Flutterings

I have a long catch-up post this month, as I was traveling across the January to February transition! I spent a month in Tokyo then, and though I didn’t expect to read very much during the trip, I ended up fitting in a couple of books (and a couple of duds).

A Room Above A Shop by Anthony Shapland
This debut novel tells a story about two unnamed Welsh men, called M and B, who fall in love during the 1980s. The book focuses on their experience of staying closeted and hiding their relationship from the others in their small Welsh town. Outwardly, they take the appearance of a shop owner and his live-in apprentice. Shapland’s prose is sparse and atmospheric, which along with the indirect way of addressing characters and glancing, in-the-know references to Welsh history, make for an extremely stylized read which has been recognized with awards and in reviews. It’s a short, quick book, and so I would recommend it broadly—not because I think it’s generally palatable, but because it’s an easy dose to take.

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The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
The Rules of Attraction starts midsentence. I knew this, but forgot, and flipped back and forth in my eBook to confirm that I hadn’t skipped a page. Later, reading Wikipedia, I learned that many readers over the years have also treated this as a mistake in the printing—a shared experience. The book continues chaotically from there.

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The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
This was my third Maugham, a choice made by happenstance once I realized that I would have many 20-30 minute rides on the Tokyo Metro with not much to do but read or think. The Painted Veil was on my phone, short, and I’d forgotten any summary of it. Let me attempt one now: Kitty Fane is an Englishwoman displaced to Tching-Yen (fictional Hong Kong) by her marriage to Walter Fane, a bacteriologist working under the colonial government. She is unhappy in her marriage, which she chose because of the impending date of her younger sister’s own to a wealthier man, and in the two years since her move she’s begun an affair with the older, handsome Assistant Colonial Secretary, Charlie Townsend. Walter discovers this affair, and the aftermath of this discovery is the meat of the book, in which the Fanes face a cholera epidemic and Kitty, now disillusioned with Charlie and in a remote outpost with more limited company, completes a transition from frivolity to self-actualization.

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Two DNFs:

• Providence by Craig Willse A professor at a small liberal arts college in Ohio (modeled significantly after my own undergrad!) becomes obsessed with a mysterious and dangerous student. Willse writes a convincing and funny take on the elite rural midwestern SLAC, and an unconvincing take on why an English professor with a tenure-track appointment would ruin life and career for a nineteen year old boy.


• George Passant by C. P. Snow Small-town politicking in exurban 1920s England. The opening incident is a fascinatingly direct tale of homosexual attraction ruining a man’s reputation, but after that Snow’s writing loses focus, and his blank-slate narrator fails to persuade me to attend to any of the actors in this slow-moving drama.

K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts
Ed Viesturs is an American mountaineer famous for climbing all fourteen mountains taller than 8000m, and in this book he takes on K2, the second tallest of those after Everest. He explores the history of climbing on K2 through the stories of a half-dozen notable expeditions on the mountain, looking at the challenges, failures, and mistakes in each of those years. Viesturs refrains from defining success as a complete ascent of the mountain, though of course that figures—he takes the more interesting approach of discussing teamwork, technique, and technical feats by the climbers. Though somewhat jargon-y, it’s still easy to follow the action in the book, and between Viesturs’ appreciation for the emotions of mountaineering and Roberts’ presumable editing and writing contributions, the book flew by.

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