I survived. Work continues, of course, and I spent a lot of time doing reporting and such post-session, but I am no longer commuting 45 minutes each way after waking up at 5 AM every day and for that I am grateful.

In Books…

• East of Eden: Widely regarded as Steinbeck’s masterpiece, this novel at its heart tells the story of a family, and in particular, two generations of brothers. Charles and Adam are the two sons of Cyrus Trask, an unhappy farmer “back East”, as west coasters tend to say, who compete viciously for the limited affection and approval on offer from their father and his second wife. Charles would seem to be the ideal son for someone like Cyrus, who has never gotten over his brief service in the military and spins it into ever-more intricate lies about his importance: he is naturally aggressive, harsh, and often unkind. But it is the more sweet-natured Adam that Cyrus favors, wanting him to join the army to carry forward his legacy. The two brothers have a ugly fight as teenagers after Cyrus’s birthday, in which Charles’s gift of an expensive fancy knife is ignored while Adam’s gift of a hunting dog puppy is cherished. Charles attacks his brother, nearly killing him and earning himself a lifelong scar from the attempt. After Adam’s stint in the army, including a detour to see his father, whose falsities have propelled him into a top-ranking military role in DC, his unease about returning home to his brother lead him to a second enlistment, followed by a time when he lives as a hobo. The two do eventually reunite but are never quite able to fall into step despite what seem to be reasonable efforts to do so, and only become more estranged when a bruised and battered young woman literally arrives on their doorstep. Cathy Ames is blonde and beautiful and Adam falls in love with her as he nurses her back to health, having no idea what lies under her appealing surface. After manufacturing the deaths of her parents for some small slights, she turned to prostitution and used her relationship with her pimp to store away assets for herself, only to be beaten nearly to death when she was no longer able to quell his suspicions about her. Charles, however, sees her for what she really is and demands she leave. Which she does…as Adam’s wife. Against her wishes, he moves them to northern California’s Salinas Valley, where he buys a farm, becomes friends with local patriarch Samuel Hamilton, and dreams of making a lovely, prosperous home for his cherished wife and the child she carries. But life does not go according to plan. Shortly after Cathy bears twin boys, she shoots Adam to effectuate her escape, leaving him with only the aid of a Chinese servant, Lee, to help him raise the children. Adam retreats into despair, but between the efforts of Lee and Samuel manages to engage with his boys enough to name them Caleb and Aaron. These brothers play out similar dynamics: Caleb is softer than Charles was, more of a mix of light and dark, but is capable of real cruelty. Aaron, on the other hand, is downright saintly. He does not seem to understand hatefulness. Caleb, in his late teens, manages to find out deeply upsetting information about their mother, who they’ve been told is dead and has to decide what to do with this information when it comes to his brother…hide it, or reveal it. His choice has ramifications for them all. This is a retelling of Cain and Abel. In case you couldn’t tell, what with the two pairs of brothers with names beginning with “A” and “C”, where the brother whose name starts with A is the good one and the brother whose name starts with C is the bad one. Charles literally attempts to kill his brother and is scarred for life. If that was too subtle for you, Adam, Lee, and Samuel have an extended conversation when they are deciding to name the boys about Cain and Abel and the implications of that Biblical story. This incredible lack of subtlety was what held me back from really truly enjoying the book. I wanted to be trusted more as a reader to draw these parallels for myself without being buffeted about the head with them. There are an intriguing cast of characters on offer here, not the least of which is Cathy. It is all too easy to see the influence here on Gillian Flynn’s representation of female evil in Gone Girl‘s Amy Dunne, another beautiful ice princess who knows how to exploit the people around her to get what she wants and does not shy away from murder to achieve her ends. But my favorite character was Lee, who at first made me cringe with his stereotypical depiction and pidgin speech but develops beautifully into a fully-integrated part of the Trask family. His character arc was far and away the most complete and interesting to me, and I thought the gender politics were interesting for the time as he is in many ways a stand-in female figure in the family and depicted without shame or judgement for fulfilling this role. My suspicion of the racial politics of the book, though, was not wrong, given the way he casually deploys the n-bomb as the sobriquet of the owners of one of the town whorehouses. I wish that had been excised, certainly, as well as most of the subplot about the Hamilton family, which is author-insert indulgence from Steinbeck about his own lineage (a young John even briefly appears in one scene of the book). It doesn’t add much to the story, which already plods along pretty slowly. As always, the scenery-setting about the Salinas Valley is lovely, with his love for the place shining true and clear. A very good book, by far and away the best Steinbeck I have read, but I will not be joining the ranks of the people for whom this is an all-time favorite.
