i'm a very very complex person

Happy New Year, friends! Oh, my year is off to a lovely start. I have come down with a cold, it's true, and I would prefer if I hadn't. But other than that it is lovely. I am settling in to my residency; I am working; I am walking in the woods in the afternoons; I am reading Virginia Woolf; I am watching bluebirds outside the window of my studio. I will have more thoughts to share about the residency soon, but for now it is time to talk about books.

So. here is the list of what I read during the past year. Links go to the post that contains the closest thing to a review of each book that I wrote; my orderly reviewing habits got away from me a bit towards the end of the year, so there are some books without links. Oh well. Some of them I still intend to write about; others will just have to be passed over. Books marked with a "Q" are those that I deem to be, in some way, queer:

1. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (Q)
2. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Q)
3. The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi (Q)
4. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
5. The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr
6. As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann (Q)
7. Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (Q)
8. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
9. Another Country by James Baldwin (Q)
10. The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
11. Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris
12. Am I Blue?, Marion Dane Bauer, ed. (Q)
13. H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
14. The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
15. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
16. The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
17. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
18. Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
19. The Gathering by Anne Enright
20. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
21. A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
22. Now and Then by William Corlett (Q)
23. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
24. Lila by Marilynne Robinson
25. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
26. On the Edges of Vision by Helen McClory
27. The Women by T.C. Boyle
28. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
29. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
30. How Winter Began by Joy Castro
31. The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
32. Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
33. Watchers at the Pond by Franklin Russell
34. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (Q-ish)
35. Sunstroke by Tessa Hadley
36. So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ
37. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
38. Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff (Q-ish)

Look at how many Qs there are in the first part of the year, and how few in the second! That's interesting. This is also the third year in a row in which I didn't re-read any books--I'm glad I set myself a goal of doing a bit of re-reading to remind myself that it has real value. Books by women made up 55% of my reading this year, so that's nice and balanced. I only read four works of nonfiction; while that may not be balanced, it is quite typical for me.

Because I always find this a bit interesting, here is the list broken up by ( nationality of author. )

Books that will stay with me:

As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann: I had been searching for over a year for a book that would sweep me off my feet, and this was the one that did it. It is a flawed book, but it tells an all-consuming story. A muscular, immensely powerful, ferocious story. An indelible reading experience.

Another Country by James Baldwin: A big, messy, and stunningly ambitious book about race, sex, identity, and the way those things intersect and merge in New York in the late 1950s. It sprawls, and some parts of it are more successful than others, but it contains fearless metaphors and more than one scene that I know I won't forget.

Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris: This is the sequel to Harris's book The Southpaw, but it far surpasses it in quality. It's the best baseball book I've ever read. Harris touches on deep matters with a light hand, finds humor everywhere, and bundles it all up into a beautifully bittersweet package.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald: I can't remember the last work of nonfiction that held my attention as effortlessly as this memoir. I love books that are in deep conversation with other books, as this one is with T.H. White's The Goshawk. Smart, thoughtful, and written in straightforwardly beautiful prose.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. This book is a tour de force. On the surface it is about four siblings who survive Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, but it is about so much more than that: family, memory, poverty, community, and so many different forms of love.

Other titles that I recommend include Jacob's Room, The Testament of Mary, The Gathering, A Month in the Country, Lila, The Blue Flower, and Sunstroke.

Happy reading to all in the coming year!

I finished reading As Meat Loves Salt last night. The reading experience was extraordinary: profound, all-consuming, in some ways almost as violent as the book itself. Maria McCann does not do things by half measures. Every characteristic of this book is the most: the battle scenes are the bloodiest, the sex is the most ardent, the loving moments are the tenderest, the anger is the bitterest, the pain exquisite. When she writes about a troubled character, he is tormented by the blackest demons imaginable. When she writes a book about obsession, the book will come to obsess me, lingering in my thoughts all day, every day, even when I'm not reading it. Reading this book, for me, was so intense that I can't quite say I liked it.

( I am not much for either spoiler alerts or trigger warnings, but this post may merit both. )

I was moving across your frozen veneer
The sky was dark but you were clear
Could you feel my footsteps?
And would you shatter, would you shatter? Would you?

