I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941 (Victor Klemperer)

■ Wednesday is comics day. This week, my pull list comprised Saga #42 and Revival #46.

■ Crouch’s Dark Matter entertained three of us late last year, so I chose Pines for an easy, escapist read.

■ Move Evicted to the top of your TBR pile. Now. Really. I’ll wait. From my commonplace book:

p. 256
The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn’t going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.

p. 257
Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health: not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.

p. 285
Poverty could pile on; living it often meant steering through gnarled thickets of interconnected misfortunes and trying not to go crazy. There were moments of calm, but life on balance was facing one crisis after another.

p. 291
The home is the wellspring of personhood.

■ We will see the world premiere of The Book of Joseph at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater next month. The play adapts the correspondence collected in Every Day Lasts a Year.

■ Our family book club chose The Handmaid’s Tale for our winter selection. We listened to the audiobook for a bit during each of our drives in and out of Chicago and on the way back to campus. (Claire Danes does exceptional work with the narration.) My husband completed the audiobook, my daughters are reading the rest in between classes and research, and I finished by rereading my thirty-one-year-old hardback. Since I first read Tale, it has been a looming part of the landscape of my imagination, yet I was unprepared for how much more horrifying it seems now — now that I am the mother of adult daughters, now that the world appears to have gone a bit mad.

p. 181
No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn’t do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.

■ I picked up Bird Watching from a bargain table at the university bookstore. I want to adore McCartney’s playfulness, but I do not.

■ Maybe I should have declined the invitation because I knew I would not be able to give the “Shakespeare in a Year” project my complete attention until this weekend, but I am confident I will be completely caught up by Groundhog’s Day.

■ As much a meditation on loss and grief as it is an exploration of memory and how memory shapes (and haunts and robs from) the present, William Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow is as perfect a book as A Good School or Revolutionary Road (both by Richard Yates) or Olive Kittredge (Elizabeth Strout).

p. 9
What I didn’t say, across the few feet that separated our two beds, was that I couldn’t understand how it had happened to us. It seemed like a mistake. And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn’t be. Between the way things used to be and the the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune that anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me, perhaps because of that pacing the floor with my father, was that I had inadvertently walked through a door I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

p. 27
What we, or at any rate I, refer to confidently as memory — meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion — is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

p. 113
In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

■ So thoroughly did my family enjoy the Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of King Charles III (reviews here and here) that I decided to read the play.

■ The Shakespeare Project of Chicago is hosted by libraries, and the library at which we saw King John is engaged in a “One Book, One Community” program for which The Story Hour (Thrity Umrigar) is the selection. It interested me enough to order a copy.

■ I wanted to add another passage from J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy to the commonplace book before shelving it:

p. 228
For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated — the switch flipped indefinitely. We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom. We become hardwired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there’s no more conflict to be had.

■ As I mentioned last week, Elegy segues neatly into Evicted (Matthew Desmond). Fifty pages in, what I’ve noticed so far is that Desmond seems evenhanded in his depiction of the tenants and their landlords.

In 2016, I completed 123 books. Of course, this unrepentantly promiscuous reader could easily add another 250-plus titles of books left in various stages of “undress,” but only cover-to-covers appear on my annual list. Although I completed 16 fewer books this year, I read the same number of fiction titles (excluding graphic works) as last year: 57. Of the remaining 66 books, 15 were plays; 18 were non-fiction books; and 33 were graphic fiction.

Here are a few more numbers:

Number of plays read that were attributed to Shakespeare: 10 (of which 5 were rereads)
Total number of rereads: 13
Number of books read in 2016 that were published in 2016: 46 (of which 16 were novels)

Best fiction read in 2016:
■ A Good School (Richard Yates; 1978. Fiction.)
■ The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 (Lionel Shriver; 2016. Fiction.)
■ The Elementals (Michael McDowell; 1981. Fiction.)
■ The Shawl (Cynthia Ozick; 1990. Fiction.)
■ My Name Is Lucy Barton (Elizabeth Strout; 2016. Fiction.)

Honorable mention:
■ The Last Policeman (Ben Winters; 2013. Fiction.)
■ The Nest (Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney; 2016. Fiction.)
■ The Girls (Emma Cline; 2016. Fiction.)

Best plays read in 2016:
■ Arcadia (Tom Stoppard; 1993. Drama.)
■ The Life of Galileo (Bertolt Brecht; 1940. (Trans. John Willett; 1994.) Drama.)

Most compelling non-fiction read in 2016:
■ One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway — and Its Aftermath (Åsne Seierstad; 2015. Non-fiction.)
■ Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife (Barbara Bradley Hagerty; 2016. Non-fiction.)
■ Neighbors (Jan T. Gross; 2001. Non-fiction.)

Honorable mention:
■ A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (Sue Klebold; 2016. Non-fiction.)
■ Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Jon Krakauer; 2015. Non-fiction.)

Best graphic fiction read in 2016:
■ Fell, Volume 1, Feral City (Warren Ellis; 2007. Graphic fiction.)
■ The Silence of Our Friends (Mark Long; 2012. Graphic fiction.)

Best reread:
■ Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad; 1899. Fiction.)

Honorable mention:
■ The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell; 1996. Fiction.)

Random remarks:
● Repeating this bit from one of my summer book posts: A Good School was, quite possibly, the best book I’ve read this year — which may have been the same thing I said about Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road eight years ago. In “The Lost World of Richard Yates” (Boston Review, October/November 1999), Stewart O’Nan wrote:

Once the most vaunted of authors–praised by Styron and Vonnegut and Robert Stone as the voice of a generation–he seems now to belong to that august yet sad category, the writer’s writer. Andre Dubus, who was his student at Iowa, revered him, as does Tobias Wolff, and the jackets of Yates’s books are adorned with quotes by the likes of Tennessee Williams and Dorothy Parker, Ann Beattie and Gina Berriault. When authors talk his name pops up as the American writer we wish more people would read, just as Cormac McCarthy’s used to. In the acknowledgments section of his novellas, Women With Men, Richard Ford makes it plain: “I wish to record my debt of gratitude to the stories and novels of Richard Yates, a writer too little appreciated.”

With his insightful and ranging appreciation, O’Nan — also a writer too little appreciated (if you are not familiar with his work, begin with A Prayer for the Dying and Last Night at the Lobster) — all but ensured that Yates would be revisited: Many of Yates’ books are, of course, back in print, and his “painful and sad” first novel received big-screen treatment in 2008. In fact, I finally saw the film over the summer, which led to the mentally intoned assertion, “The book was better,” and to the shelves, where several Yates titles awaited me. By the way, fans of John Williams’ Stoner will also appreciate A Good School.

● The Elementals deserves a much wider audience.

● My birthday wish is Fell, Volume 2.

● In this “Year of the House Sparrow,” I cannot imagine how I managed not to read Chris Chester’s Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds, which languished on my TBR pile all. year. long. (That’s not the worst of the indignity heaped upon it: I purchased the book — Shhhh! — nearly nine years ago.)

● Books like the brilliantly reported One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway — and Its Aftermath (Åsne Seierstad, 2015) and the upliftingly informative Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife (Barbara Bradley Hagerty, 2016) are the reason I read. I must read more non-fiction this coming year. It’s that simple.

● Speaking of Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife, here are a few passages I have pressed into my commonplace book:

p. 219
You may be thinking, Who in midlife has the time for this? To which I say: Maybe you don’t now, but you will probably at some point. And how will you spend it? Frittering away the time? Or in full-throated pursuit of a passion? Even if you have full-time work and children at home, as many people in midlife do, you can still take small steps to punctuate the days and weeks with a hobby that gives you a little zing every time you think of it.

p. 235
Middle age makes no exclusive claim to stress, trauma, and the need for resilience. People break bones, lose their jobs, develop cancer at all points in their lives. But it seems that for many of us, troubles start to cluster in midlife: You are more likely to lose a parent or spouse after forty, more likely to be diagnosed with cancer after forty-five, and much more likely to be replaced by a younger, cheaper, more tech-savvy employee after fifty. I never gave much thought to rebounding from setbacks in my twenties and thirties because life was ascendant and setbacks were rare. Now I feel as if I spend half my time trying to plug leaks in the dam. Happily, the research indicates, I may be better equipped because I have lived for five and half decades.

For more than thirty years, well before we knew its name, my husband and I — and later, our children — have celebrated “Christmas book flood” on December 24. One of our favorite days of the year, we celebrate with a long walk in the woods, a feast, and, when night falls, an exchange of gifts, especially books.

Another of our winter traditions is to spend Thanksgiving and / or Christmas at the Brookfield or Milwaukee County zoo. For the last few Thanksgivings, our daughters’ studies have put the kibosh on the trip, but we’ve been consistent about visiting on or near Christmas, and on Friday, we had the Milwaukee County Zoo to ourselves. Tree kangaroos, fennec foxes, and tiger cubs! Oh, my!

Wishing you and yours a wonderful winter holiday!

… until jólabókaflóð!. As I shared last year, it delights me that the way in which we have celebrated Christmas Eve for more than thirty years has a name, “Christmas book flood.”

A flurry of coupons, gift cards, and textbook sellbacks has meant that I’ve experienced a bit of a flood before the flood, so to speak. Speaking of recent acquisitions, The Vegetarian is a fine book, but it has, in my opinion, been rather over-praised. The “Kafka-esque” description, for example. Really? It reminded me more of Josephine Hart’s Damage (1991) — fraught, erotic, offbeat, memorable even; but, ultimately, slight.

Soon it will be time for my annual reading life review. At this writing, I’ve completed 120 119 118 books, of which thirty were graphic works and seventeen were plays. Interestingly, at least a dozen were rereads, including a number of books first read in high school or earlier (e.g., The Call of the Wild (Jack London) and The Turn of the Screw (Henry James)).

What have you been reading? What books do you hope to receive this holiday?

Two articles about reading captured my attention this week. The first, Will Schwalbe’s essay “The Need to Read” (WSJ, November 26), begins:

We all ask each other a lot of questions. But we should all ask one question a lot more often: “What are you reading?”

One of my favorite questions! Unfortunately, it can yield a crop of disappointing answers, including, “Oh, I don’t have much time for reading.”

Receiving a title or genre in response to the query is no guarantee that disappointment won’t soon follow, either. “I just read for entertainment” and “Oh, don’t over-analyze it” are two of my least favorite follow-up responses. Both seem designed not only to end what could have been a vibrant interaction but to dismiss and disparage me for being keen to explore. “Over”-analyze? Because I compared one novel to another? Because I wondered if you’d seen so-and-so’s review? Because I quoted a line or asked if you thought the closing paragraphs were effective?

Bosh.

My family spends a great deal of time talking about books — and, for that matter, movies, plays, art, television programs, and music. We describe what works for us and what doesn’t. We compare one book (or author or director or actor or artist) to another and stitch thematically similar works together — all in an ongoing conversation about what each of us is reading, thinking, learning, doing, and seeing. Over the last decade, we have been able to approach some works multiple times: Shakespeare’s plays, for example; LOST and Sherlock; Fargo and Soylent Green; the exhibits of many museums. This deepens and colors our discussion. More valuable to me than nearly all that we own is this mental treasure map of our shared experiences and memories, complete with its legend, comments, and annotations.

If that’s “over”-analysis, I am guilty, I guess. It’s funny, though, because, to me? That’s just good talking.

Here is another passage:

Books are uniquely suited to helping us change our relationship to the rhythms and habits of daily life in this world of endless connectivity. We can’t interrupt books; we can only interrupt ourselves while reading them. They are the expression of an individual or a group of individuals, not of a hive mind or collective consciousness. They speak to us, thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s. You can rant against a book, scribble in the margin or even chuck it out the window. Still, you won’t change the words on the page.

The other article is “A Plea for Reading in College” (Forbes, November 30):

I’m not saying that everyone should read a prescribed core of “great books” or that not enjoying reading automatically makes you suspect. However, one of the great advantages of reading, aside from the activity itself, is how it develops one’s imaginative powers. Whether in fiction or non-fiction, entering into a dialogue with characters and authors widens a reader’s perceptions of the world, a condition that greatly increases an individual’s ability to grasp the complexities that surround us, at the same time interacting with them and creating new forms and ideas.

Both articles compare the act of reading to a discussion: “They speak to us…” “You can rant against a book…” “[E]ntering into a dialogue with character and authors widens a reader’s perceptions of the world….”

So. I’m not “over”-analyzing. I’m reading, thinking, learning, and talking.

And you? What are you reading?