plus ça change .....

The book I am currently reading is The shores of Bohemia: a Cape Cod story, by John Taylor Williams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). We have just gotten through World War I and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial and execution. Plenty of writers and artists were involved in protesting the trial where the judge implied  that the fact Sacco and Vanzetti were immigrants was perhaps the greater crime. Sounds too familiar. It sometimes seems like Trump's bullying and nastiness are singular. His narcissism and glee in being mean may be singular but othering, alas, is close to eternal.

If you want to read a review of the book by Andrew Sullivan, this one (click here) appeared in July 2022 in the New York times.

"not even a little"

Kip is working for the caterer at a fundraiser for St Thomas. He literally runs into Scott with a tray of some canapés. Kip and Scott have undoubtedly (Maria says for sure) been flirting with each other at the smoothie shop where Kip works as he plans his graduate studies in art history. Scott invites Kip out for Mexican after the reception and Kip asks if he minds waiting until he's done with the gig. Scott replies "not even a little."

This happens in episode 3 of Heated Rivalry. Like many, I have been rather obsessed with the series from Crave, a Canadian streaming service, and it's carried in the U.S. by HBO Max.

I took a bit of a break from that rom com to read The Guncle by Steven Rowley. Imagine my surprise and delight when Grant asks his Gay Uncle Patrick, or GUP, if they are "famouth" (he lisps). Patrick responds "not even a little bit" which I definitely heard in the voice of François Arnaud who plays Scott in Heated Rivalry.

There are oodles of websters who are making parallels in something like Heated Rivalry so I'm just joining the crowd and going from one medium to another.

street names

"Whenever I come to a new town, I like to get my bearings. I want to understand the layout of the streets and the layout of the people. In some cities this can take you days to accomplish. In Boston, it can take you weeks. In New York, years. The great thing about Morgen, Nebraska, is it only took a few minutes.

The town was laid out in a geometric grid with the courthouse right in the middle. According to the mechanic who'd given me a lift in his tow truck, back in the 1880s the town elders spent a whole week deliberating how best to christen the streets before deciding -- with an eye to the future -- that the east-west streets would be named for presidents and the north-south streets for trees. As it turned out, they could have settled on seasons and suits because seventy-five years later the town was still only four blocks square."

This is how Duchess describes how small Morgen is, in The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (page 85). The town we lived in in Nebraska when I was in high school was a bit bigger ... but not much.

I too am intrigued by how cities are laid out and what effect that has on its people. Imagine how different Manhattan would feel if its street layout above 14th Street was more like the Financial District or Boston.

When we were in Morgantina, a Greek archaeological site on Sicily, I was intrigued that the streets were numbered in either direction but they were arabic numerals in one direction and roman numerals in the other.

the books I read in 2025

The books I read in 2025 are listed here, in chronological reading order. The date may not be the original date of publishing and may, rather, represent the copy I happened to read.

• Demon copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver (2022)
• Architect, verb: the new language of building, by Reinier de Graaf (2023)
• The city we became, by N.K. Jemisin (2020) - thanks to Daniel who recommended this one; quite a fantasy and very New Yorky
• The wisdom of donkeys: finding tranquility in a chaotic world, by Andy Merrifield (2008)
• Family meal, by Bryan Washington (2023)
• Plagued by fire: the dreams and furies of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Paul Hendrickson (2019) - it occasionally made me furious
• Peaces: a novel, by Helen Oyeyemi (2021)
• The marriage portrait, by Maggie O'Farrell (2022) - from Renaissance Florence ...
• The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner (2018) - ... to 21st century California (the Mars Room is a bar)
• Saint Sebastian's abyss, by Mark Haber (2022)
• I left it on the mountain: a memoir, by Kevin Sessums (2015)
• Let the record show: a political history of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993, by Sarah Schulman (2021)
• Tramps like us, by Joe Westmoreland (2001, new edition 2025 with introduction by Eileen Myles)
• The midnight library, by Matt Haig (2020)
• Dead end: suburban sprawl and the rebirth of American urbanism, by Benjamin Ross (2014)
• One last stop, by Casey McQuiston (2021) - another very New Yorky book, plenty of subway
• The world in a selfie: an inquiry into the tourist age, by Marco D'Eramo (2017)
• Tom Lake, by Ann Patchett (2023)
• The march, by E.L. Doctorow (2005)
• The dawn of everything: a new history of humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021)
• The fraud, by Zadie Smith (2023)
• Love junkie, by Robert Plunket (1992, new edition 2024)

Twenty-two books again this year. It's rather weird that it's been 22 books the last couple-three years, usually split about evenly between fiction and nonfiction. This year was a bit lopsided, with fourteen fiction and eight nonfiction.

For a visual compilation of my year's reading, Goodreads provides some statistics with pictures of the covers linked to the description and whatnot. Let the record show was the longest book I read and also the highest rated. It is important and interesting and well-written.

Goodreads is part of the Amazon empire but I recommend buying your books from an independent bookstore or at Bookshop or, gosh, maybe reading a library copy.

Edmund White

When I review the books that I've read over the course of a year, the titles are generally split about equally between fiction and non-fiction. I am reading Edmund White's obituary (Times) and the author notes that Edmund White's more than 30 books are almost equally divided between fiction and non-fiction.

There is also a wonderful essay on White in the Times: The very gay life of Edmund White by Aaron Hicklin who is working on a documentary about White. Hicklin writes about how influential the cover of A boy's own story, as well as the story, was in his life.

what are you reading?

Every week in the New York times book review, there is a box on the "Letters" page with two or three short notes listing "what our readers are reading." Last week, one of them said "I am reading Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar for the second time. I first read it 70 years ago. It's still a great read!"

I was reading Marjorie Morningstar way back in the '80s. When I saw Judith one day, she asked what I was reading and I said Marjorie Morningstar and held up my unjacketed older hard-covered edition, bound in basic black. She said that you shouldn't actually admit to reading Herman Wouk.

Whatever. I remember thinking then that it was a good read. At the moment, though, I'm reading the thoroughly modern Family meal by Bryan Washington.

short-term rentals and noise complaints

The Alfred Village Planning Board has been working on revisions to the zoning code. One of the new considerations is short-term rentals like Airbnb. Alfred is a college town, rather overwhelmed by its student population. A lot of the houses in the center of the village and beyond are rental houses. Some are big and can be noisy, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. There is fear that short-term rentals will be occasional party houses and therefore should be limited to the multi-family zones (R-2 and R-3). Some of the bigger houses in the village are grandfathered for greater capacity than two units.

We board members were having an email discussion about which zones should be allowed to have short-term rentals. Someone brought up boisterous parties they knew about in such rentals. It seems to me ungracious to preclude graduation parties in the "collegiest town" in America. As a resident of the central village in R-2, I know about the noise that can burst from the house and yard of some of those group houses, especially on a warm afternoon. The boom-boom from the speakers can be especially irksome. But I do really appreciate being in the center of town, where I can walk to most every place I need to go.

This morning as I ate my breakfast, I was reading last Sunday's New York times book review, particularly the article on Antonio Di Benedetto by Michael Greenberg. "No writer has laid bare so thoroughly the ongoing predicament of the Argentine, for whom the resolution of even minor problems, such as a noise complaint or the collection of one's modest salary, seems beyond normal human effort. Di Benedetto understands this bitter ingredient of Argentine life, where the middle class is as evanescent as melting ice, subject to impoverishing currency devaluations, corrupt populists, vicious military coups, cynical guerrilla movements and useless reforms."

I don't know whether Di Benedetto's books are exactly the thing to read now, as parallels to the chaos of the moment, or the thing to avoid and let yourself slip into comfortable release. Whatever, it will be pleasant when it's nice enough to sit on the front porch and read, even if the ex frat house across the street is boom booming.

the books I read in 2024

There are still a dozen days left in 2024 but my progress in The black book by Lawrence Durrell is quite dismal. I probably won't finish reading it before the end of the year. I made the mistake of checking the book out because I was rewatching The Durrells in Corfu on PBS Passport. That series is an adaptation of Gerald Durrell's books about the family's years on Corfu, from the 1930s up to the spread of fascism sending the family back to Bournemouth. It's the rollicking story of a widow and her four eccentric children. Durrell's Black book is more experimental and surrealistic. I was also intrigued because I had read The black book by Orhan Pamuk (1990) many years ago. I remember very much liking Pamuk's book though the images in my brain at the moment could be from that book or other Pamuks.

These are the books I read in 2024, in chronological order.

• Orwell's roses, by Rebecca Solnit (2021)
• The sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
• Becoming, by Michelle Obama (2018)
• Red, white & royal blue, by Casey McQuiston (2019) - I don't think I've watched the film adaptation more than 100 times yet.
• Trickster makes this world: mischief, myth, and art, by Lewis Hyde (1997)
• Didn't nobody give a shit what happened to Carlotta, by James Hannaham (2022)
• Bad gays: a homosexual history, by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller (2022)
• Architects of an American landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the reimagining of America's public and private spaces, by Hugh Howard (2022) - Bill and I walked about in Mount Auburn Cemetery in October, one of the great 19th-century public spaces.
• Theorem, by Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated by Stuart Hood (first published 1968, my copy is the NYRB, 2023 edition) - the basis for the Pasolini film Teorema (1968)
• Let's not do that again, by Grant Ginder (2022)
• Pink line: journeys across the world's queer frontiers, by Mark Gevisser (2020)
• Young Mungo, by Douglas Stuart (2022) - like his earlier Shuggie Bain, this book has a strong sense of place
• Blackbird, by Larry Duplechan (1986)
• The color of law: a forgotten history of how our government segregated America, by Richard Rothstein (2017)
• Erasure, by Percival Everett (2001) - I read a review of his new novel James (inspired by Huck Finn's companion) and read this book in anticipation of James coming out in paperback. More recently, I read a review of Colored television by Danzy Senna in NYTBR. Senna wrote the introduction to My search for Warren Harding (see below) and is the wife of Percival Everett. Will the circle be unbroken?
• The Paris hours, by Alex George (2020) - plenty of amusing name-dropping from literary Paris, e.g., Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Proust, Sartre
• Older brother, by Mahir Guven, translated by Tina A. Kover (2019)
• What she ate: six remarkable women and the food that tells their stories, by Laura Shapiro (2017) - a lucky grab from random searching at the public library. Shapiro's voice in the concluding chapter seemed so familiar even though our life paths were different. Turns out, she was born the day after I was. It was a good read too!
• The pairing, by Casey McQuiston (2024) - more food and drink and story
• The box: how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger, by Marc Levinson (2nd ed., 2016) - I accidentally ordered two copies and gave one to Craig. I hit "add to cart" at bookshop.org when it seemed like things were going kerflooey and didn't review my cart carefully enough. Craig enjoyed the book too.
• This is New York, by E.B. White (1948)
• My search for Warren Harding, by Robert Plunket (first published 1983, my copy is New Directions, 2023)
• The black book, by Lawrence Durrell (first published in Paris in 1938, not published in unexpurgated form in the U.S. until 1960 or in Britain until 1973; my reading copy is Dutton, 1960)

I use Goodreads to record my reading. As usual, it's about an even mix of fiction and nonfiction. If you want to see how Goodreads compiles these books and shows you a clickable cover where you can get more information, go to 

https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2024/6837039

I'm an antique and like print magazines

The ceramics library did not receive the July/August issue of The Magazine Antiques and it has been claimed. I imagined that I could go over to the David A. Howe Public Library and use their copy to index the issue for the Avery Index. Both the Hornell and Wellsville public libraries used to subscribe to Antiques. Those were the days, the before days. The holdings in Wellsville stopped in mid 2020. The librarian looked in STARCat and said that there was no indication of the magazine being held at Hornell. There were quite a few other Wellsville periodicals that seemed to stop in 2020. And the display of current magazines was quite paltry, relative to a few years ago when I indexed an issue there. Sigh.

But it was too early, after I discovered there was no issue to index, to go over to Texas Hot for lunch so I meandered into the special collections parlor and then to the 700s to see what was there on art and architecture. Drifting along into the 900s for history and biography, I noticed a book entitled What she ate: six remarkable women & the food that tells their stories, by Laura Shapiro (Viking, 2017). I read the first few pages of the introduction and went right over to check out the book. Next. 

My current reading is Older brother by Mahir Guven (Europa Editions, 2019). I'm enjoying it so I should be able to get through it and What she ate before the latter is due back at the library.

the disappearing hours

Having lots of books around the house can be a real delight but sometimes one will just disappear. It won't be in the place that I'm sure it should be. The most recent disappearing title was the small and inexpensive, and long-owned, partial facsimile of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France. This fourteenth-century manuscript illuminated by Jean Pucelle even has a Wikipedia page. 

The facsimile is just under five and a half inches tall. When the book of hours, now in the Cloisters collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was being restored, the Met displayed the disbound manuscript before it was cleaned and rebound. The "facsimile" is actually slightly larger than the original.

