“The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus” by Emma Knight

I'd been looking forward to reading this book ever since I first heard about it, which was months before it was released. But by the time it finally arrived, I found myself avoiding picking it up for a little while. What if it was just meh? What if I didn't like it at all? Or what if I liked it too much?  

Finally I got over myself and read it, and in the end it was just right. Knight's writing is clear and precise, and she has some really good turns of phrase. Unfortunately I didn't note any until this one towards the end: "Her way of looking made Pen feel like a fish at the market, gutless and splayed on ice chips, on the verge of being sliced up and eaten raw." Pretty evocative! I could imagine just what that felt like.

Despite the title of this book (and the reference to a fish market), I made it all the way through chapter 40 with nary an octopus in sight (unless you count the epigraph). But that's not as surprising as it might seem. This is not a story about marine biology, but about human relationships, and how they grow, change, and sometimes dissolve over time. The octopus only exists as a metaphor for the self-effacement of motherhood, which can occur in even the most intelligent beings; when fought against, it can make the mother feel judged as selfish and unnatural. At least according to Margot.

Motherhood isn't really the major theme of the book, though. It definitely appears in various tangential threads throughout the book, but the main character (Penelope "Pen" Winters) is a Canadian university student studying in Scotland, with not even a hint of a baby on the horizon. There is a minor mystery in her life, though. When Pen's dad went to university in Scotland, his best friend was Elliot Lennox. But for some reason Lord Lenox and Ted Winters are no longer on speaking terms, and Pen wants to know why. So we are treated to a cast of unique characters and their university life, as well as Pen's interactions with the posh (but also down-to-earth and welcoming) Lennox family. And as it turns out, sometimes the best mysteries aren't the ones you solve--they're the ones that teach you something about yourself and the people you love.

“The End of the Road” by John Barth

I don’t even know what to think about this book.

Jacob "Jake" Horner has been under the care of a doctor for Remobilization Therapy for the past two years. (What is Remobilization Therapy, you may ask? It is intended to resolve Jake's inability to make a decision, which is severe enough that it rendered him practically catatonic in a train station for more than a day.) Now twenty-eight, and having floated between temporary jobs throughout his therapy, his doctor has told him to take a teaching position at Wicomico State Teacher's College in Maryland. So he does. 

There Jake meets fellow teacher Joe Morgan and his wife Rennie. Joe and Jake are both highly intelligent, but beyond that they are opposites: married vs single, a parent vs childless, but most importantly, their ways of thinking are diametrically opposed. Joe is decisive and opinionated, sees everything in black and white, and wants everything defined and discussed. He has a very strong (if strange) identity. Whereas for Jake, all of life is a gray area. He avoids making decisions, is impossible to pin down in a debate because he has no strongly-held beliefs, and when asked what he thinks about something, his most frequent answer is "I don't know"--not because he finds it difficult to express what he thinks, but because he just doesn't think about that thing. He has an almost complete absence of identity.

I usually try to avoid spoilers in my blog posts, but I'm just going to lay it all out for this one, partly because it was written decades ago so it's not likely that you've been waiting all this time for just the right moment to read this book, and partly because I'm a bit baffled and maybe I'll figure something out as I type. So here we go. Jake, Joe and Rennie become close friends, spending a lot of time together and having deep philosophical conversations that mostly just flew right over my head. Then one night when Joe is out of town, with no preamble or even much of a hint of sexual tension, Jake and Rennie end up in bed together--Jake because he's just going with the flow and not making any decisions, and Rennie because--well, I don't know that she ever gives a reason, but afterwards she's definitely regretful. After a few agonizing days, she confesses to Joe, who reacts in a very Joe way and wants to understand the motives behind their betrayal. He obviously finds it very unsatisfying that Jake can't provide any explanation. So Joe basically decides to force Jake and Rennie to continue their affair until they can come up with an explanation . . . and after a month or so, Rennie ends up pregnant, but there's no way to know who the father is . . . and she ends up dying from aspiration of vomit while under ether for an abortion performed by Jake's Remobilization Therapist. And I was left thinking, WTF was all of that? I feel sure it was rife with symbolism and allegory, but I'm not sure what the hidden meaning was. The whole thing left me feeling a bit unsettled and off balance. And (if you're ready for an embarrassing confession) it didn't help that throughout most of the book I had conflated John Barth with Roland Barthes. 

So I'll wrap up with a thought about the ending. While abortion is not what this book is about, it's obviously a major plot point, and it portrays a horrifying experience that leaves a woman dead. Here's what I find interesting: I know that some people would read this and say, see, this is why women shouldn’t be allowed to have abortions. But others would read this and say, see, this is why abortion should be legal . . . so that it can safely be performed by a trained doctor rather than a Remobilization Therapist.

“The Red House Mystery” by A. A. Milne

Next up in the line of Paperbacks To Shed was much more enjoyable. Did you know that A. A. Milne wrote more than just Winnie the Pooh? I was vaguely aware of this, but had never read anything of his other than Pooh, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. So I didn't know what to expect from Milne's writing for adults, although I guessed it was possible he would be shockingly raunchy and I might never be able to look at that silly old bear the same way again. 

Thankfully, The Red House Mystery is a cozy one, much in the vein of Agatha Christie (which, as you know, is right up my alley), so Pooh is safe. This is the story of a very English house party during a (maybe not so English) hot summer week. Host Mark Ablett's estranged brother Robert returns from Australia, is found dead in Mark's office only minutes after he arrives, and Mark has disappeared. Four of the houseguests scarper to avoid the awkwardness (but no matter, their alibis were airtight); two remain to solve the mystery. At first it seems obvious that Mark was the killer and is now on the run, but as Antony Gillingham collects clues with the aid of his Watson, William Beverley, they begin to realize things are not as simple as they seem. I guessed the solution long before Tony and Bill did, but that was part of the fun. 

While I was left with much happier feelings about this book than the one I finished the day before, I was happy to shed it as well, and do not plan to buy a nicer copy.

“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” by John Fowles

The last time we went away for a week, I only brought two books, and it was very nearly a disaster. I’d been trying to pack light (at which I succeeded) and also trying to be reasonable about the amount of time I would have available for reading (at which I failed—or, viewed from another perspective, maybe I was too reasonable). 

This time I brought six books (albeit short-ish ones, and paperbacks only, so they would not take up too much space in—or add too much weight to—my luggage). And I purposely chose old, humdrum editions that I would not want as part of my collection after reading (if I really loved the story and wanted to possess the book forever, I would buy a nicer copy). This way I could shed weight as I went, leaving a trail of books behind me. (Which, I have just realized, would be the best superpower ever.)

Up until now, I have enjoyed all of my John Fowles reading experiences (of which there have been at least three), but I will decidedly not be buying a nicer copy of The French Lieutenant's Woman. Unsurprisingly, the writing was great, and the story was absorbing enough. It starts with a betrothed Victorian couple, Charles and Ernestina, strolling along the seaside in Lyme Regis and gossiping about Tragedy, the miserable young woman all in black who has scandalized the town by pining over a French sailor. It ends with everyone being miserable (including me). The advanced praise at the beginning of the book promised the story would grab me from the first page (it didn't) and a sex scene so steamy that it would, like, cause my head to explode or something (skull is still intact). But even if I hadn't had too-high expectations, I think this book would have fallen flat for me.

I do understand that the story is meant to be a social commentary on Victorian repression, but I just can't grasp the character of Sarah Woodruff. I don't understand her or her motivations, and I don't identify with her at all. What did she want? What was she trying to achieve? Did she just decide she didn't want it after all, or was it not what she expected, or did she feel she didn't deserve happiness (but if not, why not?), or was she just completely perverse in a way that I can't wrap my mind around?

I’m just angry.

Ugh.

“Le chien jaune” by Georges Simenon

Check it out! I've read a book in French! (Did it take me almost six years? Yes. Yes, I literally started reading this book in 2019. This teeny, teeny tiny book of only 183 pages.)

Here's how it went. 

1. I took 5.5 years of French in school, which was only enough to make a bank clerk giggle when I said, "Je voudrais échanger de l'argent." (I still don't know what I did wrong there. Was it just my accent? Or did I somehow word it the way a pirate would, asking for pieces of eight?) I always intended to get better at French, so maybe next time I ask a waiter "Avez-vous du beurre," he won't superciliously reply, "Oui, nous avons du beurre" instead of just bringing me some dang butter. 

2. I took a few decades off from learning French and probably forgot most of the little bit I'd learned in school.

3. In September 2018 I discovered Duolingo, and started learning French again. 

4. Sam told me that reading books in French would accelerate my progress. On one of our too-rare but always-fun visits to Half Price Books, I discovered a teeny tiny foreign language section, and picked up this slim mystery novel called "The Yellow Dog." 

5. I tried reading it and found it very very difficult. I felt like I had to look up almost every word (or ask Sam if I was getting it right, which made it feel too much like work for him). I started keeping a list of new words in a little notebook . . . that list goes on for pages and pages. Some words appear on the list more than once, because I forgot that I had already learned them. 

6. I was initially trying to read a little bit every night before I went to sleep, but I don't think I stuck with that for very long. I don't remember for sure, but I probably let this project lapse for quite some time. 

7. About a year and a half ago, I decided to get back to it, and decided on the more reasonable schedule of once a week, working through one or two pages in each session. I also started writing down an English translation. (Believe me, the end result is not impressive. But it did help me keep the story straight in my mind.)

8. Now here I am, at the end! 

Did it work? Did my progress accelerate? Hard to say. I continued needing to look words up until the very last page. Maybe, just maybe, by the end it was more because I wasn't sure I was getting it right, as opposed to having no idea what was going on. And possibly I could work my way through a page marginally faster by the end than I could at the beginning. It HAD to have done some good, right? I mean, it can't possibly have slowed my progress. But I must admit it didn't do as much good as I had hoped and expected. 

So what about the story itself? It's part of a series built around a particular character, a police inspector named Jules Maigret (or Le Commissaire Maigret), who is a less flamboyant and less obviously arrogant Hercules Poirot. He is called in to investigate a series of incidents linked to l'hôtel de l'Amiral in Concarneau: Mostaguen, the wine dealer, is shot (but not killed) through the letter box of an abandoned house on his way home from the cafe; his friend Yves le Pommeret has drinks in the cafe, goes home for dinner, then dies of strychnine poisoning; their acquaintance, the journalist Jean Servieres (also called Goyard), disappears, leaving behind his bloodstained car. What is happening in this formerly sleepy seaside town? Leave it to Maigret to get to the bottom of this mysterious business.

Obviously I was more interested in what this book could do for my French than in the story itself, but it helped that the book wasn't dry and dull. And I plan to keep going! I have three more French books lined up and waiting for me. Get ready, because I'll be reviewing the next one in about six years . . . 

“The Whisperwicks, Volume I: The Labyrinth of Lost and Found” by Jordan Lees

The day I’m too old for children’s books will be a very dark day indeed. 

So says the surprising Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth. And suddenly I'm feeling off-kilter because I hadn't really been enjoying reading this book. It has plenty of elements that I love, taking place in a magical world discovered on the other side of a doorway in the basement of a bookshop. It's full of adventure, intrigue and mystery. But somehow this book wasn't hitting it for me. I couldn't possibly, finally, actually, be . . . old??

We bought this book purely for the cover art, which is by Isobelle Ouzman. If you're not familiar with her work, you really should check it out. But, being a book that we own that I had not yet read, it ended up on my TBR shelf (which is actually multiple shelves) and I decided it was time to give it a go. So it's a little disappointing that it turned out to not be my thing, but I aim to keep it on display!

“I’ve never met a reader who wasn’t special in one way or another. When you read, you connect with the world . . . As it once was, as it is, and as it one day might be. To read, to be curious, is the most astonishing kind of magic.”

“Insignifiant Events in the Life of a Cactus” by Dusti Bowling

So get this. My 12-year-old baby read this book in school last month, then decided I needed a copy of my own to read. He conspired with Sam to get me one, it arrived on Monday, and Baby gave it to me as a surprise gift. Which marks the first time in about 15 years that one of my kids has been so strongly affected by a book that they coerced me to read it; I can remember Bookworm Child (who is now Bookworm Adult) reading a children’s novel and then telling me, “You have GOT to read this book!!” (Although now I can’t remember which book that was. I was sure I blogged about it! But I searched for it to no avail.)

I love surprise books! And it's even better when it's a book that I enjoy. I'm sure I never would have picked this book up (or even heard about it) on my own, but it definitely wasn't a chore to read. It was actually quite interesting. It's about a 13-year-old girl named Aven who moves from Kansas to Arizona in the middle of the school year so that her parents can manage a failing theme park called Stagecoach Pass. Such a move might be hard on any adolescent, but it's especially so for a girl who was born with no arms. Aven is very self-sufficient and has learned to do amazing things with her feet (including writing and playing guitar), but being "unarmed" certainly sets her apart as different. But instead of being mired in self-pity and moping about all the things she can't do, Aven is spunky and sarcastically funny and doesn't let her armlessness stop her. 

I think my favorite part about this book was how, every morning, Baby asked me how much I'd read and what I thought. You should have seen his eyes bug out on Thursday morning when I told him I'd already finished it!

“The Tree” by John Fowles and Frank Horvat

It's strange how memory works (or doesn’t). Sam read this book years and years ago, and he loved it. Then, a while back, we bought a copy and started reading it aloud to each other  . . . and it wasn't very long before Sam said, "Wow, this book is kind of boring." So we set it aside, but (as usual) I always intended to finish it.

When I finally pulled The Tree out again (though not to read aloud), Sam smiled and said, “I love that book!” He still remembered his initial experience with it and had forgotten all about the boredom since then. 

This book is more like a long essay, with each facing page a different tree photographed by Frank Horvat. It was first published in 1979, and while the photographs seem to me to be "of their time" and may not be the type of art you want to hang on the wall in large format, each one has its own subtle beauty. The writing could be described in the same way. It is a call to protect our natural world--more for the wildness of it than specimen preservation, arboretum-style--which I think may be even more warranted now than it was decades ago. It ends with a fascinating description of Whistman's Wood, which I would love to see in person someday, but for now I'll have to be satisfied by the Wikipedia entry.

By alex jane from london, uk - ancient woodland, CC BY-SA 2.0

“Cheese, Wine, and Bread” by Katie Quinn

Cheese, Wine, and Bread is part travelogue, part memoir, and part exploration of the most delicious of human creations, with a few recipes scattered throughout. The title makes it pretty obvious what the main topics are; author Katie Quinn delves into how each of these things are made, going to England to learn about cheese, Italy to learn about wine, and France to learn about bread.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this book a cookbook, especially considering the fact that I tried one of the recipes (yes, just one!)—the “drunken spaghetti”—and did not love it. If the first recipe in a book is a dud, I am hardly tempted to try any more of them. 

My sweet friend RME gave this book to me for Christmas 2021. It took me a while to make my way through it! I wasn't consistently reading it at first, but I finally found a rhythm with reading a few minutes of it every night at bedtime. I know I was reading it regularly by May 2024, because our visit to Neal’s Yard Dairy in Covent Garden was inspired by this book! 

Speaking of inspiration, this book did NOT inspire me to up my bread-making game. Can more amazing bread than mine be made? Yes, I’m sure it can. Can it be made more easily and efficiently than mine? Well, if this book is any indication: no. No, it cannot. So I plan to remain content with my great-if-not-amazing, easy-and-efficient loaves. As long as they're good enough for Sam, they're good enough for me!

“Taft” by Ann Patchett

Another one moves from the "I'd Like To Read All Of Her Books" group to the "I've Read All Of Her Books" group! 

Ann Patchett's writing is magical. While I haven't unequivocally loved all of her novels (see Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant, though these were still Very Good), I have found most of them to be brilliant, beautiful gems. Taft is up there with the best of them. 

Taft is the story of John Nickel, a former drummer who now manages a bar on Beale Street. He has a nine-year-old son, Franklin, who has moved to Miami with his mother Marian. Nickel hires a young waitress named Fay Taft, whose life (and that of her brother Carl) quickly gets tangled up with Nickel's. And there's a parallel story running through it all: Fay and Carl growing up back east, out in Coalfield, before the sudden and unexpected death of their father.

So have I done it? Have I really read them all? Well, apparently Ann Patchett collaborated on a book called Nashville: Scenes from the New American South, which (although it was published in 2018) I only heard about for the first time about ten minutes ago. I'll probably end up reading that someday, just because I can't not, but for today I'll give myself a pass so she can be in The Club. I'll just change it from "I've Read All Of Her Books" to "I've Read All Of Her Novels." 

“The Heavens” by Sandra Newman

I found this book really depressing and I’m failing to see any redeeming qualities in it. I don’t mean that it was terribly written, or that it was boring, but what I mean is that I could not find a good excuse in the story for being so depressing. (I found the excuse in the author’s acknowledgments, though.)

This, I think, is a difficult book to summarize. It's a love story between Kate and Ben, who live charmed lives of perfect happiness in New York City when they first meet. But life is complicated by the fact that Kate repeatedly dreams about being Emilia in 1593, in England. And life is further complicated by the fact that, every time Kate wakes from this dream, something about the world is a little bit worse. Things get darker, and darker, and darker still.

I didn't see this as I was reading, but maybe the story is an extreme metaphor for romantic relationships in general. At the beginning, everything is lovely and beautiful, but time has a way of exposing the ugly bits. And when all that's left is ugly bits, it takes a conscious decision to stick with it, to stay, to grit your teeth and bear it even though you know there isn't any way to save this world.

For the record, I want to point out that I don't see this as a metaphor for my relationship! 

“House of Leaves” by Mark Z Danielewski

This book took me more than a decade to read. 

No, really. It wasn’t the book itself that was the problem (or at least that’s mostly true); it was my timing. I first started reading House of Leaves right before my life turned upside down (actually, with hindsight, I can see that what happened at that time is that my life turned right side up after having been upside down for years) and I could not continue reading it. It became tinged with sadness.

But I always intended to finish it someday, and so I have. Although even the finishing of it was beset with difficulties. First, I had to start again at the beginning. It had been far too long, and I remembered nothing. Then, after I had gotten perhaps halfway through, we went on a ten-day trip, and if you are trying to pack light, this is not the book to bring. That was last May. I did not touch the book again until this past week.

And the reading of this book was . . . an experience. It reminded me of reading Ulysses, but it was simultaneously both more and less creative. (The similarity was in the inscrutability.) HoL is, shall we say, very meta (in the pre-Zuckerberg sense). The story at the very center is The Navidson Record: a family moves into a house and finds out that it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. This starts as merely an intriguing curiosity but ends up as a horror show, and it is all recorded on film. A mysterious scholar named Zampanò analyzes the film and leaves an unfinished manuscript that is bursting with eclectic quotes and academic citations. LA tattoo apprentice Johnny Truant finds this manuscript and attempts to transcribe it, adding his own experiences along the way. The book itself is full of footnotes and appendices and even a 42-page index that I think might possibly include almost every word in the text (even and is in there, though not the). Many pages have "creative" text placement (upside-down, sideways, diagonal in the corners) and there are even some full-color copies of pages scribbled with Zampano's original notations (many of which I had to use my cell phone camera to zoom in on in order to read). Towards the end, Sam looked over my shoulder and said, Ugh, I feel sorry for you reading that. 

So, yeah, I'm kind of looking forward to reading a plain and simple book next.