I lolled on the couch, one leg thrown over the back, sipping a Cappuchino precariously in the supine position.  I was reading Northanger Abbey in honor of the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birthday.  Alas, this satire of Gothic novels is my least favorite of her books. 

To tell the truth, I am exhausted.  Perhaps I should recoup by escaping into Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple mysteries or Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances. It’s not clear why, but my reading last month did me in.

The books I read in October were splendid. I devoured Kiran Desai’s Booker-shortlisted novel, two novels by Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, a biography of Muriel Spark, George MacDonald’s Lilith, and the latest novel by Ian McEwan.  

But if I want to analyze my fatigue closely, it grew out of reading two new books last month instead of one.  Reading the classics keeps me together; new books can tear me apart.

Desai’s beautifully-written family saga, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel about two Indian lovers who have lived in the U.S. and their quirky families in India, is a joyous experience.  However, it took me a week to read 670 pages.

On the other hand, Ian McEwan’s new masterpiece, What We Can Know, is deeply political. Of these two remarkable novels, McEwan’s haunts me.

In What We Can Know, he brilliantly explores the problems of a world teetering on the edge of destruction. Divided into two parts and two centuries, this novel, rather like A. S. Byatt’s Possession, centers on a scholar’s search for a missing poem. McEwan takes us from a 22nd-century England wrecked by climate change and nuclear bombs to the 21st century, where a famous poet, Francis Blundy, his unhappy wife, and brilliant friends live in relative luxury.  In addition to the missing poem, there is a “novel,” or is it a journal? – the writer isn’t sure herself – within a novel. But the scholar’s reconstruction of their lives is not quite accurate.

McEwan also exposes the problems of internet research.  Future scholars, like Thomas, an expert on Francis Blundy, have access to all email, sent and unsent, and every keystroke made online. The entire history is available on a server in Nigeria. But what they can know proves to be superficial, as if the scholars are on a parallel railroad track that never quite conjoins with that traveled by the poet.

It seem I’m not burned-out on Jane per se. It is the politics and the AI and fear of climate change that are doing me in.

At times like this, it’s better to listen to music perhaps, or take a nap.

And, yes, there’s always Miss Marple.