Stress Reading Is Not High Quality Reading

October has been a high stress month--the upcoming election, the surging coronavirus, raging wildfires, and some family health concerns have combined to put me pretty close to the edge. I'm blaming that stress for the fact that most of my reading this month has been crappy mysteries. Here's hoping a good election result (Vote Blue!) will push me to more challenging reading in November. Meanwhile . . . 

Fiction

The Only Story, by Julian Barnes. Julian Barnes is an amazing writer--I love the way he uses language. I don't, however, always love (or understand) his plots. The protagonists of The Only Story (which apparently is love) are Paul and Susan, who are 19 and 49, respectively, when they meet and fall in love while playing tennis. Eventually, Susan leaves her husband (who we later learn was abusive) and moves with Paul to his university town. Their relationship thrives for a time, but then Susan's drinking and mental illness drive them apart. Paul leaves, but can never entirely escape that first love affair--his only story. The early part of the novel alternate between first and second person--first when Paul is relating events, second when he is reflecting. The latter part of the book is written in third person, indicating that Paul has even further distanced himself from his experience. I didn't find that technique especially effective, I didn't think any of the characters other than Paul himself to be well-developed (and Paul seems to have remained a juvenile), and I doubt that love, and particularly first love, are the only story of significance in a person's story. So, despite some beautiful language and interesting insights, I don't recommend this book. 

All the Little Live Things, by Wallace Stegner. This book is a "sequel" (though written before) to The Spectator Bird, which introduced retired literary agent Joe Allston and his wife Ruth. Still trying to recover from their son's death, they become entangled with two younger people. Jim Peck asks to camp on their land, and under pressure from Ruth, Joe agrees despite his own reservations. Those reservations prove to have been well-founded, as Peck is soon running a commune of sorts (the book is set in the 60s), espousing yoga, sex, and drugs. In contrast, Marian Caitlin, the young wife and mother who moves in next door with her family, is a sunny lover of "all the little live things," whose personality enthralls Joe and Ruth. But Marian has cancer, which recurs when she becomes pregnant. The book has beautiful descriptions of place and some interesting reflections on aging, but the ongoing arguments, especially between Joe and Peck, become tedious. Worth reading but certainly not up to the standard of Stegner's best works. 

Nonfiction

Intimations, by Zadie Smith. You have to hate/admire someone who cranks out a book of essays during a pandemic lockdown. It's a relatively slim book (about 100 pages) and, thankfully, the essays are more accessible than some of her earlier works. Yet, through reflection on her personal experiences, Smith challenges us to think about time, inequality and privilege, compassion, and isolation. Recommended.

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive, by Stephanie Land. Land's memoir details how hard it is to make any economic progress when you start out without education, skills, or family connections and have to provide food and shelter for a child. The precariousness of her life--an illness or car malfunction can start a major downward spiral--is heartbreaking, and the portrayal of the way in which the owners of maid services and the consumers of their services treat the actual cleaners is infuriating. Our society needs to address these issues. At the same time, Land makes bad decisions (particularly involving men) and has an irrational belief that if she can only get to Missoula, Montana, things can be better. In fact, they do get better when she enrolls at Montana State, but she could have made the same changes in another location. I know I'm being judgey--but places aren't magical. (Also, she liked The Alchemist--ugh!) Despite my whining, I recommend the book. 

Burn the Place, by Iliana Regan. Regan is the chef-owner of the upscale Chicago restaurant Elizabeth (highly recommended by my friend Carolyn) and co-owner of a a bed and breakfast in the UP that is booked solid through 2021 (I checked on their website!).  She grew up on a farm in Indiana, struggled with her identity and sexuality, and started drinking early. After moving to Chicago, where she worked at several of the area's most revered restaurants, she continued to struggle with addiction while beginning to develop a business, most notably through sale of her "best in Chicago" pierogis. I love the parts of the book that are about food and Regan's connection to food (I'm a food memoir junkie). While I sympathize with her struggles and admire her eventual recovery from addiction, at this point I have read too many memoirs with an addiction theme to find that part of the book very interesting (yes, I might be heartless). Still, Regan writes well and there's the food, so I recommend the book.

Alone Together: Love, Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19, edited by Jennifer Haupt. Alone Together is a collection of poems, essays, and interviews about the experience of the pandemic and shutdown. A wide range of well-known (and lesser known) authors are represented; a sampling: Pam Houston, Alberto Luis Urrea, Andre Dubus III, Nikki Giovanni, Kwame Alexander, Jean Kwok, Lidia Yuknavitch. The works examine the role of art and story telling in times of crisis, how we are affected by isolation and illness, and the ways in which connections are sustained. I found the book to be both sad and uplifting and recommend it (sales support the Book Industry Charitable Foundation).

Young Adult

Clap When You Land, by Elizabeth Acevedo. In Clap When You Land, Acevedo has produced another sensitive novel in poetic form. When their father is killed in a plane crash, Camino, who lives in the Dominican Republic, and Yahaira, who lives in New York, learn that their beloved Papi had two wives (their mothers), each with a daughter. The book explores how the two come to grips with their new-found relationship while dealing with other challenges that teenagers face. Recommended.

One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia. Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern are three sisters who live in Brooklyn with their dad and grandmother. When Delphine is 11, the girls are sent to Oakland to stay with their mother for the summer--a mother they haven't seen since she left them seven years earlier. Why their father thought this was a good idea is unclear, since their mother clearly did not want them around. She sends them to a Black Panther-run day camp and when they are not at camp, leaves them to fend for themselves. The day camp is a good experience and the girls eventually gain some insight into their mother (or at least Delphine does), but I was so uncomfortable with the way their mother treated them that I couldn't enjoy the book. 

On the Come Up, by Angie Thomas. Thomas has a real gift for getting into the heads of teenage girls. Here that girl is Bri, a talented young rapper who is struggling at school due to racism and her own impulsiveness (her psychology major older brother "diagnoses" her with oppositional defiant disorder). She wants desperately to get her music career started, both for her own sake and to help her financially strapped family. When she gets a break with an angry song, however, she is branded as a thug and is pulled into gang disputes. While the ending is somewhat facile, Thomas does a brilliant job depicting how problems of society and an individual's own bad decisions can combine to put teenagers in situations they should not have to face. Recommended. 

Life as We Knew It, by Susan Beth Pfeffer. A huge meteor hits the moon, knocking it closer to earth; the resulting tidal waves drown out entire cities, while earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the cooling climate create massive problems for the survivors. Life as We Knew It is the survival story of high school sophomore Miranda and her family, and it's a story that holds your attention. The ending is a bit week, but I still enjoyed the book, perhaps because the children and their mother are so heroic--a nice antidote in our own dystopian time. 

Also Read

• A Stranger in the House, by Shari LaPena. Forgettable, in fact, forgotten.
• Long Bright River, by Liz Moore
• Lost Lake and Shatter the Night, by Emily Littlejohn. Books 3 and 4 in the Gemma Monroe series break from the repetitive pattern of Books 1 and 2 but still aren't great mysteries. 
• The 19th Christmas, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro. A little better than the more recent entries in the Women's Murder Club mysteries.
• Outsider, by Linda Castillo. Decent entry in the Kate Burkholder series.
• Separation Anxiety, by Laura Zigman. Forced zaniness featuring a troubled family and a private school followed by a weird sweet ending. 
• The Last Widow, by Karen Slaughter. More Will Trent. 
• The Wife Stalker, by Liv Constantine. Totally unbelievable plot.
• What You Wish For, by Katherine Center. This is the second Center book that sounded great in a review/write-up but disappointed upon reading. I found the use of PTSD resulting from a school shooting as a romantic plot devise deeply offensive. 
• The Turn of the Key, by Ruth Ware. I was never going to read another Ruth Ware book, but this was available on Overdrive, so . . . Better than her earlier works but not great. 
• Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death and Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet, by M. C. Beaton. I had never read any Beaton, and these two were pleasant enough diversions. Not sure how much farther I will dip into the very large series. 
• You Are Not Alone, by Greer Hendrick & Sarah Pekkanen. Totally unbelievable. 

Favorite Passages

Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first. But again, I’m only guessing.

 First love fixes a life forever; this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

 . . . nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.

Julian Barnes, The Only Story

Living with joy, even if imperfectly, is a kind of salvation.

Jean Kwok, in Alone Together

We are hurt and damaged and yearning for our better selves, esperately dreaming of a kinder world in the days to come.

Luis Alberto Urrea in Alone Together

On that small farm, among the bats, wasps, fireflies, and endless clouds, the stage was set for deep imaginings, escaping in daydreams so I didn't have to think. It was as if life happened inside a little box, and I was the marionette as well as the puppeteer. I felt like I knew more things about life than I should have. Like the universe was all those mason jars stacked in our pantry, and the world was just one of them, full of peaches. 

Iliana Regan, Burn the Place

Why Am I the Last Person to Read This, Part 2: Dreams from My Father

Back in 2002 and 2003, when we were launching the Novel Conversations book group at the Broomfield Library, my late friend Evelyn, who was the "senior" member of our group, suggested we read Dreams from My Father, predicting that the author was going to have a big future (this was before the 2004 DNC speech that really launched Barack Obama's political career).  We didn't choose to read the book, but she was certainly right about the big future. This month, I finally read Dreams from My Father and, like The Library Book last month, was richly rewarded. More about that a bit lower in the blog.

Fiction

In Every Moment We Are Still Alive, by Tom Malmquist, is an autobiographical novel about the death of a poet's partner, who is diagnosed with a fatal leukemia just as she is about to give birth to their daughter Livia. As he is grieving his partner, learning to be a father (and fighting the bureaucracy to be declared her father, a problem because he and his partner weren't married), and deals with his in-laws, he must also deal with his father's illness and impending death. The enormity and confusion of what Tom faces are well-conveyed through the use of present tense and the inclusion of enormous amounts of detail, especially when his wife and daughter are in different parts of the hospital. On the other hand, the fact that present tense is also used to narrate scenes from the couple's back story, with no indication when you are moving from the present to the past, is really confusing. If you are looking to be sad, overwhelmed, and confused, I recommend the book; if those aren't your goals, I'd say give it a pass.

Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo, shared last year's Mann Booker prize with Margaret Atwood's The Testaments. I feel a bit like I cheated by listening to the book rather than reading it because the book has no punctuation, and I just couldn't read it. I'm sure Evaristo had some important intention in not using punctuation which I missed by listening, but I am too old school to deal. Anyway, the book has a large number of characters, all Black British women, whose stories are presented in "clusters" of three to four characters who are connected with each other in some way. (There are also some connections across the clusters.) The premiere of an "afro-gynocentric" play by one of the characters serves as a loose frame for the entire set of stories. About all I took away from Girl, Woman, Other is that the UK has many Black women, who come from different places/cultures around the globe, who have different sexualities, and who make their way in the world differently. I wish there was more to it (or perhaps there is, and I'm just too dense to get it).

The Jane Austen Society, by Natalie Jenner, is one of the better Jane Austen "spin-offs." Set in the period around World War II, the book features diverse residents of the village of Chawton who work with a  movie star and a Sotheby's employee who love Jane Austen to save Miss Austen's home from developers. Some of the villagers seem like unlikely fans of Austen, but their love is sincere and deep, illustrating the power of literature to change and sustain people. I enjoyed this sweet book.

The Nix, by Nathan Hill, is a 600+ page book that is difficult to capture in just a paragraph. The protagonist is Samuel Andresen-Anderson, failed writer, college teacher, and obsessive video game player. Equally important to the story is his mother Faye, who left him as a child and has recently reemerged as the perpetrator in an assault-by-pebbles on a conservative presidential candidate. Samuel's agent approaches him to write a hatchet job on his mother, promising he won't have to give back the advance on the book he has been unable to write if he takes on this job. The narrative jumps between various stages in both Samuel's and Faye's lives while simultaneously following the current moment in Samuel's life. The book examines numerous serious themes--but it's also funny, particularly in some of the subplots. My favorite laugh-out-loud subplot had to do with a student of Samuel's who, in order to avoid being penalized for cheating (and she cheated on everything), put together a series of appeals and accusations that eventually brought the full force of his college's wrath on him. The Nix is big and messy, with an ending that seemed a little too neat--but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Severance, by Ling Ma, is my second post-pandemic dystopic novel I've read in two months. The heroine here is a 20-something, under-employed (she obtains production contracts for Bibles), pregnant Chinese American woman living in New York. When the pandemic hits (this one is a fungus, not a virus, but it too is from China), she is one of a team designated to continue coming to the office while everyone else works at home. Eventually, she is the last person standing, one of the few people who are immune to the fungus. When she finally ventures out of the office, she joins up with a group of survivors led by Bob, a former HR manager who wants the group to head to his favorite childhood place, a mall in suburban Chicago. They travel across the Midwest, "stalking" through abandoned houses and businesses to find supplies and food and killing any of "the fevered" (zombies, I guess) they come across. It's dark. Needless to say, I preferred the more relationship-focused A Beginning at the End, which I reviewed last month, but Severance was still interesting.

Mystery

Inherit the Bones and A Season to Lie, by Emily Littlejohn. I was motivated to start this series after my friend Kerry, who writes the "Bookwoman" column in our local paper, reviewed the Gemma Monroe series Littlejohn has set in a fictional Colorado town. I found the first book, which involved the death of a young man who has returned to the town under a new name, after disappearing (and being presumed dead) a few years before, fairly entertaining. The second book revolves around the death of a famous author who is teaching at the local private school under an assumed name. The false names are not the only similarities between the two stories--taking the lessons learned from reading the first book, I immediately knew who the killer was and the "surprise" at the heart of the killing. I'll probably still read the third book in the series to see if Littlejohn gets out of the rut, but if not, I'm done! 

All the Devils Are Here, by Louise Penny. My sister and I, both inveterate mystery readers, agreed a couple of years ago that we were sick of Three Pines, the setting for a number of Penny's Armand Gamache. Consequently, I was happy to learn that her newest book is set in Paris. Somehow, without the irritation of Three Pines, I became focused on other irritations. First, Penny is always having someone make a big discovery at the end of a chapter but not telling the reader what it is. Second, I am becoming tired of her fawning descriptions of Gamache. I have noticed some other authors of series seem to fall in love with their characters to the point where they can’t write about them sensibly and that seems to be the case here. Third, there were too many “surprises” at the end—some having to do with the case, but others not (and totally gratuitous). Don’t know if I’ll read any more of her.

Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith (AKA J.K. Rowling). As you have probably read, Rowling has made some rather questionable and bigoted remarks about transgender people. If this were not the case, I would not have thought anything about the fact that a serial killer in this book donned a dress in the commission of some of his crimes; however, given her remarks, this detail seems like a needle to the LGBTQ+ community, a "see--I'm right about the danger of transgenderism." What a stupid (not to mention insensitive and biased) thing to do. Other than that, the book is too long and pretty tedious. 

Nonfiction

The Yellow House, by Sarah P. Broom, is a family history, a memoir, a deep reflection on and social history of place--in this case the neighborhood in East New Orleans where Broom grew up in the yellow house--and a case study of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on one African American family, Broom's own (one reviewer described the family as having its own diaspora following the storm; one imagines many families had similar experiences). If that sounds like a lot, it is--Broom accomplishes much with this book and does it skillfully, offering insights into the history of a city that most of us think of as more of a tourist destination than a place that real people live, confront racism and poverty, and do their best to prevail. Recommended.  

Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama. Because of the title, I had always assumed this book was mostly about Obama's father, whom he met only once in his life. I think this put me, as the white mother who did most of the raising of biracial sons, off. However, I was wrong. I'm not sure how the pages parse out, but one-third of the book deals with his early life in Hawaii and Indonesia, one-third with his community organizing work in Chicago, and one-third with a trip to Kenya to meet his African family. Each part of the book is interesting in a different way. For me as a mother, the first part was the most compelling, dealing as it does with how a biracial person--one who is deeply reflective--develops a sense of identity within a white family and within multiracial cultures that do not reflect his own background. You begin to see how he became the thoughtful man he is as he grapples with who he is and who he wants to be. The second part of the book illustrates what it actually means to be a community organizer--holy mackerel, that work had to be incredibly frustrating, as the pace of change is glacially slow. Yet Obama focuses most on what he learned from the community people he worked with, an act of great generosity. The final part of the book, on Obama's trip to Africa, presented a complex, conflicted, and loving family from which he could build some understanding of his father, a gifted yet flawed person. The book is beautifully written and reflects the deep thought I wish every memoir was based on. Highly recommended. 

YA

From the Desk of Zoe Washington, by Janae Marks. Marks has created a wonderful protagonist, Zoe, who wants to be a pastry chef and to free her biological father from prison for a crime she believes he did not commit. Marks crams a lot into the novel--maybe a bit too much; there are subplots involving conflict with a friend, the disconnect between work that needs to be done at the pastry shop where she is interning and what she thinks she should be doing, efforts to invent a prize-winning cupcake recipe, family issues, and the effort to find a mystery witness in her father's case. Some aspects of the main plot seem a bit far-fetched: Would Zoe's grandmother really facilitate contact with her convict father in defiance of her daughter's (Zoe's mother) wishes? Could Zoe really find the witness no one else located? I was also overly annoyed by the fact that the "new" cupcake recipe Zoe invented was actually created by Christina Tosi in 2012 or thereabouts. Come on--be more original!  I'd read another book featuring Zoe, with hope that Marks might be more focused.

Also Read

• Don't Ever Forget, by Matthew Farrell. An Amazon Prime free ebook (I don't think I've ever read one of these and thought it was actually good)
• The Roxy Letters, by Mary Pauline Lowry. Supposed to be funny a la Bridget Jones's Diary but mostly just dumb
• The Perfect Alibi, by Phillip Margolin. Meh.
• Criminal, by Karen Slaughter. I keep reading Slaughter but I don't know exactly why.
• Death of a New American, by Mariah Fredericks. Forgettable, in fact, forgotten.
• To Tell You the Truth, by Gilly Macmillan. Macmillan has written some really good mysteries/thrillers. This one just didn't grab me, although it did provide a pretty good depiction of gaslighting. 

Favorite Passages

What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?

The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that’s not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom. How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiment into love?  . . . as long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail.

Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father