Meredith Sue Willis's Books for Readers 238-240
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Books for Readers # 238
February 24 , 2025
Detail of cover of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Anne McCaffrey; Leila Slimani; Cherrie Moraga; Percival Everett; Edith Wharton
CONTENTS
Back Issues
Announcements
Book Reviews
Good Reading Online
Especially for Writers
Obituaries
BOOK REVIEWS
Unless otherwise noted, reviews are by MSW.
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
The Post Man Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Democracy Needs Religion by Hartmut Rosa Reviewed by Joe Chuman
James by Percival Everett
The Blessing Way, Dance Hall of the Dead , Listening Woman, People of Darkness , and Ghostway, by Tony Hillerman
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Unknown Man # 89 by Elmore Leonard
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
Absolution by Alice McDermott
Shadows of Tyranny by Ken McGoogan Reviewed by Fay Martin
Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of A Queer Motherhood by Cherrie Moraga
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Dreams Like Thunder by Diane Simmons
The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
Wings of Fire: the Dragonet Prophecy by Tui T. Sutherland
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Books for Readers is still soliciting reading suggestions and reviews of all kinds of books. Be expansive, and send me your thoughts in essay form; or write something short you can use as an Amazon.com review and send to me for this publications as well.
I tend to review older books that I missed along the way as well as books from small and indie presses that deserve more attention. I believe we desperately need alternatives to the handful of remaining (and way too powerful) Big Book Reviews. These publications, like all of us, have limited angles of vision. The antidote it seems clear to me, is lots of places sharing other world views and ideas. Let's spread the word on what we're reading.
Send me your literary news too. Be sure to check out Announcements and Good Reading Online.
I am coming to the end of Kenneth C. Davis's excellent Great Short Books: A Year of Reading--Briefly. I don't take many classes these days, but I look for guidance in my reading. I had already read and even reread quite a few of the books Davis recommends (The Great Gatsby, for example), but there were also some great discoveries for me (See my review of We Have Always Lived in the Castle in this issue). I reread several like Death in Venice and was so glad I did. Things you read as a twenty-somthing have an entirely different quality forty and more years later.
For one thing, even though I was certain smarter and sharper in many ways back then, I was always panicked that I wouldn't "get" something that others considered "great." What a relief to be relaxed as I read. And yeah, sometimes I don't get something, but now I know there's no one It. I actually seem to read with more facility now. I trust myself as a reader more, and I think I'm more willing to open myself to the the book's work. Reading is to one extent or another opening yourself to another person's viewpoint, concerns, passions.
One last point, related a little. I have notes here on two Margaret Atwood novels, Alias Grace and Surfacing (the latter another Kenneth C. Davis suggestion). In my journal I questioned myself about why I don't seem to respond to Margaret Atwood the way I expected to. I find myself more moved by the work of Alice Munro (grouping them by generation, fame, and Canadian citizenship). Munro, the late Nobel prize winner has been discussed a lot lately after her daughter writing about Munro's husband who molested her, the daughter. Apparently Munro never took action against him. I've been in a number of heated conversations about this, and whether such biographical knowledge ruins one's perception of a writer's work. And the truth is, for me, even with all that, I still feel more for Munro's work than Atwood's.
They are both mostly bleak and and often depressing, but Munro's depressing stories usually leave me (mysteriously) uplifted. When I read Atwood material, I admire, always finish the books, but walk away oddly untouched.
REVIEWS
Dreams Like Thunder by Diane Simmons
This wonderful short book is at once an affectionate and humorous look at a lonely, highly imaginative eleven year old's life and the richly rendered world of a high desert farm in Eastern Oregon. It is, in fact, so eastern that the nearest city is Boise, Idaho. There is haying with sounds and smells and black dust circles around the workers' eyes, and there is our girl Alberta's delight in her adult friends who do the haying. She especially loves her father, a World War II ace pilot and flying instructor, who works alongside the hired men men.
Alberta's mother, on the other hand, is unhappy on the farm and spends much of each day lying in the sun with aluminum foil disks over her eyes. She was an Alabama Southern belle who now finds herself in the middle of nowhere living next door to her mother-in-law, who is tough and religious and does not agree about how to raise a daughter.
The story line is about the coming visit of Alberta's mother's cousin and her daughter, who is Alberta's age. The close third-person narration alternates character sketches of the people around Alberta with splendid moments of being in the out-of-doors and also a string of fantasies that she spins about the much-anticipated visit of cousin Martha Lee. She makes up stories of how they will be inseparable and become stewardesses and fly to Paris.
While she is planning where to take Martha Lee around the farm, she has a run-in with the "not-all-there" neighbor man who she is afraid is going to shoot her with his ever-present gun while she is walking a fort she built herself. There is so much hope and anticipation around the arrival of the guests, that this reader of too many novels assumed some disaster was coming: child molestation or the guests would cancel or Martha Lee would turn out to be a pill.
But this is a Diane Simmons world that is above all grounded in life and the superior power of human imagination. The guests arrive safely, and while Martha Lee is afraid of farm animals, she is plenty feisty in her own odd-ball way. The girls explore and spy and come up with an idea about writing fake notes about the life and death of a woman whose name they get from her tombstone. And the fake notes are accepted for publication by the copy-hungry editor of the local newspaper!
I love the play between the real and the imagined here. A practical joke that requires writing skill and a grasp of real life.
In the background, swirling around, are stories of the pioneer generation in Alberta's family. She hears about the murder of indigenous people that is told as a legend from the far past, as is the treatment of Chinese workers in the local gold mines. History is thus largely off stage in Alberta's world, but the tales and legends give the child's life a deep perspective that enhances and locates it in time as well as place.
The ending, with its hilarious plot twist but no disaster, is priceless.
And finally I'd like to offer heartfelt thanks to Red Hen Press for bringing this book back into print.
The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
Well, this one was not fun. The first line tells you that some young children have been murdered, the special nightmare of the working mother. The rest of the novel is about why it happened. I had to stop and go read something else for a while. The Nanny of the novel and her breakdown make a solid study of what
might have happened to such a woman plagued by psychological discord, a brutal husband, and destitution when he dies. She doesn't have the tools to deal with a difficult child of her own, but she discovers she can care extremely well for other peoples' children. So much is stacked against her: her passion of her charges, for example. All this is extraordinarily well imagined by Slimani.
Even so, at various points, I kept pulling myself back a little and saying, Yes, but you, author, are imagining this–why are you imagining this instead of something different?
Slimani imagines the horror of the victims, and the horror of the killer, but she never attempts to capture the birth mother's actual feelings when she discovers the bodies--that is treated as an hour-long scream. I find that a little odd: why is the person most like herself (based on the biographical material I found on the author) given a terrible moment that we experience from a distance?
Or maybe the story is just too much for me.
Read it for the technical and imaginative brilliance, but don't expect to have fun.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Art by Thomas Ott
This is horror too, I guess, creepy, but Shirley Jackson creepy: very funny and fond of its characters. It isn't supernatural, nor is it quite this world we live in. Merricat (Mary Katherine) he narrator is supposed to be 18, but sounds like one of the 12 year old prodigies like Frankie in Member of the Wedding. The situation is that Merricat lives with her older sister Constance and great-uncle Julian in a big house on the outskirts of a little Vermont town (like the setting for "The Lottery" and other of Jackson's works). A few years earlier, the other members of the rather aristocratic and snobbish family died in an arsenic poisoning.
Merricat's sister was generally blamed, but acquitted in a traumatic trial.
Merricat's main duty for the household is to walk to town twice a week for groceries. The townspeople stare and sneer and recite little nasty verses about poisoning. Older sister Constance doesn't leave the house. There are, of course, secrets and surprises. Everything in Merricat and Constance and Julian's orderly lives is overturned after Cousin Charley comes to visit and tries to make changes, particularly to seduce dear Constance. He is the destroyer, in Merricat's opinion, of a very happy household.
There is a house fire, and the whole town comes out to watch. The fire fighters put the fire out because, they say, that's what firemen do, but the townspeople trash the house. It's all pretty appalling, and there are no really admirable people on any side. Maybe Merricat's pet Jonas the cat, and from time to time Uncle Julian. But because of the seductive and amusing voice of Mary Katherine, we are totally cheering for her side, however well we know her and what she's capable of by the end of the novel.
Such a shivery delight to be in Jackson's idea of small town America!
A 2010 NY Times discussion of the Library of American edition of Jackson gives a good overview of her work: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/books/review/Rafferty-t.html
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
I wrote in the introduction to this issue about how I respect and admire Atwood's work and am always sufficiently entertained to keep reading, it somehow usually leaves me cold. Maybe it's me. There is
something missing for me in her characters, although she is far too good a writer for me to be clear about what it is.
In this novel, based on a real double murder in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the time when, in the USA, the Civil War was about to break out, a woman named Grace Mark is convicted of murder. She is an immigrant servant who has lost touch with her family and has fallen in with a man who instigates the murders and is hanged. Grace is convicted, but saved from hanging by a clever lawyer, and then spends thirty years in prison and insane asylums before being released. She gets a modicum of a happy ending. She is also the only character in the book who-- mysterious and possibly split-personality as she may be--has a kind of thoughtful dignity that makes her attractive.
The other main character is Dr. Simon Jordan, a young man who is ambitious about starting his own treatment of the insane in a (he hopes) profitable institution. He has Ideas, and he is studying Grace. He is sexist and classist and, more damning for a character in a novel, fatuous. I don't like him or most of the others. Simon is a twit, Simon's landlady is at once a victim and unpleasantly whining and clinging, the murderer McDermott is a brute, Grace's various bosses are beyond selfish, and her erstwhile friend Jeremy the peddler never stays in one role long enough to develop much--actually, he seems wasted to me altogether.
Even Grace's friend Mary, who lives in her imagination, may have a vengeful side. None of those things are impossible in fiction as far as me identifying with the characters--I am as fond of Elmore Leonard's assassins and jerks as I am of his heroes-- but in this book, except for Grace herself, there are mostly people to repel you.
On the other hand, it's a darn good story and the scene setting is really good--the material culture of mid nineteenth century Canada.
Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
This 1973 novel is again solid and well crafted and certainly superior to most popular literature. Surfacing is about the lives of women in the nineteen fifties and early sixties--catering to despicable men (whether or not they recognize it). Sexual frustrations is always the fault of the women. The women do the cooking and nurturing with no one even noticing.
Atwood was known first as a prolific poet. She wrote this at the age of 33 or so--a very young woman, very angry about the changes in the world and the bad influence of Americanization whom the main character identifies in a lot of Canadians. She says a lot about the wilderness and respect for the animals and land, but doesn't say much about the people who preceded the French and British.
The story has couples coming to a lake in northern Quebec to see the cabin where the narrator grew up half of every year half the year. Her parents are dead, or rather, her mother is dead and her father is probably dead, but possibly not. Perhaps he went crazy and ran off into the "bush."
The narrator does this herself at the end of the book--has either a spiritual epiphany or a breakdown. She runs from the people she came with. She won't walk into human made enclosures or eat food in cans.. In very sixties fashion, though--and of course the sixties really lasted at least till the fall of Saigon in 1975--insanity is often a synonym for extreme freedom (think of the writing of R.D.Laing who defined schizophrenia as “an adaptive response to a chaotic and disordered society.”)
So she runs into the forest, rips up her clothes, burns her memorabilia, refuses to go back to civilization, then sees the ghosts of her parents. Finally, she decides they would prefer her and her fetus (about 48 hours along) to survive, and she begins to move into the future.
I believe we are supposed to cheer, but I find myself not really trusting her decisions.
Of course, Atwood is brilliant, and she generally writes exquisitely. Also, she knows a lot about the flora and fauna and weather of the Canadian north.
And if nothing else, this would be an excellent introduction to the seventies themes of second wave feminist writers.
James by Percival Everett
One of my favorite ways to evaluate a book is to consider whether the ending is as good as the promise of the beginning.
Percival Everett's popular James aces the test. The ending fits what has come before, and is satisfying and well earned. I'm glad Percival Everett's career--long, serious, and literary--has taken off in a big way.
James has a lot of nice touches like catching a giant catfish for dinner by wiggling your fingers and almost getting your arm swallowed; the clever use of the traveling minstrels and the Duke and the King from Huckleberry Finn. All fun, exciting, clever. The one thing that I am not quite satisfied by was the oddity of having the slaves when they are with each other, speak a kind of standard twentieth century Midwestern newscaster English. I totally believe and liked the idea that the enslaved people exaggerated their dialect in the presence of the "massas," and I certainly liked at least for this story that Jim/James could read-- read Voltaire, John Locke, Rousseau and more.
But Huck and the various crackers speak dialect, so why don't the poor black people? I guess I should just accept the magical realism of this, as I accepted James freeing a whole breeding farm full of enslaved people. It did stimulate me to wonder what indeed the enslaved people DID speak to one another-- I imagine it full of figures of speech and metaphors but not plain-Jane newscaster English.
But that's all quibbling. The relationship between Jim/James and Huck was wonderful, and the action and adventure, and the skill of how he ended it.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
So then I had to reread Huckleberry Finn. It was my first reread since what? high school? My early twenties? Much easier reading than my last try--how did getting old and slow make me a better reader of nineteenth century books? Maybe I'm just more relaxed and experienced at the complex sentences?
The book whipped me back and forth between real enjoyment and admiration and being appalled at some of Twain's choices--Tom Sawyer and his cruel practical joking is of a piece with the good-old-boy American men that one has come to loathe. All the life on the river was wonderful, and yes the frequent use of the the n-word grated and weighed on me.
A little superficial survey found the book defended by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jamelle Bouie. Percival Everett thanks Twain in his intro to James. Interesting indeed that these people see the strength of Jim's character central to Twain's novel. There is also an excellent Toni Morrison essay on Huck Finn for which I had a lot of trouble getting a citation--I found some professor's .pdf of the essay for a class, and Google's little robot assistant asserts it's from the NYTimes book review, but I'm not convinced that is true--we have to keep in mind that the little AI gremlins hallucinate.
At any rate, Morrison spends time on Jim as a good father to Huck--which makes me wonder if this is where Everett got the idea for his big reveal in James.
The King and the Duke were so nasty and exaggerated (I hope) and the insane caricatured "Southren" Grangefords all getting slaughtered by their enemies. What a brutal parody of Southern gentry that was.
The final fifteen or twenty per cent though--the return of Tom Sawyer-- was appalling. I didn't like the elaborate "fun," and I didn't' like Tom, and I didn't like Huck's knuckling under to Tom let alone how they torture Jim in chains and completely disrupt the Phelps family with rats and snakes and spiders.
Tom is really a middle class brute in his creative, imaginative torture. The ending--Tom getting shot and his wound infected, then Jim sacrificing himself back to slavery-- he thinks-- for sticking with the sick Tom, and then the reveal that Jim has been freed, and Tom knew it! More torture. Yes, Twain's novel is deep and complex, and he was also making a living by his humor--but I'm still left confounded. Which Morrison says is what literature's supposed to do to/for us.
Well, maybe.
Toni Morrison's essay on "The Adventures Huckleberry Finn" , an introduction to a 1996 edition of Huck Finn, is extremely worth reading. I have a link to it here.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Oh, I do like the world as Edith Wharton creates it, and she does a great scene. She isn't as subtle as her dear friend Henry James (he perceived her as more than a little overwhelming, likely to come and sweep him up for a motor car ride), but for all of his subtlety, her scenes are at least as good, and her portrait of a specific time and place superior. (James of course liked best, especially in his late years, to abstract his people from a lot of daily life).
The first part of The Age of Innocence is stunning. The authorial voice is looking back to the mid 1800's,
commenting on how different it was from the "now" of the early twentieth century. Her authorial voice is a comfortable guide, making sometimes gentle, sometimes not, fun of the old protestant New York aristocracy with its terrible limitations on women– and, of course, its many wealthy women who manages to master their world anyhow, for good or for evil.
We follow young Newland Archer. He has his criticisms of the milieu. and he likes progressive literature and art. Art, society, Europe versus America, the preservation of virgin virtue--the book is in constant conversation with so much of Henry James. It speaks about many of the same themes, but Wharton is always a little clearer, a little louder--a little more open to dramatizing vulgarity.
For example, we learn in so many words, Archer's own, that he has sown his wild oats with a married society woman. He is in no way ashamed--feels indeed that he owes this knowledge to the innocent, virginal young woman he is marrying-- who he intends to mold into exactly the woman he imagines. He has chosen May Welland. who is, he believes the very flower of Old New York, and he expects to have her join him in some mild push back against Society, and of course in enjoying art in Europe.
Then May's cousin, the Countess Olenska arrives in town. She has left her husband, causing a scandal. Love, passion, hypocrisy and major manipulations and efforts at persuasion ensue.
The real story is what boundaries are broken and reset, and who really wins. Old New York wins the battle, but loses the war as we see in the early twentieth century part when Archer is a grandfather gazing with amazement at the world where he lives now.
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
I thought at first this was putting all its emphasis on the researched background of New York City around the turn of the twentieth century. That was interesting, but the story got better and better as it went along. I wonder if this was Caleb Cobb learning how to write a novel? He was an experienced nonfiction writer and the child of a founding member of the Beats (friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg).
This is, however, his first novel. By the second half it rolls along very nicely. He has good characters, especially his genius child psychiatrist Laszlo Kreizler (the alienist ) and a journalist narrator John Schuyler Moore who is an excellent guide to the watering holes and other delights of the city. Also part of the detecting crew is Sarah Howard who wants to be a police officer, and Theodore Roosevelt, commissioner of the New York City police at the time
Other colorful characters include some very bad cops and an underworld of "boy-whores" and other prostitutes, gangsters and a serial killer who preys particularly on the boys. Kreizler is determined to chase him down by figuring out his psychology, and this is elaborate and mostly fun, and ends with an excellent climactic scene on the parapet of the old Reservoir that was soon to be replaced by the New York Public library and Bryant Park.
Looking back at my reading experience, a day later, I realize I really liked it. Not that it needs my recommendation–it was a big best seller in 1994.
The Post Man Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
Much better than I feared: a 1930's Depression novel, first big best selling (and "Banned in Boston") noir novel. Along with Chandler and Hammett, Cain invented the genre. He was another alcoholic who wrote just a couple of
good books-- this one, Mildred Pierce, and Double Indemnity, all of which were made into classic movies.
I agreed with the general praise of its directness, its sharp dialogue. The characters have little in the way of morality, but are still attractive. There's a barren landscape and national poverty in the background making everyone out to make a buck or marry one. Sex isn't graphic as far as action goes, but there is no question there is a lot going on in bed. Cora a couple of times says, "Rip me!" which is more than a little disturbing, maybe more now than back then. It is never clear if we're talking about blouses or rough intercourse.
Cora and Frank's plans to kill her husband are sloppy and never for a moment look likely to succeed. Actually, they try twice, and there's a complicated trial and a very clever lawyer. Cora and Frank are constantly on the verge of turning on one another, and there is a final, real not staged, accident that gives us the real noir ending.
I don't think the plot bears a lot of examination, but the momentum and sexual passion make it surely rock and roll. I was surprised by how much I liked it. Lively and hot and heavy and dripping with doom.
Absolution by Alice McDermott
Highly praised, highly recommended, and I can only add my appreciation to the chorus. This one, like my favorite of her work so far, Charming Billy, is an indirectly told study of character. Charlene, an engineer's wife in Vietnam in the early sixties is a bit of a rebel, at least on the surface, a do-gooder, a mother, a woman who mutters her iconoclastic remarks in private and breaks rules sub rosa. There's a lot about Americans in Saigon and the pretty appalling attitudes of men toward women and of women toward themselves and each other.
