This year I re-directed my focus away from a couple of years of determinedly reading from backlists (so that new books comprised only about 30% of my reading) back to freshly published and forthcoming books.*

What I hadn’t anticipated was how delicately I would need to balance my library habits, without being able to renew what I borrowed. It seemed to take half the year just to get a new rhythm…and I was too busy reading to adjust my goals and be reasonable about things!

*If you’re curious—and, Rebecca, I know you ARE—that translates to about 30% of my reading being fresh books in a “backlist year” and about 60% being fresh books in a “new year”—because I continue to read authors’ backlists for paid review work, and most events and challenges invite backlisted reading too.

Nikita Lalwani’s Gifted (2007) was in my stacks thanks to Paula’s Dewithon but I kept stalling at the start (it’s true that it begins with her father’s observations of his daughter Rumi, so I felt distanced straightaway from her coming-of-age story, but I think my disengagement had more to do with the other books in my stack). In another reading mood, I clicked with Rumi more readily (even though she’s better with numbers and I’m better with words); I especially enjoyed the scenes of her after-school library sessions, when she’s supposed to be studying but she learns that she can sneak into the stacks to read novels instead.

Born in India but raised in Cardiff, Wales (like the author), Rumi takes the train into town and buys cumin in the Morgan arcade near the Queen Street Station. Because I was reading it with Dewithon in mind, I was peering closely for setting details, but what I enjoyed most about the book was the interior life of a single family, particularly Rumi’s experience of student life which is a key part of the novel, but also more fleeting details, like an argument between her father and a friend about the film Gandhi, and glimpses of India (whether memory or reality).

“Rumi had four sets of thoughts running in parallel. She alternated between them with swift nervousness, like a bird hopping between four lanes of traffic. Some were unpleasant, leading her to adjacent safer lanes; one lane, which she kept open for emergencies, was sweet.”

Paula’s #ToveTrove urged me to tarry a little with the 2014 NYRB edition of Tove Jansson’s short stories: The Woman Who Borrowed Memories (a title I’ve long admired). It landed in my stack because I was writing an article about Lauren Groff’s new novel, so as part of reading her backlist, I peeked at the introductions she’s written for short story collections by Nancy Hale, Lorrie Moore and Jansson.

So I spent some time at “An Eightieth Birthday” with Grandma: “her brocade from Barcelona and richly spread with everything from olives to cream cakes”. (Trans. Silvester Mazzarella) And I absolutely loved “The Squirrel” (Trans. Thomas Teal) particularly the way it closes in on itself in a most profoundly satisfying way. Groff’s introduction concludes: “We read Tove Jansson to remember that to be human is dangerous, but also breathtaking, beautiful.”

Daphne du Maurier’s Mary Anne (1954) landed on the top of my stacks in time to celebrate Heavenali’s #DDMReadingWeek, when I was deep into climate crisis reading. There were a couple of books in my research that literally gave me nightmares…and both their authors were pleased—proud, even—of that. (I ‘fessed up when I later interviewed them for an article about how writers are confronting climate change in fiction.)

But even when the other books in my stack were not overtly disturbing, it felt like a treat to sink into Mary Anne’s world, for just a few pages before bed (not every night, but most nights, which is why the pleasure extended for such a long time). It opens by situating Mary Anne in relationship to a bunch of other characters but, once that’s dispensed with, the fun begins. And I stuck it out because I remembered that Heavenali had enjoyed it a great deal, so there was that. And the “rise to the pinnacle of trollopdom” statement on the overleaf of my bookclub edition. Turns out that’s the kind of statement that catches my attention.

So is this: “The first exuberance, the thrill of discovery, passed to guile and all the complications of secrecy—the terror of the creaking door, the hazard of the dark stair, a footfall too loud, a clumsy stumble. These things awakened a sleeping house. Moments that should be prolonged were hastened through fear, finesse and the tender approach were skipped to achieve finality.”

It was Kaggsy’s Bookish Rambling’s and Stuck in a Book’s #1936Club that brought Rebecca West’s The Thinking Reed (1936) into my stacks, and Lisa who convinced me to finish it. I’ve done a terrific job of collecting Rebecca West’s books but a miserable job of actually reading them; they’re long, they have tiny print, are strangely sized. 

My only success to date was her first, Return of the Soldier, which is a skinny little thing. Her style takes some adjustment; it feels more tell than show and is sometimes uncomfortably direct (which, in some instances, is also what I find admirable about it).

The Thinking Reed also immediately showcases her astute observation, in particular of relationships and elements of power encased therein. It, like my #Dewithon read, was a slow start because, as also with Mary Anne, it felt like a lot of men cluttering up Isabelle’s mind and heart in just the first chapter. It reminded me of reading Edith Wharton, if only her characters had more bookshelves. (And not that we see Isabelle seated in her library with a cup of cocoa either, but somehow there’s an air of intellectualism in the authorial voice even though these characters don’t read either.)

Isabelle is in France (a place that “demanded perpetually that one should hit the note in the middle” and friendless, the “only one flaw in her new existence”. She’s a twenty-six-year-old widow and unsure about the kind of relationship she seeks, but the bulk of the book revolves around Marc. Who muses: “When one really talks to a woman, one always finds she believes in nothing…provided she is the kind of woman who has faith in life. If she has no faith, she will tell you she believes in everything.”

Say, what? But nevermind—I’m not in this for Marc, rather for Isabelle. Who also holds some curious positions. Like this, which is likely too progressive a concept for many 2021 readers yet: “It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution.” Not an easy book, but I’m glad I read it.

Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years (1995) was one of the July reads in Liz’s Tyler Reading Project, an endeavor I’d thought I’d participate in more frequently, but my own projects have consumed more time and energy. Nonetheless, even just the first sentence of this Tyler novel renewed my desire to read and reread her. I’ve read about ten of them, over the years, all without realizing that her works are quietly interconnected, with nearly all of them featuring a small overlap with another of her novels—one of my favourite things—so I’ve wanted to revisit ever since. (Learning this about Madeleine L’Engle’s books and Louise Erdrich’s had the same effect.)

And what was that magical first sentence? “This all started on a Saturday morning in May, one of those warm spring days that smell like clean linen.” It’s not even magical, I know. Indeed, when I encountered it and reread, I wondered to myself whether its even true. Surely it’s the other way around, I thought—that a warm spring day can infiltrate the fabric and encapsulate that wonderful fresh depth of aroma that speaks, so powerfully, of home. But, no, I reconsidered: when you hang a sheet out to dry in the different seasons, it does smell differently in spring, in summer, in autumn, and in winter.

So, I cast my mind back to the idea of how fabric absorbs the different seasons’ scents differently, and I feel like I’ve re-captured the peculiar spring-y-ness that Tyler is referring to. And I wonder why she hasn’t chosen the other three smells which, living in a place with distinct seasons for my whole life, is something that lives unexamined in my mind for the most part. (At least, seems to.) And that imagined scent remains, as I move forward in the narrative, which springboards from a gently comical situation, in which a man approaches a woman in a supermarket and asks her to pretend to be his girlfriend because his ex-girlfriend is shopping with her new lover and he wants her to think he’s moved on from the relationship with finality too.

When I’ve read Tyler in the past, I’ve not spent much time wondering how she pulls me into her stories. They’re filled with ordinary people—often revolving around loneliness and connection, loss and love, solitude and marriage—and ordinary situations and circumstances, and I can see why some readers would long for more plot. These kind of innocuous detail—a single scent in a single sentence—which holds the possibly of triggering nostalgia and emotionally rooted memories, is almost ubiquitous in her narrative; I fall into it and don’t even realize it’s happened.

How about you? Has your participation in reading events lagged this year? Is there a book in your stack that you have yet to finish, despite your good intentions?