What I Most Miss About Bookstores - Part II

 

OK, so bear with me for a minute because at first glance this is likely to seem more than a little bit strange - and like a lot of work. But, in fact, I didn't even realize I was doing this for a while because it is just a steady progression of something I was already doing to a smaller degree. And over the last thirty days or so, it's been working beautifully for me.

I'm lucky enough to have access to the digital public libraries of my county, my city, several adjacent counties, and a rather remarkable community college system. The really beautiful thing about all of this access is that all of these libraries share assets among each other - and they can be simultaneously (completely in the background) browsed from a single software application. The same seems to be true for access to physical copies of books, but I'm pretty sure that I would have to collect those myself in some cases. 

Two or three times a week, I do a deep dive on the app to see what catches my eye. And now that I understand the app settings, I am often notified the moment some hot new book hits the digital shelves, meaning that I get to skip the hold lines completely, or at the very least, place myself near the top of any queue that develops. I grab whatever looks interesting, and sometimes that means six or seven books in one evening. Then, over the next several days, I "flip" through the books, maybe reading a chapter or two in the process before deciding that I do indeed want to read the whole book. Of course, I'm just as likely to learn that the style and content of something is not anything I want to waste my time on - and back it goes. 

So some books get returned almost immediately, some get a prompt reading, and when things really get out of hand, others are returned and placed on the hold list for a second look later on. 

The check-out and hold list limits are so generous that I haven't come near testing them yet: 50 total books on loan and 30 books on hold. Right now, for example, I have 25 books on loan from the library and another 23 on hold. Those on hold are estimated to be available to me anywhere from two weeks from now to six months from now, so they are sort of a TBR list that the library maintains for me. 

Something I've started doing more of lately is browsing by genre - and I've found the experience to be very much like it was in the bookstores, maybe even better in some ways. For instance, I browsed the history section and the historical fiction sections last night and caught up on the best of what's been published in the genres since Covid. I have a fair feel now, I hope, for the ones I don't want to miss, and I was even able to pair up some fiction and nonfiction titles the way I used to do. 

For the first time in a while, I feel like I'm fairly informed about the genres I enjoy reading the most. I see the hot titles, the backlist from authors I haven't heard from for a while, and discover new writers I would have missed by relying on chains like the infamous B&N. It works really well for me - and so far at least, my library system doesn't seem to have any problems with the larger than average turnover I've created. (I doubt they've even noticed, actually. And if they have, they may welcome the boost in usage statistics that results.)

I know this is not for everyone. But if you read e-books a lot, or if you don't have easy access to brick-and-mortar bookstores anymore but do have a library to tap, this might be something you want to consider.

Suggestion: If you try this, and you notice others stacking up behind you on a hold list for a book you have checked out, please don't keep the book for two weeks trying to decide whether you want to read it or not. Decide quickly whether you will be reading it anytime soon, if at all, and get it back into the system ASAP. I can't help but feel as if I'm gaming the system a little bit, so that is a high priority for me.

Anyway...let me know if this is something you might try - or if you think I've completely lost my mind now.

What I Most Miss About Bookstores - Part I

 

What I miss most about having half-a-dozen favorite bookstores to make regular visits to is the pleasure of shutting out the rest of the world for an hour or two while slowly making my way through shelf after shelf of books I'd never seen before. Whichever book caught my eye next was going to, at least for a few minutes, feel like a new gift to be opened. I couldn't wait to see what was inside "the box." 

Sadly, those days are long gone. In the Houston suburbs I now have relatively easy access to two Barnes & Noble big box bookstores, but except for their physical layout they are pretty much the same. And neither of them offers any real bargains anymore other than the same handful of discounted books I can find in any Target store in the country - or even in my local Kroger grocery store, for that matter. Knowing that I'm unlikely to be able to carry home for much under $30 any book I might fall in love with (even though I didn't even know I was looking for it when I came into the store) takes away most of the joy of exploring the shelves. Instead of walking away with four or five new books on each visit - some from the now non-existent remainders shelves - I might come home with one, or none, nowadays. Let's face it, all of us read a lot of books or we wouldn't be talking about them so much, but most of us can't afford to pay $100 for four or five new ones every couple of weeks. 

So I don't browse much anymore, and when I do I often (I know, I know...that's not the thing to do) come home and place an order with Amazon. And I always come home at least a little bit angry about what Barnes & Noble has turned itself into after so ruthlessly driving all the competition right out of business like it did.

But I've found a solution of sorts. And in Part II, I'll tell you what that is and how it's worked for me for the last thirty days. 

Wandering Stars and My Friends (Impressions)

 

"A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons." 

Pros:

• Memorable Characters - especially, as indicated by the above quote, the women.
• Part One is solid historical fiction from the Native American perspective
• Tommy Orange writes very readable historical fiction.

Cons:

• Part Two (set in 2018), the aftermath of the tragedy that ended Orange's There There, makes for tedious reading well before it is over. 
• The novel offers little that hasn't already been said just as well in numerous other similar novels written by Native Americans.

"The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and, although nothing does, we continue to live in that dream."

Pros:

• Well developed, complex characters
• Seamlessly ties together Libyan history from the 1980s through the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011
• Excellent prose style
• Vividly captures the paranoia that Libyan exiles lived with for decades
• Satisfying and somewhat hopeful ending

Cons: None that are worth even mentioning

These are the seventh and eighth 2024 Booker Prize nominees that I've read. My Friends is one of my favorites so far, Wandering Stars one of my least favorites - with five still to go.

A Booker Prize Update and...

I've decided on a quick (probably rather mysterious) note to any of you who may have been wondering why I haven't posted in the last ten days or so. For a combination of reasons, I find myself so mentally fatigued at the moment that I cannot summon the energy to write even the shortest of book reviews. I don't know when, or even if, I'll resume doing so. No one thing is responsible for the way I feel right now; it's more of a perfect storm kind of thing.

In the meantime, I plan to "scribble" a note or two when I have a thought to share with you guys. I don't want to disappear, and I won't. The notes will be partially for my own record keeping / journalizing, but I hope you find them interesting enough to comment on every now and then. 

Booker Prize Update:

I've read eight of the thirteen Booker Prize nominees now, and I've decided that I like this year's list, taken as a whole, better than last year's. This is how I personally rank the eight I've read so far:

*The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden - 5.00 stars

My Friends - Hisham Matar - 4.75 stars

*James - Percival Everett - 4.50 stars

Wild Houses - Colin Barrett - 3.75 stars

Headshot - Rita Bulwinkel - 3.50 stars

Wandering Stars - Tommy Orange - 2.75 stars

This Strange Eventful History - Claire Messoud - 2.50 stars

*Orbital - Samantha Harvey - 2.00 stars

* on shortlist

This leaves me with five of the thirteen nominees still to be read - and three of those five are on the shortlist. Next up is likely to be Held by Anne Michaels since I have a copy of that one on hand. 

Although, I'm not doing formal reviews of my reading right now, I will be happy to discuss the books via comments here on the blog. Please do holler at me. 

Wild Houses - Colin Barrett (2024 Booker Prize Nomi ee)

 Colin Barrett's Wild Houses is a solid example of psychological crime fiction, and I recommend it to anyone who, like me, enjoys this subgenre of crime fiction. But for this exercise, my rating scale is a little different from what I use when personally rating non-Booker Prize nominees. In this instance, I am doing as much of a forced ranking exercise as I am an awarding of "stars" to the book. And of the thirteen books nominated for this year's prize, I see Wild Houses fitting solidly in the upper half of the thirteen-book pack, producing a relative rating of something like 3.75 stars. Just something to keep in mind.

Dev lives alone on the outskirts of a small Irish town, seldom leaving his property other than to attend to his basic needs. He quit his job after his mother died, and now lives alone in the family home with his dead mother's old dog. And he likes it that way, so when his two cousins bang on the door late one night with a battered teenager they want to stash somewhere for a few days, Dev is not at all happy about it. But Dev, huge a man as he is, is not the type to put up much of a protest about anything, so he suddenly finds himself with three uninvited guests - two of whom he knows could explode into violence at any moment.

As Dev will learn, it's all part of a revenge plot his cousins have hatched against the teenager's older brother, a man who owes their boss a considerable amount of money. Dev is a simple enough man, but he is far from stupid, and he knows that the likelihood of his rather dim cousins pulling off something as complicated as a kidnapping for ransom and revenge is pretty low - and that he will go down the drain with them when it all blows up. 

So there they are. Three cousins, two of whom are brothers, and a teenager who desperately wants to escape the situation he mysteriously finds himself in. Dev's old house becomes a pressure cooker, and as the hours creep by, it becomes more and more likely that someone is going to explode. Dev and his cousins' prisoner can only hope they are not destroyed by the blast.

Barrett has written a character-driven crime novel here, but one in which he doesn't limit himself to exploring the past of only his four main characters and how each is reacting to what looks more and more like a life or death situation. Instead, Barrett alternates chapters set in the old farmhouse where the boy is being held with chapters showing what the teen hostage's mother and young girlfriend are going through as they reluctantly team up to find the missing boy before it is too late to save him. The best things about Wild Houses are the six or seven characters at its heart, each of them memorable and very real in their own way.

Wild Houses is likely to be one of the best crime fiction novels I read this year - but the Booker Prize competition is stiff this year. And everything is relative.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Updated Personal Ratings of 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden - 5.0 stars

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars

Wild Houses - Colin Barrett - 3.75 stars

Headshot - Rita Bulwinkel - 3.5 stars

This Strange Eventual History - Claire Messoud - 2.5 stars

Orbital - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars

2024 Booker Prize Shortlist Announcement

 

Well, the 2024 Booker Prize shortlist dropped just over an hour ago, and it's left me with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I've already read three of the six finalists; on the other, Orbital, the book I think the least of so far, made the cut along with the Australian entry Stone Yard Devotional, a book that may or may not ever be published in the U.S. as far as I can tell. This already reminds me of last year when the Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song, was not published in this country until after it won the prize. As Yogi Berra supposedly once said, "it's deja vu all over again."

Here are the other five finalists to go along with that wonderful cover of Stone Yard Devotional:

So there are now two American authors (James and Creation Lake), one British author (Orbital), one Canadian author (Held), one Dutch author (The Safekeep), and one Australian author (Stone Yard Devotional) still in the running. Of the ones I haven't read yet, I'm seeing the most positive comments about Held, so I hope to get my hands on that one soon.

Question: now that Book Depository has closed it's doors forever, does anyone know how I might obtain a copy of the Australian entry without breaking the bank on postage...and shipping time. I don't think I can buy an e-book version in the U.S. unless the book is published here. Am I wrong (I hope) about that?

What I'm Reading This Week (September 15, 2024)

 

I finished three books last week, two from the 2024 Booker Prize longlist and a collection of science fiction short stories. I was relieved to enjoy both the Booker nominees, easing my concern that this year's Booker list was going to be a bit of a dud (Orbital and This Strange Eventful History had me thinking that way). I've already posted reviews for both The Safekeep and Headshot if you are interested in learning a little more about those two. It turned out to be Cixin Liu's To Hold Up the Sky that disappointed me last week - more on that one in a few days.

Because of set-in-concrete due dates at my library, I did focus last week's reading primarily on Booker Prize nominees, but now the only Booker novel I have on hand is Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars so I'll likely be returning to some of the already partially read books I tabled in their favor. When I'm done with Wandering Stars, I will have read seven of the thirteen Booker nominees, and I'm fairly pleased to be this far along before tomorrow's shortlist announcement. I'm hoping that I'll have read at least two or three of the six finalists announced then. Can't wait to find out. 

Wandering Stars is both a prequel and a sequel to Tommy Orange's previous novel There There (as in "there's no there, there"). I read the prologue (a really emotional opening) and the first three chapters of the book this morning, and I can well understand its appeal to the nominating committee. I've heard that the prequel parts work best in this new one, and based on my experience with There There I can believe that. Perhaps Orange is a better writer of historical fiction than he is of contemporary fiction. I'm looking forward to answering that one for myself.

Just when I thought I had read just about everything published by Larry McMurtry, I learn about Literary Life, a second volume to his memoir. I've only read about ten percent of this one, and so far there's not a lot that's new or surprising to me. I am, however, enjoying McMurtry's understated sense of humor as he takes the reader on his journey from young cowboy trainee to a long life devoted to books, bookstores, and reading. McMurtry was one of the most passionate book-lovers I've ever heard about - at least from the modern era. This is a relatively short, almost conversational, kind of read, a nice change of pace.

And because I can never get enough Larry McMurtry, I've been ending each day by reading a chapter or two from Pastures of the Empty Page. That limits me to 15-20 pages a day from this collection of author memories of McMurtry's influence on them individually, so I'm surprised to see that I'm a bit over halfway through this one already. I've heard many of these stories before, so it's the ones from people who barely brushed shoulders with McMurtry at some point in their lives that I'm finding most interesting.

I decided to begin Marie Tierney's Deadly Animals last week because I didn't want to have to rush through it later as its publication date gets closer. The main character of Deadly Animals is an almost 15-year-old girl who is fascinated by...wait for it...road kill. She's always on the lookout for fresh kills she can study for the impact of environment and weather on their decomposition. This kid has her own Body Farm going on, and no one knows about it. And then one day she finds the stashed body of a neighborhood bully who's been missing for a couple of weeks. Now what will she do?

There's a possibility that I'll get my hands on My Friends (another Booker nominee) this week, and in fact, I thought I'd have it before now because it's officially been in "in transit" status at my library for a whole week now. Usually when that happens, something has gone wrong, and the book never shows up at all, though, so we'll see. I also want to get back to the French novel by Indrajit Garai, The Man without Shelter, that I started a few days ago...and I see that The Rich People Have Gone Away  is now shown as "in transit" by the library. That one might shake up the plan a bit, too, if it turns out to be as interesting as it looks from afar. 

What I'm most looking forward to are the ones that are not even in my world at the moment, the ones that always seem to come from nowhere. Have a great reading week, everyone!                          

Headshot - Rita Bullwinkel (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

I don't remember ever having watched a women's boxing competition before I began reading Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot. I simply had no interest in the sport, and would almost certainly not have read this one had it not been part of the 2024 Booker Prize longlist. And I would have missed out on a really good book for that reason.

Rather than get bogged down in the mechanics of the sport and this particular tournament, Bullwinkel chooses to go inside the heads of the eight young women competing in Reno to be "the best in the world at something." How the girls, all of them between fifteen and eighteen years old, got it into their heads that winning a competition in Reno that only they, a handful of family members, their coaches, the paid judges, and the gym owner even know about is another story...but they all believe it. And winning it is the most important thing in their lives - until all of a sudden it isn't.

The tournament begins with eight competitors, four matches on the first day leaving four winners to move on to the semi-final bouts the next morning. The second day's first two matches determine which two girls will fight for the tournament championship later in the day. Headshot presents chapter-like segments covering each of the seven, total, fights. 

Bullwinkel sets the novel's overall tone early in the first match:

"This imagined winning in front of people who will never see her win, even if she does win, is symptomatic of the fact that Artemis Victor, like Andi Taylor, is more than anything, delusional. The desired audiences will never see them win. Even if they were to go and box professionally, hit some women in bikinis in the basement of a casino in Las Vegas, they wouldn't impress the people who they encounter in their lives outside of boxing. They would only impress each other, other women who are trying to touch someone with their fists."

In each of the first four matches, the reader learns who these girls are, where they come from, and the whys and hows that explain their presence in Reno, Nevada to pay so dearly for the chance to go home with a cheap little plastic trophy - along with the right to think of themselves as "the best in the world at something." Readers are made privy to the innermost thoughts of the eight competitors, their doubts, jealousies, resentments, goals, and hopes. Headshot is very much a character-driven novel, one that happens to take place almost entirely inside a shabby gym's shabby boxing ring.

The girls, as different as they may look to outsiders and even to each other, are really more alike than they are different. They are all emotionally fragile and for them boxing is their best chance of being "seen" by their peers and family. They just want others to acknowledge that they are real and valuable people. Only one of them can leave Reno feeling that she's accomplished what they all come there hoping to achieve, but every single one of them is going to learn something important about herself while she's there.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Personal Ratings of 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden - 5.0 stars

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars

Headshot - Rita Bullwinkel - 3.5 stars

Wild Houses - Colin Barrett - 3.0 stars

This Strange Eventful History - Claire Messoud - 2.5 stars

Orbital - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

Just as I was starting to have serious doubts about the judgement of this year's Booker Prize selection committee (and this is the fifth longlisted nominee of theirs I've read), I started to read Yael Van Der Wouden's The Safekeep. I almost immediately sensed that there was something different about this one, but I didn't want to get my hopes up too high that this lone Dutch nominee would at least give Percival Everett's James a solid run for the prize money. Well, in my estimation at least, The Safekeep does more than that; it's even better than James. 

The novel opens in 1961 in a more rural part of the Netherlands where people have finally put World War II far enough behind them to begin thinking about the future. Isabel is living alone in the big house she grew up in with her two brothers, Louis and Hendrik. The siblings have only recently lost their mother but, Isabel's brothers left home long before the woman died. Still, this is the only home that Isabel has ever known, and she is quite content to be living there alone. She seldom sees her brothers, each of whom are busily living separate lives of their own, and would rather keep it that way, really.

That all changes when Louis introduces his latest in a long string of girlfriends to Isabel and Hendrik over dinner one night. Isabel makes it very clear that she despises the little bleached blonde, and she makes her escape from the restaurant as quickly as possible - hoping never to see Eva again. But when Louis learns that he will be out of town on business for several weeks, he insists that Eva stay in the family home with Isabel because the young woman has no place else to stay while he is gone.  

Isabel is paranoid about protecting the things in her home and is already convinced that the girl who cleans house for her every few days is walking away with the family heirlooms one piece at a time. After Eva moves in, little things seem to disappear even quicker than before despite Isabel's attempts never to lose track of Eva when she is inside the house. As the disdain the two women feel for each other grows day by day, the house begins to feel to both as if it is about to explode.

And that's when the fun begins. There are at least two major plot twists in The Safekeep that caught me by surprise just about the moment I was starting to get comfortable with where I thought the story must be heading (thank goodness I was wrong both times). Van Der Wouden's clues about her dramatic storyline shifts are strong enough that readers won't be particularly shocked by the direction she goes if they are paying attention to the details. It is exactly these plot twists that make The Safekeep stand out in the crowd for me. 

This is a character-driven novel filled with multiple characters that began to feel more and more real to me with every new detail I learned about their personal histories. It is also one of the most sexually explicit novels I've read in a while, something that I mention here only as a warning of sorts for readers who try to avoid novels of this nature. The Safekeep is not a perfect novel, but it is definitely my favorite of the five Booker Prize nominees I've read to this point.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Personal Ratings for 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

The Safekeep - Yael Van Der Wouden - 5.0 stars

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars 

This Strange Eventful History - Claire Messoud - 2.5 stars

Orbital  - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars

Orbital - Samantha Harvey (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

(This begins what will likely be a months-long project to read and review the thirteen 2024 Booker Prize nominees. I read James by Percival Everett, another of the nominees, in June 2024. That review can be found here.)

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The premise of Samantha Harvey's Orbital is a promising one that offers numerous possibilities for exploration. Six people are in orbit around the earth in the international space station: two Russian men, an American man, a British woman, an Italian man, and a Japanese woman. Three of them have already been there for three months by the time that the other three arrive to begin their own six-month stints in obit around the planet. At this point, the reader would expect to learn more about the daily routines and assignments of the individual astronauts, their motivations for being there, a little about how they ended up becoming space explorers, and maybe best of all, what kind of personal relationships, emotional bonds, or irritations from each other's constant presence will develop over time. 

And to be fair, there's some of all of those things in Orbital. Just not enough.

Harvey tries hard to make each of her six characters into the unique individuals they deserve to be, even going so far as to labeling them this way early on:

Anton (Russian) - "the spaceship's heart,"

Pietro (Italian) - "its mind,"

Roman (Russian) - "its hands" and current captain,

Shaun (American) - "its soul,"

Chie (Japanese) - "its conscious," and

Nell (British) - "its breath."

Harvey, especially at first, offers some compelling, well-written observations such as when she mentions that the six are a kind of "floating family." She says:

"They are both much more and much less than that. Even the slightest mood swing can drastically change how they see and feel about each other. They sometimes get a feeling of merging."

...or when she explains how safe they all have come to feel inside their self-contained little world:

"...they are encapsulated, a submarine moving alone through the vacuum depths, and when they leave it they will feel less safe. They will reappear on the earth's surface as strangers of a kind. Aliens learning a mad new world."

There are just not enough moments like these despite the personal losses and fears some of the six try to keep hidden from the rest of the crew.  This is not a long book (probably the shortest of the thirteen nominees), and the reader is only along for the ride for 16 days worth of orbits. The sights outside the space station windows can change only so much, and the observations and reactions of six people to those sights even less. With repetition, those observations, and the prose used to describe them, begin to get less and less striking or effective relatively quickly. 

I hate to say it, but I was ready to reach the end of Orbital long before I got there. I hoped it would be saved by one of those big, dramatic endings that sometimes work so well, but Orbital just sort of fizzled away until it was done and gone.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Personal Ratings for 2024 Booker Prize Nominees:

James - Percival Everett - 4.5 stars

Orbital  - Samantha Harvey - 2.0 stars

What I'm Reading This Week (September 8, 2024)

 

Most of my reading time last week was dedicated to 2024 Booker Prize nominees. I decided to go that route because the Booker Prize shortlist is going to be announced this Monday, September 16, and I'm hoping, with some luck, to have read two or three of the finalists by then. So I finished up Orbital by Samantha Harvey and Wild Houses by Colin Barrett to go along with the two others from this year's list I've already read (James and This Strange Eventful History). I'm also well into The Safekeep, by Dutch author Yael Van Der Wouden, so it looks like I'll have read at least five of the thirteen nominees by the 16th. 

But that doesn't mean I'm not dipping in and out of others when the mood for a change of pace strikes, so I've also been spending a little time with these guys:

Pastures of the Empty Page is a compilation of the reflections of a group of writers who were impacted by the friendship and influence of author Larry McMurtry. The book's subtitle is "Fellow Writers on the Life and Legacy of Larry McMurtry," and that seems to be an accurate description of what to expect inside. All of the pieces I've read so far are by writers who knew McMurtry well or had at least met him at some point early on in their lives. I don't think McMurtry had any idea just how important he was, or would turn out to be, to so many of his fellow writers.

Chinese author Cixin Liu's To Hold Up the Sky is a collection of science fiction short stories set in China. There are only ten stories in this 336-page collection, so on average they are a little longer than the stories in most collections. I'm particularly taken with the first story in the book, "The Village Teacher," a story about an altruistic teacher in a remote mountain village who wants nothing more than to better the lives of his isolated and impoverished young students. Little does he know just how huge an impact he is about to have on the world.

I know for sure that this week I'll be at least beginning the other two Booker Prize nominees that I have on hand, Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot and Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars. Headshot is about a women's boxing tournament being held in Reno, Nevada. Each distinct section of the novel covers a different pair of fighters trying to make their way to the championship matchup. Wandering Stars is both a prequel and a sequel to Orange's There There from a couple of years ago. It is a story of the Native American experience that uses all the characters from There There, a novel I read just a few months ago, so maybe I'll have a little bit of a jump on this one. 

By the end of the week, I'll be ready to start with formal reviews and rankings of the Booker Prize books I will have experienced for myself. With any luck, I'll have read, or near-read, seven of the thirteen nominated novels by this time next week...if I didn't just jinx myself by saying that, that is.

I also have a promised review coming up in the next few weeks for a book I haven't started yet, so Deadly Animals (from Marie Tierney) might become a change-of-pace novel for me at some point this week. 

I'm really looking forward to learning what the Booker Prize shortlist looks like this year. It may be a few weeks before I receive another of the listed books from my library, so I'm hoping that I don't find myself on September 17 still not having read any of the six soon-to-be-announced finalists. 

Good Reading to all...

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

 

I can't explain why it took me so many years finally to read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but I don't think I could have possibly read it at a more terrifying moment than now. I can well imagine that Brave New World was horrifying for its contemporary readers to contemplate, especially as they began to sense the approach of what must have seemed to be the inevitability of yet another catastrophic world war. But that so much of the political and cultural mindset described by Huxley in this classic dystopian novel seems to parallel today's world, makes Brave New World as troubling now as it must have been in 1932 when first published. 

Huxley's brave new world is one in which everyone is brainwashed from birth (if not before) into knowing his place in society and being happy with it. It is a place in which the truth cannot be shared with anyone but the elite few who run the lives of the billions of other people who inhabit the planet, the few people who run our world from the shadows, ruthless people concerned with little more than maintaining their own power and wealth.

It is a world in which dissent is not only discouraged, it is punished by banishment from society - call it cancel culture, if you will. 

It is a world in which neither the concept equality nor equity have real meaning because the powerful elite decide for you what you will spend your life doing and what you will be allowed to achieve.

It is a world in which dissenters are called crazy, and are treated accordingly.

It is a world in which young students are not taught or encouraged to think for themselves.

It is a world in which students of all ages can regurgitate on cue the correct chant or approved point of view on any political or social issue that takes center stage for its brief moment in the sun.

It is a world in which young people have no family (literally, in this case) with which to share their loyalty and love.

It is a world in which sex is a recreational commodity, but actually having children is something to be ashamed of and socially punished.

It is a world in which only the approved opinion can be said out loud or shared with anyone else. No one is to be trusted.

It is a terrifying world.

It is a world much like the one I live in.

Welcome to 2025. 

A Study in Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

This is, I'm fairly certain, my fourth time to read Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet in the last five decades or so, but I don't remember ever enjoying it more than I did this time around. Perhaps that's due to my by now longterm familiarity with the Sherlock Holmes character, or maybe it's because I appreciate different aspects of mystery writing than I did when I first began to read that genre so regularly. Probably a bit of both.

I'm always on the lookout for a good, solid mystery, one that challenges me to recognize the bad guy before the author gets around finally to exposing him near the end of the story. That I seldom come up with the correct answer, if I come up with an answer at all, does not discourage me from continuing to try. Needless to say, the author has to play by the rules, giving me a fair chance to figure things out for myself - no withholding of key pieces of evidence that the fictional detective has access to - if I'm ever going to read him again.

