RidgewayGirl Reads Books in 2022, Part Three

Four months after getting the keys, we are mostly moved in, still waiting for a sofa (any day now!) and loving this Midwestern summer, which has meant discovering new delights in the garden every week.



My categories are largely unchanged, why mess with something that works?

Currently Reading



Recently Read



Books Acquired



Reading miscellany:

Owned Books Read: 46

Library Books Read: 42

Netgalley: 13

Borrowed: 0

Books Acquired: 85

Rereads: 1

Abandoned with Prejudice: 0

Category One.



A Window on the World

Books from around the world


Create Your Own Visited Countries Map

1. Nervous System by Lina Meruane, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Argentina)
2. Seasons of Purgatory by Shahriar Mandanipour, translated from the Persian by Sara Khalili (Iran)
3. Straight From the Horse's Mouth by Meryem Alaoui, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan (Morocco)
4. Bitter Orange Tree by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth (Oman)
5. Rouge Street by Xuetao Shuang, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (China)
6. The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Frances Frenaye (Italy)
7. The Yacoubian Building by Alaa al-Aswani, translated from the Arabic by Humphrey T. Davies
8. Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia (Mexico & Canada)
9. The Sergeant's Cat & Other Stories by Janwillem van de Wetering (The Netherlands)

Category Two.



Behind Every Window is Another Story

We Need Diverse Books.

1. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
2. My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
3. Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
4. Complicit by Winnie M. Li
5. Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
6. Love Marriage by Monica Ali
7. Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
8. Which Side Are You On by Ryan Lee Wong
9. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
10. The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias

Category Three.



Window to Another Country

Expats, Immigrants and Works in Translation.

1. The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang
2. Joan is Okay by Weike Wang
3. Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr
4. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama
5. Crossing by Pajtim Statovci, translated from the Finnish by David Hackston
6. Lemon by Yeo-sun Kwon, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong
7.

Category Four.



The Woman in the Window

Books by Women.

1. The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse
2. Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews
3. Mrs. March by Virginia Feito
4. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
5. Mecca by Susan Straight
6. Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach
7. Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett
8. Mad About You by Mhairi McFarlane
9. Ducks by Kate Beaton

Category Five.



The Rooster in the Window

Books from the Tournament of Books.

1. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (2022 Competitor)
2. In Concrete by Anne Garréta, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan (2022 Competitor)
3. Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke (2022 Competitor)
4. Matrix by Lauren Groff (2022 Competitor)
5. Subdivision by J. Robert Lennon (2022 Competitor)
6. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki (2022 Competitor)
7. Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart (2022 Competitor)
8. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (2022 Competitor)
9. Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge (2022 Competitor)

Category Six.



Rear Window

Crime Fiction, True Crime and Various Murders.

1. The Dry by Jane Harper
2. The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James
3. Slow Horses by Mick Herron
4. Don't Know Tough by Eli Cranor
5. Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse
6. When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash
7. Please See Us by Caitlin Mullen
8. Girl, Forgotten by Karin Slaughter
9. Rust & Stardust by T. Greenwood

Category Seven.



The Window in my House

Books I Own.

1. Self Care by Leigh Stein
2. The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
3. Travelers Rest by Keith Lee Morris
4. Paris Never Leaves You by Ellen Feldman
5. Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid
6. In the Drink by Kate Christensen
7. Self-Portrait with Boy by Rachel Lyon
8. Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky
9. Light Years by James Salter

Category Eight.



The View From the Train Window

Books on my iPad.

1. Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh
2. The Second Cut by Louise Welsh
3. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
4. Devil House by John Darnielle
5. We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza
6. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
7. How to Find Your Way in the Dark by Derek B. Miller
8. The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy
9. Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson
10. Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet

Category Nine.



That Old Familiar View

Books from Authors I've Read Before.

1. The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh
2. Ocean State by Stewart O'Nan
3. Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon
4. French Braid by Anne Tyler
5. Either/Or by Elif Batuman
6. Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta
7. Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
8. Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
9. Babysitter by Joyce Carol Oates

Category Ten.



A Window Open to the Morning Light

Books Published in 2022.

1. The Fell by Sarah Moss
2. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
3. The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon
4. The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
5. The Catch by Alison Fairbrother
6. The Maid by Nita Prose
7. A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon
8. Chevy in the Hole by Kelsey Ronan
9. Small Game by Blair Braverman
10. The Hero of this Book by Elizabeth McCracken

Category Eleven.



A Different View Every Day

Short Stories and Novellas.

1. And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges by Amber Sparks
2. Likes by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
3. Cities I've Never Lived In by Sara Majka
4. Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor
5. Hunger: Stories by Lan Samantha Chang
6. Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
7. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
8. Difficult People by Catriona Wright
9. Liberation Day by George Saunders

Category Twelve.



An Open Window

The Overflow.

BingoDOG



2. Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh
3. The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang
4. Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews
5. The Bed I Made by Lucie Whitehouse
8. The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh
9. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
10. The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
11. Mrs. March by Virginia Feito
12. The Dry by Jane Harper
14. Travelers Rest by Keith Lee Morris
15. Ocean State by Stewart O'Nan
16. We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza
17. Likes by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
18. In Concrete by Anne Garréta, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
19. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
20. Paris Never Leaves You by Ellen Feldman
21. The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanon
23. Nervous System by Lina Meruane
24. The Second Cut by Louise Welsh
25. Matrix by Lauren Groff

Modified Reading Challenge

I take the most interesting parts of the PopSugar, Book Riot, Book List Queen and assorted other challenges to make my own list.

1. A book set on a plane, train, or cruise ship

2. A book about or set in a nonpatriarchal society. -- Matrix by Lauren Groff

3. A book by a Latinx author. -- Nervous System by Lina Meruane

4. A book with an onomatopoeia in its title

5. A book about a "found family". -- Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart

6. A book set in the 1980s. -- The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

7. A book with cutlery on the cover or in the title

8. A book by a Pacific Islander author

9. A book that takes place during Autumn. -- When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash

10. A book with a misleading title

11. An Award winner

12. A book set during a holiday. -- Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

13. A book set in Victorian times

14. A book with a constellation on the cover or in the title. -- Cities I've Never Lived In by Sara Majka

15. A book you know nothing about. -- Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh

16. A biography of an author you admire -- Ducks by Kate Beaton

17. A book from the Women’s Prize shortlist/longlist/winner list

18. A book with a bird on the cover. -- Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

19. A book published in 2012

20. A book with with a name in the title. -- The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang

21. A book by an author from the American South. -- Travelers Rest by Keith Lee Morris

22. A book by a Midwestern author. -- Sleepwalk by Dan Chaon

23. A book with a two word title. -- Self Care by Leigh Stein

24. A book by a Pulitzer Prize Winner. -- French Braid by Anne Tyler

25. A book with a great title. -- And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges by Amber Sparks

26. An early book by an author you like. -- The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh

27. A book about Black History. -- The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

28. A book set in a country you know nothing about. -- Who is Maud Dixon? by Alexandra Andrews

29. A travel memoir

30. A book over 600 pages long.

And on this sunny day, just a few days before my birthday, I invite everyone in to my third quarter thread. Grab an Aperol spritz or a glass of lemonade and find a comfortable chair on the patio. Cheers!

>17 RidgewayGirl: Looks refreshing! I have my sun hat and Adirondack chair ready.

>18 rabbitprincess: I like an Adirondack chair, but I am slightly too short for them and so have never managed to get out of one gracefully.

Happy new thread! Your garden (and that drink) look lovely!

That looks like a lovely place to while away a few hours! Happy new thread.

>21 DeltaQueen50: It is! Somehow I spent the entire afternoon out here.

>1 RidgewayGirl: Great map! You're missing Australia: sad and hot; sad and dry.

Happy New Thread! And Happy Birthday in advance!

(I don't think anyone can get out of an Adirondack chair with any degree of grace.)

Happy new thread! What a gorgeous reading place.

But once I had managed to calm my grandmother and remove myself from the house, everything was easier than I had anticipated. The taxi driver already knew how to get to the bus station. Once you got there, it was basically people's job to answer your questions about bus schedules. You didn't have to explain anything, or account for anything, or manifest love. If anyone got annoyed at you, they couldn't cry, or scream at you, or accuse you of offending them, and at any point you could just leave. It was totally different from being in your family.

It's Selin's sophomore year and she's still dreaming about Ivan. But she's also more involved in the world, with friends and roommates and classmates constantly around her. And she's thinking as much as ever; looking at Kierkegaard's comparison of the aesthetic life and the ethical life, although really she's looking at his definition of the aesthetic life.

In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This is what I had learned from books. There was a problem of application: what did you do if you were a young girl? Nadja had been a girl, and had tried to live an aesthetic life. That had involved her being seduced and abandoned and going crazy. But that had been then. What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism had made possible? Something about the idea didn't feel aesthetic. Just think of the angry, complaining men.

Either/Or spans Selin's sophomore year, just as The Idiot (which should be read first) took Selin through her freshman year at Harvard. Selin is still figuring things out, but she's making progress and it was just so fun to be able to witness her as she muddles through, making some choices that made me worry, but always with that quiet off-beat humor that makes her such a good protagonist. I like Elif Batuman's writing and I'm looking forward to Selin's junior year.

I hope you had a great birthday, Kay. As forecast we had heavy rain and thunderstorms. Hope you got plenty of sunshine for parades and picnics.

Happy new thread! Had to laugh at the map...looks like I should attempt to be murdered in Southern Europe!

>25 MissWatson: I think we could all use a quiet reading spot with ocean breezes.

>27 VivienneR: Vivienne, it was a beautiful day, just a little hot, but still fine for having dinner outside in the shade.

>28 christina_reads: I know, right?

Happy new thread and a happy birthday all at once.
Both late, but it's the thought that counts >;-)

I took a BB from your previous thread: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus but there is a long list of library holds so it might be a long time before my name appears.

>30 Helenliz: Thanks, Helen. Now to catch up on reviews.

>31 VivienneR: I had a long wait for it, too.

Cities I've Never Lived In by Sara Majka is a collection of short stories that are all narrated by solitary people living melancholic lives. The writing is extraordinarily beautiful, but the stories in the first half of the book are all essentially static, with little to nothing happening and the paragraphs often seem randomly ordered or feature abrupt changes in time and place, as though the author just added random paragraphs together to form a story. Yes, each paragraph was beautifully structured and well-written, but it turns out I need a little more forward momentum from my fiction.

The second half of the collection were a few stories that were connected in that the narrator was the same. While there were many scenes and encounters that were unexplained, having the same narrator gave the stories a feeling of progress and I enjoyed them a lot more, even if the protagonist was aimless and had trouble connecting with other people. Despite my reservations about this collection, Majka is a promising writer and I will certainly pay attention to anything she writes.

Bitter Orange Tree by Omani writer Jokha Alharthi tells the story of a young woman attending an English university, where her friends are other foreigners, some also Muslim, some not. When she hears news that the woman she considers her grandmother has died, she is filled with regret for not giving her more of her time and affection while she could. While Zuhur becomes involved in the problems faced by her friends, she also spends time thinking about the life of her grandmother, whose life included both struggle and sacrifice.

This is a novel about women living within Islamic cultural constraints, but it isn't a novel about rebellion or breaking free. Zuhur and her two best friends, sisters from Pakistan, are content to live lives as they are expected to, although one sister decides to demand her own choice of husband. And for Zuhur's grandmother, it was never a question of choices, but of making the best of the life she was given. The different cultural perspectives and attitudes made for fascinating reading. The novel illuminated ordinary life in Oman in a way accessible to the Western reader, but not in a way that simplifies things.

Is it possible to be married with children and still not be a family? Johanna marries Salo after he's survived an accident in which two other people died, making him a kind of tragic figure in her eyes. And while she throws herself into caring for him, making a home and then in longing for children, Salo mainly cares about the paintings he's finding. And when, with a great deal of medical help, they end up with three infants, it doesn't draw Salo into Johanna's dream of a family, and the children themselves don't like each other, leaving home as quickly as possible and although two of the siblings end up at the same university, they simply don't acknowledge each other, with disastrous results. When Johanna is left with an empty nest and discovers something unsettling about Salo, she reacts by adding a fourth child to the mix. Raised essentially as an only child, will she be able to create a family out of these individuals who don't even like each other?

The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz is the story of a family, from the middle of the last century until just a few years ago. It's well-written, very well paced and a wonderful look at New York City at a specific time for a specific social caste. There's an old school feel to the character studies, even as they exist in very modern circumstances. Each character is fully explored, and the author takes time to let them spread their wings. And into this solid novel, that was so satisfying to read, there's a ton of art and while I'm generally happy with my life as it is, I'd love to be a wealthy dude in the early 1960s, just grabbing all the interesting paintings no one cared about and stashing it in the warehouse down in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that everyone is convinced will never be worth anything.

Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse is a combination memoir and true crime reportage that normally annoys me as they feel artificially smashed together, neither being a meaty enough subject for an entire book. But Tell Me Everything is an exception to this pattern, the connection between the author's life and the crime she's telling us about are clear and work together in a way that makes both facets of the story stronger.

Krouse got an offer of a job to become a private investigator for a lawyer at a point when her employment was temp work. She struggled to find her feet in her new profession, but as she became more involved in the case the lawyer was involved with, that of suing a university for Title IX violations in cases where sexual assault by athletes is enabled and hidden by coaching staff, she becomes more assured and determined to help the case. It's a complex case and Krouse's involvement contributes small portion of the evidence collected, but her own history makes this case personal for her.

Krouse writes well and this is a fascinating, if occasionally hard to read, story. I rushed through this book much faster than I'd planned to and learned quite a bit about how the legal system works. There's a painful honesty to Krouse's account and I'm impressed at her bravery in telling her story as well as the determination she showed in helping to hold an institution accountable.

Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid is a broad overview of the history, culture and politics of that large part of Eastern Europe called Ukraine. It's a fairly short book, and so it is also necessarily shallow, as it moves from the first Cossacks riding across the plains to the mid-nineties. Published well before the current war, or even the beginning of hostilities in the Donbas or the re-annexation of Crimea, it was nevertheless a good way to orient myself with the bare basics. While most of the book is a chronological look at Ukrainian history, with a side trip into the stories of Ukrainian writers and musicians, the final chapters are about subjects of interest in the mid-nineties, dealing with topics like the Chernobyl meltdown and Crimea.

Despite this being pretty much exactly what I wanted, given my near total ignorance about that part of the world, it still took me a long time to read. Ukraine was subject to the interests of the Turks, Russians and the Poles for a very long time and there were also the Cossacks riding around. Villages, especially Jewish villages, were pillaged and burnt at a disheartening rate. And between the way peasants were treated, Pogroms and the various wars that swept over the land, it's remarkable that Ukrainians have managed to forge a national identity. This was a useful book for me, and one that became more interesting in the second half, but for anyone who already has a fair understanding of the region, it would probably be a waste of time.

in Complicit Sarah is teaching screenwriting at a local college when she is contacted by a young and famous journalist making a name for himself revealing the bad behavior of powerful men. She's reluctant to speak with him, but when she does she finds herself telling her story. After graduating from Columbia, she finds a job as an intern at a small production company and, by making herself indispensable, works her way up to associate producer. During one exiting meeting during the Cannes Film Festival, the production company joins with a British billionaire, who gives them the money and connections to dramatically scale up their company. Before long, Sarah's in charge of producing a movie in LA and finding out that being good at her job is no protection, for herself or others.

I read Winnie M. Li's debut novel, which was based on her own experiences and while I didn't think that the book was entirely successful, it was brave and it left me with no doubt in my mind that Li wrote well and that she was willing to take risks in her writing. I was excited to see that she'd written Complicit and I was eager to see what she was going to do with the #MeToo theme. At first, I thought she was going to closely follow the story of one woman's experience reported in Ronan Farrow's book, especially given how the journalist was a stand-in for Farrow, but Li quickly went off into a different direction, one that allowed her to create a much more nuanced story. Once again, Li was brave in her choices and the resulting story was complex and thought-provoking. She also went into detail about what it takes to get a movie from an initial screenplay to the finished product, which was fascinating. I was impressed with this novel and I'm excited to see what Li writes next.

>37 RidgewayGirl: I know a little about the Ukraine, but I'd like to know more of its history. I've had friends who have been teaching in a seminary that trains native pastors there for many years. They were stateside between semesters and did not return, but their daughter who married a Ukrainian native and their grandchildren evacuated after the situation began. Her husband remains in Ukraine where he aids in food distribution and in other ways.

>39 thornton37814: My parents went to Ukraine (Kryvyi Rih) in the early nineties on a mission trip and so it's been on my Dad's mind a lot. He spent time with a high school principal who gave him his own bust of Lenin at the end of the trip and it still sits on his desk. I'll have to see if he wants my copy of the book.

"I could use another drink," she says. She only had a few before closing, and then one while she cleaned up. I say I'll have one too and she eyes me, deciding whether to start in on the question of if I need another. I don't, probably, no, I know I don't, but if she doesn't start in--she doesn't--I will have what I want, which is different from what I need: what a surprise.

The characters in Justin Taylor's short story collection, Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever are generally young, working menial jobs and are definitely not hipsters living in Brooklyn. From a lonely teenage asked to do something unpleasant by the uncle who had welcomed him into his family, to a guy working at the deli counter who is involved with a married woman, each story looks at all the ways people connect and fail to connect with each other. As in any collection, some stories are better than others, but all are well-written and even the less successful stories are trying to do something interesting.

Judge has nothing to do with this story. He wasn't even at home. We let ourselves in, swiped a six-pack from his fridge, and went back to Joe Brown's. Judge is simply a character on whom I can't help but dwell some. Something pulls my thoughts back his way. He inspires loathing so pure, to be silent about it seems no less a crime than denying love.

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama is the story of three women across two generations, all Tibetan refugees. First, two sisters make the difficult walk into Nepal with their parents soon after the Red Army arrives in their part of Tibet. They end up in a camp that becomes a permanent community, one sister dutiful and who stays, and the other who does well in school, so well that the community works to get her to higher education in India, an experience she finds overwhelming. Then there is the daughter of a sister, who attends university in Toronto, living with the aunt who reached Toronto before she did and who becomes involved in trying to repatriate an artifact she sees in a wealthy Canadian's home.

We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies is a vivid portrayal of what life is like for refugees and for their children, who always feel their strongest connection to a place they can't even visit. This is a book set in the Tibetan communities of Nepal and Canada, but written for western readers; explaining cultural practices and how it feels to live as a permanent exile. The plot, involving a stolen artifact and star-crossed lovers was fun, even if it lost a little momentum at the end.

Riley and Jen were best friends from when Jen was first dropped off at the daycare run by Riley's grandmother and that friendship lasted all through high school. And now, in their thirties, although they drifted apart, now that Riley's back in Philadelphia, they are picking up where they left off, sharing the same inside jokes and long history. But things have also changed. Riley is coming off of a long relationship and a reporter with a local news team, and Jen is an expectant mother and married to a police officer. And when Jen's husband in involved in the shooting death of a Black boy and Riley is assigned to cover the story, that Jen is white and Riley is black becomes a thing that divides them in ways they'd never talked about before.

We Are Not Like Them is the kind of ripped-from-the-headlines novel I usually avoid, but this was for my book club and so I picked it up and found myself liking it quite a bit. It helps that this was written by two authors, Christine Pride and Jo Piazza, and together they managed to make both characters feel fully well-rounded and the novel dug into the story from different angles that embraced complexity and conflict, while also really celebrating female friendship. Piazza has written several books and Pride's background in journalism gave authenticity to Riley's experiences. Towards the end of the book, it felt like the authors were intent on just tying up all the loose threads and the ending felt a little to easy given the sheer intractability of the characters up to that point, but kudos to the authors for being willing to directly address the issue of race in America in a way that is approachable yet unwilling to let the reader get comfortable.

Ellie's father is a famous poet. He is no longer married to her mother, and is on his third family, but Ellie knows he loves her best, after all his most famous poem, the one published in anthologies and assigned to high school students, is about the two of them tossing his old baseball back and forth. And she's worked hard to keep his attention. She's the one he can talk to, the one who remains focused on him, who makes sure her conversation is witty and interesting.

And then her father dies unexpectedly. And he has left a list of small, meaningful bequests. Ellie is sure that the old baseball he keeps on his desk will be hers, after all it has such meaning for the two of them. But the ball is left to someone named L. Taylor and she is handed a cheap novelty tie rack as her inheritance. Ellie's mourning for her father is now complicated by this final insult and the self-appointed task of finding L. Taylor to discover why her father loved them more than her.

The Catch is Alison Fairbrother's first novel, but it doesn't read like a debut novel. It's tightly structured and deliberate in what it's doing. Ellie is a young woman who feels both like she's going places with her job writing articles for a start-up internet news site and that she's spinning her wheels. She's in love, but the man is older and married so can the relationship be an honest one? I really liked this novel -- it's part of that literary sub-genres about young women making disastrous mistakes -- a sort of mirror image of the more-established WMFuN* -- but in this case, Ellie has friends and family who love her and she's more thoughtful than the usual protagonist spinning out of control. This was the kind of novel I will never tire of and I'm looking forward to Fairbrother's next one.

* White Male Fuck-up Novel

Mecca by Susan Straight is a novel about people living in the parts of Southern California tourists don't see, far inland from the beaches. The novel begins with Johnny Frias, who grew up on a cattle ranch outside of Mecca, California and who now rides the freeways with the CHP. His father still works the ranch, with two other aging cowboys and Frias helps out when he can, keeping a watch on the possibility of forest fires. He also hides a secret in those dry hills, that when he was a rookie officer, he killed a man and hid his body there.

Frias is one character in this richly populated novel about people living their lives in the hills to the east of Los Angeles. Straight effortlessly juggles a dozen characters and a large number of events from the pandemic and a wildfire to a missing baby and a teenage boy shot dead in the drive-thru lane of a fast food restaurant. And despite the fact that there is a lot going on, the focus always remains on the characters living in this dry, sun-soaked part of California. This was the perfect novel for summer reading -- I came up for air at the end of it a little disoriented and sad it was over. Straight has such compassion for her characters and understands them so well, that I had no trouble keeping track of who had done what and why they did the things they did. This is a solid book that is deeply rooted in a specific time and place.

Olga, born and raised in the Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, is a successful wedding planner, adept at managing the often unreasonable expectations of New York's wealthiest brides. Her extended family is large and colorful, but her father died when she was young of an overdose and her mother left her and her brother to do political activism and only occasionally sends a letter. Olga is involved with a wealthy and newly divorced man who wants to take the next step, but she's not interested in entering his world and she's met an interesting guy in her neighborhood.

Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez is literary chick-lit, and I mean that in the best possible way. The novel is fun and expansive and written with a light touch that serves the sometimes serious subject matter well. Because along with brides behaving badly there are hurricanes and politicians being blackmailed and a lot about Puerto Rico and how it has been badly served by the United States. Olga is a wonderful introduction to a talented young author.

You don't have to have read Election by Tom Perrotta, but you've probably seen the movie. Tracy Flick Can't Win takes place twenty years later, when Tracy, who marched off to accomplish big things, is back in town working as an assistant principal and preparing to take over as principal when the current one retires at the end of the year. But a lot of people are interested in what's going on at the high school and as the various people work to get what they want, Tracy Flick finds that she might not be a shoo-in for the job. But Tracy Flick never gives up without a fight, does she?

Is this book any good? I don't know. It's certainly fun to read and Perrotta gives voice to a wide cast of colorful characters. It's a quick read and with short chapters and a lot going on, I sailed through it. But I don't think I'll remember much about this in a few weeks, which is not necessarily a complaint; a fun, escapist read is something we all enjoy sometimes. But I do miss Perrotta's more substantial work.

Rouge Street is a collection of three novellas by contemporary Chinese author Shuang Xuetao, all set on Yanfen Street in Shenyang, an industrial city in northwest China, not far from the border with North Korea. The novellas focus on families, especially children, living through tough times. Memories of the Cultural Revolution and even the Japanese occupation are woven into these stories and there are fantastic elements that feel folklorish in tone and meld seamlessly with the gritty, realistic setting.

I was prepared for this book to be something that felt like homework. Instead, it was a delight. Each novella was very different from the others. The first was a generational tale, the second was a folktale-feeling story involving two children who were just trying to survive in the absence of parents who were capable of caring for them, and the final novella was a noirish tale of criminals and the detective hunting them down. The novellas are also inter-connected, making this feel more cohesive that the usual collection. These novellas were a wonderful introduction to a celebrated young Chinese writer. I hope more of of his work is translated soon.

I'd grown up without being exposed to many actual men besides teachers, who didn't really count. I had cobbled together a composite picture for myself out of the limited source material at hand. My mother had naturally weighed in heavily with the opinion that the male sex was a lower order without common sense or the capacity to behave responsibly, but Gothic novels and fairy tales had inculcated in me the equally strong but contrary expectation that either a prince of some kind would carry me off to his castle or Mr. Rochester would eventually marry me if I waited for him to go blind. By the time I was eight years old, I'd absorbed the idea that courtship and marriage happened when the perfect man came along and chose you from the lineup.

Claudia's not doing great. Almost thirty and her fabulous New York life means living in a terrible studio apartment she can't even afford, ghost-writing for a confused and abusive socialite while also working as her personal assistant, in love with her best friend, who has never given her the slightest encouragement and drinking far more than would be a good idea for a stevedore. In the Drink is Kate Christensen's first novel. It was published in 1999 and is very much a snapshot of a specific time, and it's also witty and funny in a we're-all-drowning-so-let's-have-a-laugh kind of way.

I really love this kind of novel, where a woman gets herself into a mess of her own making and her attempts to right things either works or goes disastrously wrong. Claudia was a wreck, but she was so funny in a Dorothy Parker kind of way and the author has taken the time to give her and the secondary characters real depth. I highly recommend this book for readers who like this kind of thing.

When Ghosts Come Home is a bit different from Wiley Cash's usual fare. It's almost a historical novel, being set in the early 1980s, and Cash's ability to vividly describe a specific place (Oak Island, North Carolina) at a specific time is unchanged, but here he's primarily engaged in writing a thriller. Taking place over just a few days, this novel starts slowly before throwing all the twists and turns in at the end.

A sheriff is jolted away by the sound of a crash at the local airfield. Arriving at the scene, he finds an abandoned plane at the end of the runway and a dead body at the other end. As he tries to find out what the plane had been carrying and what happened, he's also in a heated election battle to retain his seat, an election he expects to lose and his opponent is acting like he's already won. The dead body is the son of a local high school teacher and civil rights activist, giving the racists an excuse to menace the Black community. And his daughter, still mourning a lost pregnancy, shows up, unsure of what her future holds.

This was a character-driven novel, with a protagonist not unlike a Walt Longmire, and Cash's love of setting a scene works against the genre here. But I enjoyed this look at a Carolina ocean community in the off-season and how very nice people can hold some very ugly ideas. There's a final twist at the end that I absolutely did not see coming. While I prefer Cash's more thoughtful and quiet novels, this was a lot of fun.

>50 RidgewayGirl: I have this one waiting for me on my Kindle. I love this author's writing but perhaps will lower my expectations a little as this one does sound slightly different from his usual fare.

>51 DeltaQueen50: I liked it and was surprised by a few things. I do like Wiley Cash's writing and he's a lot of fun at author signings.

>50 RidgewayGirl: Hi Kay, I think I liked When Ghosts Come Home a little less than you. I seem to remember that I had a little issue with the way the ending unfolded. I read it last November, you would think I would remember more.

>53 lsh63: Lisa, I think that I was definitely in the mood for a book just like When Ghosts Come Home when I read it. I was thinking that Cash had set things up as the start of a series about Winston solving crimes on Oak Island so clearly I had no clue what was going to happen.

Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, Sea of Tranquility, is a hard one to pigeonhole. It begins as a straight-forward historical novel about the second son of a prominent English family sent to Canada (a novel which I would have been quite happy to stay in, by the way), then changes to one set roughly near our own time and involving characters from The Glass Hotel (I was also happy to see these characters again, and from this slightly different angle) and finally a new story, one that will eventually, and wonderfully, draw all the threads together.

Yes, this is a novel about time travel, but it's also about people and hope and what joins us together. And it poses some interesting questions as it ranges through the centuries. Mandel writes so well about human emotions. She's playing with complex ideas and creating imaginative worlds, but really she's writing about people and the connections they make. And the answer to a question she asks in the book is really the only answer that can be given. I will be thinking about aspects of this novel for a long time.

Please See Us by Caitlin Mullen tells the story of several murdered women dumped in the salt marsh behind a decaying motel on the outskirts of Atlantic City. The story centers on Lily, who recently moved back home after a bad break-up and takes a job as a receptionist at a casino spa, and Clara, a teenager working on the boardwalk as a fortune teller and whose guardian is pressuring her to take on some riskier work. There are missing girls who have family looking for them, missing women who have family who hope they will one day come home, and there are women whose absence goes unremarked and unmourned. Lily and Clara form a tenuous friendship as they look for a missing teenage girl and try to find a local sex worker when she goes missing.

This isn't a traditionally-structured crime novel. The focus is on the lives of the women before they disappear and remains on the dangers experienced by women on the fringes of society in a failing town dedicated to vice. The portrayal of Atlantic City is so well done and heartbreaking. Each woman, regardless of her decisions, is a fully drawn character with hopes and dreams and a fully-realized past. This isn't a novel about a serial killer, but one about his victims.

Disclaimer: I've read two of Lan Samantha Chang's novels and loved them both and I also really like short stories so it was a forgone conclusion that I would like Hunger: A Novella and stories by Chang. And I did like it very much.

The stories mostly follow the experiences of children being raised by recent immigrants who are struggling to find their place in communities that are not entirely welcoming. Being highly educated and skilled doesn't prevent the parents from being passed over for jobs or promotions, trying to fit in never quite works. The children deal with this by rebelling or by being compliant and eventually learn to be themselves. The book opens with the novella, which left me wanting something longer and which also was exactly the right length for the story it was telling. The best stories examined father-daughter relationships. This was an excellent collection and I hope Chang returns to the short story format.

Nothing hits the spot like a book you expect to enjoy - and you do.

>55 RidgewayGirl: I'm still on the holds list for Sea of Tranquility that was so long I considered cancelling my hold (in fact I did cancel and then put it back on again, meaning I'm back at the bottom of the list). Your review tells me to be patient, not my strong suit.

>58 Helenliz: There really is something about a book you know will be good. It makes me put off reading them because I keep thinking that I should save them for when I really need a reliably good book.

>59 VivienneR: Stay in line for it and hopefully by the time it's your turn, you will have forgotten everything you've read about it and will start it with a feeling of grim obligation, only to find that you love it.

I'm heading for Hawai'i in a few weeks. Does anyone have any recommendations of good fiction by Hawaiian authors? Or set in Hawaii? I'm not a Michener fan and I've read Sharks in the Time of Saviors, which was fantastic.

>55 RidgewayGirl: - I still need to read The Glass Hotel - seems like I'm always behind every time someone mentions a book I've meant to read. The library line for Sea of Tranquility isn't too long though.

>61 dudes22: The Glass Hotel lacks the inventiveness of the other two linked books, but it's still a good novel. She writes so well.

>60 RidgewayGirl: Good advice! My first book by Emily St. John Mandel was Last Night in Montreal that I loved - maybe even more than subsequent books. It was such a lovely surprise.

>63 VivienneR: I should reread Last Night in Montreal because all I remember about it now is that I thought it was weird.

Today, my house received a letter. The postman rang the bell and wondered if I knew who the addressee "Adlai Stevenson House" was. And the letter was from a man who had house-sat in 1976, who sent a few photos as proof. In one of the pictures was the chair -- the one I'd bought from a local antique dealer who claimed it had come from the house -- turns out he was right about that.



Anyway, he and his wife will be in town next week and want a tour and I am going to have so many questions for him.

I really liked Ling Ma's debut novel, Severance, which was an odd blend of everyday observations and utter weirdness and I'm happy to report that her collection of short stories, Bliss Montage shares those traits. There are odd situations, presented matter-of-factly, like the woman who lives in a mansion with her husband and children and all one hundred of her ex-boyfriends, and also astutely observed ordinary moments, like a woman meeting a man in a bar.

He bought me a cocktail without asking, and proceeded to explain, casually, that he lived in this neighborhood, just a few blocks away. Actually, what he said was six blocks. No, five and a half blocks. That's what he said, five and a half blocks, as if he were afraid that at six blocks I would say no. I didn't tell him that actually, I liked him up to eight blocks. In our city, that equals a mile. I liked him up to a mile.

These stories are full of young women figuring out life, how to move on from the things their mothers taught them, working out how love and life work in the world as it is. Sometimes the worlds these women exist in are different from this one, other times the author stays with this one.

What I wouldn't give to escape these late winters in Chicago. Especially the deep, post-holiday extremes of January and February, when, no longer buoyed by festivities and merriments, you're confronted with the empty expanse of a new year, discarded resolutions in your wake, resigned to your own inability to change.

I really like how Ling Ma writes, both on a sentence level and in the way she views the world. I ended up liking each story in this collection a little more than the last and would have liked it to be much longer.

>64 RidgewayGirl: - That's awesome! I lived in a really old house (built 1864) when I was young and used to wonder who had been there before.

>65 RidgewayGirl: This sounds good, not an author I've come across before. I'm thinking I should set up some kind of auto-add to the books you recommend, as I always come here and add them...

The letter from a former house sitter sounds fascinating, hope he has plenty of good stories to share when you do the tour.

>66 dudes22: It really is a great advantage to have a famous person live in your house. Then people really keep track of things. I still need to get down to the historical society, where there are allegedly many photos of the house, both inside and out.

>67 charl08: Likewise, Charlotte, especially when it comes to global fiction and works in translation. I am going to do my best not to interrogate the poor man when he's here.

<64 I'm so glad the letter got to you and that you are receptive to his visit. Hopefuly he has lots to tell you. And that lucky chair, so nice that's it's back in it's home.

>69 clue: The downside of this and having a house/catsitter while we are on vacation in a few weeks, is that the pressure is on to get those last few boxes squared away. No more just ignoring them with the thought of dealing with them during the winter months.

Love Marriage begins with a dinner to introduce Yasmin's family to the mother of Joe, her fiancé, then expands to look at the two families and Yasmin and Joe's relationship. Yasmin grew up with the story of her parents's love marriage, with her mother's family being wealthy and her father a menial worker who didn't graduate high school until his mid-twenties. He's now a respected doctor living in a quiet part of London, his wife occupies herself with cooking and bargain-hunting. But the details of their love match were never made clear and as Yasmin worries about her own love match, as her family begins to shatter, she wants the whole story. And Joe is seeing a therapist, who is pushing him in a direction he doesn't want to go; looking at his relationship with his (in)famous well-to-do mother. As family issues consume their thoughts and time, as their careers as doctors put another pressure on their emotions and their time, will Joe and Yasmin manage to get married?

Monica Ali is fantastic at pulling at the threads of family and seeing what emerges. Each character, from Yasmin's tense, regimented father to her unemployed and seemingly directionless younger brother, are given time and space to be full characters. Having each chapter follow a different character only works when each character is interesting and fully developed and their story ties in with the larger novel, things Ali pulls off effortlessly. This is an excellent novel and now I need to go back and read the books by this author that I've missed.

Small Things Like These is a novella by Irish author Claire Keegan, set in the 1980s in a small town in the southeast of Ireland on a snowy day just before Christmas. It's a small jewel of a tale, managing to cram a great deal of atmosphere and story in very few pages and it manages to end at exactly the right moment.

Yes, it's very good. There's a reason this was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And it's delightful that a novella is receiving this much attention. Novellas get short shrift in the literary world. They're too long and bloated to be a snappy short story; they're the long thing that sits at the end of some short story collections, to be begun with some trepidation. They're too short for those in the mood for a novel; there's no space to get to know the story at a leisurely pace, or to allow for a wide cast of characters or twists and turns to a plot. But they have their own charms, and in the case of Small Things Like These, it's in holding a work that is exactly the length it needs to be.

>64 RidgewayGirl: That's an amazing story! I'm so glad you'll be in touch with someone that is part of the history of your house. You'll have lots to talk about.

>72 RidgewayGirl: That's definitely a BB for me!

>72 RidgewayGirl: I read this late last year and rated it 4.5*, unusually high for me. I have a pre-pub copy of Foster, also a novella, on my shelf but have been waiting for the right time to read it. There are so many fine Irish writers!

>73 VivienneR: I'm very excited about the visit, but it also comes just before we leave for vacation in Hawai'i, so I have to keep reminding myself that the house needs to be ready for an inspection, even as I'm rooting around for suitcases and swimming suits.

>74 clue: Small Things Like These is too short to be able to find flaw with it. And I was glad to finally read something by this author. She's been on my list of authors I'm interested in reading for far too long.

Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance by Alison Espach begins with the knowledge that the narrator's sister dies, but not when or how. It sets up a tension in the story as Sally recounts her life with her older, more popular sister. Each section of the novel moves the story forward, through the terrible events in which her sister is lost, then on to how their family collapses; their shared grief serves to separate them.

This is a very well-structured novel that seems superficially like an above average tear-jerker about a family tragedy, but the way that the author puts the novel together and how she evokes the different facets of grief elevates this novel. And she nails aspects of childhood with clear-eyed accuracy.

I had great plans for the next week, involving a book festival and my two best friends, and yesterday I had a scratchy throat. Friends, I have finally succumbed to covid. Plans are canceled, I'm irked, but here I am, home for the foreseeable future. I guess I should catch up on my reviews or something.



Growing up in the eighties in Albania is hard enough, but with the death of his father, Bujar's family spins apart. Bujar's best friend, Amir, has always known what he wanted and now he proposes that the two of them set out for Italy, where they will surely prosper and live their dreams. But reaching Italy isn't the solution it first seemed, and as he moves from country to country, he finds that being an Albanian migrant is a hinderance. He tries living as a man in Spain and as a woman in Germany, each time with disastrous results. New York is difficult, but maybe Finland will be more welcoming?

Crossing by Pajtim Statovci is a novel that explores what being an outsider feels like, whether that of being a foreigner from an undesirable country or someone whose gender and sexuality fall outside of what is accepted, and is even criminalized in some places. The protagonist has to constantly reinvent himself, hoping with each move that he will finally find the acceptance he longs for. I found this novel to be thought-provoking and challenging.

>77 RidgewayGirl: Hope you have a mild case and a speedy recovery!

>78 christina_reads: Thanks, Christina! It's not at all bad so far - feels like a mild flu. I'm lazing around, drinking various teas and finishing up Mad About You by Mhairi McFarlane, which is the perfect book for this.

Sorry to hear you've been hit by the bug. Glad it's not too bad.

Get well soon! May your symptoms be mild and over very quickly!

Sorry you got bit with the bug. I wonder why it seems to be when one is making great plans.

Oh no! I hope you're feeling better soon.

Wishing you a quick recovery.

Sorry to hear the bug caught up with you, and wishing you all the best for a speedy recovery!

>85 MissWatson: I'm mad because I made it so far. I was hoping to never get it. But my schedule is clear and I'm laying around, taking naps and being unproductive even though it's been more like a mild flu than anything else.

Sorry to hear about the COVID invasion Kay, I wish you a speedy recovery. I hope you are able to enjoy the books, comfort food, and perhaps a few entertaining television shows, and naps of course.

Literature really likes a non-neurotypical protagonist these days and The Maid by Nita Prose certainly fits that bill. Molly is relentlessly literal and needs her space to be ordered and clean. She's also unable to read people at all, taking them as they claim to be. She lives in the apartment she grew up in under the care of her grandmother, although without her grandmother, she's having trouble paying the rent. She has a job as a maid at a small, upscale Manhattan hotel which she does diligently and with real enjoyment. But when she finds the murdered body of a hotel guest while cleaning, her well-ordered, if tenuous, world rapidly falls apart, leaving her with no choice but to find out who the murderer is herself, especially given that the police are focused on her.

This is a fun novel. Molly is an engaging narrator and the author knows how to pace a novel. She also allows the reader to know who the good and the bad guys are well in advance of when Molly figures this out, but the story is less in whodunit than it is in witnessing how Molly navigates her world and in how her friends care for her. This novel is heart-warming without being annoying or overly sweet, although I did think it went on for slightly longer than I would have liked it to. This novel has a similar energy to Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

>87 lsh63: Thanks, Lisa. I'm being very self-indulgent and drinking all kinds of teas. My old cat refuses to leave my side, but that may be because the weather is cooler now and he has old bones that like to use me for body heat.

>88 RidgewayGirl: Hmm, I wasn't particularly interested in The Maid, but I did enjoy Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, so now I'm wondering if I should pick up the former. Decisions, decisions...

Karin Slaughter writes thrillers and while I vastly prefer her stand-alones over her series, Girl, Forgotten was pretty good. A young woman in the mid-eighties discovers she's pregnant without any memory of any sexual encounter, but she was at a party where she got wasted and she suspects that it was either one of the boys at that party or the teacher who gave her a ride home who are to blame. Before she can get far with her investigation, however, she's murdered.

Years later, US Marshals are assigned to protect her mother, a judge, after she received threatening letters. Andrea, the main character of another Slaughter novel and now a US Marshal, investigates that earlier murder amid plenty of danger to everyone.

Slaughter is always good for a well-paced and exciting thriller and this book was no exception. Her titles, however, are impossible to remember and are far too generically "thriller" to be memorable. She does a great job describing the eighties and the feeling of growing up in a small town past its prime.

Sorry to hear that you've been hit by Covid, Kay. Hopefully it will be a mild case and you can get back to making plans soon! I am reading and loving November Road right now which I believe you loved as well. Lou Berney has become a must read author for me!

>92 DeltaQueen50: Berney is so good! He's definitely a must-read for me, too. And thank you for the well-wishes. After two days of what felt like a mild flu, I am on the mend, fever gone, just a little tired. And since I can't go anywhere until I test negative, I'm lounging around and being lazy.

Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett has the kind of voice I really enjoy, a very close first-person narration by a protagonist whose thoughts range widely as she goes about her day, mostly thinking about the story she's writing and about literature in general.

Graham Greene. Gore Vidal. Nabokov. E. M. Forster. So many men for the simple reason I wanted to find out about men, about the world they lived in and the kinds of things they got up to in that world, the kinds of things too that they thought about as they drifted out of train stations, hung about foreign ports, went up and down escalators, barreled through revolving doors, looked out of taxi windows, lost a limb, swirled brandy around a crystal tumbler, followed another man, undressed another man's wife, lay down upon a lawn with arms folded upon their chest, cleaned their shoes, buttered their toast, swam so far out to sea their head looked like a small black dot.

It's the kind of writing that is immersive when the time is taken to allow the flow of the words to take over one's own thoughts. The narrator here is so thoughtful, curious and honest that her voice is very good company, erudite and unpretentious. I will certainly be reading more by this author.

We confused life with literature and made the mistake of believing that everything going on around us was telling us something, something about our own little existences, our own undeveloped hearts, and, most crucially of all, about what was to come. What was to come? What was to come?

>92 DeltaQueen50:, >93 RidgewayGirl:

I'm so happy you both like Lou! I act like he's my son but I know he's not. I discovered him when I was looking over the latest Edger winners list a few years ago, and saw Lou Berney from Oklahoma City was one of the winners. I live 180 miles from there, and when you live in a rural state that's like going to the mailbox!
I immediately called our Library Director who had worked at the OKC University medical library to see if she knew him. She didn't, but called him the next day and asked if he would come to speak at our library. He immediately worked out a date! That evening Jennifer told him I had spied his name as an Edgar winner and he immediately asked what mystery writers I like. I started with Kate Atkinson and I don't think we even got beyond that because she's a big favorite of his too.
When November Road came out, I sent him a message representing our library and told him how proud we were of him and wished him great success with it. He sent back a sweet reply, he really is so very nice! Another of the things I like about him is that he loves his OKC hometown! He and his wife had lived away (out of the U.S.) for a few years and he talked about how much fun he had rediscovering OKC. We're waiting impatiently for his next book and we'll ask him to come again, and you know what, if he can work it out he absolutely will. He's just that kind of person.

>95 clue: That's so good to know about an author I really like. Lucky you, to have this connection to him.

I'm sorry you caught covid, too, and happy to hear that you are a little better already!

>86 RidgewayGirl: "I'm mad because I made it so far. I was hoping to never get it." I felt like this, too, when I caught it in late August.

>94 RidgewayGirl: I added this one to my ever-growing WL, it sounds very good.

>97 MissBrangwen: Claire-Louise Bennett has such a good writing style. I'm eager to get my hands on her earlier novel.

>93 RidgewayGirl: Glad to hear that you are on the mend. Take care of yourself and enjoy your down time.

>95 clue: How great it is to hear that an author I admire is a nice person in RL! I still have two from his "Shake Bouchon" trilogy on my shelf but I also hope he has a new one out soon!

How to Find Your Way in the Dark by Derek B. Miller is a madcap and heart-warming tale about a boy growing up in the years before the US entered WWII. Left orphaned after his father's murder, Sheldon swears he will kill the man who ran them off the road. This novel is similar in tone to Fredrick Backman's novels and is a prequel to the author's earlier novel, Norwegian by Night. While the story was more than a little far-fetched, the love that the author has for his characters is undeniable and the book managed to balance some heavy subject matter with humor and whimsy. I'm not really the reader of this kind of book, it was the choice of my book club, but I did enjoy reading it.

A lonely married woman becomes obsessed with the woman who used to live in her house after she receives some of her mail. As she hunts for information about the woman, developing the fantasy that they would be best friends, a series of murders in the area put her neighborhood on edge.

The question in A Tidy Ending by Joanna Cannon isn't so much whether Linda is an unreliable narrator, but to what extent. Is she reporting honestly about events as she sees them, through the filters of her delusions and hopes, or is she willfully misleading the reader? This novel works so well in maintaining that tension, until the final chapters, which can't fulfill the promise of the rest of the book, as all the secrets are revealed. But the majority of the book is successful and my disappointment with the author being unable to pull of the impossible will not stop me from taking a look at her other work.

>101 RidgewayGirl: I very much enjoyed Joanna Cannon's first two books, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, and Three Things About Elsie. The Trouble With Goats and Sheep is set in a typical avenue in a typical town in the English East Midlands in the drought summer of 1976, and the main characters are two primary school-aged girls. As a 7 year old in the English East Midlands in 1976 who lived in a typical avenue in a typical town, I can say that she absolutely nailed the place, the way of speaking, and the vibe of the time. It's not a perfect book, but I forgave it for how much I truly recognised.

>102 Jackie_K: Cannon has an engaging writing style and A Tidy Ending was very much rooted in a English housing estate. I had a lot of fun reading it.

Across the water, streetlamps blinked on, then hung unsuspended and haloed pink in the fog. Grainy daylight drained out slowly through the long kitchen window. This was the start of the devastating time of day, when, if you turned on the overhead, the texture of the walls and the edges of objects became too vivid and you found yourself straining to remember one thing that had ever brought you any joy, but if you didn't and just let the window continue to blacken, sick and slow, it felt like being lowered into a grave.

The Pleasing Hour is Lily King's first novel and it's baggy in the way of first novels, with entire chapters failing to tie into the rest of the novel and a certain unfocused meandering that is absent from her later work. That said, it is still recognizably King's work, with fine writing and a keen eye for detail. Here, Rosie, a young woman who recently gave her baby to her sister to raise, goes to work in Paris as an au pair, living in a boat moored on the side of the Seine with a family of five, including a daughter close to her own age. Rosie hasn't yet come to terms with recent events, which color her time in Paris. She has a tense relationship with the mother and an easier one with the father, that develops into a flirtation as the year progresses.

The novel stays primarily with Rosie's story, but has chapters devoted to individuals in the family she works for, some which tie to the larger story and others that do not. The chapter that least propels the story forward is also the best one, involving the young son and the family's visit to have tea with a priest. I suspect that were King to write this book today, it would be a tighter and better balanced work, but it was still a pleasure to spend time with King's writing and a melancholy young woman struggling to figure out the world around her.

Catching up. >88 RidgewayGirl: is on my radar. Just not sure if I'll get to it soon or not.

>105 thornton37814: Lori, I think you'd really like The Maid.

>72 RidgewayGirl: ohh, temptress and the library has it. If I max out my reservations, I know who to blame! (never happened yet...)

Sorry to hear you got hit by 'rona. Hope you've bounced back.

And now I'm intrigued by >102 Jackie_K:.

>107 Helenliz: Helen, Small Things Like These is short, even by novella standards. You'll like it.

And, thank you, yes, I'm all better except for a new appreciation for naps.

>72 RidgewayGirl: Thank you for this recommendation. Short, meaningful and beautifully written. One of the best books I've read this year, so I've put Foster on hold.

>109 pamelad: It's really great how everyone seems to respond to this novella. It is good.

Harriet has told her boyfriend that she doesn't want to get married. She hasn't told him that she wants to break up, but when he forces the issue by proposing at his parents' anniversary dinner, things go as badly as expected. Harriet rents a room sight unseen and attempts to move on with her life, but her ex-boyfriend's subsequent behavior, running into another ex at an event she was working at, and getting to know her landlord are forcing her into coming to terms with her past and maybe even taking dramatic action.

Mad About You, like Mhairi McFarlane, is Chick Lit, in that it's a breezily-written story about a young woman and there is a romance, but really this is a novel about domestic abuse and how its effects can be felt long after the abuser is gone. And, for all the heavy subject matter, this isn't a heavy read. Harriet has friends with full lives of their own and her own progress is made while also dealing with all the odd situations a wedding photographer can be put in and Harriet herself is a fiercely optimistic character who is as much fun to spend time with as any of McFarlane's other heroines.

Chick Lit doesn't exactly get much respect as a genre and while it is true (as it is for any genre) that most of what is published is badly written, there are a lot of good books being published in that genre. McFarlane remains one of the best authors writing Chick Lit and it's fun watching her work become more substantial even as she manages to keep the tone light and engaging.

>111 RidgewayGirl: Glad you liked this one! I really did too. McFarlane does a great job of maintaining a light and humorous tone while not minimizing the gravity of her subject matter.

>112 christina_reads: I like that she's always doing something new.

He had asked me to give him something hot in a thermos bottle to take with him on his trip, I went into the kitchen, made some tea, put milk and sugar in it, screwed the top on tight, and went back into his study. It was then that he showed me the sketch, and I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes. But for a long time already I had know that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.

This happens on the first page of The Dry Heart by Italian author Natalia Ginzberg. The question isn't who but why and this novella carefully details the relationship between a naive young teacher, living in a boarding house and longing for a better life, and a reserved man in love with a married woman. First published in 1947, this novella is also a clear look at the choices available to women at that time.

>114 RidgewayGirl: Wow, what a striking beginning! It goes on my WL immediately. I have never heard of this author, but had a look at her biography and LT page just now - how impressive to say the least.

>115 MissBrangwen: She was anti-fascist in a time and place when that was very dangerous, so I picked this up immediately after the results of the Italian election became public.

>114 RidgewayGirl: I think I have one of hers in the TBR pile. Thanks for the nudge: I should pick it up. What a quote!

>114 RidgewayGirl: Putting this on hold and recommending Family Sayings and The City and the House.

>118 pamelad: Thank you for the recommendations. I am eager to read more of her work.

Everyone thinks the South is, like, Flannery O'Connor. They think it's haunted. And maybe it is, deep down, in the soil, but I never saw it that way. We had a McDonald's. I don't know how else to say it. There were no bookstores, okay, fine. The museums we had were of the Old Jail Museum or Military Vehicle Museum or Railroad Museum variety. We had a Wal-Mart. I wore normal clothes.

Frankie is a teenager in a small Tennessee town in the nineties. She has three older brothers, triplets, who run wild, and an exhausted, hard-working mother. Her father left and now has a new wife and a new daughter who he has given Frankie's name. And she doesn't have any friends. Then she meets Zeke, in Coalfield for the summer. He's her age and just as artistic and dissatisfied. They quickly become friends and together make art together, she writing and he drawing. They make art together, combining her words and his sketches, and a little blood for effect, into a piece they then photocopy and post around the town as something to do in a quiet town during the summer. They expect some consternation, maybe annoyance on the part of some, but when there art project explodes in ways they never intended or dreamed of, they both have to grapple with the consequences.

Now is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson is, at heart, a book longing for those teenage years, after one learned to drive and gained some independence, but before the end of high school heralded in adult responsibilities. Frankie is an engaging narrator, sarcastic and incisive, as she looks back on those years as the ones that formed her, the ones she still thinks about every day. Her relationship with Zeke is lovely; two lonely young artists finding each other and finding in each other a way to belong that they hadn't found before. And that friendship is viewed through a veil of nostalgia, a combination of adult assessment and rose-colored glasses, so that she hesitates to recount that time to anyone else. Wilson has a talent at finding the weird in ordinary places and this novel is both wild and utterly believable, or at least, Wilson makes us believe it.

>120 RidgewayGirl: That's a BB for me! I really enjoyed Nothing to see here by the same author. As you say, Wilson has a talent for the wild and weird and yet it works. Two children who spontaneously combust? Completely normal.

>121 VivienneR: Nothing to See Here was fantastic and why I picked this one up. It does take a few chapters to get going and I recommend not reading the forward until after the novel, but it'll grab you.

We went to a local fund-raiser for First Book last night, sitting at a table full of neighbors and Dirk and I had fun. There was a trivia quiz and the first section was all questions about children's lit and let me tell you, I owned that category. All the other ones, not so much. But if you want to know things like who were Nancy Drew's friends or what was the name of the rat in Charlotte's Web, I'm your girl. Also, I won some cash in the raffle, so I'm buying books when I'm at the Portland Book Festival next month.

>123 RidgewayGirl: well done you! I love a good quiz, even if I have some terrible blind spots.

>124 Helenliz: My blind spots include sports, music (outside of a narrow band of time in the eighties and nineties) and TV/Movies. Do not include me on your team. But I managed to impress our neighbors before becoming useless. I was hoping, given that the event was a fundraiser for a literacy non-profit, that it would be an all-books quiz, but sadly that did not happen.

>123 RidgewayGirl: - Woo Hoo! Free book money. Well done, you.

I have a lot of odd trivia in my brain but not usually useful. But when Trivial Pursuit first came out, we were playing at my brother's house and the question was the 1927 Times Man of the Year and my brother couldn't believe it that I knew it. (It just made sense).

>125 RidgewayGirl: >126 dudes22: My proudest ever Trivial Pursuit moment was winning a nailbitingly close final-cheese-in-the-middle final question with a lucky guess on a sports question (not only that, a sports question about cricket about which I know nothing and care even less). I'm on much firmer ground with the literature questions.

>126 dudes22: I have a good friend who knows everything, she just does. But the one kind of information my brain holds onto is about books. There simply isn't room for much more.

>127 Jackie_K: A good guess that turns out to be right is often more satisfying than knowing the answer, honestly. It's like your brain knows more than you do.

>123 RidgewayGirl: Excellent work! :D Like Helen, I love a good quiz. That reminds me, I'm in an online league and have two games to play this weekend!

I don't know that much about books overall but I do use book titles and authors for passwords because I'll never forget those I know!

Congrats on the book money!

Congratulations on the quiz - and raffle results! It's so satisfying to come up with the right answer, and especially if it comes as a surprise even to yourself.

There's a particular kind of character who just hits my sweet spot. A woman who makes a lot of bad decisions and ruins her own life is always interesting to read about; after all, what is fiction without conflict and what kind of conflict is more interesting than the stuff people bring on themselves? Self-Portrait with Boy by Rachel Lyon features that main character. Lu is a young woman living in a terrible loft apartment in a sketchy part of Brooklyn in the nineties, before gentrification. She works at an expensive grocery store that allows her to pay her rent (most of the time) and buy film as she works on becoming a photographer. She is working on a series of self-portraits when it happens, she takes a truly great picture. Lu is sure that this is the key to getting her foot in the door of the art world, but who will she have to hurt to get her chance?

