enthusiastic reader

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...

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...

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 ex...

My reading came to a screeching halt after the election and I've been having trouble resuming it since. But I did have a good reading year before that day. White Noise by Don DeLillo. First read in 1998, re-read in 2016. I remembered that White Noise is about supermarkets and Hitler studies. I remember loving it in 1998, but little else. What I rediscovered is that this novel is full of anxiety, dread, distrust of systems and data, environmental waste, precocious children, familial and romantic loves, and the repression of our fundamental fear of death. It's satirical but also mildly terrifying. I am happy to say that it's still a five-star read. I also read DeLillo's Zero K, which was fine but unexceptional and probably very close to the future as elites hoard all the money and try to preserve themselves past death, waiting out the demise of most of mankind. I was happy to discover three Louise Erdrich novels: Love Medicine; The Round House; and LaRose . Loved the...

Tobias Wolff Some of the stories in  In the Garden of the North American Martyrs 1. Next Door The narrator and his wife, unnamed, live next door to a man who abuses his wife and dog, and who is hostile to the narrator and his wife. The neighbor urinates on the narrator's flowers while the narrator watches. The narrator characterizes the neighbor as "hairy" and likens him to an Airedale. The narrator does not take action against the violence; he and his wife listen to it in impotent despair. The narrator cultivates plants and the garden; his wife has been ill and rebuffs her husband's sexual advances. This odd and lonely life seems to have been exacerbated by a particularly violent encounter the pair witness from the window: the man beats the dog into submission and then he and his wife have passionate sex, all visible through the window. The narrator's wife here turns against the neighbor woman, judging her to be complicit in the abuse. The final sentence, w...

Tenth of December  by George Saunders My notes 1. Victory Lap The imagination of a girl named Alison is unspooled in this first story of the collection. She is full of romantic ideals about boys and thought in French phrases. "So ixnay on the local boys. a special ixnay on Matt Drey, owner of the largest mouth in the land." She thinks about her parents, teachers, ethics. Then there is an ominous knock at the back door. Kyle questions the "family status indicator," which his father built in the downstairs workshop. The father has left a note that shows the incredibly strict expectations for behavior and habits. Kyle's mind races for ways to live up to these rules. "I know we sometimes strike you as strict but you are literally all we have."Kyle sees the stranger trying to abduct Alison. He cannot decide what to do. But then he acts.  Victory Lap  is not as absurdist as the stories of CivilWarLand in Bad Decline . There is a manic quality to the po...