October has long been my favorite month of the year. I love the fall weather, the trees changing colors, and of course I also get to celebrate my birthday. And then we wrap up with candy, so it’s basically perfect.

In Books…

• The Gales of November: I don’t necessarily remember the first time I heard Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, but I do know I loved it immediately. The music was beautiful, and the power of the story itself drew me in: a big, proud ship on the seemingly endless water of Lake Superior, full of iron, running into a powerful storm and being buffeted by brutal wind and waves until finally it could take no more and sank, only a little more than a dozen miles from safety. No one survived. No one was even recovered. The ship and her crew sit on the bottom of the lake, where they will forever remain. Anyone who grew up in the Great Lakes region has heard that song more times than they can count, so native Michigander John U. Bacon was a natural fit to write the definitive account of the tragedy. There has always been a bit of mystery about exactly how and why the boat sank, but though there is a relatively brief portion near the end of the book that lays our and examines the various theories, that’s not really the story that Bacon is trying to tell. Instead, his book touches on the history of Great Lakes shipping with all of its dangers, the building and deployment of the Fitz in the late 1950s, and the ship’s glory days as the biggest and most famous freighter on the Lakes. He also tells the stories of the 29 men who crewed the ship on that fateful day in November, seeking out firsthand accounts from those who knew them, from family members to former crew on the ship. And finally, there’s a detailed account of that last, doomed voyage, departing from Wisconsin on a clear, warm day that felt more like late summer than late fall, with weather reports not at all clear about the full might of the storm that was soon to engulf the ships unlucky enough to be out on the water. Even by the standards of November storms on the biggest of the big lakes, it was unusually brutal. The ship’s captain, Ernest McSorley, one of the most well-respected in the business, made a series of compounding mistakes that would only become obvious as such in retrospect. Even knowing how it would end, Bacon creates such a compelling portrait of the ship and its crew that you find yourself rooting for history to somehow change, for McSorley to choose the faster and more familiar route across the water instead of opting for the less familiar “safer” one that added time the ship did not have to spare to its journey, for it to steam on through the storm at full power rather than slowing its pace to be in closer contact with another vessel, again in the hopes of safety. Tears came to my eyes at the choice of the captain and crew of that other ship, the Arthur M. Anderson, having barely reached safety after a hellish experience on the water, to turn around immediately and go right back into the teeth of it to assist with search efforts once they became aware that the Fitz was missing. It was, of course, fruitless. Bacon even wraps in a bit about Lightfoot and the song, which I was astonished to learn was released from a recording of the very first time the band played it…not their first try in the studio, but literally the very first time they tried out the music. Perhaps it is combination of the rawness of the unexpectedly popular song, and the devastating story behind those lyrics, that accounts for the ship’s staying power in the cultural memory. The book is very good…a bit of a slow starter, but once it gets going I found myself swept along with the story. Bacon’s focus on the human elements of the story gives it a compelling power, and I’d highly recommend it, especially for Great Lakes people. It would make a perfect holiday gift for dads!
• Doppelganger: In the early part of the 2000s, it was relatively understandable to confuse Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf. What are the odds that there would be two left-leaning Jewish female public intellectuals named Naomi of about the same age running around at the same time, after all? Sure, Klein was more in the corporate malfeasance realm and Wolf more about feminism…at least, until the mid 2010s. Wolf started having some very odd takes on issues like Occupy Wall Street, Edward Snowden, ISIS. Those seemed like blips until about 2019. That was the year that Wolf, about to publish a new book about the criminalization of homosexuality, found out in the worst possible way that she had made a serious interpretive error in her research: she was confronted with her mistake live on the air during a television interview to promote the book. She was humiliated, the book’s US release was cancelled, her former friends in the liberal intelligentsia turned their backs on her, and then something very not-chill happened to the whole world, and this Naomi found a calling. She became a leading voice in the COVID-19 conspiracy theory universe, making frequent appearances on Steve Bannon’s podcast to expound upon these ideas. Naomi Klein was watching all of this unfold in her home in Canada, but her surprise at the turn Wolf had taken had a unique twist. People mad at Wolf on the internet often directed their ire at Klein instead, having mistaken one for the other. It happened often enough that there was even a little rhyme about how to distinguish them. The whole experience sent Klein down a rabbit hole, she found herself listening to Other Naomi compulsively, unable to stop herself from obsessing over the woman who had become her unlooked-for double. A Doppelganger, if you will. The book speaks to the Naomi confusion at length, of course, but it also spins out to cover other sorts of doubles, mirror images, and echoes, touching on social