Hello Readers,

It is wild to be writer and reader and watch another human being acquiring language. I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to say about this experience at some point in my life, but probably not here. It’s just damn wild.

This month I return to a favorite of mine, write about a book I almost missed, talk about what is likely to be a splashy book on the indie scene, and finally include some James Joyce.

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YESTERDAY

Ashe of Rings by Mary Butts

I know I’ve written about Ashe of Rings on this newsletter before, but talking about it again, helps introduce one of the challenges of reading professionally as a bookseller, reviewer, critic, etc. Also, I’m know there are some subscribers who weren’t around when I first discussed it and it’s good enough to deserve a second look.

I have been chasing the high of Ash of Rings for years now. The magical library, the witchiness, the current of paganism, the anti-war sentiments, the complicated relationship to the land and the history of other humans working and living on the land, the relatively forward thinking grasping with issues of mental health & illness, all of it wrapped up in a prose style and fundamental humanism that makes it an avatar for English language modernism. I recommended it to a customer who had a book on gardening and a book on witchcraft and a few months later she came back and told me it was an extraordinary book. I couldn’t quite tell from her tone whether she liked it or not, but it certainly had an impact.

The problem is, I keep looking for books that create the same experience I had when reading Ashe of Rings. Books that have currents of paganism & witchcraft, books engage in a dialog with the land. (Wondering how many readers have guessed what the “Tomorrow” book in this issue is going to be from this set up.) So when I start one of those books and it’s not Ashe of Rings, I have to actively reset my reading brain to try to engage with whatever the book’s actual project is. I’ve been reading professionally now for long enough that I think I’m pretty good at discovering a book’s project and assessing it based on what it is trying to do, rather than what I want it to do. But accounting for one’s biases is not a task that can be completed, it is a process that is always ongoing.

This is one of the biggest problems with the rise of the amateur reviewer and the 5 start etc rating systems that drive some much books discourse and discovery. Many readers don’t seek out a book’s project before assessing it. They critique it for failing to do something it never intended to do. They react as if the book cannot be for anyone because it is not for them. Like reading Yelp reviews of restaurants, you can learn how to sift reviews like these for useful information about a book, but, like, why should you have to? I’m not saying amateur reviews are inherently problematic (the opportunity to post reviews I’m sure, actually drives a lot of personal growth for the readers who write them!) but that it’s not a healthy book ecosystem if they are the only critique available or the only path to discovery.

Now that I’ve introduced the possibility of writing about books multiple times in this newsletter, I kind of like what that opens up. Quite a lot of the time, I haven’t finished a book before I write about it here, and returning once I have could be revealing. And, of course, a book’s meaning changes as one’s life changes. Oh! And maybe some of you read the book after it appeared the first time and can have more complete thoughts about a second entry. That’d be cool.

Anyway, read Ashe of Rings.

Buy Ashe of Rings from Porter Square Books 

Buy Ashe of Rings from Bookshop.org

TODAY

The Murmuration by Carlos Labbe translated by Will Vanderhyden

Here are the blurbs on the front page. “Begins to fuck with your head from its very first word.” -Toby Litt. “Labbe wreaks havoc on narrative rules from the start and keeps doing it.” -Bookforum “Labbe deliberately distorts conventional narrative forms to create a challenging but engaging text.” -New York Journal of Books. It’s like someone was specifically trying to sell me a book! What could I do? I’m not made of stone!

My first impression of the style is, you know that moment in a Henry James short story (I’m thinking specifically of a candle being moved in “The Figure in the Carpet”) and you’re, like, “Wait, is this dude fucking with me?” Yeah, like that. which I can totally get into. It’s also one of the very rare books that attempts to recreate the thoroughness of a play-by-play call of a soccer match. Most books that include depictions of sports, tend to cut those scenes relatively short, just show the most significant actions or use some kind of stylistic innovation (Like maybe Red or Dead) to avoid the fact that it takes a lot of fucking words to describe the actions of an athletic contest. Given the style that precedes the first called soccer match, you almost welcome the directness, no matter how repetitive (by nature!) the prose is.

This is definitely one of those not for everyone books. Readers interested in how soccer is used in narrative may not be interested in the revolutionary politics of the book and vice versa. It seems too rooted in a version of political realism to really be one of those “narrative as landscape” books I often enjoy, while still having a style and structure esoteric enough to make it quite an outlier for expressly political works of fiction. (Even accounting for works like I Hotel and Never Did the Fire.)

And if it’s not the book for you for any of those reasons or any other reason at all, that’s cool. There’s no such think as a book that’s right for everyone & I don’t think there’s any good reason to pursue one.

P.S. 10 bonus points for the cover design. Just a perfect communication of the reading experience.

Buy The Murmuration from Porter Square Books

Buy The Murmuration from Bookshop.org

TOMORROW

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister

I wanted The Bog Wife to be Ashe of Rings.

When it wasn’t, it took some time for me to reframe my thinking and feeling about it, to engage with its project. Of course, over halfway through the book now I still don’t know what it’s project is. There is one possible explanation for the phenomena that would radically (maybe even catastrophically) change the fundamental nature of the story we’ve been reading. At this point, I’m torn on whether I want that radical change or not. It’d be ballsy for sure and you’ve got to respect and reward risk taking in literature, but that would take it even further from that Ashe of Rings experience I’m chasing, perhaps creating an almost opposing narrative. (If you’d like to join me on this particular journey through the text ask yourself, “Where are the aunts & uncles?”)

Perhaps its best not to think of The Bog Wife in the modernist terms of Ashe of Rings, but as a response to the Transcendentalists and other “back to nature” ideologies, specifically those that grew out of European relationships with the land. If your relationship with “the land” is defined entirely by your human perspective, can it really be called a relationship?

Which is not to say that The Bog Wife opposes the idea of having a deep relationship with the place you and your family live, but asks that we examine and assess the roots of that relationship. Furthermore, I think it asks whether we can describe something that seems almost fundamentally transactional (you give one thing to get another) as an actual relationship, and, though transactions are a perfectly fine part of life, whether it is ever sustainable to root an entire way of life on a transaction with the land. I haven’t finished the book so I don’t know for sure yet, but there is a real chance that the downfall of the Haddelsey clan is simply that they always “bought” the bog wife and one simply cannot purchase one’s way to immortality.

If you like a kind of claustrophobic family drama with complicated and shifting dynamics, you’ll love The Bog Wife. Same goes if you find stories of people in way the fuck over their heads compelling. (Omg they are so over their heads.) And there really is a sense of “bogginess” to it. Chronister is skilled with sensory imagery and at times you can almost smell the store. However, the story lands, and whatever I end up feeling about the landing, Chronister has asked difficult questions in compelling ways. Hard to ask for all that much more.

Preorder Those Beyond the Wall from Porter Square Books

Preorder Those Beyond the Wall from Bookshop.org

FOREVER

Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce

I used Joseph Campbell’s skeleton key for Finnegan’s Wake and wrote pretty detailed notes as I read. I would read some of FW, then the corresponding explications in Campbell, then that passage of FW again. It was the technique recommended by my professor in my senior seminar on Ulysses so it made sense to me, to use it with Finnegan’s Wake.

And I really enjoyed reading it this way. Finnegan’s Wake is so linguistically rich, that it was a rewarding experience. And since Finnegan’s Wake turns back on itself, it’s one of those books explicitly designed to be read forever. I think the most important idea from Finnegan’s Wake, both in terms of reading it specifically and in terms of what it says about literature, reading, writing, the world, etc is "Every word is a story.” I think everyone who has engaged with reading and language with any depth knows this, if nothing else, as a fact of history. Every word carries with it, the story of it coming to mean what it is.

But it is one thing to find etymologies interesting (I sure do!) and quite another to leverage that fact of inherent narrative as your storytelling engine. Every writer gives you the opportunity to crack open the words they use and extract their inherent narrative, but I don’t know if there’s another work of literature that, essentially forces you to. Whether your use a tool of some kind like I did, or just go it alone, there’s no way to get any footing in the book without cracking the words open.

Or you could read it as an aural landscape, which Joyce would also be totally cool with.

I’ve always been curious what comes after Finnegans Wake. The little bit of the book Joyce was working on when he died suggests to me that he was still wondering that as well. For the most part I think English language literature is still mostly catching up with Ulysses (with huge swaths of it just kind of ignoring the most important questions posed by Modernism) with only some of the most daring writers (Renee Gladman springs to mind, of course) working in the soil tilled by Finnegans Wake. There is a book that unifies everything from Ulysses and everything from Finnegans Wake into a work of literature that speaks to the entire breadth of human literary experience, I just don’t know if anyone will ever write it. Maybe they won’t. Or maybe someone or many people already have and it is sitting in a drawer weighed down by the many rejections it received from publishers who did not know how to sell it.

Buy Finnegan’s Wake from Porter Square Books

Buy Finnegan’s Wake from Bookshop.org