Last Month's Reads
A June full of 100 page books (give or take a page here and there)
I was going to start this post with a rambling introduction as I’m wont to do. I planned to explain my inspiration, tell you how I set about collecting titles, what my reading experience was like, how I feel in the aftermath, and so on. Then I started writing, and I realized that I failed to consider one very important possibility. Just because these books are short, doesn't mean my thoughts on them are. I’ve never been one to hold myself to a word count.
So I’ll cut the musings and just say this: in June, I decided to read only books that clocked in right around 100 pages. Some are a bit longer, and a couple are shorter, but I did my best to stay close. I somewhat unintentionally steered clear of traditional poetry collections. I’m glad it worked out that way in the end. I only included one collection of short stories, because most collections of short stories don’t end up being all that short in totality. For the rest, I stuck to novels. Novellas? Long-form short stories? Traditional fiction.
I had a ball (both reading and writing), and I wholeheartedly recommend each of the following books to you, dear reader. Please enjoy!
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
134 pages
Kicking off my month of shorties was this masterful short story collection. Double short. I’ve owned this book for a long time, and it’s been recommended to me more than once, first by my sister, Kathryn, and then most recently in this edition of Perfectly Imperfect. Aside from that, it kept popping up on book lists I read and articles here and there. I resisted! I don't know why. Maybe because we don’t read enough short stories.
Whatever the reason, for my delay, when I decided to embark on this project, I knew it was finally time. This had to be one of the month’s books. Raymond Carver has a haunting voice, and reading his stories is like watching a movie where the entire soundtrack is quietly suspenseful. Something bad might happen at any moment. In fact, something bad might be happening this very moment, it’s just happening under the surface.
The stories are not uplifting (to put it lightly), as the title at first led me to believe they might be. Instead of romance and roses and big red lipstick kisses, Carver exposes the sadder, sometimes scarier side of love. The parts of love that we actually don’t talk about when we talk about love. Appropriately, I had the sense that the words not on the page—left unrecorded—were as important as those that were.
I haven’t read any of Carver’s other work, but this collection in particular is atmospheric—damp and dark like the northwestern United States where the stories are set. My favorites were “Why Don’t You Dance,” “The Bath,” “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and “Everything Stuck to Him.”
Marigold and Rose by Louise Glück
52 pages
I ADORED this. I am a big fan of Louise Glück’s poetry, so when I saw this slice of spine at the Strand, I was intrigued. That intrigue doubled when I realized that it was not a book of poetry—at least not in the traditional sense. It is “a fiction” and tells the story of Marigold and and Rose’s first year of life. They are twins, and while they cannot yet speak, they can absolutely think.
Though Glück writes in the third person, we are mainly viewing the world—narrow as it is for a fresh baby—through Marigold’s eyes. She is more serious than Rose. More concerned with what the future holds and the meaning of life. Rose is a trusting, social baby, sweet and giggly and not overly concerned with the big questions. Marigold is not as easy to understand, and as such, people have a harder time connecting with her.
I read this in one sitting, but went through many different emotions as I did. It all happened at a rather rapid clip—one year of life, and a momentous one at that, in just 52 pages. The tale is a funny one. How could it not be with its premise? The whole thing is just an imagining of what a baby might think of in her first year of life, but Glück also goes beyond that and gives these babies real inner life. Marigold is practically a philosopher. The humor of this is balanced out by the legitimacy of the questions she asks herself. What is time? What is language? Why do people seem to like Rose more than they like me?
This book will speak to anyone who has a sibling. It subtly deals with the strangeness of realizing that someone who comes from the same source material as you, and lives through the same things as you, can have vastly different experiences and memories from you. Not only can, but will. It also made me think of my twin friends and how much I love them all.
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
103 pages
Color me surprised—I could not put this book down. I became obsessed. I haven’t read a ton of Edith Wharton (only House of Mirth and Summer), but Ethan Frome is my favorite so far. It is a touching and painful tale, set up expertly, so that when the tragic end comes, it is swift and unfussy. The reader has seen it coming and must simply rest with the pain of it along with the characters who suffer. I know this probably isn’t coming off as a strong sell so far, but stick with me.
Wharton starts with the classic outside observer setup: “I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story” (3). Our narrator is an engineer who ends up stuck in Starkfield, Massachusetts for longer than expected due to a strike on his worksite. After the first chapter of background, he dives right into the story—or at least his version of it—some conglomeration of all the other versions he heard as he pieced it together.
The story is that of Ethan Frome, a young man struggling to keep his farm operational, let alone profitable. It seems that he was dealt an unfairly bad hand, forced to give up his education early to care for his sick parents. It wasn’t long after he was freed of that burden, that his wife Zeena became perpetually unwell, needing costly tinctures and cures for her never-ending list of ailments. When Zeena’s young cousin Mattie comes to help out around the house, she introduces the spark and spirit of youth back into Ethan’s life, but with a high price to pay.
Wharton’s writing is TIGHT, and I was invested in the happenings of Starkfield right off the bat. When I first started reading, I was kind of thrown off by how quickly everything was happening, but then I remembered there wasn’t much time to get the action going. In reality, the pacing was spot on. In the span of her limited pages, Wharton crafts a story about the nuances of human love, resentment, selfishness and forgiveness. She asks what it really means to follow your heart, and she might answer too.
Bonsai by Alejandro Zambra
79 pages
“When Julio fell in love with Emilia, all the fun and all the suffering that came before the fun and suffering that Emilia brought him became mere imitations of true fun and true suffering.”
I mean…I almost feel like I don’t really need to say more than that. A quote like that?!! But don’t worry, I will say more. Bonsai tells the story of Julio and Emilia, two university students who fall in love in the midst of trying to figure out who they are individually: “They quickly learned to read the same way, to think similarly, and to hide their differences.” This is even true when it comes to Proust, whose writing neither of them have read, though both of them say they have.
Zambra’s writing is like the conversation you overhear at a coffee shop, and suddenly you can’t focus on what you were doing or reading or the person you’re sitting with. You’re enraptured by the cadence and the confidence of the words coming from that stranger’s mouth. That stranger over there who you can’t even look at, so as not to be obvious that you’re greedily lapping up their tale. You’re lapping up their wisdom, for surely no one could be wiser. They might be putting on a bit of a show. They’re speaking in absolutes for effect—to captivate their companion, and maybe also you or anyone else in earshot. If they’re putting on a show, it’s a damn good show.
This book was like that. It was a joy to read, and the slight detachment and matter of fact tone—like coffee shop gossip—doubled the poignancy of the story’s sad ending. It is a tale of youth, and love, and human connection—the ways in which even a brief love affair can alter the trajectory of one’s life if the ingredients are right. Or maybe it’s not entirely right to say “alter the trajectory.” It might be more accurate to say that our experiences stay with us as memories, and the mechanisms of how memories work are not fully understood. So, it might not be entirely wrong to say “alter the trajectory” either.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
127 pages
As someone who frequently finds herself wishing she were back in a high school English classroom, I was surprised to read The Old Man and the Sea and not feel that way at all. I had assumed that it would be the type of book well-suited to the probing and exposition that high school English teachers trade on. Yes, that’s right—I had never read this slim story before, and in fact, had never read anything by Hemingway at all until I read this.
I am pleased to report that I’m quite satisfied with my first foray. For those who don’t know, The Old Man and the Sea tells the story of…well…an old man and the sea. He is a fisherman who is experiencing a bout of bad luck—no catches in eighty-four days. On the eighty-fifth day, he sets out knowing that his luck will change. What follows is an epic battle between the old man and an unbelievably massive fish.
Though the battle is epic, it is not exactly action packed. There are moments of real excitement, of course, but the majority of time, the old man is just holding tight, engaged in the fragile back and forth of giving enough line, but never too much. He spends a lot of time waiting. The feeling of inaction, in spite of the fact that something quite momentous is taking place under the surface, is exactly how I would describe Hemingway’s writing.
Of course that’s not a revolutionary thought. It’s a bit difficult to write about such a figure without feeling like it’s all been said before. The short, matter of fact sentences and the complete lack of flowery imagery make Hemingway’s writing feel a bit brusque. The same factors also make his writing accessible, which brings me around to my original point. You don’t need a teacher or a class to tell you how to access the deeper meaning in The Old Man and the Sea. It’s all right there, if you want it, and it’s not if you don’t. It is good to read no matter which approach you take.
Foster by Claire Keegan
88 pages
Foster was recommended to me first by my sister, Isabelle and then also by a lovely reader on this post from Sara Hildreth, where I asked for 100 page book recommendations in the comments. I knew that I was in for a treat because Claire Keegan is Irish. That’s all it really takes. The Irish simply have a special relationship with language. Keegan is no exception, unless she is an exception in the other direction, which she might be. Each of her words is essential, clearly chosen with great care, and placed gently where it needs to be. The result is mosaic.
I haven’t read anything else by Keegan, so I can only say this in the context of Foster, but I also think her writing style lends itself to a child’s perspective. In Foster we have the tale of a young girl who is dropped off one day with her aunt and uncle, the Kinsellas. It is summertime, and that seems as good an excuse as any to pass off the burden of childcare for this girl’s financially careless and emotionally worse-than-careless parents. It becomes clear quickly that the house our girl is entering is very different from the one she left.
I don’t want to give anything away, but as her relationship with the Kinsellas deepens, she comes out of her shell. She learns quickly, and she becomes interested and interesting in ways that are so subtle they’re heartbreaking. One night walking on the beach, Mr. Kinsella tells a joke and she understands it. She gets that it is a joke, and she laughs at the right time, and she feels delightfully proud, just at that. The child mind is a familiar and foreign place. Keegan gets in there and brings us with her.
The same scene mentioned above also includes this quote, which I cannot bear to leave out:
“‘Ah the women are nearly always right, all the same,’ he says. ‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’
‘What?’
‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’”
If that’s not true, I don’t know what is.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
95 pages
This was perhaps my biggest happy reading surprise in a month full of happy reading surprises. If you can’t tell, I baseline thoroughly enjoyed every book I read last month. Most of them I actually Loved with a capital L. Strong urge to go back and start again at the beginning type of Love. This one most of all because it’s pretty damn close to perfect.
I was wary at the outset. This is a lyrical exploration of Maggie Nelson’s infatuation with the color blue? It is advertised as such by the very first sentence: “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” That’s enough to make any reader wonder—where on earth is this going? On top of that, the paragraphs are numbered. Why? Does Nelson thinks she’s writing some kind of philosophical proof? Well…she might.
Stick with it as I did, and you WILL be rewarded. To say that this is a book about one woman’s obsession with the color blue is not false advertising, but to say just that wouldn’t be wholistic advertising either. It is about love and heartbreak and healing and hope. It is about the things, tangible and not, that tether us to the world, past present and future. It is full of pearls of wisdom that resonated with me—some straight from Nelson, some quoted from elsewhere—and it is also full of the kind of ‘mundane’ thoughts that pop into all of our heads as we move through our days.
The format—and the numbering specifically—made reading this book feel like listening to a song played on piano. Nelson weaves her thoughts together with refrains that reappear like old friends. The numbers also helped to create necessary pause between each paragraph. They were like a special form of punctuation that said, “okay, now here’s the next thing to think about.” This permission to move on from one thought and dive into the next is such a gift. It will allow you to be carried along by the melody until one of the lovely refrains comes back to remind you what song you’re listening to. I kind of lost track of that metaphor and also don’t know anything about music, but hopefully you get what I mean.
Here are some neat, numbered takeaways from June’s reading. One for each book I read, and one for good luck.
Short stories are nice, especially when they’re actually short. Read one like a little snack as you go about your day, and you’ll finish the whole collection before you know it.
It feels good to finish a book in one sitting. If you have the whole day and strong focus, a longer book is great, but if you don’t just read something shorter.
Tightly constructed writing packs a real punch. Constraints are good for the forward motion of the story.
Writers seem more apt to play with their voice or try out something new in short books. Stylistic choices that succeed in short books might not in longer books because they would become overdone or exhausting.
Shorter books (stories or novellas) can be a great way to introduce yourself to a previously unread author’s work.
Similar to point 4, the subject matter of a shorter book can be quite intense because of the brevity. The reader can handle things in small doses that they might not be able to in larger doses.
Re-reading short books is easy and feels like a not-that-crazy thing to do because the time commitment is so minimal.
Short books are easy to carry around. You can bring them everywhere.
Will I spend a whole month reading only short books again? I don’t know, maybe. Do you like reading this many reviews in one post? Are you still here?
One thing I definitely will do is keep a running list of good short books to read in the future. It is already very much in progress thanks to the thin spines already staring out from my bookshelf, my own research, and the lovely recommendations of so many friends and strangers. Maybe instead of a month of short books, there will be one short book every month.
In addition to telling me if you like this (actually only comment if the answer is affirmative), please drop your 100(ish) page book recommendations below! You WILL get a shout out when I read your book. Kisses.
As always, you can buy the books I wrote about this week at this link to my bookshop!
This selection is chef's kiss! My favorite 100ish page book has to be Giovanni's Room 📚
The short books that come to mind are anything by Vonnegut--slaughterhouse five, breakfast of champions, and cats cradle.
A dear friend’s (james) favorite book is heart of darkness, which is light in pages but dense in everything else.