Two women tell it, a newlywed protegee of Charlene's, and Charlene's daughter. There is a lot about parenting: about miscarriages and marriages and adoption, and the twisting of even good intentions under imperialism. It is thus also about the Vietnam war. I probably liked Charming Billy better, but my second favorite Alice McDermott novel is very high on my general list.
Unknown Man # 89 by Elmore Leonard
This is fairly early Leonard (1977), when he wrote real prose instead of movie scenarios. In this novel a Detroit process server who is a recovering alcoholic meets a current alcoholic, and they work on their problems together and maybe fall in love.
There are some charming bad guys, including one who, he convinces us, discovered patience in prison--but then waits a little too long. The other isn't a professional killer, but has no problem with doing what it takes to reach his goals. He comes to Detroit from New Orleans and spends a lot of time complaining about the weather and eating the best food he can find in town. He is running a semi-legitimate scam to find people who don't know they own old stocks that have improved in value, and then take most of the recovered money for himself.
The violence feels appropriate, and the shot gun is the real power weapon.
Leonard was having a lot of fun when he wrote this.
Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of A Queer Motherhood by Cherrie Moraga
This is a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of a book with a new forward by the author and an epilog by the young man who is the baby in the story--which is a story of chosen motherhood. Moraga, a self-identified Chicana butch Lesbian, has a baby who is so premature head has to spend three grueling months in the hospital living through blockages and infections and major surgeries. The trials Moraga and her partner undergo just to get in and out of the hospital are appalling. This was twenty five years ago, and one hopes hospitals do better with so-called nontraditional families now, but we can't be sanguine about that now, if ever.
Moraga's ability to write once Rafael Angel is home is compromised and changed, and familiar to any woman who loves her child but is appalled at how she has lost her privacy, her inner life, all of the things she had that made her who she was/is. In the end, it is a wonderful memoir that brings together politically important ideas and everyday family love.
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
This is a reread for me–a book I bought so long ago that its pages are crumbling. I remember in my first reading that I looked for the good guys–the Gnostics didn't denigrate women in person on in theology, the orthodox were rigid, anti-woman, hierarchical; the Gnostics were (rather like Buddhists) inward looking for the spiritual; the orthodox were more interested in political control of their adherents and clergy-administered religion. The Gnostics were rebels, refused to accept the orthodox orders and the orthodox canon of New Testament books.
But it turns out, as always, that it wasn't so clear. The Gnostics were also elitist (only the so-called spiritually "mature" got to be part of the in crowd), and they had a weirdly elaborate cosmology with a God who was only to create while the real power was mysteriously behind that one.
Meanwhile the orthodox "catholic" church was focused on building a structure that would last for millennia and had a simple confession that included anyone who wanted to be part of it. Maybe the big difference is that at this reading I'm beginning a separate myself from "teams."
In any case, Pagels and her Gnostics certainly complicate what Christianity started out as–the Vatican must have hated it in when the scrolls of ancient alternative texts to the canon were found in 1945 (the "Nag Hammadi Library" of scrolls in Coptic translations), sold, resold, and finally publicized in a facsimile edition between 1972 and 1977.
The belief is that some monks, when ordered by the hierarchy to get rid of all non-canonic books, preserved these scrolls in a jar and hid them in a cave in an arid climate. Pagels looks at all this pretty thoroughly for a small book and makes the case that "many Gnostics, like many artists, search for interior self-knowledge as the key to 'understanding universal truths'" (p. 161-62 New York: Vintage 1981).
Liberating for me, to get a sense of how it all went down, how differently people interpreted Jesus and the religion built around him and his teachings.
Shadows of Tyranny by Ken McGoogan Reviewed by Fay Martin
Ken McGoogan’s seventeenth book, Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship, is a ‘cautionary non-fiction’ approach to capturing the current political reality. When he wrote it, Trump had not yet mused and then doubled down on the idea of Canada becoming the USA’s 51st state. He had not yet referred to Canada’s Prime Minister as Governor, and promised to annex Canada through economic war. In fact, Trump was not yet [president] when this book hit the shelves in August 2024.
So it is a chillingly prescient book. McGoogan paints the pre-WW2 world in detail, exposing alarming parallels with the current growth of demagoguery and authoritarianism around the world, including in the USA. He does not articulate the obvious. He does not finger wag. He does not explore the intricacies of fascism vs Stalinism vs communism. But his characters do.
Somebody has said and been cited that history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. This is a book of rhymes. McGoogan follows the political figures of pre-WW2 and the war as it unfolded in full context, but he also includes the supporting and contrasting cast of players. Central among them are writers – journalists, novelists, dystopians, poets, playwrights, including Orwell top of the list had he not died so young, Andre Malraux, Hanna Arendt, Drien la Rochelle, Mathew Halton, Dorothy Thompson, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Martha Gelhorn (twice the man Hemingway was, his favourite non-favourite.) McGoogan thinks that how reality is named determines how it is experienced, and writers therefore play a direct and very significant role in how reality unfolds. He is unjudgmental about how the perception of wordsmiths changed over time when it is based on engagement. He has no mercy for writers who covered the war or the precedents to war from the hotel bar.
McGoogan humanizes the cost of war to not only the soldiers, but also to those who loved them, and those on whose land they fought, whose food they ate, whose lives they displaced. And those who played the back-stage roles, often female: the nurses, the spies, the resistance workers, the code-breakers, those who stepped up to keep society running in the absence of a generation of men and of focus on everyday necessity.
If there is an overarching narrative in this book, it is the importance of words in structuring resistance. McGoogan draws reality in stark outline with fire-hose intensity. His commentary is limited to the occasional ‘Ya think?’ wink that invites the reader to make what they will of the facts he has delivered, including finding contrary or ameliorating facts if they are so inclined. He expects of readers what he expected of writers who covered the war, that they leave the safety of the hotel bar and venture into the dangerous complexity of the larger world.
McGoogan predicts the rhyme of history in early reactions to the rise of authoritarianism – appeasement, not taking risk seriously, confusion between what the true evil is that needs to be confronted, a political Tower of Babel as evil embeds. His epilogue is entitled: Where is our Churchill? Where indeed.
If this book makes you think (as it did me) that maybe we are on the brink of war again, you might also be interested in (re)reading Vera Britten’s Testament of Youth, or seeing a chilling film adaptation of the same name, available free on CBCGem.ca. Britten decries the First World War’s ruination of a generation of men, from the perspective of a privileged woman who nursed wrecked soldiers from both sides of the war, in repurposed aristocratic homes in Britain and in the mud of France. She, too, believes in resistance and resilience through words. Writers of our time should take heed.
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Another Great Short Book--this one with Camus' famous declaratory style and the narrator Meursault's flat affect. He mostly seems to want to be precisely honest about what he doesn't feel, or perhaps more precisely doesn't feel the way he is supposed to feel.
The story centers this in his mother's death. he doesn't mourn her, although he goes through an all night vigil for
her at the Home where she lived and died. He drinks coffee with an employee of the Home and offers to share a smoke with him. There's an intense even hallucinatory vividness about these small actions. Everything is moments of being, the power of the senses--especially the Algerian sun.
Camus was 29 when this first novel was published, very committed to his lack of passions, his semi-scientific nouveau roman focus on things. He was awarded the Nobel Prize at 44, died early, all that, but the thing no one says is that while he was brilliant, he was also young.
The story is compact and vigorous. Meursault-- the foreigner, the stranger, the outsider (as the various translations of the title go), spends a day with a brutal friend and the women in their lives. There are altercations with some Arabs who are after Meursault's friend who beat up their sister.
Meursault becomes feverish from sun and probably from a desire to feel what it is like to kill a man, so he does. And from there, the story is about law, prison life, the bizarre courtroom practices of the French in Algeria, and Meursault's observations and insights. He is convicted, mostly based on his lack of expressed feeling at his mother's funeral, and his execution looms.
The novel ends with Meursault yelling at an annoying priest and then experiencing a sudden understanding of life--as if the imminence of death by guillotine makes him finally wake to feeling.
The lack of interest in the murdered man niggles at me, but I was happy to see Meursault awaken.
A Few by Tony Hillerman
What can I say? I like them, and they are very short--and instructive as well as entertaining.
The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman
This was the first of the Joe Leaphorn novels, and the main character is really a white academic whose name I've already forgotten. This is the one where the editor encouraged Hillerman to enhance Joe Leaphorn. Good decision. Very exciting, believable minor characters, and Leaphorn figuring out what's going on in one place and the white academic in big trouble in another place. Good action, and a complicated plot (supposedly a strong suit of Hillerman's).
A lot hangs on a character known as "the big Navajo" whose hat is stolen and whose Navajo isn't as good as his English. This is interesting, as are the ceremonies. But Berg (the white guy--name came back) is an unbelievable jerk vis-a-vis women. I think Hillerman (at least back in 1970) would have said he was supposed to be, but it really irked my liver–as long as the guy is escaping from a sealed room and getting shot, he's fine, but I wanted to puke over him
and his love interest, whose main role is The Girl.
Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman
This one was darker, with the deaths of boys and a creepy anthropologist on a dig. But Joe Leaphorn is good again. He does a lot of tracking, and Hillerman makes it interesting. Leaphorn gets wounded in an interesting way.
There were plot details I didn't bother to go back and work out or even really understand. For me, it's the narrative, of course, and with these books, a kind of anthropological survey and even a travelogue: learning about this place, enjoying the religious distinctions between the Navajo and the Zuñi–and the tensions between the tribes.
I did look up Navajo commentary on Hillerman's novels, and in the beginning, it was generally positive, but I think subsequent generations have been more critical.
Listening Woman by Tony Hillerman
I stopped at least temporarily with the t.v. show and decided to try Hillerman's novels. I read this one first, out of order. They are all short books, and you see his writing style improving rapidly. I probably like best an easy glimpse, not overly challenging, into the world of the Navajo and other Americans who preceded the rest of us.
The last part of this novel is all physical action with Joe Leaphorn struggling with bad guys and a monstrous attack dog and caverns and fire and explosives and guns.
It's smoothly written, and hard not to like Joe with his low key wit and frequent holding back what he's thinking. In this story, an offshoot of the American Indian Movement has turned to terrorism.
I'm pleased to discover a new series.
People of the Darkness by Tony Hillerman
I've been watching the Netflix series Dark Winds, which uses whatever parts of the novels it wants to, and that threw me at first about his book which has Jim Chee for a protagonist and a white teacher named Mary Landon for a love interest. She goes along him on a combination investigation and avoidance of someone looking to kill them–the very blonde assassin. Anyhow, once I got over the confusion from the t.v. show and while I wasn't thrilled with Mary Landon's role in the story, Jim Chee's attractive self-examination over his reaction to her and HER reactions is well done. I continue to be a little nervous about how the Navajos and others appreciated Hillerman's portrayal of their lives and ways.
Ghostway by Tony Hillerman
Finished another Hillerman last night: Ghostway (?) This one starred Jim Chee, and I liked its efficiency and landscapes and, again, the Navajo lore.
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
This was the first of a popular dragon series--an early one: the world of Pern, dragons and dragonriders, time travel. I'd read about it, and was mildly disappointed after
expecting this to be really engrossing. It was instead thin in places, and even tiresome--essentailly not as well written as I'd hoped.
Apparently, McCaffrey considered her work science fiction with a fantasy tone. She sounds like she was a decent person, working with her son and others on some of her later books and finally turning the series over to him.
Well, maybe I'll try her again--if I get really hungry for dragons. I should say that in 1987, Locus ranked two of the eight Pern novels among the "All-Time Best Fantasy Novels", based on a poll of subscribers. (Dragonflight and The White Dragon).
Commenting on this list, David Pringle called them "arguably science fiction rather than fantasy proper," He called McCaffrey's work part of the planetary romance subgenre of science fiction.
Wings of Fire: the Dragonet Prophecy by Tui T. Sutherland
More dragons. This series is aimed at younger children. I read it because my almost-nine year old grand-daughter was determined to get me to read it! I liked the lovable dragon protagonist Clay a lot. The main characters are all dragons, and there's lots of cheerful violence, mostly dragon-on-dragon. The dragons have rather nasty queens who appear to be Alexander the Great wannabes.
I'm not going to say much about the plot, but it's well done, and somehow having all the protagonists and point of view characters be dragons rather than people seems to be a sort of distancing technique for younger readers. The dragons themselves seem adolescent in the purity of their ambition, adventuring, loving and hating. No need for human history or much nuance, but there is lots to like–the characters, the dragon tribes. Lots of action and friendly squabbling among the good guys. Oh, there are LA some funny little squeaky voiced creatures called "scavengers" who appear to be humans.
Democracy Needs Religion by Hartmut Rosa Reviewed by Joe Chuman
Maintaining that our democracy needs religion seems an idea ill-fitted to our times. In the West at least, religion is not faring well. Western Europe is arguably a post-religious society, with many churches and cathedrals converted to museums or concert halls. In the last several decades, the United States seems to be following Europe in a move toward creating a secular society, witnessed by the rapidly expanding ranks of the unaffiliated. More than 28% of Americans now assert that they do not belong to a house of worship, and this cohort of "nones"
includes growing numbers of agnostics and atheists. "Nones" now exceed the percentage of Americans who are Catholics and evangelical Protestants, making it the largest group on the religious spectrum. The loss of adherents may be a factor in pushing many conservative religionists to the extremes. Christian nationalism is on the rise, and the politicized evangelical churches have been among Donald Trump's most stalwart supporters, without which he could not have attained the White House. If anything, contemporary religion proves itself to be a militant destroyer of democracy, making the title of the book under review at least ironic, if not provocative. Reactionary religion has had a long history of supporting fascist regimes, and it is ominously happening under the direction of Donald Trump. Moreover, rampant sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has been a global phenomenon, undermining its claims to moral authority. And when it comes to abuse, Catholicism does not have a monopoly. The religions have a long, tragic history of complicity with the forces of darkness. Among those whose ethics are guided by decency, religion in our times does not have a good name. The Left has had a long history of condemning religion for its collusion with retrograde political movements.
Democracy Needs Religion by the German sociologist, Hartmut Rosa, is a small book that encompasses large ideas. At fewer than 70 pages, it is the revised and extended publication of a lecture that Rosa gave to the Diocese of Würzburg, Germany in 2022. Rosa's primary concept is what he calls "resonance," and it is the focal idea around which he critiques the malaise of modernity. Resonance is a concept central to Rosa's work and serves as a basis for an earlier work with that title. Democracy Needs Religion briefly applies Rosa's theory of resonance to the revival of democracy, especially in the interpersonal quarters of contemporary life.
Borrowing from Karl Marx and the theorists of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Rosa identifies alienation as the primary discontent of modern society. Resonance, which describes a change of consciousness, is proffered as the response to that alienation caused by the structure and rushed tempo of contemporary life.
In Rosa's analysis, society can be described as in a state of "frenetic standstill." Perpetual growth without direction is its prevailing dynamic. As Rosa notes,
"[frenetic standstill] is meant to imply two things. On the one hand, society is accelerating. Indeed, it is frantically rushing ahead; for structural reasons, in fact, it must rush in this way to maintain its structure. On the other hand, however, it has become mired or sclerotic. It has lost the sense of its historical (forward) momentum."
Rosa refers to this condition as "dynamic stabilization," and relentless growth lies at its core. Such accelerated growth, he asserts, is necessary to maintain the status quo. As such, modern society needs to expend more and more energy to maintain existing conditions. The demands built into the structures of late capitalism ensure that we produce and have more: more energy, more expansion, more productivity, more inventiveness, more things, more wants, all moving at a forever accelerating pace. As Rosa concludes,
"I find it truly absurd at this point to speak abstractly of growth without indicating where this growth should be achieved..."
"Even more absurd is the fact that we, as humans, don't even want all this growth because we are greedy and insatiable. We need it because, without growth, we could no longer sustain the entire existing social structure. Growth and acceleration are driven by fear, not by greed."
The relentlessness of accelerated growth results in consequences at both the macro social level and in the lives and consciousness of individuals. Environmental destruction is no doubt its most salient consequence on the planetary level. With regard to the fabric of social relations, Rosa asserts that the condition we are in renders more aggressive our relationship to the world and to each other. "Our relationship to the world is aggressive; we are always in attack mode or alarm mode." Industries, the extractive industries as the prime examples, are acting more and more recklessly in the search for oil and rare earth elements. This aggressive frenzy of perpetual expansion, Rosa asserts, informs our politics. He argues that it is the dynamic underlying our stark divisions and the transformation of political adversaries into perceived enemies.
There is a psychological toll as well. An ethos of relentless growth is experienced in what he identifies as the burnout crisis, which closely correlates to a burgeoning rise in mental illness. Rosa's realism causes him to admit that the modern agenda has given rise to tremendous levels of economic welfare, scientific knowledge, and technological capability. But despite this progress, Rosa concludes that the promises of modernity have not been kept.
The modern world is one of great utility, yet it has left us wanting for experiences fundamental to our sense of well being and our relationship to the world beyond ourselves. A pall pervades society. Growing competition and dwindling resources make the future less promising. Greater knowledge has led to more uncertainty, not less. There is palpable ignorance and skepticism as to how science relates to personal lives. Parents traditionally felt that their children would be better off than themselves: but no longer. At the same time, emergent awareness of historical evils has darkened our appreciation of the past. In Rosa's view, we have lost both the past and the future.
It is apparent that Rosa is a man of the left, and one concludes that he could amply elaborate a political analysis of the oppression and exploitation wrought by neo-liberalism and late capitalism. However, he does not take this direction in this brief work. One concludes that in his view even if economic egalitarianism were achieved, an essential element would remain missing. And this missing dimension, which resonance restores, is the answer to the alienation wrought by the modern circumstances he describes.
Resonance is a mode of experiencing the world around us. Rosa describes it initially as possessing a listening, receptive and responsive heart. Rosa describes resonance in an interview given in January 2017:
"I was looking for a way to save the concept of alienation by defining alienation's true other, so to speak. That's how I arrived at this notion of resonance. You're non-alienated from your work, for example, or from the people you interact with, when you manage to have a responsive, transformative, non-instrumental relationship with them, a resonant relationship. The difference is you don't try to manipulate the other side, which could be a person or an idea or a piece of music or nature, or to control it instrumentally or make it disposable and available. Instead, you try to listen and to answer. And whenever you are in that state of experience, when you listen to some music for example — or when you talk with people or when you do your work right, i.e. when you're in resonance, when you feel that the thing you interact with is important, then it speaks to you, it touches and affects you. So this is the one side of a resonant relationship: You are touched, and affected. But on the other side, you also have the capacity to experience self-efficacy. You reach out to the other side too! That's a relationship which is not instrumental and which is not about control, it's a form of resonance. It's a dialogical relationship, which we can never bring about merely instrumentally." (To read the interview in full, you may click here.)
In Rosa's current work, he elaborates on this concept:
"Whenever resonance does take place-whenever I really stop and connect with what has touched me- I enter into a different state of mind and consider different ideas. I begin to see the world differently." Rosa further notes that the moment of resonance, in which the person feels fully alive and is the opposite of burnout, cannot be forced or coerced.
The notion of non-instrumental relations evokes many associations, most distinctively with German epistemologies. It brings to mind thoughts of Kant's "ding-an-sich" and the unknowability of transcendentals. It suggests a mode of intuition identified with romanticism, which Rosa partially affirms. I think of Martin Buber. Rosa, in this work, cites Buber in passing and the centrality that Buber places on relationships and the experiences that occur with the engagement of 'I" and "Thou." Rosa also brings to mind Erich Fromm (an associate of the Frankfurt School) who contrasted "having" with "being."
While the applications of resonance in this brief presentation are undeveloped, Ross, as a sociologist, asserts that his concept of resonance has transforming possibilities for society, politics, and the prevailing logic of frenetic growth that governs contemporary life.
The nature of resonance, as a moment of changed consciousness, opens the door to religion as a an ally – indeed a locus – where we can find values and narratives that alight with what resonance suggests. To be sure, Rosa is not naive to religion's gross failures to fulfill its most sublime objectives. He notes, "Historically speaking, hardly any other entity has been a more effective resonance killer than the Christian church."
Intrinsic to the religions themselves, Rosa notes that religious institutions, "...and especially those that are dogmatically concerned with preserving their 'pure teachings' – can therefore quickly become monsters that not only kill the vertical axis of resonance but also, in so doing, cause social relationships to fall silent..." The dogmatizing of pure teachings, Rosa concludes, leads to the amassing of social power under the guise of "merciless commandments, domination, and submission in the name of God." It is this propensity that can explain the rampant sexual abuse we have witnessed in the Catholic church and others, as well as in denial of an equal voice to women and exclusion of the LGBTQ+ community. Rosa's appreciation of religion is highly selective, which given religion's variety and complexity, it must be. Despite its gross shortcomings, he nevertheless sees something distinctive in religion that provides the gateway to resonance that he seeks. Pointing to the best in religion, he notes that the religions, "...possess elements that can remind us that there's another way of relating to the world, a way that is not growth oriented or intent on controlling things." It is not only religious teaching or inspiring Biblical verses that can open us to this other way, but churches themselves can still play this role. He cites the experience of entering a church, chapel, or temple. Not always, but sometimes, our disposition, our relationship to being in the world, changes. Our experience is different from being in an office or a supermarket. We move from a stance of agency to one of patiency. Control falls away and aggression has no target. Will such encounters engender the experiences of resonance? Not necessarily. But the stage has been set, and this possibility is critical to Rosa's analysis. As Rosa further notes, such openness to resonance can occur in other spaces. For those for whom religion has no appeal, resonance can emerge while standing at the ocean's shore or when walking through the woods.
Rosa contends that the yearning for resonance is a powerful human need, and concludes with the notion that "If society loses this sense, if it forgets that this type of relationship can exist, then it's ultimately done for."
But what of democracy? What of its relationship to religion? With the virulent divisions we currently experience, with the consequent absence of dialogue across lines of political difference, Rosa asserts that resonance is necessary. The fundamental requirement of democracy is that people listen to one another. He states, "Democracy needs a listening heart in order to function. It needs to be perceptive to (very) different ideas, and it needs to be transformed...religious traditions and institutions have at their disposal the narratives, cognitive reservoirs, rites, practices, and spaces in which a listening heart might be cultivated and experienced....We must allow ourselves to be invoked-spoken to - if democracy is to succeed... At the heart of modernity's crisis lies a crisis of invocability.
One senses that Hartmut Rosa is an academic who is on a mission. The endpoint he seeks, I would maintain, has a long history of its own. The transformation of consciousness that will lead to the transformation of society and the often unseen ills to which the masses of men and women are not fully aware. Yet, having defined those ills and the needed response, Rosa provides scant information as to how opening the space for resonance can be effectuated. Whom is he addressing and what are they to do – politicians, church leaders, academics, citizens in general, people in the pews? The critical questions of which persons and mechanisms will lead and participate in the process remain unanswered.
But, as noted, this is a very short work, and by necessity raises more questions than it can answer. That said, the ideas that Rosa presents are critically worthy of attention. At a time when democracy is severely threatened, and religion's most precious resources have been drowned by a celebration of its own power, Rosa turns our attention to what is most basic to both religion and democracy. By introducing us to his concept of resonance, Hartmut Rosa is reminding us of what lies at the basis of our humanity.
In these times, when ominous political realities have been compounded by pessimism, it is good to receive a message of hope. Hartmut Rosa is a humane scholar who pushes against conditions that govern our lives and the malaise that has darkened our social horizons with creativity and passion.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Cornerstone Press has just published William Luvaas's new short fiction collection, The Three Devils & Other
Stories. In these stories, the apocalypse comes to Southern California in a nearly-unrecognizable near future wherein severe climate change imperils the economy and social order and wreaks havoc in people’s personal lives. It’s a wild ride from the cruel streets of Los Angeles to the San Jacinto Mountains. The air itself becomes toxic, Los Angeles is mostly deserted, and predatory gangs wander the streets, along with dreaded “stalkers.”
To survive, people must do battle with those three devils that have long-plagued humans: fear, ignorance, and denial. While these are not light-hearted stories, what writer Frederick Bush said of Luvaas's novel Going Under also applies to The Three Devils: “Luvaas’s great power as a storyteller brings the reader up out of these sorrows and into a sense of redemption that is triumphant and true.”
Call it a work of Cli-Fi or speculative fiction, but one that follows its own rules.
Scientists are asking us to help them educate people about what we are facing—to bring it home to them, so to speak. This is what Luvaas is attempting to do in this collection, as he did in his 2013 collection: Ashes Rain Down: A story Cycle.
Paul Rabinowitz News
New poems, short stories and photographs:
(Fiction)
Stoneboat Literary Journal, "The Ending"
Barely South Review, "The Studio"
(Poems)
Stone Poetry Quarterly, "Tongue Tied"
Soup Can Magazine, "Nor'easter""(Photography)
Same Faces CollectiveAnd much more! See his webpabe at paulrabinowitz.com
SAD NEWS
Newspaper man and novelist, Norman Julian--chronicler of Mountaineer basketball, homesteader-- and friend of many, including me
Our friend and colleague Carter Seaton died 12-23-24. She was the author of many book,s including. See and obituary here. For a list of her books, which included novels and nonfiction about the back-to-
the-land movement, memoir and biography, see her website.
Hilton Obenzinger reports the death of Alan Senauke, who "practiced many things, notably Zen Buddhism as Abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. But he was also a musician, an activist, a printing press operator, and a poet. I've known him since 1965 and collaborated on a lot of projects. "
See a memory piece about Alan at Shambala.com.
GOOD READING & READING IDEAS ONLINE
Check out Fay Martin's columns in which she bounces off her reading and thinking and offers insights for local communities in Ontario.
The latest issues of Danny Williams' "Adventues in the Written Word" is February 2025.
The new Issue of the Jewish Literary Journal
Here is a great reading list from Jeff Rudell. Jeff says he subscribesI "to a Substack 'book club' run by the author and teacher George Saunders....At the end of the year Prof. Saunders asked members to suggest their favourite reads from 2024. The resulting list [linked here] is a bit long (and so, perhaps less useful than a streamlined top-ten might be) but it has some wonderful selections."
Take a look at Joe Chuman's Individualism and Its Discontents on his Substack blog.
ESPECIALLY FOR WRITERS
Kelly Watt's newsletter continues to be compact and interesting. She directs us to a good blog post by Elizabeth Kaye Cook and Melanie Jennings about the Big Five and Literary Fiction.
Recommended Book on writing: Architecture of the Novel
Writer Beware (blog and website) have a lot of excellent information to make sure writers aren't scammed. They appear to be part of the excellent Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association,(founded in 1965), but are definitely aimed to be useful to writers of all genres.
BEST BOOKS LIST!
Shelley Ettinger's best books list from the past year plus. She says, "All fiction except the last. In no particular order."
Babel by R.F. Kuang
Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran
Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The Future by Naomi Alderman
James by Percival Everett
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Blackouts by Justin Torres
Symptomatic by Danzy Senna
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj
You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrigue Dixon
Descending by Karen Outen
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
The Canopy Keepers by Veronica Henry
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The Delaney Bennetts by Desiree Kannell
Long Bright River by Liz Moore
Absolution by Alice McDermott
Happiness Falls by Angie KimAnd the only nonfiction one but it's a whopper: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers #239Back Issues MSW Home About Meredith Sue Willis Contact
April 27, 2025
Octavia Butler, Yu Miri, Laura Tillman, Amor Towles
Shameless Self-promotion:
A very short story by MSW: "Recessional" just up at The Raven's Perch
A Blog to help writers with motivation "Karinwritesdangerously" features MSW on Sharing Stories
Contents
Book Reviews
Essay: Nonfiction: Men’s Reading by Christine Willis
Back Issues
Announcements
Things to Read/See/Listen to Online
Especially for Writers
Book Reviews
Unless otherwise noted, reviews are by MSW.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
COVID19 Haiku by Wesley Bishop Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
Kindred by Octavia Butler
The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W. Chesnutt
The Girls by Emma Cline
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins & Dominique LaPierre Reviewed by Diane Simmons
Echo Park by Michael Connelly
The Waiting by Michael Connelly
Great Short Books: A Year of Reading–Briefly by Kenneth C. Davis
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
We Carry Smoke & Paper by Melody Gee Reviewed by Diane Simmons
River and Stone anthology by the Morgantown Writers Group. Rviewed by Elena L. Perez
Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson Reviewed by Christine Willis
The Migrant Chef by Laura Tillman
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
The American Claimant by Mark Twain Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri
A friend told me she reads Books for Readers but thinks it is too long!
It is definitely long--but I never really imagined anyone reading every word! Rather, I picture people skimming over it, checking out the nice pictures I've borrowed off the Web, skimming a few things that look interestng--reading more fully what catches your fancy.
And, especially, finding an old book or a new independent one that you would never have discovered otherwise.
And speaking of short, I finally finished Great Short Books: A Year of Reading–Briefly by Kenneth C. Davis (see my review below). This issue has a couple of the last of the short novels recommended by Davis that I read. I also have some of the usual things I am rereading plus books I always meant to read and finally did. One of those is The Virgin Suicides (see review here). I also reread one of my all-time favorites, Octavia Butler's Kindred.
There are also TWO reviews in this issue by Edwina Pendarvis! as well as reviews by Elena L. Perez, Diane Simmons, and Christine Willis. Willis also gives us an interesting short essay just below that speculates about why she prefers reading nonfiction to .
Nonfiction: Men’s Reading by Christine Willis
I grew up with the vague notion that novel reading was not as valuable (maybe not as manly, male being the more valuable gender in the 1950’s and 1960’s) as reading non-fiction. I suspect that this attitude filtered down from Jane Austen’s era (and before) over the next 150 years (and might continue to exist in some form); while not everyone has been impacted by the attitude, some may feel a faint guilt reading fiction.
Concerning novel reading from Austen’s Northanger Abbey, 2013, Anchor Books, David Shapard’s annotated text: page 218:
“... But you never read novels, I dare say?” (Catherine speaking to Henry Tilney)
Henry: “Why not?”
Catherine: “Because they are not clever enough for you -- gentlemen read better books.”
(Page 219, Shapard’s Note #10):
“Catherine is expressing a common stereotype. Women were considered to be the main consumers of novels – regarded as inferior reading – and men the consumers of nonfiction genres such as history, religion, or classics, which were held in higher esteem. Records from libraries and reading societies do show a stronger female preference for fiction and a male preference for nonfiction, but they also show many men reading novels.”
My preference has been to read the (nonfiction) annotations in Shapard’s annotated Austen books while I am reading the text as the annotations are more interesting to me than the story itself and add to the depth of my understanding of the story, appreciation of the text, facts of Austen’s time of living, and how the facts might contribute to current life. I doubt that I would have read books of Austen’s beyond Pride and Prejudice without the annotations (which provide me with justification for reading fiction). But beyond the historical influence of the greater value of nonfiction, I prefer it because I come away from the experience of reading (of spending the time) having gained more than just entertainment, more than screen time on the printed page. I gain non-speculative ideas I can use as barter in an intellectual exchange with others.
There are those people (I among them) who don’t feel comfortable enjoying life: maybe these are the people who do not enjoy fiction, and their discomfort with fiction and entertainment is a better explanation of a preference for nonfiction
Reviews
River and Stone anthology by the Morgantown Writers Group. Rviewed by Elena L. Perez
The River and Stone anthology of short stories and poetry is a wonderful blend of voices from the Morgantown
Writers Group, which was until recently led by the late George Lies and is now continued by Melissa Reynolds and Patricia Patteson.
The book opens with a touching dedication to George by his daughter, Erica. I enjoyed reading this glimpse into their relationship; I met George only briefly in a few online writers group meetings, but anyone who mentioned him to me had nothing but good things to say. There is no doubt he was a very special person and a talented writer bursting with wisdom.
I was pleased to be able to read some of George’s own pieces throughout the anthology. My favorite was Potted Lilies, about a man who passes by an ex-girlfriend on a trip to town. He can’t remember her name so ticks through the alphabet hoping to jog his memory, which then becomes a running theme throughout the story as we learn more about his past relationship and his current one with another woman. George’s writings are definitely a standout of the collection.
There are so many wonderful pieces in this anthology that it’s tough to pick only a few to mention. Starting off the collection is a beautifully personal piece by Melissa Reynolds that’s filled with emotion and contemplation. It perfectly sets the tone of the anthology by examining the self in the present moment, yet also encompasses all the layers of past and future selves. It ends by leaving room for the reader to make their own interpretation, perhaps of their own life’s layers. I found myself reading it over several times to savor it.
Another piece I enjoyed was Fizzle by Alexandra Persad, which is a bittersweet story about a young couple falling in and then out of love. They connect over a shared passion for writing, symbolized by matching notebooks, and the story is told through snippets of video captured by a VHS camera. As a filmmaker and writer myself, I enjoyed this blending of the two genres, which created a nostalgic vibe, both for past eras and past loves.
I also enjoyed Loy Krathong by Jeremy Bock, which portrayed a family with small children enjoying the aforementioned Thai festival. The parents guide their children in making banana leaf baskets to float on the river, but woven among these interactions is dialogue between the two adults, hinting at larger socio-economic worries that the children don’t fully catch onto. The truthful interactions and dialogue provided an interesting slice-of-life
story.
Tea for Two by Aimee Hoffer is a fun steampunk, women empowerment piece. I was delighted at the introduction to Sharpe’s Tea Shoppe, where steam-powered coat racks greet visitors and mechanical iron Scottie dogs serve tea.
Budapest Lane by Matthew Smallwood has a quiet, contemplative vibe as two friends converse on a front porch. The Lake by Eric Casdorph also starts off quiet with lovely descriptions of the mist and lake, but gradually turns into something more sinister.
None So Blind–The Advent by Alan O’Connor and April Bird Walk by Elizabeth McConnell (the former flash fiction and the latter a poem) both chronicle time spent with patriarchs, learning to connect with nature. Physical Fitness and the Chipmunk Factor by Janis-Rozena Peri connects readers to nature in a different, rather absurdist way when the main character is recruited by local forest chipmunks to join a 5k race.
Cypher Basket by Emily Stanton is a lovely little science fiction piece about a pet robot. Fragments: The Language of Dreams by Cerid Jones is a hybrid of fiction and poetry, exploring one woman’s complicated approach to relationships. Built Like A Greek Temple 1837, a poem by Kellie Cole, lovingly describes the physical and historical attributes of a church built in Wheeling, West Virginia.
I was impressed with the wide variety of genres found in this anthology–including everything from memoir to speculative fiction to poetry to mystery to non-fiction–as well as the diverse locations, time periods, and array of characters. There really is a mix of something for every reader.
The length of each piece was just right: enough to get a taste of each world and feel invested in the characters and story, and sometimes leaving the reader curious and eager for more.
The collection as a whole was divided nicely into sections that complimented the works within.
The authors are equally impressive in their command of language. Vivid imagery and colorful characters fill the pages of this anthology, and as a Southern California native, I appreciated the range of perspectives set in West Virginia–and a few internationally–which provided me with a glimpse of the life and nature there. Reading this anthology was a journey into real and imagined worlds and I enjoyed the chance to be part of it.
Learn more about the Morgantown Writers Group at https://morgantownwriters.org/ and purchase the River and Stone anthology in print or e-book from Barnes & Noble or from Amazon.
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey EugenidesThis is a book I've been hearing about for its full 25 years since publication. It seems to be one of those books that hits certain people of a certain age right between the eyes, and others of us not so much. It was just right for Emma Cline (coincidentally I reviewed her novel The Girls in this issue) when she wrote of it about it seven years ago in The New Yorker . Even if I wasn't the right audience for it, It stayed in my mind after I finished reading, and I think it informed some of my dreams for a night or two.
Eugenides writes about suburban Detroit just as that city was sliding out of middle class heaven. It's told nicely in the unified voice of a group of adolescent boys who are obsessed with the five Lisbon sisters. There is a lot of agglutinative listing of the accoutrements of the sisters' lives--their clothes, their games, their odors, their health and their make-up products. You know from the first page if not the title what is going to happen, and you watch it happen through the hungry gaze of those neighborhood boys.
I skimmed a few reviews and discussions that made a lot of the "male gaze," which is certainly part of what destroys the girls, but equally destructive is the overly strict parenting style of their mother and father. Eventually, the girls withdraw from school, from the community, from all the elements of everyday life. Their father leaves his job as a math teacher too, and eventually the house deteriorates with almost supernatural rapidity. The family stops having groceries delivered.
I kept wanting the story to include at least one of the girls just walking out on the horror, but you know quite clearly that this isn't going to happen. The book has a deep pessimism about the city, about adolescence, about girls, about the future. This is, of course, true to life about moments in all adolescents' lives and about far too many moments in the lives of adolescents who commit suicide. For me, at my much later stage of life, it all feels too determined, even pre-determined. As if Eugenides is punishing the Lisbon sisters.
At some level the whole thing feels like the fantasy of a bunch of teenage boys jacking off over some girls in a window. On the other hand, there is the splendor of it sentence by sentence.
Get a younger person's take on it: look at Cline's essay.
(Image above right is from the movie version).
The Migrant Chef by Laura Tillman
This is Laura Tillman's second book, well-received like her first, and widely reviewed. Her first one came out of reporting she did when living on the border between the US and Mexico about some murdered children. This one is part of an answer to the wildly over-simplified and brutal views of too many North Americans about migrants.
The book is about Eduardo "Lalo" Garcia Guzman who was a child laborer, a migrant, a felon and permanently barred from the US. He is also now a chef at the highest level, owning restaurants in Mexico and traveling around the world (except to the good old US of A). For good overviews of the book see Kirkus and The Guardian. The second one even comes with a recipe!
While Tillman's book definitely centers on the Migrant Chef, it also examines his family and the rise of celebrity chefs in Mexico. The book has a subtitle: "The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia," and that is probably my favorite part.
There are long, fascinating passages about Lalo's wife and her interactions with some of the upper class Mexicans with whom she, a middle class girl, went to private school. Lalo's mother gets a long section too. She, like Lalo, mourns his father who was the original migrant in the family, spending much of his life moving from Florida to Michigan, picking whatever was in season to be picked. These crews of migrant workers, without any path to citizenship here, led a brutal life, with damage done to adults and children not only by pesticides (and no one will probably ever know if that's what killed Lalo's dad and made Lalo sick) but also by stress leading to things like the destructive illnesses Lalo's mother suffered.
Still, it's a book with a happy ending--Lalo and his mother and his siblings are alive and living well--rich complex people whose lives belie what North Americans stereotype as "illegals."
A bonus is Tillman's descriptions of food that make you want to book a plane and a table.
TWO REVIEWS BY DIANE SIMMONS
Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins & Dominique LaPierre Reviewed by Diane Simmons
(First published 1964)
Yes, I know that Boomers are mocked for being obsessed by WWII.
But—after a visit to Paris and then returning to our political climate at home—I decided to re-read Is Paris Burning?, the title said to be taken from a question Hitler sent to his officers who still held the city as the Allies approached.
Post-visit, I wanted to see what had happened in places I had just seen, such the small and tranquil square in front of Notre Dame, where, eighty years ago, a colossal tank battle took place. And, obviously, here in America, we are all required to renew our study of insane and vengeful leadership, something we post-war kids thought went out with the Nazis.
Though by late 1944 the war was pretty much lost for Germany, a weak and hate-filled Hitler ordered the Germans still holding Paris to mine it with explosives. Hitler—one pathetic little man-- would lose the war, but the world would lose Paris. In this telling, one German, General Dietrich Von Cholitz, dared to quietly and heroically refuse Hitler’s orders and, through various machinations, allowed the most beautiful city in the world fall relatively unscathed into the hands of the Allies.
I don’t think the book, originally published in French, broke new historical ground, but I did enjoy the moment-to-moment reporting of these thrilling days: the little girls in Alsatian costumes who offered flowers to De Gaulle (the great man noticed, barely); the Parisiennes who hurled themselves onto and into American tanks entering the city; the French soldiers racing to telephone booths, finally able to call their mothers after four years of war.
I also enjoyed going back to a time when the Americans were the good guys. May it come again.
We Carry Smoke & Paper by Melody Gee Reviewed by Diane SimmonsMelody Gee, a Chinese-American woman and author of this unusual collection of essays, was adopted from a Chinese mother in China by a childless Chinese immigrant couple in America.
The adoptive parents are loving, but Gee’s life is complicated and confusing, a quilt, as she writes, made up of secrecy, fear, endless labor, and the uncrackable code of English. Ultimately everything is about the struggle to survive. Anything that does not contribute to survival is a waste.
Gee knows that she is adopted, but this fact must remain a secret for reasons that aren’t clear. So many things aren’t clear.
One example is ritual: her parents, who have lived in America since their youth, seem not to comprehend Chinese ritual. Or perhaps it is considered vaguely unsafe. The girl is on her own to figure out what to believe in, which observances make sense, which don’t.
This confusion ultimately--as seen in the later essays—leads Gee to the Catholic faith. The church appeals in part because of its rituals. Though initially mysteriousness, they can be taught, learned and understood. The adult conversion process is a lengthy and complicated, and Gee is often frustrated. In the end, however, she finds herself on newly solid ground.
Great Short Books: A Year of Reading–Briefly by Kenneth C. Davis
I finally finished it! Well, I decided to skip Yukio Mishima for now, and ended with J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (reviewed here), which was quite good, once I opened myself up to it. There were a lot of books I'd already read, and some of them I did not reread–although I intend to later-- and some I did reread with delight and new understanding. These rereads were of books I read thirty or forty years ago. This is one of my favorite truisms: that when you read a book, it is a different book depending on your stage of life. I was thrilled with Death in Venice and A Clockwork Orange, in particular. I reread Charlotte's Web (and then read it again aloud to my grand-daughter on a long train ride from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo).
For the first time, I read Clarice Lispector and Natalia Ginzburg and I discovered Richard Wright's excellent shorter fiction in Uncle Tom's Children. I had somehow missed Nadine Gordimer's July's People, which is connected in nation, circumstance and Nobel Prizes to Waiting for the Barbarians. I read new-to-me works by Shirley Jackson, Camus, James M. Cain, Ursula LeGuin, and Primo Levi (his Auschwitz book).
I highly recommend Great Short Books as a guide for anyone, but especially for people just dipping into fiction. Each book chapter includes the opening, a short discussion of why you should read it, plus more suggestions for continuing with that author.
Thank you Kenneth C. Davis!
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Waiting for the Barbarians, although short enough to be one of Kenneth C. Davis's choices, has a large reputation and influence. It is one of the non-genre speculative fiction novels like Margaret Atwood's A Handmaiden's Tale and Nadine Gordimer's
July's People--literary novels that have a speculative premise and then play out more like so-called mundane fiction than as fantasy or science fiction. They also often leave the speculative parts unexplained in the end. The intention is literary: careful language, character development, sensual detail. The best speculative fiction and science fiction do this too, but they usually make a commitment to a hypothesis about how it's all going to come out.
At one level the point of Waiting for the Barbarians is simple and even obvious: We are the barbarians. Even the rather good-hearted of us like the narrator are in fact part of the oppression of the poor and the Other. The narrator keeps a tortured (but not by him) "barbarian" girl in his room, for example, and mostly confuses her.
The narrator is an unnamed border town magistrate who likes his life with a few friends, gardens, good food, and a semi-scholarly study of an old language. But the "friends" he mentions don't really get speaking parts. Most of his interactions are with the prostitutes he patronizes, the servants who take care of him, and the soldiers he oversees. As the book goes on, we discover he has had sex with rather a lot of the women.
Then the government changes, and his life is systematically destroyed, and eventually, he ends up himself being brutally tortured. This part, as his defenses and personality are unpeeled before us, is the part I like best.
So this is one of those books that deepens and grips more toward the end than the beginning.
Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu MiriOne of the last few Great Short Novels I read. I found this one heavy and sad–homeless people in Tokyo, a tsunami. All the narrator's close friends and relations seem to be dying. The men here, as in Laura Tillman's The Migrant Chef,are sent from their families to labor far away to survive–migrant labor. Beautifully written, but it was hard for me to slog through. My favorite part is when the emperor and his family are going to be driving by the park, and all the homeless people have to dismantle their shelters and clear out for the few seconds of the drive by.
The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W. Chesnutt
This novel of very early 1900's uses the coup/massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina (called Wellington in the novel) as the setting for its story. The context is the so-called "Redemption" of the Southern U.S. when the ruling class took over the government and culture with white supremacy and murderous racism. The life of the author, Charles W. Chestnutt, is fascinating in itself--how he built a court reporting business to offer white collar jobs to blacks, and how in spite of his very light skin, he apparently never attempted to pass for white.
His characters represent and speak for various shades of situation, opinion, and belief as well as multiple skin colors and social strata. Of the black people, Dr. Miller is, if anyone, the protagonist: he is a cultured and professional skilled physician who wants to build a hospital in Wellington for his people. There is also Jerry with an embarrassing dialect and unabashed selfishness. There is also the heroically vengeful Josh who is only waiting for his mother to die to avenge himself on a gross and blood-thirsty white man who became wealthy through contract-convict labor and hates black people to the tip of his fingernails. There are also various genteel whites who definitely want the old world back.They might pretend they would prefer to get it without ugliness like lynching, but sometimes the good ol' southren boys get a little out of hand.
Chestnutt is especially good on the mixed motives and existential hypocrisy of such people, and also on family pride. One elderly white gentleman has so much family pride that he considers a black family retainer's word as good as the white gentleman's own. There is also a white newspaper man who is completely racist but is shocked to learn that his father-in-law fathered a black daughter, now married now to Dr. Miller. And the newspaper man's wife, who is half sister to Mrs. Miller, discovers a shocking secret and about her inheritance. The half sisters each have a little boy, and the end, during the racist riots that grew out of the coup against the mixed race government of the city, there is a lot of death and melodrama. But I would submit that melodrama, as used here, can move us emotionally and further the action.
Chesnutt may be better in this book at the nuances of white guilt and racism than with the black people's stories. There is, however, one particularly interesting passage when Miller and a black lawyer friend are accosted by a group of working black men who are planning to resist the whites to the death. A lot of nice distinctions come out of this scene among cowardice, courage, fool-hardiness, and how to survive.
This is what could probably be called a didactic novel, but that never stops it from being interesting and lively and full of history brought to life.
Kindred by Octavia Butler
I love this book. This is maybe the third time I've read it, and it gets better and better. Butler goes for what life would be like in 1819 if a young black woman from the late twentieth century were transported back in time. As one might imagine, it's dangerous at best. The conceit is that a white ancestor of Dana's "calls her back" to save him from mortal threats. He doesn't know he's doing it,
and the mechanism is never explained. It is the given of the novel, and once you allow it, you are deep in the story and never doubt it again.
I found myself much more engaged with Dana's wretched slave owner ancestor Rufus Weylin than with Dana's white husband Kevin. Of the two white men, the racist-rapist-murderer Rufe is more interesting than the decent white guy who loves Dana. There is always the Evil is More Interesting theory, but I think Butler is herself most interested in the psychology of how a slave master is created from an active, normal young boy. There are also more connections between the two men than are obvious at first glance. An afterword in my e-edition points out that both men, for example, want Dana to do secretarial work for them.
Butler builds up a convincing material culture of the first half of the nineteenth century--typical food and food preparation, writing implements, clothes--all of it. She also shows Rufus and his parents oscillating between pathetic and monstrous. Simultaneously she tells of the loves and losses of the enslaved people on the Weylin plantation. and on the trajectory of Dana learning how to pass as a slave. There is also the shock of the white people when she fails to pass. The great accomplishment here is that Butler, through Dana, faces the damned souls of the white people whose genes she carries.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
It's hard not to like charming Count Rostov who is under house arrest by as a Non-Person under the Bolsheviks at the great Metropol Hotel in Moscow–a real hotel. Gallant and amusing, he makes the best of his life. He becomes headwaiter in the hotel and makes many friends, notably a child named Nina, then her child, a decade later, who he comes to consider his adopted daughter.
He lives a satisfying even brilliant life among interesting characters. Exploring the magnificent hotel, making quirky and lovable allies, including a Party functionary, living a gentleman's life under the nose of the Bolsheviks, then Stalin, then into the beginning of Khrushchev's years.
It's a bit of a paean to the discreet charm of the aristocracy. Maybe if they'd all been gallant and delightful conversationalists like Count Rostov, one wouldn't want to eat them.
It's not a dark book: Stalin's crimes are minimized–there is more bureaucracy than brutality. The novel is what it is--delightful and quate as much a fantasy as your sword and sorcery tomes.
Two Reviews by Edwina Pendarvis!
COVID19 Haiku by Wesley Bishop Reviewed by Edwina PendarvisMany people probably read or re-read Daniel DeFoe's A Journal of the Plague Year while they were staying home during our own recent plague. Many kept journals during the long days of COVID 19. Bishop’s collection plugs into the tradition of describing the effects “on the ground” of a disastrous epidemic, a tradition offering the opportunity to condense daily experience into insight on the individual, society, and maybe even the human condition.
In a brief foreword, Bishop describes his collected poems as “dispatches” from the COVID 19 epidemic in the U.S., a period that included the final year of Donald Trump’s first term as president and the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Bishop's haiku dispatches comment on these and many other incidents as well as his personal experiences from January 15, 2020, through May 13, 2021. The appeal of his approach is the immediacy of the messages, very different from prose memoir and in keeping with the tradition of haiku as capturing a fleeting moment.
Each of the days is represented by at least one haiku offering an impression of a moment in the still relatively new 21st century. If the classic Japanese haiku tradition of the 19th century is analogous to the elegantly spare, compelling ink-stroke painting called sumi-e, Wesley's haiku poems are like cell phone snapshots--the content of classic and contemporary each in keeping with its era.
What Bishop's poems don’t typically aim for is capturing the mystery of nature. At the time haiku reached its high point in Asian poetry, most people around the world spent most of their lives in rural spaces. In the United States that changed in 1920, when for the first time, the census showed 69% of the population living in urban spaces. By 2020, that proportion was 80%, What Wesley's poetic dispatches often aim for is the mystery of the interaction between the intersection of the public—the socio-political economy and the private—the life of the individual.
His poems begin with an email from a friend in China bringing him news of the coronavirus. A few days later an apocalyptic future is foreshadowed by his visit to Australia a land suffering Black Summer—wildfires that have burned for months, blazing across thousands of acres and filling the air with smoke. Throughout the book, ominous events punctuate the quotidian for the poet, his wife, friends, students, and for people the poet doesn’t know: On March 16, 2020, as COVID 19 spreads:
Indiana too.
Closes for business. “Go home.”
Workers worry, “How?”
On the 4th of July, 2020, a haiku calls to mind the “bread and circuses” of the failing Roman empire in the early centuries, CE, and rulers’ efforts to offer food and entertainment as diversions from economic pain and inequality:
Ask not, your country,
do nothing of difficult.
Freedom! Indulge! WOO!
On January 6, 2020, a quiet walk ends in explosive news, the most controversial event of the Trump presidency—an event inspired by his claims of the fraudulency of the election of his Democratic opponent--Trump supporters forcing their way into the Capitol in a rage that Wesley says, “Trumps all reason.”
Even readers who don't share Bishop's views on some social issues, may appreciate his 21st century take on a centuries old poetic convention and his recognition of artistic debt not only to Asian poets, but to such English Romantic writers as Mary Shelley whose famous monster compares himself to a blasted tree—a symbol Shelley and other Romantic writers and artists used to symbolize disruption of the natural order. In Wesley’s poem, lightning strikes a tree, and thunder belches as the tree cracks. In an April 27, 2021, entry, a paean to spring, calls poet Emily Dickinson to mind through her famous metaphor for hope:
Weather warms. Hope.
Hope is a feathered thing, yes?
Like geese returning.
The first of May, 2021, implies happy times ahead, or, at least, the resilience and high spirits of youth:
In Panera line kids
practice TikTok dance moves.
Shuffle, wave hands, laugh.
The last date, May 13, 2021, for the dispatches refers to the relation between the large and the small: “Catastrophe in world, / little world continues.” The last line of the second to last haiku: on that date is “World still on fire.” The last line of the last poem for that date is “Walk outside again.” The collection opens with catastrophe and ends with the human impulse to continue, to enjoy even the freedom of taking a walk—a freedom that perhaps rests on a more precarious balance of the natural world and the geopolitical world than citizens of this nation and others realized prior to this new century.
The American Claimant by Mark Twain Reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
Twain's opening to The American Claimant is the funniest I’ve ever read. In an explanatory paragraph just before the first chapter, he tells readers that “No weather will be found in this book. This is an attempt to pull a book through without weather.” He advises readers who feel the need for weather in the story to consult the appendix! (I went to the appendix and found a number of descriptions, most by writers far less capable than Twain and one, the last entry, from Genesis: “It rained forty days and forty nights.”)
Given that disclaimer, I was surprised to see a reference to weather in the very first sentence of the very first paragraph of Chapter One: “It is a matchless morning,” and the very first sentence of the second paragraph “. . . on this breezy fine morning.” At first, I thought Twain was contradicting himself, but then it occurred to me that the word “weather” can mean bad weather. I looked it up and sure enough that’s the case. One of the examples quoted in the on-line Oxford English Dictionary is “Then don't be late . . . there's weather coming.'“ I think Twain
was playing with the vagaries of language by juxtaposing these different usages.
His wonderful comedy features two claimants. Ostensibly, the American claimant is Mulberry Sellers, surely one of the most outrageous comic characters in literature. Sellers is an American with a claim on an earldom in England. An American claimant in a different sense is a young Englishman who is heir to that same earldom. His “claim” is the reverse of Mulberry’s; he wants to renounce his inheritance and go to America to become a working man in a democratic nation where people are judged on their merit, nor their ancestry or class. The two men are opposite in many ways, though both are, in a sense, dreamers. These two seekers’ stories unfold in a comedy driven largely by Mulberry Sellers’ fantastic plans to earn a fortune as well as the earldom.
Despite (and because of) his boundless,wildly optimistic imagination, Sellers isn’t entirely removed from reality. For example, his vague plan to buy Siberia and sell it to anyone in the market for a republic is based on his estimate of the Russian exiles in Siberia’s mines and prisons, a population he describes as more heroic, selfless, intelligent, and noble than any other—due to Russian dictatorships careful “sifting” for such lovers of liberty and shipping them out to that cold penal colony.
His fairly feasible plan of catching an outlaw in order to collect the bounty on him becomes less promising when the outlaw is killed in a fire—less promising, but not impossible, at least according to Sellers. Hawkins, His friend and co-conspirator in the bounty-collecting plan, is surprised and gratified to hear that Sellers can “materialize” the dead.
In the meantime, the young Englishman has suffered many disappointments in America, but has found love with an American—Mulberry Sellers’ daughter, Sally. Enter complications to their romance--complications engendered by Sellers’ plan to materialize the outlaw, which the two conspirators think has gone somewhat awry. Confusing the young Brit for the (unintentional) materialization of an ancestor of the dead outlaw rather than the outlaw himself, Sellers’ co-conspirator is astounded when he happens on Sally in the young man’s embrace. “Oh my god, she’s kissing it!” he thinks and determines, by hook or crook, to save her from marriage to a reanimated corpse.
The American Claimant is delicious in its irony and its broad humor, much of which is based on the plans of two very different claimants, both well-intentioned but solving altogether different Rubik’s cubes. After finishing it, I googled the reviews, and the first thing that came up was Bobbie Ann Mason's introduction to the novel. Because Mason is one of my favorite authors, I ordered that edition of the book and found that it includes several commentaries on the novel. I recommend that 1996 edition, published by Oxford University, to anyone interested in this really not-to-be-missed novel by one of America’s greatest authors.
Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood
I'm still looking for a solid new crime/mystery series that satisfies the itch I have for the early Harry Bosch books starring Los Angeles and Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti's mysteries starring Venice--oh, and Rex Stout's Nero Wolf mysteries starring New York in the the nineteen thirties and forties and fifties. I do love the cities.
This one is a historical crime novel,and just too cute and self-aware for me. It features a bisexual young woman who plays a kind of Archie Goodwin to an older genius woman detective with multiple sclerosis. Pentecost and Parker live in a Brooklyn brownstone in the nineteen forties and are dealing with the usual rich New Yorkers, some of whom will get off'd in the course of the novel, and one of whom is the killer. The series was highly praised in the New York Times mystery column, but it was just too derivative and "written" for me. I'm perfectly happy with wiseacres and a little meta fiction gamesmanship--but I don't like too much showing off cutesy.
Fortune Favors the Dead does improve over the course of the book. The second half was fun. I may try another if I get desperate, but I think I prefer my mysteries and thrillers to take place roughly contemporaneously with when they are being written. That is, unlike historical fiction, I like the technology to be actually everyday to the characters and the writer. They comfortably use current phrases and attitudes, sometimes to the point of embarrassment. Thus, Rex Stout's Nero Wolf novels have major changes in women's roles over the course of the decades, even as the lifestyle of Nero and Archie and Fritz the cook and whozis the orchid-keeper stay dependably the same. Or, Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch joins the computer/cell phone age kicking and screaming, but totally believably. And police technology is usually an important part of the story.
So this one is just pleased with its own research and references for me.
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson Reviewed by Christine Willis
Just Mercy is a non-whiney, non-fiction account of a remarkable man who has accomplished remarkable humanitarian compassion in spite of rigid and unjust judicial and court systems. The 10th anniversary edition was published in 2014.
With a small group of people, Stevenson began the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and is currently the executive director. (eji.org). Through his tenacity but never with stridency, he has gained the release of many people on death row: some, astoundingly, not guilty of the crime for which they have been incarcerated. The South appears through Stevenson's experience, to present extreme problems for criminals (and people accused of crimes they did not commit) who are poor and often Black. He has fought for adolescents who have been given a life sentence recognizing that their brains were not fully developed when the crimes were committed. He points out that years later while living a life sentence, they have matured and are no longer the person they were when they committed their crime.
One of the most compelling stories highlights Walter McMillian whose story 60 Minutes ran giving national recognition to his plight. Finally released, after great effort on Stevenson's and EJI's part, the six years on death row impacted the rest of Walter's life. (The crime for which he was incarcerated and put on death row occurred 11 miles from where he was with family members at the time of the crime.)
The stories of those who are exonerated and released from prison and death row provide a sense of relief for the reader; the prisoners who are executed leave the reader with a sense of sadness and helplessness: how could this happen?
Probably one of the most striking realizations when reading that slowly comes alive to the reader, is the near absence of complaint with blame. Steveson is one who made (and continues to make) changes rather than bemoaning the realities of racism and poverty.
The reader will want to make a donation.
The Girls by Emma Cline
This was a big best seller back in 2016 or so--a fictionalization of the Manson Family murders. It led me to skim over the material about the real Family in Wikipedia. I had forgotten how many murders were committed that summer, and what horrors some of the men, as well as the "girls," associated with Manson were. I find myself still fascinated by the "girls," and Cline has an interesting take on it, very focused on the vulnerability of young women, their desire to please, to be seen, to figure out what to do with their sexuality.
The main character is actually pretty peripheral to the crimes. I think it may beg the question of whether she would actually have participated, if she'd been invited.
There were other things that interested me that Cline left out. I never got what the semi-leader Suzanne had that drew Evie to her--something seems missing in that portrayal. The Manson figure "Russell" is fine, but not Suzanne, for me. The book maybe brings those monstrous events of 1969 down to size. Cline gets the filth and the sadness and yearning of the fourteen year old Evie, but missed a lot of the rest of it.
Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
This is Y.A. fantasy with a different kind of magic. The main character, Sunny, has the plucky good cheer that good Y.A. protagonists often evince. She is excellent at soccer and also, by the way, a person with albinism. There is plenty of teen struggle and despair. The magic is Nigerian-American juju with the practitioners called "Leopard People." The rest of us are Lambs. The Leopard people are a world wide group, all races and some of them on the dark side: in thrall to evil spirts that manifest themselves when certain magic is done.
Sunny learns in this novel that she is one of the Leopard People–most of them have been trained their whole lives, but she is what is called a "free agent," and comes to it late. She becomes part of a "coven" of four teens--friends, potential lovers frenemies etc. etc. They are called on to stop a serial killer of children and, of course, save the world.
It's a lot of fun, especially being with a character who spent a lot of her life in the States but is also Nigerian. Too much happens too fast for me, and it's maybe a little shallow, but then I'm an old Lamb lady.
Image right by Greg Ruth
Two more by Michael Connelly
Echo Park
This is the 12th Bosch book, but I think it may be one of the first I read. It is solid to excellent at the beginning and end. I am not mad about Rachel Walling, another FBI agent who comes back into Bosch's life. There is a flare-up of their old affair, and she helps out with his investigation, and then pulls away from him in the end for some of what he has done. The old shut-in who once fostered the serial killer as a boy has (IMHO) more personality. On the other hand, the several plot layers are good--a deeply damaged nut case who embraces evil, a crooked cop who sets the whole novel in motio
n, and, of course, Bosch, bless his heart. He gets a tunnel reeking of rotting bodies and makes some pretty severe mistakes and missteps, but is a kind and humble lover (one of my favorite things about him) and finally, after flailing around with a false accusation and acting impulsively but with excellent instincts, solves it all.
Just what you pay for, or, in my case, borrow digitally from the library.
The Waiting
This one is actually newish! They call it a Ballard and Bosch novel, and it came out and is set in 2024! It starts with Renee Ballard, another detective who has trouble with authority. She doesn't feel particularly female, but Connelly makes an effort: she's part of an informal group of female cops who meet, for example, and she's on a mother-quest in this novel. So even though she isn't Harry Bosch, I've come to accept her as an okay recorder of police procedure and adventure.
It's a "Ballard and Bosch," but the first Bosch who turns up is Harry's daughter Maddie, a patrol office who wants to be a detective. She volunteers in her free time to work with Ballard's open-unsolved unit. So of course I go in my mind, "Oh, Connelly is playing with us-- the Bosch is Maddie--not Harry!" But then Harry himself shows up and gets involved. A little good-humored tease for the fans. I sort of feel like I know what Connelly is doing, which is, I believe, have some fun providing fodder for the fans, and, of course, making an excellent living.
I consider the Bosch novels (and to a much less extent, the TV shows) an acceptable addiction.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
One of the pleasures of living a fairly long life is that you get to read good books many times, as as you go through changes in your life, they are like new books. I appreciate things I totally missed when I was 17 or 37. I understand the book differently. I never stop rereading Jane Austen books, but this was my first reread of Northanger Abbey and what a treat.
I reread this because my sister was reading the annotated version, and it had been a long long time. The main thing I remember from my early reading was being bored with the long hijinks about Catherine trying to make Northanger Abbey into a Gothic house of horrors. It's funny, but back then I felt Austen just went on too long. This time I wasn't bothered--it didn't even seem that long. The emphasis was on the rituals of Bath and, of course, on Catherine's teenaged silliness. She grows up a lot, she gets her man (see the cartoon "Austen Spoilers" below).
I looked for some criticism online and didn't find a lot considering how much there is about Austen's other books. I dipped into an old Reddit discussion where a lot of younger readers were praising how relatable Catherine was, and especially relationship to Thorpe. One woman saw him in a sports car driving too fast and boasting. Others identified strongly with Catherine's embarrassing mistakes. There was also a write-up in Vox about Northanger Abbey as Austen's funniest novel .
For myself, I especially liked the way Austen contrasts what a Gothic villain is supposed to do (imprison his wife) with what a real life mundane villain does (act extraordinarily rudely to a guest and possibly even put her in danger). And my favorite minor character is John Thorpe (see what I picked up from Reddit above. He assumes, of course, that he is god's gift to women, or at least to Catherine. He talks incessantly about himself and his horses and won't stop his carriage (barouche? phaeton?) when Catherine asks him to. He does not, one surmises, understand the meaning of "stop" from a woman. He also tells the Tilney siblings that Catherine has changed her mind about an engagement with them when she really hasn't. He's funny until you realize he is a stone cold date rape waiting to happen. Austen is brilliant in how she reveals him as amusing, then boorish, then potentially criminal.
Especially for Writers
New Edition of Submit,Publish, Repeat--Free .pdf download, and an excellent way to get basic information about publishing.
Latest (April 2025) issue of Adventures in the Written Word with Danny Williams
Norm Danzig likes the substack blog by Nina Schuyler called "Stunning Sentences" about--you guessed it--writing great sentences.
Exemplary Novels to Read! Here are some model novels suggested by the NYU Novel Writing Class, Spring 2025:
Speak Laurie Halse Anderson
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
Rebecca Daphne Du Maurier
The Virgin Suicides Jeffrey Eugenides
As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Washington Square Henry James (also check out Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton--MSW)
A Brief History of Seven Killings Marlon James
Portrait of the Artist James Joyce
The Analyst John Katzenbach
Carrie Stephen King
Great House Nicole Krauss
Lady Chatterly's Lover D.H. Lawrence
Zami Audre Lorde
The Golden Compass Phillip Pullman
Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
On Beauty Zadie Smith
White Teeth Zadie Smith
The Feast of the the Goat Mario Vargas Llosa.
I Am the Messenger Markus Zusak
Great Reading, Listening, & Watching
Books on the Black Experience recommended by Aleo Pugh: James Forman - Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America ; Keaanda-Yamahtta Taylor - From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (CBC, Black politics); Elizabeth Hinton - From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
Lewis Brett Smiler's story "The Sculptor" was aired online on the Creepy Podcast Take a listen.
The latest issue of JLJ is out!
Norm Danzig suggests:
the substack blog by Nina Schuyler called "Stunning Sentences" about--you guessed it--writing great sentences.looking
a publication called 100 word stories
a podcast with Grant Faulkner and Brooke Warner called Write-Minded.
A short piece by Onyekachi Iwu called "Letters from a Dead Woman."
A good ghost story: "Nectar," a story by John Colman Wood in Sun magazine. (Thanks, Jason Trask).
From Authors Publish: "The Key to a Realistic Writing Plan.
April 2025 Adventures in the Written Word: Writing it with Danny Williams An interesting essay about Two Heroes: a Memoirist who survived a concentration camp and the general whose division liberated him.
Announcements
(MSW interviewed Diane about the book at Words Bookstore
in Maplewood, NJ in March, 2025)
A new very short story by Meredith Sue Willis, "Recessional," just up at The Raven's Perch, an attractive journal of literature and visual arts that puts up new material every couple of days.
Steve Sullivan's youtube page has links to all the various bands and projects he has been a part of, except for his brief stint as a rapper. Those tracks, he says, are still not ready for public consumption. He has a new song on spotify: Your Long Story Short-- Here's the link to the youtube lyric video.
Julia MacDonnell's A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning is just published!
The story opens when the son Julia had relinquished to closed adoption in 1967 found her via a quick Google search, and emailed her. Soon after, they met for lunch, the first time they'd seen one another since he was taken from her arms by a caseworker in the hallway of a Boston Hospital. Instead of a days-old infant wrapped in soft blankets, he was a white-haired middle-aged man, closing in on 50, with a booming voice and most of his life already lived.
Coming in 2026! David Weinberger's latest book explaining technology and the internet, In Light of All from MIT Press.
Latest Paul Rabinowitz news:
Saturday, May 10 at 6-7:45PM in West Orange, NJ, I'll be a featured guest at the New York Writers Workshop West of the Hudson Reading Series.
Latest fiction piece published this month appears in La Piccioletta Barca: Portrait of Unknown Woman: Coney Island
A new book of short stories Syncopated Rhythms will be published by Finishing Line Press. It will be released on November 28, 2025.
Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers #240Back Issues MSW Home About Meredith Sue Willis Contact
July 17, 2025
Scott Turow, Frances Burney, Thomas Hardy, Angie Kim, Min Jin Lee, S.A. Cosby
Promotions!
I don't usually promote sermons by Presbyterian ministers, but check this frin Douglas John Imbrogno 's West Virginiaville. (The West Virginiaville substack is worth checking out anyhow).
Vivid, strong new Story "Molting" by J.J. Loonam online at Stone of Madness Press
Latest Danny Williams' Essay--Informative and Funny:July 2025 Adventures in the English Language, See them all here.
(Danny is an editor who would like to work with your manuscript whether it is "a vague idea, a completed manuscript, or something in between." He gives two free hours and if you like his work, hel'll do more for a fee. Email him at editorwv@hotmail.com)
Professor Goro C. Kato has a new book: Temporal Topos Methods for the Philosophy of Natural Sciences: The Nexus of Ontology and Epistemology .
Denton Loving's new collection of poems, FELLER, is coming soon! Pre-order here.
Just a reminder about my very short story by MSW: "Recessional" which can be found at The RavensPerch , an online international literary and visual arts magazine. TRP is a home for adults, young adults and children. They publish poetry, fiction, non-fiction and visual art, and are interested in writing that makes them react — all the way from calmly to boisterously.
Contents
Book Reviews
Books I Return to--Over and Over (Danny Williams's choices)
Back Issues
Announcements
Responses and Comments
Things to Read/See/Listen to Online
Especially for Writers
It's not too late to take on some books you missed and books you never heard of for your summer reading!
The goal of this newsletter is to broaden the sources of reading ideas for all of us. There are a lot of wonderful suggestions in this issue of Books for Readers from me and other people. Don't miss Danny Williams's short reviews of books he reads over and over--also his July Adventures in the English language! There are also reviews from Kathie Giorgio, Diane Simmons, Edwina Pendarvis, and Joe Chuman. I hope you'll skim and jump around till something hits your fancy.
. Thanks to my sister Christine Willis, I'm reading, gradually, Rebecca Romney's Jane Austen's Bookshelf . This is an enjoyable tour of Austen's favorite books, mostly 18th century novels by women, some of whom I hadn't heard of, some I had. Romney comes to these books from her career as a rare book seller, so she is always looking for an interesting physical edition as well as good reading. She makes the feminist argument that many eighteenth century novels by women were dismissed as second rate by the canon-makers.
I stepped away from the book to read Frances Burney's first novel Evalina. Next issue, I'll report on the even longer and more ambitious Cecilia.
Please take note of the promotions at the top of the page. One more place to look for books so we aren't all reading the same things is Jane Friedman's book recommenders list : https://janefriedman.notion.site/book-recommenders .
Book Reviews
Unless otherwise noted, reviews are by MSW
Cecilia by Frances Burney
Evalina by Frances Burney
Poems, by Gaius Publius Catullus reviewed by Danny Williams
Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby
House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng reviewed by Diane Simmons
The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovannino Guareschi reviewed by Danny Williams
The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy
White Poison: A Tale of the Goldrush by Michael Harris Reviewed by Diane Simmons
The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes Reviewed by Joe Chuman
The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard
The Three Devils by William Luvaas Reviewed by Kathie Giorgio
Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning
by Julia MacDonnell Reviewed by Diane SimmonsThe Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima reviewed by Danny Williams
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
Bending Light with Bare Hands by David B. Prather reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx reviewed by Danny Williams
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
Presumed Innocent; Innocent; and Presumed Guilty by Scott Turow
Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf reviewed by Danny Williams
Evalina by Frances Burney
Frances Burney's Evalina was hugely popular and a favorite of Jane Austen's. It's an epistolary novel like a number of well-known eighteenth century novels (Clarissa by Samuel Richardson for one). Burney was part of a famously bright and lively family and socialized with was friends with Samuel Johnson, and David Garrick and a whole crew of others of that period in London–1760's. She was interested in writing plays, although held back buy her social climber father (I'm reading a biography, and all wasn't roses in Burney's life).
The tone is far more frank than Victorian novels--the threats to women are multiple and made very clear. There is a lot of witty dialogue of a rather showy time that was valued at the time, and a lot of farce including some pretty mean practical jokes that wouldn't fly today: these are some of the difference in what we expect now and what they expected then that can stand between us and these old novels, but they are so wonderful!
The main character, Evalina, has been raised by a foster father, a cleric, to be a lady of some intellect and perfect manners, but the legitimacy of her birth is doubtful, and this uncertain parentage makes her subject to endless male insults. The second half is really exciting as these things are addressed. Her mother was deserted by her husband before her birth, but since he never recognizes his legal wife and daughter, the position of both mother and daughter is quite fraught.
A lot of this seems melodramatic in the 21st century, I guess, but the way various lords and baronets importune Evalina with words and also physically corner her in great houses and public gardens alike. This part feels very modern. The men just can't believe that she isn't available for their their predations. The book is almost shockingly direct about the dangers a young woman with doubtful protection is subject to. Jane Austen is indirect about a lot of this, although everyone remembers the climax of Pride and Prejudice itself in which Elizabeth's sister runs away with a man, and making a marriage of their relationship is touch and go for a long time.
Romney loves Evalina and focuses on the female situation and the female agency, but I kept being pulled up short by the coarse humor.
It is a romance, so from the time we meet Lord Orville--and even he is confused by her position. So you know where we're going, but the journey is a delight, mostly: how Evalina learns about the world, and improves her choices and very gradually begins to speak her mind and take care of herself. She gets smart and does some of the saving of herself by herself.
All of the dangers women are subject to are much more open in Burney than in, say, Austen, although one has to remember the climax of Pride and Prejudice itself in which one of the Bennet sisters runs away with a man, and making him marry her is essential to Elizabeth's appreciation of Darcy. But in Burney's work, all this is much closer to the surface in the older novel. Indeed, Evalina's struggle to keep men's hands off both metaphorically and literally is a lot of the plot
The parts that I did NOT like–and actually shocked me– were the ruthless classism. To give Burney the benefit of the doubt, the contempt with which the lower classes are treated reflects very badly on the upper classes. A couple of nasty lordlings set up a race between two eighty-something old women that they and their friends place bets on, for example. It's really ugly. Burney's good people, Evalina and Lord Orville don't approve, but it seems to have more to do with bad taste than recognition of pain suffered by other people.
This was Burney's first novel, and I didn't quite see what the excitement was about for the first hundred pages or so, but you can feel Burney finding her way, and the writing gets better and better. The use of letters is extremely smooth (I used to hate epistolary), and Evalina gets stronger as a personality by the page.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
This book has received a lot of excellent reviews, and I got very caught up in it too. In fact, I had to lay it down a couple of times because it made me so sad. It's a four (I think) generation story of Koreans who settle in Japan and are ill-treated during the second world war and then during the Korean war. Success in Japan for Korean immigrants is difficult, because only certain avenues are open to them, even the ones born in Japan. There severe
prejudice. Some of the characters try to succeed more or less by "passing."
There's a lot of good food; there is a good man, a Christian pastor who marries one of the main characters when she is pregnant already, and he, the good man, ends up essentially tortured to death in a Japanese prison. Children and grand children have some financial success and look down on old fashioned grandmas and fathers who made their money running Pachinko parlors.
This is a part of Japanese life I never heard of–a game that combines pinball with heavy betting, and is one of the businesses allowed to the Koreans. Organized crime is also involved, no surprise. Anyhow, it's a fine book, not as powerful in the second half as the first, although it has a solid ending. For a more detailed review, see this from NPR: https://www.npr.org/2017/02/07/512910187/culture-clash-survival-and-hope-in-pachinko
The Three Devils by William Luvaas Reviewed by Kathie Giorgio
I never expected to laugh while reading a post-apocalyptic short story collection. I expected to be horrified, terrified, and constantly comparing it to today’s world. To be fair, I did exactly those things too, but I also laughed and found myself deep in enjoyment.
Not that the post-apocalypse is a wonderful place in Luvaas’ short story collection, The Three Devils. It isn’t…and as the collection goes on, I found myself laughing less and less. As I drew near the end, suddenly, it wasn’t so funny anymore.
That was a very effective tactic. The laughter in the beginning made me feel like this couldn’t possibly ever really happen. But as I drew near the end, it became obvious that it definitely could, and possibly, was already underway.
The transition began to happen in the exact middle of the book, with the story, “The Los Angeles Culture Depository”. With many similarities to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, an attempt to save valuable literature and artwork was gripping and the start, for me, of real horror. From there, it just grew darker and darker…but still impossible to put down.
Equally impressive in this book is the juxtaposition of hopelessness and hopefulness. While the situations grew darker and more dire, and a positive outcome seemed unlikely, the characters’ continued striving to right the impossible situation brought a feeling of possible redemption. I wept for the world while I planned for its survival.
What an amazing collection. The best advice I can give a potential reader: pour a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, or even better, both, sit in a dark room with only one light on to illuminate the pages, and sit in the most comfortable chair you have. Prepare to stay awhile. You won’t want to stop.
Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
This 2017 novel is called "magical realism," and it is apparently fairly typical of Murakami's work. I think what I liked best about it was a Japanese quality of relative slowness of the life pace, a certain willingness to accept ghostly/other-worldly events. On the other hand, when I think Japanese, I tend to think Tale of Genji.
The main character/narrator here is a commercially successful portrait painter who down plays the value of his work and still yearns to paint something more powerful. Abruptly, to him, his wife tells him she has a new lover, and he leaves her on a long drive, finally ends up house sitting for a friend whose father was a great artist.
The narrator finds a lost masterpiece by the old painter in the attic ("Killing Commendatore") and puts it out in the studio. Weird things begin to happen: a bell rings in the night, a wealthy neighbor wants him to paint his portrait, and the two of them excavate a mysterious pit. The commissioned painting of the rich neighbor brings the two men into a kind of relationship, but the painting is a break-through for the narrator.
Other neighbors on these mountainsides include a thirteen year old girl who may be the wealthy neighbor's daughter. There is the appearance of a figure from the recovered painting, and a lot of mystery and what amounts to adult fantasy– you have to suspend disbelief, but Murakami makes it easy with the extreme concreteness of the fantasy. He doesn't try to explain everything, and this will never be my favorite novel, but it is engaging and not like anything I've every read. There is also rather a lot of very concrete sex, an ordeal in another realm, and a near-happy ending.
For a a good primer on his work (suggestions for what books to read first, etc.) take a look at this piece from The Guardian.
Presumed Innocent; Presumed Guilty; Innocent, and Identical by Scott TurowThis won't be reviews, but my reaction after binging on Scott Turow novels, three "Presumed" novels plus one about identical twins. I hadn't read his work
before, I don't think (and if I did, I obviously wasn't impressed). Turow doesn't need my praise, and I have to say I resented getting sucked in and laying out $14.99 to one of the Big Publishers for an e-book I don't even own. Yes, I'd rather Turow make a decent living that a lot of public figures I could name, but it just seems like too much money to lease an e-book.
My only regret is that I didn't read the Presumed books in order.
I especially liked all the courtroom parts, which is a lot of the books. He writes about that informatively and sharply. I liked his older narrators (closer to my age now). His narrators are the typical male genre author guy's hero with deep feelings and a tortured past, and again, it isn't new, but he handles it well. The surprise killer at the end of each book doesn't interest me so much, but Turow does that too more than adequately. It just not what I read procedurals for. He doesn't seem to put a lot of moral judgement on his characters who kill other people–sending out a message than any of us might be killers, and I think that may well be true.
He writes well, of course, and that's probably why all of this comes together so well. He actually went to an MFA program before he went to law school. And in spite of my complaints about the price of a book for the Kindle, I respect Turow, a past president of the Authors Guild to which I belong, for wanting book writing to be a viable career. It hasn't been for me and some of the best writers I know, but, hey, that's late stage capitalism for you.
Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby
Cosby is essentially a good writer, and I went looking for this when I was in the mood for some crime fiction and embarrassed
about how often I go back to Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly and maybe Dennis LeHane. Anyhow, Blacktop Wasteland, like Razor Blade Tears, ends with a blood bath. It is also a twist on the all American cowboy loner trope, "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do..." I was raised on those cowboy shows, and enjoy them from time to time. Cosby also works in very well the special circumstance of black men in America, although he does trashy white guys very well too. He does some terrific writing here about cars too–the character's eyes always lock onto cars, which he can fix and also drive getaway (and also plan getaways ) like an angel.
Bug tries hard to care for his family and love his wife. But then he has the familiar dilemma of whether or not to do one final job and get out. Is there a chance he can change? It's left hanging, but not hopeless: Bug and Kia are sitting in their littlest son's hospital room waiting for their other son to arrive, just released from police custody.
Cosby writes a lot of things extremely well: action; cars (as I said–I found myself actually interested in the cars!); racial dynamics; and he does redneck white boys well. The one in this novel is a foul-up and a catalyst and sometimes very funny.
So I'll continue to read Cosby, I expect, just having to take breaks to recover from gagging on all the blood.
House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng reviewed by Diane Simmons
From a big, prize-winning author. I put it down, then picked it up again. I enjoyed being in Malaya: the flora and fauna, the food, the colorful locals that the bored British colonials encounter when they venture to the streets. Art: the decorated doors of the title, for example, that have been rescued to hang throughout a dim warehouse where trysts take place.
Mostly it’s a soap opera: all the British husbands seem to be gay and to go off with other men. The wives retaliate with Chinese lovers, which--in this profoundly if tastefully racist 1920s community--is almost worse than being gay. Somerset Maugham is in residence, providing the famous name that historical fiction is often thought to require. He isn't given much to do; mostly he frets about what his lewd young secretary and lover gets up to on trips to town.
The monotony is broken when a young wife murders a male neighbor. Was it rape? Were they lovers? Will she hang, an event that would be a nearly unthinkable blow to the myth of white superiority? The scandal enthralls the colony, gives Maugham material for a story, and provides the main reason for turning those pages.
Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
This was on the long side, and the teen-voice narrator (who is actually 20) got irritating. The tone really is Young Adult, although longer and more intellectually challenging. It sold well, its heart is in the right places: emotional issues, family dynamics issues, especially interesting about the 14 year old character who has Angelman Syndrome and is locked in his brain for most of the novel.
It starts with a mystery: the family's father disappears. Angelman brother Eugene was a witness or perhaps even a perpetrator. The father may have fallen off a cliff into a waterfall abyss. So the search for dad is ongoing: did he run away with one of Eugene's multiple therapists? The most interesting part--and I keep thinking what Kim really wanted to write about--was discovering how Eugene can read and write, that his profound disability is about motor control not lack of language. There is really interesting stuff about all that– a therapist who guides his hand into writing and makes everyone's hopes get up and dashed, then a different system that really does work.
A happy ending for Eugene, and narrator Mia is funny ad super smart and it seemed too me a bit too teeny-bopper. You hardly notice her twin brother John who is as nice and bland as his name. Also, since mother is Korean and the family spent time there, there's a whole race/culture language theme I like.
It's is, for me, annoying from time time time,and you have to pay close attention, but it has overall a a nice fresh taste.
The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb
I read parts of the first book, most of the second, and in the end all of the third. This time by reading a little more slowly, or maybe it was because I knew what was coming, I didn't get impatient with the crazy dragon-carving nonsense. It still seems somewhat improvised to me, Robin Hobb's finale. Lots of fun, though, in spite of her sometimes-whiney hero. The best part for me this time was Fitz versus Uncle Regal, and, oh yes, the ferret who finally gets revenge for his bonded human that Regal murdered.
Hobb really is endlessly interesting for me, so fecund with stories,
especially in these relatively early books. I'm going to go slowly in order and read the next couple of trilogies too, I think, when the urge comes over me. I gobbled them too fast in the past and missed a lot of the pleasure. I expect, though, that the Farseer Trilogy is probably still the best: we all love the bastard orphan, exploring towna nd castle here, learning the art of poison and assassination, and how to bond with animals.
Back in 2009 (ah the hopeful Obama days!), I wrote, "I'm coming out of my intense focus on the Robin Hobb Farseer trilogy. I'm almost pleased (I think) to be disappointed with the end- the dragons were okay, fun, and did a lot of what needed to be done, but she gave such short shrift to the most frightening thing in the series which was the forging–the soul stealing.... Fitz was a terrific character, a sulky kid much of the time, although the portentous history writing present-of-the-novel Fitz always seemed necessary but annoying. The Wit– the connection with the animals was really wonderful as was the Skill–those human abilities were the best part of the magic to me– rich and just understandable enough. The dragons were dragons....I think [best]would have been to focus on the Forging as the final frontier, as it were– to make Regal connected to that evil magic....But so much was so right: that Fitz ended by not killing Regal but imprinting him with remorse, and that the nasty little ferret got to kill him in the end! Very nice. And the whole trilogy, mostly a matter of plunging into the Skill river/road and seeing what that splendid imagination saw. Whew. ...Can I rejoin my life now? "
Bending Light with Bare Hands by David B. Prather reviewed by Edwina Pendarvis
It’s not at all uncommon for Appalachian poets to write about home and the natural world outside, but in Bending Light with Bare Hands, Prather blends the domestic and the natural familiar with the wild and the supernatural so deftly that he creates an atmosphere that often bristles with electricity. In this collection what might seem ordinary often morphs into something extraordinary. Through highly creative metaphor, he not only manages to bend light, but to shape-shift reality through myth, folklore, science, introspection, and insight.
The poems include many kinds of light: sunlight, starlight, moonlight, headlights, and lightning—which get shifted into something else. Lightning bolts, for example, become the poet’s father’s voice. “Last night,” the poet tells us, “lightning raced with thoughts.” Later in the poem, he says,
I shouldn’t have stood outside where the sky yelled
like a father vexed
by his son. We know there is love Sometimes
a fulmination. But always a thunderbolt, something
so powerful
it can only emanate from the heavens.
This particular shape-shifting of light is both surprising and familiar. In mythology, some gods—Thor, for example, in Norse myths, and Zeus in Greek myths—throw thunderbolts. That powerful father of the poet narrator appears in several poems in this collection, as do the poet’s mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, their voices more subdued.
It’s not surprising that he mentions the witches in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” as there is so much a sense of “something wicked this way comes” in his poems. What is surprising is that in naming the hellbender as an ingredient in the witches’ brew, he offers a kind of inside joke for West Virginians, as no salamander is cast into their cauldron by the witches; and the hellbender salamander is famously native to the state, though like fireflies and honey bees, they’re diminishing in numbers.
Other little creatures of the natural world show up, too—often winged—fireflies, which he sees as “starflies” and refers to as “little comets.” Dragonflies, doves, and rain crows join in Prather’s intriguing web of images and ideas which seem to me to be mostly woven in the service of coping with human frailty in its many forms: vision problems, insomnia, aging, loneliness, and anxiety. In “Pandemic,” for example, the narrator describes some of the fear-inspired isolation associated with Covid. Referring first to a memory of a nephew, who “tags everyone, yells you’re it” and then to his sister, who “orders everything online” and “never leaves the house,” by the end of the poem, coping with the virus in a far different sense, he neatly returns to the tag game in a shape-shifting move.
Given enough time,
I can disappear. Even the neighbors will wonder
if I’m still alive. When I emerge, I will be it.
I will start all over again,
but stronger, harder to fight off,
lingering imperceptibly on the breath.
In “Storm Upon Us,” the poet, sleepless, thinks of his childhood nights and drifts to thoughts of faraway protests against brutality. The only support he says he can give them there in his thoughts in the middle of the night “is sleeplessness, my hopes/ they will change the world.”
This collection called to my mind The Poetics of Appalachian Space, with its essays considering how the home is portrayed in Appalachian fiction and the ideas, in a sense, the dreams, home represents. In Bending Light with Bare Hands, the poet's home is a sanctuary, mostly solitary except for his memories of family members who once lived there—memories that can either comfort or discomfit—and, though relatively safe, not inviolable.
“Apocalypse” concludes the collection wonderfully, pulling together the themes of power, danger, and human frailty and ending in a nearly universal sentiment—regret at having to leave this world—surely felt by almost everyone at the idea of immanent death. As the poet puts it with succinct poignancy, “and me/ just learning how to dance.”
This is poetry for our times. Given the recent pandemic, continuing inflation, deep political division, and two wars, one in Europe and one in the Middle East, the future looks bleak to many of us who aren’t insulated from economic hardship or from social censure for difference in race, gender, or religious belief (or disbelief). Meanwhile, poets like Prather, can show us how to cope with fear and comfort us with glints of light.
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
This is a semi-memoir set in the late nineties San Francisco Lesbian world in the first half and in a fictional Los Angeles apocalypse in the second half. "Michelle" the character has dreams shared with other people including dream sex with genders she might not have otherwise experienced as the world ends. There are lots of quickly narrated changes for "Michelle," and the book has some absolutely hilarious moments and lines of dialogue as
well as a brilliantly played smooth shift between LOL and pathos.
The apocalypse didn't please me: it always reminds me of children's writing where things get dull so the child writes, "And then they all shot each other and died." The real interest for me is always how to live. We'll each die soon anyhow, and mostly, the universe if not the human race keeps trucking on.
Tea's apocalypse has interesting aspects, especially restaurant menus where more and more fish are x'd out as they go extinct. There's too much sun and too few plants and animals except for cockroaches godbless 'em. Anyhow, in the end, Tea is such a good writer that the apocalypse doesn't matter much, it's really about the death of each of us and how we should be living in the short time we have. Really a lovely and loving book, and sexy it its own way.
The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy
I first read The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) only three or four years ago. I said then that I was especially pleased that Hardy, unlike earlier Victorians like Dickens where the "women make one slip and in the next chapter they are slovenly Women of the Night." is able to give a fair amount of agency to at least some of his female characters. Hardy is a generation younger than Dickens or George Eliot, and in his world even middle class women can alone on the streets of a provincial market town. Some of his female characters work with their hands and in the case of Elizabeth-Jane, also read and study. I have been impressed always with Hardy that he sees
working class people with lives of the mind and complex moral dilemmas.
Michael Henchard, the mayor of the title here, is an energetic, powerful man who is, as they say, his own worst enemy. After doing a great harm to his wife while drunk--he sells her to a sailor, and she is too ignorant to realize you can't really sell your wife-- he then takes a vow not to drink for twenty years, He works hard, earns a lot, becomes a solid citizen of a farming town, Casterbridge, and takes a turn with the rotating office of mayor.
Meanwhile, his wife, whose sailor has apparently been lost at sea, figures out that she is still married to her first husband, and she comes with her adult daughter to find him. Henchard takes them in. Meanwhile, he has hired a handsome young Scot to regularize his business. Once again, Henchard undercuts his own success. He develops a strong jealousy of the young man's success, and gradually takes a downward, perhaps even classically tr4agic road in life.
There's a lot of coincidence, a lot of incident, much of it taking place on a single day. Hardy is not a clumsy writer, but neither is he delicate. His plots are heavy and sometimes obvious. But for all his heavy-handedness in plot, his characters are amazingly complex: Elizabeth-Jane is the heroine, but she is cold to her step-father at a crucial moment, which she regrets later. She is the one also who takes Henchard's last wishes seriously. And Henchard himself is infuriating and pig headed and with the occasional instincts of a rutting bull– but also with occasions of great moral clarity and self-control.
Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard
This was fun--not the best Leonard, maybe, but he's always entertaining. It's short and done with one hand behind his back, as it were, in his mid eighties when he wrote it, but he's a master of what he does.
Jack Foley the gentleman bank robber is back again, this time involved with a Cuban gangster Cundo Ray who was his friend ("road dog") in prison, and actually helps him get out of prison early. Then the Cuban's girl friend who has been supposedly waiting for eight years comes on to Jack (as does his own divorced wife), and we're off on intrigue and the ethics of criminals and betrayals and action and wonderful minor characters.
The setting is the the yard at a Florida prison where Cundo and Foley wear tailored prison clothes thanks to Cundo's big bucks) and in Venice in the Los Angeles area. The novel was published in 2009, a relatively cheerful time-- Foley makes reference to Obama cleaning up Bush's messes. The dialogue as always comes on like a string quartet.
For more, here's an excellent review by Robert Pinsky from The New York Times at the time the book came out.
White Poison: A Tale of the Goldrush by Michael Harris Reviewed by Diane Simmons
In White Poison: A Tale of the Goldrush, Michael Harris has no interest in cleaning up—certainly not in romanticizing-- the story of America’s westward expansion. In this case, the focus is the coming of the whites to gold rush California, a history that Harris clearly knows intimately.
Here—in often gruesome, always riveting detail—brutality and inhumanity abound. A young boy, the narrator, is travelling West in a covered wagon, and sees members of the Modoc tribe murder his parents. In revenge, the boy becomes a cold-blooded killer, even of native children.
Like other whites, he follows the native practice of scalping those he’s killed, and sometimes takes ears to string up and wear as a necklace.
This is a world steeped in inevitable brutality as the whites take over and the indigenous people fight back. The only ease the boy finds is with a Chinese prostitute, a kind womn who has been imported from China in what amounts to slavery.
The killings—especially those of the children—remain with the narrator throughout his long life, and when, through his own mistake, his beloved daughter dies, it seems that his life is indeed cursed.
Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning by Julia MacDonnell Reviewed by Diane Simmons
Hidden Girls: A Birth Mother's Story of Reunion and Reckoning (2024) a memoir, is hard to read and hard to put down. The author, daughter of a well-to-do and image-conscious C
atholic family, is the bright, creative one among eight children. Looking for love, a commodity in short supply at home, she becomes pregnant. (It is the late mid-Sixties and neither female contraception nor birth control nor female birth control are available to her.) Immediately, she enters a nightmare of blame, shame and degradation from which, she writes, she has "never fully recovered." She is sent to a grim home for unwed mothers where her newborn—already beloved-- is immediately taken from her and put up for adoption. Meanwhile everyone—case workers and family alike—make clear that her disgusting secret must never be told.
Here, though, some fifty years later Julia MacDonnell tells, taking us on a road trip of the closed adoption system, where unmarried pregnant girls are treated with astonishingly self-righteous cruelty, so that "worthy" families may be provided with healthy newborns. Birth certificates are amended, and courts seal the records; it all becomes, McDonnell writes, a profitable business. Only recently, records have been opened and DNA tests allow adoptees and mothers to find each other. But this too is a painful process, both mother and child struggling to understand the "staggering degree of the original loss."
The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes Reviewed by Joe Chuman
More than ever, the argot of fevered capitalism pervades our discourse. Such often-heard terms as consumerism, consumption, and commodification are charged concepts often invoked to critique the excesses of our social existence, allegedly reduced to economic barrenness at the expense of humanistic enrichment. Getting and spending co-opt the better parts of our lives.
In relevant discussions, what comes foremost to mind is the pursuit and acquisition of material possessions that greatly define the aspirations of the American people at large. Relentless advertising has led us to believe that ownership of things is the primary route to happiness. We are socialized to believe that value is invested in tangibles – cars, clothes, electronics, the newest gadget, and countless other objects that it is the genius of capitalism to continuously spew forth. Capitalism's creativity is vested in its ability to create new needs which it then seeks to satisfy, and this it does feverishly.
Notably, in his book, The Sirens' Call, Chris Hayes identifies the object of greatest value not as a material possession but as attention – a phenomenon as invisible as the wind. As the fish that exists in a watery environment of which it is unaware because of its ubiquity, at first glance, few may identify attention as our most valued resource, even though, as Hayes contends, “attention is the substance of life.” It is a function of Hayes' insight and creativity to bracket out attention as a phenomenon to be commodified. But not only that. Its exploitation is a major driver of the American economy and its marketing. In this digital age, attention has become a centerpiece of our lives.
Chris Hayes is best known as a TV journalist and host of his news show on MSNBC. The Sirens' Call reveals him to be an astute thinker, a capable researcher, and an engaging writer who applies what could otherwise be a theoretical and dry treatise to issues of the moment, both political and personal.
The major driver of Hayes' thesis is the dynamics of the market. The salience and power of the digital powerhouses – Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and their ilk – that, like a global vortex, have swept us up to meet their competitive, profit-seeking ends. To do so, they must attract, grab, and hold our attention. One cannot read The Sirens' Call and escape the conclusion that we all, to the extent that we have given ourselves over to digital realities (and how many haven't?), are the objects of massive manipulation.
Hayes has a message that he conveys with urgency. Not only is the quest for attention something that pervades our day-to-day existence through the aggressive presence of the mammoth digital companies, but it is a reality that takes residence in our inner lives. As Hayes notes, “My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most importance resource – our attention – is also the very thing that makes us human, Unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” Hayes makes clear that attention is not information. Information is infinite; attention is finite. Its scarcity is the source of attention's value. When it comes to Amazon, he tells, this gargantuan retailer is not primarily about the products it sells, which he asserts is an afterthought. Amazon is an attention and logistics company. The multiple products that appear on your screen are evidence of this fact.
The pursuit of attention is, again, pervasive and aggressive. "Centering attention as a resource and understanding both its existential primacy and its increasing social, political, and economic domination is the key to understanding a lot of disparate aspects of twenty-first century life...Public discourse is now a war of all against all for public attention. Commerce is a war for attention. Social life is a war for attention. Parenting is a war for attention. And we are all feeling battle weary.”
Hayes is at his most engaging when describing the personal effects of the battle for attention, especially as manifest by electronic media. It is a political and economic reality of modern life that informs the emotional well-being of men, women, and children, including Hayes himself. His book is sprinkled with personal examples. We gain insight into the personal angst of Hayes as a cable news notable:
“Most of the stories people criticize cable news (or nightly local news) over – the disappearance of a young conventionally attractive white woman, or a live shot of an empty podium awaiting candidate Trump – are the product of intense competitive pressures and a desire to grab and hold audience attention. That's an explanation of these editorial choices, not a justification for them.
But speaking from personal experience, I can say that the moments when I felt the competition most intensely were the times when I probably did my worst work. When you are most worried about losing attention, you get thirsty and desperate and try to grab viewers by the lapels. Listen to this! The is big! This is important! You try to juice every word in the script – make things bigger, more terrifying, more surprising,, you end up chasing stories of perhaps dubious editorial value because the desperate scramble for numbers overrides all other judgments and concerns.”
The frenetic reality that consumes Hayes' professional life is merely an instance of the reality that informs all of our lives. Hayes burrows deeper by placing the role of attention within a historical analysis. He analogizes current realities to the beginning of the industrial revolution and the changes it made in the lives of workers and how they perceived themselves. Here, Hayes makes use of Karl Marx's theory of alienation to describe our current plight. This is not Marx of Capital, but the thought of the younger Marx as explicated in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The worker, according to Marx, experiences multiple forms of alienation. Prior to the factory, the maker of shoes could exercise his skills through completing the entire task. In the factory, his labor is reduced most likely to one isolated skill, endlessly repeated. In short, he becomes alienated from his creativity. Moreover, the finished product belongs to the owner and not to him. The worker's labor becomes commodified and bought and sold. Moreover, within the context of industrialized capitalism, the worker becomes isolated and alienated from his fellow workers. His outer and inner lives are transformed
And so it is with us. “The defining experience of the attention age is a specific kind of alienation. It's a feeling that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken from us against our will. This comes from the sophisticated development of attention markets, which have figured out ways to extract and commodify more and more of our attention, more and more efficiently. But our attention is not like other commodities: it's a fictitious commodity, a market good with a price but also something inseparable from our very humanity. The alienation we feel is born of the tension between attention as a market commodity and attention as the substance of our lives.”
Like the isolated worker in the factory, attention technologies are successfully isolating individuals from each other. What was once a collective experience - think of listening to music, sports events, religious practice, even watching TV - has become progressively individualized, isolated experiences. Hayes notes, “The advent of screens – tablets, smartphones, cheaper and cheaper flat-screen TVs that could be put in multiple rooms - changes this (i.e., social) behavior. Like listening to music on the Walkman and now our phones, paying attention to motion pictures has moved from a family experience to an individual one. These days, during 'screen time,' each of the children is on an individual device, each watching something different, each paying attention alone.”
Clearly, The Sirens' Call is written out of the distress of a young, sophisticated professional, well placed to experience and comment on the reality that molds our values and shapes our interests. But he is hardly the only one. As Hayes states, “I bet you could spend day and night in any city or town canvassing strangers and not find a single one who told you that they felt like their attention span was too long, that they were too focused, who wish that they had more distractions, or spend more time looking at screens.”
I am among the discontented. Many will defend social media by stating that it has enabled them to reconnect with long-lost friends or provide delight in sharing an experience with others. No doubt these blandishments are present and help explain the powerful attraction of digital technologies. Hayes affirms this as well. But as with a growing number of social critics, I conclude that the negative consequences of replacing real-time engagement with others with relations on screens outweigh the benefits.
On frequent drives to New York, I am stopped at a light and take notice of the pedestrians crossing the street. I remain amazed at the number of people gazing down at their phones, not at their fellows, not at the sights the City has to offer, and not even at the traffic they need to avoid to keep themselves safe. I conclude that there is something weird in this pervasive choice to be where one is but not really present. It is not uncommon to see couples in restaurants on what is presumably a date or a romantic evening and find each on his or her cell phone. In times past, when I invited my grandchildren for dinner, the first thing one or two would invariably do was to scroll through his or her cell phone at the table, something I find unacceptable. As a clergyman, I would often bring people together in groups for either business meetings or discussions on topics of common interest. As the leader, it would often take some effort to create focus and sustain interest. Often in the midst of conversation, a participant would pop up from his seat and hurry to the door, no doubt excusing himself on the presumption that the phone was silenced. What remains often unconsidered is that his act of self-exemption often undercuts the mood and changes the experience of all others.
We live in a time of increased isolation and loneliness, wherein people, especially of younger generations, are losing the ability to engage in the simple act of conversation with each other. People report that they have fewer friends. Americans suffer, I believe, from a condition of hyper-individualism, which is leaving undeveloped the social nature that is intrinsic to our humanity. As Christopher Hayes makes dramatically clear, this is not a matter of happenstance. It is driven by powerful economic forces that have captured, hold, and exploit our attention.
This leaves the question: what is to be done? While this book is intended for a popular audience, Hayes follows a pattern I have found characteristic of academic writing. Texts dealing with society are often constructed around a problem for which the author provides a probing analysis, as Hayes does here. Yet having handily analyzed the problem, the solutions provided are relatively thin.
Hayes briefly looks at the regulation of social media, noting the great changes brought by labor laws in an earlier era. But he rightly acknowledges difficulties given the (appropriate) strength of the First Amendment). New directions, he surmises, may emerge out of the reality that people have different impulses. In light of prevailing trends, vinyl records have made a comeback. On a personal note, he mentions that for the first time, he is receiving on a daily basis the print edition of the New York Times, and how it provides a different and, we may conclude, more enriching reading experience than the digital version. More germane is his brief observation as to how organic food and local farming movements developed in opposition to corporate giants that deliver processed food, which dominate the American diet. It is his hope that such tendencies open the possibility for the development of non-commercial forms of the internet. But Hayes needs to develop these thoughts more fully to demonstrate how they will make a significant difference and avoid being merely passing fads.
But one solution Hayes barely entertains is far more radical and is a choice I have personally made. It is simply to turn off the screens. Clearly Hayes' professional life would not allow this. Moreover, as a man in his mid-forties he is scarcely older than the internet itself. As for myself, I am almost twice his age and was socialized to a reality in which the digital technologies lay decades in the future. I admit that as someone who started to use computers later in life, its foothold on me has been less secure.
We can all exercise choices, and there are always choices to be made. One way of avoiding the predation of the attention-grabbing technologies that so concern both him and me, as noted, is to simply lend them no attention. It is to make the choice to turn off the ringer on the phone. It is to abjure soundbites and tweets and to read books. It is to spend time with cherished friends in real time, and stay off of screens. If we cannot change the world, at least we can say “no” to the corporate manipulators that have come to so dominate our social reality and take steps to return our lives to ourselves.
Chris Hayes has written an important and timely book. Implicit in his thesis are the questions, How do I wish to shape my life? What choices will I make toward that end? Where will I turn my attention?
Books I Return to--Over and Over (Danny Williams's selections)
The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx, 1993
Quoting The Byrds: “Everything is so wrong, I know it’s going to work out right.” To begin with, Homer Quoyle just doesn’t fit in anywhere, and he’s dismally aware of it. Then his malicious wife dies in a car accident, and he’s left with two daughters to care for. About a fifth of the way through this satisfyingly hefty book, there’s no direction but up for the Quoyles. An aging but lively aunt—quite a character herself— persuades them to migrate with her to Newfoundland, and get her vacant childhood home ready to live in again. Newfoundland turns out to be Quoyle’s kind of place, a land of seal blubber sandwiches, where nobody knows or cares what it would take to fit in anywhere else in the world. It’s obvious by this point that Quoyle, his daughters, and their aunt are going to find their heart’s home on this island, so it’s time to just enjoy the happy journey.
Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, 1928
I don’t call this a novel, because there’s no character development or many of the other features the word “novel” suggests. It’s a face, a romp, or want 50 years ago we would call a trip. The title character lives through about four centuries, and seemingly four hundred quite odd occurrences. The closest thing to unity or a focus I can see is Orlando coming to know many of the leading British literary figures, encounters which may or may not say something about the writers’ works. These episodes are scattered amid an assault of experimental language and social criticism, held in a framework of Orlando as page boy to Elizabeth I, Ambassador to Constantinople, award-winning poet, pastoral British nobleman (first as Lord Orlando, then as Lady Orlando) and so much more. Orlando is a flamboyant demonstration that that language is infinitely flexible and fun.
Poems, by Gaius Publius Catullus (published with various titles)
There’s something here for any mood, as Rome’s great lyrical poet addresses matters as eternal as love, and as current as his mortgage and his boat. Reading Catullus aloud back in grad school, I could sway to his rhythms even before my Latin was mature enough to catch his sly references. The love poems, addressed to an idealized woman called Lesbia, have especially endured. For a look at what these lines have inspired, search “Lesbia painting.” “Da mi basia mille,” he writes, “Give me a thousand kisses.” In the TV show Outlander, the lady’s wedding ring is thus inscribed. A song in the musical Rent echoes the “thousand kisses” wish. Another piece which endures is the “Ave atque Vale.” Catullus’s brother died far from home, and Catullus journeyed to the site to place tributes, and to write this brief “Hail and farewell” poem. “Odi et Amo,” “I hate and I love,” briefly and powerfully expresses the conflicting emotions to which all of us are susceptible. Among those who have translated and published all or some of the poems are Walter Raleigh, Ben Johnson, Thomas Campion, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Willian Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, Thomas Moore, George Lamb, William Gladstone, 19th century Richard Burton, Charles Stuart Calverly, and Thomas Hardy. (And yes, #16 is often cited as the most obscene thing ever written.)
The Little World of Don Camillo, by Giovannino Guareschi, 1950
(Several more English volumes followed, either translations or extensions of three books published in Italian, 1948-1963. There are also some movies, at least one in English.) The “simple, endearing neighborhood or small-town priest” trope is ancient, but always ripe for another revival. Don Camillo is the parish priest of a small Italian town in the Po Valley, and best frenemy Peppone heads the town Communist party, which has won a majority of seats on the town council. The “action” consists of friendly moral and philosophical (and sometimes pugilistic) arguments between the two, the quotidian problems of Don Camillo’s rustic flock, baffling encounters with the larger world, and such. It’s a comic-book story, creating a charming place akin to our fantasies of the “good old days” that never were.
The Sound of Waves by Yukio Mishima, 1964.
Bildungsroman. There, I used a big word I learned somewhere, German for “education novel.” “Coming-of-age” in English. In this slight volume—usually about 90 pages—Shinji’s father died in World War II, so the presumably teenage boy and his mother work to support themselves and a younger brother on their very small, isolated island, a setting made very real in very few words. . Shinji is learning the fishing trade, and he’s about as fine a young man as can be. Walking home from work he always visits an elderly couple, pays humble respects, and gives them a choice fish. Of course the village rich man has a beautiful daughter, and of course she and Shinji are attracted to one another. A rival suitor appears, a false rumor dims Shinji’s prospects, and everything is resolved when the two suitors face a test of courage and integrity between the two suitors.
Responses to Past Issues
Edwina Pendarvis writes of Elena L. Perez's review of River and Stone in Issue # 239, "I just read the review of River and Stone....Thank you so much! Your review is wonderful! The anthology was a huge project for Melissa and Patricia to collect pieces, edit them, and design the book; and your review took time to read, think, and write about the anthology (time and attention away from your own creative writing). I especially like that your comments helped me see several of the works and the collection itself in a new way. All the contributors owe you a debt of gratitude!"
Announcements
Good news! Book by Goro C. Kato just published by Springer: Temporal Topos Methods for the Philosophy of Natural Sciences: The Nexus of Ontology and Epistemology. The purpose of this book is to provide systematic and unifying methods for the physical and the cognitive aspects of a conscious entity.
A new issue of The Jewish Literary Journal now available.
Vivid, strong new Story "Molting" by J.J. Loonam online at Stone of Madness Press
Latest Danny Williams' Essay--Informative and Funny:
(Danny's "Adventures" are free and hilarious. He also is an editor who would like to work with your manuscript whether it is "a vague idea, a completed manuscript, or something in between." He gives two free hours and if you like his work, hel'll do more for a fee.
July 2025 Adventures in the English Language See them all herePre-order Denton Loving's new collection of poems, FELLER, and get a 25% discount through Tertulia. You don't even have to create an account. Just enter the code FELLER at checkout. (Or get 50% off if you want to try their free 30-day trial.)
In Memoriam
John McKernan
Much loved poet and professor who taught
at Marshall University for 43 years.
Jane Lazarre
Memoirist, Novelist, Poet, Teacher, and Fighter for Justice.
Recommended Online
Vivid, strong new Story "Molting" by J.J. Loonam online at Stone of Madness Press
I don't usually post sermons by Presbyterian ministers, but check this Joni Mitchell/Jesus parable sermon from Douglas John Imbrogno 's West Virginiaville. (The West Virginiaville substack is worth checking out anyhow).
July 2025 Issue of The Jewish Literary Review.
Summer 2025 issue of Review Tales Book Review Magazine-- www.jeyranmain.com
Excellent essay by Sabria Orah Mark (thank you Ann Stoney): https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/05/07/fuck-the-bread-the-bread-is-over/
Poetry month for this year is over, but you can still get wonderful poems delivered to your inbox. Here's a family poem I like a lot by Edward Hirsch.
Sign up for Poem-a-Day here.Jane Friedman's list of recommended sources of book recommendations: https://janefriedman.notion.site/book-recommenders .
Especially for Writers
Lincoln Michel's article about unusual-experimentally structured novels.
Buying Books Mentioned in This Newsletter
A not-for-profit alternative to Amazon.com is Bookshop.org which sends a percentage of every sale to a pool of brick-and-mortar bookstores. You may also direct the donation to a bookstore of your choice. Lots of individuals have storefronts there, too including me.
If a book discussed in this newsletter has no source mentioned, don’t forget that you may be able to borrow it from your public library as either a hard copy or as an e-book.
You may also buy or order from your local independent bookstore. To find a bricks-and-mortar store, click the "shop indie" logo left. Kobobooks.com sells e-books for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.
The largest unionized bookstore in America has a web store at Powells Books. Some people prefer shopping online there to shopping at Amazon.com. An alternative way to reach Powell's site and support the union is via http://www.powellsunion.com. Prices are the same but 10% of your purchase will go to support the union benefit fund.
I have a lot of friends and colleagues who despise Amazon. There is a discussion about some of the issues back in Issue # 184, as well as even older comments from Jonathan Greene and others here.
Another way to buy books online, especially used books, is to use Bookfinder or Alibris. Bookfinder gives the price with shipping and handling, so you can see what you really have to pay. Another source for used and out-of-print books is All Book Stores.
Ingrid Hughes suggests another "great place for used books which sometimes turn out to be never-opened hard cover books is Biblio. She says, "I've bought many books from them, often for $4 including shipping."
If you use an electronic reader (all kinds), don't forget free books at the Gutenberg Project—mostly classics (copyrights pre-1927). Also free from the wonderful folks at Standard E-books are redesigned versions from the Gutenberg Project and elsewhere upgraded with better fonts and layout and ease of reading.
Paperback Book Swap is a postage-only way to trade physical books with other readers.
Responses to This Newsletter
Please send responses to this newsletter directly to Meredith Sue Willis. Unless you say otherwise, your letter may be edited for length and published in this newsletter.
License
Books for Readers Newsletter by Meredith Sue Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Meredith Sue Willis. Some individual contributors may have other licenses.
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Meredith Sue Willis, the producer of this newsletter, is a writer, teacher and enthusiastic reader. Her books have been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, HarperCollins, Ohio University Press, Mercury House, West Virginia University Press, Monteymayor Press, Teachers & Writers Press, Mountain State Press, Hamilton Stone Editions, and others. She teaches at New York University's School of Professional Studies.
.BACK ISSUES--Reviews of books by...
#240 Frances Burney, Elmore Leonard, Mishima, Proulx,, Hardy, Michelle Tea, David Prather, Haruki Murakami, S.A. Cosby, Robin Hobb, Angie Kim, Scott Turow, and many more. Reviews by Joe Cchuman, Kathie Giorgio, Edwina Pendarvis, Diane Smmons, Danny Williams.
#239 Jane Austen, Octavia Butler, Charles W. Chestnutt, Emma Cline, J.M. Coetzee, Melody Gee, Nnedi Okorafor, Stephen Spotswoord, Bryan Stevenson, Laura Tillman, Amor Towels, Mark Twain, Yu Miri. Reviews by Edwina Pendrvis, Elena L. Perez, Diane Simmons and Christine Willis.
#238 Percival Everett, Diane Simmons,Alice McDermott, Cherrie Moraga, Anne McCaffrey, Tui Sutherland, Edith Wharton, James M. Cain, Margaret Atwood, Albert Camu, Caleb Carr, Tony Hillerman, Shirley Jackson. Elaine Pagels. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Fay Martin.
#237 Stephen L. Carter, Gabrielle Korn, Rachel Kushner, Neal Stephenson, Thomas Hardy, Dreama Frisk, Margery Sharp, Valerie Nieman, Elizabeth Catte, Chris Colfer, Lisa Scottoline, John Grisham, reviews by Christine Willis, Danny Williams, & Rose Culbreth.
#236 Sabaa Tahir, Rebecca Roanhorse, Julian Barnes, Jane Austen, Brandon Taylor, Joshua Leifer, Pauletta Hansel, Carter Sickel, Stephen King, and reviews by Joe Chuman, Elaine Durbach, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, Joel Weinberger, Danny Williams--and more!
#235 James Lee Burke; Kate DiCamillo; Donna Meredith; Elana Ferrante; Tana French; Joe Conason; Nadine Gordimer; Jamaica Kincaid; Ian McEwan; Cat Pleska, Illyon Woo; with reviews by Joe Chuman and Edwina Pendarvis; and more!
#234 Robert Graves, Kathy Manley, Soman Chainani, Marie Tyler McGraw, James Welch, Elmore Leonard, Jennifer Browne, Dennis Lehane, Primo Levi, Elmore Leonard, James McBride. Reviews by Martha Casey, Dreama Frisk, and Diane Simmons--and a poem by Dreama Frisk!
#233 Ursula LeGuin, Ford Madox Ford, Elmore Leonard, Deborah Clearman, Susan Abulhawa, Agatha Christie, Oscar Silver, Jeff Lindsay, Linda Parsons, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Philip Roth, Lisa Scottoline. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Felicia Mitchell.
#232 Jim Minick, Clarice Lispector, The Porch Poems, George du Maurier, Louise Fitzhugh, Natalia Ginzburg, Marilynne Robinson; Kathleen Watt; Hambly, Connelly, Alison Hubbard, Imogen Keeper, James McBride, Jenny Offill. Reviews by Hilton Obenzinger, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, Suzanne McConnell, and Christine Willis.
#231 Triangle shirtwaist fire, Anthony Burgess, S.A. Cosby, Eva Dolan, Janet Campbell Hale, Barbara Hambly, Marc Harshman, P.D. James, Michael Lewis, Mrs. Oliphant, Paul Rabinowitz, Nora Roberts, Strout, Tokarczuk. Review by Dreama Frisk.
#230 Henry Adams, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jonathan Lethem, Magda Teter, Mary Jennings Hegar, Chandra Prasad, Timothy Russell, Carter Taylor Seaton, Edna O'Brien, Martha Wells, Thomas Mann, Arnold Bennett, and more. Reviews by Mary Lucille DeBerry, Joe Chuman, John Loonam, Suzanne McConnell, and Edwina Pendarvis.
#229 John Sandford, Dr. J. Nozipo Maraire, Rex Stout; Larry Schardt; Martha Wells; Henry Makepeace Thackery; about Edvard Munch;Erik Larson. Reviews and interviews by John Loonam and Diane Simmons.
#228 Edward P. Jones, Denton Loving, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Lee Martin, Jesmyn Ward, Michelle Zauner, Valérie Perrin, Philip K. Dick, Burt Kimmelman. Reviewes by Ernie Brill, Joe Chuman, Eddy Pendarvis, Diane Simmons, & Danny Williams.
#227 Cheryl Denise, Larissa Shmailo, Eddy Pendarvis, Alice McDermott, Kelly Watt, Elmore Leonard, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Suzy McKee Charnas, and more.
#226 Jim Minick, Gore Vidal, Valeria Luiselli, Richard Wright, Kage Baker, Suzy McKee Charnas, Victor Depta, Walter Mosley. David Hollinger reviewed by Joe Chuman, and more.
#225 Demon Copperhead, Thomas Hardy, Miriam Toews, Kate Chopin, Alberto Moravia, Elizabeth Strout, McCullers, Garry Wills, Valerie Nieman, Cora Harrison. Troy Hill on Isaac Babel; Belinda Anderson on books for children; Joe Chuman on Eric Alterman; Molly Gilman on Kage Baker; and lots more.
#224 The 1619 Project, E.M. Forster. Elmore Leonard, Pledging Season by Erika Erickson Malinoski. Emily St. John Mandel, Val Nieman, John O'Hara, Tom Perrotta, Walter Tevis, Sarah Waters, and more.
