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What Are You Reading / Reviews - January - June 2022
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Tooth And Claw – Jo Walton – 4****
What a fun romp of a story! It’s a typical regency (or Victorian) romance, but all the characters are dragons. I was captured from the first page and enthralled and entertained throughout.
My full review HERE
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What We Keep – Elizabeth Berg – 4****
Do we ever really know our parents? Would we still love them if we did? Could we forgive them their mistakes? Berg writes family relationships so very well. All the ways in which we rely on and trust one another, show our love and loyalty, and hurt or betray one another. There are always two (or more) sides to any story, and it takes a mature person to wait to pass judgment until all parts are known. My heart broke for all the family members, and my loyalties shifted as I learned more.
My full review HERE
Gwendolyn Leick,
Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City
[2001] 360 pagesMesopotamia: The Invention of the City is a history of ancient Mesopotamia organized around ten cities, Eridu, Uruk, Shupparak, Akkad, Ur, Nippur, Sippar, Ashur, Nineveh and Babylon. These are discussed in the chronological order of their periods of greatest influence, but leaving aside Ur and Babylon, and the yet unlocated Akkad, they are also in geographical order from South to North. Each chapter begins with the modern re-discovery and excavation history (except of course for Akkad) and a physical description of the remains, then summarizes the history, and explains what is typical or unique in each city, usually ending with the city god or goddess or the role of the city in literature and myth.
The best book I have read on ancient Mesopotamia is Hans Nissen's The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 BC, but this is a close second; Leick uses Nissen as a source in the first five chapters and tends to accept his view as to the role of climate change in the region as an explanation of the history. She is a professor of anthropology as well as an Assyriologist, which gives the book a somewhat different perspective than other things I have read. Where the last book I read on the subject, Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat's Daily Life in Ancient Mesopotamia, treated everything as definitely known with no indication of controversy, Leick's book is almost as much about what we don't know as about what we do know (and frequently criticizes what we formerly thought we knew), which gave it a real interest.
Nothing to Hide (Lucy Kincaid #15) by Allison Brennan
4 ★
Three murders, same M.O., but none of the victims seem to be connected. Is there a random serial killer loose or is there a connection that Lucy has missed? Lucy’s partner from the local sheriff’s department does not trust the FBI or profilers and Lucy is determined find out why. There is also something going on at the boy’s home and Jesse is involved.
As always, there is so much going on throughout this whole book, but it is broken up well. There is no overlap in the stories, so there is no confusion.
The murders are quite brutal and the mystery behind them is intriguing. The author did a great job hiding things so that it was difficult for the reader to truly know what was going on. The final outcome was well played out and just a bit surprising. If I had known more about this character I may have put them at the top of my list. That was another thing I enjoyed about the book. I was unable to put together my own list of suspects.
Lucy’s partner throughout the case was a bit of a jerk, but I love how Lucy handled him. She tried not to step on his toes, but she knew when she needed to put her foot down. I understand his distrust of the FBI, but he refused to even give them a second chance. It was nice to see Hans Vigo again and I’m glad Lucy set up this meeting behind her partner’s back. It was something the case needed.
One of the boys at group home gets pulled into his brother’s gang and Michael and Jesse try to fix it on their own. Doing this ends up getting Jesse hurt and when Sean finds out he’s upset and thinks he did something to make Jesse lie to him. Kane flies in to help stop the gang and perhaps Jesse will start trusting Sean more. There is still a lot of work to be done in that relationship.
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Eat Cake – Jeanne Ray – 4****
Ruth Hopson likes to bake cakes. She finds comfort in comforting others, and lately everyone – including Ruth – needs some comfort. I have loved every book I’ve read by Jeanne Ray, and this one is no exception. Her writing reminds me of Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Berg. Her characters experience everyday life, with all its joys, crises, heartaches and triumphs.
My full review HERE
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Devil’s Peak – Deon Meyer – 4****
Book #1 in the Inspector Benny Geissel mystery series, starring the South African detective. Benny is such a flawed character and watching him try to make sense of his life and keep away from the bottle while he tracks the serial killer had me backtracking and re-reading sections to try to make sense of what was happening. Meyer does a great job of adding layers to an already complicated plot. And the final chapters are a wild ride!
LINK to my full review
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Elizabeth Blackwell: Girl Doctor – Joanne Landers Henry – 3.5***
This is part of a series for middle-school readers about the “Childhood of Famous Americans.” This fictionalized biography focuses on Elizabeth Blackwell’s childhood in England and the United States, the incidents that piqued her interest in healing, and her constant goal to become a doctor and practice medicine. It is both entertaining and informative.
LINK to my full review
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The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel – Renee Nault / Margaret Atwood – 5*****
I’ve read and reviewed Margaret Atwood’s novel previously, so will confine this review to the graphic novel adaptation. Nault’s interpretation of Atwood’s novel is marvelous. Her imagery is even more vivid and memorable than some of the same scenes as described in the original novel. I do not recommend that you skip Atwood’s novel, but this is a great introduction.
LINK to my full review
Miguel Angel Asturias,
El señor Presidente
[1933, first pub. 1946] 296 pages [in Spanish]The most famous work of the Guatemalan author and 1967 Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias, this is the July reading for the World Literature group on Goodreads which is doing Hispanic America this year. (I got confused as to the months, because I wasn't really interested in reading the June book and didn't add it to my six-month TBR list.) Unlike the novels I read recently by Carpentier and Garcia Marquez, and despite the title, this is not a novel about a dictator but about a dictatorship; although el señor Presidente is present in the background throughout, we don't actually see him very much until chapter 34, almost three-quarters of the way through the book. The novel is written in a modernist style with long passages of seemingly random images, which the blurb on the back describe as "poetic", and frequent dream (nightmare) passages which often comment on or foreshadow the actual events. Nevertheless it is also brutally realistic in its descriptions of prisons and torture; it is the most violent book I have read since Vargas LLosa's La fiesta del chivo which it in many respects resembles.
The novel is set in the capital of an unnamed semi-fictional Latin American country, which is probably based on Guatemala. The action of the first two parts takes place in a single week, from April 21 to April 27 of 1916. The third part covers a longer period. The first chapter begins with a group of beggars sleeping in the plaza near the cathedral. A colonel shows up (by chance?) and for no reason we ever learn begins taunting "the idiot", a beggar with obvious mental health issues. "The idiot" jumps up and strangles him to death, then flees. For some reason which is never explained, the police decide to use the opportunity to frame up a general, Eusebio Canales, and a lawyer, el licenciado Carvajal, for the murder. This sets in motion the whole plot of the novel. Meanwhile, the fleeing "Idiot", in a passage where dream and reality are rather difficult to separate, meets the main character, Miguel Cara de Angel, whom we learn is a close confident of el señor Presidente. It will soon appear that being a friend of the dictator has its own dangers. Other important characters are Camila, the daughter of General Canales; a secret police agent named Lucio Vásquez, his friend Genaro Rodes and Genaro's wife Fedina; and the main villain of the novel after the dictator, the Assessor of War.
A powerful novel and a modern classic, this is definitely a novel worth reading.
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The House of Broken Angels – Luis Alberto Urrea – 3.5***
A large Mexican-American family plans a get-together for the patriarch’s birthday. I have read two of Urrea’s novels previously and am a fan of his writing. He peoples the work with a wide variety of characters and balances tender scenes against highly comic ones or anxiety-producing tragic occurrences. I do wish I had had a family tree handy, however.
LINK to my full review
Carlo Rovelli,
There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness and Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World
[2018, tr. 2020]I have enjoyed reading some of Carlo Rovelli's popular physics books, such as Reality is Not What It Seems and The Order of Time, so when I saw this on the new book display at the library I decided to check it out. It is a collection of forty-six short essays, originally written for Italian newspapers between 2010 and 2018 (with one last essay on the pandemic from 2020 added in this printing), some on physics, some on the history or philosophy of science, a few on political or personal subjects. Many take off from some recently published book, so they may have originally been conceived as reviews. They are not sorted by date, newspaper, or subject but seem to be random. Naturally there is some unevenness and with an average length of five or six pages per essay everything is a bit superficial, but many of them are worth reading, particularly the ones on the history and philosophy of science; the ones that take up social science and politics are somewhat less successful.
Highlights for me included the first essay, a defense of "Aristotle as Scientist", with criticism of postmodernist cultural relativism in the history of science and pointing out that those who have read Aristotle usually have no knowledge of physics and those who do physics generally have no knowledge of Aristotle, which reminded me of C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures, first published the year Rovelli was born; and on the same theme, a group of essays about literary figures who were also scientists or at least were literate in the science of their time, starting with Nabokov's discoveries in entomology, two essays focusing on Lucretius, one on Leopardi who wrote a history of astronomy when he was fifteen, and a very interesting argument that Dante's Paradiso was based on the idea of a three-sphere.
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Circe – Madeline Miller – 5*****
In this marvelous work of literary fiction, Miller, tells us the story of Circe, daughter of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, and possibly best known for turning Odysseus’s men into swine. I studied the classics in high school so was familiar with the basic story line, and some of the family connections, but Miller gives me so much more detail and really fleshes out these characters. Miller’s writing wove a spell that completely enthralled me. I was so beguiled that a part of me wished the novel itself were immortal, and that I could keep reading forever.
LINK to my full review
The Jury (Sisterhood #4) Fern Michaels
5 ★
When the Sisterhood’s plans for a mission get put on hold, they start to look for another. They find it with Paula Woodley. Paula has suffered years of abuse from her husband and when she is brought to Myra’s estate broken and near death, the Sisterhood can’t ignore it. The main issue: her husband is a Washington bigwig. The reaction from the Sisterhood is unanimous: Challenge accepted.
This is the first book in this amazing series that had me nervous for the group. I was really afraid that something was going to go wrong and they would be caught or hurt. The plan comes together piece by piece and they make it work. My goodness did they make that man pay. It was almost (almost) hard to read.
Nikki makes a dangerous decision regarding Jack and it ends up working out for her and him. He had some issues of his own in this book and I think he finally understands why the girls do what they do.
There are two extremely sad moments in this story. Incidents that Nikki, Myra and the others have to work through while continuing to plan their revenge. The ending has a heartwarming moment for all the sisters that brought a tear to my eye.
A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses #3) by Sarah J. Maas
5 ★
This book starts off where the last ended. Feyre is back in the Spring Court, but she is there as a spy. Her plan is to gather information and see what she can learn about the invasion from Hybern. In the process she creates distrust in Tamlin’s realm. It was a slow well planned scheme that Feyre pulled off without detection or guilt.
As war comes to the courts, Feyre finally lets everyone know her title as High Lady of the Night Court. It is not received well by some, especially when she let them know what she was capable of. Some where none too happy that she “stole” their power. She handles the whole situation well.
The meeting of the High Lords of the courts was an interesting ordeal. Funny on some points and intense on others. Tempers flared and Azriel lost his cool. In the situation, I would have as well.
The battle had me on the edge of my seat. I carried the book around as I did other things (not easy, this is a thick book) because I was unable to stop reading. I cried, cheered and was shocked throughout the whole thing. Feyre’s sisters really stepped up to assist. I was very proud of them. I was also torn in two directions by Amren. She made a huge decision on her own and it could have gone very badly.
I look forward to continuing the series and see what awaits Feyre and Rhysand.
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Young Jane Young – Gabrielle Zevin – 4****
The novel is divided into five sections, each narrated by a different character: Rachel, Jane, Ruby, Embeth and Aviva. The basic plot is that a young woman gets a job interning with a congressman, and then begins an affair with him. Can you forgive yourself your youthful mistakes? Can you recover from such a public humiliation? Will you make further bad decisions to compound the problem? Or will you be able to put it behind you and go forward with grace and dignity and courage? Will the public let you? This is a wonderful exploration of the ways in which women deal with such personal disasters.
LINK to my full review
The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower #1) by Stephen King
4 ★
Roland of Gilead pursues The Man in Black through harsh deserts and lush forests. Along the way he meets some interesting people and the reader learns about Roland’s past. The book is chock-full of information and suspense. I was not quite sure where the story was taking me for a bit. It almost felt disjointed in some parts. There is a lot of information to process. The final confrontation with The Man in Black took some rereading to comprehend. The Man in Black is very descriptive and it would get tedious.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I highly enjoyed this book. I actually read it in 1 day and I look forward to continuing the series.
Boubacar Boris Diop,
Le temps de Tamango, suivi de Thiaroye terre rouge
[1981] 203 pages [in French]After having earlier this year read one of Boubacar Boris Diop's more recent (2006) novels, Kaveena, I went back a quarter of a century to his first novel, Le temps de Tamango. This is a complex, many-layered postmodernist novel, influenced by Garcia Marquez, and one of the first really experimental novels of that type by an African author. It is not an easy book to understand. It takes place in an unidentified (within the novel) African country; clearly it is meant to be Sénégal under Léopold Sédar Senghor, but while it is definitely that I think Diop is also intending it to be much more broadly applicable, about neocolonialism in all the formerly French colonies. It opens with a scene where the president is addressing his cabinet, and my first reaction was, "Oh no, not another dictator novel!" I'm getting tired of starting every review with "A dictator of an unnamed country. . ." but it wasn't that sort of book after all; it is about a group of revolutionaries and in particular one character, N'Dongo Thiam.
The premise of the book as far as I can follow it is that an unnamed Narrator (although we might suspect who he is near the end) some time in the 1980s, that is not much later than when the (real) novel was written, had begun to research and write a historical novel about N'Dongo and his activities in the two decades of neocolonial rule since Independence from France, but never finished it. Sometime in the 1990s (that is a decade after the date that Diop's novel was written) there is a "socialist" revolution which is obviously very Stalinist, the documents of the preceding time have been suppressed and an ideological and largely mythical official history has made the revolutionaries of the 1970s into precursors of "our glorious communist party". At the same time, another very different history has been written by reactionary supporters of the ousted neocolonialist regime in exile. Both histories are of course totally unreliable, and Diop's caricature of their language is quite humorous. At some point before his death about 2060, the Narrator has produced notes related to the book, whether for completing it or to explain it. In 2063, in what is now a free socialist country (at least to the extent that history can be written without external constraint) the unfinished novel (which may be called Le temps de Tamango) and the "historical" notes for writing it have been rediscovered and a group of historians is publishing it as a rare document from the past, with notes which try to use it to reconstruct what actually happened in the 1970s. That is supposedly the present book. At least, this is what I think is going on, but except for the two endpoints, the events in the late 60s and 70s and the final book in 2063, the timeline is unclear and various secondary articles online seem to assume different dates, some of which might perhaps be derived from the author's explanations.
If we leave aside the notes, the fragments of the "novel" itself are fairly understandable. There is a strike of bank employees which becomes a general strike by the Central Union Federation, accompanied by large-scale demonstrations, which are crushed by the government. There is a French sergeant named Navarro who is sent to the country as an advisor and who claims to be a general, whose actual role is unclear and disputed by the "historians". A group of possibly anarchist militants called by the acronym M.A.R.S. and led by Kaba Dialo and N'Dongo tries to forge ties with part of the union leadership but the meeting is raided by the police. N'Dongo escapes but Kaba is arrested and killed in prison. N'Dongo under the party-name Tamango (supposedly the name of an escaped slave who led a rebellion in the eighteenth century) gets a job as a domestic servant in the home of General Navarro with the assignment of executing him for the murder of Kaba. General Navarro is ultimately killed by someone else, who may be the lover of his wife (but the notes call this into question). N'Dongo appears to become insane, perhaps because of torture by the General although this is not shown in the "novel" but only suggested in the notes.
From there, it gets complicated. The "novel" leaves much unexplained, and ends in a very strange way. It is obviously fiction, and we have no idea how much of it is "true" and how much made up. The Narrator presents himself as a friend of N'Dongo but at times seems to know no more about him than we do. Near the end, the N'Dongo of the novel comments negatively on the Narrator and his biography of him (the book he is a character in), saying that the the title Le temps de Tamango is meaningless and the Narrator is no Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "notes" of the Narrator also seem to become very strange, when he begins talking about Tamango as a historical figure, with obvious anachronisms. (The only references to Tamango I could locate on the internet are to the nineteenth-century novel by Prosper Merimée (which I now need to add to my unending TBR list) and the 1958 film based on it (not allowed by the censorship to be shown in the French colonies or the United States) which differ somewhat from the version in the "notes".) Perhaps the story of Tamango, since it provides the title of the novel, also serves as a mythological or allegorical summary of the entire novel; the slaves have revolted and taken control of the ship (of state) but are drifting, not knowing how to reach their goal of actual independence. . .
Through all of this, Diop manages to give a psychological account of the after-effects of colonialism on various layers of the population. In focusing on trying to sort out the events, I have perhaps left out what is of more importance, the many allusions and discussions of politics and literature. I generally thought it was a good novel, although I think he made the same points more clearly and effectively in Kaveena.
At one point in the "novel", one of the characters proposes making a film of a play by N'Dongo called Thiaroye. An actual play of that name was written by Diop himself, and is published here along with the novel. (In other words, the play is related to the novel in the same way that Peter Pan is related to The Little White Bird.) It was also proposed to make the real play into a film, but the project fell through; shortly afterward, Sembène Ousmane, the best-known Sénégalese author from the generation before Diop, did in fact make a film based on the massacre.
