RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Four

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

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RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Four

1RidgewayGirl
Edited: Sep 29, 3:11 pm

My year of unstructured reading is going surprisingly well. I have not been entirely waylaid by award shortlists or reading challenges and I think I've found a sort of balance. Hope to keep it through the rest of the year.


2RidgewayGirl
Edited: Yesterday, 9:16 pm

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3RidgewayGirl
Edited: Sep 29, 3:37 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

8RidgewayGirl
Edited: Dec 27, 6:01 pm

USA
Megan Abbott (Beware the Woman)
Kaveh Akbar (Martyr!)
Jessica Anthony (The Most)
Elise Blackwell (The Lower Quarter)
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Chain Gang All-Stars)
Isabelle Allende (The Wind Knows My Name)
Chris Bachelder (Dayswork)
Rachel Beanland (The House is on Fire)
Halle Butler (Banal Nightmare)
Gina Chung (Green Frog: Stories)
Martin Clark (The Plinko Bounce)
S.A. Cosby (All the Sinners Bleed)
Lilly Dancyger (First Love: Essays on Friendship)
Doug Dorst (S.)
Debra Magpie Earling (The Lost Journals of Sacajewea)
Alison Espach (The Wedding People)
Percival Everett (Half an Inch of Water, James)
Ellen Gilchrist (In the Land of Dreamy Dreams)
Xochitl Gonzalez (Anita de Monte Laughs Last)
Allegra Goodman (Isola: A Novel)
Jennifer Habel (Dayswork)
Stephen Graham Jones (The Angel of Indian Lake)
Naomi Hirahara (Evergreen)
Miranda July (All Fours)
Joseph Kanon (Shanghai)
Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion)
Rachel Khong (Real Americans)
Angie Kim (Happiness Falls)
Stephen King (You Like it Darker: Stories)
Jessica Knoll (Bright Young Women)
Lisa Ko (Memory Piece)
Jean Hanff Korelitz (The Sequel)
Rachel Kushner (Creation Lake)
Julia Langbein (American Mermaid)
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
J. Robert Lennon (Hard Girls)
Rachel Lyon (Fruit of the Dead)
Sarah Manguso (Liars)
Daniel Mason (North Woods)
James McBride (The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store)
Alice McDermott (Absolution)
Juli Min (Shanghailanders)
Liz Moore (The God of the Woods)
Ann Napolitano (Hello Beautiful)
Tommy Orange (Wandering Stars)
Paz Pardo (The Shamshine Blind)
Kimberly King Parsons (We Were the Universe)
Gin Phillips (Fierce Kingdom)
Andrew Porter (The Disappeared: Stories)
Cleo Qian (Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go)
Adam Rapp (Wolf at the Table)
Shelley Read (Go as a River)
Mary Rechner (Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women)
Nathaniel Rich (King Zeno)
Rainbow Rowell (Slow Dance)
Maurice Carlos Ruffin (The American Daughters)
George Saunders (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain)
Jenn Shapland (My Autobiography of Carson McCullers)
Tom Rob Smith (Cold People)
Christine Sneed (Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry)
Stephen Spotswood (Secrets Typed in Blood)
Jesse Q. Sutanto (Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers)
Rufi Thorpe (Margo's Got Money Troubles)
Justin Torres (Blackouts)
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (Catalina)
Teddy Wayne (The Winner)
Snowden Wright (The Queen City Detective Agency)
Mariana Zapata (From Lukov With Love)
Ghassan Zeineddine (Dearborn)

11RidgewayGirl
Edited: Dec 22, 10:11 pm

2024
All Fours by Miranda July
The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones
Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
Butter by Asako Yuzuki
Clear by Carys Davies
The Coast Road by Alan Murrin
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger
Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung
Hard Girls by J. Robert Lennon
Highway Thirteen: Stories by Fiona McFarlane
The Husbands by Holly Gramazio
The Hunter by Tana French
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
James by Percival Everett
Liars by Sarah Manguso
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar)
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
The Most by Jessica Anthony
One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall
The Queen City Detective Agency by Snowden Wright
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey
The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Shanghai by Joseph Kanon
Shanghailanders by Juli Min
The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas
Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez
Trondheim by Cormac James
V13 by Emmanuel Carrière
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
The Wedding People by Alison Espach
We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons
Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp
You Like it Darker: Stories by Stephen King

2025
Good Girl by Aria Aber
Isola: A Novel by Allegra Goodman

12RidgewayGirl
Sep 29, 3:34 pm

Welcome to a new thread to finish out the year. Come on in.

13labfs39
Sep 29, 3:55 pm

I love your thread topper. Happy new thread, Kay. Hard to believe it's the fourth quarter. Like you, I tried a more relaxed approach to my reading this year, and it's working well for me too.

14RidgewayGirl
Sep 29, 4:04 pm

>12 RidgewayGirl: It's not quite the fourth quarter, just like it's not quite autumn, despite all signs saying otherwise.

15RidgewayGirl
Sep 29, 5:24 pm



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.

16dudes22
Sep 29, 6:36 pm

Happy New Thread, Kay! I admire how you manage to concentrate on newer books. I feel so guilty about older books on my shelves that I feel I have to read them first and get "caught up". I have embarked on a purge of books I don't think I'll ever read, but I think I'll still have a lot left.

17RidgewayGirl
Sep 29, 6:41 pm

>16 dudes22: I constantly strive to read the older books on my shelves, but they keep publishing new books and I do not have an iron will. I have been working on reading my tbr and it's been rewarding -- they are, after all, books I do want to read, but the new books keep jumping in front of them.

18labfs39
Sep 30, 7:17 am

>14 RidgewayGirl: Umm, isn't fourth quarter tomorrow? And didn't autumn start Sept 22?

19kjuliff
Edited: Sep 30, 9:22 am

>18 labfs39: >14 RidgewayGirl: Depends where you live. In Australia seasons start on the first of a month and they don’t consider equinoxes and solstices in defining them. It’s just easier for the average Aussie. But Kay aren’t you in Canada which uses the same season definition as America?

Also Spring starts tomorrow in Australia and where Ridgeway girl lives.

20rv1988
Sep 30, 9:29 am

How nicely organised your new thread is! And what a wonderful 3/4 of a year of reading.

21RidgewayGirl
Sep 30, 1:30 pm

>18 labfs39: I refuse to believe summer is over, despite all evidence to the contrary.

>19 kjuliff: Kate, I grew up in Canada, but am now living very comfortably in the middle of Illinois.

>20 rv1988: Thanks, Rasdhar. I do like a list.

22RidgewayGirl
Oct 1, 10:33 pm



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.

23BLBera
Oct 2, 10:41 am

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

Great comments on both the Deal and the Kesey.

24lisapeet
Oct 2, 11:51 am

Happy new thread! And, as aways, good reading already. I've never read Sometimes a Great Notion and not sure if I have the patience to look the other way from some of the more problematic elements you've mentioned... that goes in the firm "maybe not" pile, though I'm always open to suggestion. Strange Attractors looks good, though, and wasn't on my radar before.

25RidgewayGirl
Oct 2, 12:30 pm

>24 lisapeet: Janice Deal is a local Chicago writer and I heard her speak on a panel about short stories. I ended up buying the collections of all three panelists. She was so happy that I kind of expected this collection to veer towards the heart-warming, which isn't my thing. I did not expect the focus on people struggling to get by, either financially or emotionally. A few of the stories broke my heart.

26rv1988
Oct 2, 11:21 pm

>22 RidgewayGirl: This sounds interesting. I do like the format of slightly-connected stories.

27RidgewayGirl
Oct 4, 6:27 pm

>26 rv1988: I was surprised by this book. I plan to read more by Janice Deal.

28RidgewayGirl
Oct 4, 6:27 pm



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.

29RidgewayGirl
Edited: Oct 4, 6:33 pm

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.

30FlorenceArt
Oct 5, 1:33 am

>29 RidgewayGirl: Wow, he grew up fast! And he looks very mischievous.

31RidgewayGirl
Oct 5, 12:09 pm

>30 FlorenceArt: Yesterday, she knocked a potted plant off of a shelf and later knocked my husband's stack of bedside reading to the ground. She is a whirlwind with a strong purr.

32mabith
Oct 5, 1:44 pm

>29 RidgewayGirl: Definitely the face of a scamp! I'm thankful I didn't have my current cat as a kitten. She was still very kittenish when I got her age four. Young cats are fun, but I (and my various collections of china) can't cope with it!

33RidgewayGirl
Oct 5, 4:57 pm

>32 mabith: Oh, she would enjoy your collection so much! Our oldest cat, who is sixteen, still likes to play, although he will stop if he catches anyone watching him.

34labfs39
Oct 6, 11:22 am

>28 RidgewayGirl: Coast Road sounds like one I would like, and I'm always intrigued by men who write women well. Kind of sad that they stand out.

