From Indigenous Americans discovering Europe to Voltaire destroying my last shred of optimism, here’s a summary of my reading this month.
I had more time for reading this month as we stopped travelling for a while and spent some time in the peace of a rural Serbian village descending into winter. Here are the highlights.
On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock
We hear a lot about the early Europeans landing in the Americas, but what was it like for the thousands of Indigenous Americans who made the reverse voyage across the Atlantic? The sources are fragmentary, but Pennock does a good job of piecing it all together and telling a discovery story that’s very different from Columbus sailing the ocean blue.
White Masks by Elias Khoury
When I was a child, my mother sometimes complained that my bedroom looked like Beirut. White Masks deals with that period, when the city was a byword for chaos and destruction. It felt poignant reading it while Israel was doing its best to undo the decades of recovery and return the city to that same wartorn, bombed-out state. It’s about a journalist trying to find out why a corpse was left on a pile of garbage, and so I suppose it’s about war’s disregard for human life, which made it feel sadly timely.
Where Water Lies by Hilary Tailor
This story of submerged secrets makes excellent use of water as an overarching metaphor. Eliza spends a lot of time plunging into the dark, freezing water of the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath in the dead of winter, while shunning the people around her. We gradually come to understand why as she reluctantly explores a trauma from a long-ago summer, also involving water, and the well-paced plot reaches a satisfying conclusion.
All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami
This was a slow build. I started out utterly bored by the mundane life of the passive, disconnected central character, but as the details built and I came to understand why Fuyuko was the way she was, I became transfixed.
Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
An old man walks around East Anglia pursuing random thoughts about disparate subjects. It’s a terrible premise for a book, but in the hands of W.G. Sebald, it works beautifully. His prose is so fluid and mesmerising that you just follow him wherever he leads.
Candide by Voltaire
As a satirical response to Leibniz’s optimistic philosophy that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”, Candide is brilliant. Voltaire utterly demolishes this philosophy by putting his hero and most of the other characters through a catalogue of horrors and showing humanity at its most violent and deplorable.
Since Leibniz’s idea has long been discredited, though, I’m not so sure why Candide is still so widely read and studied today. In an age when we are bombarded by a similar catalogue of horrors every time we pick up our phones, our problem is not too much optimism but too little.
Over to You
Have you read any of these books, or would you like to? What was your favourite book of the last month? Let me know in the comments.
There are 15 comments
Nice diversity! I have only read Candide!
Hi Emma, Yes, it was quite a varied month for me! I can’t believe I lived this long without reading Candide, but I’m glad I got to it in the end. I guess it must be quite an established part of the school curriculum in France, right?
Nice diversity! I have only read Candide!
This is such an interesting collection. Profuse reading this month. I’ve also only read Candide, and that was college or shortly after. On Savage Shores and White Masks look intriguing. Thank you.
Playground by Richard Powers (would love your take on that one) and Trust by Hernan Diaz are recent interesting books for me.
Hi Bean, Those two sound fascinating! I love the premise of Playground in particular, and I spent a lot of time on remote Pacific islands last year, so I have an interest in the setting. Going to read your reviews now.
I’m glad you stuck with All the Lovers in the Night, Andrew. You’re right, it is a slow burn, but absolutely worth it by the mid-point!
Hi Jacqui, I’m glad I stuck with it too. Passive, paralysed characters can be tough to follow, but when the reasons for that paralysis start to come out, I found it incredibly moving. I just checked out your review and would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get to know more about this book. Here’s the link for anyone who’s interested: https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2023/10/03/all-the-lovers-in-the-night-by-mieko-kawakami-tr-sam-bett-and-david-boyd
Nice reading month! I read Rings of Saturn many years ago and loved it. I’m currently in the middle of There are Rivers in the Sky. I know you didn’t like it all that much, but I’m really enjoying it 🙂
Oh, I’m so glad you’re enjoying it, Stefanie! You’re right, it didn’t really work for me—there were aspects of it that I appreciated, but other aspects that frustrated me. But I remember you had it on your TBR, so I’m very happy to hear you’re enjoying it! I love how reading is such an individual experience and our reactions can vary so much. Will be interested to hear your thoughts on it when you’re finished.
I’ve only read Candide and W.G. Sebald, but I’d happily read any of the others rounding out your month. The new Louise Erdrich recently landed in my stack via the library, so I’m looking forward to that. I hope you’ve got plenty of good books lined up for December!
Ah, The Mighty Red—I’ve read both glowing and not-so-glowing reviews, so I’ll be very interested to hear what you make of that. Hope it’s a glowing one for you 🙂
Wow, impressed how much you got through this month and lovely mini reviews. There are a couple of books I’d really like to read here – the Sebald (been meaning to for years!) and the Kawakami. Like most of your commenters, I’ve read Candide. I hated it. It was for my first year French lit course at Cambridge and out of all the options I’d picked the 18th century having no idea what it was like – it was not my kind of thing. That being said, it worked out okay because I had no idea how to read a book critically at that point, so I learned a lot and then started moving forwards in time with much better strategies! Poor old Voltaire, not his fault at all.
Yes, I think you’d like both of those, Victoria! The writing in Rings of Saturn is quite beautiful, and the setting would be somewhat local to you (at least relative to where I’m writing this from, in northern Serbia!).
Ah, that Candide experience doesn’t sound good at all! Maybe it did help your critical reading skills along, though—it’s probably easier to analyse a book you hated than a book you loved. Maybe you needed to read Candide at that time—all is for the best in the best of all possible French lit courses 😉
The last one is the only one I’ve heard of, but haven’t read any of these. Glad you enjoyed these mostly. Hope December is going well for you too!
https://lisalovesliterature.bookblog.io/2024/12/02/the-looooong-and-the-short-of-it-a-giveaway-november-2024-wrap-up-post-and-looking-forward-to-december/
Hi Lisa, Sorry, I missed this comment over the holidays, but thanks for stopping by. My December reading was pretty good, thanks! I’ll check out your post now—and maybe your December one is up by now too!