspective. For a section of the novel, young Francesco is captivated by Marx and dreams of creating a more equal world, but his drive doubles back on itself and goes nowhere. Beyond painting a striking portrait of one troubled family against very particular social and economic backdrop, Morante doesn’t offer a path out of the trouble, until you realize that she actually already did, on page 24 at that. At the end of Elisa’s introduction she confides in her reader: “Perhaps by reconstructing my family’s story, I will finally be able to solve the mystery of my childhood as well as discover the truth behind all the other family myths…This is why I obey their voices and write. Who knows, perhaps with their help I may at last be able to leave this room.”

It’s worth noting that Elena Ferrante (whoever she is) cites Morante as one of her major influences. For Ferrante lovers, Lies and Sorcery may be a compelling text if only to place Ferrante’s work within the larger context of the Italian novel. It’s been a while, but I remember loving the Neapolitan Quartet. Ferrante is certainly unflinching when it comes to the flaws of her characters, but I remember rooting for them nonetheless, liking them flaws and all. Consider this your warning: not so with Lies and Sorcery.

Hi! This month I have been reading Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante. As predicted, it has taken me just about the entire month, and I am by this point quite eager to finish it. Maybe I will fit something else in before May comes. You’ll find out next week.

Additionally I read two short stories out of my copy of the 1997 O. Henry Prize Stories—“City Life” by Mary Gordon (the winner), and then also, because I was intrigued by a collection of hers at the Strand the other day, “Comfort” by Mary Gaitskill. The first was about woman, who having broken away from her poverty-stricken family finds herself greatly disturbed when a slovenly downstairs neighbor interrupts her carefully constructed life. The second focuses on the subject’s respective relationships with his father and girlfriend in the aftermath of a horrible car accident that disables his mother. I’ve already kind of forgotten it—“City Life” was more memorable, which I think is as good a barometer for short stories as any.

Fittingly though unintentionally (April being National Poetry Month), I read a lot about poetry and poets, including Poetry Magazine, which I mentioned last week, and two interesting profiles—one on Michael Ondaatje and one on V.R. Lang. It inspired me to finally start a list of the poets I want to read more of which is something I have thought about doing many times. The internet is a wonderful place (LOL) to discover poetry, but it is often the case that whatever you discover is totally out of context. I want more context & a deeper understanding. So far, on my list:

Jane Kenyon
Jane Hirshfield 
Linda Greg
Michael Ondaatje
Gregory Orr
V.R. Lang  

Who should I add?

I love love love this poem and was delighted to find it featured in the April edition of Poetry Magazine along with several other poems by Gregg. She is a poet I am always meaning to read more of, and in “Praising Spring,” it seems she is at her very best.

As suggested by the title it is a celebration of the beauty of spring. It arrives every year a miracle. But there is also a more sinister undertone that balances the poem and makes it true. The best poems are true. Even in the opening line, Gregg introduces the idea of this double feeling: “The day is taken by each thing.” Is the day delighted by the blooming world around it, or does each thing (those later described: the spider, the flower, the doe, the running brook) claim the day for itself?

She expands on both possible meanings simultaneously. She is certainly taken by each thing, kicked into a frenzied and compulsive movement, out, in, out again, finding herself out even in the dark of night to witness what she describes as “a beauty that knows nothing of delay.” In this world defined by incredible speed, each of us is forced out of our heads into the moment, as Gregg says, the mind “leans back and smiles, having nothing to say.”

In our best moments, our minds have nothing to say, and the coming of spring in all its glory can catch even the most active mind off guard. However, there is a piece of this poem, a piece of Gregg’s quiet mind, that remains keenly aware of the passage of time. Small performances of life and death take place all around us and very quickly during spring. The flowers bloom only so an hour, the doe becomes a deer. Gregg is awestruck (both amazed and terrified) by a growth and “wildness / that does not heed the hour.” It will stop for no one, no thing, not even the coming of night—and all that night’s darkness may represent.

Faced with such beauty and such power, Gregg acknowledges herself as a servant and sings her praises. It’s a song of wonder and a song of humble tribute to something uncontrollable. In the closing line, it begins to rain in her spring—rain, being a quintessential springtime image, representing both birth and destruction, has not been mentioned until now. We see it nourishing the flowers and filling the brook to near overflowing. There is an old farmer sleeping while his flowers open into life, there are stars to remind us of our smallness, there is mint, fresh, bright, and liable to take over your herb patch if its not contained. In spring there is room for all of it, the rain continues to fall, but the sun shines through.

I too grew up eating soft boiled eggs, and have an enduring, and shall we say recurring passion for them. When I was little—very little, my grandparents would take my sister and I to breakfast at Balthazar on Sunday mornings. This was back when they still opened at 7am for breakfast service. We were often the only people in the restaurant, and I remember the table we always sat at, to the left on the first banquet. My sister and I were charming and well-behaved little girls, much cooed at by the waitstaff.

Baba would order the eggs and soldiers, which I believe was an on-menu item at the time, but may not have been. She would request that our waiter bring out a bowl so that she could scoop my boiled eggs out of the shells, making it easier for me—probably about four years old at this time—to eat them. When we ate breakfast at home, she would do the same after boiling the eggs herself. She would tell me when the eggs went in, so I knew it would only be a few minutes, and then I would become impatient while waiting for the eggs to be cool enough for her to handle so that they could be scooped.

A warm soft boiled egg is a humble food, but the flavor—which is distinct from what you get with any other egg preparation—is rich. There are many ways to skin a cat, I mean boil an egg, but my current method is: eggs & one inch of water go into a small pot, bring the water up to a boil, turn down the heat and cover for three and a half minutes, remove eggs from pot and run briefly under cold water (just long enough to be able to touch them).

I’m an adult now, so I eat my eggs out of their shells, and own delightful egg cups (two pink ones, and two that look like camels) and two different tiny spoons for this express purpose. Toast soldiers (well-buttered) are an excellent but unnecessary accoutrement. This is the most chic breakfast imaginable. If you aren’t squeamish about eggs, which is obviously important when it comes to eating them soft boiled, I encourage you to to join me:

March was a slow-ish and random month for reading as you will soon see. I didn’t get through much, and what I did get through was thematically…disparate. I mean to continue my downward trajectory (from eight books in January) as I started Lies and Sorcery (long) and will likely be reading it through the end of the month. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First, three little March reviews.

I don’t remember why I decided on Painting Time at the beginning of the month. I finished Parma, so something shorter and something modern seemed like the ticket. I am learning through my little no new books exercise that my reading is often reactive—I rarely read two similar books in a row, even if I loved the first. Good things must be spread out. And Maylis de Kerangal is a good thing. I read The Cook by her a couple years ago and loved her depiction of total devotion. I picked up Painting Time second hand shortly after, knowing that I would eventually get around to it, then never did until now.

Where The Cook portrayed a young man’s almost compulsive commitment to the craft of cooking, Painting Time takes as it’s subject, yes you guessed correctly, painting, and takes as it’s protagonist a young woman named Paula. Paula is 20 and directionless (an “impetuous dabbler) when she decides to enroll herself at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels. This is not your typical art course, something she has already dabbled in. Instead, it is the Mecca of decorative painting, or trompe-l’œil—painting to deceive the eye. Paula is told in her interview that the course is six months of “intensive practical training” during which she will “delve into the very matter of nature, starting with wood, moving to marble, into semi-precious stones, then finally drawing in perspective, gilding, silver plating and commercial lettering.

The novel follows her through her training, which turns out to be grueling, and into her early career, which at first is non-existent. The course at the Institut gave Paula direction—something to dedicate herself to if only because she was so busy she didn’t have time to think about whether she should dedicate herself to it—but after she receives her diploma and returns home to her parents’s apartment in Paris, “her rhythm is broken.” Luckily a pregnant downstairs neighbor, possibly at the prompting of Paula’s solicitous parents, wants the ceiling of her soon-to-be nursery painted like the sky.

As soon as Paula begins, she is cured of her listlessness, wherein lies the central theme of the novel: art should be made for the sake of making it, without grand artistic intentions, or grand artistic pretensions. Doing it is enough (doing it well, of course), and is largely the whole point. By choosing painting as her artform, de Kerangal is able to put the beaux arts and it’s abstracted museum-housed descendants on one side of the coin, and what Paula chooses to do, paint for work, on the other. She argues in the end that the work is the purer form, if not of art, then at least of love.

I love the way de Kerangal writes. She has this third person narration style that is simultaneously aerial and internal. She writes in the present tense, which makes it feel like you’re watching a movie, and her oscillation between laser focused action reportage and dreamy fragmented memory turns the movie into a documentary. This was my favorite book of the month!

After I finished it, I started reading Two Dozen Eggs before bed. It’s a charming collection of stories, each of which has a corresponding recipe, but before I tell you about it, I’m going to tell you about Less Than Zero, which I started in the middle of Two Dozen Eggs because I wanted a longer story with my short stories. Back in January, I read ’s primer on Bret Easton Ellis and thought to myself, you know, I really don’t know if this is for me, but I do own Less than Zero, so I could find out. Since January, it’s been on my shelf, but in a special position that indicates “maybe read me sooner than all these other books you also haven’t read,” so I did that. Reader, it’s not for me.

Clay is an eighteen year old college student back from school in New Hampshire to spend the holidays at home in 1980s Los Angeles. His parents are divorced, which means his dad lives in an apartment in Studio Ciry and his mom lives in a pharmaceutical haze. Neither one pays much attention to him, and so he galavants around the city doing drugs with his friends, none of whom really seem Like real friends. Galavant isn’t the right word though, because that makes it sound fun. No one is having much fun.

The style is very diaristic, told in short matter-of-fact fragments. For example: “I wake up sometime before dawn. My mouth is really dry and it hurts to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth,” of “Trent calls me the next night and tells me that he’s feeling depressed and doesn’t have any more coke, can’t find Julian; having problems with some girl.” Clay is detached, only occasionally revealing his thoughts or feelings, but mostly just reporting the facts.

It’s not hard to imagine that the novel started as a handful of journal entries that Ellis submitted as part of his college admission application, which it did. His freshman year creative writing professor passed them along to a Simon & Schuster Editor, who was interested. Over the next three years, Ellis continued fleshing out the novel using scenes and stories from his own experience partying in L.A. Less Than Zero was published before Ellis graduated college.1

I can understand why people like Ellis’s style, and even more how this particular first novel took the literary world by storm. I think there’s always something compelling about unsupervised and misbehaving teenagers, and underneath the hopelessness and depravity, Ellis weaves in a palpable tenderness for Clay, or at least invokes it in his reader. It wasn’t as gratuitously violent or as pointlessly shocking as I expected it to be, but when Ellis wants to horrify, he horrifies, and ~3 truly stomach turning scenes is 2.5 too many for me.

Once I was about halfway through Less Than Zero, Two Dozen Eggs got put on pause. Well, I can’t tell you how glad I was to be able to recenter Hugh Corcoran’s world after escaping Ellis’s. Of course both of their worlds are really just our world, but Corcoran has a knack for balancing misfortune and mundanity, which are both ever-present in his stories, with a gentle and curing gratitude. I found Two Dozen Eggs at Three Lives at Christmastime and immediately bought all three copies they had in stock; one for my mom, one for Kathryn, and one for me.

I say it’s a collection of short stories, which it is, but the stories are really very short, more like character sketches than anything else. Corcoran was inspired by real people he’d encountered across his travels through Ireland (his home country), France and the Basque Country. The people he portrays are simple folk, mostly middle-aged or older, often a bit lonely, but when they cook, or even just prepare to eat, they are uplifted, transformed. Each little story is followed by a no recipe recipe, so that you too can make stuffed snails or chicken in aspic and be transformed.

Sally Finnegan is turning 87, and doesn’t have a large appetite anymore. When asked by her daughter what she’d like to eat on her birthday, she thinks a boiled egg sounds nice. Her daughter ignores her, but she’s made herself hungry for a boiled egg, which she prepares while reminiscing on her childhood in the French countryside—running out to the chicken coop in the morning to fetch warm eggs in for breakfast.

Monsieur Fourcade is poor and alone. He buys bulk rice and beans from the local Indian and North African grocers and farms a small plot of land for his vegetables. He befriends Claire, a young woman who runs a wine store (one of the few extravagances Monsieur Fourcade allows himself). When she invites herself over for lunch unexpectedly, he doesn’t have much on hand, but whips together a riz pilaf and runner beans in garlic and chili.

I am a firm believer in the power of a good meal, and Corcoran captures the magic over and over again. A chef himself, he writes well about food—convincing you that it’s not so complicated to prepare, in fact it’s all very intuitive. Impressively, he writes just as well about people, and in his sympathetic hands, the most ordinary people become the most interesting. He sums it up nicely in the acknowledgments: “This book is a memory of all the characters that I have met in my life, and in this age of homogenization being a character is more important than ever.”

The best non-book thing from this month was Granta’s Winter 2026 issue, which I read cover to cover. Its theme is therapy, more specifically, Freudian psychoanalysis, and it includes interviews with three prominent analysts, short stories and essays that tackle analysis as a concept—either head on or at a slant—and poems that aim to excavate. Favorites included “Good Medicine” by Sheila Heti (though I’m not sure I’m pro-psychedelics as therapy, and definitely ANTI-psychedelics as a way to see God), “Transference in the Afternoon” by Jesse Barron (analyst and patient are obviously both totally bonkers), “My Grandfather is the Future” by Victor Heringer (lovely tribute), and “Secondhand Smoke” by Dushko Petrovich Córdova (on the world of online perfume reviewers).

I additionally read this essay by David Sedaris in The New Yorker after my mom sent it to me to PDF so that she could read behind the paywall. This is a service I’m willing to offer. Sedaris is a little bit of a cheese ball but also a pleasure. In the SoHo McNally Jackson, I stealthily read “Curtis” by Patrick Cottrell out of the Paris Review. It’s a dryly funny little short story that packs a punch. And for my obligatory piece on something that’s going seriously wrong in the world, this article on online sports betting (and gambling more generally) from The Atlantic confirmed what I already know (online sports betting (and gambling more generally)) is a scourge on society). The obligatory piece on something going terribly wrong in the world is an area where The Atlantic seems to thrive. I meant to cancel my subscription, but I forgot, so we’ve just re-upped for another year.

In other news, daffodils, and the light is back on my walls in the morning. A pigeon is brooding over her nest right outside my lover’s front door, and neither of us has been pooped on yet. Have you ever actually seen a pigeon’s nest? I had my friends over this week to celebrate the equinox. I made chicken cutlets (by request) and a farro salad and garlic bread because I’m starting to feel like why wouldn’t you make garlic bread when you could just also make garlic bread. I did cut my finger trying to slice the baguette but it’s closed up and healing now. The baguette was so crusty and my knife was dull and slipped. There used to be a bakery on the Upper East Side called Hot & Crusty. I would pass it on my way to ballet and even as a child, I knew that Hot & Crusty was a disgusting name for anyplace that you were supposed to get food. Anyway, we had cupcakes for dessert. Xx

“A Primer” by Bob Hicok

I never formally decided that my year long ban on book buying would extend to cookbooks, but in my heart I knew that it should. The unread novel languishes on the shelf, and the uncooked (?) cookbook also! In each cookbook, a hundred (or more!) odd recipes—languishing! Well, my past self, as excited about the whole thing as my current self, had preordered the book when she (me?) first heard about it LAST YEAR. I am so wonderful. Thusly saved from having to on the one side make an exception to my rules (laws) and on the other side deny myself the pleasure of this book and the recipes therein, all that was left was to decide what to cook first.

It’s spring technically (officially as of today!!!!), but it’s still…hmmm, cold. Something light but comforting was what I craved and, was I immediately drawn to the lovely looking Poached Halibut with Fresh Chiles, Tomatoes, and Mint. I almost talked myself out of it in favor of the Lamb Meatballs with Mint and Feta in Saucy Couscous (also delicious looking for what it’s worth). It’s not tomato season and the fish counter at Citarella is good, but doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi as the fish market at the summertime beach. I’m glad I went with my gut (ha ha). SOMETIMES I EAT OUT OF SEASON PRODUCE, okay! SOMETIMES I am a modern girl.

This was literally so easy to make. I always roll my eyes when I see “TIME: 20 minutes” at the top of a recipe and plan for double that, but this one genuinely took 20 minutes. I halved all measurements since it was just me and my lover, used halibut as called for, and subbed dry vermouth for white wine (as suggested) because I had an open bottle of white wine and did not have vermouth. I served the fish and broth over a little rice because I will take any opportunity to incorporate rice into a meal, but honestly it wasn't needed. A hunk of fresh bread is the optimal carb accompaniment for this dish. No notes, enjoy enjoy enjoy!!!

Must be read OUT LOUD. Read it out loud NOW, and then read it out loud again. Xx

At the end of January,1 I finished Washington Square, and felt drawn to something a bit more contemporary. I thought it would be wise to also start the shortest month with a short book, so as not to nosedive from eight books in January to one book in February. I have a section of my shelf dedicated to skinny little spines, and I picked out Little Lazarus by Michael Bible. I picked it because a couple weeks ago I read a short story by Bud Smith, googled Bud Smith, found his Instagram (on browser), and saw that he was teaching a workshop with Michael Bible. I thought Little Lazarus might be good since I think Bud Smith is good, and Bud Smith obviously thinks Michael Bible is good, or at least is friends with him. I also think I bought it off the staff picks table at Three Lives, which will always be good enough for me.

Well, turns out Little Lazarus is good but is also a really very strange book, and I think I’ll have to read it again to really get a grip on it, which I’d be glad to do. Ostensibly, it is the story of two teenagers—Francois and Eleanor. Don’t let their French names fool you—they live in Harmony, North Carolina. Also in Harmony is a man in a seersucker suit who does not speak, and his clairvoyant giant tortoise, Lazarus, who answers yes or no questions on a small chalkboard. On a vacation in New York City, Eleanor acquires a little tortoise herself, and names him Little Lazarus. One fateful evening, these characters collide (except for Little Lazarus who is at home in a shoe box), and everything changes.

The story is told in five parts, beginning with an overture, and then a section for each of our central characters—Francois, Lazarus, Eleanor and Little Lazarus, in that order. It is a jumpy book, full of tangents, misdirection and fabricated narratives carried out to their complete conclusions. Lazarus’s advanced age allows Bible to stretch his story some hundred and fifty years back in time. But why stop there, at the preposterously long lifespan of his be-shelled fortune teller? Bible stretches even further, and he does not hide from the reader what feats of imagination will be required of them. He begins: “Envision the past. The thunderclap of everything beginning and all the pain and poetry that follows.” No spoilers, but the book wraps up nicely with the end of the world.

Francois and Eleanor are simultaneously a blip on the timeline and all important actors in the destiny of the universe. Bible makes this dichotomy, by which all of our lives are defined, come to life. As a matter of personal preference, I found the moments in which Bible leaned into ultra-specificity (of which there were plenty!) to be more compelling than some of his broad, sweeping strokes. Broad, sweeping strokes are difficult to execute well, and I will excuse the silly, wizard-like vibe of some of his narrative interjections since I understand what he was trying to achieve through them.

After Little Lazarus, I did something I literally never do and started reading three different books at the once. The first of those was Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I bought my edition at the Big Chicken Barn in Ellsworth, Maine (a magical & overwhelming place), and it also includes Other Love Poems. I decided to read it because Valentine’s Day was fast approaching and I love love. I wrote about it, and one of my favorite poems from within it, here. TLDR: read more poetry, more sonnets if possible, and read them out loud.

At the same time, I decided I might as well try to chip away at my shelf of languishing nonfiction by reading one of the most recently acquired (and thus least languishing) titles thereupon. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester was a Christmas present from my sister’s lover, John. He knows that I love volcanoes2 for their sheer destructive potential, and identified Krakatoa as a deeply destructive volcano that I should probably know about. He couldn’t have been more correct!

On August 27, 1883, Krakatoa, an island volcano in the heart of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, erupted. The eruption was so violent that it not only blew clouds of ash and rock some thirty miles into the atmosphere, but also blew up its source (itself). After the smoke had cleared, the imposing island known as Krakatoa that once sat in middle of the Sunda Strait was simply no longer there. The sound of that great final explosion was heard 3,000 miles away, which would be like hearing an explosion in San Francisco from Philadelphia.

Though some were killed more directly by the explosion, it was the three tsunamis that followed that killed close to 40,000 people. In the weeks after the eruption, the cloud of ash spreading through the stratosphere started creating striking sunsets, which continued through 1886, and of which there is much documentary evidence. In Poughkeepsie, NY the volunteer firefighters noticed a red glow on the horizon and rushed off to fight a fire, which was in fact the setting sun. The temperature dropped globally by an average of one degree Fahrenheit in the year that followed.

Most insane of all? In the place where Krakatoa once existed, there now presides a new mountain island (read: volcano): Anak Krakatoa, or “Child of Krakatoa,” which is almost constantly erupting, building steadily upon itself, and which one day will likely meet (mete out) the same fate as its ancestor.

I cannot stress how riveting I found this book. Winchester leaves no stone unturned and goes to great lengths to link seemingly disparate events at and around the time of the Krakatoa eruption. He weaves together the geopolitics and the plate tectonics with no dearth of first-hand accounts and primary sources. I feel smarter than I was before I read it, yet no greater prepared for a catastrophic volcanic eruption, which is exactly how I want to be (because what’s the point).

The third book I was reading through the middle of the month was Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. If memory serves, I bought it at the Strand a couple years ago because my friend Robbie Huffines told me Robinson was great. Housekeeping is her first novel, and I always like to start at the beginning. Then the other week, I was perusing ’s Top Reads of 2025 and she mentioned it as a favorite re-read of the year, and what’s more, as a book she couldn’t live without!

The novel centers on the Foster family, and begins by telling you how they ended up where they are, which is a fictional Idaho town called Fingerbone. Edmund Foster settled there when a west-bound train put him down there, and there he built a home for his wife, Sylvia. They had three daughters, Molly, Helen and Sylvie, whose childhood was sweet, but who through various acts of abandonment, became a source of sorrow to their mother. Years on, Helen drops her own two daughters, Ruth and Lucille, off on her mother’s porch before driving a borrowed car into the lake. These events are related by Ruth, who is our narrator, in a style that is both mythic and dispassionate. When Sylvia dies, Sylvie is called home from her life as a transient to care for Ruth and Lucille.

She is an untraditional caregiver in that she often vanishes in the night (a habit that’s startling to the girls at first), collects newspapers and coffee cans, and does not seem to mind if her charges skip school for whole months at a time. While Ruth recognizes that Sylvie is not like the other people in town, she doesn’t hold it against her—Ruth doesn’t feel that she fits in either, and doesn’t mind if all of Fingerbone is talking about how strange things seem to be over at the Foster house. Lucille and Ruth are inseparable in body and mind for the first half of the novel, but around the mid-point, a rift opens. Lucille does not want to be odd, Lucille wants to be normal.

From this point, Robinson veers somewhat off the path, or at least onto another path. The traditional narrative, coming of age story vanishes with the melting snow. Lucille chooses to pursue a conventional life, but that course of action doesn’t seem to be an option for Ruth. She continues her education under Sylvie and her story—her thoughts—become increasingly philosophical. The action, which always had in it a tinge of unreality, becomes even more untethered.

The novel is ultimately—as signaled by its title—about making and keeping a home, both literally and more conceptually, and perhaps most importantly spiritually. Set against the natural grandeur of the northwestern United States, but also against the pettiness of small town persuasions, Housekeeping puts forth that the larger world is at times indifferent, at times antagonistic, but that we must nonetheless find a suitable way to inhabit it. I was laid up with a cold as I came to the end of the novel and, my illness and the resultant haziness coincided perfectly with its devolution from something grounded into something absolutely aloft. Both before and after, it was inconceivably beautiful.

Then, with only a handful of days left in the month, I thought it would be wise to start a longer novel, one that I could focus on entirely, and one that would take me into the coming month as my first book of March. I chose The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal, because it was named as the favorite novel of the charming female protagonist of a short story I read earlier in the month.3 I finished it at the beginning of this week, so I’m including it here instead of waiting for next month.

I blew through it at such alarming speed because it’s so fantastically entertaining. It is set in Italy during the years following the French Revolution and primarily follows the lives of a young nobleman, Fabrice del Dongo, and his paternal aunt, Gina. The action eventually centers itself in Parma, in the fictional court of Prince Ranuce-Ernest IV. There, Gina holds great sway as the beautiful and clever mistress of Prime Minister Mosca. Through advantageous marriage, she becomes a duchess, and develops great plans to advance her nephew—who she loves perhaps more than an aunt should love her nephew. Everything goes off the rails when Fabrice kills a traveling actor in self-defense and the Duchess’s enemies identify a weakness that they can exploit to bring about her downfall.

But that’s getting ahead of myself—the action really kicks off when a seventeen year old Fabrice, with no military experience whatsoever, decides to join Napoleon’s army. Yes, he begins how he means to continue—romantic, idealistic, and naïve. From this point forward, he is in and out of disguise and in and out of prison too. He has a strong sense of right and wrong, but barring the introduction of a plan that offends that sense, he trusts completely the judgement of his aunt and Mosca when it comes to navigating the intrigues of the court.

The court is portrayed as a force of degradation, and the reader is made to understand that Fabrice’s high level of trust (and resultant lack of participation in the making of his own destiny) stems just as equally from familial love as it does from a genuine disinterest in playing the games that must be played. He is more concerned with his inner life. He reflects that in his life he has only experienced passing fancies, tiring of the beautiful women he woos after a short time. He comes to believe that he’s not capable of real love, which greatly disturbs him, though he tries to accept it. When love does eventually come for him, it is in the least likely of circumstances, and will upend his life and the lives of all who love him.

It’s a lengthy novel and though romance and adventure abounds, it also requires a high level of attention to keep track of the various characters, their aliases, false passports and disguises, their servants and assassins, their double crosses and foiled plans. Most of the time, it was a genuine pleasure to follow along with the duchess’s scheming. Through some of the lengthier tangents into what Stendhal refers to generally as “politics,” it was his narrative voice that kept me totally engaged. His language and tone are at once flowery and matter of fact, winking with humor, and a disarming familiarity.

No spoilers, but the ending is wildly abrupt. After spending 500 pages sparing no detail, Stendhal fast forwards three years (literally: “At this point I will ask my readers’ permission to pass in silence over a period of three years.”) and wraps up in a matter of four or five pages. Whether this was part of the plan or he was just on deadline I couldn’t say, but it certainly produces an interesting effect. I am still thinking about what exactly that effect is…

Nonetheless, The Charterhouse of Parma was my favorite of the month—highly recommend!

In shorter form, I perused a copy of The Los Angeles Review of Books that someone left in the hallway of my apartment building, and actually flipped through the copies of Poetry Magazine, The New York Review of Books AND The Sewanee Review that showed up on my doorstep. These things are always a mixed bag, but when you come across a real gem it makes the other less gem-like material worth it. I liked “The Gull McCabe” by Robyn Gill out of the Sewanee Review, but it doesn’t appear to be up on their website yet, so I can’t link to it, which is not terribly helpful in this context. If you also subscribe to The Sewanee Review, you can find it on page 47 of the Winter 2026 volume. There was a piece in the NYRB about Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir worth reading, and also one about the writing of Margaret Kennedy which I got bored of in the middle, but served its purpose in making me want to read the recent McNally reissues of one of her books.

In The New Yorker, I read “Sentimental Education” by Harold Brodkey (originally published in 1957). It’s a lovely, funny, deadly serious short story about a campus romance. It’s also why I decided to pick up The Charterhouse of Parma.

In The Atlantic, I read this illuminating essay by Tyler Austin Harper that details the current landscape of humanities funding. Highly, highly recommend if you care about that kind of thing.

Like the hoarder I am, both my refrigerator and my metal front door are covered with magnetted photos, cards, tickets, scraps of paper, etc. Unlike a true hoarder, I typically take some time at the beginning of the year to clear space in both locations. Like a hoarder again, I file the things I remove from the fridge/door in bins that I keep under my bed. Anyway…last year I stumbled upon this poem, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” by Nâzim Hikmet. I loved it and knew I loved it, so I stuck it up on my door where I forgot about it since it’s three and a half pages long when printed (thus much too long to read in passing when walking in and out of my apartment). This month, I brought it down and read it again to myself aloud (important!!!), and I still love it. I think you should read it, which you can do here.

I also read a review of a new biography of Dennis Johnson. The new biography is by Ted Geltner, and it sounds good, though I probably won’t read it. What I will read is Tree of Smoke, because I already own it. I am nervous because I loved Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke looks to be about 500 pages longer than Train Dreams, so is presumably a somewhat different kind of book. I’m sure it will be good though. Has anyone seen the Train Dreams movie? I want to see that.

I didn’t realllly want to see “Wuthering Heights,” but I also had to see “Wuthering Heights.” I have now additionally been subjected to 10000 reviews of “Wuthering Heights,” which, for whatever reason, I can’t stop clicking on even though I literally do not care. My thoughts on the music video, I mean film, summed up below:

To start, I thought it best to pick something that couldn’t be measured directly against Tartt. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is described as a “spellbinding web of dreams” on the front cover. This seemed promising in terms of incomparability with Tartt’s precision. It also won the Booker in 1992 when it was published, which made it promising in terms of general quality of writing. Thanks to a delay in Charlotte (my least favorite airport on the planet including the ones I haven’t been to), I finished it before we even arrived in Harbor Island.

The novel opens in an almost abandoned villa in the hills outside of Florence. Set during WWII in the immediate aftermath of German surrender, it focuses on four very different characters brought together by the strange circumstances of war. The villa served as a hospital at the height of the Italian campaign, but now hosts only one patient, the English patient, burned beyond recognition and unable to move, and Hana, the Canadian nurse who for reasons even she may not fully understand, refuses to leave him. Onto the scene come two additional characters: Caravaggio, a thief, spy, and, in what feels like impossible coincidence, friend of Hana’s father who she knew in her youth in Toronto, and Kip, a Sikh sapper for the Allied forces, responsible for diffusing and dismantling the network of tripwires, mines and unexploded artillery left by the Germans on their retreat.

Slowly, in disordered and dreamy vignettes, we learn about each character’s past. Particularly and most compellingly, the English patient, who was a desert explorer around the time of the North African campaign, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Caravaggio becomes convinced that the burned man isn’t English at all, but a Hungarian count who cooperated with German forces in Cairo. The burned man claims not to remember who he is, but slowly a grand love story unfolds in the Sahara through the fragmentary stories he shares when he is on enough morphine to talk but not enough to sleep.

I found the descriptions of the desert, and of what it takes to plan and execute an expedition in that most unforgiving of terrains absolutely fascinating. The segments of the novel dedicated to Kip’s history and work as a sapper were also captivating. There was a satisfying parallel between the English patient and Kip, in the danger of their chosen work and the precision required of them, and also in the love stories that unfold—one in memory and one in present day—for each of them.

It was only a few months after German surrender that the US dropped two atomic bombs in Japan ending the war, so I don’t consider it a spoiler to say that the same thing happens in the novel, jolting our four characters in the Florentine hills out of their fragile equilibrium. When I was reading, suspended as I was in Ondaatje’s dreamy world, it felt a bit like he used Hiroshima and Nagasaki to wrap up his story, if not neatly, then whatever the violent and horrible version of neatly would be. It’s not fair to hold this against him, since it’s what really happened and I think he rendered believable reactions for each of his characters. I was particularly struck by a line Hana writes in a letter home in the days following: “From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public.”

Next up, I picked up The Hours by Michael Cunningham. I bought this book years ago at the Strand, somehow without realizing that it was about Virginia Woolf. The first time I tried to read it, I decided I should really read Mrs. Dalloway again beforehand. I use this method to put off books with some frequency (see Demon Copperhead, James, etc.). Last month, however, I decided that I was familiar enough with Woolf and remembered Dalloway well enough to read it anyway. It won a Pulitzer when it was published, so I felt sufficiently confident that it wouldn’t be bad…

And it wasn’t bad. I know that it wasn’t. But if I felt the end of The English Patient was un petit the easy way to end things, I found the beginning of The Hours horribly cheap. Namely, in the first chapter, Cunningham recounts Virginia Woolf’s suicide from her perspective. And I know that Virginia Woolf doesn’t need me to protect her—she’s public domain—but I didn’t find Cunningham’s handling of Woolf to be as deft or honorable as his reviewers apparently did.

I didn’t let my initial distaste for the project generally stop me though. This was the book I brought, so this was the book I’d read, and Woolf’s timeline is only one of three. In alternating chapters, we are with her in 1923 in the suburbs of London, with young housewife, Laura Brown, in 1949 Los Angeles, with poetic muse Clarissa Vaughan in 1999 Greenwich Village. Each of these women leads what is an ostensibly fulfilling life, but each is quietly unfulfilled.

Cunningham emulates Woolf’s signature style, floating in and out of the minds of his characters. They move through the worlds, but their minds move at a different pace, in a different place. His emulation is sometimes beautifully successful and sometimes feels like the output from a freshman year creative writing seminar—overly flowery or derivative.

The same applies with his numerous references to Woolf’s life and work. The novel takes place over the course of a single day like Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Vaughn is throwing a party that evening like Mrs. Dalloway. She decides to go out for flowers in the morning, like Mrs. Dalloway. The party is for her closest friend, Richard, an acclaimed poet who has affectionately referred to her as Mrs. Dalloway since they met in college.

Laura Brown is reading Mrs. Dalloway. She reads to escape the creeping ennui that she knows she shouldn’t feel with her American dream, World War II veteran husband and charming young son, Richie. Clarissa is bisexual and in a long-term relationship with a woman named Sally. Laura kisses her neighbor Kitty in a fraught moment sitting at the kitchen table. The representation of lesbian relationships and curiosities is a clear homage to Woolf’s own sexuality.

Some of these connections just feel like they’re there to remind you that this is a novel about Virginia Woolf-like the names, almost all pulled out of Mrs. Dalloway. Others are more subtle and meaningful. I appreciated the temporal grounding—as Woolf grapples (in her own life and through Mrs. Dalloway) with the aftermath of WWI, so Laura occupies a post WWII world, and Clarissa navigates the carnage of the AIDS epidemic. Cunningham’s thesis, that life is made up of the profound mundane, and that the small moments can contain an ecstasy that compensates for life’s difficulties and disappointments, is lifted from Woolf as well. He pulls it across time, into the present day, but I’m just not sure he really needed to. The novel is homage (respectable enough, though I still find I’m irked by the suicide chapter), but it is not expansion.

Due to truly harrowing travel complications on our return, I finished The Hours in a Bahamian airport I never intended to visit, a full 24 hours after I should have been home in New York. Thankfully, I had my backup backup book at the ready: Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, another New York Review Book that I’ve heard wonderful things about from several trusted sources that I can’t remember or track down now. I didn’t get very far into this one before passing out, finally home in my bed at 2am. But when I picked it back up, I was in for a real treat.

Our main character and narrator is Ruth. Ruth has one daughter named Eleanor who is a drug addict. Eleanor in turn has one daughter, who she names Lily. Ruth tries to decode what Eleanor might need or want—tries to stay away when she feels she’s not wanted, tries to keep in touch, give some money here, bring some food there, but whatever language it is that Eleanor now speaks, Ruth can’t quite decode it. Eleanor lives in an apartment that Ruth owns, as do a cast of rotating drifters. One afternoon, when Ruth stops by with a roast chicken, she walks into the bedroom to take a look around and finds a man who has died of an overdoes laying on the bed, covered in blankets. She grabs Lily in the general panic that follows her discovery and flees.

From there on, Loved and Missed is a novel of everyday affection. Lily is a balm to Ruth’s suffering in her very existence, in her sweetness. She is also a second chance for Ruth, who blames herself for Eleanor’s situation. The narrative style, which is a simple first person takes on something extra—not as though Ruth is thinking, not as though Ruth is writing a record, but as if she is speaking out loud to herself. In a very short amount of time, you feel quite connected to her—and when elements of her past are revealed it feels as though you have become privy to something she’s been hiding, not from you, but from herself.

The novel is sweet, funny and devastating—all of that quietly. I found myself waiting always for the other shoe to drop, for Eleanor to come claim her daughter, to die, to do something horrible. For Lily to become unhappy, bitter, resentful. But it’s not a book of conflict—aside from the conflicts that Ruth has privately with herself. I found it to be a striking portrait of how one woman comes to live with herself, what she’s done and what she hasn’t done. The end came unexpectedly and was extremely well executed.

Boyt has published seven novels, of which Loved and Missed is the seventh, and first to be published in the US. I will be getting in touch with UK-based contacts to procure additional material by her as soon as I am legally allowed.

I didn’t feel like anything else contemporary after Loved and Missed, so I plucked Washington Square—a novel serialized by Henry James starting in 1879–off the shelf. I started reading it on a whim, kind of not sure if I would finish it or choose something else instead, only to find myself totally captivated.

A few contributing factors to my captivation: Henry James is a master of the sentence, Henry James is funny, and I can’t really figure out just what Henry James is trying to do. In Washington Square, he gives us a not particularly compelling heroine to root for. Our wry narrator tells us that Catherine Sloper “was a healthy, well-grown child, without a trace of her mother’s beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle countenance. The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a ‘nice’ face.”

She is, however, a heiress. Her mother, who died in childbirth with her, had a respectable fortune which her father was able to build upon considerably with his successful medical practice. Dr. Sloper is not a particularly loving father; though he takes pains to protect Catherine and give her every advantage, he does not really love her. Catherine’s paternal aunt Lavinia who has lived with the Slopers since the death of Mrs. Sloper is portrayed as something of a foolish, self-involved woman, and meddles in Catherine’s affairs to ill-effect.

What are those affairs? The appearance of one Morris Townsend, beautiful and charming good for nothing in search of, well, a fortune. Catherine proves to be an attractive target, but when Dr. Sloper catches wind of the budding relationship between Catherine and Morris, he is unequivocal in his disapproval, threatening even to disinherit Catherine should she choose to go against his wishes and marry Morris. In his stubbornness on the matter, there is a curious combination of true protectiveness—he does not wish for his daughter to end up with a man who will spend her fortune without making anything of himself—and a perverse impulse to insult and downrate his daughter.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it reminded me of Daisy Miller (the other James novel I’ve read) in that it is simultaneously tragic and totally unsatisfying. Nonetheless, James’s writing is highly entertaining. In Washington Square in particular, there was something Austen-esque about his setup and his characterizations. Austen-esque, but significantly meaner. Mona Simpson sums it up well in a 2013 essay in the New Yorker when she says of James: “He borrows from melodrama, but lops off that genre’s gratifications, going realist on us at exactly the wrong moment. If Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending, Henry James delivers something more like a comedy with a haunting close.”

In summary, favorites in bold:

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - graceful & somewhat depressing
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion - definitely depressing but in California
Ariane A Russian Girl by Claud Anet - insane
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt - so, so, so good
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje - very good until the end
The Hours by Michael Cunningham - kind of like…how did this win a Pulitzer?
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt - sweet, sad, funny
Washington Square by Henry James - Jane Austen but New York & meaner/sadder

That’s January! Back soon with more. Xx

IV

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand 
Serenely in the sunshine as before, 
Without the sense of that which I forbore—
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine, 
And sees within my eyes the tears of two. 

Elizabeth Barrett wrote her Sonnets from the Portuguese during the early years of her budding romance with Robert Browning. She was then living as an invalid in her father’s house, quite a pitiable character, as I think she herself would say. In January of 1845, she received a letter from Browning that began, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.” Within a few months he was regularly visiting her in secret, and they were writing to each other every day, sometimes more than once a day.

Elizabeth’s father was very controlling—loathe to let any of his children fly the nest, but especially Elizabeth. On top of that, having suffered a good deal—through the death of her mother, her own illness, and later the death of her favorite brother—Elizabeth had all but resigned herself to a life of solitude and sorrow. It seems she lived both physically and mentally on the brink of death, and had not imagined that she might have a second act (at 39, she was firmly in her middle-age).

It was very difficult—painful really—for her to give this love with Robert Browning a chance. Sonnets from the Portuguese is a series of 44 sonnets (not actually translated from any source material) that charts the course of EBB’s loving struggle to accept her unexpected happiness and to go against her father’s wishes. The earlier poems are tentative and disbelieving. By the end, her proclamations of love are more confident—the penultimate sonnet is certainly the most famous, beginning, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” I like to imagine that by this point, her elopement was already well in the works.

The sonnet above is number six, and EBB is still struggling to claim Browning’s love for herself in the face of obstacles real and imagined. She entreats her lover to go from her—she cannot take part in such happiness after years of sorrow. And yet (it’s all in that “yet), she knows that even now it’s too late. She has been altered by this love, and will never live without the mark of it. Browning’s shadow will be her constant companion. Going beyond companionship, she feels that her soul is no longer hers alone to command—even if he goes, that worst imagining, she has tied herself to him irrevocably.

Even an action as simple as lifting her hand “serenely” is now imbued with high emotion owing to the memory of his touch. He touched this hand! No matter the distance between them, his heart will be not only with hers, but in hers, beating double. There is a sensuality in this nesting, which continues into the following image: the wine must taste of the grapes that are juiced (also perhaps a hint of destruction here) to make it. Again, Browning is within her; she is somehow made of him. The creative act is also top of mind here, as both EBB and Browning were poets of some acclaim during their lifetimes.

She closes: “When I sue God for myself, he hears that name of thine.” So powerful is her love that it makes her secondary to Browning. When she prays for herself, the prayers come out in his name. Otherwise read, when she goes to God at her death, when her soul is weighed, it will have the weight—and the tears—of two souls, not one. There is in it that terrifying loss of self, balanced by immeasurable gain—which is love.

Happy Valentine’s Day <3

It’s been a month and a week since I bought a book, which is surely a record for me, and I’ve never read so much. I decided somewhat on a whim in December that I would embark on this little experiment, spurred only by a vague sense of embarrassment at the number of unread books languishing on my bookshelf. I thought it would be hard, which it is, particularly if I enter a bookstore, but it’s also fun.

I’m reading books that I’ve owned for years and loving them or liking them or thinking they’re fine, but I’m reading them. It’s nice to not have so much choice. I have to just pick something, and so I do, and then I read, and then repeat. I’ve picked well so far.

I started the month with The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. A couple years ago, I found a pretty cloth bound Hemingway set at a thrift store. I thought, I should probably read Hemingway, so I bought them and then I didn’t read them. I picked The Sun Also Rises because of the three in the set (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls), its spine was the skinniest. It also happens to be Hemingway’s first novel, which is nice.

For those uninitiated (perhaps many, since Hemingway isn’t exactly fashionable at the moment), The Sun Also Rises follows Jake Barnes (American, veteran, journalist, expatriate in Paris) and a cast of characters that includes Lady Brett Ashley (divorcee, bobbed hair), Robert Cohen (Jewish), Bill Gordon (from New York), Mike Campbell (engaged to Brett), and eventually, once they all make it from Paris to Pamplona, Pedro Romero (bull fighter).

Nothing much happens. They go from the cafe to the restaurant to the bar and back drinking copious amounts of regionally appropriate alcohol. They misunderstand each other, offend each other and sometimes actually fight each other. They sometimes apologize and sometimes don’t. They are, in many ways, the embodiment of the “Lost Generation”—a term coined by Gertrude Stein in reference to Hemingway and his real life friends.

This lost-ness is most clear when the characters sit around trying to talk to each other (frequently). I say trying because Hemingway’s dialogue jumps and spins. the characters don’t listen to each other, they don’t say what they mean, or they do, but only in the middle of a conversation that’s got nothing to do with it. What everyone says about Hemingway is true. His language is simple and spare. What you hear less often (I think) is that it’s simultaneously very graceful, with something of the dancer in it: controlled with the odd dizzying moment.

I was also surprised to find, that while there is an overarching aimlessness to the whole crew, there is, in Jake, a real and grounded love of place. Hemingway said that there was no hero, no protagonist in The Sun Also Rises, but I’d say that it’s Jake—and so his caring attention to his surroundings suffuses the whole novel (and fights valiantly against the creeping (tempting?) aimlessness). I was particularly fond of the fly fishing section, and the descriptions of Montoya—the proprietor of Jake’s favorite hotel in Pamplona.

When I was reading Hemingway, I remembered that Joan Didion claimed she learned to write by copying down his sentences. I own two books by Joan that I haven’t read, so I picked up Play It As It Lays. It was something of a lucky selection because it seems to owe a lot to The Sun Also Rises (probably particularly when you read them one after another).

Namely, nothing happens in Play It As It Lays, and the characters are lost—less so aimless, more so stuck in a pervasive meaninglessness. Maria (pronounced Mariah, which I simply could not get through my head) descends into madness. She goes places, mostly nowhere in particular, in her car. She drives aimlessly around Los Angeles and out into the desert and dissociates. She also drinks and takes drugs to dull the pain of the fact that her daughter Kate lives in a care facility after some kind of terrible accident—it’s never explained. All the people around her work in or adjacent to Hollywood (including herself), and they’re all awful—alternately numbed or tweaked up on their own pharmaceutical cocktails.

Like Hemingway, Didion is spare with her language. She makes do with very little, but her result is much more hollow. I don’t mean that as an indictment of her skill as a writer because I think it’s meant to be hollow, but it’s hollow nonetheless. Didion achieves, masterfully, a novel with no grace, no dance. There is no connection between the reader and Maria, there is no connection between anything.

Praise for Play It As It Lays lauds Didion’s “mordant lucidity” and calls the novel “scathing.” I can’t argue. Didion is sharp; she is caustic. But if she is eviscerating the lifestyle (prevailing attitudes, society at large) that she portrays, attempting to tear it down, etc., well, she doesn’t offer MUCH in the way of something to fill the void she leaves. I enjoyed the novel while I was reading it, but in the weeks since, I haven’t really thought of it. It’s not thought provoking, it just is.

Worth noting perhaps that people in LA apparently love this book, so maybe there’s something specific to place in it (à la Hemingway too!) that missed me.

At this point, I was ready for something with a bit more hmmm…plot, maybe even a bit of romance, but I also needed it to be kind of dark still so as not to shock me out of the stupor Hemingway & Didion had put me in. Ariane A Russian Girl by Claude Anet had been sitting on my shelf for many moons after it was purchased online during an NYRB fall sale, only to be forgotten/forsaken. The back describes Ariane as “the queen bee of her provincial Russian town…tired of breaking hearts in the sticks,” and promises “a brilliant exploration—engrossing, unnerving, comic, and cunning—of the matchless cruelty of desire.” Sounds good!

And it was—good and insane. Set in a pre-revolutionary Russia, where old-world propriety shows signs of falling to a more promiscuous way of life, our Ariane is very modern indeed. Her natural facilities are supplemented by the tutelage of her equally modern Aunt, who doesn’t believe in love, and doesn’t believe in constraining her charge either. With her sweet good looks, cunning intelligence, and hint of wickedness, Ariane is completely magnetic. Even as we are told that she has that “mix of haughtiness and mockery that, truth be told, caused her to be hated,” we are trapped in her web along with every single man she meets.

It’s not long before the little one has figured out how to manipulate everyone around her to get just what she wants. But what does she actually want? To go to Moscow and to be free. Well, naturally she makes it to Moscow, but there she meets Constantin Michel, a man too many years her senior for it to be romantic, even without the rampant manipulation that plagues their relationship from both quarters. Neither is willing to give up the upper hand they imagine they have, and so they punish each other. Everything changes.

I won’t claim that the romance I was looking for is what I got. Ariane is a fairly disturbing portrait of love, particularly by our evolved standards, but also a highly entertaining one. The characters, and the subtlety with which Anet renders their motivations—allowing them to believe in their own delusions, refusing to give them away to the reader—is really very well done. In the end, love is the great equalizer.

While Ariane was more lively than Hemingway and Didion, and was more of a story in the traditional sense, my hunt for plot continued. I thought it might be good to sink my teeth into something a bit meatier. My eye was drawn to The Little Friend—the only Donna Tartt novel (of her 3) that I had not yet read. This book would have sat on my shelf forever. Though I’ve owned it for a while, and known about its existence for much longer, I have never been drawn to pick it up. Plus compared to all the (continuing, commercial, critical, etc.) buzz around Tartt’s other novels, The Little Friend doesn’t get much action, which makes you wonder…

The novel is set in small town Mississippi over the course of a single summer in the 1970s and focuses on the Cleves, and in particular the youngest of the bunch—Harriet, who is twelve years old. One of the first things we learn about the Cleves is that they love to talk about the past, “loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history—repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire deathbed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years before.”

This habit is part myth-making, part trauma processing: they go over the past in large part to translate the horrible events of thier share history into “that sweet old family vernacular, which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form.” This includes all kinds of calamities, from the death(s) of husband(s) to the loss of the family’s beloved plantation home, Tribulation. One event, however remains too awful to speak of. Back when Harriet was just a baby, her older brother Robin—himself twelve at the time—was found dead, hanging from a tree in his family’s backyard on Mother’s Day. The police never found the person responsible.

The other family who comes more into focus in the second half of the book is the Ratliff clan. The Ratliffs are from the wrong side of town and are regularly engaged in criminal activity (ranging from petty theft to drug trafficking to capital murder). Danny Ratliff is one of five or six brothers, two of whom are currently in prison—they’ve all done their turns. Robin was Danny’s age, and when Harriet hears that people saw him hanging around on the afternoon of Robin’s accident, she is sure that he’s the one responsible. Her certainty is in no way impacted by the fact that Danny was cleared by the police at the time of the crime. She launches her own investigation with the help of her sidekick, Hely.

What follows is an incredible portrait of a bright and uncompromising girl trying to balance her (highly developed) sense of what is right with the realities of her world. It’s not just the injustice of her brother’s unsolved murder that she’s suddenly interested in, but also the racial and socioeconomic dynamics (in post-segregation rural Mississippi) that have been humming in the background of her life until now. In the course of a summer, much of the background of her life suddenly jumps into the foreground. The reader has a front row seat as Harriet takes her first (large) steps out of childish country where the world is made up of amorphous, seemingly unlinked acts and facts, into an unfamiliar territory where actions have consequences, and what you do becomes who you are.

Donna Tartt is a master storyteller, and The Little Friend is the type of novel that makes you think literally how on earth did she do that. Seriously—how did she do that? The pacing can feel slow at times, the details gratuitous, but somehow even when it drags, it drags you along with it. I think it’s probably Tartt’s least popular book in part because of the pacing and related genre confusion (a murder mystery with pages dedicated to how twelve year old girl occupies herself in a quiet house when she can’t sleep?). But if you let Tartt take you where she wants to take you, it’s an incredibly rewarding read. 10/10, favorite book of the month. LOTS of snakes though, so be prepared for that.

I additionally consumed the To Be Young edition of Hotshoe Magazine, which I acquired at Casa Magazines, probably on a Saturday when I suddenly felt spendy while out for breakfast. I have not yet determined whether this type of behavior is acceptable in the year of no new books. Technically a magazine is not a book, but some of them can be suspiciously book-like. Not Hotshoe though; Hotshoe is a photography magazine (wonderful!). From what I can gather, they bring together collections from a variety of photographers around a central theme. In this case, youth, and more specifically teenagerhood (a word?). Featured photographers include Sally Mann, Davide Sorrenti, Claudine Doury, Raymond Meeks & others. It’s mostly photographs, but interspersed are the featured photographers’ responses to set questions (When is the first time you remember no longer feeling like a child?, What advice would you give to your young self?, etc.).

In the world of less long things to read, I stumbled upon this piece in the Atlantic from nine years ago about a Filipino family who came to the United States in 1964, bringing with them their slave, Lola. They kept her up to the end of her life. It’s by Alex Tizon, one of the children who Lola helped to raise.

I was delighted to find a short story by Bud Smith in the Fall Paris Review that had been sitting on my bedside table for 4ish months. I love Bud Smith and will be buying more of his books as soon as I’m allowed. Everyone should read Teenager, it’s fantastic.

This month I also liked “The Quiet House” by Tessa Hadley in The New Yorker. I like reading about old ladies and their memories right now (see All Passion Spent). I also like her depiction of female friendship.

Also from (but this time on Substack, I guess?) I loved Mold and Melancholia by Madeline Cash. Kathryn is reading Lost Lambs; will buy when allowed.

In better news about books that I can read, this month wrote about Brett Easton Ellis and wrote about Iris Murdoch—or at least about The Black Prince. What a boon that I already own that one, AND I own Less Than Zero. My cup runneth over. I will perhaps read them both in February.

When I looked back at you (after your outburst), you thought I might laugh, but you were wrong because I love human tenderness. The weird thing was that after I said there’s nothing wrong with being friendly, and you barked back she can be friendly on her own time, another postal worker came up to say hello to you and pulled you right out of the line.

You clearly knew her—she helped you at the table in the middle of the room where people write packing slips by hand, something I’ve never seen happen in my life. You repeated your wisdom about peoples’ own time, and got a laugh from her. But for you to know her and make her laugh—and be King of the Post Office (surely, if there were one)—that means you had to, sometime or many times before this, be friendly.

You look charming too—clean and rosy cheeked and tweed-ish—so I don’t think you’re so horrible. I know book, cover and all that, but you’ll never convince me that you can’t tell at least something from the cover. My sister turned 30 yesterday. She swears that she can tell whether a person is evil within five minutes of meeting him, and I don’t think she would have thought you evil. Though she wouldn’t have had the full five minutes because your friend came and whisked you away.

I’ve had a preposterously long week, so I understand wanting to get your mail mailed and get the hell out of the post office. They still have the Christmas decorations up in there, which I find charming, though it is getting a bit late, but—charm or no charm—it’s the post office. As you were getting whatever you needed to get done done off to my right, I was being scolded by the postman (so friendly mere seconds earlier?) for not taping up my package. Oh I’m sorry, do you have any tape? OF COURSE they have tape, it’s the gd post office, but still I had to beg. I didn’t want to be there either. Well, he taped it up, two meagre pieces going in what I would call the wrong direction, but whatever. I thanked him profusely on the way out.

I left you there, gabbing with your friend, though I can’t call you a hypocrite because you weren’t holding anyone else up (having been granted heretofore unheard-of postal favor). It’s cold out but not very, and I’m so tired that it feels good on my cheeks. It’s not clear out tonight, but the clouds are thin, and on my walk home I could see the sharp crescent moon through the haze. It’s the time of year when you can see Orion, so I’m always looking up. I don’t know what it is about Orion, but it makes me want to burst into tears. All of human history it feels like. It’s really the only constellation I care about.

I like the planets too, especially Venus. Venus usually comes in March, when the sky is still dusky on my walk home from work, when spring is coming. Orion is winter, but winter is of course spring. It was almost still light out when I left the office tonight, in fact, but only almost. I read a poem by William Bronk the other day, called “A Long Two Way” that goes like this:

There is a going down into the dark
but getting there, we turn around, come back.
The solstice comes before the winter comes. 
It isn’t winter. Only slowly spring. 

Do you read poetry? Is that why you’re in such a hurry? To get out and try to see Orion through the clouds, to go home and read poetry? I don’t really think so, I think you might be a bit of a grump. That doesn’t make you evil like I said, in fact it probably makes you all the more charming to the people you do bother to charm (like your post office lady). I think that’s just fine, really, but I do wish it were the poetry and the stars. I don’t like that you were impatient with the friendly woman in front of us who spared a moment for the postman, but you have friends here too. I don’t know what to make of it, other than that I love human tenderness so much that I feel I must try to make something.

Xx

I love this poem because it’s a poem of noticing. I picture the speaker cutting through the park on the way to work in the morning, hovering for a moment to consider which way is west and which way is east. Unlike the statues that, in a satisfying inverse, hurry but go nowhere, this scene is a part of the recurring movements and rhythms of the speaker’s life. She is going somewhere.

She knows this side of the pond as well as that side, perhaps varies her route around it depending on the time of day. She knows that on certain days the pigeons are on the foot or the hand, but most often on the head of each statue. As is often the case with familiar scenes, she has known this, registered it, perhaps smiled to herself about the mocking pigeons flapping from perch to frozen perch, probably without really giving it much thought.

Then one day, they drained the pond, which sets things off balance and brings her quiet familiarity to the forefront. The pigeons go with the water, and are replaced by crows. I love the phrase, “the odd result.” How full of odd results the world is. Though the speaker does not mourn the pigeons (probably knowing that when the pond is filled again they will return), the determination, assertiveness, alterity, of the crows is perhaps a little unwelcome.

There is nothing grand or dramatic about this poem. There’s not a profound message come along at sideways, no clever declaration on the nature of change (other than that it exists). The experience of reading it, is pleasantly like the experience of experiencing it. There is enough there to hold interest if you keep your eyes open.

This poem, courtesy of Poetry Foundation, May 2024 edition of Poetry.

I will start by saying that I was supposed to read—nay was indeed reading—Doctor Zhivago last month, but I just couldn’t finish it. It was an ambitious choice for such a busy month, and that’s not even considering the fact that I generally find Russian literature totally unconquerable. I got 200 pages in, took too long a break from reading, and completely lost my tenuous grip on which names referred to which characters. Alas…

I decided something with a skinnier spine would be more suitable, and plucked All Passion Spent off my shelf. There was a vague (imagined?) memory of someone’s hot take somewhere on the internet claiming that Vita was a better writer than Virginia (Woolf that is), so when I saw it on the table at Three Lives, I bought it. I don’t know if my praise for Sackville-West would go that far, but she is very good, and I was sold on All Passion Spent before the end of the first page.

Lord Slane, Former Prime Minister and viceroy of India, has died. He’s left behind, in addition to his exemplary record of public service and a pile of jewels, six children, their numerous progeny, and his widow, Lady Slane. She is wonderful, or so her children keep saying in the hours after Lord Slane’s death, as though they are pleasantly but genuinely surprised by her ability to hold up under such a loss.

What comes next proves to be the real shock. Lovely, charming, self-sacrificing, and above all, governable Lady Slane has her own notions about how she’d like to spend the rest of her life, and is actually not glad to be guided by what her children think would be best. The children, though she loves them, are kind of a nightmare—particularly the eldest four. Lady Slane will retire to Hampstead Heath, where she may enjoy total restfulness and reflection. The children may come by, since she can’t exactly keep them away, but the grandchildren and great-grandchildren are not welcome. Their youthful energy would be too disruptive.

Amid the head shaking and hand wringing that follows her announcement, and the grand reveal of her own free and strong will, Lady Slane decamps, bringing only her devoted French maid, Genoux, with her. In Hampstead, She makes friends with her extremely eccentric landlord, Mr. Bucktrout, the local tradesman and undertaker, Mr. Gosheron, and eventually a reclusive art and antiquities collector, Mr. FitzGeorge.

It is a deliciously funny book, and perhaps not quite rollicking, due to the age of the protagonist, but close to it. It is also one woman’s moving reflection on a life that was full, like most well-lived lives are, of sacrifice. In particular, a young Lady Slane, Deborah, harbored an unrealized, and even untested dream of being a painter. She considers what she lost when she gave it up to marry a young Henry Slane. She considers the parts of her that did not die but were folded away when she stepped into what would ultimately be her main role of life: the wife of a diplomat.

If that sounds a little bit depressing, I promise it’s not. Lady Slane, like all the best old people, is honest, but she is not bitter. Somehow, through her, Sackville-West walks the narrow line between endorsing a kind of selfish prioritization of the independent and artistic life and recognizing the inestimable value of love and human fellowship, which inevitably requires sacrifice. The end is also perfect.

After All Passion Spent, I went even skinnier (spine-wise) with Things That Disappear by Jenny Erpenbeck. I bought this for myself and had it wrapped to go under the tree, from Eve, love Eve. My sister also bought it for me, wrapped it, and put it under the tree. Great minds.

