I lose all my energy when it gets hot--even though I now live in an air-conditioned condo instead of my old god-awful-hot house. I've also continued having too much work. So all in all, July has gotten off to a slow reading start--haven't read too much and nothing has been really great.
Fiction
I had categorized Jean Hanff Korelitz as a writer of literary mysteries/thrillers that I liked even though all the characters were unlikeable (her novel You Should Have Known was made into the series The Undoing). The Latecomer, her latest, is quite a change, as it is a family drama with no real mystery involved. The Oppenheimer triplets, born to their wealthy parents Salo and Johanna via IVF. The triplets, Lewyn, Harrison, and Sally, don't like each other and don't care that much for their rarely present father (who has become obsessed with modern and outsider artists and a documentarian creating a film about one of those artists) and their overly involved mother. When they take off for college, their mother decides to have another baby using the one leftover embryo, the "latecomer" Phoebe. Understandably, Phoebe does not know what to make of her siblings. Korelitz takes on art, the dynamics of collecting, overpriced liberal education, radically rural conservative education, racial posturing, various types of bad parenting, and more. It's sometimes funny, sometimes thought-provoking, occasionally annoying. One stylistic thing that kind of bugged me was that it started out as a mix of first person plural and third person; then, when Phoebe was born, she became the first person narrator--but her role as the narrator of events she didn't experience or observe didn't really work in my opinion. However, I still would say the book is worth reading.
Another unusual book is Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka. The book opens on Death Row, with 12 hours before Ansel Packer's execution. Packer killed four women, three when he was a teenager and his wife a number of years later. His thoughts as the execution nears are intermingled with the stories of his mother Lavender, his wife's twin sister Hazel, and one of the police officers who investigated the three early murders. The story kept me interested, but I felt like the description of the actual execution was gratuitous. And, when I finished, I felt there was a level at which the author was giving the three women some responsibility for Ansel's actions, which annoyed me. Overall, I wouldn't recommend the book.
Mysteries/Thrillers
I read three mysteries but I've already pretty much forgotten them:
- More than You'll Ever Know, by Katie Gutierrez--another take on the true-crime bloggers who decides to investigate a real case and, of course, learns what police never did.
- The Golden Couple, by Greer Hendriks and Sarah Pekkanen--featuring a therapist who is pretty much undistinguishable from a stalker.
- Strangers We Know, by Elle Marr--FBI agent tells a woman her DNA shows she is related to a serial killer, so she goes to meet the birth family she doesn't know. Yeah, that's logical.
- Last Girl Ghosted, by Lisa Unger--an ugly but somehow charismatic dude meets women on line, charms them in person, and then they disappear.
Nonfiction/Memoir
I like chefs' memoirs, mostly because I like reading about food. Sometimes they go beyond feeding that obsession to provide life insights. This month I read and enjoyed Finding Freedom: A Cook's Story, Remaking a Life from Scratch, by Erin French. French is a self-taught cook who worked in her father's diner as a kid, dropped out of college when she got pregnant, started cooking underground dinners and eventually was able to open her own small restaurant. However, when she went to rehab, her husband fired the staff, closed the restaurant, cleaned out their joint accounts, and essentially stole her son (the husband was not the biological father). It took her years to do so, but she eventually opened another restaurant (now highly acclaimed) in her small home town of Freedom, Maine--a town she thought she wanted to escape as a teenager but eventually decided was the place for her. She also got partial custody of her son and then, when he was a bit older, he opted to live only with her. So it's a story of perseverance. But it really made me wonder why so many chefs have a history of alcoholism or drug abuse. Restaurant work is stressful and physically and emotionally exhausting--but a lot of jobs are stressful and exhausting, like teaching, for example--but I don't think that many teachers have addiction issues. Maybe they do but they just don't write memoirs about it. Just curious if anyone has any insights on this.
Favorite Passages
Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.
--Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution
