B. Morrison's Blog, page 15

Best Books I Read in 2022

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the...

The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer

The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world.

Worse, the rest of the world is dead. Something has happened to kill the people and creatures on the other side of the wall. The one man she can see sitting on a benc...

The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser

I was first alerted to Hauser’s essay “The Crane Wife” by the Longreads list of best essays in 2019 which sent me to the Paris Review where it was published. I thought it brilliant.

So I looked forward to reading this book. Hauser calls it “a work of personal nonfiction,” saying “These essays reflect my life as I remember it and the stories I’ve made of that life to understand how to keep living in it.”

In “The Crane Wife” Hauser goes to Texas to study the whooping crane shortly after calling ...

Tigers in Red Weather, by Lisa Klaussmann

We first meet Nick and her cousin Helena in 1945. They are leaving their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Nick headed to Florida to join her husband Hughes who is leaving active duty in the Navy and Helena about to marry Avery and move to Hollywood. Helena’s first husband was killed in the war.

The cousins will miss each other but know they will meet at the family’s compound on Martha’s Vineyard: the magnificent Tiger House and the small bungalow built years ago for Helena and her mother...

Magic Hour, by Kristin Hannah

Successful LA psychiatrist Julia Cates is watching her career crumble. A suit against her brought by the families of victims of one of her patients has created a media frenzy that asserts, if not her guilt, then at least her incompetence. At the same time, her sister Ellie, police chief in tiny Rain Valley on the outskirts of the Olympic National Forest in Washington, faces a challenge unlike any that has come her way before.

The two sisters are opposites: Julia the smart one who never fit in a...

The Dark Flood Rises, by Margaret Drabble

In her seventies, Francesca Stubbs likes being busy and likes driving. When tailgated, she chooses the accelerator rather than the brake, which pretty much describes her philosophy of life.

Her job inspecting care homes for the elderly keeps her crisscrossing the country when she’s not at home in London. “England is now her last love. She wants to see it all before she dies. She won’t be able to do that, but she’ll do her best.”

The nearness of death is ever-present in this 2016 novel. The titl...

Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver

“The simplest thing would be to tear it down,” the man said. “The house is a shambles.”

Thus begins Kingsolver’s ninth novel, set in 2016. Willa Knox and her husband Iano recently inherited the house in Vineland, New Jersey from her aunt and were glad to get it. Not long before, in their fifties, they had been enjoying the rewards of lives spent building their careers and launching their children. Then the magazine Willa wrote for folded, forcing her to go freelance, and the college where Ian...

Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick

While I love a realist novel that pulls me right into someone else’s life, like Stoner by John Williams or Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy, I also like to be surprised and challenged sometimes.

Here a woman named Elizabeth, in a story written by an Elizabeth, summons her past: “If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. . . Perhaps.” What arrives is a kaleidoscope of people she’s known, places she’s liv...

Sweet Days of Discipline, by Fleur Jaeggy

“At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.” Thus begins this short, sharp novel by Jaeggy, an award-winning Swiss author who writes in Italian. Appenzell is a canton in Switzerland.

I thought of other novels I’d read set in boarding schools, but realised this was going to something altogether different when I read the next sentence: “This was the area where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college.”

Walser...

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason

Having found Mason’s novel The Winter Soldier a rich experience, I picked up this collection of short stories. I was surprised to find that I had already read one of them in The Atlantic and thought it brilliant.

“For the Union Dead” begins with the narrator being asked to sort through the belongings of his recently deceased uncle, a nan he didn’t know well. “He was a quiet figure, my father’s only brother, and overshadowed by my mother’s sprawling clan of six siblings.” The narrator does know...