Note: All the books in this roundup have affiliate links, so buying books through these links supports my work. The link to the StoryGraph is not an affiliate link, I just love the app. Thank you!

I was surprised to learn, thanks to the StoryGraph, that I had read 64 books this year. That’s about 10 more than usual. I figured it was because I spent this year writing my master’s thesis, which required me to read about 60 sources, both books and journal articles. But no! I only entered two books that I used as sources in the StoryGraph, Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200-1550 and Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages.

The list has physical books, audiobooks, and ebooks, and it’s made up of books I own and books I borrowed from the library. I listened to Number Go Up, Zeke Faux’s book about crypto, and Faith, Hope, and Carnage, a book based on a series of interviews that are more like conversations between Sean O’Hagan and Nick Cave. I borrowed Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham (snarky old-timey writers!) and Jan Morris’s classic memoir of transition, Conundrum.

I read a bunch of books for review, and I only reviewed the ones I liked, so here’s a handy list if you’ve got a bookstore gift certificate to burn (these links go to the reviews):

• I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger
• The Understory, Saneh Sangsuk
• Glorious Exploits, Ferdia Lennon
• Godwin, Joseph O’Neill
• The Long Run, Stacey d’Erasmo
• A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnes Varda, Carrie Rickey
• Sinead O’Connor: The Last Interview, published by Melville House

I read Bluets by Maggie Nelson and realized I might be the only person on the planet who does not like this book. Let me know in the comments if I’m not the only literary heathen.

I came late to the party for O! Caledonia by Elspeth Barker and cannot recommend this coming-of-age not-quite-autobiography about a wonderfully weird girl growing up in a large Scottish house enough. Somehow my mind pairs this with Loved and Missed, an entirely different book by Susie Boyt about a mother in London whose grown daughter is stuck in a cycle of drug abuse and who takes in (maybe slightly steals?) her granddaughter to raise. While we’re in the region, Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands is another coming of age novel set in Scotland, this time in the 1990s, and I loved it so much.

I read a few books about the current intersection of technology and culture. Besides Number Go Up, I read Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen and You Are Not a Gadget, an older title by Jaron Lanier that in some cases is prescient and in some cases flies far wide of the tech-prediction mark.

There are some big books on here, not only in size – Menewood, I’m looking at you – but in cultural heft. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar has been talked about and put on multiple lists, but even so I did not expect to like it as much as I did. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates is another book that is about more than the blurbs and The Discourse would have you believe.

Ædnan by Linnea Alexsson was another book that hit a lot of lists in 2024, and it was gorgeous. If you have never attempted a novel in verse because you thought it might be too unmoored from reality, too hard to follow, give this one a try. Massive props to translator Saskia Vogel for bringing this into English.

I finally finished my little stack of a dozen books by Annie Ernaux, finishing up with Mémoire de Fille and Le Jeune Homme. Then I spent more than a month with the lastest doorstopper from Valérie Perrin, Tata. It was a great book that could have ended 100 pages earlier.

I leaned into philosophy pretty heavily this year and may do so again in 2025. We’ll see. Life Is Hard by Kieran Setiya will scratch an itch for many people. I finally read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a Buddhist classic. In The Rigor of Angels, William Egginton connects the literary, philosophical, and scientific dots between Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg in an attempt to pin down the nature of reality. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you think it might be yours, this is a good book.

I also tried pairing Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a novella told from the point of view of her dog, and Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz, about the Woolfs’ pet marmoset. I thought it would be an enlightening exercise. It really wasn’t.

Poetry this year came from bell hooks (Appalachia), Tracy K. Smith (Life on Mars), and Anne Carson (Wrong Norma). I’m not sure Wrong Norma is exactly poetry, but it isn’t easy to slot in anywhere, so I’m putting it here.

Going through all 64 books, even briefly, seems like it’s going to get tedious for me and you both. I’ve tried to be better about sharing my monthly reading roundups, and I’ll get those in my 2025 schedule for sure. And I’ll have more full book reviews in 2025, with three already in the works.

The book I recommend to get you through the next year, if you need a balm for your soul, because of course you do in this hellish timeline, is A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Short and lovely, with a monk and a robot in the woods. This is the book.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

If you’re thinking about becoming a more serious reader, either by putting in more time or by more carefully considering whatever you read, there are a few tools that can help. Luckily, you probably have almost all of these already! There is no need to buy anything fancy or extra. But if you want to treat yourself, upgrades from whatever you found lying around the house and pressed into service are always nice.

Notebook and Pen

I am willing to bet you have some very cute, very cool notebooks lying around that you have been saving for some worthy purpose. Now, friend, is the time. Becoming a serious, thoughtful reader is the perfect reason to break into those nice notebooks. On the other hand, I also like to stock up on 10 for $10 college-ruled spiral-bound notebooks during back to school sales. You’ve got choices!

Your notebook does not need to be pristine or meticulously planned. Here are a few things you’ll want to note:

• Quotes from the book, especially if it’s a library book and you can’t write in it. Note the author, book title, and date of publication so you can source it later if you end up using the quote in an essay or something.
• Books that you hear about and want to pick up next time you’re at your friendly local neighborhood bookstore.
• Thoughts about the book you’re reading, or questions you have about it.
• Words you need to look up in a dictionary, including foreign words.

Like the notebook, the pen can be anything. It can be a ballpoint you swiped from a hotel room, or it can be a vacuum-fill fountain pen (my current choice). It can be a rotating selection of colorful gel pens.

You can also keep a pencil handy if you’d like to try writing in the books themselves. You can provide your own marginalia! I love to write in books and have for years. I underline, I star, I NB, I write “Um.” next to things I disagree with. As always, the pencil itself does not matter – wooden or clicky, hard or soft lead. Grab whatever’s handy and upgrade if you like later.

One cheap extra that I have found immensely helpful: a book weight. These suckers hold your place while you take a note or write down a quote. I got mine for $11, I think, on Etsy. They’re everywhere, you can probably make one yourself if you’re crafty, and they work way better than trying to use your phone to hold a book open.

Lap desk

I am using my second secondhand lap desk to write this list. I was given my first by an old coworker, back when I had coworkers, and when that one gave out I replaced it with one from Goodwill. I’ve been eyeing a wooden one online, but it’s spendy.

If you don’t have a lap desk, a nice pillow works. One that’s a little firm is ideal. Throw pillows for the couch are often the right size and density. You can also take a piece of scrap wood from a project, one that’s maybe 12 inches wide and long enough to span the arms of a chair, and sand it until it’s smooth and splinter-free. I have one of those too.

Lighting

It only makes sense to use the lighting available to you. In summer that’s the actual sun, and in winter it’s usually a floor or table lamp. Overhead lights don’t make great reading lights; are they too diffuse? Too far from the page? I’m not sure.

A clip-on book light is nice to have for reading in bed. You could even use it to read on the sofa while your partner or roommate watches a shitty movie. You have no interest in the movie, but you do have interest in the other person, so you share a space and do different things. It’s not for everyone, but it might be for you.

Of course, an e-reader has lights built in, so problem solved.

E-reader

I don’t normally hyphenate e- things, like email, but ereader seems odd, yes? So I’m going with e-reader. This is a Kindle for most people; I switched over to a Kobo a few years ago and like it even better. It’s a personal preference thing.

E-readers are spendy, but they hold so many books. And ebooks are often on sale, so you can pick up best-sellers for cheap. They also work with library ebook lending, like Libby and Overdrive, so you can borrow books from your couch on a Saturday night. I live that book nerd life.

I think physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks all count as reading, for what it’s worth. However, reading on a laptop, tablet, or phone puts just as much strain on my eyeballs as working on a screen, so I try not to read books there too. E-ink is way easier to read, since it doesn’t emit any light of its own.

Headphones

Headphones serve a couple of purposes for the devoted reader. First of all, wearing headphones signals to everyone around you that you cannot hear them and you do not want to hear them. You want to be left alone.

Second, headphones cut down on or even cancel out distracting noises. If you’re getting back into a reading groove, you’ll probably be pulled out of your book by every passing car and every cat meowing. If you’re a more seasoned reader going after some tough, bucket-list texts, you’ll want to minimize those sounds so you can be fully engaged with the material.

Once you have your headphones in place (and it goes without saying, whatever headphones or earbuds you have are fine), you can choose what to listen to. White/pink/brown/whatever noise works for mere sound suppression. Lo-fi hip-hop, jazz, and some classical work. Be careful not to choose music that’s so low-key it makes you sleepy. I also like high-energy music in languages I don’t speak so I don’t start paying attention to the lyrics.

Pets

There’s no need to run out and buy a pet if you don’t already have one or four, but if you do have an animal around, they make excellent reading partners. If you can time your deepest reading sessions for when your cat, dog, rat, or gerbil is sleepiest, they will offer a warm, furry anchor to keep you in your seat. There’s no way you’re going to disturb their nap, so you might as well read the next chapter.

The other night, I went to my friend’s house to hang out. She is very into birds, and the first thing she told me when we sat at the kitchen table was that the things that are obvious identifiers of bird species, like a cardinal being red, is called “jizz.” This is my kind of fact. She’s a good friend.

I could not let that fact go, so I looked into its etymology. She had thought it was a very old term, but it turns out it’s only been around for about century. The Oxford English Dictionary has it as “the characteristic impression given by an animal or plant,” which is basically what she had said. However, the first usage entry is from Bird Haunts & Nature Memories by T. A. Coward published in 1922. Here is the entry, because it’s delightful and you’ll probably want it as a tattoo that spirals around your biceps, maybe with a picture of a cardinal:

Jizz, of course, is not confined to birds. The small mammal and the plant alike have jizz.

The etymology of this term is unknown, according to the OED.

There is, as I am sure you are aware, a second definition.

This one is older, with a first usage in 1842. The OED notes that it is US slang for jism, providing an ocean’s worth of distance from something so distasteful. As a definition, the dictionary provides “energy, strength,” which puts one in mind of the “precious bodily fluids” from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

As a synonym for sperm, jizz is “often regarded as a taboo-word.” The first use in this sense, according to the OED, was in 1899, where it was spelled “chism” or “chissum,” which somehow makes it worse. After that comes a list of usages that will surprise no one: Burroughs, Updike, Roth, and the magazine Screw. Men of the mid-twentieth century were really into this word, and they were not birders.

Merriam-Webster Unabridged does not have the birding definition at all, confirming the OED’s conclusion that Americans are filthy slang users. M-W also has no idea where this word came from, and it limits its definition to a single word: “semen.” It’s plain that M-W would also rather have nothing to do with this word. I wonder how many etymologists are happy to let the origins of jizz remain a mystery rather than having to read the materials where the word is used. I get it; I am feeling the same way at this point in this short essay.

You might be wondering why my friend would tell me about birds having jizz, other than it being an amazing fact. Well, we do have a history with jizz in its non-taboo-word forms. Did you know, dear reader, that in the 1977 movie Star Wars, the band in the cantina on Tatooine is playing jizz music? This is a fact SW nerds hold close to their hearts, but the origin of the term is surprisingly shaky. I had heard that George Lucas named it that in the early days, but reasonably reputable sources on the internet give varying origin stories. The earliest usage I saw mentioned was a novelization of Return of the Jedi in the 1980s, which seems likely enough. It was definitely before a novelization published in 2017, which was another potential source I saw named.

The important thing to remember is that jizz is not confined to birds. Anyone can have jizz!

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

This little mini post is serving two purposes. First, it’s to share this essay on private study spaces. I have a shed in my back yard where I work; it has my desk, a book case, and a sofa where my dog hangs out most of the day. It shall henceforth be known as a studiolo, thanks to Andrew Hui. He has a book on Renaissance libraries coming out next week, so if you like this excerpt published at The Public Domain Review, you can preorder the book from Bookshop.org (it’s an affiliate link to support The Wingback).

The second purpose is to try out a new short-post format on the blog and play with the layout to see how it looks. You, dear reader, probably won’t notice a difference. But I’ll be trying out new lewks while I prep some new material in the background. Will it be slow rollout of new material over the next few months, or a big splashy launch? Let’s find out together!

Sally Rooney has a book out this fall, and for a few weeks it was absolutely unavoidable for bookish types. The marketing machine was turned up to eleven.

Here’s an affiliate link if you meant to buy Intermezzo and you’d like to support The Wingback.

I realized that I have no opinion whatsoever on Rooney’s work, and I may be the only person in the country—maybe in several countries—who is completely neutral on this topic.

It reminded me of my husband and playing spades.

When we were in college, my friends and I got hooked on spades. That is not some cool ’90s street drug you’ve never heard of; that is a card game that your great-grandparents probably played. It’s a trick-taking game with two sets of partners. We drank cheap liquor, as college students do, and took tricks for hours.

But not my boyfriend, who would become and still is my husband. He was not interested in playing spades at all. The more we proselytized the Church of Spades, the less interested he became. Like, from zero interest to negative interest. The more we begged, pleaded, cajoled, teased, the more resistant he became. But not angrily so, just sighingly so. This seems like the correct response to our insistence that it was the greatest game ever invented and that he was being uselessly stubborn. Lucky for all of us, he had other friends playing other games, and he would go hang out with them while we drank and played spades as if we were mid-century salesmen blowing off steam on a Friday night.

How my boyfriend-now-husband felt about spades is how I feel about Sally Rooney.

I am not ignorant of Rooney’s oeuvre. I have read reviews of her books and interviews with the author, plus hot takes and cool critiques. I see how her work contributes to the geist of this zeit. I have other books to read just as my husband had other friends. I haven’t read Rooney’s work, I don’t know that I will read her work, and from what I’ve read of her, I don’t think she really cares about that either way, which I do kind of admire. So I do have one opinion of Rooney after all.

My husband, for the record, has never played spades.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

Review: Sinead O’Connor, The Last Interview

Melville House, October 29, 2024

After the death of a cultural figure, Melville House will sometimes select interviews that the person did over the course of their career and publish them. This collection of Sinéad O’Connor’s interviews, including an interview she did on The View in 2021 before her death in 2023, is the latest in the series.

Like many people in the Gen X cohort, I encountered Sinéad O’Connor when I was a teenager and she was an emerging pop star. I first remember the video for “Mandinka,” where I heard her incredible ability to reach for a whispery high note then dive for a growling low note. Sometimes the change was crisp and clean; sometimes there was a hitch that reminded me of the “lonesome holler” in American bluegrass music. I took her completely at face value: shaved head, black boots, unapologetic stance with a mirrored guitar blinding the camera. I did not find this off-putting or needlessly defiant. I thought she was someone who knew herself in the way that I wished, as a teenager, that I knew myself. I knew nothing else at all about her.

https://youtu.be/Gf_RHVjPrHY

This is where The Last Interview begins, these early years, and it stretches across O’Connor’s career through her retirement around the turn of the millennium and into her second stretch of making music and writing a memoir in the twenty-first century. The interviews throw a certain light on how O’Connor thinks and speaks, but the collection really shines a Klieg light on music and pop culture journalism, and its relation to a controversial star, over the course of more than thirty years.

Take, for example, Sinéad’s famously shaved head. She offers stories of its beginning at nearly every stage of her career, and the stories say as much about her self perception as about how she is perceived by media and culture. In the first interview, conducted by Kate Holmquist for The Irish Times in 1986 when O’Connor was nineteen, she says:

I have a skinhead, but I’m not a skinhead. I have the haircut because it makes me feel clear; it makes me feel good.

The next interview, by Barry Egan for NME in 1988, is the absolute worst of music journalism—overblown and more taken with itself than the subject of the interview. She’s much pricklier here, and she only mentions her hair when asked what she looks like: “Shaved head. Small. Thin. Not very thin though. I’ve got really, real horrible legs and a big nose.”

David Wild’s Rolling Stone interview comes after the success of I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got in 1993, an album that I can sing every word to still, if you ask. Wild seems genuinely interested in her thought processes during the course of this conversation. And yet he brings a tangent back on track by saying, “Let’s talk hair.” And O’Connor does, but her story at this point in her career shines the light from a different angle, one with a current of defiant agency:

Years ago, Chris Hill and Nigel Grainge [the heads of Ensign Records, O’Connor’s label] wanted me to wear high-heel boots and tight jeans and grow my hair And I decided that they were so pathetic that I shaved my head so there shouldn’t be any further discussion. I also did it for other reasons, but that told them.

This is a reaction to being told what to do and how to present herself rather than, as she said in 1986, making her “feel clear.” She’s also straightforward with Wild about the fact that she doesn’t find herself attractive or consider herself a sex symbol or role model no matter what her hair looks like or how she dresses.

Spin also did an interview around this time, conducted by the publisher himself, Bob Guccione, Jr. He considers her a powerful, talented genius, and his conversation with her goes very deep very quickly. She answers his short questions on spirituality and religion, child abuse, war, racism, the state of music, feminism pro and con, often at length. Eventually does ask if she’d grow her hair out if a man she loved asked her to, and she says no. (He’s skeptical throughout of her ability to feel complete without a man.) He asks if this “intimidation bit” is something she’s created, and she says “Absolutely,” though it’s “not a conscious creation” on her part.

SPIN: Isn’t that why you cut your hair?

O’Connor: No. I just refuse to allow it to make me become something else.

The conversation starts to veer away from the topic and toward the things she has to deal with as a public figure, but Guccione steers it back. He wonders if she shaved her head because she was a victim. Same story, new light:

First of all, shaving my head to me was never a conscious thing. I was never making a statement. I just was bored one day and I wanted to shave my head, and that was literally all there was to it. I already had it shaved on the sides and it was about as far as I could go. I think fiddling with the hair is a huge subconscious statement, yeah. Yeah, I suppose it Is a subconscious rejection of conformity and of the family and everything that the word “family” can mean. I’m growing it now.

This version of the story seems to swing back toward feeling clear. It doesn’t mention the label guys. In the Rolling Stone interview, she leaves room for “other reasons” besides telling men in power to fuck off. The boredom and an indifference to conformity she expresses in the Spin interview are enough “other reasons” for most people to shave off the rest of an undercut.

As she ages, her hair becomes less of a subject of fascination. For one thing, she steps out of the spotlight to raise her children, which she discusses for the Irish Independent. When she’s interviewed in 2005 about her album of Rastafarian songs for Inside Entertainment, she is asked late in the conversation if she would grow dreads; she would not. During a radio interview in 2007, her hair is only mentioned in passing. In a long discussion ranging from faith to her recording process, Jody Denberg notes that the media “liked to talk about your hair or your sexuality or other tabloid stuff,” and no more is said about it.

The zeitgeist (and the range of hairstyles considered acceptable across genders) had changed by the 2010s. For a 2014 interview in Pride magazine, Chris Azzopardi asks about her shaved head as a “symbol of identity and empowerment.” O’Connor’s brief answer encompasses the self-determination of her early stories, the rebellious reaction of her pop star era, and the acceptance that can come with time:

I’m quite pleased that I look the way I look, and I guess I associated the hairdo with me. I don’t feel like me if I don’t have my head shaved. And yeah, it does mean, too, I can put on a dress and I’m still not selling what everyone else wants me to sell.

In the last interview in The Last Interview, O’Connor comes back around in 2021 to including the record executives in the narrative. But she also wants us to see the story the way she does in her fifties, as “quite funny” rather than as enraging. She tells the hosts of The View that the label asked her to grow out her “bit of a mohican” and dress sexier, which she didn’t want to do. She told her manager about it, and “he said, ‘Oh I think you should just shave your head.’” So she marched across the road in London and had a Greek barber shave her hair off, despite his trying to talk her out of it. It’s told as a laugh, as a youthful fuck you, by a middle-aged woman who has spent her life saying fuck you with varying degrees of intensity to anyone who tried to control her.

She makes very clear in these interviews—which are about far more than her hair—that she wanted the money, she was happy to win the awards, and she was genuinely grateful for her fans. She also wanted to present herself on her own terms, to bring her politics to the pop arena, to fight injustice, and to maintain a sense of integrity. She got shit on for that for a long time, but in the end, Sinéad was right.

Sinéad was right.

Sinéad was right.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from Practical Fox.

I wake up in the dark, pet a cat, and think, “It rained yesterday, and it’s dark and cloudy, and it’s probably cool and damp outside. I don’t have to run; I’m not training for anything. Running is not my job.”

I get out of bed, put on a robe, and let the dog out. I go to the bathroom and take my usual allergy pill, then look out the window. It’s not that cold, but it is cloudy and foggy, so yes, it is damp out there. But now I’m moving. I let the dog back inside, and she is JAZZED and ready for a run. So I’ll run.

As I get dressed in shorts and a lightweight wool long-sleeved shirt, I think, “It’s Thursday, which is usually a short run with some speed work. Fartleks. But I don’t have to do them. Maybe today it’s enough to get out there and run the energy out of the dog. Any pace, any distance.”

Phone in pocket, watch on wrist, harness on dog, reflective vest dug out from last spring. We walk to warm up then start our run. I think, “I feel okay, so maybe I’ll do a mile-long tempo run. Whatever I want to do is fine. I’m not training for a race. It’s just fun.”

A half-mile into the run, my watch tells me that, according to its measurements and metrics, my body is up for a workout. My mind agrees. At the mile mark, I switch my watch face so that it shows that time in larger numbers, and we begin our 30-20-10 speed work. That’s 30 seconds at a quick pace, 20 seconds at a fast pace, and a 10-second all-out sprint. Dogs love this workout. I think, “I did seven sets of these last week, and I was going to do eight today, but if I do five, that’s plenty.”

Set five ended up being at our turn-around spot by the local university, and I messed it up. We only got in a 5-second sprint. So we’ll do one more.

Well, if we’ve done six, we can do seven to match last week.

Now we’ve done seven, and doing one more set is only another 60 seconds.

And that is how I completed my full planned speed workout and ran a cool-down mile to get back home. The dog was, again, JAZZED. She’s jazzed about most things, honestly.

This morning’s thought process about running was almost exactly the same experience I often have with any writing project. I don’t want to. I don’t have to. One day off won’t hurt me, and it might actually help to take a break. I’ll just do this one thing in the manuscript, make this one change, jot down this one idea. I see how I can finish this paragraph, this scene. Well now I’m in it, so I might as well keep going. I wrote 700 words yesterday, I can write 800 today. Next thing I know I’ve been at it far longer than I anticipated, and some of the words don’t even suck. It might even have been fun. In any case, the dog will always be JAZZED.

KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion and Volume 2: Spectacle are available now at her website, Bookshop.org, or anywhere you buy books.

A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda

Carrie Rickey

Norton, August 2024, $29.99

I don’t remember when I first saw filmmaker Agnès Varda, but it had to have been late in her career because what I do remember was her hair, that magenta bowl cut with a silver center—a punk tonsure. I also don’t remember how, or where, or why I watched Faces Places, her 2017 documentary made with the artist JR. I remember being devastated when Godard refuses to see her in that film, and I didn’t even know of their decades-long shared history as founders (Varda more than Godard) of New Wave cinema in France.

Since then, I’ve watched a handful of Varda movies and shorts, including Cléo de 5 à 7 and Black Panthers. It helps that the Criterion Channel streaming service has conveniently put much of her work together in two collections: one of the innovative lifetime of work, and one of her sharp, intelligent, witty interviews.

In A Complicated Passion, longtime film critic Carrie Rickey simply follows Varda’s life from cradle to grave. She begins with the artist’s parents and her early life in Sète, where she formed her attachment to the waterfront. “If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches,” Varda said in her 2008 film The Beaches of Agnès. She would return to this location make her first movie, La Pointe Courte in 1955, at the age of twenty-five, despite having seen only a handful of movies herself. By the time she reached her early thirties, Varda was already being called the godmother of the New Wave, though she was barely a decade older than Godard, Truffaut, and the other “Cahiers boys.” While they were intensely studying and critiquing films for Cahiers du Cinéma, Varda was on location making movies.

Rickey discusses Varda’s early romantic relationship with ceramicist and longtime friend Valentine Schlegel briefly and matter-of-factly. Valentine was openly lesbian, and the women shared Varda’s home and studio on rue Daguerre for six years. Varda’s daughter, Rosalie, confirmed the relationship after her mother’s death. Varda herself seemed to regard her sexuality as a private matter hardly worth mentioning rather than a secret, and Rickey navigates this preference with tact.

In the 1960s, Varda was a young single mother who took on projects with the infant Rosalie and a nanny in tow. She saw no reason for motherhood to curtail her vision, and she made a point of hiring and training other women in a variety of roles on her sets throughout her life. Her work was always in support of women, and she was outspoken and political with that support. She even protested for the right to abortion in France while visibly pregnant with her son Mathieu in the early 1970s.

Eventually Varda married fellow director Jacques Demy, best known in the States for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Their working lives were as intertwined as their private life with two young children, and they bolstered each other’s projects in whatever manner was required, from finding financing to technical help to child care. But they did not collaborate on projects, instead maintaining their singular cinematic visions.

As Varda’s life became more complicated—Demy fell in love with a man in California, and she became a (mostly) single parent with a supportive community—Rickey, like Varda, remains focused on the work. Each film and short gets its due, from inspiration to funding to release and critical reception. Rickey also provides context for Varda’s work, not only by referencing the work of the New Wave auteurs who followed in her wake but by bringing other pioneering women of cinema to the reader’s attention. One early artist, Alice Guy-Blaché, is credited with at least 1,000 films before her death in 1968; only 150 of her films have been able to be identified over the past century. Rickey also makes sure to mark progress in the industry, however incremental, by noting the growing percentage of movies directed by women, especially in the twenty-first century.

The book comes in at under 300 pages, which is not a lot for a life as long as Varda’s; she died in her early nineties. It’s organized by Varda’s major artistic eras: Still covers her early work as a photographer; Moving describes her decades as a filmmaker; and Dimension details the coda of Varda’s life as an installation artist. It’s during this time that she takes her victory lap to receive several lifetime achievement awards and to lead the Women’s March at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

The narrative moves along at a clip rather than bogging down in the details, which is usually welcome. A few times, I was left a bit adrift and would have like just a few more words. For instance, Rickey mentions late in the book that Varda was at last able to find a negative of Umbrellas of Cherbourg and have it restored. In the late 1980s, Varda and Demy had scoured everywhere they could think of to find negatives of their early work, including flea markets and film labs; where did one eventually turn up?

Readers who have never watched a Varda movie will want to start with the work, not the life. Rickey provides sketches of plots for each work discussed, but she does assume a level of familiarity on the part of the reader, which is fair. Reading a biography of a filmmaker without having seen the films reminds me of the old saw about how writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Throughout the book, Varda comes up against the question all creatives have to ask: Is it possible to pursue an artistic career and support yourself and your family? Varda had both the creative vision and the brain for business required to make it all happen, and to happen over seven decades of her life. She knew how to plan, and she knew how to take advantage of a serendipitous moment—especially if it involved a cat.

You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

It has not been the easiest stretch for me lately. I had a tough couple of weeks, mental-health-wise (nothing too terrible! I have supportive friends and family and a therapist I like). I was pulling out of that spell when the alternator in my thirteen-year-old car died. I made an appointment to have it fixed and was feeling back on my shit when illness hit my family. Again, nothing too terrible, but illness is never a good time. So the car being fixed got put on hold for a week. But I’m okay. I’m not too bad at all, really.

And that, to be extremely cliché, is thanks to poetry.

It happened that I read an article in the Washington Post recently about the joys of memorizing poetry. (The article is lightly paywalled; apologies.) It also happened that I had borrowed Appalachian Elegy (2012) by bell hooks from my local library. And so it happened that I decided to pick a poem from that collection to memorize.

None of the poems in this collection are particularly long, and they’re constructed using short, powerful lines with clear imagery. I have a very visual brain, so being able to see what’s going on in the poem is helpful. There were a handful of poems that really struck me, and I narrowed my choices to three: one about a bear (3.), one about dying trees (18.) and one about birds (38.). I chose the birds because it held the most beautiful imagery included the lines:

as though air a net

to catch and comfort

The image of these birds swooping and plummeting and trusting the air the way a trapeze artist trusts a net released the tension in my shoulders. That seemed like a good enough reason to commit it to memory.

I was able to memorize the poem pretty quickly. I had it down in less than an hour. I recited it while I watched Olympics track and field. I recited it to the dog (not to the cats; they have strong bird feelings). I recited it to my ailing family member, who soon could help me remember the lines by making his hands swoop and plummet at the right times. I recited it as I went for a run. I recited it as I fell asleep.

Repeating this poem, whether aloud or silently, reveals poetic craft. The repeated “as though” of lines 5 and 6, and “who can fear” in lines 8 and 10. The consonance of “catch and comfort,” much crisper sounds than you might usually associate with solace. These devices gave me pegs to hang the poem on in my memory, but they also revealed the construction of the poem.

It’s a poem of daring and trusting, of inner knowledge and “infinite possibility.” It is comforting and expansive in so few short lines. I had last read bell hooks in college, and then it was mostly her intersectional feminist theory, which definitely had an influence on my thinking. But this poem has had a more immediate effect on my life, I think, though I know that sounds hyperbolic. I have been so glad to be able to carry this poem around with me for the last several days, to catch and comfort me.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

I have been a fan of the StoryGraph for a while now. I’m not a big goal-setter when it comes to reading; I read what I read when I read it. I don’t aim for a number of books or pages, nor do I usually read according to genre or anything. I’ve never, for instance, declared a year of reading women or a goal of reading more sci-fi. Because I read so much, though, I tend to lose track of what I’ve read, so that’s how I use the StoryGraph: as a memory boost. Plus I like to look at graphs, and it has graphs.

Here’s my 2024 so far in a pretty graph:

I also enjoy reading founder Nadia Odunayo’s newsletter, now called The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries. She shares her goals for features she’s working on for the StoryGraph, and her progress on those goals, even when business emergencies and other life events get in the way and that progress is zero. Rockstar programmers! They’re just like us!

In her latest newsletter, Odunayo shares that she sets goals for herself every month, and every month comes up short. But the miracle–what her friend calls her superpower–is that this does not get her down or discourage her or dissuade her at all. She just notes that some progress has been made and rolls the unfinished goals over to the next month until they get done. She calls his a delusion, but this superpower is actually the solution to the problem of moving forward on a massive project. Thus the title of that particular newsletter: Delulu Is the Solulu.

Since I read it on Monday, I cannot stop thinking about it. First, the fantastic phrase “delulu is the solulu.” It’s the perfect mix of silly and serious. And it rhymes. Is it my next tattoo? No. Did I spend too long making a dumb inspirational wallpaper for our phones? Hell yes. Download this to feel both ridiculous and motivated every day:

It takes some serious delulu to think you can build a reading app to rival Goodreads, one with more than 2 million users (that’s what Odunayo did). It also takes delulu to write books, to translate literature, to publish yourself or to find an agent, to send out newsletters, to contact bookstores. To paint. To write songs. To build furniture. To do any of the creative, crafty things we do.

The delulu is the solulu because, well, how else is any of this going to get done? Keep writing, keep reading, keep coding, keep crafting. Solidarity in delulu.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to get the 13-week summer reading newsletter! I’ll be posting once a week for all subscribers, free or paid, June 6 through August 29, using the National Book Foundation’s Summer Reading Adventure as a guide. Subscribers will also be entered to win a copy of both Rebellion and Spectacle on Labor Day. Details in this post.

Technically, this is week six, but last week’s newsletter fell on a holiday, and there was dog drama. Let’s get into it.

What Did I Read This Week?

I finished a handful of books in the last two weeks. First was Artful by Ali Smith, a writer I’ve encountered but not read much. I think this book, which was lightly adapted from lectures she gave, is not necessarily typical of her work, but I liked it so well that I’m considering a deep dive. Smith wrote a “seasonal quartet” that was published over the last decade or so, and that seems intriguing. I’m also considering How to Be Both.

I also finished The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey d’Erasmo. It took me a minute to get into it and understand the project, but once I did, I liked it very much. Middle-aged Gen X creatives will probably appreciate it the most.

And I finished reading Nancy Mitford’s biography of Madame Pompadour. I’ll admit that when things got real political in the final third, I got kind of bored and skimmed those chapters. I’m not so into Pompadour and her priest friend’s failed foray into international diplomacy, it turns out. I am into secret staircases and more successful attempts to get the queen to like her a little.

I am maybe surprisingly neutral about “best of” lists when it comes to books. I know what I like, and I’m not too concerned with what I “should” be reading or have read. But I do like to read lists to see if what’s out there that I haven’t come across before, or to be reminded of the many, many books still languishing in the TBR pile. The New York Times has a new best of the century so far list, which is fine, and it does have a few new-to-me titles that I’m probably going to borrow from the library. They’ve been sharing twenty titles each day this week. They also let you tally which books on the list you’ve already read and take a little screen shot. Here’s mine as of today, with one more day to go:

I’ve also been watching a lot of films by Agnès Varda so I can review the new biography that’s coming out next month. It’s been a good way to pass the time during the heatwave.

How Summery Was My Week?

It was summery, but not in a good way.

First, a skunk got in a fight with a cat in the middle of the night and somehow found its wounded self stranded in my semi-skunk-proof fenced yard. My dog, who has no chill, found the skunk, who had no exit plan. A massive amount of spray ensued, and the dog freaked all the way out, injuring her own face in an attempt to get the smell off her. I bathed her outside and brought her in while we waited for the skunk to find one of the few ways it could safely exit the yard. A few days later, it died under the neighbor’s shed. It was a saga on this block.

As soon as the dog recovered from the skunk trauma—mostly—it was July 3, which means fireworks. And then it was July 4, with more fireworks. She’s never been bothered by them before, but this was too much. A firework too far. So we huddled together on the couch for safety. (I hate them too.)

And then the triple-digit heat came. We were able to install air conditioning a couple of years ago, something most Pacific Northwest homes don’t have because we’ve never needed it before.

All very summery things, none of them great. C’est la vie, hein?

How Adventurous Was My Week?

As little adventure as possible was had, thanks to skunks, fireworks, and heatwaves.

Did I Check Any NBF boxes this week?

I did! I created a playlist inspired by something I read! There’s now a playlist for Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion on Spotify, Tidal, and YouTube. Playlists for Volume 2: Spectacle (published September 10) and Volume 3: TBD (coming spring 2025) are in the works.

The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry

Stacey d’Erasmo

Graywolf Press, July 2024, $17

How did I get this book? NetGalley ARC

In two ways, The Long Run by Stacey d’Erasmo was not what I expected, and in both ways, I am glad to have been mistaken. First, I requested this book for review and then forgot about it while I finished reading other books for review. When I saw it on my ereader, where it was identified only by its title—no subtitle—I assumed I had requested a book about running during one of my fits of devotion to running as a sport rather than my usual consideration of running as something I like to do with the dog four times a week.

This is not a running book.

Then I read the synopsis again to see if I even wanted to read The Long Run anymore, once my running-as-sport fervor had passed and I was back to tooling happily around the neighborhood with Mabel. That’s when I realized that it was a book about maintaining a creative practice and living a creative life over the long run. I thought maybe it would be like Csikszentmihaly’s Flow in a way. Oh, I do want to read this, my middle-aged self thought.

This is not a how-to or advice book.

D’Erasmo has instead created the clearest example of the old writing saw “show, don’t tell” for a book about sustaining one’s creativity when the demands of family, the necessity of paid work, and the maintenance of friendships drain the energy you would otherwise put into art. She interviews a variety of artists—composers, dancers, actors, writers—who have been at their work for decades. The interviews are interspersed with memoir sections of the evolution and struggle to maintain her own creative practices. As she says in the prologue: “How do we keep doing this—making art?”

Bearing in mind that I was coming at this book from all the wrong angles right from the start, it took me a minute to understand what d’Erasmo was doing. The first chapter, which centers on dancer Valda Setterfield, suddenly veered away from the performer’s story to a memoir segment about d’Erasmo’s twenties in New York City. It was interesting and, as with the rest of the book, well written, but I couldn’t see the connection. Why had she broken away from Setterfield’s collaborations with her choreographer husband and the way her dance changed as she aged and became unable to move in the ways she always had? I was perplexed, but I still somehow trusted d’Erasmo to come through. I kept reading.

The more I read, the more the connections became more clear. The memoirs connected to the work of the interview subject, or to their gender or sexuality, or to the challenges they faced as they clung to the work that gave them life. At the halfway point of the book, the actress Blair Brown encounters the prejudice against older women in casting rooms, and d’Erasmo shares a short section on finding herself attracted to men in midlife after decades of living as a lesbian. But by this point, I had caught on. D’Erasmo brings in quotes from another interview she did with the author Samuel R. Delaney, as well as considerations of work by Patti Smith, the poet Mark Doty, and the visual artist Roni Horn. Her lifetime of curiosity and reading make The Long Run more akin to a commonplace book than a stuffy intertextual treatise.

The penny truly dropped and sank into my consciousness while reading the chapter about composer Tania Léon. It opens with mention of an essay by Roberto Bolano about the role of exile in a creative life. I perked up, since I have written some about exile as it relates to Old English poetry. This was a different way of approaching exile, and I had many questions. Can exile be voluntary, or is it always imposed? How did the Old English idea of exile as a kind of hell on earth intersect with Bolano’s idea of exile as necessary for art? I made a note to look up the essay. Then I read that Léon was the pianist that choreographer Arthur Mitchell happened to overhear improvising. He hired her to compose music for his ballets. I was also reading The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby at the time and had just encountered that scene. This one chapter touched on several of my wide-ranging interests, and introduced me to new artists, like the sculptor Ruth Asawa.

This, I think, is what keeps us creating over the long run, and what d’Erasmo is showing the reader rather than telling them. D’Erasmo, along with every person she interviews, has filled the well repeatedly over a lifetime, and she draws from it as often as she refills it. Creative people in any discipline connect the dots, pick up the threads, find new puzzle pieces, chase down the mysteries—whichever metaphor works. We also learn, sometimes against our will— like when d’Erasmo endured a years-long stretch without writing—when to let things be. Cap the well, but don’t bolt down the cover. We’ll return to it.

Readers who have been at this over the long run already will see their years of scraping and cobbling and hustling for a living that would support their art reflected back at them. Our major and minor successes and failures, our personal and professional breakthroughs and losses—they’re all there. You don’t make it to the long run without passing through Dante’s dark forest of midlife.

D’Erasmo doesn’t offer many pithy, Wilde-esque, meme-able summaries of her ideas for sustaining creativity. But she does say it’s “not a will, but willingness” that makes a long run possible. That seems like a better guiding light than any how-to or advice book you could find.

(There is also a helpful chapter-by-chapter list of sources for further reading at the back of the book.)

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to get the 13-week summer reading newsletter! I’ll be posting once a week for all subscribers, free or paid, June 6 through August 29, using the National Book Foundation’s Summer Reading Adventure as a guide. Subscribers will also be entered to win a copy of both Rebellion and Spectacle on Labor Day. Details in this post.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

Concerning the Future of Souls

Joy Williams

Tin House Books, July 2024, $22.95

How did I get this book? NetGalley ARC

Concerning the Future of Souls is a follow-up of sorts to Joy Williams’s 99 Stories of God. Both contain ninety-nine very short stories—in one case that I can think of, a single word—that might be called prose poems or (very) short stories or microfictions or, as Maggie Nelson called them in her Bluets, propositions. The new book centers around Azrael, the angel who transports souls to the afterlife. (An entity that performs this work is called a psychopomp, by the way, which is an excellent word.)

This book, like much of Williams’s work, defies neat boxes, which means there are many more ways to read it than the usual front-to-back way. This is the way that I read it, and probably the way it should be read at least the first time. But the experimental form lends itself to experimental reading. Here are the suggestions I jotted down as I read:

• Read one story a day, maybe with a warm beverage or a neat whiskey. It could be a way to start the day, a midmorning or midafternoon break, or the thing you do to close the day for ninety-nine days. Read and sip and savor. This will be far more interesting than any quote-a-day calendar.
• Practice your close reading skills. It’s less daunting to do a close reading on a piece so short. Go word by word and consider what you’re being told, what you know about the world of the story and the characters. No need to know anything about Williams or the world she was writing in or even the stories that come before or after. Just take one story and read it as closely as you can. I would pick #14, “Wyrd,” for this myself.
• These stories are short, but they are full of references to other things. In a spirit opposite close reading, look up every reference Williams makes, chase every rabbit down its hole until you hit bottom or get bored. Don’t make a note and get around to it later; stop and look it up. It’s not like you’re going to lose track of the plot.
• Consider every story in light of souls—who and what have them, and who and what do not. Take into account the fact that Williams’s concept of souls extends beyond humans and even mammals in general to anything affected by climate change. Read #28 and see if you agree.
• In that light, remember someone you love who has died. As I was reading this book, my own grandmother was dying. These short pieces are not the typical comforting fare for the grieving, but I found that a collection of odd, deep, funny, tangential stories were what I wanted.
• Use the book to break your phone habit. When you find yourself scrolling and scanning without engaging, stop and read a story. It not only gets you physically off your phone (unless you’re reading this book on your phone, in which case it might not work), the oddity of the stories themselves will jolt your brain into running in another direction entirely. Refreshing.
• Pick up the book and read a story at random. Even if you land on the same story multiple times, you won’t regret it.
• Appreciate the friendship between Azrael and the Devil and how they both relate to God, who is tough to have as a friend, apparently.
• Similarly, this would make a great book for fucking around with bibliomancy. Ask a question or think of a situation you’re dealing with, then open the book up to a random page. The story is your answer. Since the book covers souls, life, death, heaven, hell, you can’t help but get a profound answer. Williams also uses brevity and imagery in ways that could unlock whatever problem you’re having.
• Dare yourself to choose a favorite, then try to figure out why you like it. You may be drawn to a one-sentence story, or a dialog between Azrael and Satan. Is it the tone? A particular word? An association with your own life? What makes that one hit right for you?
• Or you can just let Joy Williams tell you how to read the book, which she basically does in #56.

You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to get the 13-week summer reading newsletter! I’ll be posting once a week for all subscribers, free or paid, June 6 through August 29, using the National Book Foundation’s Summer Reading Adventure as a guide. Subscribers will also be entered to win a copy of both Rebellion and Spectacle on Labor Day. Details in this post.

Welcome to week three of our reading adventures, courtesy of the National Book Foundation’s reading challenge. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to read along and comment, and be entered to win volumes 1 and 2 of Memoirs of a French Courtesan at the end of the summer.

What Did I Read This Week?

I finished reading Artful by Ali Smith and liked it enough that I’m considering buying the whole seasonal quartet of novels, Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. If anyone wants to do a read-along on these, that could be fun. I am a huge fan of the StoryGraph, and it has the ability to do book clubs and read-alongs of any size now, I think. If you’re interested, leave a comment or email me at khg @ kristenhallgeisler . com.

The StoryGraph is also how I keep track of what I’ve read recently, and they do year-end wrap-ups, kind like Spotify for books. Monthly and calendar views are coming too, which sounds very satisfying.

I’m still listening to Swans of Harlem and reading Madame de Pompadour and enjoying both. I’m also reading a book for review that happens to profile the original composer for the Dance Theater of Harlem’s works, so that was a nice bit of serendipity.

How Summery Was My Week?

It was mostly warm, and it was mostly summery. The weekend in particular was nice, with lots of time for gardening, reading, and a soccer match with perfect weather, a cold beer, and a win for the Portland Timbers.

How Adventurous Was My Week?

This week’s big adventure was getting a new tattoo. I was able to get an appointment with Rebecca Cameron when their books opened this spring. They usually do gorgeous freehand (freehand!) floral tattoos, but I had a particular shape I wanted. So they worked up a design stencil using the wildflowers I love, then spent nearly half our appointment making sure the design was exactly right—balanced, sized appropriately, and well placed. The other half of the appointment was the part with the needles and ink.

It is perfect, and I could not be happier with the tattoo itself or with Rebecca’s work and creativity. If you can get into their books (they’re popular for a reason) or find them at a convention, I cannot recommend Rebecca highly enough.

Did I Check Any NBF Boxes This Week?

I did not, sadly. On to next week!

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

I’ve been thinking about balls a lot lately, thanks to my translation of Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 2: Spectacle. The author, Céleste Mogador, attends her first ball as young woman and eventually earns fame and her sobriquet, Mogador, while dancing with and for all the high-born young men in Paris.

As a break from my first pass at Volume 3 of the memoirs and my revisions of that translation, I’m reading Nancy Mitford’s biography of Madame de Pompadour. Her fame as Louis XV’s mistress came about seventy-five years before Mogador’s time, but it keeps my mind in France and on fancy parties. I was reading about the celebration of the Dauphin’s marriage in February 1745. This would be the wedding of Louis XV’s son, also named Louis but never a king himself, and his wife Marie-Teresa-Rafaela of Spain. This is not the future and more famous king and queen Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette of Austria, who have not been born yet at this point in the story, though you would absolutely be forgiven if you could not keep these names straight. Louis XV hosted a ball at Versailles to celebrate his son’s marriage and to maybe audition a new mistress for himself. Here’s the passage in Mitford’s book that caught my attention:

Every pretty woman was there to try her chances with the king. When balls were given in the state apartments, they were entirely open to the public; it sufficed to be properly dressed to be admitted.

I did not know this about public balls. More than half a century later, Mogador was attending public balls held by wealthy society families in Paris, not royal balls. The revolution of 1789 had happened by then, so those heads had already rolled, and returned, and been rousted again. She lived through an entirely different revolution in Volume 3.

Now that I was considering how people got into balls, I wondered how Cinderella and her step-sisters were able to attend Prince Charming’s ball.

Getting Grimm

I first turned to the Grimms, who published Kinder und Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812. So this story was likely collected in Germany halfway between the Versailles ball for the Dauphin and the public balls Mogador attended. I found an English translation from 1853 to read.

Right from the start, this version tells the reader that the dying mother is the “wife of a certain rich man,” so the family is not poor. When the widower father takes a new wife, who brings along her two daughters. The three women “took off her [the man’s daughter’s] fine clothes” and relegated her to the kitchen with the maid. So the man’s daughter, who is not yet named because no one is in this story, had fine clothes, and the family had a servant who worked in the kitchen.

The father is going to the fair and he asks if anyone wants anything. The step-daughters ask for “beautiful dresses” and “pearls and precious stones,” which he agrees to without balking at the cost. Cinderella asks for the first branch to touch his hat, which he also agrees to without balking at the strangeness of her request.

The reader then learns that the king is to hold a three-day festival for his son to find a wife. “All the beautiful maidens in the country were invited.” So this ball is like the state balls of pre-Revolutionary France, where anyone can come and meeting the dress code was presumably enough for entry.

What follows is the familiar tale. The man’s daughter is filthy from cleaning and falls asleep in the ashes on the hearth, so her step-family name her Cinderella. She receives magnificent dresses and golden (not glass) slippers from helpful birds and attends the festival anonymously, each evening racing home before anyone can discover her identity. She, like her step-sisters, is dressed appropriately, and the prince dances only with her. In this German version, on the third night, the prince lays a trap of tar and one of her shoes sticks as she flees. He knows the mystery woman fled to a particular estate, so the next day he visits and tries the shoe on the step-sisters’ feet. You may know that in this version of the story, one sister cuts off her toes to make the shoe fit and the other cuts off her heel. The blood is a giveaway, and the prince rejects them. Then Cinderella tries on what must by now be a hideously bloodied gold slipper, and it fits. She marries the prince.

I found another translation of the Grimm collection from 1823 called German Popular Stories. In this one, the step-sisters are invited to the ball, so apparently it’s not open to all comers. Or if it is, the step-sisters’ presence was specifically requested, likely along with the daughters of other wealthy families. There are small translation differences, like this is  “feast” rather than a “festival,” and the translator chose to call the celebration a ball more often than the later translator did. He also calls Cinderella a “slut” at one point. I shouldn’t have been surprised, since much of the insulting language we use now was in use long before we assume, but I was.

The Forgiving French

I knew that there was a French version, so I went looking for it. In 1697, Charles Perrault published Histoires ou Contes du Temps Passé (Stories of Times Past). In German, the main character was called “Ashputtel,” in French she’s “Cendrillon,” in English “Cinderella.” They all mean a girl of cinders and ashes. Much is made of the violence of the German tale, but the older French version is far less bloody. It’s also a more direct source for the Disney version. It has the glass slipper, the pumpkin coach, the mice turned into horses, and even the fairy godmother, all of which are missing from the German tale.

via GIPHY

In Perrault’s telling, Cinderella’s father is a “Gentilhomme,” which confers some social status on him in addition to presumed wealth. She sleeps in the granary on the top floor of their home, which is again typical of French families with some money and servants. Her step-sisters are described as having the best beds and, a true luxury, full-length mirrors.

Here the king gives a ball, and he invites all the “people of quality,” or high-born families. “Our two Demoiselles were also invited, because they had good reputations in the Country.” (All of the French translations are my own.) The two sisters must not be highly enough born to be included in the general invitation, so not royal or close to the court. But this does seem to say that the family had a country estate, and that despite being common, they were wealthy enough and well-mannered enough to earn an invitation to this ball. This is akin to the situation with Madame de Pompadour herself when she was still the lady of Etioles, an estate that abutted the royal hunting grounds, and not yet Louis XV’s mistress.

Cinderella’s step-sisters array themselves for the party in velvet, diamonds, and a gold-embroidered cape. They have the balls, pun intended, to ask Cinderella to come assess their outfits, “because she has such good taste.” After they leave, Cinderella gets her finery, plus her entourage, from her fairy godmother.  She also gets the midnight deadline. Midnight may be a traditionally mystical witching hour, but it’s not really that late as far as royal balls go. They would often last until sunrise, especially the large ones. If this tale was collected or written in the era of the 1697 publication date, that was during reign of the infamously powerful and luxuriant Louis XIV, the Sun King. His balls were certainly large. Popular. Well-attended. Anyway, having to leave before the stroke of midnight meant missing most of the party. This would have been a significant constraint.

Cinderella is more than dressed appropriately—as in the other tales, she is both beautiful and unrecognizable. Perrault’s prince runs out to greet her as she steps out of the carriage and invites her to return the next night before she leaves at 11:45. Her clothing is scrutinized at the ball by the “Dames,” or ladies of some standing, and found to be lovely. She does, after all, have good taste. In this tale, she loses a slipper as she runs away on the third night, no tar traps required, glass slippers being particularly slippery, I would think.

After she has fled before the midnight hour rings, the prince asks the guards if they saw a young lady leaving the ball. They answer no, that they’ve only seen a “paysanne,” or country girl, or even hick, go by. Not someone who would have ever been inside at the ball.

In case class divisions and ranking have escaped the reader up to this point, the prince sets out on his search for the slipper’s owner beginning with the princesses (of the blood, I presume), then the duchesses, then the members of the court. Then he ventures out to the estates surrounding the palace.

Not only are there no bloody feet in this version, which was published more than a hundred years before Grimms’, but there’s forgiveness. When Cinderella is revealed to be the owner of the slipper and the future princess and queen, the step-sisters beg her forgiveness, which she grants. She even brings them to live in apartments at the palace and they marry gentlemen.

Clothing Counts

In all of these instances, from Perrault to the Dauphin to Grimm to Mogador, clothing is the key to the gateway that leads to the upper echelons of society. The balls Mogador attended were public, but achieving the level of success that she did required cashmere, velvet, and jewels. Being fashionable in nineteenth-century Paris was expensive, and it required income. Mogador began as a courtesan, where she acquired her first finery. Then she had a shop, then she became a stage performer, and then a trick rider at the Hippodrome. At every step, she had wealthy boyfriends who bought her gifts in addition to her own income. In Mogador’s world, better clothing meant better company. Being underdressed for a public ball meant social death and financial ruin.

“In archetypal psychology,” wrote Clarissa Pinkola-Estes in her landmark feminist study of fairy tales Women Who Run with the Wolves, “clothing can personify the outer presence. The persona is a mask a person shows to the world. It hides much. With proper padding and disguises, both men and women can present a near-perfect persona, a near-perfect façade.” This is evident for Cinderella, Cendrillon, Ashputtel, and Céleste Mogador. Being nearly perfect gave you access to the wealthy—if you had the balls.

via GIPHY

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to get the 13-week summer reading newsletter! I’ll be posting once a week for all subscribers, free or paid, June 6 through August 29, using the National Book Foundation’s Summer Reading Adventure as a guide. Subscribers will also be entered to win a copy of both Rebellion and Spectacle on Labor Day. Details in this post.

You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

Welcome to week three of our reading adventures, courtesy of the National Book Foundation’s reading challenge. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to read along and comment, and be entered to win volumes 1 and 2 of Memoirs of a French Courtesan at the end of the summer.

What Did I Read This Week?

I finished a few short books last week, so I started a few this week. As part of the reading for my thesis, I started the Companion to Ancrene Wisse edited by Yoko Wada. Not a book for everyone, but every chapter is relevant to my work. The color-coded highlighting is off the charters.

As a fun, light, summery book, I picked up Nancy Mitford’s biography of Madame de Pompadour. The Mitford family is a real mixed bag of Nazis, Communists, and snobs, with Nancy being maybe the snobbiest. She is, in Monte Python speak, a real candidate for Upper-Class Twit of the Year. However, her writing style is effortless. She puts in the work when she writes a biography, but the book that results will never let you see her sweat. Like a swan paddling away under the surface of the water. I also enjoyed her biography of Voltaire and the Marquise du Chatelet.

I like to surprise myself by placing holds on books at the library and then just reading them whenever they become available. I often don’t remember why I wanted to read a thing or where I even heard or read about it, so I just have to trust Past Kristen’s taste and intentions. She usually does all right be me, as she did with Artful by Ali Smith. I’m halfway through it already, “it” being a book that was a series of lectures on literature, but also a novel, and maybe autofiction in some ways? Let’s settle on boundary-breaking. I don’t know that I love it, but I do love the questions its making me ask about literature and my own response to it.

Speaking of library books, I’ve turned to more audiobooks instead of podcasts lately. So I’m listening to The Swans of Harlem by Karen Valby about the first Black ballet company. I’m not very far into it yet, but Valby’s access to the ballerinas who helped found the company is priceless.

How Summery Was My Week?

It was the week leading up to the solstice, and it started very unsummery. There were clouds and a threat of rain that didn’t really materialize in my neighborhood. I had a lot of thesis material to get through, though, so no complaints.

The weather warmed up during the week, and I was able to get out to the hammock for some reading time. In anticipation of the laser beams of sunshine that start attacking the front porch in summer, I hung my porch curtains. If you have a porch and you would like to tone down the sun (and the prying eyes of neighbors), here’s the extremely cheap and easy project—no sewing required.

1. For each curtain, you’ll need:
   • A canvas drop cloth as long as your porch is tall, however many are required to block the sun/the neighbors
   • Shower curtain rings that have clips attached, four or five per curtain, maybe
   • 1-inch steel pipe (these are usually precut at places like Home Depot), one per curtain
   • Screw-in hooks, two per curtain
2. Screw the hooks into the wood above the porch (not the ceiling, the soffit). They’ll be as far apart as the pipes, minus a couple of inches. So if you bought six-foot pipes, maybe put the screws five-and-a-half feet apart.
3. Cut the drop cloth so that reaches from the hooks to the floor (more or less, according to taste). If they mostly fit and you’re not picky, no cutting required.
4. Clip the shower curtain rings along the top of the drop cloth. Evenly spaced is nice but not necessary.
5. Slide the rings onto the pipe.
6. Place the pipe into the hooks that you’ve screwed into the soffit.
7. You can sew or glue ties onto the drop cloths if you like, or finish any cut edges with hems or bias tape or something. This project adapts to both fanciness and laziness.

How Adventurous Was My Week?

A little adventurous! I had to drive a box of Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion down to Multnomah Village, a neighborhood in Southwest Portland that I hardly ever visit. It’s such a great bookstore, though, and the people are incredibly kind and knowledgeable. I realized after I left (I was still foggy-headed and hadn’t had enough coffee) that I should have asked for a book recommendation so that I could check off a box on the NBF form.

Did I Check Any NBF Boxes This Week?

As mentioned above, no. I did not check a box. But I have an adventure planned that will check off a box. And I should finish Swans of Harlem, which will earn me the audiobook box.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

Welcome to week two of our reading adventures, courtesy of the National Book Foundation’s reading challenge. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to read along and comment, and be entered to win volumes 1 and 2 of Memoirs of a French Courtesan at the end of the summer.

What Did I Read This Week?

I finished two short-ish books this week, a pair kind of made to be read back to back: Flush by Virginia Woolf and Mitz by Sigrid Nunez. Flush was Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s Cocker spaniel, and Mitz was Leonard Woolf’s pet marmoset (that, as a reminder, is a tiny monkey). I’ve long wanted to read both and write an essay on them, so with the reading done, I’m halfway there.

I also finally read Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, which is an excellent book of poetry. I sometimes find it hard to pace myself with poetry; I have the same problem with graphic novels. I tend to inhale them too fast. I read Life on Mars mostly on short work breaks, a handful of poems at a time, in a chair in the sun outside my workroom. Highly recommend both the book and this reading practice.

This summer I’m reading general works to get a grip on the major themes of my master’s thesis, so I also finished reading Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski. It’s an academic book, so it’s hard to recommend it to almost anyone, unless you’re into scholarship on medieval English women, particularly anchoresses.

The Criterion Collection edition of The Royal Tenenbaums is available to stream on Criterion’s app, so I watched the Wes Anderson commentary this week. I’m including it because the conceit of the film is that it was based on a book about the Tenenbaum family, but there is no such book. A lot of fantastic fake book covers in this movie though.

One of the checkboxes on the NBF Summer Reading Adventure sheet is reading outside your usual genres, but I read pretty widely, so I wasn’t sure how to tackle this one. Then I saw this list on Electric Literature of crime novels without the usual dead-girl trope, which I am sick to death of reading and seeing in TV and movies. So maybe I’ll pick one of these over the summer.

How Summery Was My Week?

Summery! I spent many hours reading in the hammock (see above: I read a lot). Windows were thrown open, long runs were taken with the dog, tank tops were worn without a hoodie over them. Mr. H-G and I walked to our friends’ house for pizza and beer, and it was still light and warm when we walked home.

How Adventurous Was My Week?

This week’s adventure involved a trip to Powell’s, one of the benefits of living in Portland. But it wasn’t the wander-the-aisles-in-awe adventure that visitors to the city (rightly) love to do. This was a targeted mission.

I looked up the book I wanted to buy, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, because I am a very fun person who definitely gets out a lot, on the store’s website. There were two copies, one at the big store in the suburbs, and one at the bigger store downtown, the mothership, the City of Books. I had another errand to run that was more in the direction of downtown, so I chose that option. I figured once I had that book in hand, I’d do a bit of a wander to see if anything else caught my eye.

Once I arrived, however, the book was not on the Nabokov shelf. They did have two copies of his lectures on Russian literature, but that’s not the book I wanted. I asked the very helpful people at the information desk if it might be shelved somewhere weird, but no. The only copy in the inventory database was the one in the other store. I probably read the website wrong, or (fingers crossed) there’s some other lit-loving oddball in this city who wanted Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature that morning.

Did I Check Off any NBF Boxes This Week?

I’m officially checking the “Read outdoors” box this week.

I’m also checking the “Read or listen to an interview with a living writer” box. I listened to Merve Emre interview my professor Maggie Doherty analyze a short story by Lydia Davis, so it’s basically a literary trifecta for me. Emre has a podcast, The Critic and Her Publics, where she interviews a critic and asks them to critique an object—poem, painting, Barbie, what have you—every two weeks.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

Godwin

Joseph O’Neill

Pantheon, June 2024, $28

How did I get this book: NetGalley ARC

There are two things to know about me before I begin this book review: I have been thinking about race, business, and sports since former NBA star and Portland Trailblazer Rasheed Wallace gave a blistering interview to The Oregonian in 2003, and I started writing this review in the notes app on my phone at a midweek Timbers 2 Open Cup match. So I am squarely in the audience for Joseph O’Neill’s novel Godwin.

But first, that Sheed interview. It came in so hot that the Portland daily ran a content warning of sorts to let readers know that the editors chose to let his word choices, including multiple instances of the n-word, run in print when he was directly quoted. The article noted that at the time, most of the league’s decision-makers were white and 80% of the players were black. I don’t have current stats, but I’m willing to be the numbers are still close to the same after two decades, despite efforts toward change.

Wallace, who was twenty-nine years old at the time of the interview, said, “I’m not like a whole bunch of these young boys out here who get caught up and captivated into the league. No. I see behind the lines. I see behind the false screens. I know what this business is all about. I know the commissioner of this league makes more than three-quarters of the players in this league.”

Not long after this interview was published, I was in Marseille on vacation during Olympique Marseille’s run to the UEFA Cup final, the year that none other than Didier Drogba played with the team. That was when I learned that soccer, as Danny Rojas says on Ted Lasso, is life.

But man, do I hate the business end of soccer. Transfer windows give me the creeps, and not because I’m afraid of losing great players from my favorite teams. The language around the business of sport is awful and dehumanizing. I checked the transfer news on Goal.com today and found these in the headlines: “Jamal Musiala is reportedly not for sale this summer” and  “Bayer Leverkusen slap HUGE price tag on star Wirtz.” Not at all offensive on the surface, and Wirtz had fucking nailed a hat trick in a historic win for Leverkusen just days before. But it’s the same language used to describe bars of soap or cars or smartphones: for sale, slap a price tag on it. Players are often referred to as “product.” I don’t like it.

As always, get that paper, players. No grudges there. But sometimes, especially when Black players are involved, it feels a little to close to placing a man on a platform at the market and examining his fitness for purpose. This might just be me. No one else seems to take much notice or be at all bothered by it. I’m not even sure of Sheed’s own take on this twenty years later. But I suspect, after reading Godwin, that something like this has crossed Joseph O’Neill’s mind.

But O’Neill doesn’t start with Godwin, or even with the guy who’s going to go find Godwin. He begins the book in 2015 with Lakesha Williams, a Black woman who has built a successful business for freelance technical writers in New York City. Lakesha treats her team of freelancers like family, and they mostly return the sentiment. She and her cofounder bring in business then match clients and projects with the tech writer who has the right skill set and availability to get the job done. The office hums with friendly efficiency and flexible hours. I guess this is the third point to know about me: I’ve been part of a collective like this for book editors for more than a decade. It is a typical Obama-era workplace setup, and O’Neill details its workings in almost anthropological detail.

Lakesha’s sections are the perfect balance for the sections starring Mark Wolfe, a white man and freelancer who works with her. He’s not social, he’s not “family” in the way Lakesha likes her team to be (it’s telling that she calls him Wolfe rather than Mark), but he specializes in writing successful grants, which bring in a lot of revenue for him and the collective. The second section of the book switches to Mark’s point of view, where the reader learns that he has a younger half brother in England who fancies himself a fledgling soccer agent with a lead on the next huge thing out of Africa: a kid named Godwin.

On the advice of his wife, and after causing a scene at work that leads to a strongly suggested leave of absence, Mark heads to the UK to find out what kind of scam his brother is running. He knows nothing about soccer, but when he sees the phone footage of Godwin on a rural pitch surrounded by mountains, he’s convinced enough. This bit of footage is in itself valuable, and it leads Mark to a European agent on the other end of his career and looking for a last big score. It leads almost all of them, at one time or another, to Africa in search of Godwin.

One of the strongest themes that undergird the novel is the many ways in which European and American governments and corporations have plundered the people and resources of Africa through slavery, mining, soccer, and more. There is a scene on the beach near Dahomey where local young men on a training run nonchalantly pass the Door of No Return. The last time I remember encountering this landmark of the Atlantic slave trade in a novel was in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, where it was anything but a commonplace reminder of the past.

More than a novel with a rising plot, climax, and denouement, O’Neill is telling a tale, spinning a yarn. Mark’s story ranges across three continents, while Lakesha’s stays planted within a web of office politics that blindside her. There are asides about World War II, the evolution of soccer tactics in the twentieth century, the slave trade, global refugees, climate change, endangered species, the challenges of midlife, and anything else the characters care to contemplate. Underneath it all, the meaning of family—biological, found, adoptive, and bought with cash—burbles, alongside the machinations of business, even when it purportedly means to do good in the world.

If you, like me, don’t care much for office politics, you might find Lakesha’s chapters too full of petty intrigue. If you, unlike me, don’t care much for global football, you might find Mark’s chapters mired in too much sporty detail. If you, like me, do care a quite a bit about global football, you might notice that the NWSL, the American women’s soccer league, is misnamed at one point. But trust me when I tell you that O’Neill brings all of it together in the end. Lakesha’s business and the power moves of a young upstart matter, and Mark’s attempts to find Godwin matter. But the kicker comes at the very end, when O’Neill ties it all up with a darkly hilarious bow of a punchline. If you pick up this novel, do not put it down until the end.

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You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to get the 13-week summer reading newsletter! I’ll be posting once a week for all subscribers, free or paid, June 6 through August 29, using the National Book Foundation’s Summer Reading Adventure as a guide. Subscribers will also be entered to win a copy of both Rebellion and Spectacle on Labor Day. Details in this post.

Let’s kick this off! I’ll share my week, and I invite you to share your week in the comments. (Comments are open to subscribers.)

What Did I Read This Week?

I picked up Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the classic collection of talks given by Shinryu Suzuki, who helped introduce Zen Buddhism to the United States. It’s a good book if you’re interested in Zen meditation—short chapters, easy to understand.

I also read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, thinking I would adore it. Everything I had ever heard about it led me to think this was my kind of book. Short numbered “propositions.” A meditation on the color blue that was actually a reckoning with a devastating end of a relationship. Intertextuality. Turns out, it was not the book for me. Did I hype it up to myself and set up my own disappointment? Did I not understand the reviews and references made to this book? Did I just not like it? I think it was this last one. I just didn’t like it. Lucky for me, it was short. Maybe you’ve read it and loved it; a lot of people did. If so, tell me in the comments.

Speaking of not liking a book, John Lahr really did not like the new biography of August Wilson. He wrote a lengthy review in the London Review of Books that begins with his own extensive knowledge of Wilson and his work then transitions to a harsh review of the new book:

Patti Hartigan’s? rookie 530-page biography of Wilson brings to mind a line from Karl Kraus: ‘No ideas and the ability to express them, that’s a journalist.’ Hartigan, who was a theatre reviewer for the Boston Globe, is passionate about her subject, indefatigable in her pursuit of anecdote and, as she told the Provincetown Independent, ‘loved, loved, loved the research’. That’s her narrative problem.

He next calls her writing “clotted,” and his assessment does not become more positive. But his writing on August himself is very good, and the review is worth a read.

Looking for something lighter and not potentially behind a paywall? Then read this ranking of types of bookmarks by James Folta for Literary Hub.

Lastly, if you’re looking to do something reading adjacent without actually reading, the Reading Rainbow documentary on Netflix, Butterfly in the Sky, is excellent and LeVar Burton continues to be charming, righteous, and an inspiration. The whole crew of this show was amazing.

How Summery Was My Week?

Not very summery. It was cool and rainy, which made the plants very happy. Yesterday afternoon the weather turned a corner, and now the sun is out, which also makes the plants very happy. I’ll be able to bring in a third big bouquet of roses this weekend and still have blooms on the shrubs outside.

How Adventurous Was My Week?

Sad to say my week was not very adventurous, physically or intellectually. I’ve stayed pretty close to home, I’ve run my usual routes with the same dog as always (she has no complaints), I’ve seen most of my closest friends, and my work appointments have all been Zoom-based. I didn’t read outside my usual genres (a box to check on the official Summer Reading Adventure sheet).

Did I Check Any Reading Adventure Boxes?

I did, because I read Bluets while I was in the hammock on the porch. But reading on the porch is an almost every day occurrence for me in the summer, so it feels like cheating. But I guess I should take the easy win.

I have notes, quotes, and a half-assed draft of a book review waiting in the Wingback wings. This was the weekend I was going to pull it all together and publish it on Monday.

However.

Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 2: Spectacle has been to the proofreader and the layout has been completed. I printed out the finished file so that I could do a proof in layout, where I check to make sure that there aren’t any weird-looking things, like a single word at the top of a page, or a paragraph that didn’t get indented, or a chapter title that isn’t formatted correctly. The last-minute things that all happen before a book is sent to the printer.

However.

When I started to do a quick scan of the pages, I realized that there were still mistakes—not a million, but enough that a reader would definitely notice. Missing helping verbs, missing articles, those kinds of small things. These are all my mistakes, of course. The proofreader didn’t introduce them. But they didn’t find them, either. Which is frustrating, since I thought we’d tackled all of these kinds of issues already and were nearly ready for print.

However.

I am attempting to use all that I have learned from a regular Buddhist meditation practice, decades in publishing, and plain old middle-aged wisdom to just fucking deal with this. It’s not so bad. In some ways, it’s even good. As long as I’m reading the manuscript again, I’m finding places where a different word would be a better choice, or where a sentence could be revised for better flow. These are the kinds of tweaks most writers would keep making until the end of time if a publication date didn’t loom, forcing us to throw up our hands and say, “Fine!” So it’s an opportunity, right? Sure. Let’s go with that.

However.

Paying this kind of attention to the manuscript is taking up all of my writerly bandwidth this weekend, leaving me none for writing the book review I wanted to write. (It’s an essay more than a review.) I had just enough juice left after the most recent session with Spectacle to write you this note, which is hasty and not very well thought out.

However.

Not only do you now know that I have another book review for you, you also know that I genuinely care about the books I publish. I care about every word on the page, and I want to be sure you get the absolute best version I can create each time. I like setting a high standard for myself and meeting it, because I like it when readers appreciate the books on the other end of this process (thank you, reviewers who have given Volume 1: Rebellion four out of five stars on Goodreads!).

In the meantime, please enjoy the cover of Spectacle, created by designer Jenny Kimura, because I do.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Wingback to get the 13-week summer reading newsletter! I’ll be posting once a week for all subscribers, free or paid, June 6 through August 29, using the National Book Foundation’s Summer Reading Adventure as a guide. Subscribers will also be entered to win a copy of both Rebellion and Spectacle on Labor Day. Details in this post.