October 1
Love In The Time of The Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
How many times have I read this? This is from the box of books I had sent from Seattle, which makes it likely that it’s my high school copy. On the front page my name is written and that of my best friend from college; she spent a summer in West Virginia and was bored and living by herself and I sent her a care package with heaps of my books in it, inscribed with both our names. There is so much to love, about this book, and like with all my loves, every time I read it I think about something new. This time it was two things: one, that the city Garcia Marquez describes is really its own character. It’s difficult for me to imagine the city, if that makes sense—like I would never be able to picture its map– but I feel that it can be known: the Arcade of the Scribes, the Park of the Evangels, the old slave quarter, the transient hotel. The other thing, of course, is: the pedophilia. I have come to think very differently about Florentino Ariza than I did when I first read about him when I was eighteen, when I could think of nothing better than someone loving me the way he (think he) loves Fermina Daza, but now all I can think of is the thirteen-year-old who kills herself after being raped by her elderly guardian. I will be curious to see if I can read this book again—I especially want to read about Fermina Daza staying at her wild cousin’s house and smoking with the lit end of the cigarette in her mouth—and not be squicked by the treatment of America Vicuna (although I still haven’t decided if it’s Florentino Ariza’s treatment of her or Garcia Marquez’s). Stay tunes.
October 13
Very Good, Jeeves by P.G Wodehouse
Reading Wodehouse while swinging in a Tongan hammock was a very funny exercise in incongruity, I have to say. I had expected to read a lot more than I did, in Tonga—I was too busy swimming with whales and attempting to climb coconut trees, thank you very much—but it was nice to read something comforting and familiar. I think that reading a whole big set of these stories, though, is a bit much, because they are a little formulaic. Better to dip in and out just for fun than to sit down and read them all at once, I think. I do appreciate the awesome twenties’ slang: pip pip, cheerio, and all the rest, and just the language in general, just like everyone else who loves Jeeves and Bertie. And also I secretly love how into his trouserings Bertie is—I mean who know what good reading descriptions of tennis whites and country tweeds could be?
October 15
For Relief Of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander
This is one of my faaaaaaavourite sets of short stories ever and I was so happy to see it in my box of books. I have missed it over the past two years. The title story is basically perfect, to me, but I love all these stories. Particularly I love the details of the Jewish communities Englander writes about: how to make a wig of human hair, of the Dr. Brown’s soda at the kosher pizza place, of the coffee place in Tel Aviv. You know when you re-read something you’ve loved for a long time and you have this total sigh of relief? I think I felt that way the very first time I read this book, isn’t that weird?
October 24
Always Coming Home by Ursula K. LeGuin
I am re-reading a lot this month. I have read this book more times than I care to count, and its world is so real to me now that I really can see the various towns in the Valley, down to the houses and the hills. It’s hard to describe this book: it’s a fictional anthropology, sort of. There are poems and stories and explanations (the explanations are my favorite bits). It’s not character-driven because I don’t think LeGuin wants you (me) to get to know individuals: maybe she wants you (me) to get to know a place, a time, a people. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who’s ever read this book, and I know it’s not for everyone—I mean it’s hippie, man, hippie in the sense that there is a poem dedicated to a bloodclot, you know? I don’t care though. I love it. I will always love it.
October 27
The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
This month’s only new book, I wasn’t really sure what to expect because I don’t know anything about Rumi or Islam or Turkey or anything. There are two parallel stories here, one about the poet Rumi in the thirteenth century, and one about a lonely housewife from Boston who runs away with a Scottish Sufi she meets on the internet. I greatly preferred the former story to the latter, but I think they worked together okay. I got pretty interested in the Muslim theology that the story discusses, as well as the details of thirteenth-century life in Turkey and what’s now Iran and Iraq. It makes me realize I know pretty much nothing about anything in that part of the world, either in the present or in history, and that I would like to learn more, please.
October 27
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
This is another favorite of mine—I am, obviously, working my way through my boxes of books—and I had a very happy day when I put down The Forty Rules Of Love and picked this up and finished it that evening with a long deep sigh of satisfaction. These stories are excellent, it’s all I can say. I was going to attach some adjectives to them: crystalline, delineated, tiny, perfect, but…none of those are quite right. I just believe in these stories, I guess, like I believe in each person in them. That is one of the best things in the world, that feeling.