So Many Books, So Little Time (yep, that's a title of a book!)

Fiction

I enjoyed and admired True Biz, by Sara Novic. It features a compelling story focused primarily (but not exclusively) on Charlie, a 15-year-old deaf girl with a faulty cochlear implant, no knowledge of ASL, and parents deeply divided about how to give her a good future. Her father wins custody and enrolls her in River Valley School for the Deaf, where she begins to thrive. Meanwhile, the school district is threatening to close the school, a fact headmistress February Waters wants to keep hidden as long as possible (February is having her own problems with a deaf mother whose dementia is worsening and a wife who suspects her of a dalliance with a teacher). While these characters' stories (and other subplots) held my interest as a reader, I was also learning a lot about deaf culture, sign language, and deaf education. I listened to the audiobook, which had a feature I hadn't previously experienced. When conversations in the book would have been signed, the author was actually signing in the background; of course, much of the signing was silent but you could sometimes hear the movement of her arms and smacks when one hand hit the other. It helped remind you that these conversations would have been silent. Highly recommended.

Anthem, by Noah Hawley, was definitely not what I expected since the previous book by this author that I had read was a mystery. I've seen Anthem described as a pre-apocalyptic novel, which is a new genre to me. Anyway, the book is set a few years after the COVID epidemic and begins with an unexplained rash of suicides among teenagers. One of the teens who killed themselves was Claire Oliver, the daughter of a big Pharma CEO, who overdosed on pills from her father's company. Her brother Simon struggles in the aftermath, and his parents ship him off to the Float Anxiety Abatement Center, a psychiatric facility for young people. There, he hooks up with a group of other young people, including The Prophet, who speaks to God, and a young woman victimized by an Epstein-esque character. They break out and travel across country to try to rescue another young woman. Meanwhile, the bulimic daughter of a Supreme Court nominee has disappeared from her apartment in Austin, along with her boyfriend, who it turns out is the sun of a survivalist. With other subplots I'm not even mentioning, I found Anthem to be imaginative but a bit much. 

Emily Austin has created a unique character in Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead. Gilda is an atheist lesbian with some psychological issues, including an obsession with death. She turns up at a Catholic church to access free therapy but is mistaken for a job applicant and ends up taking the job as Father Jeff's assistant. The previous occupant of the position, Grace, died under suspicious circumstances, which Gilda starts investigating. At the same time, she begins a correspondence with Grace's best friend--pretending to be Grace. She's trying to keep things going with a new girlfriend while learning the Catholic mass. Meanwhile, her apartment descends into chaos (she hasn't washed dishes in weeks and they are piled everywhere). I wanted to shake her, but I remained interested in what was happening!  

In Light Perpetual, Frances Spufford takes a unique approach. He opens with a gripping description of a World War II bombing at a Woolworth's in London, an actual bombing in which many civilians, including children, were killed. Then he asks: But what if the bombing never happened? And he tells the stories of five children who would have been killed but weren't: twin sisters Jo and Val plus Alec, Ben, and Vernon. He pops into their lives 5 years after the non-bombing (1949) and then every 15 years. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that nothing particularly special happens to them--among them, they experience mental illness, business success and failure, becoming redundant because of technology and then finding a new career, domestic violence, marriage and divorce, parenthood, and so on. Perhaps that is the point. 

I didn't care for Taylor Jenkins Reid's best-seller Daisy Jones and the Six, but it was definitely innovative, presented as a collection of oral histories from the members of a rock band. Malibu Rising is much more traditional drama of a dysfunctional family. It reminds me somewhat of Anne Tyler's recent French Braid, dipping back and forth between the parents' story and the stories of the children, which was fine until we got to a very long section of the book detailing a party at one of the children's homes. For me, reading about an out-of-control party is about as enjoyable as reading a dream sequence. Not recommended. 

Mercy Street, by Jennifer Haigh, was certainly a timely book to pick up this week, dealing as it does with abortion. Mercy Street is a clinic, where Claudia offers counseling to the clients. Claudia has an every-other-weekend lover she met on line, but she's probably closer to her weed dealer, Tim. Tim also supplies one of the regular protesters at the clinic, Anthony, who is on disability for a traumatic brain injury and whose life consists of going to mass and protesting. He is drawn into helping Victor, a misogynist who hates white women who have abortions because they're not helping sustain the race. He has started a website where he posts pictures of women going into abortion clinics, and Anthony begins sending him pictures from Mercy Street. Victor then becomes obsessed with Claudia, whom he sees in one of Anthony's photos. Yeah, it sounds like a lot--and there's more--maybe too much. But it felt real and crazy the way today's world feels. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

In The Sun Down Motel, Simone St. James combines a currently popular trope--the true crime fan, in this case a family member, who decides to investigate a case and solves it when the police could not--with a ghost story. Not a hit with me. 

An Accidental Death (DC Smith series) and Songbird (Kings Lake series), both by Peter Grainger, were pleasant enough but forgettable . . . in fact, forgotten. In contrast, Cappucinos, Cupcakes, and a Corpse, by Harper Lin was just plain dumb. Note to self: do not read any more mysteries with cutesy food titles.

Nonfiction

Musician Michelle Zauner's memoir, Crying in H Mart, made many best of 2021 lists. It focuses largely on her experience caring for her Korean American mother as she battled and eventually died from cancer. Her mother and food were her primary connections to Korean culture (her relationship with her Anglo father was somewhat distant), and she cooks manically in the months after her mother's death. I can see why people found the book meaningful, although it didn't entirely resonate with me. I would have appreciated more reflection rather than just recounting, more effort to draw meaning from her experiences--perhaps I wanted her to metaphorize (new word) herself!

I picked So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading, by Sara Nelson, out of a Little Free Library I encountered while out walking. Although I always look at LFLs when I see them, I try not to take any books because I figure they'll just end up in a stack somewhere in my house. But I actually read this one fairly quickly, although I was somewhat disappointed when I saw her goal for the big year of reading was a book a week (her book was my 120th of this year, so . . . of course, I listen to a lot of books while doing other things, so maybe that's cheating). Anyway, I enjoyed her reflections on reading "issues" that I share--having trouble giving up on books, trying not to turn against someone because they like a terrible book (or, conversely, don't like a book I love), having a tendency to be disappointed in overhyped books everyone else loves, etc. On the down side, I found her a little full of herself and her New York life (people in fly-over country are not rubes, Sara). Overall, though, I enjoyed the book. 

Favorite Passages

Preventing her abortion was all they cared about. The bleak struggle of her life--the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible--didn't trouble them at all.

--Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem--constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations--I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them. 

--Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book--at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end--is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.

--Sara Nelson, So Many Books

 

Hell of a Book, South to America, and Some Non-Serious Reading

Fiction

Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott, is about an African American author on a book tour (his book is titled Hell of a Book), which in any case must be a rather surreal experience. In Mott’s hands, it’s even more surreal, as the author seems to be having trouble distinguishing between atrocities in the news, his own life story, and the conversations he’s having with a dark skinned boy who is invisible to everyone else (his parents taught him to be invisible to protect himself)—or are the conversations memories of his own childhood? The book keeps the reader somewhat confused while considering the effects of racism, police violence, and colorism on Black creativity, mental health, and (basically) life.

Mystery/Thriller

I’ll Be You by Janelle Brown was classified as a psychological thriller. Not sure it’s really that, but I did find it interesting. Former child stars and identical twins Sam and Ellie are on the outs when their mother calls recovering alcoholic Sam to help care for Ellie’s daughter Charlotte. Ellie has gone to a weekend retreat but she hasn’t come back when scheduled. Sam soon suspects the retreat is actually more like a cult and begins investigating. Some aspects of the story were unbelievable, and the family relationships were fairly predictable, but the description of how someone who on the surface seems rational gets pulled into a cult and stays even after they realize what is happening was interesting.

While I was reading The Maid, by Nita Prose, I thought it was okay. But the more I have thought about it since I finished, the less I like it. Molly Gray is a maid at an upscale hotel, a job she enjoys. In speech and thought, she sounds like someone from a decidedly different era, but perhaps that is because she was raised by her Gran, who has recently died and left Molly in bad financial straits. Perhaps it is because she is neuro-atypical, which means she has trouble connecting to people. One day, she discovers a dead tycoon in his hotel room and then finds herself a suspect, clearly set up by nefarious others. Two friends from work--one of whom just happens to have a daughter who is a high-powered lawyer--help her clear her name. There's a twist at the end that makes clear Molly is an even less reliable narrator than we thought--and I think that's the main thing that has made my view of the book go downhill. The book has been wildly popular, but I don't recommend it. 

In David Baldacci's Daylight and Mercy, FBI agent Atlee Pine continues and completes her search for her sister Mercy, kidnapped as a six-year-old and subjected, it turns out, to a horrendous childhood and a challenging adulthood. Of course, Atlee and her trusty assistant Carol Blum manage to take down a lot of bad guys during the search. Now that Atlee has found her sister, will she disappear from Baldacci's repertoire? I find I do not care. 

In Five Total Strangers, by Natalie D. Richards, five late teens/early twenties travelers, desperate to get home for Christmas, rent a car when their connecting flight is cancelled due to an impending blizzard. One expects weather-related disasters, which are frequent, as are red herrings about why the protagonist feels like she's being watched and people's belongings keep disappearing. If you want a blizzard survival mystery, No Exit by Taylor Adams is a lot better.

Nonfiction

Good Talk, by Mira Jacobs, is subtitled A Memoir in Conversations, an apt description of this relatively short book. Jacobs is Indian American and her husband is Jewish, which makes for some interesting conversations with their parents. But my favorite conversations are with her son, who struggles to understand why some people don’t like him because of his skin color, why his grandparents were voting for Trump, and other mysteries of the modern world. While Jacobs deals with serious topics, such as colorism in the Indian community, she recounts conversations with humor.

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry, reminds me somewhat of How the Word Is Passed, as both are examinations of race in the United States with a strong link to geography. The difference is that South to America is much harder to track; even though organized around geography, the text often seems to be almost stream of consciousness, well-informed and sometimes insightful stream of consciousness--Perry holds a named chair at Princeton--but not easy to track or to discern what, exactly, to make of Perry's analysis. An example: In a section on North Carolina, Perry moves through the following topics: the alleged rape involving the Duke lacrosse team, Michael Jordan's refusal to take political positions, memorials to the Confederacy, back to Duke, to "trees older than Jesus," to the belief that birds coming into a house brings death, to origin stories. Perry does use language beautifully--she describes Atlanta and respectability politics as an exemplar of the "choreography of self-creation."  And some of her insights ring true to me--for example, she argues that strong, loving interpersonal relationships across racial lines are not enough to bring change; people in the south have been having interracial sex for centuries, but that has not changed racism. Nothing can change without systemic change, changes to institutions. For someone less linear than I, this book might be more effective.  

Favorite Passage

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite …the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.
    ― Albert Murray, quoted in South to America

First 100 Books of the Year Done!

 I passed the 100-book mark on Friday--there have been a few greats, some good ones, some mediocre reads, and some real stinkers. I don't think I've written about all of them--but trust me that you don't even want to know about the ones I've omitted.

Fiction

I am going to have to break up with Barack Obama, or at least with his book picks, which in 2021 included Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura. The protagonist is an unnamed (I really don't appreciate unnamed narrators, though I suppose they create some desired distance between narrator and reader) translator who has moved from New York to the Hague to work in the International Criminal Court. Stuff happens, including stuff that suggests her sense of ethics isn't great, but there's not really a plot; I wasn't that far into the book when I stopped caring about her relationship with her married boyfriend, the fate of the war criminal whose trial she was working on, or anything else. Not sure why I finished the book--but I was happy that I was listening as many readers of print had serious complaints about Kitamura's punctuation (or lack thereof). Sorry, Mr. Obama, this one's a loser.

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead, is a massive book--but it's worth the time. It's the story of Marian Graves, who, with her twin brother, was rescued from a sinking ocean liner as a child. The two were then raised by an alcoholic uncle in Montana. Marian early on becomes interested in being a pilot and faces extreme prejudice in order to become a pilot, first for bootleggers and then for the RAF during World War II. She eventually succeeds in finding financing for her dream of flying around the world over the poles. While the book is really Marian's story, a second narrative features actor Hadley, who is cast as Marian in a movie of her life. At first I didn't think Hadley's story added much to the book, but I changed my mind as I progressed, both because of what the interesting parallels between the two made me think about how women's lives have and have not changed and because the modern piece illustrated how someone's story gets changed as it is filtered through different authors and observers. Definitely recommended.

The Life of the Mind, by Christine Smallwood, quite literally made me feel nauseous. It's the story of Dorothy, a borderline academic supporting herself as an adjunct while struggling to write a book that might land her a tenure track position. She has just had an unsuccessful pregnancy that ended with a medical abortion. And this is where my nausea comes in. The author describes the, um, effluent (?) resulting from the abortion in great detail--and, unfortunately for both Dorothy and the reader, the expulsion/bleeding seems to go on and on. I guess it's good for people to understand what abortion really involves but it doesn't make for pleasant reading.

The Dependents, by Katharine Dion, is a family drama in which the family is actually two families that function almost as one--Gene and Maida (who has recently died) and Ed and Gayle and both couples' children.  The jacket blurb makes you think there is going to be a huge surprise about Maida, but the surprise that is hinted at never really gets revealed, and you're left with the notion that Ed should have married Maida and Gene should have been with Gayle, which was fairly obvious from the flashbacks to their college years. There are other conflicts and happenings--it's a pleasant enough read but I will have forgotten it fairly soon.

Count the Ways, by Joyce Maynard, is also a family drama, but one that had a lot more resonance for me, perhaps because it's primary focus is the mother of the family. Eleanor, an artist and children's book author, meets and marries Cam, a maker of wooden bowls, in the early 1970s. The settle into her New Hampshire farm and fairly quickly have three children. Although Eleanor is irritated by Cam's contributing little to the family, she loves motherhood and her life. Then there's an accident that she blames Cam for, and their marriage falls apart. Over the next decades, she deals with rifts with her children, as well as serious challenges faced by two of them. Despite the many sad things that happen throughout the book, it somehow ends on a positive note, which I found uplifting. 

I'm a fan of Julia Glass, whose new book, Vigil Harbor, is something of a departure as it is set in the near future and has a strong environmental theme. As with all Glass books, multiple characters play important roles, including college student Brecht, who witnessed an act of eco-terrorism that killed a friend (at the beginning of the book, he does not remember that his friend was killed and thinks he's living in the attic at Brecht's home); Brecht's stepfather Austin, a well-known architect; a journalist who had a relationship with a mysterious--perhaps alien--woman that Austin was once engaged to; Celestino, a Guatemalan immigrant who, while valued for his work as an arborist, feels set apart from the mostly white community of Vigil Harbor; and many more. Vigil Harbor is almost a character, as it offers its mostly white, mostly wealthy residents safety from the encroaching ocean, perched on a high headland. The book is engaging but there is a very long denouement (how often do you get to use that high school English term?) after what seems to be the climax. Still, worth reading. 

I have not appreciated the past few Anne Tyler books, so I'm not sure why I read French Braid. I shouldn't have as I didn't appreciate it either. It, too, is a family drama that provides glimpses into multiple generations of the Garrett family. We get the most detail about Robin and Mercy, who married in 1940 and shaped their children and grandchildren. There's a distance about their marriage--Mercy moves out when they become empty-nesters but they don't tell their children and keep up a marital pretense. We get just glimpses into the lives of the children and grandchildren and no sense of any resolution. I found it unsatisfying.

L.A. Weather, by Maria Amparo Estandon, is drama, drama, drama among a Mexican-Jewish American couple and their three successful daughters, whose lives all fall apart at once. 

Helen Hoang is an interesting author. She writes romances, her latest being The Heart Principle, that feature characters on the autism spectrum (and sex--there's definitely sex). Because Hoang is herself on the spectrum, you have to believe that her characterizations are accurate and thus informative. But the book are romances, so they're utterly predictable. We don't know what barriers the couple will have to cross (or the sexual stimulation technique Anna needs to have an orgasm--it's related to her autism), but we know Anna will end up with Quan and we're pretty sure Anna will return to playing the violin. If you like romances, you might get something a little extra from Hoang's work.

Mystery/Thriller

One Step Too Far, by Lisa Gardner, is the second installment in her series featuring Frankie Elkin, who travels the country finding missing people (usually dead). This case involves a groom who disappeared in the Wyoming wilderness on his bachelor weekend. It is five years later, and no one expects to find him alive, but his father wants to find him before his mother dies and his friends, who were along on the fateful weekend, want some resolution (and they have secrets). Basically, the book is kind of a wilderness survival tale, so not my favorite thing, but well done for what it is.

The End of October, by Lawrence Wright, is also a survival story, but the enemy is not a murderer or the wilderness but acute hemorrhagic fever. Dr. Henry Parsons, the scientist with the best chance of solving the medical mystery, ends up trapped in various locations in the Eastern Hemisphere while his family, particularly his children, must deal with the raging pandemic in Atlanta, where they live. It's not the greatest medical mystery I've read, but it was entertaining. 

I have enjoyed a number of Val McDermid's books and admire her ability to create multiple characters around which she bases series. But I did not find Allie Burns, the journalist-heroine of 1979, to be very interesting; I did find her to be lacking in common sense, which perhaps I value too much in my advancing age. Allie and her pal Danny take on two big stories, one involving tax fraud involving Danny's brother, the other requiring infiltration of a "cell" of three idiots planning a terrorist act designed to bring attention to the movement for Scottish independence (and modeled after the IRA). Literally did not care what happened in either case. 

Favorite Passage

I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory. We're celebrated for marrying, but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation.

Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle