Mr Magpie

This month’s piece is something of an improvisation, as by a small miracle I managed to sell the piece I had intended to use to fulfill my obligation here. Forgive me.

My mother likes to tell an anecdote about how one summer, when I was in elementary school, we were obliged to keep a list of all the books we read to be brought in for review in the fall. When I handed mine in, my teacher is alleged to have said something like “we only meant the books you read this summer, not every book you’ve ever read in your life” and I to have replied, honestly, “but I did read all of these this summer”. I can’t personally recall this-I was about eight years old-but it’s probably true.

I’ve been thinking about this story recently. Partly because I moved back in with my parents this summer, so I’ve heard it recently, and partly because one of the great perks of moving back in with said parents (so as to evade gainful employment) is that I’ve had much more time to read than usual. I’ve even had some left over with which to navel gaze, and so to devote to thinking about reading, when I’m not reading (or reading about reading, which I have also been doing). This has probably been the most prolific reading summer of my life thus far, and as reading has always been a significant component of my life that feels, somehow, correspondingly significant. But why? I mean, why am I reading so much, and why should anybody care?

The latter has an easy answer, which is that I have no idea, and the former several more difficult and interesting ones. 

Partly I’ve been reading a lot because I enjoy it. This is the best reason, but too easy.

Partly I’ve been reading a lot because I’ve been writing a lot, and the more you want to write, I think, the more you need to read. Grist for the mill and a means of studying craft, yes, but also insurance against pointless attempts at reinventing the wheel and a reprieve from my own awful, pretentious, dull writing (don’t we all think like that, sometimes?). 

Partly I’ve been reading a lot because I’m considering getting a job (the horror) teaching in the next year or two, and have realized by sniffing around at a few sample syllabi that I am horribly unqualified to teach anyone anything about English literature or writing. I have not lived up to my eight-year-old self’s promise (who has?); I haven’t read half of what I should have and it’s a miracle I’ve made it this far in life, really. I’m reminded of the time I was ‘encouraged’ to apply for a place at Cambridge and realized on looking at the application’s list of recommended reading that I was, by its standards, a complete ignoramus without a snowball’s chance of getting in (I didn’t). My ignorance as a student hasn’t hurt anyone but myself, but to be so ignorant as a teacher would, I feel, do a great disservice to the next generation (who are already being done a great disservice by everyone and everything else). The least I can do, I figure, is actually know what a present participle is (I don’t) or what the hell happens in Jane Eyre (I can’t remember for the life of me and, with all due respect, I don’t really want to read it again to find out).

And partly I’ve been reading a lot because, apart from going to the boxing gym and the grocery store, my life is, at the moment, essentially a great big yawning void. I’m in a very static place, physically, and a very static place in life, too. In between acts. What comes next will either be very uncertain or very dull, and time is weighing heavily on my hands. You can’t fill every second of every day with writing, or at least I can’t, because I’d go fully mad, and so reading is a way of passing the time (and a way of being, as we are all mandated to be at all times, these days, ‘productive’). A simple equation: x number of pages = x layers of insulation against boredom and conscious, regretful awareness of the years of my youth slipping away as I read (sorry, backing away from the edge now).

Anyway.

Accordingly, (and appropriately) because I’m a bit pressed for time between quite a few different writing projects at the moment, I figured I’d offer my summer reading list so far, from two months spent at home over what will likely be my last such unemployed and uneventful summer, with a few notes (which I tried to keep concise) included about each one. The books are listed in the order in which I finished them. 

Before I launch into it, a few thoughts I had whilst looking over the list:

Over these last six months or so I’ve been experimenting with reading more or less only around/for specific personal projects I’m actively working on. I figured this might be a way of focusing and structuring my reading, work, and thought, and a means of creating for myself a semi-coherent, web-like image of whatever genres, styles, or themes are of interest to me at a given moment. This is certainly much more efficient than my previous scattershot approach, which for a while had me reading exclusively what I could scrounge from those Free Little Library boxes like a stray dog digging through a back garden for a bone. This new strategy seems to be working, I’ve enjoyed it a lot, and I plan to carry on with it. Unfortunately, it does seem to lead to me buying a shit-load of books on Thriftbooks which I’m very sure, at the time, I will read, many of which then sit sad and unopened on the shelf which I have needed to repurpose solely to house them. Oh well, at least they have each other for company.

Secondly, the two writers I’ve spent the most time with this summer are Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf. They could well be framed as diametrical opposites, stylistically speaking, but they were, as people, quite alike in their utter obsession with reading and the foundational importance of the consumption, digestion, and recontextualization of existing literature in their work process. 

Besides teaching both of them to write (Woolf was educated via a mishmash of homeschooling, private tutoring, and self-education; McCarthy attended university sporadically but did not graduate and partially self-educated by reading extensively during his time in the Air Force), reading fulfilled unique functions in their respective lives: for Woolf, reading was a matter of economic necessity-for much of her life she made her living largely from her prolific output of criticism, published in literary supplements and weeklies, as only in her mid-late career did her novels begin to sell enough to support her-and for McCarthy (who never wrote literary criticism at all), who used ideas, images, and phrases nicked (sometimes verbatim) from any number of the tomes in his extremely wide-ranging library (about which a film is being produced) as material for his books. 

I’ve also noted the importance of re-reading, at least for myself. I have a fairly weak memory (hence my inability to remember the spreadsheet story) and so rely heavily on having my physical books, with their pen-defaced margins, on hand. I read a lot of the books on this list before I had any artistic conscience to speak of, and before I was really writing, and so returning to them has felt a bit like a satisfying strain of déjà vu, or encountering a missed-connection on the street and it actually being the right time this time. Lately I’ve started to realize what the core themes, images, and concepts of my own work are, and consequently to see them in the work of others. Some of them were no doubt nurtured by my early reading, and so returning to some of these books is a bit like recalling an old teacher whom one remembers as having been extremely important to one’s development as a person but not exactly how.

To wrap this thing up, two quotes on reading:

Virginia Woolf (from her essay “How Should One Read a Book?”):
“It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.”

Cormac McCarthy (asked in a very early interview for practical advice for starting writers):
“Read.”

The List:

1. The Road – Cormac McCarthy
   • I must have read this about five times by now, and this time I really appreciated the asceticism of the style and language here. Only what is absolutely necessary is included. The prose seems so simple, but I don’t think it’s really possible to write like this without spending a lifetime whittling away all of the unnecessary verbiage from one’s style. I wouldn’t want everyone to write like this, but there is something undeniable about it. Musical equivalents might be Arvo Pärt, or Bach (?).
2. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
   • I have also read this a few times now and I was struck, as I often am, by the sense that American history is just a grim loop (although nowadays it seems more like a spiral). This book is the most packed of all of McCarthy’s work with allusion to other texts, which brings me to:
3. Books Are Made Out Of Other Books – Terry Crews
   • A fascinating excavation of literary reference, allusion, and theft in McCarthy’s books. Another re-read, I was gifted this book when I was about seventeen and found it way too dense. It isn’t; a must-read for anyone interested in McCarthy or literary/artistic reference generally.
4. Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
   • My third time reading this and I have loved it every time. This is not McCarthy’s most important book but I think it might be his best. Just a joy to read and funny as hell.
5. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition – Geoff Dyer
   • I knew from the introduction that this book would change my life. I did not know, before I discovered Dyer by chance in a journalism class, that writing like this-an odd blend of memoir, fiction, criticism, and journalism-existed, and knowing that has changed everything for me. Many of these short pieces are also very funny, which adds to the joy.
6. The Last Days of Roger Federer – Geoff Dyer
   • The concept behind this is a fun one. Drags a little in places but delightful anyway.
7. Love Is A Mixtape – Rob Sheffield
   • Not exactly the most poetic prose of all time but that’s not the point. The story is crushing and lovingly told and did in fact make me cry, which few books have.
8. On Being An Angel – Francesca Woodman
   • What an artist. Her photographs are so tightly executed. Anyone can capture reality in its rawest form with a camera; that is not necessarily very interesting. Woodman was reshaping the world in her vision. I don’t have the technical vocabulary to explain the how of her photography’s power but it really stays with you.
9. To the River – Olivia Laing
   • Not nearly as good as The Lonely City, which is one of my most cherished books, but her history writing here is excellent and I love this book’s concept.
10. Stella Maris – Cormac McCarthy
    • An book-length dialogue between a psychologist and his patient is quite the formal challenge and on re-reading I think he pretty much pulls it off here. I do feel, though, that his so-called ‘novel-play’ The Sunset Limited pulls off a similar form more effectively. This book occasionally falls prey to McCarthy’s tendency to ventriloquize his characters with this particular Old-Testament-Prophet voice of his which, given the intimacy of the setting and that the character of Alicia is supposed to be twenty years old, is a little… odd. Basically this is an esoteric dialogue about quantum mechanics, math, mental illness, and music, and it’s pretty good for all that.
11. Beautiful World, Where Are You? – Sally Rooney
    • I re-read this after a conversation about contemporary fiction with a former teacher, who said she absolutely cannot stand Sally Rooney. I had liked Normal People and Intermezzo so was curious to revisit her work after a few years to see if it holds up. Beautiful World is, I think, probably her worst book, and it’s those bloody email segments that does it. These awkward puddle-deep waffly self-pitying navel gazing lacking self-awareness intrusions are just… not good. If Alice’s emails are in any significant way reflective of Rooney’s own opinions and thoughts about the world, uh oh. Also, her treatment of the character of Felix gets really close to exposing her class politics as somewhat performative and patronizing. While she clearly has a knack for dialogue and capturing the emotional stuntedness of the young generation(s) of which I am a part, I’m not sure her books-or at least not this one-are going to last. 
12. The Waves – Virginia Woolf
    • My second time reading this, and while I still feel I’ll need to re-read it a few more times to properly digest it, I think I can safely say that this is one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time.
13. The Joyous Science – Friedrich Nietzsche
    • I don’t think I understood almost any of this when I read it for the first time about five years ago. Glad to be a bit more informed now. The formal freedom of this book is really inspiring, as he jumps between essays, aphorisms, and poetry without giving a damn. Some of his ideas here are life-changing, but good god did he have awful views on women.
14. Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzsche
    • Ditto^. You have to love his humor – the “Ass Festival” portion is really something else. I was quite moved by his ability to face the dread idea of eternal recurrence and flip it into a cause for infinite joy and exultation.
15. Letters Home – Sylvia Plath
    • This clearly tells a very particular, manicured side of Plath’s story-these letters were almost all written to her mother-but still offers an interesting window into her life. It’s exciting to follow her career as it blooms from innocuous stories in lady’s magazines into what we know her for today. Ah, I almost forgot – fuck Ted Hughes.
16. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
    • Plath considered this book a pot boiler, but is it ever a hell of a pot boiler. I enjoyed it a lot on re-reading and would take this over The Catcher in the Rye any day.
17. Negative Space – Lilly Dancyger
    • A beautiful memoir about finding and creating and loving a departed parent through art. Her writing is really good and her story is unique and more people should read this.
18. On Boxing – Joyce Carol Oates
    • I read this just as I was getting seriously stuck in to training for boxing and thought the first essay in particular was brilliant. The other two are in some ways slightly redundant, as they offer up a few of the same insights (due to separate publication and subsequent collation, I assume). Like Sontag’s On Photography, Oates extends boxing into the space of ideas and takes it quite a bit further than most people who are just interested in boxing as boxing would probably find reasonable, and she does sometimes verge into conjecture, but on the whole her insights are fascinating. There’s some great and pithy political critique of boxing and class here which holds today.
19. The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon – Daniel Farson
    • An interesting approach to biography: to write based largely on one’s personal experience of the person and to let that shape the story. Leaves certain gaps but also lends a lot of humor and emotional force: the last two chapters were quite touching. As a friend and person Bacon was, in certain ways, a real piece of shit, but he could also be extremely generous and supportive. Farson writes, “I doubt if he was the greatest man I’ve ever known, but he was the most extraordinary.”
20. In Our Time – Ernest Hemingway
    • The form-short stories interspersed with vaguely related vignettes-is a strange one and not, I thought, entirely successful, but some of the stories are great and some of the vignettes are just brutal.
21. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
    • Beautiful, brilliant, perfect?
22. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
    • Not my favorite Woolf but still conceptually/poetically sublime. I tried to read this at sixteen and couldn’t make it through and I understand why, but it is nonetheless beautiful and deserving of its acclaim.
23. Moments of Being – Virginia Woolf
    • Fascinating to see that a solid chunk of the material of her novels was taken straight from her (mostly early) life. Many characters, especially those of her later novels, are pretty much tweaked portraits of people she knew. Certain memories, too: the opening memory in The Waves, for instance. You can see how certain of her recurring images fomented in childhood and developed over time. Not her best writing, and the three Memoir Club bits were a little too Bloomsbury-core for me to fully invest in, but interesting nonetheless.
24. A Writer’s Diary – Virginia Woolf
    • A great insight into her singular mind and her writing, and reading, routines, as well as a slice of her everyday life. 
25. Micro-Fiction (ed. Jerome Stern)
    • A quirky collection of stories of 300 words or less. Most were good, but unsatisfying. This hyper-compressed length seems to create a compulsion to manufacture humor. Three stories stood out: “The Poet’s Husband” by Molly Giles and “Waiting” by Peggy McNally-which were both, incidentally, single long sentences and succeeded, I thought, because they created a strong poetic image and then left the ‘story’ to the reader’s imagination-and “But What Was Her Name?” By Dawn Raffel, which took the opposite approach and spanned an entire lifetime. Interestingly, Molly Giles is now eighty-four years of age, won the Pushcart Prize just four years ago, and has had a long career in writing and teaching; Dawn Raffel is a widely published author of several books; Peggy McNally seems to have vanished without a trace.
26. Short Shorts (ed. Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe)
    • A more straight-laced collection of shorter short stories. I find their average length (~1,500 words) or maybe a bit longer to be just about right. My favorite stories from this collection were: Leo Tolstoy – “Alyosha the Pot”; João Guimarães Rosa – “The Third Bank of the River”; James Joyce – “Eveline” (of course); Ernest Hemingway – “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (of course); Yukio Mishima – “Swaddling Clothes”; Gabriel García Márquez – “Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers”; and Augusto Monterroso – “The Eclipse”. Grace Paley’s “Wants” was a strong honorable mention. James Thurber’s “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” was easily the worst.

(This is running too long but since I wrote this piece I have finished several other books and will include them here for the sake of satisfying my compulsive completionism. Again, forgive me.)

1. Foster – Claire Keegan
   • Impeccable writing.
2. The Morning Watch – James Agee
   • Surprisingly good and a great implicit critique of the effects of organized religion’s thought-policing on a young, impressionable mind.
3. Jacob’s Room – Virginia Woolf
   • The formal conceit is fascinating and does not, in my opinion, hold together.
4. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf – Edward Albee
   • Great play. Funny and horrifying in equal measure.
5. The Stonemason – Cormac McCarthy
   • Not a great play but some of the ideas contained within it will stick with me forever. Features some of his most believable and human characters.
6. The Fables of Aesop
   • The appended morals are the most interesting part. Sometimes they seem almost unrelated, sometimes they propose an alternate interpretation which throws the fable itself into deep moral ambiguity, like a weird volta. Very interesting.
7. The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
   • Currently reading and loving. A wonderful reminder that art can also be, you know, funny, and still ‘serious’ and moving and all the other things it’s supposed to be.