January started with an excellent New Year’s Eve at home in Montreal with friends, then a house party for a few days, then I came to Florence right after Twelfth Night where I have been ever since, writing and looking at art. There was a lot of ice and snow at home, and there is none here. The novel is still not finished, but I have hopes it will be by the end of February. I read eleven books in January, and they were an interesting bunch.
Better Broken Than New: A Fragmented Memoir — Lisa St Aubin de Terán (2024)
All through her career Lisa St Aubin de Terán has been writing about her own life, whether as memoir or thinly disguised fiction. And all through her career, since I was a teenager, I’ve been reading her books, fascinated and a little repelled. I think I wouldn’t like her in person, but I love reading about her. She’s had a fascinating life, and she writes in a confidential way that always keeps a little back, that draws you close but never quite tells you everything. She’s lived in Venezuela, in Italy, in Mozambique, in England, she reinvents herself from time to time, makes a new start, tries to make sense of herself, writes a book, starts a new life with a new person in a new country. She’s very self-centred, and yet open and looking out, and she’s constantly fascinated with herself and how she turned out to be the person she is. The title of this book is from the Japanese art of kintsugi, and she’s writing about her life that way. If you have not read her, I recommend starting with the novel The Slow Train to Milan but if you have read her, you may well want this memoir that will tell you things you know from her other memoirs and things she held back, and in which you know she is still holding back. She’s a tantalising writer, and you have to care about her and be interested in how weird her life has been.
Covent Garden in the Snow — Jules Wake (2017)
Romance novel set at Christmas about a woman who works in make-up and wig-making at an opera house and how she meets an accountant who likes spreadsheets, and yet of course they’re perfect for each other. Wake is a good writer, good at detail and circumstance, good at friendships and time and place. This was a lot of fun.
Hearthfire Saga Book 1 — Ada Palmer (2027)
Re-read. I read the first draft and now I read this revision. This is a book about Norse gods and the Norse cosmos, and so it’s about survival and the marginal way in which it’s possible to make space to survive. It’s the story of a man and a god travelling through memory to learn why they’re doing it, to learn about themselves and each other. As you’d expect, it’s brilliant, very intensely absorbing, very long, and very thought-provoking. It’s also meticulously researched and deeply grounded in all of the latest research about Norse culture and cosmology. And it’s great, and as I was heading towards the end I was just reading faster and faster in that can’t put it down way, even though I’d read it before and I knew what was going to happen. I will remind you when this comes out, and when it has an official title.
Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It — Gabriel Wyner (2014)
To spoil this book, the answer it to make elaborate flashcards and do them a lot, and I expect that it would work if you did it, but it would be an awful lot of work and most people wouldn’t put that amount of work in. Certainly I wouldn’t. Certainly it seems unlikely for the sort of person who’d buy this book… I’ve been trying to learn Italian for ages, and I’m much better than I used to be but still awful. It seems to me that what helps is actually using it and the repetition I get from Duolingo nagging me.
The Nonesuch — Georgette Heyer (1962)
A young man with a good fortune goes to a country village, not actually feeling in need of a wife but of course finding one. This is a charming book with a fun hero and heroine, and a spoiled beauty who wanders about the plot (such as there is of one) having tantrums. This is pure fluff, but that’s what it’s supposed to be. Light as a meringue. And the misunderstanding is beautifully set up.
Anna and Her Daughters — D.E. Stevenson (1958)
Anna, left widowed, decides to leave London and go back to the Scottish village she came from; her daughters get themselves into a tangle over a man. This book covers much more territory in time and space and emotional resonance than I’m used to from Stevenson and I enjoyed it very much. We have the three daughters growing up in their different ways, and people settling into a village, which I expected, and then then it gets complicated and interesting. (It’s fun to imagine the novel Jane writes as being The Nonesuch.)
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop — Satoshi Yagisawa (2010) Translated by Eric Ozawa.
Very gentle Japanese novel about a girl learning to enjoy life again, after being jilted, by working in her uncle’s bookshop. Nothing much happens, she reads some books, she goes on a trip to the mountains, she talks to some people. I think this was recommended to me by an algorithm because I read The Tatami Galaxy and Before the Coffee Gets Cold and I was expecting it to develop some genre connection, but no, just a mainstream Japanese novel about people. Great that this stuff is being translated, glad I read it.
Absolutism in Renaissance Milan — Jane Black (2009)
A very specialised academic book about, well, absolutism in Renaissance Milan from the beginning of the Visconti dynasty until the end of the Sforza. Much more specialised and much more about absolutism and much less about any other aspect of Renaissance Milan than I expected. Also, a large part of this book is about lawyers arguing about when authoritarian leaders are allowed to be above the law, and fighting their corners to prevent rulers doing whatever they want to without justification, and working hard to prevent them riding roughshod over the existing law. So this was also more relevant than I was expecting.
Her Son’s Wife — Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1926)
This has just become available as an ebook. So, she’s a wonderful writer, and this is a wonderful book, but claustrophobic and depressing to the point where I can’t really recommend it. It’s about a woman who sacrifices herself to save her granddaughter, and it’s very well observed—almost painfully so.
The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1845-1846, Vol 2 (1899)
Re-read. You know how I read a lot of things at once? (I read sixteen things at once. I have a system.) Two of the things I am reading are always books of letters. Every single time I opened this book, or the previous volume, every time I saw it in the list of books I was reading, I involuntarily smiled. They wrote to each other every day, sometimes several times a day, even on days when they saw each other, which was once or twice a week by this volume. And it’s all so tense and exciting as it gets towards them getting secretly married and preparing to run away to Italy!
And then… they do. And the book stops. And they never wrote to each other anymore, even though they lived here (right here in Florence) for fifteen years and wrote lots of major poetry—both of them. However, I felt bereft at finishing the book. They didn’t write these letters for me but for each other, and yet, I love them both so much and I want them to be happy, because to immerse yourself in this book is to fall in love with their love for each other. I decided that, since they were dead before I read these letters even the first time, I would consider that they are alive for the next fifteen years and I don’t have to mourn them until then. I then went to look at their house, and stood looking up at their windows. (I do know they’re not really in there.) Fifteen years. In 2041 I’ll read the letters again and… They’re free on Project Gutenberg. I think I said about Volume 1 that if you like Byatt’s Possession, you’ll like these.
Nirvana Express: Journal of a Very Brief Monkhood — S.P. Somtow (2018)
Autobiographical book by SF writer S.P. Somtow about the time he was a Buddhist monk in Thailand for two weeks. An odd mix of information about Buddhism, detail about daily life as a monk, and actual ecstatic experiences. This was interesting and strange, like a lot of Somtow’s fiction. I’m glad I read it. This could not be a more different kind of book from Better Broken Than New and yet both are the kind of memoir I like, the kind where the author is really there and being honest about themselves and their feelings even if not telling you quite everything.
The Browning letters (and window) sound wonderful. I wonder what system you use to read 16 books at once. I try to read ~ 7 and invariably drop at least one ball if not more. It helps to read aloud to family members, including, recently, Master and Commander, and Moominsummer Madness, both surprisingly riveting readalouds. I know the collection of Penelope Fitzgerald letters I once recommended did not end up hitting the spot for you, but I’ve recently been enjoying Tove Jansson’s letters, available as an ebook.
I shall definitely read Days at the Morisaki Bookshop. One of my favorite writers, actually, Banana Yoshimoto, writes this sort of quiet book about people in which conventional plot, though it may happen, is not the focus.
I strongly recommend anything by Yoshimoto, with the caveat that I only slightly recommend Kitchen, which is of course the famous one because life works that way. Kitchen is not at all bad, but it doesn’t represent her strengths, and if it had been the first of hers I read I would not have become a completist, which I am. Moshi-Moshi would be an interesting comparison with Morisaki Bookshop, in that the protagonist is dealing with grief by moving to a real Tokyo neighborhood and working in a restaurant there, and it’s about grief and legacy and memory and who owns what narrative. Asleep is several shorter pieces centered around sleeping (or failing to), which is interesting to see a writer focus on; The Lake is about an artist trying to help a young man heal as much as possible from a truly appalling backstory. But anywhere except Kitchen is a good start.
Everything Yoshimoto teeters on the rim of genre, in a way so down-to-earth it’s hard to explain. She lives in a Shinto cosmology and that’s just how things are, is the best I can do– there’s never any doubt, for example, that people go on after death and that the dead can influence and sometimes speak to the living, but that isn’t a big deal except that sometimes they have important things to say. Yoshimoto gives the impression to me not of a fantasy writer but of someone who inhabits a universe with basic assumptions and boundaries which differ from mine, some of which happen to coincide with what I think of as the fantastic.
Anyway, in the translated books by Japanese novelists writing about daily life category, I know of no one better.
I usually wait for paperback releases of books to add to my shelves and instead go to the library first, but I will not be able to resist getting Palmer’s new book asap.
Ah, the Nonesuch! I always feel that Heyer cast a young Elizabeth Taylor in the role of the violet-eyed Tiffany, the spoiled beauty.
I would love to hear more about this sixteen-book system! It sounds right up my alley.
I agree! I often find myself with bookmarks in as many as 15 books at a time, and often find I can’t manage them at all. I’d love to know this trick of the reading life, especially as I’m approaching retirement.
Seconded! I thought that was a really interesting throw-away line.
I saw the name St. Aubin and I wondered if Lisa St. Aubin de Teran was related to Edward St. Aubyn, author of the Patrick Melrose books, which are often compared to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (one of my favorite long novels/novel series ever.) Apparently not, given the different spelling, though perhaps there is some distant connection. Lisa St. Aubin de Teran sure seems to have lived quite the unusual life.