Secret Book Doctor History

Maybe I need a costume...

Well, hello there! It’s been a minute, as the kids say. I hope you all are doing well and finding time to read in your busy lives. I’ve missed popping on here with my book recommendations and essays about my sordid Catholic past. Maybe I should BECOME the Book Doctor, you know, have a cape and a hat or something. Maybe that would prompt me to keep my newsletter up to date.

In any case, as a sordid Catholic, I must confess my sins. Why have I not been writing? Stress. Just general stress. Even though it seems like the cloud of COVID is lifting, the whole plague experience has made the world a further place of dread. What Greek letter is next? And why in Christ’s name are we fighting over vaccines?

And this invasion of Ukraine is horrifying. I feel like we are voyeurs watching it on t.v., following the death and destruction and heroics for our own entertainment. I know I’m doing it too, gobbling up the news of yet another heroic Ukrainian telling the Russians to fuck off. The Ukrainian Library Association cancelled their conference until they were finished “vanquishing our invaders” so of course I self-indulgently congratulated myself as a sometime librarian. We’ll grasp at straws to be on any right side of history.

It isn’t about us, and yet it is—we’re all fighting bigger forces than we can possibly beat without banding together, and we’re doing a terrible job of banding together, at least in the U.S. When medical science itself becomes political, and there’s no shared sense of community good but only of opponents on opposite sides, I haven’t much hope for the state of our country.

But on the other hand…there’s books and writing. Some of the best literature I’ve ever encountered is being published right now. Writers like Kiese Laymon, Reyna Grande, and Ocean Vuong are finding new audiences. Readers are hungry for authentic experience and opportunities to read in solidarity. While we read for many reasons, to learn, to appreciate craft, and to be entertained, perhaps the most important reason we read is to connect with other people.

Given everything going on in the world, we need some kind of connection desperately. Perhaps literature can provide a sense of connection between different stories of struggle. Perhaps, when we see ourselves and others in books, we also see the possibility of connection and solidarity. That is my hope, at any rate, and why I keep reading and teaching. Now I need to keep writing as well.

In any case…what have I been reading? Well, I’ve been watching (actually rewatching) My Brilliant Friend on HBO in preparation for the third season, which dropped February 28th. I’m just about there, an episode and a half away from finishing season two. If you have not read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet—and you’ve not tried it yet—get thee to a library and check out the first book, My Brilliant Friend. The world of Ferrante’s Naples is inside me now. This writing, translated by Ann Goldstein, is as alive as its primary characters, best friends and competitors Lila and Lenu, who grow up in violent and patriarchal working-class Naples. Some books feel like they’ve always been there, and this series contains four of them. (If you’ve read the first book and you don’t like it, it’s not going to get better for you—you may stop with impunity. If you’ve read the first book and you need to go immediately to the second, this series is for you.) I identify with Lenu, the friend who ends up getting formally educated and becoming an author and academic. Lila, the friend left behind, is nevertheless brilliant (a brilliant friend!) and has a role to play in the political upheavals of 1960s and 1970s Italy. The HBO show is perfect—I mean, it’s note for note. Perfectly cast and acted, Ferrante co-wrote the teleplay. I do recommend reading the books first because of course I do. I am the Book Doctor.

I also reread Donna Tartt’s The Secret History for comfort, because it is a book I know nearly by heart at this point. I have a not-so-secret history with The Secret History…I reread this book all the damn time. I even read it in Spanish. (Titled El Secreto in translation, the descriptions of Hampdon College are even more orgiastic in Español, but I don’t read well enough to get very far). It’s a book about the hazards of academic infatuation, as well as the hazards of murdering someone (Hint: both mess with your head). I identify with Richard Papen, the working class outsider who falls in with a gang of privileged Classics scholars, led by a charismatic but ultimately morally bankrupt professor. Not because I’ve ever fallen in with such a group, but because I recognize Richard’s hunger for knowledge and beauty, his joy in the pleasures of reading, writing, and discussing, and his tendency to get caught in the underbelly of scholarly and academic culture. There’s a sheen on academic life that I still yearn for, that I still fall for. I won’t be pushing anyone off a cliff anytime soon, but I do understand why Richard was blind—he had scholarly stars in his eyes. I don’t believe in academia anymore, but I still believe in college.

As for my teaching, I’m rereading more edifying and exciting things—Reyna Grande’s A Dream Called Home, which chronicles a first gen Mexican immigrant’s journey as a transfer student to UC Santa Cruz. My son loved this book because he is interested in Santa Cruz for college. Grande feels profoundly left out and marginalized until she finds her community during a protest against Prop 209. Her writing is clear and accessible and each chapter ends with a page turner, kind of like if J.K Rowling wrote working class literature. I also reread Michelle Obama’s Becoming, which traces her journey from the South Side of Chicago to the White House. Obama confides in her readers that she still suffers from imposter syndrome. The women in my classes are first astonished, and then nod—this shit is all too familiar.

Finally, I’m in the middle of John Darnielle (Mountain Goats! I’ll make it through this year if it kills me)’s Devil House, a sort of meta true crime novel set in Milpitas (south of San Fran) and the Central Valley, particularly Morro Bay, one of my favorite places in the state. A huge, anomalous boulder sits in the Bay, the breeze is cool, the sand warm and crispy. Darnielle wrote one of my favorites, Wolf in White Van, and Universal Harvester (which takes place in a video rental store in Iowa). I enjoy Darnielle even when I don’t quite understand what he’s after, which is much of the time. But the writing is a tractor beam, drawing you into the titular “devil house” which may or may not hold secrets of a bloody past.

I hope you are reading, writing, or reading AND writing. And even if you’re not, I hope you’re well. It’s good to be back.

Bibliography

Darnielle, John. Devil House (2022), Universal Harvester (2017), Wolf in White Van (2014).

Ferrante, Elena. My Brilliant Friend (2011), The Story of a New Name (2012), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2013), The Story of the Lost Child (2014).

Grande, Reyna. A Dream Called Home (2018).

Laymon, Kiese. Heavy (2018)

Obama, Michelle. Becoming (2018).

Tartt, Donna. The Secret History (1992).

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)

Discography

The Mountain Goats, “This Year” from The Sunset Tree (2005).