Books Recently Read:Short Reviews

BB book reviews

Sometimes I find myself looking at a title in my kindle and not remembering if I read it or not until I open it, read a few pages and the book comes back into me.  This list started at the cusp of December 2017, I will keep it going forward, posting the most recently read at the top.

In the Kindle for reading soon:  , Sissie by John A. Williams,  Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors, Winter Kept Us Warm by Anne Raeff,
The Incendiaries R.O.Kwon, The Leavers Lisa Ko, Poetry: Half-light:Collected Poems 1965-2016 Frank Bidart, Poetry: Incendiary Art Patricia Smith

Below: Recently Read:
I was silent for a while but will try to catch up. Open City is the most recent.

Open City —Teju Cole
Julius, a Nigerian psychiatric resident in NYC, walks around to clear his mind of the patients and the breakup with girlfriend Nadege. He observes the melting pot of a city and the separations within, un-melted. He has a German mother and as a mixed person feels out of place. This is post 9-11 and he sees the pit where the Trade Center used to be. He sees the street trade mostly done by immigrants. He meets people and their stories. Images emerge. He refers things to other things as they pass through his mind triggered by what is in front of him as he walks and sees. It is as though he is stoned, or in a daze, brushing off other’s attempts at connection the way he apparently brushed off what he did to the young woman he knew and raped earlier in his life. 
Yet the stories and thoughts he is engaged in turn often to the side of humanity which is abused, oppressed. Before the rape is revealed he appears to himself (the narrator is his voice) to be moral and contemplating the condition of mankind intellectually. This contemplation leaves him at a distance, as though he, the psychiatrist, remains in his chair, listening but avoiding getting hooked into the patient’s dilemma, as though analysis is enough. For the reader the message lies in the stir of the soup of the narrator’s observations which come out in little chunks: Conversations with an internet café clerk who is described as a Muslim intellectual, a fruitless search for his mother in Germany remembered, along with a hookup with a Czech woman, older than he, remembered without emotion. A pigeon poop covered monument; cafes and music triggering cultural references indicating an informed and educated observer. A Haitian man in a rail station. A folk-art Museum. Two blind men. Blacks wanting to tell him he is a brother, one of them. The statue of Liberty, a bird killer.  A bookstore reminds him of a drunken Dutch leader in New York’s beginning days who slaughters the natives. He references writers, composers, philosophers as he encounters, and his mind relates. 
As everything settles there is a sense of mankind, messy, inconsistent as the narrator, often lost or in sorrow, and yet getting on with it — life — and the mingle continues. The City is open to all within who choose to notice that it contains all; blended cultures and people just as the narrator Julius is himself a blend struggling to be defined. 
What to make of the surprise of the rape which seems at odds with the narrator’s self-image? The rape pivots the book and throws Julius in with Idi Amin. “No one is spared,” to quote from the book, and that includes Julius, who was a creature of the place and time of the rape before he became what he is now. One can wonder privately about one’s self and the journey, and that of those next to you, and that is the point — that the detachment of the analysist is a false front and that he too is one of the stories. He is not allowed to escape. When Moji confronts him with the details of the rape he is silent and incorrectly remembers a story about a 15-year old Nietzsche burning his hand with a hot coal after some schoolmates did not believe a story about a Roman burning his right hand instead of yielding the names of his accomplices in an assassination attempt. Nietzsche “carried the resulting scar with him for the rest of his life.” But not really. The next day Julius finds it was matches and they were knocked out of his hand. Has the rape story burned him? Not really. It is just another incident which he will not forget now that he has had it refreshed, place in front of him, but it is like the statue covered with bird shit or the Lady of Liberty the bird killer. Nothing is simple, it is all mixed up, and that is what we come to realize he understands. Yet at the end of the book he remains unresolved. 

·        THE MARRIAGE PLOT Jeffery Eugenides. Here is a book which starts off describing a few college kids in circumstances I never experienced and with a seeming erudition exceeding mine, with references to semiotics (the study of signs and symbols within language to create meaning, i.e. deconstruction), something that Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher put forth but which did not reach my undergrad education while working thirty hours a week and hitchhiking to the campus. These more privileged people, in the rare air of their school, fall into common relationship issues while immersed in intellectual becomings. Madeline, the central character, takes a junior year honors seminar called the Marriage Plot, referring to the common thread of works by Austin, Eliot, James, and others. She later writes up a paper on it. As life goes on and people explore themselves and the world the author has a chance to illuminate many subthemes. The evolution of the characters carries the book forward. Leonard, who becomes the bi-polar husband of Madeline, is depicted as a case study in manic-depressive behavior. Mitchel, who explores his religious yearnings, also yearns for Madeline irrationally, regardless of having been given scant encouragement and just a few conflicting messages. While reading this book I was wondering where it was going and in the end I concluded that the characters were going nowhere very fast in a growing up which is still happening at the end. Yes, there are hints that we are on the cusp of them changing, but we aren’t there when it ends. But it was a most entertaining coming of age book.

·        HOW TO HIDE AN EMPIRE Daniel Immerwahr. This is a must read, illustrating what a void we have in our collective memory, what a false image of the US we have from school and the myths of America. At one point we had vast overseas holdings, many of which wanted to become states of the US, but they were full of brown people. The US could have been much larger, with the voluntary cooperation of the populations of Mexico, the Philippines, Cuba, and other places. The book also goes into the shifts in economic reasons to hold or not hold territories. There is much more. Great read.

·        THE LONESOME BODYBUILDER Yukiko Motoya. A book of short stories from a very imaginative mind. The title is the title of the first story in the book. The author twists the familiar into the surreal in order to illustrate what lies underneath, a failure of people to truly see each other or themselves with the solution being to start with the core: the self brought forward until it is not subservient to another or any cultural bind.

