October Book Haul

I bought these books today at the Tattered Cover - Aspen Grove. I'm about 3/4 done with Alias Grace from the kindle version and wanted a paperback I could annotate someday. There are so many references to hair, mostly on women in peril or as corpses. And the edition of the Count is gorgeous. Some other time I'll do a post about it.

Books purchased: 

• What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton
• The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott
• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas

September 2017 Wrap-Up

September was a bad month for the citizens of planet earth but a good month for my reading life, which, aside from moderate drinking and binge watching The Office, is one of the only effective antidotes:

The Progress of Love, Alice Munro
A strong story collection about people looking back on their earlier lives. There are two absolute standout stories: "The Progress of Love" and "A Queer Streak," but every story hold small treasures of human failings and complex loves. If you are okay with slow and mundane and miraculous tales of human behavior but haven't yet discovered Alice Munro, what are you waiting for? She is our greatest living stylist (I say with confidence!)

Y is for Yesterday, Sue Grafton
We're getting close to the end of the Kinsey Milhone detective series, which I have been reading since the beginning. This installment fits right into the comfortable slipper of Grafton's typical setups and prose. I'm not sure I loved the mystery, but nostalgia and anticipation got me through. (There are a couple of anachronisms that jolted me. Heavy airport security in 1989? No!)

My Name is Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout peels open the human heart and roots around for every hurt that hides there. This is a tiny novel about a woman looking back on her childhood as she convalesces in the hospital for several weeks one year. Like Alice Munro, in Strout's work you get to see past, present, and future and that is true in this rather short and exquisitely painful story. It was even better the second time around.

The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
This is a memoir about the author's traumatic childhood, which was exacerbated by her parents' unrelenting need to suppress the truth about that trauma, and her story is wrapped around a criminal case of a man who molested children and then murdered one of them. I have mixed feelings about the story and think some careful editing could have made it better. I ended up hurting for everyone involved, so in that, it worked out.

Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
I gave this novel about the African side of slavery five bright shining stars. Gyasi remarkably introduces us to fully-realized characters who have only a handful of pages to tell their stories. It is generational and redemptive. Highly recommended, and it adds new perspectives to stories we think we've already read.

Give a Girl a Knife, Amy Thielen
The flaw of this chef memoir is that the best part is shared in the first half, where a spunky, smart woman enters the male-dominated world of restaurant cooking. This section was tight and fun. But then her story meanders backward to her family's history of cooking and her garden in an isolated part of the midwest, and the air comes out of the balloon.

House of Names, Colm Toibin
I'm not a student of Greek tragedy, though I remember reading some of the plays in middle school and having my eyes opened to raw grief. House of Names retells the Greek tragedy about Clytemnestra and Agamemnon and their children, and is so wrought with murder, revenge, and pathos that I read it all in a day because I had to know what was going to happen (nothing good!). Beautiful and awful together, this tale is a living example of why Colm Toibin is one of my favorite writers.

Mini-rant: Why keep telling the "same" stories?

I recently had occasion to discuss a newish novel about the African slave trade in the 1700s and how that terrible practice affected generations of both African people and the slaves that were brought to America. I liked the book, but not everyone in the group felt the same. In the discussion, it was remarked that we already knew the stories of slavery and what was the purpose of reading about it yet again?

I didn't know what to say to that in the moment because who wants to be the know it all in a friendly gathering? But what I thought to say later and will say here is that writing a novel and then finding a company willing to publish and support a novel (or any book, really) is political, and to keep publishing new stories about old topics, especially topics that reverberate in insidious ways and just won't be easily or peacefully resolved is an especially brave act of resistance. We all know that publishers want to make a profit; they choose what to produce with the bottom line in mind. So to put a lot of capital into a work written by a person of color who has done extensive research and created a book full of compelling characters that covers decades should be celebrated. Aside from the possible "learning" on the part of the reader, there's also the pleasure of interacting with a work of art that can't be overlooked.

I read all kinds of books and not all of them can carry the weight of history or the beauty of art. I accept that about myself. But if my reading choices have a positive effect on a publisher's willingness to sell books with historical and sociological meaning, I'm glad.

August 2017 Wrap-Up

My August books ended up being published in the last year, but that’s not a normal month for me. In general I’ve been re-reading favorites and exploring books I ended up missing, just not in August, I guess. Here are my August reads.

1. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. It’s a family saga about Koreans who end up in Japan, and in general, they find they’re not exactly welcome there. Koreans were considered inferior and lived in poor neighborhoods and weren't given good jobs. Once the second world war begins, things get worse. But Pachinko is a strong family story, and I felt like I got to know the characters over the decades of their lives. I gave Pachinko four stars on goodreads.

2. Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta. I would put this Perrotta into one of his b-role novels, down there with The Abstinence Teacher. It's fun, but light, if you know what I mean.

3. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann 

A five-star non-fiction exploration of the early 1900s and a series of brutal murders of Osage people and how federal law policing developed as a result of local corruption. Great photos, amazing story, well-researched. Love it.

4. Re-read of Commonwealth by Ann Patchett 
This is a masterpiece of a novel. Happy to re-read it.

5. The Futilitarians: Our Year of Thinking, Drinking, Grieving, and Reading by Anne Gisleson If ever there's a need for community and doubt and an exploration of the Tragic vs. Trivial planes of existence, it's now.  The memoir covers a single year, 2012, of monthly meetings for contemplating works of art that question our purpose. Woven into analysis of the works that were chosen is the story of Gisleon's family history: her challenging and larger than life father and all his contradictions, the elision of her mother from hard truths about family secrets, and her tragic sisters' early and self-chosen deaths. It seems at the beginning like this might be superficial, but it's anything but. I felt a connection to the stories and the primal need for community that comes through deliberative acts of wanting to learn more. New Orleans and the catastrophic Katrina also play a major role in this memoir, brought more to light and to bear by the hurricane in Houston. 

So that's my August wrap up. I've already had a pretty good start to September with the amazing House of Names by Colm Toibin, pronouced Colum Toe-Been.