I'm moving to New Zealand

Fictionally speaking. Greta & Valdin made me do it!

Dear Readers,

Is it just me, or has your life felt more extremely online than usual this week, too?

Sure, this feeling partly stems from immersing myself in Rebecca K. Reilly’s Greta & Valdin. The novel’s structured in a series of alternating chapters from the perspective of the two siblings in their 20s. The plot and several family secrets unfold as locations are selectively tracked or not tracked, dating apps uploaded and deleted, their father pulls up an old friend’s Facebook profile to settle a family argument in front of Greta’s new girlfriend, a moment scrolling in the bathroom turns to eavesdropping on a very private conversation, phones are left behind and retrieved, charged or not charged, text messages received or ignored. Usually my book provides an antidote to scrolling. This one made it clear just how impossible it is to separate contemporary daily life from the parts of it we live online.

But the time I spent online this week went way beyond the book. It started last Monday with my official resignation from my career of 19 years in higher education, along with the announcement of my new role as Executive Director of the Tucson Festival of Books—one of the largest in the country—in the local news.

Receiving so many messages sharing in my excitement from my local and BookStack friends who saw the news helped with the grief that comes with leaving an entire career behind and the heat wave.

Every summer around the first of July, we get at least two solid weeks of temps over 105°F. This year it has been even hotter. This is when I’d normally remind my husband that when I came here 20 years ago, I wasn’t planning to die here. I’m looking into real estate in Victoria or Dunedin. Maybe Villarica. To which he has a practiced response: Many people do in fact move here with just that plan in mind. We’re ahead of the curve, he says.

For all the new subscribers who found us this way, I created a post to introduce myself and explain a bit more about how The Booktender started this big change for me:

And that same day, a real-life sibling story of literary note broke. I felt heartsick to read Andrea Skinner’s essay in the Toronto Star about her abuse at the hands of her stepfather and the family rift caused by her mother’s justifications and denials. She tore out her beating heart and laid it down upon the altar the literary world has built to her mother, Alice Munro. The way Skinner’s siblings stood by her, and the work they’ve done to heal their relationship after they were all silenced, is astounding.

When I read the news Monday, I briefly unpublished the piece I wrote for The Booktender last May as I thought about how I wanted to include this new information. I’ve republished with some changes and I want to be transparent about them.

"In the end you're a different person"

Then there’s the hype around the NYT best 100 books of the 21^st century (gift link for those who missed it). It built at the pace of 20 books per day throughout the week-- to increasing angst in the comments as it became clear the final list would be as high falutin’, Euro-centric and middle-aged as we might expect from the New York Times. The anticipation of a new list to check out every morning and all the buzz from the online book influencers around their predictions and thoughts about the rankings sucked me in.

Since our July theme is Sibling Stories, I scanned the list for you in case you want to add any of them to your TBR. Here are the three sibling-centered stories I found.

#66 We the Animals by Justin Torres

#26 Atonement by Ian McEwan

#25 Random Family: Love, Drugs, Troubh and Coming of Age in The Bronx by Adrian Nicole Le Blanc

July: Reading Sibling Stories

Did I miss any? I haven’t seen anyone complaining about the lack of sibling stories in the list and I’m wondering: Does 3 out of 100 seem low to you?

Both Atonement and Random Family are among my own favorites and I listed both in my reader participation “ballot,” an option offered to paid NYT subscribers to increase engagement.

When it came to filling that out, I could not take the project very seriously.

Since I read both literary fiction and serious non-fiction, it immediately felt false to set the most memorable from each category over the past 25 years against each other. I had to divide my ballot 60/40 to even find a way to begin. No other genres were going to earn one of those meager spots, since I don’t feel fit to judge the “best” poetry and I’m not going to give a spot to Brene Brown on my “best” list though I do read more psychology/self-help than my newsletter belies. Sorry, not sorry.

When I started to compare titles to decide which to include, I also felt an instinct to rebel against the whole concept. Since my ballot wouldn’t influence the official “best” list, it seemed boring to favor books I expected would end up on it. I wanted to vote for some underdogs. My list includes two titles, The Devil’s Highway and Everything You Ever Wanted, I had to manually enter because they were not even in the NYT’s database of over 3,000 books their official voters had nominated.

Of all the books I’ve read, I tend to best remember stories of feminine potency, of reinvention and redemption (or the impossibility of it), books about people living at the edges of a society that has left them with few options to belong, and metafiction. And while I do enjoy reading the “It” books reviewed in the big publications every year, I get a real thrill when I take a chance on a book less travelled and end up enthralled. In the end, this eclectic list reflects a sliver of my taste over these past 25 years. It’s “the best” reflection of my own taste in the moment, and it making it made me rethink what I want to read more of over (more works in translation, more backlist, more younger authors) in the next couple of months.

Speaking of lists: if you decide to read Greta & Valdin you’ll be glad for the handy list of characters at the beginning. Greta and her brother are the siblings at the heart of the story, but their family includes two other sets of siblings as well. Their father Linsch and his brother, Thony, as well as Thony’s husband Guiseppe and his brother Xabier, who’s very important to the plot. The family’s history repeats itself in unconventional patterns, with multiple affairs involved. It’s a romantic comedy of errors rather than a drama. The list helped with keeping so many G & V names and the complex ties straight so I could focus on enjoying the dry pop culture jokes, humorous takes on human nature, and let myself feel all the feelings.

In one of my favorite heartwarming scenes, Greta and Valdin play a game to ease his anxiety. She creates a one sentence narrative describing a popular song and he has to guess the title. It plays out with a sweet and funny ending, like so many late night conversations with loved ones do. In another, she bakes him a cake but he never shows so she goes to Wendy’s. In another, he buys her a bag of limes and I damn near cried.

Greta & Valdin takes on serious topics of neurodivergence, racism and homophobia in a way I can’t really compare to any other novel I’ve read recently—ruthless and stylish at the same time, without ever losing the specificity of the characters’ point of view or their care for each other.

And honestly, the best part of reading this book this weekend?  It takes place in New Zealand, where the parliament voted 119-1 to introduce a ban on semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles within a month of the mass shooting in Christchurch in 2019. After this weekend’s political horror, I am moving other books with New Zealand ties to the front of my TBR. Eleanor Catton, I’m looking at you.

Please let me know in the comments:

• Are there other writers from New Zealand or books set in New Zealand you’d recommend?

• If you’ve read Greta & Valdin, what did you think?

• Has this week’s Best 100 list or another recent event shifted your reading mood?