RidgewayGirl Reads in 2017 -- Part One

Looks like it's time to start my thread here.

I've been in the habit of posting pictures of misogynistic ads here, and while there are ample numbers available (and more being made every day) to keep this spot busy with the appalling and ill-thought-through ideas of Madison Avenue, I thought I'd take a different path this year and post pictures of my favorite paintings. I'm in the mood for something beautiful this year.

And so to begin:



Franz Marc was a young artist who was killed early in WWI. He was close friends with August Macke, another artist who was just becoming known, and who would die some months after his friend. Both men had artistic breakthroughs shortly before the war and would certainly have achieved much had they lived. Which is not to make their deaths out to be worth more than the many ordinary men whose lives were wasted by that pointless war.

Currently Reading



Recently Read



Recently Acquired

First Quarter Reading

January
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis
To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel
Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
The Nix by Nathan Hill
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
Mister Monkey by Francine Prose
The Fall Guy by James Lasdun
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
The Public Prosecutor by Jef Geeraerts (translated from the Dutch by Brian Doyle)
The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer

February
Version Control by Dexter Palmer
True Crime Addict by James Renner
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride
The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapeña
The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney
Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet
Night School by Lee Child
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge
My Lover's Lover by Maggie O'Farrell
Transit by Rachel Cusk

March
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates
The Break by Katherena Vermette
High Dive by Jonathan Lee
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
Autumn by Ali Smith
The Trespasser by Tana French
Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue

The Lists

Books by Year of Publication

1998 The Public Prosecutor by Jef Geeraerts
2002 My Lover's Lover by Maggie O'Farrell
2013 Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue
2014 Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
2015 Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
High Dive by Jonathan Lee
The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney
2016 All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis
Autumn by Ali Smith
The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
The Break by Katherena Vermette
The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapeña
The Fall Guy by James Lasdun
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride
Mister Monkey by Francine Prose
Moonglow by Michael Chabon
Night School by Lee Child
The Nix by Nathan Hill
Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel
Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet
To the Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey
Transit by Rachel Cusk
The Trespasser by Tana French
True Crime Addict by James Renner
Version Control by Dexter Palmer
We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge
2017 The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Books Arranged by the Nationality of the Author



Belgium
Jef Geeraerts (The Public Prosecutor)

Britain
Belinda Bauer (The Beautiful Dead)
Lee Child (Night School)
Rachel Cusk (Transit)
James Lasdun (The Fall Guy)
Jonathan Lee (High Dive)
Maggie O'Farrell (My Lover's Lover)
Max Porter (Grief is the Thing with Feathers)
Ali Smith (Autumn)

Canada
Katherena Vermette (The Break)

Ghana
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing) (country of birth)

Ireland
Tana French (The Trespasser)
Eimear McBride (The Lesser Bohemians)

Mexico
Alvaro Enrigue (Sudden Death)

United States
Charlie Jane Anders (All the Birds in the Sky)
Ramona Ausubel (Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty)
Lou Berney (The Long and Faraway Gone)
Michael Chabon (Moonglow)
Helen Ellis (American Housewife: Stories)
Roxane Gay (Difficult Women)
Kaitlyn Greenidge (We Love You, Charlie Freeman)
Yaa Gyasi (Homegoing) (country of residence)
Nathan Hill (The Nix)
Eowyn Ivey (To the Bright Edge of the World)
Shari Lapeña (The Couple Next Door)
Lydia Millet (Sweet Lamb of Heaven)
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees) (country of residence)
Joyce Carol Oates (A Book of American Martyrs)
Dexter Palmer (Version Control)
Francine Prose (Mister Monkey)
James Renner (True Crime Addict)
Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me)
Michelle Tea (Black Wave)
Kayla Rae Whitaker (The Animators)

Vietnam
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees) (country of birth)

And this thread is officially open for business.

Oooh. Homegoing. Looking forward to your thoughts,

I will be keen to see what you will be reading in 2017, Alison. Have seen you around the threads and thought it opportune to drop by, star your thread and wish you a Happy New Year.

Happy New Year! I'm looking forward to following your thread again. I have my eye on both Homegoing and To the Bright Edge of the World, so I'm keen to see what you think of them.

As always, looking forward to following along with your reading. Interested to hear your thoughts on Homegoing as well.

Happy New Year!

As discussed in your 2016 thread, you read all the best (and a few of the worst) new books! I very much enjoyed your museum reviews as well and am happy to see >1 RidgewayGirl: paintings posted!

I am also looking forward to your thoughts on Homegoing and to your other reviews. Happy new year!

I like the new theme at the top of your thread, Kay. We need more beauty in the world. I look forward to your favorites.... And of course the book bullets that always seem to come my way.

I appreciated what you were doing with those ads, but it is really nice to see something inspiring when I open your thread. Wish you a great year and certainly I plan to follow along. Happy New Year!

2017 needs some beauty after all the ugliness of 2016. Happy New Year!

Dropping off my wee star...

Hi, citygirl. I'm almost finished Homegoing and my thoughts are, on the whole, good thoughts. It's quite the achievement.

Hi, Paul. It will be good to see you here. I'm looking forward to following your thread, too.

Happy New Year, Rachel!

Ursula, Homegoing really is the book of the moment, isn't it? At this point I think it's well deserved, although the book is not without a few flaws.

Thanks, Liz. It's good to know that my intermittent museum reviews were not skipped over by everyone! I do miss being able to spend an afternoon in a museum now that I no longer live near an abundance of them.

Thanks, Barbara. Looking at the books due to be published this year, it should be a good reading year.

Likewise, Colleen. I approach your thread with trepidation and a pencil to note titles in hand.

Hi Daniel. I'm looking forward to your thoughts on those Ferrante novels.

I agree, Jane. Time to look at beautiful pictures.

Hi Alison. I'm looking forward to another good year of reading with people I like.

There's no question that Yaa Gyasi's debut novel, Homegoing is enjoying a moment. And deservedly so. Constructed as a chronological series of short stories beginning with two sisters, one who marries a British soldier and goes to live in the Cape Coast castle, while her sister is sold into slavery and passes through that same building's dungeons. Generation by generation, Gyasi writes about a single descendent from each sister, one in what eventually becomes Ghana, and the other in the US.

This is the problem of history. We cannot know that which we were not there to see and hear and experience for ourselves. We must rely upon the words of others. Those who were there in the olden days, they told stories to the children so that the children could tell stories to their children. And so on, and so on. But now we come upon the problem of conflicting stories.

As with any collection of short stories, some are better than others. A few seem to be little more than a historical moment and a filling of the space in the narrative, but the ones that are good are very, very good. And, taken as a whole, this book is a powerful look at how history shapes our present and the effect of the slave trade and colonialism on both Ghana and the US on the present day.

We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there, You begin to get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.

Nice review of Homegoing, Kay. As you said, some of the stories in it weren't as good, but overall the book was superb.

Darryl, I wonder how much of this book we'll see as awards shortlists are announced. I'm hoping a lot. It deserves a wide readership - I'm amazed that this is a debut novel.

Exciting first book and you leave me wanting to read it too. (I was surprised to see my library has it on audio. That means I have seen it there and ignored it. Oops. I'm 24th on a waiting list for one copy... At two week checkouts, that is potentially a year long wait)

>18 RidgewayGirl: I'm interested in reading Homegoing after reading your comments. My wishlist is going to explode, and we've only just started.

I loved Homegoing. I really didn't think of it as short stories, though. I can certainly see why you do, but somehow it really struck me as a novel instead. I suppose it's just semantics, but I wonder if there's a deeper discussion we could have here . . .

I'm in the middle of Homegoing myself, and like Jennifer I've been thinking of it as a novel vs short stories as well. Though that's probably partly because I knew it was a labeled a novel and it didn't occur to me to look at it any other way.

>18 RidgewayGirl: And here it started and we are not even 5 days into the year and I already have books I need to read that I had never heard of before... *sigh* Nice review :)

Hi Kay--Thanks for visiting my thread. I followed your interesting reading last year, but was a lurker. This year I hope to comment more.

I've been seeing a lot of reviews lately for Homecoming. I've added it to my wishlist.

Deborah, it's so good to see you in Club Read again.

Annie, it would be interesting to see what someone who isn't an American, but who is familiar with the culture thinks of Homegoing. In one chapter, a teen-age girl who was born in Ghana but whose family moved to the US, deals with being black but not African American - somewhat like what was looked at in Americanah.

Jennifer and Meredith, yes, please! That's such an interesting topic. Why would Homegoing be a novel, beyond the marketing decision to sell it as one (collections of short stories do not generally do as well as novels)? And with the rise of the book consisting of inter-connected short stories, how is this not a part of that, although less so than many such books. Olive Kitteridge was sold as inter-connected short stories and the connections between the chapters/stories was much stronger than in Homegoing.

>27 RidgewayGirl: It never even occurred to me to think of it as short stories, which I think says something in itself. I viewed it all the way through as the story of the two African sisters through their descendants and thought there was a strong thread both between the generations of each family branch and between the contrast of the two branches themselves. I thought the way she described each generation and contrasted to the opposite side of the family made it feel like a novel instead of short stories and was an intentional way to craft the novel. I don't really think any of the chapters would be meaningful without the entire book. Her point was the massive scope of slavery and how it affected those who were made slaves and those who stayed behind and dealt with colonialism and how it affects people still today. I envision her writing it as though it needn't have been broken up the way it was at all. For instance, she could have presented longer segments of each side of the family (not splitting it up so rigidly into generations) or presented all of one side and then all of the other (as in Fates and Furies) and then brought them together at the end. Overall, I guess I'm trying to say there was a fluidity to the book that is less rigid in my mind than the idea of them all being distinct short stories, or even linked short stories.

I've had a very hard time trying to articulate this, so I hope I made some sense.

(and I know you know I very respectfully disagree with you and don't take any of this to be unduly argumentative!!!)

Interesting comments on Homegoing. It's only going on release in the UK this week, so I hadn't heard of it before.

>28 japaul22: I agree, I didn't view it as short stories, and I think you hit why when you said "I don't really think any of the chapters would be meaningful without the entire book." Vignettes, or glimpses into the generations of each family, but none of them felt self-contained to me.

Jennifer, that's a good point about the connectivity of the stories/chapters, but I do think that many of the stories/chapters do stand on their own. I also think that some portions were stronger than others, so that some of the chapters felt like they existed only because something was needed from that generation to illustrate the things going on at the time. But lots of short stories do exist in dependence on one another, whether in the same collection or elsewhere, most obviously as a short story telling something about the lives of the characters of a novel after the end of the novel.

I think that some of the portions would work in isolation, but others would not. I'm still of the opinion that this is a book of linked short stories, but you've made me see that an argument can be made against that idea. And it's clear that Homegoing works best as a whole (like Olive Kitteridge!) rather than as isolated tales. I also think that if this book stands the test of time (and I think it might) teachers will be pulling individual chapters/stories out to look at in isolation.

(And I love spirited conversations disagreeing about books and literature. How much better would the world be if friendships ended and Thanksgiving dinners were ruined over magic realism or the Oxford comma, rather than politics? I'd much rather spend the time I'm stuck driving or making dinner thinking about what makes a novel and what makes a collection of short stories than Trump's latest tweet.)

Alison, that disparity between the American and the British publishing schedules is so much fun. One of the things I liked about living in Germany was getting a jump on books that would only be published in the US months later.

Ursula, I'm not entirely convinced that thirty page stories count as vignettes. And short stories often concern themselves with brief glimpses into someone's life, a few moments or days.

>31 RidgewayGirl:

Bookdepository delivers to the US books published in UK and Australia that are not due in the US until months later :)

PS: Even if some stories stand on their own, if even one does not or if a story depends on another for full understanding (even if they stand on their own), it would be a novel for me. Will have more to say on that specific book when my library gets it to me - it is on hold and there are a few people ahead of me.

You've got me interested in Homegoing. I like the sound of the structure of it. There seems to have been quite a few books blurring the boundaries between short story collections and novels recently. Looking forward to following the rest of your reading this year!

Mmm I really must read Homegoing too as I have seen so many of my pals fall head over heels with it in the last year. It is not available in the shops in Malaysia so I may have to wait for a visit to the UK.

I was already interested in Homegoing, but more so having read your review. I didn't know there was a Cape Coast connection - my cousin's girlfriend was just telling me Christmas about her family home there.

I know, Annie, but I tend not to think of that - my extended family tends to give me gift cards to amazon, B&N or my local independent bookshop, so it feels unreasonable to spend money just to get the book a few weeks earlier.

Gary, as a huge short story fan, I can only applaud this trend. Let's blur all the boundaries.

Paul, if you've got a friend back in the UK who has a library card, but doesn't read ebooks, you could always use their overdrive (on-line library ebooks) account. I did this when I lived in Germany, and it allowed me to continue to read the new books in English. I have a Canadian friend who has graciously allowed me to read the Canadian titles my small American library system tends not to get.

Rachel, that's so interesting. The descriptions of the beaches in the Gold Coast in Homegoing are so alluring that I suggest you start hinting to her that you'd like to visit.

>36 RidgewayGirl:

Yeah, I know... for a few weeks I usually don't either. A few months or years do convince me sometimes (or sometimes an extremely ugly American cover can send me that way) :)

Annie, why are the American covers so much uglier than the UK/European ones? And why do they change the titles - and the American titles are always less eloquent - so that I falsely believe there's another book out by an author I like and then I look more closely and am bitterly disappointed?

>38 RidgewayGirl: - You might find an answer in Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books by Tim Parks.

>38 RidgewayGirl: For the same reason why war and hunger cannot be eradicated - we are not a very intelligent species :)

More seriously though - because US publishers try to simplify or scandalize (or both) things so they can sell more books? At least US/UK/Australia shares a language - with translations it gets worse - some books have so many different translations that you are not sure when there is a new book and when it is just a new translation...

>36 RidgewayGirl: I'm a lover of short stories too, so I'm happy with the trend. And I seem to be automatically drawn towards anything described as a series of linked stories.

>40 AnnieMod: That makes me think of something Terry Pratchett said along the lines that American readers aren't stupid but the publishers think they are. (I don't think he had good experiences of getting his books published in the US in the early days.)

Thanks, Monica. I'll look for that.

Annie, and also with books in translation, the titles vary so widely from the original that I'm not sure whether that's another book on a similar theme or the same one. So frustrating. Of course, most companies, even global ones, have no ability to allow someone to keep their account when they move to another country. Even ones that pride themselves on their worldwide reach.

Me, too, Gary. I love the interconnected stories format.

>41 valkyrdeath: The first time I saw his books without the Kirby covers, I was really stunned. The Bulgarian publisher that published him back home licensed the covers as well (well... used them anyway - I think they were licensed) so we had the nice and colorful covers. The US ones seemed to be uninspired compared to them....

>42 RidgewayGirl: And then publishers that do not put the original title in the book do not help much. Or they translate through another language (English book translated into Bulgarian from the Russian -- that used to happen a lot; these days there is a lot of translated from the English regardless of the original language), Double mangled titles (and text) :) The fun in book-reading outside of the local bestsellers...

If you're looking for a fun, light and off-beat book that reads like Mallory Ortberg has moved into Cheever territory, and George Sanders has helped her unpack, while remaining solidly grounded in present day, American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis is the book for you. The title's a bit misleading. There are plenty of housewives, American version, but of the twelve offerings in this book, not all are really stories. Some read more like very clever blog posts; fun but not stories. Like Southern Lady Code, Take it from Cats, and How to be a Grown-Ass Lady:

Accept it: you're too old to drink more than one drink and sleep through the night. Face it: you're never going to get carded again, so quit asking bouncers if they want to see your ID. Quit going places where they have bouncers.

The tone of the stories is breezy, and hides the work and skill it takes to create the effect of effortlessness. The stand-out stories include Dumpster Diving With the Stars, about an author whose has stalled out after a single book and who now takes part in a reality show,

I published one book, fifteen years ago, but it was a doozy. What they call a "cult classic." Meaning the book was odd, but identifiable, and is now out of print.

and My Novel is Brought to You by the Good People at Tampax, in which the light breeziness has taken on a weird, threatening undertone.

I really enjoyed this collection, but I do wish it had had more substance to it. More substantial stories that rely less on the clever hook (and sometimes those hooks are very clever) than on Ellis's skilled writing and incisive sense of humor. Less icing, more cake.

To the Bright Edge of the World is Eowyn Ivey's wonderful second novel about the relationship between a husband and a wife. Allen and Sophie Forrester are newly married, living in an Army-provided cabin in Washington state, when he is given the leadership of a small group of explorers tasked with traveling up the Wolverine river in Alaska territory in 1885. The book takes the form of diaries, letters, photographs, newspaper articles and various artifacts and keepsakes that were inherited by a great nephew who sends them north to a small museum located along the route the explorers traveled through. The museum curator and the elderly man exchange letters as the curator pieces together the story's chronology and the old man recounts what he remembers.

The Wolverine river is a wild place; the Russians were forced to abandon their own explorations due to the topography and the hostility of the Native Alaskans. When Sophie and Allen part, it's with the expectation that he'll return either in the fall or not until the following spring, if they are forced to overwinter along their planned route. Allen Forrester and his companions have a difficult path ahead of them, but Sophie has her own struggles as she isn't fond of the rigid and gossipy social life of a military wife.

For the most part, this is a straight-forward historical novel, told in a chronological way, but as Allen sets out from an island off the coast of Alaska, strange things occur and the inexplicable twines itself with the traditional narrative. To the Bright Edge of the World began slowly for me, but as it progressed, I became more and more enthralled.

>45 RidgewayGirl: This is on my must-read list, and now with your review, I am even more excited to get to it!

>45 RidgewayGirl: that sounds like a great read. Enjoyed your review.

>45 RidgewayGirl: Kay, I am pretty sure that that one is now in the shops here. It will be a priority addition after your enthusiastic review.

Kayla, Alison and Paul, while I'm glad you're intrigued by To the Bright Edge of the World, it always feels like such a responsibility when someone decides to read it because of something I said!

But I'm still thinking about it, so that bodes well, doesn't it? I'm going to have to read The Snow Child soon.

Caught by this paragraph in Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel.

To their friends and children both, generations to come told the story of the abolitionist over the story of his father, proud of the relatives who had fought on the side of right. They did not speak of the fact that in order for a family to free their slaves they must first have owned them. The did not stop spending the money that had been earned with the help of bodies, bought and sold. It was that money that furnished every single thing in their good American lives.

>49 RidgewayGirl: I never put two and two together that this was the same author who wrote The Snow Child. I really enjoyed that book - it moves To the Bright Edge of the World even further up the list.

Alison, the plot of The Snow Child didn't appeal to me when the book came out, despite many people saying how good it was. I should have listened!

For awhile now, I've been unable to appreciate novels about the travails of young, beautiful and rich white people. There are so many of them and I question how taking the least interesting people and situations will make for a novel that breaks new ground and is compelling enough to spend several hours with.

Apparently, it can be done. Ramona Ausubel has written a book called Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, in which a wealthy, happy family is sent into a tailspin when it's discovered that the money has all been spent. Fern and Edgar have three happy children and a lot of money. They have a summer house on an island and the sailboat to go with it. They spend entire summers there, unfettered by jobs or obligations. Fern's parents are old money, and it's from them that the money flows, money earned generations ago from rum and slaves and cotton, but this was long enough ago to have erased the guilt that might have gone with that.

To their friends and children both, generations to come told the story of the abolitionist over the story of his father, proud of the relative who had fought on the side of right. They did not speak of the fact that in order for a family to free their slaves they must first have owned them. They did not stop spending the money that had been earned with the help of bodies, bought and sold. It was that money that furnished every single thing in their good American lives.

When they discover the money has all been spent, the only solution apparent to Fern is that Edgar must finally take up the reins of his father's steel mills, a fate he's been running from all his life. Edgar is the kind of person I'd dream of punching in the neck if I met him at a party and he started in with his usual rant of how he despises money, delivered while wearing the privilege that allows him to hate what he doesn't have to earn. But in a novel, he's a fascinating character. And that's what Ausubel does, with beautiful writing and a real understanding of her characters, she paints a portrait of people who aren't necessarily sympathetic, but they are understandable. There are also the children, especially Cricket, the daughter, who is forced into the role of caretaker to her two younger brothers when her parents spin out of control.

Ausubel is a true storyteller and I look forward to reading everything by her I can find. There are ways in which this book reminded me of Anne Patchett's Commonwealth, another novel I loved.

Kay, not much to say, but I'm enjoyed your latest reviews.

>53 RidgewayGirl: Loved this review. "Edgar is the kind of person I'd dream of punching in the neck if I met him at a party" ... I know exactly what you mean!

Thank you, Daniel. Turns out that reviewing a book right after I finish it works better for me than waiting a few weeks.

Thanks, Ursula.

>56 RidgewayGirl: interesting Kay. Do they feel different to you this way? I have a whole complex of sorts about this myself - waiting or not to write my thoughts, review, whatever we call it when we hit "post message".

I've put it on hold at the library.

Daniel, I was leaving reviews until I'd read a few other books and the force of my impressions had faded and I was finding I had less to say, but that I really wanted to talk about the new book I was reading. I'm trying to write reviews within a day of finishing the book, and while that is leading to less organized reviews, they're also fresher, I hope. Let's see if I can keep this up, though.

I hope you like it, ursula.

I've managed to grab a copy of Difficult Women by Roxane Gay. It feels wonderful to begin a book published in 2017 when January hasn't yet ended.

>59 RidgewayGirl: I always write my reviews within a day of finishing a book, often within minutes! I think they are more raw and emotional and often my opinions change over time, but I like remembering how I felt "in the moment". At the end of the year, I don't look at what actual star ratings I gave, but choose my favorites based on how I remember the book at that point which maybe balances things out.

Jennifer, that's exactly what I'm trying to do this year. No matter what I'm thinking about a book, not writing the review immediately often means the review ends up being written out of obligation or seems stale. So I'm going for disorganized but true to my immediate reaction.

>45 RidgewayGirl:
I have this home from the library right now. Glad it sounds good, cuz I'll be getting to it in a week or two (you know, after the 3 or 4 other books I'm reading....).

Glad to see your review of To the Bright Edge of the World, as it's been on my list for a while but I haven't seen much about it on LT.

Marge, the stack of library books, both physical and ebook, are a lot taller than normal at my house right now. I put a bunch of books on hold and they all came in at once.

Meredith, I hadn't seen anything about it here. I read it because it's on the Tournament of Books long list and it sounded interesting. I hope it gets more attention as time goes on.

I'm visiting your thread to note that the buzz around Homegoing is well and truly ... er... buzzing here in the UK. I had thought I was going to be smart in my LT participation this year and enjoy hearing about what others were reading while refusing to be diverted from my TBR pile, but I'm not going to be able to avoid this one, am I?

Also, I love Alexej von Jawlensky and wish I didn't have to go all the way to Germany to see his paintings!

Rebecca, it is worth reading, but I suspect Homegoing will still be worth reading, and people will still be reading it, years from now.

And von Jawlensky is good, isn't he?

I'm currently reading The Nix by Nathan Hill, and I am conflicted about it. There's excellent writing and Hill seems to been doing something interesting with the tired old WMFuN*, but he's also created a paper-thin female character who exists only to ruin the life of the protagonist. Worse than the one-dimensional portrayal, is that she is a student and he is her professor and there's a power differential at play that the author is asking the reader to believe is inverted. And that construct of the male professor as innocent victim of the evil termagant is both worrisome given how power is actually structured and because it's reminding me of The Human Stain, a book I hated, entirely because of the thick layer of misogyny.

I'm going to read the entire book, because I don't think it's fair to dismiss an author (who writes well - I'll dump a badly written book in a minute) without giving them a full chance and because it is conceivable that Hill is doing something more than vilify this young woman but I wanted to whine about it for a minute.

*White Male Fuck-up Novel. You can probably think of a half dozen right now off the top of your head.

Given recent political events, it seemed a good time to revisit Rebecca Solnit. I'd read the opening essay in Men Explain Things to Me and a few other articles by her and she has an ability to cut to the heart of an issue and clearly explain what is going on. The title essay begins with her encounter of an older, well-to-do man at a party who, upon hearing she'd written a book about a fairly esoteric subject, proceeded to lecture her about a very important book on the subject that had just been published. When she was finally able to interrupt him long enough to communicate that the book he was telling her about was indeed the book she had written, and which he had only read a review of, his reaction was not to apologize and ask her questions, but to continue his lecture. While this is a particularly blatant example of the phenomenon she discusses in this essay, it's something that happens more often than one would suspect. Her initial essay on the subject led to other women working in academia to also talk about their similar experiences, and then to the coining of the term "mansplaining." Solnit has, as a result, become a polarizing figure.

Which is a shame, because her writing is balanced and relentlessly fair. There's no broad sweeps being made at any group. She's interested in how the conversation surrounding equality has moved forward, and there's no doubt, she says, that we have moved forward, and compares where we were as a society in the 1970s when it came to racial, sexual or gender equality. We are still working towards a more just society, but what we're fighting for has changed.

Solnit is an academic and historian and so her essays are serious and well-reasoned. She's interested in the environment and anti-war activism as well. Men Explain Things To Me is a hopeful and determined look at our progress toward a more just world, with a clear-eyed look at where we are now and why it matters.

well, I have been reading your recent reviews toggling back and forth between the library's ebooks and LibraryThing. Several items added to my wishlist. Thanks.

Thanks, Maggie. The danger of wishlist bloating is a constant one in Club Read.

>67 RidgewayGirl: I am very much triggered by The Nix but haven't read it yet. I hope the good writing wins from the misogyny. Looking forward to your review.

Barbara, I'm working on the review now. I do think it's worth reading if you like big, meaty novels.

This book! I'm conflicted about what to say about Nathan Hill's debut novel, The Nix. On the one hand, it's one of my favorite kind of book - a big, meaty novel full of heart, and it's well-written and there are characters who are so nuanced and fully realized that it's a pleasure to read about them. Hill manages to humanize even the one truly bad man in this book - sure it's his wife's fault, but he's got layers. The Nix is a book about family, about how the ones you love are the ones who will hurt you, about the weight of the past, forgiveness and understanding.

And it's a messy, bloated book, in which one character is made to be the one we are all supposed to hate and, unlike every other character, drawn without depth to be the butt of jokes. It's a novel where women are the source of men's discomfort, the cause of their failure and their reward for successfully changing their ways. And it's a novel with everything neatly and nicely tied up at the end, no ambiguity allowed.

Samuel teaches English at a suburban university. He's not very good at it, preferring to put all his energy into not writing the book for which the advance has long been spent and playing an online World of Warcraft-style game. He's mad at his Mom for leaving him when he was eleven, which is also the year he made a good friend and developed a crush on his friend's talented sister. When his mother resurfaces - she's arrested for assaulting a presidential candidate - he agrees to write a nasty tell-all.

The Nix moves forward and back as it follows his mother's past, Samuel's childhood and their present, in a world almost, but not quite like our own. It's the kind of book that's hard to put down, at least when Hill sticks with his main and secondary characters. He does go off on tangents that detract from the story he's telling, but the parts that center on Samuel, his mother or the people in their immediate orbit, the book is fantastic.

I'm looking forward to what this author does next, and in seeing how he hones his craft.

Enjoyed your review of Men Explain Things to Me

Great reviews Kay, and interesting conflict you had with The Nix.

Sounds like you have had a great start to your reading year. I have recently acquired American Housewife and just listened to a podcast praising To the Bright Edge of the World so it's really interesting to hear your take. I will investigate To The Bright Edge of the World and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty.

I've found Solnit's writing hard to read in the past but your review makes me want to try again.

That said, although I am an increasingly angry feminist, I'm not sure I believe in mansplaining. I'm more of the opinion that some people are pompous, boring dickheads and if you are one of these people, you will be a pompous, boring dickhead whoever you are speaking to, woman or man. There are a couple of reasons why I think this. I meet quite a lot of PBDHs (as I'll call them) in my line of work and I have never once had a situation where I have said to a (male) colleague 'Isn't so-and-so a PBDH' and he has disagreed. The other is that my partner is a climate scientist and a vegetarian and you wouldn't believe the number of people who think it's clever to give him the benefit of their ill-informed opinions about one or both of these subjects. That said, I do think it's a bit of a dominance behaviour and therefore more likely to be part of a male communication style.

I've added Men Explain Things to Me to my wishlist as well though it sounds entirely too depressing to start any time soon.

>76 wandering_star: I've definitely run into mansplainers who do not act the same way with men though I agree that there are also a large quantity of just PBDHs around.

It's amazing how once you become acquainted with the concept of mansplaining, its perpetrators pop up all over the place. I remember this one writer's group where a 70 y.o. white man explained to the 30ish black woman how she could better understand and relate the experience of young black women. I called him on it. I am sure he was ALSO a PBDH.

Thanks, Bas. Solnit is an intelligent and kind writer. She's worth reading.

Daniel, in the pre-Tournament of Books discussion going on over on goodreads, a few people mentioned how the Laura Potsdam (the bad character) scenes all feel as though they were part of a different and lesser novel. I guess the old advice about killing your darlings still applies.

Wandering_star, I do like the PBDH designation and agree that there's a dominance factor - people rarely lecture their bosses or teachers in a condescending way. Solnit didn't coin the term "mansplaining," and I got the feeling that she's not entirely comfortable with it, but she does ring fence it to mean men lecturing women on a subject that the women are professionally expert in and the man has maybe read an article once but has strong opinions anyway. There is certainly plenty of PBDH behavior out there - for example, the number of people who feel compelled to explain to John Lewis that he is doing non-violent resistance wrong and that MLK would disapprove are legion this week.

Jane, I felt more hopeful after reading Solnit's book. She's not pessimistic or gloomy.

citygirl, I think that in the Venn diagram of PBDH and mansplainers, the second set is entirely encompassed by the first and both are a lot larger than they need to be.

>73 RidgewayGirl: Great observations in your review. I will read it.

Nice review of Men Explain Things to Me, Kay. I own it, and I intend to read it this year (I'll check now to make it's in my list of planned books for 2017, along with We Should All Be Feminists).

>79 RidgewayGirl: totally agree.

>66 RidgewayGirl: Very true, and the paperback isn't out here until the summer, so I'm safe for now at least!

Actually, making a list of new books that have caught my eye makes me feel a little more in control and a little less likely to panic-buy them. I need to remember that these books are not going anywhere.

Great discussion of mansplaining!

Barbara, I'd be very interested in what someone living in Europe thinks about the book.

Darryl, We Should All Be Feminists is also on my shortlist for reading this year.

w_s, I'm sure someone out there would very much like to explain how we are actually wrong.

And when Homegoing comes out in paperback, Rebecca, a whole new cycle of discussion will start.

>84 RidgewayGirl: Do you think it will be different from someone in the US? I'll let you know!

The house becomes a physical encyclopedia of no-longer hers, which shocks and shocks and is the principal difference between our house and a house where illness has worked away. Ill people, in their last day on Earth, do not leave notes stuck to bottles of red wine saying 'OH NO YOU DON'T COCK-CHEEK'. She was not busy dying, and there is no detritus of care, she was simply busy living, and then she was gone.

A woman dies suddenly, leaving behind her husband and two young sons. As they negotiate the days, months and years that follow, they are accompanied by the physical manifestation of their grief, a large and not entirely benign crow.

I was pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy Grief is the Thing with Feathers and for the first half that remained largely true. My brother died suddenly last year and grief, it turns out, is both unique to each person and utterly, utterly universal. Max Porter's understanding of grief is so deep as to move past the differences and grab the heart of it.

Some days I realize I've been forgetting basic things, so I run upstairs, or downstairs, or wherever they are and I say, 'You must know that your Mum was the funniest, most excellent person. She was my best friend. She was so sarcastic and affectionate ...' and then I run out of steam because it feels so crass and lazy, and they nod and say, 'We know, Dad, we remember.'

'She would call me sentimental.'

'You are sentimental.'

The offer me space on the sofa next to them and the pain of them being so naturally kind is like appendicitis. I need to double over and hold myself because they are so kind and keep regenerating and recharging their kindness without any input from me.

This is a slight book, told from the alternating viewpoints of the husband, the two sons speaking together, and the crow, who begins as a malevolent and destructive force, then mutates into something approaching, but never quite reaching, comfort.

Nice review of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Kay. I'll add it to my wish list.

>86 RidgewayGirl: I just purchased this book, and I'm going to dive into it this weekend. Thank you for sharing your review

>68 RidgewayGirl: - I have a bunch of Solnit on the wishlist for library ebooks, but they're always checked out. Should probably just buy one.

>86 RidgewayGirl: - Good review of Grief is the Thing with Feathers.

>86 RidgewayGirl: Seems like a heavy book/subject, especially for you to read. Thanks for your review, on the wishlist it goes.

Darryl, Kayla, DeiF, I highly recommend Grief is the Thing with Feathers. It's such a well-crafted and humane book.

Oddly, Barbara, it isn't at all heavy.

I've changed the painting at the top of my thread in honor of the women (and men) who marched yesterday.

Just catching up on LT after a week or two away. You have added at least a couple of books to my wish list in that time - really enjoyed your recent reviews.

Thanks, Alison.

Despite the title, Mister Monkey isn't about a monkey, but rather it centers on a not-very-good musical by that name, which is itself based on a children's book. Beginning with an actress with a role in a cheaply produced off-off-Broadway version of the play, Mister Monkey spirals out, following people whose connection to the play becomes more and more tenuous. Just when it seemed to be in danger of abandoning the musical altogether, Prose pulls the pieces together so that the separate stories all connect in meaningful ways.

There are a few things I reliably like when I read. One of them are short stories, especially inter-connected short stories. Another is when an author is talented enough and cares enough about the characters they've created, to write empathetically about all of them, even the most repulsive or mean-spirited creation. Mister Monkey has all of that, and being written by Francine Prose doesn't hurt its chances either. I found this book delightful. Prose's deep concern for her characters turned people who might have been laughable -- the desperate aging actress, the lonely and frumpy kindergarten teacher, the hormonal and unpleasant eleven year old -- into people I cared about.

Well, this was just a lot of fun. James Lasdun's newest book is a suspenseful novel that rushes along until it ends at just the right moment (so hard for authors to get this exactly right). The Fall Guy is Matthew, a chef trying to decide what to do with his life. His cousin Charlie has invited him to spend the summer with him and his wife at their vacation home in an affluent area of upstate New York. Matthew and Charlie have a long history together and Matthew also gets along well with Charlie's wife, Chloe. Sub-letting his apartment and moving into the guest house is a perfect way to give Matthew a financial break and time to think over what he wants to do with his life. The peaceful summer he'd pictured is altered when Matthew begins to suspect that Chloe is having an affair and his curiosity and concern begins to take an ominous turn, even as Charlie and Chloe seem to be losing their affection for him.

Told from only Matthew's point of view, The Fall Guy has an anxious and claustrophobic feel to it. The reader begins to suspect that how Matthew sees things may not be the way the others affected see things and the inability to step away from Matthew's brain adds to the tension as it becomes clearer and clearer that things are going very badly wrong.

James Lasdun may be known for his more literary work, but he knows how to craft a fast-paced and entertaining novel. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Less Difficult Women than Women Making the Best of Bad Situations, Roxane Gay's collection of short stories focuses mainly on relationships between men and women, from abusive or cold to the romantic and committed. Gay also returns to the themes of twins and sisterhood and how women support each other, and of pregnancy and motherhood; always fraught and likely to end in disaster.

Like any collection of short stories, the quality varied from brilliant to acceptable, but despite the way Gay constantly examined similar situations with different variables, the short stories never felt repetitive. They were strongest at their most raw - the stories that opened and closed the book were visceral and I think I'll be living with them for some time.

Such a great review of Grief is a Thing with Feathers. Enjoyed your last three reviews too.

Thanks, Dan.

So this was outside my usual reading wheelhouse. This is a Belgian political thriller about The Public Prosecutor, a corrupt functionary who is targeted by an even more corrupt shadowy Catholic organization called Opus Dei. Savelkoul is not a sympathetic guy, what with his mistress kept in a property given to him by a development company in exchange for a ruling, and the pleasure he takes in the "gifts" he receives. His wife has taken refuge in religion and in obtaining titles for her two sons. Opus Dei is out to bleed as much money from the family as they can, taking advantage of the wife's religious fervor and Savelkoul's easy ability to fall prey to blackmail.

It's basically a bunch of people double-dealing and lying as they try to grab the advantage for themselves. They eat in very nice restaurants and drink a lot of wine and then plot for ways to destroy Savelkoul or, in Savelkoul's case, try to maneuver around the traps while finding a way to get laid. Belgium, Jef Geeraerts tells us, is a aristocracy-obsessed kleptocracy, although he does make the point that corruption is present everywhere. Also, the Opus Dei are weirdos.

All in all, it was interesting, but still not my thing.

>94 RidgewayGirl: I came across Mister Monkey a few weeks ago and added it to my list as something that sounded fun, but hadn't yet seen any reviews of it. I think I'll bump it up the queue following your review.

Gary, I'd be interested in finding out what you think of Mister Monkey.

And so the sad passing of David Fallon was barely and briefly reported, and by the morning bulletins he had been bumped out of the news completely by a cyclist under a bus in the City, and a drive-by shooting in Peckham.

Nobody fed his cat.

Eve is a TV crime reporter. She stands just outside of crime scenes and times her filming so that the body bag is carried out behind her as she delivers her report. She's good at her job, has a great working relationship with her cameraman, Joe, and connections with dozens of law enforcement personnel and first responders. But she's also almost thirty and she's battling to keep her position. She's moved back home to care for her father, who has Alzheimers and requires round the clock care, and the strain has made it harder to take the kinds of career risks that might move her forward. Then she's contacted by a serial killer who wants her to air exclusive footage of his murders. She's making decisions that will have repercussions far beyond questions of taste or ratings.

Belinda Bauer writes dependably good crime novels which are varied and unpredictable of which The Beautiful Dead is one of the better, although with Eve, Bauer has created a less unusual protagonist than in her other novels. Bauer has a talent for making her characters come to life, even those given only a few paragraphs. I enjoyed The Beautiful Dead enormously and Bauer has now become one of a half dozen crime novelists whose books I look forward to with unseemly anticipation.

That sounds good - I like the extract you posted. I started Rubbernecker but couldn't get on with it. Is that one of the good ones in your view? I might give it another try.

>103 wandering_star: Yes, I really liked it. And if you didn't like Rubbernecker because the main character was so off-putting, you'll probably like this one. The protagonist is likable and believable.

Another book slated to compete in the Tournament of Books.



Version Control by Dexter Palmer is a novel about time travel, but not in the sense one expects. There are no madcap adventures in the past or future. This is a conversation about time travel, and a novel in which time travel occurs, but the packaging is subtle and more thoughtful than that.

Set in the near future, Version Control tells the story of an ordinary and likable woman named Rebecca, who is married to a physicist who heads up a lab that is working on what they call a causality violation device. She likes some of the scientists working in the lab more than others. She has a wild best friend. She works for a dating website that is quite a bit more advanced than the dating sites of today. And the world is similar to our own, but also different, with self-driving cars outnumbering the autonomous variety, civil unrest in the Dakotas and a president who frequently pops up on screens everywhere to give pep talks.

It's hard to discuss this novel without giving important events away, so I'll just say that this is the most interesting exploration of time travel that I've read. It explores several theories and ideas about time travel. My new favorite idea is spouted by a security guard who likes the sound of his own voice and my previously favorite theory is cut to shreds in a satisfyingly convincing way. But the discussions don't get in the way of the story Palmer is telling. Yes, there is a long scene with people discussing their working theory over breakfast that goes on for pages, but by that point I was invested in the story. The final chapters were a let-down, especially given the preceding section, but this was a book that I'm very glad to have read.

>105 RidgewayGirl: Interesting review, you've got me intrigued with this one! I love time travel stories and this one sounds like it does something different with it. That's got to go straight on my list.

Both your two last books sound great!

Barbara, this has been a great reading year so far for me.

>105 RidgewayGirl: That's been on my list - glad to know it'll be worth trying.

True Crime Addict by James Renner is about the disappearance of a Massachusetts college student named Maura Murray, but mostly it's about the author and his life. It's an interesting combination, but the sum is much less than the parts, as the missing woman case is thin and Renner's life would have been more interesting in memoir form.

Renner chooses to look into Murray's disappearance after losing his job as a journalist leaves him at loose ends. He's dogged, but random in his investigation and some of his decisions are simply odd. Murray had been drinking the night she left and drove north, so Renner gets drunk and drives the route Murray must have taken. I'm not sure of the insight he was looking for, but it was certainly a stupid and pointless thing to do. The story of his personal life was, in many ways, more interesting than the case he was investigating, and I'd be interested in a more introspective and in depth memoir from Renner.

The writing in True Crime Addict is not what I expected from a former journalist. The descriptions of the people he speaks to are either banal (a woman being describes as cute-as-pie) or weird (a man has insouciant facial hair) and there is a lack of the journalistic clarity customary in books by those who have worked as reporters. Still, it was a diverting book when I needed something that didn't require a full brain's worth of concentration.

>109 auntmarge64: I'm surprised by the number of people who knew about this book - I'd never heard of it before it showed up in the Tournament of Books roster.

>105 RidgewayGirl: it would be difficult to see how the final chapters of a book like version control, Dexter palmer would not be a let down. Sounds interesting.

Bas, it could have ended about thirty pages earlier and I would have rated it much higher.

I've changed the painting at the top of my thread to a Max Beckmann self-portrait. He is one of the many people denied a visa to enter the US at the start of WWII, despite being a prominent painter, utterly apolitical and having a job waiting for him in St. Louis.

I like your idea of posting the paintings this year. The story behind this one is quite timely, isn't it. I look forward to the ones you choose.

Colleen, the parallels are eerie. And that was our "good war."

I am so disturbed by the hatred that has been unleashed. My granddaughter's high school had a basketball game against another school recently. The population of the other school is far more diverse than the school she goes to. She wasn't at the game, but apparently there were racist calls to players on the other team. A video went viral. My granddaughter was so upset about it, after the school held an assembly to discuss it. My son was shocked that the coaches said they didn't know when they were asked why they didn't do anything about it. The video clearly shows that it would have been hard to miss. I thought we were so far beyond this.

>113 RidgewayGirl: I just saw a couple of his self-portraits this weekend -- the Met Museum has a retrospective: http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/max-beckmann

I must go back -- it was far too crowded and I could only manage the first room before I had to get away from the crowds.

>116 NanaCC: I am happy that my daughter is at a school where the student body is diverse. My son did report hearing some comments around election time, though, at his middle school. It's worrisome.

>117 ELiz_M: he's one of my favorite artists. If you can get back, I highly recommend spending some time at it. I wish I could go - I've just seen his work in German museums, so this would all be stuff I haven't seen.

All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders is a fantasy novel set in the near future in a world just like ours, almost. Patricia and Laurence are outcasts in middle school; she has a reputation for being weird and witchy and he's just a nerd who has managed to build himself a small time machine he wears on his wrist, although it only manages to move him forward two seconds at a time. They become friends, but cautiously. He's aware that being associated with Patricia makes him even less popular and Patricia's been so thoroughly shunned that she's defensive. They're also much more than they appear to be.

So, YA and urban fantasy are not genres that I normally read, but I did like this book much more than I thought I would. It was fun. The book is divided into the story of what happened in middle school and what happened when Laurence and Patricia meet again as adults in San Francisco, as global warming and wars are making the world unlivable. The adult Laurence is a tech prodigy working on a project to get people to another, more habitable planet and Patricia's a witch, working with a ragtag band of magicians, who feel that the world can be healed.

All the Birds in the Sky was entertaining. It's been entered into the roster for the upcoming Tournament of Books and while it's too insubstantial to do well in that competition, I'm glad I was pushed into reading it.

>118 RidgewayGirl:

My high school was majority white with greatest minority being asian. Only 2 black students when I started, 4 by the time I left, but you would never ever have heard a single racist peep from a single person, on either "side"!

I find the diversity in our education (our school excelled at arts, academia, and sports) led to a great positive, intellectual, and diverse view from the students.

Of course I can't speak for the current generation as I have not visited the school in the last 8 years or so.

I can't, in good faith, recommend The Lesser Bohemians to anyone. It's an odd, acquired taste of a book that I loved inordinately and since it would forever taint my opinion of you, were you to read the book and dislike it, please leave it be.

Eimear McBride tells the story of a young Irish woman during her first year of drama school in London. Eily's thrust into the vibrant world of London and of drama school from her quiet life and it takes an effort for her to find her feet, both in finding friends at the school and in learning the ropes of independent life. One evening, she meets an actor twice her age in a pub and they begin a tentative relationship, which grows into an intense love affair between two broken and flawed people.

McBride tells the story from inside of Eily's head, and her stream-of-consciousness abandons grammatical norms, leaving the writing a challenge to follow. There are no quotation marks, and conversations take place over a single paragraph, with no indication of who is talking. This should have been annoying, instead it make the act of reading The Lesser Bohemians an immersive experience. This was not a book I could pick up and put down during a busy day. I needed to read it when I could set aside a block of uninterrupted time, during which I would enter so completely into Eily's world that I felt unmoored when I had to put the book down. I'm sorry to have finished it, but I'm eager to read anything else McBride writes, including her grocery lists, probably.

Great start to a review! I haven't read any Eimear McBride, although I did see a one-woman performance of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing at Edinburgh last year. Unfortunately it started quite late at night after a tiring day and I couldn't stay with it, although I could tell that it was a stunning performance of an equally stunning work, had I been on-the-ball enough to appreciate it.

Enjoyed your review of The Lesser Bohemians

The one-woman show sounds fantastic, w_s, but I can certainly see how the Festival would wear anyone out. I long to find that out for myself someday. I have a copy of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

Thanks, Bas. Don't read it.

And now to plunge from the heights to the abyss of a Very Bad Book.



Most of the time when I pick up a book solely because it looking interesting it backfires on me. Not all the time. Every so often I'm rewarded, just often enough to keep me from giving up this self-destructive and time-wasting tendency. The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapeña is not one of the exceptions, but a book that reminded me why I periodically vow not to do this anymore.

The Couple Next Door are Anne and Marco Conti. They have a baby and an invitation to dinner from their friends next door, who don't like babies. When the babysitter cancels, they go to dinner and it's not a great success. Graham barely participates and Cynthia spends the evening flirting aggressively with Marco. They have to run back to their house to check on the baby every half hour, despite also having the baby monitor with them. And Anne spends the evening sulking, because she's a new mom and that's what they do, especially when they feel fat. And then they return home to find the baby missing.

It's a good set-up and the initial chapter of the dinner party is the best part of the novel. After that it falls apart in a book more interested in providing the next twist than in character-building, plot or believability. The book is written in present tense, an odd decision that continually pulled me out of the narrative. The book swings from the point of view of one character to another, mainly it seems to make sure the thoughts of the person the reader is most interested in at the time remains opaque, so while we follow Anne's inner conversation with herself when she's alone at home moping, and when she's doing something random and inexplicable, her thoughts are hidden. And one thing each character can be counted on to do, it's to act randomly and without explanation. I finished this book waiting for the many, many plot threads to wind together. They just don't.

While this should teach me not to pick up a crime novel without reading a few reviews beforehand, experience has told me that I will learn nothing.

Now this. This is what a crime novel should be. Set in Oklahoma City, The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney follows two people whose present is haunted by events that took place during the summer of 1986. Julianna was twelve when her older sister disappeared at the state fair. Wyatt was fifteen when the movie theater he was working at was targeted by armed thieves.

In the present day, Julianne works as a nurse, but half-heartedly, living alone and still looking for her sister. The man she was going to see is back in Oklahoma City, and she's determined to find out what he knows. Wyatt works as a private investigator. He's living in Las Vegas for now, but he's hired to do a favor by looking into a possible stalking case in Oklahoma City.

This is a book deeply rooted in time and place. And the setting isn't one often seen. This is a character study of how loss and uncertainty have shaped two people, and while they remain separate for much of the book, their journeys share a pattern. There's a lot going on, but Berney adeptly pulls it all together at the end in a satisfying way.

>125 RidgewayGirl: I feel like I heard something about this book at some point, but I have no idea how or why.

I love that you know you will not learn from the experience. I sometimes feel the same way about my haphazard method of choosing books, but I guess I just like the adventure, in spite of the pitfalls.

>126 RidgewayGirl: I've enjoyed Lou Berney books before so this one goes on the wishlist for sure!

>128 VivienneR: I see that he's written two other books, Vivienne. I'll keep an eye out for them. I love his sense of place and his ability to write empathetically of all his characters.

Maybe our gods are as small as we are or as large, varying with the size of our empathy. Maybe when a man's mind is small his god shrinks to fit.

Sweet Lamb of Heaven by Lydia Millet is an odd, difficult-to-describe book that had me from the opening pages. Part of the plot is easy to describe; after she becomes pregnant, Anna finds that her husband wants nothing to do with either of them so, when her daughter is five, they leave. Her husband Ned decides to make his career in politics and needs his family back for appearance's sake. Anna eventually finds refuge at a seaside motel in the off-season, but their safety is tenuous.

The other aspects of the plot are more difficult. Anna begins hearing a voice after her daughter is born. It goes away once her daughter can speak. What keeps her from thinking it's some sort of auditory hallucination is that her husband mentions hearing it, too. Then she finds other people who have had the same experience.

Millet isn't a lyrical author, and while she writes well, it's not her writing or her characters or her plots that make her memorable. Millet is an author of ideas. Sweet Lamb of Heaven is a religious book, but not a theological one; she's exploring the idea of God and what that means to different people and different species. And with an emphasis on ideas, the plot becomes secondary, as does the idea of finding any answers.

Am very late to the party! I am grateful for your thoughtful review of Homegoing, a book I put down about mid-way through and didn't pick up again (I am probably the only person to do so). Like others, I had not considered it short stories as you suggest, and that, with some thought, could explain some my response to it, or it just was not the right book at the right time. Interestingly though, despite being a big fan of Adichie, I did not finish Americanah either.

The Millet book sounds intriguing! I agree she is not lyrical and more an author of ideas. The last book of hers I read was a short story collection, Love in Infant Monkeys.

Hi, Lois. I also read Love in Infant Monkeys and at the time I thought it was only so-so, but despite having read it some time ago, I still clearly remember several of the stories. The ideas stick around.

>95 RidgewayGirl: So great to hear that The Fall Guy is good! I loved, loved, loved The Horned Man, but was bored by, and hated, Seven Lies (which was nominated for a Booker). I read some other book by him that was non-fiction about traveling in Italy --something I should be all over-- and my reaction to the later two was "???" I wondered if I was reading multiple authors with the same name. But The Fall Guy sounds like the same sneaking up of the unreliable narrator.

Immediately on to my wishlist.

And yes, I'm late catching up on your thread. Sorry. New job disrupting life.

The premise of Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel, Night School, is a solid one. Reacher, who is a 35 year old MP, along with a guy about his age from the FBI and another guy from the CIA are told to report to a class on inter-departmental cooperation. Only it's not really a class, but a top secret mission to discover and foil a plot about something unknown. The NSA has picked up noise about a big deal going down but they don't know much more than that. To discover what's going on without tipping their hand, they've chosen a few of the brightest men and given them the vast resources of the American government.

The strength of the series is the main character, Jack Reacher. He's the strong, silent type; a man who says as little as he can, and isn't slow to bang heads when needed (in these novels, there are always several occasions that necessitate the use of fists or weapons of various kinds). He's also a thinker. He looks at situations in a Sherlockian way by putting together random details into a coherent whole. And he has a cast-iron sense of duty and moral obligation to help those weaker than himself. But in A Wanted Man, a different version of Reacher was presented; a chatty judgmental guy who seems to bear more resemblance to the actor playing him in the movie version than himself. This guy was not likable, although he had a quick mouth and did the same kind of things the real Reacher would do, and he was not a guy I'd ever read a series of action-packed thrillers about. He disappeared for the next few novels, but he's reappeared here, much to the detriment of the series and the case he's working on.

When Night School opens, Jack (as I prefer to call this alternative-Reacher) is just back from successfully assassinating two foreigners in Europe, which is one of the things the Military Police does when there aren't sufficient unruly soldiers apparently. Didn't seem likely to me, but I'm not in the military. Jack joins the two other agents and they briefly hang out while Jack tells them things. Then Jack goes to Hamburg, which is where the thing was first mentioned and the other two really talented guys sit on their hands until they join Jack in Hamburg, where they sit on their hands in the American Consulate. Sometimes they make a phone call. Jack is stuck doing everything, with the help of Neagley, his staff sergeant, a Hamburg detective, and a pretty woman from the NSA, who is there to remind us all that this is very important and that all the resources of the government are at their disposal. And also to give Jack a lady friend and the author a chance to write some exceedingly average sex scenes. Jack thinks about her hair a lot.

The final quarter of the book hangs on Jack and his crew making a ridiculous mistake, a mistake so monumentally bone-headed that the real Reacher would have reacted by thinking some very pithy thoughts.

Look, I love these books. They're well outside of my wheelhouse, but reading about a highly competent and kind individual working a complex plan with effortless grace is a lot of fun. This variation though was not fun to read. This guy is not someone you'd like to have around, even in a crisis situation. Here's hoping the real Reacher is back in the next installment.

Hi, Joyce. I hope you're enjoying the new job, even if it does cut into your time here. I liked Seven Lies, though.

>126 RidgewayGirl: I've added Long and Faraway Gone to my TBR list.
I was also interested to see that you didn't like the new Jack Reacher book. I read only a little of it before I put it down - there was just something about it that didn't work.

>136 auntmarge64: I think you'll like The Long and Faraway Gone. And I see that you have the ability to put a bad book down. That is a rare skill and you should be grateful for it. Although you did miss the parts where Jack makes fun of a German guy's poor English skills. They are in Germany. Jack does not speak German, but feels superior about speaking his own mother tongue better than a guy in Germany. Reacher would have never been such a jerk.

Much has been made in reviews and interviews of the fact that Moonglow is a fictionalized account of Michael Chabon's maternal grandfather's life. I'm less interested in what Chabon is doing to blur the line between fiction and memoir than I am in whether Moonglow worked as a story. And it did. Chabon's a talented writer working at his peak and so the writing here is fine and stays out of the way of the story he's telling, which is the story of his own family tree, mainly focusing on his grandfather, and using the framing device of Chabon spending time with his grandfather during his grandfather's final days and the conversations they had.

What emerges is a straight-forward novel about an interesting man with the framing device of their conversations before he dies. The story is mostly chronological, with some jumping back and forth in time, from his childhood as a Jewish boy running around places he wasn't allowed, to his involvement in trying to find German scientists before the Soviets do at the end of WWII, to how he met his wife and their life together, and his life as a widower in Florida. In many ways, he lived an ordinary life, but in others he was extraordinary; in his devotion to the wife who never fully recovered from her life in France during the war, in his feeling of obligation to a German man who is being bullied in prison, to his fascination with the space race.

Chabon writes with an enormous amount of affection about his grandfather, and that sentiment pervades the novel. It's also, at a more basic level, just a good story about an interesting, yet ordinary man, well-told.

Been eyeing this Chabon as my library has it on audio. Glad to read your review, and encouraged by it.

>138 RidgewayGirl: I've been curious about this book. I've been meaning to read more Chabon and this sounds a good one from your review.

Gary, I think that Chabon is a talented writer and he put his heart into this book. I do prefer the others of his I've read (including his book of personal essays) but that's because I'm not a huge fan of memoir. Chabon changes genres with every book he writes, so if you were looking to give him a try, I'd suggest seeing which of his books jumps out at you. On the other hand, Moonglow is enjoying a moment and it's fun to read the book everyone is talking about.

We Love You, Charlie Freeman is the debut novel by Kaitlyn Greenidge that reads like a debut novel, which is to say that it's uneven, with parts that fit together uneasily, but also with sections that show the author she will become.

Charlotte Freeman moves with her family from their crowded home in Dorchester, Massachusetts to a spacious apartment in the Toneybee Institute, where they are to take part in a research project that has them living with Charlie, a young chimpanzee, as a member of their family. Her mother and younger sister are the most enthusiastic about the project, while Charlotte is more focused on starting at a new high school.

What this book does well is to create a rising sense of dread about the events as they unfold, as well as about what happened at the Institute decades ago. The point of view changes depending on the chapter, but stays primarily with Charlotte, who is a critical observer of what is going on. Greenidge gives a weaker ending to both storylines than is hinted at earlier, and she fails to develop the motivations for conflict as adeptly as a more experienced author might have done.

>141 RidgewayGirl: I have read some Michael Chabon before. I loved Kavalier and Clay, and I enjoyed Maps and Legends, though it was inevitably a mixed bag by its nature. The Final Solution is the book I've picked out to read next by him, and is probably the one I'm actually going to be starting tomorrow. It's pretty rare for me to be reading the book of the moment though, so maybe I will try to get to Moonglow soon too!

>143 valkyrdeath: I'm going to have to read Maps and Legends. I loved his book of personal essays, Manhood for Amateurs.

I just thought I ought to catch up with some of my more than sufficiently vivacious and entertaining friends over here in the Club Reads! xx

Looks like I am in for a slight disappointment when I get to (and it makes the shops here) the latest Reacher book.

I really like Maggie O'Farrell's novels although I find it difficult to pigeon-hole them - the best I can do is describe them as chick-lit for people who usually read more literary fare. Except they aren't quite chick-lit. In any case, I read them when I want to relax with a novel, and yet still feel like my brain is involved.

My Lover's Lover concerns Lily, who moves into the spare room in Marcus's loft and soon after begins a relationship with him. The problem is that Marcus is in mourning for his last girlfriend, and Lily begins to see her around the loft. She becomes fixated on finding out what happened.

The first half of this book just wasn't very good. It wasn't terrible, just strained and unconvincing. It improved dramatically after the big twist, and became a solid and interesting story, but the chapters I had to read to get there were lackluster. This is O'Farrell's second novel and it reads as though she wasn't quite sure what she was planning as she went along. I'd recommend After You'd Gone or The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox to anyone, but My Lover's Lover is best avoided.

>146 RidgewayGirl: Thank you for the heads up on this one, Kay. I did enjoy The Vanishing Act..... and wasn't sure where to go next.

Colleen, I loved After You'd Gone.

>148 RidgewayGirl: I just added to my wishlist. Thank you!

I liked Rachel Cusk's novel, Outline, quite a bit, even more once I saw what she was doing with it. So it wasn't a big surprise that I enjoyed every page of its sequel, Transit, although she's not doing quite the same thing here. With Outline, the protagonist was passive, becoming a receptacle for the stories of others. In Transit, she has returned to the UK from Greece and purchased a flat in London that came with terrible neighbors and a desperate need of renovation.

For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast, sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry.

The protagonist is still listening to people as they bare parts of themselves to her, but she's also present in her life in a way she wasn't in Outline. That said, this is still not a plot-driven novel. She attends a literary festival, gets work done on her house and has coffee or dinner with people. Yet, the glimpses into the minds of others is fascinating, as well as her own reactions to what they tell her. And Cusk's writing is very fine; it's as clear and unobtrusive as water.

Plans led to disappointment, to regret, to chain-smoking and sadness. Michelle refused to be tragic. She would resist having plans.

Michelle is a young lesbian living in a run-down apartment in San Francisco during the 1990s, and also as the world is ending. She works in a bookstore, but she wrote a book once, and so she's collecting experiences for her next book, which mainly means she drinks a lot and takes whatever drugs are offered to her. In the name of artistic experience, of course, she's not an addict or anything.

Their hard drinking was a sort of lifestyle performance, like the artist who wore only red for a year, then only blue, then yellow. They were playing the parts of hardened females, embodying a sort of Hunter S. Thompson persona, a deeply feminist stance for a couple of girls to take. They were too self-aware to be alcoholics. Real alcoholics didn't know they could even be alcoholics, they just drank and drank and ruined their lives and didn't have any fun and were men.

The first half of Black Wave follows Michelle and her compatriots as they carouse around the dying city. It's a self-destructive artist novel in the style of the many published during the nineties, from Suicide Blonde to The Story of Junk. I read a slew of them back then and the story remains the same, although the characters always believe they are forging new ground.

The second half of the novel is an entirely different animal. Here, Michelle Tea makes the dystopian end-of-the-world theme explicit, while also going meta and becoming a novel about the writing of the novel, where what is happening in Michelle-the-character's life becomes a topic of debate. Tea also makes the decision to have Every Thing That Michelle Says Capitalized and has everyone else speak in italics. I had thought that I was fairly open to stylistic quirks, but this annoyed me to the point that I couldn't concentrate on what Tea was doing, or even what was going on in the story.

With Black Wave, author Michelle Tea takes big risks. That they don't entirely work means that the book doesn't hold together the way it might had she played it safe. But I can't help but admire her courage.

Viet Thanh Nguyen has written a collection of short stories called The Refugees and it's really good. While each of the stories touches on being a refugee or outsider, each is completely different from the others. And they are all really good. It's a slender book, and Nguyen clearly chose to only publish his very best.

This is a much more accessible book than The Sympathizer, with Nguyen's emphasis remaining on the flawed humanity of each character. A woman is frustrated by her son's insistence that she give up the part-time library job she loves to be home with her ailing husband, a young man arrives in San Francisco to discover that his sponsor is an older gay man, a man receives an organ transplant and feels a sense of obligation to the donor's son, the young son of shop owners watches as his mother refuses to give into to blackmail.

Enjoyed your posts. Interesting about Nguyen. I think I'll pass on Michelle Tea, or at least on that one. As for Cusk, I still plan to read Outline, maybe down the road this year. Encouraged by your review if Transit.

Daniel, I think that you'd like what Outline is doing. At least, your opinion on it would be interesting.

Because he'd seen, and not forgotten.

Because there is so little we can do. Yet it is our duty, to do it.

Because he had not lost faith and because I am hoping to learn what faith is.

So Joyce Carol Oates has written a big, meaty novel about abortion. A Book of American Martyrs isn't what I had expected it to be, but does JCO ever cater to expectations? Here JCO tells the story of two men, and then of two families and finishes by focusing on the daughters of the two men.

Gus Voorhees is a public health doctor working in women's clinics, vocal and visible enough to have worked his way onto the ten most wanted lists of the more radical right-to-life groups. Luther Dunphy is a carpenter who attends a fundamentalist church and who had once had dreams of becoming a minister himself. He's active in the right-to-life movement, often joining with those protesting at the clinic in his small Ohio city. The novel opens with Dunphy firing his shotgun, first at Voorhees and then at the clinic escort who had arrived at the clinic with the doctor.

Oates then goes back and forth in time, showing the lives of both families before and after the murder. The trial forms the backbone of the book. But Oates's attention is less on abortion than on how the sudden removal of the father from a family can destroy it, and on mothers who are unable, for different reasons, to be mothers and what that does to children. Oates's writing style keeps the reader at a short distance from her characters and thank goodness for that, the book is emotionally exhausting as it is. I will call the author out for her classism, where the poor are not just lacking money, but also intelligence and curiosity. The novel might have been stronger for allowing the Dunphys to be more than they were.

>155 RidgewayGirl: I am no fan of Oates, her books always disappoint me a bit. However, your review makes me want to give her another try. Would you recommmend it?

I don't know, Barbara, it took me a long time to warm to JCO, but now I'm in her weird groove. I'd suggest her short stories, because I think she does those really well and they are like moderated doses of her, rather than the full thing. I'd really suggest asking one of people who've read a lot more of her, like avaland.

I was astonished by Katherena Vermette's novel, The Break. I picked it up solely because it's one of the Canada Reads contestants this year and I happened to find a copy, and going in with no expectations left me open to being swept away by this small book about an extended First Nations family living in Winnipeg, Manitoba and what a sudden act of violence does to them.

The Break refers to an open swath of land running between houses that holds the hydro-electric pylons. Left untouched in winter, it's where, in the early hours one morning, a woman holding a restless infant sees a group attacking a woman. She calls the police, but by the time they arrive, the only thing left is a disturbance in the snow and a pool of frozen blood. The cops don't entirely believe that she saw a woman being attacked, reasoning that she isn't exactly coherent.

While the crime does form a significant part of the book, the real focus is on the families involved, mostly headed by women, and even when there's a man in the picture, there's a real sense of a community of strong, strong women, who are used to facing both poverty and discrimination and to marching on regardless. Which is not to say they aren't often tired, or struggling along the way, but Vermette here has drawn a vivid picture of how these women relate to their communities, to each other and to themselves. She's also done a wonderful job of evoking life in winter in a northern city. I grew up in Edmonton, some distance away, but she really nailed the descriptions of what it was to walk home on a winter afternoon, or climb the porch steps when they're covered in packed snow. I'll be looking for more by this author.

>158 RidgewayGirl: that sounds like a goody. Bookmarked.

Alison, it's wonderful when a book from a culture so far outside my own is so well-written.

Alas it mustn't be widely internationally published as it's selling for £25 on Amazon. :(

It's published by a small press called House of Anansi.

>1 RidgewayGirl: Is the painting by Franz Marc or August Macke?

>158 RidgewayGirl: I bought The Break a few weeks ago, and I'm looking forward to reading it. Did you notice the Trigger Warning on the first page? I've never seen that in a book before!

>163 ELiz_M: It's by Marc. He used animals as his theme almost exclusively.

>164 Cait86: No, I didn't see the trigger warning at all, but I'm a careless reader who ignores everything in my lust to get to the first page. It's a good call here, because while the attack isn't graphically described, Vermette is relentless in tracking what it does to the victim and her family.

You had me interested in Black Wave until you got to the part where the protag's words are capitalized. Oh, well. I'm reading Homegoing now.

citygirl, how are you liking Homegoing?

>158 RidgewayGirl: Tempting review of The Break! My local library has it on order so I've added it to my wishlist.

>167 RidgewayGirl: kinda loving it but sometimes it's hard to take. Inhumanity usually is :s

Vivienne, it's really good. And it's good to hear from voices who aren't usually published.

citygirl, yeah. And the book doesn't get any easier as Gyasi moves through time.

I love the Franz Marc picture. I initially somehow thought of it as being a tiger, but as it has no stripes I thought it must be a lioness, but I see that artyfactory has it listed as a tiger. Whatever it is it would be great to see the original artwork. I didn't know Franz Marc before, but will have to look out for his work in future.

O, Marc's work is worth seeing in person, but photos and reproductions of his paintings show up all over the place. There was a big show last year at the Lenbachhaus in Munich celebrating his friendship with August Macke that was amazing. He was just 36 when he died and already an important figure in the German art world. It's his painting that launched the first edition of The Blue Rider, the journal of the Blue Rider art movement (one of the many in Munich at the turn of the last century - they tended to form with great amity and good intentions and then shatter because someone painted something shocking.)

"I'm not going to sleep with you," she repeated.

"Sure," he said. "Right."

It had been a very exciting development. Here was a woman, a beautiful woman, a new woman who didn't know the ins and outs of his every mistake, and she was thinking about not sleeping with him.

High Dive by Jonathan Lee is a fictional account of the 1984 IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, which was targeted at Margaret Thatcher. It follows the lives of three people; Moose, the acting hotel manager, his daughter, Freya, working at the hotel through the summer as she decides what to do with her life, and Dan, a young IRA member finally given an important task.

This is the kind of novel I love - there's a clear sense of time and place, with the mid-eighties being especially well rendered, and the characters are complex and compelling. The framing device of the bombing is almost beside the point, although it does ratchet up the tension of the final chapters considerably.

Ali Smith's new novel, Autumn, is the first in a planned quartet. It's a quiet novel, about the friendship between a girl and her elderly neighbor and how that friendship sustains itself over the years. It's set just after the Brexit vote, and the novel has a subdued, elegiac feel to it that suits the season that it draws its title from. But this isn't a gloomy book, it's full of Smith's careful observation of details and her beautiful writing.

Hope is exactly that, that's all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts toward human beings by other human beings in the world, remembering that they and we are all human, that nothing human is alien to us, the foul and the fair, and that most important of all we're here for a mere blink of the eyes, that's all. But in that Augenblick there's either a benign wink or a willing blindness, and we have to know we're equally capable of both, and to be ready to be above and beyond the foul even when we're up to our eyes in it.

Autumn moves back and forth in time, between Elisabeth now, staying at her mother's house so she can visit Daniel every day in the hospice, and as she watches neighbors fail to greet one another, and she battles with the postal clerk as she tries to renew her passport, and Elisabeth at eight, meeting and becoming best friends with the elderly man next door, who loves to discuss books and to tell her about art and music.

I'm eager to see where Smith takes the rest of the quartet. Autumn was a quiet book, but deceptively so.

I heard an interview with Smith this weekend on an NPR program, I can't remember which. I tried finding a link, but no good.

I finished Homegoing. It is an exceptional book, the best in storytelling. It is a bit depressing. Scratch that, it's a LOT depressing. I feel like I've taken it personally. It could be my own unknown history. At one point my husband asked me why I was reading it and when I answered (it's a good book) he replied, "Yeah, but how much do you hate white people right now?" What I like especially about this book is that is the first that I am aware of that explores the cost of slavery on the Africans left behind. The stories of the villages that benefited from the slave trade were not ones I was familiar with. At least it ended on a pleasant note. But I'm still depressed.

citygirl, Homegoing is an exceptional book. I'm still thinking of it - H's story especially, and the way the closing story echoed parts of Americanah. It's so valuable to look at the past from this different angle - there are plenty of books on the topic written by white people, and this shouldn't be dominated by white voices, or even American voices necessarily. Gyasi did a masterful job of balancing the history with the emotional toll of that history.

H's story really stuck with me, too. What is the legacy of that kind of incarceration? Ach, too much.

Even Dogs in the Wild is Ian Rankin at his best. Rebus is here, but he's retired, allowed back because Big Ger Cafferty is involved - a bullet is shot through his living room window one night and he won't talk to anyone but Rebus. Siobhan is in the middle of a complex series of murders and she and Malcolm Fox are seeing each other. Fox is stuck in a no-man's land, where he's too highly ranked to do basic police work, but there's very little available for an ex-Complaints guy. So he gets stuck chaperoning a group of Glasgow cops who have come to Edinburg as part of a long-term undercover operation. They don't trust him or want him anywhere near their work, but Fox has experience in finding out things.

It's a solid crime novel. And it's fun to see all the usual characters doing their thing. And Rebus's too cool for school attitude even has him opt out of getting information he would have found useful later, which I enjoyed seeing. This isn't a change in direction and the pattern of the series holds, but it's working well for now and Even Dogs in the Wild was fun to read.

>178 RidgewayGirl: Excellent review! I've got a lot of Rankin to read before I get to this one - don't know if that is good or bad!

Vivienne, I thought that the series lost it's mojo there for a book or two near when Rankin temporarily retired Rebus and came up with Malcolm Fox, but now that they are working together (more or less) along with Siobhan, the series is back to being excellent. I have a few back in the middle still to read, but I'm a sucker for a new, shiny book.

I'll have to get back on the Rankin train. I don't know when I got off, it was before Malcolm Fox I think, but I do remember Siobhan. Definitely one of the best mystery series. Maybe I should work backwards...nah, I'll try to find where I left off. Have you read PD James? (I'm sure you have.)

citygirl, yes, I went through quite the PD James stretch. Her later novels are terrible, though. She started writing about young-people-today and how Britain isn't what it once was, and I wish I'd stopped reading her a good decade before I did, because it does color how I view her now.

Have you read anything by Tana French? I'm reading The Trespasser now and it is fantastic.

Why, yes, I am a dedicated French fan. One of only two authors I buy in hardback. The Trespasser was good, but I still don't know how I feel about it. I reread the first one late last year or early this year, and plan to get on the second to reread sometime this year. The Likeness is my favorite.

One summer I read ALL the PD James mysteries (except the two (including Pemberley) that hadn't yet been published). I don't think I've read the very last, but I may have.

Anyhoo, yes, she was a little crankier towards the end, but I forgave her because it had been a very long time since an author had compelled me so much. She may be the best. I don't know, but maybe....

My favorite French is also The Likeness, which has such an unlikely premise I was sure I wouldn't like it. I do like how the title of The Trespasser harkens back to the title of The Likeness and how the relationship between Moran and Conway echoes that of Rob and Cassie.

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker is the story of a friendship. Mel and Sharon meet in college, when they discover a shared love of animation and comics. While they are as different as two people can be, they also share traumatic and challenging childhoods that have marked them. After college they set up shop in Brooklyn, working long hours for little recognition until they make a film based on Mel's childhood in central Florida, which lands them publicity and a grant from a prestigious organization. The attention and financial freedom put stresses on their friendship that may prove fatal.

It's hard to believe that The Animators is Whitaker's first novel. Not only is the writing self-assured, but the pacing and emotional resonance are solid. Whitaker never takes the easy road, making every action taken by the characters completely understandable. Both Mel and Sharon have their own voices, and there's no reaction that isn't solidly part of who they are. There's also a deep and fascinating love of animation working through the novel. Mel and Sharon's love of their chosen career is a large part of the charm of this novel, which can been grim at times. Whitaker writes about uncomfortable situations with a light touch and a feel for the emotional heart of the matter. I'm already looking forward to her next novel.

Sweet! I have The Animators on my library list. I'm glad to hear it's good!

>186 Bookmarque: So very good. I was sorry to finish it.

Tana French’s new novel, The Trespasser, returns her to the storytelling of the first books in the Dublin Murder Squad series. From the title echoing that of the only other book focused on a woman detective, to the dynamic of the first novel, centered around a partnership, this is French at her very best.

Antoinette Conway worked hard to earn a spot on the murder squad, but just two years in, she’s seriously considering leaving for a job with a private security firm. Her co-workers are openly hostile and she’s stuck on the night shift with the newest detective, fielding domestics and bar brawls. It’s not what she signed up for. Then, she and Moran are given what at first looks like another routine domestic murder, except they’ve been called in just as their shift ended and their gaffer has assigned a senior detective to assist them. From there, it only gets messier and before long, Conway has to question everything from the too-convenient suspect of the boyfriend to the actions of her fellow detectives.

This one never loses momentum or lets the reader come up for air. French does her best writing with the rote tasks of police work, and with the complex relationship that exists between two detectives working well together. French is writing something quite a bit more substantial than a simple police procedural and I was with her every step of the way.

And now I’m left to wait for the next in the series.

>188 RidgewayGirl: Waiting is very hard. This was a really good one.

>188 RidgewayGirl: I read Faithful Place and didn't know it was part of a series. Can I read The Trespasser als without needing to read the others or would you suggest I start at the beginning?

Colleen, I know! It was so good.

Barbara, the books don't have to be read in any order. Each book has a new protagonist. The protagonist of one book will have had a small role in a previous book, but not in any way that would affect one's enjoyment of the book.

Carlo Borromeo annihilated the Renaissance by turning torture into the only way to practice Christianity. He was declared a saint the instant he died. Vasco de Quiroga saved a whole world single-handedly and died in 1565, and the process of his canonization has yet to begin. I don't know what this book is about. I know that as I wrote it I was angry because the bad guys always win. Maybe all books are written simply because in every game the bad guys have the advantage and that is too much to bear.

Describing what Alvaro Enrigue's odd novel, Sudden Death, is about is a thankless task. After all, when the author himself admits to not knowing what the book is about, how can the hapless reader (and I was very hapless) hope to write a tidy review? Sudden Death is structured around a sixteenth century tennis game between the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo and the Italian artist Caravaggio. The novel ranges back and forth in time, from Hernán Cortés and the conquest of the Aztec kingdom to the Renaissance, amplified by comments and asides from the author, himself. There are tidbits on the history of tennis, a ton of history unfamiliar to this American reader and character studies of de Quevedo and Caravaggio. It's all very fabulous and unsettling.

It took me a while to settle into the rhythms and frenetic pace of this novel, but once I was there, I enjoyed it tremendously. It's a profane and heretical romp that leaves no historical figure unscathed. I had no doubt of Enrique's fierce wit or deep knowledge of the people and times he was writing about.

The popes of the Counter-Reformation were serious men, intent on their work, with little trace of worldliness. They put people to death in volume, preferably slowly and before an audience, but always after a trial. They were thoroughly nepotistic and they trafficked in influence as readily as one wipes one's nose on a cold day, but they had good reason: only family could be trusted, because if a pope left a flank exposed, any subordinate would slit his throat without trial. They had no mistresses or children; they wore sackcloth under their vestments; they smelled bad. They were great builders and tirelessly checked to see that not a single breast appeared in a single painting in any house of worship. They believed in what they did.