Doyle impressed me from the beginning (this is the introduction of the Sherlock Holmes character) as an author who would play fair even though his fictional detective would likely know exactly who the criminal was long before story's end. Holmes, being the deductive genius he is, would always rather easily identify the proper suspect early on, but would continue to give clues to the reader as he worked to prove his theory beyond a doubt so that a strong case could be successfully prosecuted. So the pressure was always on the reader to catch up.

Sherlock Holmes arrives upon the literary scene a flawed genius, someone whose personal failings the reader can identify with while, at the same time, being awed by the man's astounding genius. No one will ever get more from walking around a crime scene than Sherlock Holmes gets, but the rest of us get to share the fun of watching all the professional crime fighters first scoff at Sherlock's almost immediate conclusions before they end up begging for his help. 

A Study in Scarlet is the origin story that brings Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes together for the first time. Watson is in need of a reasonably priced London apartment and Sherlock is looking for someone to share a flat with; fate brings them together in the person of a mutual friend trying to do Watson and Holmes a simultaneous favor. Watson, a war invalid, desperately needs something to shake him up before he falls into a permanent state of depression and aimlessness. Holmes, on the other hand, enjoys mesmerizing people with his powers of deduction, and a man like Watson, one who does not try to hide his appreciation of Holmes's skills, makes for a perfect match. Both men find a new friend just when they need one most. 

The mystery here is a solid one, but it's secondary. A Sherlock Holmes book is about Holmes and Watson, and the friendship that became so much fun to watch from afar. 

What I'm Reading This Week (September 1, 2024)

 

Not quite sure how it happened, but I finished three books last week even while exploring the 2024 Booker Prize longlist - as much as my limited availability to those novels allowed me to do that. To say that the books I read last week have nothing much in common is quite an understatement - although at a stretch, I do see something rather dystopian in all three. The three were: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), The Chalk Girl by Carol O'Connell (2011), and The Death of the West (2002) by Patrick J. Buchanan. (I will share my thoughts on those three in the days to come.)

I'm reading only one of the current Booker Prize nominees right now, Samantha Harvey's Orbital, but I've taken a close look at two others via the free samples that Amazon Kindle allows customers to download and have four other samples on tap waiting for me to take a look at them. Thankfully, the two Booker books I've sampled are really intriguing because the last two I've read were so underwhelming that I'm beginning to question the judgement of this year's nominating committee.

By the way, if you haven't made use of Kindle samples, you're missing a really good opportunity to "browse" before you buy or take a library copy home with you. The samples I've read almost always include at least the entire first chapter - sometimes two -of a book because Amazon usually offers something in the range of a book's first 20-25 pages for a free test-read.

 

I really wanted to like British author Samantha Harvey's Orbital, but it's become a real struggle for me even to pick this one back up lately. It's the story of sixteen days in a space station inhabited by two male Russians, a Japanese woman, a British woman, and male astronauts from the U.S. and Spain. Six people crammed into a tiny space from which they can't escape each other for the next three months. I have enjoyed learning how being in such tight quarters for so long impacts each of them, but the sections about the environment and borders become a bit tedious and overwritten at times. And there's a lot of that.

I mentioned last week how I discovered The Collection of Heng Souk buried deep inside my Kindle when I was working on all of my e-books a few days ago (a project still not finished). Well, it's turned out to be one of my favorite books of 2024, and I so dread what I think is going to be its ending, that I've been reading its last 75 pages at a really slow pace. The idea of a man going back to Viet Nam to learn if his father (a man he didn't know existed until days earlier) died during the war there is intriguing enough - but what happens once he gets there is heartbreaking in so many ways that this is a story I'll never forget.

I was expecting to receive a copy of Indrajit Garai's The Man without Shelter from Amazon on July 9. Well, Hurricane Beryl decided to arrive on July 8 and most of Harris County was without power for days and days after that. The book finally arrived a couple of weeks later, and I've just started reading it. It's about a man who is suddenly released in the middle of the night  after 20 years in prison (he was wrongly convicted) with no place to go. He's pretty much just booted out the front gates, so he's basically homeless and can't find a job or shelter because of his past and ends up living on the streets of Paris. The first chapter is dark and ominous as he wanders the streets trying to find a place that feels right enough for him to stop walking.

I've also been dabbling in Sanjay Gupta's Keep Sharp, a book about brain health, and have at least temporarily abandoned a memoir called Everything All at Once because after 40 pages, I find that I still haven't connected with Stephanie Catudal and what she experienced, deeply sad as it all was. The book is doing quite well in library and Amazon sales, but the style and construction of the memoir are not clicking for me right now - maybe one to return to later on. 

AND I woke up this morning to a library email telling me that four physical books and one e-book are ready for me to borrow. All of a sudden four of the Booker Prize books are there for me to pick up on Tuesday morning:

American Nominee

American Nominee

Dutch Nominee

British Nominee

I've read the Amazon Samples of The Safekeep and Wild Houses, and I'm hoping that I will have finally found a couple of Booker nominess other than James that will speak to me. These four short-fuse novels will probably claim most of my reading time for the next two weeks, along with the others I'm already reading, but as always I expect a few surprises to jump the queue somewhere along the way, too. Happy Reading to you all!

Night of the Living Rez - Morgan Talty

 

I've read numerous Native American-authored novels and short stories in the past few years, and have found most of them to be pretty somber stuff. I understand the reason for this common tone when it comes to describing both Native American history and contemporary reservation life for many people, but after a while it starts to become a little too much to read over and over again. I keep hoping for Native American stories of a lighter, more humorous tone, stories that are more confident about the future, but those have been harder for me to find.

So I expected Morgan Talty's Night of the Living Rez (especially with that title) to be more of the same old gloomy stuff - and for the most part that is exactly what is own offer here. But then just when I was very close to giving up on this collection, I figured out where Talty was heading. The twelve stories largely alternate between two distinct sets of characters living on the same Maine Penobscot Indian reservation. The first set focuses mostly on two young men who seem to desire very little out of life more than a steady supply of alcohol and drugs to help get them through their days and nights. The second group of characters is comprised of a young boy, his older (drug addicted) sister, their mother, and the medicine man their mother has taken to her bed. When the alternating stories are taken as a whole, Night of the Living Rez begins to read more like a well constructed novel than a collection of short stories, and that's why it works so well.

"I wonder if 'How'd we get here?' is the wrong question. Maybe the right question is 'How do we get out of here?' Maybe that's the only question that matters.

...

And then I figured it out. I had the...question all wrong. It had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with me.  How did I get here, and how do I get out?'' 

The two sets of stories are equally powerful, and the way they are blended into the overall narrative of Night of the Living Rez magnifies the impact of what they have to say about life for some on a contemporary Native American reservation. I was particular taken by the coming-of-age aspect of the stories featuring young David and his family as the boy learns to deal with the peculiar ways of his mother, the new man in his mother's life, the self-destructive behavior of his sister, and a grandmother who often mistakes David for her long-dead little brother - and treats him accordingly when he goes to check on her. 

Sadly, the lives of these characters are filled with one tragic mistake after another, but even though some lives are left in ruins long before the reader turns the final page of story number twelve, I was left with at least an inkling of hope that at least one or two of them were about to figure out the answer to "How do we get out of here?"

Don't miss this one.

This Strange Eventful History - Claire Messud (2024 Booker Prize Nominee)

 

I had high hopes for Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History when I first heard of it, and had actually started reading it before the 2024 Booker Prize longlist was released a few weeks ago. Partially set in Algeria during the 1940s-1950s and centering around a pied-noir (French citizens whose families originally came to Algeria to colonize the country on behalf of France) family, it meshed perfectly with my personal experience and interest. Unfortunately, my high hopes came crashing down as soon as I realized that Messud was largely going to skip right over the periods and places I was most interested in reading about.

Instead, Messud offers the seven-decade (1940-2010) story of the Cassar family as it expands and moves around the world in the aftermath of one significant family decision or event after another. The patriarch of the family is Gaston Cassar, who when the book begins has just evacuated his family from WWII-era Greece to the homes of relatives in Algeria. Gaston is a French naval attache and knows that he is unlikely to see his wife (Lucienne), son (Gaston), and daughter (Denise) again anytime soon. This section is seen primarily through the eyes of François, Gaston's young son and it gives the first hint of Messud's approach to this family saga: it will focus on the personal lives and struggles of the small family rather than on the major historical events occurring all around them. The first jump forward in time is significant. It is suddenly 1953, the war is over, and François is now in the U.S. attending college. The remainder of the family remains in Algeria, struggling to make ends meet while keeping their financial problems a secret from François. 

The next jump forward in time, entirely ignoring the revolution that won Algeria's independence from France between segments, is to 1962 Canada (where François is in business school) and 1963 Argentina where his sister Denise is living with their parents. The segment is largely about the now 30-year-old Denise and her struggles to find her place in life. You get the idea. Each segment of the novel jumps forward about ten years in time, and each usually sees at least part of the family living in a new country. So we get 1974 Australia, 1989 Connecticut, 1998 France, and finally 2010 Rye Brook, New York. The book then circles back to 1927 Algeria for a short look back at Gaston and Lucienne's courting days.

All of this makes for a rather traditional family saga, the kind that covers multiple generations of a single family in order to show how they ended up who they are - and where they are - in the present day. As such, this is not at all a bad novel. But I have to look at This Strange Eventful History as a missed opportunity to write something special, a novel in which the "events" really were "strange" rather than relatively mundane and common in the long run.

My Men - Victoria Kielland (Translated by Damion Searls )

 

Victoria Kielland's My Men is a fictional account of a very real woman thought to be the first female serial killer in American history. She may have been the first, but before she could be stopped Brynhild Størset would claim some thirty victims after leaving Norway to begin her new life in America.

Størset was only seventeen years old when she informed the firstborn son of the wealthy farmer she worked for that she was pregnant with his child. Expecting that the young man would be pleased by the news, Brynhild was surprised when he kicked her in the stomach hard enough to cause her to lose her baby. Now faced with humiliation and destitution in Norway, the girl decided to take her chances in the United States - where she changed her name to Belle Gunness. 

Belle ended up in Chicago for a while, where her sister lived, but soon enough moved to a countryside farm after marrying a fellow Norwegian. That marriage lasted only until Belle, having had enough of the man, ended it by killing her husband. Now she had a stake in her new country, along with the two little girls she and the man had taken into their home. Before long, Belle was remarried, and the pattern was established. She continued to do quite well adding to her wealth via the dead-husband route, but realized that her luck could not hold out forever so she varied the pattern by placing "Lonely Heart" ads in the Chicago papers to keep the men coming.

And for a long time, lonely, desperate men kept right on coming to Belle's farm - never to be seen again.

But it is not Belle's spectacular murder spree that makes My Men so unusual a historical novel. It is unlikely that the novel would have gotten so much attention on both sides of the Atlantic if Kielland had taken a straightforward approach to presenting Belle's story. Instead, the author uses a strange hybrid third person/first person point of view in which the reader learns more about what is going on in Belle's head as she kills than about the murders themselves or Belle's victims. Almost everything revealed to the reader is limited to what Belle saw with her own eyes or what she had specific knowledge of. What we as readers experience is all the pent-up anger, frustration, and hatred that drives Belle, allowing her to kill so many men in her quest for personal revenge for the way she was treated as a young woman in Norway. 

I even had to go back to re-read a section or two to make sure that a murder had actually taken place because Belle felt so justified in committing her crimes that they sometimes hardly seemed to impact her other than with how much physical labor was involved in disposing of the bodies of her victims. Reading My Men makes for such an unusual reading experience, I think, that even those readers who would not ordinarily read this type of novel might want to take a chance on it.

Below is a picture of Belle and the two little girls she and her first husband took into their home, along with Belle's own son. Take a look at Belle's eyes and chilling expression...

What I'm Reading This Week (August 25, 2024)

 

Despite my being totally distracted all week, I did finish two books this past week, Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty and A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle. Talty's collection of short stories really worked for me and I'll be putting something together on the book relatively soon. And Doyle's Sherlock Holmes opener reminded me again just how skillful a storyteller Doyle was, so I ended up having an enjoyable reading week despite myself.

My biggest time-killer turned out to be my sudden urge to sort through all the e-books I've managed to scatter all over my computer drive over the last several years. It's like they had all been sucked into some immense black hole never to be seen again even though I have around 450 of them on various Kindle readers. So far I've turned up something like another 60 e-books that never made it to a Kindle, and of course have never been read. Some of the files have been corrupted beyond use and won't open, and others have bad metadata associated with the files, so it has been a struggle to figure out if they are even still readable. 

I went down this new rabbit hole after being reminded again that the purchase of an e-book doesn't really mean that you own anything. According to Amazon and others, we are all more or less just leasing e-books for some period of time that they decide is appropriate. There's nothing to keep a company like Amazon from deciding no longer to support a particular book or author and removing all trace of them from their wondrous cloud. I'm not sure what that means if you've already downloaded the book to your device, but I've been led to believe that even if you have, you lose access to the suddenly missing book. Even it that's not the case, you certainly do lose any possibility of downloading if you haven't already done so, or if you have read and removed it earlier, of being able to re-load it. 

So I have spent hours and hours using Calibre software to reformat my hundreds of e-books into the epub format from the Kindle exclusive azw3 format necessary to read them on a Kindle device - which means I have about 450 e-books in two formats now, sometimes three. Not the most efficient use of hard drive space, but this way I'm at least able to save copies of everything on my computer and backup drives - and I'm in control of who owns them, not Amazon.

Doing all of this also allowed me to buy my first Kobo reader (their color model, the Libra) and upload all the original Kindle books to the new Kobo reader. It's kind of fun to see all the covers in color again, along with whatever color was added to the book pages, too. Without having reformatted all the Amazon books that transfer would not have been possible. 

It's not only books, and it's not only Amazon, that can leave you high and dry with no access to something you believed was your property. Just in the last few days, for instance, Redbox pulled the plug on all the digital movie content it had sold over the last few years to customers who thought they owned it forever. Redbox is now gone...and so are the movies. Anyway, that's what ate up so much of my time last week...sorry to ramble on as long as I did about it. Oh, and I'm not done yet with that project.

Coming into this week, I find myself down to the last 75 pages of Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West and well into Huxley's Brave New World along with a couple of others.

Brave New World, written in 1932, is classic dystopian fiction. It's one of those stories in which the entire world has collapsed in on itself without most of its inhabitants even recognizing how bad things are for all but the chosen few. And in this case, people are definitely chosen, even before birth, for the job and societal level they will live at until they die. It's all done via unethical science, brainwashing techniques, censorship, and hiding the truth from everyone. Even those in charge, by now, don't really know how dark their "brave new world" has grown.

Wow, is this good! This is my first time reading anything by Carol O'Connell, and I probably made a poor choice by beginning with book ten of her Mallory series, but I'm really loving The Chalk Girl at almost its halfway point. Kathy Mallory (don't dare ever call her by her first name because that irritates the fire out of this young police detective) is one of the more unique series characters I've run across in a long time. She's a sociopath of sorts with very little time to worry about even faking social skills and she's always on the brink of being fired despite her obvious crime-solving prowess.

S.R. Wilsher's The Collection of Heng Souk is one of those e-books I rescued from oblivivion last week. It was published in 2016, and I have no idea why I have it, but the title of the book made me curious enough to begin reading the first few pages and now I'm hooked. It's set in Hanoi in the present day and is about a young doctor (who is married to a jerk of a police detective) who only learns that she has an elderly uncle after her father dies and leaves a package to be delivered to the man. Heng Souk, the uncle, as it turns out, was an interrogator for the North Vietnam army during the war years. 

I'm turning up so much interesting stuff as I continue my e-book cleanup that I have no idea what I'll be reading this time next week. As frustrating as it has been at times, this project is, I think, finally going to get me to look closely at each of the e-books I "own" and begin finally to read some of the ones that I've overlooked for way too long.

I hope all of you have great reading weeks as the summer months begin to come to a close. We are hoping for some relief from the heat down here, and are kind of holding our breaths as we work our way through the rest of hurricane season. Have fun!