Book report for February 2024

Letter No. 74: Includes bafflement, entertainment, epigrams, and more books bought than read, which is not unusual.

Nothing remarkable about this past month’s reading, save for Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink, a novel that I heartily recommend. What are you reading, Jogglers?

Completed

• The Auburn Conference, Tom Piazza. Entertaining but feather light. Piazza imagines a 19th-century book festival in upstate New York that brings together Melville, Twain, Whitman, Stowe, an invented ladies’ novelist, and a former Confederate general. Emily Dickinson lurks, unnamed. It’s fun but I finished it feeling Piazza could have done more with the premise.
• American Smoke, Iain Sinclair. I don’t know what to make of Sinclair, William Gibson’s declared favorite writer. Sentences dense with allusion and obscure references. Fragments assembled into paragraphs like pottery from an archaeological dig. His London Orbital is on my shelf; when it’s time, I’ll clear a month and prepare to spend as much time looking things up as reading the book.

• A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, Pico Iyer. Observant, epigrammatic essays on Japan by an Indian-English writer with a Japanese wife who has lived much of the past 30 years in Japan and is still a foreigner.
• The Weight of Ink, Rachel Kadish. It takes a while to gather momentum, but once you are past Kadish’s careful laying of the foundation, her story gets hold of you and does not let go for 575 pages. Similar to A.S. Byatt’s Possession, with twined narratives, one London in 2000-2001, the other London in the 1600s. Smart, clever, excellent in most every way.

In progress

• Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, Peter Brooks
• On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, William H. Gass

Purchased

• Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn, Ken Cuthbertson
• The Quickening, Elizabeth Rush
• and yet…, Christopher Hitchens
• The Golden Ratio: The Divine Beauty of Mathematics, Gary B. Meisner
• Wrong Norma, Anne Carson
• The Fair Folk, Su Bristow
• The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton