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
