The Candy House and More Early April Reading

 Fiction

I don't know quite what to make of The Sweetness of Water, a novel by Nathan Harris. It's set in the post-Civil War South and it does provide insight into the tension in the region during that time, with many former slaveowners refusing to acknowledge that people were no longer property. The book opens with an older man, George Walker, who has just been told by his son's best friend (also his lover, we later find out) that his son Caleb was killed in action. To avoid telling his wife the bad news, George is out hunting for what sounds like a mythic beast when he finds two young freedmen, Landry and Prentiss, camping out on his land. Landry and Prentiss have nowhere to go, so George invites them to live in his barn. George has always been something of a lay-about but decides to hire Landry and Prentiss to help him work his land. Then Caleb shows up--not dead after all but ashamed of his cowardice in battle--and begins working together with Landry and Prentiss. The rest of the town of Old Ox, GA, does not approve of this arrangement, and things spiral out of control for individuals and the town. The Sweetness of Water provides some interesting insight into a slice of the post-war South, but I felt there were many questions left unanswered and the slice may be too narrow. Still, worth reading. 

Reading Rest and Be Thankful by Emma Glass is a traumatic experience. The book describes a few days in the life of a pediatric nurse driven to utter exhaustion by long shifts caring for desperately ill babies and their parents and by the collapse of her relationship with her partner. The style wasn’t entirely to my liking—too many “dream sequences” and impressionistic passages featuring sentence fragments. Still, I was finding the description of her time at the hospital interesting until I got to the end and wanted to throw the iPad on which I was reading on the ground and stomp on it. I guess there’s a message—nurses are overworked, weary, and stressed and the care they provide suffers because of that—but it could have been conveyed without the horror of that ending. 

The Candy House is something of a sequel to Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, which followed a dizzying array of interrelated characters engaged in the music industry. Many of these characters reemerge, along with new characters, in The Candy House. With my flawed memory, I didn't remember much about the characters who make the leap from Goon Squad to Candy House--it didn't really matter (but it might have been better to stop trying to remember). Anyway, The Candy House looks at how people deal with a new technology, conceived by the brilliant Bix Bouton, which allows people to upload all of their memories to a collective archive, from which they can also access the memories of everyone else who is participating. The book opens with Bix, in a moment when he thinks he's had his last good idea but is then inspired to create the collective memory archive. What follows, as in Goon Squad, are chapters from different characters' perspectives, not presented chronologically or in a coherent plot--in fact, not always easily tied to the story you think Egan is telling about technology-- probably because Egan is actually telling a much broader story about the longing for connection, memory, pain, how life is changing. I felt confused a number of times while reading The Candy House but the confusion is part of the reading experience, which was complex and rewarding.

Several characters in The Candy House were, via various forms of memory, searching for their fathers, so it was interesting that the next book I picked up--Sankofa, by Chikbundu Onuzo--was all about the search for a missing father. Anna is a biracial British woman who, after her mother dies, discovers a diary written by her father in the few years he spent in the UK before returning to his African homeland. Reading the diary, she realizes her father was involved in radical politics and begins a quest to learn more about him--what she discovers is surprising and prompts her to visit the small nation in West Africa that is her ancestral homeland. In Africa, she has both good and bad experiences with her father and two of his other children and confronts questions about her identity and what it means to be part of the African diaspora. Some of her African experiences were nightmarish, and I had trouble reconciling how she turned them into emotional growth (perhaps because they were being read by an older white woman completely divorced from her ancestral homelands) but I felt the exploration of Anna's search for identity was well-done and I benefited from reading Sankofa (which means to go back and get). 

Mysteries/Thrillers

I'm not much for "cozy" mysteries, but I do like food, so I picked up Arsenic and Adobo, by Mia Manansala. I did enjoy the descriptions of Filipino food, about which I know nothing, but wasn't too keen on the mystery, which involved the death of a restaurant critic in the main character's family restaurant, an extortion scheme, drug-dealing, and a lot of other crazy details. If this becomes a series, I doubt I will pick up the next title--especially because it's set in a small Illinois town where, I am sure, there couldn't be enough murders to sustain a series!

The last few Lucas Davenport mysteries by John Sandford had made Lucas seem more like a vigilante than a law enforcement officer, so I was glad to see that the officer had switched focus to Lucas's daughter Letty in The Investigator, undoubtedly the first in a new series. Sadly, I was not much enamored of the book. It had an interesting domestic terrorism plot at its core (almost made me worry that a terrorist might read the book and find it a good idea) but the character development was lame, even for a mystery, and Letty is already a little too willing to kill. 

Nonfiction

I hadn't planned to read any more books about Trump, but I was looking for an audio book to check out of the library and Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa popped up, so . . . Not all that much new or unexpected about Trump; he was perhaps even crazier and more rage-filled than I had previously realized--sadly, I got no insight into why people continued to work for him when he threatened democracy and abused his staff. Woodward and Costa clearly believe we owe much to General Mark Milley in terms of surviving 2020-21.  One of the oddest anecdotes in the book is about Biden. President Biden and Senator Susan Collins were on the phone; Biden was trying to convince Collins to support his initial COVID relief package. All of a sudden someone (I can’t remember exactly what staff member it was) says “I just wanted to let you know I’m on this call, too.” Then they heard a couple of other pings meaning other staff members were getting on the call. Biden hadn’t asked them to be on the call and he didn’t know the first guy was on there. Woodward never explained how that happened, whether staff regularly monitor Biden’s calls without telling him or what. I know staff are on many calls for “documentation” purposes but this was clearly a political call so why would they feel they needed to be on there if not asked? 

Favorite Passages:

Without a story, it's all just information.

Jennifer Egan

How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith

 How the Word Is Passed's subtitle,  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, reveals a lot about the book. It is not a history. In fact, author Clint Smith is not a historian; he's a poet, journalist, and former high school English teacher with a Ph.D. in Education. Rather than a history, the book is the author's grappling with the history of slavery and how we preserve, teach/learn, and remember that history. He grapples with those topics by visiting sites where the history of slavery is either preserved or denied and talking with people he encounters there. He also does some more standard historical research, looking at relevant primary sources. 

The sites on which Smith focuses are Monticello; the Whitney Plantation, which focuses on the lives of enslaved people who labored there; Louisiana's Angola Prison, built on the site of a plantation; the confederate Blandford Cemetery; Galveston Island, where Juneteenth is of special significance; the African Burial Ground and other sites in New York City; and Goree Island in Ghana, the site from which many slave ships launched.

Where possible at each site, he takes officially sanctioned tours and scrutinizes how the site's relationship to slavery is presented to the public. He also talks to people who work at and visit the sites. Some of the sites are making serious efforts to preserve and tell the history of slavery. At Monticello, while visitors can still take a generic tour focusing on the architecture and the more traditional view of the third President, but there are also tours focused on the lives of enslaved people and the Hemings family. (I was appalled  that visitors to whom Smith spoke claimed not to know that Jefferson was a slaveholder or that separating enslaved people from their families was common practice--as a social studies educator, I felt a deep sense of failure upon reading that). 

Other sites that Smith visited ignore their relationship to slavery or attempt to "prettify" the peculiar institution. At Angola Prison, for example, no mention is made of the fact that the prison is built on the site of a plantation and that the warden used to live in a "Big House" right outside the prison. Yet the prison resembles a plantation, with black inmates toiling in the fields. Only through the inmates' newspaper is the relationship to slavery acknowledged. The people Smith interacts with at the confederate cemetery offer a stunning exhibition of historical blindness/denial.

Smith also must grapple with the idea that some sites with the best intentions are not entirely accurate. At Goree Island, for example, staff continue to provide inflated numbers of the people who passed through on their way to enslavement in the Americas, even though historical research has shown the numbers to be inaccurate. Smith asks, "Can a place that misstates a certain set of facts still be a site of memory for a larger truth?" 

I enjoyed vicariously wrestling with the questions of history, memory, and nostalgia while gaining some previously unknown information--the discussion of the Statue of Liberty is particularly interesting. Highly recommended.

Favorite passages:

"While a life like Frederick Douglass's is remarkable, we must remember that not every person who lived through slavery was like Douglass. Most did not learn to read or write. Most did not engage in hand-to-hand combat with white slave breakers. Most did not live close enough to free states in the North to have any hope of escape. No one, enslaved or otherwise, was like Douglass. There were other brilliant, exceptional people who lived under slavery, and many resisted the institution in innumerable ways, but our country's teachings about slavery, painfully limited, often focus singularly on heroic slave narratives, at the expense of millions of men and women whose stories might be less sensational but are no less worthy of being told.

"I thought of my primary and secondary education. I remembered feeling crippling guilt as I silently wondered why every enslaved person couldn't simply escape like Douglass, Tubman, and Jacobs had. I found myself angered by the stories of those who did not escape. Had they not tried hard enough? Didn't they care enough to do something? Did they choose to remain enslaved? This, I now realize, is part of the insidiousness of white supremacy. It illuminates the exceptional in order to implicitly blame those who cannot, despite the most brutal circumstances, attain super-human heights. It does this instead of blaming the system, the people who built it, and the people who maintained it."

"The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding; it was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. This history is in our soil, it is in our policies, and it must, too, be in our memories."

Damnation Spring--a Title for the Season

The last two weeks of March haven't been the greatest reading--don't even have any favorite passages. I do want to note that I am rereading Hidden Valley Road for an online book group and it's as fascinating to me as it was when I read it a year ago. 

Fiction

We Are the Brennans, by Tracey Lange, appears to be inspired by (that's the generous way of describing it) Joyce Carol Oates's We Were the Mulvaneys. The Mulvaneys and the Brennans are quite similar--Irish, four children--three boys and one girl,  well-regarded in the small New York towns where they live, somewhat problematic parents. Something happens to the daughter that isn't acknowledged/talked about but that sends the family into a decline. But then, somehow, there's redemption and family togetherness. Lange's book is unoriginal and unnecessary IMHO. 

Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson, might be categorized as an environmental novel, but it's also more than that. Set among redwood timbermen in Oregon, the book looks at the consequences of not only spraying done to control brush in the forest but also of the logging itself. It also looks at the different ways people respond when their livelihood is threatened. At the same time, it's the story of Rich and Colleen Gunderson's marriage. Rich is a fourth-generation logger while Colleen is a midwife (although she doesn't seem to be officially trained) mourning her stillborn child and seven miscarriages. She is longing for another child (they have a five-year-old), but Rich doesn't want to see her suffer yet again. This causes stress and a sexual drought in their marriage, just as her teenage boyfriend, now an environmental scientist returns to town and asks for her help investigating water quality. Some of what happens is predictable and I didn't care for the ending, but the story is told so well and the characters are so well developed, those factors didn't bother me.  

People We Meet on Vacation, by Emily Henry, had been on my TBR list for quite a while--I think it was recommended in some magazine, but it was also on a few "best of 2021" lists. It's the story of Alex and Poppy who grew up in the same small Ohio town but didn't meet until they were students at the University of Chicago. Despite being very different, they become best friends; after college, Alex returns to their home town to teach while Poppy heads for New York and life as a travel writer. Each summer, they take a trip together. I'm guessing that just from this description, you can predict what happens--the story line is utterly predictable. Disappointing.

Mysteries/Thrillers

I'm not sure how Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen got on my TBR list because I'm not a big fan of historical mysteries. And reading it did not change my mind. It's the story of a minor royal, Lady Georgiana, whose Scottish family is broke. As a result, she decides to try to make her way in London on her own. It's a struggle--and then a man trying to steal her family home winds up dead in her bathtub, her half-brother is arrested, and she is subject to a series of mishaps that just might be someone trying to kill her. It's played for laughs, but I don't think I even cracked a smile. Guarding my TBR more closely in the future.

Weirdly, I also just read another historical mystery, Messenger of Truth, by Jacqueline Winspear. Although I'm not keen about the plots in the Maisie Dobbs mysteries and Maisie herself is almost insufferably virtuous, I do appreciate the depiction of the difficulties of life in post-WWI Britain, so I read one every year or two. 

56 Days, by Catherine Ryan Howard, is a pandemic mystery told in multiple timelines. In one, a couple meet in Dublin just as the pandemic is starting. As Ireland shuts down, they decide to isolate together, despite having known each other for only a few days; the same events in that timeline are narrated from both the man's and woman's perspectives, which lets us know the man has some kind of terrible secret.. In another timeline, police officers are called to the apartment where the couple was living because a terrible odor was coming from the apartment. A male's decomposing body is lying in the shower with glass from the shattered shower door around him--but there's no blood and the apartment has been wiped clean. The lead officer feels sure a crime has occurred but can't find the evidence, while her partner is happy concluding the man's death was an accident. Well into the novel, we encounter a third timeline, starting before the couple met. By the time the author starts rolling out the twists, I was not actually surprised, but  I found the way the author put the story together so interesting that I didn't mind some degree of predictability. 

One thing I like about Peter Swanson's books is the way he references other literary works--and is transparent about it. In Nine Lives, nine people receive a mysterious list of names in the mail--the name of each person who receives the list is on it--but, with one exception, they don't recognize any of the other names. Days later, the murders of those on the list start. The plot references Memento Mori and And Then There Were None and characters talk about poetry and novels. Fun read!

If She Wakes, by Michael Koryta, is the second mystery I've read in which a character has "locked-in syndrome." It's a complicated narrative involving multiple paid killers trying to get their hands on a phone--but we don't know what's so special about the phone or why people want it til the very end. The protagonist is a former stunt driver, which may account for much of the book feeling like an extended chase scene. Not my favorite. 

Some time ago, I read Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King and thought it was a decent mystery. Then I discovered it was the first volume in a trilogy. So this month I read both Finders Keepers and End of Watch. Finders Keepers was again a mostly traditional mystery featuring retired police detective Bill Hodges and his rather unusual sidekicks, Holly and Jerome. They work a case involving a family, the father of whom was severely injured in the original crime at the heart of Mr. Mercedes. The interesting part about this book was that both the family's son and the criminal had an obsession with an author with similarities to J.D. Salinger and John Updike. Although End of Watch again features Bill Hodges et al., it takes a serious turn toward the weird--the perpetrator from Mr. Mercedes, believed to have been in a vegetative state for six years, can put his consciousness into other people and can communicate with people playing a video game, causing them to commit suicide. Not sure why King decided to go supernatural in the last book in the trilogy, but it was definitely my least favorite.

In Say Her Name, Dreda Say Mitchell and Ryan Carter deal with serious issues--police corruption and the ways in which the police and the media deal differently with crimes involving Black women versus white women. I appreciate their attention to those issues, but the plot had a lot of problems, not least of which being that an out-of-work doctor could unravel a historic case that her adoptive father, a retired police officer, had been unsuccessfully trying to solve for two decades. Not believable. 

Crossroads, The Anomaly, and Some Great Feminist Poetry

Some good stuff so far in March--and poetry month is coming! Woot, woot!!

Fiction

I thought the premise of Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart had promise: a group of friends--plus "The Actor" (never named) who is working on a project with the host--gather at a country place in the early days of the pandemic, planning to ride out the pandemic there (remember: we didn't think it would still be going two years later). Of course, there are numerous complications:  One old friend, dying of lung cancer, harbors a long-burning love for another. He is also searching for the manuscript for a novel he wrote (and was advised not to try to publish) by the host, not coincidentally a writer as well. Two of the women, one married to the host, have designs on The Actor. Meanwhile, the host's daughter, who appears to be on the spectrum, takes a liking to another of the women, making her mother jealous. At first it's an interesting and sometimes funny look at relationships and what might happen if stuck together in the country. But then the book devolves into the surreal--the author recounts too many of the characters' dreams--sleeping and fever--and I lost interest. Not recommended.

The "sticker" on the front of The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier says it was a NYT "best thriller of the year." I wouldn't call it a thriller exactly--closer to science fiction in my book. But regardless of how you classify it, it's worth reading. The premise reminded me a bit of the TV show Manifest: a plane goes through a terrible storm and something weird happens.  The book does get off to a somewhat slow start, as we are introduced to a large number of characters without knowing exactly what is happening. When the "something weird" is revealed, the book really picks up, as we learn how the government responded, the various hypotheses developed to explain what happened, and how the people affected cope. Don't want to ruin the read by saying too much more, but I really enjoyed The Anomaly (even though I didn't understand every single thing!). 

The Idiot by Elif Batuman is essentially a fictional diary of a young Turkish American woman's freshman year at Harvard, followed by a summer teaching English in Hungary (prompted by a crush on a senior, Ivan, who happens to be from Hungary). Some of Selin's experiences (which seem likely to be Batuman's experiences, since much about the author and character is similar) are amusing, but I may be too old to truly enjoy this book. Batuman has written a sequel but I won't be picking it up. 

The Wrong End of the Telescope, by Rabih Alameddine, is a complex book that occasionally feels like it's about too many things. The narrator is Mina, a transgender doctor who is originally from Lebanon but has lived in the United States since college. She travels to Lesbos, Greece, when her friend, a nurse named Emma, asks her to come and help provide medical services to Syrian refugees arriving on boats. When she gets there, there are at first no new arrivals because of the weather. Eventually, however, Mina becomes involved with a critically ill Syrian mother, who is afraid her family will be sent back if the dire situation with her health is revealed. Sumaiya's story is probably the most engaging, but Mina also narrates the stories of other migrants--and also describes disturbing behavior on the part of journalists and volunteers who ostensibly come to help the refugees but have less pure/more selfish motives. That may not sound like too much--but Mina also tells two other stories. The first is her own--her estrangement from her family (except for one brother who joins her in Lesbos) and her life in Chicago with her wife Francine. The second is the story of the writer to whom she is addressing the entire book (who resembles Alameddine himself), who freaked out in his own attempt to help refugees, holing up in a hotel room; his attempts to write about the experience have failed, so he has urged Mina to tell the story. Occasionally I felt like Alameddine was doing too much, but I'm still glad I read the book. 

I'm not one of the people who greets every Jonathan Franzen novel with cries of "This is the great American novel." So I almost feel weird saying I loved Crossroads. Crossroads (which I learned from an author interview at the end of the audiobook is the first volume in a trilogy) is set in the early 1970s, and the Vietnam War, the folk music scene, the penetration of illicit drugs to the suburbs, and a church youth group more like an encounter group are all important elements of the story. The book has multiple narrators, all members of the Hildebrandt family. Russ, the father, is a frustrated assistant pastor at a suburban Chicago church, eager to cheat on his wife with a recently widowed parishioner. Russ believes himself to be an enlightened helper of the less fortunate but in reality he's a selfish sad sack. Marion, the mother, is keeping a lot of secrets, most notably that in her twenties she was hospitalized for a mental illness, which she now fears she has passed along to her son Perry. Their three older children--Clem, Becky, and Perry, all grappling with who they are and how they want to live--are the other narrators. (Hopefully, the youngest child will get his due in the next volume.) The book is an extended character study within the context of the times, the family, and each member's evolving religious or ethical beliefs. There's humor but there's also despair--it adds up to a potent mix. Highly recommended. 

Short Stories

The story of Anthony Veasna So, author of Afterparties: Stories, is a sad one--he died in 2020 from an accidental drug overdose before his first book was published. As a young gay Cambodian American, the child of refugees who fled the Khmer Rouge genocide, So brought an unusual voice to the table. And his stories clearly impressed the critics, as his book was on 12 "best of 2021" lists. Although moments in some of the stories grabbed me, generally the stories did not resonate with me--I may be too old, too cis, too white. I'm willing to grant that the stories are well-done--they just weren't for me. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

Madness of Sunshine, by Nalini Singh, was sitting on my nightstand for a few years; I started it a couple of times but couldn't really get into it. This month, I finally finished it. It's a mystery set in New Zealand, and the descriptions of the landscape are lovely, but that's about the only thing I liked. Every character is incredibly damaged, and the story drags--a young woman goes missing and everyone in town looks for her and looks for her and searches some more. Then suddenly the perpetrator of an older crime is discovered. And the person who is responsible for the woman's disappearance is apprehended, though how the police officer in the town and his sidekick (a pianist recently returned to her home town because, you know, pianists are the best detectives) settled on the guilty party wasn't clear to me. And some of the writing, in an attempt to be poetic, is just bad: "Hanging up, Will began the nearly four-hour drive toward the hopeless scent of a beautiful young woman's death." What? 

In Nothing to Lose, by J.A. Jance, J.P. Beaumont, the retired Seattle cop who anchors one of Jance's four series, heads to Alaska looking for his former (and dead) partner's long-missing son. He solves cold and hot cases in his visit the Last Frontier. It's fairly standard fare, but Beaumont is one of the better characters in series mysteries and Jance's work on her other series seems to keep this one fresh.

I'm not really sure where The Dilemma by B.A. Paris fits, but I guess it's supposed to be a psychological thriller.  Adam and Livia are a married couple planning her 40th birthday party, over which she has been obsessing her entire adult life (ostensibly because she didn't get the big wedding she wanted--seriously??). They each have a secret about their daughter that they don't want to tell the other until after the party. If it sounds like a stupid premise, then you understand the book. Not recommended.

A Good Day for Chardonnay was my second Sunshine Vicram book by Darynda Jones--and it will be my last. Sunshine seems like an imitation Stephanie Plum in a different setting (small-town New Mexico) with more explicit sex. Also, Sunshine's love interest is part of a family of moonshiners turned whiskey entrepreneurs that could be right out of a Deborah Knott novel by Margaret Maron (and would fit better in North Carolina). Jones is trying too hard to be funny and just isn't. 

Poetry

It's almost poetry month, when I go a little crazy posting poems on FB. So when I heard Kate Bowler's interview with poet Kate Baer and thought her work sounded interesting, I immediately ordered both of her books. I liked her first book, What Kind of Woman, a collection of poems about being a woman, a wife, a mother, a friend, a human. And I loved I Hope This Finds You Well: Poems. Baer started her writing life posting feminist short stories and essays on a blog. One day as she was reading an unfriendly response to one of her posts, she saw new potential in the response--she printed it and began blacking out words, ultimately creating an erasure poem. After that, she says, she saw poetry potential everywhere. The result is this book, which includes poems she has created from nasty responses on social media, fan letters, promotional emails, congressional testimony--in other words, a wide array of sources. She publishes each poem next to its source material. Some of the poems flip the original material's message, while others intensify the original message by distilling it to fewer words. Some of Baer's poems are very funny. Others pack an emotional punch. You really need to see them to appreciate them. If we're friends on FB, you'll get some samples there during April.

Favorite Passages

. . . it would take only one of his sentences being more intelligent than he is for this miracle to make a writer of him.

The direct route hates a pothole, and the obscure professes hatred of the inexplicable.

. . . freedom of thought on the internet is all the more complete now that it's clear that people have stopped thinking.

Herve Le Tellier, in The Anomaly

It's like there are these words, they're out in the world, and you start wondering what it would be like to say them. Words have their own power--they create the feeling, just by the fact of your saying them.

Jonathan Franzen, in Crossroads

. . . There are many poems 

about the seasons, less about the time it takes 

to bury another child. It's true--

Kate Baer, "Social Studies," in What Kind of Woman

Read Until You Understand and Other February Reading

 February is a short month and I had a lot of work to do, so my reading slowed down a little. 

Fiction

In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro returns to the kind of dystopic near-future he explored so effectively in Never Let Me Go. Here, rather than clones, we have Artificial Friends, advanced robots who serve as companions for children who have been "lifted." Exactly what lifting is was not clear to me, but children who are lifted stop going to school and learn at home on "oblongs" to get a competitive advantage in college and, subsequently, adult life. Lifting also puts the children's health in jeopardy. The novel's narrator, AF Klara, is purchased as a companion for Josie, who has been lifted and is quite seriously ill. Josie's neighbor and friend, Rick, is a bright boy who has not been lifted; through Rick, we see how a class system emerges around this choice made by parents. Klara runs on solar power and thus believes the sun has healing powers that could help Josie. As he often does, Ishiguro writes in a somewhat flat tone--appropriate for a robot narrator--that still manages to convey deep emotion. I'm not doing a good job conveying any sense of the book, but I did enjoy it and found it, again as Ishiguro's novels generally do, prompted me to reflect on what it means to be human.

