The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communal Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and translated by Anna Summers in 2017 caught my attention because I had read, not long ago, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which was also set in post-revolutionary Russia in the Metropol Hotel, located in the heart of Moscow. While I enjoyed the novel by Towles, I felt that the life Alexander, once a member of the aristocracy, lived in the Metropol Hotel might be a somewhat romanticized version of the fate a person would normally have suffered as an enemy of the people during those early days of the Communist (Bolshevik)Revolution. The new leaders were purging the nation of old bourgeois influences and the privileged classes. Petrushevskaya’s story is quite different from Alexander’s and conforms more nearly to my understanding of the complicated and unpredictable suspicions that often led to the arrests of Russians in the wake of the revolution.
Anna Summers offers a preface which provides some background. She begins by describing a May 9th parade that took place in every town and village since the end of WWII with rows of ragged and neglected veterans marching proudly, and then she has us picture the day of May 9th in 2015 (Petrushevskaya originally published her book in Russia in 2006) when there were no WWII vets left to parade through the towns and villages; there were only pictures carried by their grandchildren. She tells us, “Except sometimes the facts of a family’s connection with the war weren’t suited for proud retelling and were therefore often concealed from the little ones who would then be forced to hem and haw and finally come up with some lie. Sometimes our grandparents didn’t just die gruesomely, buried alive in a tank, like mine or return disfigured or even return at all. Sometimes they were arrested and sent to the Gulag…” (Her father and her grandfather were killed in a mass execution in the late 1930’s, even though her relations were prominent Bolsheviks elevated by the October Revolution, so she had no war stories to tell and this was a problem.) “The shared experiences of their childhoods – evacuation, hunger – were heightened in her case by the unbearable – and unshareable – extreme because of the social stigma that branded her an ‘enemy of the people’”
Ludmilla’s childhood with her aunt and her grandmother was hungrier and dirtier than that of most children because of the classification and execution of her grandfather and her father. The female survivors were ostracized and interned in a prison without walls. Ludmilla’s story may begin when she was born in the Metropol Hotel but her life is lived far from Moscow for the most part. Whatever Russia was like after the Revolution for those who found favor with the Communists, Ludmilla’s memoir of her childhood years shows what life was like for everyone in a family once a progenitor became an enemy of the people, even though the reasons were often obscure, petty, or even imagined.
Soon this famous Russian writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, will join the ranks of those no longer living veterans of WWII. Thankfully she got to publish this memoir of her early hardscrabble existence and outcast state. We should not ever forget that the Russian Revolution was often an ideological quagmire with many victims, both guilty and innocent. Sounds grim, but is very readable.
Laura Elkin’s book Flâneuse is not the first book about women who are the counterparts of the more usual male figure, the flâneur, A few other books with this title predate hers. Her book has a subtitle: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London and reads very much like a doctoral dissertation, although the language is not quite as academic, and the book tends to offer a warmer reading experience than the expected dry fare of the dissertation. The flâneur she tells us is “one who walks aimlessly…A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention.
Flâneuse is the feminine form and denotes “an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. But each flâneuse discussed in any detail by Elkin is not truly idle. These women were writers, photographers, artists. Until recently it was difficult for a woman to be a flâneuse. Writer Janet Wolff did not give credence to the flâneuse as “such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century.” Other writers agree. But Elkin reminds us that the rise of the department store in the 1850’s and 60’s “did much to normalize the appearance of women in public.”
Laura Elkin was born on Long Island where no one walked anywhere. Her father was an architect who designed some of the corporate headquarters as companies left the city and moved into newly designed corporate parks. But Elkin discovered that she belonged in cities when she moved into New York City to attend college. “To sit in a restaurant on Broadway with the world walking by and the cars and the taxis and the noise was like finally being let in to the centre of the universe, after peering in at it for so long.”
The book is dense with detailed examples of women writers, artists, journalists, and more who felt most at home in cities and used the intimate details of city life gained through wandering and observation to enlighten us all. Elkin gives us a taste of London, following in Virginia Woolf’s footsteps; a soupçon of Venice, New York, and Tokyo (where wandering alone around the city is basically impossible even in daylight); but mainly of Paris which ended up being her home.
Artists she expands on in some detail, both about their lives and their work include Jean Rhys (allied with Ford Maddox Ford), George Sand (who dressed as a boy/man to roam the city freely), Virginia Woolf, Martha Gellhorn (wife of Ernest Hemingway and war journalist and more), and Agnès Varda, in French films.
Elkin’s sums things up in this way, “You don’t need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you’re a woman. Just walk out your front door.” Reading this tome is a bit like being a literary flâneuse without having to leave your armchair – lots of great little tidbits.
Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato is a story of mental illness so severe that even love and medication cannot prevail. It is a story of grief that makes a person forget all the rules that humans should heed. And it is story of parenting both neglectful and obsessed; the story of a boy so small and pale he seems to have been born an albino child; a child so dependent on his grandmother, Florence, that when she dies he is too bereft to heed the protective advice routinely offered to children.- “never speak to strangers.”
Lodato’s novel is well-written, but I was torn. The plot itself is not quite as formulaic as it might seem. This kept me reading. And clearly we cannot spend too much time thinking about the issues that arise from mental illness and our less-than-successful treatments and enabling behaviors. The rights of an individual to freedom are set against the chaos that comes with untreated serious mental illness, a set of circumstances which offers the mentally ill both a sort of dignity and the potential to destroy the balance of more than one life. Lodato makes us hope that we come up with better answers in the future. This issue that continues to challenge us all is a frustrating, but is also a rewarding thread in this book.
What I found hardest to take was the bad parenting the reader encounters in this story. Sadly, it is a fact that bad parenting is a common topic in modern literature. What happens to children when parenting is absent or inappropriate is heartbreaking and, although it probably reflects accurately on what is really the case (and not only in these times), I wish I could believe that exposure leads to improvement and that we get parenting right in the majority of families, however unorthodox the family might be. However, I have sincere doubts that such optimism is valid.
There are plot twists in Lodato’s novel that I cannot discuss. The author uses internal cues to make us think that things will come out one way, while the outcomes are actually less predictable. This should be a good thing but ends up being a bit creepy in ways I cannot specify as I don’t want to interfere with letting readers judge this aspect of the novel as they read. It bothered me; it might not bother another reader. I am concluding with a belief that those who read Edgar and Lucy by Peter Lodato will find in this novel an almost constant stream of personal emotional reactions. While it is a good read; it does not make it onto my list of favorites.
I chose the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson because I wanted a long book to read and because this author has written other books that I enjoyed. Perhaps if I knew this trilogy of books ran to 2700+ pages I might have had second thoughts but my Kindle doesn’t deal with page numbers. I like to think that I would have read these novels anyway. It certainly was not a sprint: it was a journey – a journey in time, a mental journey, and involving lots of journeying by the books’ characters. Stephenson takes us to the 17th and early 18th century. This time period represents a transitional age in that the way men lived upon the earth was changing, in much the same ways that we are in a transitional age now.
Quicksilver introduces us to the Alchemists, who wished to find a way to turn base metal into gold. Quicksilver is mercury, which fascinated Alchemists with its unusual behaviors as a metal that is liquid at room temperature and a metal that beads and rolls around as if it were solid. It was felt that quicksilver, so often found near gold deposits, was somehow transformed into gold by some kind of mysterious natural process. The Alchemists were almost done with their investigations, having failed so often in their endeavors. But the experimentations they had conducted gave them a great scientific curiosity about everything in the world around them, both nonliving and living. Out of the Alchemists came a group known as Natural Philosophers and we had the very beginning of Physics.
These were the days of Isaac Newton in England and Hooke in England and Huygens, a Dutchman, and Gottfried Leibnitz, a German. These men explored the insides of living things, they looked at everything under lenses that improved in quality as the trilogy progressed. They created “the algebra” and they began to see that all things were made of smaller things (atoms to Newton, monads to Leibnitz). Newton and Leibnitz both claimed to have come up with “the algebra” which made these two great men opponents and caused educated folks to divide into two camps depending on which great man they backed.
Stephenson gives us a fictional character to serve as a go-between for these great gentlemen who did not always agree with each other. Daniel Waterhouse is the character who speaks to all of the principals. He also avoids much of the Catholic – Protestant divide of the times by coming from a family that is neither. His father is persecuted for his beliefs, but Daniel is not. Daniel serves as our man in London and in Massachusetts where he is trying to set up the Massachusetts’ Institute of Technological Arts. (He is not the founder of MIT.)
The other two books in this trilogy – which jumps around in time and place – although not quite as neatly and tidily organized as I am making them sound, are called The Confusion and The System of the World. They take us out of London with a vagabond. On the “Continent”, we follow two very unusual fictional characters. We follow Eliza, the stunning and extremely intelligent ex-Turkish slave, captured by a French aristocrat with her mom and sold into slavery in Turkey. And we have Jack Shaftoe, a poor Englishman, also extremely intelligent, who becomes the King of the Vagabonds. Eliza and Jack fall in love when he rescues her from the Turks but their paths diverge. Eliza becomes wealthy by learning to invest in the Dutch “stock market” of the day. Dutch economics are superior to other nations earlier due to the trade of the Dutch East India Company. Eliza becomes a member of the court of Louis XIV and becomes a familiar figure at Versailles. Jack gets captured and becomes a slave rower on a ship bound for Africa. But he is too brilliant to stay down for long. Jack makes a plan, makes some friends and ends up taking us to visit all the world that was known at that time.
Jack’s plan involves stealing gold as part of a plan of retribution against the Frenchman who enslaved Eliza. He does not realize that this is known as the Solomonic Gold because it is bound to mercury. The nature of this particular gold had everyone chasing Jack and his men all over Christendom and beyond and puts his life in mortal jeopardy more times than you will want to count. The Alchemists and the Natural Philosophers are thrown into a total tizzy over this gold and several of our favorite characters barely escape with their lives and only manage it through the rather extreme machinations of Daniel Waterhouse and those he ropes into assisting him. Thus ends the age of Alchemy.
What follows are the beginnings of the Industrial Age. Here as magical science wraps up and practical science begins, just here when someone invents the “Engine that Uses Fire to Pump Water” and a contest offers a prize to anyone who can come up with a way to determine “the longitude” when on a sea voyage, things are as chaotic as they are here at the end of the Industrial Age in our real world.
The Baroque Cycle is a tale that will either entertain you over many a rainy and sunny day or will cause you to completely lose your patience and perhaps throw it at a wall. (Don’t throw your Kindle). Although I sometimes felt a bit crazed when I read for half a day and only progressed through 2% of the book, I never really wanted to stop reading it and I enjoyed it thoroughly, but it’s not an experience I can recommend to anyone. You know if you are a reader who will love this or yawn over this. As for me I will eventually download another Stephenson tome and while away some more idle hours by allowing my mind to be taken somewhere/time else. (It is also a love story of sorts.)
“At some point, says Neal Stephenson by way of Daniel Waterhouse, the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have been wrought into it…Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But – and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there’s a longboat waiting to take him away – he has to admit that having some kind of System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.
The interesting trend I see in this new crop of books on my May 2017 Book List which covers (compiled from PW, Amazon, NYT) mid-March until the end of April is that I see more nonfiction titles than fiction titles. I wonder if all the difficulty we are experiencing in our politics separating real news from fake news, and fact from propaganda or outright lies is fueling a desire to read books that attempt to be based in fact. Another trend also relates to politics because, while our country is responding to the “America First” message and turning its back on globalism, writing is becoming more global than ever before as the nationalities of the published authors show. One constant: so many great books, so little time. I am reading from older lists right now and will not catch up to this list for some time. When I do catch up the novel American War by Omar El Akkad seems like it might suit my politics, sci-fi, apocalyptic tastes. What titles appeal to you?
Publishers Weekly
April 3, 2017
Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing the Revolution by Peter Andreas (NF)
Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris: The Story of Friendship, a Novel, and a Terrible Year by Peter Brooks (NF)
What Flaubert had just written: Sentimental Education (F)
Marlena by Julie Buntin (F)
The Happy End/All Welcome by Mónica de la Torre (Sounds like a can’t miss Poetry book)
Fever of the Blood by Oscar de Muriel (Mys.)
American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad
Somebody with a little Hammer by Mary Gaitskill
Prussian Blue: A Bernie Guthrie Novel by Philip Kerr
The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty by Jonathan Morduch and Rachael Schneider (NF)
The Draw: A Memoir by Lee Siegel
God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America by Louis S. Warren (NF)
Foxlowe: A Novel by Eleanor Wasserberg
April 10, 2017
Long Black Veil: A Novel by Jennifer Finney Boylon (Thriller)
The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science by Marcus du Saufoy (NF)
Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War by Philip Fibura (NF)
Cruel is the Night by Karo Hämäläinen (F)
Beck by Mal Peet with Meg Rosoff (F)
At the Lightning Field by Laura Raicovich (Essays)
An American Sickness: How Health Care Became Big Business and How You can Take it Back by Elizabeth Rosenthal (NF)
Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro (Memoir)
Darwin’s First Theory: Exploring Darwin’s Quest for a Theory of Earth by Rob Wesson (NF
April 17
The Golden Legend by Nadeem Aslam (F)
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. (NF)
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (True Crime)
Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers by Deborah Helligman (NF)
The Sun King’s Conspiracy by Yves Jégo and Denis Lépée (Thriller)
Bang by Barry Lyga (F)
Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes by Ann Elizabeth Moore (Essays)
Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg
April 24
North of Happy by Adi Alsaid (F)
The Whole Together Thing by Ann Brashares (F)
Good Friday on the Rez by David Hugh Bunnell (NF)
The Last Neanderthal by Clair Cameron (NF)
The Outrun by Amy Liptrot (Memoir)
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout (F)
Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (F) (post-apocalyptic journey)
May 1
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan (F)
Season of Crimson Blossoms by Akubakar Adam Ibrahim (F)
The Leavers: A Novel by Lisa Ko (F)
One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of this Will Matter by Scaachi Koul (Essays)
The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis (Autobiographical novel)
Ginny Moon: A Novel by Benjamin Ludwig (F)
The Unruly City: Paris, London, and New York in the Age of Revolution by Mike Rapport (NF)
A Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (NF)
Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky (NF)
Beyond the Bright Sea by Lauren Wolk (F)
Amazon
Editors Picks, Best of the Month
Bear Town: A Novel by Fredrik Backman
American War: A Novel by Omar El Akkad
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann (NF)
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley: A Novel by Hannah Tinti
The Woman in the Castle: A Novel by Jessica Shattuck
Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg, Adam M Grant PhD (NF)
Void Star: A Novel by Zachary Mason
The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the People’s Temple by Jeff Guinn (NF)
Nevertheless: A Memoir by Alec Baldwin (Memoir)
Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr (A Bernie Gunther Novel)
Literature and Fiction
The Stars Are Fire: A Novel by Anita Shreve
If We Were Villains: A Novel by M L Rio
The Woman in the Castle: A Novel by Jessica Shattuck
My Cat Yugoslavia: A Novel by Pajtim Statovci, David Hackston
Spoils by Brian Van Reet
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley: A Novel by Hannah Tinti
The Half Wives by Stacia Pellietier
What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky by Lesley Nineka Arimah
The Practice House by Laura Mitchell
What to Do About the Solomons by Bethany Ball
Marlena by Julie Buntin
All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan, Jessica Cohen
American War by Omar El Akkad
Bear Town by Fredrik Backman
The Last Days of Café Leila by Donia Bijan
Mysteries and Thrillers
Rag Doll by Daniel Cole
Change Agent by Daniel Suarez
Earthly Remains: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery by Donna Leon
The Fix by David Baldacci (Amos Decker Series)
One Perfect Lie by Lisa Scottoline
The Devil’s Country by Harry Hunsicker
If We Were Villains by M L Rio
A Criminal Defense by William L Myers Jr.
Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr
The Lost Order by Steve Berry
Biographies and Memoirs
When You Find Out the World is Against You by Kelly Oxford
Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce Wars by Daniel J Sharstein
The Most Beautiful: My Life with Prince by Mayte Garcia
Richard Nixon: The Life by John Farrell
Sam Shepard: A Life by John J Winters
The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn
Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman
Nevertheless: A Memoir by Alec Baldwin
The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History by Stephan Talty
Arnie: The Life of Arnold Palmer by Tom Callahan
New York Times
March 26
The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution by Ganesh Sitaraman (NF)
The One-Cent Magenta by James Barron (NF)
Quicksand by Malen Perrson Giolito (Thriller)
Ties by Domenico Starnone (F)
Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar (F)
Ill Will by Dan Chaon (F)
The Barrowfields by Philip Lewis (F)
Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato (F)
Irish Fiction
Himself by Jess Kidd
Eggshells by Cartriona Lally
Slipping by John Toomey
March 31
The Evangelicals by Francis FitzGerald (NF)
A Novel of the Century by David Bellow (Les Miserables) (NF)
The Price of Illusion by Joan Juliet Buck (NF)
Blitzed by Norman Ohler (NF)
Sex and the Constitution by Geoffrey R Stone (NF)
Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu (NF)
The Unmade Bed by Stepah Marche (NF)
Down City by Leah Carroll (NF)
Reagan Rising by Craig Shirley (NF)
Jerzy by Jerome Charyn (F)
The Idiot by Elif Batuman (F)
Crime Fiction
Earthy Remains by Donna Leon
The Loving Husband by Christobel Kent
Prussions Blue by Philip Kerr
White Tears by Hari Kunzru (F)
Shot Blue by Jesse Ruddock (F)
April 7
An American Sickness by Elizabeth Rosenthal (NF)
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy (NF)
Ice Ghosts by Paul Watson (NF)
By More than Providence by Michael J Green (NF)
No One Cares About Crazy People by Ron Powers
Unwanted Advances by Laura Kipnis (NF)
The Campus Rape Frenzy by K C Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr (NF)
The Spider Network by David Enrich (NF)
My Darling Detective by Howard Norman (F)
No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts (F)
Our Short History by Lauren Grodstein (NF)
April 14
Nonfiction
Locking Up Our Own by James Forman Jr
A Colony in a Nation by Chris Hayes
South and West by Joan Didion
Letterman by Jason Zinoman
Who Lost Russia? By Peter Conradi
Never Out of Season by Robert Dunn
Martin Luther by Lyndal Roper
The First Love Story (Minus the Sin and Sexism) by Bruce Feiler
The Chessboard and the Web by Ann-Marie Slaughter
Fiction
The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World by Brian Boyle
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
Sympathy by Olivia Sudijic
The Dhow House by Jean McNeil
What to Do About the Solomons by Bethany Bell
Crime Fiction
Fallout by Sara Paretsky
The Burial Hour by Jeffrey Deaver
The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda
A Fever of the Blood by Oscar de Muriel
April 21
Nonfiction
Hamlet Globe to Globe by Dominic Dromgoole
You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser
The Knowledge of Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernback
“Brush up on your Shakespeare”. Hogarth Press has commissioned modern authors to write novels based on Shakespeare’s plays. Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood is the famous Canadian author’s offering in this series. Her novel is based on The Tempest, a Shakespeare play that I have never read. I have no real excuse except that I just never got around to it. Now I’m glad that I didn’t. I think Atwood’s book would provide schools with a great precursor to this rather complicated play, although it is probably just as helpful if read after-the-fact. Felix Phillips is the Artistic Director at the Makeshiweg Festival and he gives new scope to Shakespeare by staging productions that are quite edgy and sometimes a bit over-the-edge. He has an assistant who he has perhaps given too much responsibility for all the nuts and bolts jobs that keep theater festivals afloat. Just as Felix is getting his new cloak (pieced together from stuffed animals) ready so that he can become Prospero, Tony breaks the news that Felix’s contract is not being renewed.
As it turns out the contract now belongs to Tony. Felix has lost so much. He lost his wife of one year when she died in childbirth, then he lost his daughter, Miranda (strange coincidence, Miranda is the main female character in The Tempest) to meningitis when she was three. This second huge loss happened very recently. Now he has lost the career he loves. He is old. He married late. He is fifty and is not likely to find another meaty job in theater especially after being let go. He is mourning and he is angry. He wants revenge and he is willing to wait until his main chance arrives to get it.
He goes to ground in a very bare sort of cottage built into the side of a hill with only an iron stove for heat and no indoor plumbing, but an outhouse. He spends nine years in self-imposed exile with only the ghost of his daughter to keep him company. He uses an alias. He is now known as Mr. Duke. In his new persona he takes a job as a teacher of literature at the Fletcher County Correctional Institute where he teaches, you guessed it, Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, he works with minimum security prisoners and he has them act out the plays, records the productions, and then plays them for the entire prison population on closed-circuit television. His course is in great demand.
Finally he gets to put on the play he never got to direct. He gets to put on The Tempest and if you never understood this play you will by the time the inmates and Mr. Duke are done with you. This is a very enjoyable way to learn about or refresh your memory about a Shakespeare play that has a rather complicated plot and lots of deep things to say about humans and the human condition. And it is the perfect vehicle for Felix’s revenge, as if the universe delivered this moment to him because he deserved it. The parallels make the novel fun for those who enjoy symbolism, metaphor, etc.
Hogarth, as I said, has given very famous authors each a play that mates well with the kind of fiction they write. If you go to Google and type Hogarth Shakespeare Series in the search window it will take you to a list of who has been assigned to which play. Some of the books in the series have been written and some are not out yet. Great idea. I hope to eventually read them all. Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood was an excellent place to start.
It’s Spring (sort of) and this is the season when lots of new books appear on the market so I present to you my March 2017 Book List. Although you will find lots of repetition on these lists each source also offers some unique titles. If you just want a good story, nothing too esoteric, go the Amazon section of the list. If you have global tastes Publisher’s Weekly should satisfy, and if you like to get your book advice from the New York Times then that source is also represented in this list. For the truly compulsive, go for all three.
Nonfiction titles, for some reason, are getting longer and longer so they are, generally, easy to spot. If you are a true reader you probably wish to devour each new book and all of the older ones too. If you were to have a fantasy room it would probably have a comfy chair surrounded by piles of classic and newly-minted books. But if you set out to read each book that was published from February through Mid-March this year you would have to read a little bit over 6.5 titles per day. So don’t be discouraged if you are unable to meet your admittedly unrealistic book reading goals. You have a lot of company.
Publisher’s Weekly
Feb. 6th
Civil Wars: A History of Ideas by David Armitage (NF)
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression by Daphne Merkin (NF)
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen (NF)
Schadenfreude, a Love Story: Me, the Germans, and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words For by Rebecca Schumen (Memoir)
Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbhag trans. from the Kannada by Srinath Perur
Make Yourself Happy by Elini Sikelianos (NF)
Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular by Derek Thompson (NF)
The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease by Meredith Wadman (NF)
Feb. 13th
The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble
In Full Velvet by Jenny Johnson
We are Okay by Nina LaCour
Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma by Larry Millett
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker
The Last Night at Tremore Beach by Mikei Santiago
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt
The Undesired by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir
Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith (NF)
The American Street by Ibi Zoboi
Feb. 20th
Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach
American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution by A. Roger Ekirch (NF)
Spook Street: A Novel by Mick Herron
Running: A Novel by Cara Hoffman
Rusty Puppy: A Novel by Joe Lansdale
Optimists Die First by Susin Nielsen
The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test and the Power of Seeing by Damion Searls (NF)
Encircling by Carl Frode Tiller trans. from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland
Feb 27th
The Accusation by Bandi trans. from the Korean by Deborah Smith (Short Stories that offer glimpses of North Korea)
The Invention of Angela Carter by Edmund Gordon (Bio)
Alpine Apprentice: A Memoir by Sarah Gorham
Walking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen trans. from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston
Daughter of the Pirate King: A Novel by Tricia Levenseller
The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria by Alia Malek
The Gene Machine: How Genetic Techniques are Changing the Way We Have Kids – and the Kids We Have by Bonnie Rochman (NF)
The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World by Anne Marie Slaughter (NF)
Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson by Christina Snyder.
The Hate U Give: A Novel by Angie Thomas
Please Bury Me In This by Allison Benis White (Collection of suicide stories)
Velocity by Chris Wooding (YA Apocalyptic novel)
Camanchaca by Diego Zúniga trans. from the Spanish by Megan McDowell
March 6th
Taduno’s Song: A Novel by Odale Alogiun
The Price of Illusion: A Memoir by Joan Juliet Buck
The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui (Memoir)
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
Ill Will by Dan Chaon
Lenin’s Roller Coaster by Daniel Downing
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Rabbit Cake by Annie Hornett
Inferno: A Doctor’s Ebola Story by Steven Hatch (NF)
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
No Friends But the Mountains: Dispatches from the World’s Violent Highlands by Judith Matioff (NF)
The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico
Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World by Benjamin Reiss (NF)
The Photo Ark: One Man’s Quest to Document the World’s Animals by Joel Sartore
Goodbye Days: A Novel by Jeff Zentner (YA)
March 13th
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
A Psalm for Lost Girls by Katie Bayeri
The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea by Jack E. Davis
In Between Days by Teva Harrison (Memoir, Cancer battle)
Mikhail and Margarita by Julie Lekstrom Himes
The Wanderers by Meg Howrey
Himself by Jess Kidd Atria
White Tears by Hari Kunzru
The Family Gene by Joselin Linder (NF)
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper
March 20th
Mississippi Blood by Greg Iles
Lola: A Novel by Melissa Scrivner
Girl in Disguise by Greer Macallister
Find Me by J S Monro
Stranger in a Strange Land: Searching from Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem by George Prochnik (NF)
City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic and the First Police Chief of Paris by Holly Tucker (NF)
The Exploded View by Ivan Vladislavic (F)
The New York Times Book Review
Feb. 3rd
Too Close to Happy by Daphne Merkin (Memoir, Depression)
The New Brooklyn by Kay Hymowitz (NF)
Disaster Falls by Stéphane Gerson (NF)
The Weapon Wizards by Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot (NF)
Upwardly Minded: The Reconstruction Rise of a Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor (NF)
Fiction
A Great Place to Have a War by Joshua Kurlantzick (NF)
The Men in My Life by Patricia Bosworth (NF)
The Man Who Never Stopped Sleeping by Aharon Appelfeld
Perfect Little World by Kevin Wilson
Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Best and Latest in Crime Fiction
Rather Be Devil by Ian Rankin
Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough
What You Break by Reed Farrel Coleman
The Lost Woman by Sara Blædel trans. from Danish by Mark Kline
Books Recommended this Week
Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes by Michael Sims (NF)
A House Full of Females: Plural Marriages and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (NF)
Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World by Robert D. Kaplan (NF)
The Crossing by Andrew Miller (F)
The Patriots by Sana Krasikov (F)
Once We Were Sisters: A Memoir by Sheila Kohler
Feb. 12th
Fiction
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Night of Fire by Colin Thubron
The Evening Road by Haird Hunt
On Turpentine Lane by Elinor Lipman
Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson
This is How it Always Is by Laurie Frankel
Nonfiction
Why Time Flies by Alan Burdick
Six Encounters with Lincoln by Elizabeth Brown Pryor
(Middle East)
The Attack by Loic Daewillier
The Arab of the Future 2 by Riad Sattouf
Rolling Blackouts by Sarah Glidden
The Girl from the Metropol Hotel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
The Blood of Emmett Till by Timothy B Tyson
Generation Revolution by Rachel Aspden
The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Lévy
Black Edge by Sheelah Kolhatkar
Feb. 19th
Fiction
The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Dibble
The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates
The Dance of Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
Universal Harvester by John Darnielle
Autumn by Ali Smith
Fiction in Translation
Dance on the Volcano by Marie Vieux Chauvet
The Gringo Champion by Aura Xilonen
The Ninety-Ninth Floor by Jan Fawaz Elhassan
The Great and the Good by Michel Déon
Nonfiction
Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li
Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra
Two about Silicon Valley
Valley of the Gods by Alexander Wolfe
The Kingdom of Happiness by Aimee Groth
At Utmost: A Devotional Memoir by Macy Halford
Cannibalism by Bill Schutt
Best and Latest Crime Fiction
Rush of Blood by Mark Billingham
Racing the Devil by Charles Todd
Snowblind by Ragnar Janasson
Walk Away by Sam Hawken
Amiable with Big Teeth by Claude McKay (lost Harlem novel)
Feb. 26th
Fiction
Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama
The School Days of Jesus by J M Coetze
The One Inside by Sam Shepard
A Piece of the World by Christina Baker Kline
Journeyman by Marc Bojanowski
Nonfiction
Caught in the Revolution by Helen Rappaport
Pretending is Lying by Dominique Goblet
How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell
All the Lives I Want by Alana Massey
Testosterone Rex by Cordelia Fine
When Police Kill by Frank Zimring
Unwarranted by Barry Friedman
Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
March 3rd
Fiction
A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman
The Fortunate Ones by Ellen Umansky
The World to Come by Jim Shepard
Argentine Fiction
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Savage Theories by Pola Oloixarae
Nonfiction
We’ll Always Have Casablanca by Noah Isenberg
High Noon by Glenn Frankel
Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin
Pontius Pilate: Deciphering a Memory by Aldo Schiavone
Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall
Food Fights and Culture Wars by Tom Nealon
Reality is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli
The Islamic Jesus by Mustafa Akyol
Robert Lowell – Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison
The Nature Fix by Florence Williams
Stalin and the Scientists by Simon Ings
Best and Latest Crime Fiction
What You Don’t Know by Jo Ann Chaney
I See You by Clare Macintosh
The Dime by Betty (Riz) Rhyzyk
Twelve Angry Librarians by Miranda James
March 12th
Fiction
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Before the War by Fay Weldon
Everything Belongs to Us by Yoojin Grace Wuertz
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Nonfiction
Lower Ed by Tressie McMillan Cottom
Insomniac City by Bill Hayes
Can’t Just Stop by Sharon Bagley
Convergence by Peter Watson
Divided We Stand by Marjorie J Spruill
The Brain Defense by Kevin Davis
The Gestapo by Frank McDonough
Abandon Me by Melissa Febo
Amazon
Best Books of March
Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
White Tears: A Novel by Hari Kunzru
The Night Ocean: A Novel by Paul La Farge
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter (NF)
Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, School, or, How to Become an Expert at Just About Anything by Ulrich Boser
All Grown Up: A Novel by Jami Attenberg
Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper (NF)
The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir by Ariel Levy
Literature and Fiction
The Book of Polly by Kathy Hepinstall
Our Short History: A Novel by Lauren Grodstein
The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel
White Tears by Hari Kunzru
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg
The One-Eyed Man by Jr. Ron Currie
Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett
Edgar and Lacy by Victor Lodato
Celine by Peter Heller
Eggshells by Caitriona Lally
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
One of the Boys by Daniel Magariel
The Hearts of Men by Nickolas Butler
Bright Air Black by David Vann
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
Mysteries and Thrillers
The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes by Lyndsay Faye
Mississippi Blood by Greg Iles
The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel
Never Let You Go by Chevy Stevens
Celine by Peter Heller
Ill Will by Dan Chaon
Quicksand by Malin Persson Giolito
The Twelve Lies of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti
The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge
Murder on the Serpentine by Anne Perry
Biographies and Memoirs
Dueling with Kings: High Stakes, Killer Sharks, and the Get Rich Promise of Daily Fantasy Sports by Daniel Barbarisi
The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir by Ariel Levy
The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown by Catherine Burns
Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Earnest Hemingway by Nicholas E. Reynolds
The Price of Illusion: A Memoir by Joan Juliet Buck
South and West: From a Notebook by Joan Didion
Grace Notes: My Recollections by Katey Segal
Being Elvis: A Lonely Life by Ray Connolly
The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last Three Hermits by Michael Finkel
In Paulette Jiles’ book News of the World, Captain Kidd is in Wichita Falls, Texas, five years after the end of the Civil War, and Texas is in the midst of political upheaval. The Indians are still actively raiding travelers and communities whenever they feel that they need threats to help with treaty negotiations. Captain Kidd is a retired soldier and a printer/journalist forced out of business by the economy and then by the war. His great love of news has stayed with him through all the chaos of recent years. He is a lover of geography, literacy, and all human events in this world.
He has decided to earn his way in the world, now that his wife is dead and his two daughters are grown, by traveling to towns and small cities throughout the west, where newspapers are just about as scarce as readers, holding meetings to read out the “news of the world”. He avoids politics in these contentious times. He likes to read about exotic locations and interesting tidbits from lands people have heard of but will probably never travel to. He gives people a chance to escape the verbal battles that rage around them and marvel that other people live such odd lives and are, perhaps, unluckier than they are. People pay a dime to attend this somewhat cerebral entertainment.
In Wichita Falls he runs into an old acquaintance who works as a freighter, moving merchandise by wagon from a buyer to a seller, or vice versa. His friend Britt, it turns out, has been paid 50 dollars in gold to return a white girl, kidnapped by the Kiowa tribe when she was 3 to her Aunt and Uncle near San Antonio. His friend begs him to take this girl off his hands. Texas is a very big state and San Antonio is far out of Britt’s way. He will lose a lot of money if he takes her all the way home. He will give the gold to Captain Kidd.
“She seemed to be about ten years old, dressed in the horse Indians’ manner in a deerskin shift with four rows of elk teeth sewn across the front. A thick blanket was pulled over her shoulders. Her hair was the color of maple sugar and in it she wore two down puffs bound onto a lock of her hair by their minute spines and also bound with a thin thread was a wing feather from a golden eagle slanting between them. She sat perfectly composed, wearing the feather and a necklace of glass beads as if they were costly adornments. … She had no more expression than an egg.”
Now Captain Kidd does not in any way want to undertake this task. It is the rainy season and rivers are rising and he would have to cross several to get this child to San Antonio. Texas is relatively lawless and there could be bandits on the road. But he is the father of two daughters. And so we have a journey tale as this good man reluctantly undertakes the responsibility to get this child to all of the family she has left, people she does not even know. What happens on that journey, watching these two bond, is a sweet story and sometimes I do love a sweet story.
The author, Paulette Jiles, became interested in stories of children who were kidnapped by the Indians because they gave up their European heritage so easily and they were never happy to give up their second-hand Indian heritage. What was it about life with the tribes which gave children such a feeling of satisfaction and belonging even though it began as a harrowing and totally foreign experience? Of course we will probably never know the answer to this but there is still a part of us all that thinks that Native Americans or Indigenous People, or whatever the politically correct term is today, had a knack for living lightly on the earth and a natural social order which served most of them very well.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang (trans. from the Korean by Deborah Smith) begins with a wife who stops eating meat. When her husband wants to know why she says “I had a dream”. As a reader we are privy to at least the text of her dream but her husband has little curiosity about this dream which returns over and over again. He never explores the dream with her because he thinks that he can be married and just go through the motions of the marriage relationship without any messy emotional subtext. He expects his wife Yeong-Hye to be the same. She will do all the wifely things the role requires and will be completely low maintenance and supportive. If women have fantasies about romantic love, perhaps there are men who have fantasies about no-fuss marriages such as this where no deep feelings are required, each partner simply plays their role.
Yeong-Hye’s vegetarianism is so extreme that it will no longer allow Mr. Cheong to live in his fantasy. The wife he chose for her ordinary ways is in a crisis that is disrupting the lives of her husband and also her family. I am what would be called a “maximillist”, if there were such a classification for people who like plenty of everything and who like it plush and fluffy. I guess the word often used is hedonist, although that word does not really fit. However, personally, I do have some experience with “minimalists” of varying degrees. I have a friend who is a fairly extreme minimalist, who does not even like gifts unless they are things that can be used up; who is so slim that she seems to be almost disappearing. This becomes the case with Yeong-Hye, who becomes so thin that her family tries to intervene, which ends up badly when her father slaps her and forces meat into her mouth.
The scenes change each time this book arrives at a new section. We think we have been transported into another story and that this is perhaps a book of short stories. It is, instead, more like a jazz piano composition that begins with a theme and then rearranges the notes in each new section only to have the main theme reappear and progress in new, but still familiar directions. This is a great book and short; a fast, but horrifying, yet artistically and intellectually satisfying, read.
How do we know so little about ourselves? How do we know so little about each other? Are most people this disconnected from each other? Even though this book is very sexual, it is not sensual. Even when connecting in very intimate ways these people have actually made little if any connection that brings any warmth to their daily lives.
Although we do get glimpses into Yeong-Hye’s young life because in the last section of the composition her older sister In-Hye becomes the narrator and she does, superficially attempt to unravel the reasons for her sister’s behavior, that dream that haunts Yeong-Hye is never satisfactorily explained (or maybe you will think it is). While certainly not a cheerful book, it is gripping and it plays on you like that jazz piano calmly going through its variations, with perhaps a somewhat emotional bridge in the middle.
If you are of a certain age then you were just in your teens when Sylvia Plath committed suicide and you probably read The Bell Jar which young people, especially young women, still read today. Sylvia Plath was very interesting to English major types because she was young and she was already famous. She won a sort of internship at Mademoiselle Magazine and went off to live in New York City. Quite an accomplishment for someone just starting out in life and we will never know if, or how much, her early success contributed to her clinical depression. We know she was gone too quickly and we wondered what else she might have done if she had survived.
For a while the young Sylvia Plath lived at the Barbizon Hotel for Women which may have gained its fame from her short tenure there. I remember being fascinated to learn that there was a NYC residence that housed only women, with strict rules about guests of the male persuasion, much like the dorms I lived in at college where we were separated by gender and girls had serious rules, governing both curfews and male guests. It seemed so elegant and atavistic at the same time for a city as metropolitan as New York to have this type of restricted boarding house among its many idiosyncratic offerings.
In her book The Dollhouse, Fiona Davis, takes her readers into The Barbizon about 50 years after the days of Sylvia Plath, and at the same time, in flashbacks takes us back to the Barbizon in the 50’s. Her main character is a journalist of sorts for an online publication who happens to live at the Barbizon, now in transition with some units redone and sold as condos and some still rented to original tenants. After her married boyfriend, the owner of their shared condo, throws her out to go back to his wife she continues to try to interview some of these permanent residents who were there in the old days. One resident is especially interesting. She walks her dog everyday but no one has seen her face in many years. She wears a veil and there is a story that she has a terrible scar on her face and that someone fell from the lounge on the roof of the hotel to her death and that the mystery woman was with her when she fell.
Upon hearing this story our journalist friend is even more determined to hear the stories that the older residents have to tell. It’s almost like solving a mystery but one that was obviously resolved long ago as the veiled lady is not in prison. When circumstances conspire to allow Rose Lewin to install herself (without permission) in the mystery woman’s apartment the story begins to take shape. (There are repercussions.)
Although I did not get really attached to any of the characters in The Dollhouse, perhaps that was not the point of the novel. The author, through flashbacks does recreate the experience of living in the Barbizon which was very similar to living in a very classy dormitory. She also takes us into the jazz club scene and some of the diversity that is always encountered in this iconic city. And there is a bit of romance in the mix. However the content is a bit light and I was not successfully drawn into feeling emotionally involved in either the characters or the plot. (There was a spice book mentioned that I would love to see and smell). This is a good read, but not a great read.
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 