The Republic of Love by Carol Shields (Blog Tour Review)
“Let’s hear it for love.”
Last year I read, or reread, six Carol Shields novels (my roundup post). The ongoing World Editions reissue series is my excuse to continue rereading her this year – Mary Swann, another I’m keen to try again, is due out in August.
The Republic of Love (1992), the seventh of Shields’s 10 novels, was a runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize and was adapted into a 2003 film directed by Deepa Mehta. (I love Emilia Fox; how have I not seen this?!)
The chapters alternate between the perspectives of radio disc jockey Tom Avery and mermaid researcher Fay McLeod, two thirtysomething Winnipeg lonely hearts who each have their share of broken relationships behind them – three divorces for Tom; a string of long-term live-in boyfriends for Fay. It’s clear that these two characters are going to meet and fall in love (at almost exactly halfway through), but Shields is careful to interrogate the myths of love at first sight and happily ever after.
On this reread, I was most struck by the subplot about Fay’s parents’ marriage and especially liked the secondary characters (like Fay’s godmother, Onion) and the surprising small-world moments that take place in Winnipeg even though it was then a city of some 600,000 people. Shields has a habit of recording minor characters’ monologues (friends, family, radio listeners, and colleagues) word for word without letting Fay or Tom’s words in edgewise.
Tom sometimes feels like a caricature – the male/female dynamic is not as successful here as in the Happenstance dual volume, which also divides the perspective half and half – and I wasn’t entirely sure what the mermaid theme is meant to contribute. Mermaids are sexually ambiguous, and in Fay’s Jungian interpretation represent the soul emerging from the unconscious. In any case, they’re an excuse for Fay to present papers at folklore conferences and spend four weeks traveling in Europe (Amsterdam, Copenhagen, northwest France).

The cover on the copy I read in 2016.
Straightforward romance plots don’t hold much appeal for me anymore, but Shields always impresses with her compassionate understanding of human nature and the complexities of relationships.
This was not one of my favorites of hers, and the passage of nearly five years didn’t change that, but it’s still pleasant and will suit readers of similarly low-key, observant novels by women: Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection, Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air, Mary Lawson’s A Town Called Solace, and Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist.
Favorite lines:
“Most people’s lives don’t wrap up nearly as neatly as they’d like to think. Fay’s sure of that. Most people’s lives are a mess.”
Fay’s mother: “I sometimes think that the best thing about your mermaids is the fact that they never age.”
The Republic of Love was reissued in the UK by World Editions in February. My thanks to the publisher for the free copy for review.
I was delighted to take part in the blog tour for The Republic of Love. See below for details of where other reviews and features have appeared or will be appearing.
Library Checkout, March 2021
Loads of my reservations came in all at once this month, so I’ve had to put some effort into finishing the in-demand new releases so I can relinquish them to the next in line. I’m sorry/not sorry that a few much-hyped books ended up not being for me so that I could put them down and move on to other things (like requesting novels that made it onto the Women’s Prize longlist). On the other hand, some recent novels that I picked up more than lived up to my expectations, giving me the first few entries on my Best of 2021 list.
I resumed my regular volunteering hours at the library last week, and the building will reopen to the public on April 12th. It’s great to be back!
I would be delighted to have other bloggers – not just book bloggers – join in with this meme. Feel free to use the image above and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part in Library Checkout (on the last Monday of each month), or tag me on Twitter/Instagram: @bookishbeck / #TheLibraryCheckout & #LoveYourLibraries.
READ
- Can Bears Ski? by Raymond Antrobus (a children’s book)
- The Push by Ashley Audrain
- The Air Year by Caroline Bird (poetry)
- A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
- The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
- The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
- No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
- The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
- My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
SKIMMED
- All the Young Men: How One Woman Risked It All to Care for the Dying by Ruth Coker Burks
- Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
- A Promised Land by Barack Obama
- Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
- Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars by Francesca Wade
CURRENTLY READING
- Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
- Luster by Raven Leilani
- The Art of Falling by Danielle McLaughlin
- Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story by Paul Monette
- You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy
- How We Met: A Memoir of Love and Other by Huma Qureshi
- UnPresidented: Politics, Pandemics and the Race that Trumped All Others by Jon Sopel
- Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic
- When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman
CURRENTLY SKIMMING
- The Natural Health Service: What the Great Outdoors Can Do for Your Mind by Isabel Hardman
- The Librarian by Allie Morgan
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes
- Featherhood: On Birds and Fathers by Charlie Gilmour
- Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith
- Escape Routes by Naomi Ishiguro
- The Last Migration by Charlotte McConaghy
- Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- Who Is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews
- Under the Blue by Oana Aristide
- Espedair Street by Iain Banks
- Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
- Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania and Healing by Horatio Clare
- Ten Days by Austin Duffy
- Lakewood by Megan Giddings
- After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond by Bruce Greyson
- The Absolute Book by Elizabeth Knox
- Birdsong in a Time of Silence by Steven Lovatt
- Consent by Annabel Lyon
- Nothing but Blue Sky by Kathleen MacMahon
- His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie
- Skylarks with Rosie: A Somerset Spring by Stephen Moss
- Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley
- Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
- Life Sentences by Billy O’Callaghan
- The Ministry of Bodies: Life and Death in a Modern Hospital by Seamus O’Mahony
- Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
- Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS by Michael Rosen
- How to Be Sad: Everything I’ve Learned about Getting Happier, by Being Sad, Better by Helen Russell
- I Belong Here: A Journey along the Backbone of Britain by Anita Sethi
- Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- A Burning by Megha Majumdar – I read the first 34 pages. Interesting enough story, but shaky writing. Incessant use of the present continuous tense was going to drive me mad.
- A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion – The 1980s Philadelphia setting was promising; I read the first 28 pages and didn’t feel connected enough to any of the characters to keep going.
RETURNED UNREAD
- A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago – The font and large cast list put me off. Maybe another time.
- How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones – Women’s Prize longlisted. I knew to expect bleakness, but the writing didn’t draw me in.
- Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh – Sounds too similar to Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow…
- Hurdy Gurdy by Christopher Wilson – I can’t remember now how I heard about this or why I thought it would be for me. Medieval settings are so not my thing!
What appeals from my stacks?
Book Serendipity, Early 2021
I call it Book Serendipity when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something pretty bizarre in common. Because I have so many books on the go at once (usually 20‒30), I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents.
Josh Cohen’s How to Live. What to Do, a therapist’s guide to literature, explains why this might happen:
More than one writer – the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges – has advanced the exhilarating idea that each book is an infinitesimally small piece of one single, endless Book. I’ve always felt that this idea, unlikely as it might sound, makes perfect sense if you read enough novels [also nonfiction, for me]. The incidents, descriptions, phrases and images in the book you’re reading will always recall the incidents in another, and those in turn will call up the incidents in another, so that even as you’re reading one book, you’re reading countless others.
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- Mother‒baby swimming sessions in Some Body to Love by Alexandra Heminsley and The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp.
- [I think it would be a spoiler to even name them, but two novels I read simultaneously in January featured 1) a marriage / close relationship between a man and a woman – even though the man is gay; and 2) a character who beat his wife and then died in a convenient ‘accident’. One was published in 1997 and the other in 2020.]
- Stomas appeared in Dazzling Darkness by Rachel Mann and First Time Ever by Peggy Seeger late in my 2020 reading, and then in early 2021 in Pain: The Science of the Feeling Brain by Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen and Love’s Work by Gillian Rose.
- An account of the author’s experience of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome in Hormonal by Eleanor Morgan and I Miss You when I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott.
- Salmon fishing takes place in Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson and Kings of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth.
- The medical motto “see one, do one, teach one” appears in Breathtaking by Rachel Clarke and Complications by Atul Gawande.
- Filipino medical staff feature in America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo and Breathtaking by Rachel Clarke.
- Twin Peaks is mentioned in The Fragments of My Father by Sam Mills and the anthology Trauma: Essays on Art and Mental Health; a different essay in the latter talks about Virginia Woolf’s mental health struggle, which is a strand in the former.
- St. Teresa of Ávila is mentioned in Heart by Gail Godwin and Sanatorium by Abi Palmer.
- The same Rachel Long poem appears in her debut collection, My Darling from the Lions, and The Emma Press Anthology of Love – but under different titles (“Portent” vs. “Delayed Gratification”).
- There’s a matriarch named Dot in Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller and The Magician’s Assistant by Ann Patchett.
- There’s an Alaska setting in The Quality of Silence by Rosamund Lupton and Kings of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth.
- Becoming a mother is described as a baptism in Sanctuary by Emily Rapp Black and The Fragments of My Father by Sam Mills.
- While reading America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo, I saw Castillo mentioned in the Acknowledgements of My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long.
- Polar explorers’ demise is discussed in Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman and The Still Point by Amy Sackville.
- “Butterfingers” / “butter-fingered” is used in America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo and The Clock Winder by Anne Tyler.
- There’s a mention of someone eating paper torn from books (the horror!) in Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman and The Clock Winder by Anne Tyler.
- I was reading three pre-releases at once, each of 288 pages: Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller, and A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson.
- The Jewish golem myth is the overarching metaphor of Milk Fed by Melissa Broder and Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer.
- There’s a ceremony to pay respects to those who donated their bodies for medical school dissection in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb and Golem Girl by Riva Lehrer.
- An old woman with dementia features in The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan, Keeper by Andrea Gillies, and The Clock Winder by Anne Tyler.
- A mother dies of cancer on Christmas Day in This Party’s Dead by Erica Buist and The Fragments of My Father by Sam Mills.
- The main character does stand-up comedy in Milk Fed by Melissa Broder and This Party’s Dead by Erica Buist.
- Winning a goldfish at a carnival in The Air Year by Caroline Bird, A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez, and Anna Vaught’s essay in the Trauma anthology.
- ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) is mentioned in Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Francis and Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy.
- There’s a father who is non-medical hospital staff in The Push by Ashley Audrain (a cleaner) and A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez (a kitchen worker).
- There’s a character named Hart in The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes and The Birth House by Ami McKay.
- Cannibalism is a point of reference, a major metaphor, or a (surreal) reality in Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander, Eat or We Both Starve by Victoria Kennefick, and Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford.
- Infertility and caring for animals were two big themes shared by Brood by Jackie Polzin and Catalogue Baby by Myriam Steinberg. This became clearer when I interviewed both authors in February. Also, both women have shocks of pink hair in their publicity photos!
- A young woman works at a hotel in The Distance between Us by Maggie O’Farrell and My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (and The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, which I read late last year).
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Library Checkout, February 2021
I felt a strange compulsion to clear the decks, so I ended up returning a lot of my backlist library loans unread and will get them out another time (or not). I haven’t even listed them below, though you can see a few in the first photo. For now I’m focusing on the brand new releases. Highlights: most the Costa Award poetry shortlist (I would have chosen a different winner from the judges!) and the memoir by the new U.S. Vice President. I’m grateful that, even though the building is closed to the public and volunteering has paused during lockdown, my library is still allowing people to collect their reservations.
I would be delighted to have other bloggers – not just book bloggers – join in this meme. Feel free to use the image above and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part in Library Checkout (on the last Monday of every month), or tag me on Twitter and/or Instagram: @bookishbeck / #TheLibraryCheckout.
READ
- The Historians by Eavan Boland (poetry)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris
- My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long (poetry)
- Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud
- Citadel by Martha Sprackland (poetry)
CURRENTLY READING
- The Air Year by Caroline Bird (poetry)
- A Lie Someone Told You about Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
- The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
- The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
- City of Departures by Helen Tookey (poetry)
CURRENTLY SKIMMING
- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
- A Promised Land by Barack Obama
- Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars by Francesca Wade
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Lessons for Today by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
- Seed to Dust: A Gardener’s Story by Marc Hamer
- Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh
- You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy
ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP
- The Push by Ashley Audrain
- All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks
- Escape Routes by Naomi Ishiguro
- A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago
- The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
- A Burning by Megha Majumdar
- A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion
- My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- Can Bears Ski? by Raymond Antrobus
- Espedair Street by Iain Banks
- Ten Days by Austin Duffy
- The Natural Health Service: What the Great Outdoors Can Do for Your Mind by Isabel Hardman
- The Last Migration by Charlotte McConaghy
- The Art of Falling by Danielle McLaughlin
- The Librarian by Allie Morgan
- Liquid Gold: Bees and the Pursuit of Midlife Honey by Roger Morgan-Grenville
- Hot Stew by Fiona Mozley
- The Ministry of Bodies: Life and Death in a Modern Hospital by Seamus O’Mahony
- How We Met: A Memoir of Love and Other by Huma Qureshi
- The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey
- How to Be Sad: Everything I’ve Learned about Getting Happier, by Being Sad, Better by Helen Russell
- UnPresidented: Politics, Pandemics and the Race that Trumped All Others by Jon Sopel
- Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
- Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic
- Hurdy Gurdy by Christopher Wilson
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- The Dickens Boy by Thomas Keneally
- A Fire in My Head by Ben Okri (poetry)
What appeals from my stacks?
Ex Libris x 2: Who Wears It Better, Anne Fadiman or Michiko Kakutani?
When I heard about the new book by Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic of the New York Times, I rushed to put it on my wish list – though I ended up accessing it via the library instead. I also felt a hankering to reread Anne Fadiman’s essay collection by the same title, so I ordered myself a secondhand copy earlier this year. Both books are by (more or less) famous New York City bibliophiles and take old-fashioned bookplate designs as an inspiration. Here’s how the two fared in a head-to-head battle.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman (1998)
Like many a bibliophile, I have a soft spot for books about books. However, I’m also a real stickler about them, because all too often they make common mistakes: they’re too generic or too obscure in their points of reference, they slip into plot summary and include spoilers, or they alienate the reader by presenting the author as being on another echelon.
Fadiman, though, is a very relatable narrator in these expanded versions of 18 essays originally written for publication in Civilization, the Library of Congress magazine published from 1994 to 2000. (Can you imagine, your own bookish column in which you could write whatever you like?!) Her father was the well-known intellectual Clifton Fadiman. Theirs was a family of book-obsessed, vocabulary-loving, trivia-spouting readers, and she was also crafting her own with her husband and two young children.
I saw my family – especially my mother and me – in a number of these pieces: in “The Joy of Sesquipedalians,” about the love of obscure words and word games played on a board or along with the TV (I was a spelling bee champion, and we’re all Scrabble fiends to a greater or lesser extent), in “Insert a Caret [Inset a Carrot],” about compulsive proofreading, in “The Catalogical Imperative,” about a build-up of print catalogues and the different selves one can imagine using the products therein, and in “Secondhand Prose,” about collecting used books.
There’s one respect in which I differ from the Fadiman family, though. Tom Mole’s The Secret Life of Books had reminded me of Fadiman’s division of readers into “courtly” and “carnal” lovers of books: the courtly ones keep a book pristine, while the carnal ones use and abuse them however they wish. She introduces this piece with an episode from a family trip to Copenhagen when she was a teenager. Her brother left a book open, facedown, on the bedside table at their hotel and the next day they found that the chambermaid had carefully put a marker at the right page, closed the book, and set a note on top reading, “Sir, you must never do that to a book.” I wholeheartedly agree. While I always say “your books, your rules” to other readers, I would have to suppress a cringe if I witnessed dog-earing, reading in the bath, cracking the spine, tearing out pages, doodling in the margins, and so on.
What I can get on board with, though, is the love of books as both narratives and physical objects. In the former camp, you get essays on books about polar exploration, sonnets, outdated guides to femininity, food literature, and reading aloud. On the latter, you’ll hear about her New York City apartment groaning with books absorbed from her husband’s and father’s collections, the good and bad of inscriptions, and Prime Minister William Gladstone’s tips for storing books.
Two essays have not aged well: one on a beloved pen (though she acknowledges that this was already multiply outdated by that time, by the typewriter and then by the computer she now uses for composition) and especially one on the quandary of gender-neutral pronouns (as opposed to “every man for himself” types of constructions) – nowadays we have no qualms about employing “them” for the unknown and the nonbinary.
My favorite essay overall was “You Are There,” about the special joy of reading on location. Additional irony points for Joe Biden being mentioned in the piece on plagiarism! I’d read this from a library some years before. I enjoyed it just as much the second time around, and certain essays will reward additional future rereadings, too.
My original rating (c. 2008):
My rating now:
Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread by Michiko Kakutani (2020)
In my more morbid moments, when I imagine how I would approach the remainder of my life if I knew that I was going to die young of a terminal illness, I think about self-publishing a selection of my best blog posts and book reviews. A personal greatest hits, if you would, and anyone could forgive the self-indulgence because, hey, she’s probably going to die soon. But then I open a book like this and realize that a collection of book reviews can actually be pretty tedious, even when written by one of the greats.
“Like all lists and anthologies, the selections here are subjective and decidedly arbitrary,” Kakutani warns in her introduction. What this means in practice is that: a) if I’d read a particular book, I didn’t need to read a ~1000-word review of it; b) if I hadn’t read the book but wanted to, I avoided the essay in fear of spoilers (e.g. she does reveal some specific incidents from Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, which I have on the shelf and was looking forward to; I’ll just wait until I’ve forgotten); and c) if I hadn’t read the book and didn’t want to (there is LOTS of history and politics here, with plenty of Trump jabs shoehorned in; you do know her only previous book was a diatribe against Trump, right?), I wasn’t interested. So, while there were a few pieces I appreciated, such as one on the enduring appeal of The Great Gatsby, which I recently read a third time for book club, not many caught my eye as I skimmed the book.
In any case, it’s not a book for reading all the way through but one for having on the coffee table to read the occasional essay. It is gorgeously put together, what with Dana Tanamachi’s illustrations in the style of vintage bookplates, so would still be a lovely reference book to have around. Think of it as a collection of amuse-bouches to whet your appetite to read the books you’ve always meant to pick up but haven’t managed yet (for me, that would be As I Lay Dying and Mason & Dixon). See Susan’s more judicious review here.
My rating:
I found plenty of other books on Goodreads with the title Ex Libris, such as this one, a compendium of library-themed fantasy and science fiction stories. (Yes, really.)
Have you read one of these? Which did you prefer?
Library Checkout, January 2021
I’m grateful that, even though the building is closed to the public and volunteering has paused during lockdown, my library is still allowing people to collect their reservations. I’ve got a ton of new books on request! Some are available for me to pick up on Wednesday. So, in the near future, I’m looking forward to reading the whole Costa Award poetry shortlist, and the memoir by the new U.S. Vice President.
I would be delighted to have other bloggers – not just book bloggers – join in this meme. Feel free to use the image above and leave a link to your blog in the comments if you’ve taken part in Library Checkout (on the last Monday of every month), or tag me on Twitter and/or Instagram: @bookishbeck / #TheLibraryCheckout.
READ
- Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession (a buddy read with Annabel)
SKIMMED
- Things I Learned on the 6.28: A Commuter’s Guide to Reading by Stig Abell
- Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain by David Eagleman
- The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman (for January book club)
- Ex Libris by Michiko Kakutani
- Hormonal: A Conversation about Women’s Bodies, Mental Health and Why We Need to Be Heard by Eleanor Morgan
- The Invention of Surgery: A History of Modern Medicine: From the Renaissance to the Implant Revolution by David Schneider, MD
CURRENTLY READING
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (rereading for book club)
- The Dickens Boy by Thomas Keneally
- Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Mama’s Boy: A Memoir by Dustin Lance Black
- In the Woods by Tana French
- Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
- In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne
- How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
- Country Doctor: Hilarious True Stories from a Country Practice by Michael Sparrow
- How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang
ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP
- The Air Year by Caroline Bird (poetry)
- The Historians by Eavan Boland (poetry)
- Daddy by Emma Cline
- The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Kamala Harris
- My Darling from the Lions by Rachel Long (poetry)
- Citadel by Martha Sprackland (poetry)
- The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A.N. Wilson
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion by Fay Bound Alberti
- Can Bears Ski? by Raymond Antrobus
- All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks
- A Lie Someone Told You about Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
- The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
- Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.
- A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago
- The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
- A Burning by Megha Majumdar
- A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion
- Liquid Gold: Bees and the Pursuit of Midlife Honey by Roger Morgan-Grenville
- You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy
- Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
- A Promised Land by Barack Obama
- The Ministry of Bodies: Life and Death in a Modern Hospital by Seamus O’Mahony
- How We Met: A Memoir of Love and Other by Huma Qureshi
- My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
- UnPresidented: Politics, Pandemics and the Race that Trumped All Others by Jon Sopel
- Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
- Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic
- Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London between the Wars by Francesca Wade
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- Village Christmas and Other Notes on the English Year by Laurie Lee – I looked at the few short Christmas pieces over the holidays, but didn’t realize that the rest of the book would be set in other seasons.
RETURNED UNREAD
- The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley – Requested after me; I’ll get it out another time. There’s a section in manga style!
- Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen – I knew from the first page that this wasn’t going to be a book for me. Did you love Milkman and The Glorious Heresies? If so, you’ll probably like this, too.
What appeals from my stacks?
Book Serendipity, Late 2020 into 2021
I call it Book Serendipity when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something pretty bizarre in common. Because I have so many books on the go at once (20+), I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents than some. I also list some of my occasional reading coincidences on Twitter. The following are in chronological order.
- The Orkney Islands were the setting for Close to Where the Heart Gives Out by Malcolm Alexander, which I read last year. They showed up, in one chapter or occasional mentions, in The Frayed Atlantic Edge by David Gange and The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields, plus I read a book of Christmas-themed short stories (some set on Orkney) by George Mackay Brown, the best-known Orkney author. Gavin Francis (author of Intensive Care) also does occasional work as a GP on Orkney.
- The movie Jaws is mentioned in Mr. Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe and Landfill by Tim Dee.
- The Sámi people of the far north of Norway feature in Fifty Words for Snow by Nancy Campbell and The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
- Twins appear in Mr. Wilder and Me by Jonathan Coe and Tennis Lessons by Susannah Dickey. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald mentions that she had a twin who died at birth, as does a character in Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce. A character in The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard is delivered of twins, but one is stillborn. From Wrestling the Angel by Michael King I learned that Janet Frame also had a twin who died in utero.
- Fennel seeds are baked into bread in The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and The Strays of Paris by Jane Smiley. Later, “fennel rolls” (but I don’t know if that’s the seed or the vegetable) are served in Monogamy by Sue Miller.
- A mistress can’t attend her lover’s funeral in Here Is the Beehive by Sarah Crossan and Tennis Lessons by Susannah Dickey.
- A sudden storm drowns fishermen in a tale from Christmas Stories by George Mackay Brown and The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
Silver Spring, Maryland (where I lived until age 9) is mentioned in one story from To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss and is also where Peggy Seeger grew up, as recounted in her memoir First Time Ever. Then it got briefly mentioned, as the site of the Institute of Behavioral Research, in Livewired by David Eagleman.
- Lamb is served with beans at a dinner party in Monogamy by Sue Miller and Larry’s Party by Carol Shields.
- Trips to Madagascar in Landfill by Tim Dee and Lightning Flowers by Katherine E. Standefer.
Hospital volunteering in My Year with Eleanor by Noelle Hancock and Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession.
- A Ronan is the subject of Emily Rapp’s memoir The Still Point of the Turning World and the author of Leonard and Hungry Paul (Hession).
- The Magic Mountain (by Thomas Mann) is discussed in Scattered Limbs by Iain Bamforth, The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp, and Snow by Marcus Sedgwick.
- Frankenstein is mentioned in The Biographer’s Tale by A.S. Byatt, The Still Point of the Turning World by Emily Rapp, and Snow by Marcus Sedgwick.
- Rheumatic fever and missing school to avoid heart strain in Foreign Correspondence by Geraldine Brooks and Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller. Janet Frame also had rheumatic fever as a child, as I discovered in her biography.
- Reading two novels whose titles come from The Tempest quotes at the same time: Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame and This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson.
- A character in Embers by Sándor Márai is nicknamed Nini, which was also Janet Frame’s nickname in childhood (per Wrestling the Angel by Michael King).
- A character loses their teeth and has them replaced by dentures in America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo and The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Also, the latest cover trend I’ve noticed: layers of monochrome upturned faces. Several examples from this year and last. Abstract faces in general seem to be a thing.