Tag: books (Page 6 of 24)

Cloud Cuckoo Land – Anthony Doerr
When you win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as Doerr did for his wonderful All The Light That We Cannot See, it can be a bitch to follow it up. So why not build a story around five main characters who occupy 700 years of time? If nothing else, the sheer scope of the book will make it stand out.

There is no good way to summarize this book. It ranges from the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 to a spacecraft fleeing a dying Earth for a potential new home planet for humans in the 22nd century. A healthy dose of the book takes place in the 20th Century, both in the 1940s through the 1950s and in our current age. That all seems like a lot, doesn’t it?

There is a common thread throughout it all, though: a fictional story by the real Ancient Greek writer Antonius Diogenes called Cloud Cuckoo Land. Doerr traces the discover of a battered text of the story as Constantinople falls to the Ottomans, its effect on a Korean War veteran, his presentation of the story to a group of children in 2020, its role as a rehabilitation tool for an eco-terrorist in the near future, and finally as a source of inspiration and discovery for a pre-teen on that spaceship.

It takes awhile for it all to come together, but I promise you it does. It was a little slow and messy as Doerr got everyone settled into their roles. But, eventually, the book becomes a lot of fun. There was a nice warmth to the final 100 pages or so. Even with several very sad moments, I finished the book with a smile on my face.

All The Light We Cannot See was a fabulous book. I don’t know a person who read it who hasn’t recommended it to others. Cloud Cuckoo Land doesn’t match it, but it has fun trying.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America – Alec MacGillis
Online shopping has changed the world in countless ways. I think most consumers realize those changes aren’t all for the good. I’m the first to admit I online shop way too often, and my first stop is Amazon, even knowing how problematic that is.

MacGillis dives deep into the massive effects Amazon has had on our economy and society. And from his perspective, none of those effects are good things.

He discusses the low wages Amazon pays most of its warehouse and delivery workers. The long hours those workers spend in warehouses that are often dangerous. How the company demands massive tax breaks from local governments in return for those low-paying jobs. How Amazon undercuts local businesses in numerous ways. How Amazon demands all interactions with local government be kept secret, preventing any oversight by the outside public. And so on.

It’s not a great portrait. And it feels largely fair. It underscores my discomfort that Amazon is such a big part of our family spending. Yet it is so easy to find something you want/need on their site that will arrive cheaper and more quickly than from other vendors and go ahead and click purchase…

Good grief am I behind on these. That makes total sense, though, because my reading pace has slowed to a level not seen in years. I’ve finished just one book in the past four weeks. I went nearly three weeks without starting my next reading project. Normally I break out in hives if I don’t immediately start a new book. I guess I needed a break.

Open – Andre Agassi
I don’t know why I never read this. It got tons of attention when it was first released, and was almost immediately hailed as one of the best sports autobiographies ever released. Just after this year’s US Open a newsletter I read recommended it and I was reminded that I hadn’t knocked it out.

All that hype upon its release was legit. As the title suggests, this is one of the most open and honest sports books I’ve ever read. Agassi, who was one of my favorite tennis players, walks through his entire tennis career, from childhood to final professional tournament. He spares no one, himself included, along the way.

We learn of how his father was emotionally and verbally abusive as he forced young Andre to play tennis. The elder Agassi built a court in their backyard and kept Andre on it for hours returning balls from a machine the family dubbed The Dragon. After seeing Nick Bollettieri’s tennis academy featured on 60 Minutes, he finagled a way to send Andre to it.

Andre grew to hate the game from the pressure his father and his coaches put on him and acted out horribly during his time in Florida. But he was so good, the academy leadership largely ignored his behavior. He quit school, drank and used drugs, stole, and destroyed property at the tennis school. But as long as he kept winning, no one raised an eyebrow while other, lesser players were punished for their bad behavior.

Once he turns pro, Agassi runs through the many highs and lows of his career. His rivalries with the other great American players of his generation. Everything is offered from his perspective, so you naturally take his stories with healthy doses of skepticism, but he has an unflattering story about just about every tennis star of the ’90s.

One of the more interesting tidbits is how he was indifferent to the ad campaign that came to define his early career: the Canon Rebel “Image is Everything” ad. As he tells it, a director at a commercial shoot told him to say that line, he said it, and never thought about the implications. While some of that seems a bit self-serving, much of the first half of the book details how he was a lonely, confused, angry kid who was struggling to define himself. HIs indifference seems consistent with someone who is just going through the motions.

He shares other low points in his life. He shares the times he lost interest in tennis, for one reason or another, and let his fitness fall apart. There were times when he drank too much. And even a brief spell when he used meth.

In between the tennis, the final quarter of the book is also focused on his courtship of Steffi Graf, the former tennis pro he eventually married and remains married to today.

It’s a fascinating and compelling story. And it made me a little wistful for that era of men’s tennis, when there were so many interesting players of varying styles and nationalities and the game got more attention than today.

Harlem Shuffle – Colson Whitehead
One of the most anticipated novels of the year, from one of the most acclaimed American novelist of the moment. Perhaps all the attention this novel received before it was published set the bar too high, as I struggled to get into it. It took me well over a week to get even halfway through it, and it’s not like some 800 page story.

Ray Carney owns a Harlem furniture store. Although he has a thriving business, surviving in Harlem means keeping at least a toe in the underworld. In Carney’s case, he fences stolen items: taking them off the hands of crooks and selling them to businesses in other parts of New York City. This connects Carney with both the criminal world of Black New York and the mercantile world of White, Jewish New York.

The story is told in three different parts, each taking place a few years apart, from the late 1950’s through the mid 1960’s. A cousin, Freddie, who is like a brother to Carney, gets involved in a caper that involves some big-time hoods. When it goes wrong, Carney is pulled in and soon is dealing with some of the most notorious criminals in Harlem, plus an assortment of crooked cops.

Throughout, Carney constantly feels the push-pull of attempting to carve out a niche as a respected, progressive business owner who is trusted by his white suppliers, the need to protect his family, his loyalty to his cousin, his desire to escape the shadow of his father, and the attention of thieves and hitmen who see his business as the perfect cover. Also intertwined in this is Carney’s efforts to ruin a banker who both ripped him off and embarrassed him.

It’s all a really good story, told, as always with Whitehead, very well. But something was missing that kept me from loving it, and I’m not sure exactly what that was. Perhaps if I read it in a different moment/mood I would have connected with it better. I started a new book on Tuesday and am already about 200 pages into it, so I’ll chalk up my indifference towards Harlem Shuffle as a momentary lapse in my reading enthusiasm.

After a six-week-ish lull, my pace of knocking out books has picked back up. I’ll likely finish another book later today, but wanted to go ahead and get this out.

Missionaries – Phil Klay
Klay’s second work about modern warfare is his first true novel; Redeployment was a series of short stories based loosely on his service as a Marine public affairs officer in Iraq.

Here he takes a broader view of war. He works with a wide swath of characters to show both the ridiculousness of war and how integral it has become to our modern society. In his cast are a few Americans, both soldiers and a reporter who begin the story in Afghanistan. And a group of Colombians of various backgrounds on various sides of that country’s endless civil conflicts.

This is one of those books that, while telling a story that is a bit meandering and confusing, it is building towards making grand statements rather than furnishing a satisfying series of plot points. While all those characters come together in Colombia just as a peace agreement is up for a national vote, Klay is far more interested in showing how confusing the conflict is to the people on the ground.

In the north east part of the country, Colombians have been facing a continuously fluctuating series of interactions with various armed group. There are paramilitaries, the narcos, communist guerrillas, Federal forces attempting to crush any/all of those groups, and lately armed militias who creep over from Venezuela. The ideology and mission of each of those groups means little to the locals. Other than if they are too friendly to one, they know that probably means when the next group comes along, it will mean reprisals and death for the townspeople who just want to carry on with their lives.

Meanwhile, at a higher level, the Colombian government and American military liaisons are working to find ways to extend the American mission and assistance to the national forces. For the Colombians, that means they get Americans weapons and training. For the Americans, it means they have what amounts to a practice facility to test weapons, techniques, and strategy before using them in Afghanistan or other places.

I don’t usually write down quotes from books as I read them. But I wrote down two from Missionaries that struck me as good summations of the high level points Klay is making.

The first comes from an American who served, and was wounded, in Afghanistan and moves on to Colombia as an advisor. He has some misgivings about the American mission. But, he justifies it by arguing with himself that the mission is, at its core, a good one.

His country was a force for good here. His was a good country. His service to it was a way of being a good man. That was the faith, anyway.

That’s the same justification that has been used, at a larger scale, to justify many of our military efforts this century. And to tamp down any domestic opposition to those efforts. We, as Americans, are a good people. Whatever are arguments with each other, we are on the side of democracy and freedom. And while the conflicts we get involved in may be messy, because we are good, that necessarily makes our policies in other countries good.

The second quote gets at the larger importance of war in modern society. War, and the machine that fuels it, is how we move forward as humans.

What mattered was the global, interconnected system that generated the wealth and technology that ultimately would determine the fate of this war, and the wars to come. That system was civilization. It was progress.

I wish I could argue that Klay was wrong.

The Ugly Cry – Danielle Henderson
I shared an excerpt from this memoir a month or so ago, in which Henderson ruminated on what summer days were like for latchkey kids back in the ‘80s. As soon as I read that I put this book on hold at the library. The book was wonderful.

The first half reminded me very much of a Jean Shepherd story. Henderson relates her childhood in upstate New York with her single, teen mother and brother. Their life is tough, but they get by. There all kinds of wonderful little details in her stories, and she exaggerates just enough to make them funny while keeping them believable. (Note: I think she exaggerates the dialog of the people in her stories, and her judgements of them, not the stories themselves.) I kept thinking of the Shepherd essays A Christmas Story was based on as I read it.

However, the book takes a huge turn midway through, when her mother’s new boyfriend moves in with them. He is an addict, doesn’t work, spends all her mother’s money, and abuses Henderson and her brother in various ways. If that wasn’t bad enough, Henderson’s mother eventually chooses the boyfriend over her kids and sends them to live with their grandmother.

The final third is Henderson trying to live through her high school years. She is deeply wounded by the experience with her mother, often dangerously depressed, and prone to bouts when her stress causes her muscles to lock up so she can’t move. But she finds a few like-minded friends, discovers punk and metal in New York City, and finds that she has some talents for art.

Her grandmother is the true star of the book. She is a profane chainsmoker who takes absolutely zero shit. She is more likely to be found sitting on the couch playing Nintendo than baking cookies and cakes. But in the moments when Henderson needs her most, she is always there, showing tenderness that she normally hides.

The book doesn’t have a proper happy ending, but rather an ambiguous one when Henderson goes off to college. We briefly learn that her first college choice was a disaster and it took years on multiple campuses to earn her first degree. It also took years of therapy to come to terms with her childhood. Eventually she became a successful print writer and blogger and is now a TV writer. She may not have overcome all the pain from her youth, but being able to still find the happy and hilarious moments in it is some measure of triumph over that past.

My goodness, I am so far behind in sharing my recent completed reads. I imagine a few of these will be crappier than normal since I’ve put them off so long.

A Spy In The Struggle – Aya de León
I’ve been working through a list of good, recent espionage novels that this and the next book both were on. The list featured books that take a non-traditional view of espionage.

In Aya de León’s work, her focus is Yolanda Vance, a young, African-American woman who saw her law career derailed when the Manhattan firm she was working at was raided by the FBI. After turning over evidence to the FBI she was blackballed by the New York law community. With no other options, Vance joins the FBI. Despite some promising early work in New Jersey, she is pulled from her unit and sent to the Bay Area, and asked to infiltrate a group that caters to inner city youth the FBI believes is responsible for harassing an important defense contractor.

Yolanda just happened to play college basketball at a small school in the area, and the FBI views her as the perfect person to get inside the group to see what’s going on.

From there the developments are a little predictable. Vance initially sees the organization as a problem, filled with complainers who are unwilling to work as hard as she did to change their paths in life. In time, though, she comes to learn that the local FBI office is corrupt and is working to hide a murder that took place in the contractor’s facilities. She falls in love with a professor on campus, which helps open her eyes more to the reality of the situation. Soon she is bringing down the corrupt agents and showing that the contractor is the true bad guy in the relationship with the community.

It’s all a little too easy and feel-goody, even to my liberal heart. But de León’s characters are fun and interesting.

Northern Spy – Flynn Berry
Here, again we see that spies don’t have to fit into the mold of James Bond.

Tessa works as a producer for BBC radio in Northern Ireland. She’s a single mom who just barely manages to get through each day of work and motherhood and, thus, largely stays out of politics other than covering them for work. Until she looks up one day and sees her sister, Marian, on the news taking responsibility for a robbery carried out for the Irish Republican Army.

Shocked, Tessa fights to make contact with Marian to figure out if she was kidnapped, drugged, or otherwise forced to join the IRA. Once they meet, she learns that Marian is, indeed, an IRA member, and willingly so. But there’s a catch: she is also informing for MI5, the British security agency in hopes of bringing about an end to the latest round of violence in Belfast.

Tessa gets roped in to her sister’s world. To both sides of it, in fact. Soon she is passing information from Marian onto MI5 while also helping Marian’s IRA compatriots by writing down license plates parked at the police center, or transporting materials from one location to another.

Eventually the sisters’ treachery is discovered by the IRA. At the same moment they are abandoned by their MI5 handler. Only through some quick thinking and help from kindly strangers do they survive.

Berry’s story highlights how strange the Northern Ireland conflict is/was. And how “regular” folks got swept up into it so easily.

Caught Stealing – Charlie Huston
I was digging through some old emails recently and found one that was at least 15 years old from a friend I’m not in contact with anymore. In it, he shared a bunch of authors he enjoyed. I’ve worked through a lot of them over the years, but Charlie Huston’s name was new to me. So I grabbed this.

It is one of the most ridiculously violent books I’ve ever read.

Hank Thompson is a former high school baseball star who saw his entire life get upended when he destroys his leg late during his senior year.

Years later he’s a bartender and part-time drunk in New York. A neighbor asks him to watch his cat while he’s away for a few days. Thus ensues chaos.

Turns out inside that cat’s carrier was a very important key, a key that a lot of people are looking for. Soon Thompson is getting battered and beaten by a variety of characters looking for the key including Eastern European hitmen and cops, both crooked and straight. I’m not sure what’s more amazing: how much physical abuse Thompson takes or how he just keeps bouncing back from it.

If you can deal with the violence, this is a surprisingly funny and fun read.

Desert Notebooks – Ben Ehrenreich
I read a number of glowing articles about this book around its release. It seemed like a good change-of-pace from the spy stuff.

Ehrenreich, who writes about climate change for The Nation magazine, details the year or so he spent living in the desert of Nevada, first in Joshua Tree National Park and later in Las Vegas while serving as a visiting professor at UNLV. Along the way he documents the craziness going on in the world both politically – this was 2017–18 – and the daily reports on how our climate is creeping closer to total breakdown. And he explores the concept of time, as told through the writings of all kinds of ancient civilizations.

It’s an odd book. The historical stuff didn’t really connect with me, other than when he’s pointing out how whole swaths of known, ancient history were cut from what is taught as the roots of Western Civilization because it came from the wrong parts of the world, or didn’t fit within the story the advocates for western capitalism wanted to push.

His documentation of both our country’s political spiral and our planet’s environmental spiral is depressing. But I’m always fascinated by these “notebook”-styled books, in which you can see authors fleshing out ideas that turned into other works.

Slow Horses – Mick Herron
Finally, the first book in a series about a group of disgraced MI5 agents. These agents all fucked up somehow and are sent to Slough House, a decrepit building somewhere in London, where they are given mindless, meaningless work designed to force them to resign from the intelligence service on their own. Early on, Herron goes into detail how each member of the Slow Horses, as the folks back at MI5 proper call them, failed to earn this dubious assignment. It almost felt like a comic book origin story: a group of misfits with particular skills who are forced to work together and, though a series of accidents, become some kind of unique force.

The story doesn’t quite take that track. Turns out Slough House is being framed from within MI5 for an operation that has gone wrong. Only the Slow Horses have figured it out and know just enough to fight back.

It’s a cool little story, although very, very British. Herron uses some idioms that I had no idea what they meant, even from carefully re-reading around them to find context. There is a whole set of books that feature the Slow Horses so that may be the next series I dive into.

I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll (Except When I Hate It) – Brian Boone
Between both switching to the smaller, satellite Indy library near our house from the larger Carmel library and Covid, I don’t just go wonder the library stacks very often, surprising myself with books that speak to me as I pass them. That is how I found this book, though. I was looking for another music book, it was missing, but spied this and knocked it out in a few sittings.

It is a collection of irreverent music lists and trivia nuggets. No heavy lifting, I knew some of the stuff, but also learned some new things along the way.

The Good Assassin – Paul Vidich
I have a couple lists of good espionage books that I’ve been working through. Paul Vidich’s work was recommended on one as some good, old school, Cold War noir. This, which takes place in Cuba just before Castro takes over, certainly fit that bill. In fact it was almost too noir-ish, sucking the life out of the book and making it rather bland. None of the characters were terribly interesting and the fascinating moment in history seemed wasted.

The Premonition – Michael Lewis
This is the book I read in one night, starting it sometime after lunch and finishing it a little after midnight. Which is kind of funny because I was reluctant to read it at first. It just seemed too soon to read a book about the Covid pandemic, since the light at the end of the tunnel might be wiped out by a new tunnel millions of idiots are building to protect their personal freedoms.

But, dammit, Michael Lewis found a way to write an insanely engaging accounting of how we got into the mess we are in.

As always, he focuses on personalities to explain larger problems. Also as always, he picks fascinating people for his focus. A hard-charging health commissioner in California. A cutting-edge genetic researcher at UCSF. And a pair of men who have been working on the problem of how to handle a pandemic for nearly 20 years who pull everyone together. It was these folks, and others like them scattered at various levels of government and industry, who helped to kickstart an otherwise inept and disinterested response by far too many power players in the US.

One interesting takeaway from the book, and why things are so fucked up in this country, is that there is no such thing as public health policy in the US. Each state and municipality is kind of on their own, consulting with others but often making decisions in a vacuum without any coordination from above. Thus, when a massive event like Covid hits, there is no structure for quickly making national policy. Throw in an incompetent president who was far more worried about protecting his own image than being a leader, and it’s no wonder we are in such a mess.

Another huge takeaway was that the CDC kind of sucks. Lewis shows the CDC to be a massive, overly cautious organization that would rather force others to make decisions than be held accountable for making difficult choices themselves. They attempt to thwart decision makers who have better information than the people in Atlanta if those locals go against the CDC playbook. And they collect massive amounts of incredibly important health and medical data, but hoard it for their own research purposes rather than share it so others can attempt to make rapid decisions in moments of crisis.

It isn’t until the book’s closing chapter when Lewis finally explains why the CDC might be so gun-shy. They botched the rollout of a swine flu vaccine in 1976 for a pandemic that never fully developed and both undercut its reputation and opened the door for the White House to control who ran it after decades of independence.

The personalities Lewis writes about are truly heroic, and the structural impediments they face are truly infuriating. He pulls that all together in a work of non-fiction that is as compulsive of a read as any fiction I’ve read in years.

The Alice Network – Kate Quinn
A friend gave me this book awhile back, but I left it in my bookshelf for months before finally cracking it open. When I did, S told me she had read it on one of our vacations and loved it. We don’t read a lot of the same books, so I was both excited and nervous about taking it on. What if I hated it?

That wasn’t a problem; this was a terrific novel.

It tells the story of two remarkable women whose lives come together. The first is Eve Gardiner, a British woman recruited to serve a spy in France during World War I. She earns a job waiting at a restaurant that serves German soldiers, becomes the lover of the owner, and passes on incredibly important intelligence through The Alice Network of female spies. She is eventually found out, though, and pays a horrible price.

The second woman is Charlie St. Clair, a young American traveling to Switzerland with her mother in 1948 to get an abortion. When they land in England, she flees her mother and tracks down Gardiner, who she believes can help her find her French cousin who disappeared during World War II.

Quinn flips back-and-forth between 1915 and 1948, and we slowly learn about Gardiner’s time spying and her trip through France with St. Clair and her Scottish driver. Both women are unique for their times: outspoken, take-no-shit, boundary-destroying chicks who fight for what they want. I loved them both and see why S liked them, and the book, so much.

God Spare the Girls – Kelsey McKinney
Once again, a first-time novelist has blown me away.

McKinney’s debut novel is focused on Caroline Nolan, a recent high school grad in North Texas who is the daughter of an evangelical pastor who is famous for his teen abstinence program. And Caroline goes and loses her virginity in the opening pages of the book. The horror!

That’s not the biggest family crisis, though. Turns out her dad has been cheating on her mom, who just found out about it. Which, as you might imagine, causes a bit of a scandal, although one the church leadership seems eager to get through quickly.

However Caroline and her older sister, who is about to get married, can’t get over it as easily. They spend several weeks in isolation on a ranch property their deceased grandmother left them. There, they get into deep discussions on what their faith means in light of their father’s failures. Whether they can forgive him. What Caroline having sex means. They hash out issues they’ve had for years. It’s a wonderful exploration of sisterhood and all the baggage that comes along with that. They become closer than they’ve ever been, and then one well-intentioned but poorly thought out act by Caroline ruins that.

McKinney fills the book with characters that would be easy to turn into caricatures. But she avoids those traps by focusing on Caroline and her sister, and making them rich, complex women who make unexpected decisions because of unexpected reasons.

The Spy and the Traitor – Ben Macintyre
Next another remarkable story, this one true. This is an accounting of the life go Oleg Gordievsky, one of the highest ranking KGB agents who ever spied for the West. Disillusioned with the closed nature of the Soviet Union, he was first recruited by the British while working in Denmark in the 1970s. Eventually he transferred to London and was on the verge of being named the Soviet equivalent of Chief of Station before he was outed by CIA agent Aldrich Ames, who was selling information to the Soviets.

This discovery set off a pretty amazing escape by Gordievsky from Moscow to the Finnish border before British agents slipped him out to freedom. Following his defection in the 1985, he gave the West unprecedented insight into how the KGB functions.

A pretty cool insight into what makes people share information about their home country with their enemy.

Americana: Dispatches from the New Frontier – Hampton Sides
This was marketed as a travelogue, so I thought it would tell the tale of Sides, who wrote the excellent Hellhound on His Trail that I read earlier this year, traveling through the US and discovering something interesting about us as Americans.

Which it kind of was. I guess I didn’t read the description close enough, though, and didn’t realize this wasn’t based on a single trip, but rather a collection of his magazine writing from a roughly 25-year period. Because of that, I worked through it slowly, in small chunks, since spring break.

He profiles all kinds of interesting people, places, and events. Getting through the first 350 pages or so is worth it when you get to his post–9/11 pieces. One is an absolutely brutal look at several people who were in the World Trade Center buildings on the day of the attacks. I had to stop reading and take a walk around the house in a few spots to give myself a mental breather. Another is about a Marine lieutenant who was the first American killed in action during the invasion of Iraq, and it is equally brutal. But both pieces are also wonderfully researched and written.

