Captain's Log: Lord Jim

An ever evolving record of my reading

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

Captain’s Log is where I’ll share immediate thoughts about whatever I’ve read recently, share some links, and shoot the shit. Thanks for being a paid subscriber!

My coworker Matt (great friend, great friend of the newsletter) started doing this thing where he let the books he was reading decide what he would read next. To anyone else who faces an overwhelming To Be Read pile¹, I highly recommend it. The rules aren’t strict, but the basic idea is that if a book is mentioned in the book you’re reading, you knock that one up the list and get to it next. If no books come up in what you’re reading, you can find a theme to follow just based on novel titles. Matt’s chosen the sea. He can give you a whole list of his nautical adventures down in the comments, but last I checked he had just finished Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea, which is pretty far out to sea if you ask me. Anyway, I started following Matt’s tack while I was reading Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing, and the main character in that book talked about reading Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, so that’s what I read next. It was fun! I really understood why Lacey used Mrs. Bridge as a part of her characterization; Mrs. Bridge is a story about a woman staying in the same place and in the same marriage her entire life and nothing really changing, and Nobody is Ever Missing ends up being about a woman leaving her life and husband behind completely and nothing really changing besides the setting. Lacey probes the question of whether a person can really change, and uses the intratextual example of poor India Bridge to show the other option for her narrator. Stay or go, the existential dread remains.

Mrs. Bridge didn’t offer up many opportunities to continue the intuitive reading path; India Bridge is never much of a reader, so we get a couple mentions of the Bible (I didn’t grow up religious, so I’ve only recently started reading, very slowly, the Bible as a piece of literature - I guess that’s an update for another Captain’s Log…), a chapter on an unfinished copy of Brothers Karamazov (I have some other rereads I’d like to get through first before going through Brothers K a third time, but it was mighty tempting), and an underlined quote from a Joseph Conrad book that India Bridge comes across in an in-law’s passed-down book on her shelf, “which observed that some people go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain.” This quote is from Typhoon, though it’s never named in Mrs. Bridge, and India never again returns to the book after reading that passage. This is one of the least realistic parts of Mrs. Bridge, which is mostly committed to people skimming over the years of their existence; in most real lives, you wouldn’t find a passage in an obscure book on your shelf that perfectly explained the regrets of your life. We’ll allow Mr. Connell the flourish, given his otherwise stringent devotion to realism. Anyway, I don’t have a copy of Typhoon and Lord Jim had been sitting on TBR shelf for a while, so there I went. In this way I may have prevented or enabled my future niece-in law to pull some Conrad from the shelf to have a moment of realization, but it really depends what happens to my book collection.