·        NEWCOMER Keigo Higashino Another mystery from a popular Japanese writer who has a disheveled, non-professional way of dressing which allows those he is interviewing to relax and provide more information. Repeatedly he turns away from the assumptions of other policemen and figures out the real answers behind crimes. At first the crimes seem unrelated, like a bunch of short mystery stories, and then the whole book begins to slot together. You can’t help comparing detective Kaga in this book with Columbo of the TV series but don’t settle there, Kaga is his own unique person.

·        OUTLINE Rachel Cusk. “…a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious. What was real, in the end, was the loss of the house, which had become the geographical location for things that had gone absent and which represented, I supposed the hope that they might one day return.” Thus, the book’s narrator dispassionately answers the “neighbor” on the plane to Greece, and this is the first of the series of observations at the core of this quiet, plotless book centered on outlining the narrator indirectly as she gets the stories of others. The book is always about perspective and what defines because between people it is always perspective and frequently it is who is defining the other, or can we get past that. Her Neighbor says “We are all addicted to it … the story of improvement, to the extent that it has commandeered our deepest sense of reality. It has even infected the novel, though perhaps the novel is infecting us back again, so that we expect of our lives what we’ve come to expect of our books; but this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of.”

We learn that the narrator has “come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible. One could make almost anything happen, if one tried hard enough, but the trying – it seemed to me – was almost always a sign that one was crossing the currents, was forcing events in a direction they did not naturally want to go. . .” The book is full of these penetrations of what we may regard as “normal” in life, in that “normal” may be our own subterfuge hiding ourselves from ourselves. The author’s method is to take any moment of the ordinary as an illustration which loops into an observation. Her Neighbor recounts a story of his first marriage and regrets what he claims is his own destruction of it, in his youth, seeking what he called a brighter world and saying that in his experiences of falling in love were rebirths of identity, to which the narrator relies that for his “knowledge became an inexorable disenchantment, for which the only cure was to fall in love with someone new.” In comments such as these the author, who lives very closely aside the narrator, illustrates elements of the common human condition as we see it practiced frequently.

At one point about two-thirds of the way through the book the narrator has a meal with one woman friend, Elena, who works at a publishing house and invites a second friend, Melete, a poet of slight fame. Metete has an ex-student of hers who has turned into a mocking attendee at most of her readings. She has decided to ignore the madness of his behavior and try to love him back: “He is more faithful to me than any lover I’ve ever had.” Elena protests the “complete subjection of such a position, calling it a religious proposition,” to love what you hate and what hates you … it is the same a saying you don’t want to know what he thinks of you.” This allows Elena to describe how she has gone “beyond people’s fantasies about themselves and one another… that you accessed a level of reality where things assumed their true value and we what they seemed to be. The worst thing, it seemed to her, was to be dealing with one version of a person when quite another version existed out of site. Yet she finds herself in a relationship where she refutes that statement, saying that she would “like to go back to the time just before we first opened our mouths to speak.” Melete then points out that Elena is trying to purge frankness, which becomes a stain, an imperfection, “and you only want to run away and hide in shame.” The adult Elana, another proxy for the author’s point of view, can no longer hurtle down dirt roads on a motorbike with her girlfriend, “never knowing what they would find at the end of them.”

As the book progresses towards its end, the narrator is almost finished with her work in Greece teaching people how to write, which not so oddly involves asking them to observe outside of their usual patterns, and the next teacher is entering to stay in the same apartment as she.  They overlap. This new teacher has suffered a crisis of identity: she was attacked and then found her ex-husband to truly be her ex, uninterested in her, and she who had allowed that past relationship to define her, finds herself undefined. “She found, after the incident, that she lacked what might be called a vocabulary, a native language of self. . . “Then a chance conversation with her neighboring seatmate on the incoming plane (see the parallel?) makes her realize she is what he is not; “in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative …. while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even though its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.”  At the end of the book the Neighbor makes his second malapropism in the book, saying he will spend his day after the narrator’s departure in “solicitude,” which is then corrected to “solitude,” but there are no Freudian mistakes which go unobserved in this book.

·        THE FIFTH SEASON N.K. Jemisin. Our daughter gave me a couple of books in this series depicting an imaginary world where humans have evolved along with some other creatures. It rings of dystopia.

·        UNSHELTERED Barbara Kingsolver.  She never fails to write well and interesting books. In this book which undoubtably was partially written before the Trump, she does get to the current administration as she explores the dichotomy of the US.

·        A few more entertainment books: all Bosch mysteries by Michael Connelly: THE LAST COYOTE, THE BLACK ECHO, & CONCRETE BLOND. In all of them the detective wanders around and over ethical edges in pursuit of killers while the author provides authenticity with LA places and police slang. The usual twists and turns, misdirections, and tangles of private life fill the spaces and keep  the reader engaged until the real perp is found.

·        TRANSIT Rachael Cusk. Another in the Outline trilogy, another with the listener, Faye, who asks questions of others and again we find Faye within the Q&A. Loneliness is explored though Cusk’s usual deeply intelligent and introspective lens, which also allows time for humor. I could go on but see my writing on OUTLINE since this pretty much describes the technique, etc. of the trilogy. Kathleen and I went to City Arts and Lectures on April 8^th and heard Cusk talk about herself and her work, which she readily admits as very close to herself without consideration of any resulting relationship damage due to honesty. She also described family as like a prison. What she meant was the family restraint against the person coming into a freedom of self and as we know that perspective extends for her to any other area that touches self, including culture, mores, etc... What an extraordinary writer.

·        DARK SACRED NIGHT Michael Connelly Pure entertainment, this is a continuation of the Harry Bosch series merged with the woman detective Ballard. As usual, it is LA with deaths, risks, Harry going a bit “over the line” from normal practice but together the two detectives solve a cold case which had eluded clearance for about 9 years. Renee Ballard is 1@ Asian and a surfer, Harry is a worn detective. Far apart in age, they are not lovers but instead both insightful investigators. Slang and inside LA cop language is used for atmosphere, effectively. A good quick read, an escape for a day.

·        NUTSHELL Ian McEwan takes Hamlet to modern times, or rather a little bit of it as seen through the eyes of an unborn but quite articulate fetus who witnesses his mother plot to murder his father with the aid of his father’s brother, who is his mother’s lover. The writing is poetic, the book is short and very engaging. You will probably never read another book narrated from this point of view.

·        The Snow Gypy by Lindsay Ashford was a free Amazon book. Took about 2 hours to read and I regret the wasted time.

·        AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE by Tayari Jones. After much discarded research on the African American experience this author discarded most of it and wrote a novel which covers the consequences of injustice upon a young married couple. How does a marriage of  only a year recover from the man getting a prison sentence of twelve years for a crime which he did not commit? Tragic, the novel moves along and sustains the reader as it depicts a likely outcome rippling in the lives of those around. At first the novel feels a little forced, as though the author has pushed the characters unrealistically to act and say things which did not seem true to me but then as the meat of the book builds it becomes very real and believable. Well worth the read.

·        THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2018 edited by Dana Gioia & David Lehman. Excellent. Since I can’t write a review of the many poems inside I can just say that the works are accessible and well chosen, would be an enjoyable read even to those who seldom read poetry.

·        IN A LONELY PLACE Dorothy B. Hughs. A L.A. noir novel written in the 40’s and made into a movie in 1950 with Humphrey Bogard and others. To quote from the NY Review of Books (in the afterword of the kindle edition) “…. Spanish bungalows, eucalyptus-scented shadows, you feel as though you’ve discovered a delicious and dark secret, a tantalizing pager-tuner with sneakily subversive undercurrents.” The review goes on to cite this book as influencing the work of Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson and others writing serial killer, mind of the criminal perspectives. But perhaps more importantly the author lays bare the “…connection between violence and misogyny and an embattled masculinity.” I need not add further except to say the book also is written in a style syntax of the 40’s, providing the reader with a flashback to a time before most of us lived; a taste of where American and L.A. were, and that plus the understanding of “embattled masculinity” allows us to understand part of how American is now.

·        THE BODY IN THE CLOUDS Ashley Hay. An Australian book. A bridge is built in Sidney. The fictional novel uses history as its background. There are three time periods starting with the English landing in the cove before there was any city, then the time of the bridge being built, and then a more contemporary view. The novel is driven by the people within and a central story which connects much of the book is the fall of one of the workers from the bridge during construction, and from that the title is taken. People, connections, and a sense of place.

·        THE FIFTH SEASON N.K. Jemisin. Our daughter gave me a couple of books in this series depicting an imaginary world where humans have evolved along with some other creatures. It rings of dystopia. I read all three and if you like fantasy embedded with metaphors of our society, this series has it all in a very readable form.

·        UNSHELTERED Barbara Kingsolver.  She never fails to write well and interesting books. In this book which undoubtably was partially written before the Trump, she does get to the current administration as she explores the dichotomy of the US.

·        A few more entertainment books: all Bosch mysteries by Michael Connelly: THE LAST COYOTE, THE BLACK ECHO, & CONCRETE BLOND. In all of them the detective wanders around and over ethical edges in pursuit of killers while the author provides authenticity with LA places and police slang. The usual twists and turns, misdirections, and tangles of private life fill the spaces and keep  the reader engaged until the real perp is found.

·        OUTLINE, TRANSIT, & KUDOES 3 books in group by Rachael Cusk. Wow. The way this woman writes and depicts everything on which her lens focuses is amazing. The style is narration in which others do most of the talking and the narrator is one of the most intelligent translators of reality you are likely to read today. Each of the books is short, which is good, because you want to hang on every word. Something very close to the author occurs with complete honesty and I am not talking about plot but person. In reading these books there is much to be learned about life, writing, and others. These are do-not-miss-reading-these books. See above where I commented more.

·        FLORIDA Lauren Groff.  A  book of well-told short stories, very well written. Hard to describe without going into the details of each story but hovering overhead is a sense of the strangeness of the world and yet it is still a place where things can end well.

·        THE WITCH ELM Tana French. While there are element of a mystery in this Irish author’s book, she writes it with no haste to get there, spending most of the book developing the characters. The main character, Toby, becomes damaged by a beating and he struggles with who he is and who are those around him when he cannot trust his own memory. The real mystery lies in questioning everything when your own identity is uncertain. Thus I would call the book a hybrid with as much novel to it as any; calling it a mystery novel does not do it justice. Along the way the reader also acquires a good picture of recent past in Ireland, as would be experienced by a young Irish man under 30. This is not a perfect book and Melissa, Tody’s girlfriend, is a not totally believable sketch never colored in, but the main theme, plot, and writing carry you past those kind of things and into enjoyment.

·        GOD’S HOTEL Victoria Sweet. San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the main setting of this memoir which delves into the differences between the slow medicine of the past and the mechanistic modern medicine of today. Dr Sweet earns a Ph.D. in the history of medicine while studying Hildegard of Bingen, a 12^th century nun who wrote about the regimes of cure in her times. Dr. Sweet uses many stories of healing at Laguna Hospital to illustrate how best care must not abandon the basics of the past: a full and unhurried visit to a patient and time to digest it, a care in understanding what are the obstacles to healing, what are the prior conditions, what are the unnecessary medications. Observation. At the same time Sweet also observes the transition of the hospital from alms house to modern facility along with the gains and losses of the process. The author manages to make the book completely engrossing, a page turner.

·        EDUCATED Tara Westover. A woman born with no birth certificate, to Mormon parents withdrawn from the normal world, grows up virtually without schooling and goes off to elite universities. Her father is controlling, crazy, believing himself prophetic. He forces his kids to work in his scrap yard where awful accidents occur. Her journey is told in compelling writing filled with anecdotes and documents the difficulties the author had in mentally escaping the power of her father. Well worth the read.

·        YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME Sherman Alexie. At some point in writing this book he recognizes that he is making a quilt out of layer stories and poems which circle around his life, the loss of his mother, his mistreated childhood, the rape of his mother, the rape of native Americans, the loss of Mother salmon to the tribe. What emerges cannot be put into a linear summary of English words because in reading the book a taste emerges of both Alexie and a certain First People’s way of thinking, being, and the griefs and complexities that emerge as they live in an often-subjugated position visa-vie the White Man. His honesty drives the book and reflects many of the complicated ties he and others face with bi-polar relationships with parents, the decline of tradition into dead salmon and drinking, abuse, jail for some and all this told with occasional humor.

·        PRESIDIO Randy Kennedy. Texas. A guy who owns nothing and survives by stealing from motel rooms at a time before computers and video. He calls it borrowing. Troy, who owns nothing, goes back to visit his brother Harlan who caretakes an broadcast tower base after being wiped out of money by a bad marriage partially the fault of Troy, who ran with the grifter woman that Harlan married. They go on a quest to find her and in the process, in the way of noir type novels, things go around corners. There is an accidental kidnapping. This is more than a crime novel since crime is only a byproduct of the personalities and their motivations. It depicts a Texas of little towns, big spaces, a porous Mexico border, and the personalities that live there. The absence of ownership gradually stands in for the absences in the character’s lives.  Nice read.

·        CHERRY Nico Walker. A depiction of descent. This mostly autobiographical novel shows the effects of the Iraq war on an Army medic who returns home lost, depressed and eventually addicted to heroin. The title comes from an army expression for the new guy who has not yet seen combat and its horrors. The author is a really, really good writer who is still serving time in prison for bank robberies which he undertook to supply his habit. The detail and honesty make this a strong book about what is wrong with our returning vets, our drug policies, and how our society does not work many.  The book can also be a serious downer and the protagonist slides aaallll the way down.

·        THE CUCKOO’S CALLING Robert Galbraith – a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling. This book is the 1^st in her mystery series for adults featuring a detective named Cormonran Strike, a former investigator for the British war department who has returned home from Iraq with only one leg and begins to take on private investigations.  Rowling is a good writer but a bit wordy. The plot and action carry forward and lo, the mystery is solved.  Time for the next one.  There is character development and as the series continues the reoccurring character of his secretary is also developed. The 2^nd book in the series is THE SILKWORM and with a different problem to solve it carries forward. 3^rd book is Career of Evil. As the series advances I find the author more surefooted with this form.  These “entertainments” are useful when I don’t want to work at a harder, more literate book. I give her, within the British mystery tradition, perhaps an eight or nine on a scale of ten.

·        A MOVEABLE FEAST Ernest Hemmingway. This posthumous book was assembled from various pieces of his writing from his early years in Paris. Before his death he was attempting to create a book from those writings but it was not finished and later it was finished, or perhaps I should say assembled, by his 4^th wife Mary.  Later another version was put together by his grandson Sean. Endless name dropping takes place in disconnected vignettes saturated with drinking.  This is an interesting picture of the creative energy of postwar Paris and the characters there, but suffers from a disjointedness which would have required someone to perform the sacrilege of  a massive rewrite.  Thus it is what it is and is worth reading. Once.

·        WHITE TEARS Hari Kunzru. A rich guy with a deep interest in early blues links up with a need who builds his own special analog equipment to recreate sounds of the past in their recording studio. They run into some sung lyrics on the street and create a recording which sounds like early 20^th century work and put it on the internet. Blues collectors go wild. Seth, the nerd, had long been obsessed with what lingers in a place, as though underneath what we hear in a room there lies “the ambience of the room as it had been ten years previously, then twenty years, then fifty.” As the obsession about the fake old song which they attributed to a made-up musician, Charles Shaw, spread into a mystery including a rendezvous with a seedy man who has a story about Charles Shaw, death occurs. Seth, the nerd, is in love with the sister of the rich guy. Bad things happen and he and the sister travel to unravel the Charles Shaw mystery while the novel picks up the ambiences of years ago, co-mingling in Seth’s narration until, after more bad things, there comes an understanding, a reckoning. The shifts in narration and time do not disturb, for me, the suspension of disbelief because of the strength of the story. In the end this book is about blues and the white man’s appropriation of that.

·         AND THEN THEY WERE GONE Judy Bebelaar. Judy is a former teacher of many of the children who were killed in Jonestown when Jim Jones had everyone drink cyanide or, in the case of many kids, forcibly swallow the poison after it was squirted into the back of their throats. As a San Francisco public school teacher, it must have been very impactful to have so many kids murdered and she and another teacher from the school spent about a decade forming this book. It will make you cry.  There are a lot of books about Jonestown but the perspective is unique and needed telling. Judy  is a member of the Bay Area Writer’s Group which focuses on teachers. It is not difficult to read, won’t take you very long and is available through Sugartown publishing (local) or Amazon.

