February reads

1. **Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing: Beautifully written and devastating, weaving together the stories of three generations through WWII, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen, and the present-day life of the daughter of Chinese immigrants in Vancouver. "It was just the way life was back then," she said finally. "People lost one another. You could be sent five thousand kilometres away, with no hope of coming back. Everyone had so many people like this in their lives, people who had been sent away. This was the bitterness of life but also the freedom. You couldn't live against the reality of the time but it was still possible to keep your private dreams, only they had to stay that way, intensely, powerfully private. You had to keep something for yourself, and to do that, you had to turn away from reality. It's hard to explain if you didn't grow up here. People simply didn't have the right to live where they wanted, to love who they wanted, to do the work they wanted. Everything was decided by the Party. When the demonstrations began, the students were asking for something simple. In the beginning it wasn't about changing the system, or bringing down the government, let alone the Party. It was about having the freedom to live where you chose, to pursue the work you loved. All those years, our parents had to pretend. To see the future in a different light takes time. But we thought everything could begin with this first movement."
2. **Elena Ferrante - The Story of the Lost Child: Love, love. "When there's too much silence, she said, so many ideas come to mind, I don't pay attention. Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause, there are the likable ones and the unlikable ones, the good and the bad, everything in the end consoles you."
3. Anne Helen Petersen - Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Doesn't live up to the iconic Hairpin column. Maybe not enough f-words? 
4. *Elena Ferrante - The Days of Abandonment: Powerful, spare novel. "No, I thought, squeezing the rag and struggling to get up: starting a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses." 
5. Yiyun Li - Kinder Than Solitude: Evocative writing peopled with unbelievably hateful, irredeemable, isolated characters, whose flat-as-paper unreality made their plight uninteresting after the first 50 pages. I only kept reading because there was something strangely compelling about how awful everyone was that I wanted to see realized. "Those who are lied to are the ones to whom truth matters, don't you think?" 
6. *Janet Malcolm - The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: Reflexive exploration of the problems of reducing any person to a biography. "Truth is, in its nature, multiple and contradictory, part of the flux of history, untrappable in language. The only real road to truth is through doubt and tolerance." 
7. Alain De Botton - The Course of Love: Not as wry and insightful as the similar On Love, about a doomed relationship, but still enjoyable and a quick read. "So long as we have been the unconscious beneficiaries of the loyalty of others, sangfroid around adultery comes easily. Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly inoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the injunction not to betray our spouses evolve from a bland bromide into a permanently vivid moral imperative."
8. *Yascha Mounk - Stranger in My Own Country: A Jewish Family in Modern Germany: Insightful analysis of historical trends I've read much about over the years, particularly the exploration of how country's deal with their original sins (the US and slavery) or defining sins (Germany and the Holocaust), or don't. Especially interesting on the European left's failure to make the case for multiculturalism, allowing the right to transform "multiculturalism" into a catch-all for grievances connected to the loss of cultural traditions (that was happening anyway), loss of national sovereignty (through EU membership), and allowing the right to get away with casting open societies as dangerously self-abnegating. 
9. **Alice Munro - Runaway: It's Alice Munro, so, it's everything, quietly written so that it slips under the skin and lodges there. No one writes about the dark undercurrents, slowing eroding the foundations of our lives, the way she does. "Eric should see her now. She thought about Eric this way all the time. It was not that she failed to realize that Eric was dead -- that did not happen for a moment. But nevertheless she kept constantly referring to him, in her mind, as if he was still the person to whom her existence mattered more than it could to anyone else. As if he was still the person in whose eyes she hoped to shine. Also the person to whom she presented arguments, information, surprises. This was such a habit with her, and took place so automatically, that the fact of his death did not seem to interfere with it."