Lit Chat Vol. 32 — November in Review
Hi friends,
We’ve approached my least favorite/favorite time of year. It’s cold, it’s dark, everybody you know is perpetually a little sick. Really, the only thing this time of year is good for is reading.
But we’re also approaching a reflective time of year, and I think I still have a little gratitude hangover from Thanksgiving. As I looked back at past pyramids this week to check whether I’ll meet the goals I set for myself in January, I was overwhelmed by how low-key stellar this reading year has been.
Not only were there so many bangers I’m already anxious that they won’t all get a fighting chance in the Best Of bracket due to seeding, but this year also left me so excited to keep reading: finishing series I’ve started, exploring more authors and genres I’ve discovered in a myriad of languages, wondering what I’ll unexpectedly fall in love with next year.
Overall, I’m just grateful that I’ve had so much time to spend with these words and worlds this past year. I know my life won’t always have the space to accommodate so much reading time like it does now, which makes this era of relative freedom and abundance of literary community to share it with feel extra precious. Not taking any of it for granted!!!
Anyway, TLDR:
But the year’s not over yet! We’ve still got November and December to chat about, baby, so let’s dive on in. And a reminder that you can get these posts straight to your inbox by subscribing to Lit Chat on Substack:
THE FOUNDATION:
Chess Story — Stefan Zweig, tr. Joel Rotenberg
Work book club strikes again! This is a story of madness, told within the deceptively simple frame narrative of a man witnessing a chess match onboard a ship traveling from New York to Buenos Aires. The players are a world champion and a former Nazi prisoner, who taught himself chess to cope with the isolation of solitary confinement. The latter’s relapse of “chess sickness” is the climax of the novella, but it’s almost overshadowed by the historical context of its publication: Zweig, an Austrian living in exile in Brazil in 1942, committed suicide the day after turning in this manuscript. These circumstances can’t be separated from those of the novella, which is defined by the as-yet-vague but inevitable horror of the war to come, and the irrevocable estrangement from one’s home and former way of life. Highly recommend the Lit Century podcast ep on this novella as a companion listen to this haunting story.
Strange Pilgrims — Gabriel García Márquez, tr. Edith Grossman
I enjoyed dipping in and out of Márquez’s weird little worlds over Thanksgiving break, so near to our own but always with his signature twist of magical realism. Much like Zweig, Márquez was an expat writing about expats, and there’s a sense of displacement and unbelonging that permeates the stories in this collection. Most of the stories feature Latin Americans gone astray in Europe, e.g., a young wife accidentally stranded in a women’s asylum, a family on holiday trapped by supernatural winds, and a pair of ill-fated newlyweds separated by a strange injury. There’s a sense of wrongness, an encroaching sinisterness beneath the façade of civility and culture in each story that ties them all together, despite their being written over the course of two decades. I find it fascinating when authors revisit the same themes and ideas over the course of their career, and this is a perfect example of that kind of lifelong creative exploration.
Will There Ever Be Another You — Patricia Lockwood
The first and only word I could think of to describe this book upon finishing it was: wackadoo. I’m tempted to leave things there, but I can elaborate by explaining that this “novel” is a product of the author’s brain-scrambling experience with long Covid, which made me feel similarly disoriented and unstable just reading her attempts at translating that experience into words. And yet, there are also profound moments of grief and anxiety, as the author simultaneously deals with episodes of tragic loss and illness within her family. Having read Lockwood’s prior novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, (and having once been an avid Twitter follower), I know much of this work draws from real life. The trick of the novel is that you’re never quite sure what’s real and what’s not; truth and reality become somehow immaterial.
Tower of Dawn — Sarah J. Maas
Yes, we are still cruising through the Throne of Glass series!! I blew through book six in three days while I was home for Thanksgiving, reliving my childhood glory days of staying up past my bedtime to cram the last hundred pages in before midnight. What’s cool about this one is that it takes a complete detour from the previous book, following a couple of side characters to a whole different continent, and introducing new characters and cultures that expand and enrich the world of the series in a complex yet refreshing way. I expect we’ll catch up with the main crew in the next and final book of the series in approximately…eight weeks, when my Libby hold comes in.
SOLID SUPPORTS:
Atmosphere — Taylor Jenkins Reid
Being an astronaut was one of my many short-lived childhood career dreams, so I was especially excited for TJR’s latest. Set in the early 1980s, this book follows the second-ever group of NASA astronaut candidates to include women, and features a slow-burn romance between two of the women, Joan Goodwin and Vanessa Ford.
I’ve been describing it as Apollo 13 but with lesbians, which means it’s not a spoiler to tell you that the book opens with disaster striking during a space mission. In the span of minutes, Vanessa becomes the only surviving astronaut capable of bringing the ship home, with the help of Joan’s coaching from Houston. The rest of the story is told in intermittent flashbacks to their selection and training, including the development of their relationships with the other astronauts in their class.
I resented this structuring a bit because I knew it was going to make me care about characters that just die in the first chapter, and I don’t appreciate that kind of emotional manipulation!! But I still raced through it and thought it was not only a beautiful love story, but also drove home just how impactful—and not guaranteed!—it was for women to succeed in this field at that time, securing a future for entire decades of women in STEM.
The Bluest Eye — Toni Morrison
I read this book in the span of my travel day from Chicago back to New York, finishing just as the plane touched down at LaGuardia. Although it didn’t take me very long to read, the heaviness of its subject material ensures that it’s not an “easy” read by any means. The opening pages prepare you for a story of child sexual abuse, and the rest of the novel unfolds through the eyes of the classmates, family members, and neighbors of the victim: a little Black girl who makes a wish for blue eyes.
What I found almost even more interesting than the novel itself was Morrison’s Afterword. First published in 1970 and reissued with the Afterword in 1994, I was surprised to see Morrison express dissatisfaction with the structure of the novel as a means of engaging with themes of internalized and structural racism. She acknowledges what she was trying to do and the shortcomings of her approach, compounded with the difficulty of striking the right tone in the language itself, in the pursuit of “race-specific yet race-free prose.”
I was surprised and impressed by this admission, at how Morrison was still finding ways to engage with and challenge her work by the changing standards of the time and her own skill level, decades after its publication. The choice to publish these thoughts as an Afterword is not one of a more experienced author excusing the failures of a younger self, but of an artist continually in conversation with all versions of herself, her work, and her world, challenging her readers to stay in that conversation, too. Cool as hell, in my humble opinion!
THE TIPPY TOP:
Red Bird — Mary Oliver
What can’t an afternoon spent with Mary Oliver fix? I had requested this volume specifically from the library because it’s the book Coyote Sunrise searches for in Coyote, Lost and Found by Dan Gemeinhart, which I read back in August.
The titular red bird opens and closes the collection and pops up throughout, often serving as a go-between for the physical and spiritual world. The collection features Oliver’s signature awe and wonder for the natural world, but there’s an undertone of grief and distress that can be attributed to a number of factors: the loss of Oliver’s long-term partner in 2005, three years before this volume was published, the Iraq war, the melting of the ice caps. To love the natural world as Oliver does is to feel all of its suffering, but also to see God everywhere in its beauty.
I’ll leave you with some of my favorites, because everybody needs a little more poetry in their lives, and because this was my only five-star book of the month for a reason:
- The poem Coyote seeks is “Mornings at Blackwater,” which made me a little teary remembering the emotional release of encountering it for the first time in Gemeinhart’s novel.
- “Self-Portrait” made me laugh and so charmed me that it inspired this newsletter heading.
- “Love Sorrow” is the kind of poem you keep in your back pocket, to return to in inevitably difficult times.
- “I don’t want to live a small life” is one you may have seen before, a classic Oliver love poem disguised as inspirational nature poem.
- Oliver wrote a whole series of poems about her dog, Percy. If you pick just one of these poems to read today, let it be this one: “I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life.”
One more month to go! Historically, I’ve wound down my reading in December so I don’t have to do both a December recap and an EOY bracket, but there is simply too much to read, and it’s still anybody’s game (although On the Calculation of Volume III just might come out swinging).
Time will tell, so stay tuned, and as always, thanks for being here! Grateful for this lil circle of book lovers—you know where to find me if you ever want to chat more about these or any other books.
Until next time, happy reading!
❤ Catherine
Housekeeping note: all book links go to my Bookshop storefront, where each purchase supports independent bookstores (and this newsletter, because I get a small percentage of each sale).
Catherine Thoms 