Tag Archives: rereading

20 Books of Summer, 17–20: Jaouad, Kim, Merwin, Piñeiro (#WITMonth)

By Rebecca Foster on August 31, 2026 | 14 Comments

It’s time to draw a line under 20 Books of Summer so I can focus on hosting Short Story September. I’m technically not quite finished with these first two I’m technically not quite finished with these first two [70 pages to go in the Jaouad and 46 in the Kim], but I’ve read enough to form an opinion and will pop back later to add in final thoughts and ratings. My final four are a memoir of cancer in young adulthood; a page-turning courtroom drama about experimental autism treatment gone wrong; gorgeous nature poems; and a novella in translation that comments on disability, motherhood and mental health issues. Skip to the end for my one DNF of the challenge and a look back at some stats plus my most successful reads.

Between Two Kingdoms: What Almost Dying Taught Me about Living by Suleika Jaouad (2021)

{Updated on 7 September} Jaouad wrote a New York Times column about going through leukaemia treatment in her early twenties and what came next. After months of itching and fatigue, she fell properly ill while working her first postgraduate job in Paris and her blood test results were so bad that she flew home to New York. She would be in and out of hospital for the next five years, enduring multiple rounds of chemo and a bone marrow transplant from her brother. It’s a terrific granular account of the physical and emotional rigours of illness, as well as the strain it put on her relationships – being her primary caregiver was too much for her boyfriend, Will. But she also found a community of young cancer patients, many (like Max Ritvo) now dead. After 60% of the book’s length, as the title – its metaphor taken from Susan Sontag – suggests, the new challenge for Jaouad was resuming life. “I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.” She decides to undertake a cross-country road trip punctuated by visits to people who wrote to her through her column: fellow cancer survivors, a mother who lost a son to suicide, a man on death row in Texas. At first I thought this content felt tacked on and should have been a sequel, but ultimately it illustrates why she wouldn’t edit out her illness if she had it all to do again. I hadn’t heard of Jaouad before I stumbled on this book; from Instagram, I learned she’s now (at age 38) weathered cancer three times. (Little Free Library)

Miracle Creek by Angie Kim (2019)

{Updated on 7 September} After enjoying Happiness Falls so much, I wanted to go back to Kim’s debut, for which she won an Edgar Award. (There’s an autistic boy and discussion of therapies in that second book as well.) The bulk of the novel is set during the four days of an August 2009 trial. It’s been a year since a horrific accident at Pak Yoo’s “Miracle Submarine,” a rural Virginia hyperbaric oxygen chamber where regulars came for twice-daily treatment of autism, cerebral palsy, and infertility. Meanwhile, protesters gathered outside to draw attention to what they believed to be a dangerous and unproven technique, the equivalent of child abuse. Someone with Camel cigarettes and matches from a local 7-11 set a small fire under an oxygen tank; the resulting explosion killed two and seriously injured two more. The mother of one of the autistic boys was arrested for suspected arson and attempted murder, but as the trial goes on suspicion seems to shift to members of the Korean American family who ran the HBOT operation. There’s a lot to sink the teeth into here. Each character has secrets, and little revelations are emerging all the time, such that the prosecutor and defence lawyer are always having to adjust their approach. Like I’ve experienced with Kim before, this was intelligent, thought-provoking, and absorbing. It’s just the sort of crime-adjacent fiction I like. An author Q&A at the end reveals a couple of autobiographical inspirations: working in her immigrant parents’ convenience store near Baltimore as a teenager, and taking one of her sons, who had neurological deafness and chronic illnesses, for HBOT. (Gift from my wish list)

The Vixen by W.S. Merwin (1996)

it seems that the world is made of a single

summer as it always has been (from “Entry”)

I took this off the shelf because Merwin was one of the POV characters in The Daffodil Days, Helen Bain’s excellent novel about Sylvia Plath’s final years. I had no idea what to expect, and it took me a while to get used to his entirely unpunctuated verse. Only by reading aloud or in my head was I able to split the text blocks into meaning-rich phrases. The fox is a revenant flitting through many of these poems as they pinpoint natural rhythms and human traces across the seasons and centuries. A lot reference summer, in particular, so this was a perfect choice for the challenge. There are a few historical portraits but most of the pieces feel timeless, evoking a countryside locale where the speaker returns to find derelict dwellings given over to birds and trees. Mostly it feels like this could be England, but sometimes a dry aridity suggests the Mediterranean. There is a strong sense of temporality, especially of afterness – the close of a day, the tail end of a season, the still-resonant emptiness after life has left or activity has finished. But there is also the hint of an eternal present:

Seen from afterward the time appears to have been

all of a piece which of course it was but how seldom

it seemed that way when it was still happening (from “Completion”)

In a long book (~65 pieces), there were only a few poems that washed over me without making any impression. The run-on pace, alliteration, and close attention to the natural world made this utterly mesmerizing. I’ll be sure to read more by Merwin. (Secondhand – Bridport Old Books)

Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro (2007; 2021)

[Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle]

Piñeiro is an Argentinian author known for infusing her detective novels with a political conscience. Elena Knows is a mystery of sorts, in which the title character devotes herself to investigating her daughter’s death (Rita was found hanging in the belfry of a church). But several elements make this atypical for crime fiction: Elena has Parkinson’s disease – “that f—ing whore illness,” she calls it; refuses to accept the police’s conclusion that Rita died by suicide – she would never have gone there in the rain, she insists; and drags her uncooperative body across Buenos Aires to confront an acquaintance she thinks might be able to shed some light. It’s a circadian narrative, divided into sections by Elena’s pill schedule, but expands its timeline through flashbacks to consider the complications of the mother–daughter relationship as Elena became more physically dependent. The eventual encounter with Isabel presents a contrast in the form of a woman who didn’t want to become a mother but had to because of a prohibition on abortion, which was only legalized in Argentina in 2020. While the approach and themes were appealing, I found this repetitive and the long blocks of dialogue in italics were challenging to read. This was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, though I thought it had a better chance in that year’s Barbellion Prize race (returning this year!). (Gift from my wish list)

And a DNF:

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)

Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.

Sigh. Between February and July I read about 200 pages, then skimmed another 100 or so, then finally gave up. (My third Oates DNF. I don’t think she and I are meant to be, though I seem to have better luck with her short stories and own another couple of her books to try.) I engaged most with the early pages about her childhood with a vain, neglectful mother who ends up in a mental hospital; and then with her teenage marriage to Bucky Glazer and involvement in the war effort.

She was a sweet kid but so emotional. Wanting love all the time. She was immature and unreliable and I guess so was I; we were too young. If she’d been a better cook and not so emotional, it might’ve worked out.

Except that people were dying and being injured and the world filling up with smoldering rubble, Norma Jeane liked the War. The War was as steady and reliable as hunger or sleep. Always, the War was there.

In the part that I skimmed, she is starting to become known in Hollywood, with a nude photo shoot (for which she only earned $50), bit parts in films, and her famous stage name.

In the introductory Author’s Note, Oates writes, “for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation.” So, for instance, instead of multiple foster families, we just get one. Always, there was unwanted male attention, including molestation. I was surprised to find that the pick-and-choose, fact–fiction hybrid approach became a problem for me. I wanted to know if she really married a man named Bucky and wrote poetry. Yet I didn’t want to have to be verifying every fact either.

Oates’s kitchen-sink style involves imagined scenes and dialogue plus retrospective commentary and knowing asides; long, looping sentences and short ones; direct and indirect speech; lots of exclamation points. Lots of everything. The repetition will be deliberate, for effect, but I kept longing for a streamlined version that cut, say, three of every five sentences.

Anyway, this was certainly a project worth undertaking for Oates; you can see why it was irresistible to unearth the reality behind a legend. Norma Jeane is intriguing for her simultaneous childlike innocence and cultivated sensuality. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)

20 Books Statistics:

14 fiction

4 nonfiction

2 poetry

7 by BIPOC

3 towards WIT Month (for which I reviewed 8 in total, with library reads and Foreword reviews)

3 rereads

I’ve learned this year that it’s important, momentum-wise, to build in a number of shorter books (6 of novella length + 2 poetry collections) and best to avoid doorstoppers. I was wise to pick some addictive, undemanding novels that tread the line between popular and literary fiction (Kim, Mantel, O’Farrell, Reid, Sullivan); anything that feels like hard work (Oates!) is definitely not a summer read.

I only read a risible 4 of the specific books I set out as options in my planning post, plus 1 of my additional ideas. (It’s ironic that I struggled to finish this set of 20 when I could have labelled anything from my shelves part of the challenge – in total, I read 39 of my own books this summer.)

My favourites of the 20 were Strange Weather in Tokyo, Prodigal Summer & The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (both rereads), and The Vixen. But What Belongs to You, Miracle Creek, Mitz, The Employees, Commencement, and Flush were also great reads. To be able to single out half of the books equals a huge success!

I also completed a 4-book diagonal on the Bingo card!

Summer in the title (PRODIGAL SUMMER)
A classic you’ve been meaning to (RE-)read (FLUSH)
Features a family holiday (MITZ)
Published in summer (ELENA KNOWS – July 2021)

Love Your Library: August 2026

By Rebecca Foster on August 31, 2026 | 19 Comments

Thanks to Eleanor, Marcie, and Skai for posting about their library borrowing and reading!

This month marks six years that I’ve been volunteering in my local public library. I’m perversely nostalgic for those early days in summer 2020, when we were closed to the public and staff and volunteers socially distanced around an otherwise empty library.

In a normal year, I always forget just how busy the library gets during the school holidays. The children’s shelves, especially, look ransacked and the number of reservation requests shoots up as kids (and some adults) work towards the Summer Reading Challenge. I look forward to things quieting down again.

