I began the month with two really brisk reads.

Pico Iyer’s Aflame: Learning From Silence was one of those books that ratifies what I believe rather than challenges it. In it, Iyer describes a series of lengthy silent retreats in Big Sur, California. As you might expect, it’s driven by little epiphanies, the likes of which are often right beneath our noses. As an amateur poet, my antennae are attuned to such things; as a person raised Catholic, my antennae are also attuned to moments of daily grace. The book moves gently through deeply meaningful yet quick conversations Iyer has in these spaces, and it offers thoughtful ways to think of our own journey into silence.

I read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying equally quickly, and found it surprisingly less potent than when I read it as a teenager. It’s impossible to reread a book for the first time, and in this case, I had to fill in current gaps of wonder with memories of being blown away by Faulkner’s work. His prose shifts so smoothly from the laconic to the lyrical. His characters have often unexamined depths. For all their stylistic complexity, his narratives to me feel elemental (forgiveness, loss, renewal). I don’t think reading more slowly would have made the novel sing for me in the way that Light In August did for me–but few novels ever will do that for me.

For some reason last month, I ran deep on two novelists, loving multiple novels each by Cynthia Ozick & Sarah Perry. This month, apparently I’m running deep on Willa Cather, whose O, Pioneers! I read & wrote about in April. I loved that novel for its deep engagement with the land, with the solitude that accompanies some future-minded people, and with the complexities of friendship. If anything her Death Comes to the Archbishop goes even deeper on each of those topics. Her treatment of the land (in this case New Mexico, rather than Nebraska) is supplemented a reverent acknowledgement of what Native peoples understand about the land; her treatment of future-minded people is buoyed & animated by the realities & challenges of faith (in this case, Roman Catholic ordained men, even though Cather herself was not Catholic). It is in her treatment of friendship, though, that Cather outdoes herself & most novels I can call to mind about male friendship. Jean Marie Latour (the archbishop of the title) is accompanied & balanced by a friend he meets in seminary Joseph Valliant. They balance each other & support one another & love one another & mourn the other’s absence in ways that show an ordained life at its best. Also, great Willa Cather Archive resources for this one. This is one of my top ten of a life reading, I think.

Equally entertaining was Golden Hill, the debut novel of Francis Spufford, an author better known for his nonfiction work (which I have not read). Spufford writes in a mode hundreds of years old, befitting his story & setting, 1746 New York City. The style is ornate & artful, even / especially when it demands rereading. Like the earliest of novels Spufford emulates, Golden Hill revels in episodes, in stand-alone set pieces — dinners, journeys, conversations / debates, as well as trials & duels, letters & dramas. There are moments when Spufford relishes in the historical, both in the small moments (when he refers to neighborhoods not-yet-developed in New-York) and in large challenges (when he leans into the lived reality of women in the 18th-century, enslaved people in the 18th-century, the poor, the powerful, etc.). At the center is a newcomer, the generically, mysteriously named Mr. Smith, who arrives from London with a note for cash. An amount of cash that attracts the attention of magistrates & scoundrels, the press & the governor, women & men, old & young. Used to the big city of London, Mr. Smith blunders his way through this small town New-York in ways that are heart-breaking & hilarious. A really fun & thoughtful, suspenseful & surprising novel.

I also read Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz, a suspenseful & well-paced noir set in an alternate United States of the 1920s, a USA where Native people flourish & thrive. The protagonist detective Joe Barrow catches a murder, prominently staged in the center of the city. The particulars of the crime scene point to a Native perp — or to someone trying to send Barrow off the trail. There’s detailed city & national politics, gritty fist fights & gun fights, the KKK, and imho not enough jazz to merit its prominence in the title. It’s a mature love story with a great ending and a suspenseful murder mystery that unspools in a way that makes the murder the catalyst for the story rather than the limits / point of the story (in sort of Chinatown mode).

I listened to Chloe Dalton’s Raising Hare, a debut memoir about … well, about raising a hare that Dalton finds on her property. It’s a memoir that is aware of its niche genre — urban single educated overworked adult has the scales fall from her eyes thanks to an unexpected shift in her life. For as often as I’ve read this kind of book, I still enjoy them, and I enjoyed this one. Dalton works in plenty of nature-observation reportage along with plenty of research about how hares have been misunderstood & maligned through the ages. And while Dalton does reflect on what this raising means to / reveals to her about herself, she doesn’t center herself as much as she might have.