Monday, November 4, 2019

Living in a Fictional World: The Past Year in My Reading

What a strange time of life this is. No kids around, fewer responsibilities, an outside world which is at turns beautiful, intolerable, painful, incomprehensible. I've always used fiction as a way to understand my life and the world we live in. But it's actually a little odd and maybe even disturbing how frequently and fluidly I move from story to story during my day.

Reading is a big part of my life. I spend hours a day reading and listening to the written word. I start my day, everyday, with the newspaper. I listen to books or podcasts while driving and while walking Wally. I read on my commute into town, either of the dead tree variety or on my iPhone. I read every night before bed. I experience books on the written page, through my phone, on my Kindle, and on my computer.

At any one time, I may have several books going at once, depending on the medium, my location, my mode of travel, and the time of day. A quick look at what I am currently reading on my Good Reads account shows these works (with the mode of consumption in parentheses):

The Green Ray, Jules Verne (Kindle)
The Kingdom of Speech, Tom Wolfe (book)
The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates (audio)
Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens (book)
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (phone)
We Need to Talk about Kevin, Lionel Shriver (book)

Over the last year or so, my reading has fallen into a couple of interesting categories: short stories (perfect for commuting), graphic novels, contemporary novels of all sorts, African-American authors, and comic fiction.

I have always loved short stories. Some of my earliest memories around intense, obsessive, immersive reading come from poring through the short stories of O. Henry, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Thurber, and so many more. To me, a great short story reads and feels like a good poem, the meaning tucked away behind metaphors, images and visions. I love reading a beautifully-crafted short story. Recently, I've discovered that short stories are perfect for my once-a-week commute into Boston. I haven't minded reading novels on these commutes—I've always been pretty good about picking up narrative threads even when I haven't opened a particular book in a while.

But I've found in the last few months that reading short stories makes perfect sense. Of these, three particular ones stand out: In Persuasion Nation by George Saunders, The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret, and Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories by Lauren Groff. Saunders and Groff are two of my favorite writers of late and their stories don't disappoint, but for very different reasons. Groff's stories are like mini-novels, with fully-realized characters, strange symbols, and varied meanings; Saunders' stories are just plain odd and off-kilter, other-worldly, even though they're of this world. He has a way of making the bizarre and strange, the dystopic and futuristic, seem natural and scarily possible. I've never read Keret's work before, but this Israeli writer is one of the hot young writers who it seems like everyone is reading now. His stories are blessedly short and always strange, full of a dark comic humor that I often didn't understand.

Although I am not a big fan of memoirs (I found the hype around Educated suspicious, especially once I went down some rabbit holes on the internet), two of the graphic novels I've come across in the last year have been thought-provoking and intense: The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir by Thi Bui and Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob. I admit that I can be somewhat obnoxious about my avoidance and dislike of memoirs. There's something about curating one's life, shaping it into a narrative arc, and basking in the glory of its perfect imperfections that just gets on my nerves. But what are autobiographical graphic memoirs then? Aren't they the same thing? Perhaps. But these two books ask some really important questions about race, identity, what it means to be an American, an immigrant, a good person, and how we deal with our past. These graphic novels were among the most throught-provoking and interesting works I've read this year. Equally important to me was reading Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Ever since reading Maus many, many years ago, I feel like I've discovered an affinity for the marriage of the written word with the vivid imagery of illustrations. McCloud's intelligent prose, balanced with humor and a deep understanding of the medium, made this an enlightening and important read.

Over the last few years, I have found myself increasingly troubled by and fascinated by the African-American experience in fiction. From Octavia Butler (Kindred), James Baldwin (Go Tell it On the Mountain, If Beale Street Could Talk, Another Country), Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys), Rosalyn Story (Wading Home), and Ta-Nehisi Coates (The Water Dancer), I have found myself trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Call it the guilt of a white liberal if you will, I feel compelled to understand and explore the African-American experience in this country. Perhaps nothing brought it home more than a recent trip to New Orleans. Rosalyn Story's post-Katrina novel Wading Home brought so much into sharp focus while we were there. Her novel served as counterpoint and confirmation for some of my day trips we did—our depressingly real tour of the still-decimated and ignored lower ninth ward; a trip to the Whitney Plantation, which focuses entirely on the 300 people who were enslaved there. The long, sad history of African people in Louisiana is filled with nameless deaths, endless brutality, and uncompensated-for tragedy. No surprise, these themes aren't limited to New Orleans, as they appear prominently in all of the books I've listed above (which should include my recent re-reading of Toni Morrison's masterpiece Beloved as well as abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin). I'm not solving anything here. I'm trying to make sense out of the what and the why around this country's participation in one of the world's greatest atrocities and its after-effects. There's reparation, yes, but there's also acknowledgment and honoring, naming the nameless, memorializing those who came before if only to recognize their humanity and their stories.

Outside of these works and themes in my reading, I vacillate between reading older fiction (Charles Dickens, Ray Bradbury, Pat Barker, Alexandre Dumas, and Jules Verne among others) and newer works. I guess that's in part because some of what I read is guided by whatever my two book groups are reading. For instance, the last book we read in the book group my wife and I are in was David Nicholls' Us. The book was recommended to me by a good friend from college, perfect (and funny, too, if a little painful) for our time of life. As a couple confronts divorce at the cusp of empty nest-hood, the narrative teeters between the past and the present, and how we work and live through relationships. In my college's alumni book group (SwatBooksBoston), we started our year of post-colonial literature with Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John. Kincaid's coming's-of-age story in Antigua, set upon the backdrop of a post-colonial society, is mesmerizing and poetic.

But I find myself on other paths as well. Kent Haruf's Plainsong trilogy had been recommended to me a number of years ago. When I finally got around to reading it, his beautiful, simple prose reminded me of Stoner, and the landscapes of Alice Munro, but with more humor and more heart. I found Ruth Ozick's My Year Without Meat a deeply affecting read, too, though it tended too much toward the polemic, almost like some of T. C. Boyle's fiction. But then, Richard Powers's Overstory, though it covers similar politics, it covers different territory, was deeply engaging and beautiful. And let's face it, with so much existential gunk out there, I also have found a need to read funny things, too. My favorites over the last year are two older works by Mark Dunn, Ibid and Ella Minnow Pea. Somewhat related to Nabokov's Pale FireIbid is a novel told entirely in footnotes, about the life of a three-legged inventor and philanthropist. Ella Minnow Pea tells the hilariously tragic story of the island of Nollop through letters among the island's citizens. A statue to Nevin Nollop, the island's namesake and creator of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog", has been damaged. Letters keep falling off the statue memorializing that sentence and, as they fall, the island's government proclaims that those letters shall not be used anymore, and so thy are not used in the text of the novel either. Ridiculous and fun, and a sure-fire cure to the 24-hour news cycle.