Read Until You Understand and Other February Reading

 February is a short month and I had a lot of work to do, so my reading slowed down a little. 

Fiction

In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro returns to the kind of dystopic near-future he explored so effectively in Never Let Me Go. Here, rather than clones, we have Artificial Friends, advanced robots who serve as companions for children who have been "lifted." Exactly what lifting is was not clear to me, but children who are lifted stop going to school and learn at home on "oblongs" to get a competitive advantage in college and, subsequently, adult life. Lifting also puts the children's health in jeopardy. The novel's narrator, AF Klara, is purchased as a companion for Josie, who has been lifted and is quite seriously ill. Josie's neighbor and friend, Rick, is a bright boy who has not been lifted; through Rick, we see how a class system emerges around this choice made by parents. Klara runs on solar power and thus believes the sun has healing powers that could help Josie. As he often does, Ishiguro writes in a somewhat flat tone--appropriate for a robot narrator--that still manages to convey deep emotion. I'm not doing a good job conveying any sense of the book, but I did enjoy it and found it, again as Ishiguro's novels generally do, prompted me to reflect on what it means to be human.

Chang-Rae Lee is an author whose work I have enjoyed, but his most recent--My Year Abroad--disappointed. The novel's protagonist is Tiller, a 20-year-old college student from New Jersey, who is living with an older woman Val and her eight-year-old son Victor Jr. who is a gifted chef. Val is in witness protection because she ratted out her husband, a minor gangster. Tiller is concerned that Val will kill herself; meanwhile, he is working through his own traumas from his motherless childhood and his year in Asia, when he was supposed to be studying abroad but somehow got caught up in a of a frozen yogurt king who is trying to sell healthy smoothies to the Asian market. Mostly the book added up to nothing for me, but I did enjoy some of the descriptions of the dishes Vic Jr. was creating! 

Mystery/Thriller

I am about to conclude that I have read too many mysteries, as lately I am finding mysteries either too predictable (When You Are Mine, by Michael Robotham), too reliant on coincidence (City of the Dead, by Jonathan Kellerman), or gratuitously violent in a way not really needed to move the plot (Every Last Fear, by Alex Finlay). So why don't I just stop reading mysteries? I can only conclude I need extended periods of mindlessness. Indeed, right now, I'm listening to one mystery and reading another in print. Perhaps I need a reading therapist.

Science Fiction

A few years ago, my son Kevin convinced me to read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I liked it a lot and followed up with Anathem, which I also liked. Then I read a couple more that I wasn't so fond of (Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash). Now along comes Termination Shock, which has convinced me I'm through with Stephenson. Termination Shock is set in the near future when climate change has become worse. A Texas oilman has come up with a plan to combat climate change by shooting sulfur into the atmosphere. He draws together powerful people from low-lying countries/cities for a demonstration, in hopes of garnering their support (he is unconcerned that his plan will have negative impacts on other areas. Also in play are a hunter of feral pigs and a Sikh Canadian martial artist. While Stephenson may have serious points (and they may be bad, if he is suggesting that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos might solve the problem of climate change with a large-scale project undertaken on their own), but the characters and their interactions are so farcical that when I fell asleep while listening, I couldn't bring myself to go back and listen to the minutes I slept through. 

Nonfiction

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, by Farah Jasmine Griffin is a memoir cum literary analysis (and I love the title). Griffin is a professor who teaches courses on African American literature so her knowledge is both deep and wide. Her own life has clearly and understandably been shaped by the experience of losing her father due to bigotry-motivated mistreatment of her father by the police. She connects her early experiences learning from her father, his death, the way the community rallied around her and her mother afterwards, and other family stories to the themes of great work by black authors: death, mercy, love, Black freedom and the ideal of America, justice, rage and resistance, joy, and beauty. I found both Griffin's personal story and literary analysis interesting, although her certitude made me wonder what it might be like to be a student who disagreed with her. I did have some quarrels with her take-down of President Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech, which I believe is one of the all-time great speeches--but her critique did cause me to think, which isn't a bad thing. 

Favorite Passages

This is the power of literature: to use language to remind us of another's humanity by touching our own. 

    --  Farah Jasmine Griffin, in Read Until You Understand

Until recently, I didn't think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.

    --  Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

Festival Days, All In, and Other Early February Reading

 This month's reading (so far) has demonstrated the benefits of branching out, as I likely wouldn't have picked up Festival Days or All In if they hadn't been on several "best of 2021" lists--and both were rewarding reads. Of course, such lists also lead you to some titles you end up not caring for, but it's a tradeoff, right? 

Fiction

The Prophets, by Robert Jones, Jr.,  is the story of two young enslaved men who are in love. They are accepted by the enslaved community until two things happen: a man who wants to curry favor with the white plantation owners begins to preach a narrow-minded Christianity and the gay son of the plantation owner comes home and rapes one of the young men. After very little seems to happen in the first part of the book, all hell essentially breaks loose. I didn't really care for this book although it was beautifully written. I realize that sexual abuse and tearing apart of families were typical of slaveowners and that we too often neglect stories that affirm the humanity of enslaved people (i.e., they were sexual beings), but the emphasis on this part of the story felt like it neglected too much of the torture that was the chattel slavery system. 

