DINOSAURS by Lydia Millet

A sweet sweet novel about big big themes. I loved this one. Millet’s gaze is on Gil and the cast of neighbors and friends living in a suburb of Arizona. Gil has left a failed relationship in New York City and bonds with his next-door neighbors and their 10-year-old son in the desert community he settles in. Gil’s money, inherited from his wealthy oil baron grandfather, embarrasses him. He volunteers at a shelter for abused women as a bodyguard. There, he befriends a birder, Jason, and it is through him, his neighbor Ted, and his son Tom that Gil learns to appreciate the ways in which birds, insects, and the natural world must thrive in order for the world to survive. What makes one worthy? Worthy of love, life, friendship, sacrifice, power, and communities? Through his relationships, Gil explores how hope lives within man’s habit to destroy.

Favorite line(s): Real people didn’t move much, though. They stayed on trajectories. Believed in ghosts and God, both quite invisible. But danger, danger and the need for movement, the need for action, those they didn’t see. Refused to believe in. He did believe. But still he went along. Performing small tasks. Planning his own minor life. As though there was no emergency in sight. If only the birds would take up the fight. Help us, he said, to the sleeping flocks as well as those that were flying. Your sky is emptying. Mine too. No help seems to be coming. But face it. Birds were useless in politics. In the quiet, by yourself, you could let your thoughts roam. Villains and heroes. Bravery and sacrifice. You could conjure up anything. 

THE PAPER PALACE by Miranda Cowley Heller

Is it a love story or an anti-love story? Elle Bishop has been staying on Cape Cod at the family compound of cabins for 50-plus summers. With two narratives running chronologically, one set in the present day over twenty-four hours, and the other unfolding over years, the reader learns of our narrator’s two love affairs. There is her husband, Peter, and the great love of her life, Jonas, a childhood sweetheart with whom she shares secrets. It’s those adolescent secrets that tether the two together and the one day years later that their love consummates. Setting is everything in this novel, and in Heller’s hands it is one of the stronger characters in this richly drawn world of damaged but large-souled people. A deep dive read I didn’t want to end.  

Favorite line(s): Sitting on the cool marble tombstone of the suicide grave, playing with our paper dolls. Mine were awkward, bulbous stick figures with rounded feet and simple faces. Anna’s were always magazine-perfect—girls with Susan Dey hair, boys with brown shags. An endless wardrobe of miniature clothes—hip-huggers and purple clogs, French sailor sweaters, bandana bikinis, Fair Isles, kilts with teensy safety pins. Our secret one-dimensional world—the world we pretended was ours as we sat on a sad man’s grave eating ham sandwiches on buttered white bread, looking out across the old cemetery to our grandparents’ house on the hill, the fields of cows and cud beyond.

GETTING LOST by Annie Ernaux 

Ernaux won the Nobel prize in Literature last year at the age of eighty. Getting Lost is a diary of her year-long love affair with a married Russian diplomat years ago. An affair that left the writer depleted, dejected, and in utter despair when S (what she calls him) left his post in Paris to return to the Soviet Union without saying goodbye. It’s hard to read. It’s hard to put down. She’s forty-nine. He’s mid-thirties at the time of the affair. It’s a raw obsession. Her inability to write while always waiting for his phone call, his visit, an acknowledgment that he truly cared for her. Gutted with honesty.

Favorite line(s): Before he arrives, I’m rushed in my movements, indifferent to anything that might happen to material things (I might break a precious object, for instance), and to obligations (writing letters, etc.) because nothing but desire means anything to me now. Before, on coming back down to earth, I felt deflated, sad, and astonished at the blind haste which had taken me nowhere, because desire once appeased proved to be a vacuum. Now I accept and even take pleasure in both kinds of time. I see the time of desire, rectilinear, and also the time after desire has gone (I’m alone, tidying things up), aimless and diffuse (the best proof of this is that I am writing about it here). Knowing is a great strength and also a form of pleasure.