Unlike the events of the novel, the massacre at Thiaroye is a historical fact. The French recruited Black soldiers to fight in World War II; many of them were taken prisoner when France fell to Hitler. They were known as the "Tirailleurs Sénégaleses" ("Sénégalese Sharpshooters") although they actually came from all the French colonies in Africa. After the war, they were sent back to Africa, many to a camp called Thiaroye in Sénégal, to be demobilized. They refused to demobilize until the French gave them their back pay and pensions; the regular French army then machine-gunned them. According to the French accounts, 35 (or 70) were killed; according to the Sénégalese, over 300. Diop's play imagines the conversations of the fighters and exposes the irony of their situation.
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Olga Dies Dreaming – Xochitl Gonzalez – 2.5** (rounded up)
I really wanted to like this. I’d heard the author in a virtual event and felt her enthusiasm for the story and for her characters. I liked that her focus was on two successful siblings and their rise to those positions, and on the issues of living up to expectations (our own and those of our parents and community). But I never warmed up to the characters, even though I like how Gonzalez portrayed the siblings’ relationship.
LINK to my full review
Timothy Ferris,
The Whole Shebang: A State of the Universe(s) Report
[1997] An example of bad timing, this book was written nine years after Ferris' Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which I read two months ago, yet in some respects it seems much more dated. Partly this is because the earlier book was largely a historical survey of astronomy and related science up to 1988, while this one is more a survey of what was currently believed in 1997 with history mainly confined to the first chapter. Compared to the earlier book, there is somewhat more about dark matter, and there were already a handful of exoplanets known. This book was written in the heyday of string theory, which plays more of a role in his discussions, although it is not actually about physics.
The biggest problem is that the main theme of the book is that Omega=1, that is that the Universe is essentially "flat", with the total of mass and energy close to the "critical density". Of course, this is probably true and has been confirmed by recent observations, but it is discussed here on the assumption that the expansion of the Universe is slowing down due to this gravitational attraction, which it is not. Actually, the first evidence that the expansion is actually accelerating came a year after the book was published, so it became outdated almost immediately. This is undoubtedly why it is not as much of a "classic" as the older book.
This is somewhat unfortunate, as it is very well-written at a much higher level of popularization and would have been a good simple summary of cosmology at the time. The writing is very clear and parts of the book are still worth reading, such as his discussion of the large-scale structures in the Universe. His discussion of Bohm's views on quantum theory is interesting, and I hadn't realized that Feynman's methods were connected with Everett. One annoyance, however, is the last chapter, which is devoted to a wishy-washy discussion of religion in relation to cosmology, which concludes that religion and cosmology should be kept separate -- which is a good reason why he shouldn't have written about religion in a cosmology book to begin with.
Seduction in Death (In Death #13) by J.D. Robb
4 ★
A young girl is dead after what seemed like a romantic night. There is romantic music playing, candlelight, rose petals on the bed and champagne. When an illegal high dollar date-rape drug is found in her system, Eve must find and stop the guy (or guys) before another young girl ends up dead.
This was an interesting case for Eve, but it hit close to home for her. It ended up bringing back that bad time in her life and giving her nightmares. I also think her past helped her with the case though. She was able to look at all the angles from a different perspective. I love how she is able to look at a crime scene and run through a scenario. Sometimes it feels like she was right there when it happened.
Once again one Rourke’s businesses are involved, but that’s not hard to do when he owns half of the town. I like watching Eve and Rourke work together. The banter is sometimes funny and sometimes full of anger (mostly on Eve’s part). I like how Rourke is able to ease Eve’s temper and make like everything is okay. He’s also great at attempting to keep her healthy. Many girls would absolutely love the attention her gives her. He gets quite forceful with her when she gets sick and I had to laugh when he got Sommerset involved. I do believe Sommerset enjoyed it too much.
Mavis makes an appearance with some of her friends to help Eve get ready for a sting operation. They changed her appearance so much and although Eve hated it, I feel like she gained some respect for Mavis’s friends’ talents. Also, I’m excited to see where Peabody and McNab go from here.
This case was a very intriguing one with many twists. It took Eve a minute to narrow the suspect list down due to the circumstances around the illegal drug used. The drug used was horrific and never should have been made to begin with. The guilty party seemed, to me, to be a victim themselves. It ended up being a sad turn of events for all.
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A Fall of Marigolds – Susan Meissner – 3***
A vibrantly printed scarf connects two women across a century; both lost someone in a horrific tragedy, both experience grief, guilt and PTSD. Meissner does a good job of weaving these stories together and moving back and forth in time across a century to explore the common elements. I liked Clara’s story better than that of Taryn, probably because of it’s setting on Ellis Island. Both women struggle with the ethical dilemma of what (and when, if ever) to reveal or withhold to others. My F2F book club had quite the discussion about this.
LINK to my full review
Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Totemism
[1962, tr. 1963] 116 pagesThis short book was written at the same time as his La Pensée Sauvage (The Savage Mind) -- the two books cite each other -- which is next up in my anthropology reading project. By 1962, totemism was basically a discredited theory, after having dominated the anthropology of religion for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Lévi-Strauss compares it in the introduction to the theory of "hysteria" before Freud, and suggests that they were essentially (but not necessarily consciously) attempts to exaggerate the otherness of mental patients and "primitives". But he also asks what the real explanations were for the phenomena which were lumped together under the heading of "totemism". He gives a brief history of the decline of totemism and the theories that were advanced to explain totemistic phenomena without the general theory of totemism, considering and critiquing the views of Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, his usual bête-noir Malinowski, Firth and Forte among others. At the end, he considers Henri Bergson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to argue that the overall structure was based on a dialectical unity of opposites.
Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson
4 ★
Mattie Cook is 14 years old when the Yellow Fever hits Philadelphia. As neighbors and friends start getting sick and some die, Mattie’s mom decides to send her to the country. Mattie leaves with her grandfather shortly after her mom gets sick. Mattie’s future starts to look a whole lot different than she had planned and she must figure out how to navigate her new circumstances.
I have never read much about the Yellow Fever outbreak and this book really opened my eyes. The people who lived in Philadelphia in 1793 really had a rough time with the epidemic, especially the poor who were unable to leave town. Reading about the treatments the doctors recommended and the harm it did was heart breaking. Many farmers stopped coming to town and that left those who stayed without food. Many people also turned to crime to get food and robbed the empty houses. There were also quite a few high ranking government officials that got sick and recovered, which I did not know. The story is well researched and emotional. It was not known how the fever spread and it was sad to read about people throwing sick loved ones out the door to die. It makes one thankful to be living in a time of advanced medicine where many of these diseases have already been researched and vaccines are available. It was an interesting book to read with all that has happened with Covid.
Bloodfever (Fever #2) by Karen Marie Moning
4 ★
MacKayla Lane went to Dublin to investigate her sister’s murder and in the process found out that she is adopted and a sidhe-seer (she can see the Fae). She decided to stay AND HELP Jericho Barrons find the Sinsar Dubh since she is one of the few people who can sense it.
Mac gets herself into some wild situations in this book. She disappears to fairy thanks to V’lane and gets to see her sister (sort of). She also gets kidnapped and tortured. If it weren’t for Barrons she would be dead. Mac is slowly started to understand her role and abilities.
I was intrigued with this story and it flowed smoothly. There were some tense moments and some “I saw that coming” moments. The Fae in this story are grotesque and nightmarish. The author did a fantastic job with character (monster) building. I’m enjoying watching Mac grow into her new “self” and look forward to continuing the series.
Pablo Neruda,
Crepusculario
[1923] 86 pages [in Spanish] [Kindle, Open Library]This year I am reading extensively in Latin American literature for a Goodreads group, and it was recommended to me by the group moderator, Betty, that I should read Pablo Neruda (not one of the group readings); he was on my TBR in any case, but rather far down, so I decided to move him up and begin reading some of his works chronologically over the next few months (mainly what I already own or what is available from Open Library -- I have the Antología General which will fill in the gaps with selections from all the collections I don't read separately).
Crepusculario is Neruda's first published collection of (forty eight) poems; probably not a fair introduction since it was published when he was nineteen and contains poems from as early as seventeen. It isn't all bad poetry -- some poems I thought were fairly good, actually -- but it is very uneven.
Even leaving aside the last section which contains poems about Pelleas and Melisanda, it is obvious that he is imitating the turn-of-the-century French symbolist writers; nearly every poem uses words like "triste", "tristeza", "dolor", "llanto", "sollozos", "angustia" and other allusions to a kind of generalized existential melancholy. This theme is of course also connected to the title; there are constant references to twilight and sunset, the sea, the moon, etc. Despite his claims that it is written with his blood, it all too often seems like a Romantic pose. Technically, it is very accomplished; many of the poems are metric and use rhyme or assonance, and unlike many modern poets who attempt older forms it almost never seems to be forced or twisted to fit the form.
Pablo Neruda, Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada [1924] 118 pages [in Spanish]
Published in the year after Crepusculario, this collection of twenty one love poems is a real step forward, although according to the introductory matter in the Antología General it is still not his "mature" work. The book apparently was a public success and remained popular reading for young lovers for decades. The poems are more "material" than "ideal", about real human desire rather than some ethereal Platonic conception of love. They are loosely organized into a chronology of a relationship; the most famous poem was number 20, set after the "break-up", as was the Canción desesperada. There is still a bit of melancholy and a few references to his (unmotivated) sorrows, but that aspect is less central here; the nature references also become a little more specific and original than in the previous collection.
Cut and Run (Lucy Kincaid #16) by Allison Brennan
4 ★
When authorities find the remains of a family that went missing 3 years earlier, FBI agent Lucy Kincaid is part of the team that is called in to investigate. The family was believed to have fled the country so that the mom could avoid being prosecuted for embezzlement. During the investigation Lucy finds out that one family member is missing, the 8 year old son. Lucy and her partner Nate hit a wall with the local sheriff’s department and start to distrust them.
At the same time, Maxine Revere is investigating the death of a family friend. With the help of Lucy’s husband Sean, it is soon revealed that the 2 cases may coincide.
This was a riveting story with some pretty good twists. The way the two cases are connected is unique and unexpected. Lucy is a bit stricter with Max in this book compared to the others. She is determined to stay on the right side of the law and to keep Max there as well.
Lucy and her boss, Rachel, worked really well together in this book. It seems like Rachel is starting to trust Lucy more. I also liked seeing Lucy and Nate back together. They do a great good cop/bad cop routine.
The reader gets to see a different side of Max in this story. She misses her sister and boyfriend and actually thinks about going home before the case is solved. I was shocked, but pleased, at the change. She has finally found love.
Boubacar Boris Diop,
Les tambours de la mémoire
[1990] 237 pages [in French]Another of Diop's earlier novels, in French (he now writes mainly in Wolof, his native language), Les tambours de la mémoire is about a young man from a rich and powerful Sénégalese family, Fadel Madické, who becomes obsessed by the stories of Queen Johanna Simentho, a semi-mythical leader of anti-colonial resistance in the Kingdom of Wissombo (based on a historical figure who led resistance to France in the Sénégalese province of Cassamance in the 1940's; the name "Johanna" is apparently a reference to Joan of Arc.) The narrative is complexly structured and often deliberately ambiguous, although not as confusing as his first novel Le temps de Tamango.