• The Baby Thief: Georgia Tann was, quite frankly, a monster. As the head of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society, she pioneered the modern practice of adoption, but she was not content with merely placing abandoned children into new homes. She actively worked to steal children to ensure she could meet the demand she had created, all the way from colluding with hospital staff to abduct “stillborn” infants in an era when mothers were routinely knocked out during birth to luring young children from poor homes right out of their front yards if she needed to fulfill an “order” from a client. She became a not-insignificant figure, providing children adopted by Joan Crawford and June Allyson. The wrestler Ric Flair was a Georgia Tann adoptee. Barbara Bisantz Raymond, expanding on a magazine piece she reported previously, looks at Georgia herself, the political corruption in Tennessee that enabled her for so long, and the history of adoption, particularly in the United States. This part all goes reasonably well. But like so many reporters before her, she falls into the trap of believing that people are interested in her process of reporting. Maybe I am just a hater, but I am almost NEVER interested in that. I didn’t even like All The President’s Men because there was too much inside baseball about reporting! So we hear about her trip to visit Georgia’s very small Mississippi hometown while she’s battling a severe ear infection, which actually could have had some dynamism (she is threatened at gunpoint!) but for her frequent references to how badly her ear hurt (no one cares!). And we also get to the rub of why this issue is meaningful to her…her own daughter is adopted and expressing interest in more information about her birth family. Which, again, not to be callous, does not add anything to the story of Georgia Tann. The prose is never anything more than workmanlike, and while the actually relevant information is generally well-organized and I definitely learned a lot more about adoption, there’s just too much fat and not enough meat here.
• Daughter of Empire: Lady Pamela Hicks, nèe Mountbatten, was born into an interesting family. Her father, Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and a nephew of Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. When he wed the glamorous heiress Edwina Ashley, the Prince of Wales was his best man. The pair had two daughters, Patricia and the aforementioned Pamela, and were very open about their affairs, including integration of their longtime paramours with the family. During World War II, they sent their school-age daughters to the United States for safety, where they stayed with the Vanderbilts. Later, as a teenager, Pamela accompanied her parents to India when her father was appointed as Viceroy to oversee the transition to independence. And that’s all before she accompanied the then-Princess Elizabeth on the royal tour during which the King died and Elizabeth became Queen, and then the Queen’s first tour of Australia. Quite the early life! Hicks recounts it all with the reserve you might expect of an upper-crusty British person. If you are looking for emotional insight or vulnerability, this is not the place to find it. It is clear from the book that Pamela is an introverted person (her discomfort with crowds and noise is consistent throughout), and is much too discreet to tell any stories that the people involved would find embarrassing. She’s the most open about her own mother, who honestly seems like a fascinating woman, at one point juggling a husband, a longtime boyfriend, and several flings along with throwing herself into the kinds of work that were available for a woman of her time and class. She was not content to be a ceremonial figure as vicereine of India and got very actively involved in traveling around the country and speaking to people both before and after the partition, including in situations when she could have been in very real danger of physical harm. She also carried on at the very least an affair with Nehru during this time, though Hicks believes it was never physical. I want a whole book about Edwina Mountbatten. Though Hicks is unapologetic about the legacy of empire (she does not discuss the death of her father at the hands of the IRA), it is refreshing that at least she seems to genuinely revile racism. She brings up her disgust with people who expect her to share their antisemitic and/or anti-Indian viewpoints at several times in the narrative. I admit I was hoping for something slightly dishier or a little more engaging…she lived through such interesting, important events! But it’s well-written enough and is paced well, so while it’s not a must-read it’s pleasant to spend a little time with. Recommended for royalty/nobility fans, otherwise skippable.
• Her Many Faces: The world knows Katie Cole as a 22 year-old waitress on trial for the murder of four wealthy men in an exclusive London club. Her father John knows her as Kit Kat, the youngest of his three children and the only girl, who never seemed to really get over the death of her beloved eldest brother in a warzone. Her childhood best friend Gabriel knows her as KC, who took him under her wing as a fellow outcast when he transferred into her high school as a sickly, nerdy stranger in a small town. Her off-and-on fling and business bro Conrad knows her as Wildcat, the alluring and much younger woman he toys with as he works to ascend the corporate ladder. Her lawyer Tarun knows her as Katherine, the young woman whose reputation he needs to burnish in front of a jury as he tries to recapture his professional confidence after a nervous breakdown. And tabloid reporter Max thinks of her as Killer Kate, whose story he’s hoping could be the source of a true crime bestseller. What actually happened the night those men died from cyanide-poisoned wine, when she fled her job and was caught trying to leave the city? If she killed them, why? If she didn’t, who did? Every summer I get in the mood for a fast-paced twisty thriller, and I’m usually disappointed. This one isn’t mind-blowing (I don’t think anything will ever recapture the high of reading Gone Girl for the first time), but it is quite good and I very much enjoyed reading it! The viewpoint chapters are short and keep the pages turning quickly, making it easy to go for just one more. It’s an interesting narrative choice, to only really see the central character through the eyes of others (though Katie does get very brief introduction and conclusion chapters of her own) and I found that it did not hinder her development. By getting all of these perspectives, with their variation between love and hostility and curiosity and wariness, the reader can synthesize them into a relatively realistic portrait of a young woman trying to figure out how to be a person in the world. We get little details about the lives these men lead outside of their interactions with Katie so they don’t feel wildly underdeveloped themselves, but Cloke keeps it pretty tightly focused so they don’t feel like distractions either. Easy enough to be a beach/plane read, but with enough there there to not feel too slight for full attention. I admit I am terrible at guessing twists, but I didn’t feel like this one was telegraphed or too easy. The end was satisfying. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a propulsive little thriller with actual meat on its bones!