·        THERE THERE  Tommy Orange. The urban Native American experience is explored in this brilliantly worded, nuanced, and devastating novel of linked people’s stories heading to an inevitable end.  Along the way the reader learns how, if you are an “Indian,” you can get broken. The title of course comes from Gertrude Stein and the author uses it to question what has happened to Oakland, there, for his people. His descriptions of Oakland are poetic: the announcements on BART are delivered by the “Robot voice.” Here is a native people who have not the forest but instead the city, and often the worst part of it as they question their identity as Indians when they are immersed in another culture and themselves half something else. Orange writes with allusions of native mythology as well as a history filled with massacres and dirty blankets but his characters are always “present-tense” people often uncomfortable with themselves, “Indianing” as an attempt to step into something that does not seem to fit in a world of freeway noise. I consider this a must-read for anyone who wants to know of this invisible subgroup of Oakland.

·        HUCK OUT WEST Robert Coover. Mark Twain’s innocent and unbeguiling character Huck Finn grows up and becomes embroiled in the post-civil war era gold rush. Lincoln had, not long ago, ordered the massacre of a group of Native Americans. Others were exterminating the buffalo  upon which the tribes depended for food, clothing, tents, and utensils. Meanwhile the wild west is depicted as it probably was: mostly lawless, with little value placed upon life. Huck has been through a number of adventures including being captured by natives but then being accepted by them after taming a wild super-horse. He settles in a quiet gulch with his Indian friend and the mayhem begins with the discovery of gold. The state of civilization is depicted by Tom Sawyer, who has grown up into a conniving amoral semi-hero, out for himself while acting as lawyer, mayor, judge and jury to the ruffians of the gulch town. Much transpires, all of it faithfully in Huck’s dialogue, right down to misspellings. Occasionally the book makes a more direct comment: for example, Tom is talking to Huck and Huck says: “Tribes, They’re a powerful curse laid on you when you get born.” and later in the book Huck’s horse is quoted as having an exchange with another and Huck recounts it: “He says power don’t help a body keep freedom, it only knows how to keep’n make more of itself. When a body is trying to hang on to power, he ain’t free to do nothing else.” Later Tom mixes up Patriotism into a manifest destiny: the land stolen from the Indians is “rightfully OURN and we’re going to set up a Liberty Pole and faise the American flag on it to PROVE it!” Through most of the book a story of Coyote and Snake and a few others taken from Native American legend is woven by Huck’s Indian friend.  The story about the creation of the world is also a fable of double-double-double cross of the gods – thus staying on theme with the larger tale.

·        CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN Sayaka Murata. A woman, probably somewhere on the autistic or Asperger’s spectrum, never truly understands human behavior, but studies it, mimics it in an attempt to somewhat fit in to society. The rigor of a Japanese convenience store, with its uniform and scripts, provides an environment in which she can exist. Within this story are many exposures of how humans conform to avoid being “other.” It is a quick and delightful read.

·      

  KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, The Osage Murder sand the Birth of the FBI David Grann. Nonfiction, this book reads like a murder mystery. The Osage tribe, their original land stolen by the devious mechanisms, lies, broken treaties, etc. of the US, is pushed to an area in Oklahoma which later in the early 20^th century is discovered to contain a bonanza of oil. But before the oil became an issue the clever Osage had managed to negotiate the retention of underground rights to the Kansas land which was also being stolen from them in forced sales. The retention of the underground rights (an underground reservation) resulted in the Osage being the richest per capita people in the US at the time and then unfolds a plot (and plots) to murder the Osage so that white men, either by marriage or by paperwork or by looting of guardianships, could steal the wealth. As the Federal Investigation Department became the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover formed the agency into a force for both serious crime fighting and also his own fiefdom, he assigned and agent, Tom White, to lead the inquiry into the Osage deaths. While a series of murders is solved, the plot doesn’t end there. Many of the murders are never solved or prosecuted and the narrator of the last chapters of the book is the reporter/author Grann, who details where is research takes him, deeper and deeper into a corruption and greed which involved many, including the principles of wealth, justice, and governance in the region. This is a must-read which shows how even in the 20^th century prejudice and greed can consume the social order we presume to exist in the US. Donald Trump, if recast into this prior age, could have fit right in.

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THE CALIFORNIA FIELD ATLAS Obi Kaufmann. Published by the non-profit Heyday Books in Berkeley, this masterpiece of information uses illustrations, maps, lists and prose to gradually reveal, piece by piece, the complexity of California: trails, earth and its movement, water and rivers, forests and fires, weather, the parks, wildlife, the varied areas, and what may be coming. Looking through it I am awed by the amount of time it must have taken to assemble, draw, create this book. Everyone in the state should have a copy.

·        THE DEPENDENTS Katharine Dion. The author is a member of my Temescal Masters swim club. The book is a carefully crafted and considered story about a widowed man who is filled with loss and uncertain memories as the story moves forward and questions his understanding of happiness, what is love, and who was his wife, before reaching resolution. Dion is an Iowa Writer’s workshop graduate. Time Magazine, O Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, People Magazine, and a few others have all called the book one of the best of the summer or a must-read.

·        DIRT MUSIC Tim Winton. On the remote West coast of Australia, an impulsive daredevil daughter of a rich Perth family hooks up with a successful fisherman in a town where everyone knows everyone for generations and they are all brutal rednecks beneath the skin. Events unfold in remarkably good, often poetic, writing, and slowly a love story sits in the middle of insightful commentary and vivid scenes in the wilderness. This is a page turner with depth. As an Australian friend said to me when I told him I read the book; “Tim Winton is a national treasure!” And I agree. I am going to have to read some of his other work as well.

·        THE MARS ROOM Rachel Kushner. Great descriptions, poetic writing atop a story of pain, an imprisoned woman with two life sentences narrates her past and current existence. This is fiction based upon the author’s extensive research and many interviews with female inmates in California prisons. What gets women like the protagonist into life’s difficulties is well told and then how they deal with it when incarcerated is also well told. Although the subject is bleak the book moves along well and you want to read it. I recommend it highly. The Mars Room is the name of a lap-dance strip club where the main character worked but it is also an implied reference; imprisoned, you may as well be on Mars.

·        HOMEGOING: A NOVEL Yaa Gyasi. Alternating chapters of the descendants of two daughters of an Asante slave in Africa depict the offspring as they travel two paths from the eighteenth century to modern times. One of the daughters, Esi, stays with a Fante tribe where her mother was enslaved before escaping, and the other, Effia, is born later, when the mother is back in her Asante tribe. Effia becomes married to a British official involved in the slave trade in a fort called “the Castle.” Esi is sold to the British and then brought as a slave to America. A series of linked stories, progressing in time and alternating the paths of the offspring of the daughters, depict scenes of the positions of these successive people within he contexts of the history of each period, showing the damages of slavery both in Africa and the US. No one emerges whole. As compelling as this book is, it has to sketch some of the characters to cover so much ground. The book has themes: people may be strong, but they are still controlled by culture and gender, both of which influence what they hope for and what they may know to hope for. Discrimination: can be a consequence of labels, as in the “crazy woman” label of Akua, who burns her daughters while sleepwalking, or visual, as in the Effia side of the family being seen as mixed, or Robert’s ability to pass for white resulting in the end of his marriage, or as in the scars of whipping, which cause Ness to not become a house slave. Each of the two original daughters are given a similar stone but one side, Esi’s, loses hers in the slave pit, and with it her connection to Ghana, while the other side, Effia’s, pass the stone down. In this way stories stay with the African side, Effia’s, and are somewhat lost on the US slave side. History is a story told by the winners (I am approximately quoting the book). To sum it all up, slavery is the curse that keeps on giving.

THE PRESIDENT IS MISSING James Patterson and Bill Clinton. Perhaps stupidly, I read this book, it only took several hours and I didn’t expect, or get, great writing.  At first the story doesn't overcome the writing's problems.  Feels like Clinton altering a few facts from his real life, and then the pace picks up and turns into the usual Patterson-type thriller. The president is remade as younger than Clinton, a war hero from the Iraq war, an action figure. Reality recedes into the improbable and rushes to a successful climax, all the evil doers thwarted personally by the president, after which the president addresses a joint session of congress and Clinton takes over, with an idealistic essay (the president’s speech) about everyone in government doing the right thing for our nation.

·        WARLIGHT Michael Ondaatje. The descriptions in this well written novel are often poetic yet the plot could be a spy thriller or mystery which has been scramble and elevated into literature. It is a full of withheld information and deception while at the same time, starting with two teenagers just after WWII, it is partially a coming of age story until it isn’t. Before I got this book I read a review which called the book flawed and weird but I got it anyway because of the author and I was not disappointed.  The story was interesting and the book sped along in great prose.

·        BONE Yrsa Daley-Ward The author is Jamaican and Nigerian in extract but born in England. Prose-poetry fills the book with narratives, some of which read like short stories. and yet often her observation and presentation, her language, leave you no doubt that it is poetry. “Call the speaking clock. know that / whatever time it says is the time that / everything has to change. / Leave the damn aisle. / Don’t go anywhere where they sell / sweets, chips, booze, /fast love or lottery tickets. / See that just outside there are people / lined streets that are emptier than / your insides.”

MY FIRST MURDER, and also HER ENEMY (books 1 & 2 in the Maria Kallio series) Leena Lehtolainen, Finland’s best selling female crime author. The 1^st book did not excite me but the 2^nd was much better fare. Maria Kallio is an ex-cop by the 2^nd book (cop in the 1^st) and a lawyer. She works to get a wrongly accused man freed by investigating a murder herself. Simple entertainment.  Not the best of its kind.

·        PACHINKO Min Jin Lee. Sunja, a Korean woman, ends up in Japan before, during, and after WW2. The depth of character development merges with the cultural environment of the time carefully depict elements of racism, class, feminism, and history. Sunja’s family is at the core of this extremely well written book as they evolve and deal with the problems of the times. As Koreans in Japan, they are forever Koreans, no matter how well educated or how well they speak Japanese.  Consequently, they must survive in the margins, which is why Pachinko is the title of the book. The owner of a chain of these parlors carefully adjusts the pins of the machines every night so that players who would assume they have figured out the machine are confronted with a newly different experience even though it is the same familiar game. And so too the experience of the Koreans in Japan morphs within the same basic frame. The attempt of Noa, (the son of an affair between the main character Sunja and Hansu, a Korean pachinko parlor owner and gangster), to escape his identity ends up in his suicide after he is found and his Korean ancestry would be revealed. Ironically, in Noa’s attempt to escape he had ended up working in and then managing a pachinko parlor, the same as his brother Mozasu, who takes over the business from Hansu. There are many turns in this book which I will not describe here but in the end things twist back on themselves as though fate cannot be escaped.

·        HEDY’S FOLLY Richard Rhodes. This book is almost as much about George Antheil, an avant-garde composer and writer, as it is about Hedy Lamar and after some initial information about Hedy the book spends a lot of time setting the stage historically and explaining who Antheil was, with no mention of Hedy for a good portion of the book.  This leave the reader wondering if the book title was wrong but then eventually there is a merger where the two collaborate on a frequency-shifting invention to control torpedoes.  The invention is presented to the war department but never explored.  The author explains how, decades later, the concept of frequency shifting, used in a different way, becomes central to the ability of networks to carry large streams of independent information over the same pipeline of data. To me the book failed to prove that Hedy invented much because it kept open the possibility that her knowledge came from dinner tables when she was in Austria and married to a prominent arms manufacturer.  I would have liked to have heard of more in-depth examples of her inventing.  I feel that the book, as researched as it was, stands on weak ground because of the way the author chose to describe and support his case. Had the author spent more time on Hedy as a character, giving us a better picture of her temperament and intellectual composition, instead of such a long introduction to Antheil, the book might have held my interest much more. With six marriages and an aversion to usual Hollywood star behavior, with multiple languages and yet little education, Hedy was undoubtedly a person who could have sustained the book if she had been presented in more depth.  When Robert Osborne is quoted near the end of the book she is described as having a great sense of humor, an enormous energy; colorful, unpredictable, game, up for anything until she retreated as she aged, locking the world away while filing numerous lawsuits.  I would have like to have heard more about who she really was.

·        A LONG WAY FROM HOME Peter Carey employs several voices, those of the main characters, to tell a tale of the Bobs.  Irene is a small woman with a large spirit; spunky, will in to do most anything.  She is married to Titch, a small man who is a top salesman for Ford in Australia. Titch wants to be a Ford dealer. His father is a domineering old man who gets in the way. Meanwhile the Bobs are living next to Willie Bachhuber who is a quiz show winner on a local radio show. Events unfold with a rally type race around Australia which give momentum to the book while at the heart of it lies in the racial tangles of this continent with the original peoples and those who came to dominate.

·        THE POWER Naomi Alderman. Women acquire an electric eel-like power in approximately our current time.  The author uses this mechanism to illustrate, in a reversal of gender roles, how religion, politics, business, and crime twine around gender.  Margret Atwood coached this writer and praised the work.  The NY Times labeled it one of the ten best of the year. It is an easy read and travels quickly with a good story line but I thought the book a little over-praised because some of the writer’s mechanisms showed through for me, interrupting my suspension of disbelief. Yet it is a book worth reading.

·        THE POET Michael Connelly.  This is one of the early  books written by the author of the Bosch series which became a Amazon TV series for 4 seasons so far. Bosch is not on the scene but instead crime reporter Jack McEvoy.  As always, Connelly delivers a well-woven plot with unexpected twists, a love affair, deaths, and the FBI while the crime reporter unravels the death of his brother and others.

·        Zadie Smith’s FEEL FREE is a book of essays.  Just as readable as her prose, she delvers widely into commenting on almost anything which comes under her scrutiny and does so with erudition which does not overwhelm. Some of the subjects were of little interest to me and others drew me in. Smith is often in the US as well as the UK and so references both cultures but for the most part with a British eye.

·        A SEPARATION Katie Kitamura: A woman goes to Greece to search for her husband, the search paid for by her husband’s parents, who are unaware that she has separated from her husband because he asked that the separation remain a secret, and she complied. What unfolds is proxy for comment on a world where rules apply but are not followed and where relations between people are coded, deceptive, often about who has the power.  Very skillfully written, I enjoyed the book and found the themes well explored.

ROBICHEAUX James Lee Burke: This too wordy novel of a Louisiana parish detective is certainly infused with a sense of the place. I finished the book by skimming huge paragraphs with little content, stopping to read more deeply when the author reverted to something interesting.  But it was a slog.

·        ALIF THE UNSEEN G. Willow Wilson: This playful yet deep novel involves a hacker in an unnamed middle Eastern city but it is not a book about hackers – it drops into mythology: the world of the jinn, while Alif escapes the ills of an authoritarian state, and ends up commenting on faith and meaning. Worth reading for an inventive dip into Islam with a good story line and excellent writing.

·        MEDICINE WALK Richard Wagamese: This Ojibwa author writes about a young man and his father – a drunk, dying man. The language is descriptive, short, matter of fact and in the best tradition of writing, it is show, not tell, so that the story carries the reader along on a journey to the father’s death and along the way the father tells the journey of his life. The beauty of wilderness compounded by the young man’s place in it where he is the most at ease. In the acknowledgements at the end of the book the author speaks of the Ojibawa way of turning inward to see outward. What makes a man?  What is a good man? What ruins a man? The answers emerge, unrushed, as they travel to death in the father’s past, and then to the father’s death on a high ledge overlooking the land the son loves. Great read and short.

  LOLA by Melissa Scrivner Love : A LA gang & crime novel with a woman as the main character.  Not a literary book, it is a simple and quick read, a bit unbelievable at times, but good entertainment.

·        AHAB’S WIFE Sena Jeter Naslund: Una, the main character and most of the time the book’s narrator, is a sweeping tale which covers her childhood for about half the book and then moves to the sea and then to Ahab and afterwards. In the course of this journey the descriptive soars poetically and the perspective is that of an adventuresome, strong woman with liberal feminist opinions extending to class, race, and conventional religion.  There is much death and tragedy along the way but Una is an optimist who always ends up well even after the death of Ahab. This book appears very well researched to embed the reader in the world of the time with historical accuracy. A great read with at times a bit too much soaring thought on the part of Una, sometimes a bit much detail about nothing, and lacking Melville’s dark symbolism, the book works because of the strength of the plot and characters.

·        THE AUTUMN OF THE BLACK SNAKE: The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West  William Hogeland – This should be required reading for the entire American population, dispelling the myths of our founding fathers and describing the avarice which motivated George Washington to Machiavellian means to create a Federal army after the revolution when most of the populace wanted only the various state militias  The book centers on how the new group of semi-independent states sent John Wayne (yes, that is where Marion Morrison got his film name) to overcome the American Indian confederation so as to steal Ohio for settlement. In the process a stronger federal union emerges and many of our revolutionary heroes are enriched. The European powers are actors with England supporting the Indians but not enough, Spain owning Louisiana and controlling the Mississippi, the French exiting, and with General John Wayne’s number two commander turning out to be a Spanish spy.

·        THIS SHOULD BE WRITTEN IN THE PRESENT TENSE Helle Helle – a translated work from Denmark. A very odd, quiet book, it skips around in time, presents everything in relatively plain prose and builds into an internal portrait of a young adult, somewhat empty inside, riding trains, a few sexual encounters, a lost feeling as she navigates life, passive for the most part and yet somehow if you are patient, out of it all an interesting book emerges, carrying the reader along.

·        HALF A LIFE V.S. Naipaul – A book full of halves, Willie, the main character, never feeling a real part of anything, lost in other’s worlds (which is a comment on colonialism), he lives in India, Britain, and Mozambique, all places where he is only able to associate with others like himself, either mixtures of races/cultures or isolated away from their native lands.  The past with its codes, such as the rigidity of his father’s time are still within him, slow to fade, contributing to his alienation. Naipaul shows the past in Mozambique with the Europeans on the top of the heap, the mixed descendants below that, and the Africans separate, not really understood, gradually expelling the colonial order, this transition parallel to Willie’s gradual release from his sexual boundaries as he first goes to native prostitutes and then enters an affair with a woman who is another of the mixed semi-lords of his African subgroup. In the end the European control of Mozambique is destroyed and so too is Willie; half of everything, he owns nothing of what he inhabits.

·        THE MOTHERS Brit Bennett – an African-American girl in Oceanside, CA, escapes her background to go to U of Michigan and beyond – but she doesn’t escape the people in her life which are finely drawn, so much so that this book is a page-turner without having to be a who-done-it, but the book is full of secrets and betrayals.

THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR Yoko Ogawa -- In Japan a housekeeper cares for a mathematical genius whose memory was damaged by an accident. Interesting number work twines around a story in which a friendship is formed between the man who remembers nothing and his housekeeper and her son. A good read if you are interested in some of the intriguing ways that numbers come together.  Why is 28 a perfect number?  Answer inside.

HISTORY OF WOLVES Emily Fridlund – A 37-year-old recounts her past as somewhat feral teenager who has a difficult and transformative year. Some of the writing is great and the author throws around a lot of comment and interesting ideas on the way to a story which is worth reading but fizzles out a little along the way.

EXIT WEST Mohsin Hamid – Can you imagine if doors allowed some of the Middle East, escaping the horrors of that place, to walk through and land in London or Marin?  Using this device but otherwise sticking to our normal experience of the world, Hamid paints a picture of the effects of exile.  I enjoyed this unusual book for the insights but would not give it 10 thumbs up, maybe 8.

·        THE LATE SHOW Michael Connelly – by the writer of the Harry Bosch series, this one has a female detective and was a page turner.  Good escape.

·        SNOW HUNTERS Paul Yoon -- A North Korean man moves slowly emotionally from the damages of being a Korean war prisoner while transplanted to Brazil where he becomes a tailor. In the end, there is hope after distance – a distance and silence from others – as the main character finally moves from one to whom thing happen to a person who reaches out to another. Very poetically written, the book holds the reader throughout as it unfolds, dream-like.

WE EAT OUR OWN Kea Wilson – An American actor ends up in the Amazon filming for an Italian director of horror movies who goes beyond safety to produce a movie which, unlike its genre, is unpredictable. The is a lot of fake blood, insects, the jungle, death mixed with sessions of a later Italian court scene prosecuting the disappearance of the actor and his female lead.  While there is some good writing and a surprise ending, the book is light on theme beyond entertainment.

·        MANHATTEN BEACH Jennifer Egan – A great read about a woman who becomes a professional hard-helmet diver for the navy during WWII. Author of the Pulitzer prize winning “Visit to the Goon Squad,” Egan has written a page-turner which explores morality, the place of work as a driver of personal success and freedom, and the ocean, which symbolically is the threat and the cure.

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO George Sanders – Lincoln mourns his dead son in a kind of spirit world of thoughts.  I found this book not to my taste but at the same time I could see why it won prizes for stylistic experimentation and a great depth of meaning.

·        NEWS OF THE WORLD  Paulette Jiles.  Cultures create people differently, at least as it refers to custom, dress, likes and hates or even who gets scalped. In this book a young white girl who has been with native Americans for about four of her formative years, from about age six to age ten, is returned to the US Cavalry and then assigned to Capt. Kidd, a former printer who makes his living by reading aloud from newspapers in remote towns of Texas. In the process we see the advancements and challenges of the age (late 19^th century) as things are about to shift – the 15^th amendment recently passed, telegraph wires spanning continents and yet Kidd and the girl Johanna are still in the wild west of gangs and thieves as they travel East to return the girl to her family. Slowly the girl learns to trust Kidd and then becomes an asset to him as they travel and defeat adversaries. The girl learns to tolerate the white man’s civilization but retains some of the independence of spirit she learned as a temporary native. The bond of love which develops between the old man and the fierce little girl gives depth to this book of adventures which provides us with news of what the world was at that time and now – always in the reinvention of the world the clashes of people out for differing ends exists, and yet the bonds that can develop between people are stronger,  and therein is the news.