Tag: books (Page 7 of 24)

Well, shit. It appears that I’ve lost what was supposed to be my most recent Reader’s Notebook entry. I remember writing it and swore I posted it. (The books included were N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became and John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.) Since this entry references one of those books, I was looking back for the post to link to and could not find it. I checked the local folder where I keep all my posts after I put them online and it is not there. So looks like I never posted it and must have deleted my draft. My bad. This post should still make sense, other than the one refence.

The Fifth Season – N.K. Jemisin
The Obelisk Gate – N.K. Jemisin
The Stone Sky – N.K. Jemisin
Inspired by reading Jemisin’s The City We Became, I decided to tackle her The Broken Earth trilogy. My intention was to sprinkle those books in with others I planned to read. However, I enjoyed the first book so much that I plowed right through the next two in short order.

It’s been a long time since I have attempted to read a fantasy novel. As I said in my notes on The City We Became, that book felt more like a Stephen King novel where elements of fantasy were swirled into a more traditional, modern thriller.

This trilogy, however, sits more firmly in what I expect for fantasy. It takes place in another time – Jemisin never overtly identifies it, but it seems to be in a far future era after a massive ecological disaster has ravaged the earth – in a world that has elements that are somewhat recognizable. It is populated by humans, but there are different kinds of humans with very different abilities. Technology is much more limited, but there are hints of advanced technologies from a long-ago past. It’s not quite hobbits and elves in Middle Earth, but I would assume fans of traditional fantasy were comfortable with the framework she placed the story in.

In Jemisin’s imagined “future” earth, the continents have all been shoved back together, the moon has escaped from close earth orbit, and life on earth is in constant danger due to seismic activity. There are near constant earthquakes, volcanic activity, and tsunamis that wreak havoc. When these are especially strong they create “Fifth Seasons,” or extended winters brought about when weather patterns are interrupted, causing food shortages and mass starvation. Sometimes these Seasons last a matter of months, sometimes years, while others have lasted hundreds or thousands of years. The inhabitants of earth have learned to always be preparing for the next Season, stocking away food, water, and other supplies needed to attempt to survive.

One group of humans in Jemisin’s world are called orogenes, people who are able to tap into the seismic power of the earth. They can both control that power, stopping earthquakes and eruptions before they happen, and convert it into wizard-like abilities. Because of the mystery of how they tap into the earth’s power, orogenes are viewed with suspicion and contempt. Children who demonstrate orogenic powers are routinely killed to prevent them from harming their relatives and neighbors. The lucky ones are taken for formal training and then used to help keep the world as safe as can be.

At the center of these stories is an orogene named Essen. We learn about her upbringing, her training to be an imperial orogene, her mission with her mentor that reveals how she is more powerful that the average orogene, and their subsequent adventures. Eventually she has to flee for her life, taking on a new identity. She starts a family and when her children begin to show orogenic abilities, her husband, who is not an orogene, kills their son and flees with their daughter. Just as this happens there is a great rift in the earth, causing an unprecedented level of seismic activity that seems likely to start a Season that could last for thousands of years. As the world slowly begins to wind down, Essen begins a quest to both rescue her daughter and kill her husband in revenge for his act of murder.

During her travels she falls in with other humans who have strange powers. She stumbles into a community that is uniquely designed to survive the Season. Meanwhile her daughter, Nassun discovers more about her own orogenic powers while her father seeks a place where she can be trained to tamp down those powers and “be normal.” Jemisin also reveals more about the history of this earth, how it came to be what it is and the dangers that the upcoming Season holds for humanity. There is the obligatory great battle, and a final quest in which both Nassun and Essen race to be the first to save the earth, but in very different ways.

I’ve tried not to get too deep into the weeds of the stories, but that still feels like a pretty shitty summation of this series. Despite the poor overview, for the most part I really, really enjoyed these books. They cut through a lot of what turns me off about fantasy while still being true to what one expects of a fantasy story. I think what I enjoyed most about them – aside from the overall story which is really good – is how Jemisin writes as if the characters are of the current moment. Yes, she invents all kinds of new elements for her world, including enough phrases and words to require a list of definitions in the back of each book. But her characters speak like they were picked up from 21st century earth and thrown into whatever place and time the stories reside in.

I did have some issues with an aside in the third book that took a huge jump back in time. While it was vital to making the entire story work and understanding the motivations of one character, it was a bit hard to follow. Especially when Jemisin revealed that a handful of characters that had appeared at different moments in the series were actually three different characters appearing under different names. Or maybe three or four. I couldn’t keep straight who was who when this became apparent.

Jemisin also tackles a lot of modern concepts, like racism, stereotyping, and the existence of structural impediments that prevent equality, but without being ham-handed about it or making it obvious that she is MAKING A STATEMENT. Whether in her imagined world or the America of 2021, she makes it clear that just because people look different, sound different, have different abilities, or follow different cultural touchtones, there is never an excuse for exclusion or persecution.

Three new books to share.

Lives Laid Away – Stephen Mack Jones
Jones’ second August Snow novel. Once again the former Detroit cop gets sucked into a case that goes far beyond the neighborhood he’s attempting to revitalize. In this case it deals with rogue ICE agents, sex trafficking, and racist biker gangs.

If that seems like a lot, I think you’re on the same wavelength that I am. This book was not nearly as enjoyable as the first in the series.

Which brings me to a conundrum. I enjoy finding authors I like who crank out books within a series. It gives me some reliable fall backs when I’m not sure what to read. They help pad the reading numbers, as they are often quick to get through. And since they are in series, they can be easier to find in ebook form if I’m trying to load the Kindle up.

But, no matter how original, how good the writing is, how interesting the characters are, I’m always troubled by how they often end up being minor variations on the same story. The twists and turns may be different, but once you’ve read a few books in a series, you generally have a pretty good idea of where the book will take you.

A good author will throw in enough fun along the way so that sameness does not distract. See the Bond series, or at least the good ones.

My lukewarm response to this book means I’m not sure I’ll stick with Jones’ writing if he continues to focus on his August Snow character.

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I found the next two books from scrolling through The Guardian’s Top 100 Books of the 21st Century list that was published in the fall of 2019.

This book came in at #10, which might be a smidge high, although it is a wonderful story.

It is set in Nigeria in the 1960s, the story split between two sections, one taking place in the early ‘60s shortly after the country gained independence from the UK, the other in the late ’60s as Nigeria descended into a civil war that led the the brief existence of the nation of Biafra.

The story is told from the perspective of six characters. Olanna and Kainene, twin sisters who have chosen very different paths. Odenigbo, Olanna’s boyfriend, who hosts political roundtables at the university he teaches at and is eventually a key element of the Biafran independence movement. Ugwu is Odenigbo’s “houseboy,” basically his servant, and is educated by Odenigbo which opens up a whole new world to him. And Richard is a white, English writer who becomes Kainene’s lover.

Through these characters we see the excitement of the early days of independence and the struggles of a new country with no history of self-government attempting to throw off the burdens of colonialism and create a new, shared culture. Once war breaks out, they show the dangers of tribalism and how governments can exploit cultural differences for their political gain.

The story of Biafra is heart-breaking, and Adichie puts you right in the midst of the suffering the people of eastern Nigeria felt during the brutal years of civil war. Sadly the story of Biafra has been repeated across Africa for the past 60 years, as the artificial borders the European powers drew when carving out their territories and the ethnic rivalries they exploited to maintain control created conflicts that have prevented so many African countries from having a chance for free and successful societies after independence.

Days Without End – Sebastian Barry
This book was #74 on The Guardian’s list. It is told from the perspective of Thomas McNulty, who came to the US as a boy in the 1820s to escape the Irish famine. He eventually lands in Missouri and, while attempting to find shelter in a storm under a tree, meets another boy named John Cole. They become fast friends and set off on a lifetime of adventures.

They serve as cross-dressing entertainment for miners in eastern Missouri. They join the Army and take part in the campaign against the Native peoples of the prairies and west. They serve as adopted parents to an Indian girl captured in a raid. They travel to Michigan and begin entertaining a new set of minors, with McNulty still dressing as a woman. Then it is off to the Civil War, where they survive both battle and the horrific Andersonville prison camp. Following the war they join an Army friend as he attempts to reclaim his ancestral lands in Tennessee. McNulty is forced back to the frontier to clarify the freedom of his “daughter.” His actions there eventually earn him a death sentence from the Army, which all set up a dramatic and satisfying conclusion.

Barry writes of the immigrant experience, the settling of the American west and the treatment of the Native Americas who lived there, the Civil War, and the post-war era.

There is another major part of the story that was unexpected, though. With an almost throw-away line early in the book, he establishes McNulty and Cole as not just friends, but lovers. As an adult McNulty comes to realize that he enjoys wearing women’s clothing not just on stage, but as his normal attire. When this helps save his life a couple times, the people around him come to think it is no big deal.

The whole cross-dressing in the 19th century frontier seems a little far-fetched, but there were certainly gay people in America at the time. Barry does a masterful job showing how a man can love another man and still be a fierce soldier, survive brutal imprisonment, be a successful farmer, and otherwise live as “normally” as the next man. Even if he likes to wear dresses.

Deacon King Kong – James McBride
My To Read list is always in flux. I’m constantly adding books, like any good reader should. And also culling books, figuring if a title has been on the list for a few years and I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, odds are I never will. The list tends to grow a lot in December, when various Best Of lists hit the internet, and I make additions that seem to be earning universal acclaim.

This book was on damn-near every 2020 Best Of list I reviewed. And with good reason. It is excellent.

It is a wide-ranging tale focused at a housing project of Brooklyn in 1969. The arrival of hard drugs, and the violence associated with them, are beginning to upset the uneasy balance of the community, which has allowed African Americans, Latino immigrants, second generation Italians, and third generation Irish to live in relative peace.

At the center is Sportcoat, a kindly old drunk who used to coach the projects’ baseball team. His wife has recently passed and he walks around the projects in a drunken stupor, talking as if she were still there. One day Sportcoat walks up to the project’s main dealer, a kid named Deems, and shoots him in the ear for no apparent reason. Deems was once Sportcoat’s best player, a pitcher that seemed destined to get out of the projects through his rocket right arm, but who chose the life of selling heroin over the uncertainty of baseball.

The aftermath of this shooting is the loose thread that holds the remainder of the story together. Throughout McBride spins out a series of delightful characters. There is a Hispanic couple, now divorced, who get into constant, humiliating and hilarious verbal battles in front of the entire neighborhood. There’s an old Italian lady and her son, a crime boss of some kind, who are a connecting point between the original, European inhabitants of the projects and their current, non-white inhabitants. There’s an Irish cop and an African American woman, who through several chance encounters find a spark that surprises them and gives their lives new meaning. And there are a small series of events from that past that combine to bring everyone together in a thoroughly heart-warming resolution.

I’m a sucker for a good ending. And McBride closes the book with a scene that hit me in all the right spots. It is right up there with the final paragraphs of Ben H. Winters’ World of Trouble as one of my favorite endings.

Hellhound on His Trail – Hampton Sides
This is a book I’ve heard about for years, but never properly added to my list. However, each January I hear the calls, “You HAVE to read this,” from various trusted internet sources. And this year I decided to tackle it.

I’m a bit ashamed to admit I knew little about the topic of this book: the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the resulting manhunt for his accused killer, James Earl Ray. That, in itself, is a hell of a story. I had no idea that Ray was moments from getting on a plane in London that would have taken him to Brussels and, likely, prevented him from ever being captured. I had no idea about the FBI search for him, which took two months, spanned five countries and three different domestic intelligence services, and only had any success because of a handful of tiny, extraordinarily lucky breaks.

But what makes the book standout, and the reason people recommend it so highly, is how Sides tells the story. Through meticulous research, he is able to tell the story almost like a novel, reconstructing Ray’s life before and after the killing in extraordinary detail. One thing he did which I found interesting was always referring to Ray by whatever alias he was living under at the moment. Ray used at least five different identities between the book’s beginning and his capture, and referring to him by those names reenforces how difficult it was to track him down.

The book is not just about Ray, though. Sides gives as much attention to MLK’s days leading up to his death; the mood in Memphis, which was reeling from a trash collectors strike; and how MLK’s death along with a failed march on Washington in June to bring attention to poverty, in-fighting in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Robert Kennedy’s death all brought the Civil Rights age to an abrupt end.

This is a terrific book, presented in a style that allows those who don’t normally enjoy non-fiction to get sucked into it.

A busy start to a new year of reading.

Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man – Emmanuel Acho
These are a series of essays by Acho, a former NFL player and currently a talking head on Fox Sports, to help white folks understand people of color a little better. It is light and breezy, at times almost too light and breezy. But the title is accurate: for things to get better in this country, those of us in the white community need to have some uncomfortable conversations and accept that we need to make sacrifices in all aspects of our lives for change to come about.

Life Among Giants – Bill Roorbach
I’ve has this book for several years, a gift from fellow book lover Dave V. I think I put off reading it because he told me it was decent but not great. I could be wrong on that. I just never felt any urgency to get to it when so many other books were on my list.

I decided to finally knock it out and remove it from the stack of books in my office cabinet.

It’s a tough book to write about because it is so sprawling, told through three threads taking place in the early ‘70s, late ‘70s/early ‘80s, then more modern times. Along the way it is a wild, wild ride.

There’s so much going on it’s hard to share a decent summary. The story contains: a murder of parents in front of their teenaged son, a house full of celebrities living life to the early ‘70s highest, two athletic prodigies and two ballet prodigies, an NFL career, an odd sexual awakening, another mysterious death that haunts many of the characters, a truly strange sibling relationship, a look into the struggles of running a restaurant, and a vengeance killing that goes wrong.

I’m not sure whether it all worked. I also don’t know if I had much sympathy for the main character, who seemed a little too good and gifted to be true. But I poured through the pages and read it in about a 52-hour window, which has to say something about my enjoyment of it.

The Intern’s Handbook – Shane Kuhn
This is a fun assassin story with a twist. Rather than a straight narrative, this is presented as a handbook for interns at Human Resources, Inc., a company that takes out some of the most protected targets in the world by placing assassins and “interns” inside their organizations. Through the handbook HR, Inc’s best assassin, John Lago, relates his final mission, one that goes severely off the rails and brings down the entire company.

It is written with a very cinematic feel, and a movie was optioned from the script seven years ago but seems to have died. It would have been interesting to see how the story translated to the screen. While most of the story is fine, it fell apart a bit in the final quarter. I wonder if that would have been corrected/cleaned up as the story was reduced to screenplay.

Rocket Men – Robert Kurson
I know plenty about Apollo missions 11 and 13, the most famous of NASA’s manned flights to the moon. But I did not know much about Apollo 8, which many inside NASA think is the greatest mission of the bunch. Some podcast listening piqued my interest and I snatched this up and read it in two days.

Apollo 8 was an outlier in the Apollo program. NASA was normally very formal and conservative in how they moved through the process of getting to the moon. A had to happen before B, and B had to be completed before C, and so on.

So it was a massive change in process when NASA suddenly, in the fall of 1968, decided to leap ahead and launch a manned rocket to the moon in December of that year. This was a big deal because it was jumping past several milestones that had not yet been satisfied, most importantly that the Saturn IV rocket had not safely taken men into orbit and had failed its most recent unmanned tests. But with the Soviets seemingly very close to launching their own manned lunar mission, NASA decided to throw caution to the wind and proceed with a crash course to orbit men around the moon before year’s end.

The mission worked. Along the way it sent men outside earth’s orbit for the first time ever, had men travel the fastest they had ever travelled (over 22,000 miles per hour), and checked off numerous other firsts. And the entire mission was flown under the mystery of whether what they were attempting to do was possible. Some inside NASA thought the mission had, at best, a 50–50 chance of success. There was a constant undercurrent of not knowing whether making the next set of maneuvers would send the astronauts crashing into the moon or off into space where they would be unrecoverable.

The days when the Apollo missions can be recalled first hand are nearly over. Amazingly, all three men who traveled on Apollo 8 are still alive, and were available to Kurson to help re-tell their story. Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders add great depth to a flight that can be largely reconstructed from NASA documents and recordings.

Apollo 11 is more significant to the broader world, and Apollo 13 more dramatic. But Apollo 8 turned the theoretical into reality. I’m a sucker for a good space program book, and this one was excellent.

In my final piece of 2020 business, here are the last three books I read for the year. These put my total at 59 books for the calendar year. I know this sounds dumb, but I was disappointed with that number. I’ve read that many books in a normal year. Surely in a pandemic year I should have knocked out a few more. Oh well, a goal for pandemic year #2, I suppose.

The Birdwatcher – William Shaw
A solid thriller told in two intertwining stories. The first takes place in current-day southeast England, with community police officer William South pulled into a murder investigation of his neighbor and bird watching partner. The murder spins out to be much more than a random event, and South pushes the investigation forward where the proper murder police thought they had it wrapped up quickly.

The second story is from South’s childhood during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, centered on the defining event of his youth that led to he and his mother fleeing to England.

Naturally what happened to South as a child becomes a big part of his modern investigation. And both of those stories are really good. But where Shaw slips a bit is in how he brings the story to its dramatic conclusion. I did not buy for a second the coincidence that tied the two stories together. Which is a pity, because this book had great potential.

The Last Ballad – Wiley Cash
A wonderful historical novel based on real events that took place in rural North Carolina in 1929. Much of the state’s economy is transitioning away from farming to millwork, where cotton and other raw materials are turned into threads and cloth. After a boom during World War I, things are slowing down, work is harder to find, and conditions in the mills are getting tougher. Unions from New York are attempting to organize workers to fight for better wages and work environments. These activities have led to strikes, violence, and the use of force to break them.

In the middle of all of this is 28-year-old Ella May Wiggins. She has four kids, her husband has abandoned her, and she has become pregnant by her new boyfriend. To top it off, she and her kids are the only white family in a small community of Black mill workers.

Wiggins is intrigued by the idea of a union and attends a rally. She is asked to sing, and her voice and lyrics about working in the mills amaze the crowd and union leaders. She is quickly pulled into the leadership circle and begins organizing, not just to get her co-workers into the union, but also to integrate the union, which the union brass aren’t enthused about.

After a confrontation between some drunk, off-duty cops and striking workers, shots are fired, a sheriff is killed, and tensions ratchet up even higher. In an attack on a union truck convoy, Wiggins is killed.

There are echoes of the current moment in political history in the book such as manufactured stories to sway public opinion, a supposedly free press putting the views of the corporate class first, and the belief that anyone who follows a non-capitalist view of the world is un-American and deserves any violence that falls upon them.

It is also a pretty sobering reminder of how recently large swaths of the US population toiled in horrible working conditions, with little hope of advancing their cause.

Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Evolution – Brian Freeman
I was quite surprised to see this on a couple Best Of lists for 2020. The Bourne series has never been high art, although Ludlum’s originals were quite good.

As thrillers go, it is pretty standard. Jason Bourne is framed for the assassination of a very AOC-like congresswoman, and has to fight two different organizations that want him dead as he struggles to uncover the truth. A very attractive woman gets sucked into his world and has her life threatened in the process. Lots of violence and death. Some tasteful sex. Again, standard.

What earned this book its accolades, I believe, is how it addresses the age we are moving into. There are three different “evil” organizations in the story, and two are concerned with scooping up all your data and steering your behavior based on that information. Not just through getting the public to consume products, but by encouraging them to get out and protest or take direct actions that higher actors desire. Ten years ago it would have seemed far-fetched. But in 2021, it feels like we’re awfully close to losing whatever grip we have left on reality and large segments of the population can be coerced to act based on manufactured prompts.

(I wrote the above paragraph about two weeks ago. Clearly it is even more relevant after the events of January 6, 2021.)

Pretty good run of books.

Lucky Supreme – Jeff Johnson
The trick to writing a good crime novel, when approximately eight billion of them have been written, is to find a new angle and/or place the story in an unusual situation. Johnson did that quite well with this book.

Darby Holland owns a tattoo parlor in Portland. He’s kind of the CEO of his little neighborhood, a grimy street in the old industrial part of town that is filled with clubs, ethnic restaurants, and prostitutes. Through both goodwill and sheer power, Holland keeps things running smoothly.

He receives word that a former employee who stole some art from his walls has been spotted in California. He sets off to find the dirtbag and, hopefully, recover his property. This leads him into a confrontation with a much more powerful criminal.

Holland does his best to outsmart his new rival, and does so brilliantly at times. For all this cleverness, though, he still lands in a trap from two sides, from which it takes a pretty fun series of events to escape from.

Johnson takes a lot of elements of classic Noir and puts them in a great new setting. His characters are memorable and rich. This is a solid book, but not my favorite thriller of the month.

A Christmas Story – Jean Shepherd
My 13th annual reading of the classic collection the movie is based on.

Two Girls Down – Louisa Luna
Thriller number two of the month.

It is centered on the disappearance of two young sisters in Pennsylvania. Their family hires a California investigator who has earned acclaim for finding disappeared children when the local authorities couldn’t. She, in turn, hires on a local investigator to assist her. He is a former cop who resigned in disgrace after a suspect being held in custody died on his watch. Now he chases cheating spouses and the occasional bail jumper.

They are an odd match with different approaches and often butt heads. But they begin finding breaks where the police can’t. Their struggle to figure each other out is nearly as compelling as their search for the girls.

Luna surrounds this duo with fantastic secondary characters, and provides just enough horror in the case’s resolution to make the reader squirm. As the father of girls, my heart was beating a little extra hard while reading the pages that determined the sisters’ fates.

As soon as I finished this book, I put several more of Luna’s on my reading list.

Bluebird, Bluebird – Attica Locke
And then I closed this stretch of books with this, which is the best of the bunch. It has a long list of accolades stamped on its cover, and they are all well-deserved.

Darren Matthews is a rarity: an African-American Texas Ranger. He has a drinking problem, is separated from his wife, has disappointed the uncle who raised him with his career choice, and begins the book testifying before a grand jury regarding whether he has aided a man accused of murder.

His badge revoked, he is sent to a small East Texas town by an old buddy in the FBI, asked to look into the murder of a Black man. That murder turns into two – the second of a white woman – and soon Matthews has his Ranger status back in order to dig into the murders.

His investigation puts him on the bad side of pretty much everyone in the small community. The local sheriff, who resents his presence and struggles to accept that a Black man can be a Ranger. The white community, who are either latent racists or members of the Aryan Nation. Even the Black community, who despite his efforts to gain their trust, view him as an outsider first rather than an ally.

Again, the mystery part of the book is fairly straightforward. It’s the extras that Locke adds that make the book really shine. Most of those extras are based on race. Particularly when she dives into how, when people of different races live amongst each other for a long time, what seem like distinct lines between the communities are actually a lot more fluid than outsiders realize. Those blurred lines can make the tragic even more heartbreaking. She also explores the uncomfortable truths that acts that seem suspicious by one group can seem justified for survival by another.

Locke throws in a very nice neutron bomb of a twist in the book’s final two pages, one that blows apart any chance for a nice, tight resolution. I see she’s written a second book centered on Matthews, which I’m excited to read to see how she builds on those final pages.

The Wolf Wants In – Laura McHugh
I saw this book described as being for fans of Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects and/or season three of True Detective. I loved Sharp Objects; I’ve never watched True Detective but have always heard good things. That was enough to get me to pick this up. It also help that someone I used to be friends with blurbed the book and served as a mentor to McHugh.[1]

And it was worth it. This was a really well written, entertaining, and interesting mystery.

It is told from the perspective of two women on different sides of a death in a small Kansas town. One, the sister of the man who died, shares most of her story after his death, as she searches for clues into the truth of his final days. The other, a cousin of the deceased’s wife, shares her story from before his death. Through her story we slowly see exactly how the man’s death came about.

That truth of the death is well unspooled even if there isn’t much surprise in what actually happened.

But the stories of those two women are where the real meat of the book is. They both face struggles and use immense inner strength to overcome them. They refuse to accept the narratives forced upon them by a small town and its history. If I’m not mistaken McHugh uses one of these characters for her next book.

I will definitely be reading that, as well as some of McHugh’s earlier work.

The Plotters – Un-su Kim

This book follows Reseng, a Korean assassin, as he begins to realizes the life he has chosen is terrible.

In the book, Korea is run by corrupt politicians who maintain power through the use of “plotters”: unnamed and unknown people who send Reseng and other groups of assassins to dispatch those who run afoul of their rules.

Reseng, though, begins to question how this system works. After he finds a small bomb hidden in his bathroom he sets out on a search for who is trying to kill him. That leads him to a group of women who are trying to blow the entire system apart. He joins them and does as much as he can to help them toward their goal.

What makes this book so much fun is the dialogue and overall tone. It is light, sarcastic, and hip. Reseng hints at a Korean Vincent Vega or Jules Winfield. In the West we are often presented with a view of Asian cultures that are strict and joyless. Un-su Kim’s Korea is hilarious and violent and seems like a lot of fun.

The book was translated from Korean. That also made me think about how difficult to can be for translators to ensure that tone and meaning are consistent on both sides of the translation. I’m sure this was close to the original. For a moment, though, I laughed thinking what if the translator had completely changed the book’s atmosphere by making it more sarcastic in English that it was in Korean.

August Snow – Stephen Mack Jones

I love reading first novels in a series when you can tell, very early on, that this is a character you want to spend more time with.

August Snow is a former Marine and Detroit police officer. He was a rising star in the DPD, son of an immensely respected officer. But when he pointed out some corruption in the department he was fired. In turn he sued the force and city, won a $12 million verdict, and fled to Europe and Asia to drink away his guilt and mixed feelings.

Now he has returned home, and not everyone is pleased. Including a lot of cops who view him as a Judas. Soon after his return, a former client pitches a potential investigatory job to him. A few days later she is dead, of a suspicious suicide, and Snow jumps into the case.

Stephen Mack Jones was a poet and playwright before he began cranking out crime novels. You feel that background in his language. While the story is tough and gritty, like you want a good crime story to be, it is also sharp and literate. Jones gives Snow a mixed heritage – his father was Black, his mother Mexican, and he grew up in Detroit’s Mexicantown neighborhood – and the way he layers these influences is nicely done. The moments are violence are extremely violent, but they also pass quickly. The dialogue is terrific. Jones hits all the checkmarks you want to hit in a book like this while also making it feel fresh and new.

Jones seems like a fine, Midwestern counterpoint to someone like George Pelecanos. There are two more August Snow novels. I’ll be checking them out soon.

The Ghost at the Table – Suzanne Berne

It seems like books that take place at Thanksgiving are always about some kind of familial disaster. Bingo for this one, which is about an absolute meltdown of a Thanksgiving.

Berne tells the story of Cynthia, a writer from San Francisco who visits her sister in New England over the holiday. They pick up their invalid father, from whom Cynthia has long been estranged, from his home with plans to drop him at an assisted living center. But those plans are thwarted and set off a series of unexpected events and encounters that turn this Thanksgiving into a disaster.

It’s a good enough book. There was a moment when it seemed poised to veer into farce, and holiday farce is the best kind of farce. Unfortunately Berne directed the story another way and it became awfully dark and I didn’t really like any of the characters by the end.

As I read it, I couldn’t help but think about our family holidays. The book is centered on relationships between two different groups of sisters. My first thought was of how S and her sisters interact when they all get together. Most gatherings are fine, but there are the ones when at least one person is in a mood (sometimes it’s a sister, sometimes a brother, sometimes a spouse/partner) and years of family history come roaring back.

But I also realized I’m old enough where I can’t just sympathize with Cynthia and her sister, adults with older parents. I kept thinking a few decades ahead in time, when S and I will be the older parents and our girls will be the adults, weighed down by decades of their own issues. That was sobering in many, many ways. Hopefully our girls treat us better than the two sisters at the center of The Ghost at the Table treated their parents.

Nothing much going on today. Might as well share my most recent reads.

A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

My master reading list isn’t complete; I didn’t really start digitizing it until the mid-to-late 2000s, so a lot of books I read in the first decade of this century aren’t accounted for.[1] So I know I’ve read a few of Bill Bryson’s travel books, I’m just not certain how many.

This, however, is not a travel book. It is exactly what the title suggests: a short history of nearly everything. At least from a scientific perspective. From the beginning of the universe and its composition to the world of elements and atoms and molecules to the development of life on earth, Bryson hits just about everything. He shares a ton of incredibly large or exceptionally small numbers to explain the size of things, and always finds a way to put those into a perspective that you can understand. And it is all written with his normal wit and good humor.

What kept striking me as I read it, though, was how much has changed or been newly discovered since the book was published in 2003. I’ve been reading some articles about deep space exploration and universe formation theory recently, and they all pushed well beyond what Bryson wrote about nearly two decades ago. I’m sure that is true in many other areas that he covers. More than undermining my enjoyment of the book, it made me appreciate how much we are still learning about who we are, where we live, and how we got here.

A Difficult Conversation: How to Talk to Trump Supporters – Shea Serrano

If you follow Serrano on Twitter, you know how this goes.

The Cove – Ron Rash

Rash is on that list of Daniel Woodrell-like authors I keep going back to, hoping I can find something as good as Woodrell’s work.

This book takes place in North Carolina in the closing days of World War I. Laurel and her brother Hank, who returned from Europe missing a hand, live in a blighted area of land near the border with Tennessee. Locals believe the land to be cursed, and think that Laurel’s birthmark is a sign she has been touched by evil. Thus she is aggressively shunned. Hank has earned a bit of respect for his service in the war, but none of that transfers to her.

One day Laurel discovers a man, who presents himself as a mute, in the woods near their home. She brings him, named Walter, home where he carries a note stating his name and that he desires a train ticket to New York. With the next train about a week away, Hank offers to pay Walter if he will stay on their property and help him with some farm work until the date of his trip.

Walter gets ingrained into the family’s life, he and Laurel strike up a romance, and he decides to stay longer than expected.

Soon we learn that he is not, in fact, mute. Rather, he is a German musician who was stranded in New York when the war began and interned in an Arkansas prison when the United States joined the war. Laurel figures this out but keeps the truth from Hank, fearing his wounds will cause him to either harm Walter or turn him in to the authorities.

However, others soon guess Walter’s true identity and a pack of hyper-patriotic locals come looking to exact justice. This leads to a rather sad if somewhat bland ending.

There wasn’t nearly the darkness in this that I was looking for. So Rash didn’t really scratch that Woodrell itch for me.

I rediscovered my reading mojo over the past few weeks. It helped that I found a book I had been trying to locate for a year or more, and then two other great reads on top of that.

Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever – Geoff Edgers
First is the book I’ve been trying to find for at least a year, since I read a brief excerpt before it was published. For some reason, the Carmel library has never stocked the book. I finally thought to check the Indy library and BAM there it was!

This is the story of the song that changed music, the 1986 version of “Walk This Way” that featured original artists Aerosmith and rappers Run-DMC. The first half is mostly quick biographies of both bands and their key members. The Run-DMC section is as much about the development of hip hop as the band itself.

After that, Edgers takes us through 1986, as Run-DMC was working on their Raising Hell album, Aerosmith were spinning their wheels in an attempt to gain sobriety and relevance, and producer Rick Rubin got the idea to bring the bands together in the studio to cover Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.”

I knew a lot of the details of the collaboration already, although Edgers sheds more light on the one day they spent in the studio together than I had heard before.

The issue is that the book doesn’t break new ground, at least for people like me who knew a lot of the story’s details. The parts about the bands separately, both before and after their collaboration, are more interesting than the moments the bands were together. And Edgers doesn’t really frame it in a new and interesting way. It was a fun, but not necessarily required read.

Nothing Can Hurt You – Nicola Maye Goldberg
I never know what to call books like this (or the next one). Both feature a wide range of characters, and in each chapter the focus and perspective shifts amongst them. I knew there had to be a name for this type of story. My quick research tells me that these can be called “mosaic” novels. Consider yourselves taught.

Nothing Can Hurt You is centered on the murder of a college woman by her boyfriend. Through her cast of characters, Goldberg paints a broad picture of abuse of women, mental illness, and the significance of gender in modern society. Some of it is very dark. Some of it is very funny.

I enjoyed this but a week after I read it, I was struggling to recall details or to give it a more thorough accounting. Not sure if that says more about the story or about me.

Those People – Louise Candlish
This one, though, it really connected with me.

Candlish sets her story in an affluent South London neighborhood. The block has won awards (from the mayor even!) for its Sundays Off program, when cars are removed, the street blocked off for traffic, and kids are allowed to play freely. It seems to be an idyllic community centered on the happiness of all.

When an elderly woman on the block dies and her nephew inherits her home, things change. He and his girlfriend are crude and rude. They play loud music at all hours. He runs his auto repair and sales business from his front yard and fills up precious parking spaces with his work. He refuses to clear out on Sundays and even backs into a kid on a skateboard one Sunday. And any time he is confronted by his neighbors, he is surly, difficult, and refuses to change his ways.

The book builds up to a death. The early chapters begin with witness statements taken after the death, then flow into that character’s actions and impressions in the weeks and days leading up to the death.

Following the death, Candlish takes us through the neighborhood’s experience as the police investigate to determine a cause of death. This eventually leads to a second death, and another investigation.

Through the book, both because of the new neighbor’s antics and the police investigations, we see just about every character slowly fall apart. They all crack, in ways large and small, from the stress of their environment. Candlish deliciously juggles the characters, giving you reason to believe any of them could be responsible for the deaths. Her first reveal is absolutely shocking. The second is not as big a surprise, but the truth of that death is a wonderful piece of writing craft. And she closes with a series of minor details that end the book with an absolutely delicious series of possibilities for what happens next.

This is a cracking good novel and highly recommended.

My reading pace has fallen way off over the past month. I tried to start a book I was very much looking forward to reading but couldn’t focus and gave up. That lack of focus is most of the problem. Where I’m usually itchy and nervous if I’m not reading in my free time, I currently lack the motivation or excitement to start something new.

I also got new glasses a few weeks back and my eyes, as always, are slow to adjust to the new prescription, which makes it difficult to read at times.

To add the issues, I just found out the library up in Carmel, where I still go most often, is currently closed for a month as they begin a big renovation/addition. They are moving part of the library to a temporary location and are using September to get settled in that part-time spot. I don’t know how much of their collection is getting moved, so I’m not sure if the browsing experience will be what it used to be. I may have to stick with the Kindle or even buy a physical book for a change.

I did manage to read two books over the past few weeks.

Not Tonight, Josephine. A Road Trip Through Small-Town America – George Mahood
I think I got this for free, or for like a buck, after I bought a couple other Kindle books for our Florida trip. I figured it might be a quick, light read that I could use to try to get my reading mojo back.

It is Mahood’s story of the year he spent traveling around the US in a extremely used minivan. Mahood is British and came over with a friend in 2002. Their plan was to spend the year traveling the entire continental US. But his friend had visa issues which only allowed him to accompany Mahood from New York to California. Mahood’s girlfriend joined him in Colorado and completed the final third of the trip with him.

As I said, the trip was made in an extremely used minivan, which they named Josephine. They purchased her from a somewhat dodgy Brazilian near Woodstock, NY for $800. They had barely crossed into New Jersey when the van required a new transmission. Over the trip they also had to add a replacement for the back tailgate, which they salvaged from a junk yard and was from a different colored van. There were new tires needed, as the ones that came on the van were mismatched in size. And another series of fairly serious repairs were required when Mahood landed in Colorado and worked as a cook and food delivery man during the ski season.

Normally I would love books like this. But Mahood never quite carves out a unique voice for his story. It is a light accounting of his trip, but it doesn’t come close to the quality of other light-hearted travelogues I’ve read. Nor does he do deep, serious dives into topics. It reads more like a slightly brushed-up version of the journal he kept while traveling. Which is fine, especially for the price. But it didn’t make me want to read any of his other travel books.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter – Tom Franklin
This takes place in the small town of Chabot, Mississippi. It explores the troubled friendship between two men: Silas “32” Jones and Larry Ott.

“32,” still called by his high school baseball number, is the town constable. Although not everyone in town is thrilled at having a Black man as the town cop, he is largely respected for his office, for the legend of his high school career that took him to Ole Miss, and for his service in the Navy.

Ott, on the other hand, is the town outcast. In high school he took a well-known girl out for a date and she was never seen again. Although there was never any evidence that he did anything to cause her disappearance, it has been held against him for over 30 years. People shun him in every aspect of his life. The auto shop he runs never gets business. Drunken teenagers vandalize his property. It is a horrible existence, but he hangs on to try to support his mother who he has put in an elderly care center.

Ott is shot one night and Jones is part of the initial investigation before the county sheriff and state agencies take over. Being in Ott’s home begins to free up memories of their childhoods and the brief period when they were friends. It also stirs up how Jones came to live in Mississippi with his mother and leads to an unexpected explanation for who is father is.

Eventually Jones discovers who is responsible for Ott’s shooting and for the disappearance of both girls. But to crack the case, he must reveal secrets he has kept locked away for nearly 25 years.

As a mystery, the story is fine. Franklin does a decent job of taking you down the path to resolution of the story’s central questions.

I liked how Franklin explored how race and gender and social status and conventional wisdom push us into corners in relationships where we feel stuck. How it is easier to go along with what everyone else believes or says than to dig in to discover uncomfortable truths. And how it is also easier to keep your mouth shut than to admit flaws in your past.

My favorite part, though, was in his look at how men befriend each other. The barriers we put up to opening up to others. The difficulty in finding people who share your interests. The willingness to let the world know that you and this other weird guy may have something in common. And the struggles to overcome and move past difficult moments in a shared past.