The holidays are upon us! It’s the end of the year, so it’s time to hunker down against the cold and get cozy. One of the nice things about living in northern Nevada is that even though we do have real winter and fall, it’s often sunny so the seasonal sads are less of a problem here than they used to be living in Michigan. This both was and wasn’t a big month for my reading, so let’s see what I got up to, eh?

In Books…

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: So you know how sometimes a book is fine and you enjoy it well enough when you’re reading it and could think of good things to say about it but it never actually hooks you? That’s what this was, for me. It’s narrated by Janina, an eccentric older woman living in a tiny Polish hamlet just over the border from the Czech Republic. Janina is a bit of a weirdo, working in her spare time to translate William Blake into Polish (from whence the title comes) and casting horoscopes as a serious practitioner of astrology. The story begins when she and a neighbor discover a man who lives near them dead, having choked on a bone during a meal. His is just the first death in a series that begins to strike in the local area, which passionate animal-rights advocate Janina attributes to revenge by animals against known hunters and poachers. It’s not quite a murder mystery since I feel like that implies some level of investigation beyond searching a natal chart for signs that the victims would have violent encounters by animals, but the murders do provide the plot’s forward momentum. Janina herself is a well-drawn character, and an unusual protagonist (an older lady, kind of kooky) in a way that feels refreshing. The prose is clever and engaging, but I think it’s the style choice that defeated my attempts to get fully into it: like Blake, Tokarczuk uses capitalization in non-standard ways and it kept breaking up my ability to get into a flow with it even once I figured out it was a Blake reference. I really wish this had worked better for me but I’ll definitely read her work again in the future!
• The Count of Monte Cristo: I remember loving the movie in high school and vaguely thinking about reading the book but being intimidated by the page count. My edition was just shy of 1250 pages, so I set out a plan to read 50 pages per day to make sure I didn’t get overwhelmed. I needed that resolution in the beginning, as the book is a slow starter in setting up the story of Edmond Dantes, a young sailor who is on the verge of a good life: he’s about to be made captain of a ship and wed his beautiful fiancee, Mercedes. He is betrayed by rivals and sent to prison for the sake of a lawyer’s ambition, being consigned to a dungeon in the dreaded Chateau d’If. There he meets an Italian priest, Abbe Faria, who gives him a broad classical education and tells him the location of an enormous secret treasure. When Dantes escapes and recovers the bounty, he remakes himself as an aristocrat, the Count of Monte Cristo, and sets about destroying his enemies. There are so many characters and plot elements in this book (it was, after all, originally published as a serial) that it doesn’t drag, per se, but the main narrative takes a while to really pick up steam. I found that the last third or so of the book was the most enjoyable for me, as the various lines of dominoes finally start falling and create some real momentum. There’s something for everyone here: a tale of adventure and revenge, stories about families both warmly connected and coldly alienated, young couples falling in love, human frailty, hope, philosophical musings about the nature of happiness. It’s very long and the interest level it’s able to sustain waxes and wanes, but in the end I enjoyed it!
• Know My Name: Like many other people, I remembered the Brock Turner trial. The young woman, found outside being assaulted in an alleyway by a Stanford swimmer. The European grad students who stopped it, who chased him down. The trial. Her searing victim impact statement. The pathetically light sentence. The judge who issued it being recalled. Amid the larger social meaning of it all, it can be startlingly easy to forget that there was a full human being who this particular thing happened to. Chanel Miller’s memoir ensures that forgetting, even for a moment, a victim’s fundamental personhood will be well nigh impossible to do. And it makes it clear how much, in addition to the crime perpetrated against them, “the process” serves to continue that trauma, inflict it in new ways. The constant delays kept her suspended in time, unable to move forward. She had to constantly relive the experience of waking up in the hospital, confused, of being poked and prodded and invaded all over again to complete the rape kit. She wasn’t able to continue working. She could not fully let her guard down around her sister for fear of contaminating her sister’s testimony. She contemplated suicide. It’s just gut pinch after gut punch. But Miller’s incisive, clear writing, telling an incredibly powerful story, is well worth it if you can stomach the subject matter. An incredible book that should be required reading (especially for men).

In Life…

• Thanksgiving: As always, my mother-in-law hosted and I baked (this very delicious pumpkin cake, which I highly recommend for those of you who, like me, don’t have much time for pumpkin pie). C is so much bigger and more aware of what’s going on around him than he was last year, I’m excited for the holiday season to continue and see how he reacts to Christmas! The weekend also included a third straight victory for Michigan over Ohio State, which left me very happy indeed.