#223 Amor Towles, Emily St. John Mandel, Raymond Chandler, N.K. Jemisin, Andrew Holleran, Anita Diamant, Rainer Maria Rilke, and more, plus notes and reviews by Joe Chuman, George Lies, Donna Meredith, and Rhonda Browning White.
#222 Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Gaskell, N.K. Jemisin, Joseph Lash, Alice Munro, Barbara Pym, Sally Rooney, and more.
#221 Victor Serge, Greg Sanders, Maggie O'Farrell, Ken Champion, Barbara Hambly, Walter Mosely, Anne Roiphe, Anna Reid, Randall Balmer, Louis Auchincloss. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Chris Connelly
#220 Margaret Atwood, Sister Souljah, Attica Locke, Jill Lepore, Belinda Anderson, Claire Oshetsky, Barbara Pym, and Reviews by Joe Chuman, Ed Davis, and Eli Asbury
#219 Carolina De Robertis, Charles Dickens, Thomas Fleming, Kendra James, Ashley Hope Perez, Terry Pratchett, Martha Wells. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Danny Williams.
#218 Ed Myers, Eyal Press, Barbara Kingsolver, Edwidge Danticat, William Trevor, Tim O'Brien. Reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman.
#217 Jill Lepore; Kathleen Rooney; Stendhal; Rajia Hassib again; Madeline Miller; Jean Rhys; and more. Reviews and recommendations by Joe Chuman, Ingrid Hughes, Peggy Backman, Phyllis Moore, and Dan Gover.
#216 Rajia Hassib; Joel Pechkam; Robin Hobb; Anne Hutchinson; James Shapiro; reviews by Joe Chuman and Marc Harshman; Fellowship of the Rings
#215 Julia Alvarez, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Anne Brontë, James Welch, Veronica Roth, Madeline Martin, Barack Obama, Jason Trask, Katherine Anne Porter & more
#214 Brit Bennet, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Robin Hobb, Willliam Kennedy, John Le Carré, John Loonam on Elana Ferrante, Carole Rosenthal on Philip Roth, Peggy Backman on Russell Shorto, Helen Weinzweig, Marguerite Yourcenar, Fatima Shaik, and more.
#213 Pauletta Hansen reviewed by Bonnie Proudfoot; A conversation about cultural appropriation in fiction; T.C. Boyle; Eric Foner; Attica Locke; Lillian Roth; The Snake Pit; Alice Walker; Lynda Schor; James Baldwin; True Grit--and more.
#212 Reviews of books by Madison Smartt Bell, James Lee Burke, Mary Arnold Ward,Timothey Huguenin, Octavia Butler, Cobb & Seaton, Schama
#211 Reviews of books by Lillian Smith, Henry James, Deborah Clearman, J.K. Jemisin, Donna Meredith, Octavia Butler, Penelope Lively, Walter Mosley. Poems by Hilton Obenzinger.
#210 Lavie Tidhar, Amy Tan, Walter Mosley, Gore Vidal, Julie Otsuka, Rachel Ingalls, Rex Stout, John Updike, and more.
#209 Cassandra Clare, Lissa Evans, Suzan Colón, Damian Dressick, Madeline Ffitch, Dennis Lehane, William Maxwell, and more.
#208 Alexander Chee; Donna Meredith; Rita Quillen; Mrs. Humphy Ward; Roger Zelazny; Dennis LeHane; Eliot Parker; and more.
#207 Caroline Sutton, Colson Whitehead, Elaine Durbach, Marc Kaminsky, Attica Locke, William Makepeace Thackery, Charles Willeford & more.
#206 Timothy Snyder, Bonnie Proudfoot, David Weinberger, Pat Barker, Michelle Obama, Richard Powers, Anthony Powell, and more.
#205 George Eliot, Ernest Gaines, Kathy Manley, Rhonda White; reviews by Jane Kimmelman, Victoria Endres, Deborah Clearman.
#204 Larissa Shmailo, Joan Didion, Judith Moffett, Heidi Julavits, Susan Carol Scott, Trollope, Walter Mosley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and more.
#203 Tana French, Burt Kimmelman, Ann Petry, Mario Puzo, Anna Egan Smucker, Virginia Woolf, Val Nieman, Idra Novey, Roger Wall.
#202 J .G. Ballard, Peter Carey, Arthur Dobrin, Lisa Haliday, Birgit Mazarath, Roger Mitchell, Natalie Sypolt, and others.
#201 Marc Kaminsky, Jessica Wilkerson, Jaqueline Woodson, Eliot Parker, Barbara Kingsolver. Philip Roth, George Eliot and more.
#200 Books by Zola, Andrea Fekete, Thomas McGonigle, Maggie Anderson, Sarah Dunant, J.G. Ballard, Sarah Blizzard Robinson, and more.
#199 Reviews by Ed Davis and Phyllis Moore. Books by Elizabeth Strout, Thomas Mann, Rachel Kushner, Craig Johnson, Richard Powers.
#198 Reviews by Belinda Anderson, Phyllis Moore, Donna Meredith, Eddy Pendarvis, and Dolly Withrow. Eliot, Lisa Ko, John Ehle, Hamid, etc.
#197 Joan Silber, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alexander Hamilton, Eudora Welty, Middlemarch yet again, Greta Ehrlich, Edwina Pendarvis.
#196 Last Exit to Brooklyn; Joan Didion; George Brosi's reviews; Alberto Moravia; Muriel Rukeyser; Matthew de la Peña; Joyce Carol Oates
#195 Voices for Unity; Ramp Hollow, A Time to Stir, Patti Smith, Nancy Abrams, Conrad, N.K. Jemisin, Walter Mosely & more.
#194 Allan Appel, Jane Lazarre, Caroline Sutton, Belinda Anderson on children's picture books.
#193 Larry Brown, Phillip Roth, Ken Champion, Larissa Shmailo, Gillian Flynn, Jack Wheatcroft, Hilton Obenziner and more.
#192 Young Adult books from Appalachia; Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Michael Connelly; Middlemarch; historical murders in Appalachia.
#191 Oliver Sacks, N.K. Jemisin, Isabella and Ferdinand and their descendents, Depta, Highsmith, and more.
#190 Clearman, Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods, Doerr, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Miss Fourth of July, Goodbye and more.
#189 J.D. Vance; Mitch Levenberg; Phillip Lopate; Barchester Towers; Judith Hoover; ; Les Liaisons Dangereuses; short science fiction reviews.
#188 Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban; The Hemingses of Monticello; Marc Harshman; Jews in the Civil War; Ken Champion; Rebecca West; Colum McCann
#187 Randi Ward, Burt Kimmelman, Llewellyn McKernan, Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Lethem, Bill Luvaas, Phyllis Moore, Sarah Cordingley & more
#186 Diane Simmons, Walter Dean Myers, Johnny Sundstrom, Octavia Butler & more
#185 Monique Raphel High; Elizabeth Jane Howard; Phil Klay; Crystal Wilkinson
#184 More on Amazon; Laura Tillman; Anthony Trollope; Marily Yalom and the women of the French Revolution; Ernest Becker
#183 Hilton Obenzinger, Donna Meredith, Howard Sturgis, Tom Rob Smith, Daniel José Older, Elizabethe Vigée-Lebrun, Veronica Sicoe
#182 Troy E. Hill, Mitchell Jackson, Rita Sims Quillen, Marie Houzelle, Frederick Busch, more Dickens
#181 Valerie Nieman, Yorker Keith, Eliot Parker, Ken Champion, F.R. Leavis, Charles Dickens
#180 Saul Bellow, Edwina Pendarvis, Matthew Neill Null, Judith Moffett, Theodore Dreiser, & more
#179 Larissa Shmailo, Eric Frizius, Jane Austen, Go Set a Watchman and more
#178 Ken Champion, Cat Pleska, William Demby's Beetlecreek, Ron Rash, Elizabeth Gaskell, and more.
#177 Jane Hicks, Daniel Levine, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Ken Chamption, Patricia Harman
#176 Robert Gipe, Justin Torres, Marilynne Robinson, Velma Wallis, Larry McMurty, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, Fumiko Enchi, Shelley Ettinger
#175 Lists of what to read for the new year; MOUNTAIN MOTHER GOOSE: CHILD LORE OF WEST VIRGINIA; Peggy Backman
#174 Christian Sahner, John Michael Cummings, Denton Loving, Madame Bovary
#173 Stephanie Wellen Levine, S.C. Gwynne, Ed Davis's Psalms of Israel Jones, Quanah Parker, J.G. Farrell, Lubavitcher girls
#172 Pat Conroy, Donna Tartt, Alice Boatwright, Fumiko Enchi, Robin Hobb, Rex Stout
#171 Robert Graves, Marie Manilla, Johnny Sundstrom, Kirk Judd
#170 John Van Kirk, Carter Seaton,Neil Gaiman, Francine Prose, The Murder of Helen Jewett, Thaddeus Rutkowski
#169 Pearl Buck's The Exile and Fighting Angel; Larissa Shmailo; Liz Lewinson; Twelve Years a Slave, and more
#168 Catherine the Great, Alice Munro, Edith Poor, Mitch Levenberg, Vonnegut, Mellville, and more!
#167 Belinda Anderson; Anne Shelby; Sean O'Leary, Dragon tetralogy; Don Delillo's Underworld
#166 Eddy Pendarvis on Pearl S. Buck; Theresa Basile; Miguel A. Ortiz; Lynda Schor; poems by Janet Lewis; Sarah Fielding
#165 Janet Lewis, Melville, Tosltoy, Irwin Shaw!
#164 Ed Davis on Julie Moore's poems; Edith Wharton; Elaine Drennon Little's A Southern Place; Elmore Leonard
#163 Pamela Erens, Michael Harris, Marlen Bodden, Joydeep Roy-Battacharya, Lisa J. Parker, and more
#162 Lincoln, Joseph Kennedy, Etel Adnan, Laura Treacy Bentley, Ron Rash, Sophie's Choice, and more
#161 More Wilkie Collins; Duff Brenna's Murdering the Mom; Nora Olsen's Swans & Klons; Lady Audley's Secret
#160 Carolina De Robertis, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ross King's The Judgment of Paris
#159 Tom Jones. William Luvaas, Marc Harshman, The Good Earth, Lara Santoro, American Psycho
#158 Chinua Achebe's Man of the People; The Red and the Black; McCarthy's C.; Farm City; Victor Depta;Myra Shapiro
#157 Alice Boatwright, Reamy Jansen, Herta Muller, Knut Hamsun, What Maisie Knew; Wanchee Wang, Dolly Withrow.
#156 The Glass Madonna; A Revelation
#155 Buzz Bissinger; reader suggestions; Satchmo at the Waldorf
#154 Hannah Brown, Brad Abruzzi, Thomas Merton
#153 J.Anthony Lukas, Talmage Stanley's The Poco Fields, Devil Anse
#152 Marc Harshman guest editor; John Burroughs; Carol Hoenig
#151 Deborah Clearman, Steve Schrader, Paul Harding, Ken Follet, Saramago-- and more!
#150 Mitch Levenberg, Johnny Sundstrom, and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns.
#149 David Weinberger's Too Big to Know; The Shining; The Tiger's Wife.
#148 The Moonstone, Djibouti, Mark Perry on the Grimké family
#147 Jane Lazarre's new novel; Johnny Sundstrom; Emotional Medicine Rx; Walter Dean Myers, etc.
#146 Henry Adams AGAIN! Also,Fun Home: a Tragicomic
#145 Henry Adams, Darnell Arnoult, Jaimy Gordon, Charlotte Brontë
#144 Carter Seaton, NancyKay Shapiro, Lady Murasaki Shikibu
#143 Little America; Guns,Germs, and Steel; The Trial
#142 Blog Fiction, Leah by Seymour Epstein, Wolf Hall, etc.
#141 Dreama Frisk on Hilary Spurling's Pearl Buck in China; Anita Desai; Cormac McCarthy
#140 Valerie Nieman's Blood Clay, Dolly Withrow
#139 My Kindle, The Prime Minister, Blood Meridian
#138 Special on Publicity by Carter Seaton
#137 Michael Harris's The Chieu Hoi Saloon; Game of Thrones; James Alexander Thom's Follow the River
#136 James Boyle's The Creative Commons; Paola Corso, Joanne Greenberg, Monique Raphel High, Amos Oz
#135 Reviews by Carole Rosenthal, Jeffrey Sokolow, and Wanchee Wang.
#134 Daniel Deronda, books with material on black and white relations in West Virginia
#133 Susan Carpenter, Irene Nemirovsky, Jonathan Safran Foer, Kanafani, Joe Sacco
#132 Karen Armstrong's A History of God; JCO's The Falls; The Eustace Diamonds again.
#131 The Help; J. McHenry Jones, Reamy Jansen, Jamie O'Neill, Michael Chabon.
#130 Lynda Schor, Ed Myers, Charles Bukowski, Terry Bisson, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism
#129 Baltasar and Blimunda; Underground Railroad; Navasky's Naming Names, small press and indie books.
#128 Jeffrey Sokolow on Histories and memoirs of the Civil Rights Movement
#127 Olive Kitteridge; Urban fiction; Shelley Ettinger on Joyce Carol Oates
#126 Jack Hussey's Ghosts of Walden, The Leopard , Roger's Version, The Reluctanct Fundamentalist
#125 Lee Maynard's The Pale Light of Sunset; Books on John Brown suggested by Jeffrey Sokolow
#124 Cloudsplitter, Founding Brothers, Obenzinger on Bradley's Harlem Vs. Columbia University
#123 MSW's summer reading round-up; Olive Schreiner; more The Book Thief; more on the state of editing
#122 Left-wing cowboy poetry; Jewish partisans during WW2; responses to "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#121 Jane Lazarre's latest; Irving Howe's Leon Trotsky; Gringolandia; "Hire a Book Doctor?"
#120 Dreama Frisk on The Book Thief; Mark Rudd; Thulani Davis's summer reading list
#119 Two Histories of the Jews; small press books for Summer
#118 Kasuo Ichiguro, Jeanette Winterson, The Carter Family!
#117 Cat Pleska on Ann Pancake; Phyllis Moore on Jayne Anne Phillips; and Dolly Withrow on publicity
#116 Ann Pancake, American Psycho, Marc Harshman on George Mackay Brown
#115 Adam Bede, Nietzsche, Johnny Sundstrom
#114 Judith Moffett, high fantasy, Jared Diamond, Lily Tuck
#113 Espionage--nonfiction and fiction: Orson Scott Card and homophobia
#112 Marc Kaminsky, Nel Noddings, Orson Scott Card, Ed Myers
#111 James Michener, Mary Lee Settle, Ardian Gill, BIll Higginson, Jeremy Osner, Carol Brodtick
#110 Nahid Rachlin, Marion Cuba on self-publishing; Thulani Davis, The Road, memoirs
#109 Books about the late nineteen-sixties: Busy Dying; Flying Close to the Sun; Looking Good; Trespassers
#108 The Animal Within; The Ground Under My Feet; King of Swords
#107 The Absentee; Gorky Park; Little Scarlet; Howl; Health Proxy
#106 Castle Rackrent; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows; More on Drown; Blindness & more
#105 Everything is Miscellaneous, The Untouchable, Kettle Bottom by Diane Gilliam Fisher
#104 Responses to Shelley on Junot Diaz and more; More best books of 2007
#103 Guest Editor: Shelley Ettinger and her best books of 2007
#102 Saramago's BLINDNESS; more on NEVER LET ME GO; George Lies on Joe Gatski
#101 My Brilliant Career, The Scarlet Letter, John Banville, Never Let Me Go
#100 The Poisonwood Bible, Pamela Erens, More Harry P.
#99 Jonathan Greene on Amazon.com; Molly Gilman on Dogs of Babel
#98 Guest editor Pat Arnow; more on the Amazon.com debate
#97 Using Thomas Hardy; Why I Write; more
#96 Lucy Calkins, issue fiction for young adults
#95 Collapse, Harry Potter, Steve Geng
#94 Alice Robinson-Gilman, Maynard on Momaday
#93 Kristin Lavransdatter, House Made of Dawn, Leaving Atlanta
#92 Death of Ivan Ilych; Memoirs
#91 Richard Powers discussion
#90 William Zinsser, Memoir, Shakespeare
#89 William Styron, Ellen Willis, Dune, Germinal, and much more
#88 Sandra Cisneros's Caramelo
#87 Wings of the Dove, Forever After (9/11 Teachers)
#86 Leora Skolkin-Smith, American Pastoral, and more
#85 Wobblies, Winterson, West Virginia Encyclopedia
#84 Karen Armstrong, Geraldine Brooks, Peter Taylor
#83 3-Cornered World, Da Vinci Code
#82 The Eustace Diamonds, Strapless, Empire Falls
#81 Philip Roth's The Plot Against America , Paola Corso
#80 Joanne Greenberg, Ed Davis, more Murdoch; Special Discussion on Memoir--Frey and J.T. Leroy
#79 Adam Sexton, Iris Murdoch, Hemingway
#78 The Hills at Home; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jean Stafford
#77 On children's books--guest editor Carol Brodtrick
#76 Mary Lee Settle, Mary McCarthy
#75 The Makioka Sisters
#74 In Our Hearts We Were Giants
#73 Joyce Dyer
#72 Bill Robinson WWII story
#71 Eva Kollisch on G.W. Sebald
#70 On Reading
#69 Nella Larsen, Romola
#68 P.D. James
#67 The Medici
#66 Curious Incident,Temple Grandin
#65 Ingrid Hughes on Memoir
#64 Boyle, Worlds of Fiction
#63 The Namesame
#62 Honorary Consul; The Idiot
#61 Lauren's Line
#60 Prince of Providence
#59 The Mutual Friend, Red Water
#58 AkÉ, Season of Delight
#57 Screaming with Cannibals
#56 Benita Eisler's Byron
#55 Addie, Hottentot Venus, Ake
#54 Scott Oglesby, Jane Rule
#53 Nafisi,Chesnutt, LeGuin
#52 Keith Maillard, Lee Maynard
#51 Gregory Michie, Carter Seaton
#50 Atonement, Victoria Woodhull biography
#49 Caucasia
#48 Richard Price, Phillip Pullman
#47 Mid- East Islamic World Reader
#46 Invitation to a Beheading
#45 The Princess of Cleves
#44 Shelley Ettinger: A Few Not-so-Great Books
#43 Woolf, The Terrorist Next Door
#42 John Sanford
#41 Isabelle Allende
#40 Ed Myers on John Williams
#39 Faulkner
#38 Steven Bloom No New Jokes
#37 James Webb's Fields of Fire
#36 Middlemarch
#35 Conrad, Furbee, Silas House
#34 Emshwiller
#33 Pullman, Daughter of the Elm
#32 More Lesbian lit; Nostromo
#31 Lesbian fiction
#30 Carol Shields, Colson Whitehead
#29 More William Styron
#28 William Styron
#27 Daniel Gioseffi
#26 Phyllis Moore
#25 On Libraries....
#24 Tales of the City
#23 Nonfiction, poetry, and fiction
#22 More on Why This Newsletter
#21 Salinger, Sarah Waters, Next of Kin
#20 Jane Lazarre
#19 Artemisia Gentileschi
#18 Ozick, Coetzee, Joanna Torrey
#17 Arthur Kinoy
#16 Mrs. Gaskell and lots of other suggestions
#15 George Dennison, Pat Barker, George Eliot
#14 Small Presses
#13 Gap Creek, Crum
#12 Reading after 9-11
#11 Political Novels
#10 Summer Reading ideas
#9 Shelley Ettinger picks
#8 Harriette Arnow's Hunter's Horn
#7 About this newsletter
#6 Maria Edgeworth
#5 Tales of Good and Evil; Moon Tiger
#4 Homer Hickam and The Chosen
#3 J.T. LeRoy and Tale of Genji
#2 Chick Lit
#1 About this newsletter
