Reading Wednesday
Feb. 19th, 2020 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRecently read
Mrs. McGinty's Dead, by Agatha Christie, is one of those novels where you get the feeling that the author had as much fun writing it as you're having reading it. It features Poirot at his funny, fussy best and the always delightful Ariadne Oliver, some great supporting characters, and a mystery that kept me guessing until the murderer was revealed to be the one character I hadn't even thought of suspecting, without it feeling like a bait-and-switch. I actually had caught one of the biggest clues - a seemingly throwaway line whose phrasing made me pause, like, huh, that's kind of a weird thing to say - but didn't follow it to its (in retrospect) logical conclusion, and totally missed its significance.
Weather by Jenny Offill crams quite a lot of plot into such a brief book, but the short version is that a university librarian with a young son and a tendency to act as an armchair therapist to everyone in her life, from her recovering-addict brother to the guy at her go-to bodega, takes a job answering emails for a former mentor who now hosts a popular podcast about climate change, and goes through (to borrow a phrase from the Cut) "the Five Stages of Climatic Grief: ignorance, disbelief, worry, heightened worry," and an obsession with doomsday preppers. Although maybe "a lot of plot" is not quite accurate: there's a lot of plot threads, but the novel itself is more atmospheric than active, told in stream-of-consciousness fragments interspersed with non-sequitors and email Q&As; specific scenes, as such there are, feel less like watching a film than flipping through a not-quite-fluid sequence of photographs. With its backdrop of climate change and the 2016 election, it is very much a novel Of The Present Moment, but less obnoxiously so than some others I've read.
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews was so, so good and completely devastating, especially since it seems to be based, in part, on her own life.* The novel focuses on two sisters, Elfrieda and Yolandi, who grew up in a relatively unorthodox family in an otherwise conservative Mennonite community in Manitoba. Now in their forties, Elf is a celebrated concert pianist who suffers from severe depression and has attempted suicide more than once; Yoli is a struggling writer and twice-divorced mother of two, who will do anything to keep her sister alive.
This book, you guys. This book. It's absolutely heart-wrenching and lovely, with a wry sense of humor and so many lines that knocked the air out of my lungs ("Her surgery was over. So was her life.") or made me want to laugh and cry at the same time ("Just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.") The last part of the novel - as Yoli and her family try to piece themselves back together after Elf's death - felt like being entrusted with something fragile and precious.
* The parts based off Toews' own life being her Mennonite upbringing, and losing both her father and sister to suicide.
Last but not least, I finally finished The Trials of the King of Hampshire, by Elizabeth Foyster! What a bizarre, sad, complicated story.
Currently reading
Currently reading Teju Cole's Every Day Is for the Thief, about a young man returning to Lagos, Nigeria after fifteen years in the U.S. Everything I can find online says it's fiction, but it reads so much like a memoir - something about the ratio of anecdote to exposition in the first-person vignettes that make up the novel, and the photographs scattered throughout - that I keep looking it up again, like, but are you sure?
To read next
I have incoming holds on The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay and The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg, so whichever one I get my hands on first.
Mrs. McGinty's Dead, by Agatha Christie, is one of those novels where you get the feeling that the author had as much fun writing it as you're having reading it. It features Poirot at his funny, fussy best and the always delightful Ariadne Oliver, some great supporting characters, and a mystery that kept me guessing until the murderer was revealed to be the one character I hadn't even thought of suspecting, without it feeling like a bait-and-switch. I actually had caught one of the biggest clues - a seemingly throwaway line whose phrasing made me pause, like, huh, that's kind of a weird thing to say - but didn't follow it to its (in retrospect) logical conclusion, and totally missed its significance.
Weather by Jenny Offill crams quite a lot of plot into such a brief book, but the short version is that a university librarian with a young son and a tendency to act as an armchair therapist to everyone in her life, from her recovering-addict brother to the guy at her go-to bodega, takes a job answering emails for a former mentor who now hosts a popular podcast about climate change, and goes through (to borrow a phrase from the Cut) "the Five Stages of Climatic Grief: ignorance, disbelief, worry, heightened worry," and an obsession with doomsday preppers. Although maybe "a lot of plot" is not quite accurate: there's a lot of plot threads, but the novel itself is more atmospheric than active, told in stream-of-consciousness fragments interspersed with non-sequitors and email Q&As; specific scenes, as such there are, feel less like watching a film than flipping through a not-quite-fluid sequence of photographs. With its backdrop of climate change and the 2016 election, it is very much a novel Of The Present Moment, but less obnoxiously so than some others I've read.
All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews was so, so good and completely devastating, especially since it seems to be based, in part, on her own life.* The novel focuses on two sisters, Elfrieda and Yolandi, who grew up in a relatively unorthodox family in an otherwise conservative Mennonite community in Manitoba. Now in their forties, Elf is a celebrated concert pianist who suffers from severe depression and has attempted suicide more than once; Yoli is a struggling writer and twice-divorced mother of two, who will do anything to keep her sister alive.
This book, you guys. This book. It's absolutely heart-wrenching and lovely, with a wry sense of humor and so many lines that knocked the air out of my lungs ("Her surgery was over. So was her life.") or made me want to laugh and cry at the same time ("Just because someone is eating the ashes of your protagonist doesn't mean you stop telling the story.") The last part of the novel - as Yoli and her family try to piece themselves back together after Elf's death - felt like being entrusted with something fragile and precious.
* The parts based off Toews' own life being her Mennonite upbringing, and losing both her father and sister to suicide.
Last but not least, I finally finished The Trials of the King of Hampshire, by Elizabeth Foyster! What a bizarre, sad, complicated story.
Currently reading
Currently reading Teju Cole's Every Day Is for the Thief, about a young man returning to Lagos, Nigeria after fifteen years in the U.S. Everything I can find online says it's fiction, but it reads so much like a memoir - something about the ratio of anecdote to exposition in the first-person vignettes that make up the novel, and the photographs scattered throughout - that I keep looking it up again, like, but are you sure?
To read next
I have incoming holds on The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay and The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia by Emma Copley Eisenberg, so whichever one I get my hands on first.
