A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Book Review: Soon The Light Will Be Perfect

Middle school, as a whole, remains one of the worst experiences of my life. I was socially awkward, chubby, awash with hormones and feelings I struggled to control but that more often controlled me. I was angry and lashed out frequently. I’ve never done so poorly in school in my life. The best thing that happened was that it ended. And I got over it! I’m something resembling a reasonably well-adjusted adult now…but hoo boy, middle school me did not seem like she was going to get there.

A lot of people struggle with those years between proper childhood and being a real teenager. Even in the best of circumstances, your body is changing, your friendships start to change, and the outside world starts to intrude. Unfortunately, the unnamed 12 year-old protagonist of Dave Patterson’s Soon The Light Will Be Perfect is not living in the best of circumstances. His family, living in rural Vermont, is trying desperately to claw out of poverty, having just moved into a house from the nearby trailer park, but his father’s shaky hold on his job in a munitions factory is causing a lot of stress. Causing even more stress is his mother’s diagnosis of cancer. The family leans heavily on their deep, conservative Catholic religion for strength, but despite the fiery pro-life rhetoric the church espouses, even the priest seems to be questioning his faith.

While his mother gets sicker and sicker over the course of the summer, the boy and his older brother are often left more or less to their own devices. The brother, about to start high school, begins to rebel, buying NWA albums and spending hours talking to his girlfriend on the phone. The boy acts out in his own way, including being drawn into the orbit of a pretty, troubled girl his own age named Taylor who’s just moved into his old trailer park with her mother. The family is teetering on the edge of a break, and it wouldn’t take much to push them over the edge.

This sounds epic, right? There is a LOT going on here: religion, parents and children, siblings, first infatuations, child abuse, poverty, social class, cancer. But the book is only about 250 pages long. Which is really where it fails: it’s overambitious and unfortunately, under-executed. A book of this length should be tight, focused. Instead, Patterson hops from heavy theme to heavy theme, never giving any of them room to breathe or develop. It feels more than anything like an early draft, where he’s got the major plot points he wants to hit on the page and will come back and fill in all the rest of it later…and then never did.

Which is a pity, because while he’s not a masterful prose stylist and some of the symbolism is pretty clunky, there are some good elements here. While I did not think the technique of leaving the narrator unnamed was effective in this case, Patterson does solid work in building the character, and everyone in the book is rendered with sympathy. The dynamic between the family members feels real and is often moving. As a whole, though, this book just didn’t come together. I can’t in good faith recommend it to anyone.

A Month In The Life: January 2025

One month of 2025 down, 11 to go! And in just a few days, the Nevada State Legislature will begin the 83rd regular session and my life will go all topsy turvy! It was a bit of a chaotic month in its own way, though, and it’s only getting more bonkers from here.

In Books…

  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: In an alternate history version of Britain, the Napoleonic Wars rage across Europe, Mad King George sits on the throne, and England has no magicians to help. It used to have them, a long time ago. One, the legendary John Uskglass, even established a separate kingdom in Northern England. There are still people who call themselves magicians, but they only study history and theory. They cannot perform magic. Until one day when an obscure country gentleman, Gilbert Norrell, makes the stone statutes of his local church come alive as an announcement that magic has returned to the land. He goes to London, eager to be useful in the war effort (and just as eager to receive the plaudits for so doing). He makes his name in the city by bringing back to life the fiancee of a government minister with the help of a fairy that he summons, the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. He makes a bargain with the fairy for half the woman’s life, but as in many fairy tales, he is deceived. Emma Pole enjoys only a brief period of her revived life before the fairy comes to collect what is his, requiring her to attend balls in Faerie every night that leave her exhausted and dazed during the day, unable to fully function. Norrell is a cautious, proud, and miserly man, who jealously guards the secrets of his art. But even his hoarding of nearly every book of magic in England cannot prevent the rise of another magician, Jonathan Strange. Strange is about as different from Norrell as it is possible to be: younger, much more impulsive, intuitive, personable. When Jonathan and his wife Arabella come to London as well, one would think there would be a clash…but for a time, the magicians get on well together, with Norrell carefully doling out knowledge to the younger man. But when Strange is deployed to war under the command of Lord Wellington, developing his skills in the field, he no longer finds that he needs Norrell’s tutelage and the two quarrel. Magic, though, does not limit itself to what Norrell and Strange want, and the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair takes an active interest in the people of England that has devastating consequences. This novel is epic, sprawling, and ambitious. In its setting and scope, it evokes the great classics of the Napoleonic Wars: War & Peace, Vanity Fair, and The Count of Monte Cristo came to my mind as I read it. It’s a bold move to place your book among those, but Clarke brings her own take on events to the table. That said, it does not always achieve what it seems to be going for. Pacing is a real issue, with a very slow start and significant drag in the back half (which feels like it might be intended to set up the sequel Clarke was originally planning). For a book of this length, the character development is surprisingly thin. Strange is the most well-rounded one but the novel is not interior at all. That being said, there are quite a lot of characters, and several of the less prominent ones are vivid and interesting, so Clarke mostly is able to distract from the lack of depth with a well-populated world. I’m not sure how much I thought Clarke’s nods to Georgian/Regency-era writing (using “shew” instead of “show”, “suprize” instead of “surprise”, etc) are successful. I think the style she deploys calls to mind that era of writing well enough without those sort of things and I found it distracting as much as anything else. But I loved the footnotes, and the overall tone of her prose. It’s overall a good book, sometimes even very good, but a big time commitment.
  • Nightbitch: I was dismayed when my book club selected this one. It had been buzzy there for a bit when it first came out but everything I read about it made me feel sure I wouldn’t like it. Still, I’m in a book club in part to read books I might not have picked up if left to my own devices, so I went in with as open a mind as I could. The book tells the story of an unnamed mother, an artist in a unnamed small midwestern town married to an engineer. When she had her son, she wanted to keep working but she was both not making enough money to meaningfully offset daycare costs and felt tremendous guilt about missing time with her child, so she became a full-time parent. Her husband’s job requires constant travel, leaving her alone with her son for the entire workweek. He’s two now, but the parenting load is not getting easier on her, only heavier and heavier. One night while their son is sleeping with them, he awakes in the middle of the night and begins to cry. The mother is exhausted from an entire week of interrupted sleep and lets it continue in the hope that her husband will attend to him, but no dice. She snaps, scaring both her child and her husband, and jokes the next morning that she is the Night Bitch. This becomes the name she is referred by as she starts noticing some…changes. A patch of hair on her neck that feels like fur. Her teeth feel longer, sharper. Her senses, particularly smell, feel sharper. She tells her husband she feels like she might be turning into a dog. He laughs it off, from yet another hotel room, but it feels more and more real to Nightbitch. Things escalate from there, but where can this possibly end up? Let’s start with the positive here: Rachel Yoder’s writing is the standout, vividly expressing the terror and anger of early motherhood, the way dealing with a toddler is both drudgery and chaos, the way it feels like every mother is doing it better than you. Now for the rest: I absolutely hated this book. This would have been a compelling short story as a riff on the ways that motherhood can make you feel like not just someone else but something else other than yourself entirely. But there’s not nearly enough there to justify a novel’s length, even though this one is under 250 pages. So there are side plots with a group of local moms that work to lure Nightbitch into their MLM and a book that recounts folklore about women who experience mystical transformations, neither of which really go anywhere. The central metaphor collapses under the weight of sustaining a prolonged narrative. Just write about how much it can suck being the mother of a small child! There doesn’t need to be this whole dog angle! Also there is a truly upsetting amount of violence to animals, including violence against a pet cat. I wish I had the time I spent reading it back.
  • The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: The real-life story of two “expert” witnesses who made their living in Mississippi, focusing on two men who found themselves in prison at least in part because of the testimony those doctors offered in their cases, this book is an expose of the way the criminal justice system can fail. Dr. Steven Hayne held himself out as a forensic pathologist despite a lack of accreditation from the most reputable organization regulating these types of doctors, performing over four times more autopsies than they recommend as the absolute upper maximum to be able to do the job with reasonable proficiency. Dr. Michael West was a dentist who claimed to be a bite mark expert…among many other kinds of expertise he was able to provide to prosecutors, almost always managing to find that law enforcement’s preferred suspect was in fact guilty of the crime at hand. Two toddler girls were sexually assaulted and killed in the early 90s, and Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer were imprisoned for the crimes, with Brewer even living for years on Death Row. The real perpetrator wasn’t connected to what happened until DNA testing in the 2000s from the Innocence Project, freeing both men but with no real ability to compensate for the wrongs that were done unto them. This is an important story, and co-authors Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington present a deeply-researched analysis of how it came to be. They go into the history of racism/Jim Crow in Mississippi and how the county coroner system enabled it to continue with impunity for as long as it did. They speak to the halfhearted efforts to create a state medical examiner position, defeated at every turn by the interests of the coroners and the law enforcement officials with whom they worked hand in hand. They review expert testimony, how it is qualified and admitted in court, and the inherent tension between science and the law. And, of course, they talk about Hayne and West themselves, and the cases that landed Brooks and Brewer behind bars. And partly, it’s the breadth of the perspective here that keeps it from really coming together to be more than the sum of its parts. The stories of Brooks and Brewer frame the narrative, but they aren’t really centered. The authors are more interested in showing the reader a system with rot at its core, and they do so with impressively thorough fact-finding, but there’s no real narrative hook. Any time any particular angle starts to pick up steam and get interesting, it’s interrupted by a switch to another subject. There’s a compelling book to be crafted with these elements, but it’s unfortunately not the one on offer here. It’s not terrible, it just never really grabs and holds attention.
  • The Muralist: Before artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock were people whose work commanded millions of dollars, they were among thousands of artists employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. B.A. Shapiro creates to join them the character of Alizee Benoit, an artist born in the United States to French Jewish parents but mostly raised in France with her brother Henri by her aunt and uncle after they were orphaned. Alizee returns to America to live and work in New York, channeling her shifting moods into her personal abstract impressionist art while she toils away at blandly patriotic murals for the government. She is close friends with Rothko, Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. She makes the most of a chance meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt, advocating for non-representational art to receive some modicum of support. As she starts to get increasingly upsetting news about what’s going on in Europe from her brother and extended family, she frantically searches for a way to get visas for them and becomes involved in political agitation to allow more refugees into the country. Her already fragile mental health suffers and she pours her heartache into her canvases, drawing her to-be-famous friends into a major project that she hopes will inspire action in the broader public. In a second storyline, in the present day, Alizee’s grand-niece Dani has always wondered about her long-lost artist great-aunt that vanished mysteriously in the 1940s, leaving behind only a few paintings. Dani was once an artist herself but traded in the uncertainty of that life for one at an auction house, where she discovers a panel of canvas tucked behind what looks like it might be an early Rothko or Pollock. Convinced that it might be the work of her aunt, she embarks on a mission to discover what became of Alizee. This follows a very familiar historical fiction formula: create a plucky lady and give her famous friends as well as the chance to interact with major historical events. It is aggressively fine. The characters are mostly pretty flat: Alizee could have been pretty interesting with proper development but is mostly an “artists need to be a little bit crazy to create” cliche, her friends are paper-thin, Dani is more plot device than person. The structure, mostly following Alizee as she works for the WPA with Dani’s timeline occasionally breaking in to fill in bits and pieces about what her descendants do and don’t know about what might have happened to her, is pretty effective at creating momentum, as are the short chapters. The prose is workmanlike, the exposition and dialogue often clunky. I knew very little about the Art Project or the artists involved, though, so I appreciated the opportunity to learn more. It’s neither especially bad nor especially good, but rather a perfectly fine exemplar of a particular sub-type of its genre.
  • Harrow the Ninth: This picks up immediately after its predecessor Gideon the Ninth, plunging the reader straight back in with nothing in the way of reorientation. Harrowhark, necromancer of the Ninth House, has ascended to become a Lyctor to the Emperor along with Ianthe of the Third House, a status achieved by the deaths of their respective cavaliers. The story is told along two lines: one in the present, told in second person, with Harrow struggling to orient herself to her new reality and the war she is intended to fight against the Emperor’s enemies. In the other, told in third person, she experiences Canaan House from the first book all over again…but this time, instead of Gideon Nav serving as her cavalier, it is instead Ortus Nigenad. Naturally, things unfold differently than they did in the first iteration of the story. While I was able to keep my head around the plot in Gideon, for the most part, I will confess that I got completely lost in Harrow, despite pulling open the Wikipedia plot summaries for both books while I was reading in a desperate attempt to figure out what was supposed to be going on. It helped a little, but not a lot. I do not think I am alone there, I think this is a book where you either have to decide to let go of really understanding everything that’s going on and just roll with it or you’ll get frustrated quickly. Once I decided to go with it, I found it a very entertaining experience. I had a hard time putting it down and always wanted to pick it back up. Character remains a very strong suit for Muir, I had been very bummed to be losing out on the snarky perspective of Gideon that was so delightful in the first book but but prickly, proud Harrow won me over. And the new characters, the Emperor and his Lyctors, were just as enjoyably rendered. Muir’s prose and dialogue also shine, full of clever references to both classical stories and pop culture. I can’t wait to get to the third book and am eagerly awaiting the fourth (and final planned one) as well. A treat of a reading experience despite a convoluted plot.
  • Stella Dallas: When working-class striver Stella meets and charms the educated, sophisticated Stephen Dallas, she’s sure she’s found her way into a higher echelon. Stephen fled from his hometown in shame after his lawyer father committed suicide when his embezzlement was discovered, breaking up what seemed like a marriage-bound relationship to Helen, the lovely daughter of a local judge. Stephen and Stella are smitten and wed quickly, with their daughter Laurel being born shortly thereafter. It would seem like a recipe for happiness in 1923, but the underlying tension between the couple over Stella’s unwillingness, or inability, to fit into Stephen’s expectations for a wife (plus a set of rumors about Stella’s flirty-but-chaste connection with a riding instructor) drive them apart. By the time Laurel is a teenager, the two have long lived away from each other. Stephen supports his wife and daughter and sees the latter for a month every year, but divorce in this era was complicated and scandalous. Even being merely separated doesn’t shield Laurel from social opprobrium…she’s left out among her private-school classmates and even the other kids at the hotel where she and her mother live. Stella is determined to give Laurel every advantage she can, making her beautiful clothing by hand because she’s spending all their money putting her daughter through private school and into lessons for horseback riding and golf to ensure she’ll fit in with the in-crowd. When Stephen reconnects with the now-widowed Helen and starts to be interested in a divorce, though, Stella is faced with agonizing decisions about how to really give her daughter the best chance for a happy life. If this sounds like melodrama, that’s what it absolutely is. It’s working hard to pull heartstrings with its stock characters, especially with the bond between the rough-around-the-edges but fiercely loving Stella and the innately good and loyal Laurel. It’s not hard to see where the plot is going to go or how it will go there, nor is the prose all that spectacular. Where I found it interesting, to the extent that I did at all, was in how it reflected what would have been the widely-held views and prejudices of its intended readers, especially in the contrast it sets up between Stella and Helen. Stella is “the tacky one”, who uses makeup (just some as a young woman and increasingly more as she ages), who has gained weight and become thick around the middle, who employed artifice to ensnare Stephen. Helen, portrayed as virtuous, is bare-faced and slim, refusing to dye her hair even as she starts to develop greys. Though she wed a significantly older, wealthy man who she cared for but did not love, this choice is tacitly approved of in the narrative. The social prejudices of Stephen’s class, which would damn both the ultimately-harmless Stella and even her daughter by association, are not challenged or criticized. In a pre-Depression world, the book reflects a perspective that social climbing is the real villain here. But it’s honestly just not very good as a piece of writing, so I can’t recommend it.

