In May 2011, I clipped David Ulin’s “Summers of Discovery” from the Chicago Tribune. (It also appeared in the Los Angeles Times: “Critic’s Notebook: In Discover Mode.”) I had thought I would reread Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle that summer, but we know how that goes, right? More than six years later, though, I finally returned to the novel, and as I mentioned in my last post, it still resonates.

p. 164
And I remembered The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which I had read in its entirety the night before. The Fourteenth Book is entitled “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?”

It doesn’t take long to read The Fourteenth Book. It consists of one word and a period.

“Nothing.”

Since my last bookish post, I have, among other things, seen the Ivo van Hove-directed A View from the Bridge at the Goodman (get there, if you can), visited my daughters, taken three flute lessons, (nearly) finished four weeks at my new job, and completed six books:

■ Timon of Athens (William Shakespeare; 1605. Drama.)
■ Macbeth (William Shakespeare; 1606. Drama.)
■ Do Not Become Alarmed (Maile Meloy; 2017. Fiction.)
■ Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Jeanette Winterson; 2012. Non-fiction.)
■ Carrying the Elephant (Michael Rosen; 2002. Poetry.)
■ War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy; 1869. (Trans. L. and A. Maude; Everyman’s Library; 1992.) Fiction.)

The plays, both rereads, represent my Shakespeare in a Year progress. I plan to read Sonnets 112 through 120 and the related commentary between now and Sunday evening, which should catch me up.

From Macbeth, which is one of my favorite of the plays:

Act IV, Scene iii

Be comforted:
Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.

Seven years ago, I pressed my copy of Maile Meloy’s Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It on someone, promising beautiful prose and original storytelling. I regretted it almost instantly, and I really regretted it a few years later when the same someone mentioned the book in conversation, “Have you read it?” she asked. “It’s pretty good.” Um, yes, I read it. The copy you just finished, in fact. And, “pretty good” seems pretty inadequate, but okay. “Mmmm…” I replied, and reminded myself, again, not to give my books away. Pass them to my daughters, sell them, donate them, yes. But give them away? Not anymore, I don’t. Anyway, while I readily concede that Do Not Become Alarmed does not cast the same spell as Both Ways, it is as impossible to put down as Fierce Kingdom (Gin Phillips), which I read last month, so, recommended.

As I mentioned last time, I reread Fun Home (Alison Bechdel) in anticipation of seeing the Victory Gardens production. I had a notion that Jeanette Winterson’s memoir would make a neat pairing, and I was a little right — and a little wrong. Here are my remaining commonplace book entries for Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

p. 140
I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.

p. 144
There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations.

Reading is where the wild things are.

p. 170
And extremes — whether of dullness or fury — successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies — unconscious strategies — to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too — sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.

It takes courage to feel the feeling — and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person.

Michal Rosen’s Sad Book, illustrated by Quentin Blake, is quite possibly the most accurate depiction of sorrow and grief I have ever read. I cannot tell you how many times I have thought to send Rosen a postcard that simply says, “Yes. Thank you.” This week, I read Carrying the Elephant, his collection of prose poems. Again, “Yes. Thank you.”

p. 48
… Yes, it is unfair and
cruel. It also makes me tired with a
tiredness that hangs on like a dog. It’s nice of
you to say you’ll always remember him. You won’t.

p. 50
… You see me and you cry, you’re
overwhelmed. You ask me how it’s
possible for me to carry on. I wonder
if I look like someone who looks like
it’s possible to carry on.

And, as I shared yesterday, I have finished reading War and Peace. Here are the remaining commonplace book entries:

Book Three, Chapter 25
As often happens with passionate people, he was mastered by anger but was still seeking an object on which to vent it.

Book Four, Chapter 13
This was his acknowledgment of the impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view. This legitimate peculiarity of each individual, which used to excite and irritate Pierre, now became a basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in other people. The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between men’s opinions and their lives, between one man and another, pleased him and evoked from him an amused and gentle smile.

Next up? It’s hard to say. Last night, I grabbed a thriller. After the “heavy” reading and work and the yard chores (yeah, I decided to mow and rake when I got home), You (Caroline Kepnes) seemed right. The thing is, I have a feeling that this is going to become graphic in a way that my post-fifty self no longer tolerates well, so I may be in search of something else before day’s end.

On a related (sort of) note: My husband and I have only two episodes of Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect remaining. We were already Ronson fans (The Psychopath Test, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed), so this podcast (free to Prime and Audible customers) interested us. Although Ronson navigates an X-rated world, the podcast is never more than R-rated. Here’s Ronson’s description:

It’s sad, funny, moving and totally unlike some other nonfiction stories about porn – because it isn’t judgmental or salacious. It’s human and sweet and strange and lovely. It’s a mystery story, an adventure. It’s also, I think, a new way of telling a story. This season follows a single butterfly effect. The flap of the butterfly’s wings is a boy in Brussels having an idea. His idea is how to get rich from giving the world free online porn. Over seven episodes I trace the consequences of this idea, from consequence through to consequence. If you keep going in this way, where might you end up? It turns out you end up in the most surprising and unexpected places.

Since my last bookish post, I’ve moved my daughters back to university; received two offers so delightful that I rethought my ideas about “retirement” and accepted one; survived a particularly nasty bout of food poisoning; and finished the following books:

■ The Followers (Rebecca Wait; 2015. Fiction.)
■ Hamlet (William Shakespeare; 1602. Drama.)
■ The Grip of It (Jac Jemc; 2017. Fiction.)
■ Measure for Measure (William Shakespeare; 1604. Drama.)
■ The Marriage Pact (Michelle Richmond; 2017. Fiction.)
■ Fierce Kingdom (Gin Phillips; 2017. Fiction.)
■ Fun Home (Alison Bechdel; 2006. Graphic memoir.)
■ Othello (William Shakespeare; 1603. Drama.)

If you liked last summer’s The Girls (Emma Cline), and I did, you may appreciate The Followers, a difficult story told well. The Grip of It offers a literary twist on the haunted house genre. The Marriage Pact passed an amiable summer afternoon despite its pedestrian prose and improbable plotting. Fierce Kingdom, however, managed something special. This beautifully written and almost recklessly fast-paced thriller is destined for big-screen treatment. For the commonplace book:

p. 17
In a year he will be in kindergarten and these days of superheroes will fade and be replaced by something she can’t guess, and then at some point the zoo itself will be replaced and life will have gone on and this boy holding her hand will have turned into someone else entirely.

p. 160
She does not know when she started imagining the end of things. It’s possible that turning forty triggered it or that Lincoln triggered it from the moment he began changing from a baby into a boy and she realized how he was going to vanish, over and over again, until finally he was grown and gone, and it’s possible she has such dark thoughts precisely because there is nothing she wants more than for life to stay exactly as it is, never changing, and maybe she loves it all the more because she knows it can’t last.

p. 165
You are supposed to be more forgiving of your parents, aren’t you, after you have children yourself? After you understand what parenting really means?

The Bechdel memoir (an exquisite, smart book I devoured and pressed on all who would listen when it was first published more than a decade ago) was a reread: We will see the Victory Gardens production later this month.

The plays, all rereads, represent some of my Shakespeare in a Year progress. (Yes, I had planned to substitute a Hamlet-inspired novel, but my daughters and I ended up revisiting the play before they finished moving back to university. Still, The Dead Fathers Club (Matthew Haig), a book that has been on my shelves since 2006 may (finally!) end up on this year’s list.) I have also reached Sonnet 111 and pushed Sir Thomas More down the list a bit.

Yesterday marked the beginning of Week 11 in my quest to read War and Peace in seventeen weeks, but the book remains so compelling that I have already finished the reading for Weeks 12 and 13.

From Book Three, Part Two, Chapter 10:

He had managed people for a long time, and knew that the chief way to make them obey is to show no suspicion that they can possibly disobey.

And now I’m reading Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

p. 8
When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.

When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of story that can be spoken.