Displaced Persons - Joan Leegant

 

I generally read about ten short story compilations a year, and even though I've been doing that for quite a long time now, I've found very few story collections as consistently good as Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons.  

The stories, half of which take place in Israel and half in the United States, share a common theme hinted at by the book's title. Each features one or more "displaced persons" struggling to fit into a world that bears little resemblance to the one left behind. Some characters manage the transition with limited difficulty, some take years even to begin feeling comfortable with the change, and others never manage the job at all. Regardless, Leegant's people have more in common than not. 

The seven stories set in Israel are presented in "Part One: The East." "The East" includes stories about those who left and the people they left behind, such as "The Baghdadi," in which an Iraqi Jew moves to Israel against the wishes of his father, or the story about a young Israeli who, against the wishes of his mother, wants to make a fresh start by moving to Germany. There are stories about "displaced" Americans naive enough to get themselves into dangerous situations, such as the one about two sixteen-year-old girls whose youthful rebelliousness places them in life-altering danger they will be lucky to escape. And there are stories about others who come to Israel expecting to go back home soon only to find that they have finally found in Israel the real home they've been yearning for.

The seven stories in "Part Two: The West" are about a different kind of displacement, one in which American Jewish families are more often than not coming apart at the seams. These stories are more about generational and religious displacement than about the physical kind. Some stories tell of children who no longer feel connected to the old ways of their immigrant parents, others of disillusioned elders who have lost the faith much to the dismay of their children. There are stories here about redemption and the kind of wisdom that comes only with age and experience. They are stories about people trying to figure out who they are and where they fit into the world. 

Displaced Persons offers, I think, an especially timely glimpse into Jewish life both in Israel and in the United States, and what it is like to be caught between those two very different worlds during the turbulent times we live in today. Joan Leegant has packed so much into these twenty-something-page stories that I will remember them for a long time to come. 

Joan Leegant jacket photo

(This New American Fiction Prize winner will be published in early June 2024. Look for it then.)

What I'm Reading This Week (May 13, 2024)

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures was one of the hottest books of 2022 and, at least in my recollection, of 2023. I got on my library wait list a little late and finally threw in the towel when I realized that it would be most of a year before I would get hold of it that way. It wasn't until this year that I thought about the novel again and decided to get back on the list - and I still started at number 65. But I had also signed up for the large print edition book and started the wait for that one in the mid-twenties. As it turns out, the wait for that edition was only three weeks, and I spent a lot of time last week finally reading Remarkably Bright Creatures. With just a few pages to go, I'm still not sure what to think of it - and that's probably not a good thing. 

I did finish up both Alice McDermott's Absolution and the Mark Twain classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well, and made good starts on James Lee Burke's Clete and Alan Murrin's The Coast Road. Too, I've started re-reading Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the novel that turned me into a lifetime fan of Tyler's work the first time that I read it back in the eighties - and I'm down to the last short story in Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons. This was one of those weeks that I found it particularly hard to focus, so I found myself moving from book to book quicker than I normally do, with shorter bursts of reading that I don't find nearly as satisfying as reading at least fifty or so pages from one book before moving on to the next. I do hope that changes this week.

Clete is a little bit different in that it is being correctly marketed as book number 24 in James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux series despite Dave being very much a secondary character in the novel - at least through the first third of the book. This time around the narrator is Clete Purcell, a private investigator who has been Dave's closest friend since their days in Vietnam. Once again, Dave and Clete are dealing with some truly evil people in small town Louisiana, but it's been eye-opening to see Dave through the eyes of a man who knows him better than anyone else in the world could ever know him. (I've read the first 23 books in the series so it's interesting to learn that Clete sees him a bit differently than I see him.)

I'm about thirty percent of the way through The Coast Road and I still haven't settled into it comfortably. The characters, all of whom are women with marital problems of one degree or another, have not separated themselves in my mind yet, and that makes it hard to keep up with the intricacies of their day-to-day experiences together. It's still hard to know which of them can be relied on to tell the truth and which of them are lying to themselves. I do expect this one to suck me in soon - well at least I hope that's about to happen.

I first read Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1983 or so, and it turned out to be one of those books that influenced my reading for decades to come. It made me a lifetime fan of Anne Tyler's work, and I've pretty much read everything she's ever written now. But guess what? I don't remember a whole lot about the plot anymore, only how immersed I ended up being in the world Tyler created and how fascinating I found the characters to be. This is one of those risky re-reads that I hope doesn't end up lessening my fondness for a book that's been on my shelves for a long, long time.

Oh, and I also gave up on Susan Orlean's On Animals because the pieces I read from the essay collection didn't seem to work together as a whole. Maybe if I had read them as standalone magazine articles they would have struck me differently. 

The little stack of books still waiting for their turn includes this bunch:

That's my Monday morning start to the week. I do have a couple of short road trips scheduled for later this week: a baseball game against Arkansas over in College Station and a lunch date with a few of my old high school friends down toward Beaumont, but it looks like we're in for another round of hard rains that are likely to wash out both trips. Whether that ends up translating into more reading time or more time frittered away remains to be seen. 

I hope you are all doing well, and I hope to visit a bunch of blogs this week that I missed out on last week...have fun.

An American Dreamer - David Finkel

 

If cotton candy were a book, it would be called American Dreamer: Living in a Divided Country. Maybe because David Finkel is a Pulitzer Prize Winner I expected too much, but my lingering impression of American Dreamer is that no one living in the United States during the last decade will be surprised by, or much enlightened by, anything that Finkel has to say here. Any American who has paid even the least attention to what has been happening all around them (and who has the ability to express themselves on paper) could have written this one. If like me, you expected to learn how and why the country became so politically divided, and what we can do together to become more united, you are going to be disappointed.

American Dreamer opens on the morning following the 2016 election as Brent Cummings and his wife wake up to the (to them) appalling realization that Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States. Cummings, an Iraq War veteran with twenty-five years of service, was born in Mississippi but moved to New Jersey with his family when he was eight years old. By November 2016, he is in charge of 750 ROTC cadets at the University of North Georgia. The book is primarily from Cummings's point of view, and how he reacts to his very conservative next-door neighbor, a wheelchair bound man who is just as thrilled as Cummings is upset about Trump's election.

Finkel observes that the two men can barely speak with each other without the distinct possibility that one, or both, of them will lose their temper and say something that there will be no coming back from. So they take to being super-polite to each other and purposely talking very little about politics at all. Consequently, they don't really know each other and never will. 

Then the book is over.

The reader has been treated to a rather short and unremarkable biography of Brent and a much less detailed one of Michael, his neighbor. It is not difficult to see which of the two men Finkel sees as the more sympathetic, especially because one of the most widely debunked charges against Trump from the last several years is mentioned several times in the book without once representing Michael's understanding of the same event. Finkel seems to believe that the two men will never really understand each other. Their political beliefs and expectations are just too far apart for that to happen. By extension, I have to wonder if Finkel sees the whole country that way, and not just these two individuals. If so, I can't agree with him.

The big problem for me is that I don't think Finkel has made a serious effort here to identify solutions or causes of America's (the world's?) political divide. American Dreamer reads more like something Finkel threw together between more serious work, and as a result it had the same impact on me as all the empty calories found inside a state fair serving of pink cotton candy...still empty, and wonder why I bothered.

Mercury - Amy Jo Burns

 

"Two young women arrived in this town, twenty years apart. The first was named Elise, the second named Marley. They lived in the same house. They loved the same men. They raised their children. Elise never loved Marley like a daughter, and yet together they built a family."

Elise and Marley even shared a surname. The difference is that Elise gave birth to the three Joseph boys, and Marley married one of them before giving birth to a Joseph boy of her own.

Mercury is a coming-of-age novel in which it is not always clear who is coming of age and who is doing the raising, especially when it comes to Marley. When she arrives in Mercury, Pennsylvania, Marley is more concerned with fitting in to her new high school than finding a new boyfriend. It's not like Marley dosen't know what to expect because her mother, constantly on the lookout for a better paying nursing job, is always up for a fresh start in a new town. This time, though it's going to be very different. 

Marley immediately catches the eye of one of the Jospeh boys, and before she knows it she's become a regular at the family dinner table. Right up until, that is, the moment she's unceremoniously dumped by Baylor Joseph - only to secretly take up with the steady one in the family, Baylor's younger brother, Waylon. (And yes, the notorious Joseph boys are known locally as Bay, Way, and Shay.) By nature, as well as by circumstance, Marley is a loner, but what she aches for more than anything else in the world is a family of her own and, as she sees it, a "place at someone's table." 

She gets more than she bargained for with the Josephs, becoming a surrogate mother to the youngest boy, manager of the family roofing business, and protector of the woman who never really stops resenting her. That Marley becomes as loyal a member of the Joseph family as any of them is no accident, but her ability to hold the family together is seriously tested years later by a disturbing discovery that Waylon and Baylor make in the church attic. The Joseph family has secrets...and Marley wants to help them keep it that way.

"Do you think it's possible to spend your life loving the wrong people?"   (Waylon)

"I think it's more likely that we love the right people the wrong way."      (Jade, Marley's best friend)

Mercury is one of those character-driven novels that, layer by layer, make themselves really difficult to put down. Even when I wasn't turning pages, I sometimes found myself wondering about the main characters and what Burns would reveal about them next. My biggest surprise is who the real hero of the Joseph story turns out to be, and how that realization made the book so much more memorable to me than I expected it would ever be. This one is perfect for book club reads because you'll find yourself wanting to talk about it with someone else who's read it, too. Good stuff. 

Amy Jo Burns jacket photo 

 

What I'm Reading This Week (May 6, 2024)

 

When it comes to turning pages, last week was a pretty good week, even if maybe not so good when it comes actually to finishing books. The only book I completed was Faceless Killers, the first novel in Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series. I do have three others near completion, with fewer than a 100 pages to go in each of them, but that means I was only able to begin one new book during the past week - and even that one was not among those I thought I'd be selecting from. I suppose I should just go ahead and admit to myself that I've temporarily (at the least) abandoned Camus's The Plague since I haven't touched it in almost a month, so that leaves me beginning the week deeply immersed in Alice McDermott's Absolution, Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons, and Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 

Absolution has taken me in directions I didn't expect it to go, and is turning out to be even better and more affecting than I hoped it would be. I mentioned last week that the first part of the book, by far the longest of its three sections, is narrated by an 80-year-old looking back at her days in Vietnam in the early 1960s - and that it is directed specifically at a woman the narrator remembers from those days as a child. It turns out that the second part of the novel is the second woman's narrative response to what she has been told by the older woman. It's a little like some amazing jigsaw puzzle that can only be put together by the combined memories of Tricia and Rainey. There's so much packed into the story that the book feels much longer than it really is when measured by page-count.

I've now read all seven of the short stories in Displaced Persons that are set in Israel along with three of the seven set in the U.S. The common theme of each is reflected in the book's title as Leegant weaves her way in and out of stories about people who never really feel completely at home where they are. There is always something about the past or their dreams for the future that have them yearning for something they've either once had and lost, or never had in the first place. Even though the stories average only about twenty pages each, Leegant has a special talent for creating complete worlds and deep characters within the space she allows herself. Displaced Persons reminds me exactly why I am such a fan of short stories.

On Animals is a series of essays in which Susan Orlean explains her "animalishness" to the rest of us. Like most children, Orlean was animalish when she was a little girl; she just never outgrew the attraction and has structured her life in a manner that allows her almost always to have animals around her. In her introduction Orlean says, "I think I have the same response to animals that I would if Martians landed on Earth: I would like to get to know them and befriend them, all the while knowing we were not quite of the same ilk. They seem to have something in common with us, and yet they're alien, unknowable, familiar but mysterious." I can't say that I'm overwhelmed by the first two or three essays in the book, but I'm still reading.

Their fast approaching publication dates mean that I'll likely be starting these in the next few days, but I'm hoping this still turns out to be the week that I get to start re-reading either Deliverance or Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, also:

Publication Date: June 11, 2024

Publication Date: June 11, 2024

Publication Date: June 4, 2024

I hope you all have good weeks, and that you find some terrific new books to tell us about along the way. I'll look forward to hearing all about them. 

The Man Who Smiled - Henning Mankell

 

Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander has to be the gloomiest and grumpiest series detective I've ever run into. Sure, I could name a lot of other unhappy fictional detectives like Kurt Wallander, but unlike Wallander, the others manage to experience really good and happy times on occasion. Wallander...not so much. He wakes up gloomy and depressed about his current life - and his past life - and he stays that way until he manages to close his eyes again long enough to recycle his problems into a series of depressing or scary dreams. I bet you can't wait to read about him now, can you?

So why do I enjoy reading the Wallander series so much? After all, it's not as if I didn't already know what I was getting into when I started reading The Man Who Smiled. I've watched two multi-season television series based on the Wallander books (one in English and one in Swedish), and I'm still hoping someday to get a look at the movies based on the character. Wallander is not exactly a bundle of joy in any of those either. But he's a good man despite his many faults, especially a temper he can barely control sometimes, who gets up every morning and goes to work putting some really bad people where they belong - behind bars. You have to admire his determination.

As The Man Who Smiled opens, Wallander is still reeling from having had to shoot to death a suspect in the last case he worked on. He's all alone, walking an isolated beach in Denmark every day, and doubting that he will ever return to the job. Then a lawyer friend surprises Wallander during one of his walks and asks him to come back to Sweden to investigate the supposed suicide of that man's elderly father. Wallander refuses to do so - until he learns that the young lawyer died in an automobile accident within hours of their conversation. Kurt Wallander does not believe in coincidence. Now he has two murders to investigate - and he can do that best as a cop. He's back.

Mankell's Wallander books fit squarely into the police procedural genre, novels in which the reader follows an investigation step-by-step from its earliest days to identification and capture of the culprits. The beauty of Mankell's novels is how he presents the procedural process to the reader by letting Wallander think "out loud" while explaining his reasoning and decisions from one step to the next. This leaves room for lots of self-doubt to creep in and exposes departmental politics, Wallander's past experiences, personal relationships, and even Sweden's national psyche to readers. I've only read two of the ten Wallander novels, both written in the early nineties, but I've been surprised that both address issues that dominate the news today: mass immigration, asylum requests, borders, drugs, extremism, etc. Maybe that's why Wallander is so gloomy...no one was listening to him.

The Man Who Smiled is a solid mystery with a satisfying result. It is atmospheric, includes an almost super-villain and enough red herrings to satisfy the most avid mystery fan, and ends with a rousing climax that's sure to keep you turning pages. I'm circling back now to the first novel in the series, Faceless Killers.

Forbidden Notebook - Alba De Céspedes

 

Forbidden Notebook very much reflects the state of Italian culture, especially the relationship between husbands and wives, during the period during which it was was first published. Even so, it still surprises me that the novel was written in 1952, not written in retrospect some decades later. Thankfully, Astra House republished a Forbidden Notebook translation by Ann Goldstein in 2023, or I would most certainly have never heard of it. 

As the novel opens, Valeria is married and has a husband, a son in university, and a teen daughter about to finish high school. She's pretty much resigned herself to her life, even though she's not completely happy with being a full-time caretaker to three other adults. But all it will take is one innocent decision to change the lives of her entire family forever. 

It all begins when Valeria goes to a tobacconist to buy cigarettes for her husband one Sunday afternoon. According to Italian law, legally the shop can only sell tobacco products on Sundays, nothing else, but Valeria manages to coerce the shop owner into selling her the blank journal that catches her eye. Valeria has been bothered that she has no private space of her own to claim: her husband has his study, and her children each have a bedroom of their own. She, however, has no place to be alone, and when she gets back home that Sunday afternoon, Valeria realizes that she doesn't even have a place to hide the journal from the prying eyes of her family- much less the actual opportunity to sit and write down her own secrets and personal feelings about what goes on around her. She's never before had the time to think much about herself in relationship to her husband and children, and how she really feels about the way each of them takes for granted that she will always be there to do whatever they need her to do for them.

But Valeria figures it out. She starts staying up long after everyone else has gone to sleep with the excuse that she needs to finish up one more household task or another. Nervous as it all makes her, she has carved out a little private time for herself, and she makes the most of it. Gradually, Valeria begins to realize that the very act of composing her thoughts before putting them to paper has made her see her world and her family in a way she never has before. And she begins to realize that she wants more from life - and more importantly that she deserves more.

The author very cleverly uses Valeria's written words exclusively to tell of her transformation, so the reader is able to watch it all happen exactly as she experiences it. This works remarkably well to pace the novel in a way that allows the reader's eyes to be opened to a more realistic view of what Italian women of the fifties were experiencing layer by layer, just as Valeria was figuring it all out for herself layer by layer. 

Forbidden Notebook is a brilliant novel with a lot to say - and thanks to Astra House, you don't have to miss it.

Alba De Céspedes jacket photo

What I'm Reading This Week (April 29, 2024)

 

Even though, or maybe because, I haven't been feeling particularly well for the last few days, I immersed myself into reading, movies, and music last week more than I have in a while. And the college baseball I was able to enjoy via ESPN+ was the absolute icing on the cake. So not a bad week, considering. I finished up two novels, The Man Who Smiled and Mercury, along with a non-fiction title, An American Dreamer. Of the three, Mercury is by far the one I enjoyed most, but I should have more to say about each of them in the next few days.

So where does that leave me? Well, I finally started reading my library copy of Absolution, and what can I say...it's Alice McDermott, after all, a favorite of mine who seems to be knocking it out of the park again with this one. The set-up, at near 100 pages in, has been brilliant. I've also read the second of fourteen short stories in Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons collection, almost half of Henning Mankell's first Kurt Wallander mystery, Faceless Killers, and have been pleasantly surprised to find that Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn can still make me laugh out loud despite its rather grim plot. Camus's The Plague, however, hasn't been touched in almost three weeks now.

Absolution is narrated by a rather naive young American newlywed who moved to Vietnam with her engineer husband (who had been seconded to the U.S. Navy) in the early sixties not too long before war started again in that unfortunate country. The narration is especially intriguing because the narrator is now about 80 years old and is addressing her memories of those days directly to the adult daughter of the woman who was her best friend in Vietnam in 1963. I have a long way to go, but this one promises to get a little messy before it's all done.

I'm still a little confused as to how the Kurt Wallander books have been published in this country. It seems like there are a lot of Wallander books out there, maybe even more than one series, including a series in which Wallander is a secondary character to his own daughter. Adding to my confusion, I do know that the books were not published here in the order in which they were first published in Sweden. Anyway, this is supposed to be Kurt Wallander No. 1 even though Kurt is already a rather gloomy old fart right from the first page. 

This is not the actual edition of Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I'm reading, but I've always been partial to this cover, and since the LOA edition doesn't have a cover image, I decided on this one. This must be the fourth or fifth time I've read Finn but it's been a really long time since the last time. As I said up above, it's a pretty brutal story, but it is also so funny that I end up laughing a lot while reading it...especially in that bit where Huck dresses up as a little girl and pretends to be in need of help. The method used by a village woman to prove Huck is a boy in disguise vividly reminds me of a story I heard my grandfather telling when I was about seven or eight years old. (The story wasn't P.C. even in those days - probably why it stuck in my memory so vividly.)

If you read yesterday's post, you know that I'm on the verge of reassessing my reading plan - at least for a while - by purposely beginning to raid my own shelves for reading material while I still can. The way I figure it, I've let the books become more ornaments and reference material now than anything else, and that's not why I bought them, nor is it why I still treasure them. I dread having to downsize at some point, but I know it's probably inevitable for most of us. I don't mean to sound gloomy, because I'm not really feeling that way; it's more that I've always been a planner, and this feels like the time to come up with a new plan.

Here are the ones I'll be considering next. These are a mix of shelf books, library copies, and ARCs on hand:

Shelf Copy from 1971

Library Copy

ARC On-Hand

ARC On-Hand

Shelf Copy from 1982

I hope you all have great weeks in every sense of the word, and I'll look forward to seeing you on the blogs...

Magical Nostalgia Tour

 

While searching my shelves for an old book that I clearly remember having purchased, I started noticing others that I haven't given any thought to in years despite how "big" they were in their day. I never did find the book I was looking for (and probably never will since so many books have passed into and out of my hands over the years that I can't remember which of them should still be with me anymore), but I ended up with a desire to experience some of those touchstone books again.

James Dickey's Deliverance is a good example. Primarily known as a Southern poet prior to Deliverance, Dickey hit the jackpot with the novel after it became a major motion picture starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight, among others. Even today that movie is remembered for its "Dueling Banjos" song and an iconic line that I won't be mentioning here - but you probably know the scene I'm referring to if you've seen the movie. Dickey, himself, even had a small role in the movie as a sheriff. 

I've also spotted old hardback copies of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses that I want to re-read. I'm generally not a big fan of movies made from books I've enjoyed, but these four are some of the few novels whose movie versions have impressed me as being almost as good as the source material. 

Those are just the tip of the iceberg, but they've started me thinking that its time to do a seriously deep dive into my own shelves. I've put together a decent personal library over the last decades, and I can't help but wonder what will eventually happen to all of the books. Fewer people than ever seem to have the time or the inclination to do much book-reading these days, much less the space to house them, so I fear that most will end up being boxed up and donated to charity shops at some point - if not junked entirely. It's time for me to start enjoying the books more and reminding myself why they are there in the first place. 

I need to find a better balance, I think, between older books and those being published today. It's taken a lifetime for the ones still on my permanent shelves to find their way there - and to stubbornly hold on to their spots there - and the odds of matching their quality in new books feels like those of searching for that clichéd needle in the haystack. I've said this before, but even though the eye-candy books always get me in the end, maybe this time I'll be able to find a more achievable balance between the old and the new. 

On a lighter note...

I just read an article about poisonous book covers from the mid-1800s that used arsenic or lead to produce certain shades of green cloth that were so popular back then. Apparently the covers are still so dangerous that "experts" only handle them while wearing protective gloves. The covers are more common on books with gilded lettering on them - and now I'm wondering about the Dickens books from the mid-1860s that are on my shelves. Some of them were signed by their original owner in 1867, and now I hope they didn't kill the poor woman.

Mine are considerably nicer than these, but this will give you an idea of the type of cover I'm talking about. There is supposed to be a long list of poisonous covers somewhere on the web, but I haven't found it yet. It's a bad day when even your books are trying to kill you.

A Heart Full of Headstones - Ian Rankin

 

Hard as it is for me to believe, A Heart Full of Headstones is Ian Rankin's twenty-fourth John Rebus novel. I haven't read all of them, but I have read most, and by now I think I have a pretty good feel for the kind of man John Rebus is. Maybe that's why the last couple of Rebus novels have left me feeling so sad for him - this one most of all. As A Heart Full of Headstones opens, Rebus sits in a courtroom accused of a crime as serious as many of the ones he investigated in his prime as an Edinburgh cop. But just when Rebus's past seems about to be catching up with him, he throws fuel on his own funeral pyre, and jumps on top the pile all by himself. 

The bulk of A Heart Full of Headstones is spread over the immediate eight days prior to the crime Rebus is accused of having committed, and as John Rebus novels usually do, it includes multiple, simultaneous subplots. One sees Rebus's loyal friend Siobhan Clarke working on the domestic abuse case of a fellow policeman that is about to blow up in the face of the whole department. A second involves DCI Malcolm Fox's push to build a case against a cop he believes to be among the dirtiest of all those he investigated when he was working in Internal Affairs. And the third storyline finds Rebus agreeing to do a personal favor for an elderly crime boss he's battled so closely for so long that the two seem to know more about each other now than their friends and families know about them.

What none of them realize at first is that one Edinburgh cop, a man threatening to rat out his fellow cops, is at the center of all three investigations. And when they do finally realize it, it just might be too late to minimize the damage.

What I find disheartening about A Heart Full of Headstones is exactly what makes the novel so realistic. John Rebus has always considered himself to be a good cop, a man who would do just about anything to protect the innocent and ensure that the bad guys get what is coming to them. Younger policemen still see Rebus as a kind of role model for the most effective kind of policing. If a little embarrassed by that sentiment, Rebus is also maybe a little proud of that status whether he would admit it or not. But now, a man Rebus worked with for years is about to name names and tell stories to save his own hide, and John is forced to admit something to himself he doesn't really want to face...he was a bad cop, one not above lying and falsifying evidence if that's what it took to get a predatory criminal off the streets for a while. His intentions may have been the best, but now Rebus wonders if his willingness to turn a blind eye to the real corruption in the ranks made sure that he was just spinning his wheels the whole time.

Now Rebus is an old man who can barely breathe anymore, and it may just be too late for any kind of personal redemption.

Ian Rankin is one of my favorite crime writers, and John Rebus is one of my very favorite fictional crime fighters, so a new Rebus novel is always something I look forward to reading. Still, I'm sad that Rebus has ended up here after thirty-five years (24 novels from 1987-2022). The next novel in the series will be published in the U.K. in October, and I can't wait to see what's in store for Rebus. Who is he going to end up being?

Falling - T.J. Newman

 

Now don't get me wrong. T.J. Newman's Falling is a very well written thriller that kept me turning pages all the way to the end. The thing is, though, I was probably turning those pages for the wrong reason. I'll try to explain why.

Anyone who reads thrillers on a regular basis, and I've read dozens and dozens of them over the years, learns eventually that the hero is never going to die in a thriller like this one. (And that has to be the farthest thing from a spoiler alert I can imagine.) It just doesn't happen - even in standalone thrillers. It is so rare, in fact, that I often find myself hoping that an author somewhere has written a disaster-style thriller in which the hero actually does die and the bad guys win because I would very much admire the courage of a writer who managed to pull that off. So if any of you know of such a book, please let me know.

The beauty of Falling is Newman's creativity, the way that she sets up one seemingly impossible-to-survive scenario after the next and manages to find a way for the hero (in this case, it's airline pilot Bill Hoffman) to not only survive, but to turn the situation to his advantage. I can't even exaggerate how clever a plotter T.J. Newman is, or how fascinating it is to watch her come up with solution after solution for Bill Hoffman and everyone on board the airplane he's piloting.

I'll quote the back of the paperback edition of Falling to give you the basics:

"You just boarded a flight to New York. There are one hundred and forty-three other passengers onboard. What you don't know is that thirty minutes before the flight your pilot's family was kidnapped. For his family to live, everyone on your plane must die. The only way the family will survive is if the pilot follows his orders and crashes the plane. Enjoy the flight."

I'm not much of a fan of the kind of book blurbs you find on the first couple of pages and covers of a lot of paperbacks, but the blurbs for Falling really jumped out at me because of who they are attributed to: Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, James Patterson, Janet Evanovich, Don Winslow, Diana Gabaldon, Ian Rankin, and others. There are even numerous quotes from newspapers and journals like the Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and The Guardian. And I agree with most of them. This is an excellent thriller.

 But as those airline passengers in Falling might tell you, the real surprises all come from the ride, not from the landing.

What I'm Reading This Week (April 22, 2024)

 

I did a lot of reading this past week but much of it involved "test reading" of books to see if I really wanted to read them or not. I didn't decide to keep reading all of the books I read from, but all of the "sampling," in addition to firming up my "TBR-soon" list exposed me to a handful of books and authors I would have never otherwise have experienced, so it was all time well spent in the long run. And I did finish both Ian Rankin's Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones and Alba De Céspedes's Forbidden Notebook (more on those to come later this week, I hope). I added another not mentioned before, An American Dreamer, and decided to permanently table the Elmer Kelton western I was reading because it's a little too YA oriented for me to take it all that seriously right now. In addition to An American Dreamer, I come into the new week reading four others: The Plague, The Man Who Smiled, Displaced Persons, and Mercury.

Mercury is one of those novels my library system underestimated demand for, so it has a much shorter time-fuse on it than I realized when I first picked it up. That means I'll be spending a lot of time with it this week so that I don't add to the wait for those behind me in line. It's taken me longer than I thought it would to get into the novel's rhythm, but at 100 pages in, it's finally starting to happen for me. It's a coming-of-age story for multiple characters, and reminds me a little bit of the kind of story that Anne Tyler writes so well. The Joseph family doesn't know what hits them when seventeen-year-old Marley comes to town and catches the eye of one of their boys...and then another of their boys.

When it comes to politics, I like to think that I'm a middle-of-the-roader, but lately I find myself drifting toward the more conservative side of the line. Even my reading has started to reflect that drift, so I wanted to read a current book that I think is written from a more liberal perspective than my own. An American Dreamer by David Finkel focuses on an Iraq war veteran trying to reconnect his vision of what America should be with what he sees happening all around him every day. What first caught my eye was not the book's title, but its subtitle: "Life in a Divided Country" because of how sad I find that phrase to be.

I hadn't planned to begin Joan Leegant's Displaced Persons quite so soon, but I was in the mood for a short story one day last week and decided to read "The Baghdadi," the first story in this fourteen-story collection, to see what I should expect from the book. And I was wowed by it, to say the least. I know that most authors lead off a compilation with a story they feel is one of the strongest in the book, but this story of an American academic's experience with a Iraqi Jew who moved to Israel fifty years earlier is so exceptional that now I can't wait to read the other thirteen.

I'm in danger of not getting to three books that I just realized are not eligible for additional check-out periods, but I'm still hoping to get to one of them this week (probably by tabling The Plague again):

So that's the plan on this Monday morning. And now I'll see what really happens. Happy Reading, y'all...

The Storm We Made - Venessa Chan

 

Kuala Lumpar - February 1945

"Teenage boys had begun to disappear."

 At first, the Japanese invaders were welcomed as Malayans hoped for "a better colonizer" than the British had turned out to be. But after the Japanese ended up killing more people in only three years of occupation than the British killed in more than fifty, they saw their past - and their future - much differently.

Vanessa Chan's The Storm We Made is the story of one fictional family caught squarely in the middle of what happened in Malaya between 1935 and 1945. The novel's central character, an ambitious and resentful Eurasian woman who realizes that she will remain a second class citizen in her own country as long as the British are there, dreams of a better life. And when a smooth-talking Japanese business man offers her a chance to help Malaya end its British rule - even if it means spying on her own husband - she is all in. 

The Storm We Made begins in early1945 when Cecily's family, like all of those around her, is struggling just to survive from one day to the next. Her husband's daily obsession is simply to find something for the family to eat, Cecily's to protect her children, especially her two daughters, from the Japanese soldiers who roam the city all day long "recruiting" girls as young as eight or nine years old for military brothels. But ironically, it is her son, not one of her daughters, who disappears on his fifteenth birthday.

"...as with the pieces she had set in motion ten years before, there was no fixing to be done. There was no coming back from this."

Vanessa Chan alternates flashback chapters to 1935 with the present to show exactly how and why Cecily planted the seeds of her own family's destruction, beginning on the night she first met Mr. Fujiwara, a prominent Japanese businessman favored by the British. Cecily, who carried the blood of the country's original Portuguese invaders in her veins, was a soft target for the persuasive Fujiwara. She already felt slighted and looked down upon by the British wives whose husbands her own husband worked with every day, and Fujiwara offered her the chance to get even with them all. Fujiwara convinced Cecily that the British would ultimately lose to Germany's aggression and would have to abandon its interests in Asia. With her help, Japan could be prepared to fill that void, and Asians would finally be given the chance to govern themselves.

"Yet perhaps this was what a woman's idealism is: not the reach for a utopia - everyone had lived long enough to know perfection was beyond reach - but the need to transform one thing into something better."

Best be careful what you wish for, Cecily. 

Vanessa Chan author photo

Final Thoughts on the 2023 Booker Prize

 

As of last week's reading of Prophet Song, I'm finally ready to give a final ranking of the 2023 Booker Prize nominees as I experienced them for myself over the past few months. Obviously, my final ranking reflects only my personal experience with the nominated books. I took one final look at the list of nominees, and ended up doing a bit of last-minute juggling that I hadn't expected to be doing at all. 

I read and reviewed eleven of the thirteen nominated novels, and decided to DNF two others at about the 100-page mark of each. The DNF books are to be found, as you would expect, at the bottom of the list:

1. Prophet Song - Paul Lynch (Reviewed on 4-14-24)
2. The Bee Sting - Paul Murray (Reviewed on 11-18-23)
3. The House of Doors - Tan Twan Eng (Reviewed 12-26-23)
4. If I Survive You - Jonathan Escoffery (Reviewed 11-24-23
5. How to Build a Boat - Elaine Feeney (Reviewed 3-18-24)
6. Western Lane - Chetna Maroo (Reviewed 11-10-23)
7. All the Little Bird-Hearts - Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow ( 1-17-24)
8. Pearl - Sîan Hughes (Reviewed on 12-1-23)
9. Old God's Time - Sebastian Barry (Reviewed on 10-27-23)
10. This Other Eden - Paul Harding (Reviewed on 12-8-23)
11. Study for Obedience - Sarah Bernstein (Reviewed on 2-24-24)
12. A Spell of Good Things
13. The Ascension

Links refer to my thoughts on each of the completed novels immediately after finishing them. I did not review or comment on the two nominees that I did not finish reading. This is one reader's response to Booker Prize 2023; make of it what you will.

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

Seldom does my week go as far off course as this last one did, and it all started just two days after I posted my reading plan for that week. A routine doctor's appointment turned into two days of outpatient testing that I won't be getting answers from for another two weeks, but at least there was enough sitting around time in waiting rooms during the week for me to get a fair amount of reading done. As a result, I finished two novels that I really enjoyed: Eileen Garvin's Crow Talk and the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Paul Lynch's Prophet Song. That leaves me beginning this new week still messing around with a couple of books I seem to have informally tabled for a while (The Plague and Many a River) while also having made good progress on another, the Rebus novel A Heart Full of Headstones. I've also started two new ones that came out of nowhere to claim my attention: Forbidden Notebook by Italian author Alba de Céspedes and The Man Who Smiled by Swedish author Henning Mankell.

The Man Who Smiled is the fourth novel in Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender series. I'm a fan of both television series featuring Wallender (one is in Swedish, the other in BBC English), but for one reason or another I've never actually read one of the books. Fortunately, I'm pretty hazy on the all the plot details of the TV shows by now, but I still retain a clear enough impression of the Wallender character that I have a little bit of a jumpstart when it comes to getting right into the books almost immediately. This one already strikes me as being very good. 

Forbidden Notebook first saw life as a serial novel published in an Italian magazine between December 1950 and June 1951. The edition I'm reading is this 2023 Ann Goldstein translation published by Astra House. The "forbidden" aspect of the notebook is that the woman who purchases it does so illegally by insisting that it be sold to her on a Sunday at a time when only tobacco could be sold in Italy on a Sunday morning...cigarettes being so essential a product, you know. But now she has to keep its existence a secret from her husband and children because she doesn't want them laughing at a woman her age (43) keeping a private diary. The very process of putting her innermost thoughts down on paper makes her reassess her life completely.

Those are the five books I expect (whatever that's worth) to be spending the most time with this week, but I've also just acquired a couple of other interesting ones:

Displaced Persons seems like an especially timely read to me considering everything that is happening in and around Israel today. I've read Joan Leegant before and enjoyed her writing, so I'm looking forward to this collection of short stories, about half of which occur in Israel, the other half in the U.S. The world is, of course, a very complicated place for all of us to live in, but I can't imagine anyone under more pressure right now than the people of Israel and those who have family living and working there. Displaced Persons is not scheduled for publication until June 1, so this one may end up sliding two or three weeks more. 

I wish I could remember what first brought Amy Jo Burns's Mercury to my attention, but it was on hold for so long at the library that I've forgotten where I learned of it. It's a strange coming-of-age story about a seventeen-year-old girl who comes to Mercury, PA, all on her own to start a new life and ends up being the glue that holds a family of three roofing brothers together after they lose their mother and their family roofing business starts to fall apart around them. It has a certain amount of mystery involved, too, but I'll know more about all of that when I pick it up in a day or so. 

I do still have another handful of library books that are aging rapidly, and I might end up plucking one or two of those from that stack this week. That's the plan anyway, but life is, after all, one big surprise after another and I love the serendipitous things that happen along the way. I'll probably be just as surprised by what I end up reading as you are. (Happy Income Tax Day, America.)