michigan

September 30, 2023

A Month In The Life: September 2023

Another month over and we’re headed towards the homestretch of the end of the year, with birthdays and holidays to close everything out. We checked off a major item in the new-family list this month: our first plane travel with the little guy! It ended with some minor drama but it was overall a very fun trip.

In Books…

Hollywood Babylon: I skipped the You Must Remember This season about this book because I wanted to read it first but now that I have, I’m really looking forward to the podcast dissecting it. This has a reputation for being salacious, and also quite possibly entirely made up, and reading it confirmed both the former and the latter. There are no sources cited, he openly references rumor and conjecture as the basis for the innuendos he repeats. There is also racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia! It was a quicker read than its page count suggests, there are a ton of black and white photos (some of which are quite upsetting, like images of people and animals after they have died!) that pad it out. It’s not really worth reading unless you’re an Old Hollywood completist.
The Last Temptation of Christ: I knew this book had been condemned by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and there is nothing you can do to make me interested in a book faster than telling me that someone doesn’t want me to read it. And last time I read a book banned by a religious authority, The Satanic Verses, I found it interesting even without much of the cultural background that would have likely made it better. Unfortunately for me, this was not that kind of book. It’s a very straightforward imagining of the end period of Jesus’s life, including both his ministry and his death (many details of which were unfamiliar to me because I mostly did not pay attention in catechism). Where it is scandalous is that it suggests that Jesus wrestled very seriously with the idea of rejecting his identity as the Messiah/a part of the Holy Trinity in favor of his identity as a man, living a life that would have included marriage and children and all of the normal, messy things about being a human. It’s not that this is an idea that couldn’t have been compelling. It’s more that this book itself is really boring. While Jesus himself is of course drawn richly since his interiority is the point of the book, most of the apostles are flat and the female characters (the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene) are stereotyped and given little to do. I never really got drawn into it at any point and it felt like slogging through mud to get through it.
North Woods: This book has been buzzy for awards, and after reading it I very much understand why. It traces the history of a house in rural Massachusetts, starting with its establishment as a cabin by a pair of teenage lovers fleeing their Puritan settlement, all the way through the present day and beyond. In between there are murders, seances, a new breed of apple, a mountain lion, joy, and despair. The story is told through multiple formats, including songs, one side of a correspondence of letters, and an article from a true crime magazine. It’s creative, compelling, and filled with callbacks to the past both large and small in a way that makes it rewarding to be an attentive reader of. I very much liked it and strongly recommend it.
Restless Valley: I’ve been thinking about whether I would have liked this book more on audio or if it would have been entirely too confusing and I can’t really decide. It’s written by a journalist who spent time in central Asia (particularly focused on the titular Ferghana Valley, which includes territory inside both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) and recounts loosely connected stories from his experiences there. I’m usually interested in stories about the former USSR, and there is a lot of stuff here that is attention-grabbing conceptually: murders! corruption! dictators! The way this was organized, though, did not at all work for me. Single stories were broken up in ways that felt jarring and made it hard to remember details that seemed like they should have been important. This is absolutely a symptom of Western privilege, but the names are unfamiliar and so keeping track of the players was a challenge. Some of the financial crimes that went along with the corruption are recounted in levels of detail that at least for me, rendered them obtuse and difficult to follow. It’s not like I got nothing out of the book, but it felt like it was actively fighting against my efforts to get drawn into it so it ended up feeling like a slog.
The Light Between Oceans: Whether or not this book will work for you depends on how you answer one question. If two people, desperate for a child, literally have an infant float into their lives and decide to keep her and raise her with love and devotion, even after finding out her mother is alive and mourning her loss, can they be good people who made a horrible, tragic choice or are they monstrously selfish? Before becoming a mother myself I think I would have been more interested in at least exploring the former idea, but now that I am one I can’t see the book’s protagonists as anything but awful. Stedman draws the couple sympathetically enough, with WWI veteran and lighthouse keeper Tom presented as genuinely torn and acting out of love for his wife, Isabel, herself bereaved by multiple pregnancy losses. They are engaged and devoted parents to the little girl they name Lucy. But all of the narrative tension depends on the reader investing in their self-created plight, so if you’re not compelled by them, their agonizing falls flat and feels like a lot of pointless waffling. There’s some pretty nature writing about coastal Australia here, though too many obvious lighthouse metaphors and clunky dialogue for me to get too drawn into the prose.

In Life…

Michigan trip with C: I have never wished harder for a direct flight between Reno and Detroit. I would have paid very good money to not need to deal with connections, especially on the return end when flight delays were an issue (as was probable food poisoning that manifested on our very last flight). It was good to bring him home though, he got quality time with both of his grandparents and got to meet his aunt, uncle, and cousin for the first time! He was a total trouper about crossing three time zones and back in less than a week, sleeping in two new places, and meeting a bunch of people. And hey, if we can survive having a baby need to use multiple airsick bags, we can probably survive a lot.

February 4, 2021

Book 270: Detroit

“The city, what’s left of it, burns night after night. Nature—in the form of pheasants, hawks, foxes, coyotes and wild dogs—had stepped in to fill the vacuum, reclaiming a little more of the landscape each day. The streets were empty and cratered. The skyscrapers were holograms. I stood and admired a cottonwood sapling growing out of the roof of the Lafayette Building. This was like living in Pompeii, except the people weren’t covered in ash. We were alive.”

Dates read: October 21-25, 2018

Rating: 6/10

I was born in Detroit. Not “Detroit”, the way some people use it, to mean Royal Oak or Birmingham. But actual City of Detroit, in Harper Woods. My mom had lived there for her whole life, from the fifties when she was born until the late eighties when we left. When I was about three, we moved out to what had been her parents’ summer lake house, about an hour away, and that’s where I was raised. Though I barely lived there, and it was three decades ago now, I’ll never stop rooting for my native city.

The City of Detroit’s motto is “Speramus meliora; resurgent cineribus”, which translates to “We hope for better things, it will rise from the ashes”. Which sounds really on the nose for Detroit now, but actually dates back to 1805 and the aftermath of an actual fire. So how did a city once known for its prosperity and loveliness (called the “Paris of the West”!), turn into…well, Detroit as we know it? When reporter Charlie LeDuff returned to his hometown after spending more than a decade working at The New York Times, he started up at The Detroit News, and his attempts to answer that very question went into his book, Detroit: An American Autopsy.

Detroit is a mix of a little bit of several things: part history, part investigation of public corruption, part memoir. The issues of the city aren’t just abstract facts to LeDuff…he grew up there, watched his mother struggle to maintain her business and raise her family as the crime rate spiked, and his own sister became addicted to drugs and died young, leaving behind a daughter who’s on the same path. He traces the city’s boom, and then the white flight that began when the Great Migration brought Southern black people to the industrial north, and then the increasingly shady operations of the City Council. LeDuff began his tenure at the News as Kwame Kilpatrick’s reign as Mayor was in its death throes, his misconduct and that of other City electeds like Monica Conyers finally becoming so blatant it could no longer be swept under the rug.

In the strongest portions of the book, LeDuff takes one aspect of the very real consequences of municipal mismanagement, the woeful underfunding of the Fire Department, and uses it as a microcosm of the larger problem. He introduces the firefighters, constantly called out into a sprawling, arson-happy city with trucks and equipment well past expiration dates. But they keep on going anyways, out of love for each other and a sense of duty to the residents, even though the conditions they’re put in mean they’re at much higher risk of death and injury.

These firehouse sections are so strong, in fact, I found myself wishing they had been the whole book. LeDuff’s an undeniably talented writer, but his lack of focus made it less compelling than it could have been. I found the memoir-esque portions least interesting, and while his look at the malfeasance at City Council did grab my attention, it wasn’t nearly fleshed out enough to paint a full picture. LeDuff’s connection with the firefighters and sympathy for their Sisyphean task is obvious, and the work just comes alive when he’s spending time with them. As it is, the book tries to do a little too much, and sacrificing its ability to do any of it to a level of true excellence. It’s good, and if you’re into reading about Detroit, it’s well-worth your time, but if you don’t have an underlying interest in the city, it might not be for you.

One year ago, I was reading: Whores of the Devil

Two years ago, I was reading: The Mind’s Eye

Three years ago, I was reading: Thank You For Smoking

Four years ago, I was reading: Orange Is the New Black

Five years ago, I was reading: Creative Mythology

July 30, 2020

Book 244: The Feast of Love

“You think that what I’ve just told you is an anecdote. But really it isn’t. It’s my whole life. It’s the only story I have.”

Dates read: June 22-25, 2018

Rating: 5/10

What is it, exactly, that makes up “chemistry”? I’m sure many of us have sat through a date with a perfectly nice, reasonably attractive human being who just could not possibly be less interesting in a let’s-fall-in-love kind of way. On the other hand, there’s the stranger we were in the elevator chatting with for five minutes that lingers in our mind for weeks afterward. You can ignore it, but if it’s there, you can’t force it.

The sparks and romantic connections between various couples in Ann Arbor are the connecting thread in Charles Baxter’s A Feast of Love. Most of them are connected through Bradley, a middle-aged man who owns a coffee shop in the mall but pursues his love of painting at home. Bradley’s marriages, both of which end in divorce, are brought in, as are his young employees Chloe and Oscar, who are crazy about each other. His neighbors, a long-married couple struggling with how to deal with their drug-addicted son, are also players in the drama. The story is framed by the conceit that a friend of Bradley’s, a professor and writer (meant to be Baxter himself), is interviewing all of the players one-by-one over a period of time.

There’s not much in the way of a plot, per se. Each little story has its own rising and falling action…Bradley’s first wife, who leaves him when she falls head over heels for another woman, is a bit player, but his second wife, who marries him mostly to spite the lover who refuses to leave his wife for her, has a larger role in the narrative. Chloe and Oscar’s story, which appears steadily throughout the book and sees the couple dealing with his unbalanced father and a larger, more unexpected problem, provides probably the most straightforward structure in the whole thing. Also constantly recurring is the title, first as the name of Bradley’s best painting, which then inspires the author-within-the-book to title his work in progress after it.

When this book is on, it has moments of real brilliance. The story I mentioned above, in which Bradley’s first wife meets, falls for, and eventually divorces Bradley in pursuit of the other woman, feels alive with poignancy. A story Bradley relates about having to kidnap his own dog from his sister sparkles with dark humor. And it’s more specific to me personally, but as an Ann Arborite in exile, I love reading about the city. Allmendinger Park, post-game traffic, the mall…all of these are deeply familiar to me and make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside to see on the page. The experience of seeing places that are meaningful to me depicted in print is something I didn’t even know could be as powerful as I found it.

Now for the critical part. I feel like I’ve read several of these interconnected-vignette style books lately and perhaps I’m just tiring of that presentation, but all of them suffer from a lack of traditional plot and tension. This feels more like a piece of writing than a book, if that makes sense. It feels stylized and over-written, and part of the issue is that the character work is spotty. Bradley’s clearly meant to have a particular personality but it never really feels honest or consistent, and the way Chloe is written was extremely off-putting to me. She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl before that was a thing, insisting on a quirky pronunciation of her name and using some of the most cringey language to describe sex I’ve ever read. Anyone who writes a girl under 20 as using the phrase “lovemaking” to describe sex unironically has never really listened to a young woman talk about it, and that is far from the worst example. In the end, I just never really got invested in it. There’s some very capable storytelling here, in parts, but it’s not well-realized enough throughout to get an affirmative recommendation for me unless you’re determined to read about Ann Arbor.

One year ago, I was reading: Money Rock

Two years ago, I was reading: Shantaram

Three years ago, I was reading: Notes on a Scandal

Four years ago, I was reading: Masha Regina

July 27, 2017

Book 87: The Other Side of the River

“That’s not to say the history isn’t there. Whites have killed blacks before. Or killed because of blacks. The stories have passed on from generation to generation, over supper or over a beer, on stoops or in parlors, told by grandmothers and by pastors, the narratives shaped and reshaped by people’s prejudices and blurred memories and by their own experiences. And while they may not be recorded in history books, they exist just as powerfully and vividly in these oral tales.”

Dates read: September 6-10, 2016

Rating: 5/10

Maybe it’s just my own privilege, or growing up in a small, fairly homogeneous town, or cluelessness, or other/more things, but I feel like the shooting of Michael Brown really kicked off a national movement of racial issues back into the mainstream. As much as we, as a country, tried to clap ourselves on the back for electing our first black president and pretend really hard that we’re living in a post-racial world, it didn’t work. Racial divides, state-sanctioned violence against people of color, and institutionalized prejudice still exist. As a white person, it’s been an exercise in learning the limitations of my own experiences and trying to figure out how to do better in the ways that I can. There’s a whole process to that, of course, and it’s one that requires constant learning and growth.

