Karen
The storytelling is very good in this novel about four siblings who go as children to see a fortune teller who tells them the dates of their deaths, and what happens afterwards. Unfortunately, I lost patience with the characters and their agonizing about what it meant to truly LIVE their lives. The very end of the book mollified me somewhat, with a couple of refreshing characters who didn't seem to be agonizing at all. Ultimately, though, this book was not really for me
The storytelling is very good in this novel about four siblings who go as children to see a fortune teller who tells them the dates of their deaths, and what happens afterwards. Unfortunately, I lost patience with the characters and their agonizing about what it meant to truly LIVE their lives. The very end of the book mollified me somewhat, with a couple of refreshing characters who didn't seem to be agonizing at all. Ultimately, though, this book was not really for me
"Instagram tradwife influencer wakes up in an Idaho farmhouse in 1855" is the hook, but the most interesting part of the story is how she got there. Yesteryear is highly readable. Its main character, Natalie Heller Mills, is a smart woman who is sceptical about the feasibility of the modern societal expectation that women should pursue both career and family life. She is also judgmental, unforgiving, smug, and a whole host of other petty flaws. Her voice is funny, intimate, as if a girlfriend was telling you her story over coffee (or an Instagram influencer was narrating her story over a series of vignettes). You find out some details of her life that make you feel sympathy for her. She's not a straw woman, but she is also not a nice person, and she is blind to her own flaws. She refers to the Angry Women who make derogatory comments on her videos, without understanding that she is also a very angry women. Her own mother asks her, late in the book, "WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR YOU TO BE KIND?"
I am not sure if I find the answer to what Natalie is doing in 1855 Idaho all that believable or even effective for the story. I'm still mulling that over. But I do think this book is worth reading for what it says about the difficulty of being a woman, whether you're in 1855 or the present day.
"Instagram tradwife influencer wakes up in an Idaho farmhouse in 1855" is the hook, but the most interesting part of the story is how she got there. Yesteryear is highly readable. Its main character, Natalie Heller Mills, is a smart woman who is sceptical about the feasibility of the modern societal expectation that women should pursue both career and family life. She is also judgmental, unforgiving, smug, and a whole host of other petty flaws. Her voice is funny, intimate, as if a girlfriend was telling you her story over coffee (or an Instagram influencer was narrating her story over a series of vignettes). You find out some details of her life that make you feel sympathy for her. She's not a straw woman, but she is also not a nice person, and she is blind to her own flaws. She refers to the Angry Women who make derogatory comments on her videos, without understanding that she is also a very angry women. Her own mother asks her, late in the book, "WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR YOU TO BE KIND?"
I am not sure if I find the answer to what Natalie is doing in 1855 Idaho all that believable or even effective for the story. I'm still mulling that over. But I do think this book is worth reading for what it says about the difficulty of being a woman, whether you're in 1855 or the present day.
A mystery about a teenage girl going missing at her family's summer camp in upstate New York, years after her younger brother went missing at the same camp. Her disappearance is investigated by a young female detective who is just beginning her career and also just beginning to claim some independence from her very traditional family.
This was a perfectly enjoyable mystery.
A mystery about a teenage girl going missing at her family's summer camp in upstate New York, years after her younger brother went missing at the same camp. Her disappearance is investigated by a young female detective who is just beginning her career and also just beginning to claim some independence from her very traditional family.
This was a perfectly enjoyable mystery.
I had high hopes for this book, but it really didn't meet them. Dougald Hine's central idea in this book is that we have come to the end of the time where we can innocently continue manufacturing, developing, and consuming as a way of life. We're moving into a new era, as we see that the planet can't sustain the old way of life and that we are going to be facing climate related disasters for which we created the conditions. We need to see what, if anything, is salvageable from the old era, that will help us as we face what comes next.
So far, that seems good, but he gets bogged down in a chapters long digression about Sweden's response to the Covid-19 pandemic vs. the US, UK, and most of Western Europe. He uses anti-vaxxer talking points, claims that Covid-19 is a disease that only kills old people, and gripes about having to put on a mask on a train as it crossed the border out of Sweden.
I *think* the reason for this anti-cautious-Covid-policy rant is that he is using it as an example of people relying only on science for answers about how to behave in the face of disaster and having it turn out badly. He wants to make the point that looking only to science for answers to our climate problems will at best only give us partial solutions, because part of the problem is the attitude we have toward our planet: we see it as an inanimate thing to be exploited or managed, not a living entity of which we are a part. Unfortunately for his book, I don't agree that requiring masks while we figured out how to respond to Covid, or requiring vaccination as soon as vaccines were available, were patently ridiculous or oppressive. Covid was not a convincing example for me, and that part of the argument took up too much of the book for me to shrug it off. Disappointing.
I had high hopes for this book, but it really didn't meet them. Dougald Hine's central idea in this book is that we have come to the end of the time where we can innocently continue manufacturing, developing, and consuming as a way of life. We're moving into a new era, as we see that the planet can't sustain the old way of life and that we are going to be facing climate related disasters for which we created the conditions. We need to see what, if anything, is salvageable from the old era, that will help us as we face what comes next.
So far, that seems good, but he gets bogged down in a chapters long digression about Sweden's response to the Covid-19 pandemic vs. the US, UK, and most of Western Europe. He uses anti-vaxxer talking points, claims that Covid-19 is a disease that only kills old people, and gripes about having to put on a mask on a train as it crossed the border out of Sweden.
I *think* the reason for this anti-cautious-Covid-policy rant is that he is using it as an example of people relying only on science for answers about how to behave in the face of disaster and having it turn out badly. He wants to make the point that looking only to science for answers to our climate problems will at best only give us partial solutions, because part of the problem is the attitude we have toward our planet: we see it as an inanimate thing to be exploited or managed, not a living entity of which we are a part. Unfortunately for his book, I don't agree that requiring masks while we figured out how to respond to Covid, or requiring vaccination as soon as vaccines were available, were patently ridiculous or oppressive. Covid was not a convincing example for me, and that part of the argument took up too much of the book for me to shrug it off. Disappointing.
Jeanna Kadlec's memoir of growing up in an evangelical Christian family in the Midwest and discovering she was a lesbian when she was in grad school in Boston. Jeanna's own story is interspersed with the history and critique of American evangelicalism, and especially how it came to be tied up with so-called "conservative" politics. I was more interested in Kadlec's personal story. I think the history and analysis is meant to add context rather than to be an in depth study of evangelicalism. Still, I found some insights in the book that will stay with me. One was that evangelical Christianity can be thought of as a civil folk religion because of how its values have become tied up in the idea of what it is to be American--the so-called Protestant work ethic of hard work and self reliance being also the bedrock idea of the American citizen, for example.
It was interesting to me that in Jeanna's story, her mother was the main transmitter of patriarchal religion. Her father, a lapsed Catholic, was checked out until she was a teenager, when he suddenly converted and then brought the family to an extremely repressive evangelical church. At that point, Jeanna attended a different church on her own, because she knew what the people at that church were doing was wrong. I was also interested in how, after Jeanna came out as a lesbian, she felt she couldn't be a Christian anymore. Despite finding churches that were welcoming of LGBTQ+ people and feeling intellectual agreement with them, she felt she "couldn't hear Jesus" anymore. Instead, she looked for expressions of spirituality that helped her listen to herself in another way; tarot, for example. It struck me that leaving Christianity was not necessarily an intellectual decision, but an intuitive one. Another form of the same religion that raised her would not help her grow the way she needed to.
I read this book for a book club, otherwise I might not have picked it up. Kadlec's writing about herself is admirable. She's not shy about describing her callous behavior to her husband as their marriage collapses (although she also describes some of his callous behavior, she keeps it to a minimum) or her enthusiasm for sex once she understands why she didn't enjoy sex with her husband.
Jeanna Kadlec's memoir of growing up in an evangelical Christian family in the Midwest and discovering she was a lesbian when she was in grad school in Boston. Jeanna's own story is interspersed with the history and critique of American evangelicalism, and especially how it came to be tied up with so-called "conservative" politics. I was more interested in Kadlec's personal story. I think the history and analysis is meant to add context rather than to be an in depth study of evangelicalism. Still, I found some insights in the book that will stay with me. One was that evangelical Christianity can be thought of as a civil folk religion because of how its values have become tied up in the idea of what it is to be American--the so-called Protestant work ethic of hard work and self reliance being also the bedrock idea of the American citizen, for example.
It was interesting to me that in Jeanna's story, her mother was the main transmitter of patriarchal religion. Her father, a lapsed Catholic, was checked out until she was a teenager, when he suddenly converted and then brought the family to an extremely repressive evangelical church. At that point, Jeanna attended a different church on her own, because she knew what the people at that church were doing was wrong. I was also interested in how, after Jeanna came out as a lesbian, she felt she couldn't be a Christian anymore. Despite finding churches that were welcoming of LGBTQ+ people and feeling intellectual agreement with them, she felt she "couldn't hear Jesus" anymore. Instead, she looked for expressions of spirituality that helped her listen to herself in another way; tarot, for example. It struck me that leaving Christianity was not necessarily an intellectual decision, but an intuitive one. Another form of the same religion that raised her would not help her grow the way she needed to.
I read this book for a book club, otherwise I might not have picked it up. Kadlec's writing about herself is admirable. She's not shy about describing her callous behavior to her husband as their marriage collapses (although she also describes some of his callous behavior, she keeps it to a minimum) or her enthusiasm for sex once she understands why she didn't enjoy sex with her husband.
The other Colson Whitehead books I've read (The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad) have all had fanciful, offbeat, or magical realist elements to them, but The Nickel Boys remains solidly grounded in recorded facts taken from a real life Florida reform school and the historical record of what it was like to live as a Black person in the Jim Crow South. The story is told in a more conventional style, but it packs a heavy emotional and intellectual wallop with its portrayal of young Elwood Curtis, a serious and somewhat idealistic student, who is sent to the Nickel Academy after being falsely accused of stealing a car. What happens physically in the reform school is brutal and horrifying, and Elwood observes that what happens to the boys' spirits is equally brutal and horrifying. This book is not easy to read, but meticulously put together and very much worth it.
The other Colson Whitehead books I've read (The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, The Underground Railroad) have all had fanciful, offbeat, or magical realist elements to them, but The Nickel Boys remains solidly grounded in recorded facts taken from a real life Florida reform school and the historical record of what it was like to live as a Black person in the Jim Crow South. The story is told in a more conventional style, but it packs a heavy emotional and intellectual wallop with its portrayal of young Elwood Curtis, a serious and somewhat idealistic student, who is sent to the Nickel Academy after being falsely accused of stealing a car. What happens physically in the reform school is brutal and horrifying, and Elwood observes that what happens to the boys' spirits is equally brutal and horrifying. This book is not easy to read, but meticulously put together and very much worth it.
In the beginning of this book, an unnamed woman goes to a Catholic retreat center near her home town in Australia, suffering from unresolved grief over her parents' deaths, especially her mother's, as well as grief, guilt, and shame over other events in her life. She seems exhausted. She's not particularly religious, and doesn't at first intend to go to the daily prayers, but then she does go after all. In the next chapter, some time has passed and we find that this woman has come back for the fourth time and this time she has stayed. She has left her husband Alex and all her friends, quit her job working for an endangered species advocacy organization, and taken on the job of cooking and housekeeping for free in exchange for permission to stay at the center.
We never do learn the woman's name or what happened to her marriage. Instead we read her close observations of daily life at the convent and her ruminations on her mother and other people she knows who have died, including a number of suicides. A woman from her past who makes her very uncomfortable appears at the convent, and there is a rat infestation of biblical proportions.
Stone Yard Devotional is not comfortable reading. I stuck with it because the narrator's preoccupations resonated with me, and I found her to be observant and somewhat insightful (if not about herself). I wanted to see if she came to any resolution in her self-exile. In retrospect, I'm glad I read it. More than a week later, I'm still thinking about several aspects of the book--the narrator, why it was written the way it was. The book club I read this for was vehemently divided over whether reading it was worthwhile, though. Reader, beware!
