I finally have a favorite book (could it be yours, too?)
Plus: a literary 'Would You Rather?'
Time for adventure, mateys! I promise I will never type that again, but it turns out, we’ve got ourselves a little adventure theme this month—which was entirely unintentional, though perhaps not surprising since one of the books is called Treasure Island!!! Captain Obvious, here we come.👇👇👇
This was, hands down, one of the best months of reading I’ve had in a long time, magically (or maybe not so magically, since I tend to work pretty hard at this) coming across the best combination of three books that I’ve read in close succession possibly ever.
If you’re a person who chooses one of the three Shirley books to read from each installment, first, thank you. And second, I have a humble suggestion—and that is that you add all three (!) of these to your TBR list.
You might have even read the first pick already—it’s been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than six months—but I loved it so much, I wanted to include it anyway. If you have read it, please share your thoughts! Comments are always open.
It’s less likely you’ve read the second and third books here, Treasure Island!!! and Mrs. Caliban, respectively. Why some works and artists take off like wildfire and others don’t is a problem I’m tempted to call a mystery. But in much the same way that reading a handful of good books in a row doesn’t happen magically, that’s not exactly fair either. The fact that many powerful works and authors live in obscurity while others don’t is a problem that, while maybe we can’t solve, we can certainly help by being more thoughtful readers, observers, and cultural stewards. Good thing popularity, specifically lack thereof, often has little to do with quality.
Related: The reason I can finally say after [redacted number of] years that I have a favorite book is thanks to Mrs. Caliban author Rachel Ingalls, an immensely talented writer who went through spurts of popularity in her lifetime but whose books had fallen out of print until she was “rediscovered” (uff da) in 2017 at the age of 76. Shortly after, she received a terminal cancer diagnosis and died, in 2019, at age 78. Still, as her sister told the New York Times of that short period in which she saw her stories gain a wider audience, “She was so happy… [she] felt she was getting to say everything she wanted to say.”
CURRENT:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
July 2022 (Knopf)
Sophie and Sam meet as kids and instantly bond over their love of video games. Sophie clocks 609 hours gaming with Sam, in fact, while visiting him in the children’s hospital where he’s recovering from a terrible car accident. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of their lives and their friendship, both of which hit the highest highs and lowest lows when they start making video games together in college in the ‘90s—very, very popular video games that let them start their own company.
People have gone nuts over this book. I have a theory that it might be like Pachinko, which, up until this point, has been my standard for a book that no one I’ve ever met hasn’t liked. (I’m not sure if that sentence made sense, but you get what I mean.) Both are sweeping, decades-long epics full of intimate details, flawed but good humans you end up caring about deeply, and satisfying story arcs—in other words, they’re traditional narratives that introduce many of their readers to worlds as yet unfamiliar to them. Familiar form + new world = completely immersive reading experience, the kind of book that suddenly has you reverting to childhood reading habits, saying things like “I just need to finish this chapter!” when someone asks you to do something.
One of my favorite things about Tomorrow is hearing the characters world-build as they’re creating the narratives of their games—who are the characters? what do they want? how will they move through the world? what will they need to face in order to succeed?—which makes it pretty meta for writers in particular. I also love that the title is a Shakespeare reference, which should instantly make you wonder, Comedy or tragedy?
PS: Related/unrelated, I was a mad “King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella” player when I was a kid and would very much like to play it again right now. This is a fact I’ll probably never have the opportunity to share again, so I’m taking it now.
CONTEMPORARY:
Treasure Island!!!, by Sara Levine
2011 (Europa Editions)
First of all, I had my own little adventure when I read this. I was recently on a vacation and took four books with me, this being one of them. I took it down to the beach, opened it up excited to read… and another book (a theory book 🥴) was printed inside of its cover. What?! That was a weird and interesting enough event to me that I expected to be disappointed when I finally got my hands on the real deal. But it was the opposite—Treasure Island!!! was even better than I expected.
Stick with me here, because I’m about to get winded, but it’ll be colloquial and painless to read, promise. (If you want to skip down to Mrs. Caliban, just know this: Treasure Island!!! has my 1,000% stamp of approval.)
To truly love this book, you have to be someone who loves a “terrible” main character and finds them irresistible. From now on, “terrible narrator” is the term I will use instead of “unlikable narrator” (as in, “I found the narrator to be unlikable,”) which anybody who has ever been in a writing workshop or a book club can tell you is the absolute WORST PHRASE TO EVER ENTER COMMON PARLANCE!!! Unless, of course, you are the person in the writing workshop or book club who uses that phrase, in which case you probably like it. Or maybe you haven’t considered it, and now that you have, please consider replacing it. Maybe this will help explain why:
The terrible narrator (formerly known as the unlikeable character and sometimes the unreliable narrator, which is totally fine as long as it’s not used pejoratively) is a pure delight to the reading experience. They are delicious and should be savored. Mostly, this is because you need someone to make things happen in order to have a satisfying story, a Captain Happen if you will. (Sadly, I cannot take credit for that perfect phrase. That goes to Charles Baxter.) Otherwise, your characters are forever looking out at the horizon while holding a cup of tea and contemplating life and that is very, very boring. You want to read about someone who is going to say things and do things that likely wouldn’t be done in polite society. Someone who is going to fuck stuff up. At least I do.
Usually, your Captain Happen is going to be a supporting character. Sometimes, it is the main character. My theory is that, because that is a less frequent scenario, when it does happen, people will often call the main character unlikable in a way that is meant to be dismissive of the work as a whole*. This is a mistake. Read Treasure Island!!! and see why.
Here, the main character is 25 years old, has a part-time job at a place called The Pet Library, which is exactly what the name implies, and has fully failed at becoming a functioning adult. Not that she would see it that way, she thinks she is very smart and the only sane person she knows—it’s everyone else’s fault, society’s fault!, that she is floundering. She comes across a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, reads it, and decides that the problem with her life is that it lacks adventure. She decides to treat the novel like a guidebook and live by what she takes away as the book’s four Core Values: Boldness, Resolution, Independence, and Horn-Blowing.
Basically, this means she becomes even more of a nightmare to her poor family, boyfriend, lone friend, and anyone else unfortunate enough to cross her path.
Does she insult people? Oh, yes. Does she cause trouble? 100% Is she funny? Duh. Does she do at least one, if not more, actually heinous acts? I wouldn’t give it my stamp of approval if she didn’t. (But, really—it gets chilling in a way I didn’t see coming, a testament to Levine’s skill.)
Treasure Island!!! is not perfect, but it is a truly impressive feat and extremely entertaining. Plus, it is short!!! Only 172 pages.
*I just developed another theory and that is that George Saunders is the exception to this rule. He often has main characters who clumsily make things happen, but his whole thing, his raison d’etre, is empathy, so his stories are more or less driven by the machinations of making those Captain Happens likable. That is nearly impossible to do, and maybe why his work garners such consistent emotional response and admiration?
OF YORE:
Mrs. Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls
1982 (2017 reissue, New Directions)
Here it is! The new favorite I was referring to in the title of this post, and it only took 1,000+ words to get here.
Careful Shirley readers with superhuman recall may have noted that this is not the first time a Rachel Ingalls book has appeared as an Of Yore suggestion. I shared my love of Binstead’s Safari with you all last spring. That book, reissued two years after Mrs. Caliban, is still every bit as amazing, AND Mrs. Caliban is even more perfect. It might even be perfect. I felt like I was high when I was reading it (and I wasn’t).
The short summary: Dorothy is a lonely housewife who has an affair with a 7.5-foot tall Aquaman named Larry. This amphibious, man-like creature has escaped the Institute for Oceanographic Research where he was being studied, wound up in her kitchen, and is considered deathly dangerous. Rather than turn him in, she develops a deep sympathy for him and hides him in her home trying to make his life, and her own, better.
Before this affair, Dorothy has suffered nearly inconsiderable loss. Her young son died a few years back during a routine surgery, she had a miscarriage shortly afterward, and even the dog she ultimately got for company on her evening walks was hit by a car. Her husband, Fred, began having affairs and ignoring her completely. (This is not giving anything away; Ingalls casually shares this information as context.)
Dorothy has, from what we can see, one friend, Estelle, with whom she shares afternoon coffees and confidences. “Whenever she was with Estelle, Dorothy became louder, more childish and happier than she was with anyone else. Estelle drew forth other people’s subversive instincts,” which makes her a pretty good friend to have if you’re only going to have one.
Will Dorothy and Larry get caught? Will she be able to help him return to the land from where he was stolen? Will they live happily ever after? All those scenarios and more are on the table, so I’m not going to say anything else. I want you to have the full magical experience of reading the 111 pages yourself.
And now, a parting poll!: Get into the Hoove?
Also this month: I became the last woman in the country to finally get around to reading Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us. Which leads me to ask:
(Very funny human and excellent author Rebecca Makkai suggested in her Substack that Hoover has been sitting on top of bestseller lists for months “like Horton on the egg,” which really cracked me up.)
That’s it! Thank you for reading. If you liked this, please share with a friend or colleague or aquatic monsterman named Larry—really, really! It’s a very good thing to do.
I don’t know if you still check this space or not, but for the past few years, whenever I’m at a loss for what to read next, I turn to these posts.
I just finished “Mrs. Caliban” last night, & I did “Treasure Island!!!” A few weeks ago. But I’ve tackled a bunch of others previously, & your recommendations never disappoint.
So I wanted to say thanks & tell you how much I’ve loved having these to reference for something new when I’m in a reading slump.