One Surprising Book (The Lioness) and One I Wish Had Surprised Me (Beautiful World, Where Are You?)

 It was another two weeks of mostly inane reading, but I'm currently in the midst of a 45-hour biography of Sylvia Plath, so I'm trying to redeem myself. Meanwhile, here's what I read as July wound down. 

Fiction

I have liked many of Chris Bohjalian's books and have always thought of him as a gentle writer (is that a thing?) who does a particularly good job depicting female characters. The Lioness is a total change of pace. Set in 1964, the book tells the story of a successful actress, Katie Barstow, and her new husband, a gallerist, who take an entourage of friends, colleagues (agents, publicists), and family members on the second part of their honeymoon (do people do that?)--a safari in Tanzania. Things go horribly wrong, and Bohjalian weaves the story of what happens with the back stories of the characters. Through the back stories, Bohjalian explores racism, exploitation of various kinds in the film industry, and child abuse, among other issues. But I found it hard to even remember who the characters were because the violence on the safari--human to human as well as animal to human--felt so overwhelming (and so not expected from Bohjalian). Not recommended.

I often do not understand why certain authors become darlings in the literary world, and that is the case with Sally Rooney, whose three novels have all received rave reviews. I didn't read her first book, and I didn't care for Normal People. As for her latest--Beautiful World, Where Are You?--I found the title the best thing about the book. At the center of the book are two young women--writer Alice and her best friend Eileen--and the men in their lives. Part of the book is presented in email exchanges between the two, while the remainder is standard narrative. In her correspondence, Alice waxes philosophical on writing, the novel, modernism, and aesthetics, which is the only part of the book that even approached being interesting to me. But nothing much really happens and what does feels prosaic. Perhaps I'm too old to appreciate what is clearly a millennial novel but I think I'm through reading Sally Rooney.

The Final Case, by David Guterson, has some similarities to Beautiful World. One of its major characters--the unnamed narrator--is a writer who thinks he's done writing but still thinks about writing quite a lot. The other major character is his father, Royal, an attorney in his 80s who needs his son to drive him around after he has a car accident that suggests he should no longer be driving. The titular case is based on a real Washington case, in which an Ethiopian girl adopted by a fundamentalist family is abused and dies; the parents are charged with death by abuse, and Royal takes on the mother's case because all the public defenders are too busy. There's a lot about the case and the court proceedings, but weirdly, the book doesn't really seem to be about the case. I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's about the good and the bad of families and the power of work. I liked it better than Rooney's book--the characters are old, like me, and the case itself, though not the point, was interesting--but it wasn't entirely satisfying either. 

Mystery/Thriller

Mysteries continue to be forgettable (and too numerous):

--The Sorority Murder, by Allison Brennan. A trifecta of tired tropes: a true crime podcast, a long-held secret among college friends, and a battle-scarred law(wo)man. Not Brennan's best.

--The Widow, by K.L. Slater. This was a freebie from Audible, so I don't feel too bad that I can't remember much about it except that a basic plot point seemed entirely unbelievable to me.

--Into the Darkest Corner, by Elizabeth Haynes. Another freebie from Audible focused on a woman who thinks she has escaped from an abusive relationship (but has developed OCD) . . . but has she? Rather predictable.

--Find Me, by Alafair Burke. Hope Miller, an amnesiac who has not known her own life story since being in an accident 15 years ago, disappears from her new home in the Hamptons. Her best friend Lindsay, a defense attorney, sets out to find her. A surprise at the end was really, really annoying.

--Insomnia, by Sarah Pinborough. This book portrays gaslighting (and the effects of not being able to sleep) really well, but I could have done without the supernatural element that Pinborough threw into the mix and the purported reason why the main character thought she was losing her mind was ridiculous.

--Blackout, by Erin Flanagan. This is a mystery with a science fiction element involving neuroscience that also deals with misogyny in academia, what constitutes scholarship in today's media landscape, rape culture, alcoholism...it's a lot. But it was good entertainment while at a water park with two 12-year-olds for the weekend.

--No Way Back, by J.B. Turner. Terrible book--wife gets killed in a complicated political scheme, estranged husband kills a couple people involved in the scheme, book ends. Obvious set-up for a sequel in which some more people involved in the scheme get killed. 

The Latecomer and Notes on an Execution

 I lose all my energy when it gets hot--even though I now live in an air-conditioned condo instead of my old god-awful-hot house. I've also continued having too much work.  So all in all, July has gotten off to a slow reading start--haven't read too much and nothing has been really great.

Fiction

I had categorized Jean Hanff Korelitz as a writer of literary mysteries/thrillers that I liked even though all the characters were unlikeable (her novel You Should Have Known was made into the series The Undoing). The Latecomer, her latest, is quite a change, as it is a family drama with no real mystery involved. The Oppenheimer triplets, born to their wealthy parents Salo and Johanna via IVF. The triplets, Lewyn, Harrison, and Sally, don't like each other and don't care that much for their rarely present father (who has become obsessed with modern and outsider artists and a documentarian creating a film about one of those artists) and their overly involved mother. When they take off for college, their mother decides to have another baby using the one leftover embryo, the "latecomer" Phoebe. Understandably, Phoebe does not know what to make of her siblings. Korelitz takes on art, the dynamics of collecting, overpriced liberal education, radically rural conservative education, racial posturing, various types of bad parenting, and more.  It's sometimes funny, sometimes thought-provoking, occasionally annoying. One stylistic thing that kind of bugged me was that it started out as a mix of first person plural and third person; then, when Phoebe was born, she became the first person narrator--but her role as the narrator of events she didn't experience or observe didn't really work in my opinion. However, I still would say the book is worth reading.

Another unusual book is Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka. The book opens on Death Row, with 12 hours before Ansel Packer's execution. Packer killed four women, three when he was a teenager and his wife a number of years later. His thoughts as the execution nears are intermingled with the stories of his mother Lavender, his wife's twin sister Hazel, and one of the police officers who investigated the three early murders. The story kept me interested, but I felt like the description of the actual execution was gratuitous. And, when I finished, I felt there was a level at which the author was giving the three women some responsibility for Ansel's actions, which annoyed me. Overall, I wouldn't recommend the book.

Mysteries/Thrillers

I read three mysteries but I've already pretty much forgotten them:

• More than You'll Ever Know, by Katie Gutierrez--another take on the true-crime bloggers who decides to investigate a real case and, of course, learns what police never did. 
• The Golden Couple, by Greer Hendriks and Sarah Pekkanen--featuring a therapist who is pretty much undistinguishable from a stalker.
• Strangers We Know, by Elle Marr--FBI agent tells a woman her DNA shows she is related to a serial killer, so she goes to meet the birth family she doesn't know. Yeah, that's logical.
• Last Girl Ghosted, by Lisa Unger--an ugly but somehow charismatic dude meets women on line, charms them in person, and then they disappear.

Nonfiction/Memoir

I like chefs' memoirs, mostly because I like reading about food. Sometimes they go beyond feeding that obsession to provide life insights. This month I read and enjoyed Finding Freedom: A Cook's Story, Remaking a Life from Scratch, by Erin French. French is a self-taught cook who worked in her father's diner as a kid, dropped out of college when she got pregnant, started cooking underground dinners and eventually was able to open her own small restaurant. However, when she went to rehab, her husband fired the staff, closed the restaurant, cleaned out their joint accounts, and essentially stole her son (the husband was not the biological father). It took her years to do so, but she eventually opened another restaurant (now highly acclaimed) in her small home town of Freedom, Maine--a town she thought she wanted to escape as a teenager but eventually decided was the place for her. She also got partial custody of her son and then, when he was a bit older, he opted to live only with her. So it's a story of perseverance. But it really made me wonder why so many chefs have a history of alcoholism or drug abuse. Restaurant work is stressful and physically and emotionally exhausting--but a lot of jobs are stressful and exhausting, like teaching, for example--but I don't think that many teachers have addiction issues. Maybe they do but they just don't write memoirs about it. Just curious if anyone has any insights on this.

Favorite Passages

Pity is destruction wearing a mask of sympathy. Pity strips you bare. Pity shrinks.

    --Danya Kukafka, Notes on an Execution

So Many Books, So Little Time (yep, that's a title of a book!)

Fiction

I enjoyed and admired True Biz, by Sara Novic. It features a compelling story focused primarily (but not exclusively) on Charlie, a 15-year-old deaf girl with a faulty cochlear implant, no knowledge of ASL, and parents deeply divided about how to give her a good future. Her father wins custody and enrolls her in River Valley School for the Deaf, where she begins to thrive. Meanwhile, the school district is threatening to close the school, a fact headmistress February Waters wants to keep hidden as long as possible (February is having her own problems with a deaf mother whose dementia is worsening and a wife who suspects her of a dalliance with a teacher). While these characters' stories (and other subplots) held my interest as a reader, I was also learning a lot about deaf culture, sign language, and deaf education. I listened to the audiobook, which had a feature I hadn't previously experienced. When conversations in the book would have been signed, the author was actually signing in the background; of course, much of the signing was silent but you could sometimes hear the movement of her arms and smacks when one hand hit the other. It helped remind you that these conversations would have been silent. Highly recommended.

Anthem, by Noah Hawley, was definitely not what I expected since the previous book by this author that I had read was a mystery. I've seen Anthem described as a pre-apocalyptic novel, which is a new genre to me. Anyway, the book is set a few years after the COVID epidemic and begins with an unexplained rash of suicides among teenagers. One of the teens who killed themselves was Claire Oliver, the daughter of a big Pharma CEO, who overdosed on pills from her father's company. Her brother Simon struggles in the aftermath, and his parents ship him off to the Float Anxiety Abatement Center, a psychiatric facility for young people. There, he hooks up with a group of other young people, including The Prophet, who speaks to God, and a young woman victimized by an Epstein-esque character. They break out and travel across country to try to rescue another young woman. Meanwhile, the bulimic daughter of a Supreme Court nominee has disappeared from her apartment in Austin, along with her boyfriend, who it turns out is the sun of a survivalist. With other subplots I'm not even mentioning, I found Anthem to be imaginative but a bit much. 

Emily Austin has created a unique character in Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead. Gilda is an atheist lesbian with some psychological issues, including an obsession with death. She turns up at a Catholic church to access free therapy but is mistaken for a job applicant and ends up taking the job as Father Jeff's assistant. The previous occupant of the position, Grace, died under suspicious circumstances, which Gilda starts investigating. At the same time, she begins a correspondence with Grace's best friend--pretending to be Grace. She's trying to keep things going with a new girlfriend while learning the Catholic mass. Meanwhile, her apartment descends into chaos (she hasn't washed dishes in weeks and they are piled everywhere). I wanted to shake her, but I remained interested in what was happening!  

In Light Perpetual, Frances Spufford takes a unique approach. He opens with a gripping description of a World War II bombing at a Woolworth's in London, an actual bombing in which many civilians, including children, were killed. Then he asks: But what if the bombing never happened? And he tells the stories of five children who would have been killed but weren't: twin sisters Jo and Val plus Alec, Ben, and Vernon. He pops into their lives 5 years after the non-bombing (1949) and then every 15 years. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that nothing particularly special happens to them--among them, they experience mental illness, business success and failure, becoming redundant because of technology and then finding a new career, domestic violence, marriage and divorce, parenthood, and so on. Perhaps that is the point. 

I didn't care for Taylor Jenkins Reid's best-seller Daisy Jones and the Six, but it was definitely innovative, presented as a collection of oral histories from the members of a rock band. Malibu Rising is much more traditional drama of a dysfunctional family. It reminds me somewhat of Anne Tyler's recent French Braid, dipping back and forth between the parents' story and the stories of the children, which was fine until we got to a very long section of the book detailing a party at one of the children's homes. For me, reading about an out-of-control party is about as enjoyable as reading a dream sequence. Not recommended. 

Mercy Street, by Jennifer Haigh, was certainly a timely book to pick up this week, dealing as it does with abortion. Mercy Street is a clinic, where Claudia offers counseling to the clients. Claudia has an every-other-weekend lover she met on line, but she's probably closer to her weed dealer, Tim. Tim also supplies one of the regular protesters at the clinic, Anthony, who is on disability for a traumatic brain injury and whose life consists of going to mass and protesting. He is drawn into helping Victor, a misogynist who hates white women who have abortions because they're not helping sustain the race. He has started a website where he posts pictures of women going into abortion clinics, and Anthony begins sending him pictures from Mercy Street. Victor then becomes obsessed with Claudia, whom he sees in one of Anthony's photos. Yeah, it sounds like a lot--and there's more--maybe too much. But it felt real and crazy the way today's world feels. 

Mysteries/Thrillers

In The Sun Down Motel, Simone St. James combines a currently popular trope--the true crime fan, in this case a family member, who decides to investigate a case and solves it when the police could not--with a ghost story. Not a hit with me. 

An Accidental Death (DC Smith series) and Songbird (Kings Lake series), both by Peter Grainger, were pleasant enough but forgettable . . . in fact, forgotten. In contrast, Cappucinos, Cupcakes, and a Corpse, by Harper Lin was just plain dumb. Note to self: do not read any more mysteries with cutesy food titles.

Nonfiction

Musician Michelle Zauner's memoir, Crying in H Mart, made many best of 2021 lists. It focuses largely on her experience caring for her Korean American mother as she battled and eventually died from cancer. Her mother and food were her primary connections to Korean culture (her relationship with her Anglo father was somewhat distant), and she cooks manically in the months after her mother's death. I can see why people found the book meaningful, although it didn't entirely resonate with me. I would have appreciated more reflection rather than just recounting, more effort to draw meaning from her experiences--perhaps I wanted her to metaphorize (new word) herself!

I picked So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading, by Sara Nelson, out of a Little Free Library I encountered while out walking. Although I always look at LFLs when I see them, I try not to take any books because I figure they'll just end up in a stack somewhere in my house. But I actually read this one fairly quickly, although I was somewhat disappointed when I saw her goal for the big year of reading was a book a week (her book was my 120th of this year, so . . . of course, I listen to a lot of books while doing other things, so maybe that's cheating). Anyway, I enjoyed her reflections on reading "issues" that I share--having trouble giving up on books, trying not to turn against someone because they like a terrible book (or, conversely, don't like a book I love), having a tendency to be disappointed in overhyped books everyone else loves, etc. On the down side, I found her a little full of herself and her New York life (people in fly-over country are not rubes, Sara). Overall, though, I enjoyed the book. 

Favorite Passages

Preventing her abortion was all they cared about. The bleak struggle of her life--the stark daily realities that made motherhood impossible--didn't trouble them at all.

--Jennifer Haigh, Mercy Street

Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem--constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations--I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them. 

--Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Allowing yourself to stop reading a book--at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end--is a rite of passage in a reader's life, the literary equivalent of a bar mitzvah or a communion, the moment at which you look at yourself and announce: Today I am an adult. I can make my own decisions.

--Sara Nelson, So Many Books

 

Hell of a Book, South to America, and Some Non-Serious Reading

Fiction

Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott, is about an African American author on a book tour (his book is titled Hell of a Book), which in any case must be a rather surreal experience. In Mott’s hands, it’s even more surreal, as the author seems to be having trouble distinguishing between atrocities in the news, his own life story, and the conversations he’s having with a dark skinned boy who is invisible to everyone else (his parents taught him to be invisible to protect himself)—or are the conversations memories of his own childhood? The book keeps the reader somewhat confused while considering the effects of racism, police violence, and colorism on Black creativity, mental health, and (basically) life.

Mystery/Thriller

I’ll Be You by Janelle Brown was classified as a psychological thriller. Not sure it’s really that, but I did find it interesting. Former child stars and identical twins Sam and Ellie are on the outs when their mother calls recovering alcoholic Sam to help care for Ellie’s daughter Charlotte. Ellie has gone to a weekend retreat but she hasn’t come back when scheduled. Sam soon suspects the retreat is actually more like a cult and begins investigating. Some aspects of the story were unbelievable, and the family relationships were fairly predictable, but the description of how someone who on the surface seems rational gets pulled into a cult and stays even after they realize what is happening was interesting.

While I was reading The Maid, by Nita Prose, I thought it was okay. But the more I have thought about it since I finished, the less I like it. Molly Gray is a maid at an upscale hotel, a job she enjoys. In speech and thought, she sounds like someone from a decidedly different era, but perhaps that is because she was raised by her Gran, who has recently died and left Molly in bad financial straits. Perhaps it is because she is neuro-atypical, which means she has trouble connecting to people. One day, she discovers a dead tycoon in his hotel room and then finds herself a suspect, clearly set up by nefarious others. Two friends from work--one of whom just happens to have a daughter who is a high-powered lawyer--help her clear her name. There's a twist at the end that makes clear Molly is an even less reliable narrator than we thought--and I think that's the main thing that has made my view of the book go downhill. The book has been wildly popular, but I don't recommend it. 

In David Baldacci's Daylight and Mercy, FBI agent Atlee Pine continues and completes her search for her sister Mercy, kidnapped as a six-year-old and subjected, it turns out, to a horrendous childhood and a challenging adulthood. Of course, Atlee and her trusty assistant Carol Blum manage to take down a lot of bad guys during the search. Now that Atlee has found her sister, will she disappear from Baldacci's repertoire? I find I do not care. 

In Five Total Strangers, by Natalie D. Richards, five late teens/early twenties travelers, desperate to get home for Christmas, rent a car when their connecting flight is cancelled due to an impending blizzard. One expects weather-related disasters, which are frequent, as are red herrings about why the protagonist feels like she's being watched and people's belongings keep disappearing. If you want a blizzard survival mystery, No Exit by Taylor Adams is a lot better.

Nonfiction

Good Talk, by Mira Jacobs, is subtitled A Memoir in Conversations, an apt description of this relatively short book. Jacobs is Indian American and her husband is Jewish, which makes for some interesting conversations with their parents. But my favorite conversations are with her son, who struggles to understand why some people don’t like him because of his skin color, why his grandparents were voting for Trump, and other mysteries of the modern world. While Jacobs deals with serious topics, such as colorism in the Indian community, she recounts conversations with humor.

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, by Imani Perry, reminds me somewhat of How the Word Is Passed, as both are examinations of race in the United States with a strong link to geography. The difference is that South to America is much harder to track; even though organized around geography, the text often seems to be almost stream of consciousness, well-informed and sometimes insightful stream of consciousness--Perry holds a named chair at Princeton--but not easy to track or to discern what, exactly, to make of Perry's analysis. An example: In a section on North Carolina, Perry moves through the following topics: the alleged rape involving the Duke lacrosse team, Michael Jordan's refusal to take political positions, memorials to the Confederacy, back to Duke, to "trees older than Jesus," to the belief that birds coming into a house brings death, to origin stories. Perry does use language beautifully--she describes Atlanta and respectability politics as an exemplar of the "choreography of self-creation."  And some of her insights ring true to me--for example, she argues that strong, loving interpersonal relationships across racial lines are not enough to bring change; people in the south have been having interracial sex for centuries, but that has not changed racism. Nothing can change without systemic change, changes to institutions. For someone less linear than I, this book might be more effective.  

Favorite Passage

American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite …the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.
    ― Albert Murray, quoted in South to America

First 100 Books of the Year Done!

 I passed the 100-book mark on Friday--there have been a few greats, some good ones, some mediocre reads, and some real stinkers. I don't think I've written about all of them--but trust me that you don't even want to know about the ones I've omitted.

Fiction

I am going to have to break up with Barack Obama, or at least with his book picks, which in 2021 included Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura. The protagonist is an unnamed (I really don't appreciate unnamed narrators, though I suppose they create some desired distance between narrator and reader) translator who has moved from New York to the Hague to work in the International Criminal Court. Stuff happens, including stuff that suggests her sense of ethics isn't great, but there's not really a plot; I wasn't that far into the book when I stopped caring about her relationship with her married boyfriend, the fate of the war criminal whose trial she was working on, or anything else. Not sure why I finished the book--but I was happy that I was listening as many readers of print had serious complaints about Kitamura's punctuation (or lack thereof). Sorry, Mr. Obama, this one's a loser.

Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead, is a massive book--but it's worth the time. It's the story of Marian Graves, who, with her twin brother, was rescued from a sinking ocean liner as a child. The two were then raised by an alcoholic uncle in Montana. Marian early on becomes interested in being a pilot and faces extreme prejudice in order to become a pilot, first for bootleggers and then for the RAF during World War II. She eventually succeeds in finding financing for her dream of flying around the world over the poles. While the book is really Marian's story, a second narrative features actor Hadley, who is cast as Marian in a movie of her life. At first I didn't think Hadley's story added much to the book, but I changed my mind as I progressed, both because of what the interesting parallels between the two made me think about how women's lives have and have not changed and because the modern piece illustrated how someone's story gets changed as it is filtered through different authors and observers. Definitely recommended.

The Life of the Mind, by Christine Smallwood, quite literally made me feel nauseous. It's the story of Dorothy, a borderline academic supporting herself as an adjunct while struggling to write a book that might land her a tenure track position. She has just had an unsuccessful pregnancy that ended with a medical abortion. And this is where my nausea comes in. The author describes the, um, effluent (?) resulting from the abortion in great detail--and, unfortunately for both Dorothy and the reader, the expulsion/bleeding seems to go on and on. I guess it's good for people to understand what abortion really involves but it doesn't make for pleasant reading.

The Dependents, by Katharine Dion, is a family drama in which the family is actually two families that function almost as one--Gene and Maida (who has recently died) and Ed and Gayle and both couples' children.  The jacket blurb makes you think there is going to be a huge surprise about Maida, but the surprise that is hinted at never really gets revealed, and you're left with the notion that Ed should have married Maida and Gene should have been with Gayle, which was fairly obvious from the flashbacks to their college years. There are other conflicts and happenings--it's a pleasant enough read but I will have forgotten it fairly soon.

Count the Ways, by Joyce Maynard, is also a family drama, but one that had a lot more resonance for me, perhaps because it's primary focus is the mother of the family. Eleanor, an artist and children's book author, meets and marries Cam, a maker of wooden bowls, in the early 1970s. The settle into her New Hampshire farm and fairly quickly have three children. Although Eleanor is irritated by Cam's contributing little to the family, she loves motherhood and her life. Then there's an accident that she blames Cam for, and their marriage falls apart. Over the next decades, she deals with rifts with her children, as well as serious challenges faced by two of them. Despite the many sad things that happen throughout the book, it somehow ends on a positive note, which I found uplifting. 

I'm a fan of Julia Glass, whose new book, Vigil Harbor, is something of a departure as it is set in the near future and has a strong environmental theme. As with all Glass books, multiple characters play important roles, including college student Brecht, who witnessed an act of eco-terrorism that killed a friend (at the beginning of the book, he does not remember that his friend was killed and thinks he's living in the attic at Brecht's home); Brecht's stepfather Austin, a well-known architect; a journalist who had a relationship with a mysterious--perhaps alien--woman that Austin was once engaged to; Celestino, a Guatemalan immigrant who, while valued for his work as an arborist, feels set apart from the mostly white community of Vigil Harbor; and many more. Vigil Harbor is almost a character, as it offers its mostly white, mostly wealthy residents safety from the encroaching ocean, perched on a high headland. The book is engaging but there is a very long denouement (how often do you get to use that high school English term?) after what seems to be the climax. Still, worth reading. 

I have not appreciated the past few Anne Tyler books, so I'm not sure why I read French Braid. I shouldn't have as I didn't appreciate it either. It, too, is a family drama that provides glimpses into multiple generations of the Garrett family. We get the most detail about Robin and Mercy, who married in 1940 and shaped their children and grandchildren. There's a distance about their marriage--Mercy moves out when they become empty-nesters but they don't tell their children and keep up a marital pretense. We get just glimpses into the lives of the children and grandchildren and no sense of any resolution. I found it unsatisfying.

L.A. Weather, by Maria Amparo Estandon, is drama, drama, drama among a Mexican-Jewish American couple and their three successful daughters, whose lives all fall apart at once. 

Helen Hoang is an interesting author. She writes romances, her latest being The Heart Principle, that feature characters on the autism spectrum (and sex--there's definitely sex). Because Hoang is herself on the spectrum, you have to believe that her characterizations are accurate and thus informative. But the book are romances, so they're utterly predictable. We don't know what barriers the couple will have to cross (or the sexual stimulation technique Anna needs to have an orgasm--it's related to her autism), but we know Anna will end up with Quan and we're pretty sure Anna will return to playing the violin. If you like romances, you might get something a little extra from Hoang's work.

Mystery/Thriller

One Step Too Far, by Lisa Gardner, is the second installment in her series featuring Frankie Elkin, who travels the country finding missing people (usually dead). This case involves a groom who disappeared in the Wyoming wilderness on his bachelor weekend. It is five years later, and no one expects to find him alive, but his father wants to find him before his mother dies and his friends, who were along on the fateful weekend, want some resolution (and they have secrets). Basically, the book is kind of a wilderness survival tale, so not my favorite thing, but well done for what it is.

The End of October, by Lawrence Wright, is also a survival story, but the enemy is not a murderer or the wilderness but acute hemorrhagic fever. Dr. Henry Parsons, the scientist with the best chance of solving the medical mystery, ends up trapped in various locations in the Eastern Hemisphere while his family, particularly his children, must deal with the raging pandemic in Atlanta, where they live. It's not the greatest medical mystery I've read, but it was entertaining. 

I have enjoyed a number of Val McDermid's books and admire her ability to create multiple characters around which she bases series. But I did not find Allie Burns, the journalist-heroine of 1979, to be very interesting; I did find her to be lacking in common sense, which perhaps I value too much in my advancing age. Allie and her pal Danny take on two big stories, one involving tax fraud involving Danny's brother, the other requiring infiltration of a "cell" of three idiots planning a terrorist act designed to bring attention to the movement for Scottish independence (and modeled after the IRA). Literally did not care what happened in either case. 

Favorite Passage

I'm told girls dream of being wives, but wifedom seems an awful lot like defeat dressed up as victory. We're celebrated for marrying, but after that we must cede all territory and answer to a new authority like a vanquished nation.

Maggie Shipstead, Great Circle 

Olga Dies Dreaming and Other Stranger Books

 I read recently that long COVID may take 10 points off your IQ, which made me think maybe I've had COVID without knowing it because my brain has just not been able to figure out several books I've read lately. This month started with one of those.

Fiction

The Book of Form and Emptiness is a cool title--but I didn't know what it meant when I started the book . . . or when I finished it. I think I understood Ruth Ozeki's story at a surface level--a boy named Benny Oh is struggling in the wake of his father Kenji's death. His mother Annabelle, who clips news stories for a living, is also struggling. Annabelle finds solace in stuff--their home has become jam packed with things she cannot part with. She becomes interested in a Marie Kondo-style book about tidying up written by a Buddhist monk and begins writing long emails about her situation to the monk (but she doesn't tidy up). Benny meanwhile finds refuge at the library, where he is less likely to hear the voices of inanimate objects, which plague him everywhere else. Several homeless people who hang out at the library befriend him, which leads to some "adventures" that pull him away from his mother and end up sending him back to the psychiatric hospital, where his doctor thinks his friends are imaginary. It takes Annabelle's intervention to clarify that the friends are real. The level at which I don't understand the book is that the narrator is The Book, a seemingly all-knowing entity. Why? What's Ozeki trying to say with this device? What are we supposed to understand that we wouldn't understand if it was simply a third-person omniscient narrator? It's too deep for me. 

A few years ago, my literary scholar son and I traded lists of books we had enjoyed (can't remember if the lists were all-time favorites or just favorites of the recent past). Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk was on his list. I finally read it and I now have serious concerns about my son. Snuff covers a few hours among the crowd of men who are waiting to help an aging porn star set a record for screwing 600 men in one "sitting." The focus is on three of the men--a boy who thinks the porn star is his mother, one of her former costars, and an aging gay TV star--and the young woman talent-wrangler. The expectation is that the effort will end up killing the porn star, turning the film into a snuff movie. It was gross in so many ways although the names of the star's old movies were funny. 

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is an interesting collection of five short stories and  a novella. Two of the stories are written in the imperative--"Confide that there's a burning cake birthday on the horizon. . . . Scroll to see how quickly the Amazon burns"--definitely an unusual style but for some reason, I found my mind wandering during these stories. Such was not the case with the story "Control Negro," in which an African American college professor, who is sometimes mistaken for the janitor, undertakes a lifelong research project in which he compares average American Caucasian males (ACMs) with his own son. He is able to observe his son from afar because the boy was the product of an affair with a married woman, and his parentage is not publicly acknowledged. The story's ending is surprising--though perhaps it shouldn't be. The title novella, set in the near future when the climate crisis has intensified, is also memorable. The protagonist, Da'Naisha Love, is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. When white supremacists attack black neighborhoods in Charlottesville, Da'Naisha, her asthmatic grandmother, her white boyfriend, her childhood friend with whom she also occasionally sleeps, and a few other neighbors escape to Monticello, where they hunker down for three weeks, hoping somehow to survive. This collection is definitely worth picking up.

In Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl Gonzalez writes about recovering from being abandoned by one's mother at age 12 so the mother can become a full-time revolutionary seeking Puerto Rican independence; about not being able to figure out what success means to someone who thought graduating from an Ivy League college was success only to realize it's only the beginning of life; about being a public figure who is closeted and afraid of being himself; about the exploiters of Latinx people, whether in Brooklyn or Puerto Rico. And she weaves all of these threads--and more, really--into a compelling novel that is both serious and funny. The protagonists are Olga, a high-end wedding planner who doesn't seem to believe in marriage, and her brother Prieto, a gay Congressman so deeply in the closet he doesn't realize how many people know he is gay (and don't care). Both are trying to escape from the shadow of their mother, who abandoned them yet still tries to manipulate them from afar. Lots happens--and it's all entertaining and thought-provoking.. 

Mysteries

I think you are either an Agatha Christie person or you aren't . . . and I'm not. Thus, my latest effort to grow my appreciation for Christie by reading Death on the Nile was unsuccessful. 

Fantasy/Science Fiction

My son mentioned that Trouble the Saints, by Alaya Dawn Johnson, was the winner of a recent award in the fantasy category, so I decided to read it. It's an interesting story about African American (and mixed race) people involved with the mob in the run-up to World War II. A number of these people have "the hands"--special powers that reside in their hands. Phyllis is a mob assassin whose hands are gifted with knives; she wants to leave this work behind her, but it proves to be difficult. Dev also has the hands; his tell him when trouble is coming, a useful skill for someone who works for the mob--and is a police officer. Dev and Phyllis were lovers who have found each other after a decade, in which Dev was partnered with Tamara, who reads the future in her cards. At times, I felt like Johnson was working to hard to be mystical and deal with racial realities simultaneously; in fact, I would have preferred the book if it were simply a book about race and crime in the 1930s/1940s--but I did find the book interesting. 

Favorite Passages:

He dangled subjects like fishhooks and baited them with implied interrogatives.

--Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

. . . story is more than just a discarded by-product of your bare experience. Story is its own bare experience. Fish swim in water, unaware that it is water. Birds fly in air, unaware that it is air. Story is the air that you people breathe, the ocean you swim in, and we books are the rocks along the shoreline that channel your currents and contain your tides. Books will always have the last word, even if nobody is around to read them.

--Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

    

A Spot of Bother in Late April

 Fiction

A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon had been on my TBR list for years; I almost took it off, thinking I'd never read it. But I finally did--and I enjoyed it. It's the story of a English family, whose members are all having some kind of crisis. Most acute is the case of George, the father, who has discovered a spot on his hip that he is convinced is cancer; this discovery sends him into a mental health spiral. Meanwhile, his wife Jean is having an affair and wants to leave George, but feels too guilty to leave him when he's having some kind of a breakdown. Daughter Katie is about to marry Ray, whom no one in her family thinks is right for and she's not at all sure she loves. Meanwhile son Jamie's inability to commit has caused a break-up with his partner Tony. Events come to a head at Katie and Ray's wedding, which is a Murphy's Law kind of event. The book is both touching and funny--although sometimes the sadness inherent in the situations played for humor made it impossible for me to laugh.

The Henna Artist, by Alka Joshi, was our book group selection for this month. It's set in India in the 1950s; the protagonist is Lakshmi, a henna artist and purveyor of herbal remedies (including abortifacients) for upper class women in Jaipur. Lakshmi fled an abusive husband, armed with knowledge she had gained from her mother-in-law, along with money stolen from the same source. As the book opens, she is doing well (with the help of Samir, a married man who peddles her birth control herbs to his lovers, among others) and building a house of her own. Then her husband and a sister she did not know existed turn up, and her carefully planned world slowly starts to unravel (won't say any more about the details). I actually enjoyed the book, even though I thought the protagonist had some serious imperfections that weren't explored and the book overall presented a somewhat sanitized version of India. But our facilitator for today told us that the author had apparently done that purposefully, as she thinks there are too many overly negative versions of India's problems. Having read a number of those novels, I found that an interesting perspective--maybe not defensible but still interesting. The book is actually the first in a trilogy and I think I'll at least check out the second title.

I admire Jennifer Egan, but I didn't like her first book, The Invisible Circus. It was written in 1995 and set in the 1970s--so maybe it's time has come and gone (at least for this 60s-era reader). It's about an 18-year-old girl, Phoebe, who takes off from her home (without telling her widowed mother in advance), heading to Europe to try to figure out if and why her older sister committed suicide. There are drugs, sex, leftwing terrorism--but none of it really added up to anything meaningful for me (although, of course, other reviewers saw it differently). I'd say skip it.

Mysteries/Thrillers

At the beginning of Andrea Bartz's We Were Never Here, best friends Emily and Kristen are in a remote village in Chile on their annual getaway. We quickly learn something bad happened on their last trip to Thailand, and soon enough something bad will happen in Chile. It also becomes clear relatively quickly that their friendship is toxic and, while it seems at first that Kristen is the manipulator, we start to have doubts about Emily too as the story advances, too slowly in my opinion--I guess it's supposed to be a slow burn but it actually got tedious. This is my third Bartz mystery (destined to be my last) and I really think Bartz does not like women. I've read plenty of mysteries in which women are the villains or the deeply flawed protagonists, so I'm not sure why Bartz's stories give me a woman-hating vibe. If I cared more, I might reread them to look for clues, but I'd rather just avoid them from here on. 

The Escape Room, by Megan Goldin, definitely has a different twist. Four colleagues who work on the same team at an investment banking company are called to a mandatory after-hours meeting. But when they get on the elevator, they find it has been turned into an escape room with clues they must solve to get out of the elevator (they do not know who has set up this challenge). Suffice it to say they don't do too well. Their third-person narrative is interspersed with first-person recollections of Sara, who had been a junior member of their group but is now dead. There's maybe more about investment banking than you would want to read, the characters are all pretty obnoxious, and the story is not very believable . . . but The Escape Room still held my interest.

The 7-1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton, is based around a Groundhog Day situation, except every day the protagonist wakes up in a different body. And he has only 8 days to solve the mystery of Evelyn Hardcastle's death. If he does, he can escape from the country house where a party is being held; if he doesn't, he's condemned to repeat the cycle, able to carry forward only one memory from the previous cycle. Somehow, everyone he shares his situation with believes him; sometimes, he talks to himself in another body. It's confusing and not really worth the attention required to make total sense of it. 

Jade is a young Caribbean-American woman engaged to middle-aged white architect Greg. They are attacked in their home, with Greg suffering a severe head injury and Jade losing her pregnancy. They suspect everyone, including each other; when the case is finally solved, it's simply not believable they could end up together (at least not believable to me). Her Three Lives by Cate Holahan is not  recommended. 

I was equally unimpressed with the next mystery I read, The Girl Who Died, by Ragnar Jonasson. Una, wanting to escape Reykjavík, accepts a teaching job in the remote Icelandic village of Skalar, where she has only two pupils. But the town's 10 residents and the long-dead girl who haunts her attic flat make life difficult for her. Her story is interspersed with first-person reflections from an unnamed woman who has been forced to confess to a murder; there's no apparent connection until near the end of the book and then the connection is somewhat ridiculous. Not a fan.

Young Adult

Long Walk to Water, by Linda Sue Park, is the lightly fictionalized of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who fled the war and spent years walking cross country and then living in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Nigeria. He eventually came to the United States; after several years here, he learned his family was still alive. He returned to Africa and then decided he must do something to help the African people. His story is intercut with descriptions of a well being dug in a village where a girl named Nya lives. At the end, the two stories come together. My grandson, a sixth-grader, is reading the book, which is why I picked it up. I'm interested to hear what their discussions focus on. 

Nonfiction

Perhaps because of its very serious title (and because the author is a writer of serious fiction), I expected Bernardine Evaristo's memoir Manifesto to be a very serious work, perhaps something of a polemic. Nothing could be further from the truth. The book is written in a conversational tone; reading it is almost like sitting down with someone who wants to tell you about their life. Evaristo's life story is certainly interesting. Just a few facts: she's one of eight children of a British Nigerian father and white English mother who experienced racism in many forms throughout her life; she spent a decade dating women but married a man whom she has now been with for many years; she started and ran a theater company, writing and acting, before turning entirely to writing; she has worked tirelessly to advance diverse voices in theater and publishing. However, I most enjoyed her discussion of how her writing evolved and her analysis of the influences on her writing. I was surprised to read that she has taken a number of personal development classes she uses to advance her writing and her positivity (she uses affirmations and has been described as a "positivity propagandist"--that surprised me). I don't think this is a great memoir but it's good enough to make me think Evaristo is a person I'd like to know. 

Susan, Linda, Nina, and Cokie: The Extraordinary Story of the Founding Mothers of NPR, by Lisa Napoli, presents excellent insights into the childhoods of the four eminent journalists and explores the discrimination they faced in trying to break into the news business in the 1960s and 1970s. For someone their age, such as myself, it brought back a lot of memories of trying to find work with a liberal arts degree in the early 70s. The book also provides a lot of background on the history of NPR; so much time was spent on Frank Mankiewicz's contributions and profligacy that I thought perhaps the title should have listed Frank along with the four women. While the book certainly engaged my interest, it also annoyed me from time to time. The tone seemed a bit breathless (even the subtitle seems a bit overwrought to me); indeed, Napoli mentions repeatedly the beauty of the journalists. While their good looks likely played a role in their success, I felt like she was overdoing the references to beauty. She also started and ended the book with Cokie's death, which felt somewhat manipulative, so the bulk of the text was devoted to the early stages of the women's careers--the founding era for NPR. More seriously, she didn't fully deal with some criticisms, particularly a plagiarism incident early in Nina's career and how Cokie used her family connections to advance her career. I'm not saying either of these things diminished their careers--I love both Nina and Cokie--but I would have like to seen them examined more carefully. Finally, there were some passing historical references that just weren't right--for example, she refers to the protestors at the 1968 Democratic Convention as rioting outside the hall when extensive investigation has established that the riot was caused by the police, not the protesters; it's minor, but it's careless. I still think the book was worth reading--just need a few grains of salt nearby while perusing it.

Near the end of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, Hanif Abdurraqib talks about writing for one's own people but being unable to control who accesses that art once it is out in the world. Hearing that line, I was acutely aware that I was too old and too white to be one of Abdurraqib's people. That point reinforced the fact that, while reading his complex contemplation of performance not only in the traditional sense (i.e., performance of music, dance, drama, comedy, sport) but in a broader cultural sense (e.g., homegoings or funerals, playing whist and spades) as well as at an individual level (presenting oneself to others and to oneself), I was sometimes unsure of the connections when the author cut from one level of analysis to another. At the same time, the care Abadurraqib took in organizing the book was also obvious--meaning I was just missing some of his points. Perhaps if I had been reading a print book rather than listening to the audio version, I might have been more likely to slow down and interrogate the connections. Perhaps I'll actually do that . . . or not. 

Poetry

Vinegar Hill is Colm Toibin's first poetry collection, but the poems in it were evidently written over a span of time. The subject matter of the poems is expansive as well ranging from religion to politics, gay life, death, other poets, and the pandemic; I can't properly identify what some of the poems are about. A few poems are quite funny--for example, one about Mother Superiors driving when nuns were first allowed to take the wheel, another about how the staff maneuvered guests out of an Obama White House St. Patrick's Day party when it was time for them to leave. One poem described my old house, which sat on the top of a hill, with no protection, facing the prevailing winds coming down off the Front Range: "All night the sea-wind makes clear/Its deep antipathy to this house." Sadly, I only found one of the poems really moving (see below). And my favorite thing may have been the cover, which featured a lovely painting by Toibin's late mother. 

Favorite Passages

Creative writers are proud of our own imaginations: we cherish our ability to conceive of ideas and to find interesting ways to express them. I give myself complete artistic licence to write from multiple perspectives and to inhabit different cultures across the perceived barriers of race, culture, gender, age and sexuality. I am the most rebellious of writers; a freedom lover and disobeyer of rules, which is why I’m curious as to the concept of cultural ownership, which rears its head in discussions about artistic freedom. How can culture be owned by anyone when it is in a perpetual state of movement and metamorphosis, of permeability and responsiveness to global influences.

--Bernardine Evaristo, in Manifesto

Open House
by Colm Toibin

This is where they lived; only the old woman is left.
The realtor takes the measure of those who come.
One stray object would ruin the show: a single shoe
Under a bed, or an old tooth brush in the bathroom.

This is where they were happy, the ones who are gone.
Their clothes have been taken away, as well as crumpled
Tubes of sun-tan lotion, pills beyond their sell-by date,
Condoms not needed now, cold cream, insect repellent.

Life and time, the original realtors, make us feel
That all is change and flow; one family has its day
And another buys the house. The shadow that flitted on the wall
And scared the children will rise again to scare some more.

But the vinyl records are gone and will not come back.
The famous lasagna she cooked is history now,
And there was a bird who outdid all his friends one year,
Keeping the house awake. He--if it was a he--is toast.

As you depart, you notice the old woman sitting in an armchair.
Frail, except for her eyes. This was her room, her realm.
The house is open. She supervises all that has been lost.
What the woman sees are sharp, clear things,

Which window picked up dawn light, what names were being called
When silence struck, how life and time seem vivid as they fade.