media, the experience of being the parent of an autistic child, and the conflict between Israel and Palestine that has since become a full-on genocide. This broader view is actually to me one of the book’s major weaknesses: it feels like it’s two things kind of smooshed together because neither of them was book-length on their own. And for my money, the portions not about Naomi were stronger. I’d have liked to see in particular the portion about parenting developed further…it’s rooted in Klein’s experience of parenting her own autistic teenager, with autism itself the subject of many conspiracy theories (and it’s gotten so much worse since the book was published), but there are hints around the edges of an analysis of parent-child relationships more generally, the way that parents often see their child as clay to mold as they will, their child’s behavior and accomplishments as a reflection of their own worth as human beings, that never actually ends up going as deep as it could. I think it could have been really interesting to examine the ways in which parents, particularly mothers, often find themselves subsuming their own identities into those of their children: sports moms, pageant moms, dance moms. But alas, we spend very very many pages going over Wolf’s turn to the right and its contrast with Klein’s perspective in detail, including enough rehashing of the ideas from Klein’s own previous works that I went from curious to read them to feeling like I had a solid grasp on the ideas without needing to do so. It was the less engaging portion of the book, for me, and I wished it was 50-100 pages shorter because it felt endless. There are a lot of interesting things to think about here, but for me it’s hard to recommend because it was often a slog.
• Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne: If I had to guess, I’d say that the woman in the world with the most biographies written about her might be Queen Elizabeth I. Her story is endlessly fascinating: born into the already high-profile union of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the woman her father was so desperate to marry that he broke with the Catholic church only to behead her a mere three years later, Elizabeth survived her brother and sister’s deaths to become queen herself, a reign that saw the work of Shakespeare and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Her refusal to marry meant she alone wielded power for over 40 years. It all becomes even more amazing when you realize how precarious her path to the throne really was: she was proclaimed a bastard after the execution of her mother, and it took the intervention of Anne of Cleves to really begin the process of reconciliation with her father. Her (and her sister Mary’s) restoration to the line of succession was only made about four years before her father’s death. Her stepmother Catherine Parr took custody of her after Henry’s death when Elizabeth was only 14, and it seems highly likely that Catherine’s new husband, the ambitious adventurer Thomas Seymour, took an interest in her that may have crossed lines of propriety and proved the subject of vicious gossip. She managed to wriggle free of the scandal, though, and spent the next whole decade navigating perilous waters between the fervent Protestantism of her brother Edward and the equally fervent Catholicism of Mary. There were serious threats that she might be married off, particularly during Mary’s reign, as it does no monarch any good to have a figurehead around which the opposition can rally…and that’s assuming that the opposition figure doesn’t engage in any skullduggery themselves, which it seems likely Elizabeth did. Simply arriving at her accession day was already the product of years of careful thought and clever planning. And that’s all before she did anything as queen! David Starkey’s biography focuses mostly but not exclusively on this delicate, complicated pre-reign period, probably about 2/3rds of it takes place before she takes the throne. Starkey is both a historian and a TV presenter, which I have to imagine contributes to his ability to balance a scholarly understanding with a straightforward presentation. This is a very readable biography and definitely aimed at a popular rather than academic market. Part of it is that he does not seem to engage in the general practice of historians of presenting various perspectives on a situation and inviting the reader to decide which one they think is the best-supported. He chooses the one he finds most compelling and doesn’t waffle around with the rest, which keeps things moving along briskly. There is a LOT going on here and some existing familiarity with the time period and players was very much helpful to have while reading, I feel like if this had been my first biography about this time period I may have felt a little lost, there are quite a few people to keep track of. I did think the book lost some steam when it got to the early days of Elizabeth’s reign. Starkey dives into the finer points of Elizabeth’s religious practice in a way that sometimes tipped towards the tedious for me. I got the impression that he found her careful balance of Protestant ideas with Catholic trappings to be a clever, thoughtful approach of a woman who understood the value of keeping her nose rather than cutting it off to spite her face…indeed, I got the overall impression that Starkey finds compelling in large part because of her sophisticated understanding of how to gain and hold public regard from even quite an early age. While the book has a lot going for it it, I have to caveat that Starkey is himself the holder of some very gross racial views so I hesitate to recommend too enthusiastically because supporting his work with your money may feel like a road too far, so if you’re curious about it, the secondhand market may be the place to go.
• What Made Maddy Run: Madison Holleran seemed to have a beautiful life…a pretty 19 year-old freshman track athlete at UPenn, she grew up as part of a large, supportive, and financially secure family and had developed close friendships through running and especially soccer, another sport she loved and was talented at. And then she jumped off the top of a parking structure, ending her own life and leaving the people who loved her with questions that will never be answered. Journalist Kate Fagan wrote a well-regarded longform piece about Maddy for ESPN, which she expanded into this book. The thesis of the original article was about the ways in which Maddy’s social media feed showed a happy teenager enjoying her first year of college and the artfulness with which it hid the deep struggles Maddy was facing, feeling lost without the familiar structure of her high school life around her and struggling to keep her head above water. This is also a central tenet of the book, a conceit that likely felt at least somewhat fresher in the mid-2010s when both were published. The book also speaks to the intense pressure placed on college athletes, who are expected to make the same challenging transition as all freshmen but while juggling a schedule that includes practices daily or even multiple times per day. After a hard first semester, Maddy wanted to quit track and even went to see her coach alongside her mother, reading a letter she’d written about how down she’d felt since arriving at Penn and how she hoped leaving track behind was the answer. The coach suggested taking a step back without fully quitting, which Maddy acquiesced to. Fagan herself was a college athlete, playing basketball at Colorado, and like Maddy she’d felt overwhelmed when she first arrived and tried to quit. Her coach, too, persuaded her to give it more thought. In Fagan’s case (and I’m sure many others), this was the right move: Fagan became a very good player and was able to turn pro in Europe for a while. In Maddy’s, though, it seems it may have felt like a way out was being closed right in front of her. Maddy was encouraged to transfer, including by her own older sister, who had left Penn State for Alabama and was much happier at the latter, but never expressed more than halfhearted interest in the idea. It’s a tremendously sad story about a family who lost a beloved daughter and sister, and a young woman who never got to be who she would become, for reasons that can never be fully explained. But I think it would have been better left as the article alone. First of all, I want to tear All The President’s Men out of every college journalism student’s hands. Reading about how a reporter went about telling their story is, for me, uniformly dull. I don’t care about you! I want to read about the subject of the book! If I want to know how you feel I will pull up your Twitter! I don’t think this self-insert tendency is at all helped by the commonalities Fagan shares with Maddy, particularly in having been a college athlete who did not have an easy time adjusting to campus life. Her own story about not liking college basketball for one semester did not give me greater insight into Maddy. I found the sequence where she apparently dreams about seeing Maddy chat seemingly happily over FaceTime only to turn off the camera and begin crying to be just…really off-putting. Fagan does try to include some mental health information in the text, recounting her conversations with both a young mental health advocate and a survivor of suicide about depression, but the way she tries to wrap up the story by going on a tear about the shallowness of digital connection feels like it totally undermines that previous work. She wants to use Maddy as an exemplar of a trend, not really tell her own specific story. Maybe it’s hard to try to close down a book about something that defies easy answers or tidy summations, but this felt like a cop-out. I can’t recommend this book.
• The Tortoise’s Tale: A tortoise is born around the turn of the century, but before she knows it she’s taken away from her home and deposited…somewhere else. Which turns out to be a sprawling estate in southern California. She’s first given the name Daisuke by the home’s dedicated Japanese gardener, Takeo. She’s also dubbed Magic, a name bestowed by Lucy, the niece of one of the estate’s owners. While she’d established a bond of mutual fondness with Takeo, her connection with Lucy becomes deeper. Lucy is kind, curious, thoughtful, and treats the tortoise as a creature worthy of dignity and respect. Lucy’s goodness encourages the tortoise be bolder around people, a tendency that is sometimes rewarded and sometimes not as humans come and go over the decades. It is not only with humans that she has relationships, though. She is curious about and spends time with the other animals that inhabit the grounds, including swans, a peacock, donkeys, and even a sad little monkey. The tortoise herself remains one of the very few constants of the property as it passes through various hands over the years, and the tides of history move her in their own way. I am generally inclined to like animal narrators as a literary choice, but I think it can be difficult to pull off, with animals often rendered too human or the narrative becoming too cutesy. Coulter, an animal rights advocate, mostly manages a truthful-seeming animal voice well, having her accompany Lucy to private tutoring sessions conducted outdoors to explain her understanding of language and the basics of the world. But her limitations remain realistic: she cannot talk, she has no mystical mental connection with people that allow them to understand her thoughts or intentions, she can’t communicate with animals of other species. Her feelings are similar to humans in many ways: she knows fear and love, and she takes a sense of pride in her accomplishments. Even given her constraints, Coulter crafts the tortoise as a memorable character, growing and changing through the long years of her life. I found myself genuinely touched by the grief she feels when she loses people she’s come to care for. Coulter does well to keep her narrative fairly brisk at about 250 pages, as the plot sometimes moves as slowly as the tortoise herself. It can sometimes be difficult to try to figure out the time period any particular portion of the book is set in, and the way real-life figures are referenced can feel clunky. There’s a parallel made between reproductive freedom and animal rights that felt jarringly outwardly political in a book that had done its work of communicating the inner lives of animals in a more subtle and to me more effective way until that juncture. Apart from that, the book mostly quietly draws the reader into the emotional experience of this fictional tortoise in a way that makes it hard to not extend out to thinking about how other animals we might see live, how they might feel about people and about each other, whether they’ve known kindness. The book definitely has sentimental tendencies and it’s low on plot, but if you’re looking for something heart-tugging without being emotionally manipulative or you just love animals, it’s a good read and I’d recommend it!
• Childhood’s End: The Space Race is just heating up, with former German rocket scientists working on either side for the Americans and Russians, when one day it’s unexpectedly cut off. The sky fills with spaceships. A week later, a single alien being calling himself Karellen announces that he and his kind (whom the humans soon dub Overlords) will be assuming control of international relations. He meets regularly with the Secretary-General of the UN, but while the human man is physically taken to the ship, he only ever hears Karellen’s voice. The Overlord refuses to show himself, promising that they will only do so fifty years down the road. During those 50 years, the initial wave of opposition is blunted by the benefits the Overlords have brought: war and poverty are ended, most necessary work is accomplished without human input and so people gain huge amounts of leisure time, learning flourishes. It is a very different world, then, that meets the Overlords and wrestles with the implications of their appearance being that of the Christian devil: wings, horns, tails, hooves. The populace has been sufficiently stripped of religious feeling that this makes little lasting impression and soon a connection with an Overlord becomes very chic. The powerful and well-connected Rupert Boyce manages to get one to attend a party celebrating his recent marriage by leveraging his extensive collection of books about parapsychology, a subject of intense interest for the Overlords. Rupert’s new brother-in-law, Jan, is particularly interested because his ambitions for space travel have been thwarted by one of the few direct prohibitions the Overlords have imposed, which is to prevent humans from reaching the stars. Through intense ingenuity, Jan is able to figure out a way to get aboard a supply ship as a stowaway and can’t pass up the opportunity, though he knows because of faster-than-light travel that even a six-month round trip to the Overlords home world will cost him close to 100 years of Earth time. In the time that he’s gone, though, the final developments of this long-running plan will be put into motion, rendering the world he would return to different than the one he had known in more ways than he could have possibly imagined. I don’t tend to read a lot of science fiction, largely because I find the sort of thought experiments typical of the genre to be interesting but fundamentally not very compelling unless tied into some well-developed characters. Alas, those are not on offer here. Given that Arthur C. Clarke is renowned as a short story writer, I perhaps should not have been surprised that this is structured more like three interconnected mini-novellas than a typical novel. Only Karellen is featured in all portions of the book, though the second and third sections are more closely related to each other than to the first section. Neither Karellen nor any of Overlords has a strong personality. The only character with any development is Jan, and I do think it’s interesting, in a laudatory way, that Clarke writes him as a Black man. Jan, an astrophysicist, is the only human with the cleverness, curiosity, and drive to successfully sneak aboard an Overlord ship and see their home world. And upon his return, he becomes essentially the sole survivor of what had been the human race. What it means to be human is the central idea being explored here, with Clarke positing that elimination of most small-scale want and all large-scale conflict would lead to the stagnation of creative endeavors…despite having large amounts of free time, great works of music and literature do not emerge in the post-Overlord world. And changes in the development of the world’s children render them something altogether different than their parents. I found the ideas Clarke played with to be reasonably engaging, but I wished there had been a better-defined narrative arc and of course, richer characters to explore those ideas around. Worth reading? Sure. Enthusiastically recommended? Not really.
• The Reader: When 15 year-old Michael Berg gets sick on the way home from school in post-war Germany, throwing up in a courtyard of an apartment building near his house, an older woman helps him get cleaned up and on his way. It turns out to be hepatitis, keeping him home from school for a few months as he recovers. Once he’s reasonably well again, he goes to see the woman, who is called Hanna, to thank her for her help. This encounter kicks off a months-long entanglement, with Michael and Hanna becoming physically but mostly not romantically involved, though he does develop feelings for her. They take baths, they sleep together, and Michael reads to her: sometimes from books popular in the teenage set, sometimes from the classics. She’s in her mid-30s and works checking tickets on the streetcars, revealing little of herself and having no interest in Michael taking her out except for one weekend they manage to get away together in which there is an incident that does not become clear until years later. Michael goes to pick up breakfast while she’s sleeping and leaves her a note, coming back to find her furious at her perceived abandonment. She says there was no note, and indeed it has vanished. The two make up, but things end when one day she simply disappears. Michael next sees Hanna when he’s in law school, taking a seminar about the concentration camps. He attends a trial of several women who were guards at a feeder camp outside Auschwitz, who were leading their prisoners on a march and when a fire broke out in the church where the prisoners were staying for the night, took no action to free them. Virtually all of the prisoners died in the blaze. One of the guards on trial is Hanna. In watching Hanna’s efforts to defend herself both against the charges and against the other women, who seek to make her the most responsible party and therefore evade harsh punishment, Michael comes to realize something about Hanna that explains both her behavior at the camp and in the time they were involved, and would tend to exonerate her, at least in part. The struggle of trying to determine whether he should reveal a secret that Hanna herself has hidden weighs heavily on Michael, altering the course of both of their lives to come. I haven’t read a ton of German literature in translation, but it seems that wrestling with the war and the Holocaust remains prominent in German cultural thought, as this book was published in 1995, forty years after the events it portrays. There’s a lot in here about blame and complicity and the secrets that may be hiding under an unremarkable facade, with Michael and his cohort struggling to square their parents, and those of their parents generation, with the horrors that were perpetrated under their flag. The book touches on an estrangement between Michael and his father, and while part of it is his father’s formal reserve, Michael also can’t help but see him as complicit, even after he lost his university position during the war for giving a lecture on a Jewish philosopher. If you came out of it alive and with any sort of stability, there’s an argument that you must have gone along with it all, at least a little. How much guilt lays on any one set of shoulders is also exemplified through Hanna’s trial, in which she tries to accept blame for what she actually did but not for what she didn’t, and the way her co-defendants try to turn her into a ringleader to spare themselves. Should it matter if anyone was more “in charge” than anyone else when they were all camp guards sending Jews to Auschwitz, knowing full well what would happen to them? Surely Hanna deserves the punishment she receives for that alone, regardless of whether or not her fellows also deserve it but are spared. How much grace does she or anyone deserve, especially when you take into consideration that in this day and age, the relationship Hanna had with Michael would be characterized as sexual abuse? There’s just barely a touch on this towards the end, when someone Michael is speaking to about Hanna long after the trial correctly guesses that he’s been unable to form warm, loving relationships even with his ex-wife and daughter. While I found this book a rich text in terms of thinking about its themes, I also struggled to connect with it. I always wonder, with translations, if a sort of distance that’s often there is a failure to fully understand cultural context or is an issue with the translation itself. In this particular case, with alienation also a significant subject, I wonder if it was a deliberate choice by Bernhard Schlink to write in a detached way, echoing the ways the Germans of that era tried to detach themselves from their history. Either way, though, the sense of remove made it hard for me to get as invested in this book as I wanted. Hanna was as inscrutable to me as she was to Michael. Michael felt more like a concept than a person, a personification of the way young Germans in the post-war era reacted to their recent history. The prose is elegant, subdued. The blurbs suggest a fiery eroticism that wasn’t really much present. It’s an interesting book, and I’m glad to have read it but would have a hard time recommending it to others, it’s a bummer and hard to get absorbed into.

In Life…

• I turned 40!: And two weeks later, so did my husband. Being the parents of a three year-old does not lend itself to much in the way of opportunities to do a big celebration, but we had dinner and spent time together as a family and for me, that was a very lovely way to spend a milestone birthday.
• Halloween: C was very vocal about his costume choices this year, so he’s being “a skeleton dressed as pumpkin”, I’m being a scarecrow, and my husband will be a ghost! This was also the first year we did pumpkin carving and real trick-or-treating. It’s so fun to see the way he understands holidays more every year!