Books from June & July / 2024
Little books, strange books, grounded books and cosmic books - summer reading has never been so sparing and gentle.
Being in the thick of summer planning, trips and Japanese studies means my brain capacity for reading has shrunk to a record-breaking size. It isn’t the most worrying thing, of course - in fact, it’s just how it goes sometimes, and it makes me a little extra grateful for the books I am able to enjoy, no matter if I enjoyed them at a snail’s pace. We have to be reminded every now and again, don’t we, of the pleasure of reading as a mode of rest. Without further ado, here’s all I read this June and July. 🔆
Embassytown by China Miéville
Finally, my first Miéville! Which broke my brain! If there’s anything I took away from this book, it’s that Miéville understands the English language (and language in general) in a such a deep way as to completely befuddle and force me to ask myself if I even know what the heck comes out my mouth when I speak English. In this story of Embassytown, a colony on the edge of all that is known about the universe and whose natives are a species called the Ariekei, the intangible boundaries and potential of language are explored by transforming them into physical shapes and struggles. What would it be like to communicate with other forms of being whose language is utterly different from everything we know? What gaps become impossible to cross? And what impossible bridges could we build in order to cross?
The words that make up this world often felt inconceivable… until I realized it was from them that my imagination could be spurred to conjure it, however feeble the attempt and result might’ve been. You have to work hard to read this book partly because Miéville allows you to use his words to build his world with your free will - it’s the type of trust between author and reader I’ve been appreciating more these days as I continue to venture into speculative fiction. While I am left with a foggy understanding of the book (foggy enough that I can barely put this little ramble together) I’m glad to have spent time with a story as complex, fun and imaginative as this one.
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
What my brain needed in June in terms of reading was something like Howl’s Moving Castle: a light, fluffy cloud kind of book with a nice amount of imagination and warmth. My brain wanted simplistic sentences that could be peeled by my eyes the same way one peels off a long strip of colorful candy sweetness. Jones’s classic fantasy novel delivered. More and more I’m starting to see how a book like this has the ability to help a poor reader out of a rut and make her excited again to read - it turns the wheels of my often slackened imagination little by little, reminding me of the pleasure of simply enjoying a story without having to work too hard for it. This kind of book spoils us, doesn’t it! Not to mention that as I read it, my imagining of the characters and Howl’s castle were made more vivid and even more enjoyable by the Studio Ghibli film. From the first page it’s clear that this is the sort of tale best read out loud, that kind of traditional fantasy that comes to life out of the spell of hearing the words; I’m sure that if/when I meet my future children this will be a top candidate for bedtime reading. And I’m saying this because it felt as if this humorous, warm story about a talking fire demon, charming and melodramatic wizard, and eldest daughter who thinks she’s a failure cleansed my reader’s soul a bit. The word pure keeps popping up in my head, and I now feel confident in continuing to meet other books, knowing I’ve got Howl, Sophie, Calcifer and Michael somewhere behind me cooking bacon and selling potions to folks near and far.
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono
This is a teeny tiny story, which can be read in ten minutes, of soft perseverance. It is simply one man’s account of a somewhat life-changing encounter with an elderly man who spends his days planting seeds. There’s really nothing more to it but the years that roll by, the changes in life and land turning like the pages of a wind-blown book. As the narrator revisits the land of all those seemingly insignificant seedlings throughout his years, you could imagine the pages turning ever greener, ever fuller of unexpected life. The toil of the elderly man happens in the background; it is as humble as the seeds he plants, but their fruition makes for a lovely reading experience. I could imagine the whole story so easily and with a sad longing - a beige bare land finally evolving into bubbling rivers and miles of trees offering their shade.
Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse (trans. by Damion Searls)
In the long term I don’t know if this is a book that will stay with me, or it might take a reread or two for it to really settle. However, if you were to sit me in a room with nothing but a chair and a voice from above reading aloud random passages by random writers, I think I’d be able to recognize Fosse’s prose in an instant. Just imagine the meandering, endless stream of your words falling out of your mouth and onto a blank page, the black stain of ink solidifying before your eyes. Fall, fall, falling: the sounds you make when emotion fills you to the brim and drowns language, the words you speak and the words you think, new and repeating. Fosse’s writing felt like pure falling thought.
Between your entrance into life and exit out of it is a lot of living. All that living, and all the time that swishes to and fro within it, is often what stories are made of. But this slim novel concerns itself with those two moments that bookend everything we have gone and will go through. It concerns itself with one man’s deciphering of the all-too familiar world that has held him from birth, and as the scenes of his life manifest and then dissolve like gliding shapes over water, the gradual realization that what we’ve always known could turn into a beautiful kind of unknown quietly pushes the reader onwards.
My Death by Lisa Tuttle
When I read a book on a plane my senses tend to get a bit numb, which never helps me when I try articulating how my reading experience was. However, reaching through that numbness with a pair of potentially translucent hands connected to potentially nothing in the dark behind them was My Death, a strange little book that makes you think, “am I wearing my self inside out…?” A story that can feel this way - circular, like clothes worn the wrong way, like a song just slightly off tune - in such a short, spare style will never not impress me. All you have to know about this one is there’s a middle-aged writer who, after her husband passes away, decides to write a somewhat neglected female artist’s biography. Now you can just open to page one and let Tuttle’s writing take you swiftly along the sea of time all the way to a huge whirlpool into which you’ll be inevitably sucked. Who knows what you’ll find at the bottom, but be assured that it won’t be terribly normal and it’ll be anything but boring.
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
At some point in this book the main character, Leigh is described as someone obsessed with nostalgia. Immediately the chime of empathy went off in me, for nostalgia is the wavering surface of water that I could gaze at day after day while the bustle of real life fades in and out somewhere behind me. Sometimes I find it a strength, a core part of who I was always meant to be; sometimes I know I am holding onto it the way a scared toddler holds tight onto her mother’s shirt.
A few days after finishing In Ascension, and while I’m still unsure of how to interpret everything that happens in it, one of the things I’m most unsure of is Leigh. And I’m not saying that is a bad thing. Instead, it makes me wonder about the inaccessibility of us humans - how there could be a subconscious decision-making or reality-making so persistent and deep inside a person that she can’t even register it herself, though it tugs her through life. And for us nostalgic humans, isn’t it pulling us toward, back and around to the beginning or true source of our identity? For our narrator the act of circularity seems to be everywhere and everything - the thing that drives her down to the depths of the sea, to the other side of the world away from her loved ones, just always away and towards some gigantic life-answer but at the same time always back around to the childhood in which her father abused her. Seemingly self-aware of her habit to run away and yet she could never stop herself. At times the epic journey in the book felt futile, frustrating to read about a person who could’ve and should’ve stayed to face the terrible trials of life, but then there again the ideas of inaccessibility and circularity would float up from the pages to strike a chord in me. Leigh and her journey make me wonder if the act of running from what hurt us could also be the thing that leads us toward finding a perspective that brings forth a kind of healing and renewal. When was grief, guilt, trauma or regret ever linear?
Seems like my summer reading this year is gonna be a bit light, but how is yours going? Any summer hits, misses or surprises? Feel free to let this nosy reader know!
My Death was one of my favorite reads of last year, and I still can't quite articulate anything coherent about it!
Really intrigued by Embassytown! I read some China Miéville for my masters a few years ago and was quite surprised and impressed but haven't put much of an effort into exploring his backlist but this sounds like an excellent pick to get back into his work.