Crow Talk - Eileen Garvin

 

Crow Talk is one of those books that sneak up on you as you read them. I was slow to warm up to Mary Francis O'Neill, the young woman at the heart of Crow Talk, and early on she is so geographically and socially isolated that I began to wonder if I ever would. It's not that "Frankie" is an unimpressive woman. As noted in the novel's very first paragraph, Frankie is first in her University of Washington graduate school class, was the first female from her high school to win a "full ride" to that school, and was even the first in her family to earn a bachelor's degree of any kind. And then there's the revealing kicker: she's also the first on either side of her family to reach the ripe old age of twenty-six without giving birth. 

Frankie has come to June Lake to regroup. She's frustrated and she's running from something, and the empty family cottage feels like her only refuge, a place where she can finally finish her thesis before getting on with the rest of her life. But there is obviously more to the story, and layer by layer, Frankie's past, her family dynamics, and the shakiness of her future are revealed. Frankie is unemployed (and perhaps unemployable), homeless, friendless, barely speaking to her family, and simply out of options. It is June Lake or nothing, even if she is the only one on the isolated lake as winter approaches. 

Then Aiden, a little autistic boy who suddenly stopped speaking a few months earlier, and Charlie, a baby crow with an injured leg, change everything. Frankie might not be able to heal herself or her family, but she's a natural when it comes to Aiden and Charlie, both of whom seem to recognize just how important Frankie might turn out to be in their own worlds. And maybe, just maybe, Aiden and Charlie Crow can return the favor.

It was only after finishing Crow Talk that I realized how fully invested I had become in the Frankie O'Neill character and how real she felt to me. Eileen Garvin has created a unique little world here filled with people I hated to see leave my own. Sure, her story is heartwarming and inspirational, but it's more than that. Much like Garvin's previous novel, The Music of Bees, Crow Talk is a painless science lesson. I came away from The Music of Bees understanding and appreciating more about the importance of bees and the intricacies of beekeeping than I ever expected to know. Crow Talk taught me about the fascinating life cycle of crows and the way that crows can interact with humans, even to recognizing the faces of their "allies." 

Eileen Garvin has become an author I trust, and I can't wait to see what she has to teach me next time around.

Eileen Garvin author photo

Look for Crow Talk on April 30.

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

 

I can hardly believe that finally, after weeks and weeks of waiting for my turn at a library copy of the 2023 Booker Prize winner, Prophet Song, is in my hands.  I even managed to make a good start on it last week, and it looks like Prophet Song is going to have been a novel worth waiting for. Right now, I don't see it moving all the way up my personal 2023 Booker ranking list to the top spot, but that's certainly still a possibility at this point. 

As for last week's reading, it's three books finished (You Can't Joke About That, Charming Billy, and Falling by Kat Timpf, Alice McDermott, and T.J. Newman, respectively) and five in progress as I start the new week:

• Crow Talk - Eileen Garvin
• The Plague Albert Camus
• Many a River - Elmer Kelton
• Prophet Song - Paul Lynch
• A Heart Full of Headstones - Ian Rankin

For those unfamiliar with Ian Rankin's John Rebus series, A Heart Full of Headstones is book number twenty-two in a series that has been entertaining me for more than two decades now. By this point in his life, Rebus is an unhealthy ex-cop still living in Edinburgh where covid restrictions are driving him nuts. What particularly intrigues about this one is that it opens with Rebus in the dock hoping to keep himself out of prison. Rebus's problems all seem to have started when he agreed to do a favor for his old arch-nemesis, a man even more seriously ill than Rebus who has suddenly found a conscious and wants to undo a few of his past sins with a little help from John. 

Prophet Song, the 2023 Booker Prize winner, was not even published in this country until after the winner was announced (way to go, Atlantic Monthly Press), and then the library system here decided only to purchase a handful of copies...so the wait has been a long one. Prophet Song is set in modern Ireland and reminds me a bit of Orwell's 1984 (including some of the cover art I've seen on various editions of that novel). With its multi-paged single paragraphs, this one is kind of a tough read, but the prose is more straightforward than I would have expected from that style, so it all kind of balances out in the end. 

I'm only relatively near done with one of the five I'm reading right now, so I probably won't be adding anything unexpected this week as I still have those three library books on hand that I mentioned last Monday...and the clock is ticking away on those. But who knows? I certainly didn't expect Prophet Song to show up as suddenly as it did, and it was only its immediate availability that saw the Ian Rankin novel jump the TBR queue out of nowhere like it did three days ago. Anyway, here's hoping everyone has an enjoyable reading week. Let's get started. 

You Can't Joke About That - Kat Timpf

 

Let's begin with three things you should know about Kat Timpf, author of You Can't Joke About That:

• She is neither a Democrat nor a Republican, and it's often hard to tell which of the two parties she thinks is run by the biggest group of idiots. 
• She is a libertarian comedian, columnist, and television commentator/personality - despite being labeled by those who don't like her message as "just another Fox News channel regular." It's actually rather surprising that she's even on Fox News at all.
• She is one very smart woman.

The subtitle of of You Can't Joke About That makes very clear what to expect from the book: Why Everything is Funny, Nothing is Sacred, and We're All in This Together. If that were not clear enough already, Timpf restates the book's theme within its first few pages this way:

"The darker the subject matter, the greater the healing that laughter can bring, disarming the darkness and making the people who are feeling isolated by their trauma feel less alone."

Anyone can make claims like this one; the old cliché about "talking the talk" as opposed to "walking the walk" works pretty well in this case. Timpf may be only thirty-five years old, but she has experienced near fatal health issues that resulted in some of the most humiliating situations imaginable, experiences that would likely leave emotional scars for most people with twice her years and experience. And she did it by laughing at the absurdity of it all - and how others reacted to the way she handled those moments. 

As Timpf points out, comedians have always been the one to hold the powerful accountable for their actions. Ridicule and public embarrassment are powerful tools that the powerless cannot afford to have taken away from them, and the current governmental and societal drive to censor comedians, especially of the stand-up variety, terrifies Timpf. As it should terrify all of us.

I don't know if Timpf wrote her own chapter headings. If not, she should give that person a fat bonus because those headings are some of the strongest I've ever read. Among them are these:

• "Intention Absolutely Matters" 
• "Don't Erase Anything"
• "No One Wants to Hear You Whine"
• "Words Are Not Violence"
• "Safe Spaces Aren't Real"

You Can't Joke About That is one of the most quotable books of its type I've read in a while, so rather than try to explain Timpf's arguments in my own, certain-to-be less insightful words, I'll just share these quotes with you:

"Erasing a joke to make the past look better amounts to lying about the past...The limitation of lying is that the truth is always going to be true anyway. The kinds of jokes that people told during a time can really tell us a lot about that time."

"The words are violence crowd doesn't want conversation - at least not one on a level playing field."

"When you say that words are violence, you inherently are saying that violence is an acceptable response to words, because violence is universally considered an acceptable response to violence."

"Claiming 'words are violence' is a tool to dictate and control, all while engaging in a massive fraud that they are on the side of compassion."

And finally, my favorite point/quote of all:

"The best part of ensuring that your own voice is heard and understood is not aiming to change the way other people talk about theirs; it's to talk about yours, and to encourage other people to be able to talk about it with you and learn. The answer isn't less speech, it's more."

 It's a dirty (not so secret) shame that cancel culture has made most of us afraid to do that anymore.

If you share any of the concerns that Timpf addresses, You Can't Joke About That is a book you will want to read. Timpf pulls no punches here, and her language is sometimes crudely expressive in nature - but she has a lot to say that makes a whole lot of sense, and thank goodness she's not afraid to say it (even though she admits it makes her very, very nervous sometimes to do so).

Ordinary Human Failings - Megan Nolan

 

I'm a regular reader of crime fiction and I especially enjoy police procedurals, so when I began combing through the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction longlist Ordinary Human Failings was the one that first caught my attention. 

On its surface, the novel does not sound all that unusual: an Irish family has moved from Waterford to 1990 London hoping for a fresh start but find that the things they fled in Waterford are only amplified in London. Alcoholism, joblessness, social stigmas, and poor parenting skills are not things easily run away from, as the Greens are about to learn the hard way after the youngest member of the family, a ten-year-old, becomes the chief suspect in the murder of another little girl.

But Ordinary Human Failings, beginning as it does as a murder mystery about damaged children, class prejudice, and the cutthroat news media, sneaks up on you and turns itself into something much more than that almost before you know it. This is a literary novel filled with memorable characters, most of them trapped in a multi-generational family unit that has failed them all. It's a story about family loyalties, addiction, parental neglect, and people who have been beaten down for so long that they have long since given up on ever bettering themselves. And now a tabloid reporter wants to set the family on fire for his own personal gain.

The term literary fiction, fluid as it is these days, can be a hard term to define, but literary fiction is generally more serious and more character driven than genre fiction. Ordinary Human Failings explores what happens when an already severely damaged family is forced to endure the public pressure cooker stress that results from having one of its own publicly labeled a monster of the worst sort. It doesn't get much more serious than that, and once all the characters have been introduced, it becomes obvious that this is more than a police procedural. 

And what characters they are:

• Carmel - the woman who fled Ireland to hide her teen pregnancy,
• Richie, Carmel's half-brother - a man crushed by the bottle,
• John, their father - who has largely given up on life,
• Rose, the love of John's life - whose death stuns John,
• Lucy, Carmel's ten-year-old daughter  - a playground bully, and
• Tom, the tabloid reporter desperate to find the bombshell story that will make him famous - even if he has to make it up himself.

Now the family has no one to turn to except each other. Whether they come out stronger on the other side of the investigation or are finally shattered for good remains to be seen. 

"There is no secret, Tom, or else there are hundreds of them, and none of them interesting enough for you. The secret is that we're a family, we're just an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness like yours." - Carmel Green to Tom Hargreaves

I'm going to remember these characters and their story for a long time. 

Megan Nolan jacket photo

My Reading Reached an Unexpected Milestone the Other Day

My reading reached a milestone one day last week that I never expected to attain. And it all started with a book list I've somehow managed to maintain since February 18, 1970, a list that started out as simply one to record the title, author and date read for every book I complete. 

When it all started, I was 21 years old and about to get married, so I must have been thinking about all the milestones ahead of us in the coming decades, and it must have seemed like a good idea to begin a list like this one. I never, though, dreamed that I would still be doing this more than 54 years later or that the list would ever approach something like 4,000 titles. I remember thinking how great it would be to look back and see that I'd read one or two thousand books in my life. At the pace I was reading back then, what with all the demands life was making on us at the time, I didn't see the odds of hitting even those numbers as being very much in my favor. 

But last week, Megan Nolan's Ordinary Human Failings, a novel I really enjoyed, became book number 4,000 on the list. And I still find that number hard to believe considering my original goals.

Below is a post I made back in 2017 about a book that rekindled my enthusiasm about maintaining the list for as long as I possibly can. Pamela Paul is a true kindred spirit for me, and what she's done with her own list is pretty remarkable. Makes me want to go back and read My Life with Bob all over again.

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It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a great while a book comes along that seems to have been written just for you.  It may be a book about some obscure hobby of yours that you figured no one else in the world cared about, or about some equally obscure figure from the past you imagined no one remembered (much less actually cared about) but you.  And in the unlikeliest of all cases, it might be a book - imagine it now, a whole book - about some weird habit of yours that you seldom speak of in public.  It is exactly that last possibility that happened to me with Pamela Paul’s My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues.  Who knew there was another person in the world maintaining a decades-old list of every book they ever read?

Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review, began keeping her Book of Books (the “Bob” referenced in this memoir’s title) in 1988 when she was just a high school junior.  (As a point of reference, I began my own “Bob” in 1970, a few months before I turned twenty-two.)  Paul describes Bob as “factory-made, gray and plain, with a charcoal binding and white unlined paper, an inelegant relic from the days before bookstores stocked Moleskine notebooks,” exactly the kind of non-descript little book, I suspect, guaranteed to remain forever safe from the prying eyes of outsiders. 

In twenty-two chapters, each chapter carrying the title of one of the books listed in Bob, Paul exhibits just how precisely she is able to reconstruct segments of her past by studying Bob’s pages.  Each of the books chosen for chapters of their own remind the author of where she was both “psychologically and geographically” when she first read them.  By studying the list to see which books she read before and after the highlighted title, Paul can easily see whether the earlier books put her in the mood for more of the same or pushed her toward reading something very different.  Too, if her reading choices moved in a new direction, she can quickly determine how long that new interest or trend lasted.  And she confirmed something concerning one’s memory about which most avid readers will readily agree: Keeping a list of fiction read does very little to solidify the recall of characters or plot details – what it does do is provide a better understanding of changes in one’s own “character.”

Pamela Paul

My Life with Bob is an intimate look into the life of a woman who has made books and reading the central core of her life.  She has had many roles during her life:  student, daughter, wife, mother, etc., but I suspect that she takes equal joy in knowing that reader is an essential term others would use to describe who she is – and always has been. 

Readers are a curious lot, and one of the things we are most curious about is what others are reading.  We cannot resist browsing the bookshelves of those whose homes we visit, often altering our opinions (either upwardly or downwardly) about those being visited according to what we see on their shelves.  We find ourselves straining to read the titles of books on shelves sitting behind pictures of celebrities and politicians because we know that people are more likely to reveal their true nature and level of curiosity by what they choose to display on their private bookshelves than by what comes out of their mouths.  We can’t help ourselves; that’s the way we are.

If you are one of those people, you are going to love My Life with Bob because Pamela Paul is a kindred spirit who gets it.

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

 

Despite being left with the feeling that I had squandered every minute of the time I spent reading one of the three books I finished last week, the week ended up having more pluses than minuses in the end, and that's all about any of us can hope for these days. I finished The Storm We Made, A Death in Denmark, and Ordinary Human Failings, and was very pleasantly surprised by Ordinary Human Failings. I've also picked up Kat Timpf's You Can't Joke About That again and pretty made good progress on a couple of other novels.   

I have a lot that I want to say about Megan Nolan's Ordinary Human Failings but I find myself wanting to let it all simmer in my mind a couple of more days before tackling a review. I had no idea what to expect of this one or its young author when I picked it up for the first time, but I found myself only reluctantly putting it down again after I had. It's only 215 pages long, but it left me feeling that I had just finished one of those long, multi-generational family sagas that I used to enjoy so much. There's a whole lot packed into this tragic story. It's a definite 5-star novel for me.

There was a little chatter last week about reading Alice McDermott, and that made me want to go back and read her National Book Award winner Charming Billy again. I don't remember many of the details about the book, but I do remember being completely caught up in the lives of Billy and his Irish-American friends and family. What I remembered most vividly about the story is its opening sequence at Billy's wake where all of Billy's old friends tell stories and speculate about his life. I've reread those pages now, and they are even better than I remembered them from my first reading. Lots to look forward to, I think.

I needed something a little less demanding, and decided to see what all of the hype is about concerning this T.J. Newman novel. I have to tell you that I just about chucked it after reading the way-over-the-top introduction to Falling, but I decided to read the first chapter before doing that, and I'm glad I did. I've only read two chapters so far, but the book seems to be very well written and nicely constructed in spite of the silly dream sequence that opens it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that that turns out to be the case.

Crow Talk has been a little more difficult for me to get into than most novels, but I'm a firm believer in Eileen Garvin's work, so I'm not about to give up on this one. I'm probably 35% of the way through the book now, and now that I'm into the characters and the family dynamics of the main character, it's all becoming pretty intriguing. Garvin's characters in The Music of Bees were so vividly painted in my mind that I still remember them well, and I think that's going to be the main strength of Crow Talk, too.

So, if you throw in The Plague (one I neglected last week) and You Can't Joke About That, I begin the week with five books in progress. And depending on which ones I finish during the week, most of the more likely candidates I'll start later in the week come from the Women's Prize for Fiction longlist:

South Korean author Mirinae Lee set this one in North Korea

Liberian born author Peace Adzo Medie set this one in Ghana

Aube Rey Lescure is a French-Chinese American writer

If any of those three turn out to be as good as Ordinary Human Failings, which is part of the same longlist, I'll already consider myself fortunate to have taken a hard look at this year's prize nominees. I hope you all had a pleasant Easter weekend, and will look forward to visiting with you during the week. Read on.