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
