Author: sarahwp

THE INVENTION OF NATURE by Andrea Wulf

In this book a man with a large unearned income has a great time and inspires lots of others to do the same.

Alexander von Humboldt was so famous that at his centennial in 1869 there were huge parades for him across cities in Europe and America.  He has more things named after him than anyone else who has ever lived (rivers, plants, geographical features, a part of the moon).  And yet, today, it is a bit: Humboldt Who?

Humboldt did not identify or discover anything in particular.  What he is famous for is his worldview.  He put forward the idea, revolutionary at the time, that nature was fragile, heavily interconnected, and at great risk from human intervention.  It’s an insight that was so influential that today it sounds obvious. 

It was not an easy road for Humboldt.  Okay, I lie, it was a pretty easy road.  He had a wealthy mother, so the second she died he stopped pretending to study medicine and was off to South America with his boyfriend (or as he liked to call him, his botanist).  He went there allegedly to discover the tributaries of the great Orinioco river, which surprised the locals, who knew them well and to his disappointment could describe them in detail.  While there he studied everything from the colour of the sky to the nature of the soil, and came to a forest of conclusions, almost all of which are correct: he invented isotherms, he identified deforestation, he called it on tectonic plates; he even flagged the dangers of ‘great masses of steam and gas’ coming from cities.  He categorically condemned slavery and the idea of racial inequality in terms that are almost shockingly modern.

After covering Humboldt’s long and cushy life, the book goes on to cover all the many other naturalists who were inspired by him, including Darwin, Thoreau, and Marsh.  Probably not coincidentally, these guys also had a ton of unearned income.  They also had disapproving parents, who either died or got worn down by their sons’ enthusiasm.  And there is a LOT of enthusiasm.  Here’s Darwin to his father:

I am at present red-hot with Spiders!  

Humboldt got so excited that when he ran out of paper he would just scratch away at his desk rather than stop writing, and he did begin to worry he was losing his mind.  Muir, meanwhile, is reported by a guest to have run out of his cabin when the earth started to shake shouting happily: “A noble Earthquake!!!”   He was apparently excited to study it.  But one does wonder on his methods, as he later wrote to Emerson that “he had asked two violets what they thought of the earthquake, and they had replied ‘it’s all love’.”

Marsh was probably my favourite, partly because he was one of the only ones who had to find a way to fit his passion in around actually having to work for money.  As he put it, earnestly, in a letter, explaining the kind of job he was after:

small duties and large pay . . .

I mean aren’t we all.  Eventually he gets a job as an ambassador, which gives him lots of time to consider irrigation around the Nile, but still he complained:

I have been entirely disappointed as to the rest and relaxation I looked for

Oh sweetheart.

I have been strangely educated on many topics by this book. That there were 15,000 ships a day entering London in 1802; that the state of Nevada was nearly called Humboldt; etc.  But I think what I mostly take from it is the fact that you can for sure live your best life.  Now, I am rather jealous that probably no one can ever be as true polymath, as Humboldt was, as there is now just too much to know.  And of course, the money thing is a problem. But I am inspired by the joy these guys took in what they were doing, how they poured all their lives into having a wonderful time. 

As John Muir put it:

I’m in the woods, woods, woods, & they are in me-ee-ey

And who cares what anyone else thought. 

THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood

I enjoy a feminist dystopia as much as the next person, but in this case, maybe just stick with the TV show.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE is set in an alternative future where fundamentalist Christians have taken over the USA.  Women have been returned to exceedingly traditional gender roles, i.e., gross old guys get whatever they want.  They have wives, they have female servants, and they have concubines.  Sounds pretty sweet.  I mean for the gross old guys.  Grisly for everyone else. Atwood said one of her rules in writing it was that no atrocity should be included that had not actually happened in history, and it is depressing to contemplate how much of this future dystopia is basically just a re-telling of the past. 

It reminded me a bit of STEPFORD WIVES, in which ordinary men are given the option to have their wives’ brains rewired to produce a ‘perfect’ woman.  What makes that book so compelling is how believable it is that given the chance, most men would take that option. 

So, it was interesting; but I can’t say I enjoyed this book that much.  It was all a bit lyrical and literary for me.  There were some very questionable dreamlike sections.  The TV show cut all those bookish bits.  The book without the book.  Much better!

FIND ME by Andre Aciman

Never ever read the sequel to any novel you have loved.  I take this as a general rule. There’s a risk that what you found heart-breakingly unique is in fact a tired old trick of that particular author, and the novel you love will be tainted in retrospect. I broke this rule by reading FIND ME, a sequel to the wonderful CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, and yes, it was a big mistake.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME is the story of  Elio, and his teenage infatuation.  It a powerful and terrifying story of the one who got away.  In FIND ME, the father of Elio, who is in his fifties, meets a beautiful twenty-something woman on a train, and they begin a wild romance. 

I mean, okay.  I’m not saying this could never happen, but for sure in this telling it seems unlikely.  Even if you assume a lot of unspoken daddy issues, there is just no way a 24 year old is referring to some old guy’s penis as a ‘lighthouse’ and listening to him talk awkwardly about Goethe.  I don’t want to be super harsh, but it kind of read like an extended and slightly pitiful exercise in wishful thinking by a middle-aged man.

Part way through the book we go back to Elio himself, who is now in his thirties.  And there I had to stop.  So far it had just been such a lot of unmotivated and unlikely drivel, I just couldn’t face the character being polluted by more of the same.  So luckily I can’t tell you how it turned out.

WAR AND TURPENTINE by Stefan Hertmans

Here a man uses his grandfather’s actual diaries to recreate life in the early twentieth century.  It starts off interesting – for example, we learn how many very specific scents are lost to us.  Here he is on his great-grandmother:

Her black apron – he called it a pinafore – smelled like the offal of young rabbits

Horrifyingly specific.  Then we get into flashforwards, where we follow the author around modern day and very dull city of Ghent.  Things go rapidly downhill. It is not easy to write about the book you are writing.  Emmanual Carrere manages it, but few others can, and certainly not this writer.  Enjoy:

. . . I would scarely recognize the area.  Wild geese, a few sluggish swans in the polluted riverside mud, nervous moorhens in the black, oil-soaked mire.  Damaged nature, memory.  Pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom.  Humming, I walk out of the old cemetery.  But in the twilight, as I revel in the adagio strains of Edvard Grieg’s ‘Ase’s Death,’ that superlative mourning music for a dead mother, I see, in my mind’s eye, the old phantoms far above me, flickering titanically on the walls of a cave, blown up into eerie shapes by the light of a fire beyond my ken.

This is where I stopped.

DEPT OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill

Here is someone who has a mental breakdown because she gets cheated on.  I don’t know, I know it’s not very nice, but my view is: toughen the f**k up. 

Partly this view comes from the fact that this novel refuses to give any character a name, calling the main one ‘the wife,’ and the other one ‘the husband.’ I always find this profoundly pretentious.  Even worse, at the end, it abruptly shifts to using the first person singular.  I mean: VOM.   And all this to mostly tell the story of this couple who moves out of Brooklyn to the suburbs because it is cheaper. 

That said, here are two things I did like:

One, a quote from an 1896 book on advice for brides:

The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to .which ‘a married woman can be subject.  Besides the false views of human nature it will impart . . . it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities

I have long wondered why I am indifferent to domestic duties.

Two, this which I find sadly and profoundly true:

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

YOUR BEST YEAR YET by Jenny Ditzler

A re-read of a book from a couple of years ago. I read it again to help me get some discipline and produce some new year’s resolutions. 2021 has to be a better year than 2020, just vaccines alone, but I’m hoping to give it a push. The blog of last time I read it is here. It’s a pretty good book, I recommend it.

FAMILY LIFE by Akhil Sharma

You wouldn’t think there was any more space left in the world for another novel of the American immigrant experience.  Apparently there is, and here it is. 

FAMILY LIFE is about a boy who moves from India to the US with his family as a child. 

The charm of the novel is Sharma’s creation of a child’s eye view of the world, direct, assured, sometimes kind of racist.    Here’s two pieces on his father:

I used to think my father had been assigned to us by the government.  This was because he appeared to serve no purpose. 

And:

While my mother was interested in status, being better educated than others or being considered more proper, my father was just interested in being rich . . . Because of my grandfather’s problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did, people would look down on him.  As a result, he cared less about convincing people of his merits and more about just owning things.

