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Book 309: Lilah

“And now, when I close my eyes and dream of beauty, of the milk and honey I thought I saw when we arrived, I cannot help weeping. Why is it that the most magnificent flowers conceal the deadliest of poisons?”

Dates read: April 11-15, 2019

Rating: 4/10

I’ve been book blogging for quite a while now, 6 years in fact! As much as I enjoy it, one of the things I sometimes regret is that I made it part of my whole deal to blog about literally every single book I read. While there are definitely upsides to this (it forces me to really think about the books I read and what works for me and what doesn’t!), it’s probably not hard to understand what the downsides are. Sometimes a book is just neither good enough to rave about nor bad enough to rant about, and there’s just really not that much to say about it.

When I was in high school, I read and loved The Red Tent. Revisiting it on audio recently (it holds up) made me curious about other biblical fiction. Marek Halter has actually written several books based on biblical women, including Lilah. I was a little disappointed to find out that she’s apparently not actually a character in the Bible, but it’s not actually important that she be mentioned in order for the world she lived in to be explored. She and her brother Ezra, both Jewish, have been raised by their well-to-do aunt and uncle in Babylon after the death of their parents when they were small. Lilah enjoys her life of privilege and has fallen very much in love with Antinoes, the Persian boy who was the siblings’ best friend growing up. Ezra, though, has renounced contact with the secular and gentile world, and has gone to live in the Jewish section of the city to learn from the rabbis.

When Antinoes proposes to Lilah, despite her delight, she refuses to accept until she has the permission of her closest male relative: Ezra. She loves her brother despite their vast difference in chosen life paths, but she knows he won’t assent to her marriage outside the faith. Ezra has come to believe that he’s meant to lead a journey of the Bablyonian Jewish community back to Jerusalem, and so Lilah endeavors to use her connections to the royal family to make that happen, as his departure will leave her free to wed. But while she does secure permission for Ezra to leave, the scheme backfires on her and she’s forced to come with him. The journey is long and arduous, and it changes Ezra. Her good-hearted brother becomes more and more fanatic, and eventually demands that the Jewish men leave behind their gentile wives and children. Lilah leaves the last bit of privilege she has left to go with the abandoned families.

This book was…okay, I guess? Lilah was an appealing enough character, though not deeply realized enough to really make much connection with. She was high-spirited in a way that felt appropriate for her time in history, and I appreciated the sex-positivity of her story arc, but it didn’t seem like she got much past surface level. Everyone else in the book was much worse off…Ezra’s development from pious to zealot is predictable and not very interesting, Antinoes is never more than a cardboard idealized love interest, and side characters were sketched very thinly. As a character-focused reader, this did not bode well for my enjoyment of the novel.

With the underdevelopment of both plot and people, I was puzzled why the book was so short! It’s less than 300 pages long…bumping it up to about 350 would have given Halter more room to create well-rounded characters and give events more momentum. There’s not even much rhetorical flair to spice things up, so the book kind of just trudges along until it’s over. It’s not bad, nothing here was actively offensive to my sensibilities as a reader, it was just mediocre. Allegedly, this is the weakest of his biblical narratives, so I’ll give Halter another shot, but I just can’t affirmatively recommend this book.

One year ago, I was reading: The Yellow House

Two years ago, I was reading: The Great Mortality

Three years ago, I was reading: Everything Under

Four years ago, I was reading: A Vast Conspiracy

Five years ago, I was reading: Invisible Man

Six years ago, I was reading: Kramer v Kramer

Book 307: Princess Masako

“Here is an ambitious, intelligent woman who cannot bear the stifling constraints of life as a royal puppet; a woman from a family with a tradition of public service denied a real role in life; a woman with a Harvard education, a master of languages, who is denied meaningful discourse, and urged to amuse herself with pursuits such as the dissection of catfish or the study of medieval barges.”

Dates read: April 3-7, 2019

Rating: 4/10

One of my guilty pleasures is royal-watching. I spend more time than I should reading about/looking at pictures of the world’s royal families, analyzing their fashion choices, gazing longingly at their jewelry collections. It’s not that I covet their lives, though I do covet many of their wardrobes, and just putting a tiara on my head once would be one of the highlights of my life. I’ve read the comments on the royal Instagrams, I’ve seen how nasty people are about the women in these families. It’s just fun to imagine being one of them for a day, and then back to normal.

Though the British royal family sucks up most of the oxygen when it comes to coverage of royalty, it’s not the oldest one. Not by a long shot. The oldest is the Chrysanthemum Throne, the seat of the Japanese emperors. Naruhito currently occupies that role, with his wife Masako filling the role of Empress. But like the women married to the British princes, Masako Owada wasn’t born into nobility. She grew up in Russia, Japan, and the United States as the daughter of a diplomat. She herself even worked as a diplomat. But once she accepted then-Prince Naruhito’s marriage proposal, her entire world changed. Unfortunately, as Ben Hill’s Princess Masako explores, it hasn’t always been necessarily for the better.

Allegedly, Masako didn’t accept the first time Naruhito asked her to marry him. Nor even the second. She was smart enough to know that a life as the consort of the Crown Prince would require her to give up everything she’d earned for herself and accept a tightly circumscribed and entirely domestic role. It seems Naruhito promised her that they’d find a way to loosen restrictions and modernize, but those promises weren’t able to be kept. Cut off from her former life and under immense pressure to get pregnant, Masako seems to have become significantly depressed. When she finally did become a mother, she faced a fresh round of criticism for having given birth to a girl instead of a boy, as only men can inherit the throne. Prior to her elevation to Empress, Masako basically became a recluse, appearing in public very infrequently.

There’s a lot of (fairly educated) guesswork here, because sources about what Masako really thinks/feels aren’t exactly forthcoming. Japanese media culture does not reward the sort of tabloid speculation that sells papers in Europe, and perhaps that is why it seems like Hill’s sources were not as strong as one might have hoped. The people he talks to about Masako, who knew her before she became a princess, are either pretty far removed from their last contact with her or never knew her very well in the first place. A behind-the-scenes kind of book like this should feel rooted in firm reality with sources just remaining anonymous to protect themselves, but pretty much everything that’s supposed to be revealing in here feels like speculation.

There’s no sense of fun, either, which is half the point of picking up this sort of book. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine how this story could be anything but tragic, but on the other hand, letting that sense of sadness pervade the book makes the gossip-y tone feel like rubbernecking at a car accident. I did learn more about the Imperial Household Agency, the courtiers that control the royal family, and got a bit more context on the relationship between the Japanese people and their royalty, and the way it’s changed in the post-WW2 era. But as a whole, the book never took off and I didn’t feel like I got much besides a straightforward account of the biographical details of Masako’s life. If you’re really into the Japanese royals, then you might find something worthwhile here, but don’t count on it for dishy intrigue. Otherwise, there’s no real reason to pick it up.

One year ago, I was reading: Looking for Alaska

Two years ago, I was reading: Patron Saints of Nothing

Three years ago, I was reading: Seduction

Four years ago, I was reading: The Book Thief

Five years ago, I was reading: The Confessions of St. Augustine

Six years ago, I was reading: Primitive Mythology

Book 303: The Stranger

“I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t done this thing but I had done another. And so?”

Dates read: March 16-19, 2019

Rating: 4/10

I like to think of myself as a “thinker”. But I don’t really go for philosophy. Which doesn’t mean that I’ve never enjoyed books that have a philosophical bent. I loved Sophie’s World! But the art of arguing about questions to which we can never know the answer gets old after a while. I’m the kind of person who went to law school because I like to be right, and when it comes to fundamental human nature or why we are here in the universe, no one can ever be right. We just don’t know.

I remember my high school humanities teacher assigning us Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” (the last part of it anyways). But I’d never read anything more by Camus until I picked up his classic The Stranger. It’s a very short book and tells a seemingly straightforward story: a French man living in Algeria, Meursault, shortly after the death of his mother, falls into a relationship with a coworker, Marie, and a friendship with his neighbor, Raymond. When on a trip to the beach with Raymond and Marie, Meursault is walking on the beach alone when he encounters an Arab man, part of a group that had previously confronted him, and shoots him. He’s put on trial and convicted, and an appeal seems unlikely to succeed. That’s it, more or less. There’s not a lot of story there.

As a novel, I don’t think this is a success. Meursault is a strange character. He’s detached from essentially everyone and everything…he seems to feel little sadness about his mother’s death, his appreciation for Marie seems primarily carnal, he drifts into a connection with Raymond mostly because he doesn’t have anything better to do. He has no depth, and it’s impossible to connect with someone so disconnected from his world and even himself. Others fare no better. The plot lurches forward without much energy or tension. And the prose is uninspiring. But it’s hard to know if “as a novel” is even the proper mechanism for evaluation.

As a philosophical treatise, though, I don’t know that I think it succeeds either. If the point is to illustrate the tension between the human urge to seek meaning and the inherent meaninglessness of life (as posited by Absurdists like Camus), it does do that, but it fails to be at all compelling. If the point is to frustrate the reader by putting forward a text bereft of meaning, therefore pushing the point about the struggle to impose order upon chaos…it also does that, but not in a way that I found especially interesting as a reader who isn’t a philosophy student.

It is interesting to think about this in contrast to Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which takes pretty much the opposite viewpoint. Both men accept the idea as the world as a place where the events that transpire are not necessarily connected to the actions people take: good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people, and there’s no way to understand why, or how. For Camus, comfort comes from embracing this meaninglessness and accepting oneself as at the mercy of the whims of fate. For Frankl, comfort comes from identifying a purpose and working toward that purpose, regardless of the obstacles that life puts in one’s path. I personally probably tend towards the latter, but understand the idea behind the former. And would have without ever having read the book, which I didn’t like and don’t recommend.

One year ago, I was reading: Naked

Two years ago, I was reading: Soon The Light Will Be Perfect

Three years ago, I was reading: Ready Player One

Four years ago, I was reading: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Five years ago, I was reading: David and Goliath

Book 269: We Are Not Ourselves

“She wanted to be in one of those scenes in the windows, frozen in time, in the faultless harmony of parts working in concert, fulfilling the plan of a guiding, designing hand. It would be lovely not to have to make every decision in life, to be part of a spectacle brought out once a year, for the safest of seasons, and put to work amusing people who stared back in mute appreciation. The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.”

Dates read: October 15-21, 2018

Rating: 4/10

It can be tempting to think that you can buy your way to happiness. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has a little section of her closet devoted to the things that seemed so right when they were purchased and never quite panned out. There’s a rush that comes with hitting the “check out” button, in triumphantly carting your finds up to the register. The little buzz of acquisition. It hits the reward centers in our brains.

It’s that intrinsic feedback loop that makes humans such good little consumers, and of course Western culture has figured out how to play off that susceptibility expertly. It’s no mistake that the much-vaunted American Dream is ultimately the pursuit of…stuff. Homes, cars, the latest toys for the kids. With her hardscrabble childhood, it’s no wonder that Eileen Tumulty, protagonist of Matthew Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves, gives in completely to the siren song of that American Dream. Her Irish immigrant parents are poor and both struggle with addiction, but raise Eileen to set her sights higher. Indeed, as she grows up, she becomes almost paralyzingly envious of anyone who gets the access to privileges she herself longs for. She dreams of marrying rich to allow her to live a life of ease, but can’t stand any of the men who could make this happen. Instead, she falls for a brilliant young scientist, Ed Leary, and they’re hopeful for a bright future together.

But a bright future looks different to each of them. Eileen despairs when Ed turns down opportunities to go into pharmaceutical development or be promoted into administration, seeking only to be a good teacher to the community college students who enter his classroom. They have a child, Connell, and eventually buy the multi-family home in which they live, but it’s not enough for Eileen. As they approach 50, she becomes obsessed with the idea of buying a new home, just for them, in a fancier (read: whiter) neighborhood of New York City. So obsessed, in fact, that she ignores her husband’s increasingly odd behavior. Once she’s finally managed to buy them a fixer-upper in the right zip code, she can’t ignore it anymore: something is very wrong with Ed. Something that threatens to tear their family apart.

I’m usually a sucker for a family saga, especially one that immerses itself in one central character over time. And the portrait Thomas paints of Eileen feels real. She’s very much a product of her childhood and her culture. Aging is no guarantee of personal growth, and while she does make some minor self-modifications, she remains consistent at her core. That’s about all the praise I can offer this novel. Because while Eileen feels real and well-characterized, she’s also deeply unpleasant and honestly boring. I’m not a person who needs characters to be likable in order to appreciate a book, but I do need them to be interesting. Eileen’s concerns are so petty and small and pedestrian, and she’s so personally cold (almost every reference she makes to her only child is as “the boy”, with virtually no affection), that she’s just tedious to spend time with.

And since the book is almost entirely from her perspective, that’s a problem. We do get some portions from Connell, but his characterization is nowhere as good as Eileen’s, and I think the book would have been stronger without those chapters entirely. The person from whom we never hear, and who I found myself the most interested in, was Ed himself. Why did he stay with Eileen? A sense of duty to keep the family together while their son grew up? I can understand that his perspective during his decline would have been difficult to write, but he never quite made sense to me even before. And once his decline begins, the book turns into tragedy porn. I think the reader is meant to feel for Eileen, but she’d been built up as a shallow, grasping asshole so thoroughly by that point that even her devotion to Ed didn’t redeem her. Thomas had plenty of ambition here, with the scope and scale of the book he wanted to write, but he came nowhere close to achieving it. His skill with prose and characterization are real, but he undermined himself with the character he created. All I could think at the end was how much I hated her and how glad I was to be done reading about her. Needless to say, I do not recommend this book.

One year ago, I was reading: Perfume

Two years ago, I was reading: Hausfrau

Three years ago, I was reading: Mansfield Park

Four years ago, I was reading: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Five years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

Book 265: Flip

“If he had got away with it so far, it was only because the truth was too bizarre for any of the people in Flip’s world to figure out in a million years. They might not always know what to make of this version of Flip, but to them, he was still Flip. A weird, puzzling Flip, but Flip even so. They only had to look at him to see that.” 

Dates read: October 1-3, 2018

Rating: 4/10

It’s easy to look at other people, people who are wealthy, attractive, skilled, popular, and think they have it made. To wonder what it would be like to go through life as them. To wish you could switch places, even if just for a day or two. Rationally, of course, everyone has problems. Appearances can be deceiving, and someone who seems to have it made could be hiding issues we could never even guess.

In Martyn Bedford’s Flip, fourteen year-old Alex Gray is a nerd. He plays music and chess, not sports. He’s nowhere close to having a girlfriend. His family in London is working class. It would seem like waking up one morning in the body of Phillip “Flip” Garamond, who is handsome, athletic, and popular, would be exciting. But it’s six months later than Alex remembers it being and he has no idea where he is, or why he isn’t himself anymore, and he’s terrified. He bumbles through life as Flip while trying desperately to figure out what happened to him before making contact with a mysterious stranger called Rob…who knows exactly what’s going on with Alex because he’s lived through it himself. Alex has to discover if things can be made right, or if he’s fated to spend the rest of his life as Flip.

The first half of this book is really solid, with a sophistication in the prose style beyond that which is typical in young adult books. For as much as it can be enjoyable to daydream about living someone else’s life for the day, the reality is that waking up in someone else’s body would be absolutely horrifyingly scary, and Bedford skillfully conveys Alex’s terror at this turn of events. I appreciated how Bedford laid out the confusion that would suffuse every moment of trying to figure out where you are, who the strangers you live with are, what you’re “supposed to” be eating for breakfast, even where school is and what classes you’re supposed to be going to. His longing to return to his real life, even though it’s less desirable in almost every way, is very affecting, and makes Alex someone easy to root for.

