RidgewayGirl Reads More Books in 2024

Here we are with another reading year ahead of us, full of hope that this year, things will go according to plan. In my case, that means less planning, a thing I tried to do last year, with limited success. So I'm going to try again, only harder. In keeping with the idea of randomness, and having not planned ahead for setting up my thread, the theme is going to change every quarter and this quarter's theme is just funny book-related things I found on the internet.

Let's get reading (starting on January first).





Currently Reading



Recently Read



Recently Acquired



Reading Miscellany

Owned Books Read: 10

Library Books Read: 17

Audiobooks: 1

Netgalley: 3

Borrowed:

Books Acquired: 15

Rereads:

Abandoned with Prejudice: 1

Category One


Create Your Own Visited Countries Map



Global Reading

1. My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls (Norway)

Category Two



Representation Matters: Diverse Books

1. Blackouts by Justin Torres
2. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
3. Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
4. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Category Three



Immigrants, Expats, Works in Translation

1. The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino, translated from the Japanese by Giles Murray
2. Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
3. Absolution by Alice McDermott
4. The Wind Knows My Name by Isabelle Allende, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

Category Four



Shiny New Books: Books Published in 2024

1. Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon
2. One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall
3. The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

Category Five



Let's Keep Things Brief: Short Story Collections and Novellas

1. Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women by Mary Rechner
2. Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett
3. So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
4. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams by Ellen Gilchrist

Category Six



Tackling the TBR: Books off of My Own Shelves

1. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
2. S. by Doug Dorst

Category Seven



Talking About Books: Book Club Books

1. Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
2. Go as a River by Shelley Read

Category Eight



Murders and Other Bad Things: Crime Novels, Noir, Horror

1. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
2. The Hunter by Tana French

Category Nine



Long Live the Rooster: Longlisted, Shortlisted and Award Winners

1. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (Competitor, ToB 2024)
2. The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo (Competitor, ToB 2024)
3. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Competitor, ToB 2024)
4. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (Longlisted, Booker Prize 2023)
5. American Mermaid by Julia Langbein (Competitor, ToB 2024)

Category Ten



Books Read on my iPad

1. Cold People by Tom Rob Smith
2. From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata

Category Eleven



Books with a Strong Sense of Place

1. Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
2. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Just for fun and, in keeping with having no goals this year, here's the BingoDog.



2. My Men by Victoria Kielland
4. Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
6. Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon
7. Absolution by Alice McDermott
8. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
11. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
12. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
14. Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women by Mary Rechner
16. Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
18. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
19. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
20. Go as a River by Shelley Read
21. Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
23. The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino
24. Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
25. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

A proper start! 😊

>14 VictoriaPL: It's all last minute and random, but I am ready for the new year!

I like all of these memes, but >12 RidgewayGirl: is my favourite. Extremely accurate and perfect for the category! Looking forward to seeing what reading fills your categories this year!

What great categories & memes! Good luck with your 2024 reading.

I love your memes so much, several made me LOL! (as I believe the young folk say) But >11 RidgewayGirl: isn't showing for me.

Happy reading!

Looks like a great start to your reading year. I'll be looking forward to seeing what you read. And - of course - the BBs.

Hi Kay, I have you starred as usual, now that I found the correct thread, and look forward to the BB’s. Good luck with your reading!

Love the pics! Good Luck with reading and the new year.

The memes were fun, and I love your approach toward your planning this year. Looking forward to more book bullets from you in 2024.

Great illustrations for your categories. Happy reading in 2024.

Hee hee! A treasury of book memes that I can steal from! I’ll be looking for inspiration at several of your categories.

Looks like it's going to be a fun year. Love your set-up and wow! - was Mick Jagger (>5 RidgewayGirl:) ever that young??

I love the memes. My favorite is >9 RidgewayGirl:. Good luck with your reading in 2024. I will be back for some more BBs.

Ah, this looks like there is some fun ahead! Enjoy your reading in 2024. I look forward to many BBs.

>25 DeltaQueen50: That was my first reaction about Jagger too!

Thanks, everyone, for stopping by. I'm trying to finish off my reviews for 2023 and come up with some sort of assessment and a new thread makes me want to drop all of it now and just start new.

Hope you are all enjoying the holiday season, however you choose to celebrate.

Thank you for the laugh. Happy reading in 2024.

I love these memes, especially >12 RidgewayGirl: ! Happy reading in 2024!

>29 pamelad: Thanks, Pam. You'll beat me to the new year.

>30 MissBrangwen: I think we can all relate to that one. Priorities!

Wishing everyone a happy new year and also:

Great set-up! Enjoy your 2024 reads!

Looking forward to following your 2024 reading, Kay! Love the memes, especially the Tom Gauld art!

>32 thornton37814: Thanks, Lori, may we both have satisfying reading years.

>33 christina_reads: Tom Gauld has so many great cartoons based on literature and reading.

Love the telegram!

>35 hailelib: Dorothy Parker never misses.

In Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, a woman goes through her days during covid in a house with her husband and children, researching Herman Melville's life. Told in single sentences spaced apart on the page, a format that delighted me the first time I encountered it (Jenny Offill's excellent Dept. of Speculation) but began to annoy me soon after, as book after book was published in this form, seemingly as a way of turning a collection of linked thoughts into a novel. String those bad boys together, I would think, you can just use entire paragraphs! But here, they work, reflecting the scattered nature of the narrator's thoughts. She's lost her focus, if not her interest, and goes off on tangents about people who interacted with Melville, or who wrote about him.

Running through the book are the words of The Biographer, who wrote two weighty volumes about the man, who idolized him, defending him from all criticism. The counterpoint to the hagiography are the many accounts of Melville being abusive and of his disregard for his family's welfare. Just as in the narrator's account, there are issues she has with her husband and moments of closeness, of shared history and fond affection.

I was charmed by this book, despite its format.

One really doesn't need to have read Moby Dick to read this novel, although MD is both worthwhile and a lot of fun, but a basic knowledge of Melville's life might be useful.

>37 RidgewayGirl: Not interested at all in Melville (I have read MD) and I'm sure I wouldn't like the page format, but it is the first time I've heard about it!

>38 Tess_W: same! 😊

>38 Tess_W: & >39 VictoriaPL: Hi, Tess and Victoria! No book is for everyone, something that is much on my mind as I read a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel for the Tournament of Books and a cozy mystery for my mystery book club.

The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino is a convoluted story of people hiding from debt collectors, their families, and their pasts and of the lengths they will go to remain hidden. A son is given his mother's ashes. She left when he was a child and as he looks into a memorial service for her, he tries to find the man she had been with in the years before her death, but the man could not be found, the name he used was not the one he had been born with. Meanwhile, a body is found in remnants of a makeshift shelter that had be set on fire. Who was the homeless man and why was it so difficult to establish his identity. And did his death have anything to do with the body of a woman from out of town found in sparsely furnished cheap accommodations that were not hers?

This installment in the series of police procedurals centered on Kyo Kaga is, once again, focused on the thoroughness of the Tokyo detectives, as they painstakingly chase down the smallest of leads. The pleasure of this series lies in how carefully the detectives work, how no loose ends are left, and how solving a crime does depend on insight and intuition, but mostly on footwork and careful attention to detail. There's a through line of people having things happen to them that put them outside of ordinary society and how they make their way. This novel provides some interesting insight into how Japanese society functions, but the real draw is the quietly charismatic detective Kago.

Yup, daunting to arrive "late" to people's threads. I'm just getting organized to do this now, but admittedly am not necessarily going back to read all the posts to catch up to now. I will do better as I follow along, going forward. :-)
Happy New Reading Year!

>42 LibraryCin: I landed here in mid-December to find the threads were already too long to catch up easily! Glad to see you here for another year.

I will be interested to see your opinion of Cold People which I read last year.

>41 RidgewayGirl: - Well I managed to make it to day 6 of the new year, but here it is, my first BB of the year. I like the sound of this. Of course, it's really 4 BBs as I will have to go back and read the others first.

Thanks for the memes, Kay. So much fun!

>44 Zozette: Maybe it turns around, but at this point, I am angry with this book and all the abruptly dropped plot lines and characters. And the contradictions and sheer inhumanity presented as for the best. I really liked Child 44, so I'm hoping Smith is just readying things for his big twist and the one being foreshadowed -- an Island of Doctor Moreau rip-off -- is all a red herring.

>45 dudes22: Betty, they are such solid and enjoyable police procedurals. I prefer Japanese police procedurals to American ones, because the emphasis is on how carefully following every lead is how crimes are solved, with very little of the rogue officer breaking laws to bring someone to justice stuff. At most, some paperwork is filed late.

>46 MissWatson: You're welcome!

>41 RidgewayGirl: I added Newcomer to my wishlist as it’s the earliest in the series that my library has.

>48 hailelib: That's one I haven't read. I do have another one in the Kaga series on my iPad though.

>41 RidgewayGirl: Looking forward to getting this one from the library.

And happy new year (I was convinced I'd already posted, but nope. Sorry about that!)

My library has a few Tom Rob Smith books. I had never heard of this author but they all look interesting.

>50 charl08: I look forward to finding out what you think about it, Charlotte. And Happy New Year to you, too!

>52 JayneCM: I really enjoyed Child 44. That said, Cold People is the worst novel I have read in some time.

My plan was not to buy any books for a while, having plenty here already, but then Barnes and Noble let me know I had a $25 credit and, friends, that knowledge has weighed on me. So I have somehow come home with three new books.

>54 RidgewayGirl: Sounds reasonable! I was looking at the Kindle deals one day over the weekend. One of them tempted me. I didn't think one of my libraries would have a copy, but one had multiple copies. So it went on the library list, and I saved my 99 cents or $1.99, whatever it was.

>55 thornton37814: Lori, I'm currently drowning in library books. All my holds came in at once, despite the number of people waiting for each copy was different in every case.

Why Silvia wanted to sew a dress when she could go to a store and buy one much more easily, even more cheaply, she didn't know. She felt like making something that didn't get eaten, felt like doing something that didn't get undone almost immediately: cooking, dishes, laundry, vacuuming.

The stories in Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women by Mary Rechner center on motherhood and how it changes a woman's identity. From the first story, Pattern, in which the mother of twins tries to make a dress in time for her wedding anniversary, to Visiting Philly, in which a woman meets up with her best friend from college and they find that their friendship is the same and different. Like most collections, some stories were stronger than others, but the best stories beautifully reflect the realities of parenting young children, of women trying to find their earlier selves in what their lives have become.

>57 RidgewayGirl: 100% that quote!

>57 RidgewayGirl: Taking a BB for this as I love short stories. Way back at >41 RidgewayGirl:, I hope I have this on my Kindle. I'm not sure if I'm ready for this one or if I need to read the book before it.

>58 JayneCM: Yes, some of the stories fell a little short, but some of them hit home. I felt this story in my bones and both my kids have now entered their twenties.

>59 lsh63: Lisa, they all stand well enough on their own. There are brief mentions of Kaga's life outside of work, but it's such a minor part of the book.

I see you’re reading S.. I’ll be interested to hear what you think of it. I was considering it for the “paper-based item” BingoDog square.

Blackouts by Justin Torres won the National Book Award and after reading it, I can say that the judges really had no choice in the matter. It manages to be intelligent, innovative and full of heart, which is a lot for one book. The scaffolding for this novel is two men in a room, a small room in an old building in New Mexico, the curtains drawn. Juan is dying and his friend, who he last saw decades ago in a mental health facility, has come to spend these last days with him in this over-heated room, as they talk about their own pasts and read a bit from an old book called Sex Variants, where each page has been altered, words blacked out, making a new text. The also discuss the person who spear-headed the book's creation, her history and how she convinced a male doctor to be the head of the project, because she couldn't get traction as a woman, and how she was ultimately disappointed in what resulted.

This is the kind of book that ranges far and wide while staying in the same place. It's clever and intelligent, with the erasures revealing more than the original text did. It shares a format with Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, a connection that Torres points out. It's a novel that deserves to be read slowly and ideally as a physical book, the object itself playing a part in how well this book holds together, with illustrations and photos enhancing the story being told.

>62 RidgewayGirl: Sounds lovely! I may have to concede and read a paper book! I haven't read a tree book in 2-3 years because I can't adjust the font or read in the dark!

>63 Tess_W: Oh, I feel that. You'll have to read this one under a bright light. I have one that has a lot of small print and I have to make sure to have good light when I read it and that my eyes aren't tired. For all that I vastly prefer the experience of reading a paper book, there's a lot to be said for how accommodating ebooks are.

>57 RidgewayGirl: I do like the cover on that one! I think those old vintage patterns just remind me of a simpler time!

>65 thornton37814: Yes, I was drawn to that cover for its vintage feel. Of course, we look back at that time as simpler mainly because we were children enjoying our childhoods and not bothered by things like jobs or rent. My mother used those Simplicity patterns often.

>66 RidgewayGirl: Yes, indeed.

Vera Wong is the sole proprietor of a failing teashop in San Francisco's Chinatown called Vera Wang's World Famous Teashop. Some days, well most days, her only customer is an elderly man who is caring for his wife. Things look up, however, when she comes down one morning to find a dead body on the shop floor. Despite the police, who appreciate neither the tea she tries to serve them, nor the outline around the body that she made in Sharpie before they arrived, the change of pace energizes her and she decides to find out who murdered the dead man herself. She even has three good suspects right off the bat -- three different people who she caught looking at her shop after she posted the news of the murder on-line.

Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto is a cozy mystery, which isn't my usual kind of book, but it was chosen by my book group and I ended up liking it. Vera is a good protagonist, she's pushy and determined, but she's also lonely and eager to help out when she sees a need. The other characters all came full of angst and deep feelings, in one case for each other, which provided the emotional stakes of this book -- the dead body belonging to someone who, everyone pretty much agrees, deserved to be dead. All in all, a fun foray into a genre I don't read.

>68 RidgewayGirl: I don't often read mysteries or cozy mysteries, however, I think this would be something different, a palate cleanser, so on my WL it goes.

>69 Tess_W: It's a solid choice for light, palate-cleansing entertainment. It really is charming.

On a pleasant summer day, aliens arrive and tell humankind that they have one month to move to Antarctica or else. It's quite a beginning for a novel, and an interesting one, but that's all we get of that. Everyone either moves south or prepares to die without question or resistance. The waters around Antarctica are filled with boats of every description, people are huddled on the shores of the most hostile continent in the middle of its winter, lacking fuel, shelter or clothing, which gives the great real start to the novel, seeing how people came together to...oh, never mind. As soon as people are huddled on shore, the book jumps forward twenty years.

Cold People is by Tom Rob Smith, who wrote Child 44 and a few other novels centered around the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence during the Cold War. They were thrillers, but ones well anchored in their historical setting, had interesting and plausible plots, and well-developed and complex characters. None of those elements make an appearance in this book.

So what is this book about, since it didn't care to waste time on the alien invasion or in polar survival? Well, since humankind is crowded onto a hostile area with very few resources and no interest in what is happening elsewhere, since people are living in extremely crowded and squalid conditions with barely enough of anything to survive, with all resources strictly controlled and rationed, with any surviving supplies from the rest of the world accessible only to the well-connected, with the end of any sort of representative government, and society controlled by a group of unelected elites, you'd expect that the story would finally gel around a resistance movement. You would be wrong. In this world, scarcity and over-crowding bring docility and contentment to the masses because, the author tells us several times, libertarianism has ended criminality. Also, there are draconian punishments for not being content and happy, but mostly it's a libertarian paradise, don't look to closely at how it works, that's not what this book is interested in.

So what is this book about? Well, because survival is so precarious, and the population dropping, all the scientists left have come together to create weird and terrifying hybrid animals that want to kill the remaining people. Yes, this was the consensus of the the best and brightest -- with aliens occupying most of the world, maybe, although no one has seen any sign of them, with humans desperately in need of a sustainable way to produce the things they need for survival, all the remaining wealth and resources are dedicated to building an enormous underground laboratory to make what they first intended to be small adjustments to the genetic code to make people better adapted to this new harsh environment, but now that all ethical considerations are considered moot, the scientists get over-excited and just keep one-upping themselves with creating new animal hybrids, each one smarter, stronger and more able to survive and kill everyone. Do I need to tell you how this ends? Because, honestly, I gave up 85% of the way through. None of this made any sense, especially, as it was written, the scientists weren't the bad guys. Also, since there was no more representative government, all the various world leaders opened a bar together. That was kind of interesting.

>68 RidgewayGirl: I'll have to look for that one! It sounds fun! ETA: I placed a hold which is estimated at 21 weeks!

>68 RidgewayGirl: Lori, I think you'll really like it. It's well written and the characters are a lot of fun.

>71 RidgewayGirl: I was disappointed in Cold People. I loved the first part when everyone was trying to make it to Antarctica but as I got further into the book I found I was getting more and more annoyed with the story especially with the 20 year jump. I did finish it but overall I would consider it to be underwhelming.

>74 Zozette: I told my husband about rinsing out the oil tanker and putting people inside and, boy, let me tell you that there is no way that would work. He went on for some time on the reasons. I was more frustrated that after all the space given to who was and who wasn't allowed on board, that the author entirely forgot about them as soon as they reached Antarctica.

I'm finally catching up with your thread, and I had a good laugh browsing through your category memes!

>71 RidgewayGirl: I was really intrigued by the premise of Cold People but after seeing some mixed reviews, I thought I should hold off, and your review confirms that I shouldn't bother with the book. I am quite impressed that you finished 85% of the book before abandoning it, and I suspect that your review made for more entertaining reading than the book itself!

>76 mathgirl40: Glad to save you from a stinker. It was so bad. I'm still mad about it.

>68 RidgewayGirl: I added it to my library list to remember. It definitely sounds better than your next one.

Go as a River by Shelley Read begins in a small Colorado town called Iola in the 1940s, when a teenage girl meets a young man and is immediately smitten. But the young man is Native American and unwelcome in that small town and Victoria's brother is excited by the idea of chasing the man away. Victoria has been taking care of her brother, father and uncle since a car accident killed the other members of this farming family and this romance has opened her eyes to the possibilities outside of her small world.

Set against the backdrop of the creation of the Blue Mesa Reservoir, Victoria's life is beset with many tragedies, from the deaths of her father and her lover, to giving away her own infant and then spending the rest of her life longing for him. In all of the melodrama, the historic events that form the background of the novel; the building of the dam, the abandonment of the town of Iola and changes to the landscape caused by the dam, are all a little lost or glossed over. But the novel is solidly written and pleasant enough to read.

He would have been terrifying to her from the moment she laid eyes on him. Gone were the head-to-toe tennis whites, the plummy voice, and the handicapped act, the pleas to compliant young women for help, which we'd been conditioned from birth to answer the same way he'd been conditioned from birth to expect a woman to take care of him.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll is a novel about the victims of a famous serial killer, in which the women are centered and the promise of their lives mourned. The person who is usually centered in this story, in movies, in documentaries, in novels, and true crime podcasts, is here never named, never described except to point out how small he was, how mediocre his mind.

Pamela is the president of her sorority house at Florida State University. She's dedicated to running the house well, which has put her at odds with her freewheeling best friend, and on that night, when most of her sisters are out having fun, she is doing paperwork. Early in the morning hours, she goes downstairs and sees a man leaving the house. The next morning, two of the girls are found dead and two seriously injured.

Ruth is newly divorced and insecure about her looks when she meets Tina, falls in love and is learning how to extricate herself from a family horrified by what she is. On a hot summer's day, she bikes to a local lake to spend time with her girlfriend, when a man asks her for help moving his boat. She never meets up with Tina.

The victims of this murderer were bright and had promising futures ahead of them. Pamela and Tina are determined to do what they can to bring him to justice, even when that means that the men around them find them pushy and unfeminine. Even when the judge at his sentencing spends time mourning the life lost behind bars and none for the women whose futures were far brighter. I suspect this will end up on my best of list at the end of the year.

>80 RidgewayGirl: This is definitely going on my library list!

>81 DeltaQueen50: Judy, you are going to love it.

>80 RidgewayGirl: Taking a BB for this one.

>80 RidgewayGirl: Hi Kay, this is on my planned list for next month, so I’m glad to see it was a five star read for you.

>83 lowelibrary: It's really good, April.

>84 lsh63: It surprises me not at all that you have this one on your list.

>80 RidgewayGirl: On my WL this goes!

Ghassan Zeineddine's debut collection of short stories all take place in Dearborn, Michigan among the Arab American community there. His stories center on a wide variety of Dearbornites, some who love the city they call home, others who long to return to Lebanon. They are observant Muslims, atheists, or somewhere in between. They are young and old, wealthy and struggling to get by. It's an achievement to write so well across such a range of experiences and this collection is impressive -- there's simply not a weak story in the book. An aspiring writer finally finds success as a narrator for audiobooks, a group of middle-aged married couples find their comfortable routines upended by the presence of a man wearing a speedo, a teenager discovers the complicated truth about the uncle he adores when his uncle comes to visit from Lebanon. Each story is so well crafted and also so fresh and full of life. This is a fantastic collection and I encourage everyone to get their hands on a copy of this excellent book.

Cody had a not-great senior year of high school, and the aftermath of that is that she wasn't accepted to any colleges. She did manage to get a summer job as a junior camp counselor at the camp she's spent every summer at, which is good, but when camp wraps up, she's not looking forward to returning home. Then, the father of one of her charges makes her the offer of a job as babysitter to his two kids for the rest of the summer, until they are returned to their mother. The job is on his private island, where there's no cell phone service, and she has to decide immediately and sign an NDA, but she decides to take the job.

Emer isn't having a great time, either, discovering on a trip to China, that the new rice varietal that the non-profit she heads has failed, leaving the farmers they'd enticed with promises of higher yields, left destitute. Now she's fighting to keep the non-profit afloat, to find a solution, and also getting a few vague texts from her daughter about an internship for an unspecified businessman, but receiving no answer to her own calls and texts. She decides that despite the turmoil at her workplace, she has no choice but to go find her daughter.

Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon is loosely structured on the story of Demeter and Persephone, and it's a lot of fun to see the elements of the myth arising in different guises. There are two entertwined stories here; a single mother's search for her daughter and the story of a very young woman who isn't sure what she wants to do with the next few years, let alone her life and how she feels her way towards maturity while existing in a place designed to thwart thought and reason.

Lyon writes with nuance and understanding from both the viewpoint of a directionless young woman and her over-extended mother, creating two characters in conflict but who also deeply love each other. She also manages to make Emer's fear for her daughter as she learns where she is and who she is with compelling and urgent while also showing Cory as curious and eager to be included in with the grown-ups. Lyon is juggling two different stories here and she does so in a way that makes both fascinating and real.

Just catching up on your thread 😊

I’m taking a BB on Dearborn. I heard good things about it, but your review has tipped the scales.

BB for me also for Dearborn, it helps that I don't need my arm twisted too much to read short story collections.

>89 VictoriaPL: Hi, Victoria, I just caught up on your thread!

>90 Charon07: It's really good. I read a lot of short story collections and this one stands out.

>91 lsh63: Lisa, you are my book twin.

One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall starts out with Cole, as he begins to rebuild his life after his wife left him. As he tells the story of his marriage, how his wife would verbally attack him and how, by the end, he was an abused spouse, but that he'd still like to put his marriage back together, how his college girlfriend also inexplicably turned on him, how he is a caring feminist, fully aware of the difficulties and dangers women face, it looks like this novel is going to be utterly predictable. As Cole goes on about what a great partner he is, and how it's the women in his life who are the abusive ones, it looks like this novel is going to simply be another book about domestic violence. Don't get me wrong, it's still underrepresented in fiction, but for a genre that requires some level of suspense and a few twists and turns, and from an author whose previous books had delivered on that element of the thriller, it was disappointing.

And then it turns out that this is a completely different novel than expected. While Cole may be exactly as he appears, the people around him very much aren't and what looked like a straightforward story becomes something a lot more complex and morally ambiguous. I don't think every element of this plot held together, but it was a lot of fun and it kept surprising me, so it did what a thriller is supposed to do.

Back when the part of the pandemic where stores were closed, my favorite bookstore allowed people to book appointments for a half hour of shopping and I jumped on the chance to finally see the top part of a good friend's face as we bought more books than planned, out of an excess of joy at being out in the world for a short time. At the time A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders had just been published and I eyed the book for several minutes before deciding to wait for the paperback. I will gleefully mark up a paperback, but will not so much as dog-ear the page of a hardcover, and this felt like a book I would want to at least underline a few passages.

I was right about it, this is a book that invites the reader to interact with it, to draw conclusions, to highlight sentences, and to tab the spots where they will want to return. Saunders presents seven short stories by Russian authors and then takes the reader through what the author was doing and how he did it. Along the way, there is discussion about everything from the predictable lessons on characterization and plotting, to how translation affects a work, to how a story might transcend the author's intentions.

I was reading other books as I worked my way through this and I found myself choosing short story collections and reading those stories differently, with a greater appreciation for the skill involved in making a character, or several characters, immediately into individuals, and how the beats of a story are spaced and structured. Saunders is a gifted and generous teacher and I'm glad to have expanded my skills as a reader. I can see myself rereading this book in a few years.

>94 RidgewayGirl: This thread is a dangerous place to visit! I’ve taken another BB for A Swim….

>94 RidgewayGirl: I have this in the TBR pile after picking it up at a reading he did in Manchester just after the pandemic. He had pre-signed all the books to try and avoid covid, and I thought 'well, I should show willing' so I bought this and the short story collection they were promoting. He was so lovely as a speaker, I could have happily listened to another hour.
I really must pick this up!

>94 RidgewayGirl: What a lovely story, and you hit me with a BB - adding that one to The List.

>94 RidgewayGirl: I really like the sound of this one. Onto the wishlist it goes...

>95 Charon07: Hanging out in the Category Challenge does mean that you're never at a loss for what to read next.

>96 charl08: I heard him speak at a book festival and, boy, do the other authors clearly think he's amazing. Have you read any of his short stories?

>97 Crazymamie: And the person I met at the bookstore was VictoriaPL, who has a thread here.

>98 Jackie_K: I think you'll appreciate it, Jackie.

My Men by Norwegian author Victoria Kielland and translated by Damion Searls, is based on the life of Belle Guinness, a real woman who emigrated from Norway to the US and then murdered several people, including family members, in the early 1900s in the Midwest. Kielland changes some details, although not the protagonist's name, but she is less interested here in the details than she is in Belle's emotional state. The novel is told in the third person, but from within Belle's emotions, so that events are recounted not by what happened, but by how Belle felt. And in moments of great emotional upheaval, Belle goes silent, so that what happens is told in the aftermath.

This is a novel without sharp details, one of rounded corners, giving the impression of watching through a dirty window. And I suspect that the translation adds an addition layer of cloudy glass. This is, in other words, a hard novel to cipher. Despite the way the book follows Belle's state of mind, I don't know any more about this character after reading this book than I did beforehand.

>94 RidgewayGirl: What a great story and sounds like a great book!

>101 Tess_W: I highly recommend it. It has made me a better reader.

>94 RidgewayGirl: It's interesting that Saunders approached the collection that way. I might need to find a copy.

>94 RidgewayGirl: - I've been debating with myself for 5 days, but I think I'll take a BB for this and see if my local bookstore can get me a copy.

Lori and Betty, it was a fun book to read, because Saunders is so knowledgeable, kind and funny, and I have noticed that I do approach books differently and admire what I read a little more (and am less tolerant of overtly bad writing, but there is less of that, luckily).

>94 RidgewayGirl: that was such a good day! 😊

If you're American, you grew up with the story of the brave Indian maid who helped out Lewis and Clark on their journey across the western half of the American continent. What usually isn't included in the children's tale is that she was taken along as the enslaved chattel of their interpreter and that she was so, so young. Debra Magpie Earling tells the more complicated story in her novel, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea.

The book begins with Sacajawea's childhood, where her parents teach her about the world around her. Earling is doing something very interesting and difficult here -- her protagonist is from a society that is pre-literate and that has its own complicated spirituality based on nature. To recount Sacajewea's experiences in her own words is to enter a place where language is used differently, and while there is a note explaining what is intended, it was an effort for me to understand what is going on in beginning of the book. As Sacajawea grows up and as events in her life lead her into contact with both other tribes and with white men, her language changes accordingly, which was easier to follow, but also heartbreaking. This is not a happy story; it's full of beauty and poetry, but also full of pain as she is first kidnapped by a hostile tribe and then traded to a French Canadian when she is still a child. I admire what Earling has accomplished here, but I am not going to reread this one.

>107 RidgewayGirl: - I've seen/heard about this in a bunch of places. In fact, I think it's up for a few awards. Although I had a general idea of what the book was about, I think, based on your comments, that I might not rush right out to read it.

>108 dudes22: Betty, it's not an easy read, given the subject matter and the way the story is told, but I think it may be a book that is still around decades from now.

The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo is a detective novel set in an alternate world where the Argentinians won the Falklands War Malvinas War and continued on to occupy the United States. The Argentinian military developed a weapon called psychopigments -- clouds of colored powder that can alter people's emotions. The first, and deadliest is called Deep Blue, which destroys a person's memories. Military use of this psychopigment has turned the large American cities into ghost towns, the new metropolises are now located in places like Boise.

The story follows Kay Curtida, an psychopigment enforcement agent tracking down illegal pigments in the sleepy backwater of Daly City, whose proximity to a still dangerous San Francisco keeps it irrelevant. She dreams of the big time, pursuing complex cases instead of chasing petty criminals. Then a case turns out to be bigger and more interesting than anything she's ever seen. Is this her chance to finally get a transfer to the bright lights of Boise?

The first twenty pages of this novel were hard going. There's a lot of world building going on, which interrupts the flow of the story, and this part of the book is overwritten; there isn't a noun that escapes without an adjective or two. Fortunately, as the scaffolding of this alternate version of 2009 is finally erected, the adjectives also calm down and the story takes off. And that story is a lot of fun as Curtida tries to figure out what exactly is going on. The story involves a photogenic religious leader, a pawnbroker who collects all sorts of junk, an old love interest, Curtida's hopeful mother and a host of other colorful characters. While it does take longer to get going than most detective novels, this is an imaginative take on the genre.

>100 RidgewayGirl: I'm taking a BB for My Men. I am currently reading Little Deaths by Emma Flint and your review reminds me a little of that, although there also seem to be considerable differences.

>Hi Kay, I took a BB for My Men also. I saw that it was available at my library so I’m working it into this month’s reading rotation.

>111 MissBrangwen: I'm curious to find out what you think of it, especially if you read it in German. In my experience, Scandinavian languages translate more easily into German than English.

>112 lsh63: I'm also eager to find out what you think about it. Let's talk about it once you finish.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano centers on a family of four sisters and the man one of them married, but all of them loved in their own ways. William grew up with parents who were unable to love him, but he found a sense of belonging on the basketball court. While attending Northwestern, he meets a young woman and they quickly marry. Julia is focused and has a plan and William is grateful to be included. He also meets her family, including her three sisters and learns quickly that their relationship with each other is unbreakable. Yet, when a crisis occurs, the sisters find themselves in conflict and decisions are made that will affect them for decades.

This is a book about ordinary people, living ordinary lives. It's also a book where the emotional impact is well-earned, with a cast of characters whose actions feel very natural. One character is described as saving herself for her own Gilbert Blythe, a detail that perfectly described the life of a bookish young person -- is there anyone who was a young avid reader whose first crushes were not fictional? Napolitano's writing is very workmanlike, yet it serves the no-nonsense feel of this story. There's also a wonderful sense of place, of the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago as it changes over the decades. I can see why this novel is a bestseller and if you're a fan of books like Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and A Man Called Ove, you'll probably love this book as well.

>114 RidgewayGirl: - I have this on my nightstand waiting. I think it might be picked for my book club later this year and I'm waiting til closer to the meeting to read it.

>115 dudes22: It's the March pick for my book club, but the library hold list was so long that I put myself on the list early, so of course it came in right away.

>114 RidgewayGirl: Aww, Gilbert! Definitely an early fictional crush of mine as well. :) I did like Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, so I may have to check this one out!

>117 christina_reads: It's charming. You'll like it.

>114 RidgewayGirl: I'm glad you liked this book and enjoyed your review. I have it on my desk in the TBR pile for this year.

Hi Kay, I’m back to report on My Men. Honestly I’m not sure what I read. The murders seemed to be written as an afterthought, and the reader never really gains any insight into Belle’s psyche. I looked to see what rating you gave, and we rated it the same.

>119 Tess_W: Tess, I look forward to finding out what you think of it. I'm looking forward to my book club's discussion next week, too.

>120 lsh63: I know, right? I felt like I didn't learn anything about Belle, and I had to refer to wikipedia just to get the broad outlines. The writing must be very good or there must have been something else about it that was lost in translation, because it won awards in Norway.

When her young son dies, a mother, overcome with sorrow, cuts open his body and takes a small segment of his lung. Placing it in a jar, she leaves her husband to return to Mexico City, where she feeds and nurtures the piece of lung until it eventually becomes something that isn't her son, or even human, but very much alive and with its own urges and tastes.

Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova begins as a story about grief and how it can pull people together and drive them apart, and then it becomes something else. Structured into four segments, following the mother, her best friend, the husband and finally, Monstrilio itself, this is a story that goes in unanticipated directions as the human characters care for the strange creature, but struggle to find a balance between letting it live its life and forming it into something like the lost son. This is an odd and oddly compelling story despite the characters behaving in ways that no actual person ever would.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is the kind of book to lose yourself in. Written by a storyteller at the top of his game, James McBride's account of the neglected community of Chicken Hill during the 1930s, when it was where immigrants and Jewish people landed before moving into one of Pottstown's more acceptable neighborhoods, and where Black Americans always lived. The story begins and ends with a body in a well, yet this isn't a mystery novel, but an expansive book about the many people who called Chicken Hill home. If you're looking for a tightly-constructed plot, this isn't the book for you; this one ranges here and there, while remaining centered on the small grocery store at the center of the community, run by a small Jewish woman who refuses to be quiet and whose compassion is legendary. For all this, McBride's story never forgets the harshness of the world in which these characters live. It's wonderfully told and while it seems to wander off into side stories, they all work together to make this book something remarkable.

>123 RidgewayGirl: OK, I had to give in and add this to my TBR. It’s been so well-reviewed and made all the “best of” lists and award short lists, but once again your review gave me the nudge to add it.

>124 Charon07: Every so often the right book gets all the attention.

>123 RidgewayGirl: Glad you liked this one--it's on my TBR.

>123 RidgewayGirl: I liked this one although the "mystery" bit was the lowest key one I think I've come across in a while...

>123 RidgewayGirl: A rare fiction book to add to my wishlist! That sounds great. I love stories where not much happens (yet everything does).

>123 RidgewayGirl: - This is already on my radar from many sources so I'll just add you to the group of referrals.

Tess, Jackie and Betty, you will enjoy it when you do get around to reading it.

Charlotte, the body in the well isn't a mystery, but a framing device -- it sets us off on the wild ride that culminates in how that body got in that well. It's funny--both my regular book club and my mystery book club chose this book to read. I think the first group will be pleased and the second group may feel cheated.

>114 RidgewayGirl: Hello Beautiful is a definite BB for me. Thank you for that one.

>123 RidgewayGirl: This is already on my wishlist - as well as a long wait list!

Looking forward to both.

Just stopping by to see what you're reading. Back at >123 RidgewayGirl:, I greatly enjoyed The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store as well, I believe it was a five star read for me. And way back at >114 RidgewayGirl:, I also enjoyed Hello Beautiful.

>131 VivienneR: Vivienne, the library hold list was so long, I ended up buying a copy.

>132 lsh63: It's funny how often the books we're reading overlap.

I am enjoying your reviews of this year's ToB shortlist books. I'm rather behind in my ToB reading, but I did finish The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store recently (and agree with your review) and will be starting Hello Beautiful soon. I did read a few from the longlist and All the Sinners Bleed was a standout for me.

>134 mathgirl40: I've heard a lot of good things about All the Sinners Bleed, which is great since it's one of my book club's choices for later in the year.

In antebellum New Orleans, a woman and her young daughter are sold to a man who wants them to care for his townhouse. He spends much of his time at his slave labor camp, called a plantation, a day's ride from the city with his family. I don't want to give any of the plot away, except that it encompasses both terrible hardship and abuse, as well as love and women in unendurable circumstances finding ways to fight back. The novel changes in tone decidedly partway through, one half being an account of a girl growing up enslaved, and the second part being a rousing adventure story.

The center of this book is the city of New Orleans, a place where slavery thrived, human beings were bought and sold, but also a place where some Black people were free and had a vibrant culture of their own. Maurice Carlos Ruffin excels in both making the horror of slavery evident, without that horror feeling exploitative, and in emphasizing the agency and humanity of those who were enslaved. And I love the title, The American Daughters, and how it claims that title for its brave Black women, both enslaved and free, working to prevent the Confederacy from winning the war.

>136 RidgewayGirl: I am going to add The American Daughters to my Thingaversary List - it sounds good!

>133 RidgewayGirl: Long holds list here too. The region libraries (where I can borrow) has 164 holds on 13 copies. I'm number 93. I haven't seen that many holds on a book since A promised land by Barack Obama.

>137 DeltaQueen50: Ruffin knows how to tell a story. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

>138 VivienneR: That's wild. But I suspect you'll move up quickly as people give up, like I did.

In Alice McDermott's novel, Absolution, Tricia is a young wife who accompanied her husband to Saigon. It's 1963, and the expat life of garden parties, evening drinks and children attending the international school while living in lavish homes cared for by local help is still normal. Tricia, by nature a good girl who grew up working class Catholic in Yonkers, is ready to do her part to help her husband's career. She's naturally shy, but keenly observant and she falls in easily with Charlene, a woman with goals and plans and the forceful nature needed to carry them out. She's quickly co-opted into Charlene's work, at first bringing toys to hospitalized children (and cigarettes to their parents), then into a plan that involves trips out to a leper colony. But the war is becoming something that can't be ignored and Tricia is forced into looking at how the very best of intentions can do harm.

The novel takes the form of letters written between Tricia and Charlene's daughter, in which Tricia explains how people thought and acted in that time and place, through the lens of what we now know. It's a balancing act, to tell the story of a woman in 1963, through her eyes then and now and McDermott is able to make that work. Charlene's actions, and therefore many of Tricia's were what we would look at now with a critical eye, as does the present day Tricia, looking closely at how what they were doing was just feel-good work for a large part, but also work that sometimes did real good and sometimes real harm. McDermott's characters seem fairly simple on the surface, but there's a lot of complexity under the surface. I will be thinking about the characters and the choices they made for some time. I recommend going into this book knowing as little as possible about it ahead of time.

People who perform on instinct do not keep vast libraries of information in their heads. They do not concentrate in company as if taking an important exam. They do not need to shut down frequently and turn off all the lights to find relief. And even then, find that peace does not come.

Sunday is living in a small town in the Lake District of England, divorced and with a 16 year old daughter she loves deeply, but is also somewhat in awe of. Sunday is easily overwhelmed, needs her foods to be white, or at least pale, and has trouble navigating relationships, despite frequently turning to a book of etiquette. It's the 1980s, so while in a later time, she'd be labeled autistic, here she's mostly thought of as peculiar or difficult. Her refuge is her work, in the greenhouse of her ex-husband's farm. Then a new couple moves into the house next door and Vita sweeps Sunday into the heady whirlwind of her erratic life. It's not a friendship that should work, but Vita is so self-centered and her husband so eager to keep everyone having a good time that it all works and before long, both Sunday and her daughter are centering their lives around this couple. Which works so well until it doesn't.

All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow is gorgeously written book told from the point of view of a woman for whom the world is a frightening and hostile place, but who nevertheless keeps trying to find a way to belong. She is both keenly observant, as a survival tactic, and utterly unaware of much of what is going on around her. There's a sense of rising dread in this book, something the reader can see coming, but not clearly, because we're seeing the world through Sunday's eyes, and how the author managed to do that is astonishing from a debut novelist.

>123 RidgewayGirl: Someone else was praising the McBride book the other day. I may give it a try. I won't know if I like it until I give it a chance.

Found you! >123 RidgewayGirl: That sounds intriguing! I haven't read any of McBride's novels, only his memoir The Color of Water, which I loved. I'll see if I can get hold of a library copy of The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store.

>142 thornton37814: I think you might like it. It's so full of heart.

>143 cbl_tn: I've heard nothing but praise for his memoir. I will have to read it, but I have a copy of The Good Lord Bird to read first.

I thought of how the world can be anything and how sad it is that it's this.

Chain Gang All-Stars is not the kind of book I pick up. From being set in an alternative version of the world to the violence of the deathmatches that form the backbone of the novel, I'm not the intended reader here. But Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah wrote one of the most brilliant and inventive short story collections that I have read, one that if you haven't read, you should go right now and read it. So what do you do when an author you think is uniquely talented writes a novel you don't like the look of? If you're me, you end up reading it anyway, pushed by its inclusion in the Tournament of Books.

In this version of the world, which is very close to what actually exists, prison inmates can opt into fighting a series of deathmatches and if they survive for three years, they will be freed. While our real prisons are often shockingly terrible places, in this world there's the addition of a taser-like weapon known as an influencer, which causes indescribable pain, and prison labor is even harsher and more deadly. Here, we are introduced to Staxxx and Thurwar, two women who have managed to survive on the circuit, Thurwar just weeks from being the first woman to win her freedom. As we accompany the two women through their season, we also dip into the lives of fans, activists protesting the "sport," and other contestants.

I found this book both hard to read and difficult to set aside. Adjei-Brenyah's writing isn't showy or beautiful, but it forces the reader into being interested, into caring for people who have done bad things, but who nonetheless do not deserve what is inflicted on them. This is an obvious indictment of our current prison industry, complete with footnotes directly relating the novel to real events and facts. While the story he's telling is shocking, it's also far too believable.

Just stopping by to catch up on your thread. 😊

>146 VictoriaPL: Hi, Victoria!

Gunther went downstairs and sat alone in the kitchen, watched the snow turn serious. The truth was that Gunther did feel windless. He felt unusually calm and he wasn't sure it felt good, though he was pleased with how he was handling the situation with his daughter. He held his hand out, like a gunfighter in a movie, to check his steadiness. His hand did not quiver. He checked his pulse. Fifty. It had never been fifty. He wanted to be anxious about his newfound serenity, but instead he grew even more relaxed. The irony was not lost on him and in fact played out as being strange and slightly amusing.

Percival Everett is one of my favorite novelists but one can never be sure if an author who writes novels well will have the same mastery of the short story. I've been disappointed before. But Everett excels at the form, in Half an Inch of Water giving brief looks at lives lived in rural Colorado and Wyoming. The main characters here are mostly men, mostly Black men, living alone, or with their families, all looking to do the right thing, keeping mostly to themselves. In the first story, a vet goes out on horseback to help search for a missing child and finds much more than he'd expected, in another, a horseman helps a woman with her riding, but is taken aback when she takes his practical advice as life lessons. In The Day Comes, the story I pulled the above quote from, the slightly bored sheriff of a quiet rural district deals with the usual small problems and then a much larger one. Each story is carefully crafted and manages to create a large impact in just a few pages.

In this sequel to The Searcher, Tana French brings us back to the rural Irish community of Ardnakelty. The Hunter shows the community slowly accepting Cal Hooper, the American in-comer who has taken on the under-parented Trey and taught her woodworking skills while providing her the stability and guidance she needed. But that all changes when Trey's father returns with a get rich scheme that the local farmers, already strained by a long heat wave, are susceptible to. Tensions mount, not helped by the weather and a little deliberate incitement, until the stakes are raised by murder.

This is a solid crime novel and a good story, filled with characters and their relationships with each other developing over time in a way that feels very real. The Ardnakelty countryside may be beautiful, but this insular community has more than its fair share of secrets and long-held grievances. French knows how to write dialogue, writing in the cadences of the Irish accent, making this novel a pleasure to read as well as a great page turner. She took her time developing Cal's relationship to this community and now that slow build pays off here.

>149 RidgewayGirl: I just got this from the library today. I’m looking forward to diving into it.

>150 lsh63: I have spent the last three days reading this book and getting very little else done. Enjoy!

Penelope teaches English in a high school and attempts to scrape by on a 37K salary. Then she writes a novel and, after it becomes a social media favorite, she quits her job to be a part of the team turning her novel into a movie script. As she dutifully attends party after party held in the homes of producers and screenwriters, she attempts to prevent her writing partners from turning her novel into a superhero movie, and begins to feel like her protagonist is reaching out to influence things. Penelope's experiences in Los Angeles are alternated with chapters from her book, an odd, feminist thriller about environmental peril and mermaids.

American Mermaid by Julia Langbein is a funny book about a young woman trying to find a place for herself in the world that demands she be money-oriented and willing to parlay her unexpected success into a high paying career. What Penelope really wants is the question she'll have to answer eventually, but meanwhile there are some fiercely self-possessed teenage girls, a co-worker who stockpiles pizza and a screenplay that seems to add to itself to figure out. The writing is witty and intelligent and humorous. I'm looking forward to whatever Langbein writes next.

Wandering Stars is Tommy Orange's sequel to his debut novel, There There, about Native Americans living in Oakland, California. Orange first takes the story back in time, into the lives of the grandparents, great-grandparents, and further back, all the way to the Sand Creek Massacre, and then forward through the years of incarceration, exile and loss, to the years of struggling to make new lives without the foundations of the old in Oklahoma and on to California. Then the novel moves forward, to after the events of There There, following Orvil, Opal, Jackie and others as they deal with what happens after.

Orange's second novel is more assured but no less pointed than his first. Providing the background makes what follows more understandable and harder to deal with. It also focuses on the aftermath of a shooting, the part that isn't newsworthy, the painful recovery into a new normal with the trauma of the event left for the survivors to come to terms with, or not, with the help of weekly therapy sessions, or not. And when a family is already struggling in other ways, someone who is quiet about their pain and the ways they find to address it can go a long time without being noticed. By tying this second novel so tightly to his first, Orange has written something that will be treasured by those who read There There, but inaccessible to those who didn't. Go read There There, then come back for this one. You will not be disappointed.

"That's why people like Vévoda always have the advantage, you know," Corbeau says, rubbing her nose. "Over people like us. Because we're cursed with the belief that people matter. It's much, much easier to bend the world to your will if bending the world is what matters most to you."

S. is several different books at once. At the base, there's the physical book; a very satisfyingly weighty object with library binding and a library sticker on the spine called, rather obviously, Ship of Theseus. That volume holds the last work of famed author V.M. Straka, a mysterious person whose identity is the subject of debate. In this novel, a man washes ashore at a small industrial port city currently in the midst of a labor strike. He is quickly swept up in the chaos and ends up taking shelter with the ringleaders of the strike as things rapidly fall apart and they are forced to flee across the mountains. Eventually, the man ends up back on board the ship that had left him at the city, and no matter what he does, he ends up back on this ship, one that becomes more and more battered as damaged parts are replaces with ever flimsier substitutions.

The next part of this book are the footnotes written by his translator, a person who never met Straka, but who has spent their life working for him. Straka himself was seemingly disappeared, or chose to disappear, the pages of this novel left scattered in the alleyway behind the hotel where he was taken. There are clues and codes embedded in the footnotes and relate to Straka's history of being part of a band of artists fighting an evil corporate entity.

Then there's the story of an English major working part-time in the university library who finds a copy of Ship of Theseus "owned" (see library markings) by a graduate student expelled from the university who is desperately trying to find out who Straka really was, even as the professor he had studied under has taken his work and is trying to discredit him. As the two correspond through notes written in the margins, they begin to work together to find out who Straka was and what exactly happened to him, leaving information between the pages of the book. There's an added layer in this correspondence, as they go back and forth through the book with their messages, so that a single page can hold messages from different times in their storyline.

The result of all of this is a very tactile and interactive book, where there are maps scrawled on napkins and all sorts of comments on the text as the story progresses. Doug Dorst has created an intricate work where the various elements enhance each other. It's a slow reading process, and one that requires more from the reader than just turning pages, and I very much enjoyed my time with this book. There is an audio version of this book, which boggles my mind.

American Mermaid sounds interesting.

>155 hailelib: An English teacher is the main character. I think it gets extra points for that.

>154 RidgewayGirl: I have this one! It is waiting for its perfect reading moment. I look forward to it. :-)

>157 cbl_tn: I hope you like it as much as I did.

Claire Keegan's stories are in such demand that she can publish a tiny collection of just three stories, two of them from previous collections, and have people (namely, me) eagerly buy the slim hardcover. So Late in the Day begins with the new story, in which a man goes through his day thinking back on a relationship that ended tragically, given the reactions of his co-workers as he goes about his day. What happened and why is slowly revealed in ways that show just how masterful a writer Keegan is. The next story, The Long and Painful Death, follows a woman on a writing retreat, staying in a cottage Henrich Böll had used. Just as she begins to settle in, her peace is imposed upon by a man who wants to tour the cottage and her attempts to keep to her plans for her days there are impinged upon by the man's presence. The final story, Antarctica, follows a married woman who has decided to have a brief fling in the city.

Each story involves the relationships between men and women, and whether the relationships are glancing or intimate, involve men acting as though their own desires were the only ones that mattered. These stories are far less hopeful than her previous two longer short stories published in this format, but they are every bit as assured and resonant.

I like the physical form this book takes, treating just three short stories as though they were as important as a novel, and the way they are formatted on the page, with generous margins and a title page for each story.

>148 RidgewayGirl: I'm taking a BB for Half an Inch of Water. I loved the other Everett books I've read and am very pleased to hear that his short stories didn't disappoint.

I have an intense fondness for the 1992 figure skating romcom, The Cutting Edge, and end up watching it whenever I run across it. So I was immediately drawn to From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata, since the synopsis sounded very similar to the movie. In this book, Jasmine is a pairs figure skater without a partner. She's prickly and quick to fight (so more Tonya Harding than Kate Moseley). She hates Ivan Lukov, who is wealthy and holds several skating titles and gold medals, so when he wants her to be his new skating partner, her initial impulse is to turn him down, but she needs a partner and Ivan is very good, but can the two of them stop fighting and work together? The obvious answer is yes, and there's nothing surprising in this story, but there are many references to The Cutting Edge and several scenes that were cribbed from the movie. Since the story was told entirely from Jasmine's point of view, many of Ivan's actions made little sense, but I'm not sure that matters much. No one said, "Toepick!" which was a minor disappointment, but the pamchenko was referenced.

Thanks to christina_reads for this recommendation.

>161 RidgewayGirl: Haha I forgot the Pamchenko reference! Glad you enjoyed this one.

>159 RidgewayGirl: Foster passed us all by until Small Things Like These got such good reviews. I was pleased to find So Late in the Day, just the title story, as a Kindle bargain and will read it soon. It won't take long. Ireland knew about Claire Keegan, but the rest of us didn't. There must be so many good writers lurking in obscurity. How to find them?

>163 pamelad: My answer is to just keep reading debut novels and the short story collections written by local authors that you find in independent bookstores. Even if you don't discover the next Keegan, you'll have a lot of good books to read.

>161 RidgewayGirl: oh my! I might have to find this one! Toepick!