Or, Summer Reading II.
With summer nearly at an end, here’s some of what I’ve been reading. It doesn’t quite match up with my earlier photo, because other books always nudge or muscle or edge their way in.
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. I found Wolf Hall oddly dull–there was a tedium to it–and yet gripping enough that I picked up the next book as soon as I finished it. Bring Up the Bodies went much faster. It’s as if Hilary Mantel had brilliantly figured out how to keep interest alive through the seemingly interminable machinations to get Anne Boleyn on the throne in the first book, making that long process viscerally real for the reader, then made the second novel zoom through her much briefer tenure as queen. This isn’t history I know at all well, so I have nothing to say about accuracy or inaccuracy. I found the handling of point of view fascinating, the way the reader is sometimes in Cromwell’s head, yet also kept at arm’s length. Mantel has a deft touch with her not entirely sympathetic protagonist (is he the protagonist?)–he’s likeable, he’s scheming, damaged, crafty, sentimental, generous. And at the end, still a bit of a cypher.
Kelly Link’s story collection, Get in Trouble. I got to hear Kelly read part of “The New Boyfriend” in Minneapolis in April, so I sort of “heard” her reading in the background now, which was fun. My favorite story was “The Summer People,” with its mix of privilege and loneliness and intricacy and absence.
Christina MacSweeney’s translation of The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli. More on that when my review comes out in the fall.
The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown. One friend recommended this as riveting, while another warned there might be just a bit too much on rowing technique and the finer points of boatbuilding. I found it absorbing. Maybe because my son had just spent a couple of weeks rowing, and we’d just been to Seattle, so we had boats on the mind. My grandfather went to college at about the same time, with likely similar finances to some of those boys and a similar athletic scholarship (= a job in the cafeteria). Idaho and football, in his case, not Washington. When I read a book like this, where you know how it turns out–it’s plastered all over the cover, they won the gold medal–I’m always trying to figure out how the writer manages to make it suspenseful. A level of detail, I think–not the giant what happens? but the small.
Because I’ll be (briefly) in Patagonia in a few weeks, and because I had never read it before, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. Something in the tone (elegiac?) makes it all seem very long ago and far away–further than the early/mid-1970s. Which were maybe longer ago than I think.