Chang-Rae Lee is an author whose work I have enjoyed, but his most recent--My Year Abroad--disappointed. The novel's protagonist is Tiller, a 20-year-old college student from New Jersey, who is living with an older woman Val and her eight-year-old son Victor Jr. who is a gifted chef. Val is in witness protection because she ratted out her husband, a minor gangster. Tiller is concerned that Val will kill herself; meanwhile, he is working through his own traumas from his motherless childhood and his year in Asia, when he was supposed to be studying abroad but somehow got caught up in a of a frozen yogurt king who is trying to sell healthy smoothies to the Asian market. Mostly the book added up to nothing for me, but I did enjoy some of the descriptions of the dishes Vic Jr. was creating! 

Mystery/Thriller

I am about to conclude that I have read too many mysteries, as lately I am finding mysteries either too predictable (When You Are Mine, by Michael Robotham), too reliant on coincidence (City of the Dead, by Jonathan Kellerman), or gratuitously violent in a way not really needed to move the plot (Every Last Fear, by Alex Finlay). So why don't I just stop reading mysteries? I can only conclude I need extended periods of mindlessness. Indeed, right now, I'm listening to one mystery and reading another in print. Perhaps I need a reading therapist.

Science Fiction

A few years ago, my son Kevin convinced me to read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. I liked it a lot and followed up with Anathem, which I also liked. Then I read a couple more that I wasn't so fond of (Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash). Now along comes Termination Shock, which has convinced me I'm through with Stephenson. Termination Shock is set in the near future when climate change has become worse. A Texas oilman has come up with a plan to combat climate change by shooting sulfur into the atmosphere. He draws together powerful people from low-lying countries/cities for a demonstration, in hopes of garnering their support (he is unconcerned that his plan will have negative impacts on other areas. Also in play are a hunter of feral pigs and a Sikh Canadian martial artist. While Stephenson may have serious points (and they may be bad, if he is suggesting that Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos might solve the problem of climate change with a large-scale project undertaken on their own), but the characters and their interactions are so farcical that when I fell asleep while listening, I couldn't bring myself to go back and listen to the minutes I slept through. 

Nonfiction

Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature, by Farah Jasmine Griffin is a memoir cum literary analysis (and I love the title). Griffin is a professor who teaches courses on African American literature so her knowledge is both deep and wide. Her own life has clearly and understandably been shaped by the experience of losing her father due to bigotry-motivated mistreatment of her father by the police. She connects her early experiences learning from her father, his death, the way the community rallied around her and her mother afterwards, and other family stories to the themes of great work by black authors: death, mercy, love, Black freedom and the ideal of America, justice, rage and resistance, joy, and beauty. I found both Griffin's personal story and literary analysis interesting, although her certitude made me wonder what it might be like to be a student who disagreed with her. I did have some quarrels with her take-down of President Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech, which I believe is one of the all-time great speeches--but her critique did cause me to think, which isn't a bad thing. 

Favorite Passages

This is the power of literature: to use language to remind us of another's humanity by touching our own. 

    --  Farah Jasmine Griffin, in Read Until You Understand

Until recently, I didn't think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.

    --  Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun

Festival Days, All In, and Other Early February Reading

 This month's reading (so far) has demonstrated the benefits of branching out, as I likely wouldn't have picked up Festival Days or All In if they hadn't been on several "best of 2021" lists--and both were rewarding reads. Of course, such lists also lead you to some titles you end up not caring for, but it's a tradeoff, right? 

Fiction

The Prophets, by Robert Jones, Jr.,  is the story of two young enslaved men who are in love. They are accepted by the enslaved community until two things happen: a man who wants to curry favor with the white plantation owners begins to preach a narrow-minded Christianity and the gay son of the plantation owner comes home and rapes one of the young men. After very little seems to happen in the first part of the book, all hell essentially breaks loose. I didn't really care for this book although it was beautifully written. I realize that sexual abuse and tearing apart of families were typical of slaveowners and that we too often neglect stories that affirm the humanity of enslaved people (i.e., they were sexual beings), but the emphasis on this part of the story felt like it neglected too much of the torture that was the chattel slavery system. 

The Rib King, by LaDee Hubbard, is a story with two distinct parts. The first, set in 1914, is told from the perspective of Mr. Sitwell, the African American groundskeeper for a once-wealthy white family that is struggling to stay afloat financially. Sitwell generally tries to make himself essential to all aspects of the running of the house (he hopes to become the butler). But then he makes some bad decisions, including signing on to a business deal with his employer that will screw other members of the household staff and things spiral out of control. In the second part of the book, which takes place 10 years later, the narrator is Jenny Williams, a young woman who worked in the same house as Sitwell. She has become a successful entrepreneur, the owner of a beauty salon who is about to sell her skin care product to a huge distributor. But her past association with Sitwell, who has become an embarrassing and yet popular promoter of barbeque sauce (he is seen as engaging in minstrelsy), threatens her success and pulls her into a morass of conspiracies and misdeeds, some seeking profit, some revenge. The book has a lot to say about race, class, and ethics, and I mostly enjoyed it--but the ending was not good.

Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny is an Anne Tyler-esque story of a teacher (Jane) who falls in love with and marries a man (Duncan) who has slept with nearly every woman in Boyle City, MI, where they live. Her life becomes entangled with his ex-wife and her very strange husband, his employee Jimmy (who seems to be slightly mentally challenged), and essentially the entire town. It's funny and touching in the "we create our own families" way. I enjoyed it.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, by Kim Michele Richardson, is my book group's selection for February. Its protagonist is Cussie, one of Kentucky's "blue" people (this is an actual thing, which I did not know--caused by a blood condition called methemoglobinemia), who served as a packhorse librarian during the Depression. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the book about coal miners, the traveling librarians, the horrendous poverty among the mountain people, mountain customs, and discrimination. I enjoyed learning about that, but as a novel, I just didn't think the book held together. 

Short Stories

Festival Days, by JoAnn Beard, is a collection of short stories that I really enjoyed (and, as the three regular readers of my blog know, I am not a big short story fan). Many of the stories feature animals in ways that highlight the deep human-animal connection.. For example, in "Last Night," a woman comes to the painful realization that it's time to let her dog go; in "Werner," an artist who is trapped in a burning building jumps out of his apartment into a neighboring building (!) and survives but is devastated by the fact that he dropped his cat in the jump. I found the story "Cheri" particularly moving; it describes a woman dying of breast cancer who travels to Michigan to get help from Dr. Kevorkian. Perhaps the stories sound grim, but they also have a redemptive quality. One minor nit to pick: it's not believable that someone was the only Jewish student in their class in Champaign, IL, home of the U of I. Seriously. Anyway, these stories helped me articulate what makes a short story work for me: it features at least one interesting character well enough drawn so you have some insight into or curiosity about their actions, there's a "slice of life" feeling that gives you a strong sense of time and place, and something happens that at least makes some sense. I think when I end up scratching my head when I finish a story, it's because nothing happened or what happened seems completely random or pointless. 

I also enjoyed some of the stories in Land of Big Numbers, a collection by Te-Ping Chen. Many of the stories are set in China and provide insight into day-to-day life and the conflicts among individuals, communities, and the state in China. Others feature Chinese immigrants in the United States. Some have surreal aspects, which my favorite story in the collection did. In "Gubeikou Spirit," Pan is one of a group of commuters rushing to catch a train when they somehow are trapped in the station--for months!--while the rest of the world (and the trains) continue as though there was nothing odd about their situation--people outside send them food and they are celebrated on state media. They build a community that is both supportive and oppressive. It's weirdly compelling, as is another surreal story, "New Fruit," in which season of a newly developed fruit produces different emotional responses in those who eat it. I didn't love all the stories in the collection, but it's definitely worth reading. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

The Dark Hours, by Michael Connolly, is the latest entry in the Renee Ballard series. Ballard can't get any support within LAPD, so she has to go back to Harry Bosch, who is no longer working, for help in solving the two crimes on her docket, one of which is a very creepy male revenge story. I thought the book was entertaining but not great. I was amused to see how many Amazon reviewers dinged Connolly for "virtue signaling" about COVID prevention practices--good grief, people.

Women violently defending themselves is Taylor Adams' thing, and there is no shortage of female violence in Hairpin Bridge, the story of a woman trying to figure out how her twin sister died. At first I was finding it mildly interesting, but after the fifth false resolution . . . ugh. 

The Outsider, by Stephen King, starts out as if it were a regular murder mystery--a child is murdered in a way described as veteran police officers describe as the worst they have ever seen, and all the evidence points to a local high school teacher. The police opt to arrest him in a very public situation--a baseball game he is coaching. But then equally compelling evidence indicates that he was somewhere else at the time of the killing. Soon another case with similar conflicting evidence surfaces and things just keep getting weirder. Entertaining (although not at all believable to this skeptic). 

Autobiography/Memoir

I always admired Billie Jean King and followed her career, so I was surprised at how much I learned about her work, not just as a tennis player but as an advocate for women, in sports and beyond, from All In. The insights into her personal life and its intersection with her professional life were fascinating. She was married to Larry King for more than two decades; he played a major positive role in many aspects of her career, but also made decisions that damaged her reputation and her financial standing. They lived essentially separate lives for years after she came out to Larry but he "refused" a divorce. She announced several times that she was retiring, but she came back to competition because she needed the money (and because she was a competitive person). She was more argumentative/angry on the court than I remembered. She had an eating disorder. And she had the same job in college that I had--handing out towels and equipment in the gym! She still clearly has some difficulty writing about her sexuality (or it seems so to me) but has become an outspoken advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. I guess if I had to summarize, I'd say that, as I read the book, she became a real person to me rather than simply an icon.  

I didn't know who Allison Bechdel was (a MacArthur genius award-winning cartoonist) when I picked up her graphic memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Other than graphic novels read with my grandson, this was my first graphic book (I can't bear to call a memoir a "graphic novel" although all graphic books seem to be classified as novels). Its breadth of content was surprising; while it is ostensibly the story of Bechdel's many fitness obsessions (a sign in one illustration advertises an "Advanced Scything Workout"), she references everything from the Romantics, Transcendentalists, and Beats (she has a few fixations) to the Lowell Mills, The Sound of Music, Janis Joplin, the monk Suzuki, and even Richard Nixon. We also track her love life and her relationships with her family. It's funny, thought-provoking, and maybe just a bit too long. 

Somebody's Daughter, by Ashley Ford is a well-written memoir about the early life of an African American woman whose father was in prison; the mother caring for her was harsh but her grandmother provided a Although she didn't really know her father, she clung desperately to the idea that they loved each other. Her life was challenging, but I would have found the book more meaningful if, rather than simply being honest (something she talks about in an interview included on the audio version of the book), she actually explained how she dealt with the challenges--for example, how, as a rape survivor, she processed the disclosure that father had been convicted of rape (somehow her family kept this from her for years). 

Favorite Passages

We're a nation of giant toddlers, dragging our blankets and bottles everywhere we go!

    --Allison Bechdel, The Secret to Superhuman Strength

Four Hundred Souls: A Community History, 1619-2019

 I have more than usual to say about Four Hundred Souls, so I thought I'd go ahead and do an individual post rather than make my next bimonthly post extra long. 

Four Hundred Souls is a uniquely organized history book that I think people who don't enjoy reading long narrative histories that remind them of their high school history texts might find more pleasurable. And it is definitely thought-provoking and informative. 

The editors of Four Hundred Souls asked 90 people to each contribute a relatively brief piece on a five-year period of  American history, with a focus on African Americans in that period. Every 40 years, they include a poem. The book starts with journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones writing about the arrival of Africans to North America in 1619 and ends with activist Alicia Garza discussing the Black Lives Matter movement. In between are contributions from other journalists and activists as well as numerous historians plus a few philosophers, memoirists, anthropologists, novelists, and political operatives. 

The essays focus on individuals, events, and movements. Some are familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of U.S. history: Anita Hill, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, Jack Johnson, lynching, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Middle Passage, etc. But they provide new insight or deeper background than you might have gained in a survey course or even from watching the news about an event. For example, Hurricane Katrina is examined from the perspective of black women's "depresenceing" in the aftermath. Blair L.M. Kelley's essay on Plessy v. Ferguson puts this test case mounted by the Citizens Committee in the context of black life in New Orleans (and also reveals that the pictures of Homer Plessy that appear in texts and pop up when you google his name are not of the defendant in the case). 

Other essays are about lesser-known people and events--the Virginia Law on Baptism, Lucy Terry Prince, Elizabeth Keye, the black press at various points in history, the Combahee River Collective to name a few. One story that everyone should know is that of Eddie Lee Holloway, Jr., who moved from Illinois to Wisconsin, took his documents  to get the ID needed to register to vote in the state, and was unable to do so because of an error on his birth certificate (which had not prevented his voting in Illinois). After investing $200 (and numerous visits to government offices) in trying to straighten the situation out, he was still unable to vote and eventually moved back to Illinois in frustration. This happened not in the Jim Crow era, but in 2016! In formerly progressive Wisconsin!

Many of the authors draw explicit connections between the history they write about and subsequent historical and contemporary developments. Among the themes that emerge are inhuman oppression, resistance, struggle, creativity, and achievement. But the unique way the book is put together also makes clear that African American history is not one story but innumerable stories. 

I hope that others will consider constructing histories of other groups or developments in this way. Meanwhile, I highly recommend Four Hundred Souls.

Favorite passages:

Who we are and who belongs is the most fundamental question that we have ever asked or can ever ask. We are still struggling to get the answer to this question right. We are still coming up short.
    --John A. Powell in an essay on Dred Scott

No war is civil.
    --Michael Harriot in an essay on the Civil War (which he also calls the War on White Tears, War for           White Supremacy, War for Slaveholders' Rights, and Conflict for Future Racist Monuments)

Change does not occur without backlash, at least any change worth having. And that backlash is an indicator that the change is so powerful that the opposing forces resist that change with everything they have.
    --Alicia Garza in an essay on Black Lives Matter