A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Book Review: Gilead

“It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.”

I have never been a religious believer in my adult life. And there are things I think I miss out on, in a practical sense, for not being a member of a church, most particularly a sense of community. But I can’t reconcile myself with faith in the Church and its tenets. One of the concepts I struggle with the most is that of grace. I tend towards a strict definition of “fairness” at the best of times, and can get petty at worse ones. So the idea of love and forgiveness being granted not because of anything tangible that one does, but because of one’s faith, because it is needed and not because it is deserved, is honestly one that keeps me on the other side of the belief fence.

You know just from the title of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead that it’s going to be about Christianity. As a non-believer, I shy away from the Christian/religious section of the bookstore, but when it’s won the Pulitzer, I make an exception. It’s a relatively simple story: John Ames, nearing the end of his life, recounts his experiences as a Congregationalist pastor in a small town in Iowa, called Gilead. He’s the son of a pastor, who was himself the son of a pastor, and Ames is the father of his own small son. How he came to be an older man with a lovely wife decades his junior, Lila, and a young child is revealed slowly over the course of the novel.

The connections between people are what propels this narrative. Just as important as his family is his relationship with Robert Boughton, the Presbyterian minister in town. They bonded as young men, each with their own families, but when Ames’ first wife and baby died, he became so much a part of the Boughton family that they named one of their sons after him. And it is Ames’ conflict with this now-adult son, his namesake, that provides the tension that keeps it moving. He has devoted his life to his faith, even after his beloved brother left it behind and even his pastor father lost it. A central tenet of Christian doctrine is forgiveness, grace. But Ames doesn’t know that he can forgive Jack Boughton for actions he took as a young man…and when Jack returns to Gilead after a long time away, he’s brought into closer contact with the younger man and the issue becomes pressing.

I’ve always been a person who finishes reading a book. I know it’s not for everyone, and quite often I wish I wasn’t this way and that I could just put down a book that isn’t working for myself and spare the frustration. But every so often, there are books that I would have put down, if I did that, that do end up being worth my time. This was one of them. It started, for me, very slow. I didn’t really love Robinson’s Homecoming, and I was thinking maybe she’s just not a writer for me. I was bored, and it all seemed very Men Having Feelings About Fathers. But as it went along, I found myself getting more and more drawn into Ames’ life: the stuff about his father and grandfather didn’t do much for me, but his relationships with his first family, with the Boughtons, his work in the church, the way he’d reconciled himself to loneliness before Lila appears, the way his feelings for her and his son reflect the loss he suffered…I got heavily invested in the character.

Much of that was due to Robinson’s truly lovely writing. Not only is her prose lyrical, but her understanding of what it means to be a person (which sounds so hokey, but I can’t think of another way to say it) really makes the life she creates for this book feel real, and lived-in. She’s a writer who chooses her words carefully, who is capable of evoking deep, strong feelings with relatively few words. There’s a delicacy here that really captures a sense of wonder, and she knows that too much explaining would only break the reverie. Not only did I find this very moving, I bought the sequels because I want to come back to this world she created. Which is quite a feat after I started the book thinking I would eventually wish I’d stopped it. I would recommend this to anyone and everyone.

Top Ten Tuesday: 21st Century Books I Think Will Become Classics

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week is a throwback freebie, so I looked back to a topic from my first year of motherhood, when TTT was not even on my radar, and picked books from this century I think will become classics. This was HARD to winnow down, there are so many excellent books, but here are the ones that really stand out to me!

 

The Corrections: I personally liked rather than loved this book, but there is no denying its place in the modern canon. There’s the Jonathan Franzen of it all, the imbroglio about its inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club, the midwestern setting, the family conflicts, suburban discontent. It fits the bill.

Atonement: This one’s profile was helped by the well-regarded movie adaptation, but was on its own a smash-hit bestseller that just feels like a classic (maybe it’s the English country house).

Wolf Hall: I will freely admit that I liked the sequel more (and haven’t yet read the third in the trilogy), but there is no denying that this is a tremendous work of historical fiction about the Tudors, an era that has been written about extensively but never like this.

Gilead: Honestly an underdiscussed contender (at least to me) in the eternal debate over The Great American Novel: an elegantly-written story of family and love, slavery and the Civil War, and religion.

The Year of Magical Thinking: An absolutely devastating and razor-sharp insightful examination of grief. One of the very greatest memoirs.

Americanah: An examination of America through African eyes, wrapped together with a love story and bound with Adichie’s incredible prose.

The Goldfinch: I like The Secret History more, but this one is more accomplished and feels more like a classic in its scope, including in its allusions to established classics like Great Expectations.

Between the World and Me: “Short” and “an easy read” are not always synonyms, and they certainly aren’t here. But Ta-Nahesi Coates’s book, written as a series of letters to his son, is vital, devastating reading.

There There: A dazzling display of talent, this book and its interwoven perspectives will challenge anyone’s pre-existing notions of what Native American stories look like.

Gone Girl: This book changed the entire trajectory of marketing for domestic thrillers, a genre that had seemed relegated to supermarket checkout lane impulse buys and exploded into the mainstream. Plays with a lot of the classic tropes of the genre but doesn’t feel stale, in part because of Gillian Flynn’s razor-sharp writing.

A Month In The Life: June 2024

June was at the very least better than May, though that’s a very low bar to clear. We’re still mourning our sweet little pug, which I suspect will be the case for quite a while to come: he was a part of our everyday lives for over eight years. Otherwise, it was a typical summer month in Reno: dry and hot, and lots of trips to the park and the library and sometimes just honestly wherever we can think we might take the toddler where there’s air conditioning and he’ll be entertained.

In Books:

  • Lower Ed: A classmate of mine in law school once said something I’ve never quite forgotten. This was well over a decade ago, he’s a good person, and I think he would retract the sentiment now. But he’d gone to an Ivy League college, and was expressing regret at ending up at his home state’s law school, and said something about feeling like a failure for being at the same law school as someone who’d gone to DeVry University for her bachelor’s degree. The classmate who’d gone there had gotten pregnant shortly after high school, married her boyfriend, and gone on to have two more kids. By the time she was ready to pursue her degree, she was a working parent of three. She was in many ways exactly the target student for a for-profit university. Tressie McMillan Cottom would know. She was an enrollment officer at two kinds of for-profit universities before she earned her Ph.D. at Emory. The beauty school and technical college she worked at served different clienteles, but the students often shared motivations: they need skills to secure a steady job, or position themselves for the next step up on the ladder, and time/ease of process are at a premium. This book is clearly a re-working of her dissertation research, so it’s a little more academically-oriented rather than “pop” non-fiction, but I found it honestly very accessible. She takes pains to not bury her points under loads of jargon, and her qualitative research (actually talking to students) shines. She explores what drives students towards for-profit universities, how those schools market themselves to students, and the underlying social and economic forces driving both the students and the growth of the schools. As a result of her own experiences in enrollment, as well as being a member of a group (Black women) that are disproportionately represented in the sector she is examining, she is uniquely well-positioned to take a clear-eyed look at the situation, probe its origins, and think about its future. I don’t know how broad this book’s appeal is because not everyone finds the subject matter especially intriguing, but I think it’s interesting and well-written and makes an argument about why you should care, even if you think you don’t, so I’d recommend it!
  • The Historian: I had been really intrigued by the idea of a big sprawling historical thriller about a hunt through both archives and the world for the legacy of Dracula. Honestly, though, it was a real disappointment. It spins the tale of a teenage narrator (never named) who lives with her father in Amsterdam when she discovers an old book, blank but for a woodcut of a dragon in the middle. When she asks her dad about it, he tells her how it came into his possession as a graduate student in America and how his own inquiries to his thesis advisor about it was followed shortly by the older man’s disappearance. In trying to discover what happened to his professor, her father found himself on a journey around the world, to places he never dreamed he might visit in a desperate attempt to find clues, and connecting with people with lives incredibly different from his own. The path leads inexorably to Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, and the haunting possibility that he may not be in his purported tomb at all, but still active in the world. And then her father, even before he can finish recounting the full story, disappears as well. All of this is an excellent set-up for a literary page-turner! Instead, it was a drag. The book needed at least 200 of its 700 pages cut, because the pacing was mind-bogglingly bad. I got incredibly bored in the middle and kept hoping it would pick up, but alas, virtually all the action (such as it is) takes place in about the last 50ish pages. Even with all of those pages of text, there is very little character development despite it being nominally rooted in a family story, which was a bummer to me as someone who really loves rich characters. I couldn’t really get engaged with anyone. And the payoff was not remotely worth it. The book’s version of Dracula is just kind of dull. There’s a reasonably good book in here somewhere, but it’s not the one that was published. I can’t recommend it.
  • Ladykiller: Sometimes I get a hankering for a dumb fun thriller, but picking one up is usually followed closely by remembering that they just make me anxious and I don’t actually like them very much. This was about par for the course. It tells a story about Abby and Gia, best friends since they met as children when Abby’s mother came to cook for Gia’s multi-millionaire father. In the hopes that steady Abby will be a good influence on willful Gia, her family pays for Abby to attend the same exclusive prep schools as Gia, and the two girls (with Gia’s little brother Benny) spend their teenage summers poorly supervised on a small Greek island. The summer they turn 18, though, disaster strikes. When a former acquaintance of Gia’s attacks Abby, Gia inadvertently kills him in an effort to defend her friend. After that, their paths diverge, with Abby pursuing college and then law school, while Gia writes a best-selling tell-all about what happened and generally jetsets around and lives the life of a 20something heiress. The two remain close, however, until shortly after her father’s death when Gia impulsively marries Garrett, a man she’s known for just a month. Angry that Abby would not support her choice, the girls (now approaching 30) fall out…but then, Gia invites Abby to Sweden to celebrate her birthday with her brother, just the three of them. But when Abby and Benny get to Sweden, Gia isn’t there. She’s not answering her phone. She’s seemingly just gone. The book follows two tracks: one, in Abby’s present as she gets the invite from Gia, goes to Sweden, and tries to figure out what could have happened to her friend. The other is a manuscript written by Gia beginning a few months before the trip, as she and Garrett prepare to put up the family home in Greece up for sale and enjoy the last few weeks there. Only three months into their marriage, it seems painfully obvious that Garrett is not exactly who he appears to be…and then a young, attractive couple show up on the island and start sharing the house with Gia and Garrett, complicating things even further. I don’t read a lot of thrillers, but even I can tell that this one relies on a lot of tropes familiar in the genre: unreliable narrators, elements of the past rising up again in the present, double identities. I thought the pacing could have been better, the beginning dragged a bit but it took off around the halfway point. It’s a page-turner, with the kind of short chapters that make “just one more” an easy sell. The ending has some ambiguity, which may or may not be appealing (I don’t mind it in and of itself) but it felt rushed. I didn’t like it very much, clearly, but I’m also not really the target audience.
  • Shadow and Bone: This book was very popular on the bookish internet when I started blogging so it’s been on my list for quite some time. Alina Starkov is an orphan who serves in the Army of the fantasy kingdom of Ravka (which is obviously meant to be Russia) with her childhood best friend and longtime crush Mal, she as a mapmaker and he as a tracker. The kingdom was split in two centuries ago by the Shadow Fold, a pitch-black wasteland populated by monstrous bird-like creatures called volcra, and Alina and Mal’s unit is set to make an attempt to cross the Fold. When they do, however, an injury to Mal triggers the display of an amazing magical power by Alina. She is promptly whisked away to the capital to become a member of the Grisha, who use their magical talents in their own military units, commanded by a leader called the Darkling. In an unfamiliar new world, Alina is hailed as a savior who could destroy the Shadow Fold forever. But feels like a fraud as she struggles to learn how to use her power and manage a growing attraction to the Darkling, even as she yearns for news of Mal. A betrayal is discovered and Alina’s subsequent flight has consequences she could have barely imagined. I had mixed feelings about this one. To start with the positive, it’s undeniably engaging, a page-turner filled with vivid characters and their shifting motives. Alina is reasonably appealing, as these kinds of characters go, naive and full of doubt without being too much of a dummy or sad sack. But it’s the “as these kinds of characters go” that’s representative of the bigger problem here. There are a bajillion of these books out there, YA fantasy with a 16-20 year-old female protagonist, who feels awkward and plain, and finds herself as a sort of Chosen One, probably with a love triangle thrown in to boot. Leigh Bardugo is a talented storyteller, her version is compelling! But since there are so many of them, everyone seems to feel the need to take an angle on the material to keep it fresh. Bardugo chose Russian/Slavic as her flavor, and this is where she erred enough to mar my enjoyment of the book. I don’t speak Russian and won’t pretend to have an exhaustive knowledge of Russian culture, but I know enough that her choices threw me out of the narrative. Alina’s surname, for instance, in Russian, should have the feminine “-a” ending: Starkova. If she’d just decided to use Western naming convention as a default, that would make sense: she’s writing for a primarily American audience. But no, there’s reference later on to a person called “Ilya Morozova”, which is doubly perplexing because now while we do apparently have feminine surnames…Ilya is a boy’s name. Bardugo’s characters drink kvas, an actual beverage consumed in many eastern European countries. It is about as alcoholic as kombucha, but Bardugo’s characters get drunk on it like beer. Why not just use vodka as the alcoholic beverage of choice? And then there is the term “Grisha”, which is literally just “Greg”. These are unforced errors that could have been solved with a Google! For many readers, these sort of things likely won’t be an issue. But it was for me, and it’s a shame because I did otherwise like the book.
  • The Darkening Age: As someone who grew up going to church at least semi-regularly until my teen years, my rough understanding had been that Christians started out as a persecuted and harassed minority (sent to the lions at the Colosseum!) but the Roman government was unable to keep the faith from spreading, and when Constantine converted, becoming the first Christian emperor, it was only a matter of time before the whole empire followed. If you look at the historical record, though, it turns out that it’s a bit more complicated than that. This book traces the role of Christians/Christianity in the later years of the Roman Empire, challenging the widely-accepted narrative of a relatively peaceful transition of power. Rather, Nixey posits it as a violent time of staggering cultural loss. Untold numbers of statues, frescoes, and other objects of art were defaced, beheaded, or destroyed because they depicted either personages (the gods) or themes (sex, mostly, or any other sort of leisure or enjoyment) that were antithetical to Christian doctrine. Much the same was true of literature, philosophy, and even science/math with the overwhelming majority of written work being either censored or destroyed. Christians were not content to displace the previously-existing Roman culture, or, as the Romans themselves mostly actually wanted to do with the Christians when the roles were reversed, subsume and integrate it. They wanted to (and did) virtually destroy it. After all, under the tenets of their creed, this was a mercy. Better to remove temptation to err and prevent the loss of an immortal soul. As someone who has become largely skeptical of organized religion, this book was interesting to me. Despite being a bit of a history nerd, I actually find the Roman Empire to be kind of boring, so I was largely unfamiliar with the time period and felt like I learned new things. But I did feel like it struggled a bit with style/tone. It’s meant to be a popular history, accessible to a broad audience without significant specialized knowledge. And it succeeded in that! It’s readable and non-technical, avoiding getting into minutiae about Latin translations in the way a more scholarly text likely would. But it also limits the depth of the analysis, leading to it often feeling repetitive. I wanted it to be just a little more thoughtful than it was, but as a broad introduction to the time period and the perspective, it’s very solid.

In Life:

  • I got my first tattoo: I’ve thought sometimes about a tattoo but never felt strongly enough about something to pull the trigger. But the depth of my feelings of loss meant I wanted to do something significant to memorialize Stan, so I worked with an amazing local tattoo artist and we came up with the tattoo in the picture above. It just feels right, somehow, to be literally forever marked by loving him and losing him.
  • Eighth anniversary: We’ve officially been married for eight years! We don’t tend to make a big fuss out of our anniversaries so we just hung out at home with our little guy but I know how lucky I am to have found such a wonderful husband and father.

Top Ten Tuesday: My Summer 2024 TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about the books we’re reading this summer. As usual, my books are not remotely summery-themed, but they’re what I’ll be reading over the next few months!

The Darkening Age: This is a book about a time period I’ve always found interesting but haven’t ever read about before, when European peoples went from largely engaging in pagan folk practices to practicing Christianity. It has wildly diverging reviews on Goodreads, so I’m curious to read it for myself.

The Shining Girls: This seems like a fascinating genre mash-up, with elements of science fiction and horror and a thriller.

The Invention of Everything Else: I read Samantha Hunt’s follow-up novel to this one several years ago and really liked it, so I’m looking forward to going back and reading this book, rooted in the life of Nikola Tesla.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: I’ve had Jenny Lawson’s (The Bloggess) memoir recommended to me several times, and it’s supposed to be hilarious, and I am excited to finally get to it!

The Hired Man: This one is historical fiction about war and secrets in Croatia that is supposed to be really well-written.

The Children’s Book: I loved A.S. Byatt’s Possession and am hoping this scratches the same kind of itch!

Diamond Doris: The true story of a Black woman from a small town in West Virginia (also home of one of my favorite musical artists, Bill Withers) who became a professional jewel thief, which seems like it will be completely bananas!

Geek Love: This has been recommended enough by reviewers I trust that I’m going to try it, but honestly I am not sure how I’ll feel about this book about a family of circus “freaks”.

Hum: I don’t know a ton about this pending August release, except that it’s speculative fiction about AI and surveillance technology and that feels very intriguing to me!

Play It As It Lays: I am SO excited to read more Joan Didion.

Book Review: Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams

 

“What happens to a man who is regarded by his own community as a star and who enjoys playing the part, who looks like a star, dresses like a star, lives like a star–yet knows, in essence, that no one is beating down a door to give him work, that each time he goes to the office of a producer or a director for a interview, it is like starting out all over again?”

I’ve been a movie buff for a long time. Which means I’ve watched a lot of old movies. Some of them are great, while others are just…old. You know what you see a lot of in old movies? White people. Sometimes if there are roles for people of color, they’re just actually white people in extremely cringeworthy makeup. Actual people of color are pretty few and far between.

When people think of Old Hollywood, the stars they think about are almost certainly the white ones. They got the image-making, the publicity pushes. But actors of color did exist, and they had a rich social world of their own. Donald Bogle’s Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams explores the largely-unexamined world of Black Hollywood, from the very first movies until about the 1950s. Nellie Crawford rechristened herself Madame Sul-Te-Wan after landing roles in D.W. Griffiths movies and acted consistently for decades. Ernest “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison became a child star, but left the industry for the stage. Lena Horne got the glamour-girl treatment, but was unable to find major roles because of racism. Sammy Davis, Jr scandalized the town by marrying a white woman.

If you’re looking for a book that will be mostly about movies themselves, this will disappoint you. It does, of course, deal with the roles that were offered to Black actors, and the tension within the community about taking maid/servant roles just to have a chance to be onscreen. But that’s really not the focus here. In this book, Bogle is really trying to look at the entirety of the world of vintage Black Hollywood, and while that does encompass work, it’s mostly the neighborhoods where Black actors and their families lived, the clubs they patronized, the connections they made to each other through marriage and friendship. And it wasn’t just actors…Black singers, dancers, musicians, and businesspeople were all in and around Los Angeles, keeping things chugging along while getting barely any credit.

I found this book really compelling! The way Bogle introduces people and doesn’t feel the need to tell their whole story right away, lets them wind in and out of the larger whole depending on which part of the milieu he’s looking at in any given moment, really creates a sense of momentum. A history of this kind, with a lot of people involved and looking broadly at a place in time, could get bogged down in too much description, but it really strikes the right note on level of detail: enough to create a well-developed picture, but not so much that the whole thing gets dragged down. I really enjoyed learning more about the Nicholas brothers, Hattie McDaniel, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge, and actors who I’d known nothing about at all before I picked this up. If you have any interest at all in vintage Hollywood or the history of people of color in the entertainment industry, definitely check this out!

A Month In The Life: May 2024

This is not usually a space where I’m inclined to be heavy, but May was a month of grief. At the beginning of the month, my best friend lost her mother suddenly and I took a brief trip back to Michigan to spend time with her. I also found out my book club was winding up operations. And we had to say goodbye to our beloved doggie, which still has me reeling.

In Books…

  • Conversations With Friends: Frances is 21 years old, works at a job she is not at all engaged with and almost would seem to prefer to not have, goes to college, and performs her spoken word poetry with her best friend/ex-girlfriend Bobbi at night. The latter has gotten enough attention to draw into their orbit Melissa, a 30something writer and photographer who wants to profile them, and her husband Nick, a working actor who has found only minor success. While Melissa and Bobbi hit it off, Frances and Nick develop a connection of their own and it’s not too long before they wind up in bed together. This doesn’t feel like a spoiler, as it is very obvious that it’s going to end up there. This obviously has reverberations for Frances’s relationships with both Bobbi and Melissa. Sally Rooney is one of those authors that has a devoted following, so I was really excited to start reading her work with this, her debut novel. But if I’m being honest, I didn’t really understand the fuss. This is a character book, which I’m inclined to like, but without a character I found compelling. Frances is a frustrating protagonist. Not because she’s aimless or sleeps with someone else’s husband or is trying to figure out who she is, but because she’s just not very interesting while she’s doing all of that. I didn’t find her unlikeable, I just found her boring. I found myself wondering why and even if I was supposed to care about her or her connections with Nick, Bobbi, and Melissa. I had a hard time understanding how a person seemingly so empty and detached could write poetry that was engaging enough to get anyone’s attention. What kept my interest was the quality of the prose. Rooney’s writing is subtle, and she has a real knack for dialogue and descriptions. Her words are clearly deliberately chosen but she never slides into flowery language. Her use of language alone makes me want to read her other books, but I hope they’re better than this one.
  • Fun Home: I’d never read a graphic novel before, but I’d heard good things about this one and was excited when my book club chose it! It’s a memoir about Alison Bechdel’s childhood and teenage years, in which her family ran the local funeral home (the titular fun home, of course) in their small town. Literate and thoughtful, Bechdel comes to realize she is gay once she goes away to school and her coming-out is followed by the revelation that her intellectual, aesthetically-oriented father is also queer. Shortly after her long-suffering mother asks him for a divorce, her father is killed in a collision with a truck. Was it an accident? Was it on purpose? This question clearly haunts Bechdel, and was an obvious motivator behind this book. I don’t know that I felt like this being a graphic novel rather than a traditional manuscript was something that worked for me, personally, particularly because I did not care for Bechdel’s art style. But the actual amount of text here is less than I wish it was. I wanted her to have more space to really draw out the allusions to the literature that connected her to her father that she makes throughout the book. It’s an impressive accomplishment, a compelling and emotionally resonant story even despite the analytical distance she tries to place between herself and her childhood.
  • The Story of a New Name: I liked well enough but did not understand the fuss about the first of the Neopolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend. I’d heard that the second one was better, and while that’s true, it still wasn’t like, good-good. Picking up right after the end of the first, this book continues to trace the stories of Lila and Lenu as they become young women. Lila realizes even before her wedding reception is over that her new husband Stefano has aligned himself with the local organized crime family, the Solaras, who she despises. This, of course, immediately sours her marriage and it devolves quickly into domestic violence. Lenu, on the other hand, starts to neglect school without either the competition with Lila or the desire to impress her longtime crush, Nino, who has graduated. Lila pushes Lenu back on track, and once she begins actually studying again her future, not just high school but university studies, starts to align. But a love affair drives the two friends apart again, and Lenu leaves for school in Pisa as things become more dire for Lila. Once again, I am left to wonder if my issues with the book are related to its translation. The prose is choppy and staccato, the opposite of my own experience of Italian. And there remains the issue of how to elegantly render the difference between Neopolitan and standard Italian, which is significant enough that it can’t go unremarked upon but is always jarring when the text denotes a change. The character development, though, ably builds on the foundation from the previous volume, giving greater shading and complexity to both Lila and Lenu. I enjoyed things more when I stopped looking for this deep and profound friendship I felt like I was promised by reviews of the book and understood that they’re more frenemies than anything else. It was more engaging by enough that I’ll continue the series, but I still remain perplexed at the raptures people go into about these books.
  • The Good Girls Revolt: In 1970, Newsweek published a cover story about the women’s movement. On the same day that issue was released, a group of its female employees (including author Lynn Povich) sued the magazine for sex discrimination. Newsweek hired many bright young graduates from top colleges, but while men became writers and editors, women were largely stuck in the research department (a few were reporters, even fewer were actual writers themselves, and none were in senior editorial leadership). From her inside perspective, Povich writes about how the lawsuit came about, with women who had been socialized to see each other as rivals deciding to extend trust and band together to right the wrong they came to understand was being perpetrated. She shares her own recollections, along with those of her colleagues, about the dynamics of the magazine and how they changed after the lawsuit (and didn’t, leading to a second suit with a second settlement). As a woman who was born in the 1980s, I know I don’t know nearly enough about the stories of women who led the fight (and faced the consequences) to more fully secure women’s rights to equal educational and employment opportunities. I appreciated getting the opportunity to learn more about the landmark Newsweek lawsuit, which I’d never known anything about. But if I’m being honest, the book was fairly disappointing. Povich’s style doesn’t have a lot of literary flair or a particularly compelling narrative. There’s a lot of “this happened, and then that happened”. I can see how her writing would be well-suited for a magazine, but I didn’t feel like it translated to book-length (and it’s a shorter work of non-fiction, only just over 250 pages) effectively.
  • On Beauty: We meet the Belsey family at a time of crisis. Howard has just confessed infidelity to Kiki, his wife of 30 years. Howard is white, a British expat, and an academic, an art history professor at the prestigious local liberal arts school whose long-gestating book on Rembrandt is going nowhere. Kiki is Black, Floridian, a nurse, disinclined towards intellectualism, and almost as much of an expat in her own way as her husband in their small New England college town. They have three children: Levi, who is still in high school and whose adolescent search for identity is all the more fraught because of his background, Zora, a student at her father’s school, ambitious and smart and vain, and Jerome, the oldest, who draws his own family into contact with the Kipps family. Not only is Monty Kipps, a Black British man who originally hails from the West Indies, a professional rival for Howard, with a just-published and very popular book on Rembrandt, but he proudly stands for conservative, faith-based values that are antithetical to the liberal atheism practiced by the Belseys. Jerome interns with the Kipps’s family business and has a brief, intense fling with their daughter Victoria. Shortly thereafter, Kipps is invited to be a visiting professor at the college Howard teaches at, putting them all in close range to each other, and they begin to interact in some ways that are expected…and some that are not. This is just my second Zadie Smith, but I feel like I already have a sense of the kinds of stories she enjoys writing (families in opposition, culture clashes, the ongoing legacy of the British Empire, deceptions coming to light). I found White Teeth to be less polished and more engaging, but On Beauty left me with more to admire than to actually connect with. Smith’s writing is sharp and witty, full of little skewerings of academia. She also has a strong sense of scope, able to draw in multidisciplinary and multicultural references to her narrative, which also draws some parallels to Howards End, though it’s hardly an adaptation and I don’t think the book loses much without those references if you haven’t read it yet. I read it a few years back and quite liked it, so I enjoyed being able to find those little moments of connection, like a little treat. It’s an accomplished, assured novel. But what kept me from being able to really get into it the way I’d hoped was the characters. Kiki was the most interesting of all of them for me, but I never really felt like I understood her, particularly her marriage to Howard. That marriage, and whether the family that it created will split apart or pull together, is central to the story and never really made sense to me. As the story unfolds, it is clear what draws Howard to her, but not at all clear why she did or does find him worth her time. Virtually everyone else is some degree of unlikable, but not in a dynamic way, just in a way where I found them tiresome to spend mental time with. Worth reading certainly but not one that I imagine ever coming back to.
  • Gideon the Ninth: This book was bananas. It tells the story of Gideon Nav, eighteen years old, a trained soldier, and desperate to escape from her lonely existence on the planet that is home to the Ninth House. In this universe, an all-powerful necromancer made himself into a deathless god, anointed himself as the Emperor of the First House, and set out the other eight houses. The Ninth is bound to protect the Locked Tomb, which holds the body of the only foe who ever seriously challenged the Emperor’s supremacy. Each house is run by families that each practice different forms of necromancy. The heir of the Ninth House is teenage Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and she and the heirs to the other houses are each called by the Emperor to his home world, where they are charged with unlocking the secrets within Canaan House, the ancient ruin he and his closest advisors once called home, so that they may become a part of his inner circle. But in order to accept the call, Harrow needs a cavalier, a bodyguard and warrior who can protect her. The only viable option? Gideon, with whom Harrow has been in a constant and bitter war of attrition since childhood. This sounds heavy and dark and while it is in some portions both of those things (in the case of “dark”, honestly most portions), it is also very entertaining (ghosts! skeletons! puzzles!) and surprisingly funny. It takes a little while for the action to start happening, but once Harrow and Gideon arrive at Canaan House and we meet all the other house’s necromancers and cavaliers, it really starts to pick up momentum, with the plot getting more and more propulsive as it goes on. The characters, especially Gideon and Harrow but also a handful of the other people in the House, are vivid and enjoyable to spend time with. It’s undeniably unevenly paced, and has a kind of ramshackle kamikaze feel around the plot, as though Tamsyn Muir was building the plane as she was flying it. But it’s very engaging and I really enjoyed reading it!

In Life…

  • My book club wound up: This was a double whammy of a bummer. First, the local independent bookstore (Sundance Books) shut down after 39 years in operation. It was something I loved about living in Reno, a place I liked to bring out-of-town guests to visit. Losing an indie bookstore (right after I’d taken C there for his first Independent Bookstore Day!) is always rough. But it was also the host of the book club I’ve been a member of since 2016, and so its closure heralded the end of the club. I’ve loved some of the books we’ve read, loathed others, found many just okay. But it was a place to talk about books with people who would mostly otherwise have not crossed my path and I had a great time in the past nearly-eight years of discussions! There are going to be some efforts to continue and I do hope they pan out, but I don’t think it’ll be quite the same.
  • We lost our beloved pug: Shortly after we got engaged, I finally convinced my husband to get a dog. A pug, specifically. A retiring stud dog at a puppy mill, he had just turned four when we got him and it was clear he’d basically never seen kindness from people. He was petrified of everyone. But with love and lots of snacks to build trust, he became our funny little weirdo, confident enough to walk into any place he was taken and assume people wanted to pet him and feed him. If they didn’t feed him, he’d find anything he could that was within range, including banana bread and balsamic vinegar left on the floor. He was our good boy when we got married, and through pandemic social distancing, and when we bought our home. He always loved my husband the most, but he was extra cuddly with me when I was pregnant and took being replaced as the household’s most cherished little creature in stride. He was repaid for his patience in snacks and dropped food, and “pets” from our son that were suspiciously close to smacks. He was so incredibly gentle with the baby, who disrespected his personal space constantly and didn’t understand kind hands as well as we might have hoped. He lost a lot of his interest in food earlier this month, and when we took him to the vet we found out he had liver issues. No sooner had we gotten him on a supplement to help with that than he had a seizure. The emergency vet suspected a tumor in his brain, but he fought to recover enough to come home with us for two last days of pets and cuddles. Then he had a second seizure, a worse one, and we knew it was time. Eight and a half years with him was not enough but we were grateful to have every second of it. Good boy, Stan. You’re in our hearts always.

Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’d Love a New Book From

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about authors we’d like a new book from! I’ve broken my list into two, so it’ll be five authors I want another book from that are still alive, and then five that I wish had written another book before they passed.

Donna Tartt: She’s written a book about every ten years and The Goldfinch came out in 2013 so I am ready for the next one!

Jeffrey Eugenides: He hasn’t written a novel since The Marriage Plot all the way back in 2011! I know he teaches full time but I want another book-book from him (I’m not a big short stories person).

Margaret Atwood: She’s actually been putting out books fairly regularly, but I’m really wishing for at least one more original novel (I haven’t read her Handmaid’s sequel The Testaments yet, but I want something not based on an existing book!)

Jhumpa Lahiri: She actually does have a pretty recent book (Whereabouts, which was released in 2021), but that only brought her total number of novels to three and I want moooooore.

Neil Gaiman: He hasn’t written an individually-penned novel since 2013’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane!

Leo Tolstoy: I loved his long epics and their beautifully realized characters so much.

Jane Austen: Only six books was far too few.

Oliver Sacks: One of my all-time absolute favorites. I still have some of his work left to read but I am gutted there won’t be any more.

Joan Didion: I actually still have quite a lot of Joan back catalog to get through but the idea that I will eventually reach the end makes me very sad.

Sylvia Plath: I am not a poetry girlie so for me it’s just the brilliance of The Bell Jar that makes me long for something more.

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