Hello!
Sorry to be boring and start off with a note about the weather, but autumn is really kicking in now isn’t it?? The extremely hot days in summer have haunted me so I appreciate this cold snap a lot -- that might be why I’ve managed to read so much this week. A real hodge-podge of stuff also so this newsletter might be a bit all over the place.
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
I finished Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe (1973) and it did everything I needed it to. It’s a middle-grade book and in some ways you can tell (it focuses on a child, as one example), but in others this was a quintessential Lively novel. Every single time I finish a book by her I say this, but she has an amazing way of talking about work and careers; her characters often have a distinct job that seeps into their private life and shapes their outlook. In Moon Tiger (1987) the protagonist is a public historian, which entirely impacts the way that she tells her life story; in According to Mark (1984) the protagonist is a literary biographer; in City of the Mind (1991) an architect; in Cleopatra’s Sister (1993) a journalist; in Heatwave (1996) an editor, and so on. In Thomas Kempe, the ghost of Kempe is a physician, who believes he can fix the village in its present day with his old-timey medicine. It’s well-paced, funny and probably quite scary to a younger reader (but not I, because I am 30 years old). I read it because I hadn’t read any of Lively’s writing for children and was intrigued by it -- a nice experience, overall.
I then read The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield-Fisher (1924), which is one of the Persephone Books reissues. This was a complete surprise -- I liked it a lot. It’s about a woman who has three children and an unmotivated husband, who looks after her house and family with extreme precision. Her husband loses his job and is unable to work after an accident (kind of, but I won’t go into that in case of spoilers), so she goes out seeking a job in the department store that her husband formerly worked for. Her husband stays at home looking after the house and the kids, one of which is too young to go to school and is extremely hard to control. It becomes evident that the switch in typical gender roles is better for everyone involved; Eva, the mother, flourishes in the workplace and is soon bringing home more money than Lester, her husband, ever did; Lester soon gets a handle on the children and they thrive where they formerly did not. It’s a fantastic meditation on the nature of work in and out of the home, who it serves, and what impact it can have on both the individual and the communal unit. It did sometimes fall into sentimentality but, for the writing period, it largely comes across as very brave and subversive. There was also a lot in there that criticised the capitalism that is involved in Eva’s job and Lester’s former workplace, told from the perspective of Lester himself, which I appreciated as the text overall does not give a unified and clear perspective on exploitation in either setting -- rather, the reader is given the space to come to their own conclusions.
On Tuesday I did something that hasn’t happened in a while -- read an entire book in a day. It was Eric LaRocca’s Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke (2021), which comprises a novella and two short-ish stories. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me; the premises of the stories were stronger than their actual execution. I have beef with the word ‘merely’, as it generally gets used by writers actively looking to imitate a kind of formal intelligence that becomes grating. It gets used…a lot. There was little distinction between the language of each character, as they all seemed to be grasping after that ‘intelligent’ voice, and it just never really felt authentic. The strongest story is the middle one, ‘The Enchantment’, about religious delusion and isolation. Again, the premise was better than the execution -- all of the stories have a cinematic quality to them, this one especially so, and I imagine that they would look better than how they actually read on the page.
I started my reread of Bleak House (1852) for teaching in a couple of weeks -- at 979 pages, I thought it best to start now. I don’t think I appreciated how funny it was the first time I read it (maybe because I was an undergrad taking herself too seriously), but I’m enjoying it a lot, as I knew I would. I also started reading a book I don’t think I can talk about, but it’s an early copy (as in, extremely early, it’s a PDF) of a friend’s book out next year. I can’t wait to talk about it properly as it is, predictably, phenomenal.
I’ve also read a fair bit of poetry this week, to varying success. I reread a whole heap of Tennyson for teaching, and unlike every time I’ve read him, I didn’t hate it. I actually really enjoyed it (maybe my recent read of Ivanhoe made me appreciate medievalism that isn’t weirdly racist). ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is obviously a banger, as are ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Crossing the Bar.’ I also started Wendy Cope’s Family Values and really didn’t get on with it at all. I found the child’s voice that is invoked really odd, especially after reading Lively’s characterisation of a child that is maybe a bit too old, but doesn’t come across as condescendingly simplistic. I’m going to pick it up again, but it was such a bizarre reading experience that threw me a bit, because everything I’ve read from Cope has been much better.
What’s on my radar (but don’t hold me to it)
The Othered Woman by Shahed Ezaydi. Sooo happy that Shahed is writing a book; Othered will be reflections on feminism and islamophobia. It’ll be published by Unbound, meaning it’s crowdfunded — click here to pledge.
Bandit Country by James Conor Patterson. I picked this up at West Kirby Books after the vent last week and I’m so excited to read. James is such a brilliant poet and I’ve no doubt this is excellent.