Three and Seven

Readers,

I like the idea of describing a life through books read and unread. So, apropos of nothing but my own musings (read: self-indulgence?), here are three times books failed me and seven times they didn’t, in no particular order.

(1) First Grade - Readers, this may (not) surprise you, but when I enter school for the first time I am not an instantly popular child. In fact, my own mother has gone so far as to call me ‘a huge nerd’. But in first grade, I don’t yet need friends. I have “My Side of the Mountain” by Jean George and it seems that, like Sam Gribley, the only friend I’ll ever need is a peregrine falcon that I have raised from a chick into a fierce-but-loyal bird of prey. Unfortunately, I cannot find any falcon chicks.

(2) College - A child of two countries, I am American and not. In my first year of college I feel the “not” strongly. It is clear to all - in my not understanding how mundane squirrels are, in my ambivalence about Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, in my saying rubbish bin not garbage can, in my routinely failing to grasp the complexities of the social situations in which I find myself. I am at sea in a giant country whose history is infinitely nuanced. I read “The Fire Next Time” by James Baldwin and begin to understand what it is to be an American. 

(3 - a failure) The Golf Course - I find myself, during my second semester of college, homesick. I read everything I can that is set in New Zealand. I read and read. But none of it satisfies. Succumbing to my melodramatic instincts, I go sit alone on the golf course at school to feel less claustrophobic. I realize there are no words that will make me feel like I am on my farm, looking at the mountain, feeling the northwest wind on my face. 

(4) Nashville - For the first time in my life I am quite lonely. I know no one except my three newly-met roommates. I am sweaty all the time. It is unclear why I am there, doing an internship I barely researched before writing my application. But, during my bus rides to and from work, I read all of Jane Austen’s novels, one after another. I laugh out loud in the stifling bus. I am either hysterical, or, maybe, I am finally understanding Austen. I move on to Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch. In that strange Southern city, I take joy in a world even stranger than my own. 

(5) College Again - I have gotten myself philosophically muddled. In part, this is symptomatic of taking myself much too seriously, and, in part, it is a genuine crisis of faith. Two back-to-back seminars on American pragmatism and social justice theory have taken me apart at the seams. I read “The Will to Believe” by William James and start to piece myself together again. 

(6) Backseat of an Uber - I discover early in my professional career that what limited interest I have in “chatting” must be wholly dedicated to the demands of my job. I discover shortly thereafter that there is no greater source of salvation, upon settling into the backseat of an Uber, than an open book in my hand and headphones in my ears. Try chatting to that girl, I dare you. 

(7 - a failure) Christmas - Finally, when I am much older than is reasonable, I come to terms with the knowledge that only a tiny percentage of people enjoy receiving books as gifts. This is less a failing of books than of people. Nonetheless, I am at a loss for Christmas presents.

(8) Two AM, anywhere - I read, at random, from the middle chapters of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” for the ten-thousandth time. We’ve both been here before. We both know our role. Harry, to be quietly distracting, to shut down the spinning excel figures and instant replay of every socially awkward interaction I’ve had today. Me, to pretend his valiant efforts are going to work, and I really am going to drop off to sleep any second. Harry always delivers. I rarely do.

(9) New York City - My great uncle is dying and I have come into the city to see him. I wait in his hospital room for my aunt and grandfather to arrive and decide what ought to be done. My uncle is mostly sleeping but I read aloud to him for hours, quietly, in the ICU. We are both lovers of books, and, at a loss for words, I borrow someone else’s.

(10 - a failure) Melbourne - This time, when I move apartments, I move all my books. I am tired of throwing them away. Weeding them - as I did when I left college, left the US, emptied my childhood room - is emotionally draining. My new apartment is too large. My books fail to fill it up, fail to make it homey. I finish unpacking, and head out to buy more.

Less

Readers,

I’ve moved. In fact, I’ve been moving - almost constantly - for the last 8 weeks. I’ve been darting between Melbourne and South East Asia, logging in reading time on airplanes, in airport lounges, in airport security queues, in cars to and from the airport, by hotel pools, alone in hotel restaurants, on the phone (Sister: “Are you paying attention to me?”) and, of course, in my bed, late at night, whenever Jet Lag is having its way with me. (I have also, for the record, moved apartments.) For my efforts I have taken down a treatise on why orcas are better creatures than humans (Of Orcas and Men by David Neiwert), the first two Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss (reconfirming that I lack the discipline to read fantasy with any modicum of moderation), The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (somewhat underwhelming), Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty (ditto), Past Tense by Lee Child (always excellent), and Less by Andrew Sean Greer - to name a few. It is this last novel, Less that I want to talk about today.

The premise is this: Arthur Less - our titular hero - finds himself underwhelmed with his lot in life as he nears his 50th birthday. His mediocre success as an author is paralleled by his mediocre success in relationships. At a loss for what to do, he plans a trip around the world - beginning in New York, then visiting Mexico, Italy, Germany, France, Morocco, India and Japan - in the hope that he’ll figure himself out along the way.

You may think this plot sounds a little trite. Readers, I don’t blame you. In a lot of ways, it is. There are many moments in this novel that feel obligatory - when Less has an affair with a younger man as a distraction from the loss of his lover, when Less, near-rock bottom, realizes he is something of a celebrity in Italy, when he becomes befuddled by the idiosyncrasies of daily life at a writers retreat in India. What is wonderful about this book is not the mere fact of these moments, but the way the book uses them to advance its central thesis. Less - with Andrew Sean Greer at its helm - is unfailingly self aware. Every move it makes - in sharp contrast to its main character - is made with clear eyed intention. Every step is pacing the reader toward a conclusion that unfolds so naturally we believe we have come up with it on our own.

Readers, there is a trap that almost every middle-aged bildungsroman falls into: self-indulgent melancholy. Time and again, our heroes and heroines find themselves on the downward slope of life, disappointed in their fortunes to-date. What Greer does with Less is to tee up just such a story, and just such a character (a wet-blanket of a fellow, with washed out hair and sloping shoulders), only to subvert it at every turn. What the reader comes to understand, through this carefully crafted subversion, is a small but vitally important point: The story of Arthur Less is not the story of a lost man struggling to come to terms with his failures, it is the story of a regular man realizing the joy of his rather wonderful, if unremarkable, life.

I’ve been thinking about this point a lot recently, because, like I’ve said, I’ve been on the move. In our culture, we place a lot of value on moving. We move upward, we go outside of our comfort zones, we expand our horizons, we re-invent ourselves in new cities and jobs, we move on. But in my experience, moving around a lot has mostly made me realize what I have when I’m standing still. If it took an around-the-world trip for Arthur Less to realize he had everything he needed back home, then it has taken me an 8-week stint of near constant travel to appreciate the same. I have: summer mornings walking in the botanical gardens, phone calls with father that make me laugh in the street, colleagues who will drop everything to give me advice, good coffee, great books, bourbon to drink late at night on balconies overlooking the city, larger-than-life friends, a beautiful home, even people with whom, in rare, invaluable moments of conversation, I can be truly honest. I am lucky.

Readers, I’m not a big fan of the the gratitude rhetoric that is increasingly thrown around in popular culture. I think it discourages people from being honest about how hard life can be, and, at worst, can shut down conversations on mental health. I’m not here to pretend everything is perfect. But, for me, reading Less was a much-needed reminder that despite the hard, messy parts, there’s a lot of good in my life. Or, as Greer’s narrator would put it: “What I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.”

Normal People

Readers,

Summer has come to Melbourne, or, at least, it’s been popping in and out to say hello. With the advent of Summer, comes the advent of many other great things in my life: aperol spritz at the cafe beneath my building, beach trips with new friends, tennis with old friends, sporadic run-ins with feisty churchgoers debating whether morning tea should be held on the lawn or in the hall, lying on my couch listlessly every Sunday afternoon between 5 and 6pm listening to Lady Gaga while waiting for my sun-flooded apartment to stop being unbearably hot, and, perhaps best of all: Summer Reading.

