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!

Mrs. Plansky's Revenge - Spencer Quinn

 

Mrs. Plansky is the sun around whom the other members of her family orbit; they all know to come to her when something needs to be fixed, and Mrs. Plansky always does whatever it takes to make their lives easier. Not only is she the caretaker of her 98-year-old father, she also has to worry about her daughter and that woman's parade of husbands, ex-husbands, and live-in boyfriends while trying to be there for her college-aged grandson whenever he needs her. But let's face it, Mrs. Plansky is 70 years old now, and she could stand a break or two from all the action herself.

But that's not going to happen because Mrs. Plansky is about to get a phone call in the middle of the night that will rock her world.

Still half asleep, Mrs. Plansky listens to a voice on the phone claiming to be her grandson Will. The boy on the line, whoever he really is, tells her that he's in trouble with the law and desperately needs ten thousand dollars to get himself released from jail. Mrs. Plansky, always eager to help her grandson, follows "Will's" instructions step-by-step - and the next morning she wakes up to learn that all of her bank accounts and investment accounts suddenly show the same balance: zero.

Mrs. Plansky does what any of us would do; she goes to the authorities for help. It doesn't take long, however, for her to realize that the authorities are not likely ever to get her money back for her, and that's really all she wants. Sure, she'd like to see the scammers brought to justice, but with so many people still depending on her, the lost money is the most important thing to her. So Mrs. Plansky does something that most 70-year-old people would never have the courage to do - she buys a ticket to Romania to confront the thieves face-to-face. She is determined to bring her money home with her. 

Mrs. Plansky's Revenge, despite its occasional violence, is a goodhearted feel-good novel, one in which readers can root for the good guys with full confidence that everything will work out in the end. Despite the plot being a tad predictable, the story is so good that I found myself turning pages just to see how the author was going to get the elderly woman out of the latest jam she had managed to wriggle herself into. Mrs. Plansky's Revenge is lots of fun, a nice diversion from the more brutal brand of crime fiction, a novel I feel good about recommending to others. 

(Thanks again to CLM and her Staircase Wit blog  for turning me on to Mrs. Plansky's Revenge.)

Bookshelf Organizing: A Challenge for Both the Mind and the Body

  

As you can probably see from this picture, I'm still in the process of cleaning up some of the mess I made on Saturday while reorganizing approximately 1,000 books that are shelved in my home office. But overall, especially now that my knees are feeling a bit better after two days of resting them, I am pretty pleased with the result. I can't believe how much easier it is now to find any specific book that I might be searching for than it was before I moved almost every single book shown here to a new spot on the shelves.

I still have some fine-tuning to do with the few books still on the floor, but I have also marked about 30 books to be given to friends in a few days and discovered more than a few hidden gems I'd forgotten all about.

Prior to this re-do, my books were mostly sorted alphabetically according to author surname. I also had that center section dedicated to older editions, classic literature, and all those Library of America books in the center of the middle section, along with another couple of shelves for signed copies and other more valuable first edition copies of some of my favorite books. But the main problem was that many of my favorite writers didn't limit themselves to novels. They also wrote short stories, novellas, essays, memoirs, literary criticism, and the like - genres that seemed to disappear into some kind of black hole when I went looking for a specific type of reading experience. 

So I decided to chuck the surname method in favor of dedicating separate sections of the shelves to:

• Short Stories
• Memoirs, Essays, and Criticism
• Westerns
• Biographies
• Historical Fiction
• Road Trips and Long Walks
• History
• Science Fiction
• Signed Copies / More Valuable Editions
• Favorite Series
• Spy Fiction
• LOA Books, Modern American Books, and Other Favorite Editions of "Literature"

Within these genres, the books are still sorted by author surname or, in the case of biographies, by surname of the subject of the biography.

This is what it looked like as I first began to shift the shelves into standalone stacks while I tried to do some shelf-cleaning at the same time. All was going well until a couple of hours later when one of the stacks tilted over into another stack and the domino-effect resulted in books all over the floor in one big heap - to be resorted all over again. 

I still have another wall and some smaller bookshelves in other rooms to sort through, so this is still very much a work-in-progress, but I'm already happy with the results. I'm particularly excited to find that I have so many short story collections, for instance. Until I saw all of them in one section, I never realized how many stories I still haven't explored or even sampled. Even a substantial portion of the LOA books are short story compilations, but those are going to be kept with the other LOA books. I think this effort is going to impact my TBR list for years to come because I only realize now what a goldmine I've been sitting next to for all these years. (I've also culled some junk from the shelves - books that are going to be donated.)

How do you guys organize your own shelves? Traditionally, randomly, by genre - or  by some combination of all of this? I'd love to hear if you have something better that works for you.

What I'm Reading This Week (August 18, 2024)

 I read two very different books last week, The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves and In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch, and I enjoyed both. That I would enjoy an Ann Cleeves novel as much as I enjoyed The Dark Wives doesn't really surprise me simply based on my past experience with various Cleeves-authored series. On the other hand, I didn't know at all what to expect from Deutsch's heartfelt praise of the bookstore, but I found much of it to be quite thought provoking - even inspirational. But as often happens in books about books, I found myself floundering several times while trying to keep up with the author's thoughts. It's not so much that I don't at least partially understand what's being said when that kind of thing happens, it's more that I find myself "numbed" by the whole conversation. I'll have more to say about In Praise of Good Bookstores later.

Still in progress are Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West and Morgan Talty's Night of the Living Rez, two books I'm hoping to finish this week.

I mistakenly mentioned last week that this is a ten-story collection, but as it turns out there are actually twelve stories in Night of the Living Rez. An even better surprise to me, now that I've read nine of the stories, is how the stories connect to each other through two different sets of characters that appear in alternating stories. All of the stories are set on a single reservation, with every story focusing on a single family unit, so I don't expect that the two groups will ever interact. This technique has the effect of making Night of the Living Rez read more like a novel than a short story collection. 

I somehow made it this long without ever having read Brave New World, something I just realized while looking over one of those "Best of" lists last week. It's the kind of book that you are sure you must have read sometime or another right up until the moment you realize that, no, you really haven't. My curiosity finally got the best of me, so I read the first chapter online, was duly impressed, and hope now to finally complete it. As we become more and more dependent on high tech to take care of our every need, this may just be the perfect time to read a dystopian novel like Brave New World. That first chapter (in which artificial insemination is taken to its ultimate extreme) was certainly scary enough.

I've also been reading A Study in Scarlet, the first, and very short, Sherlock Holmes novel this week, but the book I really want to talk about is one that I hope to start in the next two or three days:

Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning was published in May 2010, and until yesterday I didn't realize that I had a copy of it hidden on my shelves. (I sometimes place books behind a displayed row with the intention of getting to them a little later on.) I'm as taken with the cover now as I must have been when I purchased the novel, but it's the plot that really caught my attention this time around: "Twelve American tourists join an art expedition that begins in China...and heads south into the jungles of Burma...And then on Christmas morning, eleven of the travelers boat across a misty lake for a sunrise cruise - and disappear." So now I'm just hoping that this one is half as good as its book jacket description makes it sound.

Another novel I unearthed during a complete resorting of the books on my shelves is The Moment Before Drowning by British author James Brydon. I have no doubt why I bought this one...it is set in December 1959 and focuses on a French Resistance fighter who has just returned from the fighting in Algeria. The man is a former detective, and while awaiting his own trial for a brutal crime (in Algeria?) he is asked to help investigate the murder and mutilation of a teenaged girl in the small French village he calls home. This is a 2018 novel.

I'm still recovering from spending almost all of yesterday resorting my bookshelves from top to bottom. That turned out to be much more a physical challenge than I expected it would be, so I'm taking it relatively easy the rest of the weekend. I'm way behind on catching up on all my favorite book blog reading at the moment, but I do hope you all have been discovering some great new books for the rest of us. See you soon.

The Dark Wives - Ann Cleeves

 

The series novels of Ann Cleeves, be they the ones featuring DI  Jimmy Perez, the ones featuring DI Vera Stanhope, or those featuring Detective Matthew Venn, all have something in common that is extremely important to the veteran mystery reader.  Readers know that the mystery to be solved by any of these fictional detectives is going to be every bit as intriguing as it is complicated - and readers who figure any of them out before Cleeves makes her big reveal near the end of each novel are to be congratulated. The Dark Wives, book number eleven in Cleeves's Vera Stanhope series, is most certainly no exception to the rule.

It all starts when the body of a young volunteer at a home for troubled teens is found dead outside the building early one morning. When Vera Stanhope arrives on the scene she also learns that a fourteen-year-old resident of the home has not been seen since the previous evening. While others, including Vera's favorite Detective Sergeant, Joe Ashworth, instinctively see the missing girl as suspect number one, Vera is not so sure. Her gut tells her that the young girl is more likely to be victim than villain. Whether the investigation proves her right or not remains to be seen. 

So here we have the makings of another solid Vera Stanhope novel. However, what really makes an Ann Cleeves novel so good these days is the special care that Cleeves uses each time out to further develop the emotional evolution of her recurring series characters. As The Dark Wives opens, Vera is still struggling to cope with the loss of of a female officer whose death she blames herself for. But even now, despite being determined to be more open with her staff - and less rash about placing herself in harm's way without backup - Vera keeps falling back on her old habits. 

Joe Ashworth, personally closer to Vera than anyone else in the department, can't help but notice and worry about Vera's struggles, so when the flashy new investigator Rosie Bell shows up to begin her first day on the team, Joe is not quite sure what to expect. Rosie is very different from her predecessor, so different, in fact, that Joe begins to feel a little threatened by her presence after Vera starts to show her what Joe can't help but feel is special treatment at his own expense. 

As one thread after another is yanked on by the investigators, shocking as the results often are, it all starts to make perfect sense to Vera. But even when she is almost certain that she knows the identity of those behind everything that went wrong at the teen refuge, Vera still has to prove it. So has she learned to share her theories with the rest of the team yet...or will she make the same mistakes she made last time?

The Sherlockian - Graham Moore

 

I've been an on-again, off-again fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories for as long as I can remember, periodically going on epic reads of the tales before dismissing them again for a decade or so. Sometimes it's a new movie version that reignites my interest in Holmes, other times a new modern approach to the Holmes myth from a current author. This time it looks like Graham Moore has done the trick  with his cleverly written The Sherlockian.

Reading The Sherlockian is a bit like reading two related novels at the same time by alternating chapters from each in succession. That's exactly how Moore structured his novel about a a young Sherlock Holmes fanatic who is trying to solve the murder of a fellow member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a prestigious club of fellow fanatics that once claimed the likes of Isaac Asimov, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt as members.

In the real-time set of chapters, Harold is being inducted into the ranks of the Irregulars during its biggest event of the year when the keynote speaker is found murdered in his hotel room just moments before he was to reveal to everyone where he finally found the long-missing final volume of Arthur Conan Doyle's personal diaries. In the every-other-chapter flashback, Doyle is still trying to live with the public's scorn for his having killed off the Sherlock Holmes character so that he would not be forced to endure another moment in the fictional detective's company. Doyle hates everything about Holmes, and he fully intends to keep the man in his grave forever - as he does until suddenly deciding to resurrect the famous detective for another round of solving unsolvable mysteries for the police. 

But Sherlock Holmes fans all over the world have always wondered why Doyle threw Holmes off the mountain in the first place...and why after several years the author decided to bring him back to life as he did. Supposedly, the long sought answers are in the missing diary pages - and now they been found. So is the secret such a dark one that someone would actually kill to keep it hidden forever?

That's exactly what Harold intends to find out.

The Sherlockian makes for fun some reading. Despite the very real murder that takes place early on, and the presence of a serious villain or two, it's easy to brush past all of that and focus mostly on all the references to the Sherlock Holmes canon that are used both as red herrings and as real clues to solving the diary's old mystery. 

Which gets me back to where I began this review. Reading it that way brings back such pleasant memories of the Arthur Conan Doyle books, that I know already that I'm going to be revisiting some of those classics soon. 

It's happened again.

What I'm Reading This Week (August 11, 2024)

 

 I finished two books last week - each of them being a challenge of sorts to get through - and neither of them made for a particularly enjoyable or satisfying reading experience in the long run. That's not to say, however, that they are necessarily bad books. Of the two, Victoria Kielland's My Men was the more rewarding because of it's unusual twisting of first and third person voices to tell the story of America's first female serial killer. On the other hand, Claire Messoud's This Strange Eventful History was disappointing to me more for what it failed to do than what it did. Even so, I'm pleased that I experienced both the books and I'm likely to try each of the authors at least one more time.

And somehow or another, I've ended up with four books in progress even though I was trying to cut down to two at a time to see if that would jumpstart my reading back to where it was before the summer started. (I suppose maybe that experiment worked because adding books to my current reading has been the norm for me for years, and it feels comfortable to me to do it that way again.) These are the four:

  

I read another two chapters in Pat Buchanan's The Death of the West and I grow more and more astounded at my ignorance of the world's relatively recent political history. I'm learning about the Frankfort School (founded in Germany in 1923) and it's 100-year-old philosophy that is playing out in the West today. Also learning who people like Hungarian Georg Lukacs, Italian Antonio Gramsci, German Theodor Adorno, and German Herbert Marcuse were and how they set the world on its hellish course in the last century.

I'm about forty percent of the way into this latest Vera Stanhope novel from Ann Cleeves, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, Cleeves just keeps getting better and better. Her earlier Vera novels were much heavier focused on the mystery than on the main characters, but now over time Cleeves has shifted more to developing these characters via our ready access to their thoughts and emotions. They are now very real people to longterm fans of the series, me included, and I dread the day that Cleeves writes her last Vera Stanhope novel.

I have read quite a few Native American writers in recent years but only recently heard about a new talent from that community, Morgan Talty. Talty's Night of the Living Rez is a ten-story collection that won four separate literary prizes for the author in addition to getting him chosen as a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" nominee. I've read the first two stories, the first being only five pages long, the second over twenty pages in length. Both stories focus on the bleakness of reservation life, and they both pack a solid punch to the gut. Good stuff.

Because I literally discovered this little book while browsing a used-book bookstore the other day, I had to chuckle a little bit about the historical origin of that word as described early on in Jeff Deutsch's In Praise of Good Bookstores. According to Deutsch, to browse originally men to to graze or chew one's cud, a word commonly used to describe a cow's activity. Somehow, the word became associated with the way that bookstore customers behaved when shopping - as they grazed for new books. I'm already liking this one a lot because Deutsch brings up so many interesting bookstore-related things to ponder.

Waiting in the wings, among dozens of others, these few are starting to peek around the corner now:

Review Copy 

Number 1 in the Series

Love the 1950s Pulp Covers

Have heard great things about O'Connell

So there you have it for now. I don't expect to get to all four of this last bunch right away, if ever, but they are the ones that have caught my eye this week. 

As for the Booker Prize situation...just as I'd hoped, lots of early signers-on to my library's hold-list have already dropped off out of frustration. I have not moved up significantly for any particular title yet, but at least there's noticeable movement. I do feel pretty good about having already read two of the thirteen nominees, but it will still be quite a wait before the third one gets into my hands. And then they'll probably all show up in the same ten-day window...

The Dirty Dozen - Lynda La Plante

 

I have been a fan of Prime Suspect, the British TV series starring Helen Mirren as Detective Jane Tennison, for a number of years now. Truth be told, even though it was really Helen Mirren's presence that first drew me to the series, the shows are so well done that the series soon became one of my favorites. But despite all of that background, I had not read one of the Lynda La Plante Tennison novels until I spotted The Dirty Dozen at my library a while back. And as it turns out, The Dirty Dozen, despite it being book five of a nine-book series, is not a bad place to jump in because this one marks the beginning of a whole new phase of Jane's police career.

It's April 1980, and Jane is about to break new ground for female detectives by becoming the first female assigned to the Flying Squad, a group of cowboy-cops tasked exclusively with investigating the armed robbery of banks, armored cars, and other businesses with a heavy cash flow. At the moment, the reputation of the Flying Squad is somewhere between notorious and renowned; it all depends on who is answering the question. Jane herself has no doubts about the group. She is proud that she was chosen to break the Flying Squad gender barrier, and is excited about starting her new Met assignment.

Little does Jane know that she is only part of what is seen by the higher-ups as a temporary experiment to determine if adding a female to the mix might make the Dirty Dozen at least a little less likely to go off the rails when it comes to dealing with suspects and evidence. Part of the Flying Squad is already under official internal investigation, and desperate times require desperate measures. Jane is that desperate measure. Of course a secret like that one is destined to leak, and after Jane learns the truth she is more determined than ever to prove that she is up to anything the rest of the squad can throw at her.

The Dirty Dozen is first and foremost a police procedural during which Jane and her new partners try to solve a botched bank robbery that sees one off-duty policeman shot and another crashing his car into a nearby residence during the ensuing chase. It is a detailed day-to-day account of how the next interview, clue, or sudden burst of inspiration, leads Jane and the boys to the right suspects - and how they hold off arresting the bunch until a rock-solid case against them, one guaranteed to get a conviction, can be built. 

But The Dirty Dozen is also a reflection of the times in which it is set, a time when women police officers were upwardly limited and (hopefully) treated with less respect by their fellow male officers than they are today. Jane's struggle to gain respect and get past all the built-in barriers she faces is what sets The Dirty Dozen apart from the common procedural. Now I'm only trying to figure out if I want to go back to the beginning of the series or continue on from this turning point in Jane Tennison's career. 

Tuned Out - Keith A. Pearson

 

Toby Grant, main character of Keith Pearson's Tuned Out, is a rather misguided millennial who sincerely believes that his parents had an easier time coming of age in the sixties and seventies than he is having now. Admittedly, in some ways they probably did - but all of us know that, for good reason, the grass usually appears to be a little greener when you're looking at it from a distance. So what might happen were Toby given a chance to see his parents' generation up close and personal for himself? 

We are about to find out.

"The problem with social media...is that it doesn't offer a balanced reflection of the lives your friends are actually leading. Everyone is keen to show photos of their latest holiday or new car but not so many are keen to share photos of their bathroom scales post-holiday, or the final demand from the car finance company."

Toby is not happy, or even remotely satisfied, with what he has achieved in his almost three decades of life, especially when forced to hear precisely that from his father over the occasional Sunday lunch. He knows it's time to get on with the rest of his life now, but the cost of big city living is so high that he fears he will never be able to afford anything as substantial as a home of his own. Then Toby makes an embarrassing, and very public, mistake that requires a little judge-ordered community service as payback - only to get the surprise of his life in the process. 

More or less conned into humoring an old man in a nursing home, one whose company Toby utterly despises, Toby manages to "tune into" 1969 only to learn that he is almost certainly going to be trapped in the past for the rest of his own life. This is not a good thing. Toby is shocked by how primitive life can be without the internet, cell phones, social media, and the instant gratification they offer. Hopeless as Toby's former life felt to him, all he can think about now is a way of figuring out how to get back to it.

And then he falls in love...and realizes that the only way he can go home again is by changing the past. But does he really want to do that?

Tune Out is fun. It's not especially deep or philosophical, but there is enough meat here to make the reader think a little. This, in fact, is about as deep as this one gets (but no one can deny the truth expressed here):

"...there is no better or worse time to be alive - every generation has its challenges, and in every generation there are winners and losers. All you can do is make the best of the hand you're dealt; rather than blame the dealer."

If you're looking for some lighthearted entertainment, give this one a try. 

(Available on Kindle Unlimited)

What I'm Reading This Week (August 4, 2024)

 

It appears that my hoped-for early start on the 2024 Booker Prize longlist is already doomed, so I'm adjusting my reading plan accordingly. My library system, probably the largest in the state of Texas, does not have anywhere near the number of copies yet that are going to be needed to make the hold list reasonable for any of the Booker titles (and three of them are not available at all yet). I'm hoping that changes in the next three or four weeks now that the actual longlist has been announced, but at least for the moment, I'm not expecting any Booker titles until late November or early December at best. 

I finished two books last week (reviews to come soon - I hope), and I have two others in progress.  Finished up were a couple of e-books, The Sherlockian by Graham Moore and Mrs. Plansky's Revenge by Spencer Quinn. The two in progress are these:

I didn't spend a whole lot of time with The Death of the West last week, but what I read continues to fascinate me with its prescience. Buchanan's book is like reading a 20-year-old playbook for the accelerated destruction of Western culture we've experienced in the last two decades. Everything he described in 2002 is what we are living through today. Buchanan was not a prophet...The Death of the West is more a history book that begins in World War I with the failure of Marxism to predict a worker's revolution. It's about the substitution of patient non-violent revolution for the more violent version that never manage to win "hearts and minds" in the long run.

I was lucky already to have a library copy of Canadian-American author Claire Messud's This Strange Eventful History on hand before it was placed on the 2024 Booker Prize longlist or I would have had to wait a long time to get my hands on one. I'm about 180 pages in, and it's not looking to me like this will be a strong contender for the prize. My disappointment is that it is more of a novel about the particulars of one family (based on the author' own), and less a novel about the big historical events the family lived through, than I had hoped.. It's all very personal, with events like WWII's impact on Algeria, the Algerian revolution against French occupation, etc. being completely skipped over as the novel moves from decade to decade. Instead, everything is seen in the aftermath of one or another geographic move the family is forced to make. 

As for the change of plans, I hope to begin both of these this week:

I don't read a lot of True Crime, but I have always been both horrified and fascinated by serial killers. My Men is a novel based on the actual crimes of a Norwegian woman who came to the U.S. in the early 1880s to begin a new life for herself. As it turns out, she may have been the first female serial killer in this country, having killed both her husbands and (it is believed) as many as thirty other men she lured through newspaper ads. The novel places readers very much inside the woman's head - but that might not be a good thing. We'll see.

The Dark Wives, number 11 in Ann Cleeves's Vera Stanhope series, will be published in this country on August 26 so I would have likely been reading it this week anyway despite the Booker Prize fiasco I mentioned earlier. I'm very much taken with Vera, so I always look forward to an addition to the series. If I recall correctly, this is the longest series that Cleeves has ever written by at least two or three books now, so I have to wonder how many more we'll get. I do hope for lots more because, even as well as I know the characters now, I still really enjoy their investigations and experiences together. 

So that's what the next few reading-days look like here. I'm about to go outside to grill burgers for a late lunch, but I'll look forward to visiting a bunch of your blogs this evening to see what everyone's been up to. Have a great week...

Piglet - Lottie Hazell (Pocket Review)

 

Let's start with the essentials:

• The main character of Lottie Hazell's Piglet is a young woman whose parents hung that atrocious nickname on her when she was a child because of a one misunderstood incident involving a large cake. 
• Piglet's narcissistic parents are guilty of some of the worst parenting imaginable. 
• Piglet is very insecure.
• Piglet resents the personal successes and achievements of even her closest friends - and acts accordingly towards them.
• As an adult, Piglet is now obsessed with everything to do with food, including its preparation and quality.
• Piglet cannot control her appetite, especially when she is under unusual stress.

That said, I did not feel bad for long about not giving a hoot about this narcissistic character as she goes about detrimentally impacting the lives of just about everyone who makes the mistake to letting her into their worlds. 

Piglet is filled with characters I never grew comfortable with no matter how much I tried to understand their motivations for doing some of the rude things they kept doing to each other. This is one of those "every man for himself" kind of novels where, in the end, almost everyone ends up getting pretty much what the reader might wish upon them. None of it particularly good. 

The best I can say for Piglet is that it's well written, and that it reads very smoothly. But still, the bottom line is that I couldn't wait to leave for good the company of the people in Lottie Hazell's fictional world. That's probably why it felt so good to turn the last page.

This one is just not for me.