I already did a whole post of random notes, but here's one more--I just finished The Spy Coast, by Tess Gerritsen, which features a cluster of retired CIA agents. This leads me to ask: What started the current spate of books about older crime solvers (or perpetrators)? I suspect it was Richard Osman--there were older heroes before, but the popularity of his series seems likely to be the impetus. Although The Spy Coast seemed far-fetched to me (of course, I know nothing about international intrigue/spycraft), I did appreciate that Gerritsen did not in any way make the retirees seem laughable as some of the other books in this vein do. I will give the second book in The Martini Club series a try. (And of course I'll be watching The Thursday Murder Club on Netflix when I have the chance.)
This post is feeling very long, making me think maybe I should go back to monthly posts. Don't know if I'll actually do that, but I am posting this before summer is officially over (Labor Day always seems like the end, right?).
Fiction
I debated whether to include Liars by Sarah Manguso on my "favorites." I didn't exactly enjoy it but that was because Manguso did such a masterful job of conveying what it is like for a woman (Jane) married to an irresponsible, gaslighting, emotionally abusive, cheating man (John). She is a writer, with several books published; she is also in demand as a writing teacher. He is an artist and serially unsuccessful entrepreneur who constantly belittles her career, asking her to make more money while doing nothing to help at home (they have a son) and demanding they move pretty much annually for his work. The book is written in the first person, in short accounts of daily activities in their family; the fact that she refers to their son as "the child," never naming him, somehow adds to the claustrophobic feeling of reading this book. One of the blurbs on the cover described Liars as a "crime novel, except the crime is heterosexual marriage." So, not upbeat--but really well done.
Rabbit Moon by Jennifer Haigh, opens with a young American woman being the victim of a hit-and-run in Shanghai. When her divorced parents, Claire and Aaron Litvak, are notified, they are shocked to learn that rather teaching in Beijing, as they thought she was doing, Lindsey is actually living in Shanghai. Her apartment looks like it belongs to another woman--they have no idea why she is in Shanghai, why her closet is filled with clothes she would never wear, how she is paying her bills. They rush to Shanghai where there is little they can do. As Lindsey languishes in a coma, they reflect on their failed relationship and their daughters (their younger daughter Grace, who was adopted from China, is miserable at camp). We learn why Lindsey was in Shanghai and what she was doing there, as well as why she didn't tell her parents. There's a lot to reflect on about how our experience of love as a young person shapes us and future relationships, good and bad. My only quibble with the book is that, after we come to what feels like the climax of Lindsey, Claire, and Aaron's stories, there's a whole additional section about Grace, which feels like it was meant to be revelatory and uplifting but somehow just feels unnecessary. Despite that, I enjoyed the book.
I don't really think Octavia Butler's Kindred is science fiction (the genre she is known for), but it does have a time travel element, so maybe. Dana, an African American woman living in 1976, time travels to a plantation in 1815. She fairly quickly figures out that the people of the plantation--white and black--are her ancestors and she must save Rufus, who is a young (white) boy in 1815 in order to ensure her own birth. When she returns to her own time, only a short period of time has past, even though her subsequent trips (each involving saving Rufus from something and each involving her more deeply in the life of the plantation) keep her longer in the past. Her white husband accompanies her on one trip and ends up trapped in the past for months when she returns. The novel explores interracial relationships in the 1970s as well as the brutality of slavery and its hideous effects on all involved. It's a complex and sometimes difficult read but thought-provoking in a variety of ways.
There's a lot going on in Dream State by Eric Puchner. Some of it didn't really work for me--namely, the author's attempt to weave climate change into the story, ending with Montana in a near-post-apocalyptic state. However, the main narrative of the book, which a NYT reviewer called a "coming-of-old-age" story, is engaging. Charlie and Garrett are best friends from college; while Charlie has become a successful anesthesiologist in California, Garrett has struggled since the death of another friend in a skiing accident for which he feels responsible. Then CeCe, Charlie's fiancee, comes to Montana to get ready for their wedding, and Charlie asks Garrett to befriend her. What happens next causes a rift that lasts for years while children are born and marriages go through the ups and downs of long relationships. Eventually, the friendship is mended, and the friends help each other through a child's addiction and CeCe's Alzheimer's. Perhaps because I'm old and have been through some "stuff," this all resonated with me. BTW: Dream State is a good multi-meaning title!
Weirdly, Culpability by Bruce Holsinger has some similarities to Dream State. It's a book about relationships, particularly family relationships, that also carries a current events theme, in this case AI and its effects. The book opens with a terrible car accident, in which two elderly people are killed while the Cassidy-Shaws all survive though it seems likely they (or their self-driving car) caused the accident. Each family member has some responsibility--17-year-old Charlie was driving, dad Noah was supposed to be the responsible adult but was on his laptop, mom Lorelei (an expert in AI) was similarly absorbed in work, and the sisters Izzy and Alice--well, I'll leave you to discover their involvement. The family gets away to the shore to heal, but the trip reveals further rifts. To be honest, I didn't love this book--near the end of the book Holsinger goes on way too much (in my opinion) about AI and I found Noah and Lorelei deeply annoying--but people with an interest in AI might enjoy it--and read back to back with Dream State, the "serious theme" similarity was so odd, I wanted to comment on it. It is probably not coincidental that both books were recent Oprah Book Club picks--Oprah does love an issue! BTW: Culpability is way too obvious a title.
And then came the third book in a row with an issue-based theme (again, climate change/planet destruction) behind the human story of friendship, loneliness, alienation, etc. Plus, Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter, has a metaverse aspect to it. To me, the book read like interlinked short stories, although it clearly says "A Novel" on the cover, so guess I'm wrong. Anyway, the book opens with young couple Annie, Edward, and their infant daughter Rose living in a tiny apartment, until Annie's coworker Stephanie comes over and their closet mysteriously turns into a lovely terrace. They soon discover it only appears when Stephanie is visiting, so they invite her over more and more often, entertaining her with "terrace stories," untrue accounts of their lives that Edward somehow sees as appropriate to the magical setting of the terrace. Annie begins to wonder if Stephanie and Edward are getting too close and then . . . don't want to spoil it. The next section is a slice of Annie's childhood; this is followed by a section on Stephanie from childhood up to and after her friendship with Edward and Annie (it's also the section when the metaverse element appears). The final section follows the climate apocalypse when Rose is interviewing people to become residents of "Suburbs," idealized space communities. As with Dream State and Culpability, the planetary destruction theme seems tacked on to the exploration of human relationships. I'm not sure what it all means, but it's weird and entertaining.
Author Kate Fagan (Colorado alum and former Buff basketball player) uses an interesting structure for her first novel, The Three Lives of Cate Kay--a memoir of the author Cate Kay, presented as something of an oral history with other people who are part of her story providing their perspectives. Cate began life as Annie, a girl growing up in upstate New York with her best friend Amanda. The two are "drama kids," who dream of going to LA and becoming stars. On the eve of their departure, Amanda is hurt in an accident and Annie runs away, changing her name to Cass. Through deception by a lover, Cass believes Amanda is dead and she pours her grief into a post-apocalypse novel that becomes a sensation. Cass writes under the name Cate Kay and safely guards her identity, only revealing her identity to the actress Ryan who is going to star in the movie version of the novel . . . and they fall in love. Lots happens and there's a happy ending that felt a bit contrived. Still, the story and the exploration of friendship, grief, fame, and coming out kept me interested.
Short Stories
I have seen Highway Thirteen, by Fiona McFarlane, classified as a mystery or thriller, but I don't see it that way, despite the fact that it's about a serial killer. It's not directly about the murders or about the hunt to find the killer. Rather it's a series of short stories about people whose lives were touched in some way by the killer and his crimes, from the podcasters who crow about new evidence to the couple who helped a young traveler later murdered by the killer, the actor who portrayed him in a film, one of the police officers who tracked him down, a politician with the same last name as the killer, a man whose feelings about his murdered sister are triggered by a young girl trick-or-treating alone. Of course, some stories resonate more than others, but taken together they paint a sad picture of how a horrendous crime can echo across time and space.