Now, Readers, Summer Reading gets a bad rap. We all know it. We’ve all been duly ashamed when our great aunt spies the baby-blue paperback in our bags and loudly remarks, “Are you enjoying that, darling? Good for you. Sally told me it was an excellent ‘beach read.’” - no doubt pronouncing “beach read” in such a way that you spend the rest of your evening referencing whatever scraps of Shakespeare you can remember, just so that no one doubts your intellectual sophistication.

Readers. This reputation is entirely undeserved. I’ve already said my piece about the virtues of fun fiction vs. serious fiction (see: The Last Mrs. Parrish). But Summer Reading is not all “fun” nor is it all “beach worthy.” No, Readers, for me, what characterises a great summer book is pace. Summer books should move slowly. They should meander, and dwell, and allow their characters to stew. They should be overthought. And yes, they should be fun and emotional and melodramatic. Sue me. We all know we want it.

It is because of these criteria, and not for any lack of literary quality (which it has in more spades than I could ever hope to accomplish), that I submit to you Sally Rooney’s Normal People as a great summer read. The premise is this: the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Connell and right-side-but-misunderstood Marianne begin a tentative friendship in their final years of high school. This connection, which begins inauspiciously, becomes the inescapable gravitational center of their lives, as Connell and Marianne move into adulthood - a fraught, beautiful relationship around which all other aspects of their lives helplessly rotate. Normal People is a love story and a coming of age story all in one.

Readers, Normal People gets a lot of things right - deep characterization, poetic prose, sharp dialogue - but the thing I want to talk about is more tonal than structural or literary: it’s the slow burn. Which is, in essence, just a paraphrase for the diligent exploration of those eternal questions that plague every love story: Will they or won’t they? They’re friends now, but will they be more? Can’t they see they’re meant for each other? Can they survive this? Can they forgive this? Can they learn to be happy?

The way Rooney gets it right is by letting the relationship burn on and on. We follow these two characters, a single relationship, over many years and many pages, dwelling upon it and un-stitching it at the seams. By the end, all is laid bare for examination and scrutiny. There are no hidden pieces, very little is skipped over, or left to imagination: this is two people coming together and then apart and then together again in excruciating, beautiful detail.

Queen Elizabeth I once said, “Playwrights teach us nothing about love. They make it pretty, they make it comical, or they make it lust, but they cannot make it true” (okay, it was actually Judy Dench who said this in Shakespeare in Love, but she was playing Queen Elizabeth at the time). I tend to agree with the Queen. But in Normal People, Sally Rooney has taken us a step closer to disproving the statement. She portrays with surefooted-accuracy the revolutions of a relationship, the tragic moments of undeniable pain, and the ecstatic joy of recognising in each other - at long last, despite bad timing, and other loves, and damn-the-consequences - whatever it is you’ve been searching for.

For me, the slow burn of Normal People reminded me of two things. (1) When you have been with your spouse or partner for a very long time, it may be easy to to forget the phenomenal good luck you’ve had, the sacrifices you’ve made, and perhaps even the trials and tribulations you have endured to find and keep that person, but it is never safe to assume that your story is over. It isn’t. (2) When you have not yet found that person, brace yourself. It won’t be easy when it comes. Which is to say, Rooney shows us that true, life-lasting love is always long and never quick. It may start fast, but it always ends slow - played out through reprieves and firestorms and hopefully long periods of contentment over the course of a lifetime.

Here is Rooney, describing the power two people can have over one another, in her clear, simple style: “She had been sad before, after the film, but now she was happy. It was in Connell’s power to make her happy. It was something he could just give, like money or sex… He was the only one who knew her like that.”

Wolf Hall, Part 1

Readers,

This week I am working my way through Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel. Wolf Hall is not the kind of book that can be read in a week, so the review will have to wait. In the interim, I decided to keep a diary - documenting all the places I have been while reading this novel. It's interesting to me where we read, and when, and how we're feeling when we do so. Reading a book like Wolf Hall is kind of like leading a double life: constantly darting between modern day Melbourne and the fractious court of Henry VIII. All this week, I kept finding myself looking up from its pages feeling disoriented and unsure about where I was supposed to be going. Readers, my life isn't that exciting, so I won't make you slog through the gritty details. Instead, here are the highlights: 

On the train to work, standing, trying to balance: coffee, book, body, bag. Failing. A few drops of my coffee spills on a man’s shoes, but he doesn’t notice. The train keeps moving, as Wolsey falls.

In my apartment, mid-migraine. All the words are blurry, but it’s better to pretend to read than occupy the pounding in my head.

Outside a Vietnamese takeaway. I still like to pick up my own food late at night. It gets me out of my apartment, onto the street. Tonight, I stand surrounded by ten or fifteen UberEats delivery men, chattering, greeting each other, helmets on. I think, that's smart of them - Who knows when you might crash? I look down as the gossipers agree: Anne Boleyn’s star is on the rise.

Before playing tennis, outside in the sunshine, waiting for my friend to arrive. I'm more worried about whether I'll be tan enough to wear a bathing suit when I go to Mexico in a few weeks, than I am about the plague running through London. But then, I know how the plague will end, and I'm not yet sure about my tan.

On my sofa, early on Sunday morning. In half an hour I'll go to my Anglican church. I'll sit next to my priest's wife and read the Bible in English. My friend Harrison and I will gossip about the quality of the morning tea. It will all be very unremarkable. The irony is not lost on me. "But do you know, Henry says [to Cromwell], I am beginning to care very little about the Pope and his permissions?" 

Late in the evening, my apartment: music playing, candles burning, windows open to the late-night noises of my neighborhood. I'm drinking my first glass of rosè in months - herald universal that summer is coming. I take a sip. Cromwell's daughters have died. One of them wanted to learn Greek, but what use is there in educating a woman? I get up and pack my bag for work. I am 1/3rd of the way through Wolf Hall. 

The Incendiaries

Readers,

Tonight, I’m sitting on my couch, looking out at the sunset, with the windows open for the first time in several months. I’m listening to music, and reflecting on a thoroughly good weekend. Let’s just say, for me: life’s pretty good right now. The weather is coming back around to Spring here in Melbourne, and so I too come back to you – your long lost book critic. I doubt you missed me, but I’ll say that I missed you. The absence of writing this blog has made me realise how much I get out of it (isn’t that what they say? Absence makes the heart grow more disciplined? Something like that).

The book I want to write about tonight is on a topic near and dear to my heart. That topic is faith and the book is The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon. The premise is this: a young man named Will starts attending an elite college in the US, having transferred there from bible college after losing his faith. He meets Phoebe, a fellow-student who is into the party scene at the school. The two quickly fall in love. At the same time, however, Phoebe is turning away from the wild lifestyle that initially attracted Will and becoming increasingly committed to a cultish Christian group led by the mysterious John Leal. Things escalate from there. And I mean it, Readers – this book is not for the faint of heart.

Readers, let’s for a moment agree that one of the central purposes of literature is to teach empathy. Further, let us agree that this purpose is achieved, in great books, by allowing the reader to walk in the footsteps of a character's life for a short (or perhaps long) period of time, such that the reader learns of the character's motivations, fears and history. In the end, if the author is successful, the reader can understand, deep in their gut, what leads that character (however different from the reader herself) to act in the way that they do. By this criteria, The Incendiaries sets itself a monumental task. After all, it’s co-narrated by a former-evangelical teenager, a young woman in the process of being drawn into a violent cult, and the cult leader himself. The book is exploring, simultaneously, the intense pain of losing faith, the exhilaration of being young and discovering a newly opened world, the desperate need for anchor in such a world, and the maniacal desire of a dangerous few to control others. Like I said, Readers, not for the faint of heart.

But despite the odds stacked against it, The Incendiaries is a beautiful book, stunningly written, and perfectly crafted. The story unfolds effortlessly for the reader, but with phenomenal literary skill acting as a guiding hand. This is a good thing – when tackling characters like this, you need someone with sure movement to be in the center of the arena. R.O. Kwon is exactly the woman for the job.

