What I'm Reading

Colm Tóibín and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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I have been disappointed by such a great many books lately! Everything is so mid, as my bestie likes to say. I have dutifully slogged through them nevertheless, but I haven’t felt particularly inspired to share my thoughts on them. The world is going to hell, life is short, we’re all just doing the best we can, etc.

The despair about the disappointing books recently led me to reread more books than I usually do¹. First, Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones because Hugo had just read it², then The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (not quite as exhilarating as the first time I read it, but still good) and then the great Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, because I saw it in a used bookstore in Scotland and just couldn’t help myself and I can confirm that even upon the third (fourth?) reading, it remains one of my favorite novels ever.

But mercifully, there were other good reads, too. Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection was savage and hilarious. Jan Morris’s excellent books Venice and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere were evocative and fascinating. German Autumn by Stig Akerman was brief and incisive. Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection was a gleamingly sharp little dagger right between the ribs.

The two books I liked the most, though, because I am a woman who mostly just wants to read about other women, were Colm Tóibín’s Long Island and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count.

Long Island picks up the story of Eilis Lacey, who is now Eilis Fiorello, from Tóibín’s previous book, Brooklyn. You must read Brooklyn before you can read Long Island and my bet is that one day, Tóibín will publish a third and final book about Eilis. I don’t think her story’s over yet. Brooklyn told the story of a young Eilis who left Ireland for New York as an adolescent, fell in love with an Italian guy named Tony, and returned to Ireland for one fateful summer before committing to life with Tony. In Long Island, Eilis is now 40, with adolescent children herself, when a revelation about her marriage sends her back to Ireland for the first time in decades. While there, Eilis reconnects with her mother, an old friend and an old lover and tries to use her time there to figure out her next steps.

After the parade of middling books I had been subjected to, Long Island was almost excruciatingly pleasurable to read. Tóibín is a master of subtlety and there is never a word out of place in his perfectly crafted sentences. The interplay of his restrained prose and his tightly controlled characters with the roiling depths of passion and despair they experience below the surface is astonishing. My heart ached when the book finished. But like I said, I think Eilis will be back. We’ll see her again.

Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel in 10 years, her first novel since both her parents died, and her first novel since she became a mother (she had three children between when her last novel, Americanah, was published and this one), was absolutely worth the wait. The book, divided into four sections, tells the interconnected stories of four African women. Three of them are close friends from Nigeria—Chia, Zikora and Omelogor (who is actually Chia’s cousin)—and the fourth, Kadiatou, is a Guinean woman who once worked for Chia as a housekeeper.

Dream Count captures all four of its characters in early middle age, but within their own sections, their thoughts are constantly retracing their younger years as well. Each section references characters from the others and so, as you read, the women come more and more into focus, their worlds becoming more fleshed-out, more replete with the details that paint an entire teeming tapestry. To varying degrees, the women look back on their past experiences with both regret and longing. Their memories are bittersweet. An appraisal of their own shortcomings, or that of the men they’ve loved or been in relation with, is never far behind.

Adichie’s writing is whip-smart and so rich, full of sensual details, razor-sharp observations and devastating conclusions. Adichie has, in addition to her novels, become famous for her eloquence and wisdom at her public events. In this book, she delivers what feels like, to me, a fusion of her public and private personas, tackling feminism, of course, and what it means to be a middle-aged woman and the kind of emotional baggage one carries at this point in life, but also contemporary life in America, immigration, female desire and friendship, sexual assault, motherhood, and Blackness, both in America and in Nigeria. That makes it sound like the book is almost too full of topical issues. But Adichie is such a talented story-teller and tackles all of it with such alacrity and verve that you can’t put it down. It’s just so good.

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What I’m reading right now: Curtis Sittenfeld’s story collection Show Don’t Tell

What’s on my bedside: Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey

What I just ordered: Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll and Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster

My cookbook! Tap to purchase.

1. It’s funny how I read Anne of Green Gables 14 times (not even kidding) as a child, but until recently would have never, ever reread a novel as an adult. Is there a book that you have read countless times and if so, was it when you were a child or an adult and furthermore, which book was it??

2. Some other time, I will write a newsletter about the experience of rereading the books you adored as a child, because I have a lot of conflicting opinions about it!