News of the World by Paulette Jiles – Book

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 – Book

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.

The Dollhouse by Fiona Davis – Book

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.

February 2017 Book List

February 2017 Book List

New York Times Book Review

January 6, 2017

The Strays by Emily Bitto

Idaho by Emily Rushkovich

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

Latest and Best Crime Fiction

The Old Man by Thomas Perry

The Borrowed by Chan Ho-kee

The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer

The Death of Kings by Rennie Airth

New Books Recommended This Week

The Correspondence by J. D. Daniels

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

Mary Astor’s Purple Diary: The Great American Sex Scandal of 1936 by Edward Sorel

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey Smith

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the present by John Pomfret

Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

The Moravian Night: A Story by Peter Handke

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe

Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir by Amy Kurzwell

January 13, 2017

How America Lost its Secrets by Edward Jay Epstein

Human Acts by Han Kang

The Kaiser’s Last Kiss by Alan Judd

Books We Recommend this Week

Selection Day by Aravind Adiga

The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force by Eliot A. Cohen

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

War Against War: The American Fight for Peace 1914-1918 by Michael Kazin

The Strays by Emily Bitto

Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 by David Cesarani

Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films by Molly Haskell

The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars by Daniel Beer

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

Idaho by Emily Ruskovich

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

New Paperbacks

The Lost Tudor Princess: The Life of Lady Margaret Douglas by Alison Weir

Arcadia by Iain Pears

The Invention of Science: A New History of Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

Predicting Trump – The NYT recommends a 1935 book – It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

That Other Clinton: A Brief Biography of Bill by Michael Tomasky

Audacity by Jonathan Chait

The Afterlife of Stars by Joseph Kertes

Huck Out West by Robert Coover

Enigma Variations by André Aciman

Class by Lucinda Rosenfeld

Best and Latest in Crime Fiction

The Girl Before by J. P. Delaney

Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis

Different Class by Joanne Harris

New Books We Recommend this Week

The Dry by Jane Harper

Nicotine by Gregor Hens

My Life, My Love, My Legacy by Coretta Scott King as told to Barbara Reynolds

Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White by Michael Tisserand

Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson

Human Acts by Han Kang

New Paperbacks

World’s Elsewhere: Journeys around Shakespeare’s Globe by Andrew Dickson

The Gold Eaters by Ronald Wright

Excellent Daughters: The Secret Lives of Young Women Who are Transforming the Arab World by Katherine Zoepf

Mothering Sunday: A Romance by Graham Swift

Kill ‘em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul by James McBride

Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey

Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency by David Greenberg

January 27, 2017

1^st Outline, now Transit by Rachel Cusk

The Patriots by Sana Krashikov

The Signal Flame by Andrew Krivak

Selection Day by Aravind Adiga

The Crossing by Andrew Miller

Earning the Rockies by Robert D. Kaplan

The True Flag by Stephen Kinzer

Once We Were Sisters by Sheila Kohler

New Books We Recommend this Week

Transit by Rachel Cusk

The South: Henry Hampton and “Eyes on the Prize,” the Landmark Television Series that Reframed the Civil Rights Movement by Jon Else

Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy that Will Prevail by Jonathan Chait

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

Huck Out West by Robert Coover

The Book that Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation by Randall Fuller

The Afterlife of Stars by Joseph Kertes

The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State by Graeme Wood

Homesick for Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh

Enigma Variations by André Aciman

Amazon

Best Books of January

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

History of Wolves: A Novel by Emily Fridlund

The Bear and the Nightingale: A Novel by Katherine Arden

The Dry: A Novel by Jane Harper

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk: A Novel by Kathleen Rooney

This is How It Always Is: A Novel by Laurin Frankel

Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekeran

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine

Human Acts: A Novel by Han Kang

Literature and Fiction

Huck Out West: A Novel by Robert Coover

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

Indelible by Adelia Saunders

Idaho: A Novel by Emily Ruskovich

The Midnight Cool: A Novel by Lydia Peelle

Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

Idaho: A Novel by Emily Ruskovich

Fever Dream: A Novel by Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell

The Sleepwalker by Chris Bohjalian

The Dry: A Novel by Jane Harper

Human Acts: A Novel by Han Kang

Her Every Fear: A Novel by Peter Swanson

The Girl Before: A Novel by J. P. Delaney

The Final Day: A Novel by William R. Forstchen

The Girl in Green by Derek B. Miller

Nonfiction

Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelle

Is It All In Your Head? True Stories of Imaginary Illness by Suzanne O’Sullivan

What Doesn’t Kill Us: How Freezing, Extreme Altitude and Environmental Conditioning Will Renew Your Lost Evolutionary Strength by Scott Carney

Books for Living by Will Schwaibe

Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats, and Drugs by Martin Torgoff

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine

The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America by Mark Sundeen

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life by Ayelet Waldeman

Letters to a Young Muslim by Omar Saif Ghobash

Biography

How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft by Edward Jay Epstein

Amazon: New for February

4321: A Novel by Paul Auster

The Impossible Fortress: A Novel by Jason Rekulak

Universal Harvester: A Novel by John Darnielle

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver and Me by Bill Hayes

Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel by George Saunders

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Literature and Fiction

Forever is the Worst Long Time: A Novel by Camille Pagán

4321: A Novel by Paul Auster

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel by George Saunders

The Impossible Fortress: A Novel by Jason Rekulak

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaimen

The Refugees by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller

A Separation: A Novel by Katie Kitamura

The Weight of Him: A Novel by Ethel Rohan

The Clairvoyants by Karen Brown

Mysteries and Thrillers

Six Four: A Novel by Hideo Yokoyama, Jonathan Lloyd-Davies

A Separation: A Novel by Katie Kitamura

Right Behind You by Lisa Gardner

I See You by Clare Mackintosh

Desperation Road by Michael Farris Smith

The Turn: The Hollows Begins with Death by Kim Harrison

Gunmetal Gray (Gray Man) by Mark Greaney

What You Break (A Gus Murphy Novel) by Reed Farrel Coleman

Racing the Devil by Charles Todd

Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller

Biographies and Memoirs

Nearly Normal: Surviving the Wilderness, My Family, and Myself by Cea Sunrise Person

Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall

The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory, and Love by Michael Lemonick

Karakoram: Climbing Through the Kashmir Conflict by Steve Swenson

The Inkblots: Herman Rorschach: His Iconic Test and the Power of Being by Damion Searls

Truffle Boy: My Unexpected Journey Through the Exotic Food Underground by Ian Purkayastha with Kevin West

This Close to Happy: Reckoning with Depression by Daphne Merkin

Instrumental: A Memoir of Madness, Medication, and Music by James Rhodes

Insomniac City: New York, Oliver and Me by Bill Hayes

No Barriers: A Blind Man’s Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon by Erik Weinhenmayer, Buddy Levy with Forward by Bob Woodruff

Nonfiction

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity by Derek Thompson

Black Edges: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel Dennett

Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History by Bill Schutt

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Haran

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley are Changing the World by Brad Stone

High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic by Glenn Frankel

The Art of Invisibility: The World’s Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick and Mikko Hypponen

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey

Gilded Age (Dark Gifts) by Vic James

All Our Wrong Todays: A Novel by Elan Mastai

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley

The Book of Etta (The Road to Nowhere) by Meg Ellison

The North Water by Ian McGuire – Book

If you choose to read The North Water by Ian McGuire you will be signing on for the last whaling voyage of the Volunteer to Greenland with Captain Brownlee and his crew. You will be traveling with a murderer and you will be a pawn in a plot to make the rich ship owner, named Baxter, richer. The world has discovered fossil fuels, oil and gas, and the market for whale oil has all but dried up. Baxter doesn’t want to lose any money in this energy transition and he has a plan.

I guarantee that Ian McGuire will show you the truest depths to which men can sink and that you will feel only barely better about his main character, Sumner, who has been signed on by Baxter as the ship’s doctor. (Perhaps there are good reasons these men are almost never referred to by their first names.) Sumner has fallen far and he is addicted to opium from his time as a medic in India. A ship’s doctor can order in a big supply of laudanum and stay out of the limelight and find himself with very light duties.

You may not make it through the first chapter, which is harsh and brutal, and even these two words are understatements. If you do there is a sorry tale to tell with implications for another transitional moment that our culture is going through right now with our need to shift away from fossil fuels. A lot of people think they stand to lose a lot of money and seem to be ready to do whatever they must to turn back the clock to keep their fortunes growing. Is what Baxter is doing any worse than what these 21^st century billionaires seem prepared to do? Judge for yourself.

Of course Baxter’s plans for self-preservation do not call for him to actually get involved in any of the seamy details. Brownlee is in on the plan but no one in his crew realizes what he is up to. Why does he take the Volunteer north when all the other ships begin to head south? How many survive this ill-fated trip? How does Sumner end up reluctantly solving a murder mystery and exposing a man with no soul? With murders big and small all over the place is one villain any worse than the next? This story is in no way uplifting, but there are reasons to read it if you have the stomach for it. The North Water by Ian McGuire will set you to thinking. It reminds me of books by Joseph Conrad, and Cormac McCarthy, and Herman Melville because it is both brutal and meaty.

The Whistler by John Grisham – Book

John Grisham writes about the corruption that often seems rampant in our culture, and that seems to arise from the dark side of humans, tempting people to break laws and then to defend their behavior physically by intimidation and even murder, if necessary. In this book The Whistler we begin with an unidentified whistle blower. Whistle blowers have been learning to remain anonymous because the information they share is not information someone (or some group) wants shared. In this case the people who would like to silence the whistle blower are criminals so we see the need for secrecy, but how the two parties (info providers and info recipients) react is often less clear cut.

There is a go-between in this case, a guy who has no known address (lives on a boat) and has a fake name and basically lives off the grid. He relays the information from the whistle blower to Lacy and Hugo who work for Board of Judicial Conduct for the State of Florida in St. Augustine. Lacy and Hugo are tasked with investigating complaints about judges. They are not detectives or law enforcers and are not used to dealing with dangerous criminals or even equipped to do so. But this time the judge in question is entwined in a web of some complexity. There is a criminal gang involved, a Native America tribe, a ton of expensive and profitable development, and a casino on Indian land that is a gold mine once all that nearby development is in place.

But everyone is holding his/her cards close to the vest. The whistler wants to be protected before offering data that would prove that a corrupt judge is at the center of this web. The off-the-grid go-between has had dealings with this gang before, and although the gang is mainly interested in building things, raking off profits, accepting protection fees and off-shoring lots of laundered cash, the gang does not mind knocking someone off if it becomes necessary. In fact at least one person we have come to like does get killed and Lacy almost dies. As usual John Grisham puts himself and us at the intersection of human greed and human corruption.

Exactly how corrupt is the Honorable Claudia McDover? Is she worth taking down? Lacy is definitely in way over her head and even before she has any real proof to go on there is a target on her and her partner. This is one hot case for a pair used to going after small time judicial misconduct.

John Grisham, while he does not suck us in quite the way he did in his early books, still gives us a thriller that manages to cover both whistle-blowing and the human love affair with money however it is obtained. It is perfect for a weekend when TV is a wasteland, as it is most weekends, and if you like Grisham’s book you should enjoy The Whistler.

Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple – Book

“Today will be different. Today I will be present. Today, anyone I speak to, I will look them in the eye and listen deeply. Today I’ll play a board game with Timby. I’ll initiate sex with Joe. Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes, and change into yoga clothes only for yoga, which today I will actually attend. Today I won’t swear. I won’t talk about money. Today there will be an ease about me. My face will be relaxed, its resting place a smile. Today I will radiate calm. Kindness and self-control will abound. Today I will buy local. Today I will be my best self, the person I’m capable of being. Today will be different.”

This is the mantra that Eleanor chants (and since this book is written in the first person it is quite a while before we learn Eleanor’s name – first we know she is Mom to Timby, and she is Joe’s wife, she writes graphic novels, at least she is supposed to be writing one; her husband is a “hand” surgeon who is in much demand in sports circles – we learn all this before we know her name). No matter, the pledge she makes on the very first page tells us plenty about how Eleanor’s life has been going and it seems a bit haphazard, self-absorbed, and borderline clinically depressed. Once she catalogs her faults and commits to change you would think she would catch a break while she tries out her new lifestyle. But right from the very beginning this is a day that cannot be tamed and Eleanor’s creator, Maria Semple, treats us to a manic day that has us (and Eleanor) doubting whether she has already jinxed her life beyond repair. Here is a writer who puts us right inside her character’s head and has us experience this absolutely mind-bending day at the same breakneck speed that it assaults and is assaulted by Eleanor. I have never made a pledge quite this detailed but I have set out to live a day on my own terms and I have found that our best laid plans like to turn and bite us in the butt, just for fun. This book is so good that we fly through it as if the family dog Yo-Yo was pulling us at the end of his leash and when it’s over we’re hardly sure what will happen next – although clearly change is indicated by the events of this whirlwind day. Where does Eleanor’s sister Ivy fit in to the picture? Why doesn’t Timby know that he has an aunt? All is revealed. It’s complicated.

The story ends with Eleanor repeating the same pledge she made the previous day. Although we are unsure, it seems as if she might make some progress after the revelations of the day before. Maria Semple’s current title is Today Will Be Different. She is also the author of the memorable Where’d You Go, Bernadette. She is a true original, and her books are wonderful.

Faithful by Alice Hoffman – Book

I’m still reading Alice Hoffman’s books, even after all these years and it is not a difficult task to be a loyal fan because her writing is always pretty flawless. Of course not every book has been a favorite; there are some tales I have liked better than others, and there are still books that really hit the literary spot for me. Faithful is almost in that sweet spot. It a very good book, just not one I would put on her top shelf. It has a beautiful blue cover and it contains lots of blue imagery, but it seems to lead to nothing more than a very blue mood, or perhaps the ink tattoo artists use.

We begin with two high school beauties, one slightly prettier than the other, with all the confidence and arrogance their looks endow them with. These two are a powerful presence in their school. Almost everyone is either in love with them or envies them. Then life happens. One beauty ends up in a coma in her childhood bedroom with the rose wallpaper. That’s Helene Boyd. The other Shelby Richmond, stops her life to do penance for still being alive. She shaves her head, once adorned with long stylish hair. She wears black clothing. She cuts herself. She slits her wrists. She ends up in a Psych ward where she is raped routinely by an orderly until her mother finds out and takes her home. Helene, it is rumored, can make miracles happen. Shelby can barely survive from day to day.

Someone is looking over Shelby though. Postcards arrive for her in the mail with interesting drawings and messages perhaps from an angel or a savior, or maybe somehow from Helene. They bear cryptic messages such as, “Say something”, “Do something”, “Be someone”. Shelby keeps them in a box with a blue velvet lining. Who will save her? Will anyone save her? That I cannot tell.

This is not rocket science. It is not the great American novel. It doesn’t employ deep symbolism or leave you in a literary trance. Still it portrays the depths of grief a human soul can plumb and it shows that the way out is a function of time and positive social interactions until one day hope becomes stronger than grief and the two strike a bargain that allows life to offer some sweetness once again. Faithful is a story of our times and one that young adults would find very relevant indeed.

January 2017 Book List

I started a book list for December and then gave it up. December is just not a normal month in publishing. Readers, writers, publishers, editors and reviewers tend to look back over the year and give us their best-books-lists, or they sometimes have their experts pick the book/s they read or reread in the past year that they thought was/were best for any number of different reasons. I like “best of” lists, especially when folks explain why these were the best choices, in this case, the best books. So in January my list will include mostly books published in December and November. Amazon gives us titles that are out now and ready to buy. The Indies give us, as usual, books purchased most often in December in their shops. Publisher’s Weekly goes European on us for the most part, and the New York Times was more impressed with nonfiction than fiction this time. For what it’s worth, here is my January 2017 book list, prepared for me and by me, but shared with you just in case you are interested.

Amazon

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World Class Performers by Tim Ferriss (NF)

Dangerous by Milo Yiannopoulos (political humor) (NF)

The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis (NF)

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Doug Preston (NF)

History of Wolves: A Novel by Emily Fridlund

The Bear and the Nightingale: A Novel by Katherine Arden

The Dry: A Novel by Jane Harper

Lillian Boxfish takes a Walk: A Novel by Kathleen Rooney

This is How it Always is: A Novel by Laurie Frankel

Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran

Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society by Cordelia Fine

Human Acts: A Novel by Han King

Idaho: A Novel by Emily Rushkovitch

Indelible by Adelia Saunders

Huck Out West: A Novel by Robert Coover

The Midnight Cool by Lydia Peelie

Mystery, Thrillers, and Suspense

Idaho by Emily Ruskovitch

Her Every Fear: A Novel by Peter Swanson

The Girl Before: A Novel by J. P. Delaney

The Sleepwalker: A Novel by Chris Bonjalian

The Dry: A Novel by Jane Harper

Human Acts: A Novel by Han King

The Girl in Green by Derek B. Miller

Fever Dream: A Novel by Samantha Schwelsin and Megan McDowell

The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America by Mark Sundeen (NF)

Independent Booksellers

The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

The Muralist by B A Shapiro

The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly

Nutshell by Ian McEwan

The Seventh Plague by James Rollins

Turbo Twenty-Three by Janet Evanovitch

The Chemist by Stephanie Meyer

Publishers Weekly

Merrow by Ananda Braxton Smith

The Thieves of Threadneedle Street: The Incredible True Story of the American Forgers who nearly Broke the Bank of England by Nicholas Booth

Under the Midnight Sun by Kiego Higashino (whodunit)

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson (NF)

The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything by D A Mishane (police procedural)

These are the Names by Tommy Wieringa (trans. from the Dutch by Sam Garett)

The Gentleman form Japan: An Inspector O Novel by James Church Minotaur

The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg (graphic novel)

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind by Siri Hustvelt (NF)

The Garden of Consolation by Parisa Reza (trans.from French by Adriana Hunter) (Iran)

Kill the Next One: A Novel by Federico Axat (trans. from the Spanish by David Frye)

The Return of Münchausen by Segizmund Zzhizhanovshy (trans. from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull)

The Hollow Man: A Novel by Rob McCarthy

Best Books Read by PW staff in 2016

The Gentleman by Forrest Leo

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

The ABC’s of Socialism edited by Bhaskar Sunkara, illustrated by Phil Wrigglesworth (NF)

We Want Everything by Anne Baletrini, trans by Matt Holden

The Obelisk Gate by N K Jemisin, (Volume 2) (Volume 1 published earlier, The Fifth Season)

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (trans. by Tim Parks)

Girl in Disguise by Greer Macallister (not out until March)(read in galleys)

A Beam of Light by Andrea Camilleri (trans. by Stephen Sartarelli)

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

The North Water by Ian McGuire

NYT Book Review

How to Survive a Plague by David Franco (NF)

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada

Thus Bad Begins by Javier Márias

Judas by Amos Oz

Nonstop Metropolis, A New York City Atlas edited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (a most unusual atlas)

The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardenas

Colonel Lágrimas by Carlos Fonesca (trans. by Megan McDowell)

Blood of the Dawn by Claudia Salazar Jiménez (trans. by Elizabeth Bryer)

Divorce is in the Air by Gonzalo Torné (trans. by Megan McDowell)

The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma by Ratika Kapur

A Want of Kindness by Joanne Limburg (Queen Anne)

The Country of the Blind by Edward Hoagland

Crime

Kill the Next One by Federico Axat

Out of Bounds by Val McDermid

Stone Coffin by Kjell Eriksson

Plaid and Plagiarism by Molly MacRae

Melt by Helen Hardt

The Moravian Night by Peter Handke

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett – Book

Commonwealth is a traditional English term for a political community founded for the common good.

The term literally meant “common well-being”.

There is, however, another form of commonwealth. The ever-helpful Dictionary.com offers this alternate definition: a “self-governing, autonomous political unit…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth

There are at least two commonwealths in the novel Commonwealth by Ann Patchett. In one instance the term most likely refers to the Commonwealth of Virginia (technically designated as such) and in the other instance it could describe the relationship that develops among the children in the two blended families we meet in this novel. If you have watched You’ve Got Mail as many times as I have, then you remember the scene in Kathleen Kelly/Meg Ryan’s little bookshop where Joe Fox/Tom Hanks is trying to hide his identity. When one of the children with him reveals that she is the aunt of the much older Joe Fox and the other young child reveals that he is Fox’s brother, Tom Hanks says, “We are an American family.” Well here in Commonwealth we find another such non-nuclear American family.

The beautiful Beverly is married to a man named Fix Keating, who is a policeman. When his second child is born an uninvited DA, Albert Cousins, crashes the party and that ends up being the catalyst that brings about the destruction of two marriages. The problem is that Beverly is a parent who really is not suited to parenting and her second husband, the wife stealer DA, Bert, is almost a completely absent father. These two parents reside in Virginia. Fix and the wife of Bert Cousins, Teresa reside in California. There are six children. Carolyn and Franny are the children of Beverly and Fix. Cal, Holly, Jeannette, and Albie are the children of Bert and Teresa. After Beverly and Bert divorce their spouses and marry each other, Fix and Teresa both remarry but not to each other. So each child ends up with 3 sets of part time parents.

Two of the children, Carolyn and Franny live in Virginia and only visit California; the other four spend the school year in California and the summers in Virginia. It is difficult to keep these families straight when the children are young. Although each child has his or her own personality, I found it difficult to remember which child belonged to which parent.

The children have complicated emotional responses to their situation and to their natural and by-marriage siblings. But as they age they find that they become a sort of commonwealth of five and we learn who is who, so it is not necessary for readers to worry about those early confusions. There is, of course, a great tragedy that brings the children together in guilt. They are keeping a secret about what happened to the sixth child, which does not really get told until the parents are dying. In classic novels this would have been the key to deep psychological wounds in the children, but the tone of this novel is perhaps too superficial, or too modern, to go “there” in any meaningful way.

Ann Patchett is an excellent writer who knows how to tell a story but this story is just giving us details of a tale that is so common in modern life as to almost be cliché. I liked the children and some of the parents but the story is more a slice of life than any kind of social commentary. Do I think fiction has to be culturally relevant? Perhaps not, but novels that stand the test of time usually have a je ne sais quoi factor that raises them out of the ordinary. I enjoyed reading Commonwealth, but I am not sure that it will turn out to be a keeper.