A Portable Magic

After four very very busy months, I have really enjoyed rolling into an easy summer. Knowing that things slow down for a bit afterwards makes getting through the session bearable.

In Books…

• The Hakawati: The plot of this book feels almost impossible to describe. On its most basic and fundamental level, it’s about a Lebanese man, Osama, who has been living in the United States since he was a teenager and returns to Beirut to visit his dying father, telling not only his story but that of his parents. And grandparents. And great-grandparents. His paternal grandfather was a hakawati, a professional storyteller, and the stories Osama was told by his grandfather as well as his uncles and cousins and friends make up a large portion of the book. It’s a fantastic read for someone with ADHD (like yours truly) because the stories are layered over each other, constantly interrupting each other, each one sometimes receding and sometimes coming to the fore. While I ended up loving this quality of the book, it made it a little hard to get into at first. The ground constantly felt like it was shifting under my feet, but it was kind of like being on a boat: once you fall into the rhythm, it feels very natural. Alameddine does an incredible job keeping all of his plates in the air, creating interesting and vivid characters, keeping the narrative moving forward and keeping the reader engaged. To sum it all up as a story about storytelling feels like its giving the book short shrift but is also very much true. I ended up really enjoying it, and it feels very much like a book that will be a good one to revisit someday, as Alameddine clearly understands the pleasure of a familiar story well-told.
• Heart Berries: This is a very short (less than 150 pages) memoir, and could conceivably be read in one sitting if one was so inclined, and in some ways it was hard to not just sit down and devour it. Terese Marie Mailhot is a beautiful writer, her prose is lyrical and shot through with lines of breathtaking insight and clarity. Even as she recounted some very heavy things, like her mental health breakdown in the wake of a bad breakup and coming to terms with the generational trauma she experienced as a Native American/First Nations woman, the way she wrote about it was honest and compelling and thoughtful. The thing that kept this from being truly great, for me, was its structure. I can deal with but don’t always love non-linear storytelling, but find it particularly challenging in memoir. It was difficult to orient myself in when things were happening, where she was along the trajectory of her life at any given moment. It’s a valid stylistic choice, of course, but didn’t quite work for me as a reader. It was still very good and I would recommend it, but only if you’re reading for something with a lot of darkness.
• Trust: I am not a “no spoilers!” person. It’s one of the reasons I don’t read a lot of mystery: I find too much plot tension more irritating than exciting. But some books really are better if you don’t know that much going in, and this is one of those. Trust me (see what I did there?). Here’s what I think is safe to share: this book is four books in one: a novella, a rough draft of an autobiography, a short memoir, and a series of journal entries. It’s concerned with New York City in the 1920s: up to and very much including Black Tuesday and its aftermath. It’s about finance, and marriage, and the bonds between people. It’s about stories, both the ones we tell to ourselves and the ones we tell to others. It’s about who lies, and why. Given that it recently won the Pulitzer Prize, it feels very cliche to say it’s very good but it is. I found it very compelling and tore through its 400 pages in about three days. I don’t know that it will be something everyone will enjoy, necessarily, but it’s worth a shot.
• Unnatural Murder: This might have been the first book I’ve really read about the court of King James I of England and Anne Somerset does excellent scenery-setting. James, descended from the line of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret after she married into Scottish royalty, became king on the death of Elizabeth I. He had a bit of a messy personal life after his ascension, marrying a woman and impregnating her several times before becoming openly much more interested in the company of men, generally maintaining a “favorite” young and attractive man with whom he was openly affectionate and tightly bonded. One such favorite was Robert Carr, who became the Earl of Somerset at the King’s wish. The Earl was lavishly gifted with power, land, and money, but wasn’t really smart enough to manage it all and enlisted the help of his friend, Sir Thomas Overbury. The duo worked well together until the Earl fell for Frances Howard, widely regarded as the most beautiful woman at court. Their romance had a major obstacle, though: Frances had been already married as a teenager, and though the marriage was miserable and remained unconsummated even years later, divorce was not available. James wasn’t jealous of his kept man’s new relationship, but Overbury was, and tried to keep the lovers apart, including by saying awful things about Frances, who was trying to get her marriage annulled (which was a whole other drama). A pretense was established for Overbury to be thrown into the Tower, where he died some months later. Frances won her suit and married Somerset and had a baby and everything looked rosy for a bit, until two circumstances converged to the Earl’s detriment: James took an interest in a new, younger man, and it was alleged that Overbury had died by poisoning. It did not take very much work to find out that Frances had sent poisoned things to Overbury in prison. Trials ensued. This is an actual history book, not pop history, though it’s filled with enough scandal to keep things quite lively. The scene-setting was the part I personally enjoyed the most, since I knew so little about this period of history and it turns out it was wild! The trials (both Frances’s nullity suit against her first husband, the Earl of Essex, and the several trials of participants in the poisoning conspiracy) are recounted at length, and while Somerset generally keeps things moving along, these portions do drag a little bit. Many documents are unavailable and Somerset is forced to rely on secondhand accounts, which leaves gaps in the narrative. Somerset’s analysis of the key players and how their flaws played into the outcomes that resulted is concise and insightful, I’ll definitely read more of her work but this is not one that I see myself coming back to.
• The Crack-Up: When we think about F. Scott Fitzgerald, we generally think of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby, the artistic expatriate community in Paris, his tempestuous marriage to Zelda. What we don’t usually think about is the end of his life. He died of a heart attack at 44 after a long struggle with alcoholism. This book was published after his death by his longtime editor and collects several nonfiction essays he wrote in the later part of his life, along with ephemera like letters, notebooks, and some pieces that other people wrote about him and his work. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s a mixed bag. I found the essays, along with his letters to his daughter in her late teens/early 20s, to be the best and most engaging parts of the material. The notebooks are a slog (reading other people’s bullet points of ideas isn’t really very exciting), and many of the letters written to friends were written in a state of intoxication and start to sound very same-y after a whole. It’s hard to know what to say about it since it’s a collection without much of a unifying theme and is probably best left for Fitzgerald completists.
• Lay Your Body Down: This had a promising start! Delilah “Del” Walker is a 20-something living in the Twin Cities. Her life is a mess: she’s just quit yet another dead-end retail job, her rude med student boyfriend has dumped her, and her roommate is getting ready to move out. Then she finds out on Facebook that her first boyfriend, Lars, who had broken her heart in college by cheating on her, has died in a hunting accident. He’d just contacted her for the first time in years about a week beforehand, leaving a cryptic voicemail. She wants to go to the funeral, but that means going back home to the small town she grew up in, where everyone she knows is a member the conservative, culty church she quit after that college breakup…including Lars’s widow/the girl he cheated on her with, Del’s former friend Eve, who has become a popular blogger espousing the submissive “Noble Wife” philosophy propagated by the church’s leader. At the funeral, Lars’s parents beseech Del to look further into the explanation for his death, since she has connections they don’t as church outsiders. After seeing Eve in a suspicious circumstance with one of the church’s pastors, she agrees. Sounds interesting, right? Small-town secrets, a cult angle, a maybe-murder mystery? But it goes pretty quickly downhill from there. Del’s “investigation” makes the Scooby gang look like sophisticated sleuths, the prose is amateurish and relies on the characters delivering huge chunks of exposition through dialogue completely unrelated to the way people actually talk to each other, the obligatory romantic interest is a plot device rather than a real person, and the end…did not land, at least for me. Would not recommend this even as a beach read.

In Life…

• Trying not to melt: It’s been a very warm one! Thankfully in the past week or so it has cooled down to normal (like, mid-90s) but I am just not built for 100+ degree heat. Counting my blessings that it’s not as bad as last summer and that Calvin being bigger now means we can go out for a bit in the morning before it really starts to heat up so he can at least get some outside time in.
• I was re-diagnosed with ADHD: I was first diagnosed as a child but never medicated. I’d found little coping mechanisms here and there but it turns out motherhood does not care about how well your previous coping mechanisms were working beforehand! Everything I needed to do in life has a phone alarm, and everything I needed to find has an AirTag. My practitioner has put me on medication and it’s great! Apparently you can just think about needing to do something and then…do that thing? Like bring in the dry cleaning that had been in my car for weeks? What a feeling!