Good evening!
I know everyone keeps saying it, but I can’t believe we’re in June. We’re almost halfway through the year and, more importantly, it is my birthday this month (on 23rd). By my count I’ve read 31 books so far and my favourites would have to be:
Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery
This is Not Miami by Fernanda Melchor (tr.Sophie Hughes)
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
Vehicle by Jen Calleja
In The Cut by Susanna Moore
Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt
Almost everything I’ve read has been good, the notable exception being the terrible Sagan, Paris 1954 by Anne Berest, which is not pure luck, it is a habit I’ve (almost) perfected. I choose what I read quite carefully; I know what my taste is but, equally, I am open to new things if there is something about it that appeals to me. I don’t put too much faith in what is being sold well, and I like to go into bookshops and pick up things I maybe never would have found. I don’t accept every proof that is offered to me, and if I’m busy, I don’t request things I would like to read but realistically won’t be able to get to. Pretty much all I am looking for is good writing, whether that be in something that is plot-heavy or in experimental form.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
As predicted, I finished Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2022) quite soon after sending out my last newsletter. It’s a really wonderful novel and I’m very pleased that it jointly won the Pulitzer with one of my favourite books of last year, Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022). (On a side note, I saw that Trust is Waterstones’ paperback of the month. In my local shop, if you buy one of the books of the month you get a free drink in the cafe, so I’d urge you to buy it and start it while having a nice cappuccino.)
There’s not much more that I can say about Demon that I haven’t already mentioned. While I read it, I skimmed over David Copperfield (1850), and it really is quite a feat that Kingsolver has pulled off. David is complex and multi-layered with both its plot and its messaging -- I would probably say that it’s Dickens’ most intelligent book -- and so supplanting that onto a contemporary setting must have taken a lot of untangling.
The novel being an adaption made me think a lot of one of my favourite ever essays on literature, Louis Menand’s ‘How to Misread Jane Austen’. I encourage you to read it, but to summarise, Menand argues that reading Austen (and by degrees, any text written in the past) through our own conceptions of economy and socio-economic relationships ultimately fails the text. I think Demon Copperhead is a success because it doesn’t try and blanket apply Dickens’ nineteenth-century context into the Appalachian late ‘90s, early ‘00s, but updates it where it is needed.
I’m about three quarters of the way through West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein (2016). I’m absolutely sure that this will be a favourite read of the year. I’m always so excited to get back to it but I’m also dreading finishing it.
Technically, this is a collection of interviews based around distinctive families or people in Hollywood, from the early period to the late twentieth century. Like Scanlan’s Kick The Latch (which is based on interviews with a horse trainer), this is still very much Stein’s book, because she’s really cleverly taken excerpts from interviews and put them one after the other, showing how the story of the person she is focusing on develops, and how different people see and describe the same incident or person. There are some really funny moments when one person will say somebody else is a ‘great beauty’, and then the next excerpt will be from someone who describes the person as hideous.
The different sections are based around the oil magnate family the Dohenys, who developed land in Los Angeles in Hollywood’s early period; the Warner family, of Warner Brothers fame; Jane Garland, a schizophrenic young woman who lived in L.A. with her mother, who married various Hollywood types; the actress Jennifer Jones, and lastly, Stein’s own family. There are quotes taken from people like Arthur Miller, Lauren Bacall, Dennis Hopper and Stephen Sondhein, among others.
This is such an interesting text, and it gives me so much to chew on. I am always thinking about the nature of fame and legacy, and how we don’t stop making up narratives about real people, even if (especially if) we don’t know them. That’s why we have such strong reactions to certain people, especially when they go against our made-up stories or if they strongly adhere to them. Anyway, more next week!
Books on my radar
Every now and again I receive a proof that makes me wonder what I did in a past life to deserve such earthly riches; this week it was a copy of Melissa Broder’s Death Valley, which is out in October. I am a huge fan of Broder, and consider The Pisces (2018) to be one of my favourite novels. I’m so excited to read this one.