February Reading

I read 14 books in February, and nothing hit quite the same heart chords as my January favorite The Waves. Scattered thoughts follow. I have been playing video games obsessively the last week and it’s done a number on my reading and writing abilities.

The best book I read last month is Mihai Eminescu’s Poezii. That won’t help you, however, because Eminescu has the double burden of a poet and a writer of a minor language, so translations of his in English are atrocious. This is a shame, and something I’ve thought of fixing. Eminescu is on a level with John Keats or Friedrich Hölderlin among Romantics. The best book I read in English is Henry James' The Ambassadors. I cannot, however, in good conscience recommend this either unless you value style, character, and endless hypotaxes above what James would call the trivialities of plot, and care to see the realist novel stretched to the point of breaking.

Instead, and as a nod to February being Black History Month, I will recommend two very short novels written by Black authors. Toni Morrison’s Sula is a novel about female friendship with characters that almost bristle with life and uniqueness, and whose pages are filled with the home-run phrases that Morrison is known for:

In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

And from across the ocean, we have David Diop’s At Night All Blood Is Black which, beyond its phenomenal title, has a hypnotic ritualistic quality to it as it explores the dark past of France’s colonial empire on the brink of World War I. An intense and harrowing descent into the heart of darkness within the heart of war.

Some other stuff I read last month that I would not recommend:

• Most disappointing: Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
• Paternalism is a racism: Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Flashes of insight in a dull sea: Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell