Summer Rants and Reflections

I just survived a week of 95+ degree days with a nonfunctioning AC unit (now replaced), which has no relevance to this post other than I felt like whining. First world problems, for sure (and I lived in an unairconditioned house for 44 Colorado summers, so I should be tougher). Anyway, whenever I get a lot of notes at the top of a draft post that won't go up for awhile, I figure it's time for a "rants and reflections" style post. So here we go. 

August brought two nonfiction books that made me feel inadequate. First was On Morrison, Namwali Serpell's in-depth exploration of Toni Morrison's work. I've read several Morrison books and some of her essays, but this book made me realize how shallow my reading of Morrison is. My son pointed out that if you're a white person reading a book about a black author by a black scholar, you should be getting some deeper insights into Morrison's work. So I'm trying to appreciate learning and not feel dumb. Serpell's book would be a great text for a class on Morrison or a useful resource to anyone teaching one of Morrison's major works, but as leisure reading, only for those serious about Morrison. Then came The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who advocates for taking part in a gift or reciprocal economy, rather than the economy of accumulation and profit. I was listening to it as I came out of Ace Hardware with a purchase I probably really didn't need. Sigh. 

August also brought two books that seemed very mundane for their particular authors, not bad, just not all that interesting by comparison with their earlier works. This is especially true for Tom Perrotta's Ghost Town. Perrotta's best books feature odd happenings or characters with somewhat bizarre character traits (my favorite is The Leftovers), but I found Ghost Town to be a rather typical coming-of-age story. Disappointing. Less disappointing but still surprising was Daniel Mason's Country People, which is a satirical look at academics--a father who has been working on his dissertation for more than a decade and his wife and her colleagues at an elite institution where she is teaching for a year--as well as the small-town Vermonters in their college town. It's a far cry from his most recent prior novel, North Woods, in which he chronicled the lives of people who lived in a particular location over many years. I didn't love that book, but I did admire what Mason was attempting. Country People, while pleasant enough, didn't offer anything that hasn't been done by Richard Russo and others. 

On to another topic. The New York Times recently came out with their list of the top 50 thrillers of the 21st century (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/books/best-thriller-books-21st-century.html). I had read 38 (probably spending too much time on thrillers/mysteries), including some that I would not have called thrillers--The Goldfinch (hated) and The Sympathizer (loved) are two examples. If you have read these, would you consider them thrillers? This led to a discussion with my son and DIL about what a thriller is compared to a mystery; some Googling indicated that in a mystery, something bad has happened and a character is trying to figure out who did it; in a thriller, the protagonist is in jeopardy and must prevent a future attack or catastrophe. An offshoot of this discussion involved whether, if the reader knows who did the bad thing (a la the old Columbo TV show), it's still a mystery. I say yes, but not sure sticklers would agree. Accepting thoughts on any or all of these definitions/questions.

And speaking of something that might be a thriller (not a mystery according to the Google definitions), A Sociopath's Guide to a Successful Marriage, by MK Oliver, presents a completely unsympathetic protagonist, surrounded by other incredibly flawed people. For a few chapters, it felt humorous, but then it just became a portrait of such an awful person that I kept reading only because I was hoping she would get her comeuppance. That didn't happen. This isn't the first book I've read in which a perpetrator gets away with murder (or multiple murders), and I've read books with casts of terrible characters. But everyone is so unrelentingly awful (except the children, who are more props than actual people) that this was hard to take (not sure why I finished it, to be honest) and made me wonder what exactly the author was trying to accomplish. 

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.