Category: Books

This year it felt like I was making great headway on the Booker. Prize long-list.  At one point it even felt like I might finish all the books before the short-list was announced.  Considering that I had read none of the long-listed titles before the announcement, that was probably unlikely, and this proved to be the case.  As the date of the short-list announcement approached, I realized that I would be far from finished, yet I still fully intended to write a post listing and rating the books I had read. This is not due to any pretensions that my opinion matters in the scheme of book prizes, or anything really, merely an exercise in pursuit of mental clarity.

 

However I found myself slowing down and unable to corral my thoughts.  

The short-list was announced (above in title order).  I was simultaneously thrilled to see that four of the books I had read made the cut and frustrated that I had failed to write.   I thought the opportunity was over.  Then I realized it wasn't.  I still like the books I like.  In the end, I think it will be interesting, to me at least, and since this is my blog nothing else matters, to note my own comparisons, ratings and thinking on the matter

 

Still it took me over a week to get myself to a point where I felt I had energy enough for my brain to work in a somewhat coherent matter and then another week to actually get words to take shape.  That is just the way my life rolls at the moment.  Hopefully my brain and I will get through this intact.

 

So what did I read?  Before the short-list was announced I had finished seven novels on the long list, and was in the middle of an eighth.  I have since finished the eighth, but this post is only about those initial seven novels.

 

 

These are the novels, shown above in order of my preference, from first (Small Things) to last (Booth).  I thoroughly enjoyed all the books except one.  Even though I had not read the entire list, I thought my top three were strong short-list contenders and I was rather on the fence about the fourth, Glory.  I found that rating these books was very difficult because they are all quite strong and the distinctions that make one book more meaningful than another are often minute.  

 

And now my thoughts, in reverse order.

 

7. Karen Joy Fowler:  Booth.  This was the third Booker-nominated book I read.  It was, and continues to be, the least in my estimation by a rather wide margin.    I suppose what I struggled with the most was that there was little that was literary about this book, other than its intentions perhaps.  Booth is about the Booth family, the family of the infamous John Wilkes, and the times that led up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  Ostensibly it is supposed to be about how the forces of the time and culture shaped the outcome and how the family itself both contributed to, and dealt with, the aftermath of President Lincoln's assassination.  The author has stated that she wanted to write about how a family deals with their own culpability and all of the questions of might-have-been or could-have-done. She has also spoken about her own struggles with current political turmoil in American life and her attempt to reconcile her feelings through writing this novel set in another time of great political and social turmoil.  In fact there is no shortage of interesting ideas and big questions in this novel. The problem is that these ideas are dealt with in a rather heavy and plodding way with conventional language and really rather pedestrian prose. They remain, somehow, "ideas that we are supposed to address" rather than something seamlessly revealed in the story itself.  This novel captured me with neither literary allusions that opened new insights or a story that captured my imagination.  

 

6. Leila Mottley: Nightcrawling.  This novel, based on a real-life case of institutional misconduct, was a fascinating, thought-provoking, enlightening and thoroughly enjoyable read, even if its subject matter is ultimately upsetting to my own comfortable middle-class illusions.This is the story of Kiara, a seventeen year old girl who lives alone with her older brother following the death of her father from cancer, possibly exacerbated by his own sojourn in prison, and her mother's incarceration following the drowning of a baby sister due to neglect.  Her brother is a talentless wanna-be rapper who has abandoned caring for her in pursuit of his dreams.  Kiara also serves as babysitter and ultimately the primary caregiver for a nine year old boy whose mother is a junkie. She is a girl with no options.  Faced with a tremendous rent increase and a series of happenstances, Kiara drifts into prostitution and quickly finds herself in a situation from which she cannot extricate herself.  The writing here is brilliant, and Mottley, who is really a teenager herself, captures the combination of innocence and scathing bitterness that define the world of her protagonist.  The action and the feelings are often hyperbolic, but to me this both works for and against the novel.  It gives a sense of urgency and loss to the story, and it captures completely the way a teenager, a teenager who has seen far too much of  the bitterest side of the world, deals with what she sees around her.  Hyperbole and teenage angst go hand in hand.   The  amped up emotion however is a dual edged sword; it is both a strength in terms of drawing the reader into Kiara's mind and heart, and a profound weakness, because there is no way to delineate issues, no way build emphasis. When everything is overwrought, there is little room for nuance or clarity.  I am grateful for having read/heard in my mind this voice, but at the same time there were times when the story would have had even more power had a little more distance been maintained.  I do recommend this powerful novel, and Mottley is a rising talent.  I hope to read more from her in the future.

 

5. Hernan Diaz: Trust.  I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel, and it has remained on my mind but I give it more points for ideas than for actual execution.   Trust is a novel written in two parts, or is it four parts? There are actually four short novellas which make up the novel, all of which revolve around the story of a Wall Street Tycoon and his wife during the time leading up to the crash of 1929.  But there are actually two parts to this novel, and the first two stories are divided from the second two stories by a rather significant shift in point of view, and in fact reflect a greater cultural shift, although the stories are not necessarily told in strictly linear order.  Sounds complex no?  

 

The novel opens with a short, roughly 100 page novella written in the style of Wharton, Wharton with a perhaps a touch of Theodore Dreiser thrown in, about the life of a wealthy New York financier and his wife.  I found it quite interesting and engaging, but flawed.  It is not completely successful, either as a nineteenth-century novel, or as a modern pastiche of a nineteenth century novel. But that is, at least in part, the point.  The second novella tells a very similar story of a Wall Street tycoon and the mental instability of his wife.   The third version of this story is told by another narrator, Ida Partenza, who tells the story of how she wrote the second novella, combining this with the story of her own life and choice to become a writer.  In Ida's novel we make a transition toward the a more modern approach in novels, and from this point Trust becomes a far more engaging read.  The reader might wonder why the author did not interleave these stories in alternating chapters, but I do think the linear progression and delineation is part of the story, even if I feel the technique was not entirely successful.  Diaz is giving us a deconstruction of the novel which is simultaneously a deconstruction of the myth of the American dream and the stories we tell ourselves.  Diaz deconstructs not only the division between art and science and art and finance but also the divide between the stories we tell and the realities we portray, especially as they concern capitalism, free markets, the idea of the self-made man, and the common good,  as well as the even bigger question of trust.  The reader trusts the writer, must trust the story being told, must trust the myth on which a society is being built.  But this novel consistently calls that trust into question and raises the issue not only of who gets to write the stories but of how and why the story is written.  This grand scheme also references all kinds of side issues around which this novel revolves:  finance and markets, the suppression and co-opting of women's ideas and voices, and an interesting discussion of music as well as art.  In once sense, I can also see this novel as a musical composition in four movements.  I need to follow that idea a bit further, which means of course that I will be reading this novel again.

 

4. NoViolet Bulawayo: Glory.  Glory is a viciously funny satire that seeks to portray the events in Zimbabwe following the coup which deposed Robert Mugabe.  Despite my laughter, I admired it more than I actually enjoyed reading it.  The author has stated that she initially considered writing non-fiction or perhaps more conventional novel but eventually decided to write something more satirical taking her inspiration George Orwell's Animal Farm and utilizing local animal-based mythologies.   I can perfectly understand the choice of Orwellian satire, and although I do feel that Bulawayo has successfully updated the Orwellian tradition for a perhaps younger, twenty-first century audience, writing a novel full of wit and humanity.  I do not think the novel quite measures up to the level of art seen in Orwell, other African writers such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’, or even some of the other writers on this list.  I also think that her use of the animals, the constant references to twitter, and the repetition of short sound bites have made the novel more of-the-moment and accessible, even if ultimately less profound as art.

 

3. Percival Everett: The Trees. This is a powerfully explicit and confrontational novel about lynching in the United States, specifically connecting our history of lynching and police violence against people of color, which the author explicitly links to genocide. 

Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over 100 years, no one notices. Where thee are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.

This is accomplished in a novel that successfully wraps a brutal expose in a cover of genre convention, in this case a crime procedural or detective novel.   Short chapters, snappy dialog, and laugh out loud stereotyping and humor lure the reader into its circle. The novel is outrageously funny while simultaneously being deeply unsettling.   In one heartbreaking section there is a list of names of the victims. It is a sobering list, coming as it does in the middle of the action, the impulse may be to skip over it, but instead one should take time with these names, google them, think about the implications. Everett does not pacify his reader with with pat answers or easy solutions.  In fact the novel questions the entire idea culpability for the past and the role of justice, of its necessity, of the way it makes us uncomfortable because it often defies morality, defies societal convention, societal secrets.   I did have some issues with this book, although not with its subject matter.  If anything Everett played to my own biases and understandings.  But I do think this is a pointedly inward looking and pointedly American novel. Although the need for justice is universal, and historically this need always erupts somewhere, somehow, into something deeply unpleasant, the novel does not feel as much universal but deeply specific.   Still it stays on my own short list because it is so brilliant at what it does.

 

2. Alan Garner: Treacle Walker. Treacle Walker is the story of a young boy of indeterminant age, Joe Coppock, who is convalescing at home, when he encounters Treacle Walker, a rag and bone man "able to cure all things except jealousy", which caused this reader think back to the etymology of the name treacle itself, which harkens back to Middle English as an antidote to venom, where it is derived through old French from Latin and Greek thērion or wild beast, a derivation aptly relevant throughout the course of this short book.   Treacle Walker is also probably the most elegant literary exploration of quantum mechanics I have ever read. As might be expected from that previous statement, there is a plot but it is follows a rather thin, definitely non-linear thread. I find the book thought provoking and thoroughly enchanting, but I also acknowledge that it may be difficult for many American readers as it is rife with colloquial language, references to British culture from the mid 20th century, and a heavy use of local (English) folktales and myths and literary traditions.  Still, it is worth the effort.  Alan Garner has written a novel that seems to capture the magic of reading.

 

Claire Keegan: Small Things Like These. Keegan's novel has already won the 2022 Orwell prize for political fiction. Set in Ireland in 1985, the story, on the surface, has all the makings of a sickly sweet holiday feel-good novel.  Christmas, Ireland, A protagonist who does the right thing and helps a girl in distress. And there are probably people who will read this short novel as just that, but it is so much more.  This is the story of Bill Furlong, the father of five daughters, a man who runs a successful coal and timber business, and also the child of an unwed mother who was taken in and helped by a widow who employed her as a domestic servant.  Bill, who is an introspective thoughtful man, who is already disquieted by the poverty he sees around him and the comfort displayed by the Catholic Church, is thrown into a deeper crisis when he visits the local convent to make a coal delivery and is shocked by the appalling physical condition in which some of the girls under the care of the nuns are treated.  Keegan captures this man, his history and his struggle, as well as that of his country and his church, in spare, elegant, pitch-perfect prose.  Not a word is wasted. Rarely does the reader come to know a character so deeply and thoroughly in such a short time.  It is a beautiful book, and yet one that does not pander to the reader with easy answers and a perfect ending except that Bill knows that his action is not an ending but a beginning, and not an easy one at that, but one upon which he has no choice but to embark.  

 

Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

 

I did so much in July.  None of it was exotic or exciting.  Mostly I just started doing things, the kinds of things that were once routine. Finally I am feeling like I am getting my feet back under myself and beginning to function in some way that feels like it is approaching normal.  I am still tired; occasionally I become temporarily frustrated, especially when I overtire myself and all my routines and plans crumble around me.  I do realize,  however, that I am tired because I am doing more, and this is a good thing, and my frustrations are alleviated.  There is nothing like getting your assumptions about your own independence knocked out of you. And yet at the sometimes it is necessary to stare upward from the bottom of the well before realize that "doing more" has nothing to do with the meaning or purpose of life.

 

But that does not mean I am not going to write a blog post. Nor does it mean that I will not admit that I did not lot read a lot of books in July.  I read. It is just finishing that was slowed, and it is ok to admit that, even to admit that I struggled with some of my reading. There was one book I loved, and one, more difficult, that I did not love, but the reading of it was still a good thing.  Alas I just noticed that I listed the first book, the one I love, in my last post, crediting it to June when I actually finished it on July 8th.

 

That leaves only one book to list here:

 

44.  Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

 

As. I've already stated, I struggled. I am quite aware that Poe is a seminal American author, and that much of the development of American Literature, are influenced by his work.  I am not just talking about mass or popular culture and our love of horror stories and tales of mysteries and the haunted house at the county fair.  His influence percolated into high culture as well.  I cannot deny that he was a great storyteller, or that he was brilliant, a genius, really.

 

I was plagued by the thought that he could really never be credited as being a fabulous wordsmith, or even at least to my mind, a great writer.  That is okay.  There are those who write beautifully but emptily, and those who capture our imaginations and even shape our culture but whose prose is pedantic at best.  Perhaps that is one of the downsides of working one's way doggedly through over a thousand pages of an author's work.  Most of the work is not great.  Even the great work could use editing, but as I also look at the some of the edited editions, I also see that much of Poe's genius gets edited out as well.  Oh we all know the stories.  

 

If I don't feel that Poe's poetry is great as poetry, it is certainly great in terms of its cultural influence.  I suspect that most Americans, especially those educated in this country, can quote at least some part of the Raven. Poe, was also a critic, and particularly a critic of the influence of the earlier poetic tradition America had inherited from Britain, and I do think his thoughts on the evolution of poetry are something he explored in his own writing.  He is also on the cusp, if not a pivotal influence, although this is nowhere near my own level of competence, in the changes in poetic form that were soon to occur, both in American and English poetry.  But I think his insight, and his obvious attempt to pursue it, were more astute than his craftsmanship.

 

In terms of the stories, I think the best of them have seeped into the popular mindset.  They have been edited and reprinted for readers of all ages.  They have been turned into movies.  Much as I disliked reading some of the stories, and thought they needed editing.  Poe tends to expound at length on distracting topics, and he repeats, again and again, the same tropes and conventions to the point of pedanticism.  But he is a brilliant storyteller. His stories are cryptograms, often historically funny as well as frightening,  Poe had great insight into the human psyche, and also a great understanding of how to create myths that pervade the mind of both the individual and the greater culture beyond.  In this, he reminds me of Dickens, although Dickens was by far the better artist.  And in his understanding of the motivations, fears, and actions of his characters, he reminds me also of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  But Tolstoy wrote his novels with great understanding of the human psyche, but also with great love and care for his characters.  Both he and Dostoyevsky were, again, far superior artists.  And although Dostoyevsky explored some of the darker impulses of the human mind, and did so with great insight, his novels seem almost naive compared to the darkness explored by Poe.  Perhaps here it is blessing that Poe's art does not bring the reader that sense of connection that Dostoyevsky does, because to do so would make the story unbearable.  

 

But enough of Poe.  I don't regret reading Poe, and he made me think of many things, including how little I understand Poe's writing and in fact that entire period in American Literature and its influence on the literature of today.

 

I do want to mention, briefly, What Strange Paradise.  It is a beautiful book and I loved it.  But it is also very dark, very sad, and has a very ambiguous and not hopeful ending.  It is the story of a 9 year old Syrian boy who follows his uncle onto a fishing vessel set to sail north with a load of refugees seeking asylum.  It is a rash decision and the boy, Amir, does not really understand what is happening, the pressures, or the consequences.  The boat flounders, and Amir is the only survivor among hundreds of refugees found dead on a beach.   The story is told, quite effectively, in alternating segments titled "Before" and "After".  In each we see the world, often as interpreted by a small child.  It can be quite devastating, and much of the story will bring up issues about bravery, desperation, hope, and fear, but also uncomfortable truths about cruelty, about the fleeting nature of outrage, and even kindness.  It is a novel that can be quite uncomfortable to the sensitive reader, as it is explores the limits of hope, and the reality of a comfortable world that may rise up in occasional moments of outrage, but us otherwise perfectly content to keep unpleasant truths, especially those we fear might affect our own security,  hidden behind barriers. It is a novel I will not soon forget.

 

 

 

One year of reading ends and another begins.  I am not going to list all the books I read in 2021 here, but I will include links to the previous monthly installments at the end of this post for those who just can't get enough.  This is the first year in many that I actually posted a reading list every month.  In fact, there may have been months when I believe that is all I posted.

 

I read more books in 2021 than I did in 2020, and in both years I read far more than my yearly average over previous years.  I hadn't really thought about this very much until I sat on the fringes of a conversation regarding reading, where the others involved noted that they had in fact read less than usual since the Covid-19 pandemic began.  I noted, to myself, that I had read substantially more, but didn't jump in because the conversation was actually far more interesting without my input, which would have served no purpose other than bragging rights.  

 

As for my own increased reading there were several factors involved.  To begin with, I had decided to read more in 2020, even before the pandemic shut-down began, and then, like many others, I went through a period of ennui where I was unable to read.  I overcame that however.  To some degree I simply. read more because I went out less; there were fewer social obligations to distract me.  I also have to admit that health issues may have contributed; it would be naive to deny this.  My television viewing also increased exponentially, and that I do blame on health struggles and lack of energy.  My heaviest television use occurred at those times of greatest listlessness.  

 

I also cut back on social media in many ways.  One would think that in a time of greater social isolation, greater social media would enhance one's sense of connectivity.  But that was not what I found.  Yes, zoom was a godsend and I have friends I zoom with, and friends I talk with regularly.  But otherwise it seemed to me that I found social media sites polarizing.  Pandemic shut-downs were hard enough for everyone, but there were times that I felt that the combination of the news and social media, especially combined with a lack of one-on-one human interaction, were more isolating, and made conversations and interactions, if anything, more high-strung and volatile, as if none of us could completely get out of our heads.  Books helped me with this.

 

At any rate, I have been happy to be a reader, and I still wish to see myself as a reader.  I have no regrets over any book I have read, no matter if it was difficult or mindlessly simple, no matter if I found myself agreeing with the author, or disagreeing vehemently.  Each and every book showed me some perspective on the world outside of my own, and often I was most surprised by the books I least expected to be surprised by. 

 

Still my plan is to read less in 2022.  My goal is 60 books, and I would be very happy if that is all I read.  I will also be happy if I read more, or even less.  I have other things I want to do with my time, and although those things do involve social engagement, I also find I have no desire to be out in the world as much as I was prior to 2020.  In short it is all an adjustment.  Who knows where it will all lead.

 

Note that already my reading was tapering off in December:  6 books, 5 of them fiction.  The one non-fiction book, Avrum Bluming's Estrogen Matters, was a reread.  I had read it the first time in April, so technically, although there are 140 books listed, that one was listed twice, for a total of 139 books.

 

135. Edwige Danticat: Claire of the Sea Light.

136. Alice Hoffman: The Marriage of Opposites.

137. Joy Jordan-Lake:  Under a Gilded Moon.

138. Avrum  Bluming: Estrogen Matters.

139. Louise Penny: Still Life.

140. Jean Stafford: Boston Adventure.

 

Edwige Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light takes place in Haiti in the seaside village of Ville Rose.  The center of the novel is the occasion of Claire Limye Lanme's 7th birthday and in many ways the action of the book weaves its way around this center, much like a circular maze, using Claire's story to tell the story of the village, its history, its residents, as well as the story of Claire herself.  In the first part of the book we get a fairly straight-forward explication of Claire's story up until the time of this birthday, and Claire closes out the novel, making a decision about her own place in this intricately woven web.  In between these two points, the story moves forward, backward, and often sideways, showing us the interconnected lives that make up this place, and which make up the underlying foundation on which Claire's life is built.  It is a fascinating, and often poetically told story.  Despite the name of the novel, Claire is not the main character, she is simply a point of light around which all these other stories come into focus and are told.  It is a beautiful and compelling novel, although the story line is often convoluted and will frustrate the less than focused reader.    It is as much the story of a place as of a person, and in fact the story of each person is as much the story of the place and the people that shaped them.  Claire initially seems as much an idea, a creature of mist and yearning as she seems a child, just because of the way the story focuses around her but not on her.   As the stories weave together, the reader also begins to see how Claire will, herself, become interwoven into the story of this place, and this place will be interwoven into her own story.

 

Alice Hoffman's The Marriage of Opposites also takes place in the Caribbean but it is an entirely different kind of novel, much more in the vein of classic historical fiction.  It is the story of Rachel Pomie Petit Pizarro, the mother of the painter Camille Pissarro, beginning with her childhood in the prosperous Jewish community in Saint Thomas and ending in France.  Hoffman paints a fascinating and occasionally maddening portrait of Rachel and through this rather good historical novel she also allows the reader to explore the precarious situation of women in early 19th century colonial life.  Rachel's stories, and her descriptions of Saint Thomas seem to flow from some of Pissarro's work.  I am certain this is intentional as Hoffman tries to weave together the little we know of Pissarro's family with what we do know of his work as an artist.  I found the story also fascinating because it explores the Jewish culture of St. Thomas, where there had been a strong sephardic Jewish community since 1700. Hoffman's description of the synagogue itself is particularly beautiful, blending a bit of magic with historical reality in the understanding and eyes of a child, the young Rachel. The telling drove me back down memory lane, allowing me to relive my own experience of visiting the synagogue of Congregation Beracha Veshalom Vegmiluth Hasadim in St Thomas, which is one of the oldest standing synagogue I have personally been to.  This one is the second oldest building built as a synagogue in the Untied states, having been built in 1832, and it is still in use. 

 

From there, and continuing in the historical fiction vein, I read Joy Jordan Lake's Under a Gilded Moon, which concerns the Vanderbilts and the building of  the Biltmore Estate in nearby Asheville, North Carolina.  This was a book club choice, I believe partially chosen because it is about local, or at least regional history.  The novel shows the sharp dichotomy between the Vanderbilts, including their friends and kin, and their attitudes toward the poorer residents of the region. I felt it was particularly good at describing the beauty of the scenery. It suffered from attempting to add in too many "real people" and "real places", as if somehow it had to be a survey of all that was once here, at the expense of the story line.  It was clear a great deal of research went into the novel but the detail overwhelmed the story, resulting in inconsistently tenuous connections and gaps in the plot.  Still the novel did open a discussion into the roots of the divisions and attitudes, between rich and poor, attitudes that we still struggle with to this day.

 

For my other book group, i reread Still Life, the first of Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache novels.  I enjoyed reading it the second time as much as I had the first, which makes me think I will enjoy it again and again, and it was good, from this perspective to see how many of the characters who might take center stage in later novels are introduced here.  

 

Lastly I read Jean Stafford's early novel Boston Adventure, which proved to be a difficult choice.  The novel itself was good although at times tedious.  It is a carefully painted and studied portrait of Boston Society in the mid 20th century told from the perspective of an outsider, a poor girl, who is brought into the circle but who is never really a part of it.  In many ways it is a fascinating study of social isolation, perhaps not the best thing to read when our entire culture has been experimenting with a different vein of social isolation.  It is also a fascinating study of the cruelty that is often contained in social "kindnesses", in the way that persons of one class or milieu often, in the name of "helping", create effective prisons without explicitly meaning to do so. It was a worthwhile novel, but not perhaps the best airplane reading, where I would have done better with one (or four) short frivolous novels.

 

Previous months:
January, February, March, April, May, June, July1 and July2, August, September, October, November.

 

 

 

Sometimes life just gets the better of us, despite all of our good intentions, despite all our efforts to bear up and soldier on, and sometimes there is no recourse, or perhaps no healthy recourse, other than to allow oneself to be caught in the tide, washing up wherever one will.

 

November was, in many ways, a difficult month.  During that last 10 days or so of radiation therapy I was just done, mentally exhausted perhaps more even than physically exhausted.   Although I had allowed myself to be sick, allowed myself to stay in bed as needed, allowed myself to shirk responsibility, I hadn't really allowed myself the option of wallowing, of hosting my own private pity party, of tossing myself headlong into escapism and grief.  And then November hit.

 

As you may recall, I ended October with a novel in Fern Michaels' Sisterhood series.  I went on to open November with a binge-read, finishing the first nine novels in the series over the course of twelve or so days. When I wasn't reading I wasn't doing much else either, other than flouncing about or hiding in bed.  I have no real regrets about that; I needed to allow ennui full access, allowing it to simply run its course and die from exhaustion.

 

In fact, were I not so generally listless and in need of escape, I might not have enjoyed these books as much as I did.  Michaels is a story-teller, not a writer, and the novels very much follow a simple formula.  This is the crime; this is the punishment; how does one then make the story work.  As I mentioned before, this is pure simple escapist and revenge fantasy and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.  They read like a literary equivalent of a Lifetime movie.  I would want to say Hallmark, but they get perhaps a little too gritty on the revenge side for that, at least in some of the volumes.  There is no nuance, no sophistication, no real character development, and yet they were exactly the escapist distraction I needed.

119. Fern Michaels: Weekend Warriors

120. Fern Michaels:  Payback.

121. Fern Michaels:  Vendetta

122.  Fern Michaels:  The Jury.

124. Fern Michaels: Sweet Revenge

125.  Fern Michaels:  Lethal Justice

126. Fern Michaels:  Free Fall.

127. Fern Michaels: Hide and Seek.

128. Fern Michaels:  Hokus Pokus.

 

If you were observant, you may have noticed a gap.  

 

Somewhere in the middle of that list, about the time of my last treatment, of ringing the bell, of celebrating the joy of finally being done, I threw myself into a literary novel, and a very good one at that.  It didn't hold, that focus, and I was back to fantasy fiction before I knew it, but enough of that.

 

123. Richard Powers:  Bewilderment.  I found this slim novel entrancing, moving, powerful, provocative, and bewildering.  I intend all of that in the very best way, but it also may have been slightly more than I was ready to deal with at the time.   It is the story of Thomas, an astrobiologist, who is raising his nine-year old son, Robin, following the death of his wife some years previously; but the novel is both more and less than one particular story line.  Thomas is thinly drawn, often rather one-dimensional, and also far too clueless, even for a trope. Sometimes too much weight is placed on Robin, not that children can't be wise beyond their years, or fragile in ways that we, as adults have long forgotten.  But the story is deeply affecting and even the sometime glib characterizations play an important role in this.  It is the story of a family struggling; it is a story of a struggling earth and the damage mankind is inflicting on it; it is a story of scientific ethics; it is an overtly political novel; it is an overtly humanistic novel.  In short it is a short novel that can be read on many levels in many ways, and that will both entrance some, myself included, and annoy others.   

 

I found  the tile of Bewilderment entirely apt.  Mostly it is exactly that, the story of our own bewilderment.  Thomas is a bewildered single father, struggling to deal with the needs of his son in the face of the expectations of society, neither of which he fully grasps; he is a man most comfortable with his science. Robin is a child probably somewhere on the spectrum, but his father wishes to avoid labels and drugs. Robin is preternaturally bright, a trait inherited from both of his parents, and emotionally unstable.  He is bewildered by humanity, by the learned behavior humanity embraces, especially as this behavior appears contradictory to the natural world Robin so keenly observes. Bewilderment is also portrayed in the glimpses we are given of the life of the mother, Alyssa, (A – Lyssa, or not-fractious) who fights against the destruction of the natural world and yet struggles to contain her own emotions and anger at said destruction.  Robin is very much the blossoming of the union of Thomas and Alyssa, neither of whom fit into the world completely, into something new — a new beginning, which alas does not survive the bewilderment of the world into which it is born.  I do believe there is a lesson in this, as well as the most telling lesson in this book, which is not the bewilderment of the primary characters, or the bewilderment of the natural world, which is ongoing, but the bewilderment of humanity at its own destructive tendencies.  In this novel the complacency, ignorance, and willful blindness are their own kind of bewilderment, a bewilderment of unseen consequences.  What choice does one make when the alternatives are bewilderment or retreat into a comforting complacency? Do we chose bewilderment? Or would we rather be comfortably numb? Can we learn? Or is it already too late?  Will we change, or will we retreat into our own solace, our own grief, our own bubbles?  There are no real answers here, but despite all the big questions, there is quite a bit of humanity.

 

129. Heather Busch's  Why Cats Paint. This slim art book proved to be a humorous romp.  Yes, it is a book for cat lovers.  Yes it is about cats making messes with paint, as well as making messes with other things.  It is a brilliant satire of both the culture of cat lovers and the elitism of the art wold. A good reminder not to take oneself too seriously.

 

Having gotten all that out of my system, my reading settled down. Here is the remainder of the list.

 

130. Booker T. Washington: Up from Slavery.

131.  Maggie O'Farrell:  Hamnet.

132. Hillary Rodham Clinton: State of Terror.

133. Tommy Orange:  There, There

134.  W.E.B. DuBois: The Souls of Black Folk.

 

Although they are not sequential on the list, I am going to discuss Up From Slavery and The Souls of Black Folk together primarily because they have formed their own conversation in my thoughts.  I had heard of both authors of course but do not believe I had read either.  They should both be part of some essential syllabus that is required reading for what it means to be educated in America, along with the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.  In fact, I wish I had read them as a teenager, when I was reading both of the latter.  But I also realize that both men, Washington, and DuBois, write in ways that are not really accessible to teenagers today, and that we do not really teach historical context, historicity, or train young people in how ideas change and evolve, and how our own thoughts are changed by shifting tides of ideas and events that often really have little to do with the original context facing the writer of the words themselves.  I suppose I continue to hold onto the hope that such a world is possible. 

 

I found both books fascinating and equally valid but quite different.  DuBois does not agree with Washington's stance.  I am not certain Washington would have agreed with DuBois, but that is not the point.  I am also not convinced that Washington was an "Uncle Tom" and although I know what the term means, I also struggle with the idea that the Uncle Tom most of us know is the one portrayed in movies and on television, and that Uncle Tom is but a shadow of the original Uncle Tom as he was written.  Dismissing Washington as an Uncle Tom, the idea of the Uncle Tom itself, is a fiction, a trope for a two dimensional world that refuses to acknowledge nuance, or reality.  It is simpler, but not true.

 

But I have wandered into the weeds.  Both works are shocking at times; both are moving, often most moving when talking, almost off-handedly, of deeply personal things.  Both writers are most revealing when they are also the most oblique, when they hint at the vastness of things not said.  DuBois' essays are meticulously argued, but it is the poetry of the personal stories that resonate.  One cannot understand where we were without reading both, just as you cannot understand where we are now without also reading MLK and Malcolm X.  

 

And then back to fiction, my comfort zone.

 

Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet has resided on my shelves since its initial publication and I am only now getting to it.   Once I started I wondered why I had put it off so long.  This is fine historical fiction.  Set in Stratford in the late 16th Century it is the story of the young William Shakespeare, although he is actually never named here, his wife, Anne Hathaway, and the loss of their son, Hamnet.    Hamnet was apparently another spelling of the name Hamlet, which I knew; my early English literature training coming to the fore here.  In so many ways our obsession with proper spelling of names is such a modern thing.   O'Farrell imagines Hathaway as a strong, resourceful, fierce and creative young woman, the kind of young woman to which an observant and poetic young man might be drawn.  The setting is convincing, the story as well, and the author ties in the few known facts about Shakespeare's personal life into the story in convincing, if not always historically accurate,  ways.   Anne and Will never really overcome the rift created between them over Hamnet's death, although the drift was already present.  It was always evident that young Will's imaginings that he would take his wife to London were at odds with everything we were shown about her character; as well as many of the realities of life in 16th century England.  This did not surprise me, knowing that it was not unusual for families to stay behind, and I was grateful that O'Farrell did not fall into the modern assumption that Hathaway was a shrew simply because she stayed in Stratford.  But more than just a beautiful and heart-warming story, Hamnet is also an exploration of loss and the transformative origins and consolations of art. 

 

Next I read the new Louise Penny/Hillary Clinton political thriller, State of Terror, and I actually enjoyed it more than I anticipated.   It is a well-crafted political thriller and it read like a good mix of the two authors voices.  I am not certain I am happy about some of the connections made with Penny's Three Pines characters, I suppose these had to be added in to satisfy Penny's fans.  There is also a lot of sarcasm and political pay-back, which I did expect, and although some of it bordered on off-putting, generally the story got moving quickly enough that one just let it slip.  It always seems to me that a fair amount of suspension of disbelief is required in these novels anyway.  It was a gripping read that I didn't really want to put down. Although I suspect that the political machinations and insights are not as off-base as my heart would prefer, I did find it lacking in the empathetic insights of Penny's Three Pines voice.  This was no cozy mystery.   The ending left open the possibility of another novel, but I am not certain I would follow through, even if the authors do.

 

Lastly, I read There, There by Tommy Orange.  This was a novel that completely surprised me.  I don't remember why I put it on my library hold list, a recommendation from a friend probably, but I absolutely loved it.   The opening chapter is explosively passionate and I was completely captured by the voice, by the changing voices, by the palpable anger and confusion and even poetry of emotion and loss. This novel is told from the point of view of several characters, telling stories that initially seem disconnected but eventually come together to form a complexly woven whole.  Sometimes the transition between the stories seemed choppy; sometimes the stories seemed incomplete, and I cannot say it was the easiest read,  but I gradually came to recognize that this was intentional, a part of the story itself.  There is some confusion around the timeline just as there is confusion in the characters understanding of themselves, their place in society, and their own history — the very state of existence known as Native American.  

 

The title of the novel is taken from a famous quote by Gertrude Stein, about Oakland, where the novel mostly takes place, when she stated that there was no "there, there" meaning the Oakland of her childhood was no longer evident in the 'there' of contemporary Oakland.  Of course this is always the case for all of us, but in this novel that meaning is even more profound as the characters are trying to reconcile the "there" of their modern lives in Oakland with an almost mythological "there" of their heritage, something to which many of the characters have no knowledge or palpable connection, other than the fact that they are judged for being Native American and they yearn for some defining story to make sense of their lives.  This is an incredibly powerful novel, filled with raw emotion.  Orange captures the feelings of these characters so that something of each of them and their struggles sneak under the skin of the reader.  Never have I read anything so powerfully soul-wrenching about the experience of alcoholism, or being a child born with fetal alcohol syndrome.  Never have I felt such raw yearning.  I can't say it was a favorite book because it was too shocking to be so classified; but I will certainly look for future work from this author, and my view of the world will never be the same. 

 

'Tis the last day of November,

And what do I do?

I struggle to publish

A book list for you……

 

Bad attempts at poetry not withstanding, I will get my October reading out of the way, if only so that I can start on the November list, hopefully before my December gets out of hand.  

 

It may already be too late for that, of course.  November seems to be simultaneously a time when I have mustered energy and strength enough to begin putting the routines of daily life back to rights while at the same time, shoving my shoulders to the door and bracing my feet to keep it from bursting wide open with the calls and demands of worldly too muchness.

 

But…….Books

 

My October reading was, for the most part, light and inconsequential, not that there is anything to complain of in that.  I was in undergoing radiation therapy.  I had days of increasing strength and energy, and days where I would have happily stayed in bed.  I was frustrated that, although I was feeling increasingly better as chemo therapy drugs were dissipating from my systems and my body was beginning the long process of healing from the onslaught, neuropathy continued to be a problem.  I wanted it all to be done.  Very human that, as also is the impetus to escape into something silly and or distracting.

 

114. October started off with The Guest Book by Sarah Blake.  Oh my, was this a frustrating read!  In fact, had it not been for a book group, I would have abandoned this book fairly early on.  

 

Surprisingly, although I struggled through the five-hundred some-odd pages of dissatisfied whining by wooden characters in a novel with no core, no heart, nothing to grab onto, there were parts of this novel, certain themes, that persistently stayed glued in my thoughts. Yes, I thought. Yes, I wondered.  Yes, I wished that the author had been less scattered in her focus on big themes, and had more adept at tying them together in deeper development of at least one character.  There is a lot that could have been explored here:  A multi-generational family saga, an island in Maine, family secrets, so much to explore.  But it wasn't really explored, just listed, and almost analyzed through the overlapping stories of three generations of women, except that this interleaving of experiences never quite worked, and this reader never really connected with any of the three women.  

 

Blake was taking on big questions and alas, the questions overwhelmed the novel.  Rather than deft emotional exploration we were given minutia, pat answers and cliché. This book left me yearning for a different book; it could have been so much more relevant, revealing, even rewarding had there been less attention paid to throwing in circumstances and greater focus on the personal repercussions caused by the ripple of those circumstances. I found the novel to be less than satisfying, even if thought provoking.  No regrets however: it was worth reading the book if only for the group discussion, which was far more interesting than the novel itself.  In that sense, I would have to say it was a good book club novel; depending on the temperament of the club itself.

 

Book 115:  Charming Falls Apart by Angela Terry.  This sweet, charming, bit of fluff, chick lit at its best, just made me happy.  It didn't take long to read, and the story was predictable, but those were not problems here.  The story, about a young woman who loses her job and her fiancé on one fateful day, and has to find her way back from this upset of her "perfect" life, is just fun to read.  There is humor and growth, and yes a bit of sappiness as well, but it was the perfect book for me at the time.  The gentle exploration of vulnerability and self-mockery exploited by self-help books was particularly adept. Sometimes one needs something that just brightens the spirits, and does it with a light hand. 

 

116. I went into Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken with high hopes.  I was disappointed although it is not necessarily a bad book.  Perhaps it is just that the passage of time has not played well with Hawken's thesis.  It is actually a very good survey of millions of small NGOs from around the world, of the desire of people to effect change, and a cataloging of the, mostly local, desire of humans to change direction  and return to some kind of biological, environmental, and humane sanity.    But he is trying to define this movement as a coherent movement, despite its incoherence.  Hawken acknowledges the localness of the human condition, and even makes efforts to point out that the global human community and its impact does not depend on agreement on specifics, but acknowledgement of the common humanity that includes our differences.  He fails in that he focuses too greatly on labeling a movement, even as he acknowledges that a defining focus cannot exist.  I found the book naively optimistic.  

 

A quote from the introduction stuck with me though, and it defines much of the tenor of this book, and hits home with me in my own views of life:

 

If you look at the science that describes what is happening on earth today and aren't pessimistic, you don't have the correct data.  If you meet the people in this unnamed movement and aren't optimistic, you haven't got a heart.   (4.1.4)

 

117. Next, I picked up James Baldwin's slim but profound volume, The Fire Next Time.. Baldwin's passionate voice, the intelligence of his observations and his prose are still highly relevant even over half a century after this book was written.  Baldwin writes about being black in America, about how black Americans see white Americans, and chillingly so, how whites do not see themselves.  It is a book that is easily read in one sitting, and yet I kept coming back to it over the course of several days.  Absorption took weeks. I saw Baldwin's insights in other books, other events in my life, changing my thoughts, still.  I think this is a book everyone should read, a book that I wish I had read when I was 15, when I was reading the writings of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.  I didn't know about James Baldwin at that time. In my own, admittedly naive in some ways, worldview, this and quite a few primary sources would be taught and read by all teenagers when they study American History. But that would require a world that took a different view of itself.  Whereas the more pessimistic side of myself believes the only lesson history teaches us is that we don't learn the lessons of history.

 

I ended the month with more frivolity.  I talked to my mom on October 31, and she mentioned a book she had found in the library at her assisted living facility, Safe and Sound by Fern Michaels.  I was tired and overwhelmed, I needed an easy read, and I was able to download it from the local library system to my kindle right then and there.  So I read it.

 

118. This is volume 29 in Michaels' Sisterhood series, but I didn't know that when I picked it up.  It was still an entertaining read, quickly finished in just a couple of hours.  I will say up front that I do not like most of Michaels' romance novels, but I enjoyed this, and I went on to a bit of a mini-binge into the beginning of November.  The novel is meant to pull at the heart-strings:  a lonely, abused, child in trouble, women who want to protect him, and inflict punishment on those who cause this charming boy harm. The Sisterhood is a series about female vigilantes.  It is pure over-the-top female revenge fantasy where bright ambitious women take on the ills of the world.  No one is killed, but that does not mean that punishment and retribution are not occasionally quite violent.  Yes, I loved it.  I can say that even as the punishment in this particular case made me squirm, although I also understood it.  

 

We are complex  and inconsistent, we humans, aren't we?  No point in pretending otherwise.

 

 

 

September seemed to have been an "all fiction, all the time" month, although considering that many of the novels were light, it seems odd to me that I read only 11 books.  Nevermind. First the List:

 

103.    Anuk Arudpragasam, A Passage North.

104.    Ann Cleeves, Red Bones.

105.    Lee Child, The Sentinel.

106.     Ash Davidson,  Damnation Spring.

107.     Annette Valentine, Sufficient Sacrifice.

108.     Phillip Roth,  The Dying Animal.

109.     Sally Rooney, Normal People.

110.     Louise Penney, The Madness of Crowds.

111.    D.E. Stevenson, Still Glides the Stream.

112.    Lawrence Block, The Sins of the Fathers.

113.    Lawrence Block, A Time to Murder and Create.

 

Once again, I am going to attack the list in the order read. Surprisingly, all of the novels remain clear in my mind despite the fact that I often feel so tired that I feel like my brain has short-circuited, and I did not take extensive notes in my reading journal as I read. This was because for most of September my hands were not working well and I could not hold a pen. A keypad was also uncomfortable (and still can be) but I prefer my journaling with pen and paper, a setback that seems to have radically upset my life in ways I did not expect.

 

But onto the books:

I started the month planning to continue working my way through the Booker nominees.   But that plan fell by the wayside with the first book I selected, although beautiful, was too intensely philosophical and meditative for my mind to wrap itself around at that time, sick as I was following my final chemotherapy session.  It quickly became apparent that I needed lighter reading, something focused more on movement than introspection, and so began a month of wild swings in reading material.

 

That first novel was Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North.   This is an intensely literary novel; there is very little action, there is no dialogue,  A young man in Columbo, Sri Lanka receives a phone call informing him of a death; he takes a long walk; he takes a long train ride; he observes the world around him and meditates on previous train rides, personal history, public history, the toll taken by war on those touched directly and those seemingly untouched in any obvious way.  It was all too intensively introspective at a time when I needed an escape from the inward gaze. 

 

I would not recommend this book if you are looking for a clear-cut story line and easy answers. If you can tolerate beautiful, elegantly meditative prose that makes time and place feel very real, it may be book for you.  I stated that there is no real action in this novel, and yet, action and inaction are referenced constantly.  One begins to see a world through this young man's eye; one begins to feel like one is interacting with people otherwise unknown and, to most of us, unseen.  It is the story of culture, of trauma, of family, of yearning, of love, and of death.  With no direct story at all, Arudpragasam manages to reference a rather large story, a story that touches all of us in one way or another, celebrating those moments lost in fleeting thought, and somehow coalescing them into a rather poetic whole.  He accomplishes this in a very slow meditative way, without bashing the reader on the head, through seductively quiet prose.  It is not a novel this reader could pick up and read straight through.  In fact I am convinced that this is a novel savored slowly, in increments, allowing its qualities to slowly percolate into our thoughts.  I will probably write about it again at the end of the second reading, and this book is worth reading twice, as is the case for all truly good books.

 

My reading of Arudpragasam was interrupted by Ann Cleeves' third Shetland Mystery, Red Bones, which serendipitously showed up just when I needed it from my library wait list.  This story takes place on the island of Whalsay, where Sandy Wilson has returned home for a visit.  While he is home his grandmother is shot and an investigation begins.  As usual the landscape is its own character in this story.  I have never been to the Shetland Islands, but the story had me yearning for cold foggy mornings, wind, and the contrast between bitter chill and warm fires.  No, it is never as nice as imagined. The story was also interesting because Jimmy Perez is somewhat at loose ends in this novel.  Fran Hunter is down in London and he can't stop missing her and thinking about her, and he finds himself oddly out of his depth on Whalsey, despite being Shetland-born.  Perez is an astute observer of people, but he doesn't know this place or its history, Sandy grew up here, but like many a youth, he drifted through much of the family drama, letting it slip past his own self-absorbed haze.   Sandy begins to grow up and come into his own in this novel, begins to take more responsibility rather than just seemingly drifting through life, and Jimmy also seems to mature, to begin to reach past his insecurities, to see and accept the need for assistance and working relationships that initially seemed elusive.  I am looking forward to the next installment.

 

Next up was The Sentinel, a Lee Child/Andrew Child collaboration and the next in the Reacher series.  I found it thoroughly entertaining.  I love the way the fight scenes are described, the physics of it, even though I personally abhor the urge to fight or harm others.  I was happy to avoid the rather predictable sex scenes.  This Reacher was slightly different.  He spoke more.  He spent more time in active, at least as described to the reader, thought.  As a chronic over-thinker, one of the things that appeals to me about the Reacher character is that he does not spend loads of time mulling over the options; I appreciate the essential contradiction of his nature, — either seemingly completely at rest and quiet (easily under appreciated) or explosively taking action.  Still, the character was familiar and the book enjoyable.  Reacher is still Reacher; the man and his code appear intact and I will continue to read.

 

The next book, Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson, had a bit more meat.  And yet I struggled.  This is a very ambitious debut novel centering around a family in a Northern California logging community in the late 1970s and the story takes place over the course of about a year.  This is where it also bogs down on occasion.  There is so much here, technical information about the physical act of logging and great detail about the lives of the logging community.  This is a community that is being torn apart, trapped between the conservationists who want to preserve the redwoods, and the entire corporate industrial side of the logging structure which is basically unseen but is represented by the spray which the companies use to cut down on the undergrowth and make the logging possible.  We see the complexity of the issue, of loggers whose families have been in this community, doing this work, for generations, men who both love the forest and also take pride in the work they do, in the pressures of a world that demands more and more lumber and places ever increasing pressure on both the environment and the loggers themselves, men who are trapped in a system completely outside their control.  When the community  learns they are being poisoned by the very spray they are told is safe and which makes their work possible, they are almost torn apart.  The incomprehensibility of it, that a company and a government would intentionally spray chemicals that harmed the workers, is palpable, as is the anger,  the fear, and the push-back, because this is a community with nowhere to go.  This goes on and on, as if the author is slowly, meticulously, building a bed on which the fallen tree can land once she lands it.  I appreciated the information and yet 400 pages are spent in this complexly interlayered preparation.  When the giant redwood that is this story falls, it falls quickly, almost too quickly. I found the novel to be mostly compelling, the primary characters Rich and Colleen to be well drawn, realistic and memorable.  I drew them into my heart.  And yet there were sections where the book was painfully slow, where the words and the stories seemed like more vines and low growing brush that needed to be cut away; I felt the ending, although beautiful and powerful, was slapped on and not well integrated into the story.  I understand the idea of the structure, or at least my interpretation of the structure, but I felt the story bogged down simply in having too much to say. But these are minor quibbles, Damnation Spring is a powerful novel with characters who ring true, characters who might find their way into your heart and make you reconsider what you thought you knew.

 

Sufficient Sacrifice is the third of a series of novels by Annette Valentine about her father.  I read all three books for a book club, and I have struggled with all three to one extent or another.  Oddly, this is the volume I struggled with the least. I read the first volume, Eastbound From Flagstaff in February, and as I mentioned I found the writing a bit sanctimonious, lacking in flow with too much detail about small points, little character development and obvious and awkward transitions, but I did find the story interesting enough that I wanted to see how everything turned out.   Our group next read the second book in the series, Down to the Potter's House, and I wrote about it in March.  It was one of two books that earned a flight rating, meaning I did not finish it and wanted nothing more than to throw it against a wall.   Despite all this I read the third book, although I will admit that I skimmed sections.  I struggled with the same issues concerning the prose, but I found the story a bit more compelling here.  This book seemed to come from a core emotional place that I found in the first book of the series, and talking to the author later, this was indeed the case.    The author was obviously trying to write about and express something deeply personal, there was a deep vulnerability that surfaced, despite the prose, and I am glad that I read the book, even though I would not read it again and am really not sure I would even recommend it. 

 

Then the next two books were read for my other book club, and I am going to write about them together, even though in many ways they would seem to be at odds.  First of all, I can say that I had read Sally Rooney's Normal People previously, and although this was the first time I had read The Dying Animal, I had read other novels by Roth, including previous David Kepesh novels.  The books were chosen following a discussion revolving around an opinion essay which ran in The NY Times on September 3, "What's Wrong with Sex Between Professors and Students" (link here).   The Roth novel was referenced in the article as one example of the dynamic and its problems, and the group had also been discussing reading Rooney's novel, which seemed a bit of a stretch, although it does include university students and sex.  

 

In the end I felt the novels played off each other nicely and both had deep and powerful statements to make about humans as sexual beings, gender equality and politics, human relationships and how we develop or fail to develop, even what is "normal".  And yes, Roth addresses this as well.  I was less convinced that the Roth novel related to the article in question on anything more than a superficial level.

 

We didn't all read the Roth; several found it offensive.  Well it is, isn't it?  But that is one of the things I find fascinating, and brilliant, about Roth, the way he can write something so deliberately offensive, misogynistic, shallow, selfish, frivolous even, and yet, if you can let yourself get beyond your rising bile, you find that it is a novel of powerful depth.  This slim, apparently self indulgent novel is filled with literary and cultural allusions. In fact one could argue that it is not misogynistic at all except for that fact that humans are animals and sexual ones at that, men and women alike. I was also impressed by the parallels between Roth and Rooney in that they are both deeply examining human psyche as it relates to human development, becoming mature, sex, and heterosexual relationships.  If anything I think we tended to dismiss Roth as shallow and crude.  Neither am I convinced that we really explored the depth of Rooney.  Yes we have two lonely teenagers; yes one of them gets drawn into self destructive relationships, but she also grows beyond that, and most of the women in this novel do not grow between adapting/wanting/changing to please a man.  Rooney uses stereotypes as a tool, much the way Roth is using sex. Like the Roth novel, it can be easy to dismiss the Rooney as a relationship novel about young adults, to distance oneself from the main characters, when it is really so much more than that. I was constantly amazed at the parallels between the relationships in the two novels.  I definitely have to read the Roth again.  And I would still like a long conversation about all these issues over wine or whiskey. Takers?

 

And then I finished out the month with lighter fare.  First up was Louise Penney's 17th Inspector Ganache novel, The Madness of Crowds, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  Penney's choice to make this post-pandemic, was optimistic as most readers are probably still mired in it, at least initially, but I don't begrudge this.  It had to be dealt with.  And she brings up many of the questions that have been on people's mind, the uncertainties, the fears, and even how easy it is to take information and draw incorrect and/or inhumane conclusions, to sway a population that lives in fear.  This novel was on the darker end of the Ganache novels, but still not horribly dark, and all ends peacefully again in Three Pines. 

 

I downloaded D.E. Stevenson's Still Glides the Stream when it turned up for free on my kindle simply because I have a friend who loves Stevenson's novels.  I was not thrilled with the first one I read, but felt that the author deserved another chance.  The novel was sweet and completely predictable.  I pretty much knew the story line, the plot, and how everything would turn out  by the end of the first chapter or two. The characters did not develop in anything but predictable ways.  I can see how this could be comforting for some, like watching an old favorite movie again and again, but I did not find there was enough wit or meat to hold my attention and I am not inclined to pursue the author further.  Still it was a cozy way to curl up for an hour or two and escape the world.

 

The last two novels were by Lawrence Block who wrote the Bernie Rhodenbarr series which I love.  I have never read any of his other novels but know people who love Matthew Scudder, so I thought I would give them a try.  I rather enjoyed The Sins of the Fathers. It was well written, entertaining enough, and Scudder looked promising even though he was obviously going through a rough time.  I was less thrilled with the second novel, A Time to Murder and Create.  Scudder's alcoholism is obviously getting the better of him in this novel and he makes stupid decisions; in fact I was simply grateful he didn't get himself knocked off.  I do know that he will eventually clean up, and the character looks somewhat promising, but I remain on the fence about whether I will take this any further.

 

There you have it, September from the land of books.  October has been relatively light, reading wise.  I have finished two books; I have four books currently in process and a week left in the month.  I do not know how far I will get, at the moment I feel pulled in too many directions. What about you?

 

 

I have been fighting with this blog post for over two weeks. That is not all I have been fighting, but a strict accounting is irrelevant to anything. Suffice it to say the best I can do simply is not enough right at the moment.  We all fall into these periods on occasion.   Today, I am determined to get at least this one thing done, this one thing outside of my two naps and my radiation session and pulling together adequate nutrition.  All of that makes for a rather busy day.

In August I read 13 books.  Here is the list:

 

90. Paul Fussell:  Class, A Guide through the American Status System.

91. Victor Krachenko:  I Chose Freedom.

92. Sue Monk Kidd:  The Book of Longings.

93. David Brooks:  Bobos in Paradise.

94. Elizabeth Curid- Halkett:  The Sum of Small Things

95. Naomi Hirahara:  Summer of the Big Bachi.

96. Ann Cleeves:  White Nights.

97. Matt Haig:  The Midnight Library.

98. Zora Neale Hurston:  Hitting a Straight Lick With A Crooked Stick.

99. David A. Price:  Geniuses at War.

100. Nadifa Mohamed:  The Fortune Men.

101. James Baldwin:  Going to Meet The Man

102. Lucy Foley: The Hunting Party.

 

The first three books,  Class,  Bobo in Paradise and The Sum of Small Things were all rereads prompted by a discussion with a friend who was be bemoaning the loss of the class system of her youth.  I thought her understandings were somewhat off base, not necessarily completely in regards to the class structure of mid-twentieth century America but to shifts in play since that time. This is irrelevant to our friendship of course, and I was mostly rereading not to continue an argument, but in order to reconsider and refine my own thoughts.  I was in the midst of my reading when David Brooks' reconsideration of his own thesis, How the Bobos Broke America came out in the August Atlantic Magazine.  The article was promptly shared between one circle of friends and further discussion ensued.   I might have been thinking of a blog post, but decided I had little more to contribute on that subject, and I agree with many of Brooks' points.  In some ways I think he is kinder to the Bobos, and I say this seeing myself as very much a part of this tribe, than I myself would be.  Still, I am glad to have reread and reconsidered.  

 

I read two other non-fiction books.  Victor Krachenko was a Soviet Official who defected to the United States in 1944 and later wrote a book, I Chose Freedom about his life in the Soviet Union.  I read it because Kravchenko lived through some of the famines and issues discussed in the novel I read in July, Child 44. I believe the book was a best-seller at the time and I can see how the information that Kravchenko revealed about the Soviet Union was new and shocking.  Even though we know much more today, I still found the book interesting, and at times surprising, although I was perhaps equally surprised by young Victor's naïveté as by some of the more brutal and calculated abuses.  The book was indeed interesting, but not necessarily one of my favorite books.  Worth checking out for anyone interested in that particular period/subject.

 

The other non-fiction book Geniuses at War by David A. Price was indeed fascinating.   Price tells the story of the codebreaking efforts that went on at Bletchley Park and the impact these efforts had on the Allies ultimate success in World War II.  It is a fascinating book, although at times the reading may be a bit technical for some.  Price puts the work of Turing and others into context and tells the story of how Turing's work was leveraged into the world's first digital computer, Collosus, yes, at Bletchley Park.  I found it to be a compelling story of brilliant but also flawed people working under incredible pressure, people whose story is not often enough told.

 

Everything else I read was fiction.  I am not going to separate out literary versus commercial fiction as I always struggle with these distinctions.  I am interested in what I think is good and what I enjoy, and the categories we create don't often correlate with what survives and what doesn't (most doesn't anyway).  Many of what we consider "great" novels today were definitely looked down upon as commercial in their own day.  But that is only a small part of why I chafe at these distinctions.  But I am too tired to explore this in greater detail, just as I may also be too tired to discuss the books themselves well.  Therefore a simple linear accounting will have to suffice.

 

I loved Sue Monk Kidd's The Book of Longings, which tells the story of Ana, the wife of Jesus. Yes, it is that same Jesus, although Kidd mostly focuses her story peripherally to the one told in the gospels, the story of two people before his ministry began, of Ana's life, lived separately, during the period of ministry.   I thought the story was well told, I liked the character development, and that it remained mostly on the fringes of the more famous story.  I like that Kidd uses an actual document from the time, one earthed in the Nag Hamadi Library and tells the story of an educated woman who could read and write in a time when we know there were women who were both literate and literary, even if they may not have been common.  I thoroughly enjoyed the story.

 

The Summer of the Big Bachi is a mystery and the first in a series revolving around accidental sleuth Mas Arai.  But what I really liked about the novel was the dialogue and dialect, the exploration of a sense of culture and place that is foreign to me.  I am not sure the plot is the main draw here; the appeal was of being immersed in another culture and growing to to appreciate someone life might appear to fit expectations in once sense, and yet was completely foreign and more complex than imagined.  I grew fond of the old gardener.

 

White Nights is the second of Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island mysteries, a series I am thoroughly enjoying.  Jimmy Perez is really beginning to come into his own, and has much more confidence in himself and control over this investigation than in the first volume. Once again Inspector Taylor from the mainland arrives to lead the investigation, but he quickly becomes rather peripheral to the case. Perez is an astute observer and the story well told.  I will be happy to continue this series.

 

I thought Matt Haig's The Midnight Library was shallow, predictable, done so much better elsewhere.  Haig does an adequate job with parallel lives and with exploring the idea that changing one's life, with wishing one had made different decisions only to learn that those decisions had repercussions that were not necessarily what one might have anticipated. Despite this, I felt it lacked depth and characterization, as if it was capitalizing on a particular moment in time, a particular trend, but adding little to the conversation.  I found it terribly trite.

 

Two sets of short stories were both fabulous:  Zora Neale Hurston's Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick and James Baldwin's Going to Meet the Man.  I never was a reader of short stories; that may be changing.  Both collections are a mixed bag; some stories are stronger than others but most of them are also beautifully written and brilliantly astute about human nature.  Both writers can shock the reader with the profundity of their insight.

 

Nadifa Mohamed's novel The Fortune Men is based on the true story of a murder that took place in Cardiff in 1952, a murder in which the wrong man was imprisoned and the true murderer was never found.  It is a compelling tale filled with richly drawn and even compassionate characters, with a fabulous sense of place. and the complex relationships of a multiglot society filled with a mingling of races, religions, cultures, and attitudes both old and new.  The author captures a sense of community, a sense of hope.  The jarring disconnect between the abiding faith many of the African and Caribbean immigrants have in the British system, in its presumed justice, and the endemic fear and racism which still lie beneath the surface still haunts.  It is a powerful and moving book, a book that has since made the Booker Prize shortlist.  Well recommended.

 

Lastly, I read Lucy Foley's The Hunting Party. I read this because I had enjoyed Foley's more recent closed-room mystery, The Guest List,  and liking the genre, thought I would give this one a try.  This one is not quite as tightly developed, but it is still very enjoyable with beautiful writing and astute psychological development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've been knitting.  But I have also been dreaming of projects and the newest Rowan Magazine, # 70, has contributed to those knitting dreams.

 

 

Admittedly I am distracted by this book at least partially because I want to knit the two cover items, staring with this scarf.  The pattern is named Dolomite and it is knitted in the round using wonderfully soft Felted Tweed with DMC Diamant.  The question is whether or not I will actually wear it, or perhaps whether I want the scarf as much as I want to be the woman in the suit with the scarf.    I do love the pattern, and the idea and I know I will love knitting it.  I am pausing over two things primarily:  Do I have fall/winter clothes I can wear with this item?  Does it fit into my current life? As you might surmise, the questions are related, and both are somewhat up in the air at the moment.  First of all because I am once again sussing out what is important to me in my post cancer life, and  because I don't really know what winter clothes I own that will fit.  But the nice thing about knitting, is that it can wait, and I can knit this anytime, if and when the need arises and there are no fit issues with a scarf, other than how it fits into a life.  Sometimes I do think it is the knitting itself that makes the need arise. 

 

I am also quite enamored of this sweater shown on the back cover.  The pattern named Sardonyx, and it is  knit in Kid Classic and DMC Diamant.  Let me just say how interesting and exciting I find Rowan's use of Diamant in their knitting patterns this fall.  It is an embroidery thread I have in my embroidery stash, a thread I was playing with at least partially because it looks like a metallic thread but is far easier to use.  Alas that all came to a stop with neuropathy, but I do hope that not only will my knitting perk back up, but my embroidery will also.  Eventually perhaps I will be able to share a little of both.

 

But back to the sweater.  This is something I know I would wear even though kid classic is a heavier, aran weight yarn.  But although it is heavier than Felted Tweed, it is also a yarn I think of as soft and cuddly.  The sweater fits more smoothly into my life and perhaps my style than the the idea of a polished and besuited me.   I can accept that this sweater may only get a couple of outings a year, rather than heavy wear, at least in the Tennessee climate, but this only means that I will not wear it out quickly after knitting. My main question at the moment is one of sizing as I am currently between two sizes.  This, and many of the patterns in this volume are oversized, and although I think this sweater needs to have the positive ease to look good, I am still on the fence.  I do not look good if there is too much volume in a dolman-style sleeve and I tend to be narrow between the bust points, which I also think is critical to how this sweater will look.  I do tend to think that if I get the shoulders and the center front panel right, the dolman sleeves will be more manageable.

 

 

But there is more.  This cropped sweater, Chromium by Lisa Richardson,  is knit in Alpaca classic and, once again, DMC Diamant.  The alpaca is a fiber I struggle with more here in Tennessee, as the winters are often more damp than cold, and alpaca and I are not always friends in that situation.  It is also both lighter and warmer than wool, which becomes problematic in heated interiors.  But I think I can also layer this over a shirt or a long turtleneck.  Or not.  This may simply be a dream sweater more than a sweater I actually knit and wear. 

 

However, this cardigan, Lazurite by Martin Story, has "knit me" and "wear me" all over it.  It is knit in Kid Classic, the same as my cuddly oversized pink cozy cowl cardigan, which I knit in the winter of 2019/20, but in a more versatile length.   This pattern is written with substantial positive ease, more perhaps than I think I want.  But sizing down will depend substantially on the resulting hand of my knitted fabric. This may well be worth buying a few extra skeins of yarn first, and knitting a substantial swatch to determine the qualities of the fabric before committing to, and starting the actual sweater.  In many ways this illustrated the classic, and  ongoing problem of imagination versus reality.  There is the sweater I imagine from the picture,  and there is the actual sweater, as designed, conceived, and executed by the designer.  Of course, I as knitter do not have to create the same sweater, or use the same yarns.  Once again, a commitment to some playing with yarn may well be the answer.  Very often the very act of swatching and playing with fiber clarifies my thought process, occasionally cures the itch to knit a specific design, or turns my attentions in a very different direction.

 

 

No issues with oversized sweaters here.  This vest is named Carbon and it is knit in lightweight cuddly Felted Tweed and Diamant.  The Diamant could be a problem in all this color work, especially if one is inclined to be a tight knitter, as I suspect, based on my embroidery practice, that it could break.  

 

Luckily I am not a tight knitter, or will not be once my neuropathy wears off.  If it wears off.  That is one of those wishy washy things about the way cancer treatments are described.  Most women on Taxol get some degree of neuropathy (more of them get severe neuropathy than minor neuropathy) and most women recover fully within a few months.  The actual statistics are a little more worrisome.  80% (give or take a percentage point here and there) get neuropathy.  Of those, 40%, or only a little less than half, are left with some degree of permanent neuropathy. Yes it is true that most of those who get neuropathy recover (60%) but sometimes all this optimistic rosy speak hides some still disturbing news.  Anyway, I have done my research, and am doing my best to do everything in my power to manage my treatments and my neuropathy, in the hopes that I will be in the lucky 60%.  This sweater is one I would wear, if I can knit it.  I haven't really worn fitted vests in a few decades now, but I have tried on a few more fitted sweaters lately in stores, although not purchased them, and this would be a very happy addition to my wardrobe.

 

 

As would this vest, named Mica.   This vest somehow looks boxy in the photo, but is only designed with a couple of inches of positive ease.  Knit in Felted Tweed, I like the drape of the fabric.   I also like that the pattern is offset. The actual design is a rectangle.  I like the deep neck, although I would add in a little waist shaping, without making the garment exactly fitted.  This one is pretty high on my list right now, and it is also probably the most immediately wearable of all the garments in this magazine. It would be an easy knit to boot.

 

 

Similarly, this pullover, named Tungsten, is also eminently wearable in my life.  Also knit in Felted tweed with an off-center argyle motif, this appeals to me in much the same way the vest above appeals.  And I think it would be a sweater I would live in.  The design and the softness of the felted tweed, it seems to have that cuddly sweatshirt appeal, at least in my imagination, does call for positive ease, but I am not convinced I would knit this with the 10" of positive ease called for in the pattern.  Or perhaps I am just being difficult.  Anyway, although I would knit the vest in a neutral, this sweater is crying out to me for color.

 

 

Last but far from least is this slightly more polished sweater, also knit in Felted Tweed, called Topaz.  Again wearable, and versatile.  Although perhaps more versatile if I lived in a colder climate.  The soft oversized sweater above looks cozy, and looks like something I could wear.  This sweater looks like it would want to be worn as more of a polished indoor outfit.  In the past I have found Knoxville overheated in winter time, more so than New York.  But I may have changed, and adapted, or not.  I love this sweater, and of course, I do not need to knit it in this yarn.  Still, this design remains well entrenched in the realm of possibility.

 

And there you have it, actually far more knitting than I need or will finish in a year, especially given that I have. a large stash of queue waiting in the wings.  But it never hurts to dream, nor is there any point in being niggling with one's dreams.  Embrace all the possibilities, and then just see how they evolve.