Spring has sprung (kind of), and I'm hoping the reading and the weather will both be on the upswing. Meanwhile, thought I'd just highlight my favorite reads of Winter 2023. I've already posted about Taste by Stanley Tucci and Chris Whipple's Gatekeepers, so I won't say anything more about them except they were both exceptional. Some other books I really enjoyed this winter:
- I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai. Makkai takes two tired tropes--the podcaster protagonist who returns to the boarding school where a tragic death occurred when she was a student--and creates an entertaining who-dun-it that also explores the #MeToo movement and its impacts. The book is addressed to Mr. Bloch, the theater teacher whom Makkai suspects was grooming students--including the dead girl--for sex. The Great Believers is still my favorite Makkai book, but I Have Some Questions for You is definitely worth reading.
- Musical Tables, by Billy Collins. In this collection, Collins tries his hand at the very small poem, and he does the form justice. Many of the poems are funny, but others are touching. Two examples to support my point:
Headstones
If the dates show
the husband died
shortly after the wife--
first Gladys then Harry,
Betty followed by Tom--
The cause is often
gradual starvation
and not a broken heart.
A Memory
It came back to me
not in the way
a thing might be returned to its rightful owner
but like dance music
traveling in the dark
from one end
of a lake to the other. The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan. The School for Good Mothers is set in a United States that at first seems "normal." Frida Liu is a 39-year-old mom on the brink of mental collapse when she leaves her 18-month-old daughter home alone to go to her job at the University of Pennsylvania. Her neighbors report her and she is arrested and then subjected to unrelentless surveillance by Child Protective Services. Her crime and the data CPS collects result in her being sentenced to a one-year stay at a new facility, the School for Good Mothers, where the mothers must care for robot children in order to perfect their parenting skills. There is no escape and no way to succeed. It's a chilling look at what constitutes good parenting and society's (or the government's) role in enforcing norms.
The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: A Memoir, by Paul Newman. Some years ago, Newman recorded reflections on his life and a collaborator also taped friends, family members, and colleagues talking about their experiences with Newman. Then he got busy with other projects and the memoir was abandoned; eventually, he died, and no one knew what had happened to the tapes until they were found fairly recently. The book is based on those rediscovered materials and it's fascinating. Newman's insecurities were surprising to me--he was Paul freaking Newman!--and I was moved by his efforts to be a better person. Jeff Daniels was a great choice to read the audiobook (with assists from a variety of others).
