I read a lot in November—partly because I have had a cold that won’t quit and have been reading while lying around—and enjoyed a surprising number of the books read. I still read some titles I ended up sneering at, but in the spirit of the holidays, I've decided not to deal with them here.
Fiction
Lake Success, by Gary Shteyngart. Hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen, plagued by an SEC investigation and unable to cope with his three-year-old's autism diagnosis, takes off on a Greyhound bus in search of his college girlfriend, leaving his much younger wife Seema to cope with their son, her immigrant parents, and the SEC. Barry's experiences as he lurches across he country might teach a better man something important about himself or humanity, but Barry is not the reflective type. Seema, on the other hand, grows in her Barry-free time, finding ways to encourage their son to become a functioning human being. This book was my first by Shteyngart, but it won't be my last.
Searching for Sylvie Lee, by Jean Kwok. Sylvie Lee is the older daughter of Chinese immigrants to the United States who spent the first 9 years of her life living in the Netherlands with her grandmother and an aunt. After travelling back to the Netherlands to be with her dying grandmother, she disappears, and her younger (and much less accomplished) sister Amy travels to Europe to try to find her. As Amy searches for her sister, she uncovers family history that has been held secret for decades. The story is told asynchronously from the viewpoints of Sylvie, Amy, and their mother; as the climax approaches, we begin to sense what may have happened, but there is still a bit of a twist at the end. An engrossing family drama.
Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue. Cameroonian immigrant Jende thinks he has landed his dream job driving for Lehman Brothers executive Clark. Jende's wife Neni and their son have joined him in the United States, and she is going to school and expecting their second child. Despite the challenges of being an immigrant in the United States, they believe they are on their way. Then the great recession hits, and Jende loses his job and his somewhat trumped-up asylum request. As his family struggles, so does Clark's family, as dreams at many levels (people might have to start flying coach!) are crushed. What makes this book different from so many other immigrant stories (SPOILER) is that Jende, over Neni's objections, decides the family should return to Cameroon.
The Confession Club, by Elizabeth Berg. This is Berg's third feel-good book set in Mason, Missouri. The center of this story is a group of women who meet regularly to eat and confess to each other their misdeeds and regrets. Several characters from the previous two books reappear with new problems to solve, but all ends happily. It's corny but charming.
Nonfiction
Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams. Williams is brilliant, a marvelous writer, and an environmental advocate. While reading Erosion, I occasionally felt I had read the same environmental arguments in her book about the national parks, but her writing about the reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments reminded me of the destructiveness of the Trump Administration (so much keeps happening that you forget the outrages of first two years) and the utter lack of understanding of the indigenous people's histories. Her essay on her brother's suicide is terribly raw and moving, beautiful in its grief. The book is not uniformly great, but there's enough that is to make it worthwhile.
Eat Joy: Stories and Comfort Food, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett. This collection brings together writings (and recipes) from a variety of well-known authors, who describe a moment in their lives when food was important. The title is somewhat misleading, as many of the stories have more to do with sadness than joy--dead fathers abound (Edwidge Danticat's essay about sharing rice with her dying father is perhaps my favorite)--but the pieces are nonetheless rewarding. And it's somewhat shocking what horrible food some authors lived on (General Tso's tofu, anyone?).
To Obama, with Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope, by Jeanne Marie Laskas. Every day of his presidency, Barack Obama read 10 letters from constituents, sometimes replying with handwritten notes, other times leaving directions for staff to investigate and respond. Selecting these letters was only a small part of the work of the Office of Presidential Correspondence, and Laskas gives us insight into what that work involved, its rewards and its challenges (the office received a lot of what were termed Red Dot letters, those that suggested an emergency in progress, whether self-harm or violence against others, and under protocol had to be responded to with assistance within 24 hours). Laskas talked to a number of people whose letters made it into 10LAD, examining how writing the letter and getting a response affected them. She also talked to President Obama about how the letters affected him. He told her, "If we duplicate enough of those moments, enough of those interactions, enough of those shared stories, over time we get better at this thing called democracy. And that is something that all of us have the capacity to do. That's not the job of the president. That's not the job of a bunch of professional policy makers. It's the job of citizens." Of course, the letters and the President's responses are the soul of the book--it's good to be reminded how angry people were in 2008 (and interesting to see that Obama often argued with accusations made against him). To Obama may not be the deepest book written about his historic administration, but it's an enjoyable one.
Mysteries
Those People by Louise Candlish. Candlish's work reminds me of the novels of Liane Moriarty--both skewer the smug self-satisfaction of the upper middle class and do it in a way that is both creepy and humorous. The fact that Those People includes police interviews with people in the neighborhood where the book is set makes this title even more reminiscent of Moriarty's Big Little Lies. In Those People, a lovely suburban neighborhood near London is disrupted when a lower class gent inherits a house on the block. He and his female partner immediately offend by playing heavy metal at deafness-causing levels, parking a variety of junky vehicles on the street and in their yard, and starting construction projects that promise to be protracted. Then the scaffolding required for one of the projects collapses, killing someone. Was it an accident, negligence, sabotage? Relationships break down as the police investigate. It's entertaining and somewhat mysterious.
Favorite Passages:
Whatever I know as a woman about spirituality, I have learned from my body encountering Earth. Soul and soil are not separate. Neither is wind and spirit, nor water and tears. We are eroding and evolving at once, like the red rock landscape before me. Our grief is our love. Our love will be our undoing as we quietly disengage from the collective madness of the patriarchal mind that says aggression is the way forward.
Erosion, by Terry Tempest Williams
Election Results
An Abecedarian
A shuffle of slippers awakes me. I arise from my
bed. Mom looks at me through tearstained cheeks. "Honey, she lost.
Clinton lost." I squeeze my eyes shut. I can't even pretend to suppress the
dry sob that
echoes in my throat. Someone
fear-driven will be the head of this
glorious nation, my
home country. How could we have done this?
I convince myself to get up. The days are now numbered until
January 20th, that dreaded day when our true leader is
kicked out, no
longer in the position to
make our country the place we
need it to be. Right now,
only Obama can make me feel better, so I
press the Home button on my iPad to watch his speeches.
Quiet tears leak down my face, a whispered
reminder: my Mexican, Asian, and Muslim friends may
soon be leaving me, all because of
Trump, who can't even begin to
understand the rest of the world's point of
view. I thought I
would be angry. Instead, I'm sad that he's brainwashed America with his
xenophobia-ridden lies. I turn back to Obama,
yearning for everything and nothing at the same time. I tell myself.
"Zoe. We can get through this."
Zoe Ruff, age 13, in a letter to President Obama
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