Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens – Book

Something freaky happened while I was reading Delia Owen’s book Where the Crawdads Sing. I experienced a small invasion of fireflies in my house. When I turned off my lights at night the flashing lights began, like little twinkle lights, except with a bug attached. Now Kya, the “Marsh Girl” in Owen’s book may have found comfort in a few little fireflies, she may have looked them up in her books and learned all about them, but I didn’t like the idea that they might cozy up to me while I slept so I kept catching them in plastic containers and taking them out to the porch and setting them free. What I learned about fireflies in this novel made them far less romantic, but Kya would excuse them because that is just nature. It’s about survival and reproduction of the species.

Where the Crawdads Sing is a book that requires you to suspend your disbelief, but it is also a book of beautiful images and natural lessons. Kya is born into a family with parents and children, although some of the children are quite a bit older than she is. Her father drinks and yells and slaps and punches, anyone who gets near him but especially his wife. Kya is only six when her mother leaves her, when she walks off in her alligator high heels, carrying a small suitcase, tossing a white scarf over her shoulder. Kya looks every day for years for her mother to return. Her closest sibling, brother Jodie, also leaves. He tells her that it is too dangerous for him to stay and he has to go. That leaves Kya with that abusive father. But Kya is a child of the marsh land and the swamps. They entertain her, teach her and hide her. She simply hides in the marshes when things get scary.

Kya had heard all about the potential horrors of foster care. She tries school for one day and then cannot bring herself to go back. The town sees the father and little daughter as trash and they do not really want to be involved. Kya’s dad stops drinking for a while and they fish together and motor around the marshes in his small boat but eventually he starts drinking and gambling and once again gets abusive. Eventually, when Kya is only ten, he also leaves and doesn’t come back. She barely survives but she uses the gifts from the sea.

What the beaches and marshes of the South Carolina lowlands come to mean to Kya, the deep loneliness she feels, that she sees herself as unlovable among humans but an accepted part of the beaches and marshes and swamps and clearings that she comes to know and love, eventually offers her some ways out of poverty and solitude. She meets two men, Tate, who shares her love of the lowlands and who teaches her to read, who brings her books and her first kiss. The second man is of the town and if Kya was not so lonely she would not have been involved with him.

I avoided reading this book for quite a while because I guess I am not very enamored of crawdads, but it was a compelling story, whether believable or not. Delia Owens leaves you with some things to think about, and if you finish it you will see why it was freaky to have those fireflies visit while I was reading Kya’s story.

Photo – From a Google Image Search – The Bibliofile

An Entire Decade in Two Volumes

I did it! I fit an entire decade into two volumes. So you can buy my essays by the year or you can get the whole megillah all at once.

Omnibus Edition 1 covers 2010-2016

These essays were all written in the administration of Barrack Obama. They show a Republic Party that had been radicalized by the Tea Party movement, the Federalists, the NRA, and a web of Conservative think tanks and policy groups. Fundamentalists had their own influential groups that also worked with the Conservative web. It became clear that there was a concerted effort to put forth an firm agenda for the way Conservatives planned to steer government into the future. We came to know these agenda items as ‘talking points’. It also became clear that Republicans were looking for members who would lead aggressively and who would not put too fine a point on civility. The groundwork for this agenda was laid out before Obama won, but the obstructionism and the racism, the voter suppression, and the reactionary attitudes towards women and immigrants became Republican strategy and this strategy is still in use today. Conservatives seem dedicated to winning a final battle with liberalism, once and for all. As you read these essays you can watch this campaign unfold.

Omnibus Edition 2 with bonus material covers 2017-2020

Donald J. Trump was elected to be America’s 45 th President in 2016. He was inaugurated in 2017 and joined an elite club of men who have led American through good times and bad. From the beginning he seemed to deliberately govern America as if he were a king or a mafia don. He does not ever worry about representing all Americans. He is, clearly, the “Red State” President with his own supporters, his own media and his own agenda, which also includes helping the Republicans and the Fundamentalists accomplish their agenda when doing so suits his purposes.

What ensues in the first term of Trump is the subject of this book, which covers the essays I wrote during Trump’s first term in office. Since I would like to get these thoughts out in time to convince voters of how important it will be to replace the Republicans and Donald Trump with Democrats if we want our republic to survive, I had to publish before the end of 2020.

We are in the midst of trying to emerge from a pandemic and whether this virus is done with us or not remains to be seen. If there is a second wave of the virus we are unsure what will happen to the American economy. This administration does not value workers except as cogs in a Capitalist machine that drives the stock market. This is not an argument against Capitalism. It is an argument against a misguided ideology that divides people into winners and losers and plans to give the winners dominion over the losers.

https://www.amazon.com/author/nlbrisson

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel – Book

The title of The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel is more symbolic than actual, although the book abounds with expensive houses and hotels full of glass walls, and images of light on glass, and reflections in glass, water like glass, and even two cryptic examples of acid writing on glass. Despite all the reflected sunlight, and the sunlit exteriors viewed through shaded interiors we get the feeling that this will be a dark tale. The sunlight simply covers over the crimes little and big that all human lives seems to collect. The glass suggests a transparency which does not exist. It is as if you tried to look through the glass from the outside, but the inside was so dim in the bright sunlight that all you could see was your reflection.

Paul is the first character we meet. Although he certainly wanders along underneath the main narrative, his is also an iconic modern story. Paul’s sister, Vincent, I know strange name for a girl, but that is her name, does not know her brother well and is warned by her mother that he has a difficult life and she should stay away from him. However, Paul is adrift and Vincent is his only anchor so he makes sure that his path sometimes crosses hers. Paul wants to be a musician but he is in college studying math. He is barely surviving and then things get even worse when he goes to a Goth bar to hear the group Baltica and buys a bad batch of Ecstasy. He hands it off to the band, not realizing that it is a messed up batch and Charlie Wu dies of a heart attack. Talk about a life-haunting event. And why did it have to happen to a guy from the back of beyond in Canada who already had a tenuous grasp on life skills. Paul becomes a heroin addict.

Vincent, who once engraved with an acid pen on her window the mysterious phrase ‘Sweep me Up,” does get swept up by billionaire John Alkaitis when she is working as a bartender at an exclusive hotel near her hometown of Caiette. Vincent also drifts along through life, although she is not very old. She has the habit of filming scenes from nature, especially of water for five minute segments of time but this does not seem to be leading her to any career or art form. It’s just something she does. Paul, actually Vincent’s half-brother, also is working at the hotel and he is accused of etching the sentence ‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass’. It’s an odd echo of his sister’s behavior and we even think that Vincent may have done this. It’s a mystery that isn’t solved until much later so I will leave it there.

This is not really the story of Paul and Vincent although they begin the story and end it. The fact that Paul keeps stealing parts of Vincent’s life and slowly killing himself with drugs will have you wondering about the reason these two are even in this story. They are sort of two innocents destroyed by the evils of modern life. But John Alkaitis does not seem evil. He’s very good to Vincent and he has style and wealth. He’s a sympathetic figure as he lost his first wife to cancer. Vincent is too young for him but she doesn’t question him or try to control him in any way. She is just a pretty, cheerful and self-contained presence. But John Alkaitis is a financial wizard who seems to use magic to produce investment returns that are consistently high. How does he do it?

The book is well-written, full of evocative images. It begins with a flashforward to the end which you may not even process unless you go back and read the beginning again. The beginning did not draw me in but I stayed with it and became quite enamored of the book. It’s not easy to pluck a story out of the news and make it fresh, with a decided literary flair.

Camino Winds by John Grisham – Book

Camino Winds takes us back to Camino Island just in time to greet a direct hit by a Category 4-5 hurricane named Leo. John Grisham takes us to revisit Bruce Cable at his very popular bookstore when Mercer Mann is scheduled to do a reading and book signing for her new novel, named Tessa after her grandmother. Bruce Cable is an enthusiastic fan of Mercer and he is an enthusiastic fan of all novelists, although he likes literary fiction best. The island has attracted a small, oddball group of writers who enjoy each other’s company and are happy to be strong-armed into attending the book signings Cable sponsors. His bookstore is a popular stop on publishers’ marketing circuits.

Mercer is with her new beau Thomas, also a writer, but they have to evacuate the island before the book signing can ever take place. Mercer’s grandmother’s cottage may not be able to survive a direct hit by such a strong storm. Bruce moves all his first floor books to the upper floors in the bookstore and decides to stay put in his Victorian home, beautifully decorated by his wife Noelle, an antiques dealer. Noelle is off on a buying trip. Nick, a young student working part time in the bookstore hangs with Bruce through the storm and the aftermath. Bruce has a generator.

The storm is a doozey and there is plenty of damage but it is to the north of where Cable lives, closer to the big hotels. And indeed, the electricity does get taken out by the storm. But one of Cable’s writer friends fares far worse in the storm. When they go to check on him they find him folded over a stone wall in his back yard, dead. At first they think he was hit by flying debris, but young Nick, lover of mystery books, offers good reasons to believe this is actually a murder.

Nelson is an author who has just finished a new book, although he has not yet sent it to a publisher. At first no one except the reader of Camino Winds thinks there is a connection between the manuscript and Nelson’s untimely demise. But we, John Grisham‘s readers knew it. We were right, sure enough there is a connection and it makes for another edge-of-your-seat story, even with a little edge of menace. Watch out or you will be pulling another all-nighter.

Camino Island by John Grisham – Book

I decided to go for a bit of lighter summer reading and I know John Grisham well and so I knew if I chose his book Camino Island that I was likely to find what I was looking for. The book begins in a library at Princeton University, always a good sign for me when a book begins in a library. In this case four thieves decide to take on a nearly impossible heist of five original Fitzgerald manuscripts from a very well-protected vault. Pulling off the theft required plenty of advanced planning and ingenuity and the end result was both successful and not successful. The books ended up in the shady end of the rare books trade.

In a parallel story, which we know will eventually connect back to this theft, we meet a young author Mercer Mann (great author name) who has just lost her job teaching at a university due to the economy. She had published one book which was well-accepted by critics but did not really sell because of inadequate marketing. She had spent many summers on Camino Island with her grandmother Tessa, protecting endangered sea turtles, enjoying her grandmother’s company, and learning to love the ocean and the beach. When her grandmother, who had gone sailing, was found drowned after a storm, Mercer stayed away from the beach house she loved because she could not face knowing her grandmother would no longer be there. But it has been several years and Mercer is without a job and finding it difficult to write her second novel.

Enter Elaine, chic insurance investigator looking for those missing Fitzgerald manuscripts and running out of time. When she offers Mercer much more than a year’s salary to spy on the local bookseller, Bruce Cable, and then ups the ante by offering to pay off Mercer’s burdensome student loans, Mercer takes on this task despite her gut feeling that this is a very bad idea and that she is unsuited to the task.

John Grisham is skilled at grabbing us with his prose and his timing and keeping us engrossed in a story until we risk losing sleep over the matter. He has not lost his touch. He also knows how to make imperfect people likeable enough that we make allowances. This book doesn’t attempt to meet any goals that inspire global equality or cooperation; it exist strictly to entertain, and it does that very well. The book has suspense and questionable choices, but it also offers warmth and charm.

Network Effect by Martha Wells – Book

From a Google Image Search – The Nerd Daily

Perihelion’s network has been taken over by alien remnants and so has its engine, draped in organic alien remnants, so the ship kidnaps SecUnit, our SecUnit, the surgically altered, Murderbot who figured out how to turn off its own governing module. The problem is that SecUnit is not alone. Amena the somewhat annoying teenaged daughter of his new friends from Preservation is with him when he gets kidnapped. Fortunately the bot who usually controls Perihelion, the one our antisocial SecUnit calls Art, works with and understands teenaged humans and Amena is more grounded than she seems. This is the way Network Effects by Martha Wells, her fifth Murderbot book begins. From that point on the action is nonstop.

We are not at all sure why we like a SecUnit with an attitude, but he has become recognizable to us because of certain little foibles like his addiction to space movies which are basically space soap operas. SecUnit has taught Art to share his taste in movies. Whenever either can free up a small amount of his/her coded brain, which is a network in control of many things at once, you can bet there is movie running in the background with a title like Mainstream Defenders Orion or World Hoppers.

Clearly our SecUnit is also becoming more an augmented human than a murderbot. Murderbots are incapable of empathy or social anxiety. They are built to be stone cold murderers. Even before SecUnit turned off its own governor module it had far too many moral issues with the orders it was being given to be an efficient murderbot. When a murderbot doesn’t behave it gets shut down and reconfigured by whatever corporation or other entity owns it. Since they are very expensive they are usually owned by only the wealthiest companies and bonded out for specific jobs. Our SecUnit became his own “person” very early in his career. Here’s the old artificial intelligence question about whether or not machines can learn. And what about a machine that is a mix of machine parts and organics? SecUnit is quite lovable and handy to have around, but isn’t it possible that might not always be the case with an ungoverned murderbot. (Random, but valuable thought, not answered in this novel.)

We also get a enormous dose of animosity towards the role of corporations in exploring and developing planets. Martha Wells does not seem to believe that rapacious corporate entities are going to be any less greedy and profit-oriented out in space than they are on earth, but the repercussions could be very deadly. And sometimes they might be deadly on purpose. Entertain yourself sometime with Network Effect or one of the other Murderbot Diaries. If you don’t like them it may be because you are not addicted to space soap operas like me and the other bots.