Favorite Covers of 2023

Since in 2023 I've only posted about a few favorite books each season, it doesn't seem like anyone needs a "Best Books" post from me, so I decided to wrap up the year by sharing some book covers I really liked. A few years ago, the trend in covers seemed to be stripes, which can still be seen now, but less frequently. Current trends I've noticed are flowers; women depicted from the back; close-ups of women's faces; a red, purple, or other vivid sky; or a creepy house seen from a distance. These trends are probably influenced by the fact that I read a LOT of mysteries.  Two  of my favorite covers of the year do fall into these trends; I think I particularly like them because of the saturated colors. 

Here are a few others I liked; they don't necessarily have a lot in common except, perhaps, strong graphic elements:

It's often somewhat difficult to figure out what a cover--even a cover I like--has to do with the book within, but here are a few favorites that did link to the content.

I am sometimes amused or perplexed by the changes in covers from one edition to another. The pair below I can understand, as the original cover is not appealing to me (and I'm old so images of old people should resonate with me). The second one (used for the audiobook) still manages to convey age without frightening anyone (perhaps it's my long, scruffy beard prejudice). 

Finally a mini rant--if I were the designer of a lovely cover, I would hate for it to be obscured by meaningless blurbs or "seals" indicating what awards the book has won. How much better would these two books look without those distractions?

Would love to see some other folks weigh in on their favorite covers of 2023. For favorites of design professionals, see https://lithub.com/the-138-best-book-covers-of-2023/. 

 

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures, Absolution, and a Few Other Fall Favorites

Yikes! I've only got five favorites from fall. I certainly read plenty of books, but most were just pretty good, mediocre, or outright awful. Perhaps I should spend the rest of 2023 reflecting on my book selection process. This idea compels me to say that I often don't like books highly praised by the literati; for example, I could not even make it through the book landing on the most "best of 2023 lists"--James McBride's The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. And I know that, regardless of what I say here, I will print out LitHub's "Ultimate Best Books of 2023" list (https://lithub.com/the-ultimate-best-books-of-2023-list/) and plod my way through a number of those I haven't yet read. Some people never learn. 

Anyway, here are my favorite books of fall; may Winter 2024 bring more great reading!

A book group friend loaned me Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt last spring. It sat on my nightstand all summer and into the fall--I just couldn't deal with a book in which an octopus was a character (sentient animals aren't my favorites--I hated The Art of Racing in the Rain with a passion). But I finally decided to give it a try so I could get the book back to its owner and, to my surprise, I really enjoyed it. The octopus, Marcellus, charms, as he intervenes in the lives of two people who work in the aquarium where he lives--the widowed Tova, who is still grieving the loss of her son 30 years ago, and Cameron, a 30-year-old who hopes to find and extort the father he has never met. The book is rife with coincidences and is far from believable, but it delights nonetheless.

All the Sinners Bleed is the third of S.A. Cosby's books (often classified as mysteries but definitely more than that) and it is definitely my favorite. The protagonist is Titus Crown, a former FBI agent who has returned to his Virginia hometown and become sheriff. A school shooting incident morphs into the shooting of a young black man by two white deputies and then into the discovery of a trio of serial killers, one of whom remains at large. As Titus pursues the psychopathic killer, he deals with racism, pastors with a range of ulterior motives, the effects of abuse, a rat on his staff, and personal demons. The story is dark and violent and features a great deal of evil, but Cosby illuminates problems worth examining. 

Absolution, by Alice McDermott, is set in the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, when the military presence was relatively small and there were many civilian advisors. The main characters are American wives, their very presence in country an indication of the status of the war. Patricia is a young, naive, Irish Catholic bride who wants desperately to have a baby. She is drawn into the "cabal" of Charlene, a "Waspy" and yet sexy mother of three who runs a variety of money-making operations, some legal, others exploitative of Vietnamese women, ostensibly to benefit a variety of charitable activities, none of which are very useful to the recipients. Indeed, Charlene's last effort to "help" is a disaster. The story is told in the form of letters exchanged between Patricia and Charlene's daughter Rainey, many years later, with the bulk of the book one letter from Patricia. For me, telling the story from the perspective of these young women makes it different from other books about Vietnam that I have read--and I liked that. 

Amanda Gorman blew us away in 2021 with her inaugural poem "The Hill We Climb." Her book Call Us What We Carry shows her growing as a poet, trying new forms, alluding to classical and contemporary literary works, and dealing with challenging historical and current content. It's impressive and well worth reading, even though you, like me, may not resonate with all of the work. One of my favorite poems in the collection has a hopeful tone (not necessarily characteristic of the collection as a whole):

Every Day We Are Learning

Every day we are learning
How to live with essence, not ease.
How to move with haste, never hate.
How to leave this pain that is beyond us
Behind us.
Just like a skill or any art,
We cannot possess hope without practicing it.
It is the most fundamental craft we demand of ourselves.

I also felt this excerpt from a very long poem titled "The Truth in One Nation" very moving:

Every second, what we feel
For our people & our planet
Almost brings us to our knees,
A compassion that nearly destroys
Us with its massiveness.
There is no love for or in this world
That doesn't feel both bright & unbearable,
Uncarriable.

