What I read in 2021 & what I'll read in 2022

When I think about what I am going to read for the year or what I have read, I focus mainly on whole novels, memoirs or books of essays that I have completed, ignoring the little scraps of reading I do, often in the form of reading a poem here or there.

But you can find a whole world in a single poem. And most of us are probably voracious readers who move from a book to a magazine to the cereal box to an article online (about, say, literary controversies).

So it seems fitting to note that after reading a New Yorker article  about Paul Celan and wartime poetry that mentioned Wilfred Owen, I grabbed down from the shelf the old anthology of poetry I spirited away from my father to look up Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est." Then I left the book open to that page for a few weeks. I suppose to commune, for a while, with this idea:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

That's reading, right? The one-off poem. A single verse could save your life, so maybe I can log it here. I'd read the poem 1,000 years ago at school and it's as stunning as ever.

This past year was a particularly fertile year for reading. I read voraciously -- maybe extra voraciously! In my diary, I find notes about days in which I read bits from five or six or even seven different books. I guess that doesn't speak well of my ability to concentrate but I wanted to wallow in reading at times, I wanted to bathe in books. You, too?

I also read vastly contrasting books -- so one day in March, while I was reading Le Carre's Legacy of Spies I was also listening to the audiobook of Blue Highways (for that course on travel literature that got canceled), before dipping into Il Pane Perduto (an Italian memoir), La Stanza del Vescovo (I re-read it after the ALTA judging; it was a finalist in our contest) and a compilation of "Mafalda" comics (in Spanish -- some of the panels escape me because I don't have a big vocabulary (!) but when I understand what the little Spanish-speaking cherub is saying, it is deeply satisfying!)

Some of my reading resulted in reviews that I published here and there. For example, I reviewed the Italian memoir Distant Fathers written by Marina Jarre and translated by Ann Goldstein (a.k.a. Elena Ferrante's translator).

Indeed, there were lots of memoirs in the early part of the year! Including a book by New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples: Parallel Time. I teach an essay by Staples called "Black Men and Public Space" and have long wanted to read his memoir, which did not disappoint.

I also finally "discovered" Rebecca Solnit. In Wanderlust, she writes, “Walking ideally is a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.” And, “Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” The Gospel according to Rebecca!

And then around the time I went to the New York Public Library for the translation and research fellowship, I switched back to heavy Italian reading.

In all, I read 40 of books from start to finish, and 15 I perused without finishing. That's not great; my Uncle Larry reads something like 80 books a year.

Some of the books I actually read:

A Stranger's Pose, by Emanuel Iduma (travelogue)
Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon (travelogue)

Home Before Dark, Susan Cheever (memoir)

Parallel Time, Brent Staples (memoir)
The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster (memoir)
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott (memoir/writing guide)
Distant Fathers, Marina Jarre (memoir)

Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin (essays)
Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit (essays)

Bourdain: The Official Oral Biography of Anthony Bourdain
JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century by Frederik Logevall (biography)

Northern Spy, Flynn Berry (novel)

Voices within the Ark: Modern Jewish Poetry (anthology)

Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong (poetry)

Some books in Italian (outside of NYPL fellowship)

Anna by Niccolo' Ammaniti (novel -- er -- romanzo!)

Non ti muovere by Margaret Mazzantini (novel)

Tre volte all'alba by Alessandro Baricco (novel)

Il Pane Perduto by Edith Bruck (memoir)

Notable non-book reading

*Cards and letters from the New Yorker cartoonist Jack Ziegler to my uncle (they were friends)

*The photo albums my mother painstakingly compiled when we were children

What I read at the New York Public Library for my fellowship (at least in part):

*Smoke Over Birkenau by Liana Millu (translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, my old Bennington prof!)

*Voci della Shoah: Testimonianze per non dimenticare

*Giorgio Agamben’s Quel che resta di Auschwitz (In English: The Remnants of Auschwitz)

*Auschwitz by Frediano Sessi

The Year in Writing ... and Contemplation

Here we are at the end of another year -- at the end of another can-you-believe-it year. A year where you could be forgiven for asking, Did that really happen? Except you would be asking it almost every day.

And those of us who write ... tried to write. (Some of us even tried to translate, though not nearly as much as desired).

It seems odd to tally up what's been gained when I am so mindful of what's been lost. Dare I say I was hoping to be a catcher in the rye, not of wayward children but of sick parents?

Last year when I wrote this annual roundup, I talked about not achieving much. But I think that when I wrote it, I admitted as much with the naive idea that 2021 would be different. We'd go back to normal and we'd be logging all kinds of achievements and wins.

Not so much, right? I was shocked a few months back when my doctor said she doesn't think the pandemic will be going away but rather we'll learn to live with it. Maybe this was 100 percent clear to you, and everyone else. But I hadn't gotten that memo. I was thinking at some point I wouldn't have one hand tied behind my back all the time.

I suppose of it's of a piece in a year in which my parents seemed to grow old overnight, and I had the belated realization that they have been the superheroes of my life -- at the exact moment their super powers have begun to wane.

I hope it won't appear unseemly to continue on with this tradition, in light of recent events, and I will be counting on you to join me so we can count our blessings together. I'll start with the year's highlight, then step back to consider the broader picture.

I didn't publish much in the way of translations this year but I did have a wonderful experience that was very much tied to translation: my short fellowship at the New York Public Library. I finally took it, aimed at working on translations and doing research on Italian women authors who have written works about surviving the Holocaust. Clearly the people who built the library's main branch on Fifth Avenue knew that readers and scholars needed a sanctuary -- a church or temple or mosque of books -- and they made it so. Every moment studying in that gorgeous monument to learning sparkled, and besides, simply returning to New York was a gift. I blogged about it, of course, homing in how I now experience Manhattan through my father's eyes, and you can read those posts here and here.

The Rose Main Reading Room dazzles; with a painted and gold-ornamented ceiling, it's as beautiful as some of the churches people visit in Florence (and for the topic I am researching, the library has EVERY book imaginable). If you visit, make a detour to the periodical room on the first floor -- it might just be the most beautiful room in the entire library. The kind of wood-paneled reading nook all of us books-obsessed folks dream about.

Having begun with the pinnacle, I will pause to ask:

What are your writing goals (or creative goals or for my sister, Denise, exercise goals)? I often update my goals -- mid-year adjustments, I call them! -- but really, I have a few permanent ones: 

*Write regularly, and 

*Land work in a new publication. 

I also have what appears to be a pie-in-the-sky goal: land a regular writing gig at a publication (like a column; I always think if I had stayed at the Morning Call, I would have hoped to become one of the newspaper's columnists). Oh and I also would like to meet Bono! But I suppose that is neither here nor there.

Putting the pie-in-the-sky aside, I managed to keep writing regularly and also land work in a new publication. In fact two, though you may think the first doesn't count: CNN. 

Yes, I work there as a contract news editor but getting an essay published by CNN Opinion is totally separate! And now that I've done it once, I see it's not so easy. Here it is:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/03/opinions/family-history-research-pandemic-year-bonner/index.html

I also did a tiny bit of reporting this year for CNN in connection with three stories I pitched -- something I hadn't been doing. Shall I inch my way back to reporting? I do miss it -- it's hard as hell but the contact with people and the process of gathering information is exhilarating. Ex-journos, how do you handle this? I don't mean to wax poetic about the business of journalism -- it's brutal. But there's something about reporting that is elemental. And I think I need to do a little reporting each year, if I can swing it. If you agree, let's chat. Here's one feature story I wrote about libraries doing some rather heroic work during the pandemic:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/13/us/coronavirus-libraries-pandemic/index.html

As for the other new publication/venue, an essay of mine was published in the Boston Globe's Sunday Ideas section -- which was a thrill. Possibly a new home for future work, and I got the whole back page the week it ran! If you haven't already read it, it's about pocketing small items from my parents' house that will let me hold onto their spirits.

Notes from a funeral

The appearance of bagpipers for Daddy’s funeral was apt and moving but also like a movie cue from the Celtic DVD catalog: This is grief! You have suffered a terrible loss and you need this soundtrack.

We ran down to the beach this morning and stripped down to our bare feet so we could wade into the chilly water. Maybe if my feet are freezing, I won't know my heart is breaking.

The two-day wake-funeral doubleheader is like a long distance race of grief. You have multiple opportunities to grieve (i.e., lose it): when I arrived at the funeral home, I kneeled by Daddy and left a note; then there was a brief service; then I said my goodbyes at evening’s end; when we returned this morning – along with a large party of family members – we had another occasion to say final goodbyes. And throughout the wake, people appear like guests on "This Is Your Life," triggering additional bouts of grief. 

(That's no complaint -- I now know the funeral ritual performs a purpose as old as our race with precision; when my beloved relatives and friends arrived, I abandoned myself to their embrace. I no longer needed to stand on my own. That's the power of the funeral rite).

I said goodbye for Leo, too; he sat apart from the rest of us, as if to physically distance himself from the corpse across the room. He appears confused and angry but most likely also -- or simply -- sad.

I’m allowed to spread the “pall” over the casket. I don't know what the funeral director means when he makes this offer, but I know it will be clear when the moment comes, and it is. Somehow it feels right and proper to spread the little shroud over the coffin.

So many occasions to realize my father's life is over, no chance at rebuttals or re-dos. I try to tell Leo that in some ways being so engulfed in grief is a good thing – I am not ready for our shared time together to come to an end. My father was called to play the role of Daddy and now I see he gave a star turn. No one else could have been my father.

My father and Steve Winwood

There's a song on Steve Winwood's last studio album called, "Take It to the Final Hour."

But in my mind, the song has another title: "What My Father Says," because that's the song's refrain.

I have listened to the album a lot in the past year. And as often happens with music, new associations emerge, or maybe just deeper ones.

The song reminds me that while I sometimes may see reckonings coming -- even those a few years off -- that doesn't change the outcome. 

And in the past year while my father languished due to complications from blood cancer, the song has become transformed in my mind -- it's part of an internal playlist that's been on as I've dwelled on his illness, on what will never be, on what I left undone. 

Also: what will now go unsaid. 

Because my father says almost nothing. After a lifetime of robust argument and debate, of recounting funny stories, of using his voice almost like an instrument to emphasize, to chastise, to entertain. Now more or less gone. Silent.

This is what I think about while Steve Winwood is singing. The mind does that, right? The mind immersed in music.

Indeed, at times when I need to cede to the emotions emerging from the new normal, I've cued up the song in the car. 

I do it especially after taking Leo to school. I am alone, I am momentarily free of obligations, I do not need to put on a mask (or at least not the kind that hides our emotions).

I go to the song and I allow it to work its magic, or in this case, wreak its controlled havoc within the confines of my mind and my car. In other words, I am just one more wacky mom, crying as she returns from school drop-off.

One morning last Fall, after taking Leo to school, I listened to the song again, losing myself to sadness on a short rainy ride home, with the wet leaves that cluttered the ground acting as an appropriate shroud around me. I wanted to be shrouded, to be hidden, to privately pick at my wounds. Chief among them, what I’ve lost in not being able to talk to my father.