The Perils of Reading Pregnant

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May 20, 2011 | 10 books mentioned 27 5 min read

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When I was engaged to be married, I lost my mind.  I’m aware that sounds hyperbolic,  but that’s really how it felt: as if my mind had abandoned me,  slipped through my ears when I wasn’t looking, to be replaced with something that I didn’t recognize or trust.  I was so nervous all the time, my mind skipping from one terrible and scary thought to the next, that reading became almost impossible.  Do you know how many stories there are about bad marriages?

During this fraught time, I tried to read an Alice Munro story in the bath.  What story, I have no idea (clearly, I blocked it out), but it was about a woman who kills her husband.  I couldn’t finish it because I began to fear–to believe, actually–that I was in danger of killing my own future husband.  Oh, how my Intended laughed when I voiced these fears!  He wasn’t afraid of me and my murderous capabilities!  He eventually talked me down from my nonsense ledge, and got me laughing along with him.  But I was still too afraid to finish the story.

That was five years ago.  I’ve since retrieved my mind, gotten and stayed married, and returned to reading.   Thank goodness.  Sometimes, I imagine all the great and beautiful books I must have missed during my engagement, and the loss sends a shiver of regret through me.

Last fall, when I found out I was pregnant, I waited for the mind-losing anxiety to descend on me once more.  It didn’t.  (Or, I should say, it hasn’t yet.  I do have five more weeks to lose my mind for old time’s sake!)  Because I feel as normal as can be expected when you’re growing a human being inside of you, I’ve noticed that other people experience anxiety for me.  They don’t want me to carry anything, not even a carton of orange juice.  They want me to sit down already!  They want to give me more water, a glass of milk, a pint of ice cream.  And they don’t want  me to read just anything.  More than once I’ve had a person recommend a book to me, and then say, “Oh, but don’t read it now.  Not while you’re pregnant!”   Apparently, people’s protective urges extend beyond the body of the mother-to-be, and into her reading life.  If literature is clogged with unhappy marriages, it’s certainly also darkened with dead babies and the complex melancholy of mothers.

So, as either a warning to other mothers-to-be, or as great “Fuck you!” to all the people who keep telling me to keep things light as I carry my child to term, here’s a list of non-friendly pregnancy books.  Read at your own risk…

coverRosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin: I admit, I haven’t read the novel, but I love the movie, starring the bewitching Mia Farrow.  I have purposely kept my blonde hair very short these last 8 and a half months because I appreciate the cinematic allusion, though I have one friend in particular who urged me, early on, to grow out my locks.  “It’s not funny!” she said. “What kind of message are  you sending?”  How about this: Every pregnant woman wonders, at least once, if she’s got the devil’s spawn growing inside of her.

coverThe Hand That First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell: This is the next novel I’m going to read, despite my sister Heidi’s warnings that I should wait until after my baby’s born. O’Farrell’s novel, which my sister could not put down, and which made her sob at its ending, follows two stories–one about a woman in post-war London, and one about contemporary parents in that same city.  There’s apparently some childbirth trauma.  Lots of blood, my sister said.  She also told me to avoid Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks.  The deaths–deaths, plural--in this novel still haunt her.

coverAn Exact Replica of a Figure of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken: Every morning I awake to the spine of this powerful and painful memoir, which I chose as one of my favorite books of 2008.  It sits on the shelf by my bed, right next to Nox by Anne Carson and Skippy Dies by Paul Murray.  (That’s a lot of death to wake up to, I realize).   McCracken’s story of raising a child after the stillbirth of her first is all the more terrifying and moving because it’s true, and because she speaks of trauma and grief in a distinct, unflinching, and sometimes even funny way.  I keep wondering if this book might mean more to me on a second read, now that I am pregnant, now that I know firsthand what I could lose, what and whom I would mourn.  Such a book reminds me not to take this time in my life lightly; it reminds me that I’m already a mother.

Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk: This novel is about one day (a la Mrs. Dalloway) in the posh lives of British mothers.   The unhappiness of its characters is so delicately and expertly rendered that it, at times, grows oppressive.  These are women who feel unconnected to their husbands, their kids, their lives. Such a book makes me fear the very phrase Sippy Cup.

coverWe Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver: Shriver’s brilliant and dark novel is narrated by Eva, whose son Kevin is guilty of carrying out a Columbine-style high school killing.  It’s a grim but often very funny narrative of maternal ambivalence, and it’s certainly a mind-fuck for any mom-to-be.  Eva articulates every single dark thought a pregnant woman would be wise to avoid (For instance:  “What if my child grows up to be a murderer?” And, “What if I don’t love him?”).  Here’s a taste of the sharp prose, most likely to be left out of the highly-anticipated film adaptation with Tilda Swinton, due out this fall:

Meanwhile, I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distentions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.

The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness of my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species’ heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is so far my favorite book of the year.  I read it when I was about four months pregnant, and as I did so, I prayed I was having a girl (She might be anorexic, I thought, but she probably won’t be a serial killer.)  Turns out, I’m having a boy.  Ha!   Shriver’s novel is the most memorable book I’ve read in a while. And also, um, the most frightening.

What novels do you recommend a pregnant woman avoid?  Tempt me…

is a staff writer and contributing editor for The Millions. She is the author of the novella If You're Not Yet Like Me, the New York Times bestselling novel, California, and Woman No. 17. Learn more about her writing classes at writingworkshopsla.com.

Lists

Seven Reasons to Read A Dance to the Music of Time

Lists
January 27, 2012 | 10 books mentioned 16 13 min read
These books deserve a continuing readership. They are masterful, they are deeply artful — and they are also rather fun. They contain a wealth of comedy, closely observed as the best serious work but with an additional twist that makes for a startled laugh when you suddenly realize what’s going on. They deserve to be popular. They deserve to be widely read and loved. And yet, in point of fact, nobody I know has read them. And so I am taking to the Internet to make my own case for Powell to anyone out there who is in search of a new reading project as I was, or who simply needs something to read on these winter days.
Lists
| 10 books mentioned 16 13 min read
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Lists

A 2014 Cheat Sheet for All You New Kindle (and Other E-Reader) Owners

Lists
December 24, 2014 | 10 books mentioned 2 3 min read
With each new holiday season the reach of ereaders expands, as a new crop of Kindles, Nooks and iPads are fired up. The first thing to do is download a few books. Just a few years after ebooks and ereaders first emerged as futuristic curiosity, they are fully mainstream now. Even among the avid, book-worshiping, old-school readers that frequent The Millions, ebooks are very popular. Looking at the statistics that Amazon provides us, 48% of all the books bought by Millions readers at Amazon after clicking on our links this year were Kindle ebooks. This is an uptick from last year, when the percentage was 45%. In 2012 it was 33% and the year before it was 25%. It seems almost fitting, given the tug-of-war between book and ebook partisans, that the numbers would eventually settle out near even, with neither format coming out the "winner." So, for all those readers unwrapping shiny new devices, here are some links to get you going. For starters, The Millions published a pair of very highly regarded and very affordable ebook originals in 2013. If you are new to the ereader game, we hope you'll pick up these titles: Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever by Mark O'Connell ($1.99) The Pioneer Detectives: Did a distant spacecraft prove Einstein and Newton wrong? by Konstantin Kakaes ($2.99) They are also available on Apple and other platforms. Here are some of the most popular ebooks purchased by Millions readers in 2014 (which you'll see are very similar to our Hall of Fame and most recent top-ten which take into account books in all formats). Publishers appear to still be having luck pricing ebooks pricing near the magic $9.99 number that has been a focus for many in the industry (all prices as of this writing), though aggressive pricing on some backlist titles is clearly driving brisk sales. Occasional promotional pricing, a frequent occurrence in the Kindle store, has likely driven some of these sales as well. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ($6.99) Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose ($1.99) Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter ($5.99) Just Kids by Patti Smith ($8.62) The Round House by Louise Erdrich ($8.61) Tampa by Alissa Nutting ($9.78) Fox 8 by George Saunders ($0.99) A Highly Unlikely Scenario by Rachel Cantor ($9.99) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith ($6.99) Underworld by Don Delillo ($11.74) Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales by Ray Bradbury ($12.62) Other potentially useful ebook links: Editors' Picks Best of 2014 Top 100 Paid and Free Kindle Singles And in this fractured ebook landscape, you've also got your NookBooks, Google ebooks, Apple ibooks, and the IndieBound ereader app that lets you buy ebooks from your favorite indie bookstore. Finally, don't forget Project Gutenberg, the original purveyor of free ebooks (mostly out-of-copyright classics). Happy Reading!
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| 10 books mentioned 2 3 min read
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27 comments:

  2. here’s one but it’s not necessarily one to avoid, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas by James Patterson. A heartwarming story of a pregnant woman’s diary to her unborn son. It’s a departure from the genre that Patterson usually writes.

    It is a VERY good book and not just about the story itself, but life too in how we’re juggling so many balls hoping not to let one drop.

    enjoy!

  3. I had the same experience last year when I was pregnant with my son. I defiantly read PURGE by Sofi Oksanen after several people told me I just couldn’t read it while pregnant. And I found it profoundly unsettling in a very unpleasant way, just as they’d feared. So I made quite a reading list after that of “books I’ll read when I’m no longer pregnant.”

    What everyone failed to mention to me was that if a book is too disturbing for a pregnant woman to read, it will almost certainly be too disturbing for the mother of a newborn (who has very little time for reading anyway). I read THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE shortly after my son’s birth, and O’Farrell’s decription of the frighenting, drug-addled days following a traumatic birth is spot on. It’s a tremendous book that, while devastatingly sad, never made me feel anxious about my new status as a mother. Much like ROOM (which I read when I was 39 weeks pregnant), It made me feel invigorated, determined to be as strong and resilient as the mothers in it. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ll ever read WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN now. I just can’t bring myself to pick it up.

  4. I reread Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child periodically, and although I’ve never conceived, it never fails to terrify me.

  5. My baby is six weeks old, and while pregnant, I read the McCracken, the O’Farrell, and the Cusk you mention above. Ha! I also read the Shriver about six months before I got pregnant; that one stays with you, every time you get a bad blow to the ribs.

    I also read: War and Peace (the charming mustachioed princess dies in childbirth!); Half Baked (one baby dies, one is born at 24 weeks and struggles for life in the NICU); Every Last One (almost all her babies die!) and Jacob de Zoet (some pretty horrifying childbirth/child sacrifice material). Soon after giving birth I read Sue Miller’s The Good Mother, and right now I’m deeply in the midst of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Disturbances in the Field, both of which are heavy lifting.

    I say pooh to Little Earthquakes and all the light fuzzy chicky mom lit. You’re already in deep. You may as well read your way through the worst of it.

  6. Fay Weldon’s She May Not Leave broke me. Eastern European nanny seduces away father in slinky, insidious way with an awful, awful, bleach-my-brain-please scene in last 20 pages.

  7. I read The Road when I was nine months pregnant. BIG mistake. I love Rachel Cusk–glad you mentioned her. Her “A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother” is one I would suggest for after the baby is born.

  8. I would stay from Joy William’s “The Changeling.” It’s a horrifying book, Pearl, a young mother drinking gin and tonic after gin and tonic, after her failed attempt at escape from a sinister island. And her baby, who turns out to be a mother’s greatest nightmare. A scary, scary child. It’s also a remarkable, wonderful book, and I’m really happy that the Fairy Tale Review Press put it back into print.

  9. Agree completely about WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN. I read it in January, way behind the curve, and it blew my mind. Lionel Shriver is so brilliant I don’t care how disturbing the book is. (Although I can’t say I wish I’d been pregnant while reading it…)

  10. I remember being pregnant with my second son and my husband rented the movie Gallipoli (which PJ Harvey sings about in her beautiful, haunting new record about WW1) and I was TRAUMATIZED. But I was not a tough pregnant lady in general- I was super delicate emotionally. Oddly, I don’t remember books being a problem, but I also don’t remember many things. I remember reading Map Of The World (Jane Hamiltion?) when my sons were babies and it didn’t bother me -the dead child part–but it did bother me “politically”. That said, it was deeply engrossing.

  11. I love this post Edan! The other-people-worried-for-you during pregnancy is so true. But really, I could have gotten used to all those pints of ice cream…

    Soon after August was born I read Skippy Dies. I felt worse about the title than any other aspect of the book and it definitely drew some funny looks from people.

    5 weeks left for you and Patrick? How exciting, enjoy them (but only from a sitting down, legs up position with a pint of ice cream in your hand)!

  12. Totally second the Joy Williams comment. Same for State of Grace. She is so, so, so good, though.

  13. Thanks for all these great suggestions–there’s a lot to dig into here..

    Yep, Lauren, now I only have 4 more weeks..!

  15. Pingback: Dog-Eared Books, Paul Giamatti and Gary Shteyngart, Banned Words, and More Literary Links « Fiction

  17. I didn’t read it while pregnant, but I think if I attempted White Oleander while pregnant, there might be dire consequences!

  18. Oh thank you thank you thank you for this! I am due next week, and while I’ve stuck mostly to sci-fi and other lighter fiction throughout my pregnancy, I very much appreciate the spirit in which your article was written.

    In fact this might be my new mantra: “Because I feel as normal as can be expected when you’re growing a human being inside of you, I’ve noticed that other people experience anxiety for me.” So true! And SO much worse this close to my due date… no wonder all I’ve been doing is reading as the big day gets closer! Thank goodness for escapism.

  20. You may also want to stay away from Joanna Kavenna’s “The Birth of Love,” although it’s fantastic. The long description of the beginnings of labor might be a bit much for you.
    And don’t even go near the nonfiction. I read the title “Pushed” while I was pregnant and it got me all worked up–mostly with righteous indignation toward doctors. And, arguably, you need doctors while you’re pregnant, so that’s no time to be feeling crankypants toward them.

  21. I second Doris Lessing’s Fith Child – it should right up there in the list. Also, Chuck Palahniuk’s books must not be fun to read if you’re battling morning sickness…

  22. Midwives, by Chris Bohjalian

    It’s a good book, and I would recommend it to anyone who is NOT pregnant. The night before I went to the hospital to have an induced labor for my 13-day-late firstborn, I read this book. I knew it would be disturbing, and it was, yet I could not put it down.
    It was a very long, tough labor – overseen by my least favorite of the three nurse-midwives whom I had seen throughout the pregnancy. My delivery had a better outcome than the one described in the book, but I still haven’t been able to read it again, even 11 years later.

  23. Pingback: New Links on the Block | Rockabye Baby!

  24. What I Thought I Knew by Alice Eve Cohen. Memoir of an unexpected and traumatic pregnancy with extreme medical complications, the contemplation of late-stage abortion, and the outcome of all this.

  25. I’m coming a bit late to this, but THE HOTTEST DISHES OF THE TARTAR CUISINE is one that you might consider avoiding. I heard a reading of it by the translator, in which the narrator tries several gruesome methods of inducing miscarriage in her simple-minded daughter. (I’d just found out I was pregnant and had to excuse myself to get the nausea under control.)

    Other than that though, I salute the act of the freedom to read whatever you want when you’re pregnant. It’s easy to be superstitious about this stuff (I’m susceptible!), but there’s no reason we shouldn’t have deep literary experiences even while being a bit delicate with our bodies. Thanks for this piece!

  26. I wasn’t pregnant when i read it, but The Obscene Bird of Night is the most horrific book i’ve ever read and i never want to read it again, but i’ll never forget it. Rosemary’s Baby is actually a novel i have at home but haven’t read yet! i’m almost 20 weeks :)

  27. Don’t read The Time travellers Wife. I read it in early pregnancy and there seemed to be endless miscarriages with lots of descriptions of blood

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Lists On Poetry

The Whispered Language of Secrets and Fears: Ten Poems for People Who Hate Poetry

Lists On Poetry
January 5, 2016 | 10 books mentioned 8 7 min read
Novels might bore, and short stories can frustrate, but poetry is the only genre of literature that elicits consistent hate. People hate poetry because it is obscure, elitist, vague, complex, somber, trite, ornate, pretentious, out-of-touch, and dated. William Shakespeare is blamed. Secondary school teachers are blamed. Contemporary poets are blamed. Poet voice is blamed. Tumblr is blamed. Greeting cards are blamed. James Franco is blamed. Perhaps it is the way we talk about poetry that is to blame -- we being those who have already been converted, who read and write and share poetry. Love is a private emotion; it risks withering when shown public light. We who love poetry think it will save the world. Why must it save the world? It should be enough to save a single minute. If a poem pauses someone, that is enough. This list is an olive branch to the poetry skeptics. Prose is great for fiction, essays, and belabored introductions to lists, but poetry has its own place in this world. Poetry is the grand language of ceremony and spectacle, as well as the whispered language of secrets and fears. Many wonderful poems exist, but the following selections will appeal to readers of prose: work that is approachable, funny, smart, but still verse. Take a chance on these 10 poems. 1. “A Perfect Mess” by Mary Karr (Sinners Welcome) “It’s not law but the sprawl / of our separate wills that keeps us all flowing.” Our world is a perfect mess: just when you think things could not get any worse, small miracles right the course for a few important moments. Poetry is a snapshot form, and Karr’s poem captures the feel of the city, the world unraveling in a million directions. The narrator watches the “unprecedented gall” of piano movers “shoving a roped-up baby grand / up Ninth Avenue before a thunderstorm.” Those movers “knew what was coming, / the instrument white lacquered, the sky bulging black / as a bad water balloon and in one pinprick instant / it burst.” They are saved by unlikely heroines. “A Perfect Mess” ends on an ellipsis, because, she says, “You only unplug from [the city], the current never stops ...” 2. “Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion” by Matthew Olzmann (Mezzanines) I might have chosen Olzmann's hilarious and sweet “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem,” but there's something extra special about his Isaac Newton poem. It has been said so often that poetry makes the ordinary extraordinary, and yet that transformation is often a romantic one (think a farmer standing in front of a field moved by wind, or someone looking down at Earth from an airplane). Yet equally appealing to me is how a great poet can make you appreciate stasis and even boredom. “Matthew Olzmann / is an object at rest, and will remain at rest, / reclining on the couch while drinking Guinness / and watching football.” I can't trust a poet without a sense of humor. Olzmann has my trust, so I'm willing to follow his lines everywhere. Next time someone calls you lazy, share this poem and proclaim your leisure art. 3. “Blue Prelude” by Saeed Jones (Prelude to Bruise) If Jones wrote a two-line poem it would still hit me with the power of an epic. “Last night, the ceiling above me / ached with dance.” What brings me back to poetry are those single-word decisions: “ached,” how that one note pulses through the entire line. We've all known the feeling of longing, of being so close to joy and yet so far away, and Jones follows the emotion from that upstairs room to the empty bed of the narrator. There he “dreamed / the record's needle / pointed into my back, spinning / me into no one's song.” 4. “Ode to Browsing the Web” by Marcus Wicker (Maybe the Saddest Thing) “I've been told the internet is / an unholy place — an endless intangible / stumbling ground of false deities / dogma and loneliness.” I'm worried that a poetic traditionalist would make such a claim, but thankfully poetry has embraced the online world. Wicker packs so much material into his lines, modulating speed and pivots with care: “The camera pans to another / pocket of the room where six kids rocking holey / T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls.” The beautiful thing about language is that it makes ugly action sing—in the right poet's hands. This poem is an ode to sitting in front of a “holy streaming screen / of counterculture punks,” blinking the day away “without care for time or density.” 5. “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Lucky Fish) For years I’ve been sharing Nezhukumatathil’s poem “Baked Goods” as an example of a perfect love poem, and “Break-Ups” might be the perfect explanation of how poets must lie. In popular culture, poetry is often presented as the purgation of unfiltered feelings -- a genre of writing where writers lose all self-control and bleed on the page. Catharsis without craft. Poetry is actually a space for play. If every love in Nezhukumatathil's poems were real, “Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many / slices of cake?” There would be husbands making a “great meal,” one could change the baby while another reads the newspaper, “and every single / one of them wonders what time I am coming home.” 6. “That's Incredible!” by Michael Robbins (The Second Sex) When I read a poem, I expect a poet to surprise, shock, or confuse me with language. If you hate poetry, than you might have read poets who only confuse -- or who don't speak to your particular experience or anxieties in life. I have called Robbins “the most provocative Christian poet in America” with appreciation, but he is truly one of the most inventive writers working. For the uninitiated, it might take a Robbins poem or two before you get his style, but once it clicks, you feel as if you're part of a very smart inside literary joke. Robbins is like a poetic machine who takes the entirety of popular culture, history, politics, music, and God, and then remixes them into poems with beats worthy of recording. 7. “Double Dutch” by Gregory Pardlo (Digest) Often people who hate poetry hate the poems that served as their introduction to the form. Inevitably that poetry is “older:” formally staid, metered verse that feels antiquated. Of course older poetry is beautiful, the foundation of modern verse, but to the new eye, older poetry feels like a series of abstractions without contemporary reference. Say what you will about our embrace of free verse, but many contemporary poets mix detail and sound to create magic. Pardlo, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, hails from the Garden State, and I haven’t found a better contemporary poet to capture the songs of my home state’s peculiar mix of asphalt and grass. Give “Double Dutch” to someone who has never studied poetry, but has spent hours on the blacktop like those girls “shadowing each other, / sparring across the slack cord / casting parabolas in the air.” Watch them nod when they recognize the truth of his lines: “she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish / as she flutter-floats into motion / like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos / thumbed alive.” Watch them smile at how a poet renews youth: “She makes jewelry of herself and garlands / the ground with shadows.” 8. “Before” by Ada Limón (Bright Dead Things) If we share song lyrics to ease the pain of loss and distance, than why not great poetry? Limón’s short lines in “Before” arrive as a sequence of phrases and breaths. In poetry, so often honesty has become another word for brutality; a poet is only authentic if she is raw. Limón’s authenticity is on another level; it is like hearing the confession of a friend. She is able to capture the particular grief of separation experienced during youth. “Before the road / between us, there was the road / beneath us, and I was just / big enough not to let go.” A great poem brings us back to our own tenuous moments, to our own “hazardous bliss.” 9. “Intersection” by Kerrin McCadden (Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes) McCadden, a fellow high school English teacher, knows how to offer poetry to a skeptical audience. There is an accepted narrative structure to prose. Sentences scaffold paragraphs, and paragraphs are the links for pages. Poetry is somewhere between a dream and a scream. “Intersection” moves in a surreal manner; first, there is that tedious interaction at the four-way stop. Then, love: “Your hands cup the wheel / at ten o'clock and two, then float / past my knee and only sometimes land.” How quickly, and yet how smoothly, McCadden moves us. If this were prose, we would ask: is this really happening? In poetry, we ask: why does this not happen more? 10. “Nothing Is Haunted” by Sandy Longhorn (The Alchemy of My Mortal Form) In many great poems, there is a space of absence. It might be a chasm or a pinhole, but it is a space of uncertainty, and it must not be so big as to swallow the rest of the poem. “Nothing is Haunted” is that type of poem. The first lines are surprising enough to invite us in: is it true that “Nothing is haunted / in quite the way small Midwestern farms / are haunted”? Longhorn convinces us. The source are these lithe girls who “lie awake through summer's / liquid heat and listen to the rattling window screens.” We can hear the panting between the lines; this is horror in verse. “The girls throw off / their bleached sheets and untangle their legs.” Hot and uncomfortable, they want to run, but instead “huddle” while “quivering in one weak circle of light.” Are these girls or ghosts? Longhorn carries that absence, that confusion, on to the final lines, and then hands it off to us, to you. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Lists On Poetry
| 10 books mentioned 8 7 min read
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Lists Notable Articles

A Year in Reading: New Yorker Fiction 2005

Lists Notable Articles
January 4, 2006 | 10 books mentioned 7 12 min read
My year in reading involved a couple dozen or so books, most of which I wrote about here, but it also involved, to a large extent, my favorite magazine, the New Yorker. I spent three or four out of every seven days this year reading that magazine. So, for my "Year in Reading" post, I thought I'd revisit all the time I spent reading the New Yorker this year, and in particular, the fiction. It turns out that nearly every one of the 52 stories that the New Yorker published this year is available online. I thought it might be fun to briefly revisit each story. It ended up taking quite a while, but it was rewarding to go back through all the stories. What you'll find below is more an exercise in listing and linking than any real attempt at summary, but hopefully some folks will enjoy having links to all of this year's stories on one page. I also wanted to highlight a couple of blogs that did a great job of reacting to New Yorker fiction this year - you'll find many links to them below - Both "Grendel" at Earthgoat and "SD Byrd" at Short Story Craft put together quality critiques of these stories. Now, without further ado, on to the fiction:January 3, "I am a Novelist" (not available online) by Ryu Murakami: This story by the other Murakami is about a famous novelist who is being impersonated by a man who frequents a "club" of the type often described in Japanese stories. The impostor runs up a huge bar tab and gets one of the hostesses pregnant. Murakami is best-known for his novel, Coin Locker Babies. Links: I Read a Short Story TodayJanuary 10, "Reading Lessons" by Edwidge Danticat: A Haitian immigrant elementary school teacher, a resident of Miami's Little Haiti, is asked by her boss - and lover, "Principal Boyfriend" - to tutor the illiterate mothers of two of her students. In 2004, Danticat received much praise for her novel, The Dew Breaker and this year she put out a young adult novel called Anacaona, Golden Flower.January 17, "The Juniper Tree" by Lorrie Moore: I really had to jog my memory to remember this one. It starts out with a woman who puts off visiting her dying friend Robin in the hospital. She plans to go in the morning but Robin has already died. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital is Moore's most recent collection. Links: Tingle Alley, Elegant VariationJanuary 24 & 31,"Ice" by Thomas McGuane: This story was more memorable. A young protagonist with a paper route is intimidated by a drum major. To overcome his fears he skates toward Canada on frozen Lake Erie as far as he dares. Presumably, this story will appear in McGuane's upcoming collection, Gallatin Canyon. Links: I Read A Short Story TodayFebruary 7, "The Roads of Home" by John Updike: The middle-aged absentee owner of his family's Pennsylvania farm, David Kern returns to his childhood home after a long absence, feeling guilty and a little disoriented. A standard Updike story. Updike has a new book coming out this year called Terrorist. Links: This story has inspired a field trip sponsored by The Alton Chronicles - AKA The John Updike Reality Project.February 14 & 21, "Up North" by Charles D'Ambrosio: City guy visits the inlaws for Thanksgiving at their hunting lodge. He goes hunting with the family men and finds out about some skeletons in the closet. I remember liking this story. I'm guessing this story will appear in D'Ambrosio's new collection, The Dead Fish Museum.February 28,"The Conductor" by Aleksandar Hemon: The narrator and Dedo, two Bosnian poets, are reunited in America after the war. This memorable story contrasts the hardness of their Bosnian experience with their new lives on the American academic circuit. Touching and funny. Hemon's written a novel, Nowhere Man, and a collection of stories, The Question of Bruno. Links: 3quarksdailyMarch 7, "The Gorge" by Umberto Eco: Italian boy and anarchist help Cassocks escape from Germans in war-torn Italy. Pretty straight-forward for a story by Eco, it turns out this piece was culled from his then-forthcoming novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Links: Conversational Reading, A Roguish Chrestomathy, Unhappy with the New Yorker's editing: The LaboratoriumMarch 14, "Della" by Anne Enright: I'd completely forgotten this story. It made no impression at all, but upon rereading I see that it's a sad story about two old folks living next door to each other, one worrying the other is dead, and beneath its somber surface, there's a little humor to it. Enright's most recent book is The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.March 21, "Men of Ireland" by William Trevor: I've never been a big fan of Trevor, his stories are a little too gray for my taste, but it can't be denied that he's a great storyteller. In this one a destitute man accuses his childhood priest of long ago improprieties. Though we can't know the truth for sure, somehow, in this telling, both seem guilty. Trevor's most recent collection is A Bit on the Side. Links: James Tata.March 28, "A Secret Station" by David Gates: A classic New Yorker story: An old man ruminates on his wasted life - multiple marriages and infidelities, dabbling in prescription drugs to dull the pain. But Gates paints the characters well and this is a good read. Gates is best known for his novel Preston Falls. Links: shes-krafty.com.April 4, "Solace" by Donald Antrim: I've always enjoyed Antrim's stories. This one is sort of a romantic comedy about two disfunctional people who, due to difficult housing arrangements, must conduct their relationship only in borrowed apartments. Antrim's memoir, The Afterlife, pieces of which have appeared in the New Yorker, will be published in May.April 11, "Mallam Sile" by Mohammed Naseehu Ali: Another good story, especially if you like exotic locales. This one is about the original 40-year-old virgin, a tea seller in Ghana. It is included in Ali's recent collection, The Prophet of Zongo Street. Links: James Tata.April 18, "The Orlov-Sokolovs" by Ludmila Ulitskaya: I've had the impression for a while now that the New Yorker publishes a lot of stories by Russians, but perhaps it just seems this way because they loom so large on the page. This story is about a young couple that falls prey to Soviet bureaucracy. The story appears in Ulitskaya's collection Sonechka.April 25, the only issue of the year with no fiction. Instead, a remembrance of Saul Bellow by Philip Roth.May 2, "Where I'm Likely to Find It" by Haruki Murakami: The first of three Murakami stories that appeared in the New Yorker (Yes, he does get in there a lot.) In this one, we have a typically-Murakami detached narrator who investigates missing people, but, this being Murakami, it's not a typical mystery story. Murakami has a book coming out this year called Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Links: Earthgoat.May 9, "Along the Highways" by Nick Arvin: A sad fellow named Graham follows his brother's widow and some guy named Doug as they drive out of Detroit for a weekend getaway. Graham does this out of jealousy and a misplaced protective instinct. It does not end well for him. Arvin's debut novel, Articles of War, came out in 2005. Links: Earthgoat.May 16, "The Room" by William Trevor: The second of three Trevor stories in the New Yorker this year (Yes, he gets in there a lot, too.) Another gray story, but, of course, well-crafted. It's about a woman who covered for her murderer husband and is now admitting everything to her the man she's cheating on the murderer with. It sounds more thriller-like than it is. Links: Earthgoat.May 23, "Two's Company" by Jonathan Franzen: Franzen goes Hollywood in this tight little story about a screenwriting couple that battles over a script that celebrates monogamy. There's no Franzen fiction in the pipeline that I'm aware of, so if you haven't read it already, ignore the hype and read The Corrections. It's that good. Links: James Tata.May 30, "The Russian Riviera" by David Bezmozgis: This is a great story. One that I still remember well more than six months after I read it. There's something about boxers. It seems they're always getting suckered when all they want is a shot at the big time, like in a favorite movie of mine, On the Waterfront. Bezmozgis received much praise for his debut collection, Natasha. Links: Earthgoat.June 6 "A Mouthful of Cut Glass" by Tessa Hadley: Normally, I dislike Hadley's stories, but this one stands out as better than the others I've read. It's about being young and in love and the tendency that those so afflicted have to romanticize their partners. No false notes in this story. Hadley's most recent book is Everything Will Be All Right. Links: Simply Wait, Earthgoat.June 13 & 20. Then came the Debut Fiction issue in which three stories appeared, "An Ex-Mas Feast" by Uwem Akpan, "The Laser Age" by Justin Tussing and "Haunting Olivia" by Karen Russell. I discussed the issue here. My favorite was the Akpan for its exotic setting. I was also impressed to learn that Russell was just 23. Of the three, only Tussing has a book on the way, The Best People in the World.June 27, "The Blow" by J.M. Coetzee (not available online): This novel excerpt (from Slow Man) is about an elderly amputee who, after at first resenting his caretaker, allows himself to be fatherly to her son. Good, but too long. I wish the New Yorker would do away with these novel excerpts. They're not really short stories. Links: Conversational Reading, Earthgoat.July 4, "Ashes" by Cristina Henriquez: This story is set in Panama City and it's about a young woman whose mother dies. Her family is already in tatters so it's up to her to try to keep everything together. Henriquez's debut collection, Come Together, Fall Apart comes out this year. Links: Simply Wait.July 11 & 18, "Long-Distance Client" by Allegra Goodman: This, I think, was my favorite story in the New Yorker this year. In it, Mel, the oldest employee at a tech start-up, bewildered by his coworkers, finds himself misaligned and in severe pain. He goes to an odd sort of chiropractor, Bobby, who, when not giving Mel the runaround, is able to straighten him out. But Bobby claims to have a client that he treats over the phone, and the truth behind Bobby's claim becomes the quirky question at the heart of this story. Goodman has a new novel coming out soon, Intuition. Links: Earthgoat.July 25, "Awaiting Orders" by Tobias Wolff: The masterful Wolff puts together a brief story that deftly circles the topic of gays in the military. It's funny that now that we're at war, the once popular gays in the military controversy is old, old news, and, somehow, without being obvious, Wolff manages to highlight that irony. Wolff's most recent book is Old School. Links: Earthgoat.August 1, "Commcomm" by George Saunders: There's no one writing like George Saunders. "Commcomm" is too weird to briefly summarize, but in typical Saunders fashion, he places us in an alternate and oddly terrifying universe where people talk like zombies yet somehow remind us of people we interact with every day. "Commcomm" includes an element I'd never seen before in a Saunders story: ghosts. Saunders' new collection, In Persuasion Nation will come out this summer. Links: standBy Bert (featuring an appearance by Saunders in the comments), Earthgoat.August 8 & 15, "Gomez Palacio" by Roberto Bolano (Not available online): A somewhat oblique story, this one is about a young man teaching in Gomez Palacio. Both he and the director of the school are poets and they're a little odd. They go for a long drive together. That's about all that happens. A new book by Bolano is coming out this year: The Last Evenings on Earth. Links: Earthgoat.August 22, "Thicker Than Water" by Gina Ochsner: This story is about a Latvian girl who lives across the street from a family of Jews. Latvia being what it is I suppose, her parents are suspicious of these people, but she is fascinated by them. In the end, there is an ill-fated chess tournament. Ochsner's most recent book is People I Wanted to Be. Links: Earthgoat. August 29, "The View from Castle Rock" by Alice Munro: An unusual setting for a Munroe story - a ship heading for Canada in 1818. I like Munroe's stories generally and this one is no exception, though the drama at the center of this long story - a young man who meets a well off father and daughter who tantalizingly offer to lift him from his poorer circumstances so that he must choose between his family and the promise of a better life - it's a bit trite. Munro's most recent collection is Runaway. Links: literarylover, mike.whybark.com, Earthgoat.September 5, "Club Des Amis" by Tony D'Souza: Mr. Wu, who lies at the center of this story, is a Chinese man in Africa. The narrator is a Western aid worker, and he relates how Wu's son "went native" and died in the bush and now Wu is trying to be a distant benefactor to the son his son had with a native woman. I'm a fan of exotic locales, so I liked this one. This story appears to be an excerpt from D'Souza's forthcoming novel, Whiteman.September 12, "Coping Stones" by Ann Beattie: A very good story that asks how well do we really know the people we think we know. A widower, Dr. Cahill, rents a house on his property to a young man, Matt, who he treats as a son, but one day the authorities come looking for Matt. Beattie's most recent collection of stories is Follies.September 19, "Cowboy" by Thomas McGuane: This story is about An old cowboy who hires a young cowboy to work with him. Both exist under the watchful eye of the old cowboy's sister, who eventually dies. I think this story is about friendship, really, one that grows slowly over many years. This story will appear in McGuane's collection, Gallatin Canyon. Links: Literarylover.September 26, "The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day" by Haruki Murakami: What if you knew in advance that you would only love three women (or men) in your life? Would you worry, with each new person you met, whether he or she was one of three. This is Junpei's problem and it makes relationships pretty tough for him. Links: shake it off.October 3, "Companion" by Sana Krasikov: I enjoyed this story. Ilona, thrice divorced we quickly learn, is living with Earl, a man much her senior, not because she is "with" him but because she is in financial straits and he has offered her a room. This makes pursuing her love life difficult and all of her friends somewhat snidely assume Ilona and Earl are together. Earl's family meanwhile is quite suspicious of her. I like the desperation in this story. A sample description: "The air was stale with the yeasty scent of bread."October 10, "Early Music" by Jeffrey Eugenides: Another story of desperation. Rodney just wants to play "early music" on his clavichord, but he and his wife Rebecca are in serious debt. She is trying to make ends meet with her ridiculous invention, Mice 'n' Warm. His precious clavichord on the verge of being repossessed, Rodney watches his life's dream slipping away. Eugenides' most recent book is Middlesex.October 17, "Path Lights" by Tom Drury: A bottle falls out of the sky - no, it's not The Gods Must Be Crazy - and almost hits Bobby. He becomes obsessed with this bottle, Blind Street Ale, and eventually tracks down the bottle-thrower, but it's awkward. This story may be an excerpt from Drury's forthcoming novel, Driftless Area. Links: Short Story Craft.October 24, "Summer Crossing" by Truman Capote (not available online): This is an excerpt from a long-lost, recently found Capote novel. The story is well-crafted, if a bit formulaic. Rich girl gets mixed up with tough guy who she thinks she can "save." You can tell that Capote wrote this when he was young - he was only 19 - but still, his talent is evident. Links: Earthgoat.October 31, "The Children" by William Trevor: Another Trevor story, the final one of the year, and he uses the same palate we're used to, the scrubby Irish countryside. Young Connie and her father Robert suffer the death of a mother and wife and when he decides to marry the mother of Connie's friend, we think all might be well, but as Robert new wife Theresa discovers, "nothing was as tidy as she'd imagined."November 7, "God of War" by Marisa Silver: A daring choice of main character, the troubled child Ares, is at the heart of this story. Set near the desolate Salton Sea, this story covers Ares' relationship with his brother Malcolm, whose inability to speak Ares may have caused, thus dooming them both. Silver's most recent book is No Direction Home. Links: Wuff.November 14, "The Best Year of My Life" by Paul Theroux: A young man and woman are in love but nonetheless, she is pregnant with his baby. To escape scrutiny (the story is set in an earlier time), they hide out in Puerto Rico, where they are miserable, but somehow find the experience heartening. If there's anything I enjoy as much as stories with exotic locales, it's stories in which the protagonists travel. Theroux's most recent book is Blinding Light. Links: Short Story CraftNovember 21, "The Year of Spaghetti" by Haruki Murakami: One of the weakest stories to appear in the New Yorker this year. Murakami brings us a guy who eats a lot of spaghetti, then a girl calls looking for an old friend of his, the narrator demurs and returns to cooking spaghetti. That's about the extent of it. Murakami has a book coming out this year called Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. Links: Earthgoat, Short Story Craft.November 28, "Love and Obstacles" by Aleksandar Hemon: I loved this story; exotic locale,traveling, etc. An adolescent Croatian (I think) narrator is sent by his family to buy a freezer in Slovenia. Desperate for adventure, he treats this errand as though he were a wandering poet, but he turns out to be more bumbling than anything else. Funny and poignant. Hemon's written a novel, Nowhere Man, and a collection of stories, The Question of Bruno. Links: Short Story Craft, The Glory of Carniola.December 5, "Wenlock Edge" by Alice Munro: This was one of my favorite stories of the year. It starts out very predictably before taking a deliciously strange turn. I won't ruin it for you, but basically our narrator gets thrown in with an oddball roommate in college, and this roommate lures her into some odd situations. Munro's most recent collection is Runaway. Links: Short Story Craft.December 12, "La Conchita" by T.C. Boyle: Boyle, a California resident, loves to make use of his home state's frequent natural disasters in his fiction. In this story, we're dealing with mudslides, which impede the route of the narrator who is delivering a kidney for transplantation. He is on a journey to save a life but he stops on the way to try to save another. Boyle has a book coming out this year called Talk Talk.December 19, "Twenty Grand" by Rebecca Curtis: A pretty good story. A harried young mother is forced to give away an old coin - a family heirloom - at a toll booth, only later discovering the coin's real value. The story is told from the perspective of the young daughter. Links: Short Story CraftDecember 26 & January 2, The year ended with the International Fiction Issue. It contains five stories. In lieu of descriptions, I'll rank them in order of my favorite to least favorite and provide links when available. "Last Evenings on Earth" by Roberto Bolano, "The Albanian Writers' Union as Mirrored by a Woman" by Ismail Kadare, "Beauty is a Fate Better Than Death" by Tahar Ben Jelloun, "Pregnancy Diary" by Yoko Ogawa, "The Word" by Vladimir Nabokov. Links: Literary Saloon.If you want to keep up with the fiction next year, you can always subscribe.
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