Olga Dies Dreaming and Other Stranger Books

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

Fiction

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

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

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

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

Mysteries

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

Fantasy/Science Fiction

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

Favorite Passages:

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

--Alaya Dawn Johnson, Trouble the Saints

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

--Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

    

A Spot of Bother in Late April

 Fiction

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

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

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

Mysteries/Thrillers

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

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

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

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

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

Young Adult

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

Nonfiction

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

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

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

Poetry

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

Favorite Passages

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

--Bernardine Evaristo, in Manifesto

Open House
by Colm Toibin

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Candy House and More Early April Reading

 Fiction

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

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

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

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

Mysteries/Thrillers

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

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

Nonfiction

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

Favorite Passages:

Without a story, it's all just information.

Jennifer Egan

How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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

Favorite passages:

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

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

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

Damnation Spring--a Title for the Season

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

Fiction

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

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

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

Mysteries/Thrillers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crossroads, The Anomaly, and Some Great Feminist Poetry

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

Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

Short Stories

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

Mysteries/Thrillers

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

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

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

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

Poetry

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

Favorite Passages

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

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

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

Herve Le Tellier, in The Anomaly

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

Jonathan Franzen, in Crossroads

. . . There are many poems 

about the seasons, less about the time it takes 

to bury another child. It's true--

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

Read Until You Understand and Other February Reading

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

Fiction

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

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

Mystery/Thriller

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

Science Fiction

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

Nonfiction

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

Favorite Passages

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

    --  Farah Jasmine Griffin, in Read Until You Understand

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

    --  Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun