Wednesday Reading Meme

[osprey_archer]

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a quiet yet absorbing SF novel about a little coffee shop in an alley in Tokyo where one of the seats can transport a patron through time. But there are rules: nothing the time traveler does will change the present; once they’re in the past, they must stay in the seat; and they have to finish their visit before their coffee grows cold, or they will remain in the seat as a ghost.

If the book had placed more weight on that last rule it could have turned toward horror, but the author instead focuses on the intimate, emotional aspects of these journeys. Although time travelers can’t change anything that happened - if someone died, they will stay dead - their trips through time can change their attitude toward what has happened and their behavior in the future.

I also read Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, in which May argues that our current cultural expectation (May is writing from England, but this is true in America too; possibly this is an Anglophone thing?) that constant happiness is possible is not only false but fundamentally damaging, because it makes people feel alone and broken when they meet with life’s inevitable sadnesses, when really what they are going through is as inevitable as the winter in temperate climes.

You will be unsurprised to hear that I agree with this thesis whole-heartedly. I thought the book would have been improved if May cut down on the excursions into memoir by about two-thirds, though. This is my perennial complaint about modern nonfiction. If the book isn’t actually meant to be a memoir, then adding memoir very rarely adds anything.

Here is a quote that I liked, though, from one of the non-memoir portions, when May muses about the widespread human tendency to project the qualities about ourselves that we like least onto wolves: “In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again.”

What I’m Reading Now

“Why didn’t anyone tell me about Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow?” I was going to complain, but actually I am glad no one did, as I think I’m reading this book at exactly the right time. It’s a slow-moving (yet absorbing) book about a Russian count whom a Bolshevik court sentences to life imprisonment in the Metropol Hotel, and how he finds meaning and interest in his life within those confines. A good read for pandemic times, when many of us are finding ourselves living (at least for the moment) more confined lives than we anticipated.

I also started reading Louisa May Alcott’s Work, because it was in the same collection as Diana and Persis and I did not realize that the collection only included the first six chapters, plus the concluding chapter. Why! Why would you print only a part of the book like that? Fortunately ebooks exist, but I cannot IMAGINE how frustrating it would be to have read this in the pre-ebook days of 1988, when the collection was published, and discover that there are THIRTEEN CHAPTERS MISSING.

Last but not least, I’m continuing on in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale. Allan Armadale (1) has just become fast friends with a mysterious stranger who (as Collins gleefully points out) MIGHT be Allan Armadale (2).Would Collins really have the face to lampshade the possibility if the mysterious stranger really IS Allan Armadale (2)? MAYBE. I certainly wouldn’t put it past him.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’m finally getting Elizabeth Wein’s The Enigma Game!!!! And Micah Nemerever’s These Violent Delights will be arriving around the same time. WHAT DO. I feel the library could have staggered the book’s arrival more effectively…

Comments

[isis]

Haha, yes, A Gentleman in Moscow is excellent pandemic reading. I just read it myself this past September.

[osprey_archer]

It really is so perfect. We are all Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov right now.

[troisoiseaux]

I read A Gentleman in Moscow a few years ago, but it sounds like a good time for a re-read.

[osprey_archer]

It's SUCH a pandemic mood. Despite being about not a pandemic at all! Which makes it easier to read during pandemic times, really.

[asakiyume]

Wow, both Before the Coffee Gets Cold and A Gentleman in Moscow sound fascinating! How did you come across the former? I have to add that to my to-read list. The latter also sounds really cool, but I think maybe I'll let myself experience it through your review rather than actually reading it myself. Is it a novel or nonfiction?

I agree with you about cutting down on memoir in nonfiction; we've talked about that. It sounds cruel, but really, if I'm interested in X topic, then that's what I want to read about, not about the writer's feelings and encounters with X, unless they're somehow material to the topic, and really the materiality drops MARKEDLY when the writer starts talking about their divorce and whatever (unless the topic is divorces, I guess). Relatedly, I feel a little bit that way about knowing personal stuff about people whose fiction I read. It's different if I already knew the person personally (as with you, say!), but if I know *nothing* about the person and have enjoyed their writing, sometimes it just feels strange to learn about them as a person. It kind of adds freight to the reading experience that I don't particularly want.

[osprey_archer]

I heard about Before the Coffee Gets Cold on the book blog Modern Mrs. Darcy. My tastes don't always align with the blogger's (thank God, or the site would utterly explode my TBR!), but in a way that makes the blog more useful to me, because I hear about books that would otherwise remain outside my bailiwick.

A Gentleman in Moscow is fiction. (I nearly went on, but on second thought I'll save those further comments for next week's Wednesday Reading Meme.)

The funny thing is that I LOVE memoirs, provided that I'm expecting the book to be a memoir. You'd think that would make me more forgiving when excess memoir crops up in nonfiction that is supposedly about North Korean film history or whatever, but in fact no. Of course, if you pick up a memoir, you have control over what type it is: if you pick up a divorce memoir, you know what you're getting into, it's not going to blindside you like picking up that North Korean film history book and, oh, okay, I guess we're going to talk about the author's failing marriage for ten pages now...

Also, writing about oneself actually seems to be a tricky skill. You'd think it would be a piece of cake - the definition of writing what you know! - but people are often so close to the topic, they don't seem to realize that readers will not find the author's failing marriage intrinsically interesting.

[asakiyume]

it's not going to blindside you like picking up that North Korean film history book and, oh, okay, I guess we're going to talk about the author's failing marriage for ten pages now... 😂

"What did you learn about North Korean film from that book?"

"Not sure, but I *did* learn that snooping through someone's texts is bad for building trust but good for revealing secret liaisons"

[anna_wing]

I have been very irritated several times when an interesting book about something or other keeps dipping into the writer's deep, emotional, nay almost spiritual response to the something or the other, their past emotional traumas, their search for themselves etc. Travel books are particularly prone to this.

[osprey_archer]

There's often an expectation in travel books for at least a little memoir, and a lot of people clearly see that door cracked open and are like... clearly time to talk about my divorce! While the reader is like OH MY GOD I am here to read about PARIS why are we talking divorce all of a sudden. A divorce that took place in Idaho, no less!

[holyschist]

our current cultural expectation...that constant happiness is possible is not only false but fundamentally damaging, because it makes people feel alone and broken when they meet with life’s inevitable sadnesses, when really what they are going through is as inevitable as the winter in temperate climes.

This is not really what gets to me, I think - I find happiness in the small sense pretty easy - a cat, a cup of tea, a nice plant. And that kind of happiness can coexist with periods of sadness and illness and frustration and even depression.

It's the constant pressure to be "productive" to justify my existence that makes me feel like a broken failure when I inevitably do need to slow down and rest (it looks like she addresses "workaholic culture" in the book as well?). (And the actual biological effects of SAD definitely play a role in winter - is it "normal" to want to sleep all day and stay up all night? I dunno, but it's not something society allows me to embrace even as a freelancer, and I'm not sure embracing it would actually be good for me - certainly not for my vitamin D levels.)

I'm always a bit hesitant about anything that sounds like "the reason you're miserable is because you want to be happy too much, and if you just accepted your unhappiness you wouldn't be depressed (still unhappy, but that's fine, because unhappiness is normal)" - like, I've never really felt like I was reaching for an unrealistic idea of ~constant happiness~, just that it would be nice to not be miserable and stressed and precarious and I want to be able to function as an adult in society and hold down a job and feed myself regularly and actually go to the doctor, and some of that is brain chemistry and some of that is absolutely a function of the capitalist workaholic society we live in, but hygge is a personal coping mechanism (one that I embrace!), not an actual fix for the broken system that's making so many of us miserable. It's like "have you tried meditating your way into mindful acceptance of your role as a cog in the capitalist machine?" personal approaches to coping with systemic problems sold as fixes when they're not.

I think often the takeaway I get from this kind of thesis is often "you're broken because you medicate your depression in order to function instead of just accepting that you'll always be miserable and nonfunctional." Which may not be what they mean, but there is already so much stigma around depression and especially around medication for it that I'm probably a bit hypersensitive (if I had a dollar for everyone who's told me I "don't need meds" because they thought I seemed "fine" before, when I was hanging on by my fingernails and nearly crashing and burning out of a master's program...) - but it does make me wonder if people realize that chronic/seasonal depression and event-induced grief/depression that passes in time are very different things that require different approaches.

(Also, sometimes the lifestyle/hygge approach to coping feels a bit like repackaged productivity narrative to me, only instead of work output it's like, homemade bread output. And I'm just so tired all the time, and tired of being tired, and this is me at probably the most functional I've been since I was a kid.)

...sorry about semi-related essay sparked by a book I've never read.

[osprey_archer]

I think her point is sort of orthogonal to that - it's not that if we accepted sad/unproductive periods in our lives as normal and inevitable, those periods would no longer be miserable, but that current cultural expectations create an extra, added source of misery because many people believe (often more or less subconsciously) that misery is a moral failing (especially if it's accompanied by unproductivity, but even if it isn't) and therefore feel guilty for feeling miserable... which just makes them more miserable... which makes them feel guiltier... and so on and so forth.

[holyschist]

Belatedly, hmm, could be. I know I do have a kneejerk reaction to Intense Positive Thinking that tries to paint everything as rosy gratitude and brush aside that things can be shitty and hard, and that kneejerk reaction is not "yes! I should think more positively!" I can see how that would feed into a bad cycle.

(As it turned out, my constant feeling of exhausted burned out misery was untreated ADHD. So there's that.)