Friends: September is always an interesting and challenging time for me---the end of summer, the start of school both when I was a student and when I was a teacher, my birthday, a daughter's and two grandchildren's birthdays, the Jewish High Holidays. There has been much to ponder and consider as the years have gone by, and I found that this month's reading made this year's exercise richer and more rewarding. One result is that this month's essay is longer than usual, but I hope you'll read to the end where there is a new feature.

Here are the books I read this month.

Most serious writers at one time or another take up their pen to write about writing and reading. Among the authors who have done this are Harold Bloom in his 'How to Read and Why', Susan Hill in her "Howards End is on the Landing", Francine Prose in 'What To Read and Why', and Peter Orner in his recent 'Still No Word From You'. Each of these works includes a list of books that the authors have found particularly important.

Those lists have led me to more read more and to compile yet another list, the reasons to read. I used my list of 'reasons to read' as the outline for summarizing last year's reading, dividing my favorite 22 books of 2022 into the categories of empathy, beauty and mystery, information, pleasure/distraction, and wisdom in the twilight of life. This month, I'm adding another 'reason to read' which I found in reading William Maxwell's 'The Outermost Dream'. In that 1989 collection of book reviews and essays, Maxwell who edited fiction at The New Yorker for nearly 40 years, cited his own primary reason for reading: rapture.

Rapture is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a 'feeling of intense pleasure or joy', and here's what Maxwell says about it: “Reading is a rapture…A felicitously turned sentence can induce it. Or a description. Or unexpected behavior. Or ordinary behavior raised to the nth degree. Or intolerable suspense, as with the second half of Conrad’s ‘Victory’. Or the forward movement of prose that is bent only on saying what the writer has to say. Or dialogue that carries with it the unconscious flowering of character. Or sometimes, a fact.”  Have you ever read a better description of the wonder of reading books?  

Having added 'rapture' to my list of reasons to read, I read three books this month that met that criterion. The first was one of the three volumes of poetry which I chose when invited to select several books from the library of a friend's late husband. Both of these friends had been MIT professors, and his library was filled with exceptional volumes of poetry, philosophy, anthropology, and the classics. Among them I found Jane Hirshfield's 'After'.

'After: Poems' is both beautiful and nuanced in its exquisite focus on language. Eighteen poems in 'After' are entitled 'Assay' followed by a common word such as Assay: Envy, Assay: Possibility, Assay: Of, and Assay: And. Hirshfield writes that “Poetry, for me, is an instrument of investigation and a mode of perception, a way of knowing and feeling both self and world…I am interested in poems that find a clarity without simplicity; in a way of thinking and speaking that does not exclude complexity but also does not obscure; in poems that know the world in many ways at once—heart, mind, voice, and body.” Read her poetry and experience rapture.

A second book which gave me intense pleasure and joy was Wright Morris's 'Plains Song: For Female Voices'. Morris, like Ted Kooser whose superb volume of poems is entitled 'Delights and Shadows', is a Nebraskan. He wrote 33 books between 1942 and 1986, but as Peter Orner who has championed a revival of interest in Morris's work, wrote "“The mystery of Wright Morris isn’t why he’s so forgotten, it’s that he was never much known in the first place.”  The volume of 'Plains Song' that I read had an introduction by Charles Baxter, who like William Maxwell is a little known but outstanding writer's writer. Baxter writes of 'Plains Song' that "there is a ‘special beauty of this narrative‘ . He goes on to warn the reader that the book is ‘somewhat devious, and some of its treasures may remain hidden from the casual reader. 'Plains Song' is a wonderfully strange novel and only gets more strange and beautiful the more you look at it, like a photograph that slowly reveals its truth under very close inspection….The novel takes its time, and time, finally, is one of its major subjects.”  Baxter goes on to refer to the characters in this book as “about the right size, not enlarged to heroic proportions nor ironically diminished by condescension… Morris’s novel is an act of lyrical attention.” From that description it will not surprise you that 'Plains Song' is not a page turner; rather, it is a beautiful elegy to the women of the late 19th C plains and the hard conditions they endured in order to survive and give life to their families.

The third book in the rapture category was Maxwell's own collection, 'The Outermost Dream', a collection of 18 book reviews and essays. Many of the books he reviewed were obscure 30 years ago and remain so today, but the joy in reading Maxwell is not so much the books he reviews but the language he uses in those reviews. Maxwell edited the work of Cheever, Updike, Nabokov, Welty, Salinger, Singer, and others and wrote several novels and short story collections. Read 'The Outermost Dream' to experience a master of his craft as well as to generate yet another list of 'books to be read'.

Among the other books I read in September, there were two very good novels. 'History of the Rain' is situated in contemporary Ireland and traces a family through four generations of individuals trying to meet The Impossible Standard set by the patriarch while struggling with the omnipresent rain, mud, and floods by the Shannon River. S.A. Cosby's 'All Sinners Bleed' is a gripping tale of serial murder and racism in a small Virginia coastal town. The sheriff is a Black, former FBI agent faced with Confederate re-enactors, a hostile Selectman, and the ghosts of his past---it's a good read.

This month I read the 36th book in the 'Best American Essay' series. Begun in 1986 with Elizabeth Hardwick as the guest editor, this series has featured the best American non-fiction writers as Hardwick's successors. This year's guest editor, Alexander Chee, is no exception, though his selections differ markedly from previous volumes. Chee, a gay, Korean-American writer, presents 23 essays which address the challenges and perils faced by those ‘othered’ in our society. With a single exception, these authors were unknown to me and I venture to guess, unknown to most readers. The authors were predominantly female or non-binary people of color and hyphenated Americans (i.e. Chinese, Jamaican, Filipino, Korean, or Mexican-Americans), and only two white males (one of whom is an immigrant) were included. The topics of the essays were, similarly, starkly different from preceding years when book reviews, politics, or various art disciplines were the focus. This volume has two essays about transitioning, three essays about alcoholism, several about depression or bipolar disorder, and the remainder about poverty and its damaging impact. Reading it was often unsettling, and that is clearly what Chee set out to accomplish.

The Poetry Tree on The Charles this month features five poems from a collection mentioned in a blog entitled The Marginalian published weekly by Maria Popova. Each week Popova comments about books and articles which she has found interesting and compelling. Her September 3rd edition highlighted a volume of poems chosen by Tess Taylor that focus on the garden "where the poets find consolation for grief, connection to the cosmic compost that made us, consecration of our finitude and of the infinite in us — for “the gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… the Amen beyond the prayer.” Ranging from Keats and Whitman to the present, these five poems particularly appealed to me: