A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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All in Contemporary Fiction
Michiko Aoyama’s slender novel, What You Are Looking for is in the Library (2020, English translation 2023) connects a series of vignettes about largely disconnected individuals living in contemporary Tokyo. The central hub of the many spoked story is the community library with its large librarian who seems like a character who has stepped out of a Miyazaki film like My Neighbor Totoro.
Try as we may, all of us remember the feeling during Covid lockdowns and quarantines when we wanted to escape the confines, climb out of our skin, anything to escape the mindless numb of every day. Sarah Moss puts flesh on those feelings in her post-pandemic novella, The Fell (2021, first American edition 2022). Coming in just under 200 pages, Moss’s latest fiction will haunt readers just as much as our own memories of COVID’s darkest days.
Some books zoom in on a place and its local culture, bound to the setting both in terms of geography and time in ways that pull the reader in. Ash Davidson’s debut novel Damnation Spring (2021) does just that. Readers cozy up with the book firmly in the 21st-century, but within sentences Davidson’s prose transports them to 1977 amid the coastal redwoods and gritty logging families of Northern California. As anyone with knowledge of 1970s logging communities knows, this book deals with some very difficult themes (things like premature death, poverty, miscarriage, and adultery to name a few). Rural towns like the one readers come to know intimately in Damnation Spring, witnessed major cultural upheaval during the 1970s. Growing public environmentalist sentiment and dwindling old growth logging opportunities led to heated conflicts which often pitted neighbor against neighbor. It is a conflict that continues to play out in logging
Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008) is the story of a family with a son whose sorted past and heavy heart, continue to define and limit him well into middle age. As his father—“Reverend” to even his sons— faces the final journey after a long and upstanding life, Jack returns home to the town of Gilead, Iowa to face his inner demons and the setting for his earliest shame. This novel tells the story of his return, reception, and renewal. Robinson writes this novel, the second of four in the Gilead series, alternating close third-person perspectives between Jack, the wayward son, and his youngest sister Glory.
Nathan Hill’s new novel, Wellness (2023), peals the onion of modern, middle-aged life. It nails so many truisms about contemporary life in terms of fitness, AI, health trends, Facebook wars, married life, love, polyamory, mindfulness groups, parenting in the digital age, careers in academia, and urban gentrification, to name a few. Many of the contemporary elements are laugh-out-loud funny, others are crushingly depressing. Woven into the pre-pandemic age of twenty-teens Chicago contemporary storyline are a number of backstory character-driven vignettes. These reach back in time to highlight traumas and generational family dysfunction with which the main characters live, whether they are conscious of that fact or not. Many read almost as stand-alone pieces, but together they create the patchwork of Hill’s characters’ lives. Wellness is witty and poignant, delightful and difficult
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong is a poetic, organic coming-of-age novel about a Vietnamese American child, Little Dog. Vuong crafts the novel as a letter of sorts that Little Dog writes to his illiterate mother. It is intimately personal, written in first person, as it bounces from point to point in the narrative of his childhood and adolescence.
The Covenant of Water (2023) by Abraham Verghese well-deserves the title of (my personal) most anticipated book of the year. As soon as I heard that Verghese, author of the beautiful, difficult book Cutting for Stone, had a new book coming out, this one set predominantly in India, I got a little giddy. Verghese’s career as a surgeon (he is faculty at Stanford’s School of Medicine, after all) blends with his incredibly artful prose to make moving, fascinating reads. Even after many months of anticipation, The Covenant of Water wowed me, moved me, and left me feeling connected to something bigger and more beautiful than any single life.
The late nineteenth and entire twentieth centuries reeked of industry and human innovation as humankind observed, dissected, and theorized about the nature of the universe, matter, everything vast and miniscule. In effect, mathematical and scientific theory attempted to define everything, everywhere, all at once (to borrow the phrase). The impact, as Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut demonstrates in When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), led to immense suffering on mass scale (WWI and WWII). This novel, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021 explores the cracks between fact and fiction, between progress and destruction, between genius and madness. Labatut’s book also investigates the private anguish, the inner misery of some of the world’s greatest minds. By interweaving history, math, physics, chemistry, and mathematics with a healthy dose of fiction, Labatut creates a wildly readable book that both educates and troubles, confounds and inspires. It is the perfect book to read in tandem with watching one of this summer’s blockbuster movies Oppenheimer as we consider the question of where that invisible line ought to be exist in the figurative sand of human innovation.
When I picked up Barkskins (2016) by Annie Proulx, I expected a book about trees. And trees there most certainly are growing among its pages, although not in the Richard Powers’ The Overstory sort of way; trees are not characters and the tree-inspired figurative constructs with which Proulx crafts her novel differ greatly from Powers’. What I found was something more than trees but certainly relating to them both as a subject and a metaphor. Proulx’s multi-generational story spans the course three and half centuries. In that sense, it is tree-like; many arboreal species live much longer than that. Spread over so much time, this hefty novel (it exceeds 700 pages) comes to life with a large cast of characters, so large that the family trees at the book’s end are useful, even necessary. At the heart of all their stories is a familial link to trees.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022) is a novel that plays with various texts as it scaffolds a story across genre: a novel, two memoirs (although one reads more like an incomplete autobiography), and a diary. Broken into four sections authored by four different characters, Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel constructs a layered tale about a New York City financial mogul and his wife during the 1920s and 30s.
Certain stories resonate in history. Specific people become fascinating characters lodged in the minds and hearts of a nation; their feats become a part of culture. Yet, often these fictions fail to realistically reflect the history; over time characterizations and backgrounds shift. This is especially true for famous historical figures who left no written records, many of them women and people of color. Such has certainly been the case with Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, particularly with regard to the young Shoshoni woman who accompanied them for most of their journey. Even the spelling of her name—Sacagawea (derived from Mandan for “Bird Woman”) or Sacajewea (from her native Shoshoni meaning “boat-launcher) is uncertain. And yet, she was a woman with a voice, even if written history fails to capture any of her actual words. Debra Magpie Earling’s The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (May 2023) provides her a voice and a story in a spectacularly crafted novel that provides Sacajewea with her own journals, in an answer of sorts of the famous Journals of Lewis and Clark.
Nearly twenty years ago, I read a book about Native life western Montana that shook me with its vivid descriptions of place, its unsettling scenes of poverty and institutional Indian schools. Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red (originally published 2003) was beautiful in its intensity, startling and raw. It captured the harsh conditions of life on the Flathead Indian Reservations in the 1940s. And then it went out of print. Happily, the good folks at Milkweed Editions rectified the situation and Perma Red returned to print in the fall 2022; and I eagerly revisited the story that wowed me all those years ago.
There are many ways to tell a story and many ways to construct a hero. Amor Towles’s most recent novel The Lincoln Highway (2021) certainly plays with how a story might unfold and who readers identify as its star(s). His previous two novels focus on specific protagonists and take place over different time periods—Rules of Civility (2011) is an older woman’s retelling of one year in her life thirty years prior and A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) is one man’s story told chronologically over the course of thirty years. The Lincoln Highway takes an altogether different approach both in terms of characters and telling.
Geraldine Brooks’s most recent novel, Horse (2022), threads the lives of various characters existing across 150 years of American history into a powerful story. The three storylines braid together as the narrative builds; and it is a horse that binds the strands to one another. As she has did in People of the Book, artifact and historical characters speak to the lives of modern ones and a tapestry of individuals and subplots work their way toward mutual resolution.
Just like the ceaselessly falling rain, unusual even in Scotland’s wet climate, there is something eerie from the start in Sarah Moss’s Summerwater (2020). It was a similar feeling to that aroused by the opening scene of bog sacrifice in her Ghost Wall (2018). Both begin with scenes that portend harm, that set an ominous tone. And yet, there is also something so everyday about so much of the human experiences and interactions in Moss’s slight books. Something so recognizable takes form amid her characters. It is that tension—the foreboding and the mundane—that make her books so compulsively readable. The reader wonders, will she go there, will it get that dark, that startlingly disturbing; it is not until the final pages that the reader can grapple with answers to such questions.
Since the publication of her 2009 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (or for some even before then), readers have recognized the understated brilliance of American novelist Elizabeth Strout. Something in her sparse writing makes readers feel seen; their life experience, or the life experience of those they have loved looms large, mirrored through her written word. There is unquestionably a magic at work here. I recently read Strout’s Lucy Barton novels, which begin with My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and includes Oh William! (2021) and Lucy By The Sea (2022).
