justin

When I first read this novel forty years ago, I found the structure fascinating but the story itself disappointing. I had understood the book, first published in 1962, to be a story of free women, the title of the frame story that begins each section and ends the book. I eagerly looked forward to reading about the lives created by women who had freed themselves of society's constraints on women's roles. However, as Lessing herself points out in her 1971 introduction, this book is not about women's changing roles; it is the story of an artist whose creativity is blocked and who eventually cracks up.

Anna Wulf and her older friend Molly are free in the sense that they are not married anymore and have careers, Molly as an actress and Anna with a communist press. They each have a child: Molly's son Tommy is a difficult twenty-year-old and Anna's daughter Janet a young schoolgirl. While the two women have much in common, their friendship is complex, full of shifting alliances and attacks, envy and admiration. The emotional honesty of Anna's story eventually won me over.

And I was fascinated by the structure of the book: each section also contains portions of Anna's four notebooks in which she writes about different facets of her life: a black notebook about her life as a writer, a red notebook about politics, a yellow notebook where she writes stories based on her experiences, and a blue notebook which is more of a diary. Thus we see events and entanglements through a variety of lenses, their meaning shifting. Eventually Anna abandons these notebooks for a single golden notebook.

What made this novel valuable to the Women's Movement of the 1970s is that the artist in question is a woman, so the ways in which she is blocked and fragmented are those of a woman. What disappointed me then and startles me today is that she is a woman steeped in the culture of the times, the late 1950s and early 1960s, when women were supposed to be happy homemakers, vacuuming in their pearls and high heels and ever-ready to serve their men.

At the same time, whipped up by books written by men, women as mothers and lovers were blamed for all of men's problems. In fact, later that year I actually tore up a Philip Roth book—the only book I have ever destroyed—in my fury at his insistence that women were only put on earth to serve the male protagonist's needs and that he was entitled to destroy any woman who dared to ask for something from him. As Anna says, “‘None of you ask for anything—except everything, but just for so long as you need it.'”

Anna's reactions to the men with whom she becomes entangled reflect her times and her struggle to change, thus contributing to the perception that the book is about, as Lessing says, the war between men and women. To me, it is more the war within a woman, and in that first reading despaired at what seemed to me Anna's weakness.

On this reading, however, I have a better appreciation for the difficulty of change and treasure Anna's small victories. It is not easy to create for yourself a new kind of life, one for which there are no role models. I value the honesty of this book, where Anna truly weighs and expresses her commitment to one social structure after another. For example, she is forthright about her shifting attitude toward communism: the danger of conformism—when two people meet they speak honestly about politics, but add a third and they revert to the party line—and the way one's will is sapped by the belief that someday the world will be a worker's paradise. Yet she values “the company of people who have spent their lives in a certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that their lives must be related to a central philosophy.” It is only through this honesty that Anna is able to win through to a new understanding.

So I was surprised by this novel a second time and impressed by how well it holds together despite its fragmented structure and deeply troubled protagonist. In some ways it is an artifact of its time, but its refreshing truthfulness and candor make it a book for all time.

Have you reread a book years later and changed your opinion of it?

One night last week I went to a reading by Andrew Motion, thrilled at the opportunity to hear one of my favorite poets, and so close to home! I heard Motion, Poet Laureate of England from 1999 to 2009, read once before, in Toronto, at the International Festival of Authors. I was profoundly moved and changed by that experience, partly of course by the poems themselves with their richly evocative detail, their deeply felt experience, and my own sudden shock of recognition, but also partly by the way he read, the way he presented them.

At many of the readings I attend, the authors give the briefest of introductions to their poems or story excerpts, if indeed any at all, and then read in a monotone. When this happens, I have trouble paying attention and find myself thinking If you are so bored with your work, how do you expect me to be interested?

When I heard him in Toronto, I felt Motion hit just the right balance of talking about each poem, giving it some context, before reading it. He was engaged with the audience, a huge one, filling the large auditorium. Slipping in some dry wit here and there to keep us alert, he at one point provoked a spurt of laughter from someone in the back, causing him to smile wryly and say, “Exactly!” And, although the poem he then read, one that is in this book and that he read again last week, is enough to break your heart, the laughter was not out of place. The world can be confusing and chaotic; by focusing in on one moment in time, going into it fully, we find ourselves grounded again.

Hearing him last week, his introductions to the poems somewhat different for an audience that was almost entirely students, writers themselves, I understood suddenly that when I first started reading my poems, when my initial collection came out, I had unconsciously based my reading style on his. The introductions, yes, but also the way he read the poems themselves which, while not flamboyant in any way, gave each line the attention it deserved, honoring the emotions it encapsulated and evoking them in us.

This collection from 2002 contains his first poems as Poet Laureate. I picked it up at a used tool and book sale in a market town in England, because it was by him, of course, but also because I was curious as to how so private a poet would write for state occasions. The answer takes me deeply into what it means to be a writer, one whose work is out in the world.

I wrote poetry for many years just for myself; it was my way of making sense of the world. When my first book came out, I honestly didn't expect anyone to read it. I didn't feel that my privacy was violated in any way, but I just didn't think anyone would care about these poems that were so personal to me. And yet some people do, as I was reminded just today by my friend Laura.

Some of the poems in this book come out of Motion's childhood experiences. While I never went to boarding school or fly fishing with my mother, I recognise the reactions and emotions he conjures. What is private to him nonetheless touches a shared experience. Similarly, his poems about England in the section The Stormcloud of the Nineteenth Century and his other poems commissioned in his role as Laureate are clearly written out of a deeply private feeling but capture something that we hold in common. His short poem on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, for example, moves me to tears no matter how often I read it because it so perfectly sums up the beauty and tragedy of her life and her own struggles with the boundary between what is private and what is public.

Motion's investigation into that boundary in this collection touches on what I value most in this work I have taken on: reading and writing enable us to experience the world through someone else's eyes. As a result, our own gaze becomes more empathic. We are reminded that while we may each be our own private spinning world, there is much that we hold in common and a shared aspect to our lives.

This is a good thing. However, finding the right balance between what is private and what may be made public becomes more challenging every day, with the proliferation of technology that can track our every move and changing social mores that seem to make reticence a thing of the past.

What challenges have you encountered in balancing your privacy with what is shared publicly?

A friend loaned me this first volume of Lessing's two-volume autobiography. The Nobel Prize winner passed away November 2013 at the age of 94, and reading the articles about her reminded me that I hadn't read any of her books for a long time. Back in the 1970s I gobbled up books like The Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence series. They were a huge influence on my emerging understanding of myself as a person and of women's roles in society. The Golden Notebook also influenced me as a writer, one who was just beginning to appreciate experiments in form.

I decided to reread these books and also catch some of the books I'd missed. Then, much to my delight, this autobiography fell into my hands. Now I almost wish it hadn't, or at least not until I'd reread the books.

Don't get me wrong: it's beautifully written. I raced through it, intrigued by her early life in Persia and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), thoroughly enjoying the beautifully detailed descriptions of life in the bush, such as this when she hears a rustling at night:

It is as if the thatch is whispering. All at once, as I understand, my ears fill with the sound of the frogs and toads down in the vlei. It is raining. The sound is the dry thatch filling with water, swelling, and the frogs are exulting with the rain.

I was also captivated by her later involvement in politics. Lately I've found myself more and more interested in the communist and socialist movements of the 1930s and 1940s, so I was fascinated by her description of a now-lost (“killed by television”) culture of working men's colleges, political study classes and lectures. I paid close attention to the workings of the groups and shifting attitudes she describes, so familiar to me from my activist days, yet tempered by her looking back from old age (77 when this book came out).

. . . why do we expect so much? Why are we so bitterly surprised when we—our country—the world—lurches into yet another muddle or catastrophe? Who promised us better? When were we promised better? Why is it that so many people in our time have felt all the emotions of betrayed children?

Her description of how things changed with the advent of the Cold War is chilling: “From one week to the next, we became pariahs.” What makes this especially harsh is the thought that (as I now believe) the Cold War was cynically manufactured by those in power not only to sell more guns and missiles, but also to create a false sense of emergency to use as a weapon against labor organizers and others attempting to help the working class.

Lessing's parents are richly presented, their courage and limitations, their dreams and the harsh reality. They met during WWI when he was in hospital recovering from having his leg amputated, and she was his nurse. I marveled continuously at his wrestling a farm out of the bush with his wooden leg, and sympathised with her making the best of a rough isolation after her gay social life in London. I look forward to reading Alfred and Emily, Lessing's novel based on them.

Why do I wish I'd waited? In the autobiography Lessing is quite open about using her own life and friends as material for her novels. Now that I've plunged into The Golden Notebook, I find it hard to distance myself from the so-similar autobiographical details and encounter the story ingenuously. Of course, as a writer, I find interest in what she's done with real life to create fiction. But as a reader, I miss the immersion experience I had expected. Still, I look forward to reading the second volume, which begins as she leaves Africa for London.

Does knowing about the life of an author change your perception of his or her novels?

I enjoy mysteries. I like the puzzle-solving aspect, the attention to characterisation, the recognition of the world's chaos and the restoration of order. I don't like detailed descriptions of brutality—some writers seem to compete to gross our the reader—but a good writer can overcome my reluctance. Dennis Lehane is one of those writers. He captured me with his first book, A Drink Before the War, and continues to engross me with his artistry.

I also like Boston. I lived nearby for some time and always meant to return. Perhaps I still will. So the combination made this book the perfect holiday gift for me. The stories are set in and around Boston, including Cambridge, North Quincy, and Watertown. Some of my favorite authors are represented: Stewart O'Nan, John Dufresne, and Brendan Du Bois. Some are new to me: Dana Cameron, Don Lee, and Lynne Heitman, among others.

The part I liked best was Lehane's introduction. He portrays Boston and her people in ways that I immediately recognized—the knucklehead humor, the war of gentrification. And he gives a succinct take on what constitutes noir. He suggests it can be characterised as a “working-class tragedy”, its heroes not going out in a blaze of Aristotelian glory, but rather “clutching fences or crumpled in trunks”. His terse and brilliant summation is that “Noir is a genre of loss, of men and women unable to roll with the changing times, so the changing times instead roll over them.”

It's hard to pick a favorite story from this collection, but it might be “Dark Waters” by Patricia Powell. It's about a woman who answers the door one night when the lights have gone out. “Her name was Perle, she was forty-seven, and just six months ago she got up one morning and decided she was leaving her marriage.” The subtle changes Perle and the person at her door undergo in these few pages left me breathless with admiration, sadness, and sympathy.

This book is part of a series, each set in a different location with an editor associated with that place. I find them an interesting way to visit or revisit cities here and abroad.

Have you read a book recently that is set in a place that is meaningful to you?

A few weeks ago I mentioned that memoirs about the lives of celebrities seem to find a ready market. McMurtry is a celebrity within the world of writers, thanks to the success of books such as Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment, and the phenomenal success of movies made from them. This third memoir from him is about his interactions with Hollywood, his screenwriting career, which began almost by accident before he was famous, and his later efforts to have his books made into movies.

One expects that memoirs supposedly written by famous people are actually ghost-written, but in this case we can be confident that McMurtry wrote it himself. It is a casual recounting, jumping here and there, with chapters ranging from one to three pages. A ghost writer would certainly have added some organization and filled out the brief text. We do get some brief mentions of actors, producers and directors with whom he's worked, and more substantial descriptions of a few people such as Peter Bogdanovich and his agent, Irving Lazar.

Reading this slight and rambling book is a bit like listening to a favorite uncle run through his store of anecdotes: they are sometimes mildly interesting or amusing, but there is not much substance to them. He occasionally repeats himself, but you let that pass because of the affection you have for him.

Do I care that he once sat at a table at an Oscar party with George Burns and James Stewart, both of whom—quite elderly—sat silently throughout? Or that he met Stephen Spielberg once but their conversation was interrupted almost immediately? Even celebrities with whom he claims friendship, such as Susan Sontag, Diane Keaton, and Barbra Streisand, are only mentioned briefly because, as he says, he does not kiss and tell.

I did enjoy descriptions of two not-famous people who influenced his stories, a former Texas Ranger named Joaquin Jackson and a tragic Wyoming lawman, Ed Cantrell. I also enjoyed his descriptions of scouting locations for Hud and The Last Picture Show in his native Texas. As a writer I was amused by his descriptions of staying in the penthouse at the Beverly Hilton and flying first class, though he would really prefer a private jet. No writer I know enjoys such luxuries, but this is movie-money talking, not book-money.

He does mention that after his heart attack in 1991 he no longer has the attention span to write screenplays. He says several times that fiction comes easily to him but scripts do not. After his heart attack he confined himself to fiction, “which doesn't really require a clear mind”, until he was able to persuade Diana Ossana to become his screenwriting partner. It was Diana's idea to offer Annie Proulx an option for “Brokeback Mountain” after reading the short story in The New Yorker.

One interesting insight I gleaned from this book is his take on the difference between fiction and screenwriting:

How different? Well, for one thing, movies are sort of talked into marketability, if they have any, the talk being mainly between writer and producer, or writer and director, or both. Actors will occasional ally offer an opinion, but these opinions are rarely heeded . . . The line producers who are responsible for the daily money flow rarely get into the aesthetics of the project either.

Another helpful insight comes when he maintains that his success at having his books optioned for movies is due to his ability to write characters whom famous actors want to play. Until an actor who is thought to be a success at the box office is attached to a project, it won't generate interest or the necessary funding. For instance, Terms of Endearment might not have been made if Jack Nicholson hadn't decided at the last minute to join the cast. That makes sense, though I hadn't thought about it in those terms before. Certainly McMurtry excels at creating characters with the depth and/or quirks to make them interesting.

All in all, this is a pleasant and undemanding read. There is rarely any continuity between the short chapters, so you can pick it up and read for only a few minutes. Like many readers, I tend to read several books at once, some light and some weighty, picking them up to match my mood and attention span.

Do you read multiple books at once or focus on one at a time? What movies made from books have you liked?

I enjoy short stories, especially at times like these when my attention is a bit fractured. Just now about all I can handle is a powerful short story that can pull me in, tumble me about and let me go, as changed as the person in the story.

This is the first I've read Robinson's work, which was recommended to me by my local indie bookstore. Unsure what to expect, I steeled myself for pranks and allusions and metafictional games. But no. These stories stand four-square, solid and traditional. With great deliberation they capture my attention.

Most of the stories start with a single, declarative sentence: “That summer we rented a house in France, with friends.” No tricks, no mischief, just a simple statement of fact, yet plunging me into the story. Then it continues to draw me in, enticing me with evocative description:

. . . it was a long farmhouse of golden stone, with a faded orange tile roof. In front of it was a flat stretch of pale gravel, shaded by wide trees. The swimming pool was shimmering turquoise, surrounded by high green hedges; along the garden paths were cypress trees—cool, dark sentinels against a light-filled landscape.

These two quotes are from “Assez”, perhaps my favorite story in the book. The situation is not unusual: a woman hoping to use a summer away to regain her husband's interest, sharing a house with a couple who are their closest friends, Nina and John. What makes it stand out is the way Robinson makes me care so deeply, so immediately about these four people as they do ordinary holiday things: touring Roman ruins, shopping in the village, going out to dinner.

She does it with the detail, the bit of dialogue or description that is fresh and startling, like Steven returning from shopping and proudly stating that he has become “‘a man known to the locals.'” He explains that when he was leaving the vegetable shop and thanked the woman at the counter, as he always did, she not only thanked him back, but added:

“‘à demain.'” Steven looked at us all. “‘Until tomorrow'! She expects me!”
“‘Now that is a real accomplishment,” Nina said generously.

and she offers him one of the olives he's just brought home. A small thing, but the exchange delightfully suggests the friendship between the couples, the trust that can allow a playful boast and equally lighthearted praise. Yet the darkness is there, and Robinson masterfully manages the pace of the story to keep us shifting between the dark and the light.

I have read and reread these stories, at first just enjoying them, and then studying them. I admire the pieces—the pacing, the description, the dialogue, the characterization—but admire even more the way they are put together, the balance perhaps a little different from one story to the next, one a little heavier on action, another on reflection. I also like the different narrative voices: some protagonists are male, some female, a child, a teen, a middle-aged suburbanite.

Although they used to be popular, today's market wisdom is that people don't like to read short stories any more. Do you agree?

This autobiography by the well-known British poet was completed in 1950, when he was 41. He meets the objection that he was too young to sum up his life by explaining that “events both public and private tended to make my pre-war life seem complete in itself”, the public event being the end of WWII. John Bayley, in his introduction calls the book “the best autobiography in English written in the twentieth century.”

I have not read widely enough to assess that claim, but it is certainly very fine. I like autobiographies and memoirs because I am always curious about other people's solutions to the problems of living. Admittedly I read these books, not just to learn something, but because they are written in a fascinating voice, such as Angela's Ashes, or tell a compelling story, such as The Glass Castle. However, judging by the books published and the best-seller lists, we also read to learn about the lives of celebrities or about historical events or famous people. Meeting those criteria as well, Spender knew literary celebrities like Auden and Virginia Woolf, earned fame himself as a poet and describes major historical events such as the Spanish Civil War and WWII.

However, the appeal of this book lies in his openness. Spender gives us simultaneously the story of his emotional, intellectual, political and poetic journeys during the years 1928-1939. He brings out the inner conflicts of his time, when Freud opened new ways of understanding ourselves while the Puritanical British society denied them. “As a child, even, I wanted to know someone who saw himself continually in relation to the immensity of time and the universe: who admitted to himself the isolation of his spiritual search and the wholeness of his physical nature.”

Spender pursues his goals first of trying to discover his real self and then to find a right relation to the world. He says: “My difficulty was to connect my interior world with any outward activity. At what point did my inner drama enter into relation with the life which surrounded me?” He is concerned with the relationship between our inner and outer lives, “the conflict between personal life and public causes”.

As a corollary, he addresses the issue of whether poets should avoid politics in their writing, as his friend Auden maintained, or if events of the time were of a magnitude that they could not be ignored. There are many wonderfully insightful critical assessments of the writers of his time, most of whom were his friends, along with anecdotes about them which illuminate them wonderfully, such as an account of one of Virginia Woolf's dinner parties. I most enjoyed reading about Berlin in the early 1930s, when he lived there with Isherwood and other friends.

I should explain that the book in is five parts. The first is a short section about childhood, intended to lay the groundwork for the rest of the book. The second part is about his time at Oxford where he became friends with Auden, Louis MacNeice and Isaiah Berlin, among others, and began his vocation as a poet. The third section is an account of his time in Weimar Germany after leaving Oxford, beautifully describing the sense of freedom, ferocious life, and creativity before moving into the darker forces which would result in Nazism. This section also includes his life in London when he became intimate with the Bloomsbury Group. The Spanish Civil War dominates the fourth section, and the final section is about London during WWII before tying the whole back to the themes discovered in childhood.

I've described these sections by outer events, but Spender presents them with his own emotional and creative responses and the cultural currents that run alongside and mesh with the political ones.

Then there are the short, vivid descriptions written out of his poetic sensibility. Serving as a fire fighter in London during the war, he describes standing in the middle of a fire, training his hose on the flames, as peaceful, “as though . . . standing in the centre of the pine forest at Sellin with a sound of crepitating pine needles and oozing gum, more finely etched than silence itself upon the burning copper wall of the day.” Or this description of visits to country houses of Bloomsbury friends such as Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Harold Nicolson and Victoria Sackville-West:

In my mind these houses in the south and south-west of England, belonging to people who knew one another and who maintained approximately the same standards of living well, talking well, and believing passionately in their own kind of individualism, were connected by drives along roads which often went between hedges. At night the head-lamps would project a hundred yards in front of us an image of what looked like a luminous grotto made of crystal leaves, coloured agate or jade. This moved always in front of us on the leaves and branches. Delight in a vision familiar yet mysterious of this kind was the object of much of their painting, writing and conversation, so that when we drove in the country at night, and I watched that moving brilliant core of light, I felt often that I was looking into the eyes of their sensibility.

I love this partly because it reminds me of my own drives through English hedge-bound roads, but also because of its insightful summary of the group of people who became my first models of what an ideal life would look like.

What memoirs or autobiographies have you loved?

Since we enjoyed Kavalier and Klay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union so much, my book club selected Telegraph Avenue for this month's read. Chabon's 2012 novel has gathered a lot of critical praise, but we struggled with it. Only one person besides me finished it, and most of the others couldn't make it past the first 50 pages.

Old friends Archy and Nat run a used record store—yes, records as in vinyl—called Brokeland Records on the title's street in North Oakland. Their struggle to keep the store going is dealt a serious blow when a former football star plans to open a megastore just down the street, with a large used record section. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, work together as midwives. Eight months pregnant herself, Gwen has trouble keeping her temper as she wrangles doctors and babies and Archy and her own cumbersome body.

Julius, whom everyone calls Julie, is Nat and Aviva's 14-year-old son who has become friends with Titus, a boy his age who has arrived from Texas to stay with a distant relative. Further complicating matters is the appearance of Archy's father, Luther, a former star of blaxploitation films. He deserted his family long ago and has struggled with drugs and stints in jail, but now he's been clean for over a year and looking for a relationship with Archy.

I wish I'd had that summary before I started reading. We all found the beginning confusing and overwhelming. Even I was put off, and I'm a big fan of Chabon's writing. I thought too many characters were introduced without enough information to keep them straight or perhaps they were just not clearly presented. I didn't understand who they were or what their relationship to each other was; it took me forever to figure out that Luther was Archy's father. We spend a lot of time with one character who then disappears except for a single brief reference near the end. It was also unclear at the beginning who the main character is. Presumably it's Archy since the book starts with him, after a gorgeous brief paragraph about the (as yet unnamed) boys, Julie and Titus, but then Archy's gone before we have a chance to care about him.

I think the heart of the story is what it is to be a man. Archy stumbles through each of his roles: friend, business partner, husband, potential and unexpected father, community member, son. His failures mount as he seems unable to assert himself, to make a plan and carry it through. This section moved me: Gwen has not slept well, troubled “By thoughts of Archy and his furtive approach to grief. Holding his sadness close, as if it were a secret, the man always moving from one thing he couldn't talk about to the next, sneaking across the field of his emotions from foxhole to foxhole, head down.”

What I haven't captured is the immense exuberance of the text. Each sentence explodes with references and allusions and sneaky bits of fun. I enjoyed the verbal fireworks, but found the prose so demanding that I was not able to read more than a few pages at a time. By then, I felt pummeled and drained. Some members of my book club thought Chabon was just showing off and felt manipulated, but I can see how the style supports the story. I think the prose is a brilliant capture of today's environment with its rapid-fire demands on our attention, but it sure is exhausting. Section III, though? Even I thought that was just showing off. Quite remarkable, but unnecessary.

Chabon's references and allusions are great if you get them. I found myself snickering and laughing out loud as I read. One person started looking them up but soon quit. Several people felt that the ebullient prose distracted and distanced them, keeping them from delving into the story and caring about the characters. The character who interested me was Julie, so smart and self-possessed, so willing to give of himself.

Many of these references and allusions are embedded in the imagery—metaphors and similes—which pack every sentence. Some are brilliant. Others you just have to go with and not try to analyse. I found that I was kind of surfing, letting myself be carried along; that was the best way to handle the confusion, chaos, and conflicting demands of the text.

And by doing that, I was responding exactly the same way Archy responds to the chaos of his life. Brilliant!

I'm glad I stuck with this book, but I don't think my book club is likely to read another Chabon novel. That's a shame because he's such an amazing writer.

What is your book club reading?

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. These are the ten best books I read in 2013. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of each book.

1. Human Chain, by Seamus Heaney

I was saddened to learn of Heaney's death this week at what seems to me now the young age of 74. In his honor I salvaged this 2010 collection of his poetry from the depths of my to-be-read pile. In these poems he brings together and shares tesserae from all of his ages—climbing with Jim Hawkins into the ship's rigging, buying a used copy of the Aeneid, being carried on a stretcher, hearing funeral bells toll. Heaney fashions the final mosaics, examining the questions that absorb us at the end: what is the use of a life, my father's life, my own?

2. Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov

Rereading this remarkable memoir has been even more delightful than the first time. And more awe-inspiring. From the poetic beauty of his sentences to the intricate structure of the book, Nabokov's consummate writing skills are on display.

3. Twilight of the Superheroes, by Deborah Eisenberg

Stumbling across Eisenberg's short story “Another, Better Otto” resulted in one of the most satisfying reading experiences I've ever had. Immediately I hustled to the library and laid my hands on this collection, which includes that story along with five others, and sat down to savor them. Eisenberg's tales stretch out to give us a complex world with characters who tantalise the reader with their many facets.

4. Prospero's Daughter, by Elizabeth Nunez

As the title declares, this novel retells the story of The Tempest. Set in 1961 on Trinidad and the small island of Chacachacare off its coast, Prospero's Daughter portrays the intersection of a handful of lives as England's empire withdraws. This story is enthralling, keeping me up nights to finish it. Nunez's descriptions are gorgeous. Like its precursor, this is a story about power, the power of knowledge, the power of love, the power of courage, the power of integrity. It brilliantly brings out the relationship of power to class and race buried in Shakespeare's play.

5. Authenticity, by Deirdre Madden

Finding a new favorite author is a lovely bit of serendipity. Set in Dublin, this story revolves around two artists and is about art: the joys and costs of pursuing your gift and the consequences of ignoring it. It is simply a good story well-told, a rare and remarkable accomplishment. This Irish author has published several novels, and I will be trying to get my hands on every one of them.

6. Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Ron Rash

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of stories set in North Carolina. The various accents of the readers enhanced the verisimilitude of the characters and their environment. What makes these stories so powerful is the way he goes deeply into the characters. While the plots often take surprising turns, you won't find slick tricks here, just good, strong story-telling. The folks who populate them are so thoroughly imagined and so carefully presented that I feel I know each and every one of them.

7. The Crime of Julian Wells, by Thomas H. Cook

Philip Anders, a middle-aged literary critic, is shocked by the death of his best friend, the successful writer Julian Wells, at the home Julian shared with his sister in Montauk on Long Island. Though the two have known each other since childhood, Philip cannot imagine why Julian would commit suicide. To answer that question, Philip begins retracing Julian's footsteps, trying to learn where things went sideways. The writing is masterly; the pacing magnificent. I love an intelligent read like this, one that challenges my preconceptions and delivers a satisfying conclusion.

8. The Cat's Table, by Michael Ondaatje

A young boy—only eleven—is sent alone by ship from Colombo to London where he will join the mother he hasn't seen in four or five years. For his meals he is seated at the Cat's Table, the one farthest away from the Captain's Table and clearly reserved for the least important passengers. This is a story that you can read lightly, chuckling over the boys' adventures and mourning their frayed innocence, or you can pay closer attention. The book is dense, as one person in my book club said, with motifs and themes that all tie together. Ondaatje's books always reward close attention. This one, too, is a masterpiece worth reading and rereading. It is a Boy's Own adventure of knives and dogs and mischief, and at the same time a coming-of-age story. Memories are dismantled and reused; the mysterious motives and knotted hearts of adults are unwound; and the secret scars of childhood laid bare.

9. House of Breath, by William Goyen

Published in 1949, this first novel explores the hold memory has on us, those earliest memories, of childhood's dark cellars and magical woods, of the family that looms like a race of giants. Snippets of memory repeat and repeat, creating our own personal mythology. These are the memories of Boy Ganchion, called up on a dark night in strange city. I had to adjust to reading this memory-packed stream-of-consciousness style, so the first few chapters went slowly. I felt that, like Boy, I was struggling to sort out and make sense of the overwhelming rush of memory. However, a semblance of structure emerged, and the power of the prose grew on me. The last few chapters are simply magnificent, culminating in a celebration of what it means to be alive in the world, carrying our own particular past.

10. Collected Poems, by Hope Mirrlees

Born in 1887, Mirrlees was a poet, novelist, and translator who is best known for her fantasy novel, Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), and an influential modernist poem, “Paris” (1920). “Paris” chronicles a day's trek through that city, starting in the underground, wandering the streets, and finishing up at dawn in her room on the hotel's top floor. Her fragmentary, stream of consciousness style was new to British poetry when Hogarth Press published “Paris”. She acknowledged the influence of Jean Cocteau's poem _Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance”, and her poem became a bridge between French experimental poets and British writers. Her erudite references and use of footnotes are believed to have influenced her close friend, T.S. Eliot, in “The Wasteland” which he began the following year. I recommend this rediscovered masterpiece. Take your time with it.

What were the best books you read in 2013?

Anne Tyler has long been one of my favorite writers. Her stories are set in my neighborhoods and feature their eccentric inhabitants. In my love-hate relationship with Baltimore, the quirkiness of its denizens is definitely a plus. While not glossing over their peculiarities, Tyler always treats her characters with compassion.

This 2012 novel is set in motion when Aaron is visited by his recently deceased wife, who was killed when a tree crashed into their house. He mourns for Dorothy, so traumatized by her loss that he does not expect to return to the house, even once it has been restored. Only 35, Aaron displays the fussy crankiness of an old man. Stolid and reticent, he rejects offers of help, throwing out the many casseroles deposited on his doorstep, though meticulously washing and returning the dishes. This is nothing new to him. Handicapped by a withered right arm and leg, he has spent his life fending off the well-meant assistance of his mother and older sister. Dorothy's serious and independent demeanor broke over him like a refreshing wave, and he does not know how to bear life now without her.

With his sister, he works for the family-owned vanity publishing business. One of their big successes is a series of short books for beginners: The Beginner's Wine Guide, The Beginner's Dinner Party, The Beginner's Colicky Baby. Although his co-workers urge him to take time off, he buries himself in work.

When Dorothy—short, plump and plain—begins to appear, walking beside him, sitting next to him in the mall, even conversing with him, he becomes obsessed with finding the right conditions to make her reappear.

I am reminded of one of my favorite films: Truly, Madly, Deeply. Nina is so tormented by grief at the loss of her husband that he takes pity on her and returns. Her joy is gradually tempered by the day-to-day frustrations of living with someone—he keeps the heat turned way up because he is always freezing and brings his ghost friends over for movie night—until finally she is ready to move on. It is the most wrenching film I've ever seen, capturing both the reckless fun of being in love and the despair of letting go.

Aaron's story is milder, but still deeply felt. I particularly love his tenderness toward his unglamorous wife. “She had a broad, olive-skinned face, appealingly flat-planed, and calm black eyes that were noticeably level, with that perfect symmetry that makes the viewer feel rested . . . She wore owlish, round-lensed glasses that mocked the shape of her face. Her clothes made her figure seem squat—wide, straight trousers and man-tailored shirts, chunky crepe-soles shoes of a type that waitresses favored in diners. Only I noticed the creases as fine as silk threads that encircled her wrists and her neck. Only I knew her dear, pudgy feet, with the nails like tiny seashells.”

It's a delightful story, filled with misunderstandings and kaleidoscopic shifts in relationships. There is much humor, but it is never cruel. And through it all, for me at least, the familiar details of my particular world, as Aaron walks my streets, shops at my grocery, visits my Apple Store. Tyler celebrates the small events in a life, an ordinary life, such as that of the person next door to you.

Is there a novel set in your town that you particularly like?

As the year ends, it seems like a good time to consider what (or whom) we are ready to say goodbye to.

What are you ready to let go of?