The Best Books from the First Half of 2021
Hard to believe we’ve already crossed the midpoint of the year. My top 20 releases of 2021 thus far, in alphabetical order within genre (fiction is dominating this year!), are below. I link to those I’ve already reviewed in full here or on Goodreads:
Fiction
Under the Blue by Oana Aristide: Fans of Station Eleven, this one’s for you: the best dystopian novel I’ve read since Mandel’s. Aristide started writing in 2017, and unknowingly predicted a much worse pandemic than Covid-19. In July 2020, Harry and sisters Ash and Jessie are among mere thousands of survivors worldwide. Their plan is to flee England for Uganda, out of range of Europe’s at-risk nuclear reactors. An epic road trip ensues. A propulsive cautionary tale that also reminded me of work by Louisa Hall and Maja Lunde.
The Push by Ashley Audrain: Blythe Connor, living alone with her memories, ponders what went wrong with her seemingly perfect family: a handsome architect husband, Fox, and their daughter Violet and baby son Sam. How much of what happened was because of Violet’s nature, and how much was Blythe’s fault for failing to be the mother the girl needed? The fact that her experience with Sam was completely different makes her feel ambivalent about motherhood. A cracking psychological thriller with an unreliable narrator.
A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies: Davies’ minimalist approach – short sections skating over the months and years, wryly pulling out representative moment – crystallizes fatherhood, illuminating its daily heartaches and joys. The tone is just right in this novella, showing both sides of parenthood and voicing things you aren’t allowed to think, or at least not to admit to, starting with abortion, which would-be fathers aren’t expected to have strong feelings about. I loved the rumination on the role that chance plays in a life.
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan: Extinction, personal and global, is at the heart of this timely and enchanting story. It starts off as a family drama. Francie, the 86-year-old matriarch, is in a Tasmanian hospital after a brain bleed. Her three middle-aged children can’t bear to let her go. In an Australia blighted by bushfires, species loss mirrors Francie’s physical and mental crumbling. Smartphone addiction threatens meaningful connection. And then characters start to literally disappear, part by part…
Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden: Grief Is the Thing with Feathers meets Girl, Woman, Other would be my marketing shorthand for this one. Poet Salena Godden’s debut novel is a fresh and fizzing work, passionate about exposing injustice but also about celebrating simple joys, and in the end it’s wholly life-affirming despite a narrative stuffed full of deaths real and imagined. The novel balances the cosmic and the personal through Wolf’s family story. Unusual, musical, and a real pleasure to read.
Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny: This tickled my funny bone. A cross between Kitchens of the Great Midwest and Olive Kitteridge, it’s built of five extended episodes, crossing nearly two decades in the lives of Jane and Duncan and lovingly portraying the hangers-on who compose their unusual family constellation in Boyne City, Michigan. All the characters are incorrigible but wonderful. Bad things happen, but there’s a core of love as Heiny explores marriage and parenting. A good-natured book that feels wise and bittersweet.
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood: This starts as a flippant skewering of modern life. A woman who became a social media star by tweeting quips like “Can a dog be twins?” reflects on life on “the portal” and under “the dictator.” Midway through the book, she gets a wake-up call when her mother summons her back to the Midwest for a family emergency. It’s the about-face that makes this novel, forcing readers to question the value of a digital existence based on glib pretence. Funny, but with an ache behind it.
In by Will McPhail: Alternately laugh-out-loud funny and gentle. This debut graphic novel is a spot-on picture of modern life in a generic city. Nick never knows the right thing to say. The bachelor artist’s well-intentioned thoughts remain unvoiced; all he can manage is small talk. That starts to change when he meets Wren, a Black doctor who sees past his pretence. If only he can find the magic words that elicit honesty, he might make real connections with other human beings. A good old-fashioned story, with a wide emotional range.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters: A sparkling, sexy comedy with a tender heart beneath the zingers. Peters has set herself up as the Jane Austen of the trans community, tracing the ins and outs of relationships with verve and nuance. For me this was a valuable book simply for normalizing trans sexuality. The themes are universal, after all: figuring out who you are and what the shape of your life will be. I admire when authors don’t pander to readers by making things easy for those who are unfamiliar with a culture. Great lines abound.
Brood by Jackie Polzin: Polzin’s debut is a quietly touching story of a woman in the Midwest raising chickens and coming to terms with the shape of her life. The unnamed narrator is Everywoman and no one at the same time. At one point she reveals, with no fanfare, that she miscarried four months into pregnancy in the bathroom of one of the houses she cleans. There is a bittersweet tone to this short work. It’s a low-key, genuine portrait of life in the in-between stages and how it can be affected by fate or by other people’s decisions.
Nonfiction
The Circling Sky by Neil Ansell: Hoping to reclaim an ancestral connection, Ansell visited the New Forest some 30 times between January 2019 and January 2020, observing the unfolding seasons and the many uncommon and endemic species its miles house. He weaves together his personal story, the shocking history of forced Gypsy relocation into forest compounds starting in the 1920s, and the unfairness of land ownership in Britain. The New Forest is a model of both wildlife-friendly land management and freedom of human access.
The Inevitable by Katie Engelhart: Engelhart spends time with doctors and patients who are caught up in the assisted dying argument, chiefly in Western Europe and the United States. Each case is given its own long chapter, like an extended magazine profile. The stories are wrenching, but compassionately told. The author explores the nuances of each situation, crafting expert portraits of suffering people and the medical professionals who seek to help them, and adding much in the way of valuable context. A voice of reason and empathy.
The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster: A Renaissance man as well versed in law and theology as he is in natural history, Foster is obsessed with swifts and ashamed of his own species: for looking down at their feet when they could be watching the skies; for the “pathological tidiness” that leaves birds and other creatures no place to live. He delivers heaps of information on the birds but refuses to stick to a just-the-facts approach. The book quotes frequently from poetry and the prose is full of sharp turns of phrase and whimsy.
Intensive Care by Gavin Francis: Francis, an Edinburgh physician, reflects on “the most intense months I have known in my twenty-year career.” He journeys back through 2020, from the January day when he received a bulletin about a “novel Wuhan coronavirus” to November, when he learned of promising vaccine trials but also a rumored third wave and winter lockdown. An absorbing first-hand account of a medical crisis, it compassionately bridges the gap between experts and laymen. The best Covid chronicle so far.
A Still Life by Josie George: Over a year of lockdowns, many of us became accustomed to spending most of the time at home. But for Josie George, social isolation is nothing new. Chronic illness long ago reduced her territory to her home and garden. The magic of A Still Life is in how she finds joy and purpose despite extreme limitations. Opening on New Year’s Day and travelling from one winter to the next, the book is a window onto George’s quiet existence as well as the turning of the seasons. (Reviewed for TLS.)
Dusk, Night, Dawn by Anne Lamott: Lamott’s best new essays in nearly a decade. The central theme is how to have hope in God and in other people even when the news – Trump, Covid, and climate breakdown – only heralds the worst. One key thing that has changed for her is getting married for the first time, in her mid-sixties, to a Buddhist. In thinking of marriage, she writes about friendship, constancy, and forgiveness, none of which comes easy. Opportunities for maintaining quiet faith in spite of the circumstances arise all the time.
A Braided Heart by Brenda Miller: Miller, a professor of creative writing, delivers a master class on the composition and appreciation of autobiographical essays. In 18 concise pieces, she tracks her development as a writer and discusses the “lyric essay”—a form as old as Seneca that prioritizes imagery over narrative. These innovative and introspective essays, ideal for fans of Anne Fadiman, showcase the interplay of structure and content. (Coming out on July 13th from the University of Michigan Press. My first review for Shelf Awareness.)
Sanctuary by Emily Rapp Black: A continuation of The Still Point of the Turning World, about the author’s son Ronan, who died of Tay-Sachs disease at age three. In the months surrounding his death, she split from her husband and raced into another relationship that led to her daughter, Charlie. Rapp Black questions the sorts of words she got branded with: “brave,” “resilient.” Sanctuary is full of allusions and flashbacks, threading life’s disparate parts into a chaotic tapestry. It’s measured and wrought, taming fire into light and warmth.
Poetry
Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar: An Iranian American poet imparts the experience of being torn between cultures and languages, as well as between religion and doubt, in this gorgeous collection of confessional verse. Food, plants, animals, and the body supply the book’s imagery. Wordplay and startling juxtapositions lend lightness to a wistful, intimate collection that seeks belonging and belief. (Coming out on August 3rd from Graywolf Press. Reviewed for Shelf Awareness.)
Eat or We Both Starve by Victoria Kennefick: In this audacious debut collection, the body is presented as a battleground: for the brain cancer that takes the poet’s father; for disordered eating that entwines with mummy issues; for the restructuring of pregnancy. Families break apart and fuse into new formations. Cannibalism and famine metaphors dredge up emotional states and religious doctrines. There’s a pleasingly morbid cast to the book, but it also has its lighter moments. Rich with imagery and alliteration, this is just my kind of poetry.
What are some of the best books you’ve read so far this year?
What 2021 releases do I need to catch up on right away?
Three Junes by Julia Glass (2002)
I had the “wrong” introduction to Julia Glass’s work in that I started with The Whole World Over (2006) in January 2019 instead of the novel to which it is a rough sequel: her National Book Award-winning debut, Three Junes. This wasn’t really a problem, though. The main link between the two is the character Fenno, a Scottish transplant to New York City who runs a bookstore. He narrates the central and longest section of Three Junes, while the shorter bookend chapters are in the third person. All three pieces braid past and present together such that the novel’s 10-year span feels even more expansive.
“Collies,” set in 1989, opens the book on Greece, where Paul McLeod has headed for a package holiday after the death from cancer of his wife, Maureen, who was an obsessive dog trainer. In “Upright,” which moves six years into the future, Paul’s son Fenno and his younger twin brothers, David and Dennis, are at the family home in Dumfries to divvy up the estate. Fenno’s mind drifts back through his time in New York City and particularly the lovers and friends of his life, some of whom died at the height of the AIDS crisis. In the present day, he faces a dilemma when his brother and sister-in-law ask him an intimate favor.
“Boys,” dated 1999, closes the book and centers on Fern, a young widow who is visiting a friend’s beach home in Long Island and contemplating how she will tell her new boyfriend (who happens to be her landlord’s son) that she is five months pregnant. This final chapter ropes in a few characters from previous sections – but, in a frustrating yet delicious instance of dramatic irony, the two main figures don’t realize there’s a couple of connections between them.
Many of the elements that I loved in The Whole World Over were present here, too: a New York City bookstore setting, the comfort of animals (David is a vet), gourmet meals (Dennis is a chef), and a matter-of-fact but tender consideration of loss. A minor character declares, “people overestimate the power of the past,” but this tripartite narrative puts the lie to that statement as the past continues to seep into everyday life. And the last line goes on my list of favourites encountered so far this year: “Here we are—despite the delays, the confusion, and the shadows en route—at last, or for the moment, where we always intended to be.”
I didn’t particularly warm to the first chapter and worried that this boded ill for the whole book, but as soon as Fenno’s voice took over at about page 60 I sank into the inviting prose. After my first taste of her work, I likened Glass to Louise Miller and Carolyn Parkhurst; now I’d add in Elizabeths Berg and Strout. I’ll read the rest of her books for sure. I have a paperback copy of I See You Everywhere and her latest, A House among the Trees, is on my Kindle.
Source: Secondhand purchase from Wonder Book and Video outdoor clearance area
My rating: 
Classic of the Month & 20 Books of Summer #5: A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy (1873)
While going through my boxes stored in my sister’s basement, I came across an antiquarian copy of this lesser-known Hardy novel. I used to place a lot more value on books’ age and rarity, whereas now I tend to just acquire readable paperback copies. I also used to get on much better with Victorian novels – I completed an MA in Victorian Literature, after all – but these days I generally find them tedious. Two years ago, I DNFed Hardy’s The Well-Beloved, and I ended up mostly skimming A Pair of Blue Eyes after the first 100 pages. In any case, it fit into my 20 Books of Summer colour theme. It’s sad for me that I’ve lost my love for my academic speciality, but life is long and I may well go back to Victorian literature someday.
I found similarities to Far from the Madding Crowd, my favourite Hardy novel, as well as to Hardy’s own life. As in FFTMC, the focus is on a vain young woman with three suitors. Elfride Swancourt is best known for her eyes, rapturously described as “blue as autumn distance—blue as the blue we see between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny September morning. A misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface, and was looked into rather than at.” Her vicar father, suffering from gout and sounding much older than his actual age (40 was a different prospect in that time!), warns her that architects will soon be arriving from London to plan restoration work on the church tower.
The young architectural assistant who arrives at the Swancourts’ coastal parish in “Lower Wessex” (North Devon?) is Stephen Smith, a clear Hardy stand-in, desperate to hide his humble background as he seeks to establish himself in his profession. Stephen emulates his friend Henry Knight, a dilettante essayist and book reviewer. Book learning has given Stephen passable knowledge of everything from Latin to chess, but he doesn’t know how to do practical things like ride a horse. Elfride and Stephen, predictably, fall in love, and she is determined to go ahead with an engagement even when she learns that his parents are a mason and a milkmaid, but her father refuses to grant permission. It’s intriguing that this poor clergyman fancies himself of the class of the Luxellians, local nobility, than of the Smiths.
{SPOILERS FOLLOW}
Elfride’s previous love died, and his pauper mother, Mrs Jethway, blames her still for toying with her boy’s affections. When Stephen takes a position in India and Mr Swancourt remarries and moves the family to London, Elfride’s eye wanders. Time for love interest #3. The family runs into Knight, who is a distant cousin of Mrs Swancourt. There’s another, juicier, connection: Elfride is a would-be author (she writes her father’s sermons for him, putting passages in brackets with the instruction “Leave this out if the farmers are falling asleep”) and publishes a medieval romance under a male pseudonym. A negative write-up of her book needles her. “What a plague that reviewer is to me!” And who is it but Knight?
They begin a romance despite this inauspicious coincidence and his flirty/haughty refusal to admire her fine eyes – “I prefer hazel,” he says. Some of the novel’s most memorable scenes, famous even beyond its immediate context, come from their courtship. Knight saves her from falling off the church tower, while she tears her dress into linen strips and ties them into a rope to rescue him from a sea cliff (scandalous!). Somewhere I’d read an in-depth account of this scene: as Knight dangles from the rock face, he spots a trilobite, which, in its very ancientness, mocks the precariousness of his brief human life. Lovingly created and personally watched over by a supreme being? Pshaw. Hardy’s was a godless vision, and I’ve always been interested in that Victorian transition from devoutness to atheism.
The novel’s span is too long, requiring a lot of jumps in time. I did appreciate that Mrs Jethway becomes the instrument of downfall, writing a warning letter to Knight about Elfride’s mistreatment of her son and another former fiancé. Knight breaks things off and it’s not until 15 months later, after he and Stephen bump into each other in London and Knight realizes that Stephen was her other suitor, that they travel back to Wessex to duke it out over the girl. When they arrive, though, it’s too late: Elfride had married but then fallen ill and died; her funeral is to take place the very next day. As the book closes at the vault, it’s her widower, Lord Luxellian, who has the right to mourn and not either of her previous loves.
{END OF SPOILERS}
As always with Hardy, I enjoyed the interplay of coincidence and fate. There were a few elements of this novel that I particularly liked: the coastal setting, the characters’ lines of work (including a potential profession for Elfride, though Knight told her in future she should stick to domestic scenes in her writing!) and the role played by a book review, but overall, this was not a story that is likely to stick with me. I did wonder to what extent it inspired Lars Mytting’s The Bell in the Lake, about a country girl who falls in love with the man who comes to oversee construction at the local church.
Source: Secondhand purchase, most likely from Wonder Book and Video in the early 2000s
My rating: 
Library Checkout, June 2021
I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things after my trip to the USA plus 10 days in quarantine. I sent my husband to pick up my latest pile of library reservations, and tomorrow I’ll get the chance to go in for one volunteering session before we’re off to Northumberland for 10 days (our major vacation of the year). It looks like Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, at over 600 pages, will form the bulk of my holiday reading.
I would be delighted to have other bloggers – not just book bloggers – join in with this meme. Feel free to use the image above and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part in Library Checkout (on the last Monday of each month), or tag me on Twitter and Instagram: @bookishbeck / #TheLibraryCheckout & #LoveYourLibraries.
READ
- Under the Blue by Oana Aristide
- Blue Dog by Louis de Bernières
- Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny
SKIMMED
- How to Be Sad: Everything I’ve Learned about Getting Happier, by Being Sad, Better by Helen Russell
CURRENTLY READING
- Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story by Paul Monette [set aside temporarily]
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- This Happy by Niamh Campbell
- Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare
- Lakewood by Megan Giddings
- The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley
- A More Perfect Union by Tammye Huf
- The Rome Plague Diaries: Lockdown Life in the Eternal City by Matthew Kneale
- Elegy for a River: Whiskers, Claws and Conservation’s Last, Wild Hope by Tom Moorhouse
- Joe Biden: American Dreamer by Evan Osnos
- The Dig by John Preston
- Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee
- Broke Vegan: Over 100 Plant-Based Recipes that Don’t Cost the Earth by Saskia Sidey [to skim only]
Plus a cheeky new selection from the university library – graphic novels, poetry, and a bit of fiction. No photo as of yet, but this is what my husband is bringing back for me later today.
- The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx by Tara Bergin
- Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler
- James Miranda Barry by Patricia Duncker
- The Kite Runner: Graphic Novel by Khaled Hosseini
- The Summer before the Dark by Doris Lessing
- Jilted City by Patrick McGuinness
- The State of the Prisons by Sinéad Morrissey
- Frankenstein: The Graphic Novel by Mary Shelley
- Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel by Anya Ulinich
ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP
- Misplaced Persons by Susan Beale
- Second Place by Rachel Cusk
- The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris
- The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis [to skim only]
- Nothing but Blue Sky by Kathleen MacMahon
- Demystifying the Female Brain: A Neuroscientist Explores Health, Hormones and Happiness by Sarah McKay [to skim only]
- Heartstoppers, Volume 1 by Alice Oseman
- Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
- Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham
- Still Life by Sarah Winman
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- Consumed: A Sister’s Story by Arifa Akbar
- Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews
- Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories by A.S. Byatt
- Darwin’s Dragons by Lindsay Galvin
- When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain
- His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie
- To the Island of Tides: A Journey to Lindisfarne by Alistair Moffat
- The Sea Is Not Made of Water: Life between the Tides by Adam Nicolson
- Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
- Everyone Is Still Alive by Cathy Rentzenbrink
- My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
- Earthed: A Memoir by Rebecca Schiller
- I Belong Here: A Journey along the Backbone of Britain by Anita Sethi
- Forecast: A Diary of the Lost Seasons by Joe Shute
- Plague: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Slack
- August Folly by Angela Thirkell
- A Walk from the Wild Edge by Jake Tyler
- August by Callan Wink
- The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers – The first few pages didn’t draw me in, and I’ve seen very polarized responses.
- Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth Macneal – I read the first 40-some pages and skimmed up to p. 90. Victoriana by numbers. None of the characters leapt out at me. Such a disappointment after how much I loved The Doll Factory!
What appeals from my stacks?
Three June Releases: Allen-Paisant, Cowen and Mosse
Two poetry offerings and a short memoir this month. A similar strategy is at work in both verse volumes: Jason Allen-Paisant contrasts Jamaica and England via the medium of trees, and Rob Cowen comments on current events through the prism of the natural world. In Kate Mosse’s first nonfiction book, she reflects on bereavement and caregiving.
Thinking with Trees by Jason Allen-Paisant
Allen-Paisant, from Jamaica and now based in Leeds, describes walking in the forest as an act of “reclamation.” For people of colour whose ancestors were perhaps sent on forced marches, hiking may seem strange, purposeless (the subject of “Black Walking”). Back in Jamaica, the forest was a place of utility rather than recreation:
In Porus life was un-
pastoral
The woodland was there
not for living in going for walks
or thinking
Trees were answers to our needs
not objects of desire
woodfire
But “I give myself permission / to go outside,” he writes, to notice the turning of the seasons, to commune with trees and birds, even if “there is nobody else like me / around here”. Explicitly calling into question Wordsworth’s model of privileged wandering, he injects a hint of threat into his interactions with nature. Most often this is symbolized by the presence of dogs. Even the most idyllic of scenes harbours the possibility of danger.
beware of spring
believe you are
a sprout of grass
and love all you see
but come out of the woods
before the white boys
with pitbulls
come
The poet cites George Floyd and Christian Cooper, the Central Park birder a white woman called the police on, as proof that being Black outdoors is inherently risky. There’s no denying this is an important topic, but I found the poems repetitive, especially the references to dogs. These felt like overkill. While there is some interesting enjambment, as in the first extended quote above, as well as internal and half-rhymes, I tend to prefer more formal poetry that uses more sonic techniques and punctuation. Still, I would be likely to direct fans of Kei Miller’s work to this collection.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.
The Heeding by Rob Cowen
This poetry and art collaboration arose out of a “pact to pay attention” during a year of lockdown in the UK and record observations of nature, current events, and everyday life. Cowen is drawn to the moors near his home in Yorkshire, but also yearns to spend time with his friends again. He watches hawks and blue tits, notices the insects that fill his garden, and celebrates the way that allotment gardening brings together all sorts of people.
The emotional scope of the poems is broad: the author fondly remembers his brick-making ancestors and his honeymoon; he sombrely imagines the last moments of an old man dying in a hospital; he expresses guilt over accidentally dismembering an ant, yet divulges that he then destroyed the ants’ nest deliberately. There are even a couple of cheeky, carnal poems, one about a couple of teenagers he caught copulating in the street and one, “The Hottest Day of the Year,” about a longing for touch. “Matter,” in ABAB stanzas, is on the theme of racial justice by way of the Black Lives Matter movement.
My two favourites were “Sunday School,” about the rules for life he’s lived by since leaving religion behind, and “The End of This (Drinking Poem),” which serves as a good-riddance farewell to 2020: “Let me shake off / this year the way the otter / slips out of fast, rising water / and makes the holt just in time … / Let me rid my days of caution and fear, / these protocols and tiers / and Zoom funerals for people I love / and will never see again.” The book is worth the price of admission for the latter alone, and Nick Hayes’s black-and-white woodcut-style engravings are a plus.
However, in general I felt that the balance of current events and nature was off, especially compared to books like The Consolation of Nature, and ultimately I was not convinced that this needed to be in verse at all. “Starling,” especially, feels like a straight knockoff of Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Words (“We forget that you once shimmered through frozen air, ripple bird. / Shape-shifter, dusk-dancer. Murmurer, sky-writer”). Judging from Cowen’s Common Ground, this would have been more successful as a book of short prose diary entries with a few poems dotted through.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the proof copy for review.
An Extra Pair of Hands: A Story of Caring, Ageing and Everyday Acts of Love by Kate Mosse
Mosse’s parents and mother-in-law all moved in to live with her and her husband in their Chichester home when they reached old age. Her father had Parkinson’s and died in 2011, her mother survived him by a few years, and Granny Rosie is still going (reasonably) strong at the age of 90. This is a compact and relatable account of a daughter’s experiences of caregiving and grief, especially with the recent added complications of a pandemic.
What came through particularly clearly for me was the older generation’s determination to not be a burden: living through the Second World War gave them a sense of perspective, such that they mostly did not complain about their physical ailments and did not expect heroic measures to be made to help them. (Her father knew his condition was “becoming too much” to deal with, and Granny Rosie would sometimes say, “I’ve had enough of me.”) In her father’s case, this was because he held out hope of an afterlife. Although Mosse does not share his religious beliefs, she is glad that he had them as a comfort.
The author recognizes the ways in which she has been lucky: as a full-time writer, she works from home and has the time and energy to devote to caring for elderly parents, whereas for many – generally middle-aged women, who may still have children at home – it is a huge struggle to balance caregiving with the rest of life. What is more, money is no issue for her. Repeating some of the statistics from Madeleine Bunting’s Labours of Love, she acknowledges that the situation is much more challenging for the average person.
I can see how this could serve as a great introduction for someone who hasn’t previously read much about bereavement, caregiving or old age, and I imagine it will especially appeal to existing fans of Mosse’s writing, whereas I was new to her work. I’ve read so much around these topics, including most of the works included in the bibliography, that the book did not offer me anything new, though it was a perfectly pleasant read.
Readalikes I have reviewed:
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Be With by Mike Barnes
All Things Consoled by Elizabeth Hay
The Fragments of My Father by Sam Mills
With thanks to Profile Books/Wellcome Collection for the free copy for review.
What recent releases can you recommend?
Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler (1991)
This year I’ve been joining in Liz’s Anne Tyler readalong for the novels I own and hadn’t read yet – I have one each lined up for the next three months as well. Saint Maybe was Tyler’s twelfth novel and forms part of what I consider to be her golden mid-period. It’s most like Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, my absolute favourite, in that both might be classed as linked short story collections: each chapter is a standalone narrative with knockout first and last lines; together they build a careful picture of a dysfunctional family over the years.
As the novel opens in the 1960s, Ian Bedloe is a lazy teenager contemplating college. When his older brother Danny marries Lucy, mother to Agatha and Thomas, Ian can’t help but comment on the timing of his sister-in-law’s third pregnancy. Danny didn’t realize he’s not the father of this new baby, Daphne, and the newfound knowledge pushes him over the edge. Lucy also fails to cope, and Ian is consumed with guilt at how he inadvertently caused the collapse of their family. In an effort to atone, he joins the puritanical Church of the Second Chance and drops out of college to help his parents raise the three children. Others have to convince him that life is not just about penance and that he deserves happiness, too.
This is one of those books where every character, no matter how minor, shines. I particularly loved Reverend Emmett, whose well-meaning doctrines have been taken further than he intended; Rita, whom the family hires to declutter the house (she’s reminiscent of the dog trainer in The Accidental Tourist); and Daphne, who turns into a rebellious teen for whom Ian will always have a soft spot. Ian’s parents could have faded into the background, but the book probes their grief and their feelings of purposelessness in retirement. My only slight qualm was about how Tyler describes the foreigners who live nearby: Middle Eastern graduate students at Johns Hopkins, they’re there simply to provide comic relief with their harebrained home maintenance schemes; the depiction is good-natured, yet seems dated.
In a few other Tyler novels, I’ve been put off by what can seem like flippancy or inconsequentiality. The works of hers that I love best emphasize both the humour and the sadness: the absurdity and tragedy of these ordinary suburban lives. Here, I especially noted the double-edged portrait of the nature of childcare: Ian “wondered how people endured children on a long-term basis—the monotony and irritation and confinement of them,” yet “They were all that gave his life color, and energy, and …well, life.” I also kept finding personal resonances – for instance, the whole theme of the short homily the pastor delivered at my mother’s wedding ceremony was second chances, my stepfather has a failing old dog like the Bedloes’ Beastie, and the account of Church summer camp rang all too true.
At the sentence level as well as the plot level, this is a very strong showing from Tyler, and a close second to Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant for me. I reckon anyone will be able to find themselves and their family in this story of the life chosen versus the life fallen into, and the difficult necessity of moving past regrets in the search for meaning. (Source: Charity shop) See also Liz’s review.
Favourite lines:
Bee (Ian’s mother): “We’ve had such extraordinary troubles, and somehow they’ve turned us ordinary. That’s what’s so hard to figure. We’re not a special family anymore. … We’ve turned uncertain. We’ve turned into worriers.”
“‘Mess up, I say!’ Daphne crowed. ‘Fall flat on your face! Make every mistake you can think of! Use all the life you’ve got.’”
“When is something philosophical acceptance and when is it dumb passivity? When is something a moral decision and when is it scar tissue?”
My rating: 
The 14 Tyler novels I’ve read, in order of preference (greatest to least), are:
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Saint Maybe
Ladder of Years
The Accidental Tourist
Earthly Possessions
Breathing Lessons
Digging to America
Vinegar Girl
Back When We Were Grown-ups
Clock Dance
A Blue Spool of Thread
The Beginner’s Goodbye
Redhead by the Side of the Road
The Clock Winder
Next up for me will be A Patchwork Planet in late July.
USA Trip and Book Acquisitions
On Wednesday I got back from my first trip to the USA in two years. It was for the special occasion of my mother getting remarried, so was well worth the extra complications of pandemic travelling. While quarantining at my sister’s house for a week, I observed the chaos of a household with FIVE members in virtual schooling. When it all got too noisy for me, I’d retreat upstairs to read with Pierre the cat.
I also spent some time, as always, going through my boxes of mementoes and books in her basement. I later sold back several boxes’ worth of books that I’d weeded out, but of course I acquired more as well. Below are a super-belated Christmas 2019 gift, my Wonder Book haul, hand-me-downs from my stepfather, two Dollar Tree purchases, and my 2nd & Charles haul (mostly from the clearance shelves). Subtracting buyback credit, my total spend was $3.76!
Almost purchased, just for the title.
The wedding itself (and meeting my new stepfather and his daughters) went beautifully. We had hot but not unbearable weather, and bright sun for picture-taking. The below passage from Carol Shields’s The Box Garden, which I’d noted last year while buddy reading it with Buried in Print, felt particularly apt for the occasion.
I also acquired two new U.S. releases to review for BookBrowse.
I squeezed most of the new acquisitions, plus another 37 books from storage, into my suitcases. I focused on bringing back books I’m eyeing up for certain challenges, appealing memoirs, and books I want to reread (the far left stack below).
As for those mementoes, I made some amusing finds, including my childhood blankie; the “medical kit” I made at about age nine, inspired by a visit to the National Museum of Health and Medicine and my love for the television show Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman; and a few early writing attempts. “A Day in the Life of a Gangster” is a story I wrote at probably age seven. I love the old typewriter font, but my “About the Author” note was the funniest bit – I am so not a mystery reader anymore, and I doubt I’d been on a single proper hike at that point in my life. Newsboys: Take Me to Your Concert was my co-written entry for the Write-a-Book Contest in eighth grade, and What Is a Llama? I wrote and illustrated with my own photographs at age 14 as a county 4H project. I even won a ribbon and a cash prize in the random amount of $4.34.
Back in self-isolation here in the UK, I had seven review copies waiting for me, and another five have arrived in the last couple of days, so the cycle never ends: acquire books, read books, write about books, part with or figure out how to store and/or display books…
On with the summer reading!
Three on a Theme for Father’s Day: Auster, Knausgaard, Lewis
In advance of Father’s Day, I picked out a few short memoirs from my shelves that explore the bonds between fathers and their children.
The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster (1982)
This was the nonfiction work of Auster’s I was most keen to read, and I thoroughly enjoyed its first part, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” which includes a depiction of his late father, a discussion of his relationship with his son, and a brief investigation into his grandmother’s murder of his grandfather, which I’d first learned about from Winter Journal. Auster finds himself unable to cry and has to deal with all his father’s possessions. “There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man … everything from a set of barbels to a broken toaster.” A personalized family photo album he finds is blank inside. That and the cover image, a trick photograph taken of his father at Atlantic City in the 1940s, feel like perfect symbols of an elusive heritage. I didn’t connect with the second, slightly longer half, though: “The Book of Memory” is more like Auster’s novels, describing the exploits of a lightly fictionalized character named “A.” and full of copious allusions to the likes of Flaubert, Freud and Tolstoy.
My rating:
Fatherhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009; 2013)
[Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett]
I assumed this was a stand-alone from Knausgaard; when it popped up during an author search on Awesomebooks.com and I saw how short it was, I thought why not? As it happens, this Vintage Minis paperback is actually a set of excerpts from A Man in Love, the second volume of his huge autofiction project, My Struggle (I’ve only read the first book, A Death in the Family). Knausgaard takes readers along on a few kiddie-oriented outings: a dinky circus, a children’s party, and baby rhyme time at the public library. His trademark granular detail gives a clear sense of all the characters involved. With him are his wife Linda and the three children they had by then, Vanja, Heidi and John; his friend Geir is his chief confidant.
It’s evident that he loves his children and delights in their individual personalities, but at the same time he feels his intellect assailed by the tedium of the repetitive tasks involved in parenting. He demands an hour to himself each afternoon to read and smoke in a café – even though he knows his wife doesn’t get such an allowance. Specifically, he writes that he feels feminized by carrying a baby or pushing a buggy. Recounting the children’s party, he recalls an earlier party when a heavily pregnant Linda got locked in a bathroom and not even a locksmith could get her out. He felt unmanned when a fellow guest (who happened to be a boxer) had to break down the door to free her. I didn’t know quite what to make of the fragile masculinity on display here, but was grateful to get some highlights from the second book.
My rating:
Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood by Michael Lewis (2009)
This was expanded from an occasional series of essays Lewis published in Slate in the 2000s, responding to the births of his three children, Quinn, Dixie and Walker, and exploring the modern father’s role, especially “the persistent and disturbing gap between what I was meant to feel and what I actually felt.” It took time for him to feel more than simply mild affection for each child; often the attachment didn’t arrive until after a period of intense care (as when his son Walker was hospitalized with RSV and he stayed with him around the clock). I can’t seem to find the exact line now, but Jennifer Senior (author of All Joy and No Fun) has said something to the effect of: you don’t take care of your children because you love them; you love them because you take care of them. And that indeed seems to encapsulate Lewis’s experience.
The family lived in Paris when Quinn was tiny, and the pieces on adjusting to the French parenting style reminded me of Pamela Druckerman’s French Children Don’t Throw Food / Bringing Up Bébé. His parenting adventures take him everywhere from the delivery room to a New Orleans racetrack at Mardi Gras to a Disneyland campground. He also, intriguingly, writes about a visit paid to Roald Dahl in the writer’s later years. Even when he’s exasperated, his writing is warm and funny. I especially laughed at the account of his post-Walker vasectomy. This maybe doesn’t break any new ground in terms of gender roles and equal responsibility for children’s needs, but I expect it’s still true to the experience of a lot of hapless males, and it was an entirely entertaining read.
[Postscript: My timing on this one was pretty ironic: I read it on the plane to the USA to visit my family and then handed it off to my brother-in-law as I think he’ll enjoy it too. My sister looked at the cover and said, “wait, didn’t his daughter just die in a car crash?!” She’d seen it on her phone’s news feed just hours earlier. I couldn’t believe that the sweet little girl with the squinchy face on the middle of the cover was gone! (Dixie, aged 19.)]
My rating: 
If you read just one … Make it Home Game.
Fathers seem to be a big theme in my recent and upcoming reading. There was Featherhood by Charlie Gilmour, a rare 5-star read for me, last month, and I have review copies of the thematically similar Will This House Last Forever? by Xanthi Barker as well as the essay collection DAD. I even pulled out another trio of father-themed memoirs from my shelves, but ended up running out of time to do a second set of three. There’s always next year!
Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau (Blog Tour)
Are you having a groovy June yet? If not, I have just the remedy: a juicy coming-of-age novel that drops you directly into the Baltimore summer of 1975. Mary Jane Dillard, 14, lives in the upper-class white neighborhood of Roland Park. Her parents are prim types who attend church every week, belong to a country club, and pray for the (Republican) president’s health before each sit-down family dinner. When Mary Jane starts working as a daytime nanny for five-year-old Izzy, the Cones’ way of life is a revelation to her. They are messy bohemians who think nothing of walking around the house half-naked, shouting up and down the stairs at each other, or leaving a fridge full of groceries to rot and going out for fast food instead.
Dr. Cone is a psychiatrist whose top-secret assignment is helping a rock star to kick his drug addiction. Jimmy and his actress wife, Sheba, move into the Cones’ attic for the summer. If they go out in public, they wear wigs and pretend to be friends visiting from Rhode Island. While the Cones are busy monitoring or trying to imitate their celebrity guests, Mary Jane introduces discipline by cleaning the kitchen, alphabetizing the bookcase, and replicating her mother’s careful weekly menus with food she buys from Eddie’s market. In some ways she seems the most responsible member of the household, but in others she’s painfully naïve, entirely ignorant of sex and unaware that her name is a slang term for marijuana.
Open marriage, sex addiction and group therapy are new concepts that soon become routine for our confiding narrator, as she adopts a ‘What they don’t know can’t hurt them’ stance towards her trusting parents. Blau is the author of four previous YA novels, and while this is geared towards adults, it resonates for how it captures the uncertainty and swirling hormones of the teenage years. Who didn’t share Mary Jane’s desperate curiosity to learn about sex? Who can’t remember a moment of realization that parents aren’t right about everything?
Music runs all through the book, creating and cementing bonds between the characters. Mary Jane sings in the choir and shares her mother’s love of both church music and show tunes. Jimmy and Sheba are always making up little songs on which Mary Jane harmonizes, and a clandestine trip to a record store in an African American part of town forms one of the novel’s pivotal scenes. The relationship between Mary Jane and Izzy, who is precocious and always coming out with malapropisms, is touching, and Blau cleverly inserts references to the casual racism and antisemitism of the 1970s.
I love it when a novel has a limited setting and can evoke a sense of wistfulness for a golden time that will never come again. I highly recommend this for nostalgic summer reading, particularly if you’ve enjoyed work by Curtis Sittenfeld – especially Prep and Rodham.
My thanks to Harper360 UK and Anne Cater for arranging my proof copy for review.
I was delighted to be part of the blog tour for Mary Jane. See below for details of where other reviews and features have appeared or will be appearing soon.
20 Books of Summer, #1–4: Adichie, de Bernières, Egan, and Styron
The first four books for this summer’s colour theme took me from Australia to New York City to Nigeria, and into a mind plagued by depression.
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2003)
This was my last remaining unread book by Adichie, and that probably goes a long way toward explaining why I found it underwhelming. In comparison to her two later novels, and even her short stories (of which this reminded me the most), the canvas is small and the emotional scope limited. Kambili is a Nigerian teenager caught between belief systems: her grandfather’s traditional (“pagan”) ancestor worship versus the strict Catholicism that is the preserve of her abusive father, but also of the young priest on whom she has a crush. She and her brother try to stay out of their father’s way, but they are held to such an impossibly high standard of behaviour that it seems inevitable that they will disappoint him.
Adichie’s debt to her literary hero, Chinua Achebe, is evident from the first line onward: “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the étagère.” It also sets up, with a certain lack of subtlety, the way in which religion is wielded as a weapon in the novel. Meanwhile, the title suggests rarity, beauty, and fragile hope. Had this been my first taste of Adichie’s fiction, I probably would have stopped there, so in a way I’m glad that I read her first book last. Now I just have to wait with tapping fingers for the next one… (Free from a neighbour)
Blue Dog by Louis de Bernières (2016)
A sweet coming-of-age novella about a boy moving to the Australian Outback to live with his grandfather in the 1960s and adopting a stray dog – a red cloud kelpie, but named Blue. I didn’t realize that this is a prequel (to Red Dog), and based on a screenplay. It was my third book by de Bernières, and it was interesting to read in the afterword that he sees this one as being suited to 12-year-olds, yet most likely to be read by adults.
Mick’s father is dead and his mother has had a breakdown, so Granpa is the only one around to look after him, though out at the cattle station the boy mostly fends for himself, having adventures with stinging lizards and cyclones and bushfires and cursed caves. All along, Blue and his motorcycle are constant companions. Taylor Pete, a wry Aboriginal man, and Betty Marble, a pretty blonde hired as his teacher, are two amusing secondary characters.
This reminded me of Gerald Durrell’s writing about his childhood, and was pleasant airport and plane reading for me: light and fun, but not fluffy, and offering an armchair traveling opportunity. I especially liked the Australian lingo and the blue and black illustrations at the head and foot of each chapter, with a flipbook-style cartoon of a running dog in the upper right corner of each odd-numbered page. (Public library)
Emerald City by Jennifer Egan (1993)
Each of these 11 stories has a fantastic first line – my favorite, from “Sacred Heart,” being “In ninth grade I was a great admirer of Jesus Christ” – but often I felt that these stories of relationships on the brink did not live up to their openers. Most take place in a major city (Chicago, New York, San Francisco) or a holiday destination (Bora Bora, China, Mexico, Spain), but no matter the setting, the terrain is generally a teen girl flirting with danger or a marriage about to implode because the secret of a recent or long-ago affair has come out into the open.
Recurring elements include models/stylists/fashion photographers and people getting conned out of money. The title story is set in New York, described as “a place that glittered from a distance even when you reached it.”
To me the best story, for offering something a bit different, was “One Piece,” about a brother who seems to hurt everything he touches but comes through for his sister when it counts. Egan’s characters are caught between emotional states: remembering a golden age, regretting a moment that changed everything, or hoping that the best is yet to come. “The Stylist” was the one story that reminded me most of A Visit from the Goon Squad. As soon as I closed the book, I found that I had trouble remembering details of any of the stories. (Little Free Library in suburban Philadelphia, May 2019)
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron (1990)
(Visible darkness must have a colour, right?) I had long wanted to read this and finally came across a secondhand copy the other day. What I never realized was that, at 84 pages, it is essentially an extended essay: It started life as a lecture given at Johns Hopkins in 1989, was expanded into a Vanity Fair essay, and then further expanded into this short book.
Approaching age 60 and on his way to Paris to accept a prestigious award, Styron could feel his depression worsening. Rather than being proud or grateful, he could only doubt his own talent. The pills his doctor prescribed him for insomnia exacerbated his feelings of despair. When he threw away the journal he had been keeping, he knew it was a potential prelude to suicide. Hearing a piece by Brahms on a movie soundtrack was the one thing that reminded him of the beauty of the world and the richness of his life, enough for him to reach out and get seven weeks of treatment at a mental hospital, which was what saved him. These experiences, recounted in sections VI and VII, are the highlight of the book.
Styron also muses on the creative temperament and the ubiquity of suicide among writers, especially those who, like him, had an early trauma (his mother died when he was 13). The prose is forthright and intimate, ably evoking a psychic pain that is “quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.” This made me want to try his fiction, too. (Secondhand purchase, June 2021)
Favourite lines:
“each day’s pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief. The evening’s relief for me—an incomplete but noticeable letup, like the change from a torrential downpour to a steady shower—came in the hours after dinnertime and before midnight, when the pain lifted a little and my mind would become lucid enough to focus on matters beyond the immediate upheaval convulsing my system.”
“Alcohol was an invaluable senior partner of my intellect, besides being a friend whose ministrations I sought daily—sought also, I now see, as a means to calm the anxiety and incipient dread that I had hidden away for so long somewhere in the dungeons of my spirit.”
Next two in progress: A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy and Ruby by Ann Hood.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