35RidgewayGirl
Oct 6, 11:32 am



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.

36RidgewayGirl
Oct 6, 11:34 am

>34 labfs39: I agree, it's a little depressing that men who write women well stand out, while pretty much every woman author can write men just fine. The Coast Road is beautifully written and I love how resilient his women characters are, willing to find ways to survive in difficult circumstances.

37RidgewayGirl
Oct 7, 3:19 pm



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.

38rv1988
Oct 8, 12:27 am

>29 RidgewayGirl: Definitely looks like he's plotting something.

>35 RidgewayGirl: This sounds entertaining, adding it to the list.

39labfs39
Oct 8, 7:50 am

>37 RidgewayGirl: I haven't read this in a long time; your review makes me want to do a reread. I think Scout is one of my favorite characters of all time.

40BLBera
Oct 8, 11:16 am

>37 RidgewayGirl: We love this book at our house. :) I haven't reread it for a while. I recently read an interesting essay about the book by Roxane Gay; she is not a fan. Scout and her mom read it together earlier this year, and when they were done, Scout said, "I love my name."

41RidgewayGirl
Oct 8, 12:59 pm

>38 rv1988: She is a terror. Luckily, our largest guy, Ollie, likes to play with her and when she attacks him, she just slides off of him as he goes about his day.

>39 labfs39: Lee did such a fantastic job writing Scout. I rewatched the movie as well (it's available on Hoopla) and the actor playing Scout is perfect.

>40 BLBera: I'll have to look for that essay. I certainly saw a polite racism, of the we can all get along as long as everyone stays in their lane and doesn't get uppity kind in the book. It is very much a product of its time. But it also pushed a bit at those boundaries in ways that allowed white people to stay comfortable and also maybe think a little?

Scout is named after one of the greatest protagonists in American literature, she should love that name!

My son is at school in Daytona Beach, FL. He decided to leave Monday morning, driving up to stay with friends in SC. I'm really grateful that he trusted his gut on this one and left so early, saving me so much worry. I have a lot of sympathy for everyone with loved ones in Milton's path now and I hope you are able to remain in contact with them throughout.

42dudes22
Oct 9, 6:40 pm

>41 RidgewayGirl: - Leaving early was probably the smart thing to do. Our grandson is in Jacksonville which, hopefully, won't get it as bad. I texted with him earlier today and told him to go get extra groceries. Just in case.

43RidgewayGirl
Oct 9, 7:10 pm

>42 dudes22: Yes, Jacksonville is outside of the hurricane zone and the hotels there are full of people who have evacuated. I'm sure if your grandson has been there half a minute, he knows what to do to prepare. When my son was planning to stay, he did a grocery run and also picked up a few cases of bottled water, so he's at least in good shape for the next one.

44RidgewayGirl
Oct 25, 12:49 pm

I'm back from two weeks of vacation and visiting in-laws. The long drives between our house in Illinois, the South Carolina lowcountry and central New Jersey had me finishing several books, but now I'm behind on my reviews (and everything else).



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.

45FlorenceArt
Oct 25, 4:21 pm

>44 RidgewayGirl: I love this cover.

46RidgewayGirl
Oct 26, 5:16 pm

>45 FlorenceArt: It suits the book, despite not being directly drawn from the text. I like it, too.

47RidgewayGirl
Oct 26, 5:16 pm



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.

48BLBera
Oct 27, 11:55 am

Both Held and The Most Jessica Anthony sound good, Kay.

49RidgewayGirl
Oct 27, 12:20 pm

>48 BLBera: They are both fantastic. This is how awards long and shortlists really work for me -- as a way of hearing about great books.

50RidgewayGirl
Oct 29, 4:08 pm



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.

51labfs39
Oct 30, 3:57 pm

>50 RidgewayGirl: I'm looking forward to this one due to the setting. When I lived in Washington, we would go out to the San Juans often and once even paddled between them on the Cascadia Marine Trail, staying at campsites only accessible from the water. Beautiful. Unfortunately the discrepancy between the native islanders and wealthy tourists is dramatic. Sort of like Hawaii.

52RidgewayGirl
Oct 30, 6:32 pm

>51 labfs39: I think you'll really like Bear, then. Phillips writes about the natural beauty of the islands.

53RidgewayGirl
Nov 1, 3:19 pm



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.

54RidgewayGirl
Nov 5, 3:45 pm



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.

55kjuliff
Nov 5, 4:39 pm

>54 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for this review. I’ve almost borrowed this book several times and now I definitely will

56RidgewayGirl
Nov 6, 4:52 pm

>55 kjuliff: I'm interested in what you think about it. Italy is really producing a lot of brilliant authors these days, and she's the first one I've read who leans into a kind of dark humor.

57RidgewayGirl
Nov 6, 5:35 pm



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.

58rachbxl
Nov 8, 11:36 am

I already had my eye on Bear and Lost on Me, but your comments on them have nudged them up.

59dchaikin
Nov 8, 6:40 pm

I’m with you on Held, but didn’t really take to the humor in Lost on Me.

60AnnieMod
Nov 8, 6:51 pm

>57 RidgewayGirl: I picked that one up a couple of weeks from the library as well :) I expected them to be somewhat repetitive so I read a story (or 3) a day. That helped in not running the stories into each other although even like that, they sounded a bit too like each other. I still enjoyed it though :)

61RidgewayGirl
Nov 8, 9:41 pm

>59 dchaikin: Dan, I saw youur review and I wonder how easy it is to communicate that dry humor in an audio version of the book.

>60 AnnieMod: Annie, I enjoyed them, too, although I think they are best for distracted reading. Have you seen the show Reacher?

62AnnieMod
Nov 8, 9:55 pm

>61 RidgewayGirl: No, not yet. I want to get a bit further along in the book series before I go for the show (apparently I’ve read only 7 - one of those “I know I’ll like it so it can wait” series which I am trying to get back to).

I agree - they are perfect for distracted reading. :)

63RidgewayGirl
Nov 8, 10:12 pm

>62 AnnieMod: How fun to have so much of that series ahead of you. I did stop reading when he started outsourcing the writing--they are now being written by a family member and the character of Jack Reacher was changed just enough to make me not want to continue. The tv series is enormously fun. Alan Ritchson is fantastic in the role.

64RidgewayGirl
Nov 8, 10:12 pm



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.

65dudes22
Nov 9, 5:23 am

>63 RidgewayGirl: - In looking at fantasticfiction,com, it looks like I have a half dozen or so to go before I reach the ones that have "co-authors". I agree that Ritchson is great in the role of Reacher.

66labfs39
Nov 9, 9:45 am

>64 RidgewayGirl: Ooh, this sounds fascinating and right up my alley. Onto the wishlist it goes.

67dchaikin
Nov 9, 12:09 pm

>64 RidgewayGirl: very interesting

68RidgewayGirl
Nov 10, 4:38 pm

>65 dudes22: Enjoy them! It's been so long since I started the series, that I'm sure I can enjoy rereading the first ones now. I picked up One Shot back in 2006, when I was living in England, because it was offered at a discount at a Waterstone's at the train station. I'm sure I would have heard about the series later, but it was fun to be able to introduce the series to Americans, since it was still unknown in the US.

>66 labfs39: Lisa, I'm sure you would like this book a lot, from the way Hertmans writes about what was going on culturally in Belgium that allowed the Nazis to find fertile ground there, to how he writes about his own experiences. He wrote the excellent War and Turpentine, which is how I first heard of him and now I'm eager to get my hands on the only other book of his translated into English, The Convent.

69dchaikin
Nov 10, 5:45 pm

>68 RidgewayGirl: I have War and Turpentine! I moved onto my little Booker shelf, since it was longlisted on the International Booker Prize. But I haven't read it yet.

70RidgewayGirl
Nov 10, 5:54 pm

>69 dchaikin: Dan, I think you'd like his approach to history. It's thoughtful and he doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable things in his own or in his family's history.

71dchaikin
Nov 10, 6:02 pm

>70 RidgewayGirl: thanks! I hope so...

72kjuliff
Nov 10, 7:22 pm

Dropping by to say thank you for putting me on to Clear back in August. I’d put it in my tbr after reading your review . I’ve just finished it. Not sure what to read next, it wa such a page-turner.

73RidgewayGirl
Nov 10, 9:25 pm

>72 kjuliff: It is a gripping story. Years ago, I visited the Blasket Islands, which are off of the west coast of Ireland and abandoned in the 1950s and it was such a remote and lonely place. Hard to imagine living alone on a small island like that. It was beautiful, though.

74rv1988
Nov 11, 1:52 am

>44 RidgewayGirl: I really enjoyed Held too - although the copy I got from the library had a different cover. I like this one more.

Thanks for all these great reviews. I've added half a dozen books to my TBR just off your thread.

75lisapeet
Edited: Nov 11, 9:32 am

Good reviews, thanks for those! I have Held, Bear, and The Most on my pile. Somehow I missed that The Most had such a strong Laika theme—that's one of those words, like Dumbo, that make me tear up a little on sight—but I want to read it anyway.

76RidgewayGirl
Nov 11, 6:00 pm

>74 rv1988: It's a fair trade, tbr-wise. You've pointed out so many books I would not otherwise have ever heard of. I have Cocoon sitting on my bedside table now.

>75 lisapeet: The Most has a lot of details that cement it at a very specific point in time and Laika is very much a part of that.

77RidgewayGirl
Nov 12, 7:16 pm



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.

78kidzdoc
Nov 12, 7:25 pm

>77 RidgewayGirl: Nice review, Kay. I enjoyed her short story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed.

79dchaikin
Nov 12, 7:39 pm

the couple maybe rented an Airbnb in the wrong book. I'm pretty sure Enriques is new to me.

80kjuliff
Nov 12, 9:25 pm

>77 RidgewayGirl: Nice review. I’ve noted Mariana Enriquez and will definitely be looking at getting at least one of her books. There have been some interesting writers showing up from Argentina. Some very humorous ones. Have you read The Dangers of Smoking in Bed?

81rv1988
Nov 12, 10:07 pm

>77 RidgewayGirl: Such a nice review (and this one was already on my TBR!). Looking forward to your thoughts on Cocoon.

82RidgewayGirl
Nov 12, 10:10 pm

>78 kidzdoc: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was my introduction to her writing and it's my favorite. This collection is similar, but I was less surprised by it, because I already knew what she can do.

>79 dchaikin: They did pick the wrong genre, for sure!

>80 kjuliff: I have read The Dangers of Smoking in Bed and her novel, Our Share of the Night. I far prefer her short stories to her novel. I take a good look at anything Megan McDowell translates as she chooses interesting books. There's a lot of interesting and innovative stuff coming out of Latin America now.

83RidgewayGirl
Nov 12, 10:12 pm

>81 rv1988: Thanks! The stack by the bed keeps growing, faster than I can read them.

84stretch
Nov 13, 4:02 am

>82 RidgewayGirl: I hadn't put that together but Megan McDowell does translate a lot of the dark and strange books that end up in my library. She has great feel for interesting stories coming from Argentina.

85RidgewayGirl
Nov 13, 12:30 pm

>84 stretch: And she does a great job with the translations. I'm starting to pay attention to who translates a book when I really like it and she and Jeremy Tiang (Chinese to English) are the ones I look for.

86RidgewayGirl
Nov 13, 5:50 pm



"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.

87dchaikin
Nov 13, 9:48 pm

Whoever the I is in that quote would love Creation Lake.

88RidgewayGirl
Nov 14, 5:56 pm

>87 dchaikin: It's on my list, Dan. I loved The Mars Room.

89RidgewayGirl
Nov 14, 6:29 pm



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.

90japaul22
Nov 14, 6:45 pm

>89 RidgewayGirl: Agreed. I didn't take to this book either. I found the pacing extremely annoying - so many "revelations" over and over - it was just overwhelming.

91dchaikin
Nov 14, 6:58 pm

>89 RidgewayGirl: eek. I think i’ll pass on that one

92kjuliff
Nov 14, 9:26 pm

>89 RidgewayGirl: I read it a while back and just checked my own review as I’d completely forgotten any detail. I seem to have enjoyed it well-enough but was lukewarm. Definitely there’s a lot better out there.

What was interesting was that our reviews differed in what we got from the book but both of us came away underwhelmed.

93RidgewayGirl
Nov 15, 5:49 pm

>90 japaul22: I saw your review and it looks like we had very similar reactions to it. I did yell at the book a few times.

>91 dchaikin: I can't imagine it would have been something you would have picked up anyway. I would have happily left it alone, but it was a choice of my book club and I am doing my best to approach those books with as much goodwill as I can.

>92 kjuliff: You were a lot kinder than I was, Kate.

94RidgewayGirl
Nov 16, 1:28 pm

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.

95dchaikin
Nov 16, 1:48 pm

❤️

96RidgewayGirl
Nov 18, 5:48 pm



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.

97dchaikin
Nov 18, 9:18 pm

Great review. Sounds difficult to read and important.

98kjuliff
Nov 18, 10:03 pm

>96 RidgewayGirl: This sounds interesting. It is coming out soon in audio so if I take up reading again I’ll probable get it.

99lisapeet
Nov 19, 12:12 pm

>86 RidgewayGirl: I'm a fan of Jess Walter too, and have been wanting to read that since I went to Spokane earlier this year. Glad to read your rave!

100RidgewayGirl
Nov 19, 4:16 pm

>97 dchaikin: Yes, but also very humane. Carrière spent his time learning about the people involved and those who attended the entire trial, which lasted for most of a year, developed a sense of camraderie. Carrière is such an interesting writer.

>98 kjuliff: Kate, I did notice that this is one of the few of his books available in English on audible.

>99 lisapeet: And I know you like short stories, Lisa. These are such stellar examples of the form. I also love finding a book set outside of the usual half dozen cities.

101rv1988
Nov 22, 9:07 am

>96 RidgewayGirl: Great review, and yes, Carrere is such an interesting character. Have you read his book, Limonov? A professor of mine gave me his copy a few years ago and said I would enjoy it - it was a very interesting ride!

102RidgewayGirl
Nov 22, 12:49 pm

>101 rv1988: No, I haven't. I did read The Adversary, which caused me to grab V13 as soon as I could and I will certainly read more by him. I'll look for Limonov.

103RidgewayGirl
Nov 24, 2:36 pm



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.

104kidzdoc
Nov 24, 3:45 pm

This is the second very enticing review of Intermezzo I've read recently, so I may need to add it to my 2025 reading list.

105RidgewayGirl
Nov 24, 4:23 pm

>104 kidzdoc: Hmm, I wonder what you'll think of it. I look forward to finding out!

106dchaikin
Nov 24, 5:17 pm

terrific review. I haven't read any Rooney yet. So I remain really curious.

107BLBera
Nov 24, 11:38 pm

I loved Intermezzo, Kay. I think it's Rooney's best so far. She used point of view so beautifully.

108RidgewayGirl
Nov 25, 1:41 pm

>106 dchaikin: Dan, if Jane Austen had been an Irish Millenial, this is what might have resulted. Rooney is polarizing, but she's immensely talented. (I suspect many people will scream at the comparison.)

>107 BLBera: Beth, I agree. This is her best book so far. I'm already looking forward to the next one.

109RidgewayGirl
Nov 28, 5:47 pm



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.

110kjuliff
Nov 28, 7:28 pm

I will try The Plot to when i get better. You have a knack of finding books I need at the right time. Thanks Kay.

111RidgewayGirl
Nov 30, 6:05 pm

>110 kjuliff: I hope it is the right book when you get to it. Take care, Kate.

112RidgewayGirl
Nov 30, 6:06 pm



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.

113kjuliff
Nov 30, 6:13 pm

>111 RidgewayGirl: I’m going to try to read 🎧 it. It available in audio from NLS. The narrator is a bit dull but the writing seems good. I’m still really ill but managing to follow a few threads. Thanks Kay.

114SassyLassy
Nov 30, 6:33 pm

>112 RidgewayGirl: Interesting review. How do you think it would have worked reading it from the end (2014) forward in time, especially having read it in the author's intended sequence?

115RidgewayGirl
Nov 30, 10:21 pm

>114 SassyLassy: The characters in the earliest stories (the final chapters) were sympathetic people with stakes that felt genuine. I think I would have been more invested in the stories set later, when they were just random super rich people behaving badly, since I'd already seen them as nuanced characters. I'm not sure why the chronology was reversed, there doesn't seem to have been a point to it. As another reviewer put it -- I wanted to know what happened next, not what happened five years earlier.

116mabith
Dec 1, 9:09 am

>115 RidgewayGirl: Engaging a lot with Chinese media as I do, I feel like starting at a late stage in someone's life and then going "and how did they get to this" is very common. Definitely not always done completely backwards like that, but makes sense to me for an author looking to create a point of difference in a book to go that route. And I kind of get wanting leave the reader with the characters in a more sympathetic/normal state.

It's a shame it wasn't successful in this case, though I agree with you that it's a struggle for authors to really make us care about the troubles of the uber-wealthy in fiction (or real life, to be fair).

117RidgewayGirl
Dec 1, 10:45 am

>116 mabith: It's an entire genre -- novels about rich people behaving badly. I think in this case, that the family was so far outside of what we think of as rich -- they had multiple luxury homes in different countries, they had money to pay to make any issue go away -- made it hard for there to be stakes as all. And I'm admittedly not a good audience for this as I immediately take against them on general principles. I think the author missed an opportunity when she made the stories about members of their staff all uniformly worshipful of their wealthy employers. But part of the genre must be selling the fantasy, I guess. I did like that it was set in Shanghai, instead of New York or London.

118mabith
Dec 1, 1:04 pm

Yeah, the staff unanimously admiring them would put a damper on it no matter how good the rest was. There are definitely poorer people who see 'have money' as the highest good but it wouldn't be universal in a group.

119RidgewayGirl
Dec 1, 6:16 pm

>118 mabith: It felt like the author had fallen in love with her characters, which I expect is really hard to avoid. Moments when we see what others think of the main characters are usually illuminating.

120RidgewayGirl
Dec 2, 5:22 pm



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.

121dchaikin
Dec 2, 9:03 pm

Glad you enjoyed Orbital. It’s a terrific novel

122Willoyd
Edited: Dec 4, 12:00 pm

Just discovered (or maybe rediscovered?!) your thread. So many books to add to my possibilities list!
Also glad you liked Orbital - probably my contemporary fiction read of the year (so far!). Listening to some of her interviews on its gestation, I reckon the Booker couldn't have been further from her mind. I think most UK Booker followers reckoned James was a shoe-in, although it niggled at me that he was the only man on the short list, and there hadn't been a female winner for 5 years, so did wonder. To my thinking Everett should have won 2 years ago with The Trees.

123dchaikin
Dec 3, 7:09 am

>122 Willoyd: I feel the same about Harvey. As for James, i thought about the gender issue. Not only were 5 of 6 shortlisted books by women, but the last four winners were men. (I would have chosen The Colony over The Trees and The Promise in 2022 - but that’s just personal preference)

124Willoyd
Edited: Dec 21, 12:22 pm

>123 dchaikin:
So far, I have only read books off the shortlist from 2022, so not The Colony (yet!). TBH, I was rather underwhelmed with the shortlist that year, except for The Trees. But then, Booker juries do have their moments of madness!

The Promise was the winner in 2021, so wasn't up against The Colony. It was the first book in my Round the World tour, and I felt a great start, although I haven't read much else on the list from that year yet, so can't say whether I think it was a worthy winner or not though!

125dchaikin
Dec 4, 12:55 pm

>124 Willoyd: oops. Thanks. The 2022 winner was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. I thought it was terrific. The Promise is a great book too.

126kjuliff
Dec 4, 7:05 pm

>111 RidgewayGirl: I did end up trying The Plot 🎧 and could tell it was well-written, but the narrator was so flat that I couldn’t get into it. A real pity. The last book I enjoyed was The Husbands, having ben unable to concentrate on other books that I know I’d normally enjoy. So many of us in this quagmire.

127RidgewayGirl
Dec 5, 7:06 pm

>121 dchaikin: & 122 Orbital is a gorgeous little book. And it's nice to have a hopeful book now and again.

I do think James was the more substantial and important book, but he has the National Book Prize and, given that he has previously faithfully published with a small press, has not seemed to want to chase the prizes. I do wish him all the acclaim in the world -- he's one of our most important writers and one who constantly astonishes me.

>126 kjuliff: Ah, nuts, Kate. So many books stymied by the wrong audiobook reader.

The Tournament of Books has announced their shortlist -- https://www.tournamentofbooks.com/the-2025-shortlist (and also their longlist -- https://www.tournamentofbooks.com/the-year-in-fiction-2024) if anyone is in need of ideas of what to read next.

128RidgewayGirl
Dec 6, 7:26 pm



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.

129RidgewayGirl
Edited: Dec 9, 6:24 pm



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.

130mabith
Dec 10, 11:33 am

You've made Good Girl sound very appealing, which is a tough sell for me and college-age contemporary fiction protagonists these days.

131RidgewayGirl
Dec 11, 3:54 pm

>130 mabith: I don't go for the party girl stories like I used to, so it was fun to watch this one start out that way and then move into something more substantial.

132RidgewayGirl
Dec 11, 3:54 pm



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.

133RidgewayGirl
Dec 15, 12:36 pm



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.

134dchaikin
Dec 15, 1:42 pm

>133 RidgewayGirl: cool. Are they all set in South Korea?

135RidgewayGirl
Dec 15, 1:49 pm

>134 dchaikin: No, one is set in France and is about a young Korean woman volunteering for a French spiritual retreat where she meets another volunteer, a young man from Africa, with whom she forms a close friendship. It was my favorite of the stories. But most are set in Korea and show facets of Korean society that were fascinating, including references to events like the student protests of 1980 and the ferry disaster of 2014. It was altogether a fantastic collection.

136dchaikin
Dec 15, 1:52 pm

>135 RidgewayGirl: that all appeals

137RidgewayGirl
Dec 15, 10:13 pm

>136 dchaikin: I gave it 5 stars. It's excellent.

138RidgewayGirl
Dec 20, 5:41 pm



"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.

139Willoyd
Dec 21, 12:28 pm

>138 RidgewayGirl:
That last sentence absolutely nails my feelings about CL. I can see she's a really good writer, but as a book this fell absolutely flat for me, for exactly those reasons. To such an extent, I was rather perplexed at it being shortlisted.

140RidgewayGirl
Dec 21, 3:15 pm

>139 Willoyd: It turns out that it's very hard to write a good literary thriller. I loved The Mars Room, I like her work quite a bit, but it turns out that I'm not that interested in idle musings about Neanderthals.

141Willoyd
Edited: Dec 22, 6:59 am

>140 RidgewayGirl:
That was my first time reading Kushner. Sounds like I should give her another go sometime.

142kjuliff
Dec 21, 8:07 pm

>140 RidgewayGirl: it turns out that I'm not that interested in idle musings about Neanderthals.
I thought it a great way to start the book and to get into the head of an intelligent member of the Beat generation who has retained some of his charisma but has never grown up.

But facetiousness aside, I loved Creation Lake and think it should have won. It is a book of ideas tinged with humor. It’s different but not negatively so - it’s comments are much more relevant of the times we are living in, than the story of girls boxing or girls in a spacecraft.

I found it very female, very amusing and a breath of fresh air.

As to the relative worth of the Booker over the years, at least Booker 2024 didn’t have a frail old woman close to death, looking back at three generations of women marred by war and male chauvinist pigs.

I really liked the fact that it was set in real-time and I didn’t have to keep trying to place which time and place the various characters belonged to. It’s a hard thing to. do, and except in the exceptional hands of Ane Michaels ( Held), pointless.

143dchaikin
Dec 22, 12:08 am

>138 RidgewayGirl: yes - not full of tension or momentum. It’s not really a thriller, but more interested in ideas, identity and in undermining idealists. And perhaps it takes that way too (i wanted more something - progress, pursuit of ideas, something). Fun to see your take.

>142 kjuliff: fun comment. Which reflective frail old women did you have in mind?

144kjuliff
Dec 22, 3:51 am

>143 dchaikin: Possibly myself - but seriously there are heaps and I will make sure I note them as I come across them in reviews and cover notes. Then I’ll get back to you. Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger comes to mind. And I’m sure there’s a Kate Atkinson lurking in there.

The old women usually have names like Edna, and some have lost a lover in a war. Mostly they are intelligent; some are even thought to be special needs, and have been locked up in homes (usually British) for the insane.

145dchaikin
Dec 22, 11:35 am

>144 kjuliff: i was wondering about Moon Tiger. Also This Strange Eventful History

146RidgewayGirl
Dec 22, 5:55 pm

>142 kjuliff: Creation Lake is critically acclaimed and well-loved by very smart people. It just didn't resonate with me at all, but I will certainly pick up Kushner's next book. One of my book clubs has chosen it to discuss at the October meeting, so I will reread it next year. Maybe I'll see what you see in it.

147RidgewayGirl
Dec 26, 8:15 pm



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.

148rv1988
Dec 27, 12:34 am

>132 RidgewayGirl: The book may have been awful but I liked your review. I know exactly what you mean by 'this plot insulted me'.

>133 RidgewayGirl: Sounds fascinating! I will add Shoko's Smile to the pile.

>138 RidgewayGirl: I haven't started Creation Lake yet, but reading through reviews, I find that many people are ambiguous about how they feel about the book - it certainly seems to produce many thoughts.

Happy New Year! It's been really lovely chatting with you and reading your reviews on CR this year. Looking forward to 2025.

149RidgewayGirl
Yesterday, 7:00 pm

>148 rv1988: Likewise, Rasdhar. I look forward to finding out about so many books from your thread next year.

150RidgewayGirl
Yesterday, 9:35 pm



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.

151lisapeet
Yesterday, 10:18 pm

>138 RidgewayGirl: I'm with you on not being quite sure how I felt about Creation Lake in the end, but I will say that its total unpredictability from page to page was pretty engaging. She had some really weird thoughts and plot points in the mix, whether or not they worked, and that kept me going.

>120 RidgewayGirl: Also agree about Orbital. Are you a map lover? I am, and that was something that appealed to me so much about the book, that love letter to parsing a map—except it's the real thing.