The Rib King, by LaDee Hubbard, is a story with two distinct parts. The first, set in 1914, is told from the perspective of Mr. Sitwell, the African American groundskeeper for a once-wealthy white family that is struggling to stay afloat financially. Sitwell generally tries to make himself essential to all aspects of the running of the house (he hopes to become the butler). But then he makes some bad decisions, including signing on to a business deal with his employer that will screw other members of the household staff and things spiral out of control. In the second part of the book, which takes place 10 years later, the narrator is Jenny Williams, a young woman who worked in the same house as Sitwell. She has become a successful entrepreneur, the owner of a beauty salon who is about to sell her skin care product to a huge distributor. But her past association with Sitwell, who has become an embarrassing and yet popular promoter of barbeque sauce (he is seen as engaging in minstrelsy), threatens her success and pulls her into a morass of conspiracies and misdeeds, some seeking profit, some revenge. The book has a lot to say about race, class, and ethics, and I mostly enjoyed it--but the ending was not good.

Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny is an Anne Tyler-esque story of a teacher (Jane) who falls in love with and marries a man (Duncan) who has slept with nearly every woman in Boyle City, MI, where they live. Her life becomes entangled with his ex-wife and her very strange husband, his employee Jimmy (who seems to be slightly mentally challenged), and essentially the entire town. It's funny and touching in the "we create our own families" way. I enjoyed it.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson, is my book group's selection for February. Its protagonist is Cussie, one of Kentucky's "blue" people (this is an actual thing, which I did not know--caused by a blood condition called methemoglobinemia), who served as a packhorse librarian during the Depression. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the book about coal miners, the traveling librarians, the horrendous poverty among the mountain people, mountain customs, and discrimination. I enjoyed learning about that, but as a novel, I just didn't think the book held together. 

Short Stories

Festival Days, by JoAnn Beard, is a collection of short stories that I really enjoyed (and, as the three regular readers of my blog know, I am not a big short story fan). Many of the stories feature animals in ways that highlight the deep human-animal connection.. For example, in "Last Night," a woman comes to the painful realization that it's time to let her dog go; in "Werner," an artist who is trapped in a burning building jumps out of his apartment into a neighboring building (!) and survives but is devastated by the fact that he dropped his cat in the jump. I found the story "Cheri" particularly moving; it describes a woman dying of breast cancer who travels to Michigan to get help from Dr. Kevorkian. Perhaps the stories sound grim, but they also have a redemptive quality. One minor nit to pick: it's not believable that someone was the only Jewish student in their class in Champaign, IL, home of the U of I. Seriously. Anyway, these stories helped me articulate what makes a short story work for me: it features at least one interesting character well enough drawn so you have some insight into or curiosity about their actions, there's a "slice of life" feeling that gives you a strong sense of time and place, and something happens that at least makes some sense. I think when I end up scratching my head when I finish a story, it's because nothing happened or what happened seems completely random or pointless. 

I also enjoyed some of the stories in Land of Big Numbers, a collection by Te-Ping Chen. Many of the stories are set in China and provide insight into day-to-day life and the conflicts among individuals, communities, and the state in China. Others feature Chinese immigrants in the United States. Some have surreal aspects, which my favorite story in the collection did. In "Gubeikou Spirit," Pan is one of a group of commuters rushing to catch a train when they somehow are trapped in the station--for months!--while the rest of the world (and the trains) continue as though there was nothing odd about their situation--people outside send them food and they are celebrated on state media. They build a community that is both supportive and oppressive. It's weirdly compelling, as is another surreal story, "New Fruit," in which season of a newly developed fruit produces different emotional responses in those who eat it. I didn't love all the stories in the collection, but it's definitely worth reading. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

The Dark Hours, by Michael Connolly, is the latest entry in the Renee Ballard series. Ballard can't get any support within LAPD, so she has to go back to Harry Bosch, who is no longer working, for help in solving the two crimes on her docket, one of which is a very creepy male revenge story. I thought the book was entertaining but not great. I was amused to see how many Amazon reviewers dinged Connolly for "virtue signaling" about COVID prevention practices--good grief, people.

Women violently defending themselves is Taylor Adams' thing, and there is no shortage of female violence in Hairpin Bridge, the story of a woman trying to figure out how her twin sister died. At first I was finding it mildly interesting, but after the fifth false resolution . . . ugh. 

The Outsider, by Stephen King, starts out as if it were a regular murder mystery--a child is murdered in a way described as veteran police officers describe as the worst they have ever seen, and all the evidence points to a local high school teacher. The police opt to arrest him in a very public situation--a baseball game he is coaching. But then equally compelling evidence indicates that he was somewhere else at the time of the killing. Soon another case with similar conflicting evidence surfaces and things just keep getting weirder. Entertaining (although not at all believable to this skeptic). 

Autobiography/Memoir

I always admired Billie Jean King and followed her career, so I was surprised at how much I learned about her work, not just as a tennis player but as an advocate for women, in sports and beyond, from All In. The insights into her personal life and its intersection with her professional life were fascinating. She was married to Larry King for more than two decades; he played a major positive role in many aspects of her career, but also made decisions that damaged her reputation and her financial standing. They lived essentially separate lives for years after she came out to Larry but he "refused" a divorce. She announced several times that she was retiring, but she came back to competition because she needed the money (and because she was a competitive person). She was more argumentative/angry on the court than I remembered. She had an eating disorder. And she had the same job in college that I had--handing out towels and equipment in the gym! She still clearly has some difficulty writing about her sexuality (or it seems so to me) but has become an outspoken advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. I guess if I had to summarize, I'd say that, as I read the book, she became a real person to me rather than simply an icon.  

I didn't know who Allison Bechdel was (a MacArthur genius award-winning cartoonist) when I picked up her graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Other than graphic novels read with my grandson, this was my first graphic book (I can't bear to call a memoir a "graphic novel" although all graphic books seem to be classified as novels). Its breadth of content was surprising; while it is ostensibly the story of Bechdel's many fitness obsessions (a sign in one illustration advertises an "Advanced Scything Workout"), she references everything from the Romantics, Transcendentalists, and Beats (she has a few fixations) to the Lowell Mills, The Sound of Music, Janis Joplin, the monk Suzuki, and even Richard Nixon. We also track her love life and her relationships with her family. It's funny, thought-provoking, and maybe just a bit too long. 

Somebody's Daughter, by Ashley Ford is a well-written memoir about the early life of an African American woman whose father was in prison; the mother caring for her was harsh but her grandmother provided a Although she didn't really know her father, she clung desperately to the idea that they loved each other. Her life was challenging, but I would have found the book more meaningful if, rather than simply being honest (something she talks about in an interview included on the audio version of the book), she actually explained how she dealt with the challenges--for example, how, as a rape survivor, she processed the disclosure that father had been convicted of rape (somehow her family kept this from her for years). 

Favorite Passages

We're a nation of giant toddlers, dragging our blankets and bottles everywhere we go!

    --Allison Bechdel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History, 1619-2019

 I have more than usual to say about Four Hundred Souls, so I thought I'd go ahead and do an individual post rather than make my next bimonthly post extra long. 

Four Hundred Souls is a uniquely organized history book that I think people who don't enjoy reading long narrative histories that remind them of their high school history texts might find more pleasurable. And it is definitely thought-provoking and informative. 

The editors of Four Hundred Souls asked 90 people to each contribute a relatively brief piece on a five-year period of  American history, with a focus on African Americans in that period. Every 40 years, they include a poem. The book starts with journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones writing about the arrival of Africans to North America in 1619 and ends with activist Alicia Garza discussing the Black Lives Matter movement. In between are contributions from other journalists and activists as well as numerous historians plus a few philosophers, memoirists, anthropologists, novelists, and political operatives. 

The essays focus on individuals, events, and movements. Some are familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of U.S. history: Anita Hill, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, Jack Johnson, lynching, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Middle Passage, etc. But they provide new insight or deeper background than you might have gained in a survey course or even from watching the news about an event. For example, Hurricane Katrina is examined from the perspective of black women's "depresenceing" in the aftermath. Blair L.M. Kelley's essay on Plessy v. Ferguson puts this test case mounted by the Citizens Committee in the context of black life in New Orleans (and also reveals that the pictures of Homer Plessy that appear in texts and pop up when you google his name are not of the defendant in the case). 

Other essays are about lesser-known people and events--the Virginia Law on Baptism, Lucy Terry Prince, Elizabeth Keye, the black press at various points in history, the Combahee River Collective to name a few. One story that everyone should know is that of Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr., who moved from Illinois to Wisconsin, took his documents  to get the ID needed to register to vote in the state, and was unable to do so because of an error on his birth certificate (which had not prevented his voting in Illinois). After investing $200 (and numerous visits to government offices) in trying to straighten the situation out, he was still unable to vote and eventually moved back to Illinois in frustration. This happened not in the Jim Crow era, but in 2016! In formerly progressive Wisconsin!

Many of the authors draw explicit connections between the history they write about and subsequent historical and contemporary developments. Among the themes that emerge are inhuman oppression, resistance, struggle, creativity, and achievement. But the unique way the book is put together also makes clear that African American history is not one story but innumerable stories. 

I hope that others will consider constructing histories of other groups or developments in this way. Meanwhile, I highly recommend Four Hundred Souls.

Favorite passages:

Who we are and who belongs is the most fundamental question that we have ever asked or can ever ask. We are still struggling to get the answer to this question right. We are still coming up short.
    --John A. Powell in an essay on Dred Scott

No war is civil.
    --Michael Harriot in an essay on the Civil War (which he also calls the War on White Tears, War for           White Supremacy, War for Slaveholders' Rights, and Conflict for Future Racist Monuments)

Change does not occur without backlash, at least any change worth having. And that backlash is an indicator that the change is so powerful that the opposing forces resist that change with everything they have.
    --Alicia Garza in an essay on Black Lives Matter