Well, LitHub did indeed come out with their "ultimate" list of best books in which they rank books by how many "best books" lists they appeared on. More than 80 books were on anywhere from 4 to 14 lists; I had only read 14 of them. I have started chipping away at some others (Devil House and Free were both from the list, as was Sea of Tranquility, but I'd been on the hold list for that for months). There won't be a lot of overlap between my list of favorite reads of the year (coming up shortly), in part because many of the books I read weren't published in 2022 and in part because I just didn't like some of the books that the literati did like (hello, Vladimir and Either/Or).
But on to the last two weeks of reading in 2022, which included some very good books!
Fiction
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, by Jamie Ford, is a richly imagined and rigorously researched story about six generations of women of Chinese ancestry (most living in the United States but others in China and the UK). Through the stories of these six women, spanning the years from the 1830s, when the first Chinese woman (the real Afong Moy) came to the United States, to 2045, when her descendant Dorothy is living in storm-ravaged Seattle, Ford explores epigenetics, the inheritance of experiences, particularly traumatic experiences. In the intervening years we meet Lai King Foy, put on a ship to China when the plague swept through the Chinese community in San Francisco; Zoe, who attended Summerhill in the 1920s; Faye, a nurse in China during World War II; and Greta, Dorothy's mother and the inventor of a feminist dating app, whose career is ruined by a MeToo style abuser. Each woman has moments in which she feels the experiences of Afong giving birth in an alley, as well as experiences of others of the ancestors. For Dorothy, the experiences are intense--and she sees signs that her five-year-old daughter Annabel is also experiencing something similar. Dorothy seeks help from an indigenous doctor who is experimenting with treatments for inherited trauma and the results might be described as mind-blowing. My description is definitely not doing justice to the book--I'll just summarize by recommending you read it.
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev, by Dawnie Watson, has some similarities with the much-lauded (but not liked by me) Daisy Jones and the Six--it's a book about a rock group that uses fake oral histories as one narrative device. But Opal and Nev stands above Daisy Jones, in my opinion, because it is not only a story of relationships and the music industry but gains depth through the author's look at race in those contexts. Opal is a black woman who is more or less plucked from obscurity by Nev, a British rock star wannabe who has little success until he brings Opal into the band. But, early in their career, their drummer (Opal's lover and the father of Sunny, the book's fictional author) is killed by fans of a redneck band sharing the bill with Opal and Nev at a music festival. Though many years have passed, the event still looms large for Opal, who does not want to reexamine her beliefs about what happened, and Sunny, who wants to truly understand how it happened. Watson uses the oral histories that Sunny gathers to untangle and re-tangle the "facts." Recommended.
The world is so insane these days it can be difficult distinguishing satire from serious commentary (not that satire isn't serious in its own way). However, I'm banking on The Unfolding by A.M. Homes being a satire--even though a lot of what the author talks about seems to have happened. The book centers on a character known only as the Big Guy, who decides on election night 2008 that people like him--rich white hide-bound and racist Republican men--must take action to save the United States from Barack Obama and those who would vote for him. He puts together a group of like-minded dinosaurs, framing his argument as: "We are among the last of an era, a generation where phrases like noblesse oblige, and haberdashery and supper, along with a glass of milk at night and a stiff shot of scotch during the day, were all a piece of something. We summered in one place and had Christmas in another." The group begins plotting a long-range plan to regain control (or, one might say, to make America great again). At the same time, the Big Guy's alcoholic wife rebels after he checks her in to Betty Ford and his 18-year-old daughter is having experiences causing her to think for herself for the first time. Although Homes's writing is sharp and often funny, I found the long conversations between the Big Guy and his compatriots became tedious. And, of course, the proximity to reality is alarming.
Woman of Light is Kali Fajardo-Anstine's second book, and it is a worthy successor to her collection of short stories, Sabrina and Corina. Woman of Light is Luz Lopez's story. At the beginning of the book, set un 1934, Luz reads tea leaves and does laundry for rich white Denverites, but when her brother is chased out of town by the family of a girl he was involved with, Luz needs a better job to help her aunt pay household expenses. She becomes the secretary for a Greek American lawyer, who fights for justice but is sometimes inappropriate in his behavior towards Luz. Fajardo-Anstine provides vignettes on the challenges faced by previous generations of Luz's family, which provide context for the resilience she, her family, and community show in the face of economic hardship and discrimination. Well worth reading.
I probably should have a sci-fi/fantasy header for Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel, but somehow that feels like too much work right now (yeah, really feeling the post-holiday laziness). The problem with really loving the first book by an author that you encounter is that subsequent books have a hard time measuring up--and that's the case with this one. I had the feeling Mandel wanted to write about the pandemic but doing that in a straightforward way would not be her, so she constructed a complicated story involving seemingly unrelated characters experiencing a slip in the space-time continuum. The relationships among the characters became clear in the end, but it just didn't add up to anything eye-opening for me. As my friend Suzy said, "Not sorry I read it but not what I have come to expect from Mandel."
It took me a long time to commit to The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a sequel to his award-winning book The Sympathizer, a book I thought very highly of. Here the unnamed protagonist and his friend Bon have once again left Viet Nam, this time after surviving a re-education camp. This time they have traveled to France, a country Vietnamese people have many feelings about; this is most particularly true for the protagonist, whose father was a French priest. The book is full of violence and philosophy, and I didn't much care for it.
Ms. Demeanor, by Elinor Lipman, is a pleasant enough read about an attorney who has sex on the rooftop of her building, is reported to the police, and ends up on home detention for six months, her license to practice law suspended. She has various adventures and everything turns out great in the end. Sadly, the book lacks the edge found in Lipman's other books; I suppose there's some minor commentary on the judicial system and immigration problems, but it lacks the satirical bite I've found in other books. Perhaps Lipman is beating a retreat from her previous book (Rachel to the Rescue), in which she took on Trump pretty directly. I hope in future she'll return to that middle spot where her work has lived for decades.
Mysteries/Thrillers
I wanted to read Robert Galbreath's latest, The Ink Black Heart, to see if I agreed with J.K. Rowling's critics, who claimed the book was an extension of her transphobic remarks. And, no, it was not, although it did deal with the toxic nature of online culture, which Rowling has experienced. In the novel, Edie Ledwell, the co-creator of a popular web cartoon who has been subject to online harassment after speaking dismissively about a fan-developed game based on the novel, is murdered. Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott are hired to find out who the anonymous developer of the game is, which in essence means solving Edie's murder. Sadly, the book is WAY too long and involves WAY too many red herrings. To make matters worse, all of the ongoing story lines--the sexual tension between Corm and Robin, Corm's reluctance to meet his sister Prue--remain stagnant. Definitely not recommended, but I do recommend the LA Times review, which deals with the transphobia issue: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2022-09-10/column-the-new-j-k-rowling-book-is-not-great-but-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-transphobia
I'm not sure Acts of Violet by Margarita Montimore, really belongs in this category, but there is a mystery at the center of the narrative: What happened to Violet Volk, a gifted magician who disappeared 10 years ago? I think I should have known I was going to have problems with the book when I discovered Montimore uses the overworked podcast trope. There was also a fantasy element that, like the fantasy element in Montimore's Oona out of Order, was not well explained. While I didn't mind it in the earlier book because the story was so intriguing, here I found it irritating. While unraveling the mystery helped Violet's sister, niece, and brother-in-law resolve a number of family issues, those issues could have been more easily solved much earlier if they had just freaking talked to each other. Disappointing.
Hide, by Tracy Clark, launches Clark's second series set in Chicago and, despite the fact that it was a freebie from Amazon Prime, I enjoyed it (this is a fairly rare occurrence). The protagonist is police detective Harriett Foster, who is just returning to work after her former partner's suicide. Foster's grip is tenuous at best--her 15-year-old son was murdered several years ago, she divorced, and she now lives in a house where she can see the tree her son leaned against as he died. So it's challenging when her first case back on returning to work turns out to be a serial murderer. There's also a slightly off psychotherapist and a family with murder in their pasts.
Wrong Place Wrong Time, by Gillian McAllister, is a singular mystery. One night, waiting for her son Todd to come home, Jen looks out the window and sees a strange man on the street. Before she realizes what is happening, her son has stabbed the man. After hours at the local police station, she goes home and wakes to find herself reliving the day before the stabbing. She proceeds backwards through time, trying to figure out what she needs to know to stop the murder and return to the present. Its beautifully constructed with lots of surprises (only one of which I was able to anticipate). Highly recommend.
I have long thought that what Scott Turow does best is construct courtroom scenes, which he does beautifully in Suspect, the story of a police chief accused of sexually abusing her officers. Sadly, too much of the book is taken up with other aspects of political corruption in Kindle County, familiar to Turow readers, and with the "romantic" life of Pinky Granum, the book's protagonist (and granddaughter of Alejandro "Sandy" Stern). In general, I don't think Turow's later works hold a candle to his earlier books--and this follows that pattern.
I'm not sure Devil House, by John Darnielle, really belongs in this category but it was mysterious to me so this is where it landed. Gage Chandler is a true crime writer who is talked into moving into a house (and former porn shop) where a notorious double murder took place in the 1980s. At the time, the crime was rumored to be the work of teenagers wrapped up in Satanism. Gage thinks he can set the record straight and sets about his research (the descriptions of his method are very interesting). He's also thinking a lot about his first book, which featured a teacher who killed two students when they broke into her house. Gage had sympathy for the teacher, and when he receives a letter from the mother of one of the victims, he really begins agonizing about the ramifications of his work. There's a twist at the end that both surprised and confused me. Definitely a unique book. Last note: I listened to the audio book, which was read by the author in a manner that included many somewhat odd pauses--authors can be great or not so great narrators of their work--in this case not so great. Maybe in 2023 I'll keep notes on the good and bad of narrators and do a post devoted just to that topic.
Nonfiction
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert, is a look at possible human solutions to human-created environmental problems. The title is based on the fact that some of the geoengineering strategies proposed as a means of controlling global warming would turn the sky white. The book is informative and alarming, though I don't know what exactly to do with the information. Not exactly an enjoyable read but still worthwhile.
The subtitle of Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships, by Nina Totenberg, is more descriptive of the content of the book than the primary title. While there is certainly a lot about Totenberg's friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the author spends considerable time talking about her marriages, her friendships with Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer, friendships with other SCOTUS justices (including Antonin Scalia), and even the theft and recovery of her father's violin. "Dinners with Ruth" is more of a symbol for the ways in which friends demonstrate their love. I appreciated the examination of friendship, as well as insider information from Totenberg's many years covering the Court. I did have some reservations about her socializing with people she covered (RBG was a somewhat different case since they were friendly before RBG was a judge), although she makes a case for why "old Washington" offered advantages over "new Washington," where there's less friendliness among politicians, jurists, and journalists (I had a similar reaction to reading about SDO's socializing with political folks when I read her biography). I can certainly see the advantages of Democrats and Republicans in Congress being more friendly, but I'm less sanguine about relationships between jurists and politicians and journalists and those they cover. Something to think about--and there are lots of other things to think about as well. Two points, one that made me angry and one that made me laugh. Anger-provoking: Mitch McConnell refused to give permission for Ginsburg to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda, so instead she was relegated to Statuary Hall. Laughter-provoking: one of RBG's grandchildren once unfriended her on social media. This book wasn't what I expected, but I enjoyed it.
Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History, by Lea Ypi, is the first book I picked from the LitHub ultimate list that I didn't already have on my TBR list. It presents one young person's experience of Albania in the years leading up to and following the collapse of the Communist regime. Her parents did such a good job convincing her to support the Albanian state that, as a child, Ypi was devoted to Stalin and former Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, not realizing that her parents were from bourgeois families and that both of her grandfathers had been political prisoners. When the regime fell, she was shocked to learn that her family did not support Communism (or socialism as she refers to it). She details the challenges the family and nation faced in trying to rebuild. The book is informative (I knew virtually nothing about Albanian history), but I didn't find it funny as some reviewers promised it would be. If you are interested in Albania or what happened in various eastern bloc nations after 1989, this would be a good choice for you. Otherwise, give it a pass.
Favorite Passages
There's a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.
--Emily St. John Mandel in Sea of Tranquility
Keep your eye on the horseshoe. I'm telling you something real: the far sides, the extremes, are closer to each other than any of us are to the center.
There are those who demand attention and others who do not need to be known . . . Perhaps it is safer to go unseen.
--A.M. Homes, The Unfolding
