Dog Days Start Early

It seems like the Dog Days of Summer have started early this year--perhaps because it's been hot or because the pandemic is resurging (if that's a word) or because I dog-sat an actual dog twice in a month (technically, one time was in June, but who's counting?). Or maybe it's because I read some dogs this month. But, as usual, there were some good ones too. 

Fiction

Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli. None of the four major characters in this novel have names--they are a married couple referred to as Mama and Papa, his son (The Boy), and her daughter (The Girl). After meeting and falling in love while working on a project to archive the sounds of New York City, the parents are both contemplating new projects and decide to take a family trip to the Southwest to explore the possibilities. Papa is obsessed with the Apache, while Mama is researching lost child refugees. As they travel cross-country, tensions between the parents increase, and The Boy, at least, is aware of the possible break-up of their family and looking for a solution.The book is much more complex than I am depicting it--it's complicated and sad and well worth reading.

Anatomy of a Miracle, by Jonathan Miles. This is a very unusual book, written to resemble a nonfiction book about a paraplegic veteran who suddenly stands up and walks (the resemblance to a nonfiction treatment seems to fade as the book progresses). The mysterious miracle has a ripple effect, influencing the vet's sister, his doctor, his pastor, the couple that runs the convenience store where the miracle happened, a reality show producer who wants to make a show about the vet. It's weird, and the romantic ending comes out of nowhere, but the book is nonetheless entertaining. 

Recipe for a Perfect Wife, by Karma Brown. I had read some glowing reviews of this book, which depicts the lives of two women who lived in the same house, 70 years apart. While Nellie Murdoch appears to be a perfect 1950s housewife, her husband is abusive, and she is determined not to have his child. The current occupant of the house, Alice Hale, has been pressured by her husband to move to the suburbs after losing her job. He sees it as the ideal opportunity for her to write her novel while they work on getting pregnant.  She finds Nellie's cookbook and a neighbor gives her some letters written by Nellie, and she begins to feel comfortable wearing retro housedresses and cooking such 50s gems as tuna casserole with potato chip. Yet she resists getting pregnant by secretly getting an IUD and doesn't tell her husband that she hasn't written a word of the novel. While the format of the book and the cover suggest a lightness, both stories are on the dark side.  Not really up to the glowing views, but still fairly entertaining.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien. I've had this book for years and resisted reading it, at least in part because I have trouble dealing with books or movies about Vietnam. It's been described as "an arc of fictional episodes, taking place in the childhoods of its characters, in the jungles of Vietnam and back home in America two decades later"-- and that description is better than anything I could come up with.  There is circling back to tell stories in different ways, some brutal descriptions, and also lyrical language. There are "meta" aspects to the book, with O'Brien talking about stories told that didn't happen but were true. A masterpiece but not always easy to read. 

Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong. Ruth decides to leave her job in the Bay Area for a year to return to her parents' home and help her mother with her father, who has dementia and has been involuntarily retired from his job as a professor. Ruth, her father's teaching assistant, and a group of his students decide to cheer him by telling him the department has decided to let him teach one seminar. The seminar is fake, but it has the desired effect until he discovers their deception. The book is sweet and funny while giving some insight into the progress of dementia. I loved it! 

Meg and Jo, by Virginia Kantra. Meg and Jo is a somewhat silly retelling of Little Women set in modern-day North Carolina (and New York), with Mr. March cast as a self-satisfied jerk (I might have to reread Little Women just to see how Alcott treated him--or maybe Geraldine Brooks' March).  Yet I enjoyed it and fully expect to read Beth and Amy when it inevitably comes out. 

Mysteries

Two Girls Down, by Louisa Luna. Single mother Jamie leaves her 8- and 10-year-old daughters in the car when she runs into K-Mart for 5 minutes. When she returns, they are gone. With the police seemingly overburdened with the meth and opioid crisis, the family hires bounty hunter Alice Vega, who has a reputation for finding lost children. She's from out-of-town, so hires on local ex-cop Max Caplan to help her try to find the girls. Not a standout, but good enough that I'm currently about to start another book by Luna. 

Nonfiction

First: Sandra Day O'Connor, by Evan Thomas. This biography of Sandra Day O'Connor made me appreciate the tremendous pressure that Sandra Day O'Connor was under as the first female Supreme Court Justice, especially one who was not as well-prepared as many other justices. I also found myself somewhat annoyed by the very social (and, one might say, political) life that she led in Washington, DC, at least in part to make her beloved and very social husband John happy. (Her efforts to keep John at home and maintain her job when he was slipping rapidly into dementia are heartbreaking.) Her clear partisanship make her vote in Bush v. Gore easier to understand, but no less infuriating.  Still, even after reading the book, I found I did not understand her as a person very well at all--she remained an enigma. One irritating thing about the book: The author often wrote about her as thought she were dead--which she still is not. But that doesn't stop me from recommending the book.  

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward. Although published in 2017, this collection is tragically just as timely (and sadly shows very little has changed since Baldwin's work was published in the 1960s). As with most collections of essays by various authors, some entries resonated more with me than others. Some of my favorites: Wendy Walters' "Lonely in America" describing her attempts to uncover the truth about the discovery of long-buried African Americans in Portsmouth, NH;  Garnette Cadogan's "Black and Blue" about walking in Kingston, Jamaica, New Orleans, and New York; Claudia Rankine's "The Condition of Black Life Is one of Mourning," which connects Mamie Till's decision to allow her son's body to be photographed with the Black Lives Movement. You would likely find others most interesting/challenging/stimulating--definitely worth exploring the collection to find your favorites. 

The Dogs (Oh, look, they're all mysteries!)

A Reasonable Doubt, by Phillip Margolin

I Know Who You Are, by Alice Feeney

The Escape Artist, by Brad Meltzer

Dark Corners of the Night, by Meg Gardiner

The Murder List, by Hank Phillippi Ryan

A Double Life, by Flynn Berry

Someone We Know, by Shari LaPena

The Suspect, by Fiona Barton

These Women, by Ivy Pochoda (despite very positive reviews suggesting this book was a significant commentary on class, I thought it was completely unbelievable)

Favorite Passages:

The way home became home.

Garnette Cadogan in The Fire This Time

What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person, what we felt about that person.

Rachel Khong, Goodbye, Vitamin

Reading and Reopening

Our library started curbside pickup in June, which was great (it also had delivery to seniors but I figured though I am pretty darn old, I am also able to get around and shouldn't use that service). The library is reopening July 1, with restrictions and safety precautions. Book stores have also reopened, although I have not ventured into one as yet. I did get two book store gift cards for my birthday and have to report that the online mail ordering process at Denver's renowned Tattered Cover was much less user-friendly than that at the much smaller Book Bar, which has done a great job throughout the pandemic. They definitely have a new fan in me.

Anyway, as an older person, I have mostly been remaining home in June and have gotten a lot of reading done, some of it good.

Fiction

Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore is an older collection of Moore's short stories (I think it was her first book). I was surprised--but perhaps shouldn't have been given the collection's title--that a majority of the stories are written in the second person, parodying the self-help form. Stories purport to give advice about how to be the other woman, get through your parents' divorce, leave a man who's dying, talk to your mother, or become a writer. The last story in the collection, not in the second-person format, details the mental collapse of a middle-aged woman whose marriage is loveless and whose mother has dementia. As is typical for Moore, the stories can be both grim and funny. Remembering how my first book group responded to another Moore collection 30 years ago, I can imagine that some readers would not find the humor in the stories--but I enjoyed her work.

My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell, is one of the disturbing books I have read in some time. As a 15-year-old, the titular character was abused by her 45-year-old English teacher. Yet, as an adult, she struggles to see their "relationship" as abusive, despite the evidence that the teacher repeated the same behavior with multiple other students--indeed, she refuses to believe the story of another woman who comes forward. Russell does an especially good job of depicting the manipulation that the teacher subjected Vanessa to and the long-term effects of being the victim of such manipulations. I questioned whether we needed the rather detailed description of sexual encounters between Vanessa and the teacher. The author has talked about this in multiple interviews, saying "Those scenes are so important and so formative, because even though those are scenes of abuse, that's also her introduction to sex, and you can't untangle the two . . .  it is coercive and even violent, but it's also just sex." To my mind, no, not really. There's also been controversy around the book, with Latina author Wendy Ortiz alleging that the story was plagiarized from her memoir, which she had difficulty getting published. In a preface to the book, Russell had emphasized that this was not her story, that it was fiction. Since the plagiarism accusations came out, Russell has gone public with the fact that she was abused by older men as a teenager. Still sorting out my thoughts on this book so not sure I can say I recommend it. I can say that the audiobook was very skillfully narrated by Mamie Gummer.

Your House Will Pay, by Steph Cha, is extremely timely, as it is a fictionalized account of the long-range impacts of the killing of African American teenager LaTasha Harlins by Korean American shopkeeper Soon Ja Du on the two families involved. Two characters center the novel. Shawn is the cousin of the murdered girl; has spent some time in prison but has been out and working hard to build a life and support his extended family. His cousin's death has scarred him, but he is still shocked when the killer, who escaped jail time, is shot--and the evidence suggests it was someone in his family when shot her. The second key character is Grace, the daughter of the shopkeeper-killer, who knew nothing of her family's history until her mother is shot. The two individuals' struggles to do the right thing, the dynamics in both families, the cultural context--all are presented thoughtfully and yet the book also is a "good read." Highly recommended.

Fools, by Joan Silber, is a collection of six interconnected short stories. The title (and first) story is about a group of young radicals in New York in the 1920s. While ideology shapes them, they are still subject to the vicissitudes of everyday life and one of them "folds";  Betsy leaves her husband Norman to run off with the owner of the local speakeasy to run a hotel in Florida. But Vera and Joe remain together and committed to their beliefs. The second and third stories focus on the next generation--Betsy's son, who runs away from the prospect of marriage (and of being caught stealing from his parents' business) to a challenging life in Paris, and Vera and Joe's daughter, who struggles with her parents' beliefs while trying to maintain a more mainstream public face during World War II and ends up in a marriage in which she and her husband live thousands of miles apart but do not divorce.  The protagonists of the final three stories have less tight connections to the original group-- the son of one of Betsy's employees, who learns after a long separation from his Muslim wife that she needs his permission to go on the hadj; a gay man going through a breakup finds solace in a memoir of Greenwich Village written by Norman; and a woman who stole from Betsy's son in Paris becomes the target of New York fundraisers. I found some stories more meaningful than others, but enjoyed the connections, the reflections on belief and life choices, and Silber's writing.

The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich, was inspired by Erdrich's own grandfather, a night watchman who sent numerous letters to officials in Washington about the future of his tribe. The title character of the novel is Thomas Wazhashk is also a night watchman, at a factory that employs many Turtle Mountain clan women doing exacting work for the Defense Department. Thomas is organizing to save the tribe from termination by the federal government. Meanwhile, his niece Patrice, who works at the factory, is trying to find her sister, who went to the Twin Cities and disappeared, while protecting her family and trying to figure out how she can go to college and find more rewarding work. Add to these two plots Erdrich's usual tribal lore and mysticism and you get a thoroughly rewarding read. Not Erdrich's very best, but darn good.

I found The Perfect Nanny, by Leila Slimani, both creepy and dull. You know from the prologue that the perfect nanny kills the two children she has been hired to care for. The rest of the book narrates how she devolved from "perfection" to murder, while the children's parents gradually become so reliant on her they virtually disappear. The book has gotten a lot of kudos, but I simultaneously hated the characters while also not caring what happened to them.


Mysteries

Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough, by Steph Cha. After reading Your House Will Pay, I decided to read Steph Cha's series of mysteries featuring Korean American sleuth Juniper Song. Although they're not perfect, I liked them well enough to read all three--and really enjoyed the way LA is a essentially a character in the books.

Miracle Creek, by Angie Kim. A mystery that deals with serious issues, from the immigrant experience to what it is like to be the mother of a child on the autism spectrum. Every character revealed themselves to be deeply flawed (if not hateful) and yet I still liked the book.

Yesterday, by Felicia Yap, is an imaginative and twisty mystery set in a time/place where people have only one or two days of memory, and the "Duos" regard themselves as superior to the "Monos." The discrimination is so bad that the police detective tasked with solving the murder of a beautiful woman has hidden the fact that he is a Mono throughout his career--and the murdered woman's unusual memory is key to her history and fate. Definitely enjoyed this one.

The Break Down, by B.A. Paris. Most predictable "mystery" ever.

The Child, by Fiona Barton. So-so mystery with a twist at the end based on such a huge coincidence that it seems completely unbelievable (and yet predictable--I had figured it out quite a few pages before it was revealed, and I'm not even that good at  figuring out whodunit).

I'm not sure The Need, by Helen Phillips, is a mystery, but the main character, Molly, and readers are trying to figure out who the intruder who looks just like Molly and wants to care for her children really is. The author does a great job depicting the difficulty of caring for children and working (Molly's husband is out of the country for work). But I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention (that does happen sometimes when I'm listening to a book) because the ending made no sense to me.

A Measure of Darkness, by Jonathan and Jessie Kellerman, was the first of the father-son duo's books that I have read. Okay.

Non-Fiction

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, is an interesting combination of scholarly analysis, exhortation to us all to be better, and memoir. Kendi defines an antiracism someone who supports ideas and policies affirming that "the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences--that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group." Some of his ideas may be controversial. He asserts, unlike many, that black people can be racists. He also says that self-interest, not hatred, is the root of racism. Agree with all of his ideas or not, Kendi sparks thought.

The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander, is an extremely well-documented analysis of how drug laws, unequal enforcement, and mandatory sentencing laws constitute a new Jim Crow system that has produced loss of freedom for African American men through, not slavery, but mass incarceration. I think it's a little longer than it needs to be, especially when Alexander strayed away from her primary point to frown upon civil rights lawyers and critique affirmative action. Still it's a book anyone who questions whether systemic racism exists should read.

Inheritance, by memoirist Dani Shapiro, is the story of what happened when Shapiro learned that the father who had raised her was not her biological father. Rather, she had been the result of artificial insemination with donor sperm. Since both of her parents were dead by the time she made this discovery, she began researching every aspect of it herself; surprisingly, she found the donor relatively easily and was able to start a relationship with him and his family. Other questions were less easily answered. I found the book interesting, while thinking that Shapiro completely overreacted to the news (as, in my anti-memoir frame of mind, seems like something a memoirist would do). Of course, you don't know how you would react to something so unusual when you haven't experienced it. In addition, the author was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and biological inheritance seems to be very important in Judaism. 

Stories I Only Tell Myself, by Rob Lowe, is the somewhat interesting story of the actor's life. Lowe comes across as a nice guy who is a little paranoid about having been mistreated in the industry.

Favorite Passages

You never forget certain years of being young.

--Joan Silber, Fools

Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.

Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.

--Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist