Category: Books

Last week I posted the first half of a two-part review of my July reading.  As I mentioned at that time, it seemed all I did in July was read, although in retrospect I can say that mostly I read and I slept.  Not a month marked by ambition in any sense.  Or was it?  My body may have been fighting its own battles, but my mind was at least grasping at something, anything.

 

First, I shall repeat the list.

68. Thomas Seyfried, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease.

69.Eric Kossoff, Ketogenci Diets: Treatment for Epilepsy and Other Disordors.

70. Lee A Reich, Uncommon Fruits Worth of Attention.

71. Leofranc Halford-Stevens, A Short History of Time.

72. Margery Allingham, Look to the Lady.

73. Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.

74. Robert A. Weinberg, One Renegade Cell: How Cancer Begins.

75. C. S. Wilkins, Bandera Bound.

76. James Hillman, Healing Fiction.

77. Herbert M. Shelton, The Science and Fine Art of Fasting.

78.  Peggy Knickerbocker, Love Later On

79. Arundhati Roy, Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction.

80. KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning.

81. Neil McKinney,  Naturopathic Oncology.

82. Joanne Fluke, A Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder.

83. Scott Zesch, The Captured.

84. Herman Pontzer, Burn.

85. Toni Dwiggins, Quicksilver.

86. Karin Slaughter,  False Witness.

87. Kristen Hannah, Firefly Lane.

88.  Ann Cleeves, The Crow Trap.

89.  Amy Greene, Long Man.

 

In this post, I am discussing the groupings of books coded red (mysteries and suspense), purple (other literature),and turquoise (uncategorized, memoir, or "hell I don't know what to call this but I loved it").

 

First up: mysteries and suspense.   

 

First was Margery Allingham's Look to the Lady.  I had not read Allingham in many years, but as mentioned last month, I had recently found myself interested in looking back to the great mid-twentieth century grand-dames of mystery, and I wondered how my memories of youthful perceptions would mesh with my current experience.  I found the novel to be a grand romp:  interesting, fun, light-hearted, and at times surprising.  The story is almost more quest than mystery, with many interesting and overlapping themes — callow young lordling about to come of age; a criminal gang out to steal a priceless medieval chalice; hints of mysticism and ancient rites — but all is tied together quite satisfactorily in the end. I tend to think Albert Campion has aged well, but I suspect this may be because he is witty and charming, reminding me perhaps of Nick Charles.  This is perhaps more a mark of the time; both Campion and Charles hail from one particular style prevalent in the 1930s when criminals were deviously psychological and the detectives were charmers who relied on a wealth of informants.  Also of its period is the strong emphasis on the mystical, and, perhaps more difficult for modern reader, the disconcerting class differences.  I personally think these are linked, and it is easy for this reader, with the advantage of history on her side, to look back to the changes in the British class system that were already well underway, if not yet fully recognized and accepted, at the time this novel was written.  Perhaps what actually draws me in is Allingham's ability to tell a story without taking herself too seriously. She is a master storyteller, one whom I feel is perhaps under-appreciated, and I continue to enjoy her novels. 

 

The next couple of mysteries were not such successes.  I read Joanna Fluke's Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder simply because I have on occasion enjoyed the Hallmark series based on these books and found them a lighthearted mindless escape.  Initially the characters appeared more complex than they do in the series, appearing less saccharine, and I was encouraged, but that perception rapidly changed.  I was expecting a light-hearted, fluffy read, and I got that, but I also felt like I was getting a load of sanctimonious crap about how women should and should not behave, look, think, etc.  In the novel, as opposed to the series, thank goodness, the brother-in-law cop goes out of his way to encourage his sister-in-law, the local cookie baker, to do his work for him while he reaps all the credit. In what world could this even begin to be acceptable?   I found all of this, the belittling of the slightly overweight but well-meaning, unmarried, and obviously therefore a failure, baker, who's talents and kindness were taken advantage of, if not outright used, by all of the characters and never given credit for her accomplishments, difficult to swallow.  I suppose none of this was as overt as I make it out to be, but still, not a role model for women and not the kind of novel I want to read.  

 

I suppose I felt the same way about Toni Dwiggins's novel, Quicksilver. I read the book because I found the premise interesting:  a pair of forensic geologists solving mysteries through scientific knowledge.  However, although I thoroughly enjoyed the geology, I found the plot to be over simplistic and the actions of the main characters to be improbable.  I just couldn't believe that people who could be so smart about their science, could also be so utterly clueless, and goodness knows I've known a few clueless geniuses in my time. The female lead was even worse than the mail scientist and all of the men in the story treated her in a rather patronizing way. Given the idiocy of her behavior, and the simplistic clues left her by the others, which she still missed, this may have been partially deserved.  The scientific side of this book was highly detailed and well done, but not particularly well integrated with the story.  This is the first of a series, and perhaps the author has managed to integrate the characters and the science more fully, and interestingly, in future volumes, but at this point I am not certain I am inclined to find out.   

 

Despite the fact that it is not light and entertaining, I thoroughly enjoyed Karin Slaughter's new novel False Witness.  I preordered the book upon finishing the last novel in July and dove in to it as soon as it arrived.  Once again, abuse against women is a central focus of this story.  But don't let that idea lead you think that this novel is so narrowly conceived.  The novel opens with our main protagonist, Leigh, a woman who appears to have it all:  a legal career at a blue-chip firm, a daughter she adores, an ex-husband with whom she is able to maintain a close relationship.  She is the woman everyone envies.  Or is she?  Slaughter deftly upends the narrative as Leigh is thrown into a case that reveals a deeply troubled childhood which she thought she had escaped.  We watch Leigh as her neatly compartmented life crumbles, as she reconciles with her sister, Callie, who never managed to escape their past, and as she fights for those she loves and prays that the life she has built does not come crumbling down around her.  Slaughter captures the relationship between the sisters well, both in its sisterly normalcy as well as its dysfunction.  All of the characters are complex and multi-faceted, even the sociopathic serial rapist Leigh is called to defend.  This is a terrifying and deeply disturbing novel, but it is also gripping and difficult to put down.  Slaughter pulls no punches on how abuse and violence rips apart the fabric of childhood, the fragile psychology of the surviving adult, or even an entire culture built on denial.  But Slaughter is also a master of plot, and she keeps the reader on edge.  

False Witness is a hard-driving and compelling novel, but there is a lot of food for thought here: violence against women; drug culture and the way the war on drugs has fractured society; regret over lost relationships and the stupid mistakes people make without ever meaning to do so. The novel is set currently.  The Covid-19 shutdown has interrupted the court system. Characters are masked.   Although Slaughter does not slap us in the face with this, there is a sad and shocking sense of the toll the pandemic shutdown has taken on those segments of society where the struggle for survival is marginal at the best of times.  In fact, I think this book is worth reading again as it is compelling, entertaining (if one can tolerate the darker side of life) and thought-provoking.

 

Like Karin Slaughter, Ann Cleeves' mysteries are character based, but there all similarities end.  The Crow Trap is the first of Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series and it is an interesting, if a bit odd, introduction to the character.  Stanhope does not really appear until half way through the story, and although the reader gets a good introduction to the detective's unorthodox ways, she does not always come off as particularly in control of the investigation here.  I admit this may be a feint.  

The story takes place at the site of a proposed quarry where three scientists, all women, have been called in to prepare an environmental impact statement.  The initial portion of the nivel goes over the same events from the perspective of each of the women.  These events begin with the suicide of a neighbor, Bella, shortly before the women arrive, to the murder of Grace, one of the three scientists.   Cleeves successfully fleshes out the background to the mystery from the three different perspectives of the women, Rachel, Anne, and Grace, allowing us to get to understand the characters from their own individual points of view.  DI Stanhope, when she finally entered the story, appears to be a highly unusual and intelligent detective.  Even as I write this, I can see more clearly, how Stanhope's actions, and manipulation of the characters, deviously sets the stage for the murderer to be revealed.  I still think this is an odd introduction to a set of serial mysteries, but a devious and well thought out one.  I must also admit that I have never watched the PBS mini-series based on these novels, and although I may well do so, it will wait until after I have more fully caught up with the reading. 

 

Next up, those pesky turquoise books that I don't specifically know how to categorize although I suspect I am placing them both in the memoir category.  First up, Anne Lamott's Help, Thanks, Wow is an essay in book form.  It focuses on the development of gratitude, humility and a sense of wonder (the three essential prayers). This book was given to me when I started chemotherapy and although I wanted to read it immediately, somehow it disappeared into the stack and re-appeared later on, just when I was ready to read it as it happened.  I have long been aware of this book, and even longer been of the opinion that all prayers fall into these same categories, although we are often more cognizant of praying when we are asking for help.  But that is not the point of this book.  Lamott's book is more of a memoir with a spiritual bent, and a reminder of what we all already know but too easily put aside and forget, that not only do we need help in this world, but that we also need to hold onto a sense of wonder, something we all to often suppress as we move from childhood into adulthood, and something that we cannot become fully developed as humans without embracing.  I love Lamott's books, primarily because they explore things we all already know but are inclined to shove aside.  In short they are books about things we should not need to read about in books.  And that, precisely, is the point.

 

Peggy Knickerbocker's Love Later On is another memoir, this one about falling in love later in life.  Knickerbocker is a character, and she appears to be comfortable with writing about who she is, or was, and the process of allowing herself to upend an otherwise comfortable life to find something unsettling but perhaps more rewarding.  Knickerbocker's life is not my life.  There is a lot of name dropping and discussion of San Francisco food culture, which does not bother me because I am food-obsessed anyway, even though I am not at all a part of that world.  This was a light, refreshing book that made me smile.

 

The last three books, coded purple for other literature have nothing in common except the fact that they are fiction and I enjoyed all three albeit to different degrees and in different ways.   The first, C. S. Wilkins Bandera Bound,  is a romance, the second in a trilogy revolving around the Buchanan family in Bandera Texas.  I loved this book.  It is a light read with a strong story-line and well-developed appealing characters. I admit it is not like most of the books I love, and yet it appeals in a way that moves my heart, and makes me think of home.  

 

The next novel, Kristin Hannah's Firefly Lane is a bit more complicated, as is my reaction to it, although I did end up enjoying it in the end.  When I started the novel I had an uneasy feeling I had read it before; then I remembered that I had watched the first few episodes of the Netflix series based on the book before turning it off in frustration.  My frustration with the series probably did not help my attitude about the book.  And yet, I kept reading.  I will admit that I found the characters two-dimensional; they never really changed, never really grew up, and the. story line and dialogue were predictable, manipulative and boring.  In short, typical chick-lit, except that Hannah is a better writer than that, and parts of the book was surprisingly well written given the obvious attempts to exploit an emotional response in the reader.  I enjoyed the way Hannah captured the atmosphere of growing up in the 70s and 80s in the Pacific Northwest, as it added richness to the story, even though her experience, or the experience of these characters is nothing like my experience of the same period in a different part of the country.  I cried, I finished the book. Hannah has stated that this novel is based on a personal storyr, the story of her mother, and as I read my feelings about the book softened. I felt there was something obviously heart-felt on the writer's part, and that this inner struggle contributed to the lapses into poor writing and cliche.   In the end, I am wiling to give Hannah that.  There is something here that is meaningful, perhaps more meaningful, because I find this novel somewhat at odds with the author's other novels.  I accept my complicated response as a good thing, and found this was worth reading.

 

Last, but far from least, we come to Amy Green's novel Long Man, which I thoroughly enjoyed.   It is a historical novel set in rural Tennessee at the time the TVA was erecting dams on the Tennessee River.  The writing is lyrical, moody, tense and powerful and Greene captures the sense of place and time beautifully.  The story takes place over the course of three days in 1936, in a place that is soon to be flooded. Most of the residents have relocated but a few remain, especially one family, that of Annie Clyde Dodson, her husband James and their three year old daughter, Gracie.  All the characters are well developed and we do get into their thoughts, but the portrayal of Annie Clyde is particularly powerful.  Or perhaps I am biased, because as I read Annie Clyde's thoughts and her interactions with James, I could hear my maternal grandmother, also a southerner, slightly older than Annie Clyde, from Mississippi rather than Tennessee, of a completely different background.  Yet her stubbornness, her sense of history, of place, of belonging, and her inability to suffer the interference of others struck close to home.  I understood Annie Clyde in a way I might not have otherwise, and I understood how deeply she loved James, how deeply she felt tied to that particular place, and the terrible threads pulling at the center of who she was. 

 

At times the writing is choppy, and transitions between characters are not always smooth, but how could they be?  Part of the power of this book is the very contrast between the beauty of the setting, the rawness of poverty, and the pain and fear and lack of communication that drives so much of the story. That very sense of disruption gets into the skin.  The child, Gracie, disappears in a storm, and a search is mounted.  Everyone comes out, but the search centers more around the fears of the searchers than any reasonable thought about what might have realistically happened to the child.  We are given strong hints about what happened to Gracie early on, and the astute reader will worry that she may not be found in time.  But the stories, the recriminations, the fears and loss, poverty and absence of any attempts at understanding will also resonate with the reader.  In many ways the search for Gracie is the archetypical search for that which has been lost.  Gracie will be found, but her life will never be the same.  Annie Clyde and James will move on as well, but that which is lost is not so easily replaced.  

 

 

 

 

Last week I dreamt of two blog posts, hoping that I would have the energy to say something, anything.  Perhaps that hope was naively predicated on the idea that I would have something to say.  As yet, I still don't know if there is nothing there, nothing worth saying, or if perhaps what wants to be said wanders a tad too close to vulnerable territory.  No extra posts then, and it is best to stick with a format, in this case the bookish format.  

 

So what did I read in July? Obviously, if you look at the list below, I read a lot, over 20 books.  I was able to do little else.  My body was fighting its own battles, primarily telling my ego to sit still and be quiet.  I did have study plans, but even those became too ambitious.  There were times when I read with a plan, and times I just floundered about.  Now I look at it all and see a tangled mess that I don't know how to parse. I am not certain that there is thread here, just the random entertainments of a person in all her humanity searching, sometimes hiding….

 

What I have decided, however, having spent far more time than I had hoped attempting to sort this out, is that 21 books is too many.  I cannot write coherently about 20 books in one post.  No one wants to read about 20 books.  It is likely that no one wants to read about 10 either, and equally likely that coherence will be marginal at best.  Nonetheless, I am breaking my July book review into two.  First up will be those books colored green and blue in the list below, which are all non-fiction. The remainder of the list, primarily fiction, but not entirely so, will appear in the second post, either later this week or early next week.

 

68. Thomas Seyfried, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease.

69.Eric Kossoff, Ketogenci Diets: Treatment for Epilepsy and Other Disordors.

70. Lee A Reich, Uncommon Fruits Worth of Attention.

71. Leofranc Halford-Stevens, A Short History of Time.

72. Margery Allingham, Look to the Lady.

73. Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers.

74. Robert A. Weinberg, One Renegade Cell: How Cancer Begins.

75. C. S. Wilkins, Bandera Bound Book 2.

76. James Hillman, Healing Fiction.

77. Herbert M. Shelton, The Science and Fine Art of Fasting.

78.  Peggy Knickerbocker, Love Later On

79. Arundhati Roy, Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction.

80. KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning.

81. Neil McKinney,  Naturopathic Oncology.

82. Joanne Fluke, A Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder.

83. Scott Zesch, The Captured.

84. Herman Pontzer, Burn.

85. Toni Dwiggins, Quicksilver.

86. Karin Slaughter,  False Witness.

87. Kristen Hannah, Firefly Lane.

88.  Ann Cleeves, The Crow Trap.

89.  Amy Greene, Long Man.

 

Let's start with the more ambitious reading.   As had mentioned back in May, I had accumulated a stack of books related to cancer both directly and indirectly, and had a rough plan for getting them all read.  That plan has remained rough, but I have made progress.   I started with Thomas Seyfried's book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease, which I found both challenging, fun, and fascinating.  In one sense, it would have made more sense to read Robert A. Weinberg's The Biology of Cancer first, as that would have given me a broad introduction to the currently dominant view of cancer development and treatment.  But Seyfried addressed much of Weinberg's text in his own book, and there were many chapters where I was simultaneously reading Weinberg and Sefried side-by-side.  My edition of Weinberg is newer than the one Seyfried referenced, and some ideas have changed over time, which is probably good.  It seems to me that these two views of cancer cannot exist separately, although at the moment they seem to.  I am hoping that changes.  Yes cancer is caused by a change in the DNA of cells, but it is also quite obvious that these changes affect and are affected by metabolic changes to the ways that cells operate and grow.  There is much yet to discover.  And although our knowledge of cancer has grown by leaps and bounds, the effectiveness of this knowledge remains questionable; treatment lags far behind. Weinberg himself admits that as much as we have learned about cancer, and as fascinating as cancer DNA is to the researcher, himself included, cancer DNA research is unlikely to yield a cure.  That admission alone seems to be a powerful statement, and one that motivates me to power on. I am still reading Weinberg.  I went back and started at the beginning after finishing Seyfried, and got about a third of the way through the book before my body told me that even intellectual pursuits were pushing the bounds of my available energy.  I just picked the book up again recently, and hope to finish it this month, along with a huge stack of research papers, which will not be reviewed here, but the volume of which seems to keep growing.

