Somehow I ended up reading a ton of things this month, as always mostly fiction, a good gender balance, but not as much in translation as I usually do.

PG Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning. A truly silly, truly delightful, absolutely enjoyable comic novel. I have heard great things about Wodehouse, and I am glad that I started with this one, apparently a late novel of his. The interplay between the upper class twit Wooster & his always-capable butler Jeeves was, as advertised, subtle & funny. There were just enough silly misunderstandings to keep you reading from chapter to chapter, and the resolution presages Seinfeld’s sitcom rules: No hugging, no learning. Highly recommend the audiobook.

Kate Williams, Tell the Machine Goodnight. I had expected this one to be pretty creepy, given the set-up: A device that kinda reads your life and makes future-focused life rules, based on some algorithmic robot thinking. Williams’ first example of this machine guidance begins with innocuous things like “Eat more honey” and shifts quickly to jarring what-could-this-mean things like “Amputate the outermost digit of your index finger.” There’s a really tender & complicated mother-son-divorced dad relationship at the center, driven by various regrets & struggles. Not as tech-focused as the title & cover would suggest. A really human book.

J. Niimi, 33 1/3 series: REM Murmur. I love this series, each of which focuses on a single album. When you’re a fan of an album, you know a lot about it–sometimes the introductions to these things are rehashes of things / interviews familiar to you. AND when you’re a fan of an album, you cherish a curated deliberate return to it. In this case, the author offers great insight into the production & recording of specific tracks, and she meditates on her own experience with the album & the early 80s. Parts of this book feel quite obviously padded, or maybe it’s fairer to say that they feel quite academically wonky. But it was worth a return to REM, a band I’ve written about here before.

Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons. I have avoided this author, because of the breezy & “quirky” movie adaptation of The Accidental Tourist. I’ve been missing out. This novel takes place on a single day (with welcome & enjoyable flashbacks offering context) in the life of a middle-aged woman & her husband traveling to a friend’s husband’s funeral. There are bumps along the way in this relatable accessible everyday novel, each of which is the result of the varieties of love. Sometimes we love in a hurry, we love on impulse, we love because others are watching, we love to recapture something we’re afraid of losing. The couple leaving for the funeral, Maggie Moran and her husband Ira, make it home from the funeral, and they make it home with a kind of life & wisdom they didn’t have when they left. Loved this one.

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India. I first encountered this novel as homework in grad school. Forster crafts human interaction with great precision & skill; some readers like my professor felt he crafts these interactions with great empathy. It’s a story of culture clash & cultural divides focusing on upper class Brits & educated Indians. When I read it for the first time, I was frustrated by the limits of the cast of characters (all of whom seemed to me overly refined, polite, cultural-norm-bound). But I don’t expect I would have been receptive to a novel that aimed for a kind of novel written by Forster that purported to examine, say, the lives of the poor or of that took a deep dive into Hindu faith & belief. It is a novel that thrives in ambiguity & mystery, in distance & separation.

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. Probably the funniest, most thoughtful book about Jewishness & doubt & doubles that I’ve read since Philp Roth’s Operation Shylock, which I wrote about here. Ferris centers the action on Paul C. O’Rourke, doctor of dentistry, a Red Sox fan living in NYC with a thriving practice, a very present ex-girlfriend, and a troubling online double. This double posts in his name a series of claims about the Ulms, a millenia-old hiding-in-plain-sight tribe of nonbelievers. The Ulms, according to the online O’ Rourke have suffered persecution analogous to yet worse than that of the Jews. As reviewers note, the conspiracy parts read like Pynchon; the funny parts read like Eggers; the Jewish history parts read like Roth; and the whole thing is a creation that is Ferris’s alone. I have a couple of quibbles, but the last fifty pages are about as good as any novel I’ve read lately.

Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. I remember now what unites this month’s reading–it’s The Guardian‘s list of the 100 best novels. I mean, who cares if they really are the best ever? It’s just helpful to have a list sometimes to narrow things down. In this case, I would have never come across Taylor’s novel, even though it’s published by NYRB, whose novels I purchase in half price on the spine logo alone. This one is a perceptive & at times heart-breaking novel about old people & fellowship. The Claremont is a hotel mostly occupied by elderly tenants comfortable enough to afford it, healthy enough to live on their own, but separated enough from family to have nowhere else to go. The hours pass slowly. The days even more slowly. Errands are invented & painstakingly rendered by Taylor, as tender reminders of how empty a life is without family, without friends, without something to make meaning. The title character Mrs. Palfrey, a new tenant at the Claremont, has the emptiest of days until a kind of meet-cute brings her to Ludovic Meyer, an aspiring poor writer young enough to be her grandson. In fact, to save face with her tenants at the Claremont, Mrs. Palfrey lies, saying that Ludo is her grandson. I won’t spoil the utterly believable complications & subtle kindnesses Taylor creates in this novel, but I will say that it is true without being depressing, hopeful without being naive.

Johannes Anyuru, Ixelles. Ixelles is a region in Belgium, not a personal name. While this novel was centered on a single mystery (who killed Mio?) impacting a single family (Ruth & her son Em) and a single compelling piece of new evidence (a compact disc with a mysterious voice), I had to keep reminding myself that Anyuru’s project was bigger & deeper. What is the immigrant experience like in Europe? What stories do we live by? Which stories can we shape, and to what end? What fences us in, and how can we find escape & safety & home outside those fences, those families, those communities? You do find out whodunnit, and you do emerge with a mature sense of where this family might go next, thanks to the voice on the compact disc. And it is about a whole lot more than that too.