You know I love a chef's memoir; I also am a huge Top Chef fan, so it's predictable that I would like Savor: A Chef's Hunger for More, by Fatima Ali with Tarajia Morell. Chef Fati was a talented, driven, late-20s Pakistani-American chef when she appeared on Top Chef in the Denver season. Shortly after appearing on the show, she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer; when rigorous treatment failed to stop the  cancer's progress, she was given one year to live and vowed to complete her gustatory bucket list in that year, traveling to all the world's best restaurants. But then her health deteriorated even more rapidly than expected, making such a trip impossible, and she decided to write a book about her life, hoping that the story of her struggles would inspire young Pakistani women, prompt interest in Pakistani cuisine with a goal of alleviating hunger in her home country, and perhaps nudge that country toward changing its attitudes toward gender relations and identity. The book  is composed of stories she shared with her collaborator in an intense week while she was essentially on her death bed, other writing she had done earlier, and chapters written by her mother. Her mother's participation is brave, in that Fati, while celebrating her close relationship with her mother, is also brutally honest about ways in which her mother (and father and stepfather) failed her. Morrell has done a marvelous job putting the pieces together in a way that gives us Fati's story in context. 

Favorite Passages

Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures. 

Shelby Van Pelt, writing as Marcellus the octopus in Remarkably Bright Creatures, by Shelby Van Pelt

It occurred to him that no place was more confused about its past or more terrified of the future than the South. 

--S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

Rants, Thoughts, and Amusements: Also a Poet, A Country You Can Leave, the autism spectrum in books, and Death Watch

The random notes I insert before my seasonal favorites are getting longer as the year progresses. Am I just getting cranky, making bad choices, or what? Anyway, I had so many curmudgeonly observations by Thanksgiving, I decided just to do a special ranting/observation post. 

Shouldn't Memoirists Be at Least Slightly Self-Aware?

I've pretty much stopped writing about things I don't like, but I feel compelled to say something about Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, by Ada Calhoun. I had never heard of Calhoun or her father, the art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, before picking up this book and didn't know much about Frank O'Hara, but had seen the book on many "best of" lists so decided to give it a try. Calhoun found a box of tapes of interviews her father had done in preparation for writing a biography of O'Hara that never came to fruition and decided to pick up and complete the work herself, in large part (in my view) to demonstrate to her father, who apparently "forgot I was there," that she could do something he couldn't. The biography doesn't happen, although various takes on O'Hara are presented through snippets of the interviews, but the book is mostly about Calhoun's relationship with her father and how she processes it as she works on the book. I started out liking the book but found myself disliking Calhoun with increasing intensity. She is the most parochial of Americans, the native New Yorker (how many times does she have to mention they lived on St. Marks Place--she can't just say they went home, she must say they went to St. Marks Place). Plus, while spilling her guts about many of her emotions, she seems tone-deaf and lacking in any real self-awareness. At one point, she criticizes someone for bragging about disgusting acts. But she herself sounds like she's bragging about her own sexual abuse and promiscuity because she was a "child of bohemians." And, while she catalogs the many ways her father has hurt her, she seems unaware that her response comes across as vindictive. One can only hope that the success of this book will obviate the need for more memoir from Calhoun!

Does a Bad/Unsatisfying Ending Ruin a Book You Were Otherwise Enjoying? 

A few years ago, I read an article that said endings don't matter (https://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/04/the-nonsense-of-an-ending-in-defense-of-the-middles-of-books/), and while I agree that the middle of a book is the most important part, a bad ending can definitely kill my enthusiasm for a book. Such was the case with the coming-of-age novel A Country You Can Leave, by Asale Angel-Ajani. I am perhaps being too picky, as I like the idea I think she's trying to convey in the ending, I just think the way she did it was too abrupt with a metaphor that didn't work for me. 

Should Being on the Spectrum Be a Source of Humor? 

In recent years, I've noticed many more protagonists who are neurodivergent or who have mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. On balance, this is a good thing--representation matters. But when being on the autism spectrum, for example, is played for laughs, it bothers me. There's a thin line between gentle wit that illuminates and humor that to me feels wounding. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and The Rosie Project are two popular books that for me crossed the line, leaving me feeling uncomfortable. To convince myself that I'm not being totally judgmental, I did love Extraordinary  Attorney Woo, a Korean TV series about a brilliant young woman who is on the spectrum. I can be convinced I'm wrong about this!

What's the Most Bizarre Premise of Fall (So Far)? 

Death Watch, by Stona Fitch, is about a watch that actually kills its wearers at random times. Yet people buy it, paying $50,000--and they continue buying it after it starts killing people. What?

Favorite Reads of Summer 2023

 

I'm wondering about myself a bit because lately it seems like many of the books I like are true stories of personal trials, including illness and death. There are even books in this genre that I liked but didn't put on the favorites list (The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, by Meghan O'Rourke). I tell myself this has something to do with my advancing age and the need to understand mortality--but I'm not sure that's it. After all, I loved Death Be Not Proud when I was a teenager. So . . . 

Couple of side notes:

• Favorite title of the season: You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty. It sounded so intriguing, so potentially deep, but despite the fact that some reviewers suggested author Akwaeke Emezi "reimagined the love story," it was just a love story--and one that was a bit "eww" at times.
• Although I didn't love Parable of the Talents, by Octavia Butler, I was impressed by how prescient she was. Her character Andrew Steele Jarret and his supporters were so Trumpian it was creepy. And the book was published in 1998, before most of us could have imagined the horror.
• Weirdest premise of the year to date belongs to One's Company, by Ashley Hutson, in which the survivor of a horrific crime wins the lottery and uses her winnings to build a replica of the sets of Three's Company, where she lives in isolation, pretending to be each of the characters for a year. 
• Couldn't help wondering what my librarian friends would think of the premise of How Can I Help You? by Laura Sims, in which a serial killer/nurse hides out as a librarian.  (You can guess, at least in part, how that goes.)

Anyway, here are my favorite summer reads:

Fiction

I've already written about  Ann Patchett's Tom Lake so I'll just repeat here that I loved it.

The subtitle of Erica Baumeister's new book, No Two Persons, proclaims it to be a novel, but she describes it as interlinked short stories. I think it's somewhere in between because the short stories add up to something that isn't a novel--but is just as good. And my different take is proof of the point she's making--people see books differently, but the books keep their power. No Two Persons opens with a young writer, recovering from a family trauma and struggling to bring the boy who has appeared to her to life in words. It then moves to a young mother who reads manuscripts for a literary agency in her "spare time" and to the narrator of the audiobook, an actor who has turned to voice work because of a skin condition. We then meet a series of people who encounter the book--some read it and are moved, some don't read it but still are affected (an artist turns the pages into wings for a "found art" sculpture she is making). 

Late Bloomers, by Deepa Varadarajan, may not be the deepest book, but it is an enjoyable one. It's narrated by four members of an Indian American family: Suresh (father) and Lata (mother) Raman, who divorced after nearly 40 years of (arranged) marriage, and their children Nikesh (son), a lawyer and father, and Priya, their professor daughter. Both children are keeping secrets from their parents, who are, in very different ways, trying to figure out their lives as single people, Suresh through Internet dating and Lata by taking her first job and making new friends there unlike her traditional Indian American married friends. The book is funny while also offering cultural and universal insights. The ending is unusual, in that much is left unresolved, but it feels true to life (and not like a set-up for a sequel, although I could be wrong about that). 

Mysteries

Attica Locke's Black Water Rising is set in the 1980s, with frequent flashes to the protagonist's days as a civil rights activist in the 1960s that ended when an unjust prosecution almost sent him to prison and two friends were killed by the FBI. In the '80s, Jay Porter is a lawyer, a struggling solo practitioner who is about to become a father but has lost his passion. Then he rescues a woman while he and his wife are on a river cruise and all hell breaks loose. Like the protagonists of many mysteries, Jay makes a lot of dumb decisions, but there is real investigation involved and the story has some gravitas, dealing with race and class. It's long for a mystery--400+ pages--but Black Water Rising is worth the investment.

Nonfiction

I've been divorced for 30 years, but I still found much to chew on in Maggie Smith's book You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir, which is a reflection on her divorce, her marriage, and her life after both. Smith brings her poetic skills to the brief vignettes through which she tells her story--the language is often quite beautiful. Some of the devices she uses (e.g., titling chapters "A Note on . . ." --plot, character, betrayal, etc.) seemed somewhat forced, but others (very brief chapters that pose "unanswerable questions" she is trying to answer) worked well for me. The messages I took from the book are relatively straightforward--it's not worth it to give up yourself to try to save a marriage in which your partner wants you to be someone you're not, you can be happy after divorce--but the thinking she goes through to come to those conclusions is instructive and beautifully rendered.

I found Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad an honest, insightful, and moving account of her early-20s diagnosis of leukemia, the incredibly grueling course of the disease and treatment, the pain of losing so many friends who went through treatment with her, the toll on her relationships, and the challenge of returning to "normal" when one is cancer-free (part of her answer was to take a cross-country road trip, shortly after learning to drive, to reach out to people who had contacted her as a result of a column about her illness she wrote for the NYT). I really enjoyed her narration of the audio book. At the end I was touched when I realized the music was by her and her partner. Then she thanked Jon Batiste, and I realized she is the wife whose cancer returned in 2021 and, honestly, that knowledge made the book devastating.

Every few years, someone follows a teacher around for a year and writes a book about the challenges and rewards of teaching. The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable Important Profession, by Alexandra Robbins is in that genre, highlighting problems that mark education in the 21st century. Robbins, who became a substitute teacher while writing the book, spent a lot of time with three teachers (all in elementary/middle school) and interviewed many others (including high school teachers). While many of the challenges are expected--too much emphasis on testing, inadequate resources, obnoxious/entitled parents, difficulty of balancing work and personal life--I found myself shocked by the description of workplace bullying among teachers. I have worked in education for more than 40 years and I know all teachers aren't nice people, but the extent and venality of the bullying among coworkers described in the book was stunning. If you're a parent or a taxpayer for that matter, it's worth reading this book.

On a more cheerful note, of course I have a food-related book. Although its perspective might not be as unique as editor Zosia Mamet thinks it is, My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feeling is a delight. It would be worth reading if it only included Andrew Bevan's tale of being broken up with just after taking a bite of a meatball (his essay also comes with a 16-step "recipe" for preparing SpaghettiOs with Meatballs) or Ted Danson's reflections on why chipped beef on toast tastes like cowardice and the loss of innocence. But there are lots of other funny and/or moving pieces by the likes of Richard Shepard (eating at Sukiyabashi Jiro), Rosie Perez (how her Tia's Pollo Guisado helped her survive PTSD from living in a children's home), Kwame Onwuachi (getting stood up when he had made Veal Blanquette for a date), Anita Lo (being tied to dumplings because of her Chinese background), Mari Andrews (the difference between solitary and lonely food), and much more. Loved it!

Poetry

The poems in Clint Smith's Above Ground are reflections on parenthood and how becoming a parent changed his view of everything, from racism to Hurricane Katrina to school shootings to family history. Some are sweet, while others challenge the reader to reconsider personal and public events. "We Have Made It Through Worse Before" is one of the latter, ending with the powerful lines

. . . We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled. 

Powerful lines pop out throughout the works:  

"Nostalgia is a well-intentioned wound." 

"I still can't tell the difference between a memory and grief's imagination." 

"I fear everything I cannot control
and know that I control nothing."

Highly recommended.

Favorite Passages

. . . he always, deep down, admired men like King, for whom the ability to love was a gift, like an ear for music. Jay, on the other hand, lived a life of constant struggle against his own cynicism, his well-earned knowledge of the limits of human grace.

He has not slept a solid night in days. Or is it years? He gets mixed up sometimes.

    --Attica Locke, Black Water Rising

The thing about birds: if we knew nothing of jays or wrens or sparrows, we'd believe the trees were singing, as if each tree has its own song.

The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful. 

    --Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

For the person facing death, mourning begins in the present tense, in a series of private, preemptive goodbyes that take place long before the body's last breath.

Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep. It fills your chest with shards of glass. It interrupts you mid-laugh when you're at a party, chastising you that, just for a moment, you've forgotten. It haunts you until it becomes a part of you, shadowing you breath for breath.

    --Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms

Tom Lake

My favorite novel so far this year is Ann Patchett's Tom Lake. Lara (nee Laura), her husband Joe, and her three 20-something daughters are all spending the pandemic at the family cherry orchard in Michigan. It's a lot of work, but it also gives them time together--and time for Lara to tell her girls the story of her relationship with the Oscar-winning and recently deceased actor Peter Duke (one of her daughters went through a phase in which she believed Duke was her father). When she was her daughters' age, Lara had been working as an actress, a job she more or less fell into because she was very good at playing Emily in Our Town. But she realizes fairly early on that you cannot play Emily forever and takes her life in a different direction. Her story--she does edit out some pieces--is about becoming and knowing yourself through good and bad decisions, brief and lasting relationships. And it's a story about love and family and everyday life--just as Our Town is. 

I love "Our Town," so its part in the plot enhanced the book for me--I might have liked the book just as well had a different play been cast in the role (so to speak), but it's hard to think of another play that would have been so perfect for the part. The Cherry Orchard is also referenced, but I don't think I've even read it so those allusions did less for me. 

One of the things that I am chewing on after reading Tom Lake is whether children can ever truly know their parents as people, even if the parent makes a point of telling their story--and to what extent all of us would edit our stories for retelling to our children. Of course, the converse is also questionable--can the parent fully see their children as adults? 

It's also worth noting that if you're Ann Patchett, you can apparently get anyone you want to narrate your audiobook. Tom Hanks did her last book, and Meryl Streep does this one--do I even need to say she does it beautifully? 

Favorite passage:

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you'd never be able to let go? Now you're not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping jobs, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well. 

Favorite Reads of Spring 2023: Recipe for Disaster, a Heart that Works, and More

I have perhaps not been very discerning in my spring reading, but there were some highlights. And here they are.

Fiction

We Are the Light, by Matthew Quick, is written in the form of letters from the protagonist, Lucas, to his analyst Karl. In the letters, he is processing the grief and everything else that follows a mass shooting. Lucas intervened in the shooting (at a local movie theater) and is regarded as a hero by the community, but he feels like a monster who was unable to save his wife. Then the shooter's younger brother sets up a tent in Lucas's backyard and engages Lucas in making a film about the tragedy. The book doesn't shy away from the brutal heartbreak of an event like this, but it still manages to be a hopeful look at the healing power of art and community. 

One Two Three, by Laurie Frankel, is narrated by teenage triplets (ergo the one two three of the title) who live in a town whose health--physical and economic--was destroyed by a chemical company nearly 20 years ago. The girls represent the children of the community--Mab is able-bodied and encouraged to leave town as soon as she graduates, Monday appears to be the autism spectrum (e.g., she eats only yellow foods), and Mirabel is brilliant and severely disabled. The return of the family that owned the chemical company raises numerous issues: Will the town choose safety and justice over economic recover? Can anyone from the family be trusted? What should the girls do? Entertaining and thought-provoking.

I guess if you've read a lot of feminist dystopian literature, Gather the Daughters, by Jenny Melamed, may not seem fresh. Since that's not a genre I've explored in great depth, I found the book interesting (and horrifying). It's set on an island, where the people have escaped from some apocalyptic event on the mainland (AKA "the Wastelands"). But were they escaping? Or was their society simply set up by men who want to dominate women and girls, whose life experiences include being raped by their fathers; running wild in the summers, when adults stay home and children roam freely; and being forced into marriage and childbirth. Because of inbreeding many children are born with problems--and they are immediately killed. Yeah, it sounds grim, but the four girls at the center of the book are smart and brave and well characterized. 

Mysteries

City Under One Roof, by Iris Yamashita, is set in an Alaska town where everyone lives in one high-rise building; the town, reminiscent of the town of Whittier, is only accessible via tunnel (which is closed early in the book due to a blizzard).  Anchorage police detective Cara Kennedy (on leave) arrives in the town after a teenager finds a hand and a foot on the beach; Kennedy thinks the discovery may be linked to the death of her husband and son on a camping trip. The town's residents are an eccentric lot and the plot gets complicated by the introduction of a gang from a nearby Native village, but I enjoyed the characterizations and the unusual setting. 

Nonfiction

I picked up Recipe for Disaster: 40 Superstar Stories of Sustenance and Survival at the library one morning, started reading it when I got home, and didn't stop until I finished. Alison Riley has compiled stories for 40 people, generally folks in various forms of the arts (including the culinary arts), recalling a difficult time in their lives and the food that sustained them. Example contributors: Bowen Yang, Alice Waters, Brian Lehrer, Jacqueline Woodson, Thundercat, Emily King. Some of the stories are funny (Samantha Irby on her breakup recipe); many are touching, bordering on heartbreaking (Simon Doonan on a friend who died of AIDS in the early 80s after trying a macrobiotic diet in hopes that it might help--later research showed it may have made the disease progress faster). While some are individual (young single father Cey Adams searches for somewhere to change his baby's diaper in Penn Station), others deal with larger events--9/11, the AIDS epidemic, the COVID-19 pandemic. And many reference childhood, either positively or negatively. The book is also beautifully illustrated with photographs, some closely tied to stories, others with a more abstract connection, by Grant Cornett. I absolutely loved this book (even though I don't want to try the recipes). 

A Heart that Works, by Rob Delaney, is another book about grief, and it is heart-rending, as it deals with the illness and death of the author's young son. But, surprisingly (at least for those who aren't familiar with Delaney's work, which I was not), it's also profane and, at times, humorous. Delaney says he wrote the book because he wanted to make people understand--and he does a good job of conveying the terrible experience his family went through although I'm not sure anyone who hasn't had the experience can truly understand it. And, unlike many couples who lose a child, Delaney and his wife Leah survived as a couple, which was inspiring. 

Having heard Mary Louise Kelly talking about her new book It. Goes. So. Fast. The Year of No Do-Overs on Kate Bowler's podcast, I thought it was entirely about her year trying not to miss any of her older son's activities during his senior year of high school and dealing with the conflict between home and work during that year and throughout her life as a parent. Although I'm long past my active parenting days, that resonated with me, as I (in a much less high-powered job than Kelly) decided not to travel at all during my two sons' senior years). However, that's only a piece of her reflections on time's passage (and she actually missed one of her son's final soccer games because she went holed up in New England to write the book)--the book is also about aging, reporting (there's detail on her infamous interview with Mike Pompeo), her father's death, anchoring and reporting with significant hearing loss, her younger son's delayed speech, and more (briefly mentioned is the break-up of her marriage). I would actually have liked the book to be closer to my expectations, but I still enjoyed it because journalistic memoirs are inherently interesting to me.

People probably have numerous ideas about Valerie Bertinelli based on her life as a sitcom actress, Food Network personality, former wife of a rock star, and frequent "public dieter," her memoir Enough Already gives readers a much more complex view of who she is--and she's pretty remarkable. I was especially impressed by the way she and Eddie Van Halen kept a positive relationship after their divorce. Her reflections on aspects of her life have also set me to thinking about how I handled facets of my own life. 

Favorite Passages

From Recipe for Disaster:

Are you feeling like a cook now? This is the part where I look around the kitchen, thrilled by the sounds and the smells and low-key in awe that I am the one making those things happen, and break my fucking arm trying to pay myself on the back.

--Samantha Irby

After his [the author's father] funeral . . . food began to arrive. The faces of every elder and ancestor whom I could remember rang the doorbell not to stay, not to speak too much, but to leave a dish knowing it would hold the love they felt for us in every bite. Their faces looked like the ones I remember in Geismarand Denver; they looked like the fces of both of my grandparents. They were faces of my mourning family, smiling at me like my father sitting on the shore, smiing at me without speaking, letting the sunflower seeds fall beneath us. 

--Damani Baker

Still No Word from You, by Peter Orner, is a peculiar book, blending memoiristic pieces with brief essays on literary works. Because I'm a very linear thinker, I often couldn't figure out how pieces related to each other. What exactly does Richard Wright's turn to haiku late in life have to do with the pet turtle of the author's brother? Although I couldn't comprehend Orner's point (if he had one), I could appreciate his writing, which is lovely. Some examples: 

In our  house we did eat together, if also alone, at a rough wooden table so small our knees touched. It wasn't for lack of a bigger table. We had a long one in the dining room nobody ever went into. I've written about the kitchen table before. It isn't true that we write stuff out of us. 

There are days I crave the lake, when I look east and there's nothing at all in that direction but trees and unfamiliar mountains. When I was small I'd go down to Millard's Beach and lie in the shallows and let the current wash over me, and I'd put my ear to the bottom and listen to the way the tiny pebbles seethed as they tumbled back and forth beneath the water. We walk the beach where love has taken us, my mother and me. February sun over Lake Michigan. There's no warmth in it. It's fake as varnish. 

My Favorite Reads of Winter 2023: School for Good Mothers, I Have Some Questions for You, and a Few More

Spring has sprung (kind of), and I'm hoping the reading and the weather will both be on the upswing. Meanwhile, thought I'd just highlight my favorite reads of Winter 2023. I've already posted about Taste by Stanley Tucci and Chris Whipple's Gatekeepers, so I won't say anything more about them except they were both exceptional. Some other books I really enjoyed this winter:

• I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai. Makkai takes two tired tropes--the podcaster protagonist who returns to the boarding school where a tragic death occurred when she was a student--and creates an entertaining who-dun-it that also explores the #MeToo movement and its impacts. The book is addressed to Mr. Bloch, the theater teacher whom Makkai suspects was grooming students--including the dead girl--for sex. The Great Believers is still my favorite Makkai book, but I Have Some Questions for You is definitely worth reading. 
  
  
• Musical Tables, by Billy Collins. In this collection, Collins tries his hand at the very small poem, and he does the form justice. Many of the poems are funny, but others are touching. Two examples to support my point:
  
  Headstones
  
  If the dates show
  the husband died
  shortly after the wife--
  
  first Gladys then Harry,
  Betty followed by Tom--
  
  The cause is often
  gradual starvation
  and not a broken heart.
  
  A Memory
  
  It came back to me
  not in the way
  a thing might be returned to its rightful owner
  
  but like dance music
  traveling in the dark
  from one end
  of a lake to the other. 

• The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan. The School for Good Mothers is set in a United States that at first seems "normal." Frida Liu is a 39-year-old mom on the brink of mental collapse when she leaves her 18-month-old daughter home alone to go to her job at the University of Pennsylvania. Her neighbors report her and she is arrested and then subjected to unrelentless surveillance by Child Protective Services. Her crime and the data CPS collects result in her being sentenced to a one-year stay at a new facility, the School for Good Mothers, where the mothers must care for robot children in order to perfect their parenting skills. There is no escape and no way to succeed. It's a chilling look at what constitutes good parenting and society's (or the government's) role in enforcing norms.

• The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir, by Paul Newman. Some years ago, Newman recorded reflections on his life and a collaborator also taped friends, family members, and colleagues talking about their experiences with Newman. Then he got busy with other projects and the memoir was abandoned; eventually, he died, and no one knew what had happened to the tapes until they were found fairly recently. The book is based on those rediscovered materials and it's fascinating. Newman's insecurities were surprising to me--he was Paul freaking Newman!--and I was moved by his efforts to be a better person. Jeff Daniels was a great choice to read the audiobook (with assists from a variety of others). 

And, now . . . on to spring reading!

The Gatekeepers

I'm going to be taking a break from the blog, but before I do, I wanted to highlight an informative and fascinating book by Chris Whipple: The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, which my sister-in-law Kathy recommended. I learned a lot about how the White House operates and how important the Chief of Staff is to the successful functioning of an administration. The book also prompted me to think about some interesting things, such as the fact that being the smartest person in the room isn't always the clear advantage you'd expect it to be. The author obviously regards Carter, Clinton, and Obama as very smart guys. But Carter wanted to micromanage everything and didn't even have a chief of staff for a couple of years--this caused some serious problems in the White House. Clinton, on the other hand, was tremendously disorganized. And both Carter and Clinton chose as their first chiefs old friends with whom they felt very comfortable, but who may not have had the skills/knowledge necessary to do the job really well or may simply not have wanted to push their friends in the ways they needed to be pushed (Clinton did better with subsequent chiefs Podesta and Panetta). Whether Obama looked at their experience and figured out he should try to avoid their mistakes or he was just smart enough to see what needed to be done is unclear--but he picked Rahm Emanuel with whom he was not close but who knew Washington well and didn't care who he offended as his first chief.  He didn't do quite as well with Daley and McDonough (on whom the author placed the blame for the failure of the health care website). 

I was also interested in how the Chiefs of Staff interacted with the First Ladies--Nancy Reagan and Hillary Clinton were the most involved in policy issues while Pat Nixon and Laura Bush are not even mentioned and Betty Ford, Barbara Bush, and Michelle Obama--three big personalities--were only mentioned in terms of family issues/concerns. 

Finally, all the chiefs the author interviewed said that James Baker was the best chief of staff ever. Weirdly, Reagan went from him to a really bad one, Donald Regan. Also weirdly, although Bob Haldeman was definitely one of the worst chiefs (he did end up in jail after all), the chiefs all quoted his line about the chief of staff being the "president's son-of-a-bitch." I did hear the author say on Preet Barara's podcast that Mark Meadows was the worst chief of staff ever, so Haldeman has gotten out of the basement! 

Anyway, as all this rambling shows, I thought this was a really good book. If you're at all interested in politics, I think you would enjoy it.

Taste, Mad Honey, and We All Want Impossible Things Redeem January

There's nothing like an excellent food memoir to redeem a month of reading--thank you, Stanley Tucci! A couple of novels also "came through"--though there were also lots of disappointments. More below.

Fiction

Less Is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer, picks up several years after the events of Less. Our hero's former boyfriend whose marriage to a younger man sent Less off on his worldwide journey, has divorced and returned to his relationship with Less. This time, the impetus setting Less off on a trek across the U.S. is the need to make money fast to pay years of back rent he didn't know he owed. The book is occasionally funny and maybe has something to say about love and literature, but mostly it felt unnecessary. Didn't hate it but won't read another sequel should Greer be tempted to churn out Less Is More (or whatever).

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O'Farrell, is the reimagined story of Lucrezia, the daughter of a nobleman in 16th-century Italy, who is married off to a duke at 14. Inspired by the famous Browning poem "My Last Duchess," O'Farrell opens the book with a scene in which Lucrezia is convinced that her husband is going to kill her (reason not provided); as a result of that set-up and some rather florid writing, the backstory we then proceed through comes across as overwrought. While portraiture and artists are a part of the story, O'Farrell doesn't give us anything approaching the moving demonstration of the power of art that she created in Hamnet. A disappointment.

In Mad Honey, written with Jennifer Finney Boylan, Jodi Picoult returns to the formula that she has gotten away from recently: a hot topic (challenges faced by transgender teens), a teenage protagonist (or two), and a court case. The book has two narrators--Olivia Levy, the mother of Asher, who is accused of killing his girlfriend when he learned she was transgender; and Lily Campanello, Asher's girlfriend. Obviously, the two narrators tell their stories on different timelines, which adds some suspense to a story in which we already know one character is dead. Although occasionally the book feels a little bit like a nonfiction work on transitioning, I enjoyed it. In an author's note, Picoult says that she had wanted to write a book about transgender rights for some time but knew that she would likely not have the insight of a person who is transgender. She also noted that transgender authors can still have difficulty getting their work published, so her writing on this issue might keep a transgender author from being published. Thus, she ended up co-writing the book with Boylan who is a transwoman (a published author so not unknown--but still probably benefitting from the marketing and buzz that accompanies a Picoult book). Picoult wrote the Olivia chapters, Boylan the Lily chapters. I thought it was an interesting approach.  

I generally like Elizabeth Strout, but her Lucy by the Sea is a totally unnecessary "what I did during the pandemic" story that offers no insight into the pandemic, human relationships, or, well, anything. We all lived through the pandemic and know what the isolation was like; unless you have something to offer that will help us understand what we experienced, don't write about it! ,BTW:  Lucy Barton spent the pandemic in Maine with her ex-husband William, who has been conveniently emasculated by a botched prostate surgery and become the saint who puts up with her! Please, Ms. Strout, no more Lucy books!

We All Want Impossible Things, by Catherine Newman, explores the process of dying, friendship, and grief--but it's not entirely sad. Edi, dying of cancer, is discharged from the hospital--but all the hospices near her are full, so she says good-bye to her husband and son and goes to a hospice near her best friend Ash's home (this seems unlikely for multiple reasons). They reminisce, Edi deteriorates, and Ash cares for her and her own family while having sex with Edi's brother and her hospice doctor (and possibly others--I lost track). Yeah, it's a little bit crazy and unlikely but still manages to be life-affirming. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

Too many free listens from Audible this month (free for a reason) -- The Couple on Cedar Close and The Stranger's Wife, by Anna-Lou Weatherly; The Killing Time, by T.J. Brearton; and Immoral, by Brian Freeman. But they're good for falling asleep to and my expectations are generally low.

I had much higher expectations for The Heights, by Louise Candlish, whose books I've enjoyed in the past--this one not so much. Very short summary: it's about a woman who wants to wreak vengeance on the boy who was driving the car when her son was killed. She's unlikable (as is her target) and the other people in her life are not well developed as characters. There's an unnecessarily complicated structure in which the woman is writing her own story, which is then being written about by a journalist. Not recommended.

In The Deepest of Secrets, Kelley Armstrong finally finishes off Rockton in the midst of murders involving the revelation of secrets from the residents' pasts. I found it curious that, as a reader, I knew a lot about the characters that others in their fictional town did not and thus did not find the various revelations shocking. Must work on empathy.  Armstrong will be launching (or perhaps already has) a series based in the new town Casey and Eric are going to start.

Nonfiction

If you saw his film Big Night or his CNN series on the food of Italy, you already know Stanley Tucci  likes food, especially Italian food. This is confirmed in his memoir, Taste: My Life Through Food, a book that delighted me. He starts with memories of his mother's spectacular Italian cooking and proceeds through wonderful meals he has eaten and prepared. He shares anecdotes from his professional life (he once ate sausage that tasted like poop . . . with Meryl Streep), as well his family cooking adventures/ misadventures.  And somehow, I am touched to read about the help of his famous friends when he had cancer (Colin Firth and Ryan Reynolds and Oliver Platt held him up in a terrible time). But most of all, Tucci describes food and meals and the company enjoyed around the table so lovingly, that it makes me want to write a memoir. Just kidding--but I did really love this book!

By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners, by Margaret A. Burnham, is basically a litany of African Americans killed in racially motivated homicides in the South during the Jim Crow era. Some of the homicides were killed by law enforcement officers, others were essentially sanctioned by the justice system because no one was held responsible. It's a difficult accounting, but a necessary one that gave me a new understanding of why many African Americans have a different view of the law that those of us with the privilege of believing that justice is possible, if not likely. 

Favorite Passages

Losing a beloved family heirloom is a very real personal loss; they're things that cannot ever be replaced or re-created. But perhaps the most precious heirlooms are family recipes. Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time. Yet unlike a lost physical heirloom, recipes are a part of our history that can be re-created over and over again. The only way they can be lost is if we choose to lose them. 

    --Stanley Tucci, Taste

Life is messy. I certainly don't expect tidiness from yours or anybody else's. 

    --Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

Early January Disappointments: Demon Copperhead and Horse

 It's sad when you get excited about a favored author's new book and then you really don't enjoy the book. Topping off the the two books that fit that description were two that I honestly did not understand at any meaningful level (and they made it onto multiple "best of 2022" lists). Yeah, that makes you feel stupid. So here they are.

Fiction

As someone who never really cared for Dickens, I guess I should have realized I wasn't going to love Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead as soon as I learned it was David Copperfield reimagined in contemporary Appalachia.  The inspiration is clear--Damon Fields, whose nickname is Demon Copperhead, is being raised by a young, single drug-addicted mother in rural Virginia. When she dies of an overdose, he enters the foster care system at age 11. At his first placement, where the children are unpaid workers for a tobacco farmer, he meets his own Fagin, the charming and immoral older boy known as Fast Forward. Damon has another bad foster placement, which he escapes by running off to find his grandmother, who cannot or will not let him stay. However, Damon is not without skills, both artistic and athletic, and  goes to live with the local football coach. When he is injured in a game and does not have the treatment he needs, he becomes addicted to opioids and enters a downward spiral. There's a somewhat surprising ending on the happy end of the spectrum for a book about a young drug addict, but it does not redeem the story for me. This summary skips over other bad experiences--the book is entirely depressing, perhaps particularly because there were so many instances in which adults could have made a difference in this young man's life. I recognize that Kingsolver is dealing with a very real problem or constellation of problems, but I didn't feel like she took me anywhere that I hadn't already been through news stories and Empire of Pain.

