Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay

Before picking up Bad Feminist, I had seen Roxane Gay in a few TV interviews in passing. She's always struck me as a thoughtful analyst of issues. But now I know something else. She's FUNNY! This book was funny. There's an entire essay devoted to how awful the 50 Shades series is and it's hilarious. 

Part memoir, part op-ed type essays, Bad Feminist describes one woman's navigation of the complex world of feminism and all the trappings that go along with trying, or avoiding, declaring oneself as such. 

I'm was also reminded throughout this book why it is so important to make sure one is exposed to a variety of voices and narratives outside the echo chamber we create for ourselves within and without social media. Many more years ago than I realized had passed, I read The Help with my book club and attended an author talk about the book in Chicago. I remember being vaguely uncomfortable at the use of dialect in the book, written by a white woman, about black women in the Civil Rights Era South. But, for lots of reasons, I didn't recognize the very basis of the book as problematic. And then, overtime, I came to realize the deeply flawed foundation of the book. And Roxane Gay laid it all out in an essay on the topic in this book.

She also dove deep into her Scrabble talent. I didn't realize, but probably should have, that there were such things as competitive Scrabble tournaments. 

There were deeply heartbreaking stories mixed into the story that give a glimpse of the author and her early life's journey. Overall it was a very enjoyable 11 hours to spend in someone's company.

4/5 Stars. 

American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land - Monica Hesse

There's nothing like a good airplane ride to get some pages logged. I finished American Fire shortly after touchdown in Florida. I love a good narrative non-fiction book. This one felt a little less smooth than my favorites, but I really enjoyed the subject matter.

Essentially, abandoned structures start burning on the East Shore of Virginia. Accomack County has seen better days and the countryside is littered with buildings left behind when the County was. Brave crews of volunteer firefighters begin to battle the blazes and are shocked when three burn in one night. Something nefarious is going on. 

Hesse does not structure this like a mystery, so we know right away who the culprit is. The details of why are teased out over the course of the story. Charlie Smith, a one time volunteer firefighter and convicted felon has had a rough go of life. Seemingly below normal in IQ and decision making skills, Charlie has a recurring drug problem that leads him into trouble, but he is occasionally able to set that aside for the sake of love and a new woman. He does so about a year before the fires begin. His new flame (haha I'm punning) is Tonya Budnick, a bit of a party girl. The two of them fall in love and annoyingly have a joint facebook account. 

But there's a problem. Charlie suffers from crippling insecurity and he can never believe he is deserving of this woman. So he is unable to "perform" sexually. Which, combined with the couple's dwindling finances and problems with one of Tanya's children, lead to a whim one night to burn something down. So they begin.

And for 66 fires, they baffle the investigative teams sent to solve the crimes. Until they are caught. While Charlie confesses right away, Tanya remains steadfast that not only was she not involved in the setting of the fires, she also was not aware Charlie set any of them. If you find that far fetched, you're not alone, so did the jury that convicted her. 

I liked the woven themes of an aging and declining County and the arson. It was a good read.

3 1/2 Stars. 

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America - Morgan Jerkins

This is the third nonfiction book I've read by a WOC this year (black woman to be specific) and I'm so glad to be hearing these new voices and growing in understanding of a life experience I am not closely familiar with. So This Will Be My Undoing was a deliberate pick by me to do better, to be more aware and to really just appreciate the story of someone who I might otherwise never had heard from.

I loved Morgan's essay which explored living in Harlem and what Harlem meant and how she saw it. I loved thinking about spaces outside of a white gaze. I am accustomed to looking at culture through my own white lens. My own (flawed and often unconscious) judgments are based on the white norms I have accepted and reinforced. The ways in which I expect people to ask, the conformity I expect them to accept is based on expectations that have their origin in white supremacy. 

Maybe the first step of allyship is to really listen to the stories of POC and specifically WOC and specifically black women. I'm there. I'm doing that part. And now it feels not quite enough. Like this is the baseline. This is the absolute minimum. Morgan talks about going to Japan as a middle school and then undergrad student. And during that time there she would walk into a store and the attentive sales people would help her and ask if she needed anything. This was such a mind blowing experience that she couldn't wait to see her own mother experience it as well. 

Wait, back up. Yep, that's what I wrote. This brilliant, beautiful, multi-lingual woman was feeling truly seen, by a sales clerk. Shit, America we are doing something dreadfully wrong if we can't even up our game to baseline dignity and respect for women of color by saying hello and asking if they need help when they enter our shops. Phoebe Robinson told a similar story about going to a Michael's store and standing at the framing counter waiting to be helped. (You can read my review of Phoebe's book, You Can't Touch My Hair here). She wasn't even acknowledged and several other customers walked in later and were helped in front of her. So, yes. This is a problem. This is a embarrassing basic problem. We need to not only see WOC, but we need to allow them to take up whatever space they need AND be fine with it.

4/5 Stars. 

You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain - Phoebe Robinson

I really needed this book after a lot of heavy reading in January. It was full of really honest critiques but also funny. I listened to this as an audio book, which based on how it unfurled, might be the only way to really digest this book. 

You Can't Touch My Hair (YCTMH) comes through in a series of essays by Phoebe Robinson, one of two women who make up the podcast duo of Two Dope Queens. Phoebe has been a writer, standup comedian, and actress and is still making her way in the entertainment business. I gather from the book that the book deal came after the popular success of a blog, Blaria (Black Daria), but I've never read the blog before.

Robinson is a few years younger than me, so her pop culture references were on the periphery of my own experience, but still close enough that I understood them. Glad I didn't waste time watching The Kingsmen even though I love Colin Firth. Listening to the book was a bit like spending an extended period of time with a Millennial. As a gen-x type I got a little tired of the constant voice modulations prevalent in the young, but that's probably spot on generation-wise. 

I digress. I've spent time this past year consciously trying to make an effort to listen to more voices that aren't like mine, specifically cis, het, college educated, white woman. My echo chamber is deep and wide after almost ten years of college and post-graduate education. So listening to Robinson's book was not only entertaining because of the jokes, but also interesting because of the different perspective Robinson brings as a black woman.

In the end, I felt the book ran a little long. I feel like there was quite a bit of material added for the audiobook that may not have appeared in print, and in the end it felt a little repetitive, but YCTMH still made me laugh. I actually spit coffee out in my car when she referred to Craig's List as Lucifer's Taint.

That's back to back Robinson books for me (Michelle Robinson aka Michelle Obama and Phoebe Robinson). What should I read next? 

3/5 Stars.

Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates

“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”

In February, I try to focus my reading on black authors and black history. Between the World and Me has been on my list for quite some time. I've seen Ta-Nehisi Coates in videos and on the daily show, and I've always appreciated his perspective on issues and the way in which he presents them. 

A letter from a father to a son. A letter from a black man to a black teen. A letter from a black man to white America. A letter from the soul of a person, to the unending silence that answers us in return whenever we share something so deep that no response is adequate.

This is a very moving and illuminating look at race and racism in America. In the way that the belief in American exceptionalism requires an ignorance of the policies and practices which have propelled the American experience for centuries. 

“And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.”

It would be wrong to say Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only voice discussing race, politics, and intersectionality in America. He is however, one of the most powerful voices to recently take up the conversation. It would also be wrong to assume that his view is representative of all African Americans. Or that he can speak for black women who have not gained the name-recognition, but still have powerful and illuminating stories all their own. But anytime we take a step outside ourselves and our known world to try to really hear and understand the experience of someone else, without judgment - whenever we are really open to listening with our ears and mind open, then the collective experience of being American is all the better. All the better that this audio version was narrated by Coates himself. 

I was moved by this book, truly moved. And humbled. And thankful.

5/5 Stars. 

A German Requiem - Philip Kerr

It's 1948. The War is over, and at first, we're not really sure what Bernie has been up to that whole time. We do know that he has a wife, but it doesn't seem to make him as happy as he thought he could be during the last book where he felt his own biological clock ticking.

What is clear, is that post-WWII Berlin of A German Requiem is not a good place to be even BEFORE the blockade. Bernie has to navigate the various occupied zones and life again as a private detective and he's not doing that great of a job at any of it. Meanwhile, his wife Kirsten is waiting tables at an American bar and coming home with unexplained gifts.

Bernie is approached by a Russian colonel with a proposition, go to Vienna and clear the name of his former police colleague Emile Becker who stands accused of murdering an American officer. The money and his home life lead Bernie to agree and so we get to see Bernie a little of his normal game, in a new city full of more uncertainty. And as the story progresses we learn that he was drafted from the police squad into an SS regiment, requested a transfer as the mass-murdering of civilians was not his style, and fought on the Russian front until captured and held in a Gulag. On the way to his execution by the Russian government, he escapes and makes his way back to Berlin.

But it seems the war, and the SS just can't leave Bernie be. He's entirely too moral and this makes him an unknown player in post-war espionage. The book is very well done and I always appreciate the final twists and turns that I don't really see coming. I also really liked the book's treatment of collective guilt and the shades of truth that exist in that examination. Women again don't fair very well in this story, even where they do try to have some agency of their own.

The audio version continues to amuse me as Christopher Lee narrates Bernie with such a cynical British accent, but the Russian and American characters got accents all their own. Poor British sounding German Bernie.


3.75/5 Stars.

The Nix - Nathan Hill

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

The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead

Breathe. Just breathe and you may be able to get through some of the more difficult passages in Colson Whitehead's new novel, The Underground Railroad. I listened to the audio version of this book and closing my eyes to block out the words was not as effective as it can be with a written page. 

Whitehead's tale starts in Africa and arrives in America with Ajari (sorry, I listened so I have no idea how names are spelled). Ajari is the mother of Mabel, who is the mother of Cora, our central character. Cora, born into slavery on the Randall plantation in Georgia, is abandoned by Mabel when Cora is 10 years old. An outcast, she goes to live in a slave cabin with other outcasts - the lowest of the low of slave society. 

After a particularly brutal encounter, and trust me, the entire description of slave life on Randall is brutal even if it's just a hum in the background it's always present - she is approached by Caesar, a new slave on the Randall plantation. Caesar wants Cora to join him in running away, as her mother did. Cora agrees. And so we are finally introduced to The Underground Railroad. Not a metaphor in this book, an actual collection of railways and engines under the soil and ready to take Cora and Caesar north. 

The two fugitives head to South Carolina, which the railroad operator tells us has a more enlightened view towards colored advancement. In South Carolina, all the African Americans are owned by the government. They are given job placements and go to separate schools. In essence we have arrived in Jim Crowe times, where separate, but certainly not equal is the norm. Blacks are made to submit to recurring doctors visits where the medical staff offer sterilization to some, and mandate it to others. The medical staff also watches as a certain segment of the male black population descends further into syphilitic delirium. Is it better? Cora comes to understand that all of these efforts are just another form of slavery.

Cora is being chased by slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway, a blacksmith's son who found more power and status as a slave catcher than an honest trade. He makes it his mission to find Cora and return her to the Randall plantation and the particular cruelty of Terrence Randall. When Ridgeway appears in South Carolina, Cora goes on the move again, back to the tracks and on to North Carolina where the norm there is simply to eliminate all blacks from the state and any sympathetic whites. It's desolate and bleak and heartbreaking. 

It seems like this journey will never end for Cora, that each stop offers a different set of indignities. I've read a few reviews that felt like Cora was never fully developed. I don't agree. Cora is the center of the story. The looking glass through which we see America to its fullest potential for evil. She takes us with her to each new degradation and somehow allows us to continue to hope that each next stop will be better even through the very end. 

This book feels timely to me, as our national conversation for the past year has included such weighty topics as the Confederate flag, the building of the White House, and of course the all too frequent killing of unarmed black men and women by police. We can't afford to lose sight of where our country has come from if we really aim to move forward. A false narrative does nobody any good.

As important as the material is, I'd be remiss not to say that the prose itself is well written and engaging. I know some people took issue with the backstory chapters interspersed throughout the book, but I actually appreciated them, as they usually came just after the death of a minor character we never really got to know. Learning about their motivations after they disappear from the narrative rather than before had an interesting affect on the story. 

I can see why Oprah chose this book for her book club and I think it deserves all the accolades and success that are sure to follow.

5/5 Stars.

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

I don't even know where to start on this. That this book could have existed for ten years without my having read it, having known about it, seems impossible now. Hyperbole? Maybe, but it's hard for me to really put into words what I thought of this without resorting to statements of grandeur. It's a novel of a vast concept so it requires vast descriptions.

The premise of the novel is fairly straightforward, America is a melting pot, and when immigrants arrive here, they bring their gods with them. Gods from all over. And while those religions or those beliefs die out, the gods remain, diminished in power, but here all the same, wandering our country, or taking jobs to make ends meet, until finally they are extinguished, forgotten. 

So a man named Shadow, a convict, is released from prison and on his way home to his wife,when he learns she has died. Grieving and bereft of an alternative plan, Shadow meets a man named Wednesday who offers him a job. Shadow then travels with Wednesday, meeting gods and learning about the dark world the gods inhabit. 

A war is brewing, between the old gods and the new. Gods of media and the internet, versus traditional gods of ancient and lost kingdoms. Wednesday is trying to rally his troops as they prepare for battle. Shadow is his cohort, his companion on the journey. But Shadow isn't an ordinary man, in his dreams he straddles the world of the gods and sees into the "shadows" created by their existence. He sees things that others miss. 

I was immensely fond of Shadow. He's such an interesting character. He's a roll with the punches guy. He's often underestimated, but he's very intelligent. People are drawn to him, intrigued by him. He makes mistakes. He admits them. He's just as confused about the world of the gods as the reader.

The audible version I read is the 10th anniversary edition. With an introduction by Neil Gaiman, whose silky voice narrates the "Coming to America" interludes found in the story and the epilogue. The 10th Anniversary is a "author's cut" of the story, longer than the original that was published more than a decade ago. I'm so happy this book was mentioned in passing by a co-worker. I'm so pleased to have read it this year.

5/5 Stars.

Hamilton: The Revolution - Lin Manuel Miranda (with notes on an unforgettable night in New York City)

I'm not entirely sure if this book took me so long to read because I was savoring every minute of it, or because at parts my eyes were too watery to keep reading (I'm looking at you "It's Quiet Uptown"). In any case, I absolutely adored this book. Reading it both before and after seeing the live show in person was pretty much the best decision I've made in my entire life (aside from saying yes to marry my husband, without whom the trip may have been a lonely pilgrimage and the only person who really looks at my strange obsessions and just shrugs them off without judgment).

In any event, if you are a fan of the cast album, and you've been reading the annotated genius.com lyrics, and you've read article after article on the internet wondering what indeed does the show LOOK like, not just sound like, this book is definitely for you. Also, do you like funny stories and great pictures? Yeah, this book is for you too.

The book begins at the beginning, at the forming of the cabinet - Lin Manuel Miranda (writer), Tommy Kail (director), Jeffrey Seller (producer), and Andy Blankenbuehler (choreographer). From this hefty brain trust grew the words, music and ideas that shaped the entire show. And really, if you haven't heard of Hamilton yet, google it, watch the 2008 White House Poetry Jam, and I dare you to not be intrigued. 

The book is full of great anecdotes regarding all the principle actors and contributors, how they came to be involved with the show and how they felt/feel about their role. It's fascinating. I saw an interview with Lin Manuel Miranda when the book first came out a few weeks ago and he said that so many times historians have to go far back in time to recreate these types of stories, and to piece together the information from surviving fragments of history, but this book does all that work up front and while it feels fresh, it also feels really special. In under a month, the original cast will splinter and begin to go their separate ways. The original cast will be filmed this month to save the performance for posterity (I haven't seen any notations regarding the footage to be released for general consumption - still gotta sell those tour tickets y'all). But if and until that footage is released, this book and it's amazing photographs are the keepsake album you wish you could have scrapbooked yourself. 

Also the annotations are amazing because LMM references Harry Potter in several locations, basically cementing the fact that he is my patronus, you know if such things were real. Also, this is pretty much the most physically beautiful book I own, so there's that.

5/5 Stars.

I'm fairly certain I don't have to explain that actually seeing the show on Broadway on June 10th was an experience I will NEVER forget? We arrived in NYC on June 9th and after finding our hotel and mostly navigating the subway system, we dropped the bags and decided to have lunch and then walk into Times Square. In what I promise was a completely random event, we chose 46th Street as our path and walked past the Richard Rogers theater for the first time. 

As you can see, there were brave folks in their sleeping bags waiting for last minute cancellations (I'm not entirely sure who gives their tickets up last minute without trying to garner the $1,500 per ticket price for which they are now going on stub-hub, but hope springs eternal). That evening we attended a Yankees game. Our seats were less expensive than our Hamilton tickets, but only because I chose to sit up in the outfield, along the third base line. It was chillier than we had anticipated, but luckily we wore jackets and the home team won.

The next day was Hamilton day, also, our 10th wedding Anniversary. We went to a diner in the morning and then headed uptown to the Met to see some great art and hopefully keep me distracted from watching my watch every second as the longest countdown ever to Hamilton. This was good in theory, but Hamilton kept popping up wherever I went, including the large collection of John Trumbull paintings at the Met, including this annoyingly described one:

Don't worry Met, I know you meant Angelica Schuyler Church, not Mrs. John B. Church.

Anyway, finally, the evening approached and we showered, changed and headed out to dinner where we were surrounded by giddy theater goers, some who would be attending Hamilton that night. The funny thing is, all the anticipation of seeing it, all the barely contained glee I had felt in the MONTHS leading up to this trip, I felt serenely calm once we sat down to dinner. I was going to see the show, it was really happening. I wasn't going to need to wonder anymore if the real life event would live up to my expectations. 

So after dinner we headed back to the Richard Rodgers theater and waited in line with the other theater goers. Once inside, it was a bit of pandemonium as patrons thronged the souvenir booths and purchased hats, shirts, coffee mugs, books, pins, cards, CD's, all kinds of stuff to remember the show by. We then found our seats in the rear of the orchestra, under the mezzanine overhang, which meant that some of the stage would be partially obstructed, the top portion, from where some of the chorus sings during songs. The funny thing about partially obstructed views at Hamilton though, is that no one cared. I mean, you're in a room with people who either paid a lot of money for the privilege, or forewent a lot of money for the privilege and there we all were. Watching the show together. The vibe was fairly electric. 

Then the show started and I forgot to keep breathing. With each principle actor who started a verse of the opening number the crowd applauded. Then LMM came on-stage in answer to "What's your name man?" and when he said "Alexander Hamilton" the place erupted. Somewhere during Aaron Burr, Sir, I remembered that breathing was important and began doing that laborious task again. But the spell, the feeling, was still there and my whole self tingled with the sensation of sheer joy. 

At intermission I fought my way downstairs to the ladies room (don't freak out ladies, the line is long but it moves fast, everyone wants to get back to their seats in time). I was so focused on reliving the first act in my brain that I almost missed the fact that I was standing next to Magic Johnson as he tried to make a phone call in the small hallway where the ladies room queue is formed. He's hard to miss though because he's huge.

Act II was glorious and I was nervous that I might sob my way through Blow us All Away, Stay Alive (Reprise) and It's Quiet Uptown, but my tears were held to silent streams and occasional sniffles. So I was kind of proud of myself. I read on LMM's twitter that sometimes he looks out in the crowd and see a stranger crying and that makes him more emotional. What a softie, but also what an experience to look out and see that something you created touches people so deeply. Sigh. The night was incandescent (I was told amazing was too pedestrian an adjective to use). 

Afterwards, me and hundreds of others who had seen and not seen the show that night, lined up outside to try to get a moment to say hello to the actors as they left the theater. First Phillipa Soo came out but I was too far back in the crowd to get an autograph. Same for other minor actors who came out the door. Finally the crowd thinned and I was able to snag a 'graph from Rory O'Malley (King George the III, the fourth). 

Then the stage manager announced that no more actors would be coming out to sign anything, and we walked the two blocks back to our hotel. Upon arriving back, even though I usually am asleep by 10 p.m. and it was now well past midnight, I could not sleep, my brain was too awake playing and replaying the scenes from the show, the moments I knew were coming, and those that came as a total surprise. My body felt warm like after a day in the summer sun and eventually sleep claimed me. 

The rest of the trip was so fun, visiting the top of the Empire State Building, perusing J.P. Morgan's Library, visiting Alexander and Eliza's graves at Trinity Church (Angelica is there in an unmarked grave she shares with a Livingston), silently sobbing to myself in the corner of the south excavations of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum (seriously so moving, so sad), and then an amazing dinner with my first friend, my sister, brunch on sunday morning and a visit to the High Line park in Chelsea before heading home. The trip managed to make time slow down for once. The week after returning seemed to fly by in comparison, but for those four days, in addition to being in the Room Where it Happens, we also caught some moments for ourselves and managed to make time slow down and Take a Break. 

9/11 Museum. Original steel from the building bent like a twig.

 Reading this book over the past week has made me relive so many of the events of our trip and the night seeing Hamilton. It was the perfect way to keep the images and thoughts fresh in my head. Aside from being one of the most physically beautiful books I own, it will be a book I return to again and again to remind myself of how lucky I am to be alive right now.

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

I'm not sure how I missed Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men when I was slogging through required reading in my High School and then Undergraduate years. But somehow, I'd never read this short gem of a novel. The plot is relatively straight forward. Lenny and George are ranch hands, traveling within California and going from ranch to ranch to work the land.

George is a small dark fellow with dreams of owning his own land and never having to work for anyone again. Lenny, is a large lumbering blonde man who is dim witted and essentially has the mind of a child. George looks out for Lenny and has a lot of compassion and love for Lenny that goes beyond simple companionship. Essentially, George has become Lenny's caretaker, his parent-figure. And he takes his duties seriously, even if he may resent it a little.

Lenny has a penchant for soft things he can pet. At the beginning of the story, we are shown that Lenny has pocketed a small mouse, but in the midst of his overzealous petting, Lenny has killed the mouse. It doesn't keep him from wanting to keep petting it however. George advises Lenny that when they buy their own land, he will get Lenny some rabbits, which will be larger and therefore, harder to kill.

Lenny obviously doesn't mean to kill the mouse, but he really has no concept of his own strength and he is sad that the mouse had to die, although there is a strange disconnect between Lenny's knowledge of the death, and his knowledge of his own actions which produced the death.

Lenny and George get hired on to a new ranch at the beginning of the story. The old ranch they had to leave when Lenny took a liking to a girl's red dress and wanted to pet it. Even after being told to let go, he got confused and grabbed tighter, leading the girl to run to the authorities, who then run Lenny (and by association, George) out of town.

Lenny is joyous to learn that the lead ranch hand on the property has a dog that has just given birth to a litter of puppies. The lead ranch hand, Slim, is appreciative of the care George has taken for Lenny and agrees to give Lenny one of the puppies. The new jobs are complicated by the son of the ranch owner, Curly, a small man with a Napoleon complex who decides Lenny is a good target to pick on, and his wife, who shows up at odd times ostensibly to "look for her husband" but really to flirt and talk with the men.

Steinbeck does a great job of overlaying all scene's with Curly's wife with an uneasiness bordering on foreboding. George tells us she is no good and will only lead to trouble. In the end she does, but not in the way we'd expect.

The unlikely friendship between Lenny and George is a bright spot in the book. It's easy to see how Slim would be warmed by it. Taking care of Lenny makes George more human. It gives him a reason to want a better life, to remain connected to himself and his humanity. This makes the ending that much more despairing. I won't write a spoiler here in case you are like me and one of the probably 25 people who have not read the book before. But if you have managed to miss it, you should pick it up and give it a chance. The writing itself is fantastic and the story really hits hard. It's no wonder it's withstood the test of time and is considered great American fiction.

5/5 Stars.

The Early Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald - F. Scott Fitzgerald

I really can't say enough good things about this collection of short stories. I have been a long time fan of the Great Gatsby and I've also read a previous collection of his short stories which included the unforgettable "Diamond as Big as the Ritz."

In this collection of early stories, you can see Fitzgerald process and explore themes following and during WWI. He's writing at a time when social mores are becoming undefined and the gender norms blurred.

The first story, "Babes in the Woods" explores a loosening of sexual restrictions among teenagers. Both play a game in which they observe the required social niceties, all the while thinking of how they will break them. When they fail to achieve their desired results, both are equally disappointed.

"Sentiment - and the Use of Rouge," follows a young man home on leave from the war who finds that he does not understand what has happened to society. He finds the women too "painted" and the men too scarce. The war may have meant something to him at the front, but it has wrought further changes back home.

"The Cut-Glass Bowl" uses a woman's conceit and pride to illustrate her downfall in both beauty and superiority. Just as the "Four Fists" shows a man learning life lessons at the end of a fist.

I cannot leave out the hilarious "The Camel's Back" in which a disappointed suitor attempts to arrive at a costume party as one half of a camel.

Lastly, the collection also includes "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which I think I knew was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald but alas is nothing like the movie. It's main focus is on the things were learn as an adult, but shows them in reverse as Benjamin loses that knowledge as he becomes younger.

There's such a delicious voice of yearning, disappointment, understanding and disillusionment in so many of these stories. I can't recommend them enough.

5/5 Stars!