Karen

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.

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.

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.

There is an element of mystery novel in The Postcard: who sent the postcard that arrives at the Berest home bearing the names of the grandparents, aunt, and uncle who were murdered in the Holocaust, and why? The main character of the book, Anne, waits 15 years before she is motivated by an incident at her daughter's school to try to find out, but once she starts, she is determined. As a mystery novel, it's poignant and satisfying, and without the feeling of forced cleverness or contrivance that mystery novels sometimes have.

It's also heartbreakingly clear about what happened to Anne's great-grandparents and great-aunt and uncle, and her grandmother Myriam, who was the only one of her family to survive the Holocaust. In the course of tracking down the sender of the postcard, Anne becomes more closely acquainted with her Jewish heritage--something her family kept its distance from as she was growing up. She becomes more aware of the anti-semitism that still permeates the modern French society in which she lives. She also cultivates a new kind of relationship with her mother, Lelia, exploring these topics that had always seemed off limits before. Through this investigation of the postcard, Anne comes to a deeper understanding of her place in the world and in her family--who she is. By the end of the novel, I imagine her life opening up, with dark places illuminated, and horizons visible that she had not imagined before.

Marian Graves is a female aviator from the first half of the 20th century who disappeared with her navigator Eddie in 1951 in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe by flying over both poles. Hadley Baxter is a present day young movie actress who lost both her parents in a plane crash at a young age and like Marian Graves, was raised by an alcoholic uncle. When Baxter is fired from her movie franchise, she gets an unexpected offer to play Graves in a biopic. The Great Circle tells the story of both women, although the bulk of it is devoted to Graves' life up to her final flight. Baxter makes intermittent appearances, looking for love and connection with people who don't seem capable of supplying it, but subtly making progress toward understanding herself and what she does and doesn't want. The connection between the two women is tenuous, but there is a "great circle" of sorts between them that is satisfying.

At 589 pages, it is an immersive novel, which was what I wanted.

As a work of imagination about a historical figure, this is a great book. Groff writes from the assumption that Marie de France was Marie the Abbess of Shaftesbury, illegitimate half sister of Henry II of England. From there, she writes a surprising novel about an ungainly, unwanted girl from a family of "viragos" coming into herself in a place that was meant to be a dustbin or a prison--a place where she would be out of the way, among a group of other unwanted girls and women.

When Marie first arrives at the Abbey, it is so poor that the nuns are starving. The Abbey was willing to accept her because she came with a dowry which would buy food for a while. By the end of the novel, Marie as Abbess has made the Abbey rich and powerful in its community and increased the number of nuns and oblates many times over. Over the course of the novel, she and the Abbey grow in stages, maneuvering around threats from outside and pushing through internal resistance. It's a portrait of leadership, among other things.

I was curious about the title of this book, Matrix. The book is full of "-trices," meaning female staff: cellatrix, infirmatrix, etc. So, what is the meaning of "matrix"? The latin meaning is "Womb," a place within which something grows. Similarly, in biological sciences a matrix is the substance in which a sample grows. So, Marie is the womb in which the Abbey of Shaftesbury grew, but I think the name also suggests some other less literal growing. I'm enjoying thinking about that.

Also, the writing in this book is so good.

Horse tells the story of the great racehorse Lexington and his enslaved groom and lifelong companion Jarret, but it recognizes that that story didn't end when Lexington died, or even when Jarret Lewis died. Their relationship continued into the future, and the conditions under which they lived their relationship had profound effects on the people who came after them. All of this is accomplished in a novel that moves back and forth between characters in pre- and Civil War times, and characters in 21st century pre-Covid times. I found it deeply absorbing, touching and disturbing, and well worth reading. Not too many details here, because I don't want to give spoilers, but this is easily my favorite of the Geraldine Brooks novels that I've read.

Adunni is a 14 year old girl living with her father and two brothers in a Nigerian village at the beginning of this book. Before her mother died, she made Adunni's father promise to keep her in school and not marry her off, but soon the family can't afford the cost of school or the rent of their house. Adunni's father tells her that she will marry Morufu, a man 40 years her senior who already has two wives and 4 other children, in exchange for enough money to pay the rent. Adunni is already mourning her mother, and this violation of the promise her father made to her mother is devastating to her. Everyone around her, including her friends, tell her she should be happy, since she'll be married and taken care of, and will soon become a mother, but her only wish (besides having her mother back), is to go back to school.

Adunni's troubles continue and multiply until she is a domestic servant in a wealthy Nigerian woman's house in Lagos, beaten and starved by her employer and sexually harassed and pursued by her employer's husband. At every step of her journey, however, she has found someone willing to help her--sometimes in a small way, but sometimes in a big way. In Big Madam's house, in the midst of her troubles, she also finds hope.

The narrative is written in what I think is meant to be a native Yoruba speaker's pidgin English--Adunni telling her own story. It's not explained, but it becomes clear later in the book that Adunni's English is not very grammatical when someone offers to help her improve. However, the "pidgin" English that Adunni uses is consistent within itself and has grace, so it's a pleasure to read.

This is a tale of a young girl's resilience and the courage to free herself from hardship that many of the people around her expect her to just endure. There's a lot of sadness in the story, but also bright moments of kindness that nurture hope for the future.

I read this several months ago, just now getting around to writing a review. As someone who fell in love with the Twin Cities while visiting as a teenager and moved here permanently in 1998, it's fascinating to get glimpses inside the minds and lives of people who were born here and often live not far from the neighborhood where they grew up. Although I have been here almost 30 years, when I get that chance, I feel like an outsider newbie all over again.

I'd never heard of Mark Connor, a St. Paul Irish American poet who also writes about boxing, until I was given his book to read this spring. His voice in this book is conversational, like someone you'd run into at your neighborhood dive. His poems revolve around his concern for a woman he's having a kind of ambiguous relationship with, trying to honor his Catholic faith, and binding it all together, his Dad, who taught him the Catholicism he now loves. The poems are connected by a narrative that covers Irish Americans in St. Paul, growing up around his parents' friends, going off to work on an Alaskan fishing boat, returning to volunteer at a homeless shelter for Native youth, boxing, and what Catholicism means to him. If someone were to record this as an audio book, I could imagine Craig Finn of the Hold Steady narrating it.

Although this book was not really my cup of tea, I enjoyed the glimpses of my adopted hometown through a native born son's eyes. I appreciated the humor and philosophy woven through It's About Time (the title is a pun), and I will keep an eye out for Connor's name in future Twin Cities publications.

The main idea I have about this book, having just finished it two hours ago, is that Navalny understood his place in the world. Towards the end of the book, he writes about faith being a great help to him as he lived in prison and tried to keep fighting corruption from there under very difficult circumstances. It's not the glitzy TV evangelist type of faith he was talking about, but the knowledge that the work he was doing was right, and he was the person to do it. In that sense, he was called by God to do it, and while it was painful to have so much taken away from him, it was more important to keep doing his work. I find his clarity about this so touching and so powerful.

I read a review when Patriot first came out that said it was cobbled together from bits and pieces, and it showed. I think it's appropriate that it shows, actually, given that Navalny wrote much of it from prison in one hour chunks when he was allowed to have writing materials. The "cobbled together" feel adds to the power of the book. Highly recommend to anyone who cares about Russia, US relations with Russia (especially DJT's relations with Russia) and American politics post 2024.

I love to read advice columns, so I was pretty sure I'd enjoy this book. I didn't know anything about Dear Sugar or The Rumpus, but I was right, I did enjoy it. I enjoyed the way Sugar would answer her letter writer's question with a story from her own life, and the way that story's relevance was often not what I expected it to be (somewhat like a parable). And, of course, I enjoyed reading the letter writer's story too. It's all about the stories, and there were some doozies in this book.

I'm not sure I would have enjoyed writing a letter to Dear Sugar and having it answered the way she usually did, though. I definitely wouldn't have enjoyed being called "sweet pea," "darling," and "honey bun." And I might not have liked having my heartfelt question responded to with a detailed story from the advice columnist's life. It feels self involved. The times when it bugged me the most were the times when she described her own reactions to the story from her life and then told her letter writers that that would be their experience as well. That was misguided. In many cases, I think the advice she gives in this book is wise and humane, but it might have been better to leave out the lengthy stories about herself, or at least make them less lengthy. But had she done that, the book would have been a lot less fun to read. So, I'm ambivalent.

In this book, the story of the 1986 fire at the Central branch of the Los Angeles Public Library and its aftermath is interwoven with the history of the LAPL, its many directors and their stories, and the story of the young man who was suspected of setting the fire. In the course of bringing all of these pieces together, Susan Orlean shows the depth of what a library is for its community. I really enjoyed this.

This is Singer's memoir of growing up as a Hasidic boy in Warsaw before (and during) World War I. His father was a rabbi with a small following, and people from the neighborhood brought him their questions and disputes to solve, while young Isaac observed from the sidelines. There are wonderfully odd characters described with gentleness and affection, as well as a clear eyed description of an insular, patriarchal culture under pressure to change. As Isaac grows older, the stories are more focused on his own experiences and discoveries, and the tension between his older brother and his father is perhaps a shelter for his own growing away from the culture of his upbringing.

I also think an essential part of reading this book is recognizing that the culture Singer describes, as well as the place, and many of the people were destroyed only 20 years later by the Holocaust. He refers to this fact in a couple of places, and most plainly in one of the chapters set in Bilgoray, where he mentions that one of his cousins was the only one of her siblings to survive. At the same time that it is a loving remembrance, it evokes sadness.

I can't believe I got to this point in my life without having read any Isaac Bashevis Singer, but I will surely read more.

I read Dubliners in college, so long ago that I barely remembered the experience. Now I've read it again for my book club and I think I probably found it pretty opaque the first time around. So much meaning is not explicitly stated, but needs to be gleaned from context or background knowledge. The people in the stories are living somewhat grim lives, with alcoholism, loneliness, poverty, and other kinds of desperation. In almost every story, someone is trying to get away with something. I didn't feel kindly toward many of the characters, but I appreciate the artistry of the book.

In a word, fantastic. Ed Yong writes with passion, clarity, and humor as he surveys the study of animal senses, from insects to elephants and whales, and through the senses we as humans are familiar with to a few that we do not have. He shows us that even the senses we think we know operate differently in other animals, so that sight, taste, touch, smell, and hearing become mysterious and wonderful. Reading the footnotes is essential in this book.

Notes, bibliography, and index in the back.

Two quotes from the last chapter: "The previous 12 chapters of this book represent centuries of hard-won knowledge about the sensory worlds of other species. But in the time it took to accumulate that knowledge, we have radically remolded those worlds. We are closer than ever to understanding what it is like to be another animal, but we have made it harder than ever for other animals to be (346)."

"Wilderness is not distant. We are continually immersed in it (353)."

A mixture of a memoir of the author growing up grieving her father, an artist and heroin addict, who died when she was an adolescent, and a journalistic investigation of her father through his relationships with friends and family members, and his art. This book is heart wrenching, but also a very beautiful and brave attempt to come to terms with complicated love and grief.

The text is illustrated with black and white photos of the art of Joseph Schactman and family photos of the author with her mother and father.

Even though some brutal stuff happens in this novel, I'd still call it gentle. Patrick DeWitt treats his characters, all weirdos in their own ways, with tenderness, even though life doesn't.

Bob Comet, retired librarian, ostensibly someone who reads about life instead of living it, finds a confused old lady at the 7-11 and returns her to the senior center where she resides. His experience at the senior center inspires him to ask the manager if he could volunteer there, and she reluctantly agrees. She tells him that most of the volunteers they've had gave up quickly, because they couldn't cope with the residents.

As you might guess, Bob Comet perseveres at the senior center, with some ups and downs. In the process, we learn about his past: his failed marriage, his failed friendship, his youthful adventure as a runaway, and the significance of the Hotel Elba in his life.

Although I liked this book, it does teeter on the edge of the "loveable, quirky old folks" trope AND it plays dangerously with the "librarian who reads instead of living" stereotype (though I would argue it doesn't really buy into that last one). It also has more than a tinge of melancholy.

This is a behemoth of a book at 645 pages. It's very readable history of ACT UP New York, with interviews from surviving members of ACT UP, pages of photos, and appendices for primary source documents. Unlike some histories, this one contains the personal voice and perspective of the author, who was also an active member of ACT UP. Schulman covers ACT UP's meeting format, the affinity groups and other interest groups that formed, planning and execution of actions, and the tensions that formed between the group of ACT UP members who would meet and work with government and pharmaceutical companies and those who carried out the disruptive protests and actions in the streets (and workplaces, and churches, and news organizations...). It was completely fascinating.

This is a good old fashioned melodramatic thriller set mostly in the fictional town of Ruffano, Italy. Armino Fabbio, a tour guide for a Genoan tour company, has a chance encounter with an old woman who reminds him of the nurse who took care of him as a child in Ruffano. When she is later murdered, he leaves his job and sets off for Ruffano to see if he can verify if it really was Marta, his old nurse. As he comes back to the town he left as an 11 year old boy in the chaos of the end of World War II, he is drawn into the intrigues between factions at the university that threaten to engulf the whole town, and he finds that his family drama is at the center of them.

I was instantly drawn in and read this compulsively in two sittings. The melodrama hit the spot. I especially appreciated the mirroring of the town's (fictional) historic drama between medieval Dukes Claudio and Carlo that is essential to the plot.

I appreciate this novel for giving me the opportunity to put "spontaneous combustion" in my tags.

Fallon Kazan and her two brothers, Ovid and Terrence (sometimes known as Cosmo), are adults dealing with the fallout of their mother's apparent spontaneous combustion in the Chilean desert when they were on a family trip as children. Their relationships with each other are turbulent, and Fallon and Ovid have trouble building lives for themselves in the world. Their father, Walter, is a passive man who doesn't know how to help them and may not even think it is his role to help them. This is the state of things in the beginning of the novel. When Ovid has a crisis, things begin to shift in the story. Fallon is led to set off on a journey of discovery in the very car her family was driving in Chile when her mother disappeared in a flash of fire.

In many ways this is a conventional story of adult siblings navigating the aftermath of trauma from their childhood, coming to new understanding of what happened to them, and learning to trust themselves and each other. It was the unexpected elements of the story that made it fun to read. The hints of magical realism in Blue Woman Burning add to the sense that the world of the Kazans is seriously off kilter. Eustacia's over the top personality repeating itself in Ovid, her obsession with him, and his behavior after her exit from their lives suggests not just family drama, but family horror. Fallon's experiences and the people she meets on her epic journey are imaginative and build meaning within the story. I really liked being surprised over and over by what happened next.

I do wish that the character of Walter, their father, had more development. I had so many questions about him. He had enough of a personality to persuade Eustacia not to name her daughter Fallopia and her son Ovum, but almost nothing is said about his reaction to Eustacia's fiery exit. Is his passivity and helplessness in later life because of that or something else? Despite these questions, I really enjoyed the book.

Sometimes you're in the mood for a book about a woman marooned on an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, battling bears, starvation, and her own demons. If that's you right now, this is your book. Best of all, this novel is based on a true story.

In the novel, Marguerite de la Rocque's parents die when she is a young girl, and her care is left to her unscrupulous kinsman Roberval. Roberval speculates with her inheritance and loses it, so Marguerite's house and lands are rented out and she and her small household are packed off to live in an outbuilding. Roberval's moods are unpredictable and he seems to take pleasure in keeping Marguerite off balance, so we quickly understand that he isn't just unscrupulous with money, he's an all around bad guy. There's no recourse for Marguerite. She's at his mercy and no one is going to hold him accountable for taking her money.

When Marguerite comes of age, Roberval brings her and her nurse Damienne to his house in La Rochelle, and from there on board his ship sailing to New France, where he has been declared viceroy. On the voyage, Marguerite falls in love with his secretary, August, and when Roberval discovers this, he maroons the pair of them (and Damienne) on an island there, with their belongings and some supplies. The story moves from maddening injustice to Robinson Crusoe, as the castaways figure out how to take care of themselves alone on the island, and then to heartbreak as hardships set in.

The theme of religious faith and questioning in this book is handled so well. Marguerite compares her faith to that of her companions and finds herself lacking because she doesn't passively accept her lot, but chafes against her restrictions and tries to make things better for herself. She feels unhappy, complains, and asks for what she wants, while her closest female companions pray much more, and don't complain. Marguerite does experience a dark night of the soul in this book, and while she doesn't come out of it behaving more like those companions, she has more maturity and steadiness than she did before.

A really worthwhile read!

The lifelong friendship of Leah Hanwell and Natalie (Keisha) Blake takes place against the backdrop of Willesden, a working class borough in the Northwest of London that is home to Irish, South Asian, and African immigrants. The two girls lived there with their families as children, did well enough in school to go to university, and have both made it "out" of the neighborhood as adults, but are still very much rooted there. Although the action of the novel centers around Leah, Natalie, and a young man named Felix, Willesden itself is arguably a character in its own right. Its shops and restaurants, alleys and bus stops, parks and churchyards are populated with people who are struggling, joyful, weary, gentle, violent, philosophical, etc. There are some truly delightful scenes that depict the character of the place.

Although I enjoyed the novel, I didn't understand the structure of it. The central section (and the longest), called Host, tells the story of Leah and Natalie's friendship from its beginning when they were girls to a point where Natalie comes to a crisis in her adult life, in 178 sections ranging from as short as one sentence to as long as several pages. The sections before and after Host are fairly traditional narratives, so this read to me at first like notes for the backstory of the novel. After a while I got used to the different pace and structure of that section and it didn't feel so disjointed anymore, but I still wonder about the reason for the style change.

Anyway, if you like novels about female friendship, give this one a try. The two main characters are excellent and their friendship is real.

I was in middle school when Ronald Reagan was elected and a teenager when AIDS was an epidemic. I remember Angels in America coming out and people talking about it, but this is the first time I've read it. Reading and talking about drama is not my forte, but this play (these two plays?) put me back in those times. Although I remember that expectations around masculinity and femininity were rigid and the stigma against being gay was absolute, it's easy to intellectualize it now and forget the feeling of airlessness and stricture the sexual politics of the time had. Not that these issues are all in the past....

In 2025 putting these issues, and the intimate details of the lives of gay men with AIDS, on stage doesn't seem daring, however relevant it might still be. But in the early 1990's it must have been radical. Reading this play now, I am thankful to Tony Kushner and everyone else who insisted on talking about the lives of gay men during the AIDS epidemic, about the lives of gay and lesbian and transgender people in general, and on putting those issues in front of Americans. This play brings the hypocrisy, denial, shame, and racial and sexual bigotry that lurked behind the US's official policies toward gay men in particular out into the light of day, and let some air into the room for everyone to take a breath and see a little more clearly. If we were willing.

This is a great anthology of folktales from around the world and many different cultures featuring women and girls as heroines who solve problems and rescue others with their wisdom, intelligence, and courage, and who make their own destinies instead of having them made for them by others. Each story has a brief commentary (1-2 short paragraphs, half a page at most) by the author at the end. I found the commentary a little uneven, but it's a small enough part of the book that it's easy to ignore. There are end notes and an index in the back, along with a list of selected "further reading," including picture books, young adult books, and secondary literature.

Overall, I really enjoyed this!