My library recently acquired the Wainwright Prize shortlists, so I’m taking advantage of the opportunity to read most of the Conservation titles (whereas the Nature writing titles mostly struck me as samey). I’m hoping it will also buy more from the Booker Prize longlist – besides the Harrison and Perry, which I’m waiting for. You can see I’ve also been stocking up on short story collections for Short Story September, which starts tomorrow!

My library use over the last month:

(links are to any book reviews not already featured on the blog)

READ

Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns (for Classics book club)
I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron
One Ukrainian Summer by Viv Groskop
The Shock of the Light by Lori Inglis Hall
Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami
The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha
Country People by Daniel Mason
The Heartstopper Yearbook by Alice Oseman
Heartstopper: Volume 6 by Alice Oseman
The Land and Its People by David Sedaris

Women in Translation Month reads:

(All originally published in French, though Valckx is Dutch?)

The Years by Annie Ernaux [transl. Alison L. Strayer]: This was a buddy read with Marcie of Buried in Print, though she quickly zoomed ahead! I preferred it to some of Ernaux’s other short memoirs (Happening, I Remain in Darkness, A Woman’s Story) precisely because it is not a memoir but a portrait of her life and times, mostly delivered in the first-person plural with some third person – in the late pages she herself calls it an “impersonal autobiography.” I was most wowed by the opening and closing litanies of the random memories lost whenever any individual ceases to exist. Elsewhere, when not used to depict her actual experiences (via scenes or photographs), the approach does tend toward the generic, yet it gives a good sense of social fads and political trends all the same. Education and consumerism seem like routes out of poverty, whereas novelty and technology offer false promise. Reading something like this would be a good way for younger generations to summon up some sympathy for Boomers.

Favourite lines: “Our parents and the middle-aged were from another time” / “She does not feel any particular age, though certainly feels a young woman’s arrogance vis-a-vis older women, a condescension towards the post-menopausal. It is unlikely she will ever be one of them herself.”

Edith: The Girl Who Was 100 Years Old by Catharina Valckx [transl. Antony Shugaar]: Speaking of never growing old… This is a charming middle-grade fantasy about a girl given two blessings by fairies: the ability to animate objects, and the gift of eternal childhood. The former is good fun, allowing her to have a sentient grandfather clock and a pet lemon named Squirt; the latter comes to seem like more of a curse, though. Edith has long outlived her parents and starts to think her condition is “eternal boredom.” She, Squirt and Bolster the dog set out to find the original fairy, now herself an old lady, and see if the spell can be reversed so Edith can experience life in all its stages. Somehow I can’t see this message catching on in the USA! I loved the illustrations and the whimsy but wanted it to go further, Moomins-like, into Edith’s losses and longing.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi [transl. L’Association / Anjali Singh]: This was one of the first graphic memoirs I ever read (along with Fun Home), a classic of the genre. I wanted to reread it because it has, unfortunately, taken on renewed relevance because of war in Iran and the author’s death earlier this year. Her memoir of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s illuminates what it’s like to live under an authoritarian religious regime in a time of war, and likely planted the seeds for novels such as Martyr! and The Persians.

Satrapi’s parents had secular values but, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, everyone had to fall in line: she wore the veil whenever she left her house, and though her family made wine they were ready to dump it down the toilet at a minute’s notice. On the one hand, she and her friends were normal Westernized adolescents interested in pop music and trendy clothing; on the other, there were shortages, bombings, and rumours of relatives and neighbours being disappeared for voicing revolutionary ideas. A missile exploded in her neighbourhood, narrowly missing her building but killing their Jewish acquaintances.

Volume 2, “The Story of a Return,” has Satrapi attending school in Austria and encountering a whole new world of drugs and sex. “The harder I tried to assimilate, the more I had the feeling that I was distancing myself from my culture, betraying my parents and my origins”. She returned to Iran four years later to find a country that was still repressive but beginning to be rebuilt after war. Art school (with fully clothed life models) and a brief marriage in her early twenties followed, but she had to leave Iran for good to find a life of creative fulfilment.

Her father’s wise words: “As long as there is oil in the Middle East we will never have peace”; “We Iranians, we’re crushed not only by the government but by the weight of our traditions.”

CURRENTLY READING

Taking Pictures by Anne Enright
I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections by Nora Ephron
The Given World by Melissa Harrison
Night, Neon and Other Stories of Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates
Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens
Hum by Helen Phillips (a buddy read with Marcie of Buried in Print)
Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath (from university library)
The Original by Nell Stevens
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter S. Tevis

SKIMMED

Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis by Lucy Easthope

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

Ever Land by Amy Abdelnoor
Through the Window by Julian Barnes (to reread)
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories by Margaret Drabble
The Most of Nora Ephron – I’m on an Ephron kick at the moment!
Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto
Gentleman’s Relish by Patrick Gale
From Far Around They Saw Us Burn by Alice Jolly
The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing (from university library, for Classics book club)
Everest by Ashani Lewis
The News from Dublin by Colm Tóibín

ON HOLD, TO BE COLLECTED

In Meadowlight by Sussie Anie
The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn
The Leveret by Anna Goldreich
Eat the Planet Well: How to Fix Our Toxic Food System – One Meal at a Time by Dave Goulson
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World by Suzanne Simard
Fiesta: A Journey through Festivity by Daniel Stables

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

The Strangers by Naomi Alderman
Stop All the Clocks: Poems of Love and Loss by W.H. Auden
Dodge City by Patrick deWitt
Honour & Other People’s Children by Helen Garner
Every Last Fish by Rose George
Neurodivergent by Nature by Joe Harkness
Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold by Daisy Johnson et al.
How to Be Hopeful by Caitlin Moran
The Winter Guest by Sarah Moss
Autumn by Kate Mosse
Sunrise by Téa Obreht
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
Green Crime by Julia Shaw
The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain

RETURNED UNREAD

Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn – It takes a lot for me to overcome my groundless antipathy to stories about The Troubles.

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.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: Alison L. Strayer, Anjali Singh, Annie Ernaux, Antony Shugaar, Catharina Valckx, first-person plural, French literature, graphic memoirs, graphic novels, libraries, library books, Library Checkout, literature in translation, Love Your Library, Marjane Satrapi, middle grade, rereading, volunteering, Women in Translation month

Summer Reads, Part II: Ellis, Faulkner (Reread), Groskop, Ruskovich

By Rebecca Foster on August 30, 2026 | 16 Comments

Thankfully, since I last wrote about summer, we’ve had abundant rainfall – a cosy wet weekend after nearly two months of drought. Our pond is looking full again and our apple tree is perking up, but it will take much more to fill the country’s coffers. I’ve spent significantly less time outdoors than usual this summer, taking refuge indoors from the unremitting heat and sun. Luckily, there have been plenty of books to keep me company.

Book 2 of The Summerhouse Trilogy

The Skeleton in the Cupboard by Alice Thomas Ellis (1988)

Summer was a dull season. In spring things were growing; in autumn they were harvested; in winter they were waiting. Summer was pointless, designed for idleness. An inbred Yorkshire Puritanism led me to despise it.

{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}

After The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987), this novella felt conventional and superfluous. Repeating the run-up to Margaret and Syl’s wedding from the perspective of Margaret’s mother-in-law-to-be, Mrs Monro, is only worthwhile in that it allows for two key revelations: one, that Margaret was molested by her father, which goes some way toward explaining her flat affect and inability to love Syl; and two, that Lili also slept with Syl’s father in the summerhouse, long before she bedded Syl himself there on the morning of the wedding. Otherwise, this is a collection of sad and somewhat clichéd meditations on the loneliness of alcoholism-prone older age and widowhood. Provided it doesn’t simply reproduce stereotypes of the seductress, I’m hoping the third volume, from Lili’s perspective, will end up being the most interesting; the middle book of a trilogy always kinda sucks, right? I’ll read Book 3 for one last seasonal instalment before the autumn equinox. (Secondhand – Regent Books, Wantage)

Light in August by William Faulkner (1932)

Memory believes before knowing remembers.

In my second year as a college English major, I took a senior elective on Faulkner & Morrison. Ever since, I’ve remembered this and Song of Solomon as my favourite from each author – the books I’d read again even without them being assigned. For several of the last few Augusts I’ve meant to pick this up, but when I finally did I found Faulkner’s style oppressive and only succeeded in a quick skim. The one thing I’d remembered beforehand is that there is a mixed-race character named Joe Christmas. But the first character we’re introduced to is the indomitable Lena Grove, who’s heavily pregnant and has hitchhiked from Alabama to Mississippi to find her baby daddy. She still believes he’ll do right by her and their child, but the fact that he’s living under an assumed name is our clue that he has no intention of taking responsibility. The plot is set in motion by a misunderstanding: she’s looking for Lucas Burch, but others know there’s a Byron Bunch nearby, and he takes a shine to Lena.

Meanwhile, Burch is going by Joe Brown and rooming with the sadistic Joe Christmas, who gets caught up in bootlegging and murder and goes on the run. The language about his “black blood” driving him to do things, and what happens to him, is awful, but true to its time as well as to Faulkner’s vision of tragic inevitability. I only got the bare bones from a skim, but did love how the novel feels epic yet only spans about a month; it completes a full circle as Lena and her baby move on again, this time to Tennessee. I also liked the neologism in the description of a town’s “garland of Augusttremulous lights.” All told, I’m unlikely to read Faulkner again; he’s like a darker version of Steinbeck, who I’d recommend instead. (Secondhand – Wonder Book and Video)

My original rating:

My rating now:

One Ukrainian Summer: A memoir about falling in love and coming of age in the former USSR by Viv Groskop (2024)

As part of her Russian degree course at Cambridge, Groskop spent a year abroad in St Petersburg, where she also conducted English lessons for adults. She arrived in September 1993 and the next month, in a nightclub, met Bogdan Bogdanovich (“God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift”), a young man whose rock band called itself “Ukraine answer to Red Hot Chili Pepper.” She would be the solitary groupie on their tour the following summer, but first she had to get through a freezing winter of too much alcohol, too many cigarettes, and turbulent living situations. Her pen portraits of friends and acquaintances are quite amusing. There’s an appealing blend of self-deprecation and nostalgia to her outlook: “I was a clueless, lovesick, pedantic linguist. But I held the future of Ukrainian rock ’n’ roll in my hands.” I never got a particular sense of any of the cities she visits, but the long train ride from Moscow to Kiev is evocative. Each chapter is headed by a vocabulary word, given in Russian and then in the (very similar) Ukrainian. There are lots of Slavic phrases in the text, too, rendered in Roman script. I enjoyed reading them to myself in my head, but none of them has stuck. Let’s see if I can commit this one to memory: “Babine leto” (Ukr.) = “grandmother’s summer,” the equivalent of an Indian summer. Kudos to Groskop and her agents, all of whom donated their proceeds/fees to PEN International, which supports writers at risk. (Public library)

Nightjar: Stories by Emily Ruskovich (2026)

I abandoned Ruskovich’s 2018 debut novel, Idaho, early on, but will absolutely go back to it now because these stories are phenomenal. There are only five, so they tread the border between short story and novella at ~50 pages each and reminded me in their intricacy and depth of short fiction by Lauren Groff and Alice Munro. All are set in the American West and circle themes of loss and remembrance, and they often feature animals prominently. “Victor’s Room” sees a young wife become obsessed with exposing her husband’s false memory of the Oregon house where his brother died in childhood. In “Owl,” the only first-person, historical story, the narrator’s wife is accidentally shot by boys who mistake her for an owl in the night; as she convalesces, her old life lures her back. “Round Lake,” probably my favourite, finds violinist Jade adrift in Tokyo, where she agreed to meet a love interest. There’s water in her ears from an Idaho lake, which she only learned after her swim was where her mother drowned. “Petty Creek Road,” about middle-aged brothers, introduces a subtle note of magic realism (through Will’s premonitions of danger) that is echoed in the final, title story in the tangible reflections that Tess finds each morning in a bucket of water. Jade keeps orphaned hedgehogs, Jane feeds stray cats in “Owl,” and Tess communes with a goat named Panic Boy. The writing and character development are extraordinary, and the question of how memories become stories, or take on physical weight, truly resonated with me.

I’ve included this in my summer round-up because, for me, nightjars are synonymous with warm evenings on Newtown Common, where we go once a year to catch up with nightjars (not the same species as Tess encounters in Montana). This small scrubby nature reserve never fails to turn up several nightjars: unearthly with their gaping mouths, alternating churring and yipping, and jerky flaps against the gathering dusk. We made our annual pilgrimage on 15 July and it didn’t disappoint. (Edelweiss)

I have a few more summery reads lined up to take me through what I sincerely hope is this season’s last gasp. I’m looking forward to getting out my corduroy coat, wearing hoodies and lap blankets around the house, and eating autumnal goodies based around squash and apples.

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews | Tagged: alcoholism, Alice Munro, Alice Thomas Ellis, drowning, Emily Ruskovich, Idaho, languages, Lauren Groff, linguistics, Mississippi, mixed race, Montana, nightjars, Oregon, PEN International, pregnancy, race, rereading, Russia, sequels, short stories, summer, summer house, summer reading, Tokyo, trilogies, Ukraine, Viv Groskop, William Faulkner

20 Books of Summer, 14–16: Danticat, Ravn (#WITMonth) & Woolf

By Rebecca Foster on August 29, 2026 | 26 Comments

Today I have a tender Haitian American bereavement memoir, a shocking slice of Danish sci-fi about humans and robot hybrids aboard a spacecraft, and a reread of a delightful and rather overlooked classic. I’ll spend the rest of the weekend scrambling to finish my last few books to review on Monday!

Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat (2007)

But isn’t death, no matter how or when it takes place, always solitary?

I’d read and enjoyed a novel and a short story collection by Danticat, so when I learned there was a bereavement memoir in her back catalogue I knew I had to have it. It opens with, and continues in the vein of, the conjunction of life and death: on the same day in 2004, Danticat found out she was pregnant with her daughter and her father was diagnosed with end-stage pulmonary fibrosis. She spent a year moving between her home in Miami and her parents’ in New York City. At the same time, her uncle, a pastor who raised her and her brothers for eight years back in Haiti after her parents left to set up the family’s new life in America, was in crisis. Gang warfare was rife in his neighbourhood and there had been threats against his church and against him personally. Aged 81, he flew to Miami, confident he would be accepted as a political refugee because his life was in danger. Instead, he was taken to a detention centre and denied his medications; he subsequently fell ill and died in a local hospital. All this happened in a few days. Danticat’s father outlived his brother, but only long enough to meet his granddaughter and namesake, Mira. I got a bit lost in details of family history and military coups, while my interest was piqued in her uncle’s earlier trip to the US for throat cancer treatment (thereafter his Kreol came through an electronic voicebox). This is an understated work that lets the awful facts speak for themselves. Ron Charles says of her new novel, Dèy, which takes on U.S. gun violence, that it exhibits the same “tempered outrage” as much of her work; maybe too mild for me. (Secondhand – gift from my wish list)

The Employees: a workplace novel of the 22nd century by Olga Ravn (2018; 2020)

[Translated from Danish by Martin Aitken]

Maybe the humans are that very element of chaos that keeps the world alive.

I knew about this from its International Booker Prize shortlisting. It took me nearly a third of the book to figure out what was going on because I’d avoided reading the blurb, but once I got it I was hooked into something like a sharper, horror-tinged version of Orbital. The novella is structured as a series of 100+ statements, in semi-random order, collected as part of an 18-month workplace tribunal. Each is about a page in length. All are voiced by crew members of the Six-Thousand Ship. Part of Statement 067 reads: “There’s humans, and then there’s humanoids. Those who were born and those who were made. Those who are going to die and those who aren’t.” It’s not always clear who is who. A trove of “objects” (I never quite decided what these are) the spacecraft takes on at a planet stop prompts musings about memory and emotions, loyalty and freedom. The humanoids, grown in a two-year process, are perfect workers from day 1. It’s their “responsibility to make sure the human section of the crew don’t buckle under to nostalgia and become catatonic” – like those who only want to spend time with holograms of their children. The humanoids have had longings implanted in them, to “move in with someone, get married, bake cookies, push a pram, learn to play an instrument, dance a waltz. I think I’ve seen all this in your educational material, is that right? What are cookies?” There’s humour here, but also a growing air of menace. When violence breaks out, it doesn’t just derail the mission, but threatens the whole future. My jaw dropped at the dark turn of events and the bleak but profound phrases it engenders:

I don’t think we as a category are going to survive.

I got the strong feeling that we have failed, and that our time is over.

How can we live with the knowledge that none of these days will be remembered by anyone, not even ourselves?

With the lines so blurred, we’re forced to ask what is essential to humanity. Mysterious and sobering, this is both a meditation on identity and autonomy and an elegy for life on Earth. (Secondhand – Hungerford Bookshop)

Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (1933)

Woolf’s novels are so demanding that it’s good to be reminded she also knew how to have fun. Flush is a cheeky short ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, spanning the dog’s whole life but even (in a few prologue-like pages) dipping back into prehistory when his ancestors hunted rabbits in Spain. I was tickled to discover that Flush’s first owner was Mary Russell Mitford of Three Mile Cross near Reading – I know of her as a local author and have a copy of her book Our Village. Only because the Mitfords were desperate for money was she willing to sell him to her invalid friend, Miss Barrett. And so in 1842, Flush, used to chasing pheasants in the countryside, has to adjust to life as a city lapdog. He witnesses Miss Barrett’s compulsive letter-writing (“she would lie hour after hour passing her hand over a white page with a black stick”), Robert Browning’s courtship, and their preparations for moving to Italy and welcoming a baby with a mixture of ignorance and alarm. His dignity comes under attack by fleas, and by thieves who hold him to ransom for five days in a London slum – a thrilling central chapter in an otherwise serene narrative. As in Mitz by Sigrid Nunez, which is an homage to Flush, there is dramatic irony between what readers understand and a pet cannot. He mostly experiences the world through the senses, and there are lovely passages where Woolf rhapsodizes about what Flush smells and feels: “He knew Florence in its marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness.” Whether you’re a Woolf (or Barrett/Browning) fan, or dog lover, or not, this is an offbeat charmer. (Secondhand – Wonder Book and Video)

My original rating (2013):

My rating now:

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews | Tagged: Artificial Intelligence, bereavement memoirs, Danish, dogs, Edwidge Danticat, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Florence, Florida, Haiti, International Booker Prize, Italy, Martin Aitken, Mary Russell Mitford, New York City, novellas, Olga Ravn, rereading, Robert Browning, robots, Samantha Harvey, science fiction, Sigrid Nunez, space, summer reading, Virginia Woolf, Women in Translation month

Paris in July, III: Dundy, Maugham, Sarton Novels; Nonfiction by Durand & Carles, Gopnik

By Rebecca Foster on July 31, 2026 | 20 Comments

All in all, I’ve reviewed 13 books (a mix of fiction and nonfiction) for #ParisInJuly2026; see also Part I and Part II. It’s been such a fun escapist project for the summer – thanks to Emma of Words and Peace for hosting! I’m squeaking in at the last minute with a final set of five made up of a few obscure classics and two sets of essays that veer between autobiographical reflection and social observation, with a bit of self-help thrown in. A shared theme this time is differences between the USA (or England) and France. Here’s a quick paragraph on each.

Fiction

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (1958)

“The world is wide, wide, wide and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”

Sally Jay Gorce is determined to live it up in Paris. After all, now that she’s lost her passport, it doesn’t look like she’ll be going back to the States any time soon. With her dyed-pink hair, self-deprecating sense of humour, and heavily notched bedpost, she’s an endearing and impulsive protagonist. She’s always falling in and out of love and embarking on new projects, from acting on stage or as a film extra to posing as a painter’s model. I found her turns of phrase amusing – “To my chagrin, I found all my clothes … splitting themselves resolutely up into three categories: Tyrolean Peasant, Bar Girl, and Dreaded Librarian”; “It was dessert now, and I was deserting” – but did weary a bit of the meandering plot. This work of autofiction seems ahead of its time what with the protagonist’s promiscuity. I’ve always been intrigued about the title and learned that it arises from a love interest’s likening of American girls to avocados (“A hard centre with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing … so eternally green”) plus his mishearing of Sally Jay’s “dead” for “dud.” Somewhere on a continuum between I Capture the Castle and Nina Stibbe, this comic novel was a pleasant distraction. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)

A linking passage: “Boy, we met a real nut on the beach today. A skinny young American with a fierce black moustache called Hugo McCarthy. He’d just left the South of France a couple of days ago, where he’d been kicked out of Somerset Maugham’s villa in Cap Ferrat for the third time.”

The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham (1908)

“There’s no place like Paris for meeting queer folk.”

Who knew Maugham tried his hand at supernatural horror? The nearest thing I’d read from him before was Up at the Villa, a suspense novella. An autobiographical fragment preceding the text explains that Oliver Haddo, the villain of the piece, was inspired by a poet Maugham met in Paris, Aleister Crowley, who dabbled in Satanism and the occult. Arthur Burdon, an English surgeon in Paris, is engaged to marry Margaret Dauncey. Margaret’s roommate, Susie Boyd, is fascinated by Haddo, who looms large in personality and body. Margaret, on the other hand, says, “I’ve never met a man who filled me with such loathing.” Arthur and others of their acquaintance don’t know whether to take him seriously or not. This means that they underestimate the threat he poses to their happiness – and perhaps their lives. It’s rare to encounter a story of demon possession these days, and hard to know quite what to make of it. I found this reasonably compelling but melodramatic, plus it felt distasteful how Haddo’s weight increases to match his evil. Do read Maugham if you haven’t yet – he is reliably readable and a number of his works are short – but maybe not this one first. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)

Shadow of a Man by May Sarton (1950)

I’d not heard of Sarton’s third novel before I picked it up at random in a used bookstore. For those of us who discovered Sarton through her journals or poetry, I suspect her fiction will always fall short. The psychology of her characters’ relationships tends to lack subtlety, and plotting isn’t always her forté. I enjoyed this one well enough, probably because I could relate to the main character’s feeling of being adrift after his mother’s sudden death. After the funeral is over and done with, twenty-six-year-old Francis Chabrier decides to spend the summer in Paris. He’s half-French and thinks some time away from Boston might do him good. Except when he gets there he promptly falls in love with a family friend, Solange, and that’s complicated because she’s a 45-year-old widow whose late husband was shattered by his time in a concentration camp. It’s clear their romance will be short-lived. Francis’s stepfather, Alan, describes the young man as “a comet on the loose,” and the purpose of the months in Paris seems to be to set him on a more stable course. It grated that Solange is portrayed as almost an old lady (I’m only just over two years off her age now!), and that their affair only serves as a prelude to a more sensible relationship back home. However, the Paris setting (and coastal Maine later on) is delicious, and I marked out plenty of lines about Francis and his mother’s family dynamic. (Secondhand – Wonder Book & Video, Hagerstown)

Nonfiction

Pardon Our French: Parisian Lessons for a Happier Life by Alex Durand and Tom Carles with Allie Kingsley Baker (2026)

Durand and Carles moved to the USA to play college soccer and went viral on social media for their “AT Frenchies” videos about French language and culture. (I’ve not actually seen any.) Although they’ve come to admire aspects of the American lifestyle, such as ambition and individualism, they still prize traditionally French values of curiosity, privacy and a more relaxed approach to time management. Chapters on romance, food, style, friendships, green living, the arts and rituals bring out the best of what France has to offer. “L’histoire d’Alex” and “L’histoire de Tom” memoir sections alternate with more generic self-help advice. I expect Baker had a lot to do with the vernacular prose, which can be slick and clichéd. Still, it’s a good-natured, chatty book and it’s always worthwhile to be reminded to live in the moment, savour small pleasures, and insist on quality.

To be published by Penguin Life on September 8. (Read via Edelweiss)

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik (2000)

Longtime New Yorker writer Gopnik lived in Paris in 1995–2000 with his wife and young son; their daughter was born just before they left to return to New York City. Like other New Yorker regulars such as Elizabeth Kolbert and Susan Orlean, he is an excellent essayist. His book on French cuisine is a favourite of mine, and on this reread I most appreciated the pieces on food, and the general observations on being an expat:

Fish and plugs are the two great differences, the two things that are never quite alike from country to country. … This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop

We have a beautiful existence in Paris, but not a full life, and in New York we have a full life and an unbeautiful existence. (= his wife’s conclusion)

everything about moving to France has been wonderful, and everything about emigrating to France difficult.

That summary of French bureaucracy, so at odds with the cultural experience of living in Paris, reminds me of what David Lebovitz has to say on the subject. There is too much about politics and sports in this book for me, but I loved his close attention to his son’s development and the customs they create around Christmas but also in the everyday, such as an ongoing bedtime story about a baseball player (“The Rookie”) and cake and hot chocolate after swimming. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)

My original rating (2016):

My rating now:

Some apt quotes about Paris I encountered this month:

Adam Gopnik: “Paris in July is pretty much left to the tourists and the people who look after them” & “Perhaps in the end this is why Paris is ‘romantic.’ It marries both the voluptuous and restricted.”

David Lebovitz: “Like New Yorkers, Parisians have a complicated relationship to their city. They appreciate the beauty and excitement, but as Romain told me, Paris is dur (hard). That things aren’t easy—l’administration, the neighbors, the brusqueness, the fact that it’s not a perfect place—is what he likes about Paris.”

May Sarton: “I think Paris makes everyone wise … All Americans fall in love with Paris. It’s the coup de foudre.”

Overall favourites: the whole of my first batch!

Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein & Real Estate by Deborah Levy
Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews | Tagged: Adam Gopnik, Aleister Crowley, Alex Durand, Allie Kingsley Baker, Boston, Elaine Dundy, essays, France, French, grief, May Sarton, memoirs, New Yorker, Paris, Paris in July, rereading, self-help, soccer, Tom Carles, W. Somerset Maugham

Love Your Library: July 2026

By Rebecca Foster on July 27, 2026 | 33 Comments

Thanks to Eleanor, Marcie and Skai for posting about their recent library reading!

My library hosted a talk with Claire Fuller early in the month and I volunteered as a steward. It was a very hot evening, but I was still disappointed that there wasn’t a larger turnout for an author of her stature (though two members of my book club came). I hope she got a good impression of Newbury and its readers nonetheless. Her new novel, Hunger and Thirst, arose from a short story she wrote about Ursula’s first time at a restaurant. It’s about loneliness and belonging; necessity and desire – hunger being literal here but also figurative for everything missing in the protagonist’s life. Ursula lost her mother young and grew up in care. Fuller said she had to interview lots of people who were involved in the care system to get this right. (She disagrees with the view that you can’t write about things outside your own experience; you just have to be careful to represent them properly. For instance, she talked with her own daughter, who has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, before giving a character that condition.)

At 16, Ursula is working in the post room of an art college and living in a squat that has some properties of a haunted house. Her friend Sue is obsessed with horror films and they have a go at filming their own – until real life takes a horrific turn. A true crime documentary is used as a framing device in the novel, with snippets of interviews interspersed. Fuller said she had to take care not to reveal too much via these in terms of who was still alive. (No spoilers here or in the talk!) I was interested to hear that the author makes a cameo appearance in the novel, as a 19-year-old student rolling a cigarette, and that her spin-off story imagining Sue’s twin siblings several decades in the future, “A Land Beneath,” is in the anthology Unquiet Guests, which has just won a Shirley Jackson Award. Hunger and Thirst has also been a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime – an odd choice for that given the spookiness! – and she was impressed that they abridged the story by 80% but it still managed to hang together.

This was my least favourite of Fuller’s novels, unfortunately – for once I don’t think her flirtation with genre fiction really works – so I was more interested in her general thoughts about the writing and publishing process. She doesn’t plan at all, instead finding the plot as she goes along. If she’s not actively publicizing a book, she’ll be at her desk 9 to 6. (Though she does sometimes have to scramble to write a few words before her husband gets home from his library job.) She’s never had multi-book deals because she doesn’t want to deal with deadlines or publisher demands. Instead, her books are sold ad hoc. She said her agent is a useful go-between if there’s ever an issue, e.g. she didn’t like the original proposed cover for Bitter Orange; her agent conveyed that message and it got changed quietly without anyone falling out. There is film news about several of her books: filming is to begin in June for Our Endless Numbered Days, and both Bitter Orange and Unsettled Ground have also been optioned.