This is not usually a space where I’m inclined to be heavy, but May was a month of grief. At the beginning of the month, my best friend lost her mother suddenly and I took a brief trip back to Michigan to spend time with her. I also found out my book club was winding up operations. And we had to say goodbye to our beloved doggie, which still has me reeling.

In Books…

• Conversations With Friends: Frances is 21 years old, works at a job she is not at all engaged with and almost would seem to prefer to not have, goes to college, and performs her spoken word poetry with her best friend/ex-girlfriend Bobbi at night. The latter has gotten enough attention to draw into their orbit Melissa, a 30something writer and photographer who wants to profile them, and her husband Nick, a working actor who has found only minor success. While Melissa and Bobbi hit it off, Frances and Nick develop a connection of their own and it’s not too long before they wind up in bed together. This doesn’t feel like a spoiler, as it is very obvious that it’s going to end up there. This obviously has reverberations for Frances’s relationships with both Bobbi and Melissa. Sally Rooney is one of those authors that has a devoted following, so I was really excited to start reading her work with this, her debut novel. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t really understand the fuss. This is a character book, which I’m inclined to like, but without a character I found compelling. Frances is a frustrating protagonist. Not because she’s aimless or sleeps with someone else’s husband or is trying to figure out who she is, but because she’s just not very interesting while she’s doing all of that. I didn’t find her unlikeable, I just found her boring. I found myself wondering why and even if I was supposed to care about her or her connections with Nick, Bobbi, and Melissa. I had a hard time understanding how a person seemingly so empty and detached could write poetry that was engaging enough to get anyone’s attention. What kept my interest was the quality of the prose. Rooney’s writing is subtle, and she has a real knack for dialogue and descriptions. Her words are clearly deliberately chosen but she never slides into flowery language. Her use of language alone makes me want to read her other books, but I hope they’re better than this one.
• Fun Home: I’d never read a graphic novel before, but I’d heard good things about this one and was excited when my book club chose it! It’s a memoir about Alison Bechdel’s childhood and teenage years, in which her family ran the local funeral home (the titular fun home, of course) in their small town. Literate and thoughtful, Bechdel comes to realize she is gay once she goes away to school and her coming-out is followed by the revelation that her intellectual, aesthetically-oriented father is also queer. Shortly after her long-suffering mother asks him for a divorce, her father is killed in a collision with a truck. Was it an accident? Was it on purpose? This question clearly haunts Bechdel, and was an obvious motivator behind this book. I don’t know that I felt like this being a graphic novel rather than a traditional manuscript was something that worked for me, personally, particularly because I did not care for Bechdel’s art style. But the actual amount of text here is less than I wish it was. I wanted her to have more space to really draw out the allusions to the literature that connected her to her father that she makes throughout the book. It’s an impressive accomplishment, a compelling and emotionally resonant story even despite the analytical distance she tries to place between herself and her childhood.
• The Story of a New Name: I liked well enough but did not understand the fuss about the first of the Neopolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend. I’d heard that the second one was better, and while that’s true, it still wasn’t like, good-good. Picking up right after the end of the first, this book continues to trace the stories of Lila and Lenu as they become young women. Lila realizes even before her wedding reception is over that her new husband Stefano has aligned himself with the local organized crime family, the Solaras, who she despises. This, of course, immediately sours her marriage and it devolves quickly into domestic violence. Lenu, on the other hand, starts to neglect school without either the competition with Lila or the desire to impress her longtime crush, Nino, who has graduated. Lila pushes Lenu back on track, and once she begins actually studying again her future, not just high school but university studies, starts to align. But a love affair drives the two friends apart again, and Lenu leaves for school in Pisa as things become more dire for Lila. Once again, I am left to wonder if my issues with the book are related to its translation. The prose is choppy and staccato, the opposite of my own experience of Italian. And there remains the issue of how to elegantly render the difference between Neopolitan and standard Italian, which is significant enough that it can’t go unremarked upon but is always jarring when the text denotes a change. The character development, though, ably builds on the foundation from the previous volume, giving greater shading and complexity to both Lila and Lenu. I enjoyed things more when I stopped looking for this deep and profound friendship I felt like I was promised by reviews of the book and understood that they’re more frenemies than anything else. It was more engaging by enough that I’ll continue the series, but I still remain perplexed at the raptures people go into about these books.
• The Good Girls Revolt: In 1970, Newsweek published a cover story about the women’s movement. On the same day that issue was released, a group of its female employees (including author Lynn Povich) sued the magazine for sex discrimination. Newsweek hired many bright young graduates from top colleges, but while men became writers and editors, women were largely stuck in the research department (a few were reporters, even fewer were actual writers themselves, and none were in senior editorial leadership). From her inside perspective, Povich writes about how the lawsuit came about, with women who had been socialized to see each other as rivals deciding to extend trust and band together to right the wrong they came to understand was being perpetrated. She shares her own recollections, along with those of her colleagues, about the dynamics of the magazine and how they changed after the lawsuit (and didn’t, leading to a second suit with a second settlement). As a woman who was born in the 1980s, I know I don’t know nearly enough about the stories of women who led the fight (and faced the consequences) to more fully secure women’s rights to equal educational and employment opportunities. I appreciated getting the opportunity to learn more about the landmark Newsweek lawsuit, which I’d never known anything about. But if I’m being honest, the book was fairly disappointing. Povich’s style doesn’t have a lot of literary flair or a particularly compelling narrative. There’s a lot of “this happened, and then that happened”. I can see how her writing would be well-suited for a magazine, but I didn’t feel like it translated to book-length (and it’s a shorter work of non-fiction, only just over 250 pages) effectively.
• On Beauty: We meet the Belsey family at a time of crisis. Howard has just confessed infidelity to Kiki, his wife of 30 years. Howard is white, a British expat, and an academic, an art history professor at the prestigious local liberal arts school whose long-gestating book on Rembrandt is going nowhere. Kiki is Black, Floridian, a nurse, disinclined towards intellectualism, and almost as much of an expat in her own way as her husband in their small New England college town. They have three children: Levi, who is still in high school and whose adolescent search for identity is all the more fraught because of his background, Zora, a student at her father’s school, ambitious and smart and vain, and Jerome, the oldest, who draws his own family into contact with the Kipps family. Not only is Monty Kipps, a Black British man who originally hails from the West Indies, a professional rival for Howard, with a just-published and very popular book on Rembrandt, but he proudly stands for conservative, faith-based values that are antithetical to the liberal atheism practiced by the Belseys. Jerome interns with the Kipps’s family business and has a brief, intense fling with their daughter Victoria. Shortly thereafter, Kipps is invited to be a visiting professor at the college Howard teaches at, putting them all in close range to each other, and they begin to interact in some ways that are expected…and some that are not. This is just my second Zadie Smith, but I feel like I already have a sense of the kinds of stories she enjoys writing (families in opposition, culture clashes, the ongoing legacy of the British Empire, deceptions coming to light). I found White Teeth to be less polished and more engaging, but On Beauty left me with more to admire than to actually connect with. Smith’s writing is sharp and witty, full of little skewerings of academia. She also has a strong sense of scope, able to draw in multidisciplinary and multicultural references to her narrative, which also draws some parallels to Howards End, though it’s hardly an adaptation and I don’t think the book loses much without those references if you haven’t read it yet. I read it a few years back and quite liked it, so I enjoyed being able to find those little moments of connection, like a little treat. It’s an accomplished, assured novel. But what kept me from being able to really get into it the way I’d hoped was the characters. Kiki was the most interesting of all of them for me, but I never really felt like I understood her, particularly her marriage to Howard. That marriage, and whether the family that it created will split apart or pull together, is central to the story and never really made sense to me. As the story unfolds, it is clear what draws Howard to her, but not at all clear why she did or does find him worth her time. Virtually everyone else is some degree of unlikable, but not in a dynamic way, just in a way where I found them tiresome to spend mental time with. Worth reading certainly but not one that I imagine ever coming back to.
• Gideon the Ninth: This book was bananas. It tells the story of Gideon Nav, eighteen years old, a trained soldier, and desperate to escape from her lonely existence on the planet that is home to the Ninth House. In this universe, an all-powerful necromancer made himself into a deathless god, anointed himself as the Emperor of the First House, and set out the other eight houses. The Ninth is bound to protect the Locked Tomb, which holds the body of the only foe who ever seriously challenged the Emperor’s supremacy. Each house is run by families that each practice different forms of necromancy. The heir of the Ninth House is teenage Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and she and the heirs to the other houses are each called by the Emperor to his home world, where they are charged with unlocking the secrets within Canaan House, the ancient ruin he and his closest advisors once called home, so that they may become a part of his inner circle. But in order to accept the call, Harrow needs a cavalier, a bodyguard and warrior who can protect her. The only viable option? Gideon, with whom Harrow has been in a constant and bitter war of attrition since childhood. This sounds heavy and dark and while it is in some portions both of those things (in the case of “dark”, honestly most portions), it is also very entertaining (ghosts! skeletons! puzzles!) and surprisingly funny. It takes a little while for the action to start happening, but once Harrow and Gideon arrive at Canaan House and we meet all the other house’s necromancers and cavaliers, it really starts to pick up momentum, with the plot getting more and more propulsive as it goes on. The characters, especially Gideon and Harrow but also a handful of the other people in the House, are vivid and enjoyable to spend time with. It’s undeniably unevenly paced, and has a kind of ramshackle kamikaze feel around the plot, as though Tamsyn Muir was building the plane as she was flying it. But it’s very engaging and I really enjoyed reading it!

In Life…

• My book club wound up: This was a double whammy of a bummer. First, the local independent bookstore (Sundance Books) shut down after 39 years in operation. It was something I loved about living in Reno, a place I liked to bring out-of-town guests to visit. Losing an indie bookstore (right after I’d taken C there for his first Independent Bookstore Day!) is always rough. But it was also the host of the book club I’ve been a member of since 2016, and so its closure heralded the end of the club. I’ve loved some of the books we’ve read, loathed others, found many just okay. But it was a place to talk about books with people who would mostly otherwise have not crossed my path and I had a great time in the past nearly-eight years of discussions! There are going to be some efforts to continue and I do hope they pan out, but I don’t think it’ll be quite the same.
• We lost our beloved pug: Shortly after we got engaged, I finally convinced my husband to get a dog. A pug, specifically. A retiring stud dog at a puppy mill, he had just turned four when we got him and it was clear he’d basically never seen kindness from people. He was petrified of everyone. But with love and lots of snacks to build trust, he became our funny little weirdo, confident enough to walk into any place he was taken and assume people wanted to pet him and feed him. If they didn’t feed him, he’d find anything he could that was within range, including banana bread and balsamic vinegar left on the floor. He was our good boy when we got married, and through pandemic social distancing, and when we bought our home. He always loved my husband the most, but he was extra cuddly with me when I was pregnant and took being replaced as the household’s most cherished little creature in stride. He was repaid for his patience in snacks and dropped food, and “pets” from our son that were suspiciously close to smacks. He was so incredibly gentle with the baby, who disrespected his personal space constantly and didn’t understand kind hands as well as we might have hoped. He lost a lot of his interest in food earlier this month, and when we took him to the vet we found out he had liver issues. No sooner had we gotten him on a supplement to help with that than he had a seizure. The emergency vet suspected a tumor in his brain, but he fought to recover enough to come home with us for two last days of pets and cuddles. Then he had a second seizure, a worse one, and we knew it was time. Eight and a half years with him was not enough but we were grateful to have every second of it. Good boy, Stan. You’re in our hearts always.