RidgewayGirl Reads in 2017 -- Part Two

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RidgewayGirl Reads in 2017 -- Part Two

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1RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Oct 5, 2017, 12:46 pm

It's the second quarter of the year already!

And so to begin:



Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, like his fellow artists of a certain age (he was born in 1880), fought in WWI only to see his life's work declared degenerate when the Nazis rose to power. Over 600 of his paintings were destroyed by the Nazis and in 1938 he committed suicide.

Kirchner used and reused his canvases. He would paint over earlier paintings or restretch the canvas so that he could paint on the back of an earlier painting.

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3RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Oct 4, 2017, 9:14 am

Second Quarter Reading

April
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeline Thien
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki
Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
How to Survive a Plague by David France
This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
American Rust by Philipp Meyer
True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies

May
Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta
You Had Me at Hello by Mhairi McFarlane
The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
Human Acts by Han Kang
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag translated by Srinath Perur
Ill Will by Dan Chaon
A Separation by Katie Kitamura

June
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans translated by David McKay
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
The Long Drop by Denise Mina
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
Rapture Culture by Amy Johnson Frykholm
Twisted River by Siobhan MacDonald
Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong
An Atlas of Countries that Don't Exist by Nick Middleton
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell
Dis Mem Ber by Joyce Carol Oates

Third Quarter Reading

July
Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson
Marlena by Julie Buntin
No One You Know by Michelle Richmond
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Autopsy of a Father by Pascale Kramer, translated by Robert Bononno
The Patriots by Sana Krasikov
By Gaslight by Steven Price
Letters to a Young Writer by Colum McCann
The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap by Gish Jen

August
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan
Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon
The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
Looking for Transwonderland by Noo Saro-Wiwa
Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

September
I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan, translated by Jessica Cohen
The Answers by Catherine Lacey
Frog Music by Emma Donoghue
The Weight of this World by David Joy
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
The Arrangement by Sarah Dunn
See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
The Whole World by Emily Winslow

October
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
Frontier by Can Xue

4RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Oct 4, 2017, 9:16 am

The Lists

Books by Year of Publication

1998 The Public Prosecutor by Jef Geeraerts
2002 My Lover's Lover by Maggie O'Farrell
2004 Rapture Culture by Amy Johnson Frykholm
2008 Frontier by Can Xue
No One You Know by Michelle Richmond
The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood
2009 American Rust by Philipp Meyer
2010 True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies
The Whole World by Emily Winslow
2012 Looking for Transwonderland by Noo Saro-Wiwa
You Had Me at Hello by Mhairi McFarlane
2013 Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag
Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue
War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans
2014 All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Human Acts by Han Kang
Men Explain Things To Me by Rebecca Solnit
2015 An Atlas of Countries that Don't Exist by Nick Middleton
Frog Music by Emma Donoghue
Get in Trouble by Kelly Link
Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
High Dive by Jonathan Lee
Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon
The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood
2016 All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
American Housewife: Stories by Helen Ellis
An American in Moscow by Amor Towles
Autopsy of a Father by Pascale Kramer
Autumn by Ali Smith
The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
The Break by Katherena Vermette
By Gaslight by Steven Price
The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapeña
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeline Thien
The Fall Guy by James Lasdun
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
How to Survive a Plague by David France
I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta
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
This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell
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
Twisted River by Siobhan MacDonald
Version Control by Dexter Palmer
We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge
2017 The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
The Answers by Catherine Lacey
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
The Arrangement by Sarah Dunn
A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates
Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
Dis Mem Ber by Joyce Carol Oates
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
The Girl at the Baggage Claim by Gish Jen
Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong
Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
Ill Will by Dan Chaon
Letters to a Young Writer by Colum McCann
The Long Drop by Denise Mina
Marlena by Julie Buntin
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
The Patriots by Sana Krasikov
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
Tears We Cannot Stop by Michael Eric Dyson
Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
The Weight of this World by David Joy
Woman No. 17 by Edan Lepucki

6RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Oct 2, 2017, 9:50 am

Mexico
Alvaro Enrigue (Sudden Death)

Nigeria
Noo Saro-Wiwa (Looking for Transwonderland)

Pakistan
Mohsin Hamid (Exit West)

Switzerland
Pascale Kramer (Autopsy of a Father)

Ukraine
Sana Krasikov (The Patriots) (country of birth)

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)
Julie Buntin (Marlena)
Michael Chabon (Moonglow)
Dan Chaon (Ill Will)
John Darnielle (Universal Harvester)
Sarah Dunn (The Arrangement)
Michael Eric Dyson (Tears We Cannot Stop)
Helen Ellis (American Housewife: Stories)
David France (How to Survive a Plague)
Siri Hustvedt (The Blazing World)
Amy Johnson Frykholm (Rapture Culture)
Roxane Gay (Difficult Women, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body)
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)
Joshilyn Jackson (The Almost Sisters)
Gish Jen (The Girl at the Baggage Claim)
David Joy (The Weight of this World)
Joseph Kanon (Leaving Berlin)
Rachel Khong (Goodbye Vitamin)
Katie Kitamura (The Separation)
Sana Krasikov (The Patriots) (country of residence)
Catherine Lacey (The Answers)
Paul La Farge (The Night Ocean)
Shari Lapeña (The Couple Next Door)
Min Jin Lee (Pachinko)
Edan Lepucki (Woman No. 17)
Kelly Link (Get in Trouble)
Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy)
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (The Fact of a Body)
Philipp Meyer (American Rust)
Lydia Millet (Sweet Lamb of Heaven)
Ottessa Moshfegh (Homesick for Another World)
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Refugees) (country of residence)
Joyce Carol Oates (A Book of American Martyrs, Dis Mem Ber)
Dexter Palmer (Version Control)
Francine Prose (Mister Monkey)
James Renner (True Crime Addict)
Michelle Richmond (No One You Know)
Emily Ruskovich (Idaho)
Rebecca Solnit (Men Explain Things to Me)
Dana Spiotta (Innocents and Others)
Elizabeth Strout (Anything is Possible)
Michelle Tea (Black Wave)
Amor Towles (An American in Moscow)
Kayla Rae Whitaker (The Animators)
Emily Winslow (The Whole World)

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

7RidgewayGirl
Avr 6, 2017, 9:34 am

And there it is. A new and shiny thread ready to be cluttered with books and comments of various kinds.

8NanaCC
Avr 6, 2017, 9:40 am

Very interesting artist at the top of your thread. It is so sad to think of everything lost.

9RidgewayGirl
Avr 6, 2017, 9:56 am

Colleen, there was so much art lost. The world would be so much richer had it survived. And German Expressionism would be as well-known and lauded as French Impressionism.

Here's another by him.

10citygirl
Avr 6, 2017, 11:12 am

Hi! Love your shiny new thread, with new pictures and lists...all that a fellow bookworm could want :-)

11SassyLassy
Avr 6, 2017, 4:26 pm

Oh dear. I just read your thoughts on Sudden Death in your previous thread and then somehow I seem to have ordered it!

Love the image in >9 RidgewayGirl:

12RidgewayGirl
Avr 6, 2017, 5:16 pm

Hi, citygirl! What did you think about Homegoing?

SL, I will be eager to read your thoughts on it. And Kirchner is one of my favorites. I'm still mad about so many of his painting being destroyed.

13citygirl
Avr 7, 2017, 10:12 am

It was pretty devastating. Beautifully written in that style that seems so natural, but some brutal truths within. I think it's an important book.

14RidgewayGirl
Avr 7, 2017, 12:08 pm

>13 citygirl: I'm eager to see what Gyasi writes next.

15RidgewayGirl
Avr 9, 2017, 11:17 am



Pachinko is a multi-generational story of a Korean family, from their modest farm on an island, through their move to Japan at the start of WWII and on into the 1980s. Min Jin Lee explores how Koreans living in Japan are treated, even after they have been their for generations and how it affects both them and Japanese society. Her descriptions of life in Japan during WWII were especially vivid. Sunja and Isaac move from Korea to Japan when he takes the post of a minister to a protestant Christian congregation, a difficult and dangerous position as any lack of conformity is considered treasonous. The struggles of the generations who came of age after the war do feel less weighty than those of their parents, but they still faced life in a country that was prejudiced against them and barred them from many kinds of employment, leading the family into the world of pachinko parlors, a world where the yakuza (Japanese gangsters) control many of the gambling dens and a world that isn't entirely respectable, although it is lucrative.

Pachinko was an interesting book to read. The author kept things moving and the history she recounted was largely unfamiliar. She was clearly writing for a western audience, and she took pains to explain historical events. My only complaint about the book is one that wouldn't be an issue for many readers; Lee keeps the secondary characters uncomplicated, and often the primary characters as well. They aren't complexly drawn. Admittedly, in a novel that has such a large cast of characters and which covers so much time, this is difficult to do.

16RidgewayGirl
Avr 12, 2017, 1:03 pm



Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeline Thien is a multi-generational novel about the Chinese Cultural Revolution and afterwards that puts all other multi-generational novels to shame. It's really good, combining wonderful and vibrant character studies with excellent writing and story structure. Thien deserves all the praise she's received for this book.

Marie is a girl living Vancouver, Canada, with her mother, her father having returned to China and committed suicide, when they are joined by Ai-ming, a college student fleeing China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square. She leaves them to go to the US in hopes of being granted asylum and Marie never sees her again. In adulthood, Marie undertakes a search for Ai-ming, who may have returned to China. As her search goes on, the story is told of how Ai-ming and Marie's family were connected and goes further back to the story of Ai-ming's parents and grandparents, as they survive WWII, Mao's reign as dictator and on into the turmoil of Tiananmen Square.

It's a lot of history, and a quantity of characters, but Thien juggles the storylines adeptly and makes each character from Big Mother Knife to Marie herself, vivid and complex. This is a novel well worth reading. Also, it's a page-turner.

17Simone2
Avr 13, 2017, 12:15 am

>9 RidgewayGirl: I have never even heard of Kirchner, what a shame. Love these two pictures. Did any of his work survive WWII and are they to be seen somewhere?

18RidgewayGirl
Avr 13, 2017, 10:40 am

Barbara, yes, a number did survive and are able to be seen in museums, mainly in Germany, although there are paintings on view in museums in New York and Davos, Switzerland. I don't know what's over in your corner of Europe, but it wouldn't surprise me to find a Kirchner tucked into some corner of an art museum in Brussels or Amsterdam.



I know this one hangs in the Pinothek der Moderne in Munich.

19Simone2
Modifié : Avr 13, 2017, 4:59 pm

It is beautiful. I am going to Google and find out more about him. Thank you for bringing him to my attention.

And an update some minutes later: Nacktes Mädchen hinter Vorhang (Fränzi) hangs in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, practically my neighbour. Tomorrow I have a day off from work so will go and have a look!

20RidgewayGirl
Avr 17, 2017, 1:52 pm

Barbara, what did you think? And among the many things I miss about Munich, that easy access to the best of the art world is near the top of my list.

21RidgewayGirl
Avr 17, 2017, 1:52 pm



Woman No. 17 is Lady, a wealthy woman, separated from her husband, with two sons, one a toddler and one beginning college. She hires S as a nanny for her younger son, so that she can work on the book she's writing about her relationship with her older son, Seth, who is mute. S is adrift after the end of a relationship and determined to live her life as an art project.

