the cassandra pages

Books of 2021

Well, here is the list of books I read during the past year, and I am grateful for every one of them. Each became my companion for a time during this second pandemic year, and through many of them, I was joined by the intrepid members of my book group who met every Friday morning to discuss the next 50 or 100 pages of whatever novel we were reading together at the time. We helped each other finish a lot of long and sometimes difficult books, we kept each other company, and got to know each other better as friends. So although reading is, by its nature, solitary, it's hard for me to look down this list and not think of the experience with certain titles as a shared one. I know that this sort of group is not for everyone, but it's been good for me, and as facilitator for most of the books, it's really kept me on my toes.

If I could only recommend one of these books to you, I think it would be Milkman, by Anna Burns, written about Ireland during the Troubles: one of the freshest, most original pieces of writing I've read in years, with brilliantly-drawn characters who will win your sympathy. I've just finished Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante, and admired her writing, though the story of a boy growing up on an island off the coast of Sicily is one that makes you cringe at times. While we're talking about islands, there was the Laexdal Saga, from The Sagas of Icelanders, well worth anyone's reading time as a vivid portrait of human love, jealousy, greed, generosity and wisdom 1000 years ago, with characters who leap off the page and feel entirely recognizable. Finally, Roy Jacobsen's The Unseen is the first book of four about people living impossibly difficult lives on tiny islands off the coast of Norway. It's Nordic noir without even trying to be; I've only read the first in the series but found it absolutely compelling.

The year began with Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, which is a book that should be on every serious reader's shelf and taken down several times as we go through life, because with each reading, it reveals something new to you about yourself. I was very happy to read it with the book group; I think we all got more out of it than we would have alone.

Teju Cole's Black Paper is a collection of essays not just about race, but about the dark side of human nature as well as the forces of beauty that are its counterpoint, and most employ his signature style of interweaving seemingly-unrelated ideas or subjects to give a new perspective. Golden Apple of the Sun combines a series of photographs of his kitchen countertop during the pandemic with a concluding essay that is a searing indictment of racism from the early days of American colonial history. Fernweh, on the other hand, is a book of carefully-sequenced photographs taken in Switzerland that has been a consolation to me this year, not because they are pretty or conventional pictures, but because in depicting a place that at once feels closed but seductive, both artificial and natural, beyond-human and yet curated and manufactured, it somehow evoked the strangeness and alienation of the world in which we've found ourselves, but lands squarely on the side of beauty, offering a space in which to breathe. It has stayed on my bedside table since the day it arrived.

A confession: I started with the intention of reading all of Dante's The Divine Comedy, but found Inferno hard going: it's because the year itself was just too depressing to spend more of it in a fictional or imagined hell! On the other hand, I thought that Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil was one of the most brilliantly-written books I've ever read. It's not well known, and it's written in a daunting stream-of-consciousness style with page-long sentences and few paragraph breaks, to which you simply have to surrender, allowing yourself to be swept along. The reward is that if you stay with it, your view of what it might mean to meet one's impending death, as a literate and conscious person, will be enlarged and changed.

Finally, I was surprised to find myself enchanted and then almost obsessed by Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. I had read almost all of Hesse's other works, but not this one, his last major novel, which sets up a hypothetical world in the future where education and culture are preserved and controlled by an elite group of celibate, secular, male intellectuals who live in near-monastic remove from the "real world" of ordinary people. The high achievers of this elite society became Masters of the "Glass Bead Game", a never-fully-described exercise in which participants make connections between disparate aspects of cultural artifacts or knowledge, such as relating a law of physics and a Bach sonata. The book provoked a great deal of thought about contemporary academia and tensions between the life of the mind and "real" everyday life in the world; European intellectual life prior to WWII; the preservation of human culture; relationships between men and women; and the interplay (or lack thereof) between political history and cultural/scientific achievement. If you didn't read it back in the 1960s, take a look now! To whet your appetite, I'll include, at the end of this post, my somewhat lame but colorful response to our group leader's challenge to create a mini "glass bead game" ourselves.

Happy reading in 2022, and, as always, please let us know in the comments what YOU read in 2021 and what books were highlights for you! I look forward to hearing from you.

 

2021

We Are All Equally Far From Love, Adania Shibli

The Unseen, Roy Jacobsen

Arturo's Island, Elsa Morante #

Dubliners, James Joyce (excerpts)

Shifting the Silence, Etel Adnan

Time, Etal Adnan

Black Paper, Teju Cole

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse#

Beowulf, Seamus Heaney, trans.#

Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje#

Unwinding Anxiety, Judson Brewer

Real Presences, George Steiner

The Lowlands, Jhumpa Lahiri

Golden Apple of the Sun, Teju Cole

Fernweh, Teju Cole

The Laexdal Saga (from Sagas of Icelanders)#

The Interior Circuit, Francisco Goldman

The Little Red Chairs, Edna O'Brien

Under the Glacier, Haldor Laxness #

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a monograph by various authors

The Hostage, Brendan Behan

Milkman, Anna Burns#

The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Dante

Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louise Gluck

O Pioneers, Willa Cather #

Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes

Agamemnon, Aeschylus #

The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch

Travels with Epicurus, Daniel M. Klein

The Return, Hisham Matar

A Month in Siena, Hisham Matar

Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante

Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, Luisa A. Igloria

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky #

# indicates a book read with my book group. Stats:  37 books total; 14 by women, 23 by men, vast majority read as e-books. 20 of these books were written originally in English, 17 read in translation.

 

 

Hermit Diary 58. My Companions the Books

Today, I learn, is #WorldBookDay. Who makes up these things? (And immediately hear a response in my head: "Publishers like you!") Be that as it may, in my life, every day is book day, and it's been so practically ever since I can remember. Last week the members of my book group started talking about when we had begun to be readers, and what form it took for each of us. We told stories about the books in our homes, local libraries in the small towns many of us had grown up in, how reading early made problems for us in school, happy hours spent reading in treehouses, or curled up on couches on rainy days, what those favorite books were and how they shaped us as the readers we are today. I've never been a solitary introvert, but I was definitely a bookworm whose parents often told me, "Come on, get your nose out of that book, and go outside!" This was a somewhat half-hearted admonition from my mother, who was pretty much of a bookworm herself. As an only child, I was alone a lot, and books always felt like my friends as well as boats and planes and magic carpets on which I could travel to other places and times.

Exactly one year ago today, Jonathan and I made a decision at 5:00 in the morning, half an hour before calling a taxi, to cancel our planned trip to Mexico City because a pandemic looked like it was actually going to happen. We figured we could get down there all right, but coming back on March 20 might not be easy, or safe. A number of people thought we were being over-cautious, but it proved to be the right decision. During this long year, one that I don't think any of us will be able to truly process until much more time has passed, life has changed a lot. In addition to the good developments, like becoming proficient at Zoom and finding new friends, communities, and artistic outlets through that medium, we've stopped seeing family and friends, moving freely from place to place even within the city, having a studio, singing with my choir and going to the cathedral, shopping in stores, having routine medical appointments or getting our hair cut, going to any kind of in-person event, or even having normal visits with our neighbors. Montreal has been hit very hard, and people over 65 have been asked, and at times required, to stay in their homes. Thank God none of us knew it would be this bad, or go on this long, or I think we would have been even more despairing. Although it's been a very hard year for us in a number of ways, I feel incredibly lucky that we're still here, and we have appointments for our first vaccinations next week. I'm immeasurably grateful to the scientists who have developed these life-saving, world-saving vaccines in record time. I just wish that they would be available equally and fairly to all human beings -- but, as this year has also shown, inequality and injustice are concentrated in minority populations, and there is no vaccine for that: we ourselves are the only solution.

Fortunately, during this time I've had three steady companions: my husband, my cat, and books. As always, books have transported me to other places and allowed me to glimpse other lives, and that has been both a saving grace and at times uncomfortable, as it should be. Walking with James Baldwin, Ibrahm X. Kendi, Toni Morrison or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have forced me to confront realities and histories that have not been my own. While I've already read a lot of Haruki Murakami and his rather peculiar world of male-female relationships, the experience of reading a previous generation of Japanese writers like Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata is disconcerting in a different way. They speak of a world where women's and men's lives were markedly stylized and fixed, often to the great detriment of women, but there is little sense of happiness or fulfillment on anyone's part. I've gone on this year to read some contemporary Japanese female authors like Banana Yoshimoto and, most recently, Mieko Kawakami, whose Breasts and Eggs depicts in graphic detail the lives and preoccupations of non-wealthy Japanese women seeking self-fulfillment in a rough life, mostly without men at all. Roberto Bolano's 2666 is a literary exploit that took me from academic literary Europe to the horrific world of Mexican drug cartels -- an undercurrent we have always felt and guarded against during our tips to Mexico City, but never experienced directly. Then there was the pre-revolutionary Russia of Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamzov, where a sense of social morality and ethics based on tradition, culture and religion clashed with "new" nihilistic, atheistic ideologies espoused by young thinkers influenced by Europe, who insisted that free will is all, and "everything is permitted." The book list has been long and challenging, and probably isn't most peoples idea of escapist, but it's been a big part of what's kept me going while living in a two-room apartment, especially through this long winter.

Right now I'm re-reading Aeschylus' Agamemnon, written in the 5th century BC, which reminds me of how little human beings have actually changed. The immediacy and familiarity of the characters and their thought and language goes a long ways toward erasing the cultural and historical differences between us and 2500 years ago; it's what drew me with amazement to those myths and stories when I was young, and then to the original works of literature. Agamemnon was written when Athenian democracy was just beginning, and its author was critical of government and especially of tyrants who fought wars that cost thousands of lives -- he himself had fought at the famous battle of Marathon during the Persian Wars. Athenians were preoccupied with the questions of justice, the rule of law, and free will in a society where the tyrant and the fear of his wrath had been removed: a new form of justice had to be created and agreed upon by its members. At the time of Aeschylus, most people still believed in fate being determined by the will of the gods, and that the sins of the father were often visited through subsequent generations, but as the Greek plays and Athenian democracy evolved in the next hundred years, we see a change away from this sense of fate and divine retribution to a greater exercise of free will and human choice, and how that is reflected in the government.

Fast-forward to Russia in the waning years of the Tsar; and further still to our own time when large swaths of society believe that individual freedom is more important than the collective good. These seem to be fundamental human tensions, with which we still struggle, along with the fact that justice is never equally applied. Thinking these questions through and acting on them are a lifetime's work, and for me, that task is helped by reading what humans have written not just in our own time, but throughout the millennia. While justice struggles to advance and our understanding of difference is greatly enhanced and shaped by contemporary writing, the best and the worst aspects of human behavior have always existed; we are neither unique nor isolated from the past, and, frankly, we believe so at our peril -- as books and their authors have always tried to tell us.

Hermit Diary 51. Books of 2020

Roberto Bolaño and Fyodor Dostoevsky

 

Books of 2020 (list at the end of this post)

Books have been my salvation during the months of isolation. I know many people have said they've had trouble concentrating on reading, but my situation has been the opposite: for me it's been a deep dive. One thing that's helped is an online book club of far-flung friends which grew out of a desire of a friend for companionship reading Murakami's IQ84 during the early days of the pandemic. Sadly, that friend decided they didn't really enjoy reading with a larger group, but some of the people stayed on with me and we've formed a cohesive and congenial group. We've mostly been reading long, challenging books together that we might not have read alone, and meeting each week via Zoom for a discussion -- and it's been great. The other reading group of which I've been a part for several years has not met regularly, so there's been a shift, but it was with that group that I read Beloved and re-read Americanah in the early part of the year.

The #1 standout of the year for me was Roberto Bolaño 's 2666, a huge, challenging, harrowing, and brilliant book I had been afraid to read on my own, but which we tackled together in the new group after completing IQ84. I am so grateful now for having read it -- it's one of those books that changes you forever, both as a reader and as a human being. I've long admired Bolaño 's writing, and completed Savage Detectives and several of his shorter novels in previous years. But 2666 is both masterwork and monster-work -- the great unwieldy sort of literature Bolaño himself said was the only literature worth giving one's life to -- that grapples with the most important themes and questions that confront human lives. A work in five parts, each one a "book" on its own, but related, it is perhaps unfinished - other fragments were found in Bolaño 's papers after his early death - but he raced to complete these parts before succumbing to his illness, and the result feels complete while leaving many questions for the reader unanswered -- which could also have been his intention.

We're currently reading The Brothers Karamazov, which is the other major fiction standout for me this year. Supposedly I read it years and years ago, but I barely remember it, so Dostoevsky's plot and characters are coming to me afresh and vivid. I'm in awe of what he attempted and accomplished, and sad about how slight, insubstantial and superficial most literature of today seems by comparison to either of these two books.

Having said that, I both enjoyed and cringed at Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, her thinly-disguised autobiographical account of a young woman's affair with an aging writer who resembles Philip Roth, and very much liked Scorpionfish, by Natalie Bakopoulos, a novel about relationships and choices set in modern-day Athens and on one of the Greek islands. But though I've admired some other books by Rachel Cusk, I lost patience with her perturbed, blaming voice in Coventry.

My interest in Japanese literature has continued with contemporary works by Banana Yoshimoto and Yoko Tawada, tense re-readings of The Frolic of the Beasts by Yukio Mishima and Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, and then Kawabata's new-to-me The Master of Go, which is actually non-fiction literary reportage of the highest order, about an epic, months-long final match between an elderly Go master and his young challenger who represents a new generation of players as well as customs. (If you enjoyed watching The Queen's Gambit, as I did, this book would make a very interesting counterpoint.)

Toni Morrison's Beloved, of course, is a work that ranks with the highest, and one that I was grateful to read even before Black Lives Matter became the major movement it did in 2020. I think I wrote admiringly in a previous year about Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Later this year I read James Baldwin's searing novel Giovanni's Room, and several non-fiction books about racism, all of which I recommend. I'm ashamed that I hadn't read Beloved or The Fire Next Time before now.

Three non-fiction books rise to the top of the list. One was Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who brings both a botanist's and Native American's knowledge to one of the most fascinating natural history books I've ever read, and inspired me to rekindle my own interest in primitive plants, gather some moss and lichens of my own in the fall, and make two terrariums that are still doing very well in mid-winter here in my apartment. The other two are books about Greece by the great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, that were particularly meaningful to me because of having traveled in the same areas many decades after the books were written. Roumeli (1966) is about the disappearing tribes, villages, customs and linguistic complexities Fermor encountered in the north-central mainland, and Mani (1958) is about the fierce and independent people of the remote peninsula of the southern Peloponnese where Fermor eventually made his home, and where Jonathan and I traveled to consign the ashes of his mother to her beloved Mediterranean. Late in the year, I also read Fermor's memoir about three writing retreats in Orthodox monasteries, A Time for Silence.

In the Mani near Anatoliki. Pen-and-ink in my Greek sketchbook, 2019.

To my surprise, I felt lukewarm about Virginia Wolff's To the Lighthouse, and never finished The Voyage Out: I'm sorry but while appreciating her modernist approach to point-of-view and female perspective, I found them both tiresome, although I love her non-fiction and essays, and liked Mrs. Dalloway more than either of these novels. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was just as good as it had been the first time around.

I was impressed and riveted by David Foster Wallace's essay This is Water, and his long essay on Dostoevsky and his biographer Joseph Frank, and it made me think perhaps 2021 is the year to attempt Infinite Jest, and certainly to read his essays in Consider the Lobster, which concludes with the piece on Dostoevsky. I will leave you with a quote from Wallace's essay, with which Bolaño would almost certainly have agreed:

“The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we here, today, cannot or do not permit ourselves...

“It’s actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic… For there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art’s culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material possession is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.”

Will the pandemic and the paroxysms of political tensions and change finally alter this fact about modern American literature? Perhaps 2021 will be too soon to tell, but I eagerly wait to see.

And, last but not least: what have you read in 2020, and has it been easier or harder than usual? Please send me your lists! Here's mine:

** are this year's standouts; *books I liked a lot but not in the top tier; # books read with my book club

 A Legacy of Spies, John le Carré (in process)

**Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer

**The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky # (in process)

A Time for Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor

Make Ink, Jason Logan

The Road to Santiago, Cees Nooteboom (in process)

Inés of My Soul, Isabel Allende (dnf)

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez # (rereading)

*Scorpionfish, Natalie Bakopoulos

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf (dnf)

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf #

Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday

The Emissary, Yoko Tawada

This is Water, David Foster Wallace

**2666, Roberto Bolaño #

The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

The Four, Scott Galloway

False Spring, Darren Bifford

How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi

Moonlight Shadow, Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima (rereading)

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron (rereading)

*Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata

**The Master of Go, Yasunari Kawabata

The Woman of Porto Pim, Antonio Tabucchi

*1Q84, Haruki Murakami (rereading) #

Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Stout

*Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie # (rereading)

Coventry, Rachel Cusk

**Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Writer and the World, V.S. Naipaul

*Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin

**Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor

**Beloved, Toni Morrison #

Flights, Olga Tokarczuk

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Pond, Claire Louise Bennett

 

Hermit Diary, Montreal. 4: Shakespeare

                    But when the planets
in evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth.
Commotion in the winds, frights changes horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixure!

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

It's probably not surprising for me to turn to literature during times like this, as I search for historical patterns and the meanings that past writers have found in similar events. In The Atlantic, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a professor of English at Linfield College, writes "Shakespeare wrote his best works during a plague:" an article about present and past theatre closures due to epidemics from bubonic plague to AIDS, and the dramatic literature that came out of those times.

Shakespeare's work is full of references to the plague, which took the lives of several of his young brothers and interrupted his own life several times. Productions had to be halted, theatres closed, and Shakespeare, as actor/producer, was left to go back to writing. In 1593, he wrote poetry during the closures, and in 1606, he wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. The plague also figures in a number of his plays. Here's a quote from Pollack-Pelzner:

"In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, written just after the end of the 1593 outbreak, the friar who’s supposed to tell Romeo that Juliet is only pretending to be dead gets prevented from delivering his message because he’s quarantined with a fellow priest who’s been helping the sick: “The searchers of the town, / Suspecting that we both were in a house / Where the infectious pestilence did reign, / Sealed up the doors and would not let us forth.” Romeo never gets the message, of course, and he kills himself before Juliet revives."

Shakespeare was just echoing prevailing beliefs when he blamed plagues and earthquakes and violent storms on "planets in disorder" or the wrath of God. I'm sure there are plenty of people who would still do that, if they couldn't conveniently blame this particular horror on "foreigners." What I noticed particularly in the quote from Troilus and Cressida was the wonderfully-stated and apt comment that these disasters "divert and crack, rend and deracinate/the unity and married calm of states" from what before felt firmly fixed -- just as we now witness the world's most successful economies, and supposedly top-drawer health care systems, cracking apart and tearing up the roots of the seemingly-solid states themselves. What is new to us was not new at all to a keen observer like Shakespeare, who never stopped at the event itself, but sought to look underneath and behind and beside it, as well as having his characters predict possible futures that could result.

In watching Trump's pathetic, deluded performance during this crisis, it seems as if we're seeing a drama unfold in the same proportions as some of Shakespeare's history plays or his immortal tragedies: a tragedy that will go down through the ages in history and in literature. The king blusters and blasts and blames through the first act; in the second he concocts fantastic schemes; but by the third, he's relegated to one side of the stage, where he sits, defiant, his jaw set, having lost every shred of our sympathy, while the disaster he's failed to prevent swirls around him, his toady-ing ministers desert him, and once-minor characters begin to take the reins or emerge as heros.

What we can't see yet, of course, is how it all ends.

"Woe to that land that's govern'd by a child!
All may be well. But if God sort it so,
'Tis more than we deserve or I expect."

William Shakespeare, Richard III (II.3)

---

(Portrait drawing by me, in pencil, 3.5" x 5")

 

Books of 2019: eclectic as usual

Boxing Day. Traditionally, this has been a day of curling up on the couch with a new Christmas book, but for the first time I can remember, I didn't receive a single one! I wonder if this is a trend among readers of this blog too. We don't buy or receive as many physical books, and maybe our friends and families are less likely to give them to us. I wonder, and, as a publisher, I worry. No matter -- trends haven't affected my reading patterns very much, except for the change to reading e-books borrowed from the Overdrive service at my library, or purchased on Kindle. I read almost exclusively on my phone, unless I've borrowed a physical book from the library. And though I did buy myself a couple of books about Greece that haven't arrived yet, I'm trying not to acquire too many these days -- the shelves are already overburdened. But read, I do.

I don't have a great deal to say about the books I read this year... there's a definite focus on Portuguese literature, because of traveling there and trying to write about it subsequently (a still-unfinished project). As usual, there are some classics from both ancient literature and the 19th and 20th centuries. After a debate with a friend about "the greatest novels" I decided to reread some of the candidates. Middlemarch was a first-timer for me, and I liked it. War and Peace was a re-reading, but while I had remembered the characters and basic plot, the book affected and impressed me much more now than when I read it before as a much younger person with so much less experience of life -- I think it deserves its status as one of the greatest novels ever written. I finally made it through Ulysses a few years ago, and don't plan to re-read The Brothers Karmazov, Anna Karenina, or Madame Bovary any time soon; other candidates are lined up for re-reading next year: The Magic Mountain, Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury. But I find I'm more interested in continuing to read books in translation from world literatures that are less known to me. In addition to War and Peace, the "biggest read" was Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, about the city where my mother-in-law spent her youth after leaving Armenia -- a city whose history is virtually disappearing.

Particular favorites this year were Compass by Mathias Enard, and two books by friends: Immigrant, Montana, by Amitava Kumar, and Human Archipelago, by Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole. Among the Lisbon books, I especially loved For Isabel: A Mandala, and Requiem: An Hallucination, both by Antonio Tabucchi, and A History of the Siege of Lisbon, by Jose Saramago. Helen Vendler's Seamus Heaney is brilliant and illuminating. I didn't think Pachinko was incredibly well-written, but it was such a great window into a diaspora I knew little about (Koreans living in Japan). Likewise, there's always a Murakami on my list: I liked Killing Commendatore a lot, but didn't think it was in the same league as, say, 1Q84. The Frolic of the Beasts, by Yukio Mishima, is an excellent, extremely disturbing novel by the great Japanese writer.

It might be worth mentioning (since I don't think I have before) that I also regularly read and highly recommend the Canadian (but international) literary magazine Brick. I'd love to have a piece in there someday -- I came close with one this year, according to a kind letter I received from one of their editors, and will try to submit something again in 2020.

Right now I've started Flights by Olga Tokarczuk -- original, unsettling and intriguing so far. I enjoyed Greek to Me, a love letter to Greece and the Greek language by New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris, especially because since our recent trip I've been studying modern Greek - half an hour each morning, along with half an hour of French in the afternoon. In her book, Norris mentions visiting the home of the late great travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor in Kardamyli, Greece, on the Mani peninsula. We were nearby and fascinated by the stoic ruggedness and remoteness of that region, so I've ordered a couple of Fermor's books -- one about the Mani, and the other about northern Greece -- so that will be how 2020 is likely to start out.

Finally, it was a great pleasure to hear and meet one of my literary heroes, Michael Ondaatje, this year at a reading he gave in Montreal.

What about you? Please share your favorites, or entire book list if you keep one, in the comments! I always love hearing from fellow readers at this time of year, and wish you all a happy year of reading ahead!

 

Book List, 2019

Drink Time! In the Company of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dolores Payás

Greek to Me, Mary Norris

Electric Light, Seamus Heaney

The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Jose Saramago

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Jose Saramago (rereading)

The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester (audiobook, dnf)

For Isabel: A Mandala, Antonio Tabucchi

The Lives of Things, Jose Saramago

Helen, Euripedes

The Women of Troy, Euripedes

Ion, Euripedes

Falling Upward, Richard Rohr

The Proper Study of Mankind, Isaiah Berlin (bits and pieces, mainly the essay on Tolstoy "The Hedgehog and the Fox")

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (rereading)

Human Archipelago, Fazal Skeikh and Teju Cole

Middlemarch, George Eliot

Pachinko, Min Jin Lee

The Frolic of the Beasts, Yukio Mishima

O Sing Unto the Lord: A History of English Church Music, Andrew Gant

4 3 2 1, Paul Auster (DNF)

Pereira Maintains, Antonio Tabucchi

Warlight, Michael Ondaatje (second reading, for book club)

Requiem: an Hallucination, Antonio Tabucchi

What is Not Yours is Not Yours, Helen Oyeyemi

The Tiny Journalist, Naomi Shihab Nye

The Lisbon Poets (anthology)

Five-Minute Sketching: Architecture, Liz Steel

The Book of the Red King, Marly Youmans

Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (3rd and 4th books, Mountolive, Clea)

Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami

The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell (First two books: Justine, Balthazar)

The Relic Master, Christopher Buckley (DNF)

Immigrant, Montana, Amitava Kumar

Compass, Mathias Enard

In Memoriam

Photographer Robert Frank died yesterday at the age of 94.

Jennifer Lewis, artist, photographer, ceramicist, and one of our closest lifelong friends, died a year ago this week, at the age of 68; the day the photograph above was taken, we were together at the 2008 Robert Frank show at MoMA, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the publication of Franks' masterpiece, The Americans.

Aaron Moore, historian, professor, and husband of my dear friend Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, died on Sunday at the age of 47 -- just half that of Robert Frank.

I have no way to make sense of the unfairness of life, the time we're each allotted, or the way each of us meets our fate. What I do know is that each of these people used the time they had to be creative, to be productive and engaged, to connect with others, to try to make a difference, and to be courageous. Each of them touched me, in quite different ways, and I will always be aware of them and remember them.

Jonathan and Jenny looking at Robert Frank's contact sheets, New York City, 2008.

--

It's September 11th, a day of remembrance that goes beyond any one person. That morning, Jennifer called us in Vermont, from her roof in lower Manhattan: we were on the phone with her when the second plane hit the tower.

And on this day, I think, too, of what Robert Frank photographed in his iconic book, The Americans. Like Dave Heath, whose photographs we saw earlier this summer at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, like Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg, all of whom knew each other, Frank was trying to express something tragic and destructive that he sensed at the heart of American life in the 1950s and early 60s -- something that would explode into violence later in the 1960s, and has never been resolved. Frank showed us America's racism, economic inequality and insensitivity, its feel-good culture, and above all, its denial. Now, much of the divisive toxicity that became an undercurrent after the 60s has been allowed, and encouraged, to boil over and come to the surface. So I think a post entitled In Memoriam today is also a requiem for an idea of America that is dying, and must die eventually -- but how long that will take, and at what cost, none of us can predict.

 

The Book of the Red King

I hope that readers of this blog will want to know about this beautiful new book of poems, written by Marly Youmans, illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and designed and published by me. It's available as a hardcover with linen covered covers and a printed dust-jacket, and a paperback, and the pre-order pricing extends until this Friday, July 19th. All the ordering information and full book information is on the Phoenicia website.

"For those who love well-formed poems and for those who love fantasy, this is a must-read and a distinctive, evocative voice. There is no one like Marly Youmans." --Kim Bridgford 

"The reader will be spellbound." --Kelly Cherry

"It is the territory of Yeats and Tolkien." -- A.M. Juster

A short book description:

From Marly Youmans, author of the epic poem Thaliad (Phoenicia, 2012) comes the story of the mysterious Red King, the metamorphosing Fool, and the ethereal Precious Wentletrap, told in a series of connected poems of rare beauty. Whether read as fantasy, symbolic story, or simply poetry, the world Marly has created is a spellbinding place where we can glimpse truths about our own lives, and the world. The Book of the Red King is illustrated with drawings by the acclaimed Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

 

A June Watercolor Sketchbook

Studio still life with a painting of Thingvellir by Kjarval. A recent fairly loose watercolor; I want to do more painting like this.

About a month ago, I read about an online watercolor challenge happening in the month of June. The idea is to paint 30 "direct" watercolors in 30 days -- that means painting without preliminary ink drawing, just plunging in and painting or drawing rapidly with your brush. his is the second year for this challenge, the brainchild of Marc Taro Holmes, a well-known "urban sketcher" who used to work in the video game industry, and now happens to live in Montreal, and Liz Steel, an urban-sketcher and watercolor teacher  known for her watercolors of architecture. The point of the month-long challenge is to encourage lots of painting practice and less thinking and worrying about picky details or great results; like life drawing, this is to get people loosened up and moving from one painting to the next without judging themselves. I'm totally in support of that, because what I see in so many people who tell me they'd love to paint is fear of beginning, and then a whole lot of self-criticism which boils down to "I'm no good at this." There's no way someone isn't going to learn and improve if they paint 30 sheets of paper in a month, while just one a week, or one a month, leaves a lot of room for those self-defeating thoughts.

I kept thinking about the challenge, and finally decided I wanted to participate. The experience of doing my Lisbon sketchbook has taught me a lot. I've still got two pages left to go in that book, but by eliminating the ink lines about halfway through I've ended up with sketches I liked much more. And I really liked the fact that it's a complete book.

As for the "rules" of this challenge, I'm probably going to bend them. I'm in a different position from a beginning painter; learning to draw with a brush isn't my personal challenge; it's to pursue the work on a daily basis, sometimes painting very freely, at other times with more detail. At this point what I'm interested in doing is painting better (and more) watercolors, toward a particular style. Sometimes that means I need a quick preliminary pencil under-drawing -- so while I may sometimes go directly to watercolor, I'm not going to force myself to eliminate pencil drawing on every page. However, speed is going to dictate a certain amount of looseness, and that's always good for me.

Because I wasn't satisfied with the paper in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook, I decided to make myself a new sketchbook for June. I used a single sheet of 22" x 30" Arches cold-pressed paper given to me recently by a friend. It's the lightest watercolor weight, 90 pounds, but still substantial. I cut it into smaller sheets that were 10" x 7 1/4", which folded down into 5" x 7 1/4" pages. The one sheet of Arches yielded three signatures of 12 pages each, for a book of 36 single pages, or 18 spreads. I made a traditional sewn binding on linen tapes, with cover boards made of acid-free matboard, covered with Italian marbled paper from my paper stash, added black Canson endpapers, and a spine covered with black leather. 

I wasn't sure how it would work, because I'd never made a book with such heavy paper. The only technical problem was that I didn't sew the signatures quite tightly enough, so even after gluing there is a small gap between them when you open the book to those pages.  But otherwise, it came out well.

The big challenge, I knew, would be to actually USE it. My own inner voice was already saying, "You're going to ruin that beautiful little book!" But I told myself I could make others, and on June 1, the same day I finished the binding, I painted the opening page. 

My goal isn't to do 30 watercolors, necessarily, since I don't have a 60-page book; what I hope to do is to completely fill this sketchbook with sketches and paintings from the area around my studio, which is near the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks. (We'll see what happens -- already it's June 3 and I've only done one painting!) I was shocked when I first put my brush on the Arches paper -- even though I've used hundreds of sheets of it in the past, I had become so used to using the Moleskine paper that the extra "tooth" and receptive surface felt like a wall of resistance, when really the high-quality paper was just begging for more water and paint. I'm not sure what will happen to the book itself when I get this paper really wet -- unlike a block of watercolor paper, the pages will ripple and buckle. But as a teacher once said, "Sometimes you just have to fight with it." At the end of June, I hope I'll have an interesting book full of paintings, and that I will have learned some more things. And you know what? If it's the end of July, that's OK too.

 

Lisbon Travel Journal: A Process and a Search

The Logistics

I went off to Portugal with a new, blank, pocket-size watercolor sketchbook, and the intention of doing as much sketching as I could -- more, I hoped, than I had ever done on a trip. That's what happened -- but, as usual, things got complicated. We planned an itinerary each day, and were on the go most of the time. J. and I walked a lot and for the most part we were always together. This is my choice, even though it conflicts with drawing. Lisbon is beautiful, with many exciting and challenging views, plazas and monuments, and complex perspectives. Still, I found that I didn't want to take too many precious hours out of the day to sit and draw. And when I'm traveling with someone else, it's not fair to ask them to be patient for an hour or more while I sit bent over a sketchbook. My partner -- a photographer -- is really very understanding about this, but we both try not to impose on each other's good nature too much. I sketched before or after some meals in restaurants or cafes, and occasionally at a church or a miradouro -- one of the many "lookouts" scattered at high points around the city. I also did some still life and interior drawings in our apartment in the larger sketchbook I'd brought. Sometimes I did a quick sketch in pen-and-ink on location, and added watercolor in the evening after we were home for the night. But all of this still barely scratched the surface of what could have been recorded in my sketchbook.

After we returned home to Montreal, three weeks ago,  I plunged into choir duties for Holy Week and Easter, plus we had a big professional design job to finish up by the end of the month. The sketchbook kept calling to me, though, and when my friend Valeria Brancaforte, a printmaker and painter in Barcelona, suggested that I just use my photographs and my memory to fill out the pages, it was the encouragement I needed. I've tried to do one new drawing every day or two.

The Project

What started as a fairly amorphous idea -- a bunch of random sketches and impressions of a particular place -- became even less clear to me during this trip. 

Whenever I've traveled as an adult, throughout the past forty years, I've generally kept some sort of journal. Originally, before computers and long before phones, these journals were mostly words in a small notebook, maybe with a sketch or two. I took pictures with film cameras, and made albums of prints when I got home. Later, this same journalistic process evolved into blog posts. After we moved to Montreal and established a much more functional studio space, my blog -- which had been mostly words and photographs -- became more of an art blog, and I started drawing nearly every day. When I traveled, I still took along notebooks or sketchbooks, but the words went into my computer. Although I was drawing while away, I never tried to make a sketchbook that stood on its own. The sketches, along with words, ended up on my blog.

View of the Targus River and Castelo de Sao Jorge

During these same years, in the craft world, scrapbooking became a thing, while artists took it one step farther, making personal journals that combined elements of scrapbooks, sketching, and handwritten journaling, and teaching others to do it. Online, we saw the rise of the wildly popular urban sketching movement, with talented artists holding international seminars on techniques for drawing architecture, urban landscapes, and people. Local groups of avid sketchers have sprung up in many cities. These travel and urban journals are personal too, often combining words and paper ephemera along with pen-and-ink or watercolor sketches. People share their work not only in local groups but on personal and group blogs, and social media.

Natas (Portuguese custard tarts) in pen-and-ink and watercolor, with stickers and packaging from Pasteis de Belém.

All of this is fantastic, I think -- it's brought new methods of creative self-expression, as well as community, to a great many people. I've certainly been influenced by some of these trends, and they've found expression on my blog, but until I decided to make one cohesive paper journal of this trip, I hadn't thought it through. What exactly was I trying to do? What was this thing I was making?

The Targus River from the Alfama (the old Moorish quarter)

The drawings in my large sketchbook were not confusing: they were black-and-white line drawings done in my familiar style. I had made a somewhat subconscious decision to do the small pocket sketchbook pages entirely in color. But in what style? Good question! The answer that emerged was that I didn't have one -- at least, no style I was completely happy with. Most of the first pages were done with pen-and-ink, followed by watercolor washes. Sometimes the line felt too heavy for the small pages, giving a cartoon-like feeling. At other times, when I managed to stay looser, the result was more pleasing to me. I thought I'd try working in direct watercolor, over a lightly sketched pencil drawing. I did the two landscape sketches (above) over the rooftops looking toward the Lisbon harbor, as a comparison. Both were nice: they're just very different in feeling and even in purpose. 

When drawing tiles or ceramics, using line work made a lot of sense, and seemed effective. For sculpture or landscape, I wasn't so sure. I kept going back and forth between the two.

Madonna and Child at Igresa de São Domingos

Halfway through the trip I decided that this was the real purpose of the project: to explore and search out a style that I liked, or perhaps to refine two different styles for different purposes.

I did two full-spread seascapes using watercolor alone, and began to feel a little more satisfied. Both were too contrasty, and I struggled with the Moleskine paper, which is really not very high quality, but they had more feeling, depth, and emotion than ones that began with a pen line. Was it ridiculous, I wondered, to spend so much time on an 11" x 3.5" sketch, when I could have worked much larger on excellent paper, and gotten a much better result? 

Calçada do Combro, with tram lines overhead.

Then there was the problem of perspective. For years I avoided drawing buildings, even though I've studied perspective and know the basic rules -- I thought it bored me, but really I lacked the necessary patience. Doing complicated urban drawings of buildings and rooftops, which I'd first tried last year in Mexico City, gave me more confidence. In Lisbon, with its hills and endless angles, I tried to pay more attention, and take the time to get the drawing approximately right, but I was also learning how much to leave in and what to leave out to create an evocative impression and satisfying sketch rather than an architectural rendering.

In spite of all my second-guesses and self-criticism, the sketchbook itself was beginning to fill out, the pages adding up to a record and impression of what I had seen. I didn't have this from any other trip we had taken. So I kept going, determined to finish a standalone, completed book, rather than abandoning it mid-stream. Some pages would just work better than others; that was fine with me. It could contain a variety of styles. In the end, it would be a record of my own search and struggle, as much as it was a record of a place.

Dinner at the apartment: salad, fruit, and vinho verde.

A modern travel sketchbook can be so many things -- there are no rules. The most satisfying ones, to me, have a developed, personal style, but their "tone" varies just as much as we artists vary in personality; that's part of what makes them so cool and interesting. Some are detailed and architecturally accurate, some much looser; some are whimsical and playful. Some focus on food, or buildings, or people; some use more or less color or pen line; some incorporate a lot of ephemera. In the end, it's all up to the maker.

 

John Singer Sargent, Ceiling of Palatine Chapel, Palermo, Sicily, watercolor, 1897

But what did I most want to do? A few days ago, I spent some time in the library looking at some John Singer Sargent watercolors I hadn't seen before, including his travel sketches from Sicily. Back in 1897, he had sketched altar retablos, wall mosaics and pavements that I too had admired and photographed 120 years later. I felt a flash of connection and recognition, as well as gratitude, as I pored over his masterpieces. Each sketch, no matter how loose or unfinished, was worthy of framing. They confirmed my gut-level instinct: I was most interested in trying to follow in the footsteps of artists like Sargent -- whether that took the form of a book of paintings and drawings, perhaps to use later with words, or loose sheets intended as standalone paintings, or sketches that could form the basis for later paintings.

This, on balance, is the most important thing the process has showed me: that at least part of the time, I want to aim high and do something more serious, partly because I feel the press of years: I don't have unlimited time.

Like anything worth doing, drawing and painting require discipline and practice, and also passion. I really love to draw, and always have. Developing a lively pen-and-ink style, with or without color, has been a priority for me, and it's fun. Likewise, direct watercolor is a medium I love, even though it's technically difficult, and very easy to ruin. Better paper is a requirement. In the future, maybe I'll end up binding sketchbooks for myself to use, with the paper I like best -- I can guarantee that the traveling artists of the 1800s and early 1900s were not using cheap sketchbooks. I need to take my own advice, and use the best materials I can afford.

I was happy with the first direct watercolor I did after revisiting Sargent's. It took twenty pages to get to this point; I've got another ten to fill. 

 

 

 

Book List - 2018

In the past year, I read fewer books than usual, but if anything I thought about them more. The year began with a big project: reading Homer's Odyssey chapter by chapter with two other friends, each of us reading a different translation and discussing them online. As the only one of the three readers with any ancient Greek, I was the one who looked up and struggled through passages we wanted to compare. This not only revived my interest in the language but rekindled my desire to go to Greece, which came true at the end of the year. The final book I'm reading, Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, is a novelistic treatment of the life of Alexander the Great, whose Macedonian birthplace we visited. There were a number of other classical books, or works inspired by them, in the early part of 2018 - specifically several by Seamus Heaney; Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire, a version of Antigone with an immigrant heroine and her brother, a suspected ISIS terrorist; Alice Oswald's Memorial, a poem that lists all the deaths mentioned in the Iliad, and Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey, about teaching the book to a class that included his own father and then going on a trip with him that recreated the ancient voyage.

Besides this focus, books I particularly enjoyed in the past year were William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, an autobiographical book about surfing that held me riveted from the first to the last page; Cesar Aira's bizarre and miraculous Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, Michael Ondaatje's luminous latest novel, Warlight, set in post-WWII London,, and Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami's most recent collection of short stories, many of which appeared first in The New Yorker.

The book that impressed me the most was probably The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, Vol 1: The Formative Years, by Ricardo Piglia, one of the greatest of all Latin American writers. When diagnosed with a terminal illness, he spent the last ten years of his life compiling, revising and editing the huge volume of journal notebooks he had kept throughout it under the name of his alter-ego, Emilio Renzi. They are just now being published in English.  The concept is monumental, and the writing extremely compelling; for someone like me who has kept journals off and on all her life (including this blog) it was a mind-bending project. Vol 1 covers the years when he was beginning to want to be a writer, through university, and up to the time his first book was published that brought him acclaim -- so it is the diary of a writer becoming a writer. It was a great contrast to last year's mammoth project (Knausgaard). Volume 2, The Happy Years, came out in November, and I look forward to reading it. I followed Vol 1 with one of Piglia's novels, which was great, but confess I liked the journals better. If you like Bolano, you will appreciate these.

Finally, in the fall, Jonathan and I both read William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, a memoir of the writer's pilgrimage in the footsteps of 6th-century monk John Moschos who visited Orthodox monasteries all over the Byzantine world of his time. Dalrymple's journey begins on Mt Athos, Greece, takes us to Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the West Bank, and ends in the Egyptian desert. The book was written in 1997 and chronicled not only where Moschos went, but the lived reality of the same monasteries fourteen centuries later, most of which were, or had been, under attack by other religions and political groups and were currently inhabited by only a handful of monks; his own visits sometimes alerted the authorities and endangered the present monks, who could be accused of harboring a spy. But it was exactly the right book for us to read before our own first trip to see the Byzantine world at closer quarters; I'll be writing about our trip to the ancient monasteries at Meteora, Greece very soon. 

As always, I look forward to hearing what you've been reading too, so please post your lists in the comments as well as your reactions to any of what I've said or listed here! And best wishes for happy reading adventures in 2019! I'm anxious to read the next Piglia, as I said, and the new Murakami novel, Killing Commendatore; also on my list is the Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell, and The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel about Sicily. How about you?

 

2018  (**=favorites)

Fire from Heaven (Alexander the Great trilogy, Vol 1), Mary Renault

**Men Without Women, Haruki Murakami

A Sort of Life, Graham Greene

**From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, William Dalrymple

Artificial Respiration, Ricardo Piglia

**The Diaries of Emilio Renzi, Vol 1: The Formative Years, Ricardo Piglia

The Sense of Sight, John Berger

Transit, Rachel Cusk

**The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, Cesar Aira

Quarantine, Jim Crace

**Warlight, Michael Ondaatje

Memorial, Alice Oswald

In the Night of Time, Antonio Munez Molina

Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

Unreasonable Behavior, Don McCullin

**Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan

An Odyssey, Daniel Mendelssohn

No Time to Spare, Ursula LeGuin

**Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie

Aeneid Book VI, Seamus Heaney

The Cure at Troy, Seamus Heaney

The Foliate Head, Marly Youmans

**Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney

**The Odyssey, Robert Fagles, translator (rereading with friends, each a different translation)