“What if, what if, what?” is the refrain I often hear in my head as I ponder the limitless possibilities that could result from life’s choices. What if we moved to a small town? What if I went back to corporate? What if this relationship (or that) was different? And then I return to some sage advice Angela Jane Fountas gave me once, “You only get seven out of ten of what you want. You can change which seven, but you’ll never get ten.” Fitting, then, that what struck me recently about her gorgeous new book Another Kind of Symmetry is that she’d found the perfect way to explore and inhabit life’s myriad what ifs.

The book centers on twin sisters, Agni and Effie who live with their Greek-born parents in Astoria, Queens while going to college. Effie is wilder and Agni quieter, and the fact that they are twins already gives us a chance to explore two ways of blooming from the same circumstance. But because of their heritage and close family ties, we get two other what ifs: living the diaspora or returning home and whether to embrace the city or the country.

Another Kind of Symmetry begins with Agni and Effie at their grandmother’s grave in Greece, five years after she died and six years after Agni decided to stay in their ancestral village after coming for her grandfather’s funeral. They are there to dig up their grandmother’s bones after her soul has finally transitioned to the afterlife—this being just one of many chances we the readers get to see touches of Greek life that we may never have encountered before. This scene provides an early sense of the divergence of the sisters’ paths, but just enough to provide a framework for the treat of a story Fountas is about to unfold for us.

This is not a book I want to unfold for you, because one of the beauties of the way the book is constructed is in how it consistently presents us with the two sides of something and leaves us to plumb our feelings (all while enjoying a great story). The richly-drawn characters experience love and loss as they are trying to figure out their own lives and all the while the world changes around them in locations are as carefully detailed as the characters. Themes of personal identity mix with gentrification and how to love someone you don’t understand.

This is also not a book to read quickly, as much as you may find yourself wanting to. Regardless of whether you are a country mouse or a city mouse, I strongly urge you to take the time to sit with Agni and Effie and what they teach you about who you may want to be.

As for me, I may never have the fireplace I so wanted when we were looking for a house all those years ago, but I spent the last couple of weeks harvesting and processing plums, apples, and tomatoes from the garden of the place we have made our home. And I have the memories of watching Stinky and Dirty with my son when he was tiny, listening to those trucks sing a refrain whose wisdom he was probably too young to understand at the time but one that reminds me every day that everything is a choice.

If you pick up your copy of Another Kind of Symmetry from Bookshop.org, I get a commission.

A novel in sonnets would not normally be my first pick for anything. It’s an interesting idea but I’m not versed enough in the form to fully appreciate it and I’d worry that the effort to conform would be too great to really let a story sing. But something about the press release for Beyond Where Words Can Go by Richard Smith called to me and I’m delighted to say the book showed me how wrong I could be. The themes of the book also helped me think more deeply about some topics that are forever on my mind: serenity, sensuality, and schism.

Serenity and Slowing Down

A monastery is, of course, a natural setting to seek serenity and a slower pace of life. Smith’s beautiful descriptions of the lives of monks in 16th century England gave me a model to strive for as I’m remaking my own life and (literally) planting our garden anew for the next season. Depictions of monastic life aren’t new to my library, but there’s something about the spareness of the form and space constraints Smith was working with that let air into the work in a way that The Name of the Rose could not. And I found peace in the ordered life, much in the way I’ve found peace in Pico Iyer’s Aflame, and the freedom to open my mind.

…”Grace can only dawn
upon our hearts, our minds, our souls when we
immerse ourselves in God’s simplicity.”
– Richard Smith, Beyond Where Words Can Go

Sensuality versus Viscerality

Of course one of the things that opens up when you slow down is attention, specifically attention to the body. Smith actually starts the novel there:

The first thing that I notice is your hands:
big knobby knuckles, long thick fingers made
for work but spared so far—unscarred, untanned,
as if some dream-fogged toolsmith carved a spade
of ivory…
– Richard Smith, Beyond Where Words Can Go

Not having read the book’s description too deeply (lest I spoil it for myself), this careful attention spoke so loud of love that I immediately wondered about what would come later, carnal love (including gay love) not being usually welcome in a monastery. The withholding of the text, though, mirrors the withholding Simon (the narrator) must go through as he finds desire in a place and person incompatible with his chosen life, and we are immediately switched into the history of how Simon got to the monastery. But the feeling of sensuality lingers as Smith attends to all of our senses and Simon continues to long for Philip. The way Smith ends the book with a bookend image (that you’ll have to read yourself) is especially poignant.

The sweetness of all of this is darkly contrasted with visceral descriptions of the lives of the saints (“Bodies splayed / out on an icy pond until they froze. / Eyes filled with molten lead”) and the acts of the Tudor king against those he’d newly declared heretic (“The hangman slit him open, groin to chest, / and reached inside to sift through what was there.”). Thankfully, these moments are few in the book, but their rareness makes them ring all the louder (and more effectively).

Schism

I’d wondered early on why this book was set when it was, but this is as carefully chosen as the rest of the book. The roiling tumult of a capricious king raises the stakes (sometimes literally, sorry) for the rest of the story and it forces Simon, Philip, and all the other monks we come to love to make choices between serenity and devotion. Henry VIII’s increasingly petulant and self-serving acts as he shifts from Catholicism to Protestantism mean nothing is stable, regardless of what choices are made, and it’s instructive to watch the characters try to weather the times just as it’s instructive to watch the characters’ coded speech.

I’d like to tell you more about this book, but mostly I want to leave the unfolding to you as a reader. If it calls to you (as it did to me), know that you will come out of this book with a wider perspective and (if you’re like me) a deeper resolve to commit to the life you were meant to lead. Mike, I think you especially will love this book.

To experience your own awakening, Beyond Where Words Can Go is available now from Bookshop.org. If you use those links to purchase, you’re keeping indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

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?

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.

It’s the time of year to reflect on existential questions and lay out splendid plans to enact the lives we dream of. This makes it the perfect time to talk about books, two of which have been guiding my own thinking these past days: Dreams Under Glass by Anca Szilágyi and A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors. These two very different books took me on a tour of the struggles to make a meaningful life and the complexities of arrival in the place you think you want to be.

Dreams Under Glass

In Szilágyi’s engrossing novel, twenty-something Binnie is grinding through her workdays as an underpaid paralegal at a law firm while living a second life planning Joseph Cornell-inspired artworks in her mind. She gives up a rent-controlled apartment to spend less time commuting to have more for her artwork, but she often struggles to make the commitments to the work itself that would allow her to finish a piece (and thus potentially capitalize on some connections that could turn her fortunes). It was sometimes painful to watch Binnie’s choices, mostly because I’ve been there and the hours we spend on things besides art (hello, Twitter) are easiest to quantify and lament from the outside.

“The hot floor would contain vats of steaming black coffee, a bitter stink of burnt grounds and toner fumes. Wallpapering this floor would be documents from tobacco companies, dizzying red text printed on pink paper. Perhaps here we’d have moaning figures, neckties draped over their shoulders, parched mouths panting at the vats of coffee, unable to drink.” – Anca Szilágyi, Dreams Under Glass

Szilágyi delves deep into Binnie’s ideas, which made the inside of Binnie’s mind the most fascinating part of this book as we experience the visceral details of artworks the world may never see. Binnie draws inspiration from her struggles in a dysfunctional, capitalist workplace and from a well of knowledge about Cornell. In fact, Cornell almost becomes a character in the book as Binnie draws upon his memory while planning how to arrange her squirreled objects and I learned a lot about the artist, despite having taken a lot of art history classes back when I thought visual art was my future.

I won’t reveal the major shift that happens toward the end of this book, only that there is one and that I’ll never think of the color turquoise quite the same way again.

One of the more touching aspects of Dreams Under Glass is Binnie’s relationship to her boyfriend, Gary. Although he seems clueless about her art, he very clearly cares deeply about her. What struck me most was a moment when, after Gary met Binnie’s parents, he gently prods her about her feelings for him and then says, “You make me feel alive.” It’s a tender thought and not one I think I would have appreciated quite the same way five or ten years ago. Maybe not even a year ago, because, like Binnie, I’ve spent a lot of time striving to find inspiration and time to make art. And in the struggle I’ve missed some of the best parts of what surround me every day, like the softness around my husband’s eyes when he brings me yet another cup of tea (when he could be working on his own art).

So while Binnie was finding her way toward art, I was finding my way into a quieter view of what makes a great life. I hope I can find compassion for the Binnie in me along the way.

A Line in the World

“I want to wake beneath a sky that is grey and miserable, but which creates a space of colossal dimensions in a second, when the light comes ashore. A horizon is what I want, and I want solitude. Healthy solitude, and I want intimacy, true intimacy. I no longer want to be anyone but myself.” – Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World

In January 2020, my husband and I were starting a lot of big discussions about how to make the life we want. The theme was being intentional in our choices. Like everyone else, our choices were very quickly limited, but this discussion is once again rising to the surface in a practicable way. Sometimes this means picking the breakfast I want (rather than eating my oatmeal default) and chewing my toast slowly so I can experience and enjoy the last bite of special jam. Sometimes it means going to the beach, because one of the small (but huge) things that makes me feel whole is being near the ocean. This is why I was pretty sure I would love A Line in the World. What I didn’t know is my choice to curl up with this book during a week of sickness and recovery after Christmas would itself be healing.

“But a vacuum is always waiting to be filled with something. In the Wadden Sea, you bring the contents with you, and the contents of a supposedly authentic life can be terrifying.” – Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World

I’ve never read Nors’ fiction, but this collection of essays written during a year traveling the west coast of Denmark (or the east coast of the North Sea) was perfect. She resists a geographic order as these essay explore everything from family history to climate change to Danish surf culture (sometimes all together in a few pages). The writing, masterfully translated by Caroline Waight, seems effortless and I’m giving myself the gift of letting this book be the last I read in 2022. I know I will return to this book again and again but right now I want the feeling of having read it to stretch into a new year, and maybe a new life.

“Surely, to be great is to stand at the northernmost tip of the nation, right at the very top, with a foot in each sea. Can you feel the potential? This is your country, your language. Your limitations. In this moment under your jurisdiction, and only yours.” – Dorthe Nors, A Line in the World

So the struggle continues, in books and in life, and the glory, too, as we embrace the best of the lives we can make. What have you read this year that makes you see where you’ve come from, where you might want to go?