The family are on the path of hard work and immigrant grit when his SPOILER ALERT older brother is in an accident that leaves him brain damaged.  Things get much harder from there.   Side point,  I love this:

Weeks passed.  The weather got colder.  The days tipped backward into darkness.  Some evenings our house and street appeared dark while the sky was light.  In October the trees shed their leaves, and our houses stood undefended on its lawn.

He works hard in high school, has a girlfriend, goes on to university, and becomes a miserable investment banker (is there another kind?).  I liked this thought on his girlfriend:

Minkashi lives in Texas now.  She is an accountant.  This surprises me because you always expect people who matter a great deal to you to end up leading glamorous lives

A really good book. I shall look for his other novel. 

MONOGAMY by Sue Miller

All I have to say to this novel is OK BOOMER. 

It tells the story of a marriage between two older people, and about their circle of friends.  We learn a lot about their daily lives, their dinner parties, their CD collections.  Enjoy this sample:

She had already prepared the white beans with thyme and olive oil for tomorrow’s dinner, and the plan was to put the lamb in a marinade tonight.  But she still had some shopping to do – last minute things.  Back in Cambridge, she stopped at Formaggio, the fancy neighbourhood shop, for cheeses – cheeses and crackers and several kinds of olives.  They had cherry tomatoes that looked nice in the produce section . .

I’m not even going to get into the ‘frisee salad with new potatoes and bacon’ incident. 

The husband is a book store manager, the wife a very under-employed photographer.  What we don’t learn is how they are funding two homes, and two kids, and daily fancy meals, on those salaries!?!  This is the kind of lifestyle you only get to have if you were born in the 1940s or 50s. MONOGAMY was like having my nose rubbed in inter-generational economic unfairness for 336 pages. I already have had quite enough of it from when those selfish people voted Brexit, secure in the knowledge that they would not be the ones working to pay their fat pensions.

The hook of the book is that after the husband dies the wife finds out he had a brief affair.  Rest assured, there is nothing revelatory in this.  Everyone acts like they can’t imagine why someone married thirty years might have an affair and yet still love their wife.  I mean, snore. 

There was only good part, which was where we learn about how the husband gave up on writing a novel:

It had felt liberating to acknowledge this to himself and others, to shed his painful sense of the obligation to be somehow remarkable; but it left him with the unanswered question of what to do with his life, and simultaneously the realization that working on the novel endlessly had been a way to avoid facing that question.

I like the idea of giving up on being remarkable.

PREP by Curtis Sittenfeld

This book reminded painfully me of the nightmarish self-involvement that is adolescence.  It tells the story of a girl, Lee, who gets a scholarship to a posh boarding school and spends the entire time behaving as if it is a concentration camp designed for in-depth examination of her choices by everyone concerned.  I mean check it out kids: you are not that interesting.  No one cares. 

PREP covers Lee’s four years of high school, and is an exhausting accounting of all the stupid things she worries about.  This includes even positive interactions with others:

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person.  And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: the less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that’s what you thought you’d been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement.  Also: the shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; . . . And finally: the better the original interaction, the greater the pressure.  Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction – I’d just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

Eventually as a senior she starts to hook up with a guy she has had a crush on for a long time.  It remains ‘secret’ for reasons that are unclear to her. 

Before and after I was involved with Cross Sugarman, I heard a thousand times that a boy, or a man, can’t make you happy, that you have to be happy on your own before you can be happy with another person.  All I can say is, I wish it were true. 

This did make me laugh.  It’s a lot of peoples’ experience, but it’s not something often admitted.

I enjoyed the book, it was very more-ish, but quite interestingly it didn’t actually go anywhere.  She got older, but no wiser.  I guess we typically assume that books have a shape and some kind of resolution (especially when they appear on the surface to be coming-of-age stories) but in this case, there was none.  For a while I found it annoying, but perhaps it’s just honest.  Sometimes I guess it’s true you just don’t change, but stay trapped on the same old hamster wheel. 

WHAT I READ IN 2020

I read 66 books this year, more than any year since 2011.  A pandemic will do that for you, I guess.  That said, given I read 60 books last year, I’m surprised this year isn’t more.  I seem to have had nothing but time, so I’m not sure what I filled it with.  Some serious wall staring, probably. 

I’m half half male and female writers this year, so that’s a positive.

My favourites:

CHERRY, by Nico Walker.  A wonderfully hilarious and strangely poetic story of military service and heroin addiction.  The girl he has a crush on, who was “either a slut or just real down to earth;” the starling with big dick energy; the time he vomited down the front of his shirt while trying to rob a bank.  Amazing. 

THE COPEHAGEN TRILOGY by Tove Ditlevsen.  I’ve never read a memoir so totally without justifications or excuses.  Creepy but brilliant.  Covers her life from childhood rickets to poetry to drug addiction.

SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox.  The only non-fiction on the list. It is not a book about which it my business to say if it was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but rather just to be astonished at what Albert Woodfox has achieved, which is surviving forty years in solitary confinement with his sanity intact. 

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson.  A near miraculously clever, bleak book, about a poor girl who “isn’t destined for greatness but is figuring out how to steal it from someone stupid enough to relax their grip on it.”  Also involves children who bust into flames.

NOTES ON A SCANDAL by Zoe Heller.  A taut and exciting book about loneliness.  Let me quote at self-indulgent length: 

Being alone is not the most awful thing in the world . . . You visit your museums and cultivate your interests and remind yourself how lucky you are not to be one of those spindly Sudanese children with flies beading their mouths.  You make out To Do lists – reorganize linen cupboard, learn two sonnets.  You dole out little treats to yourself – slices of ice cream cake, concerts at Wigmore Hall.  And then, every once in a while, you wake up and gaze out of the window at another bloody daybreak, and think, I cannot do this any more.  I cannot pull myself together again and spend the next fifteen hours of wakefulness fending off the fact of my own misery.

And that’s the perfect ending I think for a roundup of this plague year, during which, more than ever, my books have been a delight, a consolation, and an escape. 

The list:

THE GLASS CASTLE by Jennette Walls

CREATE DANGEROUSLY by Albert Camus

SEA WIFE by Amity Grainge

WRITERS & LOVERS by Lily King

COOL FOR AMERICA by Andrew Martin

HOUSE OF HUNGER by Dambudzo Maruchera

MR SALARY by Sally Rooney

SEVERANCE by Ling Ma

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE by Dolly Alderton

TOPEKA SCHOOL by Ben Lerner

AUGUSTUS by John Williams

THE ROOMMATE by Rosie Dannan

THE GREENGAGE SUMMER by Rumer Godden

THE NONESUCH by Georgette Heyer

LEOPARD IS A NEUTRAL by Erica Davies

ANGLE OF REPOSE by Wallace Stegner

OHIO by Stephen Markley

THIS MOURNABLE BODY by Tsitsi Dangarembga

HONS AND REBELS by Jessica Mitford

SATISFACTION by Gillian Greenwood

THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI by Andrew Sean Greer

THE YELLOW HOUSE by Sarah M Broom

CHERRY by Nico Walker

INTO THE WILD by John Krakeur

THE HUMAN STAIN by Philip Roth

THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai

I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou

THE DIARY OF A NOBODY by George and Weedon Grossmith

THE UNKNOWN AJAX by Georgette Heyer

THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN by Wallace Stegner

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES by David Sedaris

EXCITING TIMES by Naoise Dolan

NOTHING TO SEE HERE by Kevin Wilson

THE THORNBIRDS by Colleen McCullough

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIERS by Kevin Barry

CARRIE by Stephen King

A GIRL’S STORY by Annie Ernaux

RUNNING WITH SCISSORS by Augusten Burroughs

NOTES ON A SCANDAL by Zoe Heller

 A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR by Daniel Defoe

MAGICAL TIHNKING by Augusten Burroughs

HALF EMPTY by David Rakoff

AND QUIET FLOWS THE DON by Mikhail Sholokhov

DEPENDENCY by Tove Ditlevsen

I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE CAKE by Sloane Crowley

TO CALAIS, IN ORDINARY TIME by James Meek

MY MISSPENT YOUTH by Meghan Daum

HOW COULD SHE by Lauren Mechling

ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT by Stephen King

YOUTH by Tove Ditlevsen

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris

PRIESTDADDY by Patricia Lockwood

I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK by Nora Ephron

A PERFECT SPY by John Le Carre

INDONESIA by Elisabeth Pisani

CHILDHOOD by Tove Ditlevsen

CALYPSO by David Sedaris

EXPECTATION by Anna Hope

THINGS WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL by Jeannie Vanasco

SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox

COST OF LIVING by Deborah Levy

LUCKY JIM by Kingsley Amis

MOUNTAIN LION by Jean Stafford