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.

Cat’s Eye is the heartbreaking story of Elaine Risley. The novel starts with Elaine as a nine-year-old, follows her through school and college, and ends up with her as a well-respected artist who in middle-age has her first retrospective in her home-town of Toronto.

As a child, Elaine is a little odd. In fact, her entire family is slightly out of place in the Toronto of the 1940s and 1950s. Her father is an entomologist and so she, her father, mother, and brother spend the summers out in the forests of Canada researching insects. They really don’t have a home until at some point they return to Toronto where her father begins work at the university.

Elaine finally makes some friends. Elaine, Grace, Carol, and especially Cordelia are her best friends. But they are not. This is a novel about the cruelty of a group of girls*, and the trauma that bullying can cause throughout a person’s life. It is about how the past never really leaves us, but lives on, buried in our psyches and ready to reappear.

It seems to me that the novel’s focus is on a few years of this bullying, years that the adult Elaine has suppressed, and how this suppression has impacted her art, her relationships, and really her whole life.

The novel is written with Margaret Atwood’s wonderful prose. I was hooked from the beginning and felt for Elaine, and indeed for most of the characters (although Josef I could do without). I love Margaret Atwood’s writing, and this is among her best (maybe it’s not quite at the same level as The Handmaid’s Tale, but few books are).

It’s full of quotable lines, but one of my favorites is the last line, which in a way reaches back to her childhood with her brother. Speaking of stars: “It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by.” Not hope precisely, but acceptance.

*of course, the stereotypical bully is that of a boy beating up other boys, but boys can also bully in the same way that Elaine’s friends bully her.

The War with the Newts is a satirical, dystopian, speculative fiction novel by Karel Čapek. Čapek was a Czechoslovakian writer of the interwar years and War with the Newts was written in 1936. It skewers politics (liberal, democratic, and fascist), Hollywood, newspaper reporters, and even pretentious university professors, and he seems to hold a special contempt for the politicians of the day. In addition, Hitler’s presence was looming over central Europe and the Nazis rightly considered this novel subversive (they did try to arrest Čapek after the invasion, but they hadn’t realized he had died, so they arrested his wife instead).

The novel is in 3 parts. The first part relates the discovery of a species of giant newts or salamanders who are I think around 4 feet tall. They walk on two legs and are amphibious. Part two is about the exploitation of the newts. It is full of newspaper articles and “scientific” articles and contains copious footnotes. They are essentially turned into slaves and since there are so many of them, they are considered expendable. There are the beginnings of arguments among the maritime countries of the world about the newts. The third part is about…well, you can see it in the title.

Due to the type of novel and the large cast of characters, who are heavily satirized, it was impossible for me to identify with any of them, apart from Mr. Povondra. I really liked him. The style strikes me as very 1930s, and the translation is faithful to this style. However, I really liked this novel and appreciated the mirror it held to 1930s Europe and the US. It is a mirror that could be held up to the world as it exists today, as well. I am not well-read enough to understand the details as they relate to the world at that time.

I think there are people who have read this and do not like the way it ended—the last chapter is titled “The author talks with himself.” I thought it was perfect.

The Snowman is the 7th in Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole thriller/mystery series.

Harry Hole is a brilliant, generally unpleasant, alcoholic police detective. And while it seems strange that someone this damaged can remain on the police force, I am willing to suspend my disbelief. The Snowman is the name given to a serial killer who targets women. Why he targets these women is a spoiler that I won’t reveal, although anyone who has seen the TV series will know why (I have not seen the series).

There are many secondary characters and Nesbø is skillful enough that I had no trouble keeping them apart. All the non-serial killer characters are imperfect to a greater or lesser degree; some of them understand this and try to compensate and some do not.

The plot is fast-moving. There are number of twists and turns that are handled well. I guessed the killer about half-way through the book, but this didn’t bother me since this is far more in the thriller category than the mystery category. It was fun waiting for Harry to figure everything out.

The setting is dark and dreary Norway, mainly in the cities of Oslo and Bergen and their surroundings. Perhaps it is this aspect of the actual climate of Scandinavia that makes thrillers set there so gruesome and gory, and The Snowman is certainly gruesome and gory.

I enjoyed reading this novel, perhaps as a way to avoid thinking about how gruesome and gory the real world is.

Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew is set during World War II in Berlin, Paris and the French countryside. This is a novel where magical realism sits beside the monstrous horrors of the Nazis and the very human actions of the characters. Most of the characters are Jewish, most die at the hands of the Nazis. The literal Angel of Death is hovering nearby and one of the main characters is Ava, a golem. It is a novel about love, loss, resilience, and what it means to be human.

It starts with Hanni Kohn, mother to 12-year-old Lea, and her desperate desire to save her daughter. The only way to do this is to go to a world-renowned rabbi, and ask him to create a golem, whose one purpose in life would be to protect Leah. Having failed once before the rabbi refuses. The rabbi’s daughter overhears the conversations and says she will create a golem, although this would be a sin, since women are not supposed to act in this way. But the golem, who is female created by a female to protect a female is created and she is called Ava.

There are a multitude of characters in the book that I had no trouble keeping apart. Most are Jewish, but not all. I was so very sad when one of my favorite characters was killed, but that is the historical part of this historical fiction novel. Anyone starting to read this because it is historical fiction, should be aware that it is not true historical fiction, but fiction with a lot of history thrown in and a lot of magical realism and elements of Jewish folklore.

However, the novel reads sort of like an extended fairytale, a style that is difficult for me. I thought the writing, plot, and characters were wonderful, but the fairytale like style took me out of the story on occasion. But this was not enough to really bother me, and I thought this was a wonderful, wonderful book that I am so glad I read.

There are parallels to the world we currently live in that are frightening.

This is a wonderful book. The writing is beautiful, while at the same time being “simple” and easy to read. There are Farsi words scattered throughout Martyr!, but these didn’t bother me, though I must admit, I spent a lot of time with Google translate. It is about so much: life, death, love, family, and the place of art in the world. At times it became a little pretentious, but that was ok, the subject seemed to demand it.

This is written with several POVs, and it moves back and forth in time. I thought Akbar handles this well. The are dreams and surreal episodes. These are also handled well.

Many of the chapters start with a poem. Generally, I can’t appreciate poetry, so I ended up skimming these. Some chapters began with a report on the shooting down of an Iranian flight 655, a passenger jet shot down by mistake in 1988 by the USS Vincennes. All 290 passengers were killed. This was a real event. It plays a key role in the life and death of one of the characters.

The main character is Cyrus, a young recovering alcoholic and sometime poet. I shouldn’t say too much more about him since there are plot points I don’t want to reveal. Anyway, Cyrus is a wreck, and his ruminations and dialog are pretentious and over-the-top. He is concerned that his life “Mean” something. I can’t stand these people in real life, but this is a novel after all, and I found him kind of loveable.

There are many other characters in the novel. They are all well written and I really wanted to know more about them. There are Cyrus’ parents, Ali and Roya; Roya’s brother Arash; Orkideh, a New York City performance artist; and Zee, Cyrus’ perhaps lover and friend. Zee was the kindest and most loving person in the novel, and he was my favorite character.

The ending is somewhat ambiguous. This is okay, since I was able to project a very happy ending for Cyrus and Zee.

I don’t really have much more to say other than the fact that I loved Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!

The Offing is the story of Dulcie, an older woman living alone in cottage by the sea in England, and Robert, a sixteen-year-old boy who stumbles into Dulcie’s garden after walking from his home in the north. Dulcie is wise and eccentric, and apparently well-to-do. Robert has finished with school, which he hated, and has decided on a little freedom before he goes down into the coal mines as his father and grandfather have done. The time is just after World War II, when the soldiers who survived the war return, but nothing is normal yet in Great Britain. Unknown to Robert, Dulcie is grieving the death of her lover, a famous German poet. She despises what her country and Hitler has done but because she is German, her poems went out of favor.

This is a coming-of-age story for Robert, but it also meaningful for Dulcie. Although Dulcie and Robert are years apart in age and miles apart in social class, their relationship becomes a true and deep friendship.

This is a beautifully written book, with wonderful descriptions of the English countryside, the people who inhabit it and of Dulcie, Robert, and Romy who was Dulcie’s lover. It is also about class, the environment, and it is deeply pessimistic about our ability to avoid wars. Nevertheless, it feels to me like a quiet book.

My only, relatively minor complaint is about Dulcie. Is anyone really that wise, and not just wise, but smart. And why does she have all the exotic food she desires, while the rest of the presumably poor population is still using ration books?

Anyway, aside from this, it is a gem of a book.

The Son of Man is a novel with three main characters known only as the father, the mother, and the son (or sometimes the child). The mother became pregnant with the child at 17. A few years after that, the father disappears, presumably, but not certainly to prison. Six years later he returns. He insists that the mother and the child accompany him to a derelict cabin in the woods for a new beginning. It does not go well.

The novel has shifts in time and POV, which I thought were handled well. It was very detailed, and the details were also handled well. The details of nature, the cabin, etc., were an interesting stylistic contrast to the fact that the main characters remained nameless throughout the novel. One of the most important details about a person was missing from this novel full of detail.

In addition, the writing gave me a real sense of foreboding.

However, I really didn’t like the style of the writing or at least the vocabulary used, especially in the prologue. I will occasionally need to consult a dictionary to look up a word, but I was constantly having to do this for this novel. When I did look these words up, I found that many of them had a perfectly good synonym that would have been much more comprehensible to the general reader. I wonder if this was a choice made by the author or the translator. Anyway, I don’t know if I reacted so strongly to this aspect of the book because it just took me out of the flow of the narrative, or simply because it made me feel stupid.

I almost DNFed this. I’m glad I didn’t because it is a good novel. The atmosphere that del Amo creates is really something, the sense of foreboding is unrelenting.

And the ending is something that will hang over me for a long time.

For everything other than language/style-4 or 4.5. For language and style-3. So 3.5

A Room Above a Shop is a novel about tenderness, true love, yearning, and fear.

B and M live in small town Wales in the 1980s. They are gay in a time and place where that was considered disgusting, evil, etc., etc. They find each other by chance and fall in love. They have no way to declare their love to the world, but in their “room above [M’s] shop” they carefully build a life together. This room is their refuge.

The ending is heartbreaking.

Anthony Shapland writes in sparse, spare prose. It is almost like poetry. There is much left unsaid in his prose, but despite this we know what is unsaid.

“He learned the things he needed to like. If he got the wrong ear pierced…if he looked at his finger-nails the wrong way…”. I grew up in Tennessee and not small-town Wales, but I still remember trying to remember which ear was the correct ear to be pierced or how to look at my fingernails the right way. The fear of getting it wrong and that people would know.

This short, poetic novel about yearning and love (and fear) is wonderful.

However, the next gay novel I read will have a happy ending.

I loved Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere.

The Richardson family lives in Shaker Heights, Ohio. The family is made up or Mr. and Mrs. Richardson and their four children: Lexie, Trip, Moody, and Izzy. They are comfortably upper middle class and live in comfortably upper middle-class Shaker Heights, Ohio, just outside Cleveland. Elena Richardson inherited a small duplex from her parents and rents it out. She rents it to Mia, a single mother and her daughter Pearl.

The novel begins with the Ricardson’s house burning down. We go back in time to find out why.

Ng gives us characters that are good but do questionable things at times. She shows us that while we think things are black and white, they are really shades of gray. Sometimes when faced with choices you must pick the least bad thing. Sometimes when you are faced with two good choices, you must pick the choice that is the most good, and hopefully the person choosing is aware that this choice is sure to hurt someone who doesn’t deserve to be hurt.

