Karen
Written in the form of a letter to his 15 year old son, this book is about the author's experience and understanding of growing up and living as a black man in America. As such, reading it had the quality of listening in on a conversation I wouldn't otherwise have a chance to hear as a middle aged white lady.
Coates writes beautifully and thoughtfully about the grim subject of violence against black people throughout American history and comes to the conclusion that this is actually the tradition of America, built in from the start and taken as a birthright by those who “think they are white” and those who are aspiring to “the Dream” of upward mobility, a nice home in the suburbs and an unlimited stream of material belongings. He doesn't offer any solutions, other than clear-eyed, undeluded struggle, yet this book comes across as a very kind, loving communication from father to son.
The blurb on the front of my copy says, “‘This is required reading.' – Toni Morrison.” I agree. Let all with eyes to see, read.
There's so much going on in this book. Helen, a historian and falconry enthusiast, is grieving the death of her father. In her grief, she arranges to buy and train a goshawk. In the course of working with her hawk, she reflects on the life of T.H. White, the writer of The Once and Future King and another book, The Goshawk, which haunts her. There are the stories of her and her father, stories about T.H. White and his struggles, and the story of Helen and her hawk in the present. All of these are braided together in a memoir that is more than a memoir.
There is more than a little melodrama here. In a book where death and grief are so central, it's not surprising, but at times it was painful to read about the turmoil of T.H. White and then witness, in a way, the turmoil of Helen. Thankfully relief does come, along with some startling insights about the human relationship to the wild.
The main thesis of this book is that librarians are people who work on improving their communities through knowledge creation. The first section of the book, talking through the various conceptions of librarianship and making an argument for his view, was OK, but later sections on various types of libraries were repetitive, taken up with manufacturing straw men, poorly edited, and generally not edifying to read. I gave up in the Excursus when I saw the word “Liberians” where it was obvious that it should have been “librarians.”
The best thing about this book were the stories about what individual librarians had done to facilitate a more vibrant community in their libraries.
In this book about the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North and West between 1915 and 1975, Isabel Wilkerson follows three families who left the South at different times, from different states, for different reasons. The stories she tells of these families are the backbone of the book, and they're fascinating.
This book likens the experience of black migrants to that of immigrants from around the world who were coming to America during the same years. It's a comparison that makes a lot of sense, though it was a new idea to me. Black migrants were fleeing terrible conditions in hopes of making a better life in a safer place. They went to places where they already knew people–relatives or other townspeople who had gone ahead of them. They came with very little, and were in competition with other immigrants for the dirty, dangerous jobs that no one else wanted to do. The crucial difference was that these were citizens in their own country, searching for a place where they would be treated as such.
It's beautifully written and completely absorbing. I enjoy learning about things like the history of Harlem in New York or the South Side of Chicago, and what it was like to work in the citrus groves of Florida in the 30's and 40's. What is most striking to me, though, is that most of the story that the book tells took place during the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents. Some of it took place even during my own lifetime. So, it's close to home and enlightening, like reading an account of a major event in your own city after you saw hints of it in the traffic and the moods of people around you.
I really loved this book.
I won't try to describe the plot of this huge novel, since the Goodreads synopsis does that perfectly well. The depiction of Jamaica in the 1970's as divided up between playgrounds for rich white tourists and battlegrounds for corrupt police, CIA operatives, and gangs run by the two main political parties, is like a dystopia. The book is appallingly violent. Most of the main characters are killers and thugs, yet I found myself liking some of them quite a bit, sympathizing with them.
The story is told through the voices of the people involved in it. Some people speak only a few times, but others come back over and over.
Bob Marley, “The Singer,” is at the center of the story. His influence endures throughout the book although his character dies only a third of the way through.
These are my random thoughts about A Brief History of Seven Killings. In short, I loved it. It's gripping. I heartily recommend it.
The Circle is heavy handed in its message about the dangers of allowing a private technology company remarkably like Google too much access to customers' private information and too much influence over social and political life. Its main character, Mae, a recent college graduate who is thrilled to land a job at The Circle in the beginning of the novel, transforms from new employee who takes solitary kayak trips to relieve stress and feels outraged when her privacy is invaded, to an always-on-camera company spokesperson who mercilessly hounds a former boyfriend who has rejected social media.
Mae's transformation doesn't come with any psychological underpinning, though. We see her acquiescing to her bosses' assertions that if we're being watched, we won't do bad things, and that sharing our activities is an act of generosity to others, but we don't understand why she allows herself to be convinced and why she becomes such a true believer.
In spite of the un-subtle message, and the thinness of Mae's character, this novel made me feel queasy about posting on social media and using Google for search, email, creating documents and storing photos. I'm liable to feel queasy about it from time to time anyway, but this book reminded me that technology companies like Google are profiting from my freely providing them with data about myself.
This is another quick read. 190 pages, and I read it in two nights (staying up too late the second night to finish). Michael Dibdin takes the details of the canonical Sherlock Holmes stories and skillfully fits them into this unconventional interpretation of Holmes and Watson. If you're a fan of Holmes, you'll feel quite at home...until you don't, and then it will be too late to back out of the story.
This story of Mouse, a young girl with no family, being raised as a healer in a monastery in 13th century Hungary (?) is compulsively readable. She knows there are things that are odd about her situation, but we see her as she begins to learn more about herself and has to cope with major difficulties away from the people who have raised her. There are real historical characters woven into a tale of political intrigue and metaphysical danger, there's a love story that may or may not be star-crossed, and there are characters like Mouse who are easy to care about.
This is a dark story. There are some deeply creepy moments, some touches of horror, and then sheer bleakness. I don't usually read stories this dark, and at a couple of points I questioned whether I should continue, but I was in it, and it seemed to be going somewhere–until the last 10 pages or so, where it rushed to a conclusion that didn't feel like a conclusion. I hope that conclusion wasn't an attempt to leave room for a sequel, because it cheated a strong book of a satisfying ending.
I picked up this book because the blurb on the cover said “An uplifting, joyous, life-affirming read for people who ordinarily steer clear of uplifting, joyous, life-affirming reads.” My conclusion upon finishing is that I didn't need to read a whole book about the world of obituaries and the people who love them. Marilyn Johnson writes about the structure of obituaries, the various styles of obits and the papers that run them. She introduces us to the obituary writers she admires and the people who influenced them. Throughout, she provides many examples of obituaries, all fascinating. Her style is lively and witty. She's aware that her subject may seem a little off the wall, but she defends it well, saying that a good obituary distills what is unique about a person, so that some little piece of her will be preserved after she has died.
My problem with all of this is that I would have liked the book so much better if it had been a long essay instead. I lost patience in the chapter near the end where Johnson describes the hours she spends on the Usenet message board alt.obituaries. I wanted to reach into the book, pull her out of her chair and make her go outside. In other words, she didn't convert me to her obituary obsession–and there's nothing really wrong with that. There was just too much of this book for my taste.
A friendship develops between Thomas Maggs, a young boy growing up in a seaside English village, and the Scottish artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who comes to the village for convalescence. War has just been declared between England and Germany (1915), and village life gets a little harder because of it. The Maggs family has its own difficulties, which weigh heavily on Thomas.
This is a quietly beautiful, moving book. I look forward to re-reading it in a year or so.
To read this book, you need to have a lot of patience with not knowing what's going on. There is some sort of epic battle going on between elves, their human allies, and another unnamed but evil force. Two little girls with mysterious pasts, Maria in France and Clara in Italy, are key to the outcome of this battle. As the story progresses, we learn a little more about who these girls are and why they are so important, but we don't learn all that much about who the enemy is and what's at stake. It's a testament to the beauty of the writing and characterization that I still cared about the outcome of the story.
I've read that this is the first book of a proposed trilogy. I doubt I'll read the next installment.
Read on lunch breaks and on the bus. Laughed out loud and also felt my blood boil.
Solnit describes experiences most women have had, of being talked down to, talked over, ignored, not taken seriously, and connects them to the statistics for sexual assault in the US. The title essay starts with the famous story of Solnit having her own book explained to her at a party by a man who wouldn't hear that she had written it and ends contemplating another man who dismissed the idea that a woman he'd seen run out of her house naked in the middle of the night screaming, “My husband's trying to kill me” could possibly be telling the truth.
I've been a fan of Solnit's other writing on travel, wandering and getting lost. Her ability to put a name to experiences that are slippery and hard to name, in beautiful and precise language, is on full display in this book. I recommend it highly.
A Slight Trick of the Mind. Although this is a book about Sherlock Holmes, it's really not a mystery. Instead, it is a novel about Holmes as a 93 year old man, frail and forgetful, long retired, but still encountering celebrity worship from people who know him from Dr. Watson's stories.
The Holmes in this story is vigilant about protecting his privacy and not allowing celebrity seekers to disturb his life. He has trouble keeping a housekeeper–he's so crabby that they leave before a year is up. This sounds consistent with the Holmes of Conan Doyle's stories, but in this novel we are allowed to see more of the complexity of his thoughts, his care for others, his confusion in emotionally difficult situations, his deftness in some situations and clumsiness in others. Near the end of the story, an angry woman asks him, “What would you know about love?” and while we have sympathy with her, it's also clear that the people Holmes meets have difficulty letting him be an ordinary person instead of the hero who knows all from the stories.
This is a delicate, beautifully written book about existential loneliness and what fuels a person through life.
Skimmed. It does a good job of showing and explaining how there is a white racial frame that shapes how white Americans think and feel about people of color. It examines the history and development of that racial frame. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time with the book, so I can't do an in depth review. Well worth reading–I learned some things I didn't know, and was able to recognize some attitudes I had when I was younger and understand better where they came from.
This enjoyable book chronicles the author's exploration of the place of the mythical figure the Green Man in the 21st century. She starts by noting an increased interest in the Green Man in our time and toys with the idea of trying to start a new religion, a sex cult, centered on him. The sex cult idea doesn't last very long, though, before she meanders on to another theme. She visits sites in England and Germany where carved Green Man images are to be found. She also visits a couple of pagan festivals, consults a shaman about communicating with trees, constructs a sacred grove, muses about Christian appropriation of pagan symbols, the roots of Nazism in nature worship, panpsychism, trance music and many other topics. The book moves from topic to topic in an organic way, so that it's hard to tell if you're getting anywhere even though you are surely being entertained.
One complaint: other people in the book are referred to by their first initial only. It's irritating because it raises unnecessary questions: have I come across this person before? Why don't I get to know this person's name? I wish she had not made this editorial choice.
I'm of two minds about this book. Partly, I felt it was sentimental fluff and the main characters were stereotypes of an older couple whose marriage had gone bad. Partly, I wanted to find out what happened, and I did like the characters that Harold meets along the way in his journey from the south of England to the north. I liked the simple, unadorned prose style of the story, and I appreciated that it was told from both sides of the unhappy couple. The book grew on me as I read, but then I was really irritated by the climax of the story and the resolution of the problem. Apparently there's a companion novel about Queenie Hennessy, the woman Harold walks the length of England to say goodbye to–but I won't be reading it.
Fascinating to read, but I wish the author didn't inject present day popular culture into the story in an effort to make it more understandable to 21st century readers. Some of the best parts of the book were places where Schiff took the time to explain enough about Puritan theology and beliefs about community, for example, that you could understand why they felt it was important to keep an eye on each other and report each others' wrongdoings. Putting comparisons to Harry Potter into the story is at odds with that kind of understanding.
Schiff doesn't argue for any particular theory of why the witchcraft crisis occurred, but she does describe the context, from the precarious political position the Massachusetts Bay Colony was in in its relationship with England, to the ever present threat of attacks by Native Americans. I hadn't known that Salem village was already a contentious, litigious place long before 1692–property disputes, ministers who hadn't been paid for months and whose congregations broke into factions for and against them, livestock that disappeared and ended up in someone else's barn.
I learned a lot from reading this book, but I can't help but wonder if someone else has done a better job of writing the history of the Salem witchcraft trials.
Sherlock Holmes, in retirement, meets a misfit teenage girl, Mary Russell, and takes her on as an apprentice. Before long they have cases to solve and things get complicated. I was skeptical about this, but I actually liked it. Mary is as much of an over the top character as Holmes in her own way, and I read the book as a kind of commentary on the original. The apprenticeship of Mary involves plenty of explanation of methods and convoluted exercises in detection (my favorite: Mary comes to visit Holmes at his cottage and finds a note that says “Find me. –SH”) I didn't like the book's dismissive attitude toward Dr. Watson and I thought Mycroft was portrayed as overly hospitable. The author has a disclaimer at the beginning saying that this is not Conan Doyle's Holmes, but I'd say he has enough in common with the original Holmes to make this a pretty satisfying entertainment.
This book started out as a story about a young Middle Eastern computer geek with girl trouble, and ended with a battle between mythical beings going on in the sky while a political revolution takes place on the ground below. I enjoyed the story and appreciated the three dimensional characters who grew in maturity or revealed their value as the story developed.
A fun read, with some substance.
The Stone Book Quartet is four related novellas bound together in chronological order. They tell the stories of people in different generations of the same family at moments of vocation or clarity in their lives. Each book is written with such care, there seem to be no spare words.
The presentation of the book suggests that it's for children. Its print is on the large side, and each page has a border. Also, the main character of each story is a child. The themes of vocation to a craft and finding one's identity bound up with a place are ones that adults can appreciate too, though, and the storytelling is not obviously meant for children.
You could read through this slender volume in an hour or two
–the print is larger, so there aren't a lot of words on each page, and the vocabulary is not hard–but you'd miss the beauty of the story. If you find a copy of this book in your hand, read slowly, one story at a time, with pauses in between.
This is an epic story of three generations of sailors from the seafaring town of Marstal, Denmark. It is narrated alternately from a third person omniscient point of view and from the point of view of an unnamed Marstaller, which gives the impression that the town itself is narrating the story. Unlike some of my favorite seafaring novels, this book does not romanticize the life of a sailor–many of the characters, both at sea and on land, are brutal, and the conditions awful. I wondered whether I would make it through the whole book. But by the time I was sailing through Polynesia with Albert Madsen, in search of his father, the story had hooked me and I had to stay with it. I felt kinship with the youngsters in the story who survived their first brutal voyages as ships boys and came to realize that the sea had a hold on them that they did not want to escape.
This is a strange and wonderful novel.
This is a riveting non-fiction account of the experiences of the Zeitoun family during and after Hurricane Katrina. Abdelrahman Zeitoun is a Muslim Syrian immigrant who came to New Orleans, was naturalized, married an American woman and built a successful house painting business in the years leading up to Katrina. When the hurricane came, Zeitoun stayed in the city to keep an eye on his house and other properties, while his wife and children left to stay with relatives out of the path of the storm. In the first few days after the hurricane struck, Zeitoun traveled around the city in a canoe, trying to help whomever he found. Then he was abruptly arrested and put in prison. The story quickly turns dystopian.
I was a big fan of Dave Eggers' What Is the What–his plain narrative style let the heartbreaking events of that book speak for themselves. His style is the same here and it is just as effective. He also weaves Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun's past memories and experiences into the story of the hurricane in a way that made me feel I had entered their family and heightened my anxiety on their behalf.
In a way this is both a heartwarming story and a terrifying one. I recommend it.
A really great read. Mary Karr doesn't spare herself as she writes about her descent into alcoholism and her long crawl to sobriety, but she does take every opportunity to highlight any humor there was to be found in her situation (sometimes very dark humor indeed).
Her sharp but affectionate treatment of AA meetings reminded me of some of David Foster Wallace's descriptions of the program in Infinite Jest, where the characters hilariously acknowledge that the behavior that is being asked of them is absurd, undignified, embarrassing, they don't want to do it, but they do it anyway because they know it is saving their lives. Then a bandanna wearing David Foster Wallace made his appearance in Karr's memoir, and I thought, “of course.” The two met in AA.
Mary Karr's struggle for sobriety is entwined with her spiritual journey to Christianity, and as an adult convert I was especially interested in that part of the story. She's very matter of fact about her scepticism and her reasons for getting baptised in the Catholic church (her kid was getting baptised, she liked the particular church they had found), but then once she had committed herself she jumped in with both feet, undertaking the spiritual exercises of Ignatius under the direction of a nun.
From this memoir I learned that Mary Karr is one tough, funny woman who is becoming more loving through grace and the help of an impressive array of people who love her.