I have quite a few books I want to talk about!

Selected Stories by Katherine Mansfield:
I first encountered Katherine Mansfield in grad school, when we read her long story "At the Bay" in a novella workshop I took. I was Mansfield's coolness, by her light touch, by the ease with which she shifted about among an array of perspectives, by the way she built a story out of tiny, ordinary moments somehow turned it into much more than the sum of its parts. Now that I've read more of her fiction, I can say that these qualities are shared by all of her best stories, and the ones that don't succeed are the ones where she loses her lightness or the effortless mobility of perspective. I found some of the stories in this collection to be quite flat, but those that are good are very very good. The best stories of all were the group about the Burrells, the family in "At the Bay."

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel:
What an uneven collection! There were a few standout stories that I loved (the title story, "The Heart Fails Without Warning," and "How Shall I Know You?"), but the rest were either underdeveloped or marred by pat endings. Reading this collection gives the impression that Mantel is much better at starting stories than at finishing--almost every piece here had a promising premise and atmospheric beginning, but most of them fizzled by the time they were over. Although I was sometimes frustrated by Mantel's prose in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, in general I found it more interesting than the style in these stories.

The Matisse Stories by A.S. Byatt:
Wonderful! A beautiful tiny gem of a book. This book contains only three stories (longish stories, but still), yet it feels very rich and full. And pleasurable! I luxuriated in Byatt's descriptive writing. The characters all felt natural and believable, and though there was considerable thought put into themes and connections, it didn't impinge on the stories' need, first, and foremost, to be good stories. (Hilary Mantel could learn a thing or two.) As much as I admire Byatt as a novelist, I'm beginning to think I might like her even more as a short story writer.

Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet:
I've just started this after having it on my shelf for quite some time. I confess that I'm reading it now more out of sense of mingled curiosity and obligation (if one is going to claim to be knowledgeable about queer literature, one must read Genet!) than out of a deep desire. So far all I can say is that it's a strange book, with very flowery prose applied to base acts, and an unusual relationship between the narrator, the author, and the text.... I am fifty or sixty pages into the book, and still feel like I don't quite have a handle on it yet. We shall see.

J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians tells the story of a magistrate in a small frontier town on the edge of the Empire. The nameless magistrate is a civil servant of long standing, content with the status quo. The people of his walled town grow grain and fruit, store food for the long hard winters, hunt along the shores of the lake, and coexist peacefully with the nomadic tribes outside the gates. Everything is fine until Colonel Joll arrives from the capital with orders to put a stop to the barbarians--those same nomadic tribes--who are preparing to make war on the Empire. Joll cannot be swayed by the peaceful reality; he conducts raids, brings in prisoners, and tortures them until they confirm the things he already believes. This is the end of the magistrate's complacent existence, as he begins the process of resisting Joll and Joll's methods, and the much slower, longer process of understanding the nature of empire and his complicity, however unthinking or unwilling, in the deeds of his own Empire.

That may seem like a lot to tackle in a book that's only 150 pages long. And that's not even the whole of it. There is also a trek across the desert in winter, complete with evocative descriptions of the changing landscape and the hardships of the journey. There is a strange relationship between the magistrate and a barbarian girl who has been blinded and had her feet mutilated by Colonel Joll. There are brutal scenes of torture and famishment. There are the mysterious ruins of an earlier civilization buried in the dunes of the desert, and thin slips of poplar bearing their inscrutable writing. And yet the slim little book never feels rushed or overstuffed. Perhaps this is because Coetzee's prose is so spare and clean, or because he is so economical, bringing characters and settings to life with just a few well-chosen phrases.

In some ways, Waiting for the Barbarians felt almost like a fairy tale. The story seems to take place in the same world where fairy tales are set--in a place where there are towns, deserts, and lakes, but none of them have names; where it is always some time in the past, though never a specific year. There is a sort of fairy tale detachment in the way the story is told, too. Although the books is written in first person, from the perspective of the magistrate, he seems to be telling his own story from a great distance, as though it all happened many years ago. It reminded me most of Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal. Both books are meditative takes on totalitarianism, both are short, both make use of archetypes and feel almost allegorical. Neither one affected me much emotionally; both contain powerful images and plenty to think about.

And now I am reading Anna Karenina, which I expect will keep me busy for a while.

I have, at long last, finished Memoirs of Hadrian. I have spent three months with the book, but now that it is finished I hardly know what to say about it. I have never had a reading experience quite like this one, in the sense that it felt both transcendent and like a slog, often simultaneously.

Let me say first that the book is undoubtedly a work of genius. The phrase "literary ventriloquism" gets tossed around, but Marguerite Yourcenar has achieved something that goes beyond even that commendation. Memoirs of Hadrian is the perfect distillation of a human consciousness, a work of utter authorial effacement. Despite the incredible amount of scholarly work she did to produce this novel, Yourcenar renders herself invisible and presents to us Hadrian complete: full of his memories, shaped by his time and by his lifetime's worth of work and thought. Not only does she do this, but she does it in absolutely beautiful prose--her sentences are careful, measured, unadorned, but beautiful nonetheless.

So why did long stretches of the book fail to hold my interest? Why did I feel so little impulse to pick the book up again after I had put it down? I found that reading it required immense concentration; I could only handle five or ten pages at a time, and even then I had to continually pull my focus back to the words on the page in front of me. I developed a fondness for Hadrian as I spent more and more time with him, and there were times (though they were isolated incidents) when his thoughts or (even rarer) his feelings resonated deeply with me, yet this never translated in a desire to know what would happen next. I could admire the book intellectually and aesthetically, but could not feel deeply engaged with it.

But it's another form of engagement, isn't it, to spend three months with a character? To sip continuously from a book over a long period, rather than drinking a few deep drafts? It is, of course, even if I can't describe exactly what the difference is. I only considered quitting the book when I was trying to read it in my usual mode. Once I had slowed down, and settled myself into the habit of reading just a few pages at a time I never questioned whether it would be worth it to finish the book.

And perhaps that is the result of my long wrestling with this work: something of value has been imparted, though I can't say now what it was. Perhaps the value, or part of it, is in the wrestling itself.

( Reflections on the Composition )

Today I am thinking about the question of believability in fiction. A vital question--if you can't make your audience believe in the story you are telling, then what's the point of telling it?--but also a slippery one. What makes one story more believable than another? Why can one writer make me believe things that seem entirely implausible from another? What makes a story feel true when I know perfectly well that it is a fiction? It can be easy to assume that the answer is realism, or that believability and realism are interchangeable ideas, but I don't think that's true. There are works of fantasy, strange dream-like works, outlandish bits of magical realism that have felt more believable to me than stories that take place in the most realistic of settings.

So what is it? Consistency is part of it, of course, and character is perhaps the most important component of all--it I don't believe in the characters, if their actions seems artificial or their words ring false, then forget--there is not likely to be anything that will redeem the story for me. But it's not just that, of course. It is a quality unto itself, something ineffable, something fundamental to the act of creating fiction. Some stories don't strive for it. Satire, for instance, is rarely rooted in believability. And some writers actively undermine it, like Ian McEwan, who seems to have made his name in literature by writing stories that purposely highlight their own artifice. And that's fine. Stories can be entertaining without being believable; they can have interesting things to say; they can be ironic or clever or funny or beautifully written. But I have never felt a deep emotional resonance with a story in which I could not wholeheartedly believe. I have never loved a story I did not wholeheartedly believe.

I am thinking about this today because last night I finished a book with a believability problem: The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. The book concerns three women: Tony, a tough-minded historian; a flaky New Ager named Charis; and Roz, a garrulous but highly successful business woman. The three are ostensibly friends, though we scarcely see them interact with each other and they seem to have nothing in common besides the fact that, at one time or another, all three of them have been manipulated, duped, and had a man stolen from them by a mysterious and mysteriously powerful woman named Zenia. Atwood gives us the back story of each of the three friends in turn--first her childhood (each one difficult in its own way), next her relationship with the man in question (each one dysfunctional in its own way), finally the fateful entry of Zenia.

And it seems funny that I had trouble believing these stories because none of them, on the surface, are that farfetched. It's not impossible for people to fall in love with people who are bad for them. It's not impossible for people to want desperately to keep a relationship alive, even when anyone can see that the relationship was unhealthy. It's not impossible for people to believe a whole pack of lies, especially when the lies are specifically constructed to be something they want to believe. It's not even impossible for people who are intelligent to do all of these things. Yet when the women in Atwood's story did them, I couldn't believe in it. What is missing from the story that would make me believe? What would it take to get me to feel for these women whose lives are so stagnated that they can't get over what Zenia did to them so many years ago? I don't know. I couldn't feel for them. I could only say, "Are you kidding? It's been decades, and all three of them still think about this shit every day? Are you kidding? None of the various abuses, abandonments, and deprivations they suffered as children taught them the resiliency to deal with this situation? Not one of them has taken the time to reflect on whether or not the man that Zenia stole was really all that great to begin with?"

Not everything about the book was awful, of course. There were individual scenes that were highly compelling, and I really liked the way Atwood presented Charis's nutty New Age beliefs sincerely, in the same way Charis herself would have presented them. Tony was an interesting character, and her individual narrative the strongest of the bunch. But in the end the fact that I could not believe in the story or the characters sunk the book for me. Ah well. It is interesting to note that Surfacing, my favorite of the Atwood novels I've read, tells a story that, on the surface, is much more far-out than the story of The Robber Bride, yet I had no trouble at all in finding that one believable....

A man worries vaguely about his sister while stuck in the Paris airport after his flight is cancelled. A young couple pay two separate visits--first to his parents and later to her family--and they each react differently to the way the presence of the other causes contexts to shift and familiar things and people to seem strange. Three strangers return to the house of their godmother, where they all spent time as children, to sort her possessions after her death. A daughter-in-law spends a weekend in the country with her husband's family.

It's difficult to summarize the stories in Tessa Hadley's collection Married Love. The plots are too wispy and too subtle to be captured in a sentence or two. Anything I write seems to say both too much and too little. The stories are richer than any summary can convey, but also finer and more delicate. But this is what I loved about the stories--the way they are little ineffable things themselves, brushing at the ineffable things of life. They reminded me of stories by Alice Munro in the way they felt so complete (each one a world unto itself) and the way they ranged so widely, encompassing entire lives' worth of memories and backstory in the space of a few thousand words. And they reminded me of A.S. Byatt's short fiction in their disregard for the conventional structural expectations of short stories.

In case it's not already obvious, I found Married Love unendingly pleasurable to read. I wanted it to go on forever and ever. But what I loved most about it (and what I envied beyond belief) was its effortlessness. I wrote earlier about Hadley's prose, each sentence obviously carefully crafted yet in such a way that the work never showed. The whole book was like that, in every element: the characterization, the plotting, the movements backward and forward in time. Oh, that my work could ever feel a fraction as effortless as these stories! Beautiful, beautiful.

The edition of Married Love that I read had one of those sections of supplemental material that are occasionally found at the backs of books--the sort of thing that sometimes contains discussion questions for book clubs, or previews of the author's next work, or whatever. This one contained a little four page autobiography by Tessa Hadley and a short essay on the writing of the stories in Married Love. One thing I learned is that Tessa Hadley is one of the late-in-life writers who I find so encouraging (and who we were talking about last week, marchioness): she was nearly 50 when she published her first book. She said a few other things I liked too.

About the years she spent raising children before going back to university and then pursuing her writing career, Hadley writes

I'm sure my daughters-in-law can't imagine a retreat so complete and dull-seeming as those years of shopping and cooking and cleaning and waiting in the school playground. They're right, probably. Though there's something to be said for all that slow invisible work the mind does when it isn't buoyed along by anything outside.

About short stories:

For me short stories represent a wonderful kind of writing freedom. In a novel, each element as you introduce it will have to have its fulfillment later and be woven into the created whole fabric of the book. In a short story, you can be irresponsible. The short form is so good at catching life on the wing, flashes from the intensity and mystery of people's inner lives, their strange motivations, their yearnings. [...] I think you have to feel that you can hold a story in one hand, however it sprawls. It's a single thing; it's a single room, if you like, in the house of fiction. Whereas a novel is a whole house, and the writer (and reader) can move around inside its different spaces.

If you had to wait until the end of a novel to find out what to make of it, the novel would fail. But you can hold a short story in suspension as you read, waiting to see: Where will this go? Where must it stop? What does it mean, that it stops there? [...] a moment comes that seems to clinch something or change something, but it's not obvious what or how.

A wet and grey afternoon in the middle of a week that has been busier and more stressful than anticipated. But now I am home from running errands in the rain and wind, and I'm going to make a cup of tea and tell you about some books.

I. "The Great Plain Drinks the Blood of Christian Men and Is Satisfied"

It's been over a week since I finished Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rölvaag, and I still don't quite know what to make of it. The books is centered around Per Hansa and his wife Beret, a pair of Norwegian immigrants who travel from Minnesota to settle in the Dakota Territory. Per Hansa is ideally suited to life on the prairie--he's hard-working, optimistic, and neighborly. But Beret struggles with their new life. She feels isolated, hates the endless unbroken prairie around her, and turns to strange forms of religious fanaticism to comfort her in her misery. There is much that's interesting in the book, from Rölvaag's detailed accounts of daily life in the Dakotas in the late 19th century to his sensitive depiction of Beret's unhappiness, but somehow the book never came together into a compelling whole for me. A few great set pieces, lots of interesting historical detail, but no real emotional resonance. And I hated the ending. Really hated. I can't think of the last time a book's final ten pages had such a negative impact on my opinion of the whole work.

One interesting fact about Giants in the Earth: despite the fact that it's set in the United States and tells what seems to be a quintessentially American story of settling the Great Plains, Rölvaag wrote the book in Norwegian and it was originally published in Norway. Only later was it translated into English so it could be read in the US.

II. "...and the button, too, there, still, only not where I am."

Still dipping my toe occasionally into the cool, eddying waters of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. Still enjoying my intermittent immersions in Davis's meticulous prose and quirky thinking. I've been thinking too about how fortunate I am to have had the chance to hear her read on two occasions. She is a fantastic reader of her own work, and I find myself trying to hear these stories in her voice when I read them.

III. "...all the years of decline and renewal..."

I've started reading Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, a book that has been sitting on my to-read shelf for years. It's interesting to finally read it, because I'm realizing how little I knew about it. I had no idea, for instance, that it was such a Californian novel (though I'm well aware that Stegner's famous fellowship is at Stanford, so I don't know why that came as a surprise). For some reason I also imagined that it was a difficult book, but I've found the first 80 pages to be accessible and engaging. The book seems to be starting somewhat slowly and I wasn't sure at first that I liked Stegner's narrator, but I'm warming up to him now. Plus, the book is about one of my favorite themes: family history, and the things we know and those we will never know about the people who came before us. I think I'll like it.

Martin Dressler, Martin Dressler... Or, to use the book's full title, Martin Dressler: the Tale of an American Dreamer. I picked it up because I've read several of Steven Millhauser's short stories in The New Yorker recently, and I liked them enough to want to read one of his novels. I finished it yesterday, and I'm not entirely sure I know what to make of it.

Martin Dressler, the dreamer of the title, begins life as a hard-working helper in his father's cigar and tobacco shop. As a teenager, he gets a job as a bellhop in a hotel and rises quickly through the ranks. He saves his money and, while working at the hotel, he opens a successful cafe that soon becomes a chain of cafes. Before long he buys the hotel where he used to work, then begins building his own, ever grander and more outlandish hotels. Martin's success in business seems effortless; everything he touches turns to gold. His personal life is a different matter. Martin is tenacious in his pursuit of him business goals, but he seems unable to focus on the other side of life. He meets a pair of sisters, aimlessly falls into a marriage with the wrong sister, and then acts like he's too distracted to remember that he has a wife.

I found Martin's messy relationships more interesting than his charmed life as a hotel magnate. There were powerful moments of foreboding, when it felt like things were about to go seriously wrong, and hints of some dark and strange sexual currents flowing between Martin and the sisters. But Millhauser seems to find this stuff less interesting than I do--he would rather spend his energy describing the crazy features of Martin's latest hotel: the underground parks with full of flowing trout streams and live squirrels and chipmunks, the forest on the 27th floor where woodland cottages take the place of hotel rooms, the Moroccan bazaar on the 7th floor staffed by actors trained in the art of haggling like real merchants. All of this stuff is fine, and Millhauser's prose is a pleasure to read no matter what he's writing about, but I often found my attention wandering. I couldn't help feeling like there were rich veins in this story that Millhauser failed to mine.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book for me was the setting. The story ostensibly takes place in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is actually set in a sort of historical dreamtime. Some of Millhauser's historical details are accurate, I'm sure, but accuracy does not seem to be his goal. There is very little about Martin's story that is believable, and the same is true of the era. Millhauser isn't much concerned with representing what day-to-day life was really like; instead he gives us a dream image of New York at the turn of the century. Paul Harding's Tinkers was like this, and 'historical dreamtime' is, in fact, a phrase I have begun to use in thinking about my own book and its relationship to historical fact.

Besides Tinkers, Martin Dressler reminded me of two other books: Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, which I found completely aggravating when I read it about six months ago, and Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, which was stranger and better than either Helprin's book or Millhauser's. The connections with Helprin are obvious: the same New York City setting, the same historical era, a similar sprinkling of magical realism over the narrative. The relationship with Ondaatje is harder for me to tease out. Perhaps it is in the slightly loose connections with which both Millhauser and Ondaatje bind incidents to each other. Or else it is in the focus on cities, growth, construction--Millhauser's scenes of Martin's hotels being built are reminiscent of Ondaatje's Toronto bridge-builders.

I think that I will seek out more of Millhauser's work, despite the fact that Martin Dressler was not quite what I hoped it would be. Perhaps I'll read a collection of his short fiction, instead.

In other news: Ms. E gets home from Arkansas today, and all her summer travels will be over! Her flight lands in just under an hour, so I need to get ready to head to the airport.

Tommy did so much reading that he had to take a nap.

Yesterday I finally, finally finished Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. I got so bogged down in it, and it took forever. I wanted to like it, I tried to like it, I am sympathetic to some of Hesse's themes, but I just could not stand Hesse's pedantic and preachy approach to those themes. Hesse seems to believe that his readers are incapable of handling subtlety, so he hectors us with repetitions and lectures and heavy-handed prose. Bah! It didn't help that I found the narrator, Harry Haller, to be insufferably self-absorbed.

Perhaps I should have just put it down, but I didn't. I forced myself to struggle through, and now that it's done, it feels like a relief. Perhaps this is the tail-end of last year's mediocre reading, and I just needed to get it out of the way so I can usher in an era of exciting new books.

After my unpleasant experience with Steppenwolf, I am taking a break from my German literature reading project, at least for as long as it takes me to read Toby's Room by Pat Barker. I love Pat Barker; her Regeneration trilogy has for years been the thing I would choose if I could put my name on the work of any other writer. But of course that makes trouble for her other books--none of them quite live up to Regeneration. Toby's Room is a sequel of sorts to Life Class (although it begins at a point that falls chronologically earlier than any of the action in Life Class), and I'm excited about it because I thought Life Class was a bit thin, full of interesting ideas and characters that needed further development.

I've only read the first 70 pages of Toby's Room, but oh, is it off to a good start! I stayed up later than I meant to last night because I just kept wanting to read a few more pages and then a few more pages... That hasn't happened to me in ages, and it's a fantastic contrast to scarcely being able to keep my eyes open through Steppenwolf. Barker focuses this time on Elinor Brooke, a character I didn't find particularly interesting in Life Class, but this time Barker has given me some very important and intriguing glimpses into her family life, and I am finding Elinor immensely compelling so far. And, as always, I love reading Barker for her brilliant way with detail. So subtle, so nimble--the way each tiny, meticulously chosen observation lights up a scene.