My second disappointment of the month was Horse, by Geraldine Brooks, who has written some fabulous novels (March, The Year of Wonder, People of the Book). I wasn't too enthusiastic about reading the book (two book clubs I'm in chose it as a selection) because I'm not that interested in horses, but I finally jumped in. The book is well constructed, intercutting three (at least three) stories. The first is the story of the enslaved trainer Jarret Lewis who had a special connection with the great race horse Lexington (a real horse in the 1850s); it was interesting to learn about the important role of enslaved people in horse-racing, which was an immensely popular entertainment in the years leading up to the Civil War, although I always cringe when a white author writes their take on African American dialect (and I remained mostly uninterested in the details of horse racing). The second story is that of the artist Thomas Scott, an artist who specialized in horse paintings, which were evidently very popular in the era (although another topic I'm not that interested in--perhaps I am just very close-minded). Scott is also a real person, to whom Brooks gave a male lover, something she admits in the endnotes is not based on historical fact; I found this an annoying attempt to give the story some modernity. But the worst example of that comes in the third story, set in 2019 and involving two young scholars: Jess works at the Smithsonian and is reconstructing Lexington's skeleton that had languished in a storeroom for decades and Theo is an art history graduate student  trying to find out more about a Scott painting of Lexington he found in his neighbor's trash. I was interested in the give and take in the relationship between Jess (a white woman) and Theo (a black man), which highlighted the truth that black people must think about race all the time while white people have the luxury of not thinking about it. SPOILER: However, when Brooks has Theo killed by cops, I about lost it. It was a totally gratuitous plot twist that was inadequately dealt with, leading me to conclude it too was added just to add currency to the story and was disrespectful to the people who have experienced this type of violence. Not everyone will agree with me on this (although my sister does!), but this event took me from being neutral about the book to being rather negative. 

On to the books that made me feel stupid. First was The Furrows by Namwali Serpell.  The book started out as the story of a woman whose brother died when they were children; as she grows up, he dies over and over at different phases of her life. I wasn't sure whether that was supposed to be an exploration of different futures in the metaverse or an indication that she was deranged by grief and guilt. Then abruptly, in the second part of the book, it became a story about a man who was trying to somehow scam her family by pretending to find her brother or be her brother or I don't know what. Honestly, I just have no idea what was happening or what the reader was supposed to take away from the book. I was happy to see that the NYT reviewer wasn't crazy about the book. She didn't feel stupid after reading it (as I did), but she did say "The book is so laden with odd convergences and there are so many brushes with demons that it does leave you feeling tiny and weird." 

The second stupid-making book was The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy. The book focuses on two characters, a brilliant brother and sister who were in love with each other. The sister Alice's sections are conversations between her and a set of imaginary beings that more or less harangue her (mostly a character referred to as The Thalidomide Kid--use your imagination). The sister committed suicide ten years before the parts of the book narrated by the brother, which also are primarily presented in dialogue. The brother is a salvage diver who finds a plane that there appears to be some mystery about--what the mystery is or how it relates to the federal agents that start following Billy is unclear. While not much really happens, Billy's conversations are wide-ranging, covering such topics as physics (Billy and Alice's father was involved in developing the atomic bomb), the Kennedy assassination, the existence of God and the possibility of an afterlife, and much more. Again, I have no idea what the point is or if there even is a point. However, McCarthy writes so beautifully I still might read the novel that he wrote as a pair with this one, which evidently focuses on Alice's treatment for schizophrenia.

Mysteries/Thrillers

I've mentioned numerous times before that I read too many bad mysteries, but I've decided that the serve some sort of mental health-preserving function so I'll undoubtedly keep reading them. None that I've read so far this month were worth saying much about (listed below),, but I  have a rant or two:

• Mystery writers should think twice before inserting a twist that has no real function in the story. To me, the purpose of a good twist is to make the reader rethink how the story is different now that they have this new information. There's one at the end of Blood Will Tell that really is just the author trying to surprise the reader for no reason. I felt the same way when, several books in the series ago, Louise Penny revealed that Jean-Guy's daughter has Down's Syndrome.  Of course, twists that you can tell the author thinks are major but in fact were predictable are also rather pointless (see The Perfect Marriage). 
• Some mystery authors do actually use the language very effectively. But others are just trying too darn hard. Example from The Murder of Sara Barton:  "Her celebrity hangs over the courtroom like the carcass of a dead animal." WHAT?  Just stop it. Mystery readers are generally looking for plot and character not the most beautiful language (for that we go to Cormac McCarthy).
• Some genre writers--especially those doing police procedurals or legal thrillers--need to try a LOT harder when it comes to getting legal matters right. In A Killer's Wife, for example, a prosecutor handles the case of her former boyfriend who allegedly killed using the same MO as that prosecutor's ex-husband. (Yes, you read that right.) No, that would not happen. 

Okay, probably more rants next time, but here are the mysteries read:

• Blood Will Tell, by Heather Chavez
• The Perfect Marriage, by Jeneva Rose
• The Murder of Sara Barton, by Lance McMillian
• A Killer's Wife, by Victor Methos
• Black Echo, by Michael Connolly (first Bosch book; audio book has an interesting interview with the author and Titus Welliver who narrates and portrays Bosch in the series)
• Anywhere You Run, by Wanda K. Morris (not sure this belongs in this category but that's how it's marketed--mostly it is just so sad)
• Black Heart, by Anna-Lou Weatherly

Nonfiction

My son Kevin reads lots of biographies, so I decided to give one that made a lot of "best of" lists a try: The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, by Stacy Schiff. So first, let me say, I found myself drifting off while listening to the book (and I'm a social studies person) so perhaps not 100 percent engaging. But my biggest question was whether this was really a biography of Adams or a history of the run-up to the American Revolution focusing on activities in Massachusetts. I learned some about Adams' contributions but didn't gain a lot of insight into Adams himself. It's also impossible to assess the author's research when you're listening to an audiobook because the footnotes aren't included. I'm not one to read every footnote, but I do find it informative to check what the author cites, where they cite, etc. So it may be awhile before I pick up another biography, but I'll probably go for print next time I do.  

Favorite Passages

Grief is the stuff of life. A life without grief is no life at all. But regret is a prison. Some part of you which you deeply value lies forever impaled at a crossroads you can no longer find and never forget. 

We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.

     --Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger