Is reading ever easy? Is knowing what you want to read possible? The times when the two click—when you find a book that says not what you know but what you need to hear—are the times I remember with the most longing. When a book speaks to you, and you are able to hear it, it’s everything.
This year it was a struggle to find that match, to meet with a book each on our terms. My needs from reading were all over the map—did I want escapism? something to help me process life? Who did I want to be in charge, my brain or the book or both? There were books I devoured even though I didn’t particularly like them. There were books I wanted to read that I just couldn’t bring myself to continue. I wept, I laughed, it was the best of times, the worst of times.
I read the first two books of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavansdatter trilogy this year. Written in the 1920s and set in 14th-century Norway, there wasn’t anything obvious that called to me about them, except that they’d been on my list since I read a review of the Tiina Nunally translations, and I’d just finished reading the Steerswoman books and needed something that was in an alternate world to sink into. The first one, The Wreath, pulled me in and didn’t let me go, even though I wanted to shake Kristin continually. A few months later, The Wife did the same, this time with more wanting to shake Kristin. And then in September I tried to get on with The Cross and I just couldn’t. There was so much to keep track of, the ins and outs of feudal politics in a country I had absolutely no knowledge about, and by this point Kristin’s life seemed to her and to me so hopeless, so without any of the joys the earlier books brought, and it was all too much.
Tommy Orange’s There There was a different story. I loved it. I read it deeply. And then. And then it was too hard to read about Native American experiences of genocide and survival while also struggling with experiencing Jews as both the subjects and perpetrators of genocide. What does it mean to be an urban Indian, far from the reservations on which Indian life is seen to be based? What does it mean to be an American Jew, far from the biblical lands we were exiled from? What’s identity and nationality and the ongoing horror of feeling separated from your community because you know they are so deeply in the wrong but also mixed in with that an anger and sorrow because you know how and why they feel the way they do, but you don’t know how to broach that distance nor how to convey to outsiders the thousands of years of trauma we tell ourselves? As the book bore down closer and closer on the violence that was being planned, I slowed my reading down to a crawl and then paused and now I don’t know when I’ll pick it up again.
My tale of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is different yet again. The playfulness of that book! The layers on layers and twists on twists, all about reading books and writing books and making books—how could I not love that? Plus, I was reading it along with my book club. But oh! It was a busy summer and then I got Covid and you know what’s hard to do when your brain hurts and is in a fog? Read a book that you actually have to keep track of. I loved it and I wanted to understand it. And so I put it down until it’s been too long now to remember enough to be able to pick it up again. Will I do so in the future? I hope so. On the other hand, life is long and books are never ending and if all I have is a taste of this marvel, that could be enough.
Is it rude to leave you only with the reading failures? Here’s what worked for me this year:
Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds reimagines the origins of the United States and oh, how I mourned what the seventeenth century did to us all.
Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series imagines a whole new reality that is about knowledge making and what’s the line between magic and technology and I loved it. But I’m going to tell you something now, though, because I didn’t know and I was not prepared and I was wrecked: the series just stops. The last book isn’t the end of the quest, but just the last book written. It’s an abrupt ending I wasn’t at all prepared for and I did not like being kicked out of that world.
Barbara Pym is still everything. Quartet in Autumn is hard hard hard. But even lesser Pym is still great and I am looking forward to many rereadings of them for a long time. What does she imagine? That the small details of unmarried women are vast and tragic and comic.
Mary Renault’s The Charioteer imagines a world in which gay men are worthy of love, self love and partnered love. To write that world at a time when it was so viciously denied? What a gift, then and now.
May we all know how to give voice to the futures that seem impossible so that we can act them into being.