• The Color of Magic: Discworld is one of those series that the people who love realllllly love, so I had to try it eventually. Discworld is, well, exactly what it sounds like: a world that is a flat disc, which is borne on the shoulders of four elephants balanced on the shell of a giant turtle. This first volume tells three interlinked stories about a wizard-school dropout called Rincewind, who finds himself in the company of and nominally responsible for Twoflower, a tourist from another empire. The pair, accompanied by Twoflower’s trunk, a sentient and multi-legged creature called the Luggage determined to find its way back to its master whenever they may be separated, have a series of comic misadventures in a magical world populated by criminals, wizards, gods, and dragons who only exist when you believe in them, among many others. This book is less a coherent attempt at a novel than it is a witty, tongue-in-cheek send-up of cheesy 80s-style fantasy, lovingly mocking the tropes of the genre: bumbling wizards, capricious gods interfering in human affairs, stock heroes, beautiful women wearing virtually nothing. Character development is virtually non-existent, plots are convoluted, but what makes it work to the extent it does is the delightful prose. Terry Pratchett was clearly having fun writing it and wanted readers to enjoy reading it just as much, and it’s that infectious sense of silliness that won me over, despite not actually really liking it all that much. Turns out the way everyone says that you should not start with this one is very much for a reason! If I wasn’t assured that there were much better entries out there, I’d probably have abandoned the series, but I think I’m just going to let myself read out of order from this point on.
• Supreme Power: Many Americans will vaguely remember the phrase “the switch in time that saved nine” from government class in high school, and recall that it had something to do with court packing on the Supreme Court, and maybe FDR. This book, by Jeff Shesol, tells the story of that switch and places it in context. When Roosevelt was elected in the wake of the Depression, he enacted many broad, sweeping social programs as part of the New Deal…and then watched a few years later as the Supreme Court started to strike them down as exceeding the power delegated to Congress as part of the Constitution. As his frustration mounted, he started to think about ways that he could get around this obstacle, including requiring justices to issue determinations of constitutionality prior to a bill’s passage, changing their jurisdiction so they would no longer be allowed to strike down federal law, or by simply adding more justices to the Court to replace aging, conservative judges with younger, liberal ones. After being re-elected by an overwhelming margin, and bringing a huge Senate majority with him, he decided to bring a bill to require Supreme Court justices to retire at age 70 or have a new justice appointed alongside them (who would then replace the justice whenever he did retire). The bill faced a steep uphill climb, including among members of FDR’s own Democratic party, when something happened that changed the conversation: the existing justices started ruling differently. Two justices started voting more often with the liberals, sustaining programs like Social Security and state minimum wage laws that had previously seemed to be on rocky ground. FDR did not stop pursuing his bill, but it took most of the little wind that existed out of its sails. Ultimately, of course, nothing changed on the Court. There were nine then. There are nine now. It was very interesting to read this book now, with the current dialogue around the Court. Like then, there are three liberal justices who form one block, four conservatives who form another, and another two conservative-leaning who are occasionally on the other side. Like then, there is a liberal outcry about the ways the Court has ruled. When Biden was in office, there were not infrequent calls for him to engage in court packing. This book made clear to me, though, that it would have been incredibly logistically difficult to do so. If a second-term FDR with an overwhelming majority in the Senate couldn’t get it done, why would we think it would be realistic for another president to do so? Even with both a legal and a political background, I was expecting this book to be a challenging read. I was pleasantly surprised to find it very accessible! It keeps its cast of historical figures as small as it realistically can and provides enough detail to be comprehensive without becoming dry and dense. United States history is not my favorite subject to read about, so I have some substantial gaps in my knowledge, but I felt like Shesol managed to deftly balance grounding a reader unfamiliar with this world in his narrative without it feeling hand-holdy and patronizing. It’s probably too long (about 530 pages prior to endnotes) and too focused on a single historical moment to be truly “pop” history for a very broad audience, but the writing is engaging and clear, and though it was published 15 years ago it is still incredibly relevant to our current moment and I definitely recommend it for anyone with any interest in the subject at hand!

In Life…

• Finished my seventh legislative session: Each one brings new challenges, and each one is weird in its own way, but this one may have been the weirdest, culminating in a filibuster over a last-minute change to an interim committee that left quite a number of bills without a final procedural step they needed to be sent to the Governor and rendering them dead instead. It is almost certain we’ll need to go back in the fall assuming that the federal government makes changes to the Medicaid program, but I need these few months away from all that.
• Ninth wedding anniversary: Mid-month my husband and I celebrated our ninth anniversary…and by celebrated I mean we just did the normal family stuff, it was a Wednesday after all. We’ve never been into making a big to-do of it and usually exchange only small gifts, and having a toddler has only exacerbated that tendency. Next year is a biggie though, so we might have to actually make some plans for that one!