I've been sitting on this review for a couple of days. I know. I know. I usually am able to review something quickly, but for some reason, I don't know where to begin. I thought I'd give it a few days to percolate out but alas, lacking in divine inspiration I'm going to move forward and hope it makes sense.
The Nix is one of the most highly rated books of 2016. It has a lot going for it. It's funny, hilarious even at points, a total satire on our current culture, but also somehow extremely truthful, it covers a wide range of issues, but somehow feels intimate and personal at points.
I'm not sure how Nathan Hill does this, although having 600+ pages to work with certainly helps. And at times this book did feel long. I listened to the audio version and have to say the narrator was GREAT!
Is the story about Samuel Andreson-Anderson, a has-been english professor whose life is in shambles? Or his mother, Faye Andreson, who abandons Samuel in his pre-teen years and vanishes without a trace. Until, that is, she appears on cell phone video throwing rocks at Senator Packer, a staunchly conservative candidate for president. Samuel's publisher, to whom Samuel has owed a manuscript for years, threatens to sue Samuel for all the advance money he was paid, unless Samuel pens a scathing tell-all about the mother who abandoned him at age 11.
Samuel agrees and then attempts to figure out what exactly his mother was doing all those years before she became his mother, and then after she left him and his father. The story then takes us back and forth between Samuel's life and troubles (he's being taken down by a vengeful co-ed whom Samuel fails in the first couple chapters), and Faye's history.
Samuel, despite himself, begins to understand Faye. She once told him, "The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst." And it's true, of Faye, whom Samuel desperately loved as a child. And it's true for Faye, who desperately loved and wanted to please her own father who in turn had issues of his own. Faye too, must take the time to understand her own father and in turn, forgive him.
There's a wonderful and heartbreaking cycle of love and disappointment in the story that Samuel first starts to unravel when he begins to forgive his mother. And yet, in all the descriptions above, I feel like I've made the book seem weightier than it really is. Because in the midst of all this, you have Samuel's friend Pwnage, an avatar Samuel meets in the computer game Elfscape, a clever twist on the word "escape," where Samuel spends hours everyday avoiding the empty shell his life has become.
What Faye tells us is that "if a new beginning is really new, it will feel like a crisis. Any real change should make you feel, at first, afraid. If you’re not afraid of it, then it’s not real change." And I think this is really felt throughout the book. While it seems like a description of the ultimate crisis in both Faye and Samuel's lives, the book ends up being a new beginning for them both. And it's hopeful which seems entirely impossible given how dire everything seems through the rest of the story.
This is a thinking book and a feeling book. But it's also a long book, so if you aren't willing to invest in the payoff, beware.
That Nathan Hill manages to loop in 1940s Norway, 1960s Chicago and 2011 New York and make it all seem completely obvious these things would have something to do with each other is a testament to his skill as a writer. Since this novel took him ten years to write (he writes long hand - CRAZY), I don't expect anything new soon and I hope he doesn't feel pressured to crank out something too fast. But when his next book does come out, count me in.
5/5 Stars
On a recent work trip to Portland, OR, I found myself at Powell's Books. I've you've ever been to Portland, you've probably visited here. It takes up an entire city block. It's shelves are filled of new and used books. There are helpful tags everywhere regarding staff picks and recommendations. Good God, I could have spent hours here. And so ironically, I'm Thinking of Ending Things was a book I picked up on the first pass through the first room I entered. It's one of NPR's 2016 Books of the Year. So I figured I couldn't go wrong.
For all the hype, I guess the book was a bit of a let down. Although it does some things very well for what it is. I should probably stress that horror is not my go-to genre. I don't seek out opportunities to be scared. But if you're into that thing, this book sets up very nicely. We start with driving in the car with Jake and his girlfriend. It took me a few chapters to realize she doesn't have a name, even though the narration is from her point of view. She's thinking of ending her relationship with Jake, but then she describes all the things she finds wonderful about him. So the premise feels off. I was wary. And then after a while and they were still in the car, I was bored.
This is a 210 page book and the first 100 pages of the book are of Jake and the GF in the car driving to his parent's house. Who decides to break up with a guy but still agrees to meet his parents? The GF is also keeping a secret from Jake in that she is getting threatening phone calls from someone she refers to as "The Caller", someone who calls from her own number and then leaves cryptic voicemails.
So there is this overarching uneasiness that starts to develop in the drive out to his parents that then evolves into a more menacing feeling as the meeting with the parents is predictably awkward. Jake's mom is a bit off and the house seems empty and old. There is a building of menace and it's very well done.
Getting you even further into the plot would ruin a lot of things and the final twist, but I admit I didn't see it coming, although I did have a feeling that something was definitely off. The plot twist seems a little gimmicky and overall is like a push to have you read the book again from the perspective of knowing the ending (almost like wanting to go back and watch The Sixth Sense from the beginning once you find out Bruce Willis has been dead the entire time).
3/5 Stars.
I appreciate that over the course of all the books in the Alphabet Series, Kinsey Millhone manages to advance in one way or another. What I appreciate less is the mundane details of Kinsey's life. I actually spent two pages reading about what was happening to her car in a car wash. At that point I considered packing it in on this series. So what if I received X for free in exchange for a review, is that worth my time reading about what someone had for lunch? And how many soft rag mechanisms are inside the car wash? But, on the mystery side, this one played out fairly well.
Kinsey is called when a man turns up dead with Kinsey's number in his pocket. The guy is homeless and an alcoholic so Kinsey tracks down his homeless friends and tries to figure out the man's identity. The homeless friends are less than helpful, but she does get just enough information to start unraveling the thread. What unravels is a distant kinship to the man through her father's side of the family, a side not covered in the prior books.
In what seems to be an unrelated story, a private eye of unscrupulous practices also turns up dead. The two tales grow slowly together as we are given back story through the point of view of the dead detective.
What was unexpected was the extended commentary on homelessness presented in the book. It was well balanced and looked at the issue from a lot of angles. I appreciated Grafton's choice to not make the issue cut and dry and the attention to nuance was well done.
A few of Kinsey's love interests pop up to provide some continuity color. All in all, the mystery was one of the better of the series, but the over-described banality of everyday life got a little exasperating in this edition.
3/5 Stars.
I first heard of this book from an NPR story (you can read NPR's review here) while I was driving during my morning commute. I think the part of the review that caught my ear was "one of those deceptively spare tales . . . that punch well above their weight." I am a huge fan of short fiction and I appreciate those stories that can do more in 25 pages than some novels do in 500. Short fiction, I've come to understand, is not "easier" to write because the page requirement is less; it's actually far more difficult. A writer must do more in less time, evoke feelings and emotions in the reader that often take hundreds of pages, but do it in 20, 15, or 10. A writer that can do that should be commended. And Graham Swift is a writer that can do that.
Mothering Sunday takes place on March 30th, 1924. A holiday in which service staff across the English countryside are given the day off to spend with their mothers. Jane Fairchild, maid to the Niven family, however, does not have a mother. Abandoned as a child, she has no family to visit on Mothering Sunday. At first she intends to spend the day with a book from the Niven library - a character trait that is teased out and expanded upon over the course of the book.
Her plans are changed however, when she gets a call from Paul Sheringham, the only surviving son of a neighboring gentry family with whom Jane has been having an affair for some years. Paul is engaged to be married to Emma Hobday within a couple of weeks, and Jane knows this is likely to be their last tryst.
Over the course of Mothering Sunday's sparse pages, Jane's character is lovingly teased out as we see the world through her eyes. We know only what she knows. We feel only what she feels. It's a remarkably limited, but also necessary point of view. As Jane wanders Paul's home after he has left her in his bed, we see the changing society reflected back through Jane's thoughts. The war is over - a generation of young men have been buried in France or Belgium, never to return home. And the life of those in service and those they serve, is changing (have you seen Downton Abbey?).
The story slowly reveals Jane's future as an accomplished novelist in her own right - a path she was set upon maybe even before the events of that Mothering Sunday, but certainly a path that was clearer once the dust had cleared from the day.
At times evocative and luxurious, reading Mothering Sunday felt like a sprint and a marathon all at once.
4.5/5 Stars.
I went to law school so the words "Epic Courtroom Battle" were sure to catch my eye. And since I went to law school I am aware that there is such a thing as the Southern Poverty Law Center. And I live in America and am aware that lynching was a terrible crime against people of color, mostly in the American South, during the civil rights movement and before. So the most shocking thing in reading this book, was the fact that the lynching in question, the lynching that launched the epic courtroom battle mentioned, happened in Mobile, Alabama in 1981.
Yep, 1981. I was actually alive that year and while I don't remember it at all, it's shocking and heartbreaking and maddening that a lynching happened in America in my lifetime. Michael Donald was 19 years old when he had the misfortune of walking down the street in Alabama by himself at night, where he was approached by Tiger Knowles and Henry Hayes. He was beaten, choked, and had his throat slashed before he was thrown in the trunk of a car, driven to Mobile, and hung from a tree.
That Knowles and Hayes were KKK members shouldn't be surprising. And that Mobile authorities did little to investigate and solve the crime shouldn't be surprising either. Leamer's tale takes us up through the end of Knowles and Hayes' criminal trials. Trials which would not have happened without Michael Figures and other members of the federal Department of Justice. Then Morris Dees, chief trial attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center, gets wind of the case and knows he is going to use the lynching to bring down the United Klans of America (UKA) and its leader Robert Shelton.
Dees, it seems, knows racists from experience. Growing up in Alabama, Dees attended U of A and worked on George Wallace's gubernatorial campaign in college. Although Dees would graduate from law school, he focused his work on a mail order publishing business he started with a partner in college. After both finding they were unfulfilled with the business world, Dees and Fuller sell off their company and go their separate ways. Dees goes on to found the SPLC and Fuller begins Habitat for Humanity.
Dees evolution into a crusader against the UKA was a gradual process and by the time the civil trial starts, he's been trying and winning civil rights cases for some time. He definitely marches to his own drummer and does things his own way, but Dees had a singular purpose in this case, and that was to bring down the UKA in such a way that could be used in the future against other violent hate groups.
The best parts of the book, to me, were the background information regarding the civil rights movement and the campaigns of George Wallace. The courtroom battle fell a little short of "epic" to me, but Leamer is not an attorney himself and since most of the defendants were representing themselves, I doubt they produced many quotable arguments.
I picked up this book as my non-fiction selection for Black History Month. I may not have finished it in February, but I'm glad I read it.
4/5 Stars.
What a delicious feeling it is to start a new series and thoroughly enjoy the first book. I recently took a long car trip and The Last Kingdom was my companion for ten hours of riveting driving through southern Illinois. The series begins with Otrid (I listened to this so be prepared for some completely inaccurate spellings) in Northumbria. He marches to war at 10 years old with his father and sees his father and most of the Northumbrian army slaughtered by the invading Danes. He's taken captive by a Dane named Ragnar and grows up learning to fight.
As the Danes move to take Mercia and East Agnlia, Ostrid is introduced to real battle and becomes torn between his love for Ragnar and the Danish way of life, and to his fealty to his homeland of England. When the Danes move to take Wessex, the last kingdom free from Danish rule, they are met by an unlikely English champion in the pious King Alfred.
The book is just really really well done and I have to give special props to the voice narrator for his inflections and changes between accents. Listening to this was really delightful. Cornwell was lucky in that not many source documents exist from this period of time to draw his facts from so he had a lot of room to invent and imagine, but he still kept everything in the realm of reality.
I was sad that I couldn't immediately start the next book in the series. I can't wait for it to show back up off my hold list at the library.
4/5 Stars.
I'm kind of all over the place with this one. By the end, I can say that I enjoyed the book. But the beginning was confusing, and the middle was kind of boring. This one started out with feeling a lot like American Gods, but in London. Certain sects of differing gods being worshipped in an underground community of magical and magic-ed creatures and humans. A special police unit devoted to sorting out the good guys from the bad.
The story begins with Billy Harrow, a scientist working at the Darwin Center. A research and museum facility in London whose main attraction is a giant squid preserved in formalin and appearing at the center of a specimen room. When the squid is stolen, Billy becomes involved in the London underground world of cults and magic. He's completely unprepared, and his disorientation is a bit disorienting for the reader as well. That I listened to this one on audio book was probably not helpful. If you're thinking about picking it up, I'd recommend reading rather than listening.
Two thugs for hire, Gus and Subby go around tormenting all kinds of mystical folk at the direction of "The Tattoo" a arch villain reduced to, yes, the tattoo on the back of some poor sod forced to an eternity of facing backwards while the Tattoo orders his minions about. Turns out that the squid is a revered god for a Kraken-ist cult and the theft of such a large specimen signals and impending apocalypse. So the magical world is scrambling to figure out who took the squid so they can prevent such and end.
The way the story is laid out is well done except again for the middle parts which felt repetitive and fell flat. Because I listened to it on audio, I thought I had caught a word in one section that became a suspicion of a certain character through the entire book and therefore ruined the final "who done it" aspect for me, even if the the word I had thought I heard in the beginning was just a part of my own imagination. But see, that's part of the problem with the book is that there was so much extra stuff in it that I drifted off in several parts because the facts just exceeded my curiosity, even about a world that was being created whole cloth out of the myths and alleyways of London.
3/5 Stars.
I've been sitting on this review for a couple of days. I know. I know. I usually am able to review something quickly, but for some reason, I don't know where to begin. I thought I'd give it a few days to percolate out but alas, lacking in divine inspiration I'm going to move forward and hope it makes sense.