But really, of course, these issues have been a problem for a long, long time. It doesn’t seem like the early 90s were that long ago, but it’s somehow been 25 years since then. And in 1991, the mysterious death of a black teenager in small-town western Michigan inflamed the same kinds of tensions that surround race today. Alex Kotlowitz’s The Other Side of the River examines the fallout of the drowning of 16 year-old Eric McGinnis on two towns, Saint Joseph and Benton Harbor, divided by race and class, and yes, a river.

If you’re the type of person who needs their mysteries to be solved, don’t read this book. We never do find out how Eric ended up in the water where he perished. He could have been walking and slipped. He could have tried to swim. He could have been chased and fallen in. He could have been pushed in. Trying to figure out exactly what happened bedevils Kotlowitz, as well as Jim Reeves, the detective assigned to the case. What they do know is that Eric, from mostly black Benton Harbor, came into overwhelming white Saint Joseph one evening to go to a teen dance club. He had recently had a short flirtation/relationship with a white girl. At some point in the night, he was busted stealing cash from a car and was briefly chased down the road by the furious owner. And a few days later, his body surfaced.

Kotlowitz pulls back and widens the frame to give us the context for the scene in which Eric’s death occurs. He talks about the history of the two towns, how Benton Harbor was initially the big, prosperous one and Saint Joe was little more than a string of beach cottages…but, like in so many cities, white flight during the 60s drained it of capital. Despite being neighboring communities, the divides between St. Joe and Benton Harbor just got deeper and deeper as the years passed. The communities had already been roiled before Eric’s death when a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager who he mistakenly believed was a dangerous suspect in a crime. So when Eric drowned and the St. Joe’s police department, unused to handling potential homicides, made some tactical errors and failed to find any serious suspects, unease and suspicions between the communities flared back up.

The book is interesting enough, and well-written enough, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Kotlowitz clearly wants to get his readers to think about all sides of the issue (and by that I mean there’s a definite sense that he knows most readers will be white and leads them through the struggles of the local black community so they understand why a drowned teenager was viewed with such suspicion), but he doesn’t have anything especially insightful to add to the conversation. It’s a solid read, but ultimately doesn’t resonate much.

One year ago, I was reading: Behave

April 18, 2017

Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Instantly Make Me Want To Read A Book

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic: things that make me instantly want to read a book. Not in the sense of “long committee meetings” or “when my husband pops in a sports video game”, but more like things about the book itself that make me want to pick it up. I try to read a pretty broad spectrum of books, but here are ten things that I get a little extra excited about when I see in a book I’m thinking about picking up.

Royalty: Not even going to lie, this is probably the top one. Both fiction and non. I love me some royalty books. Give me queens and kings and princes and princesses.

A Michigan connection: As a native Michigander, I’m always a sucker for books about my homeland.

Female friendships: Some of the deepest and most meaningful relationships in my life have been with the women that are my friends. I love reading about the platonic-but-no-less-profound-for-being-so bonds that form between women and comparing and contrasting them to my own friendships

Dysfunctional families: It’s like Tolstoy said…every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Really getting into the dynamics between people that might not have picked each other, if given the chance, but are tied together by blood and love anyways is a favorite reading experience of mine.

Coming of age: The experience of growing up is a universal one, and one that I don’t feel quite “done” with yet, even at 31. So stories that draw on that experience are, to me, just incredibly compelling.

Post-apocalyptic: I used to be more interested in dystopias until it seemed like they were everywhere (but not always very well done). I’m finding myself more drawn these days to books that think about the world we live in and what might happen after a catastrophic event.

Character-driven: At the end of the day, I’m happy with a book that might not have much in the way of exciting storylines as long as it creates memorable and vivid characters.

True crime: Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated with stories about awful crimes and the detectives that solved them. It’s a weird morbid streak that’s not something I think most people I know would think that I have.

Neurology: Oliver Sacks did it best, but I love reading about our brains and how the ways they get it right and wrong impact human lives.

Retelling: Folklore and fairy tales, those first stories that we ever know and become ingrained in us, are all the more interesting to take apart and see from another angle.

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