Meredith Sue Willis's Books for Readers 238-240

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Current Issue Is #239

 

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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 Collective

And 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 Kim

And the only nonfiction one but it's a whopper: The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

---

 

Meredith Sue Willis's
Books for Readers #239

Back 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 Eugenides

This 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 Simmons

Melody 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 Miri

One 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, but at least pretend they would prefer to get it without lynching.

Chestnutt is especially good on the mixed motives 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 Pendarvis

Many 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 motion, 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

Diane Simmons' Wonderful republished novel Dreams Like Thunder of growing up on a farm in Eastern Oregon!

(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.

 

 

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...

#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, 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

      

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