Mystery/Thriller
Summer was two-thirds over before I encountered a mystery I really liked--cause for consternation! Anyway, that mystery was the latest book from Karin Slaughter, We Are All Guilty Here, which is the first in the new North Falls series. Set in a small town in Georgia, the book introduces Emmy Clinton, a deputy in Clinton County, where her father is the sheriff--yeah, the Clintons are an influential and complicated family, a fact that provides a lot of backstory. Two teenage girls disappear during the town's Fourth of July celebration; eventually, a local man is convicted of kidnapping them. But 12 years later, he is released due to new evidence uncovered by a podcaster, and Emmy, her dad, and her son--who is now also a deputy--must decide what to do about that case, while looking for another young girl who has disappeared. In many ways, We Are All Guilty Here is a fairly typical mystery with some interesting twists, but the fact that Slaughter is a better writer than many who write in the genre sets it above everything else I've read so far this summer!
And then along came The Author's Guide to Murder, by Beatriz Williams, Laura Willig, and Karen White. It's a satire about three authors writing a book together, written by three authors. The three authors in the book write in different genres--fantasy romance, historical biography, and cozy mystery--and have distinctly different quirks (which many reviewers on Goodreads found very annoying). They travel to a writer's retreat at a castle in Scotland, all harboring justified rage toward the "host" of the retreat, who--surprise, surprise--ends up dead. Romance and mystery tropes all come in for satirical treatment, and it's quite silly . . . but fun.
I haven't loved every title in Cara Hunter's DI Adam Frawley series (I haven't read all of them yet), but I did like Hope to Die. The case at hand involves a young unidentified man killed in the home of an elderly couple who thought the dead fellow was an intruder. But was he? And did they know why he was really there? Things get more complicated when Frawley and company uncover the fact that the couple are the parents of a woman who was convicted in a notorious baby-killing case--and that's just the first of many twists. As she often does, Hunter includes manufactured "documents" that provide back story and insight into how the public sees the case. A fun read.
Nonfiction
I am not a big nature person--I enjoy being outdoors but I don't approach it as a naturalist would. Thus, I am not the obvious audience for The Comfort of Crows, by Margaret Renkl--but I loved it. I listened to the audio book, read by the author in a gentle Southern accent that sometimes was a little too calming (i.e., I dozed off, not because the book was boring but because it created a sense of peace). However, I missed the illustrations by the author's brother so have ordered a print copy. The book is a series of short essays, each introduced by an evocative quote, that trace the changing seasons of the natural world and, through the author's memories, of human life. Many of the essays are titled "Praise Song for (the Coming Bud Burst, Mole Hands in the Coyote Scat, a Spring I Was Not Alive to See, etc.)," which is an indicator of Renkl's love of the natural world. Renkl doesn't shy away from the ways humans are affecting nature's cycles in deleterious ways, through climate change and habitat destruction. Despite this--and the inevitable "red in tooth and claw" moments--the book is somehow joyful. Fun fact: Margaret Renkl was Reese Witherspoon's high school English teacher.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams is not joyful. In fact, it's right up there with Empire of Pain in the not joyful category. The author worked at Facebook for seven years in the mid-2010s, working directly with top management, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Wynn-Williams had believed so strongly that Facebook could have a positive impact globally that she had spent more than a year trying to get a job at FB working on policy and relations with other countries. However, when she actually got hired, it did not take long for her to recognize that the concern at the company, specifically of Mark Zuckerberg, was not its stated mission of connecting people but growth of the business. She recounts numerous stories of utter lack of concern for the common good, whether that might involve the mental health of teenage girls targeted by advertisers for beauty products when their posts indicated they were feeling sad or depressed or the literal safety of tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar who were targeted by hate speech that Facebook content monitors were leaving up even when confronted about their clear violation of Facebook policies or the integrity of U.S. elections (FB embedded staff in the Trump 2016 campaign to teach them how to use disinformation and incendiary posts to increase engagement; they offered the same service to the Clinton campaign, which turned them down). Executives lie repeatedly to the public, to policymakers, to everyone. The entire effort to get Facebook into China is a mass of deception, illegal activity, and disregard for the wellbeing of Chinese people, the security of all Facebook users' personal data, and democratic principles. Zuckerberg comes across as an immature narcissist who is so upset over President Obama confronted him about Facebook's role in the election that he plans visits to all of the early presidential primary states in what certainly appears to reflect some interest in running for president (thankfully that run hasn't happened . . . yet). There is also a strong thread of gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the company. Some critics have charged that Wynn-Williams is just a disgruntled fired employee. Fine, but colleagues have spoken up to support her claims, and I suspect that her picture of the company is accurate. Definitely worth reading.
In 2019, on a trip to Sierra Leone, John Green met Henry, a teenaged tuberculosis patient. Already somewhat obsessed with microbes as a symptom of his OCD, Green began a deep dive into the history, treatment, and current status of tuberculosis. The result is the informative Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection. If you don't know much about TB--those of us in wealthy countries generally have the privilege of ignorance--you are likely to find much in the book, particularly the number of annual TB deaths worldwide, shocking (note: TB is readily curable). A theme of the book is "The disease is where the cure is not. The cure is where the disease is not." Why? Because the system (i.e., us) does not care sufficiently to stop stigmatizing TB patients in poor and marginalized communities/countries and provide them with respectful, effective treatment, a lack of care that is exacerbated by concern for profit/cost-effectiveness. It is, as Green says, a "disease of injustice." I highly recommend this book--you will learn a lot about TB and some about John Green, which, if you are already a fan of his work, will only make you like him better.
Favorite Passages
I was in charge of everything and in control of nothing.
--Sarah Manguso, Liars (I could pull out a lot of other quotes but it would be really depressing)
We live at the intersection of causality and chance.
--Jennifer Haigh, Rabbit Moon
Absorbed by the grace of his undulating flight, I never thought to reach for my camera. This will make me sound like the worst sort of crank, but here is the truth: the only reason I carry a cell phone is to have a camera in my pocket, ready to record something extraordinary. I can't see the point of taking selfies. This pronouncement is surely an irony coming from an essayist, someone who keeps her finger on her own pulse for a living. As a writer, I err toward earnestness, but I'm at ease with this particular irony. The visible world is astonishingly, heartbreakingly lovely. Why waste it looking at myself? On the other hand, what good is having a camera in your pocket if you don't take it out in the presence of something wild and beautiful and rare. I stood that morning motionless while the most primeval of all the woodland birds disappeared into the forest. I walked out of the woods with not a single image to commemorate the encounter. I was angry with myself trudging back toward the cabin, but it wasn't long before I began to reconsider. Even when it is pointed in the right direction, a camera has a way of stunting sight. How truly valuable is a device that makes you take your eyes from an experience so momentary you might miss it altogether?
--Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows
Now I'm consumed by the worst of it. The grief and sorrow of it. How Facebook is helping some of the worst people in the world do terrible things. How it's an astonishngly effective machine to turn people against each other. And monitor people at a scale that was never possible before. And manipulate them. It's an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes . . .
--Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People
We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause.
We must also be the cure.
--John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis
I didn't like coffee. I liked cream and I liked sugar. Coffee was the vessel.
I'm always noticing the little ways society protects us from the menace of silence, like with Muzak in elevators. Humans; we built the Pyramids and made all the world's information instantly accessible, but apparently if we stand together quietly, we'll short-circuit and melt.
--Kate Fagan, The Three Lives of Cate Kay
“I’m always noticing the little ways society protects us from the menace of silence, like with Muzak in elevators. Humans: we built the Pyramids and made all the world’s information instantly accessible, but apparently if we stand together quietly, we’ll short-circuit and melt.”
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