middleagedmiddlechild.

The summer has provided me a lot of time to read, and I worry that I’m reading too quickly as a result. Or maybe I should be glad that, between semesters & with increasingly independent self-sufficient teenage kids, I can devote large swaths of time during the week to what I love. I kicked off the month with two short novels & a novella.

In Desperate Characters Paula Fox depicts the kinds of characters that I would probably really enjoy in a Woody Allen movie. Educated, status-savvy without being materialistic, child free, articulate, emotionally vulnerable … as I heard somewhere, these are the kinds of people who grow up using “summer” as a verb. It begins, as any reader would note, with a biting-the-hand-that-feeds episode, Sophie Bentwood & a stray cat outside the apartment she shares with her attorney husband Otto. Social engagements (a dinner party, late night drinks, a leisurely weekend brunch) delay a trip to the doctor, and political / economic realities (crime, work struggles, a city that never sleeps at its shabbiest & dirtiest) make the daily troubles of this upper-class couple feel downright existential.

In The Country Girls, Edna O’Brien brings two teenage girls to age & to the city (Dublin). Caithleen “Cait/Kate” Brady and Bridget “Baba” Brennan are school friends and, due to the size of their village, their paths & families cross often. Cait loses her mother early in the novel and, thanks to a scholarship to a convent school, she doesn’t have to live with her often-boozing widowed father; Baba’s family is much more well off, much more secure, but is not without tensions & dysfunction. Both leave their villages for the same convent school & then leave that school for the city. This is the first novel of a trilogy, and it feels like it. Baba’s sometimes friendly teasing / bullying of Cait shifts in satisfying but not complete ways; Cait’s growth into her own sexual & personal independence (so taboo in 1960 that the novel was banned) is not without its stumbles & disappointments. The closing of this novel reminded me of the resolution of Joyce’s The Dead — but Cait has two more acts in her narrative that Joyce never gave Gabriel Conroy.

Benedict Kiely’s novella / story “Proxopera” tells the story of a proxy bomb attempt, that is, of a group of terrorists forcing innocent citizens to carry out a bombing (in this case, a car bombing) on their behalf. It’s a story that opens with an idyllic look at the land & comfortable home of a retired teacher, returning with his son & family from a day outing. The idyllic home takes a horrifying turn with three masked men taking them hostage, two of whom the older Mr. Binchey recognizes despite their masks. The suspense is interrupted throughout by Binchey’s reflections of the village where he lives, of the troubles currently plaguing the country, of the life he has lived along the route he drives with the bomb in his passengers seat. Even though I am very ignorant of Irish history, Kiely narrows the troubles & the hopes of the time to this one family, this one fateful day in a way that will stay with me for a while.

I wanted to love Jonathan Gould’s Burning Down the House: Talking Heads and the New York Scene That Transformed Rock. The subtitle notwithstanding, Gould does a better job at providing artistic context to the band’s output & processes. (If you like that kinda thing, check out the 500 Songs podcast.) After the band’s second album–and after several of the bandmates move from the city–the subtitle makes less and less sense. Another off-target choice: Gould describes each album song by song without providing much depth either lyrically (as even anonymous Genius contributors do) or musically (as loads of podcast & YouTube hosts do). Another tiny but telling off-target bit: In one of many not-very-convincing comparisons to the Beatles, Gould pushes a long refuted narrative about how tense & unpleasant the Get Back sessions were. Most apparent is the lack of new material to draw upon — this is an unauthorized book that none of the band interviewed for. It shows.

I went on vacation in the middle of the month. Beautiful drive, beautiful time with family, at a beautiful place. I spent hours each day with my feet in the sand, looking out into the water, letting waves hit me. Hours. I didn’t read a thing for five or six days. Probably the longest I’ve gone without opening a book. No regrets : )

Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet opens with a lengthy walk up a steep street toward the richest part of a village of vine-sellers & merchants. The neighborhood has fallen on tough times: various things sprout from cracked centuries-old stones; the narrator turns our attention to vacant worm-eaten benches, to decades-unopened doors; the sun doesn’t reach this part of the village. We pity it before we meet the cooper-turned-vinter-turned-stock-market-speculator Maitre Grandet, a man adept at business & money-making but so consumed with avarice that his family lives a dark, constrained, meager life. Including his beautiful, pure daughter Eugenie. The story is downright archetypal — the tension between beauty & power, between youth & experience, between private passions & public expectations. It’s a really mature novel about practicality, about temptation, and about the freedoms that we can find even in the direst of situations. It’s part of Balzac’s Scenes from Provincial Life, which is one part of his larger lifelong project La Comédie humaine, a kind of sociological project to document & meditate on France in a thorough & realistic way, focusing on the shifting norms & challenges of nobility, femininity, rights, & capitalism. There are forty-eight volumes in the project — I’d be eager to hunt down a couple more.

I read a lot less professional development books than I should. Luckily, I have friends that write great books. Brett Vogelsinger, author of a great book about how to incorporate poetry into your teaching, just published Artful AI in Writing Instruction: A Human-Centered Approach to Using Artificial Intelligence in Grades 6–12. My favorite part of the book is the stance Brett takes — as a learner & collaborator rather than as a researcher or expert. Brett leans on student voice early & often, drawing upon candid admissions & practical applications that his students reveal. I also appreciate how Brett opens the book by telling you that you can skip to Chapter 7 if you’re the kind of person that wants the main takeaways of the book, including being open to change, being careful about what media you consume, etc. Highly recommend for classroom teachers.

Joanna Miller’s The Eights takes its inspiration from the first class of women that matriculated at Oxford in 1921. Before then, women could attend lectures, but they could not earn degrees. Miller follows four women who come to be known as The Eights because they live on hall 8 of the same college. Having watched a fair bit of Sex & The City & Girls, I really enjoyed how Miller’s collection of protagonists allows the reader to entrance to several historical, sociological, & psychological realities of the time & the place — both broad open issues like shell shock and suffrage, as well as more intimate indignities / struggles like gendered or class expectations. It doesn’t go into enough detail for this teacher-reader about the academic life of The Eights, which is a shame, given that the characters study subjects as varied as politics & logic, mathematics & literature. A pleasing but not really probing read.

My last two books of July were read in a kind of flurry — one in a single day, the other in two or three. The first one is Salt the Water, a YA novel in verse (an increasingly popular form) by Candice Iloh. I loved how it reminded me that, for teenagers, friends and family can at times feel like they are enough to fill a life. But then there’s school, which somehow feels separate from your friends, all of whom you know from school. Iloh focuses on high school senior Cerulean Gene (they/them), living through a dispiriting cycle of test prep with an uninspired teacher. Cerulean sees this last academic “means to an end” as downright poisonous. Even with ample support and smarts, Cerulean feels like they are treading water when they really want to swim freely. They make one big choice about three-quarters of the way through that is underexplained, at least in their own words. We are left with their friends & brother to make sense of Cerulean and to consider the variety of ways we plant the seeds of meaning in our lives.

The last book that I powered through is a funny & unique pirate story, sorta. Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica is published by NYRB, so you know it’s good. Hughes centers the story on a British family running a plantation in Jamaica, a plantation that is wrecked within the opening hundred pages by a huge tropical storm, rendered in dramatic detail. The children are sent over the ocean to family in England, where they’ve never been — but not before their ship is overtaken by pirates, who bring the children on board and eventually take to them in ways that only pirates can. There are surprisingly touching moments, surprisingly fatal accidents, and a resolution that satisfies, not just because of the turn of events but because of the knowing, wry voice of the narrator.

Early this year, I joined a book club at a local independent bookstore. It’s been great, not just to talk books without having to manage the talk, but also to have the choice outsourced, to have the next book curated for me.

