Whistler, I See You've Called in Dead, Mother Tongue, and More: 10 Great July Reads

July was a great reading month--I really enjoyed 10 books (the max number of images Instagram lets me post) in just one month--so here are the July "good reads." And if you think I'm getting soft, don't worry: there were plenty "so stupid" and "ho-hum" notations in my reading journal too! 

Fiction

I read back-to-back books about choosing to think differently about your life. The first--Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikaza Kawaguchi--involves a coffee shop in which very restricted time travel is possible: you can't change the present, you can only meet up with people you had previously met in the coffee shop, you can only access time travel through one seat in the shop and can't leave the seat while time traveling, and you have to return to the present before your cup of coffee gets cold. The very popular book was a play before being adapted into a novel, and that origin is visible. The book was so popular it's been followed by several sequels. It didn't really move me but I can see that some people might love it. I much preferred I See You've Called in Dead, by John Kenney, in which obituary writer Bud Stanley, drunk after a very bad blind date, writes an absurdist obituary for himself and accidentally posts it to the newswire where he works. Suspended from his job as a result, he starts attending funerals of strangers, along with his friend Tim. Their experiences are funny, touching, and ultimately redemptive. I really enjoyed Bud's journey.

After this pairing, I found myself reading back-to-back books about women and the supernatural (might not be the right word). Both books feature lots of characters and tons of contemporary issues. The Antidote, by Karen Russell, opens on the day a massive dust storm hits Depression-Era Nebraska. The community is dealing not only with the aftermath of the storm but concern over the possible wrongful conviction of a young man accused of a series of murders. The title character is an indigenous woman/witch, who takes on the secrets and pains of her clients, essentially everyone in the town. She is being mistreated by the town's crooked sheriff, and a young basketball-playing high school girl is seeking witch's training from her. Other key characters include the girl's uncle/guardian, a scarecrow, and a WPA photographer whose photos are mysteriously revealing. Sound crazy? It does get that way as the book progresses, but it also address questions of what it means to be a woman, the power of secrets, the utility of art, and the human causes of environmental disaster. Sometimes confusing but a worthwhile read.

This book was followed by The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan, which is set in modern-day small-town Maine, where a woman whose alcoholism has cost her a marriage and an archivist job at Harvard has returned to clean out her late mother's home. Her best friend from childhood arranges for her to have a consultation with a medium, whose insights set her off on a journey to learn more about previous residents of a large house whose new owners have moved bones from an old cemetery to make way for a swimming pool. The narrative is nonlinear, interspersing the contemporary story with back stories of various characters (real and spectral). Although it sounds like a somewhat straightforward piece, it also deals with an array of topics: the way alcoholism weaves its way through families, the mistreatment of indigenous relics and bodies, the relationship between feminism and belief in past life/mediums/etc., and the beliefs of the Shakers. Again, it gets a little crazy but it's entertaining and ultimately positive. 

These "pairings" were totally accidental, as was a pairing of two books featuring young struggling  artists; sadly, I didn't care for either of us (though they received some great reviews elsewhere), so we will leave that combo behind. 

I admire Ann Patchett, as an author; an advocate for books, reading, bookstores, and the First Amendment; and a bookstore owner recommending books on social media. So it is probably not a surprise that I really enjoyed Whistler. There's been a lot of conversation about the book, so I assume most people know that it begins when Daphne's husband Jonathan notices an older man following them around the Met. That man turns out to be Daphne's former stepfather, Eddie, who was briefly married to Daphne's mother decades ago. The marriage ended abruptly after a weekend of family traumas; Daphne felt blamed for the breakup, and neither girl understood what had happened and why they never were able to see the much-loved Eddie afterwards. Whistler is a book about family, love, memory, how incompletely we know even the people closest to us, and forgiveness (it's not about horses, despite the cover). And it's positive in a way that feels necessary at this historical moment. I listened to the audiobook; for an author whose two most recent works were narrated by Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, it must have taken some chutzpah for Patchett to narrate this book herself, but she does it marvelously well.

If you pay attention to book news, you likely know that Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is about a tradwife/homesteading influencer who wakes up in the mid 1800s, forced to live a truly homesteading life. In many ways, the depiction of social media queen Natalie is what you would expect--she does her flawless videos with the help of two nannies (five children, sixth on the way) and a producer. Her husband runs their ranch (not very skillfully) with the help of laborers he picks up at Home Depot. When she wakes up in the 1800s, she has the same husband, although he's apparently much older and better in bed, and they have four children, none of whom were the kids from their previous life. It's easy to despise Natalie in both the past and present, but as Burke builds her back story, while I wouldn't say I came to like her, I did appreciate that her character is more complex than at first suggested. I enjoyed Yesteryear and think it would be a great book club selection. 

Mystery/Thriller

So fun to discover a new mystery writer and her debut book--Blood Relay by Devon Mihesuah. A young woman, an Indian Horse Relay rider, disappears on her way home from a successful competition. Is her disappearance one more in a long string of abductions of Native American women in Oklahoma? Or is she a victim of family members who are angry because she won't agree to sell the family allotment? Native American police officers Perry Antelope and Sophia Burns are determined to find the woman, as well as figure out who took her, and make some pretty bad decisions as they investigate the case. The author is a registered member of the Choctaw Nation and a history professor, so there's a lot of background info that some readers found slowed the book down to much but that I enjoyed. Hoping this is not her last thriller.

I thought I had read all of the Cassie Dewell series by C.J. Box but discovered I had actually missed one, The Highway. It's the first book (I think) in which we meet the Lizard King, the truck-driving serial killer who reappears in Paradise Valley. Events of The Highway were also the launch pad for the tv series Big Sky.  Cassie Dewell is a police investigator partnering with Cody Hoyt, who on the day he is fired and drinks after two years of sobriety goes missing while searching for two missing teenage sisters on their way to visit Cody's son. Cassie pretty much single-handedly launches an investigation to find Cody and the two missing girls. It's a rather grim story but definitely holds the reader's attention.

One of the things I like about Peter Swanson's mysteries is that they generally have a literary thread. Such is the case with The Kind Worth Saving, which features private detective and former English teacher Henry Kimball, who loves poetry. He is hired by one of his former students, Joan, to verify that her husband is sleeping with a colleague, Pam. Joan was in Henry's classroom when a student murdered one of her friends and then killed himself. But this, it turns out, is not Joan's only brush with violent death and soon Henry is suspicious of her motives in hiring him--and quite a bit more. I didn't love the first book in which Henry appeared (The Kind Worth Killing), but this one's quite an entertaining story of people of questionable character doing bad things. 

I hadn't heard of Joanna Schaffhausen until last year and have been catching up on her two series, not necessarily in order. I just read the middle book in the Annalisa Vega series, Dead and Gone.  She is still a cop in this one, partnered with her ex-husband Nick, but somehow pretty much solves five cases on her own--the hanging death of a private investigator, the three cases he was working on, and a dude known as the Chicken Bandit. Lots of what happened seemed unrealistic, but I'm including it because the case involving Annalisa's college student niece Quinn scared the crap out of me as the grandmother of a college girl! I figured if the author could that vividly portray the various people who might harm a young woman on campus, she was doing something right!  BTW: I counted 17 books titled Dead and Gone on Amazon--should be banned as a title for at least 5 years!

Nonfiction

Mother Tongue by Sara Novic is a memoir of her life as a deaf woman, mother, and advocate. Through reflecting on events of her life, she also takes on institutions that have impacted her and others in the Deaf community. For example, after spending her teen years trying to "pass" as hearing, an experience at an accepting church led to Novic embracing her deaf identity, a positive step at a difficult time in her life. But other teachings of the conservative church later caused her to question whether it was a place she could belong (Novic also identifies as queer, although that aspect of her identity is not explored in much depth). Her experiences in childbirth, for example, provide an opportunity to examine the medical establishment's treatment of deaf people, and the adoption of her second son leads to an honest discussion of some of the issues with that institution. If you've read Novic's wonderful novel, True Biz, you already know how she feels about cochlear implants, but the pushing of that device to hearing parents and other technological efforts to "cure" deafness come in for critique here as well. While the medical establishment fares poorly in Novic's estimation, education fares no better. Very informative. 

Loved One, The Sweet Spot, London Falling and Other May-June Favorites

Do you ever read a book by an author you've been reading for years but have started to sour on, say to yourself "I'm through with author X," and then, when they publish a new book and people are saying it's great, read it anyway, only to say once again "I'm through!" Or, read a highly touted book, think "Why do people like this so much?" but read the author's next book because you wonder if you're wrong about them but still don't get the appeal. Okay, maybe it's just me, but I've now actually started a written list of authors I'm through with in hopes it will help me resist--so many books, so little time for books you're pretty sure you won't enjoy. On the list so far: Janet Evanovich, Ruth Ware, Kristen Hannah, and Taylor Jenkins Reid (if you like them, you do you!). A few others are lurking just off the page. Also any mystery with food or a cute book store, coffee shop, or other cozy scene on the cover (exception: the books of Diane Mott Davidson, but I think I've already read all of hers). 

Perhaps this snobbishness on my part explains why I'm suddenly liking a lot of nonfiction, which traditionally has not been my favored reading.  And, on nonfiction, I want to note that since I posted about Belle Burden's divorce memoir, reporting indicates that she made her financial peril during the divorce appear much more severe than it was. This has prompted a lot of debate--I found author Jo Piazza's take on the controversy informative: https://jopiazza.substack.com/p/is-belle-burden-a-liar

And speaking of nonfiction, I recently read a book by two highly intelligent and skilled writers whose philosophical exchanges made me long for (or should I say be grateful for?) the unexamined life. Most days I enjoy being shallow.

On to what I did like in May and June (little bit of a slump in terms of books I really liked).

Fiction

Loved One, by Aisha Muharrar, is a book I would have loved in my younger years but expected to find less than enthralling in my advanced years. When Gabe, the best friend and sometimes boyfriend of protagonist Julia, dies in a weird hotel-room accident, the emotional turmoil she'd already been experiencing because of a rift between them only intensifies. Hoping to find some healing and a few of Gabe's lost possessions, she heads to Europe to meet with his last girlfriend, Elizabeth, whom he had described to Julia as "essentially cold." As might be expected, her encounters with Elizabeth are not all smooth-sailing. Surprise, surprise--I liked the book and its exploration of grief quite a bit. Somewhat predictable in terms of the outcomes, but still a good read. 

In contrast, The Sweet Spot by Amy Poeppel, is a good beach read. It's hard to describe it succinctly because there's no one central character and the interconnections among the numerous characters are complicated. A bit of a stab at describing some of what happens: Lauren is a ceramicist whose work is being promoted by a chain of stores owned by ambitious and somewhat narcissistic Felicity, who has "stolen" the husband of Melinda, who blames Lauren for giving Felicity advice that led to the breakup.  Meanwhile Melinda, who sets upon a revenge tour, gets young Olivia fired from her job at Felicity's store, so Olivia becomes the babysitter for Lauren's three kids. Too coincidental? Yes, and there are many more crossing paths. And the ending is a little too pat--but it's good fun and there are strong characters of all ages!

Mystery

I started reading a lot of mysteries back in the 80s, and I recently had the thought that people I read a lot of in the early decades of my mystery mania have kind of fallen away--some because they stopped writing (or died), some for no discernible reading. So I started looking at some of those names to see if there were books I had not read and started with Eleanor Taylor Bland, one of the pioneering African American mystery/police procedural writers. Bland did die back in 2010, but I hadn't read a few of the later titles in her Marti MacAlister series, so I picked up A Dark and Deadly Deception (the only Bland book my local library had) and enjoyed it. Marti and her partner Vic are dealing with a bad boss, spouses who are ill, a dead actress found in the Des Plaines River, and a cold case involving bones discovered in a historic building under renovation. The coincidences in the book are beyond believing, but it was a good read nonetheless.

Nonfiction

I'm not sure why Margaret Atwood gave her book the subtitle she did: Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts. It's definitely a memoir and a very interesting one at that. She recounts her childhood and education, as well as her romantic life, but when she gets to her writing life is when it really started to grab me. She talks about the challenges of writing in different settings, the inspirations for some of her books and how the books evolved, technical issues like how to choose characters' names, the different ways writers make money besides book sales, how publishing in Canada was different from publishing in the US and UK when she began her career, and the crap you take when you win awards. There's a lot to think about--I'm definitely reflecting on why there no longer seems to be a utopian genre--have we lost faith in the idea of utopia or is a perfect world just too boring? Atwood herself thought enough about this question that during the pandemic she taught an online course in constructing utopian worlds. And here's a quirk that surprised me:  she's into reading palms and other metaphysical practices. Atwood narrates the audiobook, which strengthens the feeling that you're getting to know her. 

Late in her book 107 Days (may even have been in the acknowledgments), Kamala Harris says she is by nature a doer, not given to reflection. And, in my opinion, the book definitely lacks reflection. Before I launch into my disappointment with the book (though I still think it's worth reading), I voted for Harris and I think she's an intelligent and competent person. But, perhaps like Hillary Clinton with What Happened, she wrote the book too quickly after her defeat, so she hadn't had time to sit with the outcome of the election. Anyway, the book is essentially a diary of what she did during the campaign--it's interesting but there's little about developing a strategy or a vision to compete with MAGA. She provides a lot of detail about the process of picking a running mate (and casts some shade at Buttigieg, Shapiro, and Kelly, but once past the Democratic convention, Tim Walz disappears from her account--what is the message there? Her explanation of why she lost is basically that she didn't have enough time (and, to a lesser extent, because Biden's people undercut her; Jill Biden is definitely not a favorite). Again like Hillary, she doesn't acknowledge making significant mistakes herself. She doesn't mention misogyny, racism or Christian nationalism--she seems to think Trump voters were just naive enough to believe he could bring prices down on day 1 and not holders of despicable views. This seems like willful ignorance or cover for someone who doesn't want to offend voters in case she runs again. So overall the book was disappointing but interesting in terms of how a campaign works.

Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit and Wisdom from History's Greatest Wordsmiths, by Mardy Grothe, is, despite the overly long subtitle and the author's being identified as "Dr." (we don't care, Mardy), a very entertaining collection of "quotations that contain incompatible or incongruous elements." They are not all from great wordsmiths (Yogi Berra and George W. Bush come to mind), but they do offer both smiles and inspiration. Some of my favorites were from church bulletins; example: "The cost for attending the Fasting and Prayer Conference includes meals." Many of the quotes in the chapter "Political Oxymoronica" are appropriate for our time; to wit "It is characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions they attack"--Voltaire. Thanks to my friend Colleen for giving me this book. 

Patrick Radden Keefe is an incredible investigative reporter and writer, unraveling complicated stories and presenting them in an entertaining and digestible way. The story that he tells in London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth (but, really, the long subtitle is too much) demonstrates his skills admirably. The death in the book was that of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, whose plunge off a balcony in a fancy London highrise was caught on cameras at the headquarters of MI6. For a couple of years before his death, Zac had been hanging out with two older men, doing "deals" and telling his parents Matthew and Rachelle that he was making big money. The apartment where he took his fatal fall was the home of one of these men; the other had been present the evening of his death. But almost nothing about Zac was as it seemed; his parents learned some of the deceptions on their own, but Keefe dug even deeper into the world of corruption and crime, much of it involving Russian oligarchs who had found London a welcoming home. Similarly, Matthew and Rachelle knew the police investigation had been half-hearted at best, but Keefe documents the issues in shocking detail--for those of us who have seen too many British crime dramas with extremely acute and determined police officers, illusions are shattered. 

Chef/restauranteur/writer Gabrielle Hamilton's new memoir, Next of Kin, fits into a subgenre I don't generally think highly of: the "I had a terrible childhood and/or parents" genre. However, the way Hamilton dissects the myths her family spun around themselves and then thinks about what that means for the way she has lived her life makes the book worth reading. An example: Her family viewed themselves as quietly exceptional, nonconforming and resilient but eschewing the precious in favor of the practical. This family mythos emerged, in part, from the father's decision to give up his dream of being a painter to become a set designer and, Hamilton realizes, it led to her initially becoming a chef, rather than the writer she always wanted to be. Her father's exceptional nature, she thought, allowed him, when confronted with the death of her brother Todd, the first of the family's five children to die, to say, "Well, if you have to lose one, at least it's the one you liked least." While this caused her a bit of discomfort, it was not until the death of a second brother, this one by suicide, evoked a "Well that's over" comment from her father that she fully realized that her family was not complex and charming but in many ways small and ugly--and that in the ugliness, she was both a victim and a perpetrator. Next of Kin is not a pleasant read, but Hamilton's analysis invites the reader to reflect on what stories one's own family tells about themselves and how those stories affect one's life decisions (I have not figured this out beyond "we thought we were the smart family in town," but I am thinking about it.) To clarify: My family was not small and ugly and my childhood was not terrible, but all families have something!!

Poetry

I had not heard of Hannah Rosenberg, didn't know she posted her poetry on Instagram (@hannahrowrites), I just liked the look of her book Same--the beautiful cover, the poems that each fit on a single page. So I picked it up at my local library, and I'm so glad I did. The poems in the collection focus on love--of our younger selves, our friends, our romantic partners, our families, our bodies, our minds, and our children. They celebrate the beauty of everyday life without denying the challenges. The poems bring up memories and prompt reflections on experiences you may not have had (I, for example, suddenly realized that, except for the dorm years, I never had the experience of living with female friends). I was a grandma's girl (whose first son's middle name is grandma's maiden name), so this poem really hit me:

If you were here

If you were here, I'd invite you for coffee.
We'd sit at my kitchen table and I'd put out
snacks, more than we both could eat and 
you'd say this is too much, but in a way that 
made me feel good. I'd ask you to tell me
about becoming a mother again, ask you about 
details I didn't think of before. I didn't think of 
so many things , and it all hits differently now,
you being a mother, you being my grandmother,
now that I have a baby of my own. Now that I have
a baby who shares your middle name, I wish like I've
always wished that life let you live more,
that life would let us all live more even though you
said that death was nothing to be scared of.
How do we give away our hearts to the people we love
and still make sure they stay whole?

Is there a way? I'd ask you, if you were here.

As an old (perhaps not so wild) person, I also appreciated this poem:

Old and wild things

Isn't it true that we love the look of exposed brick,
the uneven nature of cobblestone roads?
Haven't we all stopped to take pictures of buildings
with vines climbing their sides, stood in awe of 
wildflowers peppering open fields?
Don't we all agree that tree trunks seem more magnificent
the older they get?
And so it must be true that with our cracks and asymmetrical faces,
our worn skin, weighted bodies, weathered hair, our disproportionate
tops and bottoms, with all of the things that make us wild and old,
that we are a thing of beauty, too. 

Favorite Passages

To believe the things we believe about our families, to be able to describe them each in our own way with some emphasis here and some omission there, is to be able to declare about ourselves the things we wish to be true. 

    --Gabrielle Hamilton, Next of Kin

What Do You Like in a Cookbook Cover Design?

 Last week I watched a Substack livestream on cookbook cover design, featuring Jenna Helwig (founder of the Substack Cookbookery Collective, cookbook and mystery author, food editor at Real Simple, and daughter of my book group friend Linda) and Frances Abrantes Baca (book designer). They were focused on new cookbooks released this summer. It was a fun conversation that inspired me to look through my cookbooks (I probably have around 80), pick out some favorites, and think about what features I tend to like. I like to think I'm not overly influenced by covers, but I'm guessing the influence might be greater than I think. 

Anyway, here's what I discovered. I like blue covers (like Jenna and as I do with other genres of books). I have quite a few books with red covers and few with yellow/gold covers. Don't know if that reflects bias in my buying or perhaps trends at different times when I was buying cookbooks.  Couple examples:

  

  

I also really liked this high-contrast cover (that also aligns with my preferences in other genres) and didn't pick any lighter colored covers among my favorites: 

I also like covers with a "homey" feel like these: 

  

In general, I'm not a huge fan of having the author pictured standing behind some food (especially if they are "social media" chefs or strictly TV chefs), but the "just back from the farmer's market" feeling of the Ruth Reichl cover and the connection to the title of the book (which is a memoir/cookbook) made this work for me. 

I also like big pictures, not little pictures with a lot of text or little pictures in the four corners of the cover or no pictures at all. I like photographs a bit more than illustrations, but some illustrations work too. And, of course, the food should be colorful--brown food may taste good, but it's not so photogenic. I also like an out-of-focus background, as seen in these two covers, rather than the plate of food being knocked out with no background (BTW: the salad on the cover of Colorado Colore is one I've made many times--delicious!):

   

As professionals, Jenna and Frances were a lot more attuned to type font than I am--as long as I can read the title, I'm okay even if the type is a bit much, as with the nonword Colore above. Something that both of them mentioned liking is when there's a hand shown, suggesting the hand of the person creating the food. I think that might be a recent trend because I don't have a single book depicting a hand. 

I found this a fun exercise--and the next cookbook I buy, I'm going to try to make sure I'm not overly influenced by my cover preferences. 

What do you like in a cookbook cover?

Highlights of March and April: Bog Queen, Some Bright Nowhere, and Buckley

 A couple months ago, I decided I should start paying attention to Booktok/Bookstagram since content creators who are part of those "communities" are allegedly having a big influence on what people are reading. So, I did and, I'm sorry, but the content is generally substance-free. Even the comments from the dude who purports to have a PhD and have taught AP literature for 20 years are inane ("It didn't do it for me"); he's also fond of stereotyping people who like particular books (if you like To Kill a Mockingbird, you're an overachieving eldest daughter). There are common tropes (maybe not the right word but the best I can think of) like "Yes/No/Maybe" or "Overhyped/Underhyped" or "Books that Changed My Brain" (all with virtually no useful explanation for why books are liked/not liked/brain-changing) and even standard ways in which the books are displayed visually. Books mentioned lean heavily toward fantasy and romance, although some posters deal with a broader selection of literature--but never in any real depth. So far, I am uninfluenced by any of the folks I've come across. If you like Booktok/Bookstagram, what am I missing? 

On to good books read in March and April (no mysteries!!).

Fiction

Most of Peter Heller's books are muscular tales about people (generally men) in peril. The Orchard is definitely not that; it is a gentle and sad story narrated by 30-ish professor Frith, who in the early stages of pregnancy has retreated to the cabin in the Green Mountains where her mother Hayley raised Frith after her retreat from a beloved but drug-addicted husband and from academia. As Frith reads her mother's work--she was a respected translator of Chinese women poets--she reflects on her childhood. (The poems, which are lovely, were written by Heller, which somehow bothered me a bit.) Frith and Hayley lived on the edge economically, but they loved each other and their home--and they had friends, particularly Rosie, who brought color and adventure to their lives, and the biker Sci-Fi, who brought them food. As she reflects, Frith considers how and where she will raise her child; the father wants to be involved/in a relationship, but she's not sure that's what she wants. The book is about love--of family and friends, of nature/place, of language. It's beautifully written, but, despite things happening, it felt more like a series of moments in time than a novel with a plot. So overall, my response was mixed, but it sparked an interesting discussion about translation with my literary son, and I'm still thinking about it, so maybe that tells me something.

Another book about which I had mixed feelings was How to Read a Book, by Monica Wood, which was a selection of my online book group. The book features three main characters. Violet is a young woman recently released from prison, where she was serving a sentence for killing a woman in a drunk-driving incident. Her family has rejected her, and she feels alone and frightened. She then runs into Harriet at a bookstore; Harriet is a retired teacher who ran a book group at the prison. They forge a friendship that helps Violet a job at a lab researching parrots. At the bookstore, they run into Frank, the widower of the woman Violet killed. Despite a rocky start, the three become supportive friends. The book is about friendship, forgiveness, books, and defining what matters in your life. While reading the book, I kept thinking it was all a bit facile; when Violet gets involved in a relationship with her married boss, I felt it was an unnecessary plot development that wasn't handled well (and I didn't think Wood convincingly defended it in an author talk with book groups--she argued it was necessary as a way for Violet to recognize her beauty and power--what?). At the same time, I enjoyed the way Wood wove books and the function of story into the narrative. So qualified recommendation. 

Tracing the friendship of a group of women over the course of years is a common trope in fiction, sometimes done well, sometimes offering little to the reader. Happily, The Wilderness, by Angela Flournoy, is the former. The book tells the stories (not chronologically) of four African American women, from their 20s to their 40s. Desiree, doesn't seem to have a direction in life, although she has spent years taking care of her aging grandfather, who raised her and her sister Danielle after their father left and their mother died. In fact, when we meet Desiree, she is taking her grandfather to Europe so he can have a medically assisted suicide, a trip that contributes to estrangement between the sisters when Danielle finds out about it. Nakia is a lesbian, socially conscious chef who eventually becomes quite successful. January is a graphic designer who seems always in the process of leaving her boyfriend/husband while having two children. Monique is a former librarian whom we meet primarily through blog postings that are part of her effort to turn herself into an influencer; consequently, we don't really know her as well as the other women (guessing that is Flournoy's point). The women move back and forth between New York and Los Angeles as their relationships and careers evolve; in the process, they deal not only with the complexities of friendship, family, and romantic relationships but such contemporary issues/events as police brutality and climate change. I became a bit confused in the book's third section, which shifts from third person to first and is less direct about identifying which character is speaking--but the confusion seems appropriate to the events occurring late in the story (no spoilers)! Definitely worth reading.

Bog Queen, by Anna North, is like no other book I've ever read. First, moss is one of the narrators, beginning and ending the book, with a number of short sections interspersed throughout. Of course, North hastens to tell us at the beginning of each of these sections that a colony of moss does not speak or think like humans, but if it did, it would have some wise insights. Second, while the moss sections are narrated in first person plural, the modern human section of the book, which features a forensic anthropologist named Agnes who is trying to discover the cause of death of a 2000-year-old corpse found in the peat bog, is in third person. But wait, there's another point of view, told in first person singular--that person is a young druid, a 15-year-old woman who is trying to bring her small community forward by aligning with the Romans. Somehow, North manages to make these sections sound almost like a fable, though we suspect early on that they are connected to the modern-day mystery in the bog. To further complicate matters, the bog where the body was found is the subject of controversy--environmentalists want to save it, developers want to pave over it, and a woman whose aunt disappeared 50 years ago wants it excavated in hopes of finding her aunt's body. Plus Agnes is dealing with her own insecurities, an overprotective father begging her to return to the United States, and the teenage daughter of one of her colleagues who struggles with insecurity and seems to relate well to Agnes. There's a lot going on--perhaps a bit too much--but I really enjoyed the book for its interesting content and lovely writing. 

Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer is full of pain but also love. The book opens at Claire's last appointment with her oncologist--treatment has failed and she is entering hospice care. Her husband Eliot, from whose perspective the story is told, is shocked when, shortly thereafter, Claire asks him to move out so she can be cared for by two of her friends. He complies, but the decision causes him to question the foundations of their marriage and his subsequent loneliness--he's not even sure how often he's welcome to visit--and hurt feelings cause him to make some decisions he later regrets (eavesdropping on Claire and her friends from the garage of their home) and eventually to rebel. While you may question the actions of the characters, Packer presents the situation with such insight, you empathize with what they are going through. 

Nonfiction

As a young adult, I occasionally watched Firing Line featuring William F. Buckley. While his conservative views did not appeal to me, his urbane surface presentation and prodigious vocabulary combined with his bitchy wit were entertaining. When my dad died in 1975, I took some of his books--including several by Buckley--home with me and did try reading one of Buckley's, but didn't find it either convincing or interesting. Still, I thought of him as a rich but harmless East Coast conservative intellectual. Now, thanks to Sam Tanenhaus's Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, I realize how wrong I was. He wasn't rich--for most of his life he lived largely off family money, his and his wife's. He wasn't truly Eastern--he had deep Southern roots and a Southern attitude toward race. He wasn't an intellectual--he was intellectually lazy, rarely doing the reading and thinking that would back up his thinking and, indeed, had few original ideas. He had no journalistic ethics--he once drew heavily on a piece by Garry Wills before that piece was published, making it look like Wills had pulled from his work; he accepted a position in the Nixon administration that was a clear conflict of interest; he masterminded a "prank" that involved publishing fake documents in the National Review, claiming they had been omitted from the Pentagon Papers. In point of fact, he was an advocate posing as a journalist. While known as a skilled debater who was friendly to his adversaries on Firing Line, his debating often relied on ad hominem attacks and he was astonished if bested by an opponent's superior reasoning and oratory. He was  racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic. The author suggests he mellowed somewhat with age, but even in his advancing years, he refused to hire a Jewish journalist (David Brooks) to edit NR. I could go on, but I will stop now, concluding by saying the book opened my eyes and reminded me that I was fairly gullible when young (hope I'm less so now).

Historian Jill LePore spent several years directing a project to create as complete a data base as possible of all the constitutional amendments ratified, proposed, included in party platforms, and advocated for in other ways (https://amendmentsproject.org/). She drew on this work, in addition to other historical scholarship, to write We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution. Looking at amendments--successful and unsuccessful--and the people who supported and opposed them is an interesting take on the history of a document intended to be amended (see Article 5). I was particularly taken by learning of the role Birch Bayh played in achieving some critical amendments. Alarmingly, LePore thinks polarization has made the Constitution virtually unamendable since the 1970s. This has, undoubtedly unintentionally, given the Courts more power in "changing" the meaning of the Constitution. She picks apart the originalists' approach, noting that the justices might do well to pay more attention to the work of historians, who, for example, know that Madison's notes are not the be-all they were once believed to be because he tailored them to support his own views. Are we now hamstrung by an unamendable document written more than 200 years ago when much about today's world could not be imagined? That is a question worth reflecting on.

I think any divorced person (probably some married ones as well) reading Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage would reflect on their own marriage as they read Belle Burden's memoir. I certainly understand how falling in love blinds you to the red flags your prospective husband is waving madly at you. But it is harder for me to understand being so besotted you think your marriage is happy until you learn your husband is having an affair and is leaving you. As Burden relates the story of her marriage, it is clear her husband was not fully engaged (while still being controlling) and was taking advantage of her financially, despite the fact that he was earning a huge salary; I guess it's a good reminder of how blind we can be. Not realizing there were problems made the separation even more painful for her than it might have been. Adding to her pain, her husband James showed little interest in their children following the separation (again, I can relate to this) and many of their friends and acquaintances seemed to blame her. And yet, she still feels a yearning for him when she sees him. It's a painful story, although Burden eventually reaches some level of stability if not actual happiness. For those who are happily married, perhaps the book will help build empathy (and hopefully not scare them) for people who are divorced but still need friends; for those unhappily married or divorced, it may prompt some useful reflection. Note added June 5: Recent reporting indicates that Burden made her financial peril during the divorce appear much more severe than it was. This has prompted a lot of debate--I found author Jo Piazza's take on the controversy informative: https://jopiazza.substack.com/p/is-belle-burden-a-liar. 

I didn't love Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, by Caroline Fraser, but it's so strange that I decided to include it. The author's main thesis is that the surge in serial killings in the 1970s and 1980s is linked to the killers' exposure to lead in childhood. She is particularly focused on the Pacific Northwest, but also includes other killers in areas where there is a high level of pollution with lead, arsenic, and other heavy metals, including sites in Kansas, Idaho, Texas, and British Columbia. She traces the childhoods of several serial killers, as well as detailing their crimes; most attention is devoted to Ted Bundy. There's certainly research showing adverse effects of heavy metal exposure but whether this can be causally linked to becoming a serial killer, I'm unsure. Nonetheless, with the rollback of environmental regulations by the Trump Administration, any possible negative effects are concerning. But back to the book--Fraser also includes a running narrative about the many disastrous bridge projects involving Mercer Island, as well as memoir-style writing about her own rather strange childhood (as an eight-year-old, she plotted--in some detail--how she could kill her father, a cruel and controlling Christian Scientist). I found it difficult to put all these pieces together, especially since there some considerable jumping around from killer to killer, location to location. But Murderland is not like any other book I've read lately so it seemed worth including.

Favorite Passages

Safe. To be held. To be protected. To feel Hayley's chin on the top of my head, rubbing as she read the book. To feel her strong arms encircling. To feel the breath in her chest pressing my thin back. I would listen, feel, and try to keep my inhales steady and anticipate the moment our breaths would coincide. A quiet joy in all of it. 

     --Peter Heller, The Orchard

A breeze in the trees; a far-off argument of thrushes. She never would have guessed, before she left her home, how strange and huge the world is, what surprises it contains. 

What is the body like? She is like an armload of driftwood, Agnes could say, rubbed clean and silvery by the sea and sand. She is like a dried flower. she is like a pearl. She is someone at rest in a final state, as final as is possible on this turning Earth, whose cycles are ushering us ever into wondrous new forms. 

     --Anna North, Bog Queen

What was caretaking, anyway? Could you separate caretaking as a whole from the sum of its parts? Helping, soothing, driving, phoning, cooking, listening, tending, waiting, learning, remembering, deciding, forgoing. A lot of forgoing.

     --Ann Packer, Some Bright Nowhere

Run for the Hills and Joyride Top Early 2026

I started the year with some good nonfiction (see previous post), but it's been mostly downhill since. Indicative of that, some complaints before we get to what I have liked lately: 

Although I did include negative reviews when I started this blog, nowadays I don't usually attack the books I don't like. But I'm making an exception for A Better Life, by Lionel Shriver. Many novels tell immigration stories, but I've never before read a blatantly anti-immigration novel, which is what this one is. Yes, she's making fun of the liberal middle-aged woman who is afraid of cheese (symbolic of her wokeness), has a college graduate son who doesn't work and lives in the basement, and decides to take in an immigrant woman. I can see the humor (even though Shriver would probably make fun of me too), but then hosting the immigrant woman turns into a nightmare of epic proportions--and, in the process, we get to read a lot of diatribes about how immigration is ruining New York. Shriver's a good writer so she does build the suspense effectively--but that can't cover the mean-spirited ugliness. NOT RECOMMENDED.

Another irritation--when a writer firmly based in LA (Michael Connelly) writes a book (The Poet) about a character who lives in Colorado and refers to I-70 as "the 70"--no, no, a thousand times no. Calling highways "the 10" or "the 5" is a Southern California thing. Here it's I-70 or just 70--no Coloradan would say "the 70." Yes, I'm blowing this out of proportion, but come on--didn't he have an editor? And speaking of editors, The Poet is a decent mystery, but it definitely exceeds my idea of how long a mystery should be--where was the editor to tell Connelly to tighten it up? Editors matter. (In case you're wondering, it's 598 pages--unless a mystery is incredibly complex and well-written, the low 300s is where I think it should top out.)

One of the plot points in The Poet is that the perpetrator forces police officers to write "suicide notes" that are quotes from Edgar Allan Poe's poems. Weirdly, while reading a print copy of The Poet, I was listening to Murder by the Book, by Amie Schaumberg, which also has a literary twist--the killer in this case poses the victims as characters in classic literary works. While I liked the literary element, neither book was fabulous overall.

Fiction

Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson starts with Mad, a 30-something farmer, working their farm stand when a strange man pulls up in a PT Cruiser. Turns out the man, Rube, is her half brother, a mystery writer who was abandoned by their father years before that same father abandoned Mad and her mother. What's more, Rube has evidence that he has abandoned two subsequent families and is now living in California. He wants Mad to travel west with him to find their half sister and brother and then go on to seek out their dad in California. At first, Mad doesn't want to go, but her mother encourages her to join Rube--and she does. As they pick up basketball-playing sister Pep in Oklahoma and 11-year-old filmmaker Tom in Utah, they learn that with every new family, their dad assumed a new name (Charles, Chuck, Chip, Carl) and a new profession (mystery writer, farmer, basketball coach, filmmaker--yes, the children, despite being abandoned, have adopted their father's various passions). They have adventures or mishaps on their journey and achieve insights into how their own identities were shaped. They do eventually meet their father, who, unsurprisingly, can't really answer the questions they've carried with them since he abandoned them. I'm making this sound really serious--and the themes of abandonment, creating found families, and developing one's own identity are serious--but, like all of Wilson's work, Run for the Hills is quirky and funny too. 

Mysteries

Late in 2025, I realized it had been a while since I had read any Tami Hoag mysteries. So I Googled and found she had a lot of books I hadn't read. So I've been working my way through some of them since. She has several series, and in the past couple months I have read a couple titles in the Kovac/Liska series and a couple in the Broussard/Fourcade series. She relies on some familiar tropes--the rule-breaking cop and the conflict between the pressures of being a cop and one's family/personal life. Nothing earth-shattering, but reliably entertaining.

I didn't think the last couple of Richard Osman's series The Thursday Murder Club were very good, but I still read The Impossible Fortune and enjoyed it. There's a lot going on, and it all seems to start when the best man at Joyce's daughter's wedding finds a bomb under his car. Shortly thereafter, he disappears and his business partner dies in a bomb blast. Turns out they were sitting on crypto that is now worth over a quarter of a billion pounds--but it's in an underground "cold storage" space, and no one has the codes needed to access it. At the same time, Ron's daughter and grandson have fled from her abusive husband, who is planning to kill them. Meanwhile, Elizabeth is grieving her husband's death, Joyce is beginning to assert herself a bit more in the group (despite still being goofy), Ron is worried about his own health, and Ibrahim continues to counsel the criminal Connie. Somehow I thought it all worked. 

Nonfiction

Joyride by Susan Orlean is a memoir--she discusses her marriages, becoming a parent, having cancer, getting through the pandemic and the LA fires--but more importantly to me, it's a portrait of a writing life. The publishing environment has certainly changed radically since Orlean began her career decades ago, but her insights about writing are still on point. In fact, if I were teaching writing, I would use the book--or at least segments of it--as a text. She also includes a number of the pieces she has written in an appendix, which could be analyzed in light of what she says about writing. Highly recommended for people interested in writing.  

Favorite Passages

This wasn't supposed to be how a family worked. Family was just there when you appeared in the world, waiting for you. Each new addition after that, you had time to prepare, to make a place for them in your heart. The only danger was reduction, the numbers thinning out, people leaving. You weren't supposed to suddenly get a new family at eleven o'clock on a Saturday after you'd sold out of eggs. 

Mad figured that most therapy consisted of focusing on how your parents messed you up, and then finding ways to keep that pain contained within your own body so you didn't pass it on to anyone else or yell too much at the people responsible. 

For the first time in her memory, she thought about what it would be like to have a child, to have that child tell you that they wanted to play basketball, then having to attend years and years of games, each time hoping your child doesn't get hurt or ruin themselves. And maybe you felt that same tension just watching them go to school, to the arcade with friends, sitting in their room with their headphones on. Maybe every single moment of loving someone you helped make was connected to this low-level terror that hurt your heart. 

     --Kevin Wilson, Run for the Hills

Contemporary teenagers. It's Lord of the Flies in designer labels.

     --Tami Hoag, The 9th Girl

Each of us contains an unimaginably rich world, a full universe of thoughts and knowledge and aspirations and reveries, of stories and memories and perceptions and emotions that the sum of each person is an entire galaxy, unique and whole. If I had to point to one principle that has guided me, inspired me, and taught me how to be in the world as a writer, this would be it.

     --Susan Orlean, Joyride

Bridging 2025-2026 with Nonfiction

 I've read a lot of nonfiction in December-January, way more than I would normally read in a two-month span--and some of it has been really informative or even enlightening. So here's a rundown--and apologies for how long it is (I previously mentioned the first two on FB so skip down if you've already seen my thoughts on those). 

Timothy Egan's A Fever in the Heartland presents the story of the KKK's resurgence in the Midwest (particularly Indiana) during the 1920s. It's a frightening story, all the more so because the language and strategies used echo into 2025. The conviction of the Klan leader for a leader on a violent sexual attack that ended with the death of the woman also feels quite familiar. We can only hope the crimes documented in the Epstein Files will ultimately bring down the MAGA movement the way the death of Madge Oberholtzer brought down the Klan. 

Who Is Government? is much more positive, and I hope it will be widely read, particularly among those who view all civil servants as greedy and/or lazy people who live to make life difficult for Americans. The profiles in this book, written by Michael Lewis, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, W. Kamau Bell, and others, present detailed looks at the unknown work of dedicated public servants. My favorite is the profile of the manager of the National Cemetery Administration, who has created an incredibly efficient operation while providing deep consideration to the bereaved. Liking this book does not mean I believe there's no way to improve the agencies of the executive branch--of course, there are savings to be had and efficiencies to be developed. But letting people who know nothing of the true work of the agencies savage them was not the way to make reform--and I think it will be hard to believe it was if you learn more about the real work of the people involved. 

Life and Art: Essays, by Richard Russo, is organized into two parts--life and art. The essays in the life section are mostly focused on the impact on Russo's life of the different perspectives of his parents, the mental struggles of his mother and grandmother, and growing up in a struggling Rust Belt town. I felt that these essays got repetitive, although I did enjoy his take on dealing with fools! The essays in the art section were more varied. Three examples:  I admired Russo's nuanced take on cultural appropriation v. creative imagination. I also found his piece on writers' responses when their works get turned into films or television shows informative. as a Paul Newman devotee, I was moved by his sympathetic take on Newman's loneliness and view of himself as merely lucky. One stylistic thing that kind of annoyed me was his tendency to end every essay with a snappy one-liner, which felt like something I did back in the 60s/70s--but maybe that's still a thing. 

The People's Project: Poems, Essays, and Art for Looking Forward was curated by Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith in response to the 2024 election, Project 2025, and all they portended. Sales benefit the ACLU. The first few short pieces didn't move me, but they I got to "Raising the Resistance" by Aubrey Hirsch, a piece in the style of a graphic novel focused on raising good men as an act of resistance. Then Koritha Mitchell introduced the idea of "know-your-place aggression," which seems like a very useful concept. Essays by Kiese Laymon, Abi Maxwell, and Jason Bryan Silverstein gave me a lot to think about; all of these are represented in the Favorite Passages section (I went a little crazy with the quotes). 

I'm not sure why I had The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, by Edwidge Danticat, on my TBR. I think most of us are more interested in death as we age, but I certainly have no intent to write about it. Still, there it was at the library, and Danticat is a marvelous writer, so . . . While she makes some generic comments about writing, Danticat really provides no guidance on writing about death. What she does do is analyze how various notable authors have done so in various contexts--individual death, mass deaths in natural disasters, suicide, death by execution, and  close calls. She also writes extensively about the deaths of people close to her, particularly the death of her mother. I don't think I am taking away a lot of insights about death, but I may read death scenes in other books more carefully in future. 

Sadly, I wasn't too crazy about Burning Questions, a collection of Margaret Atwood's essays written between 2004 and 2021. I think I was mostly put off by the chronological arrangement which made it hard to discern themes--perhaps there weren't intended to be any but I would have appreciated it, even if the categories were as big as Richard Russo's life and art. The essays I enjoyed most were about literature and writing--see, there's a category. 

In Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef, Slutty Cheff focuses too much on the slutty piece of her pen name and not enough on the cheff part. I did enjoy the parts of the book about cooking, food, and the stress of restaurant work in the UK (much like the stress in the US), but the oversharing about her sex life and use of drugs (not as many drugs as in some chef memoirs) was too much for me. 

Favorite Passages

What good is it to be Ivy League educated if you end up Ted Cruz or Ron De Santis?

      --Richard Russo, Life and Art

Opening sentences yank us out of our lives and into other lives. They also carefully set the stage for what's to come. They are our first opportunity to meet a writer, or character, and decide whether or not we want to spend the next few hours or days with them. 

     --Edwidge Danticat, The Art of Death

The following are all from The People's Project:

If they want to force us back into our kitchens, we will turn them into war rooms. If they shove us into corners, we will fight where we stand.

     --Aubrey Hirsch

Consider how different conversations would be if major outlets had rigorously examined white men's lack of interest in other people's life chances.

     --Koritha Mitchell

The road forward runs through the past. It must reach beyond the exam room into the economy, the environment, the housing courts and zoning boards, the school districts and labor laws, the city budgets and federal prisons. The cure must be as vast as the violence.

     --Jason Bryan Silverstein (from a piece on health care)

I remember that in Mississippi we know how to fight. We know how to lose. We know how to organize with broken hearts. We know how to win. We know how to breathe with collapsed lungs

     --Kiese Laymon

Sometimes, I walk through the apartment that I still have not learned to call my home and I look at all of Hope's photos, one after another after another. On the hardest days, I even run my hand right over their rough surface, just grasping for the roof I know they can give me--that we can manifest the light that is already there. 

    --Abi Maxwell

Starting the Year with Heart the Lover

 

Warning: This discussion contains spoilers.

I'm not planning to write about every book I read this year, but I was excited to start the year with Heart the Lover, by Lily King. I have read most of her books, and I think she is an amazing writer. Perhaps the best indicator of her skill in Heart the Lover is that the book is both a prequel and sequel to her earlier book Writers and Lovers and also works as a stand-alone. It was on many best of 2025 lists--and yet I did not love it. The structure is fine, the writing at the sentence and paragraph level is lovely (see favorite passages below), but some combination of the plot and characters created problems for me.

The plot: The story starts with a college love triangle (love triangles are definitely a thing with King) among three English majors--Casey (the protagonist from Writers and Lovers), ultra-religious Sam, and less stifled Yash. There is a lot of English major talk, which many reviewers loved but I found a bit much. Indeed, the boys give Casey the nickname Jordan after a character in The Great Gatsby and she is called that throughout their relationship (cute or vaguely icky?). Plus the character Sam is so problematic (although scenes with Sam and his family did provide some comic relief), it was obvious that Yash was really the guy for Casey. Soon enough, the story morphs into a love story between Yash and Casey. That affair ends badly, with Yash seeming to choose Sam over Casey and doing it in a particularly heartless way. All of this held my attention and brought up some memories of what it was like to fall in love in college, but it didn't enthrall me. 

From there, we jump ahead 20+ years. Casey is married to Silas (one of her lovers from the love triangle in the earlier book) and has two young children. Yash stops in for a visit, the first time they have seen each other in decades--and it's awkward. They talk, but very little is surfaced. Another short leap forward in time, and Casey's son Jack has brain tumors and is in such pain that his body seizes as a means of alleviating the pain. Sam contacts Casey to let her know Yash is dying and she leaves her son to go to Yash. As a plot point, this sets up scenes of secret-sharing, recrimination, and reconciliation--everything they didn't talk about in the earlier visit emerges under the pressure of impending death. All of this is surely essential to what King wants to say about love,  connection, and forgiveness. But I could not get past Casey, who up to that point is portrayed as a wonderful mother, leaving her son for any reason really, but particularly for a former lover. She says that Silas convinced her to go, and I can understand why he would want her to resolve some of her old feelings. But did he want her to repeatedly miss flights home? Did Jack want her to go? Oh hell no!! My reaction to Casey's decision rendered me unable to be moved by the closing chapters, which--based on Goodreads comments--left many readers sobbing.

I recognize that caring too much about my own feelings toward a character and being judge-y about bad decisions that serve the author's purposes are not hallmarks of sophisticated reading. Will I change? Maybe I'll try, but I lack full commitment to that goal.

Favorite Passages

He looks scared, like something out there is more menacing than the snow falling faintly, faintly falling on the living and the dead. 

I laugh. I'm incapable of understanding his dilemma. It feels completely made up to me. I've noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems. 

You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you're reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.