When our library closed a couple of weeks ago due to the pandemic, some friends went over at the last minute and got a good stack of books to read while sheltering at home. I didn't do that, figuring I'd go electronic and also try to work through at least some of the TBR stack, while recognizing that some books stay on the stack for a reason (i.e., you don't really want to read them). And I have definitely read some losers in March, but there were still highlights!
Fiction
Memory Police, by Yoko Ogawa. Memory Police is an older book (1994) only now available in English. It's an intriguing story of a society where more and more things are disappearing--in reality and in memory. A few people do not lose their memories when the items disappear, and these people are in extreme danger from the Memory Police. So the book's protagonist, a writer, hides her editor, who happens to be one of those people, in her basement. That's just a basic sketch of the book, which is quietly scary and sometimes a tad surreal. Definitely interesting.
Ghost Walls, by Sara Moss. In the north of England, a family whose bus-driving father fancies himself an amateur historian takes its holiday with an anthropology professor and group of grad students who are recreating life in the Iron Age. In enacting ancient cultural practices, weird (and misogynistic) things start happening. Ghost Walls is really more of a novella than a novel and even so, the pacing seems a little off--slow in the beginning, fast at the end. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it.
The Rabbit Series: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest, and Rabbit Remembered, by John Updike. I had read the first Rabbit novel a few years ago and honestly didn't care for it, so I'm not sure why I suddenly decided to work my way through the entire quartet (plus a tag-along novella). As Updike works his way through the decades, Rabbit remains an idiot, as do pretty much all of the other characters. Updike is certainly making a point about the crass nature of American culture, and perhaps at the time the books were written, people were surprised to read these depictions. From the perspective of decades later, I just found the books unpleasant. Rabbit Remembered, which is set after Rabbit's death, is slightly less annoying, as it seems to suggest redemption is possible, but really, if you feel tempted to start the Rabbit series, don't.
Weather, by Jenny Offill. Offill writes in short paragraphs that don't relate directly to the paragraphs before and after. Although taken together, they provide a roughly chronological narrative, it's a very different way of putting together a novel and it conveys a sense that things are falling apart. And that's what's happening to the protagonist, Lizzie, a librarian who takes on a second job answering email, whose marriage is wobbly, and who feels responsible for her unstable brother. I don't think Offill is for everyone, but I enjoy her work (although I think The Dept. of Speculation was better).
The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner. If you were an Orange Is the New Black fan, you might want to read The Mars Room, which feels much more authentic to me. Romy Hall is a single mother and former exotic dancer on her way to prison to serve two life sentences as the book opens. Her experiences over a number of years, as she navigates prison life and tries to locate her son, are juxtaposed with her backstory, building a totally authentic character. The audio version is narrated by the author in an urgent tone with a peculiar habit of not changing her intonation at the end of sentences. This was curious (and made me wonder if authors reading their own works is really a good idea) but didn't stop me from admiring the book.
Strangers and Cousins, by Leah Hager Cohen. This book recounts events in the several days before a large and somewhat unruly family marries their eldest child to her college girlfriend. Many secrets are being kept--the parents are pregnant and planning to sell the family home, the somewhat demented great-aunt is hiding the fact that she lost a brother in a fire that killed 18 children in the community, and the brides are planning a "pageant" more than a wedding to make a political point. All this is happening against a backdrop of community dissent over potential "take-over" of the town by a Hassidic community. The audio version of this book, too, is narrated by the author, but Cohen has a strangely sweet voice that to me did not match the story. Did not love.
Short Stories
Grand Union, by Zadie Smith
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, by Helen Oyeyemi
These two collections of short stories were positively reviewed; indeed, one reviewer said What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours was "flawless." Sadly, I didn't enjoy either collection, but I found What Is Yours . . . particularly opaque. I enjoyed a couple of the stories in Grand Union, but overall I wouldn't recommend either collection except for short story aficionados.
Mystery
Shape of Night, by Tess Gerritson. Completely ridiculous (btw: Not a Rizzoli and Isles title).
Tell Me Lies, J. P. Pomare. This was an Audible freebie and, embarrassingly for both me and the author, I can't really remember the book even though it's only been three weeks since I listened to it. So . . ,.
A Death of No Importance, by Mariah Fredericks. This historical mystery set among the nouveau rich in New York City in 1910. The protagonist is a ladies maid--much more intelligent and woke than her employers. A variety of serious social/political topics are touched upon (the book ends with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire) though they weren't all really well woven into the story. Still, good enough that I would read later titles in the Jane Prescott series if I come across them.
Almost, by Elizabeth Benedict. This isn't exactly a mystery, but I didn't want to dignify it by putting in the Fiction category. There's way too much foreshadowing of a nothing story.
Nonfiction
Know My Name, by Chanel Miller. Everyone should read this book, the account by the victim in the notorious sexual assault case in which the perpetrator, a Stanford swimmer, got a very minor sentence. The greatest insight for me was how multifaceted and long-lasting the effects of the assault were, even though Miller was unable to remember what happened to her at the hands of the perpetrator. It was alarming to me (perhaps particularly as a civic educator) how totally naive Miller was about the court system--for example, she was shocked by the fact that the jury decision had to be unanimous. We are clearly doing a bad job of educating young people about the justice system. I disagree with some of her recommendations--because she feels that the perp lies with impunity in the courts (and other reasons), she argues for cases to be handled by the universities, all while she rightfully excoriates Stanford for their handling of the case. Certainly, we must do better and one way to do that is to talk about important works like Know My Name and Missoula, by Jon Krakauer.
In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado. This memoir is primarily an account of the author's relationship with a psychologically and physically abusive woman. It's beautifully written, very descriptive without going overboard. It's written in the first, second, and third person (which can sometimes get confusing). Even the chapter titles are intriguing, although I didn't always understand them; each was formatted as "The Dream House as . . . " with the phrase finished with terms such as "Prologue," "Perpetual Motion Machine," "Memory Palace," "Time Travel." I listened to the audio version, which was narrated by the author in a very urgent tone with few changes in inflection, which made listening somewhat exhausting. As a white cisgender woman, I had trouble understanding why anyone would be surprised that there is domestic abuse in lesbian relationships--violence clearly cuts across genders, sexuality, socioeconomic status, etc. But Machado helped me understand why those in the community don't want to acknowledge or talk about the problem. Her book should help bring it into the light.
Women Rowing North: Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing As We Age, by Mary Pipher. The subtitle pretty well sums up the author's purpose, which she addresses through anecdotes and results from interviews she conducted. While Pipher is a psychologist, I didn't feel like she brought that much from her profession to the advice she gives--the book is more common sense than anything else. I felt like any intelligent woman in our age bracket [60s and 70s] could have written the book based on their own experiences. However, the book has been popular--my sister and a friend have really enjoyed it, so maybe I'm wrong.
Eat, Pray, Love Made Me Do It. I wasn't a big fan of Eat, Pray, Love and this book didn't really move me, but the idea of the book did--it's a collection of short pieces by people who were motivated to change their lives by reading Eat, Pray, Love. Books/words are powerful!
Miss American Pie, by Margaret Sartor. The bulk of this book is the author's diary, written when she was a teenager growing up in Louisiana. It's mostly as mundane as you might expect, but it did remind me that nearly everyone is insecure at that age--and probably at every age. And, the young Margaret did have a sense of humor.
Favorite passage:
It seems to me that most boys are born stupid.
Margaret Sartor, Miss American Pie
Sunday, March 29, 2020
Saturday, February 29, 2020
My February: Snow and Satire
It's been cold and snowy in the Denver area this month--but not wanting to venture out some days meant it was great weather for reading. My favorite books of the month were satirical takes on parenting and race--The Gifted School, by Bruce Holsinger, and Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid.
The Gifted School
Several school districts north of Denver announce that they are opening a special school for gifted students--the school will, by all accounts, be fabulous, incorporating all the best practices for educating high-performing and talented kids. But the parents of Crystal (very thinly disguised version of Boulder) go completely nuts in their efforts to ensure that their children--of course, they are gifted; of course, they are more gifted than the child of their housecleaner--get into the school. The narrative focuses on four friends with children who are the same age--and the competition to get into the school is hard on the friendship but even harder on the children! It's very funny (especially to someone who has served on a lot of school district committees with exactly these parents) but also addresses serious issues of privilege, education, friendship, and more. I thought the "surprise" at the end--while genuinely surprising--was kind of dumb, but it didn't take away from my enjoyment of the book.
Such a Fun Age
Such a Fun Age begins with an episode that is frightening--Emira Tucker, 25-year-old babysitter (she has a second job as a typist), gets a call late one night when she's out with friends. Her employer Alix (pronounced A-LEEKS) of the little girl Briar whom Emira cares for wants her to pick up the child for a bit (she can take her to the upscale grocery store, which the child loves) because the parents have had to call the police. Someone threw a rock through their window in protest of a racist comment the newscaster father made on the air that day (this piece is not explained to Emira). At the store, another customer wonders why a white toddler is out with a young black woman dressed in party clothes (and perhaps just a tiny bit drunk). The nosy customer calls security, and Emira and the security guard are soon yelling at each other. A man sees what is happening and videos the confrontation on his cell phone. It feels like things could go very bad--but the problem is resolved, and Emira just wants to forget about it and worry about how she's going to pay for health insurance when she is kicked off her parents' policy on her birthday.
When Emira sees the man who videoed the grocery store incident (his name is Kelley Copeland) on the train, they start dating. He has a lot of ideas about how she should be adulting, as does Alix, who imagines herself quite the "woke" white person. Alix is an "influencer" who is supposed to be writing her first book but spends more time secretly reading Emira's emails. Emira's group of three friends, all of whom are more successful in their careers than she is, also have some ideas about what she should be doing.
There are funny complications and a relatively happy ending (not an "everything gets wrapped up with a bow" ending but Emira does get health insurance!), but neither of these things obscure the act that author Kiley Reid is dealing with serious issues of race, coming of age, and relationships of virtually every type. One thing that bothered me a little was that Reid uses the trope of the black caregiver who truly loves the white child (and Briar certainly needed someone to love her, as her mother barely acknowledged her existence); generally, this trope appears in books by white women (The Secret Life of Bees and The Help) who don't even recognize that the black women who cared for them would rather have been home with their own families. But Reid, who is African American, was a childminder for several years so I recognize the trope has more legitimacy in her hands. At any rate, I really enjoyed the book.
Other Fiction
Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Trust Exercise, winner of the National Book Award, is the story of students at a performing arts high school. I found the first section, narrated by Sarah, a young woman who has just published a novel about her high school experiences rather dull. It seems like there have been SO MANY books about exceptional students who betray each other, have bad experiences with adults, etc. etc. The book got more interesting in the second section, when the narration switches to Karen, who describes events from a very different perspective. The third and final section has yet another narrator, Clare, whose identity I don't want to reveal (that would totally be a "spoiler"). I was happy for the varied perspectives, but Trust Exercise would not have made my list of the best books of 2019. Big disappointment.
Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This Coates' first foray into fiction, and it's an ambitious story about slavery, the violence of white Americans, and the Underground Railroad. Although I could admire the author's intention, I didn't care for the fantastical element or the fact that so much of the book consisted of other people telling the protagonist, Hiram Walker, their stories. I know the book was very positively reviewed, but for me it just didn't work.
Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner. Weiner has written about the sexism of the literary world, with books about relationships written by male authors (e.g., Freedom by Jonathan Franzen) hailed as masterpieces and similar books written by women dismissed as chick lit. Her point is valid and I always feel bad when I don't love her books. Mrs. Everything (terrible title) is no different--it's the story of two girls from childhood in the 1950s to the present. Jo and Beth (there names are no coincidence) are opposites. Jo is a classic tomboy, intellectual rebel, and lesbian--but she marries a man after her true love betrays her and becomes a suburban housewife. Beth is a well-behaved girly girl, who is first molested by an uncle and then gang-raped at a music festival in college; she enters the "counterculture" eventually ending up at a women's commune and becoming a successful entrepreneur. The plot is crammed with events and issues--and still the book just isn't very interesting.
All This Could Be Yours, by Jami Attenberg. I found this story of family dysfunction more interesting, perhaps because it used multiple narrators and dipped back in time to build back story rather than employing a straight-on chronological approach. The patriarch of the Tuchman family, Victor, is in the hospital, having had a stroke. His children, daughter Alex and TV director Gary, both of whom are struggling, wonder why their mother Barbra stayed with the brutal and crooked Victor. Alex hopes desperately that her mother will explain her reasons now that her father is dying--as is the case in most families, though, she will never really understand her parents. My brief description only hints at the dysfunction--it's both deep and wide. Weirdly, Attenberg sometimes throws in a section narrated by someone outside the family whom they encounter in their travels around New Orleans, where most of the book is set--but in the end, even these sections add depth to the portrayal of a family in pain.
The Travelers, by Regina Porter. This is the story of two interconnected families--one primarily white, one primarily black--and other people in their orbits. I found the book really confusing--there were so many characters with so many different connections, it was hard to remember who everyone was. The fact that every chapter started somewhere not at all related to what happened in the previous chapter added to the confusion. It may be a book better read in print than listened to, but I didn't like it well enough to test that hypothesis.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris. To me, this book proved that a good story does not necessarily make a good novel. The author spent years interviewing a concentration camp survivor, Lale, a Slovakian Jew who was given the job of tattooing numbers onto the arms of fellow prisoners. He falls in love with a girl named Gita. Both of them endure horrifying experiences but survive and marry after the war. Sadly, the writing was so leaden that I was actually bored while reading. (Others in my book group liked it, however, so perhaps I cannot e trusted.)
The Jane Austen Project, by Kathleen Flynn. Liam and Rachel travel back to 1815 England with the aim of stealing letters and an unpublished manuscript from none other Jane Austen. The bulk of the book is about their attempts to pass themselves off as 19th-century Brits newly arrived from Jamaica as they try to reach their goal without changing history. At the end, there is a time-traveling twist that livened up the narrative--if the author had done more with the time travel possibilities, the book might have been more interesting. Reminded me a little of the only Jasper Fforde book I have ever read, although in his series, I believe, people actually travel into books--which might have livened this novel up as well.
Memoirs
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading, by Maureen Corrigan. Corrigan is an English professor and the book reviewer for Fresh Air. I often disagree with her reviews, but found her book interesting (it might not quite be a memoir, but I decided to put it in that category). She focuses on three themes in books that have meant a lot to her: (1) the notion that family dramas/epics of caretaking are the women's version of extreme adventure stories favored by men, (2) the idea that mysteries are one of the few genres of fiction that focus on the honor and details of work, and (3) Catholic martyr stories (this theme didn't resonate for me at all, so I have blanked out what the point was. Interesting if not earth-shattering.
Ordinary Girls, by Jaquira Diaz. This memoir feels like a lot of other memoirs I have read--girls' mother is a schizophrenic addict, father is a hustler and womanizer who lets their brother physically abuse the girls and doesn't seem to mind when the older girl (the author) continuously runs away, gets arrested, drops out of school, and drinks and uses drugs. Diaz was born in Puerto Rico, moved to Miami as a girl, and has obviously turned her life around. But I didn't find much new in her memoir.
Mysteries
The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides. This mystery has gotten a lot of hype, and I agree it's pretty good--although not perfect. Alicia is an artist who killed her beloved husband Gabriel and has not spoken in the six years since. She is confined to a mental hospital, where new staff therapist Theo (who got the job there primarily because he wanted to treat Alicia) is determined to get her to talk. From the beginning, the reader (or at least this reader) feels like there is something off about Theo, but the author still manages to surprise us with a twist near the end. Definitely worth reading.
The Thinnest Air, by Minka Kent. A woman married to a wealthy older man disappears in a Utah mountain town. Her sister investigates the case--why are sisters, daughters, friends always better able to solve a crime (while almost getting killed themselves) than the police? I'm tired of that particular plot.
The Museum of Desire, by J. Kellerman. Pretty typical Alex Delaware mystery.
The Tenant, by Katrina Engberg. A translated Danish mystery, quite complicated and featuring a rather tortured detective, sometimes likable, sometimes not.
Poetry
An American Sunrise, by Joy Harjo. Harjo is the latest Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that post. In introducing this book, Harjo explicitly links the Trail of Tears and the current treatment of migrants on the Southwestern border. Many of the poems in the book, which are interspersed with text passages that provide historic perspective, are, in my view, a form of resistance. Consider this one, for example:
Wise questions that certainly would have screened out the current occupant of the White House. While I struggled with some of the poems (not unusual for me), I appreciated many others. Definitely worth picking up, even if you don't read every poem.
Young Adult
The Boy in the Black Suit, by Jason Reynolds. Reynolds is the new Library of Congress Ambassador
for Young People's Literature. Thus, I decided to read one of his novels. The Boy in the Black Suit is 17-year-old Matt, who works after school in the local funeral home. He is interested in observing how other people grieve, as he is still grieving his mother's death and his father is providing little help, having started drinking heavily and ended up in the hospital. At one funeral, he meets Love, whose grandmother recently died. Love and Mr. Ray, the undertaker, become good friends and supports for Matt, as he struggles to deal with his grief. Good book that should be helpful to kids struggling with grief.
One, by Sarah Crossan. My granddaughter had to read a novel in poetic form for her seventh-grade English class; she chose One and then recommended it to me. It's the story of conjoined twins, Grace and Tippi, who start attending school for the first time in as teens, make two amazing friends while facing scrutiny and ridicule from other classmates, and then face a health crisis when Grace's heart begins to fail. The poetic form seems like especially apropos to the exploration of identity that most of us cannot even imagine. I liked One a lot.
Favorite Passages
Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise
The Gifted School
Several school districts north of Denver announce that they are opening a special school for gifted students--the school will, by all accounts, be fabulous, incorporating all the best practices for educating high-performing and talented kids. But the parents of Crystal (very thinly disguised version of Boulder) go completely nuts in their efforts to ensure that their children--of course, they are gifted; of course, they are more gifted than the child of their housecleaner--get into the school. The narrative focuses on four friends with children who are the same age--and the competition to get into the school is hard on the friendship but even harder on the children! It's very funny (especially to someone who has served on a lot of school district committees with exactly these parents) but also addresses serious issues of privilege, education, friendship, and more. I thought the "surprise" at the end--while genuinely surprising--was kind of dumb, but it didn't take away from my enjoyment of the book.
Such a Fun Age
Such a Fun Age begins with an episode that is frightening--Emira Tucker, 25-year-old babysitter (she has a second job as a typist), gets a call late one night when she's out with friends. Her employer Alix (pronounced A-LEEKS) of the little girl Briar whom Emira cares for wants her to pick up the child for a bit (she can take her to the upscale grocery store, which the child loves) because the parents have had to call the police. Someone threw a rock through their window in protest of a racist comment the newscaster father made on the air that day (this piece is not explained to Emira). At the store, another customer wonders why a white toddler is out with a young black woman dressed in party clothes (and perhaps just a tiny bit drunk). The nosy customer calls security, and Emira and the security guard are soon yelling at each other. A man sees what is happening and videos the confrontation on his cell phone. It feels like things could go very bad--but the problem is resolved, and Emira just wants to forget about it and worry about how she's going to pay for health insurance when she is kicked off her parents' policy on her birthday.
When Emira sees the man who videoed the grocery store incident (his name is Kelley Copeland) on the train, they start dating. He has a lot of ideas about how she should be adulting, as does Alix, who imagines herself quite the "woke" white person. Alix is an "influencer" who is supposed to be writing her first book but spends more time secretly reading Emira's emails. Emira's group of three friends, all of whom are more successful in their careers than she is, also have some ideas about what she should be doing.
There are funny complications and a relatively happy ending (not an "everything gets wrapped up with a bow" ending but Emira does get health insurance!), but neither of these things obscure the act that author Kiley Reid is dealing with serious issues of race, coming of age, and relationships of virtually every type. One thing that bothered me a little was that Reid uses the trope of the black caregiver who truly loves the white child (and Briar certainly needed someone to love her, as her mother barely acknowledged her existence); generally, this trope appears in books by white women (The Secret Life of Bees and The Help) who don't even recognize that the black women who cared for them would rather have been home with their own families. But Reid, who is African American, was a childminder for several years so I recognize the trope has more legitimacy in her hands. At any rate, I really enjoyed the book.
Other Fiction
Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi. Trust Exercise, winner of the National Book Award, is the story of students at a performing arts high school. I found the first section, narrated by Sarah, a young woman who has just published a novel about her high school experiences rather dull. It seems like there have been SO MANY books about exceptional students who betray each other, have bad experiences with adults, etc. etc. The book got more interesting in the second section, when the narration switches to Karen, who describes events from a very different perspective. The third and final section has yet another narrator, Clare, whose identity I don't want to reveal (that would totally be a "spoiler"). I was happy for the varied perspectives, but Trust Exercise would not have made my list of the best books of 2019. Big disappointment.
Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This Coates' first foray into fiction, and it's an ambitious story about slavery, the violence of white Americans, and the Underground Railroad. Although I could admire the author's intention, I didn't care for the fantastical element or the fact that so much of the book consisted of other people telling the protagonist, Hiram Walker, their stories. I know the book was very positively reviewed, but for me it just didn't work.
Mrs. Everything, by Jennifer Weiner. Weiner has written about the sexism of the literary world, with books about relationships written by male authors (e.g., Freedom by Jonathan Franzen) hailed as masterpieces and similar books written by women dismissed as chick lit. Her point is valid and I always feel bad when I don't love her books. Mrs. Everything (terrible title) is no different--it's the story of two girls from childhood in the 1950s to the present. Jo and Beth (there names are no coincidence) are opposites. Jo is a classic tomboy, intellectual rebel, and lesbian--but she marries a man after her true love betrays her and becomes a suburban housewife. Beth is a well-behaved girly girl, who is first molested by an uncle and then gang-raped at a music festival in college; she enters the "counterculture" eventually ending up at a women's commune and becoming a successful entrepreneur. The plot is crammed with events and issues--and still the book just isn't very interesting.
All This Could Be Yours, by Jami Attenberg. I found this story of family dysfunction more interesting, perhaps because it used multiple narrators and dipped back in time to build back story rather than employing a straight-on chronological approach. The patriarch of the Tuchman family, Victor, is in the hospital, having had a stroke. His children, daughter Alex and TV director Gary, both of whom are struggling, wonder why their mother Barbra stayed with the brutal and crooked Victor. Alex hopes desperately that her mother will explain her reasons now that her father is dying--as is the case in most families, though, she will never really understand her parents. My brief description only hints at the dysfunction--it's both deep and wide. Weirdly, Attenberg sometimes throws in a section narrated by someone outside the family whom they encounter in their travels around New Orleans, where most of the book is set--but in the end, even these sections add depth to the portrayal of a family in pain.
The Travelers, by Regina Porter. This is the story of two interconnected families--one primarily white, one primarily black--and other people in their orbits. I found the book really confusing--there were so many characters with so many different connections, it was hard to remember who everyone was. The fact that every chapter started somewhere not at all related to what happened in the previous chapter added to the confusion. It may be a book better read in print than listened to, but I didn't like it well enough to test that hypothesis.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris. To me, this book proved that a good story does not necessarily make a good novel. The author spent years interviewing a concentration camp survivor, Lale, a Slovakian Jew who was given the job of tattooing numbers onto the arms of fellow prisoners. He falls in love with a girl named Gita. Both of them endure horrifying experiences but survive and marry after the war. Sadly, the writing was so leaden that I was actually bored while reading. (Others in my book group liked it, however, so perhaps I cannot e trusted.)
The Jane Austen Project, by Kathleen Flynn. Liam and Rachel travel back to 1815 England with the aim of stealing letters and an unpublished manuscript from none other Jane Austen. The bulk of the book is about their attempts to pass themselves off as 19th-century Brits newly arrived from Jamaica as they try to reach their goal without changing history. At the end, there is a time-traveling twist that livened up the narrative--if the author had done more with the time travel possibilities, the book might have been more interesting. Reminded me a little of the only Jasper Fforde book I have ever read, although in his series, I believe, people actually travel into books--which might have livened this novel up as well.
Memoirs
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading, by Maureen Corrigan. Corrigan is an English professor and the book reviewer for Fresh Air. I often disagree with her reviews, but found her book interesting (it might not quite be a memoir, but I decided to put it in that category). She focuses on three themes in books that have meant a lot to her: (1) the notion that family dramas/epics of caretaking are the women's version of extreme adventure stories favored by men, (2) the idea that mysteries are one of the few genres of fiction that focus on the honor and details of work, and (3) Catholic martyr stories (this theme didn't resonate for me at all, so I have blanked out what the point was. Interesting if not earth-shattering.
Ordinary Girls, by Jaquira Diaz. This memoir feels like a lot of other memoirs I have read--girls' mother is a schizophrenic addict, father is a hustler and womanizer who lets their brother physically abuse the girls and doesn't seem to mind when the older girl (the author) continuously runs away, gets arrested, drops out of school, and drinks and uses drugs. Diaz was born in Puerto Rico, moved to Miami as a girl, and has obviously turned her life around. But I didn't find much new in her memoir.
Mysteries
The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides. This mystery has gotten a lot of hype, and I agree it's pretty good--although not perfect. Alicia is an artist who killed her beloved husband Gabriel and has not spoken in the six years since. She is confined to a mental hospital, where new staff therapist Theo (who got the job there primarily because he wanted to treat Alicia) is determined to get her to talk. From the beginning, the reader (or at least this reader) feels like there is something off about Theo, but the author still manages to surprise us with a twist near the end. Definitely worth reading.
The Thinnest Air, by Minka Kent. A woman married to a wealthy older man disappears in a Utah mountain town. Her sister investigates the case--why are sisters, daughters, friends always better able to solve a crime (while almost getting killed themselves) than the police? I'm tired of that particular plot.
The Museum of Desire, by J. Kellerman. Pretty typical Alex Delaware mystery.
The Tenant, by Katrina Engberg. A translated Danish mystery, quite complicated and featuring a rather tortured detective, sometimes likable, sometimes not.
Poetry
An American Sunrise, by Joy Harjo. Harjo is the latest Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that post. In introducing this book, Harjo explicitly links the Trail of Tears and the current treatment of migrants on the Southwestern border. Many of the poems in the book, which are interspersed with text passages that provide historic perspective, are, in my view, a form of resistance. Consider this one, for example:
“For Those Who Would Govern”
First question: Can you first govern yourself?
Second question: What is the state of your own household?
Third question: Do you have a proven record of community
service and compassionate acts?
Fourth question: Do you know the history and laws of your
principalities?
Fifth question: Do you follow sound principles? Look for
fresh vision to lift all the inhabitants of the land, including animals,
plants, elements, all who share this earth?
Sixth question: Are you owned by lawyers, bankers, insurance
agents, lobbyists, or other politicians, anyone else who would unfairly profit
by your decisions?
Seventh question: Do you have authority by the original
keepers of the lands, those who obey natural law and are in the service of the
lands on which you stand?
Wise questions that certainly would have screened out the current occupant of the White House. While I struggled with some of the poems (not unusual for me), I appreciated many others. Definitely worth picking up, even if you don't read every poem.
Young Adult
The Boy in the Black Suit, by Jason Reynolds. Reynolds is the new Library of Congress Ambassador
for Young People's Literature. Thus, I decided to read one of his novels. The Boy in the Black Suit is 17-year-old Matt, who works after school in the local funeral home. He is interested in observing how other people grieve, as he is still grieving his mother's death and his father is providing little help, having started drinking heavily and ended up in the hospital. At one funeral, he meets Love, whose grandmother recently died. Love and Mr. Ray, the undertaker, become good friends and supports for Matt, as he struggles to deal with his grief. Good book that should be helpful to kids struggling with grief.
One, by Sarah Crossan. My granddaughter had to read a novel in poetic form for her seventh-grade English class; she chose One and then recommended it to me. It's the story of conjoined twins, Grace and Tippi, who start attending school for the first time in as teens, make two amazing friends while facing scrutiny and ridicule from other classmates, and then face a health crisis when Grace's heart begins to fail. The poetic form seems like especially apropos to the exploration of identity that most of us cannot even imagine. I liked One a lot.
Favorite Passages
Women’s feats tend to be less Herculean and more Sisyphean
in nature.
Words can summon up a skyline from the dark; they can bring
back the people you loved and will always yearn for. They can inspire you with
possibilities you otherwise would have never imagined; they can fill your head
with misleading fantasies. They can give you back your seemingly seamless past
and place it right alongside your chaotic present.
Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading
“Break My Heart” (excerpts)
The heart is a fist.
It pockets prayer or holds rage.
It pockets prayer or holds rage.
It’s a timekeeper.
Music maker, or backstreet truth teller.
Music maker, or backstreet truth teller.
“How to Write a Poem in a Time of War” (excerpts)
He knew one day, far day, the grandchildren would return,
Generations later over slick highways, constructed over old
trails
Through walls of laws meant to hamper or destroy, over
stones
Bearing libraries of the winds.
He sang us back
To our
home place from which we were stolen
In
these smoky green hills.
Yes, begin here.
Joy Harjo, An American Sunrise
Saturday, February 1, 2020
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and Other January Reading
A new year, new books, some of them very good, some of them not worth writing about. But all in all, an interesting month.
The "Best of" List
I continued reading from the LitHub list of books on the most "best of" lists for 2019, and it was really a mixed bag. At the top of the list was a wonderful nonfiction title (maybe a memoir--not sure how to classify it) Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb. Gottlieb is a therapist who is gobsmacked when "Boyfriend," with whom she was planning a future, suddenly breaks up with her. She seeks a therapist (the process of finding someone who is highly regarded by peers without telling them it's for you was indicative of Gottlieb's humor, which suffuses the book) and ends up with "Wendell." The book recounts breakthroughs and speed bumps on Wendell's couch while also describing the work Gottlieb is doing with four of her patients. She offers insight into various therapeutic approaches and, at a more fundamental level, into human nature. I found a lot to think about, talk about, and enjoy in this book. Highly recommended.
At the other end of the enjoyment spectrum was On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, which was one of the two books at the top of that LitHub list, appearing on 21 lists (the other was Nickel Boys, which I read last year). Vuong is a poet, and much of the language in On Earth is graceful and moving. The story is framed as a letter from a son, Little Dog, now in his 20s, to his mother, who it seems likely could not actually read it, and conveys a seemingly random series of memories from his childhood. The parts that focused on the mother-son relationship and the lives of the women of the family in Vietnam before they immigrated were insightful and moving. But the teenage sexual relationship between Little Dog and a white boy in a position of economic power over Little Dog was so abusive and so graphically described that I trouble had reading those sections. In addition, all of the different memories didn't seem to actually add up to anything. So despite some positives, I did not enjoy this book and wouldn't recommend it to most people.
The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner (another novelist-poet), was interesting but not completely successful. Adam Gordon, a high school senior and champion debater, seems to be the protagonist. But he shares so much time with his parents--his father a psychologist focusing on "Lost boys, his mother a feminist scholar--and an "outsider" classmate that Adam and his friends manipulate mercilessly that I did not feel I got to know him well enough to understand what this book was supposed to be about. I've read reviews that purport to know (though they don't necessarily agree), so it may be that I do not understand enough about white male rage or "trauma, sex, paradox, magic" to comprehend this book. But whatever the reason, it fell flat for me.
As an almost-70 white American woman, I am not the intended audience for Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams, which is the story of a Jamaican British millennial journalist whose long-term boyfriend has recently broken up with her. While waiting for him to come to her senses, she dates some fairly hideous men and at work struggles with racism, frustration that her story ideas are rejected, too-frequent absences, and a totally unfounded accusation of sexual harassment. Things get so bad she's forced to move back in with her grandmother, which has both its ups and downs. The biggest plus in the midst of Queenie's breakdown is her group of three friends, nicknamed "The Corgis," who offer love and good advice (which she doesn't always heed). I appreciate the portrayal of day-to-day racism in Great Britain but I found Queenie's decisions so frustrating I often wanted to scream at her. Perhaps a typical Baby Boomer reaction to a millennial's stressors.
The Testaments is Margaret Atwood's follow-up to the classic The Handmaid's Tale. Because I only recently read The Handmaid's Tale, I didn't have the longstanding commitment to the book that made it hard for some readers to accept The Testaments. Consequently, I very much enjoyed the sequel's story focusing on three characters--Aunt Lydia, a young girl living in Canada who does not realize she is a famous child kidnapped from Gilead, and a Commander's daughter who is facing the prospect of marrying a repulsive older man and getting lost in the role of wife. It may not be as good as its predecessor, but it's plenty good!
Say Nothing, by Patrick Radden Keefe, has been been billed as a mystery about the death of a widowed Irish mother of ten during "The Troubles," but it's not really much of a mystery. It's more of a history of The Troubles from the perspective of a few of the participants. I took two main take-aways from the book: (1) Gerry Adams was a tool who denied his role in the IRA and managed to convince a lot of people that he was innocent of any violence and (2) the oral history project launched by a binational team of Irish and Americans (at Boston College) seemed like a good idea but was so ill-conceived it is mind-boggling. The book is a tad slow-moving but provides insight into the causes and consequences of political violence.
I generally don't care for short stories, and Orange World & Other Stories, by Karen Russell did not change my mind. Many of the stories involve elements of creepy "magical realism"-- the living and the dead interacting, a woman's body taken over by a Joshua tree, young mothers must nurse demons to save their babies. The one story I enjoyed was "The Tornado Auction," in which a lonely former tornado farmer buys a baby tornado to bring meaning back to his life. Weird but entertaining. The rest of the stories . . . not so much.
I wanted to like Miriam Toews' Women Talking, which is based on real events in a Mennonite community in which women and children were drugged and raped by the men of the community. Toews imagines eight women who meet in a barn to debate whether the women of the community should leave, rebel, or do nothing--and how their decision will impact their relationship with God; they invite the male schoolteacher, reviled as unmanly because he failed as a farmer, to take minutes. The book is supposedly those minutes. I found the book repetitive and, finally, dull. Not recommended.
Other January Reading
I really enjoyed Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, by Pam Houston. Houston shares how buying a ranch in the high country near Creede, Colorado, essentially saved her life. Part of the reason her life needed saving was the horrible abuse she suffered from her father and the lack of any kind of support from her mother. Somehow, caring for animals and doing the hard labor required to maintain a small ranch gave her solace and hope. I was less fond of a detailed description of the 2013 fire that came very close to her ranch. It presented a lot of information, with definitions of fire terms interspersed throughout the text, and just didn't flow like the rest of the book, which included many beautiful passages that made me stop to savor Houston's writing.
Thirty years ago, I used to read a lot of true crime. I read Fatal Vision, talked about it relentlessly, and went on a binge of Ann Rule-type books. So this month, I tried an Ann Rule book, Practice to Deceive, which focuses on a 2003 murder in Whitby, Washington. The book is not very satisfying, as Rule did not have access to the guilty parties and never uncovered a motive for the killing. This made me wonder how many cases a true crime writer starts working on before choosing one--if you choose the wrong one, years of research would go down the drain, or you end up with a mediocre book like this!
Everything Inside, by Edwidge Danticat, is an excellent collection of short stories, all involving characters with connections to Danticat's homeland of Haiti. The stories are mostly downers--in "Dosas," a woman helps her ex out financially when he tells her his new woman has been kidnapped, only to learn she's been scammed; "In the Old Days," a woman goes to visit the father she has never known only to find he died shortly before she arrives; a teenager with AIDS is given a worthless placebo in another story; and a man who survived being pushed from a boat en route from Haiti to the United States falls into a cement truck. Yes, the stories are hardly uplifting, but they're well crafted and worth reading.
Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living presents Krista Tippett's reflections following countless interviews with spiritual leaders, thinkers, and scientists on her radio program On Being. The work is organized around five "basic aspects of the human everyday . . . breeding grounds for wisdom": words, the body, love, faith, and hope. The book is hopeful, with many thought-provoking excerpts from interviews Tippett has conducted. All together, however, I felt like I might learn more by listening to old On Being programs.
My education was sorely lacking in terms of reading the classics, a fact I from time to time try to remedy. I don't think there's anything I need to say about Frankenstein, other than that I was surprised how much I liked it.
My YA book for the month was Dear Martin, by Nic Stone. Stone has admirable intentions--exploring racism, particularly police violence against African Americans, while also examining normal issues of teenage angst. While her protagonist, Justyce, an African American teenager, a senior at a private school with few African American students, is engaging, I don't think the book worked overall. The device of Justyce writing letters to Dr. King doesn't really go anywhere, and the dialogue often seems like a series of mini-lectures. Similar issues are explored much more skillfully in The Hate U Give.
Favorite Passages
Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof.
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
How do we become who we are in the world? We ask the world to teach us. But we have to ask with an open heart, with no idea what the answer will be.
There is love in these old logs and in RJ's workmanship and I can feel it every time I walk inside. We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us--it's as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we've slept, the kitchens where we've cooked, in the food we've prepared for the people we love and in the walls we've shaped with our hands.
Pam Houston, Deep Creek (and there are so many more!)
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Best of 2020
I read a LOT this year--228 books, perhaps the most ever for a year since leaving childhood behind. Getting into audio books has definitely increased my reading, since you can listen while cooking, doing a puzzle, playing a computer game, walking, driving, etc. I've read some very good books this year although I'm not feeling as strongly about the best novels as I did in 2016-2018. But that's not stopping me from making some "best of" picks.
Fiction
Feast Your Eyes, by Myla Goldberg. I will admit I picked this book over my two honorable mentions because it was more original. In fact, it was not like any other novel I have read, in that Goldberg structured it as an exhibit catalog written by the artist/photographer's daughter. It also incorporates excerpts from her mother's journal and interviews with people from her mother's past. The story that unfolds is a complex exploration of a problematic mother-daughter relationship, female friendship, and the life of an artist, both in terms of the economic challenges and the way in which the creative mind works. I loved Goldberg's first novel, Bee Season, and Feast Your Eyes is similar in its originality, its complexity, its insights into art, and its spot-on portrayal of a young female character, and yet wholly different.
Honorable Mention: The River, by Peter Heller and The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo. Still feeling unqualified to choose a best sci fi/speculative fiction, I would just say I thoroughly enjoyed The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi; Recursion, by Blake Crouch; and The Dreamers, by Karen Walker Thompson.
Oops--how could I have forgotten Olive, Again, by Elizabeth Strout? Loved it!
Mystery
Fiction
Feast Your Eyes, by Myla Goldberg. I will admit I picked this book over my two honorable mentions because it was more original. In fact, it was not like any other novel I have read, in that Goldberg structured it as an exhibit catalog written by the artist/photographer's daughter. It also incorporates excerpts from her mother's journal and interviews with people from her mother's past. The story that unfolds is a complex exploration of a problematic mother-daughter relationship, female friendship, and the life of an artist, both in terms of the economic challenges and the way in which the creative mind works. I loved Goldberg's first novel, Bee Season, and Feast Your Eyes is similar in its originality, its complexity, its insights into art, and its spot-on portrayal of a young female character, and yet wholly different.
Honorable Mention: The River, by Peter Heller and The Most Fun We Ever Had, by Claire Lombardo. Still feeling unqualified to choose a best sci fi/speculative fiction, I would just say I thoroughly enjoyed The Dispatcher, by John Scalzi; Recursion, by Blake Crouch; and The Dreamers, by Karen Walker Thompson.
Oops--how could I have forgotten Olive, Again, by Elizabeth Strout? Loved it!
Mystery
Odd Child Out, by Gilly Macmillan. Two British teenage boys, best friends, sneak out after dark; one ends up being fished from a canal. The other is in a state of shock, unable (or unwilling) to speak. As the police try to figure out what happened, the reader grapples with issues of adolescent friendship, childhood illness, immigration, and sexual violence.
Honorable Mention: Idaho, by Emily Ruskovich; Those People, by Louise Candlish; and Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman (Ruskovich and Candlish might not consider their books mysteries, but I wish more mysteries resembled them)
Nonfiction
Grace Will Lead Us Home, by Jennifer Berry Hawes. Hawes documents the horrific 2016 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC, and the aftermath for the survivors and families of the victims. The survivors were badly let down by their church and pastors in the aftermath and, while some victims' families were remarkable in their strength, others experienced conflict and estrangement, compounding their losses. The perpetrator's story is equally disturbing, since his radicalization seems to have occurred largely on line. While the book offers moments of uplift, it's mostly terribly sad.
Honorable Mention: Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson; If I Understood You Would I Have This Look on My Face? by Alan Alda; and Everything Happens for a Reason . . . And Other Lies I've Loved, by Kate Bowler, which gets a special award for leading me to the author's wonderful podcast (https://katebowler.com/everything-happens/).
YA
The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo. This may be the best book I read this year--I absolutely loved it. Acevedo, a former middle school English teacher, wrote the book as the poetry journal of the main character, high school student Xiomara. The writing is exquisite and the character's challenges as a teenager and the child of strict immigrant parents are presented with great empathy. It's a beautiful book. Here's one poetic excerpt (I love the Legos metaphor so much!):
Every time I think about Aman
poems build inside me
like I've been gifted a box of metaphor Legos
that I stack and stack and stack.
Honorable Mention: The Opposite of Always (my granddaughter's favorite), by Justin A. Reynolds, and Words in Deep Blue, by Cath Crowley
Poetry
Monument, by Natasha Trethewey. I read several poetry collections this year (yay me!) but some were a little too obtuse for my taste (shame on me!). Trethewey's poems chronicle the life experiences of life experiences of African Americans, especially African American women, from slavery to Hurricane Katrina. If the book only included the first stunning poem, it would be worthwhile; that poem is about the murder of Trethewey's mother by her stepfather and the things people say to her about this trauma ("Do you think your mother was weak for men?"). As a farm daughter, I loved these lines:
. . . Lord, bless those hands,
The harvesters. Bless the travelers who gather
Our food and those who grow it, clean it, cook it,
Who bring it to our tables. Bless the laborers
Whose faces we do not see--like the grl
My grandmother was, walking the rails home:
Bless us that we remember.
"Invocation, 1926"
Honorable Mention: Shout, by Laurie Halse Anderson
Favorite Passages
I loved so many passages in The Well-Read Black Girl, edited by Gloria Edim, that I'll just refer you to that review for a sampling: https://novelconversations.blogspot.com/2019/05/well-read-black-girl-edited-by-glory.html.
Perhaps related at some level to those passages is this one:
Sisters, drop
everything. Walk
away from the lake, leaning
on each other's shoulders
when you need
the support. Feel the contractions
of another truth ready
to be born: shame
turned
inside out
is rage.
Shout, by Laurie Halse Anderson
And, although it's hard to say this is a favorite of all favorites, I do appreciate some snark:
If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told it does, it appears that writing takes some away.
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend (the narrator's thought when she hears another writer say about her friend, "Now he's officially a dead white male")
Rounding out the Year of Reading
Fairly early in December, LitHub compiles a list of the books that landed on the most "best of" lists (https://lithub.com/the-ultimate-best-books-of-2019-list/); I immediately start perusing the list and asking myself, "Why haven't I read that . . . or that . . . or that?" So I start madly trying to get my hands on some of the books I haven't read (this continues through February); some prove to be worth it while others make me scratch my head. December's reading was definitely peppered with items from that list, as well as other random choices. Here are the more interesting titles from December.
Note: I read two books of poetry this month--The Tradition, by Jericho Brown and Hybrida, by Tina Chang. Both have some beautiful language and imagery but I find I have nothing intelligent to say about them, so . . .
Fiction
My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Korede is a well-respected nurse in a hospital in Nigeria. Her more beautiful and Instagram-obsessed sister Ayoola is a bit of a challenge, calling her from time to time to help clean up the mess that results when she kills her latest boyfriend. Then Ayoola starts dating a doctor from Korede's hospital, the doctor Korede just happens to have been in love with for ages. What is Korede going to do? The book is a satirical look at sibling relationships and social media--a quick look at reader reviews on Amazon shows that many people love this book. I enjoyed some of the humor but wasn't entirely won over by the absurdity of the situation.
Akin, by Emma Donoghue. An elderly man who is about to make a pilgrimage to his hometown in Europe learns that he is the sole relative available to provide temporary care to his 12-year-old great nephew. The boy's mother is in jail, his father and his paternal grandparents are dead, and the maternal grandmother with whom he has been living has just died. A social worker agrees to let the boy travel to Europe with the great uncle, and the book is he story of their "adventures." In some ways the book is endearing, as the simultaneous experience of investigating his mother's history and learning to cope with the young boy opens the old man's mind and heart. However, the situation is so ridiculously unfeasible (what social worker would go for this plan?) and the two characters make so many bad decisions (that's my kind way of saying they are obnoxious) that I became weary of the book about half way through.
Normal People, by Sally Rooney. Very near the top of the LitHub list (and a favorite of President Obama's for 2019) but not universally loved on GoodReads, Normal People is the story of a relationship between two bright teenagers, the wealthy loner Marianne and Connell, a member of the "in crowd" at school whose mother works for Marianne's family. The two start a secret sexual relationship that waxes and wanes as they go off to college and enter early adulthood. Although they are drawn to each other, they can't seem to establish a healthy relationship as they struggle with self-esteem issues and the need to please/impress their friend groups. This will probably seem weird, but the relationship reminded me of Rhett and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind. In the end, the author leaves the future of the relationship to our imaginations.
Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson. Also high on the LitHub list, Red at the Bone examines the effects of a teen pregnancy on two African American families, one successful, the other struggling. The book is told nonlinearly from the perspectives of the child Melody, her parents Aubrey and Iris, and her grandparents. Woodson goes back into the grandparents' memories of violent racist attacks on their family and the struggle to overcome, relates Aubrey and Iris's teen marriage and the sadness that persists as a result of Iris's rejection of both her daughter and her husband, and explores Melody's dating and friendships. While there is great sadness and pain, there is also uplift in the way in which Aubrey essentially became the child of Iris's parents and the love with which Melody was surrounded. And, of course, there is Woodson's exquisite prose, crafted to express five distinct voices. Definitely recommended.
Rules for Visiting, by Jessica Frances Kane. I really enjoyed this light book featuring May, a gardener at a college. When she gets an extra month of vacation from her job, she decides to use it visiting four old friends that she hasn't seen for years. Feeling herself not well-versed in friendship, she studies up on how visitors should behave. The resulting visits are awkward, funny, and sometimes touching. And there's a lot of information about plants. If it sounds silly, it is a bit--but it's a good silly.
Supper Club, by Lara Williams. This one was lower on the LitHub list, but I can't imagine how it got onto even four "best of 2019" lists. Maybe it's a millennial thing. The protagonist Roberta and friend Stevie, stuck in unrewarding jobs straight out of college, start a supper club for women in which they make elaborate dishes from foods they have obtained through dumpster diving. They eat until they feel sick, hoping to be able to take up more space in the male-dominated world in which they live (The Guardian described the supper club as a female version of Fight Club). This is an interesting, if somewhat nauseating, idea, but the supper club is only a piece of the story, which also deals with Roberta's dysfunctional childhood, rape, self-harm, and painful/bad relationships. Maybe this could all add up to something insightful, but for me, it does not.
The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami. At the heart of this novel, also lower down on the LitHub list, is the hit-and-run killing of Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant who owns a small restaurant in a small California desert town. His daughter Nora, a composer (not a career her parents would have chosen for her) believes the accident might have been a hate crime, and the investigation into this possibility provides a through thread for the novel. At the same time, through multiple narrators, Lalami explores the conflict between self-interest and doing the right thing, the longing for home, the particular stresses in immigrant families, the effects of violence/PTSD, and more. While some of the content and themes may seem to be particular to the immigrant experience, I found the author's insights equally applicable to all people. The author's skill in weaving together different perspectives and themes while keeping the narrative of the accident moving forward was impressive. Recommended.
Mystery
The Nanny, by Gilly Macmillan. Macmillan has written some very good mysteries. The Nanny is so-so. I found it predictable and also winced at the "bad mother" theme that seems to be common in recent mysteries.
How the Dead Speak, by Val McDermid. Years ago, I read a lot of Val McDermid. Then I decided she was getting too dark for me, so I stopped until about five years ago, when I started reading her newer series. I enjoyed several of them quite a bit. Sadly, I found How the Dead Speak, which is number 11 in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, somewhat dull, though you'd think dozens of children's bodies found in the yard of an orphanage would make for an interesting read. Perhaps it's because Tony and Carol aren't actually the main characters in the book. Perhaps it's because Tony is in prison, trying to use his psychological skills to help other inmates while avoiding getting beaten. Perhaps it's because there's a major coincidence that ties two cases together in an unbelievable way. This one just didn't do it for me.
Sci-Fi/Speculative Fiction
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. My friend Suzy, who is a big reader of sci-fi, recommended this book. Its structure is interesting, in that the bulk of the book is devoted to seven travellers telling their stories a la The Canterbury Tales. Because I am very bad at getting the gestalt of fictional worlds, here is a slightly edited version of Wikipedia's overview of the context: In the 29th century, the Hegemony of Man comprises thousands of planets connected by farcaser portals. The Hegemony maintains an uneasy alliance with the TecnoCore, a civilisation of AIs. Modified humans known as Ousters live in space stations and are in conflict with the Hegemony. Hyperion is a planet with no farcasters that is difficult to access without significant time dilation. It is home to structures known as the time Tombs, which are moving backward in time and guarded by a creature known as the Shrike. On the eve of an Ouster invasion of Hyperion, a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs has been organized. I found several of the pilgrims' tales to be very interesting; however, I was put off by not having a better understanding of the point of their pilgrimage and by the ending, which was an obvious indicator that there would be a sequel (which there was).
The Dreamers, by Karen Thompson Walker. In a small college town in California, people suddenly fall into a deep sleep. Some die, others just keep sleeping. In the fear engendered by the sleeping illness, people and institutions take drastic actions to try to prevent its spread and the reader experiences those actions through the eyes of various townspeople.Eventually, for no apparent reason, some people start to wake up, bringing with them memories of dreams they believe predict the future--and some seem to. Yet others of the dreams, while still perceived as images of the future, are actually forgotten events of the past. The book leaves us with many more questions than answers. My description does not do the book justice--it's highly entertaining and also thought-provoking.
Nonfiction
Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese Laymon. Kiese Laymon is an accomplished writer and educator. Reading his memoir about growing up in Mississippi and the long-term effects of abuse of varied types, pervasive violence, and racism makes one wonder how he has managed to achieve so much. Clearly, his success has not been easily won, as he has struggled with addictive behavior (exercise, eating, gambling), psychological issues, and persistent racism. He addresses the memoir to his mother, which is an act of courage, given that she was at the heart of many of the troubling aspects of his childhood (and she is still alive). Heavy is a courageous, troubling, and intense book that can be uncomfortable reading--but will worth the discomfort.
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About, edited by Michelle Filgate. I found it somewhat ironic to be reading this book in the last week of the year in which my mother died. There were certainly plenty of topics we did not talk about but reading the 15 essays in this collection made me feel like the pain and anger under those silences are fairly low key in comparison to what others have experienced. The parental failures to accept their children, to address their traumas, to be there recounted in some of the essays are heartrending, and one can understand how estrangement between parent and child happens. Other essays deal with silences that seem less significant to me; an NPR reviewer classified these as wanting to know "what to know what their moms were like before they were moms." Trying to unravel the mysteries of our parents' youth is certainly interesting but it's a silence of a different nature (believe me, as I am currently transcribing my grandmother's diaries, I have some questions about the family narrative, but I am not obsessed with finding answers). I don't think I had any major insights into my relationship with my mother (or my children) as a result of reading this book, but I did find it interesting.
YA
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green. Hank Green, brother of mega-popular YA author John Green, has created a fast-paced tale about graphic designer April May, who comes across a giant Transformer-like statue on a Manhattan street. She calls her videographer friend and they post a video about the statue on YouTube; when it turns out that these statues have appeared simultaneously in cities across the world, the video goes viral and April becomes a media star. The book deals with serious themes--fame/celebrity and their effect on people, how social media is changing culture, fear of the unknown and how it can be exploited, and more. The book is entertaining but the ending is clearly a set-up for a sequel (to be published in 2020), which is something I'm not fond of. Interestingly, my granddaughter couldn't get into the book while it's her best friend's all-time favorite.
Favorite Passages
His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid. The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body. And her heart--now thrumming strong and steady, against her father's chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life--that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat. And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else's dreams."
Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers
For too long we said nothing. There was something moving through me like a razor in my chest--I didn't know then if it was rage or sadness or fear. Maybe Iris felt it too because she moved closer to me, rested her hand on the back of my neck, and pressed her lips into my hair. I wanted more, though--a hug, a kindness whispered into my ear. I wanted her to tell me I was beautiful, that she didn't care what music played, that she loved me. I wanted her to laugh with me about the ridiculousness of garters and stockings.
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone (and very relevant to What My Mother and I Don't Talk About)
Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.
Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
Note: I read two books of poetry this month--The Tradition, by Jericho Brown and Hybrida, by Tina Chang. Both have some beautiful language and imagery but I find I have nothing intelligent to say about them, so . . .
Fiction
My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Korede is a well-respected nurse in a hospital in Nigeria. Her more beautiful and Instagram-obsessed sister Ayoola is a bit of a challenge, calling her from time to time to help clean up the mess that results when she kills her latest boyfriend. Then Ayoola starts dating a doctor from Korede's hospital, the doctor Korede just happens to have been in love with for ages. What is Korede going to do? The book is a satirical look at sibling relationships and social media--a quick look at reader reviews on Amazon shows that many people love this book. I enjoyed some of the humor but wasn't entirely won over by the absurdity of the situation.
Akin, by Emma Donoghue. An elderly man who is about to make a pilgrimage to his hometown in Europe learns that he is the sole relative available to provide temporary care to his 12-year-old great nephew. The boy's mother is in jail, his father and his paternal grandparents are dead, and the maternal grandmother with whom he has been living has just died. A social worker agrees to let the boy travel to Europe with the great uncle, and the book is he story of their "adventures." In some ways the book is endearing, as the simultaneous experience of investigating his mother's history and learning to cope with the young boy opens the old man's mind and heart. However, the situation is so ridiculously unfeasible (what social worker would go for this plan?) and the two characters make so many bad decisions (that's my kind way of saying they are obnoxious) that I became weary of the book about half way through.
Normal People, by Sally Rooney. Very near the top of the LitHub list (and a favorite of President Obama's for 2019) but not universally loved on GoodReads, Normal People is the story of a relationship between two bright teenagers, the wealthy loner Marianne and Connell, a member of the "in crowd" at school whose mother works for Marianne's family. The two start a secret sexual relationship that waxes and wanes as they go off to college and enter early adulthood. Although they are drawn to each other, they can't seem to establish a healthy relationship as they struggle with self-esteem issues and the need to please/impress their friend groups. This will probably seem weird, but the relationship reminded me of Rhett and Scarlett in Gone with the Wind. In the end, the author leaves the future of the relationship to our imaginations.
Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson. Also high on the LitHub list, Red at the Bone examines the effects of a teen pregnancy on two African American families, one successful, the other struggling. The book is told nonlinearly from the perspectives of the child Melody, her parents Aubrey and Iris, and her grandparents. Woodson goes back into the grandparents' memories of violent racist attacks on their family and the struggle to overcome, relates Aubrey and Iris's teen marriage and the sadness that persists as a result of Iris's rejection of both her daughter and her husband, and explores Melody's dating and friendships. While there is great sadness and pain, there is also uplift in the way in which Aubrey essentially became the child of Iris's parents and the love with which Melody was surrounded. And, of course, there is Woodson's exquisite prose, crafted to express five distinct voices. Definitely recommended.
Rules for Visiting, by Jessica Frances Kane. I really enjoyed this light book featuring May, a gardener at a college. When she gets an extra month of vacation from her job, she decides to use it visiting four old friends that she hasn't seen for years. Feeling herself not well-versed in friendship, she studies up on how visitors should behave. The resulting visits are awkward, funny, and sometimes touching. And there's a lot of information about plants. If it sounds silly, it is a bit--but it's a good silly.
Supper Club, by Lara Williams. This one was lower on the LitHub list, but I can't imagine how it got onto even four "best of 2019" lists. Maybe it's a millennial thing. The protagonist Roberta and friend Stevie, stuck in unrewarding jobs straight out of college, start a supper club for women in which they make elaborate dishes from foods they have obtained through dumpster diving. They eat until they feel sick, hoping to be able to take up more space in the male-dominated world in which they live (The Guardian described the supper club as a female version of Fight Club). This is an interesting, if somewhat nauseating, idea, but the supper club is only a piece of the story, which also deals with Roberta's dysfunctional childhood, rape, self-harm, and painful/bad relationships. Maybe this could all add up to something insightful, but for me, it does not.
The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami. At the heart of this novel, also lower down on the LitHub list, is the hit-and-run killing of Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant who owns a small restaurant in a small California desert town. His daughter Nora, a composer (not a career her parents would have chosen for her) believes the accident might have been a hate crime, and the investigation into this possibility provides a through thread for the novel. At the same time, through multiple narrators, Lalami explores the conflict between self-interest and doing the right thing, the longing for home, the particular stresses in immigrant families, the effects of violence/PTSD, and more. While some of the content and themes may seem to be particular to the immigrant experience, I found the author's insights equally applicable to all people. The author's skill in weaving together different perspectives and themes while keeping the narrative of the accident moving forward was impressive. Recommended.
Mystery
The Nanny, by Gilly Macmillan. Macmillan has written some very good mysteries. The Nanny is so-so. I found it predictable and also winced at the "bad mother" theme that seems to be common in recent mysteries.
How the Dead Speak, by Val McDermid. Years ago, I read a lot of Val McDermid. Then I decided she was getting too dark for me, so I stopped until about five years ago, when I started reading her newer series. I enjoyed several of them quite a bit. Sadly, I found How the Dead Speak, which is number 11 in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, somewhat dull, though you'd think dozens of children's bodies found in the yard of an orphanage would make for an interesting read. Perhaps it's because Tony and Carol aren't actually the main characters in the book. Perhaps it's because Tony is in prison, trying to use his psychological skills to help other inmates while avoiding getting beaten. Perhaps it's because there's a major coincidence that ties two cases together in an unbelievable way. This one just didn't do it for me.
Sci-Fi/Speculative Fiction
Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. My friend Suzy, who is a big reader of sci-fi, recommended this book. Its structure is interesting, in that the bulk of the book is devoted to seven travellers telling their stories a la The Canterbury Tales. Because I am very bad at getting the gestalt of fictional worlds, here is a slightly edited version of Wikipedia's overview of the context: In the 29th century, the Hegemony of Man comprises thousands of planets connected by farcaser portals. The Hegemony maintains an uneasy alliance with the TecnoCore, a civilisation of AIs. Modified humans known as Ousters live in space stations and are in conflict with the Hegemony. Hyperion is a planet with no farcasters that is difficult to access without significant time dilation. It is home to structures known as the time Tombs, which are moving backward in time and guarded by a creature known as the Shrike. On the eve of an Ouster invasion of Hyperion, a pilgrimage to the Time Tombs has been organized. I found several of the pilgrims' tales to be very interesting; however, I was put off by not having a better understanding of the point of their pilgrimage and by the ending, which was an obvious indicator that there would be a sequel (which there was).
The Dreamers, by Karen Thompson Walker. In a small college town in California, people suddenly fall into a deep sleep. Some die, others just keep sleeping. In the fear engendered by the sleeping illness, people and institutions take drastic actions to try to prevent its spread and the reader experiences those actions through the eyes of various townspeople.Eventually, for no apparent reason, some people start to wake up, bringing with them memories of dreams they believe predict the future--and some seem to. Yet others of the dreams, while still perceived as images of the future, are actually forgotten events of the past. The book leaves us with many more questions than answers. My description does not do the book justice--it's highly entertaining and also thought-provoking.
Nonfiction
Heavy: An American Memoir, by Kiese Laymon. Kiese Laymon is an accomplished writer and educator. Reading his memoir about growing up in Mississippi and the long-term effects of abuse of varied types, pervasive violence, and racism makes one wonder how he has managed to achieve so much. Clearly, his success has not been easily won, as he has struggled with addictive behavior (exercise, eating, gambling), psychological issues, and persistent racism. He addresses the memoir to his mother, which is an act of courage, given that she was at the heart of many of the troubling aspects of his childhood (and she is still alive). Heavy is a courageous, troubling, and intense book that can be uncomfortable reading--but will worth the discomfort.
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About, edited by Michelle Filgate. I found it somewhat ironic to be reading this book in the last week of the year in which my mother died. There were certainly plenty of topics we did not talk about but reading the 15 essays in this collection made me feel like the pain and anger under those silences are fairly low key in comparison to what others have experienced. The parental failures to accept their children, to address their traumas, to be there recounted in some of the essays are heartrending, and one can understand how estrangement between parent and child happens. Other essays deal with silences that seem less significant to me; an NPR reviewer classified these as wanting to know "what to know what their moms were like before they were moms." Trying to unravel the mysteries of our parents' youth is certainly interesting but it's a silence of a different nature (believe me, as I am currently transcribing my grandmother's diaries, I have some questions about the family narrative, but I am not obsessed with finding answers). I don't think I had any major insights into my relationship with my mother (or my children) as a result of reading this book, but I did find it interesting.
YA
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green. Hank Green, brother of mega-popular YA author John Green, has created a fast-paced tale about graphic designer April May, who comes across a giant Transformer-like statue on a Manhattan street. She calls her videographer friend and they post a video about the statue on YouTube; when it turns out that these statues have appeared simultaneously in cities across the world, the video goes viral and April becomes a media star. The book deals with serious themes--fame/celebrity and their effect on people, how social media is changing culture, fear of the unknown and how it can be exploited, and more. The book is entertaining but the ending is clearly a set-up for a sequel (to be published in 2020), which is something I'm not fond of. Interestingly, my granddaughter couldn't get into the book while it's her best friend's all-time favorite.
Favorite Passages
His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid. The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body. And her heart--now thrumming strong and steady, against her father's chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life--that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat. And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else's dreams."
Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers
For too long we said nothing. There was something moving through me like a razor in my chest--I didn't know then if it was rage or sadness or fear. Maybe Iris felt it too because she moved closer to me, rested her hand on the back of my neck, and pressed her lips into my hair. I wanted more, though--a hug, a kindness whispered into my ear. I wanted her to tell me I was beautiful, that she didn't care what music played, that she loved me. I wanted her to laugh with me about the ridiculousness of garters and stockings.
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone (and very relevant to What My Mother and I Don't Talk About)
Perhaps memory is not merely the preservation of a moment in the mind, but the process of repeatedly returning to it, carefully breaking it up in parts and assembling them again until we can make sense of what we remember.
Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
Tuesday, December 24, 2019
Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson
I have long admired Bryan Stevenson's work as the founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative and marveled at his fierce yet gentle demeanor. But I had never read his book until now--and it confirms that he is a true American hero. The book details his work on behalf of those treated unfairly in the criminal justice system, often because of racial discrimination, but also because they lacked the resources needed to receive a fair trial because they were poor, young, or disabled. The story of Walter McMillian, who was wrongly convicted of a murder (literally everyone involved with the investigation and prosecution lied) and sentenced to death, provides a through line for the book. Eventually, Stevenson was able to win McMillian's freedom, and he continued to assist McMillian after his release (as he and EJI have done for many).
Alternating with chapters about McMillian are chapters that delve into some of the issues with which Stevenson and the EJI have worked--sentencing and treatment of the mentally disabled or mentally ill, trying juveniles as adults and rendering death penalty or life without parole penalties in those cases, women who had stillbirths and were subsequently charged with murder, and more. Near the end of the book, he describes the decision to become in education programs to help people understand racial discrimination in the larger context of the African American experience in the United States with slavery, post-Reconstruction terrorism, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration being four phases of that experience. That work has resulted in the construction of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice; you can learn more about these educational projects at https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/.
The book can be difficult reading--I was crying on an airplane as I read earlier today--but it should be read by everyone, particularly those who think that our justice system operates well. Highly recommended.
Favorite passages:
The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of hope makes one strong.
I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
Alternating with chapters about McMillian are chapters that delve into some of the issues with which Stevenson and the EJI have worked--sentencing and treatment of the mentally disabled or mentally ill, trying juveniles as adults and rendering death penalty or life without parole penalties in those cases, women who had stillbirths and were subsequently charged with murder, and more. Near the end of the book, he describes the decision to become in education programs to help people understand racial discrimination in the larger context of the African American experience in the United States with slavery, post-Reconstruction terrorism, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration being four phases of that experience. That work has resulted in the construction of the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice; you can learn more about these educational projects at https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/.
The book can be difficult reading--I was crying on an airplane as I read earlier today--but it should be read by everyone, particularly those who think that our justice system operates well. Highly recommended.
Favorite passages:
The kind of hope that creates a willingness to position oneself in a hopeless place and be a witness, that allows one to believe in a better future, even in the face of hope makes one strong.
I guess I'd always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we're fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we're shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
Monday, December 2, 2019
Thankful for Good November Reading
I read a lot in November—partly because I have had a cold that won’t quit and have been reading while lying around—and enjoyed a surprising number of the books read. I still read some titles I ended up sneering at, but in the spirit of the holidays, I've decided not to deal with them here.
Fiction
Lake Success, by Gary Shteyngart. Hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen, plagued by an SEC investigation and unable to cope with his three-year-old's autism diagnosis, takes off on a Greyhound bus in search of his college girlfriend, leaving his much younger wife Seema to cope with their son, her immigrant parents, and the SEC. Barry's experiences as he lurches across he country might teach a better man something important about himself or humanity, but Barry is not the reflective type. Seema, on the other hand, grows in her Barry-free time, finding ways to encourage their son to become a functioning human being. This book was my first by Shteyngart, but it won't be my last.
Searching for Sylvie Lee, by Jean Kwok. Sylvie Lee is the older daughter of Chinese immigrants to the United States who spent the first 9 years of her life living in the Netherlands with her grandmother and an aunt. After travelling back to the Netherlands to be with her dying grandmother, she disappears, and her younger (and much less accomplished) sister Amy travels to Europe to try to find her. As Amy searches for her sister, she uncovers family history that has been held secret for decades. The story is told asynchronously from the viewpoints of Sylvie, Amy, and their mother; as the climax approaches, we begin to sense what may have happened, but there is still a bit of a twist at the end. An engrossing family drama.
Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue. Cameroonian immigrant Jende thinks he has landed his dream job driving for Lehman Brothers executive Clark. Jende's wife Neni and their son have joined him in the United States, and she is going to school and expecting their second child. Despite the challenges of being an immigrant in the United States, they believe they are on their way. Then the great recession hits, and Jende loses his job and his somewhat trumped-up asylum request. As his family struggles, so does Clark's family, as dreams at many levels (people might have to start flying coach!) are crushed. What makes this book different from so many other immigrant stories (SPOILER) is that Jende, over Neni's objections, decides the family should return to Cameroon.
The Confession Club, by Elizabeth Berg. This is Berg's third feel-good book set in Mason, Missouri. The center of this story is a group of women who meet regularly to eat and confess to each other their misdeeds and regrets. Several characters from the previous two books reappear with new problems to solve, but all ends happily. It's corny but charming.
Nonfiction
Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams. Williams is brilliant, a marvelous writer, and an environmental advocate. While reading Erosion, I occasionally felt I had read the same environmental arguments in her book about the national parks, but her writing about the reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments reminded me of the destructiveness of the Trump Administration (so much keeps happening that you forget the outrages of first two years) and the utter lack of understanding of the indigenous people's histories. Her essay on her brother's suicide is terribly raw and moving, beautiful in its grief. The book is not uniformly great, but there's enough that is to make it worthwhile.
Eat Joy: Stories and Comfort Food, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett. This collection brings together writings (and recipes) from a variety of well-known authors, who describe a moment in their lives when food was important. The title is somewhat misleading, as many of the stories have more to do with sadness than joy--dead fathers abound (Edwidge Danticat's essay about sharing rice with her dying father is perhaps my favorite)--but the pieces are nonetheless rewarding. And it's somewhat shocking what horrible food some authors lived on (General Tso's tofu, anyone?).
To Obama, with Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope, by Jeanne Marie Laskas. Every day of his presidency, Barack Obama read 10 letters from constituents, sometimes replying with handwritten notes, other times leaving directions for staff to investigate and respond. Selecting these letters was only a small part of the work of the Office of Presidential Correspondence, and Laskas gives us insight into what that work involved, its rewards and its challenges (the office received a lot of what were termed Red Dot letters, those that suggested an emergency in progress, whether self-harm or violence against others, and under protocol had to be responded to with assistance within 24 hours). Laskas talked to a number of people whose letters made it into 10LAD, examining how writing the letter and getting a response affected them. She also talked to President Obama about how the letters affected him. He told her, "If we duplicate enough of those moments, enough of those interactions, enough of those shared stories, over time we get better at this thing called democracy. And that is something that all of us have the capacity to do. That's not the job of the president. That's not the job of a bunch of professional policy makers. It's the job of citizens." Of course, the letters and the President's responses are the soul of the book--it's good to be reminded how angry people were in 2008 (and interesting to see that Obama often argued with accusations made against him). To Obama may not be the deepest book written about his historic administration, but it's an enjoyable one.
Mysteries
Those People by Louise Candlish. Candlish's work reminds me of the novels of Liane Moriarty--both skewer the smug self-satisfaction of the upper middle class and do it in a way that is both creepy and humorous. The fact that Those People includes police interviews with people in the neighborhood where the book is set makes this title even more reminiscent of Moriarty's Big Little Lies. In Those People, a lovely suburban neighborhood near London is disrupted when a lower class gent inherits a house on the block. He and his female partner immediately offend by playing heavy metal at deafness-causing levels, parking a variety of junky vehicles on the street and in their yard, and starting construction projects that promise to be protracted. Then the scaffolding required for one of the projects collapses, killing someone. Was it an accident, negligence, sabotage? Relationships break down as the police investigate. It's entertaining and somewhat mysterious.
Favorite Passages:
Whatever I know as a woman about spirituality, I have learned from my body encountering Earth. Soul and soil are not separate. Neither is wind and spirit, nor water and tears. We are eroding and evolving at once, like the red rock landscape before me. Our grief is our love. Our love will be our undoing as we quietly disengage from the collective madness of the patriarchal mind that says aggression is the way forward.
Erosion, by Terry Tempest Williams
Election Results
An Abecedarian
A shuffle of slippers awakes me. I arise from my
bed. Mom looks at me through tearstained cheeks. "Honey, she lost.
Clinton lost." I squeeze my eyes shut. I can't even pretend to suppress the
dry sob that
echoes in my throat. Someone
fear-driven will be the head of this
glorious nation, my
home country. How could we have done this?
I convince myself to get up. The days are now numbered until
January 20th, that dreaded day when our true leader is
kicked out, no
longer in the position to
make our country the place we
need it to be. Right now,
only Obama can make me feel better, so I
press the Home button on my iPad to watch his speeches.
Quiet tears leak down my face, a whispered
reminder: my Mexican, Asian, and Muslim friends may
soon be leaving me, all because of
Trump, who can't even begin to
understand the rest of the world's point of
view. I thought I
would be angry. Instead, I'm sad that he's brainwashed America with his
xenophobia-ridden lies. I turn back to Obama,
yearning for everything and nothing at the same time. I tell myself.
"Zoe. We can get through this."
Zoe Ruff, age 13, in a letter to President Obama
Fiction
Lake Success, by Gary Shteyngart. Hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen, plagued by an SEC investigation and unable to cope with his three-year-old's autism diagnosis, takes off on a Greyhound bus in search of his college girlfriend, leaving his much younger wife Seema to cope with their son, her immigrant parents, and the SEC. Barry's experiences as he lurches across he country might teach a better man something important about himself or humanity, but Barry is not the reflective type. Seema, on the other hand, grows in her Barry-free time, finding ways to encourage their son to become a functioning human being. This book was my first by Shteyngart, but it won't be my last.
Searching for Sylvie Lee, by Jean Kwok. Sylvie Lee is the older daughter of Chinese immigrants to the United States who spent the first 9 years of her life living in the Netherlands with her grandmother and an aunt. After travelling back to the Netherlands to be with her dying grandmother, she disappears, and her younger (and much less accomplished) sister Amy travels to Europe to try to find her. As Amy searches for her sister, she uncovers family history that has been held secret for decades. The story is told asynchronously from the viewpoints of Sylvie, Amy, and their mother; as the climax approaches, we begin to sense what may have happened, but there is still a bit of a twist at the end. An engrossing family drama.
Behold the Dreamers, by Imbolo Mbue. Cameroonian immigrant Jende thinks he has landed his dream job driving for Lehman Brothers executive Clark. Jende's wife Neni and their son have joined him in the United States, and she is going to school and expecting their second child. Despite the challenges of being an immigrant in the United States, they believe they are on their way. Then the great recession hits, and Jende loses his job and his somewhat trumped-up asylum request. As his family struggles, so does Clark's family, as dreams at many levels (people might have to start flying coach!) are crushed. What makes this book different from so many other immigrant stories (SPOILER) is that Jende, over Neni's objections, decides the family should return to Cameroon.
The Confession Club, by Elizabeth Berg. This is Berg's third feel-good book set in Mason, Missouri. The center of this story is a group of women who meet regularly to eat and confess to each other their misdeeds and regrets. Several characters from the previous two books reappear with new problems to solve, but all ends happily. It's corny but charming.
Nonfiction
Erosion: Essays of Undoing, by Terry Tempest Williams. Williams is brilliant, a marvelous writer, and an environmental advocate. While reading Erosion, I occasionally felt I had read the same environmental arguments in her book about the national parks, but her writing about the reduction of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments reminded me of the destructiveness of the Trump Administration (so much keeps happening that you forget the outrages of first two years) and the utter lack of understanding of the indigenous people's histories. Her essay on her brother's suicide is terribly raw and moving, beautiful in its grief. The book is not uniformly great, but there's enough that is to make it worthwhile.
Eat Joy: Stories and Comfort Food, edited by Natalie Eve Garrett. This collection brings together writings (and recipes) from a variety of well-known authors, who describe a moment in their lives when food was important. The title is somewhat misleading, as many of the stories have more to do with sadness than joy--dead fathers abound (Edwidge Danticat's essay about sharing rice with her dying father is perhaps my favorite)--but the pieces are nonetheless rewarding. And it's somewhat shocking what horrible food some authors lived on (General Tso's tofu, anyone?).
To Obama, with Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope, by Jeanne Marie Laskas. Every day of his presidency, Barack Obama read 10 letters from constituents, sometimes replying with handwritten notes, other times leaving directions for staff to investigate and respond. Selecting these letters was only a small part of the work of the Office of Presidential Correspondence, and Laskas gives us insight into what that work involved, its rewards and its challenges (the office received a lot of what were termed Red Dot letters, those that suggested an emergency in progress, whether self-harm or violence against others, and under protocol had to be responded to with assistance within 24 hours). Laskas talked to a number of people whose letters made it into 10LAD, examining how writing the letter and getting a response affected them. She also talked to President Obama about how the letters affected him. He told her, "If we duplicate enough of those moments, enough of those interactions, enough of those shared stories, over time we get better at this thing called democracy. And that is something that all of us have the capacity to do. That's not the job of the president. That's not the job of a bunch of professional policy makers. It's the job of citizens." Of course, the letters and the President's responses are the soul of the book--it's good to be reminded how angry people were in 2008 (and interesting to see that Obama often argued with accusations made against him). To Obama may not be the deepest book written about his historic administration, but it's an enjoyable one.
Mysteries
Those People by Louise Candlish. Candlish's work reminds me of the novels of Liane Moriarty--both skewer the smug self-satisfaction of the upper middle class and do it in a way that is both creepy and humorous. The fact that Those People includes police interviews with people in the neighborhood where the book is set makes this title even more reminiscent of Moriarty's Big Little Lies. In Those People, a lovely suburban neighborhood near London is disrupted when a lower class gent inherits a house on the block. He and his female partner immediately offend by playing heavy metal at deafness-causing levels, parking a variety of junky vehicles on the street and in their yard, and starting construction projects that promise to be protracted. Then the scaffolding required for one of the projects collapses, killing someone. Was it an accident, negligence, sabotage? Relationships break down as the police investigate. It's entertaining and somewhat mysterious.
Favorite Passages:
Whatever I know as a woman about spirituality, I have learned from my body encountering Earth. Soul and soil are not separate. Neither is wind and spirit, nor water and tears. We are eroding and evolving at once, like the red rock landscape before me. Our grief is our love. Our love will be our undoing as we quietly disengage from the collective madness of the patriarchal mind that says aggression is the way forward.
Erosion, by Terry Tempest Williams
Election Results
An Abecedarian
A shuffle of slippers awakes me. I arise from my
bed. Mom looks at me through tearstained cheeks. "Honey, she lost.
Clinton lost." I squeeze my eyes shut. I can't even pretend to suppress the
dry sob that
echoes in my throat. Someone
fear-driven will be the head of this
glorious nation, my
home country. How could we have done this?
I convince myself to get up. The days are now numbered until
January 20th, that dreaded day when our true leader is
kicked out, no
longer in the position to
make our country the place we
need it to be. Right now,
only Obama can make me feel better, so I
press the Home button on my iPad to watch his speeches.
Quiet tears leak down my face, a whispered
reminder: my Mexican, Asian, and Muslim friends may
soon be leaving me, all because of
Trump, who can't even begin to
understand the rest of the world's point of
view. I thought I
would be angry. Instead, I'm sad that he's brainwashed America with his
xenophobia-ridden lies. I turn back to Obama,
yearning for everything and nothing at the same time. I tell myself.
"Zoe. We can get through this."
Zoe Ruff, age 13, in a letter to President Obama
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