A Walk in the Park

A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon

By Kevin Fedarko 

A deeply moving account ever of walking the Grand Canyon, a highly dangerous, life-changing 750-mile trek.

The Grand Canyon is an American treasure, visited by more than 6 million people a year, many of whom are rendered speechless by its vast beauty, mystery, and complexity. Now, in A Walk in the Park , author Kevin Fedarko chronicles his year-long effort to find a 750-mile path along the length of the Grand Canyon, through a vertical wilderness suspended between the caprock along the rims of the abyss and the Colorado River, which flows along its bottom.

Consisting of countless cliffs and steep drops, plus immense stretches with almost no access to water, and the fact that not a single trail links its eastern doorway to its western terminus, this jewel of national parks is so challenging that when Fedarko departed fewer people had completed the journey in one single hike than had walked on the moon. The intensity of the effort required him to break his trip into several legs, each of which held staggering dangers and unexpected discoveries.

Accompanying Fedarko through this sublime yet perilous terrain is the award-winning photographer Peter McBride, who captures the stunning landscape in breathtaking photos. Together, they encounter long-lost Native American ruins, the remains of Old West prospectors’ camps, present day tribal activists, and signs that commercial tourism is impinging on the park’s remote wildness.

An epic adventure, action-packed survival tale, and a deep spiritual journey, A Walk in the Park gives us an unprecedented glimpse of the crown jewel of America’s National an iconic landscape framed by ancient rock whose contours are recognized by all, but whose secrets and treasures are known to almost no one, and whose topography encompasses some of the harshest, least explored, most awe-inspiring terrain in the world.

It would be hard to say that any book or video (but especially a book without many pictures) can do justice to the experience of being at or inside the Grand Canyon but Fedarko gives it a good go. There's a point at which he says that he realizes that he's been trying to "experience" the Grand Canyon at its most pure, i.e., by walking through it, but eventually comes to acknowledge that even the casual hikers who skim just the merest part of it can still find real appreciation of its natural beauty and power. 

Speaking as one of those casual hikers who, upon approach to the Grand Canyon was immediately awestruck, I appreciate the concession.  The Grand Canyon is aptly named. It is so magnificent a landscape that I cannot conceive of a thinking, feeling person who, when confronted with it, is not in some way awed and amazed.  

That being said, I really don't think even reading this book (or any book) can do justice to it, so it's no fault of Fedarko's that it falls short. There is just no replacement for being in the canyon itself, something is apparent when we hear about the people who are drawn, again and again, to hiking and exploring it, regardless of the dangers. We learn about several people who did in fact die while exploring it, who are only small steps of association away from the author himself. It's sobering and comes at a point when you almost feel that the risks are overstated.  Fedarko admittedly likes to cast himself and his hiking partner Pete McBride as somewhat hapless, unprepared "off the couch"ers, which can be amusing at points, but I think also does a disservice as it understates the preparation and fitness required to make an adequate attempt at what they achieved. 

The first sections are mostly scene setting and the first initial foray into the planned through-hike, which ends in disaster.  The latter sections, as Fedarko and McBride get further underway (and more comfortable) also explore the connection of the native tribes to the land (for better or for worse) and the prospect of further development and commercialization. There's an upsetting couple of chapters as they hike past Grand Canyon West, the skywalk and helicopter tour on Hualapai tribe land, which begs the question of whether and how tribes and other landowners should be allowed to profit off of the Grand Canyon (given the deterioration of the canyon unders also the kind of non those conditions), especially when the policies of the American government towards the tribes has created the conditions of poverty and social ills which they seek to escape by commercializing the only asset left to them. 

 If nothing else, this book certainly does not make me want to hike the Grand Canyon. Preserve it, yes. Boat through it, maybe. But definitely not walk through it. As far as non-fiction books about hiking misadventures go, I think Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods sets the gold standard. A Walk in the Park, while paying homage, fails to meet the high standard set. But still, it calls up memories of one of the most wondrous places on Earth. And even a fainter echo is still something special.

46: A Book Where Nature Is The Antagonist

Family Style

Family Style

By Thien Pham

Thien's first memory isn't a sight or a sound. It's the sweetness of watermelon and the saltiness of fish. It's the taste of the foods he ate while adrift at sea as his family fled Vietnam.

After the Pham family arrives at a refugee camp in Thailand, they struggle to survive. Things don't get much easier once they resettle in California. And through each chapter of their lives, food takes on a new meaning. Strawberries come to signify struggle as Thien's mom and dad look for work. Potato chips are an indulgence that bring Thien so much joy that they become a necessity.

Behind every cut of steak and inside every croissant lies a story. And for Thien Pham, that story is about a search―for belonging, for happiness, for the American dream.

 I liked Family Style, although it suffers from the same problem that so many graphic novels do: it's so fast (and relatively easy to read) that it feels less substantial than it should.  For example, I'm pretty sure I read and liked The Best We Could Do, but it doesn't stick in the memory the way a longer, heftier tome would. Anyway, maybe writing this review will help. 

 I liked the framing device that Pham uses, of focusing on certain moments in his life and spotlighting them, along with the food that they're associated with, the early chapters involving his family's escape from Vietnam and subsequent stay in a refugee camp, then culture shock in the United States, integration, and finally citizenship.  For some reason the last section felt very disconnected from the earlier parts, and I'm not sure if it's because it seemed like the author skipped so much time or what. I did read the book over several days so I guess that may be partially to blame, but it still took me a really long time to figure out that we were still following the main character (i.e., the author) and hadn't switched to his father's point of view.  

But by far the best part was the commentary and Q&A section at the end. His conversations and interviews directly with his family members (and illustrated, to boot!) were hilarious. I love the Calvin & Hobbes 20th Anniversary book for the same reason: we frequently get commentary and annotations from actors and singers but less common is an author's commentary on their own book (aside from introductions) and even less often (but very fun) is a comic artist's commentary. 

25: A Book Where The Main Character Is An Immigrant Or Refugee

 

 

Between Two Kingdoms

Between Two Kingdoms

By Suleika Jaouad

 In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.

It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

 It was an interesting experience to read about someone whose personality seems so diametrically opposed to mine. Cancer treatment notwithstanding, it seemed very clear to me that Jaouad is substantially extroverted, someone who thrives on interacting with people and a serial monogamist, seemingly incapable of being alone. Which makes her road trip all the more intriguing, although it does sound like she spent a good chunk of it dwelling on her romantic prospects. 

Jaouad spends the first half of the book detailing her first cancer treatment (since the time frame of the book, it sounds like she's had at least two more bouts) and then the first part of the second half talking about how hard it is to adjust to not being sick anymore, so the road trip takes up a fairly small chunk. For a road trip lasting 100 days and circumnavigating the continental United States, we spend a whole chapter and two weeks not even leaving the state of Vermont and then skip directly from Texas to the end of the story. 

She's a great writer. It's a long book but beautifully described. Naturally, almost all of it is internal musings and descriptions of her pain and care, but it's still well paced, and doesn't get bogged down. And as exhausting as she sounds to be around at points, I both admire and grimace at her bravery in writing about the end of her relationship with Will (again, not a spoiler for those who do a casual google search, she's currently married to Jon Baptiste). It sounds like she was lucky to have Will for as long as she did, doing as much as he did, but never felt lucky. But how could anyone feel lucky, with that kind of diagnosis and illness hanging over their heads? You're more likely to feel like the sword of Damocles is waiting to fall. 

In the end, I don't think that Jaouad comes up with any philosophical ideas outside of ones that seem common sense for someone in that position: focus on the present, not the past, learn to live comfortably with uncertainty, accept the love that others want to give you, etc., etc. But while I think much of the book is Jaouad trying (and mostly failing, so I hope that she's gotten better at this since 2015) to come to terms with her experience, I think much of the value of the book for others is the deep dive into what it feels to be so torn between being sick and being well - between two kingdoms, is the metaphor she uses over and over again. It is hard for many to imagine being so sick for so long that you have something like PTSD from it. And it is a small revelation to consider that being well again after something like that can be harder than being sick, and you should not expect unalloyed joy from a bill of good health.

12: A Book About A Road Trip

The Frozen River

The Frozen River

By Ariel Lawhon 

Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community. Months earlier, Martha documented the details of an alleged rape committed by two of the town’s most respected gentlemen—one of whom has now been found dead in the ice. But when a local physician undermines her conclusion, declaring the death to be an accident, Martha is forced to investigate the shocking murder on her own.

Over the course of one winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha doggedly pursues the truth. Her diary soon lands at the center of the scandal, implicating those she loves, and compelling Martha to decide where her own loyalties lie.

So I was reading the book and enjoying it reasonably well as one does, and then I come to the author's note at the end and apparently Martha Ballard is a real person! Whose diary entries were excerpted for the book! And it's based around a real rape case! Except that almost all of the rest of it was manufactured, i.e. bodies and murder plots and the Colonel's nefarious backstory about scalping people during the French and Indian War! All of the "juicy" bits.

I was thinking about why this made me so unsettled, and it reminds me of that terrible book The Ministry of Time where the author exhumed someone who died on the ill-fated Franklin Exhibition in 1846 and then wrote this whole book about him time travelling and having sex in lurid, graphic detail. I suppose in one sense, these people died hundreds of years ago and it's not like their relatives are going to be scandalized. And people write about long-dead famous people all the time - Cleopatra, Empress Sisi. But it feels weird that a "normal" person could be molded into this whole fantasy, especially when these modern books are likely going to be more readily accessible and certainly more popular than their actual true biographies. All of that is to say that I enjoyed the story more when I thought it was a story, and had I known it was a fictionalized version of true events, I would have preferred the author not to add their own spin on things.

And I did enjoy the story when it was a story. The mystery is interesting, given how many people seemed to have motive, both moral and immoral, to kill Burgess. The characters (which again, feels like a weird thing to say given that all of these people appear to be based on actual patients and neighbors and relatives) are all neatly drawn and delineated. The authors note humorously says Lawhon helpfully changed names so there weren't ten "Hannahs" in the book. There's a neat piece where [spoiler!] Martha's matchmaking and assumption about a girl who had a child out of wedlock are neatly turned on their head - something to give our hero feet of clay.

I agree the historical detail and setting is a big part of its charm, and it's a nice change of pace to read about a couple who love each other. Although rape plays a central role in both the current and flashback stories, and it is described (in a courtroom setting), it didn't feel exploitative.

It's nothing that strains your brain, or is meant to say something deep about our cultural institutions (except, perhaps, about the overweening arrogance of certain types of men - to take, to dismiss experience born of decades of work). The mystery of which of Martha's family members may be involved in Burgess' death is not hard to guess correctly, and Martha's victory over the villain is never much in doubt. It's just a good story, well-told. 

 

43: A Book That Includes A Nonverbal Character

The Woman They Could Not Silence

The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear

By Kate Moore

1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of twenty-one years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened - by Elizabeth's intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.

The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband. But most disturbing is that Elizabeth is not the only sane woman confined to the institution. There are many rational women on her ward who tell the same story: they've been committed not because they need medical treatment, but to keep them in line - conveniently labeled "crazy" so their voices are ignored.

No one is willing to fight for their freedom and, disenfranchised both by gender and the stigma of their supposed madness, they cannot possibly fight for themselves. But Elizabeth is about to discover that the merit of losing everything is that you then have nothing to lose...

Kate Moore writes about women whom history has forgotten, women who have suffered and whose lives have changed the course of history and whom, despite that, we know very little about. Her first book, The Radium Girls was distinguished more by the subject matter than by the writing. Moore's style is a bit flat here too - she cites constantly from the source material but in so doing, I find her use of quotations more distracting than anything else. I would much prefer her to present the facts and cite by footnotes than constantly insert quotations like a Zagat's Guide. There's almost too much focus on Elizabeth and her own thoughts. It's not a short book, although it does go pretty quickly, but in the last few sections, Elizabeth is released and we broaden our scope to her lobbying efforts. It's certainly less interesting, so I don't fault Moore for spending relatively little time on it, but it would be nice to get more of a sense of the effect these laws had on the systems and any long term impacts her anti-asylum groups had.

 

That being said, once again Moore has chosen an excellent subject. Elizabeth Packard is wholly compelling personage and, as seen in her own writings, eloquent and persuasive.  We see very little of her life prior to her institutionalization and perhaps a bit more background could have helped to explain why she felt so called upon to resist, especially given how common it seems it would have been to keep a low and biddable profile in order to return home. Moore's author's note indicates that she wrote, then cut, an entire beginning section that dealt with Elizabeth's church discussion groups, which seem to kick off the schism between Elizabeth and her husband.  Were there other moments of resistance before this that paved the road?

 

It's inspiring, and intentionally so. Moore writes that she deliberately chose a story with "a happy ending" for which I commend her. Nothing like reading about women needlessly thrown into asylums without proof to make you crave a happy ending.  Elizabeth's courage is manifest, but it's still a tragedy that she endured so many years of separation from her children. I did find it amusing that once her husband Theophilius accepts that she cannot be squashed, they seem to be able to live if not comfortably, at least compatibly.  It just goes to show the damage that a weak man, with all the tools of an unjust system, can do in the pursuit of his own protection. If only he had been able to admit that Elizabeth was always the stronger of the two, perhaps all of this could have been avoided. Maybe it was Theophilius all along who held the insane views since his belief in his own superiority was clearly contrary to the truth.

But Moore's central thesis, which she hammers hard at the beginning and slightly again at the end, that "insanity" is merely a convenient way to dismiss and thwart those who would challenge those in power, is a convincing one. It begs each of us to consider all the ways in which our own prejudices and judgments are informed not by truth but by habit. I find myself uncomfortably close to the subject matter right now, as I find myself advising a family that - for her own protection - a woman needs a guardianship. But Elizabeth's example should be a guide here as well - regardless of the circumstances, to treat everyone with kindness and dignity even if they cannot manage themselves.  

 

And if ever we needed a reminder to keep fighting, the book itself is proof that, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "The Arc of the Moral Universe is long, but it bends towards Justice." 160 years later, it is Elizabeth Packard's name, not the good doctor MacFarland, whose name adorns the Illinois state asylum in Springfield. 

 

32: A Book About An Overlooked Woman In History

An American Marriage

An American Marriage

By Tayari Jones

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

I wasn't really looking forward to this, since I thought the subject matter would be very weighty and therefore depressing (I also considered Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder for this prompt, and maybe I will read that too anyway, since it sounds intriguing). And the subject matter was weighty, I guess, but the book is pretty easy to read and skips over a lot of the time that Roy spends in prison, so it's mostly build-up and then the three characters wringing their hands over Roy's return to freedom.

It's fine. I did spoil the ending for myself, so maybe I would have been more rapt if I hadn't know how it would turn out, but as it was, Celestial mostly annoyed with what seemed to be small cruelty in separating herself from Roy, but not actually divorcing him, thus keeping him on her line and giving him false hope. I think it would have been ameliorated if we'd seen better why she did it, i.e., was it to give him strength while he was in prison? But we don't, we just see her realization that he's in prison for a long time, she doesn't really love him as much as she ought, and then her leaning on Andre because (and for real) he's right there. Honestly, if she hadn't gotten pregnant at the end, I would have said that if Andre would up in prison, she would have left him just as she had Roy. She just doesn't seem to be deeply committed to anyone but herself. And that's fine, I suppose, for her, but it does make the book seem like less of a tragedy and more of a pity.

Meanwhile, of course, Roy is out here not appearing to take his marriage vows super seriously either, so who knows. Perhaps there's an argument that they were married longer because he was in prison than they would have been if he'd been out. I did find it funny that the first question in the "book club" questions at the end was one I had been thinking about while reading it, namely, what makes this an "American" marriage? Is it the wrongful conviction? Certainly other countries are subject to the phenomenon as well, although perhaps it's less common. Is it the racism? Is it the ways in which the characters each justified their actions? I agree that it does "feel" uniquely American somehow, like this story could only have happened in this country, but it's hard to say why.

I liked the beginning of the book much more than the end. The beginning is the love story of Roy and Celestial, as well as their communications in prison. It felt like it might be a story about handling something terrible and life-altering, something that truly is not your fault, and living through it. Something like optimism. Something like Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, haha. But all the characters just wallow. For good reason, especially in Roy's case, but it never felt more than surface level.  I dunno, I just, this is the kind of book where you want to feel deeply for these characters and the loss of their hopes and dreams and the ruins of their marriage, and instead, you just wish they'd be a little more honest - with themselves first, and then with other people. And don't even get me started on the idea that Roy happens to end up in a prison cell with his biological father for five years. Now it's just hokey.

On the plus side, it was a very easy read.

48: A Book That Features A Married Couple Who Don't Live Together

The Book of Delights

The Book of Delights

By Ross Gay

The winner of the National Book Critics Award for Poetry offers up a spirited collection of short lyrical essays, written daily over a tumultuous year, reminding us of the purpose and pleasure of praising, extolling, and celebrating ordinary wonders.
In The Book of Delights, one of today’s most original literary voices offers up a genre-defying volume of lyric essays written over one tumultuous year. The first nonfiction book from award-winning poet Ross Gay is a record of the small joys we often overlook in our busy lives. Among Gay’s funny, poetic, philosophical delights: a friend’s unabashed use of air quotes, cradling a tomato seedling aboard an airplane, the silent nod of acknowledgment between the only two black people in a room. But Gay never dismisses the complexities, even the terrors, of living in America as a black man or the ecological and psychic violence of our consumer culture or the loss of those he loves. More than anything else, though, Gay celebrates the beauty of the natural world–his garden, the flowers peeking out of the sidewalk, the hypnotic movements of a praying mantis.
The Book of Delights is about our shared bonds, and the rewards that come from a life closely observed. These remarkable pieces serve as a powerful and necessary reminder that we can, and should, stake out a space in our lives for delight.

I am finding it hard to write a review. When I recall the book, I have a sense of remembered pleasure, but moreso than anything it engenders calm and peace. I find myself relishing inactivity, breathing in and out and content to be at rest. A lassitude and quietude. Which of course ruins any hope of productivity. 

The Book of Delights is a series of short essays on the delights of daily life which may occur to you if you simply open yourself. I feel as though they are something like secular homilies, although this description does them no service. It falls short of the talent Gay displays in the transcription of his ideas, the poet's talent for wordplay, for following thoughts like twining vines, up and over and out again.

Below is an entire excerpt from one such essay, which is probably not the best in the bunch, but serves since it is so short and still amusing:

When my brother and I were little kids, maybe nine and seven, one of the big kids (this description has almost none of the gravity it once did, when kids actually went outside unsupervised and uncoached and so the small ones would on occasion be thrown by the big ones into the sticker bush or dropped into a sewer for sport) caught us in the woods and pinched us on the backs of our arms until we cursed, which we adamantly and unusually for our neighborhood did not do. (I wonder, in retrospect, if we acted a bit superior due to our linguistic chastity.)

"Asshole!" we screamed into the woods behind the apartments. "Shitbag!" The tears making our faces shine as this big twelve-year-old twisted the meat on our arms. When we went home crying to our mom (my brother more from the pinching than the cursing, which I suspect he was glad for the excuse to do), she found the kid and read him the riot act, calling him a gutter mouth, telling him that Rossy and Matty are not going to be little gutter mouths like him, before telling him he would probably grow up to be a child molester. She was fucking his ass up. I remember him listening quite calmly, almost demure, calling my mother Mrs. Gay and suggesting he would not become a child molester. I think Tim was probably right, and was just in a  sadistic phase, not unlike my own at around twelve.

But mostly I offer this story as a kind of background against which to enjoy the easy way my mother described her granddaughter's, my niece's, third-grade teacher, who evidently could sometimes not be very nice to some of the kids, as a real dickhead.

 It feels like a rope, a hand stretching out to pull us from the despair and pessimism of These Times and remind us not to sink into depression but to remember the point of life and remember to enjoy what we may while we have it. It is like a small flower, growing amidst adversity, and with love, and hope, I am fortified against the hordes once more. 

01: A Book About A POC Experiencing Joy And Not Trauma

A Person of Interest

A Person of Interest
By Susan Choi

Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician nearing retirement age, would seem the last person likely to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a popular young colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee’s detached response and maladroit behavior lead the FBI, the national news media, and even his own neighbors to regard him with damning suspicion.

Amid campus-wide grief over the murder, Lee receives a cryptic letter from a figure out of his past. The letter unearths a lifetime of shortcomings – toward his dead wife, his estranged only daughter, and a long-denied son. Caught between his guilty recollections and the scrutiny of the murder investigation, determined to face his tormentor and exonerate himself, Lee sets off on a journey that will bring him face-to-face with his past – and that might even win him redemption.

Once again, complete ignorance strikes. I had no idea this book was broadly set around the Unabomber, so the references to the newfangled computer geniuses took me aback. I also had no idea that Choi almost won the Pulitzer, and had somehow not connected that she'd written Trust Exercise - a book which has been in my To Be Read list for years, but never attempted due to some reviews hinting at unhappy stylistic flair. If I had known, or remembered that, maybe I would have been better prepared for this. Ostensibly yes, about a mathematics professor who finds himself unfortunately entangled in an FBI investigation into the bombing of his neighboring office, it's much more a character study into someone  alienated from almost everyone in their life. It's not a thriller, it's LITERARY.

The problem you see, is while it's well written, we spend the beginning third of the book wallowing in professor Lee's painful reminiscence of the past, wherein he met and fell in love with his first wife Aileen (who happened to be married to a friend of his, and pregnant to boot), and she separated from her husband and then lost custody of the baby due to some immoral, if not strictly illegal, machinations by her ex-husband.

What should be a quickening pace is instead bogged down again and again by the intermittent forays into the past. And the author's writing style doesn't help. There's page long paragraphs composed of only one or two sentences, meandering but important, and frequently I would be finish a paragraph only to find I had read none of it, and have to return, unhappily, to follow more closely.  I'm sure no author is boo-hooing that their readers have to *gasp* actually focus on reading their books, but again, it makes the reading experience slow, repetitive, and unpleasant, which shouldn't be the case for a book as well written as this one.

If you don't understand what I mean, here's a sample:

But now that she was pregnant, the little dumb show, Gaither's penning of his letters in the kitchen where she would observe him and his cheerful reading of the paltry responses, had come to an end. It was true that she had mostly been in bed, and that Gaither had gotten the mail from the box when he came home from school and heated chicken broth in the kitchen, and washed and dried the bowls afterward. But she could easily see him relocating his correspondence from the kitchen to the lamp table next to their bed, perhaps directing a superfluous inquiry to her prone form: "Aileen, what was the name of those beautiful flowers you planted? I'd like to tell Mother." She could easily see him having added the most recent card from his mother to the tray that he brought her each evening and expressively reading his mother's few words while she struggled to eat. But Gaither had done neither. She knew that for him estrangement from his parents was painful, both for how unwanted a condition it was for himself and for the distress he assumed it caused her. She couldn't disabuse him of this latter notion without insulting him further, but the truth was that his estrangement from his parents did not upset her at all. It was easier for her than she imagined the opposite would have been: their pious embrace of her as a daughter, correspondence duties of her own, treks to their sterile home on Christian holidays. All of it intensifying unimaginably after a child was born. Gaither had once compared her, with what seemed to be uneasy admiration, to Athena sprung unsentimentally from Zeus' thigh, or maybe out of his head: neither of them could exactly remember the story. But Gaither's meaning had been clear, that even as a child Aileen was essentially parentless. Aileen's parents had been learned, mildly crusading, moderately well-off and extremely late-breeding; though when they finally had children, they somehow had six, of which Aileen was the last. Aileen's childhood had taken place in the time after her parents had acquired housekeepers and assumed an emeritus status, so that passionate attachment to that primal relation of parents to child and measuring of all subsequent relations against it were foreign to her. What she had were her siblings, numerous enough that they composed more a loose federation than a snug family. Some she had always shared an easy sympathy with, and others were so much older she'd hardly known them at all. With no one did she have an exceptional bond, as she might have if there had been fewer of them overall.

That is a single paragraph.

The book presents some interesting questions, which I believe are also used in her Trust Exercise book: when we inhabit a character's head, how can we trust what they're telling us?  You see it here, when, at the very end of the book, Aileen's sister tells Lee that his terrible temper is the reason Aileen was scared of him. We see some other characters allude to fights he had about various work issues - granting tenure, etc, but because Lee doesn't think he has a temper, these are all presented as harmless disagreements with colleagues. And there's certainly space for that to be believable, even as we see how little responsibility Lee takes for his other cantankerous activity.

I mean, any man who watches his wife lose her infant child and takes not a single step to prevent it or console her (because he doesn't want to raise another man's child) is certainly trash, and I am glad that he acknowledges in the end, that he is responsible for the destruction of his marriage, not his wife's ex-husband or anybody else, but it does feel unsatisfactory that there's no real follow up from this. Aileen's dead, so there's no resolution there. Their daughter, Esther, appears only at the close, and we don't get any conversation or resolution with her. And while we might assume that Lee has undergone real change, since he accepts and isn't an asshole when Aileen's long lost son appears on his doorstep, again, we get a single introductory conversation and not much more, between the two of them.

While the primary focus is on Lee's relationships and emotional withering, there's also the Unabomber plot in the background! Choi makes the interesting choice to fictionalize a different bomber who (it turns out) knows Lee personally. I suppose it would have to be plotted this way, since otherwise Lee wouldn't become "A Person of Interest" and wouldn't have his life so disrupted that he effects real change - well, except that I do think that this could have been done without actually making him instrumental in catching the bomber, which begins to tread into that thriller territory we've been kept so assiduously away from.  It seemed to me that the great upheaval for Lee was the realization that his former friend, and wife's ex-husband, Gaither, was not the architect of all his sorrows, as he'd been so used to presuming, for the last thirty years or so. And so the idea that the bomber could have been someone else, someone who, again, from Lee's biased perspective, had everything, this idea could have affected Lee without the whole going-to-Idaho-at-the-bomber's-invitation-and-getting-inserted-into-an-FBI-operation-while-a-tangential-civilian.

37: Two Books With The Same Title

The Light Pirate

The Light Pirate

By Lily Brooks-Dalton

Set in the near future, this hopeful story of survival and resilience follows Wanda—a luminous child born out of a devastating hurricane—as she navigates a rapidly changing world.

Florida is slipping away. As devastating weather patterns and rising sea levels wreak gradual havoc on the state’s infrastructure, a powerful hurricane approaches a small town on the southeastern coast. Kirby Lowe, an electrical line worker, his pregnant wife, Frida, and their two sons, Flip and Lucas, prepare for the worst. When the boys go missing just before the hurricane hits, Kirby heads out into the high winds in search of his children. Left alone, Frida goes into premature labor and gives birth to an unusual child, Wanda, whom she names after the catastrophic storm that ushers her into a society closer to collapse than ever before.

As Florida continues to unravel, Wanda grows. Moving from childhood to adulthood, adapting not only to the changing landscape, but also to the people who stayed behind in a place abandoned by civilization, Wanda loses family, gains community, and ultimately, seeks adventure, love, and purpose in a place remade by nature.

Told in four parts—power, water, light, and time— The Light Pirate mirrors the rhythms of the elements and the sometimes quick, sometimes slow dissolution of the world as we know it. It is a meditation on the changes we would rather not see, the future we would rather not greet, and a call back to the beauty and violence of an untamable wilderness.

For a book about the end of the world, The Light Pirate is surprisingly peaceful. We follow the story of Wanda, from birth to death, in four sections, Power, Water, Light and Time. There is drastic upheaval, deaths, births, storms, fires, magic, murder and the loss of every marker of modern life, but the story uses a dreamy, semi-distant approach to these crises, so at no point does it feel as overwhelming as it otherwise might. 

In the first section, Power, yet another hurricane blows through a Florida that looks only a little more hard worn than the one we know today, devastating one particular family and resulting in the birth of a girl with an effervescent power. This is the most visceral and urgent section, describing a single 24 hour period, and the only one (with the exception of the epilogue) which is told linearly. With each subsequent section, we get more and more emotionally distant from the story.

In Water, ten years later, it is the last gasp of civilization, as Florida succumbs to nature, and the family is torn asunder again. 

Light, another ten or twenty years along, is the longest section, as it flits back and forth between the present, when Wanda finds potential new companionship, and fills in the gaps of the past, the final severing between Florida and the outside world, the loss of their home, and the loss of Wanda's mentor and mother figure. Time, which is a mere single chapter long, is the capstone to Wanda's arc and a look into what appears, finally, to be a stable and hopeful future. 

Although we dwell in detail on the decimation of life and property through the book, we spend no time at all on the creation of a new community which can survive the changes world. Perhaps that is why the ending appears optimistic: we don't wallow in the drudgery, the sheer effort of living, that even the best commune could offer under such circumstances. Whereas we hear in detail about the creeping encroachment of water and the sweat and pain of finding shelter in a world so blasted that it's impossible to be out in the daytime, we get to gloss over things like the return to a human existence where 50% of kids don't survive to their first birthday. (Something which was on the forefront of my mind, since Light introduces two women, one of whom must have had a kid since the loss of infrastructure, and one whom is imminently anticipating giving birth. As a reader, I'm immediately projecting the death of the mother and/or baby, which isn't, I assume, the tone the author was going for).

I don't think the epilogue is intended as trickery, I do think the author wants to offer hope. I just find myself cynical after seeing how far down the road we've already brought ourselves, with no expected reversal in sight. The last year has brought not only the inland mountain flooding in North Carolina, and the headlining wildfires of Los Angeles, but, in an eerily prescient twist, the widespread loss of electricity to the island or Puerto Rico on New Years Eve, due to deteriorating infrastructure. It's simultaneously hard to imagine a future in which the country simply abandons entire states (as tempting as the idea sounds, for other reasons), and yet hard to deny that seems overwhelmingly difficult to reverse - if we even had agreement on the whys and hows (and ifs!) it should be.

The depressing subject matter notwithstanding, it's a little treasure of a book. The descriptions of nature, the glimpses into a life which is both beyond comprehension yet all too real, the way the characters find the strength to keep going and continue making connections in spite of the odds. The primary relationship is between Wanda and Phyllis, an older neighbor, who eventually takes Wanda under her wing and gives her the tools (literally and figuratively) to survive. I mentioned this before, but aside from the first section, the entire book feels dreamlike and drifting, letting the atmosphere seep into the story at every level.

The Light Pirate seems to say both that the destruction of civilization is inevitable, and that we must adapt to the world, instead of adapting the world to us, if we wish to survive. I sure hope it's wrong. 

 

 

49: A Dystopian Book With A Happy Ending

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Set in during the Roaring Twenties, this masterful story by F. Scott Fitzgerald is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a young man who moves to Long Island and attempts to learn the bond business in New York City after the war. There, he co-mingles on Long Island with his affluent and wealthy socialite cousin Daisy Buchanan, her brute of a husband Tom, and friend Jordan Baker.

Nick's new residence sits across the bay from Daisy and Tom's house, and right next to a mysterious mansion. He begins to hear rumors of an infamous man named Gatsby who resides there. Eventually, when Gatsby learns of Nick's ties to Daisy, he extends Nick an invitation to one of his lavish parties. Gatsby's plan to court Daisy, in an attempt to revive a previous love affair, eventually bubbles to the surface and tragedy ensues.

Brief aside: Do you know how hard it is to find a reasonable description of a so-called "classic" book? Everyone just describes the accolades rather than the plot. c.f. "Amidst extravagant parties and societal excess, Fitzgerald weaves a narrative of love, betrayal, and the dark undercurrents of the Jazz Age. Through vivid prose and complex characters, the novel explores themes of disillusionment, class divide, and the relentless pursuit of an idealized past. With its timeless exploration of human desires and the consequences of unchecked ambition, ""The Great Gatsby"" remains a literary masterpiece that resonates across generations." blah blah blah.

 

As a counterpoint though, my library had this to say about the book's description, transcribed in its entirety: 

 

"Nick Carraway meets Jay Gatsby, a young millionaire with shady business connections and who is love with Daisy Buchanan, Nick's cousin." 

 

I love that this basically says: "We all know you're going to read this book regardless of what it's about, let's not pretend we have to intrigue you with jacket copy."

***

Ah, one of those classics that was written by men about the American Dream in which everything is a symbol and life is meaningless! Women are unfathomable, men are noble, or brutes, or dogs, and we all learn a Very Important Lesson, like an afternoon tv special. 

I liked the first chapter, but as we get introduced to all the characters, none of them, or it, appealed, so that by the end, Daisy's decision to stay with Tom was as boring to me as what color dress she planned to wear, and Jay's death didn't feel tragic so much as exhausting.  

As Nick, the narrator says, they're all terrible people, and not even in interesting ways. They're terrible in terribly boring ways. I can understand why the book was a failure when it came out, and why it became popular by soldiers in WWII: it appeals to a man's sense of thinking they're deeper and more philosophical than they are. It's easy enough for most people to read and understand while giving the impression of importance and intelligence when you tell people you've read it.

It's short enough to get through quickly, a mark in its favor. I was struck by how literate it was. Just the style and vocabulary that would have commonplace in the 1920s feels ornate and antiquated now, even though it would be hard to point to any one sentence and say it couldn't have been written today. It does make you feel that people, on the whole, are becoming much stupider.

 

There's a musing cadence to the story which infuriated me. Not only the dreaded navel-gazing but the absolute mush of a main character. There's absolutely no point to Nick at all, may as well have had an omniscient narrator. For all he complains about the wealthy, careless folks he meets here, he has absolutely no curiosity about any of the non-white or non-wealthy characters.

I suppose I'm glad to have read it, as now I never will have to again.  

April 9, 2025 

edited to add:

 

Since, apparently, it is also the 100th anniversary of its publication (which I was not aware of when I chose to read it, but how serendipitous!) there's a few articles being published about it. I appreciate the other perspectives and thoughts as well.  I found the theory, newly re-circulating, that Gatsby can be read as a black man passing as white to be intriguing, adding another layer of interest and subtext to the primary story. I also saw a lot of people comparing it to The White Lotus, as today's version of the rich and careless American.  I found that interesting, since I've enjoyed The White Lotus but my watch experience bears out the same lack of patience I had for the characters in The Great Gatsby: without fail, I will watch the first several episodes with interest, then find myself getting bored halfway through the season. I hate not to know what happens though, so I'll read spoilers and become interested enough to go back and watch the last episodes for the relevant story-lines and fast-forward through everything else. So at least I'm consistent.

39: A Classic You've Never Read

The Briar Club

The Briar Club

By Kate Quinn

Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?

I've had this on my hold list for probably seven or eight months at least, patiently waiting my turn. At this point, Kate Quinn is now one of those authors of whom each new release will be guaranteed a spot on my reading agenda.  Although the blurb didn't exactly grab me - a far cry from her books on WWII spies, codebreakers, and other assorted heroines - it still ended up carrying her trademark: secrets, women, and yes, ultimately, spies.  

It's also stuffed full with a panoply of 50s historical references and side plots. There's almost too much going on, between the birth control pill, gangsters, segregation, the Korean War, modern art, the All American Women's Baseball League, gay rights, and the ever looming spectre of McCarthyism. Not to mention the recipes, for everything from swedish meatballs to honey cake. Quinn does post a lengthy author's note at the end describing some of the real stories behind her fictional ones. The breadth of the historical detail is astonishing at times - there's a scene involving a real dessert called Candle Salad that makes you wonder how Quinn managed to find such an offbeat but perfectly apropos recipe. The only one I wasn't at least a little familiar with was the invasion of Texas, Operation Longhorn, which is both so insane that it's hard to believe it's just a historical footnote now as well as perfectly believable given how nuts everyone else was.

The book is a little bit chunkier than her others: the framing structure involves a murder (or, at least, a dead body) and the police investigation of a Washington D.C. boarding house full of women. Most of it though, is lengthy chapters chronologically preceding and leading up to the murder, each focusing on the key characters and tenants of the house in turn: Pete, the landlord's son, Nora, the secretary and gangster's moll, Bea, the baseball player, Fliss, the English nurse drowning in motherhood, Reka, the former artist who narrowly escaped Germany only to find the American Dream not all it was promised, Claire, the gay pinup girl, and Grace, whose entrance starts the book, and who flits in and out of the others lives in a cross between a fairy godmother and puppet master.

There's certainly some things which, if you're familiar enough with the period (or, ahem, some relevant popular entertainment about the period) come as not-very-surprising surprises and the book itself feels much slower paced than her others, which is to be expected since it takes place over four and a half years. I assume Quinn kept the timeline that way for both historical accuracy as well as to give the relationships time to feel genuine growth, but it does make some things feel like they're being artificially set back, in order to have all the players at the table for the denouement (i.e. Nora reuniting with her boyfriend and Sid's planned escape both get delayed YEARS so they're all at the fatal dinner, plot wise). Those issues aside though, the book doesn't feel very slow, since each chapter concerns a mini crisis of sorts for its respective narrator. It would almost fit the series of interconnected stories prompt. I couldn't not use The Briar Club here though - the blurb literally mentions the unlikely friendships!

It also managed to make me feel somewhat optimistic about how things have trended in the US lately: if we can manage to get through all the shit the 50s pulled, perhaps there's hope for us as well. Overall, it was an enjoyable, if not necessarily demanding, read. I will continue to put my reading trust in Quinn. In fact, I have my eye on one of her older books to fill another prompt.

 

28: A Book That Features An Unlikely Friendship

The Feast of the Goat

The Feast of the Goat

By Mario Vargas Llosa

Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million. Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own.

You can tell the book is written by an expert. Despite the heavy (and at times excruciating - the rape of a pre-teen seems mild in comparison to some of the horrors described) material you are kept rapt, pressing on to the inevitable conclusion. The book deals in turn with three storylines: Urania, a woman returning to the country after 35 years, who comes to reckon with the past and her family's involvement with the regime (wholly invented by Vargas Llosa), a collection of collaborationists, traitors and conspirators, waiting to assassinate the dictator (real people fictionalized), and the dictator himself, Trujillo, on what will become the last day of his life (also, obviously real but fictionalized). There's multiple flashbacks in each story-line and, especially in Urania's story-line, the text will switch abruptly between present and past conversations with no noticeable delineation. This is used more heavily in the later chapters, when we have a better understanding of all the players and plots, but it's still not an easy book to read.

Since it's not entirely fictional, there's a need to include certain prominent figures, even though it can complicate and confuse the reader. There's seven conspirators waiting for the car, and more who are waiting in the wings. There's multiple government officials and hangers on. All of these people are known to each other and in some cases are brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews. The sections involving Urania's story are relatively contained in comparison: her, her father, aunt, cousins, and a nurse, all of whom are made up, are the only characters in the present. Although I managed to keep most of the large cast straight, I did struggle, particularly in the last few chapters, at the culmination of the assassination, when the scope of the plan widened and the ripple effects began to be seen.

It's also interesting to note that although the beginning of the book takes each of the three story-lines in turn, around chapter 19, when we leave Urania waiting to be delivered to the belly of the beast, several chapters in a row focus more on the immediate and long term period after the assassination, and Vargas Llosa instead slots in the finale to Urania's story as the very last chapter. It's both out of order and interestingly, Urania's last chapter follows the "Balaguer chapter" which ends, somewhat optimistically, with the removal of the Trujillo family from the country and the pardoning of the living conspirators - they literally walk into Balaguer's open, welcoming arms. Balaguer's chapter is also the last chronological moment before Urania comes back to the country 35 years later, which is the start of the book. As tempting as it might have been to leave it at Balaguer, Vargas Llosa instead returns us back to the scene of one of Trujillo's final, personal, petty crimes (albeit wholly fictional one), and reminds us that no matter the events to follow, the effect of the regime cannot and should be be forgotten - and in the character of Urania, physically unable to forget, as others in the book appear to have done. 

I think Vargas Llosa does an incredible job of setting us in the time and place, and in differentiating between the various narrators, which is something that can be hard for authors to do. Here, it's immediately apparent when Urania or Trujillo is narrating, although some of the assassins are not as easily distinguishable from each other. Although we know what happens to Trujillo (he was in fact, assassinated in May 1961) you anticipate the moment as a reader with some relief of anxiety and joy. After so much detail about the degradation and horrors that Trujillo presided over, you want Trujillo to be done, you want the assassins to succeed, and you know (as someone with access to Wikipedia) that they do. I don't know whether Vargas Llosa assumes knowledge of the outcome on the reader's part. Surely, as it become more and more distant past - it's already been 23 years since the book was first published - fewer and fewer readers can be expected to be familiar with what happens next. Certainly I didn't know, and didn't "spoil" myself. This section was the hardest for me to read, perhaps because it was so immediate, perhaps because it seemed so unjust for an action which should have been celebrated (and in fact was, if only they could have lived long enough to see it).  History is written by the victors.

In the end, I am left with only two questions, both of which come from Urania's fictional story-line, and which therefore the author has even more deliberately decided not to address overtly: Who hid the memo (if, in fact it was deliberately hidden) from Trujillo about Urania's departure? One reviewer attributes the memo's disappearance to Balaguer as a nod that no action of Balaguer is ever unconsidered, and states that it is a demonstration of Vargas Llosa's appreciation for him as a politician, by showing Balaguer's compassion in that (completely fictional) moment. That's a compelling argument. I did think that Balaguer, of all the characters, was probably the hardest to write about, given his outsized importance to the country later, and the fact that, at the time the book was written, he was still living and still actively involved in politics, despite his age and health. It is hard to judge the legacy of a living person.

My second question was about the ostracization of Cabral in the first place. Was it just a loyalty test, as Trujillo seems to allude to in one chapter, or was it designed with ulterior motives in mind? I also think it's interesting that Vargas Llosa so clearly lays out the torture and consequences for those in opposition to the regime in the later chapters. It adds more layers to Cabral's decision to pimp his daughter out, in his effort to appease the Generalissimo. There are real, and not imagined, consequences for angering that type of person.  In this case, the choice was fatal not only due to Trujillo's inability to perform and further angering him, but also being ultimately pointless given his assassination weeks later. But would there be a devil on the shoulder to say that, in the absence of that foresight, Cabral's choice was unreasonable? When you live in hell, what salve to conscience can you afford? "In this country, in one way or another, everyone had been, was, or would be part of the regime. 'The worst thing that can happen to a Dominican is to be intelligent or competent,' he had once heard Agustín Cabral say ...and the words had been etched in his mind: 'Because sooner or later Trujillo will call upon him to serve the regime, or his person, and when he calls, one is not permitted to say no.' Egghead was proof of this truth....As Estrella Sadhalá always said, the Goat had taken from people the sacred attribute given to them by God: their free will."

 It is possibly the best book I never want to read again.

 

21: A Book Where A Main Character Is A Policitician

 

When No One is Watching

When No One is Watching

By Alyssa Cole

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?

I struggled with this one - I'm not sure where exactly it's lacking, but it did feel lacking to me.  I didn't warm up the characters right away, or even at all.  They switch off viewpoints between Theo and Sydney and we're introduced to both as they're drunk/hungover and aimless.  Sydney is admittedly paranoid and kind of belligerent, Theo is a weird passive aggressive doormat.  Both have "secrets," which are kind of out of left field, albeit nothing too outre for the genre.  They're not really people I like spending time with, or feel empathetic towards.  So that's strike one.

Strike two is maybe the concept itself.  It's basically a "what if gentrification was actually a legit conspiracy to eliminate black people from a community (instead of simply being a convenient byproduct) and people were being murdered and experimented on" kind of concept.  Not a bad idea, per se, but... I don't know, there were thriller-ish elements - the weird cabbie, the drugged man, the fake meter reader - but we also spent a lot of time just rehashing basic history, i.e., the seizure of land from anyone non-white, if the land was valuable at that time, the racial policing, yada yada yada.  Like yeah, it's important for background, but it also slows down the pace a loooooot.

It's compared to Get Out in the description, but I feel like it's a less successful take on the genre. Maybe the idea just lends itself better to a theatrical presentation. Maybe it's because there's never really a point at which any white person (other than Theo and possibly Jenn/Jen) is even marginally suspected to be a good person? Like, forget microaggressions, it's pretty much just straight up aggression.  I think it loses some of the thriller feel here too, because we're not second guessing whether this is actually happening - it's actually happening, and it's not that subtle. Maybe if we spent all the narration with Sydney? Then Theo could have been a wild card, and added more uncertainty to the story. 

I liked the incorporation of the old folks into the "actually onto the villains' game the whole time" role, but feel like they were underused - again, with main characters like Sydney and Theo, I think bringing the old people in (and potentially putting them at risk, raising the stakes) would make you care more about the characters.  

I also appreciated how all of the MANY people Sydney and Theo killed (at least, like 5-10, right? I lost track at the rejuvenation meeting) were just elided over since the corporation took care of everything.  Really? How convenient. And convenient that both Sydney and Theo were like, cold blooded shooters. We spend all this time really laying the groundwork for how realistic a conspiracy this could be, and then blow it all up with the dumb-enough-to-use-a-neighborhood-chatroom-to-lay-bare-their-plots, plus don't get me started on all the Wild West shooting goin' on in them thar hospital.

What's weird to me is how many people downvoted it solely because of the language.  I mean, there were a lot of other issues besides the cursing, for sure.  It felt kind of messy.  I'm not big into Cole's other romance novels, so it might just be her style, but it fell flat to me.  Again, because the reader knows the corporation is behind all of it, but it takes so long for Sydney and Theo to catch up that we don't have a lot of time for unfolding the conspiracy.  It's pretty much: hey, everyone we interacted with in the book is a bad guy and they're having a meeting this Tuesday. Literally, even the lawyer for her mother is not merely lazy and uncaring (which would have still been fine for drama too! We need those uncaring bystanders and again - uncertainty builds tension!) but actively involved.  Sometimes it can be frustrating to get done with "the bad guy" only to find out they're only a small part of the bigger picture, and here's an even bigger and badder guy we never suspected, but this was frustrating too.  We never even catch a glimpse of the snake's head.

33: A Social-Horror Book

Dopesick

Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America

By Beth Macy

In this extraordinary work, Beth Macy takes us into the epicenter of a national drama that has unfolded over two decades. From the labs and marketing departments of big pharma to local doctor's offices; wealthy suburbs to distressed small communities in Central Appalachia; from distant cities to once-idyllic farm towns; the spread of opioid addiction follows a tortuous trajectory that illustrates how this crisis has persisted for so long and become so firmly entrenched. 

Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother's question-why her only son died-and comes away with a gripping, unputdownable story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy investigates the powerful forces that led America's doctors and patients to embrace a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. The unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death. 

Through unsparing, compelling, and unforgettably humane portraits of families and first responders determined to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows that one thing uniting Americans across geographic, partisan, and class lines is opioid drug abuse. But even in the midst of twin crises in drug abuse and healthcare, Macy finds reason to hope and ample signs of the spirit and tenacity that are helping the countless ordinary people ensnared by addiction build a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities.

I think that description is balderdash.  It's a much bleaker book than the blurb appears.  The "once idyllic" farm communities are actually coal mining areas, beset first by the terrible working conditions of the mines, and now by the even worse specter of no working conditions at all. Maybe they're scenic, but they were never idyllic.  There's also very little hope in the book.  Although there is greater recognition of opioids and laymen are more familiar with the dangers of Oxycontin, Macy doesn't seem to think the epidemic is slowing at all. I suppose it will burn itself out eventually, as fewer people get on the opioid track to begin with, but there's nothing promising real diversion from that track once began. 

I was wrapped up in the book; although it's fairly dense Macy manages to keep it pretty zippy and move things along.  The first section focuses on the pushed over-prescription of opioids for low-level issues, the incentives behind the American medical system for companies and individual doctors to upsell drugs and the gaps in oversight which let it happen (and the financial incentives to keep doing it this way). The second section is more about individuals who, once hooked for whatever reason, are now sliding deeper into addiction, and the third section was more about what options there are for diversion, rehab, prison, getting clean, etc. The third section felt the weakest, less focused and more self-insertion, as to what is or is not an appropriate way to treat people.  The whole fentanyl thing was also confusing - fentanyl is another opioid drug, but also, any amount included in heroin will kill you? Or is it just fake fentanyl? It felt like the topic was so big another book could have been written on it, so including just a little bit was like getting only one or two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. 

One criticism I will level is Macy's habit of introducing a character, diverting almost immediately onto another topic or segue, and then come back to the character.  It was annoying for several reasons: (a)  I couldn't keep everyone straight and that made it harder to connect who I'd already been reading about versus who was newly introduced (b) it felt like she was doing an injustice to their personal stories by leaving us on these sort of "cliffhanger" notes, like they weren't real people with heartbreaking problems, and (c) she'd sometime bring us in in the middle of an event, like an overdose, and I struggled to figure out if we'd read any background on these people or not.  Was I supposed to remember that they had been in fifth grade together? Whose mother was it that this person was relying on? Although honestly, it wasn't all that relevant, since basically anytime a mother was mentioned, they had an adult child who was addicted, and they were all helping out other parents and children.  No explanation was given as to why fathers were never involved.  Were these all single parent households? Did the fathers just not care about their children? Is any of that relevant to these kids' addiction stories? Who knows?

For all that I criticize, it is a good, engrossing, important read.  There needs to be more attention paid to the systemic problems pointed out in the book - the incentives to push drugs for profit instead of health, the bias towards jail instead of rehabilitation, the reluctance to commit resources or medicines to combat the problem, the idea that the addicted are somehow deficient, rather than victims. Although I certainly don't feel as sympathetic for teens who just took random medication at pill parties as those who were over-prescribed opiates by trusted physicians, I also don't think that anyone deserves to be reviled for a single bad decision, especially one when made at the height of peer pressure and immaturity. Like I said, it's a depressing read, but a worthwhile one. Hopefully it will help change minds and allow doors to open that create better results for the addicted than what we currently see.

31: A Book Featuring A Man-Made Disaster

 

We Are Okay

We Are Okay

By Nina LaCour

Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart.

I mostly picked this one because (a) reviews said it was short and (b) it was available at the library - and in fact had been on my TBR list for some time, even though I have no idea when or why I added it.  It's not something I would  normally go for, i.e., it has no plot, and concerns the emotional goings-on of a young teenager who mopes around after several of her family members die. 

It sounds kind of maudlin, but you know, in the way that teens really dig.  The author does a great job of not falling too deeply into that hole, despite the subject matter.  Yes, it does make you cry (even me, who hates sentimental teenagers and found families and other such wholesome activities, and even though I could feel myself starting to cry, and tried to will myself not to fall into the trap).  

It's a profoundly sad book.  The present storyline involves the narrator, Marin, planning for and receiving a visit from her old friend/ex-girlfriend Mabel, from California, during winter break. The past storyline, is pretty much what you think it will be from the outset, i.e., Marin graduates high school, starts getting involved with Mabel, and then her grandfather, with whom Marin has grown up after her mother died surfing, basically commits suicide by walking out to sea, leaving her to find out that he was hoarding all of her mother's memories.  This upsets her, leaving her to flee California like she's wanted for a felony, hence her current hermit-like cocoon at school in New York.  

Mabel's visit gets her to open up, grieve, talk, and begin planning how to exist again, rather than just remain in stasis.  It is, as I mentioned, very light on plot, very heavy on character drama.  The romance with Mabel is more wistful and in the past than an active relationship.  This is one of those books where you kind of read them for the catharsis jolt you get.  Does it feel weird and manipulative? Yes.  Does it prevent you from crying? No. I knew what was coming and I still cried.  

So, is it a good book? It's well written, and contains a decent enough story.  It's a sweet story, and no one is really the villain.  Mabel comes across as inhumanly patient, but aside from that, it's decently realistic, I guess.  For a YA novel.  There was a phase of my life that this would have hit all those synapses, but I'm a little more jaded and less wallow-y now.  I'd still recommend it to any teen girl.

05: A Sapphic Book

 

 

 

Trail of Lightning

Trail of Lightning

By Rebecca Roanhorse

While most of the world has drowned beneath the sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse, Dinétah (formerly the Navajo reservation) has been reborn. The gods and heroes of legend walk the land, but so do monsters—and it is up to one young woman to unravel the mysteries of the past before they destroy the future.

Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine.

Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology.

As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive.

Welcome to the Sixth World.

I had this on my list for SO LONG, and I was excited to read it, I swear, but then I read some mishegas about the author being decried as appropriating Navajo culture and mashing things together, which s a shame, since it doesn't affect the quality of the book, but did, perhaps undeservedly, dampen my enthusiasm. I would describe it as akin to Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden series, in tone and style, and I also fell off that series after just a few books, so who knows but that I wouldn't have gone much further anyway.  

The idea is still very cool, and it sounds like the second book explores the Big Water disaster that resulted in the setting, which sounds cool, but execution-wise, the pieces just didn't gel for me.  It may have been my fault, for assuming, for example, that Neizghání was like a mentor/father figure to her (since he found her at age 16 and taught her how to fight monsters), so the incorporation of her being in love with him and being heartbroken at his departure was weird and never gained my sympathy.  Maybe the first book should have been her fighting monsters with Neizghání, and the ending being his departure.  That seems like it would have had a lot more emotional resonance (plus maybe Coyote's beef with Neizghání would have made more sense). 

Here's an early example: Maggie is sent off to track down a monster which has abducted a little girl.  She finds the monster, but the girl is too far gone to save.  She brings back the girl's head for the family, but then just drops it off at the front of the compound, so we never see the family's reaction to either (a) her "rescue" or (b) their child's head. It's like we have to rush along to the next plot point so fast that we don't have time to explore Maggie's life or her interactions with people.  We've lost out on building that connection.

And I couldn't figure out why she ever trusted Coyote, since she says in the beginning that he's tricked her before.  Without actually knowing their background and previous interactions, her conversations with him just felt like I was missing a bunch of context and subtext. I still don't understand what the point of Coyote's mission to Canyon de Chelly was in the first place.  Was that supposed to lead her to Neizghání sooner?

And I don't get why Kai's death was necessary or useful.  Perhaps there's some part of Navajo lore that would have explained it to me, but why would she assume that Kai would be reborn? Or that Tah would be brought back because of Kai's death?

I really liked the monster hunting at the beginning - the trade sequence, the desperation of the locals and the lost little girl.  But it starts to feel a little underbaked soon after she meets up with Kai.   Without the relationship with either Neizghání or Tah, there's very little emotional underpinning here.  When I should be anticipating her fight with Neizghání with dread, all I feel is confusion that she ever agreed in the first place and disdain for her choices (especially since it's "to the death" and Neizghání... can't... die... right?).  I mean, even if we accept that they had a lover-quality relationship, him leaving her spurs her on in a fight to the death in a cage match? Girl, look at your life. 

I just couldn't get into Maggie's head or heart enough to ride along with her decisions or feelings. It's like listening to a friend who constantly makes bad choices, and eventually you get impatient that you're still hearing this hard luck story all over again. I like the setting, I like the background, I like the details, but the characters lacked depth and the book lacked an emotional hook, for me. 

I don't think I'll be getting the next book in the series. This is certainly more of an episodic series than her other, so the plots are all pretty well tied off, even though we're waiting on Kai's rebirth and there's a looming threat of Neizghání breaking out of the hoops.  But I just didn't want to spend more time with Maggie or the other characters.  

39: An #OwnVoices SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) Book

Fevered Star

Fevered Star

By Rebecca Roanhorse

The great city of Tova is shattered. The sun is held within the smothering grip of the Crow God’s eclipse, but a comet that marks the death of a ruler and heralds the rise of a new order is imminent.

The Meridian: a land where magic has been codified and the worship of gods suppressed. How do you live when legends come to life, and the faith you had is rewarded?

As sea captain Xiala is swept up in the chaos and currents of change, she finds an unexpected ally in the former Priest of Knives. For the Clan Matriarchs of Tova, tense alliances form as far-flung enemies gather and the war in the heavens is reflected upon the earth.

And for Serapio and Naranpa, both now living avatars, the struggle for free will and personhood in the face of destiny rages. How will Serapio stay human when he is steeped in prophecy and surrounded by those who desire only his power? Is there a future for Naranpa in a transformed Tova without her total destruction?

So, I was pretty jazzed about the first book in the series, Black Sun, yes?  But I'm struggling with Fevered Star because the same issues I had with Black Sun? I have all over again with Fevered Star. Mainly, Fevered Star has all the same problems of too much build up, not enough release.  Both books have various deaths and betrayals and stuff, and there's a clash between gods to keep the readers busy, but it still feels a lot like place-setting.  

Let's recap, since I guess I'm committing to the next book in the series.  Serapio lives (this is apparently Not Part Of The Plan, which is uh, news to me.  Guess my last recap should have been more detailed), and he winds up falling with Okoa and Carrion Crow, before getting overwhelmed by zealots, disbursing himself into birds, and then basically biding time until he can confront Naranpa again. 

Naranpa is also alive (not a surprise, thanks recap!) and comes to in the crypts over at Coyote's Maw. There's some back and forth with her brother, but eventually he convinces her to put herself out there as the Coyote Matron (he does this by promising on her behalf, without talking to her about it first, and then when she says no, his punishment consists of thorns through his dick, which I think is totally unnecessary. Surely there was another way to arrive at this plot point).  She does, and also finds new powers as the actual sun god avatar, and ends up confronting Serapio and telling him instead of trying to kill each other, he needs to unite the whole city to save it from the other enemies, while she goes to learn more about her new god powers, which include turning into a big bird. Oh, and her brother dies, and Naranpa makes his ex-girlfriend the new Coyote Matron.

Xiala wanders around trying to find Serapio, once she realizes he's alive, and ends up falling in, semi-accidentally, with Iktan (who is also alive, but that's only a surprise to some people, I think). Iktan is spying on Carrion Crow when we meet him (I guess he had a sub in at the great deathening, and he's mad that Naranpa "died" so he wants revenge or something) but he and Xiala quickly fall in with a Golden Eagle contingent marching around on the plains.  Xiala gets landsick, the Golden Eagle commander lies to Iktan about Naranpa being alive, and we find out that Xiala left Teek because she thought she killed her mother who (in a surprise to Xiala but definitely not to the readers) is not dead, but in fact shows up in the third act at Hokaia as the queen of Teek (even though they don't have queens, just go with it).  Her mom claps her in irons to take her back to Teek.  Note: I am not entirely sure how this is justified, since the murder she thought she committed clearly wasn't. So what crime was she guilty of? Unclear.  Also, I'm lovin' all these people who are alive when they're not supposed to be.  It's thrilling!

Anyway, also converging on Hokaia is Balam and a contingent from Cuecola.  Now Balam is the plotting one, I guess he set up the Serapio thing to... make Tova vulnerable? And then he was also planning to like, take over the world? All I know is that he's devious and plotting, and chewing on god parts so he can dreamwalk, and he's both committed to another politician that he's going to raze Teek, while also promising to Xiala he'll get her back on a ship if she'll be his spy on the inside.  I assume he did not tell her what happened to his last spy (tortured).  Anyway, Hokaia is where all these random factions are meeting up, Golden Eagle, the Teek contingent, the Cuecola plotters and the new ladies leading Hokaia, after an internal coup. Again, I'm not really sure what everyone's initial plans were or what they're all trying to accomplish now, but I like the energy! 

Oh and Okoa: he fiddle faddles around, feeling bad for himself, torn about helping Serapio (who leads the zealot crows) versus his sister, who leads the normal crows, and then he finds out who in Carrion Crow betrayed his mother but that person is like, immediately murdered, so it's not really a big thing.

Again - we're doing a lot of moving people around with not a lot of results here.  There's machinations out the wazoo, but very little payoff.   The stuff I understood the most, i.e., the attempted coup by Golden Eagle, the clash with the Carrion Crow zealots, all the Tova stuff basically, which is the whole first book, turned out to be sort of pointless, since all the main action now centers around the players meeting in Hokaia.  It's honestly frustrating, not to mention that the MAP is COMPLETELY USELESS.  I have always taken issue with the way Tova, an ostensible inland river city, is made of up islands that are like, perpendicular to each other, not to mention all the mentions of canyons and bridges and borders between zones, which are NOT on the map, and now Naranpa can get from the Maw into the celestial tower, which is three zones over, go through a bunch of books in the library, confront Serapio and get back in nine hours, total??? Is this town like, a town for ants? Irrelevant tangent, sorry, but anyway, we get outside of Tova and the first place we go is NORTH, which is nowhere to be found. Like sure, it's boring and doesn't really matter, but seriously, if you make a map, you need to put the places on it where your characters go!  

So this whole thing is actually pretty frustrating.  That being said, as I mentioned before, I am committed and planning to read the next one, but Roanhorse better start resolving threads, if not outright finishing the series, or I may find myself falling off. This is an exciting world, but my patience is not limitless.  There's no single character that I'm hooked by, so the book itself has to hook me. Let's see if she can stick the landing. 

More map rants: Why is Tova so far upriver? Why aren't the big towns at the deltas, for both Tova and Hokaia? How big is this world supposed to be? It's winter in Tova while it's spring in Hokaia, and apparently Teek is warm all the time, but like, Tova and Hokaia look like they're at the same latitude. I know I was pretty pissed about The Cartographers, but their initial idea to do a bunch of fantasy maps like real places and vice versa was super cool. I wish Fevered Star had a realistic map. 

03: A Book About or Set In A Non-Patriarchal Society