RidgewayGirl Reads More Books in 2024, Part Two

Spring is here and, thanks to a long series of allergy shots, I'm facing it upright and with all of my fluids still in my body, rather than streaming out of my face. I've prepared the screen porch and I'm reading to start spending time outside. My goal of reading randomly was interrupted by the Tournament of Books, but that being over, I'm back to choosing my books by whim and happenstance.

Happy Spring!





Currently Reading



Recently Read



Recently Acquired



Reading Miscellany

Owned Books Read: 17

Library Books Read: 22

Audiobooks: 1

Netgalley: 7

Borrowed:

Books Acquired:42

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)
2. People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated from the Javanese by Tiffany Tsao

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
5. The Moon of Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice

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
5. Real Americans by Rachel Khong

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
4. Trondheim by Cormac James
5. Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp

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
5. The Disappeared: Stories by Andrew Porter

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
3. Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde edited by Bregje Gerritse

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
3. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv
4. All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

Category Eight



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

1. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
2. The Hunter by Tana French
3. The Angel of Indian Lake by Stephen Graham Jones
4. Hard Girls by J. Robert Lennon

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)
6. Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan (Longlisted, Women's Prize for Fiction, 2024)

Category Ten



Books Read on my iPad

1. Cold People by Tom Rob Smith
2. From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata
3. The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas
4. We Were the Universe by Kimberly King Parsons

Category Eleven



Books with a Strong Sense of Place

1. Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
2. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
3. The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell
4. King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich

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
17. The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell
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

Welcome in, friends. I baked a cake.

Happy new thread! I am DYING at the Pepys Peeps!

I told you what I thought of that cake! Is there tea?

>14 christina_reads: It made me laugh when I saw it, and it's perfect for Spring.

>15 VictoriaPL: I'll make a pot right now!

Fourteen years went by and the Wilsons' luck held. Fourteen years is a long time to stay lucky even for rich people who don't cause trouble for anyone.

I went through it with In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, a short story collection written by Ellen Gilchrist and first published in 1981. I began the collection and was quickly enamored of the voice; it's like Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Parker were collaborating to have the most terrible things happen to cruel and thoughtless people. And slowly, sometime around the fourth or fifth use of the n-word, I felt qualms. 'Maybe Gilchrist is just really committed to using the words her characters, white people living in the South in the 1970s, would have used?' I rationalized, and maybe? It shows up as a descriptive term used by the omniscient narrator as well, so I will say that perhaps some short stories age better than others and there's a reason she isn't much read nowadays. And about the fourth or fifth short story I started to get tired of bad things happening to bad and careless people.

Then, two-thirds through this book about mean people the author clearly disliked, something extraordinary happened. I reached Revenge, a longer short story in which a girl is sent to spend the summer of 1942 in the South with her grandparents and her cousins, all boys, who exclude her from their project of becoming Olympic athletes. She is enraged by their behavior.

I prayed they would get polio, would be consigned forever to iron lungs. I put myself to sleep at night imagining their labored breathing, their five little wheelchairs lined up by the store as I drove by in my father's Packard, my arm around the jacket of his blue uniform, on my way to Hollywood for my screen test.

Rhoda is not exactly a sympathetic character, but Gilchrist here takes the time to inhabit her life so that I understood her frustration with being stuck inside when she really needed to run around outside. It's a great story with a fantastic ending, one that fully respects who Rhoda is. A perfect story and one I don't think I will soon forget. And, in the stories that follow, Gilchrist continues to excel, each story centering a girl unable to conform to what's expected, while still fully inhabiting the prejudices and expectations of her time and place. It's superbly well done.

How to reconcile a book of stories that have aged badly, but that include some brilliant stories? I have no idea.

Happy New Thread! I'd like just a sliver of that cake - it looks good.

Happy new thread. I have to pass on the cake (I am allergic to raspberries), but I would love a cup of tea.

Happy new thread Kay, I’m here for not only the cake, but the BB in >17 RidgewayGirl:. I do love my short stories!

I’m here for the new book memes! (And the cake!) How did you enjoy the Rooster this year? I’d only read one of the contenders, and it was knocked out in the first round.

>18 dudes22: Thanks, Betty. And you are welcome to as large a slice as you want.

>19 lowelibrary: VictoriaPL hates raspberries, so you can sit next to her.

>20 lsh63: Lisa, I highly suggest just reading the stories in the final section.

>21 Charon07: It was good! I thought that there were more books included this year that I wasn't interested in reading, but it's always so much fun. We were asked to help them define what kinds of books we wanted to see and I think that will help with next year. What was the book you read?

My favourite illustrations are the Calvin and Hobbes and Kate Beaton comics! All of them are very well chosen. Happy new thread.

>23 rabbitprincess: Thanks, rp. I could have used only comics pulled from Hark! A Vagrant, but decided to not do that to people.

>22 RidgewayGirl: Open Throat, and I loved it. It was very moving. I think the flaws that the judges and the commentariat pointed out were fair, and I didn’t expect it to get far, but I was sorry to see it knocked out so soon.

Edited to add that I hope to read Blackouts and several other short-listed books, but the wait list is incredibly long at my library.

>25 Charon07: Open Throat was a favorite of many of the people who follow the ToB.

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabelle Allende and translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle begins with the story of a six year old boy in Vienna in 1938, beginning with the terrible night when his father disappears and he and his mother take shelter in the upstairs apartment of a war veteran while their own apartment is vandalized. He is later placed on a train filled with other Jewish children and sent to live out the war safely in England.

Then, in 1981, another child it taken to the city by her father for healthcare. While she is there, the residents of her village in El Salvador, El Mozote, are all murdered by the military. She and her father flee north to the United States and attempt to put together a life in this new country.

And in 2019, another young girl and her mother arrive in Arizona after a dangerous journey from El Salvador. They are quickly separated and while Anita is terrified, she ends up with allies, an immigration advocate and the lawyer working pro bono. Their first task is to find her mother.

The stories of these three children intertwine over time, and that story is both harsh and lovely. Allende is making a point here, about how damaging being left alone can be for a child, but also how desperate a parent has to be to let a child go in the hopes that they will at least survive. She is interested in what happens in the new, strange place, when the people around that child are not necessarily nurturing or welcoming and the lasting damage done, but also the people who are willing to open their hearts to these children. Allende herself founded a non-profit helping children immigrating to the US and her knowledge of the situation is clear in her writing.

>27 RidgewayGirl: This description reminds me of a children's book (very good, made me cry) with immigrants from different places over multiple time periods: Refugee by Alan Gratz.

Happy new thread but you really got me thinking regarding >7 RidgewayGirl:!

If there was an apocalypse I have five Kindles that I could load with books but if there was no way to recharge I would be totally screwed. Talk about hell on earth!!

Happy new thread! The book memes are fabulous - so is the cake! Are you sure there is enough cake to go around this crowd?

>28 ReneeMarie: That looks wonderful.

>29 DeltaQueen50: You can come over to my house, Judy. There are plenty of physical books here. I would be sorry to lose the books living on my iPad, though.

>30 VivienneR: Thanks, Judy. I'm baking cookies today as my son is due for a care package, so if we run out of cake there are always salted caramel cookies.

Happy New Thread! I had to laugh about all the memes, especially the medieval helmets! And I took a BB for >27 RidgewayGirl: The Wind Knows My Name - it sounds like a heart-breaking but important novel.

>27 RidgewayGirl: Happy new thread! Allende is hit or miss for me, but I'm going to put this on on my WL.

>32 MissBrangwen: There's quite a bit of hope in this novel as well. I look forward to finding out what you think of it.

>33 Tess_W: It's missing the magical realism vibe that made The House of Spirits a five star read for me.

