
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Book Chase: The June 2020 Reading Plan

Friday, May 29, 2020
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker
Between 1945 and 1965, twelve children were born into the Galvin family, ten boys followed by two girls. Statistically, this alone would make the Galvin family an unusual one, but this is just the beginning of their story. What makes the family a true statistical rarity is that six of the ten Galvin boys, starting with the oldest, were afflicted with schizophrenia. For decades, theirs was a household literally at war with itself, one in which brothers were constantly in the kind of physical warfare with each other that placed them and everyone else in the home in grave danger. Six of the boys, as they reached adolescence, so lost touch with reality that they became a danger to themselves and anyone who had to live with them, especially their two little sisters – who suffered the worst kind of abuse imaginable from several of their brothers.
And Don and Mimi Galvin, often victims themselves, were helpless to stop what was going on around them. This was all happening when schizophrenia was still largely a misunderstood mental illness, a time when locking up patients long enough to stabilize then with drugs or electric shock therapy before releasing them back into the world was really the only answer that doctors had. And that did not work; some patients, including more than one of the Galvins were in and out of the same hospital dozens of times until their minds were effectively fried by the drugs imposed on them. Perhaps even more tragically, two of the Galvin brothers died at age 53 of heart attacks, the cumulative effect of all the drugs they had taken for four decades.
What I, as an outsider, find most difficult to understand is how Don and Mimi Galvin could have continued to have children, almost year after year, when it should have been so obvious to them that the illness afflicting the children they already had was likely to be an inherited one. Particularly since both parents were very concerned about image and reputation, this makes no sense. Being in utter denial seems to be the only answer that makes much sense.
The good news about the Galvin family – and there is some - is that the family agreed to participate in a study in which their genetic material was studied by scientists looking for answers about the illness. What causes schizophrenia? Is it inherited or is it a product of environment (it used to be blamed entirely on an over-controlling mother)? Can the illness be prevented? The Galvin family was a goldmine for researchers because no scientist had ever found so many full-blooded sibling schizophrenics in a family before. The genetic material they provided has become central in the study to unlock some of the secrets of the illness that have plagued human history.Robert Kolker
That research continues to this day.
Bottom Line: Readers will find Hidden Valley Road fascinating for two distinct reasons. First, is that everyday life inside the Galvin family reads more like something out of a farfetched Stephen King novel than it does as something out of the real world. What those fourteen people (maybe especially the eight trying to cope with the behavior of the six schizophrenics in the family) endured for so many years was horrendous. Second, is the chronological history of our understanding of schizophrenia and its treatment that is interspersed in separate chapters throughout the book. The Galvin family is a truly remarkable one.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
The Library of America Just Made My Day - Again
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
Is Ending a Novel with a Cliffhanger Ever Justifiable?
I saw a post on another blog this morning praising a book whose predecessor had ended in an exciting cliffhanger. The blogger went on to say how much this had made him look forward to the next book in the series, and how happy he was finally to get his hands on this latest one. That got me to thinking about book series and my own reaction to the ones that abruptly end before the climax has been fully resolved - or sometimes even partially resolved.
I don't particularly mind books with open-ended endings where the author leaves it up to the reader to figure out for himself, based on all that comes before the last page, what is most likely to have happened offstage to the main characters after the written story ends. (I do prefer the author doing the work, however.) But that's not at all the same as having a book end in the kind of cliffhanger I used to see in those old movie serials that were so popular on Saturdays when I was a kid. We all knew this was part 4 out of 13, and we weren't at all worried about our hero.
After all, if the book is part of an established series, we already know that the main character and 99% of the supporting characters are going to survive whatever danger the author is leaving them in. So why the silliness of making readers wait an entire year to resolve the action? By then, details from the previous book are going to be at least a bit hazy to readers, meaning that the new book is likely going to start with a recap of how the previous one ended. Boring.
I even remember one debut novel that without giving any indication at all that it was the first book in a new series ended in a physical cliffhanger that seemed near-impossible to escape. So, new readers were tricked into investing several hours reading a story that would not end until the second book was published a year later. And we would only even learn a few months after being left holding the bag that this was only book one of several to follow. I felt cheated and angry enough to avoid the rest of the series to this day - and I doubt I was the only one to feel this way.
So, what do you guys think? Are cliffhangers at the end of books a good idea? Do you enjoy them and do they make you look forward even more avidly to the next book in a series? Or do they tick you off, the way they tick me off?
Sunday, May 24, 2020
The Benefits of Breathing - Christopher Meeks
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Christopher Meeks |
Saturday, May 23, 2020
Redhead by the Side of the Road - Anne Tyler
Thursday, May 21, 2020
I Really NEED to Visit a Brick & Mortar Bookstore - And Soon
I want to wander the shelves aimlessly on a Saturday morning, maybe taking the occasional coffee break along the way, and gathering up a few books to take home with me that I didn't even know existed on Friday night.
I want to search the "Bargain Book" shelves to see if something by an author whose work I collect has recently ended up in the stacks of remainders there.
I want to take a look at the magazines on offer to see if there's some new literary magazine I need to read or subscribe to.
I want to listen in on the occasional bookish conversation between customers or between customers and booksellers that often make me smile to myself. (Sometimes, I even gather the nerve to worm my way into the conversation - even if a bookseller is part of it.)
I want to browse all the bookish junk that bookstores place near the front of the store in order to tempt you one final time as you stand in line to check out (bookmarks, pens, journals, book-lights, bookends, bookstands, etc.).
I even want to look at all the puzzles, games, toys, and LPs on offer in so many bookstores today - a practice I've often criticized, so I must be getting soft.
The thing that scares me most about not being able to shop an actual bookstore is the possibility that I will forever miss out on dozens and dozens of books I would have otherwise discovered for myself by browsing shelves.
And, I'm really getting tired of reading so many e-books. That's just not the same reading experience as reading a hardback or quality paperback, and it never will be.
Just writing this short post has made me realize that if I ultimately contract Covid-19, the most likely reason will be that I started shopping bookstores before it was really wise to do so.
I can hold off on most other shopping without much of a problem because I didn't do all that much of it even before this mess began. And, as for groceries, I find that if you go early enough in the morning, and keep that cart moving, you don't run into all that many people anyway. So I'm not as nervous about grocery shopping as I was just a few weeks ago.
No, it will be a bookstore that gets me, I'm pretty sure, if anything does. I can't imagine holding out until a vaccine is available in a year, or two years, or ever. I really need my bookstore-fix, and I need it soon.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
The Cruelest Month - Louise Penny
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Louise Penny |
Monday, May 18, 2020
Past Reason Hated - Peter Robinson
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Peter Robinson |
Saturday, May 16, 2020
In West Mills - De'Shawn Charles Winslow
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De'Shawn Charles Winslow |
Friday, May 15, 2020
My Sister the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite
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Oyinkan Braithwaite |
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
A Week of Reading at Half-Speed
Consequently, I haven't done a whole lot of reading of tree-books, e-books, or even audiobooks. I listened to two hours of the audiobook version of Peter Robinson's Past Reason Hated a couple of days ago only to realize later that not a single thought made its way to my brain, so I had to re-read all of those pages via an e-book copy of the book I have on hand. I have no idea what I was thinking for those two hours of listening to the book, but reading them in the e-book one day later made it obvious to me that the audiobook had turned into some kind of white noise as I packed.
Every day is still filled with some combination of phone calls, video calls, and physically packing up dad's old residence in preparation for his impending move. I'm really hoping that once he's in place next week, things will get back closer to whatever has become the frustrating new normal we've all faced for the last eight weeks or so. I miss reading! Reading less than 20 pages a day is driving me nuts - and playing havoc with my planned-review schedule.
Surprisingly, though, the 386 pages I've read in the last week did result in two completed books (and a little progress on the Peter Robinson title) because most of the pages I read came during the second halves of both books. Now, I need to find the time and energy to review the books before I forget too many of the details to do the job properly. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them, and different as they are, it was easy to get back into their plots despite the few number of pages I could work into my day.
My Sister the Serial Killer is a story of sibling-rivalry set in Nigeria in which the older, less attractive, sister finds herself helping her younger, stunning, sister dispose of the bodies of her victims. The older girl has to decide where family loyalty ends - if it does. In West Mills is set in a black community in North Carolina. It begins in the 1940s and ends near the present day as it tracks a core group of characters whose lives intertwine in surprising ways during all those decades. Of the two books, I especially recommend In West Mills.
Wednesday, May 06, 2020
I, John Kennedy Toole - Kent Carroll and Jodee Blanco
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John Kennedy Toole |
Tuesday, May 05, 2020
Blood: A Memoir - Allison Moorer
Monday, May 04, 2020
Colson Whitehead Wins 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Congratulations to Colson Whitehead for winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the second time in the last four years.
This time around it's for The Nickel Boys, a novel about a Jim Crow era reformatory that was a living hell for many of the boys sent there for minor crimes. In 2017, Whitehead won the same prize for his imaginative take on the Civil War underground railroad that helped so many slaves find freedom north of the Mason-Dixon line. The best thing about the underground railroad in Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is that it really was a railroad...and it was really underground.
Covid-19 Journal - Week 8 Begins
This would be terrible enough if we were only dealing with a virus that has the potential to kill millions of us and change our daily lives far into the future - if not forever. But it's not that simple. Instead, we also have to survive the meddling of those, be they cheap politicians or be they cheap businessmen, who are more interested in personal gain than they are in solving the devastating problems the world faces right now. I am fast losing faith in the world leaders tasked with getting us through this truly historical moment in our lives. Most of them, I suspect, will be harshly judged by future historians.
On a personal note, I'm still trying to deal with my father's hospitalization via telephone and email. It's impossible to judge his recovery progress this way, of course, as all I can do is rely on the professionals I speak with every day. One way or another, I have to place him in a new care facility within the next eight or nine days. The clock is ticking, virus or no virus.
Virus Stats from Johns Hopkins:
In the last week,
Worldwide cases increased from 2,995,456 to 3,534,367,
United States cases from 968,203 to 1,161,804, and
Texas cases went from 24,968 with 651 deaths to 31,998 with 878 deaths. (So Texas appears to have just had its worst week since this all started, and today is the day that our governor has set to start opening things up again. I hope that I'm not reporting a huge increase in Texas infections and deaths two or three weeks from now.)
Outside:
Our early summer weather has a tight grip on the area. We are reaching temperatures in the high eighties every day, occasionally pushing past ninety, with very little rain in the forecast as a change of pace. The walkers, even the children playing in the neighborhood streets, seem to have almost disappeared in the last week or so. We are down now to that core group of regular walkers and bike riders I was used to seeing before the stay-at-home orders were issued. I find this a bit curious, but maybe it's because some people are going back to work now instead of working from home.
Reading/Watching/Listening to:

Despite already having a high stack of books on hand for reading and reviewing (and being way behind), I added two new ones at the end of last week. One of them is Run with the Wind, the second novel from 84-year-old Jim Cole, a fellow Texan I "accidentally" met in a Kroger store a few months ago. The oddity of that meeting is that Jim lives down in Victoria, about 150 miles from the store, and I live about 6 miles from it and seldom shop there. I enjoyed his first book, Never Cry Again, and I'm looking forward to this new one - even though it will probably be sometime in June before I can get to it.
I also added In West Mills to my stack because the library unexpectedly made it available to me as an e-book. Just yesterday, they were predicting that I would have it in approximately 4 weeks, so this one catches me by surprise. I haven't downloaded it yet, but I can only postpone the download for three days or I will lose it. This is the first real crack in my May reading schedule - that sure didn't take long. I've heard great things about this 2019 novel, so I don't want to squander the opportunity to read it now despite of the weird timing.
Waco is a six-part miniseries about Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and his followers who died in that tragic fire near Waco back in 1993 during an FBI siege of their Mount Carmel compound. 78 of the faithful still in the compound, along with Koresh, died in the devastating fire although a few did escape the flames. Almost 30 of the victims were children, and more than a dozen of those were fathered by Koresh. The series is based on two books about the event, one written by a Koresh follower who jumped through a closed window to escape the flames, and the other written by an FBI hostage negotiator who worked so hard for two months to get Koresh to surrender everyone to authorities. From what I can tell, it's historically accurate to the event.
Listening To:
In the Kitchen:
No improvements on the grocery or shopping front, I'm afraid. In fact, parts of the state are now seeing limits on the amount of beef or chicken that shoppers can purchase on any one trip to the grocery. Meat packing plants in other parts of the country are faced with high numbers of covid-19-infected workers, and that's starting to have an impact even on a beef-producing state like Texas. I haven't personally run into that yet, but my brother in Austin tells me that his grocery store limits a customer to two packages of beef or chicken, no matter the cut.
The Outside World: