I've been reading a lot more lately. Partly because I have more time now that my Fall adjunct work is done, and partly because looking at the real world is stressful. (Last time these assholes won the presidency, I tried to get politically active - remember when I won a seat on the school board in 2017? But I didn't have the stomach for the pettiness of volunteer public service, so I quit, with surprisingly little guilt).
Anyway. Books. Here are some I've read recently.
Richard White, Who Killed Jane Stanford? A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University. 2022.
Broome County Public Library
We read a book by White in the class I taught last fall, and one of my students mentioned this other book during their presentation and weirdly our county public library had a copy. Yeah, the Gilded Age. Corrupt rich people being entitled jerks. It sounds familiar, doesn't it. Here's the true-crime story of the never-solved murder of the wife of railroad magnate Leland Stanford and all the people who had cause, including most of the staff at Stanford University, which she and her husband founded in memory of their son. The first three-quarters of the book were fascinating, but the last part dragged through some far too detailed research on the movements of a specific bottle of bicarbonate of soda, then ended in an odd chapter reminiscent of the detective gathering everyone in the library to explain his deductions.
Liana De La Rosa, Anna Maria and the Fox, 2023
Broome County Public Library
My very smart friend Leslie said she'd been enjoying some romance novels lately, and this was at the top of her list, plus it made some other public Best Of lists, so I figured I'd give it a try, and yeah, it's not my thing. Politically progressive but still shallow and formulaic with awkwardly explicit sex scenes that I think I was supposed to believe were hot.
Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, 2019.
A beautiful boxed and signed Powell's Book of The Month Club selection (we no longer subscribe, mainly because we have too many books, but they curated an excellent collection. Actually, I can't find any evidence that
Powells still has a Book of the Month subscription)
We've had this in the house for years and neither Michael nor I had read it yet, and with the movie coming out, I finally got around to it, and it was as good as I expected, although I wasn't expecting the challenging setting (bad things happen to children). We went to the movie a couple of weeks ago, and it was beautiful, but the narrative structure was difficult to adapt to the screen and they made one particular choice that I found jarring. I won't say anything more because I don't want to give too much away.
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle, 2021
[I have absolutely given up fighting with typepad on trying to get an image of this book to post. It's colorful. Red and yellow and green and orange.]
Because The Nickel Boys was so good, I decided to read the other Colson Whitehead we own, which is Crook Manifesto, but that's apparently a sequel to Harlem Shuffle, and I need to read the first book first, so off I went to the public library, where they had 3 copies on the shelf. Whitehead has won two Pulitzers, and damn, he deserves them. You probably don't remember me telling you about The Snatching of Bookie Bob, so follow the link if you care to, because there's that same kind of energy to his writing, with a subtle hint of noir, and surrounded by 1960s race riots. He can do impressively quick and deep secondary character sketches, on top of everything else he does so brilliantly.
Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain, 1997
Broome County Public Library
I've made a list of historical novels I might eventually get around to (I don't want my list to become oppressive, so I imagine it more as a bunch of suggestions than a must-do), and something recent by Andrew Miller ended up on it, but they didn't have it at the library, so I got this instead and it was dark and weird and very well done and I am surprised I'd never heard of him.
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, 2013
Autumn Leaves Bookstore, Ithaca. That's our new bathroom rug, in case you're wondering why I have orange pile carpet in the house.
When Michael saw I'd bought this at the second hand book store, he remarked that he'd recently given away our copy (to the library book sale, probably) because we'd owned it for ages and didn't seem likely to get around to it. I'd never heard of her or noticed this on our shelves or in the to-donate pile, but it was on my Historical Novel list, and I've learned that Atkinson is prolific. Michael described her as straddling the line between literary fiction and best-seller, and that's a reasonable take. A lot of the story takes place in London during the Blitz, and gets pretty heavy at times, because it is the Blitz, and also for other reasons. I found the ending unsatisfying, but her writing is good. In looking up a link for the title, I discovered there's a BBC television adaption, plus she wrote a second book about the same family, which I'm considering reading.
This is a lot of books to talk about in one sitting. Are you still even with me? Feel free to stretch and get a snack, because I still have two more to go.
Alan Hollinghurst, Our Evenings, 2024
Broome County Public Library
I'd come across a mention of Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool library, god knows where, and so when Michael and I were at the library dropping off more books for their fundraising book sale (you might think we've been winnowing ruthlessly, but don't worry, we still have far too many books left in the house) and I noticed this on the new books display, I grabbed it. You think it's going to be about one thing, and then it turns out to be about another thing, and then at the end he tells you it is about two more different things. England. 1940 to 2020. Prep schools. Gay men. Theater. Brexit. Racism. Falling in love. It's all there and he writes very beautifully and subtly about place as well as people.
Leo Vardiashvili, Hard By A Great Forest, 2024
Broome County Public Library
I do not know how this got onto the Historical Novels list. Someone needs to be more careful. It's about a man who goes back to Georgia (the former Soviet republic, not the US state), having left it as a refugee as a child. At first I thought the writing was going to be annoying, but he settled down and became effectively evocative of emotion and landscape and culture in a way that made me want to go to Georgia, and also to never ever go there. The title comes from Hansel and Gretel, and there are indeed dark things lurking in the Caucasus forests. But also some funny things.
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