One of the first things I do whenever I move to a new place (trust me, I’ve lived in enough cities, towns and villages to know what I’m talking about here) is to visit — and join — the local library. There’s something comforting and consistent about libraries the world over that grounds me.
Growing up in Australia, the town library was always free to join. The same applied in Sweden, where I lived for 11 years. Sure, you might need to pay a token amount for a late book but if you were interacting with a good librarian — and let’s face it, they’re all good — they’d usually waive it.
Therefore, it was a bit of a shock to discover, when we moved to France in 2022, that we had to pay for the privilege of borrowing books from the local médiathèque. But our kids could still join up for free and I guess it was also a price I was willing to pay to have access to English-language books.
Fast-forward to 2024, and I was very curious to find out what kind of library experience awaited me in Fryslân. Of course, living in a village of 200, I hardly expected to find a library close by. But the Dokkum and Leeuwarden bibliotheken (libraries) are just 12km and 15 km away, respectively.
While the bibliotheek in Dokkum is cute and cosy, the city library in Leeuwarden, known affectionately as dbieb, is probably one of the best libraries I’ve ever visited. Housed in Het Blokhuis, a former prison on the edge of the old town, dbieb is full of character and colour.
As part of my personal imburgeringstraject (LOL), I signed up for a vakantieabonnement (holiday subscription) over the summer, just to find out whether it would be worth paying EUR 57 per year — which is pretty steep, compared to what we paid in France — to become a full member.
This week, my trial subscription expired. While I went through the motions of weighing up the pros and cons of a full year’s membership, I knew deep down that I was going to join no matter what. I suspect that’s just due to the accumulated effect of 50 years’ exposure to libraries and books.
All of which is a long-winded way of getting to the list of library books I actually borrowed and read between July and September this year. I have posted these lists before (see this example from 2005: cripes, what a time that was!) but it’s not something I’ve done systematically. Well, let’s change that!
And screw GoodReads!
This time around, rather than simply list all the books I’ve read as a form of passive-aggressive humblebrag, I thought it might be worth adding a few words about my impressions of them. More as a way of remembering what struck me as interesting than a contribution to Pseud’s Corner, mind.
So, without further adieu (I’ll stop now):
My ‘uninterrupted, sustained, silent reading’ (USSR) list for July-September 2024
- Scrublands (Chris Hammer): Surprisingly, one of the only Australian novels in the dbieb collection, Scrublands is a piece of outback noir about a journalist who goes to a small rural town to write an article on the anniversary of a mass shooting. Funnily enough, Chris Hammer is also an Australian journalist. Write what you know, anybody? While I found the story intriguing, the descriptions of the landscape and climate were a little over-egged. I mean, I get it: it’s warm out there in the bush. I know, I lived there. But maybe show me some more of that instead of telling me over and over again how bloody hot it is?
- Old Filth, Last Friends and The Man in the Wooden Hat (Jane Gardam): This trilogy explores the secret lives and loves of Sir Edward Feathers (aka Old Filth), a child of the British Raj who goes on to become a barrister and judge in post-war Hong Kong. At first glance, I wondered whether this was really the kind of book for me but I found the entire trilogy gripping, poignant and fascinating. Gardam presents multiple versions of Feathers, as well as his wife, his main rival at the bar, and an assortment of other characters. Each book is a profound meditation on memory and secrecy, regardless of the order in which they are read. That being said, I’ve been told by other readers — including my better half — that you do need to read them in order, so maybe ignore my recommendation on this point.
- Version Zero (David Yoon): Okay, this one was a bit of fun, a cross between arch-cyberpunk and slapstick comedy, involving the obligatory techbro, a programmer romance, some evil dudes and a finale set on a snowy peak in the Balkans. I mean, what’s not to like? I enjoyed just letting this piece of pulp take me wherever its author wanted to go. But there was a darker, more serious side to the novel. Its insights into social media companies’ algorithms and strategies, as expressed by a barely fictional version of Twitter called Wren, certainly remains topical, given that platform’s descent into absolute gobshite territory since the book’s publication in 2021.
- You Can’t Catch Me (Catherine McKenzie): Not being an expert in the categories publishers and booksellers use to classify literary works, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest this one’s not anywhere near “high-end”. Like Version Zero, You Can’t Catch Me is a thriller that could not have been written prior to the advent of social networks in the early 2000s. Ostensibly about a series of women named Jessica who have been subjected to an online scam, You Can’t Catch Me read to me as if it had been workshopped, edited and focus-grouped to hell, with a corresponding lack of roughness around the edges which would have made it suspenseful moments a bit more realistic.
- If I Had Your Face (Frances Cha): Full disclosure: I will read just about any book with a Korean author, main character or theme. If I Had Your Face has all three (while Cha was born in the United States she has lived and worked in Korea). As an added bonus, it’s an utterly terrifying glimpse into the lives of young Korean women working in room salons in Seoul. While I’ve spent time living in Gangnam, which is notorious for this kind of salon (not to mention the epicentre of the Korean plastic surgery industry), Cha manages to convey the violence to which these women are subjected, as well as their solidarity and unlikely friendships. I really loved this book.
- Mayflies (Andrew O’Hagan): Turning to another cheerful subject, Mayflies describes the coming of age of a group of young men in Glasgow in the late 1980s, with a focus on the friendship between the narrator and Tully, a larger-than-life oddball who discovers he has cancer when they are all in their mid-forties. Tully’s euthanasia journey provides the book’s narrative propulsion, but the narrator’s reminiscences about a trip to Manchester’s Haçienda, and the characters’ arguments about 1980s bands and lyrics, make this a really moving portrait of a time and place that’s now receding into history.
- Sharks In the Time of Saviours (Kawai Strong Washburn): Another novel I wasn’t quite expecting to ‘hit different’, as the kids say, Sharks In the Time of Saviours tells of a Filipino-Hawai’ian family’s struggles with poverty and the co-option of traditional Hawai’ian culture by mainstream US society. Individual family members narrate alternating chapters, with the plot revolving around the disappearance of Nainoa Flores, a young man with an apparent gift for reanimating and/or spirit-summoning animals (including sharks). Washburn sure knows his way around an adjective, and the novel drips with descriptions of the natural environment in Hawai’i and the harsh reality of urban life. Amazing.
- French Braid (Anne Tyler): Maybe it says more about me than anything else but I’d never heard of Anne Tyler until I came across this book, whose arty cover caught my eye on the dbieb shelves. And wow: I am so glad it did! French Braid tracks an American family from the 1950s to the Covid pandemic (a risky contemporary flourish, handled well). I probably learnt more about Baltimore than I will ever need to know but there’s something so authentic about the way Tyler handles relations between partners, parents and children, siblings, and across generations. On this last point, a scene in the novel involving a train trip to New York by a woman and her granddaughter is heartbreakingly poignant. Just as I felt when I personally ‘discovered’ Joyce Carol Oates, I have a feeling I’ll be coming back to Anne Tyler’s work.
- Aria (Nazanine Hozar): I picked this novel up on the basis of a quote by Margaret Atwood describing Aria as a Dr Zhivago for Iran. Which I found a bit puzzling but intriguing. Having finished the novel, I can’t say I’m any wiser, although I see what Atwood meant in terms of its historical scope, set against the backdrop of the Iranian revolution. Not only is it long; it’s a pretty tough read, too. I found it challenging to remain engaged in a narrative where most of the characters are unremittingly awful to each other. Of course, it’s not that I want my literature sugar-coated or ‘normal’. There are some amazing poetic moments amid the random acts of violence and clerical machinations, which ultimately make this a worthwhile — but tough — read. And given the state of world affairs, Aria offers a perspective that I suspect might encourage more nuanced understandings of Iran on the part of Western readers.
So, there you have it: my reading list for the (northern) summer of 2024. Having invested in a full year’s membership of dbieb in Leeuwarden, I now look forward to writing a follow-up post in January 2025. Not to put any pressure on myself, of course. Or make promises I can’t keep.
Until then, dears: drop everything and read, srly!
