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.