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Booknotes 3.30

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Nonfiction

  • The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World, by A. J. Baime, published 2017. On Truman’s succession to the presidency and his first four months as president. I didn’t quite mean to read this right after The Splendid and the Vile (I usually try to switch eras so each book stays more distinct in my mind), but it worked out nicely. Really liked it. As a sidenote, I now want to read more about Truman as a reader — more detail on which books he read, particularly as he got older.
  • Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass, published 1845. Maddening and horrifying. (And on top of the evils of slavery itself, the religious hypocrisy of the slaveowners? So infuriating.) A great book well written and well worth the read. It’s not very long, either. Everyone should read this. (I used the Standard Ebooks edition, by the way.)

Fiction

  • The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman, published 2024, fantasy. Other than the crass parts, I really liked it. (Which is also how I felt about Grossman’s Magicians trilogy.) Enjoyed the whimsical fairy tale logic and the weaving in of the knights’ backstories. Also liked what it did with the matter of Britain, which continues to pull me in aesthetically, though I have yet to actually read most of it — Malory, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, T. H. White, etc. — and maybe this is the year I do something to change that. The interplay of religion and faerie worked well for me. And goodness, how fun is the word gwyddbwyll.
  • The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton, published 1920, historical fiction (it takes place in the 1870s). Started out thinking this wasn’t going to be my kind of book but ended up intrigued and really liking it. Delicious writing. Nor did the story go where I expected it to, which was good in this case. Fascinating, too, to read about a culture dominated by cross-generational family in a way so different from how family fits into my culture, at least in my own experience.
  • The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker, published 1988, escalator fiction (har har). Very Proustian, which felt fitting since I’m in the middle of reading Proust, and indeed that similarity was largely the reason I chose to pick it up. (I’m in the mood for experimental fiction. I don’t know if Baker considered this experimental, but I do.) This novel is, among other things, about: the move from paper straws to plastic; stapling; the distribution of shoelace wear over time; smelling milk to see if it’s gone bad; toilet seat design; croup; perforation; napkin dispensers; shampoo; checkout line strategy; and footnotes (lots of them). A novel composed of short essays, one might say. I quite liked it.