There's a feeling of unease throughout the novel that Edan Lepucki executed really well. This isn't a crime story, or even a novel where a lot happens, but rather a close look at motherhood from the point of view of two women who both had very flawed and difficult relationships with their own mothers, one of whom is figuring out motherhood for herself. Halfway through, I found myself buying a copy of her first novel, which is to say, Woman No. 17 is worth reading, especially if you like character studies and fine writing.

22japaul22
Avr 17, 2017, 3:08 pm

>21 RidgewayGirl: That looks interesting, thanks for putting it on my radar.

23Simone2
Avr 17, 2017, 4:17 pm

>20 RidgewayGirl: Do you know this work of his, Kay? It is beautiful, this nude girl, looking so shy and self-conscious. Thank you again for bringing Kirchner up.

24dchaikin
Avr 17, 2017, 4:51 pm

That painting in your op is striking. The three reviews, of Lee, Thien and Lepucki, are terrific.

I finished and reviewed the Gyasi. Probably I didn't like it as much as you did, but I did really enjoy it quite a bit.

25RidgewayGirl
Avr 19, 2017, 2:37 pm

Jennifer, I'd be interested in finding out what you think about it.

Barbara, I've never seen it in person, but I've seen other Kirchner nudes and they are fascinating. I'm so glad you like his work.

Thanks, Daniel. I've been very lucky and happy with my reading so far this year. Giving up the idea that I should read certain books and allowing myself to read what I want has been a good decision for me.

26RidgewayGirl
Avr 19, 2017, 2:38 pm



I like short stories. When they're done well, they pack a novel's punch into a a few dozen pages. Or, to belabor the point, they're like potent shots of whisky, to the novel's tankard of beer. Sometimes a short story does nothing more than perfectly depict a moment or a mood, and sometimes they're weird and discombobulating, like Kelly Link's collection, Get in Trouble. Link draws easy comparisons to George Saunders and Heather O'Neill, but she's her own off-beat thing.

Link sets the reader down in the middle of only superficially normal settings and tells a story, leaving the reader to figure out on the fly how the world Link is writing about is different from the one we're used to, even as her characters do ordinary things like sit on a hillside with a lover, prepare for a hurricane, or go to meet someone at a hotel. Link's stories occupy worlds where fairy tales are factual elements of daily life, superheroes do things like play chess in the park and attend conventions, and Florida has become, as we all knew it would, weirder than everywhere else.

As in any collection, some stories work better than others, but each contained a novel's worth of ideas. I'm still thinking about several of the stories. The opening story, The Summer People provides a perfect introduction to Link's off-kilter and brilliant mind.

27AlisonY
Avr 19, 2017, 6:11 pm

Hope you're enjoying American Rust as much as I did.

28dchaikin
Avr 19, 2017, 9:25 pm

>26 RidgewayGirl: that Florida bit, it sounds like nonfiction. Should we read Saunders, O'Neill, or Link...if we had choose one?

29RidgewayGirl
Avr 19, 2017, 10:10 pm

Alison, I may be. It's very good.

Daniel, I'd recommend Tenth of December by George Saunders to you. I think you might like him. In any case, he's easier than Pynchon.

30RidgewayGirl
Avr 23, 2017, 12:59 pm



David France's book, How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS isn't a carefully balanced account of the work done to find ways to treat AIDS. It also isn't balanced geographically or emotionally. David France moved to New York city in the early eighties, looking for a place where he would find acceptance and be allowed to be himself. Instead, he entered the epicenter of a horrific epidemic at its beginning and remained through to its ending. So while How to Survive a Plague tries to be balanced and journalistic in its approach, the real human feelings, along with the chaos and frantic need to find any source of hope shines through this account of the New York gay community during the AIDS crisis.

Going through the crisis chronologically, the story is told with all of the physical and emotional turmoil intact. As people struggled, even to find out what was going on, what this new disease was, as the government and American society reacted with a callous disregard at best, and an unseemly schadenfreude at worst, the men at the center were frightened for both themselves and their loved ones. Out of that, rose groups willing to do what they could to find answers, to care for the afflicted and to find ways of compelling the NIH and pharmaceutical companies to get anything that might help to market. And these groups were often at loggerheads with each other, with one group fighting for one thing and another fighting with equal fervor for the opposite. France does a good job of reflecting those conflicts in his writing and his own experiences during this time are recounted along with those of the other members of New York's gay community.

I learned a huge amount from this book. And while it's length is daunting, and arguments could be made for tightening up the story, the way it was written, with each meeting of each group detailed, along with the inter-personal conflicts and resolutions carefully recounted, that very approach deepened my immersion in the subject. And while the focus stays fixed on the fight for a cure, and how that was achieved, what remains in my mind are the heart-breaking and utterly common stories that France includes like the one of one partner last seeing his longtime life companion at the doors of the emergency room, as hospitals routinely barred entry to the partners of people with AIDS.

31janeajones
Avr 23, 2017, 2:34 pm

We moved out of NYC just before anyone knew what was going on, but because we had many friends and colleagues in NYC and London, we became somewhat enmeshed in the situation. It ravaged the theatre community (my husband is an actor) and other arts communities.

32RidgewayGirl
Avr 23, 2017, 10:04 pm

Jane, I can't even imagine. I knew three men who died and I was a teenager living in Arizona.

33auntmarge64
Avr 24, 2017, 5:12 pm

You've made me want to read Do Not Say We have Nothing. Luckily it's available at BPL as a Kindle ebook ...... Just sayin'

34valkyrdeath
Avr 25, 2017, 7:32 pm

>15 RidgewayGirl: Good to see your opinion of Pachinko. I've been curious about that book for a while as I enjoyed the author's previous book. It sounds like Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a book I need to check out too.

35RidgewayGirl
Avr 26, 2017, 12:06 pm

>33 auntmarge64: Do Not Say We Have Nothing is one of the best books I've read this year. It really is very good. I hope you get to it soon!

Gary, I was running into Pachinko everywhere, including Costco. I can see why - it's an excellent, mainstream novel that looks at a culture (Koreans living in Japan) that most Westerners know nothing about.

36RidgewayGirl
Avr 26, 2017, 12:06 pm



With her first book, After You'd Gone, Maggie O'Farrell won my goodwill forever. She a writer who writes well, and has an ability to bring her characters to life, they don't exist idly on a page. Her novels are hard to characterize, they're somewhat lighter than most literary fiction, but they're lacking in any adherence to formula and tend to explore what loss does to a person in some way or another.

So This Must be the Place fits right in with her usual novels. In it, Daniel meets Claudette and they get married, but both of them have complicated pasts that they never fully dealt with. Daniel has children from a previous marriage, as well as romantic relationships that ended badly, while Claudette left behind a long-term relationship and a successful career that she fled from, leaving with her son early one morning and hiding out in the most rural corner of Ireland she can find. They're both not very good at trust or relationships.

It's in the telling that this novel runs aground. O'Farrell has a great story to tell, but since she gives the background of and center stage to so many secondary characters, from the children to a woman met on a holiday excursion, the story is so fractured it's hard to see the marriage at the center of the novel. Time is spent on both Daniel and Claudette, and on their relationships with the many people they were involved with at different stages of their lives,but little light is shone on their marriage, so that while I was interested in both Daniel and Claudette individually, I never saw why their marriage was important to either of them. In some writers' hands this approach of never showing the center of a novel directly can work, but here it just means that the book feels like it would have worked better as a series of unrelated short stories.

37RidgewayGirl
Avr 29, 2017, 9:10 am



A Gentleman in Moscow is the story of Count Alexander Rostov, who in 1922, was escorted to the doors of the Metropol hotel, where he had been staying, and told he'd be arrested if he left the building. Rostov was a member of the aristocracy, and should have been summarily shot, but a certain event meant that the government was unwilling to shoot him. And so he existed as a non-person, able to live in quite a bit more comfort than his countrymen, but stranded in the limbo of house arrest.

But living in a protected place, outside of the turmoil of life in the Soviet Union during the first half of the last century, didn't mean he was outside of life. The Metropol remained the premier hotel in the city, and was visited by government bigwigs, foreigners and celebrities alike. The two restaurants saw people from every walk of life and Rostov would eventually end up as a member of staff.

Amor Towles is a skilled writer, and one who has clearly taken the time to construct a solid novel. The book is well paced and the characters are wonderfully written. Alexander Rostov is a charming man and this book exudes charm and warmth. Which is really all I have to say in criticism; like his old university roommate points out when he visits Rostov after the end of the Great Patriotic War (WWII), by being incarcerated, Rostov ended up being luckier than all of his friends and associates. A Gentleman in Moscow provides a nicely buffered version of the history of the Soviet Union, free of the fears, struggles to survive and uncertainties faced by everyone else. Avoiding the Politburo is presented as a series of amusing escapades. I was charmed by this novel, although by the end, all tension was absent as I knew that all would be well, just like it had all turned out well in every other adventure undertaken by the Count. Still, this is escapist, comfort reading of the highest quality, written by an author who knows what he's doing.

38japaul22
Avr 29, 2017, 12:27 pm

I just won Woman No. 17 in the ER program - looking forward to reading it!

39RidgewayGirl
Avr 29, 2017, 12:49 pm

Jennifer, I look forward to finding out what you think of it.

40RidgewayGirl
Mai 12, 2017, 11:20 am



It astonishes me that American Rust is Philipp Meyer's first published novel. It's not so much that the story is gripping or that he's captured the atmosphere of a place; plenty of debut novels have done this, but that the pacing is perfectly timed, the characters fully realized and the book ends exactly where it should.

The story begins with Isaac English leaving his rural Pennsylvania home with the intention of riding the rails to California. He stops by to say good-bye to his best friend, Poe, a high school baseball star who never left and who lives in a trailer with his mother. They walk awhile together, and when they meet some other men when they take shelter in an abandoned building, violence ensues. American Rust deals with the aftermath of that crime and it's impact on the families involved. Mostly though, it's about a time and a place. Isaac and Poe live in a community that had made its living off of steel manufacturing, and with the mills closed, the towns in the county are sinking into poverty.

My father read American Rust, and said that it perfectly summed up the place he grew up. Given the amount of attention being paid to places like this one, American Rust is as timely today as it was when it was written almost a decade ago.

41RidgewayGirl
Mai 12, 2017, 5:14 pm



True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies is a novel about a self-destructive young woman. The unnamed protagonist is an intensely self-involved and unstable woman who becomes involved with a man she meets in the benefits office where she works. It's a terrible relationship with a dangerous man, and both her parents and her best friend are unable to keep her from seeing him. Her behavior becomes increasingly erratic as the novel progresses and it's clear that she's even less in control of herself than her exterior behavior indicates.

This isn't a book for everyone. Told from inside the head of the protagonist, the novel is disturbing and, as her behavior and thought patterns become less and less reasonable, the reader is forced to endure her disequilibrium right along with her. The writing is good and the author's willingness to dive into dark places was impressive.

42kidzdoc
Mai 15, 2017, 3:58 am

Thanks for that great review of How to Survive a Plague, Kay. I bought a copy of it last month, and I'll read it soon.

43RidgewayGirl
Mai 15, 2017, 1:46 pm

Darryl, I'll be interested in your thoughts about How to Survive a Plague, especially since you'll be reading from the viewpoint of a health professional.

44RidgewayGirl
Mai 15, 2017, 1:46 pm



I began reading Innocents and Others by Dana Spiotta armed only with the knowledge that a person whose taste in books is similar to mine made an off-hand comment about it being very good. The title gave me the expectation of the book being a collection of short stories, which was only the first surprising thing about this novel. I didn't even read the dust jacket until the book turned abruptly from being one story into being a very different one, and I think I was lucky in approaching Innocents and Others in complete ignorance about it.

Innocents and Others centers on Meadow, a driven young filmmaker, who has a strong friendship with Carrie, another filmmaker. As their lives progress from high school to adulthood, their friendship shifts in the way of adult friends whose lives have moved in different directions. But more than friendship, this book is about filmmaking and a passion for films and how they are made, with both women pursuing different visions in that art form. There's a lot of the detail of how films are made, the history of film and detailed accounts of each of Meadow's documentary films. It was fascinating, and I ended up looking up some of her topics to learn more.

I suspect that Innocents and Others would not appeal to everyone. It's an emotionally raw novel that is nonetheless written in a distancing way and the details of film-making may not prove fascinating for all readers. I loved this book, with its unapologetic focus on female friendship and the complexities of relationships.

45RidgewayGirl
Mai 16, 2017, 4:57 pm



I really like Mhairi McFarlane's light novels and You Had Me at Hello was no exception. The story doesn't always hold together perfectly, but McFarlane write with a humorous touch and her characters are intelligent and likable. The story follows Rachel, a reporter with a local paper in Manchester, who had a best friend while in university, but they parted ways after graduation. Now Ben has moved to Manchester and they rekindle their friendship. Rachel likes her job and is training a new court reporter, who may be less scrupulous than Rachel.

This is a fun, escapist novel about intelligent, likable people. Rachel is fun to spend time with, she loves her job, if not all her co-workers, and her friends are written as actual people who have more to do than be foils and sounding boards for Rachel. And the plot, slight though it was, moved along at a pleasant pace. I need to remember to read books like this one more often.

46janeajones
Mai 16, 2017, 7:08 pm

Innocents and Others sounds intriguing. I really like novels about professions and crafts I know little about.

47RidgewayGirl
Mai 19, 2017, 1:12 pm

Jane, when it's done well, a book full of passion for a profession I know little about is wonderful. And this was beautifully done - a lot of detail but all in service to moving the story forward.

48RidgewayGirl
Mai 19, 2017, 1:12 pm



This book! If I were allowed to do so, I'd give the first half of Alex Marwood's crime novel, The Wicked Girls, an enthusiastic five stars. Marwood started with a bang, with the story of two pre-adolescent girls who were convicted of a murder and, years later, given new identities after their release, to protect them as their case was a famous one. The novel begins with the adult lives of the two women, although the reader doesn't know which adult was which child as both stories unfold.

In the present day, there are a series of murders of young women in the holiday seaside town of Whitmouth. Both women are tangential to the crime; Amber works as a cleaner in the amusement park where one body is found and Kirsty is a freelance reporter, sent to cover the story. As their paths begin to circle, the story tightens.

I read the first half of the book sure that I'd found another author as brilliant as Tana French. Then, as the story unfolded, it became more predictable, so that the third quarter of the book slipped back to a three and a half star read. I was still interested, but the plot started to fall into predictability. And the last quarter of the book was a generous two star read; the writing and the characters lost their nuance and vivacity and became rote, predictable and something that would not surprise anyone. I'm still surprised that a novel that was so good could change so completely, as though the first half had been written by a different person than the second half.

49citygirl
Mai 19, 2017, 3:21 pm

Did you know that Anne Perry is one of the girls whose story is told in the movie Heavenly Creatures? I haven't been able to read her since I learned that.

50NanaCC
Mai 19, 2017, 5:22 pm

I'm sorry to hear that Wicked Girls didn't pass muster. I had heard about it somewhere, and it sounded interesting. Now, I'm not rushing to get to it.

51RidgewayGirl
Mai 19, 2017, 5:44 pm

citygirl, I knew that, but I haven't read any Anne Perry, although you'd think it would make my ghoulish mind want to read her immediately. I've always had the impression she wrote mysteries that approached the cozy.

Colleen, the first half is fantastic. Unfortunately, it's impossible to leave a crime novel halfway through. I'll give Marwood another go, based on that first half, but only one more chance.

52citygirl
Mai 21, 2017, 8:29 am

No, not cozies. Some of the murders are positively gruesome, which makes the whole thing worse.

Actually Wicked Girls still sounds interesting to me. I may not seek it out, but if it comes my way I'll give it a shot.

53RidgewayGirl
Mai 21, 2017, 11:44 am

citygirl, I may have to read one then, except there are so many new and interesting books being published and I'm currently mostly reading brand new titles. And Marwood's worth trying. I've got another book now as I want to see if she developed on the promise of the beginning of The Wicked Girls or if she's chasing the bestseller market by simplifying her characters and making her plots more predictable.

54RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Mai 23, 2017, 2:25 pm

55RidgewayGirl
Mai 23, 2017, 2:37 pm



There's no way that I can write anything that accurately sums up my reaction to Elizabeth Strout's new book, Anything is Possible. In form, it's most closely related to Olive Kitteridge, being a collection of closely related short stories about people from Amgash, the small town where the protagonist of Strout's previous novel, My Name is Lucy Barton grew up. Amgash is a struggling agricultural community, whose residents work as high school guidance counselors, janitors, nurse's aides and housewives. Those who leave enjoy broader prospects, but are nonetheless shaped by the town they grew up in. Lucy Barton's existence hangs over the town; she's a success story, but the residents are ashamed of how she and her family were ostracized and of the bleak poverty that clung to them.

Each story stands on its own, but is made richer by being situated with other stories about the same place, with central characters from one story being mentioned in another. I'm a sucker for the interconnected short story format, and I'm a fan of Strout's understated but fine writing, but I'm pretty sure this book is very, very good.

56NanaCC
Mai 23, 2017, 4:06 pm

>55 RidgewayGirl: I really enjoyed Olive Kitteridge, so I've added this one to the wishlist.

57AlisonY
Mai 23, 2017, 5:29 pm

>54 RidgewayGirl: I like that. Thanks for sharing.

58RidgewayGirl
Mai 24, 2017, 6:55 pm

Colleen, I look forward to finding out what you think of it, but it is excellent.

Thanks, Alison.

59RidgewayGirl
Mai 24, 2017, 6:56 pm



Back during the Tournament of Books, people kept mentioning how much more they'd loved Human Acts than The Vegetarian. I was sure that something was wrong with them. Now that I've read Human Acts, I have to concede that they had a point. While The Vegetarian was a weird, off-balance tour de force, Human Acts is more so.

In May, 1980, a student-led uprising in Gwangju, South Korea was violently quashed by authorities. Over 600 people were killed by government forces, and many more imprisoned. In Human Acts, Han Kang looks at the repercussions of that event in a series of inter-connected short stories, beginning with the story of a student searching for the body of a friend, and continuing with the stories of a protester who was imprisoned and tortured, an editor with a small publishing company who is punished for working with a specific translator, a young woman who grew up in a house which had previously held someone killed in the uprising and even a boy killed by government forces.

This book is astonishing, both in the brilliance of the structure and writing, and in the power of the story being told. Han Kang chose not to begin the story with the uprising itself, but with its tragic aftermath. And she repeatedly hammers the real human suffering home to the reader. While this isn't a cheerful book, it is an important and compelling one.

60RidgewayGirl
Mai 27, 2017, 9:06 am



Ghachar Ghochar is a slender novella about a family in India who once struggled to get by but sudden business success has catapulted them into wealth, a state of affairs that is not altogether positive. Vivek Shanbhag's tale is charming, but with dark undertones and comparisons to Chekov's short stories are not without merit. There's a lightness to the writing, here gorgeously translated by Srinath Perur, that makes the book a delight to read. It had me hooked from the opening description of the narrator's favorite café. The book is very short, but there's a lot packed into its pages.

61RidgewayGirl
Mai 31, 2017, 9:30 am



Dustin Tillman is a psychologist and a widower with two sons. When he was thirteen, in the early eighties, his adopted brother murdered his parents and his aunt and uncle. Dustin's testimony helped put him in prison and the case was notorious at the time, when the Satanic Panic was in full swing. Now he discovers that his brother is being released from prison. At the same time, he's spending more of his time with one of his patients, an ex-cop who is obsessed with what he sees as a series of serial killings of drunk college students.

Dustin's younger son is adrift. He was supposed to have begun college classes, but he never made it to a single class, using the tuition money for drugs and hanging out with his high school friend Rabbit, and Rabbit's dying mother. Since his mother's death, his father hasn't noticed anything and so when an uncle he hadn't known he had gets in touch, Aaron is eager to get to know him.

Ill Will is an odd and brilliant book. Dan Chaon plays around with structure and language in a way that made me very happy. The two central crime stories twine around each other and Chaon allows each story to feel both plausible and like a weird conspiracy theory. Like the two primary narrators, the reader is left with many questions as the book progresses. The ending has me utterly confused, and I'm still trying to figure out what was and wasn't true. Chaon is clearly an author who is comfortable making the reader pay attention and drawn conclusions without any hand-holding. I generally like an ambiguous ending, but in this case I'm looking for someone to explain it all to me.

62citygirl
Mai 31, 2017, 1:16 pm

Verrrrry intriguing.

63RidgewayGirl
Juin 1, 2017, 1:42 pm



Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips took me weeks to read. It's not an overly long book, the author writes well, and the story is a fascinating one, but Forsyth county is just a hundred miles from my home and a quick two hour drive away. It could just as easily have happened here.

Forsyth county lies just outside of Atlanta, Georgia and Patrick Phillips moved there with his family in the 1980s, when the county still didn't allow non-white people to live, or even pass through there. In 1987, his family went to march with Civil Rights campaigners seeking to integrate the county, but when the busloads of peaceful marchers were turned back by crowds of Forsyth county residents, Phillips and his family had to have the police escort them home. Then Phillips left for university and his hometown became just a colorful topic of conversation.

Years later, he has written a book about how in 1912, after one woman is discovered in bed with a black man and another is discovered murdered in the woods, angry mobs drove all African Americans from the county. And they and their descendants kept Forsyth county free of anyone not seen as white until the 1990s. Phillips is rigorous in his research and the story he tells is shocking and difficult to read about, but is tremendously important -- it's essential reading given how recently the county was integrated and how the attitudes still exist today.

64citygirl
Juin 1, 2017, 7:03 pm

Yeah, I heard about this one on NPR. Fascinating and horrifying. *shudder* We vacationed in Forsyth County in the early 00s. I kept expecting people to act weird, but they didn't.

65Simone2
Juin 2, 2017, 9:02 am

>61 RidgewayGirl: Great review. Guess I'll need that one.

66RidgewayGirl
Juin 2, 2017, 4:31 pm

citygirl, yeah once the bigots lost, the county could become a bedroom community of Atlanta and coincidentally a lot wealthier and a little diverse.

Barbara, I'd love to hear what you think of it.

67RidgewayGirl
Juin 3, 2017, 2:37 pm



A married couple have separated, but agreed to keep their marital status quiet for a while, when the husband disappears while in Greece. Sent by her mother-in-law, who still believes them to be together, the unnamed narrator of A Separation checks in to a room at the resort hotel in an isolated area to look for her husband.

A Separation reminded me a lot of Rachel Cusk's Outline series, with its detached tone and how the narrator is content to keenly observe what is going on around her. She's in an odd position, being viewed as the wife of the absent man, but having been apart for six months, she's moved on with her life.

There is a crime in this novel, but this is not a crime novel, or a thriller, but a quiet examination of relationships and how a change in one relationship affects other relationships. Katie Kitamura's writing is clear and lovely and does much to enhance the meditative feel of this novel.

68baswood
Juin 3, 2017, 5:06 pm

>54 RidgewayGirl: Wiki tells me that Good Bones is a very popular poem and I can understand why.

Enjoying your excellent reviews.

69RidgewayGirl
Juin 3, 2017, 5:22 pm

Thanks, Bas.

70RidgewayGirl
Juin 6, 2017, 5:46 pm



To anyone who read Ottessa Moshfegh's excellent and distasteful noir, Eileen, her new collection of short stories, Homesick for Another World, follows much of the same ground, being full of creepy, repulsive and lonely people interacting with other repulsive characters. It rarely ends well.

But a short story collection isn't the best platform for her writing. Most of the stories would do very well set apart from the others, but all together, they form an unrelenting repetition of misery that becomes less effective when read one after the other, although I did try to only read one story a day. In the form of a novel, an off-putting character creates an effective atmosphere of unpleasantness that is a great deal of fun to read. In a series of short stories, with each main character as creepy as the last, the effectiveness is reduced.

That said, the story called Mr. Wu encapsulated Moshfegh's style perfectly. In it, a shy older man wonders how to approach a neighbor, a woman he has fallen in love with from afar. As he tries to work up the courage and to find the right approach, the reader slowly realizes how terrible it would be for this relationship to blossom.

71VivienneR
Juin 7, 2017, 3:49 pm

Enjoying all your excellent reviews. My wishlist has ballooned!

72RidgewayGirl
Juin 7, 2017, 4:05 pm

It's only fair, Vivienne, considering what your thread does to mine.

73bragan
Juin 8, 2017, 11:13 pm

>70 RidgewayGirl: I don't know, though. At least they were slightly different horribly unpleasant people in each story. I'm not sure I could quite face up to the thought of reading an entire novel about any of them, myself.

74RidgewayGirl
Juin 9, 2017, 8:36 am

Betty, Eileen was about one horribly unpleasant person and I loved that book so much. I do know that I'll be reading whatever Moshfegh writes next.

75AlisonY
Juin 9, 2017, 6:28 pm

Lurking and enjoying your reviews :)

76bragan
Juin 9, 2017, 7:10 pm

>74 RidgewayGirl: That almost tempts me to read Eileen. But despite the fact that I very much admire Moshfegh's writing, I'm not sure I'm up for it.

77RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Juin 9, 2017, 9:03 pm

Betty, there's an incident with frozen vomit that I'm still thinking about.

Lovely to have you here, Alison.

78RidgewayGirl
Juin 13, 2017, 4:14 pm



Author Stefan Hertmans was given his grandfather's diaries but it took him several years to get around to reading them. With War and Turpentine he has taken his memories, his family's memories and the diaries and written a novel about his grandfathers' life. The book is divided into two themes, that of painting (turpentine) and WWI (war). His grandfather, Urbain, was a keen amateur painter, carefully copying various classical paintings. His own father had been a church painter, restoring paintings and frescos in religious buildings around Ghent and further afield. A love of art in general and of classical painting in particular bookended his life.

Urbain was a young man when WWI started and Belgium was a battlefield. This part of the book is taken directly from Urbain's diaries, which he wrote some years after the war had ended. This part of the book has a very different feel than the rest. Urbain was either a brilliant and prescient soldier, surrounded by less able men, or he thought he was a brilliant soldier surrounded by idiots. In any case, he was injured numerous times and spent one convalescence in England, before returning to the battlefield.

War and Turpentine is a picture of Belgium that no longer exists, and is a character study of a man who was both ordinary and unique. I found the parts about his childhood and what being poor meant at a time before government assistance and social safety nets to be both fascinating and sobering.

79arubabookwoman
Juin 14, 2017, 9:35 pm

>61 RidgewayGirl: I had the same puzzled reaction to Ill Will that you did I think. I wrote about my questions in a very spoilerish review over on my thread.

Enjoyed your reviews as always.

80RidgewayGirl
Juin 15, 2017, 9:15 am

arubabookwoman, I skipped your review at the time because I was planning to read Ill Will, but I went back and read it now. The ending has me scratching my head. I have a high tolerance for unresolved endings, but this takes that to an extreme. Next month, The Morning News (https://themorningnews.org) Rooster Summer Reading Challenge is reading Ill Will and discussing it. I'm eager to find out what different readers think about it, especially the two authors hosting the read.

81RidgewayGirl
Juin 19, 2017, 6:02 pm



Universal Harvester was an odd book that sucked me right into it. John Darnielle has written a sort of horror story about Jeremy, who is working as an assistant manager at a video rental store when a few of the tapes appear with odd and frightening insertions in the middle of the VHS tapes. Looking more closely, the location of these clips is a farmhouse not to far from the small town of Nevada, Iowa.

The horror in this book is subtle, and is effective for most of the book. It's a masterclass in creating a feel of rising dread. Whether that creepiness is maintained as the origin of the clips is unveiled is debatable. Universal Harvester does succeed unreservedly in portraying a specific time and place and Darnielle's writing is never gets in the way of the story he's telling.

82RidgewayGirl
Juin 22, 2017, 3:16 pm



With The Long Drop, Denise Mina has changed directions somewhat. Mina has taken what is known about Peter Manuel, a serial killer who killed the family of William Watt in 1956, and a night these two men spent drinking together.

After Watt's family was murdered, Watt was arrested and spent time in prison. He ended up trying to find the murderer himself, to clear his name. Manuel agrees to meet with him and promises he has information. So begins Mina's tale of a night two very different men spent drinking together in the bars of Glasgow, and as the evening progresses, Mina takes the reader both back to the time of the murders and forward to the eventual trial of Peter Manuel.

If you didn't already think Mina was a masterful writer, this novel will convince you. Mina tells a compelling story, gives life to the characters, writes 1950s Glasgow into soot-encrusted life and even adds a touch of humor to the mix. Mina's made a name for herself writing tough, flawed women and here she shows she can write about anything and make it sing.

83NanaCC
Juin 22, 2017, 4:40 pm

>82 RidgewayGirl: you definitely hit me with a BB on this one.

84dchaikin
Juin 23, 2017, 2:22 pm

Hopelessly behind, but happy to see what you're up to. You seem to be cruising along. War and Turpentine has a lot of appeal (I swear I've read a review elsewhere in CR). Interesting about Mina and The Long Drop. if i read/(when I read?) mysteries...

85RidgewayGirl
Juin 25, 2017, 1:53 pm

Colleen, you already like Denise Mina, don't you? I have no doubt you'd eventually get to this one.

Hi, Daniel. The Reading Globally group spent a quarter reading books from the Benelux countries, and while I had hoped to read this book during the appropriate time period, I didn't get to it in time. A few people read it then, though. It's certainly worth reading.

86RidgewayGirl
Juin 25, 2017, 2:42 pm



The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge is the story of a summer author H.P. Lovecraft spend in Florida with the family of a teenage fan and of what happened. It's the story of Charlie, who had disappeared from a psychiatric facility and was presumed dead, and of his wife, Marina, who was looking for him and for clues she hoped could be found in looking into Charlie's research into Lovecraft's life. The Night Ocean tells the story of a book published and immediately banned, a book formed of Lovecraft's own diaries, or it's a book about a controversial forgery, written by a hard-to-track-down con man. It's the story of Barlow, the boy who spent a summer with Lovecraft and about his adulthood as a college professor in Mexico City, where he would encounter William S. Burroughs under less than ideal circumstances. And, finally, it's the story of a fraudster, who both is and isn't telling the truth.

The Night Ocean is a clever novel, crammed full with fascinating people, none of whom are telling the truth, even on the third or fourth "real" version of events. I was utterly unable to untangle the mess of lies and plot threads and I didn't care. This book was so entertaining, with the stories growing more interesting as the book progresses, so that the story of an old man living in a small lakeside town in Ontario is the most compelling of the bunch.

Lovecraft is a tricky person to write about. He was an undeniably imaginative writer of that genre that combines science fiction and horror, but he was racist even by the standards of a century ago. He's about a controversial a figure as one can use to fashion a novel around, and La Farge ducks and avoids the issue in an unsatisfying way, in large part by only allowing Lovecraft into the novel in small doses and keeping him talking about other things. But Lovecraft is not the most interesting character here, nor is Charlie, the person the novel is structured around; both he and his wife Marina remain ciphers. But Barlow and Spinks, two men whose lives were shaped by Lovecraft, are wonderfully drawn, so complex and alive even when one is hiding the truth and the other is lying as fast as his lips will allow.

87RidgewayGirl
Juin 26, 2017, 12:05 pm



For a few years I've been reading a blog that deconstructs the Left Behind books, a popular series of novels about the Apocalypse, page by page, examining why they are bad, both from the standpoint of the writing and of the eschatology behind the events they describe. So when I saw Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America by Amy Johnson Frykholm I was intrigued at the thought of finding out who reads these books and why.

Frykholm is well-situated to look at this topic. She approaches her project as an ethnographer, and one who is able to approach both the books' defenders and detractors with openness and with a lack of judgement. She interviews a number of people, attending church with them and learning about how the books fit into their worlds. The book consists mainly of these interviews, along with her observations and I found it interesting. It certainly reinforces my desire to never read the series!

88RidgewayGirl
Juin 26, 2017, 3:48 pm



I have a great fondness for dark crime novels, so I picked Twisted River off of a display labeled "Celtic Noir" with great excitement, having never heard of author Siobhan MacDonald. It's always exciting to discover a new favorite author. What I discovered instead is that while I love the genre, I also love a well-written and well-plotted book, and Twisted River was neither of those things.

Two families swap houses for a week in October. Kate and Mannix want to give their sensitive and bullied son the treat of a week in New York and Hazel wants to show her hometown of Limerick, Ireland to her family. Told in chapters that alternate between the adults, the reader learns about the problems both families are facing.

The story starts to take off on page 159, although the two women mention that they are feeling a sense of rising dread or impending doom several times. The tension in the story is based on characters withholding information from the reader even as the chapter is told from their point of view. So one character will ruminate at length on the ominous text messages he's receiving, while failing to think about the actual messages, or a character will make oblique references in a personal journal that point in one direction, but this will be shown to be a red herring later on. And the ending was just silly.

I loved that this book was set in an unrepresented locale. That's what was good about this book.

89dchaikin
Juin 26, 2017, 9:07 pm

I think I was happily oblivious to Left Behind. The culture does encourage some curiosity - but in kind of the same sense as watching a car accident caught on film. Well, maybe not exactly.

Fun reviews. Loved for first paragraph on Twisted River. The Night Ocean sounds very entertaining.

90Nickelini
Juin 27, 2017, 1:42 am

For a few years I've been reading a blog that deconstructs the Left Behind books,

How have I missed this thing? Sounds right up my alley. Please post link to such blog.

Night Ocean sounds strangely good. I don't think I've read Lovecraft but he's been on my radar for 30 yrs.

91RidgewayGirl
Juin 27, 2017, 9:18 am

It's a hard culture to understand, Daniel. She does a good job getting people to talk to her and I learned a bit about it, so for me it was time well spent. And The Night Ocean is weird, but purposefully so.

Joyce, here's a link to the first post. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2003/10/18/left-behind-pretrib-porno/ They are a lot of fun although the blogger, Fred Clark, has admitted some fatigue at the sheer amount to wade through. He's up to the third book, I think.

92RidgewayGirl
Juin 27, 2017, 8:52 pm



Ruth goes home for Christmas for the first time in three years to find that her father's Alzheimer's has progressed and her mother wants her to move back home and help with his care. Goodbye, Vitamin is about the year Ruth moves back home, reconnecting with her best friend and taking care of her father, with a little help from his former grad students.

I see, walking on the other side of the street today, a man with enormous pecs. They look as inflated as popcorn bags right after microwaving.

The phrase "born humans" is what I think of whenever I see someone wildly different from me.

Fetal circulation is different from that of born humans. Fetuses have fine hair all over them that born humans don't have. Fetuses do a thing like breathing that isn't actually breathing--the motions develop their lungs. They take their first breath when they're born and that's when the whole system changes incredibly: unborn to born.

We're
born humans, I think, about the huge pec'ed man. With our functioning circulatory systems. Breathing, walking, having real hair. Just look at us.

Rachel Khong has a light, humorous writing style that pairs surprisingly well with the subject matter. Ruth is a fun person to hang out with as she gets a haircut from her best friend, remembers her childhood with a father who would buy an order of fries for some pigeons and schemes with her father's former students to have him teach a class on campus, while keeping him out of sight of the administration.

And the Alzheimer's is handled with sensitivity and humor. Ruth's Dad is a fully realized character and the family's struggle to accommodate and understand what was happening felt very real.

Later at the farmers' Market, I watch a couple bros sample dates.

"Shit," says one bro, coughing, "I think I'm allergic to this giant raisin!"

"That's not a raisin, Steve," says another bro. "That's a Medjool date."


Born humans, I remind myself.

93Nickelini
Juin 27, 2017, 9:53 pm

>91 RidgewayGirl: Thanks! I'm looking for something new to dip into now and again. I've grown tired of my usual places (some of them also on Patheos)

94citygirl
Juin 28, 2017, 11:15 am

Your description of Night Ocean reminds me a bit of Night Film by Marisha Pessl, who wrote Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Have you read it?

95RidgewayGirl
Juin 28, 2017, 4:36 pm

citygirl, yes, I really enjoyed Night Film. You're right about them probably appealing to the same readers, although The Night Ocean is more weird history.

96VivienneR
Juin 29, 2017, 12:48 pm

>82 RidgewayGirl: The Long Drop is on my wishlist already (naturally) but I had heard it wasn't coming out until November this year. This is good news, it's time to go looking for it!

97RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Juil 9, 2017, 11:33 am



DNF.

I usually battle on to the bitter end of a bad book, hoping for redemption or at least for it to move from "bad" to "so bad it's good," but I couldn't with this one. From the main character being a male fantasy of the perfect woman (while she didn't spend time fondling her own breasts, she did possess a perfect and "petite" body, a startling lack of agency in a woman with an alleged Ph.D and a voracious sexual appetite, focused on a vampire who claims to be her Dad. Ugh.), to the idea that a violent offender in a psychiatric prison would be a woman's sexual fantasy, this book made me too angry to continue. Write women as though they were actual people, Mr. Pyper!

Andrew Pyper is a good author. I'm a fan. I have no idea what happened here, but there will have to be some seriously good reviews for me to pick up another book by this author. The Killing Circle is a solid and well-written thriller. Read that instead. Unless the thought of a man ripping the ears of a random passer-by is exciting to you. Then you and this book's main character are peas in a pod and I wish you a vampire of your very own.

98RidgewayGirl
Juil 9, 2017, 5:30 pm

A dear friend gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card for my birthday and so the kids and I went off to find books. I came home with three, all found in the bargain area. I forgot to use my gift card, so I'll be forced to go back.



And then my husband gave me a well-chosen book from my favorite bookshop.

99drneutron
Juil 10, 2017, 1:38 pm

>97 RidgewayGirl: Hmmm. Bad news about The Only Child - I have that one on my public library wishlist. I'll take your advice on The Killing Circle, though!

100RidgewayGirl
Juil 10, 2017, 2:38 pm

Jim, I was excited to find it on my local library's shelf. Apparently, it's intended to be a modern mash-up of Frankenstein and Dracula. It certainly had a vampire in it.

101RidgewayGirl
Juil 10, 2017, 4:29 pm



An Atlas of Countries That Don't Exist: A Compendium of Fifty Unrecognized and Largely Unnoticed States by Nick Middleton is a beautiful book. A lot of attention to detail and care has been put into the design of this amazing book, from the color scheme of subtle gray-blue and cherry red, to the way each location is set in a map, with the previous page having a cut-out so that the reader first encounters the country, and then its place on the globe. This isn't the kind of book designed to help children with their geography homework, or to be an information-filled guidebook, instead, each entry is features a flag and some basic information, with a few paragraphs telling the story of each state, with the intention of arousing curiosity and interest, rather than providing a lot of details. These stories are often poignant or weird, but always interesting.

I loved Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands, and this book falls into the same wheelhouse, being more about the idea of these places than anything else. The places featured range from the well-known and expected (Greenland, Catalonia) to the off-beat and obscure (Transnistria and Somaliland) to the downright odd (Elgaland-Vargaland, Atlantium), but all are fascinating.

102RidgewayGirl
Juil 12, 2017, 8:51 pm



Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin is a novella set in a hospital in an unnamed South American country. A boy questions a patient about the events prior to her admittance and she describes what has happened from when she first arrived from the city with her daughter. The woman's account is dreamlike and often confused, with it becoming increasingly clear that something has gone terribly wrong.



I like Joyce Carol Oates's short stories, so I was quick to grab her newest collection, Dis Mem Ber. The strongest stories by far bookend the collection, being concerned with uncomfortable and dangerous things that happened to awkward girls on the cusp of adulthood. Oates really excels at writing teenage girls who are rushing headlong into something they don't fully understand. A few of the stories were not quite finished, with one ending abruptly and another that read as though it were an idea that hadn't been allowed to fully develop. That said, a sub-standard short story by JCO is still worth a look.

103avaland
Juil 13, 2017, 10:32 am

Thanks for the review of the latest Oates collection; I may pass on the that one (contrary to popular belief, I don't collect everything she writes!) The last collection I picked up was the The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. I don't usually go with the horror stuff but, hey, it was dolls, you know? The two stories I've read from it haven't been as good as I imagined they would be.

(I'm trying to get back in the swing of Club Read....)

104RidgewayGirl
Juil 13, 2017, 1:09 pm

Hi, Lois! If you run across a copy, you could just read the first and last stories and leave the rest. JCO does do horror well - that creepy feeling is pretty much present in most of the stuff she writes anyway.

105RidgewayGirl
Juil 18, 2017, 10:18 am



Michael Eric Dyson is a professor at Georgetown University, but first and foremost he is a minister and that shines through Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. He writes in the format and the cadences of a sermon, and with that intensity. He's here to explain to us how life is experienced by black citizens and why that should matter to us. He's angry and determined and also patient and kind, a guide who isn't interested in making people feel guilty, but he does aim for the reader to find understanding, repentance and an interest in taking action.

Dyson here explains both history (why and how discrimination didn't stop with the abolition of slavery, or even with the passage of the Civil Rights Act) and our present (topics ranging from police shootings to Colin Kaepernick) with both the compassion of a pastor and the solid grounding of an academic. Tears We Cannot Stop is an important book for anyone with an interest in the welfare of all Americans.

106RidgewayGirl
Juil 20, 2017, 11:43 am



When Cat's parents divorce, her mother moves her and her older brother to a small lakeside town in northern Michigan. They're barely scraping by, but they're better off than their new next door neighbors, Marlena, her little brother and her meth-cooking father. Cat is fascinated by Marlena, the cool bad girl, and they quickly become close friends. But Marlena's reckless behavior is self-destructive and even years later Cat, now living in New York with a kind husband and fulfilling job, is still haunted by Marlena.

Julie Buntin's debut novel is the book I had hoped The Girls would be. It's a deep dive into the intense relationships of adolescence, in an environment where the normal adventuresome nature of teenagers has lasting consequences.

107dchaikin
Juil 20, 2017, 3:22 pm

Catching up is always fun on your thread. You got my attention with Goodbye, Vitamin.

108auntmarge64
Juil 21, 2017, 11:48 am

It always interests me to see what books you've been reading and what you thought of them. We seem to be drawn to the same titles, but our reactions are often so different. But unless I'm reviewing a title, I very rarely finish a book I don't enjoy. There are just too many around that I might love to read instead!

>67 RidgewayGirl: A Separation sounds wonderful. I'd already recommended it to the Brooklyn PL and now I'm really hoping they'll get it for Kindle.
>81 RidgewayGirl: Universal Harvester I'm in a "Midsomer Murders" mood lately, so this was just a bit too creepy for me when I tried it. For horror, I tend to turn the news on.
>82 RidgewayGirl: The Long Drop looks good. I've liked the previous books I've read by Mina and will have to get this one. I don't know why I never think of her when I'm looking for something, because there are quite a few I haven't read.
>87 RidgewayGirl: Rapture Culture - Oy, now there's a topic I try to avoid, having Calvinist evangelicals in my immediate family. It just makes me too angry to read books about them, but I do enjoy the reviews.
>98 RidgewayGirl: A dear friend gave me a Barnes and Noble gift card for my birthday and so the kids and I went off to find books. I came home with three, all found in the bargain area. I forgot to use my gift card, so I'll be forced to go back. Awwwwww - such a tragedy! (Snicker, snicker)
>101 RidgewayGirl: An Atlas of Countries That Don't Exist - oooh, this sounds wonderful. I'll have to get it in hard copy.
>106 RidgewayGirl: Marlena - another on my waiting list. Good to know it's worth a try.

109RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Juil 22, 2017, 4:44 pm

Daniel, I wonder if it's out on audio, ready for your daily commute.

Marge, thanks for stopping by. An Atlas of Countries that Don't Exist is so wonderful. We do tend to like many of the same books, which makes reading your thread lots of fun.

110RidgewayGirl
Juil 22, 2017, 9:15 pm



No One You Know by Michelle Richmond was the ideal vacation read. It was diverting, without requiring my undivided attention. In it, a woman looks for her sister's murderer, after the man who she thought was the culprit convinces her of his innocence. It's pretty much a standard thriller/mystery novel, but it's well-executed, well-written and well-plotted, which is enough to make it a stand-out in a very crowded field. Refreshingly, the conclusion didn't involve the protagonist putting herself into jeopardy, the killer being unnaturally evil or the person a lesser novelist would have chosen. No One You Know was fun, and while I suspect I'll have forgotten it in a few months, it was good enough for me to want to find a copy of the author's other book.

111RidgewayGirl
Juil 27, 2017, 9:14 am



". . . But that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind."

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is a look at the situation of refugees, told through the story of Nadia and Saeed, two young people living in an unnamed country that falls into civil war when religious extremists begin to take control. Saeed is quiet and devoted to his family and his faith. Nadia is adventurous and intent on forging her own path. Their relationship is cemented in the dangerous circumstances they find themselves in, eventually leading them to flee the country together, taking only what they can carry.

Hamid is using Nadia and Saeed as representatives of refugees, and their experiences are also representative of the whole. Which is not to say that Nadia and Saeed are not fully fleshed-out characters; it's a testament to Hamid's skill that they are very much real people. He's telling a story that's universal, but also specific. The country Saeed and Nadia flee is unnamed, while the places they end up (a Greek island, London, the outskirts of San Francisco) are both specific and act as stand-ins for the various welcomes a refugee might encounter. Hamid uses the device of doors opening into other places as the method Nadia and Saeed use to travel, and the places, while specific geographically, are imagined reactions to a country faced with a sudden influx of migrants.

Exit West is a brilliant novel and deserves to be widely read. It echoes The Underground Railroad in its use of an artificial construct used to move characters from one situation to another and in the way it makes the reader examine difficult issues. It's wonderfully constructed and written, in a way that seems effortless and natural.

112Simone2
Juil 28, 2017, 5:04 am

>111 RidgewayGirl: Sounds like a serious candidate for the Booker Prize.

113dchaikin
Juil 28, 2017, 8:51 am

>109 RidgewayGirl: sounds too heady for audio. I could always try.

>111 RidgewayGirl: interesting, especially on the "artificial construct" aspect. A trend?

114RidgewayGirl
Juil 28, 2017, 10:36 am

I think so, Barbara. I'm really excited about this year's longlist. It's stellar. I want to read them all, which is not usually the case.

Daniel, I hope the artificial construct aspect is a trend. I do like it when authors try new ways of telling old stories.

115RidgewayGirl
Juil 29, 2017, 11:12 am



An infinite nostalgia for everything that had gone wrong in her childhood began to weigh down on her like a stone.

Ania has been estranged from her father for years, and when he dies, she returns to her childhood home and has to deal with all the unresolved issues she left behind. Gabriel was a prominent and strong-willed man, who enjoyed his position until an ill-advised rant in which he defends the brutal murder of a young migrant turns him into a pariah. He was also an exacting man whose disappointment with his daughter's imperfections drove her away.

Autopsy of a Father is a slender book that packs a surprising amount into its 200 pages. Ania is a woman raising her deaf son alone, mostly content in the small world she has carved out for them in a Paris suburb. Her final unsatisfying meeting with her father as well as her return after his death bring up memories of her childhood as well as a needed reckoning with her present. This is my first encounter with Swiss author Pascale Kramer's writing, but it certainly won't be my last.

116dchaikin
Juil 29, 2017, 11:38 am

>115 RidgewayGirl: Another one that catches my interest...

117RidgewayGirl
Juil 29, 2017, 1:06 pm

>116 dchaikin: Oh, good. Kramer's writing is stunning and sort of oblique and I'm excited about it. Robert Bononno did a fantastic job with the translation. Kidzdoc also recently read it and I think he liked it as much as I did.

118AlisonY
Juil 29, 2017, 1:20 pm

Another few onto the wish list pile.... Some interesting reads I'd not heard of before.

119RidgewayGirl
Juil 30, 2017, 1:23 pm



The Patriots by Sana Krasikov was a wild ride of a book. Krasikov tells the story of Florence, a young Jewish woman coming of age in Brooklyn and feeling stifled by the life expected of her. It's the height of the Depression and she's outraged at both the stark inequality she sees around her and the lack of opportunities for women. She gets a job with a firm connecting the Soviets with American companies and meets a Soviet engineer and after his return to the USSR, she sets out in 1934 to join him.

She's not the only American emigrating eastward at the worst possible time. And when she arrives, she finds the Soviet Union less open and free than it had presented itself. But Florence has grit and stubbornness and she makes a life for herself, marrying and having a son, before being arrested and sent to the Gulag.

None of that is a spoiler as there's a second story being told concurrently; that of her son, a man with an adult son who emigrated to the US in his teens and is now working with an American oil company, seeking to take advantage of the newly open Russian economy. But Russia in 2008 isn't a safe place to do business, and Julian is also tasked by his wife with bringing their son home from Russia, where he went to take advantage of the new business opportunities there.

Florence's story is impossible to walk away from. I couldn't stop reading about this idealistic and stubborn woman who was negotiating her way through a dangerous world. She was a very real character living through the most interesting of times. Julian's story, which begins as he is a child surviving in a Soviet orphanage, started well, but eventually it couldn't keep pace with Florence's story. As her situation became more and more perilous, Julian's became the safe world of a comfortably-off American executive. The story of doing business in Putin's Russia was interesting, but it couldn't compete. And, like in so many novels in which a modern story brackets the historical one, one story became a drag on the other.

I did love this book. Krasikov was born in Ukraine and was raised in Georgia, so her depiction of the people and environment were starkly vivid. I will certainly be watching for her next book to be released.

A note on the cover: it's certainly striking, but the clothing is all wrong for the time period of the novel.

120RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Août 1, 2017, 11:08 am



"It was a .36-calibre Colt Navy and in Chicago he kept it the way some other men kept secrets: it was the first thing you saw. You saw a gun and there was a man with it like he was on retainer and first the gun said hello and then the man nodded and said hello too."

William Pinkerton is the son of the famous detective agency's founder and a fearsome detective himself. With his father dead, he's trying to find a man his father couldn't; the mysterious thief known as Edward Shade. He's come to London because he's heard there's a woman there who was once Shade's associate.

Adam Foole, a small man of mixed heritage, arrives in England with his small crew of grifters. He's received a letter from a woman he once loved, asking him to come as she's being hunted by a Pinkerton detective. When he arrives in London, he discovers that she's been murdered and so he seeks to join forces with Pinkerton to find her killer.

By Gaslight is a Victorian novel in all the best ways. It's full of the stinking atmosphere of Victorian London and the novel is one that is simultaneously page-turning and taking its time. There are long digressions into both men's pasts, but as they are exciting pasts and shed light on their motivations as the novel moves forward, it never feels like lost time. Steven Price immerses the reader in the complexities of both men's lives, so that even when they are in direct conflict, one can't help but hope for the best for both men. The novel is also Victorian in its large cast of colorful characters, from spiritualists to child pick-pockets to Civil War spies. The writing reminds me of Mary Doria Russell's Doc in its ability to create warm, breathing characters. It wears its length lightly and I was sorry to have turned the last page.

121citygirl
Août 14, 2017, 4:07 pm

You've sold me on By Gaslight. The only thing better than a contemporary Victorian novel is an actual Victorian novel :-) The Girl at the Baggage Claim sounds like a good candidate for Audio. I am currently listening to Quiet by Susan Cain and one of the ways Cain examines the introversion/extroversion continuum is through Asian culture compared to Western.

122Simone2
Août 15, 2017, 6:05 am

>126 japaul22: Almost! Maybe give it a try if it reaches the shortlist. I wait with the Auster until then!

123RidgewayGirl
Août 16, 2017, 8:58 am

citygirl, Victorian novels are the best. I finished By Gaslight and immediately started rummaging through my shelves for another massive tome. I'm thinking it may be time to read The Luminaries.

Barbara, the long list is really good this year, but I am finding that I'm much more excited about some books (Reservoir 13, Elmet, Home Fire) than others.

124RidgewayGirl
Août 16, 2017, 8:58 am



It was easy. It's still easy. You simply refuse to answer a woman. You don't engage in a dialogue. You let her words or her pictures die.

Harriet Burden is a talented artist who can't get any traction in the art world. Even her beloved husband, an important gallery owner, doesn't notice her art. So she comes up with a plan; she creates three stellar shows and has a different male artist take the credit for each one. Her plan is to then reveal herself and prove to the art world how sexist it is, but it doesn't work out as planned.

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt is not a gentle or tactful novel. It is an angry, vibrant portrait about living as an artist in New York, about pushing against boundaries, about mental illness and genius. Were Hustvedt to have wanted to simply preach, she would not have created Harriet Burden. Harry is wonderful; chaotic, impulsive, angry and immensely talented. Her life blazes across the pages of the novel, which is told in the form of interviews, articles, diary entries and other biographical notes. It's an effective way to tell the story, with Harry's friends and family, as well as her detractors and other artists able to give their view of the events. Harry is as controversial and colorful as Francis Bacon or any other modern artist.

I was impressed by Hustvedt's writing and the depth of her knowledge. I'll certainly be reading more by this author.

125dchaikin
Août 16, 2017, 9:14 am

I remember the buzz around this when it came out. Fun review, and a good reminder. Still very relevant...

126japaul22
Modifié : Août 16, 2017, 10:07 am

I loved The Blazing World and still think about it. I then read What I Loved - very different, very emotional (had to set it aside for a bit) and very well-done. She is an impressive writer in the best sense of the word. And challenging in a good way.

127RidgewayGirl
Août 16, 2017, 10:18 am

Depressingly relevant, Daniel. And the art world is really sexist. Art by female artists sells for less and many fewer women are able to break through. And with regularity, some prominent artist will flap his gums about how women just can't create art as great as the art men create. Of course, this is also true of literature.

Jennifer, as a rule, I never buy a book by an author if I already have a book by them on my tbr. Luckily, I broke this rule and so already have a copy of What I Loved.

128japaul22
Août 16, 2017, 11:10 am

>133 Simone2: excellent!

129torontoc
Août 16, 2017, 2:45 pm

I really liked The Blazing World and What I Loved
I loved The Luminaries- some of my friends found it difficult to get into and couldn't finish the book- I had a little trouble at the beginning but then I couldn't put it down.

130NanaCC
Août 16, 2017, 4:59 pm

>129 torontoc: I loved The Luminaries, Kay. I think for some people it may have been hard to get into because the first chapter is so long. But each chapter following is shorter than the one before it, so that it gives the feeling of a slow buildup, and then a race to the end. I would highly recommend it.

131RidgewayGirl
Août 17, 2017, 9:08 am

Well, then, The Luminaries is on deck.

132RidgewayGirl
Août 17, 2017, 9:09 am



Deepak Unnikrishnan's book, Temporary People, is a collection of short stories set in United Arab Emirates, primarily among the guest workers who make up a majority of the population of the UAE, and have made their lives there, but who know they someday must leave. The stories are surreal and discombobulating and clever; I appreciated them more than I enjoyed them. Unnikrishnan is a talented writer, but often in these stories, the cleverness overrides the emotional depth.

In the opening story, workers fall from the skyscrapers they are building, landing injured in construction sites all over Abu Dhabi. A woman rides out every night on her bicycle and reassembles the workers, reattaching limbs and patching holes so that they can return to work in the morning. In Mushtibushi, children in a large apartment building believe that the elevator is a monster who needs appeasement, to explain a series of molestations. And in a few stories, the roaches take center stage, whether in a boy's desperate attempts to keep them at bay, or in the story of a roach outcast and how he becomes the leader of the roaches.

None of the stories are comfortable or fun, but despite the surrealism, they do paint a vivid picture of what life is like for guest workers and their families in the UAE.

133Simone2
Août 18, 2017, 7:12 am

Some great reviews again. I'll add temporary people to my TBR.
I also loved the Hustvedt, especially the way she describes fictional works of art. I should really love to see them. It is a reason I loved What I Loved as well - or even better because of its plot.

134RidgewayGirl
Août 18, 2017, 4:34 pm

Barbara, yes! I'd love to see Harriet Burden's art. It sounds a bit like Louise Bourgeois's stuff.

135dchaikin
Août 18, 2017, 9:03 pm

>138 RidgewayGirl: - Not sure I can do that one. Among other things, the roaches... Interesting, though.

136RidgewayGirl
Août 22, 2017, 11:27 am

Daniel, the roaches were easy, in comparison to many of the other conditions/situations explored in this book. The roaches did wear pants, if that helps.

137dchaikin
Août 22, 2017, 7:43 pm

Well, that is an improvement.

138RidgewayGirl
Août 22, 2017, 7:58 pm

Wearing pants is always an improvement.

139RidgewayGirl
Août 23, 2017, 10:24 am



There are writing books that are instruction manuals, with exercises and chapters on plot, or semi-colons. Then there are the inspirational books about writing, that give little to no instruction, but leave the reader fired up and eager to put pen to paper. Colum McCann's Letters to a Young Writer falls somewhere in between, being both advice and inspiration.

Each chapter is brief and to the point, whether the subject is writing dialogue or finding an agent. McCann isn't wasting any words here, so each brief letter is packed full. I read this short book over a period of months -- the chapters run together when read all at once -- and I found it to be full of advice I'd be thinking of throughout the day. This is a generous and useful book.

140RidgewayGirl
Août 25, 2017, 8:52 pm



Alex Meier fled Germany as a young man, and then returned to Berlin in 1948, forced out of the US when he refused to cooperate with Senator McCarthy. The Soviets are eager to build their stable of prominent writers and Meier is in need of a country. His real intention is to find a way to return to his son in the US, but as both the Americans and the East Germans are eager to use him, the possibility of doing so becomes more unlikely than ever. He also meets up with people from his past, people who were scarred by the war and who have agendas of their own.

Joseph Kanon knows Berlin and he's good at both writing morally complex characters and intricate plots. With Leaving Berlin, he's playing to his strengths. This is a fun spy thriller, with a bunch of twists and a large dose of moral ambiguity. It was a solid vacation read.

141RidgewayGirl
Août 26, 2017, 1:09 pm



Joshilyn Jackson has been writing novels that have been characterized as chick-lit/women's fiction for years. And they sort of fit that designation, with personable and likable main characters who fall in love while dealing with quirky family situations. Jackson is also an able writer, with the sort of light effortlessness and dialogue that is better than found in most novels and underneath the enjoyable and humorous stories is a sharp edge of substance.

In The Almost Sisters, a successful writer of graphic novels finds herself pregnant after an encounter with an attractive Batman at a ComicCon. Thirty-eight and financially secure, she accepts that this may be her only chance to have a child. As she's bracing herself to break the news to her mother and stepfather, her family situation turns to chaos. Her half-sister is considering divorce and her teenage niece is upset and in the small town of Birchville, Alabama, her grandmother has just had an episode at the church fish fry that shows she may be too elderly to continue to live independently. Leia takes her niece and heads for Birchville, where she finds the situation much, much worse than she'd thought.

There are plenty of humorous situations and heart-warming reconciliations, but Jackson is doing more than just entertaining. While her earlier novels have dealt with serious issues like domestic violence, The Almost Sisters takes on the racial tensions of a small Southern town. Leia, forced to examine social structures, comes to the realization that there are two Souths.

The South I'd been born into was all sweet tea and decency and Jesus, and it was a real, true place. I had grown up inside it, because my family lived there. Wattie's family owned real estate there, too. The Second South was always present, though, and in it decency was a thin, green cover over the rancid soil of our dark history. They were both always present, both truly present in every square inch, in every space, in both Baptist churches, at both tables.

142RidgewayGirl
Août 28, 2017, 12:42 pm



In Idaho by Emily Ruskovich a woman wants to understand her husband's past, especially his previous marriage, but is hindered by his early-onset dementia. Ann teaches music at a small private school in Idaho, where she meets Wade, a quiet man who comes to her for piano lessons, hoping to stave off the dementia that took his father from him and that he can now see signs of in himself. After a shocking and tragic event takes his daughters from him, Ann marries him and works to be a good wife even as she is haunted by all she doesn't know about what happened.

If grades were given to books, this one would receive an A for effort and for getting all the different elements right. But the book never quite hangs together the way it should. The characters never solidify and their motivations remain opaque. The reader knows that Ann loves Wade because Ann mentions that a lot, but she never explores why she chose to marry a man she had barely spoken to and whom she knew had dementia remains the central mystery of Idaho.

Rushkovich writes well enough and she certainly knows how to pile up interesting elements. I look forward to her developing further as an author and learning how to fit the various pieces into a harmonious whole.

143RidgewayGirl
Août 30, 2017, 10:22 am



Noo Saro-Wiwa is the daughter of human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was murdered by the Nigerian government as part of their efforts to keep Shell Oil Company happy. Sara-Wiwa grew up in Britain, but spent her summers in Nigeria until her father's burial, at which point she never returned. Now, decades later, she returns to travel all over the enormous (much larger than Texas) and diverse country. Looking for Transwonderland is her account of her travels.

Saro-Wiwa is the ideal traveling companion for Nigeria. She is both native and stranger, intimately familiar with the country's history and culture, while also standing slightly outside of it, which allows her to explain and describe Nigeria in a way that was clear and fascinating to this non-Nigerian, while able to travel and explore with the freedom of someone born in that country.

And Nigeria is more than worthy of a guided tour. It's a diverse place, with artificially created borders containing three major and over 300 minor people groups. The country's size means it's land encompasses both desert and rainforest. Sara-Wiwa travels all over Nigeria, hunting down wildlife refuges, historically significant landmarks and art while talking to people from all walks of life about life in Nigeria. Sara-Wiwa is an opinionated and humorous guide and I would love to accompany her through any other county she chooses to write about.

144dchaikin
Août 30, 2017, 12:06 pm

Was just going to stop by a check your thread, and I see five new book reviews pop up (of various styles). Enjoyed learning about them. Looking for Transwonderland holds a lot of interest to me.

145RidgewayGirl
Août 30, 2017, 2:16 pm

Daniel, it was excellent and fascinating. Darryl (Kidzdoc) wrote a much better review of it recently.

146RidgewayGirl
Sep 3, 2017, 12:19 pm



Dirty Work by Gabriel Weston tells the story of a young surgeon who badly botches an operation. As she waits for a hospital committee to decide her fate, and as her patient lies in critical care, she thinks back over her childhood and her training. Nancy is a reclusive and hesitant person whose only personal ties are to her sister and her sister's family. Without friends in the hospital in which she works, she's less able to withstand the uncertainty that comes with having made a mistake.

Nancy is an OB GYN surgeon, and along with her other tasks, she routinely performs abortions. She and her mentor regard them as part of their natural duties, but part of her isolation at the hospital stems from the low-level harassment she undergoes from her co-workers who leave doll parts in her locker and make her life more difficult in small ways. Dirty Work addresses her reasons for performing these unpopular procedures.

While the subject matter was interesting and there is certainly a dearth of novels that address abortion, or the pressures of being fallible in life and death situations, the book was more focused on the issues raised than it was in character development or setting. Still, it packed a lot into a slender novel.

147RidgewayGirl
Sep 4, 2017, 5:51 pm



Charlotte Wood's impossibly grim novel, The Natural Way of Things, tells the story of a group of women who find themselves imprisoned on an old sheep ranch in the Outback. Each has been involved in some sort of sex scandal, from the girl who was gang-raped in the toilets of a nightclub to a the girl who had been sexually abused by a priest. Each carries both notoriety and the aftermath with her into this make-shift prison ruled over by a small group of utterly untrained people.

Yolanda was the girl in the nightclub. As her shock at incarceration fades, she learns to assess her situation and to make the most of it. She forms a tenuous bond with Verla, who had a relationship with a married politician when she interned for him. As conditions at the camp worsen, both women learn to rely on themselves and find themselves changed.

This isn't a story where a group of teenagers band together to defeat the bad guys. It's certainly set in a dystopian world, but one only a small step removed from our own. There's no great lesson learned (at least none that these women hadn't already learned when their stories became media fodder) and no grand triumph at the end. But while The Natural Way of Things sometimes makes for uncomfortable reading, it was a well-written and superbly imagined novel.

148dchaikin
Sep 4, 2017, 6:46 pm

enjoyed your comments on these two apparently disturbing novels.

149RidgewayGirl
Sep 5, 2017, 4:47 pm

Daniel, I've seemed to have picked up a tall stack of disturbing novels. See below.



In I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid, a young university student drives out with her boyfriend to have dinner with his parents. The drive is a long one, and as they drive, she thinks about their relationship and how she's thinking of ending it. As she visits his childhood home and meets his parents, that decision becomes more certain, even as things go slightly off-kilter and a sense of foreboding grows.

Like John Darnielle's Universal Harvester, this is horror, but one that depends more on a rising sense that something very bad is about to happen and a creepy atmosphere than it does on gore or the supernatural. But, boy, is it an effective way to creep me out. Reid's writing is spare and there's a philosophical tinge to the young woman's thoughts, which does nothing to make this novel less tension-filled.

150RidgewayGirl
Sep 6, 2017, 12:04 pm



The Fact of a Body is Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich's book about her childhood and how it affected her adult life. It's also a story about a murderer, his life and crime and how the criminal justice system dealt with him. Both stories are interesting. Marzano-Lesnevich was molested by her grandfather from the age of three, until she finally spoke up many years later. Her family believed her and reacted by never allowing the grandfather to babysit or spend the night again. But they continued the normal visits and dinners with him and never spoke of what happened. Marzano-Lesnevich was left to deal with these multiple rapes on her own and without any support system. She encounters Ricky Langley's case as a legal intern working in on capital case appeals in Louisiana. Langley murdered six-year-old Jeremy Guillory and, once arrested, quickly confessed to the crime. His own childhood was not a good one, and Marzano-Lesnevich looks at the family history, the crime and the investigation and at the subsequent trials, in the hopes of understanding his motivations. Langley was a pedophile and the author hopes that if she can understand him, she might understand her grandfather.

The two halves are good on their own but lose intensity and focus as they are alternated and mashed together. The connections between the two are tenuous at best, and in trying to give the criminal case as much life and immediacy as her own personal recollections, the author resorts to making up the content of conversations she has only the broadest of outlines of. She's upfront about this, but it does lessen the reliability of the work she's doing in telling Langley's story.

151RidgewayGirl
Sep 11, 2017, 9:28 am



All the Rivers is the title given to the English translation of a novel by Israeli author Dorit Rabinyan which was banned from Israeli schools. It's the story of a relationship that forms between an Israeli translator working in New York on a temporary basis and a Palestinian artist. The story is interesting, but unremarkable except for their heritages. Liat reacts by hiding the relationship from her family and living under a fear of being seen by someone from back home whenever they are together in public, a fear that extends to being seen by anyone from Israel. Hilmi is unafraid of their relationship and his frustration comes from being sent out of the room when her parents call, even as his insistence in including Liat in an evening meal when his brother visits from Ramallah results in an uncomfortable evening for everyone.

This book did give me an insight into how intractable the division between the Israelis and the Palestinians is, even as Hilmi remains optimistic about the future. They both live with the damage the long conflict has done to them, creating areas where they can't communicate. This isn't a trite story of love conquering all, and even when they are together in New York, their relationship is a very real one. In the end, Rabinyan fails to stick the landing, writing an ending that carefully skirts around any hard decisions on the part of Hilmi and Liat, and one that also avoids making any sort of meaningful comment on Israeli-Palestinian relations. I'm left wondering if this careful circling around of the issues still resulted in All the Rivers being viewed as controversial, what would have happened had Rabinyan refused to allow her characters an easy way out?

152RidgewayGirl
Sep 12, 2017, 6:21 pm



So I only picked this up because I was seeing it everywhere. That usually doesn't pay off for me, but every so often it does, and reinforces the whole futile exercise. This book is odd and also brilliant. There's so much going on that it shouldn't work, but Catherine Lacey is so sure-footed that every bit of The Answers fits together in ways that, days after finishing it, I still don't fully understand.

Mary Parsons is a young woman who has very few friends. One, really; her college roommate Chandra. She was raised by very religious parents living off the grid in the woods. She broke free and managed to get through college with her roommate's and her aunt's support. Then her health problems began. Chronic pain and inexplicable symptoms have put her deeply in debt as doctors continue to order expensive tests and procedures. Chandra suggests an offbeat, new agey procedure called PAKing and Mary jumps on it, desperate for any hope. And it works. But she has to take a second job in order to pay for it, which is where the book starts to get weird.

See? So many plot lines. Each sufficient for a book all on its own, but here, somehow, all those plot elements add up to just the right amount of stuff going on. This is an accomplished novel, with complex character studies, interesting things to say about popular culture, and a perfectly paced plot, despite the quantity of things going on.

153Simone2
Sep 13, 2017, 1:43 pm

>158 RidgewayGirl: Interesting. I've read Nobody is Ever Missing and although I liked it, it felt especially promising, as if Lacey was not ready yet, and needed more developing as a writer.
Your review makes The Answers sound as if she made this next step.

154RidgewayGirl
Sep 15, 2017, 12:04 pm

That's interesting, Barbara. I'll hold off on reading Nobody is Ever Missing for now, then and wait for her next novel instead.

155RidgewayGirl
Sep 15, 2017, 12:04 pm



Frog Music is not a slow-paced and measured novel. It's set in San Francisco in 1875 during a heat wave and a smallpox epidemic and it begins with murder. Then it really gets going, featuring former circus performers, burlesque dancers, a cross-dressing woman riding a penny-farthing, French lullabies, a murder investigation, mob riots, and a missing baby. It's not a question of what happens on the next page, but how many things will happen.

Emma Donoghue's historical novels are scrupulously researched, and Frog Music is no exception. But it wears it's research lightly, so that the sure-footed mastery Donoghue has of the time and place enhance the story she's telling. I found this novel to be a great deal of fun.

156RidgewayGirl
Sep 21, 2017, 10:39 am



He wasn't sorry then and he wasn't sorry now. There was wickedness in this world that swallowed any light that might've been, darkness that could be answered only with darkness.

The Weight of This World by David Joy tells the story of Aidan McCall and his friendship with Thad Broom. When Aidan was twelve, he watched his father shoot his mother and then himself. This is the opening scene in the book and certainly paves the way for the rest of it. Aidan eventually ends up living in a trailer with his buddy, Thad, who was moved out of his house by his new step-father. The two boys raise themselves, Thad eventually joining the army and serving in Afghanistan, but returning to live in the same single-wide and to the same life of picking up occasional work, but mainly getting by by stripping foreclosed houses of their copper wiring. Aidan would like to leave the hamlet of Little Canada, in the mountains of North Carolina, to go to Asheville or maybe even further afield, somewhere where the jobs paid better and were easier to find. He's trying to save a little, but Thad is content to spend whatever money they come by on booze and meth.

It's the meth that gets them in trouble.

The Weight of This World fits into the sort of gritty Appalachian noir of Daniel Woodrell and Donald Ray Pollock. There's a lot of violence, some of it breath-taking in it's random casualness, and a bleak sense of place that shows in both the beauty of the mountains and hollows, and in the relentless poverty of the people living there. There are grace notes and Joy never forgets to write his characters, large and small, as real people, but this isn't a book for the faint of heart.

157avaland
Modifié : Sep 23, 2017, 9:03 am

Ce message a été supprimé par son auteur

158RidgewayGirl
Sep 22, 2017, 3:20 pm

Thank you, Lois.

159avaland
Sep 22, 2017, 3:36 pm

My error: it was August 12th

160AlisonY
Sep 23, 2017, 4:57 am

Wow - just caught up on some great reviews. I'm going to seek out the writing book - that sounds terrific and just what I need.

161RidgewayGirl
Sep 23, 2017, 12:08 pm



Priestdaddy is Patricia Lockwood's account of her childhood as the daughter of a Catholic priest, through the framing device of the year she and her husband moved in with her family. Lockwood's father is a larger-than-life character, a manly man of out-sized opinions who dominates every room he's in. Her mother is also colorful, a good Catholic wife with a passion for the ways the world can injure or even kill you.

Lockwood is a poet with a fierce sense of humor and both her facility with language and her ability to write an uproariously hilarious scene are integral to this memoir. It's a wonderful balancing act between the accounts of very funny things that happened, accounts of things that are very funny because of how Lockwood tells the story, and accounts of how her childhood shaped who she is as an adult, not all for the good. She has a wonderful, and wonderfully easy-going husband whose presence grounds both her and this book.

Here's her description of her father's guitar playing.

It sounds like a whole band dying in a plane crash in the year 1972. He plays the guitar like he's trying to take off women's jeans, or he's standing nude in the middle of a thunderstorm and calling down lightening to strike his pecs. . .

Some people are, through whatever mystifying means, able to make the guitar talk. My father can't do that, but he can do the following:

1. Make the guitar squeal
2. Make the guitar say no
3. Make the guitar falsely confess to murder
4. Make the guitar stage a filibuster where it reads
The Hunt for Red October out loud.

162RidgewayGirl
Modifié : Sep 26, 2017, 10:16 pm



In The Arrangement by Sarah Dunn, Owen and Lucy, a couple with a special needs kindergartener decide to take six months off of fidelity. They have rules, primarily the time limit and that any activities not affect their happy family life and remain secret. They live in a storybook town with an intensely involved PTA and friends who keep an eye on them. As one might expect, things don't go as expected, let alone smoothly.

Dunn writes for the sit-com American Housewife and that shows in the dialogue, which feels like regular conversation, only faster and wittier, and in the often funny situations the characters find themselves in. But Dunn is also going for more than an entertaining read here, and manages to handle a morally ambiguous topic with a great deal of nuance. It does wrap up a bit too neatly at the end, with all characters settled and accounted for, but as an escapist novel with a bit of substance, The Arrangement suits very well.

163RidgewayGirl
Sep 27, 2017, 6:14 pm



The murders of Lizzie Borden's parents, along with the court case that decided she wasn't guilty of the murders is an endlessly fascinating facet of American history. Here, Australian author Sarah Schmidt gives us her interpretation of events in See What I have Done. It begins with some promise, rendering a portrait of a claustrophobic living situation with an autocratic father making hasty decisions, an older sister torn between a desperation for escape and a love for her troubled little sister, and an unstable and erratic Lizzie. But the characterizations remains opaque, the trial is side-stepped and there's too much wrapped up in the final moments for an event steeped in ambiguity. A story like this requires unanswered questions.

164avaland
Sep 28, 2017, 6:35 am

Hi, I'm trying to get around on Club Read more than I have been. I did note elsewhere that we are both reading/listening to the Hillary book. I find her voice very soothing....

We don't seem to have as much reading in common these days. I've been back at the bookstore on a regular basis for almost a year now (just once a week computer stuff, whereas before I was just filling in...) but it brings me into contact again with free arcs and a regular scanning of reviews in Publisher Weeklys (where I find interesting titles that the bookstore is not likely to stock) so an embarrassment of riches, so to speak, much more than I can ever really get to.

Are you back from overseas then?

165janeajones
Sep 29, 2017, 11:42 am

Many tempting reviews here. Frog Music sounds particularly fun.

166RidgewayGirl
Sep 29, 2017, 5:24 pm

Lois, I'm really enjoying What Happened. I'm having to do more driving these days than I'd like and she makes it worthwhile. I love how clear it is that she loves the details of policy.

And, yes, I've been back from Munich for a little over a year now. I'm envious of the access to plentiful ARCs, but I still somehow find plenty to read.

Jane, I found it to just be a lot of fun.

167citygirl
Modifié : Oct 2, 2017, 3:02 pm

I read What Happened. I went through a lot of emotions (while reading it), but I ended up in a peaceful place. I haven't talked to anyone else who's read it.

Priestdaddy sounds riotous.

168RidgewayGirl
Oct 3, 2017, 5:05 pm



I was in the mood for a decent crime novel and so pulled The Whole World by Emily Winslow off of my tbr and found it to be just the thing. Polly and Liv are Americans studying at Cambridge. They meet Nick, a graduate student and become a trio, only Live likes Nick and Nick like Polly. Then Nick disappears just after Polly's mother shows up and many secrets are revealed.

Winslow used to make up logic puzzles for a game magazine, so the plot is both intricate and fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. This is both a boon and a drawback to this novel; while it's refreshing to read a debut novel where the final answer lives up to the promise of the set-up, by the end of the book, all the details are resolved a bit too tidily. Still it was a fun book to spend an evening with and the writing was good, so I'd be happy enough to read another book by this author.

169avaland
Oct 3, 2017, 5:08 pm

>174 Interesting...

170citygirl
Oct 4, 2017, 10:41 am

>174 I read that several years ago. It's barely stuck. I felt disappointed at the end, like it was just too ephemeral and lacking in the impact that was promised.

Eh, who knows?

171RidgewayGirl
Oct 4, 2017, 5:10 pm

Lois, interesting enough for a diversion from more solid fare.

citygirl, it held together at the end, which is not something that can be said about a few of the recent bestselling novels billed at the next Girl on the Train. (I'm looking at you, The Couple Next Door)

172Nickelini
Oct 27, 2017, 2:29 pm

I was going to mention that The Natural Way of Things was inspired by a true story, but you already know that because I see you were part of the conversation on my thread about this book last year. For anyone who is interested in the roots of this novel: https://www.librarything.com/topic/226530#5764735

I thought you'd like this one. Glad it worked for you.
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