Wintering by Katherine May
Wintering actually came out in February 2020, but it’s a pandemic book if there ever was one. I remember reading about it in the before times and thinking I’d save it for when the time was right.
When I finally read Wintering, two years in, it gave me the push — or, I guess, more like the soft pull — I needed. Because, if you remember, the pressure towards the beginning of all this was to produce and make the most of what was supposed to be a short pause.1 So I spent two years feeling guilty, like most of us probably did.
Someone once told me that if you feel a depression coming on you shouldn’t just invite it in for tea and put on its favorite music and a snuggle by the fire. That’s the exact opposite of May’s advice — make some tea, light a candle, sleep a lot. It’s a season, you can’t rush it. Give yourself permission to do nothing or at least the bare minimum and don’t feel bad about it. Behold the bear. Etc.
Anyway, now it’s spring! Here’s some stuff I read and painted.
Doodlin.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and A Model World, both by Michael Chabon
When I think about my own favorite books, they feel so personal that I don’t want to share them, afraid of what they might say about me. So, it makes me a bit nervous to read what a close friend tells me is their favorite book. It almost feels like an invasion of their privacy, looking for the little pieces they might have resonated with, the parts that made them laugh or cry or feel nostalgic.
Kavalier & Clay is massive, though, so if there were clues hiding there about my friend’s connection to it, they were obscured by escape artists, golems, pressrooms, Antarctic waystations, giant moths, and smutty comic books.
For me, at least, what Kavalier & Clay stirred up was a feeling I’d sort of forgotten: the feeling of infinite possibility when you’re young and have a big idea, and the feeling of running with it, staying up all night in a fever, chasing something improbable but BIG.
On the tail of Kavalier & Clay, I picked up A Model World, a book of short stories from the used section at B&N. It came out nine years before Kavalier & Clay, and you can definitely see growth between the two. Then I tried to read Yiddish Policemen’s Union and just couldn’t get into it. Maybe later.
The Past is Red by Catherine Valente
So, it’s long after the apocalypse. Society’s living on a floating trash island. Things have devolved a bit. Everyone hates the narrator, who lives in a cottage made of thrown-out candle wax2 and gets beat up all the time, but she doesn’t mind so much. She takes their shit, gets into trouble, has a forbidden love, etc. While the plot and elements of the setting weren’t anything too new, The Past is Red managed to be incredibly refreshing.
Grand Union by Zadie Smith
I’ve read all of Zadie Smith’s novels and most of her essays, so I knew I’d enjoy Grand Union. I liked the way the stories said something different than I’d ever heard Smith say, but in a way that is so distinctly hers. But, on the other hand, one of the things I’ve appreciated most about her novels is the way that scenes and characters stick with you — I still think about bits from White Teeth or On Beauty years after I read them. Flipping through Grand Union, which I finished maybe a month ago, the stories already felt unfamiliar; they didn’t have that same sticking power.
Exception: “The Lazy River”.
Watercolor / the boys in their yacht, near Buffalo.
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
I know I have a habit of starting most of my arguments/points with “I read this essay about…”3 Lately, a lot of those times I was referring to something from Trick Mirror. It touches on most of the things I get riled up about: social media, diet culture, sexual assault, religion, cults… But even when she’s writing about something I don’t get riled up about (ecstasy) it’s delightful.
Read a good interview with her here and, for something delightful but weird, this.
And finally, her succinct summary of something that’s been bugging me lately, from an interview with The Paris Review:
Identity performance itself is not something that I think is necessarily bad. I write in the book about how the internet makes us want to perform our identities in a way that’s attractive to other people. It sort of systematizes and monetizes that process. And I think that wanting to please other people and wanting other people to like you, wanting to come off well, is a natural and healthy thing—I think it’s good that I want my friends to like me. So some degree of self-delusion is inevitable, and there’s some mechanism within it that can be good.
For example, the idea that what you’re doing is worthwhile—I think it does require some self-delusion, especially now, to think anything we do matters. At the same time, what we do matters tremendously. Our mind gave us the ability for self-delusion for good reason. I mean, even to be a writer—ugh—some sort of self-delusion is completely necessary to think people need to read what I have to say. But I don’t think that’s bad. I think it’s great. Because it leads to something better than what would exist otherwise.
Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl
You can’t get much closer to nailing down my taste than a book of short personal essays about birds, growing up in the South, and big feelings. I skimmed through Late Migrations a few months back and put it down because it wasn’t the right time. It moved too slowly and was too heavy.
I picked it back up when the birds were just starting to nest — we saw a grackle snatch a baby starling from a nest and beat it on the neighbor’s roof, then fly it back to its own nest to feed its chicks.4
It’s been a spring of loss and learning and reflection, and Renkl’s short, lyrical pieces about the cycles of time and the brutality of nature have been a wonderful way to make sense of that.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
When I’m choosing my next book to read, I usually gather a stack of books from different shelves and sit down to read the first page or so of each one. In the case of Piranesi, I didn’t leave my chair until I’d finished the whole thing.
The plot is like a super-soft House of Leaves. I usually shy away from fantasy/sci-fi that spends too much time describing a world, but I ate up every bit of Piranesi. It’s not scary like House of Leaves is — the narrator shows off a world that might terrify anyone else but that, to him, is a beautiful home. There’s not much more to say without ruining the fun, but settle in with a beverage and spend a few hours on it.
Watercolor / I put a mirror over my desk.
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
This was a re-read for me. The first time I read it was a few years back when I was between jobs and visiting my brother in Florida. I read it so fast that I only remembered 1) really enjoying it and 2) the bit about becoming an Art Monster:
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things.
It was as good as I’d remembered, and, since the last time I read it, I’ve gotten a bit further on my way to becoming a happy, selfish lil art monster.
Or, as a friend put it, “We thought we were going to write a whole album but ended up just jerking off and watching Netflix the whole time.”
Note to self: turn all of those almost-empty, dust-gathering candles into one big frankencandle.
I have a suspicion this is annoying. Sorry.
My partner, who stood there watching this with me, assured me that this was inevitable, since grackles are native to upstate New York and starlings aren’t.