A Portable Magic – Page 6 – A Life In Books

September 23, 2025

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Fall 2025 TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re previewing our autumn reading! As usual, I have a mix of fiction and nonfiction, ranging from a romance to a biography to the true backstory of a song beloved across the Great Lakes states, to a book I recently put on a list of the longest ones on my TBR!

The Poisoned City: I’m generally aware of the broad strokes around the situation with Flint and the lead in the water, but I’m curious to learn more.

Doppelganger: I’ve heard great things about this book from Naomi Klein, oft-confused for Naomi Wolf, and ideas around doubles and mirror worlds.

Tiny Imperfections: Everyone needs some fluff reads!

The Gales of November: Like any good daughter of the Great Lakes, I love “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. I also love John U. Bacon so I am thrilled he wrote a book about the story of the ship!

Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne: This biography of Queen Elizabeth I focuses on just her early years, up to her being named Queen, which is a less-explored time of her life.

What Made Maddy Run: This exploration of the death by suicide of a seemingly-perfect college student-athlete is probably going to make me sad.

Childhood’s End: Arthur C. Clarke is an author I’ve never read before and this is his best-regarded novel.

The Reader: I watched the movie ages ago but have always been curious about how it comes off on the page.

The Tortoise’s Tale: Animal narrators are often a device that I think I will enjoy more than I actually do but I am always willing to try again!

The Stand: It’s enormously long and will only be my second King so I am realllly hoping I like it!

September 12, 2025

Book Review: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

HOMES. Ask any Michigander what the acronym means, and they’ll rattle off Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. The Great Lakes. As I sometimes remind my husband, when/if we run out of water here in the arid West, I’m going home to where 25% of the world’s freshwater lives. Not just the United States, a quarter of the fresh water in the entire world is contained in the boundaries of these five bodies of water. They are truly natural marvels.

I hope, as the world becomes more and more aware of the value of fresh, clean water, that we’ll all be more interested in what is happening with the Great Lakes, because while they are awe-inspiring, they’re certainly not magical or impervious to harm. Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes explores the major crises that have challenged these inland seas. The first issue he focuses on is the Saint Lawrence Seaway, excitedly sold as a way to make Midwestern lakeshore communities into the kind of bustling port cities of the oceanic coast. But while the promised boat traffic has mostly failed to materialize, the ones that have made use of the channel have brought dangerous invaders like zebra mussels and alewives in with their ballast water. And then there’s one of American engineering’s true marvels, the backwards flow of the Chicago River. Designed to improve sanitary health in America’s Second City, the threat of Asian carp crossing into a Great Lakes ecosystem wholly unprepared for them remains real.

The question that reveals itself as central to the book is what the lakes are “for”, exactly. As new species get inevitably introduced by the activities of humankind, sometimes even in the face of safety measures, how should we respond, if at all? Are the Lakes meant to be for recreational pleasure for boaters and swimmers? Are they meant to be for fisherman in search of an exciting catch? Are they meant to increase the economic prosperity of the people who live on their shores and in the surrounding communities? Or should they exist in as close to their natural state as possible? Egan recounts conversations with people with many different answers to these questions, which seem to be influenced by where they’ve been educated, where they grew up, and the root of their own attachment to the Lakes and their shining waters.

As someone with a pre-existing deep emotional bond to the Lakes, I found this book to be an engaging read. Egan’s history of the Lakes is thorough but not exhausting, and his own level of care for them shines through his writing. He’s thoughtful…though he recounts both past disasters and potential future threats to the vitality of the Lakes, he doesn’t get overwrought or come off as scare-mongering. I will say that I’m not sure, if you don’t come in caring about what becomes of the Lakes, that he does a great job of building a case about why you should. The realization that one of every four gallons of fresh water for the entire world can be found in them should be enough, but when he depicts the ways that the Lakes have gotten to at least some level of recovery through crisis after crisis, the whole thing feels less urgent than it could have been. It’s better journalism, but it’s less successful at impressing the importance of the issue to the reader. Nevertheless, I think this is an extremely important book about a pressing environmental concern, and a well-written and interesting one at that. I would definitely recommend it to everyone!

August 31, 2025

A Month In The Life: August 2025

We enjoyed some reasonable temperatures in the latter half of July but with August the heat has returned. There’s no guarantee that it’s going to get cooler in a hurry now that September is here, but we’re closer to that than we are to peak heat and for that I am grateful.

In Books…

The Sunflower Boys: Artem has a relatively normal life growing up as a 12 year-old in Ukraine. He lives with his mother and younger brother Yura, who is nine, in an apartment in a small city. His father, or tato, is one of a handful among his classmates that lives and works abroad (in his case, in the United States) to earn more money. He’s been best friends, nearly inseparable really, with his neighbor Viktor since the two were seated together on the first day of school. And he’s realizing, slowly, that his feelings for Viktor may be something more than just friendship. Navigating the tension in that relationship is among his primary concerns until February of 2022, when he and Yura wake up one morning to the window of their bedroom blowing in because the Russians are bombing their city. Everything turns upside down in an instant, and the family flees quickly to the home where their mother grew up and their grandfather still lives. It’s remote, isolated even from the nearest village, so it seems safe enough…but with this war there is no real safety, and soon the boys are on their own, desperately trying to reach Lviv, near the Polish border, to reunite with their tato. But that is not the end of their journey to reach safety, and peace…peace is a whole other prospect. What a beautiful book! It did not read to me like a debut. Sam Wachman balances writing an Issue Book about the war being raged by Russia on Ukraine with telling an actual, compelling story about people with a deftness that eludes many authors. Part of it is that he gives his story room to breathe, with the book nearly halfway over by the time the Russians arrive on the scene. By the time peril strikes, we’re already invested in Artem and his increasingly complicated feelings about his tato living overseas, his relatively new diagnosis with a seizure disorder and his frustration with feeling babied because of it, his growing romantic interest in Viktor and the way their dynamic changes when Viktor starts to become aware of it. So by the time terrible things started happening, I was really invested in these characters and what would become of them. The peril they’re put through is realistic but not gratuitous, and Wachman doesn’t wallow needlessly in despair or prolong the tension about how any particular situation they find themselves in plays out. Are there some issues here? Sure. Artem is probably depicted as too level-headed and emotionally mature for 12. Some of the situations the brothers find themselves in after the invasion are resolved a bit too neatly. There’s a reunion near the end of the book that feels a little too much like wish fulfillment. But these are minor quibbles, really. I remember watching the early days of this war play out, at home shortly after my son was born, awake in the middle of the night with him and watching the bombs fall, the horror I felt. But this book really brought the situation home for me in a whole new way. I loved this one and highly recommend it to everyone!
Darling Days: A quick note on pronouns: I will be referring to author iO Tillett Wright as “they” when referring to the time in the memoir, as they identified as non-binary when the book was released and recount experiences identifying as both male and female (they were assigned female at birth). When referring to Wright in the present, when he has transitioned to male, I will use “he”. This seems to make the most sense to me. Anyways, Wright begins their memoir before their own birth, with the story of the shooting death of their mother’s boyfriend, Billy. iO’s mother (Rebecca, called Rhonna in the book), an actress/dancer/model in New York City, never really recovered from the loss, but she moved on anyways, and iO comes out of her relationship with Seth Tillett, an artist. Though their child was unplanned and their relationship ends, both parents love iO fiercely and accept them unconditionally. When iO is about six, they’re thrilled to get their long hair cut off due to completely ungovernable snarls and shortly thereafter announce to their parents that they are a boy. Their unquestioning embrace of iO on their own terms is perhaps the best thing either of them do for iO as a parent, because both are facing deep, dark demons. Rhonna drinks heavily, her grasp on sanity and ability to hold down any sort of job that might provide steady income becoming increasingly unstable. Seth starts another family and is fighting addictions of his own, rendering him only an occasional presence in iO’s life. He is blind, presumably willfully so, to the chaos and deprivation his child lives in. It’s clear that iO doesn’t understand the precarity of their situation early on, but as they grow up and are exposed to kids outside of their bohemian circle, who know where their next meal is coming from and aren’t forcibly evicted from their apartment by it being knocked down around them after months of warnings and relocation offers, they have no real choice. For their own survival, they finally confess how bad it is to a school counselor and are sent to live with their father overseas. All that childhood trauma, though, does not render iO an easy teenager to live with. They’re sent to a boarding school in the English countryside because their father cannot realistically care for them while nursing his longstanding heroin habit, where they start living as a girl again and experience some small measure of stability thanks to the school environment. They fall in love for the first time. But the tie between iO and their mother is not sundered that easily and they’re drawn back into her orbit. iO finds new relationships, makes new friends, founds an underground art magazine, and finally manages to move out on their own at 22, where they leave the book. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting here, though probably more focus on iO’s experience of understanding himself and living as a trans child. That sort of thing is in there, iO recounts his terror at using the boys bathroom and having his female body discovered leading to having accidents at school well into his elementary years, his refusal to attend a ballet school that would have required him to wear a leotard, his inclination to make himself charming but remote to his peers as a way to prevent questions about his gender. But it’s much more a story about coming to terms with parental failures and accepting parents on their own terms as people, even when those failures are of the “hoarding habit so bad that they live in filth and poverty so desperate they often do not have literally anything to eat” variety. The love that iO has for his mother, and hers for him, shine through thanks to his beautiful, evocative writing. But iO is equally clear-eyed that his mother was very much unable to care for him and his move to get child protective services involved was necessary. iO is open and honest about his circumstances and willing to share some very dark experiences, but it is not the kind of childhood that would create an adult comfortable with emotional vulnerability and I think that lead me personally to struggle to connect with his story. It’s a wildly different story than my own, of course, but there’s a sort of remove as well that rendered it even more foreign to me. The structure, dividing the book into short snapshot chapters of moments in time, perhaps also contributed as it felt kind of choppy, a series of incidents rather than a cohesive narrative. It’s remarkable that iO grew into a functional adult with the way his early years played out, he’s a gifted writer, but this memoir just didn’t do anything for me and I can’t recommend it.
An Anthropologist on Mars: A collection of neurological case studies, here you will find stories on blindness (both color-blindness and a person who regained their eyesight through cataract removal surgery decades after losing it in childhood), amnesia, temporal lobe seizures, Tourette’s, and autism. As is typical for his writing, Oliver Sacks is much less interested in going into the minutae of symptoms that the people he writes about experience than exploring what it might mean to live in the world with those symptoms. I found particularly affecting the story of Franco Magnani, who grew up in a small village in the Tuscan countryside called Pontito. Forced from their home during WWII, his family left and returned only briefly, he himself went to school for a few years in a larger city before becoming a sailor to earn money, eventually settling in San Francisco. He lived a relatively normal life there, working as a cook, until he began having visions of Pontito. Not just fond remembrances, but full-scale, immersive visions of the place he hadn’t seen for decades. Consumed with these apparitions, he began to make paintings of the town, which proved to be incredibly accurate. Sacks quickly runs through the probable diagnosis (temporal lobe seizures) and their presentation and history, but he’s much more interested in what it actually means for Franco to live with them. The way his obsession with Pontito has driven away friends and even family members. The ambiguity he feels when he thinks about taking a trip back to Pontito, both excited and scared at the prospect. The way he feels when he eventually does decide to return. It’s not about the medical mystery. People live their lives with these disorders every day outside of the context of the medical system. What does that mean for their experience of life? What I enjoy about reading Sacks’s writing is his intense curiosity. He never puts on an air of anything being old hat, or seems to feel like if he’s seen one person with a particular condition he’s seen them all. Indeed, in this book alone he writes about two people with autism: Stephen Wiltshire, an artist with incredible recall who can draw detailed cityscapes from memory but engages in only very limited verbal communication, and Temple Grandin, the university professor who has done incredible work to improve slaughterhouse practices to help the animals die as peacefully as possible. They are wildly different people, and Sacks does not try to flatten either of them into a neat “autistic” box, but rather approaches them both as their own people with their own strengths and challenges. I will say I found this book less lively than his other major case study collection (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), probably because there are only seven stories here as opposed to 24 in the other. It gives Sacks more time to dive deeply, but sometimes he does seem to be spinning his wheels and getting a bit repetitive. But it’s good, interesting reading, and I’d recommend it to those inclined towards a medical or psychological book.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: Leila Majnoun, Leo Crane, and Mark Deveraux are all 30something Americans who haven’t quite managed to figure it out just yet. Leila works for a do-gooder humanitarian organization in Burma, where her journeys into the country’s interior to try to get a shipment of aid goods unstuck lead to her accidental stumble upon a pair of American defense contractors clearly up to something nefarious. Before she knows it, her school principal father has been accused of awful crimes and her visa has been revoked. Mark, a writer, is the son of a single mother whose magician father took of when he was an adolescent but left behind in his son the charisma and confidence to become a successful self-help bullshit artist when an essay he writes goes viral. He gets a book deal, the book sells well, and he becomes a sounding board for a powerful tech CEO…who he hopes can bail him out having to actually produce his contractually-mandatory second book, which he has no inspiration to write. Leo has been cushioned by the trust fund he inherited from his parents, who owned a successful board game company, from having to find a real direction in life. He’s long turned to drugs and booze to self-medicate his bipolar disorder, but his instability has undermined his attempts to secure gainful employment, all the way from a failed stint at running a bookstore to getting fired working in childcare. Their paths come to intersect as Mark’s tech guru patron reveals the depths of his plans to seize control of personal information, and a guerilla opposition group races against time to try to scuttle those plans before they can be fully implemented. I remember this as having been a bit of a buzzy book when it was released over a decade ago, but it seemed to have totally faded without making a real mark and I was curious about why. Now I know. The novel spends quite some time introducing its central trio, which would usually be something I’d be into as a character-oriented reader, but none of them wind up being all that interesting. Mark is a vain white-collar scammer taking his father’s low-rent confidence game techniques as far as he can manage, and his endless cycle of being unable to write, being plunged into self-doubt, and coping with that feeling by drinking too much and smoking too much pot is just not compelling. Leila’s motivations are surprisingly opaque given the amount of time we spend with her…her father’s situation drives her actions on the surface level, but what does she actually want? It’s hard to tell. She serves mostly as a foil to the story’s men. Leo is perhaps the most engaging, but he’s also someone who has used his unearned wealth to do exactly zero good for anyone and indeed, is seemingly not very interested in doing much for anyone else. He does show some growth in the latter portions of the book, but that leads me to the most significant issue with the book: its completely nonsensical pacing. The introductory portions drag along endlessly, with storylines not starting to converge until halfway through and the plot only starting to rev up around the 2/3rds point, leaving far too many things that require in-depth explanation to happen very quickly, getting brushed over faster than they should be to not fall apart upon further reflection. This culminates in an ending that’s less cliffhanger than just…sudden cessation of forward momentum. There’s no narrative arc, no climax, no falling action. The only explanation that holds much water to me is that the book was originally quite a bit longer and was split into two, with a sequel intended to be put out after this book became a hit. The book had a quite large initial printing for a debut novel (30,000 copies), indicating the publisher was excited about it and thought it would sell very well. When the demand for the book (not to mention a sequel) failed to materialize, plans changed. Which leaves this book to stand alone, which it is too unbalanced to do competently. A pity in some ways, because David Shafer’s prose is often quite clever and I would have been curious to read something else he’d written, but there has not anything else since this book came out in 2014. Way too many issues for me to recommend this book, even as a curiosity.
At Last: When Helene’s son Tom marries Evelyn’s daughter Ruth, two very different women come into each other’s lives. Helene hardly knew her older doctor husband when they married and left West Virginia for Cleveland and their relationship was never emotionally close. She poured her love into their only child, Tom, determined to not let his father’s constant time at the hospital keep him from having a good childhood. Evelyn’s own parents separated when she was young, her mother determined to give her daughters opportunities in the city and away from the farm. A deeply practical woman, she had a warm, loving relationship with her husband until his death and three daughters, including whip-smart spiky Ruth, who comes into Helene’s life when the latter discovers letters written in German in her husband’s desk after his sudden passing and wants them translated. This leads Ruth to Tom, who she marries and has a daughter, Francie, with. Francie and Evelyn both dote on the sweet, anxious little girl, who is removed from their daily lives when her parents decide to move to New York for professional opportunities. As she grows up, she’s faced with bumps in the road and is faced with decisions that will determine the path of her life. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book was not quite what it’s marketing would have lead me to believe. I was expecting much more drama between Helene and Evelyn, and it’s not that there isn’t any, it’s just that it’s not as central to the narrative as I had anticipated. If you’re looking for dramatic grandmas battling it out, that’s not much of what’s on offer here. What is on offer are stories about being a woman in the world and the options that are presented to us. Helene, the least-loved child of her parents, is obsessed with external validation and appearances. Evelyn, faced with early instability, marries a solid provider and raises her children with detached affection. Ruth, too smart for going along to get along, strains against the boundaries that would put her purely in the domestic sphere. Francie seeks escape from her anxieties in ways that might not be healthy for her. Their lives are presented to the reader in snapshots over time, which keeps the pace lively but leads to dropped plot threads. We learn little about Evelyn’s marriage, for example, her husband only appearing vaguely in her recollections. The information in the letters Helene hires Ruth to translate could have lead somewhere, but this is not pursued. The earliest portion of Francie’s life in New York is a mystery. I often complain that books should have had tighter editing, but this is one I actually feel like I wish had been fleshed out a bit more. I found it enjoyable enough, but there are hints of a richness and depth that could have been achieved but never is. Shafer’s prose is clear, her characters vivid. The story concerns mostly the small moments that make a life, someone looking for a propulsive plot won’t find what they were hoping for. But if you enjoy female-centered family stories, this is a very solid one.
The Children Act: When we meet Fiona Maye, her marriage is in crisis. A respected judge in her late 50s, she’s floored when her husband proposes an affair with one of his colleagues, a woman nearly half her age. He doesn’t want to sneak around, he wants her to acquiesce to his desire to have one last fling. Naturally, she refuses this idea, but he walks out of their London home anyways. The same night, she receives an emergency filing. A young man called Adam, almost but not quite 18 years old, is dying of leukemia. A procedure requiring a blood transfusion will make his survival highly likely, but without it he will almost certainly die. Adam and his parents are devoted Jehovah’s Witnesses and refuse the transfusion on the basis of their faith. It will be up to Fiona to decide how to proceed. After hearing from experts, she decides to see Adam for herself. She travels to his hospital room, where he is obviously dying. Even so, he’s trying to learn to play the violin, and she impulsively joins in a duet with him, singing to the accompaniment of his string instrument. The decision she ultimately renders will have repercussions beyond what she might have imagined, especially as she tries to figure out how to proceed with her husband after his indiscretion. This is the third McEwan I have read, and he loves a certain type of morality tale. He enjoys setting up his protagonists as having a certain kind of self-righteousness, as people who perceive themselves and are largely perceived by others as holding a fundamental decency although they may have their foibles. This person then faces a moral crisis, and makes a decision they justify as correct to themselves, which is ultimately revealed to have been ill-considered, and they struggle with how to reconcile their error in judgment with who they believe themselves to be. McEwan is a talented writer, his prose is clever and his characters have the feeling of reality, with flaws that feel rooted in who he builds them to be. But I get the feeling as a reader that he actually kind of hates them even as he writes them, relishing the chance to bring them down out of their self-satisfaction. He encourages moral equivalencies that seem valid when reading the book and hold up much less well on further reflection. I find his books frustrating because there’s always a mean-spiritedness in place of an empathy that would render the stories more genuinely emotionally engaging. This will probably be the last one of his I pick up, and I can’t recommend it.
We Should All Be Mirandas: I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting when I decided I wanted to read this book. Obviously it was prior to the debut of And Just Like That, which I have absolutely refused to watch but I understand took Miranda in a new direction as a character. I guess I thought it would likely be something pop-culture oriented and fun but still smart: maybe an in-depth character study of Miranda, how she changed between the original debut of Sex and the City and its last episode and/or the movies, comparisons with other pop culture figures in a similar bent, like fellow attorney Ally McBeal or career-focused strivers like Leslie Knope. But perhaps that was a bit much for a book that spun off from a novelty Instagram account about outfits. What’s on offer is totally harmless bog-standard life advice for late 20/early 30somethings, encouraging readers to find work they enjoy and stick with it, to date around even when it sucks, to nurture meaningful friendships, to develop a personal style that is true to their own sensibilities, and other similar kinds of things. All of it illustrated, of course, with references to Miranda’s plotlines on the series. There’s virtually nothing of substance here, just a bunch of references to the show strung together with enough pages to call it a book.

In Life…

Another low-key month: C has been agitating for Halloween since even before this month began, so I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a toddler’s spirited rendition of “This Is Halloween”. Otherwise, we’ve been trying to keep ourselves and him reasonably entertained as we approach what will be a busier month!

August 19, 2025

Top Ten Tuesday: Doorstoppers On My TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about big giant long books…some of my favorite kinds of books to read! I’ve highlighted some of the longest books I’ve read before previously, so I thought it might be fun to take a look through my to-be-read list to see which gigantic ones are out there waiting for me!

The Power Broker (1246 pages)

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1196 pages)

The Stand (1152 pages)

Kristin Lavransdatter (1144 pages)

Truman (1120 pages)

Infinite Jest (1088 pages)

What It Takes (1051 pages)

Dreadnaught (1040 pages)

Kushiel’s Dart (1040 pages)

The Way of Kings (1007 pages)

August 11, 2025

Book Review: Patron Saints of Nothing

It’s surprisingly easy, even in today’s connected world, to be completely ignorant of what’s going on out there. My news, like everyone else’s, is filtered: I’ve got some local news sources, some national, some international, but I can’t read everything. Nor do I really try. I click on stories about Nevada, about Michigan, a little bit of national-level politics, any sort of big international news, but I like to watch movies, and hang out with my husband and son, and read books, and so thousands of things happen in the world without me having the slightest bit of awareness about them.

It’s a luxury, of course, to be able to ignore a large portion of the news. Also kind of coasting along inside a cozy bubble is high school senior Jay in Randy Ribay’s Patron Saints of Nothing. Having already secured admission to the University of Michigan, he’s taking it easy, planning to spend his Spring Break playing video games with his best friend Seth. That is, until his father gives him bad news: his cousin Jun, in the Philippines, has died. Jun was only a few months younger than Jay, and though Jay and his parents had moved to the United States when Jay was only a baby, they had once been close. Jay’s father won’t tell him much, except that Jun’s death was related to the drug war in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte. Feeling guilty that he’d let their connection peter out, Jay decides to use his Spring Break to go to the Philippines himself and investigate what happened to Jun.

Jay’s father’s siblings still live in the Philippines, so he stays at first with Jun’s parents and sisters. While Jay’s uncle, Maning, is a harsh police officer who exercises strict control over his family, Jun’s younger sister Grace introduces him to Mia, a journalism student. With her help, Jay begins to dig into what happened to his cousin. His understanding of who Jun was deepens further when he goes to stay with his aunt and her partner, learning that Jun stayed there for a few years after leaving home. With only a short time before he heads back to the United States and his normal life, Jay needs every bit of help he can get from every member of his family, and Mia, to piece together the end of his cousins’ life.

This is an Issue Book, which isn’t necessary a bad thing. Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak fall into the same category. But they can be tricky to pull off, to ingrate the issue into a fully realized story. Unfortunately for Ribay, he’s not able to really make that happen. I was never able to forget I was reading a book about Duterte’s drug war, and not about people who happened to get caught up in it. I understand what he was trying to do with using Jay, as an American-raised Filipino, to draw in readers who also don’t have a lot of context or understanding and let them make discoveries with Jay as they go along…but what happened was that it ended up having a lot of clunky expositionary dialogue, and some abrupt tone shifts from very casual conversations to ones that suddenly sounded a lot more formal. Every time these kinds of things cropped up, it took me out of the narrative.

It didn’t help that Ribay tries to bite off a little more than he’s really prepared to chew. He makes some broad attempts to incorporate the history of the Philippines, which is certainly relevant, but doesn’t give it enough room to really go anywhere. Much more narrative space is given to Jay and Mia’s romantic tension, which failed to land for me, partly because of thin characterization all around, but I’m not the young adult target audience of this book and maybe that angle played better to the teenage crowd. Representation is important, and it’s nice to see a Filipino-American teen as the lead character and hero, but I wish this was a better book overall. It’s got some bright spots, but is much too uneven to really recommend.

July 31, 2025

A Month In The Life: July 2025

The calm continues. I’ve been doing a bunch of little home care projects I didn’t have time for during session, including finally getting rid of some things that C hasn’t used since he was a tiny little baby! It’s been nice to have the time to devote to these tasks.

In Books…

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

In Life…

Enjoying a slower pace: Things are mostly eased up on the work schedule front for the summer, so it’s been nice to be able to do things like clean up C’s room and organize things better around the house. But there are special session rumblings (hopefully not until October-ish, keep your fingers crossed for me!) so this may end sooner than I would like.

July 15, 2025

Top Ten Tuesday: Books with Honorifics in the Title

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re highlighting books that have honorifics in their titles…so words like Miss, Mister, Missus, Lady, etc. I’ve never thought about my books like this and it was fun to search through my to-be-read list with an eye out for these sorts of words!