 

In Life…

  • Preparing for session: There’s no way to ever really be ready for session, at least not that I’ve found over the past five I’ve been a part of. But I’ve been reading bills and working with legislators and clients and it’s going to happen no matter what!

Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2024

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the authors we read for the first time last year, and as usual my list includes several writers I am embarrassed to be so new to but better late than never?

Ursula K. LeGuin: One of the masters of science fiction! I found her work thought-provoking and enjoyed the way she created relationships between her characters so I’m really curious to keep reading her back catalog.

Octavia Butler: Another queen of sci-fi and I enjoyed her thoughtful, realistic world-building just as much as LeGuin so another one I’ll be reading extensively!

Sally Rooney: She’s like THE millennial lady author. I have to admit I wasn’t especially impressed with the one of her four books I’ve read thus far but people are rapturous enough about her stuff that I’ll be trying the others.

V.E. Schwab: She’s written a bunch of fantasy novels that I have on my to-read list and I quite liked the one I read this year so I’ll be reading more in this series and more of hers overall for sure.

Aminatta Forna: I’d seen a couple of her books on monthly Kindle sales when I was browsing those regularly and they seemed interesting enough so I bought a few but just got around to reading one this year and it was really good so I’m eager to read more!

Jean Hanff Korlitz: Her book The Plot was recommended to me by my boss, but I read a different one first that I already owned. It was not my favorite, it did that thing where it’s pretty engaging but then falls apart as soon as you finish and actively think about it, but it wasn’t so bad I won’t read more.

Ali Smith: An author I’d been meaning to try for a long time and I’m so glad I finally did, I loved her work and am excited to read more!

Juhea Kim: She’s only written two books, but I liked the second one enough to be very excited to go back to read the first and anything else she puts out!

Jasmine Guillory: I’d heard her described as a person who writes romance novels with broad appeal, and while I found her book enjoyable enough to give her another try, it was more insubstantial than I’d been hoping for.

Colleen Hoover: The darling of BookTok, I figured I might as well give her work a try. Well, now I have tried, and I know to never return to that well.

Book Review: Empire Falls

For all that we mythologize the small town as “real America”, it’s not always what it’s cracked up to be. A small town, like Empire Falls, Maine, in Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, can be suffocating: everyone knows everyone else’s business, a few wealthy/well-connected people can exert outsized control, and opportunities can be slim. Miles Roby dreamed of escaping Empire Falls as a young man, and managed to get out to go to college for a few years before returning when his mother, Grace, got sick. That’s when he began working at the Empire Grill, which he now manages and hopes to one day purchase from Francine Whiting, the widow of the wealthy C.B. Whiting, who basically owns the town. The town was once home to successful mills, but those have long since closed and it seems like more than anything it’s the tenacity of the townspeople keeping it alive at all.

Miles himself is in a rough spot: his wife Janine has recently divorced him after cheating on him with Walt Comeau, the owner of a fitness club where Janine’s frantic exercising helped her lose quite a lot of weight. Their daughter Christine, called Tick, just broke up with the popular Zack Minty, son of police officer Jimmy Minty, who’s never liked Miles and finds little ways to harass him when he can. Zack, for his part, not only bothers Tick but also antagonizes fellow high-schooler John Voss, who has a bad home life. Francine’s daughter Cindy, who has long nursed an unrequited crush on Miles, has just returned to town…but Miles is thinking about finally acting on his own crush on waitress Charlene. And a trip that Miles took with his mother to Martha’s Vinyard as a child resurfaces in his memory, throwing everything he thought he knew about his childhood into question.

This is a book that I probably would have liked if I’d read it in my 20s. Books about families and relationships over time are ones that I tend to gravitate towards, and this digs deeply into two generations of Robys. But as I’ve matured as a reader, I’ve developed a more critical eye, and there are some serious issues with how Russo tells this story. The book is rife with subtle misogyny, particularly in the character of Janine. She’s written as vapid and shallow, obsessed with maintaining her weight loss, desperate to maintain the active sex life she enjoys with Walt, and inconsiderate of everyone around her. Miles’s perspective makes clear that he wasn’t a good husband to her (partly because he was constantly pining over his co-worker), but he is absolutely portrayed as the sympathetic party in their relationship. And then there’s a plot development at the end of the book that I thought was ill-considered and gratuitous in general, but specifically to this point used trauma inflicted on Tick to spur Miles to make an important decision for his own personal growth. Using female pain as a catalyst for male action is a trope that’s so deeply embedded in our storytelling that it’s hard to notice unless you’ve had your attention drawn to it, but once you see it, it’s everywhere, including here.

While this was published in 2001, well in advance of current political events, I came to it as a reader after the 2016 election. My interest level in narratives that seek to glorify small-town white dudes and center their problems as uniquely relevant and important is pretty low, and that’s exactly what this book does. It’s not a bad book, per se. Russo’s prose is high-quality and the plotting/storytelling was generally pretty solid (apart from the end, which I don’t intend to spoil, but I thought was cheap and unearned). It has the polish and heft of a prize-winning sort of book, so I’m not at all surprised that it won the Pulitzer. But at the end of the day I just didn’t enjoy reading it, and so I can’t recommend it for other readers either.

What A Year: 2024 Edition

2025 is here, so it’s time for my annual look-back at the year that was!

In Life…

In comparison to the changes of the last several years (buying a house in 2021, having a baby in 2022, going through my first legislative session as a mother and experiencing a bunch of other parenting “firsts” in 2023), this has been a quieter year. In many ways, a smaller one. And with the loss of our little doggie, a sadder one too. We’ve stayed busy, there is no other way to be as parents of a toddler. But busy with trips to the park and swim lessons and potty training and home maintenance and normal-ish work schedules and trips away here and there, not big showy busy. 2025 is almost certain to be a more chaotic year. We’re on the cusp of another legislative session, which will be challenging in new ways than the previous one. C is somehow going to turn three soon, which feels barely possible. He continues to learn and grow by leaps and bounds. He loves to sing and laugh. He still needs a nap but skips it almost always. He’s obsessed with cars. I love being his mama and watching him turn into more and more of his own sweet funny person is a source of profound joy for me.

We made our annual family trip back to Michigan, of course, and I did get to have some solo travel experiences as well. My work retreat was to Austin, a city I would love to get a chance to explore more fully. And also on deck for a return trip someday is Montreal, where I spent the better part of a week inside the Centre Bell watching the Figure Skating World Championships with my best friend, but we didn’t get as much of a chance as we might have liked to really get out and around because it was very very cold. I went to Portland for the first time with my childhood besties and we had a blast eating and drinking and exploring, so let’s put this one on that list too. I wish we could have done a second trip in a row to Worlds, which is being held in Boston, but it will be during session and so we went to Skate America in greater Dallas instead. This one is not on the “go back someday” list. Allen, Texas, is not a town with things to do in it…at least not ones I am interested in doing.

In 2024, I read only books by women as an experiment. I did have a higher average rating for my books this year than I did last year, but honestly it was a quite small change and I expect that at least part of that is related to the fact that I am usually a schedule reader, and I chose my books for the year differently than I do normally, allowing for more of what was currently piquing my interest rather than sticking to what was up next. It was not my highest rated year since I began seriously tracking (that was 2017). I honestly didn’t feel like my reading experience was all that different overall. Some books were great, some were terrible, most were okay-to-good. But it was interesting nevertheless, and while I am going to return to “normal” for 2025, I expect to do another theme year in 2026. One major book-related development in my life was the closure of my local independent bookstore, which hosted the book club I’d been a part of for nearly a decade. Many of the members of that club are making an effort to continue to meet, and Reno does still have a Barnes & Noble so we’re not without access to a bookstore, but it was a blow. I remember the enchantment I felt the first time I walked into Sundance, the many many hours I spent there both as part of the book club and just browsing the shelves. I’d even taken C on his first trip to the bookstore shortly before I found out that it was going to close, and of course I’d imagined continuing to venture in together over the years. Sometimes I wish I had a more entrepreneurial bent, because while “working in a bookstore” sounds like an actual dream come true, dealing with all the complications that come from running a small business most decidedly do not.

In Books…

Read: 64. While my ostensible goal every year is 52, my real goal this year was to exceed last year’s total by at least one. And by that measure, I was successful! I read four more books than I did last year, and still managed to read several lengthy ones so it wasn’t by virtue of reading shorter and/or less complex books. Just about one quarter of my reading was non-fiction (mostly history), which is on the low end for my usual habits since I try to read between a quarter and a third nonfiction. While basic literary/contemporary fiction was, as usual, my most read genre, I actually read quite a bit more science fiction/fantasy/speculative fiction than I typically do. It seems to be a type of story that I find particularly compelling right now, which likely has something to do with the uncertainty facing the world right now and the way having a child forces you to think about the future in a longer-term kind of way.

Best Book of the Year: The Children’s Book

One thing I have discovered as I’ve started paying more active attention to my reading trends is my fondness for character-based stories. I can deal with prose that’s middle-of-the-road, a plot where nothing happens is no big deal, but if I don’t feel like the people I’m reading about are well-constructed or compelling, it is very unlikely I am going to really connect with the book. Luckily for me, this was a book that was all about people growing and changing (or not changing, in ways that said a lot about who they were). I got so drawn in to the stories of the Wellwoods, the Cains, the Fludds, and all the people in their orbit that despite usually feeling relief as the end of any 500+ page book approaches (even ones I really enjoy!), I felt an almost palpable sense of loss when it ended. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t getting to see how the rest of the story played out. I can see where people wouldn’t care for this, Byatt can get lost in superfluous detail. Some of the storylines take turns that aren’t satisfying. It feels on the over-indulgent side. But for a reader like me, this is exactly the sort of thing I want and having also enjoyed her Possession when I read it a few years back, I am ready to dig even further into her back catalog.

Least Compelling Short Stories: A Manual for Cleaning Women

I’ve definitely mentioned it before, but I’m no fan of short stories as a format. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, I’ve read a handful of collections I enjoyed. But for the most part I find them frustrating, because if they’re good I just want them to be longer. I did not want any of the stories in this quasi-autobiographical collection to be longer. I found a handful of them reasonably good, but I remember the praise this got when it came out and I truly cannot understand it.

Most Unnervingly Prescient Read: The Parable of the Sower

As income inequality rises and climate change continues to manifest, it is not difficult to imagine social unrest on a much broader scale than we are currently experiencing. Such is the 2024 that Octavia Butler conceived of when she wrote this in 1993. In a world where middle-class living represents a state of luxury out of reach of much of the populace, who are unable to find steady work and turn to increasingly powerful drugs to cope with their despair, one teenage girl sees the writing on the wall and begins to prepare for a time when she’ll no longer live in a house with her family but will have to turn to the road. Lauren is refreshingly free of the tropes that I’ve come to expect to define this sort of protagonist: she’s not sassy but secretly insecure, she’s not shy and waiting for a guy to define herself around. She’s smart and resourceful and competent, makes mistakes but learns from them, and begins to build a philosophy around her belief that any conception of God has to be rooted in change, the most fundamental aspect of life, and that mankind’s destiny will take them to the stars. It’s an excellent book but the kind it is hard to say you “enjoyed” because it was also very sobering.

The Sci-Fi/Fantasy I Didn’t Expect To Love But Did: Gideon the Ninth

Science fiction and fantasy tend to be genres I either love or hate. I either get completely drawn into the world or find every detail more tedious than the last. Space has been a bit of a mixed bag as a setting for me, and I considered picking something else instead of this one when it was up on the list because I didn’t know that I was in the mood for a space story. I was wrong! Gideon is an incredibly vivid character, all but leaping off the page, and I could not turn the pages fast enough to race through Tamsyn Muir’s story, which is good because I feel like if I’d taken more time to think about it the whole thing could have fallen apart. It was exciting and dynamic and a lot of fun and I am definitely reading the sequels.

Least Balanced Book: The Historian

I really wanted to love this take on the Dracula story. As a book nerd who loves folklore and research, how could I fail to enjoy a story about people tracking the legend around the famous vampire across the world? Well, if you make it 90% vamping (pun intended) and 10% anything happening, and ALL of that 10% is right at the end. I am just honestly astonished that this didn’t get fixed in editing, it is SO detrimental to the book!

A Sequel That Didn’t Disappoint: The Year of the Flood

I’ve read plenty of wonderful series, but I feel like even when they’re good, the second entry is usually my least favorite. While this could still be true for the Madaddam series (I haven’t actually read the third yet), Atwood seems to have subverted the tendency by switching direction from the first book entirely, bringing in entirely new characters and very different storylines. I read the first several years before I read this one, but apart from some general background information that’s helpful to have from the first they could be read more or less interchangeably. I’m really looking forward to reading the third sometime this coming year!

Non-Fiction Most Specifically Crafted For My Interests: The Star Machine

I have long been fascinated with celebrity as a concept, and more specifically with the role they play in the broader culture, the way the public projects certain qualities onto people they don’t even know. Image-making, conducted by the studios, was very deliberate during the Golden Age of Hollywood, sometimes for better but much more often for worse for the people who went through it. This book doesn’t get into the big, major stars (Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, etc) that everyone already knows, instead focusing on actors who were very successful in their own time but aren’t necessarily super recognizable to those who haven’t taken an interest in classic film: Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, Jean Arthur, Lana Turner. It reviews the ways their images were created through the roles they were assigned and the ways their personal lives were manipulated and/or promoted by studios and the news outlets that depended on them, and how, despite these efforts, these talented performers did not achieve screen immortality. It is often overly detailed and sometimes threatens to verge into tedium but honestly I want this kind of thing injected into my veins.

Book I Was Most Surprised Was Picked By A Celebrity Book Club: City of Night Birds

Don’t get me wrong, I quite liked this book. But it’s very much a slow starter and is most effective if you come in with some background knowledge of Russian culture. While many of the elements of a “ballet book” are present, it’s really an introspective character piece with more ambiguous friendships than obviously catty dancers. I expect celebrity book clubs to choose books with more obvious wide appeal so was (pleasantly) taken aback to see this one chosen by Reese Witherspoon.

A Month In The Life: December 2024

Tomorrow is 2025! There will be a whole big year-in-review post tomorrow, but today is the month-in-review one. We are through the bulk of the holidays and it is so terrifyingly close to being my busy season! But for now, we’re still enjoying being a cozy little family together. I hope you are with people you love too!

In Books…

  • Future Home of the Living God: Cedar Hawk Songmaker, the adopted Native daughter of an upper middle-class white couple in the Twin Cities, is about four months pregnant when she decides to seek out her birth parents on the reservation to learn more about her medical history. It’s the near future, and it hasn’t snowed in years, not even in Minnesota. But even more alarmingly, something has recently gone awry with evolution. It seems to be going backwards. Children are being born that aren’t quite homo sapiens. Crops are failing. Ancient animals are appearing in the suburbs. No one understands why or how. The government is increasingly unstable as panic builds over whether the human race will survive at all, and women/their wombs are suddenly a subject of intense interest. On one of her last trips outside the home, Cedar watches a very pregnant woman be abducted off the street by police in broad daylight, torn from her husband and child. She is desperate to avoid that outcome, to be able to meet her own child, however they are to turn out, as a free woman. But the further along she gets, the greater the risk that she will be discovered. The book is written as Cedar’s diary, a series of entries written to her unborn child to document her experience bringing them into the world. This is a storytelling device that worked pretty effectively for me. Erdrich leaves a lot of details about the world vague, but it makes a certain amount of sense in context, as Cedar is isolated and outside sources of information become both less accessible and less reliable as civil society collapses. But even so, one of the things that kept me from getting more wholeheartedly into the narrative was the implausibility of some of the changes in the world. Over a series of just weeks, Cedar goes from being able to withdraw thousands of dollars from her bank account (luckily just ahead of a larger bank run) to a virtual prisoner in her home, terrified to so much as open the door to her home on a street newly renamed after a Bible verse. I found myself wishing the book started earlier on in Cedar’s pregnancy so it could flesh things out a little more and have an easier timeline. Indeed, a longer narrative could have solved many of my issues with the book. There’s a LOT going on thematically. There are echoes of A Handmaid’s Tale and its story of declining birthrates and subsequent control and commodification of female fertility, as well as of Children of Men and its speculation about how a world without (in this case, recognizably human) children would function. Cedar is a Catholic convert who publishes her own magazine about faith and is particularly intrigued by Kateri, the first Native American saint, bringing religion and the role of Christianity (with its central miraculous birth) and more specifically Catholicism (with its adherence to more restrictive gender roles) into the mix. There is adoption, and of course race. There is the nature of love (romantic, parental, familial), and its boundaries. There is the mystery of what’s happening to the world and why. But the novel itself doesn’t even run to 300 pages, which makes a lot of it feel underdeveloped. As always with Erdrich, the prose is elegant, with the last line ringing in my head long after I closed the book. It was good, I appreciated reading it, but it never grabbed me the way I’d hoped it would. Recommended for Erdrich enthusiasts and lovers of dystopias/post-apocalyptic stories, but otherwise not an essential read.
  • Verity: Lowen Ashleigh is a professional writer on the verge of financial collapse when she’s presented with an unusual offer that could solve her problem. Best-selling suspense author Verity Crawford has been in a serious accident and is unable to complete her enormously popular book series, and Lowen is asked to come in as a co-author on the final three books for an enormous sum of money. When she agrees, she travels from where she lives in New York City to the upstate home where Verity resides with her husband Jeremy and young son Crew. Crew is the only one of the couple’s three children who is still alive, their twin girls having died in separate accidents shortly after each other. Lowen quickly learns that Verity isn’t just injured, she’s in a persistent vegetative state and won’t be able to provide any guidance at all about what she intended to do with the as-yet-to-be-written books. While combing through her office for any notes or outlines, Lowen comes across Verity’s unpublished autobiography and starts to read in the hope it will help her get into the other woman’s head. But it turns out Verity’s head is a very dark place to be, as the manuscript relates increasingly unhinged information about the writer and her family. And strange things are happening around the house, making Lowen wonder what, exactly, has happened and is happening with the Crawfords. Colleen Hoover is an enormously popular author, so I decided to try out her work, and this seemed like the most interesting thing of the bunch. But y’all…this is bad. Clearly the point here is the plot so let’s start with that, eh? The set-up here is that Lowen is a writer with some low-to-moderate level of success writing suspense novels who has just depleted all of her savings because she’s spent the last year taking care of her mother as she died from cancer. Despite the fact that Lowen is relatively obscure, we’re meant to believe that not only did she have an income level that allowed her to rent a studio apartment in NYC alone, but that would support her moving to a one-bedroom apartment and not working for an entire year. She has no apparent side gig. She does not have family money. She apparently makes this kind of money through advances alone? This is just not remotely reflective of my understanding of the economic reality of writers! The entire premise falls apart under even light scrutiny! The characters come with their own set of problems. Neither Lowen or Jeremy has any real personality. Neither of them gives any indications of experiencing any trauma about their recent devastating personal losses. We’re told early on that Lowen has a history of sleepwalking, that she’s injured herself doing it before, so it seems rife with possibility to figure into either her character development or the plot in some way but besides one isolated incident in which she ends up somewhere she shouldn’t that has no further ramifications, it’s a total dead end. My issues with Verity’s character would require major spoilers to get into so I’ll just leave it to say that she’s also poorly developed. The prose is dull and utilitarian, there are no interesting turns of phrase or any subtlety. I felt like the entire thing was insulting to my intelligence and not even engaging. What a waste of time.
  • Diary of a Void: I haven’t read anything for book club recently because the past few months have been books with male authors, but this one was December’s pick and it’s by a lady! Ms. Shibata (we never do learn her first name) is a Japanese woman who works in middle management at the office of a company that manufactures cardboard tubes. Well, actually, she’s the only woman in her section of the office. Which is why, it seems, the menial tasks of office management tend to fall into her lap: in addition to doing her actual job, she’s expected to answer the phone, serve coffee, clean up afterwards, empty the trash can. Even as more junior men come into the office, these tasks still fall to her. Her resentment grows until one day, impulsively, she announces that she can’t deal with the aftermath of the coffee because she’s pregnant and it’s triggering her morning sickness. She finds herself suddenly liberated from much of the workplace unpleasantness she previously experienced: not only is she not expected to do the admin work anymore, she’s also exempted from much of the overtime she’d been putting in. She’s suddenly able to do her grocery shopping at a normal time, meet people for drinks, go to the gym. She experiments with various ways to fake a changing body. And about halfway through her “pregnancy”, she joins a maternal aerobics class. As her due date approaches, her situation becomes increasingly fraught. What will become of her? This is an odd little book. It follows along with Shibata’s situation in weekly increments, some longer and some quite brief, tallying up towards the 40 week marker of a full-term gestation. It’s clear from the beginning that the pregnancy isn’t real, but the deeper into it she gets, the stranger turns things take. The tone of the prose throughout is matter-of-fact, not remotely inclined towards anything resembling a flight of fancy, making the contrast with the surreality of the events being recorded more stark. There comes a point quite late where events transpire that make it clear that our narrator is not reliable, which makes you wonder where exactly that unreliability started. The tension of wanting to know how the situation can possibly be resolved drives its momentum throughout, but it changes from being interested in whether she will get caught to something else. I found the question about when and to what extent Shibata was deceptive to be the most compelling aspect of the book. There are also themes around the ways women are expected to take on additional “caretaking” duties in the workplace, like taking notes and light cleaning, which may have some additional cultural resonance in Japan but are plenty applicable in the US too, as well as disconnection and loneliness. Shibata’s closest friends are both married and out of the workforce, and it becomes clear when she meets up with them with her newfound free time that they don’t actually have very much at all in common anymore. The bond she forms with the women in her mommy aerobics class encourages her to keep up and deepen her deception. But of course, it can’t last, can it? I found it reasonably engaging but it didn’t make a significant impression on me. It’s fine, it’s not a waste of time to read or anything, But it’s not really compelling enough for an affirmative recommendation.
  • Red Fortress: The Kremlin is instantly recognizable, with its towers and the iconic domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral standing in as a visual shorthand for Russia itself in just about every newscast about the country anyone in the US has ever seen. It is in fact the ways in which the Kremlin implies status, legitimacy, and authority that Catherine Merridale explores in this book. She starts all the way at the beginning, much farther back than many Westerners know anything about, with the founding of Kievan Rus, the establishment of the grand principality of Vladimir, and the emergence of the principality of Moscow/Muscovy as a major city that attracted the attention of the Golden Horde. It is in this distant past that the Kremlin sprang up, back then just a kremlin (which is Russian for a fortress within a city). Various leaders built structures (primarily churches) within the walls of the Kremlin to commemorate their deeds and burnish their own credentials, as a surprising number of them had tenuous-at-best claims to what became the tsardom of Russia under Ivan the Terrible. Merridale does not repeat the rumor that circulates around the building of St. Basil’s, that Ivan had their eyes put out so they could never again build anything like it, which probably means that it is not supported by the historic record as quite a few of his other misdeeds are recorded. She traces the bloody conflicts that arose after that tsar’s son died, ending the Rurikid dynasty, and the eventual resolution of those conflicts when the Romanov dynasty began. The imperial history becomes lighter after the reign of Peter the Great, who of course moved the capital to his namesake city of Saint Petersburg, but the Kremlin still served as a useful backdrop for important state ceremonies, including the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsaritsa Alexandra. While the main events of the Russian Revolution happened in Saint Petersburg, Lenin was canny enough to know that to seize and hold the Kremlin would lend credibility to his fledgling revolution and moved his government and personal residence to the fortress. But he also was determined to make a hard break with the old regime and ordered the demolitions of several historically important buildings. Many of the imperial occupants of the Kremlin did the same thing in their own time, each wanting to leave their own mark for posterity. Another recurring theme throughout the history of the Kremlin and Moscow generally is just how often it all burned down, with the last major fire having taken place as Napoleon partially blew up the city behind him in his retreat. It is staggering to think of how much significant history happened in this one relatively small area, and it’s one of the places I most long to see with my own eyes (particularly St. Basil’s), but it’s hard to imagine a future where such a trip would be possible to make safe. This book feels like it lives in that place between being written for a popular audience (it’s far too detailed) but isn’t quite fully academic either. The writing isn’t especially lively, but it’s not turgid or drowning in jargon and minutiae. It’s best for people in a similar position to me, who already know they enjoy reading Russian history and want to learn more about this incredibly interesting place.

In Life…

  • C’s third Christmas: He was basically a potato his first holiday season, but last year he was more into it and this year he has fully embraced Christmas, constantly singing carols to us with his own toddler version of the lyrics and demanding tours of the neighborhood to see all the decorations. He was incredibly spoiled by everyone who loves him and we are so lucky to have our little guy surrounded by so many people who want him to have the best Christmas possible.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Winter 2024-2025 TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about our upcoming reading for the season! As usual, I’ve got a smattering of a lot of different things on my list, from a giant fantasy epic to classic Russian literature to Hollywood history and necromancers in space. It should be interesting!

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: This is a book that’s been on my list forever and I’m scheduled to read in 2025. It’s gigantic and so, since I’ve already hit my reading goal for this year, I’ve decided to start it next to get a head start on it!

The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist: Devil in the Grove was so good, I’m very willing to take a chance on more true stories about law enforcement corruption in the South!

Nightbitch: My book club’s January pick. I’m not particularly looking forward to it, I’m generally leery of “weird fiction” because I virtually always find it frustrating but one of the reasons I’m in a book club is to force myself to read outside my comfort zone!

The Muralist: Someone, and of course I can’t remember who, but someone I follow at one point rapturously recommended this book and it seems like the sort of historical fiction I am generally inclined to find at least pleasant so definitely worth a chance.

Harrow the Ninth: The first book in this series was one I enjoyed more than I was expecting to earlier this year so I’m excited to read the sequel!

Stella Dallas: This seems like the kind of old school “women’s novel” that I often enjoy.

Last Night at the Viper Room: The death of River Phoenix is one of those seminal Hollywood events that I “know about” without actually knowing much at all about so here’s me trying to learn more.

Doctor Zhivago: Russian lit classic so of course a must-read for me.

Orbital: We’ve actually already selected our February book for my book cub and it’s this, which I would have read as a Booker winner anyways!

Deadkidsongs: I think this is one I picked up on a whim from a Kindle sale years ago because it caught my eye, which means it could be great or terrible or something in between.

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