Karen

I enjoyed parts of this story about a young woman with a missing father navigating work life in New York in World War II. Anna Kerrigan has a disabled younger sister whom her mother, a former showgirl, stays home to care for. Her father didn't come home one night when Anna was 12 and the family has given up trying to find out what happened to him. So, Anna goes out to work in a Naval Yard factory measuring ship parts, which is how she learns about naval diving and sets her heart on becoming a diver. This is the core of the story and the most sustained and coherent part.

There is more involving gang bosses and shady men that Anna's father had contacts with. This part of the story is less satisfying and has holes that I couldn't ignore. There were a couple of characters that were introduced only to be abandoned–one, Mr. Voss, who had seemed to be a significant character, was literally abandoned in a nightclub just when I thought he was about to become more significant, never to be heard from again. Finally, the ending was literally unbelievable, and left me disappointed with the novel as a whole.

I enjoyed this book not so much for its mystery/thriller aspect as for the main character, Smilla. Smilla is the daughter of a Danish father, a famed doctor, and a Greenlander mother, a hunter who disappeared at sea when Smilla was a child. She's now 37, lives in Denmark, has a strained relationship with her father, and is, in her own words “a bitter, old shrew.” She doesn't cultivate relationships with people, but to her surprise she makes a connection with a 6 year old boy from Greenland, Isaiah, who lives in her building with his alcoholic mother. When Isaiah dies by falling off the roof of their building, Smilla doesn't believe it's an accident. Smilla's Sense of Snow is the story of her doggedly pursuing the truth about what happened to him. Along the way, we get to know her backstory. She reads Euclid's Elements for enjoyment. She had a career as a scientist and a navigator. She ran away from her many boarding schools, and later never finished a degree at the graduate schools she attended. She puts people off with her focus on facts rather than emotions. She apparently has a “sense” for snow and ice, which is partly a lot of factual knowledge about snow and ice, but also is apparently a kind of intuition for its behavior. Smilla is a fascinating character, and I cheered her on throughout the novel.

I also enjoyed the portrayal of the colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland, an integral part of the story, and something I didn't know about before.

The story as a thriller is convoluted and bound up in that colonial relationship. The number of details and the tenuous connections between them were a little hard to keep track of, but I was OK with all that until the end, when I was left disappointed and confused. I will be looking for someone to talk about the end with, hopefully to understand it better.

Lindy West's reflections on growing up and living life as a fat woman who writes commentary and comedy for the internet and TV. The essays about her girlhood are funny and poignant, but a couple of the essays about her work and life as an adult are gems of writing about vocation. She's a hilarious and humane person, and I really enjoyed reading this little book.

This is a slender, quick to read book about a man, Edward Buckmaster, who has apparently left his wife and child to live alone in an abandoned stone house on the moors in the west of England. As the book begins, he's standing in a river for hours, letting his legs go numb. “ I climbed into the river in the early morning and I stood there until the sun was highest in the sky. I let the water take my body away from me so I could see what was beyond my body. I let the river numb me and I understood that I had always been numb. The sky opened a crack, but only a crack. There was still something beyond that I could not touch.” Buckmaster is in search of something, but he doesn't know what it is, or how he will know if he finds it. We get some hints that the people he left behind tried to dissuade him from doing this. He compares himself to ancient hermits and saints who left civilization behind to live in the wild, closer to God.

Things take a disturbing turn when Buckmaster tries to fix a hole in his roof during a storm and is apparently blown off the roof. The narrative breaks and then picks up again in the middle of a sentence. He's severely injured, but doesn't know how it happened. Although his body begins to heal, he becomes disoriented. The landscape seems empty of other living beings, until he catches a glimpse of a large black beast. He becomes obsessed with finding the beast, and at the same time stops eating. Punctuation becomes more sparse in the narrative. It's hard to know whether what's happening in the story is real or a hallucination.

I liked this book a lot. I'm a fan of Paul Kingsnorth's essays, and his novels ( this is his 2nd) add another dimension to his writing about living in the Anthropocene.

Circe is best known for turning Odysseus's men into pigs when they landed on her island on their journey back from the Trojan War, and then being persuaded by Odysseus to change them back again. She was the daughter of the Titan Helios and a nymph in Greek mythology. She fell in love with a mortal sailor, Glaucus, and turned a fellow nymph, Scylla, into a sea monster (who also appears in the Odyssey), out of jealousy. Madeline Miller's book is a retelling of Circe's story from the point of view of Circe herself.

I've often wondered why the stories of the Greek gods always portray them as so invested in mortals— not only invested in what mortals are doing in general, but often having favorites among mortals, as Odysseus was a favorite of Athena's. This book offers an answer I hadn't thought of, as it looks at an immortal woman's struggle to grow and make a satisfactory life for herself. Mortals have something that the gods don't: an arc of story, rather than a continuous line of episodes following each other without end. On one hand, since it's us mortals telling the story, we may just be consoling ourselves that even though we have to die, we've really got the better deal. On the other hand, it's interesting. Does an immortal life have meaning?

The more I think about this book, the more I like it. I may come back and award it another star later, but right now I'm giving it 3. At first read, it can seem like the book has no central plot—just a huge cast of characters, some of them quirky and lovable, some of them creepy and evil, some of them noble heroes, meandering around and getting caught up in the conflicts of the day. That's not exactly wrong. But I am caught by the realization that the story begins in an abandoned graveyard that is a lonely, desolate place, and ends in that same graveyard that has become a haven, a place of safety for people who were at the end of their ropes.

Also, the meandering between the beginning and the end is so enjoyable to read. The many stories that are told are rich, sad, but hopeful. Some of the strands are about transgender women and their place in India, Muslim/Hindu relations, the disputed region of Kashmir, the caste system, environmental degradation. There's more, and there's even a character on a hunger strike who is adopted as a symbol for almost every protest cause there is, even causes that conflict with each other.

So, it might feel like The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has no plot, but it does. It has many plots that lead to the same place: a place of safety and hope for those who have been through heartbreak and despair and need a place to rest.

I'd usually rather read a fat novel than a book of short stories, but I loved Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, so when I saw this book on the shelf at the library I grabbed it. Of the people in this book, some are refugees from Vietnam who resettled in the US, some are the sons and daughters of those refugees, some are American soldiers who fought in Vietnam and now have to reconcile themselves to children who have decided to live there. All are fascinating in their richness. This author also has a subtle way with humor that I really enjoy. I recommend these stories highly.

Lizet Ramirez is the daughter of Cuban parents who came to the US as teen refugees. She upsets her family in Miami, FL by getting admitted to an elite college in New York state and insisting on going. The book is about her struggle to find the right course for herself between honoring her commitments to her family and following her own interests in studying biology and finding a life outside the Miami community where she grew up.

I really enjoyed reading this novel. The author, Jennine Capo Crucet, does a good job of showing how complicated it can be to find one's own way when the demands of community and family are so strong, and how little understanding there is in the mainstream for people in Lizet's position. Lizet's actions in the story feel exasperating at times, especially when you can see that her defensiveness is costing her friendship and opportunities. At the same time, though, you can see all the forces exerting pressure on her and understand her defensiveness.

This was a great book to get snowed in with. It's a classic British spy novel set in modern times when we have Islamophobia and ISIS, suicide bombings and hatred of immigrants. The spies who are the focus of the story have all screwed up in some way and been demoted to Slough House, where they are known as slow horses. Their boss is Jackson Lamb, who had a career as a field agent, but who now seems to be an overweight, ill-tempered, washed up has-been. They spend their time on tedious assignments that are designed to demoralise them to the point that they quit of their own accord, sparing the Secret Service the hassle of firing them. Through a series of seemingly unrelated events, the slow horses get drawn into investigating the kidnapping and impending broadcast execution of a young man.

Slow Horses is well written and darkly funny. It has intricate subplots, misdirection, clever wordplay, and political strategy, all of which make it fun to follow the story, but also a little bit hard. It was really an enjoyable book. I didn't realize it was the first of a series when I picked it up, but now I feel I need to read the second.

Once I picked this up and started reading, I read it straight through in a single day. The story is told through the lives of five women who have different connections to motherhood in a small Oregon town. In the recent past of this book, laws have changed to make abortion and in vitro fertilization illegal. Life is legally defined as beginning at conception, and embryos are endowed with rights to life, liberty, and property. Also, looming in the novel is a new law about to take effect in the new year that restricts the right to adopt a child to married couples only.

In this situation, we meet “the biographer,” a history teacher at the local high school, a single woman who is trying to become pregnant via sperm donor. She is also writing a biography of a female Arctic explorer of the 19th century who was forced to have her work published under a male colleague's name, because no one believed it was her own work.

There is also “the wife,” a married woman with two small children who is dealing with despair about her marriage. “The daughter” is a 14 year old girl who was adopted into a happy home and feels she can't tell her parents about her accidental pregnancy. “The mender” is a woman who grew up in the town and has been dismissed as “stupid” (she didn't finish high school),”crazy” (she prefers to live on her own in the forest with only the trees and animals for company), or a “witch” (people come to her for herbal remedies).

I liked the way this book showed this group of women dealing with the problems of their lives against a background of a repressive political reality in a non-preachy way. I didn't want to read a novel about how bad a repressive society is. Instead, this is a novel that shows women grappling with the question, “What is my life for?”–much more interesting!

I did wonder whether, in the universe of the novel, same sex marriages would be recognized as legitimate, and whether same sex couples would be able to adopt. I also wondered whether a teen mother would be able to keep her baby after the “Every Child Needs 2 (parents)” law took effect. I felt like these were obvious questions that should have been addressed (especially since there was a pregnant teen who would be giving birth after the law took effect), so it made the book feel less finished to me.

Still, I really enjoyed it.

This Sherlock Holmes pastiche is mildly enjoyable, but I thought it was pretty thin in places. The premise of the story is that Holmes' cocaine addiction is spiraling out of control, so Dr. Watson and Mycroft Holmes cook up a scheme to get SH to Vienna and into the care of Dr. Sigmund Freud. I liked the explanation this story provides for SH's obsession with Professor Moriarty (he IS a villain, just a different type of villain than we've been led to believe). I even liked the meeting with Freud and the suggestion that the mystery Holmes is asked to look into as he is recovering from his cure has worldwide significance. However, that mystery turns out to be pretty lame, and the train chase that ends it was just boring. The good news is that it doesn't take long to read this book, and then you can move on to better ones.

This book is about the current trend of women marrying later in life or not at all and the conditions that have contributed to this new situation. It is also about the history of when in life women got married, and what was said and thought about women who didn't get married. I had the unusual sensation of feeling external validation for my single status while reading this book (I've worked long and hard on the internal validation), so I think it's worth saying that if you're a single lady, this book will make you feel kind of proud of yourself and also relieved that you're not living in another time.

The book has fascinating interviews with many unmarried women, some famous (Anita Hill, Gloria Steinem), most not. It has notes in the back, and an appendix of recommendations from the author for policies that would help make life more equitable for single women in the US.

The author, Rebecca Traister, has had commentary pieces in the news lately, as so many sexual harassment and assault allegations have come out. Her writing has a definite point of view which resonates with me, but is also beautifully plain. I'm looking forward to reading more of her.

Every possible angle on the story/myth of John Henry, set in a small town in West Virginia with a claim to be the site of the famous race between John Henry and the steam drill. The town is hoping to give itself a boost by putting on an annual John Henry Days festival, and for the first annual celebration they have gotten the USPS to unveil a John Henry stamp. J., a black journalist from New York, has come down to attend the festivities and possibly write about it. A host of other characters come and go through the book, with references to past scholars who attempted to find out whether John Henry was real, the origins of the Ballad of John Henry, a little boy who steals a steel driving hammer out of an exhibit, and a shopkeeper who collects John Henry memorabilia and turns his home into a museum. It's a marvelous book about myth and pop culture.

This is a book of short stories about guest workers from India in the United Arab Emirates. I'm not usually a fan of short stories–I like LONG books. I've never read short stories like these, though. Maybe I need to read more?

The stories range from lists of the jobs that guest workers in the UAE do, to a several chapter long story about a scientist who figures out how to grow guest workers as a crop, and what happens as a result. Some of the stories feel disturbingly detached, like the one about an American woman who tapes workers back together after they've been injured on the job. Other stories fairly pulsate with emotion, like the one about the young man who gets a job dressing as a clown to sell detergent. My favorite is a story about some cockroaches who teach themselves to speak and walk on two legs, wearing clothing, as the young boy in the apartment they inhabit attempts to kill them off. I couldn't help but think of the cockroach Archie from the Archie & Mehitabel poems.

The stories in this collection are unique and sometimes grotesque. I didn't expect to like them as much as I did.

Meh. An unnamed narrator is so passive that she lets her estranged husband tell her not to tell anyone they're separated. The she lets her mother in law send her to Greece to track the husband down because he is not answering his mother's phone calls and she feels she can't break her word not to tell her husband's mother that they are separated.

The narrator also tends to imagine what is going on in the minds of the people she observes and assume that she imagined correctly.

The narrative is written with commas in many places where there should be periods, which I found distracting.

Finally, the blurbs I've seen for this book make it sound like a thriller or a suspense story. Don't be fooled. It's not.

This story begins with the brutal rape and attempted murder of Geraldine Coutts, a Native woman who works to help people establish eligibility for tribal membership. Her 13 year old son Joe and husband Bazil attempt to help her heal, but she retreats into her bedroom and won't come out. Joe does some investigating of his own, although he's been told not to, and makes important discoveries.

If it weren't for the horrific reason for the story, this would be a lovely book about friendship, community, and belonging. Joe moves between his parents' house and his aunts and uncles, cousins and friends with absolute confidence that he will be taken in wherever he goes. Although he is fluent in how to charm old ladies into feeding him, he goes to his elderly grandfather to ask questions about the meanings of disturbing dreams and complex family relationships. Joe is shaken, but he's also at home in his community and he brings all the resources of that community to trying to solve the problem of his mother's rape.

There's a point in the story, long before the end, where Joe expresses relief at being able to go back to being 13 again. Needless to say, he doesn't get to stay 13 for very long. For all of its beauty, this is a bittersweet story. I really loved it.

This novel set in Gunflint, MN had lots of promise, but it disappointed me. The story involves an old man, Harry, who at the beginning has wandered off into the wilderness, and his son, Gus, who tells the story of how (and why) the two of them went into the wilderness to spend the winter once long before when Gus was 17.

The story of going into the wilderness, the borderlands between Minnesota and Canada, is the best part of the book. The tension between the father and nearly grown son is so well portrayed. The days of canoeing and portaging through woodlands, wetlands and lakes and the work it takes to survive there in winter are given deep attention.

Part way into the journey it becomes clear that for Harry this isn't just a fun winter trip with his son, but that there are other motives at work. These other motives gradually come into the open, to Gus's consternation.

The story is framed by Gus relating this old tale about himself and his dad to his father's long time companion, Berit, who spent her youth caring for Harry's estranged mother, and yearning for Harry. Here is where the novel broke down for me. Berit seemed to have no purpose in the book aside from yearning for Harry and listening to Gus's story. I was annoyed by her because she was in so much of the book with so little to do. At the very end, she tells Gus a story about Harry that he presumably hadn't heard before, but by that time it is too little, too late.

This is a collection of essays, mostly also published over the last 10 years in magazines and newspapers, in which Paul Kingsnorth critiques assumptions at the heart of 21st century environmentalism ( it still treats the planet as a commodity, with “resources” to be exploited, it assumes “progress” or more technology will solve many of our problems, it thinks of humans as separate from nature). Although it's tempting to say he has given up on environmentalism, and the title of this book encourages that idea, he hasn't gone out to buy a gas guzzling SUV and build a McMansion in Ireland where he lives. These essays are making the case for a quieter, more personal approach to the problem of how to live in a world where environmental degradation is speeding up all the time, and while we pay lip service to “sustainability,” we have mass extinctions and other signs of environmental collapse.

It IS safe to say Kingsnorth has given up the idea of saving the world, so the question he addresses with these essays is what to do instead. His process of coming to answers is thought provoking, imaginative, original. Reading this work has helped me clarify why I have not felt enthused about all the “sustainable” products now available in stores and the more mainstream status of the “green” movement.

I recommend Kingsnorth's writing to everyone, and it's especially convenient to have these essays collected together in one volume. I was happy to see the book also includes Uncivilisation, a manifesto from 2009, which announced the beginning of the Dark Mountain Project, an effort to create new stories for our time of collapse.

My hurried, inadequate review: The harrowing story of a slave called Lilith on a Jamaican sugar cane plantation in the late 18th century. The story is told in the 3rd person in Jamaican patois, and you don't find out until the very end who the narrator is, when it really packs a punch.

Lilith's story is of a young woman with no family that she knows of (at first), at the mercy of a brutal institution and people who don't believe she is fully human, coming to find a place for herself in the world. Her relationships with fellow slaves are prickly, even with the people she feels sympathy for. The terrible things that happen to people around her make you aware that it is not safe for anyone to be too vulnerable. Lilith also seems to have a knack for self protection. People who try to harm her come to bad ends of various kinds.

When Lilith finally does encounter someone who wants to be kind to her, it is a tainted (and doomed) relationship. It develops in the midst of planning a slave rebellion which is then violently put down. Through the rebellion and the cruel punishment that came after, Lilith seems to find a place for herself to exist between enslaved blacks and free but brutal and depraved whites.

I loved this book because of how complicated Lilith and her world were. White overseers could father children with slaves and not see them as people to care about. Lilith could long for love but be prevented from living it out because of her social situation. The uneasiness in this book seemed real–people were living in a mess.

A 19 year old princess who has grown up in hiding is smuggled back to the capital city of the Tearling to be crowned Queen. She spends the book learning how to be Queen while trying to put an end to the corruption and evil that had been allowed to run rampant under the Regent, her uncle. Also, she fights off assassination attempts. Meanwhile, in the neighboring country of Mortmesne, there's a 113 year old queen who is preparing to invade and inflict horrors on the people of the Tearling.

I liked this book up until nearly the end, when suddenly magic solved a major problem. Kelsea, the princess, had an interesting personality, the history of the Tearling was intriguing (is this a post-apocalyptic story?), and it was very readable. There were some characters who had second sight, and a necklace that had mysterious properties, but magic didn't play a major role until late in the story. I found the shift kind of jarring.

This is the first book of a trilogy. I'm not sure if I'll read the others.

Marlena is the story of an adult woman looking back at her teenage friendship with a neighbor girl two years older than her. Although the friendship lasted less than a year, it was formational for her in ways that she doesn't fully understand. As the story moves between the woman's present life and her memories of Marlena, she acknowledges the grip of the past and begins to see the possibility of a future.

It's not as therapeutic as it sounds. The teenagers have broken families, they are reckless with themselves and others, and they cause permanent harm. The question at the end is whether the girl who's left will be able to move forward.

The danger I felt with this book is that it could so easily lapse into cautionary-tale-about-wild-girls-becoming-adult-druggies, OR wild-teenager-finds-redemption. However, many details kept it from lapsing into cliche and allowed it to be its own story. I appreciated the main character's mother, especially, who is a bit distracted by her own troubles, but is an admirable person.

I read this for the Morning News Summer Reading Challenge. I wouldn't have picked this book for myself, but I'm glad I read it.

In Ill Will, four members of a family are murdered one night in 1983 while their children sleep outside in a camper. An adopted child of the family is convicted of the murder and sent to prison and the other children grow up either coming to grips with the horrific event...or not.

Ill Will focuses on Dustin, the youngest of the group of children, cousins, who are left behind. He has grown up to become a psychotherapist who wrote a doctoral dissertation on recovered memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse. He has married a high powered lawyer named Jill and they have two sons. You quickly realize that Dustin is a bad therapist for many reasons. He allows his patients to cross professional boundaries, he accepts questionable stories without much resistance, and he deceives himself that he is in control of the situations he finds himself in.

When the story begins, Dustin finds out that Rusty, his adopted older brother, who had been sent to prison for the murder of their father and mother, aunt and uncle, has just been released after being exonerated of the crime by DNA testing. He also finds out that Jill, his wife, has cancer. Dustin's life descends into a kind of chaos that you feel he'd have the power to calm if he would wake up and stop lying to himself, or tell someone else the whole truth about.

This book is highly readable. It is psychologically creepy. Also, like certain horror movies, it has characters who don't listen as you tell them not to go to that abandoned former funeral home in the middle of the night, with similar results. It has some stylistic quirks. One quirk, leaving blank spaces in a line of text to indicate gaps in Dustin's thought, is pretty effective. Another quirk, where several narratives are printed in columns on the same page, is less so. I thought the ending was satisfying in that it solved the main original questions, but also left quite a bit open to speculation.

This biography of Alan Turing is one of the best biographies of any type I've read. Andrew Hodges explores the known facts of Turing's life, goes into the details of his mathematical, philosophical and scientific work, and tells a convincing story about Turing's inner life based on papers left behind and testimony from friends and associates. He also does a good job of explaining the distinct way that the time in which Turing lived shaped the story of his life. It's a weighty, substantial book, but very readable even for someone (me) who isn't particularly strong in math.

This is also the book which the movie The Imitation Game credits as its inspiration. The movie oversimplifies the story (necessarily?) in places, but also takes liberties with the facts (annoyingly). See the movie as a fairy tale, but read the book for a real, complex, and completely fascinating interpretation of Turing's story.

I've never read H.P. Lovecraft, but that didn't stop me from enjoying this book, which involves a quest to discover the truth about a book called The Erotonomicon, purportedly written by Lovecraft himself. The Night Ocean is stories within stories, searches for truth in dark places, impersonations (or is it transmigration of souls?), disappearances, and and coming back from the dead.

The story about Lovecraft and his teenage friend Robert Barlow is framed by a present day story about a psychologist, Marina, and her missing husband, presumed dead by suicide. Charlie, Marina's husband, had gone into a deep depression after his intensively researched book about The Erotonomicon was attacked and exposed as a hoax by Lovecraft experts. After Charlie's presumed suicide, Marina re traces her husband's research to try to understand what happened to him. This frame feels essential to the story because it reinforces the themes of the Lovecraft story, but it's also the flimsiest part of the book.

For science fiction fans, this would be a fun book to read because of the history of early “weird fiction” and the cameo appearances by classic authors (Ursula LeGuin was my favorite). I'm still not tempted to read any H.P. Lovecraft on the strength of this book, but I do recommend The Night Ocean as a creepy story that goes deep.

The author's premise is that the civilization we have now, largely based on capitalism and powered by fossil fuels, is doomed. Our planet is warming, and we're unable to come up with solutions that the world community can agree upon and implement. We are the problem, and there is no escape. Thus, we are going to have to learn to die, both metaphorically, in letting go of the fantasy that we can continue to have the standard of living to which the West has become accustomed, and literally, as the consequences of climate change start to worsen.

This book doesn't provide much in the way of advice about how to go about “learning to die.” It just asserts that it is necessary. However, the last part of the book argues that in order for humanity to survive, in addition to the physical conditions being right, we will need to have preserved our cultural memory, the art, knowledge, and wisdom of the past. It's implied that we will also find what we need to know about how to die, literally and metaphorically, in our cultural memory as well. The already-dead can tell us what we need to know.

As a librarian who specializes in the humanities, this argument speaks to my heart. However, I thought the book was a bit sloppy, especially toward the end. Ideas were not fully explained, so they seemed half baked. This was disappointing. On the plus side, a bibliography is included, so you can follow this book up with additional reading.