RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Three

This is a continuation of the topic RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Two.

This topic was continued by RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Four.

TalkClub Read 2024

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1RidgewayGirl
Edited: May 25, 5:51 pm

My year of reading what I want, when I want to is picking up nicely. It is easier to pick books when there's a small list of books to read right away, but I'm getting a feel for unrestricted reading. Let's see if I can keep it up.

2RidgewayGirl
Edited: Sep 27, 4:12 pm

Currently Reading

Recently Read

Books Acquired

3RidgewayGirl
Edited: May 25, 5:54 pm

First Quarter Reading

January

1. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
2. The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino, translated from the Japanese by Giles Murray
3. Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women by Mary Rechner
4. Blackouts by Justin Torres
5. Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
6. Cold People by Tom Rob Smith
7. Go as a River by Shelley Read
8. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
9. Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
10. Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon
11. One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall
12. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
13. My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

February

1. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
2. The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo
3. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
4. Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
5. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
6. The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
7. Absolution by Alice McDermott
8. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

March

1. Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
2. Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett
3. The Hunter by Tana French
4. American Mermaid by Julia Langbein
5. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
6. S. by Doug Dorst
7. So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
8. From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata
9. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams by Ellen Gilchrist
10. The Wind Knows My Name by Isabelle Allende, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

4RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jul 1, 4:40 pm

Second Quarter Reading

April

1. The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones
2. Trondheim by Cormac James
3. Hard Girls by J. Robert Lennon
4. The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas
5. Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice
6. Real Americans by Rachel Khong
7. The Disappeared: Stories by Andrew Porter

May

1. The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell
2. Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp
3. All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby
4. Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde edited by Bregje Gerritse
5. People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated from the Javanese by Tiffany Tsao
6. King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich
7. Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan
8. We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons
9. Don't You Forget About Me by Mhairi McFarlane
10. Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
11. First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger

June

1. Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton
2. Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry by Christine Sneed
3. Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić
4. James by Percival Everett
5. Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara
6. Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore
7. The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey
8. Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung
9. Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
10. The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma
11. Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
12. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri

5RidgewayGirl
Edited: Sep 25, 2:24 pm

Third Quarter Reading

July

1. The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey
2. North Woods by Daniel Mason
3. The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark
4. Shanghai by Joseph Kanon
5. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
6. You Like it Darker: Stories by Stephen King
7. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
8. Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
9. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
10. Clear by Carys Davies

August

1. The Wedding People by Alison Espach
2. All Fours by Miranda July
3. The Wake-Up Call by Beth O'Leary
4. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
5. Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
6. Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go by Cleo Qian
7. The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
8. Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez

September

1. The Silence of the Rain by L. A. Garcia-Roza, translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser
2. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
3. Highway Thirteen: Stories by Fiona McFarlane
4. Liars by Sarah Manguso
5. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
6. Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories by Janice Deal
7. The Coast Road by Alan Murrin

11RidgewayGirl
May 25, 5:49 pm

My old thread was getting long, so here's a fresh, short one. Let's go read some books and then talk about them.

12kac522
May 25, 8:31 pm

>1 RidgewayGirl: OMG! You mean I can blame my mother (RIP) for all the piles of books around here???

13BLBera
May 25, 8:51 pm

Happy new thread, Kay. >1 RidgewayGirl: I love it!

14RidgewayGirl
May 25, 10:35 pm

>12 kac522: She's getting to them!

>13 BLBera: I find that cartoon very comforting. I will get to read ALL the books.

15labfs39
May 26, 7:21 am

>14 RidgewayGirl: I find that cartoon very comforting. Me too. And I love that the ghost's library card continues to work. Jackpot!

16dudes22
May 26, 5:21 pm

Happy New Thread, Kay. I love that cartoon! I'm hoping it applies to my quilting projects too.

17RidgewayGirl
May 26, 5:32 pm

>15 labfs39: & >16 dudes22: It does make a good argument for continuing to add to the book pile. I'm assuming the ghost uses the self-checkout.

18RidgewayGirl
May 26, 6:25 pm

In Memory Piece, three Chinese-American girls meet in weekend language school in the nineties. As the years pass, one becomes an artist, one a tech entrepreneur and one a community activist, but they continue to move in and out of each others lives, through the present and into the future.

I was really looking forward to this book. I enjoyed Lisa Ko's debut novel, The Leavers and anticipated that her vision of these women's lives in the future and the world they inhabit would be imaginative and thought-provoking. The first half of the book is excellent, although I was far more interested in Giselle's development as an artist than Jackie's involvement in a tech start-up, and Ellen's life taking over a derelict building and starting a community garden was given less space. Each woman finds their own path, two with substantial buy-in from billionaires. The first part of the novel is the strongest, depicting New York in the nineties, with each woman showing a different aspect of life in that time, from neighbors fighting gentrification to the long hours demanded of tech workers.

The final half of the novel, where Ko takes her characters into the future, is the weakest part of this book. The world she depicts here is that of a thousand other dystopian novels, a disappointment after the inventiveness of the first half of the book. That genre, with its future world basically the same across the board, is very popular and her version of it will no doubt be interesting to many readers, but I was bored. The first half, however, was very good.

19kjuliff
May 26, 7:07 pm

>18 RidgewayGirl: it’s so dissatisfying when you get toward the end of a very good book and it ends in a boring fashion. Much worse than if you dislike what happens in the ending. I really loved The Woman from Uruguay but it fizzled toward the end. It was an ok ending but just not up to the standard of the first 80% of the book.

20RidgewayGirl
May 26, 8:51 pm

>19 kjuliff: I'm sure it's hard to end a book well, but a disappointing ending is hard to overcome, while I've read books that redeemed themselves in the second half and I remember those much more fondly.

21RidgewayGirl
May 29, 6:35 pm

Lilly Dancyger is the coolest girl you'll encounter, or at least the coolest girl that I've heard about. I don't think girls that cool could have existed in the suburban Scottsdale high school I went to, stuck as it was in a land of malls and residential areas. Dancyger was living in New York, where she was comfortably hanging out in dive bars at fourteen, something that probably couldn't happen in a place where you'd have to ask your mom for a ride. She may have dropped out of high school but she still managed to get a full ride to a private university; we don't inhabit the same universe. So when it began to dawn on me that while First Love: Essays on Friendship was about friendship, it was mostly about Lilly Dancyger, I was only mildly annoyed by the bait and switch.

Like most of us, Dancyger had intense friendships in childhood and in her teenage years and early twenties. She's good at capturing how intense those relationships can be and how they ebb and flow, so that the person you shared every thought with one year, is less important the next. There are several other topics addressed in this book, with grief being on of the most prevalent, including grief following a violent death. Dancyger is young and so there's a bit of stretching needed to make this memoir-in-essays work, with a friend writing embarrassingly complimentary segments in one essay. There's little universality here, these are essays about Lilly Dancyger, her life and her thoughts. I'm still looking for a book taking a look at friendship and the role friendship plays in our lives, but I did enjoy reading about Dancyger's life well enough.

22cindydavid4
May 29, 8:29 pm

>21 RidgewayGirl: ditto about our upbringing here in suburbia circa 1970 yes a very different way of life and dont like those bait and switches either but her life sounds interesting and Id like to read it:)

btw the last list of mabel beaumont is defintly about the roles that friendship plays in our lives. I just finished and I now realize what people mean when they dont like being manipulated by an author. But it might be good for your search

23RidgewayGirl
Jun 1, 12:43 pm

>22 cindydavid4: She is worth reading, especially if you have ever idly wondered what a bohemian life in NYC could be like. I'd still like to see non-fiction about friendship and if that book is ever written, I will read it.

24mabith
Jun 4, 11:33 am

If you're looking for some good non-fiction about friendship, I'd highly recommend The Girls From Ames and Big Friendship.

25RidgewayGirl
Jun 4, 12:24 pm

>24 mabith: Thank you! I have an ARC of The Girls from Ames and it also fits my intention to read more about the Midwest.

26RidgewayGirl
Jun 4, 6:06 pm

"I learned from my late father that women should show generosity towards everyone. But there are two things I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine."

In Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki and translated by Polly Barton, Rika is a journalist working for a Newsmagazine in Tokyo, and she wants to eventually become the first woman editor in the newsroom, able to write her own articles. Work takes up all of her time; she has a boyfriend she sees on the infrequent occasions they both have the time and energy to spare and her meals are bento boxes or prepared food bought in convenience stores on her way home. Kajii is a convicted murderer who lured lonely businessmen to their deaths with her unctuous care and carefully prepared meals. She was a media sensation after her blog, which explained her philosophy on pleasing men and about her culinary experiences was discovered. Now that the initial media scrum has died down, Rika wants to interview her, hoping to produce something that will help her career, but it's not until she asks about a recipe that she finally gets Kajii's permission to visit. What follows is a sort of cat and mouse game, as Kajii's instructions send Rika on a journey that upends her relationship to food and has a ripple effect on her own relationships, including the one with her best friend, a woman who chose to step away from her career in the hopes of starting a family.

Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder does involve both food and murder, but this isn't a crime novel, or one that features recipes. Instead, it's a look at misogyny and fatphobia in Japan and how the expectations placed on women are ones they can never meet. Yuzuki takes her time with this story, using the space to illuminate the different impossible positions women are faced with. Expected to nurture and care sacrificially not just for their children, but also for their husbands, the skills they use to do so are seen as frivolous and unimportant. Expected to devote themselves fully to their jobs, they are constantly reminded that they need to find a husband and have children. While this portrayal of Japanese society is a stark one, there are plenty of similarities to life in western countries.

This novel makes a strong argument for paying attention to what we eat, to choose to make a simple meal over grabbing something pre-made, to learn to enjoy the process of creating something edible and to pay attention to the flavors. The interplay between three very different characters works so well here, leading two of them to find their own ways to exist that give them the strength to withstand the pressures put on them. I remained fascinated throughout the novel and eagerly await for more from this extraordinary author to be translated into English.

27rv1988
Jun 4, 11:32 pm

>26 RidgewayGirl: Great review. I felt much the same way. It is a very powerfully written book.

28RidgewayGirl
Jun 5, 12:24 am

>27 rv1988: You brought up an important point in your review, which I forgot entirely by the time I read Butter, about how Yuzuki based the book on a very real case. I am going to read about it and think about that.

29kidzdoc
Jun 5, 10:30 am

Great review of Butter, Kay!

30japaul22
Jun 5, 11:47 am

>26 RidgewayGirl: I've had a hard time connecting with many of the Japanese novels I've read, but this one sounds really interesting. I put myself on the library waitlist for it. Excellent review!

31FlorenceArt
Jun 5, 1:59 pm

>26 RidgewayGirl: I agree with the others that Butter sounds very interesting, and there is a French translation available. I have read very few contemporary Japanese novels and so I wishlisted this.

32RidgewayGirl
Jun 5, 2:22 pm

>29 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl!

>30 japaul22: I'm curious to find out what you make of it.

>31 FlorenceArt: I suspect you may have access to more Japanese novels than English readers due, just because of how so few books are translated into English. I'm glad this one is widely available and I'd be interested in finding out how the norms of Japanese society compare to French culture.

33stretch
Jun 6, 8:14 am

>26 RidgewayGirl: Great review of Butter, I am just beginning to make my way into the book. I wonder how all the food writing will hit for me as someone who really doesn't enjoy food or cooking all that much.

34FlorenceArt
Jun 6, 1:32 pm

>32 RidgewayGirl: When I was living in Japan (and I had read several books written by Americans in preparation for that), I felt that some things that felt very exotic for Americans were closer to normal for me. I was also keenly aware that for the Japanese, I was just a kind of American. They would call me by my given name (with an approximation of the American pronunciation) when for me the family name would have felt more natural. It's been a long time and I couldn't really elaborate more than this. Anyway, things have changed a lot since then, France has become more Americanized, at least as far as first name / last name. I think Japan has changed a lot too but I'm not sure how, which is part of why I want to read more contemporary Japanese literature.

35RidgewayGirl
Jun 6, 2:58 pm

>33 stretch: Now I'm curious about this, too. I think you'll see the novel from a different angle. I'll keep an eye out for your review.

>34 FlorenceArt: Oh, no one who isn't one likes being mistaken for an American! When I was living in Paris, many years ago, all the Canadians I knew had little Canadian flags sewn to their bags and outerwear, purely as a protective device.

36labfs39
Jun 6, 4:53 pm

>35 RidgewayGirl: no one who isn't one likes being mistaken for an American

And even though I am one, I try to hide the fact when travelling, especially in France.

37RidgewayGirl
Jun 6, 5:09 pm

>36 labfs39: I do love this place, but there's no question that we are not universally loved, deservedly so. Living in other countries, Americans were a group that people felt comfortable mocking, often in front of me with the laughing aside, "oh, not you, obviously," which was less reassuring than one might expect.

38RidgewayGirl
Jun 6, 5:09 pm

In her opinion, there were more than two sides in most debates, and most questions couldn't be answered with a simple yes or no. She had talked about this with Connie Fox, who was her hairstylist and not the person to get too philosophical with, as it turned out. As punishment for Lynne's willingness to argue for a third point of view, Connie Fox cut her bangs too short and later told the other women in the beauty parlor that she was an atheist, which wasn't true and Lynne had later said so, but she didn't know if anyone had believed her.

Christine Sneed is one of my favorite short story writers and, even if she wasn't, a book called Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry is one I would have picked up anyway. The stories in this collection mostly deal with women dealing with men, often older men, usually men who feel they have a say in how that woman lives her life. From a teenage girl who realizes the man who told her he was a model scout wasn't who he said he was but wanting to take him up on his offer to take pictures anyway, to a woman who thought she had a casual arrangement with a well-off older man until she tries to break it off, from the granddaughter of a famous artist who inherits a sketchbook, to a divorced woman making a new start in the small lakeside town she used to spend holidays as a child, these women find that life isn't as clear or unhindered as it should be but that they are not without resources of their own.

What I like most about Sneed's stories is that each protagonist has her own voice and none of them could be mistaken for each other. Sneed's women are witty and fully themselves and the situations they find themselves are often absurd but also very real.

39cindydavid4
Jun 6, 5:12 pm

>36 labfs39: when I was a teenager traveling around Israel with two Canadians and two Brits, I was told that the first time I act like an american they will take me back to the kibbutz. I complied.

40LolaWalser
Jun 7, 5:19 pm

I'm looking forward to your impressions of Ivana Sajko. She's shaping up into an important author in Croatian. (And her translator, a great writer too, is a dear friend of mine.)

41RidgewayGirl
Jun 7, 5:24 pm

>40 LolaWalser: I'm mustering my thoughts. The book was intense. In the afterword, her translator said that she often had to take a break from the translation because of that.

42kidzdoc
Edited: Jun 7, 6:22 pm

>35 RidgewayGirl: Oddly enough, I was rarely mistaken for being an American whenever I traveled to Europe, perhaps because few African Americans travel there, or because of the way I dressed and carried myself. I routinely received shocked looks whenever I spoke and gave myself away, especially in the UK and the Netherlands. The looks were never unfriendly, but simply surprising; I remember watching a television game show in the 1970s and one of the contestants was an Asian man, who opened his mouth and spoke with a heavy Southern accent, which threw everyone, myself included!

I was often told that I didn't act like an American, which to me was a compliment.

Whenever I visited the Netherlands it was common that I was addressed in Dutch, and I quickly learned to reply "ik spreek geen nederlands (I don't speak Dutch)." One year several members of the 75 Books club met in Amsterdam (three of us came from London via Eurostar, three others were Dutch), and even though I had met the Dutch couple several times previously I asked the group why I was spoken to in Dutch so often (something that rarely if ever happened to my White American or British friends). The three quickly said, "oh, that's because you look Surinamese," which was puzzling until I started to notice that I truly did resemble them in skin color, and not like African immigrants.

43labfs39
Jun 8, 7:40 am

>42 kidzdoc: I could sometimes pass as French, especially when travelling in Eastern Europe, and was happy to do so. When I was studying in Blois, my French became decent and I learned to dress more like a local. In Paris one time I was negotiating with a hotelkeeper about a room, and when I turned to my sister and asked in English if bathroom down the hall was okay, he immediately said in English, "No room!" We had to wander the city until we came to a youth hostel. It was very frustrating.

I certainly don't blame people for disliking Americans. The stereotypical American tourist is obnoxious: never attempting simple phrases in the language, expecting everything to be big, and service to be fast. If you want everything to be the same as in America, why travel?

44kidzdoc
Jun 8, 11:57 am

>43 labfs39: Right, Kay. The stereotypical American is not favorable, as is the stereotypical person from the UK, but fortunately a large minority, if not a majority, are not loud, obnoxious, or showy; at least I think (or hope) so. The ones who annoy me the most are the loud American (mostly) women who must broadcast where they have been, where they are going to, etc. to the people they are talking to, and anyone else in a quarter mile radius.

If you want everything to be the same as in America, why travel?

Following up on my last point above, it seems as though many of these people want to be able to brag to their friends and relatives that they visited certain notable places, in the manner of a pissing contest.

45RidgewayGirl
Jun 10, 5:38 pm

...and told her he had to go out, there was something he had to do, catching her on the verge of a nervous breakdown while she was scraping burnt milk off the bottom of a pot, with the pee-soaked child trying to climb her leg, while she was begging the baby to wait, to wait for just one second, all the while trying with enormous difficulty to refrain from screaming or breaking something, because the child was bawling angrily and slapping at her thigh with tiny hands, demanding the right that every child should be able to claim, not to have to wait, just as he demanded the right that every man should be able to claim to pursue goals more noble than washing the dishes and wiping up urine. Without having to explain himself.

I won't be long, he said and ran out into the stairwell.

Love Novel by Ivana Sajko and translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić is a novella that hits hard. In it, a couple live together unhappily, both under enormous stress. She's the only one working as well as the only one taking care of their baby and apartment. He's angry all the time; at the situation they are in, that their country is in, that he is in. She's frustrated and reactive. The neighbors complain about the noise. But, somehow, they remain together, tied by their initial attraction to each other and the child they share. There's no work and no money, and whether they make it through is uncertain.

The guard could have been his father. He had the familiar expression of bewilderment that marked the faces of the fathers of his generation, the disabled and other war veterans who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side, though they'd done nothing but follow orders, and so they couldn't fathom how all this had come about, this wretched inversion; why, having only ever done their duty, done their job honestly, the only thing they had to show for it were skeletons and debt.

While this novella remains firmly centered on the specific complaints of this couple, it's also a look at a nation losing hope and how that plays out in individual lives. The man in this book attends protests, without real conviction about the purpose of each one, just that protest is necessary to him. It's a way for him to feel alive, even as he doesn't believe that it changes anything.

I had a hard time reading this book, it's often raw and unpleasant, especially the husband's anger directed at his wife. Sajko certainly knows how to make a situation feel horrifically real in very few words. I can see why Love Novel was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, which is a great source for books in translation.

46kjuliff
Edited: Jun 11, 6:22 pm

This message has been deleted by its author.

47labfs39
Jun 11, 4:14 pm

>45 RidgewayGirl: Fantastic review, Kay. I'll keep an eye out for this one, and for this author.

48wandering_star
Jun 11, 6:06 pm

>28 RidgewayGirl: I am currently mulling my review of Butter and so I had a look at the real-life case - I was surprised how closely the character of Kajii is to the actual killer. Some of the choices in the novel now make more sense to me.

49rv1988
Jun 11, 11:50 pm

>38 RidgewayGirl: This sounds lovely, I haven't read anything by Sneed before. I'm adding it to my list.

>45 RidgewayGirl: This sounds like a difficult read, but powerful.

50RidgewayGirl
Jun 12, 2:55 pm

>45 RidgewayGirl: Take a deep breath before diving in, Lisa. It's a book I had thought I could read in one sitting, but I needed breathers.

>48 wandering_star: You have sent me down the rabbit hole.

>49 rv1988: There are so many excellent writers who aren't well-known, or who are well-known only in a specific area or group.

51labfs39
Jun 13, 8:14 am

>50 RidgewayGirl: That would make an interesting list: books that required breathers.

52RidgewayGirl
Jun 13, 6:17 pm

James is a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and because it's by Percival Everett, you already know it's going to be good. This novel is in the form of a diary kept by James, known as Jim in the originating novel. When James finds out he is to be sold, he runs, unwilling to lose his family. He is soon joined by Huck, who is running away for his own reasons and they set out together to journey down the Mississippi River to where it joins the Ohio, which is where James plans to head north. As they travel, they face many dangers and are often separated, but always the dangers that James faces are magnitudes higher, as is made clear, over and over again.

How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one's equal must argue for one's equality, that one's equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.

Everett makes the horrors of slavery clear, but like he did in The Trees, there is also humor. This is, after all, an adventure story, with the episodic structure of that genre. James is well-read, having used Judge Thatcher's library for years and, like the other enslaved people, he uses the dialect expected of him around white people, but among others like him, he is free to speak the way he wants, a secret language switching that Huck occasionally catches him at. His odd friendship with Huck is wonderfully developed. This is the best book I have read so far this year and I will be surprised if anything surpasses it. It's an extraordinary achievement from one of our greatest living writers.

53cindydavid4
Jun 13, 7:10 pm

this is definitely the best book Ive read this year, and might be on the best reads ever. Wanna read Trees now

54RidgewayGirl
Jun 13, 8:05 pm

>53 cindydavid4: Oh, The Trees is fantastic. It's angry and horrific and very, very funny.

55lisapeet
Edited: Jun 14, 12:33 pm

Happy belated new thread, Kay! A few people sent me that cartoon... I wonder why.

>21 RidgewayGirl: Have you read Dancyger's Negative Space? Another memoir, this one focusing on her childhood. I'm interested in it because that was my NYC milieu, though I didn't know her parents—I was just a little art student at the time, but that part of downtown did sometimes feel like a big small town, and you knew of people. I also want to read First Love, because friendship is always an interesting topic to me.

And James is up at the top of the pile because EVERYONE has recommended it to me.

56labfs39
Jun 14, 12:00 pm

>52 RidgewayGirl: Wow. That's quite the endorsement. I must get to it.

57RidgewayGirl
Jun 14, 2:02 pm

>55 lisapeet: & 56 Lisa & Lisa, you must read this book immediately. Everett is brilliant and I hope this book wins all the awards.

58rv1988
Jun 15, 5:19 am

>54 RidgewayGirl: >53 cindydavid4: Seconding the recmmendation for The Trees. "Angry and horrific and very, very funny" is a perfect description.

>52 RidgewayGirl: Great review. Oh, I can't wait to read it.

59RidgewayGirl
Jun 15, 1:01 pm

>58 rv1988: James is fantastic, regardless of your relationship to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, although Huck was one of my childhood favorites -- I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and so vacations to the US involved very long drives. My parents would pick up a few classics, chosen for their length, to parcel out to me, since I was a silent and easy traveler as long as I had a book. So I read Huck Finn, but never the much shorter Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

60RidgewayGirl
Jun 17, 3:42 pm

In Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara, a young married woman and her parents return to Los Angeles with her new husband. It's been years since they were sent to the Manzanar internment camp and they hope to rebuild the lives they enjoyed before the Second World War. But before the war, Japanese Americans were not allowed to own property and their homes and businesses are now occupied by others. Aki is a nursing assistant at the Japanese hospital where she is shocked to discover that the elderly man admitted to the hospital with serious wounds is the father of her husband's good friend. She never liked Babe, but could he really have battered his own father? As she looks for answers, she stumbles into a larger series of crimes, while also learning about the conditions of many of the returning Japanese-Americans are living in.

This is a mystery novel where the mystery is far less important than the time and place. Hirahara is great at explaining the history of how Japanese-Americans have been treated before, during and after WWII. I knew some of the basics, but Hirahara brings out so many small details of what life was like on a daily basis. The mystery was overly complicated and didn't hold up, but the reason to read this novel is for the way it brings a little-known piece of American history to life.

61ursula
Jun 18, 2:25 am

Catching up here - I've put both Butter and Love Novel on my library list, thanks!

62RidgewayGirl
Jun 20, 1:03 pm

>61 ursula: I'm looking forward to finding out what you think of them!

63RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jun 20, 1:03 pm

On a Trans-Siberian train, a young conscript becomes increasingly desperate about his future and finally comes up with a plan to escape by leaving the train in one of the cities spread across Siberia. A French woman in her mid-thirties impulsively leaves her Russian lover who had brought her from Paris to a city in Siberia. She gets on the first train out, which is Eastbound to Vladivostok. An encounter leads to sheltering him in her first class compartment.

Maylis de Kerangal manages to pack a great deal into this novella and Jessica Moore has provided a beautiful translation. Although de Karangal is far more detailed in her descriptions of Hélène, she still manages to make Aliocha's fear and uncertainty vivid. There's something wonderful about novellas, how they can provide both detail and breadth, while keeping the story tightly focused, and this one certainly is certainly a great example of what they can do.

64chlorine
Jun 20, 2:57 pm

Fantastic last few review. James in particular seems very interesting. Love Novel as well but I'm not sure I could stomach it.

65kjuliff
Jun 20, 3:26 pm

>63 RidgewayGirl: You make a good point about novellas. Many a novel would have packed more punch as a novella. I too loved Eastbound. A most satisfying read.

66RidgewayGirl
Jun 20, 4:02 pm

>64 chlorine: James is fantastic. I am sure it will show up in French bookstores soon.

>65 kjuliff: Kate, I spent a lot of the book yelling at Hélène in my head. I had a hard time believing she was in her thirties with her impulsive, unthinking actions. I moved to a country where I didn't speak the language at her age and it boggled my mind how easily she gave up. Of course, that's a testament to de Kerangal's writing that I got that invested in a character's behavior.

67kjuliff
Jun 20, 4:07 pm

>66 RidgewayGirl: Yes, I ended up just accepting Hélène‘s strangeness. The French don’t make the best travelers 😉

68RidgewayGirl
Jun 21, 12:48 pm

Wherever she was running, I knew it wasn't to a collapsing home with a pothead father or into the bushes with the burnout boys. Watching her run, I thought, down is somewhere.

Sara is living in Victoria, British Colombia, a tourist destination full of cobbled streets and charm, but that's not her Victoria. Her Victoria is feeling trapped on an island, living with her father who has one foot (and then both feet) out the door and spending her school hours hanging out in the woods behind the high school with the burnout boys. When the boys recount what they did to a girl in her class, Sara abandons them and soon school and her empty house altogether, sort of looking for a girl she saw once, running with a torn skirt, mostly just hanging out, getting into deeper and deeper trouble and pretending that she's cool, she's fine, she's about to turn her life around.

The Torn Skirt is by Canadian author Rebecca Godfrey, a novel that preceded Under the Bridge. Written in 2001 and set in the 1980s, this is a world where sexual assault is shrugged off and Go Ask Alice is more familiar than any textbook. Godfrey is a talented author, giving Sara a voice that is at once naive and street smart, young and clever.

I'm sure he was trying to help when he called the Street Outreach worker, some gangly guy with Bible breath.

Sara lets the reader know in the opening paragraphs that she's being questioned by the police, that something very bad has happened, but how she goes from being a high school student with an attitude to a suspect in a crime is the story told in The Torn Skirt.

69chlorine
Jun 21, 2:23 pm

>68 RidgewayGirl: This seems very interesting. It must be a difficult read as well.

70RidgewayGirl
Jun 21, 3:42 pm

>69 chlorine: It was more compelling than difficult, but I did want to go yell at her absent parents several times in this book. Godfrey was a talented writer and was able to create a character who was so blithely self-destructive and also naively hopeful.

71RidgewayGirl
Jun 23, 2:16 pm

Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung is just fantastic. I read a lot of short story collections and I like most of them, but this one astonished me. There's a story narrated by a praying mantis and a story narrated by a kumiho, a creature from Korean folktales that appears as fox with many tails or as a beautiful woman. There's a story told from the point of view of a group of middle-aged church ladies and stories told in the second person. And there are stories that are about ordinary women and girls, usually Korean-American, just trying to figure things out. It's a stellar collection that deserves to be widely read.

72FlorenceArt
Jun 23, 2:35 pm

>71 RidgewayGirl: Interesting! I like the cover.

73labfs39
Jun 23, 3:54 pm

>71 RidgewayGirl: Ouch, that's a book bullet.

74rv1988
Jun 23, 10:20 pm

>71 RidgewayGirl: This sounds fascinating, I'm going to see if our library has it.

75cindydavid4
Jun 23, 11:33 pm

>71 RidgewayGirl: this is why I love this place. Im in

76RidgewayGirl
Jun 24, 4:06 pm

Every single one of you will be so happy when you're reading Green Frog.

My current project is painting the study -- a very small room that used to be a sleeping porch and so is mainly windows -- and that involves removing all the books from the bookcase in there and then unscrewing it from the wall and that is certainly a task I decided to do in a room that doesn't get much of the air-conditioning and on a hot summer's day. OK, off to go sweat a little more.

77labfs39
Jun 24, 4:11 pm

That's such a sweet room. What color are you painting it?

Take it easy not to overdue in the heat.

78RidgewayGirl
Jun 24, 4:54 pm

>77 labfs39: A rich ochre -- the room's so small and with the windows, I wanted something dramatic and warm. I am being careful, just sweaty. I want to get it done. We're hosting a neighborhood happy hour in August, with a tour of the house included (since it's Adlai Stevenson's childhood home, there is curiosity about it), so my goal is to have the house looking its best.

79WelshBookworm
Jun 24, 4:56 pm

>78 RidgewayGirl: Pictures please when it is finished!

80RidgewayGirl
Jun 24, 5:02 pm

>79 WelshBookworm: I can do that!

81mabith
Jun 25, 8:53 pm

Your Green Frog review is making it very tempting. I find I either love a short story collection or find it 'meh' and a waste of time with little in between.

82RidgewayGirl
Jun 26, 5:49 pm

>81 mabith: One thing that I liked about this collection is that the stories are very different from each other. I think you'd like it.

83RidgewayGirl
Jun 26, 5:49 pm

I had bad taste in men, but then came Jed.

Jacy is pregnant when she and her husband travel to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to his father's house, an isolated rural retreat near the Wisconsin border. She's excited about the trip, about having a baby, she likes Jed's urbane father. But Jacy hadn't known about the housekeeper, whose position in the household she can't figure out. And now her husband's acting weird and he and her father-in-law's attitude towards her pregnancy seem to omit her from having any say, especially once a local gynecologist and personal friend of the family is called in for a consult.

Beware the Woman is a gothic suspense tale by Megan Abbott, here writing with more than a tinge of Joyce Carol Oates. This is a claustrophobic story, told from Jacy's point of view, where she's not certain of what's going on around her and her husband is either absent or just wants her to calm down. This is one of the best things Abbott has written, tying a classic genre together with very modern fears about bodily autonomy.

84RidgewayGirl
Jun 29, 4:27 pm

In Biafra, like a world removed from the known world, one discovers new vistas of emotions, new faculties one did not know were there before. This feeling of being drained and abandoned, which comes upon Kunle so quickly that it invades his senses completely, is one such experience.

Chigozie Obioma's new novel, The Road to the Country, is the story of the Nigerian Civil War told from the point of view of one young man who is caught up in the fighting. Kunle is at the university when he is told to come home -- his younger brother has left with a neighboring Igbo family to go live in Biafra. Kunle, intent on his studies, had been unaware that anything was going on and after returning home, he blithely joins a Red Cross team taking supplies into Biafra and sneaks off, thinking he can find his brother and they can both return with the Red Cross van the next day. But the war going on isn't a game and before Kunle gets very far, he is discovered by the Biafran army and conscripted.

What follows is a coming of age story and one that depicts the brutality and meaninglessness of war, in this case, the slow grinding down of an out-matched insurgent force, as the communities around them are also bombed and starved out. Obioma made an audacious choice in centering the novel on a central character who enters the war with no stake in it or even any knowledge. He, and the reader, soon hear stories of why his various comrades have chosen to fight, but for the most part, the reader, like Kunle, experiences the war as just a series of random events. There's a lot of repetition and a lot of waiting. It did take some effort to read the most part of this novel. Obioma pulls everything into context eventually, but like Kunle's wartime experiences, it's a slog. But as Kunle remains part of a battalion, he forms friendships and relationships, and his observations about the world around him sharpen into clearer focus. He never forgets his initial goal in sneaking into Biafra, and that gives form and meaning to his experiences. There are no doubt non-fiction accounts that provide a clearer look at that place and time, but The Road to the Country shines a light on the war's cost in human suffering.

85kjuliff
Jun 29, 7:06 pm

>84 RidgewayGirl: I’m interested in this book. Have you read Half of a Yellow Sun? I’m interested in how the two novels compare. I haven’t read anything by Obiama and am very interested in the Biafran conflict.

86RidgewayGirl
Jun 29, 10:14 pm

>85 kjuliff: No, I haven't read the Adichie. I did read Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta, which was also set during the Biafra War, but that's it. There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe has been recommended to me as a good non-fiction book on the subject.

87kjuliff
Jun 29, 10:22 pm

>86 RidgewayGirl: Half of a Yellow Sun is one of my favorite books. I highly recommend it. I’ll look into the other books you mention. Many Biafrans emigrated to the US during Nigeria’s civil war. Their children are now grown, and some are not even aware of the war.

88chlorine
Jun 30, 3:29 am

>85 kjuliff: What did you think of Under the Udala Tree? I've read Okparanta's short-story collection Happiness, like water and really loved it.

I'm so ignorant about Africa's history that I didn't even realise Biafra was in Nigeria. I have Half of a Yellow Sun on my wishlist and just nudged it up.

89labfs39
Jun 30, 7:55 am

>84 RidgewayGirl: I have Chigozie Obioma's Orchestra of Minorities and had intended to read it last year, but didn't get to it. Do you feel that his writing was good, but just not well executed in Road to the Country?

90RidgewayGirl
Jun 30, 1:14 pm

>87 kjuliff: Half of a Yellow Sun is definitely on my reading list, Kate.

>88 chlorine: I really liked Under the Udala Trees and think it was more successful in what it set out to do than The Road to the Country was. The main character of that novel felt more real to me. That may be because a novel concerned mainly with the battleground experiences of a young man was always going to be hard for me to immerse myself.

>89 labfs39: Obioma's writing is very good, this book was just so ambitious. It's hard to write about the repetitious and meaningless reality of a front-line soldier without falling into repetition oneself, I suspect. But the book was still well worth reading.

91Jim53
Jun 30, 2:31 pm

>71 RidgewayGirl: I've needed a push to read some more short stories and I think you've given it to me. I've put The Green Frog on hold and will start it after I can find someone to take me to get it. Thanks!

Adlai Stevenson's childhood home! That sounds interesting. Did your family get it from them?

92RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jun 30, 4:43 pm

>91 Jim53: Jim, you will be so sorry you asked! I love talking about this place. So, in late 2021, my husband was headhunted by a start-up in Bloomington, IL and I started looking at houses. And there was nothing. A few fixer-uppers and a large number of line drawings for houses that would be built the next summer and this house, which I loved. It was built in 1900, by a local architect named Arthur Pillsbury.

The Stevenson family were its second owners, and Adlai Stevenson II was six years old. He had an older sister, Buffie, who would own the house until her death in 1994, when she left it to the McLean County Historical Society with the intention of it being made into a museum. Buffie Ives was a well-known termagant and force of nature and people who grew up in this neighborhood all have stories of her yelling at them when they were teenagers. She also preserved this neighborhood, single-handedly preventing the street we live on from being turned into a four lane road.

The Historical Society completely renovated the house, replacing the electrical "knob and tube" system, the roof and the plumbing, adding HVAC and restoring the interior. But there wasn't enough interest in a museum and eventually the house was sold to the people we bought it from, who were luckily as interested in the historical background of the house and so they restricted their renovations to making the attic into a rec room (there was already a maid's room and what was once a space for storing clothing that I now use as a craft and sewing space) and renovating the kitchen into something usable but still in keeping with the rest of the house.

My husband and I love this house and its history. Last winter, my husband got the old pocket door working again and found a love note from Stevenson's wife to him from before their marriage. Here are a few pictures of how it looked back in the day.

The front of the house, to the right of the front door.

The dining room. The built-in hutch in the background is still there.

One of our oldest neighbors remembered when Stevenson was a political bigwig. He said that it made this small midwestern city feel like it was the center of the world. And he visited it often, given that his sister was living here

93cindydavid4
Jun 30, 4:47 pm

Last winter, my husband got the old pocket door working again and found a love note from Stevenson's wife to him from before their marriage.

oh what a wonderful find!!! love stories like this

94rv1988
Jul 1, 9:44 am

I was going to comment on your reviews, but I have been totally distracted by these wonderful photographs and accounts of the house. What a beautiful building, and how rich with history! I hope the preparations for hosting are going well.

95RidgewayGirl
Jul 1, 4:33 pm

>93 cindydavid4: Cindy, we were so excited. The Historical Society wants the note and it obviously belongs with them, but I am taking my time turning it in.

>94 rv1988: Thanks, Rasdhar. I've just got one small room to paint and then I'll be done. Note that the man walking between the two women in the second from last photograph is LBJ. It's wild to me that now my house is mainly books and cats when it was once full of politicians.

96mabith
Jul 2, 8:33 am

That's so neat about the house and about the note especially! Of course turning it over doesn't negate also taking a picture or scanning it for yourself...

97RidgewayGirl
Jul 2, 2:43 pm

>96 mabith: That's a good idea! Then we could have a copy of it in our collection of house lore.

98RidgewayGirl
Jul 2, 2:45 pm

You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know.

In Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe, Margo is still a teenager when her English professor gets her pregnant. And in the following weeks, despite everyone telling her not to, she decides to keep the pregnancy. She has an apartment that she shares with three other girls, the man who told her, over and over, how much he loves her, her best friend Becca and her mother. And once she has Bodhi, the professor ghosts her, her mother quickly tells her that she will not be helping out, her best friend disappears from her life, two of her roommates move out and she loses her job. Margo does indeed have money troubles, but money is only one of her problems.

They had tried to warn her: her mother, Mark, even Becca. But when they talked about the opportunities she would be missing, she'd thought they meant a four-year college. She hadn't understood thy meant that every single person she met, every new friend, every love interest, every employer, every landlord, would judge her for having made what they all claimed was the "right" choice.

But she's not without resources. First, there's the one roommate who didn't leave, and then there's her father, someone who was largely absent while she was growing up but now, fresh out of rehab, he needs a place to stay and he can pay rent. And he gives her an idea of how she can make money to take care of her and Bodhi. None of it is ideal, but there's a chance this odd family can make it work, or maybe the underlying issues are too serious to paper over with love and effort.

This book surprised me. Thorpe's writing is light and smart and she often goes for the clever wordplay over a more sincere telling. And Margo is a young woman who hides her own feelings with her quick mind and a careless attitude. But as this novel progresses, it doesn't take the easy way, or the expected direction, but chooses to be more real and complex and muddled in ways that make it more than the breezy language indicates. I ended up rooting for Margo to figure out a road between the many obstacles placed in her way.

99RidgewayGirl
Jul 3, 2:37 pm

Maybe it was the heat dome, but my garden has never looked so abundant. Look at these plants going nuts!

100Jim53
Jul 3, 4:30 pm

>92 RidgewayGirl: I'm never sorry to hear someone talk about something that intrigues or excites them.

>99 RidgewayGirl: Wow!

101rv1988
Jul 5, 1:42 am

>95 RidgewayGirl: This is an inarguable upgrade, I would take books and cats over politicians any day.

>98 RidgewayGirl: This sounds interesting, a great review.

>99 RidgewayGirl: How beautiful your garden looks!

102FlorenceArt
Edited: Jul 5, 4:10 am

>99 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for the photos, your garden looks luxuriant!

103RidgewayGirl
Jul 5, 4:45 pm

Thanks, everyone. The plants are really doing their best right now.

104RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jul 5, 6:40 pm

Jhumpa Lahiri's newest collection of short stories, Roman Stories, are not all set in Rome, but do concern people who live or have lived in Rome. Lahiri's characters range from the exceedingly well-off to those on the fringes of society. Lahiri's stories are strongest when she remains close to her own experience, like in The Reentry, where a woman is invited to lunch with a friend at a traditional restaurant, where she encounters rising levels of racism, which her friend tries to brush aside. The middle story, The Steps, celebrates Rome's diversity in age, ethnic background, and financial status, in a natural and affecting way. Some of the stories fall flat or feel a little moralizing, but her writing is, as always, worth reading. Lahiri's been in Italy long enough to have a clear-eyed view of its faults and strengths and it's interesting to get her take. This isn't her best collection of short stories, but she's an extraordinary writer and the bar is set very high.

105kjuliff
Jul 5, 8:24 pm

>104 RidgewayGirl: I totally agree with your review. Yes the stories were a mixed bunch. I remember my favorites were “The Steps” and “The Well-lit House”.

106RidgewayGirl
Jul 5, 9:47 pm

>105 kjuliff: The Steps was the best story in the collection, but the one I keep thinking about is that woman enduring all the quiet racism at that restaurant until the child makes it obvious. It felt like that story came from her life.

107BLBera
Jul 5, 10:41 pm

Love hearing about your house, Kay. What a lucky find. Lahiri is a great writer of short stories. I really enjoyed this collection.

Margo's Got Money Troubles sounds interesting. Great comments.

108kjuliff
Edited: Jul 5, 10:43 pm

>106 RidgewayGirl: I’ll check it out - that’s the “re-entry” one? I can’t remember it - maybe I missed it. I remember skipping a couple of stories when I found there was a lot of inconsistency.

109RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jul 6, 1:14 pm

>107 BLBera: Regarding Margo's Got Money Troubles -- it does have some issues, but the energy and how realistically Thorpe wrote her characters makes it worth reading. It's also a lot of fun, even if I recoiled from a lot of her choices, they were honest ones.

>108 kjuliff: I thought it was the best one in the collection, but then I didn't notice any inconsistency at all, so I may not have read as closely as you did.

110RidgewayGirl
Jul 7, 5:49 pm

The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey is the story of a girl growing up on a farm in Scotland in the 1880s, where she is being raised by her grandparents. She loves the farm and the farm animals with all of her heart and has a companion jackdaw and a steady friend in the hired boy. Lizzie does have one thing that sets her apart; sometimes she has brief visions of future events. But this story remains one about a girl growing up and of a young woman figuring out how to make her way in the world and how best to care for those she loves.

I saw a review calling this book "Anne of Green Gables for adults" and that's a pretty accurate description, honestly. This novel deals far more with the darker parts of farm life and of that time, the risks of death or injury, the financial precarity, the way that most people are struggling to get by and a single mistake can cost everything. Lizzie is pragmatic and resourceful, like all good protagonists. I enjoyed every single moment I was reading this excellent book.

111kidzdoc
Jul 7, 6:26 pm

Your reviews are very good, Kay, but they pale in comparison to the stunning photos and history of your house!

112kjuliff
Jul 7, 6:56 pm

You have a lovely house and a stunning garden. Looking at your garden photos reminded me of my garden back in Melbourne and I actually cried. I love your landscaping style. Just the right combination of wilderness and design.

113RidgewayGirl
Jul 7, 10:02 pm

>111 kidzdoc: Darryl, it's amazing to live in this house. We were lucky to have found it.

>112 kjuliff: Kate, I understand missing a garden. We've only been here two years and so while we've added a few plants and bulbs, most of it was already here. Our work has largely been tidying up a neglected, but lush garden.

114rv1988
Jul 7, 11:50 pm

>110 RidgewayGirl: This sounds very interesting. "Anne of Green Gables for adults" is a delightful concept. Thanks for the review, it goes right on the TBR.

115RidgewayGirl
Jul 8, 1:26 pm

>114 rv1988: I loved The Road from Belhaven and Lizzie's resilience as well as her love for the world around her make it similar. It's not at all twee or whimsical, however.

