The calm continues. I’ve been doing a bunch of little home care projects I didn’t have time for during session, including finally getting rid of some things that C hasn’t used since he was a tiny little baby! It’s been nice to have the time to devote to these tasks.
In Books…
- The Original Black Elite: There was a brief period, during Reconstruction, when it looked like America might do right by its Black residents. Racism still existed, obviously, but opportunities were available for both former slaves and those who were born free in ways they hadn’t been before. It is in this moment in time when Daniel Murray, born free in Baltimore, the only child of what was the second marriage for both of his parents, came of age. After getting an education, he followed an older half-brother to the District of Columbia, where he worked in the official Senate restaurant that his brother ran. From there, he got a job in the then-tiny Library of Congress, where he was one of just 12 staffers and the library was bursting at the seams. He spent the rest of his professional life there, rising to become an assistant librarian, and it must have seemed like the sky was the limit. The woman he married, Anna Evans, was also born free and was an Oberlin-raised daughter of an abolitionist activist family. After teaching music to small children, she became a noted advocate of kindergarten programming and successfully lobbied Congress to provide financial support for free kindergarten in the District. The two became quite a power couple in DC’s Black elite scene, which included elected members of Congress, even as they raised a large family. But as their children grew, the world they would inherit became smaller. Republicans, concerned about electoral fortunes, backed away from Reconstruction measures that alienated white voters. Jim Crow laws began creeping northward into the District, which began to segregate facilities like hotels and restaurants that had previously been open to all. African-Americans in Congress lost their seats. Murray’s forward professional progress stalled, his rise arrested by concerns that white men would not accept a Black supervisor. It would take decades for this trend to be reversed, leaving untold numbers of Black citizens who could have been successful in ways that would benefit themselves and their communities stymied, blocked by artificial barriers. I picked up this book because this is by and large an era I am unfamiliar with and I wanted to learn more. I appreciated Elizabeth Dowling Taylor’s focus on one family to illustrate the larger cultural and political forces of the time, it took what could have been abstract and made it very real. Daniel and Anna Murray were interesting and self-made people, smart and ambitious and engaged with civic and community life. Taylor uses excerpts from their correspondence in a way that let me feel like I got bit of a sense for them as people. Unfortunately, Taylor falls into a very common history book trap: she clearly did a ton of research and wanted to cram as many of the details that she found intriguing in the course of that work into her text. What results is a narrative that moves more slowly and less engagingly than it might have, forever taking little tangents about things that aren’t really all that important (like details of church design). It’s a bummer about the pacing and density, because I found myself genuinely curious about the Murrays and compelled by their story, but the book could have done with some focusing. As is, it really wasn’t enjoyable enough to fully recommend.
- Martyr!: I haven’t been to book club in ages (a combination of session and books I wasn’t all that interested in) but this month we read something that was already on my list! Cyrus Shams is effectively in a state of suspension as he approaches 30. Born in Iran, his father immigrated with him to the United States when Cyrus was just a baby, after the death of his mother on an airplane shot down by America when it was mistaken for a military jet. He develops a drinking problem almost immediately after arriving at a nearby liberal arts college, not at all helped by the death of his father before he graduates. He manages to flail his way through school but he’s already in the full grasp of addiction, working dead-end jobs after he graduates that keep his head just barely above water. He gets sober, but he’s still unsure about everything: how seriously to pursue his poetry, what to do with his life, if he even wants to stay alive at all. When a friend brings up an art exhibit in New York City in which a terminally ill woman is living out her last days at a museum, speaking to whomever comes to see her, Cyrus and his best friend/roommate/occasional hookup Zee impulsively decide to go. The trip has a profound impact on Cyrus, and not just because it helps give him inspiration for the book he’s working on, poems about historical martyrs which he plans to conclude with his own death…if only he could figure out a way to make it meaningful. This was a book I was hesitant about. A lot of people I know loved it, but descriptions of it made it feel almost toooo literary fiction: a story about an artistic, orphaned, alcoholic young man contemplating the nature of life and death sounds like a cliche. And I’ve never cared much for autofiction. Kaveh Akbar is Persian-American poet and addict in recovery writing about a Persian-American poet and addict in recovery. But I’m very glad I was inspired to pick this up by my book club, because it was actually very good and all of the people who said nice things about it were right. The story is told through various point-of-view