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Book 325: Washington Black

“How strange, I thought, looking upon his sad, kind face, that this man had once been my entire world, and yet we could come to no final understanding of one another. He was a man who’d done far more than most to end the suffering of a people whose toil was the very source of his power; he had risked his own good comfort, the love of his family, his name. He had saved my very flesh, taken me away from certain death. His harm, I thought, was in not understanding that he still had the ability to cause it.”

Dates read: July 5-9, 2019

Rating: 6/10

It’s been shown time and time again that dehumanization is a crucial aspect of the commission of atrocities. Calling other people animals, or insects, thinking of them that way, makes it easier to rationalize cruelties towards them. But we don’t as often consider the other side of it. To be dehumanized has recognizable effects on the perpetrator, but what about the recipient? How do people come to absorb that conception of themselves?

What would it mean to be born into a system where your humanity wasn’t recognized, to have no “before” to remember your full self existing in? Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black explores the life of the titular character, called “Wash” for short, born into slavery on a sugar plantation in Barbados owned by a cruel man called Erasmus. His life changes forever when he’s 11, when Erasmus’s brother Christopher (“Titch”) comes to visit, and Wash and his mother-figure, Big Kit, who work in the fields, are asked to help serve dinner in the house. Titch asks for the use of Wash while he’s on the plantation, to assist him in his experiments, and this leads to the first time in his life that Wash is treated at all like a person. While Titch has tasks for him to perform, he’s allowed to get regular sleep, to think about whether he likes the food in front of him, and a previously undiscovered talent for drawing is developed and acknowledged. But then there’s a death, and Wash is blamed, and he and Titch are on the run.

Once they read the United States, Wash is given the opportunity to be transported to freedom in Canada through the Underground Railroad. But he sticks with Titch, and the two of them are pursued by a slave hunter while trying to uncover what really happened when Titch and Erasmus’s father disappeared and reportedly died. Eventually, they are separated, and Wash is on his own for the first time in his life. He ends up in Nova Scotia, where he meets Tanna, the daughter of an oceanographer, and their growing bond, as well as Wash’s gift for illustration, earns him an invite to travel with them to England, where Wash plunges deeper into a search for answers about his life.

The coverage I’d heard of this book before I picked it up made it sound like an adventure story, which I was not particularly excited about. And it partly is: the portion of the book where Titch and Wash are on the run, making up much but not all of the first half, is quick-paced and the atmosphere of suspense that Edugyan creates as they try to stay ahead of their tracker was engaging. But the back half of the novel becomes much more languid, turning inward as Wash begins to really examine himself and build a self-concept. This is usually the kind of thing I eat up, I love novels rooted in psychological realism! But I think the pacing of the book was damagingly uneven. After the brisk energy of the first half, the slow-down makes the book feel like it’s dragging and it began to seem like a slog to get through.

Which is unfortunate, because Edugyan is a beautiful writer. Her prose is elegant and insightful, and she does wonderful character work with Wash, whose journey towards personal understanding is moving. I do wish she’d done more with the character of Tanna, who starts out dynamic and winds up in a role as Wash’s emotional supporter that feels cliche and reductive. Once Titch leaves the narrative, though, so does much of the tension driving the plot forward, and to have that momentum built and then lost unfortunately undermines the strength of the work as a whole. It has brilliant moments, and I’d still say it was pretty good, but the pacing issues kept it from greatness. I’d look forward to reading more work from Edugyan in the future, and this book does have merit and is worth reading if you’re interested in it, but it’s too unbalanced to really affirmatively recommend.

One year ago, I was reading: Throne of Glass

Two years ago, I was reading: The Moor’s Account

Three years ago, I was reading: There There

Four years ago, I was reading: Motherless Brooklyn

Five years ago, I was reading: In The Skin Of A Lion

Six years ago, I was reading: The Name Of The Rose

Book 323: Amsterdam

“As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.”

Dates read: June 25-27, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Lists: Booker Prize, The New York Times best-seller

Few things are more satisfying than boiling hot self-righteousness. If there’s a drug that gives you that feeling of someone else being not just incorrect, but morally wrong, and being about to shove it in their face that you’re a better person than they are, please no one tell me. I will become an addict. Of course, we all know that it is almost inevitably followed by realizing that you are not quite in fact as heroic as you felt, nor is the other person the literal spawn of Satan. But it’s a heady rush while it lasts.

Even long-standing friendships aren’t immune from misunderstanding and resentments. In Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, two old friends meet at the funeral of a woman they each had loved once. But it isn’t the free-spirited Molly, now gone after a brief but terrible bout of dementia, that drives apart Vernon, the editor of a struggling London newspaper, and Clive, a respected composer. They’ve long since come to terms with that part of their lives. Neither of them can much understand what she ever saw in another one of her former lovers, who also attends the funeral: Julian, a conservative politician whose policy stances would seem to be anathema to Molly’s guiding principles of love and acceptance. Nor can they understand why she married George, who seemed bent on controlling her and molding her into conventional respectability. Like many friends, Vernon and Clive have gone through cycles of being more or less close over the years, and the funeral pushes them back into each other’s orbit. Spooked by the circumstances of Molly’s death, each promises that if the other were to be in a similar state of decline, they would help the end come quicker.

Not long afterwards, both men find themselves in a position to have to make a moral choice. Vernon is given photographs that Molly took of Julian during their relationship…photos that his support base would find shocking. These photos would solidify Vernon’s position at the paper by boosting circulation and catapult him into the spotlight after a lifetime of toiling away in relative obscurity. Clive has received a prestigious government commission to compose a piece to celebrate the millennium, and struggles for inspiration until, when taking a hike while out of town, he sees a man attack a woman on the trail. Finding himself suddenly able to see where he wants his symphony to go, he ignores the situation and doesn’t report what he saw to the police. Clive is aghast that Vernon would even consider publishing the photos of someone else’s private, intimate moments. Vernon is insistent that Clive report what he saw and face responsibility for his failure to intervene on behalf of the woman and keeping what he witnessed from law enforcement. The two are bitterly estranged.

This book is so short as to practically be a novella. That doesn’t limit the impact of McEwan’s satire, though. If you have ever known a pompous middle-aged man, Vernon and Clive are pitch-perfect. Both ruminate on the clarity of the situation facing the other, while running themselves ragged in the mental gymnastics required to justify their own choices. Each can only see the ways in which they themselves have been good, devoted friends, while the other has taken advantage of their generosity. But that’s kind of one of the issues: character. While obviously something this brief and with this perspective isn’t out for a deep character study, Vernon and Clive are basically the same person. And George, who shows up to create havoc throughout, seems more like a plot device than a human. I never found anyone compelling enough to really care about how it would end up.

How it ends up is a little too tidy and convenient, for that matter. And the pacing is odd…it drags and feels bloated (despite its brevity) in places, but the conclusion feels rushed. It’s not without its clever moments and witty turns of phrase, but it really feels like an excellent short story concept that got padded into a decent-but-unspectacular short novel. It’s worth a try (the upside of having such a low page count is that even if it doesn’t work, it shouldn’t take long to finish), but there are sharper, funnier satires out there.

One year ago, I was reading: The Eyre Affair

Two years ago, I was reading: The Year of Reading Dangerously

Three years ago, I was reading: Daisy Jones & The Six

Four years ago, I was reading: My Name is Venus Black

Five years ago, I was reading: Nefertiti

Six years ago, I was reading: The Namesake

Book 322: American Psycho

“There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and, possibly, total disgust. I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning. Something horrible was happening and yet I couldn’t figure out why—I couldn’t put my finger on it.” 

Dates read: June 21-25, 2019

Rating: 6/10

The trouble with having grown up prior to the YA boom is that when I was a teenager, once you ran out of the Lois Duncan, R.L Stine, and Sweet Valley High books, there wasn’t a lot left. That’s a bit of an oversimplification (the excellent Speak came out when I was in 9th grade, and obviously the Harry Potter series as well), but not too much. So I read a lot of adult literature. Some of which was just too complicated for me (I gave up about 60 pages into Anna Karenina), some of which went over my head, but a lot of which enriched my mind and expanded my boundaries! As a result of that experience, I’ve always been strongly opposed to any sort of censorship of teen reading…making sure you know what your kid is reading and talk to them about it, sure, but the reading is the important part.

I didn’t think I would ever read anything that would make me think that an age restriction for a book could be realistically justified. And then I read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Patrick Bateman (older brother of The Rules of Attraction‘s Sean Bateman) is a New York City banking bro in the 1980s. It would seem like he has a pretty great life: his job is prestigious and pays well, he has a pretty fiancee, he works out regularly and is in good shape, he has a nice apartment. But what Patrick also has going on is a gnawing emptiness at his center, and violent urges he’s not quite able to control. He lashes out at first against the powerless: poor people, prostitutes. But his need to hurt people escalates farther and farther until he’s committing actual atrocities against even people he knows, while somehow still trying to keep it together enough to go to work and live his life as normally as possible.

I’m not usually overly puritanical about depictions of sex and violence in books. Sex and violence are (fortunately and unfortunately, respectively) parts of life. And I’d seen the movie! I thought I had a handle on what was in store. But this book doesn’t just flounce right over the line of being gratuitous, it goes into actively stomach-churning territory. There are things I read in this book that gave me pictures in my head I will never unsee and honestly gave me heaves. And part of it, I think, is deliberate…besides being just gross, the book is also a razor-sharp satire. A recurring motif are Bateman’s much-stressed-about trips to the video store, where he rents violent pornography which desensitizes him both towards normal sex and violence against women. Living in a culture where depictions of outlandish acts of sex and violence are easy to access means that it requires yet more extreme examples to achieve the titillating/disturbing effect…examples, of course, that the text itself provides. It’s clever, if also very off-putting.

I had a really hard time deciding how I felt about this book. As a cutting send-up of the consumer culture of the 1980s, particularly in the heart of the NYC finance scene, it was extremely effective and often entertaining. The agonies about getting a table at the latest bougie restaurant serving the most unappetizing-seeming “exotic” food combinations were dead on. The way the book played with identity, with Patrick both constantly mistaking people he sees for people he knows and being wrong, and himself being called by the incorrect name, because as seriously as he takes his outfits (most of which are described in detail), the end result is that he looks just like everyone else, was smart and insightful. I would be pulled in and admiring the craft of it…and then there would be a gruesome murder and I would pulled back out again.

Even just skimming much of the over-the-top portions of the book (it gets worse and worse as it goes along), it was a reading experience I found really difficult. This book has age restrictions for access in several countries, and I’m actually not mad about it. I might have found one of the few things I actually don’t think a teenager should read without an adult having to be a part of the process. I don’t know that I would affirmatively recommend that anyone read this book, it’s that messed up. Which is a pity, because the parts of it that are satirical are incredibly well-executed (pun sort-of intended) and effective. But the rest of it is just too much. Yes, it’s worse than the movie. Much, much worse. If your interest in still piqued and you have an iron stomach, there is merit here. But be prepared.

One year ago, I was reading: The Leftovers

Two years ago, I was reading: The Lives of Tudor Women

Three years ago, I was reading: Forest Dark

Four years ago, I was reading: Wonder Boys

Five years ago, I was reading: Between the World and Me

Six years ago, I was reading: Ahab’s Wife

Book 312: Jackaby

“The chief inspector did not seem like the sort of man who could ever be overwhelmed by empathy. He would fit right in to the crime adventures in my magazines. He held the little pad like a shield, stoically barricading himself from the human tragedy. I wondered why Jackaby didn’t carry a little notebook. It struck me that a detective should have a little notebook.” 

Dates read: April 26-20, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Sometimes I feel like I pigeonhole my own reading. I try to read across genres, but often gravitate towards the serious stuff (“literary” fiction and non-fiction) because I just assume that it’s more likely to be something I’ll enjoy. And while I do like a lot of the kind of things that tend to win writing prizes, that doesn’t mean it’s the only sort of thing for me. I am a creature of habit, especially in my reading habits, but breaking out of a slump often reaps rewards.

What if you took a Sherlock Holmes type, made him someone sensitive to magic and occult rather than the “real world”, and then gave him a plucky female Watson? Well, you’d get something much like William Ritter’s Jackaby. The titular fellow (that’s his last name) is the aforementioned supernatural detective. The high-spirited lady sidekick is Abigail Rook, newly arrived in Victorian-era New England from Britain. She’s fled the fancy upbringing she had back home, first trying to follow in her archeologist father’s footsteps, ultimately winding up in America. She needs a place to stay, which means she needs money, which means she needs a job. But no one in the town of New Fiddleham seems willing to hire her…and that’s when she sees an advertisement for a detective’s assistant, which leads her to Jackaby.

On her very first day, she and her new employer find themselves a case to investigate: a murder. The police (with whom Jackaby has a rocky relationship) think it probably has a mundane explanation, but the detective thinks otherwise. Abigail’s keen eye makes her a valuable asset as the murders continue and the team investigates, and a budding flirtation between her and young policeman Charlie Cane keeps them clued into the official inquiry as well. There are ghosts, werewolves, banshees and more as they race against time to try to stop the killer before the next victim falls.

This isn’t anything that could be called literature by any stretch of the imagination. But it’s not trying to be. It’s trying to be an enjoyable, easy-reading fun supernatural mystery story, and it largely succeeds. The vibe between Jackaby and Rook will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever watched Doctor Who (and if you do watch and enjoy that show, this book will definitely be right up your alley), and is blessedly free of romantic tension. Abigail’s story, while definitely a familiar one, is well-told, and she feels like more than just a stock character due to Ritter’s characterization. Indeed, of everyone in the story, it’s Jackaby himself who feels the flattest…his aloofness renders him challenging to understand or particularly like. I think it’s supposed to come off as being mysterious and Holmesian, but for me it just made him boring.

Another area where this doesn’t quite succeed is as an actual mystery. I am legit terrible at figuring out the who-dun-it question in virtually every mystery I’ve ever read, and I was calling the big twists by about halfway through the narrative. I think it was supposed to be a fun and exciting mystery more than a genuinely suspenseful and thrilling one, but it could have leaned a little more heavily towards the latter without giving too much ground on the former. On a writing-quality level, Ritter’s prose (like much in this genre) is unspectacular, though he does have a pretty good ear for dialogue. So while going into this expecting greatness, or even very-good-ness, is likely to set you up for disappointment, if you just want a tasty little snack of a book, something light and engaging, this is for you. I did enjoy reading it, enough to download the second one in the series to read later, so as long as you know what you’re getting going in and keep your expectations reasonable, I’d recommend this!

