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.
No comments:
Post a Comment