In the beginning of this book, an unnamed woman goes to a Catholic retreat center near her home town in Australia, suffering from unresolved grief over her parents' deaths, especially her mother's, as well as grief, guilt, and shame over other events in her life. She seems exhausted. She's not particularly religious, and doesn't at first intend to go to the daily prayers, but then she does go after all. In the next chapter, some time has passed and we find that this woman has come back for the fourth time and this time she has stayed. She has left her husband Alex and all her friends, quit her job working for an endangered species advocacy organization, and taken on the job of cooking and housekeeping for free in exchange for permission to stay at the center.
We never do learn the woman's name or what happened to her marriage. Instead we read her close observations of daily life at the convent and her ruminations on her mother and other people she knows who have died, including a number of suicides. A woman from her past who makes her very uncomfortable appears at the convent, and there is a rat infestation of biblical proportions.
Stone Yard Devotional is not comfortable reading. I stuck with it because the narrator's preoccupations resonated with me, and I found her to be observant and somewhat insightful (if not about herself). I wanted to see if she came to any resolution in her self-exile. In retrospect, I'm glad I read it. More than a week later, I'm still thinking about several aspects of the book--the narrator, why it was written the way it was. The book club I read this for was vehemently divided over whether reading it was worthwhile, though. Reader, beware!
As an academic librarian, this literary mystery is just my cup of tea. The fact that it is set in a post-apocalyptic future (2119) where sea levels have risen to the point that England is now an archipelago, the remains of the Bodleian Library are now in Snowdonia, and Nigeria is the most prosperous country, give it the flavor of speculative fiction. A little time is spent reflecting on what led to this state of world affairs, as the main character, a professor of literature named Thomas Metcalfe, thinks about how his area of interest, the early 21st century, was just before catastrophic changes in the world began.
Metcalfe's research is focused on a poem, A Corona for Vivien, written by acclaimed 21st century British poet Francis Blundy for his wife Vivien and read aloud at her 54th birthday party in 2014. The poem itself was never published and no copies have ever been found, although well known literary folk who were at the party and heard it later published lavish praise for it. Literary scholarship ever since has been focused on finding the poem, or attempting to discover more about it. Given the worldwide catastrophes that have taken place in the intervening time, it seems unlikely that there could be anything more left to discover, but Metcalfe is driven as only an academic can be by his fascination for the time period and the people who were involved in the mythologized birthday dinner party.
This is an intricate book about the effort of trying to understand the past, the effort of being married to another person, literary academia in an environment that sees humanities as impractical or foolish, facing or not facing the reality of climate change, and probably many other things. However, it's written in a style that allows readers to just enjoy the mystery if that's what they want to do.
As an academic librarian, this literary mystery is just my cup of tea. The fact that it is set in a post-apocalyptic future (2119) where sea levels have risen to the point that England is now an archipelago, the remains of the Bodleian Library are now in Snowdonia, and Nigeria is the most prosperous country, give it the flavor of speculative fiction. A little time is spent reflecting on what led to this state of world affairs, as the main character, a professor of literature named Thomas Metcalfe, thinks about how his area of interest, the early 21st century, was just before catastrophic changes in the world began.
Metcalfe's research is focused on a poem, A Corona for Vivien, written by acclaimed 21st century British poet Francis Blundy for his wife Vivien and read aloud at her 54th birthday party in 2014. The poem itself was never published and no copies have ever been found, although well known literary folk who were at the party and heard it later published lavish praise for it. Literary scholarship ever since has been focused on finding the poem, or attempting to discover more about it. Given the worldwide catastrophes that have taken place in the intervening time, it seems unlikely that there could be anything more left to discover, but Metcalfe is driven as only an academic can be by his fascination for the time period and the people who were involved in the mythologized birthday dinner party.
This is an intricate book about the effort of trying to understand the past, the effort of being married to another person, literary academia in an environment that sees humanities as impractical or foolish, facing or not facing the reality of climate change, and probably many other things. However, it's written in a style that allows readers to just enjoy the mystery if that's what they want to do.