But it’s in Alex’s quest for answers, and the ones Bedford devises, that everything falls apart. I’m going to throw in a spoiler alert here, because I will be discussing the ending, because it is the culminating cherry on the downward slide of the book. After looks of searching, Alex stumbles across a message board for “psychic evacuees”, people whose consciousness left their body, usually at the point of death, and took over another body that was “connected” to them in some way. It is here that Alex meets Rob, who shows up to hang out and talk about the life he’s been living in someone else’s body for years now. They discover that Alex didn’t die, but was rather in a car accident that’s left him in a coma…and his parents are about to take his body off life support. Alex devises a plan to “trick” his spirit back into his body by smothering himself and honestly it’s all just bonkers.

For a novel that begins so pleasantly rooted in realism, it’s disappointing the way it careens into plot angles that could be charitably described as “crackpot”. I was genuinely curious about how Bedford was going to explain the body-switching, because it seemed like, from the way he was writing, it would be something that seemed at least quasi-plausible. He might as well have had Alex touch a cursed amulet for all the sense it made, though. And although the novel asks us to feel for Alex, it’s shockingly unsympathetic to Flip, who must have gone from minding his own business to being stuck inside a strange body that’s unresponsive, which is even more awful than Alex’s situation, and then finally being freed only to face the mess that Alex made of his life…not just his social situation at school, but facing criminal consequences for his behavior! It tries to handwave this away at the very end, but I didn’t find it at all convincing. I don’t want to write this book off entirely, because there was some very solid stuff to start it off, but the ending is too preposterous and poorly thought-out for me to honestly recommend it at all.

One year ago, I was reading: Without A Prayer

Two years ago, I was reading: Island of the Colorblind

Three years ago, I was reading: Rebecca

Four years ago, I was a reading: The Moonlight Palace

Five years ago, I was reading: Occidental Mythology

Book 243: The Completionist

“I can’t remember telling her my name. I can’t remember breaking her arm. But no, I didn’t break her arm. I would never harm a woman, not me, not myself. Yes, I’ve harmed women. I’ve damaged their brains, their hearing, their eyes, their skin. I’ve killed women; I’m sure I have. But that was different. I’ve never broken a woman’s arm. I have two sisters. I would do anything for them, but I would never break a woman’s arm.” 

Dates read: June 19-22, 2018

Rating: 4/10

I can’t think too hard about the amount of information the internet has about me or I get freaked out. I willingly upload the photos that could make facial recognition on any internet-connected camera possible. I tag myself in certain places, opening myself up to profiling based on my patterns of behavior. I click on emails advertising sales from my favorite stores, giving them valuable information about what percentage off I need to see to engage with their content. Even on this blog, I’m constantly talking about my life, my childhood, my past and my hopes for the future. I don’t think of myself as a particularly public person, but I’ve got precious little privacy when push comes to shove all because of my own behavior on the internet.

For many of us, our phones might as well be glued to our hands since they’re seldom more than arm’s length away. In Siobhan Adcock’s future-set The Completionist, they’ve just cut out the middleman and wearable devices are implanted directly into your arm and connected with your nervous system at a young age. They monitor your health, transmit messages directly, and all you need to do to figure out where your family members are is look, because your GPS position is uploaded automatically. So when his little sister Gardner disappears from the map, recently discharged Marine Carter Quinn is worried. His older sister Fred is even more so, and insists he try to find her. Fred would do it herself, but she’s pregnant, which is something of a miracle in the post-apocalyptic Chicago they inhabit, especially since it happened naturally. Ever since the wars, when the water was poisoned and the precious artificial water was developed instead, there have been fewer and fewer babies being born, and most of them are the result of years of expensive fertility treatments.

Carter is glad to have something to do. Ever since he returned to civilian life from the outlying areas where soldiers fight to defend the shipments of water that keep the city alive, he’s been having a rough time. It’s not just the PTSD, which he treats with growing consumption of alcohol. It’s some sort of bioweapon used against the enemy that he inhaled himself, which he can’t figure out how to treat at all. He throws himself into the task of looking for Gardner, who was last working as a Nurse Completionist (a sort of midwife/specialized mother-to-be nurse) at a mysterious clinic, trying to track her down before Fred’s forced marriage to the one-night-stand who knocked her up. But Gard remains out of sight while Carter goes farther and farther down into an underworld he didn’t even know existed.

Let’s start with a positive: I absolutely loved Fred as a character. Hard-driving and irrepressibly foul-mouthed, the book is strongest when she’s on the page. While Carter and his father (one of the few other significant characters) generally seem mired in their own dramas, Fred comes in and actually moves things forward. In the back half of the book, we get a long series of past conversations between Fred and Gard before the latter’s disappearance, and I wanted it to go on forever because she was such an entertaining, lively presence. I basically wanted the entire book to be from her perspective.

But it wasn’t, and the choice that Adcock made to have Carter as the protagonist was a significant factor in the book’s failure to launch, for me. He’s not honestly very interesting, and spends most of his time either drunk or fighting off symptoms of his poison exposure, which makes everything that happen seem disconnected from reality in a way that was not effective. And, not to spoil the book, but the post-apocalyptic world it’s set in, in which women who do get pregnant are subjected to almost impossible demands to care for their child literally as soon as its conceived, didn’t hold up to scrutiny for me. It would seem that if babies are rare and precious, there’d be more support for the mother rather than punishments. I get the parallel she was going for with our own world, with the expectations we put on mothers and very real pushback they get for failing to meet them perfectly, but I didn’t think it really worked in the way she tried to scale it up to official government policy in a world experiencing a fertility crisis. While I’m generally interested in the wave of feminist dystopia that’s been pretty trendy in the book world lately, this is not a strong example of a genre and everything about this book apart from Fred is forgettable. It’s not egregiously bad, but I don’t really recommend it either.

One year ago, I was reading: Sashenka (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Romanov Empress

Three years ago, I was reading: Station Eleven

Four years ago, I was reading: The Fugitives

Book 230: Game of Crowns

“In the game of chess, no piece is more useful than the queen. It can move vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, and-like all the pieces on the board- its sole purpose is to protect the king. And, in some cases, the future king.”

Dates read: May 1-3, 2018

Rating: 4/10

One of the first pop-culture events I have a very specific, clear memory of is the death of Princess Diana when I was 11. I remember stuff before that, of course (I have a very clear memory of the latchkey staff rolling TVs into the room for the OJ verdict, for instance) but Di’s death was the first time I had a real sense of the context of what I was seeing and hearing. I remember my mother’s genuine sadness, though her usual response to news about foreign royalty was to wonder why anyone would care. She also did not subscribe to the idea of the television being left on as background noise (a mindset I’ve inherited, much to my husband’s chagrin), so the fact that it wasn’t snapped off but was allowed to continue to play marked the significance of the thing.

Getting disproportionately emotionally invested in the death of a divorced British mother of two made us not at all unique. The whole world lost it a little for a minute there. Diana’s life and death continues to resonate around the British Royal Family, and it is through this prism that Christopher Andersen presents her mother-in-law, romantic rival, and would-have-been daughter-in-law in his book, Game of Crowns. Queen Elizabeth II, Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Katherine, Duchess of Cambridge are all women who either are or could be queens of England, and all of them are touched by the legacy of the People’s Princess.

So it makes sense, in a way, that Andersen spends so much time talking about the ill-fated marriage between Charles and Diana. At least one third of the book is devoted to the story of their courtship, their terrible marriage, and their contentious divorce. On the other hand, though, the “War of the Waleses” is an already extensively documented phenomenon. There’s no real new reporting here: they barely knew each other when they got married, they both cheated (though Diana at least went into her marriage without an active side piece), they both orchestrated media to lash out against the other, and they were both active, engaged parents. Her death and the near-constitutional crisis that the response to it engendered had a real impact on the monarchy. And his reporting of William and Kate’s courtship isn’t really much better, in terms of doing more than just summarizing already-available information: lingerie on the catwalk, the break-up, the make-up, the wedding.

What is new is gossip, nearly all of it negative, about Charles and Camilla, with special venom reserved for the latter. He begins the book with a lengthy “what could happen” riff about the ascension of Charles to the throne when his mother dies, predicting that his vanity and hubris will lead to the abolition of the monarchy. While Diana’s leaks to the press are treated a part of her savvy media strategy, leaks from Charles and/or Camilla are portrayed as sneaky, underhanded, and devious. Camilla is depicted as scheming and manipulative, and set against Kate, who’s given a Diana-esque sheen of being both glamorous and naturally gifted at connection with strangers (without any actual supporting evidence). I checked out of the book entirely when Andersen breathlessly related that Camilla had “leaked” information about Kate’s low tally of “engagements”, the kind of meet-and-greets and ribbon-cuttings that make up royal work. The reality is that the Royal Family publishes engagements in the easily-publicly-accessible Court Circular, and a year-end tally is common practice for journalists covering the royal beat. Camilla wouldn’t have had to leak anything to anyone to “shame” Kate for lackluster numbers because that information would have been published anyways! A failure to understand something as basic as this shows the whole book to be without rooting in fact. It’s basically a very long, poorly fact-checked People article and I don’t recommend it.

One year ago, I was reading: The Lowland (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: The Kingmaker’s Daughter

Three years ago, I was reading: The Leavers

Four years ago, I was reading: The Crack in Space

Book 226: Chosen Country

“But his abiding concern was with the same thing preoccupying the townspeople at the meeting in Burns, a desperate and totally genuine love for an idea of a communally minded and free-living western way of life that corporate agriculture and federal regulations were supposedly squeezing out of existence. I don’t think you have to idealize this sort of thing, support the Bundys, or believe in a glossy magical cowboy past to take this kind of love seriously.”

Dates read: April 17-20, 2018

Rating: 4/10

I never thought about public lands before I moved to the West. Michigan has some National Forest land, a National Lakeshore. But I’d never even heard of the Bureau of Land Management, and wouldn’t have been able to tell you what it did before I moved to Nevada and starting working in politics. I guess I would have figured most states were like Michigan, if I’d bothered to think about it at all. Turns out that the federal government owns and administrates upwards of 80% of the land in Nevada! In the West, I think one of the only things as controversial as water rights is the issue of federal ownership of land.

The first controversy over federal land I followed after I moved to Nevada was the Bunkerville situation, orchestrated by a Clark County rancher, Cliven Bundy, and his sons Ammon and Ryan. Not too long after that incident, Ammon and Ryan led the takeover of Malhuer National Wildlife Refuge. It’s still mind-boggling to me that a group of armed men occupied federal government property and this was only sometimes referred to as terrorism and only ended in one death. I try to imagine what might have happened had those men not been white and it doesn’t seem likely that a protracted stand-off would end with no loss of life beyond one man who tried to break a roadblock. Reporter James Pogue was in and around the Refuge during its occupation, and turned his experience with it into a book: Chosen Country.

Pogue half-heartedly tries to tie the Malhuer episode to the greater scope of the dying out of the “traditional” ranching culture of the West and the long-standing libertarian streak of the people here, their sense of independence and alienation from a bureaucracy so far away. I say half-heartedly not because the connection is tenuous, but because it’s poorly explored. There’s a rich history here, but Pogue only glances over it, completely leaving out incidents like Ruby Ridge (which aren’t tied into the lands dispute, but definitely inform the prickly relationship between people who live in the rural areas and the federal government), so that he can spend more time talking about the relationships he built with the men who occupied the refuge and the things he did with them. In this choice, I really feel like he fails his readers, who I imagine are mostly picking up this book out of curiosity about the larger movement and Malhuer’s place within it.

Pogue also stumbles in his organization of the book. Perhaps if I’d been reading a hard copy rather than an e-book, it might have been easier to flip back and forth and have a better sense of who he was talking about when, but Pogue tends to introduce a person (and there’s a fairly large cast of them) and then go on to never again place them in context. For some of the more prominent people, like the Bundy brothers and LaVoy Finecum (who was ultimately killed), that’s probably not necessary, but I kept forgetting who everyone was and their relationships (if any) to each other. He also jumbles his timelines quite a bit between Malhuer, Bunkerville, and a smaller incident he highlights involving a dispute over a mining claim. He’s constantly ping-ponging back and forth in time and place without re-orienting his reader and it’s confusing.

I know that’s a lot of negativity, but I didn’t hate the book. I mostly was disappointed in it…Pogue is talented at his work and paints a captivating portrait of Ammon Bundy in particular, as well as Finecum. His reporting for Vice about these events is very worth reading, and I can understand why he was able to pitch a book on the strength of it. I don’t regret having read it, but I wish it had undergone more vigorous editing and done a better job of illuminating the environment in which the takeover took place. Instead we get stories about how Pogue understands why people value public lands so much after he takes a bunch of drugs while he camps in BLM land. Instead of reading this book, I’d recommend finding his original articles, which cover much the same territory without feeling like a padded-out term paper.

One year ago, I was reading: The Rules of Attraction (review to come)

Two years ago, I was reading: Of Human Bondage

Three years ago, I was reading: Stranger in a Strange Land

Four years ago, I was reading: Sex with Kings

Book 193: The Lady Elizabeth

“She fixed Hertford with a regal glare and was gratified to see him wilt slightly under her gaze. Thus she had seen her father do, and it cheered her a little to know that she had inherited something of his formidable will and presence. This was what it was to be royal, she reflected, this mysterious power that could make others tremble; it was something that might prove useful in the future. But what use was the semblance of power without the substance? For when it came down to it, King’s daughter or no, she was just a helpless young orphan, with no choice but to do as she was told.”

Dates read: November 29- December 4, 2017

Rating: 4/10

As blended families become more and more common, I’m often surprised to hear the amount of judgment people have for parents who have children with different partners. In my experience, it’s certainly not unusual to know others who, like myself, have a half-sibling, but I still hear snippy comments fairly regularly about women who have children with different dads, or vice versa. Being generally unafraid of confrontation, I almost always let people know that they’re talking to someone whose sister is actually her half-sister, and most people walk it back, but it seems like there’s often a gut instinct to deride it as “low class”, which is just total nonsense.

Indeed, one of the most admired women of all time is a product of such a household. Queen Elizabeth I had not one but TWO half-siblings! Actual royalty has been doing this for hundreds of years, it does not get more upper-crust than that. At least in the Tudors’ case, though, it does create some issues, which Alison Weir explores in her novel about the childhood of that monarch, The Lady Elizabeth. It begins with some segments of Elizabeth’s early childhood but really takes off shortly before the death of Henry VIII, and while it primarily focuses on the perspective of Elizabeth herself, we also see events through the eyes of her nursemaid, Kat, older half-sister Mary, and stepmother Katherine Parr, ending in Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne.

The relationship Weir depicts between Mary and Elizabeth is…complicated. Mary was stripped of her royal title and proclaimed a bastard when Henry divorced Katherine of Aragon to wed Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn. Although this devastated both Katherine and Mary, Weir depicts the latter as having made a real effort to be kind and loving to her little half-sister, despite having been made a part of Elizabeth’s service when she was born. Elizabeth, too, was made a bastard when her mother was executed, and the book depicts Mary as haunted by the allegations made during Anne’s trial that Elizabeth was actually the offspring of one of Anne’s alleged lovers. Once their brother Edward dies, there is too much between them, from that history to their differences in religious faith, for them to be close any longer, and it is only Elizabeth’s canny walking of a very thin line that keeps her from being disinherited.

I wish the book had focused more on this, and less on the salaciousness of the relationship between Elizabeth and her stepmother’s new husband: Thomas Seymour. While it’s certainly a significant factor in the period between her father’s death and her own inheritance of the throne, and deserved to be explored, it got a little too bodice-ripping for my taste. There’s historical record of some of the improprieties that occurred while Elizabeth lived with Katherine and Thomas, but Weir really makes it the centerpiece of the narrative and escalates it as high as she possibly can. We get endless scenes of Elizabeth’s growing desire, of Kat’s encouragement of the sparks between them, and it’s like Weir is going for a kind of Philippa Gregory-esque fun prurience (I’m not trying to mock, I like Gregory’s books) but forgot the fun part of it.

All in all, this was a second disappointment for me with Alison Weir and her fiction output. I read Innocent Traitor, about Lady Jane Grey, several months before I read this and while this one was better, they both fell flat for me. Her nonfiction histories do an admirable job of being informative but feeling light rather than heavy, making the people on the page come alive, but her fiction prose drags. There’s just no spark there, and her characters feel boiled down to as few personality traits as possible. While I certainly intend to keep reading her nonfiction, I think this is my last stab at her fiction. I would not recommend this book.

One year ago, I was reading: Less 

Two years ago, I was reading: Who Thought This Was A Good Idea?

Three years ago, I was reading: The Lords of Discipline

Book 177: Duel With The Devil



“This room, filled with the most distinguished legal eminences in the state, might have seemed a Gordian knot of tangled conflicts of interest: Burr’s company owned the murder scene, had employed the defendant, had rejected a bid by a relative of the deceased, had financial relationships with the court recorder and the clerk, and had political alliances and rivalries with his fellow counselors, the mayor, and the judge. In any other time or place, all this might have at least raised an eyebrow. But in Manhattan in 1800, it was just how business was done.”

Dates read: September 15-19, 2017

Rating: 4/10

True crime, it seems, has never been more popular. It’s always had a fanbase: look at Unsolved Mysteries, or America’s Most Wanted, or Ann Rule’s entire career. But ever since the first season of Serial took the country by storm (it was the first podcast I ever subscribed to, and I don’t think I’m alone in that), it seems like it’s everywhere, from other podcasts like My Favorite Murder to TV shows like HBO’s stellar The Jinx. And there’s never-ending source material: there will always be cold cases and shaky convictions all over America every day. What remains to be seen is if this is a trend that’s here to stay.

One of America’s oldest cold cases is the basis of Paul Collins’ Duel With The Devil. Elma Sands, a young, often sickly Quaker woman who had come to New York City with her cousin, Catherine, and lived in a boarding house there, was found dead in a well in her best clothes. Suspicion quickly turned on Levi Weeks, a fellow boarder, who’d been seeing Elma and who she’d reputedly left her room the night she was killed to secretly marry. Levi happened to be the brother of Ezra Weeks, who was a well-connected businessman and arranged for Levi’s defense by what was likely America’s first legal Dream Team: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Henry Brockholst Livingston. Despite the almost overwhelming public opinion that Levi had done it, the defense managed to echo (pre-echo?) the OJ Simpson case in another respect: he was found not guilty. His legal victory did nothing for his PR woes, though, so he left the city not long thereafter and ended up in Mississippi, where he lived out the rest of his life being mostly pretty boring.

Collins complies his relatively brief book by doing four things: he gives the reader tons of background and context for the New York City in which the murder transpired and fleshes out the principals, he recounts the trial, he posits his own theory of who might have killed Elma, and he wraps up with the famous duel between the one-time co-counsels and long-time political enemies that cost Alexander Hamilton his life. I found Ezra Weeks to be a surprisingly interesting figure: we’ve all known of those “prominent citizen” types that seem to be able to pull all the strings, and he was able to get his brother two of the foremost attorneys in the city in a way that only one of those types could do. He was a local construction guy, and he had two customers with a taste for the finer things but without a budget to support that taste, who therefore owed him money: Hamilton and Burr.

The full-on Hamilton craze seems to have peaked a while ago, but there’s still a lot of interest in his story. To be perfectly honest, this book, and the case at the center of it, aren’t much more than a footnote in a life that managed to encompass a great deal despite its relative brevity. Collins does what he’s trying to do here well enough, but there’s nothing revelatory. If you’ve got an interest in cold cases or you’ve found out about this case in particular and wanted to know more, this book tells its story with clear, informative prose and is worth your time. If, however, you’re more interested in Hamilton’s entire career, I’d recommend Ron Chernow’s Hamilton instead, which I listened to on audio and is very long but fascinating. 

One year ago, I was reading: Chosen Country

Two years ago, I was reading: The Children of Henry VIII

Three years ago, I was reading: Dune

Book 169: Charity Girl



“The matron and her cornering. Barred windows. But all these things, it hits her, she can bear, has been bearing; these things every patient here must bear. And that’s what’s so awful: that they take it, that they can, that it’s so easy to lose the fighting edge.”

Dates read: August 13-16, 2017

Rating: 4/10

The process for how textbooks get developed is fascinating. Especially for K-12 public school texts in the United States. The information contained in what’s really just a handful of books makes up the knowledge base for what the majority of students end up learning. Large buyers can exert significant influence, given that companies want to market their products to as wide a base as possible. So you end up with books that shy away from controversy, meaning that when you learn about “Manifest Destiny”, you read about it as triumphant white people making their way from sea to shining sea with just side notes about the devastating effects that the migration had on Native American communities. You have to actively seek out information that runs contrary to the official version.

Michael Lowenthal’s Charity Girl explores one such “hidden” aspect of history. His novel follows Freida, a teenager who flees from her Russian Jewish immigrant mother after her father dies and she’s about to be sold (literally) in marriage to a much older man she barely knows. She goes to Boston, where she gets a job in a department store and makes friends with her coworkers. She meets Felix, a dashing young soldier who sends her heart a-flutter…but leaves her with syphilis before he reports for training to head overseas to fight in World War I. She’s tracked down by the Committee on Prevention of Social Evils Surrounding Military Camps, and even though she tries to get away, she’s eventually picked up and sent to a reform facility.

She’s committed no crime, but neither she or the other girls she’s detained with (some prostitutes, some, like Freida, “charity girls” who don’t sell their bodies but have offered their company to men who take them out) are sophisticated enough players to work the system. While there, the girls are treated for their STDs (this is the pre-antibiotic era, so those treatments are on the harsh side), as well as proselytized to about leaving behind their “scandalous” ways. There is a social worker who offers her help to Freida, and she never loses hope that Felix does care for her and will effectuate her release. She does eventually leave the home, but I’ll leave the how for anyone who wants to read to discover.

Let’s start with the good things about this book. First of all, it introduced me to a piece of American history I’d never heard of. That the military members who were as often as not the source of the diseases the girls had were able to get treatment and move on with their lives while the women were subjected to indefinite detention (sometimes followed by criminal prosecution)…is, honestly, not all that surprising, unfortunately. But it was definitely something entirely new to me, and I’m glad I read it and found out more. I actually thought Lowenthal did a fairly good job with Freida’s characterization (she’s kind of wishy-washy and prone to flights of fantasy, but she’s a 17 year-old girl who was sheltered for most of her life), and I appreciated that he surrounded her with a relatively diverse cast of characters.

But it wasn’t really a very good book at the end of the day. Frieda might have been a well-drawn character, but as a protagonist, she was more irritating than not. The other girls she lived with might have been diverse, but they were all pretty flat. As soon as you find out than one of them is pregnant, it’s obvious that there’s going to be a botched abortion, because along with the helpful social worker turning out to be a predatory lesbian (yikes) who turns her back on Freida when she discovers that she’s still infatuated with Felix, that’s just the kind of story this is. I never really felt like the stakes were that high or got invested in the story. The writing is fine, but unspectacular. Unless you have a particular interest in this time period, I’d say that this is skippable.

Tell me, blog friends…what did you only learn about after high school history?

One year ago, I was reading: The Selfish Gene

Two years ago, I was reading: The Bear and the Nightingale

Three years ago, I was reading: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Book 143: The Highest Tide



“Olympia rain rarely calls for hats, much less umbrellas, but this was a waterfall. And by one forty-five in the morning I saw the auras of the remaining biologists, or maybe it was just backlit mist. What I do know is that I saw a blue light around every one of their heads. And Florence had taught me that people with blue auras are relaxed and ready for anything, which suited these people perfectly.”

Dates read: May 1-5, 2017

Rating: 4/10

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with dogs. OBSESSED. Like, I bought a copy of the AKC breed manual and read it like a book, cover to cover, over and over. I also went through a phase of intense obsession with mythology, even writing a letter to The Detroit News when they published a piece that misgendered Osiris. It seems like that’s something we lose in adulthood, the ability to become passionately wrapped up in a single topic like that. We have so many other things to think about, it makes sense, but it still feels like kind of a loss, realizing those days of throwing myself wholeheartedly into something new are behind me.

In Jim Lynch’s The Highest Tide, 13 year-old Miles O’Malley is a budding marine biologist. Not in the way of like, teenagers who think that means getting to play with dolphins all day for a job. But in the way where he reads and re-reads Rachel Carson’s works on oceans, cares about the ecosystem, and regularly sneaks outside to kayak along the Puget Sound beach he lives on to explore what the animals who live in the water are up to. On one such adventure, early in the summer before he begins high school, he discovers a giant squid washed up on the shore. And so begins a season that will change his life forever.

Like so many adolescents, everything is changing for Miles. His parents seem headed toward an end of their long-shaky marriage, he nurses a desperate crush on Angie, the older, bipolar girl next door who used to babysit him, he becomes a figure of devotion for a local cult-type group, he feels queasy about the older man he sells aquarium specimens to, and he faces the increasing deterioration of his best friend, the old lady who lives next door. Miles is confused about virtually all of the above, not quite knowing how to handle any of it. On top of it all, he’s extremely self-conscious about his diminutive stature and has very few friends his own age.

This is a fairly slim book (only about 250 pages), and the feeling I was left with at the end was that it tried to take on too much without doing any of it particularly well. There are too many plot threads and none of them are developed properly. Lynch sketches Miles as a sensitive, observant boy, and I wish he’d dropped some of elements he piled on (the shady animal dealer and the cult group in particular don’t resonate well) and given the rest some room to breathe. In particular, I felt like Angie got the short shrift…I can see what the appeal of her would be to Miles, but I never got much of a sense of what the appeal of Miles would be to her. She’s given an interesting story: daughter of a prominent local judge with not-adequately-treated mental health issues and a wild streak, but she’s never realized as an actual character. Lynch’s prose is adequate, but doesn’t do anything in terms of making up for the plot issues.

Reading books like this, though, makes me reflect on the enduring popularity of the coming-of-age genre. I think the appetite for books in this sphere explains a lot of the appeal of the YA boom: people really like stories about growing up. In part, I think this is because even the culturally-recognized “growing-up” period has gotten extended…just look at how much later my generation is doing things like getting married and buying houses, in large part, that our parents’ generation or even Gen X. And even now, firmly in undisputed adult territory, I still feel like I’m not done growing and changing yet. Maturing is a process that feels like it’ll never really be done, and stories that reflect the sometimes-painful but always-necessary movement forward are very appealing. I wish The Highest Tide were a better example of the type, but not every book does it for every one. There’s good stuff in this one, it’s more frustrating than bad, but I still wouldn’t recommend it when there are so many in this category that do it better.

Tell me, blog friends…what were your childhood obsessions?

One year ago, I was reading: The Idiot

Two years ago, I was reading: The Last One

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