Books I Feel Richer for Having Read in 2021

I spent more time reading in 2021 than I have in years (I think. I don’t know. This was the first year I’ve ever tracked my reading and I was going to write a few sentences about that here, but that writing got me thinking about something bigger that I hope to articulate and post separately if I can figure it out.) Let’s keep this post simple. Reading helps me. Here are eleven books I feel richer for having read in 2021, categorized and unranked. They range widely, but if I have to pick one word to describe them all, I’ll go with “unflinching.” Yes, even (and maybe especially) the YA graphic memoir.  

Five Novels

Landslide, Susan Conley, 2021
Finished on March 30
Provenance: Special ordered from The Book Rack

A family story set in a struggling Maine fishing village. The portrayal of mothering teenage boys and loving taciturn Mainers broke my heart. I found the narrative voice to be funny and self aware, which might not be clear from the rest of this description.

Damnation Spring, Ash Davidson, 2021
Finished on May 10
Provenance: Galley sent to me by the author! But I bought a hardcover later… from the Book Rack

A novel set in California logging country in the year of my birth (coincidence). The protagonist cuts down redwoods, and yet somehow I’m rooting for him to be allowed to keep going. The details of logging are fascinating, but I was in it for the family at the center of the story. Davidson has an unflinching eye and a sly wit. And yes, the rumors are true! She was my student in Fiction 210 at the University of Arizona nearly twenty years ago. Her stories blew me away then, and she got even better.

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2015
Finished on June 18
Provenance: Picked up a used copy at the Book Rack and then it languished on my shelf for a few years

I was slow to start this one because I knew it would be a demanding read. And it was, but I found the narrative voice — which comes in the form of a confession — irresistible. I’m generally drawn to quiet realism, and this is more like a combination of existentialism and satire, but the voice is bristling with intelligence and pathos and there is a great deal of plot. The form and style feel perfect for the story. It’s not clear whether the narrator’s sacrifices in having lived a double life have made much difference for the cause. I like that.

Transcription, Kate Atkinson, 2018
Finished on September 27
Provenance: Fox Library

A slippery, atmospheric novel that gives proper attention to the bureaucracy and absurdity of spying, told with mordant wit. Set in London during World War II and in 1950. It’s thematically similar to The Sympathizer, and equally ambiguous, but the style is masquerading as quiet realism.

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, 1850
Finished on December 9
Provenance: Inherited from my Uncle Chuck (more on Chuck and his books in “My Uncle’s Books,” an essay I wrote for the Ploughshares blog)

Reading this book was one of the highlights of my year. I read Chuck’s Modern Library copy, with burgundy cloth cover, gold details (which I scuffed), ribbon bookmark, original illustrations, and Bible paper pages. It felt right. I love how if you read through the chapter titles, you can surmise the whole plot of the book. No one can paint a character as efficiently or as cuttingly as Dickens. I was afraid this book would take me forever to read, and it did take a while, but mostly because I slowed myself down so I had the comfort of returning to good, cosy company. I haven’t read much Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities is up next.

Two Memoirs

Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon, 2019
Finished May 31
Provenance: Robbins Library request

This memoir of growing up Black in Mississippi is arresting in its honesty. I felt I was getting the truth of Laymon’s experience in every sentence, and as I read, I found myself pausing more than once to reflect on what a generous and rare act that is. The book is written as a letter to his complicated mother, and Laymon sent me to read James Baldwin’s essay “Faulkner and Desegregation,” published in 1956, which led me to read more Baldwin essays — some for the first time and others again. This was a good idea, of course, and it came with the bonus of allowing me to pull another one of my uncle’s books off the shelf.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May, 2020
Finished October 25
Provenance: Fox Library

I have the good fortune to live a few blocks from a little branch library. This title called to me from the speed read shelf while I was in the middle of reading David Copperfield. Much of the book takes place in Dickens’ part of England, so the landscape was familiar, and I paused to devour it in a couple of days. The title flirts with self help, and the book is very much about May helping herself, but it’s really an honest, searching memoir of a difficult year, brimming with acts of careful attention. It’s not the book she set out to write, which only makes it better. I immediately procured a copy of her earlier memoir, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and read it next. I’ve recommended Wintering to a lot of people, and I bought my own copy after I surrendered it to the library because I knew I would return to it, and I have. Here’s something to return to as we find ourselves in the middle of another winter:

“When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: What is this winter all about? I asked myself: What change is coming?”

A Reread

The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, 1920
Finished February 4
Provenance: Inherited from my uncle Chuck

This was my only reread of the year, and what a reread it was! So little is spoken and yet so much is understood. House of Mirth is still my favorite, and one of my most frequently reread books, but this one is a pleasure and a page turner, too. Edith Wharton gets it!

A Shared Read

Guts, Raina Telgemeier, 2019
Finished October 15
Provenance: School Book Fair, 2019

My son has been dealing with Irritable Bowel Syndrome for the past year. One morning, after a string of absences and early dismissals due to stomach symptoms, we snuggled on the couch and read this book straight through together. He’d read it many times, but I hadn’t. We read silently, turning the pages when it was time for both of us to move along. I asked him questions and he used the narrator’s experience to help me understand his experiences. It was a hard morning, and it was the best thing we could have done. I’m happy to report that he’s been improving steadily during the past couple of months.

A Book About Writing

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit, Brenda Ueland, 1938
Finished November 19
Provenance: Gift from my Mom, at least twenty years ago

My mom has always been a great supporter of my writing, and she’s given me many writing books over the years. This one has been on my shelf for a long time and has survived several moves without ever having been read. It was always in danger when I culled books, but I remember, more than once, opening it ready to admit I was never going to read it, and then reading a few pages and realizing I should give it a chance. I reached for it during a dry spell in my writing life, and it was that feeling of finding just the friend you need when you need a friend very badly. I wish I could have been in Brenda’s class at the Minneapolis YMCA in the 1930s. She’s astute, she’s funny, and most of all, she’s encouraging. A few ideas I’ve taken aboard from her: microscopic truthfulness, moodling, and this:

“Know that it is good to work. Work with love and think of liking it when you do it. It is easy and interesting. It is a privilege. There is nothing hard about it but your anxious vanity and fear of failure.”

It’s amazing how much space anxious vanity and fear of failure can take up, but I’m trying to move them to smaller containers and store them in the way back of a cabinet — behind the things I actually need.

A Book I’m In the Middle of Reading

The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay
Provenance: Book Rack special order

I started this right before Thanksgiving, and I’ve been reluctant to finish it. These brief essays are mostly about savoring something small, and in that spirit, I want to savor them, too, and to let them form a bridge from 2021 to 2022 for me. Although the pieces are about finding delight, they also contain difficult truths. Gay talks about the book as being about “the virtues and the labor of delight.” Here’s a short video of him reading a story about flying with a tomato seedling. Guaranteed smiles.

 

A Plantiversary

My friend gave me a prayer plant last January.

She’d propagated it from a cutting, and I was touched. It was adorable, just a few inches high, with four healthy leaves. I walked the few blocks home, hopeful but nervous, because I am not good with plants. Explain it to me like I don’t even know what a plant is, I said. She did. I placed it in what I thought was the right light. My family admired its diurnal movements. Each morning, it lowered its leaves. Each night, it raised them.

Within days, the leaves began to turn yellow and wither. I moved my new plant all over the place and texted my friend photos, frantically seeking advice. Pick a spot and leave it there, she said. Keep the soil moist. I think it will be okay. This happens sometimes. New growth pushed its way up the middle, a leaf furled so tightly it resembled a blade of grass. As it grew, one of the yellow leaves gave up the ghost, turning brown and drying to a husk. I clipped it off, worried.

The new leaf opened, looking considerably less hearty than its predecessor. I watched as this zero-sum game played out three more times. The pace was excruciating, each episode taking a couple of months. I removed the dead leaves and tracked the progress closely, letting up only when I trusted that the new leaves were holding their own.I kept the soil moist and enjoyed the plant’s presence in my living room, but I can’t say exactly when it broke even, growing a fifth leaf without sacrificing an earlier one.

Now it also has a shoot pushing up from the middle, the tallest of any yet. It could spend a month on the unfurling, in that languorous way it has. The older leaves have developed their colors, a deep green set against a paler shade, with swooping lines of magenta. The younger leaves are bright, with darker splotches emerging in awkward shapes that strike me as adolescent.

Throughout this tortuous year, I’ve regularly updated my friend about the plant’s progress, sending her photos, joking about my urge to make it a metaphor, admitting that I’ve imbued it with way too much meaning. I’ve never felt this way about plant. I think it might be love, with a dash of idolatry.

I thought it would be fun to celebrate the plantiversary with my friend, so I scrolled through our texting chain of the past year, which forms a hilarious (to us), wide ranging, and fragmented record of some things about 2020. I loaded at least a dozen pages before I found the date she entrusted the plant to me: January 20, 2020. Today is January 20, 2021. I am nervous but hopeful.

The Perfect-for-you Choice

“If you’re honoring where you are, you are making the perfect-for-you choice, which is what makes it perfect, right?”

Every day these days I seem to need a new set of words to live by, and today they come from Katie, this morning’s stationary cycling instructor on my audio-only fitness app. Imagine them spoken above the opening strains of Toto’s “Africa,” because they were. Of course they were.

I’m a fiction writer who often writes essays about literature. If I’d ever imagined myself living through a global pandemic, the vision would have featured me combing through Grace Paley’s short stories or turning to Tolstoy, looking for guidance and comfort and maybe turning that experience into essays that would bring other people guidance and comfort. Instead, I find myself in the process of retraining myself to read fiction, mainly by turning off my news alerts and hiding my phone and computer and shutting the door on my kids. I am much better at watching TV right now.

I’ve gotten myself on my spin bike two mornings in a row, because I’ve recognized that it’s helpful to everyone who lives in this house if I receive a daily dose of endorphins. Still, there is often a vast sea between knowing what I should do and the act of doing it, so I am pleased I boarded the boat — the imaginary boat that crosses an imaginary sea to the actual bike that goes nowhere.

Fitness instructors on apps or video tend to follow certain norms. Like the reader of a novel, the exerciser suspends disbelief and surrenders to the world of the story. The instructor pretends she can see the lone exerciser. She awards copious high-fives verbally. She believes in “you.” If she acknowledges the artifice, it’s usually in a sidelong way. Just before Katie uttered her words to live by, she said, “That was the perfect first choice. How do I know it was perfect? Because you did it for you.” How convenient that, in English, the singular “you” can be indistinguishable from the plural “you.”

Katie is a real person, but these are recordings, and so she is frozen in time. I don’t know when they were made, but most of the workouts I’m doing were probably recorded before pandemic times, an idea that inspires competing emotions. Canned Katie has no idea, the poor sweet ignorant girl. Or canned Katie must be some kind of diviner, to know so exactly what I (yes, I!) would need.

For twenty to thirty minutes a day, Katie tells me what to do, and I make choices within narrow parameters. Do I want to increase resistance a quarter turn or a half turn? Do I want to stay in the saddle or stand up for this last set? I show up for her instructions and I stay for her encouragements, which are nuggets like, “I’m so proud of you.” And “Thank you so much for taking this time and giving it to yourself.”

The same words would have played if I hadn’t tried my best. But it does me more good here to suspend disbelief than to cling to it. Without Katie’s words to prompt me, I wouldn’t have taken a moment to feel proud that I’d managed to do this one thing. I would have moved on to the next part of my day without accepting her framing of time as something I should be thanked for giving to myself — not as something I’d sneaked or taken from my family.

Even for a fitness instructor, Katie is notably peppy and positive. I voluntarily spend a lot of my time wrestling with the written expression of complex and often dark emotions, so it is tempting for me to dismiss Katie’s brand of positivity as shallow and unhelpful. But it helps me.

It helps me partly because it’s easy to joke about. When my friend texted me that her order of 50 pounds of flour and 24 pounds of yeast had just arrived and wondered if she’d lost her mind, I texted her back, “You made the right choice for where you are right now.” She knew it was a safe place because I’d just received my delivery of 50 pounds of flour a couple of days earlier. I told her I was going to follow the guidance of the spin instructor on my app all day long.

I told her, “Katie says, ‘If you’re honoring where you are, you are making the perfect-for-you choice.’”

I said, “She is talking about how much the unseen exerciser turned up the knob in the previous set, but I’m sure nothing could go wrong if we applied it to everything today.”

She agreed that Katie is a genius. We both know that if we applied Katie’s axiom to everything, plenty could go wrong. It could be used to justify any number of self-destructive or deeply selfish acts. Maybe our bulk food buying is a selfish act. But it’s also probably not great that I had to go to three stores the last time I went out shopping in order to find one bag of flour. I will give any neighbor a cup of flour right now (from a safe distance), and within hours of its arrival, my friend had given away more than half of her yeast on a Facebook group, delighting local bakers and probably causing several failed sourdough starters to be pitched in the garbage at last.

Katie’s axiom is flawless when applied to the question of whether to turn up the knob on the bike, but it’s also useful for people who notice what they aren’t doing well more easily than they notice what they are doing well. There are a lot of us, especially right now.

My husband and I are tired and often anxious, but we do sometimes find ways to tell each other we’re doing a good job. We might say, “You were patient with the kids,” or “This bread is so good!” (That flour has to go somewhere.) When we have the energy to receive an honest answer, and sometimes when we don’t, we ask questions like, “Are you okay?” and “How are you doing?” In response, we say things like, “This is really hard, but I think we’re going to be okay, basically, at some point. Right?”

We don’t say things like, “You can do it!”, or “I’m so proud of you for showing up!” We spend a lot of time and energy encouraging our kids in these discouraging times, and those expressions are a little off-brand for both of us. Even (especially) our nine-year-old would roll his eyes. But Katie’s encouragement is recorded. She only had to say it once. It’s real because she genuinely means it and it’s fake because she’s pretending it’s personal, but I agreed to dream that dream when I downloaded the app, way back when.

There is a special drama in the final “hill” of a cycling workout. It’s the stationary cyclist’s last chance to turn up the dial, to Go. For. It. Today (my today — not Katie’s), before the final set, Katie asked, “Are you at your edge? Are you at the top of hard?”

It’s a strain to see around the metaphor to the literal. I’m at my edge, but I’m pretty sure I’m not at the top of hard. I think we’re all just starting to realize the top of hard might not even be in view yet. I honored where I was. I disobeyed Katie’s order to empty the tank.

“Give yourself a hand,” she said. “That was awesome.”

Sophie’s Choice and Radical Acceptance

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I first read Sophie’s Choice the summer after I graduated from college. I don’t know why I waited so long. I had spent large portions of my childhood compulsively reading Holocaust memoirs. My mother, a children’s librarian, made phone calls and drove me to libraries in other towns to find more. I had a strong preference for memoirs over fiction because I knew the narrator would survive. Almost everyone she loved would die, but she would live and eventually write the book I held in my hands.

In Sophie’s Choice, the narrator lives, but he’s not a Holocaust survivor. Stingo—an aspiring young novelist—is a white Protestant Southerner racked with guilt over slavery, the continuing subjugation of black people in his home state of Virginia, and the fact that although he enlisted to fight in World War II, he did so mainly to fight the Japanese, a foe characterized by Americans in a distinctly racist way. He meets Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz, in Brooklyn after the war.

Who was Stingo to write about the Holocaust, to tell Sophie’s story? And who was I, a Catholic growing up in a Boston suburb in the 1980s, to devour the distinctly Jewish stories told in the memoirs I read, to dwell on them as I did? I recognized in Stingo a shared, possibly inappropriate interest.

Read more at Ploughshares

Shirley Jackson, Madeleine L’Engle, and Motherhood

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I read much of Shirley Jackson’s memoir of raising four children, Life Among the Savages (1952), on a weekend when I was caring for three children. For a brief stretch—maybe five pages—we achieved a fragile equilibrium and they were all attached to me as I read. The eight-year-old snuggled against me reading his own book. The six-year-old sat on my lap, idly turning pages I didn’t want turned, and I had made the mistake, earlier, of telling him that Shirley Jackson’s husband seemed kind of terrible, so he interrupted me to ask exactly how he had been terrible.

“He didn’t help with the kids or the cooking or the cleaning,” I said, leaving out the affairs and trying to find my page. My son didn’t seem sufficiently horrified, so I added, “He didn’t think men should have to do those kinds of jobs.” He put his hand over his mouth and giggled. “But what else?” he asked. Wasn’t that enough?

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Mistresses, Written By Women

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The affair in Lorrie Moore’s story, “How to Be an Other Woman,” starts with a meet cute on a bus: “A minute goes by and he asks what you’re reading. It is Madame Bovary in a Doris Day biography jacket.” It’s a clever description of the story itself, which like many of the stories in the collection, Self-Help, is written in the second person. It’s considerably more playful than Madame Bovary and doesn’t end in suicide, but gives serious consideration to the trials of adultery. Unlike Flaubert’s protagonist, Moore’s is not married. She finds out after the affair is already underway that her lover is married.  She’s been duped into mistress-hood.

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.  

You walk differently. In store windows you don’t recognize yourself; you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins. In public restrooms you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration, murmuring into your bluing thighs: ‘Hello, I’m Charlene. I’m a mistress.’ 

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Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth Isn’t Just for Suburban Moms’ Book Clubs

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I am so into Ann Patchett right now. Is it hip to be into Ann Patchett? Is it edgy? No. It’s book-clubby. It’s suburban-mommy. My book club of suburban moms met last night and discussed Patchett’s Commonwealth. When we chose it, we laughed a little about what an obvious pick it was. Suburban moms are often brutally self-aware. Ann Patchett is, too.

When I recently recommended Commonwealth to a friend I used to work with at a bookstore back in our younger, edgier days, she replied, “I haven’t read it, but I gave it to my mom for Christmas.” There you have it. It was my own mom who introduced me to Patchett with a copy of Bel Canto. All of her librarian friends had loved it. It had a book club discussion guide at the end. I rolled my eyes for months before I bothered to read it, only to find that I loved it, too. I was awestruck by the floating, omniscient narrative which would change mid-sentence and still remain fluid and easy to follow.

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Sanctuary

As the effects of the president’s cruel and regressive executive order on immigration are becoming clear, I’m proud to live in a town that’s ready to stand up for what’s right. This week, our Board of Selectmen voted to cosponsor a warrant article with the Human Rights Commision that would make Arlington a Sanctuary Town.

The final language and whether the Board will recommend a yes vote still need to be worked out, but based on the discussion, I’m optimistic that I will have the chance to vote in favor of this article in Town Meeting this spring. The Arlington Police Department already follows these practices, but the warrant article would codify them and send a powerful message. Adopting Sanctuary Town status is not without risk, since the president is threatening to pull federal funds from sanctuary cities and towns. Whether he can do this remains to be seen. I’ve reached out to local officials to see if there’s anything voters or Town Meeting Members can do to help, and if I hear of anything I’ll let locals know.

But I’m excited to think of what could happen if other cities and towns became sanctuaries. California is blanketed with sanctuary cities and towns. A proponent of the warrant article said at the meeting that in Massachusetts, Amherst, Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Lawrence, Northampton, Orleans, Somerville, Springfield, and Holyoke offer this kind of protection. Newton and Salem are currently considering similar proposals.

If your town is not on this list, would you consider reaching out to your town leaders to see if it’s in the works or what you can do to help make it happen? Their email addresses are easy to find on town websites. Even if elected officials are not supportive, citizens can sponsor warrant articles. Generally town websites or the clerk’s office can give you information about that. It’s always great to have buy-in from the electeds, but it’s not a requirement. Arlington citizens are the ones who started the movement here (I wish I had been one of them). As towns gear up for their spring meetings, the timing is right. I’m personally feeling overwhelmed by where to begin to oppose this administration’s bigotry and authoritarian bent. I’m grateful that my senators and representatives are already fighting the good fight. I don’t need to call them. Reaching out to your elected town leaders about this issue is a small local action. This movement could be very powerful if enough cities and towns join in.

The Ambiguous Epiphany

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When I was a child growing up Catholic, the Feast of the Epiphany struck me as an afterthought. December was all about the thrilling run-up of Advent, characterized by candle lighting and singing at mass and by lists for Santa and chocolate-filled calendars at home. Finally there was the tremendous climax of Christmas. Jesus is born! Santa is here!

After that, it was all denouement. Epiphany was when our Christmas tree—by then shedding needles at an alarming rate—finally hit the curb. It was also the last little burst of festivity at church before the long stretch of Ordinary Time. The three wise men had made it to Bethlehem. My mother or maybe a priest explained that in many cultures, Christians waited until the Epiphany on January 6 (also known as Little Christmas, Twelfth Night, and the Twelfth Day of Christmas) to exchange gifts. This was mildly interesting, but I wouldn’t be getting any more gifts, so it was hard to get too excited.

Now that I’m a lapsed Catholic fiction writer who still loves Christmas, I’m trying to figure out what stories to tell my kids about this season. I keep coming back to the Epiphany, which seems to me now fantastic and magical, a journey fraught with hardship and intrigue and faith and even espionage. When the Magi arrive in Jerusalem and ask King Herod, “Where is the infant king of the Jews?”, he is disturbed and sends them on to Bethlehem with instructions to report back when they find the baby. But after they meet the infant they’re warned in a dream not to return to Herod. They instead follow a different route back home. Herod intends to kill the baby, who he sees as a rival.

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Christmas with Alice Munro

Like many of Alice Munro’s stories, her Christmas stories are occupied with work and explore the subtleties of how work defines identity. Of the three stories I’ll discuss, “The Turkey Season” (1980) is the most explicitly about Christmas, ending with a snowy tableau on Christmas Eve. But the major function of Christmas in the narrative is to create demand for Christmas turkeys, which creates the need for turkey gutters, providing the narrator—a girl of fourteen—with her first job.

Inside the Turkey Barn, she learns about how people in her town are categorized—and what it means when people don’t fit into any of the accepted categories. Although she’s from the place, a small town in Ontario, she already knows she doesn’t fit in:

Work, to everybody I knew, meant doing things I was no good at doing, and work was what people prided themselves on and measured each other by. (It goes without saying that the things I was good at, like schoolwork, were suspect or held in plain contempt.)

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