Things That Disappear comes in at a mere 71 pages and is made up of narratively disparate but thematically linked vignettes. What happens when things disappear? Why do some things go while others stay? Where do the things that go go to? Are we supposed to just let them go? Erpenbeck was born in 1967 in East Berlin, so her scope ranges from the very broad (entire countries and cities, their architecture and character) to the highly particular (socks & shops where you can get your stockings mended).

Early on, in a chapter titled “Junk,” Erpenbeck contemplates the “Japanese Style” of living—sleek, no knickknacks, no dust—that has become so popular. Her house comparatively is fully of junk. When she recounts a move towards the middle of the book, she says, “so many things have grown attached to me and have to disappear with me when I leave.” This includes the wooden planks of disassembled treehouse. The things she has amassed and lives with come up again later when a Russian woman visits her apartment and finds it all so lovely. She recently moved to Germany and couldn’t bring everything with her.

This is, of course, a central condition of life, and one that we fight against to varying degrees depending on our brain chemistry (I guess): you can’t bring it all with you. There may be something to the idea that practicing—letting go—is good preparation for what’s to come, but Erpenbeck is clearly a collector. She collects things, but also ideas and memories, through which she can create an afterlife for the things that have gone, or are going.

Much like All Passion Spent, the book is in turns deeply moving and winkingly funny. A small piece of expensive cheese vanishes into thin air, and she likes it, actually, when a gentleman helps her into her coat, though that type of courtesy seems to be on the way out. Also gone is the simple life her great-grandmother used to live. There was an outhouse, an open fire in the kitchen, and a bucket of water to wash your hands, which all seems archaic now, but was just fine at the time. One section on Splitterbrötchen, a now difficult to find German pastry, ends with the following: “I’m not interested in the variations, I’m interested in the essentials. Today’s Splitterbrötchen is something fundamentally different from the Splitterbrötchen twenty years ago.”

While somber at times, Erpenbeck’s writing never feels pessimistic or hopeless. It’s not really hopeful either, it just is. She opens her hand to her reader, and it’s full of shiny little things. She says, “Look, these things existed once and no longer do. These things exist but soon will not. They might be worth holding onto.”

thanks for reading, bye <3

Subscribe now

Share

I’m always quite energized by the new year, and this year is no different. The days are getting longer. I went to the Marlton yesterday to write and reflect and decide what resolutions I could make. They seated me in the bar room at a little round table like a second class citizen. Before long, a pair of right-wing gay men were seated to my left and a pair of therapized bros (for lack of a more elegant term) to my right. Apparently, when you import people from corrupt and low-trust societies they will engage in corrupt and low-trust behavior, and your ex-girlfriend’s desire for complete certainty before making decisions is actually a sign of narcissism.

As soon as I managed to stop eavesdropping, I scratched out the reflections and resolutions I’d come for. Do 10 pushups, stop watching short-form video entirely, etc. They’re still coming together, which is okay, since you can make new year’s resolutions at any time. You can count a year from any day. One of my resolutions, however, came to me in early December (and thank God, since I needed time to prepare1). Dear reader, you won’t believe it, but for my next feat, I will go an entire year without buying a single book.

I weighed the pros and cons (pros: hopefully ends with the ability to say I’ve read all the books on my bookshelf, cons: might cause depression?), and decided to forge ahead. This year could be the year that I finally read David Copperfield, The Power Broker, DUNE! The options are finite, but still bountiful, and I’ve started already with Hemingway—the pretty edition of The Sun Also Rises that I found with matching A Farewell to Arms & For Whom the Bell Tolls at thrift store maybe a year ago, maybe more. All three have been sitting on my shelf looking nice and collecting dust since then. I can’t help loving Hemingway.

What should I read next (it’s embarrassing, I know)?

love you, bye!

Another point in favor of my prematurity is that this roundup can serve as your Official Something Eve Read Gift Guide for 2025 That’s Based Entirely on What Eve Read This Year Only and Therefore Excludes Lots of Really Amazing Books You Could Give as Gifts but If Eve Doesn’t Introduce Some Kind of Limiting Factor, Compiling a Gift Guide Becomes an Impossible and Un-Fun Task. No need to scramble at the last minute for Christmas books, start shopping now! Books make the best presents honestly, and as I outlined last year, everyone you buy a present for should also get a book.1

Without Further Ado ! ! In the order that I read them (mostly):

Potentially my favorite book of the year was the first one I read2—The Last Samurai. Helen Dewitt is a genius, and I will read anything she puts out with GLEE. Her new book (Your Name Here w/ Ilya Gridneff, which sounds absolutely absurd) is on my Christmas list. Give The Last Samurai to someone who is too clever for their own good.

The Queen’s Gambit is a good pick, even for someone who’s seen the Netflix adaptation. I’d already watched it myself and still really enjoyed/breezed through this novel. It’s pretty un-put-downable, and a good pick for a man if you’ve got one. Riders of the Purple Sage is also a good pick for the man in your life, particularly if he’s into the American West—OR, for the crossover no one saw coming, your friend who’s addicted to Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.3

In the spring I read One or Two thanks to the girls and was delighted. It’s weird and weirdly prescient, and would be a diabolical present for the person in your life who’s on Ozempic even though they don’t need to be. If you don’t have one of those, anyone who likes ghost stories, body horror, or gothic vibes would enjoy this.

Honorable mention as well to this amazing shirt from Mandylion, which I ALREADY OWN don’t worry, so no one needs to buy it for me. It is 100000x cooler than whatever bookclub merch Kaia Gerber or whoever is putting out.

I read one (1) real non-fiction book this year, but luckily it was an absolute banger, so I can recommend it wholeheartedly! Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies will delight the conspiracy theorist in your life. It is, and I really mean this, such a fun read.

Lady Chatterly’s Lover was my sleeper hit of the year. I thought I would find it annoying, but instead I found it deeply moving. Every woman and frankly also every man should read this. Give a copy to your friend who is in an unhappy relationship and see what happens!

To celebrate Jane Austen’s 205th birthday (it’s on December 16th!), read Northanger Abbey and then buy 10 copies to give away. This was a reread for me, but I didn’t remember it very well, and it might be Austen’s most underrated novel. It is so funny and so sweet. Austen is the OG and possibly the reigning champ when it comes to a comedy of manners and a happy ending. Get this for anyone who likes that kind of thing (especially the person in your life who can’t stop reading romance novels).

East of Eden for everyone, seriously. I unapologetically/unabashedly think this is one of the greatest novels in the English language. I love Steinbeck so much, and I would love him even if he wasn’t so hot. My sister is reading it right now and texted me that she was sobbing crying halfway through, already dreading the end. My lover finally finished it this year after reading the first half and stopping in the middle 3 years ago (psycho behavior). He loved it, we loved it, East of Eden for everyone.

In the category of contemporary literary fiction, you cannot go wrong with On The Calculation of Volume (I-III). Solvej Balle is a beast. Every time I think I’m starting to worry that I might get bored, it’s like she reads my mind and makes something absolutely riveting happen. Queen of pacing! I think your mom might like them especially. Added advantage to giving these as gifts is that it presents an opportunity to make someone else suffer what you must suffer (the long wait until April when the fourth part comes out in English).

If you have a writer, or really any artist in your life, I highly, highly recommend The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. So beautiful, and so sticky. I read it with reading & writing friends & earlier this fall, and I don’t think I’ll every get Dillard’s images out of my head.

And, lastly, for the person in your life who (a) wants something to really sink their teeth in, (2) digs WWI stories, (3) is ready to think existentially about memory and what it means to be a person, The Remembered Soldier is what you seek. This book was recommended to me by three (!) members of the Huffines family (my most trusted book recommenders), and it did not disappoint. It’s 600 something pages long and it’s too short.

But wait! Speaking of short, I haven’t forgotten! My favorite short books of the year were Fup by Jim Dodge and Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard (love her so much). Also honorable mention to the best short book ever (maybe) The English Understand Wool, which I reread this year too. Going to the bookstore and picking out a stack of skinny spines and tying them up with a ribbon is a wonderful idea. Other all time favorite shorties include The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Foster by Claire Keegan, Bluets by Maggie Nelson & The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway.

Oh but wait! Don’t forget the poetry. Everyone should read more poetry; be the change that you want to see in the world and/or foist the change upon your loved ones. Two recently published collections that I have my eyes on are Dog Show by Billy Collins and Startlement by Ada Limón. Anthologies are always great as well like the new-ish Poetry Is Not a Luxury or something from Everyman’s Library (cute and small).

Hope this helps4, love you so much, thank you for reading, see you next year, Merry Christmas, bye <3

3