starlings overhead

I’m calling this month a bit early so that I enjoy the rest of my holiday reading without rushing to finish in the next week. :) I really enjoyed this month, especially the first two—and that’s another reason for this going up now! After two great books in a row, it’s a bit difficult to want to follow them with something which simply won’t be as good (to me), as much to my tastes. Do you ever feel that way after reading something? I need a sort of come-down to adjust back to books that aren’t nearly perfectly aligned with my interests.

The Temple, by Stephen Spender

This was the first great book that I’d finished in what felt like a long time. I loved it. It also felt like I was completing part of my literary collection in reading it, as I’ve read Auden and Isherwood before, and now I have Spender as well.

The Temple is a thinly-fictionalized account of Stephen Spender’s youth spent living abroad in Hamburg, Germany. It opens on him as Paul (all real figures have been given aliases), badly managing an early infatuation with a fellow university student. His poems about this crush lead to friendships with Auden and Isherwood expies as well as a man named Ernst Stockmann, who is a friend of one of the college deans and soon becomes an admirer (romantic, artistic) of Paul. Ernst invites Paul to spend the summer of 1929 with his family in Hamburg. Germany was then an escape from censorship and the anti-homosexuality laws of Britain, and both Auden and Isherwood were already making use of this. Paul, their disciple, seizes on the invitation to launch himself there.

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I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Auden or Isherwood, who is interested in queer or Jewish experiences during the Interwar period, or who enjoys autofiction. It’s one of those rare books in which a queer author, late in life, has outlived the profanity laws which stifled their younger writing and can finally see it published. That alone makes it a story worth reading.

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Where does one begin when a novel occupies so much space in the modern imagination? It is night-impossible to escape some peripheral awareness of The Secret History as a reader of campus novels. The book’s fame and accolades have only been augmented by the past decade’s creation of Dark Academia—literary trend, clothing style, digital aesthetic. In such a context, a book cannot only be a book.

Despite all of the forces against it, The Secret History is a very good book. It tells the tale of a group of college students studying Classics at a small liberal arts college in Vermont, modeled very much on Tartt’s own undergraduate experience at Bennington College. (This is, by the by, how I first encountered the novel: the Esquire piece from 2019 got shared around to me as a liberal arts grad. I read and enjoyed it at the time, but wasn’t moved to read any of the novels mentioned.)

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The Bacchae, by Euripedes

When embarking on a new genre, I never know how to write about the first work I encounter. That’s a bit of a lie—I think that I read Oedipus Rex and Lysistrata in high school. I certainly don’t remember particulars. The sum total is that, in reading The Bacchae, I am both unsurprised by and unfamiliar with its conventions. I’ve seen the form, but I have no meaningful context for it. I’ve spent years circling around the classics by reading those old Victorians and Edwardians, and so I’ve grown a sense of their consequence, a certain era of their cultural cachet and meaning, and read my share of one-off poems. But to sit with a long piece, one of the great tragedies, is a different task.

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