What I'm Reading

Lauren Groff and Daniel Mason

This is What I’m Reading on Letter from Berlin: Every other week I share thoughts on books that I’ve read and loved recently, along with other things I’m reading. The book links are affiliate links. I am grateful, as ever, if you choose to subscribe. Your support is essential.

Dear readers, forgive me for the long break between What I’m Readings; as I explained in my last newsletter, the final sprint of the cookbook took over my life in September and October. When I wasn’t in the kitchen, standing over a pot of simmering potato dumplings or frantically nixing Grünkohl for Bayrisch Kraut, I was lying in bed with my computer on my lap, fixing headnotes and trying to think of ways to describe Sauerbraten and Königsberger Klopse that didn’t include the words “delicious,” “savory” or “rib-sticking.”

I did still manage to read, thank goodness. There was Girl, Woman, Other—as electrifying and unputdownable as everyone has said and so deliciously satisfying; The Friend, which I think was too subtle for my distracted brain to be enchanted by; Sea Wife, which I liked; Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object, which I found too precious despite my abject Laurie Colwin fandom; My Roman History—more on this gorgeous brilliance soon, but already available for preorder!; Sing, Unburied, Sing, read during this past terrible month and unnervingly bleak; Today Will Be Different, wise yet almost off-puttingly glib; and Desperate Characters for my book club that had to be postponed due to my first official Covid infection (!) and now I feel like I need to go back and read it again because so much has happened since reading it that I’ve forgotten the book entirely.

(There was also a smattering of non-fiction books, but none that interesting. Oh, and Demon Copperhead! How could I forget? Not my favorite of Kingsolver’s books, but gripping and powerful. Though after an interview I listened to with her yesterday, I now really want to read Unsheltered. Have you? And what did you think of Demon Copperhead?)

But! What I really want to talk about today are the two books that most recently swept me off my feet.

The first is Lauren Groff’s new book, The Vaster Wilds. As soon as we landed in Boston for my kids’ school break, we made a beeline for the library so that I could pick it up. I read it in a day or so—within the first few paragraphs, she grabs you by the scruff of your neck and really doesn’t let go until the end. The book is tightly imagined over the course of just a handful of days, but it contains an entire universe of emotion and experience in that small window of time. The premise: Under cover of night, a desperate girl breaks out of a diseased and starving English settlement in 17th century Virginia and makes a run for the woods, where she attempts to make her way through the wilderness to safety and freedom. With resourcefulness and grit, she tries to evade the dangers of man and nature and the limits of her own body, with the backdrop of faith an ever-changing shadow that looms, both hopeful and menacing, above and within her.

Lauren Groff’s masterpiece

To me, this is Groff’s masterpiece. It is masterfully plotted, gorgeously written, compact and efficient but emotionally vast. It made my heart race, made me hold my breath, filled me with both awe and wonder at the girl, the author, and that magical alchemy of imagination and talent, tinged with the delicate touch of the divine, that sometimes sweeps you away to another plane as you read. Days later, I still couldn’t stop thinking about it. You know that feeling when you’re in the middle of a book and you have to put it down to go to do something else and while you are away you feel an almost physical ache to return to the world within the pages, no matter how devastating and dark it may be? That is this book. It is hypnotic.

What everyone will be getting for Christmas this year

Before we left for Boston, I received a box of books in the mail from Penguin Random House that included Daniel Mason’s North Woods. I had heard almost nothing about the book, didn’t know the author, and so put it and the others aside. When we came back from Boston, something propelled me to pick this one up next. As soon as I started reading, it felt like an uncanny coincidence. Because North Woods also opens with people having escaped an English colony in the New World for the mystery of the forest. But where The Vaster Wilds stays tightly focused on its desperate girl and her attempts at survival in an indifferent world, North Woods soon blooms and expands like a tightly wound piece of fabric dipped in water.

I almost don’t want to attempt to tell you what this book is about, for fear that any simple summary could obscure the wild, hilarious and joyous wit with which the book was written and I don’t want to risk that. I want to just tell you to READ IT, and NOW. But okay, for those who will want some description, here is my feeble attempt: A yellow house in what is now western Massachusetts is the fulcrum for a series of stories, spread out over 400 years, about different people who end up living or working or have some connection to the house, like a landscape painter in an unhappy marriage, an enterprising pomologist and romantically challenged aging twin sisters, but also a murderous wild cat and the lowly elm bark beetle. The author uses their stories to weave a history of the region centered around its ecology, but suffuses it with poetry and crime and romance, the erotic and the supernatural. It made me laugh out loud, it made me cry, it gave me goosebumps. It is magical and magnificent, the kind of book that you will press into people’s hands with a wild look in your eyes. “Just read it, trust me, just read it!”

I hope you do.

What I’m reading: Elif Batuman’s Either/Or
What I bought in Boston: Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
What arrived in the mail: Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet