Tag: books (Page 2 of 25)

Going to fire off three quick summaries of recent books before we head to the airport.

Middle of the Night – Riley Sager
The Only One Left – Riley Sager

I was not at all familiar with Sager’s work, but when I saw Middle of the Night pop up on multiple lists of must read new books over the summer, I jumped on it. Wise choice.

It is an excellent, spooky, freaky, fun mystery revolving around the disappearance and presumed death of a young boy in 1994 and his best friend’s efforts to cope with that loss as an adult, and then deal with weird coincidences that pop up 30 years after the disappearance. It pushes up against the supernatural, but eventually the causes for those seemingly unexplained incidents are relatively mundane. Except for one element…

Lots of twists and turns, especially in the final 20 or 30 pages, when Sager fakes the reader this way and that. Highly satisfying.

After that, I put a ton of his old books on hold and The Only One Left was the first to pop up. You can tell it’s from earlier in his career. It is less subtle and more in-your-face at times. That final stretch, where he offers several solutions for the mystery before the final reveal, is less elegant than in Middle of the Night. But it’s still a cool story, in this case about a 50-year-old murder mystery that has a shocking story that has been hidden in plain sight for those decades.

Cold Shot – Mark Henshaw
This is book two in Henshaw’s Kyra Stryker & Jonathan Burke series. After stopping a secret Chinese weapons program in the first book, here they are investigating a connection between the Iranians and Venezuelans that seems pointed at producing nuclear weapons for one or both of the rogue nations. Henshaw has been described as a modern Tom Clancy. That fits. He doesn’t go into pages-long descriptions of weapons or technology, but does find a way to still provide a lot of detail about such things without derailing his story for too long.

Solid plot, lots of action, the good guys win. What else do you need?

Trust Her – Flynn Berry
Three years ago I read Berry’s A Northern Spy, about an unaffiliated Northern Irish woman, Tessa, who gets pulled into the conflict between the IRA and British authorities because of her sister.

In this follow up, set a few years later, the siblings are settled in Dublin where they have carved out new lives with new identities. Until the IRA finds Tessa and threatens her family unless she attempts to turn the British agent she worked for when she was still in the North.

Much of the book progresses without much happening, just the slow building of pressure on Tessa. I wondered if Berry was making a statement more about the stresses people involved in the conflict lived with rather than writing a more straight-forward thriller. Then she threw a couple twists into the final fifth or so of the book that picked up the pace and gave it a more traditional feel.

I guess that ending was needed. After finishing I wondered if a book with a messier, open ending would have been more effective. I liked the idea of nothing ever truly being resolved during The Troubles. Each kidnapping and bombing and death led to another, then another. Each time the situation around you calmed down, there was sure to be some retaliatory act that would ratchet events back up again.

Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
I remember seeing this book a lot as a kid, but never read it until now, after finding it on a list of best espionage novels ever written. After finishing it, hard to believe I put it off so long.

Set during World War II, it is the twin tale of a German spy embedded in Britain and the agents tasked with tracking him down. The chase picks up steam in the weeks before D-Day, when the spy discovers the true location of the Allied landing and attempts to get photographic evidence back to his superiors in Germany. There’s a rather unlikely but entertaining climax to his efforts in which a regular citizen is responsible for his failure. The entire plot is a bit by-the-numbers, but it is always entertaining, and ultimately works.

As the book was written in 1978 and set in the 1940s, I wondered if it would feel a bit off in tone. With the exception of a couple brief passages, which I think were reflective of how people would have talked during the war, I was surprised that the book did not feel out-of-date or fashion at all.

World Within A Song – Jeff Tweedy

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) – Jeff Tweedy
I’ve been a casual fan of Wilco, with occasional moments of greater interest, for a little over 20 years. I am most fond of the music they made from 1999 to 2004; hot-and-cold with them at other times.

When we had friends over a few weeks ago, I talked books with one guest. He asked if I had ever read any of Jeff Tweedy’s books. When I said no, he said he bet I would enjoy them, no matter how much I listened to Wilco’s music. He had just read World Within A Song and suggested I start there.

So I did, and read it in two days. And immediately got Tweedy’s proper memoir and read it in two days. Dude can write more than a good song.

World Within A Song is a list of both songs that have influenced him, for better or worse, over his life and little snippets of observations about touring or life. It was not what I was expecting. He is all over the place in his song choices. He writes about music from artists like The Minutemen, The Clash, Bob Dylan, The Replacements, etc that he loves and influenced what he wrote. He also includes tracks from artists like Leo Sayer and Judy Garland that bring back memories of his parents. And traditional stuff like “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Happy Birthday,” songs we have all heard a million times in our lives that he kind of hates.

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) is a straight autobiography, beginning with his childhood. He covers his discovery of music both as a listener and artist; his days in Uncle Tupelo and how he and Jay Farrar grew apart; the formation of Wilco, the addition and later firing of Jay Bennett from that band, and Wilco eventually leaving the major label world; his opioid addiction and recovery; how he met his wife, her cancer battles, and how they started a family; the deaths of his parents; and his fights with the recording industry. Pretty much everything. You always question how honest and accurate books like these truly are, but this seems like a warts-and-all accounting. I’m not sure if Farrar, Bennett’s family, or some of the other people Tweedy had conflicts with would agree with everything. But a book like this can only have one perspective.

What made me read these both in four days is that Tweedy is a terrific writer. Funny, eloquent, and open. He shares some pretty horrific, cruel stuff he did in his years as an addict without much filter. He doesn’t mince many words when he discusses his conflicts with Farrar and Bennett. You don’t necessarily admire him for every step he’s taken in his career, but you understand the bigger context they came in. He also gets deep into how he makes music and how that has changed over his career. Wilco has taken many hard left turns over their 30-years together. The songs covered in World Within A Song and events in Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back) help those diversions make a lot more sense.

Well, August was quite a month when it came to reading. I finished seven books last month. And that was with a vacation, the Olympics, paying more attention to baseball (at least some of the time), and watching the US Open mixed in. I guess I used my free time wisely. Also I read some very enjoyable books that kept me engaged and turning the pages.

Here are the last four from that run.

Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman
One of my sisters-in-law had this with her when she visited last Christmas and without asking her about it, I added it to my reading list. When I checked its status at the library there was a 30+ week wait for it. Yowsa. I placed my hold and waited until early August when my name hit the top of the list.

Worth the wait. It is a fun, entertaining, thoughtful, charming, at times poignant book.

A group of four residents at a British retirement community start a club where they dive into cold cases for fun, hoping to find clues the police missed and bring the proper people to justice. Hey, big surprise, the group stumbles into a real murder in the process! Then another. And another. Working on their own, and sometimes in concert with the police, they eventually solve all the mysteries. Naturally the cold case they started with ends up tied to the new ones they are looking into, with a surprising connection to their group.

The end got a little messy, as Osman unravels all the threads he’s spun, including several that intentionally led in the wrong direction. That is the tiniest quibble. And perhaps I was just reading too fast as I raced to get to the resolution. I’m looking forward to more adventures with the gang from Cooper’s Chase.

She Rides Shotgun – Jordan Harper
It’s been quite awhile since I read a super-dark book. Like cringey dark. I’m not sure if this officially qualifies – it’s not into Daniel Woodrell territory, for example – but it did make me a little uncomfortable.

This centers on the heart-warming story of a dad reuniting with his estranged 11-year-old daughter and them forging a new relationship.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. Nate has been in prison and, just before being released because of a technical error in his conviction, kills a higher-up in one of the prison’s Nazi gangs. Then he kidnaps his daughter, Polly, from her school because he knows she is being targeted by the Nazis as part of their plan to destroy his life in retribution. After grabbing his daughter, Nate finds her mother and new husband murdered by the Nazis. They flee both the Nazis and the police, who think that Nate is responsible for the murders. Then Nate teaches Polly how to be a badass and she helps him rob Nazi stash houses and whatnot to earn a measure of revenge.

