Shakespeare as a Plot Device . . . This Month's Fad

Is it possible for a sixteenth-century writer to be a twenty-first-century fad? Yes, apparently it is, as books that make Shakespeare and Shakespeare scholars an element of their plots seem to be trending . . . at least on my book list. The fad started in January with Small Blessings and continued this month with several items discussed in Fiction below.

Mysteries
Breakdown, by Jonathan Kellerman
Find Her, by Lisa Gardner

These titles are both the latest releases in long series. The Kellerman book, featuring child psychologist Alex Delaware, starts very slowly, as Alex is called in to help a psychotic actress whose son he evaluated several years previously. When she is found dead, he launches his own investigation, eventually drawing his buddy Police Lieutenant Milo Sturgis into the case, which gradually grows more complex and involves multiple murders. Not great but not bad either. The same could be said of Gardner's latest D.D. Warren book, in which the Boston detective is searching for Flora Dane, a woman who was kidnapped and held captive for over a year and has now been kidnapped again while serving as a consultant to a dad whose daughter is missing. Far-fetched but still moderately entertaining.

Fiction
Still Time, by Jean Hegland
The Bookman's Tale, by Charlie Lovett
The Rent Collector, by Camron Wright
Purity, by Jonathan Franzen
Language Arts, by Stephanie Kallois
The Secret Chord, by Geraldine Brooks
Kissing in America, by Margo Rabb

Still Time is my favorite of the Shakespeare books. It focuses on a Shakespeare scholar whose fourth wife has put him in memory care due to his worsening dementia; at the same time, she encourages his daughter, from whom he has been estranged for a decade, to make an effort to reconnect. The story goes back and forth in time, helping us understand John's relationship, his life as a scholar who blames his daughter for blowing his one chance to vault into the academic "big time," and the frightening state of his mind as his dementia deepens--often he can quote long passages of Shakespeare but cannot remember why he chose that passage or the identity of the young woman he is talking to. I found Still Time to be profoundly moving.

In The Bookman's Tale,  Charlie Lovett examines the mystery of who wrote the Shakespeare ouevre. The novel's protagonist, Peter Byerly is an antiquarian book dealer who moved to England after being widowed. Trying to track down the source of a 100-year-old painting of a woman who looks exactly like his late wife, he becomes involved in investigating the provenance of several documents that might shed new light on the Shakespeare controversy. The book bounces between the present in which these events are occurring, ten years previously when he and his wife were falling in love, and centuries earlier when the documents were created. Although there's a twist at the end that is utterly unbelievable, overall the book is entertaining.

The Rent Collector probably shouldn't be included in the Shakespeare fad because the bard is only mentioned as one of a number of writers whose works inspire the two heroines of the book--a young wife and mother living in a Cambodian dump, where her husband scavenges to support their family and the title character, whom the young woman convinces to teach her to read. The process changes both of their lives. The author's son made a documentary about living in the dumps, which inspired Camron Wright to pen this book, which presents interesting background on the Khmer Rouge and conditions in Cambodia and covers intriguing themes, like the power of stories and traditional vs. Western medicine (the young mother has a sick child). Somehow, however, the book doesn't quite feel authentic. This feeling may have been strengthened by the fake Asian accent that the narrator of the audible book chose to employ in reading the book.

Jonathan Franzen is not one of my favorite authors, but I always feel compelled to read his books because they garner so much publicity. Purity has some of the same features as Franzen's earlier novels The Corrections and Freedom--multiple points of view, nonlinear plotting, a section that is someone's autobiography or memoir, engagement with current issues (here journalism vs. hackers/leakers such as Assange and Snowden), sexist portrayals of female characters. I found the first part of the book boring and the rest repellent--I don't even want to waste time describing its characters, plot, and themes. Read it if you love Franzen and avoid it if you don't.

Language Arts is the story of a couple, Charles and Allison, whose marriage was destroyed by the inevitable conflict that raising an autistic child causes. They try to work together to make good decisions about their son Cody's care, but it's difficult. Charles is a teacher who lives alone now that his daughter Emily has gone to college, and he writes her lovely long letters. One of Charles's students begins a project that involves both Cody and a former nun with dementia (perhaps dementia is also a theme) who often relives the years of World War II in her mind. Without going into depth but Charles and the nun have a deep attachment to the Palmer handwriting method, which is used to surprising effect in the story. Although the book is sometimes painfully sad, it is also hopeful, and I recommend it highly.

I loved Geraldine Brooks's first three novels, but her more recent ones have not enthralled me. The Secret Chord is the story of King David, narrated by his prophet Natan. My religious education (and practice) stopped in about 1968, so I'm hardly qualified to judge whether Brooks gives David a fair treatment. I will say that the story features murder; unceasing war; rape and abuse; plotting against friends, foes, and family; and a variety of other nefarious acts. Suffice it to say that bringing David to life, as many reviews claim the book does, seemed a pointless effort to me.

Kissing in America is a charming coming-of-age story. Sixteen-year-old Eva's father was killed in a plane crash two years ago and not only will her mother not talk about him, she is dating the charmless Larry. Craving love and attention, Eva falls in love with the enigmatic Will; when he moves to California, she cooks up a scheme that involves her and her best friend Annie taking a bus trip to LA, ostensibly so Annie can be on a quiz show for smart girls but really to see Will. Naturally, the bus trip provides numerous adventures, both the quiz show and rendezvous with Will are disasters, and Eva and her mother achieve some rapprochement. Predictable--but still entertaining.

Other
Unforgettable: A Son, A Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime, by Scott Simon

I love the way Scott Simon tells stories on NPR. In Unforgettable, he's telling his mother's story; as Patricia lies dying in a Chicago hospital, they reminisce about her unconventional life and his childhood. Chapters start and end with tweets that Simon sent out from her hospital room; while the tweets evidently engendered some considerable criticism, I liked their use as bookends. Simon doesn't tread new ground with his account of maternal death; nonetheless, I found the book affecting.
 

Picks of the Litter: Still Time and Language Arts

Favorite Passages:
Memory--uncorrected, uncorroborated, and (by its very nature) unreliable--is what allows us to retroactively create the blueprints of our lives, because it is often impossible to make sense of our lives when we're inside them, when the narratives are still unfolding: This can't be happening. Why is this happening? Why is this happening now. Only by looking backward ae we able to answer those questions, only through the assist of memory. And who knows how memory will answer? Who will it blame? Who will it forgive?

From Language Arts, by Stephanie Kallos

We don't become the people we are all at once. But if we are lucky, every love, laugh, and loss puts a wrinkle in our hearts to make us distinctive.

From Unforgettable, by Scott Simon

Dreary Days of February

Although it was snowing as I began writing this (it took me a good 24 hours to finish--the snow is now gone), except for a blizzard the first week of the month, February has been anything but dreary, with temperatures getting up to the low 70s here in Denver. February reading, however, has featured a rather wearisome "mini-theme" of hospitalization and illness. By the third book featuring extended time spent in a hospital, I was feeling rather ill myself. Luckily, not everything this month has fallen into this theme.

Mysteries
Back of Beyond, by C.J. Box
Long Gone, Alafar Burke

I stopped reading C.J. Box's Joe Pickett several years ago because it had gotten too dark and violent for me, but I decided to try the first book featuring a different character, Cody Hoyt. Montana lawman Cody has a lot of personal problems--alcohol being foremost among them--but he is relentless when his AA sponsor is found dead. The trail leads into Yellowstone National Park, where Cody's son is on a wilderness trek with his stepfather--and at least one murderer. Back of Beyond is kind of combo mystery-Western and, though not for me, I can imagine this "manly mystery" would be entertaining for many readers.

In Alafar Burke's stand-alone thriller, unemployed gallery worker Alice Humphrey suddenly gets an unbelievably great job offer . . . and just as quickly finds a dead body in her new place of employment. As she realizes she has been set up, Alice must figure out who is behind the plot before the police arrest her. The story is so convoluted, it lost me rather quickly. Although I like Burke, I wouldn't recommend this book.  

Memoirs
The Ogalalla Road, by Julene Bair
A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren
Anchor and Flares, by Kate Braestrup

Julene Bair came to a Novel Conversations meeting several years ago to discuss her earlier memoir, One Degree West, and she was interesting and charming. Her new memoir, The Ogalalla Road, is subtitled A Memoir of Love and Reckoning. It recounts two of her past (failed) relationships --though she says little about her current long-standing marriage--as well as her struggle to reckon with her family's role in farming the Plains in a way that has contributed to depletion of the Ogalalla aquifer. Also woven into the story are the challenges of raising her son as a single parent. There is much that is interesting in the book, but I am too linear to discern all the connections and metaphors that she finds between the various threads of her story. I also found (am I becoming an old fogey?) that I didn't enjoy hearing about the challenges of her sex life with her lover Ward.  Somehow, reading sex scenes among fictional characters is better than reading about the author's own sexual experiences.

Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance confirmed all the reasons that I already liked her, most notably that she seems to be one of the few people who entered politics to help people, From humble beginnings and challenging young adulthood (a too-early marriage), she constructed a good life of teaching and public service, at times sacrificing a simpler, more satisfying life to take jobs that she believed would advance the common good. I only wish that it were she and not Bernie Sanders who was leading the campaign to make the economy work for more than the super-rich. In other words: Warren for President!

Kate Braestrup is a chaplain to the warden service in Maine. She is also the mother of a blended family of six children who found herself alarmed when her oldest son Zach decided to join the Marines straight out of high school. That alarm prompted this book, which is a reflection on parenting, peril, and service. Braestrup has a good sense of humor (wouldn't you have to with six children?), a strong commitment to service, an ingrained optimism, and a way with words, so the book can take you from laughter to admiration to tears in the space of a few pages. I'd recommend the book--but read her earlier memoir Here If You Need Me first.

Fiction
Fortune Smiles, by Adam Johnson
Three Wishes, by Liane Moriarty
My Name Is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout
Inside the O'Briens, by Lisa Genova
All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews

Fortune Smiles won the most recent National Book Award and it is indeed an impressive collection. Its six short stories are set in very different times and places but all are melancholy (the title, which refers to a rigged North Korean lottery game, is misleading). My favorite story, "Interesting Facts," is narrated by a woman with cancer, a woman whose husband sounds very much like Adam Johnson. "Nirvana" also features a sick wife (I believe the mini-theme started here) but is narrated by her husband, who has created a hologram of the recently assassinated president--people can download the hologram and chat companionably with the dead president, and many are doing so. In the title story, Johnson returns to Korea, the scene of his Pulitzer-winning novel The Orphan Master's Son, telling the story of two defectors from North Korea trying to adapt to life in the South. The other stories feature a UPS driver whose son was dropped off in his truck post-Katrina, the former warden of an East German prison, and a child pornographer. Yes, there's a creepy factor, but the stories are nonetheless well-done.

Liane Moriarty has a gift for making life seem funny, even when it goes horribly wrong. Three Wishes is the story of triplets whose lives may be a bit overly entwined. Cat's husband is having an affair with the sister of Gemma's boyfriend. Hyper-organized Lyn is opting not to get pregnant because Cat has had a miscarriage and Lyn does not want to hurt her feelings; meanwhile, Gemma learns she is pregnant and decides to give the baby to Cat. Meanwhile, their long-divorced parents are dating . . . each other. Moriarty uses a third-person observer device throughout the book to show what other people thought of the triplets at various stages of their lives; she used a similar device in Big Little Lies, but it worked better there because there was a reason (a police investigation) for outsiders to be commenting. Here, the device falls flat--but the book is still a fun read.

My Name Is Lucy Barton kicked the hospitalization/illness mini-theme into high career. Lucy Barton has gone into the hospital for minor surgery and ends up stuck there for two months. During that time, her mother comes to visit her, the first time they have seen each other in years. The visit prompts Lucy to reflect on her hard-scrabble childhood in rural Illinois and her relationship with her mother. The book has the feeling of a memoir, with Lucy recollecting her time in the hospital from many years in the future (but of course it's fictional); I'm not sure why Strout used that structure and I didn't think it was very effective. In addition, I would have liked to see other relationships besides that of Lucy and her mother explored. This is probably my least favorite of Strout's books--but feel compelled to say that a FB friend (a retired English prof) posted today about how much she liked this book, so others have a different view!

Inside the O'Briens involves less hospital time, but lots of illness. Joe O'Brien is a Boston police officer who discovers he has Huntington's Disease, which rather quickly ends his career and limits his mobility. Meanwhile, his four children must decide whether to find out if they have the gene that means they will develop the disease and how to live their lives no matter what their decision. This book feels like it was written not as a compelling story but as a way to teach about Huntington's. While that's a laudable goal, it doesn't make for a great novel.

All My Puny Sorrows returns readers to the hospital--this time to the psych ward, where the narrator's sister, Elfrieda (a talented concert pianist), is being treated following a suicide attempt. As the narrator Yoli juggles caring for her sister in Winnipeg and her children in Toronto and New York, she also is considering whether she will help Elf commit suicide by taking her to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal for the mentally ill. The book is well-written, the characters well-developed, and the dilemmas authentic--and that's what makes the book so very painful. I think All My Puny Sorrows is a good book, but I would only recommend reading it knowing in advance that's it's not going to be easy.

Other
Fed, White, and Blue, by Simon Majumdar
My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life, by Ruth Reichl

When Simon Majumdar, the British/Indian food critic and judge on various Food Network shows, decided to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, his wife suggested he needed to see more of the country. He took up the challenge, giving the journey a food theme, and Fed, White, and Blue is the result. The book is mildly amusing but his "take-aways" are pretty mundane--basically, he learned that there are friendly people and good food all around the United States. He briefly touches on some food-related problems, but leaves them rather quickly for more upbeat tales. One note: I listened to this book; Majumdar's voice and British accent are so distinctive that the narrator's American accent was disconcerting if not offputting.

My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life is a thoroughly lovely book. Although Reichl refers to it as a cookbook, it's so much more. It's a collection of recipes that Reichl made in the year after she lost her job as editor of Gourmet when the magazine folded. It's also a journal of that year, interspersed with tweets that she sent as she went through the process of grieving her job and finding new directions. I found these impressionistic and evocative missives to be like little poems (see examples in "Favorite Passages" below). On top of all of that, the book is illustrated with wonderful photographs by Mikkel Vang. Yes, there is food porn, but there are also pictures of Reichl at work in her kitchen and at her writing desk, as well as photos of the natural beauty surrounding Reichl's home in upstate New York. I've read the book, but I plan to look through it many more times (I got it from the library, but may end up buying a copy).

Pick of the Litter:  My Kitchen Year

Favorite Passages

Sun coming up. Hawks hovering outside. Dancing in the kitchen with gnocchi and the blues. Good way to start a Sunday.

Up early. Vast rose sky, cloud wisps. Wood thrush calling. Cool cucumber soup. Lemon vebena. Threads of mint. Day starts well.

From My Kitchen Year, by Ruth Reichl

Suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next to the next, like flexibility or grace or dyslexia. My grandfather had big green eyes, and dimly lit scenes of slaughter, blood on snow, played out behind them all the time, even when he smiled.

From All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews

Bad things happen but the world isn't ending. No bang, no whimper, no sudden fix, just this long, slow slog we're all taking together toward the next shining, inevitable miracle.

From Anchor and Flares, by Kate Braestrup

Finishing Anna Karenina . . . and Other Late January Achievements

Well, to be honest, there weren't many other late January achievements, as I didn't get too much reading done while traveling the last week of the month. However, finishing Anna Karenina was a high point!

Mysteries
Tricky 22, by Janet Evanovich
In a Dark, Dark Wood, by Ruth Ware

I had planned never to read another Stephanie Plum mystery, as they have become tedious (how often can a blown-up car be funny?), but this one was available as an audiobook via OverDrive and I fell for it. Shouldn't have!

In a Dark, Dark Wood has gotten a lot of ink--treated as a successor to Gone Girl and Girl on a Train. Unfortunately, it doesn't deserve that attention, as the plotting is not as creative or tight as in either of those books, the structure is not as interesting, and the suspense is lukewarm (and I say this not being the biggest fan of Flynn's and Hawkins' books). The protagonist of In a Dark, Dark Wood, Leonora, is invited to a "hen weekend" (British version of a bachelorette party) for a childhood friend she has not spoken to in a decade--and she hasn't been invited to the wedding, meaning she doesn't know who Clare is marrying, a fact that turns out to be important. The weekend is being held in a remote lodge in a forest--where there is no cell service and, as a number of weird things start happening, the landline stops working too. So why would Nora go to this weekend? And why would she stay when things got ugly and contact with the outside world was impossible? And why are people, including me, reading this book? Those are the real mysteries.

Classics
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

The first surprise in Anna Karenina--besides the recognition of just how long it is (almost 1000 pages)--was that Anna did not actually appear until quite a ways into the book. I had foolishly expected her to be the sole focal point of the book--but it is a Russian novel after all. As the novel opens, we learn she will be arriving in Moscow soon to intervene with her brother Stepan Oblonsky's wife Dolly, who has learned of his affair with the family's governess and is in a state. We also meet the character who turns out to be an equal to Anna in importance in the book--Konstantin Levin, a landowner who is in love with Dolly's sister Kitty. Kitty, however, is in love with Count Vronsky, who will eventually become Anna's lover, for whom she will leave her husband and eventually ruin her life. While Anna Karenina, like the few other Russian novels I have read, has many characters, these six are central and it is through their lives that Tolstoy explores his themes of hypocrisy, jealousy, fidelity, family/marriage, social and political change (the changing role of the peasant, education reform, changes in women's roles and marriage law), and the contrast between rural and urban lifestyles. Despite the many characters, themes, and topics, I still found Anna's story the most affecting part of the novel. In the section of the novel when she has been rejected by society, she is cut off from her son, and her relationship with Vronsky is troubled, Tolstoy uses an almost stream-of-consciousness style to convey Anna's breakdown, leading to her suicide. While the discussions of political and social issues are interesting, Anna's tragic end--brought on by a combination of her own bad decisions and a rigid society--is what lingers after the last page is turned. I don't find this the "best novel ever written" as William Faulkner did (and he was way more qualified to make such a judgment), but I'm glad I finally read it. On to War and Peace?

Fiction
Recipes for a Perfect Marriage, by Kate Kerrigan

I thought this book sounded good because it was described as being the story of a bride using her grandmother's recipes to work on her marriage--and I'm a sucker for a novel with recipes. However, the bride is an obnoxious character and her grandmother, whom she idolized as having a perfect marriage, is her own kind of pain in the butt. If that sentence isn't enough to convey that I didn't enjoy this book, then I'll just say it: not recommended!

Other
Letter to My Daughter, by Maya Angelou

Here, too, I had a misconception about this book--I thought it would actually be a letter, written to all the young women who looked up to Angelou. Instead, it is a collection of largely autobiographical essays and poems, many previously published. Overall, the collection fell flat for me, though I did enjoy the pieces on Fannie Lou Hamer and on poetry.

Pick of the Litter:  Anna Karenina

Favorite Passages: 

Rummaging in our souls, we often dig up something that ought to have lain there unnoticed.

All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.

From Anna Karenina

Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America's great novel that You Can't Go Home Again. I enjoyed the book but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one's skin, at the extreme corners of one's eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.

From Letter to My Daughter

Thirteen Ways of Looking . . . and Other Early January Reading

So I've decided to change my approach again--posting semi-monthly instead of monthly (I forget too much in a month's time . . . sad).

The year got off to a good start with Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann, a volume that includes a novella and three short stories. The title novella is the story of an elderly widower, formerly a judge, who goes out to lunch and is killed. Alternating chapters present (1) his internal monologue about the indignities of aging, the frustration of dealing with his son (whom he loves and dislikes in equal measure), and other matters and (2) the investigation into his death--but in a manner unlike any other crime story. Investigating a crime is compared to writing poetry, and these chapters include many lovely set pieces, including an wonderful riff on snow.

The three stories that make up the rest of the book are varied. "What Time Is It Now, Where You Are?" is written from the perspective of a writer who has an assignment to write about New Year's Eve and wants to do something that breaks the mold. He thinks he'll write a story set in Afghanistan, with a woman alone in a post, waiting to call her partner and her partner’s son at midnight. "Sh’khol" (a Hebrew word for a parent who has lost a child--no comparable word exists in English) is the haunting story of a woman who adopts a deaf-mute six-year-old from Russia. She buys him a wetsuit for Christmas. The next morning, he puts on the wetsuit and disappears for 48 hours. When he returns, she realizes she’ll never know what happened in those two days. What will happen when he grows older and stronger is a frightening prospect for her and the reader. The final story is "Treaty," in which a nun sees the man who raped and tortured her on the news 37 years later and travels across the Atlantic to confront him

The book also has an interesting back story--it was written before and after McCann was assaulted on the street in New Haven while trying to assist a woman. I thought for sure the novella was written after that event--but it turns out I was wrong. So the effects of the incident aren't necessarily obvious, but they are there.

Definitely recommended.

And more from the first half of the month . . .

Mysteries
Playing with Fire, by Tess Gerritsen

Gerritsen is the author of the Rizzoli and Isles mystery series, but here she branches out with a stand-alone thriller (not her first) that combines the contemporary story of a violinist whose toddler has suddenly become violent with a parallel story of a young violinist in World War II Venice whose family is sent to a concentration camp. Gerritsen is trying for something meaningful, but it falls flat.

Memoirs
Fiction Ruined My Family, by Jeanne Darst.

Fiction didn't ruin Darst's family . . . alcohol and bad decisions did. Just another tale of a sad childhood leading to young adult dysfunction. I've read enough of those.

Classics
Adam Bede, by George Eliot

George Eliot's first novel is the story of two highly moral characters, carpenter Adam and the Methodist evangelist Dinah; two morally compromised characters, Adam's beloved Hetty and the local squire Arthur; and a host of villagers, including several very annoying mothers/aunts who plague the younger people in their families. Adam Bede is a morality play in which the righteous, after pain and suffering, find a happy ending while the sinners pay the piper. Questions of class, religion, and women's roles play a part in the story as well. As a newcomer to Eliot, I found Adam Bede less complex and rewarding than Middlemarch but interesting nonetheless.

Fiction
Small Blessings, by Martha Woodroof
The Bookseller, Cynthia Swanson

Small Blessings reminded me in its general outline of The Storied Life of AJ Fikry--a bookish man is brought out of his shell by gaining sudden responsibility for a child, whose presence also brings an engaging woman into the man's life. But Woodroof's plot is less believable than Zevin's and, even though our book group didn't think The Storied Life was particularly deep, the comparison shows Zevin's greater care and concern for the realities of parenting and the relationships people have with literature. So if you're choosing, read The Storied Life of AJ Fikry instead of Small Blessings.

Set in 1962-1963 Denver, The Bookseller is the story of a 38-year-old woman who suddenly begins to dream an alternative life in which, instead of being a single bookstore owner, she is the married stay-at-home mother of triplets, one of whom is autistic. At first she enjoys the dreams, but gradually she faces serious challenges in both her dream and real lives. There's a twist at the end that actually did surprise me, which is fairly unusual, so hats off to the author for that. I especially enjoyed the description of our city in a period of transition (every period in Denver seems to be a period of transition).

