Bookshelf – Foster, Claire Keegan (2022)

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To read my notes about Foster would likely take longer than to read the book itself, a bite-sized novella laden with more human insight than many heavily-blurbed behemoths.

Narrated by a teenage girl, never named, but a stand-in for every adolescent enduring the hardships of an unhappy home, the story spans a summer in rural Ireland when the girl is sent to live with distant relatives while her mother prepares to have another baby.

The couple that takes in the girl, John and Edna Kinsella, are farmers, like her own parents, but prosperous, childless, loving and industrious. The girl experiences much that is new to her – a full table, a bathtub to herself, and a father who does not yell at and threaten her but walks with her hand in hand.

A tragedy explains Kinsella’s childless state and their desire to care for the girl. “God help you, child,” Edna whispers to her. “If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.” Betraying their crude baseness, the girl’s parents blame the Kinsellas for the tragedy (while, ironically, asking them to care for their daughter).

The summer is transformative. The girl develops an adult eye, able to divine the differences between the two families. She also rediscovers her childhood, which had been buried under domestic labor and her father’s harshness. Her astute observations keep a story that could have turned maudlin far removed from common emotional tropes.

The ending is both decisive and ambiguous, as all are of life’s messy moments.

A wonderful book. A perfect story.

Bookshelf – Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

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After a run of mediocre reads, I needed a palate cleanser. Claire Keegan obliged with this sparse, compact story of a middle-aged man who, grown weary of the ordinary repetitions of daily life, untethers himself from the norm via an extraordinary act of rebellious compassion.

“Small Things Like These” is thin – a novella, really – so to reveal even a little about the story is almost to say too much: Set in a small Irish town in the mid-1980s, a time of economic grimness, the story centers on Bill Furlong, proprietor of the local coal business. He is a family man with a wife and five daughters. His comforts, while moderate, are leagues from his beginnings as the son of the unwed housekeeper of the town’s wealthiest matron.

As a boy, the matron’s patronage spared him from the harshness of the local Catholic shelters. Years later as a man, he discovers something in such a shelter – for girls – that disturbs him deeply and compels him to confront not only his own complicity in what he sees, but that of the entire town.

I am late to find Keegan, but grateful I did. She crafts savory sentences that linger in the mind, especially when read out loud. Here, for example, is the opening paragraph:

“In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.”

Highly recommended.

Bookshelf – Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

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As a university student in 1968, Toru Watanabe’s life oscillates between adolescent angst about love and purpose, soothing retreats into books and cultural investigation, and nocturnal forays into the labyrinths of Tokyo’s tiny whiskey bars searching for compliant young women.

In short, Watanabe is a typical teen of the late Sixties. Except for one thing: his obsession with Naoko, once the lover of his best friend, Kitzui, and now a fragile woman whose identity is shattered under the weight of Kitzui’s suicide.

“Norwegian Wood” is Watanabe’s recollection twenty years later of that symbiotic triangle and the scars its collapse carved into him and Naoko. What keeps “Norwegian Wood” from ever bending toward maudlin – as many tales of love unrequited and hidden despair tend to do – is Watanabe’s impassionate, almost stoic observational abilities. Whether it is Naoko’s roommate at a sanitarium confessing an improper sexual interlude, or the glimpse of a cloud “clinging to the dome of heaven like a thin streak of test paint,” or the gradual acquisition of wisdom gained via costly emotional transactions, Watanabe watches, listens, experiences, and learns. As much as “Norwegian Wood” is a story of love, it is also one of maturity.

Young Watanabe comes to accept, and take solace in, the belief that “death is not the opposite of life but an innate part of life.” Older Watanabe seems at peace with the repeated trauma that stained his adolescence. What doubt that persists with him is common among writers who reach for the past: “Writing from memory like this,” he says, “I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?”

At one point, Naoko’s roommate, Reiko, tells Watanabe in the context of explaining why she, Naoko and Watanabe are drawn to one another, “What makes us most normal is knowing that we’re not normal.”

“Norwegian Wood” is much the same. It asks big questions about life, but it doesn’t proffer big answers. Murakami allows each of us to find our own version of normal.

Bookshelf – Listen up!

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Approaching the midpoint of a year in books best described as “meh” – a result of my own poor selection and persistent intrusion into my quiet hours by the noise of the real world – I can say as a positive note that more than a few of the most satisfying titles thus far are audiobooks.

The four novels below have one thing: a stellar reader whose rhythm, accent, and overall transformation of the written word into literary performance is as soothing as it is captivating.

They are:

* Hang on St. Christopher, Adrian McKinty, the eighth of the Sean Duffy detective novels. Narrated, as were the previous seven, by Gerard Doyle, a true master of Irish nuance.

* The Road, Cormac McCarthy, the father-son tale of dystopic bleakness. Narrated by the late Tom Stechschulte, who delivers each of McCarthy’s precisely chosen words as a savory morsel. A delicious experience.

* The New Iberia Blues, James Lee Burke, part of the series about Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux. As always with Burke, the story packs punch, but the narration by actor Will Patton (one of my favorite readers) elevates the prose to theater.

* The Stars at Noon, Denis Johnson, the story of a young woman adrift in Nicaragua during the Sandinista rebellion. Narrated again by Patton, his hypnotic almost comforting manner provides antidote to the angst, danger, and dissoluteness that defines the story.        `,

Bookshelf – My Year in Reading, 2025

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Two words summarize my reading in 2025: disappointment and distraction.

I abandoned only three books out of seventy-six, but many others left me wishing I’d done something else with my time. At fault, it seems to me, is the plethora of newer authors who are not only poor storytellers but equally mediocre writers. They create books made for visual streaming, heavy on dialogue, short on exposition, absent of character depth. Publishers churn out these fast-lit titles and package them in breathless blurbs hoping to gain footing on celebrity or other “best-of” lists. Too often the hype is just hyperbole.

Add to this an elevated state of personal distraction rooted in the perversions of the current occupant of the White House as well as homefront complications that resulted in shortened leisure time and shattered an already compressed attention span.

The result: fewer books (76 in 2025 vs. 100 in 2024) and less satisfaction.

Nonetheless, I managed to read to a number of wonderfully written and narrated books. Five of my favorites:

  • Wild Dark Shore (Charlotte McConaghy) – an enthralling story of nature’s ferocity and mankind’s duplicity.
  • The Impossible Thing (Belinda Bauer) – goodness and avarice clash in this tale of a treasure that survives through persistence and ingenuity.
  • The MightyRed (Louise Erdrich) – a story about the value of authenticity and acceptance disguised as a love triangle.
  • The Vegetarian (Han Kang) – a very human book that is uncomfortable to read, but rewards those who find solace amid distress.
  • America Was Hard to Find (Kathleen Alcott) – an expansive novel of the shifting cultural tectonics that ruptured America in the 1960s, part requiem, part eulogy for an epoch.

Others just as good: November Road (Lou Berney); Hotel Ukraine (Martin Cruz Smith); The Bottoms (Joe R. Lansdale); A Lesson Before Dying (Ernest Gaines); and, Leaving (Roxana Robinson).

I discovered audiobooks while taking long, solo walks during the Covid confinement. I still mostly listen while I walk. For me, the narrator is everything and when I discover one I like I tend to binge a series. Hence, this year:

  • Adrian McKinty’s tales of Northern Irish cop Sean Duffy: The Cold Cold Ground; I Hear the Sirens in the Street; In the Morning I’ll Be Gone; Rain Dogs; Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly; and, The Detective Up Late.
  • Walter Mosely’s addictive story of Joe King Oliver, a railroaded NYPD detective: Down the River Unto the Sea; Every Man a King; and, Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right.
  • Finally, there is, to me, no finer narrator than George Guidall, who reads (among many other books), Craig Johnson’s stories of Absaroka County sheriff Walt Longmire. This year I listened: An Obvious Fact; The Western Star; and, Depth of Winter.

At my age, I set few goals (I’ve already accomplished most of what I could and hold no regrets for what I couldn’t). That said, here’s one: I will do my best to ignore the world’s noise and devote more attention to the inner tranquility I find in books.

The List:

  1. Yellowface – R.F. Kuang
  2. The Most – Jessica Anthony
  3. A Lesson Before Dying – Ernest Gaines
  4. As the Crow Flies — Craig Johnson *
  5. Don’t Believe It – Charlie Donlea
  6. Down the River Unto the Sea — Walter Mosley *
  7. Of Women and Salt – Gabriela Garcia
  8. The Friend – Sigrid Nunez
  9. Every Man a King — Walter Mosley *
  10. The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray – Walter Mosely *
  11. All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries – Martha Wells
  12. The Last King of California – Jordan Harper
  13. Patricide: A Novella – Joyce Carol Oates
  14. Peace Like a River – Leif Enger **
  15. All the Colors of the Dark – Chris Whitaker
  16. The Price of Salt – Patricia Highsmith
  17. The Drop – Michael Connelly *
  18. Leaving – Roxana Robinson
  19. Been Wrong So Long It Feels Like Right – Walter Mosley *
  20. Foregone – Russell Banks
  21. Lazarus Man – Richard Price **
  22. Roseanna — Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
  23. The Martian – Andy Weir
  24. Open Season – C.J. Box *
  25. Savage Run – C.J. Box *
  26. A Drink Before the War – Dennis Lehane
  27. Original Sin – Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
  28. The Neon Rain – James Lee Burke *
  29. The Wager – David Grann
  30. Heaven’s Prisoners – James Lee Burke *
  31. Writers & Lovers – Lily King
  32. Winterkill – C.J. Box *
  33. I Cheerfully Refuse – Leif Enger
  34. The Vegetarian – Han Kang
  35. 33 Place Brugmann – Alice Austen
  36. Never Flinch – Stephen King *
  37. We Do Not Part – Han Kang
  38. The Gray Anarchist – Jeffrey Marcus Oshins *
  39. The Cold Cold Ground – Adrian McKinty
  40. An Obvious Fact – Craig Johnson *
  41. The Last Flight – Julie Clark
  42. I Hear the Sirens in the Street – Adrian McKinty *
  43. The Bottoms – Joe R. Lansdale
  44. The Invention of Solitude – Paul Auster 
  45. In the Morning I’ll Be Gone – Adrian McKinty *
  46. We Had to Remove this Post – Hanna Bervoets
  47. Heartwood – Amity Gaige
  48. Desert Star – Michael Connelly *
  49. The Tattooist of Auschwitz – Heather Morris
  50. The Emperor’s Children – Claire Messud **
  51. King of Ashes – S.A. Cosby
  52. Antes de Ser Libres – Julia Alvarez
  53. Tides – Sara Freeman
  54. At What Cost – James L’Etoile **
  55. The 6:20 Man – David Baldacci *
  56. Rain Dogs – Adrian McKinty *
  57. The Mighty Red – Louise Erdrich
  58. Trophy Hunt – C.J. Box *
  59. And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie *
  60. The Impossible Thing – Belinda Bauer
  61. Elizabeth Finch – Julian Barnes
  62. Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly – Adrian McKinty *
  63. Hotel Ukraine – Martin Cruz Smith
  64. Lilith – Eric Rickstad
  65. Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy
  66. The Black Box – Michael Connelly *
  67. America Was Hard To Find – Kathleen Alcott
  68. The Western Star – Craig Johnson *
  69. November Road – Lou Berney
  70. Depth of Winter – Craig Johnson *
  71. After the Lights Go Out – John Vercher **
  72. The Librarianist, Patrick deWitt
  73. The Detective Up Late, Adrian McKinty **
  74. The Long and Faraway Gone, Lou Berney
  75. The Trouble Up North, Travis Mulhauser **
  76. Abscond: A Short Story, Abraham Verghese

* Audio

** Did Not Finish

Woman with sombrilla, Oaxaca, Mexico

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After a lengthy absence from posting photos — for reasons that are too common to number — I am endeavoring to return to publishing what I shoot. This image, made in the winter of 2025, is from one of my favorite streetcorners in Oaxaca, a busy intersection packed with bus riders and blessed by lated afternoon western sun.

It may appear that the woman beneath the umbrella is hiding from me. She is not. Woman there commonly shield themselves from the bright, southern sun to protect their skin. Their shelter creates a ready shape for me.

More of my images from Oaxaca.

Bookshelf — The Librarianist, Patrick deWitt (2023)

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Some years ago, as my reading appetites changed, my consideration of books as a prix fixe meal slid into the notion that books can be consumed a la carte. After all, if you love the steak au poivre and the pommes frites, there should be no obligation to suffer the beet verrine.

Embracing such an approach elevates your chances of enjoying The Librarianist, an intriguing and often moving story of a retired librarian who, after living a sedentary, solitary life defined more by what he read than what he did, volunteers at a center for the elderly and finds himself awash in deep currents of humanity. He also finds the answer to a lifelong mystery.

As a boy, Bob Comet sought comfort from youthful complications in books, which led him to the library, which led him to being a librarian, a job he held for a half-century. A contented man, he needed little else, so he was delighted when love and friendship came his way, and equally devastated when they left him. This part of the story, complete from beginning to end and interwoven with Bob’s later, self-revelatory time at the elder center, is beautifully told and written, at once respectful of Bob’s contentment with simplicity and, when others regard him, wryly astonished by it.

For example, in a conversation about schadenfreude, Bob confesses to Linus, a gregarious resident of the center who channels the Jack Nicholson character in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” that “I’ve made love to one woman in my life.” Linus “shut his eyes, and he became so still, as though he’d suddenly succumbed to slumber. After a while he stirred, opened his eyes to slits, and asked, softly, ‘What’s the German word for pity, scorn, and awe happening all at the same time.’”

Suddenly, though, about two-hundred-fifty pages in, deWitt sends an 11-year-old Bob on a run-a-way sojourn. As the boy bounces here and there and back again, I couldn’t keep up, so I started flipping forward, skipping about fifty pages of beets, so to speak, and arriving at a denouement that is both surprising yet comfortingly expected. Happily, the book ends exactly where it should.

So, there is it – a truly wonderful 300-page book about aging and love and humanity and heartbreak wrapped, somewhat unfortunately, in a 350-page carton. If you don’t mind skipping a course or two, it’s a great meal.

Bookshelf – America Was Hard to Find, Kathleen Alcott (2019)

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“Kathy, I’m lost”, I said, though I knew she was sleeping
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They’ve all come to look for America
All come to look for America
All come to look for America
— Simon and Garfunkel, “America,” 1968
***
Kathleen Alcott’s expansive novel of the shifting cultural tectonics that ruptured America in the 1960s is part requiem, part eulogy for an epoch that defined Baby Boomers – one way or another – and scattered so much social and political debris that the clean-up continues to this day.

I loved this book, but I will note there are others who did not. In online reviews, they found the narrative indistinct and the characters unappealingly damaged.

To them, I say: Welcome to the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties – periods of chaos and confusion, virtue and violence, self-improvement and self-delusion, dreams of freedom and deadly liberties. None of them fit into distinct narratives, none is free of repellant personalities.

Into this mix, Alcott places an Air Force test pilot who becomes the first man to walk on the moon; a fiery young woman who rejects the bland values of her wealthy parents and embraces radical politics; and their progeny, a feral son raised amid the wilds of the counterculture and set free to face the scourge of AIDS.

The U.S. landing on the moon in 1969; Weather Underground bombings and the Kent State massacre of the 1970s; the existential threat of AIDS in the gay communities of San Francisco and New York – each bookmarked a decade.

And each shaped me. In the ‘60s, Armstrong’s one small step thrilled me, and Nixon’s war enraged me; in the ‘70s, the detritus of the Haight crushed me; in the ‘80s, as a journalist in San Francisco, I mourned the deaths of friends and colleagues taken by the disease Reagan dismissed as “gay cancer.”

In short, my personal history parallels the stories “America Was Hard to Find” tells with passion and depth. Alcott captures the nuance of the time, the conflict between self-righteousness and uncertainty, the irony of youthful brigades intent on saving the world while slowly killing themselves with self-abuse, the emergence – and the acceptance – of the reality that change has no endpoint.

Clearly, how anyone responds to any particular novel depends on personal experiences, so your mileage surely will vary, but you don’t need to be a battered Boomer to enjoy this book. It is filled with good writing, vivid description and a plot that while not a zig-zagger is agreeably serpentine.

Finally, should you read “America Was Hard to Find” and wonder at some moment about the veracity of something you’ve just read because the change or the person or the act seems too radical, too weird or too improbable, I can assure you it is none of those things. “America Was Hard to Find” is a truthful as any piece of fiction can be.

Bookshelf – Tides, Sara Freeman (2022)

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If you can’t let go of anything, let go of everything.

These are the words Mara recalls one night as she considers her circumstance: solitary, penurious, sleeping on an attic floor, hiding in a seaside village.

Mara took that advice: She fled her home in Canada for the Maine coast, carrying only a handful of clothes, some cash, and a burning, charring, hollowing grief ignited by her stillborn child. Left behind are husband and family, and the illusions of desire and happiness that held them all together.

Mara is broken, fragmented, and this is how Freeman tells her story: in shards – a paragraph or two per page, connected by narrative, but separated by space. Like Mara herself, her outer and inner selves apart like repelling magnets. Each paragraph is a complete vignette, soulful, but descriptive, never yielding to linguistic sleight of hand. It is language a journalist would love for its directness, but also a logophile for its elegance.

The timeline loops, but not excessively. As Mara finds her footing, details emerge from her past, deepening the context of her flight, and by the time the story reaches its apex, we see Mara in full, a woman set adrift by grief, but also one in the midst of an opportunity to gauge the value of the life she’s abandoned.

You might think we humans would be good at grieving, given all the loss we experience, but mostly we’re not. Once sorrow encases us, there are but two options: give in or move through and beyond. Both are painful, but one offers hope. “Tides” is a beautiful story about a woman who chooses hope.

Bookshelf – The Last Flight, Julie Clark

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Disappointing. I expected more from a four-star Goodreads book, but The Last Flight fails to satisfy on almost every level. Some examples:

* Premise: A wealthy woman on the spur of the moment switches identities (plane ticket, ID, phone, etc.) in an airport with a stranger in order to escape an ambitious, abusive husband. Seriously? OK, maybe, if the woman is so emotionally distraught that any more logical solution (divorce lawyer!) doesn’t occur to her. But conveyance of emotion in a novel needs …

* Good writing, of which there is little in The Last Flight. Telling dominates showing. Most attempts at depth produce superficialities such as: “I’m ready to step beyond the fear. … I want my life back. Mine. The one that belongs to me.” However, flat writing tolerated if a book has a killer …

* Plot. I don’t need to worry about a spoiler alert here, because there’s not much to spoil. Every plot twist is signaled many pages ahead. If The Last Flight were a racetrack, it would be a straightaway.

As always, then, what’s left is personal taste. Not everyone loves every book. I can say, though, that my, ahem, literary palate is quite wide. Unfortunately, it is not ample enough to have enjoyed The Last Flight.

Bookshelf – The Cold Cold Ground, Adrian McKinty

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As police procedurals go – and many of them really don’t go anywhere – this first book of Adrian McKinty’s series about detective Sean Duffy has several advantages:

* First, it is set amidst the turbulence of the Troubles, the sectarian violence that plagued Northern Ireland for three decades. Social unrest provides rich fodder for political intrigue and random mayhem, and there’s plenty of both here.

* Second, the text abounds with the linguistic curiosities of the location – bog (toilet), banjaxed (messed up), sleekit (sly), peeler (cop), bonce (head), hallion (worthless fellow), and, my favorite, eejit (idiot). To amuse your American self, say them aloud in a faux accent.

* Third, the action in The Cold Cold Ground gets hot, hot, hotter as the plot progresses – which is a good thing because early on the book wallows in a wee pochle (mess) as Mckinty introduces characters and sets up the story almost exclusively through pages of dialog. In fact, the difference in pacing between the beginning and the ending is so pronounced that it seems like McKinty took note of the slog and deliberately ditched the Prius for a Porsche.

The story itself involves the suspicious death of a young woman and the gruesome murders of two gay men (at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Northern Island). Duffy and his small squad welcome an actual crime as relief from either trying to prevent Catholics and Protestants from killing one another or cleaning up the results when they do. They learn, though, that there’s no escaping the Troubles.

McKinty hangs enough flesh on Duffy’s bones to create a solid character, an officer of the law for whom justice has multiple definitions. He’s the kind of cop we probably don’t want in our own community, but the type that makes for good reading. 

Bookshelf – 33 Place Brugmann, Alice Austen

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War inflicts two types of violence: immediate and protracted. The former arrives as a bullet or a bomb, come and gone in an instant; the latter, though, lingers, suppressing the defeated through a deliberate, ongoing degradation of individual and civic life – control of movement and expression, fear of arrest and disappearance, lack of food, medicine and other necessities. It is intended to grind the body and the soul into complete submission.

As “33 Place Brugmann” opens in August 1939, the residents of this eponymously named apartment building in Brussels sense the coming storm. With the Great War concluded only twenty years earlier, Germany is once again ascendant and militarized. More than invasion, which seems inevitable, the Belgians, especially those who are Jewish, fear occupation.

The tenants are a diverse group, among them: an architect and his precocious teenage daughter, Charlotte (who is chief among the characters); an art dealer who is Jewish; a retired army officer; a Russian refugee; and the building supervisor, who favors the Nazis. As the Germans approach, the art dealer and his family flee to Scotland (but do not escape the reach of the war), while the others confront the daily indignities of life under the eyes of the Gestapo.

The beauty of Austen’s storytelling is that is doesn’t descend into tropes. It is multi-dimensional. While, yes, anxiety and paranoia are endemic within 33 Place Brugmann, there are also celebration of small victories, recognition of the restorative power of art, and presence of the  persistent, simmering belief – growing as the years pass – that survival is possible.

“33 Place Brugmann” made me think of Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See” (2017), the story of another father-daughter family caught in the same war. In comparison, Doerr’s book is richer and more complex, but that is not to take anything away from “33 Place Brugmann,” which is equally human and equally effective at capturing the long violence of war.

Bookshelf – The Vegetarian, Han Kang

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It is a fortunate person who attains adulthood unscarred by the complications of childhood. Some scars are superficial. These fade with time. Others, though, cut deep and retain the heat of hurt. They inflame emotions and force the bearer to construct inner defenses needed to maintain outer control.

Yeong-hye is scathed in this way. As a girl, she survives a brutish father. As a woman, she marries a loutish man, who describes her “as completely unremarkable in every way.” Equally unexceptionable is her life. She cooks, she cleans, she yields to her husband’s priapic urges. She leaves nary a footprint on the world.

One night she has a dream, a violent, sanguine nightmare that resurrects a dormant memory of her and her older sister seeking shelter from their father in a copse of bleak woods. In the dream, she takes refuge from the darkness in a barn, only to find herself enmeshed in a labyrinth of “long bamboo sticks strung with great blood-red gashes of meat, blood still dripping down.” She tries “to push past but the meat, there’s not end to the meat, and no exit.” The next morning, Yeong-hye declares herself a vegetarian.

It is a fateful proclamation. She is surrounded by carnivores. Her husband pronounces her crazy, her father force feeds her meat, and her sister commits a horrific act that cannot be undone. In response, Yeong-hye, already a mere shadow of a being, turns further inward, her identify eventually receding so far that she is compelled to adopt another.

The Vegetarian contains a cascade of extraordinary, revelatory scenes of exploitive selfishness, sexual indulgence, and, perhaps most tragic, realization that one’s perceived strength might in fact be little more than self-protective cowardice. All are beautifully written, and in each a façade falls. The debris forms a message: A hard as it might to be truly know oneself, it is degrees more difficult to truly know another. “To thine own self be true,” advises the Bard. “Yes, of course,” Yeong-hye would reply, “but who is myself?’

The Vegetarian is a very human book, which means at times it is uncomfortable to read. If you don’t care for such emotional unease, it is not for you. But if you possess the knack, or the curiosity, for finding solace amid distress, then I highly recommend it.

Bookshelf – I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger

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As we beat on against the currents of these fractious times, our civil norms beset by those who would discard them in favor of an absolutism based on an idealized past, it is easy to forget the audacity of the foundational American phrase: All men are created equal.

It was a radical declaration in an age of rapacious imperialism (as flawed as it was by its exclusion of women and enslaved people under the arc of  “all men.”) These five words launched a nation that, at its best, strives to grant (as its pledge promises) liberty and justice for all, but all too often woefully fails to do so.

Critics consider “I Cheerfully Refuse” a dystopian novel, a voguish genre. However, I came to see the story as less about some (near) distant plutonian reality and more a reflection of the retrograde momentum now afoot in the land and its possible outcomes.

Consider Merriam-Webster’s definition of “dystopian” – “relating to, or being an imagined world or society in which people lead dehumanized, fearful lives.” Interpreted strictly in the context of current political policies purposely intended to dehumanize and frighten, we don’t need to imagine the arrival of a dystopic tomorrow when its vanguard is upon us today.

This thinking occupied my mind as I read “I Cheerfully Refuse.” In the beginning, I struggled. There is an ample cast of characters, and the plot is as liquid as Lake Superior, in whose realm it sits. The main character, a musician, and his partner, a bookseller, live with such simplicity that little of significance happens even though constant references to a fractured society create an anxious foreboding. I wanted more speed. It’s going to get bad, I thought, so bring it on.

But then, a shocking turn. What follows is a story of flight and discovery, of the cold horrors of inhumanity (see above) and the magical warmth of humanity. It is a yeasty, enjoyable blend that eventually rises to reveal what I think is the book’s fundamental theme: the value of liberty.

“I Cheerfully Refuse” celebrates, in a misty, whimsical, but fully serious way, the audacity of individual freedom. It challenges the desire of despotic authority to control our lives and embraces liberty of choice, even should the option be the unencumbered existence of a bass-player and a bookseller. As the musician says at one point:

“… I remembered the future, reimagined a path of years with books to read and bass lines to explore. The idea was so tempting I set it aside, but it kept returning, wider each time. Long walks might be out there down unknown roads. Days of work, weary muscles, sores and ointments, goodwill toward creatures, questions to ask, birds to hear, and stars to watch.”

Bookshelf – Writers & Lovers, Lily King

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All of us who labor in media or the arts know someone like Casey Peabody, a talented writer (or photographer or painter) who swirls in the eddies of unfulfilled dreams, seemingly stranded as success and relationships dissolve in the passing currents.

In “Writers and Lovers,” a sometimes baffling, often entertaining, and ultimately moving tale of finding creative authenticity and discovering the difference between love and need, Casey Peabody struggles. Burdened with student loans, she waitresses through double shifts. Grieved by her mother’s sudden death, she tears up with regularity. Deceived in love, she vacillates between two suitors, one who offers comfort and security, the other a chance at something unique. At 31, she feels her sell-by date approaching.

The perspective is unblinkingly female, and men are not seen well – overbearing, dishonest, clueless, insecure. One of Peabody’s beaus, for example, is a successful novelist who frets about the smallness of the venue for a book-release event. “I am forty-seven years old. I was supposed to be reading in auditoriums by now,” he laments. Casey’s thought bubble responds: “Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. … I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it’s how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.”

The storytelling itself is both clever and conversational, with dialog worthy of being eavesdropped. Here is Casey …

  • … rejecting a potential date: “I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.”
  • … wondering what killed her mother: “Was it a pulmonary embolism? From the long plane flight? That’s what my brother’s boyfriend, Phil, thinks. But he’s an ophthalmologist.”

Beyond the banter of Casey’s inner voices, and despite some passages that overly linger on artistic angst, “Writers and Lovers” is at once fun to read and, more deeply, affirming of those who reach, who don’t settle, and who persist in pursuit of dreams.

Bookshelf — Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

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If it’s possible in these inflammatory times to ponder a question about American politics without igniting an inferno of accusation, contempt, and derision, then this is my query:

Were Joe Biden and Donald Trump the best the nation had to offer last year? Were you, like many voters, “despondent that in a country of three hundred forty million people, (we) had to choose between these two men”?

Perhaps you are pleased with results of last November’s election, perhaps you are not. Regardless of level of satisfaction, perhaps we can agree that the two major political parties left us hung out on dilemma of deception: one candidate, now the occupant of the Oval Office, for whom truth seems secondary to advantage; and the other, his predecessor, who promised to be a one-term president and then, when hubris erased that promise, tried to hide the toll aging had exacted from him.

“Original Sin,” a solid piece of reporting clearly told, tracks the decline of Joe Biden from the end of his vice-presidency in 2017, when he was still a sharp septuagenarian, albeit one prone to spoken gaffes and other verbal malarkey, to July 21, 2024, when, as an octogenarian enfeebled by a stiffening body and softening mind, the latter displayed for all to see during a disastrous debate with Donald Trump, he shut down his campaign for a second term and tossed the keys to the Democrats’ future – and the country’s – to Kamala Harris.

The book – developed from more than 200 interviews – is a damning indictment. Biden’s vainglorious (and delusional) belief that only he could defeat Trump is the least of the culprits. Enmeshed in a web of complicity, willful ignorance, and the primal motive of career politicians – self-preservation – the guilty abettors include Biden’s family, his campaign team, and elected Democrats of all stripes. They blinded themselves to Biden’s stumbles, deafened their ears to his mumbles, and held themselves mute even as Biden’s fall hastened Trump’s rise.

The narrative is rich with anecdotes – Biden not recognizing actor George Clooney at a Hollywood fundraiser, the distress of staffers watching Biden freeze gape-mouthed during the debate – but the larger message that may or may not be of service to nation is that Biden’s deception deepens the mistrust most of the populace has of politicians.

“One of the great lessons from 2024,” said former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, is that “never again can we as a party suggest to people that what they’re seeing is not true.”

If “Original Sin” contains a durable wisdom, it is rooted in this observation by the authors: “… the Constitution isn’t necessarily about optimal requirements (for the presidency). It’s about minimum requirements. The US Constitution does not require politicians to be self-aware, or brave, or selfless.”

It is up to us, then – we, the people – to impose such a requirement.

Bookshelf — The Wager, David Grann

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“The Wager” came out just as I was finishing Grann’s previous book, “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2017), a magnificent account of murder in pursuit of oil money within the Osage Indian territory, but only now have I gotten around to reading it.

Extensively reported by Grann from contemporaneous documents and written in his adventurous narrative style (journalism meets Hollywood), “The Wager” follows an ill-fated armada of British warships that leave England in 1740 bound for the west coast of South America with the intent of capturing a Spanish galleon laden with gold.

The ferocity of the Southern Ocean punishes the ships and their crews as they attempt to round Cape Horn on the tip of the continent. Disease plagues the men as the winds and currents hold them captive. They die by the dozens. Some ships turn back, a couple continue, one of which, the HMS Wager, runs aground on a barren island jutting from the Chilean coast. From there, life for the survivors gets even worse. It is revealing nothing to say mutiny and murder ensue (as promised on the book’s cover).

Your fascination with such a true story will depend on your taste for seafaring tales. Mine is relatively high (I was such a teenage fan of the “Mutiny on the Bounty” trilogy that I read it twice). I will say that the latter third of the book, which deals with the consequences of what happened on that forsaken island, suffers in comparison to the whiplashing action of what comes before, but Grann wraps it up nicely. And the ending reminds that little has changed in politics and government in the last two centuries. As a whole, the story and the telling do not disappoint.

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If fun is to be found amid such a bleak happenings, it is within the colorful language of the those 18th century mariners and how some of it still enlivens modern English. For example:

  • The names of diseases: the Saffron Scourge (Yellow Fever), the Bloody Flux (Dysentery), Breakbone Fever (Dengue).
  • “A ship was ‘three sheets to the wind’ when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control.”
  • “When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be ‘under the weather.’”
  • “To ‘turn a blind eye’ became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.”

Bookshelf – The Most, Jessica Anthony (2024)

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John Cheever meets June Cleaver in this amuse bouche of a novel about a 1950s suburban housewife who one day awakens to the limitations of her life and finds herself enmeshed in a web of disenchantment and deception.

Poor June, or in this case, Kathleen Beckett, finds herself so traumatized by the deceit of her husband, Virgil, a handsome, but unambitious insurance salesman, that on a sunny Sunday morning she retreats to the kidney-shaped swimming poor of her apartment complex. There, ignoring the stares of elderly neighbors and Virgil’s entreaties, she spends the entire day, allowing the chlorinated water to bleach herself of delusion.

By nighttime, her skin slack and aqueous, but her heart anxious for truth-telling, Kathleen must choose: confront Virgil, extract a confession, and, in return, admit her own deception.

Virgil, a type who never faced a difficult decision because things always “just sort of worked out,” also must decide: continue on with Kathleen and find solace in “the small repetitions that made a life,” or yield to his temptations and leave.

Among readers, “The Most” seems pretty much a love-it-or-hate-it novel. I’m one of the former because I like stories that embrace the complexity of simplicity, or perhaps better said (with another nod to Cheever), stories that peer through the façade of familiarity.

Bookshelf — A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines

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One of the delights of Libby, the free mobile app that enables the download of audio- and e-books from local libraries, is the serendipity of its random-search tool.

A recent such search amid the thousands of novels “available now” (my preference over waiting lists), produced “A Lesson Before Dying,” Ernest Gaines’s mournful, impactful telling of the execution of a young Black man in 1948 in rural Louisiana and his interaction with a local schoolteacher.

I’d read the book when it came out because Gaines was a fellow alum of San Francisco State University, and whatever he wrote was always on my radar. Reading it again three decades later – with my view of race in America at once more hopeful and, of late, more fearful – I appreciate even more the story’s powerful simplicity.

Condemned to die for participating, unwittingly, in a liquor store robbery that resulted in three deaths and labeled in court as no better than a hog, Jefferson retreats emotionally in resentment and anger, cloistering himself in his cell and rejecting visitors.

His godmother implores teacher Grant Wiggins to speak with Jefferson and somehow give him the capacity to rise up and die like a man. Wiggins is reluctant. He does not want to involve himself with local police at a time when just being a Black man with a degree already draws suspicion. But supplicated by his aunt, he agrees.

A deep relationship forms between the two men, rooted in their shared oppression. Trust flourishes even amid the toxicities of Jim Crow and even with the foreknowledge that it faces a hard stop. With patience and persistence, employing a message that death with dignity is a form of resistance, Wiggins draws Jefferson out. On the day of his execution, Jefferson walks tall and straight to the chair.

The sadness of “A Lesson Before Dying” exists on two levels: historical, being the shameful past of American enslavement; and, contemporary, the equally vile durability of racism across the nation and its recent elevation to the most powerful office in the land.

It is more important than ever these days not to forget that legalized racial discrimination and brutal social customs were the norm in the United States within the lifetimes of we Boomers. Reading a novel like “A Lesson Before Dying” helps maintain the freshness of such memories.

Bookshelf – Yellowface, R.F. Kuang

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The New York Times opines that “Yellowface” is “a twisty thriller and a scorching indictment of the publishing industry’s pervasive whiteness and racial blind spots.”

If only it were so.

Rather, while “Yellowface” is indeed a send-up on the failings of the publishing industry – which, ironically, the author herself takes full advantage of – there is neither anything twisty, thrilling, or evenly mildly scorching about it.

In a word, “Yellowface” is annoying.

The prose reads like a lengthy post on Bluesky or X, a self-indulgent rant by perhaps the most unlikeable character I’ve come across: a whiny, weak-minded, morally empty would-be author so emotionally needy that she balks at no deceit to feed her sniveling inner beast.

I told myself as the year began that I would bail early on such drivel, but because “Yellowface” was my first book of the new calendar, I slogged on to the equally disappointing finish.

If indeed “Yellowface” – published by William Morrow — somehow indicts Big Publishing it does so by its very existence, testament to the current sad state of standards that not only allow but seemingly encourage younger authors to publish whatever comes into their digitally shaped minds.