A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

A Month In The Life: December 2025

We’ve made it to the end of the year! As always I’ll have my big reflections post up tomorrow so I won’t steal my own thunder by putting it here. But as the number of minutes of daylight begins to slowly increase and we turn towards the new year, I want to say thank you for reading along with me and I wish a very happy new year to you and yours!

In Books…

  • Our Hideous Progeny: When her geologist husband Henry’s father dies, Mary Sutherland travels with him to his ancestral home in Scotland for the reading of the will. She possesses a keen scientific mind herself, and the pair make their living writing articles, which she edits and illustrates. Both long for glory in the Victorian London they call home, but don’t have the resources to really dig into their own experiments. Her father-in-law’s will doesn’t help on this front: Henry only comes away with enough to pay debts, while the bulk of the estate goes to his sister Margaret. He has long resented the attention and money focused on his chronically ill sister and seethes, though Mary finds herself drawn to her. Mary has no hope of money of her own, as an orphaned illegitimate child who grew up on the Isle of Wight and eloped to escape. When they return home, though, full of fury about an exhibit on dinosaurs that they believe to be incorrect, Mary comes up with something that might make their names after all. She finds notes belonging to the great-uncle she was always told had gone insane and vanished: Victor Frankenstein. Mary and Henry become determined to prove their own theories on dinosaurs by creating a live one of their own, using an outbuilding on the family Scottish property as a base. As Mary and Henry’s marriage struggles, the connection she’s formed with her sister-in-law grows stronger, but the experiment threatens to upend everything. Obviously this is a riff on the Mary Shelley classic, and I think does some things quite well. Mary is a well-developed character, though often a frustrating one. She’s not quite the historical fiction trope of “plucky young woman with 21st century sensibilities about gender dropped into a different time period” that drives me bananas, but her constant railing against the (very real) injustices she experiences as a woman becomes irritating. I do appreciate seeing a woman who cannot control her temper rather than just passively accepting her relegation to second-class citizenry, but I found my appreciation flagging as it turned repetitive. Also, the other characters are much thinner…Henry is a cliche of a disappointing man, and an antagonist character all but twirls his mustache. I don’t know that I think CE McGill makes any real improvement on thematic development over Shelley’s original. The elements are similar (the sometimes amorality of scientific ambition, the both religious and familial implications of creation), are done better by Shelley, and the newer ones don’t feel like they really go anywhere. McGill is still very young (they were only 23 when this was published!) and I enjoyed enough about this book (the prose is strong, the plot was engaging) that I’m really interested in seeing what they do next. This is a solid read that feels very much like the debut it is, so if you’re looking for a twist on a classic, it’s worth reading but it’s not unmissable.
  • The Visitors: Eleven year-old Lucy Payne and her mother both come down with typhoid fever after drinking from a contaminated well in the English countryside in the post-WWI era, but only Lucy survives the ordeal. Her father, a veteran afflicted with what we’d now call PTSD and a classics professor at Cambridge, doesn’t know quite what to do with his daughter as she struggles to fully recover from the disease. Luckily for her, one of her mother’s old friends from her childhood in America quietly shakes down her mother’s wealthy relations and takes her to Egypt in the hopes that the climate will be good for her. And it’s a very exciting time to be in Egypt indeed, as it is the time in which Lord Carnarvon is funding Howard Carter’s excavations in the Valley of the Kings. Lucy and her chaperone are drawn into the social world surrounding the digs, and Lucy becomes close friends with Frances Winlock, whose father is an Egyptologist for the Met in New York, as well as Rose and Peter, the two children of a socialite friend of Carnarvon’s. These prove to be enduring, lifelong bonds. Once Lucy is healthy again, she returns to England, but things there are not as she left them, as her father has procured a sort of governess for her, an intelligent, unpredictable, and beautiful young woman called Nicola. That her father eventually marries Nicola is not surprising, but the bond that forms between Nicola and Lucy defies easy description. Lucy manages to finagle her way back to Egypt, where she’s rejoined by Frances a few years later, making her present in the Valley when King Tut’s tomb is discovered and privy to much of the hubbub surrounding that discovery. Returning back home to England, she further develops her relationships with her friends, her family, and other people who enter her life for the first time…and when she’s quite elderly, she’s contacted by a documentarian putting together a film about King Tut’s tomb who asks her to dredge up all her old ghosts. This book almost feels like it’s two different stories entirely…one about a pre-teen girl who finds herself around the edges of the major historical event of the discovery of the tomb, and one about a pre-teen girl greiving the death of her mother and navigating her relationship with the woman who becomes her stepmother. Besides the fact that there is crossover of some of the Egyptian story characters in the England, they otherwise feel like independent narratives. Both are compelling! I found myself missing each when I was starting the other one, but the tonal shift from a kind of adventure story to a much more low-key family drama was a bit jarring. There’s an attempt at the end to braid them together, and it’s somewhat successful, but the overall disjointed feeling remained. I appreciate the way Sally Beauman rendered the relationship between Lucy and Nicola, who it seemed was going to get the “wicked stepmother” edit but their bond was made much slipperier and more complex than that. It was probably my favorite aspect of the novel, but I also very much enjoyed the Egyptian portions, as someone who went through a very very intense Egypt phase as a child and was fascinated with the story of the discovery of the tomb. Despite being a person who usually wants books to be more tightly edited, there was actually a lot I found myself wishing were expanded, like Lucy’s collegiate studies and the middle years of her adulthood: we get the early years, including a marriage that she refers to repeatedly as her “first”, but not anything about any other marriages…or indeed, even a real conclusion to the one we do learn about, as their divorce process begins but the way it ultimately plays out is left a mystery. There are several minor dangling plot threads like that that seemed like they should have been followed up on. But overall it’s a very readable book for its length, it moves quickly and held at least my attention well. I liked it quite a bit, despite its issues, and would recommend it!
  • Night: As World War II broke out, Eliezer Wiesel lived with his family in a small town in what is now Romania. His father was a prominent member of what seems to have been a reasonably sizeable Jewish community. Their first hint that something was amiss was when foreign-born Jews were deported, and a short time later, one of those deportees returned bearing tales of atrocities: they were taken by train to an isolated forest, where they dug a trench and then were shot. The man escaped because he was shot in the leg but mistaken for dead, and returned to urge his fellow Jews to leave. His dire warnings unsettle the community, which does not want to believe such a thing is possible. And then come the bits we know about, piece by piece: the wearing of the star, the curfew, the development of ghettos. And then the deportations via train, arriving at Auschwitz. Wiesel’s mother and little sister are immediately gassed, but he and his father are selected for labor. The stakes become immediately apparent, with Wiesel watching, disbelieving and horrified, as a truck delivers a load of children’s bodies to be burnt. He had spent much of his early teenage years in devoted Talmudic study, but that moment profoundly undermines his faith. He and his father are assigned to the Buna work camp, where they count on each other for survival in a world where starvation and violence are the only things promised. As the Russians begin to press in near the end of the war, Wiesel and his father survive a death march to Buchenwald but its physical demands take a final, fatal toll on his father’s health and he dies just a few months before the camp is liberated, where Wiesel ends his story. It’s very difficult to critically examine a Holocaust memoir, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, this is an incredibly powerful work of literature. Both its brevity, only just over 100 pages and easily readable in a single sitting, and its prose styling, clean and stark, make it land like a sharp punch that knocks the wind right out of the reader. It does not present so many atrocities that it feels overwhelming, so the mental images of the ones that are delineated really resonate and linger. His rage and despair are only given extended voice in a few sections, but they underlie the entire narrative. In an era where antisemitism continues to spread and be espoused by prominent cultural figures like Kanye West, this book has lost none of its urgency and import and I highly recommend it.
  • Heart the Lover: A college senior meets a pair of friends, Sam and Yash, in an upper-level English class. When Sam asks her out, she’s drawn into their world, where they live for free in the home of a professor on sabbatical. As she’s a former scholarship golf player, they quickly nickname her “Jordan” after the Gatsby character. Sam and Jordan have physical chemistry and a decent camaraderie, but the relationship fizzles out, ending on a sour note right around his graduation. Jordan and Yash stay in school another semester and their friendship quickly deepens into more, something much more substantive than what she had with Sam. Both want to be writers, but struggle with the realities of post-graduate life. We then pick up many years later, when Yash stops by the Maine home where Jordan lives with her husband and two sons, their lives having taken very different directions. And a few years after that, Jordan and Yash and Sam are reunited once more for unexpected reasons, with revelations about the past lingering. This book is excellent at creating a mood, and that mood is the kind of desperate romantic longing that may be specific to relationships one has in that heady late teens/early 20s period of our lives. Both the feeling of that sort of “chemistry’s there but the rest of it isn’t, not really, but trying to force it” and the even more overwhelming “this is just so good, everything is so right, please oh please don’t let me mess this up” are powerfully evoked. The book is quite short, only about 250 pages, so there’s not a ton of room for deep psychological investigation, but Lily King knows how to show rather than tell. There’s one instance where Jordan and Sam go to visit his family and he becomes furiously angry with her for turning up downstairs “late” despite the fact that she was never told what time to be ready and she becomes angry in turn for having been set up to fail and looking lackadaisical in front of his family. It tells us so much about their dynamic, about who they are as people and to each other. I also thought King did a brilliant job of capturing the feeling of being older, and happy with the life you’ve chosen, but not able to completely let go of old feelings. Like being a boat against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past, if you will. It’s an elegant, powerful novel with an impact not remotely blunted by its brevity. I really responded to it and recommend it very highly.
  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo: A Cuban girl, Evelyn Herrera, grows up in Hell’s Kitchen as the only child in a poor family. Her mother dies when she’s still quite young, but she’s already encouraged Evelyn to dream of Hollywood. As Evelyn grows into a teenager with a beautiful face and a ripe body, she knows she has to get out before she gets stuck there forever. At 15, she all but throws herself at an 18 year-old neighbor who she knows is moving to LA for a job, determined to live out the plans her mother once had for her. This is the first of Evelyn’s seven marriages. By the time she reaches out to a prestigious magazine in connection to an auction of her legendary gowns, she’s Hollywood royalty, an almost mythological figure. Long since withdrawn from the public eye, she specifically requests up-and-coming writer Monique Grant. When Monique sits down with her for an interview, though, she learns that Evelyn doesn’t actually want the magazine piece. She wants to give Monique her full, unvarnished biography, talking about all of her husbands and who she really loved, a book that will be an enormous bestseller. Why she’s chosen Monique slowly becomes clear as we learn, one by one, about all the men who have been her husbands. My expectations were very high going into this book, which has been enthusiastically recommended to me several times as someone who loves Old Hollywood, and I’d loved Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six a few years ago. But I think the combination of being not as good as Daisy Jones and having just read a much more subtle, accomplished book made it hard for me to get hooked into this one. It’s not hard to spot the inspirations here if you’re familiar with the era of Hollywood being evoked: the changes to Evelyn’s name and appearance to make her more “white” are callbacks to Rita Hayworth, the teenage marriage to escape a tumultuous home life echoes Marilyn Monroe, the marriage to a high-profile heir who turns out to have demons is reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor, and so on and so forth. But spotting the references is only a brief, superficial enjoyment. Evelyn herself is obviously quite well-developed, as are a handful of other characters, but I don’t know that the characters always ring true. That Evelyn would be smart and have a hustle mentality makes plenty of sense, but Reid writes her as almost preternaturally canny starting at the age of just 17. While she makes mistakes in her personal life through the course of the book, I feel like it would have rendered her more interesting to have had more early public missteps, make her earn her smooth operator stripes. Other characters, like one of Evelyn’s husbands who she marries only to create publicity for a movie she thinks might otherwise bomb, are essentially non-entities. I wish she’d spent more time with the internal dynamics of that and some of the other marriages. I also don’t think the framing device entirely works. Reid gives Monique conflicts to work through, presumably in an attempt to get the reader invested in her story too, but ultimately failed to create a character compelling enough that her bits of the narrative felt like anything but padding. There’s also just a heavy-handedness about the writing where it often felt like Reid did not trust her readers enough to just make her point, she had to underline it too. There’s very little in the way of finesse. It’s not a bad book by any means, it’s pretty solid for the most part and quite a few people really love it. This is actually a kind of book that I tend to find frustrating in that it’s not poorly executed or badly written, but there are good bones and it could have been better. I think a lot of people would enjoy it more than I did, but my own disappointment means I can’t really affirmatively recommend it.
  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem: I’d read one of Didion’s memoirs previously, and one of her novels, but this was the first of her essay collections I’ve read. Didion is particularly noted for her work about California, and many of these essays concern her native state. Perhaps the most famous is the title work, a recounting of a time she spent in Haight-Ashbury at the peak of the counterculture there in the late 1960s. In her trademark cool, reserved prose she strings together vignettes about the people she meets, most of whom are high on something or other, usually acid. Teenage runaways wind up there in search of something they can’t even define, just something different than what they knew before. And of course there is the famous anecdote in there about a five year-old whose parent claims to have deliberately dosed them with LSD. It’s a very interesting work to consider, and at the end the thought that rose most irresistibly in my mind was about what material she chose to include and all that she must have left out…it might have been less alarming to include more about care and affection, but it would have also likely made a less arresting portrait, and Didion was committed to nothing more than to make the writing as memorable as possible. There’s no denying the power of it as is, which likely confirmed the fears of many about what was happening there. It’s the longest and richest of the essays, which vary in length from just a few pages to a couple dozen, and to be honest also vary in quality. There’s something mocking in nearly all of them, even and perhaps most viciously when their subject is explicitly herself. She elegantly ridicules Joan Baez’s earnestness, the self-righteousness of a leftist operative, the small-mindedness of the old families of Sacramento like her own, herself for keeping a notebook and for being heartbroken at having failed to secure membership in Phi Beta Kappa. She does not skewer John Wayne, a childhood hero who she visits on a movie set and remains charmed by. As a Nevadan, I found her portrait of the Las Vegas wedding industry quite funny. But regardless of the subjects and even the overall success of the pieces, the joy of reading Didion is her prose. It’s spare in a way I don’t usually tend to gravitate towards, but it is peppered with deftly crafted insights into the human condition that I wanted to shove into my brain for safekeeping like a squirrel with so many acorns. There’s such a clarity to it, such a delicate balance of unsentimental observation with reminders of her own consciousness of herself as observer. It’s fantastic writing, I really enjoyed reading it and recommend it.

In Life…

  • The holiday season: It’s been a very mild winter in the high desert, feeling like late fall and with temperatures into the upper 50s pretty close to the end of the month. It’s finally turned cold, and there’s even been some precipitation, but we did not manage a white Christmas. Nevertheless, our little guy was relentlessly spoiled and we are very lucky to have family and friends who make sure he wants for virtually nothing, either in material goods or affection.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books On My Winter 25-26 To-Read List

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re previewing our reading for the winter season to come. As usual, I have a variety of books on my list: nonfiction, literary fiction, science fiction. And if you think about it, you’ll be able to spot something that I’m doing next year (the first book in the list will be read before the end of this year, so it doesn’t count).

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: I love Joan Didion’s writing but have never read her most famous essay collection.

The Warmth of Other Suns: This is one of those books that gets constantly recommended if you like non-fiction and we know I do!

Such a Fun Age: This was longlisted for the Booker and very trendy when it came out in 2020 so I’m looking forward to getting to it.

The Fifth Season: I’ve heard great things about N.K. Jemison’s sci-fi generally and this one in particular!

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe: Every so often I dip my toes back into young adult books and this one was especially well-reviewed.

The Old Fire: I do like to mix in some new releases, and this tale of sisters and long-buried secrets seems like my sort of thing.

Kindred: A modern classic I am embarrassed I haven’t read yet!

When They Call You a Terrorist: This is a memoir from one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement and I’m curious to read her account of its formation.

The Black Calhouns: This is a family history written by Lena Horne’s daughter, chronicling the generations since her great-grandfather, born a slave, through her mother’s career as a starlet and her own life, which sounds really interesting!

Norwegian Wood: This will be my third Murakami.

Book Review: The Talented Mr. Ripley

It can be difficult to not let envy of other people’s circumstances eat you up. I remember applying for what seemed like a million jobs after I passed the bar exam, seething with jealousy about people who had lawyers for parents who could employ them or get their friends to hire them. I get a little green-eyed about people who don’t have student loans and just like…save money instead of waving goodbye to hundreds of post-tax dollars every month. But I try to remember that for every advantage I long for that someone else has, there are plenty of people out there who look at me and see the many many perks I have gotten without doing anything of my own accord to earn them. Any the ones with the stuff I want, they’ve almost certainly got their own struggles too.

Patricia Highsmith created one of literature’s greatest monsters of desire in her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. As anyone who’s seen the (very good) movie knows, it follows the titular Tom Ripley, who goes to Italy to seek out Dickie Greenleaf at Dickie’s parents’ request. Tom, who has been quietly running a small mail fraud scheme on seniors for his own amusement while living virtually broke in New York City, is desperate for both the approval of and the funding offered by the Greenleaf family to find their wayward son and bring him home before his mother dies of cancer. It doesn’t take him long at all to track down Dickie once he arrives in the seaside town of Mongibello, but Dickie has no interest in returning to the United States. Tom manages to ingratiate himself with Dickie and his best friend, Marge, feeding stories back to the Greenleafs that he thinks he’s starting to convince Dickie to come back to keep the money going. But he doesn’t just want to be Dickie’s friend, he wants to be Dickie. When the frustrated Greenleafs cut off Tom’s remuneration and Dickie seems to be souring on his company, he’s driven to a desperate act: he murders Dickie, and then assumes his identity.

For a little while, it works: he’s able to play Dickie’s part well enough to cash his checks. But when an acquaintance blunders into the truth, Tom commits another murder and then he’s on the run. He criss-crosses Italy, trying to keep one step ahead of not only the cops, but of Marge and Dickie’s father, who get involved to try to figure out what happened to him. Tom is clever, but is he clever enough to not only get away with one murder, but two?

I’ve watched the movie all the way through a few times and then caught snippets on TV here and there, so I had at least some inkling of the plot going into it. Though it’s a novel of suspense, I found that knowing generally how it would end decreased my enjoyment of it not at all. The plot varies enough that it’s not a carbon copy and there are still moments where I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen or how/if Tom was going to be able to work himself out of a situation. Highsmith does an excellent job of creating narrative tension, keeping me turning the pages and getting wrapped up in the plot.

In order for the book to really work, though, she has to get you to root for Tom and want to see him get away with it, at least a little. And she does! Like Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert, Tom is a sociopath who acts with regards to his own feelings above all, engaging in monstrous behavior…but also like Humbert, he’s compelling against your better judgment. It would have been easy enough for the character to slip into Patrick Bateman territory and be repulsive, but Highsmith really finds a way to present Tom’s covetousness as less different from and more just a bigger version of the kind everyone feels. This is an excellent, well-written thriller (a genre I don’t always especially enjoy) and I would highly recommend it!

A Month In The Life: November 2025

The nights are long and getting longer, but now that we’re into the holiday season and people have their Christmas lights up it gives a little glow of cheer in the night! This was an interesting month, with a somewhat expected work event having some very unexpected developments.

In Books…

  • Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery: What most people (in the United States anyways) know of what happened after Henry VIII died is that his young son Edward ruled briefly and then died, and then Bloody Mary ruled and burned a bunch of people in her efforts to restore Catholicism before dying, and then Elizabeth ruled and Shakespeare and the Spanish Armada and so on and so forth. Most people have long since forgotten, if they ever knew, that there was a glitch between Edward and Mary. For no longer than a fortnight, there was a different queen: Jane Grey. Jane was the granddaughter of Henry’s younger sister, and like Edward a devout Protestant. Mary, though, rallied troops to her cause as the daughter of Henry, named in his will as the second in line to the throne, and successfully marched on London to claim the crown. Jane (and her husband Guildford) was put into the Tower, but there was every reason to believe she might one day be released as it was her father-in-law, John Dudley, that was largely viewed as responsible for her very brief reign. As a figurehead for those opposed to Mary and her Catholic reforms to rally around, though, she came to be seen as too dangerous to live and was executed. Historian Eric Ives, though, finds this widely-understood narrative to be flawed. If you, like me, came to this book thinking it would be primarily about Jane because that is after all her name as the title, you will be disappointed. Ives’s real point in writing this book is to assert that John Dudley, her father-in-law was unfairly maligned and does not deserve the share of the blame he has gotten over the years. There is some extent to which this seems to be true. Where his argument hinges is on the way Henry VIII established his succession (Edward, Mary, Elizabeth). He did not ever walk back his declarations of the illegitimacy of his daughters. Rather, he continued to hold that they were illegitimate, but he personally chose them to succeed him if their brother were to die without offspring. Edward, Ives argued, was equally entitled as sovereign to make his own decisions about the succession, which entirely disinherited his sisters in favor of his cousins the Greys (Jane had two younger sisters who were set out as next in line after her). John Dudley was the leader of Edward’s council and was doing nothing “wrong” by seeking to enact the terms of Edward’s plan for succession. It was in fact Mary who was the usurper, not Jane. So far, so convincing. But he overeggs the pudding by trying to paint it as innocuous that Jane was married to Dudley’s own son, Guildford, shortly before the death of the king and that this was not an example of ambition, arguing that Dudley would have preferred to continue to be an advisor to Edward, who may not have seemed to be on his deathbad at the time the marriage was arranged, than to be the father of the king. This strains credulity. As Dudley himself had seen and even perpetuated, advisors could be toppled and it would be far more secure to be bound to royalty by blood ties than any other sort of connection. I wanted more about Jane herself, though Ives seems to honestly not find her especially interesting. She loved learning and was highly educated, she was devoutly Protestant. That’s about all we learn about her. This is a nitpick, but it also drove me crazy that Ives insisted on referring to Edward’s succession plan as a “deuise” instead of a “devise” because that’s how it was rendered in Edward’s handwriting. This book was written in 2019, just use “devise”, no one thinks you’re doing something about historical accuracy by using that spelling! This is clearly deeply-researched and will be most accessible to someone very interested in the intricacies of Tudor politics, those looking for information about Jane Grey herself should avoid this.
  • The Vegetarian: Yeong-hye Kim is a completely ordinary-seeming young woman in South Korea. She’s been married to a salaryman for several years, she does freelance graphic design projects, and the couple seems likely to begin following the path of her sister, In-hye, and brother-in-law and have a child soon. But one night her husband awakes in the middle of the night to find her going through their refrigerator and throwing out every bit of meat inside it. When he asks her what’s going on, she tells him she had a dream. She refuses from that point forward to cook or eat meat, causing tension within both her household and her larger family as she stops eating much in the way of other food either (she goes fully vegan very quickly). She wastes away physically and in many ways withdraws from the world, but no matter what anyone tries she will neither engage in debate about her choice or change it. This inspires a range of reactions and counter-reactions with ramifications more dramatic than anyone might have ever imagined. There’s more plot, but the point of this book really isn’t about the plot. The story is narrated by three people: her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister…notably none of which are Yeong-hye herself. It’s a book much less about her than about the way the people around her react to her decision. Her husband, whose narration makes it clear that he sees her as not a person as much as a body to fit into the role of “my wife” (in fact, I don’t think the portion of the book that deals with him has him once refer to her by name), is dismayed not at what she is doing to herself but how it impacts and reflects upon him. Her brother-in-law, an artist, sees in her a body that could serve his artistic purposes. Her sister does see her as a person, but also resents her in a way, for finding an escape hatch from the pressure of performing the role of “successful woman” that she herself feels trapped by. It should not be surprising that in a book that centers men thinking of women as something less than fully realized people, that there are some very upsetting things that happen to Yeong-hye. I do not personally tend to find these sorts of highly symbolic narratives compelling. I’m perfectly happy to have my nonfiction be about ideas, but I prefer fiction to be about people, and this is only vaguely that. This is a book full of triggers: disordered eating, sexual assault, physical assault, self-harm, and while I get why they’re there for what it seems Han Kang is trying to do here, I mostly found it unpleasant and upsetting for very little purpose, in the end. I did not enjoy the experience of reading this book and I cannot recommend it.
  • Cape Fever: When Soraya Matas goes to interview with Mrs. Hattingh for a position as her maid, she does not let her future employer know that she can read. In the wake of World War I in Cape Town, South Africa, Soraya’s mother advises her to keep her literacy (she’s a good reader, though a relatively poor writer) to herself, as many of the rich white people who employ servants prefer them to not have this skill. Soraya immediately notices that the once-grand home has fallen into disrepair, with obvious spots that used to hold paintings left bare when the art was sold. But Soraya needs the money to help support her family so she takes the job, though she’s dismayed at the condition that she can return home to the nearby Muslim Quarter only once every two weeks. Hattingh, long since widowed and with her only child, a war veteran, living in London, is lonely and clearly needs the companionship of another person in the home almost as much as she needs Soraya’s work cooking and cleaning. Hattingh is every inch the colonial white woman, holding a lot of opinions about Soraya’s “people” based on virtually no real interaction with them. She peppers Soraya with questions and she learns that she’s engaged to a childhood friend, Nour, who is working on a farm outside the city while he prepares to enter the teacher’s college. When she proposes that she will help the young couple correspond by writing letters for Soraya and reading the responses to her, Soraya can’t resist the opportunity to stay in touch with her fiance. After a family tragedy, though, Soraya realizes that something is amiss, and the truth is something she would never have imagined. The plot developments aren’t especially hard to see coming here, so if you’re looking for a twisty mystery/thriller this might not be the read for you. If you’re looking for gothic vibes, though, they’re here. Big, mostly-empty house with secrets inside, check. Soraya loves ghost stories, putting together yarns spooky enough to have caused a fuss in the neighborhood about scaring the little kids, but what seems at first to be just a powerful young imagination is revealed as potentially being much more. Hattingh at one point hosts a seance, and it’s ambiguous whether the medium is a total charlatan or only half of one. I found it atmospheric and engaging despite its lack of real surprises on offer, and I appreciated getting the opportunity to learn a bit about a time and place I’d never really read about before. Soraya and Hattingh are both well-developed characters considering the relatively brief length of the book, which comes in under 250 pages. I appreciated its brevity, I feel like many writers would have tried to pad it out but the story felt like it was fully told and I think would have felt bloated with more.  Did it feel like maybe it wrapped up a little too neatly? Sure. But I found it an enjoyable, quick read and appreciated the nods to classic gothic tropes and I would recommend it!
  • Beautiful: Hedy Lamarr is famous for being both gobsmackingly gorgeous and having helped invent, in the 1940s, some of the technology that would one day lead to WiFi. Born as Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914, Hedy lived a privileged childhood as the child of a well-off ethnically Jewish couple (her mother had converted to Christianity and Hedy was not raised in the Jewish faith). Her parents were socially active and Hedy apparently felt lonely as a child, which did not stop her from also being very busy during the early years of her own children. Hedy was an indifferent student, though intellectually curious at home, and left even her finishing and acting schools early to pursue a career in entertainment, finagling her way into a job at a silent film studio and debuting on the stage. At only 18 she starred in what became rather a notorious movie, Ectasy, about a younger woman married to an older man who has an affair with a guy her own age. The role had significant nudity and her conservative parents did not approve. Neither did the man she married only about a year later, a wealthy and powerful munitions dealer with significant ties to right-wing regimes including that of Benito Mussolini. Fritz Mandl, the first of what would turn out to be six husbands, was controlling to the extreme that Hedy had to flee in disguise to get away from him about four years later. She met Louis B. Mayer, who signed her to MGM, beginning what would be about a 15 year-long career as a major Hollywood star. In the 1940s, a staunch patriot of her adopted country, she was top seller of war bonds and worked happily at the Hollywood Canteen. It is in this period that she worked with a close friend, a composer, on an frequency-hopping torpedo whose patent they donated to the government. She adopted a child with her second husband and had two biological children with her third. All of her marriages were impulsive, often happening within just weeks of meeting, and it became a slippery slope, with her inclination to abandon her career for love tanking her earnings, making her more likely to take a bad role with a good paycheck. She was never good with money and frequently embroiled in lawsuits. A trial for shoplifting in the mid-1960s, though she was acquitted, damaged her reputation even further. She eventually became a bit of a recluse and moved to Florida, where she faced shoplifting charges again in the early 90s but eventually played the stock market well enough to leave a substantial sum behind in her will. Hedy was clearly a complex, multi-faceted woman who lived a life including both the highs of fame and fortune and the lows of seclusion and barely scraping by, virtually none of which she’d have ever been able to imagine growing up as a privileged Austrian girl. But author Stephen Michael Shearer isn’t interested in taking a look at her life in the macro and identifying patterns, like an obvious tendency to impulsivity and even recklessness that persisted from her teenage years fleeing her finishing school to lifting eye drops at a Florida drugstore. His book is a straightforward, linear recitation of her life, including sometimes tedious levels of detail about her film, television, and radio roles. It is obvious that he’s a fan, he takes pains to present positive reviews of her work in movies as well as his own, almost uniformly glowing opinion about how well she did with her roles. His attention to her personal life, outside of tracking headlines about who she was dating at any given time, is frustratingly inconsistent. He mentions that Hedy was concerned about getting her mother out of Austria after the Anschluss, then goes like 50 plus pages before he mentions it again with an update, followed by another like 50 pages after that before a conclusion. There’s just no analysis or critical engagement here, it’s a recitation of facts. His attempts to put a bow on it in his prologue and epilogue go straight to cliche, falling back to describing her as a simple, romantic Austrian girl when all of the evidence is that even as a teenager she was clever and resourceful. I’m sure there’s a good book to be written about her, but it isn’t this one. I can’t recommend it.
  • The Stand: One day in 1990, a security guard flees a top secret portion of a military base in the California desert, scared out of his wits. The unit he’s escaped from is developing viruses for germ warfare and their latest trial, a variation on the flu, has killed every single one of the research subjects. The man takes his wife and daughter and flees east. Several days later, his car crashes into a gas station in a small town in Texas where Stu Redman and his friends are hanging around chatting. The only one still alive in the car is the man himself, and only just barely. He dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. But the new disease, soon nicknamed Captain Trips, has entered our interconnected world and it begins to spread. It spreads to New York, where Larry Underwood, a session musician whose first studio single has started climbing the charts and who has fled home from getting into trouble with his new success in California, will end up taking care of his mother while she dies. It spreads to Arkansas, where a completely Deaf man, Nick Andros, is recovering from being attacked by a group of local meatheads, recuperating at the sheriff’s house while the men who assaulted him are in jail. It spreads to Maine, where college student Frannie Goldsmith has just told her parents that she’s become pregnant despite being on birth control. While the flu wipes out 99% of the world’s population, that leaves all these people among the 1% left to figure out how to survive in this new world. The survivors begin having dreams about two figures. One, Mother Abagail, is a 108 year-old Black woman from Nebraska who appears in peaceful dreams. The other is called Randall Flagg, a presumably white man (he was once a member of the Klan) of uncertain age, whose manifestations are nightmarish. Two camps become established as survivors find each other and are drawn to either Abagail or Flagg, with Abagail’s group eventually settling in Boulder while Flagg sets up shop in Las Vegas. The Boulder group, knowing that Flagg will not be content to leave them alone, prepare for confrontation by sending spies, but what is to come is a surprise to everyone. This was only my second-ever Stephen King, despite having quite enjoyed The Shining. This nearly 1500-page doorstopper was a very different experience in some ways, but less so in others. On display again is his real talent for character work, the cast here is sprawling and each of them feels like a person. What kept me engaged was less the plot, which is terribly paced and was honestly not especially compelling to me, but the characters and their relationships. With the sheer number of characters to play with, King gives himself a lot of room to explore parallels and mirrors. Abagail and Flagg, of course, but also some morally grey characters, like Larry Underwood and a woman he encounters on the road called Nadine Cross. He may have been a dissolute wannabe rock star and she a virginal schoolteacher, but given the opportunity to become whoever they want to, Larry and Nadine make choices that set them on very different paths. Indeed, the theme of destiny v. free will is a constant. Even with the characters, though, there are some issues. As might be expected from King, his writing of women and minorities is suspect. While there’s something to be said for portraying the leader of the forces for good as a Black woman and making white dude Flagg essentially a literal demon, Abagail is very much in the media trope of a Magical Negro and she is the only character of color in the book that I can recall. Overall, though, the characters are a strength, especially as compared to the plot. The version of this book that I read is King’s preferred text, but it was originally published with about 400 pages less of material, apparently based on concerns about how much the book would need to cost at full length. Without having read that version, I do believe there is probably about 400 pages that could be cut from this version for a better book. The opening section of the book, detailing the spread of the flu, does have some interesting things to say about the ways government sometimes looks to serve itself above its citizens. Even as the President comes down with the virus, he goes on TV to lie about its origins, about the military response, about a vaccine to be made available. Even though he’s immune, Stu’s survival is imperiled because he’s fallen into the hands of government agencies who see him as a liability who knows too much and he’s forced to kill his own would-be assassin to escape death. The problem is that these introductory portions go on for well over 300 pages alone. Knowing that the book is a post-apocalyptic story, I found myself impatient to get to the end of the apocalypse. Once we get there, I thought the bits where survivors begin to come together were engaging enough and while I imagine plenty of other people found it dull, as a person whose work is politics, I was very much interested in the ways that the Boulder community began to be organized. But again, there were issues because while we change perspectives to the Las Vegas world occasionally, it was hard to have much of a sense of what Flagg actually wanted. What the Boulder group wants is easy enough to understand, and the struggle of how to effectuate it is where the tension comes in, but what exactly the Las Vegas contingent hopes to attain (beyond the destruction of the other) was a mystery to me. Control, yes, but then what? I suppose the same question may be asked of the end goal of any despot but it left that portion of the narrative without much energy. When the central conflict comes to a climax, the denouement was, to me, a little too rushed. I wanted to see more of what happened, how it played out. We get some fast-forward bits but they only hint at developments that could have been fleshed out. Knowing that The Lord of the Rings was an inspiration for King, I found myself thinking about the Scouring of the Shire. The first time I read the books it left a bad taste in my mouth, to have the heroes go through all of that and then being rewarded for their immense sacrifice with yet more hardship, but the older I get and the more I understand about human history, the righter it feels. While what the characters decide to do at the end makes sense, the wrong character drives that decision, for me. Am I glad I read this? Yes. It’s nowhere near being The Great American Novel, but I do think it is an interesting American novel. It’s very readable, I tore through it in about two weeks despite its page count (classics of similar length have previously taken me at least a week more). It’s hard to recommend because of its length and its supernatural elements, which some readers may find alienating. But I think it’s worth reading and if someone is at all curious about it, they should give it a try.

In Life…

  • Special session: Regular session ended with some dramatics, which left some things undone, and so we ended up having a special session. Starting on a Thursday, most hoped it would wrap by the end of the weekend (typically in the past decade special sessions last 3-4 days maximum) but it ended up taking until the following Wednesday to get everything done. The legislature actually ended up doing something it had never done before in Nevada and amended the special session by a supermajority vote to hear a bill that was not on the original list of subjects to be considered. There were some very very long days, there was a lot of waiting around for things to get going, two bills died dramatically and unexpectedly on the floor right at the end. It is all over now, though, and I have been very glad for that.

Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Books I Think Will Become Classics

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about modern books we think will be classics in the future. I’ve done a topic like this before, last summer, but in that one I used books from the 2000s generally, so I figured I’d restrict myself to the last ten years for this edition (and obviously, not repeat, so that’s why There There isn’t on this one!).

Bad Blood: Basically an instant classic, this deeply reported book on the rise and fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes is the kind of gripping non-fiction that seems too wild to be true but it IS.

The Hate U Give: In many ways it reads as the young adult book it is, but its story of a teenage girl whose close friend is murdered in an act of police violence has a ton of power and I think will be relevant to readers for years to come.

Less: A perfect read for when you want something that’s both good-quality and heartwarming, this book’s charm will give it a long life.

The Bear and the Nightingale: People (including me, I am people) genuinely love this book and series for its spellbinding world building and fierce heroine. I think it’s going to have the kind of staying power that The Golden Compass has had.

Say Nothing: Despite being nonfiction, it has the narrative tension and twisty structure of a thriller and I think that will keep it on people’s minds for a long time.

Exit West: Short but no less impactful for its brevity, this tale of immigration and reconfiguration has a timelessness that will keep it in good stead.

The Nickel Boys: Colson Whitehead’s novel is so great and such a gut punch and his body of work is really just bananas, something has to be the one that sticks the most and this was my favorite of his thus far.

Know My Name: This account of rape and its aftermath is beautiful and searing and an absolute must-read.

Hamnet: If the movie version hits, I think it will continue to lift the profile of this book that already seems to have gotten a bit of a following and is heartwrenching in the best possible way.

Daisy Jones & The Six: This isn’t a phenomenal book in a literary sense, but it was enormously popular because it’s intensely readable and a real page-turner, with vivid characters and compelling relationships, and I think it will be read and enjoyed for quite a while to come.

Book Review: The Great Mortality

I seem to get the flu at the most inconvenient times. Once was during a special legislative session, that I needed to cover…I was allowed to cover from home, but being able to stay awake and focused enough to give the work product to the client that we needed to produce was a tall order. I took LOTS of Day-Quil. The second was after I got The Call to be on Jeopardy! I was planning to use the approximately three weeks notice I was given to buckle down and study areas that frequently pop up on the show where my knowledge base was lacking. Instead, I got a particularly nasty bout of the flu that took me out of commission for much besides converting oxygen into carbon dioxide for a week. None of those subjects showed up in a significant way, so it didn’t end up making a different anyways.

It’s easy to forget how deadly the flu can actually be. But its death rate has nothing on the big kahuna of epidemics: the plague. Originating in wild rodents native to the steppes, the impact of the disease was primarily local for hundreds of years. But with the development of the Silk Road, the fleas who served as carriers of the virus had a busier, more straightforward route into the population capitals of Europe than ever before. John Kelly’s The Great Mortality tracks the outbreak known as the Black Death as it wound its deadly path around the continent, taking about one third of the population along with it.

Kelly has clearly done his homework, describing the varieties of plague (bubonic and pneumonic being the primary types he believes to have been involved in this epidemic), the trends that lead to Europe being especially vulnerable to disease, and tracing its trajectory from its likely genesis in the Black Sea region, entering Europe through shipping based in Italy. There was no way, really, to stop or contain it as it marched first through the city-states and then into the continent more broadly, even out to England and up to Scandinavia. It gave fresh vigor to anti-Semitic sentiment, with Jews blamed for it and subjected to pograms. It gave rise to new religious movements, like the flagellants. And it left Europe missing about 1 in every 3 people. An astonishing number!

In some ways, this book succeeds: it manages to convey a lot of information but remain readable. There’s a certain monotony just built into any narrative about the Black Death, because the story is fundamentally the same everywhere: the plague gets to a new city, everyone panics, lots of people die, it moves onto the next place, and then it happens all over again. Kelly attempts to counteract this by livening up his book with occasional humor and pop culture references, which ultimately work against it. It comes off cheesy. What’s worse is the editorializing he indulges in with his footnotes. In one, he notes two sources which differ on their estimates of the mortality rate of the plague in England. Without citing any additional supporting evidence, he asserts that one “has it about right” over the other. His willingness to throw his weight behind an opinion he apparently just likes better and endorse it as fact really undermines any authoritative weight he might have been able to establish. Which is unfortunate, because there’s a lot of good here, and I absolutely feel better-informed about its subject than I was before I read it. But both of those things drag the book down into being only okay, when it could have been solidly good. It’s not a waste of your time, but I can’t recommend it either.

A Month In The Life: October 2025

October has long been my favorite month of the year. I love the fall weather, the trees changing colors, and of course I also get to celebrate my birthday. And then we wrap up with candy, so it’s basically perfect.

In Books…

  • The Gales of November: I don’t necessarily remember the first time I heard Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, but I do know I loved it immediately. The music was beautiful, and the power of the story itself drew me in: a big, proud ship on the seemingly endless water of Lake Superior, full of iron, running into a powerful storm and being buffeted by brutal wind and waves until finally it could take no more and sank, only a little more than a dozen miles from safety. No one survived. No one was even recovered. The ship and her crew sit on the bottom of the lake, where they will forever remain. Anyone who grew up in the Great Lakes region has heard that song more times than they can count, so native Michigander John U. Bacon was a natural fit to write the definitive account of the tragedy. There has always been a bit of mystery about exactly how and why the boat sank, but though there is a relatively brief portion near the end of the book that lays our and examines the various theories, that’s not really the story that Bacon is trying to tell. Instead, his book touches on the history of Great Lakes shipping with all of its dangers, the building and deployment of the Fitz in the late 1950s, and the ship’s glory days as the biggest and most famous freighter on the Lakes. He also tells the stories of the 29 men who crewed the ship on that fateful day in November, seeking out firsthand accounts from those who knew them, from family members to former crew on the ship. And finally, there’s a detailed account of that last, doomed voyage, departing from Wisconsin on a clear, warm day that felt more like late summer than late fall, with weather reports not at all clear about the full might of the storm that was soon to engulf the ships unlucky enough to be out on the water. Even by the standards of November storms on the biggest of the big lakes, it was unusually brutal. The ship’s captain, Ernest McSorley, one of the most well-respected in the business, made a series of compounding mistakes that would only become obvious as such in retrospect. Even knowing how it would end, Bacon creates such a compelling portrait of the ship and its crew that you find yourself rooting for history to somehow change, for McSorley to choose the faster and more familiar route across the water instead of opting for the less familiar “safer” one that added time the ship did not have to spare to its journey, for it to steam on through the storm at full power rather than slowing its pace to be in closer contact with another vessel, again in the hopes of safety. Tears came to my eyes at the choice of the captain and crew of that other ship, the Arthur M. Anderson, having barely reached safety after a hellish experience on the water, to turn around immediately and go right back into the teeth of it to assist with search efforts once they became aware that the Fitz was missing. It was, of course, fruitless. Bacon even wraps in a bit about Lightfoot and the song, which I was astonished to learn was released from a recording of the very first time the band played it…not their first try in the studio, but literally the very first time they tried out the music. Perhaps it is combination of the rawness of the unexpectedly popular song, and the devastating story behind those lyrics, that accounts for the ship’s staying power in the cultural memory. The book is very good…a bit of a slow starter, but once it gets going I found myself swept along with the story. Bacon’s focus on the human elements of the story gives it a compelling power, and I’d highly recommend it, especially for Great Lakes people. It would make a perfect holiday gift for dads!
  • Doppelganger: In the early part of the 2000s, it was relatively understandable to confuse Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf. What are the odds that there would be two left-leaning Jewish female public intellectuals named Naomi of about the same age running around at the same time, after all? Sure, Klein was more in the corporate malfeasance realm and Wolf more about feminism…at least, until the mid 2010s. Wolf started having some very odd takes on issues like Occupy Wall Street, Edward Snowden, ISIS. Those seemed like blips until about 2019. That was the year that Wolf, about to publish a new book about the criminalization of homosexuality, found out in the worst possible way that she had made a serious interpretive error in her research: she was confronted with her mistake live on the air during a television interview to promote the book. She was humiliated, the book’s US release was cancelled, her former friends in the liberal intelligentsia turned their backs on her, and then something very not-chill happened to the whole world, and this Naomi found a calling. She became a leading voice in the COVID-19 conspiracy theory universe, making frequent appearances on Steve Bannon’s podcast to expound upon these ideas. Naomi Klein was watching all of this unfold in her home in Canada, but her surprise at the turn Wolf had taken had a unique twist. People mad at Wolf on the internet often directed their ire at Klein instead, having mistaken one for the other. It happened often enough that there was even a little rhyme about how to distinguish them. The whole experience sent Klein down a rabbit hole, she found herself listening to Other Naomi compulsively, unable to stop herself from obsessing over the woman who had become her unlooked-for double. A Doppelganger, if you will. The book speaks to the Naomi confusion at length, of course, but it also spins out to cover other sorts of doubles, mirror images, and echoes, touching on social media, the experience of being the parent of an autistic child, and the conflict between Israel and Palestine that has since become a full-on genocide. This broader view is actually to me one of the book’s major weaknesses: it feels like it’s two things kind of smooshed together because neither of them was book-length on their own. And for my money, the portions not about Naomi were stronger. I’d have liked to see in particular the portion about parenting developed further…it’s rooted in Klein’s experience of parenting her own autistic teenager, with autism itself the subject of many conspiracy theories (and it’s gotten so much worse since the book was published), but there are hints around the edges of an analysis of parent-child relationships more generally, the way that parents often see their child as clay to mold as they will, their child’s behavior and accomplishments as a reflection of their own worth as human beings, that never actually ends up going as deep as it could. I think it could have been really interesting to examine the ways in which parents, particularly mothers, often find themselves subsuming their own identities into those of their children: sports moms, pageant moms, dance moms. But alas, we spend very very many pages going over Wolf’s turn to the right and its contrast with Klein’s perspective in detail, including enough rehashing of the ideas from Klein’s own previous works that I went from curious to read them to feeling like I had a solid grasp on the ideas without needing to do so. It was the less engaging portion of the book, for me, and I wished it was 50-100 pages shorter because it felt endless. There are a lot of interesting things to think about here, but for me it’s hard to recommend because it was often a slog.
  • Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne: If I had to guess, I’d say that the woman in the world with the most biographies written about her might be Queen Elizabeth I. Her story is endlessly fascinating: born into the already high-profile union of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the woman her father was so desperate to marry that he broke with the Catholic church only to behead her a mere three years later, Elizabeth survived her brother and sister’s deaths to become queen herself, a reign that saw the work of Shakespeare and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Her refusal to marry meant she alone wielded power for over 40 years. It all becomes even more amazing when you realize how precarious her path to the throne really was: she was proclaimed a bastard after the execution of her mother, and it took the intervention of Anne of Cleves to really begin the process of reconciliation with her father. Her (and her sister Mary’s) restoration to the line of succession was only made about four years before her father’s death. Her stepmother Catherine Parr took custody of her after Henry’s death when Elizabeth was only 14, and it seems highly likely that Catherine’s new husband, the ambitious adventurer Thomas Seymour, took an interest in her that may have crossed lines of propriety and proved the subject of vicious gossip. She managed to wriggle free of the scandal, though, and spent the next whole decade navigating perilous waters between the fervent Protestantism of her brother Edward and the equally fervent Catholicism of Mary. There were serious threats that she might be married off, particularly during Mary’s reign, as it does no monarch any good to have a figurehead around which the opposition can rally…and that’s assuming that the opposition figure doesn’t engage in any skullduggery themselves, which it seems likely Elizabeth did. Simply arriving at her accession day was already the product of years of careful thought and clever planning. And that’s all before she did anything as queen! David Starkey’s biography focuses mostly but not exclusively on this delicate, complicated pre-reign period, probably about 2/3rds of it takes place before she takes the throne. Starkey is both a historian and a TV presenter, which I have to imagine contributes to his ability to balance a scholarly understanding with a straightforward presentation. This is a very readable biography and definitely aimed at a popular rather than academic market. Part of it is that he does not seem to engage in the general practice of historians of presenting various perspectives on a situation and inviting the reader to decide which one they think is the best-supported. He chooses the one he finds most compelling and doesn’t waffle around with the rest, which keeps things moving along briskly. There is a LOT going on here and some existing familiarity with the time period and players was very much helpful to have while reading, I feel like if this had been my first biography about this time period I may have felt a little lost, there are quite a few people to keep track of. I did think the book lost some steam when it got to the early days of Elizabeth’s reign. Starkey dives into the finer points of Elizabeth’s religious practice in a way that sometimes tipped towards the tedious for me. I got the impression that he found her careful balance of Protestant ideas with Catholic trappings to be a clever, thoughtful approach of a woman who understood the value of keeping her nose rather than cutting it off to spite her face…indeed, I got the overall impression that Starkey finds compelling in large part because of her sophisticated understanding of how to gain and hold public regard from even quite an early age. While the book has a lot going for it it, I have to caveat that Starkey is himself the holder of some very gross racial views so I hesitate to recommend too enthusiastically because supporting his work with your money may feel like a road too far, so if you’re curious about it, the secondhand market may be the place to go.
  • What Made Maddy Run: Madison Holleran seemed to have a beautiful life…a pretty 19 year-old freshman track athlete at UPenn, she grew up as part of a large, supportive, and financially secure family and had developed close friendships through running and especially soccer, another sport she loved and was talented at. And then she jumped off the top of a parking structure, ending her own life and leaving the people who loved her with questions that will never be answered. Journalist Kate Fagan wrote a well-regarded longform piece about Maddy for ESPN, which she expanded into this book. The thesis of the original article was about the ways in which Maddy’s social media feed showed a happy teenager enjoying her first year of college and the artfulness with which it hid the deep struggles Maddy was facing, feeling lost without the familiar structure of her high school life around her and struggling to keep her head above water. This is also a central tenet of the book, a conceit that likely felt at least somewhat fresher in the mid-2010s when both were published. The book also speaks to the intense pressure placed on college athletes, who are expected to make the same challenging transition as all freshmen but while juggling a schedule that includes practices daily or even multiple times per day. After a hard first semester, Maddy wanted to quit track and even went to see her coach alongside her mother, reading a letter she’d written about how down she’d felt since arriving at Penn and how she hoped leaving track behind was the answer. The coach suggested taking a step back without fully quitting, which Maddy acquiesced to. Fagan herself was a college athlete, playing basketball at Colorado, and like Maddy she’d felt overwhelmed when she first arrived and tried to quit. Her coach, too, persuaded her to give it more thought. In Fagan’s case (and I’m sure many others), this was the right move: Fagan became a very good player and was able to turn pro in Europe for a while. In Maddy’s, though, it seems it may have felt like a way out was being closed right in front of her. Maddy was encouraged to transfer, including by her own older sister, who had left Penn State for Alabama and was much happier at the latter, but never expressed more than halfhearted interest in the idea. It’s a tremendously sad story about a family who lost a beloved daughter and sister, and a young woman who never got to be who she would become, for reasons that can never be fully explained. But I think it would have been better left as the article alone. First of all, I want to tear All The President’s Men out of every college journalism student’s hands. Reading about how a reporter went about telling their story is, for me, uniformly dull. I don’t care about you! I want to read about the subject of the book! If I want to know how you feel I will pull up your Twitter! I don’t think this self-insert tendency is at all helped by the commonalities Fagan shares with Maddy, particularly in having been a college athlete who did not have an easy time adjusting to campus life. Her own story about not liking college basketball for one semester did not give me greater insight into Maddy. I found the sequence where she apparently dreams about seeing Maddy chat seemingly happily over FaceTime only to turn off the camera and begin crying to be just…really off-putting. Fagan does try to include some mental health information in the text, recounting her conversations with both a young mental health advocate and a survivor of suicide about depression, but the way she tries to wrap up the story by going on a tear about the shallowness of digital connection feels like it totally undermines that previous work. She wants to use Maddy as an exemplar of a trend, not really tell her own specific story. Maybe it’s hard to try to close down a book about something that defies easy answers or tidy summations, but this felt like a cop-out. I can’t recommend this book.
  • The Tortoise’s Tale: A tortoise is born around the turn of the century, but before she knows it she’s taken away from her home and deposited…somewhere else. Which turns out to be a sprawling estate in southern California. She’s first given the name Daisuke by the home’s dedicated Japanese gardener, Takeo. She’s also dubbed Magic, a name bestowed by Lucy, the niece of one of the estate’s owners. While she’d established a bond of mutual fondness with Takeo, her connection with Lucy becomes deeper. Lucy is kind, curious, thoughtful, and treats the tortoise as a creature worthy of dignity and respect. Lucy’s goodness encourages the tortoise be bolder around people, a tendency that is sometimes rewarded and sometimes not as humans come and go over the decades. It is not only with humans that she has relationships, though. She is curious about and spends time with the other animals that inhabit the grounds, including swans, a peacock, donkeys, and even a sad little monkey. The tortoise herself remains one of the very few constants of the property as it passes through various hands over the years, and the tides of history move her in their own way. I am generally inclined to like animal narrators as a literary choice, but I think it can be difficult to pull off, with animals often rendered too human or the narrative becoming too cutesy. Coulter, an animal rights advocate, mostly manages a truthful-seeming animal voice well, having her accompany Lucy to private tutoring sessions conducted outdoors to explain her understanding of language and the basics of the world. But her limitations remain realistic: she cannot talk, she has no mystical mental connection with people that allow them to understand her thoughts or intentions, she can’t communicate with animals of other species. Her feelings are similar to humans in many ways: she knows fear and love, and she takes a sense of pride in her accomplishments. Even given her constraints, Coulter crafts the tortoise as a memorable character, growing and changing through the long years of her life. I found myself genuinely touched by the grief she feels when she loses people she’s come to care for. Coulter does well to keep her narrative fairly brisk at about 250 pages, as the plot sometimes moves as slowly as the tortoise herself. It can sometimes be difficult to try to figure out the time period any particular portion of the book is set in, and the way real-life figures are referenced can feel clunky. There’s a parallel made between reproductive freedom and animal rights that felt jarringly outwardly political in a book that had done its work of communicating the inner lives of animals in a more subtle and to me more effective way until that juncture. Apart from that, the book mostly quietly draws the reader into the emotional experience of this fictional tortoise in a way that makes it hard to not extend out to thinking about how other animals we might see live, how they might feel about people and about each other, whether they’ve known kindness. The book definitely has sentimental tendencies and it’s low on plot, but if you’re looking for something heart-tugging without being emotionally manipulative or you just love animals, it’s a good read and I’d recommend it!
  • Childhood’s End: The Space Race is just heating up, with former German rocket scientists working on either side for the Americans and Russians, when one day it’s unexpectedly cut off. The sky fills with spaceships. A week later, a single alien being calling himself Karellen announces that he and his kind (whom the humans soon dub Overlords) will be assuming control of international relations. He meets regularly with the Secretary-General of the UN, but while the human man is physically taken to the ship, he only ever hears Karellen’s voice. The Overlord refuses to show himself, promising that they will only do so fifty years down the road. During those 50 years, the initial wave of opposition is blunted by the benefits the Overlords have brought: war and poverty are ended, most necessary work is accomplished without human input and so people gain huge amounts of leisure time, learning flourishes. It is a very different world, then, that meets the Overlords and wrestles with the implications of their appearance being that of the Christian devil: wings, horns, tails, hooves. The populace has been sufficiently stripped of religious feeling that this makes little lasting impression and soon a connection with an Overlord becomes very chic. The powerful and well-connected Rupert Boyce manages to get one to attend a party celebrating his recent marriage by leveraging his extensive collection of books about parapsychology, a subject of intense interest for the Overlords. Rupert’s new brother-in-law, Jan, is particularly interested because his ambitions for space travel have been thwarted by one of the few direct prohibitions the Overlords have imposed, which is to prevent humans from reaching the stars. Through intense ingenuity, Jan is able to figure out a way to get aboard a supply ship as a stowaway and can’t pass up the opportunity, though he knows because of faster-than-light travel that even a six-month round trip to the Overlords home world will cost him close to 100 years of Earth time. In the time that he’s gone, though, the final developments of this long-running plan will be put into motion, rendering the world he would return to different than the one he had known in more ways than he could have possibly imagined. I don’t tend to read a lot of science fiction, largely because I find the sort of thought experiments typical of the genre to be interesting but fundamentally not very compelling unless tied into some well-developed characters. Alas, those are not on offer here. Given that Arthur C. Clarke is renowned as a short story writer, I perhaps should not have been surprised that this is structured more like three interconnected mini-novellas than a typical novel. Only Karellen is featured in all portions of the book, though the second and third sections are more closely related to each other than to the first section. Neither Karellen nor any of Overlords has a strong personality. The only character with any development is Jan, and I do think it’s interesting, in a laudatory way, that Clarke writes him as a Black man. Jan, an astrophysicist, is the only human with the cleverness, curiosity, and drive to successfully sneak aboard an Overlord ship and see their home world. And upon his return, he becomes essentially the sole survivor of what had been the human race. What it means to be human is the central idea being explored here, with Clarke positing that elimination of most small-scale want and all large-scale conflict would lead to the stagnation of creative endeavors…despite having large amounts of free time, great works of music and literature do not emerge in the post-Overlord world. And changes in the development of the world’s children render them something altogether different than their parents. I found the ideas Clarke played with to be reasonably engaging, but I wished there had been a better-defined narrative arc and of course, richer characters to explore those ideas around. Worth reading? Sure. Enthusiastically recommended? Not really.
  • The Reader: When 15 year-old Michael Berg gets sick on the way home from school in post-war Germany, throwing up in a courtyard of an apartment building near his house, an older woman helps him get cleaned up and on his way. It turns out to be hepatitis, keeping him home from school for a few months as he recovers. Once he’s reasonably well again, he goes to see the woman, who is called Hanna, to thank her for her help. This encounter kicks off a months-long entanglement, with Michael and Hanna becoming physically but mostly not romantically involved, though he does develop feelings for her. They take baths, they sleep together, and Michael reads to her: sometimes from books popular in the teenage set, sometimes from the classics. She’s in her mid-30s and works checking tickets on the streetcars, revealing little of herself and having no interest in Michael taking her out except for one weekend they manage to get away together in which there is an incident that does not become clear until years later. Michael goes to pick up breakfast while she’s sleeping and leaves her a note, coming back to find her furious at her perceived abandonment. She says there was no note, and indeed it has vanished. The two make up, but things end when one day she simply disappears. Michael next sees Hanna when he’s in law school, taking a seminar about the concentration camps. He attends a trial of several women who were guards at a feeder camp outside Auschwitz, who were leading their prisoners on a march and when a fire broke out in the church where the prisoners were staying for the night, took no action to free them. Virtually all of the prisoners died in the blaze. One of the guards on trial is Hanna. In watching Hanna’s efforts to defend herself both against the charges and against the other women, who seek to make her the most responsible party and therefore evade harsh punishment, Michael comes to realize something about Hanna that explains both her behavior at the camp and in the time they were involved, and would tend to exonerate her, at least in part. The struggle of trying to determine whether he should reveal a secret that Hanna herself has hidden weighs heavily on Michael, altering the course of both of their lives to come. I haven’t read a ton of German literature in translation, but it seems that wrestling with the war and the Holocaust remains prominent in German cultural thought, as this book was published in 1995, forty years after the events it portrays. There’s a lot in here about blame and complicity and the secrets that may be hiding under an unremarkable facade, with Michael and his cohort struggling to square their parents, and those of their parents generation, with the horrors that were perpetrated under their flag. The book touches on an estrangement between Michael and his father, and while part of it is his father’s formal reserve, Michael also can’t help but see him as complicit, even after he lost his university position during the war for giving a lecture on a Jewish philosopher. If you came out of it alive and with any sort of stability, there’s an argument that you must have gone along with it all, at least a little. How much guilt lays on any one set of shoulders is also exemplified through Hanna’s trial, in which she tries to accept blame for what she actually did but not for what she didn’t, and the way her co-defendants try to turn her into a ringleader to spare themselves. Should it matter if anyone was more “in charge” than anyone else when they were all camp guards sending Jews to Auschwitz, knowing full well what would happen to them? Surely Hanna deserves the punishment she receives for that alone, regardless of whether or not her fellows also deserve it but are spared. How much grace does she or anyone deserve, especially when you take into consideration that in this day and age, the relationship Hanna had with Michael would be characterized as sexual abuse? There’s just barely a touch on this towards the end, when someone Michael is speaking to about Hanna long after the trial correctly guesses that he’s been unable to form warm, loving relationships even with his ex-wife and daughter. While I found this book a rich text in terms of thinking about its themes, I also struggled to connect with it. I always wonder, with translations, if a sort of distance that’s often there is a failure to fully understand cultural context or is an issue with the translation itself. In this particular case, with alienation also a significant subject, I wonder if it was a deliberate choice by Bernhard Schlink to write in a detached way, echoing the ways the Germans of that era tried to detach themselves from their history. Either way, though, the sense of remove made it hard for me to get as invested in this book as I wanted. Hanna was as inscrutable to me as she was to Michael. Michael felt more like a concept than a person, a personification of the way young Germans in the post-war era reacted to their recent history. The prose is elegant, subdued. The blurbs suggest a fiery eroticism that wasn’t really much present. It’s an interesting book, and I’m glad to have read it but would have a hard time recommending it to others, it’s a bummer and hard to get absorbed into.

In Life…

  • I turned 40!: And two weeks later, so did my husband. Being the parents of a three year-old does not lend itself to much in the way of opportunities to do a big celebration, but we had dinner and spent time together as a family and for me, that was a very lovely way to spend a milestone birthday.
  • Halloween: C was very vocal about his costume choices this year, so he’s being “a skeleton dressed as pumpkin”, I’m being a scarecrow, and my husband will be a ghost! This was also the first year we did pumpkin carving and real trick-or-treating. It’s so fun to see the way he understands holidays more every year!

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