Elephants in the room

Today I asked my students to tell something interesting they'd read over break, and I heard a lot of references to Cosmo. One student read the entire Harry Potter series, and several others read books they'll be reading for classes this semester--Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon or McTeague by Frank Norris. It occurred to me that I haven't reported on my holiday reading. Not that anyone asked:

Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The cover copy states, "I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story," except it isn't a story so much as a collection of fragments, most of them immediately forgettable. In fact, every time I try to talk about this book, I forget both the title and the name of the author. She's charming and clever and funny at times, such as when she juxtaposes common but confusing acronyms (NASDAQ, NASCAR, ASCAP, NAACP, NAPSTER, NASA, NETSCAPE, NESCAFE), but the book as a whole feels slight and self-indulgent.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson. It wasn't on any of my wish lists and it's not as falling-on-the-floor funny as Bryson's travel books, but this guided tour of a particular house allows the author to examine some interesting history and ideas about home. "It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you knew well but have never seen from such an angle before," he writes, and this book offer just such an angle into the deepest recesses of house and home. Thrilling indeed.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I kept delaying reading this because I thought it couldn't possibly be as good as everyone says it is. It is. Six hundred pages but what a trip: a fresh and suspenseful account of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in Henry VIII's court. The characters spring into messy life, trailing clouds of chaos behind them. Bryson's book goes into some detail about childbirth practices in Victorian homes, but Mantel takes us even further into characters' souls:

When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the farther bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark toward life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, her tide may turn.

Did I mention Mantel's remarkable ear for sound and rhythm? Read that passage out loud and you'll hear the muffled oars and stifled screams.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, another book I've delayed reading and now I wonder why. Krauss introduces separate narratives told by characters whose lives become intertwined in unexpected ways, all orbiting around a manuscript written by a man haunted by the Holocaust. One character tries to live with his past but finds that it's like "living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him."

The Holocaust also looms over The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, and not just because various characters keep insisting that it's time to stop obsessing about the Holocaust. The elephant in the room sits down on your face on every page of The Finkler Question as Finkler tries to figure out what it means to be a Jew in 21st-century England, along with his friends Libor and Treslove, who isn't a Jew at all but suffers a "tendency to sudden gloom" that motivates his "search for some identity that came with more inwrought despondency than he could manufacture out of his own gene pool." This Booker Prize novel combines broad social satire with finely wrought characters and a plot full of small, gentle, mundane surprises.

The Finkler Question is worth reading but I don't need both copies I received for Christmas. I will send my extra copy of The Finkler Question free of charge to the first person who posts a comment containing a brief review of a book recently read. So come on: what did you read over winter break?