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?