Today is my birthday! Well, it’s not my birthday as I write this, since you may have noticed that The Wingback hits your inbox at six a.m. every other Sunday. I’m writing this a few days in advance, when it is very windy and I’m typing with crossed fingers because the power tends to go out in my neighborhood on windy days. Anyway, Sunday is my birthday, the day you receive this newsletter.

This week I read Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving Up the Ghost, and I loved it as much as I expected to. Even going in as a fan of her authorial voice, I was still surprised at the narrative flow of this memoir, the way it zooms in on particular days or seasons and then zooms way out to fly over entire years until she arrives at the next pertinent point. She talks about her writing process (or lack thereof) throughout the book, and how she turned and returned to writing during chronic pain and illness. Situations that other, more conventional memoirs might dwell on — like marrying, divorcing, and remarrying your spouse after living on three continents — are mentioned but not given the same attention as the formative event in her life: seeing a spectral devil in the back garden. I would argue that Mantel’s memoir has more in common with her Cromwell trilogy than with other memoirs; it’s that distinctive. Anyone who hasn’t wanted to dive into three long books set in the time of Henry VIII but has wanted to give Mantel a try would do fine to start here.

I also read The English Understand Wool, a delightfully acerbic short read by Helen DeWitt. I get the sense from reviewers of her work that you either know DeWitt or you don’t, and you either love her style or you detest it. I love it, and I can also see where others could hate it. DeWitt and her characters are unapologetically Smarter Than You, which turns a lot of people off. Fair enough. This little book, at less than 100 pages and meant to be devoured in an afternoon is also Smarter Than You, and the twist features a delightful skewering of people in publishing. As I write this, I’m realizing that I am not at all selling you on this book, readers. It’s sounding very elitist and insider-y. And it is. But if you’ve got an afternoon and a few bucks, maybe give it a whirl. It’s fun.

And I borrowed Wolfpack by Abbie Wambach from the library on a whim and read it in two days. It’s a very short book and meant to be easy as hell to follow. I was having one of those days where I, a person who makes lone wolves seem like party animals, wanted to have a pack. A community! Let’s go, team! Wolfpack both scratched that itch and reminded me that I am terrible on teams. But Abbie points out that while your pack can be your family, friends, coworkers, or whoever, the real pack we’re part of is women — all kinds of women. Big-tent womanhood. That I can get behind, because no one expects me to go to a party with every woman on the planet.

Let’s talk about our read-alongs, where no one’s playing at being Smarter Than You! My goal is to offer questions and discussions that help you dig more deeply into a book. Maybe you’re interesting in seeing how a particular book or scene or character works; we will talk about craft. I also want to encourage everyone to read deeply enough that you see how literature fits into your life, your thought processes, and the wider world. I’m not so interested in reading best sellers for the sake of keeping up with the zeitgeist; I am interested in reading anything that makes you think more deeply about yourself and your world and how they mesh—or don’t.

So here are my thoughts so far. Please use the comments to let me know if any of these are more appealing to you or to ask for more info about any of these suggestions:

• Books in translation: Long Live the Posthorn, Vigdis Hjorth; Tokyo Ueno Station, Yu Miri
• Short books: The Swimmers, Julie Otsuka; No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood; Piranesi, Susanna Clark; The Trees, Percival Everett; The Friend, Sigrid Nunez
• Historical fiction: Matrix, Lauren Groff; Kindred, Octavia Butler (yes, I did put it under historical fiction); The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert
• Classics: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte; David Copperfield, Charles Dickens; any Edgar Allan Poe; any Sherlock Holmes; any P. G. Wodehouse

Nothing is settled, so if anyone has a particular book they want to read, put that in the comments too. I’m game for just about anything. I mean, we could even do a fun series, if you wanted to spend 2023 reading something like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series or Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time series.

If you want to participate in the read-along, whatever we pick, all formats are valid: paperback, hardcover, annotated edition, audiobook, ebook, library book. If we choose a book published in the United States before 1926, it’s in the public domain, so free or very inexpensive electronic copies will be available.

A Moment of Canine Zen

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