Moving house has precluded much of any writing lately. So much of my idle thinking has been dedicated to shades of pink, strategies for negotiating with furniture sellers, and half-questions all leading back to how does one build a life in a new place? The books are in boxes and I’m not sure where they’ll go. I started working at the library, again. I’m reading Howards End on a Godforsaken Kindle.
While my thoughts are all strewn about and the list of errands runs on, I’ve treated my reading like a buoy. No need for big insight or hanging onto every word. I don’t even need to write about it if I don’t want to. Do you know when you move and, even though the kitchen’s unpacked, you keep making excuses not to cook? I suppose I haven’t landed on how the writing, like the cooking, will fit into the life I’m making here. In the spirit of getting back to it, though, I’m going to start by telling you what it is I’ve been reading.
Somehow the idea that I’d write a mystery novel got into my head. I’m not a particular reader of mysteries. The only mystery novels I can recall reading until very recently are from the Nancy Drew series. And Bleak House. Before rereading these books, which I might well do, I picked up Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. The latter begins like so:
“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.”
I feel the vastness between these twenties and the twenties within which Maltese Falcon was written in the strangeness of its language. I’m not sure the novel has hooked me. The problem may be that I don’t buy the protagonist’s supposed sex appeal. I do like imagining San Francisco, and the vague nostalgia of its street names.
I like mysteries because they put me in a certain apprehensive mood. Nancy Drew was perfect: atmospheric and relatively low-stakes. The familiar formulas worked every time.
I told Patrick that I wanted to watch “the best mystery movie ever made.” When he asked which film I was talking about, I couldn’t answer. We went to ChatGPT, whose guidance was characteristically mild and uninspired. I wanted something like Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), which fits the thoughtful, suspenseful, and atmospheric bill. It also plays to my pretensions as a burgeoning Francophile. One thing I liked about Agatha Christie was her running assumption that I'm capable of reading in French.
I thought about Caché again when deciding where to install bookshelves in our new home. I watched it years ago but could recall the film’s interiors with some immediacy. The greater part of the fictional couple’s living space is overtaken by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They’re right there when they watch TV, dine, fight, entertain... In this house, we read. In this house, we act like readers.
I made a full revolution: first shrinking from placing the books front-and-center, in our living room, then eventually landing back at that very conclusion. As I’ve written about in previous iterations of this newsletter, my books are sentimental objects fraught with memories and wishes—some half-baked, others realized. Naturally, I want to live around them.
On break at the library, I rented a copy of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. What can I say about this book? For one thing, I wish I would have read it sooner. I wish I could hand it back to the version of myself lashing out in fresh grief. Or maybe it wouldn't have landed back then. I might've compared my own grief to Didion's and ended up somewhere else.
writes about the cult of Didion and the texture of her own love for the writer. In reading the essay, I recognized my reflexive turn away from those writers—and artists more generally—who imprinted upon me as a teenager and very young adult. (There are songs, good songs, that I feel embarrassed when I listen to now.) Somehow, in order to emerge as someone "older and wiser," it feels necessary to reject the art you loved keenly and instinctually as a young person. Perhaps this is why I haven't read Didion in years.Yesterday, I downed about half of Magical Thinking and cried some. Then I saw my Zoom therapist and cried a lot more. She said, "You're grieving." When I walked downstairs, all puffy-faced and bleary-eyed, one of our new neighbors was standing in the living room. Later Patrick and I laughed about my dramatic, or pathetic, emergence.
Danler describes the flurry of fascination with Didion’s blowout estate sale in Hudson, NY, which I considered attending after learning about it through a young New Yorker on Tik Tok. She writes,
“Who would buy a stack of books by [Didion’s] ‘favorite’ writers? What secrets did they expect to glean from the underlining and highlighting, from the margins of her life? I didn’t believe the person buying those books was going to read Graham Greene or Norman Mailer . . . I realized that I didn’t think the person who bid at the auction was even going to really read Joan Didion.”
Her irritation, Danler elaborates, stems from the sense that so much of Didion’s legacy is cosmetic: “She—not her words, but more her face—has become a commodity, traded, used to signal what kind of woman/reader/writer/Californian you are.” Here I’ll admit that I saw the photos of Didion’s Upper East Side apartment when it was put up for sale. I saw the blue trim and the white walls, and I decided to paint the ceilings a shade of blue that I’ve been chasing ever since.
Finally, Howards End on the Kindle. I bought a Kindle for a very good and professional reason, and subsequently gained access to a giant Google Drive file of downloadable texts. One of them was E.M. Forster’s Howards End, and I downloaded it like might as well. I didn’t expect to love it like I do. It’s a gorgeous novel and so much about moving house. It’s also about the complicated pretense of intellectualism as it butts up against money and class. It’s about the sad and strange passage of time and the perplexity of loving men.
Lately I decided that the word I’d use to describe my taste in literature is “obvious.” In any case, I’m certainly one of those who believes that books come across our desks, or Kindle screens, when the time is right.
I’m curious to know what everyone’s reading and, additionally, what the best mystery movie ever made is. Please also drop your recommendations for brilliant novels that are incidentally mysterious. Thanks for reading, and be well.