And there was reading in December. . . .

First of all, Happy New Year to all of you! I am so grateful to you for reading and commenting here, and I’m looking forward to another year of sharing booktalk with you.

But I’m not quite done with the Old Year yet, not until I post my December reading. For all its faults (and we know there were many!) 2020 afforded us abundant reading time even if it sometimes sapped our will to turn the pages. . .

In fact, I read enough last year that I had to staple extra pages into my little reading journal.  By next week, I’ll post my complete list of Books Read in 2020, but for now, here are

The Books I read in December 2020:

— Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea (fantasy, contemporary romance/adventure, NYC, LGBTQ)

— Ali Smith’s Summer (literary fiction, Britain)

— Jess Kidd’s Himself (fantasy/supernatural, mystery, comedy of manners, Ireland)

— Clare Beams’s The Illness Lesson (literary fiction, historical fiction, feminist, gothic, New England)

— André John Talley, The Chiffon Trenches (memoir, fashion/style, Black lives, LGBTQ)

— John Banville, Snow (literary fiction, police procedural/mystery, social commentary, Ireland)

— Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (autofiction, epistolary novel, coming-of-age, US immigration, poverty, sexuality, LGBTQ, bereavement, love)

— Stephanie Butland’s The Lost for Words Bookshop (romance, mystery, light reading, book world)

— Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders (mystery, female detective, book world)

The challenging conditions of 2020 must have something to do with why I’ve read so much more fantasy this year than is my wont.  If ever there were a year for fiction that transports us to worlds with different possibilities. . .  And oh, does Erin Morgenstern create such a world, one which her characters can enter through doors from this one. . . It’s a world of stories, a world in which words create and are created.  Below, a photo of the relevant page from my Reading Journal with my scrawled jottings. . . . Instagram post here.  (Did you ever read Morgenstern’s earlier fantasy novel, The Night Circus? I did, back in 2011 when I wrote a few words about ithere. Recommended)

Next title I read in December hews much more closely to 2020’s unpleasant reality, but in Summer, the last volume of her seasonal quartet, Ali Smith imagines, if not fantasizes about, the possibilities for hope. Connections between characters; resonances between Nazism in the ’30s and 40’s and the current rise of fascism or, at least, right-wing intolerance of immigrants and the incarceration of refugees in Britain; relationships between older characters with lifetimes of social justice and environmental activism and the young characters–wavering between despair and an angry determination to bring change– they inspire.  There’s a particularly beautiful letter — describing swifts — written by a teenaged girl to a heroic refugee she’s heard of, a man who’s being held indefinitely in a detention centre where he can barely catch glimpses of the sky.  . .  (I wrote briefly about Smith’s early volumes in this series: Autumn, Winter, Spring).  

And see my Instagram posthere.

I borrowed three of the four seasons from our library (and bought a hardcover copy of Spring), but I think I’ll pick up the other three in paperback, perhaps checking used bookstores for them. These will definitely repay a second reading. So much wordplay and literary allusion — and references to art and personalities that I’d like to find out more about. If you haven’t read these yet, I’d suggest beginning where Smith did, in Autumn. And let me know what you think, would you?

Next up in December was Jess Kidd’s Himself.  . . Perhaps, if 2020 hadn’t been the year that it was, I might more wisely have paced myself with the Jess Kidd oeuvre after my daughter passed along her copy of Things in Jars (my brief scribbled notes here).  As it is, I’m all finished now and must wait patiently for this wildly imaginative and entertaining writer to deliver another novel. (I’m hoping she’ll follow up with a second adventure for Victorian detective Bridie Devine.) 

All three of her novels (I mentioned Mr. Flood’s Last Resort here) feature some supernatural elements, a touch — or more! — of the Gothic, but they  all take place in concretely detailed, satisfyingly identifiable “real-world” settings.  There are adventurous, near-death shenanigans in all of them, mysteries to solve, and characters to love (a few to despise as well). Read them in any order — I seem to have gone backwards in her catalogue — but perhaps stretch them out more thoughtfully (less greedily!) than I did. Have fun! Click here to see my Instagram post.

A different kind of Gothic in Clare Beams’s The Illness Lesson to which I was initially drawn by having seen Michelle Kingdom’s deliciously embroidered cover art. (See more of Kingdom’s work by  going to my IG post about this book and clicking on @michelle.kingdom within that post. Or simply go to IG and enter her name in search feature.)

Beams’s novel fits well within a tradition of the gothic genre used to critique patriarchal societies.  . . and while it has a very different energy than Jess Kidd’s Things in Jars, they “read well together” in looking at the ways science and education have supported patriarchal values. . . and the way their female protagonists subvert that alliance by finding agency in their knowledge of science, their own education. . . 

and then a change of pace with influential, even iconic, American fashion journalist André Leon Talley’s memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, which I gobbled up in an e-book borrowed from Vancouver Public Library.

I thought that John Banville’s Snow, ostensibly a police procedural set in County Wexford, rural Ireland, would have been an entertaining and very well-written bit of escape reading. And it is, except that the mystery is solved when we’re taken to a dark core of horror covered over by Church-governed Irish politics of mid-20th-century — which must surely have some continuity into the present.

Another book I borrowed from the library but now need to own a copy of is Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Beautiful, lyrical, painful, powerful, even a redemptive manifesto of sorts. A young Vietnamese immigrant to the US, Little Dog, racialized, stigmatized by poverty, writes a letter — as an adult, a writer, a university graduate who teaches in a prestigious graduate writing program — to his mother who may or not be able to read.  Language alienates them, then, as language alienates Rose from her adoptive country. But the novel celebrates language while it manifests the alienation, celebrates it as tool, as joy. Vuong/Little Dog doesn’t flinch from describing his abuse at Rose’s hands but is also compassionately observant about her fierce care, her limited opportunities, the abuse she experienced, the effects of the Vietnam war. . .   He writes to her about his first love, doomed by boyfriend Trevor’s addictions.  His intimately detailed, corporeal, lyrical, almost rigorously analytical descriptions of the way their bodies join — while their identities and/or their minds or spirits both do and do not merge as expected — remind me of the equally bold and vulnerable descriptions of (lesbian) sex in Carmen Machado’s In the Dream House.  Highly recommended.

My IG post here.

And finally, I closed out the month and the year with two lighter books. . . . 

both thoroughly engaging and just right for reading all day on the couch while it rains or snows out the window (we’re still waiting for snow here — ours tends to fall more in February — but oh, we have enough rain to float an ark or three. . . )

There! Posting this today, I believe I’ve got December’s post up more quickly than any other month’s. That’s because I need to work on my List of Books Read in 2020 which I’ll try to have up by next week.  I’m trying to choose a Top Five . . . or maybe a Top Ten? And also trying to decide if I might try to do some Top Titles in a few different genres as well. I don’t want to get too complicated because meanwhile, of course, I’m already reading January’s books and beginning my 2021 Reading Journal. Thinking of what I want to do differently here and/or on Instagram. . . Even debating a return to a single blog (folding these posts into Materfamilias Writes), since I’m now consistently doing a single monthly Books post.  Your feedback on this and, as always, on any of the book entries in this post are very welcome. I’m also keen to know the best books you’ve read lately (you’re the reasons I can never keep up with my TBR list, and I call that a good thing!). . . and also to know what books you’ve started the year with. I’ve missed our chats.

xo,

f