Seasonal Book Recommendations for April 2022
"tulip, resin, temporary"
For love,
you leapt sometimes
you walked away sometimes
that time on the phone you
couldn’t get your breath
I leapt but couldn’t get to you
I caught the brow that bid the dead
I caught the bough that hid
I’m, you know, still here,
tulip, resin, temporary—— Jean Valentine
This month in Cleveland is holding up its reputation for being the cruelest— alternating days of cool sun and dull snow at exactly the moment I’m sure I can’t take another day of cold. At least the skies are more changeable, more light-torn, than they are in February. Brilliant sun and slashing sleet alternate more than a dozen times a day. I grit my teeth and plant a tray of lettuce seeds inside. Even now a blade of sun cuts across the snowy garden and touches the desk where I sit writing this.
The end of this month brings a date I’ve awaited for almost a year: Rebecca Schiller’s marvelous memoir, published in the UK as Earthed and largely updated and reworked for North America (“same story, new telling” as Rebecca so wisely put it), will publish here as A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention.1 If you follow me on social media at all, you’ll know the full story of my passion for this book, the way it changed my life and I hope will change many others, too. If you’re in the US or Canada, I’d love if you wanted to preorder a copy from your local bookshop or, you know, mine.
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
“By the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.”
When I was a teenager, E.M. Forster was to me what Jane Austen was to my friends. They had Pride & Prejudice; I had Room With a View. I don’t remember how I stumbled upon it first—I don’t think I’d seen the Merchant Ivory films at that point? But it flared in my imagination and has burnt there ever since, even if I do now smile a bit indulgently about some of Forster’s grand philosophical asides (which perhaps shows just how much more growing up I still have to do).
A Room with a View—the story of Lucy Honeychurch’s coming of age and falling in love while traveling in Italy—is, in many ways a straightforwardly charming romance. It’s full of Forster’s iconically heavy-handed demonstrations of what a waste of precious life are societal systems that degrade some humans while privileging others. But then, I think, typing the last sentence, when something is such a waste, why waste time being arch and subtle about it?
Forster was of his time, of course. (As am I; as are you). I can appreciate his reaching to grapple with the travesties of the racist, misogynous British Imperial experiment and still cringe at the limits of his own lens as a cismasc, upper middle class white gay man. But I just reread Room with a View and read, for the first time, Forster’s other “Italian novel,” Where Angels Fear to Tread (a darker, more melodramatic book) and was struck by the way his commitment to compassion and mercy shine as brightly for me now as they did 20 years ago. And even more, how compassion and mercy are revealed to be the very hardest things, the things that the best of us will fail at over and over again.
And then there is that scene with the violets. I won’t see a violet from now til the day I die without thinking of that “terrace, the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.”
The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon
“Food is not just some fuel we need to get us going toward higher things. Cooking is not a drudgery we put up with in order to get the fuel delivered. Rather, each is a heart’s astonishment. Both stop us dead in our tracks with wonder.”
I wish I remember how I became aware of this book. I suppose it was a customer at Loganberry? I was intrigued by the idea of a cookbook written by an Episcopalian priest in 1967 and reprinted as a cult classic ever since. Though I don’t read a lot of food writing, I got myself a copy and had it sitting around until the start of Lent last month when, in a real reading funk, I picked it up one snowy afternoon.
I opened this book, read the first few pages, and wept. Yes, there are plenty of recipes in here, and yes, there are moments when Capon, like Forster, writes very much as a man “of his time.” But mostly, this joyful, luscious book is as perfect an encapsulation of my theology as I’ve ever found. After a long, life-and-death struggle with the anti-queer, anti-body Christianity of my youth, I found—through the transformative love of one congregation—the millennia-old possibility of Christianity as a deeply queer, deeply embodied way of being.2
While I usually focus on “seasonal reads” as they relate to the meteorological/natural world3, Supper’s “seasonality” stems from how suited it is to Easter and, ancestrally, to Passover, which was an original Supper of the Lamb. These feasts are tied to environmental seasonality: liberation from cold, still confines; and also more literally, the availability of lamb to eat—these are very spring things.
This idiosyncratic book stretches out the idea of—and recipes for—cooking a leg of lamb to feed a crowd, though many of the other recipes are also vegetarian-appropriate. But Capon picks up, drops, and then recovers his instructions for cooking amongst meditations on the deep glory of food and bodies and pleasure. He wrote this book at a time when diet/fitness culture as we know it today was very close to its current form, and he writes against all that body hatred with a fiery passion. His guided meditation (my words, not his) on chopping an onion is one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read. (“Stand your onion, therefore, root end down upon the board and see it as the paradigm of life that it is—as one member of the vast living, gravity-defying troop that, across the face of the earth, moves light and airward as long as the world lasts.”) It makes me deeply regret my allium allergy, so convincingly does he invite the reader into communion with this simple vegetable.
Communion is what this book is all about—the foundational rite of Christianity, the mass or the Eucharist, is also known as communion, and it stems from the part of Jesus’ life story when he was preparing for his torture and death at the hands of the state. Jesus’ reaction to this looming violence was to gather with his friends to celebrate Passover—to have a feast of the lamb. Jesus turned to the solace of communal religious practice, commemorating the ancestral legacy of liberation from slavery in the beauty of sitting to eat with friends.
At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid
“Oh, sensation. I am filled with sensation. I feel—oh, how I feel. I feel, I feel, I feel. I have no words right now for how I feel.”
My knowledge of this book I can actually trace. My boss, the owner of Loganberry Books, is passionate about At the Bottom of the River—will rave about it to anyone who will listen, stacks it deep, has done for years. But I only this month got around to reading it. You know how it is.
What is this book? Why is it especially suited to April? The answer to the first question is a resoundingly satisfied “I have no idea.” The answer to the second could change with the seasons, but for now, it’s an April book because it was EXACTLY what I wanted this past week: incredibly brief, incredibly strange, incantatory words from a singular prose stylist. They could be stories; they could be essays; they could be something as-yet unnamed.
It’s such a skinny little book, one to take out into the garden with you (Kincaid herself writes wonderfully of the pleasures of reading while gardening in her My Garden (Book)), or on a picnic. Let a sudden rain shower interrupt your reading; return to the same sentence 5 times over without knowing what it means after falling asleep in the sunshine. This book is made for that kind of reading. If it helps you figure out what this is like, (hopefully it doesn’t put you off!) I was so under Pond’s spell and no other book was quite strange enough—until this one. I see Claire-Louise Bennett as being in the direct lineage of Jamaica Kincaid’s more experimental prose, bristling with equal parts mystery and personality.
About book linking: because I’m a bookseller, I’ve made book hyperlinks to the Bookshop.org storefront of the store where I work, Loganberry Books. If you have a local shop you love, I hope you’ll try to order from them first: like all communities, they are able to be there for you because you are there for them.
Also: Libraries! Libraries! I hope your library is as wonderful as mine.
If you’d like to know more about this—especially if you are trying to survive post-religious trauma—please feel free to reach out to me.
I refer to what is seasonal for me in the temperate Northern hemisphere. My experience is overwhelmingly privileged/reflected in Western/Global North literature. If you are in a different environment, in the Global South or elsewhere, I would so love to hear about and share your seasons readings.
I do believe you've convinced me to read that Forster novel at last.