Bookshelf – The Vegetarian, Han Kang

Posted on June 26, 2025 by Tim Porter

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

Posted on June 21, 2025 by Tim Porter

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

Posted on June 15, 2025 by Tim Porter

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

Posted on June 12, 2025 by Tim Porter

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

Posted on June 12, 2025 by Tim Porter

“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.

***

If fun is to be found amid such a bleak happenings, it is within the colorful language of the those 18^th 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)

Posted on February 18, 2025 by Tim Porter

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

Posted on February 17, 2025 by Tim Porter

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

Posted on January 29, 2025 by Tim Porter

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.

Bookshelf – My Year in Reading: 100 Books in 2024

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Tim Porter

By November last, I was falling behind on my goal of reading (or listening to) one-hundred books in 2024. So, I said to my wife, from now until year’s end I am only choosing books of fewer than two hundred and fifty pages. That’s cheating, she told me.

Fortunately, I ignored her (as she might say I often do), and found myself noshing on a amuse-bouche of titles that were not only delectable but often more tasty than many more portly popular tomes. Among them:

Orbital, Samantha Harvey (207 pp.)
The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury (182 pp.)
The Shadow-Line, Joseph Conrad (192 pp.)
Eastbound, Maylis de Kerangal (140 pp.)
The Pole, J.M. Coetzee (166 pp.)
Passing Nella Larsen (141 pp.)
If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, Tim O’Brien (225 pp.)
Home, Toni Morrison (147 pp.)
Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman (140 pp.)
On Chesil Beach Ian McEwan (166 pp.)

Here are the numbers, for those who insist upon them:

Print – 69
Audio – 31 (including Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father and A Promised Land. His august voice alone remedies current discomforts.)
Did Not Finish (DNF) – 4 (read at least fifty pages)

Once again, thanks to the serendipity of both digital and physical browsing, I found myself delighting in books I might once, limited by a narrower view of the world, never have read. Among them:

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden
Apeirogon, Colum McCann
News of the World, Paulette Jiles
Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman

I have multiples reads from some authors (because why not repeat a good thing?):

Ian McEwan (3), Percival Everett (3), Colm Tóibín (2), Paulette Jiles (2), Jane Harper (2), and among the audio listens for the gym and the trail: Walter Mosely (3), Michael Connelly (3), and Craig Johnson (10).

Finally, ten that I loved, in no particular order:

Apeirogon, Colum McCann
Day, Michael Cunningham
James, Percival Everett
Flags on the Bayou, James Lee Burke
The Trees, Percival Everett
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie
Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison
Eastbound, Maylis de Kerangal
The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden
On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

The List, 2024

Motherless Brooklyn – Jonathan Lethem
The Brass Verdict – Michael Connelly *
Nightcrawling – Leila Mottley
The Women – Kristin Hannah
This Other Eden – Paul Harding
The Godfather – Mario Puzo *
Day – Michael Cunningham
Devil in a Blue Dress – Walter Mosley *
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
Exiles – Jane Harper *
Lessons – Ian McEwan
The Lost Man – Jane Harper *
The Gathering – Anne Enright
California Fire and Life – Don Winslow *
Generation Loss – Elizabeth Hand
Tinkers – Paul Harding
News of the World – Paulette Jiles *
The Cold Dish – Craig Johnson
The Friends of Eddie Coyle – George V. Higgins *
The World Made Straight – Ron Rash
Death Without Company – Craig Johnson *
Enemy Women – Paulette Jiles
Ordinary Human Failings – Megan Nolan **
Zero Days – Ruth Ware **
A Red Death – Walter Mosley *
Be Mine – Richard Ford
Sharp Objects – Gillian Flynn *
Annie Bot – Sierra Greer
James – Percival Everett
Kindness Goes Unpunished – Craig Johnson *
Flags on the Bayou – James Lee Burke
Until August – Gabriel García Márquez
City of Dreams – Don Winslow *
Liliana’s Invincible Summer – Cristina Rivera Garza
City in Ruins – Don Winslow *
The Trees – Percival Everett
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman
Another Man’s Moccasins – Craig Johnson *
The Great Fire – Shirley Hazzard **
Einstein’s Dreams – Alan Lightman
White Butterfly – Walter Mosley *
On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan
Brooklyn – Colm Tóibín
The Dark Horse – Craig Johnson *
Salvage the Bones – Jesmyn Ward
The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett
The Reformatory – Tananarive Due **
The Lede – Calvin Trillin
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder – Salman Rushdie
Pet Sematary – Stephen King *
Junkyard Dogs – Craig Johnson *
Anxious People – Fredrik Backman
Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates *
Nightwoods – Charles Frazier
An American Marriage — Tayari Jones
Legends of the Fall – Jim Harrison *
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
Autocracy Inc. – Anne Applebaum
Nobody’s Angel – Thomas McGuane *
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin – Erik Larson
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Hell is Empty – Craig Johnson *
Speedboat – Renata Adler
Long Island – Colm Tóibín
The Nearest Exit – Owen Steinhauer **
If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home – Tim O’Brien
Fade Away – Harlan Coben *
The Almost Moon – Alice Sebold
The Heart in Winter – Kevin Barry
Dreams from My Father – Barack Obama *
Sofrito – Phillippe Diederich
Passing – Nella Larsen
Breafast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
The Pole – J.M. Coetzee
Eastbound – Maylis de Kerangal
The Wife – Meg Wolitzer
A Promised Land – Barack Obama *
Fat City – Leonard Gardner
The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark *
The Shadow-Line – Joseph Conrad
The Overlook, Harry Bosch – Michael Connelly *
Burn – Peter Heller
Creation Lake – Rachel Kushner
9 Dragons, Harry Bosch – Michael Connelly *
Pedro Páramo – Juan Rulfo
Home – Toni Morrison
A Serpent’s Tooth – Craig Johnson *
The Marian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
Erasure – Percival Everett
Fortune Favors the Dead – Stephen Spotswood *
Parade – Rachel Cusk
Journey Into Fear – Eric Ambler
Any Other Name – Craig Johnson *
Orbital – Samantha Harvey
Dry Bones – Craig Johnson *
I Remember Nothing – Nora Ephron
The Invisible Hour – Alice Hoffman
The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden
Mildred Pierce – James M. Cain

* Audio
** Did Not Finish

Bookshelf — Erasure, Percival Everett (2001)

Posted on December 2, 2024 by Tim Porter

There are few cultural realms more fraught with foot-in-mouth peril than racial identity, especially when it clashes with stereotypical expectations.

In “Erasure,” Thelonious “Monk” Ellison writes historical novels that are best known – if they are known at all – for their obscurity. Your books don’t sell, Monk’s agent tells him, because “the line is, you’re not black enough.”

Monk rankles. “I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose,” he says, “some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black.”

Nonethelesss, Monk remains content to be his own version of Black until a first-time author writes a bestseller called “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,” a cliché-ridden work peppered with street-corner patois and lauded by critics as “a masterpiece of African-American literature.”

Enraged by the crudeness of the book, Monk fumes and sulks until one night, alone in his mother’s house after just installing her in an assisted-living facility, fury drives him to write a parody of “Da Ghetto.” He finishes it in five days, titles it “My Pafology,” assigns himself the pseudonym of Stagg R. Leigh (a 19^th century Black pimp). Of course, his agent loves it and gets Monk a hefty advance.

The imbalance between his minimum effort and his maximum reward forces Monk to confront himself: Is he the USC academic and remainder-table novelist who fly fishes, or is he a scribbling sellout who traffics in racial tropes to bank big money? Is he more Black as the latter than the former?

This is the fourth Percival Everett novel I’ve read (after “Telephone,” “The Trees” and “James,” this year’s National Book Award winner). All share what seem to be signature Everett characteristics: cleverness, intelligence, and characters who don’t betray the complexity of being human.

“Erasure” entertains, but also questions. It respects the reader by allowing irresoluteness to stand. It is a delight to read.

(“Erasure” gained fame last year with the release of the film “American Fiction,” which is based on the book.)

Bookshelf – Fat City, Leonard Gardner (1969) & The Shadow-Line, Joseph Conrad (1917)

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Tim Porter

(Disappointed by several recent tomes, I am indulging in short, tasty reads).

“Fat City” is a boxing story – some say the best ever written – but it also is a tale of Skid Row, where the fight to make it through the day takes a greater toll on its denizens than a beating received in the ring.

Set in the late 1950s in Stockton, Calif., then a city of itinerant laborers and Mexican fieldworkers, “Fat City” follows the fates of two boxers, Billy Tully, a fry cook who almost made it to the big time and now dreams of a comeback, and Ernie Munger, a teenager who mans the pumps in a gas station.

The story is dark, but vividly so, meaning that the shadows these strivers cast are sharp and solid, palpable even. Their struggle, to make money, to find some serenity amid the chaos of their lives, to play the hand bad fortune dealt to them, is universally relevant. For example, Ernie thinks one night while next to his sleeping wife: “At times as he lay in bed listening to her breathing, a fear came over him that after marriage death was the next major event.”

Highly recommended.

***

One of Conrad’s later novels, “The Shadow-Line” follows a young man elevated to the position of ship’s captain for the first time. The title refers to the passage such new authority demands: “… one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.”

The adventure (and misadventure) takes place in colonial times along the Malay Peninsula and in the waters of the Gulf of Thailand, just as sailing ships are giving way to steamers. The young master, who is never named, replaces an aged captain who dies of rampant self-indulgence and, as a spectral presence, fools with the fate of the ship and its crew.

I am no Conrad expert, having read but a couple of his books, and those years ago, so I can’t say if the language in “The Shadow-Line” is typical of him, but it certainly is enjoyable, laden with strong adjectives and vivid descriptions that, despite their formality, made me yearn for just such precision in many current books that seem to have gone directly from first draft to print. Oh, well.

A very satisfying read.

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner (2024)

Posted on November 24, 2024 by Tim Porter

I doubt there are many readers of “Creation Lake” who don’t pause in more than one section – perhaps in a passage about the values or Neanderthals vis a vis those of Homo sapiens – and wonder: What is going on here?” Or, “Why am I still reading this?”

Just such questions caused me to abandon “Creation Lake” at page 175, but the next morning, I read ahead a couple of more pages and became entranced by a lengthy antidote about a French boy named Bruno who, during World War II, finds a dead German soldier. Bruno grabs the soldier’s helmet, puts it on his head, and unwittingly infects himself with the dead man’s lice. His grandmother tries to kill the lice with kerosene, which damages his vision. The boy matures to be one France’s leading radical activists, and now, as an old man, he is the visionary for a nascent group of eco-terrorists.

It is this communal band, Le Moulin, and the freelance American spy, former FBI agent Sadie Smith, hired to disrupt them, around which “Creation Lake” revolves (and sometimes wobbles). There are several interwoven plots – the spy game, Sadie’s search for self-identity (which has gone missing after years of working undercover), and Bruno’s Aristotelian musings on love, war, politics, the purpose of life itself, and the aforementioned stages of hominin development, all fo which emerge from the cave where his retreat from late capitalism has taken him.

Sounds heavy, right? But it’s not if you approach “Creation Lake” as I did after my brief departure on page 175 – not as a novel, but as a journal in which entry, while mutually connected by strands either obvious or diaphanous, is complete unto itself. That perspective enables you to pass through the more maddening moments unperturbed and enjoy what the New York Times, in its gushing review, calls Kushner’s “floor-level interest in humanity,” meaning she doesn’t miss a tic or a trick of our post-evolutionary habits.

So, yes, amid Bruno’s philosophizing, Sadie’s searching, and the I-spying, there is fun amid the complexity. For the most part, I found “Creation Lake” engaging, entertaining and, even, thought-provoking. Yes, it is uneven, but all journals are.

Bookshelf – Home, Toni Morrison (2012), The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury (1950)

Posted on November 23, 2024 by Tim Porter

In my quest this year to reach a three-digit number of books read, I’ve reduced the page count, favoring of late slim titles.

This less-is-more strategy has produced an unexpected benefit: an upgrade in quality. In recent weeks I’ve been entertained and enlightened by J.M. Coetzee, Meg Wolitzer, Joseph Conrad, Juan Rulfo, and, now, Toni Morrison and Ray Bradbury.

***

“Home” is the more soulful of these two titles. It tells the story of Frank Money, a young man just mustered out of the Army after a stint amid the slaughter of the Korean War, and his younger sister, Cee, a survivor of horrific abuse inflicted by an eugenics-obsessed doctor. Both carry secrets, one shared since childhood when they saw a band of white men burying a Black body in a field, and one Frank bears alone, a scarring memory brought home from war.

As they struggle to reunite in their rural Southern town, they must muck through the sheen of post-war racism that oozes across the country, subtle in some areas, but flagrant in the sibling’s native ground. Morrison, as she always does, infuses “Home” with humanity, and lets the narrative unfold from there.

Although the underlying themes are heavy, the storytelling is not. The dialogue is rich and uttered by an array of characters, some hateful, others delightful, all interesting. Well worth reading.

***

“The Martian Chronicles” – which I never read until now – imagines the colonization of the fourth planet from the sun by the denizens of the third planet. The story begins in the year 2030 when Earthlings once again face the existential threat of nuclear war.

Told through a series of short, anecdotal stories connected by context but distinct by time and subject, “The Martian Chronicles” is a cautionary tale. It warns, with both force and humor (if one can laugh at the fate of the world) that toxic culture is not detoxified by being transplanted in a more benign environment, but rather tends to infect its new host, as the Martians find out to their detriment.

Writing amid the geo-political pall of post-war America, Bradbury uses the anthems of the times – the red scare, the nuclear scare, the hegemony of the U.S., the rising nationalistic censorship of art, dissent, and differing points-of-view – to make his point: we are a flawed species and not much good can come of us. Again, serious stuff, but addressed with deft, irony and sarcasm.

The book is full of surprises even as it wends its way toward one of several imaginable endings – a Door #1, #2, or #3 situation. No matter which door you choose, what lies beyond should please you.

Bookshelf – Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2)

Posted on July 20, 2024 by Tim Porter

This is a short observation about reading vs. listening:

When I first read “Between the World and Me” three years ago (a bit late to the game), its unblinking directness astounded me and my truculent ignorance ashamed me. I wrote:

“There are sounds in life so distinct and universal they cannot be mistaken for anything else – the tumble and hiss of heavy surf onto sand, the guttural reverb of distant thunder, the ominous hustle of night winds through tall trees.

“To these voices of the world I would add that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who speaks through the pages of this epistolary essay about blackness and whiteness in America with such honesty and authenticity that from now on I will measure the veracity of all other literary voices against his.”

Just the other day, I listened to Coates’s narration of the book and found it to be even more profound. His voice, eloquent, educated, but still inflected by the streets of West Baltimore, amplifies the wisdom, truth and necessity of his written words. Heard aloud, their poetry flourishes even further, as does their urgency.

If you have not read Between the World and Me, I urge you to do so. If you have read it, I suggest you also listen to it.

(Original review)

Bookshelf — Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder – Salman Rushdie

Posted on July 11, 2024 by Tim Porter

All memoirs should be measured against this harrowing account by Salman Rushdie of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him and left him half-blind: detailed, unblinking, contextual, and surprisingly soulful – all packed with precision into two-hundred pages.

To hijack a phrase I’m sure I picked up from someone else’s review: “Knife” is a display of Rushdie in full command of his talents: inventiveness, intellectual breadth, insight into the foibles of humanity, and an emotional spectrum that runs from anger to fear to love to outrage.

Rushdie lived beneath the sword since 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for his execution, proclaiming that Rushdie’s book, “The Satanic Verses,” defamed Muhammad. With time, the threat seemed to diminish. Still, says Rushdie, he was not surprised one day, while standing on stage, to see a young man appear from the audience and lunge toward him with a knife.

“I confess,” he says, “I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are. It is said that Henry James’s last words were ‘So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.’ Death was coming at me, too.”

The book begins here and follows Rushdie’s journey of recovery and rediscovery – of who he is, of what he loves and why, and of the importance of art and honesty in a pluralistic society.

“I had to write the book you’re reading now.” he says, “before I could move on to anything else. To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.”

Indeed, “Knife” is art – it is personal, yet universal; it is wisdom distilled from pain; it answers the question everyone must face when calamity confronts them: “One has to find life … One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.”

The Lede

Posted on June 30, 2024 by Tim Porter

For my fellow wretches, an excerpt from Calvin Trlllin’s most recent collection of his writing, “The Lede”:

It is said that when James Thurber, as a young newspaper reporter, was told by an editor that his story’s first paragraph, what newspaper people refer to as the lede, suffered from wordiness, he handed in a rewrite whose opening paragraph was, in its entirety, “Dead.”

There followed a second paragraph: “That’s what the man was when they found him with a knife in his back at 4 p.m. in front of Riley’s saloon at the corner of 52nd and 12th streets.”

Bookshelf — The Reformatory, Tananarive Due

Posted on June 30, 2024 by Tim Porter

I tried to make it to the end of this mash-up novel of ghosts and racists and the mid-century-America Black folks they haunt, but I didn’t. A couple of hundred pages short of the finish I realized I held in my hands an excellent three-hundred-page book that, unfortunately, sprawled across more than five hundred pages.

And that’s a shame.

The story of “The Reformatory” is based in part on the experience of the author’s great uncle, who was remanded to the infamous Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, the violent institution that was also the setting of Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Nickel Boys,” a powerful book that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The two works differ in many ways (the ghosts, for example), but mainly in scope: Colson weaves a taut story, Due spins an overly complex web.

To be sure, my opinion is not widely held. On Goodreads, “The Reformatory” averages four-and-a-half stars. I gave it two, and here’s why:

During my first weeks as a newspaper reporter I scribbled what I thought was a first-rate piece of American journalism. After turning it into the desk, the crusty city editor shoved the pages back to me after scanning a few hundred words. What’s the problem with it? I asked, expecting some specific criticism about sources or emphasis. She withered me with a look rooted in years of suffering idiots, and said simply, “Too many words.”

Bookshelf – Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward

Posted on June 25, 2024 by Tim Porter

This is a beautiful, emotionally challenging book about what happens when the complex pull of family abuts the hard truths of the world: Life is not fair, some people can’t escape suffering, and misplaced solace, no matter how inviting, often leads to more pain.

These truths, depicted with both savage and elegant bluntness by Jesmyn Ward, made “Salvage the Bones” hard to read. As calamity upon calamity falls upon the 15-year-old narrator, her three brothers, and their father, a family less alive than surviving, I wondered, alternately angered by the injustice and saddened by the grinding inevitability of their fate, How can anyone live like this? How can we morally allow our neighbors to live like this?

For the family – daughter Esch, sons Randall, Skeetah, and Junior, and Daddy – the questions are existential. It is 1995, and their Mississippi bayou town sits in the sights of Hurricane Katrina. However, the coming threat remains secondary to the urgencies of daily life: Esch’s need for love, Skeetah’s dog-fighting dreams, Randall’s basketball fantasy. Only Daddy tries to prepare – until he cannot.

What Ward does so well is not blink before the storm. She infuses her powerful prose with blood. She highlights sibling tenderness and then stains it with feral immorality: stealing is sanctioned, as is drunkenness, animal cruelty, and sexual abuse. She offers no hope, only endurance – which, as it turns out, is the more useful tool.

“Salvage the Bones” rewards those who persist, those who endure its harder passages. The closing section of the book, when Katrina engulfs the town, is a potent literary punch, mighty words crafted in full flex. Along with roads and houses and land, the storm sweeps away pain. What it leaves behind are better angels who emerge under the clearing skies and discover within them yet another truth: Life goes on. Dawn brings a new day.

Bookshelf – Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Tim Porter

In 1951, Eilis Lacey, against her wishes, leaves the small Irish town she’d hoped to spend her life in and boards a steamship bound for America.

Once in Brooklyn, she finds the familiar comforts of family replaced by the random cattiness of a rooming-house. Her dream of being a bookkeeper lays idle while she puts in six-day weeks at a department store, work arranged by the parish priest.

As the months go by, she begins to ground herself, only to be wooed by a young man, an Italian-American. Things happen fast until, suddenly, with Eilis facing pressure from her beau, what’s done can’t be undone.

In this sense, Eilis’s story is a universal story. In post-War America, especially in working-class communities fed by immigrants, the roles of men and women were well-scripted – by family, by church, and by social norms. So it is unsurprising that Eilis so willingly allowed these constraints (which bound women much more so than men) to remake her so easily.

Eilis Lacey is an untethered soul; she is adrift on the river of life, her own hand never on the tiller.

The chapters that follow Eilis’s transformation from wide-eyed hick to nascent New Yorker engage the most. Tóibín’s clear, clean writing makes for good storytelling, and I rooted for Eilis to navigate the labyrinth of her new life. Which she mostly does.

Then, as the book rounds the final turn, Eilis finds herself in a complex situation that compels her, in the course of a few pages, to chuck all she’s accomplished in America in exchange for the “sweetness, certainty and innocence” of the old sod.

I felt gob-smacked, ready to so some chucking of my own, namely some of the appreciation I’d gained for “Brooklyn.” I didn’t, though. It’s a matter of choice. I wouldn’t have ended the book as it does, but, that said, I didn’t write it.

So … yes, read “Brooklyn,” especially if you plan to read “Long Island,” Tóibín’s new sequel to the meanderings of Eilis Lacey. “Brooklyn” is enjoyable and insightful, and whether the ending sits right with you will depend on your palate and patience.

Bookshelf — On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Tim Porter

If there is one indelible line among the many memorable words that form this compact novel, it is this: “The entire course of life can be changed – by doing nothing.”

Edward and Florence are newlyweds. They are “young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.”

The couple is as inexperienced at communication as they are in the carnal arts. Their courtship was “bound by protocols never agreed or voiced, but generally observed;” in other words, they had friendship – but no benefits. Florence abhors the notion of sex. She does not want to be “entered or penetrated,” verbs she found in a how-to handbook for brides. Edward, his perception warped by priapic frustration, misinterprets Florence’s reticence as a dormancy awaiting a passionate reawakening.

Perched uneasily aboard their honeymoon bed in an inn overlooking Chesil Beach in Dorset, England, Edward and Florence attempt to reconcile their fantasies – he yearning for relief from his passive torment, she determined dutifully to grin and, ahem, bare it. Then, in an instant, these dreams collide, revealing sharp edges that had been hidden behind the dullness of cordiality.

“On Chesil Beach” is set 1962, “when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.” McEwan, as artful as ever in nuance, and as theatrical as necessary when the tension tightens, captures the era perfectly: Edward and Florence are innocents, duped by cultural norms and lacking the means – neither language, patience nor honesty – to overcome their entrapment.

“On Chesil Beach” is a penetrating story of loss – of love, of opportunity, and of saying the right words at the right time. I highly recommend it.

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