Here I am still trying to catch up on my reviews! Featuring books about the modern world, fish and heartbreak, and a really creepy portrait.
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May
This is a book about emotional survival in the modern world. Divided into four parts based on the four elements, it explores stories from the author's experience as a way to process the trauma of Covid, the horrors of being tethered to world-wide news 24/7, and how to reclaim some of the enchantment that comes more naturally to children. It's part memoir, part musing, and her writing voice is absolutely mesmerizing. Highly recommended.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (read via the Voyage of the Nautilus newsletter)
I read this book when I was a teenager, and was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of the book that's just dedicated to listing fish. Like, if you took out the fish descriptions, the book would be about twenty pages long, I swear. Like most of Verne's works, it's a travelogue/episodic adventure story, but this one also happens to be a Beauty-and-the-Beast-style Gothic romance. Since both characters who fill these roles are men, teenaged me totally missed this, but all the tropes are there, complete with a hero-worshipping, starry-eyed imprisoned narrator and a brooding, mysterious, pipe-organ playing captain with a dark past. It also has some great side characters and exciting adventures, so as long as you know that 90% of the book characters infodumping to each other about fish, history, and the history of fish, you'll enjoy it. Despite its heartbreaking ending, it's absolutely delightful.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (read via the Dorian Gray Weekly newsletter)
This was another novel I read as a teenager and hardly remembered— and now I can see why: this book has very little plot. It's mostly horrible upper-class people sitting around saying horrible things in incredibly witty ways, in between the most exquisite descriptions of textures and fabrics and flowers and dinner-table-settings that you've ever read. (My goodness, Wilde is an amazing writer!) Along the way, there is a gut-wrenching tragic spiral for our main character, a very sympathetic artist who has the worst taste in friends, a lot of unrequited feelings, several chapters of cringe-worthy anti-Semitism, multiples affairs and deaths, and complex unanswered questions about art, life, morality, love, responsibility, and obsession. Definitely worth the read if you've never read it before.
Previously on What I've Been Reading:
All What I've Been Reading posts
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