October 2024 Reading Roundup

Dear Readers,

You may have noticed that I am not a planner when it comes to reading. I’ve got a read-along going right now that I shared on a whim because I thought we could all use a little comfort read during the latest iteration of These Trying Times. I have no goals for a day, a week, a month, or a year of reading. But I do like being reminded of what I’ve read, and sharing them with you keeps me from devouring books like a mindless literary monster, which is my natural tendency.

So here’s what I finished up in October.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. I had read this in college, which was in the last millennium, a thousand years ago. I remember my friend Jon saying I would love it, and remember loving it. So I bought a copy at a local bookshop a while back in case I ever wanted to reread it. Another friend had never read it, and she was looking for a classic sci-fi book, so we pulled this one off our TBR piles and read it at the same time. Well. After thirty years of not reading it, I can say I did not like Canticle this time around. For one thing, where are the women? I get that this is a monastery, but no one anywhere knows a single woman at all? No mothers mentioned, no women scientists on the team, no women in the government? Was it so impossible in the mid-twentieth century to imagine that women might be doing anything at all a few hundred years in the future? I could write a whole critical essay on this book; I took notes as I read. And there are thoughts that it definitely provoked that were worth thinking. But I’ll stop here before this quick recap becomes an “in this essay I will” situation.

Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar. This book is on all the lists, the long lists and the short lists and the best-of lists and the must-read lists, and you know what? They are not wrong. Martyr! is not at all about what you probably think it’s about, and even if you see the mild twist at the end coming from eighty miles away, it’s still very touching and meaningful. And funny.

The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates. Another list-friendly book, and another Coates book that packs so much into a short text. The second half of the book, which describes Coates’s visit to Israel and Palestine, has turned out to be more timely than he probably imagined. What I appreciate about this longest essay in the book is that Coates shows the reader step by step, day by day, encounter by encounter, how he reconsidered his previous positions and allowed for more complexity in his considerations. It’s the story of how a mind changes, and it’s much needed.

Loved and Missed, Susie Boyt. This book came out in 2021, and I heard about it somewhere over the summer and placed a hold at the library. Past me was on her shit, because this book is a stunner. I’m still considering writing an essay, maybe a close reading of a particular passage. In a nutshell, it’s a first-person narrative of a mother and grandmother in London whose daughter is an addict and whose granddaughter she kind of gently snatches away and raises. The narrator works so hard to not be devastated that the reader can’t help but be a little devastated. Luckily, we have her outspoken best friend to puncture the facade every once in a while. This book is wittier than it has any right to be, and comes at a common narrative through an uncommon point of view.

Sinead O’Connor: The Last Interview. I got this book for review just days before it was set to be published. So I read it fast and wrote fast, and ended up with a 1500-word essay on O’Connor’s changing relationship to the media as shown by her story of shaving her head. A good book if you love Sinead, and one of my favorite essays to write, if I’m being honest. I get that it’s a long one, though.

Choosing to Run, Des Linden. Am I an avid listener of Nobody Asked Us with Des & Kara? Yes. Did I buy podcast merch? Yes. And when I was out of things to listen to during breaks, did I get Des’s audiobook from the library? Also yes. I have no idea if this is a good book. I just like running and Des Linden.

August Blue, Deborah Levy. I had this on a wishlist for ages, and when I decided not to buy any more books in 2024, I cleared out most of that wishlist. Then my friend told me she read August Blue and loved it, and I remembered why I had put it on my wishlist, so I hit up the reliable library and it was available! No holds! Kismet. I also read it and loved it. Style-wise, it weaves the discursive with the fragmented in a way that makes clear the narrator’s state of mind. This is a book about lost and found family, about childhood’s effects on adulthood, and about a piano prodigy. If you also like books about piano prodigies, check out Every Good Boy Does Fine, Jeremy Denk’s memoir, and The Loser, an experimental work by Thomas Bernhard that’s about old friends of Glenn Gould.

I’ll leave you with two beautiful sentences from August Blue:

We agreed that whatever happened next in the world, we would still rub conditioner into our hair after we washed it and comb it through to the ends, we would soften our lips with rose-, strawberry- and cherry-scented lip balms, and though we would be interested to see a wolf perched in a lonely mountain, we liked our household animals to betray their savage nature and live with us in our reality, which was not theirs. They would lie in our laps and let us stroke them through waves of virus, wars, drought and floods and we would try not to transmit our fear to them.

A Household Animal

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