Mysteries
Red Ribbons, by Louise Phillips
Y Is for Yesterday, by Sue Grafton
Proof of Life, by J.A. Jance
Boar Island, by Nevada Barr
The 14th Colony, by Steve Berry
Red Ribbons was the first in a series that now has additional numbers. It features Dr. Kate Pearson, a psychologist and profiler who is brought into what appears to be a case involving serial murder of young girls. The story is told from Kate's perspective, as well as those of the killer (quite creepily portrayed) and a woman who has been in a mental hospital for more than a decade because she is believed to have killed her daughter. Even the noncriminal characters are not very sympathetic, perhaps because they do so many stupid things. Doubt I will give book 2 of the series a try.
Y Is for Yesterday (Kinsey Milhone) and Proof of Life (J.P. Beaumont) are the latest titles in long-running series. Both are okay but not the best of their respective series--still better than most series after 20 or so books! Boar Island is also part of a lengthy series (Anna Pigeon), but not one that I have regularly read. I read a couple of the early titles in the series, set in different national parks, but didn't really care for them; I just picked this one up because I couldn't find anything else on Overdrive--and I didn't care for it either.
I didn't care too much for The 14th Colony either (sometimes I'm just hard to please), but it did seem relevant to current events, since it deals with Russian interference in U.S. politics (interference may be too tame a word for what happens in the book, but I'm going with it anyway) and questions having to do with the 20th Amendment and succession in the event of a mass murder at inauguration. Although the 25th Amendment would be even more relevant (perhaps wishful thinking), the constitutional twist was interesting to me, as my sister, who mentioned the book to me, thought it might be.
Fiction
Moshi, Moshi, by Banana Yoshimoto
The Chalk Artist, by Allegra Goodman
Longbourn, by Jo Baker
Class Mom, by Laurie Gelman
New People, by Danzy Senna
The Refugees, by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Love and Other Consolation Prizes, by Jamie Ford
And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer, by Fredrik Backman
The set-up for Moshi, Moshi is intriguing: Yoshie is a 20-something whose musician father has died in an apparent suicide pact with a mysterious woman. She struggles to deal with her grief and the shocking circumstances, which to her are unbelievable. As Yoshie finds some comfort in learning the restaurant business and moves out of her parents' upscale condo, she comes home one day to find that her mother has moved in with her. She acquiesces with this new living situation, recognizing that her mother is struggling as well, and she tentatively builds a relationship as she investigates the woman who died with her father. I didn't find the book's ending entirely satisfying, I take responsibility for not fully understanding the Japanese perspective.
The Chalk Artist is a love story set among millennials in a video game world. The main characters are Collin, the title character whose life seems as aimless as you might expect from someone whose medium is transitory, and Nina, an inadequately prepared high school teacher struggling to reach her students. Nina's father also happens to be the head of a cutting-edge video game company and she decides to "help" Collin by getting him a job at her father's company. Disillusionment, a break-up, and way too much description of video games ensue. Disappointing.
Also disappointing was Longbourn, about which I had recently read some very positive comments. Baker tells the story of servants at the Bennett family home (in case you are like my older son, who claims Pride and Prejudice ruined his reading life, these are the people in P&P). It was eye-opening to read about the amount of work that went in to keeping such a household going but the story made even the most far-fetched soap opera twists of Downton Abbey seem believable.
Satirical treatments of millennial and Gen X parents are popular of late, and Class Mom is another entry in that vein. As her third, much younger child enters kindergarten, Jen Dixon isn't about to be the perfect class mom that the other parents expect. The book offers some laughs but lacks both the bite and the warmth of, say, Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies.
As the mother of biracial children, I have found Danzy Senna's exploration of related issues in Caucasia and You Are Free both uncomfortable and insightful. Consequently, I was looking forward to New People. and found that the discomfort outweighed the insight. At the center of the book are Maria and Khalil, an engaged couple who met at Stanford and were "the same shade of beige." They now live in New York, where Khalil is busy with professional concerns while Maria works on her dissertation about music in Jonestown. They have been chosen to be among the subjects of a documentary on racially ambiguous people; meanwhile, plans for their wedding are proceeding as Maria tries to convince herself that good sex isn't so important and she can tolerate Khalil's dreams for their future, despite their being antithetical to her notions of the life she wants. While all of this is happening, Maria is also stalking a poet and getting into increasingly strange and potentially dangerous situations. Is her breakdown caused by the expectations placed on a woman of her background, her struggles to figure out who she is, racially and intellectually, or her bad decisions? I don't know--and, frankly, I care more about the injustice to Khalil, which I doubt is what Senna intended.
The Refugees is a collection of eight short stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, The stories depict the lives of refugees from Vietnam, including struggles unique to their experience and universal challenges. A woman, a ghostwriter of autobiographies about scandalous lives, is haunted by the ghost of her brother, who died in the escape (by boat) from Vietnam. Another woman tries to deal with her professor-husband's dementia, as he mistakes her for someone she gradually surmises was the real love of his life. A man has two sets of children--one of which escaped to the United States with their mother, the others, to whom he gives the same names as the first set, lives in Vietnam. When the American daughter Phuong visits the Vietnamese daughter Phuong, secrets will out. An orphaned boy is adopted by a gay couple in San Francisco, experiencing multifaceted culture shock. Even this short story skeptic found these stories evocative and well worth reading.
At the heart of Love and Other Consolation Prizes is a shocking story--the raffling of a Chinese immigrant orphan at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition held in Seattle in 1909. That boy--Ernest Young--is recalling the events that led to and followed from that moment as Seattle celebrates another World's Fair in 1962. Ford weaves in details about the experience of coming to the United States in steerage, working in the red light district, the crusade against prostitution, and much more as he weaves a story of a young man who loves two girls and what happens when he chooses one. An enjoyable read.
Since And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer is a novella, the title seems overly long, but the work is a sweet reflection on the relationship between a boy and his widowed grandfather as the grandfather's mind slowly deteriorates. I haven't read any of Backman's much-hyped longer works, but this lovely piece convinced me that I should.
Science Fiction/Fantasy
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
Anathem is my second book by Neal Stephenson, an author who creates complex worlds populated by interesting characters. His books are difficult to synopsize, but this one is about a young man, Fraa Erasmas, who lives in a concent, similar to a monastery, but for mathematicians rather than the religious. His generally peaceful life comes to a crashing halt when the world (not Earth) is threatened by interplanetary forces. Some parts of the book were a little too philosophical and mathematical for me, and I somewhat regretted that I was listening to it rather than reading it, since Stephenson engages in a lot of word play that I felt I would have appreciated more in print. Nonetheless, I found the book entertaining.
Drama
Murder in the Cathedral, by T.S. Eliot
Murder in the Cathedral is a classic, a dramatization in verse of the assassination of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett. To be honest (and I'm 100% sure the problem is mine and not Eliot's), I found it difficult, although it started to make more sense when I read it aloud.
Nonfiction
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens
It's Always Something, by Gilda Radner
Book of Days, by Emily Fox Gordon
Christopher Hitchens' detailed argument against religion seems, to me, to be a book without an audience. Those who agree with him do not need his close reading of texts and analysis of the ways in which religion, a man-made phenomenon has been destructive in human history. Those who disagree with him will be unmoved by his arguments--faith is unlikely to be shaken by logic, reasoning, or science. Without even mentioning in which camp I fall, I found the book tedious.
Gilda Radner was a brilliant comedian, and her book is sometimes funny. But mostly it is terribly sad description of her illness, her treatment, her relationships with various doctors as well as with her husband, and her efforts to help others through the Wellness Community. Knowing that she died about a month after recording the audio version of the book (which I listened to), her effort to be optimistic is truly heart-breaking.
Last month I read several memoirs that were well worth the time. This month, I encountered a memoir that reaffirmed for me while I have traditionally had little respect for the genre and its writers. Emily Fox Gordon spent her early adult years apparently doing very little, which she regarded as preparation for finding her metier as a memoirist (she calls her works "personal essays," according to her an essentially modest form compared to the grandiosity of memoir--yet she refers to herself as a memoirist). To me, that would seem to give a person little to write about, but this doesn't stop Gordon. I found her "personal essays" empty of interesting or meaningful content and found myself highly annoyed by her condescending attitude. She found herself a faculty wife by default--but she was a faculty wife because she was married to a professor, just like all faculty wives (or spouses). Because she didn't want to think of herself as a faculty wife does not exempt her from that descriptor. Her husband is a philosopher, long possessed of a university appointment and widely published (by her own description)--yet she dismisses him as not being a scholar. Perhaps most damning (for me) is her statement that "For the essay, the equivalent of plot and characterization is thought." Please!! Good fiction requires so much more thought than bad memoir, I can't even stand it.
Pick of the Litter: The Refugees (somehow I feel it's wrong to pick a brief novella, but And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer was wonderful)
Favorite Passages
We shared a passion for words, but I preferred the silence of writing while she loved to talk.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees
If life is a process of accumulating more and more things
you simply can’t bring yourself to make peace with, well, my feelings about
this are vast and deep enough for an entire lifetime’s worth of hang-ups.
Banana Yoshimoto, Moshi Moshi
That's why we get the chance to spoil our grandchildren, because by doing that we're apologizing to our children.
Fredrik Backman, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer
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