rocketjk's 2021 reading travels

I've had fun charting my travels the last eleven years. 2020's reading brought me to 20 countries, including the U.S., and eleven states within the U.S. Plus "non-country specific" books in the Middle East and South America and "non-state specific" books in the U.S. That's on earth. I also left the planet once via Otis Adelbert Kline's The Swordsman of Mars.

As always, I don't select my reading to purposefully "travel" in any particular way. Rather, I just have fun seeing where my more random reading choices take me! I'll be writing at greater length about each book on my 2021 50-Book Challenge thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/328305. Finally, while I do add every book I read to my list in this top post, I only add individual posts to describe books that are, at least tangentially, to do with the general theme of the group.

THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Non-Planet Specific
Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams

EARTH
Non-Country Specific
Ways of Escape by Graham Greene (memoir)
The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World -- and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen (history)
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson (biography)
Sgt. Mickey and General Ike by Michael J. McKeogh and Richard Lockridge (memoir)
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
Youth by Joseph Conrad

AFRICA
Non-Country Specific
The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker (history - Also listed in America)

ASIA
Japan
Rashomon Gate by I.J. Parker

THE CARIBBEAN
Haiti
The Comedians by Graham Greene

EUROPE
Belarus
The Zelmanyaners: A Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak

England
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
Lucia in London by E.F. Benson
The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson (history)

France
The Rover by Joseph Conrad
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

Hungary
Sigh for a Strange Land by Monica Stirling

Ireland
The Book of Kells: Art -- Origins -- History by Iain Zaczek (art history)

Northern Ireland
The House of Ashes by Stuart Neville

Spain
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende (also listed in Chile)

MIDDLE EAST
Iran
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar

Palestine/Israel
Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments by Oz Shelach

NORTH AMERICA
The United States
Non-State Specific
The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen by Herbert Tarr
Western Adventures Magazine - October, 1943 (short stories)
Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton (non-fiction)
The Union Reader edited by Richard B. Harwell (history)
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Collins (non-fiction)
American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country by Kay Bailey Hutchison (biographies)
A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin (short stories--a few set in Mexico)
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (history)
In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson (history)
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGee (non-fiction)
Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington (memoir)
The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (history)
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (essays)
We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert Kennedy by Edwin Guthman (memoir)
Glimpses by Lewis Shiner
Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman (memoir)
Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford (short stories)
The Corporal Was a Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie by Ira Berkow (biography)
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer (memoir/philosophy/science)
The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker (history - Also listed in Africa)
Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year by Tavis Smiley (history/biography)
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby (biography)
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

Arizona
Pot of Trouble by Don Tracy

California
The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell (history)
San Francisco Life Magazine - Volume VI, No. 5 - April, 1938 edited by E.I. Campbell (periodical)
Indian Summer by Effie McAbee Hulbert

Florida
Bright Orange for the Shroud by John D. MacDonald
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Iowa
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Louisiana
Look Down on Her Dying by Don Tracy
In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu (memoir)

Massachusetts
Harvard Has a Homicide by Timothy Fuller
Death Blew Out the Match by Kathleen Moore Knight
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
Reunion with Murder by Timothy Fuller
Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill by Thomas J. Fleming (history)

Ohio
The Long Season by Jim Brosnan (memoir)

Pennsylvania
The Seventh by Richard Stark (a.k.a. Donald Westlake)

Tennessee
Shiloh by Shelby Foote

OCEANA
Polynesia
Adventures of Captain David Grief by Jack London

SOUTH AMERICA
Chile
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende (also listed in Spain)

I finished Joseph Conrad's last novel (or at least the last published during his lifetime), The Rover. Published in 1922, The Rover is an adventure of the French coast set during Napoleonic times. On it's surface this is a more straightforward narrative than the better known Conrad novels, but there is still a lot going on, observations on human nature-wise. Regardless, this is also a very enjoyable tale. A longtime oceangoing adventurer, older now but still strong, who has been sometimes a privateer and sometimes a gunner in the French navy, wants now to retire to an isolated farm on the French Mediterranean coast. But Nelson's fleet lies offshore in blockade formation, an soon a French navel officer shows up "on assignment."

I finished Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell. This book is admirably written, with a stunning sense of time and place (Stratford, England, during Shakespeare's time) and a wonderfully effective sense of invention (Shakespeare's family life, essentially, through the two perspectives of Shakespeare himself and, more emphatically, his wife, Agnes). All of this orbits around the pull of the short life of their son, Hamnet.

For all the writing skill and acute observation, however, I have to admit that I frequently became impatient during the book's first half. The characters and situations struck me too often as too familiar set pieces, and more than once I thought to myself, "Can we move along?"

The second half of the book, however, I found very effective, indeed, as the characters came much alive to me as individuals, and their situations, experiences, relationships and emotions moved for me from the general to the unique. By the end (which I found terrific), I was wholly invested. So, yes, all in all, I found Hamnet to be a very, very good book.

Back to England via Lucia in London by E.F. Benson. This is the third book (or second, depending on whose list you look at) in Benson's humorous Mapp and Lucia series.

In Lucia in London, dear Lucia's husband, Philip (a.k.a. Pepino), has inherited a house in London from his aunt. Will the couple stay loyal to their own Riselholme or will they decamp to the more glamorous world of the capitol? The answer becomes clear early on, as off to London they go. Lucia soon begins trying to push her way up the social ladder. At first, the London society members Lucia encounters are put off by her, but soon many of them become amused and delighted by the clumsy transparency of her ambition, and start encouraging her just to see what she will do next. In the meantime, the friends left at home have issues of their own. It's a gentle comedy, all played for laughs, and Lucia is never allowed to become a villain.

There are times when the goings-on in this novel become repetitive, but overall this was for me enjoyable light reading.

I finished The Zelmenyaners: a Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak.

The Zelmenyaners is considered a classic of Yiddish literature. The novel is a comedy spanning several generations of an extended Jewish family in Minsk, the capitol city of Byelorussia (now Belarus), but centering on the period from 1926 through 1933 or so. The family all lives together, in a single courtyard on the outskirts of town originally built by the family's patriarch, one Reb Zelmen, who came to the city from somewhere in "deep Russia" in the 1870s. By the time the action of the novel begins in the late 1920s Reb Zelmen has died, though his widow lives on, and the family is led by Zelmen's four sons, whose own children and sons and daughters-in-law and their children populate the courtyard's many old buildings. (One building is even made of brick!)

The tale centers around the older generation's desires to retain their old ways, including the vestiges of their Jewish beliefs and practices, in the face of the growing incursions of Soviet society and economic collectivisation. As the younger generation grows to maturity, they less interested in the old ways and more interested in being good Bolsheviks. Even the older Zelmenyaners are pushed to end their independent lives as tradesmen (tailors, tanners, carpenters) and go to work in the factories, like good Soviet workers.

The story is in fable-like, farcical narrative. Rumor, scandal and gossip, feud and loyalty, busybodies and misanthropes swarm and swirl about the courtyard. Knowledge of the outside world is minimal, sometimes comically so, for most of the Zelmenyaners. Our affection for this crowd is cemented early on, and though the story is played for comedy, the pathos is evident throughout as the family fights a losing battle to retain their way of life, their heritage and their family identity in the face of societal forces from without and betrayal from within.

I found this book moving for many reasons. For one thing, it describes the place my grandparents came from, the place where they would have lived, and most likely would have died within a decade of the action of this novel, had they not left for America in the early 20th century. Furthermore, Kulbak was also a poet, and his descriptions, especially his uses of natural settings to set mood, are often wonderful. The winter snow and freezing cold becomes almost a character, a member of the family. But here is a description of the end of one summer:

"The first thin, slanting autumn rains began to fall. Beneath them the silent summer, its myriad colors squelched and soiled, was snuffed out in the gardens. Disconsolate beet leaves with hard, purplish veins lay cast between the vegetable beds. Dirty yellows, oranges, and browns were trodden silently underfoot. On days like that you didn't need an antenna to hear distant cries."

Adding poignancy to the reading was this note on the book's back cover:

Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist and dramatist. He was arrested in 1937, during the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence. After a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot at the age of forty-one.

I finished The Comedians by Graham Greene. The Comedians is Greene's novel of Haiti during the dark days of the Papa Doc regime. Greene presents intertwining themes of the value of loyalty and compassion, bravery and absurdity, and the quicksand of despair that self-loathing, jealousy and mistrust may throw in one's path. The plot moves quickly and the characters are, mostly, believable. The constant sense of horror and dread help the reader understand what life in that time and place was about. Greene actually did spend time in Haiti during this era in its history. Naturally, there is a difference between reading an account, fictional or otherwise of these times written by a Haitian and reading one written by an Englishman, by definition here an outsider. Within those limitations, I felt that Greene did an admirable job, here.

I recently read Greene's memoir, Ways of Escape, and it seemed that this was one of the novels Greene was proudest of.

I finished Rashomon Gate by I.J. Parker, second novel in Parker's Sugawara Akitada Mysteries series, set in 11th Century Japan. Our man Akitada is a relatively low-level nobleman who holds down a boring government administrative job but who in the series' first book acquired a reputation for being able to solve mysteries. So these are mysteries of the "talented amateur is smarter than the police" variety. In this novel, Akitada has been asked by his former mentor to return to the royal university to help unravel a blackmailing scheme. Also, there as been a disappearance of a high-ranking nobleman from within a Buddhist shrine which is being put down by everyone from the emperor on down as a miracle: the nobleman has achieved Nirvana and been taken in by the gods. Murders ensue and complications arise, as we knew they would.

These books are fun. The plotting is good and the historical information, assuming it's anywhere near accurate, is interesting. The writing itself, on a sentence level, I give a B or B-. People to often "preen" and "mince" and "comment drily." But this sort of thing does not turn up in the writing often enough to ruin the entertainment value of the story for me. I have the first four books of this 18-book series on hand. I'll probably read books 3 & 4 over the next little while, though I doubt I'll go much further.

I finished A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabel Allende's most recent novel. I expected to like it better than I did, alas. It is the story of two families, and in particular one member of each (one man and one woman who end up together; no shock, there), living through the Spanish Civil War. The protagonists end up in Chile (again not a spoiler, as the book's title refers to that country). The story takes the two through their entire lives.

The storyline, the times described and the characters are certainly interesting, so why was the book ultimately unsatisfying to me? One element was the flat nature of the narrative. We are in third person omniscient. And while we often touch down inside the mind of one or another character, particularly our two main players, I felt that too much of the book was spent in above-the-fray exposition and explanation, and way too much time in historical overview mode. Everything from the history of the Spanish Civil War through the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power, with long lessons on Chilean history in between, are doled out paragraphs, sometimes pages, at a time before we finally get back to our characters and their stories.

I finished The Book of Kells: Art -- Origins -- History by Iain Zaczek. This is a coffee table book, with relatively brief text but lots of full color illustrations, describing this amazing late 9th Century Book of Gospels created by Irish monks, most probably on the Island of Iona.

I enjoyed Adventures of Captain David Grief (originally published as A Son of the Sun) by Jack London. Captain David Grief is a South Seas adventurer traveling about Polynesia, a self-made millionaire, tycoon merchant during the days of the sailing ships, with engines just beginning to come on the scene. I kept thinking of Grief as sort of a South Seas Bruce Wayne. At any rate, London, of course, was a great writer of adventure stories. In these seven tales, Grief is always the hero, almost always the smartest one on the ship or in the village. There's not much going on below the surface in these stories. Sometimes the villains and/or fools are other Europeans, sometimes they're the island inhabitants.

I finished the mostly excellent history The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. The subtitle for Larson's latest is "A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz," which is a pretty good description. This is a history of the first year of Churchill's time as Britain's wartime Prime Minister. I was mostly already familiar with the circumstances of the Battle of Britain, but Larson, in focusing in on this one year and in the Churchill family's experience of the event, adds a lot of detail that was new, and interesting, to me.

I finished Sigh for a Strange Land by Monica Stirling. This short but quite affecting novel tells the a teenage girl, her aunt and her aunt's lifelong friend, Boris, as they are forced to flee from the effects of a violently suppressed revolution. The country is not named, but all hints lead us to the uprising in Hungary during the 1950s. The story is told in an odd, disjointed manner that adds to the sense of alienation and uncertainty. Although the characters are soon over the "frontier" and into (we presume) Austria, I'm listing this as a Hungary reading experience because the sense of the place the trio has fled from is much stronger throughout than the sense of where they have landed.

I finished Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments by Oz Shelach. Picnic Grounds is an understated but very powerful collection of short vignettes (the fragments of the title), anywhere from a half page to a page and a half long, about life in Israel, mostly in and around Jerusalem. More specifically, they are about denial and absurdity. The "absurdity" aspect could mostly be about government deception and double-talk anywhere. But the "denial" dimension, much more prevalent overall, are about a very specific Israeli phenomenon, the historic denial of the destruction of Palestinian villages and the uprooting and banishment, sometimes the murder, of their inhabitants around the time of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

I finished a reading visit to France, plus a deep dive into the nature of memory and love, via Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.

I finished Northern Ireland noir writer Stuart Neville's latest novel, The House of Ashes. This book is not really what most of us think of when we see the phrase "crime fiction." It's about the horrifying abuse of women by cruel and manipulative men, in twin stories taking place 60 years apart. As such, it's a gripping book and very well written, but just be sure to have a look at a synopsis or two before deciding to read it.

I finished The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, an Iranian author living in political exile in Australia.

This is a fascinating novel about life in Iran just after overthrow of the Shah and the onset of the Islamic Revolution, and over the following decade. The story is narrated by 13-year old Bahar. We learn in the book's second sentence that her brother, Sohrab, has recently been hung without trial by the new regime for political "crimes" that are trifling at best. Bahar's parents, and particularly her father, are lovers of art, history and literature, both modern and ancient, and deeply versed in age old Iranian mythology. In other words, they are targets in the new order. Soon, Bahar's parents have moved the family to a remote village in hopes of evading the wrath of the revolutionaries. As the novel progresses, we watch Bahar's family attempt to make their way through the crucible of anti-intellectualism, institutionalized violence and cruelty.

This fable-like allegorical tale of the violent unraveling of Iranian society during this era is told in fluid, poetic language (and, oh, to be able to read this book in the original Persian). The story is full of magical realism, as both ghosts and the jinns and demons of Iranian mythology abound. There is a real human touch shining through, here, and yet the current of anger courses through the telling of the story, especially in the book's first half, as a counterweight. In the second half, the fantasy element spins out in ways that I didn't always feel were entirely effective. I have a guess, though, that if I were more knowledgeable about Iranian legends and mythology, that section might have resonated with me a bit more. At any rate, by the book's end I was fully on board again.

For all its violence and sorrow, this a thought-provoking and, at least for me, ultimately life-affirming novel.

Well, I hereby bring the curtain down on 2021, and I didn't really do much globe trotting this year. A big part of that has been my ongoing project of reading from a rather long list of books about African American History and the history of racism in America. So a large percentage of my reading fell into the U.S. non-state specific category.

All in all I read to only 14 countries this year, including the U.S. among my 67 books completed. There were also 6 books that fell into the "non-country specific" category. I also left Earth once via the science fiction novel Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams. Of my U.S. reading, I visited nine different states, but the vast bulk of my reading here, 24 books, or 36% of the books I read this year, belong in the aforementioned "non-state specific" category.

Well, cheers all! I'll give this another go in 2022 and see where my reading takes me.

I read your reviews this morning and I see that your MA in Literature/Creative Writing in your reviews.

>18 mnleona: Thanks! These reviews are about the only place I get to use that knowledge these days.