The most recent novel this book club chose was Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s), translated from French by Sam Taylor. It’s an epistolary novel, and often an entertaining one. It’s set in 1557 in Florence, when master painter Jacopo da Pontormo is found murdered in San Lorenzo chapel where he’s painting an enormous fresco (his never-finished Last Judgment). This murder mystery, however, expands via the letters to give voice to Medici family political intrigue, Renaissance-era religious movements / conflicts, refined principles of art criticism, and more. Certain letters ring quite false, in rare but lasting way; Binet crafts a secondary mystery / suspense story in the form of a scandalous-to-some, politically-expedient-to-others painting that was taken from Pontormo’s studio. The resolution to the murder mystery is … not satisfying, but the debates about the intersection of religious faith & mannerism carried me through the last quarter of what had become a frustrating read for me.

Last month, I read a ton of Francis Spufford, which spilled over into this month with Light Perpetual. In this lovely act of imaginative historical fiction (maybe that’s a redundancy), Spufford returns to the site of a disaster — the V2 Woolworths rocket bomb of November 25, 1944. Rather than tell the story of that disaster, Spufford spares the innocent, imagining that the rocket was off target that November day. He imagines five children at Woolworth’s that day — What if they had not died that day? What might their lives have been like five years later, ten years later, decades later? Via each of these survivors, Spufford is able to look at pop cultural and political cultural touchstones of Great Britain: rock & roll music, the rise of White Nationalism, the erosion of labor unions, the everyday realities of social climbing & mental health, etc. In rare cases, the novel’s research is a little clunky; more often, however, Spufford places his narrative lens lovingly & realistically into the ambiguities of our lives: How do we make a living? How do our relationships change us? What tragedies do we create or dodge just by being alive?

Kinda continuing with my 2025 pattern of reading several works by a single author in a single month, I chose three Colum McCann novels. First, Let the Great World Spin, then Apeirogon, and finally Twist.

Let the Great World Spin is a great NYC novel. It’s set in gritty neighborhoods and upper class penthouses, it’s got love and loss, and it’s got tremendous heart. One of McCann’s first novels, which I haven’t read, digs deep into NYC also, focusing on the construction of the subway system. This novel begins with & returns throughout to an upward gaze, leveraging the story of Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. No matter the class or race or social comfort of McCann’s New Yorkers, the reader sees the risk & joy of their walk through the city. He constructs some surprising rubbing of shoulders, each of which rises to a decades-long, hard-won small orbit of love. Really impressed by this one.

I read Apeirogon next, and I think I like it even better. The summary of the novel captures the idea well: McCann tells the true story of two fathers, “one Palestinian, one Israeli, both connected by grief and working together for peace”. What the summary doesn’t capture is the organizing principle, which is in the title, namely, an infinitely-sided polygon. For a story of grief & loss & the struggle for peace in the Middle East, you’d expect at least two sides; McCann provides 1,001, inspired by Scheherazade. Growing up, I knew that character’s name, and I knew about the 1,001 Arabian nights, but I didn’t know that Scheherazade tells her unending story for a reason — to tell the tale is to stay alive. McCann honors the two fathers, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, by joining in their life work, which is to keep the memory of their daughters alive by telling their stories. All but two of the novel’s 1,001 chapters offers a unique facet of the story, not chronological, not predictable in any way, so you are always learning some new detail in what you might have thought was a simple story of the Nakba, a simple story about the Second Intifada. Two of the 1,001 chapters are turned over entirely to Aramin & Elhanan. I can’t wait to hear what my students think about this novel.

Before moving on to Twist, I read the back cover, which made several Conrad references. So I made a detour to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novella I’ve read a few times & taught once (though I don’t remember how the students responded). Because it’s a story told by Marlow while a crew waits for a turn of the tide, I’m really glad that I audiobooked this one. It’s a story of descent, a story of how the best of us succumbs to the temptation & payoff of horrific power; it’s a story of crews & support staff on land and aboard a steamer, revealing how the narrow lens most of us have never prepares us for the moral shock of a full vision of the systems we sustain. I didn’t know how this story inspired McCann’s Twist, and even if the inspiration is slight, I’m glad I reread it. McCann’s Twist turned out to be a subtle take on Conrad. Early in the novel, the narrator attempts to make sense of the story’s years-ago events, preparing the reader for ”a story about connection, about grace, about repair” (5). It’s set on the ocean and eventually upon the ocean floor, where the journalist narrator & the crew of the St. Georges travel to repair a severed undersea cable. Like the narrator, I didn’t know that around 97% of internet traffic runs not via satellites above us but via deep in the ocean. Several elements carried over gracefully from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness — a journey of descent, an engagement with the negative consequences of our global connectedness, a narrator taken morally & narratively & personally with an enigmatic protagonist, some morally ambiguous choices, a closing conversation between the narrator & the protagonist’s “Intended”, etc. McCann’s narrator admits on the last page that there are some things that he “can’t presume to explain” — the ultimate state of the narrator’s family relations, the ultimate goal of the protagonist’s action that drives the last third of the novel, the relationship between global internet traffic & global injustice, etc. Really human, really perceptive, really good novel nonetheless.

I don’t read much nonfiction, but with a book group, I gave one a try — Charles S. Cockell’s Taxi From Another Planet: Conversations With Drivers about Life in the Universe. The really good part, which is most of the book: Each chapter is fueled by Cockell’s response to a different question, the responses & questions always posed in really accessible language. For example, Should we solve problems on Earth before exploring space, or Do microbes deserve our protection, or Might the universe be devoid of aliens? If I challenged my students to come up with big questions to ask an astrobiologist, they could do worse than the questions Cockell chooses. Each response is thorough & brisk, detailed with scientific terms without ever descending into jargon. The less-than-good part, which is a small part of the book: The framing is often not great. The taxi drivers sometimes ask an innocent question that Cockell takes where he wants it go; Cockell sometimes leads the taxi driver explicitly & awkwardly. The recounting of / the conceit of a conversation lasts maybe the first two pages of each twenty-something-page essay. I often found myself skipping those pages entirely. And it’s still a pretty engaging set of essays.

Jane Gardam’s Old Filth is a novel about a long & rich, troubled & surprising life. Sir Edward Feathers comes to be known as Old Filth, filth an acronym for Failed In London, Tried Hong Kong. We meet him via gossip among lawyers at the highest reaches of the British legal system — they know his legend, his wealth, his being cuckolded, his travels, his precise if no-longer skill in a certain corner of the law. But nobody knows each facet of Filth. With each chapter in this non-chronological account, Gardam presents a deep relationship, a deep betrayal, and surprising good fortune that sustains & wounds Filth. Childhood friends, parents, aunts, his wife. Two journeys he takes (one by car, one by plane) drive Filth closer to some kind of reconciliation, some kind of closure. These journeys are punctuated by his poise & his wandering mind, his memories & his traumas. It’s a powerful & complex novel, one that resolves with a homecoming that satisfies in a deeply emotional way. Gardam wrote two more Filth narratives (one told from the POV of his wife, the other from the POV of his nemesis), but I don’t think I’ll be reading those. They cannot be as good as this one.

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.

It’s been a really good reading year. Giving up social media was easier than I thought it would be, and giving up most news outlets was too. If my December 2024 screen time totals can be trusted, those choices freed up … well, they freed up more time than I care to admit. So I’ve had a better reading year than I can remember.

This month, I locked in on two living authors I had never read before — Cynthia Ozick and Sarah Perry.

What I liked immediately about Cynthia Ozick were two things. First, she crafts stories with what felt like a brisk pace; also, she favors soon-to-be-discarded or recently forgotten characters, which she treats with candor & humor.

Her novella Antiquities was the first of hers I read. In it, a well-born & well-educated man is enlisted by the trustees of a barely surviving academy to write part of that institution’s history. Our narrator, retired from an illustrious legal career, finds it difficult to record any history except for the recent & ongoing history of (a) his quarrels with the surviving geezers in this home / academy and (b) his disappointments with his son, an aspiring Hollywood producer (emphasis on aspiring). Then the narrator remembers Ben-Zion Elefantin, a Jewish former classmate. The bits & pieces of this student’s story bring up difficult memories of anti-Semitism at the school & in his own biases & assumptions & lapses in kindness way back then. The story never gets published / compiled; the academy shuts down. And we are left mining these antiquities of memory.

Her novel The Puttermesser Papers reads like several novellas — in fact, pieces of it were published in The New Yorker. And what loopy, varied, utterly complete & tragicomic pieces. We are with Ruth Puttermesser from her childhood through to her death at the hands of a rapist / robber. As the only Jewish woman in a law firm, she endures the most frankly acknowledged glass ceiling; as a mostly single woman, she endures one nearly-available lover (or would-be lover) after another; a bookish woman, she models (and almost succeeds in finding happiness) her life after George Eliot. Most entertaining to me was a passage in which Ruth conjures somehow by near-accident a female golem, who assists Ruth in becoming the mayor of NYC. Some of the stories are hilarious; each is heart-breaking in its own way, given how this character is forced to a knife fight of a life armed with only what she is, namely, a puttermesser (that is, a butter knife).

Her novel The Messiah of Stockholm … oh my goodness, these posts are getting really long. I’d return to what I said from the beginning, namely, that Ozick enlivens soon-to-be-discarded characters. Lars Andemening is not the messiah — he is the son (so he thinks) of forgotten, murdered-by-Nazis novelist Bruno Schulz. Lars, a low-level literary reviewer at a not-exemplary journal, a twice-divorced orphan with few connections to friends or family, can channel his father’s vision. He spends each afternoon dreaming through Schulz’s lens. Until a bookseller finds a person who claims to have a lost work by his father — and the person claims to have the same father as Lars. It is a puzzle of identity and a reckoning with cultural loss caused by the Shoah. Suspenseful & surprising, and highly thoughtful & entertaining.

What I liked immediately about Sarah Perry were two things. First, she crafts stories about thoughtful people in thought-full relationships with one another, usually on opposite sides of a thought; also, she looks unblinkingly at how friendships can be complex & hurtful not despite the love in them but because of the love within them.

I read Enlightenment first. a novel set in Essex. In a small city there, Thomas Hart writes a regular column in the small newspaper. Grace Macaulay is a motherless friend decades younger — Thomas is in church on the day that she is born, in the service in which his father brings the infant Grace. Who vomits on Thomas. That Thomas is gay and falls into a lovely friendship with a thoughtful man causes some unbearable tension; that Grace falls for not-quite-the-right-boy offers hope and tension. Thomas suffers makes which … well, I still can’t tell if it’s a betrayal on his part. I’m leaving out the big thread uniting this decades-long narrative — astronomy. It opens with the approach of the Hale Bopp comet in 1997 and is driven by the discovery of an amateur female astronomer who might have been the first to see a comet, and it culminates in 2017 with the viewing of the long-awaited comet. The highs & lows of this novel are huge. And it resolves well, if not in the perfect way we want.

Then I read her earlier novel The Essex Serpent,. I think I would have preferred to read this one first, but this order didn’t ruin anything. This novel is set in Essex too, but in the 1890s. Like Enlightenment, this action centers … scratch that. I was going to say that it centers on faith, but faith is actually one part of the twin orbit of faith & reason. These forces revolve around one another with dramatic & enjoyable conversations about / against each force, conversations between erudite, passionate, three-dimensional people. Cora Seaborne, a scarred & smart recent widow, takes her (probably autistic) son & dependable lady servant Martha to Essex to search the marshes for fossils & bones. A family friend recommends that she look up the country parson Will Ransome, a strong & caring man with three kids and a loving wife. Cora & Will take an immediate liking to one another, and their children take an immediate liking to the respective other families. Perry fleshes out an encyclopedic world — beggars, fishermen, doctors, politicians, landscapes, cityscapes, family, friendship. And a mythical monstrous serpent that seems to haunt Essex. It’s, like Enlightenment, a story about love & idea(l)s, about loving idea(l(s. I cannot recommend this novel enough, a novel that like Enlightenment offers just enough reality to make it hurt, and just enough hope to make you happy for the world Perry creates.

I also read Tom Lake by Anne Patchett in a joyful rush of two days. It’s a kiss & tell novel in the best way. As a way to kill time during the pandemic, a mother recalls to her three grown daughters her summer of love, a brief success treading the boards as Emily in a summer stock version of Our Town. It’s a lovely what-if novel, if you’re young; if you’re not as young as you once were, it’s a lovely thank-goodness novel about the choices & consequences of our lives, including those that others would want us to do over. I … I’m not sure that you can appreciate the novel fully if you don’t know Wilder’s play. In fact, it’s a great novel about life imitating the art that imitates life.

Somehow I powered through two books about great-souled people creating lasting change. Willa Cather’s O, Pioneers! surprised me with its loving portrait of the complexity of “frontier” life, in this case, Nebraska around the 1890s. Cather shapes the difficulty of that landscape & that kind of living by centering our focus on Alexandra Bergson, a risk-taking & thoughtful daughter of a Swedish immigrant. Her vision doesn’t always align with that of her brothers, who begrudgingly follow her advice, which makes them comfortable & rich. Cather navigates the messiness of small-town life, of social & familial power, and of romantic love. Louis Auchin­closs’s The Rector of Justin surprised me in its thorough portrait of a headmaster of an elite boys school before, during, and immediately after the wars. Auchin­closs centers the story on a would-be minister Brian new to Justin Martyr school, someone that might be objective about the headmaster Rev. Francis Prescott but who, like most people, finds himself entralled by him. Brian becomes the confidant & the story-curator of several people near & some dear to Prescott. An early review notes that Auchincloss, an attorney by day, assembles a multivoiced narrative that is in effect a set of witnesses for the prosecution and the defense of Prescott. I’m a teacher at a pretty elite school (not as elite as Justin Martyr), and I was really taken with how Auchincloss brought out the class-specific, history-specific, faith-specific humanity & complexity of this headmaster, his students, his colleagues, and last of all his family. Again, two fantastic novels about great-souled people shaping a world out of love & determination.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is another novel I discovered thanks to The Guardian‘s list of 100 best novels in English. It is a novel just short enough to make you wish it were longer & just relatable enough to make you think it’s autobiographical. The title character, a teacher at a Scottish day school for girls, is just enigmatic enough to amuse you and just wrong-headed enough to shock you–she has a strange (& apparently not uncommon) fascination with fascist leaders in the 30s. Miss Brodie is in her prime, as she is quick to tell her students, particularly her “set” of favorites, whom she keeps an eye on even after they progress to the high school level of her school. It’s a great novel about the allure & danger of a great-souled person, about the power & limitations of friendship, and about the ways we live on in the lives of others, for better or for worse.

The Voices of Adriana by Elvira Navarro is a sneaky & surprising little novel. A novel in three parts, each of which has its own focus & angle & narrative approach. Part 1 focuses on the narrator Adriana navigating a new normal for her widower father as he recovers from his stroke and enters the world of online dating. Part 2 focuses on the home of her childhood & summers, not her parents’ home but that of her grandparents–further out in the country, deeper into religious faith, richer in the stories & legends of the Spanish Civil War. Part 3 curates the varied voices of the narrator, her mother, and her grandmother, sometimes contradictory, sometimes upset at what they are being made to say. The Voices of Adriana rewards a slow & adventurous reader. It reminded me of The Crying of Lot 49, another masterful novel that gets more curious and less certain (for this reader) as the novel progresses.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. A story that opens with a stark choice, a woman deciding to leave her husband & job & life for a religious community in a desolate landscape. It happens to be the landscape of her childhood, which brings up childhood cruelties & childhood acquaintances in dramatic ways. Years & silences bring horrors both relatable & fantastic– a once-bullied classmate & a plague of mice (really), among other things. I was ready for this one, a thoughtful novel that takes meditation & memory seriously, a deeply emotional novel that isn’t strident or loud in its depths, and finally, a novel that provides resolutions that are earned & believable, if not utterly rosy.

True Failure by Alex Higley. First of all, a novel that is universal in its look at early middle-age, at pre-parenthood marriage, at nearly-meaningful adult work, at the allure of fame, at the horror of living hand-to-mouth in the upper reaches of middle class. Higley centers his novel on Ben, a recently-fired early-30s shlub with indie-rock tastes & middle-America dreams — namely, reality-show fame, if not wealth. His long-shot dream draws in several people: his wife Tara a would-be painter currently running a daycare center from their home, a reality-show bigwig Marcy currently seeking a deliberate but subtle way to get fired, Marcy’s interns, a super of one of their apartment buildings, etc. and special guest star Mariska Hargitay (!/?). I loved to see how this one unfolded, how love frustrates & finds a way here.

Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein. What Wicked does for The Wizard of Oz, Epstein attempts to do for Oliver! the musical &/or Oliver Twist, the classic novel. The antisemitism of the time is a fact of Epstein’s novel rather than a disappointing shortcoming of characterization. Hatred of Jacob Fagin (given a first name for the first time in any incarnation of his story) is specific to the haters, not a response to stereotypes Fagin embodies. Epstein begins with a retelling of a scene you’d know, namely, Fagin’s meeting Oliver in the presence of Nan & the Artful Dodger. From there, she fleshes out this character’s deep backstory, his East London neighborhood, his own apprenticeship, and his limited set of choices in / for life. Haunted by the ghost of his hanged thief father & the real menace of his one-time pupil-in-crime Bill Sikes, Fagin wins our empathy, and Epstein affords him a resolution that makes a kind of not-entirely-rosy yet hopeful sense.

Two books by Raj Tawney. Independent bookstores have their charms. Cool selection, cooler staff, and personal connections. Dallas’s Deep Vellum Publishing has been a huge part of my reading since 2014, and Deep Vellum Bookstore naturally followed. Recently, they asked me to host a conversation with independent author Raj Tawney. For my narrative nonfiction juniors, his memoir Colorful Palate: A Flavorful Journey Through a Mixed American Experience really hit a sweet spot. Besides loving how disarming it is in its stories of ethnicity, family, they felt like it was tonally unique. Each chapter wraps up with a recipe, but not necessarily with a happy resolution. Tawney is honest about how human our family relationships are — he understands tension as evidence of love rather than as an obstacle to it. More importantly, they admired how, chapter by chapter, he was able to honor each member of his family on their own terms, to center each relationship as a reflection and a part of himself. And Tawney demonstrates that, like all of us, he is more than the sum of those familial parts. He also has a novel called All Mixed Up, a middle-school level novel about identity, friendship, and the challenges of growing up in a post 9/11 world.  My favorite part of this one was the frankness of the friendship: These middle-school boys are still boys but are there for each other in ways that can inform a life. In this book too, Tawney constructs & honors full-contact relationships with family, sometimes family that disagree with us, family that disappoint us, family that challenge & frustrate us. I’d highly recommend either book — and I’d probably start with Colorful Palate, for how it inspired me to think of the fullness of my family, to be grateful for the wide array of love that has fed me throughout my life.

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.