Our library had a Local Author Fair today, and Cynthia Swanson was the keynote speaker. She mentioned that the book has been compared to the film Sliding Doors (to which I recently compared the not-so-successful All the Difference). Swanson does the alternative futures scenario in a way that makes the book more psychologically complex--because it's a dream, we assume, the married-with-children-scenario is wish fulfillment for the author; thus, when it starts to be a source of stress rather than enjoyment, we look to her emotions--rather than an external source--for an explanation. I think this is a good complication.

I asked Swanson about the title of the book, which I did not find to be evocative of the story (I didn't say that). She shared that she had been through several titles (one was Life at This Moment, which I prefer), but her editor at Harper Collins felt that the title needed to convey that the book was about someone who owned a bookstore. Ergo . . .

The Bookseller is cleverly plotted and an enjoyable read.

Other
Erratic Facts, by Kay Ryan
The Book Club Cookbook, by Judy Colman and Vicki Levy Krupp

I had previously only read a couple of poems by Kay Ryan and had enjoyed them. This collection of terse pieces left me cold, however. Since Ryan is a highly regarded poet, I'm sure others might enjoy Erratic Facts, but it definitely wasn't for me.

The Book Club Cookbook is a book you can imagine two friends taking on as a fun project. The book includes brief synopses of more than 100 books; each is accompanied by one or more recipes for food either eaten by characters in the book or representative of the type of food they would have eaten. Occasionally, these recipes were even provided by the authors of the books being discussed. For each book, there is also a description of one or more book groups that have discussed that particular title along with their way of wedding book talk and food. I was surprised at how many book groups seem to make food related to the books a part of their experience and found the descriptions of how the book groups operate interesting. If I were starting a new book group, I would consider a lot of ideas from this book (though probably not the heavy emphasis on food). The recipes did not tempt me to try them out (and I'm a person who regularly tries out recipes), so the book failed as a cookbook but succeeded as an examination of book groups. My favorite part of the entire book was a brief story about food and writing sent to Colman and Krupp by Julia Glass, an author I really enjoy. The fact that her story ends with the following sentence just topped it off beautifully: "We ate every bit of it [a wonderful meal based on one served in her book Three Junes], we talked and laughed and drank wine, and then I read from my book. I stood up before a crowd of happily sated readers under the comforting beams of that fine old creaky house and I thought, You need not always be careful what you wish for." I'm probably going to hang on to this book just for this story.

Pick of the Litter:  Thirteen Ways of Looking 

Favorite passages:

Poets, like detectives, know the truth is laborious: it doesn’t occur by accident, rather it is chiseled and worked into being, the product of time and distance and graft. The poet must be open to the possibility that she has to go a long way before a word rises, or a sentence holds, or a rhythm opens, and even then nothing is assured, not even the words that have staked their original claim or meaning.

He looked as if he had dressed himself in the third person.

[Both from Thirteen Ways of Looking, from which I might have chosen many other passages.]

What Is Novel Conversations Reading?

So, I have recently stepped back from facilitating the Novel Conversations group; nonetheless, I can report on their slate of upcoming books:

--February: Persian Pickle Club by Sandra Dallas

--March: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

--April: A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman

--May: Restless by William Boyd

--June: Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris

Best of 2015

It's always fun to see how the year started and ended; 2015 started with J.A. Jance (somewhat frighteningly, I read more J.A. Jance than anyone else this year) and ended with Toni Morrison. In between were sufficient good books to make me happy to be able to access books in so many forms. I read 159 books this year but was undoubtedly proudest when I finished Middlemarch; I'm currently working on Anna Karenina and anticipate feeling equally puffed up by my own achievements when I finish it.

Anyway, here are the books I liked best in 2015.

Best Novels
A God in Ruins, by Kate Atkinson. Two years ago, I picked Kate Atkinson books as the best of the year in two different categories and she came through again this year with a follow-up to Life After Life focusing on Teddy, the beloved brother of that novel's heroine Ursula. Again, she experiments with form and challenges the reader to think about their assumptions about fiction, while educating us (or at least me) about pilots in World War II--since my dad was one, this is a fascinating topic for me--and giving us insight into human relationships.

Our Souls at Night, by Kent Haruf. This novella tells the story of two older residents of Haruf's fictional Holt, Colorado, who begin sleeping together to assuage their loneliness (and, at first, it's just sleeping and talking). It's a lovely reflection on friendship, aging, and, indeed, humanity that is also sad, a sadness deepened by the fact that Haruf wrote it as he was dying. There won't be another story from Holt or more passages like this: "I do love this physical world. I love this physical life with you. And the air and the country. The backyard, the gravel in the back alley. The grass. The cool nights. Lying in bed talking with you in the dark."  That is a loss for all readers.

Honorable Mention: The History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters, by Julian Barnes

Best Short Stories
Redeployment, by Phil Klay. These stories about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the psychological damage done to those who fought them should be required reading for those of us who supported or opposed those wars but were safe at home all the while.

Best Mystery
The Skeleton Road, by Val McDermid. This is a double mystery (who killed the person whose skeleton was found on the roof of an abandoned building in Edinburgh and who is the vigilante killing Balkan war criminals?) but it is also a history lesson about the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s. Definitely not a perfect mystery, but the best of the year by a large margin.

Best Nonfiction
Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. I'm 65 and my mother is 91, so books about aging and dying have resonance. Being Mortal is a clear-eyed examination of the disservices our culture--particularly medical culture--does to the elderly and the terminally ill. This passage from the book is one of my favorites from the year: "In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments--which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves."

Missoula, by Jon Krakauer. This examination of rape in one college town is one of the most frightening books I have read in a long time. If you can read this book and still deny there is a problem with rape on college campuses--a problem fueled by alcohol, a sense of male entitlement, and inadequate education for police officers, prosecutors, and young men and women--I have serious doubts about your rationality.

Honorable Mention: The Light of the World, by Elizabeth Alexander (Michelle Obama's favorite book of the year)

Best Poetry
Citizen, by Claudia Rankine. I don't think Citizen is actually classified as poetry, but to me its language was poetic. Take, for example, this passage: "The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you."  Even with Rankine's wonderful language, reading this material is painful. Rankine forces our attention to everyday racism--the thoughtless remark, the refusal to sit next to an African American on the bus, the easy judgments about prominent African Americans who, for one moment, lose their equanimity. But she also looks at the larger problems of race in our society, including police killings of African Americans.

December's Reading

December was definitely an interesting reading month, with some definite highs, unfortunately not in the first category.

Mysteries
The Unbidden Truth, by Kate Wilhelm
The Short Drop, by Matthew FitzSimmons
Dance of the Bones, by J.A. Jance

I wouldn't recommend any of these mysteries--Dance of the Bones was an especially disappointing offering from the usually reliable J.A. Jance.

Memoirs
Glitter and Glue, by Kelly Corrigan

A few years ago, Corrigan penned a memoir about her relationship with her father. Glitter and Glue is  purportedly about how she came to appreciate her mother, with whom she had a more distant relationship. Unfortunately, it focuses mostly on the author herself, offering little real insight into the mother-daughter relationship. Corrigan exemplifies why I don't care greatly for memoirs--she thinks her life is interesting and meaningful in some way that should engage others (and, to be fair, she has many fans), but I think her life to be about as memorable as mine--i.e., she's just a regular person and her efforts to make her life into some kind of metaphor fall flat.

Fiction
The State We're In, by Ann Beattie
The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishigura
Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, by Gabrielle Zevin
Kitchens of the Great Midwest, by J. Ryan Stradal
Redeployment, by Phil Klay
God Help the Child, by Toni Morrison

Sometimes I wonder why I continue to read short stories (and memoirs for that matter) when I rarely like them. Ann Beattie is a well-regarded practitioner of the form but the Maine stories in The State We're In mostly left me cold. My favorites were three stories that featured teenager Jocelyn, sent to live with a peculiar aunt and uncle while her mother recovers from surgery; Jocelyn is taking an English course in summer school, a course requiring her to consider such topics as "What Magical Realism Would Be." While the other stories do convey a sense of place, I was not enthralled.

And speaking of not enthralled, I could not figure out what Kazuo Ishigura was trying to achieve with The Buried Giant--unless he's just trying to prove he can write in many different genres. This book is a historic fantasy, in essence an exercise in myth-making. It recounts the journey of an elderly couple seeking to find their son; they cannot remember much about their pasts, allegedly because of a mist that lies across the English countryside. On their quest, they encounter knights, monks, strange animals, a dragon, magical children, and more; the two appear to be devoted to one another, but as they begin to remember troubling incidents in their past, that devotion is called into question. While I appreciate Ishigura's versatility and creativity, The Buried Giant was too obscure and quasi-allegorical for my taste.

Revolutionary Road, in contrast, is the realistic story of a young couple starting a family and moving to suburbia in the post-World War II years. While veteran Frank Wheeler believes he is somehow superior to others and destined for unspecified intellectual achievements, his girlfriend April gets pregnant, they marry, he takes a dead-end, do-nothing job at the same company where his father worked, and they move to the suburbs. As they sink into conformity, they still long for another life; they even go so far as to plan a move to Paris, where Frank can find the niche where he will excel. Instead, April becomes pregnant with their third child, and their marriage, deprived of the dream that propelled it, begins to collapse. It's a story of self-delusion, isolation, and conformity and, though the characters really have only themselves to blame for their problems, a tragedy nonetheless. Highly recommended.

The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, Novel Conversation's selection for January, is much more upbeat. It's the story of widower AJ Fikry, who lives above his small bookstore in a tourist town on an island off the Massachusetts coast. He drinks too much, carries only books he likes (he's not a fan of David Foster Wallace), and doesn't really like most of his customers. But then someone leaves a baby in the store and soon he's raising the child, dating a book rep, organizing a book group for police officers, and hosting author events. The book talk/gossip is fun and, although there are some sad moments in the book, overall it leaves the reader feeling positive about humanity. Also highly recommended.

Kitchens of the Great Midwest is another quirky book, this time featuring a Minnesota girl, Eva Thorvald, who has the finest palate of her generation. The book follows Eva from her birth, through difficult family circumstances, to a teen-age dating experience, to success as a chef who creates exquisite dining experiences that people wait years to gain entry to. The chapters are like vignettes, many telling the story of how she met someone who would later become part of her "constructed" family. I wanted to like this book more than I did, and I can't really explain why I didn't find it as entertaining as The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.

Iraq war veteran Phil Klay won the National Book Award for Redeployment, a collection of 12 short stories that depict the physical and psychological effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on those who fought them. The characters range from a recently returned Marine struggling to figure out how to reestablish himself in life stateside to a chaplain, a serviceman who served on corpse detail, and an Arab-American college student who tries to explain his service in psychological operations to a fellow student. Through the stories, Klay portrays the psychological damage and dislocation that the war has wreaked on those who have fought it. It's impossible to say I enjoyed this book--and I wouldn't have chosen it as the best book of 2014--but those who want to understand the wars of the past decade plus should add it to their reading lists.

God Help the Child is more contemporary than most of Toni Morrison's work. It is the story of Bride, a successful young woman whose mother disliked her because of her extremely dark skin. As the book opens, Bride's lover has left her with no real explanation, and she is devastated. At the same time, she is planning to meet a woman she testified against as a child as the woman leaves prison; when the woman beats her within an inch of her life, Off work while she recuperates from her injuries, Bride begins to deteriorate in other ways, apparently morphing back into the little black girl she once was. She decides to take a road trip to find her ersatz lover Booker, who has deep-seated issues of his own. She crashes her Jaguar and spends weeks recuperating with a hippy couple who stole a child off the street. When she does find Booker, yet another tragedy occurs. While Bride and, to a lesser extent, Booker are the primary characters, others also have a chance to narrate sections of the book; these include Bride's friend Brooklyn, whom Bride trusts completely but is actually plotting to take her job; Sweetness, Bride's delusional mother; the woman whom Bride accused of child abuse; and others. Bride, Booker, and others were affected by child abuse/neglect and the one character who seemed to reach out to  child--Booker's aunt Queen--neglected her own children. God Help the Child is as sad as the title suggests and it's not entirely satisfying, but it's still worth reading. After all, it's Toni Morrison!

Other
Gratitude, by Oliver Sacks
The Best American Poetry 2015, edited by Sherman Alexie

Gratitude is a slim collection of four essays by Oliver Sacks written in the last two years of his life. Focusing on age, illness, and death, they reveal Sacks to have been an amazing human being who provides a compelling model of what it means to face death with dignity and courage.

It can surprise no one that Sherman Alexie has more sophisticated taste in poetry than I. On first reading, I found many of the poems opaque, but enjoyed Madelyn Garner's reflections on dementia in "The Garden in August," James Galvin's poem about a "Wedding Dress" for sale at a thrift store, and Rebecca Hazelton's lovely "My Husband," which celebrates the beauty of the mundane.  I started to enjoy this collection more when I got to the author notes, which included many interesting discussions of the poets' work--how one compelling rhyme can morph into a series that create the base for a poem, how experimenting with form drives some poets' work, how a poet found the raw stuff of her poem on Craig's List. Reading the poems again in conjunction with the notes led me to greater appreciation of the poems. While I feel certain most readers will not like all of these poems, I feel equally certain they will like some of them and will learn something from reading the notes.

Pick of the Litter
Revolutionary Road, The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, and Gratitude.

Favorite Passages
I cannot pretend that I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.  
--Oliver Sacks, Gratitude 

How resigned she seems
to the eviction notices her body is receiving.
--Madelyn Garner, "The Garden in August"

The less-than-distinguished GOP field for a DiCaprio biopic: Leo, Revealed.
A brand new wok for Lou Brock
--Cody Walker, "Trades I Would Make" (hilariously silly)