Our hero in Platform Decay by Martha Wells, as with all the Murderbot Diary books, used to be a murderbot. He found a way to override his governor switch because he found killing distasteful and lacking as a nuanced approach to solving problems arising between corporations or corporations and humans in space. With each entry into the diary, murderbot becomes more organic and less of a bot. Eventually he was adopted by Dr. Mensa and the Preservation colony. He is on a mission to bring two endangered citizens with close personal ties to Dr. Mensa home.
Our murderbot is now a SecUnit, a security unit, with skills that make him the perfect one to mount a rescue mission to a decaying platform surrounding a dead planet. When he arrives at the designated platform, he learns that there are a few more people who need to be rescued, but he doesn’t totally trust the woman who is seeking his help.
Once again, his old enemy, the powerful BE corporation is involved and the story becomes an action-packed race through well-kept parts of the platform that rings the planet and old, abandoned parts of the platform. Will SecUnit get everyone out safely this time? It’s a tense situation. It helps that SecUnit can turn off surveillance cameras or wipe them after the fact. It helps that he has pockets full of drones to use as scouts.
When SecUnit is stressed, he watches old movie episodes. He especially loves Sanctuary Moon, but he has expanded his internal library. I use the Murderbot Diaries in the same way that SecUnit uses Sanctuary Moon. The books are a brief adrenalin rush that refreshes because they are fictional. Long live our increasingly human Murderbot.
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett started in an old folks’ home with a killer cat named Pancakes, and I almost quit reading. But, although this was a story of heartbreak and grief, it was also a story about how taking risks might mitigate grief or at least give a person the tools to handle life’s next blows.
The story ended up being a kind of a romp. PJ and Ivy lost their oldest daughter, Kate, on prom night. PJ deals with the loss by drinking, a lot. Ivy divorces him and moves in with a mutual friend, Fred. Ivy, in other words, moves on. Fred and Ivy, seeing how PJ is flailing and failing, take care of him as a family member. When Fred and Ivy announce that they are going to Alaska and that they will be unreachable by phone or text for a while, it appears that PJ might not make it. Then he sees an online post about a death in Tucson, Arizona of the husband of a woman he knew in school. She lives in the Tender Hearts community. He falls in love. It’s fate. He decides to travel to Tender Hearts. Should he take his old beaten-up ride?
However, fate has another path in mind for PJ. Luna and Ollie are headed for foster care because of parental stupidity (murder and suicide). Pancakes had a hand in this, maybe. Their father was PJ’s estranged brother. These children are not happy to accept PJ, Luna especially, but their only other option is foster care. Luna believes that her real father is a movie star who used to go to her mother’s high school.
What was a rather iffy situation becomes tolerable for everyone when PJ decides that they will all go on a road trip to find Luna’s movie star and ask him to complete a paternity test. Meanwhile they can also stop by Tucson to meet PJ’s intended at the Tender Hearts Senior Community. PJ’s grown daughter, Sophie, recently fired from her job, reluctantly decides to go with them. Hartnett’s novel tells the story of their journey. They take Pancakes along and leave a small trail of deaths behind them. We learn that Pancakes doesn’t kill indiscriminately.
Once we lose someone we love, the grief never leaves us, but Hartnett’s story gives hope that there is life after loss, even if fate has to beat us over the head and send us off on a wacky road trip to figure it out. There’s a lot more to this journey, but, of course, I won’t tell you.
I’m still enjoying the booty of rewards from Audible. I listened to the Tana French Cal Hooper books, The Searcher, The Hunter, and The Keeper almost without coming up for air. The books are read by Roger Clark who easily switches from an Irish accent to an American accent. Cal Hooper, an ex-cop from Chicago retires to the small village of Ardna Kelty expecting to be surrounded by the beauty of the land and getting in some fishing. He doesn’t have much time to get tired of too much peace and quiet though.
In The Searcher, Cal finds himself being stalked by a wild creature, which eventually reveals itself to be a very paranoid 11-year-old boy with a furtive manner, hand-me-down clothes and a shaved head. What could turn a modern child into the mess that is Trey Reddy? As it turns out, a small Irish village where families have long histories is not as peaceful a place as you might expect. Trey wants to know about her brother Brendan. (Cal discovers that Trey is a girl) She needs to know what became of her brother. She knows that there is someone or perhaps several someone-s who know what happened to Brendan, but the locals can keep secrets, especially the deepest, darkest secrets. It’s not all gothic drama. Cal is settling in, getting to know his neighbors, planting vegetables, and tempting Trey to do some carpentry. He tries to avoid the widow they are trying to fix him up with, but when he meets Laina, he immediately sees her excellent qualities. Does Trey eventually get her answers? You know I can’t tell.
When I learned there were three Cal Hooper books (a trilogy) I downloaded the other two and the “lost weekend” happened, pleasantly lost though. In The Hunter, Trey’s father comes back from London, and he is a man with a plan. John Reddy has always been a dreamer (with no moral boundaries). His wife, Trey’s mom, Sheila seems more anxious than pleased. Johnny tells guys he knows down the pub that a man he met in London is related to the Feeny’s in Ardna Kelty. The man’s great-grandmother told him that there was gold buried along a path through the mountains in Ardna Kelty made by an old stream that ran into the river. This begins a village gold rush. Johnny got all his friends to invest in a fake gold trail that would inspire the investor to look for the real buried gold. Trey is happy to have her dad back, but she doesn’t put her trust in him. Laina, Cal, and Trey have settled into a peaceful life. However, Cal is finding that peace in Ardna Kelty has little permanence. Is there gold in them thar hills? Read and find out.
Some quiet years must have ensued because in the next book, The Keeper, Trey is sixteen, and although she will always be socially different, she has made friends and it’s looking like she may be headed for a more intimate relationship. When Rachel, a young woman from the village who is about to marry the son of a successful, but rather overbearing local developer, comes to talk to Laina about her cat (and her life), Laina doesn’t want to involve herself in Rachel’s decision-making, so she sends her off without any satisfying bits of wisdom. Soon after, Rachel is found dead by what looks like suicide-by-drowning. Plenty of small-town speculation goes into deciding who’s to blame. Laina, as supposedly the last to see Rachel is devastated and it doesn’t help that most of the villagers blame her for Rachel’s death also. (Side question: Can an old woman who sits all day in a gloomy parlor really have such influential behind-the-scenes power?) Cal can’t get through to Laina, and he is grieving the loss of their relationship. Mart, Cal’s neighbor and friend with an irascible personality that may make you laugh out loud, also ends up dead. Is there any way to stop a man determined to get his way at all costs without ruining the lives of innocents in the town? Better call Cal.
So, you might want to explore the dark undercurrents in that small village in Ireland whose beauty and peaceful appearance is tempting you to throw over your old life and begin a new one. Your in-depth research could start with Tana French’s, Cal Hooper trilogy. But be prepared to lose track of time and be unavailable for socializing due to a pleasurable excursion into the dastardly deeds done in gorgeous, isolated places, and to meet a new set of memorable characters..
The novel Theo of Golden by Allen Levi kept popping up on my reading radar. It’s not the kind of book I am normally drawn to, but I knew it would be a positive experience. I often enjoy things that are more labyrinthine and that offer some social commentary, but it seemed like a break was just what I needed. This is a lovely story. I know “lovely” is often the kiss of death in a book review, but I mean lovely in the sense that it validates human virtues, rather than human sins. The images the author creates as he describes the town of Golden and the people Theo meets are also lovely, in the sense that seeing this world through Theo’s eyes allows us to see how beautiful it can be.
Theo is old and he is in Golden for a reason, but he’s not ready to say what his reason is. He was born in Portugal, and he is a river man. He lives near rivers, at least within walking distance wherever he goes, and is in the habit of visiting the nearest river at sunrise and sunset whenever possible. He was born near the Douro in Portugal, knows the Seine intimately, as well as the Hudson River in Manhattan.
The people in Golden know very little about Theo as he spends his days along the Promenade which runs down the middle of Broadway. He spends time at The Chalice, a coffee shop owned by Shep and Addie Carlile. Shep and Addie share the work of a local artist, Asher Glissen, around the walls of the coffee shop. The paintings are portraits of the residents of Golden.
Theo decides to stay in Golden for one year. He is allowed to rent the apartment that Mr. Ponder has upstairs in his house. Ponder, a Broker and Consultant, has never rented this apartment to anyone so the locals are surprised when he takes in Theo. Mrs. Gidley, Ponder’s secretary, is quite suspicious of Theo at first, but he wins her over. In fact, Theo wins over almost everyone he meets. He becomes good friends with Tony who owns the bookstore. He befriends a homeless woman. A young cello player comes to value Theo. Making friends is his talent, although we eventually learn that he has many.
Theo takes on a project which involves the paintings that decorate the walls of the coffee shop. It’s the heart of the story so I will let you discover this part of Levi’s tale for yourself. The soul of the story is also connected to the paintings. Taking on a book that I wouldn’t usually read was rewarding. It reminded me of all the unselfish things that people do in this world. It reminded me that everyone has a story. Good stuff.
Sybil Van Antwerp rarely leaves her home these days. She runs errands, goes for walks, goes to garden club meetings and tends her flower garden. She clerked for many years for a well-known judge. People always ask her why she was content to be a clerk to a great man, when she could have been great in her own right. She always reminds them that when she grew up women did not have all the options available to them now.
Sybil writes. She corresponds. She writes letters on the stationery she has used for decades. Sybil writes letters to friends, to favorite authors, to her best friend, Rosalie, to her brother Bruce, her son Felix (and her dead son Gilbert), to her daughter Fiona, and even to her ex-husband Daan. Rosalie and Sybil always end their letters to each other by telling what book they are reading. She has written to Joan Didion and Ann Patchett and has no compunctions about sending off missives to famous people. Guilt is an undercurrent in her letters, but, of course, guilt is an undercurrent in all our lives if we are older than twenty-five.
Sybil knows that she will soon be blind, which may be a reason she stays so close to home. She knows her property is desirable as it has a water view and is close to DC. She writes all her letters while she can still while sitting at a window that faces the water. She hasn’t told even some of her family members about the condition that will most certainly end in blindness.
The universe is a mysterious place. Just when you’re enjoying your daily routine, your rut, your hamster wheel, the universe sets things in motion that will bring change to your life. Sybil doesn’t shift gears easily but, in the end, there is information and there are people that get her out of her rut and allow her to embrace the very things that will make her life fuller.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a novel that consists completely of letters sent and received by Sybil. This cannot have been an easy novel to write and, unless it is based on real correspondence, required planning, consistency, a list of characters, and a coordinated timeline. Perhaps Virginia Evans will inspire you to become a correspondent, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter because the novel is well done and doesn’t make any demands on you to become a writer of letters.
John Grisham has been a very prolific writer. I haven’t read all his books, but I remember reading The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and The Client, each in one gulp. You know the experience; you are so engrossed in reading that you forget to eat, and you stay up way too late. So, I check back in with John Grisham now and then and then wander off in other directions until I find myself picking up a new book he has written. He writes from the world of courts and lawyers for a legal adventure that reminds me of all the corruption humans are heir to, and all the ways good laws, good judges and good lawyers can set things right. The Widow, Grisham’s newest book tells just such a story.
Simon Latch is a small-town lawyer. He handles “bankruptcies, drunk driving charges, delinquent child support payments, foreclosures, nickel-and-dime car wrecks, suspicious slip-and-falls, dubious disability claims” and occasionally, estate work – updated last will and testaments. He is bored with it all and is finding excitement in sport’s gambling at Chub’s Pub, getting himself in a bit of debt, but still under control. He and his wife have three children but there is no love left between them. His blah life perks up when Eleanor Barnett (Nettie), an 85-year-old widow walks into his law office.
Nettie wants Simon to write a new will. She doesn’t trust Wally Thackerman who wrote the last one. Wally did plan to steal a good chunk of Nettie’s net worth, even though no one could pin down whether she was rich at all. She mentioned Coca Cola stock and Walmart stock worth about 16 million.
Greed is one of mankind’s seven deadly sins and it can afflict any of us. Wally was greedy and unethical. Simon silently vowed to keep his greed in check and keep his work on the right side of the law. He did keep the will secret from his secretary; he did meet his client for lunches so they could try ethnic foods. He was responsible for her love of a certain ginger cookie which led to Simon’s arrest for murder. Was he guilty?
Enjoy the book to find out about Nettie’s bad driving and what happens to Simon. See if you like Raymond Lassiter as well as I did and add to your schema on poisons (thallium, in particular). Warning: you might stay up all night.
From a Google Image Search – Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 2025
Sonia Shah is in her junior year at a college in Vermont and she is lonely. She cries on the phone to her parents in India. Thus begins the story by Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It’s an excellent story of two upper middle-class families in India experiencing the injections of modernity into their traditional lives. There is the traditional reliance on arranged marriages, for example, while all the younger people seem to believe that it is better to marry for love.
Sunny Bhatia’s father died young so Babita, his mother, is left to fend for herself. Her father (the Colonel) happens to play chess with Sonia’s Papa, Manav, and he suggests an arranged marriage between his daughter, Sonia, and Sunny. A letter is sent to Sunny in NYC and to Sonia in Vermont. The timing is bad, as these are two of those modern children who want to marry for love.
Sonia, in her loneliness, becomes involved with an older man, an artist, with a personality that wavers between charming and mentally abusive. Ilan de Toojen Foss, is a strange man given to magical imagery and manipulation. He’s a painter and very ambitious. The relationship of these two has a Haruki Murakami vibe.
Sunny is living with an American woman from the Midwest, Ulla. They travel together to meet her parents in Kansas, which Ulla thinks will be a disaster. It isn’t a great success, but it isn’t terrible. When they return to NYC, Sunny goes home to visit his family in Delhi. He’s working as a reporter-at-large for the Associated Press and he plans to write and publish articles as he travels. When he arrives back in New York, he finds that Ulla has left him, moved out with all her possessions.
Sonia, who wants to write a book, is still with Ilan when his wife arrives and eventually evicts Sonia. Sonia’s mother keeps a cache of jewelry at an Indian bank, intended for her daughter’s dowry, but she gives Sonia an amulet in a silver case carved with Tibetan clouds and dragons holding a little demon figure. The demon is a talisman called Badal Baba, or Cloud Baba. When Sonia leaves Ilan he keeps her amulet.
Is this why Sonia and her family have a run of bad luck? Is this why a fierce ghost dog keeps chasing Sonia and disappearing. Is this why she almost drowns in Goa.
Sonia and Sunny do not realize that their parents have arranged their marriage, although they give them a choice in the matter. These two meet entirely by chance in India on a train. Sunny likes her right away because of the title of the book Sonia is reading. They have a few conversations in India, and when Sunny’s friend Satya gets married, Sunny convinces him to go to Goa where he also plans to meet Sonia. Goa is on the ocean and the two of them encounter the terrifying ghost dog who, fortunately, disappears into thin air.
Sunny returns to NYC, and Sonia stays in India with her family. Sonia’s mother and father live separate lives. Her mother lives in the cloud cottage in the mountains, full of magical visions and fantastical imaginings. There are eyes everywhere in this story.
Sometimes the story turns very informative, revealing aspects of Indian life, relationships with servants, the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Parents are aging and need care, so Sonia becomes the caregiver for her father. Sunny’s mom faces a crisis that forces her to sell her home. Her families’ ties to corruption are revealed. She ends up in Goa.
It’s a long time before Sunny and Sonia meet again after a disastrous trip to Venice. Read the book. It’s wonderful, but I can’t tell you all the reasons why. I listened to the book on Audible because I had built up credits. The voice of Sneha Mathan, the woman who read the story made the story even better. Then I bought the book so I could get all the names straight.
In the Pillars of Earth, Ken Follett got us involved in the building of a Gothic cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge. Many readers already knew the architectural features of classic Gothic cathedrals right down (or up) to the flying buttresses. It was one of Ken Follett’s finest novels. Obviously, cathedrals were not a primitive undertaking. Societies and population had to reach a certain point before such a building might be needed or even imagined.
In Follett’s newest book, Circle of Days, he weighs in on the speculations of how a place like Stonehenge could have been built before the age of machines. His words draw for us a possible moment in time when tribes of people occupied a fictional Great Plain. He gives us the flint miners, the herders, the farmers, and the Woodlanders. The herders have more time to think about eternal questions like the human spirit and practical matters like seasons, the heavens, and math (counting) all of which affect the herds of cattle they protect. Herders’ duties were not constant burdens as were the survival struggles of the other groups.
Often the fortunes of a tribal group depended on the temperament of the leaders. Follett’s farmers have a cruel authoritarian leader, who does not respect the boundaries of the other tribes and who exercises absolute authority over everyone (especially women).
Herders happen to have a council of leaders who make decisions after discussion by majority agreement. It’s not voting but it’s similar, although only involving a small group of elders.
Woodlanders are more primitive than other tribes. They love their woods which provide them with all their simple needs. They stay hidden and speak a language of their own.
The herders have built a circle of tall tree trunks joined by a wooden lintels and arranged in pairs. They have priestesses who know how to count, something others have trouble mastering beyond what they can see on their fingers and toes. The priestesses know how long a year is. They memorize songs which keep their knowledge in a form that can be passed on to new priestesses. They know about equinoxes and solstices, although not necessarily by those words. Four times a year they perform the songs, and they count. The tribes gather and travelers come to trade. The flint miners play a large part in these markets.
But because these are humans, the tribes do not always live in harmony. When there is a years-long drought, those who are cruelest seem to have better survival skills because these leaders have no boundaries and will steal land or cattle or woodlands, exercising a sort of early imperialism. When the farmers (the men only) decide to divert the midsummer market, which is the biggest market, from the monument of the herders with the circle of trees, they burn down the circle to rob the herders of the ceremonies that bring travelers to the village near the circle.
Because of the moral character of some of the herders (mostly the women) the priestesses refuse to be beaten. Joie, daughter of the wisest woman Ani, has seen a field of giant stones out on the Great Plain. She wants to build the monument circle out of these giant stones so they cannot be destroyed.
Follett tells the story of how he thinks they did it. Are humans with extraordinary talents, born at the right moment, responsible for the progress of human societies? Follett seems to suggest that is true. This project is not as complex as building a cathedral but, considering that the population of the area was much smaller and the social structures so much simpler, we have all wondered and speculated about why Stonehenge would have been imagined and how it could have been built.
Reading about the state of humans on and around the Great Plain is made interesting by giving the people in the story names, personalities, families, sexual structures that helped prevent inbreeding, and by creating a crisis that brings out the best and the worst in his characters. Even more interesting is Follett’s theory of how this magical circle was built which stays close to our current educated guesses about how such primitive people could produce such a sophisticated monument involving a detailed knowledge of astronomy, in particular the movements of the sun and moon. I found the novel enjoyable. Perhaps you will too.
Daniel Silva has published a new book called An Inside Job. His key character is Gabriel Allon, a retired head of Israeli intelligence. He is also a talented artist who restores Renaissance Italian artworks, often frescos in cathedrals. He has a connection to the Pope and knows his way around the Vatican because he has worked on restorations there. He lives with his wife Chiara and their precocious twins in Venice.
Gabriel is almost finished with his current restoration project, a project requiring scaffolding and spotlights with a canvas curtain to separate him from tourists. When he spots an anomaly in Venice waters one day, the police investigate and pull the body of a young woman from the harbor.
This young woman has a connection to the Vatican, so we leave the rather lighthearted watery environs of Venice and find ourselves once again immersed in the Byzantine politics that surround, but do not implicate, the Pope. This time the object of contention is the discovery of a possible new painting by Leonardo da Vinci. It’s all about money after that and involves a shadowy mafia-style group that skims money from the Catholic Church and is determined to keep these activities secret.
Facing possible murder, Allon finds the evidence to hold the perpetrators accountable along with the help of some of our favorite old members of the Allon team. In the end we find ourselves back having ice cream with Chiara and the twins in Venice. All-in-all a very satisfying installment, rumored to be based in reality, and, indeed, An Inside Job á la Daniel Silva.
Fiction reflects the culture of the particular moments in which it is created. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong is a book of the twenty-first century, but its characters are immersed in three different wars.
Hai and Sony (named after a TV) are refugees from the Vietnam War. Sony, whose damaged brain makes him a target for bullies, knows every detail about the American Civil War. And Grazina, an immigrant from Lithuania, now in her eighties and in and out of dementia, is reliving the Second World War.
None of these good people are thriving. Grazina meets Hai when she stops him from throwing himself off a bridge into the river that runs by her house. She has a son and daughter who rarely, or never, visit her at their ramshackle childhood home. After she saves Hai, he stays to take care of her. When she imagines she’s back in the war, he stumbles onto the perfect strategy for managing her dementia. He pretends he’s Sgt. Pepper and he joins her in her war memories about being chased by Germans. When she can name the current president, he knows she is back in the present.
Vuong’s book is not only about the wages of war. It’s also about families, both biological and accidental families – families that just happen. Sony has a mother, Hai’s Aunt Kim, but she’s in jail right now. Hai has a mother, but she thinks he’s in med school in Boston. Grazina is a mother but for Hai she takes the place of his deceased grandmother, and for Grazina, he takes the place of her neglectful son.
When Grazina runs out of money for the Stouffer’s dinners she loves and for utilities, Hai hits Sony up for a job at the “HomeMarket”, a fast-food restaurant that offers “Thanksgiving dinner year-round. Another ersatz family results from the many hours these workers spend together in this economically challenged rural town of East Gladness. There are not a lot of distractions or opportunities.
Drug addiction is also an undercurrent in this story, with Hai popping the downers that Grazina no longer takes. Drug addiction along with the experiences of immigrants in America connects these characters with each other and with the sinking economic circumstances of many Americans living in the twenty-first century.
Ocean Vuong is a master of description, Although often stark, and therefore strangely beautiful, his descriptive style captured my attention right away. The unique quality of his descriptions comes from his ability to make the landscape suit the characters.
“But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree. Mornings when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, they rise as mist across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth.” (pg. 1)
Ocean Vuong – here’s a good writer, and a book that will stay with you. As for the ending, I forgive you Ocean Vuong, maybe.
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 