In this final installment of the Indian Lake trilogy, The Angel of Indian Lake, Jade is no longer a teenager, no longer an inmate and, thanks to the influence of her best friend, Letha, she's making a stab at adulthood teaching history at Proofrock high school. Sure, she's still smoking a lot and maybe not sleeping much, but she's retired from the final girl stuff, getting therapy, and even wearing pantyhose and sensible heels to work. So when some local kids go missing, it's not her problem anymore. And when a head rolls through the middle of the school car line, her only involvement is in babysitting the new sheriff's toddler. But Jade can't just opt out of what's happening and soon enough she'd drawn across the lake once again.

In any trilogy, the final book has to pull everything together while also providing larger stakes and in this regard The Angel of Indian Lake delivers. This isn't a book that will make sense when read out of order, but if you've read the previous two books, you'll find this to be a satisfying ending, even if Stephen Graham Jones is far too eager to kill off favorite characters. Adult Jade is still prickly, but she's also oddly empathetic, understanding the trauma of the people around her and hoping to help them. There's more gore and jump scares than ever. Jones has a read love of slasher movies.

When they get the phone call that their oldest son is in a coma in a hospital in the Norwegian city of Trondheim, Lil and Alba hurry there from their apartment in France, leaving their two other children, to be at their son's side. At the hospital, they are left waiting to see if he will regain consciousness and to find out what the damage to his brain is. Cormac James's novel follows the two women as they wait, stuck in a stressful situation, where the only thing they can do is wait. And, as they wait, as the medical staff work to pull him out of his coma, the fissures in their relationship are laid bare.

There's a lot of good stuff in this novel. James writes well and the character studies of the two women, especially Lil, are interesting. The Norwegian hospital and how the medical staff become involved in the lives of this small family is detailed and very different from how this same situation would be handled in the US. There are, however, two issues I have with this novel. The first is that I wonder why the author chose to make the characters two women, when their marriage is a stereo-typed caricature of a heterosexual relationship, with one character being uncommunicative, contemptuous of her wife, enjoying casual affairs and preferring to drink over showing any affection for the woman she married. The other woman is nurturing, has a body that shows the impact of three pregnancies, knits, needs affection, has religious beliefs and keeps her own anger hidden from everyone, including herself. My second issue is the lack of character development. Despite the great upheaval and shock of their son's medical emergency, neither woman changes at all during this book. I waited for a confrontation, a real conversation, a reconciliation, or a decision from one of them that being married to someone you hate is unhealthy and divorce is a reasonable solution, at the very least, and (spoiler alert) none of that happened. James does write well and I'm interested in seeing how he develops as a writer.

There's something great about reading a novel by an author you trust, isn't there? Hard Girls is by J. Robert Lennon, so I started off thinking that I was going to enjoy a wild ride that would surprise me a few times, and it turned out I was right. Jane is a mother in her mid-thirties, married and working as administrative assistance at the same college her father teaches at, which lets her keep an eye on him. She's worked hard to build this ordinary existence, and then a single email from her twin sister throws it all into the air. It all has to do with her mother, who disappeared decades ago and had not really been around much when Jane was a child and she and her sister developed Harriet the Spy-level skills to try to figure out what was going on with her. Moving back and forth from her childhood to her teen years to Jane's present day, the story is both a thriller with a lot going on and a nuanced look at the relationships between mothers and daughters. It looks like this is the first of a planned series and I will be reading every single one of them.

>34 RidgewayGirl: That might work for me. I'm' not a fan of magical realism and that's why Allende is a hit or miss for me.

The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas consists as a bundle of papers collected at a boutique hotel on a Greek island. The first section is a letter, written by Evelyn to her husband, Richard, on their honeymoon. In it, she explains why she is leaving him, going back through their relationship, but with the most detail on the events of the past days. It's compelling--and sets the reader up for a she said/he said dissection of a relationship, an impression enforced by the second section beginning with a letter written by Richard about their relationship, but that's not what Thomas is doing here, or not all that she is doing here. There's also the hotel owner, about whom the couple react to strongly, but very differently. In this novel, what is happening is happening, but so is a lot of other things, events and perspectives on the same events.

Thomas is a skilled writer and she's managed to pull off a novel that begins as one thing and ends as another. It's best to go into this novel knowing as little as possible about it. All I will say is that the novel is both a portrayal of the sexual dynamics between a newly married couple and something else entirely.

Who knew I needed marshmallow version of Samuel Pepys in my life? Until now, not me!
Hoping to see what you make of Marzahn mon amour It caught me at exactly the right time and mental space.

>40 Helenliz: I'm eager to read Marzahn, mon amour! (looks anxiously over at the bookcase holding all the other books that I want to read right now)

The Moon of Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice is the sequel to the surprising and fascinating apocalyptic novel, The Moon of Crusted Snow, in which the inhabitants of an isolated reserve in northern Ontario are cut off from the rest of the world when all communication technology suddenly stops working. At the beginning of this sequel, twelve years have passed and the small Anishinaabe tribe have settled a short distance from their old settlement, having built traditional dwellings and having embraced their heritage, from their language and customs to the ways they interact with the world around them. And for a time, that has served them well, but now the lake holds fewer fish and they realize that they will need to move to a new location. A plan is hatched to send a small group to their ancestral grounds on the banks of Georgian Bay. This novel is the story of that journey.

I'm an outlier on this, but I am so tired of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic novels. There's a sameness to them and I find it hard to be pulled into the same tired story. The Moon of Crusted Snow was different enough for me to be intrigued and Rice created characters who were very likable. The sequel was fine, but it falls into the patterns of the genre, making it more predictable. Still, for those who loved the first book, the sequel will be a satisfying read.

I so much want to read (or listen) to The Moon of Turning Leaves as I loved the first book. Unfortunately it isn’t available for Australians yet unless I buy the imported paperback for $AUD52 (about $US33).

>43 Zozette: Oh, yikes. The book situation is one of Australia's few drawbacks (also the snakes and spiders.)

In Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, Rachel Aviv uses four case studies to explore the interaction between psychiatry and the actual lives of the people who fall under its care for varying reasons. A woman in India becomes increasingly involved in living spiritually, and Aviv uses this case to explore how religious behavior and western psychiatry can conflict. A man spends months in an institute undergoing psychotherapy, losing his family and career along the way, only to have pharmaceuticals quickly lift him from his depression. Aviv here looks at the tension between therapy and modern pharmaceuticals as well as society's belief that certain mental illnesses are personal failings rather than errors in brain chemistry. A young Black woman's mental health issues go unaddressed until she ends up incarcerated, highlighting how society is set up to provide support to some, and punishment to others. And a woman, having been prescribed an ever changing and increasing cocktail of drugs to manage her depression is faced with the difficult task of trying to wean herself off the drugs.

The book is also prefaced and ended with an account of her own early childhood stay in a mental health ward and how the two girls she looked up to while she was there had lives that turned out very differently than her own.

There's so much here, and it's all so fascinating. Aviv isn't advocating for specific approaches (although she is clear on the need for more funding and improvements to mental healthcare), but exploring the places where the contradictions lay. It makes sense that an organ as complex as the human brain would sit uncomfortably with simple answers or that what works for one person would also work for another. Aviv is also so deeply caring of her four subjects and her reporting here includes family members and those who have interacted with them, showing how mental illness doesn't only affect the person disabled by the illness. Aviv knows how to tell a story and her attention to detail is effective here. This is a far cry from the usual "look at this wacky mental illness and how it makes this guy act weird" approach and I'll be thinking about the issues she raises and the very real people she writes about for some time.

>45 RidgewayGirl: Thanks for this review! It sounds like a book we ought to have in the library where I work. I'm going to put in an order request.

>46 cbl_tn: It really is a fantastic book about mental illness. I would never have picked it up except it's my book club book for next week. I'm going to have to thank whoever suggested it.

>47 RidgewayGirl: isn't it great when a book comes at you like that, one you'd never have picked up without a prompt and yet you get something from it.
It sounds like a very considered account.

>48 Helenliz: That this happens does help me to approach the book club books that don't look interesting to me with an open heart.

For those who enjoy the Jackson Brodie books -- Kate Atkinson has a new installment called Death at the Sign of the Rook that will be released in August.

Rachel Khong wrote the delightful Goodbye Vitamin, and now she has a new novel that takes on three generations of the same family to look at the reasons they split apart and how they might come back together. Real Americans begins in the middle with Lily Chen, raised by immigrants from China, she feels her mother's disappointment in her lack of purpose, as she works unpaid as an intern and struggles to get by with a series of side gigs. When she meets Matthew, the golden son of a family whose immense wealth is based on their pharmaceutical company, they feel a real connection but their differences may sink their relationship. Then there's Nick, raised by his mother in a small Washington community, feeling like an outsider. Reconnecting with his father is fraught, but that's not the only family member he's never had the opportunity to get to know. And finally, the book goes back to the beginning, with a bright, determined girl growing up in rural China, eager to find a way to get to university, but that opportunity is destroyed by the Cultural Revolution and her best chance may be to get out of the country with the young man who wants to leave too.

Often, the different timeline structure doesn't work, but here, Khong keeps the book structured into three distinct sections, so there's no jumping around. She also gives each generation's story a different tone and style to reflect the time in which it is set. Khong writes so well, and is so deliberate in her choices, yet there's an effortlessness to her writing that made the entire novel a lot of fun to read. There's a lot of ground covered in this novel, but at its heart it's the story of family and of forgiveness and learning to understand each other across the generations. I loved this book.

>50 RidgewayGirl: Taking a BB for this one!

>51 christina_reads: I'd be interested in hearing what you think about it.

There was also, that spring, the sensation of getting older. It was right there in the mirror, of course, but it was also in other places--the supermarket, where I walked among young people without any of them ever looking up to notice me. It was in the absence of this acknowledgement, I think, that I felt the greatest sadness. It was the reality of being unseen, of walking through life as a ghost.

In The Disappeared: Stories by Andrew Porter, men, usually in their early forties, usually living in Austin, but also sometimes in San Antonio, wrestle with aging and the pressure to have figured things out by now. They work, if they are employed, as adjuncts or in some administrative job at the university, still sort of working on that project, or carefully avoiding recognizing that they've abandoned that film/artwork. You'd think a short story collection in which the protagonist could almost be the same guy would end up being boring or repetitive, but Porter's writing is so good and this everyman character he's playing with is a guy we all know and he's kind of likeable. Each story captures something about the human condition, while also being specifically anchored in a specific time and place. It's all a little reminiscent of Cheever while being entirely its own thing.

There's a giant book sale happening this weekend a few hours drive from me and I am trying to justify going. On the one hand, I have a lot of books. On the other hand, BOOK SALE.

A few hours away? How do you even know about it? I wish someplace near here would have a book sale. Ours seem to start later in the spring than other places.

Good Morning Kay, giant book sale you say? I would definitely have decision paralysis with that one. I'm trying to resist bringing new books into the house, except for the electronic variety of course. Also, as usual I'm taking a BB for yet another short story collection in >53 RidgewayGirl:.

>49 RidgewayGirl: Oh, thank you for mentioning the new Jackson Brody book! And the good news is that it's at the "on order" stage at my library.

>55 dudes22: Betty, there's a site called booksalefinder.com. I moved a few years ago, from a place with a giant book sale and two FOL booksales every year and I miss that. Both nearby library systems have opted to have an area of donated books for sale instead of holding booksales. Nothing beats a big booksale though.

>56 lsh63: My decision paralysis lasted only a few minutes. I'm going on a road trip tomorrow. I'm working on keeping the number of books in the house constant and I have a good-sized donation pile now, so a few books should be fine.

>57 VivienneR: I got a thrill when I saw that she had a new book coming out and figured at least one other person would also be pleased with the news. Did you put your name on the hold list? There's nothing better than being notified on a book's publication date that it's waiting for you at the library.

>54 RidgewayGirl: I’d love to hear how the sale was when you get back! I was thinking of making a weekend trip to see the Botanical Gardens a little later (when most of the roses are in bloom), but maybe next year I’ll try to time my visit with the booksale.

>59 Charon07: It was a very large book sale, and the quality was higher than most, in my experience. If you decide to go next year, we should meet up at the sale and egg each other on. I stuck to the fiction and literature sections and emerged with a modest stack of ten books, having enjoyed myself quite a bit. The line to check out was long, but from the complaints, you would never guess every single person in line had something to read with them.

>60 RidgewayGirl: That’s a good haul! And I’d love to meet up next year, when I’ll have hopefully read more of the books currently languishing on my shelves and can justify adding to the TBR.

>61 Charon07: My justification will always be being prepared in the case of a zombie apocalypse. And I've been slowly weeding out the books I liked but am unlikely to ever reread.

>62 RidgewayGirl: Zombie apocalypse, eh? I guess I could build an impenetrable bunker with walls of unread books! Or yeet the read ones at zombies’ heads?

>63 Charon07: When we are all hiding out and there's no internet or electricity, books will be the thing. I leave the fighting zombies and the survival stuff to others, I will lend people books.

>60 RidgewayGirl: Wow, a Persephone! I always feel like I've hit book sale gold when I find one. Great haul!

>53 RidgewayGirl: This sounds intriguing. I just started The Stories of John Cheever so the comparison caught my eye.

>60 RidgewayGirl: Nice haul! I just got back from my branch library's FOL book sale. I dressed appropriately in my "It's not hoarding if it's books" t-shirt.

>62 RidgewayGirl: I always say I am preparing for the Great Book Famine.

A book stack! I'm feeling the urge to shop Mr K's.
Just catching up on your thread.

>65 NinieB: I was very excited to find this one. They are hard to find in the US.

>66 cbl_tn: It so well-written and the protagonists feel like a kind of everyman, set in our present time. Nothing as poignant as Cheever can sometimes be. And that is a perfect t-shirt!

>67 VictoriaPL: Oh, I miss Mr. K's. To think it was just a five minute drive from my house.

She was unprepared to see the coast, plot after plot either empty or a pile of rubbish that used to be a house she envied. Miles and miles of destruction. She tried to find some pleasure in the fact that for once the wealthy had fared worse that the poorer people who couldn't afford to live on the water, but the effort failed. It was all carnage.

The Lower Quarter by Elise Blackwell is set in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. People are slowly returning and there's also an influx of new residents, eager for a fresh start. As Katrina bore down on the city, a man was murdered in a French Quarter hotel room but with the devastation, the police aren't doing much to solve the crime. But others are interested in what happened, especially since the man had in his possession three painting, only two of which are recovered from the hotel room. To find that third painting, Elizam, fresh out of prison, is sent in from the west coast. One of his first contacts is a woman named Johanna, a beautiful blonde who makes her living restoring artwork. She has plenty of work, repairing the damage the hurricane and the subsequent mold and humidity caused. Then there's Clay, the son of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in New Orleans. He's waiting for his share of the family wealth, occupying his time with various internet pursuits and in his own particular sexual practices. And, finally, there's Marion, who is scrambling to make ends meet through a variety of jobs, from sex work to bartending. She's really an artist, though, if she can find the time and money to keep painting.

Johanna was familiar with this move: a man seeking sympathy for being married to someone he had chosen to marry. It occurred to her that he might think she'd worn the blue dress--which was modest in its neckline but short enough to show her knees when she sat and mad of a snug-fitting knit--because of him. She wasn't above pursuing such men. Married men were usually easier to get rid of quickly. But not always, and then they were the biggest problem of all because they felt entitled to whatever it was they thought they were exploding their lives to obtain.

This novel is only superficially a crime novel and there are elements of noir in it, from the tough and haunted PI to the blonde bombshell with the mysterious past at the center of the novel. At heart, this is a novel about a specific city at a specific time in its history and a character study of four people. While it was well-written, that tension between what it appears to be and what it is makes the book less effective than it could be. Still, who doesn't like a bit of art theft and vivid rendering of a beautiful city as it remakes itself?

Wolf at the Table by Adam Rapp is the story of a large Catholic family beginning in 1951 when the oldest daughter, Myra, is thirteen and eager to get a few minutes alone to read, her family responsibilities as the oldest of six siblings take up much of her time. Each chapter follows a different family member, from the mother trying to keep her family running and God-fearing, through to the son, Alec, who seems to delight in small acts of cruelty. Each chapter jumps forward a few years, as the siblings grow up and set out to make their own ways in the world, some marrying and settling down and some floating around. Rapp focuses on two of the siblings and on one of their children, pulling in other family members here and there, each chapter almost standing on its own, but also building the story of this family.

Given away in the blurb and the marketing for this book is that one of the siblings is a serial murderer and that different members of the family know something is very wrong to differing degrees. It's well-integrated into the novel and doesn't distract from the interest I had in all the family members and their more ordinary concerns. Rapp has an eye for detail and writes well, and that one of the characters he centers is a woman who is just doing her best, without great adventures or ambitions was a good choice and made the whole novel far more interesting and true.

All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby is a dark and gritty crime novel set in a rural county on the banks of the Chesapeake in Virginia. Titus was with the FBI, but had to leave that job. Returning home to care for his father, he becomes sheriff in a county where the law has previously been unequally applied. He's determined to change that, despite resistance from those who feel threatened by change. A school shooting leads to the gruesome discovery of murdered children buried in a field and Titus is in a race to stop the murderer before he kills again, while simultaneously keeping a lid on the simmering tensions and fears in the county that the murders have fueled.

Cosby is an author who does a lot more than just write an entertaining crime thriller. Here, he sheds light on how tradition and habit have imbedded racism into the fabric of a small town's culture and how hard the pushback is to any sort of move towards equality. His portrayal of the people of this small town is clear-eyed and sharp, without ever descending into stereo-type or caricature. Titus is perhaps a little too perfect and too often right, but he's a complex and interesting character. It feels like we may see more of him in future novels and I would be happy to see what he does next. The crimes at the center of this mystery are particularly grim and while the descriptions are not graphic, they were still hard to read. I read Cosby's first novel and it's clear he becomes better with every book he writes and that he still has a great deal to say.

>60 RidgewayGirl: Terrific haul!

Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde : Along the Seine edited by Bregje Gerritse is one of those lavishly illustrated books based on art museum exhibitions that I usually buy to remember the art I saw, but don't really get around to reading. And, to justify my usual habit, the first essay in this book, about the industrialization and suburbanization of the area to the northwest of Paris was an effort to get through. It was interesting more in the abstract than the actuality. But then came the chapters that covered each of the five artists represented in this book; Vincent van Gogh, obviously, but also Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard, and Charles Angrand, and things became much more interesting.

Asnières is a suburb of Paris, and combined factories, bourgeois residential areas and the recreational possibilities of the river, along with being an inexpensive and short train journey from the city center. As working class Parisians increasingly visited the area on their days off, for a few years, some truly talented artists drew inspiration from the juxtaposition of the industrial and the bucolic. Van Gogh moved to Paris and began painting in Asnières, often in the company of one of the other artists mentioned here. It must have been an interesting experience, painting with Van Gogh as Signac remembered that he had a tendency to get over-excited and gesticulate violently, covering himself with paint, and also unsuspecting passers-by. Their influence was strong, moving Van Gogh from his early, traditional and murky works into the exuberant use of color and brushstroke that we are all familiar with.

The essays on each artist are not especially well-written, written as they are by art historians and curators, but the subject matter is interesting enough to override the dryness of the text. These artists were a contentious and enthusiastic bunch, forming close friendships and feuding with real energy. Bernard once refused to take part in an important show because Signac was already signed up and a visit to Van Gogh in Arles was cut short because of a fight. I am shallow enough to be entertained by 150 year old gossip.

But the real reason anyone buys these giant, heavy books is for the pictures, and the reproductions here are beautifully done, on good quality glossy paper and the part where artwork by the five men is reproduced next to postcards from the same era, of the same scene, often from the same vantage point more than justify the cost of the book.

>60 RidgewayGirl: Nice haul!

>74 Tess_W: And there's another book sale, nearer to me, this weekend. I don't expect it to be as good, but I do want to check it out.

Budi Darma is an important Indonesian author who attended grad school in Bloomington, Indiana. In the late 1970s he wrote a collection of short stories called People from Bloomington, about Americans living in the Midwest. The narrator/protagonist of each story is a young man, sometimes a student at the university, sometimes a working man, sometimes renting a room from a widow on a residential street, sometimes living in a large apartment building. But in every case, the man finds someone to fixate on, whether a pretty girl he sees as he walks through a neighborhood, a pair of rowdy children, an elderly lady who isn't keeping up her lawn or simply a stranger he would like to meet. In the introductory essay, he is compared to David Lynch and the Coen Brothers and, yes, these stories are often dark, and the narrator is neither reliable nor benign. The narrator often goes to extreme lengths to achieve his ends and he is often, but not always, shocked at the consequences of his own actions.

I like the reversal of the usual white author writing about a faraway land with foreign characters and how Darma didn't make any of the characters charming or simple. He has a sharp eye and a willingness to portray people with all of their worst attributes on display. He does have the habit of many authors writing about a place that isn't their home of mentioning street names and intersections, but that might be fun for people who have been to Bloomington.

In New Orleans, in 1918, an axe murderer is on the loose, terrifying the people living there. At the same time, a cornet player is trying to find work playing Jazz, but making ends meet by helping a guy he knows rob people. It's more lucrative and easier than getting a job digging the new canal between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, but with the town and the police on edge, he's ready to call it quits and take the job his pregnant wife wants him to take. Then there's Beatrice, who has run the family crime syndicate since her husband's sudden death. She's grooming her son to take on more responsibility, but it's an uphill battle. And there's Bill, a war veteran and police officer whose PTSD is causing him to see people who aren't there. He's never dealt with the guilt of surviving a specific incident and things with his wife are strained. But if he can catch the axman, he'll win back her love and find peace.

There is a lot going on in King Zeno, which reflects a city in the middle of upheaval and change. Each of the three narrative threads are interesting and could certainly fill an entire book of their own. And that's this novel's weakness; there is simply too much going on. Things tie together at the end, but the novel is split into three separate stories, none of which get enough space to really breathe. This book is full of history of New Orleans (the axe murders did happen, the canal was dug, Jazz was played) and one senses that Nathaniel Rich was so full of the history of this place and time that it overwhelmed his narrative structure. I did enjoy my time with Isadore, Bill and even Beatrice, I just wanted more of them.

>73 RidgewayGirl: I love art reproductions, and this one sounds gorgeous.

>76 RidgewayGirl: This intrigues me since my father lived in Bloomington, Indiana, for a couple of years before he met my mother. I think he took some courses at IU but didn't get a degree there. Have you read The Stone Diaries? A good chunk of it is set in Bloomington.

>78 cbl_tn: I didn't know that about The Stone Diaries. It's been years since I've read it and it would be a good one to reread.

I spend a very pleasant hour browsing a book sale, in Springfield this time. The weather was perfect and I came away with six books.

When a small child goes missing on a London housing estate, Tom, an ambitious young reporter with a tabloid, goes to gather information. Chances all, the tot will be found and it will all be a waste of time. He chats with the residents, who tell him about the problem family. So when the child is found dead and the daughter of that family is taken in for questioning, he's in the right place to get the family out of the estate and sequestered in a small hotel, where he can get his first big story. But as the drinks flow and Tom asks his questions, the stories he hears are not the ones he needs to get a scoop.

Ordinary Human Failings follows the lives of the members of a small Irish family. They are not liked by their neighbors, and there are reasons for that, not the least of these being that once the girl's grandmother had died, there was no one to care about what she did, her mother intent on escaping the dead end that became of her once bright future, her uncle intent on drinking himself to death and her grandfather, sitting passively. Megan Nolan, who wrote the excellent Acts of Desperation, knows how to write with enormous empathy about people on the edge of society and here she has created a moving and thought-provoking novel.