The other day, I was thinking about something and the facsimile came to mind. I went to that shelf of small books in my bedroom and the Hours facsimile was not there. The facsimile of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy was there. I went down the shelf book-by-book several times. I looked on a few shelves where other books of manuscript illumination are kept. I thought, for a while, that I might have lent the facsimile to an art student who was in the manuscripts class. No luck. I was about ready to resign myself to no longer having the facsimile.

This morning, it is cooler outside and I was opening the window in the middle room of my part of the family house. I realized that there was another cluster of little books at the end of the shelf just to my left. And, there was the facsimile of the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. Happiness. Made my day.

P.S. (an hour later) I went to move some of the other little books from the shelf near the window to the shelf in the bedroom, the most expectable collective spot for shelving my little books. There was the book on the Bosch and other Flemish paintings in the Prado that I'd really spent a lot of time looking for a year or more ago. I looked among the travel books and among the folders of stuff from trips to Spain. Nope, it was hiding in the little stack of little books.

just a normal guy

“I’ve never felt symbolic. I felt — you know, I’m just here.” He laughed. “I’m just Ken.” (This was an allusion to Ryan Gosling’s showstopping song at the Oscars, the night before the interview.) “I’m just me. I’m just somebody who’s trying to be a writer, trying to do his best. And that’s all I’ve ever wanted to be.”

Salman Rushdie, in an interview with Sarah Lyall, in the New York Times Book Review

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/books/salman-rushdie-knife-interview.html

the big thrill

I was in Beaufort, South Carolina, last night, with early supper at the Lost Local for tacos (one ahi tuna and one carnitas) and a yummy margarita (Perfect Margarita on the menu). It was Saturday night so I asked the waiter if she knew where I might get a Sunday New York Times the next morning. She didn't know but asked one of her colleagues. One place was City Java & News so I figured there was a good chance they'd be purveyors of a good selection of papers including the Times. They weren't open after I left the restaurant so I couldn't ask. The waiter said she saw folks with Sunday papers so the chances seemed good with both City Java and the other coffee shop, over on the waterfront.

Well, when I went 'round on Sunday morning, neither of the coffee shops had any papers other than the local weekly. So I asked the City Java clerk if there were any big grocery stores. Yep, there's a Publix over on Boundary Street, on the way out of town, said she. And I'm delighted to say they had quite a stack of Times but one less after I got mine.

There was a fine used book store in Cleveland named Publix Book Mart. We medieval art history graduate students at Case Western used to find great treasures there. Like manuscript leaves (at least one of mine is from the Ege album), early prints (at least one of Chuck's was a Dürer and I found a page from the Nuremberg Chronicle), and other good stuff. 

Ege 13

Nuremberg Chronicle

reading at the taverna

"Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Each summer I rent a house in a village in the foothills of the White Mountains in Crete. There is one bougainvillea-shaded taverna, which shares the village square with a tiny Byzantine chapel, decorated with magnificent 14th-century frescoes. I go there at lunchtime with a book. The taverna owner, Kostas, brings me whatever he's cooking, with beer. He lets me talk my lousy Greek. Cats snooze. Dogs lollop. The local farmers come and discuss the price of watermelons. I'm in heaven."

Dan Jones, "By the book," New York times book review, January 28, 2024.

Sounds perfect, Mr Jones.

the books I read in 2023

The last book I finished in 2023 was The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce. I was in New York City for the New Year's weekend, catsitting at John's. John had shown me an article from Harper's on "Street Life" by Rachel Kushner from the August 2023 issue. I went to the film "All of Us Strangers" on New Year's Day. The book, the article, and the movie all circled, in their way, around the banality and disappointment and glory of everyday life and how big a role observation can play in how that works out. On the 30th, I was off galleryhopping at MoMA PS1 and ran into Janis, Sherri, Julie, and Hikmet in the Court Square subway station. I joined them in visiting the Tracey Emin and Donna Huanca shows at Faurschou in Greenpoint but then split off and went to the Whitney and LGBT Center before meeting Heidi and Dan for supper. All everyday and ordinary and glorious and, well, New York City.

The books I read this past year are listed here in chronological order of reading.

• The magician, by Colm Tóibín (2021)
• Harlem shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (2021)
• Flâneuse: women walk the city in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, by Lauren Elkin (2017)
• Piazza Carignano, by Alain Elkann (1985) - bought at a used book store in Provincetown; the Carignano Palace in Turin was one of my favorite buildings on our 2018 trip to Turin, Milan, and Genoa; the book was fine but I really enjoyed the association with the building and plaza
• Driver's eduction, by Grant Ginder (2013) - this only gets 3.17 stars on Goodreads; that's why I don't pay too much attention to review stars; I really enjoyed this book and its style
• Germania: in wayward pursuit of the Germans and their history, by Simon Winder (2010) - one of a trilogy of histories of Middle Europe; I really enjoyed all three volumes (thanks, Daniel)
• Just by looking at him, by Ryan O'Connell (2022)
• Just mercy, by Bryan Stevenson (2014)
• Mrs Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls (1982)
• Radio girls, by Sarah-Jane Stratford (2016)
• Italian days: fifty things we know about life now, by Beppe Severgnini (2022)
• Danubia: a personal history of Habsburg Europe, by Simon Winder (2013)
• The art of description: world into word, by Mark Doty (2010) - it sounds like a book on cataloging ... but it's not, it is about words and putting them together
• The heart's invisible furies, by John Boyne (2017)
• The honey bus: the memory of loss, courage and a girl saved by bees, by Meredith May (2019)
• JD, by Mark Merlis (2015)
• Girl, woman, other, by Bernardine Evaristo (2019) - it took me a while to get used to the writing style but it worked: each sentence was a paragraph, not capitalized
• The library book, by Susan Orlean (2018)
• Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver (2018) - chomping at the bit, waiting for Demon Copperhead to come out in paper but did enjoy this one while waiting
• Becoming George Orwell: life and letters, legend and legacy, by John Rodden (2020)
• The promise, by Damon Galgut (2021)
• The poetics of cruising: queer visual culture from Whitman to Grindr, by Jack Parlett (2022)
• Solomon's crown, by Natasha Siegel (2023) - Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus, 12th century speculative fiction
• The address book: what street addresses reveal about identity, race, wealth, and power, by Dierdre Mask (2020)
• The last day: wrath, ruin, and reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, by Nicholas Shrady (2008)
• The personal librarian, by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray (2021) - fictionalized life of Belle da Costa Greene, longtime librarian for J.P. Morgan; it took me a while to get into it but I really enjoyed it once I hit the rhythm
• Every good boy does fine: a love story, in music lessons, by Jeremy Denk (2022) - maybe my favorite book of the year
• High-risk homosexual, by Edgar Gomez (2022)
• French braid, by Anne Tyler (2022)
• Dream cities: seven urban ideas that shape the world, by Wade Graham (2016)
• The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce (2012)

I would not advise you against reading any of these books. I enjoyed some of them very much as I read them. Several of them resonated with places I have been or want to go. I bought several of them in Provincetown, over the years. Plenty of Rachels. As usual, about an even split of fiction and non-fiction. And now I've started reading Orwell's roses by Rebecca Solnit and find it thoughtful (no surprise because Solnit) and compelling.

If you want to see how Goodreads saw my year in reading, go to https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2023/6837039. There, you can click on book covers and see a summary of the book and how it is rated on Goodreads. I did read a note in one of my magazine newsletters that the author had given up on Goodreads (part of the Amazon empire) and was just using Google Sheets where she could add a column for author's gender if she wanted to. I would like a column for how I heard about a book. I know Carol recommended Orwell's roses.

George and Dora in Philadelphia

Great Aunt Dora was one of the most gracious ladies that I knew in my childhood. She was the longtime Dean of Women at Alfred University when that role also included playing hostess to esteemed guests of the university. Her first husband was George C.R. Degen, a stockbroker, and they lived in Philadelphia for most of the first couple decades of the twentieth century. They also lived for a while in New York City; I have seen a photo of their NYC apartment which shows a bit of the cherry dining table that became part of my furnishings for much of my adult life. That table came back to the family house in Alfred, New York, in 1995 when I moved from Texas to my studio apartment in New York City.

Aunt Dora came back to the family house in Alfred, New York, after the death of her husband in the early 1920s. She married J. Nelson Norwood, also widowed, in 1954 and they lived upstairs in the family house. Uncle Nelson had been president of Alfred University. This picture shows Aunt Dora and Uncle Nelson in 1936, both officers of the university and probably part of the centennial celebrations that year. They were not yet married but are standing in front of the family house.

