Scott Graham

A welcome harking back to the Garp through Owen Meany years with Dickensian characters and situations revolving around the main character Jimmy Winslow, son of the titular character Esther Nacht. Once a foundling at the St. Cloud orphanage, Esther is adopted as an au pair to the Winslow family’s youngest daughter and ultimately acts as a surrogate birth mother for her to have a child without all the trappings and processes that go into conceiving, gestating, and delivering. The greater part of the book follows this young Winslow boy, Jimmy, born of Esther but raised by the youngest Winslow daughter, through his formative years, into his colorful years as an exchange student in Vienna Austria, and finally as an adult novelist, always with his adoptive Winslow mother hovering over his daily life, and in the background, in the shadows, is Esther, safeguarding his well being. This novel strikes this reader more than any of Irving’s other books as both a bildungsroman and roman à clef for his younger days through the peak of his writing career. Immersive, compelling, and captivating through to the last sentence.

Book 2 of the Game Changers series and the source novel for the phenom Crave/HBOMax streaming series tells the story of arch rival hockey stars engaging in a series of clandestine sexual encounters lives up to the hype. The main characters are both immensely likeable, Canadian boy-next-door-type Shane Hollander and snarky, arrogant Russian Ilya Rozanov become entangled almost from the first moment of their non-meet-cute. The built-in animosity is emotional for Shane but more performative for bad-boy Ilya and isn’t much of an obstacle to overcome. Ilya is the more sexually experienced of the two as Shane almost blindly feels his way into new territory beyond his awkward, unfulfilling prior encounters with women. As the characters wrestle with their emotions and the relationship evolves, the author does not shy away from being descriptive, so warning to those squeamish over descriptions of homosexual activities.

An interesting gates of hell apocalyptic story was adversely attected by an overwrought narration. An emotionally unhinged young woman accepts a subjectively princely sum for the responsibility of caretaking a waterfront property (and perhaps unbeknownst to her, the world), for a weekend with mysterious tasks disclosed in increments as supernatural threats accumulate and the remedies grow from quotidian to more onerous and life threatening.

Granted, the author stacks the deck against the antihero, and trust me, the MC is not an easy person to root tor. To add to the general feeling of antipathy toward the MC, the narrator performs the MC as a screaming lunatic, from when the listener is just hearing her thoughts up through her ramblings toward other real and otherworldly characters. Even her more rational moments are read with a snide sarcastic voice that grows irritating quickly. Take an ativan before listening. Better yet, read the physical or ebook version and give the MC the voice you deem best because it will most definitely be a better choice than Simon & Schuster's choice foisted on the insuspecting audiobook consumer.

The latest collection of easays by David Sedaris is a tasty flight of wines of a lesser vintage. Although expertly and perhaps flawlessly narrated by the author, the tales ran between droll and chuckle inducing, most leaning toward the former. My particular favorite was the poignant “Good Grief”, where the author recounts the dualistic grief of finding out about the death of a former best friend, and experiencing the loss of one once so close while re-experiencing the memory of the death of a close relationship of youth. The humor in the memory of the hijinks of the two friends is perhaps overahadowed by the schadenfreude Sedaris lets leak through in his description of the deceased as ultimately haviing lived a lesser life, and looking much older. Even though the author has been accused of gilding the lily in some of his essays, one can’t help but feel the humanity in the truth of that sentiment; as Gore Vidal has been supposed to have said, “It is not enough to succeed. Others muat fail.” That may perhaps be no more true than when you had a close friendship with the object of that comparison — a friendship that died ignominiously a long time ago. The other tales are all interesting, but this reader can’t help but feel that Mr Sedaris has already mined the best nuggets of golden memories from his life, and he is now offering us the silver ones.

A fine collection of short stories by Susanna Clarke as an addendum of sorts to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell; all stories contained therein involve the use of magic and faeries and Sidhe in the same world she explored in the aforementioned novel. The stories help to add color and detail to England at large, rather than the dining rooms and parlors of its nobility and gentry or the counterparts in Faerie. A very much appreciated revisit of magical England without having to embark on a rereading of the expansive JS & MN.