Last month, I wondered if I might be reading too quickly. Even for teacher-on-vacation mode, the pace was surprising. A lot of books and, more importantly, a lot of books back to back by one author. I really felt like I got, say, Colum McCann or Willa Cather. I might be back into that mode one day, but for now, I’m trying to slow down my reading. Or I will, with my next book.

The first one I read this month was Fiona Davis’s The Stolen Queen. Wikipedia tells me that Davis writes historical fiction set in NYC. I don’t remember how this one wound up in my library queue, but that’s one delight of buying fewer books these days. When my default was purchasing books, I had a closer sense of the origins or my interest in a book. With a library queue, I often don’t remember what led me to a story. I doubt that I would teach The Stolen Queen, but that probably says more about me than about the book. We meet Met curator / Egyptologist Charlotte Cross in 1978 as the museum is gearing up for two things: The Met Gala and the tour of King Tut’s remains. Davis also takes Charlotte back to Cairo in 1936, when she discovers (& loses) a gorgeous piece from a tomb she co-excavates. You’ve got some smoothly included history and art, both Egyptian and fashion-focused (thanks to the Met Gala passages). Annie Jenkins, a teenager just out of high school, loves the Met, visits it often, and winds up working there as an assistant to Diana Vreeland. When an artifact gets stolen during the Gala, Annie is blamed, and Charlotte (suspecting that it was stolen in order to be returned to Egypt) sets off on a return trip to the Valley of the Kings in search of the stolen queen. As I’m typing this up, I recognize that it’s a lot of plot, in two timelines, with two family histories that I haven’t even talked about, with important debates about the morality of “owning” excavated / looted / stolen antiquities. The debate doesn’t get resolved because it isn’t in real life; the chase for the queen and the partnership struck up between Charlotte & Annie is suspenseful and fun and thoughtful.

I’ve encountered Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy in loads of lists & podcast guest recommendations and only recently read it. I’ll offer the cliched critique that it’s one of those nonfiction books that seems “padded” beyond the limits of its stated practical goal / title. But Odell recognizes that this how-to has deep cultural roots (Diogenes & Thomas Merton, Bartleby & hippy communes, performance art & labor unions, etc.), so what some readers might call padding is actually context, is actually variety, is actually needed. I was inspired by lessons from wage laborers that Odell recounts, especially given her reminder to advantaged readers like me, who have time to think about our attention. I was made quite nervous by her research into the millennial “grind or die” ethos that sees excellence (in grades, in internships, in off-the-clock work availability) as the for-now assurance of possible financial security. Gonna be thinking about this one for a while.

I’m rereading a book, Chance Meeting: American Encounters, that I loved when I first read it because it innovates upon the promise of its idea: Construct a daisy-chain of chance meetings & inspirations & interactions of American creative people. This takes a little explaining, but just a little: Author Rachel Cohen writes a chapter devoted to Person A meeting Person B, then one devoted to Person B meeting Persons C & D, then one devoted to Person D meeting Person E, etc. I The chapters often capture one person in pre-fame, or even pre-talent mode; they ground each person not only in the age of the times but also in the specifics of their domestic and working lives. For example, Willa Cather before her fame seated at a birthday dinner for Mark Twain just before he dies; for more examples, scroll down on this page of Rachel Cohen’s site. A really idiosyncratic whos-who of American culture & letters. And even more idiosyncratic, for as heavily researched & factual as Cohen’s “encounters are, she prepares the reader in the intro for a little needed latitude: She opens & closes each chapter with a paragraph that, based on her research, is all her lens, is utterly imaginative. LOVE this book. (Shameless sort of unnecessary reader flex: When I got the book years ago, the [better] title was A Chance Meeting : Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967.)

I read two novels by Penelope Fitzgerald, a writer who published her first book at 58. The two novels I read were published late in her career. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988, The Beginning of Spring opens with a mother abandoning her husband, taking her kids away from their home in Moscow. The entire family is British, but have been living in Russia long enough that all feel thoroughly Russian — it is right before the Russian Revolution, which lingers for the reader but impacts the characters like a possible haunting. How the father keeps his family warm and happy, how the husband hold out hope that his wife will return, how the provider for this family contends with perilous work and cultural conditions animates this subtle & powerful novel. GREAT ending. Fitzgerald’s last novel, The Blue Flower, is a piece of historical fiction that won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997. It’s about a German Romantic thinker I had never heard of. In this novel also, human relationships are realistically complex, tragically funny, and believably unpredictable. You really get a feel for how things were then & there — with respect to wooing, to university life, to royalty, to money, to weather, to town life — and you get a feel for how little changes — with respect to ego, to life’s mysteries, to fortune, to family. Not sure I’m explaining this very well, but neither could The Guardian‘s critics, so [insert shrug emoji], all I can do is recommend Fiztgerald’s work heartily.

I wrapped up the month with a novel that I enjoyed less (much less) than any other I read this month. When you read a lot, you can brush off or appreciate certain stylistic tics in a work because you know that you’ll be on to your next read soon. And sometimes, there are stylistic tics that you can’t unsee, stylistic tics that seem downright inconsiderate (or at the very least attention-grabbing-while-claiming-to-be-attention-agnostic). This novel I read had two that drive me to distraction. First, dialogue is not separated from narration in any way. No quotation marks, no dash, nothing. Joyce separated dialogue from his prose, Borges did too, Barthelme did too, etc. If you think this choice is “modern” or “realistic”, well, you must be waaaay more modern & cutting-edge than those authors. [ahem] The other thing that this novel does is dismiss with traditional comma usage. The author / narrator / protagonist writes what English teachers would call comma splices throughout. Sometimes that kind of choice can represent well a breathless or frenetic interiority about the character or narrator; this character had those moments, granted, but those moments were not rendered as extraordinary emotionally because the entire dang novel had that comma tic, so heightened moments were not heightened. I mean, look, [inset name of author]: You’ve got paragraph breaks that follow convention, you’ve got chapter breaks that follow a standard sort of pace, you’ve got a straightforward sort of affection / attention triangle, you’ve got a narrator that’s upper class & educated & utterly free, so why are you pretending that this choice has any impact other than to signal boost your “‘”boldness”” (extra air quotes deliberate) in a novel that is anything but bold? It’s rare that I stick with a novel I don’t love, and in those cases, I don’t write about it here. This one is an exception.