What I Read in July 2020

We are hurtling toward the end of summer. It’s almost here. It will be winter soon—yes, winter is coming and, yes, it’ll be a winter of discontent and the think pieces will come with it—but my immediate concern is not the end of winter but, instead, how far behind I have fallen on my monthly book blogging.

It took me so long to blog about what I read in May that I saved it for July and covered both May and June at once. I won’t do that this time. The end of August is almost here but I won’t wait. Here it is. The books I read in July.

Books Finished in July

The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky
The Body by Stephen King
Love by Roddy Doyle
The Breathing Method by Stephen King
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Books Partially Read in July

2666 by Roberto Bolano
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
A Perfect Spy by John le Carré
My Struggle: Volume 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Books Started and Abandoned in July:

Killer by Jonathan Kellerman (or was it Guilt by Jonathan Kellerman?)

Let’s start with what I haven’t finished yet

So this is embarrassing: the list of books that I partially read in May and June are the exact same books I partially read in July. While I often gloss over the books I partially read but didn’t finish, there’s a major theme here.

First, all but one of these partially read books is by an author who I recently read a different book by. I finished We Were Eight Years in Power in June and launched straight into Between the World and Me. I jumped immediately from Beloved to Song of Solomon. I have been on a le Carré streak that would make A Perfect Spy the fifth of his novels read by me over the last year. And the third book of My Struggle comes fast on the heels of its predecessor.

(The one exception is 2666, which has been a partially read book in every installment of these updates so far. I am slowly re-reading it on audiobook, tuning back in here and there, a few hours per month.)

All of this is not unusual for me. I go on tears with writers I like. Among the books I finished, the two Stephen Kings are the 5th and 6th books I’ve read by him this year. I did an Ishiguro double header at the end of May and beginning of June. This is something I do.

What is worth noting here is that I think it can become a problem for me, especially when, as indicated by the list above, I am jumping into something before realizing that this is the equivalent of taking another helping of the main course when maybe it was time for something less hearty, time for dessert, or time to take a break until the next meal altogether. (Not that such a break ever happens; I’m never entirely without a book.)

But there’s one more theme here that the titles don’t tell you: all of these partially read books are e-books or audiobooks. I think that says something. I have a lot of screen time these days. My job is screen time. My life is screen time. Our lives are screen time. So books that rely on technology to exist—whether it’s headphones, Bluetooth speaker, or Kindle—have less of a feeling of escape for me, less of an appeal.

Which brings us to what I did read. And, yes, it still includes includes two audiobooks.

Reading Dante’s Inferno on Vacation

The sixth season of Mad Men opens with Don Draper reading The Inferno on a beach in Hawaii. This is stuck in my head because on my recent Mad Men re-watch, I stopped on this episode—not by choice, but because Netflix lost the rights to Mad Men and I haven’t determined how to watch it in a world where I must pay for it. (I’ve been waiting for it to appear on HBO or Hulu or to make a triumphant return to the ever-weakening Netflix.)

I think it’s meant to be funny, the idea of Draper reading Dante’s Inferno on vacation. I’m sure it also points to a greater theme in that sixth season. I’m not entirely sure what that theme is yet and whether it’s subtle or obvious, as I haven’t seen what happens next. (The last time I watched it was 6+ years ago and I can’t recall.)

I do know that it took me over a year to get through this. I started reading it in the summer of 2019. I stalled out somewhere during that summer. I decided to finish reading it this year and read a few cantos of it on the morning of the 4th of July; if there was ever a moment in time to read about Dante’s trip to Hell, it’s the morning of America’s ostensible birthday in the bleak cyberpocalyptic dystopia that is 2020.

Is it worth reading Dante’s Inferno? I think so, as do lots and lots of other souls. And yes, I absolutely endorse the version of it that I read. It’s translated in a style both poetic and plain spoken.

For a simple example of how it’s translated, the famous words of warning inscribed above Hell’s front door in this version are:

Abandon All Hope, You Who Enter Here.

You. Not Thou, not Ye, but You. That’s how it is translated. You know what’s going on through the language, even if it’s hard to tell literally what’s happening. (He’s in Hell talking to yet another obscure Italian murderer, I guess?)

The introduction of the book helps, too, and the notes, and all the other included materials. It touches on one of the things that resonated with me the most: Inferno isn’t just about a trip to Hell. It’s about a guy who went to Hell and then decided to go home and write a really long poem about it. As John Frecerro says in the Forward, “the pilgrim becomes the poet who has been with us from the beginning.”

On Stephen King’s Novellas

Are novellas books? Also, has this blogging format run its course? I just wrote what would make a nice blog post about reading a recent translation of The Inferno, and now I still have four more books to respond to. If I’m going to write these monthly blog posts about every book I read, I should start reading fewer books.

The Body and The Breathing Method are both good. The Body is great. Maybe his best? My favorite, at least? And like The Inferno, there is that same distinction between poet and pilgrim, the person telling the tale and the younger version who lived it.

In the future, I’ll write something more about whether a novella is a book or not, but not today.

Love by Roddy Doyle

The only book I had previously read by Roddy Doyle was Bullfighting, his short story collection I liked so much I would call him my favorite author, had I read anything else by him.

Love might be a perfect contemporary novel. I haven’t read any reviews of it. I don’t know if other people agree.

But I do know that Roddy Doyle isn’t the famous writer he deserves to be. Bullfighting has 15 reviews on Amazon. Fifteen! Is this a mistake? Is there an issue with Amazon’s data? The Moonborn has more than 15 Amazon reviews. (It has 18.)

It might be his audience, or his characters. They’re always white, always men, always middle-aged, always dealing with the issues that white middle-aged men deal with. They go to the pub. They go on vacation. They deal with work, death and love.

Love—which has only 62 Amazon reviews, as of now—seems a spiritual sequel to Bullfighting, whether or not it was marketed that way. I guess you don’t market something as a spiritual sequel to a book that didn’t make a major impact.

Or maybe Roddy Doyle is famous? He won the Man Booker Prize, which I think is a big deal. He has been published in The New Yorker, which remains significant, I think.

Either way, if I wrote a list of the Best Books of 2020, Love would be on it. The trouble is, I’ve only read two books that came out in 2020. I typically don’t read books the year they come out. But maybe Obama will read it and put it on his list, the only Best Books of the Year list that I typically read and care about. Would Obama like Love? Will it be on his list? Is it as good of a book as I think it was?

I love the way Love unfolds, the way it’s told, the way it might not be about anything at all. It’s two men in a bar. Two old friends. One of them thinks he has something very important to tell the other. The other doesn’t care and thinks his friend is a liar. He has bigger things in his life. They drink a lot. They talk. The story unfolds. It’s good. It’s funny. It’s sad. I think people should read it, but I’m not sure who. Start with Bullfighting. It’s short stories. If you like those and want more, Love will be there.

Such a Fun Age

I wanted to read something different. I scrolled through some lists of the best recent contemporary fiction. I wanted something like Love and unlike Dante’s Inferno, something set in the present and compelling. Something like The Dinner by Herman Koch or, well, I don’t know what else. I don’t read contemporary page turners very often and I wanted to find one.

I came across Such a Fun Age on a list, I don’t know which one. I was googling what to read. I read that it was about a Black babysitter accused of kidnapping, that it was riveting, that it was by a young Black female author, that it addressed real social issues and was also a good read. So I read it and, for the most part, I really liked it.

And here is a book with over two thousand reviews.

Such a Fun Age is one of those books that, whether you are enjoying it or not, you cannot put down and you need to find out what happens. You want to find out what happens to Emira Tucker, the babysitter accused of kidnapping, and her white influencer boss Alix Chamberlain. Sometimes these books end and you hate them. I can recall books where I raced to the ending in one long sitting, only to realize I was racing through a series of cliffhangers to no meaningful or purposeful conclusion, flying through yellow lights just to end on a permanent red. (See also: The Outsider by Stephen King.)

This book certainly follows some of those tropes: it’s fast-paced, exciting, interesting, engaging, about significant social issues—racism, both personal and institutional—without relying on violence to drive the storyline.

But there is one issue I had with Such a Fun Age: the entire storyline is based on one enormous coincidence that, once the book has finished, seems impossible to comprehend. What exacerbated this issue for me is that I read the entire book thinking it wasn’t a coincidence. I thought I was reading a work of dramatic irony, where the ending would reveal that the thing the main characters mistook for a coincidence—or, more accurately, a series of impossible-to-believe coincidences building into a storyline that consumes the entire narrative— was really the result of a conspiracy or manipulation by one of the other characters.

It turns out I mis-read the book. I braced myself for the stunning reveal that would occur at the end, when we found out that what Emira and Alix had read as coincidence was really cunning manipulation conducted by the man who had come between them. Turns out that, no, yeah, it was just a bunch of weird coincidences. Just a total coincidence that this guy was at the center of huge turning points in each of their lives and that he also was consistently in the right place at the right time to drive the plot forward. I’m not going to bother with all the recapping and spoiling, but it just stretched the line of believability for me too far. I know that books have to have a certain level of suspended disbelief, that some crazy things have to happen. Otherwise, why is a story worth telling? But the way in which this story unfolded had me continually thinking that a reveal was around the corner, a reveal that would explain the strange coincidence at the center of the book. That reveal never happened and, as a result, I really felt confused by the end of the book.

I did go find reviews for Such a Fun Age, after finishing it, and found my reading validated. Slate, The Observer, The Boston Globe and others all noted that the coincidence was a little hard to swallow.

But there is a lot to learn from this book, I think, both in terms of how to tell a well-paced story and how to tell a story about race, society, and the world we live in that both entertains and provokes thought.

And that brings me to my other major takeaway from the book… it reminded me of Jonathan Franzen. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good, in the sense that it tells a story of the world today that pushes believability while keeping the reader engrossed. But, also like Jonathan Franzen, I think there’s a fundamental disconnect between the author and some of the characters. You can often tell when Franzen does not like one of his characters. In his case, it’s usually the women. The same is true of Reid in Such a Fun Age. I think she wrote a book where the point-of-view shifts between the two characters, but Emira is sympathetic (if naive), while you can tell that Reid just hates Alix Chamberlain. Cannot stand her. Yes, there’s something entertaining in it, but the author paints a picture of such a calculating-yet-idiotic faux-woke white woman that you wish maybe, just maybe Reid had found one or two ways to make her Alix less pathetic and more sympathetic. And the best comparison I can think of is that Kiley Reid’s disdain for Alix Chamberlain resembles Jonathan Franzen’s disdain for his female characters, particularly Patty Berglund of Freedom.

Can an author hate one of their own characters? Sure. But maybe it shouldn’t be so obvious to the reader. But maybe it can? They’re both successful writers. They must know something I don’t.

The Book Abandoned

Before reading Such a Fun Age and Love, I also tried a book by Jonathan Kellerman. It was about a murder or something. I found it at a garage sale and will be giving it to a Little Free Library. I’m sure it’s just right in the right context, for the right reader, but it was not what I was looking to read.

Stay tuned, as I’ll soon be writing about what I read in August, and then I have more to write about novellas, audiobooks, and the links between stories and memories.

Blog Posts Written by D. F. Lovett