Stuff I’ve Been Reading: October/November 2019

Books Read:

• Fierce Attachments—Vivian Gornick
• Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis—Sam Anderson
• Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad—M. T. Anderson
• On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons (published in the US as Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child)—Laura Cumming

Books Bought:

• The Noise of Time—Julian Barnes
• A History of the Bible: The Story of the World’s Most Influential Book—John Barton

It has been a couple of years since the Black Mountain Mob, the Las Vegas outfit who won this magazine during a card game, took over from the previous owners, the sweet-natured but naive Polysyllabic Spree. Comparisons are invidious, and it would be unwise to make them; some things (the quality of the toilet paper, for example) are better, and some things are worse: the days when visitors were offered a forty-page herbal tea menu and a dance interpretation of an Old Norse poem are long gone. But in the old days there was a dear old man called Spencer (first name) who worked, assiduously and for very little money, as the in-house historian and statistician. I understand. The Believer is a business now, like Google or Philip Morris, and there is no “need” for Spencer, or for Helge the masseur, or Mia the human rhyming dictionary. Cuts had to be made; I can see that.

I didn’t use Spencer’s services very often, but right now I miss him. I would like to know whether, in any of the fifteen-odd years I have been writing this column, I have ever had a reading month like this one. And he would have been able to tell me immediately. Spencer used to make me assign marks out of twenty-five to each book I read, a figure only ever intended for staff edification, but interesting to flick through when you had nothing better to do. Those stats have disappeared, along with Spencer himself—shot to pieces during a night of drunken target practice. (The stats, not Spencer. I don’t know where Spencer went—probably to The New Yorker.) I actually visited Spencer’s office last time I was in Believer Towers. It was occupied by a young woman called Chelseee La Rouge, who told me she was a special friend of the editor. She seemed nice, but was uninterested in the rich history of this magazine.

Anyway, by my estimate, this is a one-hundred-point column: every book listed...