If you’re active on booktube or bookstagram - or really any of the online communities or mediums involving sharing what you read on the Internet - you will probably at some point encounter some variation of the question, “How do you read so much?”
This past month, the answer was, more or less, “I didn’t.” 😂
It is, perhaps, a truth universally acknowledged that we all would like to read more. Even if you are already a confirmed book addict and read profusely, satisfaction is elusive because there are always so many more books out there that you haven’t read yet. And the many views on all the “How to Read More” videos on YouTube seem to indicate that there are plenty of people out there who would like to develop more bookish habits but have not yet hit a reading stride that suits them.
Throughout June I only really finished one book (Death Comes for the Archbishop), although I’m about three fourths through another (Brideshead Revisited), and I did finally crack open the copy of Anna Karenina that I borrowed from my brother Porthos at Christmas. Having at least opened the cover and read some dozen pages feels like an accomplishment. 😆
I do have plenty of quotations and thoughts in this month’s reading wrap-up, but since I didn’t read quite as much as I typically do, I also thought I’d share some musings on reading generally. It’s always so interesting to hear readers talk about their bookish habits! I think that one of the most magical things about reading is its inherent serendipity - when you unexpectedly read just the right book at the right time, or when you find a connection between two books you were reading simultaneously that you never would have expected to discover.
Booktube has certainly made me a more organized reader in many ways, and coming up with a list of titles to fit readalong challenges or being able to share a fun book club discussion with like-minded readers can really enhance the enjoyment of a book - and serve as handy extra motivation to push you to finish the book in a timely manner! But at the same time, the organizational devices are hopefully working with the spontaneity/serendipity and never pushing it out of the way. And if encountering the unexpected is part of the purpose of reading, then perhaps it doesn’t really matter if I didn’t read quite as much as I expected, especially since one of my June reads was wonderful and the other was at least very thought-provoking.
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
This book dealt beautifully with faith, history, humans, life, and landscape: it was a beautiful journey back in time to follow two missionary priests working tirelessly in the 1800s in the wilds of New Mexico and the American Southwest. I found the descriptions to be so evocative:
This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.
Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Ácoma as his introduction to the mesa country. One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it. These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapour; sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the smoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave.
Apparently Cather called this book a narrative rather than a novel, and it certainly covers a wide swath of time and space. It definitely makes me want to learn more about the history of the area (since much of the book is drawn from real life and actual happenings) and also to plan a trip to the Southwest!
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
It must be confessed that Evelyn Waugh and I have have never hit it off in the past. I’ve always felt like I would like him because of his glowing encomium of P.G. Wodehouse which is featured on the back of many of our family copies of Jeeves and Wooster. Yet Brideshead never grabbed me when I gave it a try…I thought Vile Bodies admittedly had some beautiful writing but was ultimately just okay…A Handful of Dust was so spectacularly depressing I couldn’t even finish it.
However, I have been putting aside my misgivings and giving Brideshead Revisited a proper chance this month, and I will admit I’m quite reasonably impressed. Reading about how and when the book was written in the prologue helped me to understand the somber and sentimental tone a bit better, but it was still a slow start. I loved the Oxford setting at the beginning but definitely didn’t care for the casually excessive drinking and such. The writing, though, is really good and incisive:
“…what they always want to go to London for in the best of the summer and the gardens all out, I have never understood. Father Phipps was here on Thursday and I said exactly the same to him,” she added as though she had thus acquired sacerdotal authority for her opinion.
This passage not only introduced me to a new word, but it also called me out. It is rather irrelevant to mention in conversation with person A that you made the same observation previously to person B, and yet I do it; but since person B, in my case, is not typically a priest but just a layperson, perhaps I am (unconsciously) seeking mere general rather than sacerdotal authority. 😂
As noted in the video wrap-up, I would highly recommend the audiobook narrated by Jeremy Irons. His rich inflections add a lot! I think the most powerful parts of the book come deeper in, as the characters realize the consequences of their careless actions and realize that God has always been pursuing them and will never let them go. I’m looking forward to finishing it!
*edited to add:
So I explained earlier that the jury was out on Evelyn Waugh and me, but as I’ve been making more progress in Brideshead over the holiday, the jury is coming in, and it’s not looking good. One wonder that struck me early on in the novel was what Lady Marchmain could have done differently to hold her family together better. As a lover of Jane Austen novels, in which the heroes and heroines are differentiated by their tendency to look their inner demons in the face and attempt to grow and mature, this is not an unusual wonder, but I realized the further I got in Brideshead that it was not a wonder which occupied Waugh’s thoughts at all.
As I mentioned in the video, Waugh is playing with the idea that God can hook human beings with a thread long enough to let them wander to the ends of the world only to recall them with a twitch of the thread. This may be true and even beautiful in a way, but my preferred type of hero or heroine is the type that doesn’t wander to begin with, but rather actively looks for the thread and does their part to follow the thread back to God.
I also talked in my video about the idea that a classic is a book that points out and attempts to dispel the mists we throw over our inner demons, the problems that we ought to face but instead ignore and skate around. I think Waugh is fascinated by those fogs, enraptured by their mystery and the partial glimpses of the weeds they hide, weeds that look enigmatic and enchanting when half obscured in swirls of vapor. He’s perhaps so captivated by the phenomena of the self-inflicted inner haze that he doesn’t want to dispel it. But like Austen’s best characters, I have no patience with the mists of self-deception. They hold no appeal for me; I want to cut through them as quickly as I can and do my part to pull up the weeds. Waugh’s language and descriptions may be impressive, but I’m realizing that he is just not my vibe.
Leave me a comment and let me know what kind of summer reading start you’ve made - whether slow or speedy, serendipitous or sedulous - or even, as in my case, somewhat sacerdotal!
What I Read in June 2023