We have a house full of guests this week. My brother-in-law and his family from Boston are staying with us. So far that has meant lots of pool and play time as we’ve dodged the daily thunderstorms.

It’s also C’s first real week of summer after wrapping summer school up last week.

In a few hours I’m going to go do the final walk-through at my in-law’s new home, which they will move into in about a week.

With visitors around that likely means a quiet week here on the blog. For now, here are some more books I’ve read recently.

The Janes – Louisa Luna
Luna’s second Alice Vega novel was a fine sequel to her first. This time Vega and her partner Max Caplan have been brought in by the San Diego police to investigate the deaths of two young immigrant girls. They discover a sex trafficking ring that is getting protection from high levels of both local and federal law enforcement. Unravelling exactly who is responsible and why is a violent and satisfying process.

Solo: A James Bond Novel – William Boyd
I found this on a list of good espionage reads, identified as the rare modern Bond story that is worth reading.

That reviewer’s expectations must be very low because I found this to be rather boring, lacking any of the glamour and coolness that Ian Fleming’s original stories were built on.

This story takes Bond back to his heyday, in the late ‘60s. He is sent to a fictional African nation that is splitting into civil war with the task of taking out the breakaway republic’s leader to end the war and stabilize western access to the country’s oil. Good premise, and still feels relevant today.

The story never lives up to that potential. Nothing that was cool about Fleming’s original Bond novels is present here. It’s as if when stripping out some of the problematic elements of those original stories Boyd also removed the charm, elegance, mystery, and fun that made those stories compelling.

There is never much intrigue about where the story is headed. It lacks either a realistic espionage or goofy-fantasy base, instead getting stuck somewhere in the middle, and suffers greatly for it.

At least it was a quick read.

Glory Days: The Summer of 1984 and the 90 Days That Changed Sports and Culture Forever – L. Jon Wertheim
This was my birthday present to myself, something that was right down the center of my interests. Built around Michael Jordan and the 1984 US men’s Olympic basketball team, Wertheim explores how a series of events and developments in the summer of ’84 dramatically changed the sports and entertainment world in ways we are still feeling.

Jordan creating the model for how NBA superstars were marketed, especially through his relationship with Nike. Michael Jackson and the Jacksons’ Victory tour setting both a new standard for live music spectacle and sending waves out into the wider world that, eventually, helped to create the New England Patriots dynasty. Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe changing what it meant to be a tennis star, and Martina completely upending what was expected of female athletes. The first Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals matchup of the ‘80s being a key moment in the NBA’s recovery from the disastrous 1970s. Wayne Gretzky winning his first Stanley Cup and changing how the American sports public viewed hockey.

It’s full of great stuff – some stories I knew, other details were new to me – about my favorite pop culture year. It should be no surprise that I raced through in in less that two days.

My reading pace slacked off significantly over the past month. I only finished three books in May, and none of them should have taken more than a couple of days. Because of that, the first two books in this entry don’t get very good recaps as it has been too long since I finished them to write anything terribly coherent about them.

I also had my first abandoned book of the year.

The good news is I’ve already finished two books in June.

Sarah Jane – James Sallis
Sallis is supposed to be a master of modern noir. And this book certainly fit into that realm. Here he writes of a small-town sheriff, a female veteran of our Middle Eastern wars, with a complex and complicated background. She settles into the job well, but can never completely escape those demons and doubts leftover from her past. I enjoyed this, primarily because we so often think that the gritty, tough, multi-layered protagonists in noir novels must be men. Sallis does an excellent job flipping all of that seamlessly, showing how all that can apply to a woman just fine.

Girl Gone Missing – Marcie R. Rendon
I wish I could remember where I discovered this book. I know it was in a blurb for another book I enjoyed, in which the person writing the blurb compared the two books.

I was expecting a lot based on that blurb. This book let me down.

It begins with a ton of promise. Cash Blackbear is a young college student in Minnesota in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. Raised by foster parents after she survived a car accident, she was often abused and neglected because of her Native American heritage. But she learned to persevere and survive on her own, with some help from a kindly sheriff.

When two small town girls disappear after trips to the Minneapolis area, the sheriff asks Cash for assistance in looking through the case. She thinks about the case a lot, does some research in the library, but never really gets directly involved in the case.

Until she is suddenly very personally involved in the case. Which leads to a pretty wild 10–15 pages near the end.

So much of the book was just repetitive details of Cash’s life. Her boredom in class. Her alienation on a campus full of white people. Her time in pool halls. The many cigarettes she smokes each day. And then – WHAM – suddenly she’s in the midst of this case.

I loved the guts of the novel, and all the potential in those guts. But this felt more like a fleshing out of those ideas, an early draft that should have been turned into something much more compelling.

The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson
I’m not sure that I had ever heard of this, first published in 1952, until I read this essay by Dan O’Sullivan comparing Republican lawmakers in Texas to Lou Ford, the psychopath at the center of this completely insane novel. Stephen King wrote an effusive forward for the edition I read, so I’m guessing he was heavily influenced by Thompson’s violent work.

Ford is a deputy sheriff in West Texas, and the book serves as a first-person confession of his sadistic behavior. Appearing to all around him as just a normal, everyday, trust-worthy guy, Ford is in fact a complete psychopath. He was sexually abused by his housekeeper as a child, and in turn molested a girl when he was a teenager. Rather than face punishment for his behavior, Ford’s foster brother took the blame and jail time for it. Ford’s involved in a dark relationship with a local prostitute. His sex life with his long-time girlfriend skewers toward the deviant. And, soon, Ford starts murdering people. By the end of the book at least five people are dead at his hands, and a sixth dead because of the shock of Ford’s actions. Ford left little direct evidence of his crimes, so he is placed in a mental hospital until he finally trips up enough to force an end game with the police.

This book is dark and twisted and strange today. It must have blown people’s minds back in 1952.

Midnight Sun – Jo Nesbø
Crap. I hate it when I read a book not knowing that it is a sequel or part of a series that had other books before it. I’m not sure I missed much not having read Nesbø’s Blood on the Snow, which was part of a mini-series with this book.

This is a very quick tale of a fixer for an Oslo drug dealer who skips out on a hit he was ordered to perform with a stash of drugs and money his target offered to save his life. “Ulf,” the name the fixer takes as he flees Oslo, lands in the farthest reaches of Norway and drops into a drama that has hit a small community. He runs afoul of local customs, falls in love with an unattainable woman, and has to dodge the hitmen who have come to take back what he left Oslo with. And it all works out in the end.

The core of the story was fine, and I enjoy Nesbø’s writing. But this story seemed a little half-assed, and ripped through complex moments without much effort. It’s almost as if he became bored with the story and tried to get it over as quickly as he could.

That said, I’m going to dig into some of his other works this summer, as I really enjoyed his The Snowman which I read years ago.

Abandoned Book: Black Wave – Kim Ghattas
I read raves about this book, which is an accounting of the roughly 40-year battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for supremacy in the Muslim world. The idea fascinated me, as that’s a conflict that doesn’t get much attention in the US despite the many very direct effects it has had on our life.

I just couldn’t get through the book’s early section, which was so dense in history of a part of the world I know little about that I felt overwhelmed. Perhaps I’ll give it another shot some other time when my mind is more open to wading through its detail.

Time for some book chat.

The Marsh King’s Daughter – Karen Dionne
I hate it when books that come highly recommended don’t hit me with the same impact they hit others. I found this book on some “best new thrillers” list, and its jacket featured some positive blurbs from other authors I’ve enjoyed. But the story just didn’t work for me.

It tells the story of Helena, a woman in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan who was raised in captivity. Her father kidnapped her mother when she was 14 and kept her and Helena hidden in a swamp from the world until Helena herself was 14 and the women managed to escape.

One half of the story takes place in the present, with Helena’s father escaped from prison and setting a trail for her to follow. The other half tells the story of her childhood, when she worshipped her father as he taught her his Native American ways and how to live on what the land gave her.

All of that was interesting and well-done. It all hit a little harder because there are some moments of stark violence, and Dionne’s author pic in the back jacket shows her to be a friendly, gray-haired (likely) grandmother. Not the author I expected to write this story!

However, Dionne uses a literary trick to help explain how Helena solves the problem of escaping in her childhood and surviving in her adulthood that I simply did not buy. It drug down what was otherwise a pretty solid story.

The Grind: Inside Baseball’s Endless Season – Barry Svrluga
There’s maybe no better trick if you want to write about sports than using an entire season to dive into all the little details of a sport/team/athlete. John Feinstein has made a career out of this. Daniel Okrent’s Nine Innings is one of my absolute favorite sports books ever. Michael Lewis’ Money Ball is another terrific example.

Here Svrluga writes about the 2014 Washington Nationals, for which he was the beat writer for The Washington Post. Rather than a deep dive into all the nitty gritty of a baseball season, this is more of a high-level view. Svrluga selects a few topics and uses them to illuminate how the length and intensity of a baseball season affects those involved. He looks at a veteran player, a scout, the GM, a starting pitcher, a player’s wife, and so on.

The book suffers some in comparison to the classics from Okrent and Lewis as Svrluga is more concerned with painting these brief sketches than digging into all the ebbs and flows of a baseball season. I’ve read both Nine Innings and Money Ball multiple times because, even though they are now dated, they are so good at showing you these deep details of baseball in the moments they were written.

The Grind feels more like a series of Sunday profiles for the paper. Which makes sense since Svrluga was still a beat writer at the time and not on hiatus to do an authoritative accounting of the 2014 season. The result is a nice, quick read for any baseball fan, but not one that reaches the level of the classics.

The Cold Millions – Jess Walter
I did not realize the labor wars of the West Coast mining industry in the early 1920s would make for such a compelling story. This was a terrific read.

Gig and Rye Dolan are orphaned brothers who have landed in Spokane after searching throughout the west for work. Gig is the older, wiser, and more charismatic brother. When he is arrested at a labor rally, 16-year-old Rye immediately jumps into the fray and is quickly arrested as well. As a minor, his cause gets taken up by labor attorneys who have come in from the Midwest and East coast to fight for the miners’ rights. Rye soon becomes an integral part of their strategy, traveling around the west with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a (real) firebrand of the labor movement through much of the 20th century.

There are double-crosses, unfortunate alliances, and in the end a tragic event that separates the brothers permanently. There is also a large swath of tremendous supporting characters.

The idea of a labor war seems quant in 2021. But a century ago they were common, often violent, efforts to somewhat lessen the difference between the haves and have-nots. While all of that is interesting, what truly carries the book is the love between the Dolan brothers, Rye’s innocent desire to follow anyone he trusts, and the final steps the brothers take to protect each other.

The Last Days of John Lennon – James Patterson with Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge
The title is a lie: this is not just about John Lennon’s final days in 1980 before he was murdered by Mark David Chapman. Although there is plenty about that, especially Chapman’s activities leading up to the murder.

But the bulk of the book is a breezy history of both the Beatles and Lennon’s life between the band’s breakup and his death.

I’ve read at least three books about the Beatles and/or Lennon, but it’s been awhile. This book was a good refresher for someone with my reading history. If you’ve never read a Beatles book, this can be an excellent jumping-in point.

Can’t Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop’s Blockbuster Year – Michaelangelo Matos
My spring break read seems like it was written directly for me. Matos takes a deep look at all of the music of 1984. It begins with Thriller dominating the music world in late 1983 and carried through to mid–1985 and Live Aid. Along the way he spends nearly equal time digging into the biggest artists of the year – Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Lionel Richie, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Tuner – along with many, many other artists who cracked the Top 40 that year. There are also some interesting and necessary side tracks into underground/college/indie rock, heavy metal and hardcore, and, most importantly, rap music.

I mean, come on! Is there a more perfect book for my interests than this?

I will say I didn’t completely love it. It is a little choppy at times. I don’t know if that was because of Matos’ writing style, or because I read it on a Kindle which may have made some transitions that were smooth on paper abrupt on the screen. And, I have to admit, I already knew a lot of the big points he hit. I wanted more obscure facts that made me put the Kindle down and immediately text friends with tidbits. “Did you know…”

That said, since it scratched one of my favorite itches, I’m not going to complain about it too much.

Conversations With Friends – Sally Rooney
I read, and did not understand the hype for, Rooney’s Normal People last year. I recognized her writing ability, but the story itself just did not do much for me.

This book is also based on a young person struggling to figure out who she is.

In this case it is Frances, a 21-year-old student and poet, who has found some acclaim performing spoken word pieces with her former girlfriend around Dublin. At a party she meets Nick, a 32-year-old semi-famous and very handsome actor. After some brief flirtation over several weeks, Frances and Nick fall into an affair that becomes relatively serious. Frances keeps it from her ex-girlfriend, who is still her best friend and sometimes roommate. Nick keeps the affair from his wife, who has had at least two affairs over the course of their marriage, which had become loveless and difficult.

Their affair ebbs and flows, and both Frances and Nick become self-destructive in small ways along the way.

I struggled with their relationship. Maybe it’s because I never had an affair with a married woman 11 years my senior when I was 21, but I did not understand why Frances would say things she said, or have expectations she had. Perhaps they are normal in a relationship like this. The book came awfully close to veering into territory of Normal People where I didn’t like the characters or the choices they were making.

But I came around somewhat to Frances and Nick, as they became more open in their communication with each other.

And I became fascinated by some of the unstated questions that Rooney posed to her readers. What are your expectations when you begin any relationship, let alone one with a partner that is already in a relationship? What is someone thinking who enters an affair but has no desire to end their marriage? Why do people put stable relationships in jeopardy for new ones that have no guarantee of happiness or safety? And an endless number of other questions about relationships and gender and what it’s like to be young and trying to figure out who you are and what you want in a complicated world.

I imagine this is a good book club book because you can spin conversations in all kinds of interesting directions.

That element is what saved the book for me. And I really enjoyed how Rooney ended it. The final sentence is a perfectly ambiguous line that reinforces the questions the book brought up and gives the reader all kinds of room to imagine what happened next.