RidgewayGirl Reads More Books in 2024, Part Three

With the neighborhood kids back in school startlingly early and my own youngest child starting his senior year of university, it seems a good time for a new thread. Also, my old thread was getting kind of long.

Welcome, friends. Expect an occasional kitten picture, but I will try to stick to books.





Currently Reading



Recently Read



Recently Acquired



Reading Miscellany

Owned Books Read: 41

Library Books Read: 52

Audiobooks: 2

Netgalley: 20

Borrowed:

Books Acquired: 101

Rereads: 2

Abandoned with Prejudice: 1

Category One


Create Your Own Visited Countries Map



Global Reading

1. My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls (Norway)
2. People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated from the Javanese by Tiffany Tsao (Indonesia)
3. Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Japan)
4. Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić (Croatia)
5. Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore (France)
6. The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria)
7. The Silence of the Rain by L. A. Garcia-Roza, translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser (Brazil)
8. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Netherlands)
9. The Ascent by Stefan Hertmans, translated from the Dutch by David McKay (Belgium)
10. V13 by Emmanuel Carrière, translated from the French by John Lambert
11. Away! Away! by Jana Beňová, translated from the Slovak by Janet Livingstone

Category Two



Representation Matters: Diverse Books

1. Blackouts by Justin Torres
2. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
3. Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
4. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
5. The Moon of Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice
6. Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
7. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
8. Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
9. Good Girl by Aria Aber

Category Three



Immigrants, Expats, Works in Translation

1. The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino, translated from the Japanese by Giles Murray
2. Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
3. Absolution by Alice McDermott
4. The Wind Knows My Name by Isabelle Allende, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle
5. Real Americans by Rachel Khong
6. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
7. Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
8. Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated from the Italian by Leah Janeczko
9. A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
10. Shanghailanders by Juli Min

Category Four



Shiny New Books: Books Published in 2024

1. Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon
2. One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall
3. The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
4. Trondheim by Cormac James
5. Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp
6. Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
7. Shanghai by Joseph Kanon
8. Highway Thirteen: Stories by Fiona McFarlane
9. The Coast Road by Alan Murrin
10. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Category Five



Let's Keep Things Brief: Short Story Collections and Novellas

1. Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women by Mary Rechner
2. Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett
3. So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
4. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams by Ellen Gilchrist
5. The Disappeared: Stories by Andrew Porter
6. Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung
7. You Like it Darker: Stories by Stephen King
8. Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go by Cleo Qian
9. Safe Enough by Lee Child
10. The Angel of Rome by Jess Walter

Category Six



Tackling the TBR: Books off of My Own Shelves

1. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
2. S. by Doug Dorst
3. Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde edited by Bregje Gerritse
4. Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry by Christine Sneed
5. James by Percival Everett
6. Clear by Carys Davies
7. Liars by Sarah Manguso
8. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
9. Hairpin Bridge by Taylor Adams
10. Shoko's Smile by Eunyoung Choi
11. Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler
12. Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips

Category Seven



Talking About Books: Book Club Books

1. Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
2. Go as a River by Shelley Read
3. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv
4. All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby
5. Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara
6. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
7. The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark
8. Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
9. Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
10. The House is on Fire by Rachel Beanland
11. Secrets Typed in Blood by Stephen Spotswood

Category Eight



Murders and Other Bad Things: Crime Novels, Noir, Horror

1. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
2. The Hunter by Tana French
3. The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones
4. Hard Girls by J. Robert Lennon
5. The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey
6. Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
7. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
8. Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
9. Hearts of Darkness by Jana Monroe
10. The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Category Nine



Long Live the Rooster: Longlisted, Shortlisted and Award Winners

1. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (Competitor, ToB 2024)
2. The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo (Competitor, ToB 2024)
3. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Competitor, ToB 2024)
4. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (Longlisted, Booker Prize 2023)
5. American Mermaid by Julia Langbein (Competitor, ToB 2024)
6. Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan (Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction, 2024)
7. The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (ToB Summer Reading, 2024)
8. Held by Anne Michaels (Booker Prize shortlist, 2024)
9. The Most by Jessica Anthony (National Book Award Longlist, 2024)
10. Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Booker Prize winner, 2024)
11. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (National Book Award Shortlist, 2024)

Category Ten



Books Read on my iPad

1. Cold People by Tom Rob Smith
2. From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata
3. The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas
4. We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons
5. Don't You Forget About Me by Mhairi McFarlane
6. First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger
7. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
8. The Wedding People by Alison Espach
9. The Wake-Up Call by Beth O'Leary
10.Isola: A Novel by Allegra Goodman

Category Eleven



Books with a Strong Sense of Place

1. Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
2. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
3. The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell
4. King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich
5. The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey
6. North Woods by Daniel Mason
7. Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories by Janice Deal
8. The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright
9. Bear by Julia Phillips
10. Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell
11. The Winner by Teddy Wayne

Just for fun and, in keeping with having no goals this year, here's the BingoDog.



1. Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki
2. My Men by Victoria Kielland
4. Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
5. Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
6. Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon
7. Absolution by Alice McDermott
8. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
10. First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger
11. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
12. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
14. Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women by Mary Rechner
15. James by Percival Everett
16. Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
17. The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell
18. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
19. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
20. Go as a River by Shelley Read
21. Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
22. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
23. The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino
24. Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
25. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Come on in, grab a cup of something and a comfortable chair and let's get reading.

Happy New Thread. I laughed at the comic in >8 RidgewayGirl: and thought that is not much of a threat.

Happy new thread!

>15 lowelibrary: I just finished reading The Husbands and this guy does make an appearance in that book. He does not last long.

>16 NinieB: Thanks, Ninie!

Happy New Thread Kay! As always I'm perusing your books on deck, and I was about to read A Game of Lies, but then I saw that it's the second book in a series beginning with The Last Party which I'm reading now and is pretty good, but perhaps a tad too long.

>18 lsh63: My husband brought home a copy of A Game of Lies for me, so I'm going to read out of order.

Happy New Thread! I always like someone's new thread as a chance to review the books they've read.

Continuing the conversation from the last thread . . . we used to be able to request ebooks before they were purchased through Tennessee Reads. That option is no longer available, and I really hate that it isn't.

>20 dudes22: Likewise. I keep finding books I want to read, but then they're already on my wishlist.

>21 thornton37814: Ebooks here are through an Illinois-wide system, which certainly gives me a larger number of books to choose from. I don't know if I can request an ebook. If it's something I want to read, it's usually faster to request a physical copy and I've only requested those so far. I still prefer paper.

>22 RidgewayGirl: You can request to “notify me” in Libby for books that aren’t available, but I’ve only done that for older books, and they’ve never become available.

Happy new thread! I love the images, especially the Poe comic and the tweet about 19th-century love interests.

>23 Charon07: Retired acquistions department librarian here! Clicking that "notify me" button in Libby will put the book on a list that your library's e-book purchaser will see, so they'll know there's interest. But if a book's been out for a few years without any of the library's users expressing any interest, the library may not think it cost-effective to buy a copy that's likely to circulate only once, to the person now requesting it after all those years. And e-books are usually a lot more expensive than print books, making it even less likely that the library will purchase a copy for a single user. The "notify me" button is far more effective for newly released/pre-publication titles.

Given that libraries do not technically own the e-books in their collection, it seems unlikely that anyone is working very hard on technology that would allow libraries to lend e-books to users from other libraries in the way that the ILL system allows print books to be shipped from one library to another. For older books that your library does not own, you are probably better off requesting a print copy via ILL than hoping that your library will be an e-copy.

(Multiple "notify me" requests will, of course, carry more weight than a single request, and one could, I suppose, game the system by asking one's friends to "notify me" the book in which one was interested; I leave it as an exercise for the individual library user to contemplate the ethical implications of such action.)

As always when I spout off on such topics, these comments are my own opinions and should not be interpreted as reflecting the policies or procedures of my former employer.

>25 KeithChaffee: Thanks for that info! I wasn’t sure that anyone saw those requests. I figured it wasn’t likely that older books would be acquired, but I think it’s still worth letting the library know there’s interest. I can usually find the books I want in the actual print book collection, or else in Hoopla or at the local university library. But how on earth can ebooks cost the library more than print books?!

>26 Charon07: I'm sure Keith can answer more thoroughly, but the short answer is that because publishers are able to control how many times an ebook is circulated, and because, unlike physical copies, libraries can't just buy the ebooks on the open market, they have jacked up the prices for library copies and control how many times a book can be checked out before the library loses that ebook and has to buy another.

https://apnews.com/article/libraries-ebooks-publishers-expensive-laws-5d494dbaee...

>26 Charon07: Because that's how the publishers price them. Your library is, in many cases, paying 2-3 times as much for an e-book as they are for the same book in print. And they aren't actually buying the book for that price; they are buying the right to loan the book for a specific time period or for a specific number of loans. After the six months are up, or after the book's been borrowed 26 times, they will have to "buy" another copy.

Libraries and librarians have been working to change that system, and there was a small bit of progress last week, when the Independent Publishers Group reached a deal that will allow libraries to actually purchase e-books. This isn't going to affect most library users, because it's a small group of publishers and titles (and not many bestsellers among them), and access will be through a specific platform (not Libby) that most libraries don't use. But it's a first step in the right direction.

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.

Happy new thread! I enjoyed revisiting your categories, particularly the memes :)

I've settled in and I am looking forward to both books and cats!

Happy new thread! I love reading lists of books. I'm just trying to decide on my favourite graphic, but I think Edgar Allan Poe at #4 gets my vote!

Just stopping by to catch up after a long hiatus. I always enjoy your reviews!

Happy New Thread!

Thanks, Jackie, Judy, Vivienne and Barb.

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.

>35 RidgewayGirl: I had this on my Libby hold list forever and finally cancelled the hold. Reading your review makes me want to revisit that decision. Maybe the list won't be as long now!

>36 beebeereads: This book surprised me with how good it was.

>35 RidgewayGirl: Taking a BB for this one. It sounds interesting.

Happy new thread! It was nice to re-read your CATegories again!

Happy new thread, Kay. I love to see those memes...

>38 lowelibrary: I was in Chicago this weekend with a friend and we could not stop bringing up The Husbands, although we talked about a lot of books.

>39 Tess_W: & >40 MissWatson: Thanks, can you believe it's almost autumn?

This weekend I went up to Chicago for the Printers Row Lit Fest, which was fantastic, with perfect weather and so many excellent authors. The stand-out was Luis Alberto Urrea, who is a natural story-teller, and Phillip B. Williams, who wrote Ours. All of the panels were interesting, even the one my friend dragged me to. We also visited my favorite bookstore, Exile in Bookville, which is in an old building where there is still a man operating the elevator, and which has a ton of books in translation and from small presses.

In any case, a red haze descended, putting me in a fog of war-type situation, and in two days, I ended up with this enormous stack of books. I regret nothing, but will have to find room on the shelves.

>41 RidgewayGirl: What a great haul, and what a fun trip!

>42 Charon07: So much fun! I told one of the owners of Exile in Bookville about how much I loved her bookstore and she gave me an ARC of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, which mentions the shop.

>41 RidgewayGirl: LOL at the fog of war! Enjoy your haul!

>41 RidgewayGirl: That sounds like you had tons of fun. I am surprised you bought only these...

>44 christina_reads: Thanks, Christina, I will!

>45 MissWatson: Well, we are heading down to St. Louis today to see their excellent art museum (my favorite is the room filled with Max Beckmann's dreariest works) and there's a convenient bookstore nearby.

>41 RidgewayGirl: LOL to the fog of war--described well!

I collect bookstores as many of us probably do, so I think I must have a copy of The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore.

>47 Tess_W: What's worse, is that after Chicago, we drove down to St. Louis to see their excellent art museum, SLAM. And as I was looking at a book in the gift shop, a woman noted that the price for that book was very good. That's how I discovered they were selling their gorgeous exhibition catalogs for $5 and I bought four more books.

>48 clue: I was delighted with the gift and quickly noted that Exile in Bookville is mentioned in the book.

>49 RidgewayGirl: Wow! It's hard to find a good price on some of those exhibition catalogs.

>50 thornton37814: The only place I've found inexpensive art exhibition catalogs is at large booksales if I get there early. It was great to find new copies. The used Max Beckmann retrospective had the previous owner's assessments of each art work. There were penciled comments in the margins next to the color plates saying things like, "good," or "too much pink."

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.

>52 RidgewayGirl: Ivan Milat!

>53 pamelad: Yes! She changed the names of everyone involved and changed some of the details, but it's clear what she's referring to.

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.

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.

>56 RidgewayGirl: Sounds like an interesting setting!

>57 thornton37814: I really like books set somewhere I don't know that much about.

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.

>41 RidgewayGirl: Congratulations on a fabulous haul!

Wonderful stack - look forward to hearing more about the books.

I heard the author of Call and Response speak at a recent event and then when adding it to my list of purchases (I couldn't resist) I realised you'd read it and recommended it ages ago. So good!

>60 VivienneR: Thanks, Vivienne. I am very pleased with all of the new books. That said, I don't think I've ever regretted a book purchase.

>61 charl08: Charlotte, I would love to hear Moeng talk about her work. Did you get your copy signed?

>62 RidgewayGirl: No, I am usually too impatient to queue at these things, and the few times I have, have managed to sound like a berk when trying to express enthusiasm for their books. Still get the horrors re an attempted conversation with Kate Atkinson about 14 years ago re the audio version of her first book.
Of course, regret not getting it signed now having read the book. I assumed she traveled to the US a lot but I may have misunderstood that.

>63 charl08: She may be in the US reading and signing her book all the time, but I'm in a small city, 2 1/2 hours from the nearest city she would be likely to visit. I do miss being in a city large enough to be a stop on author tours.

And I am always an idiot in front of author I like. Just the absolute most awkward and embarrassing person you've ever met. I still remember how kind Denise Mina was and how weird I was.

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.

First published in 1964, Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey follows the Stamper family, who own a mill and logging outfit in coastal Oregon. Primarily, it tells the story of two half brothers; Leland Stamper who has returned to the family house out of a desire to take revenge on his older half brother, Hank, who runs the one logging concern still at work during a brutal strike because the business only employs family members. As the two men work together, they reluctantly form a bond, but Leland is intent on his revenge and finds Hank's wife a convenient target.

This is a novel just seething with testosterone. Kesey chooses to portray striking lumberjacks as lazy and Hank as the stalwart individualist who will do it all himself if he needs to. But the job he has set himself is to cut and transport down the river to a large corporate mill a quantity of lumber that requires that he cooperate with other men to succeed. He has one solid friend, the unreliable help of his half brother and assorted family members who begin to peel off as the tension with the striking lumberjacks makes things unpleasant. In the end, he is running short of willing workers, which will make the project harder to complete and a lot more dangerous.

The writing in this book is truly lovely. Kesey can write. It's a long book, with a lot of descriptive passages, but they are the best parts of the book. The story itself is pure soap opera and full of men having big feelings. The thing that renders this book difficult to read is the endless casual racism, especially a particularly egregious portrayal of a Native American woman, as well as how the women in this book exist solely as possessions of men and don't have agency of their own. Hank's wife, Viv, who gets some space in this novel, nonetheless is portrayed as not having choices of her own when it comes to being used in Leland's war against his brother. This is an immersive book, but one that asks the reader to put up with a world in which the only people who matter or who count are white men.

All of the stories in Strange Attractors: the Ephrem Stories by Janice Deal are set in the same Illinois town not too far from the Wisconsin border. I was a little wary picking up this book, wondering if I was going to be reading a Lake Wobegon knock-off, but instead discovered stories with a hard edge to them. Ephrem is no scenic small town, but a place without charm. There's a failing mall, a barely adequate community college and a few housing developments and no real downtown, making Ephrem feel more like a down-on-its-heels suburb than an actual place. And the people who live there are not doing well. This book is filled with people just about getting by, lonely children, living through the aftermath of disaster, or just the aftermath of ruining something good, and people trying their best, discovering that things can still go badly wrong. There's both a quirky tone to these stories, and a melancholic edge that works surprisingly well together.

>67 RidgewayGirl: I’m intrigued by small-town Illinois stories, but worried they may be too depressingly realistic.

>68 Charon07: Deal does a great job of putting in moments of grace and humor, but these stories have a gritty realism to them. I've seen the author at a panel I attended and she's a very sunny person, so the starkness of her characters's lives surprised me -- in a good way though, because I like that kind of thing.

The Coast Road by Alan Murrin takes place in Ireland, on the coast of Donegal, in 1996, just before a referendum that would legalize divorce. In that time and place, divorce was impossible and the book follows three women; Izzy, the wife of a local politician who will not allow her to work, so she hides her discontent by collecting figurines and taking classes; Dolores, who has young children and a new baby and an abusive and philandering husband; and Colette, a woman who left her husband, only to return in hopes of being with her sons and when her husband refuses to let her into the house or access to her children, she takes an isolated cottage on the coast road.

This is a beautifully written book that paints a vivid picture of the setting these women exist in. It's also a nuanced picture of their different lives and how they negotiate their way through situations where they have very little power and a great deal of expectation weighing on them. I loved this novel and found the depictions of the women to be lovely -- they are complex and not always easy to like, and how they deal with the realities of their lives is very different.

And I just want to point out that the kitten who recently came to live with us is now twice as large, twice as fast and about 90% mayhem.

>71 RidgewayGirl: Happy lucky kitty

>72 lowelibrary: She does seem to be enjoying life.

>71 RidgewayGirl: Look at that angelic face of contentment and serenity—surely she couldn’t be an agent of mayhem!

>74 Charon07: Before that picture was taken, she knocked a plant off of a shelf. After that picture was taken, she toppled the stack of books my husband keeps by the side of the bed.

>71 RidgewayGirl: That is such a "who, me???" face! I am sure she was quite happy with her mayhem production :)

>71 RidgewayGirl: >76 rabbitprincess: I think it's a "what are you going to do about it anyway?" face.

>76 rabbitprincess: She is proud of her accomplishments!

>77 Jackie_K: Kiss her furry little head and let her sleep in my lap, obviously.

Molly imagined her mother-in-law over the years, living with a brutal husband, raising a son without help, her tools the same ones Molly herself had acquired in her journey through the world of men: a cunning charade of ignorance, a guileful pretense of naiveté. Some doormats lay on top of trapdoors.

Clem is the owner of The Queen City Detective Agency and she has one employee, a cheerful Vietnam vet who takes her seriously when she points out the casual racism around them. As a Black woman in 1985 in Mississippi working primarily for white people, she finds plenty of examples. But as she takes the job of finding out who poisoned a prison inmate, she spends her time trying to stay alive as she and Dixon find that Turnip Coogan's death has ties to local real estate moguls and to the shadowy Dixie Mafia, a criminal gang whose tentacles reach out in every direction.

The plot is elaborate, the criminals plentiful, and the detective hard-nosed and determined. It's a fun ride, sometimes held back by Snowden Wright's tendency to over-write and over-explain. The plot rushes along and the story, with its many characters and digressions, nonetheless is tight and well thought out. I had to skim a bit of the cock-fighting scenes, they are so vividly rendered, but all of that is part of painting an unapologetic portrait of this forgotten corner of the Deep South.

I've read this a dozen times, the last time in 2011, and rereading it now a few things stuck out to me. First, Lee is fantastic at writing children. Second, I hadn't noticed the classicism in this book until now -- the idea that there is a rigid hierarchy of value based on one's family didn't stick out to me before now, but that may be why this book has done so well over the years -- we can all imagine ourselves to be like the good Finches and not like the bad Cunninghams or worse Ewells. It softens the way the novel wants the reader to look at racism. That the one person who sees the situation clearly has to pretend to be a drunk and is still acceptable because he comes from a "good" family is certainly something. All that said, this is such a brilliant and approachable book. Probably the closest thing we have to a national novel.

>71 RidgewayGirl: Ah, they grow up so fast! She looks very at home.

>81 VivienneR: She gets bigger every day! And, yes, she feels very at home.

You were right, Kay. I'm enjoying Conviction quite a bit. I got about 2/3-3/4 of the book read yesterday on the flight. I'm hoping to fit it in a bit more while we're here and not have to wait for our return flight to finish it.

I read Green Frog and loved it - thanks for the rec! Such an original collection of stories.

Returning after two weeks of vacation leaves me far behind in my reviews. Not to mention the new books that still need to be added to my LT catalog. Half of the time was spent with VictoriaPL and so included more than a few bookstores.



Held, which is shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is written by Anne Michaels, who also writes poetry and that shows in the writing and cadences of this remarkable novel. Beginning with a few hours spent with a British soldier in the trenches of WWI, each chapter looks at moments in the lives of a family through time. These are lives that deal with tragedy and setbacks, but the overwhelming theme of this novel is the resiliency of love. A hopeful book for these anxious times, it's not twee or self-consciously heart-warming. Michaels shares Claire Keegan's skill of pulling moments of grace out of grim circumstances.

Set in Autumn of 1957, The Most by Jessica Anthony centers on a married woman with two young children against the backdrop of the Soviet space launch of the dog Laika on the Sputnik 2. On a warm Sunday morning, Kathleen stays home from church and instead goes down to the unused pool in her apartment complex. Her husband, Virgil, goes to church with the children, happily planning to spend his afternoon golfing with his friends at the insurance agency. As Kathleen sits in the pool and her husband takes the kids to church and then golfs, their pasts are revealed as well as the tensions in their marriage.

This is a slender book, taking place over a single day, but there is so much included in its less than 150 pages. Character studies of two people at a point at where they need to change to move forward, a look at how the roles imposed by the culture they lived in harmed both of them, a vivid picture of a place and time, and over them, the small body of a Moscow street dog.

>85 RidgewayGirl: I was on the fence about this one, but you’ve persuaded me to add it to my TBR. The cover is just gorgeous, so I’ll be happy to gaze at it in my LT library.

I hope you had a wonderful vacation. And I’m glad to hear your son made it through the hurricane relatively unscathed.

>87 Charon07: An excellent vacation and I know it was good because we were both ready to go home and pick up the routine again by the end of it. Held is a lovely, gorgeous book.

Two sisters live in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington. They take care of their mother, and live in their tiny house, but they are waiting for a time when they can sell the house and go live on the mainland and start their lives. Sam works at the concession stand on the ferry, selling snacks and hot chocolates to tourists, hooking up now and again with one of the other ferry workers. Elena works at the golf club as a waitress, and takes on more of the work involved in caring for their terminally ill mother, but she's the oldest and takes on this burden. Things seem smooth, if not comfortable, after all, the pause in Sam's employment caused by the pandemic has left them in a hole, but they have the future to look forward to. Then a bear appears in their front yard, a rare, but not unknown occurrence. Bears do swim between the islands, mainly in search of mates. While Sam is wary, Elena is fascinated and although she tells Sam she's catching rides to work with co-workers, and not walking through the woods alone, this may not be true.

Bear is written by Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth, a brilliant collection of tightly connected short stories set on the cold and wild eastern coast of Russia. While the setting is not dissimilar, being on the isolated fringe of an empire, this novel has a simpler plot, told entirely from the point of view of one of the sisters, and moves straight-forwardly through time. That said, Phillips is doing some interesting work here; the bear is both a metaphor and an actual bear. The way that Phillips tells this story through Sam's unreliable eyes, the vivid way she describes the island setting with its beauty and lack of opportunities and affordability for working class people, and of wanting to escape a place you love is beautifully done.

Hearts of Darkness is Jana Monroe's memoir of her working life, beginning as a police officer in the 1980s, but most of the emphasis is on the time she spent working for the FBI in the Behavioral Sciences unit, which we are all familiar with from movies, books and tv series. Monroe entered a work environment that wasn't friendly to women, but where she meets the man who will become her husband. She describes what her job was like and how she rarely got to see what happened with the cases she worked on. As the only woman in the unit, she was the one who was tasked with guiding actors around as they prepared for roles, from Jodie Foster to Demi Moore. And she talks about how she eventually was burned out and changed by her daily exposure to terrible crimes and so left the BSU, first moving up in the FBI heirarchy and finally leaving for a corporate job.

Usually, memoirs from people with interesting jobs fall into two categories. Either they are very badly written or the author is so committed to explaining how much better and smarter than the people around them, that they end up sounding like a jerk. There are exceptions, although those are usually written by academics, and so starting this book, I did not have high hopes. Monroe, however, is self-aware, as open about her missteps as her successes and she writes clearly. She's willing to throw a little shade and also explain her biases, making this book fun to read as well as truly illuminating.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished, they say.

Actually, the family will be just fine, as has always been the case since the dawn of time, while it's the writer who'll meet with a terrible fate in the desperate attempt to kill off mothers, fathers, and siblings only to once again find them inexorably alive.

So begins Lost on Me, Veronica Raimo's funny and sharp novel about a family of eccentrics in Rome. Verika is an observant child, if one prone to misinterpretation. She remembers everything, from being raised with an exceptional older brother, who goes on to become a priest, while her mother is able to say about her a lackluster, well she likes to draw. Her father subdivides their small apartment into an ever increasing number of rooms, to give a little private space to the six people who live there. Her mother had the uncanny ability to track down her children no matter where they went, a talent that grew onerous when they were teenagers. A large, boisterous Italian family is a mixed blessing.

Not only was I a skinny little girl with no appetite, but I was growing into an adolescent who was shamelessly flat-chested. My grandmother was always eager to repeat the mantra she'd learned from her late husband: "You've got to fill at least a champagne glass."

With this, she would slap an espresso cup against my chest and burst out laughing."

Verika is a wonderful narrator of her family's life, and of her own. This novel won the Strega Giovani Prize in Italy, which makes sense because it is intelligent, wry and very funny.

Safe Enough is a collection of short stories by Lee Child that do not involve Jack Reacher. Instead, the protagonists are cops, hit men, enforcers and body guards. Sometimes they behave in ways Reacher would understand, sometimes they are the bad guys, sometimes they are hapless rubes. Despite the wide range of professions, the stories all fit nicely into the world Reacher inhabits and end up feeling similar. Still they were a good accompaniment to a few days of travel and a solid choice for a distracted mind or busy waiting room.

The Emperor and the Gardener--a gripping title for this book, it seemed to me, but I settled on something closer to home, to the house in Drongenhof; I found all the space I needed in those rooms where the walls breathed out stories that settled on the floor like a thick layer of dust, where the pale garlands on the musty wallpaper inspired me, that first day as Mr. De Potter led me on my ascent through the house.

In 1979, in the quiet Belgian city of Ghent, Stefan Hertmans buys a near derelict house in a run-down part of town and lives in it for twenty years. Later, he discovers that the house was previously lived in by a high-ranking member of the SS and his family. The Ascent is his telling of Willem Verhulst's story, focusing on the WWII years, when the Verhulst family lived in the house. It's a compelling story--Verhulst married a devout Dutch woman who didn't like his involvement with the Germans, yet remained with him out of a sense of duty, while he had a mistress, with whom he fled to Germany as the end of the war neared. The Belgians drawn to the Nazis were largely from the Dutch-speaking Flemish population who felt that the French-speaking Walloons treated them badly. Joining with the Nazis gave them a sense of power and, indeed, they formed the bulk of the Belgian collaborators. Verhulst went from being an unsuccessful salesman to being in charge of a large department, compiling lists of people for the Nazis to question and reveling in being a member.

Hertmans was lucky in that Verhulst's wife and two of his children wrote memoirs about that time and that there were many records of his words and activities. Nevertheless, it's an impressive accomplishment and Hertmans's writing and how he structures this book is very good. He calls it a novel, which is to say that this is narrative non-fiction.

You find the most interesting books. I'm taking a BB for Bear because of the mention of the San Juan Islands. The islands provided the view from my office when I worked. I've spent enough time gazing at them that a book will be a nice treat.

>94 VivienneR: I think you'll love Bear. Being able to picture the scenery accurately will certainly enhance your enjoyment.

Mariana Enriquez is an Argentinian horror writer who has written both short stories and one big novel that have been translated into English. Her stories are odd, inventive and unsettling and her newest collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People, is as solid and surprising as her previous ones. In this book, a woman is able to communicate with the newly dead; an elderly man sells his dead wife's designer gowns to a second-hand store; two friends tour a palace that had previously been used for torture, only to find themselves pulled into the past; and a couple rent an Airbnb in a small, picturesque town and have a very bad weekend.

The stories are remarkably varied and give a look at what life is like in Argentina from the neighborhoods teetering on the edge of poverty, to the comfortably off deciding where to go on vacation. Megan McDowell's translation is, as always, seamless and easy to read. These stories lean towards the unsettling side of horror, rather than gore, but some are disturbing. Enriquez is such an imaginative writer and her short stories are where she shines brightest.

>96 RidgewayGirl: I love the title. I liked Things We Lost in the Fire so will see if this is available too.

(I thought I had posted to say the same thing about your review of >91 RidgewayGirl:, but apparently not! Apologies about that.)

>97 charl08: I'm wondering if there are more translated books being published now or if I'm just more aware of them and know where to look, but it's been great for my reading life. There is a fantastic bookstore in Chicago called Exile in Bookville, on the second floor of an old high-rise where the elevator is still run by an operator (an older gentleman utterly bored by our exclamations of delight -- I'd never encountered an elevator operator before), that specializes in small presses and books in translation and it's become my favorite bookstore by far.

>98 RidgewayGirl: I’m going to have to make a trip to Exile in Bookville someday!

>99 Charon07: It's worth the trip! I'll meet you there, we can do the Art Institute, too.

>98 RidgewayGirl: - Oh yeah - if I ever get close, I'll be over too. My focus for next year's challenge is small presses. In fact, I picked it for the theme of my RL book club for next year. People seem enthusiastic about it too, which makes me happy.

>100 RidgewayGirl: >101 dudes22: Sounds like fun! Will have to be after the holidays for me, I think, but let’s plan on it!

>101 dudes22: I look forward to your thread adding more books to my tbr!

>102 Charon07: The holidays are coming at us far faster than I would like.

"Hey," he said, "this is going to sound like a line, but . . . do you maybe want to get out of here?"

He was right. It did sound like a line. And I did want to get out of there.

"Okay," I said.

I disliked him from the moment I decided to sleep with him.

Jess Walter is a fantastic novelist, and it turns out that he's even better at writing short stories. The Angel of Rome and Other Stories is simply one of the best collections I have read. It's lousy to like a book so much when it comes to writing a fair and unbiased review because I am biased! This collection is great and a demonstration that a good short story can do more in twenty pages than most novels. In this collection, which is set mainly in Spokane, Washington, a man looks for a suitable retirement home for his father, whose dementia hasn't stopped his womanizing or drinking much at all; a woman returning to Spokane is reminded of the year she was in high school and dating a college student from a wealthy family; a woman sleeps with a movie star even though she doesn't particularly like him or his movies; an elderly man invites a group of young hoodlums into his house; and in the titular story, a young man spending a year in Rome studying Latin ends up working as a translator for an American actor, despite not knowing any Italian. Each story was memorable and so well-crafted, and each one was different from the others.

>104 RidgewayGirl: - I have a few of his books on my TBR, at least one of which I took as a BB from you. I need to get reading him.

>105 dudes22: I look forward to finding out what you think of him. Of course, I'm sure you have a healthy tbr and it might take some time.

Happiness Falls by Angie Kim tells the story of a family tragedy. One day, the father takes the youngest son out for their usual hike, but only the son returns home, alone and upset. The son, Eugene, is neurodivergent and non-verbal yet he is the only one who knows what happened. Told from the point of view of his older sister, Mia, a hyper-verbal and analytically-minded college student, the story follows the family as the police and volunteers search for the missing father and how the investigation begins to focus on the one person who can't speak for himself. His family tries to protect him, but some of their efforts backfire, and as they search for answers they discover the secrets that could solve the mystery or destroy their family.

There are positive things to say about this book. Kim does a good job with the pacing and keeping a long book moving quickly. Mia is an interesting character and it was brave for the author to choose her as the narrator, since she gives far more information that is needed at every step, complete with footnotes and long asides to explain everything. And since Mia is writing this after the events in the book are in the past, there is a lot of foreshadowing, and statements along the lines of "if we had only known how badly this would go wrong," which felt like the author didn't quite trust the readers to remember things without her telling them that a scene was important. The aspect I liked most about the book was how the family lived for awhile in South Korea and her descriptions of how that experience was for the family, as well as how they did as a mixed family in the US, were fascinating.

A friend of mine whose son is autistic, had quite a bit to say about the depiction of Eugene. It seemed far-fetched to me in a well-it's-a-novel kind of way, but she was angry about it. If you're the parent of a non-verbal kid, you probably have already heard about this book and have your own opinion. As a whole, this is the kind of book that ends up being a book club choice, but honestly, it isn't very good. Between the heavy-handed pay-attention-now writing and the over-explanations, I was not the reader for this book.

>93 RidgewayGirl: Off to secure this one!

>108 Tess_W: Tess, it's so readable and I learned a lot about Belgium during the war.

The kitten has chosen her favorite cat, and he is being given no choice in the matter. He tries to nap, and most of the time she is attacking his head, but then she also wants to cuddle. I told him that raising a kitten is hard, but they do grow up quickly.

>109 RidgewayGirl: They’re so sweet napping together!

>109 RidgewayGirl: Lovely kitties.

>110 Charon07: & >111 lowelibrary:, Thanks. Today Homer held the kitten down so he could give her a bath and now they are napping together.

The trial for the surviving perpetrators of the attacks in Paris on November 12, 2015, which included the massacre at the Bataclan nightclub, took place over most of a year and Emmanuel Carrière covered it, attending every day and writing about what happened and the people also attending in a column that was published in four different papers in four European countries. Those columns have been reworked into V13: Chronicle of a Trial.

It's gripping stuff. Carrière is curious about the lives of everyone involved, from the many surviving victims, families of the victims, to the men being charged. The length of the trial meant that he got to know many of the other attendees very well and he approaches the lives of everyone involved with the same care. The book is involving and a little claustrophobic, as it must have been for him, sitting every day in the same purpose-built room in the center of Paris. He struggles to understand the men charged, to understand what motivated them, finds himself sympathizing by a man caught up because he helped a friend, he visits a place a perpetrator hid out, and he talks about the experiences and aftermath of those whose lives were shattered in those moments.

This book is, of course, very hard to read at times, but it's also a remarkable document that constantly highlights the human lives affected. Carrière, like Janet Malcolm, writes well and has a genuine curiosity about human lives.

Cats and kittens are so entertaining! Terrific photo!

>114 VivienneR: Thanks, Vivienne. They are highly entertaining. The cat water cooler that had sat in a corner of the upstairs hallway has now been moved to the bathtub because a certain kitten considers it a paddling pool.

>113 RidgewayGirl: I've requested this from the library. Not sure if I'll make it all the way through but will give it a go. Thanks for flagging this one, I wouldn't have thought about it otherwise.

>116 charl08: It's surprisingly gripping, and Carrière is so curious about the lives of other people. I hope you find it to be a rewarding book to read.

Intermezzo, Sally Rooney's new novel, follows two brothers separated by ten years and a growing estrangement, as their relationship with each other and the women in their lives changes. Peter, the older brother, is outwardly highly successful as a human rights solicitor, but he's a mess. He's taking far too many drugs, both licit and illegal, and his personal life is divided between his college sweetheart, who ended their physical relationship after an accident left her in chronic pain, and his decade-younger girlfriend, a college student living in a squat and relying on him and her OnlyFans for her money. And Ivan, the younger brother, was deeply affected by their parents's divorce, by being unwelcome in his mother's new family and then by his father's death, which opens this book. He's was a chess prodigy but his career has stalled out, and he feels his abilities are failing. He is well-known enough in Irish chess circles to appear in provincial towns and it's through one of those appearances that he meets a divorced woman in her mid-thirties and they begin a relationship where the reservations are all Margaret's.

Once again, Rooney has written a novel focusing on the romantic relationships and social issues of a small group of people. This one is tightly focused on a relatively short span of time, and remains tightly focused on the points-of-view of three of the characters. Each character's voice is different and Rooney is a master of creating initially unsympathetic characters and situations and slowly drawing out the nuances and mitigating factors until the reader's attitudes are challenged and their mind is changed. I read this book at the beginning of November, during a stressful week that included the election and a family member in the hospital and this was the one book that could pull me into its world, despite me not liking either brother very much at the beginning of the book.

>118 RidgewayGirl: Definitely putting that one on my WL

>119 Tess_W: It's all over the place, so probably easy to find a copy.

First of all, it wasn't even that hard. The way they went on, all those writers, so incessantly, so dramatically, they might have been going down the mines on all fours with a plastic spoon clenched between their teeth to loosen the diamonds, or wading in raw sewage to find the leak in the septic line, or running into burning buildings with forty-five pounds of equipment on their backs. But this degree of whining over sitting down at a desk, or even reclining on a sofa, and . . . typing?

The Sequel is, well, the sequel to The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz's fast-paced thriller about an author who steals a plot from a dead man and suffers the consequences. In this follow-up, his widow is touring with his last book and along the way decides to write her own novel, which is kind of auto-fiction, and it does well, but then the threatening notes that haunted her husband start up again, but she's not her husband and she's not going to put up with the threats.

This book has to be read after The Plot and if you haven't read that banger of a book, do that first. Korelitz has a lot of fun with book culture and the publishing world and how other writers view each other, and this book would be fun if only for that, but it's also a well-paced thriller of the kind that surprises and fits together into a very pleasing whole. Anna, the widow, is a fantastic character, of whom I can say nothing without giving something away and so I'll just say this book and its prequel are the kind of intelligent escapist novels that remind me how fun reading can be.

Shanghailanders by Juli Min begins in 2040 and each subsequent chapter takes the reader back to an earlier event, ending in 2014. It follows the five members of the extremely wealthy Yang family, people who live in luxury and fill their days traveling between their various homes, while the children attend exclusive private schools and then American Ivy League universities. They have to invent friction for their own lives, having affairs, choosing to take risks, but will always be insulated from any real consequences. As the years roll backwards, they become younger, and eventually the family are just two people meeting in Paris, a lonely French Japanese woman and the orphan from Shanghai. In between, the stories center different family members and sometimes one of their servants.

It's not impossible to make the problems of the über-wealthy sympathetic, but it certainly is a sizable hurdle for an author to overcome. Min makes it even harder by ordering the stories in reverse order, and saving the stories where their lives still resemble those of people we might recognize for the end, along with the stories of their servants, who are loyal and think the family are wonderful (how much more interesting it might have been to have at least one of those stories be from the perspective of someone who didn't consider them perfect).

Still, this novel is well-written and contains some interesting stuff about Shanghai. The reverse ordering of the novel was an audacious idea, but one that didn't work for me at all. By the time I'd reached the chapters where their behavior made sense, I'd already written them off. And the chapters where their servants admired them, even as they struggled to achieve some level of marginal financial security, felt inauthentic. I think that there is a market for stories about the very wealthy carelessly buying expensive things they don't care about or trying to fill the voids in their lives with self-destructive activities that they can buy their way out of any consequences, but I'm not the reader for that. It really is well-written and if it is your kind of thing, this is the book for you.

Hi Kay, just checking to see what you’re up to reading wise. I had Intermezzo in my hot little hands but returned it to the library when I wasn’t feeling well enough to finish it. I’ll try to borrow it again sometime next year. >121 RidgewayGirl: This looks good, I’ve added it to my wishlist. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

>122 RidgewayGirl: - The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks used the same idea although it sounds like she did it more successfully as I remember enjoying that book quite a lot.

>124 dudes22: The Brooks book changes the characters every chapter, and this book follows the same characters, which makes this format harder to make successful.

>125 RidgewayGirl: - Yes - I can see how it would. I guess I thought that as you moved back, the generations would change so different people.

>126 dudes22: No, but that would have been interesting. Shanghai through history.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey follows six astronauts on board the space station as it orbits earth over the course of a single day. They watch the earth through the window, do their tasks, interact with each other and think about their own lives. The writing is really lovely and if you've ever been entranced by satellite images of this planet we are living on, you'll enjoy the descriptions of what the astronauts see. There's no plot here, just descriptions that sing and a vision of what life on a space station might feel like. It seems almost purposefully written to win the Booker Prize, honestly.

>128 RidgewayGirl: - I just took a BB from Jennifer for this. And it's published by a small press so I might try to read it next year.

>129 dudes22: I'm excited to follow your small press adventures! I'm trying to move in that direction and also trying to read more in translation, which is usually published by small presses. It's a little far to visit, but if you're ever in Chicago, I know a great bookstore that specializes in smaller presses. I could spend all my time and money there.

>130 RidgewayGirl: - I think you may have mentioned that bookstore before? And, yes, to the smaller presses and translation. I'm hoping to read more of those too.

>131 dudes22: Sorry, I do mention Exile in Bookville a lot.

Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell is a romance novel about two ordinary people in the middle of the United States finding each other again. Shiloh and Cary were best friends in high school, everyone thought they were a couple, but neither was willing to risk their friendship. Both are being raised by single mothers struggling to get by and both are active in the school paper, but mainly they hang out with their other best friend and never imagine that they won't be friends forever. But years later, Shiloh is a single mom herself, working for the Omaha Children's Theatre and has made a life for herself, a very different life than the one she'd planned, which revolved around getting as far from Nebraska as she could. Cary joined the Navy straight out of high school and while he now is an officer in charge of a ship, he's never married. A mutual friend's marriage brings them back together and this time they're going to take the chance.

This is a quiet novel about a relationship building over time between two cautious people and it's a testament to Rowell's writing skills that it works as well as it does. There's a lot of things I usually dislike in novels, from cute kids, to a lack of communication, to a decidedly heart-warming tone. But I loved my time with these two good-hearted people.

>133 RidgewayGirl: I read this book earlier this year and enjoyed it alot.

>134 lowelibrary: It was delightful!

Good Girl, Aria Aber's debut novel, begins as the story of a Berlin party girl and slowly changes into something nuanced and complex. Nila is nominally a university student, not attending many classes but going out to nightclubs in search of a specific man, a middle-aged American author currently partying in the downmarket clubs Berlin is famous for. She does find him and manages to catch his interest and even go home with him, but this is an uncertain win. The writer is mercurial and enjoys stringing her along and even as she assures the reader that she is playing the same games, that's not entirely true, or even mostly true.

Nila's not the free spirit she presents herself as. She's not Italian or Israeli or Greek, or any of the rotating places she claims to be from. She's born and bred in Berlin, but her parents left Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, leaving their medical licenses and their home behind to resettle in a grim apartment block and working menial jobs. She's living in their apartment still, with her father who has given up after the death of her mother. She's ashamed of her roots, finding herself at home neither in the rigidly structured world of Moslem immigrants nor in the free-wheeling world of young well-off partiers, although she throws herself into the latter world with all her might, staying up all night, taking whatever drugs she's offered and hoping that the taxi driver taking the group she's with to their next party isn't someone she knows.

Aber's a solid writer and she's able to write her story without needing to be obvious about where she's going. Nila is an unreliable narrator, who constantly works the narrative to make it appear like she's in charge, that she's fine, that she's making choices, even as she is barely treading water. It's interesting to see what Aber is doing as the story unfolds and her picture of Berlin, from the neighborhoods housing skinheads and refugees to the tawdry nightclubs, is vivid and unique.

Hairpin Bridge is set in the remote Montana mountains, along a defunct highway. It's the bridge Lena's estranged sister fell or jumped from and Lena sets off to find out what happened, knowing only that the key to finding out what happened lies with the police officer who pulled her sister over shortly before her death. But for all her planning, it always comes down to her alone on that bridge with a cop who may or may not be her sister's killer.

I really liked Taylor Adam's previous novel, No Exit, a fast-paced and enjoyable thriller, so I was happy to pick up another by he author. But this book shows the difficulty of putting together an exciting plot that makes sense. It's overly complicated to the point of being silly. I don't ask much from a thriller except that the writing be acceptable and the plot not insult me, and folks, this plot insulted me. Take out half the ridiculous twists and something can be pulled out of the wreckage of this one, maybe.

I thought you might be interested to see the sole bookstore featured in this NYT article about reading in Chicago: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/books/chicago-books-rebecca-makkai.html?unloc...

>138 Charon07: Thank you! I enjoyed that and have added to my wishlist and to my list of things to do in Chicago.

The short stories in Shoko's Smile by Eunyoung Choi all revolve around relationships of various kinds and lean into the things people don't say, the feelings left unexpressed. In the title story, a young woman looks back on when a Japanese exchange student lived with them for a few weeks, and they are pen pals for years, but when she travels to Japan to visit, the reality is jarring. In another, a mother travels to Seoul but doesn't stay with her daughter. Each story looks at relationships from a woman's perspective and examines how cultural and political events affect how people relate to each other.

I picked this book up on a whim, which is something that rarely works out for me. I've read some real duds this way. But when I pick a stellar collection like this one, it really shines. While the title story, the one that begins this collection, was my least favorite, every single story here is remarkable. Choi is an author to watch and this collection, with it's examination of Korean society and human relations, is worth reading.

>140 RidgewayGirl: I gave this one 5*s, would love to read more by this author.

>141 charl08: I hope we'll see a lot more from her. I also gave it 5 stars.

Hi Kay, I love it when I see a book here that intrigues me and my library has it available. Talk about your instant BB! I enjoy short story colllections, so I think I will fit Shoko's Smile into my reading rotation this month. I'm taking two weeks off from work so I should have plenty of time.

>143 lsh63: Lisa, I'm looking forward to finding out what you think about it.

So, a friend has invited me to join her book club. I'm already in two! So I'm thinking about whether this is a bad idea or a good one that will introduce me to a new group of people. Also, her asking me was clearly a big deal to her and I want to respect that.

Checking in to see what you've been reading. I'm happy to report I didn't get hit by those book bullets. My list is too long already!

>146 thornton37814: Lori, my list may even be longer!

"Sadie" (not her real name) worked undercover for the government, infiltrating groups to see whether they are planning any terrorist acts, and sometimes encouraging them to do so. When a job goes badly, she works as a private contractor, doing the bidding of corporations or unknown groups. In Creation Lake, she works her way into a secretive cult/environmental group living in an obscure corner of France. To do so, she moves to the area and insinuates her way into the group and as she does so, she is taken with the writings of a man corresponding with the group, with ideas about Neanderthal society. The goals of the people who hired her have nothing to do with finding out the truth, and more to do about protecting powerful corporate interests and Sadie will have to decide what she wants.

Creation Lake is superficially an undercover thriller where the protagonist is possibly the bad guy, possibly just interested in collecting her fee, and the novel is told entirely from her point of view. Rachel Kushner isn't writing genre fiction, though, so while the scaffolding is there, you won't find much in the way of adventurous chases or even a propulsive plot, as Kushner casts her eye on how societies and groups structure themselves and what can cause them to change. I'm still figuring out what I think about this books, which contains some interesting ideas but also seemed to get so dragged down in ideas and the narrator's cynical ennui that it forgot that a book with a set up like this should also be full of tension and forward momentum.

>145 RidgewayGirl: That's a tough one!

>148 RidgewayGirl: I’ve been on the fence about adding Creation Lake to my TBR, but now I think I’ll pass on it.

>150 Charon07: A lot of very smart people loved this book. I think it depends on how much you enjoy someone imagining what Neanderthal society was like.

I'm setting up my thread for next year's challenge and I think I'm going to have to find a new theme. I like my current theme, but it's so serious and I'm pretty sure the number of people here who are excited about German Expressionism is one (me). So I'm thinking it through and hope to have something up before the New Year. I'm impressed with everyone who is already up and running.

In 1811, a theatre in Richmond, Virginia caught fire and by the time the fire was out, over seventy people, mostly women, had died. The House is on Fire by Rachel Beanland tells the story of that tragedy and its aftermath through the voices of four characters: a young enslaved woman who accompanied her mistress to the performance and who uses that terrible opportunity to flee north; a widow attending the theatre with her brother and her sister-in-law, who is trapped with her sister-in-law on an upper floor after the stairs collapse; an enslaved blacksmith who rescues several of the women trapped on the second floor; and a teenage stagehand and aspiring actor who knows the reason for the fire, but who helps the owner of the acting troupe to obscure the origins of the blaze.

This is a solidly-told account of an historic event I knew nothing about. Beanland pulls out many of the details of this tragedy, and does a good job describing the city of Richmond and the culture of the time. It is very much an account intended for a mainstream audience and so the secondary characters remain largely one-dimensional. It also falls into the trap of having the "good" characters hold views, especially regarding women and Black people, that were distinctly outside of what a typical white person living in the city that would become the capital of the Confederacy would hold. But as a book that intends to inform readers about a forgotten historical event, it did a fine job.

>140 RidgewayGirl: Shoko's Smile sounds good, although the format of short stories doesn't usually appeal.

>152 RidgewayGirl: This sounds remarkably similar to something I saw on tv a year or two ago. It may have been a documentary. The part that I remember most is that, as you say, the "good" characters hold views untypical of a white person in that city at the time.

My best wishes for a happy, healthy New Year. With lots of cat photos please!

>153 VivienneR: There will be plenty of cat pictures, Vivienne!

Secrets Typed in Blood by Stephen Spotswood is part of a series involving two private detectives, Lillian Pentecost and her assistant, Willow Jean Parker, and is set in the years immediately after WWII. In this installment, a woman who writes stories for a detective magazine under various pseudonyms finds her scenarios are being enacted in seemingly unrelated murders around New York City. Parker takes the lead on this investigation despite her misgivings about the client, who seems to be keeping secrets from her.

The mystery here is fine, if overly complex and the solution felt convenient, but the mystery is less important here than the style, which aims for an old school hardboiled tone with protagonists who would be entirely comfortable in the present day. It didn't entirely work for me, but if you want that noir vibe with a softer tone and none of the unfortunate attitudes that are usually present in the vintage stuff, this might hit the spot.