The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington (p). Wonderfully bizarre saga told from the perspective of an imaginative ninety-two year old woman losing her outer senses.
White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link (p). Modern twists on seven fairy tales. Creepier, but felt like a natural follow up to Carrington’s absurdism. My favourites were ‘Prince Hat Underground’ and ‘Skinder’s Veil’, but overall I had the feeling I was missing things, perhaps from not knowing the source material well enough, perhaps from not knowing how much of a “lesson” to expect at the end of fairy tales.
Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri (p). Short stories about Indian characters caught between India, the UK, and the US. Recurring themes of loneliness and disconnection, especially marital. (“Perhaps they, too, had little in common apart from three children and a decade of their lives.”) “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” (spoiler: that title is a pun) was a nice combination of disturbing + some laugh out loud lines: “She was not allowed to watch the television (Haldar assumed its electronic properties would excite her),” “‘Apart from my x-rays I have never been photographed,'”, “Haldar placed a one-line advertisement in the town newspaper, in order to solicit a groom: ‘GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETRES, SEEKS HUSBAND.'”, “It was rumored by many that Bibi conversed with herself in a fluent but totally incomprehensible language, and slept without dreams.”
Outlive, Peter Attia (a). There are value judgments about health and aging, e.g. that living a long life where you feel healthy is a good thing (agree), and that being able to swim considerable distances into your 70s is desirable (I’m less moved). Then there are judgements of facts or predictions, e.g. that strength training three times a week will extend the average person’s life by months to years, or that LDL cholesterol levels increase your risk of heart disease. I did not find much to complain about in the second bracket, in the evidence on longevity as Attia presents it here. In fact, I liked it quite a bit. I appreciated his approach of making best guesses in areas where causal evidence is hard to come by but the answers matter(e.g. arguing exercise matters more than nutrition) then staying agnostic when the effect sizes are small so answers matter less (e.g. average differences between diets if you hold calorie intake constant). But more of the book’s umph, as I read it, comes from the value judgments — ultimately that one should live a vigorous life, stave off death, and be a top physical performer (often phrased in comparative terms and percentiles). My version of a vigorous life sometimes involves ambling to a diner with a new friend at 3am, a three-part crime against Attia — sleep deprivation, alcohol, and grilled cheese. I mostly do not resonate with Attia’s particular throb. I also wish he’d brought some of the lessons from the end of the book to the front. This quote in the epilogue should give pause to rethink the whole framework: “Zl bofrffvba jvgu ybatrivgl jnf ernyyl nobhg zl srne bs qlvat.” (Decode with rot13 if you don’t mind the spoiler.)
I found some ideas in this book helpfully provocative, such as the idea that your cardiovascular fitness and muscle mass decline 5-10% per decade from your 30s onwards, so you can already predict the things you won’t be able to do by a certain age (e.g. walk up a hill) if you don’t take action. But as far as I can tell Attia’s recommendations would add up to spending ten hours a week exercising, largely in service of health in my final decade. I want to spend eight of those hours differently, e.g. reading books.
The Charioteer, Mary Renault (p). More addicting than other 1950s British novels I’ve read (Lucky Jim was a slog, #18). The first chapter is written from the perspective of a five year old boy overwhelmed by his surroundings, and is special on its own. All chapters after that are subtle and indirect to the extent that I’ll probably have to read the book again to get it all. If you’re not British it may be fully impenetrable. (Here’s some sample dialogue: “‘He may be a drip, but he isn’t absolutely ravers.'”) Yet the heart thumps. There are many sentences and phrases where Renault captures the essence of something nicely. Here are some: “Her real-good-sort façade was not so much false as slovenly, like a cover flung over an unmade bed.”; “‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Nurse Adrian correctly.”; “Willis always made him feel uncomfortable. One felt he should have been given a choice at the outset, whether or not to be born.”; “Between [spoiler name] and [spoiler name #2] there began to weave the first fine filaments of a dislike mutually known.”; “he had a digestive look” (I chuckled); “His throat tightened; he wanted to take her away and cherish her as if she were about to die” (she was about to leave for a bit); “At twenty-three, one is not frightened off a conversation merely by the fear of its becoming intense.” — what a great measure for youth, and one you can live up to as you age; “Sometimes one can get one’s mind straight but one’s feelings take longer.”; After hanging out with his crush: “He felt absolute, filled; he could have died then content, empty-handed and free. … This, he thought with perfect certainty, this after all is to be young, it is for this. Now we have the strength to make our memories, out of hard stuff, out of steel and crystal.”; “‘Yes we talked plenty about you.’ Andrew smiled, and settled his head back on his arms. ‘We were in favour of you,’ he added sleepily.”; “‘Cheer up, cock,’ said Reg in a leading voice. ‘All the same in a hundred years.'”; “It was a vivid dream, and too direct to fascinate an analyst.”; “The out-patient departments of general hospitals do not conduce to a thoughtless optimism.” (incredible); “No one could be expected to talk of such [intimate] things except to strangers.”; “I’d been trying to work up what I was [= being gay] into a kind of religion. I thought I could make out that way.”; “A leisured view of the room yielded so many awful little superfluities, so many whimsies and naughty-naughties, tassels and bits of chrome”; “[it] gave him the feeling one can have with a dying dog, that one is being trusted like God and is going to fail.” (what a description!); “‘Don’t you see, some things are too important to be tampered with for any reason at all.'” (indeed); British people… “in his heart he was deeply hurt that she had taken him at his word”; an Aunt who likes to help: “she was always overthanked and underloved” (brutal).
Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh (p). Novel written in 1956 about a fictional border village during the partition of India and Pakistan. The story grounds the incomprehensible hundreds of thousands of deaths in a set of characters you can get a grip on. Some humour but overall not for the faint of heart. The final paragraph made the whole book worth it; I had full body chills.
The Room on the Roof, Ruskin Bond (p). Coming of age novel about a British-Indian boy, written when the author was seventeen, strangely enough also in 1956. Sweet, simple, short.
Sita: An Illustrated Retelling of the Ramayana, Devdutt Pattanaik (p). I knew little of the story of the Ramayana before reading this. It’s thrilling to read something that so many people have watched, listened to, read for thousands of years, and feel some continuity and glimmer of connection. I am not sure how much to trust this particular version, since there seems to be so much variation on what to include from different regional tellings, different time periods, etc. But it’s a start. Thanks Shruthi for the recommendation (and, indeed, buying me the book during our wanderings).
The Bachelor of Arts, R. K. Narayan (p). Another coming of age novel in India, this time written in 1937. It felt more than twenty years different from the other two novels given everything that happened between them (e.g. the university where he gets his BA feels like Oxford or Cambridge). Unlike The Room on the Roof, there’s plenty of self-awareness of the follies of youth from the narrator, and overall more irony. Some chuckles.
Vulgarian Rhapsody, Alvin Orloff (p). San Francisco novel following similar themes to Orloff’s memoir Disasterama! I read last year (#22). I liked Disasterama! better.
Jacob Trefethen 