tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47496552924437722202024-03-18T19:44:42.024-07:00Novel ConversationsLaurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.comBlogger732125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-14389476965582851212024-03-18T19:43:00.000-07:002024-03-18T19:43:56.770-07:00Favorite Reads of Winter: The Talk, Wellness, and More<p> </p><p>I seem always to have issues with books that appear on "best of" lists, but I keep reading them to expand my thinking; meanwhile, I remind myself that what is "good" is a matter of taste and I have as much right to my opinion as the loftiest critic. However, I have read quite a few reviews of <i>The Bee Sting</i> by Paul Murray, and none of the professional reviewers have mentioned the weird shift from third to second person midway through the book. Many reader reviewers mention it, so I know I'm not the only one it bothered. But I do wish someone with insight would have discussed the thought behind the switch. (The book was also too long and totally predictable.)</p><p>I also am compelled to ask if it's possible to write a book set in Iowa City (and they are legion) without including a scene in which a student at "The Workshop" suffers a savaging of their work. I believe I have read more than my share, most recently in another book from the "best of" lists--<i>The Late Americans</i> by Brandon Taylor (didn't care for it, although the savaging scene was okay). Perhaps it's a fad . . . </p><p>And fads do exist in publishing, like books with "Girl" in the title, books set in bookstores or libraries, books written in first person plural, etc. January saw four mysteries in which the bad people escaped punishment for their crimes. Mysteries are generally little morality plays, in which the hero/heroine uncovers the truth and the perpetrator is punished, so it's somewhat jarring to have my expectations turned on their heads. All four were written in the 2020s, which does make me wonder if bad people getting away with stuff in real life (okay, one bad person) might be consciously or subconsciously prompting this trend. Come to think of it, gaslighting has been a theme in more mysteries in the past few years than I used to see--that, too, might be prompted by the public gaslighting we've all been subjected to of late.</p><p>But on to things I'm not complaining about. I've already written about <b><i>Year of Yes</i></b> and <b><i>The Country of the Blind</i></b> in my post on memoirs, so I'm not saying any more about them here--but they're good. And I'll start with some other memoirs I liked.</p><p><b>Memoirs</b></p><p><b><i>The Talk</i></b>, the graphic memoir from Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Darrin Bell, focuses on what it is like to grow up as an African American in the United States--and then to become a parent who must learn from your own childhood experiences how best to help your children navigate a biased world. The title refers to the conversation parents have with African American children, especially boys, about how to survive encounters with police officers and others who may pose danger for young black people. Bell's white mother had "the talk" with him, but his African American father could not bring himself to share his own experiences with his sons. Bell makes a different decision, although he, too, feels the pain of memories. The book is sometimes uncomfortable to read, but it's worth it. </p><p><b><i>Enough</i></b>, by Cassidy Hutchinson, isn't a great book, but it does reveal some new information about the chaos of the Trump White House and the terrible events of January 6, 2021. It's actually alarming how quickly Hutchinson gained a great deal of influence as a naive young staffer, about as well-informed and insightful as most 20-somethings interested in politics (i.e., better informed than many but still a long ways from wise). It seemed fairly clear to me that many people in power were using her as a conduit for information. It was also clear that her influence went to her head, prompting an attitude and actions that I sometimes found distasteful. She, like others in the Trump White House (and in the Clinton camp as well--see the book on Hillary's campaign, <b><i>Shattered</i></b>, for more on that), placed a high value on loyalty, a principle that often discourages reflection on whether the person to whom one is loyal is acting in accordance with other important values. Of course, Hutchinson eventually thought through her experiences and decided to forsake loyalty to Mark Meadows and Donald Trump to be honest in the interest of preserving democracy, for which we can all be thankful. <b><i>Enough</i></b> is a cautionary tale for naive young people who want to get into politics--not to discourage them from doing so, but reminding them not to subvert their values for influence or "loyalty." </p><p>After reading <b><i>Enough</i></b> and watching the January 6 committee hearings, I thought I knew quite a bit about January 6 and its aftermath. But it seems there's always more to learn--and none of it makes you feel better about Republicans and the state of democracy. In <b><i>Oath and Honor: A Memoir and Warning</i></b>, Liz Cheney makes the violence of January 6 more real than any account I've seen or heard. And she takes down Trump and his staff, as well as Republican Members of Congress, with a mountain of evidence and impeccable reasoning. I'm surprised Kevin McCarthy is still able to face himself in the mirror after the way she exposes his lack of leadership, integrity, and knowledge. Here's a telling anecdote from the book. At the first January 6 committee meeting, she was shocked to see Jamie Raskin taking notes for remarks another member would be making. She had never seen McCarthy or other Republicans taking notes in a strategy session. They relied on staffers to take notes and then synthesize the notes into talking points. This is perhaps not the most significant story, but to me it's an indicator of both classism and lack of professionalism and commitment to ideas. For a left-winger like me, every time Cheney mentioned her family was kind of a cringe-moment, but overall I found the book informative--I wouldn't really call it a memoir though, more like a first-person history (if that's a genre). </p><p>Yikes, have I become a memoir person? </p><p><b>Other Nonfiction</b></p><p>Ross Gay decided to write an "essayette" daily for a year, reflecting on things that delight him each day. The result was <b><i>The Book of Delights</i></b>, which I expected to consist of pieces on lovely things that, by attending to them, gave Gay delight. And there is some of that in the book (which includes 102 essayettes)--Gay writes about such things as bird song, gardening, a lavender infinity scarf, poetry readings, fireflies, lying down in public, and beating two 12-year-olds in a pick-up game of basketball. But there are also many much more serious topics that only a gifted "delighter" could include in the collection--pieces on, for example, the commodification of black suffering in popular entertainment, a study that involved exposing black children to huge doses of radiation, Donny Hathaway singing about death. Considering how delight can grow from these topics requires reflection on what <i>delight</i> means. Gay suggests not only that "delight and nostalgia, delight and loneliness . . . are kin" but that the combining of sorrows creates joy. I am leaning toward <i>delight</i> meaning laughing and crying at the same time. Gay has a delightful (see what I did there?) casual but incisive style. He describes the Super Bowl as our "nationalistic celebration of brain damage" and stops to reflect on his own use of the phrase "I found myself," saying "I adore that construction for its Whitmanian assertion of multitudinousness." He describes his mother as "one of the varieties of light." I found so much language to enjoy in these essays. I didn't love every piece (to wit, there are two about peeing that I found unappealing) but the book is full of delights of many types, and I recommend it.</p><p>I heard Jeff Sharlet talking on a podcast (I think it was Dahlia Lithwick's <i>Amicus</i>) and thought his book, <b><i>The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War</i></b>, sounded interesting. So I read it and found that terrifying might be a better descriptor, as Sharlet reports on, among other things, a cross-country trip during which he talked with numerous folks who participated in or supported the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. How and what these folks believe is so extreme and fantastical that I find it impossible not only to understand but to describe. So I borrow from the NYT review by Joseph O'Neill: "The result is a riveting, vividly detailed collage of political and moral derangement in America, one that horrifyingly corresponds to liberals' worst fears." The book is well written and researched, but I would only recommend it if the fate of our democracy is not already keeping you up at night. </p><p><b>Novels</b></p><p>It's been a bleak winter for novels--most of those I've read, including both "serious" books and mysteries, have been less than totally rewarding. I will mention that, though the writing and characterization don't live up to its premise, <b><i>The Measure</i></b>, by Nikki Erlick, has a premise that offers lots of material for discussion. One morning, everyone in the world over the age of 18 wakes up to find themselves the recipient of a box, in which is a single string, the length of which accurately (governments do studies!) predicts the length of your life. Characters grapple with such questions as: Should they open their box? Should they get married if they're a short-stringer (or their beloved is)? Should they have children? Should a short-stringer be able to run for the Presidency? Should short-stringers in the military be protected from hazardous assignments? How should they live their lives? Lots to discuss!</p><p>A better novel is <b><i>Wellness</i></b>, by Nathan Hill. <i>Wellness</i> seems to have a narrow focus--the lives and marriage of two people, Jack and Elizabeth. But within that story, Hill deals with a plethora of themes, many satirically--what it means to stay and fall in love, the utility of psychology, art and how scholars and collectors regard it and talk about it, the effects of technology, gentrification, polyamory, parenting, and even more--but it never seems like he's stuffing too much into the book. The book is non-chronological--at one point, Jack's friend Ben tells him that hypertext will change literature forever, which made me think that perhaps Hill was putting the book together as one path through the story--but we could cut up the pieces, rearrange them, and find another meaning in the book (perhaps I am being fanciful). My favorite humorous piece is when Elizabeth is reflecting on strategies she's tried with their son and what she might do next to bring him out of his shell--and her thoughts include citations! It's a long book, but it's worth it.</p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>. . .in witnessing someone's being touched [in the not quite right mentally sense], we are also witnessing someone's being <i>moved</i>, the absence of which in ourselves is a sorrow, and a sacrifice. And witnessing the absence of movement in ourselves by witnessing its abundance in another, moonwalking toward the half and half, or ringing his bell on Cass Street, can hurt. Until it becomes, if we are lucky, an opening. </p><p><span> --</span>Ross Gay, <i>The Book of Delights</i></p><p>I went looking for trouble and I found it and now I realized what a fool I'd been. We're past the days of "looking for trouble" in America. They were always an illusion. Trouble has always already been present. That's the fear I felt racing too fast under the skin of my left wrist.</p><p> --Jeff Sharlet, <i>The Undertow</i><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-44380833043508353262024-02-03T19:57:00.000-08:002024-02-03T19:57:02.898-08:00Good Memoirs: Year of Yes and Country of the Blind (And Some Bad Ones)<p>I have often whined about not liking memoirs--but I continue to read them and even like some. Since I've read four memoirs in the first month of 2024, I thought I'd ruminate on what makes a memoir good or bad from my perspective. </p><p><b>The Good</b></p><p>In <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight</i>, Andrew Leland does not confine himself to looking inward, as so many memoirists do. He does certainly examine the impact of his vision loss due to retinitis pigmentosa on how he lives his life, interacts with people, and thinks about his identity--and he does so in a thoughtful manner. But he also looks outward to the experiences of other visually impaired people, as well as to assistive technologies and medical treatments that have been developed or are being tested. There's much to be learned as well as much to think about. In the former category, among other things, I learned a lot about the use and learning of Braille and about the development of assistive technologies by blind people themselves, who often have not gotten the credit for their inventions, which have gone on to find wide applicability among the sighted population as well. In the latter category: Is blindness defining when it comes to identity or simply incidental? How is it that the male gaze continues to be relevant when we are talking about blind men? What can we learn about intersectionality and discrimination in its many forms by considering the varied thinking of blind people who are also black, female, and/or LGBTQ? Well worth reading. </p><p>I never intended to read <i><b>Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person</b></i> by Shonda Rhimes. The subtitle in particular sounded like a gimmicky quasi self-help book by a celebrity. But then it was available on Libby and I needed something to listen to while taking my daily walk and I actually liked it a lot. Rhimes was a highly successful TV creator and single mom when her sister shocked her by complaining that she never said yes to anything. She realized her sister was right and decided to say "yes" to every intimidating, scary offer that came her way, from giving a commencement speech at her alma mater to going on Jimmy Kimmel. As she took on these challenges, she also recognized she needed to expand her thinking about saying yes to include saying yes to her family, to herself, and to saying no not out of fear but out of conviction. It gave me a lot to think about, which for me is what makes a memoir worthwhile. Plus, Rhimes is funny!</p><p><b>The Not-So-Good</b></p><p>Reinforcing the idea that subtitles can be important: While a subtitle pushed me away from <b><i>Year of Yes</i></b> until I was desperate for a book, the subtitle of <b><i>The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays </i></b>by CJ Hauser intrigued me. Based on my understanding of the essay form, I thought a memoir in essays would surely offer interesting insights. Um, no. First of all, the book starts with a long section of anecdotes about the love stories of Hauser's progenitors, no resemblance to what I expect from an essay. This is followed by a series of what I guess are essays; I did enjoy pieces about Hauser's responses to <i>The Philadelphia Story</i>, <i>The Fantasticks</i>, and <i>The X-Files</i>, even though I wearied of everything being run through a lens of Hauser's love life. Did she have nothing else in her life but failed relationships? Then, near the end of the book, she concludes a piece by saying "If you are waiting for me to tell you how the story of my going to the fertility clinic comes together with the story of the man who drove me through the park in lilac season with the story of whether or not I want to keep my teats, you are missing the point." And she goes on to blame any reader dissatisfaction with her approach on the reader's misapprehension of "what has to happen in a story." I go on to conclude there really just isn't a point. </p><p>I received John Stamos's memoir <b><i>If You Would Have Told Me</i></b> as a Christmas gift; I wouldn't have picked it up on my own, but I did read it and don't regret it too much, as it's a quick read. It actually starts with a nice anecdote about driving in LA drunk, with people in other cars yelling "Uncle Jessie, pull over." When I recounted this story to my son and DIL, they both thought it sounded highly unlikely. And, sadly, Stamos didn't provide any real insight into addiction and recovery. Mostly, he talked about famous people (especially the Beach Boys) he knew--and he threw his ex-wife under the bus. There's nothing to ponder or take away. It's one of those memoirs that makes the reader ask, "Why did you think this was worth writing?" </p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b><br /><br />I found that the experience of blindness encompasses both tragedy and beauty, the apocalyptic and the commonplace, terror and calm. This is true of most of human experience: the same can be said of the process of aging, or of dying. In the end, I found that the separation between the blind and the sighted worlds is largely superficial, constructed by stigma and misunderstanding rather than any inherent differences. If we could remove the misperceptions people have about blindness--the image of it as a place of fear, claustrophobia, infantilization, and fundamental otherness--the landscape would begin to look very different. The two worlds would cease to feel so distinct, and their overlapping zones would grow. Ultimately, they'd have to yield and concede and share territory. The blind belong to our world, and we belong to theirs. It's the same world. </p><p> --Andrew Leland, <i>The Country of the Blind</i><br /></p><p>When you negate someone's compliment, you are telling them they are wrong. You're telling them they wasted their time. You are questioning their taste and judgment. You are insulting them. If someone wants to compliment you, let them.</p><p> --Shonda Rhimes, <i>Year of Yes</i><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-55083977093870746662023-12-27T18:42:00.000-08:002023-12-27T18:43:43.428-08:00Favorite Covers of 2023<p>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. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiuJ31kyqQQ7sIL7y-9hl8hEg7TfeRCvTEzf6nFOvXmVswzXsBOn9jBbhAYS9JJTX5YZD4m-HeqrFKrA4b6iwD3PhTD07EGhoQeB2GL3JMOlZLqbEKB1gml9K70Y9XM0V5mFYbQPGM6GqYJQTF4TMsp9jtttzgWX39febtybQ3hBNkemuEaP-_p6KB_9o8I" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiuJ31kyqQQ7sIL7y-9hl8hEg7TfeRCvTEzf6nFOvXmVswzXsBOn9jBbhAYS9JJTX5YZD4m-HeqrFKrA4b6iwD3PhTD07EGhoQeB2GL3JMOlZLqbEKB1gml9K70Y9XM0V5mFYbQPGM6GqYJQTF4TMsp9jtttzgWX39febtybQ3hBNkemuEaP-_p6KB_9o8I" width="240" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjrp-AtyMF0b6h9nGacN1myrENeByCre4dxkvrOeSj1vC6nJVPAKCw7EDfWhyU2rgz3cTTG_P7OmEmmQ43HCMBj6MMDZoaEylISMgxXiM7N4BH_eo4P7NeE8RrUinn1JFRwrPMxyMk_lg2uDRD5JuzbAwRw-AV4K-lrJhacyo2_mmnGiqzZh2qUWwtnrlE0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="987" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjrp-AtyMF0b6h9nGacN1myrENeByCre4dxkvrOeSj1vC6nJVPAKCw7EDfWhyU2rgz3cTTG_P7OmEmmQ43HCMBj6MMDZoaEylISMgxXiM7N4BH_eo4P7NeE8RrUinn1JFRwrPMxyMk_lg2uDRD5JuzbAwRw-AV4K-lrJhacyo2_mmnGiqzZh2qUWwtnrlE0" width="158" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div></div><p></p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Here are a few others I liked; they don't necessarily have a lot in common except, perhaps, strong graphic elements:</div><p></p></blockquote><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhwjLff2ckuw2Du3Fws21jl9DdJIpF7HaS1YO3Bi9gDmpYkitQhG9t_IDfijt3_p-8wHQmLyTNu4_Tpvebtr441n-RBPM7sG-9aIwxUAxWqzimsSxKBA3tvrhgnAX9SdyX7x5-NvnufxrzH1pn51JsLJxxAeJGUdvi4TX0kbfXG_T0sSpeverhoQYSuQsvl" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="1003" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhwjLff2ckuw2Du3Fws21jl9DdJIpF7HaS1YO3Bi9gDmpYkitQhG9t_IDfijt3_p-8wHQmLyTNu4_Tpvebtr441n-RBPM7sG-9aIwxUAxWqzimsSxKBA3tvrhgnAX9SdyX7x5-NvnufxrzH1pn51JsLJxxAeJGUdvi4TX0kbfXG_T0sSpeverhoQYSuQsvl" width="160" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiUXQWIzyqt5E0qwXI2XnLLK0FhFJ_nFbBnMQ3bopuE_ODnwTpGXV7JsTvAIAmuX92rOafDkYgydzF6g5Pzzyg2LDbOAlqX0r8QgHtMwTBiSvwGWmmNkJgPYn9-9UxTNZdjwTUbi0hhrQXZ5JSzMTtsGeWtlCVV3zL1lBlRqTBtGzA6lw-J1_kt7ekEz6Pb" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="990" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiUXQWIzyqt5E0qwXI2XnLLK0FhFJ_nFbBnMQ3bopuE_ODnwTpGXV7JsTvAIAmuX92rOafDkYgydzF6g5Pzzyg2LDbOAlqX0r8QgHtMwTBiSvwGWmmNkJgPYn9-9UxTNZdjwTUbi0hhrQXZ5JSzMTtsGeWtlCVV3zL1lBlRqTBtGzA6lw-J1_kt7ekEz6Pb" width="158" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjE3HhAC0I9k7oPxQt4IuXl5qOMFeVn2TOI6Ahd56yUbjIuB1__Kjviz6V7IYEjUw7DRvaHYDzuFhQcYg2bjewrufr2l5I33hvctVUtY7lAWVKp5HBN-_sXehwtY4XdCBI6Dr6KtRX1zQKV8OfePE7svwParR3GbmRPIGzw5iEcpMPaEuL-0OFeXY5TIOTt" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="2550" data-original-width="1688" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjE3HhAC0I9k7oPxQt4IuXl5qOMFeVn2TOI6Ahd56yUbjIuB1__Kjviz6V7IYEjUw7DRvaHYDzuFhQcYg2bjewrufr2l5I33hvctVUtY7lAWVKp5HBN-_sXehwtY4XdCBI6Dr6KtRX1zQKV8OfePE7svwParR3GbmRPIGzw5iEcpMPaEuL-0OFeXY5TIOTt" width="159" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">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.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfJWqJAtcfRo1G5KNZxtFYa6gW3mOL51A2tdKc9ge2fvPJKmNSboAbrohKUXncelA7CSTHXyaNxJ4pjFFonUZNVc4EHt-gEecYKzBF69k-L52d8pvXPbfbbU6c2mmLdYBqvnt8iQaNUBK2udp1aCWBgyYcuOOE-8bnJokk8tMkF1fNhcMDgEpt80v8GDbb" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="982" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgfJWqJAtcfRo1G5KNZxtFYa6gW3mOL51A2tdKc9ge2fvPJKmNSboAbrohKUXncelA7CSTHXyaNxJ4pjFFonUZNVc4EHt-gEecYKzBF69k-L52d8pvXPbfbbU6c2mmLdYBqvnt8iQaNUBK2udp1aCWBgyYcuOOE-8bnJokk8tMkF1fNhcMDgEpt80v8GDbb" width="157" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhemAtmFHekjJo1_2ZlVVx37kOAhsOgEUEnjQ6vNrAQWdmfh-mHe2xAEsg-f7ffEK59k36rruxhbmnt6S6CnJqybuZ53bPYvuNiJ5A_TTSbBiiOO52BSz9PIWaf7nAzdWPBhhK-VrbGgTC4bX6tom2j38nVdVSxKwu0wWayojH_bCQzsgGtpr0cAU3cJlhc" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="996" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhemAtmFHekjJo1_2ZlVVx37kOAhsOgEUEnjQ6vNrAQWdmfh-mHe2xAEsg-f7ffEK59k36rruxhbmnt6S6CnJqybuZ53bPYvuNiJ5A_TTSbBiiOO52BSz9PIWaf7nAzdWPBhhK-VrbGgTC4bX6tom2j38nVdVSxKwu0wWayojH_bCQzsgGtpr0cAU3cJlhc" width="159" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgpYDIIDNMougJJenf8jEqnXQmBSdpECO3Nj2bt764j25_3WVHcmkGICyJ5hwazcOlEmwjNVwTvzudI4tUY1CyalioEz4E09lxtEDEm4938wibqpbq62HpY02EvjTf34o_tJklJ87jpDJ3oGg05KDzdVWN0yXks5qKG5guCdSQjN3roMXylcaVNQilCtfyF" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="971" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgpYDIIDNMougJJenf8jEqnXQmBSdpECO3Nj2bt764j25_3WVHcmkGICyJ5hwazcOlEmwjNVwTvzudI4tUY1CyalioEz4E09lxtEDEm4938wibqpbq62HpY02EvjTf34o_tJklJ87jpDJ3oGg05KDzdVWN0yXks5qKG5guCdSQjN3roMXylcaVNQilCtfyF" width="155" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">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). </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEisZkxGA9IF_C9aPMFprfLcv-0p4jHSz5CvO2kGoVBgG8tho5dI3OhW3gJ-cGe1zAc9F_cTC9wZAe9zRR71bCcGM_MYesrRB8ujMQGFWFe6y2XPSzrvYJAMd11eGS4JYIluy54sMkZsDDX5X0X2S9iTS6nCNsMD4Js_tnns0fXUFvuIG8_RBpd3TCqkH55Y" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="466" data-original-width="378" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEisZkxGA9IF_C9aPMFprfLcv-0p4jHSz5CvO2kGoVBgG8tho5dI3OhW3gJ-cGe1zAc9F_cTC9wZAe9zRR71bCcGM_MYesrRB8ujMQGFWFe6y2XPSzrvYJAMd11eGS4JYIluy54sMkZsDDX5X0X2S9iTS6nCNsMD4Js_tnns0fXUFvuIG8_RBpd3TCqkH55Y" width="195" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhGMfsrPCjKRhBz_JxTL5gZTXLkbQShuyckD9gzpUTH1zYTw1jKyansIFnz2bxudzEFS5JagM3x1dNqA8Z0_OJKeoV4zMdWZxvYxxznd1RHiRd6SLyarHQ3__25bLLoQogop3fiR0dglSbakXybVKGogxgg5kMNsosQE8quIBs1prBBRIO8cRVKamcHS064" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="500" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhGMfsrPCjKRhBz_JxTL5gZTXLkbQShuyckD9gzpUTH1zYTw1jKyansIFnz2bxudzEFS5JagM3x1dNqA8Z0_OJKeoV4zMdWZxvYxxznd1RHiRd6SLyarHQ3__25bLLoQogop3fiR0dglSbakXybVKGogxgg5kMNsosQE8quIBs1prBBRIO8cRVKamcHS064" width="240" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj0cbGQ8FMvqqehAnG1P7iVsOUtmwjhYKV7mvhYgPB_WtfyddOyAAWi8wKpj183diVl4hZRdvreCH0AlftgkemqIlJTUeopPYjd5AETrVHpMMteRfqXcGJV8hp4GvvhaG3NKQClk3ioqNxJBAY5mBEZoUkPdOmcbwD-pbfNamby0t8b93L0UFeQRLFwM2r6" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="993" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj0cbGQ8FMvqqehAnG1P7iVsOUtmwjhYKV7mvhYgPB_WtfyddOyAAWi8wKpj183diVl4hZRdvreCH0AlftgkemqIlJTUeopPYjd5AETrVHpMMteRfqXcGJV8hp4GvvhaG3NKQClk3ioqNxJBAY5mBEZoUkPdOmcbwD-pbfNamby0t8b93L0UFeQRLFwM2r6" width="159" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiYQ4spuHTgpRaXVJP3qe51g7xsyEwj66ZttAEjLFb3cdPHQOOI02iiLTgJvF-SZalEYtyFuf5Dy-Kb8smgR_hlrdHWgyuf8lk8ql8y1AuwIyPV32_2aEkap2f1ISFlymdFdy7_xyrC3qAKpaplaB-bPR0EFaNzMBqrTVZKgWrOtQb18cFeoX6dkn0a1gus" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="1500" data-original-width="971" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiYQ4spuHTgpRaXVJP3qe51g7xsyEwj66ZttAEjLFb3cdPHQOOI02iiLTgJvF-SZalEYtyFuf5Dy-Kb8smgR_hlrdHWgyuf8lk8ql8y1AuwIyPV32_2aEkap2f1ISFlymdFdy7_xyrC3qAKpaplaB-bPR0EFaNzMBqrTVZKgWrOtQb18cFeoX6dkn0a1gus" width="155" /></a></div></div><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">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/. <br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /></div><br /><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /></div><br /></div><br /><br /></div><br /> <p></p><p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><br /><p></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-72730851350218556622023-12-20T12:19:00.000-08:002023-12-20T12:19:27.819-08:00Remarkably Bright Creatures, Absolution, and a Few Other Fall Favorites<p><br /></p><p>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 <i>The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. </i>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. </p><p>Anyway, here are my favorite books of fall; may Winter 2024 bring more great reading!</p><p>A book group friend loaned me <b><i>Remarkably Bright Creatures</i></b> 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 <i>The Art of Racing in the Rain</i> 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.</p><p><b><i>All the Sinners Bleed</i></b> 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. </p><p><b><i>Absolution</i></b>, 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. </p><p>Amanda Gorman blew us away in 2021 with her inaugural poem "The Hill We Climb." Her book <b><i>Call Us What We Carry</i></b> 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):</p><p>Every Day We Are Learning</p><p>Every day we are learning<br />How to live with essence, not ease.<br />How to move with haste, never hate.<br />How to leave this pain that is beyond us<br />Behind us.<br />Just like a skill or any art,<br />We cannot possess hope without practicing it.<br />It is the most fundamental craft we demand of ourselves.</p><p>I also felt this excerpt from a very long poem titled "The Truth in One Nation" very moving:</p><p>Every second, what we feel<br />For our people & our planet<br />Almost brings us to our knees,<br />A compassion that nearly destroys<br />Us with its massiveness.<br />There is no love for or in this world<br />That doesn't feel both bright & unbearable,<br />Uncarriable.</p><p>You know I love a chef's memoir; I also am a huge <i>Top Chef </i>fan, so it's predictable that I would like <b><i>Savor: A Chef's Hunger for More</i></b>, by Fatima Ali with Tarajia Morell. Chef Fati was a talented, driven, late-20s Pakistani-American chef when she appeared on <i>Top Chef </i>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. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>Humans. For the most part, you are dull and blundering. But occasionally, you can be remarkably bright creatures. </p><p>Shelby Van Pelt, writing as Marcellus the octopus in <i>Remarkably Bright Creatures</i>, by Shelby Van Pelt</p><p><br /></p><p>It occurred to him that no place was more confused about its past or more terrified of the future than the South. </p><p>--S.A. Cosby, <i>All the Sinners Bleed</i></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-28118257453549138952023-11-25T09:48:00.000-08:002023-11-25T11:45:06.185-08:00Rants, Thoughts, and Amusements: Also a Poet, A Country You Can Leave, the autism spectrum in books, and Death Watch<p>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. </p><p><b>Shouldn't Memoirists Be at Least Slightly Self-Aware?</b></p><p>I've pretty much stopped writing about things I don't like, but I feel compelled to say something about <b><i>Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me</i></b>, 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!</p><p><b>Does a Bad/Unsatisfying Ending Ruin a Book You Were Otherwise Enjoying? </b></p><p>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 <i><b>A Country You Can Leave</b></i>, 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. </p><p><b>Should Being on the Spectrum Be a Source of Humor?</b> </p><p>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. <i>Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine </i>and <i>The Rosie Project</i> 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!</p><p><b>What's the Most Bizarre Premise of Fall (So Far)? </b></p><p><b><i>Death Watch</i></b>, 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?</p><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-4297119481240270122023-09-20T16:21:00.001-07:002023-09-20T16:21:18.404-07:00Favorite Reads of Summer 2023<p> </p><p>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 (<i>The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness</i>, 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 <i>Death Be Not Proud</i> when I was a teenager. So . . . </p><p>Couple of side notes:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Favorite title of the season: <i>You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty</i>. 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.</li><li>Although I didn't love <i>Parable of the Talents</i>, 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.</li><li>Weirdest premise of the year to date belongs to <i>One's Company</i>, 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 <i>Three's Company</i>, where she lives in isolation, pretending to be each of the characters for a year. </li><li>Couldn't help wondering what my librarian friends would think of the premise of <i>How Can I Help You? </i>by Laura Sims, in which a serial killer/nurse hides out as a librarian. (You can guess, at least in part, how that goes.)</li></ul><p></p><p>Anyway, here are my favorite summer reads:</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>I've already written about Ann Patchett's <b style="font-style: italic;">Tom Lake </b>so I'll just repeat here that I loved it.</p><p>The subtitle of Erica Baumeister's new book, <b><i>No Two Persons</i></b>, 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. <i>No Two Persons</i> 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). </p><p><i><b>Late Bloomers</b></i>, 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). </p><p><b>Mysteries</b></p><p>Attica Locke's <b><i>Black Water Rising</i></b> 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 <b><i>Black Water Rising</i></b> is worth the investment.</p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p>I've been divorced for 30 years, but I still found much to chew on in Maggie Smith's book <i><b>Y</b></i><b><i>ou Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir</i></b>, 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.</p><p>I found <b><i>Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted</i></b> 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.</p><p>Every few years, someone follows a teacher around for a year and writes a book about the challenges and rewards of teaching. <i><b>The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable Important Profession</b></i>, 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.</p><p>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, <b><i>My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feeling</i></b> 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!</p><p><b>Poetry</b></p><p>The poems in Clint Smith's <b><i>Above Ground</i></b> 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</p><p>. . . We are not all left<br />standing after the war has ended. Some of us have<br />become ghosts by the time the dust has settled. </p><p class="MsoNormal">Powerful lines pop out throughout the works: </p><p class="MsoNormal">"Nostalgia is a well-intentioned wound." </p><p class="MsoNormal">"I still can't tell the difference between a memory and grief's imagination." </p><p class="MsoNormal">"I fear everything I cannot control<br />and know that I control nothing."<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Highly recommended.</p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>. . . 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.</p><p>He has not slept a solid night in days. Or is it years? He gets mixed up sometimes.</p><p><span> --</span>Attica Locke, <i>Black Water Rising</i></p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p>The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful. </p><p> --Maggie Smith, <i>You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir</i><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p> --Suleika Jaouad, <i>Between Two Kingdoms</i><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-33871029310683234552023-08-04T22:22:00.001-07:002023-08-04T22:22:33.694-07:00Tom Lake<p>My favorite novel so far this year is Ann Patchett's <i><b>Tom Lake</b></i>. 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 <i>Our Town</i>. 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 <i>Our Town </i>is. </p><p>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. <i>The Cherry Orchard</i> is also referenced, but I don't think I've even read it so those allusions did less for me. </p><p>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? </p><p>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? </p><p><b>Favorite passage:</b></p><p>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. </p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-92061334495157638042023-06-21T11:16:00.001-07:002023-06-21T11:16:09.440-07:00Favorite Reads of Spring 2023: Recipe for Disaster, a Heart that Works, and More<p>I have perhaps not been very discerning in my spring reading, but there were some highlights. And here they are.</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p><b><i>We Are the Light</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b><i>One Two Three</i></b>, 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.</p><p>I guess if you've read a lot of feminist dystopian literature, <b><i>Gather the Daughters</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b>Mysteries</b></p><p><b><i>City Under One Roof</i></b>, 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 C<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Roboto; font-size: 16px;">ara 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. </span></p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p>I picked up <b><i>Recipe for Disaster: 40 Superstar Stories of Sustenance and Survival</i></b> 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). </p><p><b><i>A Heart that Works</i></b>, 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. </p><p>Having heard Mary Louise Kelly talking about her new book <b><i>It. Goes. So. Fast. The Year of No Do-Overs</i></b> 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.</p><p>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 <b style="font-style: italic;">Enough Already</b> 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. </p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>From <b><i>Recipe for Disaster</i></b>:</p><p>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.</p><p>--Samantha Irby</p><p>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. </p><p>--Damani Baker</p><p><b><i>Still No Word from You</i></b>, 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: </p><p>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. </p><p>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. </p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-73572933819821134552023-03-23T08:52:00.000-07:002023-03-23T08:52:02.191-07:00My Favorite Reads of Winter 2023: School for Good Mothers, I Have Some Questions for You, and a Few More<p>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 <b><i>Taste</i></b> by Stanley Tucci and Chris Whipple's <b><i>Gatekeepers</i></b>, so I won't say anything more about them except they were both exceptional. Some other books I really enjoyed this winter:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b><i>I Have Some Questions for You</i></b>, 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. <i>The Great Believers</i> is still my favorite Makkai book, but <i>I Have Some Questions for You</i> is definitely worth reading. <br /><br /></li><li><b><i>Musical Tables</i></b>, 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:<br /><br /><b>Headstones</b><br /><br />If the dates show<br />the husband died<br />shortly after the wife--<br /><br />first Gladys then Harry,<br />Betty followed by Tom--<br /><br />The cause is often<br />gradual starvation<br />and not a broken heart.<br /><br /><b>A Memory</b><br /><br />It came back to me<br />not in the way<br />a thing might be returned to its rightful owner<br /><br />but like dance music<br />traveling in the dark<br />from one end<br />of a lake to the other. </li><li><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal;"><b><i>The School for Good Mothers</i></b>, 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.</p></li><li><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: normal;"><b><i>The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir</i></b>, 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). </p></li></ul><div>And, now . . . on to spring reading!</div><p></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-44012331819858110072023-02-19T09:44:00.000-08:002023-02-19T09:44:42.467-08:00The Gatekeepers<p>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: <b><i>The</i></b><span><i style="font-weight: bold;"> Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, </i>which my sister-in-law Kathy recommended</span>. 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). </p><p>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. </p><p>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! </p><p>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.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-46756656002462746152023-01-31T09:44:00.001-08:002023-01-31T09:44:33.628-08:00Taste, Mad Honey, and We All Want Impossible Things Redeem January<p>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.</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p><b><i>Less Is Lost</i></b>, by Andrew Sean Greer, picks up several years after the events of<i> Less</i>. 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).</p><p><b><i>The Marriage Portrait</i></b>, 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 <i>Hamnet</i>. A disappointment.</p><p>In <b><i>Mad Honey</i></b>, 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. <span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 15.008px;"> </span></p><p><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 15.008px;">I generally like Elizabeth Strout, but her <b><i>Lucy by the Sea </i></b>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!</span></p><p><span face="Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 15.008px;"><b><i>We All Want Impossible Things</i></b>, 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. </span></p><p><b>Mysteries/Thrillers</b></p><p>Too many free listens from Audible this month (free for a reason) -- <b><i>The Couple on Cedar Close </i></b>and <b><i>The Stranger's Wife</i></b><i>, </i>by Anna-Lou Weatherly; <i><b>The Killing Time</b></i>, by T.J. Brearton; and <i><b>Immoral</b></i>, by Brian Freeman. But they're good for falling asleep to and my expectations are generally low.</p><p>I had much higher expectations for <i><b>The Heights</b></i>, 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.</p><p>In <i><b>The Deepest of Secrets</b></i>, 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.</p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p>If you saw his film <i>Big Night</i> 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, <b><i>Taste: My Life Through Food</i></b>, 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!</p><p><b><i>By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow's Legal Executioners</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>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. </p><p> --Stanley Tucci, <i>Taste</i><br /></p><p>Life is messy. I certainly don't expect tidiness from yours or anybody else's. </p><p> --Catherine Newman, <i>We All Want Impossible Things</i><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-46723101023597236562023-01-15T13:36:00.001-08:002023-01-15T13:36:10.901-08:00Early January Disappointments: Demon Copperhead and Horse <p> 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.</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>As someone who never really cared for Dickens, I guess I should have realized I wasn't going to love Barbara Kingsolver's <b><i>Demon Copperhead</i></b> as soon as I learned it was <i>David Copperfield r</i>eimagined in contemporary Appalachia.<i> </i> 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 <i>Empire of Pain.</i></p><p>My second disappointment of the month was <b><i>Horse</i></b>, by Geraldine Brooks, who has written some fabulous novels (<i>March</i>, <i>The Year of Wonder</i>, <i>People of the Book</i>). 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. </p><p>On to the books that made me feel stupid. First was <b><i>The Furrows</i></b> 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." </p><p>The second stupid-making book was <b><i>The Passenger</i></b>, 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.</p><p><b><i>Mysteries/Thrillers</i></b></p><p>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:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>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 <i>Blood Will Tell </i>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 <i>The Perfect Marriage</i>). </li><li>Some mystery authors do actually use the language very effectively. But others are just trying too darn hard. Example from <i>The Murder of Sara Barton</i>: "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).</li><li>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 <i>A Killer's Wife</i>, 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. </li></ul><div>Okay, probably more rants next time, but here are the mysteries read:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><i><b>Blood Will Tell</b></i>, by Heather Chavez</li><li><b><i>The Perfect Marriage</i></b>, by Jeneva Rose</li><li><b><i>The Murder of Sara Barton</i></b>, by Lance McMillian</li><li><i><b>A Killer's Wife</b></i>, by Victor Methos</li><li><b><i>Black Echo</i></b>, 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)</li><li><b><i>Anywhere You Run</i></b>, by Wanda K. Morris (not sure this belongs in this category but that's how it's marketed--mostly it is just so sad)</li><li><b><i>Black Heart</i></b>, by Anna-Lou Weatherly</li></ul><div><b>Nonfiction</b></div></div><div><br /></div><div>My son Kevin reads lots of biographies, so I decided to give one that made a lot of "best of" lists a try: <b><i>The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams</i></b>, 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. </div><div><br /></div><div><b>Favorite Passages</b></div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.</div><div><br /></div><div> --Cormac McCarthy, <i>The Passenger</i></div><div><br /></div><p></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-61752394901994934332022-12-30T08:52:00.001-08:002022-12-30T08:52:42.940-08:00My Favorite Reads of 2022<p> Like everyone else, I usually call this list the "best of"--but I realized that was a bad choice of title because (1) I read a lot of books not published in 2022 and (2) I clearly have different tastes than critics so I may not know what is best but I do know what I like! So here are my favorites from just shy of 300 books read this year (many of them truly terrible mysteries I never mentioned on the blog).</p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Favorite Novel </span></b></p><p><b><i>True Biz</i></b>, by Sara Novic, is a book I'm not seeing on any "best of" lists, but I thought it was compelling and deeply moving. It's the story of 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. The audiobook has a unique feature: when conversations in the book would have been signed, the author was actually signing in the background. Hearing the movement of her arms and smacks when one hand hit the other was a reminder that these conversations would have been silent. I loved that. </p><p><b><i>Honorable Mention:</i></b> <i>Our Missing Hearts</i>, by Celeste Ng; <i>Great Circle</i>, by Maggie Shipstead; <i>Olga Dies Dreaming</i>, by Xochitl Gonzalez; <i>The Anomaly, </i>by Herve Le Tellier (best sci-fi/fantasy of the year by far, but I don't read enough to make it a category); <i>Crossroads</i>, by Jonathan Franzen; <i>Klara and the Sun</i>, by Kazuo Ishiguro; <i>The Many Daughters of Afong Moy</i>, by Jamie Ford (I know it's a lot, but they were all wonderful)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Favorite Short Story Collection</span></b></p><p><b><i>Festival Days</i></b>, by JoAnn Beard, is a collection of stories that are not only enjoyable but memorable. The subject matter is sometimes grim but the stories still manage to be redemptive. One story in particular, about a woman who seeks help from Dr. Kevorkian, has come back to me numerous times throughout the year (I read the book in February). </p><p><b><i>Honorable Mention:</i></b> <i>Land of Big Number</i>s, by Ti-Peng Chen </p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Favorite Mystery/Thriller</span></b></p><p>I read so many bad mysteries that I can't choose between the two I thought were unusual and great this year (does that even make sense?). </p><p><b><i>Five Decembers</i></b>, by James Kestrel, has a classic noir feel. Set in Hawaii and Asia during World War II, the book follows police officer Joe McGrady as he tries to solve the murder of two young people with powerful family connections in the U.S. and Japan.</p><p><b><i>Wrong Place Wrong Time,</i></b> by Gillian McAllister, is a singular mystery in which the protagonist travels backwards in time to try to figure out what she needs to know to prevent her son from murdering a man. Beautifully constructed with many twists. </p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Favorite YA</span></b></p><p><b><i>Speak</i></b>, by Laurie Halse Anderson, is an incredible book about high school freshman Melinda, who has been abandoned by her friends because she called 911 from a summer party where she was assaulted. Through the process of making art and the support of her art teacher, Melinda finds the strength to take action. Melinda's voice is authentic and sad, but there is also humor in the book and the ending is upbeat. Teenage boys and girls should read and talk about this book. </p><p><i><b>Honorable Mention: </b>They Both Die at the End</i>, by Adam Silvera</p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Favorite Nonfiction</span></b></p><p><b><i>Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty</i></b>, by Patrick Radden Keefe, is the book I couldn't stop talking about this year. It details the criminal perfidy of the Sackler family across three generations, demonstrating their complicity in the opioid crisis. Despite thinking I am a fairly well-informed person, I found this book shocking. The dilemma posed by the revelations of the family's criminality for the many institutions to which they had donated huge sums of money was another issue I knew a bit about but learned much more about from Keefe's discussion.</p><p><b><i>Honorable Mention:</i></b> <i>How the Word Is Passed</i>, by Clint Smith; and <i>Four Hundred Souls: A Community History, 1619-2019</i>, edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain (these are both wonderful books that I just didn't talk about quite as much as <i>Empire of Pain</i>)</p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Favorite Memoir/Autobiography</span></b></p><p>I am making this a separate category this year instead of lumping in with nonfiction because I read a couple that I loved and wanted to highlight: </p><p><b><i>In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss</i></b>, by Amy Bloom, is the moving and instructive story of her husband's decision to seek aided suicide when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She writes about each step in the difficult process with great insight and grace. </p><p><b><i>All In</i></b>, by Billie Jean King. I always admired Billie Jean and thought I knew quite a lot about her, especially her career, so I was surprised at how much I learned about her work, not just as a tennis player but as an advocate for women, in sports and beyond. For me, the book made her a three-dimensional person, rather than an icon. </p><p><i><b>Honorable Mention</b></i><b>: </b><i>Going There</i>, by Katie Couric</p><p><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Poetry</span></b></p><p><i><b>I Hope This Finds You Well</b>,</i> by Kate Baer. Baer creates erasure poems from nasty responses to her work on social media, fan letters, promotional emails, congressional testimony, virtually any kind of source. And the poems are funny and often pack an emotional punch. Having tried doing erasure poems, I know creating works of this quality is really hard, and she does it so well.</p><p><b><i>Honorable Mention:</i></b> W<i>hat Kind of Woman</i>, by Kate Baer; <i>You Better Be Lightning</i>, by Andrea Gibson</p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>Favorite Passages</b></span></p><p>I find it informative to look over the quotes I have chosen as favorite passages throughout the year--the process may provide more insight into my state of mind than that of authors, but still. This year I was trying to impose some themes on the quotes I chose as favorite passages--the loss of connection, the power of words or story. But I think they were more random--perhaps a reflection of the state of my brain after nearly three pandemic years. But here is one worth thinking about:</p><p>Who we are and who belongs is the most fundamental question that we have ever asked or can ever ask. We are still struggling to get the answer to this question right. We are still coming up short.</p><p> --John A. Powell in an essay on Dred Scott from the book <i>Four Hundred Souls</i><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-35781327775851546882022-12-30T08:33:00.001-08:002022-12-30T08:53:37.094-08:00Wrapping up the Year with The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, Wrong Place Wrong Time, and More<p>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 (<b><i>Devil House</i></b> and <b><i>Free</i></b> were both from the list, as was <i>Sea of Tranquility</i>, 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, <i>Vladimir </i>and <i>Either/Or</i>). </p><p>But on to the last two weeks of reading in 2022, which included some very good books!</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p><b><i>The Many Daughters of Afong Moy</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b><i>The Final Revival of Opal and Nev</i></b>, by Dawnie Watson, has some similarities with the much-lauded (but not liked by me) <i>Daisy Jones and the Six--</i>it's a book about a rock group that uses fake oral histories as one narrative device. But <i>Opal and Nev </i>stands above <i>Daisy Jones</i>, 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. </p><p>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 <b><i>The Unfolding</i></b> 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. </p><p><b><i>Woman of Light </i></b>is Kali Fajardo-Anstine's second book, and it is a worthy successor to her collection of short stories, <i>Sabrina and Corina</i>. <i>Woman of Light</i> 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. </p><p>I probably should have a sci-fi/fantasy header for <b><i>Sea of Tranquility</i></b>, 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." </p><p>It took me a long time to commit to <b><i>The Committed </i></b>by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a sequel to his award-winning book <i>The Sympathizer,</i> 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. </p><p><b><i>Ms. Demeanor</i></b>, 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 (<i>Rachel to the Rescue</i>), 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. </p><p><b>Mysteries/Thrillers</b></p><p>I wanted to read Robert Galbreath's latest, <b style="font-style: italic;">The Ink Black Heart, </b>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 </p><p>I'm not sure <b><i>Acts of Violet</i></b> 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<b><i> Oona out of Order</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b><i>Hide</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b><i>Wrong Place Wrong Time</i></b>, 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. </p><p>I have long thought that what Scott Turow does best is construct courtroom scenes, which he does beautifully in <b><i>Suspect</i></b>, 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. </p><p>I'm not sure <b><i>Devil House</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p><b><i>Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future</i></b>, 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. </p><p>The subtitle of <b><i>Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b><i>Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History</i></b>, 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.</p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>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.</p><p> --Emily St. John Mandel in <i>Sea of Tranquility</i></p><p>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. </p><p>There are those who demand attention and others who do not need to be known . . . Perhaps it is safer to go unseen.</p><p> --A.M. Homes, <i>The Unfolding</i><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-67423386321231842212022-12-15T15:46:00.001-08:002022-12-15T15:47:00.760-08:00Signal Fires and Some Unusual Mysteries <p>It's that time of year when numerous lists of "best books" come out and I ask myself: "What have I been reading? I've never even heard of half these books!" Hoping LitHub comes out with their list of books on the most lists soon so I can attack a few of 2022's great books that I missed/ignored. Until then . . . <br /></p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>I first encountered George Saunders' work in his wonderful novel <i>Lincoln in the Bardo</i>, but he is primarily known as a writer of short stories. <b><i>Liberation Day, </i></b>my first experience reading his short stories, left me feeling ambivalent. The stories, which seem to be set in an America deep in a post-democratic malaise, are well crafted but somehow unrewarding (at least to me). The title story is one of the most interesting. Three people are more or less hung on a wall, where their "owner" Mr. Untermeyer coaches them in performances that are presented to friends of the U's and Mrs. U uses one of the men, Jeremy, for sexual gratification when her husband is asleep. It's not clear how these people came to be "Speakers"; their memories have been erased--Jeremy believes he was born four years ago as a full-grown man. The Untermeyers' adult son becomes involved with a group who want to liberate the Speakers; the group breaks into one of the performances with disastrous results. Suffice it to say, liberation does not occur. Characters in some of the stories seem to be in similarly restricted circumstances; in "Ghoul," for example, Brian works in an underground amusement park called The Maws of Hell, but there are no visitors and no real justification for the existence of the park. I didn't really have a favorite story, as they all left me feeling rather empty--which may, of course, be Saunders' intent. Hard-core short-story fans may enjoy this collection, but I wouldn't recommend it for the average reader.</p><p>Dani Shapiro writes with such grace and empathy that <b><i>Signal Fires</i></b>, her new book about loss, grief, and the corrosive power of secrets, is uplifting despite its sad subject matter (I didn't even mention dementia and bad parenting). The book opens with a fatal accident in which three members of the Wilf family are involved--unlicensed Theo was driving the car when it crashed, older sister Sarah was not driving because she was drunk but protects Theo by saying she was driving, and father Benjamin, a doctor who pulls the teenagers' friend from the car, not realizing her neck is broken and she should not have been moved. The girl dies, but no charges result from the accident. Still, their roles in the death--and the fact that they never talk about what happened--affect the lives of the family members, particularly Theo and Sarah. Theo disappears for years as a young man, causing his parents great pain. Sarah builds a successful career and family but is an alcoholic. Meanwhile, their mother Mimi has developed dementia, which Ben hides from them for years. Intertwined with Ben's life is the story of Waldo, a young neighbor obsessed with the night sky, whose father is exactly the wrong person to be raising a brilliant child who appears to be on the autism spectrum (interestingly, Shapiro provides distance between the father and readers by referring to him by his last name--and, while we may understand him, he is never quite redeemed . The narrative is not chronological and is told from multiple perspectives as everyone in the story is touched by loss and grief. Yet, in the end, Shapiro gives us hope that grief can be overcome, that we can experience glimmers of those we have loved and lost. Recommended. </p><p><b>Mysteries/Thrillers</b></p><p><b><i>Local Woman Missing</i></b>, by Mary Kubica, is one of the twistiest mysteries I've read in a while. The set-up: New mother Shelby disappears. Days later, Meredith (Shelby's doula) and her daughter Delilah go missing. The women are eventually found dead, Shelby murdered and Meredith an apparent suicide. Eleven years later, Delilah escapes from a basement "prison" where she was held. The story from the time of the women's disappearances is narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. The story following Delilah's return is told mostly from the perspective of Leo, Delilah's brother, with a final chapter narrated by Kate. Within that frame, there are a number of surprises that I did not anticipate. There's also one very creepy scene in which Kate, suspicious of the OB/GYN who delivered Shelby's baby pretends she is pregnant and goes to him for an office visit, even letting him do an internal exam. I definitely could have done without that episode, but otherwise I liked the book quite a bit.