Doorstops
I have been thinking a lot lately about very long books.
Because I mostly read on kindle, and I mostly read galleys, and there is usually a few months between the time I request a book and the time I read it, I almost always start a book having no idea how long it is. Not until my Kindle decides to start telling me what % in I am or how many hours I have left. Suddenly realizing a book is very long, well, it can be a turnoff for me.
The other day I started a novel called Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton. On paper this book is so my shit. A Japanese novel in translation about a reporter trying to cozy up to a convicted serial murderer. The murderer is a woman who has killed several of her much older, very wealthy boyfriends after lavishing them with affection... and food. And food is how our work-obsessed journalist finds a way in, and discovers something about herself along the way. Totally my shit.
But after I'd been reading for a while I saw that I was still only 2% in. When I should have been more like 5% or even more. That's when I pulled it up and saw that it was a doorstop at 464 pages. Did I want to spend so long on just one book? I'm still not sure. I'm wondering if I should wait for audio, I've started interspersing it with other, shorter books.
There's just something about a long book in print that makes me go no thank you these days. Even though some of my favorite books are very very long. Even though I am almost always sad when the good ones finally do end. There's just something about it that sounds bad to my brain.
But on audio I've been feeling exactly the opposite. As everyone is doing the thing we now apparently must do every March, I am thinking about lockdown days. At first I struggled to read and deliberately chose audiobooks that were as fluffy as it is possible for me to get. But around April there was a shift. The final book in Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell series was released just as the pandemic began, The Mirror & the Light. And while I had liked Wolf Hall more than loved it I had never come back to the series and I thought maybe I would give it another try on audio. I ended up having several straight weeks of this trilogy, and went from enjoying it fine to being completely absorbed and obsessed.
The third book alone was more than 38 hours of audio. Normally I wouldn't have gone near it. But in spring of 2020 something that could fill the time was the thing I wanted most. That summer I listened to Michael McDowell's Blackwater saga, a 30 hour listen, and was just as happy to do it. Was actually annoyed it was not longer. I haven't had any audiobooks that long since, as far as I can remember. But I have been thinking longingly of how intense the experience was and wondered if I should try again.
I have a few candidates. If anything, the problem is narrowing it down. There is The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, which I learned about from this great documentary absolutely made for book and publishing nerds, and which is so long that the library makes you check it out in 3 separate volumes. (Audible puts the whole thing at 66 hours 9 minutes.) Maybe too long? There is Middlemarch, which I've only read once, have forgotten entirely, and which has a 35 hour 38 minute audiobook read by my absolute favorite Juliet Stevenson. There is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, which I grew up seeing absolutely everywhere, and have been seriously thinking about after a recent rewatch of The Last Picture Show, based on another of his novels. That one is 36 hours 41 minutes.
If you can help me make this decision I would greatly appreciate it. (You can comment at the end of this newsletter or if you don't want to sign in you can hit me up on whatever other platform we chat on.) The thought of any of them in print makes me want to groan. But audio? Let me at it.
Since I missed February I'm going to share some of my favorite February releases, plus some backlist titles I've enjoyed recently. March is a pretty long list so hopefully that will be motivation for me to write another newsletter soon.
This is one of those Just Trust Me And Go In Cold books. I will simply say of this speculative novel that I spent much of it wondering if the book was going to pull it off and be worth it since so many stories in this particular subgenre fall flat, but I was absolutely satisfied. Great plot, strong emotional core, one that I think I can recommend to just about anyone.
Sometimes I really love a book and want real success for it especially when the odds are against it and every now and then it actually works out. It's so rewarding and it's always nice to feel like you had a small part in helping a book like that find its place in the world. Moon of the Crusted Snow was absolutely one of those books so of course I was thrilled to hear we would get a sequel. This second book is very different, much slower, but even more grounded in Indigenous tradition. I don't think you have to reread the first one, though I did on audio just for funsies.
Speaking of big books, I read this one on audio (16 hours 42 minutes vs 512 pages) and had such a nice time with it that I immediately dived into another nonfiction. A history of Mormonism that centers its place in (and against) American thought and culture. It is a big topic so sometimes it feels like it's moving too quickly with the early stuff but there's also so much out there about the early stuff that I think this is probably the right move. I learned A LOT especially about that tricky 1850-1950 period.
Not a new release, but in my recent audio nonfiction streak this was a notable entry. Scratches a similar itch to true-crime-without-all-the-murder books like Bad Blood, I actually do understand crypto a lot better after reading this. And it's hard to get too copaganda-y when your main guy is a special agent for the IRS. Note: one of the investigations here involves a child porn ring, but I think the author does a good job keeping the difficult stuff off the page while still helping you understand the scope of the crimes involved.
Another audio win (I do love Irish accents) that also just got longlisted for the Women's Prize. I liked this a lot, a book about one of those horrible situations--death of a small child, unclear if it's accidental or not, and either way the only suspects are other children--that at first sounded too heavy for me but turns out to be not really about the crime but about how a family broke and how willing a tabloid journalist is to exploit them for their story. It isn't a happy book by any means, but I didn't feel like it was so bleak I wanted to cry. I really enjoyed it.
Ruffin is one of those authors I've been watching to see what he does. His debut, We Cast a Shadow, was a really interesting speculative satire. (My review called it "a punch in the face of a book.") Given how often satire misses the mark I was ready to see what else was coming. But here Ruffin goes in a very different direction, a historical novel set in pre-Civil War New Orleans. It's a slavery novel, but one where Ruffin is determined to make it a story about strength, self-determination, and finding community.