The reason I have been thinking about all this history is a coincidence in the most recent book I finished reading. The book was French Braid by Anne Tyler. Most of the characters and action are set in Baltimore. The mother of the family, Mercy Garrett, mentions at one point that she went to visit her friends George and Dora in Philadelphia. Nothing about the two, no relevant twist of the plot, nothing. Just George and Dora in Philadelphia.

housing inequality

The National Edition of the Sunday New York Times includes two or three pages of real estate and metropolitan content at the back of the business section. These days, when stock prices and currency exchange rates are readily available on the web, the business section has more content about business people or firms and socioeconomic context. The two real estate articles this past week, on facing pages, were titled "A name brand as an amenity" and "In Detroit, an eviction rattles a housing plan." While not explicitly about housing inequality, the amenity article addresses apartment buildings in Miami and elsewhere with condos selling for as much as 59 million dollars. The Detroit eviction article addresses the eviction of a homeowner for not living full time in her tiny house. Her name appears on the lease of her boyfriend's riverfront condo. She says that she works for her boyfriend's firm which is based in the apartment. The tiny houses are owned and operated by Cass Community Social Services and the rent is $1 per square foot on the lease-to-own basis.

(Photo by Michelle and Chris Gerard on Curbed Detroit)

Neither article is simply about high-priced or low-priced housing but I cannot help thinking about how many decent living spaces could be created with 59 million dollars. Not just tiny houses but living spaces from abandoned industrial buildings, rehabilitated houses, accessory dwelling units, as well as new buildings. Rehabilitation also can go a good distance on greenhouse gas mitigation.

I just finished reading Solomon's Crown by Natasha Siegel. When I went to the shelf to pick my next book, I selected The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask. I guess I will be thinking more about the socioeconomics of housing.

The Heart's Invisible Furies

I have been getting toward the end of The heart's invisible furies by John Boyne. A compelling read and some portions have been just a little too close to things that are happening or have happened in my life. This morning as I was reading, someone asked what I was reading. I handed the book to him and said something like "it's the story of an Irish man from the 1940s and I'm in the '80s now." I rarely recommend a book to someone. Enjoying a particular book is such a personal thing. Again, more resonance in Furies when I read the following passage just now.

And I quote ....

"No, you're all right. I believe you," she said, waving my offer away. "Cyril then, if you prefer. What's that you're reading?"

I turned the book over to reveal a copy of Colm Toibín's The Story of the Night. I'd owned it for years but had never got around to reading it until now.

"Now, I haven't read that one," she said, picking it up and reading the back. "Is it any good?"

"It is," I said.

"Should I read it?"

"Well, that's up to you, really."

.... end quote

As it happens, I think The story of the night is my favorite book by Tóibín.

Radio Girls, before and after their time

There are all sorts of reasons why you buy and/or read a book. Sometimes it's the stack of books on the new releases table in the bookstore. Sometimes it's a review. Sometimes a friend recommends the book. Maybe the book is just in the social air. And sometimes the daughter of a friend and colleague is the author. It was this last circumstance that put Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford on my to-read shelf.

(image from Penguin-Random House webpage for the book)

Sarah-Jane Stratford is the daughter of my longtime art cataloging colleague Nancy Norris, now retired from UCLA. It took me a little while to get into the story but I'm awfully glad I got past that. The story is set in London, between the wars, as the fascist threat grows and people become more and more aware of the seriousness of the threat. The "radio girls" are working at BBC which is in its infancy.

The first printing of the New American Library paperback edition was in June 2016. It is amazing and terrifying how the story resonates with the situation in the United States from 2016 when Trump was running and then serving as president. Suppression of news. Officious bosses. Male date assumptions. Stratford must have had her fore-seeing glasses on.

Always looking for parallels, I was amused that one of the bad guys was a Mr Grigson. Not quite the same name as Michael Gregson, from Downton Abbey, but our heroine Maisie Musgrave's fiancé Simon does go to Germany on family business and get involved with Grigson on some corporate shenanigans related to making deals with the Nazi government. By the way, librarians are mentioned a couple times as being good with facts.

at hand, just six feet away

I occasionally think that I should find an institution that could use the books on art and architecture that I've been buying for decades. I used to worry about the appraisal for tax deduction purposes and decided that was just an impediment. Still, it is satisfying to have my book collection when I am at an Unboxed Lunch sponsored by the Archives of American Art. Josh Franco talked today about new accessions to the Lucy Lippard archive. He happened to pick out the folder on her book Overlay. It was glorious to stand up, take a couple steps, and take Overlay off the shelf and look at it as he spoke.

the books I read in 2022

The last book I read in 2021 was the enjoyable Some reasons for travelling to Italy by Peter Wilson. That title will not surprise you. The only surprising thing might be the "some" rather than "oodles of." As is usually the case, my reading this past year has been a mix of fiction and non-fiction. This is the list of titles, in chronological reading order, some annotations. Most of the editions I read are paperbacks; the dates here might be the hardcover date. 

• Mr Beethoven, by Paul Griffiths (2020)
• Memorial, by Bryan Washington (2020) - this was on a friend's list of books read and recommended this year; me too
• Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart (2020) - strong feeling of place (Scotland) and economics (poverty) and youth; also on another friend's list of books read
• A nest of vipers, by Andrea Camilleri (2013) - Camilleri's Montalbano mysteries are set in Sicily and very evocative of place; many have been made into TV movies
• Dark archives: a librarian's investigation into the science and history of books bound in human skin, by Megan Rosenbloom (2020) - sounds morbid but Rosenbloom uses a book to focus each chapter which may or may not involve a book that is actually bound in human skin; really enjoyed reading this book
• Queer city: gay London from the Romans to the present day, by Peter Ackroyd (2017)
• Breakfast with Buddha, by Roland Merullo (2007) - Dorothy recommended this one after I told her about having read his The delight of being ordinary; both are recommended by me, Breakfast takes place on a road trip to North Dakota
• On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed (2021) - I had to read it for a variety of reasons, including its currency and Juneteenth is my birthday
• A visit to Don Otavio, by Sybille Bedford (first published in 1953, I read the NYRB edition, 2016, with introduction by Bruce Chatwin)
• The nickel boys, by Colson Whitehead (2019)
• How to hide an empire: a history of the greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr (2019)
• Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell (2020)
• Out of Italy: two centuries of world domination and demise, by Fernand Braudel (first published in 1989, I read Europa Compass, 2019, translation)
• Logical family: a memoir, by Armistead Maupin (2017) - some good reflections on life events that played out in his fiction
• The glass facade, by John Watney (1963)
• The folded leaf, by William Maxwell (first published in 1945, I read the 1956 Vintage edition)
• Square haunting: five women, freedom and London between the wars, by Francesca Wade (2020) - H.D., Dorothy Sayers, Jane Harrison, Eileen Power, Virginia Woolf, on Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury
• Bath haus, by P.J. Vernon (2021)
• The smart enough city: putting technology in its place to reclaim our urban future, by Ben Green (2019)
• A saint from Texas, by Edmund White (2021)
• Broken glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the fight over a modernist masterpiece, by Alex Beam (2020) - I toured the Edith Farnsworth House, outside Chicago, after the ARLIS/NA conference; the struggle to get the house built was monumental; it was wonderful to see the house, much illustrated and published, in its landscape along the Fox River
• Ninety-nine glimpses of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown (2017) - maybe I liked it because I'm just a royal family fanboy or because I was kind of obsessed with The Crown; still, this was a good read of short chapters focusing on events with some association with Princess Margaret
• The mirror & the light, by Hilary Mantel (2020) - finally
• The sweetness of water, by Nathan Harris (2021)
• Four lost cities: a secret history of the urban age, by Annalee Newitz (2021) - Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Angkor, Cahokia
• Correspondents, by Tim Murphy (2019) - the protagonist is an Irish-Arab American who becomes a journalist/correspondent in the Middle East during the late 1990s into the aughts; I enjoyed it very much, good place-ness, rather heartbreaking
• Lotharingia: a personal history of Europe's lost country, by Simon Winder (2019) - one of a trilogy about Central Europe

I'm not quite done with Lotharingia but it is such a wonderful read. Lotharingia started out as the portion of Europe given by Charlemagne to one of his grandsons.  The story has lots of Burgundy and Flanders stuff, places and art and architecture that I have long been interested in. Winder litters his history with geographic and cultural spices.

I didn't annotate all of the titles and I pretty much enjoyed all of this year's books. It took me quite a while to get through The mirror & the light but I had to read volume 3 of the Cromwell trilogy and I was deeply immersed in Tudor England as I read it. 

If you want to see how Goodreads sees my year's reading, go to https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2022/6837039. There, you can click on book jackets and see a description. Remember to support independent bookstores if you are going to buy the book. Both IndieBound and Bookshop.org can help you order a book by mail and support an independent bookstore in the process.