20 Books of Summer, 3–4: Cheri & All Things Are Too Small
A cancer story that treads the line between biography and fiction, and a set of high-brow essays about popular culture and modern life.
Cheri by Jo Ann Beard (2023)
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
Claire Keegan helped popularize the trend of publishing stand-alone stories as small hardback volumes. It was my first time reading Beard, and her style does in fact remind me of Keegan, along with Denis Johnson and Ann Patchett. This originally appeared in the literary magazine Tin House in 2002. It is the life story of Cheri Tremble, a real woman who was born in 1950 and died in 1997 via an illegal assisted suicide conducted by Dr. Jack Kevorkian. I’d heard a lot about Cheri, but his name was never mentioned – to avoid spoilers, of course, yet it’s key.
Cheri is an Amtrak ticket-taker who’s diagnosed with breast cancer in her mid-forties. After routine reconstructive surgery goes wrong and she’s left disabled, she returns to the Midwest and buys a home in Iowa. Here she’s supported by her best friends Linda and Wayne, and visited by her daughters Sarah and Katy. “Others have lived. She won’t be one of them. She feels it in her bones, quite literally.” When she hears the cancer has metastasized, she refuses treatment and starts making alternative plans. She’s philosophical about it; “Forty-six years is a long time if you look at it a certain way. Ursa is her seventh dog.”
Beard recounts all of this matter-of-factly (“the diminished lung capacity, the clangorous pain”), drawing on what is known of Cheri Tremble’s life and only adding her own stamp by making up memories that fuel flashbacks as Cheri drifts through pain-filled half-waking. One of these, of falling through the ice on a frozen pond as a child, appears early in the book and recurs at her moment of death. Beard also contrasts onlookers’ compassion or lack thereof.
It’s a potent portrait of everyday suffering and heroism and, in its way, an argument for assisted dying, which mustn’t be cloaked in secrecy as it was for Cheri – “They leave under cover of darkness, like duck hunters or criminals” to meet ‘Dr. Death’ in another state. I finished the story feeling underwhelmed; maybe I’ve simply read too much around the topic, but I couldn’t see how granting the subject interiority (which is what fiction is all about, yes, though the best biographies can do it, too) was enough to set it apart. (New purchase with birthday voucher, Hungerford Bookshop)
All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess by Becca Rothfeld (2024)
Rothfeld, the Washington Post’s nonfiction book reviewer, is on hiatus from a philosophy PhD at Harvard. Her academic background is clear from her vocabulary. The more accessible essays tend to be ones that were previously published in periodicals. Although the topics range widely – decluttering, true crime, consent, binge eating, online stalking – she’s assembled them under a dichotomy of parsimony versus indulgence. And you know from the title that she errs on the side of the latter. Luxuriate in lust, wallow in words, stick two fingers up to minimalism and mindfulness and be your own messy self. You might boil the message down to: Love what you love, because that’s what makes you an individual. And happy individuals – well, ideally, in an equal society that gives everyone the same access to self-fulfillment and art – make for a thriving culture. That, with some Barthes and Kant quotes.
The writing has verve, from the alliterative word choice to the forcefulness of Rothfeld’s opinions. But in places her points of reference (from classic cinema, especially) are so obscure that I had no way in and the pieces felt like they would never end. My two favourites were “More Is More,” in which she’s as down on fragmentary autofiction (Jenny Offill et al.) as she is on Marie Kondo; and “Normal Novels,” about how she finds Sally Rooney’s self-deprecation and communism problematic. I knew the subject matter well enough to follow the arguments here, even if I ultimately disagreed with them.
The U.S. cover featuring a Bosch painting is so much better!
Rothfeld is worth reading as a cultural critic, at least in small doses. She is clearly not interested in being a personal essayist, however, as the intimacy she keeps discussing in theory is almost completely absent. A piece on mental health, “Wherever You Go, You Could Leave,” opens with one tantalizing autobiographical line – “My first year of college, I attempted suicide and was promptly hastened home by an ominously smiling administrator” – then proceeds to poke fun at meditation for most of its 40 pages. It was interesting to see her fan-girl over her favourite novel, which I would even try if it wasn’t 480 pages: “I want to be reading Mating [by Norman Rush] constantly; I want to have been reading Mating forever, but always for the first time; I want everything in my life to be Mating and nothing but Mating”. Keep an eye out for the sequel: Actually, Moderation Is Cool: How I Learned to Temper My Expectations.
With thanks to Virago Press for the free copy for review.
20 Books of Summer Plan
It’s my seventh year in a row participating in Cathy’s 20 Books of Summer challenge, which starts on 1 June and runs through the 1st of September.
In most previous years I have chosen a theme.
2018: Books by women
2019: Fauna
2020: Food
2021: Colours
2022: Flora
Last year was a grab bag, but about a third of my choices were foodie again. I love picking the books for a themed challenge, but when it comes to actually reading them, I often get bored reading around the same topic, even if I had ensured a variety of fiction/nonfiction, author style, etc.
So this year the plan is simply to read hardback books that I own. I have at least 80–100 options, across genres and of all lengths; review copies, set-aside books and rereads are all possible. I fancy curating a blend of recent acquisitions and long-time shelf sitters. By the end of August I can decide whether they’re keepers or I want to pass them along to make room for others; the width of 20 hardbacks should be significant!
You’ll see options on shelves dotted all around the house:
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- Miscellaneous on bedroom shelves
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- Biographies
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- Bedside table
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- Classics (mix of read/unread)
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- Shelf of unread hardbacks
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- Foodie lit shelf with a few options
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- Three shelves: review copies; set-aside; to reread
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- Life writing case with one shelf of unread hardbacks
Here’s a tentative list of 20 hardbacks that are catching my eye right now – but I reserve the right to change my mind and ditch any or all of them in favour of other books that appeal more at the time!
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam (Free from a neighbour) – There was a lot of buzz about this a few years ago and I intended to read it right away but didn’t for whatever reason. My impression is of a literary novel that turns into a domestic thriller.
Cheri by Jo Ann Beard (New, Hungerford Bookshop with birthday voucher last year) – Cathy spoke very highly of this during Novellas in November. I daresay I’ll be grateful for one very short option over the summer. I wish more of my hardbacks were so slender!
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman (Secondhand, Awesomebooks.com) – This would be my one reread of the challenge. I’ve read all but one of Beauman’s novels and this is the one I remember most fondly. Zany historical fiction with a fantasy twist.
A Perfect Arrangement by Suzanne Berne (Secondhand, Community Furniture Project) – I don’t know anything about this but I’m expecting it to be, like her Women’s Prize winner, A Crime in the Neighborhood, light yet substantial and quietly gripping.
What I Thought I Knew by Alice Eve Cohen (Secondhand, Amazon with gift money) – I loved her 2015 memoir, The Year My Mother Came Back, so much that I sought out her previous one … but it has sat on the shelf unread for years.
On Trying to Keep Still by Jenny Diski (Secondhand, Awesomebooks.com) – I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Diski so far. This is a book of travel essays.
Girlhood by Melissa Febos (New, Christmas gift last year) – I was so impressed by her latest essay collection, Body Work, that I knew I had to read everything else she’s written. This previous collection mixes memoir and feminist social history.
Maurice by E.M. Forster (Secondhand, Wonder Book and Video?) – I’ve owned this for so long that I can’t remember when and where I got it, but I’m guessing it came from the used bookstore where I worked in college. My only major Forster work still unread.
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See by A. Kendra Greene (Secondhand, Bas Books & Home) – More essays to slake the desire for armchair travel. This one’s set entirely in Iceland and is all about quirky museum collections.
Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay (Secondhand, Christmas gift last year) – I’ll read anything Hay writes. This will be my third novel from her.
The Earthquake Bird by Susanna Jones (Secondhand, Hay-on-Wye in 2020) – Doesn’t feel like I bought it ages ago, but nearly four years have passed. I thought her When Nights Were Cold (historical fiction about women’s mountaineering) was fantastic in 2013.
The Memoir Club by Laura Kalpakian (Secondhand, 2nd & Charles) – I’ve long wanted to try this author and finally found one of her books on a clearance shelf in December. I’m expecting slightly fluffy fun à la Elizabeth Berg et al., perfect for summer.
City of the Mind by Penelope Lively (Secondhand, French LFL) – My most recent acquisition; why not get to it right away? Besides, Lively is one of four authors on this list (the others are Diski, Forster and Hay) by whom I own two or more unread books.
Home/Land by Rebecca Mead (Review copy) – An Anglo-American memoir should be right up my street. I don’t know why I’ve let this one sit around for ages.
A House Full of Daughters by Juliet Nicolson (Free from a neighbour) – A family memoir about Vita Sackville-West’s clan. I don’t often read biographical stuff (as opposed to straight autobiographies), so this is a good excuse.
Nine Inches by Tom Perrotta (Free from a neighbour) – Short stories of blue-collar America. I used to love Perrotta and have read most of his books. Maybe I’ll find him a little macho these days, though.
The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh by Ingrid Persaud (Signed copy won in a Faber Instagram giveaway) – I loved her debut novel, Love after Love, but have been daunted by the length of this follow-up, which I know to contain multiple POVs and patois.
Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (Review copy) – A quirky novel about queer siblings and their oddball family in New Zealand. I started it in April but haven’t made much of a dent, so this is my strategy for getting back into it.
All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld (Review copy) – Cultural criticism from the Washington Post’s in-house nonfiction book reviewer, a philosophy PhD candidate. I’ve sampled the first few pages so far.
Company by Shannon Sanders (Review copy) – Linked short stories about the members of one extended Black family. I got partway through one story earlier in the month but it’s time to get back into it in earnest.
What do you make of my list? See any other hardback options in the photos that I should prioritize instead?
20 Books of Summer, 18–20: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Sarah Hall, Meghan O’Rourke
Whew, it’s the final day of the challenge and I’ve managed to finish and write up a last batch of two novels and one nonfiction work: a magic realist tableau of love and death in Trinidad, a fateful romance set against the backdrop of the construction of an English dam in 1936, and a personal and cultural record of chronic illness and its treatment in contemporary America.
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo (2022)
I was sent a copy as part of the McKitterick Prize shortlist. The setting of a cemetery, Fidelis in Port Angeles, Trinidad, had vaguely attracted me even before its nomination. Emmanuel Darwin has turned his back on his Rastafarian upbringing to cut off his dreadlocks and work as a gravedigger (any contact with the dead is anathema in the religion). Meanwhile, Yejide, who lives in the hills, is losing her mother, Petronella, and gaining a legacy she’s not sure she wants: the women of her family are caretakers of the souls of the dead, keeping them alive in exchange for protection. Like the corbeaux, dark counterparts of tropical parrots, they tread the border of life and death. As All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days draw closer, Darwin and Yejide together have to decide whether they will be swallowed by the graveyard or escape it. While this was atmospheric and had alluring elements, the speculative angle was not notably well realized and the particular form of patois – eschewing all possessives and most verb conjugations – drove me nuts. I skimmed this one. (Free from the Society of Authors) 
Haweswater by Sarah Hall (2002)
I bought this in Cumbria one year and started reading it in Cumbria the next. Once I got home, however, there was little impetus to keep going. Were it not for the temporary local interest, I likely would not have finished this debut novel, which lurches between dry and melodramatic. As it is, I had to skim to the end. Had it been my first taste of Sarah Hall’s work, it might have put me off trying her again.
The frame is historical: Haweswater was indeed dammed to provide water for the city of Manchester in 1936, flooding the village of Mardale. Hall focuses on the people of Mardale, specifically the Lightburn family, who have persisted with farming despite its particular challenges in this hilly landscape. When Jack Liggett comes out from the City on behalf of the waterworks, he meets with hostility, including from the Lightburns’ daughter, Janet, who negotiates for their tenancy to continue until the dam is actually built. Then, well, you know, Romeo and Juliet and pride and prejudice and all that, and they start an affair. Hall has always written forthrightly about sex, starting here.
There’s a climactic final 60 pages in which three major characters die, two in symbolic acts of suicide, but it was a little too much tragedy, too late, for me after the dull midsection. I was intrigued, however, that a plot point turns on golden eagles being in the valley, as Wild Fell, another of my Haweswater-set reads, opens with the presence of the ghost of England’s last golden eagle, who vanished in 2015. This related snippet shows how over-the-top Hall’s use of dialect is: “Golden eagles wud be mor’less gone, gone or illegal these days, like, notta funni bizniz t’be gittin’ mixed up in, eh? What kinda daft bugger d’yer take mi for?” It’s like Thomas Hardy rustics – hard to take seriously. (Anne-Marie Sanderson’s haunting song “Haweswater” is based on the novel.) (Secondhand – Clutterbooks, Sedbergh, 2022) 
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke (2022)
Well before I was a devoted follower of the Barbellion Prize for books on disability and chronic illness, I was interested in these topics. For much of her forties and fifties, my mother struggled with fibromyalgia, one of a suite of illnesses misunderstood or even dismissed by the medical profession (as O’Rourke puts it, with a tongue-in-cheek nod to Jane Austen: “it is a truth universally acknowledged among the chronically ill that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick”). I hope this National Book Award nominee goes some way toward convincing skeptics that these are real conditions to be addressed by listening to patients and treating them holistically.
In 2012 the author became seriously ill and spent much of her thirties in a fog of pain, spending the equivalent of several days per month at doctors’ appointments and agreeing to ever more bizarre treatments in her desperation. Some of her issues were autoimmune and/or genetic: Hashimoto’s (thyroid), Ehlers-Danlos, POTS, endometriosis. She also dealt with infertility at the same time as she was trying to get well enough to contemplate having children. For her, the turning point was when she was diagnosed with Lyme disease and put on antibiotics. (Later she would travel to London to get fecal microbiota transplants to restore her microbiome.) Chronic Lyme is similar to long COVID, the true extent of which we’re only just beginning to understand; reading a list of the symptoms, I was tempted to remotely/retrospectively diagnose a few people I know with one or the other. It can be ever so slightly miserable reading about navigating all of these conditions, though nowhere near as miserable as it must have been for O’Rourke to live through them, of course.
I knew the author for her exquisite memoir of losing her mother to cancer, The Long Goodbye. Here the writing is more functional and journalistic, but I was still impressed by the attention she pays and the connections she draws; she’s also a poet, so she’s open to emotions and keen to capture them in words. In the face of the unexplained, she contends, chronically ill people are searching for meaning and narrative (restitution, chaos or quest, as Arthur Frank named the three options). She probes her own psyche: “had I become trapped in my identity as a sick person, someone afraid of living? If my mission in life had been reduced to being well at all costs, then the illness had won.” There’s a good balance of research, personal experience and general reflection in this one. (Passed along by Laura – thank you!) 
Related reads: Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick, It’s All in Your Head by Suzanne O’Sullivan, Waiting for Superman by Tracie White
And that’s a wrap! My summer reading was a little scattered and not as thematic as initially planned, but I stuck to my pledge to read only print books that I owned, and then cleared half of them from my shelves through reselling or donating to the Little Free Library. I’ll definitely call that a win.
My favourite from the 20 was a novel, Search by Michelle Huneven, then Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke (poetry), followed by two chef’s memoirs, A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain and Dirt by Bill Buford, and Dorthe Nors’ nature/travel essays. The one DNF and couple of skims are unfortunate, but these things happen.
Next year I fancy a completely open challenge – just, again, getting through books from my shelves. (Maybe all hardbacks?)
20 Books of Summer, 15–17: Bill Buford, Kristin Newman, J. Courtney Sullivan
One last foodie selection for the summer: a chef’s memoir set mostly in Lyon, France. Plus a bawdy travel memoir I DNFed halfway through, and an engaging but probably overlong contemporary novel about finances, generational conflict and women’s relationships.
Dirt: Adventures in French Cooking by Bill Buford (2020)
Buford’s Heat was one of the highlights of my foodie summer reading in 2020. This is a sequel insomuch as it tells you what he did next, after his Italian-themed apprenticeships. The short answer is that he went to Lyon to learn French cooking in similarly obsessive fashion. Without knowing a word of French. And this time he had a wife and twin toddlers in tow. He met several celebrated French chefs – Michel Richard, Paul Bocuse, Daniel Boulud – and talked his way into training at a famous cookery school and in Michelin-starred kitchens.
These experiences are discussed in separate essays, so I rather lost track of the timeline. It’s odd that it took the author so many years to get around to publishing about it all. You’d think his sons were still young, but in fact they’re now approaching adulthood. The other slightly unusual thing is the amount of space Buford devotes to his pet theory that French cuisine (up to ragout, at least) evolved from Italian. Unsurprisingly, the French don’t favour this idea; I didn’t particularly care one way or the other.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading about his encounters with French bureaucracy; the stress of working in busy (and macho) restaurants, where he’s eventually entrusted with cooking the staff lunch; and his discovery of what makes for good bread: small wheat-growing operations rather than industrially produced flour – his ideal was the 90-cent baguette from his local boulangerie. This could have been a bit more focused, and I’m still more likely to recommend Heat, but I am intrigued to go to Lyon one day. (Secondhand gift, Christmas 2022)
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman (2014)
(DNF, 156/291 pages) As featured in my Six Degrees post earlier in the month. Newman is a comedy writer for film and television (That ’70s Show, How I Met Your Mother, etc.). I liked how the title unabashedly centres things other than couplehood and procreation. When she’s travelling, she can be spontaneous, open-to-experience “Kristin-adjacent,” who loves doing whatever it is that locals do. And be a party girl, of course (“If there is one thing that is my favorite thing in the world, it’s making out on a dance floor”). However, this chronological record of her sexual conquests in Amsterdam, Paris, Russia, Argentina, etc. gets repetitive and raunchy. I also felt let down when I learned that she married and had a child right after she published it. So this was just her “Pietra Pan” stage before she copied everyone else. Which is fine, but were her drunken shenanigans really worth commemorating? (Secondhand, Bas Books & Home)
Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan (2020)
I got Emma Straub vibes from this big, juicy novel focusing on two women in upstate New York: Elisabeth, a married journalist who moved out of Brooklyn when she finally conceived via IVF; and Sam, a college art student who becomes her son Gil’s babysitter. Elisabeth misses her old crowd and doesn’t fit in with the middle-aged book club ladies in her suburban neighbourhood; Sam is almost her only friend, a confidante who’s also like a little sister (better, anyway, than Elisabeth’s real sister, who lives on tropical islands and models swimwear for inspirational Instagram posts). And Sam admires Elisabeth for simultaneously managing a career and motherhood with seeming aplomb.
But fundamental differences between the two emerge, mostly to do with economics. Elisabeth comes from money and takes luxury products for granted, while Sam is solidly working-class and develops a surprising affinity with Elisabeth’s father-in-law, George, who is near bankruptcy after Uber killed off his car service business. His pet theory, “The Hollow Tree,” explains that ordinary Americans have been sold the lie that they are responsible for their own success, when really they are in thrall to corporations and the government doesn’t support them as it should. This message hits home for Sam, who is distressed about the precarious situation of the Latina dining hall employees she has met via her work study job. Both Elisabeth and Sam try to turn their privilege to the good, with varied results.
Although I remained engrossed in the main characters’ stories, which unfold in alternating chapters, I thought this could easily have been 300 pages instead of nearly 400. In particular, Sullivan belabours Sam’s uncertainty over her thirtysomething English fiancé, Clive, whom Elisabeth refers to as “sleazy-hot.” The red flags are more than obvious to others in Sam’s life, and to us as readers, yet we get scene after scene meant to cast shade on him. I also kept wondering if first person would have been the better delivery mode for one or both strands. Still, this was perfect literary cross-over summer reading. (Little Free Library) 
#WITMonth, Part II: Wioletta Greg, Dorthe Nors, Almudena Sánchez and More
My next four reads for Women in Translation month (after Part I here) were, again, a varied selection: a mixed volume of family history in verse and fragmentary diary entries, a set of nature/travel essays set mostly in Denmark, a memoir of mental illness, and a preview of a forthcoming novel about Mary Shelley’s inspirations for Frankenstein. One final selection will be coming up as part of my Love Your Library roundup on Monday.
(20 Books of Summer, #13)
Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance by Wioletta Greg (2014)
[Translated from the Polish by Marek Kazmierski]
I loved Greg’s Swallowing Mercury so much that I jumped at the chance to read something else of hers in English translation – plus this was less than half price AND a signed copy. I had no sense of the contents and might have reconsidered had I known a few things: the first two-thirds is family wartime history in verse, the rest is a fragmentary diary from eight years in which Greg lived on the Isle of Wight, and the book is a bilingual edition, with Polish and English on facing pages (for the poems) or one after the other (for the diary entries). I’m not sure what this format adds for English-language readers; I can’t know whether Kazmierski has rendered anything successfully. I’ve always thought it must be next to impossible to translate poetry, and it’s certainly hard to assess these as poems. They are fairly interesting snapshots from her family’s history, e.g., her grandfather’s escape from a stalag, and have quite precise vocabulary for the natural world. There’s also been an attempt to create or reproduce alliteration. I liked the poem the title phrase comes from, “A Fairytale about Death,” and “Readers.” The short diary entries, though, felt entirely superfluous. (New purchase – Waterstones bargain, 2023) 
(20 Books of Summer, #14)
A Line in the World: A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors (2021; 2022)
[Translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight]
Nors’s first nonfiction work is a surprise entry on this year’s Wainwright Prize nature writing shortlist. I’d be delighted to see this work in translation win, first because it would send a signal that it is not a provincial award, and secondly because her writing is stunning. Like Patrick Leigh Fermor, Aldo Leopold or Peter Matthiessen, she doesn’t just report what she sees but thinks deeply about what it means and how it connects to memory or identity. I have a soft spot for such philosophizing in nature and travel writing.
You carry the place you come from inside you, but you can never go back to it.
I longed … to live my brief and arbitrary life while I still have it.
This eternal, fertile and dread-laden stream inside us. This fundamental question: do you want to remember or forget?
Nors lives in rural Jutland – where she grew up, before her family home was razed – along the west coast of Denmark, the same coast that reaches down to Germany and the Netherlands. In comparison to Copenhagen and Amsterdam, two other places she’s lived, it’s little visited and largely unknown to foreigners. This can be both good and bad. Tourists feel they’re discovering somewhere new, but the residents are insular – Nors is persona non grata for at least a year and a half simply for joking about locals’ exaggerated fear of wolves.
Local legends and traditions, bird migration, reliance on the sea, wanderlust, maritime history, a visit to church frescoes with Signe Parkins (the book’s illustrator), the year’s longest and shortest days … I started reading this months ago and set it aside for a time, so now find it difficult to remember what some of the essays are actually about. They’re more about the atmosphere, really: the remote seaside, sometimes so bleak as to seem like the ends of the earth. (It’s why I like reading about Scottish islands.) A bit more familiarity with the places Nors writes about would have pushed my rating higher, but her prose is excellent throughout. I also marked the metaphors “A local woman is standing there with a hairstyle like a wolverine” and “The sky looks like dirty mop-water.”
With thanks to Pushkin Press for the proof copy for review.
