I'm having a so-so NYRB reading year. Not in the selections they are sending, which are always somewhere between really good and pretty amazing. My so-so is just in how well I am keeping up with reading them as they come out. Some year, I swear I am going to make good and read each and every NYRB that comes through my door via subscription including the freebie. But for now I guess I shall just continue to chip away at them.
I really enjoyed April's book, Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon, which is this interesting melding of fact/memoir and fiction. She hints at not wanting to bother with straightforward memoir, so the book falls somewhere in the realm of literature/fiction. It certainly reads like a memoir, but surely coming at a life's history is tricky and you have to fill in the gaps in some way. Calling it fiction must give you the freedom to perhaps embellish a little. I hope to write about it next week some time (still need to read the afterword which I expect will be quite illuminating). I wrote a teaser to the book here.
I am reading May's selection now (it took the long, circuitous route to my mailbox so arrived quite late in the month). NYRB has a knack for choosing and publishing interesting memoirs--quite often those memoirs are reissues of older books that were perhaps forgotten but should not have been! I am quite thoroughly enjoying Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer's The Farm in the Green Mountains. The book was originally published in 1968 and came about from a series of letters home. The Zuckmayer's were German and lived and flourished in Weimar-era Berlin but had to flee--first to Austria, then Switzerland and finally they landed in the US. LA didn't suit them so they moved to the east coast and ultimately took up residence in Vermont. I love these kinds of books where I get a different perspective on my own country through the eyes of immigrants. This has that layer of nostalgia about it as she is writing about WWII era Vermont. I am trying to read a chapter/letter a day and hope to make steady progress and finish it well before the end of the month so I can get to June's book.
As a side note I have to say I have had a really good run with nonfiction/memoir-ish selections from NYRB--there has been Eleanor Pereny's More Was Lost and Teffi's Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea from last year and both of which I recall still with fond memories. And several years back when I first started subscribing I discovered Vasily Grossman's An Armenian Sketchbook.
Ah. June's book looks like it might be challenging (not least due to the 400 pages that make up the text--more to love, right?), though I see some very good reviews about it. This month's book is a reissue of the 1968 Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition 1761-1767. It chronicles the expedition made by six men from Copenhagen traveling by sea to Arabia Felix (what we know as Yemen today). It sounds like quite a cutthroat expedition, which took seven years and only one survivor returned to Denmark. "Based on diaries, notebooks, and sketches that lay unread in Danish archives until the twentieth century, Arabia Felix is a tale of intellectual rivalry and a comedy of very bad manners, as well as an utterly absorbing adventure."
If it ends up being more challenging than I can manage in the summer heat, I plan on going back to February or March's books, which have fallen through the cracks--Guy de Maupassant's Like Death or Henry Green's Living. Any time I pick up a NYRB I know I am in good hands, so wherever I end up at the end of the month, I know I will be in for a treat.