</p><p>By a weird coincidence, I finished listening to the new Armand Gamache book, <i><b>World of Curiousities</b></i>, by Louise Penny, the same day the Gamache series <i>Three Pines</i> premiered on Amazon. Having watched the first two episodes, I think it's a decent cop show but doesn't really capture what makes Gamache different from other fictional detectives. But back to the book. I tend to prefer the Gamache books that aren't so firmly set in Three Pines, but this one, while taking place to a large extent in Three Pines, doesn't focus so much on the residents' eccentricities. It includes back story on how Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir met on a case that involved two abused children, who resurface in this book as potential bad actors. The title describes a work of art, a copy of which has shown up in a secret room above Myrna's apartment and bookshop. The copy has been altered with items targeted at Three Pines residents. Armand and Jean-Guy figure out who the primary bad guy is but who he has disguised himself as and how he is linked to the two young people involved in the earlier case is not readily apparent and people are dying! It's complicated and not very realistic, but entertaining. </p><p><b><i>The Body in the Snowdrift,</i></b> by Katherine Hall Page, is a culinary mystery and Agatha Award winner. Thus, you can assume it is a "cozy" mystery and you would be right. It features caterer Faith Fairchild, who is on a ski vacation with her husband's family when all hell breaks loose. Cozy mysteries aren't my favorite because too often the female sleuths go off half-cocked and only "solve" the case when the villain tries to kill them, which describes this book well. Interestingly, this is the 15th title in a series of 25 books and the only one, as far as I can tell, to be a major award-winner (although her first book did win the "Best First Novel" from Malice Domestic so I'm being a tad unfair). I will not be going back to read the other 24 titles or the new one coming out in 2023. </p><p>I picked up Tess Gerritsen's latest, <b><i>Listen to Me</i></b>, and realized I hadn't read a Rizzoli and Isles mystery in quite a while (the last one one came out in 2017). I was also reminded how little the TV series resembled the books--about the only things that were close to the books were that Rizzoli was a Boston PD detective, Isles was the medical examiner, they were friends, and Rizzoli's mom was a bit of a pain. Why even base a TV series on a book series if they're going to be totally different (<i>Bones</i> is another example)? I guess the built-in base of readers might be a reason, but wouldn't devoted fans of the books be irritated by the lack of fidelity or do they just see show and books as totally different entities? I don't know. Anyhoo, the book is okay--Jane must find the link between two cases 19 years apart that seem unrelated but are somehow intertwined, Angela (her mom) deals with neighborhood chaos, and Jane realizes she might not know Maura as well as she thinks. I figured out both Jane's and Angela's mysteries fairly early on, but the book was still a nice light read. </p><p>Louise Candlish constructs some extremely twisted mysteries, and <b><i>The Other Passenger </i></b>is no exception. After a personal crisis, former marketing exec Jamie is working at a coffee shop, essentially living off his partner Claire, who would like him to be more motivated to find a better job (she gifts him with a series of sessions with a career counselor). They become friendly with a younger couple, Kit and Melia, who are burdened with heavy debt. Jamie and Melia start an affair, and then Kit disappears. Suspicion falls on Jamie . . . and that's when the twists start. I don't think I can say more without saying too much so I'll just say it was enjoyable!</p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead</i>, by Sara Gran, is one of the oddest mysteries I've ever read--and I've read a lot of mysteries! Claire, like her late mentor Constance, is a follower of the (fictional) detective Jacques Silette, whose master work <b><i>Detection </i></b>includes such practical advice as "the truth lies . .. at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget." Perhaps no surprise given this inspiration, Claire does not investigate cases in the way other detectives do. For example, Claire does not find clues, she recognizes them, aided by the I Ching, among other tools. Claire is hired to find out what happened to an assistant New Orleans DA who disappeared shortly after Hurricane Katrina. It's two years later, and New Orleans is a mess--although Gann suggests the city was always a mess and the storm only intensified its awfulness. While I respect Gran's creativity, I doubt I will read any more Claire DeWitt books; I'm perhaps too left-brained for Gran's work (I know the left-brain/right-brain thing is a myth, but sometimes it is useful nonetheless).</p><p><b>YA</b></p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">Piecing Me Together, </i>by Renee Watson, is a coming-of-age story for the 21st century. Jade is starting her junior year at the private high school where she is a scholarship student and one of a small number of African American students. She's made few friends in her first two years but finds a friend in a new student, Samantha, a white girl who is also a scholarship student. On the first day of school, she learns she has been chosen to take part in a citywide mentorship program, Woman to Woman, in which successful African American women mentor high school girls, who will receive a college scholarship when they complete the program. Jade is not sure she wants to participate, but the chance for a scholarship is too attractive to ignore. Her mentor Maxine lets her down in a variety of ways, as does her new friend Sam, but she learns to speak up for herself and both relationships improve. Woven into the very personal story are a variety of issues, from police brutality towards black people to shopping while black experiences and the difference between opportunities to help and opportunities to be helped. Definitely a good read--I just wish I could have seen pictures of the collages Jade created!</p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p>I often think memoirs serve the purposes of their authors much more than their readers, and often the authors' purposes have something to do with working through the traumas of childhood. This certainly felt like the case with <i><b>Beautiful Country</b></i>, by Qian Julie Wang. The book relates the story of Wang's five childhood years living in Brooklyn with her highly educated parents who, as unauthorized immigrants from China, were reduced to working menial jobs. They lived in a single room, sharing a kitchen and bathroom with other families. Wang was constantly hiding the truth of her life from her friends (when she was finally able to make some) and teachers. When her mother had to be hospitalized, she was terrified they would be deported. When Wang is about 12, her mother arranges for them to move to Canada, where they can be legal residents. Except for a brief final reflection from the author's perspective as an adult, the story ends there. As a memoir skeptic, I can't help wondering why we don't learn more about that time, why Canada was so difficult for Wang's father (she mentions this is in the final reflection), why she decided to go to college in the U.S. (Swarthmore and Yale Law) and to pursue what she refers to an "empty life" as a lawyer. This is not to say that the book does not paint a moving picture of an immigrant child's life. It does. And it likely helped Wang integrate the scared child she was with the competent adult she now is, but as a reader, I feel that the transition would also be interesting.</p><p><b>Poetry</b></p><p><b><i>And Yet</i></b> is Kate Baer's third collection of poetry and it covers much of the same territory as her earlier work--men and women's relationships, parenting, friendship, self-acceptance, and social issues. As a rather shallow reader of poetry, I appreciate that all of her poems are confined to a single page--they concentrate language and thought and, in my opinion, are more powerful for it. She also employs humor in a way that packs a punch, as in this brief piece:</p><p>Grounds for Divorce</p><p>My husband recounts our children's births<br />like a camp counselor describing cold lake water.</p><p><i>It's not that bad<br />We pushed through<br />Actually kind of beautiful once you get used to it</i></p><p>A few of her poems are what I would consider "prose poems," although I'm not sure I know the explicit definition of that term. I'm not generally fond of this form, but she works it to good effect:</p><p>Awake</p><p>When an officer is asked to administer the death penalty, they are given two<br />or three days off to recover from what they've done. I think of this at night,<br />alone with my list of rude awakenings; how a mother finds her baby dead<br />without a reason, how a kindergartner feels at the sight of a loaded gun.<br />I admit there have been occasions when I've found it difficult to be alive.<br />To remember this in the wake of such injustice fills me with a shame I've<br />always known.</p><p>If I'm honest, I'll say this is not my favorite Baer collection, but it's still very much worth reading.</p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>He'd been counting on a happy ending. But there is no such thing. Nothing ever really ends. The fat lady never really sings her last song. She only changes costumes and goes on to the next show. It's just a matter of when you stop watching.</p><p> --Sara Gann, <i>Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead</i><br /></p><p>Sometimes it feels like I leave home a whole person, sent off with kisses from Mom, who is hanging her every hope on my future. By the time I get home I feel like my soul has been shattered into a million pieces.</p><p> --Renee Watson, <i> Piecing Me Together</i><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-91583132576088759992022-11-30T15:26:00.000-08:002022-11-30T15:26:06.665-08:00You Can't Be Serious: Refocusing after COVID<p>Shortly after publishing my last post, I started feeling sick. Yep, I had COVID. This led to listening to a bunch of free mysteries on Audible that were so militantly mediocre that when I fell asleep (a frequent occurrence), I didn't worry about going back and figuring out what I missed. They will not be mentioned further here. </p><p>Now that I'm mostly recovered and am caught up on the work I missed while sick, I'm trying to refocus. It's hard . . . </p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>Emily Henry's <b><i>Book Lovers</i></b> appears on NPR's "Books We Love" list for 2022. Granted, it's a long list (400 titles), but I don't think <i>Book Lovers</i> belongs on it. It's a romance novel featuring a book editor and a literary agent, who hate each other on first meeting but very quickly thereafter find each other nigh-on irresistible. Passable escapist listening when one has COVID; otherwise, no. </p><p>I had had a book titled <b><i>The Writing on the Wall</i></b> on my TBR list for a few years. After I read the book by W.D. Wetherill, I discovered the book on my list was by a different author. But this one was interesting. It features three protagonists--Vera, a modern-day teacher whose daughter is in some at-first-unnamed legal difficulty; Beth, a young married woman wishing she could get an education in Post-WWI America; and Dottie, a nurse whose son has enlisted in the Army during the Vietnam era. What makes the book interesting is that Vera discovers the latter two women as she is pealing wallpaper in a mountain getaway her sister has purchased. Vera is staying there trying to come to terms with her daughter's situation and has volunteered to help rehab the house to thank her sister. Beth and Dottie, it turns out, wrote their stories on the walls of the house and then covered them with wallpaper. There's a strong anti-war message in the three women's stories, as well as a theme of women's need to tell their stories even if they're never heard. To me, it didn't seem like a very realistic way of telling one's story, but I did enjoy the book. Meanwhile, the other <i>The Writing on the Wall </i>is still on the TBR list. </p><p>I admire Gabrielle Zevin's work because every new book is totally fresh. <i><b>Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow</b></i> is no exception. Sam and Sadie became friends when Sam was in the hospital following a terrible car accident in which his mother was killed and he was seriously injured; Sadie visited him regularly but their friendship ended abruptly when he learned she was receiving community service credits for visiting him. They run into each other years later when he is at Harvard and she is at MIT; they start developing a game together and eventually become successful game developers. There are ups and downs in their business and their relationship and, as they experience these ups and downs the reader is challenged to think about disability and how one copes with physical pain, the benefits of building alternative worlds and playing in them, art, what makes a good teacher (not sleeping with students), and cultural violence. Sometimes Zevin went a little deeper into various aspects of gaming and game development than I needed to go, but overall, I enjoyed the book. </p><p>I don't have high expectations for the free books you can get from Audible and Amazon, but occasionally one surprises me. <b><i>I Came to Say Goodbye </i></b>by Caroline Overington was one of those. It was doubly surprising because it involved a plethora of issues--parenting ranging from questionable to abusive; the perfidy of the social welfare system, particularly child protective services; immigration to Australia; female genital mutilation; treatment available for the mentally ill; quacks promoting misinformation about children's health. And it's narrated by a father and daughter who have some serious character flaws--yet I ended up caring about them. Maybe I've gotten soft.</p><p><b>Mystery/Thriller</b></p><p>If you liked the movie <i>Memento</i>, you will find the premise of <b><i>Stay Awake</i></b> by Megan Goldin familiar. I definitely can't adequately describe the plot, but here's an attempt: Protagonist Liv has a rare form of amnesia: when she wakes up, she has forgotten everything that came before. Her arms are covered with admonitions like "Don't fall asleep." Her low-rent apartment, when she can find it, contains many Post-its with similar messages. When she sees "Wake Up" painted, in blood, on the window of an apartment where a man she knows (although she doesn't remember him!) was murdered, she fears she is being set up. I'll stop there to avoid spoilers. Goldin doesn't execute her idea perfectly and Liv can be an annoying character, but I enjoyed the book. </p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p>Questlove is a very smart man, and what he doesn't know about music is likely not worth knowing. In fact, his encyclopedic knowledge of music sometimes made it hard for me to track where he was going in <b style="font-style: italic;">Music Is History</b>, in which he starts the year he was born and examines musical highlights and historical connections year by year. He also puts together playlists that support the themes he identifies for various years. I respect this work, but someone younger and more knowledgeable about contemporary music would probably "get it" more fully than I did. Since I listened to this as I was recovering from COVID, I might have had some brain fog (how's that as a way to excuse myself for keeping up with Questlove's genius?). </p><p>My sister-in-law Kathy recommended Kal Penn's <i style="font-weight: bold;">You Can't Be Serious</i>, so I picked it up and found it both entertaining and informative. Penn ("real" name Kalpen Modi) basically tells his story in four large chunks: growing up as a somewhat nerdy Indian American kid in New Jersey (not gravitating toward his extended family's career expectations for him), his efforts (eventually successful) to make it in Hollywood in the face of rampant discrimination, his time working in the Obama Administration (he remains a big fan of how President Obama approached governing), and his efforts to get a show featuring a multiethnic cast treated fairly by NBC (spoiler: that did not happen). I guess I am naive, but I did not expect that discrimination in the entertainment industry would have been so open in the 1990s and early 2000s and would remain so institutionalized in the 2010s. Sad. I had read when the book was published that Penn came out in his memoir. Somehow, this "big news" kind of approach had prepped me for a lot of angst about the process. Totally not hte case. He writes about dating guys and finding his somewhat unlikely fiance in a matter of fact manner, which feels like the way LGBTQ+ people should be able to write about their lives. Recommended.</p><p><b>Poetry</b></p><p>I read Elizabeth Alexander's memoir about her husband's death and thought it was brilliant. I've also enjoyed a couple of Mellon Foundation (she is currently the President) webinars that she facilitated. <b><i>Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010</i></b> is her first poetry collection I have read. Many of her poems focus on African American history and life--I especially enjoyed the series of poems on Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color and the poem "Tina Green," that tells a</p><p>small story, hair story, Afro-American story<br />only-black-girl-in-my-class story,<br />pre-adolescence story, black-teacher story.</p><p>Another theme of her work is family (there's a series on postpartum dreams that is wild). I found "Cleaning Out Your Apartment," written about her grandfather, deeply moving. </p><p>A fifty-year-old resume<br />that says you raised delphiniums.<br /><i>Health through Vegetable Juice</i>,<br />your book of common prayer,</p><p>your bureau, bed, your easy chair,<br />dry Chivas bottles, mop and broom<br />pajamas on the drying rack,<br />your shoe trees, shoe-shine box.</p><p>I keep your wicker sewing kit,<br />your balsa cufflink box. There's<br />only my framed photograph to say,<br />you were my grandfather.</p><p>Outside, flowers everywhere<br />the bus stop, santeria shop.<br />Red and blue, violent lavender.<br />Impatiens, impermanent, swarm.</p><p>Among my other favorites in the collection are the poem she read at President Obama's inauguration in 2009 ("Praise Song for the Day") and a poem on "Butter" that ends with a reference to Little Black Sambo, which was an odd reading moment--but still, it's about butter!</p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,<br />any thing can be made, any sentence begun.<br />On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,</p><p>praise song for walking forward in that light.</p><p>Excerpt from "Praise Song for the Day," by Elizabeth Alexander</p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-23068988310442700122022-11-15T12:31:00.002-08:002022-11-15T12:31:22.894-08:00Books that Moved Me: Our Missing Hearts and Speak<p>Just spent the morning with my book club talking about why books are challenged/censored (fear was our main conclusion) and why people feel compelled to try to limit what other people's children read rather than just choosing deciding if a book is suitable for their own children (I think "people are annoying" was our main conclusion). <b><i>Speak</i></b>, the book I read for the meeting (see YA section below) definitely deserves to have a wide audience of teenagers and those who love them. But on to what I've been reading.</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>With her new book,<b><i> Our Missing Hearts</i></b>, Celeste Ng has gone in a new direction. Following an economic crisis, blamed by leaders on China, the United States has passed the PACT act--the Preserving American Culture and Traditions act (yes, the PATRIOT act echoes here). PACT means that books are restricted, people are asked to report on their neighbors, children are removed from parents with dangerous ideas, and Asian Americans are treated as potential traitors. The book essentially tells two stories--the first is the story of Bird, a preteen boy whose mother Margaret, a Chinese America poet, disappeared some years before. He lives with his father, a former linguistics professor who now shelves unread books in a library. The title of one of Margaret's book, <i>Our Missing Hearts</i>, has become a slogan for those protesting removal of children from their families. Motivated by this fact and his receipt of a page filled with drawings of cats that he knows is from his mother, Bird sets out to find her. When he does, the book becomes Margaret's story--how she came to be in the situation she is currently in and what she plans to do about it. It's a powerful book about intolerance and injustice, courage, art, and resilience. And, librarians are the true heroes in the story! And it's beautifully written! Highly recommended. </p><p>The online University of Illinois alumni online book group I joined earlier this year is currently reading <b><i>The Violin Conspiracy</i></b>, by Brendan Slocumb. It's the story of Ray McMillian, a gifted young African American violinist who discovers the family fiddle is actually a Stradavarius worth $10 million. This causes various conflicts, in his family (the elders claim that the violin belongs to them, not to Ray) and with the descendants of the slave-owning family who "owned" Ray's fiddle-playing ancestor (who claim the violin was stolen from them). Then, as Ray is preparing for the prestigious Tchaikovsky competition, the violin is stolen. The narrative moves back and forth between Ray's childhood, when he got no family support and was subjected to discrimination as a black child playing classical music, and his preparation for and participation in the competition, as he freaks out (understandably) about his violin. I enjoyed everything about Ray's life as a black musician, including encounters with unfriendly police, but didn't find the "mystery" particularly compelling. Interesting note: Several commenters in our group thought that Ray's childhood was taking place in the 1970s, while it was actually the early 2000s (I think). I feel like this might reflect white readers' self-delusion about how much has changed--in schools, in the classical music world, and in society in general. We want to believe Ray would not have experienced discrimination from his music teacher in the 2000s, but, sadly, Slocumb, a musician and music teacher, knows more than we do. </p><p><b>Mysteries/Thrillers</b></p><p><b><i>Ice and Stone</i></b> is the latest entry in Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone series, and it's pretty good for the 34th book about one character, perhaps because it deals with a timely topic--the murder of indigenous women. Although the specific reason for their murder seems unlikely to be the motivator for the murders that have and are occurring in the real world, the prejudice and lack of investigation by law enforcement seems on point. There is a weird subplot about an attack on Sharon and Hy's office that goes nowhere, but I still recommend the book.</p><p>I know I complain a lot about bad mysteries, but <b><i>The Coroner</i></b>, by Jennifer Graeser Dornbush, may be the worst ever--obnoxious main character who is supposedly a brilliant doctor but acts like an idiot (I actually kind of wanted her to die when she was attacked by a murderer); constant mentions that she drives a leaf (is the author getting a kickback from Nissan or is she trying to virtue-signal?); multiple violations of the Fourth Amendment by law enforcement officers (mystery writers really need to get the law right--no one in this book could ever have been convicted because pretty much all the evidence was illegally gathered); a corny romance; and a terrible cliffhanger. Authors who write cliffhangers clearly don't care about their readers--they just want to sell the next book in their series. To make matters worse, this one involves the main character--a freaking doctor--sitting by someone praying for their survival. Why isn't she DOING something? Seriously, the worst. </p><p>I first thought <i style="font-weight: bold;">Look What You Made Me Do </i>was a complete rip-off of <i>My Sister, the Serial Killer</i>, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. It certainly starts off similarly, but author Elaine Murphy does take the story in a different direction. Carrie is the witless accomplice to her sister Becca's crimes, helping her dispose of the bodies. But Becca's latest victim is discovered in a park--along with 13 other bodies, not killed by Becca. Because it's a mystery novel, Carrie and Becca start trying to identify the other serial killer. And chaos ensues. Not really a fan. </p><p><b><i>Black Widows</i></b> by Cate Quinn is not the first mystery I've read in which the murder victim had more than one wife, but it's still quite different. Told from the perspective of the three wives of dead husband Blake--Rachel, the controlling first wife, who was raised in a polygamous cult; Emily, a teenager who has an unspecified sexual problem; and Tina, a former drug addict and hooker, who probably loved Blake the most. The police ping-pong back and forth in terms of who they think the killer is--all three wives are arrested at different times--before the "surprise" of who really killed Blake is revealed. The book was somewhat entertaining, but a couple of things bothered me. First, all three wives (as well as Blake's mother) were presented as somewhat mentally damaged, which I don't think is a fair portrayal of LDS women (although, granted, I don't know any women in plural marriages). Second, while I'm not generally one to worry about authors writing about people different from themselves, it seems odd that a British author who has apparently never even been to Utah, would decide to write this book. Perhaps if she had actually spent some time with LDS folks, she might have drawn more complex characters and not portrayed every LDS character (except for one kid missionary who loaned Tina his car) so negatively. </p><p>In <b><i>Desert Star</i></b>, by Michael Connolly, Renee Ballard has become the lead detective of the LAPD's newly reconstituted cold case unit. The catch is no other detectives are assigned to the squad--she must rely on volunteers and consultants. Of course, she draws Harry Bosch into the unit with the promise he can work on a case that has haunted him because he knows who did it but can't bring the perpetrator to justice. But first he has to help find out who killed the sister of the city councilman largely responsible for getting the unit funded. Lots of red herrings, but overall it's okay, though it's hard to believe a major city would actually have a unit manned by volunteers. Also, I feel like the more closely she works with Bosch, the less interesting Ballard becomes. Hopefully, the next title in this series will do more with her character. </p><p><b>Science Fiction</b></p><p>Blake Crouch's latest, <i><b>Upgrade</b></i>, explores the idea that humans might be perfectible via gene modification (think CRISPR), delivered without the manipulated realizing what is happening. Protagonist Logan Ramsey, an agent with the Gene Protection Agency, goes into a basement where an IED with ice shrapnel explodes. At first, doctors do not think he has suffered any lasting damage, but then he starts noticing he's stronger, smarter (he can beat his daughter at chess), and more focused than ever before. Soon enough, he learns that this was all a trick by his mother, a brilliant scientist who everyone thinks committed suicide after she was responsible for the deaths of 200,000 people when one of her attempts to edit genes had the opposite effect of what was intended. She has also "upgraded" Logan's sister and wants the two of them to "save humanity" by upgrading people globally. Logan sees the potential downsides, while his sister decides to take on their mother's challenge. The rest of the book is a bit too much of a "chase scene" for me--and it's hard to develop character when the focus is on action (and science). Not my favorite Crouch book. </p><p><b>Young Adult</b></p><p>This month, my book group decided we would each choose a banned book and report back to the group on what we read and how it informed our perspective on people who challenge books in a supposed effort to protect young people. I chose <i><b>Speak</b></i>, by Laurie Halse Anderson, and it's incredible. It's narrated in first person by a high school freshman, Melinda, whose friends have all abandoned her because she called 911 from a summer party. She hasn't told her friends what happened to her at the party (it's clear she was assaulted, but we don't learn the details until we're quite a ways into the book)--they're just mad because the police came and friends and older siblings got in trouble. Melinda opts to speak as little as possible, which frustrates her parents (who are not the most insightful folk) and teachers. Only her art teacher seems to understand how to help her. Although much of the book is sad--Melinda's voice seems authentic and the reader aches for her--but parts are also funny, and the ending is upbeat and carries a positive message about how taking action can help not only yourself but others. The edition I got from the library was the 10th Anniversary Edition, which included a poem constructed from letters and emails Anderson received from readers as well as some thoughts from Anderson on censorship. She is more understanding than I:</p><p>"Most of the censorship I see is fear-driven. I respect that. The world is a very scary place. It is a terrifying place in which to raise children, and in particular, teenagers. It is human nature to nurture and protect children as they grow into adulthood. But censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in darkness and makes them vulnerable.</p><p>"Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them. They need us to be brave enough to give them great books so they can learn how to grow up into the men and women we want them to be."</p><p> Absolutely think teenagers and their parents and teachers should read this book.</p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p>My friend Carolyn loved <b><i>The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics </i></b>so much she recommended it in her Christmas letter a couple of years ago. Although it took me a long time to get to Daniel James Brown's book, once I did I really enjoyed it. I knew NOTHING about rowing, but Brown does such a great job, I actually got totally engaged in his descriptions of the crew's workouts and competitions. But the real heart of the book is the story of the "boys" from the University of Washington who made up the victorious team, particularly Joe Rantz, who got the author interested in the story; the UW team members were from middle class and lower middle class families, many hard hit by the Depression, little resembling my stereotype of crew as practiced at the elite schools of the East Coast. I was amazed at how popular rowing was as a spectator sport, one that was broadcast over the radio--who knew? The author also does a great job detailing Germany's successful plans to use the games as a propaganda opportunity while hiding the atrocities already occurring there. Given the extent to which Avery Brundage was complicit in this propaganda effort, I'm amazed he continued to hold high office in the U.S. and International Olympic Committees after the war--and into the 1970s!! </p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of the Plants </i>was written by a botany professor, member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, poet, and mother, Robin Wall Kimmerer. I don't think I will capture it's essence, but it's an examination of how the two ways of knowing represented by science and the wisdom of people who learn by engaging deeply with the world around them (over generations) are both complementary and contradictory. Kimmerer makes a case that in order for life on earth to be sustainable given the current challenges, we must move away from the culture of commodification to a recognition that humans have a reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. She makes this case through stories from her own life and teaching, explorations of indigenous wisdom, and scientific research she and her students have done with a view toward exploring those reciprocal relationships. It's deep and inspiring, but I feel like it was almost too much to process. I think I should probably have read it over a period of time, spending time with each chapter or, perhaps even better, choosing a couple of chapters and digging deeply into them with other readers. </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>Today it strikes Bird as unbearably sad, to pass by and leave no trace of your existence.</p><p>The world was on fire, you might as well burn bright.</p><p>Because telling you what really happened would be espousing un-American views, and we certainly wouldn't want that. [Yes, some of the book rings almost unbearably true of our current situation.]</p><p> --Celeste Ng, <i>Our Missing Hearts</i><br /></p><p>. . . I take it [<i>War and Peace</i>] with me whenever I have to travel, hoping that one day I'll understand it. POr at least understand why Leo Tolstoy had wanted to gift the world with a mostly boring novel of over a thousand pages. It's still a mystery to me, and I keep hoping I'll come upon some gem-like insight that will explain it. </p><p> --Marcia Muller, <i>Ice and Stone</i></p><p>They were now representatives of something much larger than themselves--a way of life, a shared set of values. Liberty was perhaps the most fundamental of those values. But the things that held them together--trust in each other, mutual respect, humility, fair play, watching out for one another--those were also part of what America meant to all of them.</p><p><span> --D</span>aniel James Brown, <i>The Boys in the Boat</i></p><p>Philosophers call this state of isolation and disconnection "species loneliness"--a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship. As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely when we can no longer call out to our neighbors.</p><p><span> --Robin Wall Kimmerer, <i>Braiding Sweetgrass</i> [I could reproduce a lot more passages, but I've already gone a bit overboard]</span><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-88564833660098699262022-11-01T10:44:00.005-07:002022-11-01T10:49:51.281-07:00You Better Be Lightning lights up late October<p>How can it be November already? Here's a look at how October ended.</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>A friend gave <b><i>The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell</i></b>, by Robert Dugoni, a rave review, so I picked it up. Sam "Hell" Hill was born with red eyes--a fact that subjected him to discrimination and bullying as a youngster. The bullies were a classmate and the principal of his Catholic school, a nun with a drinking problem. He finds two friends--Ernie, the only black student in the school and, Mickie, a rebellious girl--who make his life bearable and who continue to be his friend into an adult. As an adult, Sam becomes a tinted-contact-wearing ophthalmologist who takes on the case of his childhood bully's daughter, whom he suspects is being abused. The result is a personal crisis that sends Sam careening away from his friends and the life he has built. I thought the story of Sam's youth was engaging, but I was so annoyed by his interpersonal idiocy in his adult life that I found the adult portions of the story unsatisfying. </p><p><i style="font-weight: bold;">This Is How It Always Is</i>, by Laurie Frankel, is the story of a family with five sons, until the youngest son Claude declares he wants to wear a dress and be called Poppy. It's certainly worthwhile to explore how a transitioning child affects all the other members of a family, and I liked the book's treatment of Poppy and her brothers. On the other hand, I often wondered what her parents were thinking and why they were doing things like suddenly moving the family from Madison to Seattle and then trying to keep Poppy's status secret. And the event that seemed to bring the family to some kind of resolution--a medical mission to Thailand, in which the doctor-mom took Poppy along and both had life-changing experiences--seemed quite unrealistic. I wanted to like the book more than I actually did.</p><p>I might say the same thing about <b><i>Lessons in Chemistry</i></b>, by Bonnie Garmus. Here the central character is a brilliant woman, Elizabeth Zott, trying to succeed as a scientist in the 1950s and 1960s, further handicapped by being a single unmarried mother. The challenges are undoubtedly real, and her efforts to continue her career in unusual ways are admirable if slightly unbelievable. Her gifted daughter Mad is a wonderful character who wants to figure out the mystery of her dead father's family history, with the help of her friend Rev. Wakely, another wonderful character. I enjoyed much about the book, but I sometimes thought that the author was trying for humor in situations that really had no room for humor. For example, Elizabeth was sexually assaulted by her thesis advisor in grad school--not a humorous situation, but the way in which Garmus describes how Elizabeth stabbed him with her pencil is written in a way that seems intended to be funny. Sorry--not funny. </p><p>Two of Kate Atkinson's works of historical fiction--<i>Life After Life</i> and <i>A God in Ruins</i>--are among my favorites of the past 20 years. But her new book, <b><i>Shrines of Gaiety</i></b>, is a disappointment. Set in the seamy underside of London in the years after World War I, the book features a large cast of characters, three of whom stand out: Gwendolen Kelling, a former combat nurse who has come to London to look for two young girls who have run away from York (and to escape the boredom of her life there); Freda, one of the girls Gwendolen is searching for, who has found London to be rougher than she imagined; and DCI John Frobisher, who is investigating the deaths of young women and to whom Gwendolen turns for help. Other, less interesting characters are the family of nightclub impresario Nellie Coker and two crooked cops trying to steal Nellie's businesses. Bad things happen to almost everyone and then the book ends with a "here's where everyone ends up in the future" tacked on. I guess if you're very curious about the underside of this period, you might find the book interesting, but I did not. Not recommended. </p><p><b>Mysteries</b></p><p><b><i>Five Decembers</i></b>, by James Kestrel, is the most recent winner of the Edgar for Best Mystery Novel and, for once, I think the honor is well-deserved. Indeed, Five Decembers is more than just an excellent mystery--it's an excellent novel. The action begins in Honolulu in November 1941. Police officer Joe McGrady is faced with a challenging case--two young people murdered and found in a barn; one is the nephew of a high-ranking naval officer, putting more pressure on the police. Joe finds clues that lead him across the Pacific, and he heads to Hong Kong in search of the killer. Given the time, you can guess what happens--although what happens to Joe after the attack on Pearl Harbor is far from predictable. I don't want to give the rest of the story away--suffice it to say, I recommend this book. </p><p><b><i>22 Seconds</i></b> is the latest entry in the Patterson/Paetro <i>Women's Murder Club</i> series. This one involves violent protests against a new California gun law, as well as gun runners and drug cartels moving goods between Mexico and the United States. Subplots involving anyone other than Lindsay Boxer are underdeveloped--either a total waste or a set-up for something in volume 23. Not great, not horrible. </p><p>I did a mini-binge of the first three novels in the Jane Ryland/Jake Brogan series by Hank Phillippi Ryan--<b><i>The Other Woman</i></b>, <b><i>The Wrong Girl</i></b>, and <b><i>Truth Be Told</i></b>, the latter two of which won Agatha awards. Jane is a reporter, Jake is a police officer, they're attracted to each other but can't have a relationship (or at least a public one) because it would be a conflict of interest. They get involved investigating the same crimes, and both seem to go off half-cocked fairly often. Crimes that seem unrelated actually end up being part of one big criminal fiasco. The sexual tension story line gets tedious, but the books are fairly entertaining. </p><p><b><i>The Housekeeper</i></b>, by Joy Fielding, is kind of Halloween-appropriate. A daughter hires a housekeeper to help her father care for her disabled mother and the woman goes from being a dream to a nightmare. It's a decent premise, but Fielding foreshadows so much that there's little suspense.</p><p>We know from the beginning of <b><i>Things We Do in the Dark</i></b>, by Jennifer Hillier, that protagonist Paris Peralta is now who she claims to be. But her current life has plenty of drama--her husband has been murdered and she's a suspect. Then an old friend, who also happens to be a true crime podcaster (that trope is getting tired and it's not used particularly well here), starts to investigate a case that involved her in her earlier life. Soon, her two lives come together. There are some surprises although one is signaled a bit too obviously before it is fully disclosed. Mediocre.</p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p><b><i>Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism </i></b>(second ed.), by bell hooks, is a well-argued discussion of why the situation of black women must be considered as due to both racism and sexism/misogyny. hooks examines how misogyny affected black women in slavery; she also looks at black men's misogyny and the varied ways that this misogyny affects black women. Also of note is the racism of the feminist movement, which rests hard on women of my age, but is supported by the evidence. Recommended.</p><p><b>Poetry</b></p><p>A friend posted enthusiastically about going to a performance by queer poet Andrea Gibson, so I ordered her latest book, <b><i>You Better Be Lightning</i></b>. It took me a while to finish the book as it's pretty intense. She writes about relationships, about love and loss, the vulnerability of LGBTQ youth, illness, goosebump moments . . . life. Some of her poems are exceptionally brief but still pack a punch:</p><p>No Such Thing as the Innocent Bystander</p><p>Silence rides shotgun<br />wherever hate goes.</p><p>Spelling Bee without Stinger</p><p><i>I love myself</i><br />is often spelled<br /><i>g-o-o-d-b-y-e</i></p><p>Some of the poems are quite lengthy, some look like prose. There's a wide array of material here, but every piece conveys emotion, often painful, but sometimes joyful (check out Gibson reading "Acceptance Speech after Setting the World Record in Goosebumps," which reminds us that joy comes in diverse and individual forms:<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XK-hb_bjqU"> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XK-hb_bjqU</a>). As with any poetry collection, some poems resonant, others don't, but Gibson's work is affecting and I plan to check out more of what she's written. </p><p><b>Favorite passages</b></p><p>The process begins with the individual woman's acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.</p><p>When feminists acknowledge in one breath that black women are victimized and in the same breath emphasize their strength, they imply that though black women are oppressed they manage to circumvent the damaging impact of oppression by being strong--and that is simply not the case. Usually, when people talk about the "strength" of black women they are referring to the way in which they perceive black women coping with oppression. They ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation.</p><p> bell hooks, in <i>Ain't I a Woman</i> (and I could pull out a lot of other wisdom as well) <br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-67996902763154151582022-10-17T19:12:00.001-07:002022-10-17T19:12:14.018-07:00Widowland, People Person, and More October Reading<p> </p><p><br /></p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>The idea of <b><i>Widowland</i></b>, by C.J. Carey, is interesting. The book is set in Great Britain, 13 years after Britain agreed to be ruled by Hitler's Germany. Women have been divided into several castes that define how they live their lives. King George and his family have disappeared, and King Edward (he of Wallis Simpson fame) is about to be re-crowned, an event that will end some aspects of the British-German agreement (including protection of British Jews). The protagonist Rose works rewriting literary classics to reflect the new views of women's roles. All that is interesting. But then the book goes off the rails when Rose receives a special assignment to investigate whether a group of widows (a disrespected caste) is responsible for anti-regime graffiti. That could also have been interesting but it just didn't work (e.g., why would Rose have been chosen for this assignment, for which she had no discernible skills?). Disappointing. </p><p><b><i>People Person</i></b>, by Candice Carty-Williams, is an entertaining but completely unbelievable story. Dimple has four half-siblings (same father; the five have four different mothers) whom she has met exactly once, when she was a child and their narcissistic father decided they should all meet. When her ex-boyfriend falls in her kitchen, hitting his head on the counter and apparently killing himself, she calls her eldest sister, who brings the rest of the crew alone to help dispose of the body. The rest of the book is about the five of them helping Dimple and building a family relationship. I found this so unlikely as to be a fantasy--but perhaps I am just a bad person. </p><p><b><i>The Every</i></b>, by Dave Eggers, is a sequel to <i>The Circle</i>, a cautionary tale about what can happen when your life is lived entirely in public via social media. In <b><i>The Every</i></b>, the Circle (essentially a combination of Google and Facebook) has merged with an on-line digital retailer named for a South American jungle, and the merged company's cultural influence is even greater than in the <i>The Circle</i>. A technocritic named Delaney decides to destroy The Every from within by getting a job there and proposing terrible ideas that will ultimately bring about economic failure. But the ideas are not only adopted by the company, they become wildly popular, albeit with some bad effects. The book is more satirical and less frightening than its predecessor, perhaps because the plot isn't strong and aspects of the company's practices and culture seem so ridiculous. But I enjoyed it.</p><p>Up until a couple of years ago, I had never read much Stephen King--but I've picked up several of his books recently and I do admire his writing skills while occasionally wondering how his brain works. <b><i>Billy Summers</i></b> is interesting because it's a story in which the main character is a hired killer (although he only kills truly bad people, so there's that)whomt I sometimes found myself liking. Then I remembered there was a lot not to like about the man--but he was dealing with so many worse people so maybe that meant he was all right. At any rate, Billy was a fully realized character. I don't know if Stephen King actually knows how assassins work, but the details mostly seemed plausible. Somewhat uncomfortably enjoyable. </p><p><b>Mysteries/Thrillers</b></p><p><b><i>What She Saw</i></b>, by Diane Saxon is evidently the third entry in a series featuring D.S. Jenna Morgan. I listened to it because it was free on Audible and, while I didn't hate it, was glad I hadn't used a credit on it. It opens with a man murdering his family members and setting his house on fire. One of his daughters survives and hides in a neighbor's barn. Why she thought she should hide is not entirely clear, and it's kind of a distraction from the narrative about the work of the police. On the other hand, it's key to the climax, so maybe that's why. Probably won't read any more of the series. BTW: What She Saw is the title of multiple books. </p><p><i><b>The Guilt Trip</b></i>, by Sandie Jones, which was advertised as a mystery but seemed more of a domestic drama, had me wishing someone would die a lot sooner than they did--and I wouldn't have cared which character it was. In sum, the narrator is happily married until she goes to her brother-in-law's destination wedding and becomes convinced her husband is having an affair with the bride. She spends the weekend melting down, arguably too late, until she figures out what's really going on. Not recommended.</p><p>In <b><i>Righteous Prey</i></b>, by John Sandford, Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers take on a band of bitcoin billionaires who have decided to become vigilantes, killing "assholes," sending out press releases on their kills, and maintaining a Dark Web presence. Interestingly, Virgil's presence seems to prevent Lucas acting like the vigilante he himself has become in other recent books. The story is entertaining enough but is a clear set-up for a sequel, which I generally find annoying. </p><p>I'm not a fan of Harlan Coban, but <b><i>Gone for Good</i></b> was available on Libby, so . . . I checked it out. It revolves around a 15-year-old crime that might have been committed by the protagonist Will's brother, Ken, who has been missing ever since. Now, with a new crime at hand and evidence that the brother may be alive, Will must figure out what is going on. If it sounds similar to my description of Alex Finlay's <i>The Night Shift</i>, that's because there are similarities. But <i>The Night Shift </i>is better. </p><p><b><i>The Last to Vanish</i></b> by Megan Miranda is not a particularly great mystery about a series of disappearances from a North Carolina inn. For me to think something is a great mystery, it has to have interesting twists -- but give the reader enough information as they go along to think the twists make sense at the end. The twists in this book are so out of left field that they don't seem believable. However, I did learn about an interesting concept from the book: trauma tourism. Trauma tourists go to places where bad things have happened and wallow in the horror. I guess this is really a thing!!</p><p><b><i>The Judge's List</i></b> by John Grisham is one of those books that starts out strong--a woman whose father was murdered believes she has identified the killer--a sitting judge in Florida. She takes her evidence to Lacy Stoltz, an investigator with the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. Since the Board doesn't generally handle murders, Lacy initially refuses to take the case--but the law demands that they look into every complaint, so she begins an investigation. Around the time the judge figures out he is being investigated, I thought it broke down and became a typical "chasing the bad guy" scenario. And the ending--truly hated. </p><p><b><i>Cajun Kiss of Death,</i></b> by Ellen Byron, won the Agatha Award for 2021, Byron's second win for the Maggie Crozat series in four years. The series is set in a small Louisiana town and is just way too cutesy for me--even though people are dying, being stalked, getting food poisoning, etc. all around. I thought it might be interesting because it was all about food--a chef was murdered, other chefs/cooks were suspects, there were recipes at the end. But nothing redeemed it for me. </p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p>Although I don't live in Broomfield any more, I'm still in a Broomfield-based book group and interested in the town's literary goings-on. This year, the One Book One Broomfield selection is <b><i>The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage and a Girl Saved by Bees</i></b>, by Meredith May. As one might guess from the title, there's a lot about bees and the beekeeping grandfather who taught Meredith about the habits and wisdom of the bees. Sadly, others in her life were less supportive--her mother barely leaving her bed for years after she was divorced from May's father and her grandmother--perhaps from some guilt complex--defending her daughter when she abused Meredith and her brother. I guess the book is well done for what it is, but I found the bees as a model for human community overdone and the family dysfunction of a piece with so many other memoirs that it failed to provoke the outrage it deserved. Again, perhaps I am just a bad person.</p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>He knew there should be a balance between the taking and the giving a person does in one lifetime. That a good relationship, between bees and humans, or two middle school classmates, or between a mother and daughter, needs to start from a mutual understanding that the other is precious.</p><p> --Meredith May, <i>The Honey Bus</i><br /></p><p>People liked the idea of a strong leader--they didn't much care what that leader stood for. What citizens wanted above all things was a quiet life. They didn't mind shrinking their horizons. They didn't object to not travelling, as long as nobody else was travelling either. They wanted an orderly life with everyone knowing their place. Plenty of rules, the more of them the better.</p><p><span> --</span>C.J. Carey, <i>Widowland</i></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-59705098649374696182022-10-05T14:44:00.002-07:002022-10-05T14:44:59.343-07:00Good Memoirs: In Love and Going There<p>So I have mentioned ad nauseum that I am not a fan of memoirs, but two very good ones were highlights of my late September reading. Other than those two books, most of what I read since I last posted just made me grumpy although I should say I did actually enjoy a couple of light beach reads.</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>I was surprised to enjoy <b><i>Golden Girl</i></b>, by Elin Hilderbrand, because I had read a few of her books and never been too impressed. There's a fantasy element here that was actually entertaining--Cape Cod author Vivi is killed in a hit-and-run early in the book; a heavenly guide allows her to watch over her family for a few months and intervene with three "nudges." Who wouldn't want to do that, especially if you were a mom leaving three children behind? For me, the question of who killed Vivi wasn't that important (I guessed early on!) but getting the kids straightened out did engage me. Fun beach read (or, if you're me, fun listen on my morning walks).</p><p>Another fun though not deep read is <b><i>The Bookish Life of Nina Hill</i></b>, by Abbie Waxman. It's basically a rom-com but it's set in a bookstore (score) and trivia contests (funny) with family drama involving the heroine learning she has a large extended family she knew nothing about. Not very realistic but another fun late-summer read.</p><p><b>Mysteries/Thrillers</b></p><p><b><i>The Overnight Guest</i></b>, by Heather Gudenkauf, has a <i>Room</i>-esque element, as well as the popular trope of having a true crime writer as a protagonist. The writer Wylie Lark writes about cold cases and, rather creepily in my opinion, is staying at the Iowa farmhouse that was the scene of the crime she is trying to solve. Who would do that? Seriously? The story is told in three narrative threads: Wylie's present-day research, events around the time of the crime in 2000, and brief snippets about a child and mother trapped in a basement by the child's father. The three threads come together in a way Gudenkauf clearly intends to be surprising but just felt highly unlikely to me. Didn't love. </p><p><i><b>The Island</b></i>, by Adrian McKinty, is one of those thrillers in which people do something really stupid and spend the rest of the book trying to escape. Here it's a woman and her two stepchildren trying to escape from a crazy Australian family's island. It's basically an extended chase scene that I grew weary of.</p><p>Continuing my grumpy commentary, <b><i>Do No Harm,</i></b> by Christina McDonald, is a stupid story about a doctor who, upon learning her child has leukemia and needs an expensive treatment not covered by her insurance, becomes a drug kingpin pretty much overnight. And she's cavalier about any harm (substantial) she is causing; at points, the author seems to be arguing that opioid deaths are the price we have to pay for people getting some relief from chronic pain. Also stupid is the fact that the two local cops investigating opioid deaths are the doctor's husband (despite the fact that her brother is a known drug dealer) and a woman involved romantically with a doctor who has already been arrested on drug-related charges. Conflict of interest much? Unsure why I finished this book. </p><p>Lonely pregnant woman befriends another apparently lonely pregnant woman at a prenatal class. Second pregnant woman starts stalking first pregnant woman though first pregnant woman doesn't seem to notice. Weird doings ensue. Way too much explication at the end of the book. That's <b><i>Greenwich Park</i></b>, by Katherine Faulkner.</p><p>Slight break from grumpy negativity: <b><i>The Night Shift,</i></b> by Alex Finlay, is actually a decent mystery. On New Year's Eve 1999, someone attacks the employees of a Blockbuster, killing four (three teenage girls and the manager) and leaving one girl alive. Fifteen years later, the employees of an ice cream shop are attacked and, again, three teenage girls are killed and one survives. Are the two crimes linked? Could the suspect in the first crime, who escaped and has not been seen since, have returned? Is his brother, now a public defender, somehow involved? Is the survivor of the first crime? Pregnant FBI agent Sarah Keller has to put it all together. While I had suspicions about the person eventually revealed to be the killer early on, I still enjoyed the book. </p><p>Like other well-established mystery series, Linda Castillo's Kate Burkholder series has gotten a bit tired. Perhaps because it strains credulity that there could be so much violence among the Amish in Kate's small Ohio community, <i><b>The Hidden One</b></i> involves the discovery of the body of a long-missing Amish bishop in Pennsylvania instead of Ohio. Kate and the suspect were close as teenagers and the elders in the community ask her to investigate. Of course, she is threatened and of course she solves the case. Not terrible but not great.</p><p><b>YA</b></p><p>I can't remember who recommended <b><i>The House in the Cerulean Sea</i></b>, by T.J. Klune to me, but they sold it as a sweet fantasy/queer love story about children with special powers who suffer discrimination but feel safe in the residential orphanage/school where they live. I found it mildly interesting but predictable. Then I read that the author said he had been inspired to write the book upon reading the terrible news stories about the horrific treatment of Native Canadians at residential schools. For the second time in this post I ask, seriously? To trivialize and misrepresent that experience through a treacly fantasy story is despicable.</p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p><b><i>In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss</i></b> by Amy Bloom is the moving and instructive story of her husband's decision to seek aided suicide when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It turns out that this is not an easy thing to do if you are expected to live longer than 6 months. Bloom and husband Brian Ameche (who seemed like something of an odd couple and yet clearly had a happy marriage) eventually landed on Dignitas, a Swiss company, as the route to a dignified death rather than "the long good-bye." Bloom reflects on the early signs of Brian's dementia, recounts the process of getting approved as a Dignitas client (grueling), and describes their trip to Zurich for Brian's planned death--and she does it all beautifully. </p><p>More of a surprise to me was how much I enjoyed<b><i> Going There</i></b>, by Katie Couric. I've never been a huge Couric fan, but it was interesting to read how her career developed in an era when women journalists were subjected to various forms of discrimination and misogyny. And she does not hold back in calling out a lot of people who acted badly, especially at CBS during her 5 years there. The story of her first husband's illness and how she brought all her research skills to bear on trying to keep him alive was moving; her insight later that she had spent too much time trying to help him live and not enough helping him prepare to die was devastating. Years after his death, her daughter's research into her family's "Southern-ness" brought out some things about Jay's attitudes that were challenging, and I respect her for bringing them into the light. On the other hand, I have some doubts about her response to #MeToo and Matt Lauer. Although she acknowledges Matt did some terrible things, I felt she still has trouble accepting that these things happened (and that perhaps she should have known). In fact, she admits to being "tone deaf" or wrong a number of times throughout the book--and I felt in many of these cases she should have known better even as these things happened. So I'm still not a huge Couric fan, but the book is interesting and I recommend it. (And I was sorry to hear this week that she has been in treatment for breast cancer since June--the disease has definitely been a scourge on her loved ones.)</p><p><b><i>Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, </i></b>by historian Nicole Hemmer, is most notable in (1) pointing out that, although the right loves to quote him and pretend a reverence for Ronald Reagan, his optimistic view and willingness to compromise made him different from the conservative movement that he helped to launch (and actively disliked by some of its denizens), (2) reaffirming the influence of the right-wing chattering class, in part on television but maybe more effectively on talk radio and the internet, and (3) drawing a direct line from Pat Buchanan to Donald Trump. Donald Trump was not as new or surprising as we may have thought--he was the successful incarnation of the hateful and racist ideas that Buchanan had advocated for and eventually brought into the mainstream of the Republican Party, which, as Hemmer says, "gave up on governing in 2014" (I might say it was before that, when they announced their goals were for Obama to fail and be a one-term president). It's about power, more specifically, white power (she didn't say that specifically--but I am saying it). </p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>All happiness is fleeting, but I see now that there is fleeting and then there is the true and wall-like impossibility of ever experiencing this kind of happiness again, even once, even next week, let alone a year from now. Doors are closing around us, all the time.</p><p>"You should be with a guy who doesn't mind that you're smarter than he is, who doesn't mind that most of the time, you'll be the main event," he said. "You need to be with a guy who supports how hard you work and who'll bring you a cup of coffee late at night. I don't know if I can be that guy"--he broke into tears--"but I'd like a shot." We married.</p><p><span> </span>--Amy Bloom, <i>In Love</i></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-28999022175969462512022-09-16T10:18:00.004-07:002022-09-16T10:18:40.888-07:00Empire of Pain and Other Late Summer Reading<p>You know the feeling when you read a book and you realize how ill-informed you truly are? That's how I felt reading <i style="font-weight: bold;">Empire of Pain</i>, which I highly recommend. </p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>A few months ago, I decided to join the University of Illinois alumni online book group, which reads and discusses a book every quarter. There was a great series of discussions about <span style="font-style: italic;">Hidden Valley Road</span><b style="font-style: italic;"> </b>(a book I loved). Being over Isabel Allende, I then skipped reading <i>A Long Petal of the Sea</i>. This quarter, I was somewhat disappointed with <b><i>All the Lonely People</i></b>, by Mike Gayle. It's a pleasant enough book about an elderly Jamaican Brit, Hubert Bird, a widower who is estranged from his son and whose communication with his daughter is confined to weekly Facetime calls, in which he describes an active but totally fictional social life. When she announces she will be visiting in a few months, he decides to start making some friends so his stories won't be lies. The contemporary story is intercut with the story of Hubert's earlier life and the discrimination and challenges he faced as an immigrant in Britain. The book is okay, but I felt like it could have been so much more. Rather shallow in comparison to many other novels about the immigrant experience. </p><p>I read <b><i>We Are Not Like Them</i></b>, by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, right after reading <i style="font-weight: bold;">Fiona and Jane </i>(see below), which was interesting because both books are about best friends. Like the interracial pair of writers who penned the book, Riley and Jen are best friends of different races. They grew up together in Philadelphia, where Riley was ensconced in a solid African American family and Jen, whose single mom was somewhat irresponsible, relied on Riley's family, especially her grandmother, for stability. Riley grew up to be a successful television journalist, while Jen is married to a cop. When Jen's husband shoots a black teenager and Riley covers the story, their friendship is severely tested. Their alternating perspectives reveal the betrayals both felt. While some of the explications of their feelings felt a bit obvious and the happy ending somewhat unlikely, I still enjoyed the book and hope the team of Pride and Piazza will work together again.</p><p>I must admit I struggled with <b><i>Assembly</i></b>, by Natasha Brown. It's a short novel but it's told in vignettes that I found hard to piece together. In addition, because the author doesn't name many characters, it's sometimes hard to figure out who she is talking about. We do know the protagonist is a black Brit who works in finance, has a white boyfriend whose family she is about to visit (with dread), and has cancer. Her company sends her out to schools to talk with young people about her success (touting the company's diversity), but she knows she is lying to them, as she doesn't talk to them about the reality of the micro and macro aggressions she suffers from colleagues. When diagnosed with cancer, she decides to regain agency by deciding not to have any treatment, choosing death over a life in which she has no control. </p><p>So a second "theme" (besides best friends) in this batch of books was the #MeToo movement. <b><i>Vladimir</i></b>, by Julia May Jonas features an older academic whose husband John has been accused of inappropriate sexual relationships with students. The accusation is true, but his wife, the book's narrator, defends him because none of the relationships occurred after the college banned such goings-on and she and her husband had an open marriage. As John awaits his hearing, our narrator is under pressure herself--students feel uncomfortable around her. She has what I would call a breakdown, more or less kidnapping a new younger professor, the titular Vladimir (this isn't a spoiler because we know from the beginning that she has Vladimir chained somewhere). I have seen the book described as the first "camp" take on #MeToo. I just found it creepy. </p><p>Surprisingly, I much preferred Jennifer Weiner's <b><i>That Summer</i></b>. I'm not generally a fan of Weiner, but I enjoyed her tale of a woman who, many years after being raped by a boarding school boy as a teenager, decides to seek out the boys who harmed her. She herself isn't sure if she's seeking revenge or simply some kind of acknowledgment. She finds herself facing a dilemma when she cultivates the rapist's wife as a means to get to him--and finds that she likes both the wife and their daughter. Entertaining, while still exploring the damage done by the "boys will be boys" attitude. </p><p><b><i>The Man Who Lived Underground</i></b> is a previously unpublished novel by Richard Wright. It opens with Fred Daniels, a Black man, walking down a Chicago street, counting his pay and thinking about his pregnant wife. He is picked up by the police, tortured into confessing (having worked on a Chicago Public Schools curriculum about the police torture of the 1970s and 1980s, I know this description, while horrifying, is not overdone), and then escapes into the sewer system. It's a gripping narrative that is well worth reading, made even more interesting by its publication with an essay by Wright, "Memories of My Grandmother," in which he discusses his thinking as he wrote the book. What he was thinking as he wrote didn't parallel what I was thinking as I read, but it definitely shed light on his intentions. Highly recommended.</p><p>In writing <b><i>Cult Classic</i></b>, it seems that Sloane Crossley was trying to inject a sci-fi element into her story of a woman who has had too many boyfriends that she is still thinking about as she prepares to meet her fiance. The sci-fi piece has several of those old flames cross paths with her. For me, neither the sci-fi element or the basic story worked--though Crossley does turn some interesting phrases ("I'd done nothing wrong except, perhaps, to lay the groundwork for wrongdoing"). Not recommended. </p><p>I've seen <b><i>Reputation</i></b>, by Lex Croucher, described as feminist and compared to Jane Austen. I'd say it's more like a Georgette Heyer with female debauchery. </p><p><b>Short Stories</b></p><p><b><i>Fiona and Jane</i></b>, by Jean Chen Ho, is a collection of linked short stories about two best friends. Both girls are Taiwanese American, though one was born in the U.S. and the other was an immigrant. The stories begin when the girls were young and jump forward into adulthood. I particularly liked the story in which Jane visits her father, who has moved back to Taiwan, and learns that he is gay, involved with a man whom he knew years before he left for the States. This revelation threads through other events in her life, including her friendship with Fiona and her sexuality. While I did enjoy some of the stories, because they are about the same two characters, I wished for them to add up to more as a whole. The book was very positively reviewed in the NYT and elsewhere. </p><p><b>Mysteries/Thriller</b></p><p><b><i>Cold, Cold Bones</i></b> is one of the better recent entries in Kathy Reichs' Temperance Brennan series-- perhaps because she doesn't seem compelled in this book to instruct us on some arcane aspect of forensic anthropology. She is still trying to educate us--this time about issues faced by veterans, including Tempe's daughter Katy, but it fits in the story and isn't overwhelming. The story is one of revenge, although it takes a while for Tempe and Skinny Slidell (who is now in business with Tempe's significant other Ryan) to put together how a series of grim events--starting with a human eyeball with GPS coordinates etched into it being delivered to Tempe's back door--are linked. Entertaining.</p><p>So I was wrong about Dalton and Casey having a baby in Kelley Armstrong's next book in the Rockton series. Instead, <b><i>A Stranger in Town</i></b> brings us an incredibly complicated story of murder and manipulation linked back to Rockton's early days, as well as a suggestion of another future direction--it appears Rockton will be closed and Dalton and Casey will start their own hidden community. Or is this, too, a false lead?</p><p><b><i>American Girl</i></b>, by Wendy Walker, is a murder mystery featuring longstanding conflicts between the powerful and powerless in a small town. The protagonist is presented as being autistic, but the characterization is incredibly lazy--the girl is good at math and likes order but in no other way does she seem autistic. Nor recommended.</p><p>Lola, escaping from a dead-existence in London, heads to Paris to stay with her half-brother in <b><i>The Paris Apartment</i></b>. But when she arrives on his doorstep, he has disappeared. As she tries to find him, she discovers that all is not as it seems in the fancy building where he lives. The author inserts French phrases throughout, then translates them into English. Of course, many of these conversations would be entirely in French since the setting is Paris. Kind of wondering if that technique actually makes many readers feel more ensconced in France. Overall, just okay.</p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p> As I mentioned above, <b><i>Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty</i></b>, by Patrick Radden Keefe, was an eye-opener. Although I am aware of the opioid crisis and the protests against Purdue Pharma and the many cultural organizations bearing the Sackler name, I really had no idea of the criminal perfidy of the Sackler family across at least three generations. They knew what oxy was; they marketed the hell out of it, including selling it to known pill-pushers; they corrupted FDA officials; they sucked all the money out of the company after it became clear the company was going to be hit with huge penalties. They were/are horrible human beings. The fact that the revelations of their criminality has posed a dilemma for the many institutions to which they donated huge sums of money suggests that perhaps people should be more discerning when they ask the wealthy for donations. Highly recommended. </p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>A 2016 study found that purchasing even a single meal with a value of $20 for a physician can be enough to change the way that he prescribes. And for all their lip service to the contrary, the Sacklers didn't need studies to tell them this.</p><p>OxyContin was, in his view, entirely beyond reproach--a magnificent gift that the Sacklers had bestowed upon humanity that was now being sullied by a nihilistic breed of hillbilly pill poppers.</p><p><span> </span>--Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain (I could put a lot more quotes here--just read the book!)</p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-63909871755726530122022-09-01T13:28:00.001-07:002023-02-16T09:57:17.669-08:00Happy (Left on Tenth) and Sad (Red Comet) Lives<p>A family reunion in mid-August seems to have kept me from doing a mid-month post, but the reunion was fun as I have some entertaining relatives! A few books this month made me reflect on happy endings, which are definitely good in a memoir but can feel entirely out of place in a novel that has been successfully building dread for a couple hundred pages. </p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p><b><i>Any Other Family</i></b>, by Eleanor Brown, is an interesting look at family. It features three sets of Denver parents who have adopted the children of one biological mother and made a big effort to function in a way that the four children feel like siblings. They are all on vacation together when the biological mother announces she is pregnant again and is hoping that the couple who adopted her youngest child will take this new baby as well; but that mother is struggling with mothering one child and is not interested in adopting another. The story of the tensions that occur on their shared vacation as they try to solve the question of who will take the new baby is interspersed with their backstories and statements from prospective parents for the new baby from outside their family circle. One of the mothers is incredibly overbearing and hard to take--but I still enjoyed the unique perspective on family until the ending, which was disappointing and somewhat killed my positive feelings about the book. </p><p><b><i>The Husbands</i></b>, by Chandler Baker, is kind of a reverse-gender treatment of the classic satirical horror story <i>Stepford Wives</i>, in which women with controlling husbands "convert" them to supportive, domestic gods. But Chandler Baker is no Ira Levin and the book neither amused nor thrilled me. Since Baker also wrote the "MeToo" novel <i>The Whisper Network</i>, it's clear she hopes to illuminate women's issues, but I just didn't think this one worked. </p><p>I absolutely loved Bruce Holsinger's <i>The Gifted School</i>, but <b><i>The Displacements</i></b> bore little resemblance to that satire set in Boulder (although there is a family dysfunction element that is common). In <i>The Displacements</i>, a hurricane of unprecedented ferocity is bearing down on Miami. Except for father Brantley, a surgeon who is the incident commander at his hospital and thus cannot immediately leave, the well-to-do Larson-Hall family--mother Daphne, stepson Gavin, and children Mia and Oliver--evacuate. Their evacuation is a disaster, and the family ends up in a displaced persons camp in Oklahoma, unable to leave because they have no ready resources and Brantley is inaccessible. Things go from bad to worse at the camp, where we meet small-time crook Tate and his addict sidekick Jessamyn, who undertake a variety of scams at the camp, as well as Rain, the FEMA employee in charge of the camp. There's a prevailing feeling of chaos and devolution that seems all too possible, making the relatively upbeat ending feel out of place. Despite that, I liked the book and recommend it.</p><p>I'm sure I had read something about <b><i>This Time Tomorrow</i></b>, by Emma Straub, or it wouldn't have found a place on my TBR list. But by the time I got it from the library, I had forgotten it had a time travel element. When Alice Stern is experiencing angst over her 40th birthday, turns down her boyfriend's proposal, gets abandoned at dinner by her best friend who has to rush home because her baby is ill (highlighting the fact that Alice has neither husband nor children), gets drunk, and ends up sleeping on the ground in the shed behind her father's house, she wakes up to find herself turning 16. There's a lot of going back and forth between 16 and 40, with variations in her life at 40 based on things she did when she was back in the teenage years. But I really didn't care. The book lacks the magic of really good time travel stories (e.g., <i>The Time Traveler's Wife;</i> <i>Recursion</i>; <i>Here, and Now and Then</i>; <i>Oona Out of Order</i>) and I can't recommend it.</p><p>Tom Perrotta has written some wonderful novels about characters who make questionable moral choices, but I didn't care for<b><i> Tracy Flick Can't Win</i></b>. In case you don't recall, Tracy Flick was the character portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in <b><i>Election</i></b>. But Tracy is now an adult, a divorced mom and assistant principal at a suburban high school. Her principal is about to retire and she hopes to get his job, but there are inevitably obstacles. The story is told from six perspectives, which for me dilutes Tracy's story. When something dramatic happens at the end, I don't care, nor do I take any meaning from it. I've read a number of positive reviews of the book, so know that others do like it, but I can't recommend it. </p><p><b>YA</b></p><p>My granddaughter had mentioned that she had tried more than once to get into <b><i>They</i></b> <b><i>Both Die at the End</i></b> by Adam Silvera and had finally gotten far enough into the book to decide it was pretty good. So I decided to read it and could immediately see why it was hard to get into--in the first two chapters, the two main characters, teenagers Mateo and Rufus, learn they are going to die that day. That makes for a grim beginning. The central conceit of the book is that a "service" called Death-Cast lets people know early on the day they will die that it is their last 24 hours on earth (we don't learn how this service has come to be, and not too much else about society seems different). There are a variety of additional services available to "Deckers," those who have been notified they will die. One of these is a social media site called Last Friend, which allows Deckers to make a connection with someone to spend their last hours with. Through Last Friend, Mateo and Rufus connect and spend the day together, visiting people and sites important to them. Although I would have liked more explanation of how Death-Cast became a thing, I found, within the grimness, that the book celebrated friendship in a lovely way. And I enjoyed discussing it with my granddaughter!</p><p><b>Mystery/Suspense</b></p><p>To me, the most interesting thing about<b style="font-style: italic;"> The Sacred Bridge</b>, by Anne Hillerman, is that it looks like Hillerman the younger may be planning to take Jim Chee away from police work and back toward becoming a traditional healer. Don't know how that will translate into future mysteries but will definitely check out the next book to find out.</p><p><b><i>Alone in the Wild</i></b> is the fifth in Kelley Armstrong's series about two police officers in a secret Canadian town established for people needing to escape from their previous lives. As with <i>The Sacred Bridge, </i>the most interesting facet of this title was the signaling that in the future, Casey and Dalton are likely to become parents. Since Rockton has no children, that could be an interesting development. </p><p><b><i>A Line to Kill</i></b> is Anthony Horowitz's third title in the Horowitz/Hawthorne series featuring a retired police detective and his mystery author sidekick. The first two titles felt fresh, but this one lapsed into more traditional territory and involved way too much explanation at the end. Not recommended.</p><p>I love libraries and have a love-hate relationship with mysteries so mystery about a dead woman in a library--sign me up. That's the set-up for <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Woman in the Library</i>, by Sulari Gentill. The author tells us that the killer is one of a small group of loosely connected young people who were at the library at the time of the killing. There's also a meta aspect to the story: a fictional writer is writing a novel about a fictional writer named Hannah who was part of the group in the library; a friend provides increasingly hostile critiques of chapters of the novel. Occasionally it got confusing, but it wasn't boring.</p><p><b><i>As the Wicked Watch</i></b>, by Tamron Hall, is set in Chicago and features journalist Jordan Manning, who is investigating the disappearance of high-achieving African American teenager Masey James. I liked the first part of the book, which focuses on Jordan's work filing stories on why the police are characterizing Masey as a runaway when Jordan is sure she is the victim of violence. But then, when she is assigned to cover that store exclusively, she becomes more of an investigator than a journalist and the story seemed to spin out of control. Hall deals with a serious issue--violence against African American women and the neglect of such cases by both the media and police; I hope she'll stick to having Jordan remain a journalist rather than an investigator in future titles (assuming this is going to become a series).</p><p><b><i>What Happened to the Bennetts</i></b>, by Lisa Scottoline, also took a turn half way through the book. The Bennetts are driving home from a soccer game one evening when they are stopped by two men in an SUV, who demand their car; when the family dog jumps at one of the perpetrators, the teenage daughter is fatally shot. One of the bad guys also ends up dead on the ground. In the middle of that night, after their daughter dies in the hospital, the Bennetts are awakened by FBI agents who inform them that mobsters and drug cartels were involved and to be safe, they must immediately go into hiding in preparation for going into witness protection. The first part of the book deals with the difficulties of suddenly being displaced, how you and the people left behind react. I really liked this part of the book. Then the father, Jason, owner of a court reporting business, decides to seek vengeance on his own--to my mind, totally unbelievable. So I liked half, didn't care for the other half. </p><p>I feel like I can't say too much about <b style="font-style: italic;">No One Will Miss Her</b>, by Kat Rosenfield, without giving away some of the twists. Suffice it to say it's about two couples--a wealthy couple from Boston and a not-wealthy couple from a small town in rural Maine. There are a LOT of twists, many not very believable--but still entertaining.</p><p><b><i>Girl, Forgotten</i></b>, by Karin Slaughter, is a follow-up to her bestseller <i>Pieces of Her</i>, which became a Netflix series. The daughter from that book, Andrea Oliver, has just become a U.S. Marshall when her uncle the Senator gets her assigned to a case that involves crimes her cult leader/criminal father may have committed as a teenager. A number of things about the book really annoyed me, including: (1) a novice U.S. Marshall would never be sent out on a mission that involves her family and is a secret form her colleagues, (2) her new partner tells her that investigation is not the job of the U.S. Marshall Service--and then they spend the whole book investigating, and (3) Slaughter sets up a new confrontation with Andrea's father at the end of the book, obviously prepping us for a sequel--we've had that from other authors and it's just annoying! </p><p><b>Nonfiction/Memoir/Biography</b></p><p>Before I started reading, I definitely had the wrong idea about <b><i>Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life</i></b>, by Delia Ephron. I thought it was about Delia finding love in her 70s following her husband's death. For a brief time, it was about that--and what a gem of a partner she found in her second husband Peter. But then the book--actually her life--took a turn and became about her grueling battle with leukemia. She has unbelievable support from family and friends (even though she doesn't tell her friends about her illness for quite some time). Although I read a review by the novelist Joyce Maynard that suggested Ephron spent too much time praising people who had helped her, I disagree. If it hadn't been for reading about the support she got from loved ones, reading about her illness would have been almost unbearable. Of course, she survived, which is cause to rejoice. Reading the book is an emotional experience but definitely not for everyone.</p><p>I'm not sure why I kept listening to the 45-hour <b><i>Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath</i></b>, by Heather Clark. Clark obviously adores Plath's work and is proud that she had access to sources that the other numerous biographers of Plath did not have. So the work is adulatory and detailed. But the only real takeaway is that Plath had serious mental health problems and chose probably the worst possible person to be her husband. I loved <i>The Bell Jar</i> but have never really understood her poetry--perhaps if I go back to it now, I might be able to see my way through the poems. But even if I can, I'm not sure it will be worth the hours it took to get through the biography!</p><p>Andrea Elliott's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City </i>started as a 2013 series in the <i>New York Times </i>but Elliott continued her reporting for a total of eight years, following young Dasani from age 11 through her graduation from high school. Dasani was one of eight children of Chanel and Supreme. The family lives for years in one room in a truly awful homeless shelter. They also spend time in public housing, which is a much better situation, but one her parents are unable to sustain because of an array of bad decisions. Despite the fact that there is a lot of love in the family, the children eventually end up in foster care. Dasani initially avoids foster care because she's accepted at the Milton Hersey School in Pennsylvania. Although she does well at the school, she self-sabotages (it's not entirely clear why but concern for her siblings seems to be a major factor), getting into fights and eventually being sent back to a foster care placement in New York. New York political leaders do not come off well--particularly Letitia James, who tries to somehow take "credit" for Dasani after she became a mini-celeb when the NYT story was published. Even those who want to help the family seem unable to really make a difference. As I was reading the book, I thought it was a modern update on <i>There Are No Children Here</i> by Alex Kotlowitz, a book that had a huge impact on me back in the 1990s--and Elliott acknowledges that that book inspired her reporting. This book reminds us that the problems of poverty have not been solved, and the innocent victims of both systemic issues and parental problems are children. </p><p>Dawn Turner's <i><b>Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood</b> </i>made for an interesting follow-up to <i style="font-weight: bold;">Invisible Child. </i>Turner's work provides insight into many of the events that have shaped Black Chicago, from the Great Migration to the development and then neglect of public housing, to gentrification. All of this is context for her real focus: her own story and that of her younger sister Kim and her childhood best friend Debra. Despite their involved parents, Kim starts ditching school and drinking at a young age; after she has a miscarriage as a teenager, she is depressed and drinking more and more until she dies of a heart attack at 23. Debra was always a bold girl, but she loses her way somewhere along the way. She dances in strip clubs for years and then is convicted of killing a man she was doing drugs with. She never denies killing him but claims it was an accident. She ends up serving 19 years in various Indiana prisons. In prison, she gets a degree and works to help other inmates. She also, over time, goes through reconciliation with her victim's family. Based on the title of the book and her comment that "there but for the grace of God," Turner seems to see the women's different lives as a matter of chance. As someone who is not religious and does not believe in fate, I see individual decisions and systemic conditions as more central. Despite this difference of perspective, I did find the book a rewarding and insightful read. </p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-39792327156042105512022-08-01T22:20:00.000-07:002022-08-01T22:20:30.267-07:00One Surprising Book (The Lioness) and One I Wish Had Surprised Me (Beautiful World, Where Are You?)<p> It was another two weeks of mostly inane reading, but I'm currently in the midst of a 45-hour biography of Sylvia Plath, so I'm trying to redeem myself. Meanwhile, here's what I read as July wound down. </p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>I have liked many of Chris Bohjalian's books and have always thought of him as a gentle writer (is that a thing?) who does a particularly good job depicting female characters. <i><b>The Lioness</b></i> is a total change of pace. Set in 1964, the book tells the story of a successful actress, Katie Barstow, and her new husband, a gallerist, who take an entourage of friends, colleagues (agents, publicists), and family members on the second part of their honeymoon (do people do that?)--a safari in Tanzania. Things go horribly wrong, and Bohjalian weaves the story of what happens with the back stories of the characters. Through the back stories, Bohjalian explores racism, exploitation of various kinds in the film industry, and child abuse, among other issues. But I found it hard to even remember who the characters were because the violence on the safari--human to human as well as animal to human--felt so overwhelming (and so not expected from Bohjalian). Not recommended.</p><p>I often do not understand why certain authors become darlings in the literary world, and that is the case with Sally Rooney, whose three novels have all received rave reviews. I didn't read her first book, and I didn't care for <i>Normal People</i>. As for her latest--<i><b>Beautiful World, Where Are You?</b></i>--I found the title the best thing about the book. At the center of the book are two young women--writer Alice and her best friend Eileen--and the men in their lives. Part of the book is presented in email exchanges between the two, while the remainder is standard narrative. In her correspondence, Alice waxes philosophical on writing, the novel, modernism, and aesthetics, which is the only part of the book that even approached being interesting to me. But nothing much really happens and what does feels prosaic. Perhaps I'm too old to appreciate what is clearly a millennial novel but I think I'm through reading Sally Rooney.</p><p><b><i>The Final Case</i></b>, by David Guterson, has some similarities to <i>Beautiful World</i>. One of its major characters--the unnamed narrator--is a writer who thinks he's done writing but still thinks about writing quite a lot. The other major character is his father, Royal, an attorney in his 80s who needs his son to drive him around after he has a car accident that suggests he should no longer be driving. The titular case is based on a real Washington case, in which an Ethiopian girl adopted by a fundamentalist family is abused and dies; the parents are charged with death by abuse, and Royal takes on the mother's case because all the public defenders are too busy. There's a lot about the case and the court proceedings, but weirdly, the book doesn't really seem to be about the case. I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's about the good and the bad of families and the power of work. I liked it better than Rooney's book--the characters are old, like me, and the case itself, though not the point, was interesting--but it wasn't entirely satisfying either. </p><p><b>Mystery/Thriller</b></p><p>Mysteries continue to be forgettable (and too numerous):</p><p>--<b><i>The Sorority Murder</i></b>, by Allison Brennan. A trifecta of tired tropes: a true crime podcast, a long-held secret among college friends, and a battle-scarred law(wo)man. Not Brennan's best.</p><p>--<b><i>The Widow,</i></b> by K.L. Slater. This was a freebie from Audible, so I don't feel too bad that I can't remember much about it except that a basic plot point seemed entirely unbelievable to me.</p><p>--<b><i>Into the Darkest Corner,</i></b> by Elizabeth Haynes. Another freebie from Audible focused on a woman who thinks she has escaped from an abusive relationship (but has developed OCD) . . . but has she? Rather predictable.</p><p>--<b><i>Find Me</i></b>, by Alafair Burke. Hope Miller, an amnesiac who has not known her own life story since being in an accident 15 years ago, disappears from her new home in the Hamptons. Her best friend Lindsay, a defense attorney, sets out to find her. A surprise at the end was really, really annoying.</p><p>--<b><i>Insomnia</i></b>, by Sarah Pinborough. This book portrays gaslighting (and the effects of not being able to sleep) really well, but I could have done without the supernatural element that Pinborough threw into the mix and the purported reason why the main character thought she was losing her mind was ridiculous.</p><p>--<b><i>Blackout,</i></b> by Erin Flanagan. This is a mystery with a science fiction element involving neuroscience that also deals with misogyny in academia, what constitutes scholarship in today's media landscape, rape culture, alcoholism...it's a lot. But it was good entertainment while at a water park with two 12-year-olds for the weekend.</p><p>--<b><i>No Way Back</i></b>, by J.B. Turner. Terrible book--wife gets killed in a complicated political scheme, estranged husband kills a couple people involved in the scheme, book ends. Obvious set-up for a sequel in which some more people involved in the scheme get killed. </p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-48173776674710207132022-07-16T21:29:00.004-07:002022-07-16T21:29:37.848-07:00The Latecomer and Notes on an Execution <p> 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.</p><p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>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 <i>You Should Have Known</i> was made into the series <i>The Undoing</i>). <b><i>The Latecomer</i></b>, 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.</p><p>Another unusual book is <b><i>Notes on an Execution</i></b>, 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.</p><p><b>Mysteries/Thrillers</b></p><p>I read three mysteries but I've already pretty much forgotten them:<br /><br /></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li><b><i>More than You'll Ever Know</i></b>, 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. </li><li><b><i>The Golden Couple</i></b>, by Greer Hendriks and Sarah Pekkanen--featuring a therapist who is pretty much undistinguishable from a stalker.</li><li><b><i>Strangers We Know</i></b>, 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.</li><li><b><i>Last Girl Ghosted</i></b>, by Lisa Unger--an ugly but somehow charismatic dude meets women on line, charms them in person, and then they disappear.</li></ul><p></p><p><b>Nonfiction/Memoir</b></p><p>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 <b><i>Finding Freedom: A Cook's Story, Remaking a Life from Scratch</i></b>, 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.</p><p>Favorite Passages</p><p>Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.</p><p><span> --</span>Danya Kukafka, <i>Notes on an Execution</i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4749655292443772220.post-31443029699764648132022-06-30T18:56:00.000-07:002022-06-30T18:56:26.995-07:00So Many Books, So Little Time (yep, that's a title of a book!)<p><b>Fiction</b></p><p>I enjoyed and admired <b style="font-style: italic;">True Biz</b>, 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.</p><p><b><i>Anthem</i></b>, 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 <i>Anthem</i> 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 <i>Anthem</i> to be imaginative but a bit much. </p><p>Emily Austin has created a unique character in <b><i>Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead</i></b>. 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! </p><p>In <b><i>Light Perpetual</i></b>, 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. </p><p>I didn't care for Taylor Jenkins Reid's best-seller <i><b>Daisy Jones and the Six</b></i>, but it was definitely innovative, presented as a collection of oral histories from the members of a rock band. <b><i>Malibu Rising</i></b> is much more traditional drama of a dysfunctional family. It reminds me somewhat of Anne Tyler's recent <b><i>French Braid</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b><i>Mercy Street</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b>Mysteries/Thrillers</b></p><p>In <b><i>The Sun Down Motel</i></b>, 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. </p><p><b><i>An Accidental Death</i></b> (DC Smith series) and <i style="font-weight: bold;">Songbird </i>(Kings Lake series)<i style="font-weight: bold;">,</i> both by Peter Grainger, were pleasant enough but forgettable . . . in fact, forgotten. In contrast, <i>Cappucinos, Cupcakes, and a Corpse</i>, by Harper Lin was just plain dumb. Note to self: do not read any more mysteries with cutesy food titles.</p><p><b>Nonfiction</b></p><p>Musician Michelle Zauner's memoir,<b style="font-style: italic;"> Crying in H Mart</b>, 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!</p><p>I picked <i><b>So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading</b></i>, 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. </p><p><b>Favorite Passages</b></p><p>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.</p><p>--Jennifer Haigh, <i>Mercy Street</i></p><p>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. </p><p>--Michelle Zauner, <i>Crying in H Mart</i></p><p>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.</p><p>--Sara Nelson, <i>So Many Books</i></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Laurel Singletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08031130400545196747noreply@blogger.com0