Books Read in 2024: Five-Stars THE END

I usually try to have these reviews done by the end of January, which I realize is already late. But in the spirit of my radical self-acceptance endeavour for this winter, I am telling myself it is FINE.

Husband is off on his Rome-to-Bali trip - eleven flights over the next 17 days. We're supposed to get 30-40 cm of snow Wednesday night and Thursday. Last time he went away we had snow coming also. When we get blizzarded when he's away I usually use the Touchplow app if I'm not able to stay ahead of the shoveling - I don't mind shoveling, but with the state of my back and my hands I'm not able to stay ahead of the big snow dumps right now. I couldn't sign into the app and I was a bit concerned, and then I gave my head a shake and googled "Ottawa one-time snow removal" - and lo, a veritable plethora of services appeared. Somewhat surprisingly, the very first one I came across didn't appear on the list of 8 best - go figure that something called Plow Me Now wasn't the top choice. 

Anyway, I filled out a form for Sam's Snow and Lawn Service, and it worked out splendidly. Sam now texts me every time it snows to see if I need help. So if I pick up some water and storm chips tomorrow after work I should be good to hunker down and ride it out.

Five-Star Reads *****

Children's

Three Keys (Front Desk #2) by Kelly Yang: Synopsis from Goodreads: Mia Tang thinks she’s going to have the best year ever.

She and her parents are the proud owners of the Calivista Motel, Mia gets to run the front desk with her best friend, Lupe, and she’s finally getting somewhere with her writing! But as it turns out, sixth grade is no picnic…

1. Mia’s new teacher doesn’t think her writing is all that great.

2. The motel is struggling, and Mia has to answer to the Calivista’s many, many worried investors.
3. A new immigration law is looming and if it passes, it will threaten everything—and everyone—in Mia’s life.
It’s a roller coaster of challenges, and Mia needs all of her determination to hang on tight. But if anyone can find the key to getting through turbulent times, it’s Mia Tang!

Read this from the school library, after having it highly recommended by a grade six teacher. It's a fantastic series, and I'm really glad it's so popular with the kids. Doesn't pull any punches about racism and unfairness, doesn't get preachy, no one is a cartoon villain, and no one is written off wholesale. Hits that perfect balance between good storytelling and education.

Non-Fiction

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris:Synopsis from Goodreads: Explores the epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Doolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde-and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood, and America, forever.

I thought I had copied some quotes down and I am annoyed that I did not. Some were insightful, but some were very funny. Something like "Warren Beatty, who looked like an actor but was acting as a director, and Dustin Hoffman, who looked like a director but was working as an actor". And Rex Harrison and his wife getting drunk at dinner on location while filming Doctor Doolittle, and him singing songs about his penis while she did cartwheels with no underwear on. 

Read this for book club and doubt I would have discovered it otherwise which would have been a shame, considering the excitement about getting to pick it up again every evening pulled me through last January, which I hate even when I'm not fighting a respiratory infection.

I like movies. I will read happily enough books about movies, but for some reason I found this riveting. The process of someone deciding they wanted to make each movie, the search for producers and directors and money, the agonizing over casting, Sidney Poitier and racism in Hollywood (the unfairness of expecting him to be a mouthpiece for race relations without regard to how this would affect his career), Spencer Tracy's last years (he finished filming Guess Who's Coming to Dinner 17 days before his death), Rex Harrison being a giant tool, Dustin Hoffman's first years as a major player... all fascinating. Harris seemed to be able to take a wealth of information and organize it so it also created a propulsive narrative, alternating entertaining anecdotes with analysis in the perfect balance. I don't know if my mind just needed something to seize on or if the book is just exceptionally well written, but I loved it.

Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World by Christian Cooper: Synopsis from Goodreads: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes us beyond the viral video that shocked a nation and into a world of avian adventures, global excursions, and the unexpected lessons you can learn from a life spent looking up.

"Wondrous . . . captivating.”—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of An Immense World

Christian Cooper is a self-described “Blerd” (Black nerd), an avid comics fan and expert birder who devotes every spring to gazing upon the migratory birds that stop to rest in Central Park, just a subway ride away from where he lives in New York City. While in the park one morning in May 2020, Cooper was engaged in the birdwatching ritual that had been a part of his life since he was ten years old when what might have been a routine encounter with a dog walker exploded age-old racial tensions. Cooper’s viral video of the incident would send shock waves through the nation.
In Better Living Through Birding , Cooper tells the story of his extraordinary life leading up to the now-infamous incident in Central Park and shows how a life spent looking up at the birds prepared him, in the most uncanny of ways, to be a gay, Black man in America today. From sharpened senses that work just as well at a protest as in a park to what a bird like the Common Grackle can teach us about self-acceptance, Better Living Through Birding exults in the pleasures of a life lived in pursuit of the natural world and invites you to discover them yourself.

Equal parts memoir, travelogue, and primer on the art of birding, this is Cooper’s story of learning to claim and defend space for himself and others like him, from his days at Marvel Comics introducing the first gay storylines to vivid and life-changing birding expeditions through Africa, Australia, the Americas, and the Himalayas. Better Living Through Birding recounts Cooper’s journey through the wonderful world of birds and what they can teach us about life, if only we would look and listen.

Christian Cooper was the man who was in Central Park in 2020 and asked a white woman to leash her dog. She then said she was going to call the police and tell them a black man was threatening her life. For a change, the blowback all landed on the white woman instead of the black man. Partly as a result, he got a book deal.

You know how sometimes shit happens to people and they end up getting to write a book about it, and you're like, okay, shitty that that happened to you but you are dumb and annoying and this is a bit of a waste of a book deal? This is NOT that.

Cooper is also gay, and a write who worked at Marvel Comics for a time. He was instrumental in the first gay superhero storyline. He is also an avid birdwatcher, which was not remotely common for a black kid. He's am amazing writer - articulate, witty, thoughtful, self-aware, compassionate and funny. The Central Park incident gets comparatively little airplay, and his response to it is much more measured than I would have guessed, at least before I read the rest of the book. Cooper has also done a National Geographic show, "Extraordinary Birder", - racism, the gift that keeps on giving? I got this from the library and then promptly returned it and bought my own copy to finish the read and pass it around. So, so good.

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson: Synopsis from Goodreads: Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. But then Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help.

Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: the twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way. Lillian is convinced Madison is pulling her leg, but it’s the truth.

Thinking of her dead-end life at home, the life that has consistently disappointed her, Lillian figures she has nothing to lose. Over the course of one humid, demanding summer, Lillian and the twins learn to trust each other—and stay cool—while also staying out of the way of Madison’s buttoned-up politician husband. Surprised by her own ingenuity yet unused to the intense feelings of protectiveness she feels for them, Lillian ultimately begins to accept that she needs these strange children as much as they need her—urgently and fiercely. Couldn’t this be the start of the amazing life she’d always hoped for?

-”Roland shrugged. ‘We don’t have that much stuff to bring,’ the boy informed us. He had stripes buzzed into the sides of his hair, and I was shocked to realize that their hair was unsinged. I don’t know why, with these demon children bursting into flames right in front of me, their bad haircuts remaining intact was the magic that fully amazed me, but that’s how it works, I think. The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.”

–”’Was it good, Lillian?’ she asked me.

‘It was amazing,’ I said.

‘I think I like basketball,’ she said, not smiling, a little angry, like she was accepting some kind of ancient curse.”

Come on, that cover is cool. And oh DAMN, this was brilliant. Even without the periodic juvenile blazing it would be a fantastic book. Lillian's acerbic wit, the fraught relationship between two friends of wildly different socioeconomic levels, the misdeeds of powerful careless men, the needs of grieving children. It's bonkers and sad and funny and touching and brilliant.

The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies by John Langan: Synopsis from Goodreads: John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection of nine substantial stories includes such masterworks as “Technicolor,” an ingenious riff on Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”; “How the Day Runs Down,” a gripping tale of the undead; and “The Shallows,” a powerful tale of the Cthulhu Mythos. The capstone to the collection is a previously unpublished novella of supernatural terror, “Mother of Stone.” With an introduction by Jeffrey Ford and an afterword by Laird Barron.

-”What he studied consumed everything in his life. His position at the university, his friends, God help him, his family: it took all of them – or he should say, he gave all of them to it, willingly. Nor was that enough. The body of knowledge he had embraced would not be satisfied until it had devoured him, too, scooped what was him out of his body the way you spoon the seed out of a ripe avocado and filled the hollow with itself, leaving him nothing but a vessel for passing it on to whoever tracked him to whatever hovel he’d retreated to, the only trace that would remind of him the type of liquor he would require for his tuition. If there was to be any hope for him holding onto his self, he had to abandon the path he had been on for decades – break his staff and bury his books, so to speak. He must try to walk in a new direction, which led him back to the faith of his fathers, and from there, to the rabbinate.”

I've read some of these before, but will never pass up an opportunity to reread. They go beyond horror fiction to the point where it feels like Langan is making his own myths, as deep and rich and archetypal as any other. How the Day Runs Down is a really affecting pastiche of Our Town. The Wide, Carnivorous Sky combines metaphysical horror with the horror of war. Mother of Stone was extremely, disturbingly effective. Technicolor was such a deliciously, languorously grotesque descent into horror that I was equally amused and horrified.

Somehow while I was reading this I completely got my signals crossed and thought I was reading Laird Barron. Then in the afterword the author talks about writing to 'my friend, Laird Barron', and I felt like I was either still being toyed with or losing my mind completely. In fairness, their writing skill and style are not dissimilar but wow, what a destabilizing moment.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: Synopsis from Goodreads: A time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingenious exploration of the nature of power and the potential for love to change it all:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

-”I’d sat with the term ‘internally displaced person’ until I’d broken it down semantically. I was wrestling with a ghost meaning: a person whose interiority was at odds with their exteriority, who was internally (in themselves) displaced.”

-”’I know a little of the pavane and the jig…but if there will be only women…’

‘You really don’t need to worry about that. You just sort of…throw yourself around. And wiggle.’

‘I would like to be ‘thrown,’ she said wistfully.

‘Here. I’ll teach you the Electric Slide.’

‘I say, that looks fun,’ said Arthur.”

This was a bit of a surprise. I loved that it was clearly and unashamedly fan fic (the author was obsessed with Franklin's 1845 Arctic expedition and wanted to write a book about one of the character's, so she did). I love the description "a time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy" - honestly, all these things should not have worked so well together, and yet... I also loved that there was no coyness about the fact that the bridge was going to fall in love with her anachronistic Commander. There are all the obvious gags about people from the past being baffled by modernity, then less-hilarious issues like how men from the past react to women in the present, and then... spy stuff, which if I'm honest I can't recall all that clearly. Kaliane Bradley is British-Cambodian, as is her narrator, and this plays a role also. There was a ridiculous controvery when this came out, stemming from the fact that The Ministry of Time was also a Spanish tv show, and people somehow got the erroneous notion that the book was a rip-off of the show, which resulted in people who hadn't read the book review-bombing goodreads with one-star reviews. Since titles are not copyrightable, and in the tv show people travel BACK in time, while in the book they only travel FORWARD in time, this is patently idiotic. 

Lost Man's Lane by Scott Carson: Synopsis from Goodreads: A teenager explores the darkness hidden within his hometown in this spellbinding supernatural thriller from bestselling author Scott Carson.

For a sixteen-year-old, a summer internship working for a private investigator seems like a dream come true—particularly since the PI is investigating the most shocking crime to hit Bloomington, Indiana, in decades. A local woman has vanished, and the last time anyone saw her, she was in the backseat of a police car driven by a man impersonating an officer.

Marshall Miller’s internship puts him at the center of the action, a position he relishes until a terrifying moment that turns public praise for his sharp observations and uncanny memory into accusations of lying and imperiling the case. His detective mentor withdraws, friends and family worry and whisper, and Marshall alone understands that the darkness visiting his town this summer goes far beyond a single crime. Now his task is to explain it—and himself.

Lost Man's Lane is a coming-of-age tale of terror.

-”’Elevators,’ I whispered. ‘They’re simple genius, I tell you.’

It sounds mean, laughing about Jerry’s beloved job, but the jokes were a comfort, a reminder of the good days when he’d been in on the joke. You can’t patch up a parent’s pain no matter how badly you want to, and if you absorb too much of it, you’ll drown alongside them. Part of being sixteen is laughing at things that hurt. Hell, it might be the most important part.

We would do a lot of laughing that year.”

-”’Finally,’ she said. ‘Access to the inner sanctum.’

‘Can you ever say anything normal?’

‘I have the capacity but not the desire.’”

Scott Carson is a pen name for Michael Kortya, who writes some pretty good thrillers, but IMO the Scott Carson horror books kick the shit out of all the mainstream stuff. Teenaged son of a single mom gets his driver's license and immediately has a run-in with a scary cop who maybe doesn't exist? It's a coming-of-age story set in the late 90s with a melancholy nostalgia - world events head each chapter. It's a an amazing love story and a cock-eyed friendship story, and bittersweet family story, and an elaborately-constructed folklore-flavoured horror story. You don't know what the hell is happening until you do, and it's crazy cool. This is as good as the best Stephen King, and I will definitely reread.

The Invocations by Krystal Sutherland: Synopsis from Goodreads: Zara Jones believes in magic because the alternative is too painful to consider—that her murdered sister is gone forever and there is nothing she can do about it. Rather than grieving and moving on, Zara decides she will do whatever it takes to claw her sister back from the grave—even trading in the occult.

Jude Wolf may be the daughter of a billionaire, but she is also undeniably cursed. After a deal with a demon went horribly wrong, her soul has been slowly turning necrotic. It’s a miserable existence marred by pain, sickness, and monstrous things that taunt her in the night. Now that she’s glimpsed what’s beyond the veil, Jude’s desperate to find someone to undo the damage she’s done to herself.
Enter Emer Byrne, an orphaned witch with a dark past and a deadly power, a.k.a. the solution to both Zara’s and Jude’s problems. Though Emer lives a hardscrabble life, she gives away her most valuable asset—her invocations—to women in desperate situations who are willing to sacrifice a piece of their soul in exchange for a scrap of power. Zara and Jude are willing, but they first have to find Emer.
When Emer’s clients start turning up dead all over London, a vital clue leads Zara and Jude right to her. If a serial killer is targeting her clients, Emer wants to know why—and to stop them. She strikes a tenuous alliance with Zara and Jude to hunt a killer before they are next on his list, even if she can’t give them in return what Zara and Jude want most: a sister and a soul.

-"Jude knows she should leave. Real witches are hard to find because they don't want to be found. Plus, magic isn't something that can be controlled or divined through tarot cards or crystal balls or rat bones cast into bowls in heady rooms that stinks of incense. Once upon a time, it might've been, but those days are long gone. There's very little left of magic anymore, and what remains is bitter and strong and dangerous. It is kept hidden from the world. That is the only way for those who practice it to survive."

I really, really loved this. I'm not sure I can articulate exactly why, and I would be surprised if anyone I know read it and had the same reaction (seriously, read at own risk, don't @ me). I liked the fact that it was so female-centered, with three completely different personalities. I liked the way the storytelling was elaborate and dark and focused so much on language, because, well, words. There was something really affecting about Zara's journey - I mean, everyone who loses someone goes some way towards fantasizing about doing a deal with mortality. Not everyone destroys their life and loses their ind over it, of course. There is negotiation and sacrifice, and some really disturbing body horror, and a sub-plot about how crippling it can be to be the offspring of wealthy, careless parents (something I've been coincidentally reading a lot about lately). Mostly this just had that elusive quality that makes something an irresistible read for me. 

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, translated by Edith Grossman: Synopsis from Goodreads:Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray—he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants—Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years.

With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel. The book has been enormously influential on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, "just as some people read the Bible."

-”’It’s in God’s hands,’ said Sancho. ‘I believe everything your grace says, but sit a little straighter. It looks like you’re tilting, it must be from the battering you took when you fell.’

‘That is true,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘and if I do not complain about the pain, it is because it is not the custom of knights errant to complain about any wound, even if their innards are spilling out because of it.’

‘If that’s true, I have nothing to say,’ Sancho responded, ‘but God knows I’d be happy if your grace complained when something hurt you. As for me, I can say that I’ll complain about the smallest pain I have, unless what you said about not complaining also applies to the squires of knights errant.’”

We've been trying to put it on the book club list with numerous dissenters for years, with many dissenters. We're down two members now, which gave us an extra month with no selection, so we did Book One in September and Book Two in October.

I enjoyed it. I wasn't rapturous about it or anything, I didn't feel like I couldn't put it down. I finished Book Two at 2:45 the day of my actual book club meeting, in fact. It could be very repetitive and horribly misogynistic (of course), although surprisingly proto-feminist in parts as well. But I would read a few pages every time I sat down to read, before moving on to something more modern, and I kind of missed it when I was done.

This was considered one of the first examples, if not the first example, of the novel, and many techniques in wide use now are used here first. It would have been so interesting to read it from that perspective, which of course is impossible now. I'm not a big lover of broad satire, which I find can come across as just kind of dumb and slapstick, but there were some actual laugh-out-loud parts. I'm glad I read it.

The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi: Synopsis from Goodreads: Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings. As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men.

But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens—and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis—the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.

Propulsively readable, teeming with unforgettable characters, The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel of family and friendship that challenges expectations—a dramatic story of loss and transcendence that will move every reader.

"This is how Vivek was born, after death and into grief. It marked him, you see, it cut him down like a tree. They brought him into a home filled with incapacitating sorrow; his whole life was a mourning.”

I kept the book (The Beautyful Ones are Not yet Born) for how it was spelled. Beautiful. I had no idea why that spelling was chosen, but I liked it because it kept the beauty intact. It wasn’t swallowed, killed off with an i to make a whole new word. It was solid; it was still there, so much of it that it couldn’t fit into a new word, so much fullness. You got a better sense of exactly what was causing that fullness. Beauty.

Beauty. 

I wanted to be as whole as that word.”

I had this out from the library over last Christmas and hadn't managed to read it, so I had it with another one in the car to return, while my sister's family was here. I was driving with my daughter and my niece and my niece saw it and declared it wonderful and said I had to read it, so I kept it (did not get suspended for it though).

What a strange and beautiful book. Some parts are extremely discomfiting, which is not surprising given the subject matter. The way family members try so hard to communicate with each other lovingly but can't overcome certain differences reminded me a little of Home by Marilynne Robinson (I feel like I said this about another book from last year - Home seems to be the benchmark for this kind of thing for me). It is terribly, terribly sad and I kind of wish I hadn't read it in January, but I am glad I read it. There is a kind of comfort and redemption in the end, and my niece found it cathartic. Very sad, though.

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry: Synopsis from Goodreads: From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author, a dazzlingly written novel exploring love, memory, grief, and long-buried secrets

Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe.
But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.

A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.

-”He had not been, he did not wish to go, he was quite content just to gaze out. Just to do that. To him this was the whole point of retirement, of existence – to be stationary, happy and useless.”

-”O’Casey had been intending to press on, but Tom stopped him immediately.

‘Ah no, Jesus, no, lads, not the fecking priests, no.’ And he got up with surprising grace and agility. ‘No,no,’ he said.

‘There must have been a touch of comedy in it, because O’Casey couldn’t help laughing. But he managed to convert it fairly smoothly into speech, and anyway Tom Kettle wasn’t a man to take offence so easily. He knew there was almost always comedy stuck in the breast of human affairs, quivering like a knife.”

Okay, this book saw that I called the last one sad and said Hold My Guinness. It was an impulse read discovered on the Libby app. It took me a bit to get in it - there's a bit of a Joycean rhythm that you have to get the hang of, which is a bit like getting comfortable in a wavy ocean and then suddenly being slammed against the rocks by the reasons that Kettle is in this little shack by the Irish Sea. There are surprising moments of laughter and joy even in the terribly sad journey. As usual, the Catholic church has a lot to answer for. 

Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny: Synopsis from Goodreads: A wise, bighearted, boundlessly joyful novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family

Jane falls in love with Duncan easily. He is charming, good-natured, and handsome but unfortunately, he has also slept with nearly every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. Jane sees Duncan’s old girlfriends everywhere–at restaurants, at the grocery store, even three towns away.

While Jane may be able to come to terms with dating the world’s most prolific seducer of women, she wishes she did not have to share him quite so widely. His ex-wife, Aggie, a woman with shiny hair and pale milkmaid skin, still has Duncan mow her lawn. His coworker, Jimmy, comes and goes from Duncan’s apartment at the most inopportune times. Sometimes Jane wonders if a relationship can even work with three people in it–never mind four. Five if you count Aggie’s eccentric husband, Gary. Not to mention all the other residents of Boyne City, who freely share with Jane their opinions of her choices.

But any notion Jane had of love and marriage changes with one terrible car crash. Soon Jane’s life is permanently intertwined with Duncan’s, Aggie’s, and Jimmy’s, and Jane knows she will never have Duncan to herself. But could it be possible that a deeper kind of happiness is right in front of Jane’s eyes? A novel that is alternately bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny, Katherine Heiny’s Early Morning Riser is her most astonishingly wonderful work to date.

-”So I went downstairs, and Roland was there waiting, and I told him my sister was indisposed, and he said, ‘Well, why don’t you come to the movies with me instead?’ Now, my father was very old-fashioned, and he thought it was highly inappropriate for a twenty-year-old man to take a fourteen-year-old girl out, and he said under no circumstances could I go. But I was so woebegone, and after my sister shouted down the stairs that Roland was pretty harmless, my father decided we could sit on the porch together and have iced tea and cake.”

-”Aggie had included the cocoa recipe along with the ingredients. First Jane was supposed to warm half-and-half in a saucepan, then add shaved pieces of Leonidas Belgian chocolate and a cinnamon stick and stir it until the chocolate melted. Then remove the cinnamon stick, add a pinch of salt, and stir in more half-and-half, and then use a blender to whip it all smooth. Here’s what Jane would like to know: How, exactly, did Aggie ever get anything done?

Still, she followed the directions, and it was, somewhat depressingly, the best cocoa ever. Jane even poured some in a sippy cup for Patrice, who tasted it and said, “Ohhhh,’ in a rapturous voice.”

A Nicole recommendation. Sort of like reading the blog of a really good friend, someone smart and funny and a little bonkers. A book where the really good story just sort of carries you along, with hilarity and sadness and insight and absurdity, is such a delight (much like Nicole). Also offered as  proof that I do not only five-star books that make me want to throw myself under a truck.

James by Percival Everett: Synopsis from Goodreads: A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and ferociously funny—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.

-”I waited at Miss Watson’s kitchen door, rocked a loose step board with my foot, knew she was going to tell me to fix it tomorrow. I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of corn bread that she had made with my Sadie’s recipe. Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the end of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.”

-”’Lawdy, missum!’ Looky dere.’

‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘Why is that correct?’

Lizzie raised her hand. ‘Because we must let the whites be the ones who name the trouble.

‘And why is that?’ I asked

February said, ‘Because they need to know everything before us. Because they need to name everything.’”

I discovered Percival Everett when I was searching for another book on the Libby app (library ebooks) and saw his book called The Trees. I borrowed it thinking maybe it would be kind of like The Overstory. It was not. It was in many ways unlike anything I'd read before, and a fresh take on racism and race relations and revenge fantasy. I loved it. Then I watched the Oscar-nominated movie American Fiction, based on his book Erasure - also very good, and had some similar elements. This was more straightforward, but equally brilliant, with the same skewed and clever way of making racist white people ridiculous, although no less dangerous for it. There's something so loving and kind about rescuing this character from his place in literary history this way. 

There There by Tommy Orange: Synopsis from Goodreads: Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize.
Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism.

Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.

-"This quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn't read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it's been developed over buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there."

-"The next day the Massachusetts Bay Colony had a feast in celebration, and the governor declared it a day of thanksgiving. Thanksgivings like these happened everywhere, whenever there were what we have to call 'successful massacres.' At one such celebration in Manhattan, people were said to have celebrated by kicking the heads of Pequot people through the streets like soccer balls."

Brilliantly done, but of course very difficult to read. I didn't actually find it that hard to distinguish between the different characters' voices. The sense of mounting dread, on top of the already heaping dose of suffering, was almost suffocating. I've since seen that there is a sequel, and I have it on my list, although I'll need to screw my courage to the sticking point somewhat.

What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin: Synopsis from Goodreads: Out of the rich culture of India and the brutal drama of the 1947 Partition comes this lush and eloquent debut novel about two women married to the same man.Roop is a young girl whose mother has died and whose father is deep in debt. Soshe is elated to learn she is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner in a union beneficial to both. For Sardaji’s first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him children. Roop believes that she and Satya, still very much in residence, will be friends. But the relationship between the older and younger woman is far more complex. And, as India lurches toward independence, Sardarji struggles to find his place amidst the drastic changes.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, What the Body Remembers is at once poetic, political, feminist, and sensual.

-”And as he (Jeevan) moves from posting to posting and teaches them to fight, he says he has learned it is not only, as the English believe, Sikhs, Gurkhas and Marathas who can fight, but all men whose bodies remember humiliation and anger from this and past lives.”

-”A few months ago there was a Roop who might have protested, a Roop who had no fear because she could imagine no harm, no consequences. A few years ago there was a Roop who could have stood before a man and known herself his better by blood. But that Roop is gone and in her place stands a woman who has climbed beyond her father’s kin, and now must hold fast to the gains of fortune.

If she refuses, she can be sent home a failure, a burden to Papaji. Tongues will flap in the village. Papaji’s izzat will be dragged in the mud – Abu Ibrahim will tell Papaji, ‘What can you expect from sending a girl to school, she becomes quarrelsome, she gives trouble.’”

In the later part of last year, I realized I was getting a little bit lazy with my reading - sort of unconsciously shying away from anything too long or too dense. I don't even know if it was hesitation to try to focus for that long or a stupid concern about my reading target.

This is a book my friend Kerry recommended to me years and years ago. My library didn't have it, but some time later I was helping a friend's husband organize books for a book sale that Kiwanis was running, and it turned up like a fortuitously magical gift. I bought it, but then stuck it on the shelf for years again because sometimes I just enjoy doing things that make no damned sense. Finally picked it up after finishing Don Quixote and realizing I actually liked having something long and involved in the background while reading other books at the same time.

It was fully as amazing as Kerry said. Deals with very real political events surrounding the partitioning of India into India and Pakistan, and also treats reincarnation as an actual bodily fact with real consequences for the characters' lives. Many hierarchies are explored - male and female, higher and lower caste, British and Indian, etc. One of the main male characters was educated in England and has an inner critical British gentleman named Cunningham. Roop, one of the main female characters, goes from being a selfish and flaky child (no education for girls, hard to blame her) to a hardened and resourceful woman. The other main female character is the first wife to Roop's husband, demoted and humiliated because of her inability to bear children, and is cruel and ruthless as a result - hard to blame her as well.

It is long and luscious and moving and profound and I absolutely adored it.

Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield: Synopsis from Goodreads: When Diary of a Provincial Lady was first published in 1930, critics on both sides of the Atlantic greeted it with enthusiasm. This charming, delightful and extremely funny book about daily life in a frugal English household was named by booksellers as the out-of-print novel most deserving of republication.

This is a gently self-effacing, dry-witted tale of a long-suffering and disaster-prone Devon lady of the 1930s. A story of provincial social pretensions and the daily inanities of domestic life to rival George Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody.

-"November 7th -- Plant the indoor bulbs. Just as I am in the middle of them, Lady Boxe calls. I say, untruthfully, how nice to see her, and beg her to sit down while I just finish the bulbs. Lady B. makes determined attempt to sit down in armchair where I have already placed two bulb-bowls and the bag of charcoal, is headed off just in time, and takes the sofa."

-"Do I realize, says Lady B., that the Cold Habit is entirely unnecessary, and can be avoided by giving the child a nasal douche of salt-and-water every morning before breakfast? Think of several rather tart and witty rejoinders to this, but unfortunately not until Lady B.'s Bentley has taken her away."

-"Am asked what I think of Harriet Hume but am unable to say, as I have not read it. Have a depressed feeling that this is going to be another case of Orlando about which was perfectly able to talk most intelligently about until I read it, and found myself unfortunately  unable to understand any of it."

Another Nicole recommendation (available as a free Kindle ebook!), and one of those books that I enjoy in spite of, or maybe because of, the fact that they demonstrate how ignorant I sometimes am. I was absolutely convinced that this would be sort of stilted and formal and that I would enjoy it but in a dutiful kind of way. Then I started reading and had to keep rechecking the publishing date, because it is freaking hilarious, and seems like it could have been published much more recently. Humorous snarkiness was not invented only in the past ten or twenty years - who knew? Shows that the plight of mothers - particularly stay-at-home mothers -  is fairly timeless, which is a bit depressing but also sort of comforting, as is the fact that having a solid sense of irony also transcends time and culture.