I keep track of all of those recommendations in my 'To Be Read' notebook, and this month I chose most of my reading from those recommended books and poems. To respect privacy, I won't cite full names, but I want to thank Jeff, Andy, Gail, Penny, Bob, Jeff, Bill. and Margery for their recommendations. Many others have also recommended books which I hope to get to in the coming months.

Here are the books I read in November.

Before turning to the novels, I want to discuss three remarkable books by writers who, like all of us, wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, and go out into the world but who unlike most of us, deeply explore their experience of those quotidian events to try to develop a more coherent, nuanced, and empathetic understanding of the human condition. The result of those explorations and the writing that describes them was captured by the Israeli author, Amos Oz who wrote that he is moved when a work of literature “suddenly makes the very familiar unfamiliar to me or just the opposite, when a work of literature makes the unfamiliar almost intimately familiar.” This is a perfect description of the impact of the three books by Koenig, Ruefle, and Ferry.

John Koenig spent 12 years compiling his 'Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows' explaining in the introduction that he sought to provide readers with a "‘compendium of new words for emotions. Its mission is to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being—all the aches, demons, vibes, joys and urges that are humming in the background of everyday life…It’s a calming thing to learn there is a word for something you’ve felt all your life but didn’t know was shared by anyone else.” He goes on to write about language that “We have thousands of words for different types of finches and schooners and historical undergarments, but only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience.” Koenig then offers the 311 new words he has created to capture those subtle aspects of the human experience. Drawing on languages from ancient Greek to modern Slovenian, his neologisms are often very funny and spot on, and elicited a knowing nod, chuckle, or shiver from this reader. This is one of those very special, very strange books that must be read to be appreciated.

Mary Ruefle is a Vermont poet, essayist, professor, and former Poet Laureate. 'The Book' is the fourth book by this author that I've read, and they've all been superb. She brings a poet's eye and ear to her experience of the world, translating her unique viewpoint into prose and poetry and combining those techniques in this book of prose poems. As she wrote in 'Madness, Rack, and Honey' in 2012, " ….reading is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single life span to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again, to watch the great personal psyche spar with it, to suffer affliction and weakness and injury, to die and watch those you love die, until the very dizziness of it all becomes a source of compassion for ourselves, and for the language which we alone created, without which the letter that slipped under the door could never have been written or, once in a thousand lives—is that too much to ask?— retrieved, and read. Did I mention Supreme Joy.” Like Koenig, Ruefle has a wry sense of humor as in her poem 'The Bark': ‘I took my dog to the lake, he stood at the water’s edge and barked,/the echo of his bark came back and he barked at it, again and again/ he barked at his own echo, thinking there was another dog on the /other side of the lake. Welcome to poetry, I said.” Read Ruefle for the sheer joy of her slightly off center view of the world and her brilliant combinations of words.

Finally, I re-read David Ferry's book of poems and translations, 'Bewilderment' in homage to this outstanding writer who died last week at 99. Ferry taught at Wellesley for nearly 40 years while also translating Greek and Latin classics and writing poetry. 'Bewilderment' won the National Book Award in 1991. Its poems and translations engage in a dialogue about aging and death, about family and loss, about love and sadness, topics that leave Ferry, as all of us who consider them, bewildered. Ferry moves seamlessly from translations of the Greek 'Orpheo and Eurydice' and the Latin 'Aeneid' in which characters visit the underworld searching for lost loved ones to his own experience of his wife's death in 'Lake Water' included in this month's Poetry Tree on the Charles below. A deeply moving reading experience.

Reading Koenig, Ruefle, and Ferry, each bringing a different literary approach to the questions of why we are here and what do our lives mean, was a good preparation for thinking about the six novels recommended by friends. The books varied from the tongue-in-cheek thriller 'Killers of a Certain Age' to the literary cult classic 'Mating', from Conrad's 'Youth' written in 1898 to three books published this year, from topics as different as the Holocaust to a heart-wringing National Book Award nominee YA novel about adolescence. There are almost as many observations about the novel as a literary form as there are novelists, but this one from D.H. Lawrence appealed to me: "If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail." So, I won't try to 'nail anything down' beyond what I've written in the linked reviews with the exception of two books, Anne Berest's 'The Postcard' and James McBride's 'The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.'

In general, I shy away from any book about the Holocaust finding the topic to be too painful and raising questions that after all these years, I still can't fathom. Books about the destruction of European Jewry in the 1940's are so deeply unsettling that I often can't sleep for weeks after reading one. Primo Levi's books are a prime example. I had a similar reaction when 'The Postcard' was published but given my deep investment in writing postcards (please see https://epsteinreads.com/postcards/ if you want to learn more about my postcard projects and even to receive one from me.), I began to read the book. I reached page 142 before I returned it to the library, deeply disturbed and troubled by the events befalling Ephraim, Emma, Naomie, and Jacques Rabinovitch, the names on the eponymous postcard. But I went back to the book upon the recommendation of a friend. Still deeply disturbed and troubled, especially in these times of rising anti-Semitism, I managed to finish the book, solve the mystery of the postcard, and come to some level of peace with the unsettling story. I highly recommend it.

Joan Didion: "Everyday is all there is."

Oliver Sacks: "We are not incoherent, a bundle of sensations, but a self, rising from experience, continually growing and revised...Through experience, education, art, and life, we teach our brains to become unique. We learn to be individuals. This is a neurological learning as well as a spiritual learning."

John Koenig: "anchorage: the desire to hold on to time as it passes, like trying to keep your grip on a rock in the middle of a river, feeling the weight of the current against your chest while your elders float on downstream, calling over the roar of the rapids, "Just let go---it's okay---let go."