November 2024 Reading Roundup

I had more time for reading this month as we stopped travelling for a while and spent some time in the peace of a rural Serbian village descending into winter. Here are the highlights.

On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe by Caroline Dodds Pennock

We hear a lot about the early Europeans landing in the Americas, but what was it like for the thousands of Indigenous Americans who made the reverse voyage across the Atlantic? The sources are fragmentary, but Pennock does a good job of piecing it all together and telling a discovery story that’s very different from Columbus sailing the ocean blue.

White Masks by Elias Khoury

When I was a child, my mother sometimes complained that my bedroom looked like Beirut. White Masks deals with that period, when the city was a byword for chaos and destruction. It felt poignant reading it while Israel was doing its best to undo the decades of recovery and return the city to that same wartorn, bombed-out state. It’s about a journalist trying to find out why a corpse was left on a pile of garbage, and so I suppose it’s about war’s disregard for human life, which made it feel sadly timely.

Where Water Lies by Hilary Tailor

This story of submerged secrets makes excellent use of water as an overarching metaphor. Eliza spends a lot of time plunging into the dark, freezing water of the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath in the dead of winter, while shunning the people around her. We gradually come to understand why as she reluctantly explores a trauma from a long-ago summer, also involving water, and the well-paced plot reaches a satisfying conclusion.

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

This was a slow build. I started out utterly bored by the mundane life of the passive, disconnected central character, but as the details built and I came to understand why Fuyuko was the way she was, I became transfixed.

Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald

An old man walks around East Anglia pursuing random thoughts about disparate subjects. It’s a terrible premise for a book, but in the hands of W.G. Sebald, it works beautifully. His prose is so fluid and mesmerising that you just follow him wherever he leads.

Candide by Voltaire

As a satirical response to Leibniz’s optimistic philosophy that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”, Candide is brilliant. Voltaire utterly demolishes this philosophy by putting his hero and most of the other characters through a catalogue of horrors and showing humanity at its most violent and deplorable.

Since Leibniz’s idea has long been discredited, though, I’m not so sure why Candide is still so widely read and studied today. In an age when we are bombarded by a similar catalogue of horrors every time we pick up our phones, our problem is not too much optimism but too little.

Over to You

Have you read any of these books, or would you like to? What was your favourite book of the last month? Let me know in the comments.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.

Source: https://andrewblackman.net/2024/11/november-2024-reading-roundup/