The Infection and the Antidote

March 31, 2020

When COVID-19 was beginning to spread in North America a few weeks back, when lists of books and films about viruses and plagues were going around as a way of coping with the news, I kept thinking about Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. It’s the only pandemic-adjacent literature I’ve been interested in revisiting (no shade to Station Eleven or Severance or any of those blockbuster medical disaster movies I’ve never seen), so I started rereading it this week, our third week of physical distancing and staying at home.

In Doomsday Book, an Oxford historian named Kivrin time-travels from 2054 to what is supposed to be 1320 in order to learn firsthand about life in the Middle Ages. Almost as soon as she arrives at her destination, fully inoculated against every known disease, she exhibits symptoms of a nasty flu, before she’s even exposed to anyone or anything that might infect her. She’s taken to a village and gradually recovers there. Soon after the villagers become ill, but with a totally different disease.

Meanwhile, back in 2054, one of the technicians involved in Kivrin’s trip also becomes ill, and Oxford is put under quarantine. The authorities attempt contact tracing, but it quickly becomes impossible to track down everyone exposed. There is a long and — more so now than ever — painful time between the reader understanding the situation and the characters realizing they’ve been exposed to a mysterious and dangerous infectious disease. Interwoven with this are scenes with Kivrin, a woman alone sometime in the 14th century, suffering the same symptoms as the technician back in the 21st century, trying to figure out where and when exactly she is and wondering why she feels so bad. The tension is extreme and makes for a very propulsive read.

I’m still in the process of rereading the book, and I don’t remember all the details, so I won’t spoil it for either of us, but I’m very much enjoying diving back into Connie Willis’s world, regardless of how much it does or doesn’t keep my mind off our current pandemic.

Jill Lepore in the New Yorker considers what it means to read fiction about pandemics: “[T]he existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading. Reading may be an infection, the mind of the writer seeping, unstoppable, into the mind of the reader. And yet it is also — in its bidden intimacy, an intimacy in all other ways banned in times of plague — an antidote, proven, unfailing, and exquisite.”

I suppose I’m reading Doomsday Book, of all possible novels, at this particular moment, for the same reason I read anything. It provides a distraction, to some degree, but it also provides a lens through which to see the real world. During a pandemic and during the regular drudgery of everyday life, fiction provides the same solace, the same caution, the same escape as it always has.

March 31, 2020

Books Only Lead to More Books: Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

May 28, 2019

Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a memoir about reading and writing and immigration and isolation and mental health. The title comes from an entry in Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks, a reminder to Li why she does not want to stop writing and what writing a book is about.

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li

Li had suicidal depression while writing this book, and the quote below encapsulates the heart of the book. For her, being a writer is important, but being a reader is much more so, and reading itself is connected to the choice to live or die.

“I do not equate writing with real life … but I am unable to articulate what real life is. … Of course writing is essential for a writer, and being read, too …. Writing is an option, so is not writing; being read is a possibility, so is not being read. Reading, however, I equate with real life: life can be opened and closed like a book; living is a choice, so is not living.”

(Li’s most recent book, Where Reasons Die, is a novel about a mother conversing with her son who died by suicide. Li’s son died by suicide shortly before she wrote it. I didn’t know this until after I read Dear Friend. I haven’t read the novel yet, nor any of her other books.)

This passage complicates the idea of being isolated and present in our lives only while reading:

“I spent my days reading novels whose characters crossed paths only in my mind; I was reading writers’ diaries and biographies connected by footnotes. I did not see people outside the household often; I did not talk with anyone but one friend by phone. Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one’s real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one’s days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.”

So much of the book is about how to connect with others and how much we can really know of each other. But are we achieving what we intend with what we write? Although books can provide so much pleasure, is it perhaps better to remain silent?

“I am aware that, every time I have a conversation with a book, I benefit from someone’s decision against silence. Still, I am greedy for what I am deprived: I have a friend who erases many sentences before putting down one; another friend keeps her thoughts to herself. Yet I believe that there is truth that is truer in the unexpressed; having spoken, I am apprehensive that I no longer have a claim to that truth. Why then write to trap oneself?”

There is nothing easy or conclusive in this book. However, there are sentences scattered throughout the book that read almost like aphorisms:

“To read oneself into another person’s tale is the opposite of how and why I read. To read is to be with people who, unlike those around one, do not notice one’s existence.”

“For years I have had the belief that all my questions will be answered by the books I am reading. Books, however, only lead to other books.”

“Uncharitably one writes in order to stop oneself from feeling too much; uncharitably one writes to become closer to that feeling self.”

“Is it really to express myself that I write? Not if I think about what it is in myself that needs to be expressed: hardly anything new. This tireless drive to write must have something to do with what cannot be told.”

“Writing is a confusing business. One’s inner clock, set to an exclusively private time, is bound only to what one writes. Life is lived in a different time zone. Caught in between one’s family. To protect them from the internal clock, one risks alienating them; to include them, one risks intrusion.”

“Writing, as long as it is one’s private freedom, will always be disloyalty.”

Finally, I love this counterpoint to Susan Orlean’s perspective in The Library Book, about writing a book being protection against being forgotten:

“The possibility of being remembered, however, alarms me — it is not from the wish for erasure, but the fear that people’s memories will erase something essential. Expectations met and unmet, interpretations sensible and skewed, understanding granted or withheld, scrutiny out of kindness and malevolence — all these require one to actively accommodate others’ memories. Why not turn away from such intricacy? The less I offer you to remember, the better I can remember you.”

My copy of the book came from the library, but when Scott checked it out for me (a belated credit to him for checking out nearly all those library books I mention borrowing in my last post), for some reason it didn’t register to my account, so in theory I could keep my borrowed copy forever. I stuck it full of sticky notes when I read it earlier this month, so now I have taken my notes and am finally ready to give it back. But not before having bought my own copy.

May 28, 2019

A Place to Soften Solitude: The Library Book by Susan Orlean

May 23, 2019

I’ve always been an enthusiastic user of the public library. Every time I visit a library, if I let myself wander the shelves even a little, I come out with a pile of books, no matter how many books I’m already reading or planning to read next. I borrow at least a hundred books a year, mostly through the genius hold system. I visit the online library catalog multiple times a week. I have my library card number memorized. My library account includes a large list of books to borrow one day.

But I don’t often physically go to the library. We do live a mere two blocks away from Hamilton’s Central Library, a large open modern space with lots of concrete and glass and white glossy surfaces. The Library Book by Susan Orlean made me appreciate the library beyond a collection of books, beyond its online catalog and marvellously efficient holds system, and as a community institution and social good.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean

The Library Book as a library book.

The book is primarily about a devastating fire at the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986, but it’s really about so much more. The whole book is a treat to read, but here are a couple of my favourite passages.

She describes the impetus for writing the book, and how she wrote the book in part as a way to get closer to her mother, who had dementia:

“Right before learning about the library fire, I had decided I was done with writing books. Working on them felt like a slow-motion wrestling match, and I wasn’t in the mood to grapple with such a big commitment again. But here I was. I knew part of what hooked me had been the shock of familiarity I felt when I took my son to our local library — the way it telegraphed my childhood, my relationship to my parents, my love of books. It brought me close, in my musings, to my mother, and to our sojourns to the library. It was wonderful and it was bittersweet, because just as I was rediscovering those memories, my mother was losing all of hers. … Each time I visited, she receded a little more — she became vague, absent, isolated in her thoughts or maybe in some pillowy blankness that filled in where the memories had been chipped away — and I knew that now I was carrying the remembrance for both of us. … The reason why I finally embraced this book project — wanted, and then needed, to write it — was my realization that I was losing her. I found myself wondering whether a shared memory can exist if one of the people sharing it no longer remembers it. Is the circuit broken, the memory darkened? My mother was the one person besides me who knew what those gauzy afternoons had been like. I knew I was writing this because I was trying hard to preserve those afternoons. I convinced myself that committing them to a page meant the memory was saved, somehow, from the corrosive effect of time.”

She explains how writing a book is a form of protection against the fear of being forgotten:

“The idea of being forgotten is terrifying. I fear not just that I, personally, will be forgotten, but that we are all doomed to being forgotten — that the sum of life is ultimately nothing; that we experience joy and disappointment and aches and delights and loss, make our little mark on the world, and then we vanish, and the mark is erased, and it is as if we never existed. … But if something you learn or observe or imagine can be set down and saved, and if you can see your life reflected in previous lives, and can imagine it reflected it subsequent ones, you can begin to discover order and harmony. You know that you are a part of a larger story that has shape and purpose — a tangible, familiar past and a constantly refreshed future. We are all whispering in a tin can on a string, but we are heard, so we whisper the message into the next tin can and the next string. Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.”

There’s a passage about the expression used in Senegal for death: his or her library has burned. Like our brains and bodies and memories and consciousness is a library, and when we die it’s all gone, but that books are one way for those stories to have their own lives.

The Library Book ends on a beautiful note:

“I went to the library late one day, just before closing time, when the light outside was already dusky and the place was sleepy and slow. Central Library and the Bradley Wing are so big that when the crowds thin out, the library can feel very private, almost like a secret place, and the space is so enveloping that you have no sense of the world outside. … The silence was more soothing than solemn. A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you’re all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don’t need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen. It was that affirmation that always amazed me. Even the oddest, most particular book was written with that kind of crazy courage — the writer’s belief that someone would find his or her book important to read. I was struck by how precious and foolish and brave that belief is, and how necessary, and how full of hope it is to collect these books and manuscripts and preserve them. It declares that these stories matter, and so does every effort to create something that connects us to one another, and to our past and to what is still to come. … I thought about my mother, who died when I was halfway done with this book, and I knew how pleased she would have been to see me in the library, and I was able to use that thought to transport myself for a split second to a time when I was young and she was in the moment, alert and tender, with years ahead of her, and she was beaming at me as I toddled to the checkout counter with an armload of books. … I looked around the room at the few people scattered here and there. Some were leaning into books, and a few were just resting, having a private moment in a public place, and I felt buoyed by being here. This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvellous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”

For more library goodness, check out Robert Dawson’s The Public Library: A Photographic Essay and his photo galleries of American and global public libraries. And I’ll leave you with a poem: “Don’t Go Into the Library” by Alberto Rios.

 “The library is dangerous, full
Of answers. If you go inside,

You may not come out
The same person who went in.”

May 23, 2019

My Favourite Books of 2018

December 31, 2018

Continuing my tradition of insatiable reading, I read 112 books in 2018. My reading goal was originally 66 books. I started the year planning to slow down, to make more room for writing, but that’s not how it worked out.

It’s not always easy to pick favourite books, because it’s not as simple as listing out the books I gave five stars. The best books are not quite what this is about, exactly. It’s more about what engaged me significantly or affected me strongly while reading, what stuck with me after finishing, what I want to keep thinking about long after closing the book.

Writing a short summary of the month’s reading in the newsletter has been a useful exercise in giving a little extra thought to what I read. Some books I forget very quickly, but forcing myself to write a sentence or two about each one helps to put them in perspective and makes them seem less disposable than I am sometimes inclined to treat them.

Since I’ve been working on a novel or three all year, my perspective as a writer very much informs my reading experience, of fiction in particular. I respond differently to books which include some element — story, style, structure, tense, voice, narration, whatever — that resonates with what I’m aiming at or dealing with in my own writing. Which is not to say that I only read fiction of the kind I want to write (I try to read diversely but definitely skew more literary than genre), but that I often enjoy novels more when they teach me something about my own writing, even if I can’t articulate exactly what that is.

So let’s go: my favourite books of the year, in no particular order:

How Fiction Works, James Wood. This book deserves its own post, which I plan to give it at some point.

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis. Such a romp. Historians travel to the past to track down an object needed for the recreation of a church. Of all the purposes time travel might serve, in this universe it’s reserved for the needs of academic historians in Great Britain. Things get pretty confusing as the end approaches, but it’s fun and funny enough not to matter.

Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik. A follow-up (not sequel) to Uprooted, another favourite, which did not disappoint. Totally engrossing and engaging. Beautiful storytelling and world-building.

All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym, Frauke Elisabeth Lenckos and Ellen J. Miller. I love Pym’s novels (of which I re-read three this year), and these essays were such a pleasure to read. They provided new insights into some of my favourite books and made me think a lot about my own writing.

The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe. A classic novel about women and careers and relationships and friendships. Totally engaging.

The Friend, Sigrid Nunez. A book about grief and writing and friendship and dogs. A case where the prose is lovely and the story, such as it is, is good, but then the structure and the bits about writing elevate it to something special.

Early Work, Andrew Martin. When I try to describe what this book is about, I start to think it must have been worse than I remember it being, but I really loved the experience of reading it. It was funny and horrible and sublime.

Motherhood, Sheila Heti. I had a long conversation about the decision to have kids with a friend early one Saturday morning in a McDonald’s while killing time before an ultimate frisbee beach tournament. I told her about this book and meant to lend it to her, but I had dog-eared so many pages and kept meaning to write down the passages that struck me, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’m not sure this novel helps with the decision-making process at all, but it’s a fascinating engagement with the question.

Boddhisatva Mind and Taking the Leap, Pema Chodron. I list these together because a lot of the content is very similar, although one is an audio lecture and the other is a short book. Full of ideas I return to again and again.

An Everlasting Meal, Tamar Adler. Immensely pleasurable to read and encapsulates a philosophy of cooking which I’d like to follow more than I do. In 2018 I cooked more than I have in a long time and began enjoying it in a new way. Both watching Salt Fat Acid Heat on Netflix and reading this book have inspired me to keep experimenting and enjoying the practice of cooking food.

Aside from these favourites, there were several books I really enjoyed which definitely warrant a reread: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, Kudos by Rachel Cusk, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (more here), Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, The Wrong Way to Save Your Life by Rachel Stielstra, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts, A Monk’s Guide to a Clean House and Mind by Shoukei Matsumoto, Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, and My Private Property by Mary Ruefle.

I could continue listing more books I liked, but I’d quickly end up listing pretty much every book I read, with the exception of maybe ten. So I’m ending it here and wishing you, dear reader, happy reading in 2019.

December 31, 2018

The Stories that Lie Between Book and Reader

May 18, 2018

Pamela Paul, My Life with Bob:

“It’s hard not to wish that everyone – my friends, my family members, writers I know and don’t know – would keep a Book of Books. What better way to get to know them? You could find out so much if you could get a read on where other people’s curiosities lie and where their knowledge is found: What are you reading? And what have you read? And what do you want to read next? Not knowing the answers to these questions means you miss a vital part of a persona, the real story, the other stories – not the ones in their books, but the stories that lie between book and reader, the connections that bind the two together.”

I’ve tracked my reading publicly for nearly 20 years, on Goodreads since 2008 and before that on a hand-coded HTML page on my personal website. I can’t imagine not tracking the books I read now. It’s second nature to record what I’m reading, when I started and when I finished. And to look back on what I’ve read and look forward to what I might read next.

Between book and reader

For Pamela Paul, her Book of Books (aka Bob) is meaningful and private because that’s what reading was for her. “Reading time became my time and place, another dimension where events operated by my own set of rules. … What you read revealed what you cared about and feared, what you hoped for because you didn’t have it, what questions you wanted answered without publicly unmasking your ignorance. I guarded this information fiercely.”

When she first wrote about Bob in the New York Times Book Review along with a photo of Bob’s first page, “I had revealed my inner life in a very public way,” she writes, “but at least, I reasoned, I’d done so in a safe place, among fellow readers.”

There is an element of intimacy to my Goodreads page (which is a very safe space, especially compared to many other social media), but it’s the kind of intimacy which I’ve long been comfortable with online. The exposure is indirect. It’s an easier, more obscure way to show what I’m interested in, how I’m feeling, what I’m concerned with. It lets me avoid saying something outright in a blog post, Facebook status, or Instagram caption. But it’s also true that some books I read have nothing to do with my life or have no impact on me.

A fuzzy kind of picture emerges from the sum of the books I read. My reading says something about me, but only as much as, say, photos do. What my home looks like, what kind of clothes I wear, how I wear my hair. These are ways to reveal a portion of my identity, but not any deep truths. They aren’t enough to tell whether we’d get along, whether I’d be a good friend, or what I believe in.

There might be such a thing as knowing too much about what other people read. It’s possible to place too much importance on books. Many very wonderful people read one type of book or only the most popular books or no books at all. Books are special, but there are so many things we consume that help make us who we are. I have the privilege and luxury of making reading a priority in my life. What you read or don’t read doesn’t define you or reveal some deep truth about you. It’s just one aspect of every complicated human being.

May 18, 2018