Does your reading ever inadvertently take on a theme? Earlier this year I was on a “girl” streak: Tessa Hadley’s Clever Girl, and then Edna Obrien’s trilogy collection: The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in their Married Bliss. All of these are excellent novels set in the 50s and 60s, which perhaps explains the titular focus on girls and how they survived (or collapsed) under that era’s gender-oppressive norms. (Spoiler: they mostly collapsed.)
My most recent reading had a blue theme. I read Deborah Levy’s August Blue, about a concert pianist who walks off stage in the middle of a performance and spends the book piecing together this breakdown in light of a somewhat mysterious past. It was magical as well as beautiful.
I followed that with The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, a book I’d long owned but never read. Honestly, I finally picked it up because I heard Zadie Smith praise it in an interview as structural inspiration for her new historical novel, The Fraud, which I’m excited to read. It’s another spare and beautiful novel, set in the late 1700s, about the early life of the philosopher Novalis.
In the midst of all this, my friend mailed me a Joyce Carol Oates’ story torn from her copy of Harper’s Magazine. The story was called The Return. A day or so after I received and read it, the New Yorker Fiction Podcast featured Annie Ernaux’s story, Returns. I loved them both.
Is all this a glitch in the matrix? A literary synchronicity? Probably not. Honestly, I’d just come out of two rather punishing books so maybe it was just my brain trying to hype me up about reading again.
And it worked!
Do you have any reading coincidences or rabbit holes you want to ramble about? I’d love to hear.
Cheers,
Lacy
P.S. Remember how I got fired? Well, I’m feeling better, thanks largely to this George Saunders essay about the scary & dreary slog that prefaced his first published book. Also helpful: Epsom salt baths in the middle of the afternoon and committing absolutely to writing every day.
P.P.S. I watched the recent Joyce Carol Oates’ documentary, A Body in the Service of Mind, and then stacked up a bunch of her backlist. She’s written over 100 books! Did you know she’s only 6 years younger than Sylvia Plath? I guess that strikes me because it underscores just how much we lost there.