And it keeps getting darker from there.

I think I would have loved this story 10–15 years ago. Now, though? Not so much. Not just because of the wrongness of teaching your 11-year-old how to choke people out. There were some strange parts of the book where my question was less where was the story headed than what drugs was Harper using when he wrote those chapters.

Again, I might just be getting old. I’m going to give another of his novels a shot at some point, as he’s got a lot of notice for taking up the banner of noir lit.

The Pine Tar Game – Flip Bondy
Would you be shocked I raced through this book, about the Royals-Yankees rivalry at large and a certain 1983 baseball game in particular, in about 36 hours? I have vivid memories of the Pine Tar Game – I was at my grandparents’ home, watching with my grandfather. He took a nap after the game and when we woke, first thing he did, before lighting his traditional cigarette, was look at me, shake his head, and say, “That damn Billy Martin…” – but it was still fun to relive that day in great detail. It was also cool that one of the greatest rivalries of its era got a full accounting. Since it was a league championship series rivalry, it has largely faded into history outside of Kansas City.

Carrie Soto Is Back – Taylor Jenkins Reid
Finally, another book my sister-in-law directly recommended to me and that I saved until the US Open. Fine timing! This is focused on the greatest (fictional) women’s tennis player of all time, and her return to the game after a younger player ties her record for most majors won. Along the way Carrie Soto reconnects with her father, who had been her coach but from whom she became somewhat estranged late in her career. She has to deal with the realities of being nearly 40 and attempting to compete in major tournaments. And she gains a love interest on his own comeback trail.

Every aspect of this story is predictable. Reid has such a great, breezy yet compelling style of writing that it doesn’t matter that every twist and turn is telegraphed from chapters away. You keep turning pages anyway.

Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic – Jason Turbow
My brother in books David V handed me a copy of this on my visit to Kansas City in June. It took me some time to work through my stack of virtual books to crack it open, and once I did, I realized I had read it before, back in 2017. Looking back, I loved it so much then that I read it in two days. It’s not like this was Infinite Jest and I would be taking weeks and months away from books I had not read. So I continued, finishing it in three days this time.

Again, it was terrific. It covers the Oakland A’s dynasty of the early 1970s, how they were built, how they won three consecutive World Series, and then how free agency tore them apart. Owner Charles O. Finley, who many adults I grew up around hated because he moved the A’s from Kansas City, was the center of the storm. Turbow never gets into Finley’s politics, but he had a lot of personality traits similar to a certain old man currently running for president.

Other observations:
– It was interesting how during the Vietnam War a lot of MLB players would leave their teams in the middle of the season to do their two weeks of military reserve obligations.
– The A’s are considered one of the greatest dynasties ever. However, they were far from dominant. They easily could have lost any of the three league championship series they won, same for their three World Series. A few hits here, a few outs made there, and they are closer to the Buffalo Bills of the ‘90s as annual losers on the biggest stage, or even the Royals of the late ‘70s who couldn’t get out of the ALCS.
– Oakland couldn’t draw fans in the Seventies when they were the best team in baseball. I wondered what if they had built a better stadium in a better location. Would they have had better crowds and then been more consistently successful? Would they not be about to move to Las Vegas? Would the Giants have fled San Francisco in the 70s for Denver if the A’s were drawing 40,000 fans a night across the Bay/
– Reggie Jackson is one of the most fascinating players of all time. There’s never been anyone quite like him. He also might be one of the most overrated players ever? Maybe?
– I miss the days when teams were full of characters that didn’t speak in carefully managed sound bites and fought with each other as often as their opponents.

Then We Take Berlin – John Lawton
My vacation book, the first in a series that is generally well received that I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. Those good reviews were deserved.

What better way to start a spy series than by straddling World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, and deep in the heart of the Cold War via two different story tracks? We are introduced to Joe Wilderness, an English teen who learns the art of breaking and entering thanks to his uncle during the darkest days of World War II in London. Eventually he joins the military just as the war is ending, is funneled to intelligence, and sent to Berlin to handle some special missions. In the process he comes into contact with other Brits, Americans, and Russians who are focused not on post-war power, but on supplying goods in demand on the black market. Here’s where Wilderness’ b&e expertise comes in handy, as he discovers ways around the many physical and political impediments to moving product.

Jump to the 1960s and that knowledge becomes useful as Wilderness is recruited to help smuggle a person of importance from East Berlin to the West.

It is never a standard spy novel, as it is focused more on Wilderness’ illegal acts than his official ones. The writing is excellent, though, which made this a fine change of pace to someone like me who reads a lot of espionage novels.

The Neon Rain – James Lee Burke
I didn’t know much about Burke until recently, when I read an interview with him in which he discussed the state of our political process and society. I was intrigued when his interviewer asked about how Burke has rolled social issues into his novels, specifically discussions of race and injustice. So I figured I would give his most famous series, based on detective Dave Robicheaux, a shot. The result wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.

This book turned out to be much more of a hardboiled, classic detective novel than that interview suggested. Written and taking place in the Eighties in the south, it had a lot of cringey elements that made me wonder if Burke really was a champion for progressive causes. Then I realized that was 40 years ago, the way we talk about and to people has changed a lot, and he was reflecting the time and place his story was set in.

To be fair, Robicheaux, despite being a Vietnam veteran and a New Orleans detective who is comfortable blowing bad guys away, does seem deeper and more thoughtful than your stereotypical novel detective. My guess is that Burke slowly rolled those broader social critiques into Robicheaux.

All that said, the book was perfectly fine if formulaic. I’ll keep the series in the back of my mind for the next time I have a reading lull, but doubt I’ll rush back into it.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store – James McBride
McBride wrote the wonderful Deacon King Kong about a particular moment of life in the projects of 1960s New York. This had a very different setting, but was equally as charming.

This time he writes of a Depression-era Pennsylvania town where Jewish immigrants and Black families that have moved from the south form an uneasy alliance against locals that don’t want either of them there. The connecting point between those communities is Chona, a physically impaired Jewish woman who runs the Heaven and Earth Grocery Store frequented mostly by Black folks. She extends credit and doesn’t ask for payment. She slips children treats and presents. She writes strongly worded letters to the local papers demanding equality for all and calling out white residents who march with the Klan. In short, she looks out for all the people of her town that she thinks are getting the shaft.

Chona’s health takes a turn, there is an incident that makes it worse, an innocent Black boy is held accountable rather than the white doctor who was assaulting Chona, and both the Jews and Blacks join forces to avenge her.

That’s not a very good summation, but without going into great detail and ruining the story, it’s hard to share much about it.

Once again McBride has written a charming, hilarious, touching, and at times troubling story. It is filled with characters who have tremendous dignity and resilience in the face of a world that refuses to see them as complete humans worthy of respect and the same rights as their neighbors. And McBride wraps the story’s various threads in a completely satisfactory ending.

City in Ruins – Don Winslow
The final entry in Winslow’s Dan Ryan trilogy. Like the first two, it moves briskly. Also like the first two, that briskness makes it feel only partially formed. It was an interesting writing exercise, especially when compared to his Mexican cartel trilogy, cutting the story to the bone and eliminating anything that didn’t swiftly move the plot forward. It probably took me six or seven combined days to read this trilogy, about the same effort to read one of his cartel books. I think I prefer the cartel books.

Tales of a Vagabond DXer – Don Moore
I’ve mentioned a few times over the years how one of my weird, middle school hobbies was spending many hours listening to radio stations from all over the world on shortwave, an activity called DXing. Don Moore was famous in that sphere for living and traveling extensively in Central and South America in the 1980s and 90s, visiting these little, community radio stations that us weirdos up north would attempt to listen to at strange hours.