Pharmakon by Almudena Sánchez (2021; 2023)
[Translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore]
This is a memoir in micro-essays about the author’s experience of mental illness, as she tries to write herself away from suicidal thoughts. She grew up on Mallorca, always feeling like an outsider on an island where she wasn’t a native. Did her depression stem from her childhood, she wonders? She is also a survivor of ovarian cancer, diagnosed when she was 16. As her mind bounces from subject to subject, “trying to analyze a sick brain,” she documents her doctor visits, her medications, her dreams, her retweets, and much more. She takes inspiration from famous fellow depressives such as William Styron and Virginia Woolf. Her household is obsessed with books, she says, and it’s mostly through literature that she understands her life. The writing can be poetic, but few pieces stand out on the whole. My favourite opens: “Living in between anxiety and apathy has driven me to flowerpot decorating.”
With thanks to Fum d’Estampa Press for the free copy for review.
And a bonus preview:
Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein by Anne Eekhout (2021; 2023)
[Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson]
Anne Eekhout’s fourth novel and English-language debut is an evocative recreation of two momentous periods in Mary Shelley’s life that led – directly or indirectly – to the composition of her 1818 masterpiece. Drawing parallels between the creative process and motherhood and presenting a credibly queer slant on history, the book is full of eerie encounters and mysterious phenomena that replicate the Gothic science fiction tone of Frankenstein itself. The story lines are set in the famous “Year without a Summer” of 1816 (the storytelling challenge with Lord Byron) and during a period in 1812 that she spent living in Scotland with the Baxter family; Mary falls in love with the 17-year-old daughter, Isabella. 
Coming out on 3 October from HarperVia. My full review for Shelf Awareness is pending.
20 Books of Summer, 11–12: Gillian Clarke Poetry and Ross Gay Essays
It might not look like I’ll finish the 20 Books of Summer challenge in time, but I’ve got it all planned out and should be reviewing the last few on the final day! My initial foodie idea has turned into a micro-theme that joins only about six of the titles in total. I’ve swapped in various other things along the way, such as a couple of poetry collections and novellas (note to self: always include at least a few very short books!), but the focus has been on getting through stuff from my own shelves, especially recent acquisitions and work by women.
Today I have an excellent poetry collection infused with the language of gardening and geology and reflecting on two crises of the early 2000s, and a book of mini-essays about noticing the small pleasures that make life worth living.
Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke (2004)
I look out for black-and-white Carcanet spines whenever I’m scanning the poetry section in a secondhand bookshop. Clarke’s was a new name for me (the National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016, she’s now 86) but the blurb attracted me and this ended up being exactly the sort of poetry I love: full of colours and nature imagery, profuse with alliteration and slant rhymes, relishing its specialist terminology, and taking on the serious subject matter of manmade disasters. Several medium-length sequences are devoted to gardening (“The Middleton Poems” and “Nine Green Gardens”) and geology (“The Stone Poems”); some earlier pieces are ekphrastic, or dedicated to particular poets.
Clarke remembers the delight she took as a child in the unfamiliar vocabulary of the Bible, “a narrative of spells / in difficult columns on those moth-thin pages, / words to thrill the heart with a strange music.” The book teems with animals – though, alas, many of them are dead (as in “Adders” and “Taxidermy”). The title sequence, indeed is about the foot and mouth disease outbreak that decimated the UK livestock population in 2001. Farmers were forced to cull their flocks and news footage showed mountains of carcasses burning. She hovers over the catastrophe, imagining herself into the minds of family farmers, gossiping onlookers, and a traumatized vet. Just as one crisis was coming to an end, September 11 came – another unforgettable tragedy, commemorated with “The Fall.” A very affecting collection, all told. I’ll be sure to read more by Clarke. (Secondhand – Bridport Old Books, 2023) 
A favourite passage, from “The Yew Tunnel in Winter”:
Listen to sap rise, unstoppable flood,
for all the centuries as the tap-roots grew,
pumping through branches to the stirring bud
from deepest earth. In graveyards they say a yew
sends a root into the mouths of all the dead.
Here, sense all that power snowed in and still,
shut in the dream of winter and history
at the end of a muffled lane
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay (2019)
“Perhaps delight is like after the great cosmic finger has pointed at something, and that something … appears.”
Gay is better known as a poet, with several collections to his name, and teaches at Indiana University. This book project started as a challenge to self to write a daily essay about something that was good in his life, quickly and longhand. He started on his 42nd birthday (August 1) and continued for a full year; there are 102 micro-essays here, so he managed one every few days. They are about everything or nothing much, depending on how you look at it: an adored foodstuff or piece of music, a dream, a surprise encounter with a stranger, what was growing in his garden at the time, etc.
One essay is titled “The Jenky,” about the crooked and makeshift. Gay watches the birds enjoying a dead tree in his (deliberately neglected) yard, and notes a sign reading “Caution: Bees on Bridge” and thereby making space for nature. A few of the more memorable incidents involve plane travel. One time he flies with a tomato seedling in his lap and finds that people treat him more kindly. He gets an unexpectedly enthusiastic response from a security guard when he mentions that he’s on his way to read poems and realizes later that, by some quirk of regional American accents, the man thought he’d said “reading palms.”
Although I enjoyed the book more as I went along, something held me back from loving it. There weren’t enough sentiments that I recognized, and the loose, informal style wasn’t always for me. While you get glimpses into his upbringing and travels, I tend to prefer a memoir. It may also be that Gay and I are just different personalities. The delight he takes in other people’s oddities suggests he might be an extrovert; he truly enjoys being spoken to, or even touched (on the shoulder, for instance), by strangers, whereas I don’t particularly. Part of this is about minority group bonding for him: he writes of the “Negreeting” exchanged between Black people passing each other on a street. There were also a few too many mentions of him peeing into bottles or in his car.
So I liked this, but maybe not enough to try more by Gay, though I should probably see what his verse is like. I was glad to have read it, especially when I realized I can only think of about 20 books I’ve read by Black men. Ever. Yikes. (New – Christmas gift, 2022)
#WITMonth, Part I: de Beauvoir, Jansson, NDiaye
My first four reads for Women in Translation month were quite a varied selection: a sobering autobiographical essay about the loss of a mother, a characteristically impish children’s novel, a confoundingly elliptical family memoir, and a preview of a forthcoming Mexican novel about women’s friendships and handicraft. Another four coming up later in August.
A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir (1964; 1965)
[Translated from the French by Patrick O’Brian]
“When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.”
I’d read a lot about Simone de Beauvoir but not one of her own works until this reissue came my way. It was right up my street as a miniature bereavement memoir (just 84 pages) that doesn’t shy away from the physical details of decline or the emotional complications of a fraught mother–daughter relationship.
In October 1963, de Beauvoir was in Rome when she got a call informing her that her mother had had an accident. Expecting the worst, she was relieved – if only temporarily – to hear that it was a fall at home, resulting in a broken femur. But when Françoise de Beauvoir got to the hospital, what at first looked like peritonitis was diagnosed as stomach cancer with an intestinal obstruction. Her daughters knew that she was dying, but she had no idea (from what I’ve read, this paternalistic notion that patients must be treated like children and kept ignorant of their prognosis is more common on the Continent, and continues even today).
Over the next month, de Beauvoir and her sister Poupette took turns visiting. Initially alarmed by their mother’s condition, they soon grew used to the deterioration. “I was not worried by her nakedness any more: it was no longer my mother, but a poor tormented body.” They found her in varying states of awareness and discomfort. “In this race between pain and death we most earnestly hoped that death would come first.” Some nurses were better than others. De Beauvoir makes tantalizing references to the standoff between her and her mother about the Catholic faith Simone left behind. (I’ll need to read Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter for more on that.) Even the hope of heaven didn’t fully neutralize self-pity and physical suffering for the dying woman because she feared her daughters wouldn’t be joining her.
The title is what a nurse told the grieving daughters: that their mother’s had been a very easy death in the end (and an upper-class one, de Beauvoir adds). The word used in French for easy, douce, can also be translated as “gentle,” a tie-in to the epigraph from Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Is it better for a loved one to die suddenly, or protractedly? I’ve debated this with myself and a few others since my mother’s death from a stroke in October. Ultimately, it’s pointless to ask; any death is an affront, hard to accept and adjust to no matter how much warning is given. I appreciated how matter-of-factly and concisely de Beauvoir’s essay encapsulates the duties and feelings surrounding a death. Frank and unshowy yet potent, this is a classic of the subgenre.
Published as Fitzcarraldo Editions Classics No. 2 in June. With thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
(Books of Summer, #10)
Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson (1948; 1950)
[Translated from the Swedish by Elizabeth Portch]
My sixth Moomins book, and ninth by Jansson overall. The novella’s gentle peril is set in motion by the discovery of the Hobgoblin’s Hat, which transforms anything placed within it. As spring moves into summer, this causes all kind of mild mischief until Thingumy and Bob, who speak in spoonerisms, show up with a suitcase containing something desired by both the Groke and the Hobgoblin, and make a deal that stops the disruptions.
As always, the creatures and events, conveyed by Jansson’s black-and-white drawings as much as by her words, are inventive and whimsical. There’s a cosy charm to the seasonal rituals, like the end-of-summer pancake party here. But what I value even more is the pointed accounts of the secondary characters’ neuroses. The Moomins are generally on a pretty even keel, though there is mention of Moominpappa’s sense of being hard done by because of childhood bullying and an enduring lack of respect. However, characters like the Muskrat and the Hemulen get a wry smile and shake of the head from me because their predicaments are so familiar: The Muskrat, terrified of mortifying situations, decides the life of a hermit might be preferable; the Hemulen gives up stamp collecting and switches to botanizing because there’s no joy in a finished quest, only in an ongoing search. The Moomins books offer the perfect combination of the familial and routine with the novel and adventurous. Even staid adults should give them a try. (Little Free Library)
Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye (2005; 2015)
[Translated from the French by Jordan Stump]
I tend to love a memoir that tries something new or experimental with the form (such as Constructing a Nervous System or In the Dream House), but this was a step too far for me; the self referred to in the title is almost wholly absent. NDiaye, a French–Senegalese author, opens in 2003 with the expected flooding of the Garonne in southwest France. Fragments of narrative from 2000–2003 chart her encounters with various women dressed in green, starting with one she thinks she sees under a banana tree (though her four children see nothing). Then there’s Katia Depetiteville, dead 10 years … NDiaye’s stepmother, once her childhood best friend; her friend Jenny’s rival for Ivan’s affection; and her mother, who now has a new family. What is a ‘woman in green’? The author explicitly associates the colour with cruelty, with presumably the usual connotation of jealousy as well. But it still feels arbitrary.
It’s all rather dreamlike, with poetic repetition, rhetorical questions and black-and-white photos that seem marginally relevant. “I’m saying to myself: Is all this really real?” NDiaye writes, and the reader will surely be asking the same. “I’m always interested in stories,” she adds, and while I’d agree, I need to know that they’re being told to build to some greater meaning. It was only in the last fifth of the book, when the author goes to a literary symposium in Ouagadougou and visits her father (a many-times-married former restaurateur and amateur architect now suffering from cataracts) and stepmother that I felt like there was a purpose: a bringing together of past and present for psychological clarity. I was relieved that this was only 112 pages. (Edelweiss) 
The 10th anniversary edition is being reissued by Two Lines Press next month.
And a bonus preview:
Cross-Stitch by Jazmina Barrera (2021; 2023)
[Translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney]
In the inventive debut novel by Mexican author Jazmina Barrera, a sudden death provokes an intricate examination of three young women’s years of shifting friendship. Their shared hobby of embroidery occasions a history of women’s handiwork, woven into a relationship study that will remind readers of works by Elena Ferrante and Deborah Levy. Citlali, Dalia, and Mila had been best friends since middle school. Mila, a writer with a young daughter, is blindsided by news that Citlali has drowned off Senegal. While waiting to be reunited with Dalia for Citlali’s memorial service, she browses her journal to revisit key moments from their friendship, especially travels in Europe and to a Mexican village. Cross-stitch becomes its own metaphorical language, passed on by female ancestors and transmitted across social classes. Reminiscent of Still Born and A Ghost in the Throat. (Edelweiss)
Coming out on 7 November from Two Lines Press. My full review for Shelf Awareness is pending.
20 Books of Summer, 9: Search by Michelle Huneven (2022)
Now this is what I want from my summer reading: pure pleasure; lit fic full of gossip and good food; the kind of novel I was always relieved to pick up and spend time with, usually as a reward for having gotten through my daily allotment in paid-review books and some more challenging reads. The Kirkus review was appealing enough to land this a place on my Most Anticipated list last year, but the only way to get hold of a copy was to spend my Bookshop.org voucher from my sister and have her bring it over in her suitcase in December.
The setup to Search might seem niche to many: a Southern California Unitarian church undergoes a months-long process to replace its retiring senior minister via a nationwide application process. But in fact it will resonate with, and elicit chuckles from, anyone who’s had even the most fleeting brush with bureaucracy – whether serving on a committee, conducting interviews, or trying to get a unanimous decision out of three or more people – and the framing story makes it warm and engrossing.
Dana Potowski is a middle-aged restaurant critic who has just released a successful cookbook based on what she grows on her smallholding. When she’s invited to be part of an eight-member task force looking for the right next minister for Arroyo Unitarian Universalist Community Church –
a “little chugger” of a church in a small unincorporated suburb of LA … three acres of raffish gardens, an ugly sanctuary, a deliquescing Italianate mansion, a jewel-box chapel used mostly for yoga classes
– she reluctantly agrees but soon wonders whether this could be interesting fodder for a second memoir (with identifying details changed, to be sure). You’ll quickly forget about the layers of fictionalization and become immersed in the interactions between the search committee members, who are of different genders, races and generations. They range from stalwart members, including a former church president and Dana the one-time seminarian, to a Filipino American recent Evangelical defector with a husband and young children.
Like the ministerial candidates, they’re all gloriously individual. You realize, however, that most of them have agendas and preconceived ideas. The church as a whole agreed that it wanted a gifted preacher and skilled site manager, but there’s also a collective sense that it’s time for a demographic change. A woman of colour is therefore a priority after decades of white male control, but a facilitator warns: “If you’re too focused on a specific category, you could overlook the best hire for your needs. Our goal is to get beyond thinking in categories to see the whole person.” Still, fault lines develop, with the younger contingent on the panel pushing for a thirtysomething candidate and the others giving more weight to experience.
Huneven develops all of her characters through the dialogue and repartee at the search committee’s meetings, which always take place over snacks, if not full meals with cocktails. Dana is not the only gifted home cook among the bunch (a section at the end gives recipes for some of the star dishes, like “Belinda’s Preserved Lemon Chicken,” “Dana’s Seafood Chowder,” and “Jennie’s Midmorning Glory Muffins”), and she also takes turns inviting her fellow committee members out on her restaurant assignments for the paper.
I was amazed by the formality and intensity of this decision-making process: a lengthy application packet, Skype interviews, watching/reading multiple sermons by the candidates, speaking to their references, and then an entire weekend of in-person activities with each of three top contenders. It’s clear that Huneven did a lot of research about how this works. The whole thing starts out casual and fun – Dana refers to the church and minister packets as “dating profiles” – but grows increasingly momentous. Completely different worship and leadership styles are at stake. People have their favourites, and with the future of a beloved institution at stake, compromise comes to feel more like a failure of integrity.
Keep in mind, of course, that we’re getting all of it from Dana’s perspective. She sets herself up as the objective recorder, but our admiration and distrust can only be guided by hers. And she’s a very likable narrator: intelligent and quick-witted, fond of gardening, passionate about food and spirituality, comfortable in her quiet life with her Jewish husband and her dog and donkeys. It’s possible not everyone will relate to her, or read meal plans and sermon transcripts as raptly, as I did. At the same time as I was totally absorbed in the narrative, I was also mentally transported to churches and pastors past, to petty dramas the ministers in my family have navigated, to the one Unitarian service I attended in Santa Fe in the summer of 2005… For me, this had it all. Both light and consequential; nostalgic and resolute about the future; frustrated with yet tender towards humanity. Delicious! I’ll seek out more by Huneven.
(New purchase with birthday money) 
Books of Summer, 6–8: Elizabeth Berg, Patricia Lockwood & Wendy Mitchell
Although I have foodie lit as a background theme for the summer’s reading, my main goal is simply to read books that I own, especially recent acquisitions and long-time shelf-sitters (whereas last year, in slavish conformity to a theme, I substituted in a bunch of library books, review books and e-books). My latest batch includes a slightly twee novel, an outlandish poetry collection, and an uneven nonfiction swan song.
The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg (2005)
From the cover, I was expecting this to be more foodie than it was. The protagonist does enjoy cooking for other people and reading cookbooks, though. Betta Nolan, 55 and recently widowed by cancer, drives from Boston to the Midwest and impulsively purchases a house in a Chicago suburb, something she and her late husband had fantasized about doing in retirement. It’s the kind of sweet little town where the only realtor is a one-woman operation and Betta as a newcomer automatically gets invited onto the local radio show. She also reconnects with her college roommates, tries dating, and mulls over her dream of opening a women’s boutique that sells silk scarves, handmade journals, essential oils and brownies.
While Berg is true to the shifting emotions that accompany grief, and gives Betta plenty of cute opportunities to make friends across the generations – with Lydia, the nonagenarian former owner of her house, now in a nursing home; Matthew, the fickle young man who does some odd jobs for her; and Benny, the next-door neighbor’s nine-year-old boy – I found the subplot about Matthew’s messy house and relationships silly, and Betta’s “What a Woman Wants” shop idea is so stereotyping I could feel myself rolling my eyes. Still, Berg’s novels, of which this was my fifth, are always reliably light and pleasant reads in an Anne Tyler vein. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood (2014)
One of the more bizarre books I’ve ever read. I loved both Priestdaddy and No One Is Talking About This, but had no idea what to expect from Lockwood’s poems. They’re somewhere between absurdist monologues and thought experiments, often choosing an object or abstraction to animate (“A Recent Transformation Tries to Climb the Stairs”) and generally sexualized to the max (“Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It”). Though they’re in stanzas, they aren’t heavy on poetic techniques. Some tangential topics are Bambi, Canada, basketball, waterfalls, King Kong adaptations, American poetry, Shirley Temple, and childhood hobbies like Animorphs, Egyptology and Magic Eye puzzles.
But really, her poetry is only “about” things in the loosest sense; the repetition, wordplay and snark are paramount. If you’ve heard of one, it’s likely to be the lengthy “Rape Joke,” which went as viral as it’s possible for a poem to and is, ironically, probably the sincerest entry here. Presumably based on her own bad experience with a teenage boyfriend, it is heartbreakingly banal: “The rape joke is that he was your father’s high school student … The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. … The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say?”
A couple of my favourites were “List of Cross-Dressing Soldiers” and “He Marries the Stuffed-Owl Exhibit at the Indiana Welcome Center”; “The Father and Mother of American Tit-Pics,” in which a resurrected Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman swap genders, had some of the more outrageous lines: “Walt Whitman is the Number Two Beach Body every year, because look at the way he snapped back into shape only months after giving birth to American Poetry.” Not really like any other poetry I’ve ever read. (New purchase with Christmas money)
One Last Thing: Conversations on Life, Death and Assisted Dying by Wendy Mitchell with Anna Wharton (2023)
“We talk so often about prolonging life, but we are actually prolonging death by not discussing the suffering part of it.”
Wendy Mitchell’s first two books, Somebody I Used to Know and What I Wish People Knew About Dementia, are valuable peeks into daily life with young-onset Alzheimer’s. She has been a dedicated activist and educator in the nine years since her diagnosis, and I admire the work she’s done to get dementia services into the public eye.
The problem with her final book is that I’ve read so much about preparations for dying and the question of assisted suicide and she doesn’t bring much new to the discussion – apart from the specific viewpoint of someone deciding when and how to end their life when they don’t know what the future course of their illness looks like. Mitchell believes people should have this choice, but current UK law does not allow for assisted dying. A loophole is voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED), which she deems her best option. She stopped attending assessments in 2017 and has filed forms with her GP refusing treatment – her nightmare situation is being reliant on care in hospital and she doesn’t want to become that future, dependent Wendy.
Like Henry Marsh’s farewell book, And Finally, this gives the impression of having been written in a hurry and rushed into print, and so could have been edited more. As it is, it’s fairly scattered, repetitive and unpolished. The interviews could all be streamlined and tidied up, and the one with Kathryn Mannix is split up in a confusing way.
For readers new to the topic, however, this could be a useful introduction to the issues. It’s up-to-date in that Mitchell attends a Death Café, meets an end-of-life doula, and talks through the different forms (power of attorney, advance directive and so on) with experts. I also thought the epilogue was a lovely touch: after going for a ‘wing walking’ airplane adventure, she imagines that, having taken a bus into York, she sees her pre-diagnosis self and tells her everything she would want her to know, good and bad, about the challenges to come. (Proof copy from Hungerford Bookshop Summer Reading Celebration) [Different subtitle on finished edition?]
Summery Reading, Part I: The Greengage Summer & Sunburn by Watson
Brief thoughts on a first pair of summer-themed reads: coming-of-age stories about teenage girls who trade England for somewhere more exciting – France or Greece – for a summer and awaken to the complications of sex when let down by the adults in their lives. Both:
The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden (1958)
We wanted to read something by Godden in my book club’s women’s classics subgroup, and decided on this almost purely for the evocative title. Cecil is the second of five children who run amok at a French hotel while their father is botanizing in Tibet and their mother in hospital with an infected horsefly bite. Hotel staff and hangers-on are engaged in all sorts of shenanigans – affairs and casual molestation of the maids, for instance – and the children, caught up in the thrill of it, attach themselves to Eliot, the English lover of Mademoiselle Zizi. The adults get Cecil and her older sister, Joss, drunk on champagne. Joss is the belle of the ball and attracts an inappropriate suitor; Cecil gets her first period and tells Eliot, of all people. It’s a familiar message in mid-century fiction, I suppose: loss of sexual innocence leads to disaster. I found this quite melodramatic, with a sudden ending; it didn’t live up to the terrific premise. I was similarly underwhelmed by Black Narcissus. (University library)
Sunburn by Andi Watson; illus. Simon Gane (2022)
We open in suburban London in what appears to be the 1950s. Sixteen-year-old Rachel is offered a lucky escape from a summer of working at the butcher shop to stay with her parents’ friends, the Warners, at their home on a Greek island. Their life is a heady mix of languorous shopping, swimming and nightly parties. There’s a big contrast between the sophisticated expats and the local peasantry. When Rachel meets Ben, a fellow English teenager, it seems like her idyllic summer is complete, but things sour between them. Over the course of the book, Rachel realizes that not all grown-ups can be trusted. The plot took a twist I wasn’t expecting, which is always refreshing, but I should probably have been ready for it based on the depictions. The graphic novel is all in shades of blue, with white and light brown accents, as befitting the Greek flag and scenery. A problem I had was that most of the characters look the same – the artist has just the one way of drawing faces, so Rachel, Mrs. Warner and Ben have pretty much identical features. I would have catalogued this in YA. (Public library)
Both at least had a steamy summer atmosphere! My next seasonal read, picked up from the library today, will be One Midsummer’s Day by Mark Cocker, which is all about swifts. We have a pair nesting in our eaves again this year – hurrah! – and have been enjoying watching their (albeit diminished) screaming parties tear down the streets on warm summer evenings.
Any “summer” or “sun” books for you this year?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 