Bridging 2025-2026 with Nonfiction

 I've read a lot of nonfiction in December-January, way more than I would normally read in a two-month span--and some of it has been really informative or even enlightening. So here's a rundown--and apologies for how long it is (I previously mentioned the first two on FB so skip down if you've already seen my thoughts on those). 

Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland presents the story of the KKK's resurgence in the Midwest (particularly Indiana) during the 1920s. It's a frightening story, all the more so because the language and strategies used echo into 2025. The conviction of the Klan leader for a leader on a violent sexual attack that ended with the death of the woman also feels quite familiar. We can only hope the crimes documented in the Epstein Files will ultimately bring down the MAGA movement the way the death of Madge Oberholtzer brought down the Klan. 

Who Is Government? is much more positive, and I hope it will be widely read, particularly among those who view all civil servants as greedy and/or lazy people who live to make life difficult for Americans. The profiles in this book, written by Michael Lewis, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, W. Kamau Bell, and others, present detailed looks at the unknown work of dedicated public servants. My favorite is the profile of the manager of the National Cemetery Administration, who has created an incredibly efficient operation while providing deep consideration to the bereaved. Liking this book does not mean I believe there's no way to improve the agencies of the executive branch--of course, there are savings to be had and efficiencies to be developed. But letting people who know nothing of the true work of the agencies savage them was not the way to make reform--and I think it will be hard to believe it was if you learn more about the real work of the people involved. 

Life and Art: Essays, by Richard Russo, is organized into two parts--life and art. The essays in the life section are mostly focused on the impact on Russo's life of the different perspectives of his parents, the mental struggles of his mother and grandmother, and growing up in a struggling Rust Belt town. I felt that these essays got repetitive, although I did enjoy his take on dealing with fools! The essays in the art section were more varied. Three examples:  I admired Russo's nuanced take on cultural appropriation v. creative imagination. I also found his piece on writers' responses when their works get turned into films or television shows informative. as a Paul Newman devotee, I was moved by his sympathetic take on Newman's loneliness and view of himself as merely lucky. One stylistic thing that kind of annoyed me was his tendency to end every essay with a snappy one-liner, which felt like something I did back in the 60s/70s--but maybe that's still a thing. 

The People's Project: Poems, Essays, and Art for Looking Forward was curated by Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith in response to the 2024 election, Project 2025, and all they portended. Sales benefit the ACLU. The first few short pieces didn't move me, but they I got to "Raising the Resistance" by Aubrey Hirsch, a piece in the style of a graphic novel focused on raising good men as an act of resistance. Then Koritha Mitchell introduced the idea of "know-your-place aggression," which seems like a very useful concept. Essays by Kiese Laymon, Abi Maxwell, and Jason Bryan Silverstein gave me a lot to think about; all of these are represented in the Favorite Passages section (I went a little crazy with the quotes). 

I'm not sure why I had The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, by Edwidge Danticat, on my TBR. I think most of us are more interested in death as we age, but I certainly have no intent to write about it. Still, there it was at the library, and Danticat is a marvelous writer, so . . . While she makes some generic comments about writing, Danticat really provides no guidance on writing about death. What she does do is analyze how various notable authors have done so in various contexts--individual death, mass deaths in natural disasters, suicide, death by execution, and  close calls. She also writes extensively about the deaths of people close to her, particularly the death of her mother. I don't think I am taking away a lot of insights about death, but I may read death scenes in other books more carefully in future. 

Sadly, I wasn't too crazy about Burning Questions, a collection of Margaret Atwood's essays written between 2004 and 2021. I think I was mostly put off by the chronological arrangement which made it hard to discern themes--perhaps there weren't intended to be any but I would have appreciated it, even if the categories were as big as Richard Russo's life and art. The essays I enjoyed most were about literature and writing--see, there's a category. 

In Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef, Slutty Cheff focuses too much on the slutty piece of her pen name and not enough on the cheff part. I did enjoy the parts of the book about cooking, food, and the stress of restaurant work in the UK (much like the stress in the US), but the oversharing about her sex life and use of drugs (not as many drugs as in some chef memoirs) was too much for me. 

Favorite Passages

What good is it to be Ivy League educated if you end up Ted Cruz or Ron De Santis?

      --Richard Russo, Life and Art

Opening sentences yank us out of our lives and into other lives. They also carefully set the stage for what's to come. They are our first opportunity to meet a writer, or character, and decide whether or not we want to spend the next few hours or days with them. 

     --Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death

The following are all from The People's Project:

If they want to force us back into our kitchens, we will turn them into war rooms. If they shove us into corners, we will fight where we stand.

     --Aubrey Hirsch

Consider how different conversations would be if major outlets had rigorously examined white men's lack of interest in other people's life chances.

     --Koritha Mitchell

The road forward runs through the past. It must reach beyond the exam room into the economy, the environment, the housing courts and zoning boards, the school districts and labor laws, the city budgets and federal prisons. The cure must be as vast as the violence.

     --Jason Bryan Silverstein (from a piece on health care)

I remember that in Mississippi we know how to fight. We know how to lose. We know how to organize with broken hearts. We know how to win. We know how to breathe with collapsed lungs

     --Kiese Laymon

Sometimes, I walk through the apartment that I still have not learned to call my home and I look at all of Hope's photos, one after another after another. On the hardest days, I even run my hand right over their rough surface, just grasping for the roof I know they can give me--that we can manifest the light that is already there. 

    --Abi Maxwell

Starting the Year with Heart the Lover

 

Warning: This discussion contains spoilers.

I'm not planning to write about every book I read this year, but I was excited to start the year with Heart the Lover, by Lily King. I have read most of her books, and I think she is an amazing writer. Perhaps the best indicator of her skill in Heart the Lover is that the book is both a prequel and sequel to her earlier book Writers and Lovers and also works as a stand-alone. It was on many best of 2025 lists--and yet I did not love it. The structure is fine, the writing at the sentence and paragraph level is lovely (see favorite passages below), but some combination of the plot and characters created problems for me.

The plot: The story starts with a college love triangle (love triangles are definitely a thing with King) among three English majors--Casey (the protagonist from Writers and Lovers), ultra-religious Sam, and less stifled Yash. There is a lot of English major talk, which many reviewers loved but I found a bit much. Indeed, the boys give Casey the nickname Jordan after a character in The Great Gatsby and she is called that throughout their relationship (cute or vaguely icky?). Plus the character Sam is so problematic (although scenes with Sam and his family did provide some comic relief), it was obvious that Yash was really the guy for Casey. Soon enough, the story morphs into a love story between Yash and Casey. That affair ends badly, with Yash seeming to choose Sam over Casey and doing it in a particularly heartless way. All of this held my attention and brought up some memories of what it was like to fall in love in college, but it didn't enthrall me. 

From there, we jump ahead 20+ years. Casey is married to Silas (one of her lovers from the love triangle in the earlier book) and has two young children. Yash stops in for a visit, the first time they have seen each other in decades--and it's awkward. They talk, but very little is surfaced. Another short leap forward in time, and Casey's son Jack has brain tumors and is in such pain that his body seizes as a means of alleviating the pain. Sam contacts Casey to let her know Yash is dying and she leaves her son to go to Yash. As a plot point, this sets up scenes of secret-sharing, recrimination, and reconciliation--everything they didn't talk about in the earlier visit emerges under the pressure of impending death. All of this is surely essential to what King wants to say about love,  connection, and forgiveness. But I could not get past Casey, who up to that point is portrayed as a wonderful mother, leaving her son for any reason really, but particularly for a former lover. She says that Silas convinced her to go, and I can understand why he would want her to resolve some of her old feelings. But did he want her to repeatedly miss flights home? Did Jack want her to go? Oh hell no!! My reaction to Casey's decision rendered me unable to be moved by the closing chapters, which--based on Goodreads comments--left many readers sobbing.

I recognize that caring too much about my own feelings toward a character and being judge-y about bad decisions that serve the author's purposes are not hallmarks of sophisticated reading. Will I change? Maybe I'll try, but I lack full commitment to that goal.

Favorite Passages

He looks scared, like something out there is more menacing than the snow falling faintly, faintly falling on the living and the dead. 

I laugh. I'm incapable of understanding his dilemma. It feels completely made up to me. I've noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems. 

You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you're reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.

Year-end Notes on Reading and Blogging

 Who still blogs in the era of Substack? Yeah, that would be me. I started this blog in 2009 (geez!) and have thought about going in a different direction--posting reviews on Goodreads (tried it, didn't like it), Instagram (I do use it as a supplement to the blog), or TikTok (I find the so-called BookTok so shallow, over emotive, and repetitive, I can't bear it). Nowadays, Substack seems to be the thing, but I'm unsure what the advantages would be. So I still end up back here--changing my approach from time to time (from writing about every book in the beginning to writing about my favorites every season) but still persisting. I'm currently thinking about changing my approach again--if you have suggestions, let me know in the Comments. 

Since I changed to posting just my favorites every season and thus only write about the books I really liked, I haven't done a "best of" list. However, I would say that this year, the book I talked about most was Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Along with Elon Musk's savaging of the executive branch despite having no concept of what that branch does (and a few other questionable acts by the ultra-rich), this book made me truly despise the billionaire class, to which I had previously been largely indifferent. 

On a more positive note, in December, I got my TBR into an electronic file--yippee! Previously, it existed in handwritten lists in two different notebooks plus five or six printed out lists of recommendations. I feel organized and virtuous. The downside is that I realize the chances of my reading everything on the 12-page two-column document (which, of course, will be regularly added to) are so small as to be nonexistent (I'm 75!). Ergo, I ought to prioritize, but I'm fairly sure that is not going to happen.

The online book group I belong to asks members if they are setting a goal for how many books they are going to read in the new year. At this point in my life, I don't worry about not reading enough; I'm more worried about reading too many books unthoughtfully. In fact, one of the reasons I keep doing this blog is that I think it forces me to slow down and think about what I'm reading, at least a bit. But every year I resolve to do better--maybe in 2026 I'll even read 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley, which I've started multiple times and never gotten past page 50 or so.  I'm moving it from my "unread and may never be read" bookcase to my nightstand right now. 

BTW: About midway through the year I got on the bandwagon for reading a book set in every state. I managed to complete the challenge, though I did re-read a Louise Erdrich book (The Beet Queen) to get check-off for North Dakota. Not sure what I think about challenges like this--it did lead me to read some things I wouldn't have picked up otherwise, but I'm not convinced I am better for it. If you have thoughts on reading challenges, drop them below. 

Favorite Covers of 2025

Every year I'm awed by some of the beautiful covers created for books. I am not a visually creative person, so seeing the creativity is marvelous. I like to think I don't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes I might! This year there were a lot of covers I really loved among the books that I read (not all published in 2025). Did you have a favorite cover this year? 

To me the best covers are visually arresting while also conveying something about the content of the book--although you may not get the connection right away. These three are, I think, representative of that idea:

Color has a lot to do with why I like particular covers. Sometimes it's bright primary colors, other times it's a more muted palette. Either can be beautiful and inviting. 

Bright examples:

 

Muted examples:

    

Simplicity and/or high contrast can also be really appealing, as evidenced in these covers:

 

 

From all the above  examples, it seems that being blue is also attractive to me!

I've commented before how challenging I think it must be to design covers for a series. This is a Tess Gerritsen series I discovered this year--I like the fact that there's some coherence across the covers with the horizontal lines, while each represents the title's particular setting. 

I have also commented before on the cover photos selected for biographies or memoirs. This year I only saved one such cover, and I think the photo chosen is pretty much perfect. Do you agree?  This is one example where the author's name being larger than the title makes sense--generally, I like the title to be the most prominent text on a cover, but when the author's name sells on its own . . .

Yet a third topic I have commented on before is how interesting it is to compare covers of different editions of the same book. Here are two I noticed this year that are quite different although both are striking (and both include the promo for the Will Trent TV series--not so keen on that). . 

And here's an interesting article about that topic, focusing on YA books, both different contemporaneous editions and re-issues: https://bookriot.com/cover-makeovers-what-ya-book-wore-it-best 

So Much Poetry (and a Few Novels): The Second Half of Fall

 I just recently read Geraldine Brooks's memoir about her husband's death, Memorial Days, and it occurred to me I have read a lot of books about the experience of widowhood, despite the fact that I am long divorced and unlikely to be a widow. So I am contemplating what draws me to these books--perhaps pondering the experience of grief, which I certainly have experienced. I also realized I hadn't read (or at least couldn't remember) any memoirs written by men grieving their wives. When I did some minimal Googling, I found mostly books where men were giving advice to other widowers, rather than deeply exploring the grieving experience (although I haven't read the books so perhaps I am unfairly characterizing them); this doesn't really surprise me given, well, you know. BTW: Brooks does give some tips for other women grieving their husbands at the end of her book, which I thought was a good idea. However, if you're looking for a memoir in this genre, I would recommend Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking or Elizabeth Alexander's The Light of the World. Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup is a somewhat different book, being comprised of essays and vignettes, but is also very good. The Brooks book is okay but not my favorite. Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story and Kay Redfield Jamison's Nothing Was the Same would both have been better as essays/articles (in fact, Oates did write a very good article prior to publishing the book).

On a different note (but also on gender relations), I read a YA book recently that included adults telling a tween girl that if a boy picks on/harasses you, it's because he likes you. I know adults do, unfortunately, say that, but I don't think such statements should stand without pushback in a book published in the 21st century (it was published in 2015). Even if the statement is true, that kind of treatment is not acceptable and should have negative consequences. Come on, people, do better!

On to more pleasant things.

Fiction

I usually add books I like to my draft posts as soon as I finish them, but I finished What Kind of Paradise by Janelle Brown a week ago and am, for a variety of reasons, just now getting to writing about it. In part the delay is just due to life, but the farther I got from finishing the book, the more unbelievable some of the plot points seemed (example: a home-schooled teenager with no college education gets hired on sight--no resume, no background check--by a high-tech company during the tech boom of the 1990s). However, I had enjoyed the book while reading it and continued to think it would be a great book club selection--lots to discuss. So here's a super-short description: Jane lives with her father in a remote cabin in Montana. She is home schooled and he produces a 'zine for Luddites and hatches plans for escaping when "the feds come for him." Her father often disappears for days at a time, leaving Jane at home. When he announces he will be going to Seattle, she begs to go with him, and he agrees, drawing her into his plans, which involve a deadly crime. From there, things get really complicated, as Jane tries to figure out who she really is, whether her mother is really dead, and what to do about her father's crimes. The story is framed as her remembering the time after a reporter finds her and asks to interview her about her father's fame 20 years later. It's entertaining and thought-provoking if sometimes far-fetched. Or maybe I'm naive. 

The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami could be described as a prison novel, except the imprisoned people have not been convicted or even accused of a crime. Rather, they are being held in a retention center because an algorithm using 200 data points--including dreams--determined they are likely to commit a crime. Following a televised mass shooting during the half-time show at the Super Bowl, the United States passed a crime prevention bill allowing "retention" of people deemed to be potential criminals. Sara Hussein, a historian returning to the US from a conference in the UK, is deemed likely to kill her husband and is retained for the standard 21 days. But very few people actually are released after 21 days, instead having their terms extended repeatedly due to minor infractions. Of course, the retention centers, the algorithm, and the technology that allows dreams to be read are all run by private companies who operate on a profit motive. The narrative describing Sara's experience is interspersed with emails and documents related to these companies, which provide additional context. The Dream Hotel feels all-too-possible; indeed, one can find similarities to actual events in 2025. Worth a read. 

Heartwood, by Amity Gaige, is sometimes classified as a thriller, but I think it's much more than that. The story is told from multiple perspectives, with the three primary voices being those of a Maine ranger, a lost hiker, and an elderly woman who has been living her life primarily online. The book is thrilling in its depiction of the search for the lost hiker. But it's also deeply reflective. The ranger, Bev, is single, aging, and has immersed herself in her work at the cost of her family relationships. The hiker, Valerie, is a nurse trying to find "the missing pieces of her heart" after the trauma of the COVID pandemic. And Lena, the elderly woman, is gradually being drawn back into the world by a man at her assisted living and by the search for Valerie. A tense but ultimately life-affirming read for the end of a tough year. 

Mysteries

No mysteries that really grabbed me in the second part of fall--that makes me sad. 😞

Nonfiction

Although I am not myself fashionable, I am interested in fashion--I subscribed to In Style for years and have seen every season (even the terrible most recent one) of Project Runway. Also, I'm a Democrat. So it's probably no surprise that I enjoyed The Look, by Michelle Obama with her stylist Meredith Koop. This does not mean I have loved all of her looks, past or present--I haven't (in particular, I never cared for the wide belts over cardigans). However, I appreciated learning about how she and her team thought about fashion as one vehicle for conveying a message of inclusion, opportunity, and feminine power, as well as for normalizing a Black First Family. She has taken some criticism for her discussion of feeling the need to wear her hair straight while in the White House, but IMO those critiques are based on ignorance if not outright racism--a certain former Fox host's unhinged rant makes that clear. The book is expensive (it's essentially a coffee table book with a lot of text), so most people will want to get it from the library. BTW: Both Jill Biden and Melania Trump have had stylists as well, and it's interesting to think what factors in addition to personal taste might have influenced their choices. 

Poetry

I just finished two poetry collections, both focusing on how life changes over time, but one from the perspective of a woman in her 40s, the other from a woman nearing 90 when the book was published. How About Now is Kate Baer's fourth collection; she continues to write about the joys and challenges of being a mother and being married, but also looks at how getting older and potentially less healthy affects her and makes friends ever more important. Several poems also address technology's impact on modern life. Her work often has an edge--I love that the poem "Interview with a Male Moderator at a Decorated Literary Event" was written in response to the moderator asking "Do you ever feel that men might feel alienated from your work?" While this is not my favorite among her books, I enjoyed many of the poems. Here are a couple of examples--one about kids growing up and the other about technology.

One Day

One day your baby sits
in a bright red stroller
making wild mammalian sounds,
and the next they're saying
they never liked Dog Man and
no one their age takes bubble baths.
Christmas without a Santa.
Tooth Fairies without a tiny baby tooth.
Now they want this sort of haircut,
to take them to the mall
with other post-pubescent children.
It's not so bad--
but if you're waiting for a hug
or gentle conversation,
I suggest not looking very desperate.
Lie on the floor, get out your book.
Eventually they come. 

Meanwhile

At the concert we show our phones our favorite musician.
On vacation we show them the waves, the children playing
in the sand. We say, look phone! And turn it on ourselves.
Look at my face! I'm so old and ratty, we say to our phones.
Now look at the sunset. A four-car pileup. A dog in khaki
pants. You must remember this, we say to our phones.
Have it when we want it. (We will never want it) A gray
heron sails across the sky. Look! we say, pulling our phones
from our back pockets. You don't want to miss this, phone!
It would be a shame if you missed all this.

The second book was Nearing 90 [And other Comedies of Late Life] by Judith Viorst. I've been enjoying Viorst's "decade" books since she started writing them in her 30s (in 1968, I gave her Love Poems for the Very Married as a wedding shower gift for a college friend who got married shockingly young). Viorst's best poems find the humor in life but she can also be sentimental about the very same topics, like her husband Milton (I am sad that she is experiencing much of her 90s without him, as he died in 2022). She's technically not the greatest poet, but she's such an astute observer of life at any age that her poems still touch me. As someone who has spent some time saying which of my mother's behaviors I will never do, I particularly enjoyed this one. 

Trading Places

You can't read the menu if you don't bring your glasses.
Nor will your hearing aid work with a dead battery.
I once had these conversations with my mother.
Now my kids are having them with me.

You only should come if you want to come--no pressure.
You've got your own life to live. Go live it! Have fun!
That's how my mother used to get me to visit.
I can't believe that's what I just said to my son.

And then there's the lovely little book Washing My Mother's Body: A Ceremony for Grief, which features a single poem by Joy Harjo and is beautifully illustrated by Dana Tiger. The poem begins "I never got to wash my mother's body when she died./I  return to take care of her in memory." Harjo goes on to describe the ritual of washing her mother's body while remembering their lives together and reflecting on her mother's beauty and strength. It sounds somewhat macabre, but it definitely is not. And the illustrations are exquisite. 

Finally, I completed (a few days early) two poem-a-day collections, one generally serious, one generally humorous: 365 Poems for Life, compiled by Allie Esiri, and Days Like These, by Brian Bilston. Most readers, like me, will find many poems that move or amuse and others that miss the mark. I'll include one that appears in both books:

Serenity Prayer

by Brian Bilston

Send me a slow news day,
a quiet, subdued day,
in which nothing much happens of note,
just the passing of time,
the consumption of wine,
and a re-run of Murder, She Wrote.

Grant me a no news day,
a spare-my-your-views day,
in which nothing much happens at all--
a few hours together,
some regional weather,
a day we can barely recall.

The Correspondent Tops Early Fall Reading

Well, I finally read The Women, by Kristen Hannah. Sorry, but it's a freaking soap opera--everything that could happen to someone who served in Viet Nam does happen to the protagonist, plus two of her wartime lovers return from the dead. It's ludicrous. I really don't understand why people love it so much. 

Even though I had mixed feelings about Dream Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I wish the readers who adore The Women would read it to see what good writing actually is. Adichie is an immensely talented writer (see Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah) and many of the topics she explores in the book (mother-daughter relationships, the diverse experiences of African immigrants in the United States, sexual violence and pornography, female circumcision) are interesting, but there's just too much worrying about finding a man and/or having children for this old lady! 

I just finished the latest collab by James Patterson and Bill Clinton, The First Gentleman. From Bill's point of view, I suspect the mystery (which is okay) is just an excuse for the speech given by the fictional president, Madeline Wright, in which he presents his ideas for solving the U.S.'s long-term economic problems. Somehow I doubt that mystery readers are suddenly going to start lobbying for his proposals!

I know I have cited an article about endings not being that important before, but I recently read a book that the ending entirely ruined for me. In Honor, Thrity Umrigar makes us feel the horror of honor killings in India and then tacks on a romance novel ending. Did she think that readers just couldn't handle the sadness? Did not work for me--but maybe others liked it. 

Seems like I've had quite a few DNFs recently but I don't write them down so not sure if it was really more than usual. Two of note: my online Univ. of Illinois alumni book group's most recent choice, White Mulberry, by Rosa Kwon Easton (writing style was so turgid I couldn't hack it) and the much vaunted All Fours, by Miranda July (it wasn't the graphic sex--I just found the protagonist's midlife crisis boring). As a friend recently said, I've got less time left in my life to read, don't want to waste it on stuff I don't enjoy. And, side note, if you want to read about people who endured Korean/Japanese conflict, stay away from White Mulberry and try Pachinko by Min Jin Lee or Flashlight by Susan Choi, which I just finished and thought about including in the below list of favorites. 

Fiction

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid had been on my TBR for years but I finally picked it up and found it thought-provoking. The narrator is Changez, a Pakistani man who happens upon an American in Lahore and invites him to dine while Changez tells his story of living in the United States but returning to Pakistan after becoming disillusioned with aspects of American life and business. Why he chooses to tell his story to a stranger is not clear (at least to me), and the book's ominous ending makes that question even more puzzling. Changez came to the U.S. to attend Princeton and stayed on to work as a financial analyst and pursue a young woman named Erica. But then 9/11 happened and his perspective on  the United States began to change. After he was fired from his job (he brings this on himself ) and Erica disappeared, he returned to Lahore, where he became a teacher and protest leader. But is he a fundamentalist (religion is not part of his story) or simply someone with concerns about the United States? That is the question! 

I was surprised to enjoy Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, as I had actively hated his earlier book Cleanness. His favorite unnamed poet-protagonist now lives in Iowa City with his poet partner L. The pandemic is raging. One day he suddenly has an intense, crippling pain in his abdomen; he resists going to the ER, but after several days, L convinces him he must seek help. Soon he's in the ICU with hospital staff flocking to his room because of his unusual condition--a tear in the internal wall of his aorta. The book takes place in the protagonist's head--his worries, his experiences of illness, memories of his family and romantic life, and even thoughts on poems he has taught high school students. Although it has little of what you'd consider a plot, it's a fascinating look into the experience of illness. Also, as a result of reading the book, I've developed a corollary to my hypothesis that one cannot attend the Iowa Writers Workshop without writing a book about the horror; the corollary--no small American town serves as the setting for recent novels than Iowa City. Am I right?

I absolutely loved The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. Perhaps it was inevitable--it's an epistolary novel, a form I enjoy when done well, and the protagonist was a woman in her 70s, Sybil Van Antwerp. Since her retirement as the chief clerk in her long-time colleague's court, Sybil's main method of interacting with the world has been through letters (she emails too)--letters to her best friend (and former sister-in-law); her two surviving children; her brother, who lives in Paris with his partner; authors; the chair of the English department at University of Maryland College Park, who won't let Sybil audit courses; to the son of someone she and the judge sent to prison unjustly; to a young boy who is bullied at school but finds some solace in writing to Sybil. Though she thinks she is settled into her quiet life, in fact she is about to go a rethinking of her past and present. It sounds intense but it's also highly entertaining. Might be my favorite book of the year so far.

Vera, or Faith, by Gary Shteyngart is told from the perspective of ten-year-old Vera, an extremely bright (she keeps a list of Things I Still Need to Know in her diary), neurodivergent (she cannot stop herself from spewing facts to her classmates) Russian-Korean-American girl. Her Russian emigre dad regards himself as a literary pundit but is anxious to sell his struggling magazine to an African billionaire. A great dad he is not. Her stepmother, "Anne Mom," is a WASP-y sort at least trying to be a good mother to Vera and her son Dylan while advocating for liberal causes. Her biological Korean American mom allegedly left the family because Vera was a "difficult child."  There's family drama, dystopic political issues (in a classroom assignment Vera is tasked with defending a constitutional amendment to give the votes of the Christian right more weight, cars with women are stopped at state lines to check on their menses, etc.), AI devices (a thinking chessboard and a self-driving and conversational car), and middle school friend drama. Although the book generally received lukewarm reviews, I enjoyed Vera's combination of knowingness and naivete. 

Mystery

I recently discovered and enjoyed an older Tess Monaghan mystery I had missed--Butchers Hill, by Laura Lippman. Tess has just gone out on her own as a PI. It's early days and her finances are problematic, but she quickly gains two clients, both seeking to find young people who were adopted or in the foster care system. Of course, both cases have unexpected layers that uncover facts about a notorious neighborhood crime and about Tess's own family. It reminded me why Lippman was one of my favorites (before her last couple books!). 

I did follow-up and read the second book in Tess Gerritsen's Martini Club series, The Summer Guests, and I enjoyed it although, as with its predecessor, I found the CIA-related parts of it somewhat far fetched. Once again, retired CIA agent Maggie Bird and her cohort of four other ex-CIA folks take on the job of helping Acting Police Chief of Purity, Maine, Jo Thibodeau, this time to find the missing teenage daughter of a wealthy summer family and figure out who the dead body in the pond is (it's not the teenager). Of course, they also get on her nerves when they pay no attention to what she forbids them to do. There's spy stuff, family stuff, annoying state cop stuff, summer people vs. locals stuff--and it's entertaining. 

In my opinion, Anne Hillerman isn't the writer her dad was, but I still have enjoyed her books continuing the careers of Jim Chee and Bernadette Manuelito and the retirement of the venerable Joe Leaphorn, although he barely makes an appearance in Shadow of the Solstice. Chee and Manuelito are dealing with several situations here--a dead man discovered by a teenager, an addiction treatment scam targeting indigenous people, and the impending visit to the region by the Secretary of the Interior, which has brought a fringe environmental group to Shiprock. What I particularly appreciated was the focus on a real Medicaid scam, which was uncovered in 2023. As is the case generally with Medicaid scams, it is providers, not beneficiaries, who are committing fraud. They, not recipients, are the folks who should be punished (okay, hard not to get political these days). 

Is there a better villain than a serial killer? In The Girl from Devil's Lake, the latest entry in J.A. Jance's Joanna Brady series, we get the story of a serial killer from his earliest murder to the present, interspersed with the Cochise County sheriff's efforts to solve that present murder, the death of a young Mexican boy found across the border in Arizona. SPOILER ALERT: One of the most interesting things about the book is that a long-term antagonist of Joanna's ends up dead, making me wonder how Jance might replace that irritant/tension in future Brady books. 

Short Stories

Many reviewers seem to have disagreed with me, but I really enjoyed Curtis Sittenfeld's second collection of short stories, Show Don't Tell (I enjoyed her first collection as well). The stories feature women, many in mid-life, others younger, dealing with events or issues that somehow bring up moments from the past. In "Lost But Not Forgotten," for example, Lee (the protagonist of Sittenfeld's novel Prep) is attending her 30th class reunion, unsure why she keeps subjecting herself to a group of people among whom she always felt somewhat uncomfortable--and her life as the founder and executive director of a nonprofit that serves incarcerated people is far from her classmates' careers in finance, banking, or "managing their family's wealth." In "White Women LOL," Jill is shunned by the other elementary school moms because she "Karen'ed" a table of African Americans in a restaurant and video of the incident went viral; she tries to redeem herself by finding the lost dog of the most prominent black mom in the neighborhood. "Creative Differences" is the story of a young artist (and preschool teacher) in Kansas who realizes that the famous director who wants her to appear in his "documentary" is really using her as part of a commercial and refuses to participate. And, by the way, there is a story clearly set in Iowa City (although it's not directly identified), adding to my hypothesis about the Iowa Writers Workshop. 

Non-Fiction

Abigail Leonard followed Four Mothers as they approached motherhood and made their way through the first year of their children's lives. Because the four mothers were from four different countries--Japan, Kenya, Finland, and the U.S.--she was able to explore not only different cultural views on motherhood but also public policies toward motherhood, child care, and health care and how those policies evolved over time. Despite bringing unique backgrounds, professions, and relationships with their children's fathers to the story, many of the challenges the women face were similar in type but different in scope. One was external support available. Another was the fathers' inability or choice not to share equally in child care. The father of Chelsea's child was married and, although he at first wanted to be involved, gradually disappeared completely, leaving her without support. Anna and her partner were from different cultures and disagreed on child-raising, ending up separating rather acrimoniously when their child was an infant. Tsukasa's husband wanted to be involved, but his career and the attitudes toward work in Japan often made him unavailable. Sarah seemed to have the situation most likely to result in help from her husband--she was married and had the more lucrative job--but her husband was polyamorous and had other relationships outside the marriage, which took up time. It's all interesting and kind of sad, in that, despite a lot of rhetoric about how great parents are, we aren't doing much to help them. 

Favorite Passages

Her grandmother's euphemisms had a way of cutting deeper than anyone else's insults. Needle, needle, needle. It was like going to a bad acupuncturist.

    --Laura Lippman, Butchers Hill  (to clarify--my grandma didn't needle, but the description fits others I have known)

Authors and Issues: Kindred, Dream State, Terrace Story, and More

I already did a whole post of random notes, but here's one more--I just finished The Spy Coast, by Tess Gerritsen, which features a cluster of retired CIA agents. This leads me to ask: What started the current spate of books about older crime solvers (or perpetrators)? I suspect it was Richard Osman--there were older heroes before, but the popularity of his series seems likely to be the impetus. Although The Spy Coast seemed far-fetched to  me (of course, I know nothing about international intrigue/spycraft), I did appreciate that Gerritsen did not in any way make the retirees seem laughable as some of the other books in this vein do. I will give the second book in The Martini Club series a try. (And of course I'll be watching The Thursday Murder Club on Netflix when I have the chance.) 

This post is feeling very long, making me think maybe I should go back to monthly posts. Don't know if I'll actually do that, but I am posting this before summer is officially over (Labor Day always seems like the end, right?). 

Fiction

I debated whether to include Liars by Sarah Manguso on my "favorites." I didn't exactly enjoy it but that was because Manguso did such a masterful job of conveying what it is like for a woman (Jane)  married to an irresponsible, gaslighting, emotionally abusive, cheating man (John). She is a writer, with several books published; she is also in demand as a writing teacher. He is an artist and serially unsuccessful entrepreneur who constantly belittles her career, asking her to make more money while doing nothing to help at home (they have a son) and demanding they move pretty much annually for his work. The book is written in the first person, in short accounts of daily activities in their family; the fact that she refers to their son as "the child," never naming him, somehow adds to the claustrophobic feeling of reading this book. One of the blurbs on the cover described Liars as a "crime novel, except the crime is heterosexual marriage." So, not upbeat--but really well done. 

Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh, opens with a young American woman being the victim of a hit-and-run in Shanghai. When her divorced parents, Claire and Aaron Litvak, are notified, they are shocked to learn that rather teaching in Beijing, as they thought she was doing, Lindsey is actually living in Shanghai. Her apartment looks like it belongs to another woman--they have no idea why she is in Shanghai, why her closet is filled with clothes she would never wear, how she is paying her bills. They rush to Shanghai where there is little they can do. As Lindsey languishes in a coma, they reflect on their failed relationship and their daughters (their younger daughter Grace, who was adopted from China, is miserable at camp). We learn why Lindsey was in Shanghai and what she was doing there, as well as why she didn't tell her parents. There's a lot to reflect on about how our experience of love as a young person shapes us and future relationships, good and bad. My only quibble with the book is that, after we come to what feels like the climax of Lindsey, Claire, and Aaron's stories, there's a whole additional section about Grace, which feels like it was meant to be revelatory and uplifting but somehow just feels unnecessary. Despite that, I enjoyed the book. 

I don't really think Octavia Butler's Kindred is science fiction (the genre she is known for), but it does have a time travel element, so maybe. Dana, an African American woman living in 1976, time travels to a plantation in 1815. She fairly quickly figures out that the people of the plantation--white and black--are her ancestors and she must save Rufus, who is a young (white) boy in 1815 in order to ensure her own birth. When she returns to her own time, only a short period of time has past, even though her subsequent trips (each involving saving Rufus from something and each involving her more deeply in the life of the plantation) keep her longer in the past. Her white husband accompanies her on one trip and ends up trapped in the past for months when she returns. The novel explores interracial relationships in the 1970s as well as the brutality of slavery and its hideous effects on all involved. It's a complex and sometimes difficult read but thought-provoking in a variety of ways.

There's a lot going on in Dream State by Eric Puchner. Some of it didn't really work for me--namely, the author's attempt to weave climate change into the story, ending with Montana in a near-post-apocalyptic state. However, the main narrative of the book, which a NYT reviewer called a "coming-of-old-age" story, is engaging. Charlie and Garrett are best friends from college; while Charlie has become a successful anesthesiologist in California, Garrett has struggled since the death of another friend in a skiing accident for which he feels responsible. Then CeCe, Charlie's fiancee, comes to Montana to get ready for their wedding, and Charlie asks Garrett to befriend her. What happens next causes a rift that lasts for years while children are born and marriages go through the ups and downs of long relationships. Eventually, the friendship is mended, and the friends help each other through a child's addiction and CeCe's Alzheimer's. Perhaps because I'm old and have been through some "stuff," this all resonated with me. BTW: Dream State is a good multi-meaning title!

Weirdly, Culpability by Bruce Holsinger has some similarities to Dream State. It's a book about relationships, particularly family relationships, that also carries a current events theme, in this case AI and its effects. The book opens with a terrible car accident, in which two elderly people are killed while the Cassidy-Shaws all survive though it seems likely they (or their self-driving car) caused the accident. Each family member has some responsibility--17-year-old Charlie was driving, dad Noah was supposed to be the responsible adult but was on his laptop, mom Lorelei (an expert in AI) was similarly absorbed in work, and the sisters Izzy and Alice--well, I'll leave you to discover their involvement. The family gets away to the shore to heal, but the trip reveals further rifts. To be honest, I didn't love this book--near the end of the book Holsinger goes on way too much (in my opinion) about AI and I found Noah and Lorelei deeply annoying--but people with an interest in AI might enjoy it--and read back to back with Dream State, the "serious theme" similarity was so odd, I wanted to comment on it. It is probably not coincidental that both books were recent Oprah Book Club picks--Oprah does love an issue! BTW: Culpability is way too obvious a title.

And then came the third book in a row with an issue-based theme (again, climate change/planet destruction) behind the human story of friendship, loneliness, alienation, etc. Plus, Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter, has a metaverse aspect to it. To me, the book read like interlinked short stories, although it clearly says "A Novel" on the cover, so guess I'm wrong. Anyway, the book opens with young couple Annie, Edward, and their infant daughter Rose living in a tiny apartment, until Annie's coworker Stephanie comes over and their closet mysteriously turns into a lovely terrace. They soon discover it only appears when Stephanie is visiting, so they invite her over more and more often, entertaining her with "terrace stories," untrue accounts of their lives that Edward somehow sees as appropriate to the magical setting of the terrace. Annie begins to wonder if Stephanie and Edward are getting too close and then . . . don't want to spoil it. The next section is a slice of Annie's childhood; this is followed by a section on Stephanie from childhood up to and after her friendship with Edward and Annie (it's also the section when the metaverse element appears). The final section follows the climate apocalypse when Rose is interviewing people to become residents of "Suburbs," idealized space communities. As with Dream State and Culpability, the planetary destruction theme seems tacked on to the exploration of human relationships. I'm not sure what it all means, but it's weird and entertaining. 

Author Kate Fagan (Colorado alum and former Buff basketball player) uses an interesting structure for her first novel, The Three Lives of Cate Kay--a memoir of the author Cate Kay, presented as something of an oral history with other people who are part of her story providing their perspectives. Cate began life as Annie, a girl growing up in upstate New York with her best friend Amanda. The two are "drama kids," who dream of going to LA and becoming stars. On the eve of their departure, Amanda is hurt in an accident and Annie runs away, changing her name to Cass. Through deception by a lover, Cass believes Amanda is dead and she pours her grief into a post-apocalypse novel that becomes a sensation. Cass writes under the name Cate Kay and safely guards her identity, only revealing her identity to the actress Ryan who is going to star in the movie version of the novel . . . and they fall in love. Lots happens and there's a happy ending that felt a bit contrived. Still, the story and the exploration of friendship, grief, fame, and coming out kept me interested.  

Short Stories

I have seen Highway Thirteen, by Fiona McFarlane, classified as a mystery or thriller, but I don't see it that way, despite the fact that it's about a serial killer. It's not directly about the murders or about the hunt to find the killer. Rather it's a series of short stories about people whose lives were touched in some way by the killer and his crimes, from the podcasters who crow about new evidence to the couple who helped a young traveler later murdered by the killer, the actor who portrayed him in a film, one of the police officers who tracked him down, a politician with the same last name as the killer, a man whose feelings about his murdered sister are triggered by a young girl trick-or-treating alone. Of course, some stories resonate more than others, but taken together they paint a sad picture of how a horrendous crime can echo across time and space.

Mystery/Thriller

Summer was two-thirds over before I encountered a mystery I really liked--cause for consternation! Anyway, that mystery was the latest book from Karin Slaughter, We Are All Guilty Here, which is the first in the new North Falls series. Set in a small town in Georgia, the book introduces Emmy Clinton, a deputy in Clinton County, where her father is the sheriff--yeah, the Clintons are an influential and complicated family, a fact that provides a lot of backstory. Two teenage girls disappear during the town's Fourth of July celebration; eventually, a local man is convicted of kidnapping them. But 12 years later, he is released due to new evidence uncovered by a podcaster, and Emmy, her dad, and her son--who is now also a deputy--must decide what to do about that case, while looking for another young girl who has disappeared. In many ways, We Are All Guilty Here is a fairly typical mystery with some interesting twists, but the fact that Slaughter is a better writer than many who write in the genre sets it above everything else I've read so far this summer!

And then along came The Author's Guide to Murder, by Beatriz Williams, Laura Willig, and Karen White. It's a satire about three authors writing a book together, written by three authors. The three authors in the book write in different genres--fantasy romance, historical biography, and cozy mystery--and have distinctly different quirks (which many reviewers on Goodreads found very annoying). They travel to a writer's retreat at a castle in Scotland, all harboring justified rage toward the "host" of the retreat, who--surprise, surprise--ends up dead. Romance and mystery tropes all come in for satirical treatment, and it's quite silly . . . but fun. 

I  haven't loved every title in Cara Hunter's DI Adam Frawley series (I haven't read all of them yet), but I did like Hope to Die. The case at hand involves a young unidentified man killed in the home of an elderly couple who thought the dead fellow was an intruder. But was he? And did they know why he was really there? Things get more complicated when Frawley and company uncover the fact that the couple are the parents of a woman who was convicted in a notorious baby-killing case--and that's just the first of many twists. As she often does, Hunter includes manufactured "documents" that provide back story and insight into how the public sees the case. A fun read. 

Nonfiction

I am not a big nature person--I enjoy being outdoors but I don't approach it as a naturalist would. Thus, I am not the obvious audience for The Comfort of Crows, by Margaret Renkl--but I loved it. I listened to the audio book, read by the author in a gentle Southern accent that sometimes was a little too calming (i.e., I dozed off, not because the book was boring but because it created a sense of peace). However, I missed the illustrations by the author's brother so have ordered a print copy. The book is a series of short essays, each introduced by an evocative quote, that trace the changing seasons of the natural world and, through the author's memories, of human life. Many of the essays are titled "Praise Song for (the Coming Bud Burst, Mole Hands in the Coyote Scat, a Spring I Was Not Alive to See, etc.)," which is an indicator of Renkl's love of the natural world. Renkl doesn't shy away from the ways humans are affecting nature's cycles in deleterious ways, through climate change and habitat destruction. Despite this--and the inevitable "red in tooth and claw" moments--the book is somehow joyful. Fun fact: Margaret Renkl was Reese Witherspoon's high school English teacher.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams is not joyful. In fact, it's right up there with Empire of Pain in the not joyful category. The author worked at Facebook for seven years in the mid-2010s, working directly with top management, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Wynn-Williams had believed so strongly that Facebook could have a positive impact globally that she had spent more than a year trying to get a job at FB working on policy and relations with other countries. However, when she actually got hired, it did not take long for her to recognize that the concern at the company, specifically of Mark Zuckerberg, was not its stated mission of connecting people but growth of the business. She recounts numerous stories of utter lack of concern for the common good, whether that might involve the mental health of teenage girls targeted by advertisers for beauty products when their posts indicated they were feeling sad or depressed or the literal safety of tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar who were targeted by hate speech that Facebook content monitors were leaving up even when confronted about their clear violation of Facebook policies or the integrity of U.S. elections (FB embedded staff in the Trump 2016 campaign to teach them how to use disinformation and incendiary posts to increase engagement; they offered the same service to the Clinton campaign, which turned them down). Executives lie repeatedly to the public, to policymakers, to everyone. The entire effort to get Facebook into China is a mass of deception, illegal activity, and disregard for the wellbeing of Chinese people, the security of all Facebook users' personal data, and democratic principles. Zuckerberg comes across as an immature narcissist who is so upset over President Obama confronted him about Facebook's role in the election that he plans visits to all of the early presidential primary states in what certainly appears to reflect some interest in running for president (thankfully that run hasn't happened . . . yet). There is also a strong thread of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the company. Some critics have charged that Wynn-Williams is just a disgruntled fired employee. Fine, but colleagues have spoken up to support her claims, and I suspect that her picture of the company is accurate. Definitely worth reading.

In 2019, on a trip to Sierra Leone, John Green met Henry, a teenaged tuberculosis patient. Already somewhat obsessed with microbes as a symptom of his OCD, Green began a deep dive into the history, treatment, and current status of tuberculosis. The result is the informative Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. If you don't know much about TB--those of us in wealthy countries generally have the privilege of ignorance--you are likely to find much in the book, particularly the number of annual TB deaths worldwide, shocking (note: TB is readily curable).  A theme of the book is "The disease is where the cure is not. The cure is where the disease is not." Why? Because the system (i.e., us) does not care sufficiently to stop stigmatizing TB patients in poor and marginalized communities/countries and provide them with respectful, effective treatment, a lack of care that is exacerbated by concern for profit/cost-effectiveness. It is, as Green says, a "disease of injustice." I highly recommend this book--you will learn a lot about TB and some about John Green, which, if you are already a fan of his work, will only make you like him better. 

Favorite Passages

I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.

    --Sarah Manguso, Liars (I could pull out a lot of other quotes but it would be really depressing)

We live at the intersection of causality and chance.

     --Jennifer Haigh, Rabbit Moon

Absorbed by the grace of his undulating flight, I never thought to reach for my camera. This will make me sound like the worst sort of crank, but here is the truth: the only reason I carry a cell phone is to have a camera in my pocket, ready to record something extraordinary. I can't see the point of taking selfies. This pronouncement is surely an irony coming from an essayist, someone who keeps her finger on her own pulse for a living. As a writer, I err toward earnestness, but I'm at ease with this particular irony. The visible world is astonishingly, heartbreakingly lovely. Why waste it looking at myself? On the other hand, what good is having a camera in your pocket if you don't take it out in the presence of something wild and beautiful and rare. I stood that morning motionless while the most primeval of all the woodland birds disappeared into the forest. I walked out of the woods with not  a single image to commemorate the encounter. I was angry with myself trudging back toward the cabin, but it wasn't long before I began to reconsider. Even when it is pointed in the right direction, a camera has a way of stunting sight. How truly valuable is a device that makes you take your eyes from an experience so momentary you might miss it altogether? 

     --Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows

Now I'm consumed by the worst of it. The grief and sorrow of it. How Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things. How it's an astonishngly effective machine to turn people against each other. And monitor people at a scale that was never possible before. And manipulate them. It's an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes . . . 

    --Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People

We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause. 

We must also be the cure. 

     --John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis

I didn't like coffee. I liked cream and I liked sugar. Coffee was the vessel.

I'm always noticing the little ways society protects us from the menace of silence, like with Muzak in elevators. Humans; we built the Pyramids and made all the world's information instantly accessible, but apparently if we stand together quietly, we'll short-circuit and melt.

    --Kate Fagan, The Three Lives of Cate Kay

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