Hello and congratulations on surviving August to all 400 of you. When I started this newsletter in January, 12 of my most sympathetic friends subscribed. And now: we’ve got enough people to fill a 747.
Luckily, The Booktender has a magic plane where there are no middle seats. Thank you for choosing to fly with me and receive this little bag of literary peanuts each week. And thanks to Andy and Manny for upgrading their seats as paying subscribers this week! You get 10,000 bonus miles.
About August
True to its name, August started auspiciously, as I posted my favorite and longest and most liked reading list of the year so far, Reading the ’70s— and started my new job as Executive Director, Tucson Festival of Books. So much book excitement!
And yet— August also tends to be sticky and this one was no exception. Sticky weather and sleeplessness slowed my brain and body. Sticky situations and lots to learn made my momentum feel sluggish some days, even as the weeks seemed to fly by. I found myself repeating “it’s going to take the time it takes” as my mantra.
My reading life proceeded accordingly. I did read some. But the books I read were dense and felt long, like The Flamethrowers. Or they took me a long time to process, like Didion’s Democracy: A Novel. Many of the titles on that August list I was so excited about? Dropped cargo.
So to bring summer in for a landing, here’s a brief ode to everything I didn’t read this month.
Let’s normalize things taking the time they take.
What I didn’t read in August
Oh the irony. This book is the one I built the August list around. It has been on my shelf for more than ten years (different cover) and even survived the great purge of 2019, an event I will write about here someday. When I started August reading, I thought, “I’ll save the best for last.” Sticky August slowed me down, but really—I do want to read it.
This may be one I have built up unrealistic expectations for. But back she goes, to my Pile of Potential, the Shelf of My Infinite Soul. Her someday will come.
Did I read this? No, I did not. But— I have a list idea for the Fall that this will fit into perfectly. I’m coming back for you, Miz Abbzug.
The God of the Woods has been convincingly declared the book of the summer and I did not read it, even though it was on Obama’s list AND Liz Moore was a guest on the Jimmy Fallon show. I bought it when it first came out, emboldened by my recent enjoyment of Disappearing Earth despite generally not being able to stomach child-in-peril stories.
I want to know what that pink drip represents (nail polish?) but I hesitated and now summer is over. See you next year?
Thought it would be a hoot to knock this out in an afternoon before watching the movie on the anniversary of its release. But I only made it to page 18. This novel about a fish is not for me.
I did read the foreword, in which Benchley describes carrying around a newspaper article about a shark attack for years before writing the book, and shares his self-doubts. If you have an idea for a book, just start writing it already. It could not be worse than this one and it might even become a blockbuster movie despite itself.
I did read this one, but mostly not in August so technically it still belongs on this list. The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne was on my July Sibling Stories themed list. The last quarter of it hung around the first weeks of August like a pesky little brother.
But there was an unexpectd synchronicity to the timing. When I put Democracy on my list, I knew Didion was Dunne’s aunt and that they were close. But I didn’t know the novel was dedicated to Dominque Dunne, Griffin’s sister whose murder is the central event in his memoir.
Reading Democracy, I noticed some uncanny similarities between memories Dunne shares of that time around Dominique’s murder and experiences attributed to characters in the novel. I’m going to get another essay out of this synergy, and I have some ideas about where to pitch it.
And what I did read
This novel begins with a mystery: what’s pulling Dana from 1976 into the antebellum South and how did she lose her left arm below the elbow? We see her travel multiple times between her home and history, where she lives the violence of enslavement and experiences the fear and humiliation of her female ancestors through the lens of of a black woman who has the advantage of knowing a different way of life. She ultimately finds courage to resist the white man on whose rape and abuse of her enslaved great-great-grandmother her own existence ultimately depends.
Both Dana and her husband Kevin are writers, and I found the themes around the subversive powers of literacy and empathy complemented the story, in all its brutality, well. I enjoyed this structure of the novel, the way it moves between time periods as the answers to the questions it poses build.
By Night in Chile/Nocturno de Chile is a re-read for me, as I first encountered this book while living in Chile from 2000-2003.
On my first day in Santiago, Pinochet returned from house arrest in London, where he’d been held under orders of a Spanish judge for crimes related to disappearance and torture following his coup. In Plaza Los Leones near where I was staying, I encountered a party celebrating the return of “Tata” or “Grandpa” as his fans called him. I spoke to young people to try to understand this reception of such a notorious person. They told me they were celebrating the man who had kept Chile from becoming Cuba.
I hadn’t understood this element of Chilean society before, the degree to which many of those who remained in the country had turned their eyes away from the means by which that end was achieved.
Early the next morning, I went to Plaza Italia to see about an apartment. There the plaza was marked with fresh graffiti proclaiming that the military police were murderers. A tank with a water canon stood nearby, in case the demonstrators should return and the unrest begin again.
This was the novella that helped me understand the history I was witnessing. It’s told in one single paragraph, and this time around instead of trying to read that I listened to the audiobook in Spanish purchased from Libro.fm which has a pretty good selection of popular Spanish language audiobooks to choose from. It’s a satirical send up of the complicity not only of the conservative elements of Chilean religious and military society during the military coup of 1973 and the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship, but also of its literary community and intellectuals who took a supine stance or were complicit with the torture of their compatriots.
For the Roberto Bolaño curious, I recommend starting with By Night in Chile/Nocturno de Chile. It’s short and introduces well the themes of his longer works and will give you a sense of his fragmentary style and the degree of darkness he’ll sink to, so you can gauge whether the 912 pages of a book like 2666 might be for you.
A reprint of Chris Andrews’s translation is out from Picador USA on Tuesday, Sept 3.
So tell me:
What did you not read this month?
Which book(s) would you pair with The Monkey Wrench Gang?
Any themes you’d like to see me create a list for this fall?
Is that nail polish? Or something else?
Aisle or window?
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Haha I love this piece Abra - although I think the list of what I didn’t read is so long it is perhaps incomprehensible
I love the brutal honesty and twist of a “didn’t read” list. I’m an aisle girl so that I can get up whenever I need to use the restroom. On God of the Woods, definitely looks like nail polish, and I’m right with you in catching it next summer because the hold queue is just way too long for this year, ha.