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Reading for Change in the New World

January 19, 2025 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I was going to make this a New Year’s post, but really there have been so many markers of “new” in the past few months, from the election to me leaving my job of eight years, that January 1 didn’t really feel like a changeover date. Tomorrow does, and I realize in writing this that I’ve been preparing for a long time for whatever comes next. I often find myself drifting toward books that will help me cope with something my subconscious senses is on the horizon, and the pile I’ve accumulated recently is an interesting mish-mash of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, with a kids’ book thrown in for the real future. While I probably won’t start walking backwards as Tomás does in response to personal tragedy in Yann Martel’s The High Mountains of Portugal (a book I’m still reading), I am very interested in disrupting my norm to see what positive changes I can cause. Read on to find out what lessons about change (both self-imposed and not) that I’m taking away from the books that have jumped into my lap recently.

Saying the Important Part Out Loud with R.F. Kuang

There are many, many reasons to love Babel by R.F. Kuang, from the rich characters to the well-drawn action, but what hit me most about this book as I was reading it this fall was the way she turns history inside out by simply naming the things that were happening from an angle we are unused to. While to my knowledge there was not really a group of translators changing the world in the 19th century by inscribing spells into bars of silver (though it made for a great way to explore the power of language), she has a beautiful way of calling out the everyday assaults of empire:

“‘But I do know this. The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’” – Griffin in Babel by R.F. Kuang

Not only does this series of sentences spell out exactly the dark side of the British empire in a way I’ve never read before, it also speaks to the present and future of the U.S. in ways we would do well to consider deeply how to change. This is part of Kuang’s art, the weaving of a warning into a damned good story.

“‘You know the funny thing about Afghanistan?’ Griffin’s voice was very soft. ‘The British aren’t going to invade with English troops. They’re going to invade with troops from Bengal and Bombay. They’re going to have sepoys fight the Afghans, just like they had sepoys fight and die for them at Irrawady, because those Indian troops have the same logic you do, which is that it’s better to be a servant of the Empire, brutal coercion and all, than to resist. Because it’s safe. Because it’s stable, because it lets them survive. And that’s how they win, brother. They pit us against each other. They tear us apart.’” – Babel by R.F. Kuang

How long have we been pitched against each other by our political parties? I was relieved when the Democrats picked Kamala Harris to run, finally. The last time she ran, she became the first candidate I’d ever given money to, and I was excited about her governing to the middle. But she was hardly an outsider candidate, and in my view the Democrats have a lot to answer for to their constituents—specifically, I would have liked a choice. Which is to say that the people in power are more interested in maintaining power, however they can, than in genuinely meeting our actual needs. I would have been deeply disappointed to vote for Biden who took no meaningful stands on the women’s issues that are so close to my heart (and body as well as the bodies of 49.8% of our population). I won’t even start on the Republican Party, but I do believe strongly that there is a middle we are being steered away from seeing. And that in the middle lies a lot of answers that allow for social progress and for a wide feeling of safety at the same time.

“There was at least one reason to hope. They were running on momentum. The social forces that had prompted the Luddites to smash machines had not disappeared. They had only grown worse…Each year they put more men out of work, left more families destitute, and maimed and killed more children in machines that operated more quickly than the human eye could track. The use of silver created inequality, and both had increased exponentially in England during the past decade. The country was pulling apart at the seams. This could not go on forever.

And their strike, Robin was convinced, was different. Their impact was larger, harder to patch over…Britain could not function without them. If Parliament did not believe it, then they would soon learn.” Babel by R.F. Kuang

Collective action anyone? It is definitely time to assess what power we have and how we can effectively use it.

I have read online criticisms of this book that it is too packed with linguistic explorations, but to me that level of thought and involvement with language is only a bonus. You should read this book right now. And as you bristle against some of the things she writes, I want you to think about why and what your role has been in building our own empire. Then think about the world you want to build and how you can change your actions to bring that about instead.

Unbreaking the System with The Primary Solution

Nick Troiano is also of the opinion that the system is broken. In The Primary Solution he lays out a strong argument for how our current system of primaries disenfranchises voters and contributes to dysfunction at the party level and at the governing level because of the polarizing list of candidates it allows to move forward.

“A democracy that is controlled by its fringes at the expense of the majority, offering division over solutions, simply cannot endure over the long haul.” – The Primary Solution by Nick Troiano

Troiano argues that there is a vast, moderate section of the electorate who is not being served by the current candidates and that none of us are being served by the gridlock of the current landscape. Though my own politics are on the left edge and I am one of the 18% of voters votes in primary elections (which, according to Troiano, determines the outcome of 93% of all offices), I can’t disagree that the current state cannot continue.

My first experience of disgust for party politics was when I brought my then small child to caucus for Bernie back when we had caucuses in Washington. Our precinct captain explained the math of how the delegates were assigned and it was immediately clear that Hillary Clinton had been ordained the candidate of preference by party leadership. I was discouraged, but it was important for me to finally see that the party had the power and the privilege to make that selection, regardless of what their constituents want. I have to agree with Charles Munger, Jr., as quoted by Troiano saying, “We saw primary reform as the right tool to bring the parties back to their duty.” Imagine that—duty! The reforms Troiano explores, including ranked-choice voting and synchronized primaries, are hardly revolutionary, but if they lead to a more representative slate of candidates who can actually legislate and govern for the majority, I’m in.

The book was long for me, I think I would have preferred a white paper, but I did enjoy reading about the reasons why the ways Washington primaries have changed so much in the nearly thirty years I’ve lived and voted here. The Primary Solution is a must read for policy wonks and a good skim for anyone who thinks our government is broken and wonders what steps we can take to make it better.

Considering the After with Czesław Miłosz

I think we can all agree that World War II was some of the worst of what the world experienced during the last century. In my typical, “let’s read about the darkest thing we can find to see how people survive it” way, I was glad to read the forthcoming collection Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946-1953 by Czesław Miłosz and translated and edited by Robert Hass and David Frick. While I’ve enjoyed Miłosz in translation before (and structured Polska, 1994 around lines from “Rivers”), I was surprised to see that I’ve never really written about him. I’ve also read almost nothing of his from the period covered by this book, which is, I suppose, the point.

All the poems in this collection were new to me, which made it delicious to explore. I was excited by the twinning of irony and lament in “Child of Europe” with lines like “We, who taste of exotic dishes, / And enjoy fully the delights of love, / are better than those who were buried.” This poem felt so Polish to me in that feeling with the pairing of outward barb and the inward nod of complicity topped with regret.

I think a lot about audiences and who understands what when there are multiple layers of meaning, which made me wonder who would mistake lines like “Let the sweetness of day fill your lungs” for celebrations of autocracy, though Miłosz writes into that awareness when he gets to “A new, humorless generation is now arising, / It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.” A stanza that made me think of the MAGA youth. He also writes of the doublespeak to come, something I learned to deepen myself while in Poland, with “Fashion your weapon from ambiguous words. Consign clear words to lexical limbo.” By the time he reaches, “Gone is the age of satire” my heart dropped for the poet that Hass describes as “recovering from a war of extraordinary violence, taking his bearings in a new world, and trying to locate and understand his task as a poet.”

”The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle froth—
Of all things broken and lost
Porcelain troubles me most.”
— “Song on Porcelain” by Czesław Miłosz

My heart was equally broken by the lines “My life broke into islands, / Through no choice of my own.” In “To Jonathan Swift” as he writes of exile. As we know, Miłosz survived the after and went on to write greater poems, but it’s clear that there was great cost to all the before and the in-between. I was reading “Reflections” about “A city ruined, and above it clouds / A ruined city and above it a column of azure sky” during the worst of the L.A. fires and thinking about the myriad challenges (expected and otherwise) we face now and in the future.

”And as someone else used to say,
You have the power. Influence the course
Of the avalanche. Moderate its wildness
And cruelty. This too requires courage,”
— “Treatise on Morals” by Czesław Miłosz

What I liked most about this book for myself was seeing the “after.” As Hass writes in the introduction, in 1944 Miłosz had walked away from a city in ruins. Something like 80 percent of the buildings in Warsaw had been destroyed by the German army…” He’s fighting with himself, though, to go forward with poems like “My Mother’s Grave” where he writes, “Help me, mother. Strengthen in the man / what you knew as the child’s ardors. / Let me not put down my burdens.” And he did continue to fight in his work, though from afar, which made me want to put “Notebook: Pennsylvania” with its family shunning their heritage in a new land beside Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning” which is about cleaning up after war.

I was really hoping to be able to comment intelligently on the translations of these poems, but only the English text is included (which makes sense) and I haven’t tracked down the originals. My Polish is rusty enough that I probably would have made a hash of it anyway, but I might track down a few soon just to feel the words on my tongue again.

This book is out in February, and I’ll be excited to see what you find in it, where I’ve misread intentions in the layers of meaning, how you think about the ways life continues.

Adam Gidwitz Models Getting Frank with our Children

I wish I could give A Tale Dark and Grimm ten stars instead of five in Goodreads. This book is deliciously dark in a way that left my nine-year-old begging for more. He felt in control and in on the action and like he was tormenting me, but together we were exploring the edges of the dark and how we could navigate it together. Are coping mechanisms hereditary? It reminded me a lot of the day in March 2020 that my then four-year-old came home and told us about the virus. His teacher (herself a survivor of war in Afghanistan) had shown the children a video explaining what we knew then. And my son, having finally been let in on what the whispers of the last month were about, exuded so much confidence. That’s not to say that the months and years to come were always easy (ha!) or that we told him everything, but that we were all better prepared because we were prepared to treat him like a person with fears and ideas of his own.

While Remy and I were reading the first book in this series of Grimm fairytale retellings, he picked up the second to read with his dad (who has read the original Grimm). And the moment he and I finished the first, we picked up the third. They are gruesome, yes. They are also hilarious and the authorial intrusions remind me of the way I often interrupt our readings to gently (or not so gently) ask my son if that’s how he thinks things should be. Highly recommend these books, just plan ahead so you can finish a section before bedtime, that bit of resolution helps avoid nightmares.

It feels sacrilegious to hold the particular inauguration on MLK Day and I’ll probably spend the day with a book rather than the TV or the headlines. The day after I’ll be sharing some Lucille Clifton with my son’s class to teach the kids about how much can be said with a little and to get them thinking about their roles in the world to come. What are you reading and how are you preparing for what’s next beyond books? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments.

Seeking Myself in Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum

September 28, 2024 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

It must have been fate that I finally opened Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum during the week of September 8. I’d asked for the book ages ago and then kept avoiding it because it looked thick and the title was… not where I was at. But I had forgotten why I’d wanted to read this book in the first place—it’s an investigation of Chile’s past (specifically the death of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973) and Dorfman’s relationship to his country in and out of exile.

I’d wanted to read this book because Chile is a mythical land to me, a place I lived once when I was small enough that the white calla lilies in our garden were taller than I was. Small enough that my younger brother and I found infinite entertainment in the snails that covered our driveway. Small enough to not really understand what was happening in the country in the mid-1980s, but not small enough to not have heard about what happened at the stadium or to know about the ongoing protests. I’d wanted to read this book because I wanted to investigate my own memories of Chile with actual information this time. What I found was a gloriously complex narrative and some pretty fantastic writing.

boy and girl in front of calla lillies — The calla lilies of my memory were taller…

The Truth of Fiction vs. Memoir

The Suicide Museum is billed as a novel, not a memoir, although many of the life events happened to Dorfman and the people who surround him in the novel are the real people of his life (or at least versions of them). I love that he chose this conceit, because it freed me to be sucked into the narrative rather than fact-checking the book in my mind as I went. It was also an important framing because what the Dorfman of the narrative is tasked with is finding the truth about the death of Allende.

One of the most beautiful things about the way that this book is constructed, then, is a near constant unveiling of different truths as experienced by different characters. This is most notable in the investigation of Allende’s death when we find earnest character after earnest character telling their version of what happened that day at La Moneda and yet each story contradicts the last. It’s a Rashomon-like experience, but with such a warmth of feeling that I believed all of them. And the truth was the complexity.

A Feminist Vein

There is a strong respect for women that is woven throughout this book, one that was unfamiliar to me from my own experience of Chile and also from my experience of men of Dorfman’s generation. It was a relief, honestly. While very few of the characters who were present at La Moneda were women (history is what it is), Dorfman presents wives, daughters, mothers, and girlfriends as whole people who also shaped the historical events and who were shaped by them.

I was surprised to find as Dorfman was describing a play he was writing during the events of the book that I recognized the play. In fact the play, Death and the Maiden became a movie that was very important to me as I was living in Poland, and later as I was writing Polska, 1994. It is the story of a woman who was broken by a military dictatorship and the strength she eventually finds in retribution. I hadn’t known that Dorfman was the author, but this helped me understand the closeness I felt to his writing from the start. Dorfman also looks closely at class and how the full populace of Chile was and was not served by any of the governments.

It sounds like a sociology text the way I’m describing it, but it’s not. The Suicide Museum is a deeply moving and engaging story that I often stayed up far too late reading.

A Fractured Life

One thing Dorfman explores in The Suicide Museum is the ways that exile and return make his view and experience different from the people who could and did stay. I have never been sorry that I had the privilege to live abroad as a kid (not once, but twice), but it also changed me in ways I’m still trying to understand. Reading Dorfman helped me at least find camaraderie in the fracture.

“Maybe it was just that the trauma of changing countries and cities and homes and languages had left me wallowing in a paralyzing incertitude about who I really was and whether I could ever truly belong anywhere” – Ariel Dorfman, The Suicide Museum

This keeps coming up for me, as I’d read an essay this summer by Luc Sante about his relationship to the French of his childhood versus the English he lives in. He wrote, “A chasm yawns between languages, between my childhood and my present age. But there is an advantage hidden in this predicament: French is an archaeological site of emotions, a pipeline to my infant self. It preserves the very rawest, deepest, least guarded feelings.” I feel this, though less than I once did as I’ve let my languages go. Where in my twenties I’d run around throwing whatever word felt right into a sentence, no matter the language, I’ve reverted almost entirely to English anymore and I rarely have anyone around who would understand the “foreign” word or its nuance anyway. It’s time for that to change, though, and I found strength and encouragement in the September 2023 issue of Poetry Magazine which was almost entirely bilingual (in multiple languages) as though plurality is a strength.

I look for traces of Chile, still, finding comfort in the Latinissimo cookbook my husband bought me last Christmas (the flavors and also the rich plurality of the history of each dish). And I’ve been screening records by Inti-Illimani that my dad and his partner gave me, listening for rhythms that remind me of who I was then and there. Luc Sante also wrote, “I suppose I am never completely present in any given moment, since different aspects of myself are contained in different rooms of language, and a complicated apparatus of airlocks prevents the doors from being flung open all at once… That sometimes makes me feel as though I have no language at all, but it also gives me the advantage of mobility. I can leave, anytime, and not be found.”

In these ways I am myriad, as we all are. But not everyone gets to picture my little brother dancing the Cueca when you hear just the right song.

Or to know, when Dorfman mentions Santa Lucía Hill, just what it feels like to climb those steps.

I’ve never been back to Chile in body, but someday. Someday I’ll return. Until then I am grateful for this opportunity to learn more about a place and a time that made me who I am today. And to appreciate that for the gift it is.

Satisfying a Craving for Craft with Warlight and The Reluctant Fundamentalist

July 21, 2024 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I’ve been reading voraciously lately, hungry for the kind of craft that makes me sink into a book, that I can steal and learn from for my own. This binge put me eight books ahead on my reading goal for the year, but it wasn’t going to be satisfied until I found something really worth chewing on. Enter Warlight and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, two excellent books that helped me lean deeper into the book I am working on.

Retrospective Voice in Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

I was reading an issue of Brick, a Canadian literary magazine that always stretches me and yet always feels like home, when I realized that Michael Ondaatje (a writer who is featured in nearly every issue and whose work I once loved deeply) is someone I needed to return to. I picked up his first novel Coming Through Slaughter but couldn’t connect to the disjointed narrative the way I had with The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Then I opened Warlight and it was just where I needed to be.

“There are times these years later, as I write this all down, when I feel as if I do so by candlelight. As if I cannot see what is taking place in the dark beyond the movement of this pencil. These feel like moments without context.” Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

The story centers on two children who are left by their parents in post-war Britain in the care of a mysterious man. The dealings around them are shady and the life tenuous, but they are also held tight by a bevy of strangers. It’s a gorgeous book on the sentence level and the characters are fascinating, but what captured me and piqued my writerly senses was the way Ondaatje uses the retrospective voice. He uses it for the same reasons that I am in my next book, because children and teenagers do not have a complete view on their experiences and interjections of a later, older narrator (even if it’s the protagonist at a later stage in life) allow the reader to view a book from a second angle that enriches the story (and allows the author more control over how the book is interpreted). Ondaatje tells us exactly what he’s doing, too:

“You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing. Unless of course you wish, like my sister, to damn and enact revenge on the whole pack of them.” – Michael Ondaatje, Warlight

Without that second perspective, Warlight would be a book about an abandoned boy who falls for the lover of a man who visits their strange house that dark people flit in and out of. A boy who takes risks like ferrying unknown cargo up the Thames with a man he really doesn’t know. With the retrospective voice, and the way Ondaatje lays out the sections of his book, we can see why the children were abandoned, what was really happening in the world around them, and what was on that boat (and why). There’s a completeness in this, and even if it doesn’t bring joy, it brings satiety.

In my own book, the retrospective voice also allows me to reinterpret some cultural norms in the lens of today. If I have a raft of teenage girls running around trying to find their value through their relationships to men, that is one perspective born from the world they grow up in. If the narrator can see what they are missing, the reader gets the benefit of both views. It’s something that doesn’t always need to be spelled out, but I worry sometimes when our world is tenuous what happens if it isn’t spelled out.

This is something I struggled with in The House of Eve where the (richly drawn) characters were so trapped in their own worldviews on topics like a woman being wholly responsible for a pregnancy that I worried about audiences who wouldn’t see that the author is trying to point out the flaw in that logic. Women so beat down by the patriarchy that those words would reinforce their worldviews rather than lift them up. I like that Sadeqa Johnson trusted her audience enough to make that leap, but as someone who developed a lot of wrongheaded notions from my own early reading, I am warier.

Second Person Viewpoint in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I know everyone else read The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid ages ago when it was still new. I’d watched the movie and liked it enough that I wanted it to sit before I encountered the book. I’m glad I did because the feeling of both is much the same and the distance allowed me to encounter this beautifully-written book from a craft perspective.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is framed around a conversation between two people in a café in Lahore, Pakistan. The narrator addresses us (ostensibly the second person) as he tells us the story of his life of leaving Pakistan, attending Princeton, getting a prestigious job, and how 9/11 changed him.

This “let me tell you a story” framework is something Henry James used in The Turn of the Screw, though without the implication of the second person address. I say implication because the audience for this book is likely American and Changez is telling us all the reasons he fell out of love with America. Hamid uses the second person very effectively from the initial warming us up with his bright-eyed adoration of the U.S., through his souring, to the very last sentence where who we the audience is and what we’ve been up to all this time is painfully clear.

What I found especially compelling about the way Hamid frames this book is that he keeps surfacing back to that conversation we are ostensibly having at the café. Unlike James, who (if I recall correctly) drops us unto a narrative and doesn’t return to the fireside until the end, Hamid consistently reminds us throughout the book that we are in conversation with him. Maybe this is why the feeling of implication works so well.

“If you have ever, sir, been through the breakup of a romantic relationship that involved great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a sense of euphoria at finally being liberated; the world seems fresh, as if seen for the first time; then comes the inevitable period of doubt, the desperate and doomed backpedaling of regret; and only later, once emotions have receded, is one able to view with equanimity the journey through which one has passed.” – Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The other thing Hamid does exquisitely in this book is metaphor where the description perfectly matches something Changez was going through (above, his feelings about losing Erica) but he is very much also talking about something else. It’s masterful and you realize as you read this book that Changez (or Hamid) was very much in complete control of the conversation from the very beginning.

I’ve been experimenting with this “let me tell you a story” framework within my own novel, but just on the first page. The Reluctant Fundamentalist made me question why I’m using it if I never return to it, if there is a craft justification or if it’s just an easier way for me as a writer to slip in and it’s become something I need to edit out. Time will tell, though if I could use it even half as effectively as Hamid, I’d be very proud.

Reading All the Social Justice Books

There’s one more thing I wanted to touch on, and that’s the fact that it’s never a bad time to pick up and actually read all those social justice books you bought during the pandemic or at the height of #BlackLivesMatter. Two that have really touched me on that front lately: The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life by Simran Jeet Singh and Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. Singh’s book was front of mind as I was reading about Changez’s experience in post-9/11 New York, when being a brown man with a beard was a challenge at best. Singh lived that experience and his compassion and humanity is something we can all learn from. While the book touches on many, many things I think have the potential to heal us, the lesson I’m carrying forward with me every day is to look for the divine in every other human, even when their choices are something I disagree with. It’s a really beautiful, thoughtful book and one I wish I could make everyone read.

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is a blend of memoir and cultural criticism that really hit home for me. Like me, Hong “was the beneficiary of a mid-to-late-nineties college education, when multiculturalism was having its swan song” and I hadn’t realized until reading this book how much optimism for a better world that worldview had filled me with—and how much I have failed to reconcile with what our country became after 9/11. I appreciated the depth and foresight in Hong’s writing, especially in passages like this:

“The rise of white nationalism has led to many nonwhites defending their identities with rage and pride as well as demanding reparative action to compensate for centuries of whites’ plundering from non-Western cultures. But a side effect of this justified rage has been a ‘stay in your lane’ politics in which artists and writers are asked to speak only from their personal ethnic experiences. Such a politics not only assumes racial identity is pure—while ignoring the messy lived realities in which racial groups overlap—but reduces racial identity to intellectual property.” – Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings

She writes, “The soul of innovation thrives on cross-cultural inspiration. If we are restricted to our lanes, culture will die.” Make no mistake, this book is a rebuke of how we relate to race in America. And it is a very good and important read, one that pushed me to think harder about some important things.

I started writing this hours ago when Biden was still in the U.S. presidential race. He was not my candidate (I wanted someone who could say the world “abortion” out loud and who would fight louder for many of the things I believe in) but he was the candidate I was going to vote for. I am not pleased that he or the Democratic Party let this linger so long. We should have had a real primary, because there is strength in testing ourselves, in finding where we are weak and in trying to grow. We have the chance now to pick someone who will challenge us to a better future. They must beat Trump, but that should be only the baseline of our expectations. What if we allowed ourselves to dream again of being the country that is stronger because of our diversity not in spite of it? What if we embrace our changing demographics and try to care for all our citizens? I don’t know who the right person is, but I hope we go forward bravely and try to really find out. Life is short and the time for change is now.

In the meantime, I’m still reading too fast; maybe it’s the already waning days of summer or the tenuousness of the past few weeks (politically), but I’m also writing and editing and that is good. I’m also returning to books that help me explore the values I want to live by. What book has stopped you in your tracks lately?

Wreckers, Lighthouses, and Clearances: Scotland On My Mind

June 1, 2024 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

There’s just something about Scotland lately. Maybe I spent too much time picking out the perfect Fair Isle sweater this Christmas, but I have become obsessed with the idea of rocky cliffs and cold, crashing waves—and my reading list reflects it. Come with me on an adventure through some of the fascinating books I’ve found about Scotland and find out how I got from there to new ideas of investing in community.

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Maybe the sweater came first, maybe an old copy of Granta focused on the sea, but somehow I found in that magazine an excerpt from Bella Bathurst’s The Lighthouse Stevensons that definitely cemented me on this path. The book is a history of how Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather, father, and uncles designed and built Scotland’s lighthouses and it’s filled with descriptions of impossible odds and astounding inventions. I’m still marveling over how thick the walls had to be to withstand the waves and that there’s a relationship between the fluted lantern and lighthouses that can actually be traced.

“All the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name; and my father’s services to lighthouse optics have been distinguished indeed. I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well.” – Robert Louis Stevenson, quoted in The Lighthouse Stevensons

In a rare turn, I’m so excited about this book I don’t even know what to say about it, but if it sounds at all interesting from this sparse description, trust me that the book is amazing if you care at all about the sea, human behavior, optical design, engineering, or amazing feats. I also liked Bathurst’s writing enough that I tracked down every book she’s ever written, which leads me to…

The Wreckers: A Story of Killing Seas and Plundered Shipwrecks, From the 18th Century to the Present Day by Bella Bathurst

There was a line in The Lighthouse Stevensons about an island where tenants who lived on the shipwreck side paid immensely more rent that got me excited to read The Wreckers, and I was not disappointed. While the book is not entirely about Scotland (it’s fine, the sea is my true obsession), Bathurst does center her investigations on Great Britain. She delves into everything from the wrecks themselves to the laws around plunder to the needs and norms of the populations around the wreck-prone coasts, and it’s all fascinating.

