Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Other January Reading

A new year, new books, some of them very good, some of them not worth writing about. But all in all, an interesting month.

The "Best of" List 

I continued reading from the LitHub list of books on the most "best of" lists for 2019, and it was really a mixed bag. At the top of the list was a wonderful nonfiction title (maybe a memoir--not sure how to classify it) Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb. Gottlieb is a therapist who is gobsmacked when "Boyfriend," with whom she was planning a future, suddenly breaks up with her. She seeks a therapist (the process of finding someone who is highly regarded by peers without telling them it's for you was indicative of Gottlieb's humor, which suffuses the book) and ends up with "Wendell." The book recounts breakthroughs and speed bumps on Wendell's couch while also describing the work Gottlieb is doing with four of her patients. She offers insight into various therapeutic approaches and, at a more fundamental level, into human nature. I found a lot to think about, talk about, and enjoy in this book. Highly recommended.

At the other end of the enjoyment spectrum was On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, which was one of the two books at the top of that LitHub list, appearing on 21 lists (the other was Nickel Boys, which I read last year). Vuong is a poet, and much of the language in On Earth is graceful and moving. The story is framed as a letter from a son, Little Dog, now in his 20s, to his mother, who it seems likely could not actually read it, and conveys a seemingly random series of memories from his childhood. The parts that focused on the mother-son relationship and the lives of the women of the family in Vietnam before they immigrated were insightful and moving. But the teenage sexual relationship between Little Dog and a white boy in a position of economic power over Little Dog was so abusive and so graphically described that I trouble had reading those sections. In addition, all of the different memories didn't seem to actually add up to anything. So despite some positives, I did not enjoy this book and wouldn't recommend it to most people.

The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner (another novelist-poet), was interesting but not completely successful. Adam Gordon, a high school senior and champion debater, seems to be the protagonist. But he shares so much time with his parents--his father a psychologist focusing on "Lost boys, his mother a feminist scholar--and an "outsider" classmate that Adam and his friends manipulate mercilessly that I did not feel I got to know him well enough to understand what this book was supposed to be about. I've read reviews that purport to know (though they don't necessarily agree), so it may be that I do not understand enough about white male rage or "trauma, sex, paradox, magic" to comprehend this book. But whatever the reason, it fell flat for me.

As an almost-70 white American woman, I am not the intended audience for Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams, which is the story of a Jamaican British millennial journalist whose long-term boyfriend has recently broken up with her. While waiting for him to come to her senses, she dates some fairly hideous men and at work struggles with racism, frustration that her story ideas are rejected, too-frequent absences, and a totally unfounded accusation of sexual harassment. Things get so bad she's forced to move back in with her grandmother, which has both its ups and downs. The biggest plus in the midst of Queenie's breakdown is her group of three friends, nicknamed "The Corgis," who offer love and good advice (which she doesn't always heed). I appreciate the portrayal of day-to-day racism in Great Britain but I found Queenie's decisions so frustrating I often wanted to scream at her. Perhaps a typical Baby Boomer reaction to a millennial's stressors.

The Testaments is Margaret Atwood's follow-up to the classic The Handmaid's Tale. Because I only recently read The Handmaid's Tale, I didn't have the longstanding commitment to the book that made it hard for some readers to accept The Testaments. Consequently, I very much enjoyed the sequel's story focusing on three characters--Aunt Lydia, a young girl living in Canada who does not realize she is a famous child kidnapped from Gilead, and a Commander's daughter who is facing the prospect of marrying a repulsive older man and getting lost in the role of wife. It may not be as good as its predecessor, but it's plenty good!

Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe, has been been billed as a mystery about the death of a widowed Irish mother of ten during "The Troubles," but it's not really much of a mystery. It's more of a history of The Troubles from the perspective of a few of the participants. I took two main take-aways from the book: (1) Gerry Adams was a tool who denied his role in the IRA and managed to convince a lot of people that he was innocent of any violence and (2) the oral history project launched by a binational team of Irish and Americans (at Boston College) seemed like a good idea but was so ill-conceived it is mind-boggling. The book is a tad slow-moving but provides insight into the causes and consequences of political violence. 

I generally don't care for short stories, and Orange World & Other Stories, by Karen Russell did not change my mind. Many of the stories involve elements of creepy "magical realism"-- the living and the dead interacting, a woman's body taken over by a Joshua tree, young mothers must nurse demons to save their babies. The one story I enjoyed was "The Tornado Auction," in which a lonely former tornado farmer buys a baby tornado to bring meaning back to his life. Weird but entertaining. The rest of the stories . . . not so much.

I wanted to like Miriam Toews' Women Talking, which is based on real events in a Mennonite community in which women and children were drugged and raped by the men of the community. Toews imagines eight women who meet in a barn to debate whether the women of the community should leave, rebel, or do nothing--and how their decision will impact their relationship with God; they invite the male schoolteacher, reviled as unmanly because he failed as a farmer, to take minutes. The book is supposedly those minutes. I found the book repetitive and, finally, dull. Not recommended.

Other January Reading

I really enjoyed Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, by Pam Houston. Houston shares how buying a ranch in the high country near Creede, Colorado, essentially saved her life. Part of the reason her life needed saving was the horrible abuse she suffered from her father and the lack of any kind of support from her mother. Somehow, caring for animals and doing the hard labor required to maintain a small ranch gave her solace and hope. I was less fond of a detailed description of the 2013 fire that came very close to her ranch. It presented a lot of information, with definitions of fire terms interspersed throughout the text, and just didn't flow like the rest of the book, which included many beautiful passages that made me stop to savor Houston's writing.

Thirty years ago, I used to read a lot of true crime. I read Fatal Vision, talked about it relentlessly, and went on a binge of Ann Rule-type books. So this month, I tried an Ann Rule book, Practice to Deceive, which focuses on a 2003 murder in Whitby, Washington. The book is not very satisfying, as Rule did not have access to the guilty parties and never uncovered a motive for the killing. This made me wonder how many cases a true crime writer starts working on before choosing one--if you choose the wrong one, years of research would go down the drain, or you end up with a mediocre book like this!

Everything Inside, by Edwidge Danticat, is an excellent collection of short stories, all involving characters with connections to Danticat's homeland of Haiti. The stories are mostly downers--in "Dosas," a woman helps her ex out financially when he tells her his new woman has been kidnapped, only to learn she's been scammed; "In the Old Days," a woman goes to visit the father she has never known only to find he died shortly before she arrives; a teenager with AIDS is given a worthless placebo in another story; and a man who survived being pushed from a boat en route from Haiti to the United States falls into a cement truck. Yes, the stories are hardly uplifting, but they're well crafted and worth reading.

Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living presents Krista Tippett's reflections following countless interviews with spiritual leaders, thinkers, and scientists on her radio program On Being. The work is organized around five "basic aspects of the human everyday . . . breeding grounds for wisdom": words, the body, love, faith, and hope. The book is hopeful, with many thought-provoking excerpts from interviews Tippett has conducted. All together, however, I felt like I might learn more by listening to old On Being programs.

My education was sorely lacking in terms of reading the classics, a fact I from time to time try to remedy. I don't think there's anything I need to say about Frankenstein, other than that I was surprised how much I liked it.

My YA book for the month was Dear Martin, by Nic Stone. Stone has admirable intentions--exploring racism, particularly police violence against African Americans, while also examining normal issues of teenage angst. While her protagonist, Justyce, an African American teenager, a senior at a private school with few African American students, is engaging, I don't think the book worked overall. The device of Justyce writing letters to Dr. King doesn't really go anywhere, and the dialogue often seems like a series of mini-lectures. Similar issues are explored much more skillfully in The Hate U Give.

Favorite Passages

Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.

There is love in these old logs and in RJ's workmanship and I can feel it every time I walk inside. We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us--it's as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we've slept, the kitchens where we've cooked, in the food we've prepared for the people we love and in the walls we've shaped with our hands.

Pam Houston, Deep Creek (and there are so many more!)