Snash Reads in 2016

I really never make it to 75, more like 60, but I'll take the challenge once again. The books read this year are:

1) The Great Bridge by David McCullough
2) Wherever There Is Light by Peter Golden
3) Euphoria by Lily King
4) Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe by Sandra Gullard
5) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
6) The Known World by Edward P. Jones
7) A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
8) The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
9) A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter
10) Myth-Making and Religious Extremism and Their Roots in Crisis by Arthur Neal and Helen Youngelson- Neal
11) Peddling Mental Disorder by Lawrie Reznek
12) The Private City by Sam Bass Warner, Jr
13) The Call of the Wild by Jack London
14) The Turner House by Angela Floury
15) The Fox Was Ever the Hunter by Herta Muller
16) The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
17) My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
18) The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris
19) Good Family: A Novel by Terry Gamble
20) The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter by Tom Medicine
21) Uptown and Down by Jennifer Angled Dahlberg
22) Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River by Beth Kephart
23) Rogue Justice by Karen J. Greenberg
24) The Last Great Dance on Earth by Sandra Gulland
25) People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
26) Pilgrim Spokes by Neil M. Hanson
27) Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift
28) River Cross My Heart by Breena Clarke
29) When the Elephants Dance by Tess Urisa Holthe
30) Last Orders by Graham Swift
31) Unfair: the New Science of Criminal Injustice by Adam Benforado
32) Something Rotten in Fettig by Jere Krakow
33) Generation Chef by Karen Stainer
34) Delicious Foods by James Hannah
35) Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
36) The Republic of Whores by Josef Skvorecki
37) Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
38) Homegoing: A Novel by Yaa Gyasi
39) The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan
40) The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes
41) The Last Painting of Sara De Vos: A Novel by Dominic Smith
42) The Social Life of DNA by Alondra Nelson
43) Fruitlands by Richard Francis
44) River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit
45) A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
46) Good Time Girls by Laei Morgan
47) Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing by Jamie Holmes
48) The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
49) The Book of Night Women by Marion James
50) Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
51) Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
52) Open House by Elizabeth Berg
53) Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte
54) Mary and O'Neil by Justin Cronin
55) Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Francis
56) Get Well Soon by Jennifer Wright
57) Life Breaks In by Mary Cappello
58) Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
59) Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow
60) Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
61) A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick
62) The Clancys of Queens by Tara Clancy
63) The All of It by Jeannette Haien
64) My Life as a Silent Movie by Jesse Lee Kercheval
65) Without Knowing It by Ed Luoma
66) The Vanderbilt Era: Profiles of a Gilded Age by Louis Auchincloss

Well, fortunately, 75's just a number... :)

Welcome back!

The Great Bridge, the story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge along with the politics and personalities involved. Interesting and entertaining except that John A. Roebling was hardly likable and some of the technical descriptions were tedious.

>3 snash: Hi, Sharon! I listened to that one a while back and enjoyed it, but I think I would have found the technical stuff tedious, too, had I read it myself...

Admittedly, life in the form of dealing with arrangements for very elderly parents, may have also made me less patient than normal. It also effected my reading time.

Wherever There Is Light was a captivating love story between a Jewish bootlegger and an artist Black girl through WWII and beyond. Their pasts as well as their different races make being together difficult.

Euphoria presents a love triangle among anthropologists studying primitive tribes in New Guinea excellently done. The back drop allows for placing their actions and culture under an analytical light.

Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe is an intriguing story in terms of personalities, history, and plot twists. I found it thoroughly enjoyable and will assuredly read the last book in the series.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was a collection of sparse and sometimes grim stories about connections between people and the pain of those connections breaking.

The Known World is an engrossing, troubling saga encompassing about 40 years in the early 1800's and a number of families in rural Virginia through which slavery and racism is viewed from many angles.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a collection of short stories, mostly set in the rural south. I particularly liked 'An Artificial Nigger' but many were good though grim, often on many levels.

The Things They Carried is a collection of related memoir stories about the Vietnam War. It's excellent in that it pulls the reader into the scene as felt by the soldier. It also illustrates the effect of such experiences on the rest of the soldier's life.

A Sport and a Pastime contained lovely erotic writing, but it could have been just as effective as a short story from my viewpoint. It just seemed to go on and on saying essentially the same thing over and over.

Myth-Making Myths, religious and secular, are created by men to deal with the chaos and unpredictability in life and death. The book deals with several predominant myths over time and cultures. It was thought provoking although sometimes a little glib particularly with the present state.

Peddling Mental Disorder is superb in its taking on of the pharmaceutical industry for its disease mongering and drug pushing. It also acknowledges that society, doctors, and psychiatrists are all complicit and even encourage this approach. My difficulties with the book lie in the narrow definition of science, the complete dismissal of psychoanalysis, and ignoring of all other mental health care professionals. The suggested solutions, while correct, are very improbable.

The Private City presents a look at the social history of Philadelphia in three time spans, Revolutionary War time, 1840's and 50's, and 1920's, illustrating how the American attitude of money and business first (thus private property) has run the growth and development of the city.

The Call of the Wild Story told from dog's point of view as he is stolen, taken to Alaska during the Gold Rush, worked as sled dog, and finally joins the wolves.

The Turner House was an excellent portrayal of family, how it's haunted by the past and forever hesitant to be honest about and own up to it.

The Fox Was Ever the Hunter is a prose poem with a plot woven in. The quiet consistent terror of oppression is conveyed in the darting shadows, knife-like poplars cutting the sky, sun flower seeds floating in the toilet, and the dissected fox pelt. It's more atmospheric than plot or character driven.

The Nest swept through a complicated plot, entertaining and fun. Having read various reviews I'd say the family's not terribly dysfunctional, more like on the dysfunctional side of normal.

My Name Is Lucy Barton is the story of a woman raised with poverty and abuse as she tries to tell her story.
An excellent portrayal of the ambivalence and emotional poverty such an upbringing creates no matter how the rest of their lives go.

At first The Jazz Palace felt disjointed and sometimes confusing but by a third of the way through, I was hooked into the history of Chicago and the jazz scene, 1910 to 1930, and the characters.

Good Family was an enjoyable and sometimes humorous description of a family of old money gathered at their summer home on an island in northern Lake Michigan as the last of the oldest generation dies. It's about how a family can both damage and heal.

The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter is the story set in South Philly of two brothers who promised their mother on her death bed that they'd take care of each other. Raised by an abusive father and his next three wives, their ties were strong. The book focuses on that moment when those ties were sorely tested.

Uptown and Down was a believable and insightful look at the trials of a marriage, this one particularly challenged by career success and wealth.

Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River is an innovative and superb biography of the Schuylkill River in poetic verse with historical footnotes.

Rogue Justice: the Making of the Security State is a blow by blow, person by person, case by case accounting of the on going conflict between security and constitutional rights after 9/11. What particularly impressed me was how readable it was despite its detail and thoroughness. It is a disturbing story and an extremely important one for American citizens to be aware of, hopefully to prevent the erosion of American and international rights.

The Last Great Dance on Earth was the very engaging third part of the trilogy of historical fiction about Josephine Bonaparte. The story of love and political intrigue is very well presented.

People of the Book was a unfolding of the history of a 500 year old book by a conservator on the basis of tiny clues. Some of the fictionalized scenarios seemed a bit fantastic and hard to believe but the book was effective as a story of Jewish history -- the many times that welcoming liberal societies suddenly turned lethal.

Pilgrim Spokes is a description of a bicycle trip from Kansas to Maryland, not focusing on the details of the trip but rather on the author's musings prompted by the experience. While I enjoyed it through the first half, by the second half I could just about predict what his thoughts would be and his insistence on positivity especially in terms of other people began to grate. Pleasant enough but perhaps longer than necessary and better for a less cynical reader than I

Mothering Sunday was a delightful, twisty-turny, reflective story of a life.

River Cross My Heart was a good depiction of the black community of Georgetown during the 1920's although the plot line gets a little lost in the descriptions.

When the Elephants Dance is a story set amongst the Philippine people during the WWII. While it is a good book, its side stories seem too long and diverting and their various morals as to the family repeated.

Last Orders was the tale of four men driving to the sea to spread the ashes of their friend. Their intertwined lives are revealed in the backstories. Excellently written, humorous, bitter sweet.

Unfair looks at the various ways our mind works, often without our awareness, that render our judicial system unjust, from bias based on appearance, to malleable memories. While some of this information was not new to me, seeing it all together with its impact upon the judicial process was sobering. He ends the book with some possible solutions, some simple to adopt, all worthy of serious consideration.

Something Rotten in Fettig is a farce of the American legal and penal system with a few jabs a art. It has something of the flavor of Confederacy of Dunces, however I found the language of mockery a bit overdone.

Generation Chef is a case study of the birth and first year life of a restaurant in New York City. Besides portraying the major players such that the reader feels connected and rooting for their success, the author presents the multitude of factors shaping the restaurant business today.

Delicious Foods was a farm/labor camp which used cocaine and beatings to keep their labor force at work. Book about racial killings, drugs, as well as the labor camp dragging a person down but ends with people moving on buoyed by pure survival instinct.

Hope in the Dark focused on hope in the face of many wrongs as a necessary ingredient to propel social activism. That being the case, it pointed out the many successful changes brought about and noted that there are no final victories since perfection is not possible. The success of activism is, in part, in the effort. I found it inspiring and comforting.

The Republic of Whores was an engaging humorous satirical farce about a tank brigade in Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia in the tradition of The Good Soldier Svejk.

There are quite a few on your list this year that I have read and enjoyed Sharon.

Zora Neal Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road was most enjoyable for its language full of inventive metaphor. Particularly towards the end she gets up on her soap box a bit too much for my taste.

Homegoing: A Novel is a 300 year history of Black-Americans via the stories of two families through the generations spanning both Africa and the US. It is much like a series of related short stories very well done.

The Silk Roads was a very enlightening history of the world from the perspective of central Asia rather than Europe and as such had many interesting points. My problem with the book was that as the story got to about 1900 on, it lost some of its broad sweeping observations and got progressively more detailed and narrow. It was a fault somewhat alleviated with the concluding chapter.

That one's on my Overdrive list - sounds like I need to bump it up.

It's worth it.

The Noise of Time is historical fiction about the Shostakovich, the Russian composer, and deals with the compromises of art in Soviet Russia. More particularly it deals with courage and cowardliness, ideals and compromise all against the process of aging. Contains some great quotes.

The Last Painting of Sara De Vos centers around three paintings each considered that last at one point. In telling their story it tells the story of the painter, the owners, and the forger spanning from 1630 to 2000.

The Social Life of DNA explores the various ways that DNA testing has been used to help repair social wrongs, most particularly that of slavery. In the end she concludes that while it did make some individuals feel more connected to know a piece of their African heritage, it could not bring healing or a resolution. The book felt sometimes repetitious and longer than the information warranted.

Fruitlands was a detailed description of Alcott's Utopian experiment. There was often more detail into the philosophical underpinnings than I wanted to read but then that was the nature of the experiment. The book did give a good job of presenting its significance and echoes in today's attitudes

A great fun and thought provoking book, River of Shadows is a biography of an early photographer and then a whole lot more; the west, industrialization, Stanford, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Captain Jack. Wild and rambling, making sweeping surprising connections.

A Man Called Ove was about a rigid angry man who is cajoled into caring for others and adjusting his life for them. A feel good book that is, however, quite predictable.

Good Time Girls was an amazing account of those who invariably are poorly documented, illustrating their adventurous, hearty, generous, and enterprising nature and their contributions to the Alaskan-Yukon frontier. The numerous pictures add immensely to the story.

Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing is an exploration of the human impulse for closure and how it can often work against us, curtailing creativity, empathy, and flexibility. While proposing a few techniques to help deal with ambiguity, it would seem awareness of the forces and stresses that promote closure is a big step forward. The book is well written and uses examples from varied sources such as business, literature, and education as well as social psychology.

The Sympathizer was a story told by a Vietnamese spy for the north who worked for a Southern general covering the time from the fall of Saigon to several years later. Superbly written with very insightful observations of the complexities and hypocrisies of all places and people involved.

The Book of Night Women was a very uncomfortable book about the horrors of slavery set in the early 1800's in Jamaica. It also explores the impossible conflict of being in the half way spot between black and white. Excellently written.

Holidays on Ice had no humor in my book, sadistic and overwrought. Pointing out human foibles without any empathy, merely vicious.

Quartet in Autumn is a character study of four aging isolated people, only connected by working in the same office and their awkward efforts to connect as retirement looms. Excellently done.

Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte reads much like her sister's books although the subject manner may be less universal. It deals with the British class system and how it leaves many, particularly governesses in an isolated condition.

Mary and O'Neil was somewhere between linked stories and a novel. it's an exploration of a family dealing with the curves life throws at them. Pretty well written but seemed to rely on dreams and extreme physical crises overly much.

Adventures in Human Being is a description of the wonders of Human anatomy with a variety of case histories and references to history and literature.

Get Well Soon was a well researched and informative non-fiction book whose author's inserts herself throughout. At first this very much irritated me but as I proceeded I acclimated to her humor and personal comments. The descriptions of the plagues, their spread, and the efforts, effective and not, to combat them was illuminating.

Life Breaks In is a series of essays that are memoir, philosophy, psychology, and so much more, focused on trying to answer what is "mood": A thorough musing on the topic.

Breakfast at Tiffany's was an excellent portrayal of a young enticing vulnerable want-to-be socialite.

Homer and Langley was a bitter sweet fictional biography of two hoarding, hermit brothers on 5th Avenue, NYC

Peace Like a River narrated by an 11 year old about the search for his 16 year old brother who killed two and then escaped from jail. It occurred in the 1960's but evokes the cowboy west. Engaging story but too rife with "miracles" and religiosity for my taste.

A Reliable Wife was a psychological probe into struggle for love and meaning for people tormented by abuse and abandonment in their youths

The Clancys of Queens was a fun book chock full of intriguing characters and scenes described in raucous clear language. It's not a deep book but a very entertaining one.

The All of It is a stunning short novel about a moral dilemma and its resolution, a beautiful story, beautifully told. An Irish priest deals with a "confessed" sin and his own desires while fishing for salmon.

Wouldn't it be nice if 2017 was a year of peace and goodwill.
A year where people set aside their religious and racial differences.
A year where intolerance is given short shrift.
A year where hatred is replaced by, at the very least, respect.
A year where those in need are not looked upon as a burden but as a blessing.
A year where the commonality of man and woman rises up against those who would seek to subvert and divide.
A year without bombs, or shootings, or beheadings, or rape, or abuse, or spite.

2017.

Festive Greetings and a few wishes from Malaysia!

In My Life as a Silent Movie a woman discovers that she adopted and goes in search of her biological parents. The plot is full of too many unbelievable coincidences although it's entertaining.

Without Knowing It is a novel/memoir exploring the difficulties of homosexuality and the prejudices, overt and subtle, by presenting an attempted friendship with a straight man.

The Vanderbilt Era: Profiles of a Gilded Age contains a series of short profiles of members of the Vanderbilt family and other prominent members of their social class. Most of the profiles seem too short to get much of a sense of the people, but in the end some idea of the gilded era is obtained.