Should something that washes up onshore be considered a gift from the gods? What if you really need it because your land is so impoverished? What if you have to wrap it up like a baby and have a woman run it all over the island to hide it from the inspectors? What if you have to kill someone to get it? The stories throughout this book broadened my understanding of what it was once like to live an isolated life near the sea, and the book introduced me (briefly) to the Highland Clearances…

Clear by Carys Davies

The first fictional book in this list, Clear tells the story of a man sent to clear the last tenant off an unnamed Scottish island during a period when landlords were evicting tenants off their land so they could make more money. It was a period of great disruption that created a lot of poverty and fueled a wave of immigration to Australia and the United States. I don’t know if my ancestors were among those cleared, but I do know that the depth of humanity displayed in Clear was extraordinary, even for literary fiction. I’d previously enjoyed Davies’ stories in The Redemption of Galen Pike, yet I was still happily surprised by the quiet layers in this book.

Clear is a quick book as a minister, John, looks to improve his fortune and even build a new church by agreeing to move the last remaining tenant, Ivar, off this island. The plot thickens when John falls off a cliff and loses his memory and Ivar finds him and nurses him back to health. The two do not initially share a language but they learn to understand what they think they know about each other in a really beautiful way, all while we’re learning about the ancient language Ivar speaks and what his life was like alone on the island. I won’t spoil the resolution of the book with you, but I will say that this book definitely put me in the mind of thinking about greed and its outcomes.

The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy by Natalie Foster

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fundamental disconnect between people who see the world as zero sum and those who see it as positive sum, the ways that people who think that one’s gain must be another’s loss versus those who think there can be mutually beneficial outcomes cannot really talk to each other about change. Not a red/blue divide, but an experience or a perception based around resource scarcity and how that does and should shape our behavior. Thinking of The Wreckers, does gathering coal from a wreck hurt anyone? What about a grand piano? So I jumped at the chance to read The Guarantee for a book club.

The book club itself was amazing. In a group of just over ten people, I found myself surrounded (virtually) by women who worked at the Gates Foundation or for Consumer Reports, and people who had worked directly at high levels on many of the issues discussed in this book. Even more amazing was reading about the ways we’ve always guaranteed things in the U.S. for certain groups of people and thinking about the fact that if we broadened our focus we could provide similar support for people who really need it. The best part of the book were the examples of how we are doing this already, examples we can grow from like: experiments with basic income, the expansion of healthcare access through Obamacare, how student loan repayment pauses changed lives during the pandemic.

I was floored by how much someone’s life can change with just a few hundred extra dollars a month. I wondered why, indeed, we couldn’t provide baby bonds that gave every child a nest egg to start their adult lives with. I started to dream big about the world we are making now and about the bright future we could have if we invested in everyone in ways that gave them opportunities to be their best selves. You may say I’m a dreamer… but even the most fiscally conservative reader has to see the growth potential for our whole country if we give everyone actual opportunities.

I see the realities. I live in a neighborhood that is the poster child (literally) for NIMBYism around increased housing density. But I was also deeply inspired by what organizations like Occupy Student Debt are able to do by twisting the ridiculous aspects of the system (in this case that vast amounts of debt are sold on the open market for tiny amounts of money) to do good (here by then forgiving that debt outright. It’s easy to do what we’ve always done. It’s hard to stretch and think of new ideas. But it’s also important to note that the way we are doing things now only benefits a few, and that cannot last.

This book brought me back to what I believe the best communities are, whether isolated on a Scottish coast or not, I believe that if we nourish and support each other, if we care for what we are given and give freely of what we don’t actually need, we build love and safety. What else does anyone really need?

I hope you’ll try out any of the books above that speak to you. I couldn’t work in the Mysterious Benedict Society volume I’ve been reading with my son that also involves an unnamed Scottish isle. It will stop raining in Seattle someday and I’ll have to take off my gorgeous Scottish sweater. Until then, I’m reading about providing AIDS hospice on the Irish coast. If the book is any good, I’ll tell you all about it here.

Help! I Read All My Christmas Books (And They Were Awesome)

January 20, 2024 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Every year I save a list of the books I most want and then give that list to my husband as my Christmas wish list. I try to pick the things that are going to be sure wins and he’s kind enough to buy me hardbacks of books I’d otherwise wait years to read (no, it doesn’t take years for a hardback to come out in paperback, but once a book is no longer top of mind it might take me years to get back to it). This year was a rousing success, which is fantastic! I’ve had weeks of reading a wide variety of the best books. It was so successful, I’m now out of new books. But at least I have a huge batch of new recommendations to share with you. And the list is diverse enough that there’s something for everyone here.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer

Who wouldn’t want to counterbalance the sweetness of the Christmas season with a book about femicide in Mexico? Okay, so I get that isn’t a selling point for most people, but if you’re reading Bolaño, you’re probably reading about it anyway and Cristina Rivera Garza’s book is so tender and personal, I’d recommend this 1000 times more than 2666 (which I did not finish because 400 pages in I decided I’ve had enough literary vaginal and anal rape for a lifetime). While Liliana’s Invincible Summer is sometimes hard to read, it’s hard to read for the right reasons, because Liliana is so lovingly portrayed as a whole person whose victimhood is one thing that happened to her, not her entire purpose. Which makes sense because Liliana was Cristina’s sister and Rivera Garza is sharing with us the love of a sister’s gaze.

I’d previously read Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest and she was admiringly quoted at E.J. Koh’s book launch party for The Liberators with a perspective on trauma that deepened my thinking, so this book shot to the top of my list.

Liliana’s Invincible Summer is not at all what I expected. And I loved it. I hadn’t read the reviews too deeply because I wanted to encounter the book on my own, so I did not realize that Liliana had been murdered by someone who knew her, a type of femicide that’s so common that it too rarely makes the news. But what really floored me and made me fall in love with the book was the beginning where Rivera Garza is on a Kafkaesque trek through Mexico’s bureaucracy to even find the files related to her sister’s murder. It’s funny and it’s bleak, but most of all it’s exceedingly well rendered and sets up the rest of the book very well. Reading this book I got a sense of Liliana and also of the times she was growing up in. I learned more about intimate partner violence and I felt outrage. And I knew all the time that I was in the hands of a masterful storyteller.

It sounds like this book is heavy, and it is, but before you dismiss it consider all the heaviness we read about every day without thinking about the life that is present too. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is a book full of life.

Take What You Need

I’ve adored everything I’ve ever read that was written or translated by Idra Novey and we had some nice interactions on Twitter (when that was a thing) so I was excited to continue our “relationship” with Take What You Need, her latest book. The fact that she was dealing with mother/daughter relationships and the ways that our rural and urban selves have become so separated was a bonus.

The premise of Take What You Need is fresh: Leah was Jean’s stepdaughter for a time and once Jean dies, she hears from a man who was living with Jean about an inheritance that Jean’s left for Leah. As interesting as Leah’s relationship with Jean is (something we explore in alternating chapters as Leah travels to Jean’s after Jean’s death, while we see Jean in life), it was Jean I was most fascinated by. Perhaps because Leah felt more close to the author, she isn’t as fully explored. Jean, on the other hand, is a force that we get to know well in her contradictions and humanity as she watches the increasing poverty and isolation around her. It doesn’t hurt that Jean was a huge Louise Bourgeois fan (a sculptor I love with all my heart) or that my own first artistic forays were in sculpting metal.

I chose this as my first book to read in 2024 because I thought it would be healing. It was, and it was also cathartic. I don’t think it will spoil the ending to say that I wept at the care that can be taken with someone else’s work. Take the time to read this book and your brain will thank you.

Lone Women

What better way to follow up a book about a woman discovering her inner sculptor in a slowly rotting neighborhood than with a book about a Black woman trying to make her way on the Montana frontier with a terrible secret (horror-style)? I’m a huge fan of Victor LaValle, big enough to get me to read a western, and this book did not disappoint.

The ways Adelaide and the other settlers in the desolate landscape interacted with each other were carefully drawn, natural, and built a wonderful (and appropriate) sense of dread. I learned something new about the history of this vast nation and I was reminded, when reading this, of a visit we took to Bannack, Montana back when my husband and I were touring the west photographing ghost towns. I was also reminded that I cannot wait for the next season of The Changeling on AppleTV, feeling somewhat robbed about where the last season stopped and also hopeful that the next season will live up to my expectations. Narrated by Victor LaValle, the show made me realize how strong his authorial asides are in his books, the ways they shape the narrative with the power of his voice. This one is a classic:

“It would be nice to imagine Adelaide storming out of the store, climbing onto Obadiah, and galloping out of town, catching up with Bertie and Fiona and never looking back. But the human animal is a social animal; a lifetime of being treated like an outsider may make a person yearn to finally be let in.” – Victor LaValle, Lone Women

So wait on watching The Changeling if you haven’t already started it and read Lone Women in the interim. As with all LaValle books I’ve read, this one is a stark and important reminder that the monster is in all of us, a monster Jean tries to fight in Take What You Need and a monster Ariadne is slow to recognize when she meets him in Crete…

Ariadne

If the themes so far are in looking at people as people and trying to understand them across our differences, then Ariadne by Jennifer Saint is no exception. Technically this was a gift from my eight-year-old son (who loves Greek myths with his whole heart) but Imma guess he had a little help here from his dad. I’d read Elektra earlier in the year and was entranced by the deep exploration of this familiar material from a female viewpoint. I was less familiar with Ariadne’s story but that didn’t make me love this book any less. I got to see how little I knew about the Minotaur and then to catch glimpses of Daedalus and Icarus. Mostly, though, I really enjoyed learning more about Ariadne herself and her relationship with Dionysus. As this is my second of Saint’s books, I’m also realizing that what I like exploring is the archetypes we’ve been given and how they fit and don’t fit me and our modern world.

Ariadne is a very compelling book and I’m looking forward to reading Atalanta next.

Chilean Poet

I don’t know how I got from Ariadne to Chilean Poet, but a non sequitur was the perfect leap into this book. I’ve read Alejandro Zambra’s work before and was excited to inhabit his worldview and to visit Chile again, a country I hold deep in my heart from the year I lived there as a kid.

Chilean Poet starts in 1991, a few important years after we left, but the world was still familiar in the best of ways. The world in this book is also universal in some wonderfully human ways. It starts with first love and some furtive fumblings between young lovers on a couch. Zambra so fully inhabits those uniquely teenage moments that I started taking notes for my own book (but in a “hurry and get back because the writing is really good” kind of way). Alas, young love rarely lasts and Carla and Gonzalo are separated.

Until they aren’t. In a crazy second coming, they find each other again and Gonzalo becomes a stepdad to Vicente (I’m not spoiling much here, this happens very early in the book). What Zambra masterfully does here is jump from one life stage to another without any regard for formality or time we might otherwise experience passing. It’s a little jarring but being put directly in the stages of life where the story action is makes the book read fast, despite a strong tendency for authorial asides (more on that in a second). And he completes these jumps more than once, all equally well.

As I mentioned, Zambra takes us on these windy and lovely detours through linguistics that are entertaining and educational and made me love the book all the more. I don’t actually know whether to credit Zambra or the translator, Megan McDowell, here, but I learned more about Spanish, about English, and about how language shapes my worldview just by following the tangents. About authorial asides (and tangents): one of the things I’ve criticized Bolaño for before (and Hemingway and anyone else who thinks they are due my attention because I showed up to read their book) is using voice as a means to captivate an audience. But voice only. Now you’ve read me praise LaValle’s voice above and I’m into Zambra’s and I’ll sing the praises of Jonathan Lethem here soon, so it isn’t voice alone that irks me, it’s when I don’t feel the voice is earned. As I’m getting older I’m realizing this is my reaction to a patriarchal experience I sometimes have where people look at me—not unattractive, still youngish woman—and think “AUDIENCE.” I say people but it mostly happens with men (except this one older woman in Dublin outside a WC, but I think she was a witch). My lack of defense to this type of attack has gotten me in trouble before (just ask my husband about the time I got our whole family locked in an otherwise empty bookstore in Bellingham for an hour because I didn’t know how to say “excuse me, we have to leave” while one of these men droned on), but I’m learning. So when I say that an authorial aside is worth it or that someone’s voice is powerful and strong (in a good way), I mean it.

Well that was long. Now I’ve held you captive with my voice, sorry, turnabout is fair play? One last thing about this book I loved was that it’s full of poets. Not just people who write poetry (though lots of those) but also people who care about language and experience and taking a few minutes to see clearly the world around them. Which made reading this book feel like hanging out with the best of friends.

Fevered Star

Speaking of women ruling the world (even if it’s a fantasy world), I fell so hard for Black Sun (the first book in this series) that I gave it as a Christmas gift to at least one person who reads this blog. It felt great after reading Chilean Poet to dig back into Latin America in a more fantastic way. Fevered Star is just as strong as Black Sun, a book that pulled no punches as the worlds in it collided. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed all three of the main characters (Serapio, Xiala, and Nara) in their own ways and it was exciting to follow their further adventures in this book. I did not know what was coming and I’d been worried that this second book would not live up to the first. My worries were completely unfounded. Now I just have to worry about how long it will be until the next one comes out. That’s all I’m going to say because I don’t want to spoil either of these gorgeous books for you, dear reader, you know who you are.

Brooklyn Crime Novel

I love Jonathan Lethem’s work so hard, especially his essays, and my first introduction to his work was Motherless Brooklyn, so I was excited to return to that place which is so clearly dear to his heart with Brooklyn Crime Novel. What I didn’t realize is how close this book would bring me to my own work as Lethem experiments with some things I’m working my way through, too: unnamed characters navigating a world that’s drawn heavily from the author’s childhood. It’s something I’ve been shy about at times as I’m writing my first draft and it’s been really good for me to see what does and does not engage an audience (at least the audience of me). For sheer reading pleasure, I think I’d choose Fortress of Solitude over this book, but Lethem’s voice remains strong, strong enough to carry what could be a very challenging novel if he wasn’t so engaging.

I love that Lethem’s embraced writing about place so specifically. I had been doing something similar with my book and it started to feel like I was writing introduction after introduction full of information that felt essential but also maybe too much and I didn’t know how to part with any of it. I don’t think I’ll ultimately make the same creative choices he has (I don’t have the voice to carry it or the career clout to get it past an editor), but I’m glad to read something that feels different (in a good way). I also think I’ll ground my characters with more details earlier than he has because I struggle between twenty minute bouts of reading to hold on to who is who. Was it Toni Morrison who said you write the books you need to read? In this case I’ll also be writing the book I can read at this stage of my distracted life.

I’m actually still reading this book at this writing, as the pattern of petty and not-so-petty crimes is a little too familiar at the moment and I can’t sit with the image of my kid getting a baseball mitt stolen, let alone stuffing his pockets with mugging money, so I can only read the book in spurts for that reason as well. Lethem the human turned out okay, though, and so will my son of a painter, I’m sure. Fingers crossed for life’s lessons not being too harsh along the way.

Don’t worry about me and my empty bookshelves yet. Not only do I have an extensive pile of things I was going to read someday (really, I will finish the complete poetry of Gabriela Mistral before I die, maybe?), but my birthday is this next week. I hope your year is full of great books and great friends! If you have any recommendations, please share them with me in the comments.