chapters in different places in time, so we hear from Cyrus in the present as well as the part, his mother early in her marriage, his uncle during his service in the Iran-Iraq war. We also get some chapters that are about Cyrus’s dreams. The characters are well-developed and for the most part interesting. The language is beautiful, but largely not in a way that feels self-consciously poetic. It’s insightful and sharp and rich. There is quite a lot of darkness, but it’s not a sad or wallowing-type book and is often quite funny. What kept me from enjoying this more thoroughly was the ending. Without spoiling anything, there is a rather abrupt tone shift and the text takes a surrealist turn. How to interpret this is left up to the reader, and theories abound. For better or worse, I am a very literal reader. Symbolism often flies over my head, and satire holds no charm. As a person who therefore does not love ambiguity, this ending was very annoying to me. I have my own take, but I want to know what Akbar thinks! It’s his story! But even this annoyance did not totally spoil the book for me. There’s too much good here for me to not recommend it, I did still enjoy reading it quite a lot, but be warned that the story does not end neatly if that’s something that you also find bothersome. And if you’ve read it, I want to know your take on the ending!
- The Thorn Birds: We meet Meggie Cleary on her fourth birthday. Her parents have bought as the present for their only daughter, the youngest of their current six children, a beautiful doll they can ill afford as New Zealand ranchers barely scraping by. She loves it and names it Agnes, and two of her older brothers are intent on destroying it for no reason other than because they can. It is perhaps the smallest and most reparable of the tragedies that Meggie’s life will visit upon her. Several years later, the Cleary family receives an invitation that will change their lives forever. Patriarch Paddy, an Irish immigrant, gets a letter from his long-estranged much older sister Mary in Australia. A wealthy woman whose husband is long dead and with no children, she has no one to leave Drogheda, her enormous ranch in the Australian outback, to when she dies. She wants Paddy to come with his family to work the ranch, which they will inherit upon her passing. Mary’s wealth has also drawn the attention of the parish priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart. Ralph, another Irishman, is in his late 20s and as handsome as he is ambitious, but an altercation with a higher-up has consigned him to the rural outpost where sixty-something Mary runs Drogheda. He knows if he cultivates her friendship, persuades her to make large donations to the church, he can buy his way back into favor. She understands that his interest is pecuniary but is flattered by his attention anyways. She is seized with jealousy the first time she sees Father Ralph and Meggie together, when the latter is only 10 years old, shortly after the Clearys arrive in Australia, and that feeling only grows as he develops a soft spot for Meggie, who is soon joined by even more baby brothers and is lost in the shuffle of her family, with her mother Fiona seeing her only as a helpmeet for the endless domestic chores required to keep them afloat. Ralph treats her like she’s special, spoils her a little, and they become close even as the pretty little girl turns into a lovely teenager and develops a crush. Shortly before her death, Mary makes a play designed to sunder that bond forever, in a way that has consequences beyond what she might have ever imagined. This is pure melodrama from start to finish. Love children! Secret wills! Murder! Drought! Ill-considered marriages! Fire! I have long believed that how I feel about a book is often influenced by what I’ve read recently, and this may have hit for me more than it might have otherwise because I’d just read a couple long, serious-minded history books and some literary fiction. I was very ready for a story to just draw me in and keep me entertained, and this delivered perfectly. I have always had a taste for sweeping family epics, besides, and this follows Mary and her family over several decades. Colleen McCullough draws vivid pictures of Australia, from the dusty heat of the Outback to the tropical lushness of Queensland. Her characters are just as compelling, exemplified first and foremost by Meggie’s strength and resilience through multiple devastating heartbreaks. Everyone feels like a person, albeit with things a bit heightened for drama. I found her relationships with both her mother and her daughter, each uneasy in its own way, to be especially interesting. Despite her marriage to an attractive, bold traveling stockworker, the book’s central romance is between Meggie and Ralph, and I feel like I have to mention that it is of course unsettling to foreground and romanticize a relationship between two people who met when one was nearly 30 and the other was a literal child, with the older one being the younger’s family priest as well. This may make this book unreadable to some, and I would appreciate why. So much of the book is about other things, though, and I found it yucky but it did not ultimately keep me from getting caught up in the book. It wasn’t especially beautifully crafted from a prose perspective, but nevertheless I had a hard time putting it down and found myself picking it up eagerly any time I had a few spare moments. Despite its 700ish page length, it moves quickly. Cheesy? Yes, often. Dated? Definitely. But ultimately something I really had a blast reading and would recommend with the caveats indicated above.
- I Want to Burn This Place Down: Back in the day when blogs becoming books was a thing, Slaughterhouse 90210 was the one I loved most of all (I did, of course buy that book). I’ve been following its author, Maris Kreizman, ever since. She’s a big presence on the bookish internet and I take her recommendations seriously, even if her tastes tend to run weirder than mine. I have a paid subscription to her newsletter, I follow her on Bluesky. Which is all to say that I was very excited when she announced her essay collection and was thrilled to read this book. I wish my sky-high expectations had been matched. Maris reflects on her experience of living with diabetes, on her politics taking a leftward tack as she ages, and on the pop culture that taught her lessons about the world and how it works, for better and worse (mostly worse). But there’s an incisiveness that’s missing here, a seeming unwillingness to really go for the uncomfortable that could have taken well-written, smart pieces and taken them to the next level. She writes one essay about the ways in which pop culture teaches us that police are good guys, cool and smart and well-dressed and inherently heroic, cutting her reflections on growing up with these images with information about their inherent falsity, her own awakening to this falsity gradual because of the privilege her whiteness confers upon her. Near the end, she tells us that her older twin brothers have both become police officers themselves, that while she has become more liberal, they have become more conservative, that she’s hesitant to probe the depth of their growing political differences for fear of permanent rupture. A more interesting version would have seen her having a frank conversation with her brothers about their experiences, about any of their own hesitations about their roles, about how they feel about her beliefs. Do I understand why she didn’t write that essay? Of course! Families are complicated, risking permanent ill will with your siblings is very reasonable to consider as a price too high to pay to make an essay go from solid to great. But it’s a place where I felt, as a reader, that something bigger and more powerful was lurking underneath the surface in a frustrating way. The piece about rejecting both the grind of the corporate climb and the grind of motherhood, of choosing neither rather than falling into the trap (here, I speak from experience) of trying to manage both, also feels curiously unfinished. She winds up concluding that she’s happiest living neither for work nor for a child, which is…fine? Good for her, truly! But other than expressing a vague feeling of guilt for having the chance to really devote herself to creative endeavor and mostly not taking it, having learned that pushing herself as hard as she did in her youth wasn’t healthy mentally or physically, I didn’t understand what she was going for here. I wanted something more from it. It’s not a bad book, she is clever and funny and a talented writer. But I was hoping for something more revelatory and that’s not what she wrote.
- The Diviners: At 17, Evie O’ Neill is already pretty sure she’s outgrown her Ohio hometown. It’s the 1920s and she’s a budding flapper, and after one disastrous night out her parents feel they don’t have much of a choice except to ship Evie out of town until things blow over. You see, a drunken Evie was tuned up enough to demonstrate her little talent: if she holds an object belonging to someone else, she can discern things about that person…and she accidentally revealed a major secret of the son of a prominent local businessman. So she’s sent off to New York City to spend a few months with her uncle William, a bachelor scholar who runs an occult museum. She promptly makes friends and starts getting into trouble, but bigger trouble is about to find her. A series of ritual murders begin to occur, and her uncle is brought in to consult by the police. She of course finagles her way into the investigation, which becomes increasingly fraught as the grotesque executions continue, and it becomes a race against time to stop the killer before he can literally unleash hell on earth. The most prominent of the several secondary narratives follows Memphis Campbell, a Black teenager who lives with his little brother Isaiah in their aunt Octavia’s apartment. Memphis had had a supernatural gift for healing, but lost his skill when he was unable to prevent the death of his mother. He dreams of joining the exclusive salons of the Harlem Renaissance with his poetry, but runs numbers for a crime boss to earn money. Isaiah has special powers of his own, able to see into the future. In this world, there have always been those with these sorts of abilities, but they are becoming much more numerous as a showdown with a mysterious figure looms on the horizon. This was my second shot at Libba Bray, whose A Great and Terrible Beauty fell very flat for me when I read it in 2016. I’d been told this one was much better, though, and I do agree with that. Bray clearly did quite a lot of research into 1920s New York City, and the book’s strongest suit is its setting and atmosphere. There are password-protected speakeasies, one of the side characters is a showgirl at the Ziegfeld Follies, and there’s more period slang than you can shake a stick at. While the gorier aspects of the murders are left unsaid, there is genuine creepiness in the set-ups for them. The plot moves quickly, and Bray’s prose is engaging. The issues I had with this book are primarily rooted in the fact that it is very obviously the start of a series. It is overlong at about 600 pages, and its large cast of characters mean a lot of them have relatively flat, stereotyped personalities. But of course, it is doing the work of setting up the basis of the supernatural world that the rest of the books will explore, and presumably the characters are meant to get more development as the tale expands as well. I’d hope that would first and foremost include Evie, whose obnoxious behavior is half understandable as a teenager convinced she understands everything about the world, but the other half is just irritatingly foolhardy. One thing that I never could understand is how she seemed to have continuous access to large sums of money? She is constantly buying new clothes and accessories (not to mention cocktails), but it seems unlikely her parents would be sending her a generous allowance given that she was expelled in shame. Which leads me to one of my other issues…what set of parents, exasperated as they may be with their errant daughter, send a party girl from a little town in Ohio to New York City, the center of Jazz Age excess, as a punishment? It doesn’t make any sense. This is reasonably entertaining, but its slightly-overstuffed quality and failures of character development kept me from really getting drawn in and I’m unlikely to continue the series.
- The Inconvenient Indian: If you know anything at all about the history of the relationship between the United States government and Native Americans, you know that things are pretty bleak. If you thought that maybe it was better in Canada, you are wrong. It can make for tough reading, because account after account after account of indigenous people being sickened, stolen from, and lied to is just really depressing, honestly! Thomas King’s take on this history takes a different tack, and uses a different tone. He’s clear from the start that he’s not intending to write anything resembling a scholarly or complete history. The book is only just over 250 pages long, way too short for any sort of comprehensive history, especially once you consider that he’s covering Canada as well as the USA. There are no footnotes, and there are only a few in-line citations to other works. King, himself of Cherokee descent, elects instead to focus on a few themes to highlight, and brings to bear both intelligent analysis and razor-sharp wit to illustrate the ways both countries have abused the people who made the mistake of being here when the Europeans showed up. It would almost be easier to ascribe what has happened and does happen to Native American peoples as the product of a coordinated conspiracy, of violent frothing hatred. It would be more explicable, at least. But like the title suggests, it’s just as often that they’re in the way of what white people want to do. They were in the way when Europeans arrived in North America, dreaming of the pristine land ripe for the taking they’d been promised only to find out that there were other people there already, people who considered it their own and ready and willing to retaliate for incursions. They were in the way again when it turned out that the lands they’d been promised to have as their own forever after being shoved off the ones they’d always known had valuable resources that white people wanted. They’re in the way when white people want to be able to sell goods and services based on their crafts and traditions…so irritating of actual Natives to point out that what they’re working so hard to portray as authentic enough to be covetable is only fakery. King touches on boarding schools, the American Indian Movement and other clashes with law enforcement, the rise of tribal gaming, and more. He writes with humor and irreverence, but the simmering rage at the hundreds of years of injustice, continuing into the present, is plenty clear. It was an interesting, engaging read, and I’d recommend it!
In Life…
- Enjoying a slower pace: Things are mostly eased up on the work schedule front for the summer, so it’s been nice to be able to do things like clean up C’s room and organize things better around the house. But there are special session rumblings (hopefully not until October-ish, keep your fingers crossed for me!) so this may end sooner than I would like.