Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby. I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book. Here are my reads for August, 2019…

The Butterfly Mosque, by G. Willow Wilson – I’ve been a fan of Wilson’s writing since first meeting Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel, and I’ve been curious about Wilson’s conversion to Islam and her life in Egypt for some time now.  Her memoir of moving to Cairo, converting, and falling in love with an Egyptian man was beautiful and intimate.

Pies & Prejudice (Mother-Daughter Book Club #4), by Heather Vogel Frederick – Sometimes you just need a little sweetness, and re-reading the Mother-Daughter Book Club series is definitely providing that for me – much like the pies the girls bake for their new business venture in this volume.  When the book opens, Emma and her family are moving to England for a year and the other book clubbers are facing their own growing pains.  The gang pulls together and starts a pie-baking business to earn enough money to buy Emma a plane ticket home for spring break, and they all reunite in England for a fabulous summer vacation.  It’s good fun, as always.

Silas Marner, by George Eliot – Read for the Classics Club, and I really enjoyed my third venture into Eliot’s world.  (In my review, here, I wrote that while I’d read Middlemarch a few times, I’d not tried any of Eliot’s other work – then in scanning my bookcases, I realized I’ve also read Scenes of Clerical Life.  Too many books to remember!)  I found Silas Marner slow to begin with, but it really picked up when Silas adopted Eppie – and by the end, I adored it.

To Kill a Mockingbird: The Graphic Novel, by Harper Lee and Fred Fordham – Having heard good things about Fred Fordham’s new graphic novel adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, I grabbed it when I saw it on a library endcap.  I really enjoyed it – it was nice to experience an old favorite in a bit of a different way, and the illustrations were wonderful and really harmonized with Lee’s story and language.

Mosses & Lichens: Poems, by Devin Johnston – Grabbed on a whim from the poetry shelf at the small but wonderfully curated Old Town Books, I read Mosses & Lichens in one sitting and loved Johnston’s sensitive renderings of everyday images and experiences.

Slightly Foxed No. 62: One Man and His Pigs, ed. Gail Pirkis – Figured I should get around to the current issue of Slightly Foxed before the fall issue arrives on my doorstep!  As always, the journal was a smorgasbord of bookish delights, from the lead article on Lord Emsworth and his pigs – especially his prize pig, the Empress of Blandings – to a tribute to English food writer Jane Grigson and a struggle with Sense and Sensibility, I found plenty to enjoy (and added a few books to my to-be-acquired list).

Red, White & Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston – Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard about this charming romance featuring the First Son of the United States and a younger son of the Princess of Wales – and I can tell you, it lives up to the hype.  When the book opens, Alex Claremont Diaz, son of President Ellen Claremont, is preparing for his mom’s 2020 reelection campaign when he, his sister, and a contingent from the White House attend a royal wedding across the Pond.  Alex gets into an argument with Prince Henry, younger son of Catherine, Princess of Wales, and in an effort to do some damage control, the Palace and the White House coordinate a fake friendship to convince the world’s media that the two young men are actually good pals.  What happens next, no one bargained for: Alex and Henry fall in love.  But their romance – sweet, lovely, and wistful – threatens to sink President Claremont’s reelection chances and jeopardize the Crown.  Gosh, you guys – I just loved this.  I loved Alex, Henry, Alex’s sister June and best friend Nora, Henry’s sister Bea and best friend Pez, and the constellation of characters that buzz around them in the White House and at Buckingham Palace.  It was just a delight from the first page to the last.  Go read it!

Stories, by Katherine Mansfield – Another one to check off the Classics Club list!  I’ve been meaning to read Mansfield’s classic short story The Garden Party for ages, and it was the jewel of the collection – as expected.  I also loved her long-form short stories The Prelude and At the Bay, and devoured The Stranger.  But, as with many short story collections, for every story I enjoyed there were three or four that fell flat for me.  I keep trying, but short stories just aren’t my genre.  (Fully reviewed here.)

Whisper Network, by Chandler Baker – Looming library deadlines made this mandatory reading, which is usually a recipe for not liking a book, but I loved this one.  I whipped through Whisper Network in two days and convinced the work wife to read it so we could discuss.  (She tore through it in one day and we had a good book gushing session over coffee on Monday morning.)  The story of three in-house attorneys who accuse their boss, the General Counsel, of sexual harassment just as he is poised to become CEO of their company was a total page-turner, but my favorite parts were the Greek Chorus of women who opened many chapters lamenting about the challenges of being a working woman and mother, especially in the legal field.  Those laments were all too familiar.

Love and Death Among the Cheetahs (Her Royal Spyness #13), by Rhys Bowen – When you’re looking for a reliably fun mystery novel, Lady Georgianna Rannoch delivers every time.  I loved the latest installment, featuring Georgie and Darcy, finally married, off on their honeymoon in Kenya and tracking both a notorious jewel thief and Wallis Simpson (like you do).  The mystery was satisfying, as always, but I was disappointed in one aspect of the book: all of Bowen’s references to Georgie feeling tired, headachy, and nauseous had me convinced that a little O’Mara was on the way – spoiler alert! – but the pregnancy reveal I was expecting never happened.  Maybe in the next book!  Probably not, given how long Bowen made us wait for the wedding, but hope springs eternal.  The people want a Georgie and Darcy baby!

Summer Places, by Simon Parkes and Angus Wilkie – I’ve had this art book, featuring landscape paintings by artist Simon Parkes, for years and flipped through it many times, but this was the first time I actually sat down and read it cover to cover.  Angus Wilkie’s essays about the plein air painting tradition, the Eastern shore of Long Island, and the New England hideaways Parkes favors for his paintings were ruminative and beautifully written, and in between essays, Parkes paintings beckon the reader to summer shores.  It was a perfect way to go into Labor Day weekend.

Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid – I kept hearing all the hype about Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new(ish – I’m late to the party) book, a fictionalized account of the rise and fall of a Fleetwood Mac-esque rock band in the late seventies.  It didn’t sound entirely like my thing – I’m not especially interested in the seventies, and I’ve never really listened to Fleetwood Mac, unless you count the Practical Magic soundtrack.  I liked the story, but didn’t love it – a bit too much drugs and angst, but I guess that’s rock ‘n roll, right?  But where it might have been a bit of a miss for me just based on the story, the audio production put the book over the top.  The audiobook is read by a full cast of unique voices (and some big names – Benjamin Bratt, Jennifer Beale…) and was absolutely wonderful.  I’d definitely recommend this one, but get the audio version – it’s worth the extra time to listen.

The Tenth Muse, by Catherine Chung – Another hyped one, I liked but didn’t love The Tenth Muse.  I was expecting something more mythical, and didn’t find the story – of a young woman coming of age as a mathematician in the 1960s – all that compelling.  It was good, but not great, and sometimes I felt that it was almost too self-consciously feminist.  (Look, I totally agree with the case the book was making about equality and the unfairness of the choices women have had to make, and the sacrifices asked of us that are not asked of the men in our professional fields – but I am already living that life, and it was a little bit exhausting to read about it on every page.)  I found the story itself decently engaging but not as compelling as I’d expected.  Solidly good, but not a home run – for me.

A pretty darn good month of reading, especially with no metro, if I do say so myself!  Vacation – a long car ride and several evenings of beach house reading definitely helped – as did the good selection this month.  I almost can’t pick highlights, because there were so many – but I suppose any visit to Atticus, Scout, Jem and Boo is bound to be one.  Whisper Network and Red, White & Royal Blue both lived up to the hype in a big way, and the Slightly Foxed Quarterly and a Lady Georgianna installment are reliably good reads, too.  Really – everything was good, and no major duds.  A successful August, indeed!  Now – on to September reading.  And I’m hoping that the metro will be up and running, and with it my commute-time reading, soon too.  Onward!

Katherine Mansfield’s short story The Garden Party is widely regarded as a masterpiece of the form, and the author herself as something of a rival Virginia Woolf.  I’d never read any Mansfield, which I suppose is unsurprising given my well-documented preference for the novel form (or poetry, or essay, or history, or memoir, or basically anything) over the short story form.  I just find it hard to get into a short story, hard to care about the characters or to buy into the world of the narrative in anything shorter than a novella.  The only short story author whose work has ever really captivated me is Eudora Welty, but since the Classics Club Challenge is all about broadening horizons, I resolved to give some famous short stories a chance.

What I learned: Mansfield is indeed a master of the form, but short stories are just not for me.  With just a few exceptions, I bogged down even in the capable hands of an expert storyteller.  That’s not to say that Mansfield’s writing isn’t wonderful, because it is.  Y’all know I love a good descriptive paragraph, and Mansfield excels at them.  For instance, from The Prelude:

As they stood on the steps, the high grassy bank on which the aloe rested rose up like a wave, and the aloe seemed to ride upon it like a ship with the oars lifted.  Bright moonlight hung upon the lifted oars like water, and on the green wave glittered the dew.

I mean – I can see that.  Can’t you?

As with any short story collection, there were hits and misses for me.  I really liked The Stranger, and all three of the stories featuring the Burnell family – The Prelude, At the Bay, and The Doll’s House.  But there were quite a few stories mixed in, in which I had NO idea what was going on.  And again, because: short story, I was not really invested in deciphering the confusing parts.

As expected, though, The Garden Party stands head and shoulders above the rest of the stories on offer.  It’s a simple, limited world – but so much happens.  The Garden Party is the story of an upper class family on the day of – what else? – a garden party.  When the story begins, the family is sitting around the breakfast table making preparations for the party, and Laura – the “artistic” one – is dispatched to oversee construction of a marquee on the lawn.  As Laura goes about her party preparations, her day is upended by the news that one of the villagers – a near neighbor, geographically speaking, but not socially – has been killed in an accident.  Laura is staggered, and immediately thinks it would be best to call off the party, but the rest of her family disagrees.

