I’ve had so much fun this month in various little online communities discussing The New York Times‘s Best Books of the 21st Century list! I am BIG MAD about some omissions: where is There There? Gone Girl? The Blind Assassin (or at the very least, Oryx & Crake)? The Kite Runner? The Namesake? I also find My Brilliant Friend overrated and Outline just dull. But half the fun of these lists is the talking about them and arguing about what should have been there and what shouldn’t have been.

In Books…

• The Shining Girls: Chicago-area women are being brutally attacked and murdered by a serial killer. Apart from being women, though, they have precious little in common besides a kind of brightness of talent and determination. They are Black, white, Asian, working mothers, college students, scientists. Their lives end anywhere from 1929 to 1993. But their killer is the same man: Harper, a Depression-era drifter and small-time criminal who stumbles across a strange house one night when he’s on the run. The house is filled with objects connected to the victims, and once he enters it Harper is consumed with the need to kill them…a need the house facilitates by opening windows in time. One of those women is Kirby, who first meets Harper when he gives her a My Little Pony toy as a child. Many years later, when she’s a young woman, a strange man brutally attacks and nearly kills her one morning, leaving behind an Art Deco lighter. She survives, traumatized and wanting desperately to understand what happened to her. She finagles her way into an internship with Dan, a reporter who once wrote about crime (including her case) and starts to use the paper’s resources to learn more about other cases like hers, making connections and drawing her ever-nearer to a confrontation with a killer determined to finish the job. I usually find mystery/thriller books disappointing, but this was one that actually worked very well for me! I’ve long-since figured out that I’m much more a character-oriented reader than a plot-oriented reader, and the genre tends to focus on the latter rather than the former. This book, though, is driven largely by its characters, particularly Kirby. Kirby is complicated, both tough and vulnerable, smart and naive, methodical and impulsive, and was (for me at least) very compelling. If you like answers and closure, this may not be the book for you, as there are definitely questions remaining at the end. But I really enjoyed it and would recommend it!
• The Invention of Everything Else: I read Samantha Hunt’s follow-up novel to this one, Mr. Splitfoot, back in 2016, and found it affecting and haunting. I’ve been meaning to read her previous work ever since but just now got around to it. This has a similar kind of structure, in that there are two separate storytelling threads that connect, but honestly it’s much less well-executed. Here we follow the stories of both Nikola Tesla, the real-life prolific inventor and creator of alternating current, and a hotel maid named Louisa. Their lives converge in the 1940s, when he is an old man living in a room at the Hotel New Yorker, while 20-something Louisa works there. While cleaning his room, Louisa comes across his written recollections of his earlier life, including his childhood in Croatia and his immigration and experiences in America. She becomes intrigued by this lonely man and his creations, while at the same time her own father’s best friend claims to have invented something quite fantastic himself: a time machine. For me, the stories never quite came together the way I wanted them to. Tesla never felt real, despite the backstory I assume that Hunt invented for him in which he becomes enmeshed into the lives of a married couple and falls in never-fully-realized love with the wife. Louisa’s narrative, with her widowed father Walter becoming drawn into his best friend Azor’s claim to have invented a time machine, and her own connection with a young man named Arthur, is better developed but still never really gels. It’s hard to get a sense of Louisa as a character or understand what drives her. I kept feeling like the story was building up to some sort of twist about Arthur, given that he’s introduced as someone who knew Louisa as a child but neither she or her father can remember him and his involvement with Azor’s time machine, but it never happened. Hunt plays with some elements of magical realism, both with the time machine itself and Tesla’s connection with a pigeon, but again it’s not really fleshed out enough. Hunt’s prose is high-quality, but this is definitely the work of a talented author who has not really come into her own yet and was too frustrating for me to really recommend.
• Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: I have such a checkered history with books that people recommend to me as funny. This is probably because I have a weirdo sense of humor. I have found some books (Lamb, Bridget Jones’s Diary, the Georgia Nicholson series, Me Talk Pretty One Day) to be hysterical, laughing so much I cried. But lots and lots of them leave me cold. Anyways, in this book, OG mommy blogger Jenny Lawson writes a memoir in essays, in which she recounts her non-traditional upbringing in rural Texas as the daughter of a taxidermist, her marriage to her college sweetheart Victor, the birth of her daughter Hailey, and a wide variety of misadventures. Enough people who I trust have told me this book is hilarious that I suspect the problem here is that Lawson’s storytelling doesn’t really match up with my sense of humor. It’s very “wacky hijinks”, which I tend to find more exhausting than amusing. She depicts her dynamic with Victor as one of those performatively squabbling couples, with her constantly calling him an asshole and him constantly heaving dramatic sighs. Some of the stories (one where she takes too many laxatives and becomes convinced her house has been broken into while she’s confined to the bathroom was a highlight for me) are genuinely very funny. Other times, she seems to think that merely referencing vaginas, her own or the concept more generally, in an unexpected way will automatically make the story she’s telling better/more outrageous, but any shock value it is quickly lost and the bit became eye-rolling (to me at least). I wanted to love it, but unfortunately I didn’t even really like it very much.
• The Hired Man: While humor-oriented books can be hit or miss for me, bummer books are much more comfortably in my wheelhouse. This one tells the story of Duro, a local contractor and hunter in a small (fictional) village in Croatia called Gost. He’s hired on to help renovate the house next door when an Englishwoman, Laura, and her two teenage children arrive in town to enjoy the local atmosphere and establish a vacation rental. But some of the things about Gost that Laura finds quaint and/or charming (only one bakery when there used to be two, fields full of wildflowers) are the remnants of a dark past that the locals don’t talk about anymore. As time goes on, Laura’s presence threatens the delicate balance of secrets among the longtime residents of the town and tensions grow to a boiling point. This was a beautifully realized book, informed both by the obviously meticulous research of author Aminatta Forna and her own experiences growing up in Sierra Leone during a time of significant internal tension. She pulls back the curtain on the story of what transpired in Gost during the Croatian War of Independence bit by bit, developing the character of Duro and to a lesser extent of Laura/her family so that I was fully invested in learning the details by the time they were presented. There’s no “big reveal”, just quietly abhorrent tragedy, the kind that is all too familiar if you’ve read stories about how people who find themselves on the more advantaged side of a conflict treat those who find themselves on the less advantaged side. Forna’s prose is elegant and compelling and she does not take the opportunity to have the characters have conversations about what is happening and why, which I think is much to the book’s advantage. Everyone concerned would have understood it, artificial dialogue in which people tell each other things they would have implicitly understood in order to orient the unfamiliar reader is one of my pet peeves. I possess a reasonable amount of intelligence and have access to Google, I can find out for myself! I loved this and would recommend it though it won’t be to everyone’s taste. I’ll definitely be tracking down all of her other work.
• The Children’s Book: This is close to my platonic ideal of a book…an epic nearly 900 pages about several intertwined families at the turn of the previous century, where relatively little “happens” outside the major historical events of the time, but the characters grow and change and interact in different ways as their lives move forward. The central family are the Wellwoods, a large bunch who live in the countryside in a home called Todefright. Mother Olive is a successful author of children’s books, her husband Humphrey is a banker until his political writings drive him out of the profession, and both are members of the Fabian Society, a left-wing social democratic organization. The book follows them and their many children, as well as Humphrey’s brother Basil, a more conservative banker, and his wife and children, their neighbors the Fludds, whose patriarch Benedict is a renowned potter, and their friends the Cains. Various and sundry additional offshoots and acquaintances round out a very large cast of characters as the Victorian era comes to an end, the Edwardian age begins, the World’s Fair in Paris is celebrated, and World War I is fought. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the title, the book is deeply concerned with childhood, which was undergoing a significant change in perception at the time: from children being treated as largely as miniature adults to a recognition of childhood as a distinct state. Despite this leap forward in understanding, this book illustrates the ways in which adults still manage to damage children, particularly but not limited to their own. Mostly through a profound self-centeredness, though some characters are actively predatory. The strength of this book really is its rich and largely well-developed set of characters, all of whom are both damaged and damaging to a certain extent. They felt so real to me, it was almost shocking to turn the last page and realize their stories were over. Byatt’s writing is lush with detail, something I tend to gravitate towards so I really enjoyed but I would definitely understand if there are people out there who think she could have kept the minutiae and historical editorializing to a minimum and had a better, shorter book. I didn’t think she sold every character development (Florence Cain’s eventual husband was puzzling to me), nor was every plot angle particularly engaging (the stuff about the politics around the Victoria and Albert Museum’s management was pretty snoozy for me), but on the whole this book had me spellbound. I absolutely loved it.
• Diamond Doris: If you picture an international jewel thief pulling off heists at places like Cartier and Bulgari in the 1970s/1980s, the person you picture is probably not Doris Payne, a Black woman who grew up in a coal-mining town in West Virginia. But with confidence, elan, and charm, Doris pulled off some truly astonishing heists. This memoir, put together with help from a ghost writer, just skims over the surface. We learn about Doris’s early years, in which she watched her father, a miner, abuse her mother. She became single-mindededly focused on both finding a way to protect her mom and vowing to never put herself in a position to be abused by a man. An early experience with stealing a watch led to more and more daring thefts of jewelry as she got older. Addicted to the thrill as much as the money, she progressed to bigger and bigger jobs even as she became a mother of two and a source of financial support to her mother after she finally leaves her marriage. She talks at length about her relationships with both her married Jewish fence and a Black man who also has ties to the criminal life, both of whom she held at arm’s length. Her technique was straightforward: she’d dress well, with enough jewelry to be convincing as a woman of means, and she’d work the store clerks by engaging them in conversation and getting them to believe a major sale (and its attendant commission) was imminent, and then simply walk out of the store wearing the merchandise. Despite a decades-long career, she had only a few run-ins with police, including one in which she was detained for months by Monegasque authorities who could not find the ring she’d secreted away and couldn’t charge her. She was finally imprisoned in her 80s, but spent less than a year behind bars. This book feels like more of a highlight reel than an actual memoir. She barely touches on her relationships with her children, much less with their father (who mostly raised them). Even her longtime partner, who she never marries, is mostly a thin sketch. At one point about 2/3 of the way through the book she mentions that she’s turning 50 but there’s been no real grounding in her age prior to that so it feels kind if jarring. The writing is competent but mostly unspectacular, though her ghostwriter does a good job of incorporating what is clearly Doris’s own irreverence and wicked sense of humor. But at the end of the book, I didn’t feel like I really had much of a sense of what her life really was and who she really is beneath that disarming exterior. It’s fine, a quick read, but nothing with enough of a hook to really affirmatively recommend.

In Life…

• Trying not to die of being too hot: We kicked off the month with a record setting heatwave, with temperatures soaring to the low-to-mid-100s and staying there for well over a week. And temperatures generally remained high. Having an active toddler who needs running around time when it’s roasting outside is a not-great combination! I suppose it could be worse, as wildfire smoke has been at a minimum this summer thus far so at least we can get out early in the morning safely.