2022 in books: #4, Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

Hello! Feel free to skip this italicised section if you’ve read any of my other 2022 wrap up blogs!

A little bit of background: since the 6th grade (14 years ago!) I have had a personal mission I call “The Million Page Project.” This has taken the shape of paper logs, excel sheets, blogs, websites and most recently — an increasingly active twitter handle that talks sporadically about books and incessantly about all my other random thoughts.

The goal is to read a million pages before I die. Why? Because my 6th grade teacher set a challenge to the school to collectively read a million pages in a year and I — knowing nothing about scale — was like hmm, I could probably do that alone?

The number I’ve gotten to so far is 163,480 pages or 454 books (as of Dec 22) for anyone who’s wondering. But to be more honest, it’s not about the number — it’s just a way for me to do something I love and catalogue it. As I read, I try to review the books in my own sprawling way to capture how it made me feel, and that’s what I’ll be sharing here. It’ll have spoilers, no coherent summary of plot and often the character names will be missing. But what it will have is a whole lot of heart!

So here’s my fourth recommendation: Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers, which I read in the end May of this year.

Small Pleasures was not at all what I expected. A really weird book — but…good? Like it did not at all go where I thought it was going to go and just the whole tone and structure and plot were totally unexpected but not for shock value — though the premise would suggest that — but rather because somehow that is the natural shape of this story?

Only at one point (very late in the book) did you feel like you really had to suspend belief — the rest was so mundane and totally believable, but interesting in the way that the everyday stuff of life is interesting. I’m always a fan of romance, and it was done well in this book, but what I found much more interesting were the other relationships. The mother and daughter to the journalist, but also the journalist to her own mother — the sense of companionship and suffocation — of love and obligation and resentment. I think it’s often only one or the other — but loving somebody older, when there’s nobody else around to care for them — it can mean all of these things. Tediousness and tenderness — they rarely cancel out in a love as complicated as a mother and daughter.

I have a terrible memory but truly the story was so enthralling that I totally forgot the set up of the first chapter — I was totally unprepared for the ending.I do feel like maybe it was not necessary? It worked structurally because you knew the information right at the beginning and therefore you remember rather than discover — a very effective literary tool (I have a whole rambling essay that I will never publish on how JK Rowling does this so well), but emotionally it didn’t feel necessary. It isn’t foreshadowing per se but rather making the improbable deus ex machina feel normal because the information was given to you when you were unsuspecting.

I liked all the small interactions. The colleagues and her. The child and her father. The aunt. I did feel the father changed a lot over the course of the book and sometimes couldn’t entirely track it, but that’s a very minor complaint. Overall, I enjoyed it! Quite unique.

SPOILER ALERT!