Just finished Inland by Tea Obreht, a beautifully-written Western with two major plotlines, one about a fugitive Turk in the pre-Civil War U.S. Camel Corps, and the other about a tough-as-nails, but maybe mentally ill, frontier mom in drought-stricken 1893 Arizona. It’s exhilarating, moving and engrossing. I loved it so much that I texted especially good sentences and paragraphs from it as I went along, both to the friend who recommended the book to me (he was grateful for the reminders of such fine writing), and to my father and sisters. Highly recommended - far and away the best book I’ve read so far this year.
I’ve now begun the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Trust by Hernan Diaz, the latest pick by my book club. So far it’s about a quiet, anti-social billionaire in WWI NYC trying to find a wife. OK but not nearly as good as Inland.
I finished David Grann’s The Wager, which proved to be a surprisingly fast read. Very good book.
Now I’m reading Robert Schaeffer’s The Making of the Messiah, which I stumbled across very cheap. I expect it to be a quick read, too.
Also Piers Anthony’s Total Recall, the novelization of the Paul Verhoeven film from back in 1989. At least it’s not Alan Dean Foster writing an unneccesary novelization of a film based on an existing story, like The Thing. It looks awful, and swhat I’ve heard about confirms that, but it was free and I’m mildly curious.
On my bedside, still re-reading The Annotated Lost World On audio, still going through Preston and Childs’ Dead Mountain. I’m going to follow that up with a new translation of The Iliad. I’ve never read the whole thing on audio before (although in print, lots of times, in various translations). For some reason Random House/Penguin audio’s recording of the Fagles translation (read by Derek Jacobi) is highly selective, only giving you part of the whole thing.
Finished Misfit. Sorry to say it didn’t live up to my expectations. I thought it would be funny and have more about the eighties. It did take place in that time period but since I wasn’t a male Jewish sportsball player living in the northeast, it really didn’t reflect my experience. It was also much sadder than it was humorous.
I read that when I was a teenager on a Piers Anthony kick, back when I was developing taste and discretion. It was OK. Typical Anthony weirdness. I’ve never seen the movie so I can’t say how it compares.
Today I started on Mister Lullaby by J.H. Markert, a supernatural horror novel. The characters seem a bit flat, and all the blurbs about this guy being the next Stephen King have me wary, but the story moves quickly.
Just started on The Perfect Alibi by Philip Margolin. Second in a series, which I’ve certainly enjoyed thus far. The protagonist is a young criminal defense lawyer building up her clientele in Portland.
Finished In the Doodoo with Voodoo by Steve Higgs, the 7th book in his Blue Moon Investigations series. It was a little slow to start but the end was a page turner. There’s just enough blood and violence to save this series from the cozy label and I’m enjoying it heartily.
Finished Possession: A Romance, by A. S. Byatt. This novel contains lots of poetry and a few short stories which I thought were excellent, but I didn’t think the frame stories (there were two) worked.
Now I’m reading Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, by Nell Greenfieldboyce.
I read Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz–I think it’s the fourth of her novels I’ve read, and like the other three, I enjoyed it. The main character is an admissions officer at Princeton University who is undergoing a couple of emotional crises and has a lurking secret from her own college days she has never shared with anyone. She becomes deeply invested in getting a self-proclaimed autodidact into Princeton (her motivations are less than 100% pure, we think) and indeed much of the novel is about the process of extending or denying admission to elite colleges (which I found fascinating; ymmv). The novel handles the subject matter well, the characters seem very real, and I found the ending to be satisfying. (I wasn’t sure that was going to be the case.)
One thing Korelitz does very well is make unlikable characters seem quite genuine. There are two long conversations in the book between the protagonist and other characters in which she is defending the Princeton admission system. In one, she faces off against an obnoxious British woman who neither understands nor wants to understand the whole way Americans think about college and college admissions. Later, she takes on another woman who is challenging her about why Princeton takes students from other than the very top high schools. Both adversaries are as I say not especially likable in their arguments and even less so in their manner of making them. But both characters seem very realistic. It’s an art, I guess!
Started on Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, a middle-grade novel which came out a few years too late for me to read when it was new. I am familiar with it but don’t believe I ever actually read it. Beautifully written, if you like your writing piled high with adjectives, and Babbitt certainly does.
Started today on The Blueprint, by Rae Giana Rashad. It’s a dystopian novel about black women being owned by white men. I know, I know, sounds farfetched, right?
A flight attendant with alcohol abuse issues wakes in a hotel room in Dubai with the body of a murdered man next to her. She can’t remember much of the previous evening, so she wonders if she is the killer, or if the killer is out there, coming after her.
Tamsyn Muir and John LeCarre and Jeff VanderMeer and Yoon Ha Lee were involved in a terrible transporter accident that scrambled their brains together, and the resulting monstrosity wrote this appalling, hilarious kidney-punch of a novel. If I had at least a bachelors degree in astrophysics and/or mathematics, I would have either hated this novel or enjoyed it even more. As it is, though, it’s the best science fiction I’ve read in years: intelligent, driven equally by characters and ideas, and nonstop. It was exhausting, but I couldn’t get to sleep after I finished.
That said, it’s not gonna be for everybody. The science and math in the book are both front-and-center and quasi religious, and if either aspect bothers you, you’re gonna struggle with this. Also front-and-center? Atrocities, including (spoiler from the first two pages) Kurdish massacres by Saddam’s forces. The atrocities aren’t treated cheaply, or shield away from, but they’re in a book with vicious and biting humor; if the atrocities, or the surrounding humor, are an issue, this is not gonna be your jam.
Yeah, no shame in that. It’s a really, really intense book, in a way that won’t be suited to everyone. I couldn’t make it two chapters into The Name of the Rose, despite recognizing that it was ingeniously written, and I can definitely understand folks having a similar reaction to this book. A lot of the Goodreads reviews are DNF, either because all the theory stuff turns them off, or the atrocity sections turn their stomachs.
I finished Tuck Everlasting. Very well-known in education circles, at least, though as I said I never did get around to reading it as an adult (till now). It did not win a Newbery award or honor, which surprises me a bit. It’s very good. Simple but not simplistic, straightforward on the surface but quite deep when you think about it, characters that the reader can identify with. Even the toad. (Did the toad WANT to live forever?)
The one thing I didn’t like so much was the amount of the book given over to description. The copy I had contained an interview with the author in which she says that writing descriptions is her favorite part of writing, and if she hadn’t told us that we could’ve guessed it real easy. I have more of a Beverly Cleary attitude about descriptions (keep 'em short and sweet, or leave 'em out altogether) and I found myself skipping over a bunch of them in this book. Can’t have everything.