 

Other books in this category would include Eric Kossoff's Ketogenic Diets and Herbert M. Shelton's The Science and Fine Art of Fasting,  both of which I picked up after recommendations from Seyfried who is very interested in metabolism and the role diet plays in cancer development and recurrence. Both are informative and thought-provoking although of little interest to the general reader. The book by Shelton is not actually the one Seyfried recommended, but is the book I could get my hands on.  Shelton's book, a classically early 20th century text, was frustrating to me as he referred to many experiments and data, but unlike modern texts, was not very good at actually providing references.  At least I can say that is one less rabbit hole for me to fall into.  

 

Robert Weinberg's One Renegade Cell is, I suppose, considered a classic in the popular science vein, an attempt to explain cancer for the non-science audience.  It is actually quite good, and quite readable, but now also somewhat out of date.  It is clearly written, does not fall into either pandering or fear-mongering, and I found it an easy enough read that offered little new to say.  I will keep it though.  I suppose it should have been the first book I read.  Neil McKinney's Naturopathic Oncology, has proven to be an invaluable reference work (along with Seyfried) and I am glad to have read it as well as have it on hand when both my Integrative medicine physician and my oncologists make treatment recommendations.  Both books focus on the research to date (at the time of writing) and both point to solid resources for further exploration.  

 

Lastly, Herman Pontzer's Burn fits only tenuously into this category.  Pontzer is simultaneously fascinating and maddening; the book could have used a good editor.  When he is talking about his own research about human evolution, and the role metabolism and diet play in evolution, he is fascinating.  The book is useful for this information alone because it tends to turn a lot of stories we tell ourselves about diet and metabolism on their heads.  But he gets into trouble because he repeatedly ignores research in related fields of nutrition and nutritional epidemiology, and impugns the research of others without going further into his own epistemology.  He. tells many stories and anecdotes that seem to serve no purpose, and often come to no conclusion.  He falls into the same traps he accuses others of, the same traps we all fall into, the traps of cognitive dissonance, and he explains them away repeatedly by stating "It's complex", using complexity as an excuse rather than as an opportunity for further exploration.  And yet, I have no real regrets with reading the book even though I am not yet sure where the information I gleaned will take me, or any of us.

 

The other nonfiction books I read are a rather mixed lot although there was intention behind my choice of reading material, at least at the time the choice was made..

 

Lee Reich's Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention was, in its own way, perfect fantasy reading for a time when I cannot work in the garden, and realize that my time and priorities for gardening may have been permanently changed over the course of the last year.  I have had the book for years, and have certainly perused sections of it over those years, even if I have only read it from cover to cover once or twice.  This time was particularly poignant because I realized the fruits I miss and really wish to grow, namely currants in all their forms, are not suited to my current climate.  Truly fantasy reading to soothe the soul of one of my fantasy selves.

 

Leofranc Halford-Stevens' book A Short History of Time cropped up as I was shifting books on one of the shelves to make room for some of the books listed above.  It is not really a discussion of the nature of time itself but a history of the myriad ways humans have measured and marked the passage and existence of time.  I picked it up to reread on a whim and it was interesting enough — fascinating, even, in sections — and probably a good reference if one needs to be reminded that the way we look at time today in Western culture is neither preordained or universally accepted.   I have put the book back on the shelf although I am not particularly inclined to read it again.  Its status may change.

 

James Hillman and KC Davis are, I suppose on opposite ends of the psychological repertoire, or at least these books are.  Davis's How to Keep House While Drowning is a very short, easily read self-help book about, yes, housekeeping.  But it is also about more than that; it is about letting go of shame, and about new ways of thinking about taking care of oneself and, with oneself, one's environment.  I think Davis has a good way of looking at the way our brains judge our actions, and in finding ways to help us accept these quirks without adding unnecessary judgement. James Hillman's book, Healing Fiction,  is a much deeper and more serious tome, but in some ways it plays well with Davis' book, even though they were not intentionally read together. The latter book is really a book for psychologists and is not particularly geared to the general reader.  And yet I always find Hillman fascinating; his books allow me to think about things I think I know in different ways, and that is enlightening. I suppose what I like about the book might or might not be what a professional psychoanalyst might find useful.  I love the way Hillman looks at the essential question of "what does the soul want" and then explores the fictions we devise to both clarify and occasionally obfuscate these yearnings. I love the often subtle layering of his text; the examination of Freud, Jung, and Adler; but also the sense of exploration and deft thread of ideas that Hillman weaves in and out, never really shrinking the complexity of human development but at the same time not open-ended. Hillman explores the necessity of story in our lives while simultaneously questioning both the constraints and the possibilities, both of our stories themselves and the way we tell them, our stories impose on our understanding of our lives.  This is a book I could read again and again, and perhaps see and understand in new ways with each reading.

 

 

The other two non-fiction books came to be on my list due, at least in part,  to their relationships to fiction.  Scott Zesch's book, Captured, is about the real-life stories of children on the Texas frontier who were captured by Indians.  I read it because I had recently reread Paulette Jiles' novel News of the World. I found it fascinating, both in its stories of a Texas long gone but with which I am still partly familiar, and with its deep exploration of the two cultures and their deep misunderstandings and misrepresentations of each other.  Well, this hasn't changed in all of human history, but it is interesting to see how this clash of culture can play out in the lives of children and of families.  Zesch started writing this book to explore his own family history; I believe the story he tells is important to our history, and the history of the development of this country, to what makes us who we are.  

 

Arundhati Roy's book, Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, Fiction, was purchased last August after I heard Roy speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.  I started to read it at that time, then put it aside.  Apparently Roy has written much about politics and her beloved India and Pakistan, has written more non-fiction than fiction.  But I what I found most fascinating about this book is the way Roy writes about language, about language and culture, the way it shapes us, but also the way it used against us, to mold us in certain ways, mostly political, and in what is lost and what is gained in that process.  The political and the practical are not that separate in our lives, and one cannot really separate the novelist from the writer of political essays.  We want to separate our lives into convenient little rooms, each with defined doors between them, doors that can be opened or shut at will.  Roy explores the ways this is really not possible, the ways story and language and politics all interweave to make us who we are.  Reading this book, I now think I need to reread both The God of Small Things, and especially The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, which I think I underestimated.

 

There you have it, the first half (more or less) of my July reading.  The rest will follow.  At least I have material for at least one more blog post.   There is hope that thought and word will once again meet and that act of blogging will once again find its own groove.

 

Here it is the end of July, another month shaped by inconsistency. I have been trying to write a book post for over a week, and my fifteenth draft is possibly even worse than my first. Perhaps it is time to let go of any pretentious that I can write anything more than a straightforward list. Perhaps it is time to start yet another first draft, and then hit publish before creeping doubts seep in.

Here are the books, listed in order read,  no categories or cute stuff this month.

 

53.     Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular.  If you have read my book posts over the years, you probably know that I am crazy about Murakami and I will preorder just about any of his books.  This is the first book that has proven difficult for me, but I can also safely say it is as much the timing of the release, and the timing of my reading that caused the difficulty.  This is a series of short stories, told from the male perspective, in many ways the typical perspective of many of Murakami's protagonists, everyday, simple-appearing kind of guys who are observant and yet also isolated in some way.   As is also typical for Murakami, nothing is as simple as it seems.  As usual Murakami uses magical realism in a deeply psychological and almost allegorical way.  This book explores the inner lives of men, and Murakami makes no attempt to state that they are representative of all men, just as it is obvious that he is exploring deeply seated feelings and archetypes.  There are a three stories in which the men are so awful from a woman's perspective that female readers may have trouble reading them.  I did struggle, but I also finished each one; they are worth finishing as this author is clearly not misogynistic,  and these men are emphatically condemned. Although Murakami writes from a male perspective, and often from the perspective of rather hapless men with little understanding of their own selves, he clearly writes from the perspective that women are in charge of their own destiny, and have their own equally important and powerful lives, lives which are alas, often completely separate from, and sometimes incomprehensible to,  the inner workings of these men's emotional states. As usual for Murakami there is a lot of music in the story, and also exploration of the strangely almost invisible way the heart and soul works.  Although I struggled with the stories, mostly because I was in the middle of my own struggles with isolation, and strange interruptions in life, my own questions of meaning and relevance, many of these stories have struck with me, and I have had to read them again.  Perhaps not my favorite book of Murakami's but still worth reading and owning. 

 

54.     Lawrence Block, The Burglar in Short Order  is a series of short pieces concerning Bernie Rhodenbarr, who is certainly my favorite literary burglar.  Some of the pieces are variations on scenes in the novels, or have appeared other places.  Some were appealing, others were not. I might have preferred another novel, but this was fun and a good way to round out my collection even if it is probably of little interest to anyone but Bernie Rhodenbarr fans.

 

55.    Tayari Jones, Dispossession. This is a short story, exclusive to Audible, and it takes a little under an hour to hear the entire story.  It is about a mother reminiscing about her life and the choices she made raising her son, whom she sent away from Atlanta to a boarding school in the Northeast.  Her relationship with her son is now distant, (she has been dispossessed of him) and she struggles to understand the huge divide in their lives as she reviews her own life and the choices she has made.  I found it poignant and moving. Even though it is sad, I found it a powerful escape on a difficult day, and a reminder of the struggles we never see in other people's lives. 

 

56,     Ann Cleeves, Raven Black.  My second foray into the novels of Ann Cleeves was as rewarding as the first, this time with Raven Black, the first of the Jimmy Perez, Shetland Island series.  There is not a lot of development of Perez' character in this first novel, but there is enough that he is interesting, and although he is Fair Isle born, he also carries a sense of being an outsider, noted here primarily because of his coloring and name.  I like that this aspect of Perez character is not over-developed, and in fact the idea that Perez does not come across as being particularly egotistical.  He is, instead, an observer and a listener.  I also like the fact that Cleeves writes this novel well from different perspectives, with the different voices remaining individual and separate.  Particularly moving is seeing the events through the eyes of a lonely, confused and frightened older man, Magnus, who is seen by the community as the natural prime suspect in this murder, and in one that occurred many years earlier.   That Magnus is not the killer seemed evident to this reader early on, but Magnus' story, and the way lives are shaped by lies and fear haunts the entire community in this novel.  In fact I would say this is something Cleeves is very good at, fleshing out the way we let lies and falsehoods become facts, how we ruthlessly cling to these stories despite their costs, both to ourselves and the victims of the falsehood, simply because we prefer the supposed comfort of a lie than the perhaps more uncomfortable truth of reality.  Highly recommended and I look forward to more novels by this author.

 

57.    Ross I.S. Zbar, Floating Feathers. Ross Zbar is a physician and his memoir, Floating Feathers, the story of a horrific accident, how he survived it and recovered, despite equally horrific and inhumane treatment in the ICU, treatment that is all too common, and in fact standard.  Zbar uses his experience and his knowledge of medicine to offer insights into the often brutal ways we treat critically ill patients, how those standards evolved, and he offers suggestions for ways to make caring for the critically ill more compassionate and humane, which would lead to greater healing.

 

58 & 59.    Elinor M. Brent-Dyer. The School at the Chalet, and Jo of the Chalet School.  Elinor Brent-Dyer is the author of a rather long series of novels for young girls, beginning in the 1920s and spanning the course of 40 years, of which these are the first two.  I had not read them before, but apparently they were fairly beloved, and I might well have read them had we lived in Spain a little longer, until I was slightly older perhaps, simply because British books were more available than American ones.  Therefore I was intrigued when a friend lent me the series. The setting is charming, the author creates a pleasant bubble of a world, and the characters are believable and well developed.  But the stories barely hold together and I do not feel they have held up well.  It is not merely the extreme ethnocentrism and xenophobia, although some of these attitudes will be shocking to modern readers, but the way people are primarily described by their "ethnic" traits more than their individual characters is disturbing.  I have read other books from this era, and grew up in a time when America was far less open to diversity, but even so, at times these novels made me cringe. Also the forced jocularity and use of slang feels forced now, even though I have no idea if it actually would have at the time.  My pre-teenage self might have loved these books.  My oder self feels there are better books, even from this time period, which although perhaps still dated, offer a more timeless appeal.  I admit that although I initially enjoyed aspects of the books, I grew increasingly reluctant to finish and I dreaded the thought of picking up a third. I returned the series to its owner.

 

60.    Arianna Davis,  What Would Frida Do?  This book is billed as self-help/biography, and it does in fact mix both of these genres.  I read it hoping to attend a book group at the local art museum, which, due to chemo side effects, I missed. (the story of my life lately). Davis's goal appears to be uplifting Frida. Kahlo as a role model for today's young women on how to live life boldly despite any setbacks  that might occur, and to be true to oneself and one's own talents and gifts.  She also offers the reader a great deal of information about Frida Kahlo's life and art, as well as attempting to set Frida up as a role model for the confident modern young woman. The style was breezy and light.  In fact I initially found the book charming, perhaps a little gushy, in a girl-crush kind of way.  I had no problem with this and Davis is a good writer and I applaud her efforts in writing this book.  My problem with the book is that it did not appear to follow or adhere to a specific outline or timeline and became very repetitive, probably for this reason. The author would repeat the same anecdotes and stories, describe the same artworks in almost the same words, although granted she was trying to make different points.  Because of my chemo-induced haze, I kept thinking, "Oh I lost my place, I already read that" but this was not the case.  When I looked back, it was easy enough to locate the repetitive passages. That girl-crush sense became stronger along with a forced sense that there was just not enough material here to make the case.  I grew bored, and increasingly annoyed, especially as I would read another chapter and cry to myself that the author had just said the same thing in not so different words a few pages earlier.    I do think Ms. Davis made valid points and some of her analysis was enlightening.  And truthfully I think the book has potential.  I certainly have not written a book and admire anyone who can do so.  I agree with Arianna Davis that Frida's attitude and life have much to teach us and even though I felt that this book was rushed to press and could have used editing, I hope Ms, Davis writes more books in the future.

 

61.    Carol Culver,  A Good Day to Pie. I read one of the author's previous novels, That's Amore, in May, and found it a sweet, well written and charming romance of the old school, meaning. without steamy sex.  I understand that this is a transitional novel for the author, and although it was entertaining light reading, I did not find it flowed as well as the romance.  But I also have to admit that I am not, generally a reader of cozy mysteries and my criticisms may be completely off-base given the appeal of the genre. Although I could easily pick out the formula, the bright young woman, talented baker of pies, smart but insecure, small town environment, various interesting characters with a grudge,  it just did not seem to gel, and I felt that the author's transitions between points in the plot/formula were not as smooth as in the romance.   There was a great deal of back-circling and repetition.  Again, it got me through a rough day and the author is a talented writer so these kinks are probably worked out in future books in the series.  There are some potentially interesting story lines here, and I like the fact that Hannah's grandmother lives in a high-end nursing home, and that the author begins to explore some of the difficulties that occur in such places.  I smiled at the competition between the ladies in the bridge group.  I cannot say I would not read another on a particularly difficult day.

 

62 & 63.    Marcella Hazan, The Classic Italian Cookbook, The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.  Two cookbooks, an older volume and a newer, updated edition.  I wrote about them here. 

 

64.    C. Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold?  I adored this book. I think it is brilliant, a brutal story told with delicate realism.  It is a grand tale of the west in the time of the gold rush, about Chineseness, the immigrant experience, and gender identity.  In some ways this book is a sweeping, old-style Western, in others it is lyrical exploration of the meaning of home and the yearning for more, something all humans share.  I like that Zhang explores difficult issues: the lives and difficulties faced by Chinese and other Oriental immigrants, discrimination, gender identity, the kind of brutality brought about by xenophobia, but she does it in a rather gentle way as compared to modern trends.  This does not make her message any less powerful.  This is the time of the gold rush, and gold is a constant here, both as a physical thing worth seeking, as a metaphor for greed and avarice, but also as a metaphor for the yearnings of human nature, the constant searching for the ideal of home, of love, of the meaning of life itself.  Just as, apparently, one can never find enough gold, we never achieve what we are searching for.  Just as Lucy thinks she has found what she was seeking and settles in, she finds that the reality and the dream do not match up; yet she stays.  And we see many characters here, both immigrant and white, rich and poor, driven to search, yet also allowing themselves to believe that they have found their dreams.  This is a novel about the important searches of life, which are not, in the end, about accumulating wealth.  The ending is, in one sense, inconclusive.  And yet I think not. We never achieve what we are searching for, we never stop yearning even though we may temporarily convince ourselves otherwise.  I find the ending both unsettling, because we tend to seek fixed happy endings in novels, and calming, in that yearning itself is such an ongoing and essential part of human nature.  For Lucy to own her wanting, to accept that it is, in and of itself, a part of her, is indeed a fine ending.

 

65.     Martha Grimes, The Man With a Load of Mischief.  I had never read Grimes before and I considered this an experimental read, as I fleshed out different types and classes of mystery.  Grimes, an American author, writes classic British detective mysteries revolving around Scotland Yard inspector Richard Jury.  She does seem to employ all the comfortable tropes that readers of the genre expect, comfortable settings, small, quaint villages, quirky characters and a sense of humor in the telling off the story, dropping steady clues to help the reader untangle the mystery, including the addition of a few red herrings.  Yet I felt that plot was not a strength here.  The identity of the murderer was obvious from the very beginning and although there were still details to work out, and a few red herrings, even most of the motive was quite clear well before the end of the novel.  Perhaps this is the point.  As I have said, I am a relatively new reader of mysteries.   I did like Melrose Plant, but again, think this is not my series.  I would be more likely to reread Christie, who is a master of plot.  The Man With a Load of Mischief was an entertaining, if not memorable, bit of fluff.

 

66.    Karin Slaughter, The Silent Wife.  Karin Slaughter's novels are nothing like the others explored here, and The Silent Wife is no exception.  This novel, the 10th in the Will Trent series, comes full circle. The first novel of the Grant County Series centers on a horrific rape and this novel opens with a prison riot and a prisoner, claiming to have been falsely convicted of that first rape, who offers to trade testimony for a chance to move to a lower security facility.    The novel masterfully interweaves the two investigations and two stories, which are essentially one complexly interwoven story.  The original investigation is weak and that weakness is explored, as is Sara Linton's complex relationships with both of the lead investigators, her deceased husband, and sheriff of Grant County, Jeffrey Tolliver, and her new love Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent Will Trent.  This is a complex novel, and yes it is also a violently disturbing one at times.  

 

There are admittedly times I would prefer not to know the horrific details of the crimes perpetrated against women, but I understand Slaughter's point.  Violence against women is common, and often horrific, and as long as well deny this, we cannot stop it or change it.  Too many many girls and women are beaten and/or raped; too many men and boys do not see the issue.  The statistics are staggering. This is Slaughter's point, that violence and abuse is all too real, all too common, and although we console ourselves by saying that most of it is not "that bad" we are lying to ourselves.  The continued and ongoing trauma to the victims does not fade away.  The attitudes of the perpetrators do not soften,  Our cutlure and our world is tainted even if we do not see it, perhaps all the more so because we do not see it. I don't fault Slaughter for attempting to shock me into realizing that the world is not the bubble I would like it to be.

 

Of course the other thing I read the Will Trent series for is for Sara Linton and her relationship with Will Trent.  It is complex, concordant, and satisfying, even though in many ways on the surface, and in the eyes of other characters in the novel, it makes no sense.  Sara loved Jeffrey Tolliver, but that relationship never really worked; it was discordant.  They each loved the person they wanted the other to be, not the person they were.  Will and Sara's backgrounds were terribly different,  on at least one level, in that Sara grew up in a loving  safe family and Will grew up in a children's home and a life of abandonment and abuse.  But like so much of life, such differences are only one prism that shapes life.  Both Will and Sara are phenomenally bright, bright enough to be disconnected from others, Sara was brutally raped  and her life subsequent to that rape has changed her, and made her far stronger than she appears, a counterpoint to the way Will is far more vulnerable than he appears.   Both have a deep understanding of the evil that lies just below the surface of life.  This novel brings all this together, the relationship, the histories, the dark underbelly of violence against women in this country, the way that violence cannot be ignored even when we would prefer to put it aside and not think about it. How every act of violence, even those we write off as "minor", change us.  I am not sure where Slaughter is going next.  I fear that this is the end of Sara and Will, but I hope not.  I doubt it is the end of Slaughter's writing.

 

67.    Lucy Foley, The Guest List. Last among the mysteries, but far from least, is Lucy Foley's The Guest List, which is a stylish and fascinating "locked-room" kind of mystery.  We have a wedding on a remote island.  We are told there will be a murder.  We know who the prime suspects are and the story is told from their perspectives.  It is not difficult to deduce who will be murdered, although the actual murder is not revealed until the end, but the rest is a complexly unfolding puzzle.  I was surprised by this mystery and liked it more than I thought I would. The plotting is almost Christie-like, although this is a thoroughly modern mystery, a mystery that explores modern pop-culture, influencers, and the secrets that lie beneath the glitz.  The story unfolds in an alternating telling of "now" and "before" but the before is not always clearly delineated from the now and the different voices often overlap and become almost indistinguishable..  As the story progresses more and more inconsistencies crop up, and more odd coincidences as well, and yet the book is thoroughly satisfying, page-turning, and told well overall.  None of the characters are all that likable, but I found myself rooting for the murderer in the end.  A good read.

 

There you have it.  I got the June list out before the end of July, and hopefully next month will be better. 

Did you think I had forgotten?  I still keep a list,  although I am not convinced that the May reading list reflects anything more than random unsettledness.   But first, the List:

39. Ruth. J. Gendler, The Book of Qualities.

40. Việt Thanh Nguyễn, The Committed.

41. Karin Slaughter, Unseen.

42. C.S. Wilkins, Breezy in Bandera.

43. Karin Slaughter, The Kept Woman.

44. Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

45. George Gissing, The Odd Woman.

46. Lee Miller, Landscape Design Combinations.

47. Bryan Chick, The Secret Zoo.

48. Tom Robb Smith,  Child 44.

49. Karin Slaughter, The Last Widow.

50. Olga Ravn, The Employees.

51. Ann Cleeves, The Long Call.

52. Carole Grace, That's Amore.

 

Let's see, five suspense novels, three of them by Karin Slaughter.  I have been slowly, intermittently, working my way through the Sara Linton novels, and although I was beginning to waver during the end of the first series, with Will Trent I have become more engaged.  I connected with Sara Linton from the first novel, small town girl, too smart, awkward, self-doubting — she is a character I can understand and it is for this reason that I continue to read.  The brutality of the novels doesn't really bother me.  Sara and Will are sufficiently complicated to carry me through and I always learn something, feel my time was rewarded even if that reward is simply escape into a world so completely outside my own experience.

 

As to the other two, Ann Cleeves is a new to me author who has been oft recommended.  I saw The Long Call  at the library and picked it up.  Alas it is a new series and now I have to wait months for the second book.  I have sought out some of Cleeves' previous novels.  More about that later.  Matthew Venn is a fine character with a sharp mind, the story is complex and richly woven with both intricate relationships, a great slow-burn of a story that peaks near the end of the book and was quite a bit more complicated than I expected it to be.  

 

Tom Robb Smith's Child 44 is another slow burn, but this one is dark, raw, and emotionally draining.  Unlike Slaughter, whose brutality and darkness is somehow separate from the reader, at least this reader, this novel  seeps under one's skin and explores humanity's deepest emotions in a way that is quite unsettling.  Smith accomplishes this while telling a gripping story, one I had read before.  I didn't realize this until I was in to it, but I read this years ago, when it first came out in paperback, either when George was sick, or I was packing to move, a raw and emotionally draining period in my own life.  The book was worth reading again and it managed to surprise me even on this second reading.  Leo Demidov is a fascinating character, both filled with strength and conviction as well as doubt, but perhaps those are necessary balances, each bolstering the other.  I might well read the next.

 

Intermingled with the mystery/suspense were two literary novels.  Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Committed was every bit as brilliant, poetic, sarcastic, dark, cutting and outrageously humorous as The Sympathizer, except without the fine line of hope in the face of despair that ran through the previous novel.   I loved it but it also left me feeling cold and unsettled in my bones.  Both novels are disturbing in that they cut right to the heart of who people are, the way we act, and the stories we tell ourselves to hide the truth of our lives from ourselves and each other.  In that sense these are not happy escape novels.  But they are brilliant, insightful, intelligent, witty, poetic, and incredibly humorous.  Nguyen has a way of capturing a scene, an emotion, a way of wrapping truth and a story in humor so that you don't notice you are bleeding until after you have rolled on the floor in laughter.

 

Olga Ravn's The Employeees is a completely different kind of novel and it is not an easy read, although I do think it is brilliant and proved worth the effort.  Such a short novel: science fiction; some unknown place; some unknown time.  The story does not emerge linearly.  In fact, we get a series of short interviews, sometimes reports, sometimes vignettes, sometimes almost poetry, and through the spacing of these interviews, the use of words and white space, Ravn explores what it means to be human, memory, self, life itself as some of her characters are human-born and some are made, artificial life.  But as the story progresses the lines begin to blur and the question of who we are and how we define ourselves emerges.  I found this fascinating, unsettling, but also calming in an odd sort of way.  Highly recommended for those who can work their way slowly through metaphor and vague images, who can read a poem a day in search of a unifying thread.

 

Then there were the toss-offs,  quick easy reads that I enjoyed, some more than others, at the time of reading but which are effectively completely forgettable.   Landscape Design Combinations  was the only non-fiction in this group and although it had lots of pretty pictures, I found nothing new or particularly inspiring in it —  an afternoon of garden pictures that will have no impact on my future gardens.   Of the remaining books, Eleanor Oliphant was probably the best of the lot.  It is a rather quirky novel, and the author does a good job of hinting at Eleanor's past without either revealing too much or too little.  Eleanor herself is endearing and charming, and I loved her unintentional sense of humor.  An excellent feel-good read with little long-term impact.   I don't know how The Secret Zoo ended up on my stack; the cover perhaps?  It is a children's novel, but not a good one although I initially thought the premise was interesting.  It reads much like a bad children's movie, pandering to stereotypes with shallow character development.  That said, probably my 8 year old self would have loved it.  That's Amore is a romance, given to me by a friend in a period when I was having trouble reading or settling down, and it surprised me with how good it was.  The writing is crisp, and there is wit in the dialogue despite the other tropes of the formula.  It is a bit out of date for modern tastes in this genre, sweet and romantic, with no steamy scenes, not that I am objecting.  A perfect novel for when you crave inane feel-good fun.

 

Now let's deal with George Gissing.  I did not like The Odd Woman. It reminded me of all the worst things about Victorian Literature, and there are Victorian authors I adore and whose writing withstands the passage  of time.  Not Gissing.  Of course don't tell my former college student self that I ever admitting to liking anything Victorian.  That girl thought literature stopped in 1800.  Yes, we all have our faults.   That said, there were many good things about this book.  It was filled with shocking and valuable information about the plight of women in Victorian England.  Alas for Gissing he is no Upton Sinclair and I would be surprised if this story provoked outrage, which is a shame.  I did find it interesting, upon reading this, as I noticed how many of these same biases still shape our understanding of women's worth and women's work today.   Gissing was excellent at sussing out the foibles of people of society (then and now) and their blind spots and self-delusions.  In fact, I wished I was reading an in-depth sociological study rather than a novel; that, perhaps, I could have appreciated. 

 

And what are those two remaining books? The green ones?  Those are little frivolous bits of fluff that surprised me and which I adored.   J. Ruth Gendler's The Book of Qualities is a brief book, an alphabet book of sorts, although dealing with emotions and qualities.  I found it charming, and although yes, sometimes the analogies are simple, they are also at times quite profound.  I breezed through this book once, and keep it near my mediation chair as I find it often offers a perfect diving board for reflection on those mornings when I am too scattered, too tired, to nauseated, to settle my mind.    And since I have already. said I "breezed" through The Book of Qualities, that brings up our last book, Breezy in Bandera.   Bandera is a town in the Texas Hill Country, and this novel was written by a blogger whom I have followed for a few years now, although never really commenting.  I think I found her through knitting, but she is a fabulous weaver and inspires me, even though I have not yet warped my loom.  I found the story well written (it is a romance), and I felt at home with the descriptions of place, as if I was back in familiar territory. with a character I could relate to (an introvert who loves to cook and feed people and weave).  Yeah.  My kind of story.  Make no excuses for what you love.  I am looking forward to the second book.

 

 

Somehow my reading plans for the year have shifted.  Here is my Summer Reading List.  I will read other books of course, but this is a more focused list, one to see me throughout the rest of the year.  I am one of those people who likes to learn as much as I can about whatever I find myself involved in, and the thought of learning about cancer is calming.  Since I cannot, at the moment, ignore cancer, I can learn as much as I can about it.

As you will see from my April list, I've already read two of these books, and yet they remain on the stack.  I actually shelved them and brought them back.  I have referred back to both books repeatedly, and both have excellent references and I also have a growing list of articles to work my way through.  Best to keep them at hand.

 

But what about April?  My reading in April was scattershot and unfocused.  Often my head wasn't in it.  Sometimes I was simply depressed, sometimes I was simply too tired.  It doesn't matter.  It seems likely that I will not reach my 120 book goal for the year, but then so what.  No one is keeping track but me, and it is a minor distraction. No groupings this month, simply fiction, and nonfiction.

30.  Jane Harper, The Survivors.

31. Danielle Girard, White Out.

32. Siddhartha Mukerjee, The Emperor of All Maladies

33. Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist

34. Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind.

35. Paulette Jiles, News of the World.

36.  Avrom Bluming, Estrogen Matters.

37. Việt Thanh Nguyễn, The Sympathizer.

38. Winifred Peck, Bewildering Cares. 

 

I started the month in need of some escapist reading and, as it turns out, The Survivors was not the best book for my state of mind.  It is beautifully written, but although it centered around a murder, it is really a slow-burn character study filled with gloom and the narrator's sense of guilt.  Given my own state of mind I found it difficult, but I stuck with it and I actually liked the ending, which pulled the story together.   I think, in a different frame of mind, I would have liked this very much as it is a very good exploration of how tragedy, as well as mindset and the assumptions and stories people tell about the tragedy, marks and changes people.  In this case a murder resurrects long buried but not dead feelings about an earlier tragedy, and the reader gets to see how those memories and fears have shaped both individuals and a town.  There are inconsistencies in the accepted version of what happened in the past, but no one really sees them because they have already formed their own narrative.  In some ways, when the truth arises, it seems like it came out of left field, except that it had been present all along, in the subtext.  I found the novel fascinating, tragic, sad, but also hopeful in some ways.

 

Still looking for some kind of escape, I next picked up Danielle Girard's White Out. It opened well, and I did finish it, but again I struggled.  I perhaps could have forgiven the rough transitions, the holes in the plot, the disparate themes that were never quite connected, had the characters felt more compelling.  But to this reader they seemed so immature and inconsistent, behaving in ways that made no sense, and the inconsistencies were never pulled together in any coherent way.  Mostly I was just constantly annoyed with the lead detective, Kylie, who struck me as self-centered, illogical and often downright stupid.  Heaven help this fictional town, but at least my annoyance, and my desire to learn what had happened to the one interesting, but still too inconsistently drawn character, Lily, drove me forward.  Kylie does not interest me, so this will not be a series I will pursue further. 

 

After two iffy attempts with fiction I leapt into Siddhartha Mukerjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, which had been sitting on my shelf for what, a decade, now?  This was the distraction I needed.  I plowed through it as if it were the most gripping novel. I read hungrily.  I jotted notes and held conversations with myself.  I could not put the book down.  Yes, there was a lot of information, yes the author has some writing tics that I found annoying, but I think the book was compelling and beautifully written with wonderful metaphors and great flow.  Perhaps this too was just me, but reading about cancer as I started my own cancer journey proved to be a very calming thing.

 

The next book on my list, Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Antiracist,  just showed up because my turn finally arrived on the county library wait list.  It is an excellent book, a well written book, a book I am glad I read.  But I wanted to like it more than I did. Maybe if I had read it sooner.  I am grateful for Kendi's argument that you are either a racist or an antiracist, and his exploration of how racist ideas sneak into our consciousness without our even realizing they are there. I like the way Kendi explores the development of his own understandings as a kind of guidebook to how we can look at ourselves, the way he tells us that just because we do not know we are racist, we are not absolved from the responsibility of rooting out our own misconceptions and hurtful ideas.  There are some issues, more than we would like in fact, and racism is a big one, in which there really is no neutral territory.  You are either upholding it or trying to tear it down.  Unfortunately, and Kendi reminds us of this, the act of tearing down always starts within.  I am either upholding a system that harms others, or I am trying to fight it.  There really is no middle ground. I write this as the Tennessee legislature is attempting to legislate what can and cannot be taught about racism and American history.  I find this morally heinous.  There is no middle ground, I am either upholding racism, or I am acting to fight it.  If one does not acknowledge one's history of failings one cannot become a better person.  We all have failings, admitting them is not the same as saying we are bad people, only that we are flawed, as are we all.  I am either a racist or an antiracist. I hope I can become the latter.

 

After Kendi I returned to fiction.  Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind is a fascinating novel, very low key, but the very sense of detachment that the author employs serves to emphasize the disconnect here, the disconnect between what is happening in the world and what we want to be happening, between what really is and what we see, between how we act and who we think we are.  A middle-class and fairly middle-brow white family is renting a house on Long Island for a summer vacation.  They want to pretend that this is their house, their life, if only for a moment.  But then a black couple knocks on the door in the middle of the night, claiming to be the owners, seeking refuge from a disaster as yet unfelt in this vacation world.  Everything is challenged.  The internet is out, the news is out.  When there is no information people are driven both by fear and by hope, including the irrational hope that if they just can get back to their old life all will be well.  This is not so much an apocalyptical or even post-apocalyptical novel, but a pre-appocalyptical novel.  What happens when we don't know what is happening?  How do we behave? Who do we become?  Fascinating.

 

Next I picked up News of the World, which I had read before.  It holds up well on rereading.  I watched the movie as well.  Much as I enjoyed the movie, I still prefer the book, but then I almost always do.  Jiles captures Texas as I know it and remember it in her prose, the space, the landscape, even the history and the people.  I am reminded that I intended to read The Captured after my first reading of this novel, the true story of children captured by Indians.  I still have not gotten to that, but I will even though life intervenes.  I am also reminded that the Indian problem has been a problem throughout American history, not the problem of Indians killing settlers, but the problem of settlers who, once exposed to Indian culture did not want to return to their European roots. This dates back to Plymouth Rock, to early Virginia.  What does this tell us about our own civilization, about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves?  Reading this book again, especially following Alam's novel, the difference between Captain Kidd, who is very much a realist who deals with the world and what he needs to do, and Alam's characters, self-obsessed with their own bubbles and their neediness, so self-absorbed they don't really see others clearly, is striking.  Don't know where I am going with this yet, but that thought hovers.

 

I picked up Estrogen Matters after listening to an interview with the author on Peter Attia's podcast.  I have long been interested in the topic.  I went through menopause early, and was diagnosed about the time the a report was published from the Women's Health Initiative (2002) stating that HRT was dangerous and it increased the risks of cancer, stroke, hart disease and death.  Despite the fact that I had severe symptoms and was only in my early 40s, my doctor's refused to give me HRT. They continued to refuse, even as it became evident that this was not at all what the study found, that this report came from a misinterpretation of the data and it was not vetted by the scientists undertaking the study, that the risks were exaggerated or downright wrong.  I knew this because I had a tendency to read all my husband's medical journals from cover to cover. Yet I still could not convince my doctor.  It may or may not be too late for me now, nearly 20 years later, but there is all kinds of interesting information in this book, and all kinds of reference material available for follow-up.  I love a book that makes me think, and makes me reexamine my assumptions.

 

Next, I finally read Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer.  I read it now because his next novel The Committed came up on my library queue and I wanted to read The Sympathizer first.  I was completely blown away. It is a novel that it is almost disturbing in its intelligence, in its unsparing look at the world and the foibles of humanity. And yet it is not really polemical fiction.  It is brilliant and sharp, clever and touching. The author has a way of capturing a feeling, a place, a pivotal moment with such clarity that the reader feels the emotion of the time and is connected to his or her own pivotal moments, a way of capturing the mindset of its participants, of exploring a culture, its strengths and its discontents without really preaching.  It is a very clever book, at times bitterly sarcastic, at time outrageously funny, and although it takes place in the past it is still relevant to our lives today and our future.  As you can tell, I loved this book and was primed for the next one.  I am in the middle of reading The Committed now. 

 

I actually started Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck before I picked up The Sympathizer.  I usually like these mid-twentieth century novels of women's lives, and I usually like the novels of Winifred Peck.  But I struggled to engage with this one.  I suspect that I really needed a book that took me outside of myself, a book like The Sympathizer, and Bewildering Cares was just a little too slow for my agitated and peripatetic mind.  It is the fictional journal of a week in the life of a vicar's wife during a week in 1940, the story of a middle aged woman of some wit, who loves her husband and her parish even though she is often exasperated with the petty cares and trials of life. The novel is somewhat more serious and less light-hearted than Peck's other novels, but still funny, and I did love Camilla's constant obsession with the small things, when there were big things brewing all around.  But this is so much like most of us I found it endearing.   So there you have it, I enjoyed the book even as I struggled to read it.  A bit of an oxymoron, no?  But then, when did being human actually ever really make sense?

 

 

 

It has been a long time since I have actually wanted to throw a book at the wall, years in fact, but March of 2021 proved exceptional in that there were two such books in my reading queue, although only one actually took flight.  The second was a digital edition and I was loathe to break my iPad in a fit of pique. 

 

But first, what did I read?

 

21.  Mary Beth Keane,  Ask Again, Yes.

22. Annette Valentine, Down to the Potter's House.

23. Joe Ide, Wrecked.

24. Kristin Neff, Self Compassion.

25. Joe Ide, Hi Five. 

26. Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half.

27. Bill Gates, How to Avoid A Climate Disaster.

28. Ivan Doig,  The Whistling Season.

29. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance.

 

Mostly March was about reading fiction, but there were two exceptions, one of which I finished, one which I did not.  If you follow this blog you know I read How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which I wrote about here. It is an interesting book, and a useful book, but rather lightweight.  I believe this was the intent. Still although I feel Gates occasionally glosses over individual responsibility, he brings insight and the book is worth reading. If you are interested in greater detail on energy use, driving, and individual responsibility, my friend Grace has put up a remarkable series of posts recently, which I highly recommend.

 

Which gets me to the other non-fiction book, and one of the two books that earned a flight rating.  I have heard Kristin Neff speak, and I do think her book Self Compassion makes some important points about the way we treat ourselves and how that relates to our compassion for others, and about the dangers of self-criticism and the tendency to push oneself with mental abuse when one feels one is not achieving at a desired level.  This is, in a sense, the protestant ethic and self actualization gone horribly awry.  But the language of the book itself, and the examples just drove me crazy.  It seemed shallow and self-indulgent to me, which is a shame because it is not a trivial subject.  This is the book I literally threw at the wall, with a loud verbal "bah".  This doesn't mean this book is bad.  As I said the information is important.  And I am certain that Neff's approach will help many, many whom could not be reached perhaps by the kind of book that would appeal to me.  In fact I do not believe the book is trivial or shallow, but it is written from a perspective that does not align with my own perspective, either culturally or generationally, and that this is one of its strengths, because if this explosion of self-criticism that Neff sees is indeed a growing phenomenon, a cancer even, it is perhaps even more a problem in younger generations than in my own.  Just because this is not MY book, does not mean it is not an important book.

 

Alas I have less to say about the second flight-worthy book.  As you might recall, I was not thrilled with the first Annette Valentine novel, which I read in February for a book club.  I purchased both books in kindle format, and I was determined to read the second with an open mind.  I did not succeed.  Whereas, with Eastbound from Flagstaff, I found the story compelling enough to drive me forward despite my struggles with sanctimonious language and less than artful transitions, I found that I simply could not read Down to the Potter's House.  I believe the subject matter of the novel should have been compelling, and perhaps the language was not an issue for those drawn to this kind of Christian historical family drama, but I found the language artificial, sanctimonious, and the story, oddly, without soul. Had I not read Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Shakespeare and Tolkien, Saunders and Murakami, perhaps I would have found this novel rich.  This does not mean that reading certain kinds of books makes me a better person, it does not, but because what I have absorbed from those books as inalterably changed my perception of the world. In that sense this is a problem of my own internal wiring and my own perspective on things seen and unseen.

 

Notice that I balanced the two flight-worthy books with two books in Joe Ide's IQ series, Wrecked and Hi Five.  Both are over the top suspense/crime novels. Both were adequately distracting.  I don't know that this was planned, but it was certainly intentional as I felt I needed some kind of shock to my system, palate-cleansing, novel following each of the previously mentioned books.

The rest of the month was occupied with novels, and rather good novels at that.

 

I started with Mary Beth Keane's novel Ask Again, Yes, which is a sensitive and humanizing novel about small things, about the human condition really.  The story revolves around the intertwined stories of two families of NYPD officers who move to the suburbs.  It spans decades and, although this is the story of these  particular families, it is also a story that could be told on almost every block in every city in America.  The telling is straightforward, from the perspectives of several of the characters, and although there were moments in each telling that I wanted to roust the characters out of their own self-absorbed pity, I also have to admit that I have to do the same thing to myself, and this is very much a story of late 20th Century America.  That said, although I found this novel mostly satisfying, I wanted to like it a bit more than I did.  At times the main characters seemed more like wraiths, as if they existed merely to illustrate an emotion, a reaction, an internal state, rather than becoming characters fully formed. It felt as if their internal lives, or specific aspects of their internal lives, were more important than any external aspects of their lives, or even the complexities that makes us fully human.  I found the novel deft, intriguing and deeply thought-provoking but somehow still wanting.  I wanted to know these characters deeply but felt I could only grab onto their shadow-selves.

 

Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half was much more rewarding but suffered to some extent from the same malaise.  Here, identical twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes grow up in a small town in Louisiana, a bubble of isolation and racism although all the residents of Mallard are "light".  In many ways this story is a fairy tale and unapologetically so, but fairy tales give us a structure for examining truth and culture, and The Vanishing Half does this well.  Mallard is an almost mythical town, which eventually disappears, never officially recorded as it is, more a state of mind than a place, where the residents pride themselves on their lightness, and take pride on their breeding — only with people lighter than themselves — yearning to be white, but never actually crossing that line.  It is no surprise that the girls, Stella and Desiree, in leaving this fishbowl of their upbringing cross that line in different ways.  Stella, light, becomes white, marries a wealthy man, and moves into an entirely different world whereas her sister Desiree, or desire,  marries the seemingly blackest man she can find and produces a child, Jude, with "blue-black" skin, escapes for a while, but ends up back in Mallard, almost as if some part of her feels she must atone for her love of "blackness".  The sisters are separated for decades, each living in their own special kind of hell, riddled by their own absorbed prejudices, fears, and sense of inadequacy.  They are ultimately brought together again through their daughters, but are never fully reunited. This is a fascinating and moving novel which explores the deep psychological loathing and pain brought about by racism, the way it is absorbed, the way it taints perception and creates both fear and need, a need that in its own yearning causes yet more pain and keeps the characters from finding connection, even when that connection would benefit them and bring some degree of healing. This novel is hauntingly sad, and filled with heart-rending moments of human cruelty to one another, but it also shows the toll this cruelty takes on the victim's self-esteem and the ongoing repercussions, in perpetuated bias, denial, lack of self-esteem, echoed over generations, which steal joy from people's lives.  Some of these characters do find a place of acceptance, and although I found the book poignantly sad and unsettling, it is also thought provoking and well worth the investment in reading time.

 

After the depths of Bennett, I stumbled into The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig. This is a book filled with well drawn, complicated characters, and with beautifully evocative writing.   It is another "small" novel, by which I mean a novel about family, about a time, a place, a moment really, less than a year, when a boy begins the process of observation and outside awareness that will lead him from childhood to adulthood, and the realization of the deeper, sometimes hidden consequences of action and inaction, or the choices involved in becoming a caring, responsible adult.  It is also an homage to place, to a time now gone, to the spirit of the American West and the people who made it. It is a novel about deeply invested in the joy and power of language and a novel for the reader who loves the beauty and power of words and the images and emotions they invoke.  If you can't tell, I adored this novel, and, of the three novels discussed so far, it may be the novel I've written the least about, but it is the novel I would most likely consider reading again.

 

Which brings me to Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, a novel I have just read for the third time.  The first time I read this book, shortly after it came out, I certainly loved it, and saved it, thinking it was the kind of big grand book one could throw oneself into.  And there it rested, on my shelves, through two moves but I am not certain I read it again until three years ago, when I was packing it up, yet again, for yet another move.  It is always a gamble with a book one has not reread for decades, and it could have gone either way.  Certainly there are other novels from the 1990s that I thought were fabulous at the time, that I have since decided either now seemed dated, or that I once loved, but which are no longer suited the person I have become (see White Noise in my January book list).  But I loved A Fine Balance perhaps even more the second time I read it than I had the first.  And it has not fallen in my esteem after a third reading.  The novel concerns four friends during the period referred to as The Emergency in India (1975 – 1977).  I remain convinced that the characters, Dina, Maneck, Ishvar and Om, were created specifically to illustrate the atrocities of the period and to show the reader how the cultural biases and norms of the time, as well as how the policies enacted during The Emergency, affected the various cultural groups.  In that sense the characters have something in common with Bennett's characters, except that this novel is far richer, and these characters far more deeply and humanely drawn.  This is a big grand novel in the style of Dickens perhaps.  One member of my book group commented that she had read a review (after reading the book) that compared it to Tolstoy, and I can see the comparison.  I myself was thinking more of Dostoevsky, especially in the character of Maneck — the bright, naive, idealistic depressive who could not reconcile his hopes with the world in which he lived. Maneck was much a character of his time, but lost in his own time, and and yet a young man who could very much be a young man of the burgeoning 21st century.   In this reading I see more transformation, about the way love and friendship, but also tragedy, can refine us and transform us. I suppose, however the biggest shift for me in this book is that my younger self found the ending depressing, but my older self finds the end hopeful, or at least a combination of tragedy and hope.  The world remains a vicious and horrible place, but I see transformation there, and love — perhaps that "fine balance" after all. 

 

As I started to pull this post together in my head, my initial memory of my reading adventures in February was that I did not read much, and that my reading was mostly easy and forgettable.  As I compile the list, however, I see that my memories are only partially accurate, that, like so many other things in my life, I move in cycles, cycles of reading and cycles of not reading,  and although it was not a month of complex reading, I did not do so badly after all.

 

First the List:

13. Stuart Woods, Hush Hush. 

14. Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race.

15. Annette Valentine, Eastbound from Flagstaff.

16. D.E. Stevenson, Anna and Her Daughters.

17. Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.

18. Don DeLillo, The Silence.

19. Joe Ide, Righteous. 

20. Lydia Millet, A Children's Bible. 

 

As I look at the list now, I see there was light, palette-cleansing, brain-resetting reading — fun escape reads. I always rate them higher than they deserve on a purely technical level, at least the Stone Barrington novels, based purely on enjoyment.  These are fast, flippant reads offering a mindless escape, without placing many demands. I did think Stone showed promise in the early novels; but by volume 56 his appeal is growing tired, the promise of his youth having faded, at least from this reader's perspective.  In this volume the violence was more brutal than in the past few years; alas it did not make up for boredom.  Joe Ide's IQ novels are new to me and so far I have enjoyed them thoroughly.  Isaiah is a fairly complex character, but although the writing still crackles, and Isaiah intrigues, and there are moments that are laugh-out-loud funny, number two is not quite as ridiculously infectious as was the first.  

 

There were books that made me cry and books that made me think, sometimes both in the same book.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Silence, far more so than While Noise, which I read in January. Both books are thought provoking, both books are more art than story, and perhaps I enjoyed the second more only because the sardonicism was slightly less pointedly cruel.  But that is just me.  Frankl made me cry, as did Oluo.  So You Want To Talk About Race, reads like a brutally honest conversation with a friend, a book in which Ijeoma Oluo masterfully reigns in rage and emotion without hiding it, allowing it to pierce without explosion. It is, without question, one of the most powerfully mind-altering and moving of the recent crop of  books I have read about race.  Perhaps my reaction comes from already having read so many other books, perhaps it is just that I am drawn to the act of telling of one's story.  

 

There was a book I intentionally reread, and I am happy to have done so.  I listened to The Children's Bible  on Audible for my December book club meeting and I was intrigued by the narrative voice enough that I wanted to hold the book in my hand and actually read the words.  It is a book that is improved by reading, and a powerful story as well.  I know these parents, I know these children, I know this world on the brink of natural disaster. Alas we all do and this future is unsettlingly close.  The Children's Bible is a short novel and Millet takes on many broad themes. One might think this would weaken the story, but it does not. The author weaves the story together artfully in a way that makes all this stuff, stuff that we want to ignore and not take seriously, all the more powerful.  The flattening of the narrative voice, the easy-breezy social commentary, the exploration of religion, both flippant and childishly serious, are deftly drawn; all are unsettling, and unsettling familiar. I found this to be another book that slips under the skin.

 

And there were some books that I would not have read. Admittedly I read both books, and they were well enough drawn and the stories compelling enough that I wanted to know what happened next, even if occasionally just barely so.  Both were selections for my two very different book clubs.   Both, surprisingly,  led to significant and interesting discussions in which I was happy to participate.  Didn't love the books; did love the discussion.  I have read other books by D. E. Stevenson, but long ago, and I cannot say how much my own tastes in reading have evolved over those years, although surely they have.  I would say that Anna and Her Daughters was enjoyable enough, but was not her best and there were times when the issues of format and the demands of genre chafed.  I found the writing in Eastbound From Flagstaff to be sanctimonious, not to the point that I abandoned the book, although there were moments, but, as I said, I did want to see what happened, and so curiosity won out.  

 

But the simple truth is I could have been just as disappointed in the two suspense/mystery novels that I discussed first as I was in these two, and the novels by both Ide and Woods require significant suspension of disbelief.  Perhaps the only difference was in expectation, or my own inner biases.  For me I could accept the flippancy, the very over-the-top ridiculousness of Hush-Hush and Righteous over what I perceived as earnestness in both Anna and Her Daughters, and Eastbound from Flagstaff. I do not think it is my place to judge, merely to admit that I am not perhaps the best fit for those books.   Romance, crime/mystery, and Christian fiction are the three most profitable fiction genres today and I have read from all of them, perhaps in differing proportions in different stages of my life. At the moment I lean more consistently in one direction but perhaps it would serve me well to explore other genres a bit more fully.  Looking at my own choice of words here,  "flippancy", "ridiculous", "earnestness" it seems I am looking for something more of a romp, wicked or not, in my escapist fiction, over the treacly or soothing.  

 

That may change next month however.