The very act of recall is like trying to photograph the sky. The infinite and ever-shifting colors of memory, its rippling light, cannot really be captured. Show someone who has never seen the sky a picture of the sky and you show them a picture of nothing.

This is a well-written debut novel that really captures a time and place, when if you were willing to live in a run down and rodent-infested space where the landlord is desperate to get people out, you could afford to live in New York. Where your neighbors could be people with serious issues or they could be artists using the space to create art. Self-Portrait with Boy is also a wonderful depiction of a person who longs to be an artist, to support herself with her pictures and to find a place within that milieu. I'm eager to read whatever Rachel Lyon writes next, even if it probably won't be exactly this book.

Congratulations on the great quiz performance!

>120 RidgewayGirl: I'm taking a BB for Now Is Not the Time to Panic. I too loved Nothing to See Here and look forward to reading more from Kevin Wilson.

The Copy Editors decided not to pay back their student loans. This decision wasn't motivated by lack of funds--though between them their bank statements didn't read above four hundred dollars and their combined Visa bills were triple that--no, it was a matter of principle. Who would pay someone who sent a letter that read, please be advised that your balance are outstanding? Surely, the twins reasoned, such egregious subject-verb disagreement rendered any contract null and void.

Difficult People is a collection of short stories by Catriona Wright about difficult people, those who don't mind bending the rules or using a friend or blowing up their own lives to make a point. These are fantastic stories as long as you don't require your main characters to be likable or even tolerable. It's not that they are all bad people, it's just that they aren't good, necessarily, and might always prioritize their own wants and impulses. I wouldn't want most of them in my house, or even living in the same neighborhood, but they do make for a good short story. From a woman with a terrible job who contemplates the bonus she gets for recruiting friends, to a woman who fails to support a friend when she is most needed, each of Wright's characters betrays the people who love them most.

>135 RidgewayGirl: If only "egregious subject-verb disagreement" DID nullify student loan obligations!

>136 christina_reads: Clearly it SHOULD. Kind of outrageous that it doesn't.

Had August Molloy not returned from the dead that morning in Detroit, the Molloy family line would've ended in the bathroom of a farm-to-table restaurant midway through lunch service.

And so opens Chevy in the Hole, a novel about August and how he moved back to Flint and met Monae at a small urban farm near the old General Motors plant. It's also a novel about earlier Molloys living in Flint during the sit-down strike in the thirties at that same plant and during the unrest of the sixties. These other storylines are given much less space than the one that follows August and Monae and despite this, much of the most interesting parts of their story happens between chapters. This is Kelsey Ronan's first novel and it shows. What is also evident is the author's real affection for Flint and her deep knowledge of local history, factors that make this book worth reading.

>114 RidgewayGirl: I've just finished The Dry Heart, which is a much more dismal book than the others by Natalia Ginzburg that I've read. Not that in 1947 she hasn't every reason to be steeped in gloom, but in her later books she'd distanced herself. There's lightness and humour, and her characters aren't drowning in their misery.

>139 pamelad: I will definitely hunt down more books by Ginzburg. Thanks for letting me know they are more cheerful.

My husband and I moved up to Bloomington, Illinois in February, leaving family behind and they are slowly following us north. My daughter is looking at ISU for her Masters and last week, my Dad called to say he's ready to move here. Less than a week later, his home is sold and I am spending the week touring retirement communities for him.

Ah ha! It was you I took a bullet from. I finished Small things Like These and it is extraordinarily good. I read it in one go, there's something about it that sucks you in and drags you along. Thank you.

>141 Helenliz: It really is the perfect novella to read in a single sitting.

The Yacoubian Building sits on a once prestigious street in Cairo, a lovely European-style building with retail on the ground floor, apartments on the floors above and, on the roof, a labyrinth of small sheds, housing the people who work for the apartment owners and those lucky enough to get a space. Alaa al-Aswani follows a diverse group of residents as they negotiate their lives in a quickly changing Egypt. Everyone from an elderly and very wealthy man involved in a feud with his widowed sister, to an educated newspaper editor, forced to hide his homosexuality, to a young woman who has to work to support her family and so becomes the target of increasingly blatant sexual harassment, and a young man whose dreams are destroyed by the ordinary corruption of bureaucrats.

This is a vivid snapshot of what life was like in Cairo, at a time before the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, but when a religious extremism was on the rise, a reaction to the lack of opportunity for those without money or connections. al-Aswany also looks at the treatment of women and how they are expected to keep themselves removed from public life, as well as the stark disparity between the wealthy and those who are struggling to get by. The author treats all his characters, even the most reprehensible, with understanding and a clear-eyed compassion that made me feel invested in even the characters I actively disliked.

Nightcrawling isn't an easy book to read, but there's an immediacy to it, a raw honesty that makes it worthwhile. Leila Mottley writes well, I won't qualify that by saying she writes well for her age; her writing is good. And the story she tells here, about a teenage girl living in Oakland who runs out of options and ends up walking the street, only to be noticed by the police and forced to work for them. It's a story of desperation and resilience, hope and pragmatism. Kiara is a fantastic character and Mottley depicts her vulnerability and her ability to keep trying to take care of the people she loves despite insurmountable obstacles. There's a reason this first novel was long listed for the Booker Prize.

Lucy by the Sea left me conflicted. In this fourth book following the life of Lucy Barton, Lucy is hustled out of her apartment in New York by her ex-husband and taken to a remote house on the coast of Maine to wait out the pandemic with him. Elizabeth Strout has been writing about Lucy's life for awhile and here we see what kind of old woman she is. It's interesting to see how people change (or fail to change) over time and I'm on board for this project of Strout's. There's even a look at Olive Kitteridge in this novel, now living in a retirement home. Looking at how Lucy is thinking more than ever about her childhood and about her siblings that she left behind as she fought to be free of background of deprivation certainly fits with the elderly people I know. And Lucy's situation is exacerbated by the isolation of the pandemic and by being isolated with William, her strong-willed and not hugely communicative ex-husband. Which is to say, Lucy's tendencies toward worry have solidified into a querulous focus on all the things that upset her, past and present.

Which brings me to my conflict with this novel; I appreciate the project Strout is finishing up here, with this final book about Lucy, and I love the earlier novels in this sequence (Anything is Possible is brilliant), but Lucy is just not that fun a character to spend time with. By pairing this fussy woman who overthinks some things while entirely overlooking other more obvious things, with a focus on events we are arguably still living through ourselves, this novel is often more frustrating that illuminating. I'm on board for how Lucy, no matter how secure and loved she is, can't help but focus on the same uncertainties that blighted her childhood. But this older Lucy, inured to the real lives of those less privileged than herself, just doesn't see how the solutions her family finds to the problems posed by the pandemic, are solutions only open to those with ample resources, from extra homes waiting for when they are needed, to the ability to simply pay others to take the risks deemed too dangerous for themselves. It's an odd blind spot in a character consumed by assessing how she is perceived by others.

I'm curious how this book will be seen in years removed from the current moment. It also leaves me with the same question I've been thinking about since 9/11; when are we ready to read fictitious accounts about events we ourselves lived through? And which accounts do we want to read? I found myself unsympathetic to characters whose difficulties during the pandemic were the most minimal, sheltered as they were by wealth and a willingness to use that wealth to escape, but I think that I would have enjoyed a novel told from the point of view of someone who lacked the ability to distance themselves. Or maybe I just need more distance from events to be able to engage with them in novels.

I'm looking forward to Strout's next project, whatever form that takes.

Had a wonderful few days in Portland, at the book festival there. This is all the books I didn't buy at Powell's. Those are being shipped to me. The top three books are from a Japanese store called Kinokuniya, that had a good selection of Asian and Asian American books.

I was thrilled to meet Kate Beaton, who drew a duck in my copy of her book, and Lydia Kiesling. Leila Mottley is a very young woman who is so self-possessed and intelligent, she's one to watch. I also got to see Morgan Talty, Jess Walter, George Saunders, Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Carolina De Robertis speak and often read from their work. It was especially fun to attend an event at Tin House Publishing, where we were invited to go upstairs and grab a drink out of the fridge before the readings. Anyway, it was fantastic to explore a new city and to be excited about books with an old friend I haven't seen since before the pandemic.

Very jealous you got to meet Kate Beaton! I love her comics.

>147 christina_reads: She was amazing. Her talk was fantastic and included music from Cape Breton. Her new book, Ducks, is very different from her other work and very good (I'm halfway through it) and her signing took forever because she chatted with everyone and drew pictures in people's books.

I'm jealous too! Sounds like a good time.

What a treat! And a drink out of the fridge too!

I had a look at Ducks because it would be a good birthday present for my daughter-in-law.

>146 RidgewayGirl: Great haul. I am waiting for Night of the living rez to come out here. And of course keen to get my hands on Kate Beaton's new one.

Portland is on my book festival bucket list, there were a few of the 75ers there this year too. Maybe next year...

>146 RidgewayGirl: So glad you got to meet Kate! I met her at the writers' festival in Toronto several years ago and she drew a Nancy Drew in my copy of Hark! A Vagrant. I have a hold on Ducks at the library but should really just buy it.

>149 dudes22: Betty, it was a much needed weekend with a best friend I hadn't seen since before the pandemic. I flew home Tuesday night and flew out again Thursday morning to help my dad pack up his house and move to a retirement community near us in Illinois.

>150 VivienneR: The whole weekend was a treat, but attending readings at off-site places that are nurturing writers was special.

>151 charl08: Morgan Talty was an interesting reader. He read new work, part of a memoir he's working on. And it was fun to get my copy of his book signed. Portland is a fun and vibrant city and I heartily recommend the book festival. We also spent a day exploring the art museum and it was time well spent.

>152 rabbitprincess: rp, she was wonderful. She really had a conversation with each and every person.

Lemon by Kwon Yeo-sun and translated from the Korean by Janet Hong is about the murder of a schoolgirl and the aftermath of that death, but it's less a mystery novel than it is an exploration of how a violent death affected several people, from the two boys who were suspected of the murder, to the murdered girl's younger sister and a girl who went to school with everyone involved. It's an exploration of how people deal with loss and adversity, told in a non-linear way. I really enjoyed this short novel once I let go of all the ideas about what I thought it was doing.

Not much reading being done. I'm at my Dad's, packing up and preparing to bring him to a retirement community near us in Illinois. There's a lot to do, but we'll have things ready in time for when the movers arrive Thursday morning, I think/hope. VictoriaPL came over and helped me pack one day, which was greatly appreciated, for the work she did, but mostly for the company.

>155 RidgewayGirl: I'm sure you and Victoria enjoyed the time together. Good luck with the move.

>156 thornton37814: LOL. This morning the company moving my Dad's stuff called to say they'd come a day early, so tomorrow instead of Thursday. Today was busy! But we should be mostly ready. And as a treat for surviving (if we indeed survive) we're staying in the Poinsett Hotel in downtown Greenville, next door to my favorite bookstore, for two nights as we finish up.

My Dad's cat, Homer, has been taken to stay at the kennel, poor guy. He said some things on the drive over that I hope he will later regret.

It sounds as though your dad's move is going well. Enjoy your reward!

Glad things seem to be working out for your dad's move. I'm guessing the cat was using bad language?

>158 pamelad: If by "going well" you mean that no one has been hospitalized and the house is still standing, then yes it is. Movers have left. There's quite a bit still here, so now to convince my Dad that the people he hired to haul away the remnants should come before the house is cleaned. He's overwhelmed, so I have to choose my time.

>159 dudes22: Yes, a lot of threats and obscenities. I'm glad he's at the kennel though as he would not have done well when the movers were stomping around and doors were open.

That sounds traumatic all round.
Good luck and hopefully Homer will forgive you someday...

>161 Helenliz: Poor Homer. He really does not like change. And my Dad is doing better today and we are back on track.

Sending you good vibes for the move and for getting your Dad settled into his new place. Poor Homer - I suspect he's not going to be happy with any travelling to his new place.

>163 DeltaQueen50: Homer will definitely be the least enthusiastic individual on this road trip!

Trip update: We left Friday afternoon and with one overnight, made it to Bloomington Saturday afternoon. Homer yelled the entire way Friday, and started Saturday yelling, then abruptly stopped and became so silent we were worried that he had died of outrage. Luckily, that didn't happen and he and my Dad are comfortably settled in the guest room. The stressful portion of my Dad's move is over and from here on out, it's the joy of having him in town with us. He moves into his apartment at the beginning of December.

Glad to hear everything went well in the end.

And I'm glad the move is behind you and soon you'll be back to having time to read!

Sounds like you deserve to put your feet up and take a breather!

I hope Homer is coping with the resident felines!

I love stories about women who ruin their own lives, making mistake after mistake in ways that both baffle and make sense to the character. Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky fits this beautifully. Marie willfully blows up the tentative beginning to a new life after finishing her time in prison, hoping for the bigger win of gaining both a child and a man of her employer, along with a new life in Paris. When things inevitably come out differently than she had anticipated, she scrambles to find a way to not be caught, only to compound her original errors. Despite her terrible life choices, Marie is impossible not to root for and the entire novel was tightly constructed and a lot of fun.

Thank you all! I'm glad to be home and my Dad is getting things organized for his move to the retirement community at the end of the month. We did have a small disaster yesterday, when the sewers backed up into our basement, but after many visits from many men with fancy tools, the problem turns out to come from somewhere under the street in front of the house. Tomorrow the excavators come and do their thing and hopefully insurance will cover it -- cross your fingers! Also, the basement will need sanitizing, it's pretty gross right now. Fun times for sure.

Congratulations on getting your Dad and Homer moved. What a time for a sewer backup!!

I hope the rest of the move goes well.

>172 VivienneR: Thanks, except for the current turmoil over drains, it's been much calmer and less stressful than the previous week! And the insurance is making sounds like they will cover most of the cost, so it's just a bit of inconvenience. Gross and unpleasant, but not a crisis. Hoping for time to read soon.

I'm just catching up here, glad that your dad is going to be closer to you , but yuck to the sewer backup. It looks like you've been doing some interesting reading lately.

Well let's hope that things are less exciting for a little bit. Hope that the drainage issue is sorted asap and that Dad & Homer settle in well.

>174 lsh63: I'm really glad Dad has decided to join us in Illinois, regardless of how much work that move is. And my reading is really good right now. There just isn't enough time for reading as things currently stand.

>175 Helenliz: Helen, the drainage is sorted, now to get the basement sanitized and the insurance sorted. But we are able to take showers and flush toilets again and for that I am very grateful.

I'll be honest and admit that the entire reason I picked up Blair Braverman's debut novel is because her dogs are lovely and happy. Turns out, this may be an excellent way to choose a book. Small Game is the kind of thriller that takes its time, develops the characters along with a sense of rising dread and then delivers a punch that really delivers.

Mara grew up as the only child of parents intent on living off the grid, which prepared her well for her job at a wilderness school, delivering expensive "survival" weekends for wealthy people. When producers choose her for a reality show sending a group to an undisclosed wilderness location with the challenge of surviving together, she sees a way to improve her life and maybe even live somewhere with solid floors and a dishwasher. Her skills are stretched in an unfamiliar place early in Spring and her fellow contestants have their own motivations for being there, but all that is far less important than what happens with the producers and crew.

Braverman clearly spent time and effort in crafting a thriller in which the many parts hold together. This is a story that is terrifyingly believable and still it surprised me. And no dogs were harmed.

Cormac McCarthy has written a pair of novels that are being released just months apart. Years ago, I was given a complete set of this author's works and have felt the weight of them waiting for me to get to them ever since, which is why I picked up the first of these new novels instead. Let me tell you that the first third of The Passenger was fantastic. I was kicking myself for not reading him sooner, I was posting about the book on twitter and telling friends how good it was. And then, as the novel continued and left the promise of the first chapters behind, growing ever flabbier and more discursive, my enthusiasm waned and eventually I finished this book only through sheer force of will.

The beginning of the novel had plot, it had tension, it was going places. And then this was all forgotten in favor of the protagonist wandering around, thinking about math and various topics. I expect that the kind of person who will love this book is someone who likes long, rambling conversations about math and who has a hardcover edition of Infinite Jest on their bookshelf. I am not that person.

The writing in this novel is very, very good. I get why McCarthy has the reputation he has. He knows how to put a sentence together. He's also terrible at writing women. There's one actual manic pixie dream girl -- literally a beautiful younger girlwoman who is mentally ill and brilliant and conveniently dead for the protagonist to long for, and the rest of the women in this entire novel are contemptible sex objects, with especial vitriol saved for those over thirty, with imperfect bodies or less than docile personalities. The author pulls no punches when it comes to the way the characters in this novel speak about women. Yes, the book takes place in the 1980s among a group of men deeply invested in their own masculinity, but even so, I have rarely encountered such dedicated misogyny in a novel. It was a lot.

So I'm going to skip the companion novel.

>178 RidgewayGirl: Yeah, no. Thanks for providing a detailed reason why I don't need to pick this up, despite all the puffery around it.

Sorry to read about your basement woes. I always associate them with mice as the only house I've lived in with a basement had a problem. But that's even worse.

>179 charl08: There were mice in this house when we moved in. But as we moved in with four cats, the situation took care of itself. The basement is now dry and smells much better, so we are all much happier and have a new appreciation for the importance of drains in daily life.

This will be the slowest reading month I have had in years, decades even. Between the fun of a book festival and the sheer turmoil of managing a move in a very short span of time, not much was read. And while I am so glad my Dad is near, he sees a person reading a book as a person very much available to hear the stories of his life. So while I like having him here, I'll be even happier when he's in his own apartment and I can get up early to read. I'm missing that time so much. And while I love my Dad and will listen every time he wants to talk, I have heard every single story and topic of interest to him many, many times. But I'd rather listen to something I've already heard a dozen times than not have him here.

>180 RidgewayGirl: As someone who wishes I had my mom or dad still around, I completely understand!

>181 thornton37814: Lori, my Dad moves into his apartment in the independent living place tomorrow and he's gone from resigned to excited, which is great. Fun to see him looking forward to this new chapter. And he'll be just five minutes away.

>182 RidgewayGirl: Hope all goes well!

Rust & Stardust by T. Greenwood is a fictionalized (and largely imagined) account of the 1948 kidnapping of Sally Horner, reporting on which is thought to be part of what inspired Vladimir Nabokov to write his most famous novel. Greenwood takes the known facts of Horner's story to imagine what her months being held captive were like and to tell the story from the points of view of Sally and the members of her family, as well as a few others who knew Sally during her time with Frank LaSalle.

This was a sensational case, but Greenwood takes care to focus on the emotional impact for all those affected and to explain why Sally believes LaSalle's lies. This is pretty straight-forward historical fiction and Greenwood isn't trying to do anything ground-breaking except to tell a story well and in this she largely succeeds, with a story that certainly held my interest throughout.

No one creates a sense of creepy dread like Joyce Carol Oates. In Babysitter, she leans on her strengths to tell the story of Hannah, the well-groomed wife of a wealthy businessman and mother of two small children in an upscale community north of Detroit during the 1980s. Hannah may be active in the kinds of volunteer opportunities available to well-off women and have a live-in nanny/housekeeper that allows ample free time and she may have a group of friends she meets for lunch, but she's still deeply insecure and lonely. Her marriage to a distracted and reactionary man who is likely sleeping with other women doesn't give her much in the way of support so when a powerful man indicates his interest in her, she finds herself trotting off to meet him in a Detroit hotel.

Which is where this story starts and quickly becomes, well, creepy in the most JCO way. Hannah lacks agency and when she does try to stand up against the men who order her around, she is quickly overwhelmed. There's a serial killer operating in the area as well, one who preys on children; although Hannah would rather not spend time thinking about that, the people around her, especially her husband, are fascinated. Hannah's behavior is frustrating throughout, with her inability to withstand even the slightest pressure. This is a book in which bad things happen, and then continue to happen, where the weak suffer and the powerful prey on those around them.

Joyce Carol Oates may not be breaking new ground with this novel published in her 84th year, but she's still writing novels that are worth reading and she's certainly playing to her strengths with this one.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is Kate Beaton's graphic memoir of the time she spend after college working in northern Alberta, near Fort McMurray. After graduating, Beaton owes quite a bit on student loans and can't find a job in her native Cape Breton, an island off the east coast of Canada that is part of Nova Scotia. Following so many before her, she takes a job working in the oil industry, in an isolated place where the men often outnumber the women by fifty to one. It's not a good place for anyone, but it provides a way for people, often men without high school diplomas, a way to earn a good wage. While the job helps Beaton pay off her loans, the job and the environment grind her down.



This memoir, dealing with serious and sensitive issues is quite a departure from the author of the popular Hark! A Vagrant webcomics. But Beaton is a skilled storyteller and her account of those two years in Alberta is well-told and it will break your heart.

>186 RidgewayGirl: I just finished this today and totally agree with your review.

>187 rabbitprincess: It was an emotional read for me. And hearing her talk about it when I was halfway through was amazing.

I've long enjoyed the "Amsterdam Cops" series of police procedurals by Dutch author Janwillem van de Wetering. They lean more on the personalities of the investigating officers than on the mysteries themselves and are gentle in tone, and yet I love spending time with Grijpstra and de Gier and their associates. The series is set during the sixties and seventies and feature Amsterdam as a quiet backwater with an occasional tourist. I was in the mood for short stories and so picked up The Sergeant's Cat and Other Stories, which is a collection that spans the life of the series.

While the novels in the series allow the characters depth and nuance, short stories don't give the author enough time to develop the various miscreants, victims and dupes into full characters and given that the books were written a half century ago, many of the stories have aged badly. Some stories were fun -- the titular story involving a death threat to de Gier's cat was delightful, but too many involved foreigners behaving like cartoon stereo-types and the mysteries were too thin a scaffolding to make this book worth reading. Go read one of the novels in this series, and give the short stories a miss.

>189 RidgewayGirl: I read most of the Grijpstra and de Gier books when they were first published, then rediscovered them a few years ago. Great characters, and I love the irreverent humour.

>190 pamelad: They are charming and very much a picture of a time and place. I usually don't like gentler mystery novels, but I like these.

I need to get caught up with reviews so that I can put up a thread in the 2023 Category Challenge forum. I have read fewer books this year than I have in at least a decade, entirely because of moving first one household (mine) at the beginning of the year and then another (my father's) at the end of the year. I'm hoping next year will see me managing no moves at all.

George Saunders has reached the point where he can no longer be considered a cult favorite, having reached a point where he is one of the best known living short story writers. It's a reputation that is well deserved, his short stories are both very good and unlike anything else. This newest collection of stories, Liberation Day: Stories, is what readers have come to expect from Saunders; there are odd scenarios involving bizarre theme parks and people who have limited agency over their own lives. The author writes about people who manage to make decisions and take action in environments where they should not be able to do so, even when the characters are very much ordinary guys just trying to get by. This is a solid collection that will make any George Saunders fan very happy and would also be a good introduction for anyone who has yet to read his work.

>193 RidgewayGirl: I'd not read any of his short stories before and really enjoyed this collection. I've seen some more mixed reviews though. I did find the more explicitly "political" ones quite hard to read. Not sure what that says (if anything) about the stories: even though Celeste Ng's book dealt with a similar theme I didn't notice the same issue.

>193 RidgewayGirl: - I've not heard of him but then again, I don't read a lot of short stories. I have taken BBs before but never seem to get to them. Maybe 2023 will be the year I make a better effort. We did read a short story collection one month for book club this year and I quite enjoyed the discussion and the views different people brought to the discussion.

>194 charl08: He was a little more explicitly political in this collection, but he has always returned to the theme of people stuck working in bizarre theme parks. I do recommend Tenth of December as his strongest collection.

>195 dudes22: Betty, one way to ease into short stories is to read a story in a collection between each book you read, as a sort of palate cleanser. I need a little space between each short story or they start to run into each other in my memory.

>192 RidgewayGirl: Good luck for your reading plans in the new year! Moves are over, basement dry and sweet smelling: all is well. Bring in the books.

Set in the time between the world wars, Shrines of Gaiety centers on the underground dance halls of London, with a large number of characters running the halls, preying on their denizens or trying to shut them down. Kate Atkinson excels at these labyrinthine tales with frequent shifts in the point of view and it's clear she's having fun here. This was a good one to herald in the holiday season with. Now to wait for her next book.

>198 RidgewayGirl: I have a hold on this at the library and my name is next! I hope I get it before Christmas, but doesn't matter, Atkinson is always great.

>199 VivienneR: I'm eager to find out what you think about it!

There are the books that remain relevant and speak to readers decades, or even centuries after they were first published. There are books that sink quietly into obscurity a few years after they first appeared, and then there is Light Years by James Salter. First published in 1975, it was recently reissued and I ran into in an article that described it as an example of very fine writing and a beautiful portrayal of a dying marriage. Reader, it is neither of those things. The writing is less fine than flowery, which is nice in small doses and less so when it serves to grind the story to halt. And the story begins after the relationship between Viri and Nedra had become one of co-parents and co-hosts only. The book instead details their lives from when their children are small and they are going through the motions, united only in their love of their children, in entertaining and in love for the very nice farmhouse they own near enough to Manhattan as make frequent short trips into town easy. I'm a little envious of the lifestyle they enjoyed on the salary of a single unsuccessful architect, with long trips to Europe and expensive wines routine, but the book is set sometime in the early sixties, when I guess no one worried about money. That it stays in that same time frame despite spanning decades in the lives of Viri and Nedra is something to just not worry about.

He was a Jew, the most elegant Jew, the most romantic, a hint of weariness in his features, the intelligent features everyone envied, his hair dry, his clothes oddly threadbare--that is to say, not overly cared for, a button missing, the edge of a cuff stained, his breath faintly bad like the breath of an uncle who is no longer well. He was small. He had soft hands, and no sense of money, almost none at all. He was an albino in that, a freak. A Jew without money is like a dog without teeth.

I'm fully in favor of judging a work by the standards of its time, and will give a lot of leeway to the novels of bygone times, but yikes. There's a lot to critique about modern society but the way non-white people and women were talked about in this book was jarring. There's a repeated theme that the best thing for girls (and the girls in question are still in high school) is to be "educated" by an older man, a belief spouted even by the mother of these children. There's also a sexual fascination for a girl beginning puberty and a related distaste for aging women. Because this is a book formed mainly of conversations at dinner parties and of various characters talking about their ideas, certain beliefs that tend not to be spoken of in public today are discussed in detail and brought up more than once.

"You've been married." He handed her a glass. "I can see it. Women become dry if they live alone. I don't think it needs explaining. It's demonstrable. Even if it's not a good marriage, it keeps them from dehydrating."

There's good things in this book. There's good descriptions of what a good dinner party looked like for bohemian intellectuals, and descriptions of a very nice farmhouse. The bit set in Rome was interesting, although the plot-line of the old guy getting worshipped by a much younger and beautiful Italian woman was perhaps unlikely. Of course, the man described as having "the face of ancient politicians, of pensioners, the wrinkles looked black as ink" is forty-seven.

Anyway, Light Years is considered a "modern classic" and greater minds than my own think it's important as more than as an odd artifact of history.

>201 RidgewayGirl: I think I can safely say I would not enjoy that book, but I did enjoy your review!

>201 RidgewayGirl: What >202 christina_reads: said!

>202 christina_reads: - Me too!

>201 RidgewayGirl: Yikes. Pass on that. (But great review.)

>201 RidgewayGirl: Thank you for this review!

>201 RidgewayGirl: Yikes indeed! It looks like you took one for the team!

Thanks, all of you, but the other reviews are all very positive. I may be an outlier in being unable to get past the way everyone thought fourteen year old girls should spend time with middle-aged men, entirely for their own edification, of course. And the bigotry, which is entirely standard with the times, was enough to overshadow the pleasant descriptions.

>201 RidgewayGirl: Nope, not for me. Just the couple of quotes you supplied set my teeth on edge. Strange, I read this author before and I really liked him. Of course, The Hunters was a novel set amongst pilots during the Korean war so the issues discussed were very different.

>209 DeltaQueen50: You are the second person to mention liking The Hunters. I'll put it on my wishlist and refrain from dismissing Salter until reading it, although I'm not in a hurry.

Reed returns to his parents' house in LA after a year at Columbia ready to tell them he's dropping out to devote himself to activism. But even with politically active parents, it's not so easy to get their approval and his modern, twitter-friendly activism isn't entirely compatible with his parents', and especially his mother's, way of working for change.

Set in Los Angeles' Korean community, Which Side Are You On by Ryan Lee Wong is an exploration of left-wing political activism, both current and in the past, specifically in aftermath of the unrest in the early nineties. This is a debut novel and it often leans too heavily into a caricature of twitter activism, with Reed often unable to think or speak outside of a narrow idea of what is right, but even as he behaves like a stereo-type, he's still somehow likable. And his parents are remarkable, especially his mother, who worked to improve relations between the Korean and Black communities during a time of high tension.

In addition to the discussions about how to work towards change, this novel is a picture of an Asian American family and of the Korean community in Los Angeles. It also provides another viewpoint on the LA riots of 1992 and the murder of Latasha Harlins. While it often felt ham-handed, it was well-written, and the setting and subject matter were fascinating enough to offset that flaw.

Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet asks us to consider how we should live in the world, in relation to each other and to the world itself, at this moment when it feels as though humanity is winding down. But this isn't a tiresome or self-righteous sermon, but a genuine question filtered through the life of one man. Gil was born into wealth, but raised in both material and emotional austerity. As an adult, he struggles with how to behave toward others and what his purpose is, given that he will never have to earn a living. At the start of the story, he has sold his Manhattan apartment and walked to Phoenix, Arizona, where he has bought a house. The novel describes the work he has found for himself and the close relationship his forms with the family next door.

This is a quiet novel and a departure from Millet's last few novels, being without the Biblical allusions and drama. It's also beautifully written and a huge enjoyment to read.

FYI, all hardcovers are half price today and tomorrow at Barnes and Noble.

>213 RidgewayGirl: and in the UK I think that's the case in Waterstones too.

So I somehow came home with these books. It was fun to see the local B&N packed to the gills.

>215 RidgewayGirl: LOL at "somehow." How could that have happened?! :)

>216 christina_reads: It's all a blur, Christina!

>215 RidgewayGirl: - Shoot! I can't see the picture.

>218 dudes22: It's a stack of books, Betty. A tall stack.

Oh - I figured that :)

>215 RidgewayGirl: Ooh. Nice stack.

>215 RidgewayGirl: Well done! In the end I couldn't make it to Waterstones (I was working yesterday) and now the 50% off hardback deal is finished. Probably a good thing, at least for my bank account.

>221 charl08: Thank you. I'm very happy with it.

>222 Jackie_K: Yes, it's not like I don't have enough to read, but my son has just discovered the pleasure of reading (he previously would joke about not reading at all) and I felt like this sale was a good way to set him on the right path. He picked seven books of his own.

Ok, now to plow through all the final reviews so I can go open a thread in the 2023 Challenge. Are any of you over there yet? Probably not, eh?

A quiet novella about a woman walking around London while remembering her parents, especially her mother, is not what one usually expects from Elizabeth McCracken whose books and short stories are all so delightfully weird and off-kilter. But, of course, the upbringing the narrator describes is both normal and very odd.

The Hero of this Book does an excellent job of describing what it means to live with a disability and what it's like to live with a disabled parent. As the narrator walks around London, she remembers a previous trip with her mother and every place she goes is assessed for whether her mother would be able to access it. McCracken, as usual, writes very, very well and if you're in the mood for something quieter, you could do far worse than pick up this slender gem.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery is the story of a Jamaican American family, primarily told through the experiences of Trelawney, the youngest son. Spanning decades, beginning with Hurricane Andrew, blasting through their family home and through the family's stability, through Trelawney's struggles to make his way in a world not eager to allow a Black man to succeed.

This is a novel about toxic family dynamics and a lonely boy who couldn't figure out where he belongs. I'm not sure this novel entirely succeeds; the effort being put into its writing sometimes shows, but Escoffery has a unique voice and a real talent and his writing career will be one to watch.

The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias is a noir set among hit men, drug dealers and Mexican cartels, with a very large helping of horror woven in. It's not a cheerful book, but it is a gripping and heartfelt one.

When Mario loses his family, he augments his income with a side gig as a killer for hire. When he's offered a job that pays enough for him to maybe get his wife back and start over somewhere else, he jumps on the chance. But he and his drug-addicted friend are walking into a situation they know nothing about and the forces at work are more than drug cartels and criminals.

This book is terrifying and emotional and scary as anything.

I'm not going to finish another book this year, so here's my end of the year assessment. It was a low reading year for me, but a good one.

My favorite books of the year:

Vladimir by Julia May Jonas
Either/Or by Elif Batuman
Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse
In the Drink by Kate Christensen
Self-Portrait with Boy by Rachel Lyon
Ducks by Kate Beaton

73% of the books were by women authors.

I read 34 books by American authors, eleven by British authors, five by Canadians, three by authors born in China, two books by authors from Ireland and Russia, and a book by authors from Australia, Chile, Cyprus, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Iran, Italy, Kosovo, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, Oman, South Korea and Spain. I'm happy with that.

Most of the books I read were new, with 48 published in 2022 and eighteen published in 2021. What can I say? I like bright, shiny books. All but six books were published after 2000 and the oldest book I read was published in 1947.

And, with that, I'll say good-bye to all of you until next year. Come see what I'm up to over here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/346990#

>228 RidgewayGirl: Ha, I like the memento mori! And it sounds like you enjoyed quality over quantity this year, which is a good thing. See you in the 2023 group!