What I'm Reading

Lev Grossman and Paul Murray

This is What I’m Reading on Letter from Berlin, where I share thoughts on books that I’ve read and loved recently, along with other things I’m reading. The book links are affiliate. Thank you for your support.

Last week was the kind of week that had me crawling to the finish line. Two out of four of us were home sick and even though I was not one of the afflicted—for now, touch wood, ptoo ptoo—I was the caretaker. It made me feel sort of resentful and frantic, especially since it was only the fourth week back at school and I haven’t been sleeping well and I found it challenging to tap into any reserves to make the best of things. On Friday, when the fourth member of our family complained of a scratchy throat, I nearly shrieked in protest.

During weeks like that, the only thing that really makes me feel calm is reading. This time, I read Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword, bought on a sultry evening on the Upper West Side in July, just a few hours before I got soaked in an astonishing night storm, clutching my shopping bag to my body as I ran through the rain, hoping the book would be spared. As you know, this was the year that I reread The Dark is Rising series. Was that in the back of my head when I picked up The Bright Sword? Perhaps, subliminally. Maybe it was fairy magic.

In The Bright Sword, Grossman imagines what happens to Arthur’s Britain in the immediate aftermath of his death. Well, that is the initial premise. The book is almost 700 pages long and a lot of ground is covered. We see all the characters we think we know—Guinevere and Merlin and Lancelot and Morgan Le Fay and, of course, Arthur, in flashbacks, to name just a few—and many more, like Mordred and Bedivere and Gawain and Kay and Dinadan and Dagonet and Nimue, Merlin’s apprentice. Some of those names will be familiar to you, others won’t, but none of that matters: Grossman has breathed electric new life into all of these people and crafted a narrative that feels both ancient and contemporary, both utterly magical and crushingly sober. It is an awesome feat.

The main character, if you can call him that, isn’t actually Arthur, who hovers in a liminal space on Avalon for most of the story, but rather Collum of Mull, a young man escaping a violent upbringing and desperate to find refuge as a Knight of the Round Table. He is able to slip into that role in the chaos and confusion that ensues after Arthur dies. But Grossman understands that a single mortal soul cannot be our only guide through this multifaceted and far-reaching terrain and so he splices stories of the lesser-known knights in between Collum’s adventures, infusing them with glorious humanity, treacherous secrets and motivations that will ring true for any contemporary reader.

But perhaps Grossman’s biggest feat is the new understanding he delivers of Merlin’s twisted and fearsome power, Nimue’s apprenticeship and later rebellion against him, and the ferocity with which the magical world battles the celestial world, while the helpless humans caught between them are nothing more than cotton puffs in the wind. There are so many delicious details and scenes in The Bright Sword that will stay with me for a long time.

But the book that I really want to tell you about, the one I loved so much that I have started and stopped at least four drafts of this newsletter, the book that I haven’t stopped thinking about or raving about, the book that moved me the most this year was Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, which I read earlier this summer. I picked it up on a whim, after reading the first page in a bookshop one afternoon after work.

The book opens on a well-to-do Irish family struggling to stay afloat in the aftermath of the Irish economic crash of the late aughts. But almost nothing in The Bee Sting is what it seems, including the title. I am loathe to say anything more about it, because I want EVERYONE to read The Bee Sting and I don’t want to give anything away. I had an out-of-body experience upon finishing it and I feel almost maniacal about pushing it into the hands of everyone I can. What I will say is that it is a testament to Murray’s talent, empathy and wit that this novel, which is essentially a tragedy, is so compulsively readable and funny and incredibly, touchingly, human.

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In my Libby: The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

On my bedside: All Fours by Miranda July

Just finished: Brick Lane by Monica Ali