The holidays are here, and the last vestiges of proper fall long gone. I’m not going to go into Election Day because this space has never been a very political one and I’ve already shared my opinions with the people who care, but I will say that one of the most stinging disappointments for me was the defeat of a ballot measure in my county that would have preserved a dedicated set-aside from property taxes to library services. Taxes won’t even be going down, it will just remove the library earmark from that particular amount. The consequences to the local library system will be significant. Libraries are a crucial public resource, please support them in any way you can.

In Books…

• There But For The: Miles Garth is invited last minute to be someone’s plus-one for a dinner party in Greenwich (as in London, not as in Connecticut) one evening. In the middle of dinner, prompted by nothing in particular, he walks upstairs and locks himself inside the guest room of the house…and stays there. He refuses to respond to entreaties to get him to leave, communicating only by slipping occasional notes under the door. For various mechanical reasons, he cannot be forcibly extracted. The book explores this situation through the stories of four people who all have connections to Miles: Anna, a woman who knew him briefly when they were teens, Mark, who invited Miles along to the party in the first place after a chance meeting prompted an interesting discussion, May, the mother of a girl Miles spent time with when he was young, and Brooke, the young daughter of a neighboring couple who was also at the dinner party. Each provides a glimpse of Miles from a different perspective, and a look at the increasingly outsized reaction to his action. After the frustrated hostess writes an editorial about the absurd circumstance she finds herself in, Miles becomes notorious, an object of fascination for an increasingly large number of people. How long can he stay in there? It has to end eventually, somehow…doesn’t it? This book is about a lot of things. It’s about time. The setting in Greenwich is not a coincidence. It’s about memory, and the stories we tell ourselves, and how the past continues to speak to us. It’s about the nature of celebrity, how people become famous, and how fame itself obscures the actual person at the center of it and becomes much more about the stories that can be told about that person and how they become grist for the mill. It’s about whose stories get believed, and why. This is not a book that rewards dipping in and out or reading distractedly. It is clever and it demands the reader actually engage with it intellectually in order to get something out of it. I suspect it will be a book that rewards re-reading, I don’t think I got everything out of it that was in there on the first go-round. But despite being a bit rigorous, it is not dour. The recounting of the actual dinner party itself is hilariously funny, a razor-sharp satire of smug upper middle-class dinner parties. Smith also does beautiful work creating all four of the viewpoint characters. I had a great time reading this book and recommend it for those looking for something more challenging to read, and plan to read more of Ali Smith’s work!
• City of Night Birds: I have definitely noted before that I am a sucker for a ballet book, despite my abysmal failures at every attempt I’ve personally made to actually do ballet. This one tells the story of Natalia Leonova, who we first meet when she returns to her native Saint Petersburg after an injury derailed her career as a ballerina in Europe. She’s a mess, dependent on alcohol and painkillers to soothe both her body and her mind. Dmitri, the artistic director of the Mariinsky Ballet and someone she clearly has some sort of history with, offers her a chance to return to the stage as the lead in Giselle. As she weighs the prospect of a comeback, we follow her earlier life to see how she got where she is: the daughter of a single mother who worked as a seamstress for the Mariinsky, she was enchanted by her glimpses into that exclusive world and determined to do whatever it took to not just make it in but make it to the top. Along the way, she finds friends, enemies, lovers, and everything in between. Dance becomes her life…making it all too easy to understand why she’s in the state she is at the beginning of the book, after it’s been taken away from her. It’s a slow starter, and I struggled to get hooked into it. In part, I think this was due to the marketing, which led me to expect a much more straightforward “ballet book” sort of plot, full of backstage rivalries, love triangles, soaring highs and agonizing lows. And it’s not that those elements aren’t there, but the book isn’t really about that. It’s about a woman who is both sensitive and reserved becoming an artist, becoming a person, and how she tries to balance the compromises made between one and the other, and how those struggles change as she ages. Natalia is not always an especially likeable character, but her perspective is an interesting one and she feels fully realized, like an actual person instead of just an idea on the page. Once I started letting the book tell me the story it was trying to tell me instead of waiting for it to become the story I was expecting it to be, I appreciated it much more and read the entire back half in one go when I couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night. It’s a book that requires reflection to achieve its full effect. If you don’t have some baseline familiarity with Russian culture, some things about it will be hard to understand (the way names change depending on levels of formality, for example), but nothing that would impede being able to follow the story. It made me want to pick up the book about the history of the Bolshoi that’s been on my shelves for ages now, and make a point to go see a ballet performed in person sometime soon. I wound up very much enjoying this and would recommend it to readers who enjoy both ballet and character-centered stories!
• Royal Holiday: When Vivian Forest’s stylist daughter Maddie is called to England for Christmas after her boss has to go on maternity leave early, she insists that her mother come with her. Maddie’s client is a duchess spending the holiday at Sandringham, and Vivian, expecting a promotion that will make it hard for her to take another vacation soon, is prevailed upon to take the chance to spend the holidays with royalty. The morning after they arrive, Vivian wanders down to the kitchen in search of a snack, and she finds it in more than one sense of the word. Delicious scones, yes, but also Malcolm Hudson, the Queen’s Private Secretary, who is handsome, charming, and has a delightful accent. Malcolm, just as intrigued with Vivian as she is with him, offers her an impromptu tour of the estate, and sparks start to fly. They spend the next few days getting to know and like each other, but Vivian’s return date to go back to her life in California is right around the corner. Is this just a vacation flirtation or is there more there? I like to schedule myself a light read after ones that I expect to be on the heavier/harder work side of things, and it can be a mixed bag. Sometimes it feels like a welcome respite, to let my brain rest and have a little fluffy treat. But sometimes it backfires and the book ends up feeling too thin and simplistic. This, unfortunately, fell into the latter category for me. Vivian and Malcolm had no depth. The conflicts they were facing outside of their connection to each other were incredibly straightforward and minimally nuanced. Their connection was sweet, but the stakes felt so low. The plot was so direct as to be essentially without tension. It’s not a bad book, per se. There are cute moments, like Vivian’s experiences around horseback riding. It’s just a book that is not the sort that holds my attention. For a reader looking for a sweet, easy story about a connection between two people in late middle age, it would probably hit the spot, but it wasn’t for me.
• Oligarchy: Teenage Natasha has only just figured out that her long-absent father is an oligarch when she’s abruptly pulled out of the only life she’s ever known in Russia and sent to a small, very odd boarding school in England. The girls there, especially the tiny cluster in Tash’s dorm, are obsessed with two things: Princess Augusta, the founder of their school, who drowned in the lake on the grounds, and being thin. When one of their number, the very thinnest one, vanishes and is discovered herself drowned in the lake, attempted interventions begin. But what ails the girls is beyond any help that could come from the truly bananas people that are brought in to try to talk to them, or even the perspective of Tash’s no-nonsense Aunt Sonja. Only they can either save or doom themselves. I picked this up expecting a boarding school story with satirical elements, and well…I did get that. But I found this book largely alienating. Major trigger warnings for eating disorders in this book, it’s basically what the entire thing is about. I feel like Thomas was reaching for parallels between oligarchs/the powers they exert in shadowy ways and the way Tash and her friends are manipulated by forces outside of their direct control regarding how they feel about their bodies, but I don’t know that it was ever drawn strongly enough, if indeed it was what was intended at all. The gothic boarding school elements are there, but there’s no real life in them. There is plenty of dark, satirical humor, which is very funny when it hits the mark (a bit about an older girl who comes in to talk about her experiences as a “recovering anorexic” who is clearly still actively anorexic and winds up teaching the girls how to be better at anorexia was probably the one that stuck with me the most) but missed more often than it hit. I just wasn’t quite sure what I was meant to get out of reading this and I didn’t really enjoy the experience of trying to figure it out so I can’t recommend it.
• Black Narcissus: Back in British Empire days, five English nuns find themselves heading to a remote village in the Himalayas. They’ve been offered a building, which previously housed a harem, by an Indian General who wants to see the space be made useful. They’re going to establish a school and medical clinic, a project which was already tried by a group of monks and mysteriously abandoned. They are led by Sister Clodagh, young, proud and ambitious, who went out on a scouting expedition to see the site and there met the General’s agent, an Englishman called Mr. Dean, who lives in the mountains full-time and whose dissolute reputation and irreverent manner rattled her a bit. Nevertheless, she and her sisters trek on to face all of the usual struggles faced by people who go to far-off places: they don’t speak the language, they have very little ability to communicate with the outside world. The isolation and dramatic natural landscape have deeper impacts on the sisters as well: the gardening sister is increasingly obsessed with ideas for ever-more lavish flowerbeds, the most maternal of them finds her boundaries melting away, Clodagh is drawn deep into reveries about the lost love of her adolescence (which become even more intense when the General’s handsome young adult nephew starts frequenting the school against her better judgment), and Ruth, who has always been high-strung, is teetering on the edge of losing her grasp on reality entirely. That it is destined to end, and end poorly, seems all but certain by midway through, but how it does (and how badly) remains to be seen. Perhaps it is unsurprising that a book about nuns is as much about repressed longing as this one is, but I have to say I didn’t expect it. It is shot through with desire, sensual and otherwise. But it’s also about the ways we lie to ourselves and pretend to be other than we are, and the ultimate futility of that deception of self and others. Clodagh is the main character, and by far the best developed. We see her rigidity dissolve as we learn about the heartbreak that was at the center of it, resurfaced by her attraction to the General’s nephew and the prickly but real bond she develops with Mr. Dean. But without that rigidity, who is she, and how does she fit in her role as the head of her group of sisters? With a relatively short page count, though, the other sisters are developed just enough to be able to play their roles in the narrative. I usually think books need to be shorter but I would have liked another 50-100 pages to add more texture. Godden’s storytelling style worked well, I thought, especially in the way she draws out the story of Clodagh’s youth. The seeds for the end are planted diligently early and tended well…the way it will end is increasingly obvious, but the point of it is really how it gets there anyways. Not a runaway success, it has a kind of mannered distance in tone that feels very typical for a book written nearly 100 years ago, but I did like reading it and would recommend it!

In Life…

• Session preparation begins: We usually only get about 60-ish bills that have full language released prior to session starting, but this time around they’re putting out a lot more bills and we already have nearly three times that number! Getting my bill-reading brain back into the game usually takes a little longer but hopefully it means that it will be that much less work once February rolls around!