Cariola Is Back for 2021 Reading Adventures

Hello, Friends. Time seems to have flown by. I can't explain exactly why I didn't start my 2021 thread sooner. Partly it's because I haven't been reading as much as usual. I didn't come close to meeting the 75 Book Challenge last year, so this year I am trying to focus on quality rather than quantity (and I doubt that I will hit 75 books for the year, but I didn't want to leave this group). And that has been a problem, too, since I seem to be picking up a lot of books that just don't agree with me and have been setting them aside. I think I may have been spoiled by Hamnet; I haven't read anything that even comes close to satisfying me in every way as much as that one did. I have also been dealing with some eye issues that result in my reading for shorter periods of time. When the weather gets a bit warmer, I will venture out for daily walks on which I hope listen to audiobooks.

I will try to post a new header for the years in a day or two. This year's theme is Early Modern Friends. I'm posting below reviews of the books I have made it through so far this year. I'm looking forward to being back and seeing what you all have been reading.

Best of 2021 (so far):
The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris
Matrix: A Novel by Lauren Groff
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan
Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
China Room by Sujeev Sahota
How to Pronounce Knife: Stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell
Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey
The Color of Milkby Nell Leyshon
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Best of 2020, in order:
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
In the Fall by Jeffrey Lent
Little by Edward Carey
The Only Plane in the Sky by Garrett M Graff
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
River Thieves by Michael Crummy
I, Hogarth by Michael Dean
Spring by Ali Smith

Currently Reading:


January
The Arctic Fury by Greer Macallister
Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethaway

February
The Shortest Day by Colm Toibin

March
John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk
That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry
The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs

April
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
The Color of Milk by Nell Leyshon
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

May
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies
The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O'Farrell
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
The Moment in 1965 When Rock and Roll Becomes Art by Steve Earle
Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber

June
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
After You've Gone by Jeffrey Lent

July
Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan
How to Pronounce Knife: Stories by Souvankham Thammavongsa

August
The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Songbirds by Christy Lefteri

September
The Secret Keeper of Jaipur by Alka Joshi
The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura
The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami
Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe
World Travel by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever
The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

October
The Matrix by Lauren Groff
China Room by Sunjeev Sahota
One Friday in April by Donald Antrim

November
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Immigrant, Montana by Amitav Kumar

December
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

The Arctic Fury by Greer Macallister

The disappearance of two ships carrying explorer Sir John Franklin to the Arctic in the early 1850's is historical fact. One of my favorite novels, Richard Flanagan is Wanting, tells two stories in which Franklin is a central figure: his years as governor of Tasmania, and the production of Charles Dickens's only play, which imagines the fate of Franklin's Arctic journey. The play was financed by Franklin's wife in hopes of pushing the government to fund another rescue mission (or at least find the remains of her husband and his crew). Macallister's novel imagines Lady Franklin funding another such expedition: a crew consisting of 13 American women. The motley crew has been chosen mostly by Lady Franklin and her agent Brooks. Virginia Reeve, a young woman who has led several groups of settlers to the West, is competent and resourceful but haunted by the death of her partner and by something she refers to as the Very Bad Thing. Her crew includes some invaluable members: a map maker's daughter, an Eskimo woman, a nurse, a dog team leader. But it also includes women whose qualifications for this dangerous journey are questionable: a journalist, an illustrator, the wives of two of Sir John Franklin's party, a lady's maid. One, Caprice Collins, daughter of a wealthy Boston family whose hobby is mountain climbing, becomes Virginia's main adversary during the journey northwards. As the novel opens, we find Virginia on trial for Caprice's murder. But was it murder or, as Virginia maintains, a tragic accident?

Macallister chooses to tell most of her story with Virginia as narrator, shifting between the present day (courtroom and jail) and the progress of the women's expedition, but each member of her team is given at least one chapter of her own. This helps the reader to better understand them and their reasons for signing on for the treacherous journey. As we learn details about the journey, we also learn more about what exactly is going on in the courtroom. But if one theme dominates Arctic Fury, it is the bonds formed among the female crew in the midst of a dangerous situation in which their survival depends not only upon expertise but on trust and unity.

Overall, I quite enjoyed the book. At several points, the plot got bogged down by details about the expedition's preparation and progress, but the author threw in enough twists and turns and revelations to keep me interested. Above all, the story of the women's relationships was believable and admirable and held together through the novel's two time frames.

4 out of 5 stars.

Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

This was a real heartbreaker. Trethewey, a former US Poet Laureate, was only 19 when explores the loss her mother who was shot dead by her jealous, abusive ex-husband. She waited 30 years to return to the scene of the crime, determined to understand better her mother, the choices she made, and how the loss of her mother has shaped her own life. In digging deeper into the past, she also confronts the effect of racism on her own life and the lives of her family members.

Gwendolyn Turnbough, a Mississippi native, met her first husband, Natasha's father, while attending Kentucky State University. Eric Trethewey was a white Canadian. In the 1960s, because of miscegenation laws, the couple could not marry in her home state, so they drove to Cincinnati to say their vows, then returned to Mississippi, where their daughter Natasha was born. Unfortunately, the constant pressure and discrimination of southern society eventually took a toll on the marriage, and they divorced when their daughter was six. Gwen moved with Natasha to Atlanta, where she continued her education, earning a Master's degree in social work. She had begun to live the American Dream--a secure job, a good salary, a house of her own--when she met and married Joel Grimmette, a Vietnam War veteran with little education and a low-paying job (when he worked). It didn't take long before his resentment over his wife's success turned into jealousy and abuse. For years, he kept her from leaving him by beating her, threatening to kill himself, and threatening to kill Natasha, but Gwendolyn finally divorced him and took out restraining orders. The abuse didn't stop. He followed her, badgered her with phone calls, blamed her for his own miserable life, and, finally, killed her. One of the most chilling moments in the book is a reading of the transcript of their last phone call. It reveals how sick Joel was and how determined Gwen was to break free of him.

Trethewey relies on her skills as a poet to compose a memoir like no other. She finely tunes the story that is hers and her mother's with the perfect word, the perfect sound, the lingering image, all working together to pull us into her experience of self-discovery.

5 out of 5 stars.

John Saturnall's Feast by Lawrence Norfolk

John Sandall and his mother are both outsiders. His mother, a healer and herbalist, is rumored to be a witch, and although no one knows who John's father was, he was obviously a black man. John's mother tries to teach him everything she knows, reading from a book she carries with her everywhere. Things get worse for them when a radical puritan preacher comes to town, and when people start to fall ill of a strange fever, of course it is blamed on "the witch." Their house burned, John and his mother escape to the woods, where she tells him the ancient story of a beautiful queen whose people lived in peace and plenty until an invader came and destroyed everything in sight. Without food, the people survived on memories of their annual feast, a feast where everyone was welcomed, and John and his mother feed off their imagining of that feast.

But dreams of food can only take one so far. John's mother dies, and he takes to the road until he is picked up by a man sent to take him to Buckland Manor, where is is to join the kitchen staff, changing his last name to Saturnall to avoid persecution by the witch-hunting puritans. Starting out with the lowest tasks, he eventually works his way up to becoming the the best cook in the kingdom, in part by using his memories of the great feast described by his mother. It's not an easy journey, especially in the years building up to the English Civil War and Cromwell's Commonwealth. And John has to deal with Coates, a jealous kitchen boy who constantly harasses him and tries to spoil his every success, and with Lady Lucretia, Lord Fremantle's haughty daughter.

John's story is told in between the chapters of his own cookbook. Each is headed by a particular recipe made for a particular event, accompanied by woodcuts. As the novel progresses, John (and the reader) learns more about his own past and the connections between his family and that of the Fremantles. I am not a big fan of fantasy, so the "magical" element put me off at first, as did the overly long, detailed descriptions of food being prepared. Still, the novel won me over in time, and in the course of the 30+ years it covers, there's plenty of action, intrigue, and even a little romance. I liked it well enough that I will be looking into this author's other works.

4 out of 5 stars.

The Shortest Day by Colm Toibin

This short book (or longish short story) focuses on an archeologist exploring New Grange, an ancient Irish crypt mound, and the spirits who live inside. It has been a secret for centuries that a hidden entry point allows light to flood into the crypt at winter solstice. One of the spirits revealed the secret to a woman who has passed it down to her descendants, and one of them dropped a hint to the professor. The spirits know that he plans to keep vigil as the day approaches and worry about what this means for their future.

I was not impressed, but hey, it was an Audible freebie.

What a lovely surprise for my Sunday morning! Welcome back, Deborah. xx

>4 Cariola: That one is calling to me this year too. I have it on the shelves in hardback.

Hi Deborah! I'm sort of missing all of my LT friends because i never seem to surf the fora any more, My reading which had all but stopped during the previous administration and pandemic is slowly starting to come back. That makes me happy. My vision has gone so bad this past year, I stopped driving completely. After the pandemic, I hope to get new glasses and have cataract surgery, Then I'll have to learn to drive all over again. It's been quite a year, but I have some hope for the near future (at least during the Biden administration!) as I was just able to get my first Moderna vaccine. Things will be looking up even more soon, I hope. Be well.

Welcome back! John Saturnall’s Feast sounds like it needs to go on my list.

Welcome back, Deborah.

>6 PaulCranswick: Why, thank you, Paul! Reading has been slow, but I'm enjoying my current read, an Irish collection of short stories by Kevin Barry.

>7 SqueakyChu: I totally understand finding it hard to read in the past year or so. It seems like we are on the same page. I have had to get new lenses each of the last three years. I suffer from dry eye syndrome and am also developing cataracts. The doc says they aren't bad enough for surgery and also warned that the dry eye syndrome will be worse once I get it. I will be getting my second Moderna shot on the 15th.

I have been posting reviews in a private Facebook group and on Goodreads. But Goodreads is not really very sociable.

>8 drneutron: >9 lauralkeet: Thanks for the welcome back! I'm looking forward to seeing what everyoneis reading.

>10 Cariola: My plan is to see my ophthalmologist as soon as I am fully vaccinated! I fear cataract surgery, but it is so necessary. I don’t like anything (or anybody) to touch my eyes!

Let me know how you do with your second Moderna. I’m getting my second on April 1st.

Hi Deborah! I'm quite glad to see you back amongst us. And I'm here to say that Greer MacAllister's work is fast growing into auto-buy territory for me. Girl in Disguise surprised me with how much I enjoyed it, and The Arctic Fury cemented her place in my "waitaminnit this is GOOD" category.

>11 SqueakyChu: My brother said the cataract surgery wasn't bad. the worst thing was having to limit physical activity for a week or so, and they also want you to stay off the computer and avoid reading. I sent him a couple of audiobooks to get him through.

>12 richardderus: Hi, Richard! I hadn't heard anything about Girl in Disguise. I will have to look for it.

That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry

This is a collection of short stories set in rural Ireland. It was quite the mixed bag--enjoyed a few, couldn't wait for others to get over with. It seemed to me that Barry was trying to show the diversity of Irish society. There's one about a lonely guy who falls in love with a Polish waitress, another about a Romany girl who escapes a detention center and runs away to the forest, one about American poet Theodore Roethke ending up in an Irish "bug house" after a nervous breakdown. (I found this last one particularly annoying. It's a boring, pretentious dialogue between Roethke and the psychologist, without quotation marks or signals as to who is speaking.) For me, the first story, "The Coast of Leitrim"--the one about the Polish waitress--was the best, and it kind of went downhill for me from that point.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

I am having trouble settling on another book. I must have started five or six in the past few days and put them aside. Hence, nothing new listed as "Currently Reading."

>13 Cariola: That sounds like a nightmare. Audiobooks would not work well for me because I have so much trouble hearing and understanding. I'll deal with it when the time comes,

I had cataract surgery- it is fine! and you will find that you see colours better( blues, bright whites) I realized this when I compared viewing some objects while I was waiting for my second surgery ( 10 days after the first operation) With cataracts colours were very yellow and without brighter. I, too, have dry eye in one of my eyes. I use drops every night and was told that if they didn't work- the ophthalmologist would proscribe something else that would work.

>17 torontoc: I'm so scared for someone to even touch my eyes, let alone do surgery on them. Whar would help me calm down?

Hey! I'll be able to see YOU better, once I get back to Canada! :D

>18 SqueakyChu: I know that the idea of something touching your eyes is not a great thought -but your eyes have had anaesthesia drops- so you don't feel anything and just see bright light. The doctor could give you something as well.
Yes -after Covid- a LT meetup!

>19 torontoc: I really have no desire to travel now, I think mostly because I can't see well. Thanks for the support. I guess if I don't feel anything, I won't even know something is touching my eye. I'll keep that in mind. I'll just pretend that, if I don't feel anythng, nobody's doing anything! :D

My own eyesight has never been very good - I think all our reading and posting is not exactly conducive to ocular well being. I have always been afraid of things like laser treatment though despite so many of my friends having positive experiences.

Have a great weekend, Deborah.

>21 PaulCranswick: I think all our reading and posting is not exactly conducive to ocular well being.

Oh, great! NOW you tell us! LOL!!

>21 PaulCranswick: >22 SqueakyChu: I've been thinking about getting blue screen lenses. I wonder if they really help?

>23 Cariola: I have no idea. Until I can have corrective lenses and/or cataract surgery, I’m doomed to suffer from poor vision. It does not help watching the daily rise in the covid stats in my state of Maryland.

The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs

For a number of reasons, I was eager to read this novel based on the sad life of Lucia Joyce, daughter of the famed Irish writer James Joyce. Several years ago I had seen the play Calico in London, starring Romola Garai as Lucia. Like the novel, it focused on the Paris years, when Lucia was pursuing a career in dance and falling in love with Samuel Beckett. I had taken a seminar in Beckett's fiction in my senior year at university, so that aspect was of interest, too. While The Joyce Girl didn't have the same impact as the play, it was a fairly good read, although I found myself getting a bit bored with it halfway through.

Lucia led a life that was in some ways exciting, in other ways quite sad. She was dominated by her parents, a father who wanted her to stay at home and be his muse and a mother who made no secret of the fact that her son was her favorite and lost no opportunity to criticize Lucia. A steady stream of artists spilled through their Paris flat, so it was no wonder that Lucia longed to become an artist. She chose modern dance as her medium, but Joyce kept pushing her to learn bookbinding. As for her mother Nora, she thought performing was indecent and just hoped that her daughter would find a nice man to marry. Despite their discouragement, Lucia was a great success at a famous dance competition, performing as a mermaid in a costume of her own design--so much so that when another girl was given the prize, the audience exploded in outrage, chanting her name. The critics went wild, and she was even invited to train with a famous ballerina who was her idol. But due to familial demands and constant moving, Lucia never performed in public again.

Much of Abbs's novel focuses on Lucia's obsession with Samuel Beckett, a young Irishman (later best known for his plays, including Waiting for Godot), who assisted James in his research (his sight having begun to fail). By this time, she was becoming increasingly unstable, and it is difficult to tell whether Beckett ever had feelings for her or if he was just the person she fixed upon as a means of escape, hoping for marriage. Abbs makes him out to be even more of a cad, finally admitting to Lucia that he was only interested in learning from her father and that he had encouraged her affections in hopes that he would remain a welcome visitor. Although she has later affairs with the artist Alexander Calder and with a Russian employed by her father, she never stopped loving Beckett. Abbs considers his abrupt departure as the final push into insanity.

Lucia at one point became a patient of Karl Jung, and Abbs alternates chapters between Lucia's memories and her sessions with Jung, who seems convinced that he can cure her, if only her father would go back to Paris and leave her entirely in his care. Joyce longs for his daughter to come home and be his muse again, but she spent the rest of her life in institutions, diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Despite the intriguing material, I found myself at first frustrate with the Joyces and then rather bored with their quarrrels, selfishness, and delusions of grandeur., and the overly romance-y bits didn't help.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

How nice to see you back, Deborah. I always enjoy the 'bookishness' of your threads, and you read such interesting books.

>26 CDVicarage: Thank you!

Well, I was about halfway through Nomadland when the library download ended. I was starting to find it repetitive, so I won't mind the wait to download it again. I'm about to start something entirely different, The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon. I hope it's as good as it sounds.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

Charles Yu's short novel is an exploration of Asian stereotypes and anti-Asian racism in America--a timely topic indeed. The story is told from the POV of Willis Wu, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who has dreamed since boyhood of becoming an actor and winning the coveted role of Kung Fu Guy. Yu uses the form of a TV screenplay for a cop show called 'Black and White,' interspersed with Willis's interior reflections, memories, and conversations. He moves through a series of nondescript roles such as Generic Asian Man, Old Asian Man, Special Guest, and Dead Asian Man. Every time he takes this last role, the show won't hire him again for forty days, the length of time the studio figures it will take for the mostly white audience to forget his face. Through the metaphors of these roles and his own life experience, Willis comes to realize the persistence of Asian stereotypes and that most Asians in America play these roles in real life, too. He also relates the legal and personal history of racism, citing laws that excluded Asian immigrants and otherwise rendered Asians as nonpersons in this country, and instances of racism faced by his parents and himself.

Overall, there is much to admire in Interior Chinatown, and the brilliant framework is highly effective. My interest only flagged near the end, when Older Brother defends Willis in court, and Willis makes a lengthy statement that rather hammers the reader over the head with points she has already gotten in the earlier sections. Having "shown" so effectively, it wasn't really necessary to "tell."

An interesting side note: I am writing this review on a tablet that uses autocorrect, and while some of the "corrections" made me laugh, they also underscored the point that the way we view Asians is deeply embedded in stereotypes. For example:

Kung Fucking
anti-spam racism
Willis Wuhan
Charles You

4 out of 5 stars.

The Colour of Milk by Nell Leyshon

It has been a long time since I finished a book in 24 hours. This one had me hooked from the beginning:

"this is my books and i am writing it by my own hand.
in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty-one i am reached the age of fifteen and i am sitting by my window and i can see many things. i can see birds and they fill the sky with their cries. i can see the tree and i can see the leaves.
and each leaf has veins that run down it.
and the bark of each tree is cracked.
i am not very tall and my hair is the colour of milk.
my name is mary and that is how i have learned to spell it. m.a.r.y. that is how you letter it.

i want to tell you what it is that happened but i must be ware not to run at it like the heifers at the gate for it i do that i will get ahead of myself so quick that i will trip and fall and any way you will want me to start where a person ought to.

and that is at the beginning."

Mary is one of the most intriguing characters I've come across in a long time. She is one of four daughters of a struggling farmer who, because they have no brothers, spend their days working in the fields. Mary was born with a deformed leg, which her father never hesitates to complain about since she can't work as quickly as the others. As the opening lines reveal, she is passionate about the farm, the animals, and the surrounding landscape. When the local vicar seeks a servant to help care for the house and his ailing wife, Mary's father is happy to send her away (and to take payment for her services). Mary has no desire to leave the farm and her family--especially her grandfather, who is ignored by the rest of them--but she does as she is told. Despite the hardships and abuse she has suffered, she is an incredibly confident young woman who speaks her mind, no matter what anyone thinks. Yet the vicar and his wife take to her, even seeming to be charmed by her forthrightness.

Mary's book recounts a year in her life in four sections, each named for a season. Each begins with a variation of the passage above. She lives a simple life, accepting what comes along and recording her observations and thoughts. It's difficult to describe just what it is that makes her so engaging; perhaps a combination of stoicism and guilelessness? And the wonderful voice that the author gives her, a voice that speaks poetry without even knowing it. Some readers may find her descriptions of housework and conversations boring, but I was completely captivated. Despite the rather slow pace, the novel does work up to an unexpected climax, one that leaves the reader shaken. But Mary carries on.

I don't want to give too much away, but I hope others will give this beautiful character-driven novel a chance. I will be looking for other works by this author.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi is the keeper of an enormous, labyrinthian house whose walls are lined with thousands of statues. An ocean is imprisoned within the house, the tides causing it to hurl against the walls, flood the rooms, and crash up the staircases. Piranesi, the only regular inhabitant, has learned to watch the tides and predict when it's time to climb higher. His only "friend" is a man he calls the Other, who visits twice a week. He engages Piranesi to help him with research into what he calls A Great and Secret Knowledge. The Other warns him to stay away from a person he refers to as Sixteen, someone from the outside world who may be coming soon. Piranesi is torn between the warnings and his desire to meet someone who can tell him more about the other world.

Susanna Clarke has created an eerily beautiful setting and gives us a story that combines fantasy and mystery. Who is Piranesi, and how did he come to be in this place? I have to admit that I was swayed by the hype and the top Audie award to pick up this book on audio. I'm not generally a fan of either of the above genres, so while the book kept me engaged, it was just an OK experience for me.

>31 Cariola: The Women's Prize shortlist is announced tomorrow (it is Wednesday morning here in Kuala Lumpur already) and I wonder whether Piranesi will be included. Smart money is saying quite possibly so.

>32 PaulCranswick: Paul, I expect it will make the short list as so many readers loved it. The audio book narrator also won the top Audie Award; he was very good.

>33 Cariola: I really liked her Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and will eventually get to this one too. I haven't read any of the longlist yet though.

>34 PaulCranswick: Yep, Piranesi made the short list for the Women's Fiction Prie.

The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

I have had this book on the shelf for quite some time and am happy that I finally got around to it. The setting is World War II, and the titular Welsh girl is Esther, 17-year old daughter of a sheep farmer. In addition to helping her widowed father with the farm, Esther works as a waitress/barmaid at the local pub. This is where she meets a British soldier named Colin, one of a crew setting up a POW camp on land adjacent to her father's property.

Esther and her father have taken in several boys whose city parents wanted them transported to a safer place. The current boy, Jim, is having trouble fitting in with the locals. He resents being sent away by his mother, and resents Esther for turning down a proposal from a neighbor lad, Rhys, who had befriended him. Disappointed, Rhys, signs up with the British army, and Jim blames Esther for this, too. He joins a gang of kids who hide in the trees and harass the German prisoners.

The other main figure in the story is a young German POW named Karsten. Present at the Normandy invasion, he forced the men under his command to surrender one it was clear that resistance would be hopeless. Some of the men are angry about this decision--and let him know it. Karsten is one of the few prisoners who can speak English, and he tries to befriend Jim. He's also curious about the young woman who comes to fetch Jim every evening in an effort to keep him out of trouble.

To tell you more would be to tell you too much. Needless to say, these characters' paths cross in unexpected ways. Davies creates a realistic window into the effects of the war on a small Welsh town and its inhabitants. I found the ending a bit unexpected, but it worked. overall, a very good novel.

4 out of 5 stars.

>36 Cariola: Very good review, Deborah and a very striking cover.

>36 Cariola: I have had this on my shelf - unread - for a long while, too, but your review makes it sound good, so I must move it further up the TBR pile.

>36 Cariola: This one sounds really good - I think I'd better add it to the list. Thanks for the excellent review!

The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken

I really enjoy McCracken's short stories, and this collection was no exception. Some characters--particularly a couple named Sadie and Jack--reappear in several stories, linking them and making for a cohesive collection that develops familial relationships and friendships. Each character is unique yet recognizable, the situations they are drawn into both ordinary and epiphanal. A couple attends a family wedding. A mother takes her son to the "real" Legoland (in Denmark) and encounters an ex-husband. An elderly Jewish man, recently widowed, brings his adult son along on a trek to search for puffins on the Scottish coast. While one woman grieves for the son who died of an overdose, her childless friend searches for antique shops for a 1970s Baby Alive doll.

I have to say that I was less than thrilled with McCracken's last venture, a novel titled 'Bowlaway.' She is at her best, I think, with short stories, and I am glad to see her return to that genre.
5 out of 5 stars.

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O'Farrell

I've loved most of Maggie O'Farrell's novels, especially her latest, Hamnet, which was my #1 read last year. I still think about it a lot. Here, she focuses on memoir in an unusual fashion by focusing on seventeen episodes in her life that could have led to her death. She begins with a solo walk in the woods as a teenager where she encounters a creepy man who might have done her harm. One of the longer episodes involves her battle with encephalitis, which she contracted at age eight. Her parents weren't sure that she would survive, and her recuperation was slow and painful. Difficulty maintaining her balance left her the target of bullying at school, where she had to crawl up the stairs on all fours to get to the lunchroom. Remnants of the disease still plague her to this day. O Farrell recounts an almost-accident that surely would have been fatal; a mugging; an almost-drowning in the Mediterranean, her son on her back; nearly bleeding out on the table after a C-section; and other brushes with death over the years. The last and longest section details her struggle to keep her daughter alive. The child was born with severe eczema that the doctors couldn't resolve, spending most of her early years screaming, bleeding, and writhing in pain. After allergies were detected, she was at constant risk for anaphylactic shock and had a number of close calls.

O'Farrell's writing skills serve her well here. What could have been just a list of rather overblown anecdotes succeeds because she is able to pull the reader into each situation, mainly through her ability to describe her changing thoughts and emotions in the moment, but also due to her sharp descriptions. She also made me aware that most of us, myself included, have had brushes with death but never really stop to ponder them, except perhaps in cases where medical intervention is involved.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

I loved Madeline Miller's mythic retellings, 'Song of Achilles' and 'Circe,' and Pat Barker's Trojan War rendition, 'The Silence of the Girls,' so I snapped up 'Ariadne' as soon as I saw it. While it didn't quite equal the others for me, I did enjoy it. Ariadne is the daughter of the cruel King Minos of Crete and granddaughter of Helios, the sun god. She also has two siblings well known in myth, her sister Phaedra and her half brother, a monster called the Minotaur, who lives in a labyrinth designed by the inventor Daedalus. Defeated by Minos, the Athenians are required to send a tribute of seven young girls and seven young boys annually to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. The novel begins when a ship carrying the sacrificial victims, including Prince Theseus, arrives.

If you've read mythology, you probably think of Theseus as a great hero, but Jennifer Saint depicts him in quite a different manner. I won't go into details, because that would spoil some of the novel's best surprises. Suffice it to say that he's quite an opportunist, a manipulator, and a chauvinist, and their interactions with him define both Ariadne's and Phaedra's ultimate fates.

But this is primarily Ariadne's story and she is the narrator of it. Saint does a fine job of showing us her maturing from an infatuated teenager to a loved but somewhat paranoid wife and adoring mother. What stands out in her tale is her growing understanding of the relationships between humans and gods--their similarities, their differences, their love for and mistrust of one another.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

The Moment in 1965 When Rock and Roll Becomes Art by Steve Earle

This was a free Audible Exclusive. Never having been a huge fan of Bob Dylan (or, for that matter, Steve Earle), this was just an OK way to spend a bit more than an hour for me. Earle tells of his early love of music, his dream of leaving Texas for New York, hooking up with Dylan, and meeting the Beatles and brushes over his seven wives (six if you don't count the one he married twice) and drug addiction. You might enjoy it more than I did if you like this style of storytelling and music.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

Suffice it to say that he's quite an opportunist, a manipulator, and a chauvinist, and their interactions with him define both Ariadne's and Phaedra's ultimate fates.

That's not an innovation - that's pretty much what he is in the original myths, too. None of the Greek heroes are exactly good people and they're *terrible* husbands, to a one. It's funny that people now hear the word "hero" and plunk down our modern notions behind it onto the original heroes, and that's just not what it meant back then. They weren't out to save humanity - they were pretty much just self-serving. These modern retellings are fun in part because they tend to point out the shortcomings of these characters, but they didn't invent them.

Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber

I read Joan Silber's amazing collection of interwoven stories, Ideas of Heaven, many years ago and feel in love with her writing. Since then, she has rarely disappointed, and her latest collection is no exception. Comprised of seven chapters, six narrators recount incidents from their lives. The narrators, in one way or another, have crossed paths, and as they tell their stories, the connections between them--some significant, some just passing--resonate, creating a community of which they may not even be aware. The first and last chapters are narrated by Ethan, a young gay man whose security was shattered when he learned that his father had a second family and other children. In between, the threads are picked up by one of those other children, by brothers and sisters, by past and present lovers, by distant acquaintances. It's a clever structure, but it also has a purpose

As each tells his or her story, we sense life's pain and disappointments, but there are moments of joy and epiphany as well, often coming in the midst of the most mundane circumstances. One of the things I loved most about Ideas of Heaven was the subtle spirituality beneath the surface, and I was left with the same feeling in reading Secrets of Happiness. I'm not a "spiritual" person in the usual sense. I'm not a churchgoer or a prayer or a believer in some big daddy in the sky who controls everything. I don't meditate or palm crystals or believe in reincarnation. This world, like it or not, is what we've got, but Silber lets us know that it's enough. And that may be the real secret of happiness.

The characters are wonderful, both people we feel we know and unique in their individuality. As usual, Silber's writing is carefully crafted, witty, insightful, subtle. There's a moment of surprise for me in each of the stories, a moment when, as I'm reading what seems to be a perfectly ordinary story, I'm stunned, stopped in my tracks. I'd say it was like being struck by a lightning bolt, but it's more like finding you've been sitting in the middle of a slow-moving flood that has suddenly risen above your head. Perhaps the word I used above is best: epiphany.

Silber's books always teach me a lot about the world we live in, and they always teach me a lot about myself. It's rare for me to finish a book and not only keep thinking about it but want to read it again, and soon.

5 out of 5 stars.

Hi Deborah.

You sold me on I am, I am, I am to such an extent that it has won my recommendation of the month award. You may not know but the Book Bullet that strikes me the deepest in the previous month will win my prize.

The winning prize is of course a book that I will select and send you via Book Depo. Previous winners this year are Mark, Bonnie, Adrienne and Kerry (avatiakh). I will send you a PM to seek your mailing address so that my book can reach you.

Have a lovely weekend.

>46 PaulCranswick: That's awesome, Paul! I'm rarely up this late (early?), so this wa a nice surprise. I'm glad you were moved by my description of the book, and I hope you enjoy it.

>47 Cariola: Like you, Deborah, I had my eye out for Hamnet and snaffled it up as soon as it became available in paperback form here. Just starting it and must say that the hype appears justified thus far!

>48 PaulCranswick: Not only was Hamnet my top read last year, but it beats most of the last 10 years of top reads. I hope you love it.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri

I have long loved Lahiri's novels and short stories. Whereabouts is her fist novel in over a decade. It was originally written in Italian, the language of the country in which she has resided since 2011. (She was born in London and raised in the US.)

This short (157 pages) novel won't be everyone's cup of tea, but if you enjoy character-driven stories and don't mind the lack of a strong plotline, I highly recommend it. The writing is beautiful and the narrator's insights and observations--the heart of the book--are sometimes mundane but also at times surprising and perceptive, and she brings the reader along with her. The unnamed narrator has similarities to Lahiri herself. She's a 40-something academic living and teaching in an unnamed small Italian town. She shops, she has coffee with friends, she takes care of a couple's dog when they leave for a funeral, she reminisces about past affairs (none of which led to marriage). She observes her neighbors and the people she passes on the bridge she crosses every day on her way to work. She tries to personalize the office that seems still to belong to its previous occupant. She would like to get to know the aging philosopher who lives in her building but hesitates to invade his privacy.

The novel is written in short chapters, some only a page in length, whose titles only hint at their content, usually by location. In the Piazza. In My Head. At the Museum. In the Pool. At the Ticket Counter. By the Sea. In Winter. At the Coffee Bar. You get the idea. These are not journal entries but more a look inside the narrator's mind and emotions as she experiences the moment. She begins at a moment of stagnation but ends in movement On the Train. That's as much of a plot as I can come up with--but it doesn't matter. This was a beautifully written, sensitive portrait of a woman in the middle of her life, looking backwards at times but living in the moment and, finally (and somewhat hesitantly) moving forward in the end. Many reviewers describe this as a book about love, loneliness, and the mistakes of the past. While those elements are present, there is so much more to Whereabouts, and so much packed into each short chapter. It's one of those books that I will definitely return to, expecting to gain more insights each time that I read it.

5 out of 5 stars. (I'm on a roll!)

>49 Cariola: I'm not sure about the last ten years but I certainly loved it, Deborah.

>49 Cariola: I was taking a blurb at face value. It has been eight years since The Lowland came out. Everything else she has published since has been nonfiction or short stories.

After You've Gone by Jeffrey Lent

I'm a big fan of Jeffrey Lent, but this one really fell short for me. Set in the 1920s, it's the story of Henry Dorn, a 57-year old English professor who decides, after his wife and son die in an accident, to take a luxury liner to Holland, where he plans to explore his familial roots. On the way, he meets the woman of his dreams. One main problem for me: I hated her. She's a cliché of the so-called independent woman of the day: she smokes {hashish as well as cigarettes), she drinks (including absinthe), she wears revealing clothes, she's a regular at sleazy underground clubs where "Negro music" (jazz) is featured, she refuses to talk about her mysterious past, she flirts, she eats "exotic" foods, she has radical political views, she lives a lavish lifestyle with no apparent means of income, she plays cat and mouse games (disappearing for days at a time without warning), and she wields sex like a sword. I hated her, and I hated that Henry fell for this crap; I had expected that he would eventually come to his senses, or that Lydia would dump him. But no, instead we get a cheesy O. Henry ending that was predictable as the last chapter slowly played out.

The novel is non-chronological, jumping from Henry's childhood and his relationship with the uncle that raised him, to his curiosity as a teenager about his absent father, to the earlier years of his marriage and as a father, to his guilt over the way he dealt with his son's issues when he returned from the war. A lot of the reviews of this book focus on his self-exploration. That might have been a lot more interesting if, in the end, he hadn't come off as just another middle-aged sap.

If I've turned you off of this book, fine, but please give Jeffrey Lent a chance by reading one of his wonderfully written, highly original, and absolutely captivating historical novels, like Lost Nation, In the Fall, or A Slant of Light.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

Thanks for the review- I'll miss that one and take your advice to look at earlier works.

Strange Flowers by Donal Ryan

In a small Irish town in the 1970s, Paddy and Kit Gladney are distraught to learn that their 18-year old daughter Moll has disappeared, not even leaving a note of explanation. The only clue they have is that was seen getting on a bus headed for Nenagh. Despite a desperate search, it seems that Moll is gone forever. Five years later, Moll walks through the front gate. She says little about where she has been or what she has done, but the Gladneys are so happy to have their only child back home that they don't press her with questions. At least not until the local priest and constable show up on their doorstep with a tale of a strange young man who has shown up in Nenagh looking for the Gladney family.

This is a wonderful story focusing on the interwoven lives of three families over several decades: the Gladneys, the Jackmans (Paddy Gladney is their tenant, gardener, and jack-of-all-trades), and the Elmwoods, immigrants to London. It's a story of unconditional love, of friendship, of loneliness, and of faith. It asks how we are shaped by our family histories, our secrets, and our class as well as by our life experiences and the expectations of our society. Ryan's writing is lyrical (although some readers complain that his sentences are overly long), and he brings not only the settings but all of the characters to life. This is Ryan's best work so far. In the UK, Strange Flowers has been a best seller since it's August release, and The Independent selected it as one of the greatest Irish novels of the century.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Looks like I forgot one:

How to pronounce knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

What a wonderful book! I borrowed it from my local library, and it was due today, so I was up late last night and early this morning to finish it before they snatched it away. Yes, it was that good.

George Walker inherited a large plot of land from his father, but he's never been interested in farming. Instead, he has been selling off smaller parcels for income. He's getting older now, as his arthritic hip keeps telling him. George seems to be living in a kind of time warp, waiting for something to happen, but he's not sure just what. His son Caleb had gone missing fighting for the Confederates, who have lost the war, and the nearby town has been taken over by Union soldiers, both white and black, sent to aid in the reconstruction. Though living in the same house, George and his wife Isabelle have become estranged, hardly speaking to one another. When they get the word that Caleb has died, instead of comforting one another, the breach becomes even greater. George has begun taking long evening walks in the forest on his land. On one of these walks he encounters two brothers, Prentiss and Landry, former slaves of a neighboring farmer who are now freed men. Almost on a whim, George has decided to clear some of the land and plant a peanut crop, and he hires the young men to help with the job, promising to pay them fairly and to work alongside them.

I don't want to give away too many of the book's secrets and surprises--and there are a lot of them. Let's just say that George's growing fondness for the brothers isn't shared by his neighbors, who resent the abolition of slavery and the fact that a black man can earn the same wage as a white man. One of the most critical is Wade Webley, a wealthy blowhard who has made friends with the Union general in charge. Wade's son August, who brought the news of Caleb's fate, has secrets of his own, and when Caleb unexpectedly returns home, more secrets are exposed. Inevitably, resentment, shame and fear lead to injustice and tragedy, changing lives forever.

George is the heart of the book, and his changing relationships with his wife, his son, Prentiss and Landry, and his neighbors are the best part of The Sweetness of Water. But that's not saying there isn't one heck of a plot to keep the reader engaged as well. This book has it all.

The Sweetness of Water is the latest Oprah's Book Club selection--but please, if you're one of those readers who rejects out of hand anything she recommends, put that inclination aside and give this book a chance. Maybe you will be more swayed by the fact that it's also on Barack Obama's summer reading list, or that it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In the end, none of that really matters because this book speaks for itself. A wonderful, moving, engaging read. Highly recommended.

5 out of 5 stars

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

I expect to be in the minority, since buzz has it that Great Circle is THE book of the summer. I thought it was way too long and really dragged at times. Pages and pages and pages of technical descriptions of the pilot's controls, aviation maps, the mechanics of flying, the weather--all things I just didn't care about, and I found myself skipping long sections of the book. The author fell into the same pattern when Marian joined the female "airplane delivery" crew during World War II: too much boring detail. The fact that I found Marian a pretty unlikable character didn't help. Her story as a young girl was interesting, but then she turned into a selfish user. I guess that paralleled with Hadley's story, which was little more than a rehash of the demise of the Kristin Stewart/Robert Pattinson relationship. On the whole, I really didn't care what happened to either one of these women. I was so bored with this book at one point I put it aside and read something else (The Sweetness of Water, which was wonderful--and I read it in just a few days while it took me more than a month to plod through this one). When I got back to it, I just wanted Great Circle to be over, and I skimmed the last hundred pages or or so. That was enough for me. Zzzzzzzz.

I ended up giving Great Circle a generous 3 stars for the parts that interested me and for some of the side characters--Marian's twin brother Jamie and Caleb--but I feel that I wasted a lot of valuable reading time on this book. And that made me angry, tempting me to downgrade my rating to two stars, which I may still do.

Songbirds by Christy Lefteri

The Beekeeper of Aleppo was one of my top reads a few years ago, and I was really looking forward to this new release by Lefteri, so much so that I pre-ordered it at full l price. Unfortunately, it was a disappointment. The topic here is an important one: How female migrant domestic workers are exploited, diminished and devalued by their wealthier employers and society in general. Nisha, a young Sri Lankan widow, has left her young daughter in her home country to take a position as a maid/housekeeper, nanny to a pregnant widow who take no interest in her own child. Nisha raises the baby as if it were her own. One night, she simply disappears, leaving behind all her belongings, including her passport, a gold ring, and a lock of her daughter's hair. Petra, her employer, goes to the police, but they brush off the disappearance, saying that these foreign women often just leave and go "up north" where they can make more money. Petra makes inquiries of other maids in the neighborhood who knew Nisha, and their concerns multiply her suspicion of foul play.

Bird imagery in the novel is rather heavy handed. Petra's tenant Yiannis supposedly make a living foraging for mushrooms, but the truth is that he is involved in illegal songbird hunting. The descriptions of the trapping and killing of the birds is graphic and upsetting. They are considered a delicacy, sometimes pickled but always munched down whole. I remember reading about the songbird black market in Colum McCann's Apeirogan. It revolted me then and it revolted me here. Like the migrant women, they are hapless victims who thought they were on their way to a better place, drawn to the promise of brightness, then used and abused for the pleasure of others. Yiannis, who had hoped to marry Nisha, joins Petra in her search for the truth.

So yes, this is an important topic to bring to our attention, and the novel was inspired by true events in which five migrant workers and two of their daughters were murdered in Cypress and their murders ignored by police. The problem is that the novel not only drags but is at times preachy and really hits the reader over the head with the author's statement. The comparison to the wonderful Beekeeper of Aleppo makes it hard for me to give this one more than a 3-star rating.

Deborah! I missed your birthday a couple days ago! I'm so sorry...things got hairy for a few days. I hope it was a lovely one, exactly as you wanted it to be.

Cheers!

>60 richardderus: It was quiet, Richard. Me and the cats, take out from Olive Garden. Thanks!

The Secret-Keeper of Jaipur by Alka Joshi

This is the second in a planned trilogy, the first being The Henna Artist. At the end of that novel, Lakshmi had gotten married to a doctor and was living in the Himalayas, using her knowledge of folk medicine to help him with patients. She has arranged for her helper, Malik, to complete his education and then take on an apprenticeship at in Jaipur Palace. He has fallen in love with Nimmi, a young Muslim widow with three children, which makes leaving for Jaipur all the more difficult, but Malik knows he will need a good job to provide for an already sizable family. He is set to work on the royal family's latest project, a state of the art movie theatre. On the night of the premiere, the balcony collapses, killing and injuring many. Much of the novel focuses on Malik's quest to find out what happened. Was this really just a tragic accident, or was someone responsible for purchasing unsafe inferior materials?

There are plenty of side stories here: Nimmi learns that her goat herder brother has somehow become involved in gold smuggling. When she disappears, Lakshmi fears that she has gone to help him get free of the trade. She and Dr. Jay are determined to help her and the children. And Lakshmi reluctantly but dutifully boards a train for Jaipur when she learns of Malik's suspicions. Many characters from the first novel resurface here.

The Henna Artist caught my interest, but it waned as the novel progressed and became more of a romance. In this book, the author veers more towards crime/mystery, a genre that I do not particularly enjoy. i will probably opt not to finish the trilogy.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

>62 Cariola: That's disappointing, Deborah, I'm sad to hear it.

>61 Cariola: That sounds much more The Thing, however. Take-out is never a bad celebration in my book.

Dropping by to wish you a lovely weekend, Deborah.

I must go and look for that book by Nathan Harris. It really is dangerous over here!

The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine by Janice P. Nimura

While the focus of this biography sounded interesting, in the end, I didn't particularly enjoy it and skimmed through the last half. The main irritant for me was Elizabeth Blackwell herself. While her determination to become a medical doctor--the first woman to earn the degree in the US--is admirable, I found her to be an extremely unpleasant and unlikable woman. Instead of the empathetic personality I had expected to find, she comes across as selfish and misanthropic. You would expect the founder of a hospital for indigent women to care about those she served and strive to change their living conditions, but Elizabeth's only concern was achieving her own "greatness." She could turn on the charm for those who had something she wanted or needed, but she seemed incapable of true friendship, especially with other women. As soon as someone disagreed with her or had any ideas of her own, the two parted ways. With Elizabeth, it was clearly "My way or the highway," even in the case of her fellow physician sister, Emily. Of the two, Emily was more devoted to practicing medicine, while Elizabeth preferred teaching and giving lectures on hygiene and morality. When the sisters clashed regarding how to run their medical college for women, Elizabeth packed up and moved to Scotland. (Her disdain for the US is another point that rankled.) Elizabeth was also strongly against women's suffrage, and I found it annoying that someone who spent her life trying to prove that an intelligent, determined woman could be as capable as a man should argue against her sex's participation in governance. She also came across as jealous of other women who achieved "greatness," such as Florence Nightingale or Dorothea Dix. More than two thirds of the book focused on Elizabeth, which explains why I started to skim and speed read the last half. Emily was the more human and admirable sister, but she got short shrift here, perhaps because Elizabeth had expected her to become little more than an assistant to her own greatness. Emily had ideas of her own and actually cared about her female patients, coworkers, and friends. But I guess that made her less interesting to the author.

3 out of 5 stars (a bit generous).

Doing my rounds in order to wish you a lovely weekend, Deborah.

>66 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul, same to you!

The Reading List by Sarah Nisha Adams

This book was sweet. Sweet, sweet, sweet. So sweet. Too sweet for me, I'm afraid. Everybody lives happily ever after. Except maybe the dead people, and the author makes sure that memories of them live on happily ever after, too.

The story revolves around two characters living in Wembley, UK: Mukesh, a man in his 70s struggling to adjust to his wife's death from cancer, and Aleisha, a teenager who has reluctantly taken a job in the distressed local library. Both have family issues. Mukesh's three adult daughters have lives of their own but keep trying to control their father's. Aleisha's mother is depressed and erratic but refuses to seek professional help, instead spending most of her time in bed, except when her manic phases make demands on Alisha and her older brother Aidan.

Mukesh and Aleisha both find copies of the reading list in the novel's title, headed by a cryptic note that it is "for when you need it." Mukesh's late wife was an avid reader, and he has picked up one of her favorite library books, The Time Traveler's Wife. When he returns it, he finds the reading list and meets Aleisha. He asks her for a book recommendation and is met with rudeness. Her supervisor calls her out; he has apologized to Mukesh and tells Alisha to make a book selection for him when he returns. She chooses the first book on the list, To Kill a Mockingbird, and decides to reread it herself. Needless to say, despite their rocky meeting, the two bond over books and become fast friends.

I won't give any more details, but apparently books heal all wounds and bring people together. Other people also find copies of the reading list, found in books, in the grocery store, etc., and they all fall in love with reading and work together to save the floundering library. Almost everyone lives happily ever after, despite some rough times for Juneau and Aleisha.

So sweet.

The book is structured around the books on the reading list, which includes The Kite Runner, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Beloved and others. Each book seems to have a timely message for it's readers. It's an interesting framework, and for that, I raised my rating by one star.

3 out of 5 stars.

>68 Cariola: Oh...um...not *quite* what one would hope for, then. Sounds a bit eye-roll-y to me.

>67 Cariola: ...if only it *could* be a good weekend for PC...

>70 richardderus: Richard, I should have known early on, when Mukesh says his wife kept reading The Time Traveler's Wife over and over . . . I am trying hard not to despair over the fate of this country. It ain't easy these days.

Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America by Laila Lalami

Lalami, a Pulitzer-prize nominated journalist and novelist, emigrated with her parents to the US from Morocco. In this book, she ponders the persistence of "otherness" in our society. As an immigrant, a brown-skinned woman, and a Muslim, she is uniquely situated to consider the nation's history of prejudice and the situation we find ourselves enmeshed in in the 21st century. She covers current topics like the rise of white supremacy, racial disparity in the justice system, the oppression of women, religious intolerance, and more. Using personal examples and stories from the news, she demonstrates how adaptation and legislation persist in keeping down particular groups of citizens. The final chapter, on Bret Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing, is both maddening and devastating. Lalami's analysis most certainly will convince the open minded reader that America has not come nearly as far in the last 245 years as we would like to believe.

I listened to this book on audio; the author was the reader; it felt like a personal conversation. Despite her criticisms, Lalami claims that she still believes in this country's ideals and still has hope for our future.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe

I've always had a fascination with the Vanderbilt family and was excited to see this book by Anderson Cooper, CNN anchor and a member of the most recent generation of Vanderbilts. I purchased the audiobook, and it did not disappoint. I finished it in two days--a testament to how engaging the story is and to Cooper as a reader.

Cooper begins with Cornelius Vanderbilt, the family patriarch who was known as "The Commodore." He worked on his father's ferry as a boy and, with a loan from his mother, purchased his own boat when only a teenager. It was he whop made the family fortune in shipping and railroads. Cooper makes a brief digression a few chapters later to take us back to the first family member to emigrate to New York from the Netherlands. He arrived as an indentured servant in 1650. Like many immigrant families, the Vanderbilts struggled through generations until The Commodore rose to the top of American industry and commerce. Love him or hate him (and many certainly hated him), he was one heck of a self-0made man.

The Vanderbilts did not lead a charmed life. The Commodore had thirteen children but discounted his nine daughters and wrote off two of his sons in his will. One son died young, another suffered from epilepsy and was for a time confined to a mental institution, and a third was rejected as a "wastrel"--a drinker with debts. That left his son Billy and Billy's four sons to inherit most of the Vanderbilt fortune. Although they reigned at the top of New York high society for decades, the family history is riddled with multiple divorces, scandals, suicides, alcoholism, and tragedies, including one son who went down with the Lusitania. Cooper spares no details. It wasn't until near her death that his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, began to talk abut her troubled childhood and the infamous legal case in which her paternal aunt and her mother battled over her custody. Gloria was estranged from her mother until shortly before her death; she considered her nurse, nicknamed Dodo, as her mother, even fantasizing that she was her biological mother, and she never forgave her mother or her aunt for agreeing to fire Dodo. She and Anderson suffered through the early death of his father, Wyatt Cooper, from cancer and his brother Carter's suicide at the age of 23; Anderson was in the room when he jumped from the family's 14th-story apartment window.

Part of Cooper's purpose in revealing so much about his family is to let the public know that money does not always bring happiness--nor does it last. While he acknowledges that the Vanderbilt name opened doors for him along the way, by the time his father died, there was no fortune left for Gloria or for her sons to inherit. Gloria had to work hard and make her own way in the world through modeling, fashion design, and a home decor line. Sadly, she retained her Vanderbilt tastes and went through any money she earned like it was water. Cooper himself earned spare cash as a teenager by modelling and says that early on he did his best never to let people know about his Vanderbilt background.

This is a fascinating portrait of an extraordinarily successful and extraordinarily flowed family, told candidly by one of the last Vanderbilt descendants with great personal insight but empathy by one of the last Vanderbilt descendants. If you love family sagas or reading about Old New York or Hollywood society, or just have a curiosity about the lives of a renowned American family, this is one you won't want to miss.

4 out of 5 stars.

World Travel: An Irreverant Guide by Anthony Bourdain and Laurie Woolever

I didn't think it would be possible to make Anthony Bourdain boring. Well, I was wrong. This book is not at all what I expected. It's simply collected reviews of the places Bourdain visited in his TV shows, consisting of comments cobbled together and read by various other people, with a few unnecessary biographical comments included by the general narrator ("Tony's daughter was conceived when he returned home from this trip."). It might be OK in book form, if what you're after is minimal travel info on the cities Bourdain explored (and I won't be going to any of those places soon), but it was a huge mistake getting it on audio. I just returned it, half listened to. I just couldn't bear to hear the canned closure of each section one more time: "Taxi from the airport costs about 22 Euros, or 20 US Dollars. Drivers do not expect a tip, but rounding up will be appreciated." Something you want to know if you're planning a specific trip but not if you are looking for a visit with Anthony Bourdain.

1/2 star for Bourdain's brilliance, which is totally demolished here.

>74 Cariola: Wow! How disappointing, Deborah! I remember how much I loved the experience of reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.

>70 richardderus: Thank you, RD. My mum is at peace at least after several years of very poor health.

>73 Cariola: Whenever I see the name Vanderbilt mentioned I always think of Paul McCartney's song from the Band on the Run album in 1973.

The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict

DNF. Borrowed this one from my local library. It started out OK but quickly bored me. Bad writing and the characters are all stereotype (the ambitious mother, the obedient daughter, the quirky mogul, etc.) I put it aside to move on to something more engaging, and my loan expired. Not worth renewing or borrowing again.

>73 Cariola: HI Deb. I've added the book by Anderson Cooper regarding the Vander bilts t0 the tbr pile. Your review is great!

>78 Whisper1: I hope you enjoy it, Linda. I thought it was really good. I listened to the audio book; Anderson Cooper narrates.

The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner

Let me begin by saying that two of my not-so-favorite things in books are historical mysteries and historical fiction using the hackneyed formula of one woman in the present discovering something about a woman in the past. The Lost Apothecary fits into both categories. Nevertheless, I finished it and even enjoyed parts of it. The main problem for me was the modern-day story, which I found to be both trite and annoying.

A few days before Caroline Parcewell and her husband are about to embark on a trip to London to celebrate their 10th anniversary, Caroline discovers that James has been unfaithful. Of course, as expected, he first denies doing anything wrong, then says it was a stupid mistake and begs for forgiveness. Broken-hearted, Caroline decides to take the trip on her own. There, she ponders her resentments, not just of the affair but of the fact that she gave up a chance to earn a Master's degree in history at Cambridge, opting to support James in his career instead, went to work in her family's business, and put off having a baby until James deemed that the time was right. I got really tired of all the wah, wah, wah. You made stupid choices; get over it and move on (which, of course, she does before the end of the book).

On her first day in London, Caroline joins a group of mudlarkers and, of course, finds an interesting artifact: a glass vial engraved with the figure of the bear. The group leader just happens to have a daughter who works at the British Museum and advises her to drop by to see if she can help. This sparks Caroline's old interest in history, and she becomes determined to uncover the secrets of the "lost" 18th-century apothecary.

While Nella's story is much more interesting, it certainly has its flaws. Nella's mother, a "white witch" type of apothecary. had taught her daughter the trade, but a bad experience with a bad, bad man (almost all of the men in the novel are horrible) turned Nella into a murderer, and she started a practice in a secret back room to help rid other women of the problematic men in their lives. It is through the course of helping one of these women that Nella meets 12-year old Eliza, a servant sent to pick up the "remedy." Eliza begs to learn the apothecary's trade, but she is actually more enamoured of "magic" than medicine. The two have a push-me/pull-me relationship: Nella wants to send the girl away yet needs her help and is drawn to her as to the daughter she never had.

So blah blah blah, and Caroline hides her discoveries and bonds with Nella over their mutual betrayals by the men they loved. She even finds herself accused of trying to bump off her annoying husband James. Of course, she becomes Her Own Woman in the end, planning the future she always REALLY wanted. In short, the author should have dropped the boring cliché of Caroline and James and stuck with the Nella-Eliza plotline.

Writing this review has made me realize that I liked this book even less than I thought I had. It follows a tired formula, the writing is mediocre and the dialogue not always fitting for the time period, it screams I AM WOMAN, and one of the main characters annoyed the heck out of me. Throwing in magical elements only made it worse.

2.5 stars out of 5.

The Matrix: A Novel by Lauren Groff

Lauren Groff is one of my favorite writers, and I was very interested to see what she would do switching from contemporary settings to a historical novel set in 12th-century abbey--and in fact, I pre-ordered this book. It did not disappoint. The main character is Marie de France, known in literature for her lais, perhaps the first Francophone verse written by a woman. Little is known about the real Marie, except (as she reveals in the first line of her lais and hence her name) that "My name is Marie, and I am from France." Her education, her Parisian dialect, details in the lais, and the inclusion of some Anglo-Norman influence suggest that she later lived in England, perhaps at the court of Henry II. This lack of biographical detail gives Groff free scope to invent a life for her protagonist, which she did by researching the lives of several English abbesses named Marie who lived at the time and by the use of her own imagination.

Groff's Marie is the child of rape by a high-ranking Plantagenet (perhaps even the king himself). Fascinated by the queen, Eleanor of Acquitane, Marie followed her in a Crusade and then on to England, but her unusual size, homely countenance, and intellect were perhaps the cause of her being sent to an abbey at age 17 instead of into the arms of an eager husband. Marie, once she has completed her course as a novice, will become the head of this downtrodden abbey whose numbers have been depleted by disease and hunger. The Matrix is the story of Marie coming into her own, realizing that this company of women of faith can achieve amazing things.

Groff is obviously familiar with the theory that a religious life was not always a calling from God, a punishment for sins, or an exile for unmarriageable daughters: it often opened doors to freedom and opportunity unavailable to those who chose the familiar route of marriage, motherhood, and subservience to men. As abbess, Marie is able to flex her significant skills in business, land management, leadership, and diplomacy. At times it would seem that she is bringing the abbey to the brink of disaster, but more often she achieves astonishing success, and the sisterhood flourishes.

So yes, this is a feminist tale, but it is also a very human one. Groff develops wonderful secondary characters, both inside the abbey and in the surrounding village, and each has a unique relationship with Marie. And despite Eleanor's apparent cruelty in sending her away from court, Marie cannot break her bond with the aging queen, finally recognizing how much, despite outward appearances, the two women have in common.

I would urge you to overlook many of the nitpicking criticisms of the novel that, in the end, have little bearing on its wonderfulness. It doesn't matter that she borrows details from the like of Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury. It doesn't matter that there is hardly any mention of the lais aside from Groff's contention that they were written to impress Elanor. This is, after all, a work of historical fiction, designated by the author at 'The Matrix: A NOVEL' (not a biography and not a history). Enter Marie's world with an open mind, and I think you will enjoy and admire it as much as I did.

5 out of 5 stars. (Sorry, can't find the right touchstone yet.)

Wow, the readin's been good (pace the Benedict and Penner). I'm hoping that the rest of the year brings out its best for you.

>81 Cariola: this novel is on my wishlist!

>83 torontoc: >83 torontoc: Cyrel, I think you will love it.

China Room by Sunjeev Sahota

This is another book that takes place in two eras--but for reasons that make it a little less annoying than usual. The novel opens in 1929 in a small Indian town. Three teenage girls, Mehar, Gurleen and Harbans, have been sent to marry three brothers, sight unseen. They spend their days working on the farm, mainly in what is called the China Room, a tiny kitchen with blue and white dishes lined up on the shelves. Their mother-in-law Mai rules the roost and keeps them in line. When a husband wants to sleep with his wife, he makes a request to Mai, and the bride is sent to a dark room to wait. The girls watch the men through the window slats during the daytime, each wondering which of the three is their husband. Mehar, the youngest at 15, believes that the youngest son, Suraj is her husband, and it takes little time for the two to fall passionately in love.

Fast forward to 2019, and we see a man looking back on a pivotal episode in his past. Twenty years earlier, he had become addicted to heroin. His parents, immigrants from India, had settled into an industrial town in the north of England, where racism was still rampant. He and his family struggled to get by and were faced with constant discrimination, bullying, and even physical attacks. The pressure was just too much, and he finally succumbed to the drug dealers who had been approaching him for years. The summer before he was to enter university, his parents decide to send him to live with his uncle in India for withdrawal and recovery. Unfortunately, the uncle and his family aren't told the real reason he has arrived. At first, they are distressed to find out that he is "sick" and call in the local doctor, who diagnoses him with dengue fever, but it soon becomes apparent that something else is going on. He is constantly drunk, and after a young child suffers serious neglect in his care, he is sent to live on the long-abandoned family farm. All he knows of the farm's history is that his grandmother, Mehar, had spent most of her life locked into the china room. He has seen only one photograph of her, taken on a visit to England: a white-haired old woman holding a squalling baby that is himself.

The novel alternates between Mehar's story and that of her grandson's quest to learn more about his family history during his recovery period. Sahota creates a detailed vision of life in rural India in 1929. It's a country still tied to tradition while on the verge of religious civil war and revolution against English colonialist rule. While I was somewhat less interested in the young man's story (which is loosely based on events in the author's family), the external reason for the trip to India made it more acceptable than the usual two-era framework in which a modern day person--often a scholar, sometimes a descendant--goes on a quest sparked by the discovery of a letter, diary, or other "mysterious" artifact. The writing is quite fine and the story overall kept me captivated. It's not surprising that China Room was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I will be looking for more works by this author.

4 out of 5 stars.

One Friday in April by Donald Antrim

This is not one for the downhearted; it's quite depressing and the uplift at the end is more of a "well, maybe, for now." Antrim, a fairly successful writer, begins by describing in detail a night in 2006 spent on the roof of his apartment building, hanging from the fire escape, trying to decide whether or not to let go. This incident leads to a series of hospitalizations, therapy, clinical trials, and, after initial resistance, a course of ECT ("shock treatment"). Ironically, it was a phone call from the celebrated David Foster Wallace--an author that Antrim admired but with whom he had only slight acquaintance--that persuaded him to give ECT a go. Wallace himself committed suicide in 2008. Antrim details his "recovery" (or "recoveries"), each inevitably followed by another setback. Resisting the diagnosis of "depression," he proposes that the inclination towards suicide is a condition in itself, perhaps kicked off by childhood experiences but not subject to the usual treatments for depression. Antrim's parents were both alcoholic, and both were also abusers; his beloved mother took her rage at her husband out on her son. At the time of his suicide attempt, lost in grief but with mixed feeling about her death, he was working on a a memoir of his mother. It's no surprise that Antrim's relationships with women were, for the most part, unsuccessful. Although he appears to be in a goo relationship at the memoir's end, one can't help but wonder for how long.

Antrim's memoir is an honest one, holding nothing back. One Friday in April has been well received and compared to William Styron's Darkness Visible. It's a difficult book to say one "enjoyed" reading, but Antrim's insights were illuminating.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

I finally got around to reading Zadie Smith's 'On Beauty,' a book I have had on the TBR shelf for years. The novel focuses on the Belsey family:

- Howard, a 57-year old art historian and critic at Wellington University (fictional uni in a fictional town near Boston)

- his wife Kiki. a notably large (mentioned often) African-American who gave up her dream of becoming a nurse to support her husband and raise their children

- Jerome, the eldest son, a student at Brown University and recent convert to Christianity

- Zora, a sophomore at Wellington, who is smart, competitive, and becoming socially aware

- Levi, the youngest. a rap afficiando whose has adopted the speech, mannerisms and ideas more in tune with the Bronx than his upper middle class background

The Belseys are reeling from several recent events. First, Howard was caught having an affair with a colleague who also happened to be a good family friend. He is doing his best--if not exactly everything he could--to earn Kiki's forgiveness, and she is trying to do her best to forgive him. Jerome is recovering from an unrequited love affair with Victoria Kipps, the beautiful daughter of his father's detested rival, Monty Kipps, a black conservative who has made a name for himself attacking affirmative action (and who also wrote a devastating critique of Howard's theories about Rembrandt). Levi is trying to find his own identity and has fallen in with a suspicious group of friends. As for Zora, she has taken on the cause of unregistered minority students from the community who have been allowed to attend classes at the individual professor's discretion. When the Kipps family moves into the neighborhood and Monty is hired by Wellington's Black Studies department, the Belseys, world is thrown into even more chaos.

