In keeping with our tradition at Adam Smith, Esq. of publishing a summertime diversion in the form of a selective list of what we’ve been reading lately, herewith the 2024 installment.  Two novels  one collection of short stories, and two nonfiction volumes–one barely 100 pages and one three-quarters of thousand–that have  had  prominent places on our coffee table, nightstand, and yes, carry-on luggage, recently.  In no particular order:

• Table for Two, Amor Towles (Penguin, New York: 2024). A first of its kind repeat feature by the same author; last year we listed Towles Gentleman in Moscow.  “Table” is not a novel but a collection of short stories that at times follow a similar structural arc, from the reader thinking who-could-care-less about these unsympathetic solipsistic whiners, to (within a few pages) being abruptly yanked through Towles’ looking-glass where the bizarre and engaging mess the lead characters are abruptly immersed in must be followed to its conclusion, with empathy and concern.  The book is set in the vaguely middle 20th Century, often in New York City or with frequent references to it, and Towles’ characters (with one bracing and unforgettable exception) not only live well, but probably do so in multiple residences in name-brand neighborhoods.
• Stoner, John Williams (New York Review Books Classics: 2006).  To call this work “spare” would be a serious exaggeration.  In style it’s more akin to “arid.”  Yet part of its genius is that this style echoes its protagonist’s life as others must see him and one is left with the impression as he may see himself.  But do not take this the wrong way; it’s engrossing to the point of can’t-put-it-down.  And you will never have read anything like it.  At times the protagonist seems like a billiard ball, acted upon but not acting–a quasi-arranged marriage that ends in living inside a disaster for him, a stymied academic career, new and transformative love brutally ended by society’s professional scolds–and through it all by force of indomitable ingenuity Stoner continues to one-up the outside world.   You know what to do.
• How to Have a Life, An Ancient Guide to Using Our Time Wisely, Seneca (Princeton University Press: Princeton  2022: De Brevitate Vita).  Short–barely 100 small pages of generously large type–but as you ponder his thoughts and advice, you could easily be working on this volume for a year. How much time do you waste?  Do you wish you could have back?  Do you devote to the unworthy or the merely distracting, or attention-grabbing but vacuous, pursuits?  Seneca, who lived in the first century AD and was counselor to Nero, as well as the author of the tragedies Medea, Thyestes, and Phaedra, died by his own hand at age 65, falsely accused of belonging to a conspiracy to assassinate Nero.  Life is not too short; what we do with it makes it seem so.
• Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City, Dennis Romano (Oxford University Press, Oxford UK 2024).  605 pages (774 with notes) of what must be one of the most comprehensive and without competition one of the most engaging of histories of Venice.  (I have been there several times over the years, most recently a little over a year ago at this time). The book spans nearly two millennia from the City’s agreed-upon (even if apocryphal) founding in 421 to the present day.  And yes, it covers everything: Dukes and kings and princes, noblemen and merchants, laborers and clerics, naval architectural geniuses and financiers supporting their work, internecine rivalries, and all the rest of it.  If you find this litany, not to mention the book’s length, daunting, rest assured it is approachable and digesting it in small chunks is intellectually and aesthetically respectable.   However you approach it, you will learn more than  you could have imagined about art and commerce, chivalry and and the court, the military and trading merchants, religion and apostasy.  Plus it makes a killer coffee table statement.
• This is Happiness:  Niall Williams (Bloomsbury Publishing, New York 2021). Williams, an author new to me, sets his novel in the small, forgotten, and passed-by village of Faha–a real town in County Cork, Ireland in 1958 when electricity is about to come to the town.  The protagonist is a 17-year-old telling his story from the perspective of 60 years later, and it is surreal almost to the point of magical and otherworldly, and stunningly written.  I was tempted to underline phrases that struck me as brilliant until I realized I would be underlining something on every page, but consider the novel’s opening:
  

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  You don’t see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you’ve been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.

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  What happens in the book?  Well, not much, unless you count the accretion and erosion of human relations, and the fulcrum of the plot:  After decades away, the protagonist Christy returns to Faha, driven one must assume (his motive is unspoken) by a blend of guilt and remorse, nostalgia and the hope for one more, last chance to remedy a quiet but devastating wrong. Decades earlier he had abandoned–literally walked away from and out of the church–his fiancee as they arrived at the altar for their marriage to begin.  In unspoken ways, his journey parallels the narrator’s but 50 years apart.

Enjoy!

Back to the beach and still reading.