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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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!