Happy (Left on Tenth) and Sad (Red Comet) Lives

A family reunion in mid-August seems to have kept me from doing a mid-month post, but the reunion was fun as I have some entertaining relatives!  A few books this month made me reflect on happy endings, which are definitely good in a memoir but can feel entirely out of place in a novel that has been successfully building dread for a couple hundred pages. 

Fiction

Any Other Family, by Eleanor Brown, is an interesting look at family. It features three sets of Denver parents who have adopted the children of one biological mother and made a big effort to function in a way that the four children feel like siblings. They are all on vacation together when the biological mother announces she is pregnant again and is hoping that the couple who adopted her youngest child will take this new baby as well; but that mother is struggling with mothering one child and is not interested in adopting another. The story of the tensions that occur on their shared vacation as they try to solve the question of who will take the new baby is interspersed with their backstories and statements from prospective parents for the new baby from outside their family circle. One of the mothers is incredibly overbearing and hard to take--but I still enjoyed the unique perspective on family until the ending, which  was disappointing and somewhat killed my positive feelings about the book. 

The Husbands, by Chandler Baker, is kind of a reverse-gender treatment of the classic satirical horror story Stepford Wives, in which women with controlling husbands "convert" them to supportive, domestic gods. But Chandler Baker is no Ira Levin and the book neither amused nor thrilled me. Since Baker also wrote the "MeToo" novel The Whisper Network, it's clear she hopes to illuminate women's issues, but I just didn't think this one worked. 

I absolutely loved Bruce Holsinger's The Gifted School, but The Displacements bore little resemblance to that satire set in Boulder (although there is a family dysfunction element that is common). In The Displacements, a hurricane of unprecedented ferocity is bearing down on Miami. Except for father Brantley, a surgeon who is the incident commander at his hospital and thus cannot immediately leave, the well-to-do Larson-Hall family--mother Daphne, stepson Gavin, and children Mia and Oliver--evacuate. Their evacuation is a disaster, and the family ends up in a displaced persons camp in Oklahoma, unable to leave because they have no ready resources and Brantley is inaccessible. Things go from bad to worse at the camp, where we meet small-time crook Tate and his addict sidekick Jessamyn, who undertake a variety of scams at the camp, as well as Rain, the FEMA employee in charge of the camp. There's a prevailing feeling of chaos and devolution that seems all too possible, making the relatively upbeat ending feel out of place. Despite that, I liked the book and recommend it.

I'm sure I had read something about This Time Tomorrow, by Emma Straub, or it wouldn't have found a place on my TBR list. But by the time I got it from the library, I had forgotten it had a time travel element. When Alice Stern is experiencing angst over her 40th birthday, turns down her boyfriend's proposal, gets abandoned at dinner by her best friend who has to rush home because her baby is ill (highlighting the fact that Alice has neither husband nor children), gets drunk, and ends up sleeping on the ground in the shed behind her father's house, she wakes up to find herself turning 16. There's a lot of going back and forth between 16 and 40, with variations in her life at 40 based on things she did when she was back in the teenage years. But I really didn't care. The book lacks the magic of really good time travel stories (e.g., The Time Traveler's Wife; Recursion; Here, and Now and Then; Oona Out of Order) and I can't recommend it.

Tom Perrotta has written some wonderful novels about characters who make questionable moral choices, but I didn't care for Tracy Flick Can't Win. In case you don't recall, Tracy Flick was the character portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in Election. But Tracy is now an adult, a divorced mom and assistant principal at a suburban high school. Her principal is about to retire and she hopes to get his job, but there are inevitably obstacles. The story is told from six perspectives, which for me dilutes Tracy's story. When something dramatic happens at the end, I don't care, nor do I take any meaning from it. I've read a number of positive reviews of the book, so know that others do like it, but I can't recommend it. 

YA

My granddaughter had mentioned that she had tried more than once to get into They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera and had finally gotten far enough into the book to decide it was pretty good. So I decided to read it and could immediately see why it was hard to get into--in the first two chapters, the two main characters, teenagers Mateo and Rufus, learn they are going to die that day. That makes for a grim beginning. The central conceit of the book is that a "service" called Death-Cast lets people know early on the day they will die that it is their last 24 hours on earth (we don't learn how this service has come to be, and not too much else about society seems different). There are a variety of additional services available to "Deckers," those who have been notified they will die. One of these is a social media site called Last Friend, which allows Deckers to make a connection with someone to spend their last hours with. Through Last Friend, Mateo and Rufus connect and spend the day together, visiting people and sites important to them. Although I would have liked more explanation of how Death-Cast became a thing, I found, within the grimness, that the book celebrated friendship in a lovely way. And I enjoyed discussing it with my granddaughter!

Mystery/Suspense

To me, the most interesting thing about The Sacred Bridge, by Anne Hillerman, is that it looks like Hillerman the younger may be planning to take Jim Chee away from police work and back toward becoming a traditional healer. Don't know how that will translate into future mysteries but will definitely check out the next book to find out.

Alone in the Wild is the fifth in Kelley Armstrong's series about two police officers in a secret Canadian town established for people needing to escape from their previous lives. As with The Sacred Bridge, the most interesting facet of this title was the signaling that in the future, Casey and Dalton are likely to become parents. Since Rockton has no children, that could be an interesting development. 

A Line to Kill is Anthony Horowitz's third title in the Horowitz/Hawthorne series featuring a retired police detective and his mystery author sidekick. The first two titles felt fresh, but this one lapsed into more traditional territory and involved way too much explanation at the end. Not recommended.

I love libraries and have a love-hate relationship with mysteries so mystery about a dead woman in a library--sign me up. That's the set-up for The Woman in the Library, by Sulari Gentill. The author tells us that the killer is one of a small group of loosely connected young people who were at the library at the time of the killing. There's also a meta aspect to the story: a fictional writer is writing a novel about a fictional writer named Hannah who was part of the group in the library; a friend provides increasingly hostile critiques of chapters of the novel. Occasionally it got confusing, but it wasn't boring.

As the Wicked Watch, by Tamron Hall, is set in Chicago and features journalist Jordan Manning, who is investigating the disappearance of high-achieving African American teenager Masey James. I liked the first part of the book, which focuses on Jordan's work filing stories on why the police are characterizing Masey as a runaway when Jordan is sure she is the victim of violence. But then, when she is assigned to cover that store exclusively, she becomes more of an investigator than a journalist and the story seemed to spin out of control. Hall deals with a serious issue--violence against African American women and the neglect of such cases by both the media and police; I hope she'll stick to having Jordan remain a journalist rather than an investigator in future titles (assuming this is going to become a series).

What Happened to the Bennetts, by Lisa Scottoline, also took a turn half way through the book. The Bennetts are driving home from a soccer game one evening when they are stopped by two men in an SUV, who demand their car; when the family dog jumps at one of the perpetrators, the teenage daughter is fatally shot. One of the bad guys also ends up dead on the ground. In the middle of that night, after their daughter dies in the hospital, the Bennetts are awakened by FBI agents who inform them that mobsters and drug cartels were involved and to be safe, they must immediately go into hiding in preparation for going into witness protection. The first part of the book deals with the difficulties of suddenly being displaced, how you and the people left behind react. I really liked this part of the book. Then the father, Jason, owner of a court reporting business, decides to seek vengeance on his own--to my mind, totally unbelievable. So I liked half, didn't care for the other half. 

I feel like I can't say too much about No One Will Miss Her, by Kat Rosenfield, without giving away some of the twists. Suffice it to say it's about two couples--a wealthy couple from Boston and a not-wealthy couple from a small town in rural Maine. There are a LOT of twists, many not very believable--but still entertaining.

Girl, Forgotten, by Karin Slaughter, is a follow-up to her bestseller Pieces of Her, which became a Netflix series. The daughter from that book, Andrea Oliver, has just become a U.S. Marshall when her uncle the Senator gets her assigned to a case that involves crimes her cult leader/criminal father may have committed as a teenager. A number of things about the book really annoyed me, including: (1) a novice U.S. Marshall would never be sent out on a mission that involves her family and is a secret form her colleagues, (2) her new partner tells her that investigation is not the job of the U.S. Marshall Service--and then they spend the whole book investigating, and (3) Slaughter sets up a new confrontation with Andrea's father at the end of the book, obviously prepping us for a sequel--we've had that from other authors and it's just annoying! 

Nonfiction/Memoir/Biography

Before I started reading, I definitely had the wrong idea about Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, by Delia Ephron. I thought it was about Delia finding love in her 70s following her husband's death. For a brief time, it was about that--and what a gem of a partner she found in her second husband Peter. But then the book--actually her life--took a turn and became about her grueling battle with leukemia. She has unbelievable support from family and friends (even though she doesn't tell her friends about her illness for quite some time). Although I read a review by the novelist Joyce Maynard that suggested Ephron spent too much time praising people who had helped her, I disagree. If it hadn't been for reading about the support she got from loved ones,  reading about her illness would have been almost unbearable. Of course, she survived, which is cause to rejoice. Reading the book is an emotional experience but definitely not for everyone.

I'm not sure why I kept listening to the 45-hour Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark. Clark obviously adores Plath's work and is proud that she had access to sources that the other numerous biographers of Plath did not have. So the work is adulatory and detailed. But the only real takeaway is that Plath had serious mental health problems and chose probably the worst possible person to be her husband. I loved The Bell Jar but have never really understood her poetry--perhaps if I go back to it now, I might be able to see my way through the poems. But even if I can, I'm not sure it will be worth the hours it took to get through the biography!

Andrea Elliott's Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City started as a 2013 series in the New York Times but Elliott continued her reporting for a total of eight years, following young Dasani from age 11 through her graduation from high school. Dasani was one of eight children of Chanel and Supreme. The family lives for years in one room in a truly awful homeless shelter. They also spend time in public housing, which is a much better situation, but one her parents are unable to sustain because of an array of bad decisions. Despite the fact that there is a lot of love in the family, the children eventually end up in foster care. Dasani initially avoids foster care because she's accepted at the Milton Hersey School in Pennsylvania. Although she does well at the school, she self-sabotages (it's not entirely clear why but concern for her siblings seems to be a major factor), getting into fights and eventually being sent back to a foster care placement in New York. New York political leaders do not come off well--particularly Letitia James, who tries to somehow take "credit" for Dasani after she became a mini-celeb when the NYT story was published. Even those who want to help the family seem unable to really make a difference. As I was reading the book, I thought it was a modern update on There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz, a book that had a huge impact on me back in the 1990s--and Elliott acknowledges that that book inspired her reporting. This book reminds us that the problems of poverty have not been solved, and the innocent victims of both systemic issues and parental problems are children. 

Dawn Turner's Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood made for an interesting follow-up to Invisible Child. Turner's work provides insight into many of the events that have shaped Black Chicago, from the Great Migration to the development and then neglect of public housing, to gentrification. All of this is context for her real focus: her own story and that of her younger sister Kim and her childhood best friend Debra. Despite their involved parents, Kim starts ditching school and drinking at a young age; after she has a miscarriage as a teenager, she is depressed and drinking more and more until she dies of a heart attack at 23. Debra was always a bold girl, but she loses her way somewhere along the way. She dances in strip clubs for years and then is convicted of killing a man she was doing drugs with. She never denies killing him but claims it was an accident. She ends up serving 19 years in various Indiana prisons. In prison, she gets a degree and works to help other inmates. She also, over time, goes through reconciliation with her victim's family. Based on the title of the book and her comment that "there but for the grace of God," Turner seems to see the women's different lives as a matter of chance. As someone who is not religious and does not believe in fate, I see individual decisions and systemic conditions as more central. Despite this difference of perspective, I did find the book a rewarding and insightful read. 

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