The novel begins with Fadel's friend Ismaila and Ismaila's wife Ndella (formerly Fadel's girlfriend). Ismaila has just learned that Fadel has been brought, dead, to a hospital in Dakar, supposedly a victim of a hit-and-run accident. The official line is that he was mentally disturbed. Part one of the book is mainly about Ismaila and Ndella and their reaction to the news. They suspect he has actually been assassinated by agents of the dictator Major Adelezo. (There is no historical Sénégalese dictator by that name, and I haven't been able to learn which of the historical presidents or prime ministers is hidden under the name.) This first part ends with the funeral of Fadel. In the course of this part we learn something about Fadel's father, a rich and corrupt businessman and former politician, El-Hadj Madické, and Fadel's brother, Badou, a doctrinaire but ineffective "pseudo-revolutionary" who writes pamphlets against the government, some of which mention Queen Johanna, as well as about the relationship of Ismail and Ndella.
Part two of the novel is largely in flashbacks, giving us more background on Fadel, his growing obsession with Queen Johanna and his mania for proving that she really existed and might still be alive, as well as raising questions about his actual mental state, which despite the claims of Ismaila and Ndella remains ambiguous to the reader. He comes to insist that Johanna was actually a young domestic in his family when he was five or six years old, although no one in his family will "admit" to remembering her and the chronology is inconsistent with the known facts about Johanna (who would have been at least in her sixties when Fadel was born); and there is a thirteen-day period which appears to be a mental breakdown of some sort. In the "present" of the novel, Isamaila receives a mysterious packet which turns out to be the notebooks of Fadel, and he and Ndella decide to organize them and prepare them for publication at some point; these writings are the basis of Part three. The second part ends with Fadel's decision to travel to Wissombo to find out the reality of Queen Johanna.
Part three, which makes up more than half the novel, deals with Fadel's life in Wissombo (although there are also flashbacks to his life in Dakar.) It is ostensibly based on his papers which have been organized by Ismaila and Ndella, although the dénouement of the novel which "resolves" all the questions takes place in the last hours of his life and could not have been in his papers, so presumably is based on the imagination of the two friends, leaving everything completely ambiguous. The people of Wissombo apparently "remember" Queen Johanna, and expect her to "return" in some fashion to achieve justice and prosperity for not only Wissombo or Sénégal but all of Africa or the world. They commemorate her with plays, and it is during one of these plays that the final events of the novel begin. There are clear resemblances between the memory of Johanna and the Christian legend of Christ, although the religious world of Wissombo is definitely pagan (and the characters in Dakar are at least nominally Moslems.)
Like the legend of Tamango in the first novel, the legend of Queen Johanna is essentially a symbol for the struggle for the real liberation of Africa, in contrast to the false independence of the historical neo-colonialist regimes. Clearly, both books also deal with questions of memory and the relations of literature to history. While I had never heard of Diop before he won this year's Neustadt Prize, it seems there is a large amount of critical writing about his work and he is considered an important literary figure; I may attempt to read some secondary works after I have read his more recent books.
Abdulrazak Gurnah,
Dottie
[1990] 397 pages [Kindle]I think this is Gurnah's third novel, after Memories of Departure and Pilgrims Way. While both of those early novels, although worth reading, are a bit awkward at times, Dottie is definitely a mature work. It tells the story of Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour, a Black factory worker in London, still considered a "foreigner" despite being third generation English, and her two younger siblings, the somewhat retarded Sophie and the wild Hudson. The book opens with Sophie telling Dottie that she has decided to name her newborn son Hudson after their brother, who has recently died at the age of eighteen after a troubled adolescence. The book then returns to their life from the death of their mother, young Dottie's struggle to reunite the family, the resentment of Hudson, and their problems with poverty and xenophobia. The novel catches up to the beginning about halfway through, and we see the further life of the two sisters and their relationships to each other and to various other characters, including the men they become involved with. At the end, there is a certain ambiguous hope, at least for Dottie (who may have finally learned to stand up for herself and reject the role of self-sacrificing caretaker.)
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The Women’s March – Jennifer Chiaverini – 4****
The novel focuses on the women who risked their liberty, and their lives, to win the vote for women, including women of color. Chiaverini focuses on three of the most important suffragists of the day: Alice Paul, Maud Malone, and Ida B Wells-Barnett, to tell the story. The chapters alternate between these three central figures, showing how each approached the issue and the unique challenges each faced. The scenes of the march itself, and the near disaster it became are harrowing. While the novel itself is interesting and engaging, I really enjoyed the author’s notes, where Chiaverini gives more details on what happened after the march. As of this writing, the Equal Rights Amendment is NOT yet ratified.
LINK to my full review
John Wyndham,
The Kraken Wakes
[1953] 240 pagesA kraken, as I know from watching a Dr. Who episode, is a mythical giant octopus. There is no kraken in this science-fiction novel by Wyndham; the title is taken from a line of a poem by Tennyson. The book is an apocalyptic story of an invasion of Earth by unknown creatures who come to dwell in the deepest parts of the ocean, possibly, as one character maintains, from Jupiter -- they are obviously adapted to very high pressure environments. The central characters are a husband-and-wife team of British radio journalists, Mike and Phyllis Watson, who observe the fall of the strange red vessels while on a honeymoon cruise and come to be considered as specialists in strange events.
[Possible spoilers]
As in his earlier novel, The Day of the Triffids, there is a good deal of satire on human stupidity, as governments and people alternate between denial and panic. Some are certain that the following events (beginning with sinking of ships at sea, later invasions of islands and ultimately coastal area by "seatanks") are somehow a Russian plot (the novel was published in 1953), while the Soviet Union of course attributes them to capitalist warmongers and refuses to cooperate in dealing with them. The Western governments refuse to act in time because they are afraid to jeopardize world trade. Unlike the earlier novel, which becomes "post-apocalyptic" from the very beginning, this book deals with the unsuccessful attempts to fight the invaders, until they unleash their ultimate weapon: warming the polar regions to raise the sea-level, thereby flooding much of the land and finally causing the end of human civilization and bringing about the post-apocalyptic ending. I'm sure Wyndham would have appreciated the fact that we are doing this to ourselves now, with the same combination of denial and panic.
Like all of Wyndham's novels, and most good science fiction, this is a fast-paced, exciting tale with some thought-provoking extras.
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Thirteen Hours – Deon Meyer – 4****
This is a hard-hitting, fast-paced, police procedural with a complicated plot, a second, unrelated (or is it?) killing, and multiple twists: drugs, human trafficking, the music industry, and, of course, Benny’s continuing struggle as a recovering alcoholic. He's also been named as a mentor to a group of younger investigators, and Griessel is having a hard time with his recent assignment: Inspector Mbali Kaleni, a black woman, a Zulu, a feminist. This is an interesting pairing, and I’d like to see it continue in future books.
LINK to my full review
Honoré de Balzac,
Adieu
[1830] 59 pages [in French]An early short story by Balzac, originally placed in the Scènes de la vie privée but later moved to the Études philosophiques, Adieu is a rather sentimental story of a colonel in Napoleon's army, Phillipe de Sucy, who returns from three years as a prisoner of war in Siberia to find his lover, Stéphanie, from whom he became separated in the retreat from Russia, has become insane from the sufferings of that time.
After he recognizes her in 1819, the story flashes back to the crossing of the Beresina River in 1812. This is the most interesting part of the story; Balzac, as a monarchist with no great respect for Napoleon, does not romanticize the horrors of the events at Beresina, and gives a good feel for what must have happened at the time, although the story of Philippe and Stéphanie is of course treated in Romantic fashion.
The story then returns to the present as Philippe tries to break through her madness.
This was definitely a good story although not as serious as other parts of the Comédie humaine.
Rise of the School for Good and Evil (The School for Good and Evil #0.5) by Soman Chainani
5 ★
The battle between Good and Evil begins.
Two brothers.
One Good.
One Evil.
Together they watch over the Endless Woods.
Together they choose the students for the School for Good and Evil.
I was so excited when this prequel was announced. Fans of The School for Good and Evil finally get to see how it all began. The twin brothers are your typical siblings. They love each other ferociously, but they are very different people. I felt like the Storian put more pressure on them than was needed. It was like they had to try to agree on everything per the agreement instead of each doing his own thing. It caused a lot of problems and pushed the brothers apart. It really helped build the storyline that moved into the other books. It also makes the reader understand Rhian’s actions from the other books.
The schools were very different in this one compared to the others and the reader gets to witness the changes that are made. One castle becomes two, the tower the Storian lives in, and the bridge across the pond. Overall, the book was a great addition to the series and can be read before or after the series is read. It has no spoilers.
Juan Rulfo,
El llano en llamas
[1953] 136 pages [in Spanish]A collection of sixteen short stories set in the llano, the plains in the state of Jalisco in western Mexico. (Some editions have a seventeenth story which was not in the edition I read.) The title story is about the series of peasant rebellions which took place in the area following the Mexican Revolution; two of the later stories, "Anacleto Morones" and "El día del derrumbe" are rather humorous, but the rest are stark descriptions of peasant life in the arid rural areas, full of hardships and violence.
Honoré de Balzac,
L'auberge rouge
[1831] 49 pages [in French]Honoré de Balzac, Jésus-Christ en Flandre [1831] 15 pages [in French]
My last two readings in the Comédie humaine, for the time being, although I am planning to read a couple of other independent works to finish out my Balzac project. Both are short early works which he placed in the Études philosophiques.
L'auberge rouge is a story of a man who judges another man he considers, on very little evidence, to be guilty of a murder many years in the past. Jésus-Christ en Flandre is a legend about an appearance of Christ on a small boat during a storm. Neither are Balzac's best work.
Juan Rulfo,
Pedro Páramo
[1955] 118 pages [in Spanish]Next month's book for the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads, Pedro Páramo is one of the most important modern Mexican novels and was a major influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquéz and magical realism. It is a very difficult novel to understand even at the literal level of events. The novel begins, "Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivia mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo." ("I came to Comala because they told me that my father lived here, a certain Pedro Páramo.") The narrator, we learn later, is named Juan Preciado. (Midway through the novel he is apparently replaced by another narrator, Dorothea; in fact the ostensible narrators are not really that important given that much of what happens is presented in short independent episodes without any obvious connection to the narrators.) His mother Dolores was the wife of Pedro Páramo, who married her because his recently deceased father owed her family a large debt; when she realized that he didn't really want her, she hated him and left him to live with her sister in another town. On her deathbed, she told Juan to seek his father and try to get what he owed her.
On the route to Comala, Juan meets a man named Abundio, who tells him that Pedro Páramo has died some time before. The town seems to Juan like a ghost town, and we find that it is, in more ways than one. Abundio advises him to seek out and stay with a woman named Eduviges Dyada, which he does for the first night. Eduviges tells him that his mother, a close friend of hers from childhood, has told her he was coming and the day he would arrive; he thinks she is crazy. She also tells him that Abundio has died long ago. After he falls asleep, we get a flashback which we assume at first is his own memories of childhood, but are actually the childhood memories of the father, Pedro, flying kites with a girl named Susanna; we find out later how important she was to the events which make up the novel. Throughout the book, we are led to think that we are being given memories of one character only to find that they are another character's.
He is woken up by cries that seem to come from nearby, but he sees no one around; the next morning another character (Damiana Cisneros) comes and gets him, telling him that Eduviges had committed suicide many years before and wondering how he got into the locked house. Later this character disappears when he thinks to ask her if she is alive or dead. This is all in the first few pages.
The book is told entirely in short episodes, stories told by the characters and memories completely out of chronological order and seemingly without connection. There are references to the Mexican Revolution and to the Cristero war. I will not try to summarize the plot, not just to avoid spoilers but because it is so intricate that I would have to basically retell the entire book. We eventually with a great deal of effort can piece together what happened and the life of Pedro Páramo. And then we have to interpret what it all means . . .
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Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger – Lisa Donovan – 3.5***
Donovan is a chef and award-winning essayist who has worked in a number of celebrated restaurant kitchens throughout the South. This is her memoir. Her passion and focus has been on desserts but she knows her way around the entire kitchen. Her journey from Army brat to single mother to just-another-restaurant-worker to pastry star is interesting, and she tells her story with insight and honesty.
LINK to my full review
Thorkild Jacobsen,
The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion
[1976] 273 pagesThis is a history of ancient Mesopotamian religious beliefs and mythology, not religious practice; there is virtually nothing about the rites and rituals, priesthoods or temples. Although Jacobsen constantly quotes primary texts, which are interesting for the facts of what the Mesopotamians explicitly said they believed, his interpretations of the origins and development of the underlying ideas is very speculative; especially since the surviving texts are nearly all much later than the periods he is discussing. He begins with the concept of the Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (published in 1917), that religion is based on an experience of a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum, a sense of the numinous, of an unintelligible power beyond man, and that religious ideas, myths, and so forth are metaphors for this experience of the numinous. This more or less put me at a distance, as I have never been very impressed with the theories of Otto (or his better-known student, Mircea Eliade, not mentioned here.)
Jacobsen identifies three complexes of metaphor, the gods as providers (fourth millennium and earlier), the gods as rulers (third millennium), and the personal god as parent (second millennium). He considers the first millennium to be a time of degeneration and relegates it to a brief Epilogue.
He describes the original metaphor of the gods as being in a way identical with the internal powers of the vegetation, animal life and so forth -- some might say, in effect, as a development from pre-animism and animism, although he doesn't put it in those terms and derives it directly from an encounter with the numinous in the vegetation and so forth -- without any real personalities or activity beyond what is natural to those embodiments. He describes this as "intransitive", which seems like a strange use of the word. He suggests that the gods were originally conceived in inanimate or at least non-anthropomorphic shapes, which ultimately came to be considered as their "emblems." His example for this stage is the myth-complex of Dumuzi and Inanna, which he develops in much detail. He describes Inanna as having been the personification of the communal storehouse, and Dumuzi originally as the power of the date palm. The marriage of Dumuzi with Inanna represents the bringing of the date harvest into the storehouse. A bit later, as the villages of the date producers, farmers and herders joined together to form the first cities, their cults were merged so that Dumuzi became a more general fertility figure, representing other crops and dairy products as well as dates; this explains the myth of the death of Dumuzi (he "dies" when the crops are harvested) and the descent of Inanna (she goes into the underworld as the products in the storehouse are used up.) He uses these ideas to interpret the texts and it was quite interesting.
The second metaphor of the gods as rulers and protectors is of course more familiar, and he attributes it to the rise of the empires after Sargon. After a short summary, he then gives brief descriptions of all the major deities and their myths. The third metaphor, which he assigns to the second millennium, is that of personal gods who care for individuals as strict but loving parents. He considers this the "highest achievement" of Mesopotamian religion, undoubtedly because it is most similar to Christianity although he never says that. He follows this up with interpretations of the Enuma elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh which were very interesting; the book would be worth reading just for these two chapters alone. He finishes up with an epilogue about the first millennium, where in response to the constant warfare with the Arameans, the Assyrians, and the eastern tribes as well as among the cities themselves the ruler-aspect of the gods ceases to be that of protectors and becomes one of arbitrariness and hostility, and the religion degenerates into superstition.
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Interior Chinatown – Charles Yu – 3***
Yu’s inventive novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020; he uses a second-person narrative voice and writes as if this were a screenplay. Personally, I found the structure off-putting. It seemed to me that Yu was trying too hard to be clever. Be that as it may, he had a pretty good story to tell, and eventually I came to appreciate his message.
LINK to my full review
Paging All Bookworms!
Books mentioned in this topic
Interior Chinatown (other topics)Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger: A Memoir (other topics)
Rise of the School for Good and Evil (other topics)
Thirteen Hours (other topics)
The Women's March: A Novel of the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession (other topics)
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The sequel to The Language and Thought of the Child, which it continues and refers back to continually, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child begins with a study of the use of the word "because" ("parce que"), the corollary to the study of "why" which ended the first book, and various words equivalent to "although". Piaget says that children under 7-8 use "because" correctly when it is a question of motivation (e.g. "because my Daddy won't let me" -- his example) but misuse it when it is a question of causal explanation or logical justification; "donc" (therefore) appears only about 11-12, because it involves formal logical thought; and the words meaning "although" are also first correctly understood at that age because they implicitly involve general propositions.
The second and third chapters deal with formal reasoning and relations, and argue that children in the ego-centric stage before 7-8 have difficulty understanding relations (his experiments were on "brother" and "sister", "left" and "right", and relations of part and whole) because they involve looking at them from the perspective of the other as well as the self, and because they require synthesizing details rather than juxtaposing them. Piaget also argues that while children begin to use deductive reasoning from 7-8, they can only reason from premises that they actually believe; it is only from 11-12 that they become able to reason from purely hypothetical or arbitrary premises, and thus that is the age where they are capable of formal reasoning.
The fourth chapter continues the argument by considering what he calls "logical addition" and "logical multiplication", or what English speakers call "union" and "intersection" of sets. (Throughout the book French technical terms seem to be translated literally rather than by the corresponding English technical terms. There are also many cases where a sentence seems to say the opposite of what the context calls for, as if a "not" has been added or left out, which occurs too consistently to be typos and probably is a problem with the translation.)
The last chapter is a summary of both books, which was very welcome given how complex his arguments are.