“Mother, a man’s been killed,” began Laura.

“Not in the garden?” interrupted her mother.

“No, no!”

“Oh, what a fright you gave me!” Mrs. Sheridan sighed with relief, and took off the big hat and held it on her knees.

Laura is outvoted, and the party goes on – and she convinces herself to forget the tragedy next door and concentrate on the party.  (I was reminded of Scarlet O’Hara: “I won’t think about that now.  I’ll think about it tomorrow.”)  After the party ends, Laura is elected emissary to deliver leftover party food to the bereaved home, where she encounters the corpse and the family.

As I said, it’s a simple, constrained story – limited in time and scope – but contains masterful writing and plotting within.  I won’t say that Katherine Mansfield converted me to a fan of the short story form; I’ll never enjoy it as much as I enjoy other literary forms.  But I could definitely appreciate her phrasing, her plot twists, and the imagery in her lovely paragraphs.

Are you a reader of short stories?

George Eliot’s short novel, Silas Marner, reads like a parable or a fairy tale – uplifting, redemptive, a little sad.  When the novel opens, Silas is a young man who has been swept up into a closed religious community – Lantern Yard – in his hometown.  He is happy and content, with a fiance he loves, a pastor he trusts, and a best friend from whom he is inseparable – until he loses it all to a false accusation of theft.  Bereft of his love and driven out of his community, Silas wanders until he loses himself in a small community called Raveloe, where he sets up as a weaver in an isolated cottage.  The villagers view Silas – pale, nearsighted, with a tendency to fall into trances – with suspicion and a great deal of fear.

When Silas is engaged to weave for a local resident and receives his first payment, he cleaves to the money – having lost everything that matters to him.  Silas is unused to having money to call his own; nearly all of his wages used to be paid to his religious community.  He begins to hoard the payments he receives for his work, and because he is an excellent weaver, his money stash grows and grows – until the day that he is robbed.

Silas’s loss has the unexpected result of bringing him closer to the community.  After living on the outside looking in, Silas finds himself an object of sympathy, and the villagers’ curiosity about him takes a more gentle turn.  But the true change comes one day when Silas loses himself in a trance, only to find a golden-haired toddler on his hearth.  The nearsighted Silas imagines, at first, that the heap of gold he sees is his money returned to him; when he gets a closer look and discovers that it’s actually a little girl, he is smitten.

Marner took her on his lap, trembling with an emotion mysterious to himself, at something unknown dawning on his life.  Thought and feeling were so confused within him, that if he had tried to give them utterance, he could only have said that the child was come instead of the gold – that the gold had turned into the child.  He took the garments from Dolly, and put them on under her teaching; interrupted, of course, by Baby’s gymnastics.

The baby’s mother has frozen to death in the road outside Silas’s door, so Silas adopts the little one and names her Eppie.  With his decision to take Eppie to his heart, the villagers’ goodwill – which was already flowing into Silas’s little cottage – overflows.  Eppie connects Silas to his neighbors, and the whole town is irrevocably changed.

Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude – which was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tones – Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her.  The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward, and carried them far away from their old eager pacing towards the same blank limit – carried them away to the new things that would come with the coming years, when Eppie would have learned to understand how her father Silas cared for her; and made him look for images of that time in the ties and charities that bound together the families of the neighbours.  The gold had asked that he should sit weaving longer and longer, deafened and blinded more and more to all things except the monotony of his loom and the repetition of his web; but Eppie called him away from his weaving, and made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening his senses with her fresh life, even to the old winter-flies that came crawling forth in the early spring sunshine, and warming him into her joy because she had joy.

Silas Marner started slow for me, and some of the scenes – especially a long scene in the local pub, the Rainbow, during which peripheral characters spent two chapters discoursing over something irrelevant – made me think that Eliot may have originally intended a longer, more developed story, more Middlemarch-ian in scope.  In the end, I’m glad Eliot focused on the pared-down story of Silas, Eppie, and their connection to the local squire’s family.  This core of the novel was the most interesting and moving part, and the narrative really picked up steam when Eppie arrived on the scene and the village started to open its heart to Silas.

The one thing that I found really distracting about the book was the constant description of Silas as being nearsighted, groping around and practically blind.  I know that he was supposed to seem like a mole or some other underground creature – symbolism, y’all.  But all I could think was – I know glasses existed in Victorian times, and the village had a doctor (he appears in several scenes).  Why did no one suggest that Silas wear glasses?

That’s a minor gripe, though.  Altogether, I loved Silas Marner.  I found it sweet, sad, and profoundly moving.

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction.  We see no white-winged angels now.  But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently toward a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a child’s.