This book is a collection of reflections from that era and revised versions of articles he published 30 and 40 years ago. Even if you aren’t into radio at all, the travel aspects of his tales are pretty interesting. He began as a Peace Corp volunteer and kept a similar philosophy about his other travels, preferring hostels and other affordable lodging options to more luxurious locales. There are also good lessons about being a respectful visitor and how to make connections with people who have very different lives than you.

Old King – Maxim Loskutof
A story about people who run to our country’s most remote areas in hopes of escaping the pressures of mainstream life. One man runs to get away from his divorced wife and the memories of their marriage. Another in an effort to try to save animals as humans destroy their habitats. And a third to get as far away from all the modern aspects of society as possible while plotting his battle against modern technology.

That final one may sound a little familiar if you are of a certain age. That’s because it just happens to be Ted Kaczynski. Or at least an extrapolated story of his life in Montana’s wilderness in the 1970s and 80s. The other two main characters are people who run across Ted, and even have uneasy relationships with him while dealing with their own stuff.

Loskutof’s story is well written and engaging, but I’m not exactly sure if all those parts worked together. I found it strange that there wasn’t much of Ted, but a lot of the US Postal Service investigator who was tracking him. It seemed like perhaps this should have been just a novel about that, with the others used as color for what rural Montana was like at the time. Or, if this was to be a novel about people who reject modern, urban society and flee to our deepest interiors, the part about the postal investigator should have been scrapped.

Chain Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I almost stopped reading this book twice, despite the critical acclaim it has received. The opening chapters seemed repetitive as Adjei-Brenyah slowly introduced a series of characters through similar sets of events. They are all convicted felons working to earn their freedom by participating in the Chain Gang All-Stars, a competition where inmates fought each other in a gruesome, ramped-up, American Gladiators-style competition. Survive long enough and your record gets expunged and you go free. The catch is each battle is to the death, so the odds of winning enough fights to be released are extremely low.

The felons who survive over time become celebrities, all of their daily activities recorded and broadcast for an eager public. They get sponsors and special treatment. Stadiums are filled with adoring fans who dress like them and repeat their catch phrases.

Once the story settled and moved beyond that introductory third or so, it got much better. One particular Chain, or team of competitors, is led by two women who are both deep into their careers. One is approaching enough wins to earn her freedom. The other is not far behind. It turns out that the rules can be changed, on the fly, to make gaining freedom nearly impossible.

Throughout, Adjei-Brenyah sprinkles footnotes that point to the reality of our American prison system. Despite our society’s alleged abhorrence of “cruel and unusual” punishment, there are countless examples of prisoners being treated in cruel and unusual ways. The Chain Gang All Stars is just a natural progression from that, combining our love for spectacle, competition, and reality TV with a new way to punish our worst criminals.

I think that’s the most interesting part of his story. He is far from the first to get the reader/viewer to root for people who are, genuinely, the bad guys. There are many moments when the reader is bluntly reminded that these are not good people. In the process, though, he gets you to think about complex subjects like prison reform, what punishment is appropriate for people who have murdered and raped, how much should we consider the conditions the incarcerated were raised in or lived in when determining the price they must pay for their crimes, and what role should the context of a crime play when imprisoning the perpetrator? The book doesn’t leave you feeling good about any of it.

Fortunately, we would never stoop to this level as a society, turning convicted criminals into reality stars and watching them brutally murder each other every week, right? Well, unless you are a truly horrific person running for office on a platform of denigrating and sub-humanizing anyone who doesn’t fit your narrow view of what a real American is.

OK, that’s not fair. He just wants immigrants to fight each other for sport. He didn’t say anything about it being to the death. But slippery slopes and whatnot…

The Wager – David Grann
Another fine yarn from Grann, this time about an 18th century British ship that struggled and then wrecked in the heavy seas while attempting to round Cape Horn and the aftermath, which included multiple mutinies, multiple escape paths for the survivors, and multiple trials in England for those who made the long journey home.

Grann admits at the very beginning he wasn’t there, and is recreating events as best he can from the records that survived. That might be the most remarkable thing about this book: that so many public records do exist from the small number of men who survived the initial shipwreck and made it back to England. One log/journal was especially rich in detail and allowed us a deep look into what the men experienced. That’s just enough material to turn this into a super-engaging read.

There are some similarities to the experiences of Ernest Shackleton and his crew in their failed Antarctic expedition nearly 200 years later, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The Charm School – Nelson DeMille
I had never heard of this 1988 book before. I was pleasantly surprised that despite its age, it held up pretty well. In fact, its age was one of the best things about it.

The book is split into two halves. In the first, an American student traveling through the Soviet Union in the late ‘80s stumbles upon a secret that could take the Cold War to a new, more intense level: a secret camp holds hundreds of American POWs from the Vietnam war, and they are being forced to teach Russians how to “act American” before deployment to the US. Think The Americans. The student reports his findings to the US embassy, where two staff members struggle to verify his information and protect him from the KGB. The staffers – he am Air Force agent, she a PR liaison – also strike up a romance during all this.

In the second half, those two staffers end up in the camp and see that the report is, in fact, completely true. They are forced to fight for their lives while following some very disappointing orders from above about how to deal with the POWs.

I was surprised at the depth of DeMille’s story. This wasn’t the standard “US is good, USSR is bad” spy novel. His most patriotic Americans were able to see good in the Soviet people and questioned areas where the US/capitalism fall short. They made an effort to understand why the other side behaved the way they did. He shows little moments of levity between CIA and KGB agents despite their bitter conflict. As I read I realized that our society had more room for nuance and understanding of others in the Eighties than it does now.

I also loved DeMille’s dialogue. It was a snappy throwback to the movies of an earlier era. It took a few chapters to get into it, but once I did it was terrific.

It was also a throwback in that it checked in at 800 pages. Seems like most thrillers these days are in the 300–500 page range, which I tend to prefer. DeMille’s story and writing were good enough that I didn’t mind having to spend a little extra time with it.

The Breaks of the Game – David Halberstam
I’ve known about this book for decades. I’ve read several of Halberstam’s other books, notably The Best and Brightest, about the Vietnam War, and Playing For Keeps, about Michael Jordan’s career. Yet, despite knowing that so many sportswriters I admire consider this a classic, I never got to it. Until it received a lot of attention after Bill Walton’s death. I quickly grabbed it and raced through his accounting of the 1979–80 NBA season, with a focus on the Portland Trailblazers and Walton.

The Trailblazers won their only NBA title in 1977, behind a dominant performance by Walton. A year later they were even better, on pace through 60 games to have the best regular season in league history until Walton suffered the first of his many foot injuries. He came back for the playoffs but broke his foot and Portland was quickly eliminated. The next year or so featured much acrimony between the team and its star, with Walton eventually forcing a trade to his home town San Diego Clippers.

Halberstam’s book covers how both sides were trying to find a new normal.

I don’t know if it was the first book of its kind, but it was super interesting to read a view of a season that came with insider access from so far back.

But there were also some major stylistic differences in how sports books were written at the time compared to now. And while race will always be a big part of any NBA story, some of the ways Halberstam wrote about it was jarring to my modern sensibilities. He often referred to specific players as “the black,” which while normal and inoffensive forty years ago, seems super cringey now.

Still, a very interesting look at the NBA just before it began a remarkable decade of growth.

60 Songs That Explain the ‘90s – Rob Harvilla
Delightful. The podcast this sprung from was great, and I was worried this would just be a rehashing of those same stories. Harvilla, for sure, recycled some bits and anecdotes. But he also put songs with similar qualities together, and adjusted his approach to give a higher-level view of the Nineties than the more drilled-down effort that was his pod.

Most of all, I really enjoyed his final chapter, when he got into why music is so important to him, and how it has been his entire life. I recognized a lot of my own love of music and how it is an integral part of my life in his words.

Reckless – Chrissie Hynde
While doing my research for the recent RFTS post about The Pretenders, I came across several references to Hynde’s memoir. As soon as I completed that post, I checked and, LO!, the ebook was available at the library. I got it onto my Kindle and knocked it out over the next 36 hours.

It is a great, if limited where it really counts, rock memoir. Hynde shares pretty much everything she experienced in life, good and bad. From her traditional childhood in Ohio to her discovery of music and the alternative lifestyles available on college campuses in the early Seventies. I’m not sure I knew she was a student at Kent State and one of her friends was among those killed when Ohio National Guard troops fired on students during Vietnam protests. She shares her discovery of drugs and sex, and how there wasn’t much in those realms that she didn’t dabble in. She never asks for the reader’s forgiveness or expresses much regret about her actions, even those that seem pretty harrowing in retrospect. It was just the journey she was on and those experiences are what turned her into the woman and artist she became.

I say the book is limited because it takes her a long time to get to her actual career as a musician. There are lots of starts and stops in that aspect of her life, especially when she moves to England and works with a number of artists who go onto create legendary bands of the punk area right after they stop working with her. The Clash. The Sex Pistols. The Damned. The Slits. Chrissie Hynde worked with members of each group before they became the bands who became famous.

Finally, in the last quarter of the book, she finds three musical partners in crime and forms The Pretenders. Their success is quick but the lifespan of the core four is brief. She basically ends the book after the band fires Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott dies. The Pretenders had most of their biggest hits after the summer of 1982, but she glosses over everything that came after those terrible days in July.

Hynde has been through a lot. There is a Keith Richards quality to her life. After learning the details, you wonder how the hell she is still alive to tell her story and continue singing her songs. Her frankness and acceptance of all that she has been through make this a compelling read.

Crooked Seeds – Karen Jennings
My latest “Critically Acclaimed Book I Didn’t Quite Get.” There might be a reason I’ve never been in a book club…

This book centers on a disabled woman in modern South Africa struggling to get through her daily life. Police show up and begin asking questions about her past and force her to confront some ugly truths about her family’s history at the end of the Apartheid era. Along the way we learn how she became disabled, and how that is tied to an extremely problematic episode in that family timeline.

I know Jennings was making some broad statements about the ugliness of both the Apartheid era and how the promise of the New South Africa got trampled upon pretty quickly. I just didn’t find any of the characters to be interesting. I kept searching for ways to be sympathetic, especially to the main character, but never could connect with her.

The Bitter Past – Bruce Borgos
As with Crooked Seeds, this tells a story from two different time perspectives. The first is a modern investigation into a brutal murder of a retired FBI agent in rural Nevada. It soon becomes apparent that the murder was done by a Russian agent searching for a turned Soviet spy from the 1950s. The local sheriff, who had served as an Army intelligence officer and did a tour in Russia, with assistance from an FBI agent, is tasked with finding the modern Russian before they can kill again.

In parallel we are told the story of the 1950s Soviet agent, who infiltrates the US nuclear testing program in Nevada with the goal of creating an accident that kills thousands of civilians and turns the American public against the nuclear weapons program. This may surprise you, but he has misgivings. And, obviously, he is still alive in 21st Century Nevada so something happened to keep him in the States.

A few of Borgos’ plot elements are pretty clumsy. Their clumsiness makes the twists in the final quarter of the book apparent from a long way away. Yet it’s still an interesting story, and I read most of it near the pool over the weekend, so I didn’t mind that clumsiness. It was just fine for sitting in the sun and turning virtual pages without having to remember too many details.

The Bullet Swallower – Elizabeth Gonzalez James
This book has gotten crazy praise in literary circles, landing on numerous Best Of lists already. With good reason. It is a very well-told, fictional story of three generations of Mexicans and their family history. One is a bandit in the late 19th century border territory, who is forced to bargain for his life after a raid on an American train goes off the rails (so to speak). The other two are his son and grandson, living in 1960s Mexico City, with the third generation uncovering the secret family history the middle generation tried to hide.

The bulk of the book is solid, but it builds and builds to a truly glorious final chapter. It was one of those endings that grabs you in an unexpected way, takes your breath away a little, and makes you want to go back and read it again.

I actually read the author notes in the back and James said she had wanted to write a Magic Realism novel, and do so while pulling in some of her family history. I’m not really sure what Magic Realism is, and nothing about her story seemed all that magically real. So I can’t really comment on that part of it. It was just a damn good story, regardless of genre.

The Helsinki Affair – Anna Pitoniak
Hey, another book about generations discovering family secrets!

In this case a young CIA officer becomes one of the youngest station chiefs in the service when she correctly predicts a US Senator will be assassinated and her superior officer ignores her warnings. With her new position, she is tasked with tracking down connections between the killing and Russia. She learns that the senator was working with a Russian businessman to expose efforts by the Russian government to manipulate the US stock market while blackmailing US companies. And, in turn, she finds her dad, who was once a CIA agent and now works in the agency’s PR division, listed among people involved in the blackmail.

Uh oh.

As she unravels the Russian conspiracy and protects her source in Moscow, she learns a hidden secret about her father’s career, the truth of why her parents’ marriage ended, and we get a nice setup for a sequel.

The Family Chao – Lan Samantha Chang
You know, I read so many books that they seem to fall into certain patterns of general themes. This one slots into the “immigrant family coming to terms with generational changes, troubles assimilating, and the younger generation feeling disconnected to both worlds” camp. Doesn’t roll off the tongue, does it?

Here James, the son of Chinese immigrants, is returning to his small hometown in Wisconsin for his college winter break. He steps into a fraught situation between his parents, who have split up, and his father and oldest brother, who has been pushing to take over the family restaurant. The first half of the book tracks all the various tensions in James’ and his family’s lives. Then, smack in the middle, his dad dies when he is locked into the faulty freezer in their restaurant and the book turns into a pretty compelling mystery. Finally, it spools out an unexpected plot line where a family secret is revealed as the likely cause of the father’s death.

Again with the family secrets!

Chang also throws in elements of teenage sexual awakenings, parent-child dynamics, issues unique to small towns, economic disparities and the anxieties that come with them, and religious barriers. There is also a part of the eventual trial for the accused killer of James’ dad that contains an element that is highly ridiculous, but is used to show how arguments against immigrants are often nonsensical and based on fear and stereotypes rather than facts.

There’s a lot going into the story, and Chang makes it all work.

Bottoms Up And The Devil Laughs – Kerry Howley
Howley dives into the “Deep State,” that semi-mythical, mysterious part of our government that allegedly pulls all the strings, protects child sex traffickers and baby eaters, and torpedoed our last president’s efforts to reform our country in his image.

However, she does not look at it either from the MAGA perspective or as a “Well, actually…” explainer. Rather, she hones in on how, in the post 9/11 world, so much of society has bent over backwards to give the NSA and its various offshoots and related agencies almost unchecked access to information about our lives. The general public often participates willingly in allowing the details of our daily lives to be weaponized, if needed, against us. The spread of that data has severe consequences.

Eventually Howley settles on Reality Winner, an NSA translator, to show the real power of the Deep State. When Winner comes across documentation that shows that the Russians actively sought to undermine the 2016 election, she is disturbed that no one is talking about the evidence in the public sphere. Not the media, not the government, not countless other watchdogs. There are general claims that something went wrong, but the evidence she has seen is never used to justify those claims.

So she leaks it. And is eventually caught. Then she enters a Kafkaesque investigation and trial where her defense attorneys are not allowed to see the evidence against her because they are not cleared, even though the same evidence has been published on public websites. And then they can’t access those websites because it would endanger both their efforts to earn clearance and violate court orders against accessed leaked, classified data. And on and on.

The danger of the “Deep State,” Howley argues, is not that this shadow government is working to undo the acts of elected officials. Rather it is that these massive, largely uncoordinated elements of our system can be leveraged to investigate the personal lives of regular citizens, finding data that, freed from context, can make anyone look like a terrorist, terrorist sympathizer, or enemy of the state. And unless you want to totally unplug and live off the grid, there’s not much we can do about it.