116RidgewayGirl
Jul 8, 5:33 pm

I'm jumping ahead with my reviews because I want to talk about this one while it's fresh in my mind. I would not have read this had it not been the choice of my bookclub and I gave it a far more generous reading than it deserved because of that, but there are limits.

The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark is a legal procedural, if that's a thing, with a bit of thriller at the end, as a treat for hanging in there. Andy is a public defender in a rural county in Virginia. He's very good at his job and everyone, especially prosecutors and police, like to tell him how good he is, in a way that eventually made me feel like being a public defender was something to be a little bit ashamed about. Andy agrees; he hates his clients, who he thinks of as basically wastes of life, if not actively subhuman, so it makes sense when, at the beginning of the novel, he tenders his resignation. The question of why he stayed in the job for 17 years is not one that will be answered. He quickly finds a cushy job with a big law office, but before he can start that job he wants to finish up with the accused murderer he is defending.

The murder case is, at first glance, an easy one for the states attorney. The man, Damian Bullins, is a strung-out methhead, an Appalachian yokel stereotype, who is accused of and quickly confesses to the murder of a housewife and paragon of virtue, a devout Mormon and wife of a prominent and respected businessman. But Andy quickly discovers that he can get the confession thrown out. Bullins claims he was hired to take the fall and Andy also finds evidence of motive for the murdered woman's husband. Given that the lead prosecutor is running for election and not interested in this case except as a platform to gain name recognition, it seems clear that Andy can get Bullins off, which is his duty as a defense attorney, even if he doesn't want to.

So legal thrillers can be fun, and since Clark is a lawyer, the procedural stuff was interesting. The plot hummed along, more or less. The issues I had with this book were with the writing, the characters, the utter lack of character development and finally, and probably most troubling, the attitude about people caught in the justice system.

So the writing is serviceable if dull, characters are described by their clothing, some are never described. The characters themselves were either cardboard-thin (the good guys) or paper-thin (the bad guys) and no one ever behaved contrary to the stereo-types established at their introduction. Which meant there was no uncertainty as to who was guilty or what the end point of the book would be, but this book was not interested in suspense or in nuance, which is fine, I think probably some people prefer a mystery to be a sure and well-marked track from A to B.

My biggest issue with this book is how it treated some characters as people and others as not quite human. That Andy needed to complain regularly about how much he hated wasting his time defending people who didn't deserve it and how whoever he was saying this to would agree with him was troubling. While Andy never had any Black clients, despite having a heavy caseload, became noticeable, but was definitely a good choice on the part of the author, given how Andy viewed the people he represented. Andy never once wondered about anyone's past or the reasons that might have caused their addictions or homelessness. I can certainly see that Andy being incurious is central to his character, and so can forgive him for that. I'm less willing to forgive the author, who should, by virtue of his profession, have some passing interest in the complexity of people's lives.

That this book ends with a needless act of premeditated violence by one of the "good" guys was certainly in keeping with the odd ethics of this book.

117labfs39
Jul 9, 7:57 am

>116 RidgewayGirl: Great review, Kay. Sounds like a book to avoid on all fronts.

I returned from NY to find that the Japanese beetles have arrived. My poor birches that I planted last Earth Day have barely an intact leaf left on them. I put out the traps yesterday, but the most effective way I've found is to go around with a bucket of soapy water and manually remove them. Do you have the beetles there?

118RidgewayGirl
Jul 9, 1:58 pm

>117 labfs39: I don't think anyone here would pick it up, honestly. It seems aimed at a very specific readership that isn't me or anyone I like.

And no, thank goodness, no Japanese beetles here that I've seen, although they are infesting Illinois according to the internet. There's a fine black walnut tree next to the house in the neighbor's yard, so now I am worried. It's a very fine tree.

119RidgewayGirl
Jul 16, 6:12 pm

And in the same place in her heart where Alice kept her list of children's names, Mary kept a different list--far better referenced and annotated--of all the local husbands who got drunk and beat their wives.

North Woods by Daniel Mason follows the various inhabitants and visitors to a single house in the New England woods over centuries, beginning with the first small structure built by early colonists who had to flee into the woods. Over time the house is added on to or remodeled, the fortunes of the people living there rise and fall, the house itself growing in stature and then diminishing, along with the surrounding woods, which also change over time.

This novel is almost interlinked short stories, except the length of each section varies and is sometime dependent on the reader having read the previous chapters. This is a superbly well-written book, and it is so cleverly and carefully constructed. By using the house as the center, while really being about the surrounding natural world, Mason avoids having to start the novel sometime in prehistory, like a Michener tome, or even having the include the indigenous people living in the area before the colonists arrived. The lives depicted range widely, from two sisters running a small apple orchard, to a opportunistic grifter riding the fad for séances, to a painter in love with his traveling companion, all the way into sometime near the present day.

While I admire this book, I didn't love it. There's a feeling of separation between the characters and the reader, a sense that abated as the novel grew closer to the present moment, and the final section was lovely, shedding light on the previous chapters, but also making clear that this novel is about a place, more than about the people who temporarily occupy the space.

120rv1988
Jul 17, 3:52 am

>116 RidgewayGirl: Goodness! I see what you meant by this book. A great review from you though, and with respect to the bit in spoiler text, it's unfortunately something I've noticed a lot among this type of novel.

>119 RidgewayGirl: This is such an interesting way to frame the story, although I can see how it would make you feel a bit disconnected from the characters.

121kjuliff
Jul 17, 3:22 pm

>119 RidgewayGirl: Interesting and enlightening review Kay. North Woods keeps popping up in my recommendations but I’ve not been able to get interested enough to borrow it. Now I’m in a better position and will stop pondering. It’s not a book for me.

122RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jul 17, 3:26 pm

>120 rv1988: It may be just me as I know a lot of people have loved North Woods. And I know the ending of Plinko Bounce was pretty routine for a thriller, but kind of a kicker when the rest of the book divides people clearly in to "good" or "bad," and here's a murderer neatly stacked in the "good" pile.

>121 kjuliff: Kate, I'd hate to be the one who put you off. It is an objectively well-written, well-researched and well-done book.

123japaul22
Jul 17, 3:40 pm

I LOVED North Woods, maybe because it was more about the place than the characters. I love a novel with a strong setting, and as you said, the setting is the book here.

124RidgewayGirl
Jul 17, 3:56 pm

>123 japaul22: I've been thinking about this -- that once we're dealing with novels that are written by writers good at their craft, who put their energy and imagination into its creation, is there any calculation that can say why one reader falls into what the book is doing and another doesn't? It's such a random thing.

125kjuliff
Jul 17, 4:09 pm

>122 RidgewayGirl: I was already 99% put off! I need more than well-written and well-researched atm. I just needed an excuse really.

126RidgewayGirl
Jul 17, 4:11 pm

>125 kjuliff: That's fair. I've done the same -- looking for a reason to not read a specific book. And when I want to read it, then a negative review can get me to pick it up immediately.

127japaul22
Jul 17, 4:44 pm

>124 RidgewayGirl: It's such an interesting topic. It always shocks me a little when readers who I normally agree with feel differently about a book than I do. But it actually happens pretty frequently. Even among our relatively small Club Read group.

128cindydavid4
Edited: Jul 17, 6:11 pm

>123 japaul22: ditto. One of my top reads this year. Its almost like vaster wilds without the chase. but then Ive enjoyed books about a place since reading norah loft bless this house so it was natural for me. And there are people who make the story over the years. They come and go but each leaves something behind.

129RidgewayGirl
Jul 17, 6:45 pm

>128 cindydavid4: Sometimes they leave a hatchet and sometimes they leave some skeletons under the floorboards.

130cindydavid4
Jul 17, 10:07 pm

>129 RidgewayGirl: ROTFL

131labfs39
Jul 19, 7:36 am

>119 RidgewayGirl: I though Mason's novel The Winter Soldier was very well written, and so picked up an e-copy of North Woods. I haven't felt compelled to read it yet, but I will, based on the strength of his writing.

>127 japaul22: It always shocks me a little when readers who I normally agree with feel differently about a book than I do.

I know exactly what you mean. While it lends spice to the discussion, I start to doubt myself when I don't love a book as much as someone else: am I missing something? am I not giving the book a fair chance? And conversely, if I love a book and others whom I think will and they don't, well, then I feel bad for recommending it!

For me liking a book has a lot to do with my mental space at the moment. My mood can spoil or elevate a book about which I might have felt differently at a different time.

132RidgewayGirl
Jul 19, 7:31 pm

>131 labfs39: I'm pretty sure that some of the books I've disliked are books that I would have liked if I'd read them at a different time (this is very different from my reaction to badly written books). I'm trying to make my reactions to books be far less "did I like them" than thinking about what worked and what didn't. So while I didn't love North Woods, for example, I could see clearly that it was a book that was doing interesting things, was well-structured and very well-written.

On a related note, my book club discussed The Plinko Bounce yesterday and we opened with an absent member's scathing Goodreads review. A few people sort of liked it, but we all managed to find all the ways it sucked.

133RidgewayGirl
Jul 21, 1:40 pm

Shanghai by Joseph Kanon begins in 1938 and a Jewish man boarding a boat harbored in Trieste. After his father's arrest and death in Sachenhausen, he went into hiding, but unlike many others, he has an uncle living in Shanghai, one of the last places to still allow Jewish people entry. In Shanghai, his uncle runs a few clubs and plans to open a new one, activities that have him working with the various criminal gangs in Shanghai. Shanghai is a powder keg. It's still Chinese, but the Japanese secret police are showing their power and the city is filling with refugees, both from Europe and the Soviet Union, but also from other parts of China. Daniel has to learn quickly and play an increasingly dangerous game of playing the different factions against each other.

Kanon has written several novels about the aftermath of the Second World War set in Berlin and I've enjoyed those books enormously. He knows how to keep a thriller moving, while also creating complex and frequently conflicted characters and a real sense of place. He does the same thing here, writing a story that was a huge amount of fun to read, with plenty of tension and an intriguing snapshot of Shanghai at a pivotal moment in its history.

134labfs39
Jul 21, 5:27 pm

>133 RidgewayGirl: Ooh, that's a book bullet and a reminder that I need to read the rest of the Kanon's I already own. I loved The Good German, but was less enthused with Istanbul Passage. I have a couple more of his novels, but Shanghai sounds particularly interesting. Shanghai was a complex place at that time.

135RidgewayGirl
Jul 21, 6:29 pm

>134 labfs39: Incredibly complex and fluid. I liked Kanon bringing light to this part of WWII.

136labfs39
Jul 22, 7:41 am

>135 RidgewayGirl: Did you read Agent Sonya? It dealt in part with the WWII situation in Shanghai and, like all of Macintyre's books, was extremely well done.

137RidgewayGirl
Jul 22, 11:14 am

>136 labfs39: No, I have to push myself to read more non-fiction. I've made note of it.

138labfs39
Jul 22, 2:19 pm

>137 RidgewayGirl: It's an excellent piece of narrative nonfiction that I found hard to put down.

139RidgewayGirl
Jul 25, 6:31 pm

Living happened until it didn't. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

Cyrus immigrated to the US with his father when he was a baby. He was raised by a depressed single father who worked at a chicken farm and died soon after Cyrus graduated high school. Cyrus stayed in the Midwest for college and stayed in the same town after graduation, doing the same low-paying jobs he'd done in college and mainly drinking and taking drugs and not writing. After he gets sober, he's still not writing but he's not writing about the lives of famous martyrs, fascinated by their meaningful deaths.

I do like a sad sack doomed poet type, so I was predisposed to like Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, but it's also beautifully written. Akbar is a poet, and it shows in the word choices and how he can do so much in very few words. The novel centers Cyrus, but it's also about his absent family, with chapters told from the point of view of his mother, father and uncle, all of whom have fascinating stories to recount. And Cyrus also has a good friend, Zee, and a sponsor at AA who cares for him and sticks with him despite their differences. This is a novel that plays with language, moves around with some chapters leaning towards humor, and builds into a novel with a great deal of heart. I really loved this book and I'm looking forward to Akbar's next novel.

140cindydavid4
Jul 25, 7:20 pm

I ordered that book and am eager for it to come my way

141RidgewayGirl
Jul 25, 10:52 pm

>140 cindydavid4: Cindy, it's so good.

142RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jul 26, 4:02 pm

Today was an informal Central Illinois LT meet-up, which is to say I met Karen (Charon07) at the Friends of the Library book sale in Urbana and then went for coffee afterwards. We had a lot of fun (well, I had a lot of fun, Karen can speak for herself) and we were both wildly undercharged for our stacks of books. I found a hardcover of How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, two paperbacks that looked interesting and a very pleasant old copy of Adam Bede. What really excited me, though, were the art books -- someone was clearly getting rid of an entire collection -- so I came home with three very heavy and reproduction-rich exhibition catalogs. A well-spent six dollars.

143labfs39
Jul 26, 4:14 pm

>142 RidgewayGirl: Ooh, a meetup and a book sale! Win-win.

144RidgewayGirl
Jul 26, 5:59 pm

>143 labfs39: A win for everything but the fiction that I will read all the books in my house before I die, lol.

145RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jul 26, 6:48 pm

Stephen King is a storyteller, the kind who can make a routine trip to the store for milk into a story worth listening to. In You Like it Darker, he promises a collection of short stories darker than his usual fare, and sometimes delivers on that promise. But even the stories that end well (a surprising number!) are as interesting to read as anything he's written. A case in point is On Slide Inn Road, where King rewrites Flannery O'Connor's most famous story A Good Man is Hard to Find, (if you haven't read it, do so before reading King's version).The stories vary wildly in length from barely ten pages to ninety, the longest, Rattlesnakes, being one of the strongest, and building on both Duma Key and Cujo. A solid collection and if I might have liked King to go even darker, it was certainly a collection that I enjoyed.

146kjuliff
Jul 26, 8:11 pm

>139 RidgewayGirl: I see many are predicting Martyr for the Booker. I haven’t read it and even after your excellent review it still doesn’t appeal. I don’t have the cultural background to appreciate James but my bet is on it winning. I believe you’ve read both. What do you think?

147RidgewayGirl
Jul 26, 10:13 pm

>146 kjuliff: They are so different, but I'd be equally happy with either winning. I'm not sure either would win, given that they both American authors, but I'd love to see them on the shortlist.

On second thought, I'd like Everett to win - if not the Booker than the National Book Award. He has has written so many truly excellent books and he deserves far more recognition than he has received so far.

148lisapeet
Jul 27, 8:54 am

Just catching up after a while, and that's some good reading (mostly, I guess... I know which books I want to sidestep). I have Green Frog on my virtual pile, so now I'm really looking forward to it.

Agreed about North Woods—I really enjoyed it, but I think it was a little uneven in spots just because of the number and variety of vignettes. But it was all a good tour through a time and place that interest me. I need to catch up on reviews on my page, and that's going to be the first.

Your garden pictures didn't show up for me, but I've had the same experience—some combination of the miserable hot humid temps, rain, and a run of nice days recently has made everything really lush and abundant. I already have a pile of tomatoes and jalapeños, and am cutting back the big perennials with a vengeance. My best friend in Vermont sent me a little hollyhock cutting last year in May, maybe 6" high, and right now it's over 7' tall, no exaggeration.

I love the historic house stories! Friends of ours upstate do the historic tour thing, because they're restoring an giant old Victorian monster near Rome, NY. They really like doing it, and even bought a victrola and some old 78s to play while folks came in and out.

149RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jul 28, 1:23 pm

>148 lisapeet: Our chili pepper plants are all doing far better than they did last year. We only grow those and herbs because the farmers market is literally just down the street and the actual professional farmers grow gorgeous produce. And now that we've been here a few years, I'm friendly with a few of the people selling produce. Our yard still looks good, but the over-abundance is over.

I'm so glad not to be restoring a house! Just keeping it all in good shape gives me plenty to do. An old house is certainly a lifestyle choice. But it is really satisfying to rebuild/restore the bits that need it, taking the time to do it in a way that will last. Our next big project is scraping down and repainting the porches.

150RidgewayGirl
Jul 30, 5:50 pm

There's something about the faces of everyone in my family and in mine. I think you can see in our eyes the kind of sadness, which is in two places at once--mourning the past, grieving the future. Sad in a historically significant and visually satisfying way. Looking sad like it's your job.

In 2010, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was attending Harvard when she wrote about her experiences being undocumented. Later, she would be on the shortlist for the National Book Award for her non-fiction book, The Undocumented Americans. Now she has written a novel, Catalina, about a young woman in her last year at Harvard who is undocumented and dealing with all the uncertainties people do when they are about to be launched into the world and dealing with the constant stress of being undocumented and worrying about her grandparents who are also undocumented and also getting older, so the kinds of jobs that are open to them are becoming more difficult. Catalina also wants to have fun, have sex, fall in love, like any other girl her age. She's also an over-thinker and very, very smart.

Catalina begins as a campus novel and ends as something else. For the first half of the book, it felt like a riff on Elif Batuman's Selin novels, with an uncertain but bright and engaging heroine navigating Harvard social life, trying her hand at flirtation and finding out more about herself.

I too could quote Charles Bukowski. I could wear headbands. Learn to drink port. You can be whoever you want in America.

But when the winter break sends her back to sit in her grandparents's tiny apartment while her boyfriend tours South America, an activity she can't share as she lacks the money and, as an undocumented American, lacks a passport. And once back in Queens, she is back in her grandparents's precarious world, where a toothache is a financial emergency and a surprise visit by the ICE puts her grandfather at risk of deportation. This second part of the book is both the strongest and the most scattershot part of the novel, with so many elements crammed into a single space that most get a quick, intriguing mention only to be overtaken by the next six things Catalina does or thinks or reacts to. The flaws of this novel are all those common in debut novels and there are far more elements to be impressed by. This is definitely an author to watch.

151labfs39
Jul 30, 6:19 pm

>150 RidgewayGirl: Villavicencio sounds like an impressive person and an author to keep an eye on.

152RidgewayGirl
Jul 30, 6:24 pm

>151 labfs39: She is. I do wish she had had an editor who had guided her to maybe omit a lot of the extraneous stuff that detracted from the book as a whole, but I think it's impossible for a talented young writer to not throw every single clever idea at their first novel.

153BLBera
Aug 1, 8:05 pm

Catalina sounds like one I would like, Kay.

>142 RidgewayGirl: Six dollars!? What a steal.

Great comments on North Woods. I agree that books structured like this tend to be light on character development.

154RidgewayGirl
Edited: Aug 2, 5:14 pm

The God of the Woods centers on the disappearance of a twelve year old girl from a summer camp in 1973. Barbara disappears from her cabin one night, setting off a large manhunt. This being a novel, there's far more to the story; Barbara is the daughter of the owners of the site of the camp and her brother disappeared from the same location a year before she was born.

Liz Moore is the author of Long Bright River and she knows how to structure a good mystery novel, but what she's really good at is examining people's motivations and relationships with each other. Here, she gives herself a lot to work with, yet keeps the plotting tight. Moore follows several characters through the events, from the missing girl's mother, to the camp counselor in charge of the cabin Barbara was in, who now finds herself a suspect in the case, to the awkward girl who was Barbara's closest friend at camp, to a young detective working the case, as well as several secondary characters, all viewing the same events from different angles. Moore examines the role class plays in how people are treated and in who is believed, as well as the roles that were available to women in 1960s and 70s and the hoops women jumped through to be allowed some measure of freedom. But primarily, this is a very well-plotted and satisfying mystery novel.

155RidgewayGirl
Aug 2, 5:15 pm

>153 BLBera: The more I think about North Woods, the more I think that the characters were less important than the setting.

156RidgewayGirl
Aug 5, 6:06 pm

In Clear by Carys Davies, a Scottish minister travels to an isolated island somewhere between the Orkneys and the Shetland islands. His job is to evict the sole living resident as part of the clearances, when subsistence farmers were removed from the land their families had farmed for generations to make room for sheep, which were more profitable for landowners. What happens during his stay on the island with the man with whom he does not share a language, knowing that a ship will arrive to pick both of them up in a month's time, as well as what happens to the minister's wife as she waits and worries, results in a book that it both gentle and harsh. Davies evokes the difficulties of daily living, both alone on an island far to the north and of making a living in Scotland in the 1840s.

There's so much packed into this slender novel and yet the book never feels hurried. The three central characters are complex and richly drawn and all three are in a situation that has potential for great harm to be done to them. Davies writes so well and allows her characters to be deeply empathetic even as they face very different issues than people face today. I'm looking forward to reading more from this talented author.

157cindydavid4
Aug 8, 12:40 pm

>155 RidgewayGirl: yup

158kjuliff
Aug 8, 12:47 pm

>156 RidgewayGirl: Great and enticing review. I’ve put it on my list. I love island books.

159RidgewayGirl
Aug 8, 3:47 pm

>158 kjuliff: I think you'll like it and I'm looking forward to finding out what you see in it.

160wandering_star
Aug 9, 9:20 am

Both The God of the Woods and Clear are available from my library, so I have put a hold on them.

161BLBera
Aug 10, 10:55 am

>156 RidgewayGirl: I also loved this one, a wonderful short novel. Did you read West? I also loved that one.

162RidgewayGirl
Aug 10, 2:33 pm

>161 BLBera: No, but now that I've been introduced to Carys Davies, I'll read more of her work.

163RidgewayGirl
Aug 12, 6:18 pm

Her whole life felt like work now. Even the parts that used to be the most fun, like reading over the summer or orgasming during sex or having conversation with her husband at dinner. They felt like things she had to be really good at now, in order to prove that everything was normal.

When her fifth try with IVF ends in miscarriage, Phoebe falls into a funk and drinks too much. Her husband falls into Mia, a pregnant colleague. Since Phoebe and her husband both teach at the same university (although he has tenure and she's an adjunct), it's awkward. After the divorce, Phoebe is left with a job that can't pay the bills or even provide health insurance, and a cat. So once the cat dies, she decides to spend a night in a small, luxury hotel on the coast and commit suicide. The problem is that the hotel is otherwise completely filled with a wedding party and Phoebe is pulled into their orbit despite her best efforts.

She looks out at the ocean spread before her. From up here, the water looks calmer than it does in movies. It looks like a flat and reliable rug, as if it knows nothing about what is to come. And it's true that Phoebe expected more from the ocean, maybe because she read too many Herman Melville books in which the ocean knows everything about the future--foreshadows death with every wild and loud crash of a wave.

As Phoebe learns to say what she means, she's drawn into the lives of The Wedding People, from the bride determined to make every detail perfect, to the tween daughter of the groom, to the bride's mother, Phoebe becomes important to helping them work through family dynamics and communication failures. As for Phoebe, she's pulled back into life despite her best efforts and wondering what trying again will mean for her.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach straddles the line between humor and brutal honesty with an assured deftness. More than anything, this is a novel about failures in communication between people, and in people's failures to communicate with themselves. Phoebe is a great protagonist; her years of measuring her words and actions have made her a keen observer of human relations and her newfound willingness to say what she means gives the people she's interacting with a lot to react to, both positively and negatively. But while Phoebe now speaks her mind, she's never cruel and she might be what the members of this wedding need.

164RidgewayGirl
Aug 13, 3:27 pm

All Fours by Miranda July is a novel that invites strong feelings. You'll love it or you'll hate it, but you will not be bored. The book centers on a forty-something woman living in LA, who decides to drive to a planned week in New York instead of flying. She makes it to Monrovia, one of the bland cities surrounding Los Angeles, and checks into a dumpy motel. And the next day, instead of continuing her trip, she just stays. She becomes fixated on a young man who works at Hertz and renovates her motel room, lying to her husband and child about her trip but confiding in a friend about her obsession for Davey, the Hertz employee.

The protagonist of All Fours is entirely self-centered in a way that is less selfish than it is insecure. Everything is about her and since her emotions careen wildly from extreme to extreme, there's nowhere to feel balanced or calm. It's exhausting living in her head, what with all the panic going on between bouts of despair and euphoria. But this isn't just a novel about a woman going off the rails, it's also about how women age and what that means to them. Beginning with the protagonist's outrage at what menopause might mean to her, July spins out into a more balanced look at how middle age brings positive changes as well. And it's cleverly done, even if the exaggerated style of telling the story didn't appeal to me.

165mabith
Aug 14, 12:22 am

Definitely taking a book bullet on The Wedding People.

I recently finished All Fours as well, and I don't think any piece of fiction has ever made me more aware of my asexuality. July's writing is so good though, and in between the exaggerated everything there are so many impeccably human and believable moments. Definitely a mixed bag for me, though I'm sure there are many who found it a perfect package.

166RidgewayGirl
Aug 14, 2:17 pm

>165 mabith: The Wedding People is fantastic. Espach knows exactly what she'd doing. And All Fours made a very strong argument for celibacy. I like a sexy scene in a book now and again and none of the sex scenes were remotely sexy in All Fours, which was clearly by design as July certainly knows how to tell a story.

167mabith
Aug 15, 5:01 pm

>166 RidgewayGirl: I did like that the sex scenes weren't sexy since that feels normal/realistic. Like, I can enjoy sex because pleasure is pleasure (and I don't have any sex-repulsion), but it's the sexual attraction aspect and how that drives her in All Fours that had me disconnected.

168RidgewayGirl
Aug 15, 6:13 pm

>167 mabith: A friend who read the book said she could only picture Kevin Federline (Brittney Spears's ex-husband) as Davey, which skewed her reaction to him. July is deliberately amping everything up to eleven and that just didn't work for me, but clearly many people loved it, it just didn't resonate with me.

169RidgewayGirl
Aug 20, 8:58 am

Personal news! A kitten has moved in to an upstairs room while we wait for her vet appointment. My daughter rescued a litter of kittens and has gotten all but two adopted out, so in a moment of weakness, I agreed to one (my husband would fill the house with cats if he could) and so she drove down from Chicago with a friend and the tiny thing we have named Bettina.

No pictures yet. She arrived last night and this morning was too busy making biscuits in her kibble bowl. She is a sweet thing who already runs to us and has a massive purr and I love her already.

170cindydavid4
Aug 20, 11:59 am

Awwwww I want a kitty! yes I know we have three already but I miss them when they were young!

171labfs39
Aug 20, 4:37 pm

>169 RidgewayGirl: Our furry friends have a special place in our hearts.

172RidgewayGirl
Edited: Aug 20, 5:22 pm

Here are the first pictures of a thoroughly delightful kitten.

173kidzdoc
Aug 20, 6:17 pm

>172 RidgewayGirl: How adorable!

174mabith
Aug 20, 9:11 pm

What a cutie! I do miss being around kittens, but some of them are just too naughty for me to take a chance on (and lack of claw control + my nervous system disease don't mix).

175rv1988
Aug 21, 1:07 am

>154 RidgewayGirl: >156 RidgewayGirl: Both are books that I had added to my list as potential reads and I'm so glad to see that you enjoyed them.

>Oh my gosh! Bettina looks adorable.

176RidgewayGirl
Aug 21, 11:38 am

Progress is being made. Yesterday, she stood in her water dish to get a drink. Today, well, this is a step forward.

She also had her first vet visit. She's healthy, but underweight and 8 weeks old. She can now start being introduced to the rest of the house and the other cats.

177labfs39
Aug 21, 5:05 pm

I'm glad Bettina is healthy. She's so tiny!

178RidgewayGirl
Aug 21, 8:19 pm

>177 labfs39: She's underweight, but working very hard to remedy that.

179ursula
Aug 22, 3:42 pm

>176 RidgewayGirl: Oh my goodness, that picture made me laugh. She is so cute. I'm glad she can be introduced to the rest of the family now!

180RidgewayGirl
Aug 23, 11:57 am

>179 ursula: We've started letting the other cats see her and they are all Not In Favor.

181BLBera
Aug 23, 5:56 pm

A new kitten! How exciting. My daughter's cat Annie has never liked other cats in the house, so now she is the queen. She also rules over the dogs.

182RidgewayGirl
Edited: Aug 23, 7:37 pm

>181 BLBera: The size difference is unimportant. Dogs always end up obeying the cats. It's because cats are sharp.

183RidgewayGirl
Aug 24, 3:51 pm

Kate Atkinson has kindly provided us with a new Jackson Brody mystery, Death at the Sign of the Rook, and if you're a fan, you've no doubt already planned to read it asap.

This installment begins with Jackson arriving at a country hotel, a hotel situated in a grand house of the Downton Abbey variety, for a murder mystery weekend event, then the book goes back in time to explain why he is there, given that it's not the kind of thing he would usually go in for. It begins with the theft of a small painting from the bedroom of a recently deceased widow. Her middle-aged children hire Jackson to get it back from the caregiver they suspect of having taken it. Jackson is intrigued -- by the painting, by the caregiver, and the sense that the pair that hired him are hiding something. And so he goes about figuring things out, step by step.

This novel is delightful. It calls back to the Golden Age mystery novels with the big manor house, the characters that include everyone from a vicar to a butler to landed gentry slowing selling off the artworks to maintain the house. Of course, it's well-constructed and Atkinson manages to create a few more memorable characters, while bringing back a few old favorites.

184cindydavid4
Aug 24, 5:26 pm

>183 RidgewayGirl: I was disappointed in her last two, this might just be the ticket!

185RidgewayGirl
Aug 24, 5:34 pm

>184 cindydavid4: Her Jackson Brody mystery novels are different from her literary fiction. I suspect that there are many people who only read one or the other. I did like Shrines of Gaiety and her short stories, for what that's worth.

186BLBera
Aug 24, 8:41 pm

Hi Kay. Good to know the latest Jackson Brody is a good one.

I am on the library list for it. I can't wait. While I do have favorite Atkinson novels, basically I will read anything she writes.

187kjuliff
Aug 24, 8:55 pm

>186 BLBera: I have to get back to liking her again. I was a fan till that gin palace book.

188lisapeet
Edited: Aug 24, 9:11 pm

OH that is a cute kitten. I think my kitten rescuing days are over for a while—I’m at capacity, realistically. But those scrawny babies turn into the most loving cats because you’re mommy—our Spencer was 7 weeks and 13 oz. when we pulled him inside two years ago, and he’s such a sweetheart now. Always my baby.

I have several of the Jackson Brodie books but have read them. I’m thinking go chronologically?

189RidgewayGirl
Aug 26, 4:00 pm

>188 lisapeet: Lisa, the entire Jackson Brodie series is wonderful. If you can, start with the first one, Case Histories.

And, yes, while Bettina is a delight, we are definitely now officially at capacity.

190RidgewayGirl
Aug 28, 5:29 pm

It was hard to articulate the point at which we switched from wanting to get older to feeling like we could stand to be a little bit younger. Perhaps there had never been a point when we really felt like we wanted to be older, only to have the things we thought being older entailed: freedom, money, privacy, love. But it had always been true that if we were a little bit younger, a little bit fresher, then we'd be a little bit better.

Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go is Cleo Qian's debut short story collection and it's a banger. Qian writes about young women who are trying to find their way in life, who are figuring things out or just trying to figure out what's going on. These women are Chinese or Japanese or Chinese American and they live in China, or are traveling in Japan or are living in California. It's the variety of settings and of experiences that make this collection so interesting. Sometimes the stories have a supernatural flavor and sometimes it's just about a young woman working in a call center and living with her Mom. It's an interesting collection that introduces a new writer who is worth watching.

191RidgewayGirl
Sep 3, 6:35 pm

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio is such a wonderful and thought-provoking book, I'd rather just tell you to skip the reviews and go read it yourself. But if you want more information, the novel follows Lauren, who comes home half drunk from a great night out with a close friend to find a strange man in the hallway, attempting to get her upstairs. He claims to be her husband, but Lauren isn't married. It's all terrifying, and then more so when she sees that she's been texting with this man in a way that suggests that they are married and her apartment is different, the walls are painted differently, there are some of her things, but also things she doesn't recognize. Her phone is full of photos of them together and the downstairs neighbors act as though he's lived there for years.

And then this man goes up to the attic and a different husband emerges.

And Lauren, caught in this endless husband supply (not all of them good, from the man who likes to stick his head between her and the book she is reading to tell her to spend time with him instead, to a man full of barely contained anger) has to figure out what is going on and what she should do with it.

Gramazio writes so well and with such ease, it's surprising to know this is her first published novel. Lauren is a great character to follow. She's resourceful and resilient and, placed into an odd and unique situation, tries to make the best of things, while learning a lot about herself and what matters most to her. This was a lot of fun to read and I am already ready for her next book.

192BLBera
Edited: Sep 3, 9:28 pm

>191 RidgewayGirl: This sounds really weird.

in a good way.

193mabith
Sep 3, 8:47 pm

The Husbands sounds like an interesting ride. On the list it goes!

194RidgewayGirl
Sep 9, 9:50 am

>192 BLBera: Beth, the concept is nuts, but Gramazio doesn't attempt to over-explain.

>193 mabith: Meredith, it's so fun and I keep thinking about it.

I spent the weekend in Chicago, at the Printers Row Lit Fest, which I highly recommend. It was two days of great panels and having to make hard choices of who to see. There was also a visit to my favorite bookstore, Exile in Bookville, which has an abundance of books in translation and from small presses. I got a little carried away and when the fog of war had passed, I had to fit all of these in one very small suitcase.

195lisapeet
Sep 9, 4:33 pm

>194 RidgewayGirl: Good stuff!

196LolaWalser
Sep 9, 7:41 pm

That Lynda Barry volume is great. But then what of hers isn't.

197BLBera
Sep 10, 2:33 pm

>194 RidgewayGirl: Nice haul. I plan to go next year. I have a friend who lives in Chicago who was doing other things this year, but we have tentatively penciled it in for 2025.

198RidgewayGirl
Sep 11, 11:09 am

>197 BLBera: It's a great festival and we should meet up there if you go.

199labfs39
Sep 11, 5:15 pm

>194 RidgewayGirl: Great haul! Were there any panels or speakers who stood out from the rest as particularly excellent?

200RidgewayGirl
Sep 12, 9:18 am

>199 labfs39: Luis Alberto Urrea is a natural story-teller, and explained a lot of the research and history behind Good-Night Irene and his own memories of his mother, who was the inspiration for the book.

Phillip B. Williams talked about his book, Ours, and I would have picked up a copy then and there, but it's a sizable book and my suitcase could only hold so much. He was happy and engaged and the audience was so into it. He's also a poet, so I'm really interested to see how that affects the writing in the book.

The first panel we saw was about place in fiction and while the three authors were very different from each other and wrote very different books (Theodore Wheeler -- The War Begins in Paris, Amina Gautier -- The Best that You Can Do: Stories, and Janika Oza -- A History of Burning) they were so supportive of each other and kept pointing out aspects of each other's novels, that it didn't matter that the interviewer's questions were generic.

And I love Elizabeth McKenzie and she was exactly like one would expect given her books.

201labfs39
Sep 12, 6:30 pm

>200 RidgewayGirl: How nice that the panelists discussing place in fiction had read each other's books. That's not always the case it seems.

202BLBera
Sep 12, 9:16 pm

>200 RidgewayGirl: It sounds great.

203RidgewayGirl
Sep 13, 6:46 pm

>201 labfs39: I was impressed with the interviewers and facilitators, too. They were often authors themselves and had done their homework. In one panel about music, the interviewer was as knowledgeable as the authors she was talking with, which made for a great conversation.

>202 BLBera: Beth, my friend and I had originally planned to meet at a different book festival each year, but the Printers Row Lit Fest is so well done and Chicago has so much to see and do, that we may just keep coming back to this one.

204RidgewayGirl
Sep 13, 6:46 pm

The stories in Highway Thirteen: Stories by Fiona McFarlane all center on a notorious Australian serial killer who murdered hitchhikers and backpackers in New South Wales some thirty years ago. These aren't horror stories or detective tales, instead each story centers on someone with a connection to the crimes, some very tangential, like the first story about a man whose co-worker is fascinated by the crimes; some closer, like a politician running for office who shares his last name, or an actor taking a role in a film.

The serial killer Noah's playing is--was--a real man. Noah had heard of him before he took the part, of course. Every Australian has heard of him. Most Americans haven't. Wylie hadn't. Noah tried to explain: This is like playing Ted Bundy. This is like playing Jack the Ripper. Wylie said, Good! A complex, brave, meaty part! He knows she considers Australia, and everything in it, smaller than anything in the US or Europe. Unconsciously, of course. Smaller serial killers, smaller murders, smaller grief.

But while the stories center on the serial killer, they often don't mention him at all, or in passing. People, even people affected by his actions, still lead complex lives of their own. So in The Wake, the spouse of a detective who worked on the task force finds out the killer has died, but the character and the story are more focused on an unsettling change to her morning routine.

I've read other short story collections that use a single person or event to tie the stories together and when they are well done, the result is a collection that is varied and also cohesive. McFarlane's collection was wonderful -- she hardly needed the connective tissue as each story stood fully on its own feet, but there was so much variety in the stories collected here, that the connections, however faint, did give added force to their impact.

205kjuliff
Sep 13, 8:32 pm

>204 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for reviewing this Kay. I’ll try to read it soon. I listened to a sample. I usually avoid Australian audio books and Australian films as they make me homesick. But this sounds good for me as it’s not over the top Australian, and the narrator has an authentic Australian accent - that is, she’s not trying to sound Australian.

206RidgewayGirl
Sep 13, 9:28 pm

>205 kjuliff: Not to mention that a book centered on a serial killer is unlikely to make one long to be there.

207kjuliff
Sep 13, 10:18 pm

>206 RidgewayGirl: Ha, yes. V true. I think the backpacker killer was in NSW. I do remember reading about it. The content will indeed be a good antidote.

208BLBera
Sep 14, 10:10 am

>203 RidgewayGirl: Well, maybe I will see you there next year.

209RidgewayGirl
Sep 14, 1:46 pm

>207 kjuliff: I'm eager to find out what you think about it.

>208 BLBera: That would be fun!

210RidgewayGirl
Sep 14, 3:05 pm

In Anita de Monte Laughs Last, Xochitl Gonzalez takes the true story of Ana Mendieta, the Cuban-American artist who was allegedly pushed from the 34th floor apartment by her husband, the artist Carl Andre, in 1985 and changes the names and some details and creates a vivid reimagining of the artist's life and adds a supernatural element. Next to this story, which has been the subject of some controversy, sits another story, this time set a decade later, about an art history student who is working on her thesis when she discovers Anita de Monte's work. Raquel is Nuyorican, a fish out of water on the well-heeled grounds of Brown University, falling in love with an art major and figuring out how her blue collar roots fit into her new world.

Usually, a novel using two time lines, means that one of the storylines will be far more interesting than the other. Gonzalez manages to make Raquel's story as fascinating as Anita's. We know how Anita's story ends, for the most part, but Raquel's story has the element of surprise. Gonzalez's writing is assured and she keeps both stories moving along in tandem so that they enhance each other. While the ending denied Raquel the opportunity to choose her own path forward and leaned towards the supernatural in a way that took away from both women's stories, I still found this to be an extraordinary book.

211RidgewayGirl
Sep 16, 2:29 pm

Here we go:

I've read two of these, one of which was five stars and remarkable and the other which was slightly above average.

212RidgewayGirl
Sep 16, 2:58 pm

Inspector Espinoza of the Rio de Janeiro police department would far rather be browsing bookstore shelves than doing his job, but when he's assigned the case of a man shot in his own car in a parking garage, he reluctantly gets to work. The case in L. A. García-Roza's The Silence of the Rain ends up far more complicated and far-reaching than he expected and, given the corruption in the police force, there are very few people he can trust; a younger colleague and an old friend who is working as an investigator for the insurance company that holds a policy on the dead man. The case takes him through a bunch of suspects and women he is attracted to, from the wife of the victim, to the secretary of the dead man who has disappeared, to a petty street criminal.

This was an interesting but often slow-paced book, as the detective protagonist far prefers rearranging the stacks of books in his apartment or reading his latest acquisition to active investigation. Still, he is dogged and thorough and sharp and I found the setting and unusual viewpoint of the detective refreshing and I will definitely keep an eye out for other books in this Brazilian series.

213SassyLassy
Sep 17, 6:51 am

>212 RidgewayGirl: Need a new series, and this sounds like a good one. What's not to like about an investigator who would far rather be browsing bookstore shelves than doing his job

214RidgewayGirl
Edited: Sep 17, 11:24 am

>213 SassyLassy: Just finding a solid mystery series written by someone outside the anglosphere and set outside of the usual places is a win for me. Many of the books in the series are available on Hoopla, if that's available to you.

215BLBera
Sep 18, 10:46 am

>210 RidgewayGirl: I've loved both of Gonzalez's books, Kay, and can't wait to see what she does next.

216RidgewayGirl
Sep 18, 1:43 pm

>215 BLBera: Yes, I was a fan of Olga Dies Dreaming, too. But I do think Anita de Monte Laughs Last was a big step forward for Gonzalez as a writer and I am eager to see what she writes next.

217Cariola
Sep 18, 2:32 pm

>156 RidgewayGirl: I loved Clear--and also North Woods, although I will admit that it dragged at times. Like you, I plan to read more by Carys Davies.

Love the photos of Bettina!

You've read quite a few that are on my wish list.

218RidgewayGirl
Sep 18, 4:57 pm

>217 Cariola: We do tend to like the same books!

219RidgewayGirl
Sep 22, 11:41 am

In 1961, Isabel is living alone in the family home in a rural part of the Netherlands. Both her brothers live in Amsterdam, and she travels in to join them for dinner occasionally. Her older brother, to whom ownership of the family home has passed, brings a new girlfriend to join them and Isabel takes an immediate dislike to the gauche, bleached blonde woman. That doesn't prevent her brother from installing Eve in the family home while he is traveling for business. Isabel, prickly and protective of her privacy, does not welcome this intruder and to her surprise, Eve refuses to be a meek supplicant. As they uneasily share the house, Isabel begins at last to question how the family took possession of the house in the middle of the war, and why it came fully furnished.

I have mixed feelings about The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, which is on the shortlist for the 2024 Booker Prize. It's uncommon to see a book, written by a European, address the ways that citizens of those countries benefited from the German occupation. This part of the book was very well done. What felt less authentic to me is in how the novel addressed gay and lesbian relationships. They seemed to be centered in the present day, with a modern understanding and it felt like an opportunity was lost in not handling that important aspect of the book with the same nuance and historical grounding as the rest.

220RidgewayGirl
Sep 25, 5:28 pm

Liars by Sarah Manguso is the story of a bad marriage that lasted fourteen years. John and Jane are both working in creative fields, she as a writer, he as a visual artist, when they meet, fall in love and marry, determined to have a marriage of equals. That's not what ends up happening, and each time Jane settles into an academic job, John finds reasons they should move and she ends up managing his life as well as the household and the childcare of the baby he wanted and she didn't.

The novel is told from Jane's point-of-view and she is angry. She sees herself as responsible for everything, but in control of nothing. She dreams of leaving and has friends who tell her how much easier her life will be without him and she believes them. But she stays, losing control over her own decisions and agency. The reasons spouses are unable to leave damaging relationships are not present here; she has her own career, albeit diminished by the needs of his career, and often earns more than he does, there are no religious or cultural pressures for her to remain where she doesn't want to be.

This book is really sharp; both clever and painfully cutting. There's no part of this disastrous relationship that remains off limits. It's an interesting book to read as a married person -- there are parts that slice close to home, other parts that left me enraged, mostly at John, but sometimes at Jane for remaining so resolutely passive. The novel is an indictment of married life, yes, but also a very specific case study, one that omits any good, any reason to make a life with another person. And it makes for gripping and thought-provoking reading even as I thought it was sometimes heavy-handed.

221WelshBookworm
Oct 13, 11:41 pm

>172 RidgewayGirl: Enjoy!

This topic was continued by RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Four.

RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Three

TalkClub Read 2024

1RidgewayGirlEdited: May 25, 5:51 pm

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42kidzdoc
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43labfs39
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53cindydavid4
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55lisapeet
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56labfs39
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