In On Beauty, Smith explodes hypocrisy from all sides of the social, racial, class and political spectrum, and does it with both humor and empathy. The novel is supposedly a riff on E. M. Forster's Howard's End, but since I haven't read that one in years, I can't comment on the connection.

4 out of 5 stars.

Immigrant, Montana by Amitava Kumar

Good Lord, what a stinker! From the book description, I thought this would be an interesting story of a young Indian immigrant adjusting to life in the US. What I got was a little bit of Indian history in between the author's sexual experimentation. And believe me, he doesn't leave out any details. I'm no prude; I'm fine with sexual episodes in a book if they are part of the main story. But not when they ARE the story. I listened to the audio version, which probably made it even worse. If this is a memoir, he wrote it for himself, not for other people to enjoy. every time he reminisced about a woman in his past, he inevitably concluded, "I could almost taste her in my mouth." That's really all I have to say, and probably all you need to know.

It was so bad that I tried to return it to Audible, but they wouldn't let me because I had returned another stinker a month or so ago.

0 out of 5 stars.

A Thanksgiving to Friends (Lighting the Way)

In difficult times
a friend is there to light the way
to lighten the load,
to show the path,
to smooth the road

At the darkest hour
a friend, with a word of truth
points to light
and the encroaching dawn
is in the plainest sight.

Deborah, to a friend in books and more this Thanksgiving

Thank you, Paul! I hope you had a lovely holiday.

Oh, William! by Elizabeth Strout

Another winner from Elizabeth Strout! I liked this one even more than My Name Is Lucy Barton (which I feel that I need to reread to get some of the references in this new book, narrated by Lucy herself). William is Lucy's first husband. The two have remained friends throughout the years. William has comforted Lucy after the death of her second husband, and Lucy has remained his confidante and advisor through failed marriages and affairs and a loving but difficult relationship with his mother. Recently, William has been having strange night terrors centering on his deceased mother, Catherine. In the early years of their marriage, Lucy had difficulty breeching the gap between her and her husband's backgrounds. Lucy, who spent some years growing up in a garage with her less-than-loving family, was a social outcast at school due to her poverty, and adjusting to Catherine's golf-playing country club lifestyle wasn't easy. Now a successful writer, Lucy still struggles with the feeling that she is invisible and that no place is really home.

But things are not always what they seem. When their daughters give William the gift of an ancestry site subscription, Catherine's secrets emerge. The result is a trip to Maine, with Lucy along for support.

There's much more to this novel than the brief paragraphs above reveal, but I never like to give away too much. Strout explores not only Lucy's relationships with William and Catherine but their relationships with their daughters, Chrissy and Becka, their subsequent marriages, their attitudes towards work and community, and the process of reconciliation with the past. If, like me, you love novels that focus on characters' emotions and insights, you will enjoy Oh, William!

4.5 out of 5 stars.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

The novel's narrator is a woman writer whose longtime mentor and friend (and perhaps the man she has always been in love with) has recently committed suicide. When hi widow asks to meet with her, she's not sure what to expect and is surprised when she is requested to take her friend's dog. Apollo is not just any dog: he's a senior harlequin Great Dane who was found abandoned in a New York City park and whose abandonment issues are resurfacing as he mourns the loss of his master. For one thing, he makes an unbearable sound of grief in the night that the widow just can't bear. The narrator hesitates only briefly, even though dogs are not allowed in her apartment building.

This short novel focuses on the growing relationship between the narrator and Apollo and their joint process of grieving and healing. The one thing they have in common is their love for the deceased and their feelings of loss and desolation. It's a wonderful story about the love and loyalty of both dogs and true friends. As someone who helps to get rescued animals adopted, I've seen at firsthand the emotional support that animals can give to humans--and vice versa. Nunez manages to pull this off without any oversentimentality. It's a lovely read, recommended not only to pet lovers but to anyone who has been through the grieving process or just wants to learn more about it.

5 out of 5 stars.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

Having read two short story collections by Claire Keegan, I looked forward to reading this novella. The year is 1985, and Bill Furlong, a coal supplier in a small Irish town, is approaching forty. Like many men his age, he has begun to question the course his life has taken, becoming rather bored with the routine , demands, and expectations. He loves his wife Eileen and their five daughters, and he knows that his life could easily have taken a very different path. Bill was born to a young unwed servant who worked for a widow whose only son had been killed in the war. Instead of casting her out in shame or sending her to one of the homes for unwed mothers run by the Catholic church, the widow allows mother and son to stay, treating Billy almost as if he was her own. His mother having died in an accident when he was only tweleve, Bill is grateful for the care he was given by the widow and her stable hand. He knows that without her help, he never would have been able to complete the program he needed in order to secure his current position and provide for his family. Bill is a lucky man indeed.

In the days prior to Christmas, clients are presuring Bill to deliver their fuel today, if not yesterday. He's forced to work long hours, placing his eldest daughter in charge of the office, even rising in the wee hours on a Sunday morning to take a load of coal to the local convent before Mass. When he opens the shed, what he initially thinks is an animal turns out to be a girl about fifteen, barefoot, dressed in a ragged nightgown, covered in coal dust and shivering from the cold. Sara is obviously one of the "Magdalens," unwed mothers like Bill's own who has been taken in but forced to surrender her baby and to work the rest of her life as a laundress for the benefit is the convent. The encounter results in an unexpected surge of empathy, forcing Bill to question his and his community's blind acceptance of the way things are and the way things have always been.

Small Things Like These is itself a small, quiet book, the perfect read for a Christmas season afternoon. Keegan as writing is fine, and she does a remarkable job of enabling the reader to enter into Bill's world, his emotions, and his thoughts.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

I loved A Gentleman in Moscow, so after finishing it, I downloaded a kindle copy of his other book, Rules of Civility. Blah. It ended up being a DNF for me. But I thought I'd give this author another go with his new book, The Lincoln Highway. I finished it, but not without a struggle.

The story revolves around Emmett Watson, a young man who killed another by throwing an impulsive punch and who has just been released from several years in a juvenile prison. In the meantime, his father, an idealistic farmer with no talent for farming, has died, leaving his younger brother Billy to be cared for by a neighbor. The novel opens with the warden dropping off Emmett, who has served his time, at home. Unbeknownst to him, two "friends" from Salinas (the prison), Duchess and Wooly, have hitched a ride in the warden's trunk.

Emmett takes his neighbor's advice and decides that he and Billy should move out of town. The bank is foreclosing on the farm, and many of the residents of Morgen, Nebraska still want payback for his mistake. Emmett's inclination is to move to Texas, but he agrees to follow Billy's suggestion of driving his beloved Studebacker to California instead, although he doesn't share his brother's belief that their mother will be waiting for them in San Francisco (based on a series of seven post cards she sent right after abandoning the family). But when Duchess and Wooly show up, they have other plans . . .

The narration shifts among the characters--not only Emmett, Duchess and Wooly but also Sally Ransom, the neighbor who has taken care of Billy and the house; Ulysses and the Parson, two drifters they encounter on the way; Abacus Abernathe, the author of a book of heroes' stories that is Billy's guiding light; and several other secondary figures.

All this may sound fascinating, but The Lincoln Highway just didn't click with me. For some reason, I just didn't care about any of the characters, several of which seemed like stereotypes. There were parts that I enjoyed, but long stretches that had me so bored that I almost sent the book back to the library unfinished. Let's just say that, in the end, it was hardly an engaging page-turner or original story like A Gentleman in Moscow.

3 out of 5 stars.

May all your surprises be good ones this Holiday season.

Have a lovely holiday, Deborah.

>94 Cariola: Ooof, that one sounds like it wouldn't really click with me, either. I'm sorry it didn't work for you.

Happy Christmas!!

>94 Cariola: Yes, I had the book on my " wishlist"! Thank you for the review.
I hope that you have a good holiday season!

>95 richardderus:, >96 PaulCranswick:, >97 scaifea:, >98 torontoc: Thank you for the holiday wishes. I hope yours were wonderful!

I need to start thinking about getting up my 2022 page.

Forget your stresses and strains
As the old year wanes;
All that now remains
Is to bring you good cheer
With wine, liquor or beer
And wish you a special new year.

Happy New Year, Deborah.