RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Three

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RidgewayGirl Attempts to Embrace Chaos in 2024 - Chapter Three

1RidgewayGirl
Edited: May 25, 5:51 pm

My year of reading what I want, when I want to is picking up nicely. It is easier to pick books when there's a small list of books to read right away, but I'm getting a feel for unrestricted reading. Let's see if I can keep it up.


2RidgewayGirl
Edited: Jun 12, 2:56 pm

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Books Acquired

3RidgewayGirl
Edited: May 25, 5:54 pm

First Quarter Reading

January

1. Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
2. The Final Curtain by Keigo Higashino, translated from the Japanese by Giles Murray
3. Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women by Mary Rechner
4. Blackouts by Justin Torres
5. Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto
6. Cold People by Tom Rob Smith
7. Go as a River by Shelley Read
8. Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
9. Dearborn by Ghassan Zeineddine
10. Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon
11. One of the Good Guys by Araminta Hall
12. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
13. My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

February

1. The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling
2. The Shamshine Blind by Paz Pardo
3. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
4. Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
5. The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
6. The American Daughters by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
7. Absolution by Alice McDermott
8. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

March

1. Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
2. Half an Inch of Water by Percival Everett
3. The Hunter by Tana French
4. American Mermaid by Julia Langbein
5. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
6. S. by Doug Dorst
7. So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan
8. From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata
9. In the Land of Dreamy Dreams by Ellen Gilchrist
10. The Wind Knows My Name by Isabelle Allende, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

5RidgewayGirl
May 25, 5:41 pm

Third Quarter Reading

11RidgewayGirl
May 25, 5:49 pm

My old thread was getting long, so here's a fresh, short one. Let's go read some books and then talk about them.

12kac522
May 25, 8:31 pm

>1 RidgewayGirl: OMG! You mean I can blame my mother (RIP) for all the piles of books around here???

13BLBera
May 25, 8:51 pm

Happy new thread, Kay. >1 RidgewayGirl: I love it!

14RidgewayGirl
May 25, 10:35 pm

>12 kac522: She's getting to them!

>13 BLBera: I find that cartoon very comforting. I will get to read ALL the books.

15labfs39
May 26, 7:21 am

>14 RidgewayGirl: I find that cartoon very comforting. Me too. And I love that the ghost's library card continues to work. Jackpot!

16dudes22
May 26, 5:21 pm

Happy New Thread, Kay. I love that cartoon! I'm hoping it applies to my quilting projects too.

17RidgewayGirl
May 26, 5:32 pm

>15 labfs39: & >16 dudes22: It does make a good argument for continuing to add to the book pile. I'm assuming the ghost uses the self-checkout.

18RidgewayGirl
May 26, 6:25 pm



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.

19kjuliff
May 26, 7:07 pm

>18 RidgewayGirl: it’s so dissatisfying when you get toward the end of a very good book and it ends in a boring fashion. Much worse than if you dislike what happens in the ending. I really loved The Woman from Uruguay but it fizzled toward the end. It was an ok ending but just not up to the standard of the first 80% of the book.

20RidgewayGirl
May 26, 8:51 pm

>19 kjuliff: I'm sure it's hard to end a book well, but a disappointing ending is hard to overcome, while I've read books that redeemed themselves in the second half and I remember those much more fondly.

21RidgewayGirl
May 29, 6:35 pm



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.

22cindydavid4
May 29, 8:29 pm

>21 RidgewayGirl: ditto about our upbringing here in suburbia circa 1970 yes a very different way of life and dont like those bait and switches either but her life sounds interesting and Id like to read it:)

btw the last list of mabel beaumont is defintly about the roles that friendship plays in our lives. I just finished and I now realize what people mean when they dont like being manipulated by an author. But it might be good for your search

23RidgewayGirl
Jun 1, 12:43 pm

>22 cindydavid4: She is worth reading, especially if you have ever idly wondered what a bohemian life in NYC could be like. I'd still like to see non-fiction about friendship and if that book is ever written, I will read it.

24mabith
Jun 4, 11:33 am

If you're looking for some good non-fiction about friendship, I'd highly recommend The Girls From Ames and Big Friendship.

25RidgewayGirl
Jun 4, 12:24 pm

>24 mabith: Thank you! I have an ARC of The Girls from Ames and it also fits my intention to read more about the Midwest.

26RidgewayGirl
Jun 4, 6:06 pm



"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.

27rv1988
Jun 4, 11:32 pm

>26 RidgewayGirl: Great review. I felt much the same way. It is a very powerfully written book.

28RidgewayGirl
Jun 5, 12:24 am

>27 rv1988: You brought up an important point in your review, which I forgot entirely by the time I read Butter, about how Yuzuki based the book on a very real case. I am going to read about it and think about that.

29kidzdoc
Jun 5, 10:30 am

Great review of Butter, Kay!

30japaul22
Jun 5, 11:47 am

>26 RidgewayGirl: I've had a hard time connecting with many of the Japanese novels I've read, but this one sounds really interesting. I put myself on the library waitlist for it. Excellent review!

31FlorenceArt
Jun 5, 1:59 pm

>26 RidgewayGirl: I agree with the others that Butter sounds very interesting, and there is a French translation available. I have read very few contemporary Japanese novels and so I wishlisted this.

32RidgewayGirl
Jun 5, 2:22 pm

>29 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl!

>30 japaul22: I'm curious to find out what you make of it.

>31 FlorenceArt: I suspect you may have access to more Japanese novels than English readers due, just because of how so few books are translated into English. I'm glad this one is widely available and I'd be interested in finding out how the norms of Japanese society compare to French culture.

33stretch
Jun 6, 8:14 am

>26 RidgewayGirl: Great review of Butter, I am just beginning to make my way into the book. I wonder how all the food writing will hit for me as someone who really doesn't enjoy food or cooking all that much.

34FlorenceArt
Jun 6, 1:32 pm

>32 RidgewayGirl: When I was living in Japan (and I had read several books written by Americans in preparation for that), I felt that some things that felt very exotic for Americans were closer to normal for me. I was also keenly aware that for the Japanese, I was just a kind of American. They would call me by my given name (with an approximation of the American pronunciation) when for me the family name would have felt more natural. It's been a long time and I couldn't really elaborate more than this. Anyway, things have changed a lot since then, France has become more Americanized, at least as far as first name / last name. I think Japan has changed a lot too but I'm not sure how, which is part of why I want to read more contemporary Japanese literature.

35RidgewayGirl
Jun 6, 2:58 pm

>33 stretch: Now I'm curious about this, too. I think you'll see the novel from a different angle. I'll keep an eye out for your review.

>34 FlorenceArt: Oh, no one who isn't one likes being mistaken for an American! When I was living in Paris, many years ago, all the Canadians I knew had little Canadian flags sewn to their bags and outerwear, purely as a protective device.

36labfs39
Jun 6, 4:53 pm

>35 RidgewayGirl: no one who isn't one likes being mistaken for an American

And even though I am one, I try to hide the fact when travelling, especially in France.

37RidgewayGirl
Jun 6, 5:09 pm

>36 labfs39: I do love this place, but there's no question that we are not universally loved, deservedly so. Living in other countries, Americans were a group that people felt comfortable mocking, often in front of me with the laughing aside, "oh, not you, obviously," which was less reassuring than one might expect.

38RidgewayGirl
Jun 6, 5:09 pm



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.

39cindydavid4
Jun 6, 5:12 pm

>36 labfs39: when I was a teenager traveling around Israel with two Canadians and two Brits, I was told that the first time I act like an american they will take me back to the kibbutz. I complied.

40LolaWalser
Jun 7, 5:19 pm

I'm looking forward to your impressions of Ivana Sajko. She's shaping up into an important author in Croatian. (And her translator, a great writer too, is a dear friend of mine.)

41RidgewayGirl
Jun 7, 5:24 pm

>40 LolaWalser: I'm mustering my thoughts. The book was intense. In the afterword, her translator said that she often had to take a break from the translation because of that.

42kidzdoc
Edited: Jun 7, 6:22 pm

>35 RidgewayGirl: Oddly enough, I was rarely mistaken for being an American whenever I traveled to Europe, perhaps because few African Americans travel there, or because of the way I dressed and carried myself. I routinely received shocked looks whenever I spoke and gave myself away, especially in the UK and the Netherlands. The looks were never unfriendly, but simply surprising; I remember watching a television game show in the 1970s and one of the contestants was an Asian man, who opened his mouth and spoke with a heavy Southern accent, which threw everyone, myself included!

I was often told that I didn't act like an American, which to me was a compliment.

Whenever I visited the Netherlands it was common that I was addressed in Dutch, and I quickly learned to reply "ik spreek geen nederlands (I don't speak Dutch)." One year several members of the 75 Books club met in Amsterdam (three of us came from London via Eurostar, three others were Dutch), and even though I had met the Dutch couple several times previously I asked the group why I was spoken to in Dutch so often (something that rarely if ever happened to my White American or British friends). The three quickly said, "oh, that's because you look Surinamese," which was puzzling until I started to notice that I truly did resemble them in skin color, and not like African immigrants.

43labfs39
Jun 8, 7:40 am

>42 kidzdoc: I could sometimes pass as French, especially when travelling in Eastern Europe, and was happy to do so. When I was studying in Blois, my French became decent and I learned to dress more like a local. In Paris one time I was negotiating with a hotelkeeper about a room, and when I turned to my sister and asked in English if bathroom down the hall was okay, he immediately said in English, "No room!" We had to wander the city until we came to a youth hostel. It was very frustrating.

I certainly don't blame people for disliking Americans. The stereotypical American tourist is obnoxious: never attempting simple phrases in the language, expecting everything to be big, and service to be fast. If you want everything to be the same as in America, why travel?

44kidzdoc
Jun 8, 11:57 am

>43 labfs39: Right, Kay. The stereotypical American is not favorable, as is the stereotypical person from the UK, but fortunately a large minority, if not a majority, are not loud, obnoxious, or showy; at least I think (or hope) so. The ones who annoy me the most are the loud American (mostly) women who must broadcast where they have been, where they are going to, etc. to the people they are talking to, and anyone else in a quarter mile radius.

If you want everything to be the same as in America, why travel?

Following up on my last point above, it seems as though many of these people want to be able to brag to their friends and relatives that they visited certain notable places, in the manner of a pissing contest.

45RidgewayGirl
Jun 10, 5:38 pm



...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.

46kjuliff
Edited: Jun 11, 6:22 pm

This message has been deleted by its author.

47labfs39
Jun 11, 4:14 pm

>45 RidgewayGirl: Fantastic review, Kay. I'll keep an eye out for this one, and for this author.

48wandering_star
Jun 11, 6:06 pm

>28 RidgewayGirl: I am currently mulling my review of Butter and so I had a look at the real-life case - I was surprised how closely the character of Kajii is to the actual killer. Some of the choices in the novel now make more sense to me.

49rv1988
Jun 11, 11:50 pm

>38 RidgewayGirl: This sounds lovely, I haven't read anything by Sneed before. I'm adding it to my list.

>45 RidgewayGirl: This sounds like a difficult read, but powerful.

50RidgewayGirl
Jun 12, 2:55 pm

>45 RidgewayGirl: Take a deep breath before diving in, Lisa. It's a book I had thought I could read in one sitting, but I needed breathers.

>48 wandering_star: You have sent me down the rabbit hole.

>49 rv1988: There are so many excellent writers who aren't well-known, or who are well-known only in a specific area or group.

51labfs39
Jun 13, 8:14 am

>50 RidgewayGirl: That would make an interesting list: books that required breathers.

52RidgewayGirl
Jun 13, 6:17 pm



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.

53cindydavid4
Jun 13, 7:10 pm

this is definitely the best book Ive read this year, and might be on the best reads ever. Wanna read Trees now

54RidgewayGirl
Jun 13, 8:05 pm

>53 cindydavid4: Oh, The Trees is fantastic. It's angry and horrific and very, very funny.

55lisapeet
Edited: Jun 14, 12:33 pm

Happy belated new thread, Kay! A few people sent me that cartoon... I wonder why.

>21 RidgewayGirl: Have you read Dancyger's Negative Space? Another memoir, this one focusing on her childhood. I'm interested in it because that was my NYC milieu, though I didn't know her parents—I was just a little art student at the time, but that part of downtown did sometimes feel like a big small town, and you knew of people. I also want to read First Love, because friendship is always an interesting topic to me.

And James is up at the top of the pile because EVERYONE has recommended it to me.

56labfs39
Jun 14, 12:00 pm

>52 RidgewayGirl: Wow. That's quite the endorsement. I must get to it.

57RidgewayGirl
Jun 14, 2:02 pm

>55 lisapeet: & 56 Lisa & Lisa, you must read this book immediately. Everett is brilliant and I hope this book wins all the awards.

58rv1988
Jun 15, 5:19 am

>54 RidgewayGirl: >53 cindydavid4: Seconding the recmmendation for The Trees. "Angry and horrific and very, very funny" is a perfect description.

>52 RidgewayGirl: Great review. Oh, I can't wait to read it.

59RidgewayGirl
Jun 15, 1:01 pm

>58 rv1988: James is fantastic, regardless of your relationship to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, although Huck was one of my childhood favorites -- I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, and so vacations to the US involved very long drives. My parents would pick up a few classics, chosen for their length, to parcel out to me, since I was a silent and easy traveler as long as I had a book. So I read Huck Finn, but never the much shorter Adventures of Tom Sawyer.