Origin Story: the why, the what, and the wherefore

One of the features of our vacations for the last 5 years (at least) is my Big Bag of Books. C starts collecting books that have been recommended by book sellers, or that he notices advertised somewhere, and packs them all up for our time in Kentucky. So my reading for the next six weeks (until the middle of August) is drawn (mostly) from the bag.

101: The Sanatorium, Sarah Pearse

A super-remote sanatorium is turned into a fancy hotel– they added lots of amenities, but kind of doubled down on the scary atmosphere. Setting reminded me of the Poirot episode in the hotel (Trials of Hercules?… something like that– the one that combined several of the short stories from that collection); the murder could have been more closely integrated with the setting or with the characters– I was caught off guard, didn’t figure it out, but also don’t think I missed anything, I think it just needed more *something* to justify the conclusion. (This might be a problem of genre: maybe this is a suspense, not a mystery– I read everything as mystery, expect the conclusion to be gestured to and worked toward, but that’s a genre-specific thing.) Enjoyed it. Loved the setting, super spooky.

102: The Postscript Murders, Elly Griffiths

This was good, reminded me of The Thursday Murder Club. Old lady dies, is it murder, and who would want to kill an old lady? (Answer: plenty of people, obviously) In the way that an out-of-print book affects the plot, this reminded me of the Joanne Dobson mystery… but details of that plot are escaping me. Some long-dead scandal recorded in a racy novel that nearly nobody remembers. Anyway. This was good, and I need to reread the Karen Pelletier novels.

103: The Messy Lives of Book People, Phaedra Patrick

She name-checked The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo near the beginning, and that was wisely done. This isn’t that story, of course, but it is similar in the setup: someone gets close to a reclusive icon and kind of investigates what happened in their life. Didn’t see this ending coming, enjoyed it.

June’s reading is going to be a little different, though I loved the structure of the alphabet challenge in May. But June is (maybe) my last summer month at home, so I’m having a clear-the-shelves sprint. (I’m traveling in July and part of August, and I have a lot of new books coming, so it’s best that I read off the shelf while I’m home, rather than travel with books I’ve owned for ages.) And no non-fiction/morning reading. Trying to get as much done on my diss this month as possible, and so I’m switching it up by hitting the work first thing, instead of after an hour or so of reading. (Maybe some poetry in the morning if this feels untenable.) All of these, except possibly Ahab’s Wife, are read-then-donate books, so this feels like an excellent chance to clear some space.

The list of 10:

• The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett (off the shelf, gift from C)
• Marilla of Green Gables, Sarah McCoy (off the shelf, gift from C)
• Victoria, Daisy Goodwin (off the shelf, gift from C) (& audio from library, 14 days)
• Ahab’s Wife, or, The Star-Gazer, Sena Jeter Naslund (off the shelf, library booksale)
• The Guineveres, Sarah Domet (off the shelf, gift from C) [read or discard]
• We That Are Left, Clare Clark (off the shelf, gift from C) [read or discard]
• Becoming Belle, Nuala O’Conner (off the shelf, gift from C) [read or discard]
• Everything Here is Beautiful, Mira T. Lee (off the shelf, gift from C) [read or discard] (& audio from library, 21 days)
• Three Martini Lunch, Suzanne Rindell (off the shelf, gift from C) [read or discard]
• Edgar and Lucy, Victor Lodato (off the shelf, gift from C) [read or discard]

Ok, this month came in at 20. But it didn’t feel mindless, so it’s fine. I read the 10 I chose for myself at the beginning of the month, liked some (some more than expected), some were a bit forgettable, but none so bad I bailed. (Working on bailing books I’m not enjoying, so those don’t show up here! Being this far ahead in my reading goals has benefits!)

Some of the best this month:

I listened to this, and the closer attention of actual reading might have been a better choice. But still, this was great for listening as I did the few things that require me to put my book down. Her major argument (which barely needed arguing, but wow the info she marshalled) is that things are tested on male bodies, and that the resultant information gap is killing women. So from the AC in the office (which you’ve probably heard about), from the force that a crash test dummy can withstand, to the size of the car, to the size of the phone……. and it isn’t *just* inconvenience: when women have to shift their seats forward to reach the pedals in the car, that change in distance affects how force is distributed, how seat belts work, how a woman, vs a man, might survive. And so much else.

The Rajah Quilt is a quilt made by women on the convict ship Rajah in 1841. There were 180 women on the ship, based on the different skills demonstrated and the known histories of the women, around 30 women probably did the stitching. This intensively researched book tells the story of the women on the ship– circumstances before conviction, transportation, lives in Australia. There is a lot that isn’t known, but this book tells everything else. I thought this was going to be an introduction to a chapter in my diss, I ended up going another way. But I think this will be useful in another project I’ve had simmering about life in the colony in 1840’s. Fun stuff.

Enjoyed this overall. I need to read more poetry collections (I’m not sure if there’s a word that means explicitly what I mean– collection can be the collected works of [x], or an individual volume, written and published together with intention by the author. I like the continuance of the theme throughout variations. Possible words seem to be used indiscriminately–anthology, collection, volume…. )

The poem in which victims of hate-based violence write postcards to their attackers from national monuments. The flash of moving up the St. Louis Arch in a tiny metal capsule resonated with me, a moment of memory of being small and frightened and excited. The poem was dense and beautiful and complicated and ultimately hopeful, as the violent keeps getting smaller and smaller, less and less defining. I read this through the lens of the language around victim vs survivor, and even more, of that being the only identifier. We talk about this concept when I teach Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts– the impossible necessity of seeing the personhood of the one slaughtered, who only appears in the public record on the worst day of their life, who had a full life before they were so cavalierly renamed Venus or Aphrodite or Belle.

“US & CO.” by Tracy K. Smith

We are here for what amounts to a few hours,

a day at most.

We feel around making sense of the terrain,

our own new limbs,

Bumping up against a herd of bodies

until one becomes home.

Moments sweep past. The grass bends

then learns again to stand.