What I Read in February 2020

At the beginning of last month, I did something I hadn’t done before: I blogged about what books I’d been reading. Five books total. Four non-fiction and one novel.

The trend surprised me. 80% non-fiction? How had this happened? It had never been this way before. Now, the trend continues. In February, 2020, I finished two books. Both books were non-fiction. (This puts my non-fiction rate at 85%.)

Books I Finished Reading in February:

I read two books cover-to-cover last month.

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

Then there were the books I read some of but did not finish (to which my Goodreads page happily testifies.)

Books I Partially Read in February

Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby by Sarah Churchwell
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
The Stories of John Cheever

Books I Stalled Out on Entirely in February

And then there’s a third category of book. The books I was reading and, right now, am not actively reading, but which I intend to pick up again.

2666 by Roberto Bolano
The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman
Beloved by Toni Morrison

Why I Stalled Out

Before we get into the books I did read, let’s discuss the three I stopped reading.

2666: A re-read, yes, but one in which I’ve made no progress lately. I am in the midst of “The Part About the Crimes,” the book’s fourth section.
The Golden Compass: I’d been reading this on my Kindle and my phone. The new TV show inspired me to finally read this. I had tried it several times as a child but thought it was finally time to read it. It isn’t going well, although I do mostly like it, aside from the author’s inconsistent use of perspective.
Beloved: I’m enjoying this book but I think I need to make it a priority. It has been juggled in my reading list against too many others. That, and while Toni Morrison reads it beautifully as an audiobook, I don’t know that it’s a book I want to consume as an audiobook.

There’s another theme here. If I am to look solely at the data available to me, I’ll see that finished were 100% non-fiction and the stall-outs were 100% fiction. I’ll avoid any conclusions about this data until more of the trend is available.

Notes on Furious Hours

Furious Hours is about two things: a) a man who murdered most of his family members in a series of bizarre crimes over several years and b) Harper Lee’s life, including her failure to write about these crimes.

I wrote down the following notes immediately after finishing Furious Hours, knowing they’d probably be incorporated of this blog post:

Why is this the order the story was told in?
Was it written this way with the intentions of being divided up and reorganized but then they decided to just leave it as is?
Imagine a narrative that the shifts from Tom Radney to Harper Lee to Truman Capote back to Lee, back to Radney.
What about Burns, the final murderer? Why do we learn so little of him?

The first issue I have with Furious Hours is that it sold itself as a book about Harper Lee investigating a murder and that’s not what the book is about. Harper Lee is mentioned in the first half of the book once. In the prologue. In a scene that is never returned to. The second half of the book is her life story, which includes—but doesn’t focus on—the murders that the first half of the book was about.

Frankly, Furious Hours is a good book with the unfortunate potential to be a much better book. Or, maybe that’s not an accurate or fair way to look at it. What I do know is that it’s not the book it is advertised as.

Truth vs. Truthiness vs. Post-Truth vs. True Crime

At the center of Furious Hours—or, at least, the second half of it—is Harper Lee’s vision of truth. It created an unresolved rift between Lee and Truman Capote. Lee wanted to write a true crime book about some murders that happened in Alabama. She never finished writing this book. Capote, meanwhile, wrote a true crime book about some different murders. Lee didn’t like that he fictionalized aspects of the story he told, or that he might have, or that at least his vision of the truth was looser than hers.

The trouble with this is that I think the author of Furious Hours (Casey Cep) tries too loyally to be true to Harper Lee’s vision of truth, while never investigating the origins of Lee’s view of truth. If Lee had allowed herself to report more on gossip or rumors, she could have finished the true crime book she wanted to write.

My take here is that, as some kind of homage to Lee, Cep also sticks to the truth too closely, particularly in the book’s narrative structure. Why tell the story of Harper Lee’s life chronologically, detached from the murders and crimes covered in the first half of this book?

None of this is to say I regret reading this book. I liked it and have recommended it to a few people. But I am certain it could have been a better book.

On Doing Nothing

How to Do Nothing is my favorite book I’ve read this year, although I’m not sure why yet. It’s one of those books I just read and already might re-read.

Both books read in February were read (and recommended) by President Obama in 2019.

The book contained no enormous revelations. It’s somewhere between a work of philosophy and a self-help book that didn’t teach me anything in particular, other than to remind me that it’s good to slow down. That health is more than just deleting social media apps off your phone or considering your internet consumption.

I mean all of this in a good way. It’s an excellent book. But unlike a lot of the other books it might be compared to, it doesn’t promise some answer to everything. Odell does not puff up her arguments with phony claims to thought leadership or having all the answers.

It’s just one person’s consideration of the current state of our world and some thoughts on how things could be a little better if we all did more nothing.

Does Every Non-Fiction Book Need a Subtitle?

Now, let’s revisit the nonfiction I’ve read or partially read this year.

Just the titles:

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

Every one of these titles works on its own. Stack them up together and you have a funny joke.

What is happening here? Why does every non-fiction book have a subtitle? Is this required by publishers? By libraries? By the law? Do readers need subtitles to know what they’re getting into?

These questions sent me down an internet rabbit hole. First, the Wikipedia page on book subtitles, which “has multiple issues”, including a general lack of citations.

Next, a LitHub article on this same matter: “Why, Exactly, Do We Have Subtitles on Books?” by Mary Laura Philpott. A good read, while mostly her exploration of trying to give her own books of essays a subtitle.

Then, a Washington Post article that I couldn’t read because of a paywall but that I think, if I could, I would really like. (It’s $29 a year to read this article and I’m considering it.)

More direct, there’s Bill Morris’s “Are Run-On Subtitles Literature’s New Flop Sweat?” Worth reading. He doesn’t stick limit himself to the argument of his headline and instead explores why exactly books are receiving titles like ones listed above. Including the suggestion that SEO is behind it or that, as mentioned above, it’s due to the insistence of publishers.

Then, this Guardian article from 2008: “The power of subtitle differences”.

This article wasn’t only written to give a good argument for subtitles, but it does do that:

“It can offer an essential explanation about the book and its premise; without a subtitle it's hard to distinguish your Flat Earth News from The World Is Flat.”

The article’s more direct point is that subtitles have a history of changing from hardcover to paperback—which can either be a solution or a problem, and is almost always a matter of marketing—as in the case of:

Andrew Keen's treatise on the ill-effects of online self-expression changed from the wordy The Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture and Our Values, to what sounds like a call to arms (or the Luddite equivalent), How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture. Keen explains, "This subtitle wasn't scary enough. It didn't assault my senses, keep me up at night, traumatise my innermost being. The problem was too much Alexis De Tocqueville and not enough Boris Karloff."

So what is my conclusion at the end of this blog post and this exploration into why every non-fiction book has a subtitle? I’ve decided the aforementioned Wikipedia page needs some editing. And that I have a list of articles with which to do it.

That, and I should read a novel this month.

Blog Posts Written by D. F. Lovett