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: 30

Library Books Read: 35

Audiobooks: 1

Netgalley: 13

Borrowed:

Books Acquired:69

Rereads: 1

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 (Indonesia)
3. Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton (Japan)
4. Love Novel by Ivana Sajko, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić (Croatia)
5. Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal, translated from the French by Jessica Moore (France)
6. The Road to the Country by Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria)

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
6. Memory Piece by Lisa Ko
7. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

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
6. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
7. Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

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
6. Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
7. Shanghai by Joseph Kanon

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
6. Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung
7. You Like it Darker: Stories by Stephen King
8. Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go by Cleo Qian

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
4. Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry by Christine Sneed
5. James by Percival Everett
6. Clear by Carys Davies

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
5. Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara
6. Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri
7. The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark

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
5. The Torn Skirt by Rebecca Godfrey
6. Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
7. The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
8. Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

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)
7. The Husbands by Holly Gramazio (ToB Summer Reading, 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
5. Don't You Forget About Me by Mhairi McFarlane
6. First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger
7. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
8. The Wedding People by Alison Espach
9. The Wake-Up Call by Beth O'Leary

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
5. The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey
6. North Woods by Daniel Mason

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



1. Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki
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
10. First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger
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
15. James by Percival Everett
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.

Sure, death is one thing people will let you open your jaws and scream about for a while, especially when someone dies young--it isn't fair, I'll never get over it, etc.--but what nobody admits is how incredibly dull grief is to witness. It's boring, like hearing about somebody's toothache, all-consuming but completely personal, nontransferable. Shut up about your sorrow--take that grief and tamp it down. The people who love you need you to hurry and clean yourself up, blow your nose and fix your hair, come back from the brink.

In We Were the Universe, Kit's the mother of a toddler. Barely in her twenties, she's suddenly a stay-at-home mom in the Texas suburbs, and while she adores her daughter, she's often bored and would like a few minutes to herself, maybe to read a book. But when her daughter's attention is focused somewhere else, she ends up having sexual fantasies about the people she sees at the playground. Kit is kind of a mess, and it's not just because she dropped out of university to have a kid; her sister recently died. She and her sister were inseparable, as neglected children, they raised each other and their closeness persisted until Kit decided that without opportunities in their rural Texas community, she needed to go to college. She feels responsible for what happened to her sister and she's having trouble holding herself together.

Kimberly King Parsons, author of an excellent collection of short stories, Black Light, has created an engaging character in Kit, one who makes many mistakes, but who is also someone you can't help rooting for. Parsons likes oddballs and people who just don't fit, the rebels and the weirdos and this works very well here. This novel is far more focused on character than it is on plot, looking back at Kit's childhood and teenage years, showing how she became the person she is now, without much worry about forward momentum. It feels very much like life with a toddler, a lot of activity with little to show for it, and the things that Kit gets up to are entertaining mainly because they are recounted in Kit's voice. This is a dark story lightly told.

Georgina's family considers her the black sheep. Still working restaurant jobs as she enters her thirties, they want her to adopt a career path and settle down. After she is fired for her boss's actions and finds her boyfriend in bed with his assistant, she's in for a dinner's worth of lectures. But things may be turning around when a temporary job as bartender turns into a job and one of her new bosses is the boy she dated in high school. He may not remember her, but she has fond memories, for the most part.

Don't You Forget About Me is ChickLit, but it's less about the romance than it is about a young woman finding her own confidence and figuring out what she really wants. It's set in Sheffield, England, instead of the more usual London, and author Mhairi McFarlane describes the area with real affection. I'm unhappy to have finally read all the books McFarlane has written.

In Memory Piece, three Chinese-American girls meet in weekend language school in the nineties. As the years pass, one becomes an artist, one a tech entrepreneur and one a community activist, but they continue to move in and out of each others lives, through the present and into the future.

I was really looking forward to this book. I enjoyed Lisa Ko's debut novel, The Leavers and anticipated that her vision of these women's lives in the future and the world they inhabit would be imaginative and thought-provoking. The first half of the book is excellent, although I was far more interested in Giselle's development as an artist than Jackie's involvement in a tech start-up, and Ellen's life taking over a derelict building and starting a community garden was given less space. Each woman finds their own path, two with substantial buy-in from billionaires. The first part of the novel is the strongest, depicting New York in the nineties, with each woman showing a different aspect of life in that time, from neighbors fighting gentrification to the long hours demanded of tech workers.

The final half of the novel, where Ko takes her characters into the future, is the weakest part of this book. The world she depicts here is that of a thousand other dystopian novels, a disappointment after the inventiveness of the first half of the book. That genre, with its future world basically the same across the board, is very popular and her version of it will no doubt be interesting to many readers, but I was bored. The first half, however, was very good.

Lilly Dancyger is the coolest girl you'll encounter, or at least the coolest girl that I've heard about. I don't think girls that cool could have existed in the suburban Scottsdale high school I went to, stuck as it was in a land of malls and residential areas. Dancyger was living in New York, where she was comfortably hanging out in dive bars at fourteen, something that probably couldn't happen in a place where you'd have to ask your mom for a ride. She may have dropped out of high school but she still managed to get a full ride to a private university; we don't inhabit the same universe. So when it began to dawn on me that while First Love: Essays on Friendship was about friendship, it was mostly about Lilly Dancyger, I was only mildly annoyed by the bait and switch.

Like most of us, Dancyger had intense friendships in childhood and in her teenage years and early twenties. She's good at capturing how intense those relationships can be and how they ebb and flow, so that the person you shared every thought with one year, is less important the next. There are several other topics addressed in this book, with grief being on of the most prevalent, including grief following a violent death. Dancyger is young and so there's a bit of stretching needed to make this memoir-in-essays work, with a friend writing embarrassingly complimentary segments in one essay. There's little universality here, these are essays about Lilly Dancyger, her life and her thoughts. I'm still looking for a book taking a look at friendship and the role friendship plays in our lives, but I did enjoy reading about Dancyger's life well enough.

"I learned from my late father that women should show generosity towards everyone. But there are two things I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine."

In Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder by Asako Yuzuki and translated by Polly Barton, Rika is a journalist working for a Newsmagazine in Tokyo, and she wants to eventually become the first woman editor in the newsroom, able to write her own articles. Work takes up all of her time; she has a boyfriend she sees on the infrequent occasions they both have the time and energy to spare and her meals are bento boxes or prepared food bought in convenience stores on her way home. Kajii is a convicted murderer who lured lonely businessmen to their deaths with her unctuous care and carefully prepared meals. She was a media sensation after her blog, which explained her philosophy on pleasing men and about her culinary experiences was discovered. Now that the initial media scrum has died down, Rika wants to interview her, hoping to produce something that will help her career, but it's not until she asks about a recipe that she finally gets Kajii's permission to visit. What follows is a sort of cat and mouse game, as Kajii's instructions send Rika on a journey that upends her relationship to food and has a ripple effect on her own relationships, including the one with her best friend, a woman who chose to step away from her career in the hopes of starting a family.

Butter: A Novel of Food and Murder does involve both food and murder, but this isn't a crime novel, or one that features recipes. Instead, it's a look at misogyny and fatphobia in Japan and how the expectations placed on women are ones they can never meet. Yuzuki takes her time with this story, using the space to illuminate the different impossible positions women are faced with. Expected to nurture and care sacrificially not just for their children, but also for their husbands, the skills they use to do so are seen as frivolous and unimportant. Expected to devote themselves fully to their jobs, they are constantly reminded that they need to find a husband and have children. While this portrayal of Japanese society is a stark one, there are plenty of similarities to life in western countries.

This novel makes a strong argument for paying attention to what we eat, to choose to make a simple meal over grabbing something pre-made, to learn to enjoy the process of creating something edible and to pay attention to the flavors. The interplay between three very different characters works so well here, leading two of them to find their own ways to exist that give them the strength to withstand the pressures put on them. I remained fascinated throughout the novel and eagerly await for more from this extraordinary author to be translated into English.

>86 RidgewayGirl: I'm definitely taking a BB for this. It sounds interesting.

>87 lsh63: I do think you'd really like it!

>86 RidgewayGirl: It sounds lovely. On my WL it goes!

In her opinion, there were more than two sides in most debates, and most questions couldn't be answered with a simple yes or no. She had talked about this with Connie Fox, who was her hairstylist and not the person to get too philosophical with, as it turned out. As punishment for Lynne's willingness to argue for a third point of view, Connie Fox cut her bangs too short and later told the other women in the beauty parlor that she was an atheist, which wasn't true and Lynne had later said so, but she didn't know if anyone had believed her.

Christine Sneed is one of my favorite short story writers and, even if she wasn't, a book called Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry is one I would have picked up anyway. The stories in this collection mostly deal with women dealing with men, often older men, usually men who feel they have a say in how that woman lives her life. From a teenage girl who realizes the man who told her he was a model scout wasn't who he said he was but wanting to take him up on his offer to take pictures anyway, to a woman who thought she had a casual arrangement with a well-off older man until she tries to break it off, from the granddaughter of a famous artist who inherits a sketchbook, to a divorced woman making a new start in the small lakeside town she used to spend holidays as a child, these women find that life isn't as clear or unhindered as it should be but that they are not without resources of their own.

What I like most about Sneed's stories is that each protagonist has her own voice and none of them could be mistaken for each other. Sneed's women are witty and fully themselves and the situations they find themselves are often absurd but also very real.

>90 RidgewayGirl: Sounds really good, I'll try and get hold of a copy. I hope the UK cover is the same as yours, it has something about it.
The hairdresser quote made me laugh, I generally don't disagree much when at the hairdresser.

>91 charl08: I'm curious as to whether you'll find Sneed's books in the UK. She's published by a major publishing house, but my impression is that she's an author well-known only in Chicago, probably because she's best known for her short stories.

...and told her he had to go out, there was something he had to do, catching her on the verge of a nervous breakdown while she was scraping burnt milk off the bottom of a pot, with the pee-soaked child trying to climb her leg, while she was begging the baby to wait, to wait for just one second, all the while trying with enormous difficulty to refrain from screaming or breaking something, because the child was bawling angrily and slapping at her thigh with tiny hands, demanding the right that every child should be able to claim, not to have to wait, just as he demanded the right that every man should be able to claim to pursue goals more noble than washing the dishes and wiping up urine. Without having to explain himself.

I won't be long, he said and ran out into the stairwell.

Love Novel by Ivana Sajko and translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić is a novella that hits hard. In it, a couple live together unhappily, both under enormous stress. She's the only one working as well as the only one taking care of their baby and apartment. He's angry all the time; at the situation they are in, that their country is in, that he is in. She's frustrated and reactive. The neighbors complain about the noise. But, somehow, they remain together, tied by their initial attraction to each other and the child they share. There's no work and no money, and whether they make it through is uncertain.

The guard could have been his father. He had the familiar expression of bewilderment that marked the faces of the fathers of his generation, the disabled and other war veterans who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side, though they'd done nothing but follow orders, and so they couldn't fathom how all this had come about, this wretched inversion; why, having only ever done their duty, done their job honestly, the only thing they had to show for it were skeletons and debt.

While this novella remains firmly centered on the specific complaints of this couple, it's also a look at a nation losing hope and how that plays out in individual lives. The man in this book attends protests, without real conviction about the purpose of each one, just that protest is necessary to him. It's a way for him to feel alive, even as he doesn't believe that it changes anything.

I had a hard time reading this book, it's often raw and unpleasant, especially the husband's anger directed at his wife. Sajko certainly knows how to make a situation feel horrifically real in very few words. I can see why Love Novel was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, which is a great source for books in translation.

James is a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and because it's by Percival Everett, you already know it's going to be good. This novel is in the form of a diary kept by James, known as Jim in the originating novel. When James finds out he is to be sold, he runs, unwilling to lose his family. He is soon joined by Huck, who is running away for his own reasons and they set out together to journey down the Mississippi River to where it joins the Ohio, which is where James plans to head north. As they travel, they face many dangers and are often separated, but always the dangers that James faces are magnitudes higher, as is made clear, over and over again.

How strange a world, how strange an existence, that one's equal must argue for one's equality, that one's equal must hold a station that allows airing of that argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.

Everett makes the horrors of slavery clear, but like he did in The Trees, there is also humor. This is, after all, an adventure story, with the episodic structure of that genre. James is well-read, having used Judge Thatcher's library for years and, like the other enslaved people, he uses the dialect expected of him around white people, but among others like him, he is free to speak the way he wants, a secret language switching that Huck occasionally catches him at. His odd friendship with Huck is wonderfully developed. This is the best book I have read so far this year and I will be surprised if anything surpasses it. It's an extraordinary achievement from one of our greatest living writers.

>90 RidgewayGirl: You've convinced me. I'm not really a short story fan, but I'm off to find this book!

>92 RidgewayGirl: I think I'm going to read Sneed's latest short stories online, but two novels seem to be available via biblio.com from UK sellers (Paris, he said and Little Known Facts). They also had a copy of The Virginity of Famous Men for a very reasonable amount so I've gone for that first. LT tells me I had a netgalley copy but didn't get as far as reading it. Poor on my part!

Hi Kay, Just dropping by, good to see that you loved James. I'm pouting just a bit because my library doesn't have the Christine Sneed available, I do love short stories. It's not like I don't have plenty to read.

>96 charl08: I've also picked up a copy of The Virginity of Famous Men. Sneed is good at titles.

>97 lsh63: James was fantastic! I also have plenty to read in this house, and yet I'm constantly checking out more books from the library and driving by bookstores that aren't on my way home.

In Evergreen by Naomi Hirahara, a young married woman and her parents return to Los Angeles with her new husband. It's been years since they were sent to the Manzanar internment camp and they hope to rebuild the lives they enjoyed before the Second World War. But before the war, Japanese Americans were not allowed to own property and their homes and businesses are now occupied by others. Aki is a nursing assistant at the Japanese hospital where she is shocked to discover that the elderly man admitted to the hospital with serious wounds is the father of her husband's good friend. She never liked Babe, but could he really have battered his own father? As she looks for answers, she stumbles into a larger series of crimes, while also learning about the conditions of many of the returning Japanese-Americans are living in.

This is a mystery novel where the mystery is far less important than the time and place. Hirahara is great at explaining the history of how Japanese-Americans have been treated before, during and after WWII. I knew some of the basics, but Hirahara brings out so many small details of what life was like on a daily basis. The mystery was overly complicated and didn't hold up, but the reason to read this novel is for the way it brings a little-known piece of American history to life.

On a Trans-Siberian train, a young conscript becomes increasingly desperate about his future and finally comes up with a plan to escape by leaving the train in one of the cities spread across Siberia. A French woman in her mid-thirties impulsively leaves her Russian lover who had brought her from Paris to a city in Siberia. She gets on the first train out, which is Eastbound to Vladivostok. An encounter leads to sheltering him in her first class compartment.

Maylis de Kerangal manages to pack a great deal into this novella and Jessica Moore has provided a beautiful translation. Although de Karangal is far more detailed in her descriptions of Hélène, she still manages to make Aliocha's fear and uncertainty vivid. There's something wonderful about novellas, how they can provide both detail and breadth, while keeping the story tightly focused, and this one certainly is certainly a great example of what they can do.

Bloomington, Illinois is under that heat dome, although we're faring better here than in most places, since temps in the mid-nineties are as high as its gone and we're used to that, albeit usually just for a day or two in August. Still, the AC in my car had stopped working in March and I hadn't done anything because taking a car in for repair is a pain and the weather made open windows pleasant. But this week brought many regrets and I took the car in this morning, having had to wait for the earliest available appointment. I arrived to find out that the mechanic who specialized in AC was off and the other guy had never fixed this, but was willing to give it a try. Surprisingly, he managed to fix it, and all is well. Will I learn a valuable lesson about procrastination from this? Probably not.

Wherever she was running, I knew it wasn't to a collapsing home with a pothead father or into the bushes with the burnout boys. Watching her run, I thought, down is somewhere.

Sara is living in Victoria, British Colombia, a tourist destination full of cobbled streets and charm, but that's not her Victoria. Her Victoria is feeling trapped on an island, living with her father who has one foot (and then both feet) out the door and spending her school hours hanging out in the woods behind the high school with the burnout boys. When the boys recount what they did to a girl in her class, Sara abandons them and soon school and her empty house altogether, sort of looking for a girl she saw once, running with a torn skirt, mostly just hanging out, getting into deeper and deeper trouble and pretending that she's cool, she's fine, she's about to turn her life around.

The Torn Skirt is by Canadian author Rebecca Godfrey, a novel that preceded Under the Bridge. Written in 2001 and set in the 1980s, this is a world where sexual assault is shrugged off and Go Ask Alice is more familiar than any textbook. Godfrey is a talented author, giving Sara a voice that is at once naive and street smart, young and clever.

I'm sure he was trying to help when he called the Street Outreach worker, some gangly guy with Bible breath.

Sara lets the reader know in the opening paragraphs that she's being questioned by the police, that something very bad has happened, but how she goes from being a high school student with an attitude to a suspect in a crime is the story told in The Torn Skirt.

>102 RidgewayGirl: I used to live in Victoria so Godfrey's book got my attention. It seems Sara's opinion of Victoria matches mine. It's a city that gets lavish praise yet has more crime than I've seen elsewhere. Her later book about Reina Vick's murder reminds me of the shock in the city, yet so many people claimed that it was inevitable. I'll skip both.

>103 VivienneR: It was pretty dark, but well-done. Godfrey died far too young (which is to say she was my age.)

Green Frog: Stories by Gina Chung is just fantastic. I read a lot of short story collections and I like most of them, but this one astonished me. There's a story narrated by a praying mantis and a story narrated by a kumiho, a creature from Korean folktales that appears as fox with many tails or as a beautiful woman. There's a story told from the point of view of a group of middle-aged church ladies and stories told in the second person. And there are stories that are about ordinary women and girls, usually Korean-American, just trying to figure things out. It's a stellar collection that deserves to be widely read.

>105 RidgewayGirl: I've got this next up on audio. My cover's rather more eye catching. A girl riding a praying mantis on a bright pink background.

>90 RidgewayGirl: The library has a pair of Sneed's books, but not that one.

>106 Helenliz: I'm looking forward to finding out what you think of Green Frog. My absolute favorite was a story near the end narrated by middle-aged church ladies.

>105 RidgewayGirl: >106 Helenliz: I was wondering if I could get a copy here - thanks Helen (and of course Kay for the recommendation in the first place!)

Definitely taking a bb for Green Frog: Stories!

I had bad taste in men, but then came Jed.

Jacy is pregnant when she and her husband travel to Michigan's Upper Peninsula to his father's house, an isolated rural retreat near the Wisconsin border. She's excited about the trip, about having a baby, she likes Jed's urbane father. But Jacy hadn't known about the housekeeper, whose position in the household she can't figure out. And now her husband's acting weird and he and her father-in-law's attitude towards her pregnancy seem to omit her from having any say, especially once a local gynecologist and personal friend of the family is called in for a consult.

Beware the Woman is a gothic suspense tale by Megan Abbott, here writing with more than a tinge of Joyce Carol Oates. This is a claustrophobic story, told from Jacy's point of view, where she's not certain of what's going on around her and her husband is either absent or just wants her to calm down. This is one of the best things Abbott has written, tying a classic genre together with very modern fears about bodily autonomy.

>99 RidgewayGirl: Sounder intriguing. Putting it on my WL!

>111 Tess_W: Tess, I'm a big fan of Abbott's work, but this one was better than I'd expected it to be.

Yesterday, since my husband was still gone on his stupid business trip, I hopped the train and went to Chicago for the day, where I walked from the station to the Art Institute, where I saw the Georgia O'Keefe exhibition and then the Christina Ramberg Retrospective, an artist previously unknown to me. Then I visited a bookstore new to me, Exile in Bookville, which is worth a visit. They have a ton of books from small presses and works in translation. I finished up with a fancy spritz up on the rooftop of the Art Institute, and then took the train home. I've arranged a few days in Chicago visiting museums with friends here, but there's something about just going alone and having to answer only to my own inclinations.

>112 RidgewayGirl: Sounds like my dream day in Chicago! I’m usually visiting family when I’m there, so I don’t get to do all the fun things I’d do on my own. You don’t mention buying any books—what restraint!

>113 Charon07: Ha! I bought two, which was quite a feat of self-control on my part.

In Biafra, like a world removed from the known world, one discovers new vistas of emotions, new faculties one did not know were there before. This feeling of being drained and abandoned, which comes upon Kunle so quickly that it invades his senses completely, is one such experience.

Chigozie Obioma's new novel, The Road to the Country, is the story of the Nigerian Civil War told from the point of view of one young man who is caught up in the fighting. Kunle is at the university when he is told to come home -- his younger brother has left with a neighboring Igbo family to go live in Biafra. Kunle, intent on his studies, had been unaware that anything was going on and after returning home, he blithely joins a Red Cross team taking supplies into Biafra and sneaks off, thinking he can find his brother and they can both return with the Red Cross van the next day. But the war going on isn't a game and before Kunle gets very far, he is discovered by the Biafran army and conscripted.

What follows is a coming of age story and one that depicts the brutality and meaninglessness of war, in this case, the slow grinding down of an out-matched insurgent force, as the communities around them are also bombed and starved out. Obioma made an audacious choice in centering the novel on a central character who enters the war with no stake in it or even any knowledge. He, and the reader, soon hear stories of why his various comrades have chosen to fight, but for the most part, the reader, like Kunle, experiences the war as just a series of random events. There's a lot of repetition and a lot of waiting. It did take some effort to read the most part of this novel. Obioma pulls everything into context eventually, but like Kunle's wartime experiences, it's a slog. But as Kunle remains part of a battalion, he forms friendships and relationships, and his observations about the world around him sharpen into clearer focus. He never forgets his initial goal in sneaking into Biafra, and that gives form and meaning to his experiences. There are no doubt non-fiction accounts that provide a clearer look at that place and time, but The Road to the Country shines a light on the war's cost in human suffering.

You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know.

In Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe, Margo is still a teenager when her English professor gets her pregnant. And in the following weeks, despite everyone telling her not to, she decides to keep the pregnancy. She has an apartment that she shares with three other girls, the man who told her, over and over, how much he loves her, her best friend Becca and her mother. And once she has Bodhi, the professor ghosts her, her mother quickly tells her that she will not be helping out, her best friend disappears from her life, two of her roommates move out and she loses her job. Margo does indeed have money troubles, but money is only one of her problems.

They had tried to warn her: her mother, Mark, even Becca. But when they talked about the opportunities she would be missing, she'd thought they meant a four-year college. She hadn't understood thy meant that every single person she met, every new friend, every love interest, every employer, every landlord, would judge her for having made what they all claimed was the "right" choice.

But she's not without resources. First, there's the one roommate who didn't leave, and then there's her father, someone who was largely absent while she was growing up but now, fresh out of rehab, he needs a place to stay and he can pay rent. And he gives her an idea of how she can make money to take care of her and Bodhi. None of it is ideal, but there's a chance this odd family can make it work, or maybe the underlying issues are too serious to paper over with love and effort.

This book surprised me. Thorpe's writing is light and smart and she often goes for the clever wordplay over a more sincere telling. And Margo is a young woman who hides her own feelings with her quick mind and a careless attitude. But as this novel progresses, it doesn't take the easy way, or the expected direction, but chooses to be more real and complex and muddled in ways that make it more than the breezy language indicates. I ended up rooting for Margo to figure out a road between the many obstacles placed in her way.

>116 RidgewayGirl: Adding this to the wish list. I like that quote.

>117 pamelad: I think you'll like it. I was surprised by how well Thorpe balanced the tone of her writing with the seriousness of the issues the characters were dealing with.

Maybe it was the heat dome, but my garden has never looked so abundant. Look at these plants going nuts!

Wow how beautiful Kay! Did you plant most of it when you moved in or were some of the plants already there? I love the way my hostas are looking lately, it’s almost time for the deer to help themselves to their favorite snack🙄.

Looks beautiful Kay. Hope you've had some time to sit out in it and read.

>121 charl08: We've only been here two years and so we've added a few things, but most was established before we moved in. We're lucky enough to not have deer in the neighborhood. We do have a fox and an opossum, along with vast quantities of rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks.

>122 RidgewayGirl: Out back, where the patio is, is less flowery, but now that it's not so hot, we've been eating dinner outside.

Your garden is beautiful and so lush looking! I would love to be able to sit out on your veranda sipping on an iced lemonaide!

>123 DeltaQueen50: Drop by anytime! I just bought a bag of lemons.

>119 RidgewayGirl: Beautiful house and beautiful garden! I’ll join you and DeltaQueen on the veranda. I’ll bring some wine!

>125 Charon07: I'll grab glasses!

Just beautiful! I'm sure those beds bring you great pleasure. It's so hot here, heat factor up to 110, and I'm just fighting to keep everything alive. Hopefully it will cool down to normal temps soon but I fear future summers.

>127 clue: Yes, while we did have a few weeks of the heat dome, it just meant that we had our August weather in June. We've had plenty of rain, so everything is growing as fast as it can. People in the south and northeast really got hit hard.

I finished The Virginity of Famous Men. Thanks for the nudge re Sneed, I loved this collection so much.

>128 RidgewayGirl: My yard seems to be growing faster than normal. It is way too hot too early this year. I dread August when it is usually miserable here.

>129 charl08: Oh, that makes me so happy. I like her writing so much.

>130 thornton37814: Hopefully, August won't be hotter than normal?

>130 thornton37814: Frankly, normal is too hot! Fortunately there is this nice thing called air conditioning that helps make it more bearable. I've heard that a lot of places are having a lot of trouble with the power grid this summer because of EVs.

>132 thornton37814: Not to brag, but it's 81 degrees with a slight breeze. I know you'll be laughing come winter, but I do like summers where we can be outdoors. If the cat were not leaning on my shoulder, I would be perfectly comfortable, but this cat is made of lava and bones.

>133 RidgewayGirl: We had a weather system that came through and cooled things down a bit this afternoon. The temp has dropped to 77, and there was a breeze for a while. Hoping it drops lower than they predicted it would overnight. If it does, it should set us up for better weather tomorrow although it's supposed to be in the 90s through at least Tuesday.

Jhumpa Lahiri's newest collection of short stories, Roman Stories, are not all set in Rome, but do concern people who live or have lived in Rome. Lahiri's characters range from the exceedingly well-off to those on the fringes of society. Lahiri's stories are strongest when she remains close to her own experience, like in The Reentry, where a woman is invited to lunch with a friend at a traditional restaurant, where she encounters rising levels of racism, which her friend tries to brush aside. The middle story, The Steps, celebrates Rome's diversity in age, ethnic background, and financial status, in a natural and affecting way. Some of the stories fall flat or feel a little moralizing, but her writing is, as always, worth reading. Lahiri's been in Italy long enough to have a clear-eyed view of its faults and strengths and it's interesting to get her take. This isn't her best collection of short stories, but she's an extraordinary writer and the bar is set very high.

>134 thornton37814: I'm glad the weather has improved for you. Do your boys want to snuggle when it's too hot for that?

>136 RidgewayGirl: Sometimes they do. If I come inside dripping with sweat, they usually discover their fur gets wet quickly so they usually steer clear pretty quickly. They may stay nearby, but not where I'll get them wet.

On this perfect holiday evening, sitting outside with family enjoying a truly delicious satay dinner that my husband spent two days preparing, I was viciously attacked by a bee and now have a spectacularly swollen left eye. Luckily, I do not have any obligations that would put me in public for the next few days.

>138 RidgewayGirl: Ouch! Hope you had Benadryl handy if you needed it as I would. I'm sure around the eye is particularly painful.

>138 RidgewayGirl: Oh no, that sounds especially painful! I hope you recover from it soon.

>128 RidgewayGirl: Sorry to hear about the bee sting - I hope your eye isn't too swollen for reading purposes!

>138 RidgewayGirl: Ow! I'm somewhat allergic to bee stings, so that would not be good. At least the satay was delicious.

Thanks, Lori, Lisa, Judy and Helen. I did take a xyzal, which my allergist says is the new benedryl, but still woke up this morning with my eye swollen shut. Icing has helped, but I am enjoying this beautiful Sunday from indoors, and am glad that I won't have to show off my eye in public for a few days.

>138 RidgewayGirl: Wow, that sounds painful, I hope it clears up soon.

>144 clue: After more icing, I can see out of it again. It looks worse than it feels, thank goodness.

The Road from Belhaven by Margot Livesey is the story of a girl growing up on a farm in Scotland in the 1880s, where she is being raised by her grandparents. She loves the farm and the farm animals with all of her heart and has a companion jackdaw and a steady friend in the hired boy. Lizzie does have one thing that sets her apart; sometimes she has brief visions of future events. But this story remains one about a girl growing up and of a young woman figuring out how to make her way in the world and how best to care for those she loves.

I saw a review calling this book "Anne of Green Gables for adults" and that's a pretty accurate description, honestly. This novel deals far more with the darker parts of farm life and of that time, the risks of death or injury, the financial precarity, the way that most people are struggling to get by and a single mistake can cost everything. Lizzie is pragmatic and resourceful, like all good protagonists. I enjoyed every single moment I was reading this excellent book.

>146 RidgewayGirl: - I think I'll take a BB for this.

>147 dudes22: Betty, it's so good!

>146 RidgewayGirl: BB for me too -- love the idea of "Anne of Green Gables for adults"!

>149 christina_reads: It's not twee or whimsical, though. But the resilience of Lizzie and how she loves the world around her is similar.

>150 RidgewayGirl: Well, I suppose I can do without whimsy sometimes. :)

I'm jumping ahead with my reviews because I want to talk about this one while it's fresh in my mind. I would not have read this had it not been the choice of my bookclub and I gave it a far more generous reading than it deserved because of that, but there are limits.



The Plinko Bounce by Martin Clark is a legal procedural, if that's a thing, with a bit of thriller at the end, as a treat for hanging in there. Andy is a public defender in a rural county in Virginia. He's very good at his job and everyone, especially prosecutors and police, like to tell him how good he is, in a way that eventually made me feel like being a public defender was something to be a little bit ashamed about. Andy agrees; he hates his clients, who he thinks of as basically wastes of life, if not actively subhuman, so it makes sense when, at the beginning of the novel, he tenders his resignation. The question of why he stayed in the job for 17 years is not one that will be answered. He quickly finds a cushy job with a big law office, but before he can start that job he wants to finish up with the accused murderer he is defending.

The murder case is, at first glance, an easy one for the states attorney. The man, Damian Bullins, is a strung-out methhead, an Appalachian yokel stereotype, who is accused of and quickly confesses to the murder of a housewife and paragon of virtue, a devout Mormon and wife of a prominent and respected businessman. But Andy quickly discovers that he can get the confession thrown out. Bullins claims he was hired to take the fall and Andy also finds evidence of motive for the murdered woman's husband. Given that the lead prosecutor is running for election and not interested in this case except as a platform to gain name recognition, it seems clear that Andy can get Bullins off, which is his duty as a defense attorney, even if he doesn't want to.

So legal thrillers can be fun, and since Clark is a lawyer, the procedural stuff was interesting. The plot hummed along, more or less. The issues I had with this book were with the writing, the characters, the utter lack of character development and finally, and probably most troubling, the attitude about people caught in the justice system.

So the writing is serviceable if dull, characters are described by their clothing, some are never described. The characters themselves were either cardboard-thin (the good guys) or paper-thin (the bad guys) and no one ever behaved contrary to the stereo-types established at their introduction. Which meant there was no uncertainty as to who was guilty or what the end point of the book would be, but this book was not interested in suspense or in nuance, which is fine, I think probably some people prefer a mystery to be a sure and well-marked track from A to B.

My biggest issue with this book is how it treated some characters as people and others as not quite human. That Andy needed to complain regularly about how much he hated wasting his time defending people who didn't deserve it and how whoever he was saying this to would agree with him was troubling. While Andy never had any Black clients, despite having a heavy caseload, became noticeable, but was definitely a good choice on the part of the author, given how Andy viewed the people he represented. Andy never once wondered about anyone's past or the reasons that might have caused their addictions or homelessness. I can certainly see that Andy being incurious is central to his character, and so can forgive him for that. I'm less willing to forgive the author, who should, by virtue of his profession, have some passing interest in the complexity of people's lives.

That this book ends with a needless act of premeditated violence by one of the "good" guys was certainly in keeping with the odd ethics of this book.

>138 RidgewayGirl: So sorry to hear of your bee sting. I can sympathize, I got one last year on my eyelid.

I can't see your garden pictures but from the comments, they must be spectacular.

>152 RidgewayGirl: Yikes, that sounds like a lot of meat for a bookgroup discussion.

I hope your eye continues to improve, that sting must have been a shock.

>145 RidgewayGirl: That sounds better. Hope that it continues to improve and you can face the world without scaring or worrying it.

>146 RidgewayGirl: I can't decide if that descriptions i attractive or off putting! I read Anne of Green Gables as an adult and spent the vast majority of the time with my palms itching...

>153 VivienneR: I'm sorry you can't see my photos, Vivienne. And on the eyelid seems a lot worse than between my nose and my eye. That must have really hurt.

>154 charl08: Charlotte, I had to put it all in the review because I don't want the person who picked this book for the club to feel bad. I am going to be diplomatic at next week's meeting. But I will mention my issues with the book, gently.

>155 Helenliz: Helen, Lizzie isn't whimsical and there was no White Way of Delight. Lizzie is a pragmatic character and I loved the book so much. As for my eye, the swelling is probably only visible to me at this point. Unfortunately, it's raining, which means wearing sunglasses to the grocery store is out.

And in the same place in her heart where Alice kept her list of children's names, Mary kept a different list--far better referenced and annotated--of all the local husbands who got drunk and beat their wives.

North Woods by Daniel Mason follows the various inhabitants and visitors to a single house in the New England woods over centuries, beginning with the first small structure built by early colonists who had to flee into the woods. Over time the house is added on to or remodeled, the fortunes of the people living there rise and fall, the house itself growing in stature and then diminishing, along with the surrounding woods, which also change over time.

This novel is almost interlinked short stories, except the length of each section varies and is sometime dependent on the reader having read the previous chapters. This is a superbly well-written book, and it is so cleverly and carefully constructed. By using the house as the center, while really being about the surrounding natural world, Mason avoids having to start the novel sometime in prehistory, like a Michener tome, or even having the include the indigenous people living in the area before the colonists arrived. The lives depicted range widely, from two sisters running a small apple orchard, to a opportunistic grifter riding the fad for séances, to a painter in love with his traveling companion, all the way into sometime near the present day.

While I admire this book, I didn't love it. There's a feeling of separation between the characters and the reader, a sense that abated as the novel grew closer to the present moment, and the final section was lovely, shedding light on the previous chapters, but also making clear that this novel is about a place, more than about the people who temporarily occupy the space.

>157 RidgewayGirl: - I took a BB earlier this year from Jennifer for this. I'll add your name also so I can come back and look at what you said when I get to it.

>158 dudes22: I look forward to finding out what you think of it.

I noticed in your book covers above that you're reading an autobiography of Carson McCullers. I'm currently reading her book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for our book club next month and will be looking for your comments on her autobiography.

>157 RidgewayGirl: Hi Kay, I hope to get to this soonish, I'm intrigued about the book's format.

>160 dudes22: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is such a fantastic book and she was so, so young when she wrote it.

>161 lsh63: It's a well-structured book, with bits of poetry or historical record in between the chapters, which is very effective. I look forward to finding out what you think of it.

>157 RidgewayGirl: I was wowed with The Winter Soldier. I read it in 2019 and still haven't read anything else by him. I had seen North Woods at the library but didn't have time for it then. Whether I read it or another, I really want to read something else by him.

>163 clue: Mason is very good. I have his short story collection to read soon.

I've added North Woods to my list at the library. It sounds like one to read when I want something a bit different from my usual books.

>165 hailelib: It's really well written and certainly worth reading.

Shanghai by Joseph Kanon begins in 1938 and a Jewish man boarding a boat harbored in Trieste. After his father's arrest and death in Sachenhausen, he went into hiding, but unlike many others, he has an uncle living in Shanghai, one of the last places to still allow Jewish people entry. In Shanghai, his uncle runs a few clubs and plans to open a new one, activities that have him working with the various criminal gangs in Shanghai. Shanghai is a powder keg. It's still Chinese, but the Japanese secret police are showing their power and the city is filling with refugees, both from Europe and the Soviet Union, but also from other parts of China. Daniel has to learn quickly and play an increasingly dangerous game of playing the different factions against each other.

Kanon has written several novels about the aftermath of the Second World War set in Berlin and I've enjoyed those books enormously. He knows how to keep a thriller moving, while also creating complex and frequently conflicted characters and a real sense of place. He does the same thing here, writing a story that was a huge amount of fun to read, with plenty of tension and an intriguing snapshot of Shanghai at a pivotal moment in its history.

Living happened until it didn't. There was no choice in it. To say no to a new day would be unthinkable. So each morning you said yes, then stepped into the consequence.

Cyrus immigrated to the US with his father when he was a baby. He was raised by a depressed single father who worked at a chicken farm and died soon after Cyrus graduated high school. Cyrus stayed in the Midwest for college and stayed in the same town after graduation, doing the same low-paying jobs he'd done in college and mainly drinking and taking drugs and not writing. After he gets sober, he's still not writing but he's not writing about the lives of famous martyrs, fascinated by their meaningful deaths.

I do like a sad sack doomed poet type, so I was predisposed to like Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, but it's also beautifully written. Akbar is a poet, and it shows in the word choices and how he can do so much in very few words. The novel centers Cyrus, but it's also about his absent family, with chapters told from the point of view of his mother, father and uncle, all of whom have fascinating stories to recount. And Cyrus also has a good friend, Zee, and a sponsor at AA who cares for him and sticks with him despite their differences. This is a novel that plays with language, moves around with some chapters leaning towards humor, and builds into a novel with a great deal of heart. I really loved this book and I'm looking forward to Akbar's next novel.

Today was an informal Central Illinois LT meet-up, which is to say I met Karen (Charon07) at the Friends of the Library book sale in Urbana and then went for coffee afterwards. We had a lot of fun (well, I had a lot of fun, Karen can speak for herself) and we were both wildly undercharged for our stacks of books. I found a hardcover of How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, two paperbacks that looked interesting and a very pleasant old copy of Adam Bede. What really excited me, though, were the art books -- someone was clearly getting rid of an entire collection -- so I came home with three very heavy and reproduction-rich exhibition catalogs. A well-spent six dollars.

How nice that you had a meet-up and a book sale too. I missed a local library sale last Sat that has you take whatever books you want and give any donation you want instead of pricing the books. But it looks like you got a good deal.

>170 dudes22: I wonder how that works out for them. At the giant book sale in St. Louis, art books like the ones I brought home were all individually priced and all at least $10.

>169 RidgewayGirl: Oh yes, I had a great time! I did get more than my allotted 3 Thingaversary books, but they were such a great deal, even if they would have charged us the posted prices. (That Janna Levin is going to be in my “finish the books you’ve started but never finished” category next year, unless you finish it first and tell me not to bother.)

Stephen King is a storyteller, the kind who can make a routine trip to the store for milk into a story worth listening to. In You Like it Darker, he promises a collection of short stories darker than his usual fare, and sometimes delivers on that promise. But even the stories that end well (a surprising number!) are as interesting to read as anything he's written. A case in point is On Slide Inn Road, where King rewrites Flannery O'Connor's most famous story A Good Man is Hard to Find, (if you haven't read it, do so before reading King's version).The stories vary wildly in length from barely ten pages to ninety, the longest, Rattlesnakes, being one of the strongest, and building on both Duma Key and Cujo. A solid collection and if I might have liked King to go even darker, it was certainly a collection that I enjoyed.

>172 Charon07: I think you may well finish the Levin before I start it, lol.

>169 RidgewayGirl: Nice haul, especially the Charles Rennie Mackintosh book!

>175 rabbitprincess: I wondered if you'd see that, rp.

>169 RidgewayGirl: I think we should adopt library sales in the UK. Although it's not like I need any more books in the house!

>169 RidgewayGirl: $6? That's amazing!
>177 charl08: Entirely what Charlotte said!

>177 charl08: You do have charity shops with large book selections. Here, those shops, if they have any books at all, it's one sad shelf or a box to dig through. Libraries have booksales run by a separate group, usually called "The Friends of the Library" and those range from small to enormous, but other libraries just have a separate area where they sell books, which is what both library systems in my small city use. For one of those, the librarians chose to arrange the donated books by color, which I find delightfully anarchic.

>178 Jackie_K: We were criminally undercharged, but I suspect part of that is not wanting to deal with the art books -- the glossy paper and size makes them very heavy.

There's something about the faces of everyone in my family and in mine. I think you can see in our eyes the kind of sadness, which is in two places at once--mourning the past, grieving the future. Sad in a historically significant and visually satisfying way. Looking sad like it's your job.

In 2010, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was attending Harvard when she wrote about her experiences being undocumented. Later, she would be on the shortlist for the National Book Award for her non-fiction book, The Undocumented Americans. Now she has written a novel, Catalina, about a young woman in her last year at Harvard who is undocumented and dealing with all the uncertainties people do when they are about to be launched into the world and dealing with the constant stress of being undocumented and worrying about her grandparents who are also undocumented and also getting older, so the kinds of jobs that are open to them are becoming more difficult. Catalina also wants to have fun, have sex, fall in love, like any other girl her age. She's also an over-thinker and very, very smart.

Catalina begins as a campus novel and ends as something else. For the first half of the book, it felt like a riff on Elif Batuman's Selin novels, with an uncertain but bright and engaging heroine navigating Harvard social life, trying her hand at flirtation and finding out more about herself.

I too could quote Charles Bukowski. I could wear headbands. Learn to drink port. You can be whoever you want in America.

But when the winter break sends her back to sit in her grandparents's tiny apartment while her boyfriend tours South America, an activity she can't share as she lacks the money and, as an undocumented American, lacks a passport. And once back in Queens, she is back in her grandparents's precarious world, where a toothache is a financial emergency and a surprise visit by the ICE puts her grandfather at risk of deportation. This second part of the book is both the strongest and the most scattershot part of the novel, with so many elements crammed into a single space that most get a quick, intriguing mention only to be overtaken by the next six things Catalina does or thinks or reacts to. The flaws of this novel are all those common in debut novels and there are far more elements to be impressed by. This is definitely an author to watch.

Lovely sale haul. Glad the meet up went well.

>167 RidgewayGirl: I have read two Kanon's and enjoyed them. I was not aware of this one, but will put it on my WL.

>181 Helenliz: One thing about meeting another LibraryThinger is that I know ahead of time that we will have something to talk about. Fun to meet someone else living in the wilds of central Illinois.

>182 Tess_W: He's become one of my favorite authors. He knows how to tell a good story and he knows how to set a novel in a specific place and time, and those are pretty much what I want from a historical thriller.

>183 RidgewayGirl: We should try to arrange a meetup with other Illinois and Missouri LTers at the St Louis booksale.

>184 Charon07: That is an excellent idea.

The God of the Woods centers on the disappearance of a twelve year old girl from a summer camp in 1973. Barbara disappears from her cabin one night, setting off a large manhunt. This being a novel, there's far more to the story; Barbara is the daughter of the owners of the site of the camp and her brother disappeared from the same location a year before she was born.

Liz Moore is the author of Long Bright River and she knows how to structure a good mystery novel, but what she's really good at is examining people's motivations and relationships with each other. Here, she gives herself a lot to work with, yet keeps the plotting tight. Moore follows several characters through the events, from the missing girl's mother, to the camp counselor in charge of the cabin Barbara was in, who now finds herself a suspect in the case, to the awkward girl who was Barbara's closest friend at camp, to a young detective working the case, as well as several secondary characters, all viewing the same events from different angles. Moore examines the role class plays in how people are treated and in who is believed, as well as the roles that were available to women in 1960s and 70s and the hoops women jumped through to be allowed some measure of freedom. But primarily, this is a very well-plotted and satisfying mystery novel.

>186 RidgewayGirl: I was going to take a BB for this, but I already took one from @lsh63

>186 RidgewayGirl: - I've already had Long Bright River on my list to read for a while, and now I need to add this one too.

>186 RidgewayGirl: Waiting for this one from the library. Loved her last book.

>187 lowelibrary: I really loved Long Bright River, but I also took a BB from Lisa for this one.

>188 dudes22: Both are good, although I think I would lean slightly towards Long Bright River.

>189 charl08: One thing about having a smaller library system is that the holds line is usually not too long, even for a very in demand book. On the other hand, they do not have late fees, which is something I strongly approve of, since that tends to impact the people who most need library access to books, however it also makes people sloppy about getting books back on time. I have one book on hold for which the last person who checked it out was supposed to return it by July 8.

>169 RidgewayGirl: What a haul - and a bargain! I'm a big fan of Charles Rennie Mackintosh's work.

>191 VivienneR: I was thrilled to find that book. There are tons of full-color reproductions which means the book is very heavy, so I'm going to have to figure out how to read it comfortably.

In Clear by Carys Davies, a Scottish minister travels to an isolated island somewhere between the Orkneys and the Shetland islands. His job is to evict the sole living resident as part of the clearances, when subsistence farmers were removed from the land their families had farmed for generations to make room for sheep, which were more profitable for landowners. What happens during his stay on the island with the man with whom he does not share a language, knowing that a ship will arrive to pick both of them up in a month's time, as well as what happens to the minister's wife as she waits and worries, results in a book that it both gentle and harsh. Davies evokes the difficulties of daily living, both alone on an island far to the north and of making a living in Scotland in the 1840s.

There's so much packed into this slender novel and yet the book never feels hurried. The three central characters are complex and richly drawn and all three are in a situation that has potential for great harm to be done to them. Davies writes so well and allows her characters to be deeply empathetic even as they face very different issues than people face today. I'm looking forward to reading more from this talented author.

>186 RidgewayGirl: Just ordered this one!

Good Morning Kay, Just doing an early morning pop in to see what you thought of Clear. I see that you enjoyed it. Now I can't wait to see what you think of Liars.

>194 Tess_W: Tess, you will enjoy The God of the Woods.

>195 lsh63: Clear was so well done. It really could have gone in any direction there at the end.

>193 RidgewayGirl: I have a hold on that one but my name is down at the bottom of a long list. Looking forward to it after reading a review in The Guardian.

Her whole life felt like work now. Even the parts that used to be the most fun, like reading over the summer or orgasming during sex or having conversation with her husband at dinner. They felt like things she had to be really good at now, in order to prove that everything was normal.

When her fifth try with IVF ends in miscarriage, Phoebe falls into a funk and drinks too much. Her husband falls into Mia, a pregnant colleague. Since Phoebe and her husband both teach at the same university (although he has tenure and she's an adjunct), it's awkward. After the divorce, Phoebe is left with a job that can't pay the bills or even provide health insurance, and a cat. So once the cat dies, she decides to spend a night in a small, luxury hotel on the coast and commit suicide. The problem is that the hotel is otherwise completely filled with a wedding party and Phoebe is pulled into their orbit despite her best efforts.

She looks out at the ocean spread before her. From up here, the water looks calmer than it does in movies. It looks like a flat and reliable rug, as if it knows nothing about what is to come. And it's true that Phoebe expected more from the ocean, maybe because she read too many Herman Melville books in which the ocean knows everything about the future--foreshadows death with every wild and loud crash of a wave.

As Phoebe learns to say what she means, she's drawn into the lives of The Wedding People, from the bride determined to make every detail perfect, to the tween daughter of the groom, to the bride's mother, Phoebe becomes important to helping them work through family dynamics and communication failures. As for Phoebe, she's pulled back into life despite her best efforts and wondering what trying again will mean for her.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach straddles the line between humor and brutal honesty with an assured deftness. More than anything, this is a novel about failures in communication between people, and in people's failures to communicate with themselves. Phoebe is a great protagonist; her years of measuring her words and actions have made her a keen observer of human relations and her newfound willingness to say what she means gives the people she's interacting with a lot to react to, both positively and negatively. But while Phoebe now speaks her mind, she's never cruel and she might be what the members of this wedding need.

All Fours by Miranda July is a novel that invites strong feelings. You'll love it or you'll hate it, but you will not be bored. The book centers on a forty-something woman living in LA, who decides to drive to a planned week in New York instead of flying. She makes it to Monrovia, one of the bland cities surrounding Los Angeles, and checks into a dumpy motel. And the next day, instead of continuing her trip, she just stays. She becomes fixated on a young man who works at Hertz and renovates her motel room, lying to her husband and child about her trip but confiding in a friend about her obsession for Davey, the Hertz employee.

The protagonist of All Fours is entirely self-centered in a way that is less selfish than it is insecure. Everything is about her and since her emotions careen wildly from extreme to extreme, there's nowhere to feel balanced or calm. It's exhausting living in her head, what with all the panic going on between bouts of despair and euphoria. But this isn't just a novel about a woman going off the rails, it's also about how women age and what that means to them. Beginning with the protagonist's outrage at what menopause might mean to her, July spins out into a more balanced look at how middle age brings positive changes as well. And it's cleverly done, even if the exaggerated style of telling the story didn't appeal to me.

Personal news! A kitten has moved in to an upstairs room while we wait for her vet appointment. My daughter rescued a litter of kittens and has gotten all but two adopted out, so in a moment of weakness, I agreed to one (my husband would fill the house with cats if he could) and so she drove down from Chicago with a friend and the tiny thing we have named Bettina.

No pictures yet. She arrived last night and this morning was too busy making biscuits in her kibble bowl. She is a sweet thing who already runs to us and has a massive purr and I love her already.

>200 RidgewayGirl: welcome, Bettina, to the family. Can't wait for little fluffball pictures.

>200 RidgewayGirl: Yes, please post pics as soon as you can!

>200 RidgewayGirl: Ooh, can't wait to see pictures and read more about Bettina's adventures!

Ooh! A kitten. I too will wait for pictures.

Eager for the pictures and congrats to Bettina - she's found a great home!

Here are the first pictures of a thoroughly delightful kitten.

>206 RidgewayGirl: Aww, so *cute*!

>206 RidgewayGirl: Such a pretty kitty! Give Bettina a snuggle from me!

>206 RidgewayGirl: An adorable kitten. Welcome Bettina.

Hurray for new kitty! Welcome, Bettina!

Cute! Cute! Cute!

Thanks for the pics -- she's such a cutie pie!

Progress is being made. Yesterday, she stood in her water dish to get a drink. Today, well, this is a step forward.



She also had her first vet visit. She's healthy, but underweight and 8 weeks old. She can now start being introduced to the rest of the house and the other cats.

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland takes the now fairly common narrative structure of combining a non-fiction subject with the author's own memoir and uses it to do some very interesting things. Shapland began as a research librarian doing things cataloging donations from author's estates and sending copies of documents to scholars. It's then that she discovers some letters written to McCullers, love letters that were written by a Swiss woman, and that eventually leads to this book.

McCullers lived at a time when people were not able to be openly gay, and even less so in the small, Southern town where she grew up. So it's not surprising that she lacked the vocabulary to talk about this, but it is surprising that none of her previous biographers mentioned it, at best hinting of ambivalence. As Shapland finds more and more evidence, she begins researching seriously, culminating with a month-long residency in McCullers's own family home in Columbus, Georgia. McCullers dealt with feeling like an outsider even within the community she was born in; her health was poor and she was often unable to get out of bed, she didn't fit comfortably into the role of a Southern belle, leaving for New York while still a teenager. Married early, she leaves her marriage for the comforts of February House, a place filled with artists and writers like W.H. Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles and Gypsy Rose Lee and then a residency at the famous artists's enclave of Yaddo. Throughout she struggled with her sexuality, marrying and remarrying the same man, who Shapland contends was controlling and using her fame, but others have portrayed Reeves as protective. She struggled with her health and how difficult it often was for her to do any work.

A lot of people talk about Carson McCullers as "ahead of her time," given, I presume, her empathetic writing about gay men, interracial love, racism, and disability in the 1940s and '50s. . . but perhaps, it feels more accurate to say that she was just plain empathetic to human differences. That it has nothing to do with history, with "the times," with generation. When I read Carson's fiction, it is clear that empathy is a choice a person makes, moment to moment, in how they approach other people. On the page and off.

Shapland uses the parallels between her own life and McCullers's as scaffolding, and then moves from that into asking if it's possible to write biography without bias. From McCullers's previous biographers refusal to look at what was in front of them to her own focus on McCullers's sexuality, she contends that it's impossible for any person to write about another without introducing their own bias, from what they choose to focus on to what they omit. By putting her own motivations front and center of this book, I was sent looking for articles about specific aspects of McCullers's life alongside this book and in doing so, it was interesting to suddenly spot how the authors of those articles were choosing how they wrote about her and to realize that it would be impossible to do otherwise.

I can see why this book was a finalist for the National Book Award. This thought-provoking and personal book is well worth reading and I suspect I will be thinking about different parts of it for some time to come.

>213 RidgewayGirl: Awwwwww :D

>213 RidgewayGirl: awww. I could happily turn into a cat lady.

>214 RidgewayGirl: - Having just read McCullers' book The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for our book club, I'm finding your review interesting and wish you had read it just a little sooner as I could have included some of your points in our discussion. (Giving you credit of course) I'm not really sure I'm interested enough to read this book, but I'll certainly think of it if I'm ever interested. I may just mention this biography at our next meeting in case others are interested.

>216 Helenliz: My husband would have a house filled with cats. I can't believe there's no expression like "cat lady" for men.

I spent the early morning with my book and tea in the room we have her in. I woke her up going in and then she spent 20 minutes working on her parkour and sprinting skills, then she crawled on me and fell asleep purring. She is cleared to mix with our cats, but she's so small and our house is so big, I don't want her out without supervision. And while I love our other cats, they are big jerks who have no consideration for others, so will need to be supervised around her until they all figure it out.

>217 dudes22: I will be thinking about this book for some time. I read so many articles about different parts of McCullers's life while reading it because Shapland was clear in how it's impossible to write without one's own biases coming into play. I do want to reread The Heart is a Lonely Hunter now.

Congratulations on the new addition to your family! Bettina is so sweet!

>219 VivienneR: We are all in love with her, except for the other cats who are putting together a petition to have her sent away.

>220 RidgewayGirl: Bettina is adorable and hopefully the other cats will soon see that as well!

>221 DeltaQueen50: They will not. They have learned to live peacefully together, but they tell me frequently that that does not mean they are friends. They will eventually learn to tolerate our newest tabby.

One benefit of having three tabbies and one white cat is that the neighbors all think we have two cats and that will not change with Bettina.

>198 RidgewayGirl: Goes on my WL!

>223 Tess_W: Tess, it's one of the best books I've read this year.

Kate Atkinson has kindly provided us with a new Jackson Brody mystery, Death at the Sign of the Rook, and if you're a fan, you've no doubt already planned to read it asap.

This installment begins with Jackson arriving at a country hotel, a hotel situated in a grand house of the Downton Abbey variety, for a murder mystery weekend event, then the book goes back in time to explain why he is there, given that it's not the kind of thing he would usually go in for. It begins with the theft of a small painting from the bedroom of a recently deceased widow. Her middle-aged children hire Jackson to get it back from the caregiver they suspect of having taken it. Jackson is intrigued -- by the painting, by the caregiver, and the sense that the pair that hired him are hiding something. And so he goes about figuring things out, step by step.

This novel is delightful. It calls back to the Golden Age mystery novels with the big manor house, the characters that include everyone from a vicar to a butler to landed gentry slowing selling off the artworks to maintain the house. Of course, it's well-constructed and Atkinson manages to create a few more memorable characters, while bringing back a few old favorites.

>225 RidgewayGirl: Hi Kay, I’m anxiously awaiting this. I toyed with idea of rereading the series but I decided that might be a bit much. The last Jackson Brodie was about five years ago, so I hope I’m not too fuzzy on previous plot points.

>226 lsh63: There is absolutely no need to refresh your knowledge of previous books.

You got to this early! Neither my Library or big book bookstore has it yet. I've been in a slump this month and I think this may bring me back to a satisfying reading life.

Oh hello beautiful Bettina! I'm sure you'll soon have those other kitties eating out of your hands (or at least tolerating your existence eventually).

>228 clue: It was released on the 22nd, so your store and library should have it now. My library allows me to put holds on books before publication which has led, on one occasion, to my getting the library book on its publication day.

>229 Jackie_K: They have decided to ignore her and focus on the treats we give them instead.

>225 RidgewayGirl: Death at the Sign of the Rook isn't in the library yet so I've borrowed Shrines of Gaiety, which looks promising. No mention of fantasy in the blurb, so fingers crossed.

>230 RidgewayGirl: - Our state-wide library system allows holds before book are published but you can't do it until at least one library has put the book on order. I have been known to ask my sister who is a librarian to have the person who orders the books at her library to order a book and then I watch daily so I can put a hold on.

>232 dudes22: I think I have an advantage in being in a small library system. The one time I requested a book purchase before the book was released, I received an email from the library saying that the book was not yet published, but I would be notified as soon as they did get a copy.