2021 More books I’ve read this this past year that I’ve been thinking about recently:
A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver. She is my favourite poet and her work is a great source of hope and joy for me. If each person has a deep, fundamental fear (that they might or might not know how to name), I also believe that there is a brand of art that helps soothe that fear. This is what Mary Oliver’s work does to me. Here is an example, the first two lines of her poem Wild Geese:
“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”
It’s like she knows my innate shame of being alive and that of wanting something, but forgives me for it. Her poems carry the feeling of relief above any other emotion. Here is another quote from a different poem, part of I Worried:
“Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?”
Even though the first poem speaks about freeing yourself of your regrets and sadness and the second one speaks about that very feeling of regret and shame, they both strike a similar chord in me. In any case, I think my interest in Mary Oliver’s work is that same as my interest in landscapes and emptiness and the old question about solitude versus loneliness. I think all of these topics are intimately related, and I try to find the essence of the link through my practice.
Crush by Richard Siken. Another poetry book I’ve greatly enjoyed and thought much about.
In the foreword Louise Glueck describes Sikens’ work’s main emotion as panic. He writes all of his subjects, be it love, longing, desperation or loss through that emotion, which gives the book as a whole a particular sensation. Kind of like a musical album?
I have found that I admire and can relate to the way Siken builds a world out of his work around himself. He writes about his emotions so viscerally that it seems to have genuinely shaped a kind of place where he can go to, and I appreciate that and try to use my practice in the same way. I really love being in this space where I can work as much as I want and am around such inspiring people that I want my practice to reflect that intensity on the conceptual side of my practice.
The New Me by Halle Butler. A depressing but somehow touching story of an office worker Millie, a snobby and privileged woman who despises herself and her life, act pathetic and entitled at the same time and somehow still manages to get the reader to feel for her and side with her. I also really enjoy the violent tones throughout the book, it makes it unexpectedly dark. For example, when an obnoxious colleague is speaking to Millie: “I fold my hands in my lap and re-create him in my mind … his young girlfriend’s jaw setting compulsively when she smells his breath, his father’s dying words (I wish you had been less of a dick) …”
Obviously this is a joke, but who jokes with the intension of humiliating somone about their father dying ?
In any case, reading this book made me think about time and my own daily actions differently. Millie thinks of everything she does as a chore, but that made me start to think about everything I do as a task. This has shifted my view from a more 24 hour, cyclic system to more of a straight line that just goes per week. Every week I have a number of tasks to do ( tasks being uni work, folding laundry, watching Netflix, texting a friend, 7 nights of sleep etc.), and every week I complete them. I enjoyed that this book gave me a new perspective.
Outline, Kudos and Transit by Rachel Cusk.
This trilogy is the story of a British female writer called Faye, who goes to Athens to give several interviews and to take part in a writer’s conference. While Cusk writes at length describing Faye’s environment and the discussions other people have with her, what Faye says is barely mentioned in the books. It does not feel like she has been silenced, more that Faye deems it unnecessary to tell the reader her point of view, and rather focuses on that of those around her. These are curious little books, and while sometimes the discussions in them felt a bit slow, I never got bored. They made me think completely differently about meeting strangers and how a conversation should be built, and I really enjoyed them both the first and the second time around. Cusk writes with such restrained but still engaged interest about other people, that I really feel like I met them myself and have myself experienced this Greek writer’s conference.
McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh. My god, what a book. McGlue is the story, set in the late 19th century and across several oceans and finally Salem, NY, of a severely alcoholic sailor by the same name, who wakes up (still drunk) tied to his cot, and is told that he killed is friend, Johnson. McGlue spends nearly the whole book in denial about his friend’s murder, and it is only weeks before he is set to hang that he finally accepts his actions. Most of the book is spent in his head, either clouded by alcohol or in dry pain of a sober comedown, and he recounts stories of himself and Johnson. Johnson, Johnson. McGlue pines for his friend and doesn’t understand why Johnson won’t come to visit him before going off on another adventure together. Needless to say……. I think there’s a little more than friendship between them, though McGlue never suggests anything gay. This is truly one of my favourite books, as I am transported into McGlue’s world of agony and ecstacy, carelessness about his own life, addiction, love, loss, and desperation. The tenderness with which he thinks and speaks of Johnson, his longing…