Still, it becomes clear, by the time you reach the final pages of The Incendiaries, that we cannot really understand these characters. Nor can they understand each other. Will, try as he might, cannot understand what John Leal wants, or why his girlfriend Phoebe is abandoning her life for a faith she professes not to have. He cannot even understand his former self, the faithful child that he was just a few months ago. These characters’ emotional worlds, however much they are laid bare for us as readers, are not really accessible. Their motivations, however internally clear, are opaque to those who care about them.

This, I believe, is the great thesis sitting behind The Incendiaries: faith is, by its very definition, incomprehensible. Its irrationality makes it impossible to explain to another person, and sometimes even to ourselves. To the outsider, it is fundamentally untenable as a motivating force. I think this is why religious and non-religious people have so much trouble communicating with one another. For a person without faith, the idea of having it is literally inconceivable. On the flip side, people of faith, while they may remember a time in which they did not have belief or in which they actively chose faith, can often come to feel that their faith is irrevocable – something gifted or sprung upon them. For such people, faith is no more a choice than choosing a gender or race. It simply is.

In The Incendiaries these ideas are taken to their most extreme – the example of a cult mentality exacerbates and mutates the irrationality of faith, turning it into something we should NOT be able to rationalize. Will, who has lost his faith but misses it desperately, gives us a potent example of someone well placed to try to understand what is happening to his girlfriend. Yet even he fails, and then tries again, and fails again – each time worse than the last. We are like Will (albeit less motivated). We are trying too, to learn empathy, to understand faith, but we’re failing. Without that core of believe, there is no doorway in.

Does this mean that religious and non-religious people should just give up talking to one another? Certainly not. If anything, they need to talk more. Ignorance and separation won't fix the divide. But The Incendiaries teaches us that we need to be very patient in these conversations. We have to understand that there is a fundamental difference between the two parties. Those who have leapt over the chasm of faith are not the same as those who remain on the other side.

Readers, if we’re going to start having these conversations, and having them properly, then The Incendiaries is a good place to start. Here is Will, on his own persistence, as told by R O Kwon, with her gorgeous prose and uniquely sympathetic voice: “I kept asking questions; I’d knock until they let me in. This has been the cardinal fiction of my life, its ruling principle: if I work hard enough, I’ll get what I want.”

The Girl and The Wife

Readers, 

I'll come clean right off the bat - this is not a real book title. I made it up. But let's just imagine, for a moment, that The Girl and The Wife is a real novel. The premise might go something like this: a single, independent, slightly edgy, grown woman (aka THE GIRL) and a well-educated, fully formed, albeit slightly depressed, and somewhat bored, married woman (aka THE WIFE) meet and strike up a friendship. THE GIRL is conniving. THE WIFE, a new mother, is hopelessly frustrated while staying home with her newly born son. There is A MAN that either THE GIRL or THE WIFE, or most likely both, desire. Drama ensures. 

Readers, most people who like books will tell you that a title is not all that important. For the most part, I think that's true. Titles rarely change my enjoyment of a book, although a great title (The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury) might enhance a good book and will almost certainly improve my chances of picking it up in the first place. But, here's the thing: the humble title's relative lack of importance within the context of a single work is not indicative of its absolute responsibility within the cannon of literature, to which it represents (for any idle passerby), the whole of what is contained beneath its banner.

Titles matter in the context of popular and literary culture because they are the most public representative of their story.  What a title says about its own story will shape that narrative and people's perception of it, perhaps subtly, but nonetheless, undeniably.

All of which is to say - if The Girl and The Wife were a real book, I would not read it. We have to stop referring to grown, independent, fully formed female characters as "Girls," or as side-kicks to their more interesting husbands. In isolation, a title that uses these words to refer to female characters isn't that damaging. But I think we're past that point. It's not a good enough excuse anymore. Popular literature is in the midst of an epidemic, with no end in sight. 

Don't believe me? How about: Gone Girl, Girl on a Train, Pretty Girls, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Windup Girl, The Girl Before, The Good Girl, The Silent Wife, The Zookeeper's Wife, The Time Traveller's Wife, The Pearler's Wife, The Astronauts Wife, The Birdman's Wife, The Wife Between Us. And that's just off the top of my head. 

When we, as a popular and literary culture, not only accept books with these titles, but revel in them, we are allowing women to be repeatedly infantilized or referred to in a way that suggests they are only interesting literary subjects because of their proximity to more interesting men. I cannot stand for that. When books like this become overnight bestsellers, we tell the publishing industry that we like this way of talking about women, that we're okay with this way of describing female characters. I don't like it. I'm not okay with it.

Readers, I know a few of you are going to read this and think "She's taking this awfully seriously" or "But I really liked The Girl on the Train!" or "I thought this was supposed to be a review." To that I say: maybe I am; I liked it too; and, fair enough. But let me ask you this - why can't it be The Woman on the Train. Is it just because it doesn't sound right? Doesn't sound as fun? And if not, then why not? What does that say about us, as readers? The runaway success of certain titles has been used by the publishing industry to justify a trend which has now overtaken every airport bookstore and Amazon eBook bestseller list. 

So, I won't be reading any books that refer to adult women as girls or wives. Words matter. In popular culture - where they turn into Hollywood movie titles or are consumed by highschoolers - they matter especially. These are easy words to get right. So I say we give it a shot. 

The Last Mrs. Parrish

Readers, 

Hiatus from blogging for the last 3 weeks for no reason whatsoever. Wish I had a good reason, but I don't. In the meantime, a few things have happened: I've had a bucketload of fun consuming a truckload of down-market thrillers, the football (or as I say, Soccer) world cup has begun, and America got another year older. This last event was cause for an ex-patriot held celebration of epic proportions in Melbourne this weekend, lasting a total of eleven hours and ending with a large group of disheveled foreigners, debriefing over waffles at one of Melbourne's many hipster cafes. The party was an ode to many of the great things America is known for: cowboy hats (worn by a Swede and a Finn), Bud Light (sourced through thorough email communication with local liquor store owners), beer pong (consistently lost by me), and, above all else: enthusiastic, chaotic, revelry. 

Which brings me to this weeks' book: The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine. The premise is this: a young woman and the socialite wife of a wealthy businessman begin an intense friendship in one of New York's most expensive suburbs. They dine out, attend galas, go yachting, drink cocktails, and, in general, have good, clean, American fun. Both women, however, are engaged in an elaborate fraud. The young woman, Amber, is out to steal the socialite's husband for her own - thereby realizing her American dream. And Daphne, the socialite - well, I won't ruin it all for you. Suffice it to say, "Drama ensues."

If this all sounds a bit silly to you, well, it's because it is. The Last Mrs. Parrish is probably technically a crime novel, but what it is most of all, is a fun little romp through the world of terrible people doing terrible things to one another. And not a very well written one at that. 

Despite all this, readers, I think books like The Last Mrs. Parrish are worth reading, thinking and writing about. Not because they're good literature (they're not), not because they're important (they aren't), and not because they will make you view the world in a different way (they won't). The reason The Last Mrs. Parrish is worth reading, in my view, is because it's popular. It's fiction-for-fun. It's reading-for-relaxation. It's page-turners-for-pay. (Okay, I'm done). 

A lot of people tell me that they don't like to read very much, so they try to only read "good books." When I ask them what they mean by that, they will almost always tell me about some rather dry non-fiction they've just consumed, or a seven-hundred-page classic that they've been working on for the last six years' worth of airplane rides. That's all good and well, and if you truly don't like reading, then it's probably a good strategy. But I worry that a whole lot of people who "don't like reading" have actually just never allowed themselves to read a fun book. They've convinced themselves (probably in line with what we were taught in elementary school) that reading is some sort of morally positive activity, as opposed to, say, watching television, or playing video games. For this reason, people think that fun books are somehow "cheating" or "not really reading."

Readers, I don't have very many good opinions, but I'll offer you this in any case: reading is no better than watching TV. You can watch a documentary, or you can watch Real Housewives. You can read Middlemarch, or you can read The Last Mrs. Parrish. But books, and reading, are a unique way to experience story telling - and a powerful way at that. And it's a shame to miss out on that experience because you're taking it more seriously than you need to. You shouldn't need to prove anything when you open a book. In fact, that's pretty much against the point. You're there to step into a different world. I don't care how silly or realistic or fantastic that world may be. It's your book. And if the world you want to experience is that of the elite Hampton beach bunnies - then go for it. 

So I'm not going to write an elaborate review of The Last Mrs. Parrish today. Instead, I'll say this: if you haven't read a book for a while, or if you've gotten bogged down in the latest from Malcolm Gladwell (given to you, no doubt, by your well-intentioned father-in-law three Christmases ago) then do me a favor: go get your self a fun book, sit down on the couch, and treat yourself. See if you can have fun reading. See if it stops feeling like a chore. 

Do you need some recommendations? No problem. I'm here for you. Try: Gone Girl, The Da Vinci Code, The Diary of a Bookseller, The English Spy, The Husband's Secret, Orphan X, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, The Hunger Games, Wild, The City and the City, The Girl on the Train. Go on. Live a little. I promise not to tell. 

Readers, you might be thinking - why are you telling us to read if you really don't think it's any better (morally speaking) than watching TV or going to the movies? It's a good question. Thank you for asking. The reason is this: it's good for you. Not better for you, just good for you. I think it's good for all of us to experience the world through books. When we read, we are all alone and yet we can get closer to other people than any other form of story telling available to us. We enter worlds by ourselves, but then we get to see inside a character's head in a way that no other medium can offer - sustained, personal contact with another's thoughts. In this way, we are forced to confront and react to other people's lives without the pressure of doing so while being watched by others - the way we are in a cinema, or even on our living room sofas with our spouses or roommates. It's a special kind of communication.

So go pick up a book. Step into another world. Have some fun. And if that world just so happens to be the world portrayed by The Last Mrs. Parrish - then so be it. It's a gateway book. And, after all, who am I to judge? 

A Higher Loyalty

Readers, 

This morning I gave myself a little gift: I watched the first episode of Season 2 of the Netflix series Queer Eye. This show fills me joy, and sometimes even stronger emotions. For example, forty five minutes and two cups of coffee into Season 2, I was sitting on my sofa, weeping like a baby, while I watched five gay men and the congregation of a church in the rural south embrace each other. I'm not joking, I was: Weeping. Like. A. Baby. 

Now, I know you're all waiting for the dazzling segue way here: what do the heartwarming LGBTQ-powered makeover show, Queer Eye, and the autobiography of former FBI director James Comey, A Higher Loyalty, have to do with each other? Well, here's my answer: they both gave me hope.

Readers, this is not an easy time to be an American. Living abroad, as I do now, it's hard to express to the people around me the feeling of dread that I experience when I watch the news. I think many Americans have begun to live in this state of fear. I'm afraid that the country I love and believe in, the country I am deeply loyal to, is being torn apart. I'm afraid that the goodness at the core of the American philosophy is eroding, that we the people have failed each other in some fundamental way. It's like seeing a friend slowly succumb to alcoholism. 

James Comey's autobiography, A Higher Loyalty, chronicles his experience watching this first hand. We all know how this story ends: with Jim Comey, scandal-beset and stranded in LA, receiving the news that he has just been fired from the FBI by President Trump via a news broadcast. But where does that story start? How did he get there? What decisions did he make along the way? 

I came into this book with an open mind. Like many, I was skeptical about the handling of the Clinton emails, but I was also sympathetic to Comey based on how he had been treated by the current administration. I thought he seemed like an OK guy whenever I saw him on TV. Now, you could say that I'm naive, or partisan, or easily persuaded, and that may all be true. But it doesn't change this fact: reading A Higher Loyalty has me absolutely convinced that James Comey is more than an OK guy. As he guides you through his years fighting the Mafia, untangling the web of NSA surveillance and government-sponsored enhanced interrogation, there is a single through-line. For better or worse, Jim Comey shows us an example of what it means to live a principle-driven life. 

Readers, America is a nation founded on principles. It has not always lived up to those principles, but nonetheless it is a country whose inception was based around a creed, a set of truths, held to be self-evident by all those who call themselves American. A Higher Loyalty explores what it means to live your life according to a creed. To dedicate yourself to the service of your principles, come hell or high water. I respect and admire that, even if I don't always like the outcomes. It's so easy to live without rules, to skate by without ever really having to think about what it is you stand for, and who you take yourself to be. Because of this, it's easy to make decisions selfishly, and justify the principles retrospectively. Reading A Higher Loyalty gave me two things: (1) hope that there are principled people in government, and that they are fighting the good fight, and (2) a reminder that principles are important, thinking about them, living them, sacrificing for them. 

But what about Queer Eye? Good question readers. Here's the thing about principles, they only exist in the abstract. You need people and situations to give them meeting. Like, for example, putting five gay men in the heart of bible-belt, rural south, a territory notorious for rendering great wrongs against the queer community. Switching the setting of Queer Eye to communities around Atlanta for the reboot of the program has fundamentally altered the program. When all the hair and remodeling is set aside, the show, for brief moments, becomes a powerful vehicle driving forward the process of reconciliation. In these moments the people on the show set aside long-held principles in favor of relationships. And it's messy: you can see the anger on Bobby's face put there by the mere thought of the church, you can see Antoni burst into tears as a woman recites Psalm 139. These are hurts that run deep. And so they should. But maybe they can also be healed. So Queer Eye gives me hope for America in a different way: it makes me hope that we the people might be able to listen to each other, and figure out a path to reconciliation. 

James Comey is no wizard of prose, but his simple, straightforward style is imposing and at time gestures to the grand. Here he is, hitting home his central theme, "Policies come and go. Supreme Court justices come and go. But the core of our nation is our commitment to a set of shared values that began with George Washington - to restraint and integrity and balance and transparency and truth." 

Orphan X

Readers, 

This week was my assigned week to provide morning tea for the the fine attendees of the 10am service at my church. This may seem like no small feat to you - if so, the illusion of effortless grace is working. In reality, the whole event involved no less than three phone calls (early strategy alignment, game plan, and debrief) with the delightful organizer of the program, the laying out of fine china cups and saucers, as well as several misunderstandings with parishioners who wanted to pour their own tea (this is NOT done). I was supposed to spend Saturday baking banana bread for this affair, but in then end I hurriedly bought tea cakes en route to church, disheveled and already aware of my domestic failure. 

Here's what happened - yesterday morning I woke up and moved the seven feet from my bed to my couch. So far so good. Then, I picked up Orphan X by Gregg Hurwitz. The rest is history. By the time a group of friends showed up at my door to down several bowls of soup and several more bottles of wine at seven pm, two things had happened: (1) I had played a shocking game of tennis in the freezing cold, and (2) I finished Orphan X.

The premise is this: Evan Smoak is a disaffected, former member of a US government program that trained and deployed orphans as assassins. Years after leaving the program, Smoak has turned vigilante, helping desperate people throughout LA (I leave for another time the question of whether all citizens of LA ought to be considered desperate) to avoid terrible situations. As is so often the case, Evan's past is about to catch up with him, but in the meantime he's also got a steady flirtation going on with his downstairs neighbor, a love of extremely expensive vodka, a pesky HOA leader to waylay him in the elevator and a penchant to play into the "boys and their toys" stereotype. 

Let me say this. If you love Jack Reacher or Gabriel Allon, you will love Evan Smoak. With Orphan X, Greg Hurwitz has delivered a near perfect thriller. The motivating crime is medium-stakes - enough to keep the pages turning, but small enough to be believable.

Books like this, for me, enable a particular kind of escapism. Surrounded by my (admittedly delightful) friends, drinking cheap wine, and eating homemade soup, it's hard for me to explain why I like the idea of a friendless vigilante, drinking hundred-dollar martinis while watching grainy surveillance footage in the dead of night. But I do. For me, it's not just the excitement, or the sexiness of the lifestyle: it's the sense of purpose. Characters like Smoak only make sense to readers because we understand the single-mindedness of their motivations. They don't have families or friends or real jobs because all that would be a distraction. They live for the hunt, for the pursuit of justice. It's all very uncomplicated, and I'm sure it's very lonely. But there's something deeply appealing about that simplicity of Smoak's purpose.

Readers, let me say it this way: Evan Smoak has found his vocation. He helps the helpless (the vodka is just a perk) by killing bad guys. I haven't found my vocation yet. I hope, though, that one day I do - although I equally hope mine involves fewer bullet wounds. 

Orphan X was gifted to me by my friend Caroline. Caroline was at dinner last night, and we spent so much of the evening discussing the book that one of our friends picked it up off my coffee table and started reading it then and there.  That was absolutely the right decision. So, readers, if you've got a rainy Saturday, or just need an excuse not to bake banana bread, here's my advice: Go out and get Orphan X. Clear your schedule. Enjoy. 

Here's a snippet from the sequel, Nowhere Man (yes, I already started it), which gives you a perfect sense of the drama and pace of Hurwitz' prose: "an older man with a cane and a fresh limp finds her sobbing in the bathroom of a 7-Eleven...He gives her a phone number: 1-855-2-NOWHERE. A magical fix-it line.
She dials.
Evan Smoak picks up.
"Do you need my help?" he asks.
That's how it works." 

Home Fire

Readers, 

This week I was the grateful recipient of two novels. One was an excellent, semi-erotic set of short stories gifted to me by their author, who also happens to be a friend of mine. (How ought one respond when gifted semi-erotic short stories? Please get back to me with thoughts.) The other was Home Fires by Kamila Shamsie, which was given to me by a colleague and friend whose opinion on literature I trust implicitly - for no other reason than that, when I first met her, she was lugging all 700 pages of Wolf Hall to one of our client sites on the off chance that she'd find five spare minutes in our otherwise hectic workdays to eat through another 0.5% of that beast. (How's that for a run-on sentence?) Turns out, my trust in her was well founded. 

The premise of Home Fires is this: two Muslim families living in Britain undergo a mini-diaspora - an eldest daughter leaves for her education, the favored son absconds to America while a media storm blows over, two younger siblings grow apart from one another, finding new friends, places, and pockets of society to inhabit. In the course of this diaspora, the two families become participants in plot lines whose arcs extend far beyond the pages of this novel. Shamsie uses these characters to take up issues like the treatment of Muslims living in the West, the rise of ISIS, and, on a more familiar level (for me), the ubiquitous reality of living between conflicting loyalties. 

There are very few books that have made me stop and think "writing this took bravery" (Baldwin's The Fire Next Time being one exception that comes to mind). But let there be no mistake - Kamila Shamsie's Home Fires is an act of profound courage. This is not just because of the political moment which she speaks to - although she does that exceptionally well. It is also because of the honesty with which her characters face the most difficult decisions of their lives: between country and son, between sister and brother, between love and principle. When confronted with these choices the characters struggle - not because they don't want to do what is right, but because they cannot decide what is right. Home Fires observes their struggle - examining both sides of each choice until all hard lines begin to dissolve.

The consequence is that there are no clear winners in this book.  Patriotism does not triumph, nor does filial or conjugal love. Gradually, we come to realize that, like Antigone, from which this novel draws inspiration, Home Fires is a tragedy - a mode of literature that seems uniquely suited to this time in our history. 

Readers, I have lived between two countries all my life. My countries (the US and New Zealand), are not at odds, but they are different, and they ask different things of a person. As such, the sensation of being caught between two worlds is not completely unfamiliar to me. The gentleness with which Home Fires treats those who are caught between worlds hit me at my core. There is no judgement here. Instead, Shamsie demonstrates through her own writing the empathy needed to bridge the gap between two worlds. She gives her characters the time and attention they need to be understood - showing us by example how to go about beginning to understand each other. 

Here is Shamsie bringing us into the world of these characters, through small moments of implication, beautifully rendered: "She unpinned the hijab, folded it carefully and placed it between the two of them on the kitchen counter... She shook her head slightly and her hair, long and dark, fell about her shoulders like something out of a shampoo advertisement. She looked at him, expectant." 

The Female Persuasion

Readers, 

The book The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer is currently making waves all over bestseller lists and "must read this summer" articles (sadly it is almost winter in Melbourne, but we'll leave that for another time). The premise is this: college student, Greer, meets aging feminist-icon Faith Frank as a freshman and is instantly taken with her message. Years later Greer begins working with Faith, embarking on a years-long relationship in which Greer, Faith and the key people in their lives, must choose their own paths - sometimes diverging from each other in painful and unexpected ways. This is a book that explores what it means to be given permission to be bold, and what it means to leave the need for that permission behind.

I was raised to be a feminist by Mother - who was told that women couldn't become veterinarians' when she was a girl (don't worry she showed that guy) - and my grandmothers, both of whom are powerful, smart, funny women. They showed me what being a powerful person looked like, but they also taught me never to compromise being a woman. I wear skirts every day, I get my nails done. Doesn't mean I can't be #ruthless.  

Readers, I was also taught to be a feminist by my Dad, a man whose favorite sentiments include “Maybe you should stop complaining if you’re not going to do anything about it”, “If you’re going to be a successful person who people take seriously, you can’t say [insert incorrect grammatical formation]”, “Now that you’re an adult you need to start [doing your taxes/managing your own money/taking responsibility for your abysmal grammar]” and “You should absolutely abandon your practical, career-building major and study religion if that’s what you want to do” (okay – he only said the last one once, but it was pretty remarkable). My point is – my father never assumed I would be anything other than smart, independent, confident and bold. And his assumption that I would be that way, made me that way.

The characters in The Female Persuasion are, for the most part, not as lucky as I am. This is a book populated by lackluster, childlike parents whose children outgrow them. Instead, Greer gets her permission to be bold form her friend (Zee), her boyfriend (Cory) and her idol (Faith) who collectively give her the power to be brave. Greer cherishes this gift, even as it enables her to grow above and beyond those who bestowed it.

In the end, my biggest takeaway from The Female Persuasion was not that being a feminist is required, but that being a feminist is a privilege. To become a feminist - or any sort of person who fights for justice - takes someone telling you that you have the right to stand up for yourself and others, that you have the right to demand goodness and equality from other people. This privilege, this special kind of self-belief, should be ubiquitous, but it's not, and that is what The Female Persuasion is all about. 

Readers, the sexism I encounter in my work and life is, for the most part, insidious, not overt. It's leaving someone out of a conversation. It's making a joke that's offensive but not offensive enough to make a fuss about. Combating this kind of sexism does not demand less than the overt kind - if anything, I think it asks more from us. It asks us to be even more assured that what we see as wrong is wrong. It asks us to be principled when it might be easier to let things go - to fight for the belief in something better, even if the situation you're in isn't that bad. 

You can probably tell I found The Female Persuasion inspiring. But it's also a great story - a page turner whose characters I cared deeply about. This is a testament to Wolitzer's writing. Here she is turning the tables on us, challenging us to see beyond our own narrow definitions: "'Greer,' said Laurel, 'what are we supposed to do, shake our heads and say that he's accomplished nothing?...here's this person who gave up his plans when his family fell apart. He moves back in with his mother and takes care of her. Oh, and he cleans his own house, and the ones she used to clean. I don't know. But I feel like Cory is kind of a big feminist, right?'" 

Little Fires Everywhere

Readers, 

Back in Melbourne after a whirlwind trip to New Zealand to celebrate Dad's 60th. Good times had all around (torrential rain, massive quantities of expensive whisky, five large bodies in a too-small rental car, board games used to stave off the boredom of the aforementioned rain, more whisky). Mother chastised me for forgetting to bring her The Diary of a Bookseller. My father chastised me for not saying enough nice things about Ready Player One. And my sister didn't chastise me at all (except for being a messy, generally lazy lump who never cooks - but that was well deserved).  

However, the highlight of the weekend was Mother (who grew up in rural Pennsylvania where there was not a lot of entertainment) teaching us about a peculiar phenomenon. She made us stand in a doorway, and press the tops of both wrists hard into the door frame for sixty-seconds. We then stepped forward. Do it and you'll find your arms float to the ceiling of their own free will - as if you are about to take involuntary flight. Go on and try it. (Father: "After nearly forty years of marriage! I can't believe you never taught me this!"; Sister: "I"m going to teach all my flat mates as soon as I get home."; Brother: "Clearly they didn't have television when you were growing up.") 

I tell you this, readers, because I want you to know that my family is just a normal family passing the time. My family, in fact, is exceedingly like the family in Celeste Ng's Little Fires Everywhere. The family in Ng's novel is so normal that they could appear on any number of American sitcoms as the the stand up next door neighbors. They are the cast of people who aren't quite interesting enough to get their own show, but are fun enough to play bit parts in a greater drama. 

The premise is this: a free-spirited artist, Mia, and her daughter, Pearl, move into a rental property owned by the thoroughly suburban Richardson family. These two families become entangled with one another, and then, together, they become entangled in an unfolding drama involving an abandoned Chinese baby, a desperate-to-adopt white couple, and a remorseful birth mother. If this seems like an odd twist, it also feels odd in the book, I assure you. 

It's jarring to read a novel where the central drama has little to no consequence for any of the main characters' lives. It's dissatisfying, but it's also fascinating. Throughout this novel there is a preoccupation with the dramatic-adjacent. One Richardson daughter, Lexie, is a high-school gossip who then becomes the subject of every high-school's most horrifying kind of drama. Another daughter, Izzy, repeatedly finds the need to "do something" about situations in which she has no business getting involved. The Richardson mother digs up past dirt under the guise of journalistic endeavor, and Mia is so deep in artistic melodrama that she has lost her grip on the reality of raising a daughter. The book circles around drama without ever really touching. In fact, there are only two truly dramatic scenes. In one, we are literally left in the waiting room, forced to the periphery. The other - that of the opening chapter - is treated with cool detachment. 

I think this is extremely clever. By playing with drama but never serving it up, the novel is able to talk about essentially boring people in an interesting way. It's able to take up the mundane without glorifying it - to give us a peek into our own daily lives while saying "probably nothing interesting is happening to you right now. But that's okay, what you're doing is still worthwhile."

I think the reason I liked this so much is because I have been feeling stagnant recently. I just completed a move to a new country. Now that I'm settled in, I'm starting to wonder what I'm doing here. This novel comforted me. There wasn't any sort of revelation to it, but it made me feel calmer to realize that being on the periphery of drama is sometimes more than enough, to be an observer in life is not to waste it, but to experience it from a different perspective. Little Fires Everywhere is not saying that the mundane is interesting, it's saying that the mundane is reality: it's what we get to be going on with.

The ending of Little Fires Everywhere is the only flawed part of this novel, which is otherwise beautifully crafted. It's greatest strength is its ability to give interiority to even minor characters (in the vein of George Eliot) who may only appear for a few paragraphs. Here is Ng doing this in just a few sentences for a lonely, neighborhood man, "They were observed only once. Mr. Yang, on his way home from bus-driving duty, steered his light blue Saturn down Parkland Drive and saw a Jeep Cherokee pulled to the side of the road, two teens inside pressed against each other...It was none of his business, he thought to himself, though for the rest of the afternoon he found himself day-dreaming, back to his own teenage years in Hong Kong, sneaking into the botanical gardens with Besty Choy...The young are the same, always and everywhere, he thought, and he shifted the car into gear and drove on."

The Great Alone

Readers, 

Quiet weekend taking in the delights of Melbourne (played tennis, lay on couch, drank too much beer at comedy show, engaged in light socialization with ladies at church). It's quite a city, this city: home of the trend-of-the-moment hipster, the disaffected (or affected) Brit, bungalow dwellers, high-rise renters, and many a quietly-desperate business(wo)man. They say that Melbourne is the "most livable" city in the world (this is only a partial dig at Sydney, and to be perfectly honest, it's a bit of a stretch. Clearly the judges on that panel have never been to San Diego).

For all it's "livability" - Melbourne is not a "destination." It's steady. It's not a place that people run away to - like New York, L.A., New Zealand, Argentina, Bali, (dare I say Sydney?). When was the last time Barry stopped you at the watercooler and said, "Me and the wife are just leaving it all behind - we're going to give the dream a go and move to: MELBOURNE." Never happened. 

Kristin Hannah's novel The Great Alone is about the consummate run-away destination: Alaska. And it's about a family that is, in fact, running away: from their past, their families, and themselves. The premise is this: Leni's father, returned from Vietnam and suffering from PTSD, moves the family to a plot of land outside a tiny town in Alaska. There, they must embed themselves with the locals, prepare to survive the winter, and figure out (above all) how to survive with one another. Leni's father is violent, mean, and looking to stir up trouble in the town. Leni's mother is her best friend, wild and loving, but also blinded by love from realizing what a dangerous man her husband has become. This book is a little bit Gilmore Girls gone wrong, a little National Geographic's "Alaska: The Last Frontier," and a little bit Safe Haven by Nicholas Sparks (yes - I have indulged in all these delights. I will not apologise, readers).

I have very mixed feelings about this book, and part of me wondered whether I should even write about it. In general, I don't like to write about the books I don't enjoy. But I did enjoy this book - and so I think the fairest thing is for me to lay it all out, and you can decide: 

Let's start with the bad (I'm a cup half empty kind of girl). The book is melodramatic, with plot twists designed to yank emotions, rather than pull the story forward. This is worsened by the fact that the writing itself has significant issues. It's full of cliches and wooden dialogue. At first, I thought this was because the novel is narrated by a child - but then Leni ages and the problem persists. This is distracting.

Despite all this, Hannah's characters make it through. New characters spring onto the page in 2D but then somehow persist, becoming more interesting with each page. In the end, we are left with a handful of portraits: people who have run away to Alaska, who have given up their lives in far off places and bought into a dream. What Hannah does best is show us these character's commitment to the illusion of that dream: "this is Alaska" they are always telling us, as if that were explanation enough, 'things are different here' they almost scream at you, meaning - "we are different." These are people insulated from the harshness of their way of life by the belief that they are somehow special, stronger, more enlightened, and more interesting than those on the lower 48. It may be that Hannah is less successful than she hopes in explaining why these people live where they do, but to me, the townspeople in The Great Alone seem awfully normal - protecting their own, and justifying their choices by whatever means necessary. 

Readers, there's at least one moment every week when I convince myself it would be a good idea to "run away" from the most livable city on earth (go open a book shop in Scotland? Flee into virtual reality?). I feel about my home in New Zealand the way these characters feel about their beloved Alaska: it's different, at least to me. But reading The Great Alone reminded me of the danger of thinking that a new place is a silver bullet. Broken families don't get fixed by majestic landscape. Self-important people don't become less so by living in the wilderness. Demons come with us, even to the far north. 

Here's Hannah summing up the feeling the family has upon arriving in Alaska, faced with a new way of life, "I feel like we've fallen down the rabbit hole,' Mama said...The air smelled of wood smoke and cigarette smoke and fresh-cut wood. It sounded of chain saws whirring, boards thumping onto piles, nails being hammered...The three of them stood there, gazing out at the homestead that was changing before their eyes." 

An American Marriage

Readers,

Appalling rain all weekend. Cancelled tennis and went full on hermit in my apartment. This was not to plan. I've recently moved to a new country (America -> Australia) and so I'm supposed to be making new friends. So far, progress is strong. It's pretty remarkable what people will do for you when they sense you're desperate for company. Here's a few examples: 1) Invite you to a birthday party for someone you don't know where six very close friends sit around eating cheese and you are the only stranger in the group, 2) Invite you to a board games party in the suburbs where you try (and fail) to reign in your competitive spirit and appear charming (ditto on the close friends/only stranger thing) 3) Lead you around a church hall introducing you to everyone in sight under 30 while somehow avoiding anyone over 70, 4) Invite you to take up tennis, whereupon you discover you don't have any skill at tennis, whereupon you discover that you can befriend all the other klutz's in your tennis lessons. 

All of this is to say that people are remarkably kind. Or at least, they have been to me (I admit it - I'm a lucky duck). Maybe they want to purge the smell the desperation, maybe they're just good people. I don't know. But it makes me wonder - if we can do these things for strangers. How much more do we owe the people who we have made commitments too? If you'll invite me to your best friend's cheese party, who won't you invite? And why? 

This is the question Tayari Jones takes up in An American Marriage. The premise is this: one day Roy, newly married husband of Celestial, is accused of raping a woman and is sent to jail for a crime he did not commit. Roy and Celestial are young and black, living in Atlanta, and trying to "come up" in the world. They're doing pretty well for themselves and then, in a moment, it all gets taken away. Or at least, it gets taken away from one of them. While Roy is in jail Celestial keeps living. Through her letters to Roy, we see her starting to move on, to rely more on her best friend Andre, to find financial and critical success with her business. In essence, she becomes independent. And then, Roy is freed. He comes home. And he wants Celestial back. 

Readers, here's a quick list of some (of the myriad) things I don't know anything about: 1) Being Married; 2) Being Black in America (or anywhere); 3) Being Unfairly Sent to Prison. Tayari Jones does these topics more justice, I suspect, than I can appreciate. This book is full of questions that I don't have any good answers for. But what caught me the most about this novel - and it is a truly beautiful book - is its even more fundamental, motivating questions: what do we owe one another? And when the time comes, will we fulfill our duty? 

It's easy to read this book and judge the main characters. Roy has some things to say about women that made me want to close the book pretty quick. Celestial is prone to selfishness. The chapters narrated by Andre are laced with so much justification and explanation that I wonder who he thinks he's narrating too. 

But if we were to judge these three, we'd be guilty, I think, of deep hypocrisy. It's not so easy to stick by someone. Our divorce rates are testament enough to that. But more simply - what about the friends we've left in the lurch? Or just fallen out of contact with? If I were Celestial, and my husband were sent to jail for the foreseen future - what would I do? What do I owe him? What do I owe myself? Can it be my duty to let my life, a second life, be ruined as well? Can commitment demand that I too am sentenced? After all, vows were made. 

Tayari Jones answers the question with a single sentiment: Compassion. These are flawed characters in a flawed world. They don't always do what is right by one another, but they are always kind. When they betray, they do so with regret and an awareness of their own weakness. They are consistently hard on themselves: recognizing the failure of the standards they once set. There's something very honest, and maybe a little admirable, in that. 

Compassion is good, but standards are too, and this novel doesn't forget that. Here's Tayari Jones, in her simple, elegant prose, making sure no one gets off the hook too easily: "What is all this stuff about love and her own mind? I don't mean to be harsh, but this this is bigger than any little romance...What did Roy do to deserve any of this? He didn't do anything but be a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is basic." 

The Immortalists

Readers, 

Was on the phone last night with the beloved Sister, who had just emerged from an 11-hour Saturday shift in the hospital where she's a doctor. I had just emerged from a 4-hour movie marathon on my sofa, after getting pleasantly tipsy at an afternoon BBQ. So there you are. Let me tell you something: if you've never had to take a long hard look at yourself in the mirror after saying "I had a stressful week" to someone who just logged seventy hours on an oncology ward, count yourself lucky. We have not all been so blessedly tactful. 

My sister deals with life and death every day, but I don't (thank goodness), which is probably why I found The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin so affecting. The premise of the novel is this: in 1969 four siblings visit a gypsy woman, each entering her apartment alone, each leaving with a new piece of information - the exact date of their own death. The novel is in four sequential parts, each following one of the siblings in the years preceding their demise. There is Simon, who runs away to San Francisco in the 80s. There is Klara, who goes with him but cherishes her own dream of becoming a magician. There's Daniel, the steady-freddy doctor. And Varya, the eldest and most responsible of the four, who begins as a relatively normal do-gooder, and ends as a control-freak, obsessed with finding the cure to ageing by testing low-calorie diets on monkeys. Bet you didn't see that coming. 

The momentum of this book moves with the momentum of these character's lives, which is, in turn, dictated by the impending dates of their deaths. If you knew you were going to die young, you'd probably live harder - and so too are the opening sections of this book more urgent, galloping toward tragedy. The back half of the book is gentler, but also more nuanced.

In the end, this book is driven by a premise that renders these stories at once completely compelling and utterly predictable. The first chapter tells you exactly when each story will end. Thus, when you are told in Chapter 1 that a young, gay man has only a few years to live, and then you find, just a couple chapters later, that he has moved to San Francisco just before the beginning of the AIDs epidemic, it doesn't take rocket science to figure out how his story ends. But that doesn't mean it doesn't sucker punch you in the gut when you get there.

Let me be clear - there's nothing wrong with the predictability of this book. In fact, I think that's part of the point. It takes dramatic irony to its zenith. It gives the readers all the information they could ever ask for and then asks back: did you really want that? Don't you think you had better be more careful about what you wish for? 

Indeed, for me, it was the first and the final of the four stories in The Immortalists that left me with the most questions. Would I rather die young or have to outlive my family? Would I rather live hard for a few years, as Achilles chose, or stick around, and be the spine in a body that's starting to decay? Which is braver? Which is harder? 

It's a testament to Chloe Benjamin that she takes these timeworn questions and massages them into something new, fresh, and occasionally heartbreaking. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that there's a few things missing from this novel (there's only the slightest gestures toward faith and organized religion, which is astonishing in a book about death and meaning), and that the book occasionally relies on plot devices in a somewhat inorganic way (nothing like a secret relative revealing himself in the closing chapters), but none of that matters much. This is a story worth reading, not just because it's good writing, but because it's about questions worth asking. 

Here is one of Chloe's character's on the verge of death, ready and willing, prepared by the knowledge he's had since childhood. Let's hope we might all be lucky enough to have a little of this grace in our final moments: "For so long, he hated the [fortune-teller] woman, too. How, he wondered, could she give such a terrible fortune to a child? But now he thinks of her differently, like a second mother or a god, she who showed him the door and said: Go." 

Ready Player One

Readers,

I will be honest: the transition from Jane Eyre to Ready Player One by Ernest Cline was rather abrupt. One moment I was wandering listlessly on the moors of 19th Century Britain, the next I found myself in a futuristic, virtual-reality based society, obsessed with 80s-era geek culture. So.

This book came to me by way of yet another parental recommendation, this time from my Dad. Dad is on a tireless quest to convert me to listening to audiobooks. Thus, every once and a while I'll get an email from Audible.com, with the highly personalized note: "Hi, I've listened to this audiobook, "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline, and thought you would enjoy it, too. It's totally free and you won't need a credit card if it is your first time accepting an Audible book from a friend." At which point, I immediately go to the nearest bookstore and buy a paper copy of the book in question. Because that's the kind of daughter I am. 

The premise of Ready Player One (have you seen the movie? are you going to see the movie? need I tell you the premise at all?) is this: boy-geek, Wade, is on a quest to find an easter-egg prize within the vast virtual reality world of a video game universe. This game was created by an 80s-culture obsessed programming genius, and has quickly taken over the lives of many people in a somewhat dystopic near-future world. All fun and games right? But where is my Mr. Rochester? 

In all seriousness, Ready Player One is not great literature. Nor is it great science fiction. Because the video-game setting is entirely based on recreations of other video games, movies and role-playing games, its world building is fairly derivative. More critically, it's just jam packed with too much stuff: instead of one all important artifact to fight over, there's a dozen; instead of one great test, there's six. There's a lot of explaining: how the game works, how the technology works, how the characters figure things out. And there's A LOT of references: to obscure video games, to pop culture icons of the 80s, to the recesses of internet culture. 

Herein was my downfall. No one will tell you that I'm not a nerd. But it became clear while reading Ready Player One, that I am simply the wrong kind of nerd for this book. Don't get me wrong. I love Dune with all my heart. I love Star Wars more than any other movie franchise in existence. But I have never played a video game in my life. I spend a great deal of time trying to get away from my computer, not dive deeper into its recesses. 

Nonetheless, this book has two things going for it. One: It's great fun. It moves with astonishing pace, and with an unabashed revelry in the geekdom which it sets out to deify. I respect that. Second: It gives you a little glimpse into the world of people whose lives revolve around the internet. Its most vibrant moments are those in which the gloves (literally, you need gloves to control your avatar in the VR universe) come off, and Wade must exit the richness of his life in VR. In VR, he has friends, wealth, fame and status. When he reenters reality, he is utterly alone. The book brings home the seduction of the internet, of any reality other than our own. It makes you sit with it, and ask: is it so wrong? Isn't it beautiful that a person like this, afraid and alone, can have escape and joy? For Ready Player One the answer is still on the side of reality, however brutal that may be. But this book brings you to that conclusion lovingly, with deep compassion for those who are tempted to choose easier alternatives. And while I'm not the right kind of nerd, I know that I too have my own techniques for distracting myself from reality. We all do, right? Ready Player One might be a homage to the great games and movies of an iconic era, but what it made me want more than anything is to set all that aside, turn off my television, put down my book, and go outside. 

In the end, Ready Player One is a book about living life, and living it abundantly. Here's one of the moments where Wade must sit with the truth of his own reality. There's simplicity in this writing, sure, but I think there's something in the honesty that's chilling: "I'd come to see my rig for what it was...the cell where I had willingly imprisoned myself. Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture-obsessed geek...I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame." 

Jane Eyre

Readers,

Pouring rain today in Melbourne, leading me to believe that the promised gloom of Autumn has arrived at last. Started my morning by ironing wax off the carpet of the church that I frequent, and socializing with the gaggle of grey-haired ~70 year old ladies in attendance for this old-fashioned "working bee." Said ladies had many ideas about what proper cleaning meant. The church is old, for Melbourne, and rather gothic, especially in the half-light of the stormy day. But the old ladies had it cheerful in no time, and when I left around noon - for lunch with my friend David - I was in fine spirits.

The same cannot be said for Jane Eyre. Poor Jane. Her life is a particularly dreadful one, and particularly hard, I think, for any woman to read about now, with the privilege of a 21st Century view. On the other hand, Jane is probably one of the least apparently likeable characters in the fiction of that time (worse, I think, than Dorothea, than Emma, than Catherine). She is extremely judgmental, prone to bouts of abject bitchiness, and self-indulgently melancholy.

For these reasons, I view her as something of a kindred spirit.

In fact, this is the third time I have read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Here is my quick take from each of those occasions:

Age ~9: More concerned about proving how good at reading I was than actually digesting the books I read. Got bogged down in the exhaustive passages on Lowood school. Realized, upon reflection, I had no idea why anyone would care at all about this Jane Eyre girl. Realized, years later, that I had not understood the book at all.

Age 19: Exquisite romance. Utterly overcome. When would I find MY Mr. Rochester? My soul mate? Dear God, how had I overlooked this book in my youth? Realized I should skip the Lowood sections henceforth.

Present-day: Am I the only who feels as though Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, could have learned a thing or two from this book? There are some pretty serious dominance themes going on here, that I did NOT pick up on previously. Should we be talking about that more?

Have I become a cynic? Not really. Goodness knows that I have a lot fewer feelings than I did at age 19, but I think we can agree that's for the best. Do I view Jane's love through the lens of someone who is now older than her, and prone to judge her (and Bronte) as being somewhat overcome by her first romance? Yes. But then again, that does not change my view on one matter - which has stayed consistent since my second read: this is a book about two dreadful people, who bring out the best in each other by loving each other completely. This romance is soul-achingly beautiful (I know I'm losing the men here - bear with me). The interiority of Jane is profoundly moving as she begins to realize and contend with the narrowness of her world, and then adjust with that world as it expands in her newfound love. 

I'm not sure I'll ever experience a romance like this one, now that I'm a little past the age of Jane, and a little world-weary. I think my generation, inured by the realism of 21st century takes on marriage and relationship, have begun to protect ourselves a little too thoroughly. We are not as inclined to be thrown whole-heartedly into this kind of love. But I hope I am wrong. I hope I still have it in me. I hope I get the opportunity.

For now, I'll leave you with this moment, which hits a little close to home. She might be a tad melo-dramatic, old Charlotte B., but she certainly gets what it's like to be a woman in love: "My master's colourless, olive face, square massive brow...were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, - that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me."

The Diary of a Bookseller

Readers, 

Unpredictable weather in Melbourne this weekend + mild illness combined for a good reading climate. Used the time for The Diary of a Bookseller by Shuan Bythell, and to revamp this blog, obviously. 

The Diary of a Bookseller was provided to me, in hard-copy, by my Mother, last weekend. She presented it on the first day of her three day visit with the following recommendation, "Heard a radio broadcast with this guy on Radio New Zealand. I'm so excited to read this. Can you read it fast so that I can have it?" I offered to let her keep it, seeing as she had just bought it. "No, no. I want YOU to read it. But then bring it to me." 

So I complied, and (as always) Mother is right. "This guy" had me engrossed all weekend. The premise is this: one day, fifty-something-year-old Shaun, the owner of the largest (second-largest?) second-hand bookstore in Scotland, begins to chronicle his life. Said life is primarily composed of interactions with unsavoury customers, many-a-trip to far-off homesteads where desultory book collections are valued by Shaun, usually to the financial disappointment of those wanting to cast them off; unpredictable run-ins and late night drinks with his enigmatic shop clerk, Nicky; and daily till totals which leave you in no doubt that, for Shaun, this is a labour of love, not money. 

I wanted to start the new website with this book for a reason: Shaun is a lover of books, and a lover of the people in his community (though he tries, repeatedly, to convince you that he's a curmudgeon). Reading his book reminded me how important those things are in my own life. As he winds through the back-roads of rural Scotland, or entertains the various people in his small town, I was thinking about my own home town in New Zealand and my old life there. It feels very far from the world of Excel and Powerpoint, which I now occupy, and to which I must return, for better or worse, tomorrow morning. It is a testament to Shaun's writing that this book is at once funny, inspiring and brutally honest. Would I trade places with Shaun? Probably not. Do I admire him? Definitely.

Fortunately, my quest for my own purpose in life (yeah, I know), took a turn for the better. Upon reading this book two things happened: (1) I started a running list of things that I love and things I'm afraid of, which feels like a step in the right direction, (2) at a brunch with a wide-ranging group of Melbournians, I brought up this new list of mine and Shaun's book, which led to a fascinating discussion and reminded me that, very occasionally, people really do want to engage on the big topics in life. 

So here's to Shaun, for doing what I might only ever dream to do, and for making me laugh out loud in my apartment. Here's one of his best jokes, which sums up the book, and Shaun's tone, far more succinctly than I can: "A customer at 11.15 a.m. asked for a copy of Far from the Maddening Crowd. In spite of several attempts to explain that the book's title is actually Far from the Madding Crowd, he resolutely refused to accept that this was the case... Despite the infuriating nation of this exchange, I ought to be grateful: he has given me an idea for the title of my autobiography..."