One year ago, I was reading: Can’t Even

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

Three years ago, I was reading: Once Upon A River

Four years ago, I was reading: The Lady Elizabeth

Five years ago, I was reading: Seating Arrangements

Six years ago, I was reading: All The King’s Men

Book 310: The Fever

“As Deenie walked out, a coolness began to sink into her. The feeling that something was wrong with Lise, but the wrongness was large and without reference. She’d seen Lise with a hangover, with mono. She’d seen girlfriends throw up behind the loading dock after football games and faint in gym class, their bodies loaded with diet pills and cigarettes. She’d seen Gabby black out in the girls’ room after she gave blood. But those times never felt like this. Lying on the floor, her mouth open, tongue lolling, Lise hadn’t seemed like a girl at all.”

Dates read: April 15-20, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Teenage girls can be sociopaths. With many of the same destructive urges as boys, but less access to sanctioned casual physical aggression, we end up with a capacity for true interpersonal viciousness. I know I did some totally ice cold mean girl stuff when I was in high school, and wound up on the receiving end of something similar as a college freshman. I cut off my best friend for years over a dust-up I can’t even remember. I was awful to my own little sister. Those emotions, the bad ones just as much or more than the good, are so close the surface at that time of life. I look back on it now and feel a lot of regret, but I remember how right it all seemed at the time.

I might have had smoother skin and been much thinner, but I wouldn’t go back to being a teenage girl and feeling all those feelings again for anything. It’s such a confusing and heady place to be, and Megan Abbott’s The Fever really digs into the murky territory that friendships at that age can turn into. Deenie Nash and Lise Daniels have been best friends since they were small, but things are starting to change. They’ve recently started hanging out with Gabby, who a parent would probably euphemistically describe as coming from “a troubled home”. And Lise has grown from a cute little kid into a pretty teenager. This has not escaped notice by Deenie, or her older brother Eli (himself the subject of significant attention for his looks), or even her father Tom, a teacher at the high school. This is all putting strain on Deenie and Lise’s friendship, and then one day during class, out of nowhere, Lise falls out of her chair and has a seizure.

This alone is troubling, but then Gabby has a seizure too. One girl having a mysterious medical episode in a small town is cause for concern. Two is cause for alarm, especially as the doctors can provide no answers. Deenie thinks it might have been caused by a lake, rumored to be unclean, that all the girls spent time in together shortly before the episodes began. She worries that she might be next. Parents want to protect their daughters, start looking for a culprit. Hysteria starts to build as yet another girl is stricken, much of it focusing on the HPV vaccinations that the school mandated for the girls. The entire Nash family find themselves drawn further and further into the mystery and when it’s finally unraveled, it’s a doozy.

I won’t spoil anything, but the real villain of this book is teenage sexuality. Specifically, teenage girls having sex. That’s what the real terror of the parents over the HPV vaccine is driven by, the idea that their daughters might be sexually active. But it’s not just the parental fear. The book is steeped in sex in a very realistically teenage way: girls worrying about who’s having it, who isn’t, if the boy you like is sleeping with someone, if you think he might want to sleep with you, wanting to do it, not wanting to do it. For all I know, boys probably have the same kinds of thoughts, but having been a girl, I know that for all of the innocence that’s attributed to female-shaped persons, they are often consumed with questions of sex. Like Deenie with Lise and Gabby, you measure yourself against your friends: who’s the desirable one? Who’s the innocent? Who’s the slut?

Thematically, this is a potent work. Abbott beautifully captures the atmosphere of small town paranoia and the thrill and terror of being what Britney Spears would call not a girl, not yet a woman. But reading this book had its frustrations as well: the tension ratcheted up too high, too soon, leaving it nowhere to really go once things got really dramatic. The plot felt slightly underbaked and the pacing was kind of stop and start. And I thought having the dad, Tom, as a main character didn’t really work. I appreciated the inclusion of Eli, the perspective on teenage boys and sex made the book as a whole feel more balanced, but Tom didn’t add much for me. All together, I think this was an interesting, well-written novel and I’d recommend it if teenage psychological thriller is a genre you enjoy!

One year ago, I was reading: Plain Bad Heroines

Two years ago, I was reading: The Talented Mr. Ripley

Three years ago, I was reading: Uncle Tungsten

Four years ago, I was reading: The House of Mirth

Five years ago, I was reading: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Six years ago, I was reading: Oriental Mythology

Book 302: The Club

“Long before that evening, in my first boxing lessons, I’d learnt that it’s not the punch that hurts, because skulls are hard: it’s the humiliation. And because I was a small man who no one would expect to beat a hundred-kilo hulk in a light blue blazer, I could only win. You can’t box well if you’re afraid.”

Dates read: March 12-26, 2019

Rating: 6/10

There’s a reason there’s so much media focused on the elites: our culture is both fascinated and repulsed by them in equal measure. We love to read about and watch the ways the rich are “just like us” and then, at the end, not like us at all. The teenagers at the exclusive Constance Billiard School on Gossip Girl want to be liked and accepted and fight with their friends and worry about grades like every teenage girl, but The Great Gatsby‘s Daisy Buchanan is able to just…move on with her life after committing vehicular homicide. And even as many of us proclaim that we like our lives and wouldn’t want the scrutiny and pressure that wealth and fame brings, we all buy lotto tickets when the jackpot gets high enough.

In Takis Wurger’s The Club, we first meet our protagonist Hans as a young boy, solitary at heart but happy, living with his parents in a small town in Germany. But when both of those loving parents die in quick succession, his only living relative is his strange aunt Alex, a professor at Cambridge University. She sends him off to boarding school, where one of the teachers helps him to channel his depression into athletics and he becomes a skilled boxer. When he graduates, his aunt approaches him with an offer: she will get him into Cambridge, in exchange for his agreement to infiltrate the Pitt Club, one of the campus’s private social groups.

Once Hans reaches England, Alex arranges for him to meet up with Charlotte, one of her graduate students. At first, Charlotte is necessary for Hans to gain entry to the Pitt Club’s world, through her wealthy and well-connected father, but the two form a genuine connection. Hans gets drawn deeper into the Club as his pugilistic talents cement his place inside of it. But Alex didn’t ask him to become one of them for his own enjoyment…she has plans to expose a secret and revenge a wrong in a way that could bring it all crashing down.

Look away if you’re not interested in spoilers! Though it hardly feels fair to talk about it as such. The secrets here are not too difficult to guess at: there’s no surprise that groups of young, privileged men engage in drug use and sexual assault, and then manage largely to escape consequences for it. What makes this particular account of this phenomenon more interesting than many is its air of reality: Wurger himself attended Cambridge and was a member of the Pitt Club before leaving the university. And the book is lucky that it has that additional angle, because as a mystery/thriller it isn’t really successful…the plot development is straightforward and goes pretty much exactly where you expect it to go.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t do some things well! Wurger’s technique of narrating the story through multiple perspectives (Hans is the most prominent, but Charlotte, Alex, fellow Club member Josh, and a Chinese student desperate to be accepted are heard from, among others) is effective and keeps the story moving forward briskly. Hans, drawn as a self-sufficient introvert, is a refreshing character to spend time with…while he certainly does appreciate the finer things in life he’s able to access once he’s inside, we don’t get the dazzled-then-disillusioned arc typical in this kind of work. The subject matters feels timely and relevant. If you like these kinds of books, you’ll likely find this solid yet unremarkable. If you’re looking for something to take you somewhere unexpected, though, look elsewhere.

One year ago, I was reading: Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.

Two years ago, I was reading: Empire Falls

Three years ago, I was reading: The Luminaries

Four years ago, I was reading: Duel with the Devil

Five years ago, I was reading: The Wolf in the Attic

Book 298: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

“She thought of Miss Brodie eight years ago sitting under the elm tree telling her first simple love story and wondered to what extent it was Miss Brodie who had developed complications throughout the years, and to what extent it was her own conception of Miss Brodie that had changed.”

Dates read: February 24-27, 2019

Rating: 6/10

Lists/awards: Time‘s All-Time 100 Novels, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012 edition)

Like everyone who’s ever been to school, I’ve had teachers that run the gamut. Most of them were decent. Some were awful. Some were great. There was my fourth grade teacher, who was personally offended that I would read during class because I was bored and made it her mission to embarrass me by catching me not paying attention (she never succeeded). And then there was Mrs. Helppie, my AP English teacher who single-handedly taught me to write with anything approximating skill and would make us kettle corn and show us movies based on books/plays on Fridays. I will never forget her or her truly impressive selection of jewelry.

For most of us, our formative teachers are people whose influence on us was in the classroom, where their inspiration was related to learning about the world. In Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, however, things are different. The titular Ms. Brodie cultivates a group of girls at their school in Scotland, seeming to be one of those “inspirational” teachers often idealized in books and film: she believes that what happens outside of the classroom can be just as important if not more so than what happens inside of it. She invites them (brainy Monica, pretty Jenny, sporty Eunice, sultry Rose, observant Sandy, and the poor scapegoat, Mary) to her home, takes them on cultural outings. But along with art and history, Ms. Brodie is also a big fan of fascism. And her interest goes beyond just being a role model for her girls…as they grow up, she begins to manipulate them.

Ms. Brodie is a single woman, and falls in love with Mr. Lloyd, the married art teacher. Their mutual affection is never consummated, so even while Ms. Brodie carries on a relationship with the bachelor singing teacher Mr. Lowther, she schemes to get one of her girls to have an affair with Mr. Lloyd in her stead, confiding in Sandy about her plans. While Rose is her intended proxy, it is Sandy who winds up sleeping with him, and who adopts his Catholic faith and becomes a nun. It is from the convent that she is recounting her youth and the role Ms. Brodie played in her life.

This is a brief work, only about 150 pages. As such, many of the characters are flat, even most of the “Brodie set” outside of Sandy. But generally speaking, it paints a vivid portrait of a time, and a place, and the people involved. Jean Brodie is a character who soars off the page, complex and interesting and so deeply flawed. For all her bluster and bravado and determination to avoid pity, she’s ultimately a pitiful figure. And one who’s careless of the damage she causes, inspiring a student to run away to fight for Franco, which leads to her death. On a lesser level, Sandy’s assignation with her art teacher does not leave her without damage.

I was of two minds about the length. On the one hand, I wish there had been more time to develop the other girls, and the relationships between them as well their connection to Ms. Brodie. On the other hand, I don’t know that the plot would have the same power, the same feeling of a drive toward the inevitable conclusion, if it had to persist over a longer period of time. This is a solid book, and an unusual twist on the stories about teachers who change lives. I’d recommend it for a quick, engaging read.

One year ago, I was reading: The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B

Two years ago, I was reading: The Forgotten Sister

Three years ago, I was reading: Life After Life

Four years ago, I was reading: Mildred Pierce

Five years ago, I was reading: Wild Bill Donovan

Book 293: The Mind’s Eye

“Reading, of course, does not end with the recognition of visual word forms -it would be more accurate to say that it begins with this. Written language is meant to convey not only the sound of words but their meaning, and the visual word form area has intimate connections to the auditory and speech areas of the brain as well as to the intellectual and executive areas, and to the areas subserving memory and emotion.The visual word form area is a crucial node in a complex cerebral network of reciprocal connections—a network particular, it seems, to the human brain.”

Dates read: February 1-5, 2019

Rating: 6/10

I was one of those rare kids that needed neither glasses nor braces. I have plenty of issues on the tooth front (so many crowns!), but they grew in straight. And while my vision has declined some over the years, I still can see when I wake up in the morning without having to do anything besides open my eyes. If I’m anything like my dad, I’ll probably eventually need reading glasses, but I’m not there yet. It’s not until I spend time with people who do need glasses/contacts do I think about being fortunate that I don’t have to rely on something else to be able to be able to comprehend my visual environment.

But of course, not being able to see isn’t the only thing that can go wrong with the process of vision. Getting input is just one part of it. Oliver Sacks’ The Mind’s Eye takes his usual case study format and applies it specifically to disorders of visual processing…some of which deal with the actual mechanical part of seeing, but others about the part where we transform that information into something that makes sense. There’s a pianist who can no longer interpret the squiggles on a page of music as notes, but whose ability to memorize and play back what she’s heard allows her to continue to enjoy and be successful in her field, a writer whose ability to read deteriorates even as he continues to be able to write, and people for whom faces remain untied to the ones they know and love.

What’s a bit unusual for this series of case studies is how prominent Sacks himself is among them. Not as a doctor, which is his usual role, but as a subject. In discussing prosopagnosia (face blindness), he uses his own experiences to describe the condition and the challenges it can create. But where this self-insertion becomes somewhat problematic is in his description of stereo-blindness. This disorder is at first described using a patient who has had the condition for most of her life, but who learns to train herself to see with depth and her wonder and delight at the new world that opens up before her is enjoyable. But then he goes into an extended discussion of his own health crisis, with eye cancer, that led to a loss of his much-cherished stereo vision. It’s self-pitying and grating in a way that’s not typical of his work, even that which recounts personal struggles.

This book, despite being the kind of case study collection where he usually shines, is not Sacks’ best. There’s the issue I described above, and there’s just a lack of coherence and breadth. Even when describing diseases that lead to significant neurological deficits, there’s usually a sense of curiosity about what’s wrong and cheerful surprise at the adaptations that people are able to make, that’s infectious and engaging. While the book starts off that way, by the time it wanders into Sacks’ experiences it gets heavy and clunky, and I found myself much less invested in it than I had been previously. If you’re intrigued by the ways that perception can go wrong, or you (like me) are an incurable Sacks completist, there’s some good stuff here. But if you’re not otherwise interested, I don’t think the good outweighs the bad significantly enough to recommend.

One year ago, I was reading: A Perfect Explanation

Two years ago, I was reading: The Man In The High Castle

Three years ago, I was reading: My Own Words

Four years ago, I was reading: Crazy Rich Asians

Five years ago, I was reading: The Shipping News

Book 283: The Prince of Tides

 

“From my father I inherited a sense of humor, a capacity for hard work, physical strength, a dangerous temper, a love of the sea, and an attraction to failure. From my mother I received far darker and more valuable gifts: a love of language, the ability to lie without remorse, a killer instinct, a passion to teach, madness, and the romance of fanaticism.” 

Dates read: December 17-24, 2018

Rating: 6/10

Lists/awards: The New York Times best-seller

When you’re little, your parents are like gods…they have all the power and you assume that they’re “normal” because they’re all you’ve ever known. When you get older, though, it’s easy to get angry at your parents for the ways they failed you. And all parents fail their children in one way or another, no matter how hard they try. The hard part about growing up is letting go of that upset, of recognizing your parents as flawed but (usually) trying as best as they could. Which is all well and nice to say, of course, but it can be very difficult to put into practice.

And, of course, the scars for some people are deeper than those for others. The Wingos, of Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, had a particularly brutal childhood in coastal South Carolina. Father Henry is a talented shrimper, but throws himself into get-rich-quick schemes that inevitably fail and takes out his frustrations physically on his wife and children. Mother Lila desires nothing more than to be accepted by the upper-class women who live the life of ease she covets and refuses to acknowledge, either publicly or privately, the abuse she and the kids suffer for fear of losing face. Older brother Luke is physically tough but open-hearted and fiercely protective of his younger siblings, twins Tom and Savannah. The twins are sensitive and smart, so much so that Savannah moves to New York City when she graduates to become a writer, and has some success. But the story begins with her suicide attempt, and Tom, whose own life is falling apart, is summoned north to help her therapist, Dr. Susan Lowenstein, piece together the childhood that left her so fragile.

It’s a wild and desperately sad tale, of mental illness and horrifying violence and even a tiger. But even with the sometimes-outlandish storytelling touches, most of the story is rooted in strong, real emotions: desperation, shame, greed. And Tom isn’t the only one with a dysfunctional family: Lowenstein herself, lovely and intelligent as she might be, is locked into a toxic dynamic with her faithless musician husband. Her teenage son’s need for an identity outside his parents’ aspirations for him gives Tom a chance to regain his own footing as a football coach and the competent, capable person he’d forgotten he could be after the tragedies he endures. Eventually, Tom and Lowenstein are drawn into a bond of their own as they race through Tom’s memories to help his sister.

This is the second Conroy I’ve read, and I’ll be honest: if it had been the first, I might not have been so eager to continue reading his work. There are aspects of this that shine, but it’s less compelling than The Lords of Discipline (despite being better known because of the movie adaptation). Conroy has a clear predilection for high drama, which doesn’t bother me in and of itself, but some of the plot turns here verge on the ridiculous. That the Wingos acquire and manage to keep a young tiger, for instance, despite the crucial role it plays in a climactic scene, strained my investment in the story because it was so unbelievable. And I wasn’t sure about how the story handled Savannah’s schizophrenia, treating her struggle with a mental illness as a problem that could be solved by putting together her life story.

What saved the book from devolving into cheesiness is Conroy’s commitment to emotional truth. He has a unique talent for investing the male struggle with what it means to “be a man” (particularly, a Southern man, which has its own added level of complication) with real poignancy. The relationships he portrays between Tom and his siblings are rich and deep and realistic, and despite the more melodramatic elements what really drives the action are the kind of everyday human failures that we’ve all watched happen in our own lives. It took me a while to get into the book, as I struggled to get invested in the self-pity of a middle-aged white dude, but once I did get into it I thought it was solid. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it (I’d point anyone to Discipline first) because it was so uneven for me, but if you like stories about families or the South or want to read the book behind the movie, it’s worth reading.

One year ago, I was reading: Bird Box
Two years ago, I was reading: First
Three years ago, I was reading: On Trails
Four years ago, I was reading: Friday Night Lights
Five years ago, I was reading: The Curious Case of Kiryas Joel

Book 279: Messy

“On television, big, revealing statements always elicit loud gasps, and then a lot of background whispering with hands clapped to open mouths, while the truth-teller stands by looking refreshingly liberated. But TV is a dirty, dirty liar. Because there were no dramatic sound effects for Max’s confession, no slow clap, nor a handy background music swell to let everyone know she’d just done something courageous. There was just silence. And then, fury.”

Dates read: November 27- December 1, 2018

Rating: 6/10

As much as I aim for authenticity in this space, there’s no denying that I think carefully about what I’m putting up here. Everything gets edited after drafting. There’s plenty that I think that never even makes the draft. I don’t have my whole name or the most pertinent personal details about myself on here, but it would probably not be at all difficult to find me if you put even a little bit of effort into it, and people that I know in my real life read it. So I have to be mindful of how I present myself, how it reflects on me and the people in my life. Thankfully, there’s not much controversial about a book blog!

Curating an online presence is something basic to the life of a millennial. So when teenage wannabe starlet Brooke Berlin is trying to build her profile in Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan’s Messy, she seizes on the idea of a blog. She wants it to be witty and dishy and make her seem like the kind of sassy and smart girl that people want to see onscreen. The only problem is that she’s not an especially talented writer. She puts up an ad, prepared to pay a generous salary (with an action movie megastar for a father, she’s got the resources to make it happen), only to find that the best applicant is her nemesis, Max McCormack…who just so happens to be her sister’s best friend.

Max has no real interest in making Brooke look good, but she does need some funding for an NYU summer writing program, so OpenBrooke.com is soon up and running. In order to get the material she needs, Max is forced to spend quite a bit of time with Brooke, including on the set of the Nancy Drew movie Brooke has been cast in the lead role for. A flirty friendship develops between Max and Brady, who’s been cast as Brooke’s love interest, but when Brooke takes an interest in him, Max finds herself having a much harder time taking those checks and letting everyone think that Max’s witty, irreverent personality is actually Brooke’s.

This book is a kind of sequel/companion to Cocks and Morgan’s debut, Spoiled, though that book’s lead character Molly (Brooke’s sister) takes a backseat in this one. While I found Spoiled a little too breezy for a book about a teenager who finds herself in the middle of celebrity LA after the death of her mother and the uprooting of her entire life, that same tone works much better here for a story without that kind of heaviness. Messy is funny, and packed with pop culture references that will delight those of us who grew up in the 90s. There’s even a makeover montage! And in a nod to Cocks and Morgan’s day jobs (they write GoFugYourself.com), we even get excerpts of the blog posts that go up, which are themselves a snarky treat.

The biggest downside here is how predictable it all is. Pretty much as soon as the plot starts to get set up, it’s obvious where it’s going to go. There isn’t much in the way of subverted expectations, which could have elevated this from “fun fluff” to something more. That’s not to say this isn’t enjoyable, it very much is! But it’s so light as to be almost completely forgettable. This is a perfect beach/airplane read…it doesn’t require much attention and it’s entertaining. If you’re looking for that, you’ve found a great option! If you’re looking for anything more, though, look elsewhere.

One year ago, I was reading: Amateur

Two years ago, I was reading: The Last Romantics

Three years ago, I was reading: Silent Spring

Four years ago, I was reading: Moonglow

Five years ago, I was reading: Suspicious Minds

Book 277: Dark Places

“I am a liar and a thief. Don’t let me into your house, and if you do, don’t leave me alone. I take things. You can catch me with your string of fine pearls clickering in my greedy little paws, and I’ll tell you they reminded me of my mother’s and I just had to touch them, just for a second, and I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me. My mom never owned any jewelry that didn’t turn her skin green, but you won’t know that. And I’ll still swipe the pearls when you’re not looking.”

Dates read: November 19-22, 2018

Rating: 6/10

When I was in high school, I tore through true crime books. I loved the sense of controlled fear they gave me…sure, people did terrible things, but I knew the police got them in the end. My mom always thought it was a little macabre that I so frequently came home from the library or bookstore with an Ann Rule anthology. These days, though, true crime is big business. Not just books, but the first season of “Serial” kicked off the podcast boom…in particular, those revisiting old crimes. Some of them are more respectful than others (I’m side-eying you, My Favorite Murder), but as a culture, there’s no denying we’re obsessed with these mysteries, both solved and unsolved.

It wasn’t that long ago, though, that people on the whole viewed true crime more along the lines my mother did: kind of morbid. So, in Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, when Libby Day, the only survivor of the murder of her entire family (besides her absentee father and the murderer himself), finds herself hard enough up for cash to attend the meeting of a group of true crime enthusiasts, the people she meets are very weird. The testimony Libby gave as a child put her older brother, Ben, behind bars, where he’s been for the 25 years since. Little Libby had attracted donations for her future, and spent years living off of the proceeds, her unhealed psychological wounds (and not especially high levels of motivation) keeping her out of the workforce. But when she encounters the group, she’s flat broke, and they offer her money to go back and talk to the people that were around back then…they believe Ben was innocent, and want Libby to help prove it.

The book is told through three perspectives: Libby in the present day, as well as Ben and their mother Patty in the past. We learn about the poverty the four Day children lived in on the family farm, their father’s cruelty towards them, their mother’s despair. We watch Libby’s certitude about what happened on that terrifying night begin to erode as she digs deeper into the story, becomes invested despite herself. And we finally learn the truth of what happened, and Libby finds herself in danger of not surviving this time.

If you’ve read Flynn’s enormously-bestselling Gone Girl (and you probably have, everyone has at this point, right?), you know that she really enjoys writing unlikable characters. Dark Places is not different on that score: Libby is prickly and angry, and although she obviously suffering from untreated PTSD and depression, it doesn’t make her a pleasant person to spend time with. Teenage Ben has an inexplicable relationship with his rich and mean high school girlfriend, and a deeply problematic involvement with an elementary school girl. Patty is probably the most sympathetic, but her inability to protect her children from their father and the consequences of her own decisions make her difficult to really emotionally invest with. Everyone here is miserable and unable to cope with it, and while they do all feel realistic, it’s very dark to spend time with them.

Unpleasant though they may be, the characters are richly realized, and Flynn’s writing is compelling and vivid. The plot mostly hangs together through its twists and turns…at least, until the end. I’m not going to spoil it, but the ending feels incongruous with the rest of the book, taking a very different tone, and feels very out-of-left-field in a bad way. I’m not big into mystery/thrillers, so I’m not really sure how this fits into it and who exactly Flynn was writing for. It, like Gone Girl, is very interested in exploring female rage, and it feels by virtue of its character development more literary than typical for the genre. But it’s also very bleak, with very little humor or lightness to break it up. It’s well-constructed and interesting, but was not especially enjoyable for me to read. If what I’ve written sounds like something you’re interested in checking out, I’d recommend it. But if it doesn’t sound like it’s for you, I assure you this is not a must-read.

One year ago, I was reading: White Teeth

Two years ago, I was reading: The Rules of Attraction

Three years ago, I was reading: Of Human Bondage

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

Five years ago, I was reading: Sex with Kings

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

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