Although I know that there are some who see this differently, I felt that there were no bad characters. There were decent people who made bad choices, or perhaps we should say, they made unthinking choices in the heat of the moment.

The novel covers the important themes of cultural identity, motherhood, economic privilege, and white privilege.

Ng shows that there are rules we live by, but she asks, should we? If we choose not to live by these rules, she asks, who do we hurt.

I liked and could identify with most of the characters, but I didn’t like Izzy very much. Perhaps it is my age. I thought Mia was also a little hard to take at the beginning. No one could be that wise, that caring, and that talented. But as we go along, we learn that Mia too has made a terrible choice for the most understandable of reasons.

I was debating between a 4.75 and 5 and then realized I would remember and think about this novel for a long time, so 5 it is.

Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman is a well-researched look at Donald Trump. It is an overall picture of Trump himself and not about his policies as such. While much of what is reported in the book was already known, Maggie Haberman puts everything together in such a way that I can see the big picture more easily.

The big picture takeaway is that Trump was always Trump. The way he was at the end of his first term (when the book ends) is the way he always was. He was always narcissistic and thin skinned. He was always more interested in money and power than the public good. He just had and has a bigger stage now and with a complacent Congress he probably has more power than any other president.

This book is well worth reading. It is a very depressing book about a man that no one is neutral about. I’m surprised I could get through it.

Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a dystopian novel that spans hundreds of thousands of years. I consider this a gentle dystopia in that there are no wars, plagues, or environmental disasters in the novel itself. There is no real violence. It is about the characters.

It is written in a spare but beautiful style that leaves you thinking about what happened in the novel, and what will happen to humanity in the future. It explores themes of humanness, love, and relationships, and it is heartbreaking, moving, and haunting. However, you must be willing to live with a little ambiguity as you don’t really understand everything until the very end.

Written in a short story/vignette style these individual “chapters” all connect, not just with the previous story, but with all the previous stories, even though they take place in different time periods. I liked how some of my favorite characters reappeared (sort-of) in subsequent stories. I don’t know how Kawakami pulled this off, because I usually find this kind of thing annoying and hard to follow.

The ending shows that humanity is becoming extinct and there is something comforting in its inevitability.

I know that I will be thinking about this for a very long time and I am so glad I read it.

Gilda is depressed and anxious and can’t stop thinking about death. She responds to a flyer from a local Catholic church about therapy, but Father Jeff thinks she is there for a job, and Gilda is too embarrassed to tell him otherwise, although she is a lesbian and an atheist. So begins her masquerade as a heterosexual Roman Catholic. There is also a sub-plot, or is it the main plot, about the death of the previous church secretary.

This is a very funny premise and there were times when I laughed out loud, but generally, I didn’t connect with this book. I didn’t like Gilda. We are told that she is a “lesbian and an atheist” over and over again. A couple of times was enough. I understand rumination and anxiety, but this is a novel, not a case study. I thought Eleanor was a fool for staying with her, Father Jeff was nice but not very consequential, Barney and Giuseppe seemed to be well-meaning at times and at others odious. Her parents are clueless. I liked her brother Eli, and I would have liked to know more about him, but he hardly figures in the story.

(I guess you will have to read to book to find out who these characters are-no spoilers here).

The ending was hopeful, but it didn’t really fit with the rest of the book. So, while I liked the premise, and some of the scenes were funny, and some lines were very quotable, this one just wasn’t for me, at least not right now. Maybe later it will sit better

Leonard and Hungry Paul is about two slightly weird best friends. Leonard’s mother has just died, and Hungry Paul lives with his parents. His older sister is getting married. That is it. What can I say that others haven’t? Not much. But that is okay.

This is a moving, charming, warm, and gentle novel about two quiet and kind men. There is no real drama; there are no damaged feelings. The wedding goes off without a hitch and at the end Leonard may have a girlfriend, and Hungry Paul may have found a job, albeit a very weird one.

This is a novel about good and loving people, and except for Leonard’s mother dying before the start of the novel, nothing bad happens. It is also a novel about the value of silence and of simple pleasures, like board games and jig saw puzzles and watching the birds in the bird feeders. Reading this was like sitting on a porch looking at the flowers swaying in the wind. It is not a cute book, although there are cute moments in it. It is a sometimes profound book. It is a perfect book for these times

Here Again Now is a novel about fathers and sons, about love, about how we wound each other, and about what it means to be a man.

Achike and Ekene are both Black, gay, and are childhood friends. Achike is an actor just on the cusp of being famous. Ekene teaches drama. They love each other, but something is holding them back so they can’t act on this love. It isn’t because they are denying being gay-they both have other relationships-but due to upbringing and expectations, they can’t bring themselves to act on this love. Chibuike is Achike’s father. He is an alcoholic and some of the most touching parts of the novel are his reflections on whether he was ever a good father, and his regret at not being there for Achike when he was needed.

It is clear that all three men have been failed by their upbringing, and this has left both scars and unhealed wounds.

The novel is written from the POV of the three men. There is a focus on the internal thoughts of the three men. It is very reflective and beautifully written. It is also very, very sad and full of wasted opportunities. But there is also just a hint of hope and healing at the end. It would have been unbearable for me if this had not been the case.

Elif Shafak is one of my favorite authors. Her stories are always moving and original, her writing is always beautiful. There are Rivers in the Sky continues the pattern of beautiful, original stories.

This novel covers three basic timelines: the 18140s-1870s; 2014; and 2018. There is a kind of prologue in the time of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. t takes place in the UK and the Middle East in London, Constantinople (Istanbul), and Ninevah. There are two rivers that are almost characters in the novel—the Thames and the Tigris. And the stories and places are connected by a drop of water.

The major characters are Arthur, a man who is never able to forget and who rises from the London slums to become a respected authority on cuneiform tablets. He is obsessed with Ninevah and discovers tablets with the Epic of Gilgamesh; Zaleekhah, a scientist who researches rivers, who lost her parents in a flood by the Tigris River. And finally, there is Narin, a 9-year-old Yazidi girl, who survives the massacre of the Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq, only to be turned into a slave. Somehow Shafak ties all their stories together at the end.

This novel is beautiful and lyrical; ugly and cruel. It is at times heartbreaking, but at the same time, kindness is found in the most unexpected of places.

It is about our destruction of the natural environment and our destruction of each other. It covers the topics of modern slavery and genocide and who owns the cultural heritage of peoples that are no housed in museums and private collections.

Obviously, I loved this book, but it won’t be for everyone. The story is a little meandering, sort of like a river running through flatlands, and it dips into a type of magical realism. However, for me, it was another outstanding novel by Elif Shafak.

This is a reread for me. I first read it many, many years ago.

Michael Clark was a friend of mine who died recently from pancreatic cancer. We met in 1982, and even though our lives took very different turns, we remained friends until the end. I knew many of the people mentioned, and we are still friends with Bobby (who I know as Bob) even though he is living in the South and we are in Philadelphia. What I didn’t know was the depth of his searching/anger/despair. Perhaps he was shielding me from it? Perhaps there were other reasons. He ended two relationships while I knew him, while I am still with my now husband, who I met in 1981, so in that sense we were very different. Nevertheless, we were and remained friends. I even merit a mention in the acknowledgements!

I am not a theologian and the sections on theology went over my head, as they always did. However, reading this brought back the anger and fear of the early days of AIDS, the feeling that we had to do something. For that I am grateful.

Can’t rate this as it is too personal.

What did I just read? Was the author high when he wrote this novel? Actually, I doubt it since the “plot” is so intricate. At least I think it is intricate.

The main protagonist is Dengue Boy, later Dengue Girl, later Dengue Mother, later Dengue Void. The protagonist is a mosquito human hybrid. The novel mostly takes place. In the 23rd century when the earth is ravaged by climate change and much of Argentina has been drowned by the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. There are also multiple timelines and of course “Hail, Mighty Anarch.” Read the novel to find out about the Mighty Anarch, although I read the novel and I’m still not sure about the MA.

This novel explores capitalism, classism, racism, and climate catastrophe. It concerns itself with the role of large companies in promoting classism, racism, and climate change. It is blunt, crude, and absurd. It deals with body horror and has some truly gross sexual imagery. I know that its complexity and philosophical musings went over my head, so I had to just give up and go along for the ride.

This novel is not for everyone, and I doubt that I will read it again. However, I did enjoy reading it, although I could have done without some of the sexual imagery that seemed a little gratuitous. Other than that, it was a lot of fun while at the same time discussing some extremely important issues.

3.75

Nicola Lagioia’s The City of the Living is the In Cold Blood-like retelling of the brutal and horrifying story of the murder of Luca Varani by Manuel Foffo and Marco Prato in Rome in 2016. First, I have to say that I generally don’t like works that are neither one thing or the other. I’m far too rigid and like things in categories—just ask anyone who knows me! The book cover says that this is “the true story of modern Rome’s most shocking murder.” Yet my edition published by Europa Editions labels this a work of fiction. The outlines of the story are true. Foffo and Prato did torture and murder Varani, but I guess because there are many conversations that the author could not have heard but reconstructed and motives guessed at, it falls into the fiction category?

That being said, this is a brutal, very graphic book about the actual murder and Lagioia obviously did a lot of research and a lot of interviewing before writing it. I liked the writing style and structure of the book. I know that being so close to this story Lagioia must have come to some sort of conclusions about the 3 main characters, but if so, he doesn’t tell us what exactly it is. He doesn’t really say who he thinks initiated the crime, what were Foffo’s and Prato’s true motives, and what were the underlying causes, although he acknowledges that the prodigious use of drugs must have played a part. I liked the way the city of Rome itself is a character, if a brutal, sordid, and almost disgusting one.

One thing I didn’t really like was the parallel story of the Dutch tourist. I’m not sure why it was included. It certainly does show how depraved and evil this pedophile was, but the main story was not about pedophilia but about murder. I suppose it was included because it shows the loopholes in Italian law.

Anyway, this was a very good book, that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. I think a person needs to pick it up themselves read the book cover and then decide if they want to read about murder, rape, pedophilia, heavy drug use, etc., and the effect of these on the people left behind.

Anne Appplebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. is a short, readable and terrifying book. Her thrust is revealed in the chapter titles: The Greed that Binds, Kleptocracy Metastasizes, Controlling the Narrative e, Changing the Operating System, Smearing the Democrats (she is not talking about the US political party). In the book she talks about the interconnected ness of autocratic countries, kleptocracy, and media propaganda. I had no idea about how close the cooperation is among autocratic countries. Although they have very different pollical systems, cultures, and religions Iran will help Russia which helps Cuba, which helps North Korea, etc., etc. These countries, and the dictators that control them enable each other. Autocrats are united in their belief that the “west” wants to destroy or defeat them. Democrats are not united, which is what makes these countries vulnerable. In addition, western companies that only care about the bottom line and lining the pockets of CEOs and upper management bankroll these autocratic kleptocracies.

In any case, this is well worth reading if you are up to being very depressed by the end.

On the other hand, the US and the west get off a little too easily, and the book sometimes seems a little superficial. However, this is a short book and is best approached as an introduction to the subject. I know I learned a lot.

I didn’t like the ending. It is hopeful and feels a bit too optimistic (her dedication is “for the optimists”). This was written 2024, before President Trump took office for his second term. It seems we are following the road of the autocrats, so this last section seems a little like fantasy. I am not an optimist.