Audiobooks

The Empress of Salt and Fortune, by Nghi Vo

Say you, like me, are getting tired of podcasts but you want to listen to something while you putter. I went to my library’s website and clicked on their digital catalog (it’s called “Ebooks and More” here, but yours is probably called something else).

It’s June, so there was a list of featured LGBTQ+ titles for Pride Month. There are lots of books in this category that I haven’t read, so I clicked on that. Then I used a filter for “audiobooks” and a filter for “available now” since I wanted something to listen to right then rather than placing a hold and waiting. Ta da! Now I’ve got only about a half-dozen books to choose from rather than thousands.

This is how I found and listened to The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. I was wavering between this and the Pulitzer-prize-winning biography of Susan Sontag, but that was 22 hours long. Vo’s novella was 2.5 hours.

It was the right choice. Empress is a lush book, with fantasy and mythology and court intrigue and a talking bird named Almost Brilliant and just everything packed into a short listen (or read, if you prefer). This novella won handful of awards, including a Hugo, and there are two more stand-alone novellas set in the same world with the same protagonist, Chich, and their familiar Almost Brilliant.

It’s fun to take a chance on books from the library. So much to possibly gain, as with Empress, and so little to lose if you don’t like the book. Just return it.

Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Another spin-the-wheel-and-take-a-chance audiobook choice from my local library, and another solid win so far. I’m only about halfway through listening to Convenience Story Woman right now, but I very much relate to Keiko, the main character, who wishes humans came with a manual — then realizes there already is a manual, and everyone else seems to already know what’s in it.

I’m also interested in the narrative structure of this book, which won’t be perfectly clear until I finish reading it, of course. It has a slow-ish start, with Keiko making drastic decisions (not that she finds them all that drastic) in the middle, which I feel like I see a lot in Japanese novels. I’m completely hooked and need to find out how Keiko navigates the second half of this story.

Physical Books

Regardez-Nous Danser, Le Pays des Autres 2, Leïla Slimani

I had been waiting for this book to come out, so the timing was excellent when I ordered it this spring (from the friendly and well-stocked French Books Online, if you need a source). As mentioned in my previous newsletter, I’m translating a 19th c. French memoir, so this is my summer to immerse myself in French literature … and tackle my French to-be-read pile.

I had read the first book in this trilogy, La Guerre, la Guerre, la Guerre, and adored it. That novel began just after World War II with Amine and Mathilde Belhaj, who are based on Slimani’s grandparents, beginning their life together on a farm in Morocco and starting a family; the second book picks up where that one left off.

The paragraphs are long and dense but not difficult, a case of telling rather than showing to great effect. When we do get a snippet of conversation, the simplest exchanges have massive impact. When Mehdi, a new character in this volume, made a direct, unexpected, and unplanned request of the Belhaj patriarch, I gasped out loud in my hammock. “Mehdi, no! This is a terrible idea!”

The first book has been translated into English by Sam Taylor, though it was given the series title, In the Country of Others. If you like reading family epics that span decades and reveal as much about the complexities of the places and politics of the era as they do about the complexities of each individual character, this is your book.

Slimani also kicked off the new New York Times series on traveling the world through books. She guides readers through her Paris with books by Duras, Zola, Houellebecq, Verlaine, and a lot more. The link might require a subscription; apologies.

Ulysses, James Joyce, reread

I took a class in the art of the book review for spring term, and a few of my classmates were eager to read Ulysses for the first time. I’ve read it once all the way through and dipped in and out several times over the years, but I was up for a group read. We emailed about it, I read the first section … and it went nowhere.

Getting a regular reading group/buddy read/book club together, even via Zoom, is difficult. People have lives outside literature (or some do, I hear), and it’s summer. Lugging around a brick like Ulysses is not everyone’s idea of a good time, even if they have good intentions.

So I gave myself and my classmates the grace of letting Ulysses go this time around. I do recommend this piece by Merve Emre on love in Ulysses, which we read in that book review class. Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf might be the two most famous novels that take place over the course of a single day, and the celebrations for those days are both in June. The BBC Arts & Ideas podcast had a fun discussion (Emre was one of the guests) about Bloomsday, Dalloway Day, and the performing arts scene in early 1920s Britain. This turned into a Merve Emre appreciation post, and I do not apologize. She’s one of my favorite critics.

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I Promised Dog Pics

Her “I just ran five miles” face: