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.