UK Fungus Day: An Extract from Aliya Whiteley’s The Secret Life of Fungi
It’s UK Fungus Day today, and to mark the occasion I’m hosting an extract from The Secret Life of Fungi: Discoveries from a Hidden World by Aliya Whiteley, which came out in paperback last week.
“Nosing”
In 2001 two scientists published a report of a smell test they had conducted on thirty-six volunteers. The volunteers smelled an unspecified mushroom of the Dictyophora genus that was claimed to be incredibly rare, growing only on the lava floes of Hawaii. Six of the women taking part in the study reported experiencing a mild orgasm at the point of inhaling the smell; all the men said the mushroom smelled ‘fetid’.
It’s a tiny sample in an unrepeated experiment, but just the thought of it was enough to intrigue many. News outlets all over the world picked up the story and ran away with it. We don’t imagine that the sight of an object, any object, would be enough to induce such ecstasy, but the sense of smell is different. It cuddles up to our memories, performing the mysterious task of making us experience certain emotions. Nothing is as evocative as a scent thought forgotten. That might explain why we believe it’s possible to take the ultimate pleasure from one.
If some fungi smells are so intense to us, we can only wonder at how incredibly exciting they must be to animals with noses better than our own. A truffle, for instance – truffles have a scent so strong that it can give us headaches, and impregnate every corner of a kitchen so that everything tastes of it. The White Truffle, Tuber magnatum, is the most prized in the world for its rich, unique taste. It has long been foraged throughout Italy and Bosnia–Herzegovina, found buried underground, in the shadows of old trees, often oaks. Pigs were traditionally used to root them out, with an enthusiasm that could lead to the truffle being eaten before it could be retrieved for human consumption, so often dogs are trained to do the task nowadays.
The training of the best truffle hounds starts in puppyhood. There are different methods of reward and encouragement, but an initially expensive tactic outlined in the 1925 book The Romance of the Fungus World, by F.W. and R.T. Rolfe, sounds a great way to get a dog keen to go to work every morning. From early on in the puppy’s life, the Rolfes recommended mixing finely chopped truffle into its usual food, and then, once it has developed a taste for them, burying the truffles nearby and rewarding the puppy once it seeks them out. Then it’s only a matter of encouraging the puppy to give up the truffles in exchange for a piece of meat or a chunk of cheese. That sounds easy, but I have to wonder how straightforward that final step in the training regime might be. It would have to be a magnificent cheese to get my attention once I’d been indoctrinated with truffle love from an early age.
Pigs and dogs aren’t the only animals that love the smell of truffles. Rodents and insects too flock to the scent, and the Rolfes also mention the use of the truffle fly in the hunt for the good stuff. The larvae live in the truffle itself, so the tiny flies are said to hover there above the ground, usually in the evening, in clouds that can be spotted by those with keen eyesight. Is this one of those methods that has been lost? I can’t find any modern mention of it, and there are certainly more reliable methods of finding your truffles, but I love the idea of standing in the forest at sunset, in a glade of oak trees, bent double to look along the ground in the hope of spotting a cloud of flies to give away the position of a rare find.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for a free copy.
And Finally by Henry Marsh & Sinkhole by Juliet Patterson
As I mentioned about my first batch of September releases, the nonfiction was on two broad themes: books about books (two still to come), and books about death (with What Remains? by Rupert Callender still to come). Here’s two from the latter camp.
And Finally: Matters of Life and Death by Henry Marsh
Marsh is a retired brain surgeon and the author of Do No Harm, one of the very best medical memoirs out there, as well as Admissions. As he was turning 70 a couple of years ago, two specific happenings prompted this third book. One: he volunteered for a brain scan as part of a medical study and, though he was part of a healthy cohort, was appalled at the degeneration his results showed. The other was that, after years of ignoring symptoms, he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and a someday, far-off mortality started to seem a lot closer. The pandemic amplified his health worries and sense of isolation, so he threw himself into various domestic projects like clearing his loft, home renovations, and remodelling his daughter’s dollhouse to give to his beloved granddaughters.
As in Admissions, the book flits between topics: the hypoxia he experienced on a trip to Nepal, surgical mistakes made (he once operated on the wrong side of the neck), balcony gardens he created on his hospital’s neurosurgery wards, a potter friend who died of a brain tumour, and so on. Along with details of his cancer treatment, he discusses its typical course and waxes lyrical about the meaning of dreams, what we know about consciousness, and the fairy stories he made up to tell his granddaughters over Zoom during lockdown. He acknowledges his own limitations – he was conned not once but twice by cowboy builders, and declined to operate on a young Ukrainian doctor, leaving it to a colleague – and speaks out against technologies to extend the human lifespan and in favour of assisted dying.
In general, the book feels quite scattered and repetitious. However, I appreciated Marsh’s usual candour and could see how he would want to finish this quickly and get it out into the world, even if it would have benefited from further editing to make each chapter a more polished stand-alone essay. The good news is that his scan results were promising as of spring 2022 and I’ve seen on Twitter that he’s now in Ukraine with Rachel Clarke to speak at the Lviv BookForum. Is it selfish to hope we’ll get another book from him? 
With thanks to Jonathan Cape for the free copy for review.
Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide by Juliet Patterson
In December 2008, poet Juliet Patterson’s father died by suicide, hanging himself from a bridge near his Minnesota home in the middle of the night. When the news came, Patterson was recovering from a car accident the week before and in the middle of debates with her partner Rachel about whether they would have a child. Her father had been in his late seventies, in fine health and with full mental capacity; he left his affairs ship-shape, and his suicide note was mostly practicalities about insurance, bank accounts and car ownership.
On the face of it, he wasn’t an obvious candidate, not someone you would worry about. Yet there was family history: both of Patterson’s parents lost their fathers to suicide. And there was a bizarre direct connection between their two Kansas-based families: her maternal grandmother’s best friend became her paternal grandfather’s secretary and mistress.
Patterson returns to Kansas on research trips to unearth her grandfathers’ lives: William a pottery manager who later struck it rich through Gulf Oil and Edward a New Deal Democratic congressman who lost his second bid for re-election. She pairs archival evidence – photographs and newspaper clippings – with skillfully imagined accounts of what each of her three ancestors did and felt on the day of his suicide. Her thinking is guided especially by the work of Edwin Shneidman, a psychologist who studied suicide notes.
Throughout, sinkholes, which are common in Kansas due to coal mining (one even opened up near her grandmother’s house), are both reality and metaphor for the chasm a suicide leaves. This gorgeously written family memoir approaches its difficult subject matter with brave tenderness and is one of my nonfiction favorites from the year so far. 
Published by Milkweed Editions in the USA. With thanks to Nectar Literary for the advanced e-copy for review.
Until the Future: “Tomorrow” Novels by Emma Straub & Gabrielle Zevin
These two 2022 novels I read from the library recently were such fun, but also had me fighting back tears – they’re lovely, bittersweet reads that think seriously about time and failure and loss (and prompted me to ask myself, “Was everything better in 1995–6?” The answer to which is an emphatic YES). If you’re a city-goer, you’ll appreciate the loving depictions of New York City and Los Angeles. They’re also perfect literary/ commercial crossovers that I can imagine recommending to just about any of my readers. Both:
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
Emma Straub is one of the most reliable authors I know for highly readable literary fiction (see also: Jami Attenberg, Maggie O’Farrell and Ann Patchett): while there’s always a lot going on in terms of family dysfunction and character dynamics, her plots are juicy and the prose slides right down (especially Modern Lovers, as well as The Vacationers). Here Alice Stern is a frustrated 40-year-old who feels stuck career- and relationship-wise, working in admissions in the same NYC private school she once attended and living with an okay boyfriend she secretly hopes won’t propose. She devotes much of her emotional energy to her seriously ill father, Leonard, who it seems may never be released from the hospital.
Leonard is the one-hit sci-fi author of a cult classic about time travel, and when an inebriated Alice falls asleep near her childhood home on the night of her 40th birthday, she has her own time-travel adventure, waking up on her 16th birthday in 1996. This is her chance, she thinks: to make sure things go right with her high school crush, and to encourage her father to write more and adopt healthier habits so he won’t be dying in a hospital 24 years down the line. As she figures out the rules of this personal portal and attempts the same transition again and again, she starts to get the hang of what works; what she can change and what is inexorable. And she tries to be a better person, both then and now.
True sci-fi aficionados would probably pick holes in the reasoning, but I would say so long as you pick this up expecting a smart commentary on relationships, ageing, loss and regret rather than a straight-up time-travel novel, you’ll be just fine. Straub is closer to my older sister’s age than mine, but I still loved the 1990s nostalgia, and looking back at your childhood/teen years from a parent’s perspective can only ever be an instructive thing to do.
It’s clever how Straub starts cycling through the time changes faster and faster so they don’t get repetitive. The supporting characters like Sam (Alice’s African American best friend), Kenji and even Ursula the cat are great, and there are little nods throughout to other pop culture representations of time travel. This was entertaining and relatable, but also left me with a lump in the throat. And it was all the more poignant to have been reading it just as news hit of author Peter Straub’s death; it’s a daughter’s tribute.
Some favourite lines:
(Alice thinking about Leonard) “She would feel immeasurably older when he was gone.”
“Maybe, she thought, … her mistake had been assuming that somewhere along the line, everything would fall into place and her life would look just like everyone else’s.”
(in 1996) “Everyone was gorgeous and gangly and slightly undercooked, like they’d been taken out of the oven a little bit too early”
“Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic, how the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.”
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
I didn’t think I’d ever read another novel by Zevin after the dud that was The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry (by far my most popular negative review on Goodreads), but Laura’s fantastic review changed my mind.
Here’s the summary I wrote for Bookmarks magazine:
Sadie Green and Sam Masur met in unlikely circumstances. In 1986, Sam’s serious foot injury had him in a children’s hospital, where Sadie was visiting her sister, who had cancer. They hit it off talking video games, but Sam was hurt to learn Sadie kept up the visits to earn community service hours for her bat mitzvah. When they meet again during college in Boston, they decide to co-design a game. Helped by his roommate and her boyfriend, they create a bestseller, Ichigo, based on The Tempest. Over the decades, these gaming friends collaborate multiple times, but life throws some curveballs. A heartwarming story for gamers and the uninitiated alike.
The novel was more complicated than I expected, mostly because it spans nearly 30 years – and my main critique would probably be that a shorter timeline would have been more intense. It also goes to some dark places as it probes the two central characters’ traumas and tendency to depression. But their friendship, which over the years becomes a business partnership that also incorporates Sam’s college roommate, Marx Watanabe, is a joy. The creative energy and banter are enviable. Marx is the uncomplicated, optimistic go-between when Sam and Sadie butt heads and take offense at perceived betrayals. Underneath Sam and Sadie’s conflicts is a love different from, and maybe superior to, romantic love (I think Sam might best be described as ace).
Gaming comes across as better than reality in that it offers infinite possibilities for do-overs. Life, on the other hand, only goes in one direction and is constrained by choices, your own and others’. Part VII, “The NPC” (for non-player character), is in second person narration and is beautiful as well as heartbreaking – I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers.
Apart from playing Super Mario with older cousins at 1990s family reunions and a couple of educational computer games with my childhood best friend, I don’t have any history with gaming at all, yet Zevin really drew me in to the fictional worlds Sadie and Sam created with their games. What with the vivid imagery and literary allusions, EmilyBlaster, Ichigo and Master of the Revels are real works of art, bridging high and low culture and proving that Dickinson’s poetry and Shakespeare’s plays are truly timeless. I was also interested to see how games might be ahead of their time socio-politically.
This reminded me most of The Animators and The Art of Fielding, similarly immersive stories of friendship and obsessive commitment to work and/or play. In the same way that you don’t have to know anything about cartooning or baseball to enjoy those novels, you don’t have to be a gamer to find this a nostalgic, even cathartic, read.
Some favourite lines:
“for Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country—the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn’t want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, pickled vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavoured croissant? They were all there for the taking and delicious, in their own way.”
Sam to Sadie: “We work through our pain. That’s what we do. We put the pain into the work, and the work becomes better.”
Marx (who was a college actor) in the early years, citing Macbeth: “What is a game? It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
Patrick Gale at Marlborough Literature Festival
It’s been a long time since I attended a literary festival in person rather than online. Four of us from my book club went along yesterday evening to the headline event of Marlborough Literature Festival. Marlborough is a pleasant market town in Wiltshire about 40 minutes from Newbury, and I’d like to get back to it sometime soon when things are open so I can explore its secondhand and plastic-free shops.
Patrick Gale closed the festival by speaking about his new novel (his 17th), Mother’s Boy. I knew it was a historical novel that covered the Second World War, but I had no idea that it was based on a real person, poet Charles Causley. With Andrew Motion, Gale is a patron of the Charles Causley Trust, which runs an annual poetry competition for children. I hadn’t heard of Causley, but Gale and some members of the audience recall memorizing his poems in school – like Roald Dahl’s, they can have a wicked sense of humour. Causley also wrote in the style of traditional ballads; my husband knows a version of one on a folk album.
Gale called Causley the “least sexy” of the war poets. He was from Launceston, Cornwall and left school at age 15, joining the Navy and later working as a schoolteacher for many years. He lived with his widowed mother and, if you believe the legend, died a virgin. However, Gale unearthed evidence that Causley was in fact a closeted homosexual and had sexual encounters with men during the war. He experienced survivor’s guilt because he escaped his ship’s explosion while he had an on-shore posting so that he could sit his exams.
Equally important to the novel is Causley’s mother, Laura, who grew up in extreme poverty and, after her husband’s death from TB, raised Charles in a slum on a laundress’ salary, even managing to buy him a piano. Launceston was decimated by the two world wars, and essentially colonized by the segregated U.S. Army. Gale made up a Black character named Amos, but gave him a horrific real-life story. Laura would have met Black soldiers and, later, German POWs through her working-class church.
Gale acknowledged that he had to make up more of Laura’s story, relying only on the information about her in Causley’s tiny appointment diaries. In response to an audience question, he said he thinks Causley would be “utterly appalled” at the existence of this novel because he was an intensely private person, but that he’s salved his conscience with the fact that the book is driving people back to Causley’s poems. He wrote this as a novel rather than a biography because he tends to “overempathize” with characters, and likes to go “behind the bedroom door,” as he put it – indeed, one (non-graphic) scene he read was of Charles’s conception, while the other was about Charles learning to read at age five and enjoying his father’s company though he knew he was ill.
Mother’s Boy is most like A Place Called Winter from his oeuvre, Gale remarked, in that it’s historical fiction based on real people – in that earlier case, his own relatives. Gale’s father was the governor of Wandsworth Prison and his mother the daughter of the governor of Liverpool Prison (where he oversaw many hangings). In fact, he’s now at work on a sequel to A Place Called Winter, about his grandparents and parents, and researching from letters.
I was impressed with Gale’s delivery: he spoke engagingly for 45 minutes about the book and its context, peppering in readings and recitations, with no interviewer to prompt him. It was clearly a practiced lecture, but he had no notes and spoke warmly and as if off the cuff.
Are any of these poem titles familiar to you? These were the ones mentioned during last night’s event. (You can listen to Causley reading some of them in his eighties – with his large cat purring in the background – on the Poetry Archive site I linked to above.)
- “Timothy Winters”
- “Rattler Morgan”
- “Eden Rock”
- “The Ballad of a Bread Man”
- “Angel Hill”
I have a copy of Mother’s Boy on hold at the library for me to pick up tomorrow, and we fancy reading A Place Called Winter for book club soon – his Notes from an Exhibition was one of our all-time favourites that we’ve read together.
Are you a Patrick Gale fan? Have you been able to attend any literary events recently?
Six Degrees of Separation: From Notes on a Scandal to Belzhar
This month we begin with Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller. I remember reading it at around the time the excellent film came out; I bet I’d get more out of it on a reread. (See Kate’s opening post.)
#1 Heller’s novel came to mind as I was reading The Best Short Stories 2022: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Valeria Luiselli. In the story “Clean Teen” by Francisco González, a junior high student who lives with his grandmother in Arizona has an affair with his English teacher, who’s unhappily married to a cop. These situations never end well, do they?
#2 I’ve not read anything by Luiselli, but the book of hers that most intrigues me is The Story of My Teeth.
#3 Speaking of teeth, Joshua Ferris’s To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is a comic novel about a dentist who falls victim to online identity theft.
#4 That novel won Ferris a Dylan Thomas Prize, as did Grief Is the Thing with Feathers for Max Porter.
#5 Porter’s creative response to bereavement draws on various forebears, including the poetry collection Crow by Ted Hughes.
#6 Most of you will know that Hughes was married to Sylvia Plath, author of The Bell Jar. I’m using that as my half-step to get to one of the books I’m currently reading, Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar. We’re reading this YA novel for book club this week as Wolitzer is a reliable author for us.
The premise: troubled teens are sent to a Vermont boarding school. Jam is one of five chosen for a special literature seminar that each year focuses on just one author. This year it’s Plath. When writing in their journals, the teens find that they are transported back to the scene of their trauma and can be with their lost loved ones, or be their undamaged selves, once again. They call that magical space Belzhar. I’ll plan to review this one in full in the near future.
Where will your chain take you? Join us for #6Degrees of Separation! (Hosted on the first Saturday of each month by Kate W. of Books Are My Favourite and Best.) Next month’s starting book is the classic cookbook The Naked Chef by Jamie Oliver.
Have you read any of my selections? Tempted by any you didn’t know before?
Short Stories in September, Part III/Roundup: Ausubel, Bynum, Roberts
A rare second post in a day from me – there’s just too much to try to fit in at the end of a month! This year I read a total of 11.5 short story collections in September, nearly matching last year’s 12. I’ve already written about the first three and the next four. I’ll give details on a few more below, but the final 1.5 are going to be part of a later Three on a Theme post on “Birds” story collections. The highlight of the month was one of those: Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman. However, I read lots of winners, including Brown Girls, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies and the three below. Just shorthand responses this time; all were .
Awayland by Ramona Ausubel (2018)
Basics: 11 stories, grouped under 4 mythical locales
Settings: California, Beirut, Africa, Turkey, a museum, an unnamed island
Themes: motherhood, loss, travel
Links: Greek myths (opener “You Can Find Love Now” is the Cyclops’ online dating profile); the sister in #2 is the main character in #4
Stand-out: “Template for a Proclamation to Save the Species” (the mayor of a Minnesota town, concerned about underpopulation, offers a car to the first mother to give birth on a date 9 months in the future)
Similar authors: Aimee Bender, Lydia Millet
Aside: I’d want to read her novels just for the titles: No One Is Here Except All of Us and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty
(New/remainder purchase from Dollar Tree on a recent USA trip)
Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (2008)
Basics: 8 linked stories following 7th-grade teacher Beatrice Hempel through her twenties and thirties
Setting: Massachusetts
Themes: love, loss, motherhood, adventure vs. overprotectiveness, idealism vs. being jaded
Stand-outs: “Crossing” (Ms. Hempel, previously an English teacher, is asked to cover history, and takes her students to Plimoth Plantation; meanwhile, her department chair wishes she’d hyphenate her name to make it more clear she’s half-Chinese); “Satellite” (after her father’s death, Beatrice’s mother and younger sister decide to turn the family home into a B&B)
A similar read: Olive Kitteridge, though that takes more of an interest in the town and its other residents than this – it’s ironic that this came out in the same year, and even got lots of positive and high-profile reviews based on the quotes in my paperback copy, yet I doubt it’s been remembered as Strout’s book has. Such is the power of the Pulitzer.
Aside: I’d read Bynum’s other story collection, Likes (2020), and didn’t care much for it, but I’m glad I tried her again.
(Secondhand purchase from 2nd & Charles on a recent USA trip)
Playing Sardines by Michèle Roberts (2001)
Basics: 18 stories, some of flash fiction length
Settings: France, England, Italy
Themes: reinvention, love affairs, obsession, food, literature
Stand-outs: The ones with funny twists/shock endings: “The Sheets” (French maid beds visiting English author), “The Cookery Lesson” (woman stalks celebrity chef), “Lists” (pillar of the community prepares for Christmas, starting months ahead), “Blathering Frights” (a Wuthering Heights spoof)
Similar authors: Julian Barnes (one story is indeed dedicated to him!), A.S. Byatt, John Lanchester, Helen Simpson
Aside: I own two unread novels by Roberts and need to prioritize them.
(Secondhand purchase from local charity shop)
Alas, I also had some DNFs for the month. I read one or two stories in each of these and didn’t take to the style and/or contents:
- The Quarry by Ben Halls
- One Good Story, That One by Thomas King
- Speak Gigantular by Irenosen Okojie
- What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi
September Releases by John Clegg & Tom Gauld (Lots More to Come!)
There aren’t enough hours in the day, or days left in this month, to write up all the terrific September releases I’ve read. The nonfiction fell into two broad thematic camps: books about books (Remainders of the Day by Shaun Bythell and Blurb Your Enthusiasm by Louise Willder still to come), or books about death (What Remains? by Rupert Callender, And Finally by Henry Marsh, and Sinkhole by Juliet Patterson still to come). However, I’ll start off with the two I happen to have written about so far, which are (the odd one out) poetry about science and watery travel, and bookish cartoons. Both:
Aliquot by John Clegg
This is the second Carcanet collection by the London bookseller. An aliquot is a sample, a part that represents the whole; a scientific counterpart to synecdoche. It’s a perfect word for what poetry can do: point at larger truths through the pinpricks of meaning found in the everyday. The title poem juxtaposes two moments where the poet muses on the part/whole dichotomy: watching a catering school student and teacher transferring peas from one container to another and spotting two cellists on a tube train. Drawn in by detail, we observe the inevitable movement from separation to togetherness.
A high point is “A Gene Sequence,” about an administrator working behind the scenes at a genomics conference on a Cambridge campus: each poem is named after a different amino acid and the lines (sometimes with the help of extreme enjambment) always begin with the arrangement of A, C, G, and T that encodes them. Here’s an example:
Much of the imagery is maritime, with the occasional reference to a desert (“Language as Sonora”) or settlement (“Dormer Windows” and “Quebec City”). The locations include a science campus and a storm-threatened hotel (“Hurricane Joaquin,” one of my favourites). A proverb is described as being as potent as a raw onion. Here’s a lynx you’ll never see – but she will see you. Like in a Caroline Bird collection, there’s many an absurd or imagined situation. The vocabulary is unusual, sometimes lofty: “their cursory repertoire of query.” Alliteration teems, as in “The High Lama Explains How Items Are Procured for Shangri-La.” Overall, a noteworthy and unique collection that I’d recommend.
A favourite, apropos of nothing stanza from “Lucan – The Waterline”:
There is a kind of crab known to devour human flesh.
There is a shelf five storeys undersea
Where small yachts pile up like bric-a-brac.
There is a town in Maryland called Alibi.
With thanks to Carcanet for the advanced e-copy for review.
Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld
You have probably seen Gauld’s cartoons in the Guardian, New Scientist or New Yorker. I’ve saved clippings of my favourite bookish ones over the years. They’re full of literary in-jokes and bibliophile problems, and divided about equally between a writer’s perspective and a reader’s: the struggle for inspiration and novelty on the one hand, and the battle with the TBR and the impulse to read what one feels one should versus what one enjoys on the other. He pokes holes in the pretensions on either side. Jane Austen features frequently.
Gauld’s figures are usually blocky stick figures without complete facial features (or books or ghosts), and he often makes use of multiple choice and choose your own adventure structures. Elsewhere he plays around with book titles and typical plots, or stages mild-mannered arguments between authors and their editors or publicists, who generally have quite different notions of quality and marketability.
Lest you dismiss cartoons as being out of touch, the effect of the pandemic on bookshops, libraries and literary events is mentioned a few times. Librarians are depicted as old-time gangsters peddling books while their buildings are closed: “Overdue books are dealt with swiftly and mercilessly” it reads under a panel of a fedora-wearing, revolver-toting figure warning, “The boss says if you ain’t finished ‘The Mirror and the Light’ by tomorrow, it’s curtains!”
Some more favourite lines:
- “1903: Henry James writes a sentence so long and circuitous that he becomes lost inside it for three days.”
- (says one pigeon to another) “I’ve become a psychogeographer. It’s mainly walking around disapproving of gentrification.”
- “A horrible feeling crept over Elaine that perhaps the problems with her novel couldn’t be overcome by changing the font.”
Two spreads that are too good not to share in full (I feel seen!):
And would you look at this attention to detail on the inside cover!
This is destined for many a book-lover’s Christmas stocking.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
Tempted to read one of these?
What other September releases can you recommend?
The Dark Is Rising Readalong #TDiRS22 & #Headliners2023 Online Event
Annabel’s readalong was the excuse I needed to try something by children’s fantasy author Susan Cooper – she’s one of those much-beloved English writers who happened to pass me by during my upbringing in the States. I’ve been aware of The Dark Is Rising (1973) for just a few years, learning about it from the Twitter readalong run by Robert Macfarlane. (My husband took part in that, having also missed out on Cooper in his childhood.)
Christmas is approaching, and with it a blizzard, but first comes Will Stanton’s birthday on Midwinter Day. A gathering of rooks and a farmer’s ominous pronouncement (“The Walker is abroad. And this night will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond imagining”) and gift of an iron talisman are signals that his eleventh birthday will be different than those that came before. While his large family gets on with their preparations for a traditional English Christmas, they have no idea Will is being ferried by a white horse to a magic hall, where he is let in on the secret of his membership in an ancient alliance meant to combat the forces of darkness. Merriman will be his guide as he gathers Signs and follows the Old Ones’ Ways.
I loved the evocation of a cosy holiday season, and its contrast with the cosmic conflict going on under the surface.
He was not the same Will Stanton that he had been a very few days before. Now and forever, he knew, he inhabited a different timescale from that of everyone he had ever known or loved…But he managed to turn his thoughts away from all these things, even from the two invading, threatening figures of the Dark. For this was Christmas, which had always been a time of magic, to him and to all the world. This was a brightness, a shining festival, and while its enchantment was on the world the charmed circle of his family and home would be protected against any invasion from outside.
The bustling family atmosphere is reminiscent of Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s books (e.g., Meet the Austins), as is the nebulous world-building (A Wrinkle in Time) – I found little in the way of concrete detail to latch onto, and like with Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, I felt out of my depth with the allusions to local legend. Good vs. evil battles are a mainstay of fantasy and children’s fiction, like in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books, or The Chronicles of Narnia I read over and over between the ages of about five and nine. Had I read this, too, as a child, I’m sure I would have loved it, but I guess I’m too literal-minded an adult these days; it’s hard for me to get swept up in the magic. See also Annabel’s review. (Public library)
Headliners 2023 Online Event
For a small fee (the proceeds went to The Arts Emergency Fund), I joined in this Zoom event hosted by Headline Books and Tandem Collective yesterday evening to learn about 10 of the publisher’s major 2023 releases.
Six of the authors were interviewed live by Sarah Shaffi; the other four had contributed pre-recorded video introductions. Here’s a super-brief rundown, in the order in which they appeared, with my notes on potential readalikes:
Dazzling by Chikodili Emelumadu (16 February)
Two girls at a restrictive Nigerian boarding school tap into their power as “Leopard People” to bring back their missing fathers and achieve more than anyone expects of them.
Sounds like: Akwaeke Emezi’s works
A Pebble in the Throat by Aasmah Mir (2 March)
A memoir contrasting her upbringing in Glasgow with her mother’s in Pakistan, this promises to be thought-provoking on the topics of racism and gender stereotypes.
Sounds like: Brown Baby or Brit(ish)
River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer (19 January)
In 1834 Barbados, a former slave leaves her sugarcane plantation to find her five children. Shearer is a mixed-race descendant of Windrush immigrants and wanted to focus not so much on slavery as on its aftermath and the effects of forced dispersion.
Sounds like: Sugar Money
Becoming Ted by Matt Cain (19 January)
In a Northern seaside town, Ted is dumped by his husband and decides to pursue his dream of becoming a drag queen.
Sounds like: Rachel Joyce’s works
Mother’s Day by Abigail Burdess (2 March)
As a baby, Anna was left by the side of the road*; now she’s found her birth mother, just as she learns she’s pregnant herself. Described as a darkly comic thriller à la Single White Female.
(*Burdess had forgotten that this really happened to her best childhood friend; her mum had to remind her of it!)
Sounds like: A Crooked Tree or When the Stars Go Dark
Me, Myself and Mini Me by Charlotte Crosby (2 March)
A reality TV star’s memoir of having a child after an ectopic pregnancy.
Sounds like: Something Katie Price would ‘write’. I had not heard of this celebrity author before and don’t mean to sound judgmental, but the impression made by her appearance (heavily altered by cosmetic surgery) was not favourable.
All the Little Bird Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (2 March)
In the Lake District in the 1980s, Sunday is an autistic mother raising a daughter, Dolly. The arrival of glamorous next-door neighbours upends their lives.
Sounds like: Claire Fuller’s works
The Year of the Cat by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (19 January)
A work of creative nonfiction about adopting a cat named Mackerel (who briefly appeared on the video) during lockdown, and deciding whether or not to have a child.
Sounds like: Motherhood, with a cat
The Book of Eve by Meg Clothier (30 March)
Set in Northern Italy in 1500, this is about a convent librarian who discovers a rich tradition of goddess worship that could upend the patriarchy.
Sounds like: Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s and Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novels
The Housekeepers by Alex Hay (6 July)
A historical heist novel set in 1905, this is about Mrs King, a Mayfair housekeeper who takes revenge for her dismissal by assembling a gang of disgruntled women to strip her former employer’s house right under her nose during a party.
Sounds like: Richard Osman’s works
If there was a theme to the evening, it was women’s power!
I’m most keen to read The Year of the Cat, but I’d happily try 3–4 of the novels if my library acquired them.
Which of these 2023 releases appeal to you most?
Love Your Library, September 2022
How embarrassing to find out from a fellow blogger’s post that two North American readers host a weekly meme for library borrowing. It’s called Library Loot (title envy!), and you should feel free to participate in that in addition to or instead of my monthly event.
Pretty soon it will be time to stock up on horror and short books for R.I.P. and Novellas in November. For now, I’m still working on some short story collections, and plan to skim a bunch of nonfiction I’m interested-ish in (but not enough to read every word) to make space on my card. I did have reserves on three Booker-shortlisted titles, but admitted to myself that I don’t actually want to read them and cancelled my holds. The one that I do still plan to read is Treacle Walker by Alan Garner, a perfect read for #NovNov22, if not before.
Since last month:
READ
- Brief Lives by Anita Brookner (for book club)
- Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
- The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris
- The Boat by Nam Le
- Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
- This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
- Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
- Summer by Edith Wharton
- The Young Accomplice by Benjamin Wood
CURRENTLY READING
- The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper
- State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (a reread)
- Leap Year by Helen Russell
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Plus various new releases on loan or on hold.
What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?
Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.
Short Stories in September, Part II: Andreades, Ferris, Fliss and Mulvey
It’s my aim to read as many short story collections as possible in September. After a first three earlier in the month, here are my next four.
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades (2022)
It was Susan’s review that first enticed me to read this linked story collection. I’m always intrigued by the use of the first-person plural, though it can have downsides – in trying to be inclusive of the breadth of experiences of the “us,” the content can edge toward generic. I worried things were going that way in the early chapters about girlhood “in the dregs of Queens, New York,” but the more I read the more I admired Andreades’s debut. Each chapter is a fantastic thematic fragment adding up to a glistening mosaic of what it means to be a woman of colour in the USA. Desires and ambitions shift as they move from childhood to adolescence to college years to young adulthood, but some things stay the same: their parents’ high expectations, the pull of various cultures, and near-daily microaggressions.
Our families’ legacies, the histories we’ve inherited: grandparents who never learned to read, U.S.-backed dictatorships, bombs, wars, refugee camps, naval bases, canals, gold, diamonds, oil, missionaries, brain drain, the American Dream.
No matter their zip code or tax bracket, listen as these white people deem us and our families the good immigrants, the hard-working ones—not like the lazy people in this country who are a burden on the system.
The fulcrum is the sudden death of one of their number, Trish, which has repercussions through the second half of the book. It raises questions of mental health and whether friendships will last even when they move beyond Queens.
I especially loved Part Five, about a trip back to the motherland that leaves the brown girls disoriented from simultaneous sensations of connection, privilege and foreignness. “The colonized, the colonizer. Where do we fall?” My individual favourite chapters were “Duty,” about giving up on parentally prescribed medical studies to pursue a passion for art; “Patriotic,” about deciding whether or not to have children; and “Our Not-Reflections,” about age allowing them to understand what their mothers went through when they were new to the country. One critique: I would have omitted the final Part Eight, which is about Covid and death in general; the book didn’t need an update to feel timely. It’s a shame this wasn’t at least longlisted for the Women’s Prize this past year. (New purchase with a book token)
The Dinner Party by Joshua Ferris (2017)
I’ve read a couple of Ferris’s novels but this collection had passed me by. “More Abandon (Or Whatever Happened to Joe Pope?)” is set in the same office building as Then We Came to the End. Most of the entries take place in New York City or Chicago, with “Life in the Heart of the Dead” standing out for its Prague setting. The title story, which opens the book, sets the tone: bristly, gloomy, urbane, a little bit absurd. A couple are expecting their friends to arrive for dinner any moment, but the evening wears away and they never turn up. The husband decides to go over there and give them a piece of his mind, only to find that they’re hosting their own party. The betrayal only draws attention to the underlying unrest in the original couple’s marriage. “Why do I have this life?” the wife asks towards the close.
Marital discontent and/or infidelity is a recurring feature, showing up in “A Night Out” and “The Breeze,” which presents the different ways a couple’s evening might have gone. I liked this line about the difficulty of overcoming incompatibilities: “Why could she not be more like him and why could he not be more like her?” It seems from my short story reading that there is always one story I would give a different title. Here I would rename “The Valetudinarian” (about a Florida retiree who ends up in a comical health crisis) “They don’t give you a manual” after his repeated catchphrase.
A few of the 11 stories weren’t so memorable, but the collection ends with a bang. “A Fair Price” appears to have a typically feeble male protagonist, frustrated that the man he’s hired to help move his belongings out of a storage unit is so taciturn, but the innocuous setup hides a horrific potential. (Public library)
The Predatory Animal Ball by Jennifer Fliss (2021)
These 40 flash fiction stories try on a dizzying array of genres and situations. They vary in length from a paragraph (e.g., “Pigeons”) to 5–8 pages, and range from historical to dystopian. A couple of stories are in the second person (“Dandelions” was a standout) and a few in the first-person plural. Some have unusual POV characters. “A Greater Folly Is Hard to Imagine,” whose name comes from a William Morris letter, seems like a riff on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but with the very wall décor to blame. “Degrees” and “The Thick Green Ribbon” are terrifying/amazing for how quickly things go from fine to apocalyptically bad.
Grief and especially pregnancy loss are repeated elements. In “Yolk,” a woman finds a chicken embryo inside a cracked egg and it brings back memories of her recent stillbirth. In “All Your Household Needs,” a bereaved voice-over artist sympathizes with a child who picks up a stuffed Lucky the Dog whose speech she recorded. In “What Goes with Us,” an unreturned library book is a treasured reminder of a dead partner; “May His Memory Be a Blessing” lists many other such mementoes. Even the title story, whose main character is a mouse, opens with the loss of a loved one and posits compassion from an unexpected source.
It’s hard to get a sense of an author’s overall style from such disparate material, so I was pleased to learn that Fliss is working on her first novel, which I’ll be keen to read.
With thanks to publicist Lori Hettler for the e-copy for review.
Hearts & Bones: Love Songs for Late Youth by Niamh Mulvey (2022)
Having read these 10 stories over the course of a few months, I now struggle to remember what many of them were about. If there’s an overarching theme, it’s (young) women’s relationships. “My First Marina,” about a teenager discovering her sexual power and the potential danger of peer pressure in a friendship, is similar to the title story of Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz. In “Mother’s Day,” a woman hopes that a pregnancy will prompt a reconciliation between her and her estranged mother. In “Childcare,” a girl and her grandmother join forces against the mum/daughter, a would-be actress. “Currency” is in the second person, with the rest fairly equally split between first and third person. “The Doll” is an odd one about a ventriloquist’s dummy and repeats events from three perspectives.
I had two favourites: “Feathers” and “Good for You, Cecilia.” In the former, a woman rethinks her relationship with her boyfriend when the 2010 volcanic eruption restricts her to his French flat and she gets chatting with his cleaner. In the latter, a mother and daughter go to watch their daughter/sister’s dance recital in Dublin and witness the fall of a statue of St. Cecilia in a church they stop into. These are all matter-of-fact, somewhat detached stories set in European cities over the last decade or so. None of the protagonists had me particularly emotionally engaged with their plights. Overall, this felt reminiscent of Wendy Erskine’s work (I’ve reviewed Dance Move), but not as original or powerful.
With thanks to Picador for the proof copy for review.
Currently reading: Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff, Playing Sardines by Michèle Roberts
Up next: The High Places by Fiona McFarlane, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 