Michael

You Dreamed of Empires is certainly a strange novel.

It takes place on the day Hernán Cortés arrives in Tenoxtitlan (Enrigue’s preferred spelling rather than Tenochtitlan) and describes the meeting between the Colhuas or “Aztecs” and the Spanish.

The cast of characters felt enormous, perhaps because the names are so unfamiliar. Luckily Enrigue provides a list of the characters, and I referred to this list constantly, otherwise I would have been completely lost. The POV shifts rapidly, sometimes on the same page. Due to the constantly shifting perspectives, I was kept a little off-balance, which reflects what the Spanish were feeling, so I got used to this sort of crooked feeling. It added to the reading experience for me.

The novel describes two cultures, both steeped in violence. Both cultures have religiously based violence—Moctezuma’s are human sacrifices to the gods and Cortés’ the Inquisition—and the violence of war. In both cultures there are characters who sort of roll their eyes at the demands of official religion. And neither culture quite understands the other, and on Moctezuma’s side there is no real attempt to do so. He is in control in Tenoxtitlan not the Spanish.

At times the author breaks the “fourth wall” and speaks directly to reader about the novel and what is going on. All very meta if I understand the meaning of meta. I enjoyed these interludes.

When reading novels of this sort I am constantly looking up characters online. Is this character based on a real person, did that battle really take place, was the city as clean as it is depicted. However, I felt no need to do it for this story. I just let the book carry me wherever it wanted to go.

I loved the ending, and I loved the description of Moctezuma as being constantly high on mushrooms.

I don’t think this book will be for everyone, but I enjoyed the time I spent with it.

Lublin is the story of three teenage boys who leave their small town to sell brushes in Lublin. But the three boys are Jewish, their hometown is a shtetl, and they are traveling through Poland in the early 20th century.

The three boys are almost stereotypes: the capitalist (who is inept and tells terrible jokes), the revolutionary on the side of the workers (who is something of a bully and likes to fight more than work) and the religious (who is spoiled and otherworldly). But as I was reading, they didn’t feel like stereotypes—they felt real.

The novel feels like it is told in the style of a fable. It starts off as an adventure, but the romance of the open road is soon gone. The boys are hungry, thirsty, and the map they have is no map at all and they are lost, walking in circles. There is hatred and fear toward them from many of the people they meet. The ending is very dark.

Wilkinson’s writing style is clear and straightforward. There is an omniscient narrator who comments on contemporary event that the boys don’t know about. The narrator also comments on the fate of people 35 or so years in the future. Grim. There is a fair amount of Yiddish in the novel. I could figure out the meaning of most of it from the context, but I do wish that Wilkinson had used a lighter hand.

About those jokes-I enjoyed them! Some were bad, some good, and some I swear I had heard before—another book? A movie? Growing up?

This is an unusual book that is well worth reading.

4.25

This is one of the best SF novels I have read in a long time.

Jason is an ordinary physics professor at an ok college. However, in his 20s he was something else-a man on the edge of greatness. Then he met Daniela, and she became pregnant, and he was faced with a choice: marry the women he loved and start a family or stay on the course he was on and possibly win the Nobel Prize. He decides to marry. Does he regret the choice at times. Of course, but we all regret the choices we have made and at times we wonder what our life would be like if…. This novel tries to answer that question.

It is a novel about the road not taken, about regrets, about love, about what is important in life. It is about identity. It is about the multiverse. It shows that our choices and what we make of them are our responsibility. It’s about a lot!

I became invested in these characters, even in the multitude of Jasons. After all, like “our” Jason, they only wanted their family. However, I do wish Crouch had given us a hint about what happened to Amanda.

The ending took me by surprise.

It is well worth reading.

I had finished The Covenant of Water the day before going home to Philadelphia from Florida, where I was visiting family. This meant I had nothing to read, but I thought I could survive the 2.5-hour flight without a book. I got to the airport 2 hours before the flight (I am a rule-follower) when I got a message about a flight delay, and those messages kept coming. I knew I had to get something to read. This airport didn’t have much in the way of books from what I could tell, when I finally saw an airport shop with a selection of books. And there it was—Heated Rivalry. I never planned to read this, but it was there, so why not?

I guess the story is well-known from the TV series, although I have never watched it. Simply put, Heated Rivalry is great fun, sweet, sexy, and wonderful.

Shane and Ilya are star hockey players, rivals from the time they first met. They started their relationship by hating each other, but that soon changed. Their relationship went from dislike to dislike mixed with sex, to love (mixed with sex). There is a lot of sex. The book also shows how vulnerable they both are and how scared they are to show that vulnerability. I liked that we had both Shane’s and Ilya’s POV presented to us, so we saw that vulnerability, even if they didn’t see each other’s at first. I liked that we had the promise of a life together for the two of them.

I couldn’t stop reading it, so after waiting for the plane, sitting out the delays, and sitting on the plane, I finished the last page just as we were landing in Philadelphia.

2.75*

Perhaps I admire Truman Capote’s writing more than I enjoy reading what he wrote. He was clearly a brilliant writer, but I generally don’t respond to him. However, this book was given to me as a gift, so I read it.

These are clearly immature works. The stories were all enjoyable to a greater or lesser degree, but many of them seemed little more than character sketches. And as Hilton Als pointed out in the Foreword, Capote never gives his Black characters a “self.” Perhaps as a southerner born in the 1920’s he is simply unable to imagine Black characters as unique individuals and treats them as stereotypes. This makes these early stories uncomfortable at times. However, being himself marginalized, he can look at marginalized white characters with great sympathy.

It is very hard for me to rate collections of short stories. None of these stores were bad, in the sense that I no longer wanted to read them, many were pleasant, but I don’t think any of them will stick with me.

I believe that anyone who loves Capote’s writing will appreciate this collection and love some of the stories.

A short review of a short book.

Cheri by Jo Ann Beard is a novella. I have trouble with novellas-they are too long to be short stories, too short to be novels-but Cheri is the perfect length. Each sentence, each word was perfect.

This is the story of Cheri Tremble. Cheri Tremble is a real person. She is dying in great pain of terminal cancer. Her daughters come to care for her. When she could not bear it any longer, she contacted Dr. Jack Kevorkian, to help her with an assisted suicide. He helps her. That is the story.

But Beard turns this into a part non-fiction and part fiction story. While the basic facts are real, the musings, the inner dialogues, the conversations with family and friends, and the hallucinations are all inventions. This turns this short book into a story of grief, sadness, memory, choice, and love.

I don’t want to say too much more.

For me, this was perfect, and yes, I cried.