Category Archives: Uncategorized

When in Rome … read?

I have the unusual privilege this year of spending the holidays in Florida. For a girl who grew up in northern Vermont, where Christmas is typically white to a stupefying extent, it’s both relieving and disappointing to wake up each morning of Christmas week to bright sun, sparkling water and the sight of alligators sprawled out on the banks of the pond.

For my partner, this is paradise. Not because of the exceptional vitality of every corner of the green and living world, even in December, nor because of the wash of Vitamin D available for nine hours every day. No, it’s a paradise of golf.

And while he’s trekking back and forth across the greens in search of balls, I’ve been falling asleep in the sun with a book half-shading my face.

I packed five of the books I purchased recently at a library book sale: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Ethan Frome, Wide Sargasso Sea and a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and lectures.

That final choice is admittedly one of those books I’m always excited to acquire but rarely find myself actually reading. It’s an aspirational book — the kind I keep on myself because the person I want to be would read it, not because I plan to.

The others have thus far proven good companions for an unusual week away.

What can I say about Faulkner except that it seems he achieved in his own way the kind of experimental chronology and unfettered syntax that many contemporary novels fail so spectacularly at?

It was a relief, actually, to see that it had been done well, and so long ago.

Ethan Frome, on the other hand, is a remarkably simple novel. But what the style lacks in depth is balanced by the pulsing theme of human happiness. Maybe the lesson from a book like this is that the most profound questions should be dealt with in the simplest terms.

I’m midway through Wide Sargasso Sea now. I was put onto it, of course, after reading Jane Eyre earlier in the year. Although it’s a relatively short read, I’m digesting it slowly.

When I come to any conclusion, you’ll be the first to know.

For now, have a very happy holidays, and we’ll talk in the new year.

-abbie

Let’s connect about your project!

LET’S CONNECT ABOUT YOUR PROJECT!

For the past few months, I’ve been sharing content about books, fiction and the writing life online. It’s been such a joy to connect with all of you who love books, and especially with those of you who are chasing a writing dream.

I’m thrilled to announce a new way to connect with you and your writing. My manuscript editing web page is now live, with information about what I edit and how to contact me about your project.

If you think I might be the right person to put a fresh set of eyes on your novel, short story, essay or query package, I would love to hear from you!

Wild Dark Shore

Just as there are seasons to the writing life, so there are seasons in the life of a reader. Some seasons call for voracious pacing, hunkering down on the couch, and reading until you’re half blind. Others call for a gentler, steadier approach — for leisurely walks through the library and the bookstore, looking for the right book, and reading and rereading all your old favorites.

September was that latter kind of time for me. I read little that was new, returning to some favorite selections of W.S. Merwin and to Christian Wiman’s “Once in the West” for a much-needed reread. I also made what is becoming an annual autumn pilgrimage back to the pages of John Knowles, whose “A Separate Peace” is, on most days, my favorite novel.

But I did find time for one new novel, Charlotte McConaghy’s “Wild Dark Shore,” and one new book of poetry, Jane Hirshfield’s “Ledger.”

My grandfather was an avid amateur photographer. For many years, he kept a folder on his desktop titled “photos I wish I’d taken.”

That’s how I felt reading “Wild Dark Shore.”

McConaghy’s novel does everything I wish to be able to do in a novel. It has this gripping central storyline that drives the novel toward its climax, but nothing is sacrificed along the way. Not the characters, who are each drawn tenderly and realistically. Not the tension between hope and despair. Not the piercing reminders of a beautiful and dying world.

To draw a world and people that richly without sacrificing a riveting plot is a rare feat, and one I can’t help but admire.

My one gripe, if I had to have one, is the time and space given to the main character’s debate about whether she wants to have children.

While that debate works as a pretty functional stand-in for her flickers between hope for the future and a kind of nihilism, it seems to reduce the myriad reasons a woman might not want children to the one big existential one.

At the end of the day, though, this is a book well worth reading. For readers of the novels of the past that have contended with the great evils of their own times, it will feel both fresh and painfully familiar.

July-September 2024

It’s been a chaotic few months! My employer closed unexpectedly. I moved to a new state (New Hampshire), started a new job, and … drumroll, please … adopted a dog.

I think my reading from this time reflects the chaos. Reading, for example, a very contemporary, women-centered novel like “The Wren, the Wren” back-to-back with Thomas Merton’s “Contemplative Prayer” is probably not something a healthy person would necessarily think to do.

However, this list also reflects some of the good that came from this time of change and transition. Driving back and forth between the three states where I partially lived in August gave me the time to listen to 32 hours of “Middlemarch” on audiobook (which I got free through Libby). And the life I’m building here in New Hampshire has me spending many evenings sitting on the couch with my dog, reading while he naps off the day’s adventures. With him snoring beside me, I plowed through Emily Wilson’s translation of the Iliad.

“Middlemarch” was my first foray into audiobooks. In the past, I’ve avoided them because I resent their pace compared to reading to myself. But now that I’ve realized the power of audiobooks to allow me to read even while driving or walking the dog, I’m hooked!

I could say much more about “Middlemarch,” but it probably deserves its own post … to put it briefly, I’ll say I’ve rarely encountered a narrator at once so attuned to the absurdity of human vanity and so willing to take the mundanities of life so seriously. It’s a timeless, funny, hope-filled and faith-restoring book.

After “Middlemarch” I listened to E.M. Forster’s “Howard’s End.” I read “Maurice” earlier in the year and was blown away by Forster’s attention to the way people think, move and feel. As “Howard’s End” got underway, I felt optimistically that this story would demonstrate the same clear-eyed view of fickle man. And it did – at first – but the characters in “Howard’s End” are dissappointingly static. From a writerly perspective, there was something intriguing about that staticness. But it was intriguing in the way that pulling the tendons on a dead thing to make its limbs twitch is intriguing. Nevertheless, I liked Forster’s prose, as I did in “Maurice” and felt it labored valiantly to keep the novel alive.

Next, I listened to several young adult novels, including my former professor Gary Schmidt’s book “Orbiting Jupiter.” Schmidt is one of those rare writers for kids who seems to understand that children do not inhabit some place isolated from the one where the serious, adult world unfolds but in fact experience and respond to the same range of ugly and beautiful things adults do. I’ve been reading his books since middle school and was not disappointed by this addition to the collection.

Novels

  • Anne Enright, “The Wren, the Wren”
  • George Eliot, “Middlemarch”*
  • Moa Backe Astot, “Fire From the Sky”*
  • Gabrielle Zevin, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”
  • E.M. Forster, “Howard’s End”*
  • Gary Schmidt, “Orbiting Jupiter”*
  • Freeman Ng, “Bridge Across the Sky”*

Nonfiction and Poetry

  • Thomas Merton, “Contemplative Prayer”
  • Flannery O’Connor, “A Prayer Journal”
  • Ocean Vuong, “Time is a Mother”*
  • Bert Hornback, “Middlemarch: A Novel of Reform”
  • Homer, trans. Emily Wilson, “The Iliad”