Read These Books: Certified_Bangers_Vol.1.mp3, (and a re-introduction)

One year of Intellectual Rigor Mortis and Three Books I recommend: The Body in Question by Jill Ciment ❊ Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler ❊ Lakewood by Megan Giddings

My high school brought in a cop to teach us about online security. Facebook did not yet exist. During his presentation, he showed the entire school LiveJournal, where you could list your school in your profile. My friends and I were the only people in our school who used LiveJournal. When he typed in our high school’s name, I felt a wash of dread come over me that was so powerful that I effectively never publicly identified myself online again.¹ Until this newsletter.

Hello, it has been one year of this newsletter. There were approximately 600 people in that high school auditorium, and there are now more people than that subscribed here—wild. I had no clear vision when I started writing this, but thought it would be Cool (™) if there were at least as many strangers reading it as family and friends. Mission accomplished! Thank you for joining me. I set out to write about more than books, but it turns out I have a lot of thoughts about books. I never properly introduced myself, so here’s a basic biography:

Hello, I’m Laurel. I live in Toronto, which is also where I was born. I spent eight years in Montreal, Canada’s best city, and returned to Toronto because my family and friends are here. My connection to place and patriotism is fairly thin; my parents were both born elsewhere—on one side Ashkenazi Jews from Poland, the other English—and they have since moved again. My husband is from Germany, where we visit once or twice a year.

I live in a house that I own with my husband, friends, and dog. I wrote about co-ownership and co-dependency at length here:

Co-buying a house, the life-changing power of collaboration, and The Artist’s Way

I once paid thousands of dollars to read books and get a piece of paper to confirm having read them (otherwise known as an Honours degree in English Lit, History minor). Now, I work in marketing for my day job, and despite this (or maybe because of it) I dislike marketing myself, and will continue avoiding doing so. I think that was enough—let’s get back to books.

Certified_Bangers_Vol.1.mp3

To celebrate a year of book writing, here are some personal, highly biased “certified bangers,” by which I mean some of my favourite books that I have recommended to friends before (with a decently high success rate). Coming up with this list was a challenge, because many of my favourite books need a series of caveats like, “well, the content is wildly upsetting but…”² or they are so recently successful that it feels almost unnecessary to endorse them,³ or they have a high hit-to-miss ratio.⁴ Here are three memorably good books, spanning a few genres and reading moods.

These covers are so good, I had to include them both.

The Body in Question by Jill Ciment

The premise of this book is salacious: two jurors start an ill-fated affair while sequestered for a sensationalized, tabloid-hounded crime. Fair warning, the crime is truly heinous: a teenage girl, one half of a pair of twins, is on trial for murdering their infant sibling. But it is not entirely a courtroom drama—the trial and question of whodunit are one element of a story equally focused on what it means to grow old and still have a body. The narrator is an affluent white woman in her 50s who has spent most of her life married to a much older man. Her perspective is informed by this privilege, of both class and safety. Now, their age gap is wider than ever: she is middle-aged, healthy but aging, while her husband has reached the end of his life, rendering her more caretaker than partner.

There are a lot of moving parts to this book: husband and wife, affair partners, and the ambiguities of legal drama. If you’re expecting a mystery that is neatly set up and resolved, this will not deliver. As established in a previous newsletter—Mystery Novels for Snobs—I appreciate a book that acknowledges the messiness of truth over the convenience of a simple answer. A central conceit of this book is that human impulse is not always explicable by moral logic; we take actions that are not in our best interest, we confuse ourselves.

Another selling feature is that all of these moving parts come together in an economical 200 pages, and the writing itself is excellent: light on its feet while still being insightful. A passage I think of often:

“During her lectures, she explains the difference between the beautiful and the sublime this way: The stars are beautiful—diamonds, twinkles, something you can wish upon. The space in between the stars is the sublime—cold, black, and infinite, something that inspires awe and fear.”

Recommended if: you’re a mystery/thriller skeptic looking for something with serious aims and salacious means; you’re in the mood for something quick.

Barney’s Version by Mordecai Richler

Mordecai Richler has the distinct displeasure of being “famous in Canada.” He is very famous here! There’s a library in his formative neighbourhood (Mile End, Montreal) named after him! Back when public intellectuals and print media existed, he was one of those.

To paint a picture of both him and this book: he’s a Canadian Philip Roth, if Philip Roth were happily married to a beautiful gentile for over 40 years (entirely counterfactual to Roth’s whole deal, but please bear with me). They share a mid-century, boomer, Jewish, curmudgeonly joie-de-vivre as well as a modernist, nuanced writing style. If Roth is not an applicable point of comparison, you may also enjoy this if you like the television show Curb Your Enthusiasm: the crankiness⁵ is the point.

Richler met his beloved wife the night before his first wedding to another woman. This is part of the premise of Barney’s Version, an unconventional love story, personal diatribe, and also a dash of mystery. It is Richler’s last novel, a 400-page rollicking good time from a loud, unfiltered voice. We open with Barney Panofsky trying to set the record straight. Here are the opening sentences:

Terry’s the spur. The splinter under my fingernail. To come clean, I’m starting on this shambles that is the true story of my wasted life (violating a solemn pledge, scribbling a book at my advanced age), as a riposte to the scurrilous charges Terry McIver has made in his forthcoming autobiography: about me, my three wives, aka Barney Panofsky’s troika, the nature of my relationship with Boogie, and of course, the scandal that I will carry to my grave like a humpback.

The book is funny, both in the narrative itself and the steady footnotes that fact-check Barney’s version of events. It’s an inventive and wonderful format; Barney telling you his life story to contradict someone else’s version of events, while we have frequent footnotes contradicting Barney’s story itself. He is deplorable, lovable,⁶ and not to be trusted—the plot is Barney’s loud and long life, told with high bias and great style.

There is a film adaptation of this novel, but it is set in New York City—a disrespectful change; there are so few books about Canadian Jewish life, about the specifics of Toronto vs. Montreal, Hollywood should not take this one away from us—and therefore, I haven’t seen it.⁷ This substitution is far worse than casting Paul Giamatti to play one of the single most Jewish men to have ever been written.

Recommended if: you enjoy highly voice-driven books that could only be told by one person; if you just want to have a straight-up good time with a book.

Lakewood by Megan Giddings

In a rapid change of tone from the previous recommendation: Lakewood is a quiet but striking horror novel. Where the previous two books are plot-forward, the strength of this novel is mood-building, not world-building.

Freshly grieving and in need of both cash and health insurance, Lena signs up for the Lakewood Project, “a series of research studies about mind, memory, personality, and perception.” What follows is a sliding, strange series of events that test Lena’s mind, memory, personality and perception. It’s a surreal and inventive story. The first 200 pages are told in third-person before we shift to Lena’s direct perspective—especially effective given how much of the book is about perspective and the factors that shape it.

It’s an explicitly implicit political metaphor of a book: how class and race shape medicine, the ways in which Black people and especially Black women are made expendable at great personal cost. In keeping with the shifting, somewhat trippy atmosphere of the book, none of this is didactic or overt. The book reads like a fever dream, looping back to repeated scenes and a sense of confusion, while still remaining clear and compelling in the writing style itself.

Recommended if: you’re in the mood for real stakes and surreal set-pieces; you have the stomach for body horror and unresolved questions.

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It was a treat to come up with recommendations that follow no structure other than the promise that they’re good and they should have more readers. There are so many ways to find new good books to read. The method that consistently yields good results for me has been identifying Trusted Sources (personal friends, public critics, and increasingly other newsletter writers!) whose taste I trust. The best indication is when a few of these Trusted Sources align on a book—a sure sign that I should buy it. It is the greatest form of flattery to be a trusted source to anyone reading this.

Thank you for joining me this past year. The state of the world (local and global), the state of the internet, attention spans, politics, and so much else is so worrying that it makes your teeth physically hurt in your skull. Indulgently writing online about books has been a respite in an otherwise challenging year, although I hope not a respite too disengaged from, well, The Horrors. In thinking about what reading “means” to me, I was struck by this passage from Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather, which I am currently making my way through:

This makes art sound like a magic bullet, which should reorganize our critical and moral faculties without effort, while simultaneously obliterating free will. Empathy is not something that happens when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

1. He went to an account that, in retrospect, was probably made for this purpose: no identifying details, but a series of random innocuous posts and Scrubs gifs.

2. Hurricane Season (Fernanda Melchor), The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen), both exceptional books with indelible storytelling style

3. Tom Lake (Ann Patchett), Sorrow and Bliss (Meg Mason), the works of Emily St John Mandel or Colson Whitehead

4. I have given up on recommending Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir).

5. Kvetching.

6. Well, your mileage may vary on this front—see Curb Your Enthusiasm comparison for reference.

7. Editor’s Note: Alanna, devoted editor of this newsletter, has seen the movie and declares it an absolute exercise in mediocrity, failing to bring any of the joy, pain, or even pettiness levels required to have done the novel any justice.