This newsletter is a cry for help

An extremely low-stakes one but seriously help me

Specifically I mean I am going on a work trip next week, during which I am going to claw out forty-eight consecutive hours of alone time in a beautiful place, almost certainly the only forty-eight consecutive hours of alone time I will get in 2023, so the stakes are extremely high and I need to read the best book I’ve ever read in my life while I’m there so I can experience one of my top three feelings in the entire world: reading a perfect book in a new place with no one talking to me. (Can you tell that I now live with a two-and-a-half-year-old carbon copy of myself, who every second of the day is either singing at the top of her lungs or asking me questions like “Hello, dinosaur, what’s your name? I’m Ducky, do you want to chase me like a big scary monster?”) 

There’s a certain set of home-run books I always recommend to friends when they’re about to go somewhere and want something incredibly good and absorbing. The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud, the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst — beautiful, languid books about rich white people have a high hit rate in this capacity. Maybe the Ripley series, by Patricia Highsmith, which I read consecutively for the first time while quarantined in a hotel for COVID last summer, would fit this bill. I always recommend Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, though that’s about war. If someone were going on a long, long trip there’s obviously Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels or the absolutely under-rediscovered, soapy, all-pleasure Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. If someone’s going to the beach and has never read William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days I always recommend that. Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee — I was once so tormentedly absorbed in this book that I almost didn’t want to leave my hotel room… in Patagonia, a place I’d dreamt of going all my life. I think I read both Ted Chiang collections for the first time on planes and felt like I was leaving my body. Ishiguro is also a purveyor of perfectly transportive novels: The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, (for me) Klara and the Sun. Strange novels in translation have been some of my travel favorites: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, the Trust/Ties/Trick trilogy by Domenico Starnone, etc. The Door by Magda Szabo, a perfect book. Finishing the Three-Body Problem trilogy in the sun, in Mexico, a psychedelic feeling burned into my skin. 

But I’m getting kind of far afield. I just really am hoping to find an incredible book that I have never read before. Fiction I think is the mood here, double-traveling to a far-away place that may or may not exist. I feel like I’m maybe looking for a classic from a couple decades ago (feel like I’ve probably missed out on a few from the sort of The Known World by Edward P. Jones era) or something translated and nuts (The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, but there’s no match for that) or something just really trippy that removes you from your life (The Overstory by Richard Powers) or something that’s just… I don’t know. There’s got to be something as perfect as Giovanni’s Room that I’ve just never heard of, right? I read about a hundred and twenty books per year but lately I’ve been in a strange dead zone, the kind that hits me maybe once every six months or so but that I’m usually able to break with something fantastic. This one has lasted longer than normal — I keep starting books and not finishing them, which I don’t like doing and usually never do more than twice in a row. I started rereading War and Peace and just like instantly put it down during the first dinner party. I made it thirty pages into Possession and The Bradshaw Variations and The Man Who Loved Children and I just couldn’t keep going. I sort of feel like I was cursed by The Employees by Olga Ravn, which was such an incredible and terrifying reading experience last year that I haven’t matched it since. I have been able to get into books that are more commercial-leaning and totally pleasurable but that I finish knowing I am never going to think about them again; a lot of the hyped books last and this year are falling into this category for me. But I crave something that will really move me somewhere different — I am going on 48 hours of vacation but I want to go on a trip.

If anyone can help me find the right thing, I will be very grateful, and we have not even scratched the surface of my enormous disorganized mine of reading recommendations, and so though I have no interest in starting or continuing a newsletter qua newsletter I have sometimes thought that this could be a good way to occasionally trade book ideas back and forth, and maybe it will be.