I really enjoy the format of my Wednesday posts because they’re not reviews. I never have to pass judgment on the books I’m reading. Instead, I can just talk about the pleasures and challenges of actually reading them. I spent more than 20 years of my career teaching other people how to read; the “how” is at least as important to me as the “what.” That’s also why most of the videos on my YouTube channel are tips for reading challenging books, not expositions on them.
The down side to this is that I make mistakes. Publicly. Oh, well. I made one just a couple of weeks ago. When I finished Jane Kenyon’s collection Otherwise, I realized that I had mistaken the final poem, “The Sick Wife,” as having been written by Donald Hall. But, no. It was written by Kenyon herself. It begins:
The sick wife stayed in the car while he bought a few groceries. Not yet fifty, she had learned what it’s like not to be able to button a button.
She was writing, of course, of herself. In my Wednesday post on April 24, I wrote that
it’s a bit troubling to see, from the table of contents in Otherwise, that Hall gets the last word on Kenyon, who died before this volume was published, in both an Afterword and in a poem titled “The Sick Wife.” I haven’t gotten there yet, but already I wish he’d backed off and let her book be hers.
As it turns out, Hall’s Afterword is quite touching. It tells how, in the very last days of her life, he helped Kenyon put this book together. And then comes “The Sick Wife,” which she hadn’t yet finished but which she wanted to include in Otherwise. He calls it “her last word.” That doesn’t change the fact that much of the Kenyon biography I just read centers on Kenyon’s efforts to separate herself from Hall’s big personality and reputation. But the poem was hers, and she asked that it be included. Mea culpa.
This experience suggested to me that I might want to go back through the rest of my Wednesday posts over the past year to see where else I might have tripped up as a result of writing in media res.
Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner came immediately to mind. I felt a little bit unsettled about my post on that novel after I’d finished reading, because four-fifths of the way through the novel, a point I reached only after I had written about it, Fleishman took an unexpected turn and ended—well, let’s just say it’s one of those ambiguous endings that becomes less ambiguous the more you think about it and becomes more simply not the way you wanted the novel to end. This book did exactly what the critic Ron Charles warned me on the back cover it would do, which was to singe my eyebrows off. Even though I quoted that review to you, in the end I felt that I had misrepresented the novel. My quest to find a funny novel that does not singe my eyebrows off in the end continues.
Just a week or two after my post about The Gettysburg Review, the college announced that the 36-year-old journal would be closing. Despite an outcry from the literary community, it couldn’t be saved. That development went unrecorded in my post, but I mention it now not only because new issues of one of the nation’s highest quality literary journals will no longer be on offer but also because we should be taking care of the journals we still have with us. If you don’t currently subscribe to a literary journal, consider doing so. If you have no idea where to start, try One Story, or get involved in Becky Tuch’s Substack Lit Mag News to try some out at a discount.
I was more than halfway finished with Hernan Diaz’s Trust when I wrote my post on it last summer, ending with the hope that “Diaz will deliver an ‘aha moment’ or stick the landing at the end in some other unexpected way.” He did. And yet, most people I know who’ve read this novel didn’t like it. This is not so much a mea culpa as an “I wish I could have told you a bit more.” Like Fleishman with its hairpin turn, Trust hadn’t revealed all of itself before I posted—but it had taught me that it was capable of doing something unexpected. Maybe that’s why it ended better for me than Fleishman did.
I also wrote about Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies a bit too early in my reading. Although I speculated correctly that the second half of the book would tackle the perspective of Mathilde, the wife in the married pair at the center of this novel, I wasn’t quite prepared for what an intensely different point of view hers would be—as it turns out, the “fury” of the novel’s title. Interestingly, while I had twice failed to get started on this novel in print and had turned to audio, after an hour or so of listening to the female narrator in the second half of the audiobook, I found I had to return to print to finish. It wasn’t the fault of the reader herself, but rather something about Mathilde’s intensity that just made it too hard to listen to. I have never been on such a reading rollercoaster in terms of trying to find my way between audio and print. All of this went unremarked because it happened after I posted.
Finally, I want to give an extra shout-out to Heather Hansman’s Down River: Into the Future of Water in the West. I gave it a perfectly nice post back in June of 2023, but that book has resurfaced (pun intended) again and again over the past year. A couple of people have spontaneously mentioned it—perhaps not entirely surprising, since I work in an environmental organization, but it was published by a small press (the University of Chicago Press), so you wouldn’t expect many people to have found it. I, myself, have brought it up in conversation a number of times, and on my summer trip to Colorado, I thought of it often. It’s a book that has made a more lasting impression on me than I expected. If you’re at all interested in water resources and the role they play in climate change (or, honestly, if you just like a rafting adventure), check this one out.
Overall, as I look back on my past year of Wednesday posts, I’m struck by how many of them stand up, even though all were written as readings-in-progress. As always, it’s fun to talk about reading itself as much as (or even more than) about the books, which, after all, are different for every reader. What you bring to them is what makes them what they are to you.
I also love hearing about your own readings in progress. I’ve added many of them to my own TBR list this past year and read some of them at your suggestion. Please, keep those recommendations coming, and read on!
This was such a fun post! Loved hearing you circle back to some of your reads.
Brave post, Kathy. When I look at the stuff I've published in the last year I cringe at least 25% of the time. Writing about the experience of reading I think is the way to go. I've often found that when I've a strong opinions (positive or negative) on a piece that there's someone close by who has had the opposite.